Is Satire Still Possible?

after Trump

Watching the daily horrors from the United States, as Donald Trump continues to unravel American democracy and consolidate his culture of falsehood and childish narcissism, it might seem that satire – which traditionally exaggerates to make its points – has to struggle to keep pace. Much of what happens today at the White House would have been dismissed in the past as far too fanciful if it appeared in a satire in prose or verse. But this is real, folks.

Undeterred I have just published the fourth in a series of verse satires that began in 2011 with Get Real! a scathing attack on the 2010 Lib-Con coalition of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, followed by Trench Feet (2014) where the subject was academic opportunism and rivalrous ambition in the world of First World War literary scholarship. The subject of the next one, A Dog’s Brexit (Melos, 2017) – my most successful in terms of sales – is obvious and this month my fourth, from Rack Press, called The Culture Man is published, its target the cultural populists, of whom more in a moment. One common factor in all four satires is, I hope, a sense of humour and delight in formal play. They are first and foremost intended to amuse and the fact that some Brexiteers, for example, admitted to enjoying my assault on their hobby horse proves the point. What distinguishes the tradition of verse satire from the plain prose rant is this pleasure in verse form, comic incident, and often outrageous rhyme. The first and third of my satires were done in a verse form known as “the standard habbie” or “the Burns stanza” (slightly modified by W.H. Auden through the addition of an extra line). This form is great fun to write and the jaunty movement and comic rhyming should make such poems entertaining and pleasurable as well as giving the poet the chance to tilt at his or her favourite targets.

For my latest, The Culture Man, I have employed a variant of “the Pushkin stanza” – a reference to Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin written in tetrameter stanzas of 14 lines each with a strict pattern of alternating ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ rhymes (as they are still called). Charles Johnston’s translation of Eugene Onegin was much praised on its appearance in 1977 and there have been further examples since such as Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and John Fuller’s The Illusionists (1980). In his “Translator’s Note”, Charles Johnston writes: “The brio of the Russian text partly depends on a lavish use not only of French and other foreign words, but of slang and of audacious Byronic-type rhymes.” Following these, he warns, the contemporary “must do all he can to avoid the pitfalls of the embarrassing, the facetious and the arch”. Point taken!

Although I have a few of those “audacious” rhymes I have not followed the strict rhyming scheme of the classic Pushkin stanza, as John Fuller – our foremost contemporary poetic craftsman – pointed out to me when he read it. It really is a “variant” and perhaps I should simply have avoided referring to the Pushkin model. John Fuller, a most kind and generous as well as knowledgeable, critic added: “I think your anapaestic version of the Pushkin stanza is a great discovery: it gives it a sort of Regency buttonholing bounce that for some reason I associate with R. H. Barham (who was, after all, a contemporary of Pushkin). So I forgive you for abandoning the alternate feminine and masculine rhymes [!]. And it is full of good things: I particularly liked the “treble-clef ear-rings” and the “fat cod-Greek pillars” and things of that sort, where relevant observation suddenly combines with the language to imprint itself indelibly.”

So much for the form, what of the argument which is important in a satire if it aspires to be something more than just a comedy of manners? Of course if satire changed anything they would abolish it. On 23rd June 2016 the British electorate, as we know, voted narrowly in a referendum to leave Europe and in March 2017 a bill was introduced to begin the process of withdrawal from the Treaty on European Union. The Bill encountered opposition in the House of Lords and that month the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Watson went into his local bookshop in Richmond and ordered 20 copies of my A Dog’s Brexit which he distributed to each of his nineteen fellow members of the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union. I was naturally gratified but in spite of two important amendments by the Lords to the withdrawal bill the final reading rejected those amendments and it received royal assent on 16th March 2017. To those who deplore political poetry which, in Keats’ phrase has “a palpable design on us” this was of course no more than it deserved. They told me so.

Coming back to the new poem, what do I mean by “cultural populism”? The far right political populists who are currently in the ascendant across the world are characterised by (a) an appeal to the folks to vote for them because, unlike the “elites”, they are listening to them and are on their side and (b) a flagrant attack, once in power, on the living standards, benefits and freedoms of the folks and a massive shift of wealth and power to the rich and powerful and away from the poor. In the same way the cultural populists purport to be on our side against the snooty cultural elitists who talk of high art and the avant garde. In effect, however, these false cultural friends are themselves elitists who try to tell us what our cultural consumption should be, to control us. Don’t worry your little heads with Samuel Beckett, watch football on very large pub TV screens and stuff yourself with chips. In my poem the working class revolt against this stereotyping and drawing of cultural lines in the sand. But read it for yourself (and tell me here what you think). You can order The Culture Man from www.rackpress.blogspot.com.

Anthony Trollope wrote in his Autobiography: “Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.” Am I guilty of this fault? Smith-Johnson, the character in my poem who argues that nothing is too good for the working class and they should make their own choices at the cultural deli-counter rather than be dictated to by the well-meaning, is the author of a book called Dumbing Down and that is, for me , what is at the root of the problem. By creating false barriers between us and the more demanding (and correspondingly fulfilling) arts the cultural populists are feeding us on un-nutritious fare. On 29th March this year The Guardian published an editorial to mark the centenary of the composer Pierre Boulez. The Guardian noted that the “challenging” music of Boulez was being given a whole day of exposure on Radio 3 which it judged “a bold attempt to make sense of serialism, atonality and the postwar musical experimentation that alienated many listeners”. No mention of the fact that Boulez – I have just been listening to a CD of his piano sonatas – gave great pleasure to many listeners rather than “alienating” them. The editorial went on to attack Boulez for his “unhelpful” role in allegedly contributing to a “bifurcation” between traditional classical music and “the music of the present”. This is a particular problem for contemporary classical music faced with the conservatism of many audiences. It is inconceivable that the Guardian would publish an editorial attacking the new in visual art, for example, where the avant-garde frightens no one and Tate exhibitions are packed, but when it is a case of classical music conservatism is too often taken as the norm.

In the end I wrote these satires to give pleasure, to have fun writing them and, I hope, to make you laugh. I hope you enjoy them.