One can see how it happened. Some French composers - Debussy, Ravel, perhaps Faure and even Erik Satie - seemed to have elements of their work superficially in common with some French painters of the period - Monet, Manet, Renoir, Seurat - and so were awarded the same label. Not that the painters had welcomed the label in the first place. It was, as ever, the brainchild of a critic and taken from the title of one Monet painting. But if it wasn't an accurate name for the painters, it certainly isn't for Debussy which I realized on hearing the String Quartet in St. Martin-in-the-Fields a while ago, if not before. That is fierce in parts.
There might not be anything wrong with being 'impressionistic' but it is wrong to apply the term to something which is very accurately conceived.
But few of the prime movers of any such 'movement' are glad of their labels. Camus, for one, wasn't keen on being called 'existentialist' and none of the fifties poets recognized as The Movement even recognized such a grouping. No class act wants to be, or ought to be, reduced to such glib definition. It is the surrogates, the third-rate, those trying to get in on the coat-tails of their betters that readily identify themselves as post-modern, avant-garde, Tribe of Ben or, briefly in 1977, punk. It's them that need the uplift of association to make themselves appear significant. No artist in their right mind seriously wants to be rubber stamped, not least because, for one thing, their next work might not fit into the school they have been allocated to, however vaguely or conveniently.
Do we do Julian Barnes, Iam McEwan and Martin Amis any favours by thinking of them together in any useful way. Not really. They are more interesting for their idiosyncracies than their likeness. But another guaranteed fine time of a weekend was had with first of my batch of old Barnesy's, his first novel, Metroland, which took much less than Sunday to read and I am ashamed of myself that I hadn't read it before. What a glorious debut.
Don't you recognize,
it was only when we saw what we saw that we knew we were looking for it.
or,
My theory was that he'd only remained unmarried because there was no one rich enough to keep him who was also stupid enough not to see through him.
or,
I wouldn't mind Dying at all, I thought, if I didn't end up Dead at the end of it.
And all such things are done, of course, by having characters in novels say them at an ironic distance, whether as unreliable narrators or not, so Barnesy never expressed such outrageous truisms like a confessional poet might, but through his amusingly distanced other. Not all poets have gathered that but I'm retrospectively glad I used Barnes as my paragon example in the poem The Book Club Murder in the last booklet because it has proved even more perspicacious than it looked at the time.
Which rather neatly brings me to news of the next booklet, which aspires to pamphlet status with 27 poems in it unless I can think up a few lines to fill the rest of page 23 before I send it to the printers.It is otherwise ready and I linger only to savour the last thrilling days of it being 'work in progress', see whether the magazine I sent it to has space enough for Move Over, Darling, and put off the day when I have to send the poor thing out to kindly murmurs of appreciation and then it's back catalogue immediately. I don't think I could bear the ignominy of trying to promote such a thing. There it is, for the taking.
It might be April. It could be next week.
