Alan Brownjohn has always viewed the imagination as politically responsible. His particular kinds of generous realism connect him to un-literary lives and locations, and so to the literary tradition broadly called socialist. He is an acutely class-alert writer, and in this week's poem, "Dialogue of the Believing Gentleman and the Atheist Maid" he gently exposes the pretensions of a middle-class couple as they argue about art, God and sex.
The poem mimics the decorum, while challenging the conventions, of the classical eclogue débat. One of its interesting features is that it gives the most assertive and important role to a woman speaker (see an earlier POTW for John Suckling's highly male-orientated treatment of the "dialogue" genre). As you'd expect from a poet who is also an accomplished novelist, Brownjohn creates characters who are complicated in a modern way. Even more than the nymphs and shepherds of the classical eclogue, they seem to be indulging in roleplay. There's an irony working on several levels, beginning with the quaint personae, "Believing Gentleman" and "Atheist Maid".
The Gentleman, we learn at once, has not been all that gentlemanly. Perhaps his earnest conversation about the arts was a seduction gambit. The Maid's discouraging response has provided "the inciting incident", as fiction theorists call it. In maidenly fashion, she has "crossed her legs". This old-fashioned euphemism hints at the Gentleman's likely age. The disagreement, it's suggested, is partly about a gulf more profound, these days, than the "gender divide" – the age gap.
Whether hypocritical wolf or genuine culture vulture, the Believing Gentleman appears more shocked by the Maid's rejection of the "high", ie religious, "implications of great art" than her sexual rebuff – though not shocked enough to have lost interest in her (he concludes with a direct question about the leg-crossing – which the Maid signally fails to answer). Are we meant to believe his lofty views are genuine? That is one of the poem's intriguing questions.
The Gentleman's rhymed couplets underline his certainty, but a rhyme wrenched over the line-break in the third stanza, "Mo/na Lisa," implies tension, and possibly lack of conviction. Could the fact that the Mona Lisa isn't a sacred work, unlike the other compositions by Bach and George Herbert, simply have escaped him? The Gentleman may be confusing "major" and "sacred" as artistic categories, as if "major" implied "sacred". He worms his way out of the muddle by begging the question, of George Herbert's poetry, that "surely God decreed it".
The Maid upsets the cosmological clockwork with a large sprinkling of "late dust". Dust, of course, traditionally links believers and unbelievers: for the former, it's a temporary state of organic decay, for the latter, permanent. For the Maid, dust is the whole beautiful story. As with the devil and the best tunes, so the atheist gets the best poetry in this dialogue, and it's dust that stimulates her eloquence – the different varieties that blend on the summer air, from pollen to the ashes from the crematoria "cresting the bland peripheral hills of London". The Maid speaks like a poet, and with this particular poet's own graceful realism. Her panoramic vision and gentle rhythms contrast with the rigid coherence of the Gentleman's couplets. It's as if we'd moved from a pseudo-world of brightly baroque artifice to a contemporary organic reality, neither wholly pastoral nor wholly urban, where nothing is settled (the flowers themselves are "evolving" as they reproduce) and it doesn't matter.
However, the Maid has her own unreliability as a narrator. Her claim that sex with her could "cure" the Gentleman of his God-disease bespeaks adolescent fantasy. The full ironic force of those titles, Atheist and Maid, is now revealed. Her confident claim about the transformative powers of sex suggests she has her own gods. Although she seems altogether cleverer and better educated than the Gentleman, who perhaps was all along simply trying to impress her with some borrowed Arnoldian values, she's surely not as rational as she thinks. And it seems pretty unlikely that she really is a "maid".
At the end of her nonetheless splendid speech, she neatly tosses a new line of argument into the mix: "…those who love love love Telemann as much." Sex, it seems, is redeemed for high culture and God is out of the picture (How will the innocent Gentleman take this shocking news?) The omission of a comma after the second "love" is a brilliant touch, and, if you happen to like the Beatles as well as Telemann, you'll probably hear an echo of the Fab Four's "All you need is love … love is all you need."
"Dialogue of the Believing Gentleman and the Atheist Maid" was first published in Alan Brownjohn's 2004 collection, The Men Around Her Bed. It's reprinted in a fine new Selected Poems, The Saner Places, which draws on all the poet's major collections since 1961, and was recently published by Enitharmon Press.
Dialogue of the Believing Gentleman and the Atheist Maid
The Gentleman:
You crossed your legs and gave no reason why,
A moment ago. We were talking about the high
Implications of great art. I said 'they are religious',
A point of view you called 'preposterous'.
But I love the St Matthew Passion, I love the Mo-
na Lisa, both of which surely show
The power of a Higher Being. Then George Herbert – he
Who chastised wealth and pomp and vanity –
His work, for me, is intrinsic, and surely God
Decreed that it should exist? To me it's odd
To find some – Well, to find a girl like you
Who doesn't have any inkling of the true
Religiousness of Great Art. – And one more thought begs
An answer still. Why did you cross your legs?
The Maid:
In bed with you I could cure you of God;
But that wouldn't be to deprive you of Michelangelo's
David, or of the Resurrection
Symphony (so named), or of the Holy Sonnets.
It's 'God' I'm banishing, not the works of man
(Or woman, naturally.) – Including your Gerard Manley
Hopkins, great nature poet.
In bed we'd watch
Late dust coming in, as we'd leave a window open
To catch the pollen of the evolving flowers,
The dust from the roadworks, and from the crematoria
Cresting the bland peripheral hills of London
- Particles of our impermanency, but
Shot through with such infamy and pleasure, sent
Up by the tumult of the lovebeds where
Those who love love love Telemann as much.
ALAN BROWNJOHN