ekleksographia

Sarah Hesketh
Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf 
London: Penned in the Margins, 2009.
In English.

The story runs that Napoleon (première, he of the code and the complex), whose appetite for books was matched only by his appetite for conquest, would always set out on campaign with a well stocked bookcase, filled by the Imperial librarian Alexandre Barbier, whose function it also was to keep le petit caporal well stocked with the newest tomes from Paris. When a book was finished, or displeased the emperor, he would cast it through the thick velvet curtains of his carriage, abandoning it to fertilise the parched ground of Egypt or the frozen Russian soil.

And indeed it is in Russia, war-wracked and smouldering, that Hesketh finds Napoleon in the eponymous poem of this, her first collection. ‘Finds’ is to be preferred to ‘imagines’ in this case because it becomes clear as one reads that Hesketh sees her role less as a creator than a researcher – or perhaps better, a revealer – scratching through the thin veneer of rational, enlightened, modernity to bring to the surface the dark currents, of neglected mythology, forgotten history and childhood influences, that shape our lives but which we most often choose to ignore.

The tone is set by the epigraph, from Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter, which concludes ‘I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterwards.’ Hesketh sets herself this task. Thus in ‘Lillith’s Lament,’ Adam’s first wife displaces Eve from centre stage. Hesketh’s Lillith is candid (...he and I / had already been gods in the mud.) and wise (I taught my children several things: /  never to roost where apples grow; /  never consent to lying below.) arguably a more relevant paragon for modern women than susceptible Eve, and for Hesketh clearly worthy of revival. Likewise in ‘Iris’, in which she deals with the apparent reluctance of artists to grapple with this goddess (she can shroud each limb with face from a veil / of the most retiring virgin, or fade / away all the rainbows with a harlot’s rouge; / and still no man will paint her.) there is the unmistakable desire to right an historical wrong. Would that be wrong committed by men? Such a reading of Hesketh is possible, particularly when considered alongside the heroine of ‘Suzanna Ibsen is cold’ who ‘...does not forgive him these November days.’ However, such an interpretation may be too simplistic in that it glosses over a simple fact: mythology and history have most often been shaped and used by men to further their ends and consolidate their dominance. If one is determined to shine a light on the neglected characters of our culture, a large proportion of these characters will necessarily be women.

That Hesketh writes for the outsider, regardless of gender, is clear from another recurrent subject, so-called ‘freakishness,’ both in appearance and behaviour. In ‘Coney Island Cribs’ then, we find ‘...the Fat Lady sitting // and knitting snug booties’ and  Lobster Boy and the Invisible Man whiling away their empty lives over chess while ‘...A million lightbulbs / hum loosely around the boardwalk fence.’ Celebrities, heroes even, of a distant time and, for Hesketh, an Englishwoman, a distant place. Indeed, it is of no small note that she should choose American decay as one of her subjects. Born, as was this reviewer, in England of the early 1980s, Hesketh would have grown up with the United States as a cultural and mythological reference, a modern day land of milk and honey, whose fall from international grace these last ten years ran parallel with Hesketh’s procession to adulthood or, to return to Lillith, her own expulsion from Eden.

This concern with decay, ageing and death recurs throughout the collection. From ‘Garden’ which begins with the rending ‘Time often arrives late these days’, through ‘The Ballroom at West Riding Asylum’ and its protagonist’s ‘...new necessity / of forever remembering the waltz’ to ‘The year is 2095 and Bjorn is planting seeds from the Norwegian Ark,’ which marks Hesketh’s sole foray into the post-apocalypse, the feeling that our time is up (or at the very least, our best times have passed) is never far from her thoughts.

Likewise in ‘Tulips’ in which we meet an obsessionally cloying matriarch who ‘...has married the mouths of her tulips / with string’ so that they will hold until her daughter’s wedding day, Hesketh exploits our contemporary (arguably anti-tragedian) instinct not to admire the Sisyphean character of such an endeavour, but instead to pity and perhaps even to fear this woman and her delusions.

For all that, however, Hesketh manages to avoid sounding pessimistic. She accepts and she describes, but she doesn’t judge. There is a tenderness and humour to much of her writing, as well as the desire to lift things out of the bog of mundaneness, to raise everything, ‘bad’ as well as ‘good,’ onto its own pedestal. So in ‘Faking’ she turns her deft pen to the subject of an orgasm unachieved:

Though you have not yet
thrown my world out to that depth
where the finspines scut
and giggle across
the surface of their darkened nets -
I do not love you any less.
I am content to form
the small oh, of glory,
to add a little polish
to your morning epaulettes.

How else might a man’s pride be salvaged so artfully? It is, in fact, Hesketh’s control of her language that is the secret weapon of ‘Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf.’  There is an inescapable and (for un anglais à Paris) antidotal Englishness to the words she uses, that abound with the hues of the boggy Lancashire moors into which she digs for much of  her inspiration. While one might at times feel that the dictionary has been extensively mined to produce certain poems in the collection, this ceases to matter because Hesketh wields these words so elegantly. Just as she is not shy about assuming her modern setting by, for example, revealing in the notes the role Wikipedia played in much of her research, her richly textured use of language can at times feel like a call to her generation to salvage the language they have inherited or risk losing it. When in ‘Warsaw Uprising,’ she writes ‘Even our vocabulary is wounded’ her observation rings true beyond the historical context she has established.