HENRY REED
Born: Birmingham, England; February 22, 1914
Principal poetry
A Map of Verona: Poems, 1946.
Most of Henry Reed's work has been in genres other than poetry. His first publication was a critical study, The Novel Since 1939 (1946), and he has also translated Paride Rombi's Perdu and His Father (1954) and Dino Buzzati's Larger than Life (1962). Mainly, however, Reed has been a prolific creator of drama, especially radio plays. In particular, he has enjoyed a fruitful literary relationship with the Italian language and the Italian playwright Ugo Betti, a number of whose works Reed has translated and adapted for radio broadcast in London and for stage production in London and New York. His adaptations of Betti include The Queen and the Rebels, The Burnt Flower-Bed, and Summertime, all produced in London in 1955 and published as Three Plays (1956); later adaptations of Betti were Island of Goats, produced in New York in 1955 and published as Crime on Goat Island (1955), and Corruption in the Palace of Justice, produced in New York in 1958. He also adapted Natalia Ginzburg's play The Advertisement (1968) for production in London in 1968 and in New York in 1974. Reed's most fruitful relationship, however, has been with the British Broadcasting Corporation, for which he has written or adapted some forty to fifty radio plays, including the previously mentioned works by Betti. Reed's writing for radio began with Moby Dick: A Play for Radio from Herman Melville's Novel (1947), brief lyric sections of which form the last part of Reed's collection A Map of Verona: Poems.
Achievements
In Britain, Reed has perhaps been better known for his radio plays and his adaptations of
Ugo Betti than for his poetry, whereas in the
United States he has been known almost exclusively for
his poetry— or, more specifically, for
"Naming of Parts" and
"Judging Distances," which originally
appeared with a third poem
("Unarmed Combat") under the general title
"Lessons of the War." Much
anthologized for introductory literature courses, these two humorous lyrics emphasizing the
futility of war have been read by possibly half the undergraduate population of the United States
during the past two decades. During the period of the Vietnam War especially, the two poems
struck a responsive chord in the hearts of American college students. These two fine poems
deserve the circulation they have achieved, but unfortunately the rest of Reed's poetry is
little known in this country. His other work is
even less known, except possibly among scholars of drama and Italian.
For a first collection of poetry, A Map of Verona: Poems maintains a remarkably high quality throughout, though it does not entirely escape the unevenness typical of first collections. For the sake of completeness, and perhaps for its greater explicitness, the less-inspired third poem of the "Lessons of the War" group should be read. Among other poems which stand out, and which illustrate other aspects of Reed's poetic talent, are "A Map of Verona," "The Door and the Window," "The Builders," a group entitled "Tintagel" ("Tristram," "Iseult Blaunchesmains," "King Mark," and "Iseult la Belle"), and a group entitled "Triptych" ("Chrysothemis," "Antigone," and "Philoctetes"). Finally, admirers of T. S. Eliot, as well as other readers, should not miss Reed's wicked little parody, "Chard Whitlow (Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)."
Perhaps time will smooth out some of the imbalances in Reed's reputation, but as a poet he will likely remain known as someone who strangely produced only one early collection and who is best known for his gently humorous antiwar sentiments. No doubt Reed himself can well appreciate the irony of this situation, since one of his favorite poetic subjects is the person transfixed in time by a single defining (and somewhat immobilizing) act. Reed's act of poetic self-definition, however, is certainly not the whole story of his writing career. He will probably also be known as something of a media pioneer, a writer who could switch smoothly from print to performance to electronic medium. These smooth transitions were forecast in the nature of his poetry.
Biography
Henry Reed was born and educated in Birmingham, a sprawling manufacturing center in the English
Midlands. There is no evidence that this setting had much influence on his poetry, unless it
encouraged a desire to travel to and write about sunnier climes. He attended the King Edward VI
School in Birmingham and took an M.A. degree at the
University of Birmingham.
The influence of his education is evident throughout Reed's poetry, which, like the poetry of so many young Britons from the universities, smacks somewhat of Survey of British Literature. For example, one can detect echoes of Andrew Marvell, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Conrad, and Eliot. In addition, many of Reed's subjects are literary in inspiration. Seemingly, the weight of the great tradition bore down heavily on Reed, and reaction to this weight could have contributed to his move from poetry to radio plays.
Certainly another influence on Reed's writing career was his experience of World War II, when he served in the Royal Army and with the Foreign Office. His military training provided inspiration for the poems in the "Lessons of the War" series. In addition, the war brought him to London, where he subsequently formed the association with the BBC which has since defined
his career.
Analysis
In "A Map of Verona," Henry Reed states that "maps are of place,
not time," while in "Judging Distances" one reads that "maps are
of time, not place." These two versions of reality are not
as contradictory as they might appear, if one considers the source of each. The first version
comes from Reed himself, while the second is the official army doctrine mechanically voiced by a
training officer to a group of recruits. The first version acknowledges the inability of man's
puny symbols to represent reality, while the second asserts the military's wishful thinking, its
need to be in control, to pour reality into a uniform and make it stand up and salute. One cannot
blame the military for trying, as indeed it must, but the futility of its efforts is laughable:
in "Judging Distances" the military theory is demolished, appropriately enough, by a pair of
lovers in the distance, who finish making love even as the training officer and woebegone
recruits watch.
Like the military, though with somewhat more success, Reed in his poems is intent on creating maps of reality. In his poems, both place and time have important roles, as they intersect with human actions. Reed is interested in place for its own sake, but he is also interested in its effects on human actions. Even more, he is interested in how human actions reverberate in time—the anticipation of actions, how actions fade from memory, how the meaning of actions changes with time, how, on the other hand, actions define and transfix personalities. For Reed, reality is as fluid as the stream in his poem "Lives" that cannot be caged. To try as best he can to catch and bottle this reality, Reed concentrates on dramatic moments or their consequences, particularly their moral consequences. Supporting Reed's penchant for the dramatic is his gift of mimicry, for capturing the sound of the human voice, as amply demonstrated in his parodies of T. S. Eliot and of the training officer in the "Lessons of the War" poems. Thus, it should come as no surprise that, although Reed writes in a variety of forms, some of his best poems are dramatic monologues. It should also come as no surprise that he eventually changed to writing drama.
Perhaps the most important poem for understanding Reed's ontology, and a good poem in its own right, is "A Map of Verona." At first, it seems no more than a pleasant travel advertisement: for "a whole long winter season" Reed's thoughts have dwelt on an open map of Verona. His intention to visit Verona reminds him of a stay in another Italian city, "My youthful Naples." Naples is associated in his mind with "a practice in sorrow," with "a sketch in tenderness, lust, and sudden parting." No doubt at the time this experience, despite its air of youthful experimentation, was deeply moving; now, however, he can barely recall its "underground whispers of music." Reed does recall, though, that he once studied an open map of Naples with the same
expectation with which he now studies the map of Verona, and his map-studies then were totally "useless," since "maps are of place, not time." Still, studying the map of Verona and hearing other travelers relate their tourist impressions of the city help to "calm" Reed's "winter of expectations." The city of Verona does indeed exist, and "one day" Reed will go there: "in tomorrow's cave the music/ Trembles and forms inside the musician's mind." Meanwhile, echoing the poem's epigraph from Arthur Rimbaud, Reed can only wonder "in what hour of beauty" and "in what good arms" he will attain "those regions and that city." Finally, he wonders "what good Arms shall take them away again."
On both a literal and a symbolic level, "A Map of Verona" suggests the nature of experience. Among other things, Reed seems to say that, for the most part, people's lives are suspended between remembrance and expectation. Then, when a big moment comes, people are often too youthful to appreciate it or too experienced to believe that it will last. Still, even though remembrance fades and expectation is uncertain, both enrich one's life. Indeed, their enriching context makes it possible for a person to know a big moment when it arrives. Then there is always the potential for the big, fulfilling moment to come, in whatever "hour of beauty" or in whatever "good arms." In "A Map of Verona," the city of Verona, a jewel of Western civilization and the home of Romeo and Juliet, symbolizes this fulfillment.
Reading "A Map of Verona" is good preparation for reading the "Lessons of the War" poems. Though vastly different in subject, the two poems are not as different in theme as might appear; they merely approach much the same theme from different directions. Despite the tenuous nature of experience and the way so much of life hangs between memory and expectations, "A Map of Verona" asserts the potential for human fulfillment. If there is one sure way of cutting off that potential, and typically at an early age, it is war. The incongruity—indeed, insanity—of war is suggested in the "Lessons of the War" poems by the way time and place conspire against the military training going on. While a training officer tries to hammer home his dull lessons, springtime is bursting out all over: flowers are blooming, bees are "assaulting and fumbling the flowers," and lovers are making love. While nature moves full speed ahead toward the fulfillment of life, the soldiers train to eliminate life and in so doing put their own lives on the line. How such lessons go against the grain is also rendered dramatically in the person of Reed's recruit, who has trouble paying attention and through whose mind the reader hears the training officer's words and the recruit's spoken and unspoken responses. His rather obsessional notions demonstrate the difficulty, in springtime, of turning a young man's fancy to thoughts of war.
Although the theme of these poems is sober, their predominant tone is not. Their tone is established by the humorous dramatic situation, especially as this situation is reflected in the diction. Each of the poems begins with a parody of the training officer that reveals his routine mentality, his jargonistic
but otherwise limited vocabulary, and his limited knowledge. All of these provide marvelous openings for the clever young recruit, who responds to the officer's military litany by twisting it into poetic or profound—but always humorous—meanings. In "Naming of Parts," for example, the officer's breakdown on a rifle's parts gives the recruit a fertile field for sexual puns. This particular instance of contrasting diction, like the general contrast between the voice of the training officer and the voice of the recruit, reinforces the theme of the military's sterile, deadening influence.
The "Lessons of the War" poems well illustrate Reed's talent for humor, but most of his poems are somber both in theme and tone. What does not change is Reed's eye for the dramatic situation. His sense of drama can be felt strongly in two groups of poems that consist mostly of dramatic monologues and that might be considered the peak of Reed's poetic achievement. These are the two groups entitled "Tintagel" and "Triptych." "Tintagel" consists of four poems named after the principals in the Tristram story: "Tristram," "Iseult Blaunchesmains," "King Mark," and "Iseult la Belle." In a note, Reed indicates that these four characters "represent four aspects of a problem known (in one or more of these aspects) to most men and women." He depends on the reader's knowledge of the Tristram legend to fill in the details—that these characters represent four corners of a love quadrangle with one side missing: Iseult Blaunchesmains loves Tristram who loves Iseult la Belle who returns his love but is married to King Mark. Already the poems sound like the scenario of an Italian drama or opera, and as the four characters speak their loves and sorrows, either through their own voices or the voice of a sympathetic narrator, they sound more and more like Luigi Pirandello's six characters, doomed to repent their roles to eternity. They have, in effect, become archetypal characters transfixed in time by their self-defining actions. They are like some traumatized people in real life, locked into one searing emotional experience that repeats itself endlessly in their consciousness.
The three characters in "Triptych," All from Greek drama, have likewise defined their personalities for all time through their actions. Here, however, the characters are not equally condemned; indeed, Reed notes that the speakers in the three poems "represent a moral progression, culminating in a decision." The three poems are "Chrysothemis," "Antigone," and "Philoctetes." Chrysothemis and Philoctetes speak for themselves in dramatic monologues, but in the second poem two witnesses to Antigone's death react to it in a dialogue. Chrysothemis, the sister of Electra and Orestes, represents the onlooker who will not get involved no matter how many atrocities she witnesses; after the house of Atreus has decimated itself, she stays behind to care for the remaining children and the decaying house. The house symbolizes her moral state, though she tries to believe she is playing a useful role. The main speaker in "Antigone" is a chance onlooker who, though not involved in the action, is sensitive to its moral consequences, in particular to the way
Antigone acts unhesitatingly on what she knows is right. Finally, the ostracized Philoctetes represents the person who wants to get involved and is rejected, but who overcomes his bitter suffering and sense of personal wrong to act decisively when the time comes: even after years of intense frustration, he goes as straight to his mark as do his blessed arrows. The traumatized person is not necessarily transfixed in time; rebirth is possible.
These two groups of poems involving serious drama verge closer and closer to drama itself. The last group of five poems in A Map of Verona: Poems comes from an actual drama, Reed's radio version of Moby Dick for the BBC. In a note, Reed refers to these poems as "lyric interludes." The transition from poet to dramatist is complete. Very likely Reed's friends mourned the transition, but very likely William Shakespeare's friends did the same.
Harold Branam
Other major works
long fiction: Perdu and His Father, 1954
(translation); Larger Than Life, 1962 (translation).
plays: Moby Dick: A Play for Radio from
Herman Melville's Novel, 1947
(radio play); Island of Goats, 1955 (also known as Crime on Goat Island);
Three Plays, 1956 (translation); Corruption in the Palace of Justice, 1958
(translation); The Advertisement, 1968 (adaptation);
The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio,
1971; Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio,
1971.
nonfiction: The Novel Since 1939, 1946.
Bibliography
Drakakis, John, ed. British Radio Drama.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Contains an excellent chapter by Roger Savage which, although ultimately concerned with Reed's
radio plays, gives exceptional biographical information and makes numerous references to the
poetry. It embraces Reed's career and acknowledges his work as a poet, critic, translator, and
dramatist. This introductory essay includes notes with references that are reviews of Reed's work
and some articles not necessarily concerning him directly.
Gunter, Liz, and Jim Linebarger. "Tone and Voice in Henry Reed's 'Judging Distances.'" Notes on Contemporary Literature 18 (March, 1988): 9-10. Provides an informative analysis of the structure and theme of Reed's poetry. Useful information on Reed's poetic and technical devices.
O'Toole, Michael. "Henry Reed, and What Follows the 'Naming of Parts."' In Functions of Style, edited by David Birch and Michael O'Toole. London: Pinter, 1988. Examines the stylistics of modern English. Central to an appreciation and understanding of Reed's poetic works. Includes a foreword by M. A. K. Halliday.