‘this is plenty. this is more than enough’ and, in the end, perpetrator: ‘One man shall wake from terror to his bed.|Fivemen
shall be dead.||One man to five. A million men to one.|And still they die. And
still the war goes on.’^25 Fenton’s speakers often sound like this, as though they are
getting a bitter kind of consolation out of turning their bewilderment into lapidary
statement—statement that invites decoding in proportion to its opacity.
A sustained instance of this procedure is the poem ‘In a Notebook’, which acts
out a bewildered and bewildering incomprehension on the part of both speaker
and reader. The poem enacts the process by which event becomes memory, and
in so doing demonstrates the fact that to recall the past necessarily involves the
act of recording it; for the scene remembered in the poem reaches the reader only,
explicitly, as writing, as a piece of text. In spite of the bewilderment, or perhaps
because of it, that text has a distant, controlled, and riddling quality, gained in large
part from the rhythmically steady, trance-like iambs unvaried by caesurae. Hence
the line unit takes precedence, a stylistic feature which is cunningly deployed. The
first three, italicized stanzas (of this five-stanza poem) are evidently lines by the
poet, later happened upon by him ‘in a notebook’, describing the eve of battle.
But they are already distanced from the events and scene they describe: we are
witness not to a war correspondent’s immediate impressions but to past-tense
poetic description whose artful composition reflectsthe poet-reporter’s voyeuristic
role from a perspective already looking to the future: ‘And I sat drinking bitter
coffee wishing|The tide would turn to bring me to my senses|After the pleasant
war and the evasive answers.’^26 When the tide does turn, and he has supposedly
come to his senses, it is only to realize that, ‘reading this passage now’ from the
notebook, all that remains of the scene is the text, the (memorable) lines of poetry,
that he penned there. Hence the first of the two non-italicized stanzas, presumably
written in the ‘present’ of the poem, is largely composed of some of the (formerly
italicized) notebook lines, with the implication that all that can be retrieved of the
ravaged civilization, the ‘villages [that] are burnt’ and ‘the cities void’, is the poetry
which the poet-reporter, guiltily, even conspiratorially, made out of them: not even
memories of that civilization, but only memories as transformed into a necessarily
stylized record. Or, to put it another way, memory always distorts; there is no such
thing as pure recall. Our pasts, individual and collective, are what we were then.
Hence the conclusion, which puts aside all attempt at embellishment, poetic or
emotional: ‘And I’m afraid most of my friends are dead.’ This line, with its less
regular, almost stumbling rhythm, represents a small emotional jolt right at the
end of the poem, all the more arresting for its under-spokenness. It seems to break
through the poem’s trance-like state into a very English-sounding idiom, laconic,
tight-lipped, conversational, curiously polite, but heartfelt.
(^25) Fenton, ‘Cambodia’, inMemory of War and Children in Exile, 23.
(^26) Fenton, ‘In a Notebook’, ibid. 24.