‘this is plenty. this is more than enough’ of its perpetrators in thrall to impersonal forces, as in ‘How to Kill’, is one thing,
howeverspinechilling;todosoasanoutsidernotdirectlycaughtupintheconflict,as
someone therefore achieving a poeticfrissonin spite of himself, is quite another. The
sentence ‘As estimated, you died’ may conjure up the coldly calculating efficiency of
the Nazi death machine, but even to utter that sentence, chilling in its presumption,
is to savour insensitivity. At its conclusion, the poem would seem to be retreating
to the sort of world, with ‘a nice view of the park’, that, Hughes claimed, many
embraced after the War. Thus the poem ends, with apparent low-key contentment,
‘This is plenty. This is more than enough.’ This is more than enough said by this
poem you have just read; and if one looks at whathasbeen said, it does indeed
turn out to be more than enough, for this quasi-pastoral retreat cannot ward off
the sinister: ‘Harmless fires’ inevitably calls up the harmful death camp fires which
the speaker would erase from his mind; and in the context ‘fattens’ and ‘flake’ take
on highly sinister overtones. The description is indeed more than enough, in that it
comes loaded with more even than what the poet bargained for. The poem becomes,
in spite of itself, in spite of the attempt to put aside what the speaker himself never
experienced and therefore is not licensed to describe, knowingly melodramatic
in the way it makes poetic capital out of the Holocaust. The attempt to retreat
from self-indulgence results only in another turn of the self-indulgent screw. Even
retreating into silence is culpable. To say anything is more than enough said.
Into this arena of culpability, guilt, and silence, James Fenton’s ‘A German Re-
quiem’ entered in 1981 with an aplomb resulting, it would appear, on the one hand
from his time as a political journalist in Indochina (especially as a war correspondent
in Cambodia) and Germany, and on the other from an apprenticeship in post-
modernist poetics—although, like all postmodernists worthy of the name, he is
wary, to the point of scorn, of all such labels. A highly assured but reticent perform-
ance—assured because reticent—the poem reads as if waiting to be written, as if the
Holocaust were listening out for this memorial to the impossibility of memorial, of
what is now glibly called ‘closure’. And it is as if the poet too, as poet, had been pre-
paring for the moment when inscrutability would find its best subject. Though some
of Fenton’s poetry courts the danger of turning early Audenesque portentousness
into postmodernist affectation, ‘A German Requiem’ takes on a haunting depth. He
has created an ideal poetic vehicle for expressing, not just the inexpressible, but the
fact of inexpressibility. His most characteristic, and most penetrating, poetry neither
reveals nor conceals, but gives voice to the pervasively oppressive presence of con-
cealment. And if it encourages the reader to come up with such a response, that is
in part the point: all attempts at explanation are doomed to mere style, but in the
handling of that style lies a minimal but human salvation. Perhaps to say something,
tomakeapoem,is,afterall,worththeeffort.Itdoesattheveryleastattest,itishoped,
to our humanity. In ‘A German Requiem’ postmodernism’s evasions and indeterm-
inacies are brought to brilliant focus, in a style that combines clarity of statement