gareth reeves
Fenton’s baffled speakers often take refuge in style as a defence against their
bafflement. ‘Dead Soldiers’ depends on our knowing, we feel, as much, or as
little, about the murderous Pol Pot regime as does the poet: namely, that it was
murderous, which is to know more than enough. Being closer to it produces
nothing other than sinister wit revolving around that knowledge, which is nearly
but never uttered: ‘inflorescence of a banana salad’; ‘They called the empties Dead
Soldiers|And rejoiced to see them pile up at our feet’; ‘The frogs’ thighs leapt
into the sad purple face|Like fish to the sound of a Chinese flute.’^27 This is the
self-consciously knowing style of one who self-confessedly knows little, and who
makes a stylistic point of cultural alienation and incomprehension with Audenesque
public school phrases like ‘Slipped away with the swag’, and with comically precise
but off-centre similes: ‘Each diner was attended by one of the other ranks|Whirling
a table-napkin to keep off the flies.|It was like eating between rows of morris
dancers—|Only they didn’t kick.’ The poem ends with the speculation that Pol
Pot’s brother (‘the Jockey Cap’) was ‘done for’, ‘Either [by] the lunches or the dead
soldiers’—if in acknowledgement of possible remorse on the part of the brother,
the reader cannot tell, and nor, one suspects, can the poem’s speaker.
With ‘A German Requiem’ it is remarkable how Fenton’s experience as a war
correspondent and political journalist climaxes in an achievement whose veryraison
d’ˆetreis lack of experience, is precisely not having been present at the horrors that are
the poem’s absent subject.^28 As Corcoran writes, ‘apparently entirely simple in dic-
tion and syntax and straightforward in technique...it is in fact a poem preoccupied
with opacity...theliterally‘‘unspeakable’’Nazipastisthepressurebehindevery
line.’^29 The poet has found the perfect subject for his cryptically menacing style. The
poem presents the two complementary roles of an investigative reporter, looking
for clues and presenting the evidence, which translate on the personal and private
level as trying to remember and wanting not to forget—though tugging beneath the
surface are the opposed impulses of trying to forget and wanting not to remember.
The syndrome is hinted at in a difficult passage from Hobbes’sLeviathanused as
an epigraph to the poem, in which ‘Imagination’ must compensate for the ‘decaying
sense’ of forgetfulness, ‘So thatImaginationandMemoryare but one thing...’.
Alan Robinson helpfully explains that the poem’s ‘displaced subject—the Holo-
caust—is a perceptual absence, literally in the devastated urban landscape that has
disappeared without trace, metaphorically in the reticent conspiracy of silence of
the Germans who lived through it, and accessible to the poet only through conjec-
ture’.^30 Perceptual absence and conspiracy of silence come together in that arresting
combination of clarity and opacity which, I have been arguing, is a prime character-
istic of Fenton’s style. In the opening section, syntactic transparency screens murky
(^27) Fenton, ‘Dead Soldiers’, inMemory of War and Children in Exile, 26–27.
(^28) Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’, ibid. 9–19. (^29) Corcoran,English Poetry since 1940, 248.
(^30) Alan Robinson,Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 3–4.