adam piette
Dressed up as a quest for the old British energies in the ex-colony, Davie’s envy is
intruth an attraction to the ‘spirits’ of twentieth-century power. In a late poem
to Thom Gunn, Davie reflects on their common status as transatlantic poets: ‘We
are mid-Atlantic people,|You and I,’ he imagines Gunn saying. No, Davie demurs,
Gunn is ‘mid-Pacific’, living close to the ‘pacific|Ocean, the peacemaker’. Yet that
American peace is a blind for the true source of US attraction, Cold War weapons
of mass destruction, concealed in the Californian silos near Gunn’s adopted home,
as Davie goes on to surmise:
Over your head the flying lizard
Sprung from its Lompoc silo, Vandenberg Airforce Base,
Tracks high across mid-ocean to its target.
Ignore it, though a tidal wave will rage
From where it plunges, flood Japan
And poison Asia.^11The Movement, then, could be seen as a movement towards the edge of the Cold
War, either the wistful shoreline where Larkin’s visions of old England appear as
mirages impossibly beyond American influence, or radically towards the edges of
the States themselves, the end of the world from where the end of the world will be
unleashed: ‘This is the end of the world. At the end, at the edge,’ writes Davie, of
Gunn’s Pacific shores of nuclear America.
Another Movement poet to relocate west was the biggest cold warrior of
them all, Robert Conquest. After working for the Foreign Office’s Information
Research Department for ten years gathering information about Soviet camps and
disseminating proof of the Gulag as propaganda to interested parties, Conquest
left, first, to advocate the Orwellian poetic credo of the Movement, as outlined
in the preface to the 1957 anthologyNew Lines. For Orwellian, read Cold War
liberal: ‘[One might] say that George Orwell with his principle of real, rather than
ideological, honesty, exerted, even though indirectly, one of the major influences
on modern poetry.’^12 Conquest then went to work in America, vanguard for him
of the freedom of the West. To follow Auden was no longer to abandon British
culture, but to defend it, under the wings and missiles of the American eagle.
The US harboured the nuclear sublime, the heart of Cold War technology, the
power of rockets like ‘a wave to break across the sky’ from ‘deep in the larger
landmass’.^13 This was the country which made the science fiction (which Conquest
liked to write) come true, homeland of the Cold War, ‘this dangerous peace’.^14
(^11) Davie, ‘To Thom Gunn in Los Altos’, inCollected Poems, 294–5. Vandenberg saw the first Thor
intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) launch in 1958, hosted the CORONA spy satellite program,
Atlas missile tests and silos, then Titan andMinuteman ICBM test launches.
(^12) Robert Conquest, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),New Lines(London: St Martin’s Press, 1956),
p. xvi. 13
Conquest,‘ToLaunchtheSatellites’,inNewandCollectedPoems(London:Hutchinson,1988), 55.
(^14) Conquest, ‘A Girl at Sea’, ibid. 67.