STEPHEN WILSON

The work of the  English poet, Richard Berengarten, is well known for its multicultural perspectives. This essay focuses on his long poem The Manager with particular reference to themes linked to Jewish heritage. It concludes with an analysis suggesting that the poem deals with psychological conflict resolution.

‘I’m no different from you. I’m not I’m not I’m not’, screams a bullied schoolboy voice in the nightmarish §49 of Richard Berengarten’s book-length poem, The Manager¹, while banging his own head on the shower-room door. But this is no ordinary shower-room, no corner of Greyfriars, despite the old-fashioned British public school talk, redolent of “the fat owl of the remove”– ‘Oh Fains/ I Say Honestly You Fellows’. There are embryonic children here who will never be born, plugged into sockets in the wall. The clumsy expression ‘chamber of showers’ says it all, and if we were in any doubt, §56 spells it out, ‘Like camp inmates trudging into the chamber// Of showers’. This is a place where Jews are gassed, where otherness is murdered, where future generations are cut down. It is a chamber of horrors.

The manager’s experience is everyman’s, because nobody is free from the need to belong, from vulnerability to group bullying, from persecutory anxiety, from bad dreams. These things are part of the human condition. But the manager’s experience is also the lot of a particular kind of twen-ty-first century man, one whose history makes him no stranger to suffering and scorn, whose literature has always functioned as a bulwark against them. Jesus was never so Jewish as when on the cross, tortured, ridiculed, humiliated, mouth smarting with vinegar, he cried out words from the He-brew Bible, ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Yet the crucifixion story is ultimately the triumph of life over death, just as the story of Psalm 22², on which it is modelled, is a celebration of faith over despair; derision, bullying and cruelty are central features in the horrid atmos-phere of the Psalm:

All they that see me laugh me to
scorn;
They shoot out the lip, they shake
the head:
Let him commit himself unto the
Lord! let Him rescue him;
Let Him deliver him, seeing He
delighteth in him

so different in quality from its immediate neighbour, Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’.

The Gospel of Matthew³ inverts the narrative, turning the persecutory ‘Strong bulls of Bashan’, the ‘dogs’, the ‘evil-doers’ into Jews, into all Jews, only too willing in their stubborn, arrogant, deicidal mania to invite eternal culpability – ‘His blood be on us and on our children’, they declare. And the victim, Jesus, is somehow separated from his Jewishness, becomes a ‘non-Jew’ or ‘new-Jew’, sadly paving the way for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. In the Abu-Grhaib like atmosphere of Richard Berengarten’s poem, the victim’s arms have been amputated, he is naked to the waist, lacks any means to defend himself, has his pyjama cord undone and his erect penis involuntarily exposed, no doubt revealing the circumcised glans which marks his difference. He stammers desperately, ‘Just// Give us one extra chance’. Psalm 22 again:

And my tongue cleaveth to my
throat;
And Thou layest me in the dust of
death.

I want to unpack one word from the thousands which make up The Manager, in order to place the poem in the context of other Jewish poetry – ‘sneering’. ‘Wencott, most expert/ bully in the whole third year, stands behind me sneering’ (§49). It’s a leitmotif which stretches across the centuries, witness the Cordoban poet, Isaac ben Capron writing in the mid-tenth century⁴:

We are dispersed and scorned in every country, people
make puns about us and treat us like fools.

or Israel Zangwill at the beginning of the twentieth century in ‘The Jews of England (1290-1902)’⁵:

An Edward’s England spat us out — a band
Foredoomed to redden Vistula or Rhine,
And leaf-like toss with every wind malign.
All mocked the faith they could not understand.

or Jon Silkin’s nightmarish post-Holocaust poem, ‘The Area of conflict’⁶, in which he moves ‘like a doomed leaf’ and finds himself in ‘A field, burning with flesh’. When he asks someone raking up arms and teeth and hair what he is doing, there is no reply. Just the following:

He raised up to his mouth
The sneering lip we dread
Closing his fingers on
A complete silence. Sky dropped
Down tears in blood, I think.

Shakespeare is spot on when he has Shylock call out Antonio with the words, ‘You, that did void your rheum upon my beard/ And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur’ for the word ‘jeer’, or its close relative ‘sneer’, commonly occurs in the discourse of Jewish poets and reflects a prevalent pre-occupation⁷. Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘The Jew’⁸ has these lines:

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses,
Then why do they sneer at me?

He could have found an answer in Luc De Clapier, Marquis de Vauvenargue, writing a couple of centuries earlier⁹, ‘Nous méprisons beaucoup de choses pour ne pas mépriser nous-mêmes’ [We scorn many things in order not to scorn ourselves]. To elaborate, we obtain relief, escape from hostile internal critics located in our own minds by creating scape-goats. Everything I am reluctant to own as part of myself (infantile dependence, needi-ness, greediness, foolishness, anger, dishonesty, stubbornness, violence, irresistible sexual desire, lack of mastery over my own emotions…) I am inclined to attribute to others. If ‘hell is other people’¹⁰, is it because they impose limits on our freedom of action, constrain our narcissistic de-sires, or is it precisely because they contain them?

One can go further. When it comes to the question of alterity, things which were once inside me and have crossed the frontier, become part of the outside world, acquire a truly disgusting quality. Consider the sight of one’s own bodily products, blood, faeces, saliva — a secretion one is happy to continuously swallow but would balk at drinking in a glass. So I think there is a double effect, a multiplier. Not only do foreigners, foreign bodies, immigrants, Jews, furnish us with ideal receptacles for unwanted ‘bad’ psychological parts of ourselves, but also in crossing the boundary of our skin, of our identity, in becoming “not-me”, these disowned psychological elements grow exponentially worse. It is they who are the true outsiders!

Clearly there exist more elevated levels of the human soul, psychological forces which can be mobilised against our primitive (projective) impulsions and disarm their malevolence. To maintain internal harmony it is not always necessary to expel “bad objects”, on the contrary a way of living with the unwanted inhabitants of our minds can be found. To do this we need to invite in (introject) “good objects”, to make the experience of love, for-bearance and generosity our own. Berengarten’s §89 gives a concrete illustration of this process in the form of ingesting the food, the Sweetcorn, dis-covered in Auntie Mimi’s freezer shortly after her death.

And we who have inherited, what should we do with this goodness? Sling
it away, waste it? Bury it all with her? Or eat it, remembering her, since
she with her love prepared it?

In the words of the Lebanese-French writer, Amin Malouf, ‘magnanimity evokes magnanimity’¹¹. This internal process allows us to welcome immigrants in the external world and consider them a boon to society. However, such a response has nothing to do with the psychology of scorn which, in my opinion (like the psychology of snobbishness) always betrays pathology. Darwin¹² makes the important point that the object of a person’s scorn does not evoke terror or rage, rather it is perceived as abhorrent, something which we wish to reject or exclude. It is a kind of precari-ous vertigo aspiring to the high ground while simultaneously teetering on the brink of the abyss.

——-

1 Eliot & Thompson, (2001); Salt, (2008;) Shearsman, (2011).
2 Psalm 22, l.2.
3 v.25
4 Pelaez del Rosal, Jesus, The Jews in Cordoba (X – XII centuries), Trans. Patricia Sneesby, (Cordoba: Ediciones El Amendro,1988) p. 90-91.
5 Blind Children, (London: William Heinman,1903) p.118.
6 Selected Poems, (London, Routledge,1988) p. 25.
7 Wilson, Stephen, Poetics of the Diaspora (Oxford: Lamad Vav Press, 2013).
8 Isaac Rosenberg, Ed. Vivien Noakes (OUP, 2008) p. 119.
9 1747
10 Sartre, Jean Paul, Huis clos.
11La magnanimité appelle la magnanimité, l’indifférence appelle l’indifférence, et le mépris appelle le mépris.
12The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, New York: D. Appleton & Company. (1872): 253-277.