Myths, midlife and the end of immortality
By David Briggs
In her seminal collection Meadowlands (Carcanet, 1998), U.S. poet Louise Glück uses the characters of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus as avatars for her poetic exploration of a midlife divorce. It’s a great book, with some lines leaving you with the kind of stunned silence that might follow the final note of ‘Fantasie in E Flat’ played on a cathedral organ. Her poem ‘Nostos’, named for the homeward return theme of The Odyssey is a good example: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory”.
Larkin isn’t the only poet to have voiced an uncertainty about modern writers raiding the “myth kitty”, but I’ve long thought that no subject matter is off-limits. The skill’s in shovelling deep with the language, the patterning of sound and musicality, the transformation of an idea into an artistic event. There’s certainly some hubris in taking on The Odyssey, but Glück carries it off. Whether or not I succeed with the same material is for others to judge, but – in my defence – it felt more like the material chose me than the other way around.
When I started writing the poems that formed The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, my fourth collection, I was in my mid-40s. I wouldn’t call it a midlife crisis, since I think that this concept, coined in the 1950s by Elliot Jacques, is at best androcentric (and probably worse), but it certainly felt like some sort of transition was under way. Carl Jung borrowed a word from Heraclitus to describe a reversal of values in midlife – enantiodromia – and I did feel a measure of identification with that. In your 20s it’s hard to have a sense of just how long a human life really is, what a lifespan of 80+ years might feel like. It’s just so much longer than the life you’ve lived to that point, it might as well be forever. The young inhabit a specious form of immortality.
But once you’ve passed life’s likely meridian, when you realise that what remains is likely to be less than what you’ve already had, well, that’s much easier to fathom. Time’s running out. I don’t think those mid-century psychoanalysts like Jung and Jacques were right to suggest that we’re programmed to undergo a midlife re-evaluation, but I do think the simple maths alone is enough to prompt one.
I also think this is partly what The Odyssey is about. A bloke who’d achieved a certain measure of success by midlife now flounders about, trying to find his way back home, and in so doing is forced to re-assess what matters. Nostos, enantiodromia, complicated family ties (storge), the central importance of hospitality (xenia), the increasing frequency of death and bereavement (katabasis) – these are the themes of that great epic, and they were also what I found myself thinking and writing about.
With that uncanny serendipity that tends to accompany a newly-discovered idea, it was suddenly everywhere around me, as though it had been hiding in plain sight all along. I found myself deeply engaged by poems with titles like ‘Nearing Forty’ (Derek Walcott), or ‘Past the Middle of My Life’ (Lorna Crozier), or ‘Mid-Life Mask (Jackie Kay), or poems that began with lines like “I’m turning forty” (Sinéad Morrissey). I was moved by the plangent expressions of parental love across the felt distance of a midlife divorce in poems such as ‘Station’ and ‘Two Gathering’ by Eamon Grennan. I found elegies for deceased parents by midlife poets in almost every collection I read. The themes of midlife nostalgia and hospitality animated my reading of Auden and the three marvellous Johns – Ash, Ashbery, and Koethe.
So, the process of writing this book was a new experience for me. Typically, I find out what I’m doing as I’m doing it, or even at the very end of the process. When I’ve got thirty or forty poems that are worth the candle, I’ll print them off and spread them out across the front room. Suddenly, the book heaves into focus: those two poems there are a pair; those three, placed in that order, imply a partial narrative; that one over there is the mirror double of this one; isn’t it curious that they all seem to be different ways of looking at the same thing. So this is what I’ve been doing!
But with this book, I knew what I was doing from the outset. Maybe that makes it more conscious, more deliberate. TS Eliot once wrote that the bad poet is conscious when he ought to be unconscious and unconscious when he ought to be conscious. I sort of know what I think he means. This book certainly felt like a gentle correction of my usual, more unconscious mode. But it was also more driven, more purposeful. After all, the clock ticking in my study seemed just that little bit louder.
David Briggs was born in 1972, and grew up in the New Forest. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and has published three previous collections of poetry – Rain Rider, The Method Men, and Cracked Skull Cinema. From 2019–2023, David was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme.