I am a sucker for Sylvia Plath. Something about blonde Anglo-American manic depressives just does it for me. So when I spotted her name in Andrew Motion’s Ways of Life, the book very quickly found its way onto my shelf.
It almost found its way off again, though. Ways of Life is a collection of Motion’s essays and reviews, subtitled ‘On Places, Painters and Poets’, and the Plath piece is scandalously short. Despite that unforgivable failing, though, I decided to give the other pieces a try. Since Motion’s a multi-prizewinning Poet Laureate and all, I figured it couldn’t hurt.
And, in fact, the book starts brilliantly. Motion’s essays on places are carefully arranged in a symphony of plangent melancholy. A deep sense of vulnerability pervades them; the very first essay is haunted by his mother’s death, a memory that casts its long shadow throughout the book.
His landscapes are as troubled as his emotions, often becoming so strongly personified as to threaten him; the air ‘hurtles and charges’, while thorns ‘fling’ their arms up ‘in horror’. This strong sense of movement extends to the narrator too, who seems unable to rest in the places of his past but is instead constantly journeying, constantly in – wait for it – motion.
Where, besides bad puns, does this journey lead? As references to, and parallels with other writers appear, you can feel Motion self-consciously claiming his identity as a writer, sheltering in words where he couldn’t with places.
Yet this emerging sense of identity swiftly disappears again in the essays on painters and poets, which constitute the bulk of the book. Absorbed in his discourse on others rather than himself, he trades Andrew Motion the writer for Andrew Motion the reviewer, faultlessly erudite and faultlessly unemotional.
Not that it’s a bad thing. As a critic Motion valuably highlights lesser-known poets like John Clare, and lesser-known works like Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasion, all in a highly accessible and informative style even for the casual reader.
But it does mean that the book has a highly specific and limited appeal. Orhan Pamuk’s essay collection Other Colours, for example, is a fusion of memories, meditations, political commentary, as well as literary opinions appealing to the general reader; Ways of Life on the other hand, notwithstanding the fine few essays on places, is much more impersonal and dominated by reviews.
So if you love Motion’s writing, or want to find out more about the people in whom he’s interested, then by all means pick this book up. Otherwise, you’ll probably have more fun reading stuff by blonde Anglo-American manic depressives.
Three stars
