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.45For all the unexpected familiarity and common [Protestant] heritage, this is not your abiding place.46 Reference to  the western islandhints at the mode adopted in some of Hewitt s most effectivecommentaries on Ulster s summer of  69.THE COVENTRY FACTOR 97The poems that appeared in the booklet An Ulster Reckoningwere written in the immediate aftermath of the sectarian riots of August1969, the month British troops were first deployed on the streets ofDerry and Belfast. The Coasters is a powerful indictment of acomplacent Protestant bourgeoisie for too long salving its liberalconscience with token gestures across the sectarian divide.47 Like TomPaulin a decade later, albeit with less subtlety, Hewitt deploys classicalallusions and parallels.Thus, Ulster becomes an Hellenic hotspot, itsdiscredited oligarchy belatedly appeasing mistrusted Thebans longsettled within the city walls: suspicious of compromise, the mob smellblood.Allegorizing Thucydides, which in  Parallels Never MeetHewitt concedes is a fruitless artifice ( Reality is a of a coarsertexture ), nevertheless echoes an earlier poem,  The Colony ,published in 1953.48 Here Ulster becomes a wild outpost at the edge ofthe empire tamed by Caesar s legions and an expatriate  rabble ofland-hungry cives, camp-followers, and clerks, their children andgrandchildren ever fearful of a wrathful and revenging dispossessed:Alone, I have a harder row to hoe:I think these natives human, think their code,though strange to us, and farther from the truth,only a little so - to be redeemedif they themselves rise up against the spellsand fears their celibates surround them with.49Yet, after centuries of cultivating and adapting to a once harsh andbarren land, now  we would be strangers in the Capitol;/this is ourcountry also; and we shall not be outcast on the world.50Hewitt returned to the colonial experience in 1971, in  TheRoman Fort.The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum s majorarchaeological project in the 1960s was the excavation and partialreconstruction of the Lunt Fort at Baginton, a village just within thecity boundaries, adjacent to the then aspiring  Coventry Airport.Fieldarchaeologist Brian Hobley made his name digging the Lunt, enablinghim to move on to more ambitious projects at the Museum of London.Hobley persuaded the Royal Engineers to help reconstruct the woodengateway to the fort, with latter-day legionaries using replica tools andtechniques:98 THE CITY OF COVENTRYLike the Romans also, they may shortly receivefurther experience in a beleaguered colony,for, daily, public prints and moving picturesbring evidence of the stubborn barbarians.51Admittedly, engineers rarely find themselves  Shielded, vague soldiers,visored, crouch alert , but Hewitt makes his point neatly andemphatically.52 It is a rare occasion when his preoccupations backhome and at work are at one; and the poem is arguably as effective andpolemical as its much longer, laboured, and ever so slightly priggishantecedent, however laudable  The Colony s lesson of understandingand reconciliation.Belfast may have been  irredeemably home , and the Glens ofAntrim more than a mere R and R refuge from the exposure of themunicipal frontline, but Coventry clearly meant far more to Hewittthan has previously been appreciated.There appears to be anorthodoxy of exile, of Hewitt - in Heaney s words - setting  his lonelypresent against a rooted past, in terms of a lost community and family.Hewitt s final editor sees the Coventry poems reflecting,  the exile syearning to adapt and an echo of loss that is more than merenostalgia.53 Well yes, but is there not a danger of writing off fifteenyears of Hewitt s life, a time when much of his most important workwas being produced, as being a mere transitory phase? Am I beingunfair and over sensitive in interpreting most critical commentary as, In body he was in the West Midlands for ten months of the year, but inspirit he was always back here with us ? The Ulster identity is clearlyparamount, and yet what is fascinating about John Hewitt is the degreeto which in a quiet unfussy way he really did adopt his adopted city.Here is a familiar story of the outsider cultivating a much greater civicpride and a far deeper knowledge of the locale than most of the natives.The irony is that, beyond his immediate circle of colleagues,councillors, and confidants, precious few were aware of Hewitt sefforts to promote the virtues of Coventry redux; nor indeed of hisqualifications to be a poet wholly appropriate to the  Phoenix city ,fuelled as he was by an intensely personal, secular vision of socialjustice, community/regional values, and citizenship (.these were theKing s horses going about the King s business, never mine. ).54Like Hewitt, Larkin was at heart an unequivocally Protestantwriter, but of a largely formal Anglican mode far removed fromTHE COVENTRY FACTOR 99Presbyterian dissent and respectable sedition.Unlike Hewitt, whosevalues and politics drew heavily on those of his father, Larkin couldnever recall his parents with that same mixture of awe and affection.55Andrew Motion explored at length the young Philip s uneasyrelationship with Sydney and Eva Larkin, his hero seeing himself bythe age of eighteen,  as someone both dependent upon and draggeddown from his whining mother and autocratic father.56 Not only isLarkin seen as escaping in 1940 from what some today would see as adisturbingly dysfunctional family, but his insistence to Kingsley Amisthat growing up in Coventry was singularly uneventful is tacitlyendorsed.Larkin of course always encouraged this impression,maintaining that life behind the baize curtains at Manor Road was very normal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]