MIDDLETON, (John) Christopher

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Nationality: British. Born: Truro, Cornwall, 10 June 1926. Education: Felsted School, Essex; Merton College, Oxford, B.A. 1951,D.Phil. 1954. Military Service: Royal Air Force, 1944–48. Career: Lecturer in English, Zurich University, 1952–55; lecturer in German, King's College, University of London, 1955–66. Since 1966 professor of Germanic languages and literature, University of Texas, Austin. Awards: Faber memorial prize, 1964; Guggenheim fellowship, 1974; DAAD Kunstler programm fellowship, Berlin, 1975, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1980; Camargo Foundation poetry fellow, 1999. Address: Department of German, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Torse 3: Poems 1949–1961. London, Longman, and New York, Harcourt Brace, 1962.

Penguin Modern Poets 4, with David Holbrook and David Wevill. London, Penguin, 1963.

Nonsequences: Selfpoems. London, Longman, 1965; New York, Norton, 1966.

Our Flowers and Nice Bones. London, Fulcrum Press, 1969.

Der Taschenelefant: Satire. Berlin, Neue Rabenpresse, 1969.

The Fossil Fish: 15 Micropoems. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1970.

Briefcase History: 9 Poems. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1972.

Fractions for Another Telemachus. Knotting, Bedfordshire, Sceptre Press, 1974.

Wild Horse. Knotting, Bedfordshire, Sceptre Press, 1975.

The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon. Manchester, Carcanet, and Boston, Godine, 1975.

Razzmatazz. Austin, Texas, W. Thomas Taylor, 1976.

Eight Elementary Inventions. Knotting, Bedfordshire, Sceptre Press, 1977.

Pataxanadu and Other Prose. Manchester, Carcanet, 1977.

Carminalenia. Manchester, Carcanet, 1980.

Wooden Dog. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1982.

111 Poems. Manchester, Carcanet, 1983.

Serpentine (prose). London, Oasis, 1984.

Two Horse Wagon Going By. Manchester, Carcanet, 1986.

Selected Writings. Manchester, Carcanet, 1989.

The Balcony Tree. Manchester, Carcanet, 1992.

Intimate Chronicles. Manchester, Carcanet, and Riverdale-on-Hudson, Sheep Meadow, 1996.

In the Mirror of the Eighth King. Los Angeles, Green Integer, 1999.

Play

The Metropolitans (libretto), music by Hans Vogt. Kassel, Alkor, 1964.

Other

Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings. Manchester, Carcanet, 1978.

The Pursuit of the Kingfisher: Essays. Manchester, Carcanet, 1983.

Jackdans Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation. Manchester, Carcanet, 1998.

Editor and translator, with Michael Hamburger, Modern German Poetry 1910–1960: An Anthology with Verse Translations. London, MacGibbon and Kee, and New York, Grove Press, 1962.

Editor and translator, with William Burford, The Poet's Vocation: Selections from the Letters of Holderlin, Rimbaud, and Hart Crane. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1967.

Editor, German Writing Today. London, Penguin, 1967.

Editor, Selected Poems, by Georg Trakl. London, Cape, 1968.

Editor, and translator with others, Selected Stories, by Robert Walser. Manchester, Carcanet, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1982.

Editor, and translator with others, Goethe: Selected Poems. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Suhrkamp-Insel, and London, Calder, 1983.

Editor, and translator with others, The Figure on the Boundary Line: Selected Prose, by Christoph Meckel. Manchester, Carcanet, 1983.

Editor, and translator with others, The Stillness of the World Before Bach: New Selected Poems, by Lars Gustafsson. New York, New Directions, 1988.

Translator, The Walk and Other Stories, by Robert Walser. London, Calder, 1957.

Translator, with others, Primal Vision, by Gottfried Benn. New York, New Directions, 1960.

Translator, with others, Poems and Verse Plays, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. New York, Pantheon, 1961.

Translator, with Michael Hamburger, Selected Poems, by Gunter Grass. London, Secker and Warburg, and New York, Harcourt Brace, 1966.

Translator, Jakob von Gunten, by Robert Walser. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1969.

Translator, Selected Letters, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Translator, with Michael Hamburger, Poems, by Gunter Grass. London, Penguin, 1969; as Selected Poems, 1980.

Translator, The Quest for Christa T., by Christa Wolf. New York, Farrar Straus, 1970; London, Hutchinson, 1971.

Translator, with Michael Hamburger, Selected Poems, by Paul Celan. London, Penguin, 1972.

Translator, Selected Poems, by Friedrich Holderlin and Eduard Morike. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Translator, Inmarypraise, by Gunter Grass. New York, HarcourtBrace, 1974.

Translator, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, by Elias Canetti. New York, Schocken, 1974; London, Penguin, 1978.

Translator, with Michael Hamburger, In the Egg and Other Poems, by Gunter Grass. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1977; London, Secker and Warburg, 1978.

Translator, The Spectacle at the Tower, by Gert Hofmann. New York, Fromm, 1985.

Translator, Our Conquest, by Gert Hofmann. New York, Fromm, 1985.

Translator, The Parable of the Blind, by Gert Hofmann. New York, Fromm, 1986; London, Secker and Warburg, 1988.

Translator, Balzac's Horse and Other Stories, by Gert Hofmann. New York, Fromm, 1988.

Translator, with Leticia Garza-Falcón, Andalusian Poems. Boston, Godine, 1993.

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Critical Studies: "Shapes in Imaginary Space" by Philip Crick, in Ninth Decade 2, 1983; "Christopher Middleton: Journeys Broken at the Threshold" by Ian Gregson, in Bete Noire (Hull, Humberside, England), 10–11, autumn 1990-spring 1991.

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In an interview in London Magazine in 1964, Christopher Middleton criticized his English contemporaries for a parochialism of form and content that cut them off from the great heritage of European modernism. The latter, he argued, had "at most points connected … a strong sense of social revolution, a catastrophic view of history," with an "interest in the radical remaking of techniques." Both in his translations, primarily from the German, and in his own poetry, Middleton has tried to keep open this connection. Middleton's "catastrophic view of history" leads him continually to those moments at which personal crisis interlocks with social crisis. Thus, in "The Arrest of Pastor Paul Schneider" the pastor is dragged reluctantly from a nightmare of arrest to its actuality; in "January 1919" history rips the "holed head" of the murdered German revolutionary Liebknecht out of context, to display it "bleeding across a heap of progressive magazines"; in "The Historian" Procopius, official historian to the tyrant Justinian, is snatched from the desk where he writes his secret exposé of the regime just as he realizes that the only authentic opposition is in deeds not words. The interrupted sentence that closes the poem reveals the fragility of men amid a history they cannot control, the witness always potentially a victim ("The thought still bothers me, that, instead of writing, I might have changed the"). Many of Middleton's poems turn Hitler's and Stalin's death camps into universal symbols of twentieth-century history, uprooting men from their own proper lives to a dream of deportation and massacre, whether it is the "figures torn from a fog," "feeding on garbage in the camp near Voronezh" ("Pavlovic Variations") or the "eclipsed / Future[s]" slid into the ovens at Treblinka ("Idiocy of Rural Life"). But terror lurks not only in the major events of a public history. Middleton's poetry also detects the threat of extinction in more mundane, trivial situations. A pair of gloves left on the floor of a lavatory (so that "it seems, you'd think, smothering a giggle, / someone has been sucked down the john") can summon up a terrifying vision of people who have disappeared.

Middleton's poetry repeatedly evokes, in his own words, "a really live sense of what it is like to live in a society where the direction of life has fallen into the hands of malevolent or ignorant functionaries, where all human values seem to be threatened by inhuman organization." Poems such as "Octobers" and "Autobiography" record how this menace inserts itself into the most idyllic and private experiences. But "history … isn't the past at all, it is the multitudinous new life saturating the present," and "the little significant things" it is the poet's duty to "unravel" ("Glaucus") contain promise as well as threat, renewal as well as destruction. This is perhaps why so many of Middleton's poems are concerned with children, the inheritors for whom history, the future, is always open, though it may again and again be suppressed, as for "Fania, ten / at the turn of the century," in "The Pogroms in Sebastopol," or for "Pavel's child," who "came to pieces in my hands," dug out of the snow of the camps ("Pavlovic Variations"), or for the napalmed Vietnamese children in "Mérindol Interior," whose photographed agony intrudes into the poet's comfortable middle-class world.

At its best there are a hardness, a tautness, and a lack of false color and sentimentality to Middleton's language that argue an ascetic's imagination. Yet at the same time his poetry is passionately involved in the world, "odd as it is to care," as he says in one poem, "anyhow for things / their mass & contour / & all beginnings." His world is substantial yet curiously abstract, figured and yet not personalized. He writes often in the third or second person, and even when he appears himself, attention is nearly always focused on what is out there rather than on subjective response. This classical yet human distance is maintained by a deliberate employment of the "defamiliarization" technique described by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, whom Middleton acknowledges on several occasions. The disjunctions, dislocations, and unexpected collocations of his language, the experimental diversity of structure and theme, and a movement between extremes of abstrusity and explicitness, using the very opacity of his language to concentrate our gaze as if for the first time on familiar object and event—all enable Middleton to pursue the "defining of enigmas" that is for him the poetic vocation, exposing us to "the strangeness of being alive … the strangeness of living things outside oneself."

In "Oystercatchers," for example, the unexpected verb discloses a world strangely detached from man ("rocks in the bay below / Retrieved their shadows"), while "Wire Spring" turns the pun of the title into a sinister vision by reviving dead metaphors ("The first clock said: it is time we killed. / The second clock said: it is time we told"). "The simplest model for such poems is not the linguistic 'statement' but the question," Middleton notes on the dust jacket of The Lonely Suppers of W.V. Balloon, and indeed all of his poetry is hermeneutic, interrogative, quizzical, questioning reality with a skeptical and informed eye and perpetually reminding us that language is not an innocent carrier of meaning but itself a force for good or ill that preempts all our seeing. It is this that accounts for the range of Middleton's experiments with the resources of language, whether concrete or found poems, cut ups and grafts, or such pieces as "Computer's Karl Marx," which, starting with a joke (a history of revolution written by a computer that has only the letters of the words "production relations" to play with), goes on to show how the limits of language are the limits of the world. It is perhaps finally in this ludic sense of the ludicrous, derived from Dada and surrealism and coupled with a quite un-English seriousness, that Middleton justifies his claim to the European inheritance.

—Stan Smith