Literary Criticism: Tom Paulin continues his project to uphold the Puritan tradition of plain-speaking and personal witness over the Anglican values of compromise and balance, writes David Wheatley
'Whatever it is, I'm against it," Groucho Marx sings to Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup. As the subtitle of his new book reminds us, dissent is Tom Paulin's stock in trade too. If criticism is a pleasure for Paulin, it's a strenuous one, requiring a strong stomach: less Arnoldian sherry-quaffing than a neat whiskey (Bushmills, of course). Paulin the bruiser has long been a familiar figure: he approaches writers he dislikes (TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, Virginia Woolf) with all the reverence of a tomcat eyeing up a mouse. Even when he likes something, he does so in an against-the-grain, thrawn kind of way, as he might say himself, forcing us to rediscover the youthful radical in Wordsworth, the Irishman in Blake, the dissenting epic buried in Richardson's Clarissa. Keats deplored poetry that has a "palpable design" on us; Paulin has so many designs on the reader he could practically be a tattooist. Not for nothing has Ian Sansom compared him to Robert Mitchum's preacher in Night of the Hunter, with "Love" and "Hate" inscribed on his knuckles.
As in his two previous essay collections, Paulin's project in Crusoe's Secret is to uphold the Puritan tradition of plain-speaking and personal witness over the Anglican values of compromise and balance. There's more than a little overlap with Minotaur and Writing to the Moment, as once again Paulin writes about Milton, Rossetti, Hopkins, Lawrence and Bishop.
A new departure is a long essay on Defoe: Robinson Crusoe's island sojourn, on this reading, is a coded version of Defoe the dissenter's internal exile during the Stuart Restoration. It has always been a matter for debate whether or not Defoe took part in the Battle of Sedgemoor of 1685, that dry run for the Glorious Revolution three years later. Paulin would like to think he did, and is attracted to the image of the writer leaping free of his Bablyonian captivity with Old Testament bravura. He would also, I presume, like to think of his own contribution as leading readers out of their Blairite serfdom no less surely than Milton and Hazlitt liberated theirs; but that too is matter for debate.
As ever, Paulin places a high premium on the craggily tactile and vernacular. Like few other critics today, he believes in the shape and sound of poems, pausing over the oos and uhs in a Hopkins lyric with the zeal of a trainee ventriloquist. Having said that, anyone planning to make the sound of the word "obol" as central to an argument as Paulin does in Political Anxiety and Allusion: Seamus Heaney should know that its first o is short, not long.
One last feature of the dissenting imagination embodied by Paulin is a weakness for over-insistence and cranky repetition. His abiding theme, Ulster Protestantism, never needs a second invitation, or sometimes even a first: Tony Blair's political rhetoric is "recognisably Ulster Protestant"; he "can't read" Seamus Heaney's poem, Perch, "without thinking of the Official Unionist politician, Jeffrey Donaldson" (now in the DUP); Camus's vocabulary reminds him of Ian Paisley's; Paisley turns up again, preaching in Africa, in an essay on Andrew Marvell; the Quarto text of Shakespeare's sonnets "sounds like Stephen Rea".
The one non-literary essay in the book is a review of Dean Godson's biography of David Trimble. Why Trimble or Paisley should be so fascinating, while sometime UK Unionist Conor Cruise O'Brien received such a pasting in Minotaur, may have something to do with Paulin's disregard for anything south of Newry more recent than Joyce and Yeats. What does Paulin think of that eminently dissenting, but non-Ulster Protestant writer, Thomas Kinsella? He never tells us.
To grasp how provincial this side of Paulin has become, try imagining a southern critic who never mentioned Seamus Heaney but wrote obsessively about Bertie Ahern.
Paulin is a gifted advocate for the dissenting tradition exemplified by his hero, Hazlitt, whose use of the word "disinterested" he likes to contrast with Arnold's. Where Arnold believes in disinterested debate as something above and beyond vulgar bias and politics, Hazlitt prefers to acknowledge these currents and sways of opinion but still engage in a heated debate anyway. I enjoy the cut and thrust of my private debate with Paulin, as I read him, in just this Hazlittian sense. There has to be a way for a reader to disagree strongly with a critic but still enjoy the jousting, combative dimension to it all. Paulin via Hazlitt provides the blueprint for such a response, and it's with that excuse in mind that I raise two, if not three cheers for Crusoe's Secret.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Crusoe's Secret: the Aesthetics of Dissent. By Tom Paulin, Faber and Faber, 400pp. £20