Postcards from Hitler

by Barry MacSweeney

19 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

From The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother:
‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Then Baudelaire, Laforgue. Wrote first poems at school. That was a cissy thing to do of course. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. Met Basil Bunting, poet. Met Tom Pickard and Jon Silkin. Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. My first real lesson. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. Open to the city and the country. You can walk out of Newcastle for half an hour and be in greenery. The city gave words a harshness, like the steel or coal. Then I wd flit off to little stone cottage on the fells and fish for trout, and pick mushrooms. & swim in the freshwater lakes. Began to translate Laforgue, Cros, Corbiere.
1966-67: newspaper packed me off to Harlow Technical College, Essex, on a full-time journalist diploma course. An opposite life altogether. Synthetic new town, a dormitory to London. Its population, commuters with a vengeance. And the land was flat, that was a shock. An utter antithesis to Newcastle. Everything was so clean and clear-cut, and the people, they didn't belong, and had no roots in the town. Oasis. It was impossible to get involved. My eye, my colour/sluice became arbitrary for the first time. It was merely a funnel, and events and actions got a natural response from me. In Newcastle I was always too involved, always leaving pieces of myself against the walls. I wrote The Boy From The Green Cabaret poems in Harlow, and some political things for the first time. It was here I really woke up. Poems were fast and often, but it was bitter and solitary too. Spent days looking for some natural spot in the whole synthesis: found it, a small duck pond with sluice and lily-pads and footbridge. Told later it was one of the town planner's landscaping tricks.
Left here July 1967, sans honneur, carrying a bad character report in my hand & some poems, returned home to get the sack. But they didn’t like the cut of my face either. Since then jobs as chief reporter in Cumberland, dole, reporter, social security, dole, gardener, dole. Now helps run Morden Tower poetry readings, and publishing posters and books. & of course writing poems. Wants to see poets get away from revisionism. Nobody returns in glory to Lucknow. and this is June, 1968, Newcastle.’

Reviews

[Patrick Herron · Rating 5 out of 5]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the cliche goes. Exactly what those intentions might be and what that road may seem like from the point of view of the hellraiser has been trod famously in literature, from Oedipus to Captain Ahab. Barry MacSweeney conjures an Adolf Hitler sending postcards expressing awareness of decline and failure to achieve his dreams. Rather than demonize and "other" the historical figure, MacSweeney uses the frame of a contextualized Hitler as avatar and setting for the horrors that live within each of us. MacSweeney knew, and rightly so, that writing some mere confession of his personal foibles as a drunk would do no one any good and would certainly not serve as good poetry. Instead MacSweeney thrusts his focus into a subject that could understandably cause a great deal of confusions, misreadings, hatreds and rejections. No matter; what MacSweeney shows us is that it is humanity itself that is at stake, not his own ego. To have compassion for the most gross failings of man; no one said it would be easy. This small collection is as fresh, stirring, interesting, and beautiful as anything I have read.