Haiku are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator
My latest obsession in linguistic dexterity is the Haiku. In its basic form of observing 5-7-5, if not subject. (Alliteration is so last week.) I’ve started translating favourite novels to the measure; and I wonder if this isn’t the most marvellous, healthy exercise: A great tool for a novelist. My reasoning is thus: A good writer, whatever their form, distils quintessential meaning. In a truly great novel, every line is as important as it is in a poem, and by following a form as dense and ridged as the haiku, one can truly see what is important and what is waffle in the narrative. (To test my theory, I should really try and write one for a bad novel.) Disclaimer: Joining haiku together undermines them and could be dangerous in the hands of amateurs.
Here I’ve done the first chapter of The Magus and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t still work. Other people do crosswords, or watch TV, or have sex. So fuck off.
The Magus in Haiku
Middle-class child,
Born Nineteen Twenty Seven,
Public School, Oxford.
There I discover
I’m not who I want to be;
Lacking the right genes.
Brigadier father,
Mother the very model.
He liked Discipline.
He liked Tradition.
And Responsibility.
I seldom argued.
He had a temper,
Like a red dog, close to hand.
I didn’t dare fight.
And my parents held
Nothing but contempt for me
And the life I sought.
Quite ‘good’ at English,
D. H. Lawrence my hero;
Not their thing at all.
To the regiment –
Tradition and Sacrifice;
Not my thing at all.
One led two lives then,
At school I was the cynic,
But I had to join.
Soldier in public,
And poetry in private.
Soon to Magdelen.
There we formed a club,
With pretensions of being
Existentialists.
My parents’ plane crashed
In a storm near Karachi
In my second year.
After the first shock
I felt a sense of relief –
Free to be myself.
Expensive habits
Got me a third-class degree
But that was Oxford
And with it I got
A true first-class illusion:
I was a poet.
Inheritance gone,
I went out into the world
Equipped to fail.
All the interviews
Unsuccessful: I lacked any
Enthusiasm.
Then a nightmare job
Teaching middle-class young boys.
The teachers were worse.
And so I soon quit,
With excitement taking wing
To Heaven knows where.
I needed new lands,
A new race, a new language,
A new mystery.