Free Coasting by Jonathan Raban Page B

and there you are!”
    “Wow—.”
    “T. E. Brown,” he said. “The Laureate of Man. Great Writer. There’s a ‘Collected’ there you can have for two pounds. It says two pounds fifty in the front, but I’ll let you have it for two pounds, seeing it’s Friday. Well, that was just the way with me and the gel I’m speaking of—Betsy Lee.”
    Dazzled by the man’s salesmanship, I bought the “Collected” Brown along with a 1785 Church of Ireland Prayer Book and took them back by bus to the boat. I read Brown’s
Fo’c’s’le Yarns
—immense dialect poems, as long as novels—in the fo’c’s’le, with the oil lamps winking and the tide lifting the boat slowly up the quay wall. The same quick, tinny, musical Manx voice which I kept on hearing in snatches through the open porthole came ringing off the page.
    What was I sayin’ aw yes!
the fire;
    And what could he do? and he
wasn’ wire
,
    Nor nails
, he said: and how he’d kep’
    Out of her road; and the hold and the grip
    There was at him reglar: and allis out
    After the lines, and knockin’ about
    With the gun, and tryin’ to clear his head
    And studdy hisself …
    Was I reading this, or was this just Mrs. Quillin talking to Terry Kelly beyond the window? It was hard to tell.
    Brown’s poems are obsessively insular. Douglas Pier represents the limit of the known world. Saturated in the names of local people (Quillins, Cains, Kerruishes, Kermodes, Skillicorns and Christians) and local places (Bradda, Ballaugh, Thousla, Ballacraine, Calf and Ayre), they insist on the global self-sufficiency of Man. If an experience lies outside the range of the scallop fisherman, the parson, the draper, the miller’s daughter, then it isn’t an experience worth having. “For mine own people do I sing,” Brown wrote, “And use the old familiar speech”—a speech that by definition excluded all formal culture, all politics except those of the parish pump, all ideas. In his address to “The Future Manx Poet,” Brown hopefully instructed his heir:
    Be nervous, soaked
    In dialect colloquial, retaining
    The native accent pure, unchoked
    With cockney balderdash.
    In Brown’s narrow world, anything English, let alone intellectual or speculative, was cockney balderdash, to be despised long before it be understood.
    The poems didn’t plod. Brown had a wonderful ear for the rhythms of the local talk, and he wrote with absolute conviction about what it felt like to be out in a gale in a scallop boat or crouched in a stone cottage in front of a smoky peat fire. Yet reading them, I felt suffocated—and attacked. The dialect served as much to keep outsiders out as to include the insiders in its cozy circle; it told the foreign reader that he was an ignorant trespasser. There was a great deal of aggression in Brown’s sweet-sounding homeliness, a sense of grievance and affront at the larger world for the way it treated Man as small.
    Brown told his Future Manx Poet:
    Come, some soon, or else we slide
    To lawlessness, or deep-sea English soundings,
    Absorbent, final, in the tide
    Of Empire lost, from homely old surroundings,
    Familiar, swept …
    In another poem, he saw “the coming age/Lost in the empire’s mass.” England was Man’s mortal enemy, an imperial monster in whose maw everything that was Manx would be crushed and consumed; in this respect, Brown was standing shoulder to shoulder with all the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Indian, American and African writers who have struggled against England’s stifling colonial weight.
    Yet there was a false note somewhere in Brown’s protestations. For one thing, he wasn’t himself a “roughish” sort of chap: he took a degree at Oxford, then spent a lifetime teaching at an English public school, Clifton College, where my own grandfather must have been one of his pupils in the early 1890s. I felt cheated at finding this out. Who was this comfortably off, expensively educated man, living in a very handsome Georgian quarter of