Letter 7. This charming pan.
When I was about twelve, I think, I broke a banker’s lamp. My granny had given it to me after my grandpa died. He wasn’t a banker, but he owned one of those green-shaded, brass-based desk lamps that carry that name. Already I was showing a tendency to spend a lot of time at a desk, so my granny gave it to me. But I loved this lamp – it was beautiful, sophisticated, felt somehow more genuine than anything else in the house – and wanted to be close to it, so I didn’t put it on my desk, but on my bedside table, and then woke up a few days later to the sound of the bottle-green shade smashing to pieces. In my sleep I had flung out an arm and sent it crashing to the carpet. My lifelong clumsiness has led me to break (and rip, and spill, and stain) a lot of things, but this is one of my most detailed and enduring memories of that pulling guilty feeling, like my heart being dragged down into my guts.
So I thought of this experience the first time I read Tom Betteridge’s pamphlet Body Work and its last poem, ‘Banker’s Lamp’.* It is presented as a prose poem, and not only that but a monolith of text with justified margins and no punctuation apart from apostrophes. Of the three prose poems in the pamphlet, it’s the only one not subdivided into sentences or paragraphs. Given that we’re unlikely to be able to make anything of an undifferentiated block of words, our reading will have to look for some alternative structures. The poem begins with an effect like a glitch, a sound recording struggling to overcome a loop: ‘I was reat was reat was real’. Reat is an Old Scots word for ‘wrongdoing’ – the poem starts with a stuttering attempt to get out from under the shade of a foundational guilt – but it also hints at ‘threat’, a word that will return throughout the poem whole (‘threat was real’ [l. 10]; ’to threat was reat was reat’ [ll. 27-8]) or in pieces, its ther and ats. Repeat it enough on its own, and reat-reat-reat becomes retreat, which is what a loop is doing for precisely half its length. Other loops and persistent repetitions in the poem merge and distort repeated words, turning ‘chorister’ into ‘choristerror’ and ‘attenth’ into ‘attention’. The poem also ends by returning to the starting loop, ‘I was reat was reat’, so that the whole poem becomes one great loop. This looping effect is part of the uncanniness of ‘Banker’s Lamp’ for me – I still feel an obsolete tug of familial guilt when I think about a banker’s lamp, living the moment over and over again, regretting my decision to put it on the bedside table, cursing my splayed sleep, and then rosarying through all my other explosions of clumsiness.
How should then I incorporate my own individual associations with this poem into how I think about it? Given the very specific quality of the memory, probably nobody else shares them, but it so dominates my attraction to and interest in this poem that it would seem disingenuous not to mention it at all. Maybe the poem captures so well the experience of ‘looping’ through a persistent childhood memory that anyone confronted with it would do the same, and the resonance of the apparently unrelated title for me is an aberration. In any case, trying to unpick the ‘real’ story of the poem doesn’t seem relevant. If it were simply a narrative vignette (‘when I was a child I broke a banker’s lamp’ or ‘my father fried and my mother scrubbed’), it wouldn’t be possible to explore the looping, error-strewn quality of such memories. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, in her theory of poetry Poetic Artifice, warns against the trap of thinking that complex grammar or form in a poem is simply a way to reflect that modern living is complex, that it should aspire ’to mirror in already-known ways an already-known life’. Reading poems in order to recognise those things we already know is bound to lead to misreading, and not only of texts. If we can only recognise in poems what we already know from life, then what are they for? Reading ‘Banker’s Lamp’, at first casually in the context of a new pamphlet and then in increasingly close detail, I found patterns and associations from my life that I had not already considered coming to the surface. I hadn’t thought about the banker’s lamp in years, and I don’t think I thought about it the first time I read the poem, but the title stuck stubbornly in my mind, and eventually the memory revealed itself.
[Image description: a figure in a trenchcoat and fedora leaves a library full of green-hooded banker’s lamps.]
Despite the title, I think that the stubborn object of this poem is the frying pan, which is conspicuous by its absence. While never named as a ‘frying pan’ in the poem, there are three similar phrases:
‘owning pan’ (l. 2),
’scrubbing pan’ (ll. 16, 18, 23), and
‘charming pan’ (l. 21). But ‘pan’ also gets replaced by ‘brain’ in
‘frying brain’ (l. 3), and we have
‘scrubbing brain’ (l. 26) and
‘charming brain’ (ll. 12-13); on even more occasions, we have
‘frying shit[/e]’, to be compared with
‘charming shit’ and
‘owning shite’. Almost every possible combination except the most obvious, ’frying pan’, occurs. And while I don’t think it’s worth trying to tease out ‘events’ from this poem as such – hard to establish a linear order of events in a loop, and there’s no standard grammar – there are however some indicators about time: the riffs on the numbers/ages eleven and ten (‘eleventh year’ and ‘elevention’, ‘attenth year’ morphing into ‘attention’). So we can imagine a child at ten or eleven years of age enjoying and seeking attention as the life of adults cycles around him, their loop of frying [‘shit’] then scrubbing the pan. Like the circular motion of scrubbing, the loops and repetitions are irregular, at some points light and at others intense.
Early in George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, the title character drops and breaks his favourite brown pot while carrying water. Eliot writes that while in habitual use, ‘always standing on the same spot, always lending its handle to him in the early morning […] its form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having fresh clear water.’ Sara Ahmed, discussing this passage, writes that ’we attribute to objects the qualities of a relation: when something cannot carry out what we will; it is no longer quite so agreeable, no longer willingly helpful.’** When we attribute a particular relation to objects, they embody the success or failure of that relationship. And so there is something eerie and heart-sinking, reading this poem, about the way that the usual use-name of the object, the Frying Pan, dissolves into the scrubbing pan – it might feel like we spend more time scrubbing the pan than frying with it, and in these loops, where causality and purpose come unfixed, it can easily become a ‘scrubbing pan’. The frying pan hangs clean from a hook or sits clean in a drawer, presents itself as eagerly willing to be fried with, but the to-be-scrubbed pan languishes inconveniently in the sink, an obstacle to pleasure and sustenance. The difference, you might say, is purpose: it’s a frying pan because it was made to be fried with, and in order to fry with it multiple times it has to be scrubbed with a scrubbing brush. But there are no scrubbing brushes in ‘Banker’s Lamp’, only scrubbing brains and scrubbing pans.
Frying and scrubbing are frequently connected to a family role, and separated by gender: there are numerous instances of ‘father’s frying’, ‘grandfather’s frying’, and the gender-neutral ‘ther’s frying’ (see below). (I don’t know if frying is the most conventionally male-coded form of cooking, as I suspect it is just edged out by barbecuing/grilling, but when I was growing up, my father rarely ‘scrubbed’, and only ever cooked eggs, in a frying pan.) Meanwhile, the scrubbing is never assigned to an individual; the closest we get is ‘mother’s voice when scrubbing pan’ (l. 18). The poem figures family relations as ‘chalk gender’ – like the formation of chalk, gender is an ages-long process that turns the lives of innumerable beings into a deceptively unadulterated-looking but toxic substance. In nineteenth-century England, chalk was used as an adulterant in bread flour for its colour, with fatal results; in this poem, the apparent ‘purity’ of ‘chalk gender roles’ shifts from ‘white’ into ‘shite’. Gender is always being spoiled or damaged in the poem, and ‘ther’ appears throughout; it looks like the gender neutral singular their, but it is also an incomplete fa-ther or mo-ther. We can also read these ‘ther’s’ phonetically as ‘there’s’: ‘ther[e]’s frying brain damage’ (l. 3) – we don’t know who caused it or how (but compare this with ‘father’s frying shit’ [l. 29]). Soon, ‘ther’ loses its indeterminate character, and fathers start to appear, then are curtailed into fathes, then expanded into grandfathe, andfather, mother, and finally grandfather. As with ‘reat’ which gets resolved into ‘real’ multiple times only to keep unresolving, ‘fathe’ is repeated in the final lines until it becomes ‘father’: ‘my fathe a father’s voice under my fathe a fathe a father a father I was reat was reat’. ‘Fathe’, like ‘reat’, is an archaic word – it has a single citation in the OED, identifying it as a Middle English word for a sort of chest pain (dolore pectoris). And ‘mothe’ (l. 18), yet another archaic word, meant exhausted. The sufferings of the parents are marked by the older words that are found as if fossilised inside them (though they don’t share etymology); this archaic accumulation of lives within the family leads to the formation of the ‘chalk gender’, the geological compounding of ‘chalk gender roles’.
[Image description: the Uffington White Horse, a huge chalk carving of a horse on a green hillside, viewed from the air.]
Unlike with frying or scrubbing, it’s not immediately obvious what role the pan would play in the charming process, or even if charming is an action; in most of its appearances, it’s an adjective, a quality. As far as there is an I in the poem, the childlike figure in their ‘attenth year’, that’s who is doing or being charming: ’charming to elderly men I act out’. But throughout this reading, I’ve been doing quite selective quotations, lifting phrases that seem to make the ‘most sense’, and that’s particularly difficult to do here: ‘I am charming pan damage tradition’ (l. 21). Two possibilities: I am charming / pan damage / tradition; I am charming pan / damage tradition. In the first, the charming, the attention-seeking, has damaged the pan – I am charming -> pan damage. This is the one that resonates most with my own story about the banker’s lamp, but leaves me with a floating ‘tradition’ I don’t know what to do with. In the second, a ‘charming pan’ would ‘damage tradition’, struggle or break with the domestic cycles that inhabit the poem.
Earlier, I caricatured an imaginary conventional poem that just describes family life, which is a criticism I’m not particularly interested in making, but for a poem to do more than ‘mirror in already-known ways an already-known life’, it has to risk being irreconcilable and distorting. In ‘Banker’s Lamp’, the object – lamp, pan, family – is glimpsed from various angles and reflected in various eyes, but never composedly encountered. I believe that this poem was able to resonate with me so profoundly because it creates its meaning by internal resonance. This mode of what I call the resonant poem is not new, and although it appears prominently in modernism it’s much older (in fact I suspect it’s older than description). In reading the poem, we have to build up a system that tells us what each word and structure is referring to, almost as if we are learning a miniature language – but because of our agency as readers in this process, we find our own associations, logics, and memories incorporated as well.
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*Many thanks to Tom Betteridge for letting me share a pdf of this poem. Body Work was published by Sad Press in 2018.
**I first encountered this discussion in Ahmed’s 2016 book Willful Subjects, but the passage I’ve quoted is largely the same in the text of her lecture ‘Feminism and Fragility’, which I link here for ease of access.