The Invasion Handbook, the first instalment of his epic poem about the second World War, is an 'act of piety' for his parents' generation and an examination of the sense of British identity that prevailed during the conflict, Tom Paulin tells Helen Meany
That voice is unmistakable, with its swooping, singing cadences. In the flesh, Tom Paulin is entirely recognisable from his regular appearances on the BBC's Late Review, but this evening he is in subdued, end-of-the-week form. The famously extreme critical reactions - "it's ap-pall-ing" - accompanied by creased brow and pained astonishment at the idiocy of the prevailing cultural life have been temporarily replaced by ruminative self- questioning. It's both a relief and a disappointment to realise that he's not going to live up to his reputation for savagery.
Stirring things up with angry outbursts on TV arts shows and having spats in the British newspapers about Zionism are not all that this very public academic has been up to lately.
There's also the matter of The Invasion Handbook, the first instalment of an epic poem about the second World War, which sweeps from the seeds of the war sown in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to the Battle of Britain, proceeding by a series of cinematic jump-cuts, fragments shorn against ruins. This volume is part of a larger work, and is made up of short poems with titles such as 'Clemenceau's Revenge', 'Hitler Enters the Rhineland' and 'Wear White Gloves in the Blackout'.
Erudite, playful, obscure, dramatic and didactic by turns, The Invasion Handbook presents a collage of voices and perspectives, from that of Lenin to that of Churchill, from Walter Benjamin to Trotsky, Bakunin to Speer. Moments of drama, suspense or pathos are frequently punctured by Paulin's characteristic puns and literary jokes. Written in verse and prose, sometimes in parodic styles, inter-cutting first- and third-person narrative with catalogues, captions, headlines and inventories, it cannibalises reams of documentary material and assumes considerable knowledge of the period on the part of the reader.
Paulin has been awarded £75,000 sterling by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, funded by the UK's National Lottery, to work on this hugely ambitious project and has taken a break from his lecturing job at Oxford University. He hasn't quite gone into retirement though: he was in Dublin recently to give lectures at UCD and the James Joyce Centre, and also spoke in Belfast - where he grew up - on the city's bid to be European cultural capital in 2008.
The second World War is an ideal subject for a writer who has described himself as a failed historian and who, in his poetry, critical essays and adaptations of classical Greek plays for the Field Day company, has been consistently concerned with questions of conscience, with public events and private experience, with artists' relationships to politics, with aspects of national identity (in Northern Ireland and elsewhere), with language and definition, and with narrative codes. The second World War is a sufficiently large arena for him to let loose his favourite themes - and obsessions - and see where they take him.
"It was always what I'd wanted to write about," Paulin says. "In particular, I wanted to look at the sense of British identity that prevailed during the war, a sense of Britishness that was a capacious umbrella. It's a sense that has gone now - the Ulster Unionists are the only people who believe in it - but it fought that war. I also wrote out of piety for that generation, my parents' generation, which is almost gone now."
Paulin's father enlisted in the British army as soon as war broke out and his mother worked as a doctor during the Blitz. Born in Leeds (in 1949), growing up in Belfast and attending university at Hull and Oxford, Paulin has an insider/outsider perspective on British culture, simultaneously rooted and disconnected. His literary scholarship has been concerned with the tradition of dissent in English letters, with writers and thinkers who are recusant, or at least resistant to the hierarchies of established church, aristocracy and political privilege.
Despite the impact of the second World War, and its aftermath, it is now a somewhat neglected subject, he thinks, and fears that the struggle of the war generation is in danger of being forgotten. "The British are fixated on the first World War, on a sense of loss, rather than on the second World War," he says. "There's a modesty and reticence in the culture that won't allow them to beat the drum or to get emotional about it.
"The poem is an elegy for a certain way of seeing the world. There is some kind of common European outlook which carries scepticism with it. It's that mentalité that I want to represent, and that shared experience. I'm fascinated by the 1930s generation, the ones who were left-wing."
There are many political positions expressed in The Invasion Handbook; one of the poem's strengths is its multiple perspectives, and the vividly dramatised voices, both famous and anonymous, that comment on the unfolding events. In 'The Attack in the West', a soldier describes his experience of the Normandy landings:
we were goners I knew
so I jumped through a gap in the hedge
got a stick grenade in the leg
but I ran on I
got away I got
to the longest beach in Europe
and went down like Aeneas
among the living shades
among twentypackets of Players
floating on the tide
the greybrown bloated faces
of drowned soldiers in overcoats
The figure of Aeneas hovers over the entire work: as he writes his contemporary epic, Paulin is re-reading the Aeneid for the fourth time.
It's not yet clear how many more volumes there will be. Paulin is already "reading and reading" for the next instalment but is daunted by the subject of the Great Patriotic War in Russia. He is so close to the work that he seems unsure of its effectiveness. "It's hard to have a sense of it," he says with a perplexed frown. "It's a sequence, you worry about it . . . it's fragmentary, it's a dilution. It becomes like a work in progress."
He didn't start out with a programme or scheme. "I found myself following what interests me: the resolute integrity of the British on the one side and the rottenness of appeasement on the other. I started probing into guilty secrets, the Nazi spies such as the Duke of Windsor, and encountered a culture of embarrassment about appeasement and anti-Semitism and the way the crown tried to interfere in the political process."
T. S. Eliot is both a reference point and a target in The Invasion Handbook, and The Waste Land, with its "banal consoling message", echoes intermittently. The exposure of anti-Semitism, in particular that of Eliot - "a terrible malignity" - has also been a preoccupation in Paulin's critical essays and reviews.
Paulin's critical work and his poetry are congruent, like that of one of his great cultural touchstones, Milton, whom he admires for being both an artist and a polemicist. In an entertaining essay, 'The Critic at the Breakfast Table' (1995), Paulin writes: "Polemic is the articulation of conscience - it's about bearing witness to injustice and folly. At its heart there is a tragic cry which receives no answer . . . the polemical critic knows when to lose his temper. And how."
That sounds familiar. Through his habit of commending qualities in other writers that he exhibits and shares, Paulin has found a way of writing about himself without appearing to. His cultural heroes are absorbed as his models, so that a reading of his poetry and criticism becomes circular or reflexive, as each illustrates and validates the other. His brilliant study of Hazlitt, The Day Star of Liberty (1998), which traces the evolution of Hazlitt's critical imagination, is a paean to a certain kind of literary journalism that relies on speed, wildness, and the energy of "the vernacular" - the vividness of spoken language much celebrated by Paulin, and which his best work displays in abundance.
Hazlitt's use of what Paulin calls the "cento" form - a patchwork of phrases, associative connections and allusions - finds its way into The Invasion Handbook. "I'm interested in forms of re-quotation," he says, "in recycling what's already been used, the junk lying around". The essay as cento "is part of the deep structure of Hazlitt's imagination", he writes in The Day Star of Liberty, "one of the means by which he seeks to transform criticism into an art form".
For Paulin too, criticism is a creative cultural force, it's what shapes ideas. He is opposed to any redemptive view of literature, and resists the notion of a hierarchy between "the holy work of art and the suppliant critic" who praises the genius of the artist. For him,criticism is an act of engagement. Sometimes angry, always impassioned, his own critical writing fizzes with life; he hits the page running.
"I can't seem to write any other way," he says. "Maybe in time I'll be able to strike other tones, more measured . . ." He smiles, acknowledging that this doesn't seem to be a very real possibility.
• The Invasion Handbook by Tom Paulin is published by Faber, priced £12.99 sterling. It will be reviewed on these pages next week by George Szirtes