The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

Bergin’s collection is a hall of mirrors and its reflections are comic, grotesque and extraordinary. Marx penned the first official English translation of Madame Bovary, and here, reflected and refracted by various translators, it’s a window on the world. If this sounds highfalutin, then rest assured. It isn’t. Bergin’s notes help us to fix a pencil into a planchette, and to explore love, disappointment and betrayal through the voices of the dead.

The opening poem, ‘The True Story of Eleanor Marx in Ten Parts’, like the theme of a sonata, is developed and recapitulated: Marx, aged 43, dressed in white stained blue by a lethal dose of prussic acid.

So the urn that holds the ashes of the soft summer dress,
And of the woman who knew the power of the proletariat,
And of the chunk of poisoned apple she bit under duress,
Are taken to the offices of the SDF.

[…]

[…] There is a cupboard with two glass panes.
And there they place her to remain
For years and years.

Bergin makes us wait for that verb phrase ‘are taken’. This, combined with the repeated connectives ‘and of’ gives the line a Miltonic quality – ‘Of man’s first disobedience…’ Marx is Eve and, if the apple is eaten under duress, then who is Satan? Marx’s faithless lover, Edward Aveling? Poisoned apples also conjure the Grimm’s ‘Little Snow White’ and, as Snow White battles the jealousy of her stepmother, so Bergin’s Marx is perhaps pitted against the other woman – Aveling’s wife Eva Frye. Short lines, and perfect rhymes help to recreate Marx as a mythic subject.

In ‘Are You Looking?’ Bergin plays with Geoffrey Wall’s translation of Madame Bovary and, read against that first keynote poem, it resonates with harmonics: ‘She kept pricking her fingers’. Sensitised by Bergin’s treatment of ‘Snow White’, we’re invited to recast Marx as Sleeping Beauty, also victim to another woman. We read that, at Emma Bovary’s wedding, the ‘guest list numbered / forty-three’. A judicious line break allows that number to sit in space in order to be seen. Her first poem informs the reader that Marx died aged 43. This is an irrational piece of numerology, but then this is an irrational collection, loaded with fin de siècle colour. In ‘Karl Marx’s Daughters Play on the Ouija Board,’ Bergin presents a script, allowing Eleanor to speak from beyond the grave as the planchette’s spidery line careers across the ouija board.

The poems enjoy a universality as they explore betrayal and grief. ‘Wedding Cake Decorations’ presents:

A small white wife
with a small white face;
a thin white groom
on a round, white base.

They have no shoes
because they have no feet:
their maker thought them obsolete.

Bergin traps these unfortunates every which way: in language (‘small’, ‘small’, ‘thin’), in couplets, in the shortest of monosyllabic lines.

The collection also charts recent, seismic fractures in society. ‘Talking to Anne-Marie after the American Election’ opens in ‘the office after the catastrophe’ and the speaker discovers that she does not know Anne-Marie after all:

eventually Anne-Marie said from her desk:
Do you want to know something?
My name’s not actually Anne-Marie.
And I said: What?
And she said: My name’s not actually Anne-Marie. It’s Anne.

Perhaps politics were off-limits on that raw Wednesday morning, or perhaps the poem considers the reappraisal of neighbour by neighbour after the vote. You think you know someone, but then they cheat on you. Marx’s grief and betrayal articulate the pain of a society divided.

Tara Bergen’s The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2017. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.