Linden Huddlestone, Life and Work

Linden Huddlestone. Life and Work

Three more books arrived this week which represent a major leap forward in my Linden Huddlestone project. This followed the brainwave of searching abebooks using ‘Huddlestone’ as a keyword rather than author and adopting a policy of ordering on sight anything that mentioned our English teacher from 1970’s Gloucester.
The five volumes I now have conveniently represent stages of his life, which begins with the biographical note provided in Penguin New Writing 35 (1948),
LH was born in 1924, and educated at Mercers School and London University. During the war he served in the Royal Navy, first as an Air Mechanic (Electrical), then as Instructor Lieutenant attached to the Royal Marines. He is married, and works as a schoolmaster in a London grammar school. This is the first full length study he has had published.
It is known that his MA from London University on the poetry of Charles Williams was dated 1952, and a note found on the internet records that, probably around this time, he had a book on Williams in preparation. Although there is no trace of such a book being published thus far, he provided the bibliography for a similar book by John Heath-Stubbs.
However, the edition of The Film of Murder in the Cathedral by T.S.Eliot and George Hoellering is inscribed in Huddlestone’s immediately recognizable italic script with ‘Jean Olivia and Linden Huddlestone, May 1952’. That might have been a worthwhile find in itself. I had heard from another source that first editions of Auden inscribed by LCH had been seen in Hay-on-Wye bookshops. However, a priceless bonus with this book is a carbon copy typescript included of an essay entered into a competition for essays on the film, with the press advert for the competition neatly clipped to it. Moreover, pencilled in at the end of the essay, it says ‘2nd, 250 pounds’. A quick reference to a website that converts monetary amounts accounting for inflation says that this is the equivalent of 5000 pounds now, so it was a lucrative 3000 words.
The closing date for this competition was March 30, 1953 and Huddlestone’s address typed at the top of this essay is in Sheffield. He had mentioned when teaching us that he had taught Barry Hines, author of A Kestrel for a Knave, which was filmed as Kes.
The Winter 1964 edition of The Critical Survey includes a piece outlining the sixth form English curriculum at Sir Thomas Rich’s Grammar School, Gloucester, where LCH was by then Senior English master. It outlines roughly the same course of study that we were provided with in the mid 70’s, an enlightened programme designed to read around set books as well as prepare for A level exams, clearly instigated by one enthused by literature for its own sake, as well as passing exams and preparing Oxbridge entrance students in a General Arts discipline. He makes mention of the four English teachers, one of whom also supervised rugby, who we would confidently identify as W.G.F. Bradford, whose forthright opinions on literature seemed as gritty and full-blooded as his rugby mentoring. Mr. Bradford died during our first year sixth and Huddlestone’s memorable tribute in assembly was a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Sometimes a Lantern. Bradford was a great admirer of Hopkins, but less so of Milton, which he thought was something you cleaned your teeth with.
However, perhaps the most prestigious appearance in print is Huddlestone’s essay in The Morality of Art, essays presented to G. Wilson Knight by his colleagues and friends (RKP, 1969). Alongside other contributors like L.C. Knights, Geoffrey Hill and Wole Soyinka, LCH gives us Notes on a Production of Wilson Knight’s Ideal Macbeth and the only illustrations in the book are two plates of the set designed by him for the production of Macbeth at Ecclesfield Grammar School, 1958.
The 1971 anthology of Cheltenham Poets edited by LCH contains two Huddlestone poems, the short lyric and the Arthurian extract detailed elsewhere on this website but, realistically, the work in it is no better than would be expected from a local poetry group.
After retirement, a friend of mine met Huddlestone when visiting Painswick House Rococo Gardens, where LCH was taking the price of admission from visitors. This would have been in the mid 1990’s.
He died in January 2001.

It would be useful to find more poems by Huddlestone but, at present, his critical work looks to be his finer achievement. An Approach to Dylan Thomas in Penguin New Writing is a fine, well-organized and extensive study, usefully uncovering meaning and explaining symbols in Thomas’ often seductive but ‘opaque’ poetry. As he is elsewhere, Huddlestone is interested in the sound of poetry and the poet’s reading of it. He is particularly good on Biblical references and does much to make clear in Thomas that which sounds fine but is difficult. He uses the term ‘apocalyptic’ to describe it in an apparently non-pejorative way whereas since 1948 that might have become a more loaded and derogatory description of the sort of poetry that has since dropped out of fashion. Thomas in retrospect looks like his own worst enemy sometimes but Huddlestone’s summary is a considered and fair apology for an artist who benefits from sympathetic treatment at a time before other poets were going to redress the balance towards a plainer style.
Since one poet we were introduced to at school was the religious modernist, David Jones, one does wonder if the mystical and Biblical themes were of special interest to Huddlestone or if they were simply a vogue of the poetic zeitgeist then. He did introduce us to Ted Hughes’ Crow as a rewriting of the creation story, which of course it is. It’s a shame he never got around to reading Gunn’s The Sense of Movement with us but we did find material on the poem sequence Misanthropos when sorting out the English stock room and that isn’t very religious at all. And he did successfully identify the reference in Gunn’s poem At the Back of the North Wind for the teacher I studied some Gunn with.
The essay on Murder in the Cathedral is similarly thorough and attentive to detail. It is necessarily an essay on the film rather than the play or Eliot but again notices Church symbolism and architecture. It is by no means a eulogy to the film. Although he clearly enjoyed it, he was not going to let reservations go unremarked. The highlight of the essay for me is in a footnote,
I must also record somewhere that I can remember nothing at all of the score by Laszlo Lajtha, and that I am not quite sure whether this is to praise or blame it.
The characteristically dry Huddlestone humour is perfect here. Never knowingly any funnier than he needed to be but you can see an austere sense of fun suggesting itself as long as you know it is there.
The Macbeth essay is a more practical theatrical piece about staging the play, closing curtains, moving stage furniture about and the design itself rather than literary work. Huddlestone had written to Wilson Knight, being nearby at Leeds, as part of his preparation of the production. But the publication of his notes here alongside such fine work as an essay by L.C. Knights on Timon of Athens is a measure of its recognition and value.
It is going to be impossible to know if and when one has found all there is to find of Huddlestone’s published literary work. While the five volumes I now have are unlikely to be anything like a complete bibliography, and there were obviously more poems somewhere, whether they ever appeared in print or not, it’s not obvious when it’s going to be the right time to stop looking. And so, anybody who finds this item here and can add to it, please get in touch by e-mail.