Observer magazine 14/8/66

I am the very grateful recipient of this collector's item. I have often depended on the kindness of strangers but such generosity quickly tranforms them into friends. There's not much I want that I haven't got but this was one thing. With a visit to the Rosemary Tonks Archive in Newcastle University Library booked for soon, this is about all I was missing as a Rosemary collector.

R.S. Thomas is allocated the centre page spread with Rosemary as the photogenic front cover as The Observer caters for its literary readership with Poets and Their Worlds, the British selected as 1966's bigshots also including Larkin and Hughes, whose reputations waxed, Richard Murphy and Iain Crichton Smith, whose waned, and Thom Gunn who might not be regarded as the superstar he was then but a new, proper, big biography might reclaim some residual interest.

More space is given over to Jane Bown's photographs than any sort of commentary but the poets are given the chance to speak for themselves with one poem each which is not a bad idea. Their brief biographical notes don't offer much insight except for a glimpse of how significant marital status looked in 1966.

One now wonders how much we are being told subliminally by Gunn being 'unmarried', Larkin being a 'bachelor' and Hughes's wife, who is named, having committed suicide. By now we know much more about the 'sordid' detail between those distinctions between ways of being single but none of them really were in C21st parlance, they just weren't officially married. But that is what mattered then, even in The Observer.

It's a gorgeous thing that has been kept in pristine condition for 58 years and as its latest custodian I hope I continue to keep it so.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I should be able to see off the Gunn book and review it here before embarking on the adventure north. I'll save all there is to say for then but a few page references noted on the customary old envelope already take me a little way into that. If you reach the end of a book and then have to decide what to say about it it's maybe too late by then.