By using her 'gift' she hammered her losses into art.is how Dana Greene sums up the work of Elizabeth Jennings.
And in her Epilogue she extends this central theme of her biography explaining how Jennings had lived for poetry, which she saw as a sacrament, her purpose, 'necessary for life itself' as a healing agent and a way of resolving, however temporarily sometimes, the 'inward war' she felt between a number of conflicting elements.
Not all of Greene's points are specific to Jennings's case. That she invented an imaginary friend in childhood, felt inferior to her sister and became overly dependent on others early on are not unique and don't on their own explain a nature that Greene reveals as 'needy', a reliance on others for emotional and financial support as well as the spiritual need for her religious faith. It is also news to me to see Edward Thomas listed alongside Sylvia Plath and Hart Crane as suicides. And the point that she was included in Larkin's Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse as one of the women poets that made up only one tenth of the poets in it should not be construed as misogyny on Larkin's part but in line with similar female representation cited elsewhere at that time.
One needs to interpret this life aware that the evidence on offer can be read as one sees fit.
It does, however, provide considerable background that one will inevitably take back to the poems that is likely to shade our reading of them differently. I, for one, was unaware of nearly all of this story and had regarded Elizabeth Jennings as a highly competent, quietly thoughtful and well-organized poet. The fact that she was the only woman included in The Movement of the 1950's, along with any number of other reasons why she didn't fit, and didn't think she fitted, with them is less significant when one considers that none of the others did, either, there was no 'Movement' and it only benefitted some of the lesser lights associated with it for the reflected glory they might have gained.
The 'inward war' consisted of such difficulties as her Roman Catholicism versus the temptations of the flesh, the doubt, the over-wrought sensitivity and, in more worldly terms, money worries that wouldn't have been alleviated by gambling and shopping sprees and an appetite for alcohol that she 'medicated' herself with.
I'm not concerned about her dress sense or social graces and find it admirable in a way that she made few concessions to formality except in her verse, so whether we need to remember her as 'the bag lady of the sonnets' or as one of the most lauded poets, female or not, of her generation might be more indicative of our age in which our attentiuon has been diverted from the words on the page to such biographical detail. It may be time to redress the balance back towards the text.
While able to feel restored to equilibrium and feel fulfilled and, for brief periods, happy, it was her time spent in Rome that made her feel closest to 'whole'. Most of the rest of her life was spent in Oxford but increasingly peripatically and once, trading on a certain literary celebrity status, posted a notice outside Oxford station asking,
Elizabeth Jennings has nowhere to live. Can you help?
although we might see this alongside several times where Dana Greene qualifies some of Jennings's claims to distress with phrases amounting to 'according to her'. Her editor, Michael Schmidt, helped when he could but that wasn't always, but among her other benefactors was her 'pin-up boy', John Gielgud.
Betjeman, Larkin and, most of the time, Anthony Thwaite, were admirers of her work but she was upset by unfavourable reviews when they appeared, which they sometimes did. If the impression I had formed of a consistent high standard in her poems, that was based on a Selected and Collected that feature the best of thousands of poems written in torrents of prolific productivity and, whoever you are, that many poems can't all be outstanding. Michael Schmidt used 86 of the 'more than 1000 poems' she submitted for her book, Growing-Points, and 'in less than two months in spring 1977 she produced 486 poems'. That reminds me of when Stephen Spender first met Auden who asked him how many poems he wrote and Spender said he wrote a poem every day. Auden advised that he should write one a week, which he immediately did, but that's still plenty and far too many for me.
One could see this biography having a similar effect as Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin which was criticized for its frankness and honesty but if that's how it was, so it should be told. An old-fashioned biography of Malcolm Sargent I read a couple of years ago mentioned his divorce in passing and his penchant for parties elsewhere, which wouldn't have been so bad if not compounded by a foreword in which the author said he'd agreed with the dapper conductor it would be 'warts and all'.
We are surely better than that by now and can take it, wherever the biographer wants to set themselves on a scale between hagiography and scandal-monger. Nothing in Dana Greene's account of Elizabeth Jennings detracts from what we already thought of the poems but it adds depth to our understanding of their circumstances and Elizabeth emerges much more human, certainly more vulnerable and probably more admirable than many of us might have otherwise thought.
It is often instructive to look at the first poem in any poet's Selected, and Delay was an early landmark that set a high standard. The Clown is a later poem that Dana Greene makes central to Elizabeth's work.
It will now be interesting to go back to the poems and see what difference knowledge of the biography makes. I don't envisage it detracting from them, I only continue to wonder how much of it is our business.
