Library Discovery

My reading of Henry James ground to a halt halfway through The Ambassadors. I felt I needed to borrow the rubber stamp Larkin had made that he used on unsolicited poems he was sent, 'Why should I care?'

Sitting in my upstairs room, the second half of the alphabet of prose fiction is on my right hand side. Closest to hand is Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, very good to return to and maybe I approve of him more in prose fiction than in poems. But Treasure Island was worth picking up and I'm enjoying it very much. I knew how old it was but hadn't realized it was a Christmas present from 1967. It is inscribed to me from Aunty Joan and Uncle Andy, who do not appear on the family tree but were next door neighbours.

A 235 page novel is a big ask for an 8yo and I don't think I ever got further than its first two or three pages, which were a bit scary. I'd like to think Uncle Andy, and Joan who I don't remember now, would be glad to know I'm grateful, 59 years later. It's not my oldest possession but comes in not far behind my dog, Jock, who arrived at my first Christmas in 1959, and is roughly contemporaneous with my Astronomy books that tell me that Jupiter has 16 moons and Saturn 9. At least they were ahead of Galileo who thought Jupiter had 4.  

Friday Evening LitChat

The second half of the Occasional Joyce was as good if not better than the first. Being in chronological order that might be to be expected but it doesn't follow with the novels. It's not as if it should come as a surprise that he's a great essayist but you'd think he would be better known for them, as is George Orwell, and perhaps to the most thoroughgoing Joyceans he is.

His account of the poet Mangan, an early hero or role model, should really be a story in Dubliners,

He had become a mute wasted rag of a man, he ate barely enough to keep body and soul together until, one day he had a sudden bad fall.

and,

no other Irish song is as full as those of Mangan of nobly suffered misfortunes and such irreparable devastations of the soul. 

He makes Daniel Defoe the first 'English' writer on account of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the others before him being European and, whether it's 'realism' or just his tremendous intellect, I for one tend to take his word. I'm sure he's right about Dickens being good at what he does but 'hardly deserving a place among the highest' of writers and I'm glad of the account of Parnell, the political background to the novels never having been clear to me, a self-styled nationalist who brings about his own downfall.

From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer, from 1932, is fragments suddenly in the playful style of the Wake and one would gladly have more of all the things here.

I'm not sure how the shelves are going to be reorganised to bring Joyce out of the aphabetical classification of novelists to have his own section. Upstairs the likes of McEwan, Swift, Barnes, Murakami and Sebastian Faulks have theirs and downstairs the more elite group of mainly poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Edward Thomas, Auden, Gunn, Rosemary Tonks, Dr. Johnson and Shakespeare biographyhave theirs so somebody of one has biographies of their wife and daughter ought to qualify for that status.

A couple of days reading about Lucia has brought me to the brink of whatever it was that went wrong for her. It's not yet obvious why that should have happened unless it's linked to her giving up her dancing career but it's compelling stuff.

--

On Wednesday night I was late for Josh Brown talking about his new book, Unjudging Love: The Enigma of Dylan Thomas'. I've only lived in Portsmouth for 40 years and so can hardly be expected to find my way around yet. Four years in the making is not bad going for something fairly comprehensive but it's possible that devotion to such a figure makes one more sympathetic than is entirely good for one.

In establishing Dylan as a committed socialist, Josh mentioned in passing that the writers of the 30's and 40's were (Auden, Eliot). Well, yes, Auden but not Eliot. South Wales has long been a Labour stronghold so there's no big surprise that Dylan would be. However, don't believe everything you're told at events like these. At the 1997 Larkin Society conference a discussion panel reflected that all the writers were right wing - Lawrence, Eliot, Pound and ultimately Larkin - and turned a blind eye to Auden, Camus, Sartre, Orwell.

I think these terms retain some meaning but as tyrannies rise and, hopefully, fall, it's not obvious it matters what their professed ideologies are or if we allocate them to a wing.

The claim that Dylan was a precursor to rap and hip-hop sounded a bit dubious. I don't dispute that rap is 'poetry' or that it has been the big thing in pop music for a long time now but with a few notable exceptions it has passed me by, 'poetry' is not necessarily a good thing and I don't know how much credit Dylan would want for it. There has been incantatory verse performance with or without Dylan Thomas or Grandmaster Flash and we should be wary of claiming things for our causes that do them not as much credit as we might think.

--

Rather more on my wavelength, a few days before a trip to Soho for An Evening with Rosemary Tonks, I see that three more novels have been re-issued which must mean that The Bloater did okay at the checkout.

It's not something she'd have wanted but once you've published something, that's it, you can't unpublish it. If you think The Bloater and then The Halt During the Chase, Way Out of Berkeley Square and Businessmen as Lovers are savage and unforgiving I hope they'll get round to making Emir and Opium Fogs available too because they burn out of control.

It's not the first time I've been ahead of the wave, prompted by the first book of a revival and - I'd like to think - doing my little bit to help it along. I bought up all the Richard Yates novels well before Revolutionary Road was a film from wherever I could for whatever they cost and in due course, like Rosemary's, they were made available again. A couple of those of Rosemary's were the most I've paid for books and now they will be available for a tenner.

Not to worry. I wanted them then, not now, and there is no correlation between the price of an artefact, whether it be book, painting or recording of music and its worth. We don't concern ourselves with financial investment when it's simply the art that matters.

Desert Island Poems

This evening's meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society was, as expected, an enlightening one as members nominated their Desert Island Poems and read a couple of them each.
Statisticians will need to note that with two nominations, Under Milk Wood was the most chosen poem, yes, it's really a radio play but we don't let that worry us. With a further poem also listed, Dylan Thomas proved to be the joint most popular poet, with Larkin and Shakespeare also selected three times.

My list is, for these purposes,

Thom Gunn, My Sad Captains

W.H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

Philip Larkin, At Grass

Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden

Sean O’Brien, Latinists

John Donne,

Elizabeth Bishop,

Shakespeare, Sonnet 57, or possibly 129

57

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire.

129

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action,

 
I decided not to have more than one poem by any poet or else it could well have been three Gunn and three Larkin before even looking elsewhere. I nominated Donne and Elizabeth Bishop for being who they are, for doing what they did the way they did it without picking a specific poem.
I read At Grass and, later, the Julia Copus. And there came the unexpected turn of events. Denise had said that she had chosen her poems because she likes poems that make her cry. And there's me thinking, 'fair enough but not me, it's more about words and language than emotion'. But then, a few lines from the end of Stars Moving Westwards, somehow becoming more magnificent than I had remembered, it dawned on me about grief and bereavement, and how this actually 'meant' so much more to me, perhaps hearing myself read it. And I had to stop and collect myself.
Maybe that's why irony, detachment and a degree of impersonality are so useful in poems. When you start to mean it- and I think Holden Caulfield arrives at a similar conclusion- it can begin to be a bit much. But I didn't think it would happen to me.

I have the lists that the PPS poets brought with them. Maybe I'll make a feature of them in due course. And if anybody wants to send me their 8 Desert Island Poems, I'll use those, too. Say a few words about how you chose them if you like. For example, John Dean knows so many poems by heart that there was no need for him to take those, he took eight more to learn.     

Havant Literary Festival Poetry Lunch

Poetry Lunch, Havant Literary Festival, Sept 12

Autumn comes in, it is sometimes said, with the last horse in the St. Leger and so the last event of the summer was the Poetry Lunch as part of a day of poetry events in this year's Havant Literary Festival.
The weather forecast had threatened to make it an indoor affair but, as it happened, conditions were ideal for a garden event comfortably attended by about 25 and it was remarked that it's always a good sign when the audience at a poetry reading outnumber the readers.
In the back yard of the Green Party, I paid tribute to their support for minorities and commitment to diversity as the token bloke among the four readers. And why not.
I was lucky in my risk-taking gambit of arriving not knowing what I was going to read that the open selection process picked a successful poem to begin with. I asked one table to pick one of my booklets from the colour of its cover and they picked the blue one, Walking on Water. Then another part of the audience picked a number between 1 and 12, the number of poems in that book, and they chose number 6, which is Herbstregen, the hypnotic attempt at a sestina I wrote gazing abstractedly out of the office window several years ago. Then, in line with what I was once told as a sixth-form student of poetry, that 'poets like to read their most recent stuff' (Linden Huddlestone on Ted Hughes at Cheltenham circa 1977), I read my very latest little masterpiece, The Singing Typewriter, which is proving something of a success in its own little way.
Denise Bennett read three poems from her highly-acclaimed (by others as well as me), recent book, Parachute Silks, which is always a pleasure and a guaranteed success. This was no open-mic of randomly assembled parvenus who fancy having a go. The readers were proper ones (I won't deride them by saying 'professional') who could do it in the open air and the audience were kind enough to listen attentively rather than involve themselves only with their 'light vegetarian lunch'
One great advantage of a vegetarian buffet is that you can help yourself to a bit of everything without having to ask or follow a known vegetarian round the table only taking some of what they take. And, just as important as the applause for the poets, was the applause for Mrs. Dawes, whose art in producing the food was at least as admirable.
Joan McGavin, the soon-to-be outgoing Hampshire laureate, provided some radiant and luminous poetry in what I took to be a voice that originally came from somewhere near Edinburgh. I'm no accentologist but, having once heard Stephen Fry's quick repertoire of Scottish accents on an edition of QI , I like to think I know when I hear echoes of Morningside but, wherever it came from, it added a subtle music to her poems not always available from one born in Nottingham, schooled in Gloucester who finally washed up in Portsmouth.
One of the great things about poetry is that is simply to be enjoyed and it isn't competitive, even if competitions do constitute a significant part of the poetry world. This quartet offered slightly differing perspectives in their civilised, accomplished ways and, yes, even I wasn't bad at all by my own casual standards. But you can tell a natural performer when one shows up and Stella Bahin was that, doing everything from memory, animated, striking and impressive. She did a period of Poet-in-Residence that involved going into schools, for heaven's sake. You can't be a faint-hearted shrinking violet if you are strong enough to do that. And she also tried out new work to see how it worked, which I can quote in full,
Corbyn
Got in.
Certainly the shortest poem I've ever heard recited live. What did we think.
Well, Stella, I don't know how long it will remain topical. Was it Ezra Pound who defined literature as 'news that remains news'.

But, what a marvellous, friendly event and tremendous success it was.

Poets are supposed to have vices, it's almost the law. On the way from the Lunch to the presentation, Dylan Thomas would have sneaked into the pub for a couple of quick ones but I nipped into a well-known turf accountants to check the racing results. I have rarely been more confident in a horse than today's best bet, Emotionless, and I'd gladly have had ten times as much on it but there is no such thing as a certainty. Not only had it won to make the whole day a profitable one but I'm also now the happy owner of a 16/1 ticket on the new 6/1 favourite for next year's 2000 Guineas.
What a tremendous name for a horse. I've found a new hero.

At the Competition Reading, David Attwooll - that's double T, W, double O, double L- read the competition winner, The Greengrocer's Apostrophe, as here, http://www.havantlitfest.org.uk/competitions.php as the climax to a fine selection of runners-up and commendeds, judged by Joan. I'll gladly admit that I wouldn't have gone to that without a complimentary ticket because I wouldn't expect such an event to be brilliant. Competition winners aren't always wonderful but these were all genuine, engaging, thoughtful poets who had written more than one poem each worth hearing so I'm tempted to think that Joan did a good job of sorting it out properly.
Top marks to the Havant Festival, a low-key affair this year in the circumstances (like the organizer standing for 'higher office'). There ought to be more of it except that it has to be organized, paid for and find enough interested in doing it. And if it happened every month, it would no longer be an occasion, so Long Live Our Gracious Festival.
And let's see if Tim is prepared to stand up when we sing that one.

   

The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas

Hilly Janes, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas (The Robson Press)

Rarely has one of these anniversaries served to restore or establish a reputation for me better than the current Dylan Thomas centenary. I don't think one ever has.
Hilly Janes is the daughter of the painter Alfred Janes who made three portraits of Dylan at different times. She makes a life of the poet from that perspective, with anecdotes and material brought from the relationships between him and the group that also included the composer Dan Jones and the broadcaster Wynford Vaughan Thomas.
It is very readable, certainly not making any more of the darker side of Dylan than needs to be and celebrating his achievement while retaining an awareness of how and why his reputation in several areas wasn't always beyond reproach. It is sympathetic but by no means hagiography.
There was simply never enough money in his lifetime although in a coda that traces the development of the Dylan Thomas industry after his death, there is plenty now and, inevitably, it has to be contested. Dylan's behaviour was beyond incorrigible much of the time but many couldn't help but tolerate him due to an irresistable charm. A few made it clear that they didn't and Kingsley Amis, often incorrigible himself, is one of them and seems to be a strange choice as a trustee of the trust that administers the estate. His first-hand knowledge of the workings of the literary world was his qualification rather than any perceived kindred feeling.
Hilly Janes sets just the right tone in retrieving from the sensationalism and gaucheness of the poet superstar status that Dylan was accorded the right amount of credit for linguistic innovation, deeper meanings and ground-breaking poetry. Of course, he is not an easy poet to appreciate fully but neither is he merely a purveyor of grand-sounding rhetoric. This is a valuable contribution to the subject published at the right, significant time.
Caitlin is as difficult as Dylan- at least- and they are made for each other in a desperate, serially unfaithful and eventually traumatic way. It couldn't have been happy but it must have been magnificent in its best moments.
The book is only perhaps a little bit unsteady in a few places later on in the assessment of Dylan's legacy. I wouldn't dispute that he was a 'game-changer' but it's just a phrase I wish an alternative could have been found for. And John Goodby, professor at Swansea University, is quoted in some detail, as witness to where the poetry now stands,
'A lot of modern poetry is now formulaic and anecdotal, following on from writers like Philip Larkin,' Goodby says. 'It doesn't relish the resources of language, and is rather scared of them. Dylan's poetry is not afraid to sound like poetry
Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves there. We have only just come to realize that some of us misjudged some of what we regarded as Dylan's bombast and immediately we are accusing Larkin of some kind of lexicophobia. I think we can allow that Larkin relished the resources of language but not in quite the same way. His 'ruin-bibber, randy for antique' doesn't sound formulaic to me. Formulae, theory and doctrine are the constituency of a particularly dull strain of avant-garde, still stuck somewhere in the 1960's, who have no idea of Dylan's invention or Larkin's more considered craft and ironies.
But one is not to complain and a misguided opinion can be as interesting as one that nails it.
This is a fine book and does its job beautifully well.

Dylan Thomas - something intuited made manifest

I hope we all saw the drama on Dylan Thomas, A Poet in New York, on Sunday. I thought it was very good. I heard it said that Tom Hollander was too familiar from other recent television roles but that didn't worry me as I've never seen him before.
Another highlight of the BBC's marking of the centenary was Andrew Motion showing up on Radio 3 the previous Sunday morning to add some of his finely modulated thoughts on Dylan. I was particularly struck by his reference to Seamus Heaney's Oxford lecture in The Redress of Poetry which captured precisely what needs to be said.
Since the poets of the 1950's reverted to their common sense, empirical approach in reaction against Dylan's somewhat large gesturing rhetoric, his reputation has been somewhat reduced. Most poets have not done it quite like that since but some 'redress' is always required to balance the action and reaction. One of the better critiques of Thomas I have was the roughly contemporary essay by our old schoolteacher, Linden Huddlestone, but he wasn't in a position like Heaney to see the poems from our current perspective.
Heaney was a brilliant reader, critic and essayist. Such sensitive and nuanced reading and the facility to then explain it back again is a rare talent. Looking through the essay, I'm sure the line Motion drew our attention to was,
Imaginative force has moved a load of inchoate obsession into expressed language: something intuited and reached for has had its contours and location felt out and made manifest.
This is a propos some of the early poems like The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. Heaney is not blind to the widely accepted shortcomings of the Thomas oeuvre but seems to put them in context with consummate consideration and doesn't try to defend the currently indefensible in the later poems but makes a special exception for the masterpiece, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. This is precisely an expression of where Dylan belongs in our appreciation now but it takes a critic of Heaney's power to put it how we need it to be put.
But it led me to wonder if he hasn't provided us with a further scale on which to set poets, another way to compare and contrast. We might have previously identified two polarities of Classical and Romantic and set poems or poets on a scale that ran between them but more specfic and meaningful labels for the ends of this spectrum might be to identify the balance between pure 'intuition' and to what degree it is 'made manifest'. The usual suspects might be Keats, Wordsworth and Blake on the intuitive side and Larkin, Gunn and hopefully John Donne among those that make it manifest.
It's possible that aspects of Modernism, with Dylan as a third generation Modernist, made the inchoate more fashionable, with poets like Geoffrey Hill finding it necessary to insist that poetry should be difficult. By all means it is an option but it isn't a rule, it's not a part of a definition of what poetry is. Although if a poem leaves nothing to wonder about then it is unlikely to remain of interest for long. But I'm not convinced that some of the latest contemporary poets aren't sliding deliberately back towards an over emphasis on intuition although they can remain nameless here.
Personally, I'd prefer the poet to have done the hard work by making their inchoate obsession manifest for us. That is why they are a poet. It seems a bit presumptuous of them if they think we are really so interested in them that we are going to do their job for them. If I want a puzzle, as John Fuller describes in his Who is Ozymandias, then I don't turn to a book of poems, I know there will be crosswords in the paper at the weekend. But I'm glad the centenary has provided the opportunity to get Dylan right. I didn't enjoy feeling that he was to be derided as a passing fashion, all bluster and overblown, empty wordplay. I always secretly wanted to say I quite liked him.
And thanks to Andrew Motion for pointing me to Heaney's lecture, I've had a job done for me that I probably wasn't capable of doing for myself.
Poetry is a broad church. It doesn't benefit from being divided into factions. The avant garde are welcome but must realize that they are nothing special, they are really just a part of a mainstream that is wider than they knew. Most of which I've offered as my opinion here more than once before.

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.