Elizabeth Jennings by Dana Greene

Dana Greene, Elizabeth Jennings, The Inward War (Oxford University)

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. 
        

The Pooterish Life of the Serial Book Orderer

From time to time I am rewarded for some perceived diligence at work and receive some shopping vouchers. Diligence is a relative term and I see myself as notable only in comparison with the average, very average, standard set by my peers.
These vouchers have become quite welcome in recent years. One can either have a little treat or spend them on something that would otherwise have cost money but not all of our struggling retail outlets accept them. Since the biography of Elizabeth Jennings was due to cost money in September and Waterstones will take the vouchers, it seemed sensible to order it from them and forego any parsimonious consideration of Amazonian discounting. The advantages of online ordering were not advertised by the inability of their website to take payment by voucher. It insisted on having my credit card details.
It was at this stage that I decided to be henceforth known as Lupin.
Going into the city centre is such an arduous undertaking in this day and age. All it has is shops and they are of little interest. But I made a detour from my itinerary yesterday, accommodated by a day ticket on the omnibus which allows me to spend all day using the services of First should I see fit. And I went into Waterstones to present my credentials and credit notes.
The helpful assistant paused some way through the process of placing the order to apologize for all the rigmarole involved. I said don't worry about it, you ought to see what it's like where I work. The author's name is Greene with an 'e', mine is Green without. And they'll email me when it's in, which is all fine.
Until one gets home to find the TLS lying so self-satisfied at its own erudition in the porch and in it is mention of Don Paterson's The Poem: Lyric, Sign and Metre 752 pages of essential reading by the great man whose every utterance on such subjects needs reading as a matter of urgency and relish. Why didn't I know about that. It was published in May. I'm slipping.
Exploring the various avenues of acquiring that, and fretting that I made a technical error only an hour or so earlier, I decide the best option is to get Amazon to leave it behind the wheelie bin next week. But now the monster online retailer reckons it'll be here tomorrow, so I'll be in. You can't argue with that.
At the same time, trying to avoid all extraneous delivery charges, one sometimes has to just fling all caution to the restless wind and just pay up. It's been a long time I've been waiting to see the DVD of Un Coeur en Hiver for next to nothing. But I've now seen all my other favourite films - mostly French and from that period - several times and I'd like to see that one again.
World Cup fever didn't last long. I was completely over it by the morning after. Emmanuelle Beart fever hasn't yet abated in twenty-five years.
So, Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four, which I've sat passively through 200 pages of, amazed at the number of words that can be made out of a 'police procedural' - Proust, Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy would all have been impressed if they had lived long enough- is going to struggle to stay in the game. The Don's book is just as weighty and likely to be more compelling. It is astonishing that 752 pages need to be read before one is in a position to read the 24 short lines of Tamer and Hawk but there we go, needs must. Maybe one day poetry will escape back out of the universities.
The main benefit, though, is not the reading, not the books themselves or even the complexities one can make out of the process of acquiring them. It is writing about the minor details of acquiring them in the current era. That is as postmodern as it gets. Where's Roland Barthes when you need him.

Signed Poetry Books - Elizabeth Jennings

Not strictly speaking a Signed Poetry Book but we don't let small details get in the way. I bought a copy of the 1970 collection, Lucidities, with a signed letter 'inlaid'. That letter turns out to be a routine but very gracious reply to a fan letter. All poets will know that fanmail arrives by the vanload every day. First class postage in 1974 was three and a half new pence.
It is also a quite charming book, though not immediately obvious in retrospect how Elizabeth had really developed 'a new style' as she explains in the enclosed Poetry Book Society leaflet but it must have seemed like a departure for her at the time.
I look forward very much to the biography in September when we can intrude further into the life of this modest, if not quite unassuming poet, who already seems like somebody likeable but almost quaint from a bygone age, much to her credit.

Elizabeth Jennings

One of my internet poetry explorings found me this last week,
Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Jennings
and I'm not going to improve on it but it did prompt me to get out the old Selected Poems and I was pleased to find the 1992 Collected next to it. I was surprised to find that the excellent poem, Delay, quoted by Dana Gioia is the first in each volume. It's often significant, or at least of interest, to see where a selector or collector of a poet's poems thinks their selection should start. It's not always the poet's best work but usually the earliest item considered of sufficient worth. In the case of Delay, there isn't much better to follow but there are plenty that bring Jennings back to one's attention.
Having been associated with the loosely identified 'Movement' of the 1950's, she maintained her position only among a much smaller readership than Larkin's, when Thom Gunn and Donald Davie couldn't seriously be bracketed with The Movement as time went on and the others - Kingsley Amis, John Wain - now only look as if they were added in to make any sort of movement at all. Her poems have the clarity of diction, formality and lack of rhetoric that characterized this plain style but if her poems are carefully made they don't stretch the language too far and if they are profound and gentle they sometimes tell more than they show their meanings and require little interpretation. They are what they say they are.
But she was prolific, finding plenty to say about life, death, art and all the things in between without becoming repetitive. Having always admired her in a small way, returning to the Collected soon made me admire her the more, especially in the light of Dana's piece and the background detail included in it. Heaven knows it has taken me a lifetime to recover from the late 70's university education that taught us that there was only the text. Whether it be from biography, letters or a poet's other writing, and whether it be Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin or Hughes, notwithstanding Sylvia, surely the experience of any poet's work worth the reading is enhanced by some knowledge of time, place and circumstances.
I'm glad I found the Collected or else I'd have ordered it again but thankfully I found that there is a biography due in September, by Dana Greene, and so that provides something to look forward to. But the need to mark the moment by buying something led me to abebooks, wondering how much a signed Jennings might cost. Not that much. It's not often I add to the Signed Poetry Books collection these days - the likes of Eliot, Auden, Larkin and certainly Sylvia and Dylan being beyond my sensible budget- but a copy of Lucidities, of which not much gets collected in the Collected, has,
- signed letter from Jennings laid in. Not a signed poetry book at all, really, but an item of value to one who would value such things and if a piece of paper signed by Queen Elizabeth I was valued at £35k on Antiques Roadshow last night then a tenner for a book with such a letter seems fine to me.
I'm always glad to help restore a reputation that deserves restoration. Two years ago I wrote here with some enthusiasm about A Very British Scandal, the account of the Jeremy Thorpe trial. Look what I did for that.