Top 6 - Richard Yates

One day in 2002 there was a little review in The Times that began, 'Stop right there.' It drew one's attention to the new edition of Richard Yates' Collected Stories and said that this was the real thing. It turned out to be exactly right and I've rarely been more grateful for a review.

Later, I'd like to think that my piece in The Reader magazine played a small part in the revival of interest in his books although it has to be said that it is more likely to have been due to the film of Revolutionary Road. At that time, I collected all the novels in old editions from abebooks, several coming from America, because only Revolutionary Road was in print here then. Now, you can get any of them in a new reprint.

A Glutton for Punishment was one piece that stood out from that first book, although the book didn’t have any weak points.
For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends.
through to getting home having been axed from his awful office job,
And then with a great deflating sigh he collapsed backward into the chair, one foot sliding out on the carpet and the other curled beneath him. It was the most graceful thing he had done all day. ‘They got me,’ he said.
A Wrestler with Sharks tells of a writer with big hopes stuck in terrible hack job writing for trade magazines, dreaming of his own by-line, with nine unpublished books to his name. Yates is brilliant at observation as well as catching the nuances of vernacular American but in stories like these it is a great sympathetic achievement to give his characters dignity when their circumstances are so cruelly delineated.
In The Best of Everything we have every right to guess that Ralph’s drinking with the fellas is going to be more important to him than his marriage to Grace.
Of the novels, one doesn’t have to set Revolutionary Road apart as the best known but having come first and been successful, setting the tone for his small tragedies in desperate middle class families, one could hardly leave it out.
Cold Spring Harbor beautifully catches the relationship of Evan and Rachel and because it is a re-read of Young Hearts Crying that has brought Yates back to mind, the fine writing in that is freshest in my memory and gets ahead of the other candidates for that reason if no others.

Music for the Royal Wedding

I don't know what Ms. Duffy has got prepared for the forthcoming wedding. She's signed up for an interesting 10 years of laureateship, for such a devout leftie, compared to the benign period that Andrew Motion excused himself from ahead of time in timely fashion.

On Radio 5 this evening, there was an interview with someone from Angelsey, that is, I think, Ynys Mon now to the politically specifically correct and they said how proud they were to be giving sanctuary to the royal couple during the build up to the wedding but they did admit there was a growing industry in the sale of tacky tea towels.

And, if you're anything like me, then that only triggers off the theme tune to the old television programme, When the Boat Comes In. And, thus, for better or worse, my poem for the royal wedding was only a matter of time. About 25 minutes, actually.

Music for the Royal Wedding

(to the tune of When the Boat Comes In)

Come, little lassie,

It’ll be no hassle,
You can be the Queen

When I have married you.

You’re nice and leggy,

Like my Great Aunt Peggy

But she drank much more gin

Than you’ll be allowed to.

The plebs get a day off

But there’ll be a pay off

When the tacky tea towels

Go on sale to them.

Your see-through dress, it

Made me interested,

I thought you could be Queen

Once I'd married you.

One thing we ought to

Do is have a daughter

Or a son that Harry

Will then be behind

In the procession

Of the line of succession

That’s why we must marry.

I hope you don’t mind.

Come, little lassie,

It’ll be no hassle,

You can be the Queen

When I have married you.

From the Archives - WTTA 12 Hour, 1995

27 August, 1995 was the day I spent achieving a personal best for 12 hours of bicycle riding. It does seem unlikely now but luckily the archives still have the evidence. Here seen coming back into Lechlade, so after 110 miles or so perhaps, and sometime around midday.
Those were the days, and heaven knows how much I miss it. But I'm afraid the situation has long gone well beyond repair. There are some memorable names on the result sheet there, and it was an honour to take part alongside them.

Over

Two bits of bad news. Firstly, I'm reading Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, which is slightly disappointing. Great style, no doubt, some worthwhile insights but not a writer I could love. It is supposed to be funny and I haven't laughed yet.

Worse, though. It brought on that awful feeling of, 'I could do this'.

I know I can't do it. In the past, decades ago now, I used to try. And I found I couldn't write fiction at all. Once it was several short stories imitative of William Trevor, who I thought was the best thing.Then it was Mishima and various Japanese writers that made me want to do it. I had a story, A Brief Lapse of Confidence, published in a magazine called Fisheye, and gladly eventually forgot about it.

Unfortunately this time I have an idea that I think might work, although whether it will stretch to the 50 000 word mark that the Wikipedia entry says elevates a story from novella to novel, I don't know. This morning, I've done 430 words, so I need to do that more than 100 more times.

It's called Over and concerns the last week of a relationship between Doddsy and Madeleine.

I expect I'll run out of impetus quite soon but in the meantime I can say I have a novel in preparation. It would be great to have something one is happy with to keep in a drawer forever. The main reason for not wanting to try these last twenty years or more is that the investment of time and effort was never going to be worth the poverty of the thing it produced. I'll see what happens this time.

Amores I iv

Whatever great works they go on to create or are eventually best known for, it is often the early work that is in some ways essentially the real artist. Their first ideas being what they first wanted to express and their original style being how they thought it best put. Fame and recognition inevitably change them and so it is the early pieces in which we find them unspoiled. Ovid is probably best known for the Metamorphoses but I'm sure I prefer the Amores.
Also, as might be suspected of Donne, the poets that write about love and their amorous adventures might be those who spent more time thinking about it than doing it. While both fancy themselves as 'ladies' men', one could think that a real philanderer might have spent so much time gallivanting that they would hardly stop to write so much of it down for posterity. I don't know. But I was taken by this little episode re-reading Ovid this weekend and thought it might be strong enough to stand even my hack re-working,

Amores I iv

I’ll see you there. And, with you, your husband
Who can put his arm around you and rest
Your head upon him while across the room
We share secret glances that will murmur
Between us our furtive wordless nothings.
Read my meaning from my moving fingers
Or from the idle shapes I trace in wine.
And when you bring to mind a thought of love
Between us you should brush your glowing cheek
But if you need to chide me then perhaps
You’ll touch your earlobe so that I will know.
Don’t take the wine he offers you but say
That he should drink it and then ask the slave
To bring you some that you say you prefer.
I will drink from that glass so that my lips
Will have touched the part that you will drink from.
Don’t let him get too intimate with you,
And, above all, please don’t let him kiss you
Or I will announce that we are lovers
And the kisses that he’s stealing are mine.
But it’s the unseen lovemaking I fear
More than any because I cannot know
Of it but know of it for myself
On my own account when I have enjoyed
It with you in other public places
But discreetly, hidden under clothing.
Remember to keep his glass charged, keep him
Drinking strong wine with no added water
The sooner we can have him taken home
To sleep it off and, when it’s time to go,
Leave like the others do and blend yourself
In with the crowd, for I will be a part
Of it and meet you there. I’ll see you then.

How wretched I am to ask for only
These few short hours with you, when all night long
You will be back at home with him while I,
Desperate and tearful, watch you to your door.
And your husband will then take your kisses
As a right and take for himself the love
You give me more naturally. Might I ask
You let him do so without your response.
Don’t let him enjoy it or, at the least,
Don’t take any pleasure in it yourself.
But whatever happens during the night,
Tell me what I want to hear tomorrow.

Sean O'Brien - November

Sean O'Brien, November (Picador)

One day it might be adjudged that we have been living in the Age of Muldoon. The phrase is used by Sean O'Brien in his anthology, The Firebox, although not with the capital letter that makes it look official. But O'Brien himself is also likely to be a candidate to be made central to the poetry of our time.

It is sometimes suggested that there is a ready-made aspect to some of his phrases, a recycling of cliche that is identified by Alvarez in his essay on Auden in The Shaping Spirit,

They are all phrases from that Thesaurus of Social Abuses which became so thumb-marked in the 'thirties. It is as though Auden had not written the lines at all, but merely compiled them.

and then one wonders if it's worth turning to Donald Davie's thoughts, in Purity of Diction in English Verse, about refreshing cliche.

But then it's possible to trawl through this collection to identify how many such phrases there are and find it might not be quite be as true as one thought. It is not here the case that O'Brien is re-making worn-out expressions but returning to set piece ideas of his own, the stalled sense of purpose found on afternoons of rain, outside of history, with things turning back on themselves and the participants doubting their own reality. It is the post-Marxist aftermath of a deracinated, derelict culture.

But, looking back at Alvarez, it is Auden's poem Consider that he discussed there that could have had a big influence on O'Brien's method with its tone of diagnosis and issuing of imperatives.

If some of these poems look familar, it is not only because they continue O'Brien's disconsolate view of the state of affairs but also because they appeared in the recent book Night Train. It is in the decline of the railway system that he has found an extended metaphor for the wilderness and the enforced obsolete.

As well as tributes and memoirs of recently deceased poets, O'Brien has poems here in memory of his parents, the Elegy to his mother being one of his most memorable recent poems. It ends when he offers his seat on a bus to a woman of similar age to his mother, who declines, adding,

We haven't come this far to give up now.

That lives are still led with such dignity is in spite of the way they are processed,

The post still comes. The state that failed to keep the faith

Pursues you for its money back.

and the way, in the cinema in Verite: Great Junction Street,

We could not see that what the adverts meant

Was us, the grubby herd among the stalls.

The spraunching morons and fat girls

Who lusted for a Hillman Minx were those

We'd marry

The consolation for our disenfranchisement, the theft of our identity, the fact that we are not suffered to even own ourselves is only that we are allowed to express it.

Michael Longley - A Hundred Doors

Michael Longley, A Hundred Doors (Cape)

I saw Michael Longley reading at the British and Irish Poetry Conference at Oxford a few years ago. With Glyn Maxwell reading extracts from his plays and Deryn Rees-Jones taking an interest in her own sensual side, Longley was by far the star of the show, the venerable old warhorse not needing to get out of a canter to be best in show.

The subjects in this new collection of poems include flowers, birds, his grandchildren and the mortality of himself and others. He has a benevolent spirit that here makes of death more a kindly memory than the blind terror it is for others.

His poems are largely without affectation or special effects, often bringing to mind Edward Thomas, a strategy that must keep him in good books at home where he is married to a leading Edward Thomas authority. And in common with other poets from Ireland, he makes use of Irish place names. When you have licence to mention Carrigskeewaun in your first line, your last poem and several in between, you already have an advantage over one who lives in, say, Portsmouth.

Prelude is a fine short poem describing how the discomfort of the musician's sitting position finds its way into the music. Throughout, the poems are benign meditations and as accommodating as the poet with his pint of beer would also be. They appear to have so little art about them that it must be a technique and their honesty and sanguine attitude come so easily that we don't notice how well it has been done.