Isherwood

Goodbye To Berlin is what came off the shelves next. I'd read the other Isherwoods near it but never this which, I dare say, is his best-known and probably best book. I was already the better informed for reading the first page, it being where Thom Gunn took his To Isherwood Dying from. If MacNeice presaged war from England in his Autumn Journal, Isherwood is somewhat earlier in Germany doing the same.

Not much of it sounds made up even if Sally Bowles was really called Jean Ross. Making it semi-fictional would risk devaluing it but he says it's not 'purely autobiographical' in his preface and my edition classifies it as Fiction/Literature. Fiction and autobiography can intersect sometimes, though. In this case his cast of characters don't seem to need much additional help to be memorable. Isherwood's writing is as dapper as he always appears in pictures. Since I can't remember anything about the other books I have of his upstairs, I'd be better off re-reading them rather than buying others.

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Further fallout from the Gunn biography leads me to think that his life and work represented the process by which liberal becomes libertarian. It was perhaps always implicit in both. Liberal involves a concern for others whereas the libertarian is primarily concerned with themselves. Gunn's early work was self-absorbed and his awakening, through Touch, to the presence of others, while overcoming his solipsism, is more exploitative than caring. 

The libertarian acknowledges as few limits on their own freedom as they possibly can and only really grants others release from them in order to enjoy them themselves. Nobody is against freedom but in Boris Johnsonian terms it is a panacea that brings inherent dangers with it. If everyone were allowed ultimate freedom, anarchy would ensue and nobody would benefit in the end.

Gunn's promiscuity and drug use were, for the most part, his own business and he successfully went beyond social barriers in pursuit of his hedonistic aims. If it did no harm to others then so be it but it's not heroic. It's not an example everyone could follow and even for him one suspects his fulfilment was artificial and he might have known as much. I will still accord him some heroic status for his poems, though, the best of which were as good as anybody's from his generation and the later C20th. As with Larkin, as with George Orwell and as with so many others, we need to separate out the writing from who wrote it, the dancer from the dance and not reject one because we don't necessarily like the other.

Doing Things I Always Wanted To

When one's life is effectively one big holiday it seems a bit excessive to undergo the trauma and hardship of travel to do it further afield. My days of airports, foreign currency, language and such things have long been over and memories of Topkapi Palace, St. Mark's Basilica and the Charles Bridge are reduced to vestigial snapshots of moments. However, seeing a coach holiday in the local paper while waiting for a takeaway, with an optional day trip to Durham, prompted a return to the lower end of the holidaymaking classes. I seem to have an affinity with Northumbria, this being the third 'holiday' as such I've undertaken there out of my last four. Since Japan is unthinkable, Durham Cathedral was about the only thing on my list of places to go I considered worthy of the undertaking.

As the difficulties of coach travel and l'enfer c'est les autres can now be treated with more irony than angst, it was actually worth it, revisiting Lindisfarne all too hurriedly after maybe 27 years, seeing a bit more of Newcastle and missing Hadrian's Wall for the sake of the University's Rosemary Tonks archive, as below, into the bargain. Holidays don't come much more bespoke than that and while doing such things on one's own might mark one out as a weirdo, having anybody else there would have made such self-indulgence not admissable and, anyway, I know a few perfectly good and normal people who readily pay the single person supplement.

The complexity of the vast network of coaches moving people from all parts of the country to so many others turned out to be an additional feature of great interest. My three coaches and 12 hour outbound journey would have been miraculous except for taking in the M6 and Stoke-on-Trent and the driver apparently getting lost whether the M1 was blocked up or not. Thus two three-hour rides with only a 20 minute break weren't the original plan. And then, on arrival, having to find one's key, with a form to fill in for imminent dinner's menu choices I was prodded on the shoulder and asked reasonably politely if I could not wear my hat on the coach as it spoiled someone's view, presumably of some small but crucial detail of M1 travel that one person had particularly wanted to see.

A series of such impossibly picky gripes from various fellow travellers whose worlds are presumably otherwise forever unblemished soon became a further ghastly entertainment, with their concomitant insight into human nature, as the days went by. Even the hotel manager found it necessary to relay a warning via the understandably eternally disgruntled coach driver that guests should not be helping themselves to a free lunch from the breakfast buffet. Comparing notes with my best friends of the week, they asked if I'd read all the rules and I conceded that I hadn't. They said you could be thrown out of the hotel for doing that but the penalties were easy-going enough to stop short of transportation to Tasmania.

My temporary best friends were two ladies from Redditch, among the few ostensibly younger than me available, and I was glad of them especially as they made the effort before departing on their coach on the last day to come and wave to me. What our staid, possibly Daily Mail-reading co-travellers made of our blowing kisses to each other made of it I don't know but, in my defence, the soundtrack of the first leg of my trip north had been John Lennon's Shaved Fish compliation and so the spirit of such hippy times was expected to be within the remit of the clientele.

Having to share the once tranquil idyll of Lindisfarne with so many other day-tripping hordes would surely have made Cuthbert and Bede shudder but they were no more guilty than me and I dare say that 98% of the people one sees in Barcelona, Venice, Bourton-on-the-Water or even Las Vegas are tourists and doing what you're doing, too, and so such places can't ever be 'real' any more. My pilgrimage to the place my once favourite pop group was named after was an absurd parody of a pilgrimage.

Durham Cathedral met expectations. I can't remember very much of Canterbury; Wells is tremendous, as is Westminster Abbey. Gloucester, Salisbury, Winchester and my regular backyard in Chichester are all fine. And that's betting without Rome, Venice, Prague, Istanbul, Vienna and others. It's good, just for once, not to feel the need to make a league table. What I did come way with was more regard for Bede, the writer, than Cuthbert and all his devotions.

Alnwick Castle, The Angel of the North, Newcastle Cathedral, the Hotspur pub, the Baltic and Earl Grey on his vertiginous plinth were duly included but St. Michael's Church, Alnwick, outran its odds with a performance of much charm and genuine peace because I had it to myself and there's much to be said for that. I also found deep sympathy for Rosemary Tonks, as below. So, yes, it was worth it but, no, I don't think I'll be doing such a thing again because I can't at the moment think of anywhere else to go that could line up such a worthwhile few days.

The Rosemary Tonks Archive, Newcastle University

My intrepid journey into the North last week was the furthest I've been since I was last up that way not long into the current millenium. It was worthwhile to undergo the hardships of long-distance coach travel for the sake of seeing Durham Cathedral in the flesh, revisiting Lindisfarne and, quite brilliantly, being able to book myself in to Newcastle University Library's Special Collections and spend an afternoon communing with Rosemary Tonks via the archive they have of her there.

It is not to be undertaken lightly or without some sense of guilt. What Newcastle has is digitalized copies, to be viewed on a laptop, of her diaries, address book and notebooks from after she had renounced her work as a poet and novelist. The first indexed item one sees is a picture of the box they come in, on which it very clearly says,

All these notebooks are written in a certain way which is incomprehensible to the layman.

It is mere gibberish to the layman; for they cannot be understood. To the ordinary person the only conclusion is that the writer must be mad.

And she asks,

Please... I beg you to burn these notebooks

but they didn't. And so one is intruding where one hasn't been invited in looking at this private material and one feels bad about it, grasping at such excuses as one is only doing so because you love her. Why would anyone write down such things if they were not meant to be read. Larkin got lucky when his secretary burnt his journals before anybody else read them but perhaps Rosemary remained a writer for all that she had abjured her career as such but still felt the need to write things down for her own benefit, which might be where serious writing begins.

I only found two asides that made any reference to her published writing. I don't know if the Newcastle Archives are filed by subject area or any other but the content of the Rosemary archive doesn't really belong under Literature. She was not writing poems or novels by the time of these documents. At her own word, the best place for them might be under Psychiatry and then we involve ourselves, however improperly, in the life of a lady and her neuroses, obsessions, anxieties and moments of happiness, her comforts and joys, medications, appointments and mood swings.

Most movingly, in among her love for Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, her dismay at 'too much tennis on T.V. + that terrible Fiona Bruce in a long piece on paintings forgery', the waitress she doesn't like in the coffee shop and, over and over again, the ravens in whose croaking she finds comfort, the last entry in her diary, on 12/2/2014, is a delivery from Sainsbury's. Those won't have been her last words but they might have been the last words she wrote and compared to Goethe's Mehr Licht, or even Oscar's Either those curtains go or I do, they are the most ordinary words one could have from one who had once been such an extraordinary writer.

Before that, it is sometimes sleeplessness and the milky drinks she had faith in. She is totally convinced on a regular basis, as on 11/6/99, that,

Hooray !!

Married! To an absolutely darling man !

"Come along, my Rosemary,

Follow me, my own child..."

and that man is the Lord.

 

Newspaper reports of a poltergeist not far from where she lived in Bournemouth and destroyed her collection of ancient artefacts are understandably, in her circumstances, seen to be significant.

Her admirers might be tempted to cite Ophelia and say,

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown

but Rosemary's poems, novels and interviews from the 1960's and into the 70's had expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the world as she found it then so I'm reluctant to find fault with her for going in search of something better. It's not obvious that she found it but at least she disdained celebrity status and made for herself a way of life that made some strange sense to her.

I was glad to establish that we had the same birthday, as if astrology actually meant anything, to witness the ordinariness of the life she chose having once been the cover girl of a generation of English poets and to see that she, too, thought, as on 24/10/98, at the age of 70,

The difference between my happy normal self & the distressed wrestling person is UNBELIEVEABLE.

 

I'm not sure she'd have been the easiest of company at any time of her life because she must have been nothing if not demanding but the few hours spent with her daily notes made me grateful they weren't destroyed and, compared to the lives of such luminaries as Eliot, Yeats, Ezra, Dylan Thomas, Ted and Sylvia, Stevie Smith and others, I'm not sure how 'mad' she really was. 

Maybe in the end we either just like somebody else or we don't. And nobody in their right mind would undergo coach travel from Portsmouth to Newcastle and back to pry into a dead poet's private notes unless they cared.

Yes, the main point was Durham Cathedral, then revisting Lindisfarne and what proves to be the area I usually decide on when having a 'holiday' but any sort of experience can be given vaguely religious status if it means enough to us. We pay our money and we makes our choice. 

I'll meet with whichever friends want to see, or pay their respects at, Rosemary's grave at Warblington some time quite soon, very informally. 

Sean O'Brien, Juniper

Sean O'Brien, Juniper (Dare-Gale Press)

'Haberdashery' is a good word to have in a poem with its natural percussion and domestic associations but one might not get away with using it more than once. I thought Sean O'Brien had used it before but, with no concordance available, failed to find it in his previous work. It was used in an unconvincing Pastiche O'Brien on this website on 3/12/2009, though, and so art eventually imitates its own poor imitator and if its use in Amnesia, the poem here, is Sean's first then I saw it coming a long way off whether I knew what it really meant or not.

In Amnesia, the sundry goods are the subject of some of those now faded advertisements painted on end-of-terrace houses in,

Entire districts where the poor had fought and lost

for generations out of mind could not be found at all.  

We experience this leftover feeling in the city as 'the merely dead' and death or the dead are explicitly referred to in all but one of these thirteen poems and are at least implied in the other but alongside madness and rain and themes of such exclusion and lack of understanding, they are only really a sub-category of the over-riding theme of time.

In The Goodbye Look, 

    time's the evil in the heart of things, 

in which we have to live while it wears us out. It is always in language in verb tenses, it can't be gainsaid. Such was the idea in my own first ever poem in print but it's taken until now, and Sean's new poems, to realize that it is the overwhelming theme of all literature and life. If he has dealt in weather gods, river gods and other pagan gods at times, time is the genuine almighty.

A feature of the O'Brien technique is how he can let sentences extend and then extend further and in Peacetime one of them lasts for ten mostly 10, 12 or 14 syllable lines. That's plenty, one might think, but it demonstrates the point that while time is forever disappearing it can also drag as anyone who has gone from Portsmouth to Newcastle and back on a coach would understand.

The weight of time accumulates behind us and we call it history, or as much of its wars and brave attempts at making something of it as our amnesia allows to be preserved.

Juniper here is a small place near Hexham rather than a flavouring for gin. The title poem is in memoriam the artist Birtley Aris, a friend as Fingerposts, an even more recent poem recently heard on the TLS podcast, is for another. That had led me to anticipate a mellower, gentler, perhaps less combative O'Brien. Keats was writing Late Keats at the age of 25 but, for all we know, Sean might still be writing middle-period O'Brien in his early seventies but I suspect the discomfiting 'attitude' might not abate. Only time will tell.

Venerable Indeed

Before the long haul north, the furthest I've been for twenty years, I spent some time with Bede and his History of the English Church and People. He lived up there, as did Aidan, Cuthbert and Alan Hull and as do Sean O'Brien and Rod Clements.

Of course it's up to us how we want to interpret reports of miracles, piety and other Christian propaganda but whether any of it is true or not it's beautiful in its way. Like Vasari's Lives of the Artists in which each biography expounds the rare talents of its subjects, all the bishops and holy men that Bede tells us about are paragons of devotion and one gets the impression that both Vasari and Bede are aching to say that each was uniquely so but are held back because the definition of 'unique' doesn't allow them. 

I know the feeling. I'd like to say, at one time or another, that maybe 50 pieces of music are the best I've ever heard but you can only say such a thing about one of them.

What impressed most, though, was Bede's 'poetics'. He was more than 1200 years ahead of Robert Frost with the idea that 'poetry is what gets lost in translation' when reflecting on some lines by Caedmon that,

This is the general sense, but not the actual words that Caedmon sang in his dream; for verses, however masterly, cannot be translated literally from one language to another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.

 

By all means it would be insular of us to only read poems, or anything else, written in our own language but unless we are fluent in any others, we put all our trust in a translator to know the work of those who wrote in all the others but the 'poetry', the sound of it, is altered and so we can get a sense of it but never the whole effect.

I can't help thinking the point has been made here before, Frost notwithstanding, but Bede knew as much and, for me, that more than anything else, makes him venerable indeed.

Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life

 Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life (Faber)

You wait for what seems like half your life for the book you most wanted to read to be first written and then published and by the time it is its subject has been deposed from his undisputed position as your favourite poet, specialist subject and maybe even, I might have once precariously thought, 'role model'.

The book turning up exactly on time, once it was due, was still a major event but its sub-title made me dubious and wary. 'Cool' means 'detached' but is also a vague term of vogue approval; 'queer' is a derogatory term reclaimed in an act of defiance by those radical and upfront enough to do so, which it would have been dangerous to do in the 1950's, 60's and later. Both epithets can reasonably be applied to Thom Gunn with all good intentions but putting them so prominently on the cover does him no favours. He was much more than that in his day and if by now he's been reduced to such a definition, his work is diminished by them. 

In PNReview, Volume 16 Number 2, November - December 1989, Donald Davie wrote that,

I have in the press - to use that portentous phrase - a book about British poetry since 1960. And as I put it together I was surprised by how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre-stage.

And that's what he was, or looked like, then - a central figure encompassing long, historical perspectives in poetry as well as contemporary references; one who moved from highly discplined, metrical forms to 'freer' lines and one who set himself up as 'impersonal' in manner and removed from the 'confessional' excesses of some of his contemporaries although it is now increasingly difficult to say where any such boundary lay. To reduce him to cool and queer, as if he was a little bit Miles Davis and a little bit Walt Whitman but mostly poetry's Lou Reed isn't good enough. And the photograph on the front cover doesn't help much, either.

Few biographies resemble psychological case studies as much as this but few people spent quite so much time ostensibly analysing themselves, their relationships with others and the world. In a book advertised as being 'no holds barred', though, one still wasn't expecting to find that young Gunn shared his mother's bed after her second husband left and that Gunn was on the outskirts of being investigated regarding the assassination of JFK, via his friend Don Doody. Soon, though, these extraordinary details don't seem so extraordinary after so many chapters of drug excesses and compulsive promiscuity and, for such apparently streetwise geezers, his entourage do seem alarmingly prone to 'falling in love'. Michael Nott begins, though, with the suicide of Gunn's mother, to who he was so attached, which clearly had an enormous effect on him.

Gladly, though, Nott doesn't lose sight of the work that made Gunn famous, regularly tracing the real people and occasions into the poems. While Gunn was most insistent that he was not 'confessional' in the style of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, that's a matter of opinion. His pursuit of 'impersonality' in his poems was to be admired but it's more in the detached attitude of his language than any escape from self that he achieves because, in a very Gunn-like paradox, that attempt looks more and more like a New Age 'search for himself'. Whether consciously or not, Nott compiles a long litany of writers that Gunn takes as role models as if his thesis is that Gunn was a highly talented tabula rasa, like David Bowie became in pop music, who assimilated almost all he was from precursors - Shakespeare, Donne, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Camus, Sartre, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound. 

What he did try to achieve, in common with other 1950's poets, was the avoidance of 'bad principles' although not all of his reveiwers from My Sad Captains in 1961 onwards agreed that he was successful in that. He can be seen to become himself in a Damascene moment on a dusty road in France when all his reading, thinking and inwardness are illuminated by a sense of release which might be identified as where the adventure begins but time and again it becomes apparent that he was only at home in restlessness, that 'love' - for want of a better word- was a strategic enterprise and a hedonism that defied reasonable limits was his primary motivation. At an early stage it was remarked that,

"He laughs too loud, as if he's got something to prove...that was a bit too self-dramatizing..that isn't actually quite true to yourself."

For all that he might have thought poetry could provide some ecsape from himself, it was a brave attempt that didn't work whereas Larkin's manifold ironies that accepted his lot for the most part did pace Gunn's respect for his technical excellence but derision of his lack of ambition. 

Given his lifestyle, Gunn might be counted as lucky to survive the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's. He lost many friends who were memorialized in his 1992 volume The Man with Night Sweats, the book that restored him to more generalized critical acclaim after the perceived difficulties of his 'middle period', and most of those tributes were metrical. While there are free verse and syllabic poems to admire, that is also where more of his less successful or lazier attempts are and metre is overall what he did best.

He did not go gentle into any good night but propelled himself headlong into his decline with as much commitment as he had embraced life in what retrospectively looks like a programme of self destruction but, having given up work, he was bored, may not have wanted to live and became increasingly difficult to live with. His death at the age of 74 was entirely foreseeable although the heroin found in his body had not been known to be part of his regular diet.

Books are more significant if they change our minds rather than merely confirming what we thought already. In one way it's a dull book, detailing repetitive episodes of compulsive behaviour but for the vast majority of us who have led more sheltered lives it offers a view of a sub-culture which we might not have known quite how thoroughgoing and established it was. It also makes it more difficult to argue against Gunn being understood as a 'gay poet' because first and foremost it makes clear that that is what he always was.

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.

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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.