Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Even in the summer, a visit to the ruins of any abbey in England is likely to prompt recollection of Shakespeare’s sonnet no. 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Thanks to a top tip from Julie Mellor, a seven-mile trip out this morning from Rotherham to Roche Abbey, established by the Cistercians in 1170 and dissolved in 1538, certainly did so for me.

But it also brought to mind Peter Levi’s magnificent long poem, ‘Ruined Abbeys’, poem no. 111 in his Collected Poems 1955–1975, Anvil, 1976:

Monastic limestone skeleton,
threadbare with simple love of life[,]
speak out your dead language of stone,
the wind’s hammer, the stone’s knife,
the sweet apple of solitude

And:

Ruins are like a strong body
growing its strength in country air
then breeding age until you see
nettles are waving in its hair,
the ruined body keeps its shape
by the mechanics of landscape:
fox in the gorse, wind in the tree,
raincloud, fellside, mystery:
what was born wild is never tame:
ten numbers never written down,
fellsides and abbeys are the same:
until time draws like a deduction
true proportions for their destruction.

The poem was written when Levi was still a Jesuit, and, like the best of his poetry, has a simple, likeable mysticism which bears his vast erudition lightly. I must get a copy of Brigid Allen’s biography of Levi, himself the biographer of Horace, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson and Pasternak. 13 years ago, I spent a wonderful week at Heythrop College in Oxfordshire, which was formerly the UK headquarters of the Jesuits and where Levi trained for the priesthood. I was occupied, officially at least, by undertaking a Prince2 course, but my memories are mostly of exploring the extensive grounds, muntjac deer and all, and writing haiku in beautiful May sunshine. Among Levi’s many other books is The Frontiers of Paradise, 1987, subtitled ‘A Study of Monks and Monasteries’, which is a favourite of mine, not because I have, or ever have had, any leanings towards the monastic life, but because it’s a richly entertaining book, with many unexpected laughs.

Roche sits snugly below the limestone promontory from which its name derives, and straddles Maltby Dike which provided water for washing and beer, presumably upstream of its use as a depository from the latrine. It’s a beautiful setting, as ruined abbeys almost always are. No wonder that Turner, Constable, Piper, Sutherland and others were drawn to paint them so often. On a day like today, when the sun has finally arrived to announce the start of summer, the scene at Roche looked very beautiful indeed. It reminded me very much of Waverley Abbey, near Farnham in Surrey, the Cistercians’ first abbey in England. There, I wrote this haiku, published in Presence no. 54 and undoubtedly echoing Levi subconsciously:

ruined abbey:
the dark mullein’s yellows                                               
light the transept

I wrote some more haiku this morning. It would have been rude not to, since they’re such inspiring places.

My latest OPOI (‘one point of interest’) review, of a pamphlet by Matthew Hollis, is on the Sphinx website here. As ever, there are lots of other, fine reviews to read.

Among the many pleasures of watching Hitchcock’s 1940 rather-less-than-faithful but compelling adaptation of Rebecca is the array of acting talent; the Oscar-nominated trio of Olivier, Joan Fontaine and the unforgettable Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, with her amazing range of faraway, disturbing looks; and also the supporting cast of British talent: brilliantly caustic George Sanders; Mexico-born Nigel Bruce, doing his usual buffoonish turn, memorably in caveman fancy-dress, and Gladys Cooper, born in Hither Green, as Major and Mrs Lacy; Hitchcock regular Leo G. Carroll; and founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club, C. Aubrey Smith.

Before taking up acting, Smith had a successful career as a ‘gentleman’ cricketer, for Cambridge, Sussex and England – in one test, in which he took seven wickets, and as captain on a tour of South Africa before they’d been ascribed test-playing status. His obituary in the 1949 edition of Wisden includes the following:

Over six feet tall, he made an unusual run-up to deliver the ball and so became known as “Round The Corner” Smith. Sometimes he started from a deep mid-off position, at others from behind the umpire, and, as described by W.G. Grace, “it is rather startling when he suddenly appears at the bowling crease”.

Both Anderson and Cooper became dames. At the start of the 1970s, Anderson, then aged 73, toured America as the Prince in Hamlet.

Sanders’s life took in all sorts: birth in St Petersburg 11 years before the Revolution, a Best Supporting Oscar for his role in All About Eve, similar brilliance in a strange and chilling adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the unmistakable drawling voice of Shere Khan in Disney’s Jungle Book, Mr Freeze in the 1960s Batman TV series, and multiple marriages (including Zsa Zsa Gabor, her sister Magda, and Ronald Colman’s widow), and death by barbiturate overdose, with three suicide notes, in a village near Barcelona in 1972. Javier Marías has written about him at length.

I should add that the score by Franz Waxman, one of many great film composers who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, is a precursor of the knob-twiddling weirdness of 60s and 70s cult classics; and that the cinematography of George Barnes, especially the way the camera dwells on the shadows of the flames as Manderley burns, augments the intense atmosphere of the film.

*

Last week, I read Hetty Saunders’s My House of Sky, an intriguing, excellent biography of the short, sad life of J.A. Baker, which relies heavily on her own archival work and that of one of the founders of New Networks for Nature, John Fanshawe. The two books – the only two he published – for which Baker is remembered, The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer, are the most poetic prose books I’ve ever read, chocker with outlandish similes and metaphors, to the extent that I can only read them very slowly. They’re shot through with a deep melancholy born of his loveless start in life as an only child and then a late-teens breakdown induced by the horrors of German bombing in his home town of Chelmsford. It’s a pity that no footage or tape has survived of the television and radio appearances he made during his few years of relative fame following the publication of The Peregrine in 1967. Perhaps one will turn up in someone’s loft one day.

Here is an extract from Chapter Two (‘May: A Storm’*) of The Hill of Summer to illustrate his remarkable, unsurpassed nature-writing style:

A garden warbler sings in the caves of the darkness under the misty birches, sings endlessly over the arches of bramble. Through the hiss and roar of the rain that bows above the trees, the bird pours out his pure breath of song. It flows unbrokenly, loud and mellow and far-echoing. He sings in the shining green bubble of his own world. The whole wood is an exultant respiration of storm-driven wind and rain. It is like being inside the hollow bones of an immense bird, listening to the sudden inrush of air and the measured heart-beat of huge wings.

Curiously, the few poems by Baker which Saunders includes in her biography of him are
overblown to a degree which, whilst it works beautifully in his prose, becomes too much when set out as verse. Baker was a great fan of poetry, especially of Dylan Thomas, Housman (thus the title of his second book) and Hughes (unsurprisingly). It would still be fascinating to read an edition of his collected poems.

Over on her website, Kathy Pimlott describes how she can’t stop wanting to tinker with poems, even after they’ve been accepted for publication in a collection. That’s a compulsion I share. I often can’t tell whether I should just leave a poem alone or needlessly search for perfection. I know full well that including prosaic phrases among the more poetic ones serves to provide a background against which the high-register language can shine, and that even the greatest poets wrote dull lines occasionally; but even so, the urge to revise is overwhelming. It can be a curse. It’s interesting to note that the response – from critics and readers alike – to Baker’s The Hill of Summer was much more muted than the outpouring of praise which he received for The Peregrine, and, though some of that is due to the less compelling sense of narrative in the former, I believe it’s also attributable to the almost tangible degree to which Baker was trying to make every single phrase and sentence sparkle. Without the shade, the light becomes blinding. I realise that’s blindingly obvious, but it’s good to remind oneself of that every now and then.

* Coincidentally, as I typed this, thunder sounded outside on this May evening.

Much to my amazement, one of a few haiku I sent for the Australian Haiku Society’s inaugural John Bird Dreaming Award for Haiku has been placed second. My thanks to the judges, Vanessa Proctor and Michael Dylan Welch, and to Ron Moss for his haiga.

Seven years ago today, at about this time of day, I received a phone call confirming the passing of Martin Lucas, haiku and tanka poet and editor.

Here are a few of Martin’s haiku, selected from the first and final (#12) issues of Snapshots haiku magazine, edited, respectively, by John Barlow in 1998 and John and Matt Morden in 2006. For me, they display Martin’s observational brilliance, wry humour and ability to present each ‘haiku moment’ in spare, just-so language. Due to the manner of Martin’s passing, the final haiku has a particular resonance.


        the play of light
along the slow canal—
           cygnets preening

*

flag at half-mast—
      summer breeze
             big enough to flutter it

*

autumn evening
a cardboard box
walks down the hill

*

October dawn
the flicker of lights
at the river mouth

It’s nearly three weeks now since Lyn and I moved from Thames Ditton to Rotherham. Since then, it’s been jolly cold, as it seems to have been everywhere in the UK, and full Lockdown in England has been in place until today, when anyone who’s hard(y) and/or desperate enough can go and drink outside (but not inside) a pub. Fortunately, barbers and hairdressers can also now open, which means I no longer have any excuse for looking like a member of the Hair Bear Bunch.

What that all means is that we’ve not been out of the house much. We’ve found a lovely woodland, which contains evidence of human life going back to the Bronze Age. Curiously, it was whilst walking round it last weekend that we bumped into our new neighbours, who are very nice and kind.

I’ve tried several different running routes, chosen by looking at my copy of the A to Z of Sheffield and Rotherham, but what that publication doesn’t show, of course, is the contours of the land. There are no flat roads or paths anyway around here – you’re either climbing a very steep gradient, which I confess I quite like, or going down one, which I don’t like, because I always fear that I might get shin splints unless I put the brakes on. My thighs and ankles have never taken so much punishment in such a short space of time. I’m beginning to sound like the Hunchback of Rother Hame, bellowing ‘The hills, the hills’ to anyone who’ll listen.

I’ve been pondering the socioeconomic differences between Thames Ditton and Rotherham. The tables below, of ONS data for 2016–2018, relate to the local authority areas in which the two places are situated:

	Female	Male
Elmbridge	85.6	82.3
Rotherham	81.8	77.9

	Female	Male
Elmbridge	22.6	20.5
Rotherham	20.2	17.9

I can’t be alone in thinking that such marked differences are scandalous. Of the 317 Tier 1 and Tier 2 local authority areas in England in 2019, Rotherham was the 50^th most deprived and Elmbridge the 310^th. Is anyone foolish enough to believe that our present government truly cares about addressing such inequalities as these? Opinion polls suggest that they are, which makes me very sad. Not that the last Labour government, 1997–2010, did much to ‘level up’, in today’s parlance, either.

The books I’ve read prior to, and since, our move include: the Collected Poems of Moya Cannon, the simplicity of which have an accumulative power and brilliance; Scouse Mouse, the last volume of George Melly’s memoirs, which is packed full of details and entertaining incidents from his childhood in 1930s Liverpool; and Lydia Kennaway’s superb pamphlet of poems, A History of Walking.

I’ve written nothing new of note for several months now. I suppose that’s to be expected given the move. Yesterday, I did my first reading this year, as part of the Red Door Poets events. It seemed to go well, though apparently the Wi-Fi kept making my voice dip out. Whilst it’s great that online readings (and workshops) can attract people from anyone on the planet, it will be lovely to return to in-person readings – Covid permitting, of course.

Three more of my OPOI reviews have been published on Sphinx, of excellent pamphlets by: Steve Ely, Daniel Fraser and Cliff Yates.

I’ve long admired the Words for the Wild website, not just for the writing it features but also how stylishly it does so. I’m very happy, then, to have a poem of mine, ‘Swallowing the Toad’ (which, before you start sniggering, isn’t a euphemism) from The Evening Entertainment, on there as part of the Gilbert White feature. It includes some amazing photos of toads and a recording I made the other day of me reading the poem. As with my poems on The High Window the other day, I’m lucky and glad to be in fine company.

From my parents, I inherited a copy of both White’s Natural History of Selborne and Richard Mabey’s biography of him. Lyn and I visited White’s house in Selborne a couple of years ago. It’s well worth a visit. It’s curious, though, because half the house is given over to a display about Lawrence Oates, he of “I am just going outside and may be some time” fame. What I remember more than anything of the display was that when Oates had been posted with the Army to India, he’d taken with him his pack of hounds, but I digress.

Nowadays, the words ‘great’ and ‘greatest’ are bandied around with egregious abandon, but a strong claim can be made for averring that Edward Burra (1905–1976) was the greatest British painter of the Twentieth Century. Certainly he was, as Jonathan Meades described him in a Radio 4 Great Lives programme, “the greatest watercolourist imaginable”.

In a career spanning more than fifty years, Burra pursued his own path, through many different phases, despite the major disadvantage of poor health throughout: from a young age, he suffered from a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis and then hereditary anaemia, which tired him out quickly, thus his propensity for watercolour over the more labour-intensive oils. In later years, it was discovered that he had an enlarged spleen which caused him further, intense pain. Crucially, these conditions seem to have dampened his (gay or bisexual) libido into nothing further than looking and longing, and one can’t help but speculate that his art contains the subjugation of his sex drive.

Born at his maternal grandmother’s house, 31 Elvaston Place (above), in South Kensington, he lived much of his life in his well-to-do family home, Springfield Lodge, in Playden, just to the north of Rye. Although he was sent to a boarding prep. school, he – or rather his rheumatism-addled body – baulked at the thought of the Eton entrance exam and his parents, to their credit, enabled him to be home educated. As his copious and brilliantly droll, gossipy letters attest, his grasp of spelling and grammar was atrocious; nevertheless, he was extraordinarily well-read and became fluent in French and Spanish.

At the age of not quite 16, he enrolled at Chelsea Polytechnic (above), in Manresa Road, and there learnt the basic of what was called ‘commercial art’, as opposed to the more classical theory of, say, the Slade, and progressed to the Royal College of Art, where there was little they could actually teach him, such was his ability by then. At Chelsea and the Royal College he met and became lifelong friends with a core group – among them, the later-to-be ballet dancer and choreographer Billy Chappell, Barbara Key-Seymer, who became a brilliant photographer, and Clover Pritchard, who was just brilliant full-stop. Due to his condition, Burra was inevitably more of a brilliant observer than a participant. Chappell, in Well Dearie (1985), his selection of Burra’s letters, noted how Burra’s talent flourished:

His great gifts were obvious. Still in his teens he drew like an angel with a strength and purity of line more than exceptional. The years at Art School nourished and developed his obsessive interests. His absorption with the fantastic, the grotesque and the absurd, and always with visual truth[.]

The quartet of friends established themselves within the wider socialite circles of the ‘Bright Young Things’ who lived for the wild parties fictionalised in Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies. As Chappell said:

Edward and his friends were scrambling out of adolescence into a world of high, and excessively perverse, sophistication. How tempting and dangerous, beautiful and wicked, gloriously anarchic and strange, Life appeared. Sexual ambiguity was the rule. Sexual promiscuity and sexual aberration the mode. Had Edward known quite ordinary strength and health there is little doubt he would have become extremely wild. Wilder than any of them.

After college, Burra returned to Springfield, where he produced gloriously colourful and louche figurative paintings, much against the grain of the prevailing trends, and always from memory, without preparatory sketches. He made frequent trips up to London to see his friends and then, from the late Twenties afterwards, popped out, without telling his family as they would only have fussed, to places further afield: the fleshpots of Marseilles and Toulon; New York, more precisely Harlem, where he recorded street scenes and nightlife with an appreciation which few White artists of the time accorded; Spain, just before the Civil War; and Mexico. All those places inspired his art, or ‘fart’ as he offhandedly called it – though he had a deep knowledge of the canon of Western art.

Burra’s friend Paul Nash roped him into Unit One and the Surrealists, but he wasn’t an artist who could easily be pigeon-holed and he wasn’t a natural joiner – he rarely even attended his own exhibitions and apparently cared little for his paintings once they were out of the door. In an age of artistic movements, his recurrent refusal to be easily categorised did him no favours, and still today means that his name is far less known than other, much less technically gifted painters like Nash. That’s not to say that he’s unknown; far from it: among the super-rich cognoscenti, his most prized works sell for millions.

In many of his paintings, there is an underlying and disconcerting oddness, born, perhaps, of not having been expected to live long and of the trauma of seeing Betsy, the beloved youngest of his two sisters, die a long and feverish death from meningitis at the age of 12. That oddness often took on a more sinister appearance; as Meades says, “He makes everything look threatening”. But that is an over-statement, as Burra’s paintings are also very often trenchantly amusing and full of small details containing intriguing sub-narratives. The people in his paintings are almost always frozen in the act of doing something, from the seeming mundanity of drinking tea or biting a ham roll, to flirtation, striptease or fortune-telling.

Burra’s friendships with Chappell and Frederick Ashton, and involvement in the world of ballet in general, led to his designing sets and costumes for numerous productions in which his work was frequently cited as the best feature.

Ahead of his time, from the late Forties onwards he became a prolific recorder of British, mostly English, landscapes, and their degradation by road building. His sister Anne, who took on the principal role as general carer for him once their parents reached their dotage, would drive him all over the country, the wilder the terrain the better – as his biographer Jane Stevenson observed, “He loved the bare landscapes of England”. One could easily make a case for him being a proto-environmentalist.

Ultimately, it is the rich range of Burra’s work which sustains his reputation – and its manifestation of a well-travelled, outward-looking Englishness which our current political leaders seem only too keen to suppress. At times, there are hints in his art of the influence of predecessors and contemporaries, such as Arcimboldo, de Chirico, Dalí, Dix, Goya, Grosz, Ozenfant and Posada; yet none of them are especially key influences, and his vision was resolutely, and almost always instantly recognisable as, his own. His paintings are so full of zest and unspoken, hinted-at stories that they trigger memories and thoughts of my own which have, I hope, a similar outlook and characterisation. I can identify with his contradictory love of life and misanthropy. He is a heroic figure, who, though blessed with a wealthy background, overcame a disability which would surely have defeated other souls. He threw what energy he had into his paintings (and his letter-writing), with a controlled, thought-through looseness to which all great art surely aspires.

That Burra lived most of his life in the part of the world from whence my Paul grandparents’ forebears hailed adds to my sense of connection with him. My paternal and idiosyncratic grandfather, Walter RH Paul (1903–1989), from Eastbourne, thirty miles west of Rye, undertook teacher training at the College of St Mark a mile away up the Kings Road from where Burra was honing his craft at Chelsea Polytechnic. I like to imagine they may have bumped into each other occasionally, but who knows.

If you are unfamiliar with Burra’s art, you’re missing out. Seek it out.

All of this is a long preamble to the fact that, last summer, I wrote several poems inspired by Burra paintings. Many ekphrastic poems seem to me to be simply a rendering into words of the scene depicted in the artwork. I tend to use them, as I always did on Pascale Petit’s now legendary Poetry from Art sessions at Tate, as springboards to explore my own tangents. That’s the case with both my published poems after Burra: ‘The Nitpickers’, and ‘Blue Baby: Blitz Over Britain’. The latter is one of three poems of mine published in the spring issue of The High Window today.

around the headstone
of one who died at twenty:
wind-puffed primroses

This haiku of mine, published in Presence 56, resulted from a trip a couple of late-Februarys ago to Sheepleas, a nature reserve maintained by Surrey Wildlife Trust between West Horsley and East Horsley. The easiest access to Sheepleas is via the track beside St Mary’s church, the history of which reflects many of the most significant events in English history from Norman until Victorian times. Its graveyard is rather beautiful, as even my photo (from a subsequent, early-February visit) below shows.

Much has been written about haiku as a concept and how it is practised in English – and whether, indeed, what we know of as haiku in English can really be called haiku at all, given the cultural freight attached to the original Japanese form, which itself emerged from another form. That debate has often centred on whether or not a sound-unit in Japanese is equivalent to a syllable in English and, according to the two extreme views, that the 5–7–5 ‘syllabic’ count in Japanese should either be strictly followed or strictly avoided. Personally, I’ve always been happy to let content determine syllable count in my own ‘haiku’, rather than being insistent on a particular count. That said, I’ve often found 4–6–4 and 4–5–5 to be forms into which the sound properties of English words can be naturally expressed. In the haiku above, though, the words which I formed in my head and then wrote in my notebook on a chilly Saturday morning emerged, without any conscious thought, as 5–7–5.

In his magnum opus Flora Britannica (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), Richard Mabey, the doyen of British nature writing who’s just turned 80, reminds us that the word ‘primrose’ derives from ‘prima rosa’, i.e. that it – Primula vulgaris – is the first flower of spring. As he does with many different flowers in the book, Mabey documents the folklore and customs surrounding the primrose, much of which comes from submissions made by amateur botanists and flower-enthusiasts. He also cites the following:

A more formal celebration is Primrose Day on 19 April, when primrose flowers are placed on Disraeli’s statue in front of Westminster Abbey (and also on his grave at Hughenden in Buckinghamshire). They were the politician’s favourite flower, and Queen Victoria regularly sent him bunches from Windsor and Osborne. After his death, the botanist George Birdwood suggested inaugurating a ‘Primrose Day’ and the custom has been kept up ever since.

Such different times!

In my poem, I went for ‘first thought, best thought’ in describing the impact of the wind on the flowers. Sometimes, one can over-complicate a haiku by thinking too much about whether an adjective (or a verb) is the best fit. In this instance, it was definitely a case of following Roy Walker’s advice. But in one of those nice incidences of synchronicity (or deeply-buried unconscious association), a beautifully illustrated book, Shakespeare’s Flowers by Jessica Kerr (Longman, 1969), which I bought in Warwick on a visit there with John Barlow about 10 years ago, has jogged my memory of a famous quotation from Act 1, Scene iii of Hamlet: ‘Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance / treads.’ Despite having studied Hamlet in depth several times in days gone by, I can’t claim that the allusion in my poem was deliberate. Pleasingly, the book lists several other mentions of the primrose in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, including the Porter’s line in Act 2, Scene iii of Macbeth, about ‘the primrose / way to the everlasting bon-fire.’ In The Two Noble Kinsmen, listed as a joint work between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, the primrose is described as ‘first-born child of Ver / Merry spring-time’s harbinger.’

In early spring, another member of the primrose family grows abundantly at Sheepleas: the cowslip, Primula veris, to the extent that a large field in the reserve is known by the lovely name of Cowslip Meadow.

I’m very pleased to have a poem, here, as part of the latest issue of the excellent One Hand Clapping journal, and in some august company too. Given the pay-off of my poem, it seems very appropriate that this is where the poem should have found its home.

At Christmas 2019, I, and then Lyn, had a hideous virus the symptoms of which were exactly the same as the classic symptoms of Covid-19, including loss of taste and smell. Whether or not we, like many others who seem to have had Covid symptoms a couple of months before it was supposedly first detected in the UK, it’s very unusual for me to be ill – I’d not had a virus or flu or anything like that for 20 years or more before then.

What I remember most is that I was really feverish for a few days and for some reason the name of the ‘Avant Garde’ composer Cornelius Cardew popped into my head. I looked his details up and found that he died in the early hours of 13 December, 1981, a victim of a hit-and-run on Leyton high road, on the humpback bridge next to Leyton Tube station. Conspiracy theorists claimed that his politics made his death suspicious. One can’t really blame anyone for thinking that, given that it was round about the same time that Hilda Murrell was bumped off (though a local man was subsequently convicted for her murder).

At the time of my illness, I’d just started reading an Amy Clampitt collection What the Light Was like, published by Faber in 1986, and, immediately after looking up Cardew on my phone, I opened the book on her elegiac poem ‘A Curfew’, about the day that her brother Richard, a doctor, died, at the age of 56. The poem is subtitled ‘December 13, 1981’. The billions-to-one coincidence was increased by the fact that ‘fever’ occurs three times in the poem, including as its opening word.

Anyhow, Clampitt was a fine poet, as the selection of poems on this website to her memory shows. I especially like, as I did when I read it in my feverishness, ‘The August Darks’, about the Maine coast, with its nice quotation from Middlemarch at the end and its overall tone reminiscent of Bishop and (Robert) Lowell.

Work’s been madly busy, so I’ve had little time for reading, but what I have read, usually at bedtime, has been tremendous. First, I worked my way through Arnold Bennett’s Journals, covering the years from 1896, shortly after his 29th birthday, to September 1929, two years before his premature death. They give periodic insights into his theory of writing but rather more about the practice; he would rise early and knock out a couple of thousand words before spending the rest of the day socialising, letter-writing, napping and socialising again over dinner. He would, it seems, work out a novel’s plot and characters on long walks. What I hadn’t quite realised before was that, like other great writers whose books of specific place have a universal quality to them, he was extraordinarily urbane, the George Sanders of English literature perhaps, and lived and worked in Paris, then, after his late marriage (to a Frenchwoman), Fontainebleau. Fluent in French, he was arguably more steeped in the French canon than the English, more in Zola than Dickens, and kept up with the latest French literature. He knew Gide well, and indeed crops up in Gide’s Journals 1889–1949 far more than Gide does in his. 

He returned to England in 1912, to a large 18th Century house, ‘Comarques’, in Thorpe-le-Soken, a few miles inland from Clacton and Frinton. By then he was famous and his books sold in vast quantities, matched only by those of his close contemporary and friend, H.G. Wells, with whom he stayed on many occasions. Although he knew and dined with many of the best-known writers, artists, politicians and other celebrities of his age – among them Woolf and DH Lawrence (with neither of whom he seemed to get on, whilst acknowledging the individual genius of each), Barrie, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Sickert, Asquith Churchill, Kitchener, Beaverbrook, who appointed Bennett as Director of Intelligence in France towards the end of the Great War, and many others – he remained true to his roots in Burslem and returned often.

Bennett was well aware that his readership wanted more novels like his most popular – Anna of the Five Towns, The Card, Clayhanger,  The Old Wives’ Tale, etc. – but he pursued his own path rather than do as John Galsworthy, another of his close contemporaries, did and churn out a saga, even though Galsworthy went to get the Nobel in the days when the awarding was apparently random.

At the end of each year, Bennett would record the year’s productivity; on New Year’s Eve, 1908, for example:

I have never worked so hard as this year, and I have not earned less for several years. But I have done fewer sillier things than usual.

I wrote Buried Alive, three quarters of The Old Wives’ Tale, What the Public Wants, The Human Machine, Literary Taste: How to Form it; about half a dozen short stories, including ‘A Matador in the Five Towns’; over sixty newspaper articles.

Total words, 423,500.

How he didn’t get RSI, I don’t know. And that was before he decided to start writing plays too, at which he was also phenomenally successful.

In 1907, he turned his mind to another literary form:

Lately I have been thinking more and more of writing verse. And now I seem to be getting hold of ideas as to the sort of verse I am likely to write, something individual and unlike anything else. 

(14 February)

Last night I had the itch to write more verse. I had the itch without the subject. I wanted to do something short. I thought of the effect of gaslamps on the promenade as a subject.

(16 March)

I wrote about ten more lines of my poem, and these took me pretty nearly all day. At this rate I should say it is just about as expensive for me to write poetry as it would be for me to keep a motor-car, or a yacht.

(18 March)

All day I worked at my poem, and I finished it and called it ‘The Lamp’. At the end of thirty-seven days, it has taken me two and a half days, and I probably shan’t make a cent out of it.

(19 March)

What become of his poems, I’m not sure.

It’s high time Bennett was widely read again. His novels are so much more interesting and entertaining and insightful than those of, say, Galsworthy who was given a Nobel in the days when they were allocated on what now seems like a random basis.

* 

Philip Hoare is another writer whom I admire. His Risingtidefallingstar (2017) is Sebaldian in many ways: its episodic mixture of what appears to be autobiography – though Hoare doesn’t, fictionalise it like Sebald did – and potted accounts of incidents from the lives of literary and other figures of historical importance. Risingtidefallingstar includes chapters on gay and bisexual writers – Wilde and Stephen Tennant (about both of whom he has previously written at length), Wilfred Owen (about whose life I hitherto knew little bar the Craiglockhart interlude and the agonising futility of his death so close to the Armistice) and Virginia Woolf. But Hoare also recounts biographical details from the lives of others intimately connected with water: Melville, Nelson, Thoreau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shelley and Byron.

I know its details well, but the story of Shelley’s end resounds with me whenever I read it. In June 2017, Lyn and I honeymooned in Viareggio, where Edward Trelawney, Byron and co. ceremonially burnt Shelley’s corpse on the beach, fifteen days after the fatal boat trip and five after the body had washed up. A year later, we took the train north from Pisa to La Spezia, and then a taxi, whose driver initially dropped us at the wrong place in Lerici, before dropping us at Casa Magni itself, where Shelley and his family and friends were staying when he died. Hoare’s account, like others I’ve read (including that of Richard Holmes), states that the house is in Lerici, but it’s actually couple of miles along the coast, in San Terenzo, with a lovely beach and bay of its own. When we arrived, we found the house, now a hotel, locked up and there was no answer when we rang the bell. After a while, we were admitted and shown to what was Shelley’s bedroom. For several days we were the only guests, and the staff were absent to the point of invisibility, as if it were our own house. When two other (English) guests appeared at breakfast, it felt like a gross intrusion.

As one would expect from someone who grew up and still lives in the great port city of Southampton, whence the Titanic began its voyage, the book is dominated by the coastline – e.g. the pretext for Barrett Browning’s inclusion is her sojourn in Torquay – and oceans and the peril they bring. In that, it reminded me of Anne-Marie Fyfe’s equally restless mixture of memoir, biography and travelogue, No Far Shore, with which it shares some concerns. Followers of Hoare on Twitter will be well aware of his daily swim in the sea and how it’s an essential part of his life. As the cetacean-obsessed writer of Leviathan, he is, or would love to be, half-man–half-dolphin, meeting jellyfish and a singing whale. At New Networks for Nature a few years ago, Hoare enthralled me and the rest of the audience with his tales of close encounters with sperm whales off the coasts of the Azores. As I read his book, I heard and felt his enthusiasm and learning.

I especially enjoyed the part of the book charting his repeated stays with the artist Pat de Groot in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on a sometimes wild stretch of the Atlantic seaboard, and for a long time a bohemian haunt and LGBT resort, attracting many artists and writers, including Mary Oliver, Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz, John Waters, Tennessee Williams, Hopper, de Kooning, Rothko, Motherwell and Kline.

Alex Preston’s perceptive review in the Guardian notes not only the influence of Sebald but that of Charles Sprawson, author of Haunts of the Black Masseur, which, along with JA Baker’s The Peregrine, is the most poetic English prose I’ve ever read. It also remarks on the influence of David Bowie, whom Hoare draws the reader back to throughout the book, curiously never named, but omnipresent, like a patron saint for this man brought up Catholic, whose paternal antecedents were Irish.

For me, the real beauty of the book lies in how Hoare weaves the details together, and finds strange coincidences and mirrorings, much in the way that Sebald did.

* 

I’ve also been enjoying the latest issues of Under the Radar, Poetry Salzburg Review and The North. On the rare days at work when I’ve snatched a lunch break, Derek Walcott’s The Arkansas Testament, with its poems of St Lucia and the magnificent frigatebird, crossing the sound to Pigeon Island, have been my companion.

Here’s my latest OPOI review for the ever-excellent Sphinx. There are some cracking reviews of what sound like cracking pamphlets on there at the moment, e.g. Ramona Herdman on Cliff Yates, Mat Riches on Martin Stannard, and plenty more besides, so fill your boots.

When I start my weekly Sunday run, at 9.33, it’s just starting to snow. I presume, though, that it will be nothing more than the lightest, icing-sugar dusting. It hasn’t snowed properly in this corner of north-east Surrey / south-west London for about six years, but down it comes. To run through it is a full-on, sensory, exhilarating experience.

          refilled as quickly as I make them footprints in the snow

I watch my footing and slow my pace: I’m sure that pitching up at A & E with a broken ankle would not endear me to the brave, fantastic folk at Kingston Hospital.

          snow settles
          on a small allotment:
          the bean canes aslant

An hour and a half later, my feet are enjoying the creak through the gorgeous compactness of the snow. Victoria Park, in Surbiton, provides enough space for socially-distanced snowball fights. The pavements on Brighton Road are all but empty.

          the one-man band
          strums to no one
          swirling snow

At home at 11.07, my hands are numbed in my pink and black gloves. I have to warm them on the radiator by the front door before I can get them off and untie the laces on my drenched running shoes.

          the only traffic
          in endless snowflakes:
          speedy fox

Before long, I’m happily re-heating in the bath, the bubbles echoing the snow.

          even through the frosted glass snow light

2, 3: from The Lammas Lands
4: from The Regulars

After this week, it’s hard to discuss anything but politics on some level: chiefly, that failed coup incited by the supposed Leader of the Free World and put down with considerably less lethal force and speed than last year’s Black Lives Matter protests were; but there’s barely any moral high ground here in England where our disgraceful government has presided over more than 80,000 deaths from Covid (and those are just the official figures) and pushed the NHS to the brink of collapse, and headteachers and so many others to despair. Meanwhile, Stanley ‘Acquiring French citizenship and vaccinated’ Johnson is all right Jack, as is Murdoch. Still plenty of idiots say or imply, ‘They’re doing their best’ – yes, to line their and their donor-friends’ pockets. Of course it’s impossible to take to the streets to protest during the Covid lockdowns. As Robert Lowell observed in 1964, ‘a savage servility / slides by on grease’. The only people who are out protesting here are the scarily gormless anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers, with many of whom I had a seemingly endless Twitter spat back in August.

So it’s been appropriate for me that one of my poems published this week in #36 of Poetry Salzburg Review is (mildly) political: ‘The Ballad of Mike Yarwood’. Yarwood was the first variety act I ever saw in person, when I was five, at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, with Peters and Lee as the music act. At home and at junior school, we all loved Yarwood, and he ‘spawned the nation’s mimicry’ in playgrounds and workplaces alike. But having made a fortune from impersonating politicians and celebrities of different kinds, he became a Tory donor and cheerleader and drank himself off our screens. My poem’s ending sees him stuck in one of those hideous Apartheid communities for the absurdly rich which litter parts of the Home Counties and elsewhere, and which JG Ballard described so chillingly in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

I should add that one of my other two poems in Poetry Salzburg is ‘The Pigeon Fancier’s Daughter’, and had I known that Mat Riches was such a racing pigeon aficionado before I sent the poem off, I may well have dedicated it to him.

New Year’s Eve saw the publication, by Snapshot Press, of Thomas Powell’s debut collection of haiku, Clay Moon. I was fortunate to read the book in manuscript and honoured to be invited to write an endorsement. I’ve watched Powell develop into a haiku poet of distinction and skill, who in particular writes beautiful nature haiku. I’m certain that Clay Moon won’t be bettered by any other haiku collection this year,

As the title of his collection hints, he’s a potter. A few years ago, when I edited the ‘expositions’ – i.e. essays, features and interviews – section of the online journal A Hundred Gourds – I commissioned Powell to write an essay about the interplay and similarities between the craftsmanship of his day job and that of his haiku writing.

Of late, he’s taken to writing in his native Welsh as well as English, which is doubly interesting in that he doesn’t live in Wales, but in the North of Ireland. One of his haiku in the latest issue (#68) of Presence attracted me through its implicit use of colour. I can’t be alone in seeing a reddish-brownness in each of the concrete nouns:

peat-tinted river
the squirrel’s reflection
eating a mushroom

Haiku concerning reflections in water (especially ponds and puddles) were done to death in classical Japanese haiku let alone English-language haiku of the last half-century, so it’s difficult to do so with any real originality, but Powell achieves that here by a careful attentiveness: that it isn’t the squirrel itself which he – and the reader – sees eating the mushroom but ‘the squirrel’s reflection’. Ordinarily, ‘peat’ might be unnatural, a poeticism; here, though, it looks and, crucially, sounds fine. In fact, the whole haiku is mellifluous on the ear, without being unnecessarily flowery. The rhyme between ‘peat’ and ‘eat’ is unobtrusively helpful. Clay Moon is full of haiku as good as, and better than, this one.

No thorough end-of-year review for me, as much because my memory of what I’ve done and what I read in 2020 is scratchy at best. The comparatively giddy days of January to early March, pre-Covid, seem as though they happened years ago. I certainly don’t have 2020 vision.

If I had to choose a couple of new poetry collections which, for their consistent brilliance, I savoured more than most, they would be Alan Buckley’s Touched and Nichola Deane’s Cuckoo. That said, I haven’t yet got round to reading several 2020 collections, including Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl and Eavan Boland’s sadly posthumously published The Historians. (Compiling best-of lists is fraught, naturally, with the possibility of omissions to be regretted at a later date.)

Anyway, onwards. I’ve been reading and enjoying the latest issue of Poetry Review. It truly contains a wide diversity of poets, many of whom, I suspect, haven’t been published in the UK before. There’s also an insightful, wide-ranging interview, by Elaine Feeney, with Margaret Atwood, in which the latter, though apparently rather impatient, is nevertheless reflectively articulate throughout, as one would expect:

The difference between writing a novel from writing poetry is in novels our work is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Whereas the work involved in poetry comes after you’ve written it. You have the poem, but then you have to see what you actually wrote down, can you read it, I mean, that’s always a challenge.

Most interesting for me is an essay by Charles Whalley, which, taking its cue from the case of Maggie Hannan, examines why poets might stop writing after their first collection has been published. He wonders, ‘Maybe the question isn’t why do poets stop writing, but why does anyone start?’ It’s a good question, and the usual trite reply – ‘Because I have to’ – trotted out by poets, me included, isn’t sufficient. To go further and say, or think at least, ‘Because I believe I have something original to say which may be of benefit to others’ has an innate confidence, bordering on arrogance, which poets often have in short supply. Perhaps it’s what springs from that contradiction which makes poetry so intriguing.

The bitterness shown towards 2020 for obvious reasons is laughable, as though 2021, with the promise of mass vaccination and a return to some semblance of ‘normality’, will stand in great contrast to it. As a historian said on the radio yesterday, diseases don’t respect chronological boxes, so the expectation that 2021 will soon provide a marked improvement in the general commonwealth, that everything will be hunky-dory by the spring, seems fanciful right now, though it could be the end of the beginning. In view of all that, hibernating with lots of poetry to read is a good option, isn’t it?

robin song
the mystery of boats
berthed for winter

My latest OPOI review is on the Sphinx website. The pamphlet I reviewed is very apposite, given all the dreadful, mendacious shenanigans of Brexit. It’s also excellent, as one would expect from the pen of John Greening. As ever, there are lots of other, engaging reviews to be savoured.

Merry Christmas to everyone and anyone who’s stopped by to read my blog this year, and here’s to a better, healthier year in 2021.