Before the Storm

[Vor dem Sturm (1878)]

Vor dem Sturm
by Theodor Fontane
“The German War and Peace"
(apparently)
I picked it up in Edinburgh
& was immediately
beguiled

the heroine seemed real
Renate von Vitzewitz
stagey action
understated
like real life
her tragic early death
a psychic blow

[Theodor Fontane (1819-1898)]

The Pioneers
by James Fenimore Cooper
I had a plan to read them all
The Leatherstocking Novels
dutifully ploughed through
the first few
but this one

[The Pioneers (1823)]

The drifting snow
of its opening pages
the meeting on the road
the little town
in the Big Woods
It all seemed true
or if not true

[James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)]

infinitely desirable
but why?
Then John Meade Falkner,
The Nebuly Coat
not one of his
most celebrated works
(Moonfleet

The Lost Stradivarius)
but this one had
the atmosphere
of strange but vital friendships
formed in musty towns
deep conversations
a world one longed to enter

[The Nebuly Coat (1903)]

Three times it's happened
– 3 obscure books –
I've never dared reread them
Would it happen again?
Do I want it to?
I wonder
It was comforting, entrancing, mystical

like waking on your own

in the blue room

[John Meade Falkner (1858-1932)]

Hooked on Classics

Recently I was invited to a poetry gathering up north where I read out some of my versions from Sappho. Afterwards a rather indignant-looking elderly lady came up to me, introducing herself as a former Latin teacher:

“What you read – that was all right, that wasn’t too bad … but some of those poets are just filthy, complete degenerates. Catullus, for instance. In one of his poems he actually encourages another man to go to bed with his girlfriend! Three of them, all together! It’s depraved …”

I agreed that he was a bit of a one (actually I was secretly relieved that she wasn’t intent on criticising some of my more daring translation choices), whilst congratulating myself inwardly that I hadn’t chosen anything raunchy from Ovid or Anakreon or any of the less respectable Greek or Latin poets.

Eventually I managed to escape without committing myself to any too quotable opinions about the morals of the ancient world.

It got me thinking, though. What is it with the Classics? "Reams of ancient filth," as my father used to put it (apparently the editions of Latin authors they used at school had all the "adult" bits taken out and printed at the back in an appendix for scholarly reference; I think you can guess which parts of the book were most thumbed and dog-eared ...)

Anyway, the latest issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora includes some more of my reflections on the subject in the form of a review-essay of Ted Jenner's recent Titus Books collection Writers in Residence ...

Ted Jenner is perhaps unusual among modern writers in being a Greek scholar as well as a poet. Most other venturers into the field of classical translation nowadays (myself included) seem content with a Loeb dual-text and a lot of - possibly unmerited - self-confidence.

You don't really learn anything new that way, though. What's fascinating about Ted's work is the precision and finesse with which he reconstructs these fragments of the past, some of them literally combed out of the rubbish-dumps of Egypt (it's amazing how long papyrus can survive in a really dry climate).

Obviously I have a good deal more to say about that in my piece over at the nzepc. For the moment, however, here's a brief listing of Ted's publications to date (I've also included a few illustrations so you can appreciate what beautiful pieces of bookmaking many of them are):

• A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.
• Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.
• The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.
• Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
• Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.

You can hear more of Ted's own views in the online interview with Brett Cross and Scott Hamilton available here.

And if your curiosity extends even beyond that, why not have a look at the pages on Anne Carson and Michael Harlow which I'm gradually building up for our new Massey MA course Contemporary New Zealand Writers in an International Context?

Carson is herself a very considerable scholar (witness her fascinating 1999 book Economy of the Unlost, which daringly juxtaposes the poetry of Paul Celan with the surviving lyric fragments of Simonides of Ceos) ...

But that's more than enough self-advertising from me for the moment. Do check out the new (James K. Baxter-themed) issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora if you have a moment, though.

Fakery

[The Hutton Commentaries]

The epic battle against recidivism at the Dargaville Museum outlined in a series of recent posts on Reading the Maps (and rather amusingly replied to on Art, Life, TV, etc.) has got me to thinking about the whole subject of fakes and fakery in general.

Why is it I'm so instinctively drawn to books of pseudo-history and ridiculously unlikely theories propounded by ignoramuses?

Did you know, for instance, that the "appearance of mu" in the word "Pounamu" defines it "as a religious relic from Lemurian times"? I bet you didn't. And yet it must be so, because I read it in a book, a most entertaining and interesting volume entitled The Atlantis Encyclopedia, by Joseph Frank (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2005), pp.228-29. Frank's book contains a foreword by Brad Steiger, a veteran in the field, and author of the celebrated Atlantis Rising (1973), among many other volumes. Atlantis Rising has a most intriguing passage in it which he considers the possibility that Atlantis may be all around us even as we speak!

[Atlantis in the Andes]

As far-fetched as it may seem, for one moment consider that the incredible technology of Atlantis was able to step up the individual frequency of every man, woman, and child, every rock, flower, tree, and the very earth of their island continent and translate them into the fourth dimension.

Atlantis did not sink below the earth in a single day of an antediluvian cataclysm: Atlantis trembled for twenty-four hours as incredible machines raised its vibratory rate until it could materialise in another spectrum of tangibility and establish itself in another space-time continuum.

Atlantis may be all around us and may be entered through certain window areas of dimensional interpenetration.

Don’t be in a hurry to find such an ultra dimensional door, however; a single day in Atlantis may be equal to a month, a year, a decade in our own space-time continuum.

[Brad Steiger, Atlantis Rising. 1973 (London: Sphere Books, 1977): 136-37]

Rather a lot of "mays" and "mights" and other uses of the conditional tense in that extract, don't you think? Why might a day in Atlantis be equal to a month, a year or a decade in our own "space-time continuum"? Because that's what happens in the Narnia books? Or just because it's kind of fun to imagine it? (You never know, maybe future film-rights might be based on the idea ...)

Steiger has his tongue firmly in his cheek, I suspect, unlike his acolyte Joseph Frank, whose solemn, po-faced entries on such subjects as "Wai-ta-hanui" ["New Zealand's oldest known tribe, said to have arrived more than 2,000 years ago ... The Waitahanui were supposed to have been prodigious mariners who navigated the world in ocean-going sailing ships, and raised colossal stone structures, of which the Kaimanawa wall is the last surviving example." (p.287)] or "Mu" ["Atlantis and Mu engaged in some cultural interchange, but the peaceful Lemurians mostly regarded imperialist Atlanteans with a veiled mixture of dread and contempt." (p.188)] would be guaranteed to raise the hackles of Maps and all his PC archaeological buddies.

Why the hell do people write this kind of drivel?, I ask myself as I leaf through my little library of Atlantiana & Lemuriosity. I know why they publish it - because it sells. Which must mean that people enjoy reading it. Do they believe it? Not all of them can be postmodernist game-players addicted to the spurious and kitschy (which I suppose is my melancholy motivation for collecting it), but I doubt they're all credulous Trekkies and star-children, either. it's a kind of region of speculative semi-fiction, I suppose. Nice to read about and indulge in as a kind of "what-if."

Fundamentally, though, I think its appeal is based on mistrust. We don't really feel we can rely on "experts" any more. Too many cases of intellectual fraud and self-interest in the academic and scientific establishment have left them (or us) with about as much street-cred as so many used-car salesmen (or politicians, to take it down a couple of rungs). "Who pays your salary?" is - unfortunately - the only relevant question to ask of most "authorities": in court, in the lecture room, in print, or anywhere else for that matter.

At least cranks' motivations tend to be fairly easily discoverable - when they're not already firmly emblazoned on their sleeves. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that I take a sympathetic interest in the views of neo-Nazis or Holocaust-deniers (or neo-Colonialists, for that matter) - but that's not because they're ill-informed idiots, it's because of the sheer horror of the crimes they're attempting to palliate. I'd say the same for apologists for Stalin or Mao, for that matter. Or any other gloomy old tyrant or mass-murderer. Sorry Mr Dolan, but I'm not too impressed by the morals of Genghis Khan, either ...

People who read books about Atlantis and the Martian pyramid and NASA's great Moon-landing hoax are not necessarily idiots (or if they are, then I'm one too - which might not be too much of a stretch for regular readers of this blog). They read them because they're halfway convinced already that everything told them by officialdom is a lie if not the result of a conspiracy. What else are they to think when big US companies have started paying their executives billion-dollar bonuses again before the ink is even dry on the blank cheques paid over to them by Congress? That we can trust our Lords and masters? That they have our best interests at heart?

Anybody who'd like to investigate further the relationship between literary fakes and the standard tropes of postmodernism could do worse than read Ken Ruthven's fascinating and provocative Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), where he goes through all the various scandals where allegedly "indigenous" writers ('B. Wongar', Helen 'Demidenko' [Darville]) have been praised to the skies for their sensitive and nunanced portrayals of alternate world-views, then "caught out" and denounced for their clumsy impostures a few months later.

The books hadn't changed. They still had the same fixed arrangements of white space and black letters as before. The only thing that had changed was the shitheads composing the reviews. So much did they hate being exposed as credulous dupes and tone-deaf critics, that they had to react with swift disproportionate rage to avoid exposing the whole nonsensical ramp of "established artistic reputations" altogether.

Funnily enough, I found Ruthven's book, virtually brand-new, on the chuck-out pile at Auckland Central Library, priced at one dollar, so maybe somebody inside that august institution felt a little queasy about its implications. Call me paranoid, but ...

No, seriously, the subject is clearly a complex one. But you can't go on teaching people to distrust fixed ideas and commonplaces, to test out ideas for themselves, and then expect them to except all the ideas you're trying to peddle to them. You know you're right - that your ideas are sound, well-researched, academically respectable. But why should they accept it on your say-so? It may be worrying to watch people reading books about Celtic NZ and the Chinese influence on the Italian Renaissance instead of "sound" historical research - I find it extremely irritating seeing people reading Jeffery Archer instead of trying to penetrate my own portentous and labyrinthine tomes - but you can't really blame them sometimes.

Why are they doing it? What do they find in these books? Those, I think, are the questions we should be asking instead.

[K. K. Ruthven: Faking Literature (2001)]

The Unplanned Masterpiece

[Gabriel White, dir.: The Unplanned Masterpiece.
Produced by Amelia Harris.
Graphics by Marcus Hofko.
Music by James McCarthy
(Auckland: Film Archive / ACC, 2009)]

So I went to see a preview of Gabriel White's new film about Auckland, The Unplanned Masterpiece, last Saturday.

I suppose you could say I'm prejudiced. After all, I am in the film - albeit very briefly, as one of the more than thirty talking heads delivering views on various aspects of the city's history, life and culture - and of course Gabriel and I are old friends and collaborators. But you know, even despite all that, I was worried that he wouldn't be able to pull it off - that the film would come across as quirky or incoherent, or just insufficiently representative.

But it didn't (or didn't in my view, at any rate). I found the film continuously fascinating throughout. I'd actually thought I knew something about Auckland before watching it, but I have to say that there was a great deal there which was news to me. I find it hard to imagine the person who could say that they were already au fait with all the vital, strange pieces of information Gabriel's interlocutors unearth. Their very shrugs and gestures become laden with implication at times as they stare down helplessly at Spaghetti Junction, the Harbour Bridge, or the Ports of Auckland wasteland.

Gabriel allows his thirty-odd speakers to speak for themselves. At times one will supplement or contradict the one directly before them - it's not that the editing isn't artful; just that it doesn't seem intrusive. From the opening description of Auckland as a endlessly fought-over, contended-for space (Tamaki-desired-by-many) to the closing description of its curiously temporary (time-bound - literally) architectural spaces, what comes across most strongly is passion: love for a city which at times can seem anything but loveable.

Balzac's famous story Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, the unknown masterpiece, tells of a painter who so elaborated his work that it finally dissolved into incoherence, an immense blur with nothing discernible in it but a single foot. Gabriel's title subtly puns on that. If Auckland is a masterpiece, it must be because there was something at work there beyond the makers' intentions (as in the final passages of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder concludes that the "fierce little human drama" he had participated in might have been justified simply by the fact that it left behind a consecrated chapel for his soldiers to use ...).

Like any city, it is - or should be - the sum of the aspirations of its inhabitants. That's an easy thing to say, but until you hear Gabriel's chosen speakers talk, it's easy to forget or overlook the richness and strange beauty of our own "wasp-waisted isthmus."

Gabriel comments in his work journal that "it was a little deflating to hear the film described by one member of the audience as 'left wing'", going on to say that "one political agenda of the film is to render such Jurassic categories obsolete." It's a punchy film, certainly - one designed (as he himself said at the launch) to get people talking and disputing - but I also think he's right that it eschews any particular rigid reading of the city's history in favour of a kaleidoscopic (but never incoherent) vision of promises broken and betrayed which ended up (perhaps), somehow, with some of them being kept after all.

So, in any case, the main purpose of this post is to advertise the fact that:

Free Screenings
of Gabriel White's new film about Auckland

The Unplanned Masterpiece

are on in Auckland Art Gallery's Art Lounge
(on the corner of Lorne St & Wellesley St)
on Sunday 4th October
at 11 am & 2 pm.

It really is worth a look if you have the slightest curiosity about this city.

And if you haven't, and you live here, you should be ashamed of yourself.

[The Unplanned Masterpiece]

2 Events in 1 Night

[Bronwyn Lloyd: Tui (after Anne McCahon) (2009)]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that three of my School Journal birds (images attached) will be on display in a group textile exhibition curated by Judy Rae that opens at Waiheke Art Gallery next Friday, 25 Sept. at 6pm.

The birds will be accompanied by many beautiful textile pieces ranging from soft furnishings, jewellery, articles of attire and sculptural works, created by a range of contemporary textile artists including Rosemary McLeod, Rona Ngahuia Osborne, Merrilyn George, Miranda Brown, Paula Coulthard, and Margaret Chapman.

All of the works in the exhibition are available for sale.

I hope you can make it along to the show.

All the very best,

Bronwyn Lloyd

•

Hi Everyone,

As an attachment is your invitation to the launching of On the Eve of Never Departing, a collection of prose works by Richard von Sturmer.

The launch will be at Fordes Bar, 122 Anzac Avenue, Auckland City, at 6:30 pm on Friday, September 25th. Also launched will be Free Fall, by Rogelio Guedea, a Mexican writer. Both books are being published by Titus Books. Live music will be provided by Otis Mace.

Best wishes,

Richard von Sturmer

•

I hope you can sympathise with my dilemma. On the one hand, here's a book launch by the sublime Richard von Sturmer, whose work continues to be an inspiration to all us alternative types up here in Auckland.

On the other hand, here's the opening of Bronwyn's textile exhibition on Waiheke: 2 events in 1 night (to paraphrase the title of Janet Charman's first solo book of poems).

Go to both! you say. After all, they're bound to be boozing till pretty late on at Forde's Bar ... You can check out the exhibition, then hurry back to Parnell.

Well, you know, I would - but Waiheke? I just don't feel the logistics are on my side . So (of course) the choice is clear. I've just got to see those birds in situ, having watched them gradually come to squawking life around the house over the past couple of months.

I'm definitely going to be picking up a copy of Richard's book from Brett Cross at Titus Books asap after Friday night, though - and Rogelio's, too, for that matter.

So, for the record:

•


[Richard von Sturmer: On the Eve of Never Departing (2009)]

The booklaunch is on:

FRIDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER
from 6.30 pm

at Forde's Bar
122 Anzac Avenue
Auckland City

And here are the two culprits in question, decked out in their best plumage:

[Rogelio Guedea]

[Richard von Sturmer]

•


[Bronwyn Lloyd: Red Bird (after Jill McDonald) (2009)]

The exhibition:

FEEL OF FIBRE
(25 September - 19 October 2009}

opens on
FRIDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER
from 6.O0 pm

at Waiheke Art Gallery
2 Korora Road
Oneroa
Waiheke Island

For sales enquiries or further information,
please contact Linda Chalmers
Waiheke Art Gallery



•

I should just remark parenthetically that Bronwyn's recent honours include being selected for:

Best philosophical stand-off in a public space:
Wystan Curnow and Bronwyn Lloyd at the Rita Angus symposium

by Courtney Johnston on her blog best-of-3.

If you'd like to know more about that epoch-making stoush, check out the post here.

In the meantime, here's looking forward to fewer fisticuffs and more celebrations on Friday night!

And if you're curious to see the inspiration for Bronwyn's own nest of singing birds, check out the following images by (respectively) Jill McDonald and Anne McCahon:

[Gregory O'Brien: A Nest of Singing Birds (2007)]

[Anne McCahon: School Journal cover design (1954)]

I love chapbooks

The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander.
Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009. 20 pp.

There's something distinctly satisfying about a chapbook. They're so bite-sized, so approachable. I think a lot of people who feel daunted by a full-length, buttoned-up slim volume of verse (let along a Collected - or even Selected - Poems) feel somehow reassured by the lack of fanfare accompanying a self-confessed poetry pamphlet.

Design, too. There's more of a sense of genuine collaboration about chapbooks - book-designers choosing a text more for their own purposes than to serve some author's plan for world domination.

Dean Havard at Kilmog Press has been making a name for himself for his robust sense of design and unflagging industry. I'm not sure just how many books he's brought out to date, but it must be quite a few. He's published poetry books by Jeanne Bernhardt, Peter Olds, Bob Orr, Mark Pirie, Michael Steven - in some cases more than one by the same author - but his list also includes art catalogues and even an edition of the (so-called) Lost Journal of Edward Jerningham Wakefield!

A website is coming soon, apparently, so we'll soon be able to see a list of all his publications to date (though I gather that many of them have sold out already, so you'll have to be in fast). In the meantime, there's also a blog that you can visit.

In the meantime, the books are available from Parsons in Wellesley Street, or directly from the publisher (Kilmog Press, PO Box 1562, Dunedin). They retail for $35.

Here's the sample poem from my own book which Dean put up on Facebook (which enables me to claim a lack of egotism in reproducing it). It comes from the poem "Journey to the West":

III – Countdown

Is it high?
It touches heaven.
Deep?
It reaches hell.

White clouds surround the mountain
black mists swim
red-blushing plums / jade bamboo
dark-green cypresses / blue pines
_____________________________

Ten-mile pavilion: no travellers leave
nine-faced heaven: stars have set
on eight harbours: boats are docked
in seven thousand cities: gates shut
six palaces: officials gone
five departments: ledgers closed
four seas: fishing lines sink
three rivers: waves subside
two towers: bells resound
one moon lights earth and sky

Why John Masefield?

[Masefield as a youngster]

It's always been a bit difficult to explain (let alone justify) my choice of topics for a Masters thesis. "The Early Novels of John Masefield, 1908-1911" -- it sounds like one of those candidates for world's dullest books (Worms and Their Ways, by a "grub"; or Lesser-Known Aspects of Pre-Kantian Metaphysics, by J. M. Snotwood, MA, D Phil, &c. &c.) ...

I remember running into Terry Sturm in the corridors of the Auckland English Department shortly after I'd received permission to undertake this daring piece of original research - "So you're the Masefield man!" he boomed. When I admitted to Sebastian Black that I owned copies (mostly first editions - not that many of them actually went into second editions) of all 23 of Masefield's novels, he remarked that not many people could make that boast ("Perhaps nobody in the world," he added, with a sepulchral chuckle).

So why John Masefield? I guess the real reason is that I grew up on him. The first of his books I really read was The Midnight Folk (1927), a madly-eccentric children's book about pirates, hidden treasure, country houses, talking animals, fox-hunting - oh, and witches. Its hero, Kay Harker, went on to star in a later book for slightly older children, The Box of Delights (1935), which added the delights of time travel and Ramon Lull's philosophy to the heady mixture. There's a particularly good scene where Kay joins a circle of stone-age Britons keeping off wolves with their spears. Wolves are indeed one of the dominant motifs in the book - it's actually subtitled "When the Wolves were Running". What is it really about? I'm still not sure, but it had the effect of waking me up to the heady attractions of folklore, mythology and the past.

As time went by I started to read his poetry (he was, after all, the British Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967, so that was really his speciality). Old-fashioned, yes, but dedicated to story-telling above all. Before the First World War he was considered one of England's most controversial and hard-hitting poets, mostly because of the runaway success of his 1911 poem The Everlasting Mercy, which first introduced the poetry-reading public to the delights of truly extravagant bad language:

[John Masefield: The English Review (1911)

You closhy put!
You bloody liar! etc. etc.

"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read" (Hilaire Belloc).

As time went by, I started to accumulate more and more books by Masefield, and became more and more attuned to the paradox of an author whom so many people had vaguely heard of, so celebrated and widely-read in his day (judging by the relative ease with which one could collect his work from second-hand bookshops), and yet whom nobody now seemed to rate or even feel curious about.

And yet he was good! Or so he seemed to me. Perhaps not good in a conventional, card-carrying sense (by now I'd picked up all the standard Modernist shibboleths about the sinfulness of adjectives and the intrinsic unreliability of narrators), but so intensely idiosyncratic and strange that his work really couldn't be said to to resemble anything else I'd ever read or even heard about.

I was looking through an anthology on the writing of the sea one day when I stumbled on an extraordinary passage from one of Masefield's novels (Sard Harker (1924))which described the hero first fighting his way through an almost animate swamp, then reaching the beach only to promptly stand on a stingray's tail. It was nearly ten pages long, and so bizarrely circumstantial that I almost felt my own foot curl up in sympathy. Pain, frustration, futility - these were Masefield's principal novelistic stock-in-trade. He would devote fifty pages of a book to the attempt to find someone's address at the drop of a hat. It seemed to be axiomatic with him that committees were set up to frustrate enquiry, that all officials were stupidly obstructive, if not actively malevolent, and that if anything could go wrong, it would - only far worse than you'd anticipated.

Actually his world sounded rather like a heightened version of the tormented wasteland that I myself inhabited (at the time), so you needn't think I took to him because I like sweeping descriptions of ships at sea ...

[John Masefield: Sea-fever: Selected Poems. ed. Phlip W. Errington (2005)]

Masefield hated the sea. That's one point that's pretty much beyond dispute. It's true he wrote "Sea-fever" (the one Masefield poem everyone can quote from):

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by ...

He was compulsorily apprenticed in the Merchant Navy as a very young boy after the death of both his parents, and his painful experiences on the training ship Conway (as recorded in his 1944 autobiographical volume New Chum) were only surpassed by the sheer horror of going round Cape Horn as a sailor before the mast (as recounted in the 1913 narrative poem Dauber).

He fell ill in Chile (luckily for him) - it was probably a nervous breakdown - and was invalided home. Although he didn't officially leave the Merchant Navy until after he'd travelled to New York to join the next ship he'd been assigned to, the attractions of the city were far too much for him, and he never made another voyage except as a passenger. Masefield, then, was no Joseph Conrad - his first book might have been called Salt-Water Ballads (1902), and he might have continued to mine his early life on the bounding wave as material for the rest of his life (in classic novels such as The Bird of Dawning (1933) or Victorious Troy (1935)), but that's all it was to him - material. He was actualy far happier writing about the English countryside or the wilds of South America (the latter particularly - that time in the hosital in Valparaiso clearly left its mark).

Masefield's first book came out in 1902, and his last, In Glad Thanksgiving in 1967. Over that immensely-long career he published poems, plays, novels, war reportage, and literary criticism with pretty consistent success. When one genre ran dry, he shifted his energies to another. His first two plays The Campden Wonder and The Tragedy of Nan enjoyed immense acclaim when Granville-Barker put them on in 1908. Subsequent dramas failed to repeat the precedent, however, so he shifted his energies to fiction: first grown-up "problem novels" in the style of the day, then (somewhat more successfully, as they were more congenial to him) boys' books. The unheard-of acclaim garnered by the first publication of The Everlasting Mercy in The English Review in 1911 diverted him into writing narrative poems. The War, when it came, saw him working as an ambulance orderly in France, then a writer of patriotic "histories" (including the still-celebrated Gallipoli (1916)).

And so it went on. He came back to novels in the 1920s, when the public's interest in long narrative poems was starting to flag. The last novel he published came out in 1947, after which he stopped writing much except poetry (and letters - the five or six volumes of these which have appeared since his death contain some of his liveliest and most engaging writing).

It's easy to patronise Masefield for his lack of self-conscious intellectualism. He's no no proto-Modernist, no unsung precursor of Joyce or Pound. And yet he was taken pretty seriously by his contemporaries: Hardy, Conrad and Yeats. They read him and saw him as one of themselves. At the very least his career seems to offer an interesting parable in the pitfalls of literary celebrity.

I set out to write about all of his novels, but found the task too vast for a standard-length thesis. By the time one had summarised their plots, there would have hardly have been room for any analysis. Instead my supervisor, Prof D. I. B. Smith agreed to my proposal simply to look at his pre-war career, by turning it into a kind of case-study of a young writer on the make in the Edwardian era. So that's the thesis I wrote. It's awfully long. Two or three times the length one would get away with today, I suspect. But things weren't so strict in 1985.

I suppose then (to paraphrase my friend Scott Hamilton) that Masefield offered me a kind of keyhole on the literary conditions of the early to mid-twentieth century which I could hardly have got by looking at a more conventionally celebrated writer.

I still like his work, though I haven't read any for quite some time. The Box of Delights is well worth a look, though - unless it's one of those books that you have to have read when you were a kid for it still to exert any charm later on.

[John Masefield: Selected Poems. Ed. John Betjeman (1978)]