In Auden's Shadow: Geoffrey Grigson

Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985)

"one of the most important figures in the history of English taste in our time, the history of taste in painting, and in the sense of landscape and history, as well as taste in poetry"

- G. S. Fraser, "Rebellious Poet"
[Times Literary Supplement (12/12/63): 1030.]

I have to confess this is one case where I am a bit at a loss where to begin. As you can see from my attempt at a Geoffrey Grigson bibliography at the end of this post, no-one could accuse the man of a lack of industry.

That overall total of 84 items is in fact misleading, as some of the entries signal the overall editorship of entire series of books - as in the Festival of Britain "About Britain" guides (1951), or (for that matter) the periodical New Verse, which he edited throughout the 1930s.

The Cold Spring
from the Greek of Leonidas

Traveller, don't drink the sun-warmed water
Of this beck muddied by my trailing sheep,
But climb the hill, there, where the heifers graze,
Go on a yard or two, and you will find, below
That shepherd's pine, bubbling from wet rock,
A spring colder than northern snow.

- Poetry Foundation: Geoffrey Grigson

No matter which way you count it, Grigson produced a huge volume of poetry, prose, and editions of other people's work. It's hard to move sometimes without stumbling over one of his books: flowers, landscapes, John Clare, you name it, if it's rural and English, he's onto it somehow.

So why do I see him "in Auden's Shadow", like the other (at least arguably) overlooked and underappreciated authors in this series?

Edith Sitwell (1922)

There's an interesting anecdote about Geoffrey Grigson, Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell which puts the problem squarely into focus. Here's the opening of Grigson's review of Sitwell's posthumously published autobiography, Taken Care Of (1965):

How are we to explain or explain away (since it is going to need some explaining away for our posterity) the eminence or the acceptance or the at times reverential praise of the poems of the late Edith Sitwell? The poems will fall apart. They strike me, when I look at them again, as a tumble of imitation reliquaries. Of her early poems — the reliquaries are the later ones — some had the tinkliness of a broken music-box, some exhibited the arch simple-mindedness, not always pleasant-mindedness, of a neo-Victorian bouquet of wax and silk under the jags of a dome. Then the war, the bombs, the Great Bomb, and the reliquaries, inside of which there might — or might not — be the scraps of some body of holiness.

I was skeptical when these earnest poems began to appear and to be praised. The psalm sounded — O praise Miss Sitwell in the holiness of her pity and imaginative insight — and swelled; and even old skeptics were converted. But not this skeptic, who looked inside, and found precisely the nothing he expected to find, on past form. It was — I shall vary the exposition and call upon St. Adelbert of Prague and the luminescent fish once caught in the Danube — a fishy to-do.

- New York Review of Books (20/5/1965).

This passage rather sets the tone for his criticism early and late. Taking no prisoners, might be a positive way of referring to it. Brutal and pitiless demolition of anything he perceived to be second-rate, would be another description.

Roy Campbell (1901-1957)

It seems that at some point in the early 1950s he turned his critical eye on Roy Campbell, the South African poet (and uncritical apologist for Franco and Fascism), who had, by then, become a rather pathetic reactionary drunk. It was in response to this that Grigson was - according to some - slapped by Campbell in the queue at the BBC canteen.

Another version of the story (Grigson's own) has it that he was walking along Upper Regent Street in London when Campbell accosted him, waving his knobbed walking stick, and calling him out for being "so rude to my daddy" (by which he apparently meant Desmond MacCarthy, the senior writer who'd persuaded the BBC to give him a job in the first place).

Grigson replied - according to him - "'Don't be a fool, Roy,' and after a moment or two of nothing that was that."

Roy Campbell: Collected Poems, Vol. III (1960)

Some version of this incident was reported to Sitwell, who - assuming the fight (if fight it was) had been over Grigson's repeated impertinences to her - immediately co-opted Campbell as her white knight-errant, and started to praise his work extravagantly in print - as in her preface to the third volume of his Collected Poems, where she calls him: "one of the very few great poets of our time."

That's one side of Grigson: the attack-dog of mid-century poetry. The other side is a little more difficult to characterise. Part of it was the hero-worshipper: Auden, John Clare, Henry Vaughan - he had his pantheon of the elect. How did he put it in his 1937 essay "Auden as a Monster"?

Auden does not fit. Auden is no gentleman. Auden does not write, or exist, by any of the codes, by the Bloomsbury rules, by the Hampstead rules, by the Oxford, the Cambridge, or the Russell Square rules.

- New Verse, 26–7 (1937), 13–17.

Stephen Spender, ed.: W. H. Auden: A Tribute (1975)

And then again, in his contribution to Spender's Festschrift in 1975, he rapturises about the experience of seeing each new Auden poem for the first time, as he received them at New Verse in the early thirties:

They came on half sheets of notepaper, on long sheets of lined foolscap, in that writing an airborne daddy-longlegs might have managed with one dangling leg, sometimes in pencil, sometimes smudged and still less easy to decipher. They had to be typed before they went to the printer, and in the act of typing each poem established itself. It was rather like old-fashioned developing in the dark-room, but more certain, more exciting

At the far end of the enormous room,
An orchestra is playing to the rich

- there at last on the white page, to be clearer still on the galley, the first entire sight of a new poem joining our literature.

Earth turns over, our side feels the cold ....

- "A Meaning of Auden", W. H. Auden: A Tribute (1975): 13-25.

It sounds as if these smudged submissions from Auden elicited emotions in his acolyte more commonly reserved for love letters than for new additions to "our literature". One wonders if Auden knew? I presume that he did. After all, the excesses of fandom seem to have been every bit as extreme in the 1930s as they are nowadays.

Denis Donoghue (1928- )

What of his own poetry, though? He certainly wrote (and published) enough of it, and made enough surly pronouncements about other people's poetry for us to expect quite a lot.

It seems pretty slight now, for the most part, I'm sorry to say. Critic Denis Donoghue said of it, in an article entitled "Just a Smack at Grigson":

[I]f I were to invoke the criteria that Grigson has enforced upon other contemporary poets, none of his poems would pass. ... Grigson’s peevishness might be justified if his own performances were always sound. But they aren’t. He’s not a scrupulous writer. In a passage denouncing clichés, he writes: "Fiction can survive bagginess or looseness (though it is never the better for it), whereas by those dropsical infections poetry is drowned." Drowned by infections?

- London Review of Books, Vol. 7 No. 4 (7 March 1985)

There's some truth in that, I'm afraid. When careful, they're too careful - as in the example below, quoted with (mild) enthusiasm by Donoghue:

His Swans


Remote music of his swans, their long
Necks ahead of them, slow
Beating of their wings, in unison,
Traversing serene
Grey wide blended horizontals
Of endless sea and sky.

Their choral song: heard sadly, but not
Sad: they sing with solemnity, yet cheerfully,
Contentedly, though one by one
They die.
One by one his white birds
Falter, and fall, out of the sky.

There are some better examples of his poetry out there, though. I particularly like the short epigram, quoted above, from the Greek Anthology. And this late poem, too:

Francis J. Taylor: Dipper on a Waterfall

The Dipper


Staring down from that broken, one-arched bridge,
In that vale of water-mint, saint, lead-mine and Madge,
I was amazed by that fat black-and-white water bird
Hunting under threat, not at all disturbed.

How could I tell that what I saw then and there
Would live for me still in my eightieth year?

[From Geoffrey Grigson: Selected Poems, ed. John Greening (UK: Greenwich Exchange, 2018)]

A number of essays and reminiscences of Grigson are collected in the following volume:

John Greening, ed. "My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye" (2002)

"My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye": Observing Geoffrey Grigson
edited by C. C. Barfoot, R. M. Healey (Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 2002)

So far as I can see, there is - as yet - no full-length biography. There do seem to be rich materials for a kind of mid-century chronicle of the Auden era (and after) in an account of his life and times, though. He certainly got into enough fights with his contemporaries to figure in a vast number of other biographies and memoirs!

•


Geoffrey Grigson, ed. New Verse: An Anthology (1939)

Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson (1905-1985)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Several Observations (Cresset Press, 1939)
2. Under the Cliff, and Other Poems (Routledge, 1943)
3. The Isles of Scilly and Other Poems (Routledge, 1946)
4. Legenda Suecana. Twenty-odd Poems (printed for the author, 1953)
5. The Cherry Tree (Phoenix House, 1959)
6. Collected Poems 1924–1962 (Phoenix House, 1963)
7. A Skull in Salop, and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1967)
8. Ingestion of Ice-Cream and Other Poems. Macmillan Poets. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1969.
9. Discoveries of Bones and Stones (Macmillan Poets; Macmillan, 1971)
10. Sad Grave of an Imperial Mongoose (Macmillan, 1973)
11. Penguin Modern Poets 23: Geoffrey Grigson / Edwin Muir / Adrian Stokes. Guest Ed. Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
12. The First Folio (Poem of the Month Club, 1973)
13. Angles and Circles and Other Poems (Gollancz, 1974)
14. History of Him (Secker & Warburg, 1980)
15. Collected Poems 1963–1980 (Allison & Busby, 1982)
16. The Cornish Dancer and Other Poems (Secker & Warburg, 1982)
17. Montaigne's Tower and Other Poems (Secker & Warburg, 1984)
18. Persephone's Flowers and Other Poems (David & Charles, 1986)

Prose:


19. Henry Moore (Penguin, 1944)
20. Wild Flowers in Britain (William Collins, 1944)
21. Samuel Palmer: the Visionary Years (Kegan Paul, 1947)
22. An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood (Max Parrish, 1948)
23. Places of the Mind (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949)
24. The Crest on the Silver: An Autobiography (Cresset Press, 1950)
25. Flowers of the Meadow (Penguin Books, 1950)
26. Thornton's Temple of Flora (Collins, 1951)
27. Essays From the Air: 29 Broadcast Talks (1951)
28. A Master of Our Time: a Study of Wyndham Lewis (Methuen, 1951)
29. Gardenage, or the Plants of Ninhursaga (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952)
30. Freedom of the Parish (Phoenix House, 1954)
31. The Englishman's Flora (Phoenix House, 1955)
32. The Shell Guide to Flowers of the Countryside (Phoenix House, 1955)
33. Painted Caves (Phoenix House, 1957)
34. The Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs (Phoenix House, 1958)
35. English Villages in Colour (Batsford, 1958)
36. Looking and Finding (Phoenix House, 1958)
37. The Shell Guide to Wild Life (Phoenix House, 1959)
38. A Herbal of All Sorts (Macmillan, 1959)
39. English Excursions (Country Life, 1960)
40. Samuel Palmer's Valley of Vision (Phoenix House, 1960)
41. The Shell Country Book (Phoenix House, 1962)
42. Poets in Their Pride (Dent, 1962)
43. Gerard Manley Hopkins (Longmans, Green & Co., 1962)
44. O Rare Mankind! (Phoenix House, 1963)
45. The Shell Nature Book (Phoenix House, 1964)
46. [with Jane Grigson] Shapes and Stories (Readers Union, 1965)
47. The Shell Country Alphabet (Michael Joseph, 1966)
48. Shapes and People – A Book about Pictures (J. Baker, 1969)
49. Poems and Poets (Macmillan, 1969)
50. Notes from an Odd Country (Macmillan, 1970)
51. The Contrary View: Glimpses of Fudge and Gold (Macmillan, 1974)
52. A Dictionary of English Plant Names (and some products of plants) (Allen Lane, 1974)
53. The Goddess of Love: The Birth, Triumph, Death and Return of Aphrodite (Quartet, 1978)
54. Blessings, Kicks and Curses: A Critical Collection (Allison & Busby, 1982)
55. The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook (Allison & Busby, 1982)
56. Geoffrey Grigson's Countryside (Ebury Press, 1982)
57. Recollections, Mainly of Writers and Artists (Hogarth Press, 1984)
58. Country Writings (Century, 1984)

Edited:


59. New Verse (1933-39)
60. The Arts To-day (John Lane The Bodley Head, 1935)
61. New Verse: An Anthology. London: Faber, 1939.
62. Visionary Poems and Passages or The Poet's Eye. Lithographs by John Craxton (Frederick Muller, 1944)
63. The Mint: a Miscellany of Literature, Art and Criticism (George Routledge & Sons, 1946)
64. Before the Romantics: An Anthology of the Enlightenment (Routledge & Sons, 1946)
65. John Craxton. Paintings and Drawings (Horizon, 1948)
66. Poems of John Clare’s Madness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.
67. Poetry of the Present: An Anthology of the 'Thirties and After (Phoenix House, 1949)
68. The Victorians: An Anthology (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950)
69. [General Editor] Festival of Britain "About Britain" Guides (Collins, 1951)
70. The Three Kings: a Christmas Book of Carols, Poems and Pieces (Gordon Fraser, 1958)
71. William Allingham's Diary (Centaur Press, 1967)
72. The Concise Encyclopedia of Modern World Literature (Hawthorn Books, 1970)
73. The Faber Book of Popular Verse (Faber & Faber, 1971)
74. The Faber Book of Love Poems (Faber & Faber, 1973)
75. Charles Cotton. 1974. Poet to Poet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)
76. Britain Observed: the Landscape Through Artists' Eyes (1975)
77. The Penguin Book of Ballads. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
78. The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs (Faber & Faber, 1978)
79. The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse: With a Sprinkling of Nonsense Prose (Faber & Faber, 1979)
80. The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (Oxford University Press, 1980)
81. The Penguin Book of Unrespectable Verse (Penguin, 1980)
82. The Faber Book of Poems and Places (Faber & Faber, 1980)
83. The English Year from Diaries and Letters (Oxford Paperbacks, 1984)
84. The Faber Book of Reflective Verse (Faber & Faber, 1984)

Geoffrey Grigson (1985)

In Auden's Shadow

Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)

I guess it must be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever looked at this blog just how much I've been influenced by the life and works of the late Wystan Hugh Auden. I tried to explain the obsession here, but it's quite a tall order to sum up so long a course of reading and thinking in one short post.

I first encountered his poetry at school, in the mid-1970s. I can remember the moment, in fact. I was standing in the school store-room, waiting my turn to be 'seen' by one of the teachers (I think there was some lesson in how to ace a job interview going on, but I could be wrong about that).

W. H. Auden: Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (1966)

I noticed a book with an exceptionally garish cover lying on the table, and picked it up to see what it was. I was already a great fan of the poetry of A. E. Housman, so the first poem I picked from the table of contents was, I think, Auden's sonnet about him:

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.

It enraged me! How dare he speak so flippantly of so wonderful a writer! 'His private lust' indeed! How could he know? I went around fulminating about the cheek of 'modern' poets who dared to criticise their elders and betters for weeks afterward.

It enraged me - but also fascinated me. I'd had a chance to look at some of the other poems in the book and, while I didn't understand everything I was reading (still don't, for that matter), I understood enough for them to stay with me, keep nagging at me, get under my skin against my will.

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (1976)

My Christmas present that year (1977) was Auden's newly published Collected Poems. By then I'd got to the stage of writing a sign for my door which read:

W. H. Auden rules!
And Edward Mendelson is his prophet ...

Mendelson's editing seemed amazingly accomplished and abstruse to me at the time, especially given the maze of competing readings and revisions he had to deal with as the poet's literary executor. Auden (like Wordsworth - or, for that matter, Yeats) was one of those poets who could never leave well enough alone.

Stephen Spender, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute (1975)

A great deal of my interest came from the book above, however. The fascinating essays and reminiscences it contained seemed to open up a whole cornucopia of thirties imagery and lifestyles. There was a photo-montage of Night Mail (the film, and the poem Auden wrote for it), pieces by Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, a host of other old friends - virtually everyone who was anyone, in fact, except for those who'd predeceased him.

And so the obsession began to spread, gradually encompassing all the other writers whose lives he'd touched, or in whose books he'd somehow been recorded. I've written elsewhere on this blog about Isherwood, who would have to rank first in that pantheon, but there were many others as well: basically all the members of the so-called Auden Group:

Samuel Hynes: The Auden Generation (1977)

Hence, some 45 years after "first looking into Auden's Poems", this projected series of posts about those who have ended up - fairly or unfairly - in Auden's shadow. Auden could be a dominant, some would say a domineering figure. What of those other writers and poets? What might one say about them?

There are a great many to choose from. For a start, there are the other three components of 'Macspaunday' (a derogatory epithet coined by pro-Fascist writer Roy Campbell for this set of largely left-wing poets): Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis = Mac / sp /aun / day - get it?

Then there are those notorious lines from Day-Lewis's long poem The Magnetic Mountain (1933), much mocked and denigrated at the time by George Orwell (who referred to Auden as 'a kind of gutless Kipling'):

Then I'll hit the trail for that promising land;
May catch up with Wystan and Rex my friend ...

"Wystan" is, of course, W. H. Auden; "Rex" is Rex Warner. Ought he, too, to go on the list, then?

And then there are the editors and anthologists who promoted - some would say pushed - this literary movement at the time: Michael Roberts, whose two anthologies New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933) constituted the first real attempt to define it; and Geoffrey Grigson, whose magazine New Verse (1933-39) existed - as he himself said - primarily to promote and print the work of Auden and his friends.

Paul Theroux: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (1998)

This, then, is my list of writers left unfairly - at least arguably - in Auden's shadow (I must confess to having found some inspiration for my title in Paul Theroux's memoir of his long and difficult friendship with West Indian writer V. S. Naipaul):

1. Michael Roberts (1902-1948)
2. Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)
3. Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985)
4. Rex Warner (1905-1986)
5. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
6. Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

I'll put up the blogposts as I finish them, in no particular order, to avoid any invidious implications of primacy or degrees of importance. The list above, however, is arranged chronologically in order of date of birth. It's important, at times, to remember that Day-Lewis was three years Auden's senior, and Spender two years his junior.

Such details generally matter little for people you encounter as an adult, but the Auden group met first at school (Isherwood and Edward Upward), then at university (Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis), and a certain in-built competitiveness was the inevitable result.

There are plenty of other people I could have included: Charles Madge, of Mass-Observation fame, who did after all run off with Stephen Spender's first wife, and whose unfortunate account of first reading Auden (from his 'Letter to the Intelligentsia') remains extant to haunt him:

But there waited for me in the summer morning
Auden fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew.
And all the world's stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions

Edward Upward the surrealist, too, was closely involved with the group. And if you count in their enemies: George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, the list could grow to include virtually everyone prominent in the arts in the 1930s ...

Let's begin with the six authors above, then. I think there are important things to be said about each of them - or if not, it isn't from lack of effort on my part in collecting their various works.

Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)