The Imaginary Museum

Sunday, July 19, 2020

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:

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

Prose:

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

Edited:

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

Geoffrey Grigson (1985)

Thursday, July 09, 2020

Juvenilia

Charlotte Brontë: The Young Men’s Magazine (1830)

I remember when I used to buy those fat old volumes of the works of some poet or other, they would almost invariably include a section at the front entitled 'Juvenilia.'

Kindlier editors would relegate this to the appendices, so that it didn't constitute one's first introduction to - say - Wordsworth or Tennyson, but those obedient to the remorseless dictates of chronology would place those sorry scraps of verse right there, front and centre, the first thing the eye was likely to light upon.

There's a passage in W. H. Auden's long narrative poem 'Letter to Lord Byron' where he imagines his own fate in the next world:

You know the terror that for poets lurks
Beyond the ferry when to Minos brought.
Poets must utter their Collected Works,
Including Juvenilia. So I thought
That you might warn him. Yes, I think you ought,
In case, when my turn comes, he shall cry ‘Atta boys,
Off with his bags, he’s crazy as a hatter, boys!’

Now was the fear an entirely idle one in his case. The remorseless hand of Katherine Bucknell, editor of this and many other volumes of literary remains by the poet and his great friend Christopher Isherwood, has not allowed even this sacred turf to remain untrodden:

W. H. Auden: Juvenilia (1994)

Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. Ed. Katherine Bucknell. London: Faber, 1994.

Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. Expanded Paperback Edition. Ed. Katherine Bucknell. 1994. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003.

It's true that some of Auden's early verse is very good - excellent imitations of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, for the most part - but none of it quite reaches the level of the poems included in his first, 1928, chapbook, let alone the Faber-published Poems (1930).

C. S. & W. H. Lewis: Boxen (2008)

Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis. Ed. Walter Hooper. London: Collins & Fount Paperbacks, 1985.

Boxen: Childhood Chronicles Before Narnia. Essay by Walter Hooper. 1985. Introduced by Douglas Gresham. 2008. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

You have to be pretty high up the index of salability (as well as critical reputation) to merit publication of your juvenilia, it should be said. Another recent instance is C. S. Lewis, whose childish 'beast fable' world of Boxen first saw print in 1985, and then again - in a greatly expanded edition - in 2008.

Those who were hoping for something prophetic of the Narnia books were in for a bit of a disappointment, but so great is the interest in him that both books appear to have sold quite well to Lewis 'completists' (such as myself).

Jane Austen: Juvenilia

The Works of Jane Austen. Vol. 6: Minor Works. Now First Collected and Edited from the Manuscripts. With Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. Ed. R. W. Chapman. The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen. 6 vols. 1954. 2nd ed. 1958. 3rd ed. Rev. B. C. Southam. 1969. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

A rather better known example is (of course) Jane Austen, whose juvenilia first appeared in print in the early twentieth century, and was added by R. W. Chapman as an extra to his classic five-volume edition of her novels in 1954.

Jane Austen: Minor Works (1958)

I suppose the essence of a really impressive body of juvenilia is that it needs to be created in partnership with a sibling or other collaborator. That was the case with C. S. Lewis and his older brother Warnie, as well as Jane Austen and her older sister Cassandra, illustrator of the classic "History of England … By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian."

Frances Beer, ed.: The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë (1986)

Beer, Frances, ed. The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Of course there's no question who are the most famous family of juvenilia writers of all time - and I don't mean Daisy Ashford and her sisters, for all the undoubted charm of The Young Visiters and its successors.

Daisy Ashford: The Young Visiters (1919)

I refer, of course, to the Brontës: Anne, Branwell, Charlotte, and Emily. The story goes that their father Patrick came home one day in 1826 with twelve wooden soldiers, which he meant to be a birthday present for Branwell, who was about to turn nine. His older sister Charlotte (10), and the two younger girls Emily (7) and Anne (6) each chose a particular soldier as their own, and began to elaborate a complex game around these "Young Men" (as they called them):

However, it was not until December 1827 that their ideas took written form, and the imaginary African kingdom of Glass Town came into existence, followed by the Empire of Angria. Emily and Anne created Gondal, an island continent in the North Pacific, ruled by a woman, after the departure of Charlotte in 1831. In the beginning, these stories were written in little books, the size of a matchbox (about 1.5 x 2.5 inches—3.8 x 6.4 cm), and cursorily bound with thread. The pages were filled with close, minute writing, often in capital letters without punctuation and embellished with illustrations, detailed maps, schemes, landscapes, and plans of buildings, created by the children according to their specialisations. The idea was that the books were of a size for the soldiers to read. The complexity of the stories matured as the children's imaginations developed, fed by reading the three weekly or monthly magazines to which their father had subscribed.
- Wikipedia

Fannie Ratchford: The Brontës’ Web of Childhood (1941)

Ratchford, Fannie Elizabeth. The Brontës’ Web of Childhood. 1941. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.

Ratchford, Fannie Elizabeth, ed. Gondal's Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Brontë. Austin: University of Texas Press / London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Limited, 1955.

The classic account of all this is Fannie Ratchford's The Brontës’ Web of Childhood. She followed this up with a rather more controversial rearrangement of Emily Brontë's Gondal poems, which she saw as a connected series of lyric moments which could be linked into a 'verse novel' about a single protagonist, 'A. G. A.' - Queen Augusta Geraldine Almeda.

Pauline Clark: The Twelve and the Genii (1962)

Clarke, Pauline. The Twelve and the Genii. Illustrated by Cecil Leslie. 1962. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1970.

An even more imaginative response to their imaginary world can be found in Pauline Clarke's 1962 children's book, which concerns the further adventures of the twelve toy soldiers immortalised in the Brontë children's - the 'Genii' of the title - tales of Glass-town, Gondal and Angria.

The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence. 1936-38 (1980)

Wise, Thomas J., & John Alexander Symington, ed. The Shakespeare Head Brontë: The Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë. 2 vols. Shakespeare Head Press. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936.

Actually reading the stories themselves is not so simple as it might appear. For a long time the most complete edition available was that produced by celebrated literary forger and thief Thomas J. Wise, in collaboration with John Alexander Symington, in 1936.

However, given that he:

privately printed abridged and inaccurate editions of ... [the] manuscripts; he removed the original covers from a number of the booklets and had them rebound for his own personal library; and others he took apart page by page, selling the fragments to friends and acquaintances.
- The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 37

that's not really saying very much.

Christine Alexander, ed.: The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (3 vols, 1987-91)

Alexander, Christine, ed. An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. Volume I: The Glass Town Saga, 1826-1832. 3 vols. Shakespeare Head Press. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Alexander, Christine, ed. An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. Volume II: The Rise of Angria, 1833-1835. Part 1: 1833-1834. 3 vols. Shakespeare Head Press. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Alexander, Christine, ed. An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. Volume II: The Rise of Angria, 1833-1835. Part 2: 1834-1835. 3 vols. Shakespeare Head Press. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Light began to dawn on this unsatisfactory situation in 1987, when New Zealand-born Academic Christine Alexander started to publish her magisterial, 3-volume edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë.

I recently purchased all three of these books from Browsers Bookshop in Hamilton. Somewhat poignantly, it turned out to be a gift set presented by the editor to her old school, Woodford House. Judging from the library slip at the back, it had only ever been borrowed once, so I suppose it made sense to de-accession it. Anyway, their loss is my gain.

Christine Alexander, ed.: The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1987-91))
[photographs: Bronwyn Lloyd]

The fact that it proclaimed itself to be a three-volume edition and it was three volumes I bought led me, mistakenly, to think that it was complete. Not so, I'm afraid. Volume II, The Rise of Angria (1991), is divided into two separate parts.

So where's volume III? Nowhere, it would appear. For some reason the edition was interrupted mid-course, and we're still awaiting its completion thirty years later.

24-7 Press Release: Prof. Christine Alexander (2014)

Not that time has exactly stood still in the meantime. There's been one more attempt, by Brontë scholar Juliet Barker, to provide a representative selection of Charlotte Brontë's part of the juvenilia, as well as a strange little stand-alone publication of the late play 'Stancliffe's Hotel.'

Juliet Barker, ed.: Charlotte Brontë: Juvenilia 1829-1835 (1996)

Charlotte Brontë. Juvenilia 1829-1835. Ed. Juliet Barker. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.

Charlotte Brontë. Stancliffe's Hotel. 1837-39. Ed. Heather Glen. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2003.

Heather Glen, ed.: Charlotte Brontë: Stancliffe's Hotel (2003)

What can one say about all this? I suppose that the principal interest we take in the juvenilia of subsequently celebrated writer is for the echoes they presumbaly contain of their later, more accomplished works.

And yet they can have a strange charm in themselves. The Scottish writer Marjorie Fleming (1803-1811) wrote a diary in the late eighteen months of her brief life which contains such flashes of charm and wit that it's hard to put down even now.

Miss Isa Keith: Marjorie Fleming (1811)

The Complete Marjory Fleming: Her Journals, Letters & Verse. Ed. Frank Sidgwick. 1934. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1935.

I'm not sure that the same can be said of Opal Whiteley's very odd diary, which was all the rage in the roaring twenties, but seems now to have been some kind of an odd hoax.

Opal Whiteley (1897-1992)

The Diary of Opal Whiteley. Introduction by Viscount Grey of Fallodon. Preface by Ellery Sedgwick. 1920. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920.

E. S. Bradburne. Opal Whiteley: The Unsolved Mystery. Together with Opal Whiteley's Diary: 'The Journal of an Understanding Heart'. London: Putnam & Company Limited, 1962.

•

Anne & Jack Ross: Kwalic Archive (c.1970-1975)

I have to add, as a postscript to this post, some links to the Mosehouse Studio posts Bronwyn Lloyd has devoted to the childhood writings and drawings of my own family - mostly to do with our toy Koala bears, inhabitants of the city of Kwalalumpa, mapped and genealogised with almost Brontë-like zeal by my sister Anne and myself.

The Kwalic Archive (Part One) [4/11/2008]
The Kwalic Archive (Part Two) [17/11/2008]
Old School [3/11/2011]
Identity Parade [4/8/2013]

Anne Mairi Ross (1961-1991)

Sunday, May 31, 2020

In Auden's Shadow: Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts (1902-1948)

I used to try to buy any stray volumes of collected poems I ran across in bookshops, on the off-chance that I'd be lucky enough to locate some submerged genius who nobody else knew about. This policy had somewhat mixed success, I must admit.

One of the most interesting such books I bought, however, was Michael Roberts' Collected Poems, way back in the 1980s sometime.

Michael Roberts: Collected Poems (1958)

I didn't know anything much about him. It was a handsome Faber volume, with an introduction by the editor, his widow Janet Roberts - somewhat better known under her maiden name of Janet Adam Smith, a distinguished contributor to Scottish literature in her own right.

Janet Roberts (née Adam Smith) (1905-1999)

Here's one of the poems from the book:

The Caves

This is the cave of which I spoke,
These are the blackened stones, and these
Our footprints, seven lives ago.

Darkness was in the cave like shifting smoke,
Stalagmites grew like equatorial tree,
There was a pool, quite black and silent, seven lives ago

Here such a one turned back, and there
Another stumbled and his nerve gave out;
Men have escaped blindly, they know not how.

Our candles gutter in the mouldering air,
Here the rock fell, beyond a doubt,
There was no light in those days, and there is none now.

Water drips from the roof, and the caves narrow,
Galleries lead downward to the unknown dark;
This was the point we reached, the farthest known.

Here someone in the debris found an arrow,
Men have been here before, and left their mark
Scratched on the limestone wall with splintered bone.

Here the dark word was said for memory’s sake,
And lost, here on the cold sand, to the puzzled brow.

This was the farthest point, the fabled lake:
These were our footprints, seven lives ago.

Michael Roberts (1902-1948)

There was a sort of studied simplicity about the diction: a concreteness and sureness of touch. The subject matter was interesting, too: lots about mountains, caves, climbing ... though I think the section of the book I liked best was his late sequence of poems about Chinghis [Genghis] Khan.

Chingiz Khan: The Life and Legacy of an Empire Builder (2010)

I guess that this must have been intended for broadcast on the radio, though I didn't realise that at the time. There were a lot of stage directions and details about the various voices the narrative was filtered through. It had an undeniable power to it, though:

Coda

Tchirek River runs
Under the Dark Mountain
Where the sky is like the sides of a tent
Stretched down over the Great Steppe.

The sky is grey, grey,
And the steppe is wide, wide:
Over grass the wind has battered low,
Sheep and cattle roam.

You can say that it's a bit like Matsuo Bashō's famous haiku:

Summer grasses,
All that remains
Of warriors' dreams

or, for that matter, Carl Sandburg's rather more protracted version of the same basic idea, "Grass":

I am the grass.
Let me work.

and that would certainly be true, and yet there's something extra there in Michael Roberts' poem - something about that evocation of the mountains, the steppe and the river which persuades us that he's been there - that there's nothing second-hand about his inspiration, however much it may recall other expressions of the same thought.

One thing's for certain. He doesn't sound anything like Auden - or like anybody else, really, except himself.

A. T. Tolley: The Poetry of the Thirties (1975)

All of that, of course, was before I worked out what he was really famous for. You have to remember that these were the days before the internet, before Google and Wikipedia. All I really had to go on was the disconcertingly brief and gnomic entries in our copy of the latest (1975) edition of Oxford Companion to English Literature.

Robin Skelton, ed.: Poetry of the Thirties (1975)

So, it seems that some time in the early thirties Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press was approached by a young schoolteacher, mountaineer (and ex-communist) called Michael Roberts who tried to sell them on the idea of a short anthology designed to show just what the new young poets beginning to emerge were getting up to.

The fact that one of the writers on the list was Virginia's ne'er-do-well nephew Julian Bell might well have been one of the factors that motivated them to agree.

Michael Roberts, ed.: New Signatures (1932)

New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands. London: Hogarth Press, 1932:
[W. H. Auden, Julian Bell, C. Day-Lewis, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, John Lehmann, William Plomer, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond]

This was the result. It's quite a strange list, in retrospect: no MacNeice - and the choice of A. S. J. Tessimond may already have seemed a bit eccentric.

Nevertheless, it's probably better to concentrate on the successes than the failures. Auden was hardly known at the time. He'd only published one commercial collection: Poems (1930) - apart from a privately printed pamphlet produced by Stephen Spender on his handpress at home. The Orators was not yet out; nor was The Dance of Death.

Nor had Spender himself published a collection as yet. Only Day-Lewis had much under his belt, and he would later come to regard his three collections from the 1920s as mostly juvenilia. Roberts had published only one book of poems himself - and was probably best known for his reviews he and his wife had started to contribute to T. S. Eliot's Criterion.

Not all the reviewers were convinced. The young American poet T. C. Wilson [who he? - ed.] was content to remark: "the disparity between the intention and the published work is substantial."

Nevertheless, other reviewers and readers sat up and took notice of (in particular) Roberts's polemical introduction, in which he asserted 'that the modern poet could no longer write like Keats, rather he must take his imagery from urban and industrial civilization and "be abreast of his own times"' [cf Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-war Britain (2002): 160 et seq.].

Michael Roberts, ed.: New Country: Prose and Poetry (1933)

New Country: Prose and Poetry by the authors of New Signatures. London: Hogarth Press, 1933:
[W. H. Auden, Richard Goodman, C. Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Charles Madge, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond, Rex Warner]

A year later, Roberts put out another, larger volume, offering both 'Prose and Poetry by the authors of New Signatures.' You'll note a few additions to the line-up: Richard Goodman, Charles Madge, and our old friend Rex Warner.

This was an even greater success, and led Eliot to commission a rather more substantial exercise in canon-building, one of the most influential poetry anthologies of the twentieth century, reprinted - in various versions - to this day, The Faber Book of Modern Verse:

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 2nd ed. rev. Anne Ridler (1951)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 3rd ed. rev. Donald Hall (1965)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 4th ed. rev. Peter Porter (1982)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1982)

[A reissue of the original edition with an account of its making by Janet Adam Smith]

As you can see, the book has continued to be read from that day to this. It undoubtedly marks the high water mark of Roberts' influence, and of his publishing career. He continued to edit anthologies and publish poetry and books on science and current affairs, but the authors he'd been so successful in introducing to the public gaze went on to surpass him.

Anthony Burgess's much-thumbed copy of The Faber Book of Modern Verse

Like Louis MacNeice - and, for that matter, George Orwell - Roberts spent most of the war working for the BBC, broadcasting mainly to German-occupied countries. After the war he took up the post of Principal of the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, London. He died of leukaemia in 1948. His Collected Poems appeared, finally, a decade later.

So will he be remembered principally as an influential antbologist who also scribbled verse in his spare time, or as a poet who got diverted (briefly) into acting as the 'spokesperson for a generation'? Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose that it depends largely on whether you first encountered his work through the Faber Book of Modern Verse, or through the Collected Poems.

I read his poems before I read all those thirties-agenda-setting introductions, so I think of him mainly as a poet: a lover of the mountains and the open air, more at home on a cliff-face than a lecture room.

I, too, have had more success editing anthologies than through my own published collections of poems, so I suppose the answer is more important to me than it might be to most people. I can't help believing, though, that the work that you do can end up in unpredictable places, and I've taken much inspiration from the curt, cut-back idiom and concrete, tangible subject-matter of Michael Roberts.

Perhaps, as usual, it's best to allow the poet himself the last word:

On Reading Some Neglected Poets

This is a long road in a dubious mist;
Not with any groan nor any heard complaint
We march, uncomprehending, not expecting Time
To show us beacons.

When we have struggled on a little farther
This madness will yield of itself,
There will not be any singing or sudden joy,
But a load will be set down.

And maybe no one will ever come,
No other traveller passing that way,
Therefore the load we lifted will be left,
A milestone, insignificant.

Michael Roberts: The Recovery of the West (1941)

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Michael Roberts (1946)

Michael William Edward Roberts (1902-1948)