Jon Manchip White

Jon Manchip White

I am collecting material on White (1924-2013) largely because he is one of the “unknown” poets whom Allott saw fit to include in his classic 1962 anthology. Another being Hilary Corke who, so far as I can tell, never got a book out. White’s obituary says “Welsh writer Jon Manchip White, with his ascot, a bristly white mustache, and pleasant and gentle demeanor, never looked the part of a British spy. But he spent four years with Britain’s Foreign Service, arranging meetings for people in distant corners of the world for England’s spy masters.“ This may be true although there are problems with how all the biographical claims which he made could fit into a plausible chronology. I don’t think all of it is true. But it may well be that he was the first script editor at BBC television, in 1950. In 1984 he published a book on how to survive Russian invasion, written with Robert Conquest. This was very late for Cold War legends and it sounds as if some people were worried that their jobs might disappear as the Cold War finally wound up. That could express itself as a light-hearted (but media-friendly) book about what to do after we have lost the war (due to not spending enough on arms and intelligence during the peace, obviously). The fact that he knew Conquest is compatible with him being with the Foreign Office and involved with the Cold War Establishment in the 1950s. He records having studied the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos at Cambridge (evidently after war service), which would make him the first of a long series of poets who went through that Tripos. Ted Hughes is probably the most celebrated. I am reading White's book on the south-west USA and at p.74 he says "During the first six months of the year, the Hopi perform their kachina or kotsina dances, and in late August the famous Snake Dances." The kachina dolls appear also in poems by David Wevill and Martin Thom. So there is some continuity with poets born decades later.
I watch a lot of of black-and-white TV (a weakness, possibly!) and if you do that you notice the name Manchip White appearing as scriptwriter quite regularly. So he wrote one episode of The Avengers series two, for example. Just one. He also wrote about 20 novels. All this suggests that he was gifted enough to thrive as a freelance writer and that he might well have been a promising poet who was too busy making a living to follow it up. It is less compatible with an idea that Allott selected mediocre poems by people who had the right background, viz. Oxford or Cambridge universities. White published two books with Fortune Press in 1943 and 1945 (alternatively 1946). That implies that he paid to have them accepted (or guaranteed them, promising to purchase a lot of the print run himself) and that he published them at the age of 19 and 21. Juvenilia, one would guess. These books disappear from later lists of works compiled by himself. I saw Salamander and it seemed radically original, hyper-formalist if not necessarily very good. The poem Allott selects is “The rout of San Romano”, from a 1952 pamphlet. This was part of a group of 13 pamphlets (from Erica Marx's Hand and Flower Press) by more or less unknown poets of whom only one (Michael Hamburger) had a later career, so far as I know. It was just a very bad time to be a young poet. My guess is that they weren’t radical or unconventional but disappeared even though they were willing to reproduce what would turn out to be the central ideals of the 1950s. The only one of thirteen whom Allott takes on is Manchip White. “San Romano” is a good poem, solid and serene, although not free from the possibility that it is derivative of the Quattrocento painting which it describes.

The vagabonds lash out for no fine houses,
Bestride no chargers with a classic ease,
Rating no ransom, rewarded with carouses,
Their cadavers will dung the orange-trees.

I know the blackguards for my ancestors,
Hemmed as we are by rail-and-wire mesh,
The wags anticipate these later wars
Where crude steel battens cheaply in our flesh.
White produced one more volume of poems (The Mountain Lion, 1971, 43 pp.) My impression of his poems is that they are costume drama and he did not usually write personal poetry. He did not want to write 20th C language and looked longingly at anything involving cloaks, swords, and ruffs. It was more logical for him to write film and TV scripts than to go on writing non-lyric poems.
I saw in the Poetry Library the first collected volume of Poems in Pamphlet – there were two. I counted 25 names between the two. Erica marx says she put out one pamphlet a month and they were “unknown or little-known poets”. She was the niece of Karl Marx but does not seem to have been left of centre – she published 3 pamphlets by Rob Lyle, who was so far Right as to be outside the bounds of formal politics in this country. She refers to the preponderance of religious poetry in this time, so around 1952 and 1953. Also, to “a period of political and spiritual chaos like our own”. Poets had difficulty finding a stable frame of reference in which to write poems. I think they still do.
Maybe Erica Marx was to the 1950s what Eric Mottram was to the 1970s. The 20+ issues of Poetry Review which Eric did could correspond to the 25 pamphlets of Hand and Flower. (I think it was more than 25 in the end.) Of course 50s poetry was a big disaster and 70s poetry was a great triumph. All the same Marx gave an outlet to struggling poets. It wasn’t her fault if they weren't any good.
We have to qualify that by saying that she did a pamphlet by Charles Causley and, in 1956, a whole book by Kathleen Nott. I have written about Nott on this blog. So, OK, she did find two good poets. Causley's limitations weren’t her fault.
I have formed a pious wish to read all the Poems in Pamphlet volumes. But when time allows. There could be a lost poet in there, as opposed to someone who just thought they could write poetry. The theme of young poets in the 1950s giving up because the scene had lost energy and just didn't welcome them or even criticise them is one to be taken up another day. As for Allott, roughly 60% of the poets he selected had studied at one of the two over-famous universities. But maybe that is just how the scene was in 1960? The signal I am picking up is of famous poets wth good educations... and struggling poets also with good educations. How many of those 13 poets, the ones who turned out to be losers, had Oxbridge degrees?