B-movie

My new pamphlet, ‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is now available from Equipage. It follows up my previous Equipage pamphlet, 'Alien Skies', from 1992.
‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is an attempt to recapture the feverish and irrational mythology of the B-movie, initially based on the classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and on the neglected pre-1921 serials which realised the “roulette principle” that coherence reduces the shock value of any plot event. It reacts to that key line from Cobra Woman: it’s a wild dream of her decaying brain. Less credibly, it enters the world of manga and kaiju eiga to describe a monster, liberated from beneath Arctic ice, developing a craving for human males as impossibly cute and moe subjects of reptile fetishism, in a lunatic exaggeration of bishonen style, in a fervour of idealism and romantic craving. More broadly, a cast of methodologically suspect occult scholars pursue seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, said to contain matter which had leaked through from another universe, detected by subtle and eerie distortions of geology and building fabrics. This quest re-enacts the Storage Wars series, in which junk dealers bid on sealed, abandoned storage lockers. A role is also played by the author’s autobiographical experiences of interviewing ruined horror directors for the Journal of Pulp Critique.” The project aims to restore the lost innocence of film serials circa 1915.

** Notes
‘Lud’s Gateway’ began as a poem for Iain Sinclair's birthday, based on themes from ‘Suicide Bridge’, and a tribute to Storage Wars. It was published in the Sinclair tribute volume. Later, I added twelve more poems. The Wars franchise involves junk dealers bidding on sealed, abandoned, storage lockers, and sealed lockers recur in the poem. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was a 1972 film based on The Jewel of Seven Stars, a novel by Bram Stoker. Other themes come from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Cobra Woman, La ragazza che sapeva troppo, All the colours of darkness, Zero for tomorrow, Ultus, the Avenger, Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse, Here’s Las Vegas, Kiss Me Deadly, A Walk through H, Muzzle flash in the glass labyrinth, The Tidal Field of the Dark Star, A First-Year Library of Corrosion, and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.
As well as the B-Movie sequence, there are two other poems, "Homage to Kathleen Byron" and "Locked Up", which is about the outsider artist Madge Gill.
In Seven Stars, a sorceress from Ancient Egypt is entombed but uses magic to bring about reincarnation. When the stars have rotated back to the position they were in at the moment of her death, she will be reborn into a human form who is also the daughter of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus back to London. The daughter has seven fingers on each hand, matching the Seven Stars of Tera's star group. In the film, the event requires the re-assembly of parts of her magic equipment, now scattered. In the poem, the parts are seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, and finding them requires a search based on Storage Wars.

Heraldic universe?

Lawrence Durrell wrote an essay in 1942 called ‘The Heraldic Universe’, and this seems to connect with him trying to write like George Seferis, at that time. This ‘heraldic’ thing has little meaning. I think it’s just a way of saying “I want my work to be memorable”. That points to a fear of stories being dissolved into sociology, political theories, collective stories which are very predictable. What Durrell describes is just “art”, really. Fixed, just as a detective story printed in 1930 still reads the same way that it did in 1930. I can see that the anxiety is genuine.
It is hard to say why The Waste Land or Seferis poems seem to be eternal and linger in the mind for years afterwards. Why they seem to be outside the pool of narrative generally. I just know that they possess that quality. Any art that lingers in your mind achieves a static quality and falls outside Time. The static quality isn’t something which Durrell invented. Some patterns fascinate us. We go on processing them.
I saw a mention (in Roger Bowen’s book) of an essay by an Arab critic who claimed that the Alexandria Quartet misrepresented Egypt and hadn’t got the real Egypt. I think this sums up what Durrell wanted to avoid – he totally didn’t want to tell typical stories and to be sociologically valid. This is true, but I don’t think it’s true that he had a new theory of Time.
Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest. That sums up what novelists DON’T want. Poets too, I suppose.
The “heraldic” thing also reminds me of Edwin Muir and of George Mackay Brown. I think they were both concerned to evade sociology and the predictability of stories which are based in statistics and State knowledge. But I think the ‘heraldic’ word is a miss, the idea is really that stories would be like the Morte D’Arthur, so about knights but not simply heraldic. And The Waste Land has that basis in the Grail Quest and Jessie L Weston’s analysis of it.
I did read the whole Quartet, a long time ago, but I can’t remember any of the characters. Durrell knew that Cavafy and Seferis had that arresting quality, the ability to write personal myth, and he was fascinated by both of them. His theory applies to them, I suspect. It didn’t mean that he could write so strikingly. His theory describes what he wanted to achieve, not what he was actually capable of.
"Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest." Well, that goes for everybody. Maybe what people ask from an artist is that they build something which doesn't collapse in the face of sociology. Maybe the start point for a writer is to abandon sociology, religion, and so forth. That is square one.

The excluded

The excluded

The list below is a list of all the poets discussed in Herbert Palmer’s “Post-Victorian Verse”. With an exception – I took out the names of poets who feature in Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse, two years earlier. The point of the exercise is to define what Roberts did, in creating the image of the first decades of the 20th century which we still own (as part of our cultural assets), by giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned (and which has usually remained jettisoned). This is part of a series of blogs, on this site, (label "history of taste") about canon formation, and readers may be aware that it all started with Kipling and his exit from the stage. What happened to Kipling?

Overlap of Palmer and Roberts is 11. So 81 excluded poets:
Laurence Binyon Edmund Blunden Siegfried Sassoon Edward Thomas Charles Williams Andrew Young J Redwood Anderson Lascelles Abercrombie A.E. Richard Aldington Maurice Baring Hilaire Belloc Wilfred Scawen Blunt Gordon Bottomley Robert Bridges Roy Campbell GK Chesterton Wilfred Rowland Childe Richard Church Austin Clarke Padraic Colum Elizabeth Daryush John Davidson W H Davies Walter De La Mare Charles Doughty John Drinkwater Michael Field James Elroy Flecker John Freeman John Gawsworth Wilfrid Gibson Douglas Goldring Lord Gorell Gerald Gould Thomas Hardy Maurice Hewlett FR Higgins Ralph Hodgson Frank Kendon Rudyard Kipling Wyndham Lewis F O Mann Edith Sitwell John Masefield Huw Menai Charlotte Mew Alice Meynell T Sturge Moore Thomas Moult George Meredith Henry Newbolt Robert Nichols Alfred Noyes Seumas O Sullivan Stephen Phillips Ruth Pitter Alan Porter Edgell Rickword Victoria Sackville-West William Kean Seymour Edward Shanks Horace Shipp Osbert Sitwell JC Squire James Stephens Muriel Stuart Edward Thompson Francis Thompson WJ Turner Sherrard Vines William Watson Dorothy Wellesley Anna Wickham Humbert Wolfe Richard Middleton THW Crosland James Mackereth Charles Dalmon AE Housman Ernest Dowson Ernest Rhys Kennneth Muir RN Currey John Betjeman Geoffrey Johnson Christopher Hassall Lionel Johnson Robert Ross Joseph Campbell Oliver Gogarty Patrick Kavanagh J D Beazley Hamish McLaren Herbert Trench Katharine Tynan Mary Coleridge Margaret L Woods Margaret Sackville Sylvia Lynd Viola Meynell Mary Webb Rachel Annand Taylor Eiluned Lewis Frances Cornford Susan Miles Blanaid Salkeld Nancy Cunard S Townsend Warner Rose Macaulay Katherine Mansfield Everest Lewin Ruth Manning Sanders Jan Struther Lilian Bowes-Lyon Robin Hyde R C K Ensor Katharine M Buck Hugh MacDiarmid Martin Armstrong Edwin Muir Gerald Bullett Henry Warren Philip Henderson Frederick Prokosch R L Megroz St John Adcock Frederick V Branford Robert Gathorne-Hardy

I don’t have the energy to read all these people. I think we can use the list as raw material without energetically reading 81 books. The subject we are thinking about is the difference between the successful poets, who get critics writing about them, and everyone else – an inchoate mass of thousands of people. I say “thinking about” because the benefits come from thinking about a process, rather than reading masses of poetry. We are not thinking only of the poets whom Palmer discusses but of the whole world of outsider poets, the ones for example who paid for publication. I am sure they were incredulous that Auden won the game and they lost because they never learnt a modern style. They did lose, and all I can do is work out the rules of the game. Roberts’ achievement was less in promoting individual poets than in offering a cultural stance, something which young people could adopt and direct their poetical ideas by. Without generalising in a rush, we can say that English teachers needed such a stance, and that quite a few of them used Roberts as a guide and then transmitted the stance to their pupils. If you were writing essays, you needed a basic position, to avoid drowning in possibilities. The pupils needed confidence, and the position which Roberts had worked out obviously made you feel confident, once you had grasped it. As I said, this is less specific than pushing a particular poet, but in fact Roberts was identified as the editor who had recognised Auden, and he derived prestige from his association with Auden and his friends (MacNeice, Spender, and Day Lewis). This was a phenomenon, and it was still enjoying that centrality in the early 1970s, when I became aware of the poetry scene. That power did not rely on asserting that everybody else was dim and couldn’t really write poetry. Readers may have assumed that – it is a silent message, if that is a kind of message.
The significant thing about this stance I mention (Roberts – modernism – close reading – science – loving Auden) is that so many people could acquire it and think it belonged to them. Somehow people reading Auden felt that they had the assets which he had, and not that the poetry was brilliant but excluding them. Cultural assets only mean something if large numbers of people feel that they have a share in them.
Within the 81 names, we probably want to remember Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, James Elroy Flecker, and AE Housman. Roberts had pushed things too far. Of course, you could argue that Housman and Hardy were too old, their work coming before Roberts’ rough cut-off line (for “modernity”) of 1910. In the cause of precision, I have to add that there might be poets who were not picked up either by Roberts or by Palmer, and do not feature in this list of 81. Of poets active in 1936, or soon before, I could mention Kathleen Raine, Mina Loy, and Joseph Macleod.
I admire Palmer’s efforts in recording so many poets. However, from the lookout point of 2026, it is obvious that most of the secondary poets active in 1920 or 1930 had to be forgotten. This is not something you can reproach Roberts for, the process of forgetting had to metabolise most of these poets. Roberts was not committing an act of violence.
There has been interest in Kipling as the victim of Left-wing attitudes, and in fact the thesis of a “Left-liberal bubble” was mainly based in the removal of Kipling from the stage. I think it is relevant to look at these 81 names as a group. Yes, the combination of imperialism and nationalism vanished from the stage, and neither Palmer nor Roberts like it very much. But the great majority of those 81 poets had nothing to do with imperialism and pro-war sentiments. Kipling is just one of the poets who moved into the twilight. Political poetry can go out of date. This process is much more general than the Left quietly disposing of the culture of the Right.
The current literary culture is focused on grievances. If you have a class of people writing poetry unsuccessfully, and these 81 names are just a tiny sample of those, you have to ask why they didn’t make it. Current opinion would link it to low status, as being women, working class, un-English, and so on. This may be the wrong approach. We are dealing with a market, with shops and retail, with a system of fashion. The issue may be style, rather than sociology. People don’t have a problem recognising that textile design, or interior design, or cinema films, can be out of date; they should also realise that poetry consumption is subject to quite similar forces.
I spoke of “giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned”, but there are a dozen different styles represented in the list above. I am not totally happy to describe the 81 as representing “conservative taste”. Perhaps they were not out of date until the modern style of the early 1930s had defined them as being so. Once one style has won, all the others are out of date. But did they have unused expressive force? and did they resurface later? Auden’s early style looks like something less radical than some of the Modernist writers of the 1920s. That case is still open. However, for the most part the 81 were stylistic conservatives. That is what we are looking at.
Roberts was born in 1902. That means he spent his early teens watching ex-pupils a few years older than himself go up in gilt on the Honours board because they had joined the Army, gone to the Western Front and got shot. Or blown up. Young men born in 1901, 1902, 1903 all had that experience. They never quite got to hold a rifle. But a lot of them developed a visceral dislike of Kipling, who never saw a war he didn’t like. Modernism was the reaction of the survivors.
One of the reasons that Roberts won is that he was offering a complete package. He was offering matching shoes, handbag, and hat. He always writes as part of an argument, which the poets simply are evidence for. Palmer is much less consistent – he likes many different kinds of poetry. He writes like someone who loses arguments. At the time, streamlining was the ideal, and Palmer’s lines are amorphous or baggy because he is so inclusive. Roberts offered a complete model which students or sixth-form pupils could pick up. He helps in writing essays. But Palmer comes out better, because poetry really is very diverse, and Palmer allows that. The fact that Roberts leaves out Edith Sitwell and Edward Thomas points to a basic problem.
I think I have to re-do the count. Palmer's descriptions are so banal ("depth of feeling and precision of form") that I nodded off and missed some which should probably count. Sometimes he uses a quote where he can't think of anything to say, so should I count those. A re-run has added sixty more names. Perhaps his descriptions are generic because the poetry is also generic.