travelogue
This is a blog about a book which I have just finished (April 2026) but which I will hang on to while I think about it. The current title is “Travelogue of picturesque peoples”. The subject is British poetry and the Empire – but actually areas outside the Empire too. The subject is also the culture of the Right in Britain, how its relationship with poetry changed after 1920, and how privatisation works in the arts. It is an extension of a series of blogs which I posted, on nationalism and poetry.
There was a possible sequence where I would talk about the Nuremberg trials and say that there was no such juridical intervention in the aftermath of the British Empire. Nobody ever got dragged into court as a result of the Amritsar Massacre or the Black and Tan war. It would follow that you look at Europe around 1960 and see that the Germans are trying very hard to come to terms with the Nazi past and people in Britain don’t even see that there is a problem with the imperial past. So, in Britain, there was a gentle transition to a post-imperial condition without also a disenchantment, a critical re-living of the collective past and of collective illusions. In Germany, by 1960, there were a lot of people who were genuinely ex-Nazis – they had given the ideas up and recognised the errors of the national movement. In Britain, I don’t think there was a large body of ex-imperialists. Their activities changed because the Empire had gone, or was on the way to breaking up, but they hadn’t otherwise changed their view of race or of the colonial past. So that process of repentance might still be in the future. Young people who live through it in a rush, without the usual restraints, may have a hard time. They may come out as extremists. There is a sector of the Right which is defined by its members’ unwillingness to accept the basic lessons of what happened in colonialism and what suffering it caused.
So, why didn’t I write this up for the book. It seemed too backward-facing. And it seemed authoritarian, as I was unwilling to define one version of the Past and one set of acceptable attitudes. Maybe also because it doesn’t coincide with the poetry I was writing about. Describing what poets don’t do has a limited reach. Although I do have time to admire something like David Ashford’s John Company, dealing with the colonial past in India, or Jay Gao’s Katabasis, which deals with an effectively colonial war in Iraq. I have to observe how late in the day this critical memory is coming.
A topic I don’t include is 50s war films. My feeling is that these war films give an insight into Reform voters, the patriotic vote. I want to make a connection because my goal is to end up with one society, one government. We are all in the same boat. The problem with these films was partly their continuity with wartime propaganda. Stuart Hylton’s book on the home front records how the main street of Reading was bombed. The newspapers could not report the story even though everyone could see that their shopping street wasn’t there any more. Only several weeks later could they run the story. The media world was heavily controlled by the government. After the war, people wanted the untold stories. The stories had directly affected their lives. The films never supplied this.They tried to revive the uncritical mood of the war years and avoided the risk of showing what had gone wrong. Also, war films were amazingly popular. This meant that the industry was too eager to go with projects that were badly thought out and without the requisite talent and intelligence. The contract between the industry and the audience was not kept, and so the films got a bad reputation. There is a claim that the collective films were brought to an end by the enmity of a bloc of intellectuals, but the film industry had no interest in intellectuals. The reasons why the series came to an end are as I have set out already. The Sixties came along with a boom in satire and in subversion which was not conducive to war films. Certain parts of the audience interpreted this as a lack of concern for the broad collective, an exit from ideals of coherence and shared effort. Although anti-authoritarian, it could be interpreted as a hasty exit from the social contract.
Robert Murphy, on-line, has suggested that there was a dip in the popularity of war films between 1943 and 1950. People just got fed up with the war, and wanted entertainment at night. This would explain why the Fifties war films, however successful, were influenced by nostalgia and unwilling to explore deeper issues about the war. He also says that the post-1950 variant was more oriented towards officers as heroes than the wartime variant of film. I had not been aware of this, but during the war the unstated rules of propaganda meant that there was a stress on collective thinking, and working-class characters, as an inevitable part of the package. This suggests that the task of propaganda actually raised the standards of the film industry, dragging it out of the clutches of showbiz and towards something more memorable and less individualistic.
The historian A D Harvey, in a book about large-scale wars ("Britain in three world wars, 1793-1945"), asks the question whether there were two separate sets of war aims in the Second World War. One would be to defend the Empire and keep it in being, one would be an anti-fascist crusade which would have democracy and freedom as its goals. The latter obviously implies decolonisation. He asks which one was predominant during the war and goes into statements of the time to resolve the question. I don’t think the evidence is conclusive, especially because a large faction of opinion was concerned with defending the British Isles and saw invading Germany, seizing the Ruhr, destroying the Wehrmacht, as the only way to achieve that goal. A stand-off in the English Channel and North Sea was not enough to bring about peace. Still, Harvey has raised (esp. at pages 509-519) a question which had been un-asked before then. Another reason why this issue is inconclusive is that politics was not much in evidence during the war. I don’t think people were asking “what are our war aims”; their aim was to win, and return to peace; instead the question became important because propaganda demanded that there be some named reason for fighting. The idea of a Welfare State became very popular, but surely fighting a war was not necessary in order to found it.
The propaganda of wartime and the speeches of the 1945 general election campaigns had not told people that India was about to be liberated and the majority of the population of the Empire about to leave and start their own democracy. The word “Empire” fell out of legal use in 1947, as it had referred to India. It was replaced by “Commonwealth”. A certain fraction of the population of the Home Islands saw this as not the result of the war which they had expected. A certain idea came into circulation which held that the sub-continent had wrongly been taken away from the British people, and that an educated minority had betrayed the people, carrying out a plan which nobody had been allowed to vote on, and making a decision behind closed doors. The outcome was visibly a lot more democracy for India, Pakistan and Ceylon. It was not an issue which had been explained and debated democratically in Britain. People felt vaguely that the reward for victory in a major war was an expansion of territorial power, not the opposite. There was no film which explained Indian politics and the last, weakening, phase of the Raj, and probably no audience for such a film. The film industry was part of the world of entertainment, even if it rose above that occasionally. Bhowani Junction (1956) doesn’t really fill the gap (“MGM’s drama aflame with love and revolt”).
I am still reading histories of the imperial mind-set, but I must say none of them seems to have any interest in poetry. The links between imperialism and “naval poetry” in the period roughly 1897-1920 are obvious and important, but historians seem to have filed them under “omit”. This at least justifies my project.
I was reading a book on-line about Fascism in Britain between the wars and saw a list of the committee of the Right Book Club. One of these was Trevor Blakemore, credited as “a poet”. "Another notable collection, The Flagship: and Other Poems, appeared in 1915 from Erskine Macdonald, including patriotic naval imagery amid the era's global tensions." I can see several books of his in the second-hand market. I am letting myself off reading them. There was lots of naval poetry in 1915. Clearly he was associated with the outside Right, whether Tory dissidents or something further out. But I can’t be sure that he was able to articulate those ideas in poetry. And I find it unlikely that he was influential, someone whose symbolic discourse appealed to wider circles even in the extremist wing. His name does not appear in Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book, which describes well over 100 poets of the time. It follows that Blakemore wasn’t on the map.
Saturday, 18 April 2026
Monday, 30 March 2026
Hugh Creighton Hill
Acrostic without lights
Porticos and portcullises, backcloth of the cultured life
loggias and pergolas and stone Arcadian dignity
arrange me statically along a line of personal history
intended before my time, so far as I know, to frame me
now and for ever in quiet dedication.
The photograph is hallucination: such poses
halt and redirect a mind otherwise confused and amazed,
opaque, hammered into pattern; imposed from outside
under an alien oligarchy: for the present avalanche of spite
gathers in the lull and pours and tumbles in the storm
huge and incoherent, vehement, violent, inhumanly human
to crush, to age, to harass and always to humiliate –
such is the fact, the confounded norm, of quotidian horror.
Oh, that a dream might live, the moonlit guitars to entangle
nocturnes in the daylight of blackbirds and thrushes.
Early and late the rectangle of apprehension fences
normality with an incomprehensible madness:
tangible walls of hate grow like the beanstalk, piercing
elysian suppositions above walls of infantile fancy,
reaching to hell over hell to bring down ogres
incredibly vocal, incalculably vicious, their lineaments
neolithic with rage, and combining in a flush of terror
Gothic imps, Polyphemus, and blaspheming satyrs.
May both abominable visions dissolve, may squalid fog
yield to autumnal mists, and daubed walls drop like leaves!
Failure is nothing compared with the crippled mind:
inheritance droops, the proud discomfited heart
flags in its regular beat, the soul aspiring towards truth
tails off in compromise when days bring only the night :
is there no home for hurt ambition, no hospitable porch
embroidered with clematis where anxiety can sit
the live-long hours in harmless contemplation
holding a life-long wish in both numb hands?
Yesterday’s shame still lingers: today is for living,
eavesdropping, suspecting and fearing and work:
and all my vague tomorrows exist in a trembling faith
retching or praying or singing, or calm in the light.
another poem from Hill. This one is from a Glasgow poetry magazine circa 1956, which Peter Manson put on-line. This is another "kind of" stage in the revival of modernism, pre-Migrant. It is "The Poet". The acrostic inside the poem reads "Plain thoughts on entering my fiftieth year". The modernist elements interest me, although the autobiographical theme is fairly conventional, could even be 16th C. The poem post-dates his pamphlet, Some propositions from the universal theorem.
I have just discovered that the publisher which issued "Some propositions" was run by Robert Cooper. He ran Artisan. "In the early 1950s, still living in Liverpool, Robert Cooper edited a ‘little magazine’ (as they are known) of poetry entitled Artisan. He also set up a press called Heron, which published, alongside Artisan, a number of collections of poetry, including work by Vincent Ferrini and Alan Brownjohn’s debut. The second issue of Artisan (Spring 1953), ‘Nine American Poets’, was dedicated to the verse of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson[.]" In 1957, he went to university - giving up his job as a journalist to better himself. I think he was doing, around 1954, what Migrant were doing in 1960. But in 1957 he gave up that activity. Migrant got a lot further. The other factor is the arrival of texts. The "neo-modernist" things got going with "City" and "Briggflatts". The texts available in 1954 just weren’t so impressive. But, arguably, the new creativity followed the arrival of an ecology in which it could breathe - in the form of an audience and of publishing outlets. So we should consider also "The Poet" (the Glasgow magzine) and Artisan.
Porticos and portcullises, backcloth of the cultured life
loggias and pergolas and stone Arcadian dignity
arrange me statically along a line of personal history
intended before my time, so far as I know, to frame me
now and for ever in quiet dedication.
The photograph is hallucination: such poses
halt and redirect a mind otherwise confused and amazed,
opaque, hammered into pattern; imposed from outside
under an alien oligarchy: for the present avalanche of spite
gathers in the lull and pours and tumbles in the storm
huge and incoherent, vehement, violent, inhumanly human
to crush, to age, to harass and always to humiliate –
such is the fact, the confounded norm, of quotidian horror.
Oh, that a dream might live, the moonlit guitars to entangle
nocturnes in the daylight of blackbirds and thrushes.
Early and late the rectangle of apprehension fences
normality with an incomprehensible madness:
tangible walls of hate grow like the beanstalk, piercing
elysian suppositions above walls of infantile fancy,
reaching to hell over hell to bring down ogres
incredibly vocal, incalculably vicious, their lineaments
neolithic with rage, and combining in a flush of terror
Gothic imps, Polyphemus, and blaspheming satyrs.
May both abominable visions dissolve, may squalid fog
yield to autumnal mists, and daubed walls drop like leaves!
Failure is nothing compared with the crippled mind:
inheritance droops, the proud discomfited heart
flags in its regular beat, the soul aspiring towards truth
tails off in compromise when days bring only the night :
is there no home for hurt ambition, no hospitable porch
embroidered with clematis where anxiety can sit
the live-long hours in harmless contemplation
holding a life-long wish in both numb hands?
Yesterday’s shame still lingers: today is for living,
eavesdropping, suspecting and fearing and work:
and all my vague tomorrows exist in a trembling faith
retching or praying or singing, or calm in the light.
another poem from Hill. This one is from a Glasgow poetry magazine circa 1956, which Peter Manson put on-line. This is another "kind of" stage in the revival of modernism, pre-Migrant. It is "The Poet". The acrostic inside the poem reads "Plain thoughts on entering my fiftieth year". The modernist elements interest me, although the autobiographical theme is fairly conventional, could even be 16th C. The poem post-dates his pamphlet, Some propositions from the universal theorem.
I have just discovered that the publisher which issued "Some propositions" was run by Robert Cooper. He ran Artisan. "In the early 1950s, still living in Liverpool, Robert Cooper edited a ‘little magazine’ (as they are known) of poetry entitled Artisan. He also set up a press called Heron, which published, alongside Artisan, a number of collections of poetry, including work by Vincent Ferrini and Alan Brownjohn’s debut. The second issue of Artisan (Spring 1953), ‘Nine American Poets’, was dedicated to the verse of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson[.]" In 1957, he went to university - giving up his job as a journalist to better himself. I think he was doing, around 1954, what Migrant were doing in 1960. But in 1957 he gave up that activity. Migrant got a lot further. The other factor is the arrival of texts. The "neo-modernist" things got going with "City" and "Briggflatts". The texts available in 1954 just weren’t so impressive. But, arguably, the new creativity followed the arrival of an ecology in which it could breathe - in the form of an audience and of publishing outlets. So we should consider also "The Poet" (the Glasgow magzine) and Artisan.
Saturday, 14 March 2026
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.
‘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.
Saturday, 7 March 2026
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.
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.
Tuesday, 3 March 2026
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.
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.
Sunday, 25 January 2026
It can't be 1974 again
I was compelled by Tristram Fane Sanders’ review in the TLS of my book Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People. A fair account, I think. Several people have reacted with incredulity to his claim that I am a “working class” critic. Er, no. I have to confess to being a middle-class critic.
This may come from an over-eager reading of various caption biographies which have graced various books over the years. That bit about “worked as a labourer after leaving school” would be more complete if it read “after leaving boarding school worked in unskilled jobs for a year, partly in Germany, learning better German before going on to study Mod Langs at Cambridge”. I think various biographies may be misleading, or have been chopped up, and were not very detailed at the start. The part about working in Germany was relevant to poems I wrote in the late 1970s, and appeared on book jackets to that end. I got fed up with biographies because of times as the editor of little magazines where the caption biographies always took more time than the poems. No, you can’t change your biography again. No, you can’t win the poem inside the biography. I dislike biographies. People only need to know how I write.
“He writes with a peculiar, chilly, multi-layered irony, in an epigrammatic style.” Well, that's one answer. If you looked at 100 Cambridge cultural critics, that would be true of 95 of them. So, maybe I drank the Kool-Aid. I don’t really want to remember processes of circa 1974-6. I am quite keen on the fact that I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The problem with discussion of my class origins is that they relate to the 1960s – since I was a child in the 1960s. Surely what matters is what happened after I was 18 and old enough to make decisions for myself. There is a point here – some behaviour patterns are acquired in childhood, and they may affect behaviour in later life. But children aren’t really conscious. Literature has to do with your existence as a conscious human being. It is outside the tier of the compulsive and repetitive. And modern literature asks you to be conscious – to exercise freedom. If someone doesn’t sound middle class or otherwise, over the course of an entire book, it is not their original speech patterns which are on stage or under the spotlight. I dislike this whole area of discussion, but that is helpful because almost all the poets I write about dislike the area too. They want to be conscious, personal, minds, and sociology denies that at every step. They don’t want to repeat infantile patterns. And they don’t want society to repeat and reproduce archaic patterns.
Right after leaving school, I worked in a metal fabrication shop on a contract making prison doors. They were made complicated by adding a big metal hatch that you could put food in through. We made the same doors as part of an order for a lunatic asylum. I found that instructive, but it’s like learning Welsh – it was good for me, but other people aren’t very interested. When I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I found lots of stuff about using iron in one way or another – this felt familiar because I had spent a certain amount of time bashing iron and steel. I liked that. And that link did crop up in my poems.
This may come from an over-eager reading of various caption biographies which have graced various books over the years. That bit about “worked as a labourer after leaving school” would be more complete if it read “after leaving boarding school worked in unskilled jobs for a year, partly in Germany, learning better German before going on to study Mod Langs at Cambridge”. I think various biographies may be misleading, or have been chopped up, and were not very detailed at the start. The part about working in Germany was relevant to poems I wrote in the late 1970s, and appeared on book jackets to that end. I got fed up with biographies because of times as the editor of little magazines where the caption biographies always took more time than the poems. No, you can’t change your biography again. No, you can’t win the poem inside the biography. I dislike biographies. People only need to know how I write.
“He writes with a peculiar, chilly, multi-layered irony, in an epigrammatic style.” Well, that's one answer. If you looked at 100 Cambridge cultural critics, that would be true of 95 of them. So, maybe I drank the Kool-Aid. I don’t really want to remember processes of circa 1974-6. I am quite keen on the fact that I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The problem with discussion of my class origins is that they relate to the 1960s – since I was a child in the 1960s. Surely what matters is what happened after I was 18 and old enough to make decisions for myself. There is a point here – some behaviour patterns are acquired in childhood, and they may affect behaviour in later life. But children aren’t really conscious. Literature has to do with your existence as a conscious human being. It is outside the tier of the compulsive and repetitive. And modern literature asks you to be conscious – to exercise freedom. If someone doesn’t sound middle class or otherwise, over the course of an entire book, it is not their original speech patterns which are on stage or under the spotlight. I dislike this whole area of discussion, but that is helpful because almost all the poets I write about dislike the area too. They want to be conscious, personal, minds, and sociology denies that at every step. They don’t want to repeat infantile patterns. And they don’t want society to repeat and reproduce archaic patterns.
Right after leaving school, I worked in a metal fabrication shop on a contract making prison doors. They were made complicated by adding a big metal hatch that you could put food in through. We made the same doors as part of an order for a lunatic asylum. I found that instructive, but it’s like learning Welsh – it was good for me, but other people aren’t very interested. When I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I found lots of stuff about using iron in one way or another – this felt familiar because I had spent a certain amount of time bashing iron and steel. I liked that. And that link did crop up in my poems.
Tuesday, 30 December 2025
Maurice Elvey, scapegoat?
Maurice Elvey, scapegoat?
“Maurice Elvey was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He also produced more than fifty films – his own as well as films directed by others."
Elvey (1887-1967) was some sort of old master /wisdom figure at the film school which Sinclair attended circa 1961. In interview, Sinclair recalls with incredulity him announcing ideas which totally failed to impress the film students. So the question arises whether we can identify the whole idiocy of British film history in this one man and his lack of knowledge of how to make films.
My conclusion is that he wasn’t especially bad. I say this because the cinema here in Nottingham put on a set of 3 of the Sherlock Holmes films made in 1918, restored by the BFI. One was “produced” by Elvey, “A scandal in Bohemia”. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly wasn’t worse than the other two. So, we have to be fair to Elvey. He wasn’t a freak. He just wasn’t very talented. And the British cinema had strict genre rules which minimised the role of anyone creative, and didn’t require directors to be original or think for themselves.
I saw another film of his, circa 1932. I can’t remember its name. I thought it was OK. He just wasn’t exceptional. You have to match it up against the cinema of the time, which I have a limited knowledge of – I feel that he was competent, just not worth comparing with the talented directors, of whom there were very few in England, but quite a number in the USA and Germany.
He made his last film in 1957. The film trade union ACT interviewed Elvey in 1963. “And Elkington... we took the little theatre which was in the Adelphi, a very famous little theatre. And, of course, you could hire it then for two pounds a performance, and it was a charming theatre. I was very avant-garde, you see. I was the sort of - what shall I say - the Peter Brook of my period! I produced plays by Chekov, Strindberg, Ibsen and all the... what were then the new dramatists of the day. Inevitably, this brought me into contact with the best sort of minds of the day.” This would be, maybe, 1911? He may have made a first film in 1912, and it was “The murder in the red barn”, an old melodrama.
The counter-view to the general distaste for British cinema up to 1943 or so (or, up to 1965?), is that it has been neglected. There are no studies on individual directors or designers, no fan write-ups. So, the guess was that there were distinctive stylists hidden in the data, hiding in the largely unviewed mass of films. An operation could be carried out by fans to recover the paths of Cinematic Masters. Auteurs would surface into view, like marble statues from beneath the sea. Or the Docks, perhaps. This operation has not been very successful. The truth seems to be that English directors were not very distinctive. In the US, people like King Vidor, Joseph Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, constructed unique, personal, films, recording the way they saw the world. In Britain, this was not the function of directors. The one exception is Hitchcock, as we know. Later, Michael Powell made films in a distinctive way. Another exception, indirectly, is Ivor Novello. He was author and star of two films, The Rat (1925) and The Triumph of the Rat (1926), which are actually great. I saw them because the society for British silent films held its weekends in Nottingham, at one time. He was not a director, but those films must not be shut out of history. (The director was Graham Cutts, Hitchcock’s rival at Gainsborough, who saw Hitchcock out-distance him.) (I have just realised there was a third film in the series, which I have not seen.)
I have a book of interviews with people from the British film industry, edited by Brian MacFarlane (who conducted most of the interviews). He has the actress Rosamund John, who says “He asked Maurice Elvey to finish the film. I had never heard of Elvey but everyone in the studio said, “Oh no, that terrible man!” He was a very pompous little man who had made a lot of films before the war.” Again, Q “how did you find Maurice Elvey?”, she says: “I was appalled: he had no idea of what to do or how to do it. The electricians would be shouting, “Print number three, Maurice!”. He was unbelievable.” This was in 1943. Other interviews (out of 186 in all) mention Elvey, not saying the same thing. I couldn’t work out how someone could work so much, and had been in the business for 30 years in 1943, and not have a clue how films are made. I think the answer is in everyone taking the easiest route, so that the scripts were totally unambitious and the components after that were so predictable that the crew didn’t need the director very much. In the Holmes film, a lot of the plot is conveyed through intertitles. So, it reproduces Conan Doyle’s words. And it has scarcely become cinema. It is still words. Equally, the star is Eille Wood, impersonating Holmes and putting on a star performance. Between Norwood and Doyle, there is a limited role for Elvey. Everyone knew what Homes looked like, based on the illustrations in the Strand Magazine publication and how the stories had to go. The films which Stoll made, a series of forty-seven, had to observe the formula – a classic one but a set-piece all the same. You can’t be an auteur in a context like that. (Wiki says Elvey directed all 15 of the 1921 series of Holmes adaptations. The second series was directed by George Ridgwell.)
Britain before the later 1940s did not produce megalomaniac and failed auteurs, rather it did not produce auteurs at all. Elvey is not a metaphor for collective failure, rather he was a figure without artistic identity in a business which was designed to run without artistic identity. Cinema did not create its own forms, rather it reproduced much-loved patterns from literature and theatre, without rethinking them significantly.
Postscript. I have just seen that Elvey directed a version of '"At the villa Rose", 1920, from the novel by AEW Mason. I have seen one 'Villa Rose'.... if this was the 1920 one, it is actually a good film, for the time. Another piece of evidence. with Manora Thew and Langhorn Burton, I understand.
“Maurice Elvey was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He also produced more than fifty films – his own as well as films directed by others."
Elvey (1887-1967) was some sort of old master /wisdom figure at the film school which Sinclair attended circa 1961. In interview, Sinclair recalls with incredulity him announcing ideas which totally failed to impress the film students. So the question arises whether we can identify the whole idiocy of British film history in this one man and his lack of knowledge of how to make films.
My conclusion is that he wasn’t especially bad. I say this because the cinema here in Nottingham put on a set of 3 of the Sherlock Holmes films made in 1918, restored by the BFI. One was “produced” by Elvey, “A scandal in Bohemia”. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly wasn’t worse than the other two. So, we have to be fair to Elvey. He wasn’t a freak. He just wasn’t very talented. And the British cinema had strict genre rules which minimised the role of anyone creative, and didn’t require directors to be original or think for themselves.
I saw another film of his, circa 1932. I can’t remember its name. I thought it was OK. He just wasn’t exceptional. You have to match it up against the cinema of the time, which I have a limited knowledge of – I feel that he was competent, just not worth comparing with the talented directors, of whom there were very few in England, but quite a number in the USA and Germany.
He made his last film in 1957. The film trade union ACT interviewed Elvey in 1963. “And Elkington... we took the little theatre which was in the Adelphi, a very famous little theatre. And, of course, you could hire it then for two pounds a performance, and it was a charming theatre. I was very avant-garde, you see. I was the sort of - what shall I say - the Peter Brook of my period! I produced plays by Chekov, Strindberg, Ibsen and all the... what were then the new dramatists of the day. Inevitably, this brought me into contact with the best sort of minds of the day.” This would be, maybe, 1911? He may have made a first film in 1912, and it was “The murder in the red barn”, an old melodrama.
The counter-view to the general distaste for British cinema up to 1943 or so (or, up to 1965?), is that it has been neglected. There are no studies on individual directors or designers, no fan write-ups. So, the guess was that there were distinctive stylists hidden in the data, hiding in the largely unviewed mass of films. An operation could be carried out by fans to recover the paths of Cinematic Masters. Auteurs would surface into view, like marble statues from beneath the sea. Or the Docks, perhaps. This operation has not been very successful. The truth seems to be that English directors were not very distinctive. In the US, people like King Vidor, Joseph Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, constructed unique, personal, films, recording the way they saw the world. In Britain, this was not the function of directors. The one exception is Hitchcock, as we know. Later, Michael Powell made films in a distinctive way. Another exception, indirectly, is Ivor Novello. He was author and star of two films, The Rat (1925) and The Triumph of the Rat (1926), which are actually great. I saw them because the society for British silent films held its weekends in Nottingham, at one time. He was not a director, but those films must not be shut out of history. (The director was Graham Cutts, Hitchcock’s rival at Gainsborough, who saw Hitchcock out-distance him.) (I have just realised there was a third film in the series, which I have not seen.)
I have a book of interviews with people from the British film industry, edited by Brian MacFarlane (who conducted most of the interviews). He has the actress Rosamund John, who says “He asked Maurice Elvey to finish the film. I had never heard of Elvey but everyone in the studio said, “Oh no, that terrible man!” He was a very pompous little man who had made a lot of films before the war.” Again, Q “how did you find Maurice Elvey?”, she says: “I was appalled: he had no idea of what to do or how to do it. The electricians would be shouting, “Print number three, Maurice!”. He was unbelievable.” This was in 1943. Other interviews (out of 186 in all) mention Elvey, not saying the same thing. I couldn’t work out how someone could work so much, and had been in the business for 30 years in 1943, and not have a clue how films are made. I think the answer is in everyone taking the easiest route, so that the scripts were totally unambitious and the components after that were so predictable that the crew didn’t need the director very much. In the Holmes film, a lot of the plot is conveyed through intertitles. So, it reproduces Conan Doyle’s words. And it has scarcely become cinema. It is still words. Equally, the star is Eille Wood, impersonating Holmes and putting on a star performance. Between Norwood and Doyle, there is a limited role for Elvey. Everyone knew what Homes looked like, based on the illustrations in the Strand Magazine publication and how the stories had to go. The films which Stoll made, a series of forty-seven, had to observe the formula – a classic one but a set-piece all the same. You can’t be an auteur in a context like that. (Wiki says Elvey directed all 15 of the 1921 series of Holmes adaptations. The second series was directed by George Ridgwell.)
Britain before the later 1940s did not produce megalomaniac and failed auteurs, rather it did not produce auteurs at all. Elvey is not a metaphor for collective failure, rather he was a figure without artistic identity in a business which was designed to run without artistic identity. Cinema did not create its own forms, rather it reproduced much-loved patterns from literature and theatre, without rethinking them significantly.
Postscript. I have just seen that Elvey directed a version of '"At the villa Rose", 1920, from the novel by AEW Mason. I have seen one 'Villa Rose'.... if this was the 1920 one, it is actually a good film, for the time. Another piece of evidence. with Manora Thew and Langhorn Burton, I understand.
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