Note. There is a chapter or so on the 1940s in my book 'Origins of the Underground'. This, below, is extra material about the poetry of this lost decade.
3rd edit June 2017
Metakaluptical: The shared 40s project
or, The neo-Romantic Agony(version 1, January 2002, was released on the Pinko site)
(status: eager & scruffy research notes)
This area is meant really as an hommage to James Keery, after I got to understand his point about the continuity between the 1940s and the 1960s – especially through his wonderful essay ‘Schönheit Apocalyptica’, which I read in 1999. I hope to get James to release some material here. “Schönheit” is available on the Internet in the symposium on Prynne which Kevin Nolan has edited for JACKET. (http://jacketmagazine.com ).
My book ORIGINS OF THE UNDERGROUND (published by Salt in November 2008) is about the 1940s and the 1960s, and the origins of the underground. A shift towards the 1940s really meant the end of my contemporary poetry project, towards history and, inevitably, politics and ideology (both historical only). I wrote the 1940s chapter of ORIGINS in 2000. My ability to read this kind of poetry, and my knowledge of the range of poetry of that time, have increased greatly since that time. The kind of rethinking of the long duration which Keery is proposing is not going to complete in a short time. The pressure of new material has been wonderfully exciting but has not permitted a complete rethink so far.
Addendum. Salt keep moving the publication date, but they have now sworn that they will get me proofs in November 2007, so we can expect publication in the first half of 2008. High time, given that it was nearly in a finished state in 2000.
Metakaluptical brouhaha: Wonderment at the fate of the New Romantic poets
Apocalypse reverses apokrupsis: what was hidden shall be revealed – and, apparently, vice versa. One of the phenomena of the new decade (and of the later nineties) is the recovery of the poetry of the 1940s from under carefully-supervised Movement debris. The equation was easy to make, in the 1960s: the 1950s literary commissars (the interpenetrative elite) had risen to prominence by destroying the careers of the 40s poets (New Romantics or Apocalyptics), were busy destroying the nascent careers of the 60s radicals, and the conclusion followed (wrongly) that there was an occult link between the 40s and the 60s. There was this incentive to dig out the works and persons of the Encrypted Generation, and to use them as ammunition. I believe this is the background to the wave of revisionist readings of the 1940s which is now destabilising literary history. James Keery’s edition of the poems of Burns Singer, republication of Lynette Roberts, the announced publication of a Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod by Waterloo Press, the new volume of WS Graham’s Letters, point to a disturbing re-arrangement of the past.
Joyce Cary supplies this perfect description of the Apocalyptor: “But how much more fearfully ghostly was this apparition that shook in every joint, whose enormous pale eyes were full of an excitement equally extravagant – whose very words sounded like the language of a world where meanings defied any common syntax.” (description of Gerald Wilde, in
Nimbus) Let’s get this joint shaking! Wilde was the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins of 40s painters, wires jittering with the conduction of chaos.
One of the appeals of 40s revisionism is as a shopping project. An increase of prices is probably a symptom of the legitimation of a weird retro-ist subculture, alas. I remain irritated at various record-breaking claims by other people “I bought a complete run of
Nimbus for 15p from a car boot sale in Wigan in between collecting the kids from Sunday School”, etc. But shopping drove the whole engine – once you’ve bought Hendry’s
the orchestral mountain for £3, you want to develop a device for reading it. Reading is a purposeful distortion of the receptive organs. This was the source of the delay – but is proving productive now there are some people who can read the further reaches of 40s excess. Deform without breaking. I admit that I bought a copy of the 1949
New Romantic Anthology for 55p. Keery’s bulimic recuperative-bibliophile raids on junkshops, library sales, the cellars of Warrington Town Hall, a disused Police Store in Southport, municipal dumps outside Lewes, the fishdocks at Peterhead, and a sunken wreck somewhere off Spitsbergen, defy description. When competing with James, it’s time to pull out the cards of doubtful legality – Peter Yates, TS Law, Macleod’s Choric Scenas. The search for ever more marginal NR poets goes on apace in the pages of
Poetry London, Kingdom Come, Folios of New Writing, White Crow, Cormorant & Cicada, Poetry Scotland, Phoenix, Ore, Cambridge Front, Counterpoint, Poetry Quarterly, Cahiers Apoplax. Attempts to revive Randall Swingler, David Gascoyne, or Nicholas Moore have met with incredulity on the part of the decryptic community.
The craze starts as a reaction against Tolley’s version of events. Really, it’s only people ignored or knocked about by Tolley who score you points in this game. Bouncing a ball off Ian Hamilton’s head also scores – he wrote a haughty essay denouncing the Apocalyptics for not being soldiers and for not being Real Men like Keith Douglas, so James finding an original copy of Douglas’ first book with a Horseman of the Apocalypse on the dust-jacket was a moment of restitution. Karlien van den Beukel’s discovery of translations of Dunstan Thompson into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges also invites envy.
The three-dimensional insight that a whole scene was essential produced light from various angles. James Keery has undertaken a stunning revision of the whole modern history of British poetry. “Schönheit apocalyptica”, his new essay, methodically demonstrates the links between Apocalypse, religious language, and Prynne – a dizzying step forward. Simon Jenner has adopted a group of “second string” 40s Oxford poets, as expounded in a recent issue of Eratica, while remaining agnostic on the subject of the New Romantics. Nigel Wheale has written on Lynette Roberts in connection with the Romantic films of the 40s, especially ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, opening up fascinating perspectives on the use by poetry of the cinematic imagination, its new landscapes and ways of seeing. David Mellor’s ground-breaking 1987 Barbican exhibition on the Romantic 40s, 'A Paradise Lost?', put the New Romantic painters back on the agenda. Malcolm Yorke’s subsequent book
Spirit of Place: 9 neo-romantic painters and their times is of great value for these artists, directly illuminating the poetic universe of the time. Andrew Crozier wrote the section on poetry for the catalogue of the exhibition, and republished some key poems of Hendry for the
Conductors of Chaos anthology. I have been trying to rehabilitate Dunstan Thompson and George Barker.
All this is more than just a historical metaphor for the resurrection of poetry of the 1970s from under a flooring of cultural lies. However, just as the unspoken question was whether the poets of the 70s were ever going to blow their way out of the crypt, the unspoken problem with the NRs was why they had fallen silent under hostile pressure, and, researchably, had there been a “second generation” of this poetry, “extravagant excitement” in some lost valley of the 1950s proto-underground. James claims that there is a goldmine of 40s poetry composed in the 1950s, which I remain sceptical of.
Ore magazine (1953-96) did actually claim to be a “second generation” of the New Romantics.
Let us imagine a separation of rational and irrational faculties, into right hand and left. This separation runs through religion and art. The replacement of (most of?) the temporal functions of the Church, over the stretch roughly 1850-1950, by the secular State (charity, schooling, writing of books) has led to a revaluation by Christians of the irrational, of primitive religion, and of the apocalyptic books. The Apocalyptic formula was "Blake plus Lawrence", and the group were immediately dependent on Lawrence’s book Apocalypse. The literary or spiritual sources of this were in Ascona, an arty community into the natural life, expressive dancing, and (especially) non-European religion – notably via the Eranos gathering. Martin Green’s book on Ascona is called
The Counter-Culture Begins, and he is right – this was a source of the Counter Culture. The Ascona/ Jung/ Eliade connection was rather important for the new poetic imagery of the 1960s and 1970s, the “New Age” groove. The English translation of Jung leads us to
Nimbus, one of the last New Romantic magazines, flourishing in the 1950s (and dug up by Keery).
The release of a book by Charles Madge (only fifty-three years after his previous one!) brought up questions of documentary and sociology which lie slumbering beneath the modern pattern. For example, could we see the urge to phenomenological accuracy in describing mental experience as a derivation of documentary and Mass Observation, an optical analysis taken one stage further. Madge is the obvious forerunner of certain attempts at philosophical precision of recent decades, but the new (1949) work in the Anvil volume,
Poem by Stages, includes a lot of religious imagery – bringing it close to the Apocalyptics. Madge planned to write a book on dreams at one point. Poems by Madge and Terence Tiller show a distinctly non-romantic view of poetry, preoccupied with optics, reflexivity, the insight given by tiny flaws.
The 1949 collection (
A New Romantic Anthology) reveals the prominence of Welsh and Scottish writers in this uproar, offering a new angle on the cultural coup of the Movement gangsters in the early 1950s; their vision was not only stylistically narrow but also geographically confined to Southern England and to Oxford and Cambridge. The Welsh angle points to a connection between the anarchist-pacifist strain of politics, the political burden of the NR style (as shedding reason and the State and war), and Welsh Christian sensibilities asking for an ethical community which was not “a State” and did not make war. Plaid Cymru is now questioning the polythanatic American alliance against the Taliban in a way no English politician, seemingly, dares to do. That weird moment of
Modern Welsh Poetry (1944), a whole anthology which works, remains a beacon. Jones remarks in an unpublished interview that 2/3 of those poets stopped writing. Daring in the 1940s paved the way for 50 years of cheerful banality. So far no-one has breathed a kind word about Vernon Watkins and Henry Treece – crow scarers, a step too far for the resurrection men. But Glyn Jones and Roland Mathias were perhaps the most significant survivors of the heady days of the 40s.
The cultural critic Peter Fuller responded to the 1987 "A Paradise Lost?" exhibition with a campaign in favour of the sublime (and against the ayatollah-like barrenness of conceptual art), using the New Romantic painters as infantry in his onslaught. The result was that conceptual PR people adopted the language of “depth… landscape… painterly heroism… mystery… the sublime… transcendent” as part of the brand blather for the people Fuller had been attacking. However,
Modern Painters covered the 40s sympathetically, and functioned as a “neo-40s” magazine complementing
Temenos, edited by a genuine survivor of the 40s (Kathleen Raine), and peddling a line which can be taken on as a legitimate descendant of New Romantic dislike of the object-machine and realism in art. A figure like Peter Abbs is pursuing this line.
Temenos was deathly boring, to be honest, but Fuller’s probing into the links between objective and subjective knowledge in art, and how the transcendental disappears from art to leave merely “dead objects”, is of the first interest and likely contains a great part of the truth. Fuller’s recovery of Protestant mysticism gave an iconic position to Rudolf Otto, author of
The Idea of the Holy – and founder of the Eranos.
The American connection was briefly exciting, but eluded us in the end. We did decide that Lowell and Berryman, eminent products of the poetic 1940s, had bought into the belief in the legitimating role of the unconscious, typical of the period, and that their idea that mental illness gave them status as poets is a reflex of the apocalyptic mantle of the time. The Welsh connection is more exciting. Recognizing “the authority of illness” as a distortion of “prophetic authority” allows us to recognise Al Alvarez, in his 1962 Introduction to
The New Poetry, as a reflex of the Apocalyptics.
The reliance of MacCaig and Hendry (at the time) on improvisations which excluded the rational mind points to a faculty exploited by abstract painters and by jazzmen. The space without geometry, the space without reference, the space radiated by the body and reflecting the inside of the body, is where New Romantic poetry elapses, and shapes its curious lack of bones, its feverish quality, its reverberation without distance. This capacity to tap the unconscious and become the eyes of the abyss later (
post Eliade) sustained the fantasy of being a “Western shaman”, and would have been more productive with more practice and time.
I can’t draw any conclusions, since all is contrast, mystery, and confusion. I think the “standard model” of the collective history of poetry in the past 60 years is more holes than hull by now. New information is rolling in month by month. I would like to underline that the “blakean” strain may not have been the most productive in the long run, and that analysing experience to produce a sharper and more surprising picture may have been artistically more productive. Philosophy may have shed more light than psychoanalysis.
Other exciting work on the 1940s issues is by Andrew Crozier and Nigel Wheale. Tony Frazer is also reading through the back stacks of neglected books. No-one in this field is not grateful to John Pikoulis for his work on Lynette Roberts, culminating in an edition which was injuncted for rather extraneous reasons. Because so much new work is being done in this area, I am sure that there will be a symposium or a book to exhibit it – but I don’t know what form this will take. I think Keery’s work will culminate in a book, and Crozier has apparently written a book (perhaps on the whole period 1930-56). [2017, It is now clear, alas, that Crozier never wrote this.] It seems inevitable that there will be a revisionist anthology – since the suppression of the New Romantics took place half a century ago, and there has been no dissident anthology since that time. [2017: James Keery is now working on such an anthology for Carcanet, title "Apocalyptic Anthology"]
Issues
This area was opened up partly as a search for historical alliances against the hegemony of the Movement (as it was in say 1975), partly as an ancillary to radical shopping activities which discovered and captured incomprehensible artefacts from the 1940s. We learnt how to read these books. This gives us two issues: how to read 1940s poetry correctly, and where the “retrieval project” ends. I am afraid that this means a “double rejection” for some poets – turned down by the Resurrection men as well as by the Movement assassins. There is something obscene about this, but no-one could revive these poets wholesale without violating basic aesthetic principles.
Generalisation
The New Romantic style was adopted by a large proportion of the poets born between 1910 and 1920 who had literary ambition.
Other poets wrote simple documentary poems about their war experiences – interesting (as collected by modern anthologists) and in a separate domain.
The movement affected Wales, Scotland, and England in equal shares.
A list of 40s poets would have to include:
Francis Berry George Barker Dunstan Thompson Terence Tiller Hamish Henderson
Charles Madge JF Hendry Roy Fuller Lynette Roberts WS Graham Joseph Macleod Douglas Young David Jones Henry Treece Vernon Watkins Sidney Keyes Alan Ross GS Fraser Norman MacCaig Dorian Cooke Dylan Thomas Edith Sitwell Edwin Muir Roland Mathias Edwin Morgan Christopher Middleton FT Prince George Campbell Hay Sydney Goodsir Smith Nigel Heseltine Glyn Jones Nicholas Moore Peter Russell Burns Singer Michael Hamburger Randall Swingler DS Savage TS Law Alex Comfort James Kirkup Kathleen Raine Lawrence Durrell Philip O’Connor David Gascoyne Ruth Pitter Peter Yates Patrick Anderson Davies Aberpennar Kathleen Nott Eithne Wilkins
And I suppose the basis for entering the game is just to read these poets. However marginal some of these figures, there is an “outer margin” of poets even more obscure (and, possibly, more extreme).
I would think ten of these names are significant and worth resurrecting. Another group wrote significant poetry after the 1940s (after a premature start in the 40s style). However, no-one in the project wants to have anything to do with Vernon Watkins or Henry Treece. Peter Russell has some claim to be the worst modern English poet (evoking usually the retort, “What, worse than Nicholas Moore?”). The cultural historian Andy Croft has developed an interest in the Communist Randall Swingler, has even written a book about him – but, if anything should be consigned to the archive room with no door, it is surely the work of R Swingler. I freely admit that a lot of New Romantic poetry published in the 40s justifies the attacks of its enemies. But, let’s be careful. I find the very existence of Nicholas Moore embarrassing, and digging up a whole book of his stuff was surely a blunder, but he wrote two excellent poems. These alone would justify a reconnaissance in depth.
Simon Jenner’s magazine
Eratica did a special issue on the 40s, which included material (based on his PhD) on Drummond Allison, Philip Larkin, and Keyes. I don’t find these poets at all interesting. The issue also includes an interview with Martin Seymour-Smith, who was involved with these poets, back in the 1940s, as a schoolboy – his thing was to hang around in pubs listening to them. (He edited a couple of books of
Poetry from Oxford for the Fortune Press, a few years later.) It’s a good interview.
Missing biographical resources, or, the neo-Romantic agony
This appears here on the Internet partly because the information isn’t available. What happened to all those New Romantics who were banned from publishing in around 1952? This is really a blank space – a hint that I would like someone to do the research and write a book on this.
Patrick Anderson (1915-79) lived in England till 1938 and moved to Canada in 1940. Somewhat later, lived in Malaya and then in England again. Became a travel writer. Books:
The White Centre,
The Colour as Naked, Return to Canada (New and Selected Poems). (2 more volumes as well) edited a magazine,
Preview, in Toronto, which might contain Canadian parallels to the New Romantic style. Wrote some terrific poems. more here:
Anderson
George Barker (1913-88) I think everyone knows the story here. There is a biography of him. Went on writing prolifically until his death. A forerunner of the New Romantics, and more gifted than most of them. The period 1933-4 saw the debuts of Barker, Berry, and Thomas – arguably, the essential poets of the New Romantic style. This is several years before the codification of the style (which may have been irrelevant?).
Beecham, (Helen) Audrey (1915-89) I know very little about her (there are some amusing stories on the Internet). Catalogued as V.A. Beecham in the British Library. published a volume in the 1950s, (
The Coast of Barbary, 1957). It was on astrological themes and is notable for its dark, negative, Gothic qualities. The style is Fifties formalism. She lived in Nottingham. I should make clear that even if the book came out in 1957 many of
these poems were definitely written in the 1940s. Beecham is just
about the most interesting figure to emerge in the “rereading
mid-century poetry by women” which has been going on. One view of
Coast of Barbary is that it breaks out of the damaging
behavioural imperatives of daintiness, being ladylike, being
other-directed, etc., by being emotionally negative – the whole
book is about loathing, unhappiness, malevolence, and even the title
means that. (The epigraph clarifies this,
fuge litus avarum.) This is
a brilliant coup. You can hardly think about this without being
reminded of Sylvia Plath, who carried out a similar inversion a few
years later. A prominent example is “A Black Spell” (A wind like this tonight/
For such a one/ To clutch his throat/ And bind with ice-thongs
tight). This poem, a curse, seems to have been taken up and remembered. Part of
this poem is that, if Beecham was gay, the subject would actually be
“her” not “him”. However, it had a “threshhold role” for
a number of feminists, it offered the realisation that the male loved
object could be the one who was hurting you. While I have no doubt
that her poetry belongs with the 1940s and with the New Romantic
thing, her work is terser and tougher than what was around it. 'Per
fretum febris' [fever across the sea] says “From the pit of
ambush, the tumbled billow/ Struck to death the kite of love/ The
fake-belief false swallow” and appears to mean that the speaker was
in love with a seagull, the rapacious and merciless scavenger, but a
wave caught this predator unawares and killed him. This does not fit
into the “home making” atmosphere of 50s culture! False swallow –
looks like a swallow but is greedy and extreme. Swallow as a verb
also suggests swallowing a line, of deceit (fake belief), or even being swallowed
up by the loved one. Kathleen Raine's sleeve note says “Her vision
is of the dark, sinister side of feminine experience'. Bet on that. Could we rephrase the "dark side" of feminine experience as "male unreliability and selfishness"? Hmmm.
I regret that the first time I read Beecham's book I didn't really
connect to it, as I usually don't in the British Library. So weak of
me. But when I bought a copy (in a second-hand bookshop in
Nottingham, where she lived for many years) and read it again, it did
all get through. I thought Beecham was an isolated figure, if
brilliant. However, when I read a book about English cinema, there
was a key essay about melodrama and feminine taste. It talked about a
whole series of Margaret Lockwood films in which the actress did
nothing but suffer in multiple and serial ways. This is a key to 40s
melodrama, and films like “They were sisters” and ”A Love
Story” have suffering right at the centre. So they are perfect
matches for
The Coast of Barbary and so drive a connecting road
between this rather intellectual poetry and popular melodrama. Once
again it seems that watching 40s British films, preferably not the
famous ones, gives a better understanding of 40s poetry.
There is another 1980 book by the same poet. It includes a poem to Francis Bacon – who was arguably a visual equivalent to Beecham's poems. see posting on this site.
Tangiers was in the 1950s a resort for well-off English homosexuals who had had a tiny spot of trouble back home. Is this the coast of Barbary? Perhaps I am hearing a non innuendo.
Jack Beeching 1922-2001 his collected poems did come out in 2002. I haven't read them. He is hugely admired in some quarters. Left-leaning, hung out with communists. He was one of the poets published in the Key Poets series in 1951. Finally something I haven't read. My impression is this is in no way neo-Romantic but terse, politically sophisticated, world-weary. He was included in number 16 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, well worth getting hold of. see posting on this blog.
Francis Berry continued writing throughout. published a Collected Poems in 1994. One of the best New Romantic poets. See my article in ORIGINS
Gerard Casey This may be a case outside our jurisdiction. I can find no trace of Casey publishing anything before 1973. However, consider this. His work forms a logical unit of study with the work of Kathleen Raine and Vernon Watkins. He was born in 1918 (? 1921), in the right decade for our postulated ‘New Romantic generation’. His poetry (‘South Wales Echo’ available for purchase in an issue of
Fire magazine, edited by Jeremy Hilton) is very interesting. There is at least a case for assessing him as part of the New Romantic generation. His career is a little obscure, but his book 'Echoes' contains no original verse besides
SWE.
He was interested in theosophy
and occultism, specifically the Traditionalism founded by Rene
Guenon, and published essays in magazines attached to that esoteric and anti-western cult current.
Alex Comfort career as a poet vanished after 1950, although he went on publishing. Not really a New Romantic in style. Not at all a good poet. Much better as a novelist. Influential pacifist and anarchist.
Dorian Cooke student member of the first Apocalyptic group and friend of Hendry, Moore, etc. He had become a much better writer by the time of 'Fugue for Our Time', written in 1949 but published in 1951 by the brilliant Key Poets series. Vanished from literature, so far as we know, with the 1950s. Peter Riley rediscovered him to publish one poem, as a pamphlet, in about 1990. Peter Manson has been working on a project to produce a Collected for him. I was told that one entire book (in typescript) seemed to have existed but been lost by a Scottish publisher well-known for losing unique typescripts.
Davies Aberpennar (William Thomas Davies, 1911-96) co-editor of
Wales. Pacifist, nationalist, minister of religion. He published poems in '
Wales', in English, which have never been collected. He later wrote poetry in Welsh, which I have only seen in anthologies. It seems to me much less ambitious and interesting. He became a professor of Church History, which in Wales means something highly national, political, of mass interest, and tied up with the language issue.
'His membership of the Cadwgan Circle of writers during the Second World War had a major influence on him. This was a group of avant-garde intellectuals which met in the home in the Rhondda of J Gwyn Griffiths and Kaethe Bosse-Griffiths, two Welsh-language writers, husband and wife (...) Art for these people was almost a crusade. They discussed it – along with politics and related subjects – with high seriousness. In their search for complete honesty they held confessional sessions (...) Indeed they sought to revolutionize Welsh literature both in subject-matter and technique... Not surprisingly they were regarded as enfants terribles by outsiders." In Welsh, he used the name Pennar Davies. "His poetry makes no concessions to cultural Philistines. Indeed, its allusiveness is almost frighteningly wide-ranging." (
Profiles) He published a novel in 1968 which is in some ways a portrait of this circle. Confusingly, there is one volume in Welsh as by 'Davies Aberpennar', which I have just bought on the Internet (
Cinio'r cythraul, 1946).
Lawrence Durrell not really one of our team, but he did write poems in the New Apocalyptic style. The first collected poems neatly excises all these, but the second one, with more comfort and historical loyalty, includes them. A gifted writer but not an important poet. The best poems are prose pieces about fictional Greek painters, which so obviously point the way towards writing novels.
HRL Edwards brilliant poet in 'Wales'
Simon Evans brilliant poet in 'Wales'
GS Fraser complex career for which I lack the details. as an editor, he once published a poem by my father. and several by Veronica Forrest-Thomson. He only wrote a few New Romantic poems.
Christopher Fry (1907-2005) We could debate whether he belongs here at all. My perception is that he came out of the terrific verbal brilliance of the 40s, the willingness to fly and to risk everything on cascades of glinting and paradoxical phrases. His originality was to be perfectly lucid. He also got away from the personality cult, since he was writing for actors. Perhaps this was the way in which New Romanticism was evolving, its true direction. Arguably, you can understand Barker and Dylan Thomas much better if you set them beside Fry. In around 1953, poetry was truly popular - with the thrilling rodomontades of Fry and Thomas. Points to a branch of 40s poetry which is identifiably Romantic but cannot be identified with Apocalypse. Sweet & sociable. Also includes Keyes. Possibly Peter Yates.
Had 3 years as a schoolmaster at a prep school (and this was the one where Tippett taught – so in Oxted, Surrey?) but otherwise was employed in the theatre from 1927 on, actor then producer. So had a real grasp of the audience. His first poetic drama, for the Church, was in the 1930s; the Bishop of Chichester re-inventing verse drama, good for him! Devised pageants? so in touch with a stratum of performance other than realism. Where the aesthetic takes over. Was in Pioneer Corps for 4 years (the battalion where Derek Stanford served) so circa 1940-4; and this indicates pacifist beliefs. Stanford wrote a book about Fry, pretty cover and design, almost too gushing.
1st professional production was 1946 at the Lyric Theatre. The hit was the 1950 production by Olivier. He became very unfashionable after 1957. Frothy and cheerful, related to other “timeless” works of the 40s, or culture about culture, cf. Sacheverell Sitwell. Especially to a strand in the theatre which was aesthetic and artificial rather than documentary. Fry also wrote words for Tippett’s music for the Coronation. Strange to find two pacifists engaged in this. But so it was. I think the negativity (of e.g. an Allott) towards him was unbalanced and based on a possessive view of what was allowed to be poetry.
Venus Observed is kind of ridiculous. Cosy, English, whimsical, a fantasy, timeless, secure. Vaguely related to Shakespeare productions (but also to drawing-room comedy). No excesses – Fry has complete tact. Knows what will play. But there are also moments of real poetry.
Roy Fuller nothing to do with New Romanticism. wrote very finished poetry about dissociation, political distrust, selfconsciousness, the expectation of a completely new society emerging in the near future. Marxist, of course. His 40s poetry does not offer intense psychological rewards. It is certainly persuasive. Reading alienated poetry is sort of alienating.
David Gascoyne pedestrian and hysterical at the same time? What a combination. I have written a long essay on Gascoyne which is now included in
Origins of the Underground. He did write some excellent surrealist poems.
Kenneth Gee born 1908. published one brilliant poem in
Poetry Quarterly. Am trying to find out if I like the others. He did get a book out, with the inevitable Fortune Press.
WS Graham The quality of his New Romantic work needs to be underlined, in the face of revisionist historians with positions to defend. Obviously he is a New Romantic poet. His later evolution is wonderful in its scope. But 'The Nightfishing' is already a great work.
Michael Hamburger I have not read the poems Hamburger wrote in the 1940s. see notes here
Hamburger His mature poetry is definitely not New Romantic.
George Campbell Hay his collected poems have recently been published by the WL Lorimer Trust. Most of them are in Gaelic. His one book of the 1940s was in Scots and English, and is remarkable – if linguistically eccentric and highly keyed-up. In about 1940, he resisted his call-up and took to the hills – in Argyllshire. This is the peak of romantic Scottish anti-britishness. It was going well, but the local authorities put pressure on his family, and he gave himself up. He then served in the Ambulance Corps. After a nervous breakdown in Greece while serving, he was basically a medical case for the rest of his life. Spent long periods in hospital. The traumatic incident is slightly obscure, or overloaded, but it was a confrontation between Hay and some right-wing Greek partisans who thought he was too Left, so he wasn’t strictly a victim of the anti-German war, or a soldier. Still, he was one of the long-term victims of the war.
Hamish Henderson wrote a great book,
Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, one of the very best books of the whole decade. Certainly Romantic, but quite different in its focus and ideals from the New Apocalypse group. Marxist and nationalist. gave up poetry to become a folklorist. this was a disaster.
JF Hendry exactly how good he was is an issue now. There is also an issue about unpublished poetry (and poetry in magazines). 36 year publication gap broken by ‘Marimarusa’ (composed circa 1947, published 1978), which I think is a very fine poem. Its relationship to “Malcolm Mooney’s Land’ (and
Seven Journeys) is an undetermined issue. Discussed in ORIGINS. The correct form is "Morimarusa".
Nigel Heseltine (1916-) He published a book,
The Four-Walled Dream, with Fortune Press (in 1941) which I rather like. Participated in the anthology
Modern Welsh Poetry, and was one of the highlights of that book. Was the son of the composer Peter (Warlock) Heseltine. Spent much of his later life in Africa (acc. to Peter Finch's
Companion). Published translations of Dafydd ap Gwilym in 1944. Published in 1946
Tales of the Squirearchy, stories about 'the decayed and anglicised land-owning class'. Wrote several travel books about Africa.
David Jones Jones is possibly the most striking realisation of the New Apocalyptic ideal, writing personal myth which narrates Man's historical and religious destiny. It would seem a lot of his poetry was written in the 1940s (although dating is difficult).
The Anathemata was begun in 1948.
Glyn Jones (1905-95) major poet, one of the significant survivors of the 1940s. collected poems published recently. edited the 1949
New Romantic Anthology. influenced by DH Lawrence, in the beginning. first volume published by Fortune Press.
James Kirkup (1918-2009) perhaps the most prolific poet of the 20th C. Not really a New Romantic. His career has been obscured by his sheer prolificness, a complete turn-off for the curious. Was an anarchist and pacifist during the war, according to some accounts. Reached a peak in the 50s, I think – I would admit to not having read 50% of his output. Did a joint volume with Ross Nichols, the future Chief Druid. His 40s work is fey and even like a ballet libretto. You could re-view the Forties with this kind of thing as the centre rather than the prophetic/political stuff. It relates to Edith Sitwell and Dunstan Thompson, for example, and theatrical painting by Minton or Leslie Hurry.
Sidney Keyes killed at 22. Was posthumously very famous, and then mysteriously written out of the story. The poems are unbelievably good for someone of his age. It's hard not to believe he would not have dominated his generation. While his poems obviously fit within the New Romantic realm, we need to reconsider and extend the concept to fit his work.
TS Law (1916-97) Communist of working-class origins from east Fife. Wrote in Scots. Published a pamphlet,
Whit time i the day in 1948, connected I think with a Communist group and the magazine
Our Time (edited by Henderson?). This was followed by a 30 year publication ban. He just didn’t get on with the people who ran Scottish poetry. It may be he didn’t get on with anybody. I like
Whit time i the day (which I was given a photocopy of by the Scottish Poetry Library, hurrah) and see Law as yet another victim of an era of conservatism and intolerance. He began self-publishing in the late 70s, still very political. I am reasonably sure there is still a lot of unpublished poetry. Not a New Romantic. After the first issue of these notes his son wrote to me and said his father had been highly published all his life. All the same it was 30 years between his first pamphlet and his first book. This may have been a deep-laid plan.
Emmanuel Litvinoff some of his poems have impressed me very much. Nothing to do with New Romanticism at all, but has the weight of sombre moral integrity and vision. His poem reproaching Eliot's anti-Semitism ("To T. S. Eliot") is tough enough to punch a hole in the wall. There is some story of him reading it in public circa 1945, and Spender trying to beat him up. Litvinoff was right. You can find this poem in "
Passionate Renewal. Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945", edited Peter Lawson. Eliot almost got away with it. Not quite.
Christopher Logue
The
pigeon's blood delights the peregrine.
Beezled
in his scepter to be the faggot
Of
a King's word. Colour of lust, mine
Accidentally
with sight and range beyond
The
Asian river where, gently, I washed
For
centuries. The Knave my paramour;
Dyed
by my signet all powerful his finger
I
match the vellum that he daubs with blood.
Or
on the apron of her breasts I crozier.
Logue's first two books show a definite New Romantic flavour, as the quote above shows. He eliminated them very thoroughly from his Selected volumes. Those poems also resemble Christopher Fry. Logue was very original and his first books can't be reduced to the standard image complexes of the time. They should be republished to give the public a fair account of the time. (Beezled – bezelled, I guess.) Logue was always covering his tracks.
Joseph Macleod (1903-84) subject of a Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Duncan, and published by Waterloo Press in 2009. Not a New Romantic, but published books with Fortune Press and Maclellan. He wrote prolifically up till the end of his life; one of the peaks is around 1949-53.
Charles Madge there was a 53 year gap between his second book (of poems) and his third. Is this a record? Although a rational poet, he liked to base poems on dreams, and planned to write a book on dreams (according to notes in an obscure anthology I found a copy of). Mass Observation had a strong surrealist element, and differed distinctively from, say, governmental surveys, by paying attention to people’s wishes and fantasies. That is, they had a transitional position between Marxism and surrealism. Madge’s later work shows a sharp movement away from audenesque social details to religion –‘Poem By Stages’ is really an eschatological poem. This is parallel to the New Romantics – a typical shift from the 30s to the 40s. He went from Marxism to personal myth. Another long poem, from about 1950, 'The Storming of the Brain', was published by
The Cambridge Review in 2009. My commentary here
Storming
Roland Mathias (1915-2007) published one brilliant volume during the 40s,
Break in Harvest (1946). [NB there was a volume in 1943, not always listed by the poet in credits lists. The jacket of
Break says it is his first collection, but it's not.] His work does show the influence of Dylan Thomas but really pursues imperatives which are quite outside the New Romantic thing. It is both true that he was a 40s poet who continued and ignored the Movement, that he was ignored in England throughout, and that he found resources in Wales, where the rules were different. So "The glorious beggar Bushell globed his light,/ Lean for the Calf of Man, the oil and herbs/ Of parsimony back/ In the mustard method his great Bacon taught,/ Back in the panorama of his pageboy grace–/ And calling Charles, the noble slipmaster[.]" –surely this shows the Thomas influence. The poem is "Enstone Rock". The theme is a 17th C mining engineer, a pupil and protege of Francis Bacon, who had Charles II as a patron. details in Aubrey's Brief Lives. The pun on eating herbs and following Bacon is surely dylanesque. The Enstone Marvels, designed by Bushell, are described in Roy Strong's
The renaissance garden in England. On the theme of parsimony, let me boast that I bought
Break in Harvest for 80p. Slipmaster? is this like "slipshod"? 'Harvest' was actually his second book.
Christopher Middleton published two books in a high New Romantic style while still a teenager. Poems in Poetry Quarterly, etc. There followed a pause before his mature work (starting with
torse 3, 1963). Are the two phases connected? I doubt it.
Norman MacCaig One of the New Apocalyptics who radically forswore the style and denounced it in interviews forever after. So far as I can find out, he refused to serve in the world war, lost his job, did "war work" as gardener, missed promotion (as a teacher) afterwards. But was he a nationalist or pacifist? He kept quiet about this, which was the safest thing. So often we find the New Romantic style linked to rejecting the war idea.
Nicholas Moore published six volumes, I think, during the 1940s. widely regarded as the worst poet of the era. Could not get published in subsequent decades but went on writing. Rediscovered by Peter Riley in the 1980s (dates?). was not really a Romantic, and his best poems are imitations of Wallace Stevens.
There is a very interesting portrayal of Moore in Wrey
Gardiner's autobiographical book The Dark Thorn (1946). Gardiner
projected onto him as the symbol of poetic creativity. He wrote two really good poems. So Don Paterson's description of his poetry as "Wallace Stevens' waste paper basket" is not totally fair. Is depicted in Iain Sinclair's book "Downriver", an ennobling account.
Edwin Morgan (1921-2010) became Scotland’s greatest modern poet. Although he wrote some pure Apocalyptic poems (up to 1951?), the style did not suit him. They are there in
Poems of Thirty Years.
Edwin Muir If we revisit the 1930s, we find a configuration which anticipates the New Romantics, and in which Muir is vital. 'Variations on a Time Theme', a 1934 long poem, is remarkable. His openness to myth and the transcendental is exciting. He made the critique of science which was basic to the New Romantic approach.
Hubert Nicholson (1908-96) I did find some people who had known him. As usual, they didn't recall anything of interest. He was a journalist. He must have been involved in Marxist politics during the 1940s.
New Spring Song (1943) was published by Fortune Press and is so stylised it almost falls over. But not quite! Sort of modernist agitprop. Dig 'Logic of fascism' 'Where is Jean Cocteau' 'Catechism for dead flowers' (preceding the Rolling Stones?). It includes the famous 'Nero': 'In my wreath and purple/ walking down the Strand/ looking for a pansy/ to paddle by the hand'. Obviously this is an exposé of the decadence of late bourgeois society, and you aren't meant to enjoy it. Oh No. Not a bit.
Kathleen Nott
I have written about
Nott on this site.
Nott One of the most significant discoveries of the
whole resurrection project. She has nothing to do with the New
Romantic thing – which seems to be what I have come round to in the
last ten years (written 2017), the importance of a whole group of
poets who were neither NR nor part of the Auden thing. The clearer
the NR thing becomes, the clearer it is that these poets did not
belong to it. Nott published her first volume,
Landscapes and Departures, with Editions Poetry
London in 1947, which would have put her on the map as New Romantic –
just when the boys in charge were writing it off. Nott had a
completely disastrous career if you accept that she was a really
important poet – this 1947 book is clearly important and was just
ignored. Another proof that Tambimuttu had a genius radar-vision that could see through thousands of manuscripts to find the brilliant unknown poets.
And these deaf
dumbfounded
sons of the thought
and skeleton
have ears only of
bone,
whose hearing finds
no bearing
in this supersonic
sphere
where silent music
of a breedless love goes writing peaks of snow:
only of size
framed to the
derelict crustacean buildings,
ankylosed
corners, echoes
fashioned in the stone
and the primitive
hammer
of the clamouring
heart
and their own
deserted wells
of tears and blood.
The sense is a cliff
with many birds, and also holidaying people who are not the birds and
who are indeed “the deaf dumbfounded”.
Ruth Pitter (1897-92) began publishing poetry in the 1930s. 'Garland for a Mad Lady'. is either not New Romantic or a marginal New Romantic with a quieter style.
FT Prince cannot be defined as a New Romantic poet. he was just one of the truly admirable poets to be active in the 1940s.
Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) peaked after the 40s. She opined that she hadn't really mastered poetry until her 1953 volume. Then, the poetry she published after the age of 65 is wanting. This leaves a prime period in which she wrote really terrific poetry, exciting even if you aren't a neo-Platonist. Built up vague mystical feelings into an authoritative system, which was a big mistake. Shared a house with Cecil Collins. Edited an 80s magazine called
Temenos (1981-92), which is the legitimate heir of New Romanticism – everything has been transformed but the links are clear.
Temenos evolved into the Temenos Academy, which is part of the Prince of Wales’ Institute of Architecture, whose director of research is an ex-co-editor of
Temenos. I could not read her poetry while she was alive because I found her personality so overpowering. See my essay in
The Council of Heresy.
Herbert Read the basic story is that Read published (for Routledge) many New Romantic books, inspired them as an anarchist of stature, was a fan of 'the first hour', but did not also write Apocalyptic poetry. This is something we shall have to revisit. My brief foray into Read suggested to me that he had a great influence on Stephen Spender, and perhaps on the Auden clique in general, in writing poetry about politics.
Lynette Roberts I think everyone knows the story (see John Pikoulis’ edition of her work, and the issue of
Poetry Wales on her which he edited). It seems she didn’t write any poetry after about 1953. Her two volumes (
Poems and
Gods with Stainless Ears) are indispensable, soaring high above the other poetry of this period. Patrick McGuinness has now collected and published all this poetry, with a masterly introduction. A wonderful book.
Alan Ross not a New Romantic. Published some not especially good poetry during the 40s but also wrote some terrific poetry in the 50s and, much later, reflected on his traumatic wartime experiences to produce wonderful poetry about battle. Was a destroyer officer during the war. Seriously underrated as a poet. Wrote some of the poems which redeem the 1950s as an era. The long delay was because of the traumatic nature of his experiences – that is, he was a war victim even though he went on leading a normal life and was a brilliant editor. He was much influenced by Lawrence Durrell.
Peter Russell published with Fortune Press under another name (Gwyther Irwin?). Went to live in Italy and write amazingly bad poetry. Was published a lot in the 1980s in
Temenos, another scrap of evidence for
Temenos as a continuation and transformation of the 1940s.
DS Savage not really much of a poet. Wrote a prose memoir of his experiences as a pacifist during the war (published in a collective book of memoirs of pacifism).
Tom Scott. I would rather be beaten around the head with a brick than read any more Tom Scott.
Burns Singer lived as a journalist in London and died young. Big fan of WS Graham. Trained as marine biologist. see the new edition of his poetry by James Keery.
Edith Sitwell One of the older poets who wholeheartedly took on the Apocalyptic style. Frankly, it isn't her best work. Her enthusiasm and willingness to develop are most impressive.
Robin
Skelton Skelton made what may have been the last New Romantic debut,
Patmos and other poems (1955).
The Apocalypse of John was written on Patmos, so this is a pretty
strong signal. Skelton went to Canada and wrote many books about
which I know nothing. Born 1926?
Sidney Goodsir Smith ‘Under the Eildon-tree’ is an ‘archetypal’ work, heavily influenced by Robert Graves. This is romantic rather than apocalyptic. It is in Scots.
Smith
seems to have faded from view. There is a story (maybe I shouldn't
tell this) that he was theatre reviewer for a prominent Edinburgh
newspaper, and one evening he fell out of his box. As everyone knew
who he was, this rather "liquid" incident could not be
hushed up, and he lost his job. His poetry is theatrical, this is the
problem. He was not a Scots speaker so his poetry is a magnificent
act of display rather than deeply personal. Christopher Whyte, in
what is probably the best book on modern Scottish poetry, shows small
mercy towards Smith.
Stephen
Spender. Spender did write his Apocalyptic poems, although these do
not appear in his Collected Poems. See posting on this website for
more details.
Jim
Keery resurrected this lost moment. Spender repented of almost everything. His Apocalyptic poems are just about the best anyone ever wrote. This just shows up that most of the others were insecure about technique.
stephen-spender-and- the eternal-present
Randall Swingler famous as a librettist for Britten and for Alan Bush. Communist. Wrote public poetry for political festivals, I think. Edited a poetry series for the Communist Party (Key Poets) in 1951. Almost totally uninteresting as a poet – ideology crushes the poetry, the “personal” parts are deadeningly conventional, imported from religious poetry. Left-wing poetry began from scratch in the 1960s because the local Communist poets were so bad that nobody read them. It seems to be the fate of Blake that stupid people think they can just copy in his imagery & rhythms and the result will prove them to be “visionaries”. The transcendental is not susceptible to these essentially bureaucratic methods.
Dylan Thomas I don't suppose there is anyone who hasn't read D Thomas. The New Apocalypse school is largely to be understood as the first wave of admiring response to Thomas. The original group went to great lengths to get Thomas to join them – and he did contribute to the first anthology. There is a case to be made that the style elements pre-existed Thomas and were synthesized by him. Certainly George Barker, the other most significant debut of the 1930s, developed his style before Dylan had published. It would follow that the 40s style was already there in 1933. Surrealism was certainly a key stimulus. I believe John Goodby is now working on this moment of origin.
Dunstan Thompson (1918-75) American copyist of George Barker. It has to be said that he did it better than Barker, in general. A Roman Catholic, like Barker; tinged by Francis Thompson. Produced two terrific books (
Poems, Lament for the Sleepwalker) and then fell silent. A posthumous book (
Poems 1950-74) collects his later poetry, which I don’t like very much (a kind of travel or antiquarian style, concerned with ecclesiastical history). It seems none of these poems after about 1954 were published in his lifetime. He was stationed in London during the war, but had developed his style while still in New York. Later, he lived in Norfolk. You can get his books through the Internet quite easily. This is just about my favourite 40s poetry. (I guess the books sold very well on publication; they're cheap now because his name was forgotten.) I wrote about him in ORIGINS. and
Dunstan
Terence Tiller (1916-87) nothing to do with New Romantics and in fact attacked their style at the time. Spent the war in Egypt. I really like his poetry, which has been written out of history by various people. He belonged to the “wrong faction” of English poets in Egypt. Worked for BBC radio as a producer. Why do I mention him? Er. It's because I really like his work, because it has never been reprinted, because I like those 40s books as physical objects.
Henry Treece lamentably bad poet in a “high” New Romantic style. Lived all his life in England, had a Welsh mother, defined himself as Welsh. Wrote about Wales as if he'd never been there. Wrote essays defining the style (‘How I See Apocalypse‘, etc.) and edited a flagship magazine called
Transformation.
Eithne Wilkins had a whole string of amazing poems published in Kenneth Rexroth's 1948 anthology. Heaven only knows what happened to her after that. She certainly translated many books from German and French. A long poem appeared in
Botteghe oscure in 1954, rather
Under Milk Wood tinged. She was Welsh according to a remark in
Poetry Quarterly in 1943 but info on the Internet suggests this is just a mistake. It seems much more convincing that she was born in New Zealand, lived 1914-75, had an Irish father, moved to England in 1922. She was brother of Maurice Wilkins, Nobel prizewinner for biology (making X-ray photos of the DNA molecule). (This research is by Tim Armstrong.) Her poems are uncollected (the typescripts may now be boxed with her husband's papers, which in another story may have been lost). New information is emerging via postings on her husband (Ernst Kaiser).
Categorisation with the New Romantics does not seem
possible, she was just someone publishing in the Forties. Early poems in an Irish magazine around 1934 (as Eithne nic Liamog).
Meurig Walter brilliant poet in 'Wales'. I think he wrote in Welsh after that. Essays in
Ysgrifau beirniadol, that sort of thing.
Vernon Watkins went recklessly on publishing extremely bad poetry with Faber.
Peter Yates half William Empson, half George Barker. born 1911. not sure what happened to him after 1950. Wrote some good poems in a distinctive style, appreciated by fans of the period. Cleaner and more effective than many of the well-known poets of the time. I like his book ‘The Expanding Mirror’, of which I have a copy. It is not as prone to autosuggestion as most NRs and also lacks the tone of religious angst. Actually, not a million miles away from Terence Tiller. It's more like John Donne than Dylan Thomas, to be perfectly honest.
On
reflection I don't like the Barker comparison, I think the source is
Baudelaire in fact. (One Internet site claims he was born in 1914 and was the pseudonym of William Long; the London Library catalogue says he was born in 1911, as does the jacket of 'Petal and Thorn'. I think there may have been confusion of different writers here.) He certainly published 3 books of poems (further
The Unmoving Dancer, Dark and Light) and wrote verse plays. There was a selected poems in 1983 ('Petal and Thorn'), it doesn't have all the good poems but does have a lot of hitherto unseen ones. You have to go back to the original books, unfortunately.
Yates exchanged with John Lehmann some very negative comments on the New Romantic idea.
Douglas Young pretty much gave up writing poetry after 1950. Wrote a few very significant poems in a deep Scots. A professor of Greek, took time off for Scottish Nationalist activities and resisted call-up during the war. Despite this, became chairman of the Scottish Labour Party.
The truly marginal
Paul Dienes published one book with Fortune Press,
The Maiden and the Unicorn, undated. One of the most extreme poets of the century, to the point of delirium. Interesting for a mixture of Gnosticism, Hinduism, and synaesthesia. Could be considered as proto-psychedelic or late Symboliste.
J. Redwood Anderson also published several volumes with Fortune Press, to the excitement of those who are turned on by the distinctive Fortune design style. A trilogy on Iranian cosmology (or a synthesis of several religions), they fit in with the New Romantics only by extravagance and lack of realism. Actually they remind me of William Watson (who also turned to epic poems about Iranian cosmology when it was too late for anything else). I haven’t read them – I just skimmed through them. Anderson was a hangover from the First World War era. He was leaning away from poetry and towards esoteric religion – cf. Kathleen Raine. He (and Watson) can be seen as forerunners of
Temenos. He was the kind of illuminated crackpot who turns up in Anthony Powell novels. An index shows him as publishing a poem in
The Quest magazine (the successor to the
Theosophical Review, and with the same editor) even in 1909. Fortune Press didn’t have a policy – they published anyone who paid them (which is fairly obvious if you get a bunch of their books together). However, because Nicholas Moore did work for them sometimes, his friends tended to publish there – a cluster of which Anderson is obviously not a part.
Geoffrey Matthews wrote war poems which by a publishing freak were published recently (in 1999?) for the first time (as
War Poems). I think he wrote very few poems after the war. These are finished poems but not highly rewarding – he was a Marxist and had got that alienated quality, that Roy Fuller has, off perfectly. An atmosphere of anxiety and detachment from “shared goals” points to sudden changes of behaviour in the offing; it could have tipped over into something more expressive if he had gone on. The poems don’t deliver any experience the poet truly participates in and it is hard to participate in the poems. We feel detached and uneasy. He went to live in Norway, which probably didn’t reduce his alienation very much. Academic life probably didn’t encourage the writing of expressive poems. It’s certainly interesting to see these poems emerge after half a century in the drawer. I think Fuller’s poetry suffers from the same problem.
Underground survival in the 1950s
This remains an open issue. James is very sanguine about an underground stream of brilliant poetry, continuing 1940s ideas. Editors declared the idea was past it and over, but the poets didn't halt when the order was given. The magazine
Ore seems to be a source for this kind of material – Eric Ratcliffe (editor) is keen on Druidism and Arthurian poetry, amongst other things.
Ore ran from 1954 to 1995, which is pretty amazing. I haven’t seen the 1950s issues, but I did see an editorial in which Ratcliffe claimed to have been a second generation of New Romanticism. I think
Ore was also a low-profile magazine which lacked any contacts with the original NRs. I did find poems by Ithell Colquhoun (in issues from the 1980s?) (and an Ore pamphlet, “Grimoire of the entangled thicket”) which seem like a direct continuation of the 1940s; Colquhoun was a contributor to
The Quest, then a Surrealist visual artist in the 1930s. See website here
Ithell . Her Surrealism led her to Celtic religious revivalism and to spiritualism. The website says that after being expelled from the Surrealist group she made overtures to the Apocalyptics (in 1941). I think we would look to the organs of spiritualism, Jungianism, neo-paganism, etc. for the current of changes which neo-Romantic poets of the later period absorbed, and which their readers were quite familiar with. That is, once we accept that the poetry is not primary, there is a huge corpus of evidence which we can draw on to uncover the later history of New Romantic ideas. (There is good material on Colquhoun in Michel Remy's
The English Surrealist Movement.) There is a very good painting by Colquhoun in the Brighton Museum.
What seems to be the last gasp of the 1940s is Savage’s republication of EFF Hill’s prose writings during the 1980s. I remember going to Small Press Fairs (around 1990?) and seeing these things and being incredulous. It’s possible that DS Savage was behind the stall, selling them (to a sceptical audience). Hill died in 1955, but Savage was his literary executor, and printed his works (although only after 20 or 30 years). Hill wrote about the Apocalypse – no interest in poetry, this is just a mixture of Christian mysticism and politics. Poetry was not essential to this streak of apocalypticism.
David Wright’s anthology of
Contemporary Poetry (1965), for Penguin, is a striking example of an alternative taste – in violent contrast with the Movement hegemony. This is a valuable document of the sort of Fifties poetry which is still artistically retrievable today. Wright deserves whatever medals can go to an editor who obstinately explores outside the territory which the
bien-pensants have decreed to be acceptable, without being paranoid or depressingly factional. He excludes all the Movement pets – but doesn’t this explain so much of the mutual hostility which has smouldered over the last 40 years, that the most influential people weren’t even going to get printed if someone concerned for artistic values was at the helm. They had to be good at discrediting people, didn’t they?
The Movement hegemony
Because I spent 20 years thinking about this every day, I now find it an utterly tedious subject. All the same it is the salient fact about British poetry from 1955 to 1980, if not longer. There now seems to be a very wide consensus that it was a bad thing, and that Movement poems are tedious, shallow, smug, sententious, emotionally dead, etc.
When
people speak about the mainstream, they mean that it shares these
characteristics; but the poetry-reading public was never so
one-sided, and In particular what they hoped for in poetry was better
than what was on offer.
Wolfgang Görtschacher’s book on
Little Magazine Profiles 1949-93 has essential information on the economics of magazines during the period. What his quantitative evidence shows is that there was a terrific dearth of magazines during the 50s – an impoverishment of openings which correlates with rigid and conservative poetry, and with the hegemony of a few people determined to exclude dissidents. Wolfgang’s definition of poets like Craig Raine and Andrew Motion as a continuation of The Movement deserves serious consideration, but perhaps needs to be nuanced slightly.
Connections with the Continent
"Time for black prophecies is over: the Winter of History is whistling around us.
Man, with suicidal power in his limbs, poison in his blood, craziness in his head like a mad dog: nobody can see his destiny.
If he wants to scarify people to the bone with his new instruments of devastation: his only attainments are loss of the wheel and of fire, forgetfulness of speech, life on all fours.
But let him extricate himself: let him give up his myriad maggot-teeming acts of idiot self-will, his termite provision-activities for the outer world: first let him measure and order the inner world."
Henry Treece? no, this is a 1960 poem by Sándor Weöres. He was writing prolifically already in the 40s (born 1913), and wrote a number of perfect Apocalyptic poems. A loss of belief led naturally to thinking about the skull, as the source of everything - and civilisation was not doing well between 1933 and (say) 1944. That idea of finitude led quickly to the worm – so there you have "skull" and "worm", the basic Apocalyptic images.
I think the comparative side of New Romanticism could get right out of hand; quite clearly there was a big wave of New Romanticism right across Europe in the 40s, and in most countries it didn't stop as it did, by administrative coup, in England. Gascoyne cannot be understood except in a European context, and this is asking us to use what has yet to be invented — a synoptic view of "europistics".
It is especially difficult to retroactively write New Romanticism out of the historical record.
Connections with painting and cinema
I tend to forget that there was a 1940s outside poetry, and that there was a whole world of style which throve outside the poetic groups, and which was much more publicly visible than they. What we remember about the period is that it came just before the arrival of a “new class” of educated people (of “nether origins”) brought along by the 1944 Education Act. This has no bearing on New Romanticism at all – quite unrelated to any strata of antique privilege.
We can name four strands of cinema as the melodrama of Gainsborough Pictures, the unique artistic style of Powell and Pressburger, the documentary line, now merged with wartime propaganda, and the war film. The Powell and Pressburger films (Michael Powell’s memoirs give a fascinating portrait of the times, where he emphasises the team nature of the enterprise, and credits their two German art designers, Junge and Heckroth) can easily be classified as New Romantic, and lend themselves to comparison with the poetry. The Gainsborough films, on a much lower artistic level, equally lend themselves to a New Romantic rubric: their formula, once they’d worked it out, involved the clash of sexual urges (mainly) with the rules of the class system, full-blooded characters played by glamorous actresses, passionate conflict, and an aristocratic milieu under pressure from basic instincts. The saleable aspect was individualist freedom appealing to an audience living in considerable hardship because of the war effort. It is hard to watch these films without being reminded of the melodramatic nature of 40s poetry.
“Gone to Earth” is a Powell/Pressburger film which steals most of the Gainsborough formula.
The films can easily be connected to the “aristocracy in heroic decline” theme described below.
American connections
James came up with some really interesting stuff on this (which see). Tantalising. We didn’t find very much in the end. Dunstan Thompson edited a magazine called
Vice Versa, which I haven’t seen. Shipping and currency problems in the 1940s mean British libraries are not strong on little American magazines of this period. I did find an essay by Berryman in
Partisan Review where he denounces the whole New Romantic thing as being sloppily written and out of touch with academic standards – which is fair enough, really. Probably the American end of “romanticism” (
post Hart Crane) was more disciplined, closer to New Critical standards, and so looks very different from New Romanticism – and less exceptional. There was certainly a wave of anarcho-pacifism (and perhaps especially in Northern California?), but it had different results – the USA wasn’t really subject to wartime totalitarianism in the way that Britain was. Robert Duncan certainly had a crisis when conscripted, which led to his discharge from the Army on psychiatric grounds. It is fair to describe Duncan as influenced by British New Romanticism, and as a 40s New Romantic poet, but he was a cultured man who picked up and synthesized many influences. If he believed in esoteric symbolism, it is because he was raised as a Theosophist, with the usual cultural trappings of the Occult Revival as part of the household goods. He didn’t have the same publication ban that his British colleagues suffered. Rexroth was a classical Californian anarchist, visited Britain during the war to get in touch with anarchists and New Romantics, sponsored these poets in America, broadcast on the radio about them, but was very critical of their style. (see Rexroth interview in Melzer's book on
The San Francisco Poets) Actually, the political links were probably more important than the poetic ones. We did uncover a magazine called
Phoenix, which was dedicated to the work of DH Lawrence and had as co-editor the English poet DS Savage. This is not “New Romantic”, and the bond with Savage was through pacifism and a wish to return to self-sufficient organic farming. Robert Symmes was living at the farm (in upstate New York) where the Phoenix group lived, and helping to print
Phoenix – this is before he changed his name to Robert Duncan. This is a fact, but not a literary-historical one – Duncan’s style takes nothing from
Phoenix, or Savage, or even Lawrence. Symmes edited an offshoot magazine called
Ritual (advertised in
Phoenix) –it sounds very interesting, from the ad, but we haven't seen any copies.
Rexroth edited the classic anthology of the 1940s,
The New British Poets (1948). Oscar Williams also anthologised the period very sensitively.
New Romantic prose
This is a blank for me. However, reading Gwyn Thomas’
All Things Betray Thee was a landmark in my path towards accepting that New Romanticism might be of interest. This is simply a great novel.
Sacheverell Sitwell’s
Splendours and Chagrins seems at this date like the masterpiece of New Romantic prose. It is a great deal more realised than most of the poetry of the period.
I am pondering whether we could sneak in Northrop Frye's book on Blake (
Fearful Symmetry), and certain works of G Wilson Knight, as works that shed light on New Romantic poetry and mythical thinking.
Theatrical romanticism and a school of stage painters
New Romantic painting was much influenced by a school of stage painting led by Tchelitchew and Christian Bérard (and Eugene Berman). This combination of imaginative freedom and uncynical reliance on the characters established by an older European court art produced something altogether more light-hearted than New Romantic poetry, which had a typical burden of anxiety and despair. It is a question why the poetry turned out this way – and it is worth searching for an alternative strand, theatrical and emotionally buoyant. Liberation from realism does not have to be pessimistic in flavour.
Sacheverell Sitwell is the literary equivalent of this dedication to the art of the past. He published no poetry in the 1940s at all.
To think of New Romanticism we must also think of the Sadler’s Wells ballet, Frederick Ashton, Leslie Hurry, and the origins of English ballet –or “music theatre”. Some of these designs were by Ayrton and Minton, significant New Romantic painters, who had got their painting style initially from the Parisian stage designers, on a trip to Paris when they were both still schoolboys. (Tch. was also E. Sitwell’s great love, chosen perhaps because he was gay.) If we stick to the theme of “non realism” manipulating “timeless figures”, perhaps we can see the myths of the poets as partly equivalent to the theatrical figures (Harlequin, the rake, Aphrodite, etc.) in the ballets. When a poem refers to a “marble statue”, we can see this as the injection of a piece of visual art into the verbal domain, and directly similar to the Classical figures which appeared in so many surrealist paintings (Delvaux and Di Chirico, for example).
If we go back to Tchelitchew, we find him as a continuation of the Saint Petersburg stage designers. That is, a milieu of court art, the last great court art of European history. So perhaps there is a link, after all, between his Parisian circle in the 1920s and the English culture of the 1940s.
Henze
Hans-Werner Henze wrote a volume of memoirs called
Bohemian Fifths. I mention this partly because I thought this was an utterly wonderful book, partly because it does shed a light on English culture of the 40s. Henze has mainly worked in a kind of “music theatre” which didn’t exist in Germany before the war, and which reflects what he was exposed to in the British Occupied Zone, in the 40s, where he saw English ballet, met Ashton, and was commissioned by him. Henze has been a lifelong anglophile, and the kind of England he is in love with is precisely the aestheticism of the 40s. One of the strands which runs right through New Romanticism is producing a culture which rises above war and provides consolation for its griefs, and this musical culture clearly supplied exactly that for northwest Germany when hungry, deprived, and exhausted by war.
Prose again; The Disappearing Castle
When I think of the prose of the 40s, I think of
Brideshead Revisited, of Osbert Sitwell’s four volumes of memoirs, and of James Lees-Milne’s diaries (
Caves of Ice, etc.) What seems to link these is the theme of aristocratic classicism in heroic decay – a gigantic exploration of anxiety in the face of the conversion of the electorate to Labour. The architecture which features so prominently in these books is the equivalent of the classical figures which appear in the painting and ballet of the time; a classical, Italianate, and aristocratic past, seen as it were back-lit by the flames which are about to engulf it. The architecture of the 40s was ruins – especially the ruins of great and ancient buildings, which were the most impressive.
The authors mentioned either belonged to the landed gentry or profoundly identified with it. The poets did not – they were like fish out of water, aware that the old European culture had died but uncertain about a new life-space which could shelter them. This explains their insistence on deciding things for themselves, and their deep anxiety.
One aspect of the 40s is the crisis of the European aristocracy – not something which occupies centre stage when the threat of physical destruction was so universal. But perhaps it is something important which we miss when we look back. Because the audience for painting, ballet, etc., was so small, these art forms were closely associated with the nobility, for whom it was part of tradition. Their international nature was related to the international sense of the nobility, their aspirations to French and Italian standards. The 1940s saw the destruction of the eastern European landowners as a class. In Germany, they lost their status under the strain of war – the rise of the Waffen SS was a symbolic move away from the aristocratic officer class of tradition. The British aristocracy lost financial and social power on a grand scale. The Italian peasants saw major advances in their status, a move away from feudalism despite fierce resistance. Survivals of aristocrats with their estates and influence in places like Sweden, Spain, and Portugal seem archaic. In this context (little less than a farewell to traditional European culture), the angst of the New Romantics can be interpreted as a sense of being pressed between the old noble cultural rules and the new, aggressive, communist ones. The third possibility was an educated bourgeois culture which has been growing at several per cent a year ever since.
We are thinking less of the culture enjoyed by the nobility than of the nobility as an object of fantasy – the subject of popular art on a mass scale. The change would involve the shift for actors from a mandatory West End accent to a far wider range of voices, approximating to the real country. Something similar happened across Europe at this time – perhaps everywhere. In Britain, the shift would be from noble subjects (or living, at least, in the West End) to American film stars with classless “democratic” appeal. The influence of aristocratic salons (classically, those of Sybil Colefax and Lady Cunard) on artistic taste is hard to measure at best, but one should investigate the ascent, at this time, of groups of painters, composers, and concert musicians who achieved prestige without aristocratic sponsorship. Perhaps we need to take a look at the grim factors of economics to grasp why cliques that could deliver people with spare cash, who actually bought tickets, bought paintings, etc., were so significant for emerging new artists. Even symphony orchestras were bound by economics to fashionable hostesses. Painters do need to sell paintings occasionally. Patronage remains the basic question.
Perhaps there is a connection between John Piper and Madge’s
The Disappearing Castle after all – Madge’s brilliant definition of the loss of a noble background for culture and Piper’s serial illustration of the scenery in which it had taken place. Piper’s interest in cataloguing and recording beautiful buildings exactly resembles Lees-Milne’s activity as an officer of the National Trust, preserving stately homes – with the precondition that the owners were going to die and that the families no longer had surplus wealth. The cataloguing was a preoccupation of the period, an act of loyalty to a way of life threatened by Communism and Fascism. As a rational and didactic activity, we can see it as the forerunner of the takeover of culture by academics. We can also see it as the successor to the Shell County Books, symptoms of a redefinition of the countryside and its precious objects as a leisure park for the “common man” as liberated by the motor-car. Aristocratic culture was thus drowned by a new psychological perspective changing all the tonal values of its battered objects.
Back to the land
This is something I failed to find anything out about. (In 2002 – I have since found a whole string of sources.) Savage spent the war on a smallholding (maybe two successive ones), the Phoenix group were into self-sufficiency, this correlates with anarchism because it rejects the commercial system. Bringing it all back to the body (you work with your body to produce food, the product of the bodies of plants and animals, it’s all visible and tangible) seems to correlate with Apocalyptic rejection of the “object-machine”. Non-mechanised farming seems to connect with organic imagery in poems.
There must also be a link with the arts and crafts movement, or its descendants of the 1940s.
Horizon; fantasies of the Mediterranean
My image of the 40s was dominated by
Horizon for many years before I developed any serious interest in the New Romantics. The volumes of selections from
Horizon retain classic status for me.
One of their lines was nostalgia for the Mediterranean – nourished by despatches from people serving in the Middle Eastern theatre and trying to lead a cultural life. Cecil Beaton picnicked in the Western Desert and found a notice for picnickers saying Please leave the desert as you found it.
The cultural assets (architecture, paintings, sculpture) associated with nobility were largely of Italian origin. This combined with a hot, dry climate to produce a specific image of the Mediterranean, and a craving for the favours of that image. Poets writing about the Mediterranean in wartime include Lawrence Durrell, Terence Tiller, and Hamish Henderson. Because the New Romantic thing was happening in London, the poets in the Middle East were not caught up in it, did not feel part of it and in some cases found it ridiculous.
Horizon’s reception of the NRs was very selective, and is a guide for us. They ran articles on English Romantic painters by Geoffrey Grigson, who was very much against New Romantic poetry. The rediscovery of Danby, John Martin, etc., and indeed of Blake, contributed to the atmosphere of the time. Martin’s use of apocalyptic scenes from the Bible reminds us of the roots of “apocalypticism” - in popular religion. If we look at the Biblical epics which Hollywood was still producing in the 1940s and 1950s, we see something occultly related to the Apocalyptics – the set designs for the prototype Towelhead Picture (the first “Ben-Hur” film etc.) were based on Victorian Bible paintings which were generic descendants of John Martin’s canvases.
Continuity in Wales
A high proportion of the New Romantic poets were Welsh, and there was a classic anthology,
Modern Welsh Poetry, edited by Keidrych Rhys, 1944, exhibiting a whole school. There was more continuity of the style in Wales than elsewhere. However, later currents proved much more influential on Anglo-Welsh poetry in general. The Rhys anthology is, distressingly, much better than later Welsh anthologies, in the era of grants.
Roland Mathias is, for me, one of the most interesting poets to emerge in the 1940s. His style, too, evolved. Note a “recovery issue” – there are a lot of poems in his early volumes which didn’t get picked up in his eventual Selected Poems.
The Roses of Tretower (1952) can be considered as a variant of the Heroic Nobility theme – Tretower was the residence of the Vaughan family (as in Henry Vaughan), and is a classic building. Mathias’ ability to think about the past, rather than merely recount legends, is quite admirable. (His recent collected poems may be really complete, but I haven’t seen it.)
The 1960s
One assessment of the 1960s would be that, whatever currents of “alternative” thought it picked up, it swept them all away and changed them irrevocably. So, it would be extremely stupid to look at recent years and expect to find elements of the New Romantic style original and untransformed. Their ability to transform is – what, a sign of life?
Nimbus
A magazine of the 50s (1951-8?) which James came up with. It is of high literary quality. Because the editor was Tristram Hull, and because RFC Hull appears in the magazine, I conjectured they were related. RFCH was the translator of Jung into English. The name of Tristram Hull just vanished from the scene, but this is a very good magazine. There is some information about it in Christopher Logue’s memoirs. Martin Green claims to have founded it (in an essay appearing in the
Aquarius issue about Graham and Barker – an issue of astonishing tedium, I’m afraid).
(Peter Riley claims in an email that RFCH was the father of Tristram Hull. Riley knows a lot about 20th C British poetry, but his ideological presuppositions limit the value of his writing about it. He has some very specific investments, unfortunately.)
Enthusiasts of the NR style should turn up Christopher Logue’s work prior to his 1959 book – poems which he has rigorously excluded from his volumes of Selected. He published in
Nimbus, and is probably the most interesting New Romantic to emerge after 1950. It was not mainly a poetry magazine; and had a strong left-wing element, liking Brecht and Neruda. Later issues show “New English Review” as a secondary title – the mag may have evolved into something no longer called Nimbus? Ominously, it also stopped showing an editor’s name – just a publisher (John Trafford).
What
Nimbus shows us is the ideas of the 40s evolving – the discourse was changing without losing its basic direction. This is significant, because it means that if you are looking in the 1970s the succession to the 1940s is not going to look exactly like the 1940s. That is – poetry based on archetypes is itself subject to vagaries of fashion.
The White Goddess changed everything which came after it (in that line).
The poetry editor was David Wright – an intriguing figure whose tastes we should investigate to track the flow of underground, anti-Movement currents in a time of apparent literary dictatorship.
The rise of academicism; the New Criticism
One of the images thrown up by older literati (by the old cultured class under threat?) was of people coming along and working very hard at culture and deriving no pleasure from it whatsoever – crossing a line between “work” and “pleasure” which has proved a problem ever since. If we look at
Horizon, all the articles are quite short – raising the possibility that producing massive books quite literally missed the point of culture, burying it under tons of essentially tedious information. It would be nice if this wasn’t true, but the atrophy of poets who went into academic life seems to say it was – literature became work for them and ceased to be literature. They stopped writing poems. Wherever sensibility flees to, is where we have to go.
The eclipse of New Romantic poets by talentless academic critics is thus part of a larger and tragic story in which literati became unable to write poetry and new poetry ceased to play a role in the life of the reading public. Academic life doesn’t have to be drudgery. I would like figures for how many academics were bored and exhausted and how many were having a good time. Otherwise I think these issues will remain open.
Lees-Milne disliked the advent of intellectuals in the life of the arts; but what his diary records is his own heroic efforts to get around the country to visit potential National Trust acquisitions, heroic because of the appalling weather, the breakdowns of his car, the rundown of the infrastructure while all resources were going to the war effort. Art had become a job for him even though his great terror was of art being reduced to a form of work. In sober fact he was immersed in paperwork, petty vexations, the management of repairs to the fabric, etc. – not in designing beautiful buildings or even living in them.
The relationship of the new bad poetry of the 1950s to the New Criticism is contentious. Essentially, I see it as a piece of crooked political asset-grabbing – you justify your bad poetry by “contamination”, linking it to an obvious classic. I don’t see how Cleanth Brooks’ criticism adds lustre to dismal Movement poetry. This was a hallucination. Meanwhile, relating the classic works of the New Criticism to mass classroom practice is too difficult, because the evidence is lost and would have to be available on a mass scale. I would like to cut my losses by observing, merely, that the New Criticism could justify any kind of poetry, and that the route from serious academic study to writing bad Movement poetry is opaque and obscure.
If I look at Northrop Frye, I find a strong interest in archetypes, myth, and religious experience – all of which would form an outstanding theoretical foundation for the New Romantics. I suspect the other classic New Critics mostly show a similar enthusiasm for myth and religion as the most privileged subjects of poetry. What comes next is the opaque and obscure bit.
Gay thematic in
1940s poetry
Quite a few of these
figures are gay, maybe more whom we don't have information about. Is
this a vital theme? Malcolm Yorke, in his book on 9 neo-Romantic
painters, remarks that several of them were gay. This is very
tempting and exciting, but only if you don't expect gay people to be
present, in a minority, everywhere. Since that obviously is the case,
the panorama of gay writers in 1945 is not vitally different from a
similar array in 1965, 1975, 1995, etc.
Gay life was
different in wartime, as various witnesses have said. The imminence
of death, the break-up of settled patterns, even the blackout, made
brief but highly-charged encounters more frequent. So there was a
flourishing gay world in London, and some part of this world
overlapped with the world that produced new culture. Dunstan
Thompson's poems probably reflect this.
My guess is that
there is a specific 40s style, impetuous, dizzy with exaltation and
anxiety, more interested in feelings than facts, which was repellent
to a wide range of conventional people, but which was attractive to a
certain group of young people, of whom some were gay and some were
not.
Was there an
originally gay style for living and feeling which spilled over into a
New Romantic world? This would be a very exciting idea. I don't think
that is what happened and I am not sure that there was a gay style
which people could recognise, and which contained this mode of
self-expression, prior to 1939. I think there was a range of
stylistic/emotional stances in the cultural realm which was already
there in 1930, let's say, and one of these is what New Romanticism
sought out, made central and expanded.
I think there was a lifestyle which went with the NR art style – but I am doubtful which of the artists were actually leading it. In fact, that is a question worth asking.
If you accept that melodrama in film was in the 1940s a genre which appealed mainly to women, and that the prevalence of subjectivity over any other value is central to Apocalyptic poetry and painting, it follows that the whole style was a move into the female half of the world. This was a step into the future which had to be reversed.
Sources
Little has been written about the poetry we are interested in since 1950.
Nigel Wheale wrote about Lynette Roberts and cinema (where was this?). James Keery has written a continuing series about the 40s in issues of
PN Review.
Fundamental information on the Anglo-Welsh scene is in Glyn Jones’
The dragon has two tongues.
The sources I used most are the original books and the poetry magazines of the era,
Poetry London and
Poetry Quarterly at the forefront.
Rob Jackaman,
The course of Surrealist poetry in English, has probably the most serious account of the New Romantics currently in print.
MP Ryan,
Career patterns in modern British Poetry, (1982 doctoral thesis), has a wonderful collection of interviews with poets, including many of interest to us. There is a copy of this in the Poetry Library. I don’t know of any more worthwhile books on the subject.
Derek Stanford’s
Inside the 40s is an invigorating book of memoirs.
Addendum: Berger King: A new interpretation of the 40s
Something I mentioned the 2007 version of these notes was Peter
Fuller's rediscovery of the New Romantic art of the 1940s. I have
just been reading his 1988 book
Seeing Through
Berger, and this provides an opportunity to explore his
interpretation of changes in British art leading up to and during the
1940s.
Something that needs to be said at the front is that Fuller had a
gambling problem (and wrote a book about gambling) and came from a
fundamentalist Protestant background which looked for the hand of
Providence in the surface events of the visible world. What Fuller
says is that the destruction of so much devotional art by the
Protestant movement in the 1530s, but also more radically in the
1640s, created a hole in the English art tradition. (The Scottish and
Welsh artistic legacy is passed over but may never have produced much
of very great and abiding value.) The genre of landscape painting
mutated to come and fill this hole culminating in figures like Turner
and Constable. The English landscape had emotion poured into it, it
came to be the repository of the sublime, of comfort and hope. By
this path it came to be great painting. Fuller writes brilliantly
about an 1858 painting by William Dyce (a Scot who painted frescoes
for the Houses of Parliament) which shows figures on a beach hunting
fossils, and a meteor in the sky. The theme is geology – and before
the painting was finished Darwin had published
The Origin
of Species. Geology was swallowing up God. Fuller remarks that
because the landscape had become a vessel of religion, the acceptance
of theories which displaced God, and which relied on things in the
earth, fossils and rocks dating to hundreds of million of years ago,
shattered the morale of landscape painters. A vein of landscape
paintings expressing bleakness and emptiness became a new hole –
the hole reproduced itself. And so things went very badly until the
start of a neo-Romantic wave – starting with Graham Sutherland's
etchings of around 1930. This wave reached a great height in the
1940s, not just with Sutherland but also with Moore, Hepworth,
Bomberg, Paul Nash, and even Craxton. This was well known to Kenneth
Clark and his associates in the government patronage of contemporary
art, and they directed major funding straight at the best thing that
was happening. Love of the homeland and a sensitivity of touch as
applied to the material of the artwork produced allowed these artists
to get in touch with greatness – there was “a great welling up of
indigenous romantic sensibilities” and the hole was filled.
However, “after the mid-1950s, the great achievements of the
neo-Romantic sensibility were, by and large, swamped and displaced
first by social realism, and then by all the nonsense of imported
later modernisms, i.e. Pop Art, Americanised abstraction,
conceptualism, political art, New Expressionism, etc.” Clark fell
back: “In the 1950s, however, those who possessed the power of
patronage suffered an alarming loss of nerve, right across the
political spectrum: Clark and his colleague began to believe that the
advocates of anaesthesia had a view as deserving of public patronage
as their own.” The identification with Clark is there because the
whole book is an attack on John Berger, an authoritarian Stalinist
ideologue whose most eminent work,
Ways of Seeing,
was designed as an attack on Clark’s television series,
Civilisation. Fuller is saying that the hole returned, between
1952 and 1988 – and is the property of his enemies, as an art
reviewer. Awkwardly, Fuller had begun his career as an ardent
follower of John Berger. The 1940s are also a gaming counter in his
struggle to separate himself from Berger via praise of Clark. He sees
the 1940s as an asset of Clark, as (roughly) Art Czar for the
government in that time.
What does this give us? I am doubtful about the vastness of the
scheme, in which an impersonal force is running in 1858 and is still
running in 1958. (Actually, the story he tells starts in the 1530s.)
I cannot see it as profoundly accurate, and the scale puts a pressure
on individual, local phenomena which distorts their human and personal reality. To
be specific, so much of the art of the 1940s was bad that I can't
simply start to see it as a means of Salvation, too many images of
bad paintings flood my memory. I don't think that you have to prove
that the art of the 1950s was bad in order to reveal how good things
were in the 1940s – this is a
tic of art journalists.
Fuller's inclination to risk everything on a glittering theory, and
to see Providence shaping art history, led him sometimes to overrate
some artists and underrate others – the pattern he sees has much
sharper colours and boundaries than the one I see. His commitment to
Berger, Stalinist and anti-aesthetic and authoritarian as he
certainly was, is one of these plunges where the stake was lost.
But, in the end, Fuller has produced a very powerful
historical-cultural pattern and this is what we ask cultural critics
to do. It was a creative act. Moreover, he is not wrong. The pattern
is so vast that a few local difficulties are not prominent. He gives
a very sharp picture at certain points. While other patterns are also
visible in the history of English art, they are not more correct than
the one Fuller has drawn. I regret that Fuller's study of the 1940s
does not include poetry within its scope. His account of things
dramatises, I feel sure, ideas which the poets of the time were
excited about – maybe not what they achieved, but what was lifting
them up and propelling them forward.
From May 1940, imports of art from the Continent were virtually
impossible. Anyone who wanted to buy modern paintings or general
objets d'art was going to attend to the local wares, British art. This was
bound to give a lift to British artists. Even the art magazines were
blockaded, people were thinking about the local scene, which was
often neo-Romantic – and often documentary, recording bomb damage
and the war effort. Part of that war effort was the government
pouring money into new art. All of this was bound to come to an end
after May 1945. It just wasn’t going to come back. I think Fuller
was quite likely right about the temporary success of indigenous
artists. After that, the claim that artists were confused by the
volume of stimuli from other countries, mediated by magazines as well
as by large and impressive exhibitions, is likely to be true. Someone
with a clear and single idea of what they want to do is more likely
to succeed than someone dazed and disoriented by too many stimuli.
However, blockading art done by foreigners sounds like a re-run of
the image-smashing of the Reformation, rather than a credible policy
for the arts.
Since I am looking at this page in 2017, I may as well say that the Forties recovery phase has lost its impetus. There was a burst of activity following David Mellor's 1987 exhibition, which lasted probably 20 years. But, somehow, things have slowed down.
