Peter Wildeblood- and gay history in the 1950s

Peter Wildeblood

There is a copy of Wildeblood’s Against the Law (1955) in the Nottingham Central Library, so I read it. It is about three men imprisoned for homosexual acts, in 1954. The interest is really its bearing on Patrick Higgins’ Heterosexual Dictatorship (1996), undoubtedly a major work. In this history of “post-war” homosexuality, Higgins describes the idea, which originates with Wildeblood, that there was a crack-down on gay activity, responding to the 1951 flight of spies Burgess and Maclean, and that Wildeblood and his two friends were victims of it. Wildeblood does not expound the story that there was a special campaign at length in his book, & no other busts are cited as proof that it was really happening. The printed source he cites is from a newspaper in Sydney – not very strong as evidence that something was happening in England. The Sydney story, by Donald Horne, centres on Scotland Yard, but the bust which sent Lord Montagu, Pitt-Rivers, and Wildeblood down took place in Hampshire and originated in an RAF interrogation of two gay RAF men. The link to Burgess and Maclean is striking but purely theoretical. Politicians did not make capital out of a crackdown so the follow-up does not show that it was happening. None of the three men in Hampshire worked for the government.

Key for the “witch hunt” is the idea that the police left gay men alone (with exceptions linked to ‘public order’) between say 1940 and 1953. This is not actually asserted and certainly there is no evidence offered from magistrates’ courts and so on that this was true. So the idea of a state of tolerance being ended falls down – there was no tolerance. There is a converse side to this – the triple prosecution (Montagu, Pitt Rivers, Wildeblood) raised public attention, and certain anomalies in the behaviour of the police also raised questions about the desirability of having the police involved in people’s private lives in quite that way. So there probably was a direct link between the triple case (2 other defendants got off by informing on the others, basically) and the Wolfenden Inquiry, which was a sound reforming project, although its recommendations were shelved for ten years and presumably were shelved forever – until a later Home Secretary seized on it as a reason for changing the law without further delays and investigation.

His book does not suggest that Wildeblood was narcissistic or self-dramatising at any level. His description of himself in prison is, maybe not selfless, but very detailed and unemotional. The witch hunt thesis is not there because he thought the world revolved around him. But he doesn’t offer any further high-profile victims of the police. Most likely the prisons in 1953 had a sizeable number of gay men from all walks of life, which indeed is what Wildeblood describes for Wormwood Scrubs. He remarks that “convicted homosexuals include seven times as many factory workers, and twice as many farm labourers, as men of independent means”. Good figures, but evidently they show that the police were nicking people all the time, anywhere, whenever it was convenient to do so.

Alan Sinfield’s book Out on Stage cites figures for convictions relating to gay activity and these show a huge rise between 1938 and 1952. This demolishes any idea that there had been a “phase of tolerance” interrupted in 1953.

It can’t be that Lord Montagu was the only gay member of the aristocracy – so if there were going to be highly-publicised arrests, to blazon it across the newspapers that the law was going to be enforced every night, it is inexplicable that no further arrests were made. But the context does not suggest that the police tracked and beset Lord Montagu, as is implied in the thesis of a crack-down, a flourish of reactionary vengeance. An individual who was in the RAF got caught doing something and confessed to having relations with about 20 men, of whom one was Montagu. The RAF gave the case to the police, so the possibility of hushing it up and making it disappear vanished – too much of a paper trail. Obviously the RAF couldn’t arrest a civilian. The ‘triple’ bust was in Hampshire, whereas surely a political campaign would have taken place in London, raiding night-clubs, and run by Scotland Yard under the eye of the Home Secretary.

Wildeblood’s book is later than Croft-Cooke’s, which is equally frank, but Wildeblood had actually said in court that he was an invert, and this was the courageous and even historic moment. In 1954. But the two books do show that things were changing, the 1950s were also a time of change and not just reversion to ‘family values’. It is hard to locate books from earlier decades which are so honest about being gay. So it had become much easier by 1960, less of a shock.

I have personal regrets that my history of modern British poetry is so thin on gay poetry. Gay poets did not at that time circulate information about their private lives as part of jacket texts or other forms of publicity. The information was either private or secret, and I didn't have access to the most significant information –and I still don’t. The poets have their right to privacy, but the outcome is a series of works (not just mine) which someone could search and fail to find any account of gay poetry over, say, fifty years of the 20^th century. (The question of what the poems say is not so straightforward.)

Higgins has a focus on the papers from the Wolfenden Inquiry, which he has studied in great detail. What struck me was how little the ‘experts’ consulted by the Inquiry knew and how unlikely it was that they could answer any of the questions. They did not have knowledge based on research, either sociological or psychological. So you have the headmaster of a public school on the stand because he had spent many years punishing his pupils for any gay activity, in conditions which meant that any pupil would cover up anything they knew in secrecy and lies. In fact there was no reason to think he knew anything at all. In fact, the problem with reforming the law was that the law itself had no basis. It was a legacy from parts of the Bible which also instructed that in case of adultery both the adulterer and the wife should be put to death. My reaction was to wonder what basis there was for the narration of writers, including playwrights and poets. They had the same feelings of authority as the magistrates who sent gay people to jail, but were probably wrong in the same way about psychology and first-person experience. This is the story of the past sixty years, I mean people disbelieving literature because of its claims to knowledge and insight.

Wolfenden actually got gay people to serve as witnesses for the Inquiry – an amazing decision for a time when expertise was supposed to belong only to clergymen, landowners, and civil servants.

Higgins has done a great deal of work on newspaper files, and suggests that there was a loss of inhibitions, so that the News of the World went from a phase of pious evasion to covering a hundred stories of gay persecution, straight from the law courts, in 1953. Because this frankness also drew people's attention to odd police activity (such as provocateurs enticing men into sexual activity prior to arresting them), and to the lack of a basis for imprisoning thousands of people, it also led to the Wolfenden Inquiry – and so to the liberalisation of the law in 1967. Thus Higgins. It also makes me wonder how far the "permissive society" existed outside the media's illusory world, in which transgression was used to make conventional people buy newspapers or watch TV exposés. 

Columnists

this post has been taken down. (editorial decision)

Original post started:
My first reaction, almost, was the dread that [a] the Poetry World would lie about [...]'s drug problems [b] they would lie about the connection between his poems about polychrome visions and paranoia and drug highs and come-downs [c] this would set up a false position which I might occupy but which would fall in on all of us. 

(addition) I am interested in the distinction between insecure paranoia and documentary testimony. And whether anybody believes poetry. That joke about columnists being cheap copy for bankrupt newspapers because there is no fact-checking needed, and who the hell fact-checks poetry. So poetry as testimony is worth no more than columnists. This doesn't sound right. Some poets are telling it how it is. Maybe there should be a website where experts do fact-checks on poetry. Even an allegory should reflect a real-world process in some way.
Even someone who likes Blake probably isn't going to ask for funding for a dig to verify his account of the feats of the Children of Albion. "Remains of 5th Zoa found in Clackmannanshire": hardly.

Reconciliation? two - and naval battles

Reconciliation? and naval battles. Fights for the Flag

(this follows up a post about poetry which reaches a committed audience and poetry which might reach a previously unpersuaded audience)

I have been thinking about poetry disappearing into the catacombs, high on its own mythology, and wondering about a modernised landscape in which the grand oppositions of the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, even 2007, disappear and poetry reaches a slightly wider audience. I was musing about this at Stourpaine. I was talking about the absence of patriotic poetry and saying that an anthology titled “100 poems about killing foreigners” would go down well in the UKIP market. At this point someone interrupted to say that this was grossly unfair to UKIP supporters. I didn’t halt, and later he disappeared and didn’t return for the rest of the weekend. I regretted this, since what I was getting at was a “liberal bubble” which most people found off-putting, and here I had created greater homogeneity by driving someone away.

The Observer for 15 December 2019 reports that Labour lost in north-east England because so many people there have military associations and Corbyn was seen as not being a proper patriot, i.e. not retrospectively wanting to kill all the people who got killed in any of a hundred national (national?) wars. I don’t think poetry can deliver that feeling, i.e. “collective warmth brought about by killing foreigners together”. I was looking at old copies of 2^nd Aeon (the greatest magazine, probably) and Peter Finch covers, at some point around 1973, a series produced by Eric Ratcliffe, the guy who edited Ore for fifty years (?) and was interested in the national past. “a new series of booklets entitled ‘torches of the island’ which are selected ‘primarily for their sense of country’, this one deals with horatio nelson’s victory at the battle of the river nile,1798. Traditional in style of course.” So, fights for the flag. This doesn’t mean anything, Finch didn’t even bother to attack it, but it does allow me to point to an unconscious and negative rule: You can’t write patriotic, narrative, poetry in which killing foreigners is the emotional climax. Yes, we do have rules, here and there. Late twentieth century poetry evolved inside the area left open when all the negative rules have been mapped and the boundaries have been drawn.

The reason I was thinking about “naval battles” was an article by Norman Jope in Tears in the Fence (TITF issue 67, winter/spring 2018) where he described someone appointed as “town poet of Plymouth”, to the amazement of the Plymouth poetry scene, who wrote patriotic naval poems and then also wrote anti-immigrant poems as part of the same cultural campaign. It occurred to me that, if you wiped out the “liberal elite”, as in the terms of reference of the populist Right, the result would be violent patriotic poems, “fights for the flag”. 

Jope quotes part of a poem by this guy, whose name is Sullivan:

Now comes the hour. Where comes the man

to free the blade its sheath;

and raise again quick ‘Albion’,

lay bare its razor teeth?

To set Britannia’s heart arace,

and gorge those veins with flame;

cleave free her ill forged foreign chains,

this sceptred isle reclaim.

(‘Albion’)

Jope goes on to comment: “So is the ‘man’ Nigel Farage? Or maybe Arron Banks? Or perhaps even Sullivan himself in fantasy form? Whoever it was meant to be, 'Albion' came across to us as a xenophobic nativist piece – but one which had been published in a well-respected provincial newspaper by a Council-appointed Laureate.”

Jope reports a protest letter (to that local newspaper) which received a response, from other populist poets, to the effect that literary poetry is incomprehensible and un-democratic. This does sound a lot like UKIP attacks on metropolitan elites (in Brussels and Westminster). The message (sorry to be banal) is that, just as the political class do not deserve to run politics, so the literary elite have forfeited the right to decide who gets published, to establish interpretations of texts, to agree with each other about good taste and bad. This stricture includes the underground, some members of whom have made parallel attacks on the more visible sector of taste over the last half-century or so. It looks as if a UKIP-style assault is unlikely to take culture over but does reveal deep reefs of common values underneath different parts of the learned literary world.

The naval thing can be traced back to a stage where poems about naval battles were central and fashionable. The centrality of naval poetry lasted from about 1895 to 1920, and its start is connected with the naval rivalry between England and Germany, which was psychologically connected with a fear about loss of trade and the Empire. The famous poets were Kipling, Newbolt, and Noyes. Masefield wrote “Saltwater Ballads” but this was about the merchant navy and did not share the same politics. Bridges tried to write an epic poem about Trafalgar, but could not bring it together. There was a succeeding stage of cultural hangover after an overdose of WWI propaganda, where people (many of them) became disillusioned with collective violence and the arts moved as far as possible away from all that. This was in the 1920s, and you could say it was the younger brothers of people who had been killed in the War. Of the first three poets, two have been largely written out of history, and Kipling (“The Seven Seas”) has become a minority taste even though critics widely acknowledge his greatness. The story involves not just the absence of new poets enrolling in the patriotic camp, but also large changes of course by poets like Newbolt and Noyes. The anti-war attitude is still in force. It is something which has been transmitted from generation to generation, or which each generation has discovered and acquired.

Looking at the “naval battles” thing suggests that the whole modern scene has major features in common. The oppositions separate people only within a realm which is already small and (otherwise) shared. This suggests that you can write history in which you describe what people shared, and apply values which they could share, at least potentially. Unstitching obsolete oppositions is the key to writing a stable history of modern British poetry. That may not actually be possible, if the mutual detestation is scored right into the fabric of the poetry, but clearly pulling the camera back and taking in more of the landscape is the way towards a history which is not partial and divisive.

Just to reiterate, naval poetry is not coming back. That is a delusion. 

The other feature of the xenophobic poem quoted was its use of archaic vocabulary. So "quick" meant "living" 400 years ago, but now no longer does. Interestingly, the collective decision to scrap the permission to use archaic words also dates to the 1920s. That is a simplification. Robert Bridges said "we'll get 'em all back", about these words (can't remember the date, sometime in the 1920s). The Georgians probably made the major impact in insisting on 20th century vocabulary, but Bridges' 'Testament of Beauty' (1929) was a huge best-seller and is all in a sort of timeless historicist diction. So this is another collective rule: don't use archaic words. But the anti-elite challenge is precisely to the prerogative of those in charge to enact rules. You know what is ridiculous and what is acceptable because you are an insider. The challengers might abolish all poetic rules enacted in the past hundred years – like repealing EU-derived legislation. The protest might lead to defining bad poetry, all bad poetry, as good. ("get em all back" may be Pound's paraphrase of Bridges rather than a direct quote. But just check a page of 'Testament' to confirm the litter of archaisms.) 

Man's Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,

that tho' she guide his highest flight heav'nward, and teach him

dignity morals manners and human comfort,
she can delicatly and dangerously bedizen
the rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell.

Not without alliance of the animal senses

hath she any miracle: Lov'st thou in the blithe hour

of April dawns -- nay marvelest thou not -- 
to hear the ravishing music that the small birdes make
in garden or woodland, rapturously heralding

the break of day; 

Bridges thought he was proving Darwin wrong by his whitterings about bird-song. That anti-modern agenda has never really conceded its faults.

To sum up. The proposal is that, just as Farage wanted to repeal all legislation deriving from Brussels, since 1973, so someone could propose repealing all judgements of taste made since 1923, or 1945. The people who didn't read modern poetry, all through that time, would use this "silent exclusion" as a basis for disqualifying the actual literary elite from having any say about culture. Feelings of inferiority would take over the institutions and public utterance. Everything legitimated would be-delegitimated.
This is something to imagine... but all the details are missing. It is reasonable to say that Kipling, Noyes and Newbolt would be the core of a revisionist anthology for schools. Otherwise, the map is blank. Perhaps there is a line of followers of Bridges which has been submerged all this time. It is worth asking how the "shared past" is laid down – as exposed in anthologies and so on. It expresses a collective feeling which personally I have always been glad to be part of.

Reconciliation? -one

Reconciliation?

I was giving a talk at an event in Stourpaine (the Tears in the Fence weekend, indeed) and in the discussion afterwards I said that social mobility had been arrested over the last twenty years. The context was people in the audience expecting things, culturally, to change quickly, and me thinking this wasn’t the only possibility. Five minutes later, I realised that the true figure was a lack of mobility over 40 years, and I knew this. I had totally mis-spoken, and this was because of an unconscious unwillingness to say something so scary and depressing. 1979 was when Thatcher started, the social mobility and shifts of social structure of the radical Seventies came to a halt then. So, almost the whole of my life as an adult took place under arrangements where the core economic problem was not being addressed, or at least progress was not being made.

That leaves the question of whether culture is changing to be more egalitarian; I started with figures from the 1962 Penguin anthology in which 39.5% of the poets were Oxford graduates. I think the scene is still utterly dominated by graduates, but they are numerically a much larger group than in 1962, so you possibly have education still being the key to becoming a poet but the elite (of educated people) has grown much larger. Other questions are harder to answer. You could ask if the (same) legacy of culture is being transmitted, and if this in itself is a conservative drag. But the surface of things has changed completely since 1962.

I buy the Daily Telegraph once a week because my mother likes to do the crossword puzzle. I read parts of it, and although the news sections are insultingly inaccurate the cultural section is instructive, because (clearly) half the educated audience is right-wing, and reads newspapers like the Telegraph. The culture market includes many people fitting this description, and it is of interest to think whether they read modern poetry, whether the scene repels them, whether modern poetry could reach them (and grow a bit).

Perversely, marginalising right-wing readers could be evidence that the progressive faction in poetry is actually having an effect. This a “trophy fact”, almost. But there is a tension between group solidarity and being influential on a wider scene. The only people whose attitudes you change are the ones who didn’t agree with you at the outset. Art which influences political attitudes initially has a wider reach, it makes that crossover. Art which reaches only the committed is conservative in that specialist, analytical sense that it is not changing anything, over a year or forty years. The brand marks, the call signs, which signal that art belongs to an in-group may also serve to deter any other people from consuming it, even if they are intelligent and educated. This is a tangled area, for example it is arguable that the “small press scene” isn’t conservative because the people who have rolled up over the last twenty years are actually completely different from older generations, and the continuity is an error of perception. The idea of a continuous, legacy, collective project may therefore be an illusion; the corollary is of course that the project may not have failed over the last fifty years (and that new projects are being rolled out). A legacy project would suggest stability – structural conservatism. Real projects succeed, sign off, close down.

One view of the Telegraph is that its culture coverage is non-political. A modified version of this would be that it does this by not covering art which is tinged with politics. But, I was looking at their review of the decade on Saturday. The guy writing about visual art says “the virtue-signalling roundheads have vanquished those who still think of themselves as cavaliers.” So, in fact, he is saying that socially committed art has dominated the stage over the last ten years (starting with a world economy in meltdown and continuing to a “zombie economy” and zero hours, remember) and that this is what you will remember if you experience it (and miss if you stay at home, obviously). Because this surveys a ten-year period, and because the Telegraph editors are keenly aware that the roundheads were ancestral to the Left, this is an amazing thing to read in such a newspaper. But, in reality, it’s quite possible to get Telegraph readers to say “I don't want to buy drinks in a pub where the bar staff are on zero-hours contracts” and even “I want a more equal society and I enjoyed an exhibition which talked about inequality and asked for things to be shared out”. They may put the family money into ethical investment vehicles.

I don't want to label cultural oppositions as belonging to specific dates, because that presupposes that they are going to become obsolete, which may be a fallacy. Some situations evaporate, the curtain comes down on them; others don’t. Poetry can retain its liberal principles but reach a right-wing audience by being modern, adult, and credible in describing power and disadvantage.

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Uncontrolled inclusion lines

Uncontrolled inclusion lines

(more on the work describing British poetry 1960-97)

I looked at the earliest version of the “shopping list”, with a note “updated January 1996”. Then I did a comparison with the latest version of the list of poets I wrote about for ‘Affluence’. The outcome is that I started with a list of 65 poets and that I added another 80 in the course of research. I suppose this shows that I didn’t have the knowledge at the beginning, and that the design changed as more and more information came in. This explains why the count of volumes kept on going up, and why the date of completion kept on vanishing over the horizon. One qualification – Kathleen Raine was not part of the original list, because she was already celebrated in 1960, and I was determined to move the subject of debate on, and to omit poets I regarded as already assimilated. By 2005 or so, it was clear that the situation was different – Raine had already entered the stage of “being forgotten”. (She was included in an anthology of forgotten or excluded poets, Completing the Picture.) So I spent a lot of time in ‘Council of Heresy’ exploring Raine and the intellectual background to her work – reversing my original decision.

It was just so hard to say no to any gifted poet I uncovered. If you separate the functions of editor and researcher, as a what-if, you come up with some interesting conclusions. First, any external editor would have declined to extend the inclusion list from 65 to 150. It was just an infeasible demand. The research carried the work away from its moorings. Secondly, the design of individual books is impossible to account for. The remorseless need to tick through a dozen poets, then another dozen, is too obvious as an overriding motive of action. Thirdly, the inclusivity actually guarantees the quality of the overall design. If all the descriptions of particular poets are convincing, and the work has 150 data points, it must resemble the landscape it is trying to give a likeness of – however strange that landscape. If the narrative is labyrinthine and not strewn with bright generalisations, that is probably because the landscape in question is labyrinthine and geologically dissected and discontinuous.

The original Shopping List came from a session with Simon Smith and Harry Gilonis in a pub, probably in a terrace behind Waterloo Station. It is possible that Stephen Rodefer had asked for a list of significant British poets – a kind of Europe in 45 minutes guide. This was in 1995. It seemed stupid that there was no list you could consult. We felt that there had been an “underground” for thirty years (even if we understood this idea differently) and that this had piled up much information you needed, even if the faculty of memory to store it was dissipated or missing. I can’t imagine how nobody brought up Tony Lopez or Tom Lowenstein. It’s just inexplicable. I was 40 in 1996; why didn’t I know about all these poets? The works were never literally hidden, just that attention was perpetually distracted away from them by rafts of bad poetry.

I think the break-through into being hip was less knowing what was good than knowing what not to admire – the insight that “poetry in the High Street is boring”. People who looked at jazz through finickally pursuing the best players, the best recordings, etc., in overweening and competitive completeness, failed to take the same approach to modern poetry. Perhaps this was a tacit admission that most of the poets in the Underground were profoundly untalented.

A recount suggests that the figure of poets added after the start is greater than 80. I can’t imagine how I let the project run away with itself like this. Conversely, I find that this fuller set of data is the most solid and informative one, and that generalisations developed before the core data was analysed are suspect.

Jonathan Barker did a bibliography of British and Irish poetry, specifically 1970 to 1995. I counted 817 names (omitting the Irish, which is just to get the count right). I compared this list with the list of poets I wrote about in 'Affluence'. Conclusion: 84 of the poets I chose to write about are in Barker's "standard" list and 72 are not. My feeling about this is that I did a "ground up" job on the poetry, I didn't take over the accepted version. But, I want to amend the suggestion of obscure research – none of the finding was really difficult and the obstacles were my own obscure inhibitions rather than notable physical or even technical difficulty. If I found something “new” in 2010, the work had probably been on the shelves at the Poetry Library since 1975. The object I want to push to the centre is the social network that brings you things – so many anthologies, magazines, or just people you had conversations with, produced some brilliant poet I hadn’t heard of. My “finding” really means me standing near several dozen people who had found things and were keen to share the results. I could criticise the set of anthologies at some length, but that would just reveal how intimately dependent on them I have been, over forty years or so. Someone who thinks the outcome has been unfair might demand a description of the research programme, actually with the object of attacking it. The programme is not based on random reading but on the “connoisseur network”, and a description of it would be for 90% a description of the network. “The intelligence is in the system”, to deploy a phrase which can’t be wholly true. The network that really exists consists of people (all of them intelligent), and I guess that a description of a hundred or so people would be an adequate picture of it as it existed during the four or five decades I am interested in. One example. The only poet I discovered from typescripts, rather than from anthologies, magazines, and what have you, was David Barnett. He sent my magazine some scripts, almost certainly, because Norman Jope had recommended him to. Norman had published his poetry in Memes, so there is another question of how David, in West Wales, came across Memes, in Swindon. Anyway, a chain of individuals made this happen. It really doesn't amount to me doing heroic amounts of research, climbing bare cliffs, descending into caverns, etc. And his poems were easy to assimilate, they were obviously hippy/Jungian/ mythy poems of a type I recognised. I probably didn't think “60s survivor”, although in fact that was the case. I really liked his poems, and this is one example of how I added 85 poets to the project and almost made it sink through the earth trying to hold it up. 

My work is a record of the connoisseur network rather than of an autonomous personal journey, assuming that autonomy exists in a perfectly social medium like literature. You can imagine a second network, whose shape would uncover the nature of the existing network by acting as a comparator. This is interesting. But, on a less theoretical level, what are you saying about “poetry which does not arouse or please people in the poetry world”? isn’t that the same as saying “poetry which is not good and which should not attract resources”? I can see that a lot of people who didn’t get anywhere would like the network to be exposed as corrupt, in some way, to discredit it and create a new space in which they would be Significant and not “between 1000 and 2000 in the rankings”.

I don't want to get too theoretical, but the idea of reading lines of poetry accurately depends on a consensus, not barely about the English language, but about the conventions of poetic utterance. It is a profoundly social art. The "connoisseur network" is the guarantee that there is a correct reading of a poetic structure, namely the one which they ascribe to it. They are the society which owns the language of the poems. Poets habitually overrate their ability to make language mean what they want, but critics can succumb to that fault too. If I added 72 poets from outside the list which was "industry standard", I can be wrong; but I don't think I am, and anyway I have people who agree with me about each one of those 72 names. The discussion is open, I think.

If I say that 1000 books coming out a year is too much for the network of connoisseurs, that just points to another network, of publishers -obviously they are finding poets on a large scale, even if the poor quality control sets the whole system working in a bizarrely dysfunctional cycle. This is the “uncontrolled” phase of the system. Evidently 90% of the poets who publish are not going to be successful. The “connoisseur network” only takes on a few per cent of what the industry churns out. So one phase is unselective and one is selective. This is a balance. Not perfection, but principles that counter-act each other.