Put your cat clothes on

[ note. I failed to put this out anywhere so it is well suited to a blog release by this time. The plan is for a big Reed selected, edited by Grevel Lindop, to come out next year sometime, so I am preparing for that by looking at old Reed material.]
Put your cat clothes on: Jeremy Reed, The Glamour Poet Versus Francis Bacon - rent and eyeliner pussycat dolls (publ. 2014, composition dated 2008-9 on the cover)

The first thing to say is that Reed’s recovery in this book-length poem is amazing. He has written forty books of poetry (maybe more?) since the early Seventies, is a survivor of the glam rock era, and has produced some notably jaded or affluent work in recent years - the cognoscenti used phrases like ‘gone to Las Vegas’ or ‘glamour magazine’ to describe them. But Glamour Poet completely breaks with his work of say 1982 to 2005, and as completely transcends it. It is like some Seventies rock band coming up with album number 40 and knocking the music world on its side. My feeling was that ‘Stratton Elegy’ is his masterpiece, but ‘White Bear’ certainly runs it close. The only thing it reminds me of is Jerry Lee Lewis releasing a fantastic album (‘Two Worlds Collide’) in 1983 - as the NME review said, ‘a genius on a good day’. GP is the equivalent of changing producer and coming up shining like gold. This awesome return to form means that Reed is one of the hot contenders in 2014. The second thing is that the book is a memoir of being a prostitute - a rent boy:

every time I’ve sold myself
to write and eat (note the order) I’ve attracted someone   
in on the in breath and turned them out on the out breath
[…]
I learnt to create my own island on the pavement and to be sovereign to
That disputed constantly disrupted precinct. I was king to a radius on which
I dreamt and had to earn, when it rained the patch darkened […] What I did
Was disinformation except to the ones in on it and
They never learnt my name, only remember the colour
Of my eyes [.]
(p. 26, from ‘Love for Sale‘)

I write in Soho, get my energy
from its cells, I can’t let go
the fact that I used the railings, no one knew,
I had to feed a line [with] vegan protein
and helium uplift, had to have money
to keep from vulnerability, the cool
black painted iron a support
to making out. I’ve no pretend the way
I’ve lived as an inspired subsidiary
to the city, just notching up a word
to transport to its chemistry
without reuptake.
(p. 41)
The move is like the Rolling Stones singing songs about experiences that people really didn’t want in real life but which became outlaw glamour, erotic horror, Magdalene-like transgression, within the overheated confines of the music. ‘I’ll be in my basement room/ with a needle and a spoon’. The whole thing is urgent, brazen, high on a dozen different arousal hormones, sensationalist, outside the law.

The ‘versus’ does not refer to boxing matches but to dub or ‘mixing’ events where two DJs compete with each other, ‘Ariwa Sounds versus the Mad Professor’ or whatever - so you get to hear both of them. The railings were on Piccadilly somewhere (also the site of the all-night chemist celebrated in Reed’s masterpiece, ‘Junky Tango outside Boot’s Piccadilly’, 1978-9, renamed ‘Stratton Elegy’ for publication). It’s a relief when he gets as far away as St Giles’ High Street.

The book-length poem is actually ‘White Bear - Francis Bacon’ at pages 33 to 149 of this volume. (The White Bear seems to be the name of a pub, near the Piccadilly underground station, where Bacon and Reed used to meet.) The impetus of this poem is just extraordinary, not just the sheer weight of material and its dazzlingly integrated quality, but a developed technique for blocking any slowing-down by overrunning the changes of theme, forever cutting to action, forever announcing how much there is to say and how many ideas the poet has hidden in his hat. This is a new technique, it remorselessly gives us derepression as producer and product, and it has the momentum of an express train.

There is a question of whether the story of the book is true. Did Reed ever meet Bacon? It hardly matters. The dialogue given to the painter is all about colours:

A slash
of obsidian against hectic blue
demands a Ferrari red and a pink
you get in cup cakes or glossy car paint
or cherry pits and campari
or a black-eyed pink liquorice all sort
and slapped on with my knuckled fist
(p. 65)

and sounds like Reed, whose accumulated colour adjectives are a callsign, a routine. Maybe the book is a fanzine style re-living of something like the film ‘Love is the Devil’, by John Maybury (Bacon played by Derek Jacobi). It is ‘slash literature’ (like ‘Star trek / gay‘), that line of rewrites of famous stories to suit yourself. The work is closer to George Barker, who certainly was a Soho habitué in the 40s and 50s, than anything else; Bacon and Barker shimmer and merge. I’m just a crimson kid/ that you won’t date at p.66 is a lift from Denise Riley’s poem 'LURE 1963' somehow gulped down and re-captioned. 'Lure' could be the source of the colour orgasms in the poem.

‘Glamour Poet’ is necessary to telling the Reed story because it re-films the stories of most of his early poems. Those contacts with sordid, paranoid, crazed older men, which fill his early books, came out of being a pick-up, a scene gay. They tap a vein of dark and oppressed and thwarted emotion which is much older than Reed. They reveal a gift of psychological insight which is, literally, the whore’s insight into the clients - naked and defenceless - as well as the knowledge which animates great writing. The tale (older man picks up young boy who learns a lot about bad life and destructive release too soon) was not exactly easy to miss if you read those early books, but to have it spotlighted now - documentary still photographs to back up the semi-hallucinatory moving pictures - rewrites the Seventies. Once again, history mutates as a harsher light is turned on. My feeling is that Reed’s poetry is much more documentary and much more about other people than it is imaginative and about himself. Really we are reading a history of male homosexuals in London and in a particular old-fashioned province of the South, a history of fantasy and desire as much as of sadness and repression. White Bear reminds me of a rerun of ‘The Man With the Golden Arm’ with the characters but without Nelson Algren. It is easier to understand Saints and Psychotics (1975) now that we have The Glamour Poet.
Literature intersects: from clients to weird and messed-up artists, a transition so structural that it is hard to uncover. The flip from despair to admiration. A crack where Reed’s limitless narcissism lets in some compassion. Defining intimacy through sexual services provides an unusual view of art: in the poem, the artists he favours merge with the clients in a dozen ways. He also sees himself as part therapist-social worker.

I’m on my own, so singular,
My education Piccadilly rent,

I’ve spiked poetry like a cobalt vein
Into a sci-fi speed of light energy
Distillation of what’s glam in my time

Is this glamour? The line is that as JR was repeatedly picked up off the famous railings and taken to hotels by clients he was clearly attractive and glamorous and was a beacon beaming out A Good Time. The equation between attracting clients and attracting readers is all too clear. The basic idea, that Reed represents glamour, is basically incredible. Much of the poem consists of Reed explaining what our reactions are going to be. This might save time spent actually having reactions, but generally fails to take on that quite a lot of people don’t identify with gays, don’t much like the idea of prostitution, find the glamour ideology superficial, degrading, and frustrating. I don’t have a gay sensibility. I don’t feel envy of those clothes because that blare of self-advertisement seems like bad taste to me. If men don’t all dress like gays it is because their feelings take them in a completely different direction and a whirlwind of sequins and dyed string vests makes them feel nauseous. You would have to be gay to want to dress like that. But then - art is a temporary identity. This art as the most uninhibited and the most blatant offers the strongest signal and so an unusually powerful temporary identity. It is persuasive for as long as it needs to be. The depiction, of narcissistic apathy being stalked by thwarted and red-eyed compulsion, is as precise as a Dutch interior, sickening and undeniable, even while the voice-over is so unconvincing. That destructive radiance, orgasmic and emptying flare of sound, holds up temporarily.

The Monochrome Set described this life in ‘Oops what a Palaver', a little known song (partly due to El Records’ deliberate seeking of cult status) which contains the great line Ard cash guv - or sling yer ‘ook. The experience of being taken home by someone you’ve never seen before, getting to their gaff, sizing up from the decor and the accoutrements what is going to happen - the street-punk acuity of such moments is the most vivid streak in the book. The background for gay style as overstated, blaring, burning out inhibitions, was oppression: a whole week had to be crammed into Friday night. There was no time for ambiguity. It was like a transmitter broadcasting for five minutes a month. Or also like a three-minute single or even an advertisement.

A feature of this new style is scientific description, which may be derived from the write-ups on the packaging of health foods. There has been a complete shift from late-sixties (with Theosophical influence) style ‘sensitivity to auras’ to chemical (maybe pseudo-chemical) imagery to describe unusual talents. ‘Mitochondria’ at p.60 (‘40 years after terminal OD/ fatty mitochondria of the heart/ - degenerate H damage/ to her arteries’), describing the death of cult heroin novelist Anna Kavan, probably should read ‘myocardia’. He tells us this occupation of scientific imagery is derived from Prynne.

Reed systematically violates, in this work, the space normally owned by personal judgement. The eye’s cells are sensitive to a limited spectrum and there are ‘colours’ in the ultra-violet wavelengths (for example) which we cannot see. An ancient ‘folk metaphor’ describes the homosexual world as ‘sensitive’ to a spectrum reach (and a world of shapes) which the heteros cannot detect. A camera could react to these wavelengths but if its images were printed on paper the paper would appear to our eyes as blank. However other processing can spectrum shift the camera data to produce fake colours (Fehlfarben) which would let us see a new world of shapes and objects. Taking in words, you momentarily see the fake colours and glimpse the emotional peaks, tints, emotional tensions, and relations that Reed sees - like a hallucination - a whole new city. As your eyeball flexes back into its normal volume and curvature the picture slides off into nothing. I can’t share that city - he shows it but I can’t see it except for a second of distortion. It is like seeing a ghost - an older sense of ‘glamour’. He explains what’s not happening-

You can’t access weird if you’re straight
You lack the codifying gene, the kink
That criminalises what you see
Into same-sex perception, straights don’t do
Detail or up colour tempo
Like jumping up and down on strawberries
    (p. 104)
- but not what is. So a straight, orthodox person can’t understand these poems? How could that not mean that they are off the line - in bad taste? How can any of their stylistic decisions be right if almost nobody can identify with them? The attempts to write the rules of the game are radically flawed but he plays it with courage and resilience.

What is distinctive about Reed (or rather one segment of his wonderful output) strongly resembles features of popular culture and so may point the way to finding mass popularity for poetry. The unpopularity of poetry may not be due to its verbal difficulty but to emotional reserve, the caution of the writers reinforced by a sense of cultural superiority which makes them unwilling to make the vital charge available. The line of the book is guided by transgression - you have to leap out of your skin to go inside the poem and contact its evil heats and accursed availability. Classic rock and roll described a scene of people going out at night, dressed in coded and narcissistic and unsubtle clothes, to lose inhibitions, to pick up and have casual sex with someone if possible, to blare out hyperbolic and ‘inauthentic’ declarations, to get drunk, to insult authority. People bought the records without literally, or always, living them out. If a mass audience can ‘get with’ Little Richard, maybe they can get with gay nightlife at least as a momentary swelling on the skin. A comparison - driving cars too fast is stupid but people don’t pay to watch cars being driven at 30 mph, they do pay to watch racing drivers take it much too fast. 

  After wilful self-commodification, a sideslip from demanding expensive gifts as a sign of affection has shifted the whole structure of the poem into a homogeneous landscape of indulgence. The takeover by purchasing and consumption simply overwhelms every aspect of behaviour, something poetry has never said yes to before. It is puzzling to describe the border zone between sensitivity and macho crassness in this oral landscape where aestheticisation is gobbled up and dissolved by a process of sugar breakdown. The clients regard buying a rent boy as an act akin to buying and downing a bottle of cognac. This may be the way poetry goes. They loved the idea of renting a poet and this heaves up a glimpse of early-teen Reed loving the high-glucose idea of a Poet in the same way as the prologue to becoming one. Why be a poet? this is one answer.
While gay style may not need this compressed quality in an era where you can socialise at leisure and at length, art also has to abstract and emphasise. There is a problem with poetry which represents masculine values (and social authority) by being inexpressive. This might be a withdrawal of surface pleasures to offer something deeper, but could also be boring all the way down. It may be that the stance of being disenchanted, sceptical, self-disciplined, in control, is just incompatible with producing anything but porridge-coloured poetry.
Thinking about detail, the title is probably the worst one of all time. If you’re going to go tacky, why not Sleaze God Roams Soho or Street Dish Talks Back or My Brave Life Trolling and Trilling?
PS Grevel was shocked because when this masterpiece book came out it didn't even receive one review. This is a whole scandal. I have written a lot about Reed but I get the impression that people ignore what I say or have said. Grevel's Intro to that Selected is a survey of the whole of Reed's career and probably the first one ever.

Daryl Hine

Daryl Hine 1936-2012

I had not heard of Daryl Hine before reading Northrop Frye’s review of his 1957 book, but I now realise that he was an ambitious poet and that his career is one of the most complex in the history of literature in North America. I do not have the plan of describing that career, and to be honest his books are hard to get hold of as well as numerous. The secondary sources suggest that he made radical breaks but they were not wholly successful. At this point I am looking at what you might call typical Hine. Hine, who came from British Columbia, produced a book in 1957 at the age of 21. This is astonishing, but as the cover reminds us he had previously published Five Poems, so he had probably released teenage poems. Over-rapid learning in the Fifties made it unlikely he would un-learn it as precocity faded into something else. We are thinking of over-internalisation, and the flowering of the time was formalism, light verse, indifference to abstractions, fascination with decoration to the exclusion of real beauty. It was a few years later that Marcuse defined affirmative culture, but it was the 1950s he was thinking of, and that un-nourishing sweetness did not go away after that unless the individuals expert in it repented and found a new tune. Hine fits into that category all too cleanly. Suave? got suave. Pretty? got pretty. Sociable? got sociable. Lighter than air? got lighter than air. Hine saw the light during the formalist era and absorbed its ideals almost too much. He continued to write formalist poetry all his life, as the poetry world moved on. The objections to his work apply to formalism in general, and reflect the thinking of the great majority of poets born after 1936. They are familiar. However, that way of writing was peculiarly suited to Hine’s talent, and arguably he took it further than anyone else – where it favoured virtuosity, he was more of a virtuoso than the others. It has been called artificial, but it was evidently natural to Daryl Hine.
The title of his 1957 book is The Carnal and the Crane. The title is that given to an English carol, 23 verses long in at least one version, which is supposedly a dialogue between two birds, one of which is a carnal (otherwise unknown but at a guess could be “corneille”, a crow). They tell a tale of the very first Christmas, and Herod is the central character. He says that if he is wrong, and what the Wise Men say is true, the cockerel which they have just cooked and served up for dinner will get up and crow. Of course it does that; the theme is resurrection (what the birth of Christ brought to mankind).

The cock soon freshly feathered was
    By the work of God's own hand
And then three fences crowed he
    In the dish where he did stand

(fences – times) The crowing is an echo of the cock which crowed three times for Peter to deny Christ; Christ's coming back to life is a repeat of his incarnation, in Bethlehem. The carol is raw folklore and its very creativity suggests ignorance of learned tradition (and the absence of theologians who had read all the patristic texts). One possibility is that the carnal is so called because crows eat red flesh (including that of humans, sometimes), whereas the crane eats fish; this refers to sacrifice and to purity (embodied in whiteness). But really we don’t know; the carol may be based on legends which the world had forgotten, and its text may be the product of multiple forgetting. The title excepted, I could not find any allusion to the carol in Hine’s book. The signature of ‘Carnal’ is that most of the poems are about Christian myths but Hine’s level of interest in the doctrines is sketchy. He slips into the sequence of poems about Herod and the Wise Men a gay poem. It is about Alexis and Corydon, gay shepherds in Vergil’s Georgics. That poem has long been connected to the New Testament, since a prophecy within it was connected to the birth of Jesus. “Novus ordo saeclorum”, etc. Also, at least one of the Gospels definitely has shepherds in it. But, nobody with any belief in Christianity would slip a gay love poem into the Gospel narrative about the birth of Jesus. The myths are inherently significant, if you believe in them but Hine’s poems are merely decorative because his level of sincerity is so low. It is as if the audience of the time, sophisticated and affluent, dreaded sincerity; as a threat to decorum and gracious living. This poetry is secular in the same way that a department store at Christmas is. It is hard to explain why Hine would devote 13 pages to the story about King Herod and the Wise Men if he has no sincere belief in any of it. In ‘Carnal’, the turning of heavy religious themes into mere décor is intriguing but the ability to dissolve significance away is also a trap. It may leave art as a repetitive set of theatrical decors. The threat is that the decor will be as flimsy as the costumes – and like religious motifs painted on teacups.

The lack of significance reminds us of postmodernism. This was not around in 1957, when ‘Carnal’ came out. I don’t think it helps us. The 1980s had to face some of the problems which emerged in the 1980s as people gave up on theology. A revived interest in politics, society, government, social change, made those problems go away.

It is possible that the formalist atmosphere of 1957 reflects admiration for Dylan Thomas as well as Auden. Clever metrics were apparently the way to out-compete everybody else, at the time. I mention this because Hine’s exuberance suggests a link with Thomas – that virtuosity which was the opposite of spontaneity and spasmic release of unconscious material. Hine is almost too much in control of his material; he is not compulsive. Again, we may consider Christopher Fry and Eithne Wilkins as the most direct comparisons in the world of Forties English poetry. But the echo of Auden is altogether too strong. Of course that is Fifties Auden, with no element of documentary or of interest in politics, just suavity, fluency, and a layer of generalisations that sound wise and mean almost nothing.

The poems conduct arguments but their outcomes do not seem to matter. We are not moving from dark to light. Rather we have a steady state and the exits are neatly closed off. The classical poet whom Hine resembles is Marvell – at least, this is what I seem to be detecting. That just underlines how little interest Hine has in the arguments he constructs.
Evan Jones said “I think Recollected Poems is an excellent introduction, but In and Out and Academic Festival Overtures are Daryl’s masterpieces. […] My own favorites, in addition to those noted above, include “Don Juan in Amsterdam,” “Copied in Camoes” “Patroclus Putting on the Armour of Achilles,” “Letting Go” and “A Conceit,” poems that have moved and impressed me in equal measure.” I have not read the long poems, but three of the poems which Jones mentions are in the 1980 Selected Poems, which I do have.
I was more interested by the two poems, at the end of Carnal, about the Fat Boy entering Paradise. Their message is less obvious and their optimism more chequered. It is frustrating that he does not explain who the fat boy was when alive or what he is feeling when losing his way in Paradise.

Within his head a rank and silent fortune
Gestured slowly. On the silver screen
Papier-mâché herds of buffalo
Pursued a cowboy over endless prairie,
While down his cheeks the glittering orbs of sorrow
Ruled their separate tracks to final ruin.
What password did his virtues and his powers
Whisper, that he awoke within the gates,
Preserved against his enemies the hours,
While we who, like the vultures near the towers,
Live at the expense of those who die of boredom,
Enchained by the strait enchantment of their longing,
Must pitch our camp beneath the walls of Sodom,
Detained within the sweet preserve of time?
(from ‘A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden’)

What difference does it make that he is fat? Does that disqualify him from entering Eden? I must say that I am really not clear what this stanza means. What is the connection between Eden and Sodom? Why are they outside the walls of Sodom? Are they struggling to get in? Why is the fat boy sitting in a cinema? Is that a form of paradise, or is it somewhere else? Is a fortune gesturing within his head because his head is a misfortune, so that the sight of his face is rank and silent, part of a role which must remain silent? In the cinema, his face is invisible. Does “rank” mean “overgrown and undesirable”, like a plant, or is it a noun describing his social status, in parallel with his fortune? Rank was the biggest film company in Britain at this time, maybe not so big in Canada. Why does the sight of buffalo make him cry? Why are the buffalo pursuing the cowboy and not running away, as their allotted role as prey would seem to propose? In this way the poem seems unfinished and we don’t find out who the fat boy was. At one level, the stanza describes frozen time (as in death) versus the world of transience (which has some unclear link with Sodom). Google suggests that the name Baldar, which appears twice, is a spelling variant of Baldr or Baldur, a Norse vegetation god who was killed by a dart of mistletoe. That refers to vegetation myth, the dormancy of plants during the hard winter months. That would explain why the protagonist is dead, but why does he appear as a vegetation god? The poet seems to be so fluent that the poem fills up before it tells us what it really has to tell us. The drink turns to froth, it expands and expands but there is no wine left to drink. I like these poems but they are also a point where you realise that Hine is not properly in control of his own fecundity, that he does not focus enough on the essential point of his poems.

I started on 50s Canadian poetry because I was interested in the theme of personal myth. With Hine, it is the opposite – he takes public myths which he has almost no interest in. His next book “The devil's picture book” is almost free of Christian themes– they have just been jettisoned. It is a less interesting book than “The carnal and the crane”. His poems seem like goods shining under the high-key lighting of the department store rather than objects within somebody's home.

Hine, up to his death in 2012, represented the legacy of the 1950s. Auden had become extremely affluent in the 1950s, partly on the strength of having said farewell to communism and partly on the basis of his having access to lost and pre-modern funds of indigenous technical knowledge with regard to metrics and gracious living. This is the 1950s which the 1960s churlishly spurned. Daryl Hine never spurned it. The style had a sixty year life inherent in it once it was clarion enough to capture someone in their teens. The terms affluence and affirmative linger around him and it is only if you find them irritating that you would want them to disperse into a more cool and hi-anxiety environment. It is impressive how at 21 he has assimilated Auden, probably the most prestigious English-language style of the moment, and taken that merely as a point of departure. That might seem like a merely public ambition, but Hine has seized it with a peculiar accuracy and confidence. At that point any recovery of the 1950s is going to shed lustre on Hine. Maybe anxiety and the ways of transforming it always were the central issue. Hine certainly does transform it even if we find his result a bit like Christmas music in a department store. The verbal fluency is a form of affluence. You have to get the package – I mean, youth, effortlessness, virtuosity. It is fabulous and it really is churlish not to enjoy it. But he has difficulty with deep notes – with gravity. Marzipan is not a meal. The top film genre of the 1950s was the musical and Hine has some of the same delight in sheer skill – in the disappearance of the restraints, of realism or even of gravity. In his poems, the costume designer seems to have free hand and the dramatist to have disappeared on a long weekend.

Is this gay poetry? Well, there are 1000 ways of being gay. You can argue that a social or legal atmosphere which imposed permanent anxiety on the gay milieu elicited a response in which nothing is ever made explicit and anxiety never arrives to spoil the party. That comes out rather like a heated-up version of affirmative culture: gracious living simply expands to cover everything with its peculiar gloss and wholesomeness. It is not essentially different from any other affirmative culture – if we are going to recover the time, we have to recover the motives for that gloss, for the wish that cooking would never go wrong and that people mingling socially would always like each other. Pervasive anxiety and social rejection in adolescence could be one of the motives for wishing for sweetness in adult life. He does the generalisations about how great life is. A good example is in a poem, published under different titles, but here as “The copper maple”:

Sufficient the momentary recognition
Of the world as anomalous and perfect
As this emblematic copper maple
Alien yet rooted as we are,
Whose shade is not the green of contemplation
But imagination's fierce metallic colour,
Bronze, an aegis under which we flourish.

(from ‘The essential Daryl Hine’) The affirmative generalisation is the key message. The maple must be a reference to Canada, so this is even a patriotic poem– although another version of it was called “The copper beech”. What I miss is the transition from anxiety to freedom from anxiety. His poems don’t seem to open on anything – the threat is not allowed to be present so there is no open ground to advance into. The world it recounts has no negative side. He is interested in behavioural beauty but in terms which confine it to behavioural prettiness. I guess the anxiety might be latent in the verbal grace which might trip at any point. But we don’t really expect a formation dance in “Seven brides for seven brothers” to be interrupted by a mistake; and after a while we don’t expect emotion to interrupt Hine’s dazzling cadences. The opening of this poem is a magic moment:

After 10 am in Evanston
The leaves droop as if tired in the heat
The sky has put on that etiolated pallor
Which protests that it cannot absorb more light.
Colorless as paper. In the paper
Those who affect to predict the weather say
That it will be over 90 again today.

Evanston is where Hine lived for many years and the poem must almost certainly be taken as one about happiness in marriage, gay marriage in this case. The leaves are emblematic of a desirable suburb, an agreed symbol for settling down and enjoying life together. This is a great poem but not great all the way through. The differences between the two versions are fascinating but may also be a distraction. But, we can also offer ourselves the feeling that he could have written ten different versions, all good – that what you get with Hine is that sense of fluency, where he can go in any direction and any path he offers is going to be equally decorative, equally vivacious, equally undemanding.

Audrey Beecham

I was reading a novel which I picked up by chance in an Oxfam shop and stumbled across more references to the Western European colony in Tangiers and Fez, and found this might shed more light on Audrey Beecham’s 1957 poem ‘The Cruel Coast of Barbary’:

I am tired land and poor
[...]
I am the pattern to which the winds have rubbed me
My nails are sharpened by the sea to knives:
I know not ships – though their forests have known me-
Nor the softening fleshes of long-lost lives.

Piracy has played beneath my skylit eyeholes.
Men were enslaved to pass their lives in pain.
Monkey tribesmen clustered on my shoulders
Many times enriched my dust with richest rain.
(‘The Cruel Coast of Barbary’)

The “Barbary coast” is originally simply a coast where Berber is spoken. (Tangiers is on the Atlantic.) The "enslaved" part refers to the staple of the corsair economy, that is slave-raiding; their ships were propelled by oars manned by slaves, usually (or in legend) European. The corsairs had their homes in Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers. In a previous post, I discussed this poem (the title poem of her 1957 book The Coast of Barbary) and speculated that it might refer to (female) homosexuality, and that the locale might be a reference to a fairly dense group of gay exiles, in 1957 but also ten years later and for a few years before 1957, in Morocco and what was at one time the “international zone”. Beecham published only two volumes of poetry, the one mentioned and one in 1979 (re-issued 1980) called A Different Weather. This is the background against which we can propose that Beecham set a poem, about the curse of being gay and about being alienated and dissociated from a social role generally, in a real place, and that “Coast of Barbary” refers to the expat colony on the coast of Morocco (and, doubtfully, in other Mediterranean cities). "The Coast of Barbary” is the title of a section of 14 poems in the book. The linking theme is likely to be the image of a coast as the ego, in the guise of a welcoming terrain where the proposed lover would make landfall and choose to linger. The poet is like a bay welcoming ships in and offering them fruit and sweet water. A poem about the Fortunate Isles makes this image sharp: these islands are found in the western Mediterranean, or past the Strait but close by. Yet we do not seem to have reached them. Instead, the poet offers a hostile shore, defined by captivity and infertility; and this is the Barbary Shore. This is how that phrase can be extended to all fourteen poems. The novel is A Smell of Burning, 1963, by Margaret Lane (although I rapidly went on to read Lane’s 1968 novel The Day of the Feast, also set in Tangiers and Fez). Lane says there were lots of Europeans living in Tangiers, and refers, briefly but rather pungently, to the prevalence of gays in their number – she remarks that the third question asked about any new arrival was whether they were gay. She also shows one of her characters being accosted by a ten year-old male prostitute in Tangiers, although this scene takes place in French, to shelter the susceptibilities of English readers. This confirms what one would glean from books by William Burroughs and Rupert Croft-Cooke, that there was a group of expats living there, numerous enough to provide interesting society for each other, and that some portion of this little group were gay and had either been prosecuted for related activities back in Britain or had simply chosen to live in a city where the police were not much interested in policing the morals of European residents.
A tourist website lists these artists as having lived in Tangiers: 'Matisse, Emily Keene, William Burroughs, Paul et Jane Bowles, Bernardo Bertolucci, Josep Tapiro, Antoni Gaudí, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eugène Delacroix, Mohamed Choukri, Federico García Lorca, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Pierre Loti, Roland Barthes, Jean Genet, Mick Jagger, Jack Kerouac, Paul Morand, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett... Tous ont vécu à Tanger. De coeur ou de naissance, tous sont des enfants du pays.' This leaves out Juan Goytisolo.
Tangiers was under international control because in an era of collective hysteria European powers had been very keen to prevent any single power from controlling the strait between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Another site I stumbled on describes many Republicans as having fled to Tangiers, a zone under international control, to evade Franco, as the new dictator of Spain. However, it points out that Franco occupied the Zone from 1940 to 1945, presumably to inhibit the political activity of these inherently anti-Franco individuals. This may be the source of the literary colony in Tangiers and it may not. I am also curious about the equally hedonistic expat colony on Ibiza, which was there in the 1930s and also had problems with Franco. John Harlan Hughes remarks “At the time of the novel, there were roughly 60,000 inhabitants: half European, half Moroccan Muslims and Jews.” (That is, his novel, set in 1942.) I understand the correct term is Tangerino (to say "Tanjawi" is more pretentious). The “international zone” reverted to Moroccan control in 1956, the year of Moroccan independence. The Europeans will have been mainly Spanish and French nationals and engaged in trade or in government posts; the western European dilettanti or sexual outlaws were just a smattering. But the police were still tolerant – surely the law did not allow someone to pick up a ten year-old boy, or the boy to solicit clients, but in practice this might rarely lead to an arrest. A character in one of Lane’s novels gives as reasons for living in Morocco the lack of income tax, the servants, the climate. By “servants” we understand that incomes derived from Western Europe had a high purchasing power in Morocco, due to exchange rate anomalies and also low wages. The character does not mention “tolerance for gay sex”.
Up to 1956, Tangiers was a boom town, possibly because the international control commission was lax, exchange controls were absent, and there was a low tax regime as well as a "clean" administration. Also because of smuggling into Spain, which had steep import duties as part of the Fascist policy of autarky and import substitution. There was a construction boom in the 1950s. It was not a low-rent town and was not the classic "town in decline" where drop-outs go to live in crumbling properties for minimal rents. It was full of businessmen. (Ibiza, at least in the 1950s, was a very cheap place to live.) As a prosperous town on the edge of extensive rural poverty and under-employment, its prosperity could also be accompanied by a large group of people without money – the classic "high rent, low wages" town. It was a European town in which half the inhabitants belonged to the Third World. After 1956, the "free port" privileges were abolished; Spain moved away from the policy of autarky after 1960; anyone who had capital left to set up somewhere else. But, the Northern European colony in Tangiers were not doing much business – they lived on remittances from the home country. As a group, they lacked the work ethic – so that problems of how to occupy leisure were unusually prominent. Croft-Cooke, in contrast, worked incredibly hard as a writer living off his royalties, but he still enjoyed an abundant social life, as he describes. (His memoir of the time is The Caves of Hercules.) He lived in Tangiers for fifteen years – after coming out of prison in England.
It has been claimed that Croft-Cooke was the first writer in England who actually went into print asserting that he was homosexual. There might then be a history of homosexuality as a status, separate from people simply living out their wishes and being with and for others. A tiny part of this history is also within the history of poetry... I feel bad that I haven't written that history. You can't take writing which is secretive and ambiguous and reduce it to documentary.
Beecham presents the Coast of Barbary as a curse. But is this Tangiers? against this idea, we have to say that the sources do not mention gay female expats as a feature and they were not doing anything illegal in Britain, so that exile would not seem to be an imperative need. Further, the tolerance which someone like Croft-Cooke found would make Tangiers a benign place to live, if you were gay and cultured, where you could attend gay parties and act out a gay sensibility without worrying who would disapprove. It was a way of being true to yourself. This “Barbary shore” was hardly an accursed place to be, and people would not have gone to live there if it had been. But, on balance, I find it likely that her poem refers to exile in Tangiers and is about the curse of being born gay. It is personal symbolism and we have to accept that the personal symbolism of a 1957 poem may have vanished over the edge of what intelligence can recover sixty years later.
Lane’s novels (which I found compelling reading) also describe the arrival of what, in 1963, was a new social group – the drop-outs. A review of her describes them as “derelicts and dilettanti”, although she is always less judgemental. These people were already there when the Rolling Stones visited Morocco. Lane portrays a whole ecology of people who had no purpose in life – they have no ambitions (although meeting similar people in cafes was always a priority). Their characters are invisible because they are so inactive. They are like the “new society” of students except that they are not willing to study anything. They are connected to the rise of a “counter culture”, although that involves a level of effort which is alien to them. The role of drugs and sexual freedom was also influential. They are anti-Western almost by default. The hippy lifestyle is not based simply on dislike of English life but also on immersion in a concrete alternative on Ibiza and in Morocco. And this is all an anticipation of the new poetry. Being “non-Western” in British poetry is linked to Camden Lock market and its stalls where people returning from Morocco sold Moroccan artefacts as a way of funding their next trip to the Strait. The abandonment of a work ethic allows artistic endeavour to take centre stage. It leaves a negligent serenity in which any surviving attention is given only to details either of subjective perception or of verbal style. It was a counter-balance to the academic influence: simply describing ideas produced something which was not poetry. The poems had to have human beings at their heart, and those humans could not simply be preoccupied with commuting, office life, and the mortgage.
The connection between the middle-class expats and the “drop-outs” is intriguing, even if Lane as usual shows us a fascinating contact zone without descending into mere reportage. We can contrast Beecham’s flat-out hysteria with the blank apathy of the Tangiers hippies. Beecham represents the frustration they were saying No to. They refused to start the chase.

Patrick Anderson and endlessly Canadian writing

Problems of Adjustment: Patrick Anderson (1915-79)

The birth date of 1915 fits right into the middle of the generation who became New Romantic poets, born generally between 1910 and 1920. As you know, many of them also vocally ceased to be New Romantic Writers as the climate changed.

I never wrote about Anderson, which is now a source of guilt. My work on modern British poetry starts in 1960, and I don't think he wrote any significant poems after 1960. I tended to leave Commonwealth poets alone and he had spent much of his life in Canada (although he lived in England up to his early twenties, usually taken to be the most influenceable part of your life). I am looking at successive versions of Jim Keery’s Apocalypse. An Anthology, not yet published but sure to be a thing that changes the landscape of memory, and I have noticed that Anderson was in the earlier, 500-page, version but not in the clipped, 300-page version. It was this poem:

‘My Bird-Wrung Youth’

My bird-wrung youth began with the quick naked

voice in the morning, the crooked calling,

and closed in the quiet wave of the falling

wing, dropping down like an eyelid –

O syringing liquid

song on the bough of flight and at night, light failing,

the nested

kiss of the breasted

ones floating out to sleep in a cup of colours:

wren’s flit and dimple, the shadowy wing of the curlew

spent between stone and fern in the hollow,

the barn-raftered swallow and far at sea the rider

gull on the billow

all night, all night kept sleep till steeply

the pillow

threw morning cockcrow

up in a column of straw and blood. In childhood

days opened like that, whistled and winked away,

but now with a harsher cry birds bury

my stolen heart deep in the wild orchard,

and whether they prettily

play with the plucked bud here or marry

a cloud, I

am lost, am emptied

between two sizes of success. For, clocking

past ceiling and dream sailing, they drop down

to pick apart in a nimble and needed rain

my limbs in love with longing, yet till I long

for my twin in the sun

they rise, they almost form, to be born

with a song

in a seventh heaven!

And I alone in the ambivalence

of April’s green and evil see them still

colonizing the intricately small

or flashing off into a wishing distance –

their nearer syllables

peck through the webs of every loosening sense

and in their tall

flight’s my betrayal.

This omission is a moment of alarm and I want to say something about Anderson now. (Surinx is primarily a musical pipe, so syringing means piping.) Surely he was one of the good New Romantics and his evolution in the early Fifties is significant as a way out of a position which had become tired and needed to metamorphose. Take this stanza:

I remember the day when the world rolled over

and the mist of the blizzard was the outfit of the wave:

the sun was soft as blubber that day,

through blindman's buff of fathoms he blew his haze

and rolled his bulk, and summer was never

stronger than that, was never in sea or hay

a lovelier weather.

(‘Soft Blizzard’)

The yokings of words are continually surprising (cf. past ceiling and dream sailing), and this is the New Romantic element, where we can’t really discount either surrealism or metaphysical poetry as a source. They are surprising rather than paradoxical and anti-rational.

There is a memoir by Robert Druce which contains the key information, largely private or secret during the poet’s lifetime (in The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing). At Oxford he was president of the Conservative Association; he went to America in 1938, became a pacifist, married an American communist, moved to Montreal, where he edited the retrospectively vital magazine Preview. In around 1950, he moved again, to a job in Singapore (for two years). He then spent twenty years or so in England, retiring in 1973 to concentrate on writing.

I read a book (can’t now remember which one, it was probably (can’t now remember which one, it was probably The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition, by Brian Trehearne) ) which indicated that Anderson had been a significant part of a breakthrough generation in 1940s Canada, but had been written out of the historical record because he was gay and the chronicler or chroniclers felt that a poet had to be macho and dealt with the rugged adversities of untamed Nature. The report also suggested that he was torn between gay life and marriage, that he had written excellent poetry while struggling with marriage, but when he became consistently gay he became happy and lost the vital chemicals, of struggle, ambiguity, and so on, and ceased writing interesting poetry. The problem may also have been that the history was written by poets from a magazine which was a bitter rival of Preview and they felt themselves to have been overshadowed and out-gunned by Anderson and P.K. Page. No-one is going to record that fairly in their myth-making retrospect. He impressed me by writing a book which was a history or anthology of intense male friendship, evidently a gallery of wonderful gay relationships, and a predecessor of Higgins’ Queer Reader. This was Eros. An anthology of male friendship, 1961. This was about as openly gay as you could get in 1961. There was a copy in the local second hand bookshop (in Mansfield Road) but I failed to buy it, the contents looked a bit familiar to me. But, what do I know. I was impressed that someone in Nottingham at the end of the 1950s had been well-informed enough to buy such a book – aimed at a fairly specialised, although large, market. (It is possible that the 1961 edition was just “friendship” and a 1963 edition expanded this to “male friendship”.) There is a 1991 article (for ECW) by Robert K. Martin, “Sex and Politics in Wartime Canada: The Attack on Patrick Anderson”, which describes a 1943 anti-gay attack on Anderson in a rival magazine. A review comments “Critic and poet John Sutherland initiated the long tradition of attacks on Anderson's poetry as lacking honesty or manliness. Anderson's poetry was critiqued as being (femininely) un-Canadian, which turns the poet into "other" or foreigner.” The review was of Queer is Here, a 1999 book about problems with Canadian tradition by Peter Dickinson.  

The book I actually own is The Colour as Naked, 1953. I would like to own   The White Centre (1946) but it is a rare book and people ask high prices. Naked is really good. A description could involve saying that the poems are based on concrete scenes closely observed, but that they also want to vault over that into pure subjectivity, or freedom, and that the poet possibly regards that as winning. This double impulse allows him to renew his energies with each poem. Some asymmetrical couplings of words link him to the New Romantics, without that becoming his main thrust. Negatives are easier to define – the communist phase seems to have evaporated, he is neither using the devices of Left poetry nor expressing repentance and views on why “history isn’t as simple as that”. No more is he writing about the end of his first marriage or the start of his long-term relationship with another man. The pictures of ordinary people and crowds may be a continuation of Left themes, asserting the relationship between the poet and everybody else. There are two sestinas. This form played a symbolic role, during the 1950s, in asserting a living link between the academics teaching Eng Lit, and writing poems, and the literature they taught. It was visibly difficult and showed ease. It was even meritocratic. These poems show Anderson moving organically into a new era where political commitment was seen as simplification, and formalism as a way into the mysteries of language. (Discussion on this form in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry.) He was good at everything, and it is almost unbelievable that he stopped soon after The Colour as Naked. I like this passage from a poem about the ‘Hand’:

Flag from a cradle, with a thumb to suck

whose wit transcends the ape, this pares and feels,

selects and holds

and is the wonder of habitual trick

to thrust and break the being out

for act and handshake, levers of a world.

This is so close to physical reality and yet so rich in ideas.

Comments have been made, by Trehearne for one, about the poet’s self dissolving and losing shape. This is happening in ‘Bird-Wrung Youth’, a poem initially about birds, where the poet (rather traditionally) becomes a bird and the bird is flying around, defying gravity. The poems are perhaps trying to reach this condition. But the poems in Naked are full of concrete details and mostly start with concrete scenes. The poet is perhaps like a camera moving across a scene full of people – this is apparently a Leftist programme although it is like the mobility of the bird. The poems are at least part-way documentaries. Perhaps the thing dissolving is the sound of the bird – sound has to dissolve and never was solid. And poems are made of sounds.

An email has arrived to clarify that: >>"syrinx" is also the vocal organ of birds, functionally similar to our vocal cords but quite different in operation. << So this word probably also contains "ringing" and "siren" and is an occluded echo of 'liquid'. If we imagine the present tense as “syrings” then the past tense is 'sywrung' and this is possibly audible in the title. So a syrinx is a thing that squirts twitters? O syringing liquid
song on the bough of flight and at night. Also, in the book it is immediately followed by a poem called 'The Strange Bird' which is almost certainly part of the same meaning-complex. This second poem is mystifying, full of dream imagery, and the most Barker-like of the poems in the book. It is the closest to utter freedom and also the most laden with fixated images from childhood and the past.In 'Bird-wrung Youth', lying in bed listening to birdsong has something to do with the idea of sexual freedom. The speaker's body image flutters, kicks, takes off into the skies. In the column of straw and blood, the straw is in the pillow and the column is an early morning erection, coinciding with cock-crow.

I do feel sad about his leaving Canada, and also that he went for 23 years without producing a volume of poems. But even poets have the right to a biography. He seems to have been very happy with his life partner, Orlando Gearing. There were some more poems in the mid-50s, after Colour as Naked. Anderson produced two different selections of his poems in 1976 and 1977 – A Visiting Distance and Return to Canada. Because of the literary climate, neither is reliable for his 1940s work, which to be honest is what really interests me. There does not seem to be a Collected. He never published a volume of poetry in Britain – most of his books seem to have come out from McClelland and Stewart, in Toronto.

There is a very good essay on Anderson by Patricia Whitney, available on the Internet. Whitney has drawn on Anderson’s Journal and on some letters from him and his wife to Pat Page (P.K. Page, as a poet), in a Canadian archive. The record shows that Anderson spent much of his time in Canada hanging out with the Labour Progressive Party, who were Moscow-line communists. The Canadian Communist Party were banned in 1940 under the War Measures Act, hence the new party. His so-called autobiography does refer to this but does not describe political enthusiasm, only the eccentricities of his fellow comrades. (One of his close friends is arrested in the flap after the defection of Igor Gouzenko, an event exploited to close down communist activities far beyond any espionage involvement.) A certain amount of subterfuge was involved in several aspects of Anderson’s position.

A seller’s blurb for First Steps in Greece reads “An endearing travelogue of Greece and it's islands in the late 1950's before the advent of mass tourism. Made colourful by the characters he met and his wonderful style of writing, a wonderful read.” So you think it was all more ‘colourful’ before the advent of mass tourism, but you are reading but you are reading the book because you are one of the Unknown Tourist Masses. During the 1950s, it became possible for working-class people to have holidays in the Mediterranean area. What had been a luxury for a luxury-living class became much more normal. During the rise of the package holiday, Anderson published three travel books. He abandoned literary poetry for rather informal and entertaining prose. This was part of class differences eroding. The wave of popularisation may actually connect to cultural Communism and to the simplicity demanded from communist writers. The travel genre is quite important for the cultural evolution of the 1950s; at one level it is made up of guide-books and deals with high culture, such as painting, architecture, the lives of great writers; at another level it connects to holidays and is consciously serene and cheerful.

I acquired his 1957 autobiography, Search Me. I wasn’t expecting much, but on examination this is a major work and a significant moment in the thin history of Fifties writing in Britain. The jacket describes also a radio play, A Case of Identity (by Nigel Dennis); it was broadcast on the Third Programme, which was only listened to by a few thousand intellectuals. Outside that enclave, the 1950s were not a good time for serious writing, while broadcasting and prose resembling broadcasting chatter were making all the running. Let us remember the films of the Rank Organisation, something which Younger Readers may not have heard of. They typified a certain phase of cheerful, unpretentious, anti-intellectual, ordinary but middle class, humour in the face of pretty ordinary adversity, which reliably satisfied a recurring wish for undemanding entertainment. Anderson published nine prose books in fifteen years. They must have done pretty well for the publishers to keep coming back. Certainly, they fit in at the higher end of the holiday reading market. Search Me could be a film with Donald Sinden as the hero. It makes me think of An Alligator Named Daisy or No Kidding (1960). I am musing on the Great Rampage section of Search Me as a light-hearted comedy starring Leslie Phillips and Geraldine McEwan. Britain became a different place when Rank stopped producing films. Search Me does tend to feature comic mishaps and larger than life eccentrics. It is genuinely unpredictable; thus, when you are thinking that he is having an easy ride on anecdotes, he says “But anecdotes have their suspect side; you framed and laughed at what you really wanted to be compelled by and enjoy.” The section on a ‘model village’ with provision for Maladjusted Children and a new hope for England, at Great Rampage, is comic but is also a forerunner of what ten years later would be called the counter-culture.

“You’ll only get an occasional whiff of the moral atmosphere...

“Which is?” I probed at once.

‘Oh well, love, or fraternity, the lost revolutionary virtue. And Merrie England. And bits of Martin Buber. And the wise darkness of the world, which I suppose would be close to Jung.’

On the strength of this I bought him another tomato juice. ‘With lemon’, he cautioned me. ‘Of course everyone has his own philosophy’ he went on. ‘It’s Schweitzer and Kathleen Ferrier when the teachers come, and FS Smythe and Sir John Hunt for the Scouts, and the weavers and potters are all for functionalism and the nature of the material, and the dancers relate themselves spontaneously to space. They did an Age of Anxiety ballet recently. Hefty village girls, carrying on a muscular flirtation with the Atom Bomb… Much criticised afterwards as insufficiently positive – it lacked organic context.’

(Smythe was a mountaineer and author of The Kangchenjunga Adventure, and Hunt was the leader of the successful Everest expedition of 1953.) The last third of the book is completely different, dealing with bisexuality in the shape of a Canadian painter who comes to live in Spain with his wife. It reads like a novel. One has to guess that the painter is really an avatar of Anderson (but maybe there were two people in Montreal whose marriages suffered from bisexual temptations). Key to Search Me is this lack of guilt, for example about the failure of a marriage, and the lack of assertion of a rigid identity, so that the speaker is always changing in changing situations. If the central theme of 20th C poetry was the assertion and recording of a character, Anderson was suspicious about Character and was moving towards the idea of personality as a process. Whereas both communism's view of History and romantic fiction's view of marriage see a final transition to a static and exalted state, Anderson sees both marriage and social life as a continuous series of adjustments; like someone seeing an object a thousand times and gradually grasping its real dimensions and shape. In the end, I felt that the theme of the book is that, once one has abolished guilt and obligation, a new version of 20th C life opens up, where the inability of social roles to fit the urgings of pleasure is abiding – not moving towards a resolution, but swept along on a shimmering tide of incidents. That is, it is reminiscent of Nigel Dennis’ Cards of Identity. Both books centre on the need for adjustment, but find that process mysterious and comic. They are at least amenable to the idea that both advertisements and magazines, and even films, may serve to adjust the consumer to society (and commodities to the consumer), and even that this is a long-term function of culture. Could this be the end of alienation?
I feel obliged to quote a poem from the book, as it is possibly otherwise unrecorded. This is “a description of my return to England in 1947”:

I

At evening the rocks, the fissures,

the slanted knife-shape like a gull tilting

and the cave becoming an arch and the arch crumbling

hold blue-white light over gravel,

startle like falling of plaster but do not fall:

westward the headlands veil and swell,

the mountain humps over the cooling beaches,

the cars start up, the picnic is dismantled,

a trifling litter swings and fills

with the flooding tide, the spine of the conger.

The dogfish egg floats in the darkness.

The dried-out tissue of the sea-pink trembles.

2

Excitement

blesses the objects. Form can give

security. One hides in the attractive

sense of an island. But tonight

by the oil lamp in the parlour

or changing my shoes on the cold linoleum

by the light of a candle, running out the sand,

or turning into the sea-dark at the doorway,

vague, warm, the moth in the wind

damp on the privet and fuchsia,

the honeysuckle swing with a tendril

and the ivy clipped to the rock and the heather

wired to its peaty soil,

I shall be ashamed of alliteration

and the obvious delight. I shall be ashamed

of rootless sensuality that pumps

the blood-red flower and impacts the stone,

for the poem behind the poem is inconsolable.

I shall want to cry with my own voice:

‘I have come back. It is after ten years.

How does one learn to live?’ and the question,

hidden behind the question, once again,

will rise in its unconscionable boyhood

to be the gunman of another twilight.

(possibly running out on the sand?)

The realisation that one cannot compete with Anderson as a commentator on his own poems is modified by the fact that in Search Me he is describing poems later than The Colour as Naked, or ones he has not written yet. He is so creative that the ideas of a few years before hardly crop up in this prose book.

I also feel that the sheer flow of ideas could not have been contained in poems, and this is why he moved into the less constrained, or organised, medium of prose. I think the scene is less Anderson as someone in internal exile, hiding behind entertainment, than someone gregarious and amusing who was genuinely like the people who wrote and staged Rank films, who knew all the reasons for not being abstract and demanding. So I don’t see Anderson's career as tragic.

PS. genuinely obscure Anderson fact. In 1948, a poem of his was published in Poetry Quarterly but attributed to GS Fraser, because Wrey Gardiner had mixed the sheets up.
PPS An interested scholar (JEK) has advised that the poem was attributed to WS Graham - Wrey Gardiner's correction note itself contained an error. ‘he dies daily writing his doom’s diary/ while body’s queer career is his carrier/ in time across a plain of life and paper’ – a touch of Graham there, I guess.
There are three vital essays on Anderson in ECW (originally Essays in Canadian Writing but after expansion Extremely Canadian Writing or possibly Endlessly Canadian Writing), volumes for 1991 and 1997, which really get with the homophobia and the psychological blocks of the time.
JEK has also pointed out how similar Anderson's poetry is to P.K.Page. A poem like the "return" one sounds as if he had been talking to painters a lot, probably his wife and Canadian painters she hung out with. That might link to writing poems about the body, which is part of the link to Page. cf.:

... and if you became lost, say, on the lawn,

unable to distinguish left from right

and that strange longitude that divides the body

sharply in half – that line that separates

so that one hand could never be the other –

dissolved and both your hands were one,

then in the garden though birds

and on the ground

flowers wrote their signatures in coloured ink –

would you call help like a woman assaulted,

cry to be found?

- which is Page but sounds like a series of Anderson passages, in prose or verse (see the poem about the Hand, quoted above).

Logue scholion: the surface meaning

Logue  addition: the surface meaning 

I looked at Logue again while writing a talk about gay themes in 20th century poetry.
Logue made no reference to any gay identity in his autobiography, but other information suggests that he was gay. So this is “quasi-non-factual”, or similar.
When I wrote about Logue’s Homer translations (material included in The Long 1950s), I interpreted the choice of subject in terms of a satire on militarism. Satirising the expedition to Troy followed up Logue’s 1950s poems on British troops being sent to Cyprus for a dubious war. Many years into the project (which began in 1959), dubious wars, with British participation, saw invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.
Is this enough as a motivation for a project which stretched over 40 years and amounted to some 400 pages? If Logue was writing an anti-imperialist poem, would he have left out, as he did, any material making an argument against 20th C imperialism, and spelling out the purpose of his poem, which actually remains inexplicit?
I think we can also see the long series of combats as a parade of male beauty and self-adornment, which expresses a gay aesthetic by turning young men into glamour objects. Endlessly, or at least serially, we see young men, showing off their physical prowess, exhibited for our gaze. The patient description of their dress and equipment is probably unique in modern poetry. We might be looking at all this detail, not to support hostile feelings about the aristocracy, but as expensive pin-ups.
Two parallels led me up to this change of view. Louis Aragon’s La semaine sainte is a novel about the painter Gericault taking part in the campaign of Napoleon’s army just prior to their utter defeat at the battle of Waterloo. A lot of the characters are dashing young cavalry officers, wearing brightly coloured uniforms and riding spectacular steeds. There is no apparent reason why a Communist would choose this subject, which has no relevance to class politics. But if we see it as a gay writer describing an endless series of brilliant young men wearing ornate and expensive clothes and trappings, it makes more sense. Secondly, I was responding to Christopher Whyte’s remark that George Mackay Brown staged a remarkable number of deaths, one every three pages (roughly!). Whyte asked why this was, and the answer (for me) is a peculiar eroticism of persecution, whereby sexual feelings towards young men are tangled up with a sense of punishment and doom. The feelings themselves attract punishment, and doom or “civil death” is the fate of the homosexual in a mid-20th C society. Having grasped this for Brown, I gradually came to see that the same pattern prevails in Logue’s version of the Iliad, and he was describing a vast series of glamourised deaths. The deaths are the climactic moments, and it is significant that these scenes mainly concern athletic young men.
We could also think of Cecil B De Mille. It was said that de Mille was the director who discovered the bathroom. Even in the 1920s, his Biblical epics had a strong element of sex, and there was a double basis for his popularity. Despite his overt interest in religion, he created a classic moment of eroticism in the scene in Cleopatra where Claudette Colbert appears in the bath of asses’ milk. If we see Logue’s Iliad as a Bronze Age epic of the Near East with a foreground morality and an emotional foundation in spectacle and eroticism, that brings it close to the Hollywood line of films about ancient history. Logue is economical with footage of women characters. If you imagine the Iliad remake as a film, and imagine yourself in the canteen with all the actors, then what you would be seeing is a throng of glamorous and narcissistic young men. This speaks for itself.
It could be hard to explain to someone why 20th C films expressed sexuality in terms of women unclothed but submerged in a bath, or ranks of young women kicking their legs up in a chorus line. Everything gets displaced– everything profound loves a mask, as Nietzsche said. It certainly is hard to grasp how AE Housman expressed erotic interest in young men so often in terms of murder and hanging. Mackay Brown unmistakably repeats the poetic pattern which Housman established (and which he took in part from homosexual Hellenistic epigrams of the Greek Anthology). I find this hard to grasp, and it yields to patient work on iconography. The emotional intent is deliberately concealed, and is complex in nature – de Mille made everything visual and explicit, rapidly graspable, but the opposite is true of modern poets. Brown may be using physical death as a metaphor for doomed love, and for love which was never allowed to flourish at all, but was cut short when only a thought, a fantasy. The epigrams are often about the death of a young man – this cannot be reduced to “the eroticisation of violence”, instead the subject is the poignancy of loss and of flowers caught by a frost in the spring.
The process of civilisation has been said to be follow a course in which basic impulses are subject to more and more elaborate restraints. This produces complex cultural achievements. What if the basic impulses are being restrained by fear? That could produce even more complex cultural achievements, in which what is precious and significant is carefully hidden. What was designed to be ambiguous can never be reduced to plainness and certitude. It is possible to be wrong – but, at the same time, just reading the surface meaning cannot be enough.

Fluid Jewels: James Kirkup

Fluid Jewels: James Kirkup 1918-2009 

Anecdote. In 1976, Kirkup published a poem in Gay News which referred to the sexuality of Christ and led to a successful prosecution of the editor for blasphemy. I was a student, and a fellow-student reported that his father could remember playing rugby with Kirkup, around 1940 possibly, and was indignant that someone gay had infiltrated the scrum. We all thought this was funny. Whether the courts should have been poring over this poem is another question. We don’t have figures about how many people in that scrum were gay.

In a previous piece I wrote: “Allott anthologised a poem of Kirkup which was a documentary: he was asked to watch a heart operation and to describe it. It is a good poem, he was accurate like a draughtsman. He could write about many different subjects but did not show a central sensibility, conceptual or linguistic. His poems remain enigmatic because they do not leave much trace. It may be that James Kirkup’s nimbleness and stylistic inconsistency were connected with his status as a homosexual, as a gay chameleon. This possibly indicates why heterosexuality is signalled by dullness and self-repetition: to show gravitas and fitness to hold power. This would give us a link between personality and style. In fact, Kirkup may qualify as a genuine outsider: that was his situation, although his poems conform in every other way to the norms of poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s.”
That leaves out his 40s poetry, and the obvious fact that his chameleon powers made him very prolific. Even in 1943, Wrey Gardiner’s firm (GWP) brought out a volume of his, a shared one with John Bayliss and J. Ormond Thomas. “The Glass Fable” was published in Poetry Quarterly in 1943 – I happen to have that issue. If he was born in 1923, then he wrote this poem when he was 20: however, all the newspaper obituaries give the date as 1918. Allott’s Penguin anthology gives 1923, which was surely supplied by the poet. Fable is said to be part of a longer poem about myth, which was published in a 1947 volume shared with Ross Nichols, future head of the Druid Order. It is influenced by Edith Sitwell. The number of male poets influenced by women is fairly low – this was a direction British poetry failed to go in. Fable reads like a ballet libretto, is full of descriptions of precious stones, has a landscape which is an emanation of subjective states, raises individuals to the level of myth, has subtle phonetic effects. This is what Sitwell was doing. “The Glass Fable” was published in 1943. Cultural controls were down in wartime, and this is closer to being an explicitly homoerotic poem than the work of poets who came before or after. The theme is of a prince and a shepherd (the staging is like a ballet or a pantomime) who have a dream about each other which leads them to meet. The shepherd boy gets over-excited

His arms are stretched, and twist
like sheets of mist
the trees at anchor swim
his chrysalis of smoke contains
his heart, shaped like a moth
or the velvet arches of his mouth.
His fingers are outsprayed, distinct
aesthetic feelers, and his antlered senses
radiate alarm
along the sinews of his waving form.

The date is in a palace made entirely of precious stones. “The crystal floors are deep, and spring/ from wells of molten glass”: so the solid level of glass that you can walk on is linked to a reservoir where the glass is still liquid. I think we are looking at precious bodily fluids here, at least something which is precious and a fluid. These lines explain the title. We seem to have a problem with adornment here, not that the jewellery is fake but that the person wearing them is not genuinely female. The liquid phase of the glass seems to take over; the palace collapses around their heads. The poem says:

I am the question
only you can answer.

He rises, slowly, in a long,
slow trance
ritual, receptive
dance
an iridescent manuscript
is buried in the tomb of his loins

This is reasonably close to gay erotica. It can be linked to Symbolisme, obviously, but can also be seen as the pole of poetry closest to opera and ballet, and furthest from documentary. Kirkup’s characters in Fable do not get dialogue, but the scenery is wholly expressive. Why classical music should have pursued specific conventions is too large a theme to open – of course dance followed all kinds of other directions after 1945 – but in 1943 there was a specific sensibility prevailing and you knew what kind of evening you were going to have if you visited the opera or the ballet. The link with gay life is well-known, even if most of the steady audience weren’t gay. Writing about precious stones at length is probably not something a heterosexual man would have done at that time. I bring this up (briefly) in order to clarify what Kirkup was about: there was an Apocalyptic style which many poets were using at that time, especially poets born between 1910 and 1920, but you can’t fit Kirkup into it. If you saw the great New Romantic exhibition at the Barbican in 1987, you may well have seen Leslie Hurry’s painted backdrop for Robert Helpmann’s production of Hamlet (the play) as the most exciting thing in the whole building. There was a style of subjective and poetic theatre at that time, summed up in Hurry’s imaginative costume and backdrop designs, which was just as much an artistic centre as the Apocalyptics, and which Kirkup fitted into. The “iridescent manuscript” looks meaningless and a lot of images in 1943 were low on meaning. Iris is rainbow, a thing which shines and has bright colours, so we could draw this back to “illuminated”, a word which does go with “manuscript”. Mediaeval manuscripts were made of skin, as loins are. Manuscripts are written by hand, and the contact of hand, eyes, and loins may be significant here. The “tomb” bit is not obvious but could refer to the repressed, hidden, etc. The passage is unclear, but at times the less integrated an image is the more motivated it is.

Kirkup became eminent, and got his Oxford UP deal, by writing documentary poems. The one Allott picked up for his standard anthology is about a heart operation, which Kirkup was present at (around 1953?) with the aim of recording it. Kirkup’s facility at making real events into credible verse was astounding. Poems like “The Observatory” have an on-the-spot feel, a cosiness, a commentary tone, which are strongly reminiscent of television. This was a new tone for poetry, back in 1955. Kirkup showed adaptability but that could also mean shedding ambitions. He wrote two poems to Queen Elizabeth, (for her birthday in 1953) and her coronation (also in 1953). The coronation was the event which made British TV. The commentator was the educated voice which was acceptable in every household. Kirkup’s willingness to achieve popularity, and to write fluently and superficially, was extreme. The coronation poem is one of the most revealing. His interest in frocks and jewels was not feigned. Personally, he seems to have started with poetry which was over-wrought and much too emotional (The Last Man, The Sleeper in the Earth) and migrated to poetry which was decorative and had far too little emotional commitment. Documentary was a key issue of the Sixties and Seventies, seen as a means of opening up parts of national life which an official view had firmly kept invisible. It was an area of excitement. But he had no interest in social issues. As documentary became more and more exciting and politically charged, he gave it up. He had no interest in sociology and was much better at visual details than at human relations. He lacked ambition after 1960.

The cover of the 1996 Salzburg UP book I have is by James Dickey and says “One is bothered as much as delighted by the cleverness of the poems, and by seeing many promising themes dissolve into conventionally pretty descriptions. You feel, not really the painful search to know and to grasp something, but that, for the bright and witty, everything is already known. These poems don’t develop well, either, they stand still and elaborate[.]” This was written in 1968, so late enough for JK’s work to be in plain sight. “Dependably and even remarkably brilliant”, Dickey says. I am amazed that the publisher put the core defects of the poetry in the cover text, but this is very good criticism. I think that JK lost interest in around 1963, and that being so fluent was not good because it led him to write very numerous poems which were almost indistinguishable from hundreds of other poems being written by published academic poets in the same year. The change may connect to being dropped by Oxford University Press, or to maturity. Perhaps he stopped writing autobiographical poems because, after 40, his biography wasn’t all that interesting. So, in the Forties the theme was romantic myth and Kirkup wrote such poems, in the Fifties empiricism was the doctrine and Kirkup wrote long documentary poems. You could see this as conformism or simply as the result of being sensitive to other people’s wishes and feelings. Either way, Kirkup gave up trying to write personal myth. His poetry made a transition to being shallow and disengaged, travel poetry which suffered from the problems of tourism. Was this part of the Sixties? It was an era of convenience, tourism for example was meant to be casual, undemanding, assured, smooth. Kirkup was writing convenience poetry, light and reliable like a modern camera. Arguably he was again reproducing the feel of an era. Salzburg University Press brought out a “selected” poems in four volumes, about 900 pages. What we need to know about centres on the long poems of the 40s and 50s, such as ‘The Glass Fable”, “The Last Man”, and “The Observatory”. In the potholing poem he writes:

Here too hang from the walls high terraced gardens
Of starry crystals, arcades, tapestries and grilles
Of candied petals, leaves and branches,
Calcite shawls, veils, laces, curtains, trophies and swags
Of stalactite, translucent fold-on-fold of mineral draperies,
Crowns, auroras and sepulchres of stony snow,
And looped lucent sheets that sound,
Drummed with the fingers, like an orchestra of tympani
In deep sub-dominant and dominant accord.
All spectral, glittering, vast and still,
Far below, the torrent, that has sought
A deeper bed, goes plundering, thundering soundlessly
Down, may be to the earth’s hot centre, there
To be ardently converted into
Fountains of boiling ash, or gulfs of steam.
(from the 24-page poem “Descent into the Cave”, printed in a 1962 volume but probably written around 1958)

This shows how good his documentary writing was. I chose this passage because it is so close to parts of “The Glass Fable”. The jewelled landscapes of that poem are visibly dependent on the Book of Revelations – Kirkup had no interest in the ideas of the apocalyptics, but did go back to Revelations. The “sea of glass” of Revelations does appear in “The Glass Fable”. Jewels do have an importance – they start out as the walls of heaven, become intensely emotional symbols speaking quite basic desires, become part of documentary scenery in a cave in Somerset, and then become decorative and shiny and unresponsive.

Kirkup gave a statement to the St James Press reference work on Contemporary Poets, in which he says that one of his themes was solitude. CP is a wonderful book, with hundreds of statements from poets in the whole English-speaking world, and of course the editors aren’t responsible for what the poets choose to say. I think Kirkup could make fluent statements of things he didn’t believe, and had spent years learning how to make gracious conversation without giving away his real feelings. (He also mentions UFOs as a theme.) Solitude is the main theme of some of his poetry but it is hardly the real story. He declined military service in the war, but took the alternative of working for the non-combatant Pioneer Corps. Derek Stanford’s memoirs describe his career as an officer in the Pioneers, where he seems to have met a large number of artists and poets. I don’t have any specific evidence on this, but in the atmosphere of the 1950s being either gay or a pacifist/ conscientious objector was likely to cause outrage and rejection. Kirkup did become very conformist in the Fifties and his Coronation poem can be juxtaposed with declining to serve His Majesty with rifle in hand. He did avoid prison on both scores. The New Romantic poets generally were anarchists and pacifists.

Kirkup wrote a Nativity play which was performed at Bristol cathedral and was, according to the jacket text, broadcast on radio and television (in 1961). He reached a mass audience with this. The link with the Coronation and birthday poems is depressing – so many English poets sought refuge with Church and Crown, the traditional patrons. Poets who stuck with the idea of the personality deserve credit for their obstinacy. As the Empire collapsed, it looks as if at least some poets sought refuge in institutions that had been around since before the Empire  – Church and Crown, returning psychologically to the mid-sixteenth century. Old money in perplexing times. Kirkup wrote a historical pageant about Peterborough cathedral. Stray biographical notes show Kirkup and Robin Skelton, around 1950, organising poetry events and short-run publishing in Leeds. This is a nascent "Leeds scene", anticipating provincial poetry scenes in the 1950s. It doesn't confirm the "solitude" thesis. There may have been a shared feeling which allowed both Kirkup and Skelton to continue the mythological preoccupations of the war period – possibly. But certainly they suggested to Leeds undergraduates that poetry was still being written and had not died out in the nineteenth century.

On reflection, I think that The Last Man and The Sleeper in the Earth are mainly influenced by Baudelaire. This gives us a match – the poems about grandiose and accursed Romantic heroes come from the “maudit” part of Symbolisme and the ones set in unrealistic and balletic landscapes come from another strand of Symbolisme. This tells us what Kirkup was reading before he got going. The problem with the poems about doom is the lack of explanation in them, which makes identification incomplete or impossible. This noticeable silence is related to the problem of talking about emotions stemming either from relations between homosexual men or from solitary feelings of frustration, resentment, sadness, etc. strongly related to being homosexual. These poems are the opposite of confessional, because the psychological core has been reduced to silence. The first twenty years of his work are not "part of the history of gay consciousness" but "omit vital omissions which are part of what was suppressed and can't be recovered". Despite the silence, I am sure that anti-gay prejudice affected Kirkup’s freedom of speech and probably compromised his career. I can’t name an individual who did damage, or a concrete moment when this pressure was exerted, but I have no doubt that he was culturally victimised. This has to be made clear as part of collective self-knowledge. Because the silent rules have changed so much, we can at least say that there are silent rules and that poets are the victims of these rules. Does that mean others benefit from them? That is harder to answer. Reading Kirkup’s poetry is problematic because of what was silenced, which may be damaged again as we voice it. It is reasonable to think, both that he could not say what he needed to, and that he developed into new realms of symbolism and ambiguity in order to say it nonetheless. There are quite urgent questions about where the silent rules come from and how we can change them. The wish to hurt other people and make them shut up is not exactly mysterious. Culture expresses it, like other wishes.

Extended Breath includes two poems on flower arranging. It is reasonable to say that writing about numerous small decorative objects, capable of containing good taste and remembered affection, can be a mode of gay taste – and in fact, that Kirkup’s later poetry has a gay voice, even if without the hopes and despairs of younger years. 'Ten Pure Sonnets’ is from the 1963 volume A Refusal to Conform and has more commitment than what is around it. The labelling of the Salzburg books means you can’t work out the date of anything, but if the poems are in order you can make rough assessments.
(Extended Breath is one of two Salzburg books labelled as "Long poems", although most of the poems in it are not long.)

After a few days involved with the Kirkup case, I am not eager to read all four volumes of his
Selected. So, did I enjoy what I read? We have to leave out the question of whether he could not write clearly, in his most emotional moments, because the biographical material came from gay relationships (or gay solitude) and the society of the Forties and Fifties was not open to that. The social issue is of great interest, but you can’t rewrite the poems even if they were wrecked by silent political pressures. ‘Fable’ doesn’t work out. ‘The Last Man’ is too overwrought, it is insistent rather than having a curve of development. But ‘Descent into the Cave” and ‘The Observatory’ certainly work. He avoids psychological depths by dealing with immediate sensory data, but the poems do have a psychology – the poet’s instant, cutaneous reactions. Basically, his volumes of the 1950s (and as far as the 1962 Descent into the Cave) are the good ones. The four Selected volumes include a lot of weak material.
The jacket of A Refusal to Conform announces that he is giving up poetry. Although he issued quite a few books after that, it may well be that he slowed down a great deal and that his output from 1963 to 2009 was much slower and less committed.  My project has to do with British poetry 1960 to 1997 and Kirkup’s artistic achievement after 1960 is marginal.