Fifty Fifty E-Book

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A Book of the Year 2019 in The Morning Star.This is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a small, ambitious press over a period of radical transformation in publishing. Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of letters - handwritten, typed, and now emailed - between an author and the editor.Beginning in 1969 with the response to an invitation to subscribe to Carcanet for two guineas, the book traces Carcanet's progress and offers insight into the nature of literary editing. At its heart is the personal relationship of author and editor/publisher, the conflicts, friendships and vicissitudes that occur at the nexus between the work, its creator, publisher and reader. Poets are central, but fiction writers, translators, biographers and critics also contribute to the Carcanet ferment and firmament. Fifty Fifty celebrates the writers', readers' and editor's risks, passions and pleasures.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Editor’s note by Robyn Marsack

Introduction by Michael Schmidt

1969   •   Anne Ridler

1970   •   Elizabeth Bishop

1971   •   Edwin Morgan

1972   •   Charles Tomlinson

1973   •   Donald Davie

1974   •   Sylvia Townsend Warner

1975   •   C.H. Sisson

1976   •   Thom Gunn

1977   •   W.S Graham

1978   •   Myfanwy Thomas

1979   •   Octavio Paz

1980   •   Laura Riding

1981   •   Bill Manhire

1982   •   David Arkell

1983   •   Frank Kuppner

               Robert Gavron

1984   •   Elizabeth Jennings

1985   •   John Ashbery

1986   •   John Ash

1987   •   Stuart Hood

1988   •   Charles Hobday

1989   •   Sujata Bhatt

1990   •   F.T. Prince

1991   •   Robert Wells

1992   •   Les Murray

1993   •   Seán Rafferty

1994   •   Denise Riley

1995   •   Jorie Graham

1996   •   Christine Brooke-Rose

1997   •   Christopher Logue

1998   •   Anne Stevenson

1999   •   Alison Brackenbury

2000   •   Neil Powell

2001   •   Mimi Khalvati

2002   •   Christopher Middleton

2003   •   Peter Scupham

2004   •   R.F. Langley

2005   •   Patrick Creagh

2006   •   Alastair Fowler

2007   •   Kate Kilalea

2008   •   Arts Council England

2009   •   Tom Raworth

2010   •   Kay Ryan

2011   •   Carola Luther

2012   •   Caroline Bird

2013   •   Kei Miller

2014   •   Vahni Capildeo

2015   •   Sasha Dugdale

2016   •   Eavan Boland

2017   •   James Keery

2018   •   Iain Bamforth

Acknowledgements

with an introduction and interjections by Michael Schmidt

edited by Robyn Marsack

Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

This new eBook edition first published in 2019.

Cover image © Jonathan Wolstenholme.

Introduction & interjections copyright © Michael Schmidt 2019.

Editorial matter copyright © Robyn Marsack 2019.

Letters copyright © individual authors/their Estates 2019.

"Acknowledgements" constitutes an extension of this copyright notice.

Book design by Andrew Latimer.

The right of Robyn Marsack to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 879 3

Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 880 9

PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 881 6

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

For Kate Gavron

EDITOR'S NOTE

My own connection with Carcanet Press began in 1981, when I approached Michael Schmidt with the suggestion that Carcanet re-publish the poems of Edmund Blunden. He said they had been wanting to do so and asked me to make a selection. When I delivered it to him in Manchester, I was enthralled by the nature of the operation in the small Corn Exchange office. Michael forgave me for tripping over a cord and wrenching a plug from the wall, which erased his morning’s typesetting – and in 1982 I joined the firm as a novice sales and marketing understudy, while hankering to be an editor. I worked out of Helen Lefroy’s spare room in London, had a spell at the Corn Exchange when Peter Jones was away in India, and then moved to premises in Southwark when Bob Gavron acquired Carcanet. The Folio Society kindly gave us an office in the corner of their building: my own desk at last, and a phone, and access to all sorts of publishing experience in kind colleagues there… My connection with Carcanet continues, and so does the education in poetry it provides.

      Mark Fisher’s 20th anniversary compilation, Letters to an Editor (Carcanet, 1989), proceeded along different lines from the current one, with 328 letters, several from the same writers over the years, no notes, and introductions to each locale – Oxford, Cheadle Hulme, Manchester – of the Press that are shrewdly informative. I was amused to read some of the reactions to the request for permissions to publish those letters, including this one from Patricia Beer (21 January 1989):

I am fascinated by the idea of an anthology of letters to Carcanet and in principle I am delighted with the possibility of being included in it. I’m fairly certain that I haven’t said anything indiscreet in mine (though of course I shall be glad to be shown that I haven’t) but I do wonder if I’ve said anything interesting – lapidary comments or good jokes or anything like that – and I shall be glad to be shown that I have. […] is there anything else I can do? Shall I write a bestseller?

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James Atlas, nine of whose letters were included in the compilation, wrote to MNS on 16 May 1989:

I have just spent the morning reading through these letters; what a strange experience! I feel paralyzed with self-consciousness as I sit down to write to you now: to think that one actually writes about oneself, and leaves a public record even in private correspondence. Of course, no one will ever write my biography; but as I read these letters, I had many tumultuous thoughts: that I’ve had an interesting life; that I did actually possess a certain degree of self-knowledge, though not enough to prevent me from doing things I shouldn’t have done; that I’m only slightly different now than I was twenty years ago; and that these letters, I’m glad to say, might be of some slight interest to people interested in literature […] illuminate a little corner of literary life. It was fun reading them, remembering how happy and unhappy I’ve been.

2

Living authors have mostly been very obliging about allowing publication in this volume, even if they have had misgivings about their younger selves and opinions; we are very grateful to them, and also to authors’ executors/estates.

      It has not always been easy to match correspondents with years: some correspondents would have provided letters of interest for every year; others, who have been really important to the Press, are nevertheless not represented here. As Stella Halkyard observed to me: ‘it’s so interesting to see how significant numbers of writers seem to store up their best/ most lively writing for the work and seem not to want to waste it on mere letters, whilst for others their letters are all of a piece with the work’.

      In the present compilation I have tried to suggest, through the footnotes, the wider context of the letters, and the connections between writers and publications – even so, not all the authors connected with the Press are mentioned. The bibliography, valiantly undertaken by Stella Halkyard, at least gives a sense of the range of each year’s publications.

      I have standardised dating, references to PN Review and book titles within letters. Omissions or occasional emendations are indicated by square brackets. Michael Schmidt is referred to as MNS.

NOTES

Patricia Beer (1924–99) was brought back into circulation by Carcanet, starting with her

Collected Poems

(1988) and then her fiction and non-fiction in the 1990s.

James Atlas (1949-2019) was at Oxford on a scholarship exchange from Harvard when MNS and Peter Jones were setting up Carcanet. He went on to become a notable editor (at the

New York Times

), critic and biographer, first of Delmore Schwartz and later of Saul Bellow. His

Shadow in the Garden: a biographer’s trail

was published in 2017.

INTRODUCTION

I.

Memory, over time, becomes more and more a collaboration between actual events, accretions and imagination. There are gaps which imagination plausibly bridges or supplies from hearsay. The main problem with my memory, apart from its increasingly tenuous hold on some parts of the past, is that it has very little sense of chronology. Before and after are reversed and therefore, sometimes, effect and cause. One thing is unarguably true: the world into which Carcanet Press edged uncertainly in 1969 is so remote from the present-day reality of poetry publishing as to seem a foreign country and, despite its technological poverty, in many ways more amenable to the innocent prospector than the present republic of poetry. We did things differently there.

      As an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, and then for just a year as a graduate student, I experienced a curriculum remote from modern curricula. To be admitted to Oxford in 1967, one was required to know Latin, both to read it and in a rudimentary way to compose. Undergraduates spent the first year re-reading Virgil. Like most English writers and readers for generations before ours, from richer and poorer backgrounds, we knew something not only of Virgil but also of Horace, Catullus, Ovid, Caesar (Gallia est omnis…), Cicero, and we had been exposed to the historians, Tacitus in particular. If we hadn’t read Martial, Juvenal, Propertius et al, we expected to make their acquaintance in due course.

      We had to study Old and Middle English, reading the whole of Beowulf, much of the Anglo-Saxon poetic canon, and Chaucer, a substantial amount of Gower, Langland, Gawain,Pearl and then the Scottish Chaucerians (as we were taught not to call them) – Dunbar, Henryson and Gavin Douglas. Our main concern – certainly mine – was the primary texts, not the critical literature.

      At the same time we were reading the English canon from the sixteenth through to the early twentieth century. All of us reading English spent our first term on Milton, conning the poetry and some of the prose, and applying to it what theory was about at the time (mainly classical theories of rhetoric and genre). Thus all undergraduates had a common grounding. We then progressed rapidly, more or less chronologically, from Wyatt and Surrey up to – if I’m not mistaken – D.H. Lawrence. Contemporary literature, being contemporary, we could tackle on our own.

      Each week we wrote an essay for our medieval course and an essay for our modern course. Essays averaged 3,000 words. Each week we had a shared tutorial (usually two students) with our medieval tutor (in my case, Alan Ward) and with our modern tutor (in my case, Ian Donaldson in my first year and subsequently Terry Eagleton, fresh from Cambridge). There were lectures, too. Some of them were shrill and mannered and quite famous, like David Cecil’s. The lectures I best remember were occasional, by Christopher Ricks, and by Roy Fuller when he was Professor of Poetry. The course lectures were not compulsory and, not being compelled, my attendance was irregular.

      Terms were short – eight weeks of intensive study – with long breaks for reading and for travel, and for travail, as I began with friends to put Carcanet Press together.

      The nature of the Oxford curriculum had a considerable impact on Carcanet. I loved the structure of the course and the way it gave me and my contemporaries a strong sense of continuities and developments, of the generic and thematic connections between works remote in tone and time. As the curricula changed, one of my missions as a publisher was to try to provide some texts a new reader might miss – hence an accessible Gower or Henryson, a Surrey, a Smart – reminders, signals of the primary wealth that is there, giving off its energies. And there were the neglected figures, neglected even by our teachers: Gascoigne, say, and the great Sermon writers, and Chatterton who seemed to us much more than a footnote, and Aphra Behn, the Rossettis. Carcanet’s Fyfield Books (now the Carcanet Classics) were a response to a growing sense that the tradition, and not only the minor but key figures in it, were being allowed to drift off, or were being consciously sloughed, when they should remain current resources for poetry writers and readers.

      We did not at the time seem troubled by the lack of choice in the curriculum, though we sometimes complained about omissions. We thought we would learn to choose our own ways in due course, which of course we did. My friends and I in establishing Carcanet thought we were publishing for writer-readers like ourselves. The lecteur was our semblable and frère and not yet an hypocrite. We learned to be ironists after the die was cast.

      Had I not had a kind of phobia of libraries, I might not have become involved in publishing. Until my third year at Oxford, libraries struck me as picturesque but insanitary places. I would no more share a book (except with a friend) than I would a toothbrush. I did not like to read among other readers, their different degrees and intensities of concentration were a distraction, their physical presence a provocation. I liked to sit back comfortably and privately, indoors or out, to read, not bend forward in study mode. I must have been more of a reader than a student even then.

      I bought books, especially second-hand books, which as soon as I acquired them seemed to be purged of pestilence. I became obsessed with editions published by Jacob Tonson (1655–1736) and down the years I acquired several. I developed a substantial personal library of old and new books that became an almost intolerable burden when changing domicile and city, and requiring miles of shelving. And now on my computer I have a good quarter of those expansive editions contained in no space at all. That’s one of the most radical changes that half a century has wrought: to read widely we no longer need books.

      Which is sad news for a publisher.

II.

It would be disingenuous of me not to mention one particular book which was formative and certainly had an impact on my editorial discriminations and set me at odds, from time to time, with writers I valued deeply – Edwin Morgan, Donald Davie, Laura Riding Jackson. I still think Understanding Poetry is a wonderful point of departure for a reader and writer, but one that needs to be left behind at a certain point. That point for me was when I encountered the poetry of C.H. Sisson in 1971 and realised that the furrow I was beginning to plough needed to be wider. There was much that I had to learn, and part of that learning entailed self-contradiction. Whitman’s

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

is a proper legend for the tombstone of a servant of any modern Muse. It is as well to remember that in Whitman’s poem these words are uttered by a book. The book that speaks to us is the book we are reading, Song of Myself.

      In the 1960s, and for three decades before and as many as three decades after, Understanding Poetry: an anthology for college students, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, was the staple expository anthology for poetryreading seniors in many American schools, and for university undergraduates. There was a companion volume about fiction.*

Understanding Poetry was first published in 1938, and after the war it gained ground, becoming the anthology of choice for teaching purposes in the United States. It went through three revisions, the first in 1950, by which time its use was widespread and its perceived defects needed remedying. There was the 1960 edition, with further improvements, the edition I used at school. The most recent revision to the book occurred in 1976. It had a run of almost half a century, adjusting New Critical ideas to a changing world. The changes in the anthology, of inclusion and exclusion, of critical extension and contraction, were in the interests of making the anthology’s approach incontestable.

      The book came out of the very milieu that helped to form Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and (to a lesser extent) Elizabeth Bishop; it is a book familiar to almost every American poet born between 1930 and 1970. Its effect was to clarify and to simplify; it homogenised readership. We – my classmates and I, my American generation – knew what poems are. There were right answers, there were acceptable procedures of reading and interpretation. Certain canonical poems responded well to the New Critical approach. They were foregrounded; poems that failed to respond were not included. Lyric and narrative were privileged and certain poetic procedures came to seem inevitable. Ron Silliman, who like many of us has had a struggle escaping the book’s gravitational pull, describes it as ‘hegemonic’. The contemporary reader brought up with it had specific expectations and recognised ‘real poetry’ and ‘fake poetry’ a mile off. Silliman’s mature poetry wouldn’t have stood a chance.

      The introduction to Understanding Poetry lists general mistakes people make with poetry. Soon we are put right, we make no more mistakes; our career as contemporary readers is off to a confident start. We read well in ways we have been trained to do. A habit of mind is created: readers need explanation and direction; there is an authority and that authority is not generally challenged; the more a reader – student or teacher – instinctively performs the reading function promoted by the book, almost as a reflex, the better. The first step is to step back, create distance: we come to the perimeters of the poem not receptive and self-effacing, but with fixed expectations. We sneer at pretension and distrust experiment.

      In the original prefatory ‘Letter to the Teacher’ the principles of the anthology are established.

This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry. The temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object of study is usually overpowering. The substitutes are various, but the most common ones are:

Paraphrase of logical and narrative content;

Study of biographical and historical materials;

Inspirational and didactic interpretation.

Of course, paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and a study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but these things should be considered as means and not as ends. And though one may consider a poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest is in the poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination as a document.

By this series of prescriptions, the poem should be sufficient in itself. We experience the poem by reading: it is textual, whatever its aural properties, and the strategies for understanding it start always in its textuality.

      This book gave the American poet coming of age between 1940 and 1980 (at least) a substantial, stable and more or less constant ‘contemporary reader’ to address or affront, to beguile or épater. Poets had a clear choice: they could go along with it (they might be quite comfortable with it, as I was), or they could kick against it. Ginsberg, Creeley, Duncan, Snyder, Plath, Rich, Levertov, Baraka, Koch and Ashbery, Bernstein, Hejinian and Antin all had experience, direct or indirect, of the book and the people of the book and this experience was part of their formative environment.

      A stable readership is a convenience. For publishers, the risk of selection is minimised. Teachers know what they are doing, examiners too. When decorums are rigorous, young writers have to be plucky to challenge them. Deviants are instantly recognised. No wonder reaction, when it came, was powerful, and diverse; no single party emerged but a number of different deniers. The independent imagination, once liberated, would neither accept the old confines nor subject itself to new – at least, for a time.

III.

It was also important in the formation of the Press that my close friends and colleagues, though we had a substantial shared culture, were profoundly engaged with certain poets and poetries. Gareth Reeves, whose father worked with Robert Graves and Laura Riding and who had spent childhood holidays in Mallorca in the company of the Graves establishment, was a gentle but firm editor in his own right; he and I spent – it sometimes seemed – all our waking hours talking about poetry, and his edition of George Herbert, produced shortly after we left Oxford, was a book that had a big impact on me.

      Peter Jones, my closest friend and collaborator in establishing Carcanet, was passionate about Pound and was soon editing the Penguin Book of Imagist Verse. He was also writing Fifty American Poets and we read together, puzzling over some of those writers who would not fit the Procrustean bed of Understanding Poetry and who seemed especially difficult in an English context. Grevel Lindop was passionate about Yeats, and specifically about elements in Yeats, the mythologies, which I found and still find rebarbative. He was also reading Northrop Frye. There was continual, committed conversation; and other writers, too, played into this discourse.

      Some of them were established writers. Peter Jones gave me the first Collected Poems of Elizabeth Jennings in 1967. I went to meet her, forming a close and durable friendship, though her own concerns did not intersect with mine, particularly, at the time. Anne Ridler was among the first poets I met and from whom I sought advice. It was either Donald Davie (who had come to know her work by way of Yvor Winters) or Roy Fuller (due to his fascination with syllabics and the prosodies it made possible), who suggested I go to meet Elizabeth Daryush at Stockwell, the home her father, the poet laureate Robert Bridges, had built for her on Boar’s Hill. I wrote a poem about her: she seemed so singular and exemplary to me at the time (even more so now). It included the lines:

You evolved a mystic disregard for commerce,

For war, assassination; instead adhered

To what does not change, is not destroyed,

What you share with Sumer, Greece and Alexandria,

With Amherst, Weimar. Hampton Court,

Curious territory no single map contains,

A Geist without race, which cannot be annexed,

Enjoined, perverted, a refinement

Hungry for forms and the few sharp timeless truths.

Nothing could have been more remote from the poetics of modernism that enthralled my friends and me at the time, or the Poundian aesthetics of Donald Davie, and yet her poems appealed despite their remoteness from speech, the time-bound timelessness of their diction, their rhyme, their insistent otherness:

Old hunter for youth’s head,

          These are your old decoys –

A matron diamonded,

          A man with golden toys;

And these, too, long ago,

          Were children that you charmed –

This lad who failed to grow,

          This girl still empty-armed

      Even her syllabics, which are clearly spoken poems, come from a realm remote from the present. If syllabics were intended to bring the language closer to that of speech, her speech was from another age and realm.

      There were other poets whose writing, if not lives, were as rooted as Elizabeth Daryush’s, among them the ubiquitous, witty Sally Purcell, whose translations Provençal Poems (1970) was among our first crop of seven pamphlets, and who edited George Peele’s poems for our Fyfield Books series. The Jesuit priest Peter Levi and the poet John Fuller – his Sycamore Press active producing hand-printed broadsheets and pamphlets – were also presences, but we were not so close to them. While I was an undergraduate, John’s father Roy was elected Professor of Poetry. Though I campaigned against his candidacy, he was of a forgiving nature. Having pointed me in the direction of Elizabeth Daryush, he wrote the preface to her Verses: Seventh Book (1971), our first of her collections. He also urged me to read the poems of Marianne Moore. He was drawn to her syllabics, a form she articulated in the same year as Elizabeth Daryush did, and by her tone and manner, remote from the sometimes archaic feel of Daryush’s.

IV.

I was in the habit of writing letters to people early on. Going away to school at the age of fourteen, I wrote almost daily to my mother; and as friendships developed there were always the long gaps of holidays when the only way of keeping in touch was writing. An epistolary habit is hard to shake, even when e-mail comes along. Indeed, e-mail can make the habit an addiction. Though the medium is treacherous and reductive, and one revises less than one should on a computer, still, it facilitates rather than inhibits the letter-writer.

      Oxford and the wider literary environs, when my friends and I were undergraduates, were full of people who had served in the Second World War and quite a few from the First and those who had participated in the Spanish Civil War. Many not very much older adults had been children during the Second World War and history felt close. Peter Jones, born in 1927, was from Walsall and could remember the bombing of Coventry and the immediate post-war years.

      For my own part I was a runaway from the Vietnam War, having won the draft lottery and renounced my American citizenship in 1968. I stress the feeling for continuities and for living – or survived – history because it was part of the sense of place we had, a place (and, in retrospect, a time) we were fortunate to occupy. It also entailed a strong belief in the centrality of politics, political ideas and debates, and of the literature to those ideas and debates, from the beginning but especially as exemplified in Milton, the great pamphlet tradition and the later engagements of Romanticism. Left and right had not polarised to the extent that they have today and, while the Entitled Tory was already a figure of caricature, the genuine conservative could be understood, the principles of permanence had not yet been discredited, and the fourth estate fulfilled its democratic function with relative care and tact. We were all sceptics but had not developed the cynicism that has become pervasive.

      One final sub-set of observations, before we start reading the letters that my long-term comrade Robyn Marsack has chosen for this compendium.

      When Carcanet began, the floor and the ceiling of the literary world were much closer together than they are now. I wrote a letter to Sir Basil Blackwell, one of the great booksellers of the age, and after a few days I had a reply. He invited me to tea, we had a lively exchange, and we remained in touch after that. He invited me to put little racks with Carcanet’s pamphlet publications in his Broad Street shop (his office was just above the shop) and those racks survived for two decades, though they were used for other publishers’ produce later on. A tiny publisher and a great bookseller were on the same side, as it were, and they met, despite the substantial gulf of years and experience between them, almost as equals. It was not impossible, in fact, for a tiny publisher to sell books to W.H. Smith, and when Elizabeth Jennings’s Collected Poems received the W.H. Smith Award in 1987, we disposed of over 40,000 copies through that most commercial of marketplaces. Beyond W.H. Smith, there were few chains, and it was possible to meet the independent bookseller face to face with, or sometimes without, an appointment, and not always in a pub.

      On a similar note, I wrote to Peter du Sautoy, Managing Director of Faber and Faber, for advice. He replied, we met, we became friendly, and he nominated me for the Arts Council’s Literature Panel as a junior member. In those days the different art forms had committees of specialists (for literature the committee consisted of publishers, writers, librarians and broadcasters). On this panel I met C.B. Cox, editor of Critical Quarterly and Professor of English at the University of Manchester, and this indirectly paved the way for Carcanet to move to Manchester in 1972. Peter du Sautoy’s successor Charles Monteith, then editorial director at Faber, was a friend and patron. There was a strong sense of common purpose rather than competition between established independent imprints and the poetry start-ups which, around that time, included Fulcrum Press (1965–74), Anvil (1968–2016), Carcanet and (a decade later) Bloodaxe (1978).

      Despite my personal, early, and now overcome aversion to them, the public and academic libraries of the 1960s and 1970s were crucial for publishers of all kinds. More than a quarter of our early turnover went through major library suppliers. That is one of the elements in the commercial equation that has most sadly mutated in half a century: library sales meant books reached a wide variety of readers for whom access through bookshops was not an option. The decline in the libraries inevitably contributes to a decline in readership.

V.

      The first meeting I attended when I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1967 was that of the Oxford University Poetry Society. Its president was Roger Garfitt, subsequently a Carcanet poet and in the early years a close collaborator. I seem to remember him on that occasion wrapped in a kind of wizard’s gown and with the inclusive, friendly, smoky vagueness that accompanied many young cultural people in the evenings of the late 1960s. He declared that the OxfordCambridge literary magazine Carcanet was up for grabs and if anyone was interested they should see him after the meeting. I did so and came away with the prize.

      We ran Carcanet as a magazine for two years, then decided that as a swan song, since we were all graduating in 1969 and the journal had run its fitful course, we would produce some pamphlets of key poets from our brief editorship. The decision was catalysed by the suicide of Robert Needham, a brilliant young man who was translating the poems of Celan well before Celan was on the English map. His tiny posthumous pamphlet was our first publication, entitled Blind Openings. There were six further pamphlets, two of translations. We sold them by subscription in advance. They were widely and positively reviewed and did so well we decided on a second and then a third series. That was where the history of Carcanet began, though after the third series we had turned to book publications.

      The Oxford University Poetry Society was crucial in the development of Carcanet. I became its president in due course and was able to invite poets I wanted to hear. Basil Bunting declined (we offered expenses and no fees), declaring, ‘You don’t invite a fiddler to play and offer him his expenses.’ I got to know a number of writers I liked, came to admire and, in some instances, to publish.

      In 1967 the Poetry Society invited Anthony Rudolf to read his Yves Bonnefoy translations. Various seeds were planted on that fateful evening. Rudolf urged me to invite Elaine Feinstein and Daniel Weissbort to read, and both became close friends and key figures in the development of Carcanet. We published an early pamphlet and then books of Rudolf’s poems and translations. He was the catalyst for our three substantial volumes of Bonnefoy. A dear friend now, in 1967 he was fresh-faced and as innocent of the ways of the reading circuit and the poetry game as I was. He likes the Yiddish saying, ‘one word is not enough; two words are too many’. I will risk quoting him to himself, lines from a poem he later abandoned (in his own parentheses from his 1971 pamphlet):

(Loping in old trousers

From poem to crisis, he survives

Like the feather on his mantelpiece.)

*       I wonder if this is the specific book Thom Gunn had in mind when he called the anthology ‘a pernicious modern nuisance which keeps readers away from books of poetry’.

1969

Anne Ridler (1912–2001), poet and verse dramatist, was an editor at Faber and Faber. Her husband, the printer and typographer Vivian Ridler, printed her first volume for OUP, but the whole stock was lost in a bombing raid in 1940. Carcanet published her Collected Poems in 1994. Grevel Lindop, who interviewed her that year, wrote: ‘She was also a fine, understated raconteuse, with a perfect ear for dialogue and a neat sense of comic self-deprecation, whether recalling the contorted scrupulousness of Eliot’s response when she dared to show him her earliest work, or confessing to the illicit delights of translating an opera libretto (“When you hear it sung, you get this marvellous delusion that you’ve written the whole thing yourself!”).’

1

FROM ANNE RIDLER

Oxford

9 December 1969

Dear Mr Schmidt,

Thank you for your letter about the new Carcanet venture. I shall be interested to see the first pamphlets, and I enclose my two-guinea subscription. Why should you want to codify yourselves with a group name? I hope you won’t – and certainly not as vividist.

      I was sorry not to get to any of the meetings this term. I fully intended to, but something always cropped up on a Tuesday to prevent me.

      I think Kathleen Raine is always interested in new poetry, though I don’t know how much money she can spare for subscriptions of this kind.2 You also ask about my verse plays: they are published by Faber, and I think Henry Bly and other plays would be the one to interest you. One which I wrote about Cranmer, commissioned for the fourth centenary of his death and broadcast and acted* at the time, is now out of print, I believe.

All good wishes, Yours sincerely, Anne Ridler

*in the University Church, with Frank Windsor and Derek Hart, then little-known actors, in the cast.

3

FROM ANNE RIDLER

Oxford

11th May 1989

Dear Michael,

Many thanks for the copy* of my letter which Mark Fisher proposes to use in the Twentieth Anniversary book. What a noble record you have to show! I am proud that my twoguinea subscription earns me a connexion, however small.

      My first thought was that of course you should print the letter as it stands. My second is that if you don’t mind, I’d prefer you to delete, in the third paragraph, the rest of the sentence after ‘new poetry’. I ask this because I have found that allusions to want of money tend to annoy Kathleen, even though she makes them herself. (For instance, ‘Wearing anxiety about money like a hair shirt’, or something to that effect.) Now will this go into the archive for the next twenty years??

      I have just had offprints of the article on Marriage in Literature in which we used Joy Scovell’s poem, and I’ve sent one to her.4 She was here to tea last week, and mentioned that she had not seen the review of her book in the Times Lit. Supp. – all too brief I thought, but at least she did get a review, whereas this time they have ignored my book completely. If there is a cutting in the office, perhaps you could send her one? I didn’t keep it myself.

      Cordial good wishes, Yours ever, Anne

*This is written with the same Royal table-model typewriter, slung out by OUP & bought for a song. We bought an electric one, but I can’t get used to it.

      *

      Anne Ridler was among the many poets I wrote to soliciting a subscription for our first series of pamphlets. I typed each letter of solicitation on my huge Adler manual typewriter, one of the prime acquisitions of my second undergraduate year. A good typewriter was then as important as a good laptop is today. The letters I wrote were not personalised but personal. I did not keep copies of these bespoke ingratiations, but whatever they said, they did the trick. We had over 160 subscribers to the first series of seven pamphlets, which could be acquired for seven shillings and sixpence unsigned or one guinea signed and numbered.

      Peter Jones had started work on his Penguin Book of Imagist Verse and he, Gareth Reeves, Grevel Lindop and I were casting about for a label or brand to distinguish the work we were doing. In writing to a poet who had been T.S. Eliot’s secretary and editorial assistant, it seemed appropriate to seek her advice on ‘vividist’, our then preferred epithet, and she advised in no uncertain terms.

      Later on, some friends and I decided the most beautiful word in the English language was ‘numb’ and we joked about starting a ‘numb school’ of poetry. When I was typing Notebook for Robert Lowell I induced him to introduce the word ‘numb’ into one of the sonnets (I am not sure it survived the final cut), so we were able to claim Lowell as a marginal member of the ‘numb school’.

NOTES

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/oct/16/guardianobituaries.books

(accessed 5 June 2019).

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), poet and scholar of Blake and Yeats; there is a particularly fine photograph of her by Christopher Barker in

Portraits of Poets

(Carcanet, 1986), alongside many poets from the Carcanet list, including Ridler. The editor of this book has taken the decision to over-ride Anne Ridler’s request; she doubts that Raine’s shade will be troubled by the mention of lack of money.

The British actor Frank Windsor (b.1927) was famous for his part in the TV series

Softly Softly

and

Z Cars

in the 1970s, as well as roles in films and on stage; Derek Hart (1925–86), actor and broadcaster, was well-known for his appearances in the BBC’s

Tonight

programme.

Joy Scovell (1907–99), poet and translator, had published collections in the 1940s–50s; Geoffrey Grigson described her as ‘a poet less concerned with celebrity and self-importance than with being alive and in love […] The purest woman poet of our time.’ Carcanet published her

Collected Poems

in 1988, and a

Selected

in 1991.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      Peter Jones, Rain

      Ishan Kapur, Tomorrow’s Dark Sun Grevel Lindop, Against the Sea

      Robert Needham, Blind Openings

1970

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79), who published 101 poems in her lifetime, was not as famous in the 1970s as she is now. In the UK, Chatto & Windus published an abridged edition of her

Poems

in 1956, and

Selected Poems

in 1967;

The Complete Poems

was published by Farrar, Straus (NY) in 1969. Carcanet published the UK editions of Bishop’s

Exchanging Hats: paintings

(ed. William Benton) in 1997, and of

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: uncollected poems, drafts and fragments

(ed. Alice Quinn) in 2006. Her name recurs in Carcanet correspondence; for example, writing to Val Warner in 1998, MNS admits: ‘I continue to adore Bishop, probably disproportionately. Poets that one can teach and actually convey one’s enthusiasm for are few. I manage it sometimes with [W.S.] Graham, usually with [Eavan] Boland, and almost always with Bishop.’

FROM ELIZABETH BISHOP

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

16 October 1970

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

Your letter was forwarded to me by my publisher and I just received it two days ago. I think if I could receive such a letter once a month, say, life would be greatly improved; you probably can have no idea how cheering I found it. Thank you very much. I am touched by your going to all that trouble to find my poems, and buy them.

      Of course I’ll be happy to have you use the lines from ‘Varick Street’ and ‘Questions of Travel’. I’m curious to see which lines. Please be sure to send me your book, won’t you – I rather hope that Faber takes it because they print the best-looking commercial books, don’t you think? Your own Carcanet Press may do even better – I wonder what that name comes from – but I suppose it is more helpful to be published by one of the big recognised houses.1

      The idea of a dedication seems almost too much – but of course I’d be awfully flattered. I am eager to see Desert of the Lions – perhaps you could send it to me, but only if you have extra copies…

      Robert Lowell is an old friend and has always been very kind about my work and has helped me innumerable times, in many ways.2 We met about the time we published our first books – or rather it was really his second: Lord Weary’s Castle. I have had two letters from him recently and he sounds much better, and was about to start teaching at Essex when he wrote the last one. I am here for this semester, teaching the two seminars he taught here for six years, I think. I am not really a teacher; I’ve done it only once before, and of course it is impossible to take his place. However, I am hoping the novelty of my amateurishness and the change of sex, etc., may help out – the students have been very nice to me so far.

      This will be my address until Christmas, at least. As Cal may have told you, I live mostly in Brazil and have for many years – so I was interested to hear that you apparently make Mexico your home and also live in Egypt. Perhaps we share a geographical obsession?

Faithfully yours, Elizabeth Bishop

*

Ian Hamilton, editor of the review, had given me Elizabeth Bishop’s Selected Poems to write about and I had been astonished by them. In part it was the varied and inventive formalism, the understatement, and the clarity of them, in part the variety of geographies, which seemed to take in my own Latin America in ways I’d not seen in verse before. Originally Hamilton had offered the book to Charles Tomlinson, but he had declined to write about it. I worked on my review essay for a couple of months, sent it to Hamilton who, at the time, I much admired. He never responded at all and the piece did not appear.

      When Robert Lowell came to All Souls, his British publisher Charles Monteith arranged that I meet him. It had been my hope to study with him at Harvard, but when I went up he was ill and William Alfred had taken over his poetry course. I did not meet him in the States but at Oxford he was larger than life. Monteith had hoped he might become Professor of Poetry but Edmund Blunden had pipped him at the post, largely on the strength of the anti-American vote, it seemed to most of us.

      I discovered Lowell, when I first went to meet him, in great distress, rather like Laocoön tangled in his typewriter ribbon, which he had tried to change but unavailingly. I extricated him, changed the ribbon for him and soon had agreed to type for him, working in particular on the final typescript of Notebook. He agreed to read for the Poetry Society. We met regularly, both in his rooms and on occasion at Pin Farm where Carcanet was taking shape. It was there that Peter Jones and I introduced Lowell to Ian Hamilton, who came to tea with his beautiful wife Gisela. What I best remember is that she was wearing a lovely slanting beige summer hat, said nothing, and charmed Lowell.

      My main interest in Lowell was to find out from him about Elizabeth Bishop. He must have tired of my continual inquiries, but he mentioned me to her, and he encouraged me to write to her. I dedicated my second book of poems to her.

NOTES

The Carcanet website explains: Shakespeare calls holidays ‘captain jewels in a carcanet’. A carcanet (pronounced KARka-nett) is a ‘jewelled necklace’ with an etymological skeleton in its cupboard. Its ancestor is the Old French

carcan

, ‘a slave’s halter’.

Robert Lowell (1917–77), known as ‘Cal’ to his friends, moved from New York to England in 1970; he was a visiting fellow at All Souls 1970-76, and taught at the University of Essex for two years. His

Life Studies,

which won the 1960 National Book Award, has been called ‘perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since

The Waste Land’.

Farrar, Straus published the third edition of his

Notebook

in 1970; in the UK, Faber and Faber had published his

Selected Poems

in 1965.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      Guillaume Apollinaire, Hunting Horns, translated by Barry Morse

      John Balaban, Vietnam Poems

      George Buchanan, Annotations

      Marcus Cumberlege, Poems for Quena and Tabla

      Roger Garfitt, Caught on Blue

      Peter Jones, Seagarden for Julius

      Sally Purcell (ed and tr), Provençal Poems Gareth Reeves, Pilgrims

      Michael Schmidt, Bedlam & the Oakwood

      Michael Schmidt, Black Building Alexandra Seddon, Sparrows

      Robert B. Shaw, Curious Questions Adrian Wright, Waiting for Helen

1971

Scotland’s first official Makar in modern times, Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), was endlessly inventive, inquiring, energetic, internationalist and deeply committed to his home city of Glasgow. The first of his books to be published by Carcanet was a collection of translations of V.V. Mayakovsky’s poems into Scots, Wi’ the Haill Voice (1971). Thereafter Carcanet was his principal publisher for poetry, essays and drama.

1

His letters were both business-like and playful, and his own immaculate archive of copies and replies was drawn on to compile The Midnight Letterbox: selected correspondence 1950–2010, edited by James McGonigal and John Coyle (2015). His presence on the list attracted other Scottish poets, of his own generation and younger. He wrote to the young man he had fallen in love with at seventy-eight: ‘Sailing into calmer waters, writing Tempests, composing last quartets, taking a deckchair into the garden – no, that doesn’t seem to be me.’

2

Two years later, in 2000, the year that saw the publication of his New Selected Poems, the performance and publication of A.D. a trilogy on the life of Jesus Christ, and his translation of Jean Racine’s Phaedra, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

8 November 1971

Dear Mr Morgan,

Your essay came today – many, many thanks. It is the only essay I have received for the book which I find exactly as I would have wished – it is exciting to read, larded with excellent quotation, and in every way my sort of essay.3 I only wish you had planted yourself in the landscape you so beautifully conjure. We’ll have you later writ large.

      The rest of the book is almost complete excepting two essays still tardy, so you were not last. I feel the book is attaining a completeness at long last and pray it will be ready for Herr Printer on December 15th. Which is two months later than I’d hoped, but the span of time was painfully short, wasn’t it.

      You will, in the book, especially like Anne Cluysenaar’s piece about Steiner and the poets who refute him in practice; and Terry Eagleton’s piece on myth and legend.4 Jon Silkin’s piece on Geoff Hill is a little heavy going but very good, I think. I am not too keen on a piece we have about Bunting – but then, I am not at ALL keen on Bunting, which may help explain things.

      I was stunned by the MacCaig you quoted.5 What a superb poem. I will have to go back to him again. I liked but forgot him, which was silly. Scotland is producing exciting things. More so than any other ‘region’.

      Mr Garioch has ordered Wi’ the Haill Voice today.6 I think we must try to arrange a feature in The Scotsman about it, if only we knew whom to contact. They’ve always been warm about our books. Do you know the editor? Would Mr Garioch be a good person to ask about this?

      My goodness we are working hard. And yet I did today finally manage to find or make time to get a poem down. And it was good! It’s a relief that the service of letters has not lamed me for lettering!

      Again, a multitude of thanks for your excellent piece and for – believe it or not – your comparative promptness!

Ever, Michael

      Did I send you the catalogue? It is quite impressive – if you haven’t seen it I’ll send it.

FROM EDWIN MORGAN

Glasgow

20 November 1971

Dear Michael,

Needless to say I am enormously pleased that the article was on time and acceptable. Even not being last of all – well now. I shall look forward to reading the pieces you mention. Bunting is also not one of my absolute favourites, though I can see he has a gluey music all his own – but I like a verse that moves.7 It is not enough to have images, fine though many of them certainly are. On the other hand, his quirky crabbitness is also a ‘northernness’ and in some moods this attracts just because at least it is not smooth.

      How nice of Robert Garioch to order a Mayakovsky already. I would undoubtedly value his opinion on it eventually. But if you were to try to ask him to review it this might be taken as backscratching since we are both editorial advisors on Scottish International. If he reviews it somewhere unasked, fine. The Scotsman idea is worth pursuing. Probably you should write to Robert Nye, who is the literary editor.8 He is not himself Scotch, but is well-disposed to Scottish poetry (and I believe to Carcanet) and might well be interested in a feature of some kind.

      I have a promise of a review in Soviet Studies (a quarterly edited from Glasgow University) if you will send a copy when the time comes to Dr Alan Ross, Department of International Economic Studies, University of Glasgow.

      Could you please make two small changes in my typescript of the Scottish Poetry essay: Page 7 line 20 – for vehement read forceful, and page 9 line 13 for period read decade.

      From my window I am watching the snow flittering down past the orange streetlamps like – like – come on Bunting – like

doom-grated

orange-peel

purified through

fine fans

etc.

Yours ever

Edwin

(do please drop the Mr!)

      P.S. I nearly forgot: yes, thanks, I did receive your fine catalogue!

FROM EDWIN MORGAN

Glasgow

4 December 1971

Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for page proofs and two letters. On going through the proofs I found a fair number of corrections and I’m enclosing the relevant sheets – I hope there will still be time to make these changes as some of them are quite bad – especially the contents page – whatever happened there?

      I’d like to have the next Karcanet batch and enclose my cheque for the paperback edition. For consistency I should have written chekue. Two possible subscribers (unless you already have them) might be my two co-editors of Scottish Poetry – George Bruce (Fellow in Creative Writing, Glasgow University) and Maurice Lindsay [address]…9

      Yes, I wish I could have seen the Amalrik plays – perhaps you can tell me what they are like in due course.10 On Tuesday I hope to go to a massive Stockhausen jamboree which the university music department are sponsoring. Perhaps you saw the article in today’s Times about violence and crime in Glasgow – not untrue, of course, but I can’t help feeling that the headline STOCKHAUSEN CONCERT A SELLOUT IN GLASGOW UNIVERSITY’S HUGE BUTE HALL is unlikely to make the English papers though it is also true and might help to alter our – what is the word, oh yes, image.

Best as ever,

Edwin

*

I must have come across Edwin Morgan, as I did so many poets and translators in the early years, by the kind agency of Daniel Weissbort, the founder-editor with Ted Hughes of Modern Poetry in Translation, with whom I had undertaken to edit the Carcanet modern translations list. He no doubt had Morgan’s implausible translations of Mayakovsky into Scots, one of the earliest of our translation titles, along with Danny’s own versions of Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Poems, the Trial, Prison. Gorbanevskaya was a dissident poet held in a Soviet prison mental hospital, her poems and a transcript of her trial having been spirited out of the country. Mayakovsky was quite another kettle of fish. When we published Wi’ the Haill Voice, C.P. Snow noted in the Financial Times that he found the translations ‘marginally more difficult than the Russian originals’.

      Morgan when I first knew him was a committed avoider of the conventional. He had radical energy, an instinct for using language as subversion, keeping readers on their toes formally and semantically, teasing them with etymology, sound properties, echoes, and with unexpected formal resources. His commitment to European rather than AngloAmerican modernisms set him apart not only from his British contemporaries but also from Scottish predecessors except for MacDiarmid, whom he respected, and W.S. Graham and Burns Singer.

      We had a cheerful and open friendship, exchanging dozens of letters and even collaborating on what we called ‘Dovetails’ but were published as Grafts (Mariscat, 1984). When they were published, in a note Edwin explicitly rejected the term ‘collaboration’: ‘These poems are based on fragments from abandoned poems by Michael Schmidt. They grew round the fragments, which were kept intact but might appear in any part of the completed poem. There was no collaboration; I merely used the alien material as if the lines (as often happens) had suddenly floated into my head.’

      His discomfort with the idea of collaborating with me had a specific origin. When I became friends with Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson and my close association with C.B. Cox and the University of Manchester were known, this strong English, Modernist and in various ways conservative association put my relations with Edwin, as with Douglas Dunn and other close early contacts, under strain. Edwin did not contribute to PN Review until 1998. The bulk of his contributions, the ‘Translator’s Notebook’ series, edited by James McGonigal, appeared well after his death. Yet we remained regular correspondents and friends at one remove, as it were, and Carcanet published more than a score of his books of poems, plays, essays and translations, with thirteen of them still in print.

NOTES

On 29 December 1971, MNS wrote to Morgan: ‘Just a note at the year’s turning to wish you a happy new one, and to thank you for the very beautiful card and the very wonderful poem it contained. It was a superb poem, and it suddenly dawned on me that I don’t know your work except in anthology. Do you have any copies, or can you tell me where I can get copies, of your books? Who “does” you?’ Morgan had published with a variety of small presses at this stage; his breakthrough volume

A Second Life

(1968) had been published by Edinburgh University Press.

Letter quoted in James McGonigal,

Beyond the Last Dragon: a life of Edwin Morgan

(Sandstone Press, 2010), p.370.

The essay referred to here, ‘Scottish Poetry in the 1960s’ was published in

British Poetry Since 1960: a critical survey

(eds Grevel Lindop and Michael Schmidt, Carcanet, 1972).

Anne Cluysenaar (1936–2014) was a Belgian-born poet and teacher, who lived much of her life in the UK, latterly in Wales. Carcanet published two collections of her poems,

Double Helix

(1982) and

Timeslips: new and selected poems

(1997).

Norman MacCaig (1910–96), Scottish poet, of whom Morgan wrote: ‘Short on alienation, but surprising, accurate, and well turned, his poetry offers many pleasures. Its urbanity is by no means unable to get under the skin…’ (‘Scottish Poetry in the 1960s’,

Essays

, 1974, p.181).

Robert Garioch (1909–81), poet and translator, edited the anthology of contemporary Scottish poetry

Made in Scotland

for Carcanet (1974) and Carcanet reissued his

Collected Poems

in 1980.

Basil Bunting (1900–85), a modernist poet whose high reputation was established with the publication of

Briggflatts

in 1966. Morgan wrote a playful elegy for him, ‘A Trace of Wings’ (

Themes on a Variation

, 1988).

Robert Nye (1939-2016), poet, novelist and critic, edited selections of poems by William Barnes and Laura Riding for Carcanet, as well as

English Sermons 1750-1850

(1976). Carcanet published Nye’s

Collected Poems

in 1998.

George Bruce (1909-2002), Scottish poet and BBC radio producer; Maurice Lindsay (1918-2009), Scottish poet, broadcaster and cultural historian, who edited the landmark anthology

Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance, 1920-1945

(Faber and Faber, 1946). Carcanet published a much-revised edition in 1976.

Andrei Amalrik (1938–80), Soviet dissident dramatist, who was at this time serving a prison sentence in a labour camp in Kolyma. He was famous in the West for his essay

Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?

and his account of his first exile,

Involuntary Journey to Siberia

, published abroad in 1970.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      Michael Cayley, Moorings

      Elizabeth Daryush, Verses: Seventh Book, preface by Roy Fuller

      H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Tribute to Freud, introduction by Peter Jones

      Margaret Newlin, The Fragile Immigrants

      Anthony Rudolf, The Manifold Circle

      Val Warner, These Yellow Photos

      Daniel Weissbort, The Leaseholder

1972

Charles Tomlinson (1927–2015), poet, critic and translator, was born in Stoke-on-Trent. He read English at Cambridge where he was tutored by Donald Davie, who later became a close friend. He taught at the University of Bristol, retiring in 1992 as Emeritus Professor of Poetry. His colleague Professor David Hopkins wrote: ‘One sometimes forgot that one had someone so famous in one’s midst. The inevitably rather trivial and myopic business of department meetings was, however, always freshened with a new blast of reality when one realised that across the table was someone who had met Ezra Pound, had read The Waste Land aloud in the presence of T.S. Eliot’s widow […]’.

]

      Tomlinson's poetry was published by Oxford University Press until the Press closed its poetry list. Carcanet then became his publisher, his work having often appeared in

PN Review

. His

New Collected Poems

came out in 2009, and

Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems

(ed. David Morley) as a Carcanet Classic in 2018.

FROM CHARLES TOMLINSON

Ozleworth

11 October 1972

Dear Michael,

Your most generous letter has strengthened me against whatever the reviewers make or don’t make of that book of mine. I have felt for a long time that, really, very few people (certainly not my colleagues – the ‘experts’) have any inkling of the level at which I have been and am working. It was typical that nothing of mine should appear in the Porter-Thwaite programme and that somebody like Enright should carry the preference there.2 It struck me – just this one instance, and I have done moaning – that but for you and Calvin Bedient I could very well have been missing from British Poetry Since 1960!3 It takes a couple of furriners to see the point! But I was, indeed, very moved by what you say – the first reaction of any sort I’ve had to the book. You are probably right about ‘Mackinnon’s Boat’. It leaves me dissatisfied and yet it seemed a pity to scrap it altogether. Nice that you liked the shorter pieces – I had great difficulty in placing many of these: ‘Urlicht’ came back regularly, ‘Juliet’s Garden’ also. Yes A.A. is Alvarez and I think it’s time we gave that wilful self-regard, posing as toughness, a shove over the edge.4 I had a row with a Manchester Guardian correspondent at a dinner in Budapest, who said what a good influence A.A. was, that these people (the poor Huns) could understand the kind of language he speaks. I don’t know why I was so angry – probably unbalanced by the tokay – but I heard a deathly voice say out of me: ‘And what’s wrong with the truth as a good influence? What have “these people” done to deserve these blatant simplifications?’ My wife trod on my foot under the table and I subsided into the goulash or whatever. Rather funny in retrospect.

      Yes, I want Wordsworth and Marvell together