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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.
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EDWIN MORGAN
The Midnight Letterbox
Selected Correspondence, 1950–2010
Edited by James McGonigal and John Coyle
Contents
Introduction
Edwin Morgan’s correspondence is as wide-ranging as his poetry. The letters relate not only to current poems and translations but also to his ever-changing work in theatre, music, journalism, cultural politics and education. His literary correspondents were many and varied – here T.S. Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid appear with W.S. Graham, Salvatore Quasimodo, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Eugen Gomringer, Alastair Gray, Laura (Riding) Jackson and more. There is helpful and long-term contact too with significant figures in the younger generation of poets, such as Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Tom Leonard and Richard Price. There are kindly letters to his readers of all ages, as well as sharper ones to publishers and editors from the 1950s onwards. And these letters take many forms, from verse epistles to newspaper correspondence, from editorial strictures to academic gossip, from calligraphy and postcards to email. How were we to pick and choose from such riches?
This book emerged from Morgan’s own collection of letters, so in a sense the first selection was his. From the start, he seems to have kept most original communications and many of his own carbon-and, later, photocopied replies. He retained for the record much that a weaker personality might have concealed. Like his poetry, the letters reveal a determination to witness to the fullest range of human experience. From the late 1980s onwards, folders of this correspondence were sent in tranches with other material to the Department of Special Collections in the Library of the University of Glasgow. He had been a student there in the 1930s and lectured in English Literature from the late 1940s until 1980. From the many thousands of letters in these Edwin Morgan Papers (papers which also include manuscript drafts of poems and translations, his own and others’ artwork pasted into striking scrapbooks, libretti and screenplays, essays, reviews, scripts, lectures and travel diaries), it is possible to trace a poet’s response to, and active shaping of, a manifold life.
As editors we have attempted to map both that life and an age. In sequence the letters help recreate Morgan’s intellectual biography, documenting his eager engagement with artistic movements such as constructivism, American and Scottish modernism, sound and concrete poetry, poetry in translation, gay and avant-garde writing – and with the writers and critics involved in these. We begin in the late 1940s, but focus mainly on the last six decades of his life, from 1950 to 2010. He had burned personal letters when leaving to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940. He survived to return home, and appeared thereafter determined to keep a full record of whatever life presented to him. Thus personal and professional details emerge, with the charm and wit evident to all who met him.
Born in 1920, he tended to see his own long career turning quite radically with each decade – as it had suddenly changed from undergraduate studies to war service, and then from the narrow deprivation of 1950s Scotland to his ‘second life’ of cultural and emotional awakening in the 1960s, and again onwards into the darker 1970s, and so on. His letters reflect these changing contexts. We have followed his preference for a decade’s-eye view in presenting the letters here.
There are constants throughout, of course. A central theme is his desire to extend Scottish culture through engagement with literature from other times and places – with avant-garde American writing, with international currents of sound and concrete poetry from São Paulo to Vienna, and with Eastern European poetry in translation, notably from Russia and Hungary. His correspondence reveals an increasing involvement with poetic theatre in the 1980s and 1990s, and other ensemble work in jazz and orchestral music. His love of science and cinema was life-long.
Amidst commissions and deadlines, his customary correspondence with artists, film-makers, composers, editors, academics and readers young and old seldom slackened. Into the midnight letterbox near his flat were posted late communications for early morning collection. Since he had a gift for warm and humorous contact at a distance, domestic details constantly illumine a working poet’s life. Letters had the signal advantage of allowing him to retain the privacy essential for his poetic work while sharing enough of his alert creative self to make recipients feel that he wrote only for them. That self sometimes signed letters with six swift calligraphic strokes that resolved themselves into his initials, EM.
There are so many fine letters in the Papers that we did not need to prospect further into other literary archives in, for example, the National Library of Scotland. The present work is chosen from a much larger body of correspondence posted from Glasgow to – almost anywhere. It has been shaped finally by our and the poet’s publishers, Carcanet Press, as the realism of price and production come into play. So these Letters are a selection of a selection of a selection. In order to present the maximum possible number, we did not attempt to produce facsimiles but instead saved space in the layout of addresses and salutations. Where only a date is given, the implication is that the letter was written from the same address as the last previously noted in full. Individual glosses were preferred to footnotes for similar reasons of economy. Asterisked names in these glosses mean that these individuals were also correspondents, with letters included elsewhere and page numbers noted in bold in the index. Together with introductions to each decade, we trust that enough detail is given to guide but not overwhelm the reader. Catalogue references refer directly to the Edwin Morgan Papers in the Department of Special Collections. A brief list of further reading is also included.
In the three years taken to complete these Letters, we have been helped by many people. This book would have been impossible without them. We would like to thank the poet’s literary executors in The Edwin Morgan Trust for permission to publish; Professor Christian Kay and Dr Jean Anderson of Glasgow University for facilitating an early pilot project; and the Glasgow University Chancellor’s Fund for supporting the costs of replicating the chosen letters. This formidable task was carried out with cheerfulness and accuracy by Dr Linden Bicket. Staff in the Department of Special Collections have been unfailingly helpful. Sarah Hepworth, Deputy of Special Collections, has been unstinting in her encouragement and advice. We are also grateful to Dr Sam Maddra, Project Archivist, for special help with the Veronica Forrest-Thomson letters; to Stella Halkyard of the the John Rylands Library in the University of Manchester for additional information; to Tom Leonard for guidance; and to Professor David Kinloch and Dorothy McMillan for copies of personal letters.
Lastly, we would like to thank Dr Helen Tookey at Carcanet Press for her positive support at every stage. And we are particularly grateful to the founder of the Press, Professor Michael Schmidt, for suggesting that two editors who had been taught by Edwin Morgan in different decades would work happily in partnership on the letters that ran vitally alongside that memorable teaching. He was correct.
Prologue
Alan Shearer, friend and fellow student
(handwritten postcard)
Dearwisher
Tacks for pinning such
Fine-all washes
Your close holy
& mutch abbreechiated
Aha Mayday appropinquishes
liber-finnishgons re-odyssue
heimorganwards, by passthistime you
notes contentness by cor, I pense?
Tell laughter is animation
En Morg
1950s
(aged 30–39)
By 1950, Edwin Morgan was a young lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He had returned in January 1946 to take up undergraduate studies interrupted by five years of war service in the Middle East. A conscientious objector at nineteen, he volunteered for a non-combatant role in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. Those years of open-air life, with a measure of sexual freedom within a military environment that was generally male, hedonistic and non-intellectual, had left him ill-prepared for the enduring austerities of post-war Scotland, and for the study of literature. Romantic poetry seemed particularly beside the point.
The army had taught self-reliance, however, and he gradually got back into the way of study, made friends among the younger generation of students (he was always a charming and interesting companion), and passed his Finals so confidently that he was immediately offered a post as Junior Lecturer. Classes were beginning to burgeon, with an unstable mix of ex-Forces mature students and youngsters who had been schoolchildren during the war years, so the work was demanding enough. His parents, with whom he lived until the early 1960s, would have preferred a ‘safer’ job in a bank for their only son.
The 1950s were difficult years for Morgan, a period of doubt and doubleness. He was assiduous in his teaching, thorough and attentive to detail, and yet the burden of term-time work constrained artistic ambition. The poetic life had to be postponed to university vacations, mainly, and a sense of frustration surfaces in his letters early and late. Yet progress in poetry failed to match this aspiration, with packed lines too often reflecting a conflicted life. In the late 1940s Morgan had sent Edwin Muir some poems to consider. ‘You are too involved, in both senses of the word. You are in your own whirlpool’, the older poet commented, and was never quite forgiven.
Translation offered relief, a range of different voices and languages – Lorca, Scève, Montale, Mayakovsky – and a schooling in technique. This range, however, could bring a different sort of frustration, as editors chose to publish the excellent translations and return his own poems with regret. Anglo-Saxon poetry offered a stoic and masculine world-view that appealed; later he came to see his successful late 1940s translation of Beowulf as his unwritten war poem.
Morgan’s emotional life brought little satisfaction at this time. Although earlier he had been deeply and romantically attached to two heterosexual men (in his pre-war university years and in the RAMC) his 1950s relationships involved casual and risky encounters among the homosexual underclass of Glasgow – activities which, if discovered, could have led to social ostracism, prison and dismissal from his teaching post. Thus he came to value all the more his correspondence with those to whom he could unburden, sensing that they would accept him as he was. Two poets were particularly supportive, W.S. Graham and Michael Shayer. Elsewhere, letters half-reveal the tension, hidden beneath a camp or playful manner. We find him creating a persona in verse letters to match or mask the contradictions inherent in his daily life.
Britain struggled to emerge from a world of rationing and making-do. The post-war settlement entrenched a new sort of conflict – a Cold War of intrigue and intransigence fought out under the threat of atomic destruction. Morgan was radically left-wing and passionately interested in scientific and technological progress. The thought of human ingenuity being geared towards negation appalled him. That communism and capitalism each pursued such an end almost made him despair.
When he came to choose work for his New Selected Poems (2000), Morgan selected only two from this decade, from The Vision of Cathkin Braes and Dies Irae (both 1952, although a promised publication of the latter collection fell through). They represent the linguistically playful and the severely political aspects of his writing. The playful ‘Verses for a Christmas Card’ merges gay and literary dimensions, in a lexis that blends elements of late Joyce, Hopkins and the ‘aureate’ medieval Scots diction of Dunbar:
[…] A snaepuss fussball showerdown
With nezhny smirl and whirlcome rown
Upon my pollbare underlift,
And smazzled all my gays with srift […].
(New Selected Poems: 11)
The contrary vision of ‘Stanzas of the Jeopardy’ is a dark epistle to latter-day Corinthians that warns of the moment of atomic annihilation when all the itemised and precious particularities of the world
[…] Shall craze to an intolerable blast
And hear at midnight the very end of the world.
(New Selected Poems: 10)
In the dark nights and uncertain days of the Fifties, at his most isolated, letters offered Morgan a lifeline to elsewhere, with the possibility and hope that his words might be answered by return of post.
Book and Pamphlet Publications
The Vision of Cathkin Braes and other Poems. Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1952.
Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English. Aldington, Kent: The Hand and Flower Press, 1952.
The Cape of Good Hope. Tunbridge Wells: Peter Russell, The Pound Press, 1955.
Poems from Eugenio Montale. Translated by Edwin Morgan. Reading: The School of Art, University of Reading, 1959.
W.S. Graham, poet
My dear Sydney
Thanks for the postcard in two parts, the Shakespearian line, the looming and conception of an Epistle, and the news about your good self. You know, apart altogether from my natural desire to hear from you, I relish your communications as doves and ravens sent out from the Real, and they have I assure you plenty of waste rolling world to cross and cover, but when they do come, when they do reach me and knock on the glass of whatever half- or three-quarter-reality I am living in, I feel less like a forgotten survivor of godly flooding, with the Good Real packed away in their ark and those who were late for the queue or whose species was too indeterminate for invoicing or who couldn’t be paired off left to scuttle for strange tors and listen to the bottom of the abyss rising. One of my triplex-plated howling ben-observatories is labelled ‘Academic Pseudovivarium: Ark-Birds Keep Out’ – yet I let them in by waiting for the night-watches and I read their messages by flashlight and I feed them with corn I have hidden behind the model of the new 400-incher and back they go over the wilderness to Life. You would hardly know how to describe the country I live in; Death certainly is not its image, but neither is Life. The crags and plateaux are incredibly recalcitrant to all good walking, hail and snow are frequent, the summits are high, and many of us are swept down by the avalanches that we know may any minute calve off from the shaggy icefields we roam over. Very remarkable are the visions we have of the moon, and of the stars, and of all the icy properties and manifestations; but something has been done to the sun, it never appears more than smouldering, an ochre, a snarling crimson, even a monstrous purple. The cold of our observatories can curl round our flesh like a lash; and then it is I often visit one of the centrally-heated brochs with double insulation to keep in its fieriness and windows of horn as thick and opaque as struggling lanternlight ever seeped through; the door says ‘Half House: Communion for Incurables: Ark-Hawkers Not Wanted’. Even here, however, I have managed to lever out a few of the looser stones, and the birds soon learn to tap at the right place, and I can let them in (though they hate the smoke and heat and great press of bodies) and unscrew the tiny capsules and spell off their micro-messages. Sometimes hope is held out that the waters will eventually subside; sometimes we are urged to build an ark of our own and attempt to rejoin the Great Ark: but with what materials are we to make it? The truest messages warn me that I am not to hope, for myself or for those beside me, that things will ever be any better than they are; they even warn me against having unbounded faith in the buoyancy and oceanworthiness of the Good Ark; but it seems that nothing in heaven or earth can forbid them to enjoin love, and I have seen love even in these brochs, where so many people come to cast from them blindly and momentarily their knowledge either that they cannot love or that no one has ever loved them. As for me, I have made myself a new coat, which is of very strong material; my interest in astronomy is still keen; I neither scorn nor sell myself to the brochs; I hear snatches of our distinguished and piercing storm-music; and the petrels and frigate-birds which are messages in themselves equally with the fluttering pigeons that bring theirs attached to their bodies are my friends for whom I (with others) strain my eyes every evening through the familiar falling gloom and the accepted salty air.
I send you two more ‘Sleights’ – I think you already have one called ‘Sleights of Darkness’, which is appearing in Poetry London. Also there is a translation, I think a successful one. Have you seen the magazine Nine, edited by Peter Russell? Its next issue (should be May) is a ‘Contemporary Poetry’ number, and I have contributed a short (very short, too short) article on you and your Threshold. Russell thinks a lot of the WT volume.
All the best as ever |
Uneasy in civilian and academic life, EM valued continued contact with W.S. Graham, with whom he had exchanged poems before the war. Born in Greenock, Graham now lived in Cornwall. ‘Sleight-of-Morals’ and ‘The Sleights of Time’ (Collected Poems [CP]: 28–29) were published in Listen 1:2, Summer 1954, and The Poet 12, 1955 – slow progress towards publication, as compared with Graham’s success with Faber & Faber.
W.S. Graham, poet
My dear Sydney
I’ve overstepped my ‘week’: forgive me. You chose just the most packed and hashed week of the year for me at the university – examinations, marks, class tickets, prize-buying, meetings, dinners – and so I have not been able to absorb the poem at all properly or to feel yet that I can make any very confident statement about it. I had better tell you how it has been read, so that you can discount whatever you want to discount for the improprieties of my methods – though forced, not chosen! Mostly, it was in bed from midnight onwards; and as a contrast today this hot and brilliant Saturday afternoon; twice completely through (you’ll admit this is not often), to get the swing; and a great deal of leaning at rest on passages I liked or was worried about, and thinking about these, in intervals of the academic netcasting. From all this, what has so far emerged is, that the swing is there, the voyage completes itself, you have produced an object, and this reader atanyrate finds it a fine and moving experience (though I know myself so near many of the ideas that my liking is more of an expected identification than the quite objective comment you’re after). What I thought most interesting was the way in which this poem sums up and picks out and clarifies all the hints and guesses of the earlier poems; reminded me of the Sibelius method in music. The only worry I had about the construction, and one which is not so strong as it was when I first read the poem, was that I thought its balance had a little topheaviness in the fact that the first three sections were the best, and by ‘best’ I mean too powerful for the more numerous but quieter closing sections. I don’t know what you think about this; I am maybe looking for a greater ‘simplicity’ or even symmetry than I should be looking for, because I still feel there is a complication of the ‘real’ the ‘remembered’ and the ‘creating’ in the last four sections which may puzzle people considerably after the very clear physical/spiritual relationships of the first three. It is the time factor that upsets things, I think, and that is why I feel I know where (or ‘when’) I am except in Section V; when I read it first it read too much like a really closing section, and I thought that Section VII very nearly (taken with section I) rendered it unnecessary. But I am ready to admit that when I get to know the poem better I shall see the rightness of Section V. At present I cling to the slight dissatisfaction that comes from an early climax (the Ancient-Mariner-like return on page 11) followed by comments in different musical and psychological modes. I can’t enumerate all the things I like about the poem, because there are so many details that would delight anyone with a heart for words; but I will mention the lilting Section II refrain you sent me before: the ‘calm’ in Section III stanzas 14–19: the homecoming in stanzas 35–38: the end of Section VII: and lines like ‘The hauling nets come in sawing the gunwhale/ With herring scales’ and ‘The strident kingforked airs roar in their shell’ and ‘Sprigs of the foam and branching tines of water’ and ‘Springing teal came out off the long sand’ and ‘That wind/ Honing the roof-ridge’. The only point where I felt definitely let down verbally was the end of stanza 36 in Section III. I felt that ‘And lay/ Like a mother’ was flat and bathetic, partly because I objected to the introduction of the mother-idea which calls up a new and hoaxing series of associations but more because the stressing is too light – ‘Like a mother’ has really only one stress and you need two. And of course the short sentence and the final position throw all the light onto this idea and phrase. I felt something of that flatness at the end of the section too in ‘My fruitful share’, though this would be more of a criticism if the Section was in fact the last of the poem. There’s a difficulty about ‘unprised’ and I don’t know if you intend a double meaning. The ‘harder reading’ would be to take it as you spell it, meaning ‘not pierced yet’, ‘not broken through’; but it could be ‘unprized’, ‘not wondered at enough yet although it is ancient overhead’. I incline to the second because I have used the same image (with the word ‘unconsidered’) in the first stanza of my ‘Midwinter’. You have ‘siezed’ for ‘seized’ on page 6, and ‘amourous’ for ‘amorous’ on page 4. Things I was reminded of may interest you: Section I ll 7–8 recalled immediately ‘The Waste Land’ ll 25–26 (‘There is shadow under this red rock,/ (Come in under the shadow of this red rock)’); I often thought of Eliot’s ‘Marina’ and ‘this grace dissolved in place’; and of course the bells and wailing and gulls of ‘The Dry Salvages’. ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ sometimes hissed and plunged through your starker rigging, but you have nary a nun on board, only chirpers and silver jerseys.
Now will these remarks be of any use to you? They’re honest, but they don’t come from a deep enough acquaintance with the poem. You must take from them what you can and couple them with your own feelings and whatever Eliot has said. One thing, I am glad I called my Nine article ‘Graham’s Threshold’, for here you are cast off from the shore and sending back something brighter than herringshine. You become the sea bell, or the sea light, and there is something about both these things that fairly shakes the light in the blood and the tolled heart.
I would agree about Christopher Fry. What he should cultivate is his sense of humour, but it is a fantastic or exaggerative sense of humour and he intellectualizes it far too much (see ‘Venus Observed’); he ought to collaborate with the author of Titus Groan and give joint and teeming birth to some gorgeous gingerococobread inanity that would keep all the pyrotechnophils and farcecrackers speechless for a golden year. Have you seen any Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller plays in London? I like The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman. Does the writer of The Cocktail Party approve of these tragedies of pity-without-terror?
This being a broch night, I had better put away the observatory typewriter and see which way the wind is howling. My thermometer is filled with californium; mercury by jove would explode. The Spirit Lamp is a greater invention than Davy’s, and I keep mine bright. All my fur is pining marten.
Ever yours |
Graham had asked for comment on ‘The Nightfishing’, the title poem of his 1955 collection from Faber & Faber. EM had reviewed The White Threshold (1949), in Peter Russell’s Poundian journal Nine II:II (No. 3), May 1950.
W.S. Graham, poet
To Sydney in Truro Ward, this dark Sunday evening
In a little frost, in a little fog, a verseletter.
– Nearly a month since I wrote you, and yes after
Promising better, but I am bitterly constrained
With lectures and work and the books growling around me
Hated, here, hellhounds, as I write: forgive me.
And first, how are you far away in that hospital?
Do you mend, and are you drugged still, can you
Hold a pencil yet for makarwork, for trobar
Close or frank? I am anxious to hear
And hope by this time you will have good news
To send me – by the merest line you like.
I mend, but slowly, it is an end that only
Will mend slowly! and I am sick of the discomfort
And the sour patience of a poor inactivity
But both should end soon. It is the poem
That has suffered, and its inactivity is
My main restlessness. Come back time and energy
And Christmas weeks come on, animators
Suspended, men not at work, till then!
(It was verse you requested, dear Joke Grim
From your Zennorward eyrie, and on eagle-wings,
Inked with inveigle-beak, immetriculable
Universe here like the sure iceman cometh –
Hereward Comesnatch Everyballadry.)
O it was gratitude welled for the verse of
Your letter when you said what I had confessed
Could make no difference to how you regarded me,
And if all the imagery and congestion and turgidity
Round a simple thing could have been swept away
I would have swept it away, but it is hard, hard
To say the simple things that involve a life and a friend,
And to me friendship is like others’ love,
The most of life: and for this called, in pain, ‘love’.
Aberration draws on rebuff, rebuke, contempt.
At thirty one has built a shell, or been beaten.
The shell is complex to guard a simplicity
Or hard to guard a reproved gentleness.
In penalty, sometimes like a live thing
Feeling unaccountable or at sight of a boy’s face
In a city street stirs in me crying or
Trying rather to cry and to stretch outward
In a gesture twisting and bursting with yearning:
And I almost then stretch out my own hands
To the boy or the goading vision – almost speak;
Well, you might almost hear it, like sea’s singing.
– It is only love trying to wail to be born,
The wailing of the never to be born.
If there are Hesperides, it is not heard there.
Wheesht, sleek silkie, wheesht in the Hert-Hebrides!
– You see how the images come, even here.
I rebuke their aberrant apparition.
You ask about the phrase of my ‘friend in golden fell’.
It is one with whom I was naked and whose hair
And down were golden like a coat or fell
Or so exaggerated and word-romanticized
Since his was the golden hair in the dark and the
Down was compounded to him from a noonday
Recollection of a soldier at the beach in Haifa
Gold-felled like the Georgian epic hero
‘The knight with the tiger’s fell’, for whom too I fell.
These things should be in prose (if this is verse)
But never mind; young men as well as old
Must be explorers. (And you must tell me
About the ‘Morven maiden’ and the ‘limekiln Shony’ – remember?
A few items, a long time back, I still want to know!)
‘Cinderfall’? Well, not exactly a dream
But a halfawake full-imagination (fool imagination)
Nightmare one midnight as I watched the cinders fall.
Where now again they fall, inexpressible hour
Of the heart, when the sinking log hisses and the coal
With its faint crackle feeds the waning glow!
It will soon be twelve, and in the firelight darkness
I sit finishing fashioning this pyrotechnic
Glasgow-to-Cornwall Very-light, a Halloween
Hallowed Catherine-Wheel, a rocket of remembrance
And a poor aurora of northern thanks,
And send it all up, to flash for an hour on your sickness.
E.M.
Hospitalised in Truro after a serious leg injury, Graham was far from home in Zennor. EM lent money to help him cope with loss of casual earnings. ‘Trobar clus’ and ‘leu’ were the complex and accessible styles of troubadour poetry. EM was also suffering, from a complication of haemorrhoids, preventing work on ‘The Cape of Good Hope’, dated Aug.–Dec. 1950 in his poem folder. The images of ‘golden fell’ and ‘cinderfall’ are in ‘The Sleights of Darkness’ (Collected Poems [CP]: 27–28). The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin is a twelfth-century Georgian epic poem by Shotha Rustaveli.
Vivien Linacre, friend and businessman
You and your wires! – the centre
Will hold in our time (prepaid),
Vividest Lineament,
Centre hold, and I patient
To be mid-December-cured.
The doctor said hospital
Would not be needed, so I
Have just been struggling along
These long weeks with my fissure
Pretending nothing was wrong
And have now another month
Apparently to struggle
According to prediction.
This is called being patient
And I call miserable
The patience; my work suffers,
And the poem waits like doom,
And why should I write to you
Complaint and pity of self?
You rather write me tonic
Rx replication
Of some Vivid Liniment.
I would have written to you but
Fissure king gloom ow’rfret me
In the kingfisherless bounds.
My friend Sydney Graham is
In hospital in Truro,
Another poetry-shard
Another crock of a Jock,
And I worry about him
Since he is too drugged to write.
Tell me if you are working
Column-scanning or selling,
Coal-selling or saddening,
The diet crumbs and water,
Kebab, shashlik, fish-and-chips?
I am reading ‘Ghormenghast’
And the ‘Seventy Cantos’;
Saw an aquarium fish
Exhibition yesterday;
And have put on a yellow
Pullover to knit up care
A little with its brilliant
Ravelment; such my poor news.
Haut les coeurs, kingfisher cries,
Haut les coeurs, O haut les coeurs!
– Endgloom Mornagain!
Linacre had been an active student debater at Edinburgh University and was now seeking employment. He had sent telegrams to EM. Rx on a 1950s medical prescription stood for ‘recipe’, meaning in Latin ‘to take’.
F.W. Bateson, academic and editor
Dear Mr Bateson
When you wrote to me on 28th March about my article ‘Dunbar and the Language of Poetry’ you said that you had ‘accepted most though not absolutely all’ of my proof-corrections. On looking through the article as printed in Essays in Criticism I find that the corrections you have in fact allowed are restricted almost entirely to mere typographical errors, and in none of the points to which I specifically referred in my letter of 19th February have you seen fit to be persuaded by the arguments I put forward to defend the way in which I had expressed myself. In your Editorial Note you announce your ‘right to iron out the creases in contributors’ English’. Whatever this figure of speech may precisely mean, it certainly implies a strangely autocratic attitude towards work submitted. I must say that I object strongly to the alterations you have made in my own article, but it is the general principle behind the alterations which seems to me (and I can assure you I am not alone in this opinion) so insulting and so scandalous. Prose is not so generically opposed to poetry that statements in it can be ‘put in different ways’ without change or loss of meaning; and this is especially true of good literary criticism, which presumably you want to encourage. ‘Ironing out’ an author’s style is perhaps a legitimate device under an anonymity régime, to ensure perspicuity coupled with ‘rightness of tone’, but when an essay is signed, surely its writer is justified in asking that what he really wrote and intended should appear above his name? – otherwise, how easily will he reject criticisms of his article, by pointing out that ‘these are the editor’s words, not mine’! (This will certainly be my reply if anyone asks what I mean by ‘the distillation of poetic situation’ – a jingling and ambiguous phrase, but not mine.) Your policy will only help to perpetuate the mediocrity and timidity and ‘stylelessness’ which are the bane of so much present-day English scholarship. Why not renegue this censoring-right? I am sure the style of Matthew Arnold himself was ‘creased’, with the parallel ridges of repetition if by no deeper geologicoliterary faults; but ‘ironing out’ would have left him threadbare, if not naked. Essays in Criticism should try to win a lively integrity (and that is an integrity of individuals) quite distinct from the colourless though informative ‘received standard’ of PMLA or RES or JEGPh. Its title should not be understood as a synonym for Critical Articles. Let the authors take their style with them when they are exploring style: that is what Coleridge did, and Wordsworth, and Dryden, and Blake and Bacon too. And if this argument will not satisfy, there is a contrasting one which it seems to me is unanswerable: what could in the end be less scholarly than the practice of modifying other scholars’ considered statements in such a way that they have no redress and the readers no way of knowing where the modifications occur? It really is not good enough, Mr Bateson! It is a policy which will neither make for ‘gay and vigorous dissertations’ nor accompany a scholarship that one can trust.
I have not yet, by the way, received my two complimentary copies. Could you please hasten these up? Also by the way: my name was misspelt (not, I think, by editorial principle) in the Notes on Contributors!
Yours sincerely | Edwin Morgan
‘Dunbar and the Language of Poetry’ was published in Essays inCriticism, II: 2, April 1952, edited by Bateson. This was EM’s first substantial publication in literary criticism, and was reprinted in Essays (1974): 81–99.
Erica Marx, publisher
Dear Erica Marx
These are the names for review copies: I’ll include journals that you’ll no doubt have thought of yourself, just in case we miss any obvious ones.
Essays in Criticism (F.W. Bateson)
The Cambridge Journal (Michael Oakshott)
Scrutiny (F.R. Leavis)
Arena (Jack Lindsay)
Colonnade (Iain Fletcher)
Review of English Studies (John Butt)
Archivum Linguisticum (Stephen Ullmann – The University, Glasgow W2)
The College Courant (George Brown – also Glasgow Univ.)
The Wind and the Rain (Neville Braybrooke)
The Month (Philip Caraman SJ)
World Review
Poetry Quarterly
The Poetry Review
The Adelphi
The Cornhill XX – don’t have reviews, do they
Glasgow University Magazine (Ed., Pearce Lodge, The Univ.)
The Glasgow Herald (on a par with The Scotsman)
The Scottish Field (70 Mitchell Street, Glasgow C1)
The Universities Quarterly
Medium Aevum (pub. Basil Blackwell, 49 Broad St., Oxfd.)
Anglia (Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, Wilhelmstr. 18)
English Studies (Prof. Dr. R.W. Zandvoort, De Savornin, Lohmanlaan, Groningen, Holland)
Modern Philology (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago 37, Ill.)
Journal of English and Germanic Philology (Univ. of Illinois Press, 358 Administration Bldg., Urbana, Ill.)
Modern Language Notes (Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore 18, Maryland)
Comparative Literature (Univ. of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon)
Speculum (Mediaeval Academy of America, 1430
Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge 38, Mass.)
The Times Literanonymary Shufflement!!
The transatlantic and continental journals listed above would be almost certain to review a translation of Beowulf; so of course would the British scholarly journals; and although they’re not widely read outside scholarly circles, their influence is important as long as Beowulf is a recognized classic and a prescribed text! (– Where I’ve mentioned an editorial name, it means that I will already have been heard of or be known personally.) – How about Beowulf on the Third Programme: John Lehmann: ‘Old Soundings’?! I remember when I was listening to the Aeneid broadcasts I thought to myself ‘Beowulf would sound at least as well as this, and probably a good deal more heroic.’
I have seen Colonnade which I fear is going to be too mediterraneany and broken-columny to be of great contemporary significance (why does someone not bring out a journal called The Mushroom or Isotope?); but it is at least another journal for writers to write in, and that is something. I.F. and his co-editors call themselves ‘a splinter group’ from Nine, so presumably some split or splintering or sundering or something must have taken place. ‘Too many cooks’ may have been the cause of the relatively cliquey-look of the pre-fission cookery-book.
I quite appreciate your remarks about punctuation. I have always swithered myself between aesthetics and grammar in the question of dashes-and-commas. Although I agree with you that when the comma is omitted it looks better, I still feel the sentence-reader is never quite quick enough in seeing that the dashes are really taking over the omitted comma’s duty, and may think the sentence runs on rather loosely. In the other case you mention, I had used dashes generally (instead of colons) for the sake of consistency. I have of course no objections to the changes.
I am glad to hear you say you think it reads well, now that you see it in print. I do think myself that it should have a fairly wide range of appeal; and certainly in the introduction I have laid baits for the ordinary modern reader of poetry (if such a person exists) as well as for the expert in Anglo-Saxon versification. How can we interest the Russians, who admire the poem, and whom I refer to and quote at various points??!!
Sincerely yours | eadwine mhorghuinn
EM’s Beowulf translation in hardback from Erica Marx’s Hand and Flower Press was reissued in paperback by the University of California Press in 1962 and remained in print until 1999, selling over 50,000 copies. John Lehmann’s* radio magazine was New Soundings. Colonnade, co-edited by Iain Fletcher, Ian Scott-Kilvert and D.S. Carne-Ross*, was soon subsumed in the arts journal Adam.
Alan Shearer, friend
(handwritten)
I think you would like this city. I’ve seen the Liffey and the docks and the book of Kells and been around the Guinness brewery and watched the Irish militia practise woodcraft in Phoenix Park. My kilt is a sensation – you’d think it was the first ever seen. Like this folksy card? I thought you’d be blasé about the Liffey so I picked up a spot of old boreen instead.
Yours | Eddie
Shearer was a post-war friend and fellow student. EM often wore the kilt on holiday and special occasions at home and abroad during the 1940s and 1950s. A ‘boreen’ is Irish for a country lane, as illustrated on the postcard.
L.R. Lind, academic and editor
Dear Professor Lind
Your letter and the Lyric Poetry of the Italian Renaissance arrived almost together. I agree with you it is a very attractively produced book, and the poems and translations are nicely presented. Do not feel too desperate about the errors of page 47! It is most unfortunate, but it is the kind of thing that can happen to the most lynx-eyed reader of proofs. Curiously enough, only the other day we were complaining in the department about the inaccuracies that even the Oxford University Press have achieved of late, and I said, Indeed nowadays we tend to get fewer typographical slips from the American university presses! So this is my punishment for an unsupported generalization! Do you think that the publishers will be able to do anything at all about it, before there is a second impression or edition? There is, I should mention, one other small slip, on the same page: in the 7th song, the comma after ‘Glisk o the burn’ should be a period. If there is any chance of correcting this at the same time –?
The two things that seem to me to stand out in the book are the Jacopone da Todi and the Michelangelo: for passion, and for strength. Perhaps this is a ‘northern’ or non-Italian estimate? At anyrate it struck me very forcibly. You have really got together quite a distinguished roll of translators, with Wordsworth and Shelley and Rossetti and Pound, and this gives the book a good variety of texture, variety of approach, which I think is useful.
My best wishes to you for the success of the book.
Yours very sincerely |
Lind edited Lyric Poetry of the Italian Renaissance (1954) in which EM’s translation into Scots of ‘13 Tuscan Songs’ appeared, as well as translations of Michelangelo and Tasso. These appear in Collected Translations [CT] (1994). Not only was there inaccurate pagination in the Index and an incomplete glossary but whole lines had been omitted from Songs 3 and 4.
Ian Dallas, dramatist and screenplay writer
Dearest Ian, this being Saturday
It struck me this morning I might put on paper
The remnants of last night’s brief and faulty
Conversation at Waterloo Street.
There were so many things I had still to say
But being so stuffed with sulfsuxidine
And feeling more gastro-enteritical
Than bright and critical I had to leave them
Sketched or unsaid. Here then are words
To suggest what I mean about patterned writing.
Divergence into freedom is still divergence,
Freedom is meaningless and self-destructive
Unless it is based on bondage and constraint
(And this is true for Marxist and Christian
As it is for poets!): the greatest of verse
In a Shakespeare or Milton presents the illusion
Of enormous liberty, but the liberties taken
Are variations within one frame,
Pleasure is never anarchic – daring
As daring as you like, but daring in design,
A vast counterpoint of speech and metre,
Not just metre – and not just speech.
Believe me there’s no shortcut to impressiveness!
Speech is the very first problem to solve,
And those who would ‘heighten’ drama with words
(Rather than with stage or production techniques)
Will find in the end that poetry will do it,
Or prose will do it – but the choice must be made.
I do not say that dramatic poetry
Can never be written except by a poet,
But one who is not a poet must somehow
Encompass the disciplines the poet lives by.
And that, dear dramatist, is what I would say:
Put yourself to school, experiment more,
Extend your range, be flexible, not Fry,
Write farces, mysteries, masques, anything
To give you more patience with the varied subtleties
Of dramatic language and dramatic presentation –
And leave for a little while the ideas,
The mission, the contents, the hundredth element
Or the hundredth existential saint!
They will keep: they will! You don’t believe me
But they will. And to find your own right form
They must wait till drama is itself heroic.
You search for the hero, but can that hero
Be a man or a woman? Can the playwright descend
Low enough, low enough, when the ‘Depths’ of Gorky
Or Blanche or the Salesman or Celia or Gettner –
Or Genet – or Jessie – are heights and happiness
Compared with the numbing anonymity
Of even one of Hiroshima’s dead
With neither dust to go to the dust
Nor ashes left to join the ashes?
He is the hero and she is the hero
And the burned child in her womb is the hero.
What stage could – but I stop to remember
That the Japanese theatre is a theatre of ghosts.
– And what is your answer to the four-stress measure?
You can write it easily and still give pleasure.
And alliteration, make it massive,
Sprinkle it with trickeries till it trips like Spring-
Heel Jack or a flyblown trampoline:
Or have it plain as plain can be
With eight short words to each blunt line.
Experiment with blank verse too. ‘Go on,’
He says; ‘blank verse is dodo’s food. Nothing
Can come of nothing.’ Nevertheless, try!
Make things hard for yourself. Edith Evans
Must be put down, just like Edith Sitwell.
Flow must have point, liquidity a dam.
Hydroelectric epigrams! Dam Fry!
I use ten syllables in every line
Yet every line is capable of that
Fall into self-determination and
Late-Shakesperian ambidextrousness
Which might clothe any character you make.
‘No good for the colloquial’, you think?
Inversion’s very useful – inversion
Of feet, I mean; it’s more than surprising,
Indeed it’s fair astonishing, how much
You can make its five feet speak: see
Bridges on Milton.
And for those pauses
Between the characters, a broken blank
Verse line is still
– Tops?
– Well, tops if you like!
Even heroic couplets have their place –
They make you ponder at a cracking pace
– Heroic triplets too are no disgrace.
But joking apart, and without distress
Or undue stress in my four-stress dress –
Have I made the point? and can it help you?
The starting-points may be half-forgotten –
‘Sweeney Agonistes’ and Yeats’s ‘Purgatory’,
Or a human Shaw or a thinking Synge.
Incision: bite: satire if necessary
But heroic clarity, the words like swallows
Cleaving a pattern of white and blue
In the sky of their rhythmic involvement.
Verse, or prose, is the choice I leave you.
And seek to be skilled, as words are weapons;
Waking, not sleeping, be Wayland the Smith!
Exit, with the morning,
Edwin Morgan.
Dallas was a young playwright and actor from Ayrshire who had trained at RADA in London and was now trying to make his way as a writer. His A Masque of Summer, a high-society play in three acts, was presented by Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in November 1952. The ‘discussion’ here relates to the pre- and post-war trend towards poetic drama, associated with Christopher Fry and also T.S. Eliot (in a plainer form of verse).
W.S. Graham, poet
Dear Sydney:
Your pencilled carbon-copy letter, having been pressed folded in its envelope, opened up as a sort of shadowgraph, doublewrite, or pseudo-palimpsest, but it was really quite intelligible; nice, however, to think that your message was there backwards and upside down as well as forwards and upside up. I was glad to hear from you, as I was worried about where to send the pen. It’s being posted separately in a box, the nib being protected by a rather absurd rubber thing which (if you don’t mind the absurdity) you can keep using for that purpose. If you don’t have a top, how do you not get ink everywhere? (This is one of about 365 questions I ought to be asking you.) Your photos, by the way, haven’t been printed yet, but I should be able to let you have them soon. I had to finish off the spool, and the weather’s been so bad that this was difficult, but on Sunday I went round by Cathkin snapping model aeroplane enthusiasts in a bing-bound field and lorries and tractors patterning the mud of the new Castlemilk housing scheme, with a wan wee free sun mourning over the shoulders of Sabbath labour and Sabbath play.
I’m sorry too that we didn’t have more time together when you were up. It was exciting, as always. If it was too exciting, and I was a little on edge, and said things I shouldn’t have said, I hope you’ll forgive in the circumstances. A curious thing happened that night: when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep, although I was tired, and in that pre-sleep state, with my eyes closed, I kept being startled by a succession of the most astonishingly vivid images I have ever seen either sleeping or waking. In the morning they had mostly gone, and I could only remember fragments, though in a vague way I still knew what sort of effect they had had. It was a series of bursts of energy: great curtains of rain coming suddenly down, rockets hurtling past, brilliant fusings and crystallizations, savage animals like tigers and leopards leaping out from caves – and in every instance there was an almost physical shock or punch as the image came into focus, making me open my eyes and think about it. I suppose my mind was very much awake, and yet there was no intellectual content in the imagery – at least, if there was, it had all been transformed into pictorial and kinetic terms. Have you ever had this sort of experience?
I look forward very eagerly to seeing how your next volume will appear. Although I have said that I ‘got less’ from your poetry than I did some years ago, I still find it more interesting than most of the poetry that is being written, and in a curious sort of way, because of the strongly continuing (no matter how superficially interrupted) involvement of each of us with the other (which I would never give up) I find myself wanting or willing you to make certain changes and developments, as if I was more concerned with poetry you have yet to write than with what you have written. So far, you are like harper in hall, goodly feres around, horns brimming, tables creaking, harp with fine tone, and you with ‘Listen, all this companee!’ give great swoop among strings, crouch to it, sweep and brandish, pick and knock and then again big swoop like a sweepskate: but guests grow restless, whisper from beard to beard: it is all prelude and no song, plectrum prances but voice is avoided: you say ‘Listen!’ but then you have nothing to tell us. – Is there anything in this that you would want to take? I think what I want to see you doing is assuming communication rather than speaking about it. This may involve some such thing as ‘a return to subject-matter’ – whether descriptive, narrative, or dramatic. One reason I liked The Nightfishing was, it had a definite physical subject, though still a highly romantic-symbolic one. Perhaps I am stupidly asking you to stand in Piccadilly Circus with a notebook? And yet, I did and do feel that the danger for your poetry is too much sea and too little pavement. – I merely throw you these strands, that are not necessarily lifelines, and you will see whether you require them as they are, or cut up for some other purpose – or whether they are to be thrown back to me.
Last week I saw not the best film I’ve ever seen but the most beautiful: the adjective just slides out of it like hand from glove. Japanese it was – a historical film, The Gate of Hell. Recollection of it makes me think in exclamations. How lucky to live in the 20th century when you can see so much beauty for 2/6! What an impact, what meaning there is simply in colour! Gorgeous robes and trappings and armour in gold and purple and crimson and peach; rows of white-laundered monks sitting like seagulls; a gamboge toril rising from the waves like an ideogram; a blue moonlit garden where you could feel your fingers stroking the glossy purring leaves….. The eye is some sensualist.
You don’t say in your letter, but I take it that your banns are all gebunden, and that Nessie is Mrs G? My best wishes to you both if this is so – and in any case.
I’ll be having a poem in the next Lines Review, and my first ‘Dialogue’ (Joyce and MacDiarmid) will be in the Saltire – sometime.
Write when you can. Love – |
Graham came to visit EM in late September 1954, got lost and arrived very late – to a cool reception. This letter and the promised pen were by way of apology and explanation, an attempt to restore friendship. ‘Wee free’ signals the austere Calvinism of the Free Church of Scotland. Graham met Nessie Dunsmuir as a fellow-student at Newbattle Abbey College.
Alan Shearer, friend
(handwritten)
Dear Alan
We arrived here today, and our hotel almost overlooks the Red Square (and Lenin’s mausoleum which you can see on the other side). All is excitement and banners in preparation for May Day. Warm sunny weather – though we had snow in Stockholm and Helsinki and the ship couldn’t go on to Leningrad because the ice still blocked the Gulf of Finland (we took the Helsinki–Moscow train). I have a vast double room with private bath, telephone, and clear view of the Kremlin. More reports later I hope.
Yours | Eddie
EM’s time as a delegate on a month-long study tour organised by the Scotland–USSR Friendship Society confirmed his commitment to socialism and Russian poetry. His translations of Mayakovsky appeared in Lines Review in 1954 and of Pushkin, Pasternak, Mayakovsky and Shevelyova in the Saltire Review and Soviet Weekly in 1955.
Dear Alan
Here is some modern Russian art – I hope to be able to show you more when I come back.
I’ve now been on the famous Odessa Steps, had a gargantuan meal with home-made wine on a collective farm, and read Burns at an open-air concert in Zaporozhe.
Very warm here on the Black Sea.
Yours | Eddie
EM’s enthusiasm for Russian constructivist art was lifelong, and informed the design of his first Carcanet volume, Wi the Haill Voice: 25 Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1972).
I have seen Egdon Heath, and I brought Tess of the d’Urbervilles with me but haven’t read any of it yet – what with visiting Southampton docks to see the oceanic boats, inspecting the cliffs of Lulworth Cove (in company with a young man who has seen a flying saucer) and taking colour photographs (trying hard not to count the eventual cost!). I expect to be back Thursday night. Shall I see you Saturday at 11 (Station)?
Eddie
EM explored the poetic potential of both photography (Instamatic Poems, CP: 217–29) and space travel (in The Second Life, From Glasgow to Saturn and Star Gate (CP: 196–98, 266–68, 383–94).
R.L. Lusty, publisher
Dear Mr Lusty
Thank you for your letter of 30th September addressed to me c/o the P.E.N. There are two things I should like to mention.
The first possibility is a collection of critical essays on poets and poetry, from various periods but mainly modern. Over the last six or seven years I have had a number of essays and articles published in magazines like Essays in Criticism, The Cambridge Journal, The Saltire Review, Lines Review, and Nine; and there are also some BBC talks. The essays wouldn’t strictly speaking be connected, but most of them are related to ideas about ‘purposefulness’ and ‘communication’ in poetry, and I would write and add a general essay on this theme if you were interested.
The other suggestion is so far only a project. I paid a 6-week visit to the USSR recently as a member of a Scottish cultural delegation invited by V.O.K.S. I received various strong impressions, which I mean to write about, and I hope to produce something that will be not just another travel book about Russia. I took many photographs, in colour and black and white, and I would want to use some of these as illustrations.
I should certainly be very glad to know whether you might be interested in either of these two possibilities.
Yours sincerely | | (Edwin Morgan)
Lusty was Vice-Chairman of Michael Joseph Ltd, publishers of New Poems 1955, a PEN anthology in which EM’s ‘Northern Nocturnal’ (CP: 564) had appeared. He enquired whether EM had any project (‘not poetry’) in mind for publication.
John Lehmann, editor
Sir,
Mr Colin Wilson in his ‘Writer’s Prospect’ shows a concern for the general literary situation which is refreshing, but his diagnosis is so incomplete that his concern can hardly be of much practical use. He betrays his own cause in the first sentence, when he speaks about ‘Western Europe’ and ‘Western European literature’ as if these were terms that needed no comment; as if it was possible, far less desirable, to cut off the western half of Europe from its eastern half, and as if nothing had been written on the far side of Bonn and Venice since Dostoevsky.
It is disappointing to see in Mr Wilson merely another Western European Provincial, dressed in a new suit of clothes but clinging resolutely to the same old threadbare ragbag of traditions. To offer us a new set of reverences, with Shaw and Wells in place of Eliot and Pound, may well produce a temporary enlivening effect, but the heart of our problem will remain untouched so long as we continue to try to perpetuate ourselves through this ceaseless cultural incest. Western European literature is starving itself because it has become afraid to go beyond its own boundaries for nourishment. Dread of political stigma compels us to remain ignorant or ignorantly contemptuous of literary values embedded in cultures opposed to our own. This ignorance is so shocking, and in the end will be so bad for our culture, that one must utter a protest when Mr Wilson says we can count on very few fingers ‘the number of writers of the last thirty years who considered themselves actively involved in the destiny of their times’, without mentioning the fact that if this is true it is because Western European writers had already severed most of their life-giving connections with the rest of the world, and had become enamoured of their own decline. There were plenty of writers, some of them very great and very human writers, who were ‘actively involved in the destiny of their times’, and from whom much might have been learned, by both novelists and poets: let me mention no more than Gorky, Mayakovsky, Sholokhov. Does Mr Wilson think that these writers belonged to a different race – or even to an incompatibly different culture? Is he aware of the fact that it is the USSR, and not Britain, which shares his high opinion of Shaw and his low opinion of ‘Freud, Jung, Bergson, and Donne’? What is his view of another fact: that his ‘sense of reality’, search for pattern, ‘diagnosis of the age’, and necessity of affirmation, are all vigorously recommended by Soviet critics, and can indeed be found (allowing for natural shortcomings) at the present time by anyone who reads Russian or who even takes the trouble to look at translations of postwar Russian books. Leonov, Panova, Granin, Chukovsky, Ehrenburg: have they no relevance, Mr Wilson? Can we do without them – always?
I mention Russian literature not politically but because it is a foreign literature with which I have some familiarity and whose traditions and characteristics I respect. The point I want to make is simply that writers cannot afford at this time of day to dig themselves in within this little promontory of Eurasia and go on counting their treasures. We have all been doing that too long; the very coins will not clink as blithely as they did. I fully sympathize with Mr Wilson in his desire to revitalize the literary body, but I would suggest that his fashion of criticizing the ‘writer’s prospect’ is like a man covering one eye with his hand and complaining of the wrongness of the scene.
| (Edwin Morgan)
Colin Wilson, one of the Angry Young Men of 1950s British writing and author of The Outsider (1956), a study of modern alienation, had published ‘The Writer’s Prospect’ in The London Magazine, edited by Lehmann. EM would later take part in a forum with Wilson at Glasgow’s Athenaeum Theatre ‘Trinity Celebrity Lectures’ (14 January 1957), on the topic of ‘George Bernard Shaw and the Decline of the Western World’.
Ian Dallas, dramatist and screenplay writer
(handwritten)
Dear Sir
I read your letter in the New Statesman… Well, actually I did, Ian, and having since that date also seen Mother Courage I feel I must again try to correct that alarming tendency in you to play down all production techniques in favour of ideas and beliefs. I remember being shocked by your dismissal of things like Uranium 235 because ‘people were doing that sort of thing in Germany 20 years ago’, and your clinging to all the clichés of the British (oh so British!) drawingroom play. Now that I’ve seen the Berliner Ensemble I am more than ever persuaded that technique and presentation are of the utmost importance. You deny the importance of the revolving stage in your letter; but it is precisely this that stamps the play and its meaning on your memory. The opening scene with the cart going round and the song being sung shakes you right out of the Eliot-Fry-Whiting continuum; it has an astonishing effect, as also have the bare stage and the clear unmelodramatized lighting. Certainly the ideas are important in Brecht, and having the ‘world-view’ might solve the question of technique, but the point you miss is that without something fairly spectacularly new in technique no world-view whether religious or political is going to revitalize British theatre. If I may misquote you, ‘It is not their holistic view of drama, that makes them lively, it is their revolving stage.’ Now, does that not read much better? Be honest with me; after all, I know you! This doesn’t mean that we have to take up the revolving stage, but we do have to find a revolving something, even if it’s only a revolver to shoot down all the designers of living-room sets. The Berliners and the Peking Opera can come and go, and people will still be unhappy unless they get their three square walls and half a ceiling – and you, dear friend, what do you do but encourage them? I despair of you, I.D., so I do.
But anyhow, how are you? Does TV feed you reasonably? Any plays in the offing – I mean real plays, not nom-de-ma-plume plays? Do drop me a line sometime.
