It is June 1976. The famously hot summer had yet to peak in all its scorching glory, and the university year was drawing to a close. (The suntan I acquired, Norman Talbot’s shorts and a memory of Judy Gascoyne trying to cool herself in the lecture theatre, testify to the rising heat). I was at the end of my second year at the University of East Anglia, and I had been a student on Eric Homberger’s contemporary poetry course. We studied Larkin, Hughes, Hill, Kinsella, and others I cannot recall. I wrote an essay comparing Peter Redgrove, whose work I was keen on, and whose Sons of My Skin I had already reviewed in Poetry Information 14 the previous year, favourably to ‘the savage Mr Ted Hughes’, as Christopher Middleton calls him. I also gave a class paper on Philip Larkin that Dr. Homberger liked, and he’d even offered to let me read his work in progress, which became the very engaging work on poetry from the 1940s to the 1970s, The Art of the Real, which was published in 1977. (I was too embarrassed to take up the offer. I've just re-read the book, particularly as I noticed it begins with an account of Louis MacNeice, whose work I have just been re-reading! His account of Hughes is devastating.)
The Henfield Writing Fellow that year was David Plante. I got to know him a little bit, attended a couple of his workshops and was much taken by his fiction writing. Plante was also a friend of Stephen Spender (as related in his book of diaries, A London Life). I think it was Plante who organised this mini-conference on the Poets of the 1930s. Homberger’s seminar group was invited. I attended, and I wrote the following account, valuable because this event doesn’t appear in the Plante diaries, or in the second volume of John Haffenden’s monumental biography of William Empson, or in Spender’s published diaries. I suspect it’s not in the biography of David Gascoyne either, but I haven’t checked that yet.
I attended the reception and watched the video interviews that occurred the following day, relayed to a lecture theatre, as I hint here. I’ve no idea where the interviews are now. I know that the one with George Oppen, which I transcribed here, had disappeared by the time John Seed went searching for it decades ago. Comments in [square] brackets are twenty-first century interpolations.
Sunday 27th June 1976: The Reception
Last night we [Trev Eales and I] got pissed [no change there then, in 50 years] and saw George Melly, who was very entertaining, if that’s not an insult. Nice to hear old jazz songs, including that [obscene] one I used to sing around school about six years ago....
This evening I went to a reception for the 1930s poets. When I arrived in the Senior Common Room, I found a group of faculty huddled up in a corner and felt suddenly very embarrassed. Norman Talbot [visiting Australian poet] – attired in bohemian Australian shorts, came and chatted for a while as the room filled up. Helen McNeil appeared out of nowhere and introduced me as a ‘student and poet’ (which I was rather chuffed by) to David Gascoyne and Stephen Spender, the poems of whom I’ve been reading today whilst accumulating a bright RED suntan. Eventually I got cornered by Spender, Dr. Homberger and two German students (and later, the only other guy from the seminar group to turn up [Sandy?]). More or less we listened to the bard talking about teaching students in Florida who were ‘functionally illiterate’ and a play on Hitler he was writing. He got going about Germany in 1932 and Christopher Isherwood and the response to political murder in a liberal society. Masses of faculty had arrived, including the Vice Chancellor and Edgell Rickword who was a geriatric [the young can be so unkind], and William Empson who had no Mandarin beard but had the wind, and was wandering about like a halfwit all over the place. The guy from the seminar group and I really wanted to talk to Gascoyne, but the poets and hosts went off for a meal, and we went down to the bar to talk about contemporary poetry, Jeff Nuttall, Paul Brown, Redgrove, Hughes, Bob Cobbing.
Tuesday 29th June 1976
The Interviews
Yesterday – apart from a brief visit to see Vic [Sage] I spent the afternoon watching the half hour videotape interviews [relayed to a lecture theatre].
One. William Epsom interviewed by Helen McNeil and Vic and Lorna Sage. Apparently Empson was annoyed about being filmed, was extremely rude and demanded more money. [I think I remember Vic saying he was also annoyed at not talking directly to students.] Mostly he was asked about his critical works; he was asked about Milton and propaganda, but he had forgotten what he said in Milton’s God. He was asked about his poetry, about his notes. Yes, he thought they were obscure and needed explaining. He saw nothing wrong at all in this, and wished other poets would do the same; an insistence upon Meaning, always.
Two. Stephen Spender interviewed by Dr Eric Homberger, Malcolm Bradbury, and Stephen Spender's friend David Plante. He spoke of the 1930s more coherently than the others, as he had done to us the previous evening. He has a very strong sense – he's a diarist and autobiographer – of what happened during that decade but he – more than anybody else – dislikes the idea of being a 1930s generation writer, but is insistent of the fact that he has been writing since. He also appears to be a totally unselfconscious person. [MacNeice and Plante report the complete opposite.] He kept saying that he didn’t think about what he did, from planning the interview or leading an open homosexual life in the 1930s with a soldier. Perhaps he doesn’t think... enough!
3 Edgell Rickword – he’s the man I’ve never heard of. He’s not a complete geriatric but he's blind, which makes things difficult for him. Interviewed by Bradbury and Homberger. It appears he wrote a lot in the 1920s, one poem in 1938, ‘To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist’. He appears mainly to have been an astute critic and publisher. He couldn’t be drawn out into answering the questions. His mind was slow. Possibly apprehensive. Bradbury quoted a long passage about Eliot’s technique and physiology of sensation, for his comment, which he half did. I’m not sure he understood what he had written all those years ago. [He was one of Eliot’s first appreciative critics.] I was reminded of something in one of Pound’s last cantos, ‘a brown husk that is blown across the marshes…’ etc. Sad.
4 David Gascoyne. I’d been watching the [preceding] interviews with Mrs Gascoyne, but [at this point] she went off with him to the studios. If I remember correctly David Gascoyne has been in mental institutions but I think that his wife holds him together. In fact, most of the wives do. A lecturer from Fine Arts and Music and Helen McNeil asked him yes/no questions for ages and then it stopped. He got chatty about Benjamin Peret towards the end. He had his first volume of poems published when he was 16, a novel at 17, and imported surrealism singlehandedly when he was only 19. An impressive achievement, though surrealism proves limited, and he was excommunicated like Eluard for joining the Communist Party.
The Reading
Later on, the reading – chairpersoned by Anthony Thwaite – began with William Epsom removing his teeth and reading ‘Just a Smack at Auden’, a villanelle, and another poem. He was very witty about his own obscurity and about the poems, about how Auden liked ‘Just a Smack…’.
David Gascoyne read next, a number of surrealist things, one for Yves Tanguy, parts of ‘Holderlin’s Madness’ and a poem from the 1930s, ‘New Year’s Day 1940’, which was appropriate. Despite being asked to read his later work he read nothing from ‘Night Thoughts’.
William Empson then read three pieces by Edgell Rickword, praising them and describing one as slight(!), always concerned for the meaning of the poetry, and saying how he felt dissatisfied with the meaning implied from other readings of his own work. Thwaite then read the 1938 poem [‘To the Wife…’] which I appreciated and could hear better after Empson’s mumble. Rarely am I moved by political poems, but I was by this. Though it was hardly great poetry. [My view at the time, of course.]
Finally Spender read poems, including ‘The Pylon’, but also a recent poem about the 1930s. Each poet was applauded loudly and for quite some time.
Then they were all lined up for … questions, one from Brian [now the comedian Arthur] Smith, and two from X, who said something silly about ‘Did you consider yourself mad revolutionaries? And nobody’s got rickets and we've got the NHS and, well. if you look now at Spain...’ etc, etc, etc. I was muttering ‘Bloody Fascist!’ but everybody was laughing. Spender said something about sometimes they were mad and sometimes they were revolutionaries, and Thwaite said, ‘You sound like a man from the 1950s’ which I roared at. An applause and then it was finished. I’m glad Edgell Rickword spoke at question time because he was beginning to look like a stuffed dummy on display like an old Victorian dinner jacket.
1976
[Notes: I make use of David Plante’s diary in one of my posts upon the British Poetry Revival, here: Pages: British Poetry Revival/New British Poetry: David Plante on Nikos Stangos' editing
And I have other (later) memories of studying at UEA here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Some memories of the Creative Writing MA (cohort 1978-1979) at the University of East Anglia
And there is even more on June 1976 at UEA, and a recovered and revised early poem of mine, and memories of my friend Colin Scott from those days: Pages: A Positive Virtue: memories of Colin Scott, a friend from UEA days rediscovered.]
