I
first met Ian in 1959, during my final year as an undergraduate. What
a strange year that was! I was not to realise it fully at the time,
but it was the year of Lowell’s Life Studies, the greatest
influence on Ian’s view of poetry and a significant historical watershed
in many ways. In the parochial world of student poetry things were
different. In the aftermath of the visit of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory
Corso in the previous year, a disastrous wave of drugged and lower-case
formlessness had afflicted Oxford poets fascinated by the Beat Generation’s
typescripts (drawn tantalisingly one by one from Ginsberg’s travelling
basket at readings). Already the university seemed to be tiring of
the intellectualisms first introduced by MacBeth and Thwaite and somewhat
perpetuated by Lonsdale and Spink. The work of my friends Dom Moraes
and Peter Levi had a decidedly neo-romantic flavour. At the time,
as a recent semi-surrealist, I had been fascinated myself by the ‘great
eye sounds’ of Corso, and even quite proud to print his work along
with that of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs (probably for the first
time in this country) in Isis. But the general trend (soon
to be reflected in the wilder productions of Cape Goliard or Trigram)
wasn’t at all to my taste.
For
that reason, Ian’s magazine Tomorrow, launched in the summer
of 1959 with lashings of Michael Horovitz and thin jests from the
21-year-old Roger McGough, certainly passed me by at first. As a poet
I wasn’t much interested in the idea of ‘tomorrow’, and as a student
facing finals I was too compulsively caught up in the past.
It
wasn’t until I encountered Ian in person, and experienced his demanding,
dismissive, uncompromising sensibility at first hand that I realised
that he didn’t much like what he had been printing either. But a hungry
man must eat something, and he was simply setting up his shop, and
the shop-front was provided, impressively, by Oscar Mellor’s absolutely
authentic Fantasy Press.
I very
soon arrived at a complete awe for the blue-chip value of Ian’s commitment
to little magazines. Tomorrow did matter, after all, and
a poetry magazine wasn’t just the glamour of history, Pound as procurer
of modernism, etc, etc. It was a social instrument, a personal crusade.
And poetry was, yes, as important as football.
Ian
was different from most Oxford poets: tough, austere, unprivi1eged,
unpretentious. He possessed a natural tight-lipped authority that
paid no dues to the established channels of influence. I liked him
immediately, and felt a strange surge of relief and literary homecoming
of some kind when he took me on board. He induced me to review Donald
Davie’s The Forests of Lithuania for Tomorrow no.
3, and allowed my friend Francis Hope to do a hatchet job on Geoffrey
Hill’s first book. I think we both wanted to please, wanted to claim
a place in a forum for which Ian’s charisma seemed to guarantee a
future. No matter that it was such a mixed bag. It would get better,
we knew. And it did. The vastly expanded no. 4 contained, among other
goodies, the first printing of Pinter’s A Slight Ache. I
knew that I had found a significant ally whose ambitions cast into
the shade my earlier editorial flirtations (Isis; Gemini;
Oxford Poetry; Universities Poetry -- all in various
ways circumscribed by local circumstances or the deadness of committees
and their alien assumptions). I carried the poetry magazine virus
in my blood, but I had never let it rage untreated. Ian was seriously
infected, and I admired his single-minded genius.
But
Ian was almost as unsatisfied with Tomorrow as he was with
the magazine he had edited at school in Darlington (the contents of
the latter ostentatiously consisting, as he ruefully confessed, of
irritated letters from famous writers refusing to contribute). He
had managed to ditch his co-editor on Tomorrow, but in the
face of the financial difficulties which were for ever afterwards
to haunt his editorial chair he wanted a new start. Valuable boxes
of back-numbers were abandoned in a porter’s store-room in Keble College
because Ian, with a large battels bill unpaid, dared not risk being
seen claiming them.
As
we discussed possibilities during 1961 it became clear to me that
Ian was a compulsive serial editor. It was rather like his smoking.
As
our evenings wore on, Ian would become paler and more terse, his disagreements
bleaker, his enthusiasms less vocal, his face drained -- until he
simply had to leave (wherever he was, whatever the hour) to find a
cigarette machine. Without a magazine, he similarly became edgy anxious,
unfulfilled. The only relief was fiercely competitive bar-billiards,
or darts, accompanied by the yeasty cloudy bottled Worthington that
we liked to drink.
After
marriage and graduation in 1960 I had to concentrate on my research,
more exams, and eventually the negotiation of a job in the US. But
I eked out my grant with reviewing, and could therefore commiserate
with Ian who endured the constant slavery and distraction of WEA classes
to keep the wolf from the door. Reviewing is flattering to the reviewer,
who will feel that an important part of life is not merely writing
poetry but telling other people, whether they like it or not, how
it should be written. It is, of course, really a way of learning the
same thing oneself. This is why little magazines should only be edited
by the young.
I was
keen to be involved with Ian’s new plans (which in August 1961 were
for a magazine to be called, rather severely, Evidence in Writing),
but I didn’t much get on with his friend Michael Fried, just as I
suspected that Ian didn’t get on with Francis Hope, then at All Souls.
When I aired all this, it was clear that Ian felt that antagonisms
might actually be constructive, since we would be (as he wrote in
a letter to me) ‘a group that will generate ideas’. That we (and Colin
Falck, the other major mover) didn’t actually much meet at all didn’t
seem to matter. ‘If the magazine is the place where these differences
can be thrashed out’, Ian wrote, ‘so much the better’. He made it
sound more like a football field than a forum of cultural devotion.
Excellent! This instinct of Ian’s was right. His management of any
of his magazines’ taste and direction was always more generously catholic
than you might at first have supposed. There was in his experienced
view no certain source of material yearning for print. He knew that
the presence of a magazine would be enough to help him to find new
poets and critics: ‘We’ll have to attract them,’ he wrote. ‘We’ll
have to create a situation in which they can confidently emerge from
their caves and take a deep breath of fresh air.’
Thus
in a short time (certainly by December 1961) it merely became a matter
of what this new bi-monthly magazine was to be called and where the
money was coming from. From my Bodleian desk, working on the early
18th century, Defoe’s The Review sounded a retrievable title.
It was severe enough, in one sense, but also relaxed and neither starry-eyed
like Tomorrow nor forensic-academic like Evidence in
Writing. It was going to be responsible and investigative, and
also open-minded. The open-mindedness was always a little surprising
to me, who knew very well the range of Ian’s scorn. I never understood
why, for example, he printed my long light poem in tetrameter couplets,
‘The Art of Love’ (‘I loathe leisured, “witty”, knowing poetry,’ he
had told me. ‘I loathe that which is assured because it has so little
to be in doubt about, I don’t much care for light, satiric
verse’), but I suppose it was for more or less the same reason as
he went ahead later with an issue of Black Mountain poets (‘I half
agree with all you say about the Black Mt. people…but I think that
in terms of information the number is a useful one’). The fresh air,
therefore, was the sort that you get from your own mountain,
ie. a view of everything else.
My
influence on The Review was slight, and often disastrous.
For example, the Gill Sans of the first three issues was entirely
due to my illusion that we were somehow a reincarnation of Geoffrey
Grigson. After that, the professional touch of Tony Russell put things
right, and the authentic format was achieved. Many of the poets I
contacted were devastatingly declined by Ian (‘I have read the Moraes
and think that if we were to print any of these we would be disarming
ourselves on too many critical fronts’ -- I was tremendously impressed
by such a prophylactic touch; it made me feel like a wittering amateur).
When Ian finally found the poets who seemed to be exactly tuned to
his critical frequency, the complete character of The Review
was evident to everyone. (And incidentally, the superb recent work
of Hugo Williams and David Harsent is alone justification of the magazine’s
ten-year existence.)
Those
early years, with a fair amount of the magazine written by ourselves
under pseudonyms and every subscription worth the celebratory drink
which made a large hole in it, with darts or football (Beechcroft
Road version) and with evenings of smoke-clouded conspiracy, were
years for me never to be matched for excitement and sense of collective
intent. Ian and I have both had other lives since, but our exchanges
at that time were a critical benchmark of sorts for me, part of growing
up. There are not many people who will tell you when your work ‘won’t
do’ and I am grateful to Ian for never disguising that truth. How
easy it might have been to have lived within a world of ingratiation
and false esteem! I am sure that all Ian’s friends will agree that
we who have been lucky to have known him have escaped such a fate.
We have seen our dud manuscripts on his knee, whether in actuality
or imagination, and we have been better for it (I refer to his poem
‘Critique’). Even now, whenever I encounter some literary fatuity
especially one committed by myself, I feel the better for remembering
his laugh of disbelieving wonder: the shoulders resigned, the brows
raised, the mouth under severe control, the eyes narrowed and dancing,
the cough, the air around him full of smoke. Race you to the sea,
Ian!
