by Alexei Sayle
‘A young man?’ rumbled Mrs Sam who had entirely the wrong idea about me and young men since I had had no female companionship in the thirty years they had known me.
Sam’s wife, known only as Mrs Sam, was a tall thin woman who kept their house very clean and rarely spoke, but when she did it was in a surprisingly deep voice, rather reminiscent of a Negro from the deep south of the United States. When she addressed you at the dinner table it was as if you were being asked if you would like another serving of mousseline de tête de grenouille by the famous singer Mr Paul Robeson.
‘Yes, he’s something called a Million Pound Poet. Whatever that is. He telephoned me a little while back and said he admired my work and could he meet me for a chat? So I invited him for tea. It’s such a long time since anybody’s got in touch with me and well, you know, I did that a lot when I was young, it was quite the done thing. Write to a poet or author you admired and they were often frightfully good about inviting you round for tea, to talk about their work, sort of help out the next generation. Powell, Forster, though 1 think he was a little too interested in young men coming round; Ted Hughes of the more modem persuasion of poet served a particularly fine sort of scone with currants in it that you could only get at a little bakers in Names that meant nothing to the Sams.
‘Are you still writing your poems?’ said Sam. ‘I didn’t think you wuzz writin’ your poems. I didn’t think you’d written any poems since you had come ere.’
Sam would always be the one to say to a leper ‘Wo’s wrong with your nose then, mate?’ In fact, he would be pleased with himself, he would think he was doing the leper a favour by being so blunt and outspoken, and by not trying to ignore the deformity but coming right out and mentioning it plain and simple.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, as you’ve been kind enough to point out, I haven’t, hadn’t written for thirty years but now suddenly I’ve, well I hardly dare say it …
I was making the Sams uneasy with my giddy tone.
‘But I’ve started again, only mapping it out at this point. It’s a long poem and erm …’ I was losing them now, but anyway I can feel it’s back, the power very different but also the same. Would you like to know what it’s about?’
Sam said, ‘No we wouldn’t, no. We’re very happy you’re writing again but that’s about the limit of our interest really.’
‘Yes, fair enough. I must say I’m rather sorry that he’s coming to see me, the Million Pound Poet, because I can only write during the day for a few brief hours, and even the prospect of somebody coming to see me stops me for days. Still one has to be polite …’
Polite. Politeness, my own affliction more disabling than arthritis. I do look on it as an affliction, an inability to make clear my own feelings, to state my own desires. I have always been that way. I imagine I was influenced by all the poets and writers who infested our house in Old Church Street like termites when I was a child, weeping and borrowing money that they never repaid, molesting the staff and stealing the sugar bowls. It would have been good for them to restrain their desires, even if only once a year. Would have kept them out of the courts or the River Thames or the private clinic that everybody knew about in Wimpole Street. But it never occurred to them even for a second.
Surprising then that from when I was a child my only ambition had been to be a poet. At my prep school there were several boys in my class who wanted to be poets, it was that kind of school, others wanted to be fighter pilots, engine drivers and one boy wanted to be a cow, but there was a fair crowd of us nine-year-old aesthetes.
My father, Vyvyan Wheat, had returned from the First World War to become an editor at Fabers. As a baby I had been sick over the first draft of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. With my father I had got the Number 14 bus from Chelsea to Red Lion Square then walked past the British Museum to take tea with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, a remote creepy woman whom I was afraid of. As a final pilgrimage I had gone with my ailing father down to Southampton Docks to throw lumps of coal at Auden and Isherwood as the two cowards had set sail for America, just ahead of the Second World War.
I said to Blink, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t feel I can stay with Caspari and Millipede under this new ownership. I’m sure many other publishers would be glad to have me.
‘Of course they would be, Hillary.’
But of course they wouldn’t be, Hillary.
They did a similar thing to Barbara Pym round about the same time. You can now buy her books again all over the place but in the 1970s and 1980s it would have been impossible. Back in the unswinging Fifties she was enormous, top-five successful novelist, then more or less on one day something in the air changed: the executives at her own publishing company and the critics on all the big newspapers and magazines decided she wasn’t any good any more. Though she had been good the day before, somehow now she wasn’t. I suppose these people have to believe they have some special power, that they know ahead of time when an artist is played out. So if they bring it about, they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are scientists who can affect the outcome of their experiments. Poor Barbara kept writing books and her editor would be unenthusiastic and they wouldn’t get published. And she thought it was her fault, but it wasn’t: it was fashion’s fault, it was their fault, all the others. Nobody put her books out till they decided to dig her up at the end of her life. Too late, too late.
After my lunch with Blink I went home feeling terribly agitated, perhaps suspecting some of what was to come. My wife was in the hall arranging some flowers on the hall table. At that time we lived in an apartment block on the edge of Hampstead Heath which was called Isopod One and had been designed in the international style, along socialist principles, by a famous architecture collective called the Isopod. There had once, before the war, been a communal canteen on the ground floor that had served nourishing vegetarian meals for sixpence and a bar where there had been folk concerts. It’s derelict now.
‘How was your lunch with Blink?’ she asked.
‘Catastrophic.’
‘I said you should have gone to Claridges.’
‘No, not in that way. Well, in that way too, but the most extraordinary thing. Caspari and Millipede are being taken over by the German Poison Gas Corporation or some such, so I’ve told them I’m leaving.’
I had married for the second time to a much younger woman. My new wife, Annabelle, was taller than myself, blonde, sweet-faced, with wonderful straight posture that emphasised her perfect breasts, and she had always had terrible trouble getting men to have sex with her. Fellows at the university she went to were always finding her in their beds after parties, looking all tousled and saying things like ‘Oh I’m just so tired, can’t I stay the night here? We don’t have to do anything, honestly, we can just hold each other.’ Or she was constantly taking up the bizarre pursuits of men she fancied, such as real tennis or robotics, in order to get closer to them; it didn’t work, though she could probably have designed a tennis-playing robot long before Pete Sampras came along.
On the other hand my first wife, Frances, had been a small bandy woman with a substantial moustache and a fine collection of moles who had, sometimes literally, had to beat men, especially Arthur Koestler, off with a stick (which he had liked very much indeed).
My first wife Frances had abandoned me soon after I became famous with my first collection of poems, saying that she found celebrity ‘tacky’. She went to live on a kibbutz in Israel which collapsed in violence because of the sexual tension she generated. After that Frances had wandered the Middle East and the ructions she caused were a powerful factor in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.
My young wife Annabelle had married me because I had felt her up at a bottle party in Mayfair without her begging me to. It was a surprise to me and all in our circle when she gassed herself, after I had left Caspari and Millipede and no other publisher would take me. Nobody knew that my fame had been so essential to her, most assumed instead that she’d been having an affair wi
th Ted Hughes.
In truth we would have been able to stand me losing my publisher but it was the court case that really did for us. Now we live in more crack-up conscious times and it is well known and understood that those under stress, often without knowing they are doing it, find that they have been stealing little things, shoplifting in other words. Even back then, if I had been caught walking out of Fortnums with a jar of pickled walnuts under my coat they might not have pressed charges but the Zoo felt they could not be so understanding. Also I had my accursed ubiquity to blame, for one of the many tasks outside poetry that I had taken on was my own regular radio programme broadcast on the Home Service, called The Moral Low Ground, on which each week I would deliver an extemporised lecture, entirely without notes, on some aspect of the decline of manners and morality in society: unmarried mothers, hire purchase, lack of civility in daily life, association footballers earning more than ten pounds a week — plus shoplifting, of course. And although the penguin had suffered no injuries, indeed it was me who had been badly pecked underneath my coat, at Wandsworth Crown Court the beak sent me down for three months and I was pilloried in the press for hypocrisy and animal cruelty. This last charge particularly hurt since I had always been a keen supporter of animal rights and I think in my stress-addled mind I was only taking the penguin home because it looked cold.
With no wife, I sold the flat in the Isopod and with all of my savings bought this little house in Lyttleton Strachey. To exile myself, to punish myself, to not have to come face to face with an old friend in the Strand. I retained the best of the furniture from our Hampstead apartment, at that time the exemplar of restrained urban taste: Hille couch and armchairs in wood and moquette, Heals sideboard in sycamore, an original Ercol dining-room set, Luminator lamps from Arte Luce, Aubusson needlepoint rugs. All as incongruous as myself in what was little more than a rural council house built for the chauffeur of the Manor House, now itself converted to apartments. And I kept my clothes, which also looked out of place in their new bucolic home.
Yet along with my hunting rifle and an ugly PVC hat Larkin had given me that I’d never liked, I seemed to have left the ability to write poetry back in London.
Once my inspiration had been lost and I had come to this place I still stuck to the working routine of a poet. For thirty years, on weekdays, for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon I sat at my G-plan desk in the middle, small bedroom, which looked out over the fields at the rear of the house and wrote … nothing, basically nothing: the odd line sometimes, a fragment some days; whole poems once or twice convinced me at lunchtime that my gift had returned and as early as the same afternoon they would be revealed as complete rubbish. Once, over four days of fevered creativity, I definitely wrote something that was quite good. Unfortunately it had already been written a hundred years before by the Victorian sentimentalist Coventry Patmore.
Except now was different. In the last two months I hardly dared look at it, hardly dared contemplate it, but something real had come back. After thirty years of being mute a tiny feeble voice had begun to hesitantly speak its lines. I couldn’t quite hear what it was saying but I sat each day at the desk in that middle bedroom, grandly named my study, which overlooked the asbestos sheds into which Sam crammed whatever animal it was most profitable for him to abuse that year, and listened closely to what it was trying to say to me.
And what it wanted to talk about was what had been in front of me all along, it was the view out of my study window. When I first arrived, sitting at the same desk and looking out of the same window, the view was of a patchwork of small fields, some edged with trees, one with a large pond in the middle and over to the far left of my vista was a very charming coppice of ancient broadleaf native trees. Now there was nothing except a vast single expanse of bright yellow rape. (Who named it that? Was it someone with a sense of humour?) Such vivid colour, the shade of an RAC man’s protective jacket, always seemed out of place to me in the English countryside. Over the years the hedges had started disappearing, the pond was filled in and I could still remember the dreadful day they started the destruction of the coppice. So from diversity had come uniformity, from variety, monotony. It was the same when I went on one of my walks in the neighbourhood: years ago one guaranteed pleasure was hearing and seeing all the different birds — now with the hedges and lots of the trees gone you could walk for hours and hear only the odd wood pigeon. There seemed to be lots more paths back then too, so you could take a turning you’d never spotted before and go on not knowing where it would take you. Now all the local paths seemed to have been tarmaced and they all led to more or less identical housing developments. The realisation crept up on me that my journey from youth to age had been like that — from an abundance of options to none, from countless choices and the promise of an infinity of unknowns to a straight path leading inexorably to the last remaining unknown, the grave.
The poem taking shape in my head was to be an epic or perhaps more accurately a long meditative poem in the style of Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ or ‘The Excursion’. I had toyed at first with giving it narrative form, giving my ideas the form of a story, but after some weeks wrestling with an everyman character and his life journey I realised that this was unspeakably banal. Further weeks passed while I re-read some of the greater epics, including Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’. I must admit the reviews for this had made me wildly jealous: ‘Heaney has chosen the plain prosaic yet subtly cadenced vernacular of his Northern Irish roots as the poetic voice into which he renders the Anglo-Saxon epic. He evokes the highly alliterative texture of Anglo-Saxon verse … brilliant, genius’ etc., etc. And then the bloody thing was a huge best-seller! A lot of those buying it seemed to think he had made the story up himself. I wondered whether I should just translate ‘Le Chanson de Roland’ into the clipped cadences of a Second World War officer and pass it off as a modern comment on war rather than attempting the great original task ahead of me. I calmed myself down by re-reading ‘The Iliad’, ‘The Odyssey’ and of course ‘Paradise Lost’. This last seemed, given the subject matter of my poem, an obvious verse form to follow. But since one object of poetry is to arouse emotion, to induce a certain state of being, to enlarge the imagination into unvisited realms, the stanza form and threatening rhythms of Milton’s epic did not fit my aim of rousing both melancholy and anger in my reader. The cadence and the emotional emphasis were not what I wanted.
Then, while tending my vegetables, I recalled that for Rimbaud a poem usually first took place in his mind through some folk tune running through his head. He was inspired first by the impelling sense of rhythm, and I wondered for a while if what I had to say could be said in a simple ballad form. I worked with this for a while but realised that it was not subtle enough for the whole poem, though I thought it might work for the middle section. The dawn of false hope. I realised I was being inevitably drawn to the rhymes and rhythms of the ‘Divine Comedy’. A vague idea had stirred while I was reading Louis MacNeice’s long poem ‘Autumn Journal’ written in tercets, but it was while reading Part II of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ that it struck me that, though unrhymed, the poem was also written in tercets, the form favoured by Dante. The pace is subtle but relentless — exactly the mood I wanted to convey in my own epic. Dantesque terzarima has stanzas connected by rhyme (aba bcb cdc… and so on), each canto of the ‘Divine Comedy’ ends with a quatrain linking with the preceding tercet thus: uvu vwvw.
I could use this to emphasise the inevitability of what has preceded and the compelling necessity of what is to come.
When he came he was wearing the most ridiculous clothes.
As I said before it really was rather a bother that this Million Pound Poet was calling round at all but I couldn’t turn him away.
Excessive politeness appears to be a common disease of the early twentieth century which, like polio and scarlet fever, has largely been eradicated from modern society but I am too old to have been inocula
ted. I could no more have turned him away than I could be intentionally cruel to a penguin.
Though I was sure that my poem was the real thing at last, progress was still painfully slow. I seemed to need the long hours of solitude that had once been torture to me to bring out the shy voice, it didn’t seem to want to come out if there was somebody else in the room, indeed if there was even somebody coming to visit. A note or a scrambled thought was the yield of most days and that left me as drained and wan as if I was having chemotherapy. Now I hadn’t even been able to achieve that modest output for fretting about my visitor.
I got back to the house only a few minutes before he came, even though I had spent all morning fussing about the tea spread.
At 7 a.m. Sam had rapped on my door and, looking over his shoulder like some drugs courier, he had wordlessly handed over a big box still warm from the ovens of an all-night Franco—Morrocan patisserie that he knew about, situated on the industrial zone of St Malo. Then at almost the appointed hour I felt it somehow wasn’t quite enough, so with only ninety minutes to go I got on my moped and rode into the nearest place that still had shops, which was Towcester. There I planned to buy four of a special kind of small cheesecake that was made only at this one cake shop called Mr Pickwick’s Olde Tea Shoppe at the northern end of town next to The Saracens Head Hotel, which was visited by Mr Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. Cheesecakes that only came from one shop in all the world had to mean a pretty impressive tip-top teatime spread, even better than those that Pablo Neruda laid on. I was lucky, I got the last cakes. You had to get to the cake shop quite early and then be quite ruthless in the queue because they ran out of Towcester cheesecakes quite rapidly, always, I have to say, to the total bemusement and bewilderment of the cake-shop staff who were as shocked as anyone to find that there were suddenly no more of the special cheesecakes left. I had once suggested that they might like to consider the option of baking some more cheesecakes. The head woman just shouted, ‘No, we’re out! We’re out of cheesecakes! Have a big Lardy cake or a Belgian Bun, why don’t you!’ Then all the staff had run into a back room where they hid till I had gone away.