Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  The poetry, the concerts and the reviewing continued. Handsomely produced limited editions seemed to be in vogue at that time, and I was thrilled when the entrepreneurial Bernard Stone, whose Turret Books, a second-hand bookshop in Kensington Church Walk, was a literary oasis, proposed issuing a limited edition of ten of my poems (Poems Out of Israel) – 100 copies, numbered and signed by me. It was part of a Turret Booklets series edited by the poet and critic Edward Lucie-Smith, and to have his imprimatur was gratifying. He’d been the chairman of ‘The Group’, which had been formed in Cambridge in 1952 by Philip Hobsbaum and continued by Lucie-Smith in London. It wasn’t a literary movement of any kind but a weekly meeting of various poets who’d circulate their new poems, which would then be discussed frankly – very frankly – by the others present. I’d gone once with Douglas Hill, and we both found it unpleasant and intimidating and beat a hasty retreat, since neither of us fancied offering our necks to that literary guillotine (or perhaps it was more the sight of Edward Lucie-Smith’s slippered feet dangling from an armchair and the all-round smugness that did for us).

  * * *

  For some while, Dannie Abse and I had been working on a series of critical anthologies for Corgi Books, commissioned by their editorial director Mike Legat, for whom this was quite a courageous departure, given that Corgi was the mass-market paperback imprint of Transworld Publishers. Working closely together, Dannie and I edited alternate volumes, each featuring six poets and including introductions to their work by one of us, comments on their own work by the poets themselves, and a selection of their poems. There was a pattern to the volumes, all featuring a modern master, a living poet celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, a poet’s poet who had been somewhat neglected by the reading public, a poet who had recently died but whose work was very much alive, a young poet with a growing reputation, and a poet never before published in book form by a London-based commercial publisher. This was quite a challenge, since as well as choosing and clearing the poems, there were six separate introductory essays to be written for every volume. It also meant liaising and corresponding with various poets to get their cooperation and involvement. My first volume (following the order of the categories just listed) focused on Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, Thomas Blackburn, Keith Douglas, Seamus Heaney and the American poet William Meredith; my second featured Thomas Hardy, Dannie Abse, Vernon Scannell, Stevie Smith, Tony Harrison and another leading American poet, Daniel Hoffman.

  The first volumes were now ready, and although by mass-paperback standards our sales must have seemed relatively modest to the publishers (initially about 7,000 copies per volume), in modern poetry terms they were substantial, and I hope Mike Legat felt that this and the wide attention the books received justified going out on a limb in the way he did, especially since the books were adopted by various schools and colleges and hopefully would go on selling. Looking back now at the extensive correspondence, I can see that apart from the poems chosen to represent them, what exercised the poets most were the pieces on themselves we asked them to write or provide – Seamus Heaney, for instance, writing, ‘Jeremy, what can I say? I’m totally tongue-tied.’ In the end he most certainly wasn’t, producing a well-thought-out, carefully crafted piece about himself and the nature of poetry which began:

  A poet at work is involved in a double process of making a discovery, a process that at the best of times is unique, unselfconscious, and unpredictable. Every real poem that he makes represents a new encounter with what he knows in himself, and it survives as something at once shed and attained … I began to write poetry in 1963, craft-ridden and compulsively attracted to those guardians of technique like the water diviner and the untutored musicians, men whose wrists and fingers receive and encode energies into meaning…

  Precious words. I also found Tony Harrison’s contribution enlightening as he confessed:

  In our street in Hoggarty Leeds I was the only one who used his literacy to read books, the only ‘scholar’, and so every kind of throwaway from spring-cleaned attics and the cellars of the deceased found its way to me. I acquired piles of old 78s, George Formby, the Savoy Orpheans, Sophie Tucker, Sandy Powell, Peter Dawson, and sometimes the odd book, an old guide to Matlock, the Heckmondwike Temperance Hymnal stamped ‘not to be taken away’, and above all Livingstone’s Travels, so massive I could barely manhandle it. Sometimes it seemed that my two early ambitions to be Dr Livingstone and George Formby, were compromised in the role of the poet, half missionary, half comic…

  The responses from Philip Larkin were, not unexpectedly, more formal than those of the other poets, yet helpful enough. He did write to me after the book was published, querying my interpretation of a line in ‘Church Going’, but not in an intemperate way. I suppose I was lucky he was only taking issue with one line! Apart from that, I recall that he was more concerned with the fee we were paying for his prose contribution than any literary considerations.

  My involvement with the American poets William Meredith and Daniel Hoffman was particularly rewarding, each sending me a number of letters with their thoughts and credos, as eager to be published in Britain as I was to introduce these fine poets to a British audience. In view of my earlier comment about The Group, I was amused to reread Daniel Hoffman’s memories of a trip to London:

  I attended meetings of a group of poets who discussed each other’s work. On one occasion the poem on the agenda was mine. I recall that a passage describing a still blue sky bisected by the trail of a jet occasioned comments that surprised me. ‘The halves of heaven / Are bluer than each other’, my poem claimed. In the US such a seminar would most likely have considered the technical aspects of the poem – consistency of diction, handling of images, the rhythmic assumptions beneath the movement of the language. But in that intense circle off Earl’s Court Square, debate centred instead upon the truth or falsity of the statement. It was the moral character of the speaker of the words in the poem which engaged the discussants. ‘It is not possible’, one maintained, ‘for one half of the heavens to be a different shade of blue from the other half.’ I was dumbfounded for I knew the proposition to be true; I had tried faithfully to record my own experience.

  That meeting must have been – it surely was – an evening with The Group. Two cultures dissected by the same language! But to end this discussion about the Corgi anthologies on a different note, I should add that the second of the books I edited included Stevie Smith’s last, intensely moving, short poem, ‘Come Death’, generously sent to me by her close friend and literary executor, James MacGibbon, just as we were about to go to press. It was its first publication.

  15

  WALKING ON WATER

  Wolfgang Lotz was a colourful visitor to our office.

  I was in my second year at Vallentine, Mitchell when an Israeli literary agent appeared in my office saying he represented a man called Wolfgang Lotz, whose life story he wanted us to publish. Lotz, it transpired, had been one of Israel’s master spies operating in Egypt in the 1960s, and his story was indeed extraordinary. Jewish but German by birth and an expert horseman, Lotz had adopted the cover of a wealthy German horse breeder, opening a riding school and mixing in the upper echelons of Egyptian society. He and his attractive wife Waltraud (who was not Jewish) had thrown extravagant parties, becoming the trusted friend of generals, Cabinet ministers and intelligence officers. Convinced he was an ex-SS officer hiding from his war crimes, Cairo’s German colony had also welcomed the Lotzes into their midst – and it was from the German military experts advising the Egyptians that Lotz had discovered vital military secrets, including precise details of the rocket sites Israel was to knock out in the opening hours of the Six Day War.

  Then their radio transmitter was discovered and they were suddenly arrested, becoming the centre of a public show trial. Ironically, they were saved by the Six Day War, when the Israelis made the repatriation of Egyptian prisoners (some 5,000, including nine generals) dependent upon the couple’s release. Another thing
that had saved Lotz from being summarily executed was the fact that he wasn’t circumcised, which enabled him to maintain that he wasn’t Jewish. (When he died in May 1993, The Times obituary phrased it thus: ‘The fact that he wasn’t circumcised kept his cover intact’!)

  It seemed a sensational story, perhaps too sensational, and with his customary caution David Kessler rightly decided to have it checked out through the paper. It all stacked up, and as Lotz himself was due in London the following month, we arranged to meet him. Charming, handsome and full of good humour and engaging stories, not surprisingly he won us over, readily agreeing to work closely with me on whatever editing was necessary. A deal was struck, and over the following months we set to work. Slowly I entered the world of Israeli espionage.

  It was on a Sunday afternoon, when Lotz (or ‘Rusty’, as he was known) was at our house going through some papers, that the phone rang. It was Tom McCormack, who’d just arrived from New York and was calling from the Connaught Hotel, wanting to set up a meeting. When I told him we had Israel’s notorious ‘Champagne Spy’ in our living room, Tom immediately said, ‘Then what am I doing here? I’ll come right over!’ And so St Martin’s Press became partners in the deal, acquiring the US rights, with Rusty spending some time with Tom as well as with me, polishing and expanding the text for American consumption.

  When we launched Lotz’s The Champagne Spy in 1972, Frederick Forsyth had just brought out his bestselling Nazi-hunt thriller, The Odessa File. Noticing that Lotz appeared in it in a small way, our publicist asked his publishers whether Forsyth would like to meet him. The answer came back that indeed he would, and a meeting was set up for the two of them in the well-known Fleet Street watering hole El Vino. Rusty asked me to accompany him and I was the proverbial fly on the wall as they downed the wine and swapped stories, Rusty providing colourful detail on the Germans he’d been friendly with in Cairo, but – ever the professional – not giving much away about the Israeli Secret Service. He in turn was greatly impressed by the depth and detail of Forsyth’s research and his ability to create a nail-biting story within an accurate political and historical framework. I hadn’t realised until we got down to working on Lotz’s book that he’d not only lived in Israel but had fought with the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organisation, being seconded to the British Army during the Second World War because of his perfect German. Later, he’d been sent back to Germany by the Israelis, where he lived lavishly and loudly for several years before going to Cairo in order to ensure that his story could be authenticated if checked, details which fascinated Forsyth. Lotz was an exuberant character, and it was easy to see why people enjoyed his company and were taken in by him.

  Another – very different – character was about to come my way, who was inadvertently to affect the course of my life. Frank Cass was a publisher who had started out as a bookseller and now published academic books – generally, expensive reprints of books for which experts had advised there was a demand. Cass was also interested in Jewish affairs and that is how he must have met David Kessler, who was then sixty-five and evidently seeking to retire in the not-too-distant future. K called me in to meet Cass, and it became clear that he was interested in involving him in Vallentine, Mitchell. And, just as K had done when I was at Aldus, Cass started inviting me to lunch, asking me lots of loaded questions, plainly bent on acquiring VM in some way. He also wanted to make sure I would remain on board, for he was a canny man and it was not only Jewish books he was interested in, as I was to discover.

  But all this had to be put on hold, since towards the end of 1970 I received an enticing invitation to join four other British poets on a ten-day reading tour of Israel, which was being arranged by the British Council in association with the Israeli Foreign Office and its cultural attaché in London, the novelist Aharon Megged. The poets were D. J. Enright, Ted Hughes, Peter Porter and Dannie Abse. Normally it wouldn’t have taken a lot of thinking about, but with our twins barely three months old I was reluctant to leave Carole. However, she was insistent, appreciating what an exciting opportunity this was for me.

  It seems that all my visits to Israel were destined to be both memorable and rich in experience, and this was no exception, beginning somewhat inauspiciously when, at London Airport, several policemen swooped to halt our slow progress to the El Al plane. Even in those days, where Israel was concerned, security was especially tight. Finally, after we and our fellow passengers had been vigorously frisked, we were allowed to move forward – all of us except Ted Hughes, that is, who had to spend several loud minutes convincing the police that the five-inch tiger’s tooth in his pocket was indeed a tiger’s tooth, a present for the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, with whom he was friendly, having worked with the Hebrew-speaking Assia Wevill on an English translation of some of Yehuda’s poems. Ted also had with him his attractive new young wife Carol, so for them it was a kind of honeymoon. As always on El Al flights to Israel, there was a cluster of bearded, ultra-Orthodox Jews on board, clutching their prayer books and intoning as the engines began to rev up. It seemed that Peter Porter was a nervous passenger, and I heard him whisper tensely to Dannie as the plane soared into the sky, ‘I hope their prayers will be heard.’ I think he was only half-joking.

  I knew Ted a little from the various poetry and jazz concerts he’d taken part in, and Peter Porter too had read with us on several occasions. Born in Australia, Peter was at that time very much at the centre of the London literary scene, and a regular of The Group. Feisty and fast-witted, he was doubtless more than able to fight his corner there. I’d originally come across his poetry when reviewing his superb first book, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, for Tribune. Dennis Enright was the only poet I hadn’t met before. A highly respected academic and poet, he turned out to be both friendly and funny, reminding me of Danny Kaye in both looks and the droll way he delivered his bons mots. I think the laid-back manner in which he introduced and read his poems, and his general persona, rather surprised the academics who knew his books and had come to pay their respects.

  For the tour we were joined by six of Israel’s leading poets, reading in rotation, two or three at each event. They were all formidable, with histories I found quite humbling as I pieced them together. Only one poet, Haim Gouri, had actually been born in what was then Palestine, in 1923. The legendary Abba Kovner had been a leader of the Vilna Ghetto uprising; Dan Pagis had spent several years in a Nazi concentration camp; Amir Gilboa had emigrated illegally from Poland to Palestine in 1937 and fought with the British Army before becoming involved in smuggling Jewish refugees out of Germany. Yehuda Amichai had been born in Germany in 1924 and emigrated with his parents to Palestine in 1936; he too had served in the British Army, then in the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah. What deep and disturbing experiences they all had to draw on.

  The sixth poet, T. Carmi, had been born in New York, and emigrated to Palestine in 1947; he and I had met on my first visit to Israel when I was twenty-one, and had been taken to the artists’ colony of Ein Hod. And there in the café of this enchanting hillside village, with a beautiful woman and smiling his wide, characteristic smile, had been Carmi. The two of us had fallen into conversation and he’d invited me to his home in Tel Aviv, where, over a glass or two, we had discussed poetry and struck up a friendship. Nearly all the time I knew him, Carmi had been working on The Penguin Book of Hebrew Poetry, which finally came out in 1981, a magnum opus if ever there was one. It was Carmi who later introduced me to the Indian poet Dom Moraes, whom he’d met in Israel when Dom was covering the Six Day War for an English paper.

  In the course of our tour, we were to give five major readings and shake many hands. But before we even began the readings we had to face the press. I sat shyly behind a long makeshift table in a large hall as I looked to my more experienced and much better-known colleagues to take the lead, but they too sat in an uneasy silence, nobody wanting to break the ice.

  Ranged in front of us were the literary and features editors of I
srael’s various dailies and weeklies, asking polite questions, politely ignoring our evasions. We batted carefully, watched over by the experienced eye of Charles Osborne, literature director of the Arts Council, who had accompanied us. We were unsure of our audience, unsure at that early stage of each other. Were we a school? No, we were not. No, there was no one concern in our work. Yes, readings were popular in England – very (I had happily answered that one!). Finally, in reply to one question, Peter Porter rose stoically to the rescue, improvising for some five minutes before concluding with words to the effect that in about fifteen years, it (whatever ‘it’ was) would probably have sorted itself out. ‘That may be OK for you,’ boomed a loud American voice from the back, ‘but Mr Feinstein here has to have his copy in today!’ Next morning, the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s English-language daily, carried an ambiguous headline above a photo of the five of us, ‘No school we say British poets’. All the papers featured long articles with photos and profiles and included poems translated into Hebrew. Imagine British newspapers giving such serious coverage to a reading tour by foreign poets! But then, as we were to discover, this was a highly literate and cultured society and for them, despite the language barrier, despite the pressures they were under politically and militarily, poetry mattered. The People of the Book, indeed. (Many years later I was to hear the eminent Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch proclaim that it is not scientific progress that dictators fear, but poetry. An arresting thought.)

  The first of our readings was to an audience of some 900 in the large Nahman Hall in Tel Aviv, named after Israel’s national poet, Chaim Nahman Bialik, who had lived nearby. The next two were in Jerusalem at the Khan, a one-time stable (not that stable!) now converted into an exotic theatre; then one in the Haifa Theatre, and one on a kibbutz, Kfar Menachem, some thirty miles south of Tel Aviv. There were also some less formal readings and discussions. Just as it was fascinating for us to watch the styles of our Israeli counterparts and to come to recognise their individual mannerisms as surely as they must have done ours, so it was equally compelling to watch the various English reading styles adapting to the warm-blooded, responsive audiences, and to see the reaction to the dry wit of Enright, the learned ironies of Porter, the cutting insights of Abse and the intensity of Hughes reading from his recent book, Crow. Ted, especially, made few concessions to his audience, holding his book up high, reading slowly and with great power. The atmosphere was electric when he read. It was sometimes hard not to think back to the reading at Rolle College in Devon where he’d introduced me to Assia Wevill, his then partner, who, like Sylvia Plath before her, had taken her own life. She had also taken the life of the little daughter, Shura, she’d had with Ted. But Ted seemed to have come through the Greek-like tragedy of those years and to be relaxed and happy with Carol, and they were both particularly warm and friendly to me throughout the tour, Ted turning to me one night in the wings as we were about to go on stage and saying, ‘You’re missing your family, aren’t you?’, as indeed I was. Ted loved Israel, and at one point, doubtless encouraged by his friendship with Yehuda Amichai and his wife Hannah, was said to be thinking of buying a home in Jerusalem.