Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘How do you know about Hopkins?’

  ‘I did him at school. I thought he came on a bit strong myself; you know, working himself up over not a hell of a lot. But the master was all for him. Great genius type of thing. I hope this is right.’

  ‘First left after the bridge.’ Sue Macnamara glanced at the typewritten sheet with the name of a national newspaper at the head of it. ‘Wind-pump on the left – that must be that thing. Then left again after two hundred yards. Yes, Milton would be putting him a bit too high, but he’s up with Keats and Hopkins all right, or so they say.’

  ‘So they say was what I said. What do you say yourself?’

  ‘I don’t say anything much. I don’t know.’

  ‘But that’s the sort of thing you’re paid to know, Macnamara. This must be the turning. You with a degree from Cambridge College and all.’

  ‘The works of Edward Arthur Potter weren’t in my syllabus, Bowes. Anyway, one big thing about those works is that they’re damned difficult. I was brought up on stuff you could make a bit of head or tail of. I suspect Potter of not being as good as he looks or sounds, but only suspect. And the critics are no help. They nearly all think he’s great, but then they nearly all think people I know are bloody awful are great too. Here we are.’

  ‘Edward Arthur Potter.’ Bowes pulled up the estate wagon outside a longish, low house of pale stone. ‘That’s a crappy name. Ted Potter’s what he’s called. Like that composer bloke, Richard Robert Rodney Robin Roger Ronald Rooney Bennett. He means Dick Bennett. You go and knock on the door while I start shifting the gear.’

  Sue Macnamara, a long-legged girl of thirty, got down and opened a creaking iron gate in the middle of a fence made of tall loops of iron. There was strong July sunlight, a smell of already rotten fruit and the droning of unseen but what sounded like oversized insects. Nothing had been done about the grass and other vegetation in the short front garden for quite a time. Like the window-frames, the front door was painted a shade of light blue that somebody must have noticed a long way from this or any other part of Kent and decided was appropriate to a poet’s cottage. It – the front door – opened before it could be knocked on and a little old man appeared.

  ‘Miss Macnamara?’

  ‘Mrs. Sorry, I should have . . . You must be Mr Potter.’

  She spoke without conviction. The face that looked hard but rather uninterestedly into hers – largely a matter of silvery-rimmed glasses, broad pointed nose and deep under-lip, the whole squashed on to very little in the way of a neck – did almost nothing to evoke the two or three standard photographs of Edward Arthur Potter she was used to seeing. Not quite nothing, though: there was just about enough likeness to suggest some doddering uncle or remoter connection supported out of charity, even a half-brother born of a feeble-minded kitchen-maid near the end of the last century. But anyone like that would probably be called Potter too, Sue thought to herself without urgency, shaking a small thick hand and responding to a smile that showed a few widely separated teeth.

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’ The reply showed apparent surprise, as at a lucky hit. ‘I thought the paper said you were bringing someone else with you, Mrs Macnamara. A photographer.’

  He stressed the last word on its first and third syllables, giving it a downward social shove thereby, ranging it alongside piano-tuner and picture-framer. A handy one to use on Bowes when the moment came, thought Sue. She said,

  ‘Yes, he’s coming now. Fetching his stuff from the car.’

  ‘So he is. It’s these glasses. I can’t seem to find the other pair. Not that they’re much help. I must go and see the optician again.’

  Bowes came bustling up the flagged path, hung about the shoulders with cameras and light-meters and clutching among other things a tripod of metallic tubing. With his squat body, round pale face and habitually open mouth, he looked to Sue as little competent to be a photographer, even in the degraded sense of one who photographed, as Edward Arthur Potter looked like a poet. She would have denied that she was one of those who expected a poet to look like an actor, or even like the kind of person the kind of actor that came to mind habitually acted: peasant revolutionary, dedicated scientist, early Christian martyr. And she knew well enough that poets were not supposed to talk like actors, like actors when acting, at least. Nevertheless, this poet’s total lack of physical poeticality was a let-down, along with his manner of speech: slow, faintly glutinous, and couched in a rustic cockney that got the worst of two semi-separable worlds. Sue missed the touch of the charlatan that, after six years of this sort of journalism for the papers and television, she had learnt to expect in people who had to any degree deserved their success: not counting actors and actresses, of course, who behaved like charlatans whether they were any good or not.

  Some of this occurred to her later; for the moment, all was action of a limited sort. Introductions were made, and Bowes at once ordered Potter out of his own house into its back garden. He did this in a way that showed he thought he knew just how to get people to do what he wanted without their ever feeling any pressure. In the garden, or the fenced-off bit of field where nothing grew but grass, two or three fruit-trees well past the arboreal change of life and a few clumps of tattered dandelions, he started moving pieces of outdoor furniture and other objects about with a photographer’s unconsidering roughness, not out of any apparent impatience but as if all private property not his own were public property. Sue used this (as it proved) considerable intermission to show what was a genuine acquaintance with some of Potter’s work, mentioning a couple of individual poems. Potter showed mild and unfeigned surprise.

  ‘I didn’t think anybody really read me these days. Nobody under about sixty, anyway. When did you first come across “Drizzle and Thrush”?’

  ‘When it first appeared. In the New Statesman, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Not just homework, then. Mind you, I’m all for homework. Did you like it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Sue discarded without forethought the lying flattery she had been ready with.

  ‘Neither am I, my dear, neither am I. That’s the problem. My problem, I should say. Would you like some tea or something?’

  ‘Not for me, thank you,’ she said, wanting to avoid a second bout of delay before the interview could start. Then she caught a mental glimpse of an apple-cheeked, check-aproned wife buttering home-made scones in the kitchen. ‘But if you and Mrs Potter were thinking of . . .’

  ‘She’s not here. My wife’s . . . not here.’

  He spoke with great but unspecific force, implying anything from violent death to a grossly whimsical sortie round the shops in the town. Sue, whose thorough self-briefing had indicated a Mrs Potter alive and in residence, responded with a dead bat.

  ‘You’re on your own for a little while, then.’

  ‘Yes, I am, and a very unpleasant mode of existence it is too, I don’t mind telling you. I avoid it whenever I can. But the woman who looks after my sister-in-law, who can’t move, fell downstairs on Monday and broke both her legs, so I’ve had to let my wife go until such time as they can find someone else. That’s why I’m glad you don’t want any tea, because I’d have had to go and get it. In my experience, no kind of meal or refreshment is worth a single moment’s preparation. On one’s own part, that is.’

  ‘What do you live on, then, when Mrs Potter’s away?’

  ‘Beer and cornflakes mostly. I don’t take sugar on them, the cornflakes, so that’s one bit of bother saved. Of course, there is opening the new packet. I can’t see any way round that.’

  Neither could Sue, but she was saved having to admit as much by the intervention of Bowes, who sat Potter down in one of Potter’s garden chairs, a canvas-and-rusted-metal affair, in the manner of an army dentist with a battalion’s worth of extractions and fillings before him. His thrusting of a light-meter to within an inch of Potter’s face was also faintly dental, suggesting a dry run with syringe or drillhead. Sue found herself stationed in a similar chair
near Potter at one of the comparatively few angles nobody would naturally choose for any sort of conversation. Not far off, Bowes had thrown together a sort of cairn of stuff he must have found lying about: a couple of metal drums that might once have held paraffin, some cardboard boxes, some flowerpots, some white-painted rocks fit for a past or future rock-garden, a primordial lawn-mower, a half-sized St Francis or related figure in dirty stone. Without any trouble, Sue could visualize the end-product of this arrangement as a fashionable back-to-front portrait, a sprawling, blurred mélange in the foreground with the tiny in-focus shape of Potter in the distance, plus, no doubt, about two-fifths of herself at the edge – whatever fraction would most bore and annoy the beholder. Right up the art editor’s street, and Bowes would know it; but he was not the sort of photographer, nor the sort of man, to have two or three tries at something when two or three hundred would do. Here he was in his ritual dance, approaching, retreating, squatting, on tiptoe, clicking, winding on, now and then standing stockstill to gaze at Potter in evident consternation, only to go twitching back into the measure.

  Sue had opened her notepad. ‘Before we begin, Mr Potter, I should tell you that you’ll be sent a proof of the article in advance, so that you can make any alterations or cuts.’

  ‘I say, that’s jolly decent of you. Not many of you do that.’

  ‘I think quite a lot of people are more forthcoming if they know they have that sort of control.’

  ‘Enlightened self-interest, which is very enlightened. Right, then. I was born in Croydon, Surrey in 1899, and educated at the—’

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Potter: I think I already have really all the obvious known facts about you, what with the Lacey-Jones book, and your publisher . . .’

  ‘Good Lord.’ He lifted his glasses above his eyebrows and looked at her as hard as he had done when they first met, but this time not uninterestedly. His eyes were light brown, with darker flecks. ‘This is the first time one of you has ever . . . But then you’re not really one of you, if I make myself clear. I should have seen that before.’

  ‘Could we have the glasses up again, please?’ said Bowes in a managerial tone, and fell to bobbing and straightening as he clicked his way round a semi-circle that brought his camera within a hand’s breadth of Sue’s ear. She said to Potter, who was still obediently holding his glasses up in the required position,

  ‘Can you think while this sort of thing’s going on?’

  ‘I can think while any sort of thing’s going on, in so far as I can think at all. I wrote my first poems while I was working in a timber yard. But you’ll have read about all that. What there was of that, I mean.’

  ‘Can I ask you about those first poems? And about what made you write them? I’m sorry, I know that’s a damned silly question, but our readership’s not of a very—’

  ‘I think it’s a fascinating question, not as regards me personally, but as regards all writers of poems. But before we get on to it, I’ll save you the embarrassment of asking another question I’m sure you’ll quite reasonably want to ask. I write with a pen or a pencil, or anything that makes marks, on any sort of paper. I expect if I had nothing but a blackboard and a piece of chalk I could manage with them. Not a typewriter: I’ve nothing against the typewriter, I just can’t use it, not even for the fair copies – I get my wife to do them, and then she sends them off to my agent without my looking at them again. She keeps a carbon for the files. She does all that, very nicely too.’

  ‘I see. Why don’t you look at the fair copies before they go off?’

  ‘No point in it. I write very clearly and my wife’s a very accurate typist.’

  ‘So in a sense the first you see of the poem in its finished state is when it appears in print.’

  Potter glanced over at Bowes, who was doing something technical to one of his cameras, or trying to. ‘Well . . . it’d be truer to say that the last I see of it in its finished state is when I give the manuscript of it to my wife for her to type it out.’

  ‘You mean you don’t ever . . . you don’t normally look at it when it’s originally published? I suppose it is more satisfying to wait until you’ve got a whole collection in front of you, inside hard covers, properly done. The way they lay poems out in magazines and so on is often very . . . shoddy . . .’

  ‘Some – some people probably do find a book of things they’ve written more satisfying than the separate bits typed out or in a magazine. I just find it more frightening.’

  ‘Frightening?’ Sue was nearly certain that Potter had never publicly talked to this effect before, but the rising excitement she felt (and tried to conceal) was more than journalistic. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Seven books of my poems have been published, and they all cover, each one covers about five years’ work. Seven fives are thirty-five: I started late. As you know, Mrs Macnamara, but that’s by the way. One book is five years’ work, and five years’ work is roughly between fifty and sixty poems, and that’s all. What I mean by that is that that’s all I do in the five years that I count as doing anything. I worked in the timber yard and then in that factory office, and afterwards for those tinned-fruit people until I’d started making enough money from my poems to retire. As you know. It was work, at the timber yard and the other places: somebody had to do it and I’m not despising it: but I don’t count it. All I count is the books, and unless the books—’

  ‘We’ll take the break there,’ said Bowes generously, coming down to a stooped position at the mid-point of the triangle formed by Potter, Sue and the heap of properties. ‘Very good, both of you. Now you relax while I go and reload and do a bit of minor surgery on this bit of Jap ironmongery’ – he waved an offending camera – ‘out in the car. Rejoin us in a couple of minutes.’

  When he had gone, Sue lit a cigarette and considered, as calmly as possible, how to lead Potter back and round and along and forward again to the point he had reached when interrupted. ‘Could you tell me a little more about how you write? How a poem takes shape, or how you know when it has?’

  ‘Lots of words and phrases go through a person’s mind all the time without staying there. At least they do through mine. Then, every so often, without the person knowing why, one of the words or phrases, it just sticks there and won’t go away. That’s the beginning. I don’t mean necessarily the beginning of the poem when you see it when you read it, but it can be, quite often it is, but it’s your way into the poem, if that doesn’t sound too silly. I mean it’s the man who’s writing the poem’s way into his poem. Then a lot more words go on going through until another one gets caught, like in a net, and it sticks with the first ones because it belongs with them, you realize, or you realize later that it belongs with them. And so on. Do you fuck?’

  ‘Yes, but only my husband,’ said Sue with some approximation to the truth.

  ‘That’s a pity. I mean it’s a pity for me, because I get so few chances these days: I can quite see it’s a jolly good thing for you. And your husband. I’m in the same sort of position myself as a rule, but obviously a good deal less so, if that makes any sense, because I don’t happen to be very attracted to women of sixty-eight. That’s how old my wife is, you see. With her being away, and you being here anyhow, so to speak, I thought it would be silly not to just ask. And then in the end it dawns on you that there’s no more to come, not this time, that’s all there’s going to be of it. The thing’s over and done with and finished. At that point you write it down.’

  It was not until now that Sue realized that, for the past quarter of a minute, Potter had been talking about his poetry again. His question had taken her completely by surprise, a gigantic achievement in the face of one so constantly asked if she fucked (in those or other terms) as Sue Macnamara: no preliminary switching-on of casualness, no quick range-estimating glance, no perceptible inner shaping up or squaring of the shoulders, nothing. In the same way, her refusal had evoked not the least hint of pique, mortification, retrospective embarrassment or – what she
had noticed as quite common among the over-fifties – ill-dissimulated relief: all this gathered up in his not having bothered to make anything whatever in the way of an as-I-was-saying gesture before he went back to his previous theme, about which something had better be said soon on her own part.

  ‘I see. You always wait until the poem’s complete in your mind before you put anything on paper.

  ‘Normally. If I’ve got to go and get on a train or something like that before it’s finished, I write down as much as I’ve done and then think about something else until I can have another go at it. That seems to work.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Bowes as he approached, expressing sincere regret for having, however unavoidably, let the rest of the company in for a stretch of utter idleness. He went into a prowling circuit of the space where they sat, every few steps snatching his camera up to eye-level, failing to take a photograph and subsiding again: a more intrusive routine, if anything, than the clicking and buzzing it replaced. But at least he was about, and so might deter Potter from asking Sue just how it had come to pass that she only fucked her husband, should it occur to Potter to do so.

  ‘When the poem’s all there on paper, do you revise it much?’

  ‘Not at all, ever. I don’t even read it through. I give it straight to my wife to type, or if it’s the middle of the night I leave it face down on my table until I can give it to her.’

  ‘You were saying you didn’t read it, any given poem, when it’s typed or even when it comes out in a magazine. When do you read it?’

  Potter moved the tip of his tongue to and fro between gaps in his teeth. ‘I suppose I must have read all my poems at least once. But it’s not a thing I dwell on, or enjoy at all. The early morning’s the only time. Then I may pick up one of my books and read a few things. To remind myself I’ve done them, more than anything else. I keep a count of how many I’ve done. I’ve just finished number four hundred and twenty-three. I wrote it out just this morning, as a matter of fact.’