The morning after the birth of Young Em I went back, replaced his f and finished the edition. Then I did another, similar but on paper watermarked GG. I was pleased enough with these, and began to form even more grandiose plans. Why not a collection of all three englynion I had written? Why not a title page, too? On foolscap? And make the move into mass-production with an edition of five copies?
It did not satisfy me quite as much as my first attempt, but it still pleased me a lot. It was worth all the neckbending, squinting, the moments of despair which could be relieved only partially by destroying what I had done by a thunderous juddering whirl of the guillotine flywheel.
About the time I was finishing this second undertaking, there came to stay with us for a few days the poet Philip Pacey and Gill. Philip had been trained latterly at the College of Librarianship, Aberystwyth, and had been to Gregynog briefly before. In partnership we evolved a project which was so breathtaking that I would never have attempted it on my own: an eight-page sheet folded to four printed sides devoted to one each of our poems, a title page, and a credits page. Furthermore, such was our hubris, this was to be an edition of no less than twenty copies and was to be on green-tinted paper of an unknown dampening quality.
It was inevitable that such effrontery would be punished. It was the nineteenth pull when I noticed that (on the title page, too) the second O of my surname was not in the same font as the first O. Since this is a scholarly journal in which only the truth may be told, it must be recorded that it was Philip who set the title page; and he had not, by several days, as much experience of typesetting as I had, of recognising the faces, the bodies, the Os. It is also probably necessary to state that we were not under the influence of alcohol at the time, neither Philip at the time of setting nor myself at the time of not noticing during machining. As if it were relevant.
At the time, it did not seem to me to make a curiosity of the edition; it made a cock-up of it.
But there was no time to start again. We both signed the edition, and divided it equally between us; the chances of its being held against us we were prepared to accept.
But now, more than two years later, I still do not know what to do with the work of those weeks. The second edition is still complete; one copy from the first, several from the third and fourth have been given to friends. Should I keep them for (as if I were an optimist) three hundred years to give possible amusement to my posited descendants on Mars? The cost of keeping them in the bank might be excessive, while the risk of keeping them at home is uninsurable. Should I offer them for sale at fourpence each in the public gazettes? Should I destroy them, and allow only the myth to survive in this highly respectable place?
Does it matter? It passed the time more enjoyably than typing; though time being what it is it would (of course) have passed anyway.
Opinion
Published in Poet, 2, Summer 197433
What (as I subject my tastebuds to English fishgum) what (as I overactivate them with American variegated flavours) what, yet again, (as I perform those other acts of clerical drudgery I thought myself freed of at the age of twenty-three) what (is there no end to this?) what do I imagine I am doing in my capacity as Poetry Editor of Transatlantic Review?34
So fond am I of the opening of David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ that I shall paraphrase it here. The opinions even of one’s closest friends are noticeably different; though with these friends one may have been brought up from infancy, had a similar education, and been subjected to the same forces of prejudice. But step outside one’s own community, let alone country or language, and then the differences are even more marked. So much so that (and I feel sure you can do without Hume’s own words no longer) ‘. . .the highest arrogance and self-conceit is at last startled, on observing an equal assurance on all sides, and scruples, amidst such a contest of sentiment, to pronounce positively in its own favour.’
So there I thought we all were; but are we?
On at least two sides in contemporary poetry (those mentioned in the ‘Opinion’ of the last/first issue of Poet) there are displayed opinions which are arrogances and self-conceits which are even higher than the highest; so much so that one can only say they aspire to sublime stupidity. For both sides (and there are others, sides, that is, though I am not concerned to align them here) pretend to act as though they were right, and as though no one else could be right. And, what must indeed be the very height, they do not in the least scruple to act as though they were right for other people, too.
Now it is sometimes necessary for a poet who is interested in originality (rather than in the act of imitating being a poet) to believe that his way of writing is the right way, the only way, and that everyone else’s ways are wrong; because if he did not commit himself to this belief then he would not be able to write in his own special, original way. But if he is honest he believes this only for himself, and for his own purposes; he does not say that this is the only way for others to write.
So what, then, do I imagine I am doing as Poetry Editor of Transatlantic Review, setting myself up as an arbiter of other poets’ work?
I try very hard to suppress any feeling of power in making decisions about accepting or rejecting; though it is, in all honesty, difficult to do so on some few occasions. Simply, given the amount of space I have for poetry in a quarterly, I take those poems which move me in some way or another, purely subjectively. I can find no other reasonable criterion. There are no other standards that seem to me relevant. So that the appearance of a poem in Transatlantic Review means that it moved me in some way that resulted in my wanting to be the instrument of its being made into print and therefore having the chance of a little wider currency and (possibly) permanency. There are no schools to be discerned, no fashionable trends, no axes being ground. There are advantages in this catholicity, of course: I have never once been invited to any sort of literary function as Poetry Editor of TR, nor am I part of any faction to be manipulated this way or that by the cultural bullyboys. It also seems to me an important advantage that the editorial policy of TR in general is to carry no reviews or criticism whatsoever; the furthest we stray from actual writing is to have interviews with writers in which they talk about what they have done or are doing. The opportunities for publishing criticism already vastly outnumber those for publishing real writing, anyway, and they continue to increase. That this is remarkable in a magazine is indicated by the number of publishers and poets who send TR review copies of their books, insulting us by revealing they have not done so much as glance at an issue; one might have special pleasure in selling such copies at Gaston’s35 if that was the sort of thing one did.
Every few weeks, as I go through the two or three hundred poems which have been submitted to TR, I feel. . . .but this is not going to turn into the usual Poetry Editor’s piece on his job, full of sneers at those who are no poets, at their daring even to send in their work, categorising their ineptitudes. For I do take the job seriously; so seriously that it reduces the tiny amount of money involved to a matter of pence per hour, if I was bothered to work it out. Why do I do it? Because I believe it would be worse done if I were not doing it; and (I think it could be demonstrated, perhaps) am sure it was being worse done before I took over some eight years ago. It means that I have to read a great many boring poems, and I have to find time out of that in which I might be writing myself to read those boring poems. But even they keep me in touch with what a lot of people consider to be poetry; and if only by aversion help me in defining what I think my own ought to be. The habit of reading a lot of contemporary verse can in itself be no bad thing. At the very least it is concerned with the problem of writing poetry now; which no poetry of the past is, obviously, whatever else may be said of it.
And there are compensations. This is not going to be the usual piece about who published whom before whom in what, either; but I have published my share of unknowns who went on to become known as well as my share of unknowns who have remained so, deserved
ly or undeservedly, in all cases. If that is relevant. I would certainly not claim to have published all those who have become known in the last eight years; which magazine could? And I am also aware that there are poets who simply would not submit poems to TR even if I asked them; there is an animosity that initially depended on some overheard slight, perhaps, or secondhand condemnation out of malice or ignorance, or sheer class warfare. I find such petitions dismaying, sapping energy and patience, sad.
Perhaps I am being naïve; perhaps it has always been like this; perhaps that brings us back to David Hume again. For while I agree with him that there is no more absurd figure than the man pretending to certainty, especially in aesthetics, we now have numbers increasing at least in proportion with the population. Ian Hamilton,36 to name nearly one.
Let me say at once that Ian Hamilton may well be adopting absolutist attitudes at least partly in order to provoke reactions and have notice taken of him; and I am very conscious that I am serving that end at this moment. But it may also be useful for each generation to have a Hamilton-figure there to hate (it used to be old. . . .er. . .whatisname, remember?) without going to the extreme of saying it would be necessary to invent him. It is good to have something against which to react; that is about as much as is worth saying about him generally. As a poet, I have thought him quite good ever since I first saw his work as Advisory Editor of Universities’ Poetry Four in 1962. There seems more of the literary politician in him than the poet, however; he is a perhaps typical lame dog of our time, tragically (even pathetically) caught between real work and criticism, the two opposites, synthesis and analysis. If only Hamilton could direct all his energies into writing poems he might develop into a minor poet of real interest. Provided always that he had the necessary luck, too.
Poets in general might concentrate on the business of writing poems, and have as little to do with criticism as possible; they might, simply, do it and not write about someone else doing it. The only important use of criticism would be if it helped poets to write better; yet how many critics try to do that? I cannot offhand think of any who would not find the idea laughable as a prime concern in any definition of their activity.
Anyone’s opinion is really only as good as anyone else’s; when the desire to express such opinions is combined with an urge to impose them on other people, then the danger is that such absurdity is not seen but overwhelmed by the politics of publishing and academicism.
But perhaps this piece was so difficult to write because the whole problem is not apodictic in any case.
Soho Square [On the Angry Brigade]
Published in Film and Television Technician, January 1973
It may be by the time you read this that the Angry Brigade37 trial will be already forgotten; certainly the way the newspapers ignored it for all except the last couple of weeks of the six months it took seems to indicate that they want you to forget it.
As well they might. For it smells very nasty indeed, and raised some crucial issues about what British law and order now mean which the establishment would prefer to remain undiscussed.
In case you think this is going to be another political piece unrelated to ACTT38 activities and members, let me explain. On January 12th 1971 Robert Carr’s house was the subject of a bomb attack. It was also the day massive protests were taking place against the then proposed Industrial Relations Bill. I was amongst those who were working anonymously on part of ACTT’s protest, Freeprop Films, at the time. I say ‘anonymously’, but a week before some generous-hearted brother had blown a number of our names to The Times; immediately after the Carr bombing my telephone was (I am as certain as I can be) tapped. After the first amused and flattered surprise (they think me worthy of surveillance?) I became annoyed not because anything I said on the telephone could get me into trouble, but because my telephone service became appalling: crossed lines three times out of four, wrong numbers, silence with the sound perspective of a huge hall with occasionally a whistling phantom, no dialling tone until someone presumably threw a switch, and a perhaps paranoiac feeling someone was listening. Several times I rang up my telephone manager and complained about the poor service. At length I suggested to him that the cause might be that my phone was being tapped. The conversation then went something like this:
‘We do not tap telephones in this country, sir,’ he said.
‘But it came out in court recently that Rudi Dutschke’s39 phone was constantly tapped. We know that from the papers.’
‘It can only be done with a Home Office order, sir.’
‘And is there such an order on my number?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But that’s just what you’d say anyway, isn’t it? And I’ve just caught you out in one barefaced lie.’
A lot of people reading this must know from similar personal experience that the Carr bombing (which was only one of a series; news of earlier ones had been suppressed by the media) sparked off a massive police hunt which covered anyone who had anything to do with opposition to the Industrial Relations Bill. It was (of course) denied at the trial that this had happened at all, let alone that someone at Cabinet level had ordered it. What it now seems to me must have happened is that the police just did not know where to look, so there was blanket surveillance of everyone connected in the slightest with opposition to the Bill. Panic in the copshops, in fact.
Why am I telling you all this?
I am not here concerned to debate whether it is right to seek to change democracy violently; nor even with the hypocrisy of the media in condemning it in this case while supporting it institutionally in Ireland and elsewhere.
What I am concerned about is that justice should be (at least more or less) what we teach our children it is: if there is a reasonable doubt, then you do not convict people. And in the Angry Brigade trial there were many reasonable doubts. The senior police officer in charge of the case, Commander Bond,40 was caught out (like my telephone manager) in at least one barefaced lie. The police evidence in general was riddled with inconsistencies, and chopped and changed too. The harassment of one of the accused, Stuart Christie, by the Special Branch was prolonged, crude, and (one would have thought) basically illegal. Repeated requests by virtually all the accused for a solicitor to be present at interviews were blatantly ignored by policemen from Bond downwards.
How (you must be asking yourselves) since the media hardly reported this trial, can I know all this? Well, first of all I was concerned enough to go along to the Old Bailey on four occasions; and then each week Time Out carried an excellent report of the main points. Time Out (whatever else one may think of it) may be said to have come of age during this trial: it really showed up the national newspapers. The Guardian’s attitude, for instance, was transparently demonstrated on one occasion during the last few days of the trial when it gave more space and prominence to a report concerning the possible prosecution of Princess Anne for speeding.
Even so, I (no more than you or anyone else) do not know whether those on trial were guilty or not; what I am sure of is that there was a reasonable doubt. And (once more) at the risk of seeming naïve, I want British justice to be as it says it is; otherwise we really do have anarchy, and there are no standards, and it is all chaos. But those who engineered the vicious change from unanimous to majority jury verdicts must be congratulating themselves that they would not have convicted the four in this case without having altered this basic tenet of centuries of British justice. They are themselves the cause of disorder, of disregard of the law; and they wish to make further changes so that it is even more heavily against anyone accused.
British justice cannot afford many more Angry Brigade trials; or, for that matter, any more Oz trials.41 The one hope (as in the Oz case) is the Court of Appeal, the last defence against overzealous police and biased courts.
Meanwhile, there is Commander Bond. If there were any justice (ha!) he should of course have been required to resign; as it is he may well have been discomfited privately by his bosses
for his failure to convict more than four of the twelve he arrested, and for the revelation of police incompetence and unscrupulousness during the trial. But what he should really be asked (loud, publicly, and often) is: who bombed the Post Office Tower, then?42
The Author’s Plight – the Need for a Union
Published in Tribune, June 1973
In 1965 the Society of Authors took a survey amongst its members to find out how much writers earned; the answer, it turned out predictably enough, was Very Little. Then last year the Society repeated the survey, and found that writers were now even worse off; not only relatively, because of seven years’ inflation, but the earnings themselves were actually markedly lower.
If the Society of Authors is not to blame for this remarkable failure to defend the incomes of writers, then who is? Surely it is its job to see that such things cannot happen?
But no, that is not how the Society of Authors sees itself at all. The truth is that it is a weak, reactionary, badly-led organisation with a rigid, undemocratic structure that reduces its effectiveness to virtually nil. It is not a trade union; it is a limited company, yet probably in breach of the Companies Acts in that its members do not have the right to dismiss its board of directors. Trying to change anything by democratic means at the Society of Authors is desperately hard work, and certain of the leadership react to the term trade union with an oldfashioned class fury that would be comic if it were not to do with the serious business of seeing that writers earn a living from their job as everyone else in the book world does.
And the onus should be on the Society to prove how writers benefit from its not being a trade union, since musicians, actors, filmmakers and others concerned with the arts have all formed themselves into trade unions and are affiliated to the TUC. As such they gain enormously in strength and expertise; they are part of something much larger than themselves, and have a shared interest in so much more.
Well Done God! Page 39