Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  ‘We hear birdsong, I do hear birdsong!’ cries Isabella.

  Seek poems of the East – I will arise and go now, Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Had we but world enough and time, Let us go then You and I. . .

  ‘I shall find a poem that changes me!’ Ollie declares, grave and glad in the rules of the game.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ says Iona, effortlessly right.

  ‘I’m gonna be famous when we hit the south,’ yawns Lily now she gets it, shaking her bee-long sleeves which must have hands somewhere inside them.

  And listen (I call out over them now they’re starting to enjoy it) the one-to-ones will take place now – I mean soon – in the Borrowing Hut, whoever’s this week, Caroline, Lily, who?

  ‘It is I!’ cries Ollie, turning archaic, ‘I hope it shall go well for me!’

  ‘What are you, six-and-a-half?’ Heath mutters.

  ‘Soon I shall be grown!’

  *

  So they spread out among the stalls, to hunt for Eastern lines and poems, pulling back the canvas covers, bashing off the dust, and I head for the little Borrowing Hut in the trees to switch the heater on. Caroline’s got that done already, and I renew my efforts to be friends. It doesn’t start that well.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  Write him a love-poem.

  ‘That’s what I thought you said,’ (we’re either side of the tiny table, the columns of our white breaths engage and retire)

  Write Ronald a love-poem.

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  You’re in the west about this man, west going on north again, like he never existed, so why not write like it’s the east going on south?

  ‘What to serve this system of yours?’

  Yes to serve this system of mine. No. To write a love-poem with the voice of innocence but the breath of experience. To write the east from the west, or the west from the south, Yeats does it all the time.

  ‘Have you ever done it?’

  Good question but the wrong one. Write the man you hate a love-poem.

  She doubts it, then dismisses it: ‘I’m afraid it’s too late for the book.’

  By the book she means her putative collection, which she’s designed herself and glossily printed in Kerri’s office and which she now with reverence holds in her yellow wool-gloved hands: ‘These are the thirty poems.’

  Write it. If it’s good it goes in, and something drops out. One of your fairies dies, right? Have thirty and always thirty.

  ‘What if I improve, I mean by your lights, what if I get better? Then I might have thirty-one.’

  If you’re better you’ll have twenty-nine.

  ‘I see, and do you have thirty?’

  I’m lucky if I’ve got five. I used to have five hundred.

  ‘Why don’t you write a love poem?’

  (Bad question but the right one, I feel like saying but I say) Excuse me?

  She tenderly lays her stapled collection back in her bag and does a smile which costs her nothing: ‘Seeing as you’ve a subject.’

  I – it’s not about having a subject (and she’s standing up now in the process of leaving) and I don’t have a subject (but I do and don’t know what to say)

  ‘Well I don’t have a dog in the fight, squire, but there’s no fools in this village.’

  (As she leaves I’m actually forcing a grin as if clinging to what I have) Send Orlando in will you, if it isn’t too much bother.

  *

  (I tell him to write a song)

  ‘Like a lyric?’

  Words for music. Perhaps. Call it what you like.

  ‘Something for the midnight slam?’

  What midnight slam.

  ‘You don’t know? Bitchstock!’

  Oh god, go on.

  ‘It’s rearranged, that gig the Titmouse cancelled. Its in the hall tonight at midnight, totally off-piste and Lily’s calling it Bitchstock!’

  Is she, well there you go.

  ‘So I could write a song for that I suppose.

  ‘I haven’t told you what yet.

  ‘Wait! Notebook, notebook,’

  Write a lullaby, Orlando.

  ‘O.. .kay?’

  Write four lines to the tune of Brahms’s Lullaby.

  ‘Right. I can – do that.’

  Because I sat with my baby daughter awake for so many nights, listening over and over to that melody. In the end I helplessly had four lines: north, east, south, west. Do that. Because I did that, do that.

  A lullaby doesn’t sound like slam material!’

  Everything’s slam material. If it isn’t, nothing is. You’re in the east, Ollie, you’ve a sweetheart in your life, write a lullaby for nothing.

  (He shuts his mouth and writes it down, he nods, he’s back on assignment)

  And sing it till she’s sleeping. . .

  (Done, he looks up, and I stare at him for a moment. Then I stop) You haven’t asked me, man.

  ‘Eh? Haven’t asked you what? – Oh your four lines!’

  Nah,

  ‘What were they?’

  Too late, Ollie,

  ‘No please, Bach’s Lullaby!’

  Brahms’s. Go and get me some of Iona’s soup. Have children. Write songs.

  *

  I told Lily it was time.

  ‘Time for what.’

  Time to write a play.

  ‘I don’t know jack about writing plays.’

  You’re a born heckler, you won’t let shit lie, there’s where you start. In a poem a voice tries mastering time, it duels with silence. In a play what stops the voice is another voice. Mr X can speak till Miss Y interrupts.

  ‘Miss Y? Fuck her.’

  Bad example, Miss A speaks till Dr B breaks in, then Captain C makes a point – so you animate the part of your brain that sees things from the north, and let it run till the east rears up that’s not quite how I see it, or the south that’s total crap you guys! or the west shall we have some tea now? hey presto Chekhov, the world’s crowded, have children, write plays.

  ‘So is that you teaching drama?’

  Uh-huh.

  ‘You doing that next term?’

  No. I’m not affiliated, I’m going home to my life.

  ‘Lucky you.’

  They don’t want me in this place.

  ‘They’ve a weird way of showing it.’

  What?

  ‘I heard Pete say you were one of them now, that’s why I ain’t told you jack about the slam.’

  I know about the slam and I’m not one of them.

  ‘Midnight slam, you can come if that’s true.’

  You’re one of them, Lily, you study at the place.

  ‘Yeah but you know what I mean, I don’t have to think like Titmouse do I.’

  You could argue she’s doing her job.

  ‘Yeah you could if you were an arsehole.’

  *

  There’s excitement at the little modern stall, the one closest to the road. Bella’s found a book of mine and is reading from it to Molly and Blanche and Kornelia: ‘made east and west of nowhere. North and south it left itself, whichever way one looked see? It’s all his system, see it’s all your system!’

  It is, yes.

  ‘Hard to remember, now there is nothing here, that there was once nothing here. . . Is this mysticism?’

  Realism, Bella. Think of the blank page.

  ‘He’s published,’ Blanche observes, ‘he kept that quiet.’

  (I don’t really know what to say to that) I don’t really know what to say to that.

  ‘We’re supposed to be talking about future plans,’ Molly points out, so, professor, are you going to write more books in the future?’ Well I hope so, Molly, and what do you intend to do in the time to come?

  (But Blanche is still open-mouthed) ‘Were you aware this was here?’ she wonders, ‘Pluto, by Glyn Maxwell. That’s you.’

  Let’s walk eh, Blanche, and I’ll tell you all about it. Put the covers back, team, we’re he
ading south! The Coach House! (and a great cheer goes up, because word has got round that the South is going to be special.)

  *

  If like me you come from nowhere you kind of need a system. My home-town was a rail-track through a meadow in 1920, the place is light on history. I fell back on geography. We lived in the west of town and the sun went down in our garden, so the west had to be home. There were woods to the north – darkness, mystery, isolation – and London to the south – people, parties, noise, work. The east was on the far side of the railway where all the factory chimneys were so it was daunting and alien and I didn’t have friends there. To a child that’s adulthood. I had – have, actually – a magical spot in the north (a glade in the wood) and a magical spot in the south (a small hill beside the A1(M)). Dead-centre of our town there is an ornamental fountain in a foamy pond. Every time I pass it, on the way to or back from shopping, I look north to the wood, south towards the capital, east to the factories, west towards home, I think here I am on earth again and then I’m gone. That’s it for the autobio. Why am I telling you this. . .

  I was struck by how naturally the circle of the hours, the months, the four seasons and Seven Ages of Man interlocked and echoed each another. How this might play out in a space, a room, a town, a nation. I wondered at the patterns, the temperate climate, the four walls and ways there are, the grand calibrated stillness of writing in England. A day as a year, a year as a lifetime. Writing a poem was not so much a solitary walk beside a rail-track through a meadow as a voice that, even as it speaks, ignites its 180-degree opposite – the young man v the old, memory v daydream, bliss v bereavement -or, 90 degrees to one side or the other – its origin and consequence. That the language having been there recalls there, remembers past, imagines future. That walking this circle was loyal submission to Lord Time, but running it – or whacking it and watching it spin – was like Marvells virtuoso lust –

  . . .Though we cannot make our sun

  Stand still, yet we will make him run. . .

  And what if these compass-points were also temperaments. . . Years later when I came to write a version of old Wind in the Willows there they were: Badger wise, grave, dwelling deep in a wood, Moley innocent and hopeful, peeking out into sunlight, Toad dizzy in his mansion, sated with his goods, Ratty wry and nostalgic, watching the river flow. What if character was nothing but relationship to time?

  Look, the idea that spring and autumn sigh for opposite things isn’t news to any poet in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but at least I arrived there blank as paper, found the place myself, or found it with a little push from William Butler Yeats.

  We have come to give you metaphors for poetry. . .

  It’s about eleven, we are thirteen in number and we’re walking round the clockface 4, 5, on the way to 6. This section of the Compass Walk is April, May, and June. Imagine the past, remember the future.

  *

  IN THE SOUTH it is warm, still, pungent, fertile. All is grown to full height, full colour, you are sated, and dazed. It is noon, orange-red, it is summer, it is adult. It is sex and sport and dancing, it’s eating, drinking, sweating. It’s the five senses revelling, what we wanted, what we’ll miss. It’s sunshine or humidity, warm rain and storm and rainbows.

  All we can speak while we dwell in the South? Nothing but what’s happening NOW.

  *

  Being neither warm nor sunny, nor summer, nor yet noon, we’d make do with a Mighty Brunch.

  For a small fee Claude had agreed to open the Coach House privately, and let us sit – which we will, through bruncheon, elevenses, luncheon, thirteenses – on a long table by the fire. In we proceeded, and the sight was sweet and lavish, grand and cosy, candlelit, unlikely, but before we sat down I told them to put away the rose-pink page in the handout and recite the lines they should have learned -

  All Together Now! and it went a bit like this. . .

  ‘That is no that is no country for old men old men the young young in one another’s arms others arms birds in the skies trees trees! trees those dying generations at their song at their song their song song the salmon? the salmon-falls salmon the mackerel-crowded seas seas flesh seas fish fish flesh or fowl fish commend all summer long summer long whatever is begotten dies born and is dies dies dies. . .’

  Abysmal. And be seated.

  *

  Kornelia Peter moi Isabella Blanche

  Roy Lily

  Heath Sami

  Caroline Orlando Iona Molly

  *

  Claude emerges gleefully with laminated menus and they set to it with gusto or in certain quarters shrugging indulgence, while Molly and Isabella police our conversation so that nothing but the passing second can ever be addressed.

  ‘I like smoked salmon,’ ‘How do you know you like smoked salmon,’ ‘I just do, I want it, I want it now!’ ‘I want beer now!’ ‘I want sex now!’ ‘Go on then,’ ‘Can’t, it’s in the future,’ ‘In your dreams it’s the future,’ ‘What are dreams?’ ‘Whats the future?’ and so on, and I say let’s everyone touch your neighbor in some way just to see what happens – all sorts, Sami and Lily mutually grimacing and strangling, Blanche’s head in Bella’s lap, Heath and Caroline awkwardly high-fiying – and all the while I think of Tina sleeping, still, and I say grinning to my neighbour Peter, with whom I heartily shook hands as Bella tidied my hair by way of touching:

  So, Peter, Lillian said you said I’m, you know, affiliated?

  ‘What’s that? I do not discuss the past, professor!’

  Good man, uh-huh, that I’m one of them, am I one of them?

  (He tries to get it right for the South) ‘I know you, you are Professor Maxwell, newly affiliated! No, not newly, that implies a past – ’

  It’s not true though, Peter, about the Academy,

  ‘What I need now is apple juice!’

  Yep okay who says I’m affiliated, I’m not yet, and you work there, ‘And the pear and walnut salad!’

  Whatever. Starters come and starters go, toasts are made – to me, to Yeats, to Claude, to Ollie and Iona for helping me out with this, no that’s the past – to Ollie and Iona for Being An Item for Lily and Sami for Being An Item (Sami winces, starts writing on the tablecloth), to passers-by for passing by, to the sun for making the wet lane sparkle out there, and I drink my drinks in the spirit of Mrs Georgie Yeats nee Hyde-Lees, the wife of the poet William, who on their honeymoon in 1917 told him something was to be written through her, and what it was was this:

  with the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in

  London you mistook its meaning

  Which may well have sprung from the spirit-world, as Yeats with no hesitation accepted it did, but may, just possibly, just sayin’, have been the ingenious attempt of an anxious twenty-five-year-old newly-wed to convince her fifty-two-year-old famous husband that he’d done the right thing by marrying her – only a few weeks after his rejection by the even younger Iseult Gonne (the ‘bird’ or ‘hare’) about whom he was still brooding –

  what you have done is right for both the cat and the hare

  – and also not long after his recent rejection by Iseult’s mother Maud, whom Yeats had adored or pursued for years.

  Anyway nine days after these first occult ‘communications’ via Georgie Yeats nee Hyde-Lees, a.k.a. ‘the cat’, Yeats was writing to his old friend Lady Gregory: within half an hour. . . of this message my rheumatic pains and my neuralgia and my fatigue had gone and I was very happy. . . This sense has lasted ever since. . .’

  you will neither regret nor repine

  Georgie said the Voices said. Women eh. Men eh.

  They did this for three years, automatic writing, she said They said, husband and wife. They did it in Oxford, London and the Hundred-Acre Wood, in Dublin, Sligo, Galway and Coole Park, Portland OR, Pasadena CA, on a train from Cleveland to New York City and on the SS Megantic they did it sailing home. Their marriage, such as it was, lasted. Read it up.

&nbs
p; ‘I’m going to,’ cries Bella, prodding at her sea-bass, ‘I totally believe in those kinds of voices, this is good but it’s quite bony. . . ’

  And he used that for his poems?’ Iona leans across the table puzzled.

  ‘We don’t care, it’s the past!’ says someone confusing the game with the lesson, and I ominously intone as I pour my one-and-umpteenth glass:

  we have come to give you metaphors for poetry

  ‘Thomas of Dorlowicz’, ‘Ameritus’, ‘Apple’, that’s what They told Georgie to tell her husband. Soon he’s writing ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Demon and Beast’, ‘The Second Coming’ and then A Vision, his vast compendium of four hundred and sixty sessions of automatic writing - ‘I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books’ he rumbles to his publisher – ladies and gentlemen I give you Georgie Hyde-Lees, the immortal co-creator!

  ‘Georgie Hyde-Lees!’

  We drank, and she is sleeping, she is talking in her sleep, and the gossipy sloshed students changed their places all around me, and one or two tottered off to where? to classes of all things, good luck with that, I remember Samira not being there any more, or Caroline, or Kornelia, but word must have got around, as we now had the acting students Jacob and Yvette at the loud end of the table ordering vodka shots with some guys I didn’t know at all, plus we briefly had format who sat down opposite, opened out a foil-wrapped raisin bagel of his own and began to eat it, informing me with his mouth full:

  ‘You went out to the hazel wood.’

  I’m sorry?

  ‘You went out to the hazel wood, I noticed. Any reason?’

  Oh, oh yes – well it was actually because a fire was in my head,

  ‘And what did you do there, professor?’

  I cut and peeled a hazel wand, then, um, wait,

  ‘I think you’ll find you hooked a berry to a thread.’

  I did just that, Wayne, and when white moths were on the wing, um,

  ‘I’m listening,’

  And something something flickering out –

  ‘You dropped something in the stream, can you tell us what it was?’ A berry!

  ‘Which resulted in what exactly?’

  I CAUGHT A LITTLE SILVER TROUT! (half the table joining in)