The apologia and the pseudonymous gloss protect what is a sensitive real talent looking to the sensuality and sexual tenderness of the East for its poetic release. Rosamond also writes that the fame as Torquemada ‘in no way compensated for his disappointment as a creative artist’. I feel that Mathers is placing himself with accustomed diffidence when he writes about the Chinese American Julius Wing that ‘if I had had nothing to do with these poems … I would say that Wing was a true poet, if only a true minor’.
And Mathers, erotic aesthete, cocktail-shaking Chinese American, honorary Arab nomad, bhang-chewer, Turkish bisexual, tormenting puzzler-setter, was a true, if minor, poet whose assimilation of Eastern modes should rank with Arthur Waley or Ezra Pound, and who should be much better known than he is. And Black Marigolds is a masterpiece that still affects me in the same way even now after almost fifty years. Perhaps even more with the ‘gala day’ ever nearer. Even now!
[Newcastle-upon-Tyne]
Flicks and this Fleeting Life
* * *
2006
I was an early and avid film devotee. My street in Beeston, Leeds, was within walking distance of a number of cinemas. The Pavilion in Dewsbury Road, where I went to Saturday-morning showings of serials and cartoons, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Tarzan with Johnny Weissmuller, costume flicks with Errol Flynn. There was the Crescent, also in Dewsbury Road, and the Rex, at the end of the same road, near Middleton. On the Beeston Hill side there was the Malvern, near to where my dad was born and to his dad’s former pub, The Harrisons. Further on, a slightly longer walk or a two-stop tram ride took me to the Beeston Picture House. I remember my mother taking me to Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Malvern, and later going with my father to see gangster films, especially James Cagney. I’ll never forget White Heat and Cagney’s ‘Top o’ the world, Ma!’ as he goes down in a hail of gunfire on the top of a globe-shaped gasometer. I saw it with my dad when I was twelve. I wrote one of my School of Eloquence sonnets, ‘Continuous’, about this experience:
James Cagney was the one up both our streets.
His was the only art we ever shared.
A gangster film and choc ice were the treats
that showed about as much love as he dared.
He’d be my own age now in ’49!
The hand that glinted with the ring he wore,
his father’s, tipped the cold bar into mine
just as the organist dropped through the floor.
He’s on the platform lowered out of sight
to organ music, this time on looped tape,
into a furnace with a blinding light
where only his father’s ring will keep its shape.
I wear it now to Cagneys on my own
and sense my father’s hands cupped round my treat –
they feel as though they’ve been chilled to the bone
from holding my ice cream all through White Heat.
Flicks were classified as U films and A films. U films you could go alone to as a kid, but you had to be accompanied by an adult to go into an A. Sometimes by myself and sometimes with my friends I would wait outside the Pavilion and accost people to take us into the A film. ‘Will yer tek us in, mister [or missus]?’ I saw as many flicks as I could.
Calling it ‘t’flicks’ associated the filmic process with flick books, which had successive drawings on each following page that when flicked by the thumb made a continuous movement. I often drew and made my own. I drew them on the corners of school exercise books and Latin grammars, and it made me grasp early that combination of stillness and momentum that is the heart of film creation: so many ‘frames per second’. It was a cheap movie version of Pollock’s Toy Theatre. But I made cut-out theatrical figures too, which I coloured and arranged on the biggest dinner plate from the set my parents had been given as their main wedding present, a great oval one which I still serve my Christmas goose on.
So I made ‘flicks’ and theatre, not in a Pollock’s proscenium but ‘in the round’, or more accurately, ‘in the oval’, more like the ancient spaces in Greece or the Roman amphitheatre on the Danube that I was much later to do some of my pieces for. After I’d seen ice shows in Blackpool, where we went for our holidays, I made figures that I blew gently on so that they skated across the surface of the same plate. That I did these more or less simultaneously gave me, I think, a simple but early understanding of the difference between cinema and theatre. The kind of theatre I saw most often was late music hall, or ‘variety’, and panto, and though it was in proscenium theatres like the Empire, the fourth wall was broken down by the direct address of the comics I saw there: Norman Evans, Frank Randle, Old Mother Riley, Albert Modley, Robb Wilton and even Laurel and Hardy live on stage.
When I first saw a play in a proscenium theatre like the old Theatre Royal in Leeds, with actors only addressing each other and pouring drinks and smoking cigarettes, I felt bored and excluded. But I could enter into the realism of cinema because it was not a live exchange. The actors didn’t know I was there. I grew up loving both cinema and theatre, but because I’ve felt so conscious of how different they really are, I have always hated any video recording of my theatrical works, and when I have deliberately embraced the ancient ephemerality of the one performance of a theatre piece, as with The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus in the stadium of Delphi or The Kaisers of Carnuntum in the Roman amphitheatre of Petronell-Carnuntum, I have forbidden any filming of it.
A tram ride into town took me to the big cinemas: the Odeon and the Majestic, where the blockbuster Hollywood films were shown. There was also a small cinema, the News Theatre, now the Bondi Beach Bar, next to the city station and the Queen’s Hotel in City Square. It was there, just after the Second World War ended, that I saw the newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps. I don’t remember who took me – I think maybe my grandfather, the retired Hunslet signalman who lived with us – but there was something overwhelming in seeing such terrible images on a large screen, much bigger than life-size. I think my reaction was almost on the scale of those early viewers of the Lumière brothers’ film of the train arriving in a station in 1895. It wasn’t that I tried to escape from the heaped corpses moving towards me, but I felt that jumbling cascade of bulldozed, emaciated Belsen bodies were being dumped onto the art deco carpet of the cinema and into my consciousness for ever. It almost blighted my life, it had such a powerful effect on me, and made me draw a line between what I knew in my heart was ‘pretend’, the films that entertained me and made me laugh, and what was news: real dead bodies bulldozed into pits at Bergen-Belsen. I have never forgotten that introduction to the filming of real life, or in this case, real and terrifying death. Nor how jarring the voice-over narrations were! What narrator could find the right tone for such terror? This newsreel changed my attitude to life and film for ever.
When poetry became my chief obsession, it didn’t diminish my interest either in theatre or film, and I saw all the great classics at the Leeds University Film Society showings, from Eisenstein to the GPO Film Unit and Night Mail, with the famous verse sequence by W. H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. At the other side of City Square was another small cinema that showed new foreign films as they came out – Bergman, Antonioni, Visconti, etc. – something it’s hard enough to find now even in London. I didn’t know how I could ever commit to both poetry and film, and never imagined I’d find a way eventually.
As I believed that some of the greatest poetry was in the greatest drama, I also wanted to write poetic plays, though Eliot and Fry were to dry up the taste for them, and I only began to clear a space for myself as a poet in the theatre by translating, from the languages I’d learned, plays from that two-thousand-year-old tradition, starting with the great Greek tragedians, of drama by poets. My first translation was a version of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes I did in Zaria, northern Nigeria, in March 1964 for a group of students, in which I incorporated local village drumme
rs and dancers. It was called Aikin Mata (Hausa for ‘Woman’s Work’) and was written in collaboration with my old friend, the Irish poet James Simmons. We had collaborated at Leeds University on writing and performing revues with, among others, Barry Cryer and Wole Soyinka. We also directed Aikin Mata, and it began with a montage from newsreels and documentaries projected onto the back wall of the theatre – suggesting, by visiting US audio-visual specialist Paul Robinson’s editing, instead of innocent Hausa horsemen honouring the Emir of Zaria more aggressive cavalry charges and battle preparation. Magajiya, the Lysistrata of the original, flung a large water pot at the back wall to put an end to the warlike images. That was my first brief glimpse into the practicalities of the editing process and how you could make a shot mean many different things by changing what it was juxtaposed with, and how something seemingly quite innocent could be made sinister by editing in a terrified reaction. There is something also in the process of translation, in this case of an ancient Greek play into a modern Nigerian setting, that trains the mind in searching for equivalents, attempting to stay open to all local impressions but having to remain within the confines of an original drama. A combination of fixed form and fleeting content.
My hesitations about the creative co-existence of poetry and film were deepened when my first book of poems, The Loiners, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972 and because of that was given some minutes on a TV arts programme. I read some poems on camera, and someone went out and shot some images to go with the reading that were so clumsily and clunkily cut into the text that I had to switch the programme off. It was as if the ‘director’ had only read the nouns in the poems and decided that we wouldn’t understand them without a show-and-tell picture. Over thirty years later, that kind of clumsy illustration can still be seen accompanying poetry. It is everything a film poem shouldn’t be. That experience made me wary of entrusting poems not specifically written for it to TV, until Richard Eyre directed my reading of my long poem v. in 1987 for Channel 4, with a great sensitivity to the poetic text.
Sadly, after my Lysistrata in northern Nigeria it was ten years before I did another work for the stage, The Misanthrope of Molière for the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1973. One of the results of this venture’s success in London, Washington DC and on Broadway was that I was asked to work on more than one film, though producers soon lost interest when I innocently enquired what metre they imagined the text would be in! But there was one director who saw the play and thought he wanted the kind of verse he’d heard on the Old Vic stage. George Cukor, who had recently directed Alec McCowen with Maggie Smith in the film Travels with My Aunt (1973), came to see him playing Alceste and felt that he wanted some of those ‘couplays’, as he always called my rhyming couplets, for his new film, The Blue Bird.
So the first film I ever worked on was The Blue Bird, based on the play by the Belgian poet and dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. Although I have been frequently mocked for this sentimental skeleton in my closet, I have some fond memories of being involved in it. Despite the fact that it became one of Hollywood’s greatest disasters, I learned a great deal on the project, which I didn’t realise I would draw on when I finally started to make film poems. The Blue Bird had its very first production in Moscow, directed by Stanislavsky, in 1908. I saw a production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1967, when I had been invited over to read my poetry at Moscow University, and the programme I’d kept and later pasted into my Blue Bird notebook still credited the director as Konstantin Stanislavsky. It was translated into English by Alexander Teixera de Mattos and was produced at the Haymarket Theatre in London by Herbert Trench in 1909. In a souvenir programme for the production I found in a junk shop, Herbert Trench called The Blue Bird ‘a transcendental pantomime’. Although I was thrilled by scenic transformation and metamorphoses in panto as a kid, I wasn’t so keen on them straining for transcendence, and I wasn’t, I fear, naturally suited to the material of The Blue Bird. There had been a film version in 1940, intended as 20th Century Fox’s rival children’s fantasy to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. It was denounced as ‘hideous kitsch’ and was a great flop even with Shirley Temple as the little girl Mytyl. But Hollywood likes to repeat its mistakes.
My brief was to write lyrics for the songs that the Russian composer Andrei Petrov was going to write for the film. The music arranger was Irwin Kostal, who had done the same job on Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. The composer and arranger fell out very early on, and I found myself working in separate rooms with them both, trying to mediate. It didn’t make for an atmosphere of détente, and the shuttling back and forth didn’t help my creativity much. Even when I was away I would get a letter from Kostal warning if he sent a telegram or phoned me saying, ‘All is well with Kostal and Petrov,’ it meant the opposite! Their squabbles over credits were deeply boring. Kostal was quoted in Newsweek as saying: ‘This is a ship of fools. I’ve got a fight with Andrei Petrov every day. It’s a matter of national pride. He wants me completely off the picture one moment and the next we’re great buddies. The problem is he wants to write American jazz, and I want Volga boatmen music. But it will all work out.’ But it never did! Our interpreter, Sasha, was doing a doctoral thesis with the title ‘Creative and Sociopsychological Interaction during the Shooting of the First Soviet-American Co-Production, The Blue Bird’. The interaction he witnessed and sometimes had to find wounding words for in both English and Russian was often turbulent!
Petrov had the premiere of his opera Peter the Great at the Kirov while I was there in June 1975. I was invited. Old women tutted at the length of my hair. Young men tried to buy my denims. I think Petrov felt he was too grand for Hollywood. And I thought that I just wasn’t right for Hollywood, miscast as a musical lyricist for such potentially mawkish themes. I often felt in jaundiced mood when I came face to face with great art, as in my trips to the Hermitage when I wasn’t required on set. I came across an old notebook marked ‘Leningrad 1975’, with a note about going to see Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross (1645). I jotted down details of the hyena-like dog’s head with green eyes glaring through a clump of thistles, the pincers pulling out the nail that held Christ’s left hand to the cross. I wrote, ‘How much more human than the fucking Blue Bird! … I find myself trapped in a film where the categories of approval are “charm” and “prettiness”.’ Charm and prettiness! Not my most outstanding qualities as a poet! And certainly not the qualities a poet would need to give a voice to the Rembrandt or the terrifying corpses dumped onto the carpet of the News Theatre in City Square.
Although The Blue Bird ended up in a book called The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History (1984), it had given me the opportunity to get to know a legendary director, and to involve myself every day on the set, getting used to how things were done both behind and in front of the camera. Behind the camera was the great British cinematographer Freddie Young, of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. The second camera was operated by Jonas Gritsius, who had been director of photography on Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear. I watched them at work and stored what I could for the distant day when I might have need of it. And with them behind the camera was the Hollywood veteran George Cukor, renowned as a great director of women, though when anybody said that, he retorted what about Clark Gable, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy …? Because he was directing another band of renowned women, all the press on The Blue Bird listed his previous ‘temperamental women’ credentials. Cukor had directed Garbo, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, etc. In front of the camera in Leningrad were Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, Cicely Tyson. There was also a young Russian actress, Margarita Terekhova, playing the role of Milk, who one day asked me if I would like to go with her to see a film, in which she had the starring role, that had just been made and released grudgingly and in a limited way in the Soviet U
nion in 1975. (‘Not a single poster, not a single advertisement,’ noted the director in his diary entry for 8 April 1975.) The film was Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which I thought was brilliant and a very welcome relief from the film I was writing my lyrics and couplets for. According to the Russian critic Maya Turovskaya, ‘Mirror is the most documentary, and the most poetic’ of Tarkovsky’s films. The stark documentary and the poetic were interdependent. The film moved from colour to black and white, from lyrical fields to newsreels of the Spanish Civil War and more extended footage of the Red Army crossing Lake Sivash during the Soviet advance of 1943. Tarkovsky explains in his Sculpting in Time, which I bought and read when it came out in 1986, what drew him to the sequence:
The film affected you with a piercing, aching poignancy, because in the shots were simply people. People dragging themselves, knee deep in wet mud, through an endless swamp that stretched out beyond the horizon, beneath a whitish, flat sky. Hardly anyone survived. The boundless perspective of these recorded moments created an effect close to catharsis.
It was not simply the power of the images captured by an army cameraman who was killed the day it was filmed. Over the sequence was the voice of the director’s father, the poet Arseniy Tarkovsky, reciting a poem called ‘Life, Life’, which was, the son wrote later, ‘the consummation of the episode’ because it ‘gave voice to its ultimate meaning’.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 34