LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

INTERVIEWS

‘I do not enjoy specialised academic criticism’

LIDIA VIANU: What are your earliest memories? Your family? Your first book? The time and times you first became aware of? 

ALAN BROWNJOHN: I shall write about my earliest memories in a fairly factual way, seeking to be accurate rather than imaginative. I’m aware, from often in the past requiring students (men and women training to be teachers) to recall their own childhood and re-enter the experience, that it is possible to believe things one’s parents said to be incidents that are actually experienced; for example, mother saying, ‘When you were two years old you were very fond of the friendly black cat that lived next door – thus I create a memory of stroking a black cat almost as large as myself when I have no genuine recollection of that.

My parents’ little London house, and the flat where my father’s parents lived, five minutes’ walk away, are both vivid. Simple, true memories occur: a small, child-size cup I dropped in my grandmother’s kitchen. Dropped twice, it broke the second time. I felt guilty about that and remember that as a personal feeling, not my grandmother’s scolding. In my parents’ scullery (as we called it) I hit our dog with a stick – it wailed, and slunk away. Again a (stronger) guilty feeling. No one around watching me, so I was responsible for that guilt.

Those two cases of guilt are my earliest memories. Soon after that there are far too many memories of both those households – all the rooms, and the gardens – to choose from. Innumerable memories of childhood sickness: eczema from about two years old, measles at three, asthma following on measles. Parents’ natural anxiety, mother’s over-anxiety, probably. Difference between a protective mother and an energetic father eager to cure my ills with exercise – this conflict between hypochondria and vigorous action has been with me all my life, I believe. How crucial parental influence is, from minute to minute!

But also grandparental influence. Wiry, energetic grandmother and robust, choleric grandfather – he had been an athlete as a young man in the 1890s, was a craftsman printer, was also self-educated with passionate left-wing political beliefs. As there were periods when I was left in their care, they were to me – their only grandchild, my father being their only child – very powerful presences.

My mother had had piano lessons, and I seem to remember they were intended to occupy her while she was pregnant. I am surprised now, almost seventy years later, to think how efficiently she played – not well, but very capably, with a good sight-reading ability. I still possess, somewhere, her piano sheet-music; including simple songs for children which she played and sang to me – one or two are almost unbearably moving for me to recall. I hardly dare to look at them now.

My father was the only child of a father who had a ‘hidden’ sister – I believed she was a remote cousin, but she was a sister, and she was in a mental asylum for the last several decades of her life, and rarely mentioned. She died as late as 1957, a date I was unaware of until I investigated the life of her one son two years ago (when he died). My mother was one of a family of seven, perhaps eight, children, of Irish ancestry (name: Mulligan). But they had no Irish accent, no trace of Irish religion – they seem to me, in retrospect, to have been ‘assimilated’ working-class Londoners (so both sides of my family had deep roots in London). My uncles, and my aunts’ husbands worked on buses, or in similar humble but essential services. There developed an interest in café work – two or three of my cousins acquired cafés or restaurants and became very prosperous. My childhood was full of regular visits to the many relations on both sides of my family. As children will, I began to distinguish between those who welcomed and liked me and those who were merely indifferent – children of course know the uncle who always passes on a small gift of  money when they leave and those who never do that.

I shall abandon my ‘earliest memories’ at this point in case they turn into the first draft of a full-scale childhood autobiography. I have dealt with my family in the course of recovering those early memories, so will say no more about that except that I received constant encouragement, from my father in particular, about reading and writing, and remember being praised by teachers from the beginning – singled out for my precocity as a reader and writer from the age of five. This is not a boast, but a fact. It is also a fact that I was profoundly impractical, could never make anything or repair anything, understand anything that required mechanical or technical or technological knowledge. Hence I write these memoirs and send them by letter, instead of typing on a computer and transmitting by e-mail. I am not proud of these inabilities, just complacent about them.

My first ‘book’ was a (now rare) 20-page booklet, Travellers Alone, published in 1954 by the Heron Press in Liverpool (who brought out a small, short-lived poetry magazine called Artisan). I was very grateful to them, and regret very much that I completely lost contact with my editor, Robert Cooper, in later years. My first book in covers (hardback) came seven years after that, after rejections from several publishers. My friend Peter Digby Smith published it at the Digby Press. It was, as far as I know, the only book he ever published. He is now a teacher in France. It was probably the best-looking of any of my books, a handsome volume designed by Peter and myself using an excellent printer and high quality paper. Despite the smallness of the publisher, this book, The Railings, was widely reviewed and well-received; and it led on to a large publisher issuing my second book, The Lions’ Mouths, six years later. How slowly I write – I am still painfully and guiltily slow.

‘The times I first became aware of’ —? I take this to mean ‘my world’ in childhood. It was, of course, the frightening world of 1930s Europe moving into the horrors of World War I, a presence in the conversation of parents and grandparents, even though no one in my immediate family did military service of any kind – a question of age (grandfather was 40 in 1914, and was rejected on health grounds although he had been a formidable athlete; father was 38 in 1939). I was rejected on health grounds, in 1950, for compulsory military service. I was delighted, because I did not think I had the intellectual ability or the courage to face the ‘panels’ who interviewed those who applied not to do military service for pacifist reasons. I remain a pacifist in practice, but theoretically I believe that war might in some circumstances be just; the problem is I have never discovered, in my lifetime, something I could, in good conscience, describe as ‘a just war’. 

LV. You mentioned once briefly in a conversation your father being a printer. Could that account for your learning how to read when you were only five? You also mentioned the tremendous importance of radio broadcasts in your becoming not only aware but passionate about literature. Could you remember those times again in writing? The long hours you spent by the radio set and whom you listened to? What kind of a start in literature that offered?

AB.   My father was a printer, so was his father, so was his father and his father.  That is as far back as I can trace!  My father and my grandfather (I knew my great-grandfather, but never had close contact with him and he died when I was 5 years old) both encouraged me to read.

My father passed me the newspapers across the table, and I can remember thinking that it was much easier for me to read books because I could hold a book in my two hands and had never managed to hold a newspaper open.  My father was very eager that I should become interested in books, and passed to me all the books he had kept from his own childhood.  It was not an immense number, but some of them were quite challenging books. They included classic boys' adventure stories and sea yarns. But he also gave me Gulliver's Travels.

In a sense, my grandfather was even more important, because he took me to the local public library and signed me up as a member.  I think this was purely because my grandparents had to spend a lot of time looking after me during the Second World War, when both my parents had full-time jobs, and they wanted to keep me quiet and occupied.  But my grandfather himself, although not an 'educated' man, was a wide and venturesome reader, and was always recommending books that I could not possibly understand at the age of ten or eleven (such as T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and R.H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism).  I am not certain that he understood all of them himself. But his love of exploring ideas through books undoubtedly influenced him — and me — very greatly.

My grandfather was, though, quite a bad-tempered man (all shouting, never violence) so that I sometimes felt safer if I was absorbed in a book when he had one of his bad moods in the home.

My parents and my grandparents were all devoted radio listeners; and there was no television during the Second World War. We went to the cinema a lot (Grandad was keen on Laurel and Hardy films), and my childhood illnesses (asthma especially) meant that I spent time away from school at home, and listened avidly to radio plays and stories. Radio drama of any kind came to be very important for me, as did music.  There was comparatively little poetry on radio, but I can remember responding to it very eagerly when I did hear some. All of this was crucial in helping me to enjoy literature. I kept a notebook of radio plays I had heard, allocating marks to them, out of twenty. In that way I became acquainted with Shakespeare plays (I gave him high marks) and much modern drama.

LV. Did you begin writing as a poet or a novelist, then? Do you happen to remember what it felt like to put pen to paper for the first time, and then to reread your own text? Did you feel it would lead to a lifelong career? Were you intimidated by your first fight with the dragon?

AB. In my earlier childhood, from the age of 9, I wanted to be a novelist.  I began by telling stories to friends and occasionally trying to write them down.  So that putting pen to paper for the first time was a matter of beginning the first chapter with a suitable opening.  I can remember very little about those stories except that some of them contained — this sounds rather up-to-date! — a dashing woman detective.  I think there was such a character in one of the serial stories I was reading in a children's magazine at the time, Film Fun.  None of this work survives in writing, only in my memory. Including the name of the detective: Jean Vane.                   

I wrote a lengthy diary during my teenage years from 15 to 19 years old, so most of my literary effort went into that activity.  The diary sometimes broke into poetry, when I felt I had personal feelings to express or stories to tell which could be turned into verse. Poetry only truly began when I became a student at Oxford.  It came out of my early loneliness at the university, but I soon discovered that several fellow students were writing verse. We began to meet and exchange enthusiasms and encourage each other, so the whole desire to continue as a poet began there.  Many of those students later became lifelong poets, and I was absolutely convinced that poetry would then be a lifelong career.

LV. You often say your were Post-Movement, but not many people know what the Movement meant and what writers it included. Whom did you look up to, what beliefs made them stick together, what made the Movement a distinct grouping, and why do you think so few critics talk about it now? Where and when should it be placed? Who initiated it? Which of those writers were your friends, what did you learn from them? What differentiates the Movement form the Post-Movement? Did they come right after Modernism? Is Postmodernism a label you would use?

AB.   The idea that I was Post-Movement came from the editor of one particular anthology, but I accepted that category at once.  The Movement is thoroughly covered in Blake Morrison's book about it, which will provide all the information about the writers involved, including what I myself said and wrote about it at the time (the mid-1950s).  The writers of the Movement were roughly a decade older than myself and my student poet friends.  The principal ones among them were Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, John Wain and Elizabeth Jennings (but all of this is in Morrison's excellent guide to the period).  Generally speaking, it was a 1950s mode of writing which favoured formal techniques, and an empirical and commonsense approach to life, and was in one critic's words ‘sceptical, robust, ironic’.  These writers were certainly sceptical about some aspects of modernism, though most of them revered Eliot, Joyce and Yeats (though not Ezra Pound).

LV. Would you give your own definition of the Movement? What were the formal features that made it a movement? What characterized the Post-Movement?

AB. Briefly, I would say that it represented a return to regular forms in poetry, a rational approach to subject-matter and a general no-nonsense attitude in contrast to the freer, wilder poetry of the previous decade (a Neo-Romantic period).  The Post-Movement idea was coined by Edward Lucie-Smith for his book, and is a useful term, but it has not been taken up very much.  It signified a variety of poetry that respected the formal care and the emotional restraint of the Movement but diversified things a little by simply being less academic (many of the Movement poets had been university lecturers) and more concerned with daily life.  But all the information you really need is in Morrison's book. (I gave him quite a lot of help!)

LV. Who were your mentors? Whom did you befriend when you became a young published poet?

AB. My living mentors were any older poet whose work I admired when I was young:  T.S. Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Dylan Thomas a little, George Barker and then Larkin.  I consider that I learnt a lot from each of those.  My poetry friends when young were people of the same age as myself — I have spoken of Porter, Thwaite, Redgrove and Martin Bell (though he was ten years older), Elizabteh Jennings (a Movement poet. Died 2002).

LV. Your respect for your readers is immense. This is the cause, I think, of your wonderful clarity, which hides unsuspected depths of ambiguity, though. Do you like poems which do not make sense, or not easily? Must the reader work his soul out in order to find out the poet’s intention (if he does)?

AB. I do tend to prefer poems which do make sense, and I become impatient with poetry that seems to me to wallow in abstraction.  The idea of ‘concrete imagery’ has always seemed important to me.  But if a poet is difficult to understand and yet still seems to be working in a recognisably real world with strong qualities of imagination, then I am drawn to him or her.  Notable among these is the American John Ashbery, whom many of my poet friends find impossible!  I believe Ashbery opens up the imagination in new and fascinating ways.

So I end up in favour of working hard to understand a particular poet, if there is clearly a powerful imagination at work among all the difficulty.

LV. One day, when leaving my apartment, you gazed at me sadly and whispered: ‘You think of me so much more than I think myself...’ You are shy and yet endlessly bold in your meanings. You are at the same time personal and impersonal. Your experiences are in your poems, but not your biography. Eliot insisted on impersonality, yet never got there in his poems. Neither do you, thank God. You are the  poet of this generation. I just wonder: What place do you allow yourself in your age? Who do you think you are in today’s poetic landscape?

AB. As I grow older I cease trying to work out what place I do have in the English poetry of today.  I suppose I could allow the labels of Post-Movement and ‘the Group’ to be applied to me for want of anything better. If obliged to attempt to place myself, I think I would like to belong to a tradition of English poets who write with a care for form and feeling, a degree of wit and irony, if possible, and without too much wild excess.  Names like Edward Thomas, MacNeice and the others I mentioned immediately come to mind. (I do realise Eliot was American, MacNeice Northern Irish, etc.!) 

LV. Clear language does not mean clear poem. Your poetic ambiguity is always present. But you do want your audience (which Eliot and Joyce almost lost), and you are aware of that. How far are you prepared to go in securing the reader’s sympathy and empathy?

AB. The strange thing is that writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce probably believed that readers would come to them, and understand them, without their having to make concessions.  I come increasingly to the conclusion that the audience for poetry, or fiction, or drama, or films has lost too much of its power of concentration.  Easy sensation has been too readily offered to them and they have too readily accepted it.  Having said that, I am bound to report that with a minority (but an important minority) of young students I meet, I detect a considerable ability to work hard at understanding current poetry, fiction, music, etc.  So perhaps the people prepared to make the effort were always a minority, and that minority is a persistent group which will always exist — just call it intelligent people, if you like!

LV. Discussing your poetry with my students, we started talking about what they expected of a poet today. The general reaction was they wanted a personal connection with the poet, they wanted to share the poet’s soul, know as much as possible about his life. Most poets today – so much like Eliot of old – try to escape their life and flee to poetry. You do not do exactly that. But you do keep your life private. What do you think of my students’ desire to know more about you? As your reader, I have experienced that frustration myself. Is that the wrong way to read you?

AB. I consider that the poetry should come first, and knowledge of the ­life should only be used if it is a genuine aid to understanding the verse. X may be an admirable poet but not a pleasant man – in that case we should forget the life and appreciate X’s poetry. Myself, I shall be willing to divulge some personal information if it helps, but most of it I should prefer to leave to a biographer (if there is one!) after my death. And then, some of my poetry is oblique, and ‘fictional’, with origins in my experience but not much direct reference to it.

LV. You speak tenderly and appreciatively of Larkin. What other writers are your friends today? What critics do you favour?

AB. My main poetry friends are Anthony Thwaite, Peter Porter, and to a lesser extent – because I see them less – George Szirtes, Peter Scupham and Douglas Dunn, all over 55 years old. There are younger poets I do meet privately (not just at parties and lunches): Paul Farley (best younger poet, in my opinion), Jane Griffiths, Neil Rollinson, Mimi Khalvati, Roddy Lumsden, Julia Copus, etc.

LV. Since you are a critic yourself and have written a lot of critical essays and reviews, what do you expect from a critic? What do you think of specialized academic criticism? Is criticism literature?

AB. I expect rigorous standards, a sense of urgency about poets’ respect for language, a sense of justice (which might mean mercy sometimes), a bit of courage, a wide knowledge, a sensitive intelligence. I do not enjoy specialised academic criticism, particularly if it has been influenced by post-structuralism and post-modernism. But individual poets’ worth is generally ignored or despised by post-modernist critics. It is not criticism! Yes, a few critics have been great – Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and the deeply controversial F.R. Leavis, whose harshness blinds people to the immense sensitivity of his detailed criticism. Leavis on Shakespeare, G.M. Hopkins and D.H. Lawrence is wonderful.

LV. Since you have visited Romania many times, what Romanian authors do you favour, what critics, what translators? What does Romania mean to you?

AB. There have been very good translations of Romanian poetry into English, so I can mention Eminescu, Arghezi, Nichita Stănescu, Marin Sorescu – only the beginning of a long list. But we do not have enough fiction in English – I have read only one novel – one! – in English, and that is D.R. Popescu’s Vânătoarea regală: The Royal Hunt. And then the plays of Caragiale are not frequently translated. And has Alecsandri ever been translated? Perhaps the verbal humour of the Romanian context is untranslatable? That does not mean translators should not try.

February 2003