Two days in London

...actually, one and a half days in London, but they followed the same rough pattern as the two days I spent there last autumn and I'm just so self-referential I couldn't pass this one up. You can find out what I did last year by clicking here.

This time I went back to London for the launch of the very wonderful Katy Evans-Bush's collection of poetry, Me and the Dead. It was a spur of the moment decision, egged on by Ryanair's extremely cavalier attitude to global warming and my own desire to be surrounded by poets for an hour or so. Believe me, dear reader, I didn't regret it. (Well, perhaps momentarily, when Ryanair provided synthetic UHT cream for my cardboard bucket of already undrinkable tea and an eye-rolling Polish steward had no idea what sandwiches were available and seemed to regard this as my problem. But hey! 80 Euros...)

Before the launch and after a late lunch with my sister in the Mess - an excellent café in Amhurst Road; I recommend it - I met up with Isobel Dixon (friend, agent, poet) in a smart and colourful place at the back of the BFI called Benugo's, where we were joined by Henrietta Rose-Innes, who'd won the £10,000 Caine prize for the best short story in English by an African writer the evening before. (You can read the prize-winning story here.) We celebrated with reviving glasses of champagne before heading off to the Royal Festival Hall for a look-in at the London Literary Festival barbecue, where I almost met Rachel Holmes, head of literature at the South Bank Centre, and had some extremely drinkable white wine. This had the advantage over Pimm's of being immediately available rather than a reward for reaching the head of a shortish queue. After which, we moved on, without Henrietta but with Julia Bird, to Katy's launch in Covent Garden.

I had a great time. Katy read two poems, with great elegance and authority, from a chair in the corner of the over-crowded downstairs room of Treadwell's, leaving us wanting more - the only way to be left, in poetry as in much else. I finally met a whole bunch of people I'd previously known only as fellow-bloggers or web acquaintances of one kind or another - Elizabeth Baines, Simon Barraclough, Anne Berkeley, and wasn't disappointed. I also had the very great pleasure of seeing John Wilkinson again after more than twenty years. And the wine didn't run out. I'd planned to start reading the book on the 38 as it wound its towards Hackney, but found myself listening to a conversation between a disorderly drunk and a young artist from Liverpool, possibly about god, in which each vied with the other to see how many times they could address the other as man and still maintain something recognisable as argument. Sadly, the number was lower than either of them fully realised.

Wednesday, as those of you who were in London will know, was cold and wet. I had medical reasons, despite this, for wearing shorts (you don't want to know), although desert boots were, on the whole, an unwise choice, as was my using an umbrella that protected more or less the same amount of me as a wide-brimmed hat. Still, a grand day out it was, as my sister and I moved off once more to the South Bank to see the Cy Twombly show at Tate Modern.

I wouldn't have missed it for anything, though Twombly's final 'status' remains for me as much a mystery as ever. By which I mean that I've never been more impressed by an artist with fewer painterly virtues, and then less impressed by an artist whose painterly ambitions are clearly enormous. The first Dubuffet-influenced stuff struck me as great, perhaps because I worship the ground Dubuffet walked on, while the earlier graffiti works seemed aimless and the sequence produced at Sperlonga - ten miles from where I live - looked vacuous and muddy: I didn't get the 'symbolic whiteness' business mentioned in the pamphlet at all. The darker crusty stuff in the next two rooms was arresting, with its throbbing dicks and scatological references - I found myself wondering if he'd known Pasolini -, but the Bolsena series, ostensibly influenced by Apollo 11, didn't work at all. I felt that Twombly liked the idea of science, but not the effort involved in doing it. There was the sense of a pastiche of genuine cultural activity, when what he was doing was, basically, winging it by faffing around with formulae that were merely artistic. This carried on into, and informed, the Muybridge stuuff in the next room. My sense is that other artists have done fake science much better than Twombly, although my sister liked these two sequential works very much. She didn't much like the tributes to Nini Pirandello, on the other hand, which I thought wonderful: restrained, elegiac, hard-won. We agreed though on most of the final work. I remember one critic talking about the falling-off in Twombly's ouput, but what impressed us most was the sheer energy of the later work. There was a footling quality about the Roman stuff done in the 60s, despite the down-and-dirty aspirations it clearly had. But Hero and Leandro and The Wilder Shores of Love, particularly the former, were grandly ambitious and achieved works by someone who has suddenly become a great colourist, something that's evident in the Venice series and even more so in the two Four Seasons sequences. The large, brash Bacchus paintings in the final room, where the difference between blood and wine, revelry and madness, is obliterated by the swooping, harrowing scrawl of red, are a great way to end the show.

On the way back, a Ryanair cabin crew member was heard to scream at a passenger. "Stop shouting at me, all right? Stop shouting at me." It's the little things that count.

Me, me, me, a whole book of me

Some very good news. The enterprising, innovative and discerning Salt Publishing will be bringing out a collection of my short fiction later this year. The collection will contain a few stories you may have read, plus lots you haven't (unless you know me very well indeed). It's provisionally entitled The Scent of Cinnamon, after my O. Henry Prize Story (yes, I know you know...). I'm delighted to be in the company of such friends and fellow writers as Isobel Dixon, Katy Evans-Bush (Me and the Dead out next month!), John Wilkinson, Vanessa Gebbie, Anne Berkeley, Simon Barraclough, David Gaffney and a glittering host of others. What did they say about MGM having more stars than heaven? Well, move over, MGM.

In the second sentence of this post I originally wrote brining instead of bringing. How subliminally salty is that?

Jonathan Williams

I first met Jonathan Williams when he came to Cambridge to read for Blue Room, a poetry society founded by John Wilkinson and run by John, his old school-friend Charlie Bulbeck and the more recently co-opted me. I had the grand title of Blue Room Secretary and was responsible for, among other things, booking rooms in my college for the reading and the guest poet. On this occasion we had two guest poets because Jonathan came with his partner, Tom Meyer. I don’t remember if we were unaware of this and booked, as usual, a single room, or were aware of it but thought, as young people tend to do, that one small bed would be enough for the two of them. It may even have been the case that the college didn’t offer a double room on the grounds that women weren’t allowed to sleep within its walls. Jonathan took one look at the bed and said to Tom: ‘Well, you’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep tonight,’ in a tone that struck me as playful but, thrillingly for me, not ironic. Tom was no taller than I was, bottle-blond (though I didn’t know this then), finely built and featured, a fragile adjunct to the solider, bearded, avuncular figure of Jonathan. They’d arrived the morning before the reading and had offered to drive us to a restaurant outside Cambridge for an early dinner that evening. I don’t know whose idea it was to take them to eat kebabs for lunch at the Gardenia, a basement café just off Trinity Lane that’s recently been saved from closure by, among others, Stephen Fry, but it wasn’t a success. I remember Jonathan peering into his pita with a forlorn expression and muttering, ‘Hmm, street food.’

Later that day, Jonathan and Tom drove John and me – Charlie having bunked off by this point – out of Cambridge to a pub that was famous at the time for its irascible owner, his taste for Wagner played loud, and his accommodating, brow-beaten German boyfriend. We drank Adnam’s ale – we had no choice. This was followed by a hotel restaurant that Jonathan had heard, or read, about and wanted to try. Jonathan cared about food in a way that’s utterly normal now but, in late 1973, seemed both luxuriously decadent and pedantic, an attractive though somewhat forbidding mix. I have no memory of what we ate. What I remember is the rather meandering ride home and the way I managed to slump against Tom in the back of the car, my thigh idly – would-be indifferently – pushed against his.

The reading was attended by the usual small group of enthusiasts, but I was too taken by the physical memory of Tom’s leg against mine to be more than summarily aware of what was read; I was also drunk. At the interval, it being my job to make coffee, I darted from the room to fill my kettle and bumped into a friend – Paul Johnstone, now dead – who asked me how the event was going. I think I’m sleeping with Tom tonight, I told him, unaware that every word was heard in the room behind me, where the poets and their audience were seated. John told me later, the following day, that Jonathan had raised an eyebrow but was otherwise pokerfaced. I have no idea how Tom reacted.

The post-reading party was in my room. By this time, I’d been told about my gaffe but, stubborn and optimistic with alcohol, remained undeterred. Half an hour into the party, when Jonathan left, I was sitting in my armchair, with Tom on the floor in front of me, his shoulders between my knees. ‘I’ll see you boys tomorrow,’ Jonathan said, and I imagine Tom nodded and smiled, perhaps wryly, as I did not, not believing my luck. To understand how much in love I was with the man whose head was almost, almost against my groin, you would have to factor in so much that isn’t needed here, where what I want to do above all is to talk about Jonathan’s generosity. The rest of the party faded away quite rapidly after Jonathan’s departure and suddenly Tom and I were alone. ‘Shall I make some coffee?’ I said, and Tom said: ‘Coffee?’ in a way that made me feel both foolish and desired. Five minutes later, he was twisting peach-coloured toilet paper around his contact lenses while I, like a bride, prepared for bed.

They left the next day. We walked with them to the brand-new multi-storey car-park where they’d left the car, talking about Joseph Needham and China, or Ronald Johnson, or Thomas A. Clark, a friend of John’s who’d recently been published by Jargon. Jonathan gave us their address, invited us to visit them in their cottage in Cumbria. As the car pulled off I felt that the end of some essential organ in my body had been attached to their bumper and was slowly, smoothly unspooling. I didn’t know who I was, nor where; with what was left to wave goodbye or with what had been drawn out, away, and gathered up, like wool, by what had happened. Thirty-six hours later, having made up my mind that I could never just go on with my life as it was, which now seemed as false and hollow as I’d become, I was on the road for Dentdale.

There was snow, and the last lift dropped me some way from the house. I must have called from a rural phone-box because Jonathan came in his car to collect me. I can’t remember now if I’d let them know that I was coming or, fearful of rejection, had simply presented myself as near as damn-it to the house, giving them no choice other than to take me in.

Tom had a cold. He didn’t seem pleased to see me, or not pleased; I wasn’t certain he knew who I was, although that, surely, was impossible after only two days. More than anything, I imagine now, he must have been uncomfortable, perhaps even peeved. He’d had no idea what he’d mean to me when he chose the easy option of my room, more for Jonathan’s comfort than for his own, as if I were the by-product of his own generosity towards his partner. He’d never considered that I might think I’d fallen in love with him, his New York past, his neck. He cooked for us while Jonathan showed me round, my head a whirl of names: Kitaj, Ginsberg, Hockney, Bunting, but soon after eating he went to bed. Alone with Jonathan, in the part of the house they worked in, filled with books and records, each desk with its own electric typewriter, I wondered what would happen. Jonathan asked if I’d ever had a sauna. I hadn’t.

In the sauna, outside the house, we talked about my life, my future. It hadn’t occurred to me until we were both naked and aching with the heat that I might want to have sex with Jonathan – I was, after all, in love with Tom! – but it seemed entirely natural, and right, that after the sauna and a glass or two of single malt we should go to my bedroom, a small room with walls painted burnt orange next to the room in which Jonathan and Tom normally slept. It hadn’t occurred to me, either, how scared I was of what I’d done, and was about to do, until I was lying on top of Jonathan and snivelling into the hairs of his chest. Jonathan stroked my back, then scratched it gently. ‘You like that, don’t you?’ he whispered. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re a brave boy,’ he said. ‘Am I?’ I said.

The next day Jonathan called the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and arranged a job for me. I can’t afford the fare, I told him, but Jonathan smiled and said that didn’t matter; he’d pay for my ticket. That evening, Tom still in bed with flu, he drove me down to the local pub. Jonathan was a local celebrity – I imagine he was always that – and the people he introduced me to, bank managers, store owners, family doctors, treated me with a mixture of respect and contempt I’d never experienced before; respect for Jonathan tinged with contempt for me. It was understood that I’d become a protégé. Someone, cattily, wanted to know where Tom was. By the time we were back at the cottage and it was clear that, this evening, I’d sleep alone, I knew that I didn’t want to go to San Francisco at all. I wanted to pick up my own life once again and make it fit. Jonathan, to his credit, understood.

***

We wrote to each other a number of times afterwards and only lost touch when I really did leave Cambridge, at the appropriate time, with a degree, but I never saw Jonathan – or Tom – again. In his letters, Jonathan gently upbraided me for what he must have seen as a failure of will, hoping that I’d found my ‘Firbankian’ pleasures on the banks of the Cam. I’ve never felt Firbankian in my life, but I was certainly as ill-equipped for life as Firbank had been, and it’s to Jonathan’s credit that he gave me the chance to risk a little and then retreat. He was generous with his time, and his body, a difficult man, superb in the Italian sense of not brooking mediocrity, with that pinch of arrogance that all snobs need to survive. I’ve never regretted my weekend at Dentdale. My only regret is that it was never repeated, and now, that it never will be.

THE GIFT

Time for a little poetry after so much unpleasant and utterly disrespectful ranting. This poem, written 33 years ago, was published in a fugitive collection entitled Of Western Limits, containing my work and poems by John Wilkinson, ostensibly written during a walking holiday we went on in Scotland and intended to be a Lyrical Ballads for our generation. There's certainly a copy in the British Library and there may even be one in the Cambridge University Library. I have one myself, unbound, and I imagine John does too. And that's it. It's dedicated to Charlie Bulbeck, who printed the collection and conspired with its authors in various other undertakings of a cultural nature.

The Gift has apparently been referred to as 'the great lost work of the Cambridge school'. (Once more, I have John to thank for this information.)

Well, it's lost no longer.

THE GIFT
for Charlie Bulbeck

Where we drive it is stubborn,
parked on the cliff edge it comes
with dawn. By inclusive reckon
each meed recovers its promise,
drifts home, a treasured account

in the nervous rein. Only a
loose prize, caustic on
the parabolic curve of tin,
burnished, you might reflect,
in whose pervasive ardour.

We are spelt, as grammar and
glamour cohabit in the patch;
a scholar’s trick. We conjure
allotments, ravishing in this
bright arena, with subtle poise

down the borders of light.
From scattered harvest, neap
touches the high-water mark,
rummage of golden oddments
scooped in, the sight of grain.

Forgiven by the bollard, by
the gleaming trim of the hub,
you reap, compacted to your
lunar metric. An occult
precipice and the flank of

achievement is bare, enticing.
It is sleight of hand, the boy
looks open mouthed as the conjurer
cuts down the stalk, a white bird
shimmering on his sleeve.

And this is the gift it brings:
refracted on the car, in sight
of the coastal acres, scoured
haloes of sunlight ‘as solid
and dense and fixed’ as

you can hope to secure it.
Arrest that flame, coals glint
and the flue is absolved by this
shiny token it palms you, tanned
still, elated in the fluent breeze.

HEROES

This was first published in Angel Exhaust Ten, edited by Andrew Duncan, its publication solicited, I believe, by John Wilkinson, for which much thanks. It's an interesting (I hope) hybrid of the Cambridge School and large doses of Lorca. I don't know if the magazine is still available, but, just in case, here it is. It's part of a large group of poems that have never been published, entitled VALUE.

HEROES

‘A walled dream in which I am stupid
or a bullfighter’
R.F. Walker

1
He wants to make it more perfect.
The beaker belongs in his hand and a golden
armpit over his mouth can’t stop their
vicious whispers for more than a beat.
He is living in the surf.
The music belongs to them that
his feet will dance from, scared
to find himself
the dancer in their despite.
No one has told him off for a thousand years.
How does he know what to do?
He began by counting the waves
that rising now will engulf him
and he knows their numbers as beads of white
or as the scattering of white birds,
numbers revealing his pitiful age.
That pleasure is his for a moment
and the bending of a suddenly prolonged
lightning toward his feet, which burn.
When one day he will count ten fingers
on both his hands, and know himself whole.

2
And then he will be noticed,
everyone moving harmoniously
round the green walls of his harbour
which is all commotion.
Breaking days,
to celebrate the departure of calm
as a breach in the climate, are pinkly
vacant. And he is happy
to be lost among friends, whose concern
is the delicate frill of his suit.
He gathers them up as fruit in his gloves.

3
He is the work of his own dismayed genius.
An amphora found in the city after
excavation crumbles into dust, his mother’s
arm. To the applause of crowds
he runs through the dance that will
fire their alien tribunes, who scrape and bow.
His charm is to be foolish as they are
foolish, with his wrists in a bowl of acid.
They have come so far for nothing but his smile
they can barely see in the earthbound light
what children they are. Those he has banished
gather in their nets
while a red tongue licks from a cloud.
These have been spared, in the great
waves they are crushed to infinite sand.
He raises a finger and a new music is born.
An acrobat turns on the stars to scream.

4
Let blood. Peel off his nipples,
starfish. The philosophic jaw
swings over his tranquil harbour,
midges on its slowly-dissolving
yellow screen. Not soft enough
to be wrought as the landing-stage
sets up a film he saw years ago
in the bright arena, and bled.
He cannot bear that flatulent music.

5
His love has become grenades in the arms of girls.
They take him by the nose through mirrors
that mistake the word ‘ghetto’ for ‘grotto’.
Under the rain he makes sisters out of flowers and owls.
The house is sliding. Where is the house?
He is walking uphill between sofas and trays of cachous.
He is a black man making good.
He is searching for strangers of his own kind.
Glass-like, they wait by his raised eye
for kisses and a basket of
wounded hair. The girls explode.

6
Alone now, he presses his thumb
against the neck of the vase.
He rests an ear on the stalk of its green throat.
Casually spread with gold
the evening dips in his throat
a violent rod, the engine of desire just
turning over as it probes, its stations
revolving as echoes in the machine.

Goldenrod. Love. The break of the lights
on the turrets, swinging his way.
He pauses for the applause of guns
to fathom his silence. He looks like
winning when a breach appears in the smoke,
his seventh labour
barely begun. A little wound.

7
He is wearing that horrible light
that is love for others. Windily showing
his disregard he sloughs it off as
symptom of a gilt and whore-like age.
Glistening in what darkness becomes him
now and as though at rest
in the colonnade of his bones a dog barks
to be put to sleep. They dance in each other’s eyes,
ten boys with the gestures of one, a curtain
straining to be closed.
If anyone answers he is lost,
beginning to die for the others.
In a palmful of water his velvet cries
are expanding always
expanding into muscle.

8
The weight of his sinews is covered in fur,
hysterical and white as a fountain.
A snowman. Kissing its scandalous mouth
he is gifted with the gift of words
to cord his thighs, to make lifting a bird
in the lightning, to silence the clouds,
to tell him what he wants to hear,
the numeracy of the bone structure,
the bees in the throat chamber making music,
dresses that heal the sadly distended armies,
the dream that occurs as a junction box
to re-route the seasons into his mouth.

9
Blue smoke that bears no repetition,
that stutters its cloud-like past
within the bell, the clamour of its wanting
waking the man. He is a statue
under the watery feet of Goths,
he is a heart of legendary blackness,
he is a vein
that runs from that heart
towards a singing and vacant history
of the self among roses and storks
tattooed on a chest, he is a dragon
mounting a girl, he is a girl, he is a clock
dismembered by horses in Paris in the rain,
he is a table made of flesh
in an empty house by a lake,
his filth and compromise
the breaking of love against a coast
suddenly there, its whiteness
and the fluted numbers.
Thus he’s divided
into cards and their numerous arrangements for death
around a central point, where he is perfect
as the decorative art of his veins shall become.