Victor and Kate enjoy a drink at Manchester's Cuba Cafe

Spent many happy hours this week with my friends Victor and Kate. Victor Rodriguez Nuñez is a leading Cuban poet, and his wife Kate Hedeen is a gifted translator of Latin American poetry.

Victor was here for the Manchester International Literature festival last autumn, and liked it so much that he wanted to show Kate around. Plus, Kate is a huge fan of The Smiths, who provided the soundtrack to her early life in Portland, Oregon. So naturally we had to take the Smiths Tour of Manchester, expertly provided by Craig of Manchester Music Tours.

Kate and Craig: a visit to the Shrine!

We had a wonderful morning exploring everything from the Free Trade Hall to the Salford Lads’ Club and the famous Iron Bridge of the song. Craig was a fine, friendly guide (as well as being drummer with the renowned Inspiral Carpets) and we came away fully educated about Morrissey, the Smiths and the whole Manchester music scene.

We also enjoyed a few other quintessentially Mancunian delights – dinner at Mr Thomas’s Chop House, drinks at the Peveril of the Peak pub, and (of course) I couldn’t resist taking Victor and Kate on Friday night up to the amazing Cuba Cafe, in Port Street,  Manchester’s small but glittering Cuban bar and club, where we had a couple of Cuba Libres made with real Havana Club rum and watched one of Michal’s excellent bachata classes. I must get along there and improve my bachata dancing next week.

The famous Iron Bridge: to think I drove past it every day and never knew...

Kate paid Manchester what I take to be the ultimate compliment, saying that to her it felt like a Latin American city – gritty but friendly, hugely mixed and cosmopolitan, creative and non-touristy. A thoroughly happy few days with two close friends who are also great literary artists and a link back to my beloved Cuba. They’ve gone now but they’ll definitely be back for more.  I miss them already.

How Hall, the Ennerdale farm where Rawling spent much of his childhood

Rawling (1916-96) was a magnificent poet – perhaps Cumbria’s best 20th century poet in my view – and, though largely forgotten at the end of his life, he’s been undergoing a renaissance of appreciation since his poems were reissued by the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society in 2009. The name may sound parochial, but believe me Rawling is a fine and perhaps major poet, bringing to life in vividly textured words the farming life of an earlier generation, the landscape and the fishing. All of it, as you read, is gritty and real enough to get your hands on, and profoundly beautiful at the same time.

(Do email stanandmarina@aol.com and get hold of a copy of his poems – it’s only £7.50 and I’m sure will become a collector’s item in the future.)

 I enjoyed meeting a very friendly BBC team, including producer Dean Jones and presenter Ellie Harrison, and despite the cameras, radio mics and freezing temperature we talked pretty spontaneously in the sunshine and open air, with a rich authentic odour of cow muck in the background (the farmer was manuring his fields at the time).

After filming I had a wonderful walk in the freezing air and bright sunshine around Ennerdale Water.

And the previous day, I’d taken time out to walk up in the snow to Bowscale Tarn, that amazingly dark, melancholy and beautiful place. I’ll put some pictures in here.

Snow on Haycock across Ennerdale Water; Angler's Crag in middle distance

Bowscale Tarn: a study in subtle blacks and whites just before sunset

Liz was left, after an accident, unable to speak or write for more than a few minutes at a time. She started to realise how precious words are, and how we waste them. Eventually she had the idea of asking people what they would say if they had just under a hundred words left.

The result is a delightful little book full of wisdom, delight in the world, philosophy and playfulness. Contributors range from public figures like Desmond Tutu and Tony Benn to writers like Ursula LeGuin, Russell Hoban, Maggie Gee and Ben Okri (not that any of these are ‘like’ one another – but that’s part of the book’s charm). There are peace activists and Buddhist meditation teachers, musicians, actors, a ‘welfare funerals officer’, whatever that is, an astrologer, a fairground historian, a calligrapher and so on and on. Not on and on forever, though: only 99 of them! (Or actually 101 because a couple turned up unexpectedly that were too good to omit.)

And among them all is me, for some reason I don’t quite understand. I got this email out of the blue about a year ago, putting the basic premise to me and asking me to contribute. I agreed – it seemed interesting – and then forgot all about it. Then, as happens, came another email, telling me the deadline was nearly here. Help! I felt I would like to contribute a poem – that’s what I hope I do best – about something important. I looked through my unpublished recent-ish work, looking for short poems. Aha! There was a poem written – with tears in my eyes, I admit – when my daughter was pregnant.

Someone had just told me that at that number of days, the baby would be the size of an apple-pip, and the poem had just poured out. I put the poem, minus title, onto a page and clicked the ‘word count’ button, without much hope. Unbelievable: it was exactly 99 words! And it was about the most important subject I could have chosen: love, new birth, someone who will go on in the world (hopefully) long after I’m gone.

Amazingly, Ursula LeGuin says she had the same experience: she checked a poem she wanted to use, and lo and behold, it was 99 words long! Amazed by the coincidence, she says ‘I feel like an Augur or something.’ There must be a touch of magic about the whole business. Anyway, 99p from each copy sold goes to the charity PeaceDirect, to support local peacemakers in war zones. So click that button, or go to that bookshop, and buy, buy, buy!

Merry Christmas! and a Happy New Year to you.

I’ve been reading Helen Tookey’s work with growing admiration. Her quiet, precise poems have a genuine eeriness – a spooky quality that I’ve met with nowhere else in recent poetry. I think it comes from the fact that she has interests in both archaeology and psychology, but knows intuitively that they aren’t separate – that when we dig up the past it’s our own roots we are looking at; and when we explore the dark corners of our personal psyche, we’re also daring to open up the hidden aspects of our culture and society.

 ‘At Burscough,Lancashire’ is a case in point.  Here it is (with permission):

At Burscough, Lancashire

 Lancashire’s Martin Mere was the largest lake in England when it was first drained, to reclaim the land for farming, in 1697.

 Out on the ghost lake, what’s lost

is everywhere: murmuring in names

on the map, tasted in salt winds

that scour the topsoil, westerlies

that wrenched out oaks and pines, buried now

in choked black ranks, heads towards the east.

Cloudshadows ripple the grasses as the seines

rippled over the mere by night, fishervoices calling

across dark water. Underfoot, the flatlands’

black coffers lie rich with the drowned.

The poem is about a lake that’s no longer there. Helen Tookey uses its absence to evoke the landscape (a strange, nondescript no-man’s-land) in vivid, sensuous detail but also with semantic depth, so that the placenames on the map recalling the lost mere merge into the sound of the wind, and the trees which still turn up now as fossilised bog oak and the like become disturbingly evocative of mass human graves. Ruminating on the loss of the mere, she writes, by implication, an elegy for the communities that lived and worked there and have now, like the lake, gone with hardly a trace. She also hints at the other cultural obliterations which have stained past centuries. The ‘choked black ranks’ recall ethnic cleansing, forced migration, mass starvation. And the simple fact that, over the centuries, many people, fishers and other, must have drowned in the lake and been forgotten. Even money is there, faintly, with the substitution of ‘coffers’ for the expected ‘coffins’.

 But it’s all held together by a consciousness which sees in a context of myth. The ‘fisher voices calling/across dark water’ are voices from the other side of the river – Styx or Lethe – that separates the dead from the living. These are the souls of the dead that might call to us in sleep. Could it even be that they are fishing for us? The choice choice of ‘flatlands’ is deft also – and again a neat substitution, because we would expect ‘wetlands’ (indeed, the remnants of Martin Mere are now a bird sanctuary run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust). Not just a neat label for the nondescript alluvial west-Lancashire landscape, it suggests a flat earth that might tilt up one day and show worrying things underneath. For the mathematically aware it also recalls Edwin Abbott’s 1884 Flatland, a brilliant Lewis-Carroll style fantasy which enables even the simplest person to understand the amazing nature of spatial dimensions.

 Helen’s poem shows us just how many dimensions an absent lake and a depopulated landscape can have. And she tells us about it in such deceptively gentle and musical tones, hovering on the edge of blank verse, but always staying flexible, floating  between four stresses and five – ‘rippling’ and ‘murmuring’ as the poem says. It’s like listening to a lullaby that soothes and seduces with its beauty; but just might give you nightmares.

Victor Rodriguez Nuñez

Victor teaches at Kenyon College, Ohio in the USA but insists he is not a political exile from Cuba, just a wandering intellectual to whom geographical boundaries don’t mean a great deal.
To my amazement, he and his co-translator Katherine Hedeen have done me the compliment of translating a group of my own poems into Spanish, something I never expected and which came as a complete surprise. It will be great to see him again after so long, and the reading should be memorable.

It turned out to be totally gripping. Young had been a pioneer of mountaineering and a brilliant climbing writer, a heroic ambulance driver in World War I (where he lost a leg) and after the war pioneered mountaineering with an artificial leg. He had many German friends, and worked secretly with Germans opposed to Hitler to try and bring about the dictator’s downfall. His exploits were incredible, literally, and Hankinson’s book brought the whole thing to life, telling the story with such verve that I couldn’t stop reading.

But also the book reminded me of Alan. I first met him when I gave a talk on Thomas De Quincey in Cockermouth in 1981. Alan was a deep-voiced, jovial, lionlike chap with a mane of white hair: hugely well-read, deeply friendly, vastly intelligent and entirely likeable.

After that I bumped into him quite often around Cumbria (he lived in Skiddaw Street, Keswick); we talked about this project and that, and I was delighted when he won prizes for his wonderful book Coleridge Walks the Fells, in which he retraced the course of Coleridge’s great 1802 walk around the Western Lakes, comparing how places are now to how they were then. The book is a classic.

When I came to write my own Literary Guide to the Lake District he took a great interest – and showed it with practical help. One day I phoned him and asked if he remembered whether a particular plaque was still at the top of Grisedale Hause – because last time I was up there, I’d forgotten to check, and I needed to know for the book. There was something similar that I’d neglected at the summit of Great Gable too. The upshot was that Alan said ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go up and take a look, and let you know.’

When my book came out I was able to thank ‘Alan Hankinson, who with memorable generosity volunteered to climb both Grisedale Hause and Great Gable to find things I had forgotten to look for.’

Alan was himself of course a fine climber and The First Tigers, his history of the beginnings of british rock-climbing, is another classic and fascinating even if you’ve never set foot on a mountain. In fact, it’s hard not to keep throwing in the word ‘classic’ when writing about Alkan: he wrote so well, telling so many stories that needed to be told, and produced the perfect book on each one.

He was loyal too. Towards the end of his life he turned up more than once at poetry readings I gave at Dove Cottage and elsewhere, although he clearly wasn’t well and admitted that he was finding it difficult to write. And yet really I must have been someone he knew only peripherally, an occasional contact. But the thing about Alan was that when you met him his warmth and interest made you feel that you and he had always known each other.

Alan died, sadly, in 2007 and I didn’t hear about it until some time afterwards. Only when I read the obituaries and found out abaout his amazing career in TV, film, radio and journalism, and his war service with the Gurkhas, did I realise how many other aspects he had besides those I’d seen.

Earlier this year I was asked to run a course on English Literature for trainee Blue Badge Guides. It turned out that my predecessor in the job had been Alan. I felt proud, as well as a bit intimidated, to find I was stepping into his shoes. It certainly gave me something to live up to, though I didn’t do the job with a pint always at my elbow, as I’m told Alan used to!

Sadly his books (apart from two US publications on American Civil War battles – yes, he was an expert on that as well!) seem to be out of print. A bit of a scandal really when you know how good they are. Alan deserves to be better known. Some enterprising publisher should at least put out digital reprints of The First Tigers, Coleridge Walks the Fells, and his biography of Young. Meanwhile, I never go to Keswick without thinking of him and missing that deep-voiced laugh, and that encyclopedic knowledge of literature and the Lake District. Here’s to you, Alan, and thanks for telling so many great stories.

The Manor and one corner of the gardens

One of the things I love most is the connection between places and writing, so it was a treat yesterday to visit The Manor at Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, which is the setting for Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series of children’s books.

The weather was awful - it rained and rained – and it was a 162-mile drive each way, but it was worth it. The occasion was a family party held at occasional, irregular intervals every few years: my grandfather was the brother of Lucy Boston’s mother (to put it another way, my mother’s Aunt Polly was Lucy Boston’s mother), which I think makes us second cousins, though I’m not sure. So there we were with a crowd of other relatives, close and distant, to explore the house, and talk, and just be in a magical place.

The Knight's Room: built about 1130 and alive with atmosphere (picture from the Green Knowe website)

Tolly's Bedroom, complete with rocking horse (picture from the Green Knowe website)

The rain stopped long enough for us to explore the beautiful gardens with their old scented roses, mock-orange and wonderful topiary, and to wander by the river that flows past with its swans floating calmly on the green current.

St Christopher - the statue is at the side of the house

The rooms are just as depicted in the books, with the toys, the rocking horse, the witch-ball, the quilts and a galaxy of drawings and paintings and other art works, including the beautiful original illustrations and cover-paintings for the books, which were done by the late Peter Boston, son of Lucy Boston and husband of Diana Boston who lives there now.

The house and gardens are open to the public quite often: for details and other information about the house, the books and their story, you can go to www.greenknowe.co.uk

Packhorse bridge over Watendlath Beck

It was lovely to revisit Watendlath – one of my favourite places, with its old stone buildings, little packhorse bridge and tranquil tarn under the mass of the fells – especially outside the tourist season, when the place was practically empty and the loudest sound was the flock of insistent chaffinches hustling me for sandwich crumbs. But sadly I didn’t go for a long walk because it was simply too wet and the visibility was too restricted. Next time, I hope!

Fold Head Farm: used by Walpole as the model for Judith Paris's farmhouse

Eric and I talked under the overhanging roof of a barn, to keep ourselves and the microphone out of the rain. (The producer, Barney Rowntree from production company Somethin’ Else, wasn’t so lucky: he stood outside, holding said mic!) Walpole was an immensely popular writer in the late 1920s and the 1930s, but has been neglected since his death and is mainly remembered now for his sequence of novels about the Herries family, set in Cumberland.

The Herries Chronicle is unevenly written,  and while Walpole writes excellently about the landscape, he doesn’t always show much understanding of real Cumbrian concerns like farming. But the books are well worth reading for their drama, their incredible visual imagination, their narrative drive, and notably for Walpole’s amazing imagination for the grotesque and terrifying. He’s a superb Gothic writer: death, withcraft, hallucinations, madness, violence and terror bring out the very best in him and he deserves to be rediscovered for that alone.

Watendlath Beck, winding off towards its spectacular descent in the Lodore Falls

I summed up my mixed feelings about Walpole, and tried to suggest why he’s still worth reading, in a review for the TLS three or four years ago. I’ll put it in here for anyone who’s interested. And here’s a link to details about the programme: don’t forget to come back here after you’ve checked it out – there’s more to read!

http://www.somethinelse.com/2011/03/23/the-walpole-chronicles-bbc-radio-4/

HUGH WALPOLE

Rogue Herries  736 pp. 978-0-7112-2889-4

Judith Paris  757 pp. 978-0-7112-2890-0 

The Fortress  811pp. 9-780-7112-2891-7 

 Vanessa  852 pp. 9-780-7112-2892-4 

 Introductions by Eric Robson. £7.99 each. Frances Lincoln.

‘I’m now pinning all my hopes on two or three Lakeland novels, which will at least do something for this adorable place,’ wrote Hugh Walpole in August 1925, two years after establishing himself in a house on the fellside slopes of Catbells, six miles from Keswick. ‘I feel a longing desire to pay it back for some of its goodness to me.’ Later he added, more tensely, ‘These four books shall clinch my reputation or I’ll die in the attempt’.

            The journal-entries, with their mixture of naive enthusiasm, sentimentality (as if Cumberland somehow needed his writing) and naked careerism, are quintessential Walpole. They were also prophetic: Walpole’s reputation, such as it is, rests on the Herries novels, which have remained sporadically in print and dimly in the public consciousness long after his fifty-odd other books have vanished without trace.          Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1884, Hugh Walpole was the son of an Anglican clergyman whose career took him to England, America and Scotland. Hugh was sent to English boarding schools, where his poor sight made him a target for bullying and he sought popularity by developing a talent for story-telling after lights-out in the dormitory. A ‘third’ in History at Cambridge and a miserable six months at the Seamen’s Mission in Liverpool (he was expected to follow his father into the church) made it clear that, once again, story-telling was the solution, and Hugh entered literary London.

            His first novel, The Wooden Horse, appeared in 1909 and thereafter Hugh pursued his career by combining massive productivity with a facility for forming friendships with the great and influential. ‘I simply worshipped men of letters and went for them direct as a kitten goes to a saucer of milk,’ he guilelessly confessed later. His enthusiasm and longing to be liked worked wonders. Though no two writers could have been more different, he became the intimate friend – almost the adopted son – of Henry James, who instructed him to begin his letters ‘Très-chère Maitre’, and cushioned devastating criticism of Walpole’s writing (‘It isn’t written at all, darling Hugh – by which I mean you have…never got expression tight and in close quarters (of discrimination, of specification) with its subject’) with affection so intense that the disciple was never offended.

            Gradually the writing became more competent, the reviews better, the friendships more numerous, until by the mid-1920s Walpole could boast allies on all sides. Treated as an equal by Bennett, Wells, Buchan and Galsworthy, he was also a close friend of Virgina Woolf (though she found his Judith Paris as ‘unreal’ as he found The Waves). Walpole’s fiction, with its tone of nebulous seriousness, its vague philosophising, its faintly ‘daring’ subject-matter about relationships, appealed to the middle-brow reading public as weighty stuff. Bestsellerdom became routine, accompanied by American lecture-tours, an FRSL, and ultimately a knighthood. Progress was only jolted, temporarily though painfully, in 1930 by Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, which caricatured Walpole as Alroy Kear, a ruthless, manipulative careerist determined at all costs to be recognised as a great writer.

            Walpole, however, needed a place in geography as well as in society. He wanted to feel English, and he wanted to feel rooted. The solution presented itself when he visited the Lakes and remembered early holidays in Cumberland, the happiest times of his childhood. He quickly bought Brackenburn, a modern stone house overlooking Derwentwater, moving in in June 1924. . Though he retained a base in London, most of his writing thereafter was done at Brackenburn.

            The idea of a regional family saga was conceived at once. Derived from his reading of Hardy, Zola and (though he disliked admitting the debt) Galsworthy, it was already a slightly dated notion, but it satisfied Walpole’s characteristic impatience to use his new surroundings in fiction, as well as offering what must have seemed a reliable route to popular success and literary acclaim. Elements of self-projection are also obvious. The opening of the first novel, Rogue Herries, is clearly a fantasy version of Walpole’s own situation, the arrival of the uncouth eighteenth-century protagonist at his ruinous farmhouse in Cumberland a grotesque, gothic transformation of Walpole’s move to Brackenburn. When he later refers to his second-generation hero, David Herries, as ‘the patriarchal founder of an English family’, Walpole is making David everything he could not himself be.

            The faults of the Herries novels, which were written at headlong speed between1930 and 1933, are big and obvious. There is virtually no plot: the passage of generations of farmers, merchants and landowners with their accompanying feuds, obsessions and antagonisms generate a semblance of motivation, and that suffices. Historical accuracy is flouted: Walpole lacked the patience for research, consoling himself during the writing of Rogue Herries that ‘no one knows very much about the eighteenth century really, or only a few do. I can be venturous.’ Character development is rudimentary: it was perhaps as well that the Très-chère Maitre did not live long enough to be asked for his comments on the raging squires and red-haired gypsies of Herries. Even the Cumbrian landscape is rarely engaged with. Though often well-described, it remains a backdrop, a terrain seen as by a tourist. It has no texture, no one is shown realistically working within it. Tellingly, we never encounter a sheep until the middle of the second novel, Judith Paris, and when we do it is on a shearing-day treated as a grandiose set-piece:

There were eight hundred sheep and five hundred lambs…Beyond the house in a grand half-circle were fifteen clippers striding the sheep-stools, and each clipper held a sheep, shorn, half-shorn, about to be shorn. There was a tremendous noise, for the gate of the farmyard was packed by five score of wooled sheep pressed against it…

Walpole’s many non-literary friends in Keswick could easily have shown him any aspect of Cumbrian working life, but he probably never thought to ask.

            Yet it would be unfair to dismiss the Herries novels as mere swashbuckling fakery. Walpole’s true gifts are those of an oral story-teller. The marvellously enticing opening sentence of Rogue Herries (‘A little boy, David Scott Herries, lay in a huge canopied bed, half awake and half asleep’) offers an image for both author and reader. The author dreams the novel, and the reader will be allowed to share his dream. The result, at its best, is a kind of bedtime story for adults.

            Walpole is a dab hand at fantasy, the horrific, the bizarre. In this realm his imagination is of splendid fertility, and he has a masterful gift for the visually grotesque, as when the boy David watches the firelit room and his father’s mistress in it:

All the things in it moved; the fire-dogs grinned and yawned; over a large arm-chair of faded red silk, oddly enough, some harness had been slung, and it lay there in coils of silver and dark brown leather, and these coils turned and stretched and slipped like snakes. Then against the wall was a long, thin mirror in tarnished silver and, in this, Alice Press was most oddly reflected, the side of her face that was shown there being very thin and red, her hair tawny-peaked like a witch’s hat; her eyebrow jumped up and down in a terrifying manner.

Witchcraft, indeed, provides a horribly convincing crowd-scene in Rogue Herries, where Mrs Wilson, a mentally-confused and infirm old woman servant from Herries’s household, tries to visit a dying friend in a nearby village and is taken for a witch.

Men and women, close together as though for protection, were gathered together at the end of the cobbled path. They stood, huddled together, not speaking, staring at her. Although she could not see well and was so deeply frightened that it was though her heart were beating in her eyes, yet certain faces were very distinct to her.

She is stripped, stoned and thrown into a river, where she dies. The episode is seen from the victim’s point of view – Walpole knew all about ‘the look of lust and hatred, curiosity and pleasure’ on the faces of a bullying mob – and is cinematic in its constant restless movement and shaky, off-balance shifts of vision. Walpole was a natural screen-writer, enjoying a successful stint in Hollywood scripting David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy for David O. Selznick, and demonstrates it repeatedly in the Herries novels, in both crowded set-pieces (feasts, fights, markets, travelling-theatre shows) and episodes of fast-moving, claustrophobic horror like the burning of Fell House in Vanessa, where Adam Paris, confused by smoke, searches on the wrong floor for his daughter’s room until the fire traps him.

            Perhaps the finest scene in the tetralogy is also the grimmest. It occurs in The Fortress, where John and Uhland Herries, cousins who have cherished a lifelong loathing, make their separate ways through dense mist (Walpole is always good with mist and fog) to meet at Skiddaw House, a desolate shepherd’s bothy on the north slope of the mountain. Uhland is lame, John crippled by an obsession with his own cowardice, which he overcomes to confront Uhland. Uhland shoots John, then turns the gun on himself. Walpole heightens the scene to a painful vividness by the use of banal detail – the dusty wax fruit on the windowsill of the neglected room, the child’s drawing on the back of the crumpled scrap of paper which is all Uhland can find for his suicide note. The result is a scene that would not be unworthy of Conrad or Hardy.     The final volume, Vanessa, demonstrates that Walpole is not inspired solely by the idea of historical distance. It brings the story up to the 1930s, with episodes set in the Great War and the Russian Revolution, a debate about Virginia Woolf’s fiction, and a heroine obtusely, and refreshingly, indifferent to the scenic beauty of the Lakes, who survives a freak snowstorm at the summit of Scafell while her companion dies of hypothermia – the landscape at this last moment acquiring tactile quality and becoming uncompromisingly real.

            The Herries novels sold massively on first appearance, and survived the rapid deflation of Walpole’s reputation after his death from diabetes in 1941. In his genial introduction to this reprint (included, strangely, without variation in all four volumes) Eric Robson usefully sets the novels in the context of Walpole’s prosperous but shakily-founded career and stresses their traditional narrative virtues, though perhaps underestimating the darkness of the tetralogy as a whole, and Walpole’s real strengths as a writer of the gothic. (He was, appropriately, a collateral descendent of the author of Otranto.) There has been some quiet recognition of these strengths in recent years: Tarnhelm, a highly original werewolf story told from a child’s viewpoint, featured in a collection of his weird tales issued in 2003 by Tartarus Press as a limited edition, which deserves a cheap reissue. And several fantasy websites currently draw attention to Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, his dreamlike 1925 novella about sadism.

            As for Herries, there will be places in these massive blocks of paper where everyone will want to skip. But Walpole’s ham-fisted, messy and eccentric attempt at the Great Lakeland Novel still deserves to be read. The episodes – by turns gracelessly ornate and bleakly brilliant – remain often weirdly enthralling and memorable, their sheer self-indulgence a guilty pleasure for the reader too. In the Herries novels, Walpole confessed, he had allowed himself to be, for the first time in his adult life, ‘what I really am – a little boy telling stories in the dormitory.’

Carol Rumens, poet and critic

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/27/poem-of-the-week-grevel-lindop

It was like a surprise late Christmas present, especially as Carol’s introductory essay gave a very sensitive and imaginative reading of the poem, of a kind I’d never imagined anyone would offer.  It was quite difficult to believe it had really happened. And not the least surprising thing was that I’d almost forgotten about the poem myself. As it chanced, my wife Amanda was glacing at an old diary and noticed that I’d finished the poem in 1978 – more than half my lifetime ago.

Naturally that prompted all sorts of reflections – not least, on the question of whether I could write that poem now, if I hadn’t already. Obviously, in one sense not. I’m a different person, with different proccupations. But also, the ego naturally starts wondering ‘Can I write as well as that these days? Have I lost even whatever minimal skill with words I had then?’ There’s an irrational sense of needing to compete with a younger self.

But we can’t do that. All anyone can do is to write as well as they can (however they might define ‘well’) at a given time. A poem is made in the mould or matrix of not just a mind but a language, a culture, and a personal moment. There can’t actually be a competition, with oneself or others. Any poem that gets as far as being genuine is a species all by itself.

I also found myself wondering about form. On the few occasions when a poem of mine has been brought back from the past like this, for a critical discussion or an anthology, it has very often been a poem (like ‘My Grandmother’s Opal’) in fairly strict metre and rhyme.

In that particular poem I’d chosen a strict form (or rather, felt the need of it – you don’t really choose these things) – rhyming or half-rhyming quatrains – because I wanted the shape of the poem to be a bit like a faceted stone or piece of jewellery – quite highly polished. But Carol Rumens’s choice did make me wonder again whether poems in strict forms are more likely to survive through time, to be remembered, or just look reasonably good, after the lapse of some decades.

This could be because rhyme and metre are devices that help memory (that’s surely one reason they developed in the first place); so lines from such poems perhaps have a tendency to stick in the mind more than passages from free verse poems. I wonder also if, as the language moves on, speech rhythms change, and a free verse passage that seemed very effective at one time comes to seem less so; whilst a metrical passage gives more emphatic clues to the reader about how to stress and time the words?

I find myself that the free verse passages that stay in my memory are mostly ones that have the force of a proverb or aphorism – W.C. Williams’s ‘No ideas but in things’ or Whitman’s ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself…’ or R.S. Thomas’s man ‘nailing his questions/one by one to an untenanted cross’ – though even that last line is in fact metrical, so maybe it proves the opposite.

I write plenty of poems in free verse, but soetimes I wonder if I’m making them ephemeral for that reason. Yet, again, you can’t often choose the form of a poem (maybe you can sometimes? but if you do, that’s a different poem…). And some things maybe can’t be written about in metre. I wonder.

Anyway, thank you, Carol Rumens, for a choice that encouraged me and made me feel that all those hours of toiling away over my notebook in the evenings, in my dusty bedsit, back in the faded 1970s, had been worthwhile after all.

This week’s Poem of the Week, a witty comic salute to the New Year by Winthrop Mackworth Praed (a big mouthful of a name you don’t hear often enough these days!) is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/04/poem-of-the-week-winthrop-mackforth-praed

And Carol Rumen’s own website is at http://www.carolrumens.co.uk/

Ennerdale Water - part of Tom Rawling's home territory

He left the valley early  but kept contact with his native region and his extended family, and returned often for fishing trips. He was an expert salmon fisherman, and worked with the naturalist and fishing-writer Hugh Falkus studying not merely the catching of sea-trout but their mysterious life-cycle.

Rawling only began writing poetry when he retired from teaching, but what poured out then was a rich and powerful flood of poems about his Ennerdale childhood, his memories of the farm and the village, and about fishing. The poems are vivid, sharp and close to the earth – and they bring to life a whole world, social and agricultural, much of which has vanished from the Lakes.

He had success with two books (Ghosts at my Back, 1982 and The Names of the Sea Trout, 1984) and got to know many of the leading poets of his time – Ted Hughes was a frequent fishing companion, Anne Stevenson encouraged his work, Seamus Heaney wrote friendly notes and comments on draft poems – but then somehow his work was forgotten.

Rawling's poems and memories: A vital part of Lakeland culture rediscovered

Anyone who loves poetry por Lakeland needs to know these poems. As Chris McCully and I wrote in the magazine Trout and Salmon (my first venture into a fishing magazine – I haven’t held a rod in 50 years! – )

“Rawling’s grip on the texture of rural Cumberland life was both sensory and philosophical. Writing of ‘Clipping Day’ he remembers

           the ewe’s flesh flinching

as shears neared the throat

for the first cut into the rise

where new wool pushes off its past

in order to repeat it.

Often the recollections have a richness that rises to celebration, the glimpse of a good world charged with benevolent power that hints at the Biblical:

                                                A good summer

            was a full barn. Carts came, turned back empty,

            came again, ironshod hooves struck cobbles,

            a mare snorted as she charged the rising causeway,

            winged shelvings swayed with the load,

            wheels rattled. Then thunder, the barn floor

            booming under fetlock-feathered Clydesdale feet.

A confirmed atheist, Rawling would have repudiated any religious overtones here but the sensory precision of his work (that ‘fetlock-feathered’ Clydesdale) would have earned respect from possibly the greatest nature-poet ever to have written in English, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And always there’s the accuracy. Architecture-buffs reading the last excerpt would recognise that ‘causeway’ as the stone ramp up to a raised Lakeland granary…

“[And Rawling's fishing experience] bore fruit in poems like ‘Night Fisherman’, where sight is extinguished and the world slips all the more sharply into relief:

            Now touch is master, blindman fingering

            of reel and rod, the hook’s keen point.

            Feet shuffle-feel the ground,

            delicately crunch gravel;

            body poised ready to reach

            beneath the mirror of the pool…”

Here’s one more poem, in full:

Sloe Gin

for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost
expose the spiny twigs
reveal the bare-black fruit.
Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloes,
ignore the blood on your wrist.
Needle-prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin. Each day
an agitation of the jar,
and after many days of alchemy,
decant this ruby in your glass
to taste silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.

From The Names of the Sea-Trout (Littlewood Arc, 1993)

Besides the new collection, How Hall and the excellent CD (both available from stanandmarina@aol.com or bobnet.64@btopenworld.com) several of Rawling’s original books and pamphlets are still just about available, new or second-hand, so I’ll add the links here. If you want to catch up with possibly the finest 20th century Cumbrian poet (and yes, he stands at least equal to Norman Nicholson) then you need to read them. For me, they helped to make 2010 a memorable year for English poetry.

And now, here’s to creativity – yours, mine, everyone’s – in 2011! Happy New Year.