selected letters 1997
Tuesday March 4th ‘97
Dear Anne
Afraid I’ve been in hedgehog mode through most of January and February, curled up in the corner of my cupboard. Thank goodness it’s sunny today, the wind’s dropped, and the blue tits and what I think is a greenfinch have been vying for places on the feeder I have attached with suckers to the living room window.
To G...: yes of course whomever you invited will be fine by me and I’m not looking to have someone sympathetic particularly to any of my own hobbyhorses at all. My being somewhat taken aback was because I have only read with him once, at a Burns bicentenary festival at Strathclyde University last year. There were about ten readers, this after a dinner that concluded a three-day event.
I was looking forward to hearing G and one or two others I hadn’t heard. But he stood up and read this lengthy (it seemed very long indeed) rhyming couplets verse monologue about his living as a poet in ---, largely ignored since he did not come from Glasgow—which was given too much attention in Scotland— and because he was interested in writing sonnets and in engaging in genuine craftsmanship, rather than trendy formless free verse stuff.
All this without irony or wit. One sat with that smile on one’s face as one does at such occasions, thinking as one does, Fuck you too Jimmy…. The thought of that type of young-old-fogey bullshit being lain down so arrogantly to people I’m trying to help in their writing, does not appeal. But I get from your letter there are much healthier aspects elsewhere in his work: I’ll look them out, I meant to before this. ‘Twill be all right on the night nay doot. Am looking forward to the rest of the week.
Tuesday
March 24th ‘97
Dear
Philip
Thanks
for the MacKay review. I’d missed it, though I have
Paddy Hogg’s book and I know MacKay’s views on
it: there was a debate hosted by the John McLean society
in a pub in London Road between the two about a month ago.
I had to miss that too, though I had reports.
MacKay
I have time for, in fact I was very pleased to hear he got
the Saltire Award for his Burns biography. His editions of
the poems and the letters are I think excellent,
discreetly scholarly but very “user friendly”
to use the contemporary cliche, and recognising frankly
his debts. His recent Alan Pinkerton biography has certain
defects and has perhaps come out too quickly on the heels
of his previous work. But he is a man certainly to be
respected.
Hogg,
whom I have met twice, is very deep indeed into what he is
researching. Very valuable research it is, though I look
forward very much more eagerly to an anthology of the best
of the newspaper material as a whole rather than the
continuance of claims to new addition to the Burns oeuvre.
I can’t at the moment get involved in what has
become there for me something that is too personal, and
political not in the radical sense. It’s a pity
about the book itself, which is a rushed job, and
patchwork quilts of phrase and word congruences do not and
never will establish authorship. But I wish Paddy well, I
like him, and just hope that he calms down a bit getting
on with the work.
It reminds me of when I was researching Thomson, and first
discovered John Cumming and his apocalyptic sermons. How I
thirsted to find out if Thomson had been in Exeter Hall
between 1848 and 1849. How I knew that it would have been
surely out of the question for the boys of the Asylum not
to have been sent there! And how one gets sucked too
easily—if one doesn’t watch—into a
search to establish that which one already “knows in
one’s heart” is true, and how angry one gets
if some poor bastard doesn’t quite see it that way.
What
does really interest me about this debate is that at its
heart is the legacy of still unresolved dilemmas of the
1790’s. Burns of course died at a very crucial phase
of Scottish and Irish history, that testing time when the
lessons of the American and French revolutions might point
towards democracy, but republicanism pointed to the
destruction of the basis of the Protestant
Constitution— “the keystone of our Royal
arch”—as Burns protested when accused of
subversion. It is not trivial to note that Burns died the
same month as the first Twelfth of July parade in Ulster.
The gang culture of Orangeism imported to Scotland was
part of that which redefined the nature of freemasonry, in
my opinion. Burns became a calendar icon of Orange and
freemason culture, of one-man-to-another, of What
We’re Not and This Patch is Ours.
It runs deep, however discreet on the surface. And
it’s still trying to ward off thecommunists etc who
wanted Burns the child of the enlightenment
socialist-in-anticipation. That’s the real battle
behind the MacKay-Hogg debate—whether or not in the
protagonists themselves.
I hope things are well with you: no doubt you’ll be kept busy as can be up to the last moment in your job. ...
As envoi a poem written after reading with an American poet a couple of years back.
But it’s not finally about him, or me I hope, or anyone specifically.
Wednesday April 16th ‘97
Dear Matt (Ewart)
Thanks for the essay on Burns Singer. His earnest engagement with language and its relationship with being is what interests me in him, though it’s his images created of the sense of the dissociation such an awareness can bring that can be for me the most telling: I mean that great image of the sparks and the tramcar, and the very fine passage you quote from Marcus Antoninus Aurelius. It’s refreshing to read somebody nailing their critical colours to the mast as you do: you obviously feel as passionately about Singer as I do about the other language man of these parts, W.S. Graham.
Perhaps a sure indication of Singer’s greatness is Bold’s belittling of his achievement. Before I stopped reading ¸the Herald I had noted his dismissal of Morgan, Graham (“an egocentric solipsist’) and MacCaig “squandered a great talent”. I always regret not writing that letter to the Herald that occurred to me beginning, “Whether Alan Bold would have squandered a great talent is something we can never know.”
Friday night I enjoyed very much. The young fiddler was terrific, and Meg Bateman reading was a revelation to me, I hadn’t heard her before. I love Monty Montgomery’s readings and translations: there’s seems to be some very fine and sensitive things happening in female Gaelic poetry just now.
Thursday May 1st
‘97
Dear Marion
I hate the phone. You get asked things and you’re suddenly having to make a snap decision, and it can sound abrupt and not thought out. Anyway I still think the six o clock news isn’t the poem for the kind of book you’re describing, though I have nothing at all against contributing to a book of funny stuff, and yes people do talk about a hoot meaning a right good laugh, for which I am all in favour.
But I still think that for instance although Edwin Morgan’s Ozymandias would be right for a book like you describe with Ivor Cutler and others, something like the First Men on Mercury, a kind of cousin to it, or the Loch Ness Monster, would not be. These other two poems are also funny poems, bufit they’re poems in a way doing something with language that to put them under the title “ a hoot” would somehow be leading the reader away from something else in the poems, and something that’s important. It’s not that humour aint a serious business as they say, but of course all that’s funny isn’t accurately described as comic. Comedy’s an essential, but to me it’s essential that it’s differentiated from things that happen to be funny: the point of comedy it seems to me is in its being funny—not anything else.
Anyway I enclose something I am quite happy to have called a hoot if you want to use it at all: I had a great time with Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead writing Tickly Mince, and watching the actor Kevin McMonagle nightly doing his Frank Sinatra with this. It would be good to see it in print actually: Liz did quote a bit from it in her True Confessions years back, but full printing of Tickly Mince and its sequel fell through at the last minute.
My Way
from the revue Tickly Mince
-----
Though some maintain
the Real Presence
from here
to Rawalpindi
I decided at
an early age
that Transubstantiation
wuz oot the windy
though it might seem
a pastor’s dream
and bishops thought
my logic shoddy
I burned my boat
I turned my coat
became a Proddy
though some may mock
the macho talk
upon the Walk
of No Surrender
I’ve drunk the rent
I’ve clocked the wife
I’ve spewed my ring
upon the fender
I’ve had the shakes
I’ve had D.T’s
I’ve fell asleep
upon the chanty
I’ve woke to see
upon my knee
the Works of Dante
I’ve seized that cup
called Life’s Spatoon
I’ve spooned it up
yes, gulped it doon
I am a man
not one of them
who flee in fear
Life’s Bowls of Phlegm
though in the dumps
I’ve chewed the lumps
I’ve chewed them my way
I’ve turned again
back to my faith
my banner Truth
at last unfurled
my mission plain
before I die
to spread these words
throughout the world
toffolux queen
chopin’s cuisine
that rare frissoang
ring-a-ding-doang
sumdy’s farted
proportional representation
fa-a-at bo-oab
the pluperfect case
a sweaty groin
a pound of links
the russian ballet
chelsea seven
east stirling one
e=mc squared
a close so wally
god bless our pope
legalise dope
I’d like a grope
u-upyir jacksy
Monday May 5th ‘97
Dear Tony
Thanks again for the script of your talk, which I’ve just read. It was good to have the name of the slave-owner put to the inventory in the Judicial Records of Renfrewshire, which I happened to buy secondhand a couple of months ago, though I’d had a look at it years back. Also interesting that Glasgow Courier aspect, which paper William Motherwell—about whom I mentioned I am writing for the DNB—took over as editor in 1830 until his death in 1835. Besides keeping the anti-abolitionist flames going it was of course hell for leather against the “arch-agitator” O’Connell and his followers. A fine man Motherwell, Grand Master for Paisley and Glasgow, and of whom the Liverpool Standard said on his passing, “he did much to counter the sweeping ravages of democracy in Glasgow.”
When your book
appears I’ll want to buy one and would appreciate
forewarning in case I miss it. You should let know David
Dabydeen in the English Literature Dept at Warwick
UniveÛrsity. Perhaps you know his work anyway
he’s a poet from Guyana whose books of poetry have
slavery business, his first one Slave Song and his third
and most recent from Cape called Turner which is derived
from Turner’s 1840 painting “Slavers throwing
overboard the dead and dying” which as Dabydeen
points out in his preface, Ruskin described as showing
“the noblest sea...ever painted by man.”
He’s also done some work I caught on tv about images
of Black people in British Culture (obviously along the
lines of the family portrait you mention) and has a book
on that which I haven’t seen. When I had David up at
Paisley doing a reading when I was writer in residence
there he made a few heavily ironic remarks during his
performance about being invited to Scotland—and the
influence in Guyana of Scottish culture as a result of the
slave trade.
Another outlet your publisher should know of it it doesn’t is the New Beacon Bookshop at 176 Stroud Green Road in London. Forgive me if this is all already known, but that’s the shop run by John La Rose who this past few years was the founder and organiser of the Radical Black and Third World Bookfairs, which spread from London to other cities in England, and to Glasgow a couple of times. It’s a great shop which would certainly be interested in your book.
I enclose a review of
Roxy Harris’s book written during a brief period
when my face fitted at the Herald enough to be given
reviews. Don’t have any such place at the moment.
Anyway it was good at this time, 1990, in passing to
remind the douce readers of the origins of their City of
Culture. All the best.
Tuesday May
13th ‘97
Dear Matt
Thanks for your letter. I haven’t heard anything from anyone about a cheque. That telephone number you mention: could you phone it? I don’t know who is at that number and would rather not begin by having to ask there.
I also enclose the form you ask about. Since it’s April 11th, the new tax year, I’m not sure if it will still be the Arts Council, because the Writers in the Community scheme was taken over by Book Trust Scotland from the April 1st. It will depend on whom it was arranged with—it would have had to be previously arranged in advance otherwise they wouldn’t wear it.
Enough of all that. On poetry matters a writer whom I am to my surprise finding a lot to enjoy in now that I’m exploring the full range of his work, is Roy Campbell, the notorious Francoite who had his very public rows with MacDiarmid amongst many others, especially on the (especially English middle class) Left. There’s a lot of work on Campbell has been done by Peter Alexander, not the Glasgow academic but an Australian one. Some of Campbell’s stuff is crap but he’s always totally engaged in his work, absolutely hated the whole English middle class literary scene, and some of his writing is really fine. He’s as good a flyter—and always one sentence away from another outburst in his prose—as MacDiarmid himself. His grandparents were Scottish settlers in Natal. Alexander has written a good biography that sets the work in perspective. Do you know his work at all? I’m reading his collected in four volumes, a South African publication that’s in the university library.
Hope you’re
enjoying Mauchline. I see from my Chambers Gazetteer that
beside its Burns and Covenanting connections it “has
long been noted for its wooden snuffboxes and similar
knicknacks.” But that was 1895.
Tuesday June 11th
‘97
Dear Jeremy (
Corbyn)
Here’s the
books promised. As I said, I’ve spares, so
you’re welcome to them. In Radical Renfrew I think
you might find the Chartist Edward Polin and the feminist
Marion Bernstein interesting among others. With the
railways now privatised it can seem quite relevant also
something like “After the Accident” by the
poet William (Inspector) Aitken. When I did a radio series
on the books I remember having a lot of feeling over
Aitken’s line “Did you ever hear of railways
paying pensions to their men?” My own father worked
48 years in the railway, and retired on a pension (from
the union) of ten bob—which the National Assistance
docked off his rent allowance.
Anyway I know
you’ll be extremely busy, but nobody reads
anthologies from end to end in any case. Quick dips in the
book are intended to be made easier with the theme guide
at the end of the introduction, xxxvii.
The second half of
Reports from the Present has a deal of the stuff that was
printed as a pro-strike booklet Satires and Profanities by
the STUC during the miners’ strike. It’s a
pity that I didn’t reprint the cover from that,
three stick cartoons with the captions “Did you hear
about the Ulster D’Oyley Carte Company?”/
“They wanted to put on Trial by Jury .”/
“They were arrested for conspiring to subvert the
state.”
I hope you find some
of the stuff enjoyable. It was good meeting you. All the
best.
Thursday June
26th ‘97
Dear Hayden
Thanks for the new
Bloomsday, which crossed in the post with my own missive.
Colour dawns in the sequence: would be good to see them
lined up on a gallery wall.
Blair the bland.
Frankly I wish he was: I have already got to the point I
had with Thatcher, of being unable to look, and lunging
for the TV mute button. Soon it will be impossible to buy
a newspaper, the way the Downing Street press office so
appallingly efficiently manages daily, and weekly
menu-planning. I suppose the rocket fired at the Cabinet
office inevitably had to be outgunned one day with a
“twelve year old who wants peace” at 10
Downing Street. Photographed with the bastard who again
sided alone with America for full reintroduction of
child-killing sanctions on Iraq.
By the way, do you
listen, or can you get in Edinburgh, Radio Ulster’s
daily noontime Talkback phone in, for an hour? Absolutely
essential listening: the full range from collective
religious psychosis, Book of Revelations and all, to sane
decent people not being used as Sane Decent People for
timely propaganda purposes. Real points of view in the
full range being put: it’s very moving sometimes,
and really taking the lid off across the social divide in
a way that I think is extremely important.
Glad, mightily at
last, to see the back of Bruton, albeit he got his
unionist parthian shot in with the decommissioning he
agreed to, written in. That’s the Blair government I
understand, moving like lightning after Lurgan to
Albright’s America then on to Bruton. What other
country would you hear striking a "sudden deal with
another in the last hours of its government", without this
being considered somewhat odd? Actually the whole Lurgan
killings episode reminds me creepily of the
“Serbian” massacre of the shoppers that was to
the minute on cue to “provoke” the onslaught
on the Serbs in Bosnia—despite subsequent reports in
The Times that French and British observers denied the
shell could have come from where the Nato-Americans said
it had. Ahern has had his Reynolds hands tied, or
that’s the calculation it seems to me. He could
hardly dissent, depending on the likes of Harney for his
election in the Dail.
Anyway. There is
always some cause for optimism, and oddly the airing of
the ravings on that Ulster programme is part of it.
Hope to see you ere
too long, and that your health improves.
Friday June
27th ‘97
Dear Tessa
Thanks for the
cheque. Regarding the new Writers in Schools/Public
situation, so much of the running of the scheme depends
simply on the savvy of who’s running it: Trevor
Royle then Walter, and Shonagh of course throughout, put
their commitment to the art and the artists before any
commitment to the teachers and the schools-visit system. I
don’t sense that now in the publicity literature;
nor in the circular to all writers sent in response to
such as my own complaint about not being paid for
readings, stating that “ a small problem”
(i.e. the nonpayment of writers) had arisen, but this was
the fault of organisers, and would writers stop sending
forms to Booktrust for readings they could not be paid
for. In other words, the problem was that writers had
begun to block the System with paper. Writers, please stop
doing it.
I think as soon as
the System is put under someone with the new title of
Education Officer, then obviously it will
super-efficiently fill up with writers of children’s
stories, those writers thought best suited for classroom
teaching and the curriculum, the university lecturers,
authors of a few books of course, who can give insight
into how best to understand the canon on the way to the
exam. Within the educational system there’s an
argument on behalf of that obviously, teachers need all
the help they can get. But the person who decides to hold
a small festival or lets-have-a-reading this summer, who
thinking of a few months away, wants to get one or more
writers—where is the scope for them? Put your
tendering bid in next January to be told in March if you
can have it the following year? Where the hell is the room
for the sudden and necessary and living enthusiasms in
that? The scheme now puts first and foremost and
centrally, the system as it now runs, the educational
system, with its year-on forward scheduling in the hands
of certain teachers and schools. There will be some
writers & some almost-writers doing very well indeed
by that, while others will be paying the price of a new
exclusion. But the statistics will be better: and in a
culture of underfunding, of systems run by
“officers” — statistics come first.
Having said all that,
I remain cheery, in fact having just had another go at
another system, I feel much the better for it, and very
cheery indeed. All the best.
Saturday
September 6th ‘97
Dear M
The funeral of The
Queen of Hearts has driven me to the screen, Mozart on the
headphones to drown out any tolling bells locally.
The country has gone
completely psychotic this past week. It’s
interesting, although depressing as always, to see it from
the language position, which is always the angle I
can’t help entering it. It’s a nightmare
linguistically to see the subeditors of the British press
and their editors unanimously agree that the only possible
language to write in is what they think of as
“poetic prose”—which is to say the
language of nineteenth century tombstones. The death of
Mother Teresa last night has meant they’ve had to
squeeze more hyperbole from what they’ve already
wrung dry, every day for the past seven days.
The Scotsman is now
edited by a young rightwing shite from Sussex or
somewhere, Martin Clarke. Their front page for Monday was
“Free and in peace at last, she returns home to a
nation that must now search its soul.” All that in
block capitals. This morning they decided not to bother
trying to get Mother Teresa on board, instead having an
even longer headline, about fifty words, some homily from
the Queen’s special broadcast last night. Liz had
been frogmarched to the BBC studios by the tabloids who
had begun complaining that the Royals weren’t
joining in enough in the Nation’s Grief. It’s
very much the Gulf War again as far as the Press are
concerned, this time with a Saint instead of a Devil as
focus. Again it’s a reminder of basics to see the
Guardian and the Independent down there on their knees
pouring out the patriotic hellish language garbage with
the rest of them. On Sunday Radio Four, Three and Five
joined up for daylong raking over the ashes (sorry, wrong
metaphor) and there’s been no escape since. The
papers have been a sea of vomit. The agony aunt of the
Independent —there’s a concept—
“It was like seeing a bird in a cage which finds the
door open and escapes, only to be shot down in
flight”. And so on—everywhere. You are well
out of it over there, though no doubt soap opera coverage
reaches you too.
Bill Maclean of
course has come up in his pompous tones with “You
know it wasn’t just Rangers who crashed in
Europe”; and your hardhearted father did come up
with a newspaper hoarding headline “Our Lady of the
Workout—Driver Pished”. By such devices we try
to stay sane, enough to get lynched if it got into the
real tabloids. Anyway, to healthier things, such as good
old Mozart, who has just launched into the Linz Symphony
full blast on my headphones. Have you access to a CD? Are
you getting the chance to hear any music? It sounds really
good your context over there.
The wintry signs are
beginning to appear over here, it’s down to about 17
or 18 today, which isn’t bad still, but dull in that
battleship-grey that Glasgow skies tend to adopt so often.
Not much evidence of surfing. I thought I’d better
get this done both because it was time anyway, but also
I’m off to Inverness for the week next week to take
another of those Arvon Literature courses, same as the one
I was doing in Devon when you phoned my on my birthday
last year....
We had a few days in
Arran the week before last, we had been meaning for a
while to take a break somewhere for a few days. We stayed
in a guest house, or two actually, one for one night and
the other for two, on the Brodick front. It was quite
quiet, it being the first day that the Scottish
schoolchildren would be back at school, which was an added
dimension I think for Sonya, making the most of the first
real day of being out of the schools. It was good, we went
walks visiting among other places Glen Sannox and round
about where I did some camping on my own about thirty
years ago. Since my birthday fell while we were there,
among my prezzies was a smashing compact
birdwatcher’s guide, much more practical than the
two we have in the house. So there was a lot of
birdwatching went on, the Scottish islands are great
places to see a whole range of species you don’t see
on the mainland.
About music ( the
great slow movement of the 35th is on just now, the Barry
Wordsworth performances same as you got on CD at
Christmas) maybe when you’re in Australia you could
sometime find out for me what the discography is just now
regarding Percy Grainger, whose stuff I really like. I
have quite a lot of his work, but there might be things in
the catalogue there not available over here.
I’ll just finish here, and sorry for not writing out longhand which is best but I just can’t do that anymore without making a mess. The keyboard has been too much my place for a long while when it comes to writing.
Monday
September 8th ‘97
Dear Ronald MacAulay
Thanks for the book
and the dedication, a very pleasant surprise indeed.
I’m doing this note in the middle of the night prior
to going off for a week to tutor an Arvon Creative Writing
course beyond Inverness: I had wanted to finish your book
and write a decent letter to you, but that will have to
wait either to other correspondence or until we meet in a
few weeks or whatever, which I hope will occur.
Your chapter about my
own work is very cheering for me, but I’d really
like to be able to talk to you about your language
discussion beyond that, which I think is really very
interesting, and connects with something I have been
trying to inch towards, as usual, about language as
enclosure or not enclosure. So much of that is to do
obviously with the position of the narrator, whether even
word is supposed to stand in lieue of the world and all
that sort of thing, colonialist so often in presumption.
Your linear arrangement of voice makes the voices
apparent, the rhythm: reminds me of Reznikoff oddly enough
in his objectification of court transcripts, the voice as
aesthetic evidence. Of course I’m really interested
in that, being one who has felt that the shape of
authenticity is almost a kind of Platonic form
thing— these people who think the world is enclosed
in their word don’t realise the structure of spacing
and the rhythm, what is revealed by that, in people just
trying in language to be honest with themselves, the
presence of the person to the other person.
Which can sound a bit
highflown and middle-of-the-nightish. Anyway I enclose a
CD that came out (and fell down a bottomless unnoticed
pit) about two months ago. The single surname title is a
bit much, but what the bloke who runs AK wanted, to link
it with other cover designs, and because he’s very
keen on my work. If huge numbers of Elmer Leonard or
Leonard Cohen fans buy it by mistake, I will be delighted.
Thursday 18th
September ‘97
Dear C
A pity we missed each
other when you were up. I think it may have been the time
when Sonya and I took a few days break in Arran. Which was
very relaxing, albeit inevitably coming back with our legs
and various other bits bitten to currant buns.
Am just back from a
week in Moniack Mhor, which went ok, though these things
are very draining. But they pay well, and it was good
working with Anne Stevenson, who is an old friend and fun
to work with. We come from different angles into poetry,
which is fine, but what helps in these matters is that I
think we share tendencies to be serious about language,
whilst liking a drop of the cratur and a bit of a laugh.
So it went well.
The new version of
the Etruscan Raworth/Griffith/Leonard trilogy will be out
in a couple of months, I’ve completely changed my
contents to put in Foodies and Hesitations. I’ll
send one on when they come through. Also on the poetry
front, Ed Dorn phoned a couple of days ago to say he would
still like me to come out to Boulder University. So that
is going ahead for sometime in November, it looks like.
Not much dough in it but it will be good to get out to
Colorado from Glasgow at that time of year for a few days.
The only reading I have lined up south of the border is
beyond the other border into Aberystwyth, also in
November.
..... Since coming
back from Moniack I have been continuing to avoid news and
talk media, and papers. The Great Marian Week of Language
Vomit which immediately preceded the trip to
Inverness-shire, was too much like the Third Reich meets
the Gulf War, again. Enclosed a news hoarding from the
middle of it trying to stay sane; plus another tilt at the
folk on the hill.
Wednesday
October 12th ‘97
Dear Larry
Here’s my
invoice. I’m glad I was asked to do the workshop, as
it went well, and I enjoyed meeting the people who
attended. I almost pulled out before it to ask someone
else to take my place, as I discussed with Julie, who gave
me a lift. The truth is, I have realised, that I actually
hate the term “survivor”, which I think is a
bit of a blasphemy in the century of the holocaust, and
that it is anyway the National Health Service that is in
difficulty of surviving, if the term has to be used.
Again, I had not realised, in giving poetry to
“Nomad”, that the term could mean other than
“wanderer”: I just hadn’t conceived of
such crassness and banality as could put forward a word
capable of being translated as, “Look, we are not
mad.” Jesus: no wonder I feel as if I’ve been
bounced into supposedly being somebody who’s
“come out” as having been “in”.
What is really angering about that, is the thought of the
kind of patronising well paid idiot who can now evidently
presume to look at my work in this wholly misconstrued
light. Hell, I want nothing to do with this kind of
nonsense. As regards anyone having had psychiatry, if they
ever had, so what: if they were a rich bastard in New York
they could jog down for their weekly mental workout with
their analyst, without making themselves supposedly the
public prey of benignity-in-anticipation, from
“careworkers”. I’m not referring to your
own part in this, but the position to be patronised that
people are being put in, such as at the Tryst reading, is
I think genuinely awful.
I’m just a
writer, Larry, fuck all else. And my work is the product
of writing, fuck all else. What was good, anyway, about
last night’s workshop, was that all the
“survivor” stuff had to go and take a running
fuck to itself. It was made clear we were there about
writing, nothing to do with anything else. So it was a
good night.
Monday October
27th ‘97
Dear Charles
(King)
Will just dash this
off to you before Sonya and I head off for a swim. Have
been trying to keep the swimming going
recently—there’s the local pool down at
George’s Cross, an excellent smallish pool that is
really much used by the community, it’s great to see
all the different types and ages and disabled people at
different times; and a new large pool as part of a sports
complex opened at Scotstounhill. It’s a great place,
you feel like your going into an Olympic village visiting
it (though that makes me feel a right fraud); but we have
only recently discovered that it is on the 44 bus route
that goes past our door, so we hope to start using that
pool for a while. For myself it’s not that I’m
trying to recover my youth or some nonsense, just that
particularly as winter comes in, it’s sensible to
try to make the most of facilities like these
pools—they’re really a great public asset,
indispensable in so many ways. It’s really
depressing when you hear of facilities like this getting
closed because of cuts, such as at Govan. On the other
hand it’s great that the ones that are there do
exist, and are for general public use.
Am glad to hear your
striding over the golf links so much. Some day we must
have a game in Glasgow or Aberdeen. I must warn you that
the last time I played many years ago, my handicap was not
a great deal smaller than the course par. But we could
enjoy the walk. When I grew up in Pollok our local golf
course was the council one at Deaconsbank near Rouken
Glen.
I am really looking
forward to Colorado in a few weeks. Not the
journey—Glasgow-Amsterdam-Detroit-Denver— but
certainly seeing all the places mentioned in Chapter
Thirteen of my Thomson book. Apparently Central City,
where Thomson was based for six months in 1873, was
preserved by and large as the old mining town that it was,
until recently. However about ten years ago the gambling
laws were changed to allow gaming parlours, machines etc.
So it now looks just like any other gambling hell on
earth. I can’t think of anything more
soul-destroying than a gambling town. I cannot understand
another person’s interest in gambling: admission to
hell I’m sure will be by lottery ticket.
Anyway Charles
I’ll just finish this as we’re going for a
bus. I have recently set up a small cassette in the
kitchen where some of your tapes have been giving much
pleasure during meals and washings up recenlty. That
wonderful tape of the John Field nocturnes. And Sonya
loves the Bjorling cassette. I have not read a newspaper
or listened to a news bulletin since the Princess of Wales
funeral. The last straw I’m afraid—I have been
engaged in a rather rigorous language detoxification
programme. More on that another time. Keep in touch.
Friday November
21st ‘97
Dear M B
You can have
permission to use what you want, though I have to say that
I don’t actually agree with the way you are using
it. "Honest" is not a short story, and this satire on the
earnestness of the attitudes it contains (and part mock
tribute to Beckett’s great prose) was written in
1970, which is to say three years after Six Glasgow Poems,
which is to say long before I ever read Archie
Hind’s book, and nothing whatever to do with
“the Seventies” and its alleged new Glasgow
dialect fightback. There are things in Archie’s
book—an important one— I really admire, but
the passage you make much of I found deplorable when I got
round to reading the novel, a cul de sac of the
narrator’s own making, from a wrongly digested
notion of culture. The trouble with the way you are using
my work—though it is not uncommon
academically—is that you are making logic out of
what is being ironically satirised, to develop a straight
line of development that not only isn’t actually
there, but is being sent up in its absence.
Sandy Hamilton wrote
“Gallus did you say” etc specifically to use
in schools, I seem to remember him saying, which is
nothing to do with the way my own work operates. He is not
“following any line” of mine, to put it
mildly, and the line you have construed, in my opinion,
not only doesn’t actually exist in my own work, but
is satirised therein.
Tuesday
November 25th ‘97
Dear Robert
Thanks for the
proofs. You do retain “Vergil” in the proof
though your letter says I had you with the spelling and
you only found out “it was really Virgil” a
couple of weeks ago. Well, so long as you don’t
change my copy... Vergil is in fact given as a spelling
variant in for example Collins Twentieth Century
Dictionary, and comes up in, looking at a biblio, eg
Nettleship’s Ancient Lives of Vergil (1880),
Conway’s Harvard Lectures on the Vergilian Age
(1931), De Witt’s “Vergil and
Epicureanism” in the Classical Weekly (Vol XXV,
1932), Wili’s Vergil ( Munich 1930); not forgetting
Rehm’s Das geographische Bild des alten Italien in
Vergils Aeneis (Leipzig 1932) and from the Holy
Pontiff’s big cupboard under the stairs, Fragmenta
et picturae Vergiliani codicis Vaticani 3225 (=F) Rome,
1899.
Et cetera. The point
in using this spelling is to give it a slightly pompous
deliberately misplaced pedantry, as in those who know fuck
all about music but will insist on talking about Ludwig
van Beethoven, rather than just Beethoven. The voice in
the line in my poem has a slightly ironic pomposity, for
specific contextual reason, as one who knows about P.
Vergilius Maximus, as encountered on certain pages by
cognescenti. All meant to be subliminal of course, just
raised to the light in clearings-up like this.
Thanks for your font
work with 100 differences, teacup, dictionary, access, old
story: they look just fine.
Monday December
15th ‘97
Dear Ed
My attempts to write
a poem about my trip to Colorado like you asked, had me
thinking along my book’s lines of the New Jerusalem
as antidote to the basis of the industrial city,
Thomson’s Irvingite mother’s hopes and her
son’s reply in the poem, reply and exposition and
analysis, as it is. Revelations, and the city on the hill.
Central City is such an exposition in its own way, in the
lap of the mountains, and the basicness of the tearing at
the mountain to set up the place, or rather to set up and
bolster the institutions of the big places elsewhere.
Capitalism founded on the mining of raw materials, with
singleminded men competing for it.
It is so apposite
that it is now a gambling town. I’ve written
elsewhere that among the numerous ways of looking at the
poem some people might see “ the world of the
Redundant Male abandoned to urban industrial darkness,
having in the name of "progress" banished the Female, and
the Organic. Others will picture a lonely universe of male
repetitive-compulsive behaviour; of men who have rejected
a God obsessed with sex and physical retribution - but who
have found that self-diagnosis is not the same as cure and
release; and whose lapses into compulsion can be seen as
the private rituals of a futile quest.”
It’s certainly
a place of private ritual now, still searching for that
lost thread. It was apposite that Jane [Wodening] and I
left just as darkness was coming down, and that as we came
speeding down the hill both Jupiter and Venus were
visible—in fact the two planets were for a while the
only two night objects visible—in a gap between
mountains. It was exhilarating, given the Promethean
male/female address at the opening to Places of the
Mind.
The work for a poem
with aforesaid ingredients was too ideas-led. The attached
poster-poem came through separately, then I saw the
Colorado connections, and hope you think it’s ok to
send you it. I don’t know if you’ll want it
for the cotton print you mentioned: if you do, the
typefaces I have used are: “a”—Times
Italic Outline Shadow 54 pt; next 6 lines Times Italic
Outline Shadow 48 pt; the institution of the
state—Times Outline 48 pt.
Monday December
29th ‘97
Dear F
Thanks a lot for your
book, which I took a genuine pleasure in reading, and will
read again. It prompted me to type out the following
Henley poem for you—“Attadale West
Highlands”—a sonnet about Loch Carron, which
is a Henley poem that I like.
Another poem that came to mind reading the poems was Williams’s poem to his grand-daughter, “Suzy”, part three:
Anyway that’s
just by way of response, with thanks again. I’ve
still not done the Graham stuff for you, but I promise I
will. Here meantime is the Collected Recordings of Thomas
Anthony Leonard. Hope you enjoy them—and that we
meet up soon.
Monday December
29th ‘97
Dear Gael
Thanks for the book
you sent a few weeks ago. I had hoped that Nicholas would
have had the new Raworth/Griffiths/Leonard volume out by
Christmas, but the publisher messed up the line alignment
of some of the pages, so it will have to be rebound in
January, which is a nuisance. I like the clean look of the
new bigger sized trios.
Reading your own
there, “Erskine of Linlathen” brings me back
to our conversation at Eldon Street ages ago, though the
poem itself for me has also some connection with the
movements of the poems in the new collection that
you’ve sent. The line “the heart longing to
hear in answer” also reminds me of the opening pages
of Buber’s Between Man and Man, which opening I have
always thought an arresting beginning.
Yes it would be good
if we could meet when you’re in Glasgow, it’s
a pity we have not met for such a while. We could have a
coffee, maybe a walk up by the river nearby if the weather
permits. I would welÎcome that very much.
In November I was
over in Colorado, my first time in America. The invitation
was to Boulder, where I gave a reading and talked about
Radical Renfrew and Thomson, and stayed a few days with Ed
and Jenny Dorn. The highlight for me was getting to see
Central City, where Thomson was in 1872 whilst halfway
through writing “The City of Dreadful Night”.
The place hasn’t changed all that much
architecturally, and the visit was really amazing for me.
Ed was pretty heroic in being as hospitable as he was,
he’s very ill with cancer and it’s a difficult
time for Jenny and himself.
He asked me to write
a poem about my visit: what I have come up with, enclosed,
is a not in the form I expected to produce, but you take
what you get. Also a triptych done about a week ago: I see
it to be viewed as a vertical column, with a space between
the individual bits equal to about a page. Top one text,
middle the slashed-across, bottom one the rectangle. Keep
in touch.