Ruthven Todd and Dylan Thomas

2014 marks the centenary (as if we didn't know it) of the birth of Dylan Thomas.

It's less well known that it also marks one hundred years since the birth of the Scottish poet Ruthven (pronounced 'Riven') Todd (1914-1978), who was not only a close friend of Dylan's for twenty years but was also commissioned to write the first Thomas biography, after the poet died prematurely in New York on 27 October 1954. That biography was never written but, thanks to an enterprising independent Scottish publisher, we now know why. 

At yesterday's Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in Conway Hall, Holborn I met the poet and publisher Helena Nelson, founder of HappenStance Press. Their recent booklet The Ghost of Dylan Thomas is from an unpublished  manuscript unearthed by Helena in the Todd archives in the National Library of Scotland, and it's a wonderful discovery. Here's Todd in The Ghost of Dylan Thomas confessing to his growing uncertainty about the commission:

I started collecting material in both England and America, and soon began to realise I wasn't collecting material about the odd little Welshman I had known and liked; I was horribly involved in the creation of a mythology.

Ruthven Todd's great achievement is Tracks in the Snow, the best book ever written about William Blake. It was originally published by Grey Walls Press in 1948 and has (as far as I know) never been re-printed, although it certainly should be. It's a brilliant study of Blake and two other visionary artists: Henry Fuseli and John 'Mad' Martin. (The fascinating Grey Walls Press will certainly feature in a future blog. Run by a chap called Charles Wrey Gardiner from his home in Billericay, Essex, the Press published the first UK edition of The Great Gatsby.)

Todd is an interesting and accomplished 1940s poet, a brilliant Blake scholar and an intriguing literary figure, but largely forgotten. He is today best remembered for the popular 'Space Cat' series of children's' books he wrote in the 1950s after moving to New York. These are collectors' items, and you can see why:

You can order a copy of The Ghost of Dylan Thomas at www.happenstance.com. It costs a ludicrously modest £3.60 and includes Todd’s wonderful poem commemorating the death of his friend, and an afterword by Peter Main. As I understand it Peter is working on a Todd biography, which I look forward very much to reading. May I suggest that the book should be launched in the upstairs room of The Wheatsheaf Pub in Rathbone Street, Fitzrovia, where Dylan, Caitlin, Ruthven and a cohort of boozy bohemians used to congregate during the Blitz? This is the regular meeting place for a convivial bunch known as the Sohemian Society. You can find out more about them here.

Space Cat book cover ©  Charles Scribner's Sons, NY / The Estate of Ruthven Todd

Ariadne's Thread

W. G. Sebald's concerns are with memory and loss, and the loss of memory. His great theme is mutability and all the work has a dying fall. His career was too brief, suddenly cut short when he suffered a heart attack at the wheel of his car while driving on the A47 in December 2001. He died instantly at the age of 57. 

Since then his reputation has grown steadily and he is now regarded as an author of the first importance, a major European writer. When sent new novels for review I'm regularly impressed by how Sebaldian in tone and approach many serious contemporary writers are. His detractors tend to disparage him as a glum, Eeyorish figure. To which I can only say: better Eeyore than Tigger.

In common with many readers my first exposure to Sebald was The Rings of Saturn (1995) and, also in common with many readers, I was spellbound by this melancholy masterpiece. I suppose I've read and re-read all his English-language books by now, overshadowed by the gloomy understanding that there won't be any more. Going online recently to check some publication dates I was surprised and touched to find that his webpage at the University of East Anglia's School of English and American Studies is still available. You can see it here.

Philippa Comber, who has written a fine new memoir of the author, first met Sebald (whom she knew as 'Max') on what appears to have been a blind date at a screening of Roman Polanski's Tess at the Noverre cinema in Norwich in 1981. She had an interest in German language and literature and they began a relationship, at a time when Max was beginning to develop his career as a writer. Fortunately she kept a detailed diary, which forms the basis of the memoir. It's a beautifully written account - very moving and candid and thoughtful in its reflections on love and affection, loss and exile. Very Sebaldian, you might say, and essential reading for admirers of his writing. I was especially pleased to see many examples of Sebald's German poetry (with English translations, in this case by Iain Galbraith):


Schwer zu verstehen                        
ist nämlich die Landschaft             
wenn du im D-Zug von dahin           
nach dorthin vorbeifährst,               
während sie stumm                          
dein Verschwinden betrachtet          

For how hard it is
to unterstand the landscape
as you pass in a train
from here to there
and mutely it
watches you vanish.

Ariadne’s Thread: In Memory Of W. G. Sebald is the first book to be published by Propolis, a new imprint based in Norwich. The publisher is Henry Layte, co-founder of Galley Begger Press, the man who took a gamble on Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. 

You can order Ariadne's Thread from Propolis here.


Poem taken from Über das Land and das Wasser - Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964-2001 (Munich, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008). English translation by Iain Galbraith Across the Land and the Water (London, Hamish Hamilton, 2011) © The Estate of W. G. Sebald

Getting known

Regular readers of Salvēte! (and you know who you are) may like to know that I'm now moonlighting as a blogger with the Times Literary Supplement. The invitation to do so came as a surprise, and perhaps as much to the TLS as it did to me.

You can read my first (and impressively inconsequential) contribution here. It's about a linguistic condition (new to me but instantly recognisable) known as 'word aversion'.

It will spark the opposite of a heated debate, of this I am certain. But some debates are best unheated. If you feel prompted to post a comment on the TLS website then please go ahead. It's a free country (and that's a phrase you don't hear much these days).

I'll continue to blog regularly here, but hope you'll enjoy my occasional TLS appearances (and I'm told other writers feature there also).

Pride (the movie) 2

Pride is a new film directed by Matthew Warchus, and recommended.

It's set in 1984 when the struggle between the coal miners' union and the Thatcher government is at its height. 

In London an ill-sorted group of young gay men (and one lesbian) form LGSM, the ungainly acronym standing for Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners. Equipped with banners and buckets they start collecting money in gay pubs and clubs and on the street. When the National Union of Miners nervously refuses their contributions they all pile into an old van and drive to a remote mining village in South Wales to hand over the money directly to the striking miners and their families. Here (after some misunderstandings) strong friendships and alliances are forged.

It's a very loveable film, and moving. There are fine understated performances all round (especially from Bill Nighy as a retired, gentle, tongue-tied miner and Imelda Staunton, a pocket battleship of feisty goodness). On what must have been a shoestring budget the director has re-created a whole community, using a large (and partly non-professional) cast. It has the look and feel of the period without being in any way nostalgic. Yes - this is what it was like, then. Times were tough and most of us in one way or another supported the miners' cause. We really hated Thatcher - those of us, I mean, who didn't adore her.

At the first-night screening there were two groups in the audience - of ex-miners (and all miners are ex-miners now) up from the Welsh valleys with their wives and families, and a smaller contingent of LGSM activists and supporters. The ex-miners were all very smart in suits, collars and ties and the Bredegar Brass Band was also present in their uniforms. When footage of Thatcher appeared there wasn't so much a derisive jeer (which is usual in British cinemas when the Iron Lady materialises) as a roar of loathing. It was like the old times, a brief reminder of former solidarities.

Now here we are, thirty years later. The pits are all closed and a nation-defining industry gone, and with it the communities based around the pit. We are all capitalists now, in the post-Thatcher world. We have to import our coal (or begin the controversial practice of fracking). We have civil partnerships though. Swings, roundabouts.

When Thatcher infamously said "There is no such thing as society" she injected a toxic line of political thinking into our democracy that continues, horribly, to circulate. She was wrong - there was such a thing, as this film demonstrates. Perhaps there still is. Do see it.

On the train

A wonderful little poem by Thomas Hardy:


FAINTHEART IN A RAILWAY TRAIN 


At nine in the morning there passed a church,
At ten there passed me by the sea,
At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,
At two a forest of oak and birch,
And then, on a platform, she:
A radiant stranger, who saw not me.
I queried, 'Get out to her do I dare?'
But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,
And the wheels moved on. O could it but be
That I had alighted there!

Hardy understood trains and their passengers. Tennyson did not. In fact the poet laureate's ignorance about many simple matters was quite impressive - he not only thought that all cigars cost the same regardless of size, but (and here's the link to Hardy) didn't understand that railway trains ran on rails.

How do we know that he didn't know that trains run on rails? Because of something he wrote in Locksley Hall, a magnificent line that resonates still:

            Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

He later wrote that his odd metaphor originated in his first journey by rail in 1830 (when he was 21 years old):  "When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester, I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line."

This prompted me some years ago to perpetrate some doggerel (on a train journey, as it happens) which began:

          Lord Tennyson, a silly man

          Believed that locomotives ran

          In grooves,

          Which proves

          That poets can be clueless too . . 

I can't remember any more, which is perhaps just as well.

The Victorians had some other difficulties coming to terms with the new railway. For the first time in history a man-made object could travel faster than a horse over great distances and this produced a weird kind of optical illusion - that a train steaming rapidly across the open landscape appeared not to be getting closer but getting bigger.  (Think of Lewis Carroll's protean Alice) This inability correctly to 'read' the rapid approach of a train may have contributed to the very first railway accident casualty, William Huskisson, M. P. 

Here's Wikipeida:

While attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, on 15 September 1830, Huskisson rode down the line in the same train as the Duke of Wellington. At Parkside railway station, near the midpoint of the line, the locomotives made a scheduled stop to take on water. Although the railway staff had advised passengers to remain on the trains while this took place, around 50 of the dignitaries on board alighted when the Duke of Wellington's special train stopped. One of those who got off was William Huskisson, former cabinet minister and Member of Parliament for Liverpool. Huskisson had been a highly influential figure in the creation of the British Empire and an architect of the doctrine of free trade, but had fallen out with Wellington in 1828 over the issue of parliamentary reform and had resigned from the cabinet. Hoping to be reconciled with Wellington, he approached the Duke's railway carriage and shook his hand.

Distracted by the Duke, he did not notice an approaching locomotive on the adjacent track, Rocket. On realising it was approaching he panicked and tried to clamber into the Duke's carriage, but the door of the carriage swung open leaving him hanging directly in the path of the oncoming Rocket. He fell onto the tracks in front of the train. His leg was horrifically mangled.
       
The wounded Huskisson was taken by a train (driven by George Stephenson himself) to Eccles. When he reached hospital he was given a massive dose of laudanum. After being told his death was imminent he made his will, and died a few hours later

Pride (the movie)

To the Camden Parkway cinema this evening for the London premiere of Pride, a film directed by Matthew Warchus about gay and lesbian support  for the coal miners during the strike of 1984/5. Thirty years ago, and it seems like last week.

You can see the trailer here.

Richard Attenborough

Richard Attenborough died last week. Here's a clip from the 1947 film version of Graham green's Brighton Rock, directed by John Boulting. Attenborough is the nasty teenage gangster Pinkie (a role he played to great acclaim on stage three years earlier), and the scene shows the murder of a man named Fred on a fairground ghost train ride called Dante's Inferno.

I seem to remember that the murder in the novel was much nastier and involved a stick of real Brighton Rock. Not something to be shown in a 1940s movie.

Attenborough became a rather cuddly national treasure in later years and is much missed. But I like to think of him as in the earlier stages of an illustrious film career, a young actor with great range and depth. Pinkie is a monstrous creation, psychopathic and callow and the film deserves regular revival. Do all you can to avoid the 2010 re-make, updated to the 1960s and featuring mods and rockers.