For Laurence Brockliss
Chris Hardie and Julian Slawianski took over the editorship of the poetry magazine Helios at the end of their second year, when its founders graduated and left Cambridge. Unfortunately, they could not find anyone to do the same for them, so the mag would not be coming out again.
No-one particularly minded about this. They had had a good stable of contributors, many of whom would be staying on in Cambridge, but four years was more than respectable for a student poetry mag. In fact it was long enough for a magazine to become ‘fixed’ and slightly passé. Poets were more attracted to the fold-outs and slim card-covered booklets of the next wave of mags, with titles like Reanimator, Tilde, and Curiously Strong.
Hardie was a major student poet. He had a range of registers that evoked admiration and envy. His ‘Blue Pagoda’, for instance, was beguilingly romantic:
The turquoise breeze lingers in the porch
and trails of dust snake brownly
through the distant groves of jade
tinkle tinkle the leaves sing
the dry waves
pound in silence on the pirates’ shore
and another opened magically ‘I trust I shall tryst with you in Tintagel’. Yet he could also be abrasively New York:
Oh the blues was in my cornflakes,
Yeah, and sadness in my bread.
I am pinned on the Christmas tree of life
its Hegel tapping on Marx’s cracking window
Slawianski, who had short brushed-back hair and usually wore a jacket, clean shirt and tie, was the production manager of the magazine, but also a poet. His ‘Bedroom’ had created a sensation:
i traced that grey shadow on the wall
to its beginning
but fail with
that rainbow refraction
on the white door
However, ‘i am a dead leaf’, which continued ‘shake me off your branch/die and let die/even the cacti you gave me are dying’, was felt to be so explicit that he might be writing himself out.
The exams were over, the summer was halcyon, parties were raging everywhere, so they sent a note round to all their contributors: ‘Helios is folding. Come to say goodbye at Chris’s room, F4 Cowley Court, this Friday after Hall. Some wine and food provided, PBAB.’
Hardie had half packed. (‘But I haven’t done the infantry on your room!’ his bedder protested.) Several trunks and a mattress lay in the bay window, he had cleared his shelves, and there were cardboard boxes and piles of paper beside the sofa. But his large work table was spread with cheeses, grapes, crackers and pâté from the International, he had opened several bottles of College claret and Piesporter, and he had three more boxes under the table. He and Slawianski put on a Simon & Garfunkel album, poured themselves glasses, and waited.
First to arrive were Nick Button and Ginny Dolun, the most prominent pairing on the Cambridge poetry scene. He was tall, thin, bearded, and slightly hunched at the top. His eyes were always far away. Dolun was short, thin, hard-bodied. In her frilled polyester dress she could have been taken for a twelve-year-old, except that her steel-wool hair was greying and she appeared to have walnuts under her bodice.
‘Hi! Great to see you! Thanks for coming!’ the hosts greeted them. Slawianski poured them glasses and they started to fill their plates.
‘I saw they reprinted two of yours in Carcanet,’ Hardie said. ‘Congratulations!’
‘Um…’ Button began very softly.
‘Yes. We made sure they acknowledged first publication in Helios,’ the girl stated definitely.
‘That was good of them,’ remarked Slawianski, lighting a Gitanes. ‘What are you doing in the Vac.?’
‘Er…’ Button started.
‘We’re staying in a cottage in Devon,’ Dolun told them.
‘And then we’re hitch hiking in the South of France,’ breathed Button with a slight jerk of the head.
A.J. Beaton strode in. He startlingly resembled John Cleese in stature and flatness of head. He always wore a black jacket and orange tie.
‘This is a sorry occasion. But I must say, you’ve had a fair run. Thanks for inviting me…it’s good of you. And thanks very much for publishing me.’ He tucked in. Slawianski filled the glasses.
‘Almroth…’ Hardie began. ‘I know this is a bloody awful subject, but…do you know more about Garth Nightingale? He was a first year at your college, wasn’t he?’
‘Mm. Yes, he was. I met him once or twice. A nice chap, very fresh face…angelic even. He was translating Hölderlin. Apparently his bedder found him – fully clothed – flat out on his sofa with his arm dangling. Overdose. He’d definitely been trying LSD. I’m told he didn’t do any work for his Part I Modern Languages, though he’d come up as a Scholar…which made it worse, I suppose. A friend of mine who lives on the next staircase heard his bedder and another one talking in the court, and apparently Nightingale’s bedder said: “He’s back in bed already. He said he looked at the question on the exam paper and wrote: ‘Yes’. That’s all he wrote: ‘Yes’, and walked out.” Dear me…’
‘God…’ snorted Hardie.
‘Wha-what are you doing next year?’ Button asked Beaton.
‘Well there’s the rub. I want to do a Ph.D. on F.T. Tryng and Ned Haworth, but since they are still alive I don’t expect the Faculty – ’
‘Tryng?!’ roared a voice. ‘Hello you Bazzas…and Sheila!’
Dolun looked at the wall. It was the Antipodean poet Les Gough, a postgraduate who had taken Cambridge by storm and was published everywhere.
‘You can’t read Tryng, it’s like watching television!’
Everyone looked down.
‘Sorry! Sorry! There’s nothing wrong with television: I’m starting a job with TW3 in September myself!’
Dolun grabbed Button’s arm.
‘Come on, Nick, there’s a mattress over there.’
Chris Hardie absented himself to put on a Pink Floyd record.
‘What about Nightingale, eh?’ asked Les Gough through a kind of half-grin set on his face. ‘I suppose the writing was on the wall with those gnomic quatrains of his in Journeyman. “Suicide/Is making the world/Realize/That you’re dead.” Shouldn’t it have been “letting the world know you existed”? And he really ought to have changed his name, for poetical use at least!’
‘Come over here, Les…’ Beaton beckoned to two armchairs. Gough grabbed a bottle and followed him.
More poets were arriving, and attacking the food and drink: Jeremy Trift (disciple of Ferlinghetti), Carol Brookes (translator of Tsvetaeva), Kevin Morse, E.B. Knox, the haiku-writer Martin Helm, Sue Glenn…
Button lay on the mattress with his back to the bay window and was slowly rolling a joint. Ginny Dolun was kneeling beside him, talking at him fast and gesticulating. He ignored her.
Slawianski went over to Naomi Lewis, who was standing in the centre of the room with no-one to talk to. She had shiny black hair, large dark eyes, and wore a flax-blue jumper with a bright gold Star of David on a chain. They had printed two of her poems in the last issue, one of which, Slawianski recalled, ended: ‘I remember/The gift of your living,/The gift of my loving.’
‘What are you doing after Cambridge?’ he asked.
‘I’m hoping to go into publishing. But first I’ve got a part-time job at the New Statesman.’
‘Fantastic!’
‘And what are you going to do? You’re an engineer, aren’t you?’
‘Ah… I’m going into the family business.’
‘Really? What is it?’
‘Cars!’
He asked her if she would like some free copies of Helios, and took her over to a neat pile of them on a half-moon table.
Suddenly, there were raised voices from the mattress. Ginny Dolun had stood up.
‘Right, that’s it, you bum! I’m leaving you!’ she shouted with clenched fists and flashing eyes.
Button exhaled a cornet of smoke and said audibly:
‘Hurt is both a transitive and intransitive verb…’
She stormed out. No-one took any notice, as their relationship was well documented in Button’s poems. Button got slowly to his feet and followed, waving vaguely at everyone.
The party was going well. Les was on his second bottle and chain smoking. He cracked one brilliant linguistic or surreal joke after another at A.H. Beaton, who never entirely reacted. Kevin Morse, however, the author of some modern nonsense poetry, was squatting on the carpet before them, paralytic with laughter. Sue Glenn listened, glass and fag in hand, from a safe distance.
A veil of smoke floated, ash was getting well trodden into the carpet, a long Leonard Cohen tape was playing, and the conversation flowed.
‘…but then came Roger Woof’s article about Tryng in the latest issue of Frank Voices…’ E.B. (Edgar Barry) Knox informed Carol Brookes. He too wore a black jacket and orange tie.
‘…Steiner was arguing that it’s got Feminist posture at base…’ said Chris Hardie in all seriousness to Naomi Lewis.
‘…so then I wanged my donger…’ Les told his audience.
At 11.15 people started to leave. Kevin Morse announced that he had become a bird, and then a dolphin, but he remained manageable. There was an amiable upwelling of thanks and good wishes for the future.
‘What are you doing, Chris?’ asked Jeremy Trift.
‘Don’t laugh, I’m going to be a civil servant! You?’
‘I start at ICI next month!’
Not many home addresses were exchanged, as everyone knew that if they wanted to they could stay in touch through their old colleges. Hardie and Slawianski saw them out onto the landing, then went back in, gathered up bottles and food, stacked the plates, emptied ashtrays, and lightly hoovered.
‘Let’s have a drink, Jules,’ sighed Chris, grabbing the remains of a bottle of Médoc and sinking into an armchair.
‘Bloody good idea…’ Slawianski lit a Gitanes.
‘The million dollar question is, what are we going to do with the…literary remains? The Poetry Bookshop have got plenty of copies, our contributors have got plenty, we’ve left some in JCRs, but there’s four unopened boxes of fifty there from the printers, and that bale of editorial papers, rejected poems, other mags.’
‘The mill pool?’ suggested Slawianski.
‘Brilliant! You see that old blue trunk over there, with the broken handle…’
The following day, Slawianski came to lunch, they packed and locked the trunk, and deposited it outside in a corner of the college bike shed. At dead of night, they met and carried it to Silver Street bridge. They swiftly manhandled it onto the balustrade with fifty feet of rope through the good handle, and let it down slowly. When it was half submerged, Chris released his end and the trunk disappeared with barely a swirl. Julian coiled up the rope, which was from the boot of his car.
‘So cartons of sensibility fell through a hole in the river…’ improvised Hardie.
‘Yes. Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new!’
© Patrick Miles, 2021
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
