From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

  Later that year (1937, I think) when the editorial staff of The Booster took incontinently to its heels and fled from the threat of persecution by the French to the more liberal atmosphere of London, I found myself piloting Miller (trembling and swearing) past the Customs at Dover. (He had been turned back once before and had developed a formidable phobia of English Customs officials).[8] Furtively in another part of the crowd came Alfred Perlès wearing dark glasses which would have deceived nobody—so like an illegal psychoanalyst did he look at the best of times. We joined forces on the train and there was much rejoicing. We had a bottle of beer and an editorial conference in which we decided to change Booster to Delta and see just how much English printers could be made to stand.

  Miller had compiled a list of people he wanted to meet, at the head of which stood the name D. Thomas, followed in brackets by the words “crazy Welsh poet.”

  Anaïs Nin’s husband, Hugo Guiler the painter, also happened to be Hugo Guiler the banker and patron of the arts;[9] he allowed us to make his London flat our headquarters and thoughtfully furnished it with six cases of a good Bordeaux against such entertaining as we might have to do. And here we organised a few dinner parties which would enable Henry Miller to meet writers of his own calibre. They were good evenings. For a while it was hard to locate Thomas, and then I ran him down. He was living in Hammersmith and was delighted at a chance to meet Miller. But, alas! on the evening in question he kept us waiting hours and we were on the point of giving him up for lost when the telephone rang. He said in hollow, muffled tones: “I can’t find the flat so I’m not coming.” He wasn’t tipsy. He just sounded terribly nervous and ill at ease. “Where are you now?” I said. “Because I’ll get a taxi and fetch you.” That startled him. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m just too afraid to come. You’ll have to excuse me.” He then told me that he was telephoning from the pub immediately opposite the house. “Stay there,” I said, and ran out across the road to meet him and lay hands on him.

  I hadn’t seen him for some time and he had altered a good deal. He was the golliwog poet of the later portraits—there is one of him by that marvellous photographer, Bill Brandt,[10] which should by now be on every bottle of stout in the kingdom. He was ruffled and tousled and looked as if he had been sleeping in a haystack. He had a huge muffler round his throat. He was also extremely jumpy and touchy and said he was too frightened to move from the pub and that I should stay there and have a drink with him. This I did, and after a bit his nervous aggressiveness died down and I was able to suggest dinner. I painted a ludicrous picture of poor Henry Miller walking round and round the dinner-table cursing him until I prevailed upon him to come with me. Once we left the pub he completely changed, became absolutely himself, and took the whole thing with complete assurance and sang-froid. Within ten minutes the nervous man was teasing Miller and enjoying Hugo Guiler’s good wine—and indeed offering to read us his latest poems, which he did there and then. Miller was delighted, too, and Thomas thereupon launched into a fragment of poetic prose with his curious pulpiteer’s thrasonical voice; I didn’t awfully like the way he read—and only when I heard him on the radio did I realise the full power and beauty of his voice.

  We talked and drank late into the night and altogether it was a splendid evening; and from then on we met fairly frequently, though he would never come direct to the house. He always rang up from the pub and forced me to have a drink with him there before he would come into the house. I don’t know why.[11]

  I had several chances of discussing poetic theory with him then, and he answered questions with complete certitude, honestly and quickly. He had few preconceived views about what poetry should or shouldn’t be. He wrote slowly, I found to my surprise, and with difficulty, in that small square hand—I always imagined his work falling out red-hot into the mould. He also mutated adjectives and nouns until he squeezed them into the right shape to suit his theme. He went on worrying them for ages before he was satisfied. I saw one phrase which filled a whole exercise book, repeated over and over again in different ways.

  We argued a good deal, too, and I remember accusing him of being more interested in sound than in meaning—which he denied. But he agreed that he played all his shots, so to speak, from up at the net: every one was a smash-hit. He liked the simile and said with approval: “That’s it. No mercy on the reader.” But he was robust and without any self-importance and rejoiced in a laugh.

  I was reading a good deal in the Museum[12] at this time, and used to spend my lunch hours drifting about the manuscript room. It is always thrilling to see a page of the original Don Juan, or something in Keats’s own handwriting.[13] I never tired of it. One day, in an unfrequented corner of the room, I saw what I took to be a page of Dylan Thomas. I was surprised to find it was a page of an Emily Brontë MS, and I was so struck with the similarity that I bought a sixpenny facsimile and posted it to Thomas. The next day he wrote: “Strange that facsimile by E.B. I thought it was a rejected poem of mine when I opened it. Yes, it’s my handwriting, and I can read every word of it.” A day or two after this I happened on a picture of the three Brontë girls (is it by Bramwell, unfinished?) and I was struck by a resemblance between Emily and Dylan Thomas. The dark, slightly popping eye, the toneless skin and dark hair….I told him about it, and he was amused and delighted; and when I accused him of being a reincarnation of her he agreed at once and added: “And what is so strange about that? She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved!”

  I remember several meetings that Spring, before I went abroad again; not all are worth writing about—for some were boisterous and silly, and some unproductive of anything but good-natured noise. Thomas, under the physical and mental robustness, was quite a sensitive person and rather tended to use his boisterousness as a defence against people who might bore him and make demands on him. He did not care for conversation about writing, and was not really interested enough in ideas to give much thought to them. These things invaded the privacy he felt he needed for his work. He wanted to make himself more sensitive and less conscious. “You know,” he once said, “when I’m in company which contains admirers or fans or fellow-writers, I begin to feel I’m under false pretences. That is why I act the clown.” And he could be a splendid clown. When he was in a riproaring mood he seemed to attract to him everything that was fantastic and unreal in the air around him.

  I went for one pub-crawl with him which was as full of comic and unreal incidents as an Irish novel. Indeed the grotesque and unreal in events and people always stepped to Thomas’s elbow when he started clowning. It was as if he had touched off a secret spring of lunacy in reality itself. It was a splendid form of safety, I suppose, to move in a coloured cloud of real-life fantasies. Once I visited thirteen drinking clubs in an afternoon with him in an attempt to trace a pair of shoes which he had absently taken off in one of them—he did not remember which. The types of people we met, and the hallucinating conversations which ramified around these shoes would have made a whole novel. In one place three old men helped him crawl under a bar to see if they were there, and one of them got stuck and couldn’t be got out; in another he nearly got tattooed by an elderly Indian; in a third…It was like a Joyce Cary[14] novel. And finally, he told me, that when he got home he found the shoes standing beside his bed. He had simply forgotten to put them on….

  Yes, a splendid clown and a splendid poet. But under the clowning and the planned appearances of this wild and woolly public figure there was somebody quieter, somebody very much harassed by a gift; and I like to think of him in those early days. I am sure others who knew him well will have more interesting memories of him. I hope these lines may persuade his friends to write them down before they fade.

  Bernard Spencer

  1964

  BERNARD SPENCER’S[1] SUDDEN DEATH recently snapped a link which was first forged in 1938 when he arrived in Greece to work for the British Council in Salonika. We met first in Athens; and later, when the Germans attacked Greece
, we found ourselves fellow-refugees in Egypt together with Robin Fedden and George Seferis and many other poets and writers, some in uniform and others in civilian service like ourselves.[2] In Egypt we saw a great deal of each other, collaborated on a poetry magazine called Personal Landscape, and for some time shared a flat on the first floor opposite the Mohammed Ali Club. It was a strange period, full of a kind of tragic euphoria. Cairo at this time was buzzing with poets.

  Our headquarters then was the Anglo-Egyptian Union, where in our time off we played billiards endlessly and drank beer, criticising each other’s work with merciless candour, and arguing hotly about the make-up of each number of our little paper. There was so much material to choose from, and so many people from whom to solicit verse; the trouble was that we were short of money and paper and were forced to limit ourselves strictly to what we thought was the very best work. As it was we found excellent material to hand in poetry by Terence Tiller, George Seferis, G.S. Fraser, Gwyn Williams, and many others; and translations of major European-work hitherto not available in English—Rilke by Ruth Speirs and Cavafy by Amy Nimr. Nor must I forget to include the satire and the essays of Robert Liddell and Diana Gould.[3]

  In all this Bernard played an attentive if somewhat lackadaisical part; he was a man impossible to harry or fluster. Nor was this mere laziness; it was a kind of inherent belief that if you hurried things too much you couldn’t observe them with the necessary attention and extract from them their vital juices. He was always reproving me for my lack of what he called “a respect for the Object” and I accepted his mild reproofs with attention. I had discovered something in his poetry and his conversation which interested me and fired me—because it was a quality I felt I lacked. He had a sort of piercing yet undogmatic irony of approach to people and things; as if he had taken up some sort of quiet vantage-point inside himself from which with unerring fidelity he pronounced upon the world—not in the form of grandiose generalisations, aphorisms or epigrams, but in small strict pronouncements which hit home.[4] His best poetry is like that—a succession of plain, almost nude, statements which somehow give one the feeling of incontrovertibility. The feeling, the tenderness is all the purer for not being orchestrated too richly; in the fine grain of his poetry there is much that reminds me of Edward Thomas,[5] and his best poems will certainly live as long as the best of Thomas.

  I told him this once; he neither agreed nor disagreed. He put on his most quizzical expression and said, “Have a beer.” The real truth was, I think, that his poetry was so bracketed to his private vision that he didn’t care whether it was better or worse than Thomas or Keats or anyone else.…It was good Spencer, that was what mattered. Later, when that blond vagabond, Keith Douglas,[6] strayed into our midst, fresh from a desert battle, with a pocketful of fine poems, he and Bernard made common cause and became great friends. I understood this because they had the same sort of poetic frequency and the same lucid approach to words. But I don’t want to give the impression that we talked much theory; neither poets nor dentists talk shop for preference out of hours. But we talked about it in the context of our editing and the work submitted by our fellow writers. Each weekend was spent in a struggle to shape up the next number. (Terence was being too bloody metaphysical, Robin’s last lines lacked bowstring…and so on.)

  Nevertheless our paper (five-hundred copies) was over-subscribed from the first number onwards and I still think that the little anthology of selections from it chosen by Robin Fedden, which Tambimuttu was to father after the war, is something more than a period piece.[7] It is only when I think of all the contributors on whom we did not levy a claim that my heart sinks.…What a paper we could have made in Cairo at that time had we had world enough and time, not to mention money and paper! Freya Stark, Georges Henein, Albert Cossery, P.H. Newby[8].…So many writers we knew; writers, so to speak, within our editorial grasp! Alas! We had not enough money to launch anything on a large scale. We paid for our paper out of our own pockets, and from the first number it covered costs. Contributors were paid only in glory.

  In all this whirl of movement I seem to see the tall, rather saturnine, figure of Bernard moving about his tasks with a quiet yet purposeful energy. Physically he was tallish, extremely good looking, and of slender build; his expression was usually one of quizzical amusement. He was shy, and one had to prise a laugh out of him, but when it arrived it was quite disarming. He was reticent without being in any way reserved, and to such good purpose that I, who feel that I knew him so well, would be hard put to it to fill in a detailed questionnaire about his life. He never spoke about his family or friends. I gathered they were Indian Army, or something of the kind. He had been sent to Marlborough, where he was neither happy nor unhappy; to Oxford, which he had enjoyed mildly; to Greece, which woke him up. Once in Greece he started to carve out quite new kinds of poem, and indeed it is within the context of Greece that his work is best judged.

  It sounds unreasonable, perhaps, but I think in order to criticise his work one does have to know the Mediterranean a little, and especially Greece; just as Seferis’s poetry and my own can only be truly judged within the frame of reference created by its point of impulse: Greece. Indeed, our sense of exile from Greece was a very real thing and has been very well summed up by Robin Fedden in the brilliant little preface which he wrote for the Tambimuttu anthology.[9] I think that what I shared with Bernard Spencer was the knowledge that for both of us Greece had acted like some terrific drug—a tonic. We had sloughed a youthful skin there and grown a new one. But, of course, we were not the only poets suddenly to get penetrated by the Attic light…I am thinking of Rex Warner, Henry Miller, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Robert Liddell, Francis King, among others.

  I think it is too early to attempt a detailed portrait of Bernard Spencer; his work must be collected and be given time to find its roots. It is small in both scale and in production. Once when I tried to prod him into producing more work he said: “I was never one for the long haul.” One of the reasons he found it so hard to find a publisher was that he could seldom muster more than fifteen poems at a given time. But the fifteen were all sound as a nut. He did not labour his work like Dylan Thomas, who went backwards and forwards over the words like a spider, re-weaving them, re-ordering them, testing them; Bernard tried to re-feel weak passages and correct whole phrases rather than single adjectives or nouns. “Ah! You phrase-makers!” he once said to me. “Your trouble is that you are insanely ambitious!” Of course I used to respond by attacking his laziness, though I knew his slowness to kindle wasn’t laziness but a special pace he had set himself. When his eye was in, the result was something very special. Spencer saw things in a particular way; the surface description of person or place always led to a poetic judgement which hit one squarely. One turned back to read the poem again because, though deceptively simple, it had a kind of weird specific density of its own. Yes, he is very much a poet of place and mood—that is why he should be read in the context of his Greece, his Spain, his Austria.

  By now the war had begun to narrow to a close: history was being changed around us. We were to find ourselves being gradually dispersed by circumstance, thrown on to new trajectories by the vagaries of private destiny or by the work we were doing. Seferis, Spencer, Dorian Cooke, Gwyn Williams, G.S. Fraser, Terence Tiller[10].…It was clear that if the magazine were to survive us it would lack both contributors and the impulse and freshness which had first created it. Besides, we were jealous of it, and did not want to confide it to other hands. The preface to our last issue, a joint one, read as follows:

  A CHANGE OF LANDSCAPE

  When we were relatively cut off from England and the term of our stay in the Middle East seemed likely to be indefinite, there was an evident place for a local verse periodical. Personal Landscape was accordingly started in January 1942. For three years it has provided a vehicle, the only one available in English, for serious poets and critics in the Middle East. It has also, at a time when propaganda colours all perspectives
, emphasized those “personal landscapes” which lie obstinately outside national and political frontiers.[11] Today, with the end of the European war almost in sight, poets, like others, are beginning to leave the Middle East, and for those who remain there is no longer literary isolation. With the improvement in communications a manuscript reaches London in a week and periodicals come out here in roughly the same time. Soon, in fact, there will no longer be any need for an English verse periodical in this part of the world. For this reason the present number is to be the last. We prefer to die at meridian.

  This last issue contained Spencer’s fine poem “Auction Room,” together with poems by Tiller, Hugh Gordon Porteus, and some translations from Cavafy by Amy Nimr (Lady Smart). It also contained a brief obituary note on Keith Douglas, who had been killed in the Normandy landings.[12] The news of his death saddened and infuriated us all, but I think Spencer, who had known him best, felt worst about it. It was ominous for it somehow underlined all the other partings which were in the air. We had begun to disperse to different places—Athens, Madrid, Belgrade.…

  In my own case the future landscapes were to be Rhodes, Buenos Aires, Belgrade, Cyprus, Provence. Spencer’s trajectory took him to Greece, Madrid, London and, lastly, Vienna.[13] We kept, so to speak, a mental image of each other’s whereabouts and often, in our long journeys round the globe, managed to spend a few hours in each other’s company. The Personal Landscape period constituted a sort of extra personal link, a private geography almost; a place-name was subtly altered by the mere knowledge that one or other of our friends—our Personal Landscape friends—was there en poste. So it was that I managed to spend time ashore at Lisbon to meet Harold Edwards, the Skelton specialist, who first translated the novels of Albert Cossery into English. (He and his wife committed suicide under mysterious circumstances some years later.)[14] He was a very close friend of Spencer and the news of his death came as a shock to us all. But the winds of chance which carried Seferis to Cape Town and Ankara, Dorian Cooke to Serbia, Patrick Leigh-Fermor from Crete to Hamburg and back to Greece, carried Spencer himself back briefly to his beloved Athens for a while and then to Madrid.[15]