With the growing success of the readings in the Everyman Theatre basement, with audiences pretty well guaranteed, the British Council and other arts organisations began to use it as a venue for poets visiting from overseas. An evening of Canadian poetry went down particularly well, featuring the then granddaddy of them all, Earle Birney, and a young, good-looking man called Michael Ondaatje with whom I swapped my latest book for his. I still have my signed copy of Rat Jelly and wonder if he still has my Summer with Monika. Or did he do what I used to do (shame on me) when travelling across Australia where every other person I met seemed to have published a small book of poems? Leave Gleanings from Life’s Highway and The Silence of Stones on the bedside table for the housemaid in lieu of a tip.
One of the greatest international names we had, and the one that was the most difficult to spell, was Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko. Unfortunately I was out of town and missed his reading, which was so popular that it was held upstairs in the main theatre and sold out. A friend of mine, Clare Manifold, was studying Literature at the university and Yevtushenko was her hero, and because no books of his were on sale after the reading, she was first in the queue next morning when the bookshop on Hardman Street opened its doors at 9.30 for a book signing. When her hero arrived she was wide-eyed, ready and waiting.
‘What is your name?’ he asked, pen poised magnificently.
‘Clare.’
The poet fixed those steel-blue eyes directly into hers. ‘Clare.’ He savoured the chime of it. ‘Clare, my last day in England, and I meet the most beautiful girl in the world!’ He signed with a flourish, handed her the book and turned his attention to whoever was next in line.
Clare, weak at the knees, made her way past the waiting fans and hurried up the hill to attend her first lecture. Halfway there she changed her mind, the lecture was not important and she was in too much of a tizzy to concentrate, and besides, why hadn’t she bought a copy of Bratsk Station for Valerie whose birthday was coming up? So Clare hurried back down the hill and joined the tail end of the queue still snaking down Hardman Street. Half an hour later and now last in line she came face to face with her hero once more. ‘What is your name?’ he asked, pen poised magnificently.
‘It’s for Valerie.’
The poet fixed those steel-blue eyes directly into hers. ‘Valerie.’ He savoured the chime of it. ‘Valerie, my last day in England, and I meet the most beautiful girl in the world!’
I opted not to tell Yevtushenko that story when my wife and I were having supper with him in a little town outside Venice in 1996. Some months previously I had received a fax from Georgio and Marcellino inviting me to participate in the ‘Beat Internationale’ to be held in their home town of Conegliano in honour of Allen Ginsberg. Not only was Ginsberg reading but he would be joined by Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who would be coming over from the States, as well as a host of leading European poets including Enzenberger, Yves Bonnefoy, Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, myself and numerous Italian poets. When I talked to Georgio on the phone he confided that not only would Leonard Cohen be there but that Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, who were touring Italy, had also promised to perform. There would be no fee, unfortunately, explained Georgio, but I would be welcome to bring my wife, and all costs would be covered.
He was there to welcome Hilary and me at the Marco Polo aeroporto and on the drive to our hotel explained that sadly, it looked as if Bob Dylan wouldn’t be able to make it after all.
‘But Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed will be there then?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Sadly, no.’ The nearer we got to the Canon d’Oro Hotel, the more sadly Georgio became.
‘Enzenberger?’
‘Sadly, no.’
‘Bonnefoy?
‘Sadly no.’
‘At least it will be great having Ginsberg on stage with Corso and Ferlinghetti,’ I ventured, fingers crossed. ‘Or is it … sadly?’
‘Sì’ said Georgio. ‘Sadly, Corso could not get a visa and Ferlinghetti, his heart is not strong at this moment.’
Worse was to come. It had become painfully obvious that only Brits and Russians will go anywhere for a freebie, and, although Voznesensky had arrived, he was staying, for reasons unknown, in a different hotel. During supper, when Hilary and I were sitting with Yevtushenko and Marsha, his new young wife, Georgio and Marcellino, each with a mobile phone, were pacing up and down the restaurant in heated conversation. Why phone each other, I thought, when they’re in the same room?
Eventually Georgio came over. ‘Roger, you are a friend of Allen, sì?’
‘Well, not a friend, exactly, I’ve met him once or twice …’
He held out his mobile. ‘Please talk to him, he is staying in Milan and refusing to come for the performances in his honour.’
I took the phone. ‘Hello, Allen, Roger McGough here, I don’t know if you remember …’
Ginsberg cut through, ‘Listen, my publishers have fixed up some readings in Milan. I told those guys three fu*king months ago.’
‘But Allen, they’ve gone to a lot of trouble …’
‘Ciao Roger.’
I handed the phone back to Georgio. ‘Sadly, Ginsberg can’t make it either.’
Despite this little setback, the ‘Beat Internationale’ went ahead in a 700-seater auditorium packed to the gunwales with respectable middle-class Italians. Disconcertingly, it didn’t start until almost past my bedtime, and the show opened with a homage to William Burroughs featuring a harpist and a belly dancer, and included a reading by someone who had worked in City Lights Bookshop in the sixties, as well as a ‘Famous American singer-songwriter’ whom nobody had ever heard of, and after the first two songs we all knew why.
Actually, it is often a feature of reading in a country where English is not the spoken language that sharing the platform will be a ‘popular and distinguished British poet’ of whom I’ve never heard. And the more far flung the country, the more popular and distinguished the poet will be. Years ago there was a poet called Brian Thomas who lived outside Birmingham and billed himself as ‘the well-known Black Country poet’. A few years later, after moving to Wales, he became Bryn Thomas ‘the well-known Welsh poet’. Driven out of Wales by arts centre audiences, he emigrated to Australia and I met him in Melbourne where he had become B. S. Thomas ‘the well-known British poet’. Any day now I expect to come across him at a festival in Edinburgh or Cheltenham and be introduced to Bazzer Thomas the ‘well-known outback poet’.
On stage now is Voznesensky wearing a white tuxedo and looking like a Russian Bob Hope. His reading is accompanied by slides and his voice, both powerful and tremulous, speaks of loss and sadness. Yevtushenko, tonight is sporting his pearly king outfit. The Russian poets grow into the size of the room, forty people in a bookshop or 2,000 in a football stadium, Russian poets seem to adjust perfectly to the cubic dimension.
Allen Ginsberg, too, had this shape-changing ability, although having witnessed in 1965 his serene, intimate reading at a small bookshop in Hardman Street, Liverpool, followed some months later by a rant in front of 7,000 at the Albert Hall, I decided his trick was not to grow into the size of the venue, but to reduce the capacity of the hall to suit him.
Ginsberg spent some time in Merseyside in search of the Beatles’ aura and got on famously with Adrian Henri, his scouse doppelganger, who put him up in his flat, and was delighted to come across his hero at the kitchen sink one morning washing the dishes and singing a Buddhist chant. Exhilarated by his visit, Ginsberg proclaimed, ‘Liverpool is at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe,’ which, depending on who you talked to in the pubs and clubs around town, was either quoting the bleeding obvious or going just a teeny-weeny bit over the top.