With the exception of a short tour of Sweden, when we were confined to the back of a transit van that took us from Stockholm to Umea in the far north, stopping off at motorway cafés for reindeer steaks with snowberry sauce, travelling in Europe as one third of the Scaffold was a hurried affair. Fly to Milan/Bruges/Amsterdam, car to TV studio to perform hit song on ‘Toppi di Poppi’ or ‘Toppen der Poppen’, car back to airport and fly home reading guidebook. We all agreed that next time would be the time when we would stay over for a few days and see the sights, but next times, like snowberries, shrivelled away.
Travelling in Europe as one third of the Liverpool Poets, however, was a more leisurely affair, and because our visits were organised by the British Council rather than record companies, and our audiences were teachers of English and students of literature rather than teenagers who would have preferred the Who or the Kinks, the experience was generally a good one. We earned less for a reading than we would have done at home, the hotels were often only adequate, but audiences were enthusiastic and books flew off the shelves, on occasion hitting the author. There was also the vague ambassadorial feeling that we were spreading the good word, helping to redefine the image of English poetry as a living artform, accessible and entertaining, and not confined to a thatched corner of the BBC World Service. Our three-pronged attack was to prove successful over two decades, but I was very much on my own when the bugle first sounded and the call to arms came.
Stirrings in the breast that could only be defined as patriotism, quickened uncontrollably at a banquet held in Yugoslavia in 1982, on the final evening of an international poetry festival. In May of that year I stood on the corner of a busy street in Sarajevo, my feet fitting comfortably into a pair of footprints carved in a granite plaque, marking the spot where a young Bosnian student, Gavrilo Princip, fired the fatal shots at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and finding it almost impossible to perceive any sense of those violent times. For in that summer of 1982 Yugoslavia was proud of its own brand of benevolent Communism, wherein different ethnic communities lived and worked happily side by side. Or so I was told when I arrived as a guest of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Writers Union to take part in the twentieth jubilee celebrations of ‘Sarajevo’s Poetry Manifestation’. Poets from Russia, USA, Iraq and Europe were told that: ‘Sarajevo opens itself to poets because it has a poetic soul itself, especially in the feeling for freedom, confirmed through centuries of resistance to oppression’. It was to prove a fascinating week for me, with time off in the port of Dubrovnik as well as visits to pretty towns whose names now reverberate within the violent history of the Balkans, Banja Luka, Mostar and Sarajevo itself. It was spring and the green, opalescent rivers flowing through the countryside put me in mind of Perroquet, not the bird, but the drink popular in Provence, consisting of Pernod and crème de menthe. As well as the inevitable four-hour-long poetry readings in the native language, interspersed with folk dancing in national costume, there had been visits to war museums and Tito memorials, and a hatpin factory where the overseas poets read to the bemused workers in the canteen. The young people I met were open and charming, particularly the students who were assigned to us as translators and guides. And take my word for it, there’s no better feeling than having two breathtakingly beautiful girls following you around all day hanging on your every word, and falling about with laughter at your silly jokes.
Poets, of course, will be poets and although we all sought ‘that interchange of views and information’, we quickly broke up into little groups that shared a common language and culture. Petty jealousies arose, as to who had the most poems in the festival magazine, whose biography was the longest, who got the biggest hatpins after the canteen reading, but even then I couldn’t help noticing that the greatest rivalries seemed to be among the Yugoslavian poets themselves, hinting at the hairline cracks to be found in the ideal of Slavic unity. On our last evening in Sarajevo our hosts laid on a fine banquet for more than a hundred guests, and once coffee and slivovitz had been served, the Secretary of the Writers Union rose unsteadily to his feet to propose a toast to each of the participating poets and the countries they represented. It soon became obvious that his style was closer to Bernard Manning than to Douglas Hurd as he poked fun at the French and German poets, before comparing the colour of the American poet James Emmanuel’s skin to a local wine.
Then he turned towards me: ‘Let us now stand and drink a toast to our distinguished poet from the land of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcherland!’ There were giggles as I stood up, fearing the worst. He continued, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let us raise our glasses and drink to … Las Malvinas!’ A hundred pairs of eyes fixed on me, waiting for my response.
I decided in an instant that this wasn’t the time or place to proffer my views on Thatcher or the Falklands fiasco, but whereas up until then John Bull had meant nothing more than a puncture repair outfit, now it pushed out its chest and snarled. Resorting to cheap theatrics, I poured my upheld glass of slivovitz on to the linen tablecloth and sat down. Embarrassment in twenty-seven languages followed, before our host was led over and made to apologise. ‘No offence taken,’ I lied, squeezing drops of slivovitz from the tablecloth back into my glass.
Ten years later I was at another Slavonic conference of poets, this time in a country that didn’t exist, Macedonia, a country with a pistol to its head. The Struga Poetry Festival had been running for thirty years, and with war raging in neighbouring Bosnia and Serbia a decision had to be taken: whether to spend the money on guns or poetry. They chose the latter both for cultural and propagandist reasons, and requested that the British Council send over two poets who were expendable and who would laugh in the face of danger ‘to give public readings and become acquainted with Macedonian and other poets for interchange of views and information’. In the days before Brian and I left, at least a dozen people telephoned to wish me luck and a safe return: ‘Rather you than me’, ‘Don’t forget your bullet-proof swimming trunks’, etc. But I loftily dismissed their anxieties, the British Council wouldn’t go to all this trouble and expense to send us anywhere dangerous, would they? Would they? Although, to be honest, we were a little concerned about the prospect of parachuting in after dark, even though they assured us the landing would be well out of mortar range. Some governments, including the American, Dutch and Scandinavian, had decided not to risk their poets and so the eighteen who assembled on the terrace of the House of Poetry overlooking the river to witness the opening ceremony were given a heroes’ welcome by the country’s president. At nine o’clock on that Thursday evening in August, six rowing boats filled with vestal virgins wearing white robes crossed the Drim (pronounced ‘dream’), disembarked on the steps and ran towards us carrying flaming torches, as a Macedonian male-voice choir belted out the national anthem, but when the firework display began and a misdirected rocket screamed across the terrace, everybody thought the Serbs were attacking and ran back into the house.
The workload for Brian and me was not excessive (On cue, stand and move to microphone at centre stage of concert hall. Read one poem, then move to the right-hand side while famous Macedonian actress reads translation. Return to seat. Sit) and as the daily symposia were conducted in the local language, we spent much of the time avoiding the hotel food, swimming in the river pronounced ‘dream’, and wandering around Struga and the surrounding villages, which viewed from afar could have been Tuscan, with their red-tiled houses and rows of cypress trees. But closer inspection revealed the poverty and there were no smells of melting cheese or garlic, only cigarette smoke. And no breathtakingly beautiful interpreters this time, but an earnest and fiercely intellectual university lecturer called Zoran who tried to explain the politics of the region, which were as slippery as the trout in Lake Ohrid. Eight months after the fighting had begun on the borders, paranoia had become muted and given way to a form of ironic apathy. People tried to carry on with their lives as normally as possible. There was food in the shops, but owing to sanctions, industry was winding down and the coming winter, the first as a new republic, would be a testing one. Would there be a spring? some asked. Against such a background, would anybody be interested in poetry?
The answer, of course, was a resounding yes, for Struga was not really a festival about poems or poets, but about the idea of poetry: rhetoric and the oral tradition. Crowds turned up in their thousands to cheer themselves hoarse at the public performances, and for those who couldn’t make it the lengthy readings were recorded live and transmitted on prime-time television. Imagine viewers in this country settling down on successive nights to watch four hours of poets reading their poems, often in a foreign language, with no commercial breaks, and no other channels to switch over to. It is easy to become blasé about the role of poetry, living as one does in the West where it is widely available and either enjoyed or ignored, so it is always humbling to experience the fervour with which it is regarded in countries where life is hard and freedom is a river pronounced ‘dream’.