In the fourteen months I have been working on this book I have written 103,352 words, which is a lot for me. If you think about it, an average poem of mine consists of eighty-two words, which means I could have written well over a thousand poems during the time it has taken me to complete this. A slim volume retailing at £9.99 might contain on average fifty poems; therefore, instead of slaving away at Said and Done which sells in hardback at £17.99, I could have had twenty-five books of poetry lined up on the runway awaiting take-off at regular intervals over the next few decades, or had the series published and put into the shops right away, and twenty-five new collections at £9.99 would cost you nearly £250, so I hope you realise what a bargain you’re holding in those (delete where inapplicable) carefullymanicured/pudgy/hairy/liverspotted/loving/hands.
To those who believe that poetry is merely chopped-up prose, may I counter with my experience as someone who has always found it easier to write in verse. The poem usually either happens or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t then no amount of mouth-to-mouth or chopping up will breathe life into it. Schlimmbesserung is a fine word meaning to make something worse by trying to improve it, as in overextensive revision, but prose seems to benefit when reworked and repolished so that it can be read at a pace at which the reader feels comfortable, usually quickly, whereas a poem won’t offer itself up to a speed read. A poem creates a sort of relaxed tension, the reader hovering between boredom and anticipation, whereas prose makes a narrative promise: ‘Stay with me, it will be worth the journey.’ The process has been a learning curve for me, trying to avoid the elliptical, replacing the full stop with a comma and extending the idea. You wouldn’t believe the exhilaration I feel when a sentence runs over on to a second, even a third line. Words, out of control falling over a cliff. And the thrill of the paragraph! I’m also using a lap top, which is pretty courageous for somebody who is anti-magnetic. Inklings of poems can arrive at any time and there is always pen and paper to hand, so when writing I can see it taking shape, the crossings out and the rearrangement of lines, the alternative rhymes, all there on the page in front of me. But the job in hand required so many revisions that I would never have got beyond the second chapter if I hadn’t learned to type.
The learning curve also half-mooned into an alcohol-free zone. Very often when writing a poem I reach the point where it cries out for a drink. My brain has come to a crossroads and just wants to stretch out on that bench over there – no, not that one, the one by the tree – but when the alcohol kicks in, suddenly imagination takes flight, perhaps to nosedive shortly afterwards, but it’s always a trip worth taking. I have pictured the creative process as something like two parts of the brain at work on a poem: Magenta, who is often skimpily dressed, comes up with all the wild ideas; and Max, who wears a three-piece suit, is in charge of quality control. His role is not to be underestimated, for although a stickler for tradition, he counts the syllables, makes sure the rhymes chime and generally keeps an eye and an ear on things. Sometimes, though, Max can be a bit of a bore, and his one failing is that he can’t hold his drink, so after a glass or two of the magic potion he falls asleep and Magenta dances in with a bouquet of fanciful flights clasped to her shimmering bosom. But there’s something Presbyterian about the memoir that demands stricter control, for there is a past to be taken into account with dates, names and faces that you have elected to represent. Poems should be honest without necessarily being truthful, and the ‘I’ doesn’t have to be the author’s voice, but in an autobiography the ‘I’ must take its responsibilities seriously, even if the reader doesn’t.
Here I am
as old as Methuselah
was when he was my age
and never having stepped outside for a fight
Crossed on red, pissed on rose (or white)
Pretty dull for a poet, I suppose, eh? Quite.
It isn’t so much growing old that’s a bore, but the common sense that comes with it, the increasingly futile need for self-preservation that stops you having another drink, that says no to the chocolate fudge surprise, that nods towards the umbrella and whispers ‘just in case’. Since the onset of my fifties, having nursed the scenario of a law-abiding, bookish middle age, segueing into a ruttish, dissolute, fun-filled routine before the final curtain call, the realisation, slow to dawn, that the show’s director has something less energetic in mind comes as a bit of a blow.
I am not the author of my life, but its ghost-writer, kept at a distance, trying to create a more believable me, and I wish I’d been able to come up with someone more outrageous. Someone who had gone to the edge and beyond. A wild extrovert, able to pick up a large cut-glass goblet filled with purple onions and throw it through a window at the Savoy. Able to go up to those sports journalists in the Brown Bull and say, ‘Stop getting that young footballer pissed so that you can write about his problem.’ Able to tell John Lennon/Keith Moon/Allen Ginsberg to go back and apologise. Able to accept generously the gifts on offer (‘The door clicks shut behind him, he turns: “Tania, I really don’t think … Mmm … Mind you, on second thoughts …”’) Has writing been a form of displacement activity to keep the encroaching darkness at bay, or merely an excuse not to get too involved in real life?
‘What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’
‘Well, wrote a few decent poems, actually.’
Like many writers, excluding Hemingway and Genghis Khan, I’m a sayer who would rather have been a doer. But there’s still time to change, because it’s never too late to rise up and become a flame, as lightning out of a thundercloud, and that’s what I intend to do. But unobtrusively, so that no one will notice. And certainly not my family. It’s bad enough your father writing his autobiography and people coming up to them and saying ‘Was your father really alive during the Great War?’ And ‘Did he really have an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer?’ Without ‘Was that your father I saw this morning, surrounded by flames appearing on a cloud above Hammersmith Bridge?’ No, they can rest assured I’ll keep my attention-seeking to the written page.
I might have wished otherwise, but my guardian angel (whose name is Max, by the way) always managed to keep me in check, and although I was able to give him the slip occasionally, thanks to Magenta, I was never quite able to let go completely and join in the fun. Picture the scene: The early sixties. It is late summer, after midnight and a group of us sit around a fire on a beach in Devon drinking wine and cider, somebody strumming a guitar, when suddenly a girl strips and runs naked into the sea. Everybody follows suit and, not wanting to be last in, I unbutton my jeans. Then pause, somebody had better stay behind and keep an eye on the clothes, common sense. Listening to the screams and laughter, I throw another piece of driftwood on to the fire and take a long, untroubled swig of scrumpy. Thanks Max (or, to give him his full title, Maximus Cautious, a captain in the Brigade of Guardians).
But that was a long time ago, and now it’s April and the sun is shining and I’ve nearly finished writing about myself. This may sound naïve, or worse still, faux-naïf, but I have only recently come to the realisation that once I’ve submitted the manuscript, it is only a matter of time before it appears in book form and that some people will read it. I will no longer be able to pretend that I was merely thinking aloud, the words will be there, the ink holding them in place, page after page. Close friends, lovers, relatives may feel misrepresented, or slighted that I didn’t spend more time with them, and speaking as someone who isn’t as clever as he thinks he is, I’ll have to prepare myself for the brickbats, the slurs and the shattered roof slates that will come winging my way from the professionals. I can’t do anything about the former except feel guilty, but I’ve already taken steps to help me deal with the latter, by ordering another glass paperweight from New Mexico, containing a scorpion with lobsteresque claws and a tail like a curled rattlesnake.
In a couple of hours’ time I’ll be able to put away the diaries and the journals and the newspaper cuttings, and begin to live again in the present. Might convert the garage into a studio and start painting again, for in my youth I wanted to paint Beauty, but the paint always got in the way; maybe now I’ll be content just to paint. And who knows, I might just be tempted to accept the invitation that has arrived to attend a literary festival in a town I can’t pronounce, in a country far, far way. Might even pick up a hammer and hit the nail on the head. In other words, start doing.
Enough said.