1969

Anne Ridler (1912–2001), poet and verse dramatist, was an editor at Faber and Faber. Her husband, the printer and typographer Vivian Ridler, printed her first volume for OUP, but the whole stock was lost in a bombing raid in 1940. Carcanet published her Collected Poems in 1994. Grevel Lindop, who interviewed her that year, wrote: ‘She was also a fine, understated raconteuse, with a perfect ear for dialogue and a neat sense of comic self-deprecation, whether recalling the contorted scrupulousness of Eliot’s response when she dared to show him her earliest work, or confessing to the illicit delights of translating an opera libretto (“When you hear it sung, you get this marvellous delusion that you’ve written the whole thing yourself!”).’1


FROM ANNE RIDLER

Oxford

9 December 1969



Dear Mr Schmidt,


Thank you for your letter about the new Carcanet venture. I shall be interested to see the first pamphlets, and I enclose my two-guinea subscription. Why should you want to codify yourselves with a group name? I hope you won’t – and certainly not as vividist.

      I was sorry not to get to any of the meetings this term. I fully intended to, but something always cropped up on a Tuesday to prevent me.

      I think Kathleen Raine is always interested in new poetry, though I don’t know how much money she can spare for subscriptions of this kind.2 You also ask about my verse plays: they are published by Faber, and I think Henry Bly and other plays would be the one to interest you. One which I wrote about Cranmer, commissioned for the fourth centenary of his death and broadcast and acted* at the time, is now out of print, I believe.


All good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Anne Ridler


*in the University Church, with Frank Windsor and Derek Hart, then little-known actors, in the cast.3

FROM ANNE RIDLER

Oxford

11th May 1989



Dear Michael,


Many thanks for the copy* of my letter which Mark Fisher proposes to use in the Twentieth Anniversary book. What a noble record you have to show! I am proud that my twoguinea subscription earns me a connexion, however small.

      My first thought was that of course you should print the letter as it stands. My second is that if you don’t mind, I’d prefer you to delete, in the third paragraph, the rest of the sentence after ‘new poetry’. I ask this because I have found that allusions to want of money tend to annoy Kathleen, even though she makes them herself. (For instance, ‘Wearing anxiety about money like a hair shirt’, or something to that effect.) Now will this go into the archive for the next twenty years??

      I have just had offprints of the article on Marriage in Literature in which we used Joy Scovell’s poem, and I’ve sent one to her.4 She was here to tea last week, and mentioned that she had not seen the review of her book in the Times Lit. Supp. – all too brief I thought, but at least she did get a review, whereas this time they have ignored my book completely. If there is a cutting in the office, perhaps you could send her one? I didn’t keep it myself.


      Cordial good wishes,
Yours ever,
Anne


*This is written with the same Royal table-model typewriter, slung out by OUP & bought for a song. We bought an electric one, but I can’t get used to it.

      *

      Anne Ridler was among the many poets I wrote to soliciting a subscription for our first series of pamphlets. I typed each letter of solicitation on my huge Adler manual typewriter, one of the prime acquisitions of my second undergraduate year. A good typewriter was then as important as a good laptop is today. The letters I wrote were not personalised but personal. I did not keep copies of these bespoke ingratiations, but whatever they said, they did the trick. We had over 160 subscribers to the first series of seven pamphlets, which could be acquired for seven shillings and sixpence unsigned or one guinea signed and numbered.

      Peter Jones had started work on his Penguin Book of Imagist Verse and he, Gareth Reeves, Grevel Lindop and I were casting about for a label or brand to distinguish the work we were doing. In writing to a poet who had been T.S. Eliot’s secretary and editorial assistant, it seemed appropriate to seek her advice on ‘vividist’, our then preferred epithet, and she advised in no uncertain terms.

      Later on, some friends and I decided the most beautiful word in the English language was ‘numb’ and we joked about starting a ‘numb school’ of poetry. When I was typing Notebook for Robert Lowell I induced him to introduce the word ‘numb’ into one of the sonnets (I am not sure it survived the final cut), so we were able to claim Lowell as a marginal member of the ‘numb school’.


NOTES

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/oct/16/guardianobituaries.books (accessed 5 June 2019).
  2. Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), poet and scholar of Blake and Yeats; there is a particularly fine photograph of her by Christopher Barker in Portraits of Poets (Carcanet, 1986), alongside many poets from the Carcanet list, including Ridler. The editor of this book has taken the decision to over-ride Anne Ridler’s request; she doubts that Raine’s shade will be troubled by the mention of lack of money.
  3. The British actor Frank Windsor (b.1927) was famous for his part in the TV series Softly Softly and Z Cars in the 1970s, as well as roles in films and on stage; Derek Hart (1925–86), actor and broadcaster, was well-known for his appearances in the BBC’s Tonight programme.
  4. Joy Scovell (1907–99), poet and translator, had published collections in the 1940s–50s; Geoffrey Grigson described her as ‘a poet less concerned with celebrity and self-importance than with being alive and in love […] The purest woman poet of our time.’ Carcanet published her Collected Poems in 1988, and a Selected in 1991.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      Peter Jones, Rain

      Ishan Kapur, Tomorrow’s Dark Sun Grevel Lindop, Against the Sea

      Robert Needham, Blind Openings