Fifty Fifty

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your letters, which both arrived together a week or so ago. I have had great fun antagonising people whom I know by showing them the cover of the anthology and asking them, sweetly, if they write poetry themselves.¹ Rich, if simple, entertainment. Actually, I hadn’t realised that the anthology was also coming out in the magazine. Had I done so, I would no doubt not have sent you the two little sequences in such haste, since my main aim in sending them was to obviate what looked to me like unnecessary repetition. But this is by the by.

I have given much thought to your request for suggestions for a cover for the 400.² As a result, I have got my friend Alasdair Gray, the writer and illustrator/painter, very enthusiastic about the idea of doing a cover for me himself.³ He is away at the moment, but I might as well tell you my thoughts in the matter at once, so that if you find them useless you can let us know sooner rather than later. I thought, since the main body of the work deals with Chinese art reflected, refracted or absorbed by an Occidental prism, it might be a neat idea for the cover to show an archetype of Western art in an Oriental guise. To be brief, I have suggested the Mona Lisa, with a Chinese face, in front of Chinese mountains. This is our front-runner. Also in the race is a map of China, variously decorated to avoid imputations of flatness, which includes Glasgow (at least) innocently placed among its towns. I’ll not go on, as I probably have you clutching your head with disbelief and sorrow already.

May I say, in a completely level voice, that I do feel obscurely but strongly that the SUNG poems should appear by themselves. It seems to me that they would be happier alone in their strange little world.

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your letter of 29 September. Do you realise that, if things go according to plan, the Prague sequence will come out in PN Review 35 with the Swedish sequences coming out in PN Review 36, both at the same time. You will thud quite emphatically on to people’s doormats!

I like very much the notion of an oriental Mona Lisa for the cover of ‘Bad Day’. This is certainly a better notion than the map of China that you propose. Indeed, it is a very compelling notion! So could you work along those lines with Alasdair Gray? We are not in a position to pay very much for covers, no more than £50 unfortunately, but our gratitude is boundless.

I tend to agree with you that the Sung poems should appear by themselves. This raises a great problem regarding the other sequences, as I would not wish not to publish them if you see what I mean. We cannot bring out two of your books at once, but we would have to follow on in 1985 with a second volume incorporating the other sequences or, if the readers of PN Review can take it, publish several of them in the magazine. I would like to ask specifically at this time for permission to publish the shorter sequence you sent me last – the untitled – in the magazine. I have been asked to edit a British edition of Poetry Chicago and if I do this, it might be possible to print the untitled sequence in that context, getting it quite a good fee. We could then reserve the right to reprint it in PN Review ourselves.

Would it be sensible at some stage for us to fund your journey down to Manchester to discuss the strategy for publishing your poems? Of course one thing that would much ease our future planning is if you were less prolific! But let me not urge that. I enjoyed your history of Europe too much to wish you to stop, even to wish you to change your chosen form!

We expect delivery of the anthology and the issue of PN Review on 27th October.

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your letter of the 5th, to which I only now, after considerable thought, address myself. I have got Alasdair Gray working on the cover for the SUNG poems, and my main contribution in this area is to perpetually curb the man’s wilder imaginings, in the hope of finally getting from him a simple witty black and white image. He was all for designing it round the typeface. I would not care to predict how early or late the finished product will emerge. I presume there is no great urgency about it. Or is there?

You have my permission to print the personal sequence. I love the idea of it appearing in America, for something more than sheer cupidity; or rather, I would love it if I didn’t feel so keenly that this is usually the sort of work that appears only after the author’s death. For years I assumed that noone would ever read anything I wrote, and this gave me a wonderful freedom of expression. Was it not (of course it was) C.P. Snow who said that the price of total freedom is total neglect? The reverse also seems to apply. It might be better not to keep me in touch with the progress of this sequence, if it does progress, in case I get cold feet; but rather merely present me with a fait accompli (if any should arise). (What a paragraph! It seems the older I get, the more Jamesian I get.)

The sequence had a title, but I suppressed it. Years ago, in a theoretical mood, I tried to devise striking titles for books of poetry (this was more relaxing than actually writing poems) and I eventually came up with an all-time favourite in ‘THE SUBTLE OBSERVATION OF NAKED WOMEN’.⁴ I still think you could practically sell notebooks with that on the cover. To my discomfort, that line sprang to mind while I was writing the sequence, and I incorporated it in it, without ever feeling entirely happy about it. As the adjective seemed too cheap, I revised it to ‘accepted’, and changed the title to fit. However, I am still worried that ‘accepted’ is only the secondbest adjective – although I am at a loss to discover the first – and that such a title raises all the wrong expectations anyway. Do you have any thoughts on these matters? I am sorry if this is deeply boring: it bored even me as I was typing it.

It seems to me a good idea that we should meet. The situation is slightly complicated by the fact that I have an uncle who lives in, at or near Lytham, and with whom we are in very precarious contact, so, if I play my cards right, I might be able to arrange some sort of outing within an outing. But I imagine that here too there is no great rush. It seems to me that, merely in carrying out what has already been agreed on, you have done a colossal amount for Kuppner studies, and there is no reason why you should sacrifice your readership to my absurd, and probably pathologically motivated, productivity. The idea of putting out a book with over a thousand poems in it undoubtedly appeals to me, but probably to no-one else. Incidentally, I have finished two more lengthy works. If you have already had enough – and who could blame you – you had better get in touch, appealing to my better nature, within the next couple of weeks. Is it reasonable to suggest that you might wish to keep what you like of them, and I can then try to shove off the dross on other, less deserving souls? You see, I keep thinking: I might wake up tomorrow and no longer want to do this. Or I might forget. These things happen.

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your letter. Your book is published on May 31st and we have to have the jacket artwork complete by February 1st in order to have copies to mail by March 1st. But please don’t tell Alasdair Gray this! In fact, give him a much earlier deadline and, if my experience of artists is right, he will deliver on time 2 months late!

We published an interview with Genet in which he reflected that, while in prison, he was free to write whatever [he] wanted because no-one would ever read it.⁵ Out of prison, with his books published, people had expectations of him and it made it impossible to write at all. I see you are experiencing the same thing! I do hope the publication will not silence you, though if it slightly reduced the flow of quatrains, it might be a proper ecological measure!

I like ‘The Subtle Observation of Naked Women’ as a title and ask your permission to use it on the sequence. In fact almost any title is misleading except one which is totally neutral and unattractive. And being misleading is in itself one of the strategies of the poems, surely! Thus let us adopt the title if you have no objection.

If Poetry Chicago do not accept the sequence, then we will

of course use it in PN Review and in your second book.

Concerning your visit, it would be as well if we met some time in December or January so that the text can be finalised. I have a number of small comments, largely to do with specific points in the poems. There is one in which the last lines stretches, amusingly, too far. Unfortunately, the amusement ends about 3 clauses from the end and the line should be shortened and could be without ill-effect. There are other points of this nature which, because of pressure of work, I need a deadline to annotate, and the only deadline that ever seems to work is a visit from the author. This is rather hard on foreign authors!

Could you please send me the two new works? I would be very glad to see them. You must of course broaden your publishing base, but in terms of book publication, I would like to be your exclusive publisher for poetry.⁶ I would hate indeed to share you with anyone else! We have in the past occasionally lost poets to OUP, Salamander, Chatto, etc, and this is most distressing for a publisher like me. Thus you must spread the manna on the waters, or whatever the expression is, but when it comes time to gather it in, the basket, I hope, will remain Carcanet!

December and January, particularly the latter, are quite empty so you have free range in my diary. Do let me know soon which day you would like to come here. You would be welcome to stay over at our house in the Peaks (Chapel-en-le-Frith) if you can stand the occasional crying child in the night.

I have a soft spot – unwise in a publisher – for poets who don’t seem to care about the reception of their work but who get on with it. It’s what they do, they watch their work unfold before them quizzically and are surprised when it takes foreseen forms and unforeseen configurations. You can usually recognise such writers from their publicity photos, acquired perhaps in one of those old photo-booths we went to for our passport mug-shots in pre-iPhone times.

Frank Kuppner began in a very good place for an aspiring writer, much liked by his contemporaries and his immediate seniors. Alasdair Gray designed a wonderful cover for his first book, a history of whose genesis is recorded above. It was clearly a tightly negotiated collaboration.

Frank visited and stayed with my family, if I remember correctly when we lived in Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire. He had never experienced a baked potato and addressed it rather as Sir Walter Raleigh must have done in similar circumstances. As a gift for the hostess he brought a panda ashtray from Glasgow Zoo.

It has always been hard to market his books. He is a reluctant public performer. Occasionally a critic will speak up for him. In The Scotsman Stuart Kelly wrote, ‘That Frank Kuppner is not widely recognised as one of the most ingenious contemporary Scottish writers is a disgrace.’ He has fought Kuppner’s corner more than once: ‘From his surreal short stories (In The Beginning There Was Physics) to his haunting memoirs that combine investigations into true crime with meditations on personal loss (Something Very Like Murder and A Very Quiet Street) to his utterly idiosyncratic poetry – only Kuppner could call his selected poems What? Again? – he has consistently tested the limits of literary forms, literary tastes and literary norms.’

He is a writer I cannot imagine being without.

1983

Again

Dear Michael,

Although we discussed it on the telephone, I do want to reply to your letter of 5 December.

I believe our aims at Carcanet are to publish good books and then sell them. There is not much point in publishing a good book that won’t sell: a book that nobody buys or reads is doing no good to the literary scene. I do, of course, agree with you that a bad book should not be published by Carcanet and the fact that it may sell well should not influence our decision. I do not know about the Powys book on Keats because it is possible that this could be of interest to scholars even if it is, in our opinion, a bad assessment of Keats. For example, if you suddenly discovered a forgotten Shakespeare Sonnet while you were publishing a critical assessment of Shakespeare you would probably want to include it. If you discovered an unknown play by Shakespeare, which was a bad play (as some of his known plays are), you would probably want to publish it.

I think we must publish with an eye to the market because if we are ever to be independent of the Arts Council we must be commercially viable. I believe that our good name is the most important property we have but there is no reason why Mammon and editorial excellence cannot walk hand in hand.

How does that sound as expressed by your newly appointed conscience!

When I married and it became clear that Carcanet was likely to remain a perilous liability for a young family, I looked more energetically than ever for ‘an investor’. Peter du Sautoy, when Managing Director of Faber and Faber, pointed me towards Robert Gavron. Tom Maschler, at Cape, told me not to bother, he’d never buy such a pup.

I invited Bob to lunch at my club, the Savile. We did not talk at all about poetry publishing but about private matters and gossip. After the lunch he sent me a card to say he thought we might well do business. We met again at the Connaught, at his invitation. He had quail eggs and squirted a yolk up his tie, an amusement and distraction. In the next month or so, instead of his acquiring a half interest in the Press, he bought it outright. It was a generally happy relationship, especially after his first appointee as Chairman, the delightful, exasperating Victor Ross, an Austrian refugee who had been Managing Director of Readers’ Digest and for whom small press publishing was a contradiction in terms (for him a run of 10,000 copies was a limited edition, where our longest print runs were 1,500), was removed and replaced at my urgent behest by his new wife Kate Gavron, who had long and relevant experience at Hamish Hamilton and understood the problems and goals of a small operation such as ours.

When he died, I commented in The Bookseller (9 February 2015):

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected Poems, edited by Malcolm Hicks

T. Carmi, At the Stones of Losses, translated by Grace Schulman

Charles Cotton, Selected Poems, edited by Ken Robinson

Donald Davie, Collected Poems 1971-1983

Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: The Artist as a Free Woman

George Dekker, Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature

Padraic Fallon, Poems and Versions, edited by Brian Fallon

Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel

George Sutherland Fraser, A Stranger and Afraid: autobiography of an intellectual

John Gower, Selected Poetry, edited by Carole Weinberg

Ivor Gurney, War Letters, edited by R.K.R. Thornton

Michael Hamburger, A Proliferation of Prophets: essays on German writers from Nietzsche to Brecht

J.F. Hendry, The Sacred Threshold: a life of Rilke

Peter Huchel, The Garden of Theophrastus and other poems, translated by Michael Hamburger

Juvenal, Sixteen Satires Upon the Ancient Harlot, translated by Steven Robinson

Jean de La Ceppède, Theorems: LXX Sonnets, translated by Keith Bosley

Giacomo Leopardi, Moral Tales, translated by Patrick Creagh

Wyndham Lewis, Self-Condemned, afterword by Rowland Smith

Katherine Mansfield, The Aloe with Prelude, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan

Ian McMillan, Now It Can Be Told

Christoph Meckel, The Figure on the Boundary Line, translated by Brian Harris, Margaret Woodruff and Christopher Middleton

George Meredith, Selected Poems, edited by Keith Hanley

Christopher Middleton, 111 Poems

Christopher Middleton, The Pursuit of the Kingfisher and Other Essays

Adolf Muschg, The Blue Man and Other Stories, translated by Marlis Zeller Cambon and Michael Hamburger

Idris Parry, Hand to Mouth and Other Essays

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, translated by Stuart Hood

Michael Schmidt (ed), Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding

C.H. Sisson, Anglican Essays

C.H. Sisson (tr), The Song of Roland

George Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage: a history of Jane Austen’s family

Daniel Weissbort, Modern Poetry in Translation: an annual survey