Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) first appeared on Carcanet’s list in 1975 with Growing Points: new poems, having been published previously by André Deutsch and Macmillan. Her first collection, Poems (Fantasy Press, 1953) brought her to Robert Conquest’s attention, and he included her as the only woman in his 1956 anthology which launched ‘The Movement’. She gained a very wide readership over the years. A resident of Oxford almost all of her life, a practising and troubled Catholic, she devoted herself to her writing, living frugally in rented rooms. Her mental and physical frailty was a concern to her small but constant circle of friends. Her obituarist in The Guardian remarked on her rarely missing a new production of Shakespeare at Stratford; ‘a connoisseur of ice-cream, she was a regular at the Häagen-Daz’s icecream parlour. So avid was her filmgoing that her local cinema, in Walton Street, was rumoured to have given her a free pass for life.’1
Oxford
11 January 1984, 1.20 a.m.!
Dear Mike,
This is just a follow-up from my last. It is to raise a literary, critical question. I notice how often you use words like ‘civic’, ‘responsibility’ and so on when you are evaluating poetry or individual poems. I take it that you are judging in a moral sense; the poem is written by an ‘act of will’, a poet is not to be thought of as the poet but a human being who makes certain choices when he writes. I know this is a gross oversimplification because all sorts of other forces are engaged, primarily the imagination. Well, I wouldn’t question any of this unless I thought something rather large seems to be being left out. No one, I take it, believes any longer in art for art’s sake or art for beauty’s sake. If these didn’t die forever in the 1890s, then the worst Georgians and the publication of The Waste Land very neatly buried them. But, poetry elevates and pleases. Surely you would not quarrel with the sheer zest of, say, Keats’s Nightingale or Hopkins’s Spring or the great heights of Tintern Abbey or Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Pleasure is the bait, the rest comes when it has been swallowed. I really would be most grateful if you, when and only when you have time, would clear my mind a little about all this.
You have seen the hour, my small hours! I went for tests to the consultant today and had a rather unsuccessful time when they tried to get a specimen of my blood. My veins are tiny and I always come away with bruised arms! I have to have a Cardiogram and Cephalogram and an ex-ray of my head. I am literally having my brain and heart examined. I have a book to review for the D[aily] Telegraph and The Tablet want to print my poems more often, I had a very pleasant letter from the Editor. I do hope you are all well and safely back after a lovely time.
Love, Elizabeth
Manchester
19 January 1984
Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your letter. I reply in tremendous haste since the pressure here is unrelenting.
You may remember that some time ago in PN Review we published a translation of Valéry by G.S. Fraser. It was his poem called ‘The Young Fate’.2 He had given up writing poetry and, when the First World War came, he was asked to write a poem to help the French cause, as it were. He wrote a poem in which there was no allusion to contemporary events, to the French nation, to French ambitions or realities. However, it was a poem which used every resource of the French language. It proved that the French language was the supreme literary tool that it is simply by example. It strikes me that this is the highest possible form of civic poetry. It celebrates language which is our only common possession, it extends, cleans and strengthens it. There are other forms of civicism which I also like in poetry (as should be evident from our list).
You may say that I am defining the term so widely that it has no meaning at all. But I think it does have meaning. Especially if it is taken in reference to the way in which the language is employed – as a common language – it is the only word I can think of to define the responsible writer. Poetry is, as David Jones said, our one intransitive act, the one act we perform (I suppose other forms of art fall into this category) in which we do not expect to have a result in action – it is not a cause of an effect or a means to an end.3 It is an end in itself. But it exists in the language and for it, and the more you reflect on language as our common possession (not a fluid or democratic element, as the French critics and new philologists would have us believe), the more I think you will see what I mean when I use the word. It would be silly for any poet to write deliberately ‘civic’ poetry in a cruder sense. In fact, civicism is not an end but one of the many contributing means in a writer.
I am very sorry indeed to learn you have been unwell again and hope that 1984 will be the year in which your health levels off! It would be nice to have you working to the full and not having these blackouts any more.
I am not keen to read manuscript poems en masse again if I can help it. That is why I very much hope it will be possible for you to continue to have poems typed. If it is impossible, however, I will accept manuscript poems, but you must appreciate how much longer it takes me to read them! I do feel that it is best for me to see as much of your work as possible since there is so much of it and I am always afraid that you will unvalue your better poems and over-value your most recently written ones! I always feel that we should publish a book by you every month so as not to miss the poems which get overlooked as you move on at such speed!
The question of a Collected Poems to coincide with 1986 I will bear in mind.4 It will depend to some extent on the sales of the Selected and to an even greater extent, on the success or otherwise of our large rash of Collected Poems coming out this year. If the H.D., Sisson and Hamburger (not to mention the Mina Loy) come unstuck, we will be so much the poorer that I do not think we will risk [a] Collected again for some time! I know you are a different category altogether, but these books will give us some indication.
With love from us all,
Michael
P.S. Charles was delighted with your message!
Oxford
24 January 1984
Why red? The pen nearest to me.
Dear Mike,
Thank you for your lovely, long letter. It was so good of you to reply to my critical points at once. How I wish we could talk about them. I think I do know what you mean, about language, and in view of the dire clichés etc. that are spoken in it now, I feel how very much each language in each country needs to be purified by every living line of poetry. Steiner has much to say of this in After Babel.5
Yes, poetry is an end in itself. I think that, perhaps very rarely, it can move to action but, as a rule, it does not but doesn’t it civilise also? I think that’s important.
I will give you a very lofty analogy for poetry; it is like the Eucharist, words are spoken, a simple element is offered and the words transform that element. I think D. Jones would go along with this.6
And, yes, the poet is a highly responsible person. He, by his own talent, is responsible both to his language and to the poetry of the past for cleansing and making new our common tongue (I speak of English). Your Valéry was a perfect example of ‘civic’ verse.
Please, Mike, do not over-work. It is important for you, your family and all of us to keep well. It is good of you to ask after my confounded health. I’ve been having neurological tests at the old Radcliffe, but I’ve also been having more blackouts.
But I am working furiously…
(Continued later)
I have the results of tests – brain X-ray, electroencephalogram
and electrocardiograph on St Valentine’s day. I rather dread this.
I shall have a few typed poems soon and more to come.
A great piece of news came a couple of days ago. Puffin want to do a Quintet of Poets which means children’s poems from Ted Hughes, Causley, John Fuller, John Walsh (?) and me.7 Isn’t it exciting? It also means I can earn a bit of much-needed money.
Try this childhood joke on Charles. Ask him to say to his sister – ‘Is a bell necessary on a bicycle?’!
And much love to all of you,
Elizabeth
*
A poet finding her way into poetry as an undergraduate in the 1980s wrote, ‘Jennings was always the “one” female poet conjured by the “canon” to have even existed in Britain in the 1950s (aside from Plath)’. I was at Oxford in the late 1960s and this was not the case then. At Oxford the first poet of any sex I met was Anne Ridler. There was Elizabeth, certainly, whom I met in my early weeks (my partner gave me a book of her poems and I went to cadge her autograph, the beginning of a long friendship). But there was also the scholarly, hedonistic, eccentric Sally Purcell; and E.J. Scovell, and on Boar’s Hill Elizabeth Daryush. Many others came to read for the Poetry Society, some at my invitation – Stevie Smith, Rosemary Tonks, Kathleen Raine and Anne Stevenson; there was Ruth Pitter, too, and Patricia Beer, and Elaine Feinstein who – like Muriel Spark – had been a significant editor. And Denise Levertov who abandoned the English. Plath was a prevailing absence, and other substantial Americans – Adrienne Rich in particular, even then – cast shadows. These are poets we still remember, more than many of their male contemporaries. Ruth Fainlight survives with her readership, and Fleur Adcock. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Frances Bellerby were of an earlier generation. In the darker past loomed Charlotte Mew, a favourite of Elizabeth’s, and Edith Sitwell for whom she had a soft spot.
In my four years at Oxford I used to visit Elizabeth almost every week, sit with her for an hour taking tea and listening to her problems and her poems. She read her poems down the phone to Dame Veronica Wedgwood, one of her most devoted friends, and gave them one or two or occasionally three stars in response to her listener’s response. She wrote copiously in lined foolscap notebooks. She wrote in them from back to front and, after Growing Points, when she felt a new book was due she would give me twenty or thirty of these books to sort through, select from and type up the poems. This I did, and sometimes I made free with her never entirely consistent punctuation, tampered with the diction and even cut stanzas where they seemed to be weak. As the years passed, the gleanings of good work from the notebooks became more and more sparse.
In an obituary, I wrote:
She compared making poems to the practice of prayer, which reconciles an individual with the world outside. Self is subsumed in a larger stability. ‘Each brings an island in his heart to square / With what he finds, and all is something strange / And most expected.’ Prayer and poetry also risk the terrifying world of shadows. In a poem on Rembrandt’s late self-portraits she implicates herself: ‘To paint’s to breathe / And all the darknesses are dared.’ It was intensely exciting for me when a fine poem managed to burst free of the undergrowth of difficult handwriting and repetitive tropes (seasons, sleeplessness, remote love) to dazzle eye and ear.
At the end of the obituary I recalled her investiture:
It was her habit in later years to wear plimsolls, socks, a woollen skirt, a knitted sweater and, in the street, a knitted hat. Before she went to the Palace to receive her CBE in 1992, friends urged her to dress appropriately. She reassured us: she had bought new socks, a new skirt, a new jumper. Also, new plimsolls. A week or so after the investiture she joined me for lunch at Rules (her choice, she had always wanted to go there). She came in carrying six plastic bags and wearing the outfit she had worn to the Palace. The maître d’ had to be reassured: this was a great poet. A headline in The Times described her as ‘the bag-lady of the sonnets’. The effect was cruel, because to herself she never seemed eccentric, difficult, unusual. Out of confusion, anguish and pain she had drawn a humane, consoling body of poetry that will remain popular for generations. What could be more normal?
John Ash, The Branching Stairs
John Ashbery, A Wave
Jean-Louis Baghio’o, The Blue Flame-Tree, translated by Stephen Romer, afterword by Maryse Condé
Joachim du Bellay, The Regrets, translated by C.H. Sisson
Alison Brackenbury, Breaking Ground and Other Poems
Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon
Dino Buzzati, Restless Nights: selected stories, translated by Lawrence Venuti
William Cowper, Selected Poems, edited by Nick Rhodes
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Collected Poems 1912-1944, edited by Louis Martz
Paul Durcan, Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela
Ford Madox Ford, A Call, afterword by C.H. Sisson
Natalia Ginzburg, Family Sayings, translated by D.M. Low
Desmond Graham, The Truth of War: Owen, Blunden, and Rosenberg
John Gray, Park: A Fantastic Story, afterword by Philip Healy
Michael Hamburger, Collected Poems, 1941-1983
Christopher Hewitt, The Living Curve: Letters to W.J. Strachan
1929-1979, foreword by William Anderson
Peter Hoyle, The Man in the Iron Mask
R. C. Hutchinson, The Quixotes and Other Stories, edited by Robert Green
Ben Jonson, Epigrams and The Forest, edited by Richard Dutton
Dennis Keene, Universe and Other Poems
Karl Kraus, In These Great Times, translated by Harry Zohn
Frank Kuppner, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty
John Masefield, Letters to Margaret Bridges 1915–1919, edited by Donald Stanford
John Masefield, Selected Poems, edited by Donald Stanford
Sir Walter Ralegh, Selected Writings, edited by Gerald Hammond
Gareth Reeves, Real Stories
Laura Riding, A Trojan Ending, afterword by Laura (Riding) Jackson
Christina Rossetti, Selected Poems, edited by C.H. Sisson
Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl and Equal Danger, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver; Adrienne Foulke
C.H. Sisson, Collected Poems
Iain Crichton Smith, The Exiles
Botho Strauss, Tumult, translated by Michael Hulse
Georg Trakl, Selected Poems and Letters, edited by Frank Graziano, translated by Michael Hamburger et al
Malachi Whitaker, The Crystal Fountain and Other Stories, edited by
Joan Hart