1991

Robert Wells (b. 1947) first approached Carcanet (‘Dear Sir, I enclose a book of poems to be considered for publication…’) in 1976, and his collection The Winter’s Task was published in 1977. He worked as an editor for Carcanet for a couple of years, as a forester on Exmoor and a teacher in Iran and Italy; he has lived in France for some years. Carcanet published his translations of Virgil’s Georgics (1982) and the Idylls of Theocritus (1988). Wells reported to MNS (16 September 1980), ‘Yesterday morning I finished the first draft of the Georgics, after a record day of 38 lines, and sat down on the floor at 1.30 a.m. with a bowl of tomato soup, to celebrate. […] How do you make water-nymphs speak believably?’ Carcanet issued his Collected Poems and Translations in 2009. He wrote to MNS in 1984 that ‘the two activities [writing poetry and translating] belong together and are finally the same […] A gesture against the predominant “look at me” view of poetry.’

FROM ROBERT WELLS

Blois

18 November 1991


Dear Michael,


I’ll keep my account of Cheltenham until we next meet, or at least my account of Hulse1 […]. After his three-hundred liner about the Gulf War, a lady in the audience lent across to me and intoned ‘It may be very well between the covers of a book, but it won’t do in Cheltenham.’ I didn’t think it would do anywhere.

      I enjoyed meeting Bo Carpelan – very direct and funny and engaging.2 He told a nice story about a critic who had accused him of writing ‘summer-cottage poetry’. ‘So I called him to ask why he say this horrible thing – but he was in his summer cottage.’ Among the famous young I briefly met Michael Hofmann, charming and highly intelligent.3 It would only be necessary to exchange a couple of words with him to discover that.

      But despite these encounters, and the courtesy of Lawrence Sail,4 who is also obviously a very effective organiser, a sort of fog wrapped me the moment I set foot on the station platform at Chelters (so Stephen Romer calls it)5 and didn’t lift until I left. England seemed a place of lost connections. Is that me or England or both? I talked and was talked at a lot. But not the conversations one hopes for. Too little sleep that week, too much drink, too much moving around.

      But good, nevertheless, to find myself in Charles Sisson’s sitting-room once again after it must be six or seven years, with an equally fine view of the bookcase and the Dorset hills.6 The same slightly baffled friendship still prevailing – and the soup ‘from the garden’ still as good. I wanted to talk poetry and he wanted to talk friends and family, but somewhere between the two we met. Nora entertained me just as if I were a wandering Telemachus – including morning tea in bed, something not countenanced in France.

      News from Blois: Benoit nearly six months old now, sitting up in his pram like the infant Hercules looking for serpents to strangle. Eating enormously, but a charming and easy baby, much smiling and laughter, especially for his mother and sister. He goes to the crèche now (which means I can get back to work) where he spends much of the day locked in the embrace of various French girls. Constance is nearly four. My notions that one day she might come hill-walking with me on the Pyrenees are never to be fulfilled I think. She keeps all her energies for the city, and would jump along the entire length of the Boulevard St Germain, if given the chance.

      I have begun a new set of poems, in free verse this time. Though rhyme will creep in the interstices.

      I thought Michael Longley’s new book wonderful.7 Years since I’ve liked something so much, or felt such sympathy with the tact and taste and principle which lies behind the writing. There are some great things too in the new Bunting: ‘Such syllables flicker out of grass’ and ‘Now we’ve no hope of going back’ above all, also the close of ‘Against the tricks of time’.

      What do you know about Bunting’s editor Richard Caddel? His poems are the only ones I take to at all in the recent PBS anthology. The only ones, that is, where the form has imposed some sense of selection.

      In PNR the best thing remains the Tredell interviews.8 Scruton, as usual, comes over as not believing anything he says and not disbelieving it either.9 An attitude, a mental disposition or predicament is there and sadly real, but the actual views are just there to fill the space appropriately. I enjoyed Davie on Niedecker.10 Why is it necessary to pay some shark of a bookdealer about £50 before one can get hold of her poems? Is there any possibility of Carcanet producing an edition?

      I have another publishing selection. One of the most difficult of all Collected Poems to get hold of is John Marston’s (as against the plays), and they’re much sought after too.11 A fine edition long out of print, the only one, was produced by the Liverpool U.P. (as no. 7 in their Liverpool English Texts and Studies) edited by Arnold Davenport. Could you buy the rights and reissue the book, waiving in this case Carcanet’s interdiction on scholarship – since a satirist above all needs notes? Marston is an extraordinary poet. Don’t write back and tell me to do a Fyfield.

      Re the Tredell interviews. I think he should do one with Martin Bernal, chiefly about his work Black Athena, of which the second volume has just been published.12 Have you heard of it? It’s a rewriting of the origins of Greek civilisation, as well as an account of ‘the fabrication of ancient Greece’ over the last three centuries. But the true subject is what the word Europe means, and the book reaches out beyond its scholarship in essential ways. Please pass the idea on to Tredell.

      Good to have David Wright’s versions of Caeiro (my favourite of Pessoa’s characters).13 Can we have some more?

      What news of you? Of the Friend? Of Children? Of Poetry? Of England? Be indiscreet. And what of this Canadian trip you dangled briefly before me? Is anything to come of that?


Lots of love,
Rob


P.S. I would like to order Padraic Fallon, Collected Poems, Laura Riding, Collected Poems. I owe Carcanet for Davie’s Pound book, but can’t find the invoice. Will you send another, please.

P.P.S. You are the only fixer I know. Don’t you think the ground should be laid for Yves Bonnefoy to get the Nobel Prize?14


*


When Robert Wells sent his first collection I was still in thrall to Edward Thomas, and Wells’s poems seemed built on similar ground, in both senses: a poetry rooted in landscape and profoundly alive to the pastoral tradition and to that tradition’s wider context. In Wells’s case the context was broadened out by his classical education, and his eventual translations of Virgil’s Georgics and Theocritus’s Idylls, first mooted soon after we met, are core elements in his small but resonant oeuvre. I hope Anglophone readers will not lose the ability to hear these strains for what they are. Wells and Sisson are at the very heart of Carcanet’s first decade and without them my editorial approach would have been quite different.

      Robert was never shy about saying what he liked in PN Review and among the books we published. His approbation was something I waited for in vain much of the time: he was not a diplomat but a reader, editor and friend.

      He was part of a trio of poets comprising Clive Wilmer and Dick Davis also, the three in the end all turning up on the Carcanet list, which also accommodated poets who meant a great deal to them in their formative years, Yvor Winters and Edgar Bowers in particular. They were also in debt to Thom Gunn who perhaps pointed them in Winters’s direction. These three Cambridge contemporaries styled themselves Il Movimento Inglese, the Italian title affirming a confident European and a renaissance affiliation.

      My first introductory anthology, Ten English Poets, featured all three members of the Movimento. I had hoped to draw older poets – Davie and Sisson in particular – behind the grouping, which was not entirely pastoral or entirely formal, but it was not to be. I commissioned Donald Davie to review the book, and was not prepared (I ought to have been) for what he produced for PNR 3. I titled it – unless he did – ‘On the Wrong Track’. He takes Wells in particular to task, and traces the source of his main complaint to Winters’s door, Winters whose chair at Stanford he himself occupied and whose work he has written about with great insight. Winters seemed to absolve Wells and some of his contemporaries whose work I admired from registering and responding to the counterchallenge of Ford and of Pound, whose prose and poetry so deeply inflect the poems of Sisson.

      For Davie, the primary issues are diction and anachronism, and he insists that certain changes or adjustments are total and inexorable. ‘The initial miscalculation about diction infects other dimensions of verse-writing,’ he says. His response to this anthology, and to Wells’s poems in particular, remained an open disagreement between us down the years. Re-reading Wells’s first book today, I realise that Davie reacted against the timelessness of the poems’ manner, their resistance to what to Wells would have been mere contingencies, and their place in a living, working landscape. I can see what all the objections might be, ‘marmoreal’ and the rest of it, but I am moved now as I was then by poems such as ‘Deus Loci’ on whom the poet waits and who is ‘withheld / Only by so slight a thing as his absence.’

      Odd how the old battles persist, and the old trenches have not quite vanished from memory’s map…


NOTES


  1. Michael Hulse (b. 1955), prolific translator from German, critic and poet, currently teaches poetry and comparative literature at the University of Warwick. He was a regular contributor of reports and reviews to PN Review through the 1980s–1990s.
  2. Bo Carpelan (1926–2011), Finnish poet and novelist. Carcanet published Axel (translated by David McDuff, 1989) a fictional account of the friendship between Carpelan’s great-uncle and the composer Jean Sibelius, and in 1993 three collections of his poetry under the title Homecoming, translated from the Finland-Swedish by David McDuff.
  3. Michael Hofmann (b. 1957) had published two collections of poetry with Faber and several translations from German at this point; he contributed poems, reviews and articles to PN Review in the 1980s and 1990s. Carcanet published two of his father Gert Hofmann’s novels, The Spectacle at the Tower (1985) and Our Conquest (1987), both translated from the German by Christopher Middleton.
  4. Lawrence Sail (b. 1942), poet, critic and anthologist, was programme director, 1991, and co-director, 1999, of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. He has been a regular contributor of reviews and reports to PN Review for forty years.
  5. Stephen Romer (b. 1957), poet and translator from French, has lived in France since 1981, and was Maître de Conférences at University of Tours. Carcanet published his Set Thy Love in Order: new and selected poems in 2017.
  6. MNS took Wells to meet C.H. Sisson in 1976, and in thanking him for this opportunity, Wells wrote:
    What will remain with me is a picture of him, walking across Somerton Moor, with his slightly stumbling gait, and the talkative attempt to be good company. […] He is a moving presence. A pre-Bagehot England alive in him. To meet him is to be put in touch with this. I came away with an awareness of having a lot to learn – and some sense of where to learn it. (17 August 1976)
    When Wells read with Sisson in Cambridge in 1982, he reported back to MNS:
    The new poems he read sound as if they have some fine stuff in them. Geoffrey Hill was at the reading. I heard him say to Charles at the pub afterwards: ‘You are a gloomy old bugger.’ […] Hill glowered through my reading. I noticed at the edge of my vision that he brightened when I got to Virgil. (28 October 1982)
    Telemachus searched for his father, Odysseus, in his wanderings.
  7. Michael Longley’s collection Gorse Fires was published by Cape in 1991 and won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Basil Bunting’s posthumous Uncollected Poems was published by OUP in 1991, edited by Richard Caddel, a poet and at that time Director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at Durham University.
  8. Nicolas Tredell (b. 1950), a prolific writer on literature, culture and film who taught at the University of Sussex, contributed a series of twenty-one interviews to PN Review, some of which were collected in Conversations with Critics (1995). He edited a special issue in 1986, PN Review 49, challenging the ‘new orthodoxy’ of post-structuralism, and in 1993 Carcanet published his study of the 1980s’ revolution in critical studies, The Critical Decade: culture in crisis.
  9. Roger Scruton (b. 1944), philosopher especially of aesthetics and political thought, contributed articles to PN Review in the 1980s; Carcanet published his novel Fortnight’s Anger in 1981, and four books on aesthetics. This interview was published in PN Review 81 (September–October 1991). Some Carcanet authors regretted the presence of such a conservative public figure on the list and in the pages of PN Review. Wells comments, ‘I’m sorry to find myself taking this callow swipe at Roger Scruton. You don’t have to be of one mind with Scruton on everything to feel, as I do now, respect and admiration for him.’
  10. Donald Davie, ‘Postmodernism and Lorine Niedeker’, PN Review 82 (November-December 1991).The Collected Works of Lorine Niedeker (1903–70) was eventually published by the University of California Press, edited by Jenny Penberthy, in 2002.
  11. John Marston (1576–1634), playwright, poet and satirist; the University of Leeds currently hosts an online project of editing his complete works. Carcanet did not take up Wells’s suggestion.
  12. Nor did Tredell interview Martin Bernal (1937–2013), whose Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization was published in three volumes in 1987, 1991, 2006.
  13. David Wright (1920–94) was born in Johannesburg and lived in England from the time he was 14, attending the Northampton School for the Deaf before studying at Oxford. He lived in Cumbria and spent time in Portugal. He was editor with Patrick Swift of X magazine, ‘discovering’ C.H. Sisson, who introduced him to MNS Carcanet first published his poetry in 1976, when he wrote to MNS, ‘To be in Carcanet now confers the same kind of cachet that Fabers had in the 30s and 40s’ (Letters to an Editor, no. 106). ‘Four Poems of Alberto Caeiro’ were published in PNR 81. His Poems and Versions (1992) includes translations of Pessoa.
  14. Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016): named to the Collège de France in 1981 to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Roland Barthes, Bonnefoy was the first poet honoured in this way since Paul Valéry, but he did not win the Nobel Prize. Carcanet published his New and Selected Poems, translated by John Naughton and Anthony Rudolf in 1996, and Poems (2017), of which Romer was co-editor and one of the translators.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      Sujata Bhatt, Monkey Shadows

      C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825

      Alison Brackenbury, Selected Poems

      Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination

      Mary Butts, With and Without Buttons, edited by Nathalie Blondel

      David Craig, King Cameron

      John Crowe-Ransom, Selected Poems

      Donald Davie, Studies in Ezra Pound: chronicle and polemic

      Paavo Haavikko, Selected Poems, translated by Anselm Hollo

      Donald Hall, The One Day and Poems 1947–1990

      Gabriel Josipovici, The Big Glass

      P.J. Kavanagh, Enchantment

      Mimi Khalvati, In White Ink

      Kenneth Koch, Selected Poems

      C.A. Lejeune, The C.A. Lejeune Film Reader, edited by Anthony Lejeune

      Grevel Lindop, A Prismatic Toy

      Bill Manhire, Milky Way Bar

      Jack Morpurgo, Master of None: an autobiography

      Les Murray, Collected Poems

      Les Murray, Dog Fox Field

      Hugh Nissenson, Tree of Life

      Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, edited by Donald Allen

      John Peck, The Poems and Translations of Hi Lo

      Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude, translated by Richard Zenith

      Dilys Powell, The Dilys Powell Film Reader, edited by Christopher

      Cook

      Neil Powell, True Colours

      James Reed (ed), Border Ballads: A Selection

      Edgell Rickword, Collected Poems, edited by Charles Hobday

      Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Selected Poems and Translations, edited by Clive Wilmer

      C.H. Sisson, Antidotes

      Meic Stephens (ed), The Bright Field: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Wales

      Raymond Tallis and Howard Robinson (eds), The Pursuit of Mind

      Javier Tomeo, The Coded Letter, translated by Anthony Edkins

      Andrew Waterman, In the Planetarium