2006

Alastair Fowler (b. 1930) graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1952 and went to Oxford to study for his further degrees. MNS relished the essay Fowler submitted for PN Review about the Oxford tutorial system: ‘I ran into abrasive banter, which put me off the stride I hadn’t yet got into. The Merton men would resent being “farmed out” to a Scot scarcely older than themselves, who had no teaching room in college. I held tutorials in our tiny attic flat at 2A Church Walk, with nappies steaming away. Pupils would enter panting, “Do you have much trouble with the altitude up here, sir?” […] A congenial tutorial allowed profoundly satisfying intellectual enquiry. […] After fifteen years of tutorials, I was ready, and yet reluctant, to leave for a chair at Edinburgh, city of lectures.’1 Fowler was Regius Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh 1972–84, and published several volumes of poetry.

FROM ALASTAIR FOWLER

Edinburgh

2 February 2006


Dear Michael,


I’ve been enjoying PNR 167. That was a good obituary of Robert Woof.2 A sweet man. He was kind to me when I went to Pembroke in 1952, introducing me to the Johnson Society, etc. I’m sorry I lost touch with him later when I moved to Queen’s.

      You’re right in my view to be dubious about the Google deal.3 It will in the end be bad for academic book publishing, which is already very sick. As for academic authors, universities are all too quick to sign away their rights. The committee of vice-chancellors even tried to chisel authors out of their photocopying royalties. That 200 million isn’t all that much, either, when you divide it among the universities concerned.

      The appreciation of Derry Jeffares started off many memories of him.4 It was his tutorial on Paradise Lost in 1950 that first got me seriously interested in Milton’s style. A strange man, of many gifts. Choosing houses with a pendulum wasn’t the only paranormal practice he went in for. If you went to visit Derry and his wife you’d be liable to find them waiting with cold remedies, having dowsed the problem at long distance. And did you know about his passion for cars? He had an arrangement with a garage in Fife, to stand in as a driver (complete with uniform) and pick up people from the airport. But Derry is too large a topic for a letter.


With best wishes for 2006,
Yours ever
Alastair


FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

5 April 2006


Dear Alastair,


I wonder if you are going back to Pembroke for the Thomas Gray celebrations? I know Brian Cox is going to be there.

      My scheme for saving academic scholarship is to establish a proper means for publishing on the web scholarly editions of letters and manuscript trails. The AHRB awarded me an ‘A’ on my big proposal but found no funds to back it. So the revolution has been delayed!

      I used to know Derry Jeffares quite well, visiting him first in Leeds and then in Scotland. Unfortunately my relations with him were soured when I backed the intolerable Ian Hamilton Finlay in some of his battles.5 I also soured a warm relationship with Lord Balfour, a really kindly and good man.6 I did not know about Derry’s passion for cars! I loved his wife and her benign witchcraft.


All the very best,
Yours ever
Michael


FROM ALASTAIR FOWLER

Edinburgh

13 April 2006


Dear Michael,


No, I’ll give the Gray celebrations a miss. My connections with Pembroke and Queen’s have become more tenuous than with Brasenose. Incidentally, did you see the Scotsman photograph of Brian Cox mooning the spectators in New York?7 A very different role from that of Lear.

      AHRB has a way of withholding funds. Leverhulme might be a better bet. How would your scheme recompense the libraries? As things are at present, libraries have some control, although that may go when the Microsoft-Harvard scheme goes through. But a dark straw in the wind is the peanut dust that comes from the USA for photocopying of one’s books and articles. With the abandonment of royalties, this means that earnings from publication approach zero. Indeed my last book, Renaissance Realism, cost me about £4,000 in reproduction rights, of which OUP paid only £250.

      Yes, Finlay caused a lot of strife with his psychotic culture war. I too supported him, and in return he woke me up at dawn with an obscene phone call. My crime was membership of the SAC. I have come to think that the Arts Councils should have no direct dealings at all with artists and writers. They could do more by being unseen angels. De Marco was another who gave the long-suffering SAC awful grief.8 […] Balfour was a real saint – besides being the brightest man in the whole outfit.


All best,
Yours ever,
Alastair


*


Alastair Fowler, having been a tutor at Oxford, expressed in his PN Review essay precisely what constituted a good tutorial. It is not unlike what constitutes a good editorial session, in which the editor likes the work under review and is keen to make it better or understand it more deeply.

      What Professor Fowler says about Ian Hamilton Finlay is also pertinent: Finlay was the extreme form of the artist as arrogant beggar, persuaded of his superiority, his integrity, and most of all, his entitlement. Every pound of public or private funding he received he translated into an affront, always performing his role as though he were a radical at war with the system. Like any extremist he knew that, eventually, his patron, benefactor, friend, would be unable to follow him further into his private arguments; as soon as an ally said ‘no further’, he became an object of denigration and attack. I went a long way with him, lost a number of valued friends, and in the end realised how he worked and how I had been used. His vendettas were, as Professor Fowler makes clear, cheap and self-degrading. My participation in the Battle of Little Sparta was immortalised in a PN Review supplement and Finlay was a prominent presence in the magazine in the 1980s, though he only contributed twice: some ‘detached sentences on gardening in the manner of Shenstone’ and an issue cover.

      The restrained obituary of Finlay in PNR 169 (May–June 2006) notes, ‘long-time readers will remember the PN Review supplement dedicated to the “Battle of Little Sparta”, and the virulent attacks the poet later mounted against the journal and its editor in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Finlay’s installations remain on display at Tate Britain and at the Serpentine Gallery, and his vision and collaborations survive at “Little Sparta”, open to the public during the summer months.’ It hardly hints at the amount of trouble he caused, or the degree of malicious rancour with which he pursued us.


NOTES


  1. Alastair Fowler, ‘Tutorials’, PN Review 171 (September– October 2006).
  2. PN Review 167 (January–February 2006) carried a brief appreciation of the scholar and curator Robert Woof (1931– 2005), the first Director of the Wordsworth Trust .
  3. The News & Notes section of PN Review 167 commented: ‘Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford, the New York Public Library and Oxford University have signed agreements with the search engine Google to create searchable digital copies of their library collections. This will entail Google scanning fifteen million books from the five leading research libraries. Supporters of the controversial project believe it will help to preserve academic material and make it accessible to the world. However, many authors and publishers protest that it violates copyright law; Google was sued in September by a group of authors, and in October by five major publishers.’
  4. Alasdair Macrae’s ‘Professor Derry Jeffares: an appreciation’, vividly evokes the Yeats scholar and ‘kingmaker’ of academic English departments A.N. Jeffares (1920–2005). Macrae wrote: ‘I talked to Seamus Heaney about the gap left by his death, to which Heaney replied: “It is not a gap. The wind has stopped blowing.”’
  5. Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), the Scottish poet, writer and garden designer who was known for his combative stance towards anyone he identified with the Establishment, was in frequent correspondence with MNS in the 1980s. Despite PN Review’s championship of I.H.F.’s cause in ‘The Battle of Little Sparta’ (see PNR 32 in particular) and the editorial in PN Review 62 (July–August 1988) setting out the elements of the controversy over his work Osso in France with clear sympathy (‘He is in a sense our greatest Naive, for despite the sophistication of his works, their impeccable finish, his wide learning, his verbal-visual puns and startling juxtapositions, his art is simple despite its scale, with the inexhaustible simplicity of its joyful convictions, its optimism and its sense of truth’), Finlay wrote public denigrations of the journal and its editor.
  6. Lord Balfour of Burleigh (b. 1927) was Chair of the Scottish Arts Council 1971–80, after which he became Chair of the Edinburgh Book Festival, while serving as the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Scotland 1977–91.
  7. A confusion over Coxes here: MNS was referring to Professor C.B. Cox, and Fowler to the Scottish actor Brian Cox, who played King Lear at the National Theatre.
  8. Richard De Marco (b. 1930) is a Scottish artist and promoter of the visual and theatrical arts, with a particular interest in the European avant-garde.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      Iain Bamforth, The Good European: essays and arguments

      Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack, edited by Daniela Caselli

      Caroline Bird, Trouble Came to the Turnip

      Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, edited by Alice Quinn

      Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End of

      J. Edward Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground

      Linda Chase, Extended Family

      John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, edited by Tim Chilcott, illustrations by Carry Akroyd

      Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse & Articulate Energy

      Greg Delanty, Collected Poems 1986-2006

      Mark Ford (ed), New York Poets II: an anthlogy

      Louise Glück, Averno

      Lorna Goodison, Goldengrove: new and selected poems

      Robert Graves, King Jesus & My Head! My Head!, edited by Robert A. Davis

      Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend & The Reader Over Your Shoulder

      Robert Gray, Nameless Earth

      Marilyn Hacker, Essays on Departure: new and selected poems

      1980–2005

      Horace, Odes, translated by Len Krisak

      Gabriel Josipovici, Everything Passes

      Gabriel Josipovici, The Singer on the Shore: essays 1991–2004

      Marion Kaplan, The Portuguese: the land and its people

      Thomas Kinsella, Marginal Economy

      Thomas Kinsella, Readings in Poetry

      Karen Leeder (ed), After Brecht: A Celebration

      Grevel Lindop, Playing with Fire

      Andrew McNeillie, Slower

      Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard, translated by Elizabeth Winslow

      Mervyn Morris, I Been There, Sort Of: new and selected poems

      Les Murray, The Biplane Houses

      Togara Muzanenhamo, Spirit Brides

      Mary O’Malley, A Perfect V

      Frederic Raphael, Cuts and Bruises: Personal Terms III

      Peter Sansom, The Last Place on Earth

      Joachim Sartorius, Ice Memory: selected poems, edited by Richard

      Dove

      Charles Tomlinson, Cracks in the Universe

      Vernon Watkins, New Selected Poems, edited by Richard Ramsbotham

      Robert Wells, The Day and Other Poems

      Clive Wilmer, The Mystery of Things

      Judith Willson (ed), Out of My Borrowed Books: poems by Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind and Amy Levy