Introduction

THE SCOTTISH POET W. S. Graham—Sydney Graham, but also “Troubleyouas Greyhim,” “Double Yes Gee,” and “Sadknee Graham” (he had a patella removed when he fell twenty feet onto concrete, but strangely the drunken accident only happened after the sobriquet), also via Jock (the generic name for a Scotsman) Graham, “Joke Grim,” and numerous other variants—was born a hundred years ago in 1918 and died in 1986. He led the kind of immemorially unworldly poet’s life that poetry, now tenured and professionalized, falls away from at its peril. “The poet or painter steers his life to maim // Himself somehow for the job,” is how Graham puts it in “The Thermal Stair.”

One of Graham’s most passionate and prominent supporters was Harold Pinter. “I first read a W. S. Graham poem in 1949,” he writes on the jacket of the Collected Poems. “It sent a shiver down my spine. Forty-five years later nothing has changed.” They are the oddest of pairings, but yet it makes fascinating sense. Both are their own creations. There is Pinter, liberator of undertones in—especially British—English, of sinister aggression and hatreds, and Graham, who dwells in pleasantness and eerie brusqueness, who talks to himself as I suspect no one, not even Yeats, has ever talked to himself, and who creates in words gossamer, almost theoretical attachments to the absent, the sleeping, the dead, the speechless. The reader. It is almost Jekyll and Hyde. But none the less persuasive for that.

Pinter puts in an appearance towards the end of the wonderful book The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W. S. Graham (edited by Michael and Margaret Snow), as an admirer of Graham’s work, as a public reader and supporter of it, and as a private patron. God knows Graham needed him, or needed such a figure; his life was one of the most poverty-stricken of any of the great twentieth-century British poets. First and foremost, the letters read as a chronicle of this poverty and its effect—and, indeed, lack of effect—on the man who so unquestioningly bore it. Who sought to avoid, if at all and for as long as possible, that demon “regular employment.” Maim and shame. Near the beginning we find Graham in Cornwall. It is 1943, and he is twenty-five. He has an ulcer and doesn’t have to serve: “It’s raining now on the roof. I’m living in a caravan a friend’s lent me in Cornwall, lonely and by the sea. I fish and gather mushrooms and write and cook.” He was to stay, under only slowly evolving circumstances, for over forty years. The caravan is referred to as “the wheelhouse” or “my poor arkvan.” A sheep’s head will make soup. Tea, left in the pot until it is stewed, likewise, though not in a good way. Finding a usable lemon on the beach rates a couple of mentions. “Soon I’ll be able to get seagulls’ eggs, wonderful for omelettes.” He tries “ferreting” to catch rabbits, but without much success. He writes to friends—often the painters John Minton or Bryan Wynter—to borrow money or to discuss the modalities of its repayment. “I am completely broke just now and the people I might borrow from are also broke.” The sums involved are often tiny, a few pounds or even shillings, and it is an indication of his poverty that he is sometimes driven to ask for them at some specified future date, to be certain that they will be spent on whatever thing he has in mind, often bills or medicine. (If they came any earlier, they would just be spent.) He seems always to be cheerful; he is, after all, at some level, living the sort of uncompromised life he wants. “I’m writing every day and the good weather’s begun and we have a goat.” That’s some sentence. To go to London or Scotland, he has to hitchhike. He is in want of razor blades. He asks friends for old boots and cast-off clothes. They move to a condemned coast-guard house on the rough north coast of Cornwall. He goes out with the fishermen sometimes, does occasional stints in bad weather in the lighthouse at Gurnard’s Head nearby. “I measure out my life in paraffin gallons,” this T. S. Eliot–published poet writes in 1958, when he is forty and the author of five books. For fifteen years after The Nightfishing (1955), he published none. A visitor records: “We lived on flour-and-water pancakes cooked on a primus stove, and, when the paraffin was finished, over a driftwood fire. Sydney and Nessie [Dunsmuir, his wife] also used to collect limpets [mussels?] off the rocks and cook them, but only the cat would eat them, and even then not always.” Graham twice went to the States briefly to read or teach (“I am even homesick for England,” he wrote from there) and once to Canada. He visited Iceland in 1961 and Crete in 1964. (He seems to turn wherever he is into an island anyway.) In 1965, a friend offered them, rent-free, the use of a small cottage in the town of Madron outside Newquay. When Graham won a literary prize in 1970, he used it to get an indoor toilet installed. The Grahams ran eventually to a cat and a wireless (referred to as “the invention”). Despite increasing homesickness for Scotland, they remained in Madron until Graham’s death in 1986.

The poems seem to exist on the edge of many things: abstraction; mannerism; Scottishness; a whimsical, almost childish falsetto; a homemade philosophy of reading and communication. They were written by the sea’s edge in Cornwall, mostly at night and on a typewriter, and I fancy that these things show too: a slightly spooked sense of one’s own eccentric noise heading out into great expanses of space and time. “TAPTAP. Are you reading that taptap / I send out to you along / My element?” “This great abeyance,” to use Sylvia Plath’s term for the sea—though it would serve as well for night or a phantom readership—that was what Graham wrote into. Graham is a specialist, almost a technician of voice. His speech is never natural, and never quiet, but begins unexpectedly and continues unpredictably. In letters he starts, “Yes, it is myself,” or “It is indeed myself, Graham.” He proposed once to begin a radio broadcast of his poetry with “Can you hear me?” He makes other writers appear as though they did without grammar, without surprise, without intimacy (and instead took all sorts of other things for granted). As he puts it, he is the “flying translator, translating / English into English.” Douglas Dunn makes a clever point when he says, “Graham’s work as a whole creates the remarkable impression of a poet determined to be proseless.” It’s true. Perhaps one essay and then the letters. Nothing workaday, no compromise, no routine. There is no one like him. And he writes as though he had invented the essential miracle of poetry, those marks that speak to us from the page and continue to do so even after the poet’s death. The mixture of detachment and address, of generosity and caginess, the loss of the “fourth wall” of conventional illusionist poetry, the harping on the strange, depleted nature of what is transacted between writer and reader, all characterize Graham’s mature work. He is surprised into surprising speech.

I hold no special brief for the early poems of the 1940s and ’50s—they strike me as having been, for almost everyone then writing, two rank bad decades for poetry. Rather like John Berryman, his close contemporary in America, Graham started off writing a larded idiolect of poem-ese, derived from W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas. Similar strictures might be applied to almost all his writing before The Nightfishing, though, like a lot of poets, Graham continued to have a soft spot for his early production. I suspect that has more to do with the integrity of the person (an absence of vanity, paradoxically) and the value put upon the effort involved. It’s certainly not a surprise to find him speaking up for his early poems (Nessie records: “He said repeatedly to different people that earlier poems were not necessarily less good than later ones,” which already sounds a little on the habitual defensive). I wish I could support him, but I really can’t. I don’t care much for anything Graham wrote before he broke up his long lines and simplified or, better, purified his vocabulary. In letters, he skewers others (it was the time of the awful British New Romantics, but really, almost everything and everyone was awful then) for “a kind of artificial classicism” and “coldly exotic words like—Lattice alcoves aquatile wreathed Aeolian mezzanine,” but as far as I can see, Graham does much the same thing himself. So much on his own as he was, it took him a while to come into his own. There is often an air of random and heraldic proliferation about what he writes. I include just two early poems: “Listen. Put on Morning,” which is years ahead of anything else he was writing, and the boisterous “Remarkable Report by Some Poetic Agents,” flavored by its short sentences and a bubbling refrain. I hope I’ll be forgiven for not including things like, opened at random: “Equal to question and to allow to tread / In me the serpent rivers twin from two angels / Rivals over my head as nightfall magnified / From people, has of me a very dual fill: / I suffer cries, the snares and charmed faculties / Of captive rivers, hunted and chased replies / To fork under my eyelid’s natural heavens” (from “The Dual Privilege”). Even the celebrated long poem “The Nightfishing” (a direct contemporary of Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”), though some sort of tour de force, doesn’t have much to do with the poet that Graham became. It leaves me not exactly cold but lukewarm for long stretches, though I like Graham’s ambition for it: “if it made somebody seasick (a good unliterary measurement) I would be pleased.”

Along with night, with language and typewriter noise, with Scottish words and Cornish place-names, with painter friends and spectral readers, with his early memories of Greenock, a sugar port west of Glasgow, the sea takes up residence in Graham’s world. These things offer bearings, quiddity, scale. They accommodate the highly self-conscious movements of his poems, which may be memory-based (like “The Greenock Dialogues”) or fictional (like the sequences “Malcolm Mooney’s Land,” or “Ten Shots of Mister Simpson,” or “Clusters Travelling Out,” about Arctic exploration, a photographer, and communication among prisoners, respectively), or again consist almost entirely of his highly characteristic ontological maneuverings and jockeyings. The temptation to be abstract is repeatedly denied by the properties and settings of the poems. Even the writing about words and the writing and reading of them keeps something pragmatic and physical about it. Sometimes, it’s the beautiful Scots vocabulary—surely, unarguably a tenderer and more palpable speech than standard English, and in any case the language of Graham’s childhood and always produced with exquisite tact and timing and naturalness. Is there a word anywhere like “dreich”? Or “wheesht”? I rest my case. (As an “exile” in England and, though as Scottish as anyone, a nonparticipant in the sort of Scots supremacist renaissance of the midcentury, Graham was in a difficult position with the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid, who proposed Scots as a way station towards the ultimate grail of writing in Gaelic. Graham for his part disdained what he called the “plastic Scots” of some of his peers. I admire his language politics; a poet should be able to help himself to what he needs rather than take politically inspired direction from himself or, perhaps worse, from others.) The merging of Clydeside and Cornwall, a geographical rhyme from the Celtic peninsulas of the west of Britain, is one of the wonderful and irreducible oddities of Graham.

There is something rickety and moving about these poems of the 1960s and ’70s, even the most stodgy and naturalistic of them, that for me “The Nightfishing” doesn’t have. “The activity should happen,” he argues, talking, I think, about pleasure in reading, “because the words are in a certain order, rather than because the reality recollected by the writer is interesting.” A Graham poem gets to be as unconventionally nailed together as a Cornell box or a Calder mobile. He writes English like someone working with coat hangers, sometimes three nouns in unpredictable concatenation, sometimes three verbs, sometimes even—certainly, it feels like it—three prepositions. The very short two- or three-stress lines that are his most characteristic form contribute to this impression of language being bent:

Every (missing) comma has been thought about. More plainly trustworthy than Cummings, less learned and more dignified than Berryman, this shows what can yet be done with simple English. The poem is made of next to nothing and takes place in real time. It reminds me of what Graham says somewhere in the letters, that he most likes writing when there is nothing particular requiring to be said. And yet the poem offers the Joyce-ish coinage of “metrenome,” the Horatian paradox of “simple sophisticated” (“simplex munditiis”), the childish counting chant, the doubling of “shake,” the quiet surprises of “locked” and “falling,” the beautifully supplementary (past and present, active and passive) participial adjectives “whining” and “beaded” (the sort of thing one might hope to find in Heaney), and the humble and still somehow grandiose—annunciatory—last line. The whole thing is its own envoi, exquisitely self-making and self-born. It is characteristically wrapped up in itself, and yet its ultimate gesture is towards the reader.

Even in this “outofdoors” poem, with its oddly rackety title “[Nature Is Never Journalistic],” there is something fetchingly minute and what I would call interstitial. It is where Graham habitually exists in his poems. It is what allows him to say—he has been all round it—“It is not speaking” of the old tin can in the hedge, and to speak of it and perhaps for it. (It is his version of Whitman’s “Look for me under your bootsoles.”) Graham likes to cast himself nestling between and behind the words, “Why did you choose this place / For us to meet? Sit / With me between this word / And this, my furry queen. / Yet not mistake this / For the real thing.” In “Private Poem to Norman Macleod,” he writes: “My dear Norman, / I don’t think we will ever / See each other again / Except through the spaces / We make occur between / The words to each other.” At the end of the extraordinarily beautiful London poem “The Night City,” he writes: “Between the big buildings / I sat like a flea crouched / In the stopped works of a watch.” The “grammarsow,” the Cornish word for wood louse, and hence “word-louse” and all the rest of it, comes to occupy a crucial, evidential position in Graham’s world. These and other small deft creatures are the agency by which Graham obsessively imagines the benign burrowing movement of address in and out of language, through to the other side, the reader’s. “To put down something to take back.” “Soon to be seen from your side.” Coming to a theater near you.

There is a miniaturism and an intricacy in Graham that are simply lovely. The doughty sequences and stanzas and the even-patterned lines keep rolling in like breakers, but often broken and glittering within them is the stuff of memory and tininess—“My mother / Did those stairs a thousand times. / The top-floor door, my father’s name / Scrived by his own hand in brass. / We stand here scrived on the silence / Under the hissing stairhead gas” (from “The Greenock Dialogues”)—and we are back up in One Hope Street, Greenock (or maybe Wanhope Street, I’m sure it will have occurred to Graham), in the 1920s. My word “falsetto” was a not quite adequate attempt to suggest the tenderness, the maneuverability, the unconventional resourcefulness, and the sheer vulnerability of his writing. Here is a late poem from 1980, “The Fifth of May”:

Time and space—the history of the Clearances, maybe, the landscapes of “glens” and “rampart”—are, as it were, compressed or dissolved into this tiny piece. Again, it takes place in a slightly accelerated real time, moving through past (“I thought”) to present (“I find”) to a sort of sostenuto or slow motion (“my father’s long upperlip”), which is held at the end. It exhibits the most striking and lovely balance, between the two four-line sentences, between past and present, between large and small, between shaving and blushing. It is certainly more obvious in its charm than other poems of Graham’s, but I still find it impossible to resist. Repeatedly, incrementally, it defies expectation. There is a surprise (but seemingly not a calculation) in almost every line—“my brain,” “wee,” “I find,” “partisans,” “tender glen,” “my father’s long upperlip”—that seems to carry it effortlessly beyond itself, which again, I suppose, is poetry.

There is another class of Graham poem, which is, well, as they say in England, different class. He was anxious not to privilege them himself, but they escape his egalitarian tutelage. “Some of the poems,” he wrote, “for me have more emotion in them than others. The Bryan Wynter poem shatters me still although it is mine and I just made it up out of my head. Also the Hilton poem and my father’s poem. That maybe is to be expected. But that is the kind of poems they are. They are not better for loosening a tear from the eye.” Actually, I think they probably are, as I imagine Graham very well knew. “They” being “To Alexander Graham,” “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch,” and “Dear Bryan Wynter”:

And so on. One can understand Graham; to someone who makes things out of words, all one’s successful productions are, so to speak, equivalent. A still life is not less than a portrait or a landscape. They are all one’s children, and one loves them equally. The author, the poet is a democrat. Everything written about is ennobled, an island, a fishing expedition, a walk, a shave, a friend. But the costliest, and perhaps the hardest of these, is the friend. No less an authority than Ezra Pound—and in some ways no less unlikely an authority than Ezra Pound—knew that what matters in poetry is emotion. “What thou lovest well remains.” Graham said it too: “His [the poet’s or painter’s] job is Love / Imagined into words or paint to make / An object that will stand and will not move” (from “The Thermal Stair”). Except of course it does, in the transitive sense, “move.” This selection is unfair, unstatistical, perhaps indefensible. It is after the feeling in (mostly the later) Graham, “the subtle heartbreaking gestures,” he puts it elsewhere, “of speech woven and positioned so exactly in a poem—a very very few. And the striving to communicate the merest wink of torment or sudden drench of sweetness is as though one were talking to God”: there in the letters and elegies to friends (the painters Peter Lanyon and Wynter and Hilton, the blind poet John Heath-Stubbs, the American Norman Macleod), the tenderness to his wife, the burrowing, painstaking, tongue-tied communications, the fantasies of cold and smallness, the Scottish words and the local Cornish place-names, the sparse reconstructions of an equally sparse existence.

At many turns, the life of Graham reminds me of that of Malcolm Lowry, self-exiled to the sea and spectacular poverty. Lowry, admittedly, would occasionally receive remittances from his family, but in the 1940s and ’50s, his life in the squatter’s shack that he built for himself in Dollarton, British Columbia, resembled Graham’s, remote from metropolitan centers and “civilization,” a life lived often outdoors, among simple people, without money. Like Lowry, Graham was heavily influenced by Joyce—I never thought I’d come across anyone who would match Lowry for his Joyce-y puns, “too-loose Lowry-trek,” “Lowry’s and Penates,” “delowryum tremens,” but Graham does—and, like Lowry, he liked a drink. From time to time, I even have the ghostly sense I am reading Lowry: “Yes, somehow, Robin, assailed by our acquaintances and a friend here and there, and dodging the sometimes too-thoroughly felling arms of Bacchus and the baying slavering hounds of angst that howl from the hydrophobic dark and . . .” It was life in the wilderness, for the sake of writing. In Lowry’s case, it was crowned with brilliant triumph and tragedy, in Graham’s, a more bearable and sustained slower-burning success. Certainly, the letters abound in wonderful sentences, whether one run together on Tibet (“Tibet is a strange place and I read a lot about it”), or two split off about the United States (“The drink here is fantastic. What strange people”). “Nessie sits at breakfast and reads about the parson-bigamist and sends her love.” There are fine puns (“tritametre,” “grahami-phone”) and some grimmer—Grahamer—ones (“rust in pus”). Above all, in a group of letters to Hilton, now recognized as having been among the best postwar British painters, there are some extraordinary documents of friendship and solicitude. Hilton was an alcoholic and severely depressed in the mid-1960s when Graham met him, a tormented and tormenting man. In 1966, he was sent to prison for repeated drunk driving. Graham sent him an astonishingly, almost insanely boisterous letter. It seems like bad taste at first, but then one sees in the manic punning the utmost expression of personal devotion in mimicry, distraction, banter, affection:

Can you hold this paper with your manacled hands? Shall I parachute down to see you from the flying machine and say hello? Shall I start an underground tunnel here from Gulval? Shall I drop you a case of blondes? [. . .] What terrible drivel from so great a poet as me. Forgive me, Rog. The juices of dusk are flowing and the Autumn rooks are calling like breaking stones. Lift me your eyebrows. Count a hundred. Santa Claus is coming doon the chimney. Could you maybe get your various veins seen to and your divers wounds of your rough life and Daniel Druff and your hammer-claw toes? My fetishes are sweating in the darkened ward of my brain. I face the stretching Rogerless night. [. . .] O hogtied friend, keep the fort. I can’t think how to write properly to you yet. Be tolerant. Take it easy (How easy to say). Are you allowed to write back? If you can reply reply.

When Hilton died in 1975, Graham was given his watch. He wrote “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch.” Like a lot of Graham’s work, the inspiration is communication, is dialogue. First the poet speaks, then the watch:

The simplicity of this, the heartbreak, the jokey puns, the tenderness, the chugging “tch” sounds, the successive sentences all beginning with “He,” you might think of a Paul Klee drawing or something, but I don’t know of anything like this in poetry. It was—is (“Tenses are everywhere”)—the sound of W. S. Graham, 1918–1986.

INTRODUCTION