Transatlantic

I’m in London and jet-lag is nearly dispelled. James Byrne (see blog for June 1 of this year) met me at Heathrow, which was an enormous favor done to the bedraggled traveler weighed down with enough luggage to last him for the next six months. James presented me with a copy of the latest number of The Wolf, the magazine he edits. I’ve had a chance to read it since, and it probably is the best so far. James looks alert, fit and happy, off in a few days to Belgrade on a poetry mission. I look forward to seeing him again with his partner Sandeep Parmar who just received her degree and is a Mina Loy scholar, as well as a poet in her own right.

My host for the first night was the American poet Kathryn Maris (author of The Book of Jobs) at her attractive house on Warwick Avenue. Her two adorable children Mathias and Cosima kept us company while we exchanged news about friends in common, books, trips, plans. Poets in general are rather plain where looks are concerned, Kathryn being a great exception, with classical Mediterranean features of the sort that we imagine would have led Sappho to compose breathtaking verbal equivalents.

I have a temporary sublet down in Kennington, a flat belonging to friends of James’s. They are Anna Smaill a poet and poetry scholar from New Zealand and the novelist Carl Shuker. They’ll be in Japan for a month, which ought to give me the leisure to find something longer-term for my stay here. This is the first time I’ve lived in South London, but I always find working-class neighborhoods bracing. Nearby Walworth Road reminds me of Canal Street in Manhattan, lined with shops of every description, the clientele equally diverse—Asian, West Indian, Eastern European, and just plain old British. Anyway, it all feels like a homecoming, given that I’ve had more than a dozen stays in London since 1967. It isn’t always easy to explain a love for London to everyone: the standard plain brown brick, pierced by windows with white painted frames, the chimney pots, the prevalence of bizarre Victorian architecture, the turbulent gunmetal skies, the damp. But then my maternal Lahey grandfather was born in Liverpool, and on the paternal side there’s a Scottish great-grandfather, not to mention the first English Corns who came to Virginia in the 17th century. So perhaps it’s genetic, but in any case something there is in the gray, brown, and green of these isles that speaks to me.

Turning to the arts, you really feel that people read here. You can pick up a copy of the TLS or London Review of Books plus half a dozen literate newspapers (The Guardian a special favorite) at almost any newsstand; and bookshops are everywhere. The current TLS has several absorbing essays, beginning with a review of two new books about Mme. de Staël and Benjamin Constant. (These may have scooped a forthcoming biography of Mme. de Staël written by my friend Francine Duplessix Gray and soon to be published by Penguin.) Odd that there’s suddenly so much interest in this not terribly well-known figure. The review has it wrong, from a French standpoint: for the French Constant is the more important author; his brilliant récit Adolphe is still on the reading lists, whereas Mme. De Staël’s novel Corinne and De L’Allemagne are reserved for literary specialists. Granted, the book on Germany launched the vogue for Northern European Romanticism in France (I'm sure that's the explanation for Pierre Bayle's adoption of the pseudonym Stendhal), and there’s no question that she was important politically and as a literary-political salonniere. The review didn’t make the point that Constant (whose name seems ironic, given the facts) had already wooed and won a literary lioness before meeting Mme. De Staël. This was Mme. de Charrière a Low Countries noblewoman who married into the minor Swiss aristocracy and became an important figure in the later French Enlightenment. She published under the pseudonym of Zélide and is the subject of a lucidly written biography, The Porrtait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. (The book was recenty reissued with an introduction by Shirely Hazzard.) Scott, briefly Berenson’s secretary, was a figure on the London literary scene in the teens and 1920s; his first book, titled The Architecture of Humanism, discussed variants of neo-classical style in post-Renaissance Europe. Scott and the Berenson circle are the subject of an interesting biography by an acquaintance of mine, Richard Dunn; but not many people seem to have read it.

New subject: yesterday I had lunch with Samuel Shimon, author and editor of a magazine titled Banipal, which publishes Arab writers from the world over, some of them translated from Arabic, some from other languages. Samuel is riding the crest of the success of his autobiographical novel, published earlier this year and enjoying special success in France. Certainly his experience is unusual: born in Iraq to Christian parents, he became an expatriate at an early age and was, like Orwell, down and out in Paris, his ultimate ambition to get to the U.S.A. We sometimes forget the religious diversity of the Middle East. Not only are there Christians in Iraq there are (or used to be) Jews, Zoroastrians, and a strange sect known as Yazidis, whose hybrid doctrines draw from several sources. The Christian-Muslim divide in Lebanon is better known, but people don’t seem to realize that about 35% of Palestinians are Christians.

Anyway, Samuel was brimming over with enthusiasm and plans. Later this month there will be a tribute here in London to the Palestinian poet Darwish, with Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet who lives in Houston, Texas, and translates Darwish, as a special guest. I mentioned Fady’s Yale Younger Poets book The Earth in the Attic in an earlier blog, and it will be a pleasure to see him again. Samuel is also planning an evening of Arab poetry in New York City, at the Pomegranate Gallery in SoHo, for this coming October. He gave me the latest issue of Banipal, filled with good work, including an excerpt from the fiction of Lebanese author May Menassa—as it happens, the sister of the distinguished poet and novelist Vénus Khoury-Gata, who lives in Paris and publishes in French. The author photograph confirms the cliché that Lebanese women are particularly beautiful, Ms. Menassa in a mode different from her sister. I first met Vénus a decade ago at a French-language conference in Montréal, and then again in Paris three years back, when Marilyn Hacker brought me to have lunch at Vénus’s elegant flat in the 16e arrondissement.

I’m breaking the rule that blogs should be short, my only excuse the uprush of elation about being back in the swim here in London.

In London

This is being written in London where I’ll stay for a week until time to go to Spain for the course I’m teaching at Almàssera Vella. It’s been about forty years since London first swam into my ken (see the Keats Chapman-Homer sonnet), and there have been a dozen visits since, three of them long term. I broke up my Guggenheim year into two three-month installments here, one in 1986, the second in 1987. Those months fed a novel I began around that time, later published under the title Part of His Story (still in print with Mid-List Press if anyone is interested). Another long-term stay came in 2005-2006. Though it wasn’t the main motive for coming here (London enthusiast that I am, I don’t really need one), a course I taught then for the Poetry School, which added some variety and company during those months. I also taught a week in Devon for the Arvon Foundation, my partner for the course the poet Mimi Khalvati. Mimi is unmistakably among the top poets writing now in England, though I’m not sure she is well known in the U.S.A. Her recent book The Meanest Flower was a T.S. Eliot Prize nominee, along with Fiona Sampson’s The Book of Common Prayer, but for some reason neither of these books won.

I don’t usually dabble in bean-counting where gender or ethnic categories are concerned, but it does seem to an outsider that women poets in England don’t quite get a fair shake. Most of the poetry editors of magazines are men (exceptions including Fiona, for The Poetry Review, and Martha Kapos for the summer issue of Poetry London, but not one of the big-name publishers has a woman who edits poetry; and few of the small presses for poetry have women editors. How to explain that? There’s certainly no lack of editorial ability here, Fiona being a prime example. Furthermore, I get the distinct impression that the lion’s share of the poetry readership here consists of women. (On the other side, let it be said that Anne-Marie Fyfe presides over the Poetry Society and runs the most visible poetry reading series, the Coffee Poetry evenings at the Troubadour Café. How she does all that, appears at so many literary festivals in Britain and her native Ireland, and still manages to write first-rate poems is a mystery to which only she has the key.) But my point remains: considering how progressive the British literary scene is, why has it lagged behind in finding women poetry editors for the trade book houses? Not that it usually counts for much, but no woman has ever served as Laureate here, either. Apparently Carol Ann Duffy is close to being tapped these days, or closer than she was, now that she has broken off her relationship with Jackie Kay. It seems a woman living in a unconcealed relationship with another woman wouldn’t suit the public, no matter that Duffy is probably (along with Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell) among the most popular poets now publishing in the U.K.

This leads me to another curious fact. Although same-sex relations between consenting adults are perfectly legal here, and people of the same gender can marry, almost no openly gay poetry is published in Britain. Even Duffy’s lesbian poems are veiled, using the genderless “you” and other kinds of indirect expression typical of queer poetry during the years (what am I saying, centuries) when same-sex relations were taboo, not to mention illegal. Yes, there is James Fenton, but his love poems are all cast in the second person. The only really out-in-the open contemporary gay male poet I know of is Jeremy Reed, who twenty years ago used to be fairly well known but now has been pushed to the sidelines. And I’m sure there are younger gay poets, but they don’t seem to have acquired a wide audience yet. I hope I’m mistaken about this and that someone will correct an outsider’s view. The same goes for Ireland, as far as I know, despite the fact that some of their most famous novelists are gay—Colm Toibin and Jamie O’Neill, to be specific. And then apparently same-sex desire stops at the Scottish border, judging from the apparent absence of gay writing from that part of the island (Wait, though a resident in England now for many years, Duffy was born in Glasgow, so maybe she is the rule-proving exception.) Anyway, I wish someone could explain the weird and unnecessary reticence on the part of writers here insofar as gay experience is concerned. I thought the “No Sex, Please, We’re British” years were over. Even getting Boy George to fess up was apparently like wading through chilled tar.

I’m staying near the Barbican Centre in the City. I’m a fan of the City (as opposed to Westminster) because of its mysterious ancientness, its remnants of centuries of history, all the way back to bits of the original Roman wall built around tiny Lundinium. And yet City’s mostly passed up (excepting the Tower) by tourists, rabidly elbowing each other aside to see the changing of the guards or Big Ben. Finsbury seems to be the currently favored bohemian artist district, an easy walk from here. I just got back from a short expedition to Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, to pay respects to Blake and his wife Sophia, who are buried there, not far from Defoe and Bunyan. By the way, a couple of years ago Tracy Chevalier published a sensitive novel about the poet, or rather, a family that gets to know him. Title: Burning Bright. Recommended. I got acquainted with Tracy the last time I was living in London, when she was being talked about a lot for one of her novels The Girl with the Pearl Earring. There was a natural affinity based on, if nothing else, our respective fascination with Vermeer. Tracy’s an American, married to a U.K. citizen, and now a permanent resident here. Not to mention being a thoroughly likable person and a reader (obviously) of poetry. But then all the novelists I know read poetry, even those who don’t write it—which ought to help destroy the old cliché “Nobody reads poetry except other….”

Yesterday the stroll went in opposite direction, along Carthusian Street as far as the Charterhouse (the French for that would be La Chartreuse, as in the Stendhal novel). This is a tourist-free site because you don’t see much of the edifice from outside; only those attending Evening Prayer are allowed in, and, if you can take that in stride, the hidden courtyards and sanctuary are worth the detour.

From there I walked to the old Smithfield Market, a handsome Victorian limestone and cast-iron structure where, early mornings, meat is sold wholesale. It’s a venerable London fixture, built on the site of Bartholomew Fair (anyone read the Ben Jonson play of that name?), and was, traditionally, one of the roughest districts in London, as you might judge from the play. Walking through the market, you see commemorative plaques from several periods, one noting that William Wallace, the Scottish patriot, was drawn and quartered here early in the 14th century, his only crime having sought Scottish independence. Another plaque summarizes routine and extraordinary events that occurred at the market over the centuries. Those include “wife selling,” popular five hundred years ago. It’s explained that disaffected husbands used to bring their wives to Smithfield and sell their bodies; not for prostitution but as special viands. Unsuspecting wives were jumped, slaughtered, and carved up like veal—which sort of contextualizes Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. True, for us non-meat-eaters, the animals hanging on hooks embody a morality not at all defensible, either, but let that go.

I walked on to St. Bartholomew’s the Great, an older church than Westminster Abbey, similar in construction material (flint, limestone) to Southwark Cathedral; but less often visited. You can see it if you rerun that bit of nonsense Shakespeare in Love, but the movie doesn’t identify the church or attempt to explain what it’s doing in WS’s biography. An interesting fact for Americans is that during a period when the building was secularized and broken up into shops, young Benjamin Franklin worked as a printer’s devil there.

Restored in the 20th century, it was one of John Betjeman’s favorite churches, in fact, he lived in a little flat just opposite on Cloth Fair Street, as a blue marker will tell you if you look for it. Nowadays on the ground floor of his building, there’s a rather stylish pub bearing his name. During the hour of my walk, I saw Londoners engaging in their favorite after-workday occupation: hanging out at pubs, or in good weather spilling outside onto the pavement, pints of bitter in hand. Pub after pub and the same phenomenon. And the snuggeries all have such quaint names, more than half of them metaphorically decipherable as referring obliquely to sex.

I’m struck again by what a leafy-green city London is as compared to other world capitals. Parks everywhere, little squares, gardens, brick walls with elderflower peeping over them. Late spring is a good time to be here, when the leafage is mint-fresh and many shrubs (like elder) are in flower. It all feels very, very familiar now; and Wordsworth’s lines about the “meanest flower that blows” (Intimations Ode) keep coming to mind, with “thoughts too deep for tears” as I look back over my four decades of visiting this city.