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“Hugo Williams is a very good poet. But we must not say so. Why not? Because he writes about being a child, about being the son of a film star (Hugh begat Hugo), and about having once (and always) been to a prep school and public school. Because he is not difficult to understand, and is enjoyable to read. And funny.”

I used to publish his poems, and when I did, this phobic mantra, this imprecation, with its reference to Berryman’s complaint about the boringness of human life (“must not say so”), would enter my head. I was overdoing it, of course; there was no need for this. His poems were never to excite the indignation that savants would direct at the rude shocks, humour and didacticism wrought by popular Clive James and by the witch Pitt-Kethley: the savants would think of them in such terms, and insist that their pentameters were defective and their jokes not funny. About these poets too I felt protective, and would recite my mantra. But Williams was spared the metrical objection, and the other one as well. And it may be that I was imagining or exaggerating a right-thinking disapproval of what he was up to, that I was rescuing a Peter Pan who wasn’t in fact being burnt at the stake. In any case, his poetry isn’t the easy ride that the mantra might suggest. It is easier to celebrate, and to feel protective about, than it is to discuss.

It’s entirely evident that much of it is preoccupied with what it is to have been the son of his gilded parents, to belong to a world of mirrors, good looks, gardenias, breakfasts in France, a nanny and a governess, which is like being both enjoyable and funny. After the war, according to the poems, came money troubles and comparatively hard times for Hugh Williams, who having been wounded in the fighting, I presume, would limp to the bus stop to
attend auditions in London (as a Thirties star he’d been above that), and then miss the bus and be watched by the neighbours and by a horrified Hugo from his bedroom window. Into all this he peers as into a mirror. He is a Narcissus whose face is his family and their times together: “The past stretches ahead, into which we stare.” There’s a lot of staring in the poetry, and a lot to stare at. He pores over his father’s clothes and airs, and gets going on his own. Soon we are in the Sixties:

I carried on that way
till my father died
and allowed me to grow my hair.
I didn’t want to any more.

Some of his finest poems are more or less uncomplicated retrospects of this past - so far as such looks can ever be uncomplicated. Several of his poems are not. A doubling, or rather multiplying, of himself occurs. This is a conscious procedure on his part, and it’s examined in a poem whose opening line is Racinian in its energy, plangency and concentration: “God give me strength to live a double life.” Duality interests him, and his interests may originate, as the phenomena of psychic divison are often thought to do, in the pains and uncertainties of childhood, and the roles that childhood can seek to play - roles that seem to have been accentuated, in this case, by the presence on the stage of an actor father. He writes as his older self, and as his father, and the day came when a mixed creature walked on in the shape of Sonny Jim, a catatonic, invalid, aerial, mismated clown alter. Jim takes his cue from an alleged cereal ad:

High o’er the fence leaps Sunny Jim
Force is the food that raises him.

Sonny Jim’s leaps, as executed by Hugo Williams with a change of spelling that filialises him, can sometimes be hard to follow, and they
bring to mind the surrealistic, as many of the recollections of his youth (Jim is a grown-up) definitely do not. The funny-fearful poem about growing not so much up as old and infirm, a version of Larkin’s ‘Old Fools’ and just as good, leans towards Jim’s adult antics, but doesn’t, as I read it, cross over into surrealism. It begins:
“When I grow up I want to have a bad leg”.

This emphasis on multiple personality has to be kept under control, though, if it isn’t to tangle with what those who admire his work generally want to say on the subject. What they want to say is that it is not complicated, that it is bell-like, clear, clean, lucid and direct. It has “attack”. Many of his poems might seem to be entailed by their opening lines, and almost always manage to live up to them. Many of his lines have the air of performative utterances, such as “God give me strength”, or:

Now that I am cold
Now that I look like him
I put on this warm grey suit of wool
In sympathy with my father.

His is a directness which takes in its stride various carefully-designed effects of laid-back casualness - such as the phrase “for some reason”, used more than once.
 
This directness, naturalness, unencumberedness, tends to be present, though not invariably or unrelievedly, in most of what he does. Such qualities might indicate that he lisped in numbers, that he started young, that he embarked at a young age on the eternal youth of his subject-matter, and so he did. On the subject of his early start there’s a masterly maternal insight that was turned, as so much else was turned, into a poem. His mother asked if he was making dams as he played in the mud by a stream, or was he making poems about making dams. He is sometimes to be found making a poem about making the poem we are reading.

“I have put on a grotesque mask”, rings out neoclassically loud and clear in line one of such a poem, which explains that he has put on the mask in order “to write these lines”, and which proceeds to show him staring at himself in a mirror, by the light of a candle. It is a poem which some might assail for being one of his put-ons, for sticking out, as it eventually does, a tongue which declines to speak, for being an occasion for a poem, the props for one, rather than a poem, for delivering the conjuror’s cape and cane without the trick. That isn’t how it looks to me. It brings you into the writer’s head in the most dramatic way, and invites you to think about speech. This is not a Narcissus who has been struck dumb by self-love. Early in the poem Hugo Williams writes:

I hold up my head
like one of those Chinese lanterns
hollowed out of a pumpkin,
swinging from a broom.

The poem is in his collection of 1994, Dock Leaves, and this passage returns us to an earlier poem where the boy bursts in on his sleeping father

with a head hollowed out of a turnip
swinging from a broom. There were cigarette burns
like bullet-holes in his pyjamas.
I saw his bad foot
sticking out from under the bedclothes
because he was ‘broke’
and I thought my father was dying.

The child’s slide from injury to bankrupcy and death is a characteristic effect. Meanwhile his father’s ghost walks, with the recurrence of that lantern head.
 
This piece is not offered as an academic consideration of Hugo Williams’s poetry. I have put on a benign mask in order to write these lines, which are an expression of gratitude for the
pleasure I took in publishing it, and which should end with a word of welcome for the collection of his journalistic pieces due out this autumn. In none of them does the tongue do much wagging on the subject of his poems; these are the “adventures of a poet” who goes off to poetry readings, meets deadlines and gets into scrapes; in one or two of the pieces he might seem to be auditioning for the title role in some play about an endearing Soho character. But there’s a great deal - the comic flow and family mentions, for instance - that the readers of his verse will be grateful for. “I have been smiling and looking innocent”, he writes, “ever since I was seven”. The role here is that of the juvenile star to whom, as it happens, a double life was once attributed:

Hush, hush, what could be worse,
Christopher Rabbi is having his nurse.