Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

W.S. Graham: The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters, edited by Michael and Margaret Snow.  Manchester: Carcanet.

     W.S. Graham and Philip Larkin (for my money, the two finest post-war British poets) are chalk and cheese. It is a truism by now to note that Larkin’s epoch-defining collection, The Less Deceived (1955), overshadowed the publication in the same year of Graham’s The Nightfishing. But even if Graham had not been associated with the passé rhetoric of Dylan Thomas and his neo-romantic acolytes, popularity on the Larkin scale was unlikely to beckon; many of the readers who warmed to Larkin’s down-to-earth tones and themes would have been at sea with the comparatively dense language and philosophical ruminations of The Nightfishing. Damned by association with the descendent Dylan Thomas school though Graham may have been, his predominant influences were actually Modernist rather than Thomist by the time of The Nightfishing (“I want more from Thomas than that rich clutter of language gives me”).  As Carol Ann Duffy has written, “Graham had nothing within him that could have responded to the Movement – the bowel of English verse alarmed by Modernism – and his work, highly individual though it was and is, developed in the spirit of Eliot, Joyce and, later, Beckett”.  

     If Graham was irked by Larkin’s success, one would never guess it from The Nightfisherman, a 400-page cache of his letters. It was not so much that he turned his back on The Movement as that he faced in an altogether different direction: Larkin’s name is not mentioned – let alone spat out – in this book, whereas Eliot (who published Graham at Faber, praising his “good sense of form and a wonderful sense of rhythm”) and Pound (with whom Graham shared two lively discussions on “technical” matters during visits to his American “bughouse”) crop up quite frequently. While Larkin was always ready to denounce the poems he published prior to his three successful collections (The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows), Graham was ready to pounce on anyone who disparaged the work which preceded his three major collections (The Nightfishing, Malcolm Mooney’s Land and Implements in Their Places). 

     When Michael Schmidt (a long-standing supporter of Graham as editor and critic) reviewed Implements for the TLS, he rightly ranked Graham as “one of our most entertaining poets and one of our most original”. For his pains, Schmidt – now, ironically, the publisher of this volume of letters – received a poison-tipped paper dart from Graham deploring his allegedly “dull and uncourageous review” and adding (in “Disgusted, Cornwall” mode) that “I even had two letters asking me why you were not more for me”. Schmidt’s offence was his “belittling” of the derivative early collections, apprentice books which Graham treated with the indulgence of a father towards his drunk and delinquent offspring. Graham’s blind spot is all the more perplexing because he writes about poetry with a rare acuity and insight  much of the time; letters such as one to Charles Causley in 1955 about long poems in general (“bringing together… different and seeming incompatible textures of narrative and gestures of language”) and The Nightfishing in particular (“I wanted to write about the sea and make it a grey green sea, not a chocolate box sea”)  will be an essential accompaniment to future readings of his verse. A long and definitive letter about The Nightfishing, sent to Norman Macleod in 1960, shows how deeply the poet reflected on every stage of the creative process. The fact that Graham lived in Cornwall among painters rather than writers means, fortunately, that his letters preserve the literary ideas for which he had no other outlet. One is grateful that his fellow-regulars at the King William IV pub in Madron, the village where he finally settled, did not quench his thirst for literary conversation. 

     Among the themes of The Nightfishing identified by Graham in his letter to Norman Macleod is “the fluidity of identity”. Often taking his own identity from alcoholic fluids, Graham could be a protean character and an exasperating one. The rebuke to Michael Schmidt is not the only occasion in The Nightfisherman on which he bites a feeding hand; after his generous and solicitous friends, Ronnie and Henriette Duncan, had taken Graham and his wife, Nessie Dunsmuir, to Crete in 1977, we find the poet apologising for the consequences of “filling myself with ouzo” during the holiday: “I love you both and it would be a stupid, avoidable catastrophe if you took the huff”. Apart from booze and cigarettes, he also owns up to Benzedrine dependency: “Benz.s will help the getting into the work”. In 1965, while writing ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’, the title-poem of his finest collection, he launched a distress flare to Elizabeth Smart:

A quick SOS. I know it’s a long shot but you just might be able to help. I  need some methedrine or something of that school. I’ve been taking one  a morning for the last year and suddenly the source is dried up and I need  some to keep things going till I can arrange a more permanent supply. I just don’t want to get a big fatso and my poor Scotch brain like a  pudding. The one in the morning started me off at my writing and kept  my brain a wee bit lean.

     Whatever about the Benz., W.S. Graham’s lifestyle certainly wasn’t in the Mercedes league (indeed, hitch-hiking was a favoured means of transport). Born in Greenock in 1918, he left school at fourteen to serve an engineering apprenticeship. “Dodging the toad work” became something of a specialist skill for Graham who wanted to dedicate himself exclusively to polishing the poetry jewels in his head. His engineering career was interrupted by a year at Newbattle Abbey, a college for mature students. During wartime work at a torpedo factory, his routine included shopfloor drafting of poems as soon as his night-shift quota was fulfilled. A few years later, in London, an advertising copywriter’s job at Foote, Cone and Belding (which he abandoned after three months) seems to have provided opportunities for private correspondence during office hours; but the evidence is ambiguous: a letter in The Nightfisherman from his office address is marked “unfinished”, so the boss may well have pounced at the vital moment… A more solitary job, as auxiliary coastguard in stormy Cornwall, allowed him the uninterrupted (and, presumably, unsupervised) time he needed to write the lengthy letter to Norman Macleod already mentioned: “my coastguard duties have begun again and here I am writing here from this hut here right up on top of the rock of Gurnard’s Head with a low veiled lamp lit and a port or starboard light outside moving across that awful roaring sea dark”.

     Michael and Margaret Snow – Graham’s friends, literary administrators and, now, his diligent editors – refer to the fact that “his need for freedom of movement, association, and experiment took precedence over any need for everyday security”. As he put it himself, “I’ve always been frightened of the insidious anaesthetic of comfort…  although I am far from an ascetic by nature”. Graham might have had a walk-on (or, more appropriately, walk-off) part in Philip Larkin’s ‘Toads’, as one of those characters who, shouting “Stuff your pension!”, abscond to “live up lanes/ With fires in a bucket,/ Eat windfalls and tinned sardines”. At one point, Graham made his home in a caravan (an “arkvan”, as he called it) and kept goats. Another of his many moves (“the bard will have flown”) found him inhabiting a kind of Garret-on-Sea – a “rather bare” cliff-top cottage, with no electricity, which was accessible only by a “long rough field path”. Graham’s precarious economy would have collapsed without gifts from patrons and loans to meet day-to-day expenses: rent, groceries, batteries and paraffin. His diet included “tidy wee” breakfasts of ham bone scrapings or (in season) brambles with milk; sheep’s head broth, and conger with “milk flour mustard salt pepper herbs” were among the other appetising delicacies in the Graham recipe book. The powerful intellect behind his “word-conscious” poetry was often fuelled on nothing more substantial than plain pancakes.  

     In place of the Larkinesque “unspeakable” wife who was “skinny as a whippet”, Graham married Nessie Dunsmuir (affectionately nicknamed “Noisy Dancemore”) in 1954 and spoke of her incessantly, obsessively,  devotedly. Nessie, who hailed from Blantyre, had been a student at Newbattle Abbey during the time Sydney (as W.S. was known) spent there. She is very much the heroine of his story: supplementing their meagre income through seasonal work, enduring great hardship for the sake of her husband’s vocation, steadying his nerves at public readings. The last poem in his Collected Poems, ‘To My Wife at Midnight’, is rightfully hers:

Are you to say goodnight
And kiss me and fasten
My drowsy armour tight?

My dear camp-follower,
Hap the blanket round me
And tuck in a flower.

Maybe from my sleep
In the stoure at Culloden
I’ll see you here asleep

In your lonely place.

     Graham’s indifference towards politics was total (“I am as against the Left as the Right”); the tremors of battle barely register in his wartime correspondence and – though his enthusiasm towards Scotland fluctuated – he made little secret of his distaste for Scottish nationalism. In spite of his cerebral tendencies, he believed that “All good poems are entertaining” and his letters, too, are immensely entertaining; like Larkin’s, they can both move and amuse, the sensitive inner lining visible beneath the sometimes macho mask. Comforter of the afflicted (counselling the troubled painter, Roger Hilton, not to squander “the good spirit you have”), anatomist of language, word jester and juggler, amanuensis of domestic life (“I hear Nessie stirring upstairs and the coffee is perking… Anyhow, Michael, whatscookin? I have tomatoes growing. Hello Ness”), Graham was an epistolary master; he varied moods, juxtaposed topics, spun yarns, penned puns, improvised verses, wove elaborate fictions for the amusement of his friends:

A blizzard of such force has got up it’s a wonder the tent is not carried  away. The dogs have very good been. Remember them. I had to eat  Jessie. It was necessary. She was unusually tough (I’ve eaten dogs before  in China, on the banks of Yangtze in a barge-haulers’ village in Nanking
  Province…). 

At his most genial, as in a letter to Nessie’s sister, Mary McGinn, he could charm the grouse from a Scottish moor:

Nessie is looking beautiful and the peach-fuzz is on her cheek and here she goes working about the house singing and humming everything from Beethoven’s opus 25 to The Tailor Fell through the Bed. I can beat her at  the chutney and soup but she has me on the scones. But not as good as
 her mother’s but hush, not a cheep!… You know, Mary, sometimes I long to be sailing over the Clyde Firth and be calling in at Kirn Dunoon Inellan Rothsay and all those further away wee places like Lamlash and Corrie (where the ferry came out)… What a grand thing it was to be standing at the rail on those old paddle-steamers coming into a pier and
 the paddles churning up that lovely green water with its whiteness and almost mesmerising us.   

     For all the sponging and scrounging, begging and borrowing, drunkenness and tetchiness, the most abiding picture which emerges from the letters is of a man who is “fundamentally” happy and fulfilled, unswervingly committed to his art even when his books were out of print and his readership minuscule (“the act of writing poetry is my only salvation”). The letters, like the poems, often capture the small-hours atmosphere when the poet sits alone transcribing the silence: “I write this late at night with the owls calling and the sashes rattling”; “It’s 4 a.m… and Nessie has gone to her gentle sleep… Outside it’s thick and pitch, no fishermen moving yet, the gulls not roused yet”. The book is a portrait of the poetry no less than the poet and we follow Graham’s progress from the word-clotted early work to the final pellucid poems in which he is a “disturber” of language and a breaker of hearts:

This morning shaving my brain to face the world
I thought of Love and Life and Death and wee
Meg Macintosh who sat in front of me
In school in Greenock blushing at her desk.
I find under the left nostril difficult,
Those partisans of stiff hairs holding out
In their tender glen beneath the rampart of 
The nose and my father’s long upperlip.

Graham’s letters were as rhythmically distinctive as his poems; his poems, in turn, became as intimate and direct as letters: “Dear Bryan Wynter/ This is only a note/ To say how sorry I am/ You died”; “Dear Leonard what on earth/ Are we each doing now?”; “Dear Makar Norman, here’s a letter/ Riming nearly to the Scots bone”.  The 273 letters chosen for The Nightfisherman are themselves worthy of a celebratory poem, beginning “Dear Sydney Graham/ This is just a letter/ To say how much...”  But, without Graham himself to fine-tune the words (he died in January 1986, a few weeks after Philip Larkin), a more prosaic hallelujah must suffice.