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

Christopher Logue is a survivor and a mostly good-humoured one at that. His life has had its share of ups and downs but, as far as I can tell from his autobiography, he seems to have come out of each experience with a smile of sorts on his face. He gives the impression of being something of an innocent adrift in a crazy world, though it is, perhaps, a useful trick to play the innocent in certain situations.

     His childhood years were the usual mixture of sexual curiosity (never really satisfied), school experiences, and curious relatives, and when Logue left school he was advised that he was not “suitable for further education.” In 1944 he went into the army dreaming of heroic deeds in the SAS but ended up getting court-martialled and spending time in prison. He was interested in poetry and on his return to Britain he scuffled along with odd jobs, occasional writing, and second-hand bookselling. In a way this set the pace for the rest of his life, which he describes as “bits and bobs assembled around small regular payments: my pension, my cheque from Private Eye, my stalls.” And he often had a friend or two to provide a bed or bale him out with a small loan or gift.

     Perhaps the most interesting part of the book deals with the period Logue spent in Paris in the early 1950s. Alexander Trocchi was around, George Whitman was developing the bookshop which is now famous as Shakespeare & Company, Samuel Beckett was a presence, there was a little money to be made writing dirty books for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, and it was a time for starting brave little magazines like Merlin, The Paris Review, Zero and Points. People now write books about those years and Logue figures in them. His own account offers a fund of anecdotes to describe the characters he encountered.

     After his Paris stint he returned to London and was soon taking part in early poetry-and-jazz experiments, pioneering poster poems, marching with CND, going to prison again, and generally taking part in activities around the literary and political scenes. His story comes to a close around the time of the now-legendary Albert Hall poetry reading at which three Beat poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Corso, joined with Logue, George MacBeth, and other locals, to perform before an audience of several thousand. The quality of the poetry varied - I was in the audience so had to listen to it all - but as Logue says, “It was the moment that spoke.”

     Numerous famous names are dropped around the pages of Prince Charming, including Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Tynan, Sir Terence Conran, and Vanessa Redgrave, but I much preferred to read about Booksellers like George Whitman, David Archer, and Bernard Stone, all true friends to literature, and about those forgotten little magazines and literary adventurers. They make Logue’s memoir truly interesting.