From the Elephant's Back (31 page)

All this was of the greatest importance to a writer in the bud. His lively and compassionate views on literature were expressed in admirably fashioned prose, full of a fierce generosity which gave the lie to humbug and sterile pedantry. He occupied, from quite an early age, a well-merited position of importance in English writing and a thoroughly well-earned financial success with work on several fronts at once. All this is forgotten today but will soon be remembered when his books once more come into print.

At the time when I met him, disaster had overtaken him and financial distress stared him in the face—a serious matter for a man in his sixties, born and bred to literature, and who knew no other trade. He could not cheerfully turn to grave digging or teaching as I could—he had never been forced to do anything but write. His books on T.E. Lawrence and Norman Douglas
[1]
were responsible for this state of affairs; they had not only damaged him critically but had alienated him from the common reader, from his own public, from the libraries. With the trouble caused by these two volumes the whole of the rest of his admirable life work went out of print and out of public demand—some seventy titles in all! This was, of course, catastrophic for a man living on his books, and he was facing up to it gamely; but the tide had turned against him. Publishers would not reprint him, booksellers would not stock him; but worst of all his public had deserted him. If his last few years were made tolerable and even happy ones it was due to the timely help of a fellow writer who also admired him and who set him on his feet financially.

He was a difficult, touchy, strange, lonely, shy, aggravating, and utterly delightful man. I was very much honoured to enjoy his friendship and an intimacy which permitted me frequently to disagree with him. Curiously enough he enjoyed this very much. It never affected our firm friendship; and in fact he positively reveled in the title we (my wife
[2]
and I) bestowed upon him—that of “Top Grumpy.” He sometimes put on special performances of outrageous grumpiness especially for us, for the pleasure of making us laugh. And we tried more than once to coax him into some public field where his truly endearing grumpiness could cause sympathy and not distaste. Aldington would certainly have won both sympathy and attention had he attacked such a public medium. One could not help seeing the heart of gold underneath the surface explosions of temper; the generosity hidden under the snappy tone of voice. None of this, alas, can be done for one by cold print in default of the author's tone of voice, the connotation, the attitude of mind expressed by feature. Aldington with his striking good looks and gentle address would have been a winner. But he was too shy, and considered it “infra dig to make a mountebank of himself”—so I could only murmur “Touché” and leave it at that.

I have said he was lonely, and this is true; while he knew and loved Europe, spoke excellent French and Italian, one always thought of him rather as a British exile than as of a European of British
souche
. He had cut himself off in some indefinable way from the current of British life, and in my view this isolation was harmful to this most British of authors. But here I stumble upon a field of absolute ignorance, for he was also a reticent man. He never spoke about his private life, his marriages, his personal affairs; indeed to this day I do not know anything about him as a human being, only as a writer. He once or twice hinted that his whole interior affective life had come to a stop in the twenties, and that after that epoch “everything seemed finished.” Europe, he said, had committed suicide in 1914. I reminded myself that his first visit to Europe had been around 1905—an epoch which I have great difficulty in visualizing.

Another factor which came into play due to his isolation was a curious though intermittent faulting of judgement in literary matters; of course he was deeply embittered by the collapse of his career. But he persisted in attributing it entirely to the fact that he had been ambushed by the critics and not cold-shouldered by the public. Nothing I could say would convince him that in the case of his Lawrence and Douglas books it was more his manner than his matter which caused so much offence, which had indeed damaged the public image of this fine poet and man of letters. No. He would not have it. It was “The Cockney Commorra.” The late Wyndham Lewis also suffered from this “secret enemy” complex—perhaps we all do to various degrees?

His death came as a great blow to us; there was nothing to predict it in his magnificent physique and his robust good health. I am inclined to attribute it simply to the fact that he felt there was nothing more to live for; he despaired of regaining the lost ground. For the last few years he had been living up in the Cher as the guest of a firm friend, admirer, and fine writer, who had put his house at Aldington's disposal. But most of the time he was alone, doing his own cooking. But he was proud as well as reticent and in all the long letters we got from him there is plenty of grumpiness but never a complaint. He went down with all guns firing, and his last letter which I received twenty-four hours before he died is full of rogue elephant fireworks; a specially grumpy performance deliberately calculated to make my wife exclaim: “Ah, that wrong-headed old grumpy up there in the Cher.” I can hear his burst of laughter at the familiar phrase!

It was ironic that shortly before his death he was invited to spend his seventieth birthday in Russia and meet his Soviet readers. He went with a number of prepared grumpinesses and some specially tailored clothes designed to show that while he loved Russian literature and the Russian people he was Richard Aldington, Esq., British and Conservative to the core. But the warmth of his reception quite won his heart; readers from all over Russia slogged up to Moscow to shake his hand. I think in his heart of hearts he must have compared this reception to the grim silence of London—not one telegram of congratulations, not one line from the press!

Well, he is dead, this old British grumpy; subtract what you will on the account of wrong-headedness, of intemperateness of judgement, and so on. There remains a good deal which those who knew him will always remember with affection: great generosities, great quixotries, great gallantries. And when the smoke of battle has died down around his name, his books will win him back his true place among the important writers of our time.

On George Seferis

1975

THE NOBEL PRIZE
was a most appropriate prize to salute the work of George Seferis,
[1]
for with him Greek Literature crossed the great divide into Europe, and laid its firm claim upon the European consciousness, becoming a part of it. This is not to decry the great Greek poets of the last fifty years—far from it. But their sensibility remains Greek in the Balkan sense, and their work, while brilliant, is metropolitan Greek in spirit. They were not, as he was, essentially cosmopolitan souls (Cavafy is the one exception), and one wonders whether Seferis's Smyrniot connections did not give him the same angle of vision as Alexandria's did for Cavafy. That, and the roving life of a diplomat. He himself always ironised over himself as a wanderer, and the
persona
or double he chose for himself (just as his admired friend Eliot chose “Prufrock,” just as Pound chose “Mauberley”) was “Stratis Thalassinos,”
[2]
an ironic seamantraveller. He looked upon the impermanence and folly of life with the detached eye of a man who knows that he is leaving it, for his ship will be sailing in a few hours. He did not worry much about death—it was a voyage like any other; he was living in the midst of it! But he felt how provisional life was, and how absurd.

His temperamental relationship with T.S. Eliot will strike anyone who knew them both, for they had much in common. They were both great critics, and they both worked coolly and quietly like great surgeons (“hastening slowly”). Both were mystics, and savants. When Eliot speaks of “getting every ounce of tradition behind each word”
[3]
one thinks of Seferis, so deeply steeped in the ancient Greek tragedy, and yet so modern in his approach. As a young consul in London, Seferis announced to a friend in Athens: “There is a chap here who must have read my poems, at any rate he is influenced by them. He is called T.S. Eliot.”
[4]
At any rate he used to tell this anecdote against himself; later he explained to me why he had been right in one sense. Both poets felt that their point of departure had been the French Symbolists, and particularly Laforgue and Rimbaud;
[5]
the later theoretical work of the surrealists meant less to them. They were both clear-headed enough to recognise that that movement, however fruitful, would end in politics.
[6]
Seferis was lucky in his translators both English and French; to have Jacques La Carrière and Yves Bonnefoy to introduce one in Paris, and Rex Warner
[7]
in London—this was a great help both to him and to us, his readers.

Another faculty the two great poets shared was the ability to let drop observations about life and poetry which tumbled into the mind like pebbles down an empty well, and echoed on for years. Seferis once said that, in a sense, poetry was the complete life of the poet, the inner life, and that the mere biography was a shadow play. He added that if he were stopped after his death at the Heavenly Gates by Peter and asked to justify the time spent on earth, he could only point to his poetry in order to plead that he had not wasted his life in unliving!

Shortly before the news of the prize came through, I visited Seferis in Athens to renew a friendship which had started to fall into disrepair owing to too long separations.
[8]
He was already ill but as always resigned and brave-hearted. He said something about having to economise a bit because he was retired now and even an Ambassador's pension was relatively modest. However he knew that in Greece there would always be some corner of an island with a few black olives and a can of retsina. I tried to cheer him by saying: “Don't worry; one of these fine years Greece will be given the Nobel—and there is only you. You will get it on the grounds of your whole work. Of its stature.” He groaned and said: “Don't wish me that, my dear Larry. I feel that I am going on more and more towards anonymity!” A little while after that came the great prize.

He also said to me once: “We Greek poets have one problem more than you or the French; we have a language almost as broken up into shards as the remains of Troy. Half our vocabulary goes back to Homer, half to Byzance. We have to select and shape it, and as the peasant language is the purest, and has guarded intact so many of the ancient Greek words, using them so naturally, we must try and make the demotic our foundation in the teeth of the professors and the journalists.” He went on with a smile: “But she is such a firebrand, this damned tongue of ours.” He used the lovely word “Pismatara!”
[9]

All honour to this great poet and the old-new Greek tradition he has helped to shape.

Poets Under the Bed

1989

THE POETRY PUBLISHING WORLD
is going to suffer deeply at the passing of M.J.T. Tambimuttu, who, for some forty years, has occupied a curiously commanding position in the London world of letters, as friend, guide, and publisher of so many poets of the first rank. We all know what quarrelsome and unstable people artists are, yet their affection for and trust in Tambi and his doings were unbounded, even among those who might have had most to criticise about his work. They spoke of him always with a loving and humorous concern, through which shone affection and admiration.
[1]

I am thinking of Eliot, who spoke of him in a wondering whisper, and described him as the most courageous of the younger publishers.
[2]
And even those he might exasperate by one of his manoeuvres never for a moment lost their basic affection for him. We need this sort of living reminder in a philistine and positivistic civilisation, and if Tambi could claim anything it would be that he won the affection of souls so different as, say, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, David Gascoyne, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and scores of others.
[3]

He could also be careless and irritating. Our moments of exasperation with him were real ones, but it was always a loving and concerned exasperation, and I do not think he lost a friend ever, despite divergences of policy or practice.

My own memories of him go back to before the war and before he had made his mark on the London scene.
[4]
Some of the sites from which he elected to operate were fairly bizarre—like the steam-room of the Russell Square public baths, which he adopted as a head office for a brief period. Indeed, if he finally left the baths it was with reluctance, and because of the deleterious effect of the steam on his manuscripts.

My very first meeting with him was at a rendezvous off Tottenham Court Road, where he had rented a room in a cheap boarding-house and lay in bed late of a morning, going over his plans to bring poetry to the public at large. It was my first interview with him and I saw with amusement that the entire contents of his first number reposed under his bed in an enormous Victorian chamber-pot. It was into this that he dipped for his authors.
[5]

Of course there were later and more affluent times and more up-to-date offices, but like a true lover of art and literature Tambi had a great affection for the seedier side of his adored London. Many a pub taproom earned his allegiance as a boardroom, and for a while he could not be prised away from the Hog in the Pound in Oxford Street, a most uncomfortable venue in which to discuss literature.
[6]

He leaves the general state of poetry publishing much improved for his presence and happy activity, and he himself felt that he had scored a praiseworthy success in his efforts to found and organise an Indian Arts Council in London which might arrange exhibitions of Indian treasures already in our collections but which never see the light of day.
[7]
It is to be hoped that this activity will continue after he has gone; it would be his most effective memorial.