Muddling through his tears

Hugh Cecil

PUTTING POETRY FIRST: A LIFE OF ROBERT NICHOLS, 1893-1944 by Anne and William Charlton Michael Russell, £25, pp. 291, ISBN 0859552799 Wlien Robert Nichols died aged 51 in 1944, the critic Desmond MacCarthy remembered him generously as an ardent, disinterested man, an impetuous muddler in life, who nevertheless kept a straighter path than most people who are perpetually taking their bearings'. The theme of this fascinating biography by his niece Anne Charlton and her husband is Nichols's relentless pursuit of what he believed was his genius. Not all his poetry deserves to be forgotten, and the pathos of his disappointed career makes an absorbing story.

His name appears on the Great War poets' memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey beside others better known, such as his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden — who referred to him behind his back as 'Crikey. His collection of war verse, Ardours and Endurances, won him brief fame in 1918: but despite energy and freshness few of its poems are outstanding and their praise of courage, victory and love of country soon went out of fashion. The bitter lines he later dedicated to Siegfried Sassoon about Passchendaele (a battle neither man witnessed) are not, in this sense, typical of him:

The rain teems down. The writhen waste is dumb.

Defiled, defaced, shamed in its hopelessness. This is the ultimate Hell, the Wilderness To which all Youth. Laughter and Love must come.

Nichols inherited a delicate, nervous temperament from his mother who had retreated into insanity during his childhood. Although invalided from the army with shell shock after three weeks as an artilleryman during 1915, he never repented of his passionate commitment to victory against German tyranny. For an unbalanced poet, he was surprisingly level-headed on politics. He was implacably opposed to Appeasement, but disliked Bolshevism as much as Nazism, though he could understand the spirit which led young men to fight for the Spanish Republican cause, comparing it with his feelings in 1914.

He was a reluctant editor of his own verse — perhaps because his handwriting was almost unreadable. His 27 sonnets to the unappreciative Nancy Cunard would have been much improved by cutting lines such as 'Who gave you these most terrible of eyes/ That never never never know to weep?' or 'Aurelia, when our bodies shall be rotten'. His satirical attack on Osbert Sitwell, Fisbo, runs to 180 pages, including textual notes, and is tedious even to literary scholars. For a third of his life he toiled over his uncompleted magnum opus, Don Juan Tenorio the Great, 'a tragi-comedy in the Tyrtaean mode', holding forth to his long-suffering friends on its pioneering significance:

His voice [Charles Morgan relates] began to pour out the thoughts on dramatic poetry, of which his mind had been full, when he sighted me. In Burlington Street he interrupted himself to ask where I was going. To my tailors. He would come with me. If I had answered: 'to Valparaiso', he would have taken the same boat train.

His eloquent monologues were frequently salted with tears; weeping, he interrupted the poet Conrad Aiken's family at lunch:

His wife .., was at last fed-up with those innumerable bits of fluff, of which he was perpetually boasting. he admitted it. and gone off ... How could he possibly live without her? He strode up and down the long dining room, a grotesque and somehow El Greco figure, in the faded shorts and Tyrolean stockings, and carrying a shepherd's crook as tall as himself: and poured it all out as they sat embarrassed over their uneaten luncheon ... and had then rushed to Maxwell's, the dentist's . . . and in his office, too, to repeat the performance all over again.

He fell often and disastrously in love. When a mischievous doctor prescribed marital infidelity as a cure for his nervous attacks, Nichols needed little encouragement. He once told Conrad Aiken that he could think of nothing but fornication. His secret with women was that he seemed every inch a poet, with a tremulous sensitivity, the features of a faun (a favourite poetical subject), and an imaginative heart, despite the egoism which invariably wrecked his relationships.

Vivienne Wilkinson, years younger than him and his last great passion, was as deep an admirer of his poetic vision as his wife had been, and was determined to marry him; but time and again he excused himself, on financial grounds. It is true that in later years he was almost penniless, eking out an existence by writing prefaces to anthologies and even offering, for money, ingenious ideas to the British government (one of his first was the 'Nichols Bob,' a gigantic 'jellyfish', fired from a gun, to trap enemy aeroplanes). But the fact was, his biographers explain, he dreaded any responsibility which might divert him from his obsessive poetical ambitions. He became increasingly hysterical and was passed from one kind friend's care to another; few could endure him for long, even his devoted brother Phil.

The best of Robert Nichols, lyrical, tragic, philosophical, rousing, humorous, is preserved in his 1941 selection, Such Was My Singing. Reduced to a few pages, even Fisbo is possible to appreciate — as the description of Fisbo (Osbert Sitwell) himself.

Tight was his coat: luxurious his stock, His towering topper carried at the cock: His trousers with much nicety designed.

Stalwart in front and generous behind.

As Nichols's biographers demonstrate, his poetical art, at its most accomplished (which does not include the swashbuckling windbaggeries of Don Juan) evokes poignantly the tragedy and magnificence of life: `Larus Marinus' describes the poet's discovery, on a sunset evening, of a huge seagull dying of a gunshot-wound by the shore. Pity for the gull and for himself, certainly, but also for the world, blazes out from his heart-piercing lines:

His golden eye yet stared — an angry sun Come to make havoc among lesser spheres. There was one thing to do. It was soon done. But, oh, the smell of blood upon my hands, The chillness which had marbled the fair sky, The hateful fire of hatred in my tears!