Anecdotage

Francis King

Inside the Forties Derek Stanford (Sidgwick and Jackson £6.95) This book of literary reminiscences, covering the years 1937-1957, poses the same kind of problems of identification as a Photograph of some bygone PEN Congress. Yes, that main in the open-necked shirt can only be F.R. Leavis. That ruippled, Puffy cherub must be Dylan Thomas. And of course that is the Old Possum himself, flanked by two Impractical Cats from the Poetry Society. But who on earth is that — and that — and that? Yet the people whom Mr Stanford depicts, though many of them are now as obscure as those lampooned in the Dunciad, were once near the centre of the literary stage, the spotlights on them, Only forty or even thirty years ago. That so Many flashing, iconoclastic talents have Passed into the obscurity of death, of Pti.blishing houses or of provincial universities, is gloomy proof of the ephemerality of most sorts of literary fame. A typical example is Nicholas Moore, elder son of the mild author of Principta Ethica and of a less mild mother, who used to smoke a pipe and post her family's orders for the day in her kitchen. When I was a schoolboy, I never opened a literary tnagazine without finding some poem by Mr Moore in it. Mr Stanford recalls how, excessively uxorious, he caused some hilarity by beginning one of his poems to his first wife, Priscilla, with the line 'Darling, you see between my legs' and even more hilarity by _Deginning another, entitled 'A Very Young P.oet posts a Letter to His Girl', with the two lines: 'I stuck it in, I stuck it in, I stuck it in the letter-to' — eliciting from Dylan Thomas (Mr Stanford does not mention tins) the comment that the letter that he stuck in must have been a French one. On

form, Nicholas Moore was an infinitely better poet than these quotations might

suggest; but by the 'fifties he had withdrawn from the literary stage, his only comeback being a reissue in 1967 of his collection The Glass Tower.

The fact that the majority of those about whom Mr Stanford writes are or were poets may have something to do with their

comet-like trajectories. With rare exceptions, poets are delicate and short-lived blooms in comparison with those hardy

perennials, novelists, In any case, despite Arts Council aid today, poets have never had it so good as during the war and its immediate aftermath, with a variety of little magazines, none subsidised, acting as havens for them. Mr Stanford also recalls those verse-readings organised at the Ethical Church by Alec (Phallic') Craig — a bearded, big-bellied, bear-like civil servant,

author of a book entitled 'Sexual Revolution' and an expert on lavatory graffiti. I

myself read there on one or two occasions;

and, like Derek Stanford, I remember both Iris Orton, who believed herself to be a

reincarnation of Dr Johnson and would therefore address the most youthful and inconsequential people, much to their surprise, as 'Sir', and the plump man, usually in the front row, who in the space of a few minutes would pass from ecstatic attention to deep and noisy slumber. It was at the Ethical Church, as Mr Stanford recalls, that that rogue elephant, Roy Campbell, advanced on Stephen Spender, who was just about to read from his works, with the demand that he should

put up his fists. Spender showed a natural

reluctance to do this and was fortunately then rescued by a group of poets, led by Robert Greacen, Mr Stanford gives an

attractive picture of Campbell who, because of his idiosyncratically Right Wing stance,

consistently suffered denigration of his work by Left Wing poets who, in most cases, possessed only a tithe of his talent. I was

pleased to find that Mr Stanford had

included one of my favourite stories about Campbell. In the South of France he happened to come on a figure, curls reaching to his collar (Campbell always equated long hair with effeminacy), at work, back to him, at an easel. From the rear he looked exactly like a well-known art-critic and Campbell at once decided to

steal up and goose him ('the Bloomsbury equivalent of a hand-shake', as Campbell put it). Fortunately the figure turned round before hand met rump. It was Winston Churchill.

The most extended and for me the most interesting section of the book concerns Muriel Spark, who was content to act as Mr Stanford's collaborator before her individual star had risen into the empyrean.

When, some years ago, he put up for

auction some letters written to him by her, there were those — I must confess that I was one of them. — who used the words

'ungallant' and even 'caddish'; such people may now reach for those epithets again. 'In her own scale of values, loyally to her own person stood first' is hardly a kind comment; perhaps even less kind is 'Muriel . . was quite a plump little dumpling'. Mr Stanford first met Muriel Spark when she was secretary of the Poetry Society — a post from which she was eventually ousted by a number of the Old Guard, led by the blowzy Marie Stopes. (It was Marie Stopes who helped to finance a little magazine called 'Kingdom Come' — derisively known as 'Condom King'). At that period, according to Mr Stanford, Miss Spark suffered from 'an inability to locate her own image' — switching between the personae of the competent professional woman, the Dizzy Blonde and the feminine Shelley. After a peri6d of pinfold-style hallucinations — among other highly improbable things, she believed that T.S. Eliot was communicating secretly with her through the blurbs on certain Faber children's books and was als.o raiding her food-cupborad — she broke out of this dark and tangled thicket into the sunlight of her present success.

Mr Stanford has an amusing store of anecdotes. He also has an enviable ability to bring people to life in a sentence or two. Here, for example, is the James Kirkup of thirty years ago; 'He looked like the balletic ghost of a lily . . . Poetry belonged to la vie Boheme, so he wore his shirt with the collar open; but London, after all, was the capital city, so, along with his open-necked shirt and his tweed jacket, he carried a pair of kid gloves.' Here is the ill-fated, now dead Peter. Baker, founder of the Falcon Press, MP, father of the stillborn League of Merchant Adventurers and finally gaol-bird: 'He was cheerful rather than genial. . . I thought he would have been more at home as a sales director in some thrusting City firm.'

The book contains a memorable portrait of Rudolph Friedmann, who presided, like some pansy, Middle European drillsergeant, at Zwemmers — though I cannot remember him as having web-fingers, as Mr Stanford maintains, but merely ones that looked like frankfurters. A nervous undergraduate, I was once leafing through Auden's latest collection when the oboetones of his voice sounded behind me 'Thank you', as he tweaked the book out of my hands and replaced it on the shelf. 'If you wish to browse, I suggest Foyles across the road, sir.' It was invariably to Foyles that he directed the unwanted, as Mr Stanford demonstrates with a not dissimilar story.

Mr Stanford is not always accurate about names. For example, he spells Santayana with a third n; and surely that attractive half-Japanese poetess, god-daughter of H.G. Wells, was Gloria Kornai, not Kemai? Among some excellent illustrations, the intrusion of works by Mervyn Peake and Lucien Freud is odd. The former does not

appear in the book at all; the latter only in passing. Nonetheless, this is a highly diverting memoir, at once witty and astringent, by someone who might be represente as the Alistair Forbes du monde litteraire.