Himself the poet and the theme
David Wright
SWEETAPPLE EARTH by John Heath-Stubbs Carcanet, £Z95, pp. 70 HINDSIGHTS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by John Heath-Stubbs Hodder, £25, pp. 308 John Heath-Stubbs celebrates his 75th birthday with a new book of poems and an autobiography — no loss of vigour there. The poems are mostly in what have been called Stubbsameters — a kind of free verse instantly recognisable as his and his alone, whereas everyone else's sounds like everyone else's. They are the laid-back musings of a polymath — entertainingly informative poems full of learned humour. As a poet, Heath-Stubbs has never been
fashionable — he is too independent- minded for that — but, for the same rea- son, neither has he been overlookable.
A distinguished critic and translator, autobiography is a new venture for him. Half-blind for half his life and wholly so for the remainder, few poets can have travelled so far as he or made themselves at home in so many and multifarious milieus and com- munities — clerical, bohemian, literary, academic — or befriended such a variety of characters from Henry Kissinger to James the Shit. It follows that his autobiography, besides being well-written, is immensely interesting.
He comes from a family of Staffordshire lawyers. A distant relative is Sir Henry Newbolt; various strains in his ancestry lead him, endearingly, to speculate on possible bloodlinks with Stuf, the Jute conqueror of the Isle of Wight, the painter George Stubbs, the poets Edward and Dylan Thomas, to say nothing of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet and the Stubbs who, according to a bird-book, found a Wander- ing Albatross hanging from a poulterer's stall in Leadenhall Market.
His remarkable mother, a gifted musi- cian, became the family breadwinner when multiple sclerosis disabled his father. Educated at a dreadful prep school, whose drunken headmaster used to beat his pupils with a Woolworths cricket bat, then at a dreadfuller minor public school where the boys were half starved, followed by an interlude at Worcester College for the Blind, where the seniors were encouraged to smoke and drink, he entered Queens College Oxford as an exhibitioner a month after World War H broke out.
At Queens his fellow-undergraduates were the poets Sidney Keyes and Drum- mond Allison, both destined to be killed before they were 21. Others included Michael Meyer, Michael Hamburger, myself and Philip Larkin. Keyes and Heath-Stubbs collaborated to produce a famous anthology, Eight Oxford Poets, which Routledge published on the say-so of Herbert Read, who later accepted Keyes' and Heath-Stubbs' first collections while they were still undergraduates. But by omitting Larkin from the anthology (though actually doing him a favour, since his poems then were Yeatsian pastiches) Keyes made himself an implacable post- humous enemy who never lost a chance of denigrating him. Heath-Stubbs and Larkin were on amicable terms at Oxford but in later life Stubbs
was somewhat appalled at what he [Larkin] had become. He seemed incapable of open- ing his mouth without saying something malicious.
The insular middlebrow Larkin-Amis axis, despising as it did all continental and classical literature (especially the Anglo- Saxon epic of Beowulf) was naturally inimical to Heath-Stubbs who 'is almost tempted to say that English literature since Beowulf is a history of steady decline.' At that time Eng.Lit., so far as Oxford examin- ers were concerned, ended with the 1830s:
It meant that we learnt about 20th-century literature from each other, not our teachers ... The teaching of 20th-century literature seems to me to have led to a kind of mandarinisation ... Poems and novels are exalted because they conform to academic standards ... These are not necessarily the most vital works of contemporary literature, which as often as not are written by maver- icks who are breaking new ground. If 20th- century literature had been on the syllabus during my time at Oxford I am certain that we would have had to spend a lot of time reading Robert Bridges.
Myself, I could not agree more - recently I met a Rhodes Scholar studying modern literature who had never heard of any living poets bar Hughes and Heaney.
But Heath-Stubbs found his real finish- ing school in Soho, and later in Zennor under the aegis of George Barker, whom he champions as the best poet of his gener- ation and who was
in some ways my chief poetic mentor ... a most rigid and ruthless critic of the work of myself and others.
These chapters on wartime Oxford and Soho of the Forties are the heart of the book, spellbinding and often very funny - the former was still full of characters and the latter a rendezvous for almost all of the artists, intellectuals and eccentrics of the day. Here Heath-Stubbs displays a wonder- ful gift for bringing alive the various per- sonalities he found there: informative profiles, the distillation of years of gossip. It makes this book the best history of Soho and its habitués since Anthony Cronin's Dead as Doornails. There are affectionate sketches of Roy Campbell, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Smart, Dorothy Sayers, Nina Hamnett, not forgetting T. S. Eliot, whose typically amphibolous sense of humour he illustrates. When he asked Eliot what he thought of Thomson's 'City of Dreadful Night' his reply was a characteris- tically ambiguous one. He said it had been his favourite poem at the age of 16 leaving the questioner unsure 'whether this meant it had influenced him profoundly, or that he regarded it as an adolescent taste'.
Not that Soho is all that Heath-Stubbs has to write about. Birds and heresies are his hobbies; and there are the years he spent in Egypt among the Copts and Muslims - Suez erupted during his stay apart from long spells in the USA, Mexico, and Nigeria, about all of which he writes with a kind of encyclopaedic perspicuity, his impressions of what they are depending upon his knowledge of what they were. The last chapter is an exemplary objective account of the experience of blindness.
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