Charles Causley is a winner

Susan Hill

The poet Charles Causley has won this Year's Heywood Hill Prize. The Duke of Devonshire is the benefactor. Hurrah for both, then. But it is extraordinary how this Particular prize, which is worth a cool £12,000 after all, has been regularly air- brushed out by the media and how readily those who do not ignore it sneer at it instead. Perhaps it is time to say thank you, as the Heywood Hill's distinguished past prize-winners — who have included Patrick O'Brian, Penelope Fitzgerald and Jane Gardam — certainly have. The literary world is stuffed full of prizes — prizes for the young and for the old, for novels, plays and poems, for books about science, books about mountaineering, books about God. Anyone could be forgiv- en for thinking that entering the profession of writer is like entering the Caucus race, at the end of which, so Alice was told, 'all have won and all shall have prizes'. A few were endowed years ago by, or in memory of, a named individual — the W. Somerset Maugham, the Katherine Mansfield — but most are sponsored by a commercial firm (Booker, Orange, Whit- bread) and are a perfectly legitimate form of advertising. Not many have one living, Private benefactor and most likely, in our inversely snobbish world, if Andrew }Devonshire were not a duke his prize Would be afforded more attention. Busi- ness sponsorship of the arts is encouraged and applauded nowadays. Private patron- age is not. But the Duke carries cheerfully (311, paying for the prize and for the jolly Party at Chatsworth (assembled literati, friends of the Heywood Hill bookshop, local mayors in their chains, Pimms and two brass bands).This year's ceremony took Place last week, when the biographer Vic- toria Glendinning presented the prize, though not, sadly, to Charles Causley m Person, because uncertain health means that he cannot now travel from Cornwall and the Launceston cottage in which he has lived for most of his life and where both his heart and his muse are so firmly rooted.

The Heywood Hill Prize is not given for a single work but for 'a lifetime's contribu- tion to the service of literature'. There is no one else alive to whom the citation bet- ter applies. After the death of his close friend Ted Hughes, the mantle of 'greatest living British poet' undoubtedly fell onto Caus- ley's shoulders. No poet comes near him save Seamus Heaney (who is Irish). Like Hughes's, Charles Causley's verses are rooted in a sense of place, and, like him, he takes the writing of poetry for children as seriously as that for adults. 'I just write the poem first,' Causley says, 'then I see who it's for, which half it fits into.'

Ask people who know and love his poet- ry to describe it and they may well say first that it is accessible — it always scans and often rhymes, he frequently employs tradi- tional verse forms, particularly the ballad. He values greatly and has kept in good repair his links to other literature, to lore, myth and fable, and to the poetry of the past. He pays it homage, he has been fed by it all his working life. But that is only one side of him. Open the Collected Poems 1951-2000 and you are as likely to come upon verse as sinewy, as dense and as con- temporary in feel as that by any post-war poet. And look to the more recent past for individual comparison and the one poet you come up with every time is W. H. Auden. Read Auden's marvellous As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street ...

and then turn to any of Causley's modern ballads: I had a silver penny

And an apricot tree ...

or to the bitter I saw a jolly hunter With a jolly gun.

The two poets share a use of mysterious imagery, a glittering richness of imaginative reference, a deceptively smooth and flow- ing surface, jarred with sudden, sinister hidden rocks and by which stir mighty depths.

The sea means much to Causley. He was a sailor during the second war on the con- voys that took the young Cornishman from home to Australia, Africa, the Far East, and changed him forever. Whenever he was away he was still rooted in Cornwall, but ever afterwards and until very recently, Causley was always a traveller. The Collect- ed Poems reveal a writer startled and subse- quently fascinated and inspired by, these other worlds, their sights, atmospheres, people. European literature, too, is woven into his verses — some are translated or adapted from German, from French, from Spanish, even from Serbo-Croat.

His range, intelligence, sensitivity and depth are astonishing. To those who only know the Charles Causley of the rueful and much-anthologised 'Timothy Winters' (Tars like bombs and teeth like splinters:/ A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters'), this 'other' Causley will be a revelation.

For years he was a friend of John Betje- man, and there is something of Betjeman about him too, for in both a certain surface cheeriness barely conceals the darkness beneath. And, like Betjeman, he is a pro- foundly but never glibly Christian poet, infinitely moved by the person of Christ as well as by the moral message, and touched at every point by the imagery of the Bible. These are poems that may begin charming- ly, as in 'The Ballad of the Bread Man':

Mary stood in the kitchen, Baking a loaf of bread.

An angel flew in through the window.

'We've a job for you' he said.

But as we are led inwards, the rhymes may still run easily but the end is still shocking, and sometimes the dark heart of a poem is terrible in its power:

Watch where he comes walking Out of the Christmas flame, Dancing, double-talking: Herod is his name.

Causley conjures up people, the long- dead, the fictional, the familiar neighbour, the very old and the very young, pins them to the page and then breathes life into them, so that we know them through his poetry, and he misses nothing; details of speech, quirks of behaviour, small inci- dents, are distilled into their essence. He can move to tears and be wonderfully funny. In 'Bridle Wiles', he tells how Bridie and his cousin Queenie, aged nine,

About the time of the First Armistice Scooped me, one Saturday, out of my pram,

and how, years later 'at Uncle Heber's Co-op funeral' Gwen confesses that they had dropped him on his head and specu- lates that this may be what set his poetry off, no one else in the family being given to such a thing.

He writes as chilling and deathly a ghost- poem as anyone who ever lived, his verses can sing, laugh and wear a top hat in the sun. He is a fine public reader of his own work in his soft Cornish-but-not-too- Cornish voice, he tells wonderful stories, and his talk sparkles and crackles with anecdotes and images as much as his writ- ing does, and neither is ever forced, noth- ing is done for mere effect.

He is, par excellence, a poet to be enjoyed, yet also knotty, difficult and so infinitely rewarding.

It would not be hard to select a poem of Charles Causley's to learn by heart, nor is it very difficult to select just two that alone would mark him out for greatness. One is a deeply moving, most beautiful short epitaph for a fellow sailor. 'Convoy' comes from the beginning of his long writer's life:

Draw the blanket of ocean Over the frozen face.

He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish, Staring through the green freezing sea-glass At the Northern Lights ...

The other is much longer. It is called 'Ten Types of Hospital Visitor'. It is unquotable, has to be read in full, a mighty poem by a mighty poet who so perfectly graces the prize donated by a gracious giver.