Nostalgia
Casualties of war
Geoffrey Wagner
An occasion to turn out a cupboard the other day turned into an afternoon of acute nostalgia. Forgotten names and faces — some famous, most dead — surged up from tile shades of that Circe's island of literature, oln, dead little magazines. And despite the paper shortage — perhaps, in an odd paradoic, because of the paper shortage — the seenn,r/ world war must rank high in such. "Don t muck about with the New Saxon Pamphlets or Modern Short Stories or Today's Writer or any of those luxuries," confidently boomed then-successful Robert Westerby in 'Letter tot Writer of Tomorrow,' leading off an issue nt Peter Ratazzi's Writers of Tomorrow (we weret usually of tomorrow rather than today), btl` all too many of us did. The ephemerality of some of thes,e magazines — particularly those specialising le poetry — must have been almost total; olle wonders what their print runs were. But the got published and young writers saw Wh they were thinking. Can the same be said In unrestricted England today? They had titles, like Bugle Blast, Khaki and Blue, Se,r;1 Generation, Life and Fantasy, Plan, Calling, Lifeline, Prospect (`Voice of tt.Le Younget Generation'), The Verist, T" Decachord. They advertised in each others pages (in Outposts Spearman Publishers e?e nounce Verse Lover), were sometimes sing sheets run off on the clumsy Roneo machine of orderly rooms (like Dannie Abse's Fo.etrY5 and Poverty), and later they became the like Civvy-Street ("intended to be complete guide to that world outside Ord barrack square"), or Arthur Boyars' Mandrake or Geoffrey Moore's Cambrigd„ The Bridge, as "B" demobilisations tooltecl much wider spectrum of grant-suPP°r.t.e5 students than ever before to what universitlof there were; the first (perhaps only?) issue el Oxford Poetry then contains Tvlich,,,ath Meyer's debut and Mandrake, Kerlrli a Tynan's, a rather laboured parody °,et, powerful figure of the period, Arthur Koest' by with some fairly unbelievable poem,. Oxford's new Professor of Poetry, John `.'°en
One wonders what record, if any, has been
One of this literary flotsam of the war Ye3.10 Anyone who first published in that period only pursue these periodicals todaV J something of the painful nostalgle ef experienced coming across a coeval cOlgtty Screenplay with that original cover ot Paer Grable's backside. Seeing Brief Pic° the again will do it for you, too, as also: for North African lags at least, hearing
First, the entire atmosphere is so intensely English. Re-read from Watergate America, in the midst of banana-republic politics, the na tural patriotism behind these pages is strangely touching today. Apparently, these young 'outcast' poets generally accepted the justice of the war, its privations and duration, alongside the working class with whom they fought it.
Political factionalism was reduced until after the war, with, then, a heavy lean to the
left (Seven, Vernon Beste's Our Time, Wilfred Pickles's Youth Calling) plus an efflorescence of feminism that might surprise our young today. In fact, they were far more proletarian than most of today's semi-students might imagine (ads for 'Blotchy Skin' cures, Kolynos, Golden Shred, and speech methods — "Are You Gagged by the Old School Tie?"). Horizon and New Writing, the big time, were cosmopolitan and parochial. Cyril published John and John published Cyril, with Rupert Publishing practically everyone. It was assumed that we were all Oppidans together or, if not, ought to be. Slip down a rung and you found Seven including excruciating sergeants' mess jokes (often about the remarkably mini-skirted ATS). Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas alike enjoyed a 'steady stream of rejections from Horizon and Neu) Writing The really little little magazines were English in many other (vanishing?) ways, too. A quick check uncovered some love of animals in a high proportion of war reportage. America was regarded as still rather foreign and mainly Mammon; it is mentioned with respect in Denys Val Baker's Writing Today that Elizabeth Taylor had been published in America. The British fascination with film is represented while the hospitality to Mitteleuropean names, presumably to keep the lines of culture open, reached at one time a kind of intellectual tic. Anyone with the name }Carel or Zbigniew had a lot going for him. If the stories were often sketcny ana derivative, many bore honest witness to the times (e.g. the underestimated James Hanley). The poetry may have been second-class but it was never as bad as the nerveless Angries later claimed, and much was far better than that passes for such in America today (James Kirkup, John Hall, Maurice Lindsay). Denise :Levertow, for instance, wrote a far tighter 'diom then than now, when she is sending iflerself up as an indigenous American .eroinist. The trouble with the poetry was that was sui generis; apart from superior figures Ke Dylan Thomas, everyone seemed to write a certain style, rather vague and overmantic, full of verse sighs and apostrophes. il)ender gone bad. Yet it seems moving that a terary generation grew up wanting to articulate itself alongside a world catastrophe in verse, rather than in TV scripts. iqiWhat has happened to all these hopefuls? cholas Moore, a true little magazine writer, 't ever there was one, and Alan Rook used to Ii.vrite almost endlessly. Alex Comfort, who has ueen lately heading American bestseller lists With The Joy of Sex, was absolutely verYwhere, and even edited his own Poetry tolios which sometimes ran to as many as „We've pages. Muriel Spark is a successful "evelist and the ultra-romantic Roland Gant c''her heart was closed/within a light ring of ec'ral"), is now a hard-nosed establishment artibbisher. Wilfred Pickles became a comedian 1,1.1d the prolix Henry Treece, who enjoyed 1'101 esteem as a poet in those days, became a vhildren's book writer. w Mercifully, memory has dimmed (I myself 8rote a poem on the death in action of „ t'Ineone I have totally forgotten), just as fc).rtunately some of the paper on which we Dliti4st published was so cheap it is now Ysically disintegrating. Our writing may not ave been strictly necessary, but in our mob Je(311 didn't get an awful lot of red tape — or ash, come to that.
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