I thought I’d done with the subject of the Poet Laureate but couldn’t resist one last go after reading fun pieces in The Guardian and The Independent about the selection process in 1967 and 1972 recently revealed by the opening of a government archive held at Kew.
The writers led on the news angle of why John Betjeman was knocked back in ’68 following the death of John Masefield, only to be appointed in ’72 when Cecil Day-Lewis died. It was amusing to discover Betjeman was considered too old-fashioned first time around – ‘an aroma of lavender and faint musk, a songster of tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters’. Perhaps as polished a put-down as a civil servant has ever managed.
It should be said Masefield had held the post for 37 years, from when George V was on the throne. His Sea-Fever, published in 1902, remains a classic today, now sometimes adapted into song. (Manchester folk band Run Out The Guns performed it to wonderful effect at our son’s wedding last year.) A digression, I know, but it lends itself to a loud, soaring, multi-instrumental interpretation: I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky/ And all I ask is a tall ship and star to steer her by/ And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking/ And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
Anyway, by the time Masefield died at almost 90, obviously the world had changed. And since nobody working then had ever had to consider such a thing, the authorities didn’t quite know who to choose to succeed him. The rejections make fine reading.
W H Auden was dismissed because a poem about oral sex, purported to be by him, was published in an underground magazine. Whether or not he actually wrote it, or just couldn’t be bothered to deny accusations that he had written it, is unclear. However, he was considered ‘so filthy a character he would bring disgrace upon the office’.
I suppose the fact that a female poet was considered was to the authorities’ credit. The consideration of Stevie Smith was brief. (Maybe the mandarins had initially mistaken her for a man.) Anyway they decided she was unstable and ungrateful – she had torn up a floral bouquet on stage at the Festival Hall.
Allen Ginsberg chipped in mischievously from the other side of the Atlantic. He recommended the singer Donovan. Ignored, of course. Can you imagine the ructions in the literary world if the writer of Hurdy Gurdy Man, Catch The Wind, Mellow Yellow and Saffron had suddenly been given the symbolic barrel of sherry? He’s still alive, so might well have still been in office today.
A more serious Scottish contender, Hugh McDiarmid, was knocked back because he was considered to be ‘heavily on the bottle and had rejoined the Communist Party’. And Edmund Blunden, by then in his 70s, was dismissed as ‘unintelligible’. As the man had survived The Somme and Passchendaele, making no sense in a poem seems to me to be entirely understandable. Perhaps, given the establishment views of the era, the fact that he was three times married – one divorce, one dissolution – worked against him too. A bit rough, though. Blunden had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature six times without success. Another aside: When he died in 1974, a supposedly affectionate obituary in The Guardian declared that ‘he loved cricket and played it ardently and very badly’. He liked to open the batting but refused the use of gloves.
Eventually the powers-that-be decided on the 60-something Cecil Day-Lewis, who had by then renounced Communism and was almost entirely respectable.
When Day-Lewis died in 1974, they had to go through the whole process (of elimination) once again. It is now generally accepted that Philip Larkin declined the honour although the version in the official documents is that he was unsuitable because he was such a reserved man he would never do a public reading.
More spectacularly Adrian Mitchell, still in his early 30s, was refused because of ‘a vulgar display’ he had been responsible for at Southwark Cathedral and ‘was of the left’. The Southwark Cathedral incident I know nothing of, but need to investigate.
The excuses continued. David Gascoyne lived in what was described as a twilight world. (An awful and unfortunate reminder of Ann Widdecombe’s description of Michael Howard – ‘something of the night about him’…) Vernon Scammell was too much of a risk as a ‘heavy drinker’… you mean he might have concentrated on drinking the annual barrel of sherry rather than write the expected royal tributes?
Mysteriously, George Barker was sniffily accused of being a ‘down and outer’. Fair enough, he did have 15 children by four different women. (Well, 15 with one woman would have been downright cruel – Ed.) Even that might have been forgiven, perhaps even lauded, had he emerged from the usual public school upbringing – a London Council school and a polytechnic didn’t cut it as Poet Laureate material.
Which left dear old Betjeman, who represented the safest choice with his ‘aroma of lavender and faint musk, tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters’. Well, he deserved his presentation of the poisoned chalice of British poetry as much as anyone.
Now, of course, poet laureates get a 10-year stint at it, which is perhaps more than enough.
If it were still a lifetime’s chore, we’d still have Andrew Motion in charge. A final digression. One of our daughters was once selected as a Foyle’s Young Poet of the Year, a mysterious process in itself, but which entailed a trip to London to mix with the others who had been chosen. She returned unimpressed. “There were people there called Horatio and Jemima and a man who I think was called Motion who seemed to just drink champagne.” As far as I’m aware, she hasn’t written another poem since…
Not that I blame the poet laureate for consuming the free champagne. Given the choice of that or trying to hold conversations with a horde of teenagers, I’d have taken exactly the same kind of refuge.
Upon which note, the hens need to be let out and the pen for the new pigs which arrive next week needs to be prepared. And it’s raining out there. Miserable, soak-you-through July rain. And there will be no cricket today.
Bob Mee poetry and more 