The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Letters 1950-2010
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The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Letters 1950-2010
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| ISBN-13: | 9781784100803 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Midnight Letterbox
Selected Correspondence, 1950â"2010
By Edwin Morgan, James McGonigal, John Coyle
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2015 the Estate of Edwin MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78410-082-7
CHAPTER 1
1950s
(aged 30–39)
By 1950, Edwin Morgan was a young lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He had returned in January 1946 to take up undergraduate studies interrupted by five years of war service in the Middle East. A conscientious objector at nineteen, he volunteered for a non-combatant role in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. Those years of open-air life, with a measure of sexual freedom within a military environment that was generally male, hedonistic and non-intellectual, had left him ill-prepared for the enduring austerities of post-war Scotland, and for the study of literature. Romantic poetry seemed particularly beside the point.
The army had taught self-reliance, however, and he gradually got back into the way of study, made friends among the younger generation of students (he was always a charming and interesting companion), and passed his Finals so confidently that he was immediately offered a post as Junior Lecturer. Classes were beginning to burgeon, with an unstable mix of ex-Forces mature students and youngsters who had been schoolchildren during the war years, so the work was demanding enough. His parents, with whom he lived until the early 1960s, would have preferred a 'safer' job in a bank for their only son.
The 1950s were difficult years for Morgan, a period of doubt and doubleness. He was assiduous in his teaching, thorough and attentive to detail, and yet the burden of term-time work constrained artistic ambition. The poetic life had to be postponed to university vacations, mainly, and a sense of frustration surfaces in his letters early and late. Yet progress in poetry failed to match this aspiration, with packed lines too often reflecting a conflicted life. In the late 1940s Morgan had sent Edwin Muir some poems to consider. 'You are too involved, in both senses of the word. You are in your own whirlpool', the older poet commented, and was never quite forgiven.
Translation offered relief, a range of different voices and languages – Lorca, Scève, Montale, Mayakovsky – and a schooling in technique. This range, however, could bring a different sort of frustration, as editors chose to publish the excellent translations and return his own poems with regret. Anglo-Saxon poetry offered a stoic and masculine world-view that appealed; later he came to see his successful late 1940s translation of Beowulf as his unwritten war poem.
Morgan's emotional life brought little satisfaction at this time. Although earlier he had been deeply and romantically attached to two heterosexual men (in his pre-war university years and in the RAMC) his 1950s relationships involved casual and risky encounters among the homosexual underclass of Glasgow – activities which, if discovered, could have led to social ostracism, prison and dismissal from his teaching post. Thus he came to value all the more his correspondence with those to whom he could unburden, sensing that they would accept him as he was. Two poets were particularly supportive, W.S. Graham and Michael Shayer. Elsewhere, letters half-reveal the tension, hidden beneath a camp or playful manner. We find him creating a persona in verse letters to match or mask the contradictions inherent in his daily life.
Britain struggled to emerge from a world of rationing and making-do. The post-war settlement entrenched a new sort of conflict – a Cold War of intrigue and intransigence fought out under the threat of atomic destruction. Morgan was radically left-wing and passionately interested in scientific and technological progress. The thought of human ingenuity being geared towards negation appalled him. That communism and capitalism each pursued such an end almost made him despair.
When he came to choose work for his New Selected Poems (2000), Morgan selected only two from this decade, from The Vision of Cathkin Braes and Dies Irae (both 1952, although a promised publication of the latter collection fell through). They represent the linguistically playful and the severely political aspects of his writing. The playful 'Verses for a Christmas Card' merges gay and literary dimensions, in a lexis that blends elements of late Joyce, Hopkins and the 'aureate' medieval Scots diction of Dunbar:
[...] A snaepuss fussball showerdown
With nezhny smirl and whirlcome rown
Upon my pollbare underlift,
And smazzled all my gays with srift [...].
(New Selected Poems: 11)
The contrary vision of 'Stanzas of the Jeopardy' is a dark epistle to latter-day Corinthians that warns of the moment of atomic annihilation when all the itemised and precious particularities of the world
[...] Shall craze to an intolerable blast
And hear at midnight the very end of the world.
(New Selected Poems: 10)
In the dark nights and uncertain days of the Fifties, at his most isolated, letters offered Morgan a lifeline to elsewhere, with the possibility and hope that his words might be answered by return of post.
Book and Pamphlet Publications
The Vision of Cathkin Braes and other Poems. Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1952.
Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English. Aldington, Kent: The Hand and Flower Press, 1952.
The Cape of Good Hope. Tunbridge Wells: Peter Russell, The Pound Press, 1955.
Poems from Eugenio Montale. Translated by Edwin Morgan. Reading: The School of Art, University of Reading, 1959.
W.S. Graham, poet
12 Albert Drive Burnside Rutherglen Glasgow 30 April 1950
My dear Sydney
Thanks for the postcard in two parts, the Shakespearian line, the looming and conception of an Epistle, and the news about your good self. You know, apart altogether from my natural desire to hear from you, I relish your communications as doves and ravens sent out from the Real, and they have I assure you plenty of waste rolling world to cross and cover, but when they do come, when they do reach me and knock on the glass of whatever half- or three-quarter-reality I am living in, I feel less like a forgotten survivor of godly flooding, with the Good Real packed away in their ark and those who were late for the queue or whose species was too indeterminate for invoicing or who couldn't be paired off left to scuttle for strange tors and listen to the bottom of the abyss rising. One of my triplex-plated howling ben-observatories is labelled 'Academic Pseudovivarium: Ark-Birds Keep Out' – yet I let them in by waiting for the night-watches and I read their messages by flashlight and I feed them with corn I have hidden behind the model of the new 400-incher and back they go over the wilderness to Life. You would hardly know how to describe the country I live in; Death certainly is not its image, but neither is Life. The crags and plateaux are incredibly recalcitrant to all good walking, hail and snow are frequent, the summits are high, and many of us are swept down by the avalanches that we know may any minute calve off from the shaggy icefields we roam over. Very remarkable are the visions we have of the moon, and of the stars, and of all the icy properties and manifestations; but something has been done to the sun, it never appears more than smouldering, an ochre, a snarling crimson, even a monstrous purple. The cold of our observatories can curl round our flesh like a lash; and then it is I often visit one of the centrally-heated brochs with double insulation to keep in its fieriness and windows of horn as thick and opaque as struggling lanternlight ever seeped through; the door says 'Half House: Communion for Incurables: Ark-Hawkers Not Wanted'. Even here, however, I have managed to lever out a few of the looser stones, and the birds soon learn to tap at the right place, and I can let them in (though they hate the smoke and heat and great press of bodies) and unscrew the tiny capsules and spell off their micro-messages. Sometimes hope is held out that the waters will eventually subside; sometimes we are urged to build an ark of our own and attempt to rejoin the Great Ark: but with what materials are we to make it? The truest messages warn me that I am not to hope, for myself or for those beside me, that things will ever be any better than they are; they even warn me against having unbounded faith in the buoyancy and oceanworthiness of the Good Ark; but it seems that nothing in heaven or earth can forbid them to enjoin love, and I have seen love even in these brochs, where so many people come to cast from them blindly and momentarily their knowledge either that they cannot love or that no one has ever loved them. As for me, I have made myself a new coat, which is of very strong material; my interest in astronomy is still keen; I neither scorn nor sell myself to the brochs; I hear snatches of our distinguished and piercing storm-music; and the petrels and frigate-birds which are messages in themselves equally with the fluttering pigeons that bring theirs attached to their bodies are my friends for whom I (with others) strain my eyes every evening through the familiar falling gloom and the accepted salty air.
I send you two more 'Sleights' – I think you already have one called 'Sleights of Darkness', which is appearing in Poetry London. Also there is a translation, I think a successful one. Have you seen the magazine Nine, edited by Peter Russell? Its next issue (should be May) is a 'Contemporary Poetry' number, and I have contributed a short (very short, too short) article on you and your Threshold. Russell thinks a lot of the WT volume.
All the best as ever | [??]
Uneasy in civilian and academic life, EM valued continued contact with W.S. Graham, with whom he had exchanged poems before the war. Born in Greenock, Graham now lived in Cornwall. 'Sleight-of-Morals' and 'The Sleights of Time' (Collected Poems [CP]: 28–29) were published in Listen 1:2, Summer 1954, and The Poet 12, 1955 – slow progress towards publication, as compared with Graham's success with Faber & Faber.
W.S. Graham, poet
13 May 1950
My dear Sydney
I've overstepped my 'week': forgive me. You chose just the most packed and hashed week of the year for me at the university – examinations, marks, class tickets, prize-buying, meetings, dinners – and so I have not been able to absorb the poem at all properly or to feel yet that I can make any very confident statement about it. I had better tell you how it has been read, so that you can discount whatever you want to discount for the improprieties of my methods – though forced, not chosen! Mostly, it was in bed from midnight onwards; and as a contrast today this hot and brilliant Saturday afternoon; twice completely through (you'll admit this is not often), to get the swing; and a great deal of leaning at rest on passages I liked or was worried about, and thinking about these, in intervals of the academic netcasting. From all this, what has so far emerged is, that the swing is there, the voyage completes itself, you have produced an object, and this reader at any rate finds it a fine and moving experience (though I know myself so near many of the ideas that my liking is more of an expected identification than the quite objective comment you're after). What I thought most interesting was the way in which this poem sums up and picks out and clarifies all the hints and guesses of the earlier poems; reminded me of the Sibelius method in music. The only worry I had about the construction, and one which is not so strong as it was when I first read the poem, was that I thought its balance had a little top heaviness in the fact that the first three sections were the best, and by 'best' I mean too powerful for the more numerous but quieter closing sections. I don't know what you think about this; I am maybe looking for a greater 'simplicity' or even symmetry than I should be looking for, because I still feel there is a complication of the 'real' the 'remembered' and the 'creating' in the last four sections which may puzzle people considerably after the very clear physical/spiritual relationships of the first three. It is the time factor that upsets things, I think, and that is why I feel I know where (or 'when') I am except in Section V; when I read it first it read too much like a really closing section, and I thought that Section VII very nearly (taken with section I) rendered it unnecessary. But I am ready to admit that when I get to know the poem better I shall see the rightness of Section V. At present I cling to the slight dissatisfaction that comes from an early climax (the Ancient-Mariner-like return on page 11) followed by comments in different musical and psychological modes. I can't enumerate all the things I like about the poem, because there are so many details that would delight anyone with a heart for words; but I will mention the lilting Section II refrain you sent me before: the 'calm' in Section III stanzas 14–19: the homecoming in stanzas 35–38: the end of Section VII: and lines like 'The hauling nets come in sawing the gunwhale/ With herring scales' and 'The strident kingforked airs roar in their shell' and 'Sprigs of the foam and branching tines of water' and 'Springing teal came out off the long sand' and 'That wind/ Honing the roof-ridge'. The only point where I felt definitely let down verbally was the end of stanza 36 in Section III. I felt that 'And lay/ Like a mother' was flat and bathetic, partly because I objected to the introduction of the mother-idea which calls up a new and hoaxing series of associations but more because the stressing is too light – 'Like a mother' has really only one stress and you need two. And of course the short sentence and the final position throw all the light onto this idea and phrase. I felt something of that flatness at the end of the section too in 'My fruitful share', though this would be more of a criticism if the Section was in fact the last of the poem. There's a difficulty about 'unprised' and I don't know if you intend a double meaning. The 'harder reading' would be to take it as you spell it, meaning 'not pierced yet', 'not broken through'; but it could be 'unprized', 'not wondered at enough yet although it is ancient overhead'. I incline to the second because I have used the same image (with the word 'unconsidered') in the first stanza of my 'Midwinter'. You have 'siezed' for 'seized' on page 6, and 'amourous' for 'amorous' on page 4. Things I was reminded of may interest you: Section I ll 7–8 recalled immediately 'The Waste Land' II 25–26 ('There is shadow under this red rock,/ (Come in under the shadow of this red rock)'); I often thought of Eliot's 'Marina' and 'this grace dissolved in place'; and of course the bells and wailing and gulls of 'The Dry Salvages'. 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' sometimes hissed and plunged through your starker rigging, but you have nary a nun on board, only chirpers and silver jerseys.
Now will these remarks be of any use to you? They're honest, but they don't come from a deep enough acquaintance with the poem. You must take from them what you can and couple them with your own feelings and whatever Eliot has said. One thing, I am glad I called my Nine article 'Graham's Threshold', for here you are cast off from the shore and sending back something brighter than herringshine. You become the sea bell, or the sea light, and there is something about both these things that fairly shakes the light in the blood and the tolled heart.
I would agree about Christopher Fry. What he should cultivate is his sense of humour, but it is a fantastic or exaggerative sense of humour and he intellectualizes it far too much (see 'Venus Observed'); he ought to collaborate with the author of Titus Groan and give joint and teeming birth to some gorgeous gingerococobread inanity that would keep all the pyrotechnophils and farcecrackers speechless for a golden year. Have you seen any Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller plays in London? I like The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman. Does the writer of The Cocktail Party approve of these tragedies of pity-without-terror?
This being a broch night, I had better put away the observatory typewriter and see which way the wind is howling. My thermometer is filled with californium; mercury by jove would explode. The Spirit Lamp is a greater invention than Davy's, and I keep mine bright. All my fur is pining marten.
Ever yours | [??]
Graham had asked for comment on 'The Nightfishing', the title poem of his 1955 collection from Faber & Faber. EM had reviewed The White Threshold (1949), in Peter Russell's Poundian journal Nine II:II (No. 3), May 1950.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Midnight Letterbox by Edwin Morgan, James McGonigal, John Coyle. Copyright © 2015 the Estate of Edwin Morgan. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Introduction,
Prologue,
1950s,
1960s,
1970s,
1980s,
1990s,
2000s,
Further Reading,
Index,
About the Author,
Also by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,