Swimming Chenango Lake

by Charles Tomlinson

  Teacher and friend, what you restored to me

  Was love of learning; and without that gift

  A cynic’s bargain could have shaped my life

  To end where it began, in detestation

  Of the place and man that had mistaught me.

  Charles Tomlinson and Brenda Raybould married on 23 October 1948 in Willesden. From this day on ‘they never made a move without each other’. Charles’s debt to Brenda was absolute: she shared his fidelity to art-in-life, a life that may have felt under considerable pressure given the legacy of his childhood illness. This burden, were it ever felt, never limited them: Tomlinson’s teeming oeuvre of poetry, essays, translations, editions, paintings, collaborations, as well as his academic duties, could never have been achieved without his wife’s unstinting support.

  The year that they married, Charles had decided to pursue a career as an artist having experienced an epiphany - a ‘conversion’ he called it - while viewing Cézanne in the Fitzwilliam Museum. His fascination with painting and painters continued later in his poems, with meditations on the processes of Van Gogh and Constable. Tomlinson concentrated on painting and graphics, and began to exhibit his work in galleries in London and Cambridge, while supplementing his living as a school teacher in Camden Town.

  Between 1948 and 1951, Charles confessed he ‘read a lot of Augustan poetry’. In 1951 he published a small poetry collection, Relations and Contraries, but was unhappy about its quality. One poem survived, in which a horse-drawn milk-float ‘clips by’ his windows at dawn. He wrote of it many years later, ‘…I was approaching the sort of thing I wanted to do, where space represented possibility and where self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality. The embrace was, all the same, a passionate one, it seemed to me…’.

  The eighteenth century, and Tomlinson’s reading of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, and Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, provided what he called ‘a good antidote to the effects of Dylan Thomas’s romanticism, for Dylan Thomas was still the voice which sounded in one’s ears as one sought for a contemporary style’. He was irked by Thomas’s verbal excess. Tomlinson desired precision, tonal balance, and civility of expression. American influences were beginning to define Tomlinson’s poetry as well as his poetics (he called it ‘a mental emigration’). Michael Schmidt observed of Tomlinson that ‘Wallace Stevens was the guiding star he initially steered by’. Schmidt puts his finger on the two characteristic voices of Tomlinson that were developing in his earlier books, ‘one is intellectual, meditative, feeling its way through ideas’, while the other voice engages with ‘landscapes and images from the natural world’.

  In 1951 Tomlinson took up a post as secretary to Percy Lubbock, the critic and friend of Henry James, which took the Tomlinsons to Lerici in Italy. Five weeks into the post Tomlinson was dismissed, an episode he wrote about in ‘Class’: “Those midland a’s / once cost me a job / … I was secretary at the time/to the author of The Craft of Fiction”. The Tomlinsons were, however, given a villino adjoining the gardener’s house where Charles painted and wrote many of the poems for his collection The Necklace published by Fantasy Press in 1955. This appeared with an introduction by Donald Davie; the book greatly impressed the American critic Hugh Kenner and poet Marianne Moore. Leisure time in Lerici for the young, jobless couple was spent socialising with locals, and a friendship bloomed between the Tomlinsons and the poet Paolo Bertolani. This period is vividly brought to life in his candid book of critical reflections Some Americans (1981). For the young Tomlinson, Liguria gave him ‘so many of the elements of [his] moral vocabulary, the mysteries of light, sea, rock’. It also gave him a precise, sensuous, visual vocabulary.

  Once home from Italy, Tomlinson became a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol in 1956. In1958 they bought Brook Cottage, Ozleworth Bottom, near Wotton-under-Edge. A beck, prone to flooding, ran beside the garden. One of their neighbours was Bruce Chatwin who popped by between his globe-trotting. As Tomlinson recalled, ‘…those famous books of his underwent much discussion beneath this very roof’.

  Tomlinson’s poetry circles around themes of place and return: ‘Places for me’, he said, ‘have often been happy chances like rhyme’. Brook Cottage was the centre from which Tomlinson and his growing family flew on frequent international quests to meet and collaborate with fellow poets and artists throughout Europe, Mexico, Japan, Canada, and America. From the early 1960s to the turn of the century he was poetry’s Odysseus; and many of his poems are dedicated to the poets and artists with whom he made friends.

  His American adventure began with the publication of Seeing is Believing. A sense for passionate intelligence and clear-eyed perception informs the book, qualities he had assimilated from his European and American reading, and which were crucial to his unfurling, fastidious style of writing. The manuscript had been rejected by British publishers but, thanks to advocacy of the critic Hugh Kenner, the book appeared in New York in 1958. The event led to correspondence between Tomlinson and William Carlos Williams. In 1959 Tomlinson won an International Travelling Fellowship to visit the United States. Charles, Brenda, and their baby daughter Justine, embarked on a six month expedition, travelling by greyhound bus, writing, exploring, and befriending William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, and Marianne Moore. Their welcome eased the literary isolation he had felt among the English poets of The Movement, whose tapered engagement with the world frustrated him.

  Tomlinson’s reputation in Britain grew more secure with the publication by Oxford University Press of Seeing is Believing in 1960. His next collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) is inhabited, placed, and peopled with remembered and real characters – farmers, stone-masons, factory workers. Tomlinson and his family travelled again to America in 1962-3 where he was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, meeting Georgia O’Keefe, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and also the ‘Objectivists’ Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (whose fine-chamfered verse Tomlinson likened to carpentry). Road trips in Mexico and Arizona, as well the sense of Ozleworth as omphalos, inform American Scenes and Other Poems (1966). In 1967, Charles met Ezra Pound in Italy at the Spoleto Festival and began his long friendship with Octavio Paz. This dynamic period was recounted, often with a delightful lightness of touch, in American Scenes and Other Poems (1966).

  Appearing in 1969, The Way of a World was a daring collection, containing an array of forms including prose poetry. It opens, as does this selection, with a tour-de-force: ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, one of Tomlinson’s most scintillating poems. No less energised are the political poems ‘Prometheus’, about the Russian revolution, and ‘Assassin’, about the death of Trotsky. Tomlinson injected a muscular diction, even duende, into his lucid, supple, syncopated lines and rhymes that punctuated ‘the forward progress of an energetic syntax’. The jump-cut, filmic progression of ‘Assassin’ owed a debt to Tomlinson’s early attempts at film-making. The Way of a World also carried pieces of lucent ars poetica: on the psychical and physical reality of place in ‘Eden’; of the graces of moderation in ‘Against Extremity’; and of the choices and happy accidents of ‘The Chances of Rhyme’. Chance and choice played a role in the rediscovery of his talents as a graphic artist in 1970 as he began working in decalcomania, a technique which involves pressing paint between sheets of paper to make fortuitous imagery, and then deciding how to splice, meld, and present a final image.

  Written on Water (1972) and The Way In and Other Poems (1974) introduced powerful autobiographical elements to Tomlinson’s writing concerning the universality of place, and an unflinching exploration in ‘The Marl Pits’ on the origins of his poetry:

  It was a language of water, light and air

  I sought – to speak myself free of a world

  Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply

  To horizons and to streets that blocked them back…

  Whil
e The Way In had its roots in Stoke, and the memory of childhood, the personal epiphanies in The Shaft (1978) explored Tomlinson’s experiences of Venice, the Euganean Hills, Tintern Abbey, New York, and an imagined and actual Arden: ‘…not Eden, but Eden’s rhyme…’. This Eden/Arden, as a twinned ideal and place, bedded itself in his imagination over his later collections. Tomlinson also returned with renewed power to politics and personalities in the French revolution, in the dramatic poems ‘Charlotte Corday’, ‘Marat Dead’, and ‘For Danton’.

  Confident, playful and unalienated collections marked his publications in the 1980s. The Flood (1981) recounts the dramatic, but perceptually beguiling, flooding of Brook Cottage. Notes from New York (1984) is a book of travel, place and playfulness, and of homely exile in poems influenced in part by his admiration for Elizabeth Bishop. The Return (1987) flows back to the place where his earliest poetry was written, with an elegy for his friend Paolo Bertolani. Tomlinson’s subsequent collections take in continents, companionship, and the sometimes bittersweet associations that arise when memory meets reality (he mourned the changes to place wrought by tourism and environmental destruction). The Mediterranean and Gloucestershire provide subject, light, and story, for Annunciations (1989) and The Door in the Wall (1992). Retirement from academic duties made for genial, celebratory, witty poetry in Jubilation (1995).

  In 1997 a routine cataract operation robbed Tomlinson of sight in his left eye, a loss that was a torment to one whose painterly vision was at the heart of his being as well as his writing. Tomlinson suffered depression. Brenda cheered him along by reading aloud, including the entirety of Jane Austen and War and Peace. In his seventy-second year, Tomlinson wrote, ‘I have never felt so full of possibility. The promise of the future never felt so fecund…I think I’ve come through’. A late phase of his writing produced elegant, keenly-observed poetry about the landscapes and inscapes of Italy, Portugal, Greece and Spain in The Vineyard above the Sea (1999), Skywriting (2003), and Cracks in the Universe (2006). A New Collected Poems, scrupulously assembled and checked by Brenda, was published in 2009.

  In addition to his poetry, Tomlinson was the editor of The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980), and of critical essays on Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, and from Spanish and Italian the work of many poets, including Attilio Bertolucci and Octavio Paz. His prose includes Some Americans (1981), Poetry and Metamorphosis (1983), American Essays: Making it New (2001) and Metamorphoses: Poetry and Translation (2003).

  Tomlinson’s poems won international recognition and received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the Bennett award from the Hudson Review in 1993; the Flaiano poetry prize in 2001; the New Criterion poetry prize in 2002; and the premio internazionale di poesia Attilio Bertolucci in 2004. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, and an honorary fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge (1974), Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London (1991), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and the Modern Language Association (2003). He was made a CBE in 2001 and received five honorary doctorates, including one from Bristol in 2004, and a Cholmondeley award from the Society of Authors in 1979. His academic honours included visiting professorships or fellowships at the University of New Mexico (1962-3), Colgate University, New York (1967-8 and 1989), Princeton University (1981), Union College, New York (1987), McMaster University, Ontario (1987), and the University of Keele (1989).

  Charles Tomlinson’s poetry occupies a prominent place in any discussion of the history of twentieth-century poetry. His reputation as a true (perhaps the only true) transatlantic poet won him acclaim from readers and critics alike, perhaps even more so in America and continental Europe than the UK itself. After a long period of ill-health and tormenting total blindness, he died peacefully at Brook Cottage on 22 August 2015 with his family around him. He is survived by his wife Brenda and their two daughters, Justine and Juliet. The service before Charles’s funeral concluded with a recording of Charles reading ‘The Door’, the poem that serves as epilogue to this Selected Poems.

  *

  For my part, Charles was the poetic father who invited me into his English Literature tutorials at Bristol University while I was reading for a Zoology degree. He read my poems, making precise and helpful comments. He gave me challenging reading lists to broaden my repertoire of thought, feeling, and form. His mentorship became friendship. During the opera season, Brenda, Charles and I sometimes found ourselves occupying the high seats – ‘The Gods’ - at The Hippodrome, and would discuss music at length. Charles’s love and extraordinary knowledge of music was astonishing. As Brenda has commented, ‘You only had to play two notes of a piece and he would recognise it. This was very important for his quite subtle sense of rhythm in his poetry’.

  For many readers, this will be the first time they have read Charles Tomlinson’s poetry. After Charles’s funeral I was convinced that a strong selection of his poems could appeal to a new generation of readers. I sought the advice of Brenda and began the adventure of re-reading and selecting Charles’s work. I also listened to the recordings of his poetry made by Richard Swigg at Keele University. Hearing Charles’s poems as spoken word is to tune into their meticulous music, the ‘quite subtle sense of rhythm’ as Brenda puts it. Every time I listened to his poems it felt like the first time I had heard them. Every time I read his poems I wanted to share them with as many people as possible. I recommend that, as you read these poems on the page, you also speak them aloud: ‘Hear with the eyes as you catch the current of their sounds’.

  Personal quotations are from conversations and correspondence with Brenda Tomlinson

  About the Author

  Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke on Trent in 1927. He studied at Cambridge with Donald Davie and taught at the University of Bristol from 1956 until his retirement. He published many collections of poetry as well as volumes of criticism and translation, and edited the Oxford Book of Verse in Translation (1980). His poetry won international recognition and received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He was an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and of the Modern Language Association. Charles Tomlinson was made a CBE in 2001 for his contribution to literature. He died in 2015.

  The poet David Morley, editor of this volume, is an ecologist and naturalist by background. He won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems and a Cholmondeley Award for his contribution to poetry. His Carcanet collections include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment, The Invisible Kings and Scientific Papers. He wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing and is co-editor with the Australian poet Philip Neilsen of The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing. David Morley studied with Charles Tomlinson at Bristol and currently teaches at the University of Warwick. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Carcanet Classics include

  Beowulf translated by Chris McCully

  Dictator/Gilgamesh adapted by Philip Terry

  Gilgamesh Retold by Jenny Lewis

  Pearl translated by Jane Draycott

  Edmund Blunden Selected Poems edited by Robyn Marsack

  Catullus The Books of Catullus edited and translated by Simon Smith

  Rebecca Elson A Responsibility to Awe: Collected Poems

  Walter Pater Selected Essays edited by Alex Wong

  Propertius Poems translated by James Womack

  Arthur Rimbaud Illuminations translated by John Ashbery

  George Seferis Collected Poems

  Charles Tomlinson Swimming Chenango Lake: selected poems edited by David Morley

  William Carlos Williams Collected Poems volumes I and II

  Copyright

 
Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

  This new eBook edition first published in 2018.

  On the cover: Woman swimming in pool. (© veronika z. gaudet / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo)

  Text copyright © Brenda Tomlinson, for the Estate of Charles Tomlinson 2018. Selection and commentary copyright © David Morley 2018. The right of Charles Tomlinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him and subsequently by his Estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 680 5