Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  All we had to do now was find a job.

  5

  TO HULL AND BACK

  It wasn’t The Times, it wasn’t The Guardian or the Daily Telegraph or the Mail or even the Mirror, and how or why I ended up there, I can’t imagine. Faute de mieux, I think the French expression is. But there I was walking down Borough High Street to take up my new job as assistant editor of Modern Refrigeration – far down the High Street and long before Borough Market turned the area into a rather swinging place. I suppose at the time I was relieved to have survived the interview and been offered the job, but I suspected that most of my fellow students had gone to rather more glamorous places and were writing dramatic front-page stories, their names writ large. In reality, though, nearly all of them were cutting their teeth on local papers, on which I’d already served a kind of brief apprenticeship.

  The owner and editor of the monthly trade magazine I’d joined was a small, spruce man whose bow tie never seemed to wobble even when he became animated, which wasn’t often. I never once saw him with his jacket off, and I suppose that however hot the weather the thought of all those refrigerators kept him cool. He was courteous and well-mannered and went out of his way to make me feel at home, walking me round and introducing me to all and sundry. The scrutinising eyes made me think of my first day at school. I’d rarely felt so shy.

  I can’t pretend to have found the world of refrigeration overwhelmingly exciting, but I did my best to sub and rewrite the copy and press releases that landed on my desk, which was in the same room as the editor’s and meant I was under constant observation. Some were rather technical, but still I smiled and tried hard to show interest. The editor was passionate about his subject, naturally enough, and would wax lyrical about the latest models as the details arrived in the post. I believe his father had started the magazine at the turn of the century, so it was in his blood. He certainly knew everyone in the industry and everyone knew him: the phone never stopped ringing and invitations seem to pour in. Despite his small stature, as far as refrigerators and refrigeration were concerned, he was Mr Big. It amazed me, but still, come lunchtime, I’d find myself pacing up and down the High Street wondering whether giving up law had been such a wise move after all.

  Then something wonderful happened. I received a letter from the literary editor of Tribune, Elizabeth Thomas, asking me to contact her. She’d heard about me, she said, via Spike Milligan, a close friend of Michael Foot, who, though no longer the editor, was still involved with the paper. He knew she was looking for someone to review poetry and had passed the word on, and Spike knew of my interests and ambitions. Mrs Thomas wondered whether I might like to review some books for her. Would I not!

  In those days, Tribune, founded in 1937, had a respectable circulation and considerable influence, and I soon learned that Elizabeth Thomas doubled as assistant to Michael Foot, who’d just been re-elected to Parliament. Later, when he became leader of the Labour Party, she became his special adviser. Already a hero of mine, he had been Tribune’s editor from 1948 to 1952, following in the steps of Aneurin Bevan. Elizabeth, for her part, was following in those of George Orwell, who’d become literary editor of the paper in the early 1940s, as well as writing a series of columns entitled ‘As I Please’. It was a distinguished heritage. In a flash, my life was to change, and I immediately accepted Elizabeth’s invitation to the Tribune office in the Strand to meet her. What a delightful woman she was: tall, attractive, with fine features, sharply intelligent, and a great deal softer than the glasses she wore made her seem at first meeting. She was most encouraging and we appeared to hit it off. I returned to the office with a pile of books in my bag and a smile on my face.

  It didn’t take me long to get going. My first Tribune review, a critical study of Wilfred Owen by D. S. R. Welland, appeared on 14 October 1960, and in it I thank Dr Welland for his ‘painstaking study’ of Owen’s work. I was particularly interested to see how, as far as poetry was concerned, he divided the war into two phases – the first, in which soldiers in active service took time off to daydream and rhapsodise about their homes, the girls they’d left behind, the French countryside, etc., the war being incidental to the poetry rather than integral; then, in the second phase, the crusade quality of the war evaporating, with all the bestiality and horror coming to the fore in the powerfully realistic poetry of Owen, Rosenberg, Graves and Sassoon.

  My review, which I thought the whole world must have read, seemed to have gone down well enough with Mrs Thomas, for two weeks later I was reviewing Auberon Waugh’s Foxglove Saga, calling it – rightly or wrongly – an ‘average novel’. The fact that Waugh gave up novel writing because he was sick of being compared with his father Evelyn may have proved my judgement right. Many years later he would invite me to lunch with the aim of enticing me to publish some material from the Literary Review, which he edited. Perhaps the whole world (Waugh at any rate) had not been reading my reviews after all.

  After this, in quick succession came Aldous Huxley’s Collected Essays, a book by André Gide, a biography of Gabriel Rossetti. Then, for the first time, I was given a batch of poetry books to review, and quite quickly I was established as Tribune’s poetry reviewer. I was in my element, especially as I was starting to get my own poems accepted by various publications – Ambit, Envoi, the New Statesman and others. More importantly, I’d become friendly with Elizabeth Thomas and urged her to publish more new poetry in the paper, which she readily did, and eventually we started a regular series of Tribune poetry readings together.

  What was refreshing about Elizabeth was that her door was always open to young writers and – unlike many of the literary editors of other papers – she wasn’t a literary snob, though her standards were high. For that reason people were willing to write for her, despite the low fees. She was generous in her praise of others and unfailingly modest – one would never have guessed that she’d won a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, obtaining a First in Classics. Her interest in politics had come at an early age, when she joined the Fabian Society. Encouraged by Tribune’s editor, Richard Clements, the coverage she gave to books, new exhibitions and plays was remarkable for a paper of its size, especially one that was ostensibly a political publication. She even commissioned an excellent artist, Cecily Ben-Tovim, to illustrate the theatre reviews, which livened up the page no end. At that time Tribune was very much like a family, and a number of the MPs who contributed would regularly convene at the office, the colourful Ian Mikardo among the most vociferous of them. At Christmas there was always a jolly party at the editor’s house.

  I started to develop the idea of arranging a poetry event in Hampstead, but for the moment there was the day job to cope with, and the editor of Modern Refrigeration must surely have noticed my restlessness and growing lack of enthusiasm. Things came to a head when I was asked to go to Hull to report on the opening of a large cold store, an enormous refrigerated depot where meat and fish were kept in readiness for distribution to the trade. In my mind, Hull was more associated with Philip Larkin than with cold stores (Hull’s other famous export, Maureen Lipman, had not yet come into my life), but there was no dodging the assignment. There was just one problem: I had managed to wheedle a date out of a great-looking girl on the evening of the store’s opening and I wasn’t going to miss out on that. So to Hull I swiftly went, listened to most of the interminable speeches, and then hot-footed it back to London without waiting for the reception or interviewing anyone. As it happened, the train was delayed, and by the time it crawled into London my date had flown. Poetic justice, perhaps.

  When I arrived rather shamefacedly at the office next morning, I was greeted by an angry editor, his bow tie for the first time just a little bit skew-whiff. Not surprisingly, he’d had a strong complaint from the directors of the cold store. ‘This can’t go on,’ he said. ‘It reflects very badly on me.’ ‘I quite understand,’ I replied, my boxing training having taught me that it’s always best to land the first blow. ‘I can
see that I’m not really cut out for this and I think we should call it a day. I’m sorry to have disappointed you,’ and with that I was off to poetry new. I felt a little guilty, since, apart from sending me to Hull on the wrong day, he’d been nothing but decent to me. Still, the die was cast.

  * * *

  I may have been on some kind of mini-rollercoaster, but I was also out of a job. But first things first. At this point, and more or less out of the blue – perhaps via Pete Brown – I was invited to read in Oxford at an event arranged by New Departures, the avant-garde literary magazine I’ve never been avant-garde enough to appear in, which was (and still is) edited by Michael Horovitz. It takes real courage and commitment and not a little chutzpah to keep a magazine of this kind going these days. I admire Mike for it, as I also admired a remarkable man I met at around the same time, Miron Grindea, who for many years kept going his own very different magazine, ADAM International. The ambiguous title was an acronym for Arts, Drama, Architecture and Music. When he died in 1995, Grindea was actually working on the 500th edition of ADAM, which at the time was said to be the longest-running literary magazine. Born in Romania and educated in Paris at the Sorbonne, Miron was an intellectual of the old school, a true cosmopolitan who spoke several languages, often in the same sentence. A ball of fire, he seemed able to entice famous writers and thinkers from around the world to contribute just for the honour of being in ADAM. As interested in the visual arts and music (his wife Carola was a pianist) as he was in literature, he managed to persuade Cocteau, Picasso, Chagall and other artists to provide original pictures for his covers – gratis – always beginning his approach almost on his knees with the supplicating address ‘Cher maître’, and not letting go until he got what he wanted. T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Bertrand Russell, André Gide, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, W. H. Auden – the list of his conquests was endless.

  I well remember an early Saturday morning phone call from Miron in which he told me excitedly that he’d had a vision in the night that I was to be his heir apparent. What he really meant was that he wanted me to write letters, bring in contributors, help him raise money, and perhaps even store the magazine! In other words, it was a dogsbody he was after, not an heir, and even at my young age I was wise enough to decline his apparently flattering proposal. Later, he did publish several poems of mine, so he must have forgiven me.

  Another stoic I met at around the same time was Jacob Sonntag, founder and editor of the Jewish Quarterly. In personality and interests, he was very different from Grindea, looking to ‘literary journalism in the best tradition of Central and Eastern Europe’ for his inspiration rather than the literary salons and ateliers of Paris. But as well as political and intellectual issues, his door was always open to the arts, including poetry. Indeed, to mark the 50th edition of his magazine in 1966, he invited me to present an anthology of Anglo-Jewish poetry within its pages, in which I featured sixteen poets as well as critical articles and a discussion on the theme of Anglo-Jewish poetry (‘Is there such a thing’?), to which several non-Jewish poets contributed original articles. Sonntag died in 1984, but the magazine continues to appear regularly.

  The New Departures reading in Oxford I’d been invited to participate in wasn’t a grand affair but held in the upstairs room of a flat in a road leading into the High Street. It was packed, though, and when my turn came I somehow stumbled through the ten minutes I’d been allocated. It must have been one of the first times I’d read in public, and I’ve always been grateful to Michael Horovitz for the opportunity. I’d driven myself up to Oxford and come the Cinderella hour I felt it time to head back to London, especially since I was involved in another reading there the next day. As I walked down the stairs I was followed by a tall, dark-haired girl. Catching up with me, she said she’d enjoyed my poems and could she ask me some questions as she was reading English and it would help her studies. I politely explained that I was about to drive home, but she was not to be shaken off, following me to the car and asking if we could talk there for a few minutes. I could hardly say no, and in she climbed.

  It was only then that she revealed her true intentions, which, as she bluntly put it, were to ‘have’ all the poets who’d read. Flattered as I was to have been chosen to open the batting, we were hardly into the first over when I decided I was going to be the odd poet out that night. She wasn’t that attractive, the car was tiny, it had been a long and smoky evening in a stifling room, and I was tired. That, at any rate, is what I told myself as I made my excuses, bundled her out, and pressed my foot down hard on the accelerator. Another catch dropped, no doubt, but deliberately this time.

  Welcome to the Swinging ’60s, I thought, as I sped towards London.

  * * *

  The following night’s reading was in Soho at the Partisan, the radical left-wing coffee bar in Carlisle Street, established in 1958 by the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel. In its heyday all manner of writers, academics, politicians, poets and showbiz personalities would be found there. The actual coffee bar was on the ground floor and downstairs was a large cellar where talks, exhibitions and screenings were held, and where our reading was to take place.

  Naturally, it was exciting to be reading at a place with such a fascinating history and, just about recovered from my Oxford adventures of the previous night, I turned up in good time with some friends, as prepared as I could be. How could I have envisaged that the evening was to bring into my life someone who was to be a dear and inspiring friend for over fifty years? The other poets reading were Bernard Kops, the Finnish poet Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Peter Brown and Dannie Abse. I didn’t then know Hollo’s work, though I knew he had a considerable reputation in Finland and a growing one in England, where he now lived, working at the BBC and writing in English. I knew of Bernard Kops from his seminal play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green, as well as from various poems I’d read in magazines. One exuberant poem in particular, ‘Shalom Bomb’, has always stuck in my mind with its celebration of love and life:

  … I want a laughter bomb

  filled with sherbet fountains, licorice allsorts, chocolate kisses, candy floss,

  tinsel and streamers, balloons and fireworks, lucky bags,

  bubbles and masks and false noses.

  I want my bomb to sprinkle the world with roses.

  Poet, playwright, novelist, Bernard was born in the East End in 1926, left school at thirteen and never seems to stop writing, nor to have lost for a moment his infectious optimism and enthusiasm for life and poetry. How admirable! He was friendly that night, and he is warm and friendly now when we bump into him in Waitrose with his wife Erica, who features in so many of his poems. Seeing this lovely, close couple arm in arm as they enter the shop always adds a spring to my step. And the poems and plays, he tells me, are still flowing.

  Then in his late thirties, Dannie Abse was a poet whose work I knew and admired, and I’d also read his picaresque autobiographical novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, in which, with great humour and tenderness, he recalled growing up in Wales in the 1930s with his remarkable brothers: Leo, the future firebrand MP, and Wilfred, who was to become an eminent professor of psychiatry. But it was the fine poems in his most recent volume, Tenants of the House, that first drew me to Dannie. As I entered the Partisan, there he was, a thick mane of hair over his broad, handsome face, his smile welcoming and gentle, wisdom in his eyes. He introduced himself charmingly, and said the words I was to hear a hundred times over the years: ‘Jeremy, you read first.’ What could I do but obey? I did my best, but Dannie clearly was the best, as the Jewish Chronicle, which for some reason covered the event, justly recorded in a feature article. But they were kind to me, too, sort of. Having talked about the other poets, the reviewer went on: ‘Far more orthodox in appearance was Jeremy Robson, who, at twenty-two, already shows maturity and promise. He was the only poet present who was formally dressed – that is, minus a chunky-knit sweater.’ Reading that review the following Friday, I lost no
time in going out to buy myself one. Next time out I was going to look the part!

  After the reading, Dannie came up to me and gave me a piece of paper with his phone number, suggesting I should ring and go over for a coffee. Meadway 1961, the year of the reading. I’d never forget it.

  6

  POETRY RETURNS TO HAMPSTEAD

  From the heady heights of the Partisan basement it was now time to come down to earth and find myself another job, and this, after much searching, I finally did, moving from the cold world of refrigeration to the rather hotter one of a popular weekly magazine called Tit-Bits. The first magazine in his successful publishing empire, Tit-Bits had been founded in Manchester in 1881 by George Newnes, who had financed it by opening a vegetarian restaurant, quickly moving the operation to London as the circulation soared. The first really popular magazine of its day, it paved the way for the Daily Mail, whose founder, Alfred Harmsworth, wrote for Tit-Bits, while Arthur Pearson, who later launched the Daily Express, worked on it for five years. A number of popular writers contributed over the years too, including Isaac Asimov, P. G. Wodehouse and Rider Haggard, whose adventure novels were serialised in the magazine.

  The Tit-Bits offices were situated in a side street off the Strand, with Covent Garden just behind, a far cry from the then barren Borough High Street. I was given a place in the editorial office, alongside three other journalists, all a good deal more experienced than me, and a chief sub who sat in the centre of the room overseeing the editorial side of things and issuing directives.