Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  It was a lively enough office, and the paper ran short stories, articles on film stars, competitions, interviews, cartoons, bits of gossip and so-called sexy photos. The photos – usually of scantily clad young ladies running out of the sea, the waves bubbling around their feet – were brought in by a man in a black mac, selected by the chief sub, and then usually landed on my desk. I had the exciting job of writing captions below them, full of innuendo and double entendre. As I invented away, I remembered Ray Boston saying it was harder to write for a popular paper like the Mirror than for an upmarket daily. I began to see what he meant – you had to be creative! My other big job was to look after the weekly horoscope, and here I have to admit that I was shamelessly creative with the copy. If you were hoping for a handsome stranger to cross your path, or you wanted to know whether this was the week to make a big decision – romantic, financial or otherwise – you only had to turn to me. I wonder how many people’s destinies I changed. Apart from that, it was a question of cutting stories down to size, writing the lead-ins or thinking up racy headlines as I wandered around Covent Garden during my lunch break.

  As I mentioned earlier, I’d been thinking about arranging a poetry reading locally, and now, in between the tits and bits, I turned my mind to it. I believed there were many exciting poets writing, and that there was a large young audience to be won over. I wanted to prove it in as lively a way as possible. At first, my idea was to arrange something in a Hampstead coffee bar, but then I began to think more ambitiously, with a view to involving jazz musicians alongside the poets. Several of my friends were ready to help me, particularly one from my early teenage years, Edward Gold, who offered to look after the general administration, especially the finances – always my blind spot. That made all the difference, so, taking a deep breath, we got on to the Hampstead Town Hall, enquired about the availability and cost of hiring it, and managed to convince them that it would be an orderly, important cultural event, and committed ourselves. It seemed like a small undertaking, but it turned out to be quite a major one, with posters and leaflets to be produced, publicity to be drummed up and tickets to be sold.

  However, before we could even begin I had to recruit the poets and musicians. I was lucky to have learned from the Tribune illustrator Cecily Ben-Tovim that her brother Arnon, a doctor, played alto saxophone and led his own group. Arnon, whom I soon heard and thought excellent, loved the idea. I wanted the music to be disciplined and not to dominate the proceedings and we saw eye to eye immediately. We even discussed setting various poems to music. Given the nature of the event, Arnon decided to expand the group, adding two professional musicians to what he described in the programme as ‘a motley collection of designers, medics, admen, and teachers who’d started to play jazz in their carefree college days’. The two musicians he enlisted were his sister, Atarah Ben-Tovim, a classical flautist, and the jazz trumpeter Buddy Bounds, so we ended up with an octet. Now I had to find the poets. Jon Silkin, the respected editor of the literary magazine Stand, was one of the first I approached, and he readily agreed to come down from Leeds for the event. Then, remembering the dynamic reading I’d heard at the ICA when I was at the Poly, I took a deep breath and contacted Adrian Mitchell, and he also agreed. So too did Pete Brown and Anselm Hollo.

  At this point, fate lent a hand in the form of a note from Boris Pasternak’s sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater, following a review I’d written of a new translation of her brother’s last poems. She’d liked what I’d written and invited me to a reading of Boris’s poems she was giving in Kensington. The venue in question was large and cold with a high stage, but there was a reasonable turnout. It was a pretty formal occasion, with solemn introductions and some classical music too. Lydia read movingly from her own superb translations of her brother’s powerfully haunting poems. In fact, they didn’t seem like translations – the true test. The last two lines of one she read, ‘Hamlet’, stay in my mind (the last line being a Russian proverb):

  I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:

  Life is not a walk across a field.

  As it transpired, there wasn’t much opportunity to talk after the reading as Mrs Slater was rushing to get a train to Oxford, but I wrote to her straight away inviting her to read at Hampstead. Her response came in a four-page letter, again thanking me for my review and going on to say how bad most of the translations of Boris’s work generally were, ‘praised by people who knew no Russian and have no idea how the poems sound in the original, nor what Boris’s style really was’. As for the Hampstead reading, she was understandably wary, asking many questions – about the length, who else was taking part, was it a private affair or would there be an audience, would it be advertised, would she be able to get the 11 p.m. train from Paddington and so on. Above all she made it clear that she would not take part in anything overtly political, since this might be an embarrassment to relatives in Russia. I hastened to reassure her, and she responded immediately on a card that she’d be happy to read. Those cards of Lydia’s (and I was to receive a number in due course) were rather special, since on one side there was always a reproduction of one of her distinguished father Leonid’s magnificent portraits. One of the first Russian painters to label himself an Impressionist, Leonid Pasternak painted many of the great writers of his day. A close friend of Tolstoy’s, he’d also illustrated editions of War and Peace and Resurrection.

  Encouraged by her response, I looked out the note Dannie Abse had given me at the Partisan. Plucking up courage, I dialled his number. Dannie’s response was to invite me round for a coffee. So the next Saturday morning I found myself walking, rather nervously, towards 85 Hodford Road, where I was welcomed not only by Dannie but by his wife Joan, and was eventually introduced to their three very lively children – Keren, the oldest, who was probably about eight, Susanna, around five, and David, who could only have been about three. Many years later Dannie signed a book to me and Carole in which he scored through the word ‘friends’ from the inscription he was writing and touchingly wrote, ‘well, family really, except that we never quarrel’. I could never imagine the Abse family quarrelling, or anyone quarrelling with them, especially with Joan, whom we came to love every bit as much as we did Dannie – such an erudite, modest, gentle, caring, beautiful woman whose wise judgement Dannie always depended on. In one of his books he humorously recalls his young son David earnestly saying to a friend as he pointed to a shelf full of his father’s books, ‘You see all those books over there? My mother typed them’ – as indeed she had. But Joan was far from being simply Dannie’s ‘typist’: she was also a writer and an art historian whose outstanding 1980 biography of John Ruskin was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, and is still a key work.

  Dannie was in a particularly good mood that Saturday, having just heard that his play House of Cowards had won the prestigious Charles Henry Foyle award. Still, forever a little cautious where poetry was concerned, he wanted to know who else was reading, but when I told him Jon Silkin, Adrian Mitchell and Lydia Pasternak Slater would be in attendance he was reassured, getting out the small pocket diary he always carried in his top pocket and putting down the date. Did I mention the jazz, I wonder? Probably not. What I didn’t realise was that anything Dannie did on Saturdays was governed by where Cardiff City were playing, for he never liked to miss a home match and arranged his poetry-reading schedule around the Bluebirds’ fixture list. They must have been playing away. My luck was in.

  So we had the cast… Although not quite. We were in deep so why not go even deeper, I thought, and on an impulse I approached Spike Milligan and asked him whether he would be willing to read some of his witty children’s verse. He readily agreed. My next inspired thought was to cheekily title the evening ‘Poetry Returns to Hampstead’. Team Hampstead then set to work, sending out press releases, leaving leaflets around the area, putting up posters in the windows of any shop that would take them, including Ian Norrie’s long-gone and sadly missed High Hill Bookshop, and selling tickets.
Edward Gold was unstinting in his help, and Anne Hooper and other friends joined in too, stuffing envelopes, arranging with a local café, the Loft, to provide refreshments for the audience during and after the interval, and helping with the publicity. Those Poly years couldn’t be allowed to go to waste!

  The provocative title, the line-up and the unusual combination of Spike, Pasternak and jazz seemed to catch people’s imagination and the press took it up in an exciting way. Meanwhile, the musicians would come over whenever possible and we would rehearse the programme, and Pete Brown and I even worked with Arnon on combining a couple of poems with the jazz.

  Cecily Ben-Tovim’s striking Poetry Returns to Hampstead programme cover.

  4 February 1961. Finally the day had come, and we didn’t know what had hit us. The Town Hall was completely sold out, there were long queues, with people fighting to get in – and a moment of real panic when Spike phoned to say he didn’t feel well enough to make it. Pleadingly I told him about the crowds, that Dennis Dobson, the publisher of his Silly Verse for Kids, was waiting for him, that he couldn’t let down so many people (let alone me!), and eventually he took pity on me and relented, though warning he’d have to keep it short and get away smartly. Anything, Spike, anything! Looking back, I’m convinced he’d just had a fit of nerves, having seen all the publicity and never having read his poems in public before.

  The amazed poets arrived, the musicians began to play, while Edward struggled valiantly to control the crowds at the door. Dannie Abse, used to the usual fare of rather sedate, pious poetry readings, was perhaps even more taken aback than Lydia Pasternak. Here is part of his account of the night:

  I set out for the Town Hall not expecting a particularly large audience. So when I saw in the distance an extraordinarily long queue stretching between the Odeon and the Town Hall I briefly wondered what popular film was being shown that night in the cinema. Then I observed the queue was facing the wrong way. When I struggled through the crowds on the steps of the Town Hall, a man tried to close the doors as he barked irritably, ‘Full up.’ By the time I managed to enter the Town Hall that first Poetry and Jazz Concert had commenced.

  Dear Dannie. I don’t suppose he ever imagined he’d be taking part in several hundred more of these concerts in the coming years… and willingly.

  Given that this was indeed a ‘first’, it’s a wonder the concert proved so successful, but the atmosphere was electric and all the poets responded wonderfully, as did the musicians. There couldn’t have been a greater contrast between the styles and indeed the poems of those who braved it on the stage that night. For my part, I did my best not to let the side down, reading a few of my own fledgling poems, including one with jazz. It was an exhilarating mix of the serious, the moving, the satirical, the quietly lyrical, the dramatic and, of course, the humorous, for there (thank the good Lord) was Spike to end the evening, resplendent in green corduroy trousers and a plum-coloured sweater. He’d spent most of the evening in the wings quietly savouring the atmosphere. Anne Hooper recalls that when I introduced him he staggered in from below the stage with a lit match in his hand, pretending the lights had gone out. I don’t remember that, but I do recall his opening lines when he finally made it onto the stage: ‘I thought I’d begin by reading some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But then I thought, “Why should I? He never reads any of mine.”’ The place erupted, and Spike took off, reading one comic poem after another with great aplomb, dropping his papers all over the stage, Gooning, improvising, timing it all like the master he was, relishing the occasion. If he’d really been ill earlier, this was patently the medicine he’d needed.

  The response of both the press and the public was astonishing. In a review headed ‘Full House for the Poets of Hampstead’, The Observer called it ‘a live and brave evening’; Tatler, which covered it photographically over three pages, proclaimed it ‘a triumphant evening for poetry’; while in a leader the Hampstead and Highgate Express was effusive in its praise, calling it ‘a splendid and alive occasion we hope will be repeated again and again’. I cherish, too, a lively account in the Bolton Evening News, whose London correspondent captured the mood of the evening perfectly:

  Incredible is the only word to describe the wild scenes of arty frustration enacted outside Hampstead Town Hall on Saturday night when 300 young people found themselves unable to gain admittance to – of all things – a poetry reading. Mad bangings on the stout municipal door went on for nearly an hour after the programme inside the hall began before a packed audience of nearly 500 people of all ages.

  The writer ended by quoting one girl as saying, ‘To think that I wasted seventeen years in Chorlton-cum-Hardy.’

  Letters began to pour in, both from those who were there and from many who couldn’t get in. One lady echoed the thoughts of many when she wrote, ‘Although there was much I didn’t understand, it has certainly changed my attitude to contemporary poetry.’ There were also letters from various poets, including a surprisingly generous one from Nathaniel Tarn, a normally aloof person. ‘As a member of the audience,’ he wrote, ‘I should like to congratulate you on this – sociologically – remarkable feat of drawing and keeping such a large crowd engrossed for such a length of time.’ He went on to say how much he liked the way we’d mixed the generations and brought in humour, too. He also thought the jazz had livened up the proceedings. Who could ask for more? To me, the whole evening was like a dream, and if I didn’t have all these cuttings I’d find it hard to believe it really happened. I also have many precious photos: Spike on the crowded steps being ‘arrested’ by the police … Dannie signing books in the interval … a bearded Jon Silkin sitting studiously at the edge of the stage … Adrian Mitchell looking down from a balcony … Lydia Pasternak stately and poised as she read … Cecily Ben-Tovim drawing in the wings … Pete Brown and the band in full blast … and a very young me, introducing it all (and wearing a sweater this time!). Would I have the nerve to do it all now? I very much doubt it.

  * * *

  Spike was elated, and in no hurry to rush away after the event, coming to the party we’d arranged and being among the last to leave. There’s no doubt that the evening had excited his imagination. ‘We must do it again,’ he said, ‘perhaps somewhere larger’ – and that’s how we came up with the idea of trying to arrange a follow-up concert at the Royal Festival Hall. I had no idea about the feasibility, the costs, and whether there would be a free date in the foreseeable future – nor, indeed, whether they would have us. Looking back and going through the old file I still have, marked RFH, I must have been more than a little crazy. I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the amount of work this would entail, especially as I had a full-time job and no possibility in those pre-mobile days of making personal calls during office hours. I was also continuing to review and write for Tribune almost every week. Still, Spike had responded enthusiastically to my suggestion, promising to help publicise the event and share the responsibility – the fact that he had a new book of verse about to come out no doubt helped. But, above all, the continuing positive response to Hampstead was simply too exciting for someone as headstrong as me to ignore.

  Thus, on 3 March 1961 a contract was signed between the London County Council (for the Royal Festival Hall) and the Hampstead Contemporary Poets (the fancy name we’d come up with to give ourselves the necessary appearance of respectability as far as the RFH was concerned). On our side the signatories were a Mr S. Milligan and me. We had to pay £75 on signing the contract, and a further £145 a month later, with a percentage of the ticket sales on top after we’d had receipts of £500 – rather like a publishing contract, really. The date set for the concert was Sunday 11 June 1961, in the afternoon. There was just one problem – the hall held over 3,000 people! There was nothing for it but to weigh in, and this my enlarged team of helpful friends did with great enthusiasm, Edward Gold once again handling the administrative side of things: quite a task. Whatever it took, we had to get the required number of bums on all those se
ats. In retrospect it all seems rather like an episode of The Apprentice.

  In the midst of all this organisation I took part in an unusual event in the Holland Park studio of the painter Jan Le Witt, which was arranged to tie in with an exhibition of his paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery. Le Witt had been in the audience at Hampstead together with John Smith, a poet who was later to become involved with our concerts, writing a number of poems for jazz settings. Enthused by the Hampstead reading, Jan (with John Smith’s encouragement) decided to hold an evening of poetry and music in his large studio, during which he would also display some paintings. Calling it ‘A Triangle of Muses’, he invited a string trio to play Beethoven and Mozart, and five poets. His own striking paintings completed the artistic triangle. After all that, there was jazz from ‘Arnon Ben-Tovim and friends’, and a ‘Rampatunda’ cocktail, the mystery ingredients of which I never discovered. The evening was indeed a strange cocktail, but highly civilised, and together with Bernard Kops, John Smith, Muriel Spark and a young American poet called Edward Brash, I read a few poems. As well as a rather snooty Auberon Waugh, the invited audience included the art historian Sir Herbert Read, who was quoted in a paper as saying, ‘I don’t like jazz awfully, but it does liven up the proceedings.’ And indeed, on this occasion, as always, it did.

  In May, there was a rather less rarefied evening at ‘Mayfair’s Plush Phoenix Jazz Club’, where, together with Spike (‘appearing in person’), I read some poems. Coincidentally, the guest soloist that night, playing with the resident quartet, was the startlingly brilliant Jamaican jazz saxophonist Joe Harriott. I didn’t meet Joe that night, but our paths would cross many times in the future. Indeed, he still owes me £50!