Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  Meanwhile, arrangements for the RFH concert were moving apace. I’d long admired the lyrical poetry of Laurie Lee, so I wrote to him explaining the background and inviting him to read. To my delight, he agreed, and so, for the first time – but by no means the last – I was able to watch him take a small yellow book from his pocket and announce to the captivated audience in his quiet Gloucestershire burr, ‘This is my life’s work,’ before leading into ‘Day of These Days’, or another of his entrancing poems, lacing each of them with a brief anecdote. Laurie, whom I always thought of as the Pied Piper, was to become one of the most regular readers in the many concerts to come and we shared a lot of memorable experiences. Finally, two more superb jazzmen were added to the line-up: drummer Laurie Morgan and the saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith.

  As before, we printed leaflets and posters, but on a much larger scale. Friends and contacts took batches of these and distributed them as widely as possible. Lydia Pasternak Slater (whose surprised response to my latest mad venture had been to exclaim, ‘We’ll be reading to each other!’) volunteered to leave leaflets and put posters up in various Oxford colleges, and Leon Brittan offered to do the same in Cambridge, asking me for a big poster to put up in the Union, though, ever the realist, he wrote, ‘But I don’t know whether you can expect many to come from Cambridge as it is May Week and people will be reluctant to budge.’ He ended his letter – which I rediscovered in my RFH file – by asking me to give him a ring once the term (‘my last one incidentally’) was over ‘as I haven’t really seen you since your poetry career got under way’. We also wanted to have all the poets’ books on sale, which meant contacting their publishers, arranging delivery, setting up a stand and arranging for someone to man it. It was important, we felt, for people to be able to read the poetry they had just heard, which would hopefully lead them to explore poetry more widely.

  We decided to produce a rather more elaborate programme than last time, hoping to attract advertisers – easier said than done, as Edward, who wrote dozens of letters, quickly discovered. But we scored some successes, including a leaflet insert from the Jazz Book Club, and full pages from Guinness, the Ham and High and EMI (Parlophone Records). We also landed several smaller ones. The EMI advert had come about through the legendary Beatles producer George Martin, who, in an exciting development, had agreed to record the concert. We placed a hundred posters on the Underground, advertised in a few select places, and sent out press releases far and wide. Everything was strikingly designed by Arnon’s pianist, Peter Taylor. As with the first concert, the press seemed intrigued by our unlikely concoction and both Spike and I were called on to give a number of interviews, Spike pulling out all the stops. Things really looked up when I was asked to appear on an ITV programme called Sunday Break to read with the band, and then we were given an enormous boost when the Daily Mail ran an interview with Spike in which they included a few witty verses from his forthcoming A Dustbin of Milligan. Spike ended the interview by saying, ‘Unlike Shelley I was not drowned in Italy. But I am one of the Lake poets. Some of my best poetry has been written under water.’ By that, of course, as the interviewer rightly surmised, he was referring to the gentle inspiration of a red liquid called Burgundy.

  On the day of the concert, a more serious piece by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph gave us additional welcome publicity. In it, he rehearsed the history of the Hampstead sell-out and ended by saying that the instigators now ‘found themselves in just a few months tackling a venture that would give pause even to a hardened promoter of professional wrestling’. I must say I hadn’t thought of it like that. Probably I was still too green and carried away by enthusiasm to feel as anxious as I should have been. Alongside Booker’s piece was a photo of Spike, me and our bass player Neil Barton (plus bass) outside the RFH in front of a large poster for the concert. It was a nerve-jangling time, and when Peter Sellers asked for three tickets to be reserved in his name, I felt – not being a wrestling promoter – that I’d landed myself with something I might well regret. It wasn’t just the organisational responsibility; there was the little matter of standing up and reading before 3,000 or more people without falling flat on my face. My feelings were well expressed in a typed note I sent Lydia Pasternak Slater which began, ‘I’m sorry if this letter is a little bit jerky but that’s how I feel and how I will feel until June 12th!’

  Published in the Sunday Telegraph on the morning of our Festival Hall concert, this gave the sales a welcome boost.

  Well, we did it. The hall was full, all our expenses were met, and the pattern was set for a great many more poetry and jazz concerts featuring a strong and varied line-up of poets and outstanding musicians. Naturally, in such an enormous hall the concert had a different feel from the first one, and there wasn’t the same element of surprise, for us anyway. But it was every bit as thrilling and memorable, and as far as poetry readings in this country went, a landmark. Perhaps the now defunct Daily Herald summed it up best in its headline: ‘The day 3,000 people listened to … POETRY!’ The paper went on to say, ‘The poets went to the Royal Festival Hall yesterday, read their poems, and 3,000 people gave them the reception normally reserved for the great names of music. I call that a piece of history.’ For those who may have wondered, as a few did, what Spike Milligan was doing in the middle of a programme of basically ‘serious’ poetry, the political and literary weekly magazine Time and Tide provided a fitting response: ‘The zany, cataclysmic satire of Goonery is not so far removed from the anti-nuclear burden of most young poets; we all have our own way of shouting in despair. Milligan listened gravely as the poets read to a breathless 3,000.’

  The Guardian especially seemed to be intrigued by the occasion, running a full-page picture story, followed the next week by a rather earnest piece about poetry and music which also referred to a concert that had taken place in the RFH’s Recital Room a few days after ours. Called simply Jazz Voices, that concert, to which I went, involved speakers from London University and a small jazz group, with settings of poems under the direction of a pianist/composer called Michael Garrick, who had written all the music. That was to prove a fortunate coincidence.

  7

  ON THE ROAD

  Michael Garrick’s Jazz and Voices programme was a revelation, and at the end of the performance something seemed to tug at my sleeve and lead me to introduce myself to him. I’ve always felt it was a kind of ‘Dr Livingstone’ moment, for me certainly, but for Michael also, to judge from his warm account of our meeting in his autobiography, Dusk Fire. At any rate, he seemed well aware of the concert we’d given the previous week, and welcomed the opportunity to meet. As well as speakers from London University, the concert I’d just enjoyed featured Michael’s own quartet alongside a quintet which included a harp and cello – a rather different kind of programme from ours, perhaps, but Michael’s special talent – his empathy with the poems he’d set, together with his superb musicianship and his ability to compose striking melodies – was immediately obvious.

  We arranged to meet, and did so several times over the coming months. I gave him a few poems I felt might work well with jazz, and he came back quickly with a couple of sensitive settings. As it happened, Arnon Ben-Tovim, who’d done so much to make our first events such a success, had indicated that he wouldn’t be able to devote the necessary time to future concerts, especially if they involved travelling. His hands were more than full with his job (he became a prominent child and family psychiatrist). Thus, when in due course we received an invitation from the director of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, I asked Michael if he would like to provide the music. We went on to give well over 300 poetry and jazz concerts together over the next decade or so – at universities, theatres, arts festivals, schools, town halls and the like all over the country.

  While I too had a day job to contend with, it was not one that was as testing or responsible as Arnon’s, and I was able to combine my fairly routine job at Tit-Bits with future thoughts and plans for what
came to be called Poetry and Jazz in Concert. At the same time I was reviewing ever more frequently for Tribune, and trying to write and publish poems.

  During the lull between the Festival Hall and the next concert, my life was greatly enriched by my growing friendship with Dannie Abse. Through his older brothers, Dannie had been immersed from an early age in the politics and intellectual issues of the day – the civil war in Spain, the rise of Fascism, the work of Freud. He opened my eyes to many things. Although a practising doctor (for many years he worked as a radiologist at the Royal Air Force clinic in London), Dannie lived and breathed poetry. For some eight years he’d edited a poetry magazine called Verse, which first appeared in the winter of 1947. An offshoot of the magazine was the controversial anthology Mavericks, which he co-edited with Howard Sergeant, editor of the poetry magazine Outposts. Their aim was to provide a counterbalance to the fashionable so-called Movement Poets featured in the recent New Lines anthology edited by Robert Conquest.

  As Abse and Sergeant made clear in their introductions to Mavericks, they weren’t trying to create a new group or attach labels but simply to provide a platform for some of the younger poets who’d been overlooked and who, in Dannie’s words, ‘were unafraid of sensibility and sentiment, who are neither arid nor lush’. In his letter to Sergeant, which formed part of the introduction to the anthology, Dannie went on: ‘I can think of a number of young poets who are not writing mere exercises but working from the heat of personal predicament and common experience; who remember perhaps Dryden’s “Errors like straw upon the surface flow; / He who would search for pearls must search below.”’ In his response, Sergeant pointed out that even Kingsley Amis, the archetypal Movement Poet, had admitted, ‘The trouble with the newer poets, including myself, is that they are often lucid and nothing else – except arid and bald.’ Quite a self-indictment!

  It was fascinating for me to hear Dannie’s personal account of those stirring times, and I was interested to be introduced via their anthology to poets whose work I had not yet encountered. A few of them were to feature in future poetry and jazz concerts along with several arresting poets I had reviewed. Since Dannie knew some of them, he was able to steer me to those whose work not only read well on the page (essential) but who were also good readers of their own work (just as essential). Dannie would also reminisce about the Cosmo restaurant in Swiss Cottage, and the writers, poets, artists, refugees and colourful characters who converged there in the years after the war, talk, talk, talking and verbally wrestling until closing time – some, like Elias Canetti, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, to become famous. For a while, it had become Dannie’s regular haunt, living as he then did just around the corner.

  While I worked on in London during the summer of ’61, Dannie sensibly went on holiday. But holidays for Dannie were never quite that. Also, it seems, the poetry and jazz concerts had excited him, and he referred to them half-jokingly in a letter he sent me from Devon:

  I’ve looked around Salcombe but there’s no place here as big as the Festival Hall, which is a pity because Tennyson’s ghosts round the creek and are across the bar. We are perched high up over South Sands with a marvellous view ‘so beautiful it seems a fake’. All around, through trees, views of bays, cliffs and the sea, all drizzling sunlight. The wild flowers here – meadowsweet, fuchsia, Jack-by-the-Hedge, eyebright, blackberry blossom – a whole list in fact to make up a poem by Edward Thomas. I try to work for a couple of hours each day but however much I stare no poems float up. If I don’t write I feel quite guilty. One has to offer something in exchange for the scenery.

  ‘Are you finding the hours tame after the tensions of TV and the Festival Hall?’ Dannie went on to ask, ending his welcome letter by reminding me of our forthcoming date at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry (as if I needed any reminding!) and wishing me ‘all that is good, and odd’.

  Before the Coventry concert, which was scheduled for the following February, I was given an unexpected personal boost when I was invited by the Writers Club to be the first poet in a series of ‘Penny Poets’ they were launching. This was a small, one-page publication – a single sheet – with (in my case) four poems on it and selling for one penny. Four poems for a penny! (I’ve squirrelled a few copies away, so perhaps by now they will have doubled in value.) There was a 2,500 print run. No money in it for anyone, but that wasn’t the point. The club had various branches, meeting fortnightly, and the project was being funded out of members’ subscriptions with the aim of introducing the work of young poets to a wider audience at a more or less giveaway price. At any rate I was truly thrilled to have been chosen as their first poet and it seemed a fitting end to what had been a tumultuous year.

  * * *

  The Belgrade Theatre concert took place on 18 February 1962, and once again Spike Milligan had agreed to take part, alongside Christopher Logue, Adrian Mitchell, Dannie Abse, Laurie Lee and me. Michael Garrick led the music, which for the first time featured the stupendous Shake Keane. Born in St Vincent, Shake, to quote The Times, was ‘the most brilliant trumpet and flugelhorn player of his generation’. A large figure of a man, Shake was dynamic, exciting to listen to, full of humour, and, having studied English literature at London University, he had a great love of poetry, which he wrote himself (hence his nickname, short for Shakespeare). In later concerts, when the fiery alto saxophonist Joe Harriott joined the line-up, the jazz was simply sensational. Shake and Joe (a pioneer of free-form jazz) were in harmony with what we were doing and intrigued to be involved in something they thought novel and fresh. When in due course Shake went off to join a German band, Ian Carr, another tremendous horn player, came on board, and often with him saxophonist Don Rendell. All stars.

  Joe Harriott, it must be said, was a loner and never easy to control, and once in full solo flight it was sometimes hard for Michael to rein him in. Shake Keane, who was as close to Joe as anyone and perhaps the only musician he truly felt to be his equal, spoke of Joe’s ‘noble arrogance, the way he sat, the way he played’. The attack of Joe’s playing was mesmerising, so it was easy to forgive his occasional rampages, which always added to the excitement of the occasion. As Joe once said, measuring himself against the legendary American saxophonist Charlie Parker, ‘There’s them over here can play a few aces too.’ Fittingly, those words are inscribed on Joe’s headstone. Michael Garrick paid ready tribute to Joe and Shake in his autobiography:

  When we worked together I didn’t have to write any marks of expression on the lead sheet … the way they played was fantastic. They each had a beautiful sound instantly recognizable from the first note. Their playing was unique with warmth and maturity. They were also black in an alien society, determined their voice should be heard … I didn’t fully realise what a lucky lad I was to have them play the music I wrote.

  I believe that all the poets who read alongside them were also lucky lads to have the exciting and informal setting the jazz provided in which to read their poems, and all recognised this. Conversely, the musicians appreciated the quality of the poetry read, the different personalities of the poets reading and the showcase it gave their music. It made for an intoxicating combination, and a number of barriers were sent flying. Did audiences come for the poetry or for the jazz? It didn’t really matter. That they came, and in large numbers, is what mattered, and that they went away with both music and poetry in their heads, and perhaps some books under their arms. Above all, almost everything read or played was original, poets reading their own work, musicians playing their own music – or at least Michael Garrick’s. For as well as setting a few of my poems and Adrian Mitchell’s (and later, too, poems by Vernon Scannell, John Smith and Thomas Blackburn), Michael composed original numbers for the band, including his beautiful ‘Wedding Hymn’, which he always played after Dannie Abse’s poem ‘Epithalamion’, and he’d programme an appropriately lyrical number to follow Laurie Lee’s poems. Occasionally, though, Shake liked to play ‘She’s Like a Swallow’ as a solo ne
xt to Laurie’s poems, a lovely slow number that allowed him to display the beauty of his tone. Laurie loved it. He also loved it when Joe Harriott, with his wicked sense of humour, immortalised ‘She’s Like a Swallow’ by shifting the ‘s’ from the end of ‘she’s’ to the end of ‘like’!

  If Joe had his wild moments, several of the poets had theirs too. There was the time when the bird-like Stevie Smith hurled a book at a photographer who was annoying her with his persistent clicking (was she raving or clowning?), and the night at Southampton University when Thomas Blackburn, who seemed to have a personal war with religion, halted mid-poem to harangue an unfortunate clergyman who happened to be sitting in the front row. The unpredictable Tom, whose deep voice and dark, compelling poems would hold audiences riveted, could sometimes become the victim of his own demons. And it’s hardly surprising there were demons, since, as he recalled in a memoir, when he was at boarding school, his father, a vicar, sent him a clip of steel to wear at night to deter nocturnal erections and prevent the loss of vital bodily fluids. The casting-off of these and other childhood repressions and impositions led to the wickedly handsome Tom running riot with the ladies when he got to Cambridge, landing him in considerable trouble. I think it was after a reading at Southampton that Tom and Dannie found themselves having to share a room in student digs. As there was only one bed, they’d agreed to toss for it, and when Dannie won Tom exclaimed indignantly, ‘You’re not going to take advantage of the toss are you, Dannie?’

  But for all Tom’s ravings, nothing was more dramatic than the occasion at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge when the blind poet John Heath-Stubbs, having been led onto the stage, gradually turned around as he was reciting in his sonorous voice until he ended up facing the back of the stage, which startled the audience into a breathless silence. The image of John standing there in the spotlight, tall and gaunt, his arms outstretched and raised to the heavens, was like something out of a Greek drama.