* * *
It was now 1965, and I was relieved to have broken the back of the Chagall book as a series of poetry and jazz concerts loomed. The one in September – our second at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (Joan Littlewood’s theatre) – was memorable for the fact that both Ted Hughes and Stevie Smith were reading for the first time, along with Dannie, Douglas Hill and me, with Michael Garrick’s Quintet augmented for the occasion by Tony Coe (with Coleridge Goode on bass, and percussionist Colin Barnes). I’m amused to see that in the flyer put out by the theatre, Douglas is called ‘a young poet from Canada’ and Dannie and me ‘old stagers’. I recall that The Observer’s influential poetry critic Al Alvarez came with Ted that night. It was an electrifying concert and I managed to capture it on my very basic tape recorder – the recording now a collector’s item which I copied for Ted’s widow Carol quite recently. Given Ted’s passion for classical music, Beethoven especially, she seemed surprised that Ted had readily participated, and indeed I had wondered myself how he would react to the whole scenario, particularly to the jazz. I was relieved to receive a friendly and positive letter from him saying, ‘Thanks for the reading the other night, I enjoyed it all very much indeed.’ Furthermore, he went on to suggest that I approach the head of the English department at Exeter University, Professor Moelwyn Merchant, who, Ted said, was ‘very wide awake and new and determined to get some fresh air into the university’. He also suggested that I write to Clifford Fishwick, the head of the College of Art at Exeter, who ‘tries to get all the lectures, readings, etc. that he can for his students’. Following the Theatre Royal reading, it was also gratifying to receive a note from Stevie Smith saying, ‘I did enjoy it very much’, and being complimentary about the whole ‘splendid programme’. She was only sorry she’d been ‘unable to go off to the Chinese restaurant as Ted suggested’, and concluded by sending her best wishes and thanks to Carole ‘for transporting [her] so kindly like’. She had added greatly to the evening’s success, singing and chanting her way through her vivid poems, including the famous ‘Not Waving but Drowning’.
In another letter written in light-hearted vein shortly after that concert, Ted asked me – referring to the magazine which he founded in 1965 with Daniel Weissbort and co-edited with him – ‘Would you be interested in distributing or getting some stunning juvenile beauty to distribute for 2/6 per copy our Modern Poetry in Translation? Copy enclosed. The second edition – French – is out on Friday. You could keep 6d per copy. It’s easy to sell, at 2/6, and your concerts would be just the place.’
Among the other contacts Ted gave me was Rolle College in Exmouth, where if I had any luck I was to tell him ‘and I’ll give you two more names in Cornwall’, his idea being that we should try to arrange a tour, to make it economical. Naturally I was grateful for his enthusiastic interest and quickly followed up his suggestions, but while I had an encouraging exchange of letters with Moelwyn Merchant, he was never able to get the necessary financial support from the university. However, we struck lucky with Rolle College, where two readings were arranged for a Saturday and Sunday the following March, Ted readily agreeing to read at both. They were to prove memorable in several ways.
Meanwhile, the Belfast Festival was our next port of call, with a concert at Queen’s College. Everyone had flown there except Joe Harriott, who’d opted to go by sea, and the next morning we found him sitting disconsolately in the hotel lobby. He’d been to the port, where massive waves were making it impossible for ships to leave the harbour and all sailings had been cancelled. Joe had already suffered the terrors of a storm on the way out, arriving late and shaken as a result. We offered to try to get him on our plane, but he wouldn’t fly. Yet the night before, there was no end to his daring as he threw himself into solos that had the audience on the edge of their seats.
For some time I had been involved with an international poetry magazine in Geneva called Poésie Vivante, advising the editors on British poets they should look out for. They had invited me to compile an anthology of up-and-coming British poets for their Cahiers Franco-Anglais series, which entailed selecting and writing to the various poets, but also corresponding with both Rosemary Marie, who ran the English side of things, and Jean-Jacques Celly, who was doing the translations. The attractive little book, a paperback, featured sixteen poets, and as well as drawing on books and pamphlets I was excited to get some unpublished poems too, especially from Seamus Heaney, who sent me a few he’d written since handing in his forth-coming first book, Death of a Naturalist. He asked me to excuse his ‘atrocious’ typing and said that if they weren’t ‘up to scratch’ he’d send me more. They most certainly were up to scratch. (Earlier, he’d sent me Eleven Poems, a pamphlet containing some of the wonderful Naturalist poems – now, modestly, he was saying he was glad ‘they hadn’t put [me] off’.)
As all the poems were to appear in both English and French, most of the poets were concerned about the accuracy of the translation. To some extent I found myself drawn in, discussing meanings and nuances with the translator, all too aware of the famous mistranslation of the opening line of Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’, which begins: ‘A cold coming we had of it’ and which was interpreted as ‘They had a cold coming’. I don’t believe we committed any sins as cardinal as that!
* * *
Douglas Hill was still in Canada, finishing a book on the supernatural and writing another, The Opening of the Canadian West. He was also compiling several science fiction anthologies for Sonny Mehta, who was then working as an adviser on science fiction for Rupert Hart-Davis, and was shortly to start the Paladin imprint for Granada Publishing, before moving to Pan Books a few years later. It was in Douglas and Gaila’s flat that I first met the handsome and hugely gifted Sonny, who was to become a major force in American publishing. At that stage, Douglas hadn’t yet started to write the series of sci-fi novels that were to make his name, but he had discovered a ‘remarkable young Canadian poet called Leonard Cohen’. He asked me to find out whether any of Cohen’s books of poems or any of his novels had been published in England, ‘’cos if not I’m going to try to grab him; he’s a wild man, way out, and funny and dangerous. He’s also very beautiful in a soulful way that presumably grabs the heartstrings and other anatomical parts of women.’ A great many years later, after I’d joined up with another company, I had the opportunity to ‘grab’ two of Cohen’s books myself but was outvoted by people who thought there wasn’t sufficient interest in him. I gnashed my teeth as some months later I sat in the O2 Centre amidst a vast cheering audience of Cohen fans.
I too became an instant Leonard Cohen fan (though maybe not as fanatical a one as my mother some forty years later) when Douglas went on to describe a TV programme he’d watched in which Cohen was interviewed by a very prissy woman who kept prodding him about his Jewishness:
‘I’ve often thought of changing my name,’ Cohen eventually conceded. The interviewer perked up and said, ‘Really, to what?’ ‘Oh,’ said Cohen, looking innocent, ‘I think September.’ ‘September?’ she said, incredulous. ‘Isn’t that pretty unusual?’ ‘No,’ Cohen continued, still innocent. ‘It’s very common. September, once a year, very familiar.’ The interviewer blinked. ‘Leonard September?’ she said, testing its sound. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it wrong. September Cohen.’
Douglas had missed the next ten minutes of the programme through laughing at the expression on the interviewer’s face, ‘a superb combination of distress (at the assumption that he wanted to lose his Jewish name) and anger at the delicacy with which he’d trapped her and showed her up on her own programme’.
By now Foges and I were on relatively friendly terms and Carole and I were invited to several parties at his Hampstead home, where we met his charming and elegant wife Catherine and their son Peter, who would become a successful film producer in America. Foges was always at his restless worst on such occasions, though welcoming. It seemed I’d earned my spurs, if not yet the salary I felt I now d
eserved. I think Foges liked parties in a strange kind of way, and occasionally he’d try to let his hair down and even make uncharacteristic attempts to please his staff, which is why, one July day, we all found ourselves invited on a trip down the Thames on a boat that seemed wider than the river, where he joined in a hearty rendering of ‘Lili Marlene’ (just the song for a summer cruise down the oh-so-English Thames).
Pipe in hand, Wolfgang Foges leads a chorus of ‘Lili Marlene’ on the Aldus boat outing on the Thames
With Ben-Gurion published and Chagall more or less completed, I wondered what Foges’s next demanding extravaganza would be, while, as 1967 unfolded, the poetry and jazz concerts (and the poems and reviews) continued at an intense pace, with about forty around the country in sixteen months. In March 1967, the Rolle College concerts brought Ted back into the fold, and he turned up with a strikingly beautiful woman, ‘tall and slender, sooty-haired with startling eyes’, as Dannie Abse recalled, whom he introduced simply as ‘Assia’. (I could not have imagined then the dramatic role Assia Wevill was to play in Ted’s life – nor, of course, the tragic consequences.) It was a strange reading, largely because the college authorities were clearly suspicious of us. On no account could the grand piano in the hall be used; another had to be brought in. In fact, despite Ted’s presence in the line-up (Dannie and Vernon Scannell were the other readers), official support was withheld until the last minute, when it was realised that both concerts were virtually sold out. The audience listened intently to the poems we read and applauded the jazz loudly. Afterwards almost every book on the table was sold. The principal of the college, who had decided at the last moment to attend, exclaimed of the jazz, ‘Why, it’s like chamber music!’ She was surprised that it was organised, disciplined and melodious, and bought two LPs. Later, in the bar, a tipsy young man tried hard to provoke Vernon – the ex-professional boxer – into a fight. It was his luck that Vernon managed to brush him off without a punch being thrown.
I imagine the principal came to the concert out of courtesy or duty rather than for the poetry. The students might have come for the jazz or because they were curious, but as the classically inclined John Heath-Stubbs put it when he ventured tentatively into our midst, ‘It doesn’t really matter why they come as long as they come.’
13
SIX DAYS IN JUNE
1967. A date that for me always means the Six Day War, the beginning of a special friendship with the Israeli novelist Hanoch Bartov (at that time his country’s cultural attaché to Britain), and the editing of a book that would eventually lead to a new job. Since the war and the events surrounding it indirectly affected my own story in unexpected ways, I feel I should recall it all as I saw it then, for, like most people who cared about Israel’s future existence (and not just Jews), I was alarmed, as it really looked as if that tiny country would be swept away by the combined forces of the Arab armies massing on its various borders. We were frightened, and the spectre of the Holocaust still hovered in many minds.
The fuse that ignited it all was President Nasser’s demand that the UN withdraw its peacekeeping forces from Egypt’s border with Israel, following this up with the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israel’s shipping. After that, things escalated as King Hussein of Jordan placed his troops under Egyptian control, Nasser declaring, ‘Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel.’ When troops from Algeria and Kuwait arrived in Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and Iraq joined with Jordan’s Foreign Legion, from Israel’s point of view the situation could not have been more grave. Suddenly it found itself facing 900 tanks deployed in Sinai, 200 of them poised to attack Eilat and cut off the Southern Negev, and 50,000 troops dug in on the steep Golan Heights overlooking the villages and kibbutzim of Galilee, their positions fortified by concrete and steel. The vultures were circling.
Israel called up its reservists, and Moshe Dayan, the cavalier Israeli general who had lost an eye fighting for the British in Syria during the Second World War, was brought into the government as Minister of Defence. Gas masks were distributed, shelters made ready, everyone was on high alert, and there were chilling reports that in Tel Aviv mass graves were being dug in the night and consecrated by rabbis, which moved me to write a poem called ‘The Rabbis’ Prayers’, which was widely published at the time. It begins:
They say that in the night
you stole your way to parks
and public spaces to consecrate
ground for the ritual burial
of your people: that when the
catches on the guns snapped back
and eyes, Belsen-red, gazed
down the unfamiliar barrels, you
called upon an ancient God
who some say heard you.
It was a matter of life and death, and in Britain Jewish writers, feeling that they had to do something – anything – came together under the enlightened chairmanship of the director, writer and historian Louis Marks in a group calling itself Writers for Israel. It was at one of these meetings that I met Hanoch Bartov. We all loved him. Warm, vitally intelligent and a fine writer who had fought in Europe under the British (his book The Brigade is a classic), he galvanised us and brought us what up-to-date information he could. At that time the press was generally sympathetic to Israel’s plight and letters poured into the embassy, mostly from non-Jews, some offering to fight, some offering their services as doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers, or simply expressing their sympathy. It was a terrible time and we all sat glued to the radio, fearing the dreadful news we might hear. But what could we do except write letters, protest, use every means possible to highlight the situation, as many others did?
The Israeli novelist Hanoch Bartov, who was to affect my publishing career in a very real way.
You had to be blind in both eyes not to see the perilous military situation as it was. Fortunately, Moshe Dayan was only blind in one, and he sent the following message to his troops: ‘Our aim is not to occupy, but to prevent the Arab armies from occupying our country and to break the vice that is closing in on us. They may outnumber us, but we shall win.’ Then, in a brilliantly coordinated, highly skilled and greatly daring attack that stunned the world, Israel’s air force, flying low beneath the enemy radar, destroyed ten major air bases simultaneously, followed by a further nine. In less than three hours, Israel’s pilots had destroyed the greater part of Egypt’s air force and air defences, before turning their attention to Jordan, Syria and Iraq, all of whom had begun shelling Israeli settlements.
While the air battles raged, the ground offensive commenced, Israel’s forces (under the command of Yitzhak Rabin) striking first against Egypt, then against Jordan and Syria in ferocious battles that saw many losses on both sides, but which ended with the entire Sinai Peninsula as well as the Gaza Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh in Israeli hands (victories that took just four days). The Old City of Jerusalem, lost to Jordan in the 1948 war, was taken, as well as the entire West Bank, which had been part of the Hashemite Kingdom since 1948, and finally the Syrian positions on the Golan Heights, in the bloodiest battles of all, were overrun. By 10 June, all parties had agreed a ceasefire.
To us, following these remarkable events in peaceful London, it seemed like a miracle. No one was triumphant, just incredibly relieved. The embassy continued to receive hundreds of letters. Written spontaneously by people who had no ties with Israel, they were deeply moving, and when things were a little calmer Hanoch approached me and asked whether I would be willing to edit a book of the letters the embassy had received: it would be a permanent record of this momentous point in Israel’s history. Reading the many files he gave me, it didn’t take long to realise that with careful selection they would make a moving and very human testimony, and I agreed, working on the book in the evenings and at weekends.
All we needed now was a publisher, and Hanoch arranged a meeting with the proprietor and chairman of the Jewish Chronicle, David Kessler, whose book publishing company, Vallentine, Mitchell seemed the perfect outlet.
The JC, founded in 1841, was the oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the world, and when David, a man of wide business experience, took over the chairmanship from his father, who had purchased a majority shareholding in the paper in 1907, he endeavoured to ensure that the paper reached out to all sections of the community and above all retained its editorial integrity. A Cambridge graduate, he had the bearing of a major, a rank he had held in the British Army. He received us with great courtesy and, after listening to Hanoch’s proposal, readily agreed to take on the publication. Since I was to edit the book, this was the first of several visits to Kessler’s office, and as the months went by we found ourselves having friendly conversations and from time to time he’d invite me to lunch, always keen to talk about publishing and to get my views on how Vallentine, Mitchell should develop.
Time-consuming and involving though all this was for me, poetry remained at the centre of everything, and I was thrilled to have a poem accepted by the New Statesman, and then another by the influential magazine Encounter, which had been founded by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol in the 1950s. At the same time, the poetry and jazz concerts continued, one of them – at Malvern Girls’ College – being recorded for transmission on Radio 3 by the poet and BBC producer George MacBeth. Meanwhile, Letters to Israel was published and well received. Hanoch and his wife Yehudith had by now become friends, and the parties they gave at their Swiss Cottage flat were always brimming with interesting people and bonhomie. I remember the booming voice of the bearded novelist and political writer Mervyn Jones cutting through the chatter with a lament about his new book, which had been widely reviewed: ‘I wish someone would compliment me on the book rather than the reviews!’ On another occasion, we took Vernon Scannell with us, but we should have realised that the embassy whisky would take its toll. After we had left the party at a more or less respectable hour, Vernon had stayed on, entertaining the remaining guests with an account of his experiences with the British Army in wartime Egypt, where he’d been put in the slammer for one misdemeanour or another. Next morning we were woken by a phone call from the filmmaker Mira Hamermesh saying she had a rather worse-for-wear Vernon in her flat and would we like to pick him up. I think that giving him a bed for the night had been an act of compassion on her part rather than one of passion. In any case I can’t imagine Vernon would have been at his priapic best.
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