Glenn Hughes starts to explain

A Work in Progress 
44

While some music is heard an audience assembles at the Penthouse Theater at the University of Washington.  Thomas Campion’s My Sweetest Lesbia is a suggestion.  The Director may wish the musicians to not play this piece pretentiously but animate it with brio.

An actor will shimmer onto the stage sheathed in a bedspread which another actor will unwrap.  Both are ballet dancers.  When unwrapped the bedspread becomes a screen revealing an image like that described by Catullus in his poem about a wedding.  Only this screen will depict first the marriage of Aldington and H.D. pictured on the pavement standing outside the registry office in Kensington, London and then H.D. abandoned with her child like Ariadne on the beach of a Greek island where Dionysius (Bacchus) will come to her rescue.

The dancers wrap up the screen and exit.

Enter Glenn Hughes.  He stands next to a double bed with rumpled sheets in a hotel room near the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris.   The room is high enough that through the window near the bed the tops of trees in a small square below can be seen.

 Babette Hughes enters through the audience.  She goes straight to the bed, feels the warmth on the sheets and looks at her husband.   

“I was wining and dining Hilda Doolittle.  (At this point, the camera will traverse to the window where Babette on stage is looking out of the window down to the square below, watching the diners on the sidewalk by the bistro).  

“Down there, we had lunch at the bistro.  Where’s Mary Anne? 

(Unexpectedly, Glenn’s young wife Babette had materialized in Paris when he thought she was living at Aldington’s cottage in England with their child).

Cut to the UW classroom in Denny Hall where Glenn Hughes taught drama classes

Glenn Hughes: “She had already written a poem entitled Eurydice, (behind him is a blackboard where Hughes has chalked a triangle and written names at the three points) and once I met her, I knew that she, herself, was the subject of the poem.   For H.D., as all poets called her, had been as much spiritually crushed by Richard Aldington, her husband, as Eurydice escaping from death had been crushed by Orpheus, almost as if she had been living in Hell.”  

We hear H.D. reciting from her poem Orchard with a tender imploring voice while we see a younger H.D. and Aldington alone in a cherry orchard: 

“O rough hewn god of the orchard

I bring you an offering…

these fallen hazel-nuts

stripped late of their green sheaths

grapes, red purple

their berries dripping with wine…

I bring you as offering.”  

Then we hear H.D. reciting, as if about to pronounce a curse, from her poem Envy, while we see a young soldier just back from duty in France and desperate with battle rage violently copulating with his wife:  

“I envy you your chance of death, how I envy you this…though you clasp me in an embrace that is set against my will, and rack me with your measure, effortless yet full of strength, and slay me…” 

“She had then been abandoned by Aldington, who wanted a life of promiscuity, not responsibility.”  Here we see H.D. with a baby and Aldington walking away.  He hesitates, turns back and looks at her, then goes on his way.  H.D. is reciting from her poem Eurydice: 

“…why did you turn back…? why did you turn?  why did you glance back?  why did you hesitate for that moment?  why did you bend your face caught with the flame of the upper earth above my face?”

Next Episode (Historic Denny Hall)

We now see Glenn Hughes giving a lecture.  

“I was working on getting to know those Imagist poets I’d come in search of.  We had crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner in order to meet, among others, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington.   They were all to be found there in 1929 in the year of the Great Crash on Wall Street.  It was May 1929.  The crash was still months away.   H.D. was a married woman, although she lived mostly in Switzerland with a long-time lesbian lover and a series of male lovers.  Besides Eurydice she reminded me of Lesbia.  Lesbia, as the great Roman poet Catullus described her, was bold and vivacious.  You could also see that in H.D. if you got on her wavelength.  She liked to look fragile to the outside world, but inside she was sparkling with joy.   She was like Calypso once you had entered her sacred space.  You could never leave until she let you go.  H.D.’s husband, like Catullus, who wrote about Lesbia in the time of the First Triumvirate, was a poet.  But H.D. and Aldington, had been separated for 10 years.  He was in Paris too, a big bluff fellow, carrying on a very public friendship with Nancy Cunard while Nancy Cunard conducted her own affair with an American jazz musician.   Who was Lesbia?  A gentleman never tells!  But you will have already guessed, because you’ve accessed the syllabus, that she tormented Catullus.  And it was easy for me to see that the story of Lesbia and Catullus might not be so different than that of H.D. and Aldington.”  

Babette Hughes has left the stage and Lesbia enters, dressed as a high-born Roman woman of the time of Catullus.  She has two slaves with her and commands them to show her the next coverlet on the bed.  It depicts two lovers kissing by a lake shore while some old men look on.

Next Episode (Lake Garda and Paris)

A Roman Villa on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy where Catullus is reciting a bitter poem written on a scroll to Lesbia, who is kissed in public while elders pass by with disapproving stares.   

“I had long thought that Lesbia and Catullus were a Roman version of the great Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus.  Now, I realized H.D., and Aldington were interchangeable with them, just as Sappho could have been with H.D. and Aldington, Alcaeus.  The two modern poets, H.D. and Aldington, had been married just before World War 1.  They lost their own child when it was still born.  This was in May 1915, a week or so after the Germans brought America into the war by torpedoing a passenger ship, Lusitania, causing immense death.  They separated soon thereafter.  She'd had a child by another man.  She could not bear the man Aldington had become as a result of fighting the Germans in France.  It was as if he was French-poxed by trench warfare.  

H.D. and Aldington were two poets in a series that began with Eurydice and Orpheus.  In all of them the men abandoned their women.  But the modern poets were destined to meet again in Paris.”  

We now see Glenn and Babette above the Parisian square  watching Richard Aldington and H.D. (the same actors as Catullus and Lesbia) having an intimate meal below.   Their hands touch on the table.  They rise and walk across the square beneath the trees and enter the hotel.  Glenn and Babette are seen hiding in the stairway when Aldington and H.D. pause to kiss in the doorway before entering the bedroom.

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

In Mid-May

Scents of lilac colors of columbine lavender purple 

beside a path strewn with cedar chips sun bleached

between rhododendrons some already bloomed

Fresh white blossoms beneath an early flowering bush

shriveled red blossoms near another like blood 

while multi-hued buds unfurl on an even later bush

Lush lemon-size green buds unfurling gold sheaths

enclosing gorgeous, upturned kiss-pursed red lips

becoming melon-size many stalked blossoms basking in the sun

Persimmon leaves are paler green than the walnut tree

rhododendron leaves another shade of green

holly leaves are dark with endpoint imagery 

A fountain where fortune grants free wishes

which free range crows with no saliva needing water 

pollute with peanut shells

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

What Happens in the End

A Work in Progress
43

Just an inch a year 

the ocean creeps

higher and higher and higher

we don’t mind

just as long as we get

higher and higher and higher

tariffs bite

prices rise

higher and higher and higher

we don’t mind

it makes us get

higher and higher 

it’s what we do

while rich guys rise

higher and higher and higher

we’ll get poorer

but we don’t care

getting higher and higher and higher

until we’re broke

we’ll just get 

higher and higher and higher

we’ll be homeless 

destitute

driven higher and higher and higher

we still have hope

King Trump’s rising

higher and higher and higher

he now owns space

we can see him

disappearing

going higher and higher and higher

and when he’s gone

we’ll be glad

to have him as a memory

fading out of sight as memories do

traveling far out in space

going higher and higher and higher

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

 Donal's Early Career

A Work in Progress 
42

When I was sixteen, in 1960, I l went to work at Burroughs Wellcome's chemical research laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, England where I was a lab assistant.  They gave a day off a week for continued education.  On those days, that I didn't take the train, I would ride my bicycle from Camberwell to Beckenham to Norwood two afternoons a week to attend Norwood Technical College. I'd then ride home to Camberwell.  About 20 miles all told through London traffic.

My favored route by bicycle to Beckenham took me on a private road past Dulwich College, a private school for boys with a noted art gallery and an accomplished list of former pupils including P. G. Wodehouse. On non-college days my route home took me down steep Sydenham Hill where a traffic light waited at an intersection with a main road at its foot.  I rode a fixed-wheel bike and kept up with the busy motor traffic going downhill to stop at the light.

I had started to think of being a writer and I saw a job listed in the newspaper that would mean living in a village in Kent, as an assistant to an author. I sent a letter to apply listing my current employer.  Perhaps he had looked up the Burroughs Wellcome number in the directory as I was very surprised to be summoned to the phone. This phone, in the age of landlines, did not ring in the lab where I worked but in the administrator's office.  I was embarrassed to take the call and have a short uncomfortable-to-speak freely interview with the author in front of three women secretaries.  It might have been H. E. Bates.  I wasn't offered the job, but I kept looking.

Geraldine was the young woman who summoned me to the phone.  I was far too shy to approach her but she was my age and I thought attractive.  There were two other young women in the admin office besides Geraldine.  They would mingle with the young lab assistants as we queued for our weekly pay packets. 

Those who were not salaried staff were paid on Fridays when at lunchtime we would line up to receive our pay packets which in my case was four pounds, some shillings and pence.  We were paid in cash.

The girls from the admin office were among those who assembled.  Christine, Valerie who later became engaged to Roger, and Geraldine.   Christine, a tall girl, wore a short tight miniskirt to work one Friday when we were waiting to be paid.  Roger slapped her hard on the bottom while we were standing in line.  He was that sort of person.  He later complained, a few days later, that on copulating with Christine on the carpet in the back of his van she wasn’t even wet.

Just as at school, William Penn Comprehensive School, now long defunct, my older brother had preceded me working at Burroughs Wellcome.  He was in his third year there and getting ready to leave and go to University with a grant that provided enough money a student could live cheaply.  He had studied for the needed A level certificates while taking the day release I also enjoyed.

Organic chemistry was not for me.  One day, carelessly, while manipulating some chemicals in a fume cupboard for an experiment, I managed to drip some drops of a lachrymator, stuff that makes you cry, onto one of my shoes.  Not long afterwards, I walked over to the dining hall to pick up a tray and get some lunch. As I walked down an aisle between lunch room tables I did not notice people hurriedly rising from their seats and exiting the building.  It was a warm day and the evaporating drops on my shoe were wafting behind me as I walked.  It was powerful stuff.  

I got another job as a lab technician at Whitbread's Chiswell Street brewery in the City of London.  This was a job where I could walk to The Oval underground station to take a train to work.  The brewery had cellars that dated back to Shakepearian times.  The Lord Mayor of London's ceremonial coach was kept at the brewery behind a glass wall in a temperature controlled room.  The brewery which used the drop method of fermentation was several stories high, one of the higher buildings at the time, a film had been made from the roof of the fires in the City of London one night when London was heavily bombed by German aircraft in World War II.

At first my job involved running an experimental brewery.  The chemistry of fermentation was not then, and probably is still not fully understood.  The problem to be solved was head retention.  A phrase that elicited laughter when I used it in America.  Whitbread's problem was that their renowned bitter beer did not have such a big foamy head as Watney's carbonated beers.  What could be done by varying the ingredients that go into beer to get a better head on the beer, one that would last longer and not dwindle quickly as it currently did.

My project was to run the glass brewery which had been constructed to try out various recipes.  It modeled the real brewery and descended two floors with a metal staircase around it.  I wore a white coat as one of the professional staff.  I might have been 18.  Most of the work in the glass brewery was done by a young fellow wearing a brown coat who had been brewing beer long before I arrived to take charge.  Together we mashed in and made second runnings varying the recipe and doing the best we could to provide some good samples to the senior brewers who conducted tastings.  

Using the privilege of my white coat, I sometimes wandered the old brick brewery, passing by the big wooden vats of beer on various levels, descending staircases that went by the stately board room where the Director's met down to the cellars where cobbled streets possibly dating from Shakespearian times were still visible among the storage tanks.

 At school, I'd enjoyed acting in school plays and the brewery had a drama club that put on plays it staged before audiences at a nearby theatre near the Aldersgate station.  Rehearsals were held in the evening and through the cast members I first encountered literary London.  Our manager's secretary in the new computer programing department, Mary Adams was also one of the cast and she shared a flat with Maggie Clews, an announcer for the BBC World Service radio programs.  They were friends with actors such as Tom Bell and poets such as Peter Porter. Mary would sometimes invite them to meet her after rehearsals in the private brewery bar.  On one occasion after some jovial imbibing in the bar Tom Bell made off with a bunch of daffodils from the window boxes that lined Chiswell Street, presenting them to Mary as a bouquet.  And So To Bed, was one of the plays the drama club put on.  Another was HayFever, for which I got good reviews for my part from Mary's claque in the audience.

Most of my free time was spent studying for the English "A" level exams I needed to pass in order to apply to a university college.  One of my teachers had suggested I become a journalist when I left school but I hadn't heeded that advice.  I was intent on getting a degree in the sciences.

My story is one of continuing education.  As the story goes, Whitbread management realized that it could no longer hire staff to work as clerks with quill pens now that computers were coming into fashion.  So, aptitude tests were passed around and after taking one I was selected to go to an IBM training school to learn how to be a computer programmer.  A computer room with a raised floor was being prepared to house the IBM 1440 computer that had been ordered.  It was being built in a basement approached by descending a staircase that otherwise led up to Colonel Whitbread's private accommodation in a private wing.   A refrigerator and supplies of bottled beer were kept adjacent to the cool air-conditioned computer room.  We sometimes encountered the Colonels's butler entering the building from the courtyard.

Now a trained programmer, I was sent to work at Stowells of Chelsea, part of the Whitbread Group, whose distribution center for the wines they sold to restaurants, clubs, wine bars and off-licenses was just off the King's Road.

At Stowell's, I met Bill Sowerby, who taught me to how to properly answer the phone: Russell, speaking, not Mr. Russell.  A well tailored management trainee, he seemed to mostly be a liaison between the new team of ex-IBMers that Whitbread had hired to manage the computer project and Whitbread's old-school management led by the Colonel, who had led his own paratroop regiment in the recent war and who regularly entertained the Queen Mother at the Brewery as well as organized horse racing at Cheltenham.

At Stowells of Chelsea I became acquainted with punched cards.  Besides their use for collecting information, they fit very well into the inside pocket of a jacket and it was the custom in those days to always carry a few in your pocket ready to pull out and write notes on while at the pub, say.

Punched cards are paper cards which when punched with holes encoded eighty columns of alphanumeric information a tabulator could read.  I worked on my own at night running boxes of punched cards through a sorter.  Each card represented a transaction.  Then, I ran the sorted cards through the tabulator to print a report organized by customer.  I was warned not to let my tie get caught in the tabulator which read cards at high speed.

Jim Lewis was the manager who had set up the punched card system at Stowells that was due to be replaced by the incoming computer at Whitbread.  The Whitbread Group encompassed many breweries throughout England and Jim would soon move on from Stowells to a brewery in the Shires to be the data processing manager.  In the meantime, he was keeping things running during the day managing the young women who punched up the cards from the invoices sent and payments received.  The tabulator was programmed with wires plugged into a board, much like an old telephone exchange that had many holes in front of an operator to select.  Jim had programmed these boards to produce needed reports.  Stowells was a profitable subsidiary with higher margins on its products than beer.  Eventually, some decades later Whitbread would sell off its beer business to concentrate on restaurants and hotels.

The first computer program I was assigned to write was a make-work project given to me by my manager, Michael Russell, no relation.  He had been recruited by John Dunbar, his senior, also his former colleague at IBM.  It was a bell ringing program where eight imaginary hand bells would play a tune directed by the program.

The last program I wrote was to make mulitple Cray-1 vector register instructions chime.  That was after I had quit programming to write full-time and then returned to programming several years later in order to make a living having achieved success as a poet at the expense of becoming somewhat destitute.  

A learning experience.

Dick Russell (C) Richard M Russell

                     2025

Ode to the Chicken House
         For Gina Dearden

A Work in Progress
41

There was a structure called the chicken house

well-lit maybe once a Nissen hut where she worked

nearby a caravan where an overflow guest could sleep

a quince tree in a paddock where geese flocks cackled

a dry floored shed where fruit was left to season

on spread out sheets of newsprint from The Times

a woodshed with ample split firewood for the winter

an axe and a chopping block all kept dry

her room in the big house and access to an Aga

a fridge and a wooden table where actors would sit

and chat before leaving for the Southampton Rep 

coming home later to make cocoa before turning in

her heart was inside her studio where all seemed faraway

as she mixed colors made etchings always new things

nearby ponies traveled New Forest paths, private places

in a time when many young Americans travelled abroad

some had served in Vietnam others reluctant awaited fate

four dead students had already fallen for their cause

peachie le nic was one of those a hungry New Yorker

raiding the fridge for chicken wings scooping it all in

a Columbia journalism school grad with portable typewriter 

set with an italic font to imprint onion skin paper

artists, actors, exhibitions together in the chicken house

when the sixties hit ten and the seventies began

when we were all very young when we all felt free 

in the first act of an epic we’d all been cast in

her sketchbook cover was decorated with color

Its zeit geist design still etched in my mind

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025