On Reading Like A Fiery Elephant, the Story of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe

How Quiet It Was (A Postcard from Beckett)

There is a sadness now that comes to me when I think of friends and mentors, already  dead.  It seems my own brother's death in January 2014 brought forth that sadness to the fore.  Before then, it was not sadness that caused me to start this tale, this tale where I discovered I was once called Donnelly after my grandfather on my mother's side.  

In this tale I started to write, I was most intent on telling the story of how I got a postcard from Samuel Beckett.   At that time, everybody I cared about, except my father, was alive and well.  But very quickly, in order to provide context, in order to explain who a person was and how they got into the story I needed to supply a little history, and then a little more, and more; and, in that retelling of history I would tell about somebody dead long ago as if they were still alive today. 

Speaking people's names brings people to life again, something the ancients knew.  That is why heroes aspired to great deeds in order that their names never die on the lips of mankind.  That is why our friends who have gone on have not gone if we name them again.  They become part of a bigger story, the story of dark matter, that universe we cannot see that occupies so much of the universe we can see, that is why they vibrate in our unconscious mind, the part of your mind closest to communicating with all of that dark matter, where perhaps they have gone, that is why when you name them they twitch to life again and are remembered.

It was not long before my original title: A Postcard from Beckett, became a subtitle.  How Quiet It Was, supplanted it.  This became the story of how Donnelly, the arrogant young poet who got the postcard from Beckett morphed into Dick Russell, the would-be author who writes this now.  

I'd just read the Introduction to Like A Fiery Elephant, the Story of B.S. Johnson, a biography of the English novelist who died in 1973, by Jonathan Coe.  In his Introduction, Coe writes about Beckett on page 5 with a footnote that makes you leaf through to read a passage below page 353, actually page 354 in my edition.  B. S. Johnson, let's call him BSJ, had been exchanging friendly letters with Samuel Beckett.  On page 5, Coe writes about his first exposure to BSJ's work .  This was when a friend at college lent him BSJ's novel: Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry.  Coe was shocked to see on the cover a blurb from Samuel Beckett.  This was impressive.  Coe was of the opinion that Beckett would not write a blurb for just anyone.  Henceforth he took BSJ seriously, especially after experiencing the thrill of reading BSJ's modernistic novel.  But on page 354, Coe explains how Beckett was furious to find that BSJ had taken something from one of Beckett's letters, "a most gifted writer, etc." and published it on the cover of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry as if was a solicited quote.  Beckett is quoted as writing in fury to the publisher's, Collins, that he had never given such a quote in his life and was most indignant to have been used in this way by Collins and BSJ.   It was BSJ who had assured Collins that Beckett approved of using his name on a jacket blurb.

So, page 354 confirms what Coe states as fact on page 5, that Beckett didn't just give puffs to anybody.  But, I said, that's not true.  I also got a postcard from Beckett.

It is true, I attest, but I cannot produce the actual postcard as evidence because I gave it to an editor, Norman Hidden, to help him apply for a grant-in-aid for Donnelly, that young poet I have written about in How Quiet It Was.  I got that grant, so perhaps a photocopy of that postcard is on file at the British Arts Council. Nevertheless, other letters I got, that Donnelly got, from Brigid Brophy and Basil Bunting do survive.  I had approached them at Norman Hidden's urging at the same time I had written to Samuel Beckett and to Louis Zukofsky.  All had replied.  Bunting's letters are part of the Norman Hidden Collection of his literary papers at Durham University, in England.  Beckett's card is not there.   Zukofsky’s is.   I think Beckett’s card must have been sold to a collector.

Beckett’s card came in an envelope from his publishers, Editions Minuet, postmarked Paris, France with a French stamp.  It was addressed to me at Roughside and I received it at the Tarset, Northumberland sub-post office where I received occasional mail in 1971.  I had sent him a copy of Wolfprints and his short message was that he was glad to support my grant application.  Two Americans, Karen Wedeles and Charles Sherman were witness to the occasion.  I was stunned.  Now I had to live up to that endorsement.  

When Coe published his biography of BSJ, Norman Hidden was still alive.  I wrote to him about how Coe didn't say anything in the book about BSJ’s dealings with Norman at The Poetry Society.  Norman was Chairman of the Poetry Society then.   There was also no mention of Eric Mottram, editor of The Poetry Society's magazine, Poetry Review.  Norman had heard of Coe's book too.  Yes, he wrote back, what a pity the author had not contacted him.  We both knew that BSJ had measurable interaction with these entities.  This was at the time when Eric Mottram's editorship was being savagely attacked because of his upending of the settled London poetry scene by introducing American poets and poets in translation.  BSJ, Coe makes clear, proclaimed himself as the leader of British modernism and fancied himself as a syllabic poet.  What was BSJ's rôle in the great poetry wars in London at that time?  Coe either did not know any of this or had left it all out because it was essentially boring or perhaps not at all boring, but showing certain people of that era, then still living, in disrepute.

 

Coe doesn't comment on the name Judit Polgár either, to clear up any possible confusion with the famous woman chess grandmaster of the same name, if only to point out that the chess player perhaps well known to some of his readers was born in 1976 and therefore not alive in 1969.  Which in itself posits another interesting possibility to those who enjoy genealogy.  Could the young Judit Polgár who helped host BSJ in Hungary have been Judit's mother?  Perhaps Coe is not a chess player himself and so can be forgiven for giving expert players pause by introducing such a household name without clarification.  It is as if he written about BSJ being shown around Budapest by Sophia Loren, another beautiful woman, albeit, not Hungarian.

No matter, Coe's book provided an impetus for me write this.

(first published in BSJ: The B. S. Johnson Journal, Autumn 2015).

How Quiet It Was

It's not that pedestrians walk faster.  Nor do the clock hands move more quickly.  There is something about Manhattan that makes the pulse beat faster, that makes life speed up.  When I came to live there in 1968, I sped up to keep pace with the city.   I was no stranger to big cities, but I'd taken to New York for its lifestyle.  Fire engines in London did not charge down a public thoroughfare with siren and lights operating just to stop at the corner of a side street to pick up the current edition of that day's newspapers from a newspaper kiosk.  They did in New York.   Bookshops in London did not stay open until after midnight in the evening.  They did near Columbia University in New York.  The pace and noise of New York was London times two or three.  When I got to Roughside it was inevitable I would notice how quiet it was.

A stone farmhouse is all that now remains of Roughside Farm.  Its outbuildings and barn were torn down when its 18th Century farmhouse was made into a 21st Century bothy for the use of hikers needing a hearth to sit by and a roof over their heads.   Back in the late 1960s, my Northumbrian cousins had told me about remote places such as Roughside that could be leased very cheaply for use as occasional weekend cottages from the Forestry Commission.  During these conversations they would also bring up tales of border reivers stealing cattle, Jacobite uprisings, Catholics looking to usurp Protestant Kings, marauding Scots and a family myth of kinship with the Earl of Derwentwater who was executed for treason after the first Jacobite uprising 1715.   

I'd followed up on their suggestion while on a short break from working in New York and found Roughside.  I was motivated to find an inexpensive place to live because I was set on becoming a full-time writer.  Perhaps even a poet.  My plan was to finish my job in New York where I was earning money tax free and saving much of it and then dedicate myself to writing poetry.  My plan was to find a suitable place ready for the time six months to a year in the future when I would be free to occupy it.   So, I drove around Northumberland and Durham to look at the three cottages that were currently available.  Roughside was the best of the three.  It was also the furthest from civilization.  It was either approached by Land Rover, on an unmarked track through the forest of seedlings that had been planted; or, on foot, a country mile uphill from a Forestry Commission track and a cattle-grid.  It was an old two-story farmhouse that stood near the top of a hill two miles from its nearest neighbor,

It was a place where a marauding party of Scots or border reivers might congregate on a dark night preparatory to swooping down on the Charlton estate ten miles to the south.  The Bower, an old fortified house, would have stood in their way.  It was visible in the valley to the south east.  Six miles further on was Tarset, the nearest hamlet, albeit one without a pub.   Perhaps because of its solitude, Roughside was in the best repair.  The other two buildings I'd considered were in fields not far from roads.  They had walls that had been breached allowing cattle and sheep rights of entry.  Thus, I rented Roughside for a peppercorn rent sometime during early 1969 on a long-term lease, something less than five pounds a year.  There were no utilities.  Water was available from a local spring or from the stream that had to be forded to access Roughside from the Forestry Commision Road.

When I lived at Roughside, in the early 1970s, the forest had just been planted and the fir trees, Sitka Spruce, were roughly knee height.  Standing in the entrance way to Roughside, a wide vista presented itself.  To the east, the moor curved convexly away to a fast-flowing stream in a hidden valley, almost a lost world, where some gnarled, old trees kept vigil next to a disused ford.   Whenever I went that way, this was where the spring was, I felt I was encountering some resistance, brushing against an aura of past events that felt discordant in an otherwise peaceful dale.  Could there have been battles there long ago?  Could a murder have taken place?  Perhaps when stealing the cattle that might have grazed down on the better grass near the fast-flowing stream.

Across the ford a path led up to some old copper mines on the farther hillside now obscured by the tall trees of a Forestry Commission plantation.   Some centuries ago, the land-owning nobility had hoped to build and restore their fortunes with the profits from such mines but the Kings in London claimed such profits as property of the State.   Besides religion, this was another probable reason why some of the local nobility usually sided against the Crown during the Jacobite uprisings.

All of this was unseen from Roughside, all of it below the sloping shoulder of moorland that fell to the east. The Bower was visible to the southeast down in the valley where a tributary of the North Tyne flowed.  A reserved but friendly Forestry Commission manager and his wife lived there.  The wife apologized for having gone up just a few days before I arrived at Roughside, to pick ripe plums from the tree that stood against its south facing walls.  One day, I watched the manager shoot a hare with a shotgun near his house.  The hare had been nibbling at bulbs or other precious things in his garden shed.  A still inhabited farm lay another mile farther on to the southeast beyond the Bower up the slope on the other side of the valley.   Its occupants, a farmer and his wife, kept aloof from the new tenant of Roughside, me.   On a dark night, the stark floodlight on a barn next to their farm would be the only light in the landscape.  

On foot, access to Roughside from The Bower was via a seldom used footpath that was shown on the Ordnance Survey map of the area.  This started at a farm gate past The Bower near the spot where the manager shot the hare.   That gate needed to be opened and closed by anybody proceeding in either direction on the forestry commission road.    Once through this gate, a walker then went across a large field where a herd of cows generally grazed, sometimes with a bull amongst them, until another gate was reached on the far side of the field.  The traveler then passed through this gate and after fording a stream was confronted by moorland that had been planted with young conifers.  Ditches had been dug across the moor as part of this effort.  Rather than attempt to follow the path suitable for a horse-drawn cart, or Land Rover as it curved away to the west in a slow arc to the north up towards Roughside, it was better to head straight up towards the old farmhouse keeping to one side of remnants of a dry-stone wall.  By Land Rover, the driver would attempt to follow the original path, the horse track, that was shown on the map.  The Forestry Commission had been careful not to intersect this ancestral right of way with their drainage ditches.  In time, a forest would grow up to totally obscure the hillside and obliterate the beauty of the open moors.

Having gained the sanctuary of Roughside, it was possible to look back and see where a car had been parked, about a mile to the south next to a cattle-grid.  To the west of the cattle-grid, a mature forest of firs began with trees that were already twenty feet or more tall.  This forest was visible a mile in the distance looking down from Roughside.   As the eye traveled to the right, the forest was soon obscured by the rise of Roughside Moor to the west.   Beyond the forest and slightly southwest on top of a faraway hill on the other side of the valley was a stone cairn large enough to be visible from Roughside three or four miles away as the crow flies.  To the rear of Roughside, over the brow of its sheltering hill, to the north was more open moorland, also a newly planted forest.   Several miles walk to the north was the neighboring hill farm of Smales.   Some would have thought this a desolate spot.  I loved it. 

Until one day, some years later, in 1972, I arrived to find a letter from the bank manager pinned to the front door asking me to call on him in Bellingham, where Barclays had a branch.  I did not go to see him.  But I stopped attempting to live at Roughside after that.  I took a job working as a computer programmer in London and paid off my Barclaycard.

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

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