Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
And we wrote. Graves had abandoned his plans for the stage and was at work on an experimental novel, a completely new tack, the characters not only having no titles, but also no names: the men were identified by numbers, and the women by the various voiceless additional characters on the typewriter, such as # and [. He typed it at immense speed, with music on in the background, the carriage-return bell sometimes fitting in felicitously. I remained loyal to poetry, and alternated masked
vers libre
fantasies about the prefects with Wordsworthian sonnet-sequences on the seasons, the months, the weeks … I even started a sequence on the days of the year, each poem to be written on the day in question, but had dried up by early February. ‘The Months’ was printed in the school magazine, and received Graves’s most particular criticism. Aunt Tina read it there and worked up a mood of acclamation at home, suggesting, for some reason that seemed cogent at the time, that I should go and see Perry Dawlish, who was a friend of hers, and find out what he had to say.
Dawlish would have been about seventy then, and was considered locally to be a famous author. If ever he showed up at a fête or sale of work he would be photographed for the
Knowledge
; and his rare appearances on TV programmes about writers of the twenties and thirties were also flagged in the local press: ‘“I knew Merrifield well”, Sir Perry says, and goes on to recall his three marriages and his lively sense of humour, which he claims some people could find disconcerting!’ Dawlish was a baronet, but this didn’t discourage a general supposition that he had been knighted for his services to literature.
He had had poems published in the
London Mercury
when he was only fifteen (my own age at this first meeting) and Squire had included his work as a brilliant new star in his
Selections from Modern Poets
a few years later. He had written novels, too, which had a reputation for candour; and slender appreciations of Tennyson and Patmore. All that local people would have seen of his work was the
Memoirs
, remaindered inexhaustibly in Digby’s window, and the thin bookmaking ideas he had taken up more recently – the text to some pictures of Royal London, an anthology of ‘The Kentish Muse’. I knew little of this at the time, of course: to me he was the spruce aquiline old gent I saw hurrying through the town, looking up with embarrassed good humour through bushy eyebrows and smiling at strangers as if they had recognised him. Once or twice he had come into a shop at the same time as me, and I was aware of an unconscious heightening of tone, a kind of feudal relish on the part of the traders that I found silly but moving. Sometimes I passed him on the common. He had a neurotic papillon spaniel that aroused Sibelius’s interest and would hurtle down the leaf-strewn slopes so that it and the whirled-up leaves seemed one. He would say ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good afternoon’, but I never for a moment thought he knew who I was.
Much of his mystique for me came from his house. Blewits was named from the lilac-gilled mushrooms that grew in profusion in its dank spinney, and which he gave almost at random to people from the town. When I was a little boy my mother received a basket of them, and I remembered her anxiously pondering if they were edible, the gift of a good or bad spirit, and then hastily putting them in the bin. Gigantic beech-trees whelmed above the house on the common side and roared thrillingly on windy nights. In winter you could look down through them at the steep red roofs and shingled gables, the air full of rooks and bonfire smoke. In summer everything was hidden; the drive twisted through laurels and rhododendrons, the light was speckled and private. To visit the house was to have the magic access of a dream fused with the proud ordeal of winning a prize.
It was late May and the mossy outbuildings were roofed with fallen horse-chestnut flowers. I thought they would be fun to explore, those sheds with small cobwebbed windows and sometimes a chimney: more fun than talking to Sir Perry Dawlish. ‘Good afternoon, Sir Perry,’ I kept rehearsing, on my aunt’s anxious prompting. ‘No more cake, thank you, Sir Perry.’ I had a high regard for ‘The Months’ but even so was not fully convinced that this famous old writer, who had actually known Gordon Bottomley, would want to spend much time on them.
The house was very gloomy inside. I was aware that it was a romantic kind of Victorian house, which accounted for the dark oak and stained glass of the hall. At first I could hardly see and was impressed by the confidence with which Dawlish moved around. He had the busy air of someone unused to dealing with children but determined to make a go of it. His voice was high and enthusiastic, with the lost vowel-sounds of an earlier age.
We sat in a big muddly room at the back, a sitting-room-cum-library that merged into a conservatory with doors open on to a derelict-looking garden. Again I had the sense of his being utterly, blindly at home here, whilst I was stepping cautiously between stacks of books, parchment-shaded standard lamps, little cluttered desks with only an inch or two left to write on. He sank on to the end of a sofa that was slumped and shaped to his person, and gestured me to a hard button-backed chair that resembled a corseted lady.
‘It’s very kind of you to ask to see me, Sir Perry,’ I said. ‘My Auntie Tina sends you her … best regards’ (I couldn’t quite come out with ‘love’).
‘How is the dear woman?’ he said, with a shrewd, humorous look that suggested we both thought she was a bit of a fool.
‘Very well, thank you.’ (This was far from being the case, I recalled at once: in fact she’d just had a cancer of the throat diagnosed.)
‘What a gifted family you are. Novels and belles-lettres: that’s your aunt. Lovely singing: that’s your father. And now poetry too. You must feel you live on Mount Parnassus.’ I looked away, abashed by the tribute, and running my eye along the bookshelf beside me: George Merrifield’s
Love and Earth, Ochre
by Violet Rivière, Robert Nichols’s
Aurelia, More Verses
by Wayland Strong. The dust lay thick along their tops, like blue-grey felt, but still … real books, by real poets. I knew Merrifield’s sonnet on ‘Cider’ from
Poets of Our Time
; indeed Graves claimed I had cribbed from it in my own ‘Autumn’; but to see the full majestic volume of the man’s work was to come a step nearer to the fountainhead. I noticed a thin book of V. L. Edminson’s and thought perhaps Sir Perry could clear up a bitter dispute between Graves and me as to V. L. Edminson’s sex … ‘Do you walk on the common?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, sir, we’re always going up there. I particularly like it at sunset. It can be quite glorious then.’
‘
Glorious
– can’t it. I don’t know what I’d do without the old common. Paulette loves a run-around on the tops. My dear little dog,’ he explained. I decided against owning up to the bullying Sibelius. ‘So many different aspects to it, don’t you find, the steep bits, the flat bits, the woody bits, the open bits … There’s a bit for every mood out there! At this time of year the hazelwood is too lovely.’
‘
Lovely,
’ I agreed, not actually sure which the hazelwood was, but caught up in the nervous enthusiasm.
‘Don’t you think? I wander up there and sort out my ideas, as I call them. I dare say you do the same. Work out a poem in your head, then scamper back and write it down?’
This was exactly what I did, and I felt privileged to know that Dawlish did too. At the same time I was fractionally put out to think that the nature-mysticism I had evolved around the common’s numinous gullies and heights was not my private cult, and had other, older adepts. ‘I feel as if I’m in direct contact with the Muse up there,’ I said. And when I sat in my special tree and waited for the folding star I did, I did …
‘
Direct
contact, absolute “hot-line”, I quite agree.’
I didn’t think I could better that. ‘Have you been writing a great deal, Sir Perry?’ I was making it sound as if a new book from him was what I wanted most – we all did.
‘Well, d’you know, I have? I’ve got a new selection out next week; and I have enough poems already for two more books after that.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said, imagining retailing these potent, probably confidential, pieces of knowledge to Graves and one or two others.
‘Well’; he shrugged and burbled something about
tempus
something, which I took with a sympathetic smile. ‘Things start coming back to you at my age. I’ve been writing a lot about dead friends – and about my brother Tristram, he would have been a
great
poet, of course.’ He gazed at the floor. Should I ask about Tristram? ‘We all jolly well had to be writers, and thank the Lord we all started young. I don’t know if you know, but well,
Tennyson
…’ And off he went into an account of the Dawlishes, the bishops, the generals, the poets, Swinburne, Henry James, Robert Bridges (his godfather), young T. S. Eliot, that certainly put the Manners Family of Kent in its place, and held me enthralled in the musty gloom. Even so, after twenty minutes, I felt my concentration ebbing, my features locked in a kind of sneer of astonishment, my poems in their plastic folder still clutched in my lap, like the programme to a different concert. I felt painfully ignorant of Swinburne and Henry James; we didn’t do T. S. Eliot till next year. I was flattered but also somehow hurt that he had misjudged me and poured this well-rehearsed torrent of stuff over me.
Later we went into the kitchen together, as if not quite sure what we’d find there, and managed to make a pot of tea. Again it seemed an honour to be doing these homely things with a great man, and so soon after meeting him: it would have been less impressive if he had had the servants I’d expected. There was no suggestion of cake.
At last he made me hand over ‘The Months’ and leaving me to browse went off to a chair at the brighter end of the room. I got out the Merrifield volume, which bore the inscription ‘To Perry Dawlish from “the Old Rogue” – George Merrifield, May Day 1928: knowing that he will go far …’ I turned to the list of contents, hoping to find ‘Cider’, which I knew by heart anyway (it was the unobvious rhyme of
oozing
with
refusing
in the sestet that I had stolen); but it wasn’t in
Love and Earth
, which was perhaps an earlier collection. I realised for the first time just how large Merrifield’s output was.
I was awed by the book and its associations, and wondered why its author was known as the Old Rogue. I imagined him like Toad of Toad Hall, with goggles and a cigar, motoring recklessly from one Sussex alehouse to another. I kept peeping towards the window, trying to read Dawlish’s reactions. He was in profile, and partly canopied by a broad-leaved plant that sprawled across the glass above him. He seemed to be paying each sonnet the very closest attention. Or had he perhaps fallen into a quiet doze? It occurred to me that he might have died. No – another page was shuffled under. I wondered which month he’d reached. I was aware that some months were stronger than others, which was why the sequence began with September, like a school year. I thought it unlikely that he would be very critical of them, but I would have to be sensible and take his criticism with eagerness and resolution when it came.
One time I glanced up and found he was looking at me and slowly nodding, pausing to find the most tactful opening. ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘Simply marvellous, you’ve really got it. Really. I do congratulate you. You
understand
the sonnet, as few nowadays do. And every one of them has some memorable effect. “When all is frozen to the rover’s call” is a splendid line.’ And he said it again, to bring out what he heard as the ‘wintry echo’ of
all
and
call
. I thought it was the best line of the lot myself, and saw it gaining something like proverbial status with Dawlish’s endorsement. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt about it, Edward,’ he said, with those gestures of regret that sometimes heighten the effect of praise; ‘you are a writer. A born writer, I would say. I see a very bright future for you indeed.’
Hunting moodily through my books for something to read at Dawn’s funeral I came across
Poems Old and New
by Peregrine Dawlish, with an inscription to me, and beside it the copy of Merrifield’s
Love and Earth
that I had felt bold enough to ask to borrow that day eighteen years ago, and had never returned. I felt dully guilty about it, but it was too late now. Flicking through the Dawlish I remembered that he had been a good Georgian poet with a tight lyric grace; it was later that he mistook his gifts, made painful attempts to get modern, shrilly took on free verse and low-life subjects and made a fool of himself. You could see why Squire might have praised him at fifteen: I suppose he used the same words as Dawlish had solemnly addressed to me. Looking back, I thought I could make out the suspect emotion of that afternoon, the old man’s vicarious excitement in acclaiming talent he had only imagined, the tone of foolish self-congratulation. But at the time, it was so much what I wanted to hear that I took a nearly erotic pleasure in it. When, after a moment’s hesitation, he lent me the Merrifield, and capped it with
Poems Old and New
, with the further wing-beat of wonder at finding what Perry was short for, I felt as if I’d been received into a succession. There was something about the light that day, the penumbra beyond which he sat in the leafy window, that fixed what he said in amber. I could still hear his hollow augury now; like the words of a fairground palmist, hard entirely to discount.
Early that summer holidays I wandered up on to the common after supper. Charlie was just home from Cambridge with a Third that no one quite knew what to say about. His line was that he was a maverick genius, that exams weren’t where he shone. There was a sort of smothered row (we never had any other kind) about his waist-length hair and its probable impact on anyone who might interview him for a job. He had a girlfriend at last, whom he deferred to on everything: ‘Lisanne says you shouldn’t boil vegetables’, ‘Lisanne thinks Schubert’s really boring’. After a couple of days Lisanne had become an invisible antagonist in our house, the subject of Charlie’s veneration and everyone else’s keenest loathing. We almost longed for her to come and stay, so that we could answer her back in person.