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Notes
on Portsmouth
Elegy
This sequence was
first read at one of Farida Majid’s Thursday evenings.
The following extract from Farida’s Editor’s Note in
the Thursday Evening Anthology (1977) sums up how those evenings
started:
‘In
the beginning of 1973, when I moved into my own flat [in Cadogan Square,
Chelsea], George MacBeth and Feliks Topolski started putting an idea
into my head about organizing a regular literary gathering at my place.
I liked the idea but didn’t do anything about it.
Then one autumn evening that year I met Fleur Adcock and Alan
Marshfield at a reading of the Poetry Society.
I hadn’t seen any of them for many years. […] Why don’t we
meet more often? Well,
George had this idea of … It
just needed Alan’s organizational muscle and Fleur’s active
encouragement to get going, and within weeks of that encounter we had
our first Thursday Evening. Alan
had even produced a beautifully written manifesto for those early
days.’
I
don’t remember the manifesto but those evenings were among the most
pleasant salon-cum-workshop meetings I’ve attended.
The resulting anthology, in which appeared Topolski’s sketches
of all the poets, was a very professional run of 1,500 copies.
Farida was a graceful literary catalyst.
Portsmouth Elegy loosely contemplates the memory of my
mother’s death, and must have been written between 1973, when she
died, and 1977, when the anthology appeared.
I was forty-four then. Farida
published Numbers 1 and 4 from the sequence. (back)
1
Tide Out and Gull
Angel
The
pivotal line is ‘The gull will feast on my dead mother’—same idea
as worms eating corpses. ‘The stubbled flats are / cemeteries of desire swept from
land’: these mud-flats are the sea marshes of Eastern Portsmouth
opposite Hayling Island. ‘Cemeteries
of desire’: I guess I meant that sea creatures desire things like food
and safety. Some go out
with the tide while their dead stay in the mud.
‘Hungry creature, haunted by your prey’:
we eat creatures that have eaten us. ‘A
man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king,’ says Hamlet. ‘When the tide turns, she will sing still’: the dead,
absorbed by living things, exult in this new life as the tide returns.
Magical thinking. Remember the caveat about explications by the author.
Prefer your own any time. (back)
2
The Stone Wind
The old man is my father, who visited my mother’s grave in
the cemetery at Copnor a few times.
It was no holiday. (back)
3
Imperfect City
No one I know says Portsmouth is beautiful, not the stretch
between Cosham and Fratton. But
as my home town it will always be to me fascinating, unfathomably, every
part of it. I was twelve
when the war ended in 1945. A
great deal of the city, especially where the dock workers lived, had
been flattened by bombs. It
was decades before the central areas were rebuilt.
The Council saw to
it that our new Guildhall was a replica of the old one, Victorian
Venetian, I think, with white stone columns, green dome, Empire lions
and an apron of wide steps. Elsewhere,
aesthetic decisions must have been left to the Chamber of Commerce; I
haven’t seen the minutes, only the aftermath.
Portsmouth’s reconstructive surgery included the Tricorn Multi-Storey
Car Park, repeatedly nominated the ugliest building in England.
Less obscene but perplexing was the huge, shiny-brown, Perspex
cube erected across the Guildhall Square, like a Dali lunch box in a
Canaletto. Portsmouth is
now a ferry town for tourist ships to le Havre.
Motorways have been tied in and the place loosely links to
Southampton in a notional ‘Solent City’.
My ‘idea … of a city’ harks back to some reading I did in
the ’60s, when one writer I respected said that a city needed arterial
roads lined with amenities like grocery shops.
History wasn’t on his side.
I’m assuming it’s true to say
Mother,
you’d hate it, this clean
emptiness.
‘Victorian slum’ is a romantic exaggeration of the
backstreets I grew up in, with their
Sweetshop,
old magazine shop, butcher’s,
pawnbroker’s,
the undertaker’s alley…
This section ends with the thought that
The
City Fathers were never perfect.
That’s one of my themes, the absence of perfection, even down
to the deepest levels; much lower, that is, than the tier occupied by
city councillors. This
section is a lament for old things departed and is intended to enlarge
the elegy. It doesn’t
have much to do with the death of my mother except that she lived in
this city all her life. (back)
4
Black Mountains
I
was in Ireland, not in the Welsh Black Mountains, when my mother died.
News of her death came when I was in a County Cork cottage one
mile from the jetty facing the island of Schull (pronounced
‘Skull’). It was midnight. I
and my two young children shared the holiday home first with the
photographer Ozzie Jones, then with Brian and Ellen Harding1.
That holiday in Ireland links with similar Welsh holidays in the
Black Mountains, again with the Hardings and Ozzie.
The latter knew the owners of the abbey built at Capel-y-ffin by
the self-styled Father Ignatius, actually Joseph Lyne, an eccentric
preacher ordained by a wandering bishop of a schismatic church in
Ceylon. We spent many
summers in a flat at the abbey, which has been a private residence since
it was purchased by Eric Gill in 1924.
One year was very hot and there were hill fires.
As I say, I was in Ireland, not Wales, when my mother died, but
the fictional shift feels appropriate enough.
Being away when she died was not decent of me and my later guilt
came from having been on holiday at all.
By then I wanted to be absolved, cleansed in any way possible.
There were brooks near Capel-y-ffyn where our children used to
splash and which I recall now for these words of regret. (back)
5
The Sacred Things
Death
is personified. Why are
things that are sacred to us also sacred to Death?
Well, although Death is different from Life, neither can be
defined without reference to the other.
Death, the ultimate in simplicity, and Life, a complex mystery,
are mutual affiliates.
The sacred is what
makes life unbearable, not the more obvious bearable.
Many things are unbearable yet we suffer them: pain, loneliness,
poverty. To call them
‘sacred’ is either to kiss the foot of an Evil Creation or to
approve of Nature’s Difficult Way.
The choice of what kind of ‘sacred’ we invent doesn’t mean
a thing to Nature. It’s
not aware. This sense of
Nature’s distance is in the part about Death’s shrine:
I
leant across his stone altar.
I
have these things: you are the Lord.
God’s
wounds, I am on your side.
Being on Death’s side is being on Life’s side, too.
As for
Wave
up the past: the boiling bed,
the
charmed waif in the little streets ...
—in
the ‘boiling bed’ occurs the creation of children, an act which
might be in praise of Life. ‘... wave
them [the children] up’: let children be cited as evidence of my own
life’s ‘sacred things’. Death
is invoked as an intercessor, a lesser god than Nature herself.
‘The charmed waif
in the little streets’ is everyone who feels charmed, never to die.
Death is then asked to remind us of
... the
naked hill of the beginning,
that
improbable, slow-motion time.
I
am alluding to the aboriginal Australian Dream Time. I see it as a mythical time was when, metaphorically, the
patterns of life were laid down.
Death is asked to
recall how it all started. I’d
like to understand, to
... enter myth, as my children eat
and
my orgasm makes the night attend.
I, the mourner and a live presence, want to be listened to.
Orgasm is a form of shouting.
The essential feeling is of being shunned.
We can no more correspond with the dead than we can return to
some mythical beginning.
Death
passed on. My mother
emerged
on
the forest road; made love to him.
—‘Made
love’ in the sense of ‘embraced’.
The
Fiend, the Fiend, he favours her!
I
am left in the wrong time.
To
be ‘in the wrong time’, not in aboriginal Dream Time, not in the
ancient Eden of controlling, is to be cut off from the dead and also
from a part of life. No
culture adequately helps me to get in touch with myself and Nature.
(back)
Alan
Marshfield
1
Harding, Brian: American Literature in Context II 1830–65 (Routledge
Kegan and Paul, 1982). Harding,
Ellen (ed): Re-framing the Pre-Raphael-ites (Scolar Press, 1996).
(back)
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