Visiting Hove

 

Yesterday I gave my niece Tash a lift to her flat-share in Hove, and my eye caught the blue plaque a few doors up the street. 

John Leech was an illustrator for Punch, and also, now and then, for Charles Dickens, most famously in A Christmas Carol (1843) and its successors. 

Apparently the plaque is not quite accurate. 16 Lansdowne Place was actually a lodging house where, in February 1849, stayed Mr and Mrs Leech, Mr and Mrs Dickens, their two daughters and Dickens' sister-in-law. (Source: Judy Middleton's excellent Hove history blog, http://hovehistory.blogspot.com/2015/11/lansdowne-place-hove.html .)

Here's how Forster describes the 1849 visit:

His [Dickens'] first seaside holiday in 1849 was at Brighton, where he passed some weeks in February; and not, I am bound to add, without the usual unusual adventure to signalize his visit. He had not been a week in his lodgings, where Leech and his wife joined him, when both his landlord and the daughter of his landlord went raving mad, and the lodgers were driven away to the Bedford hotel. "If you could have heard the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor's rescue; could have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with fear; could have seen three other M.D.'s come to his aid; with an atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and servants, surrounding the whole; you would have said it was quite worthy of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings." The letter ended with a word on what then his thoughts were full of, but for which no name had yet been found. "A sea-fog to-day, but yesterday inexpressibly delicious. My mind running, like a high sea, on names—not satisfied yet, though." When he next wrote from the seaside, in the beginning of July, he had found the name; had started his book; and was "rushing to Broadstairs" to write the fourth number of David Copperfield.

(Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25851/25851-h/25851-h.htm .)

Was the story true? Doubtless it was, in outline. But Dickens was rather prone to dismissing people as "raving mad" if their behaviour inconvenienced him. When his marriage broke down a few years later, he would account for it by describing his wife's behaviour in the same way. Not, of course, an unusual thing to do.

"Mr Fezziwig's Ball", John Leech's frontispiece to A Christmas Carol. 

[Image source:  British Library (https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-a-christmas-carol).]

Dickens had a high regard for "kind-hearted" Leech's gently satirical art, undiminished even by a massive blunder in one of the illustrations to The Battle of Life (which Dickens complained of to Forster, but couldn't face pointing out to Leech himself).

 Dickens saw him as having brought beauty into a line of art previously distinguished for cruel ugliness (e.g. Rowlandson, Gillray); in Leech, he wrote, caricature had become character. Perhaps he saw a kind of parallel to his own work when compared to fiercer predecessors like Smollett; no less trenchant but more broadly humane and open to sentiment. 

Looking down the street to the sea.

The view out back.

Another blue plaque further down the street. Charles Augustin Busby was the architect of this lower part of the street, and himself lived at No. 2 from 1829 until his death in 1834. Despite contributing so much to Hove's fine facades (e.g. here, Brunswick Square, Brunswick Terrace...), he died bankrupt.

*

But no visit to Hove should conclude without Lee Harwood, whose memorial bench stands in Brunswick Square. Here's a poem from his final  collection The Orchid Boat (2014).

*

Departures

         A hot summer night,
the sound of rain in the courtyard.
                 A satin breeze
         sways the curtains.
                    She wrote
                       ‘Gently I open
     my silk dress and float alone
       on the orchid boat. Who can
take a letter beyond the clouds?’ 
       All those years ago
                    And he wrote
‘A picture held us captive and we
        could not get outside it.’
         When the winter came
                    she wrote
   ‘I put on my new quilted robe
      sewn with gold thread.’
         Is that how you saw it? 
Passing a mirror in a dusky corridor
—that face, the tilt of those shoulders.
   Or in the bright light of morning
the details of your face in that mirror
—a picture, as though set, that maps
      the wear of years, dreams,
       that this is where we’ve come to,
    and the future best left to itself.
 The letter will reach the other side of the                                         mountains,
 clouds will roll back clear of the summits.
What was needed was done, but never done,
                         it’s never done.
           Plodding along the mountain path—
drifts of rain, streams sweeping across the path,
       cloud so low you can barely see the path
                 as you stumble on loose rock.
              How to imagine an orchid boat?
      It gets harder. But days come and go,
the sun comes out and everything seems to                                           sparkle
                 and the letter spirals away.
       The picture in the mirror seemed so real,
   though only caught that imprisoning moment.
  A golden leaf in autumn spins into a dark river
where the currents dance it underwater back                            and forth, side to side.
                          Without thinking
              I step aboard the orchid boat,
                            the feel of silk
            carrying me beyond all mirrors.

(Poem source: https://kenneturner.com/tag/romanticized/ .)

Lee Harwood / Intercapillary Space / Anne Stevenson

My plan's worked. I've tricked myself into churning out an essay (of sorts, anyhow) without too much painful or protracted introspection.

The trick was to dash off a whole lot of separate posts (loosely about early poems of Lee Harwood)  and then jam them all together. The final outcome is now up on Intercapillary Space.

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/six-notes-about-lee-harwood-while.html

The effect is colourful, at any rate. I suppose this type of approach wouldn't work for a lot of poets. But for Harwood it seemed to. It was as near as I could get to emulating Harwood's own lightness of touch.

I'll leave the original posts up, for now, because they still belong. But at some point I might take them away and leave the Intercapillary sculpture teetering alone in space, without scaffolding.

One upshot of this hasty publication is that I don't feel I've really finished thinking about Harwood, not even for now.

Here's a sample of later Harwood. It re-orients things, but I didn't want that in the essay, I'd have got overwhelmed.


I want nowhere else
but to he here,
whether crouching in a stone windbreak
on a cloud bound summit,
or coming off the slopes battered and soaked
into a dark soft tunnel of forest.
(A strange form of pleasure you may say.)

But just to be here in this place.
The deserted remote valleys
dotted with ruined farms,
hawthorn and rowan growing in their hearths.
Climbing higher to the empty cwm
with its small slashed black lake.
And on up the slopes to the bare rock ridge
and the summits again.
Nowhere else.
It’s that simple, almost.


(Lee Harwood, from "Waunfawr and after")

Waunfawr is on the southern edge of Snowdonia. Mynydd Mawr is nearby.

Mynydd Mawr from Foel Rûdd

[Image source: http://blog.bordersthinking.com/2011/06/16/mynydd-mawr/]

Harwood was not a doctrinaire alternative poet. In the intro to his Selected Poems he thanked Anne Stevenson and he also dedicated at least one poem to her.

Anne Stevenson, I must explain for non-poet readers, is emphatically a name that belongs to the other side. Which means that I don't know her poetry at all well.

Googling brought me to a 2010 volume of Voyages over Voices: Critical Essays on Anne Stevenson, ed. Angela Leighton.

Everything is so different in the mainstream! I don't mean the poetry itself, that's a given, but the way people talk about it. They quote Frost, Yeats, Stevens and Bishop as authorities.

I get taken aback by John Lucas ripping in to Rosemary Tonks' poetry. Then there's John Redmond being savage about Anne Stevenson's own poetry.

You never really get this in alternative circles. It's idle to pretend we all like each other's poetry, but we sure don't see much point in saying so. If there's a body of work that does nothing for me, I just don't mention it. I'm waiting to see if I get to like it. For a lifetime, if necessary.

When we alt-poetry types are savage, (and privately, we sometimes are: we don't always keep a united front) then it's always about politics. For me it's axiomatic that if you criticize a poem, you criticize its author and the basis is, in a broad sense, political disagreement. For Lucas and Redmond, however, the situation seems to be quite different. They have a clear but apparently apolitical idea of "major" poetry. Of course it is a value-laden idea, full of great moral discriminations. But the way they use it affects me, nevertheless, as ultimately judgments of deportment : whether a given poem knows how to behave. For Lucas, Tonks, passim, does not. For Redmond, Stevenson too often tries to fake uncertainties that she doesn't really feel; I'm not quite sure if the worst offence is staging self-doubt or, perhaps, being so lacking in self-doubt that you need to fake it.  I'm the more taken aback, I suppose, because in both these rather random cases it's men criticizing poems by women. It probably is an unfair impression. I would probably have to walk through the door and join the mainstream poetry community before I could think fair thoughts about mainstream poetry debates. That isn't likely. I hope it's useful, at any rate, sometimes to mention the view from the corridor.

Lee Harwood, "Question of Geography"

"Question of Geography" has a three-part structure. The structure trembles a little, it's alive - "I can't remember... the details obscured..." - but for the purposes of now we'll stick with those three parts. Each describes a landscape experienced by Harwood at some time in his young life: call them "once", and "another time", and "now". This analysis makes the three seem more disentanglable than they really are. Really, the poem's discovery is a continuous argument. Nevertheless, here's the middle bit.

Ridge in the distance       everything the same
as before                  it must be
The moors edged with pine woods
in the south-west province     a repetition
but the cathedral town unchanged
It makes no difference who was there
all inevitably reduced to the question of
geography or memory


The text operates not with particularity but with the suggestion of particularity.  The landscapes are all different, that's the point of them, yet they must, we feel, have a lot in common with each other. (The repeated idea of a ridge-line confirms this.)

In this middle part of the poem the particularity of what is seen becomes momentarily clearer ("moors edged with pine woods"), just when the particularities of time are at their vaguest: we could easily suppose this was a scene being glimpsed in the present, until mention of the third scene dispels that idea. When, then? Unlike the two outer scenes, it isn't connected with a time of year.

Ashbery and Harwood are both very fond of the phrases "a question of" or "a matter of". They use the phrases in a gorgeous myriad of ways. But to generalize, these phrases assert a fixed point (e.g. geography, in this case) but not a proposition, only a preoccupation.

Never more subtly than here, when the postscript "or memory" immediately undercuts the apparent definiteness of the title phrase, and instead seems to shimmer with all of the earlier elements that were not geographic. I'll come back to that.

At the end, the poem gestures at drawing together its threads and making manifest its discovery, at least about how the two remembered landscapes underlie the present scene.

the others seeming somehow irrelevant in the present excitement
but still real like a very sure background
- you paint over the picture and start on
the new one      but all the same it's still there
beneath the fresh plains of colour

That last line resonates with hidden energies. It makes us pause for a long moment.

But the poem is not in fact purely about landscapes. All around its edges, reticently undefined, are other people. "our garden".. "house" ... "months gone by"... "a repetition" ... "It makes no difference who was there". These very faint footfalls, the experience and the thoughts inflected by other people, become amplified after reading other Harwood poems from the same era.

It matters because it changes the subject of the poem. The poem is not only about change of landscapes but about a lifestyle of impermanence, a lifestyle without "marriage" or "family" or "home", but with changing lovers and changing places. If there's even a certain briskness in that "you paint over the picture", then you might wish to call it a poem about ending relationships. Further, it's a poem about viewing the permanent, "the cathedral town unchanged", from the perspective of impermanence: already with a tint of the ridiculous about it, or at best experienced as "the present excitement".  It's one of the quietest, but one of the defining, British poems of the 1960s.


 * "the south-west province".  Harwood uses the expression several times in poems of this era. It momentarily unsettles location by calling up some Waleyan translation of Li Po; maybe it's Harwood's light-touch joke. But there's no real disguise: you don't get cathedrals in Sichuan. In Harwood's poetry, generally, it isn't about reserve (far from it), it's all about reticence. Which makes so much possible in these poems.

That is, if the distinction between "reserve" and "reticence" can really be maintained. That's one of the questions we need to be asking about Harwood today.


Harwood reading the poem (very beautifully, too)

The full text of "Question of Geography" isn't available on-line.

But here's some poems that are:

[PoemHunter ebook (some formatting and other errors):]

"Central Park Zoo","Landscapes","Pagham Harbour Spring","Soft White", "The Final Painting","The Seaside", "The 'Utopia'", "The Words"

[Sampler for Lee Harwood's Collected Poems (Shearsman):]

"Forestry work no. 1", "Love in the organ loft", "The nine death ships", "Boston Notebook: December 1972", "Massachusetts or On visiting Walden Pond, 1st January 1973", "Portraits 1-4", "The destruction of South Station, Boston", "Nineteenth Century Poem", "Boston Spring", "Old Bosham Bird Watch", "Portraits from my life", "London to Brighton"

[Sampler for Lee Harwood's Selected Poems (Shearsman):]

"Claret label", "A poem for writers", "Bath-time", "Text for two posters by Ian Brown", "O, O, O,... Northern California", "Coat of arms on wall in ancient city", "Hand from an Exeter cloud", "Summer Solstice", "The artful", "Waunfawr and after", "Cwm Uchaf", "On the ledge", "For Paul/ Coming out of winter"

Mark Ford in the Guardian, celebrating the Collected Poems, and quoting "Rain journal: London: June 65". 

Lee Harwood (photo by Elsa Dorfman)

[Image source: http://archive.elsadorfman.com/housebook/flagg-street-III.html]

The museum

[Image source (above and below): http://www.rugbooks.com/advSearchResults.php?action=search&orderBy=relevance&category_id=0&keywordsField=afghanistan]



These fragments I have shored against my ruins  

Somehow, modernism was in favour of museums. It was also anguished by them, by catastrophic history and a distasteful present, so the characteristic mode was irony.

By the time of the New York school, history seemed more catastrophic still. The poets begin to see the museum's contents in a different way. The details of the history you are supposed to be interested in became ridiculous. Irony died. A strong feeling of healthy irresponsibility blew through the room. It became apparent that the museum and its spaces and the items on display are crucially about now and here.

                                     whether it's the form of
Some creator who has momentarily turned away,
Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces
Are seen as part of a spectrum, independent
Yet symbolic of their spaced-out times of arrival;
Whether on the other hand all of it is to be
Seen as no luck.

(from John Ashbery's "Clepsydra", in Rivers and Mountains 1966. The first couple of pages of "Clepsydra", which include the above extract, are online here)

The third poet in Penguin Modern Poets 19, Tom Raworth, perceives the modernity too:

looking at the etruscan statues in the louvre there is a green
       patina on my hands my expression has taken its final
       shape
everything becomes modern inside these cases there is
       nothing without touching

children crawl under the glass      things are reflected several
       times

(from "Six Days", in The Relation Ship (1966))

Ashbery's idea of the "spectrum" becomes a "prism" in Lee Harwood's "The 'Utopia'" (Landscapes, 1967).

The table is very old and made of fine mahogany
polished by generations of servants.
And through the windows the summer blue skies
and white clouds spelling a puffy word.
And on the table the books and examples
of embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen
and many large and small objects - all of which
could not help but rouse a curiosity.

-----

At times it is hard to believe
what is before one's eyes -
there is no answer to this except the room itself,
and maybe the white clouds seen though the window.

------

*

ISIS destroys triumphal arches in Palmyra

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/world/middleeast/isis-syria-arch-triumph-palmyra.html?_r=0

As has often been pointed out, Daesh is philosophically just as western as it is eastern; indeed, the example of Daesh reveals such distinctions as inadequate to account for moves within a globalized world (though, of course, much remains in the stereotypes to be deftly exploited).

Daesh's intention to make a bonfire of both the nation-state and accumulated cultural riches is something that many of us will uncomfortably recognize as our own deep aspirations put into hideous practice.


*

"embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen".

Khamak and other Afghan embroideries are of course the art and labour of women. But owned and displayed by men, at least until they end up, - as a result of what transaction? - on this so-polished table...



*

Interview with Lee Harwood by Andy Brown in The Argotist Online - no date is given, but I should think it was around 2008.

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Harwood%20interview.htm

Recent short (but helpful) take on Ashbery's "Clepsydra", by John Koethe.

http://atlengthmag.com/poetry/short-takes-on-long-poems-volume-2/

John Ashbery's eyes

.... are indeed blue, but a greyish type of blue.

Lee Harwood's "As Your Eyes Are Blue. . ." and  "For John in the Mountains" are closely related poems, both recalling the same flowery and meadowy trip to the mountains. (I would assume, in France or Switzerland.)

In the latter poem, he writes:

                        a dark snow
darker than your eyes'
dark snow

Ashbery's eye-colour compared to the blueish-grey colour of snow in shadow. To spell it out.

John Ashbery and Lee Harwood, Paris 1965 (Photo by Pierre Martory)

[Image source: http://jacketmagazine.com/16/ah-harw.html, where it was reproduced courtesy of Lee Harwood (I've blown up the small JPG, which is why it looks blurred)]


*

Kenneth Koch's much-quoted 1965 conversation with John Ashbery.
http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/1/20/in-which-john-ashbery-and-kenneth-koch-start-making-sense.html


Essay by Andrew Field about the early Ashbery and pragmatism:
https://andrewfield81.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/the-imminence-of-a-revelation-not-yet-produced-ashbery-and-the-pragmatist-sublime/   (with particular reference to the opening line of Some Trees, "We see us as we truly behave:")


Essay by Bob Archambeau about Ashbery's art world at the end of 1940s:
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/john-ashbery-and-poetics-of-art-world.html

Lee Harwood again

Central Park Zoo, 1967 (Photo by Garry Winogrand)

[Image source: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/photographs/garry-winogrand-central-park-zoo-new-york-5600340-details.aspx]


I've been reading Robert Sheppard's pieces on Lee Harwood's poetry, and as a result have a bit more context for the early poems I'm reading in Penguin Poets 19.

Review of the earlier part of the Collected:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/robert-sheppard-review-of-harwoods.html
Review of the later part of the Collected:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/robert-sheppard-review-of-harwoods.html
Three sequences in Morning Light (1998):
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/robert-sheppard-on-three-sequences-by.html
Review of The Orchid Boat:
http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202014/december2014/The%20Orchid%20Boat.htm
A reflection on the above:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/robert-sheppard-review-of-lee-harwoods.html
Poem dedicated to Lee Harwood:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/robert-sheppard-for-lee-harwood-burnt.html
A laugh with Lee Harwood:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/robert-sheppard-laugh-with-lee-harwood.html
In Memoriam:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/lee-harwood-1939-2015-in-memoriam.html

The "Three sequences" piece ends with this, part of a list of features that may be said to characterize the world of Harwood's poetry:

a bit of camp (or the occasional kitsch ‘bad’ line) thrown in to unsettle the certainties of received discriminations in life and in the art

That's something that can be abundantly illustrated from "The Doomed Fleet".

This 'exciting narrative poem' (Harwoodian quotes) begins:

The entire palace was deserted, just as was
the city, and all the villages.... 

Not "the palace" but "the entire palace" (gosh) ... and that conversational but slipshod "just as was"... these are little opening hints of what's to come.

By the start of section 3 we're in full-on helpless-author mode.

Grey waves slapped against the sides of
the iron grey battleships. Seabirds screeched
above the wind; they don't sing.
Even the ships appeared deserted, except
for the occasional dark figures that would
hurry along a deck and then disappear
through a hatch-way as abruptly as when they first
appeared. 

The grand if somewhat hackneyed description is never quite in control of itself. In the first sentence, an ill-advised choice of plurality spoils a clear image; then the seabirds are improbably located "above" the wind; now comes the deliciously wrong but somehow comprehensible "Even"; and finally the clause about the dark figures, which gets itself in a tangle so that, in the end, the figures disappear at the very moment they appear. Even the decision to hyphenate, or not, seems chaotic.

The syntax is trying so hard! - too hard - but it's constantly undone by time and precedence and geography and multiple entities: it's all too much. You begin to understand "The Doomed Fleet" as a writing assignment.

Harwood, like Ashbery ("It was raining in the capital"), saw the possibilities of disastrous writing. Because, isn't all writing disastrous, really?

And a funny thing is, that as I was sitting here and teasing out these various stylistic infelicities, the attention made me focus on the image: the dark figures leapt to their syntactically improper life -

hurry along a deck and then disappear

- leapt, in a way they certainly never would have done if the grammar had been in order.

Though it did occur to me that what I was vividly imagining, and probably what Harwood imagined too, seemed a hell of a lot more like the multiple decks of a well-lit passenger ferry than a  gloomy single-deck battleship.

USS Alabama, in service from 1943

[Image source: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/nav_legacy.asp?id=128]

*

With David Bowie's death (yesterday) there's some hive-thinking about bisexual artists going on. I'm a bit taken aback by the intensity of people's love. I discover (as it were for the first time) that, passionate 70s music fan as I was,  he was someone I never really followed, and that if he meant a great deal to me it was only for a very short time, when I was 13. I think the only records of his that I ever bought were three successive 45s: "Jean Genie" (backed with Ziggy Stardust),  "Drive-In Saturday" and the reissued "Life on Mars?". Yet I did know the Ziggy and Aladdin albums quite well. I must have long-loaned them from school-friends, Anthony Aloof maybe, or John Vincent Scott. (Thereafter, David Bowie perhaps seemed a too predictable music pigeon-hole for the likes of me: so I gravitated to the harsh obscure (Can, Beefheart, Hammill) and to other people's mainstreams (Beach Boys, Dolly Parton, Al Green).

I don't really know if Lee Harwood should be labelled bisexual or not. Maybe that's part of what bisexuality is all about. But I associate Lee's hypothetical bisexuality with his binary focus, the effect that Sheppard quotes him as calling cavalier vs puritan.

Sheppard again:

An erotic liaison with John Ashbery (whom he had met in Paris in 1965), and a more general literary engagement with the New York poetry scene at its height, engendered some deeply felt love poetry, including one of the finest meditations upon clandestine gayness, erotic obsession and separation, ‘As your eyes are blue’, which Jeremy Reed has described as ‘a love poem as important to its time as Shakespeare’s androgynously sexed sonnets were to his.’ In those days homosexuality was still illegal.

(Reed said this in 2005, but I haven't found out where because Sheppard's The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood is only searchable in snippet view.)

It's tempting  (volley of sexuality-stereotypes on the way...) to associate the gay side of these poems with the urbane, with art, museums, New York; the het side with Harwood the climber, and the frequently adventurous scenery of his poems, the recurrent three horsemen, etc.   Or, as in this case, the iron grey battleships.

The poems tend to regard such Boy's-Book scenes (the Argentine, the wild tribesmen of the hills, etc) as ridiculous but it won't leave them alone.

Rupert Bear is a fighter ace.

Harwood takes the voice of Mrs Skewton and transforms it; for him, being "all heart" is a serious proposition.

Lee Harwood

Most subsequent poetry, at least the kind of poetry I care for, has been about trying to assess the cost and the damage of those delirious, irresponsible love-poems of the first New York school. Like, the complicities in this glad acceptance of the world. Wanting to share it. Should I share it?

chandeliers tinkling in the silence as the winds batter the gardens
outside             formal lakes shuddering at the sight
of two lone walkers
                                    Of course this exaggerates
small groups of tourists appear and disappear
in an irregular rhythm of flowerbeds

("As Your Eyes Are Blue...")


It's a world that's still recognizably ours, when we are leisured. The lovers wrapped up in their own impressions, which seem to interact with them and them alone; yet also a democratic world in which similar experiences affect all the tourists and tourist couples that stroll through it. The comedy, the high camp, yet the beauty, yet the sense of being absolutely clear-eyed, which asserts a moral power. By making no judgments or claims it maintains an integrity, as if the poem might, though it says nothing definite, have all the political awareness you'd personally wish it to have and a whole lot more that you don't have yourself.

The perfect grace and flexibility of Harwood's lines, his pacing, the layout, the use of spaces instead of punctuation: he can say anything, and it's all poetry. I'm still beguiled.


*

Surrealism and the English Channel

Paul Nash, painting of Dymchurch sea-wall

[Image source: from Cathy Lomax's pretty wonderful blog: http://cathylomax.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/paul-nash-and-dymchurch.html]

Lee’s poems had about them a remarkable tone. They were ‘quiet’ compared to the work of the Americans I was reading, but they were also surreal. It was a surrealism of everyday things. I often felt that surrealism arrived in Britain as flotsam; objects that floated across the Channel and sat displaced on a beach in southern England. It’s something you can see in the paintings of Paul Nash.

(From Laurie Duggan's post about the late Lee Harwood:

http://graveneymarsh.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/remembering-lee-harwood.html)


I wonder if Tim Allen (who grew up on the Isle of Portland) would recognize that particular psychogeographical configuration?

Thinking back to my Hastings days, maybe even (in early childhood)  my Eastbourne days, I'd say that I always had a vague sense of it.

A sense confirmed when, much later, I discovered Montale's poem "Eastbourne" (not that Montale was a Surrealist, but...) , and by the Channel-Islander Jeremy Reed's translations of Montale in The Coastguard's House, generously and rightly praised by Michael Hoffman in the LRB;  still surely one of Reed's most stunning achievements.

Maybe it's something about any town that sharply abuts the sea. The sudden, enormous sea-blankness always intrudes a kind of questioning commentary, a kind of provisionality, into the life of the land.

But maybe, too,  it's particularly something unique about the English Channel. Already when I was quite young, the experience here was not just of enormous sea-blankness but of a pressing awareness that, not very far beyond the blankness, though invisible to us, lay a populous, clamorous and totally different world; different languages, different history, different art, different thinking.

Plus it was a fact that continental visitors, like Montale, were a lot more likely to show up in South Coast towns than in, say, Derbyshire.

It always seemed to me quite natural that my own grandmother, an Eastbourne resident long estranged from her husband, should have nourished her imaginative and emotional life with visits to Paris and Austria. She even made me call her by a German name (Mutti). I never really thought of her as English.

Though I couldn't see across the English Channel myself, it was obvious that Mutti could.

[I've been here before.

In an essay I wrote in 2010 about Elizabeth Bletsoe's collection Landscape from a Dream (named after a Paul Nash painting), I felt concerned that taking an interest in Nash's South Coast localities might mean "an unsurrealization of Surrealism". I'm still not sure if it's true or not.]