D.R.M.

While book hunting the other day I found this little treasure. It's 'Job Morbid's Pilgrimage', a collection of poetry from 1857, a first edition if I'm not mistaken, by a poet who calls himself or herself 'D.R.M.' Now, I have a reasonable knowledge of English literature. But I'd never heard of a D.R.M. before. I was, naturally, intrigued.

I bought the book and when I got home, looked up D.R.M. on the internet. Perhaps I don't know where to look, but I found nothing. Only multiple copies of 'Job Morbid' on different Amazon sites around the world, some listing the author as D.R.M., some listing him/ her as R.M.D., and one that said 'author unknown'. Unfortunately, none of them have Amazon's 'Look Inside' facility. If they did I might be able to satisfy my curiosity by reading some work of diligent scholarship in an introduction.

A Twitter friend consulted the Bodleian digital library for me and found another book by the same author called 'Ephemeral Effusions'. The physical copy was admitted to the Bodleian in 1928. It was published privately in 1856, a year before 'Job Morbid'. I've read most of that now, seeing if I can find any clues about the identity of D.R.M., and I've begun to create a tentative picture of this lost--and it must be said, perfectly good--poet. It could be a wildly inaccurate picture, but I have no scholarly reputation to endanger by posting it here.

D.R.M. was either a public figure concerned about his reputation, or a woman. I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She went to school in Henley, but her family was from Devon. One poem is 'Addressed to the High Sheriff of Devon for the Year 1845'. That was Edward Simcoe Drewe, of the Drewe family of Broadhembury, long-term residents of the Grange.

D.R.M describes herself, in the poem, as 'a humble scion of that house'. But she is not Edward Simcoe Drewe's daughter. She says, 'My father! oh! blest spirit now at rest,' before going on to praise Edward Simcoe's generosity and charity, saying he 'worthily supports the name he bears.' Might the D. in D.R.M. have been inverted? The need for that in a privately published book containing a poem so easy to decode is questionable. But still. Perhaps she hoped to use the book to help her find a publisher in London, in which case discretion would have been appropriate, given the restrictions placed on women then. A year later, she did find a publisher. I am tempted to read something salacious into her description of herself as 'humble', a possibility which would make my inversion theory even more applicable, but that's probably going too far

Where does D.R.M. stand in the family genealogy? Since I have no birth date for her, this is harder to pin down. Is she in her forties or fifties at mid-century? If she is, she might be the daughter of John Rose Drewe and Dorothy Bidgood. They are described, bizarrely, on genealogy sites as having left 'no male children.' Might there, then, have been a daughter? And might that explain the middle 'R' in her pen name? Is it possible I'm wildly off target and none of these suppositions are even close to the truth?

Hunter

Yesterday was the anniversary of the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, who has been one of my favourite writers since I first came across his work in Rolling Stone in 1985. I remember the magazine and the year with an unusual (for me) accuracy because the article, a ten-year-old account of the fall of Saigon, made the sort of impression on me that readers only experience once or twice in their lifetime. His prose was remarkable. He used song lyrics as epigraphs. He slipped occasionally into bizarre flights of fancy. And behind all the showmanship there was an intellectual and philosophical depth I had only expected, up to that point, from poets and folk singers.

After that first article I read both Fear and Loathing books and The Great Shark Hunt. Shark Hunt collected then-contemporary as well as much older journalism by Hunter. It was a proper history of the previous twenty years in America from a perspective that became increasingly skewed as the author grew into his mature style. And that style, though it had evolved in very different cultural conditions, seemed a perfect response to the humourless, cruel, repressive social atmosphere of the 1980s.

Through his fantastic success, of course, and aided unwittingly by a newspaper strip which parodied him, Hunter created a public image which eclipsed his great talent as a writer. The public thought of him as a drug-addled maniac, celebrating him because he did everything they lacked the courage to do. I was guilty of that myself, to some extent. And to a large extent, the public image of Hunter was true; he even played up to it. In the end, however, he became a prisoner of it, like a master magician who does the same conjuring trick night after night because it pleases the crowd but forgets, eventually, how to do anything else.

One article about Hunter after he died was titled The Day the Fun Stopped. It was fun. And it has been much less fun ever since -- I sometimes watch Donald Trump on television and imagine the savaging he would have had from Hunter with such sadistic pleasure, it makes me sad all over again that Thompson has gone. Yes, it was fun when he was here. Probably the most fun a writer has ever given us. But it was so much more than that too. Hunter, to my mind, was a genuinely great writer until he burned himself out. Maybe one day we'll look through the fog of the years with enough clarity for a lot more people to see that.

The Artist and the Work

Can the artist and the work ever be separated? I have been having this discussion with other poets and a painter friend lately. I love the poetry of Ezra Pound. But Pound was an anti-Semite. Does enjoying his work make me an anti-Semite too? I love the poetry of Ted Hughes. Does that mean I approve of men having multiple relationships simultaneously? And are the achievements of either poet, or any of the other great poets, writers, painters and musicians of history to be nullified by our disapproval of the lives of their creators?

I can't really disapprove of Ted Hughes. I once slept with a woman knowing she was married, and I didn't give a moment's thought to her husband; she excited me, and I wanted her. But I do believe someone gets hurt when a trusted partner starts thinking it's all right to sleep with other people. It might not always be the person you expect, but it will happen. Ted Hughes lost a wife and a partner to suicide. He was unquestionably attracted to emotionally complex women whose apparent fire was a mask for terrible fragility. He cheated on both of them. Whether he bore full responsibility for their deaths or not is highly debatable. I've read widely on the subject and I don't think he did. But he was vilified for decades because of Plath.

I have believed for a while now that we are becoming more moralistic, more puritanical, more aggressively judgemental, on the political left. They've always played at that on the right while allowing for themselves licence to do anything they wanted regardless of the consequences. But we mean it, and we police ourselves as rigourously as we throw brickbats at the enemy. Do I want to belong to a movement in which I have to run every sentence I write by a committee before it's published? Should I have to prove my worth by making sure I tick every ideological box?

It's obvious to me that an artist's work is a product of the artist's mind, his/her experiences, perceptions, misconceptions. Pound's greatness (I think he's great) even in the early poems, comes from a set of attitudes and values which were ripe for conversion into fascism given the necessary external stimuli -- which, in my opinion, were the carnage of WWI and his move to Italy. His anti-Semitism, as he later said himself, was a 'stupid, suburban prejudice', and hardly uncommon in America or England; it was the decay of his mind that made it quite so virulent.

Hughes, likewise. His isolated Yorkshire upbringing, hunting animals with his brother in the woods, alongside the development of his colossal but unusual intelligence, made him ripe, in such a conservative, patriarchal society, for a self-serving and uniquely pretentious take on relationships . He wrote the best mainstream English poetry of his generation from a mind that saw the world as one in which primordial forces were at work, and male desire meant something, although I'm puzzled what. Hughes wrote in the programme of a performance of Gaudete:

This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of Love in his own log-like way. He organizes the women of the parish into a coven, a love society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is to produce the Messiah.

I can't read that without a straight face. To me, it's an excuse for a man to get his knob out and exploit as many women as he can. But Hughes took it seriously, at least as a mythical representation of some deeper truth, whatever that truth might be.

I doubt I would have liked Pound or Hughes very much as men. I don't think they would have liked me either. I refuse to give up on their work, however, just because their ideas don't chime with my own. Their books are too precious to me, and there's a sort of intellectual fascism in junking writers who take inconvenient or offensive positions which has no place in civilized debate. No one died because of Pound. I've heard his broadcasts; he would have been an irritant to the Allied generals and politicians, but only Ezra would have believed in his influence. People did die around Hughes, but people have died around me who I could have helped much more than I did. The hurt I've caused others in my life is incalculable. Is anybody such a paragon of virtue that they can dismiss a mad poet, or an arrogant poet, out of hand and damn them to Hell forever?

The Churchill Question

_{^{Boris Johnson tweets that Winston Churchill 'saved this country from a barbaric fascist and racist tyranny'. Sorry, mate, but Winston wasn't up in Lancaster bombers risking his neck night after night like my old history teacher Bill Lanning. Winston wasn't held in a German POW camp like Michelle's dad Bernard. Winston didn't lose his mind while being tortured in a Japanese POW camp like my great uncle Sonny. Winston didn't crack the Enigma code like Alan Turing, who our great country persecuted to death because of his sexuality. Winston didn't lose his country and then join the Allies like those Polish pilots who flew during the Blitz. But it was Winston who excluded them from the post-war victory parade because they weren't British. He played his part. But it is ordinary people who win wars and ordinary people who suffer and grieve because they're fought.}}