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[Letters from Eric Mottram :
There's
a hidden side to Eric Mottram - even to himself - and
that is his letters. They were almost always painstakingly written in his minuscule
hand, covering often several pages at a time; they answered every minor point
and teemed with seething comments on people, places and the cultural scene. They
also contain the only insights into his own personality and life, a life he has
practically kept private, never wishing to impose his own suffering as ballast
in a budding friendship. They were also my connection to the world. The first
dates from September 1957, but from 1973 to 1989, they were few and far
between. Here are some out-of-context excerpts.
February 4, 1958: "The
thought of having to put up with your arguments for more than one hour fills me
with panic, I may add; I'm beginning to see how intolerant and emotional I am,
and I don't like it. So let me do penance by reading your revised poems![...] I wonder if you have managed in Berlin to come across
a prize-winning Indian film called "Pather Panchali": it is undoubtedly a masterpiece by any
standards. The director is a young man named Satyajit
Ray: it's his first film, astonishingly enough. [...] I lead a very tied existence for no good reason I sometimes think. My
poems lie in a folder unfinished, like all my other creative writing: a pity
this. I think the time has come for another move, a change, in my life: I've
been still for three years. Here's a poem - unrevized
- on lecturing: it's as good a subject as any: and it's called the
"Lecture in the Cave." (from A-weg 39, Groningen, The Netherlands)
March 11, 1958: "...I'm
apologetic about the myth references in that awful poem which I sent you in a
brief moment of uninhibitedness: but it is a European
poem and I have a right to
my European myths. I agree that it's a pretty cheap way with
metaphor: but then I'm no great shakes as a poet of course. [...] If we use
myth to eke out our own metaphors and images, this is what happens:
incommunicability between cultures. The difference is that I want my thing read
by Europeans not Asians: you want both. [...] I must say the influence of
Anderson [the Canadian poet who taught literature in Singapore in the early
fifties] on the imitative Malayans grows worse and worse the more I hear about
it. After all, what has he produced of value? An obscure book of poems (not
published in England) and two pieces of scandal-ridden autobiography, which I
liked; but this is minor stuff. The only help a European can give to a Malayan
is, first, a truthful knowledge of European experience today and in the past,
and second, to try to sharpen his awareness of what his problems are, how
Malayan life can get its literature, what kind of language to use. Nothing else
is useful. The meteoric appearance of minor poets and their curiously
individual daily life, is no more than a freak show. [...]
The inability of Malayans to understand themselves adds to the social chaos
which is easily the obvious hallmark of the place. [...] About Dylan Thomas,
don't forget he married, had children, settled in a house, tried to accept the
double responsibility of being a man and a poet, tried to make money by art,
and drank himself to death. [...] His prose and poetry styles are strictly
inimitable: don't even be slightly influenced or it will show immediately. But
have your London life of lurking and walking by all means - it's traditional. It's
beyond my capacity to be so unselfconscious." (from
Groningen)
June 29,1958:
"... I did not expect so much frankness all at once. I am myself incapable
of it, and although I bitterly expect it from my friends, I have no right to
what I can't do myself. My only justification is this: no one has ever expected
me to explain myself. It sometimes seems to me that I have been doing little
else these last fifteen years but listen and then speak out as decently as I
could or wanted to. I want to know and feel people, but I have found little
such curiosity, at least to such an intensity, in others; so you can see how
you came to be the victim of my - I now see - rather abrupt
interrogations." (from Groningen)
August 8, 1958: "...I am
struggling to read "The Outsider" which I gave up in boredom and
irritation last year and have begun again in deference to yourself.
Camus's "The Rebel" seems to me a much more
original contribution to our times. But I enormously enjoyed your account of
meeting Wilson - only let me say, you really must be more critical of these
personalities. Obviously Wilson appeals to your own rebelliousness - but for
goodness' sake don't become a rebel's minion! There's something deeply
conservative in poetry: rebellion in the arts is always a disguise for a
profound human continuity, isn't it?"
February 2, 1959: "... My
mother has sold the old house and moved to Brighton, ...[...]
I don't much like being far from London when I am in England, but that's the
way it will be now. [...] The proofs of a poem to be put out in the US came and went: it made me a bit
courageous for a while, especially as I am to be paid - actually paid - however
trivial the sum is - it makes you feel professional, which is entirely
flattering to the self because I am not, and know it. I have been reading a
poet I admire very much and would like you to read - a young American called
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - you can read him
in "Pictures of the Gone World" or "A Coney Island of the
Mind." I even have a record of of him and other
US boys reading their stuff. I'm going to talk about him to my students the
week after next. By the way, I heard Dom Moraes
reading his stuff on the Third last night: (two juicy lines just have to be
dropped) ...He has talent but at the moment it sounds like some one else's he
has appropriated. Like John Press.// You'll laugh to
know that I am taking part in a seminar on Ayer's book [The Problem of
Knowledge] we looked at together - fortnight after fortnight all last term
and now this - unravelling that mind! It'll be engraved of my soul like Calais
or callous. Pity you weren't there to be done good to!"(from
Groningen)
May 20, 1959: "... I
always understand your silences, if you mean I realize you are like me in
writing letters nearly always on the spur of the moment, a sort of emotional
crisis in a minor way." (from Groningen)
October 12, 1959: "...
Might not your struggle for sheer independence be an illusion: no man who marries
for children wants independence surely: not unless he simply means
irresponsibility. For instance, I don't marry because I don't think I could
love a girl enough to make her happy enough to justify making her so dependent.
I'm probably merely the prey to neurosis, but that's it just now. [...] ...we
all need help, all being desperate potentially lonely men yelping to the empty
air for love, which means dependence, which means work, which means the only
comforts there are, God being either a cynical monster or simply a word without
meaning.// Don't you really do more than survive? I have a feeling you do not
fill your life with enough, and that part of your disease is emptiness: you
have not the European desire for a complex and utterly present culture. Yearning
for spiritual emptiness, nirvana, one-ness under the Bo-tree (I know you are
not a Buddhist), refusal of the penetration of the arts, all of them, and
nature. Are all Indians and Malayans Puritans? Probably yes. [...] About me, I
have been appointed lecturer in English literature with special interest in
American literature at London University, and I begin in January because my
work here is such that it carries responsibilities. I just can't simply leave.
It's a wonderful new job, and I'm lucky and grateful about it - especially in
this competitive academic world we ratrace in. But
I'm not that good and I'm wondering how long I'll last. (from
Groningen)
January 21, 1960: "... I
can only look forward to having a literary talk again - the literary set don't seem to have been much use to you in London. But I
think perhaps you expect writers to be writers all the time. But I also agree
that the literary set wields atrocious power in England. Poetry has to be in
the modes agreed upon
to get far towards publishing. I myself find it extremely
difficult to recognize the new and valuable, so entrenched in patterns of the
recognizable does one become. Open mind seems to be
not enough - even an ironic pose which really stems from patronizing
superiority!// In a way I'm jealous of your being on terms with Colin Wilson,
Spender, Enright, and so on, although I do not admire
anything they've done except early Spender poems and Enright's
essays on Rilke and Goethe. Surely you are on the
right track to be healthily sceptical of these eminences in a flat land. [...] The only poetry I've read recently that
might interest you is Robert Lowell's "Life Studies" which is a fine
achievement I think. His use of flexible rhythms in long lines will interest
you.// Why John Press? Not surely because I reviewed
his earliest critical book very critically! I don't suppose I told you any way.
He's a pretty awful poet - has all the clichés of other poets, a sort of idle
Georgian whose [sic] read Eliot and Auden, but who
can't help letting his rubbishy romantic naturism poke washily
through. Who is John Press, by the way?" (from
King's College, London)
March 19, 1960: "...I
think your view of poetry in England a shade pessimistic; Ted Hughes has just
had a new volume out, and every week or so some new volume by new or relatively
unknown poets seems to appear - and the host of poetry-publishing little
journals is quite large - a glance in Zwemmer's would
confirm this. [...] "Listen"
["Listener"?]... is associated with the
group of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie. They
like precision, clear forms, intellectual content... (They refused my only
poems I sent them!)" (from King's College,
London)
October 22, 1960: "... I
have never believed that suffering is good for a man necessarily and never
will. [...] I have one or two addresses
of publishers of tiny output - I mean they do it for love. One of the striking
things in America is this getting on with publishing at your own expense. I met
a couple, poor and clever, who "work" a little and then bring out
irregularly a magazine called "Birth" which they hawk at street
corners until it's time to "work" again - to get money to live and
bring out "Birth" - he's an oriental-looking Jewish fellow with
masses of dark curly beard, she's a lovely lithe creature with [a] lovely sense
of humour and lack of affectation.// I brought back stacks of American poetry;
I met Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Hebert Gold, Seymour Krim, and others: and toured thousands of miles meeting
hundreds of people, and discovering I hope truth. And now I want to get it into
my lectures, into writing, I might even make poems again and stop being sterile
and dull. New blood around; it's done me good; justice must now be done. [...]
Up to here in work now the university year has begun, with lectures and so on,
review-writing, courses in other colleges, Times Literary Supplement
stuff, etc. etc. I've never been so busy. So should you come over, leave a
message at King's, will you. Meanwhile, as ever -Eric" (from King's
College,
© T.Wignesan
1957-1994
T.Wignesan, a Stateless Person, expelled from Malaysia, his birthplace, now works
as a researcher-comparatist in Paris for the French
National Centre for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Writes poetry, short stories, essays, novels
and criticism, mainly in English, and is the founder-editor of the bi-lingual Journal of Comparative Poïetics/Revue
de Poïétique Comparée.