A GIRL CALLED AL FRED    

    for Retta Bowen, Stephanie Wienrich and Nick Temple, with warmth

 

I know of a hug-seeking young man         

Who was constantly being bombarded        

By text messages

From a girl called Al Fred.

 

She had never once occupied her own body.

Was permanently invalid: dead to the world of hugs.

Need anything more be said, my darling?

No, nothing more need be said.

 

The hug-seeking young man ended up

In the arms of an old man called Winnie Fred.

But that was in a subsequent reincarnation.

Enough said.

 

12 Dec. 03

THE SICK IMAGE OF MY FATHER FADES

The sick image of my father fades.

When I was three he used to take me

Tied up in a sack to the cliff's edge

And threaten to throw me over. The wind

Was ghastly, and his hands shook with terror.

I whimpered like a fretful dog. Fear

Stole over me, and I shrieked and screamed.

My father said, shall I break your legs

Before throwing you over? You should then land

On the sand without the sudden crunch crunch

Of breaking bones. I looked up at him, pleading.

Then he would laugh out loud like a normal man,

And let me clamber back on to his back, so that I forgot

The sheer drop from the cliff's edge, just for a moment.

World © John Horder

Included in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (ed. Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Mead. Harper Collins New York 1992), The Treasury of English Poetry (ed. Caldwell and Kendrick. Doubleday NY 1984), Beyond Bedlam (ed. Ken Smith and Matthew Sweeney. Anvil 1998)

DON’T POSTPONE AMAZING YOURSELF FOR ONE SINGLE MOMENT

IN WARM MEMORY OF NICHOLAS ALBERY

When we die

More than at any other moment

We need our hugging friends

To come out of their closets

And assert just how amazing we all are.

That word "all" includes our billions of ancestors.

 

Nicholas Albery had continuously

Chosen to amaze himself

During his lifetime as Nicholas.

He knew the process of self-amazement

Couldn't be postponed for one single moment.

He did not procrastinate:

 

“1) Write down your 20 main pleasures in life. Then

2) Write down ten ways to make money from your pleasures

(Ideally from a combination of your pleasures).

3) Explore one of these ways, trying it out, if you can,

In reality.” The process of Nicholas's self-amazement is continuous.

Like love, it is highly infectious. Once the barriers start disintegrating one by one

They cease for all time. Don't postpone amazing yourself for one single moment.

 

John Horder read this poem at Nicholas’s memorial service at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly in 2002.

William Empson, Straight

William Empson was drinking a glass of wine and completing a crossword when I met him at his home in Hampstead. For the first ten minutes he continued with the crossword while talking away lucidly, relishing his choice of words as he obviously relished the challenge the clues presented him. He gets through at least four or five crosswords a day.

    What he says lands home, but with delight rather than actual animosity.

    “Crosswords, oh, yes. Well the chaps at the ‘Times’ seem to be Roman Catholics these days, and there are a whole lot of estate agents at the ‘Telegraph.’ Rather curious that.”

He declined to make any comment about the ‘Guardian’ crossword.

    He is in his sixties and there is a trace of Victorian camp about his manner. This certainly becomes more pronounced on the rare occasions he reads his poetry. While reading in Hampstead at the Pentameters Club recently his high degree of Donne-like wit and intelligence first dazzled but finally left most of the audience perplexed. They found it impossible to follow the intricate line of argument in the poems.

    “Dodsworth got his facts wrong in his article in ‘The Review,’ I wrote none of the ‘Collected Poems’ at Winchester. I was cheek by jowl with Sparrow there who was editing the Devotions at the time, but I didn’t dream of writing anything remotely like that. I wanted to write argumentative poetry.”

    Empson spent much of his time at Cambridge writing film and book reviews for for “The Cambridge Review” and “Granta.” He also wrote plays which were well received and in which he acted himself. None of them seem to survive.

    “I got tired of mathematics and only got a second. As a result I lost my scholarship, so my patient mother had to pay for me in my fourth year. It was not so unusual combining mathematics with literature in those days. However, I was one of the weak sisters who fell by the way. Dear old Bronowski, he got a first in maths while editing ‘Experiment’ with me.

    “It’s funny, I get asked to lecture in Oxford, York, Liverpool, but not nearly so often in Cambridge. Once I spoke at the Cambridge Union with the mayor. He was a rationalist and he was wearing his chain of office at the time. Well, we both denounced the English churches, and there was a considerable gap before I was asked again. It looks as if I am nursing a grudge. That won’t do at all. Old men must always give the appearance of looking tidy.

    “I think I’m in the straight now. I’ve been in Sheffield since 1953 and I leave in two years time unless I am thrown out before. I regard Sheffield as the right place to be in as I come from Yorkshire. When I realized the British Council was leaving China I boasted I could only work in my own country. I’ve succeeded in carrying out my boast!”

    “‘Milton’s God’ is the only book I’ve written while I’ve been there and that was first published eight years ago. But I find it very stimulating being a university lecturer. You’re forced to reconsider your opinions all the time. Mainly by people who are doing postgraduate research, it is true. No doubt your opinions do tend to harden, but you’re forced to look up the evidence again.”

    “I wish I had seen more of C.S. Lewis. You just can’t believe people are going to die and then they do! But it would have been rather a tricky operation getting on to terms with him. I rather liked his being reckless and unscholarly, but ‘The Screwtape Letters’ was a quite dreadful book.

    “Christianity is a most harmful thing. It’s worshipping the God who is satisfied by crucifixion. That’s just about it. It’s much more harmful than, say, Buddhism. But I’m very undeveloped about religion. One can’t be quite sure that Aldous Huxley was right, but his ‘Perennial Philosophy’ provides some enormously interesting information. He’s so much smaller than the people he is quoting though. But at least there’s a start there.”

“Parsons are harmless enough nowadays. It’s the Christian literary dons who do most of the damage both here and in America. They seem to provide the last stronghold for a dreadful parody of Christianity. The standard explanation of so many authors is twisted in the Christian interest, it really is a disgrace. Milton is an obvious example, of course, but there are many, many others. Coleridge and James Joyce are dissimilar in every other respect except that they are both completely misinterpreted by the Christian dons who poison just about everything.”

    “And if you have to read a great deal of criticism as I have to do in my work it becomes extremely oppressive always having to take the Christian point of view.”

 

The Guardian Tuesday August 12 1969

THE CURATES

How impeccably well-dressed they are

These curates!

This one’s whole body

Is spruced up in a sort of corset.

The expression on his face, contorted.

 

At what cost to himself and to others

Does he spend his whole life suppressing his vital energies.

At what a terrible cost!

 (from ‘A Sense of Being)