‘Introducing
the
Archive’, Amanda Bernstein’s article in the first Roy
Fisher Newsletter, includes a scan of the
original ‘Then Hallucinations’, published by Migrant
Press in Autumn 1962. On the title-page, two addresses
are given for the publishers: first, ‘1199 Church
Street, Ventura, Calif. U. S. A’, where Gael Turnbull
was living at the time, and below it, a second, less
glamorous and sun-drenched: ‘2, Camp Hill Road,
Worcester, England’. This was Michael Shayer’s home,
where he occupied a first-floor flat. It stands near
the junction with London Road, one of the main routes
into the centre of the city.
2, Camp Hill Road, Worcester
(November 2021)
Gracious
houses,
dating from the early nineteenth-century, are placed in
large and often walled gardens along both roads. In-fill
housing has now taken over much of the earlier green space.
2, Camp Hill Road’s once extensive garden has been built on
and so has the plot of land next-door (undeveloped when
Shayer was living in the house). Similarly, on the opposite
side of the road, a villa (now demolished) and its garden
have been turned into a block of garages; beyond them stands
Royal Fort Lodge, whose wide grounds contain several
low-rise blocks of flats.
Characteristic
housing (early nineteenth-century) near Camp Hill
Road
Despite
these
changes, the area retains much of its earlier
elegance. Though within easy walking distance of the
city centre, its elevated position, near Fort Royal
Hill and Green Hill, lends it a feeling of
sanctuary. Views to the west of the Severn valley
and Malvern Hills make the countryside feel close.
2, Camp Hill Road (close-up)
– the Malvern Hills visible in the distance
Though Migrant published
both Fisher’s City (1961) and his Then
Hallucinations, subtitled ‘City II’, the
addresses suggest a publisher a world away – perhaps two
worlds away – from Fisher’s Birmingham: either Ventura, on
the Pacific coast of southern California, or Worcester,
which was physically far nearer but culturally still very
distant.
It’s hard to imagine that
Worcester is only 17 miles southwest of Birmingham,
connected by the Birmingham & Worcester Canal, but a
world apart in terms of history and outlook – very much a
traditional ‘shire’ city.
(Urban Rambles: Worcester:
urbanrambles.org/walks/uk/england/west-midlands/worcester-2989;
accessed 15/11/2021)
Fisher,
though,
had stronger connections to the city than one might imagine
and the similarities between the two places, at the time,
were greater than one might expect. Worcester was, for
Fisher, connected with a moment of considerable creative
excitement. It was there that he was shown for the first
time the new wave of mostly American poets who, Fisher said,
revolutionised his thinking about what poetry might aim for
and accomplish. At the same time, Birmingham’s redevelopment
was paralleled by Worcester. The city was razing its
medieval centre in order to make way for (in effect) an
urban motorway. Hence Worcester displayed as clearly as
Birmingham the disruptive force of human will, for both ill
and good. In the transformations effected on both, creative
energy and the will-to-power appeared together. Worcester
showed, furthermore, that there was no escape from either of
these forces, not even in the country. And, lastly,
Worcester showed that Fisher’s own work was subject to (as
well as expressive of) the intertwining of visionary
creativity and the will to control.
Michael Shayer and Gael
Turnbull, who ran Migrant Press, were school- and later
college-friends, both of them scientists fascinated by
literature. Turnbull, who had grown up in Canada, moved
between there, the United States and Britain during the
1950s, living in Worcester from
1956-58 and in Cradley, near Malvern from 1963-83. Shayer
was in Worcester from 1959 until at least 1965. Turnbull
noticed Fisher’s poetry very early on, encouraged him and
often placed poems for him in the many small-presses he had
links with. The friendship that grew up between them was
lifelong. It was established by ‘a two-day visit to
Worcester late in 1956’ during which Fisher:
saw for the first time the
work of the later Wiliams, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan,
Alan [sic] Ginsberg, Louis Zukovsky, Irving Layton, Robert
Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Charles
Tomlinson, Larry Eigner, and Charles Olson. I’d never seen
poetry used as these people were, in their various ways,
using it, nor had I seen it treated as so vital an activity.
(Roy Fisher
‘Antebiography’, Interviews Through Time & Selected
Prose (Shearsman Books; Kentisbeare, 2000), 31)
A
‘two-day visit’ meant Fisher’s sleeping over – a significant
act for ‘a non-traveller’, who until he was thirteen years
old ‘didn’t sleep a night outside the city of Birmingham’ (Interviews
62). His first encounter with all these different – and
differently challenging – innovative poets took place over
two days in a sedate, provincial city.
Eight years later in 1964,
as Shayer recalls, Worcester was again the location where
Fisher was introduced to powerful new poetry.
Gael was living
in Cradley, just the other side of Malvern at the time
and Gael had invited Basil [Bunting] down for several days
and we had a flat in Worcester. First floor flat
in Worcester which was convenient. And it was
arranged that Basil would do a reading of some new poem that
he was working on and we had quite a select audience there,
whistled up at very little notice. My memory is that there
was Roy [Fisher], I think there was Adrian Mitchell […].
Anyway there we were, five or six, or six or seven of us
sitting in a sitting room and Basil started reading his
bloody poem. It was coming out of nowhere, if you understand
what I mean. There was nothing that prepared any of us for
anything like that
(Michael Shayer,
interviewed by Richard Price, in PS [prose
supplement to Painted, spoken], No. 1 (2006),
quoted in Richard Price, ‘Migrant the Magnificent’ -- https://www.hydrohotel.net/EssaysMigrant1.htm;
accessed 15/11/2021)
Bunting
was
reading sections of what became ‘Briggflatts’.
It was in the same year – 1964 – that Worcester and
Birmingham became, materially, more similar. Peter Barry, in
Contemporary British Poetry and the City (Manchester
University Press: Manchester and New York, 2000) rightly
connects Fisher’s ‘City’ with ‘the almost nationwide
experience in mid-century Britain of urban loss and
destruction’ as post-war development ‘motorised’ city space.
‘Notoriously,’ Barry continues
this sudden obliteration of
the past was greater and more sweeping in Birmingham than in
any other British city. (197)
Worcester
was,
however, in the running for similar notoriety.
On 28th November 1964, Geoffrey Moorhouse
published in The Guardian an article titled ‘The
Sack of Worcester’, drawing attention to the demolition
being carried out on the city’s medieval centre. Buildings
in the Lychgate area, just to the north of the cathedral
were being cleared, to be replaced by a shopping centre,
multi-storey carpark and a widened, dual carriage-way road,
running down to the bridge across the River Severn. The St
Albans area, north-west of the Cathedral, was also being
demolished to accommodate Worcester Technical College, built
on the banks of the river.
Article by Geoffrey
Moorhouse, The Guardian 28/11/1964
Buildings just north of Cathedral prior to
demolition.
Looking north, towards the
Cathedral and city centre, along Sidbury towards College
Street, the A44.
Moorhouse’s article made
Worcester the focus of indignation: ‘Nikolaus Pevsner […]
described [the demolition] as a “totally
incomprehensible… act of self-mutilation”.’ It has had a
lasting effect on the city’s reputation and its self-image.
‘The redevelopment has gone down in town planning history as
an example of how not to do things’ (Urban Rambles
Worcester). The sense of outrage was intensified by the
Worcester’s status as an ancient, ‘historical’ city, whose
heritage was worth preserving. Its fate showed that the
experience of ‘urban loss and destruction’ was, indeed,
nationwide and inescapable.
Fisher may have been more than usually sensitive to
this assault on a provincial city, nestled in the
countryside, because his home-territory in Birmingham lay on
its fringes. His father, who was dying when Fisher wrote
‘City’, was (Fisher records) closely connected to ‘the area
of countryside which opened up ten minutes’ walk away [from
his home], across the Holyhead road’. This area was ‘an
enclosure whose edges you didn’t have to think about’, ‘a
vista of fields and copses and rags of hedgerow, stands of
tall trees’. And:
it was a regular
Sunday-morning excursion with my father, part of a routine
set of activities. We’d walk the lanes while my mother
cooked.
The
countryside,
as Fisher refers to this place, he ‘took to be righteous’.
On the other hand, there was:
a whiff of addiction about
my appetite for the beauty of the great rusting sheds, the
tarry stinks, and the slimy canals of Smethwick. It was a
lonely and gigantic landscape, with hardly anybody in it.
The
complication
of Fisher’s urban experience is brought to the fore by these
recollections: squalid industry offers a visionary solitude,
thrilling, liberated and sublime, while the nearby
countryside provided regularity and security, imaging a
conventionally stable landscape despite the fact that it was
‘dominated by a pair of collieries’, contained spoilheaps,
and was being encroached on by golf courses, a cemetery and
allotments – ‘the spacious, landgrabbing outreaches of city
life’. (‘Antebiography’, Interviews, 21, 22).
This edgeland was Fisher’s
piece of the ‘countryside’ and he travelled farther afield
very little. However:
At six I was taken to the
Malverns, and in a neighbour’s car to the Vale of Llangollen
and the mountains and seacoast of North Wales. The same
neighbours later took us to the Vale of Evesham and
Dovedale. These places—I didn’t know where they were, or why
they were as they were—excited me enormously. (Interviews
22)
The
excitement
is, perhaps, the curious thing. The more distant and usually
inaccessible ‘real’ countryside – of the Malverns, Wales,
the Peak District and the Vale of Evesham (which begins a
few miles south-east of Worcester) – excites him in rather
the same way as the industrial wastelands did when he was a
little older. The remnant country landscape where he and his
father walked together appears, through the comparison,
steadying and containing – ‘you didn’t have to think about’
its edges; there, by being forgotten, confinement could
become stability.
Fisher’s ‘Antebiography’
describes his father’s transformation of their backyard into
a rural space and, in his notes to A Furnace, Fisher
talks of his father as ‘born in exile’ (see Roy Fisher
Newsletter no. 1). It would be misleading, in my view,
to treat Fisher himself as a rural exile in the city.
Rather, his recollections suggest a child who was, firstly,
drawn to the city as an arena of self-realization and to the
country as a place of enfolded security and who, secondly,
found in rural scenes away from the city an intense
excitement – an excitement comparable to that he experienced
in industrial space. Visionary possibility emerged for him
in both country and city, and perhaps confusingly so. The
raptures and grandeur of his urban explorations seemed in
conflict with family loyalties – with, that is to say, the
pragmatic and restrained endurance which characterised his
extended family. Secret walks in old factories were an
escape from the regularity of his father’s countryside. At
the same time, his father’s love in exile of rural life
indicates that there may be a further source for Fisher’s
excitement when in the country. His thrilled response
suggests (to him, through an intuition that was, I assume,
unconscious at the time) that he may be experiencing direct
what his father had felt in the countryside and what he had
later kept alive in the backyard in Handsworth. His
excitement responded to the country’s being as revelatory
and sublime as the city, and the more powerfully so because
it seemed a window into (and a way of sharing) his father’s
inner life.
Michael Shayer was not only instrumental in
publishing ‘City’ in 1961, he played a considerable role in
the work’s construction as well. In one account of this
process, Fisher says that he had ‘a voluminous series of
prose pieces and poems which I was to help Michael Shayer to
edit down’; in another Shayer’s role is more decisive.
Michael looked at my great
heaving mass of odds and ends that I was writing about
Birmingham [….] and saw that this material could be used as
a kind of collage work; which he could see, and I couldn’t.
So he shook it around a bit and produced the first draft of
City (Interviews 33 and 47)
Peter Robinson’s edition of the
City
materials shows how much Shayer was involved, even to the
point where he wrote both a preface and the closing lines.
Fisher reports consistently how unhappy he was with the
end-result.
I
didn’t like it, but it caught people’s attention. The
knowledge that people were reading the stuff, and that it
was not perfect, so far as I was concerned—it gave me a
screaming fit. I could hardly move out of my chair for
months. It really upset me. (Interviews
47)
Shayer’s preface invoked Eliot,
Joyce and Pound; a 1962 review by Denise Levertov likened
the work to Carlos Williams'. Fisher’s distress may, then,
have been produced by the work’s being taken over, first, by
Shayer and afterwards by the literary system, whose points
of reference and comparison homogenised the book. The more
recognisable it was made, the less he recognised it. (See The Thing about Roy
Fisher,
edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (Liverpool
University Press; Liverpool 2000), 20, 149-50 and 194).
There is a parallel, in other words, between the urban
make-over Fisher describes in the poem and the poem’s being,
itself, made over.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Fisher’s long
period of writer’s block followed. He recounts the block as
beginning, however, after an effort to reassert artistic
power.
I
wanted more bulk or power. I spent ages trying to write a
massive novel. […] the person I had in mind was Patrick
White, the way in which he could make great and massive epic
effects. I was reading things like Voss [White’s 1957 novel], and being
very impressed by large verbal structures, gothic or baroque
things which would take you out of normality. (Interviews 47)
When writing the novel proved
unsuccessful, he tried to return to poetry and found it
impossible to write at all. Derek Slade’s bibliography shows
that, although Fisher’s poetry never absolutely dried up, he
wrote very little from 1961 through 1969 (The
Thing about Roy Fisher, 325-31).
It would be a mistake to attribute Fisher’s block to
the ‘sack of Worcester’, though the coincidence of dates is
curious. It may be, however, that the meanings Worcester
acquired for him – the figure the city made – offer a
partial explanation why he became unable to go forward.
Demolishing a city is necessary within the logic of
industrial capitalism; it expresses the economic system’s
will-to-power, to exploit and to dominate. It is also
revelatory. Not only do demolition and archaeology go
hand-in-hand, demolition exposes momentarily the innards of
buildings. And, in Fisher’s understanding of poetry, the
will to expose and to reveal is shared by developer and poet
alike. The creative energies of the new poetry, which Fisher
came across when staying with Turnbull in Worcester during
the mid-1950s, not only existed, therefore, alongside the
city’s brutal redevelopment in the immediately succeeding
years, the two seemed to originate in the same drives. This,
moreover, was true everywhere. In Fisher’s childhood, a
nearby patch of countryside offered security and refuge.
Worcester’s fate showed the country to be permeated by the
same creative and destructive energies which built,
destroyed and rebuilt urban landscapes. Similarly, the
excitement he had experienced in the countryside outside
Birmingham, when a boy, could not be seen any longer as
innocent of a wish to command. It betrayed the dangers of
the sublime along with its rapture. Fisher seemed, following
his experience with the first publication of City, to be a victim of such
destructive forces (which inhabited the art of poetry as
well as the processes of publishing and literary
career-making). At the same time, he found himself to be
determined to acquire in his writing a comparable kind of
creative power.
These
events and contexts suggest that his block was provoked by
his perception of the alignment, particularly evident in
cities, between creative activity and destructive process –
or, in other words, the poet’s complicity in the work of
power (redevelopment), even when the poet is seeking to
oppose centralising authority and to speak instead for ‘a
perceptual environment which was taken as read, which was
taken to be assumed and not a thing for which any vocabulary
needed to exist’ (Interviews
62). If this was the case, then his effort to release his
home-territory from its erasure and marginalisation would
have seemed to him a further act of conquest – by both his
own poetic ambition and by the literary. And this would have
been disabling.
Fisher
said that The
Cut Pages,
published in 1971, was an important step in releasing him
from the block. Commenting on the work, he said that the aim
of its cut-up technique was ‘to give the words as much
relief as possible from serving in planned situations’. That
aim corresponded with the writing’s concern with ‘the
dissolution of oppressive forms’. The process of writing
meant (and it made possible) ‘getting out of my own way’
(Roy Fisher, The Cut Pages
(Oasis Shearsman: London 1986), 8, 9). Planners were
somewhere in his mind, I suspect, when Fisher wrote of
‘planned situations’. His words also recall the paradox
that, while ‘the dissolution of oppressive forms’ was
claimed as one of the goals of redevelopment (as slums were
cleared and roads widened), the act was itself an oppressive
form – one that extended the reach of economic and political
power. His writer’s block was profound because, when it came
to ‘the dissolution of oppressive forms’, whether these were
geographical, economic or personal, language was, as he saw
it, so much enmeshed in the processes he wanted to write
against.
An
Objectivist neutrality had been one of his earlier remedies
for binds of language such as these. It is not, though, the
aim of The Cut Pages.
The poem’s unpredictability seeks, certainly, to dislodge
the self that would dominate and control, at once create and
overwhelm. This randomness, though, that is built into the
composition, does not seek impersonality; it accords instead
with a passive subjectivity – one that could reveal, as he
later said of City:
‘how much the place was dependent upon very evanescent,
temporal, subjective renderings of it, which might never BE
rendered’ (Interviews 62).
The
city was made up of multiple, hidden subjectivities, among
them Fisher (both one among the many and a multitude
himself). His writing can ‘render’ that multiplicity by not
seeking to govern it. This approach makes possible an
uncovering which is not exposure. The new technique of The Cut Pages is able, in other
words, to separate the writer from the developer, the poem
from the bulldozer and the wrecking-ball.
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