Jill Turnbull
Roy
Fisher
and Gael Turnbull were close friends for almost fifty years.
For much of that time they lived at a considerable distance
from each other, so their correspondence is a valuable
record of their relationship. Gael Turnbull’s archive,
housed in the National Library of Scotland as a special
collection, contains almost 500 of their
letters written from many addresses and ranging from a
few lines on a small page to six sides of foolscap paper.
Among them are poems, a few of which were not necessarily
intended for publication.
Their
correspondence began with a letter from Gael dated
11 July 1956 requesting about a dozen poems for
possible publication in Origin, the first of many
such invitations. It did not take long for their
correspondence and their friendship to develop. Roy’s
letters regularly began with an apology for his delay in
replying to Gael’s, particularly in the early years.
Roy
and Gael had much more in common than their poetry,
especially their extreme self-doubt, which is made clear in
their frank correspondence, as well as their tendency to
suffer from depression. Gael had to fight every day to make
himself get out of bed and face the world. He tended not to
discuss such issues with family members, but was able to
share his self-doubt, and other negative emotions with his
fellow poets, while Roy certainly responded in like
manner.
In
a six-page letter of 6 January 1966 Roy starts: ‘From
early November I had a frustrating and demoralizing time at
work, a chaos of women, a round of stupidities and loose
ends; and then I gave myself a rough ride over Christmas,
trying to write something sizable, willed, answerable; and
seizing up, day after day, without being able to stop, a
sort of strictive. Yet again as always, horribly
painful as well as visibly meaningless …’ After more in the
same vein, he began to comment on the poems Gael had sent
him: ‘Good stuff again, but your way of providing
alternatives slackens it all for me … Clouds. Rain etc.
Good. Blobby …’
Among
Roy’s letters is one which Ian Hamilton Finlay had sent to
Gael, who had obviously forwarded it to Roy. It begins:
I
hear you’ve called Roy Fisher
The
most
distinguished living Midlands poet.
Now,
I
may be a bit dim,
Away
from
it all up here – but what I mean is,
Distinguished
from what?
Distinguished
from
anything worth bothering about
I should
have
thought.
And
so
on, making rude comments about other well-known poets.
In
January 1980 Roy started a long letter talking about his
sight problems and the surgery which had been performed. He
went on to say that he was taking a sabbatical and ‘had more
or less fixed to spend March in the blizzard belt between
Chicago and Buffalo, Ottawa and God knows where. Just to
prove there’s a little helpless insanity left in me. Gael, I
haven’t a clue what’s going to happen to me, or why, except
that I just have to die in the attempt to polish off my
travel phobia’. Having never travelled abroad before, he
went on to list some of the readings he was committed to,
ending by hoping to see Cid Corman – and clearly dreading
the whole adventure.
He
then starts to respond to Gael’s request for his views on
the contents of his proposed Anvil book. Roy’s response was
in three parts, starting with his positive comments. After
the first two he continues ‘Then there’s the really
difficult strand, and the one that puzzles me. I think the
life of what you do is in the “vulnerable” poems. The
dishevelled (sometimes) un-smart, sometimes naive, trusting,
or whatever, Things. Some of the old Knot in the
Wood poems, and the Thomas Lundin, author-embarrassing
ones …. In a way I feel they should all be there. As a sign
that the bones of your skull (what’s that little soft patch
on a baby’s head called) have not closed.’ He ends the
letter by discussing his own work and publications. The
honesty with which Roy and Gael wrote about the other’s
poems says a lot about their mutual trust and respect for
each other’s views.
Roy’s
experience of writing does not appear to have eased much
over the years. On 10 April 1994 he wrote: ‘Poem-writing!
Living retrospectively, I’m trying to remember instances of
my ever having done any poetry except in
the odd circumstances of (1) having somehow arranged to have
myself asked; (b)sic having agreed; and (c)
being unable to face not coming up with something. It can’t
have been my only motivation, but it’s an oddly persistent
pattern.’ And so he goes on, looking back at his work,
dismissing his sense of having improved on his early poems
as ‘a complete self-delusion’. He mentions Kenneth Cox,
Ric Caddel, and then describes how he ‘obligingly knocked
out a couple of bits of doggerel designed to be put on
little posters to be stuck on Birmingham’s buses during the
Readers & Writers Festival.
Gael’s
life, unlike Roy’s, was nomadic, moving from America to
England and back again. During his period in
Ventura, California, typed in an undated letter, he
describes a family adventure to the Grand Canyon and the
native American pueblos. Starting in Santa Fe, where
the family spent four days with Ed Dorn, whose work he
published in Migrant press, he went on to meet Robert
Creeley of whom he wrote: ‘Like many writers, he often gives
a sureness to what he does that isn’t really there.’ He went
on to type out a poem called ‘A Ghost Town’, saying he ‘had
an earlier version badly “cut up” by Denise Levertov … but
this is better. However, I’m unsure of it. No hurry to reply
but I want some comment. Thanks.’
Many
of Gael’s letters don’t have a year date but at a later
period, when he was working in Britain, he was visited by
Allen Ginsberg, something he describes in interesting detail
in a letter to Roy, quoting his diary entry, which
begins: ‘Ginsberg – two days – Exhaustion – Hair
thinning on top – Body Odour (unchanged underwear) –
Nicotine fingers – Thick Glasses – Sensual, almost “liver
lips” …’ and so on. A memorable occasion!
It
can, of course, be open to question that letters such as
those between Roy and Gael should be published. However,
there is a comment by Gael written to Roy on 16 March 1966,
which says ‘some day we shall publish your letters. Why
should the rest of the world be deprived?’ It was something
of a surprise to me that Gael seemed, during our marriage,
to be perfectly happy with the idea that anything he wrote,
from poems he left for me to find on Valentine’s Day, to the
very large number of letters he wrote to, or received from,
other poets were available for publication if they were of
any interest. As he said: ‘So be it.’
created with
Website Builder Software .