Stoppard persistently frames his achievements as luck. He was fond of citing (without irony) Cecil Rhodes’ claim that to have been born an Englishman was to have “won first prize in the lottery of life”. Writing of his second wife, Miriam Stoppard, to a friend the same word crops up: “she really should have been a lottery prize”, he writes. “Perhaps she was.” And to his mother—in one of the letters he wrote to her weekly or more until her death: “I’ve been lucky all my life. . . and the way I can live. . . really begins with that fate making me an ‘English’ writer instead of a Czech one.” This is partly English self-deprecation, one senses, but it is also what lies behind the repeated coin toss at the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a sense of potential losses defied against the odds.

He was precociously good with words and his letters home from boarding school fizz with a delight in linguistic pastiche. When Stoppard chose not to go to university, but to launch into life as a journalist in Bristol, the same quality was evident in his journalism—“indefatigably facetious” is the phrase Stoppard uses in disapproving retrospect. And it appears to have been a sense that it was all becoming too easy that prompted him to resolve, on his 23rd birthday, to give up journalism and write a play. He’d been lucky in choosing Bristol, a relatively small pond in which he could easily make a noticeable splash but his move to London still felt to him like an escape. “I am drowning with the panache of someone walking on water,” he wrote in a short story at the time.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern follows soon after, the famous turning point—dismissed by most critics on its first performance at the Edinburgh Festival but rescued for a London transfer by praise from the Observer’s reviewer. Its success there transformed his fortunes. It’s a mark of Lee’s attention to detail that she can put a precise monetary figure on this change. On July 11, 1967, his bank balance was £36 19s 6d (roughly £651 in modern terms); by May 28 the following year it was £2,857 10s 10d (£50,344).

If it made life easier for Stoppard, it doesn’t particularly for his biographer. The life before this moment will be less familiar for most readers; the life after is that of a celebrated writer, much in demand, and largely lived at a desk. Lee is excellent on the plays, their intellectual context and their production history. But Stoppard’s reticence about his private life make it close to impossible to break the texture of the working life, of meetings and redraftings and rehearsals, with the textures of a private one that was not always straightforward. “Somewhere in that time, he would say, he ‘got upset about something’. But that something was not anything he would tell his biographer,” she writes of the period when his marriage to Miriam Stoppard was coming to an end. She quotes too a journal entry at the time, “I am in terrible trouble”, but either could not discover from her subject what the trouble was or chooses not to share it.

The book is longer than it needs to be, listing far too many distracting details from his appointments diaries. And even theatrical scholars may feel that her accounts of what went into the programme notes for various productions is a little too much of a good thing. It’s a pity because the slightly exhausting thoroughness of the research blurs the art of Lee’s own narrative and the care with which she weaves its most important themes through the book. One of these is Stoppard’s politics—always suspect to those who valued persuasion over dramatic exploration and even more so after it became clear that he admired Mrs Thatcher rather than detested her.

Lee is good too on the question of Stoppard’s supposed superficiality, a criticism the playwright all but invited. “The iceberg is all tip”, he once said of himself, a judgement Lee rightly declines to accept. She makes a convincing argument that the emotional depth critics announce as having finally arrived in later work was there from the beginning, even if the dazzle of the surface sometimes made it hard to see.

The final chapters—coloured by Stoppard’s belated understanding of his Jewish heritage and the writing of his most personal play, Leopoldstadt, are very fine—almost elegiac in tone (Stoppard is now 83). And Lee ends with a beautifully chosen anecdote about a production of The Tempest that Stoppard saw in an Oxford college garden, in which the stage direction “Exit Ariel” was transformed by the director into a heart-stopping moment of theatrical magic, as the actor apparently ran across a lake and disappeared into a burst of fireworks. It is presented as a story about Stoppard’s humility as a theatre practitioner—his recognition that a playtext is the start of a process, not the last word on what is to happen. It is also a fine final image of the subject as Ariel, supernaturally light on his feet, and, perhaps, a tacit acknowledgement that there are things beneath the surface that we have not been allowed to see.

Tom Stoppard: A Life
By Hermione Lee
Faber, 992pp, £30

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Angela Ritch laments the failures of today’s parents (Education, July): they are “ill-equipped to prepare their children” for today’s education; their “engagement and responsibility . . . cannot be taken for granted.”

It was not always thus. In 1813, James Mill, commenting for the Edinburgh Review on education in England, wrote:

We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.

Parliamentary surveys revealed that the number of children in education increased from 478,000 in 1818, through 1,294,000 in 1834, to 2,535,462 in 1858.

So how have we arrived at a position where teachers argue that parents need “nudging” and should suffer “financial penalties” for their children’s poor school attendance?

The first step was the introduction of school subsidies in 1834, funded by additional taxes. This discouraged the parents of unsubsidised schools, who paid the new taxes but whose children did not benefit from the subsidies.

The second step was the widespread introduction of Board Schools in 1870. These schools were funded by the rates, merely charging fees for attendance. All parents ended up paying for Board Schools: ratepayers directly, and non-ratepayers through increased rents. All other schools suffered from competition from the Board Schools: some switched to Board status, some closed, some struggled on. Effectively, education was being nationalised, even though W.E. Forster, the promoter of the Board Schools, was worried that the changes would encourage parental apathy.

The third step, taken in 1880, was to make education compulsory. The effects of this were completely unforeseen: parents took the view that since education was now compulsory, the government should pay for it. The government was forced to reimburse elementary school fees in 1891; and to abolish secondary school fees in 1944.

Each one of these interventions marginalised parents. Today’s parental apathy is precisely that feared by Forster in 1870.

How are we to put this right? First, we must recognise that the government’s interventions in schooling are the cause of this situation. Second, we must restore parental responsibility to the level noted in 1813. This will not be easy. It will require a conscious transfer of power from the government to those apathetic and ill-equipped parents.

David J. Critchley, Buckingham

Ancient and modern

Kant’s Categorical Imperative, discussed by Ralph Walker (“Why Immanuel Kant matters”, August/September)—that an action has moral worth only if done from duty—was a position taken by the pre-Socratic philosophers 2,500 years ago. Democritus thought we should eschew doing wrong, because of a sense of duty, not fear; the truly good do not even desire to do wrong; and we should learn to feel shame not before others but before ourselves. Empedocles thought along similar lines: we live most justly if we avoid doing the things for which we blame others.

Empedocles also anticipated the linguistic revisionism of which Konsantin Kisin writes (“Goodthink and crimethink”): evil men, he wrote, want to have power over the truth by distrusting it. And Democritus deftly demolished the relativist argument that is so modish today: if every opinion or statement is true then it must also be true that every opinion is not true, since that is an opinion. Therefore it is false that every opinion is true.

Even Louise Perry’s dismaying account of how women’s supposed sexual drives are being blamed for their own murder (Spare Rib) has echoes in the past. Herodotus makes one of the earliest claims that rape victims are not really victims: “The Persians say women would not have been abducted if they hadn’t wanted to be.” 

Violence was justified by presenting females as powerful and dangerous. Monstrous females such as Medusa and Scylla were just asking to have their heads chopped off. The Sphinx devoured Thebans who could not answer her riddle. The Furies and Harpies were so terrifying that in Aeschylus’s Eumenides their depiction on stage made members of the audience faint—Clytemnestra made herself Agamemnon’s widow with a two-headed axe. The 50 daughters of Danaus stabbed their husbands to death on their wedding night, and the women of Lemnos, tired of their men’s fighting and fornicating, killed the lot.

Blaming and fearing females started early: parents threatened naughty children that a female monster called Mormo would bite them if they did not behave.

Xenophanes should be our place of safety among the raging bigots of these times: no one has the certain truth, he said, for all our knowledge is but a woven web of guesses.

Michael McManus, Leeds

Seeing red

Richard Russell’s reminiscence (“Martians, mushy peas, leprechauns (and gin)”, August/September) calls to mind the exhibitions at the Galerie Vivienne, Paris, of the Salon des Arts Incohérents. In 1883 the artist and humourist Alphonse Allais exhibited a blank sheet of white Bristol paper, attached to the wall with drawing pins, entitled: “Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par temps de neige”—“First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow”, and in 1884, an entirely red work: “Récolte de tomates sur le bord de la mer Rouge par des cardinaux apoplectiques”—“Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea”.

Bohdan Rymarenko, by email

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Figures move over the strand, passing the small, fat man,
who has walked far out on these long, smooth sands,
then spread a green towel and undressed.
It is hot and blue, he wants to be deep in the water,

he wades out and stands, his ankles lost in the wash,
surprised at his want, surprised at the feel
of the water, running in over his feet, the joy,
as pleased and as lulled as a child who yearns

for the mystery of the water. This swimming
is a strange activity, as strange as fish and full of longing,
strange as this heat that’s pasting butterflies
onto white walls—spread leaves—and sends to us now

a man who stands alone in a brilliant sea.

Taken from Where Now Begins by Kerry Hardie, published by Bloodaxe Books on November 12.

The post Voyeur appeared first on Standpoint.

She has wrought iron gates,
hard standing parking for two.
Her pea gravel driveway sweeps
to a Cloudy Apple composite door,
stained window with leaded detail.

Her hallway is carpeted with sycamore
seeds and cherry blossom throughout.
Her white dogleg staircase leads to a spindle
gallery landing, with access to a loft
conversion with a skylight window.

Ground floor comprises open plan lounge/diner,
recesses either side of fire breast wall.
Her writing desk has been nudged to the brink
of the bay. Curtains may be drawn
around her to quarantine at will.

Dining table moonlights as tributary desk,
cable-knit cardigans draped across Ikea
chairs come as standard.
Spider-warding conkers mob
her laminated corners in vain.

She boasts a galley kitchen
with splashback tiling. Integrated
fridge/freezer, sunken spotlighting,
eye level oven (rarely used)
white goods to remain.

The master bedroom is in need of updating,
juliet balcony in state of disrepair.
Outside: She has a storm porch
with power and lighting,
chipped area to the side.

The estate agent’s daughter retains
many original features, coved
ceilings, double glazing throughout.
Unsuitable for first time buyers,
no ongoing chain.

The Estate Agent’s Daughter by Rhian Edwards is published by Seren (2020).

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It marks the return of Kenneth Branagh as the now magnificently-moustachioed Hercule Poirot—he and those extraordinary Kitchener-style whiskers made their debut three years ago in Murder on the Orient Express—and the supporting cast includes Sophie Okonedo, Armie Hammer and Annette Bening. Should be huge fun and you might want to make a note of its current release date—December 18—in your diary. But probably only in pencil.

Death on the Nile, you see, is just one of many so-called blockbusters that have had their release dates delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, a trend that began way back in March—before lockdown—when the producers of James Bond announced that the global release of Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007, No Time to Die, had been postponed from April to November.

Earlier this month, however, it was postponed again—this time to April next year—plunging Britain’s already beleaguered cinema sector into a new existential crisis. Within days, Cineworld announced the indefinite closure of all its UK cinemas, including its popular arthouse subsidiary, Picturehouse.

You can see why some cinematic doomsters have cheerily proclaimed the “death of cinema”. After all, for commercial cinemas to succeed they need a regular supply of big films that pull in audiences by the hundreds, thousands, even—not the sort of arthouse fodder that regards a matinee audience of 19 as a runaway success. But it’s precisely those big films that have been conspicuous by their absence in 2020, now for many months.

Christopher Nolan’s brain-scrambling Tenet may have eventually made it into cinemas, but other expected “tentpole” releases—the likes of the superhero films Wonder Woman 1984 and Black Widow, and Pixar’s Soul—have so far all failed to materialise.   

Other keenly awaited pictures such as Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan and Tom  Hanks’s naval drama, Greyhound, both ended up making their debuts on streaming services, one of the few sectors of the global economy to be enjoying a Covid-related boom.

Hence, the new crisis for UK cinemas, which only reopened their rigorously sanitised doors to the public in July. Following Cineworld’s lead, both the other big cinema chains—Odeon and Vue—subsequently announced plans to significantly reduce the number of days many of their cinemas are open for, while some smaller independent cinemas are reportedly closing their doors again entirely. It is simply not financially viable for them to stay open.

It should be the moment for all those who love film—or, indeed, earn a living making films—to rally to the cinematic cause, to don their masks and take up a regular, socially-isolated seat in the back stalls. Pour encourager les autres, as those French cinema pioneers, the Lumière brothers, might have said.

Instead, we have the likes of Mark Rylance, Oscar-winning star of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and the voice of Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, casually opining in an interview with The Times that “if cinemas all close up I won’t be that upset” but that he’d be devastated if Britain’s theatres didn’t reopen. “When I go out I want to go to something live. I want to have the soul of the person in the room.”

With a particularly bitter irony, he made the comments while promoting his latest film, Waiting for the Barbarians, an adaptation of the J.M. Coetzee allegorical novel, in which he is, inevitably, rather good. Nevertheless, I can’t have been alone among those of us dependent on a thriving cinema sector for a living in thinking: “Thanks a lot, Mark.”

To some extent, of course, Rylance was playing to the gallery, as so many actors with a film to promote do. Anything to grab a headline, eh? Elsewhere, in the same interview, he would admit how enthused he’d recently been by making a student film with a bunch of “undergrad film junkies”.

“We stayed up until 2am talking about the great film-makers of the world,” he said. Doesn’t sound like a man who’s fallen out of love with the cinema.

But the bigger question is—grandstanding apart—is he right? Is cinema dead? Categorically not. Cinema is certainly very poorly—particularly in the United States, where the prolonged closure of city centre cinemas in vital markets such as Los Angeles and New York has had a devastating effect—but it is not dead. Look closely enough and there are definite signs of life. And that, in large part, is because cinema is not just a multi-billion dollar business, it’s an artform too.          

For well over a century now, there have always been artists who choose to reach for a film camera to express themselves in the way that other artists have always reached for a paintbrush or chisel. And that form of cinema is thriving.

Just as Rylance was energised by working on a student film, I spent part of lockdown first judging the graduate films for one of London’s leading film schools and then a selection of one-minute shorts made by pupils at my old school. The energy and enthusiasm of the younger group—a generation already completely at home with the idea of shooting a film on their smart phone—was perhaps predictable.

But the technical skill and artistic creativity displayed by the older film students as they took complex, challenging ideas and turned them into something that said . . . well, what they wanted to say, was refreshing, invigorating and hugely cheering. They were making art.

Film festivals—very much the engine room of arthouse cinema—have bounced back vigorously, no doubt helped by the fact that Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s Korean thriller that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, the first foreign language film ever to do so.

This year’s Cannes, traditionally held in May, was devastated by Covid. The original festival was cancelled in March and a similar fate awaited the postponed version planned for July. A large selection of films was eventually made but despite being shown in French cinemas and at other festivals these have failed to make their normal impact.

Since Cannes’ postponement, however, things have definitely looked up. Venice, where a reduced number of attendees were tested regularly and had their temperatures taken several times a day, proceeded almost as normal at the beginning of September and was proclaimed a triumph.

Toronto, following soon after, moved successfully online while the London Film Festival, now drawing to a close, struck a happy halfway house with many screenings happening online but others taking place in real, socially distanced cinemas too. Film festivals are definitely finding their way.

As a result, we already know that films to look out for over coming months—both in the cinema and at award ceremonies—include Nomadland, One Night in Miami, The Duke, Pieces of a Woman, Ammonite and Steve McQueen’s Mangrove.

But if arthouse cinema is showing resilience, so too is commercial film production to a quite extraordinary degree. When lockdown hit the UK in March, the British Film Commission estimates £1 billion worth of films being shot here on location and in studios were instantly shut down.

However, by June, the British film industry had come up with workable, government-approved Covid-secure protocols—a flexible and evolving mix of testing, temperature checks, bubbling certain groups, additional hygiene measures, much mask-wearing—that would allow filming to resume as soon as lockdown was sufficiently relaxed. Which is exactly what happened, helped—it must be said—by the government’s widely welcomed decision to set up a £500 million fund to help producers who were understandably struggling to get Covid-related insurance cover for their productions.

As a result big, so-called “Hollywood” films, which are actually being made in Britain such as The Batman, Mission Impossible 7 and Jurassic World: Dominion started up again in September. UK film production was back in action. It’s not infallible—the Jurassic World unit were forced to suspend filming for a few days after some positive tests—but it’s a hugely important start.

There’s no doubt, however, that the recovery in the country’s cinemas is far more tentative, despite the slightly surprising but encouraging news that cinema in China—the presumed source of the outbreak—is now apparently thriving.

But should some UK cinemas fall by the wayside, I’m confident that a band of eager, film-loving amateurs will surely take their place. We live in a world where just about every significant film ever made is available in digital format and where the cost of decent projection equipment is reasonably affordable. In short, if some cinemas do close, quickly established film societies and clubs—many perhaps co-existing “virtually” online—will surely step in.

That very special experience of watching a film on the big screen and as part of an audience will not disappear. It can’t: film is simply too important for that. This may be no time for James Bond but it’s no time for cinema to die either. 

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Unless a compromise is reached by New Year’s Eve, a no trade deal departure beckons—a cliff edge that both sides are ultimately keen to avoid. Life would go on but it would undoubtedly be disruptive to trade in both directions. It would also represent a diplomatic rock bottom for UK-EU relations, which might be difficult—and take years—to rebuild.

In recent weeks, things haven’t been looking promising. The political theatre and rhetoric on both sides has at times suggested that the negotiations are destined for failure. The Prime Minister has questioned whether the EU is negotiating in good faith, accusing Brussels of threatening the possibility of “blockading food and agricultural transports within our own country”. Meanwhile, the European Commission has sent the UK a formal notice of legal action in response to the government’s Internal Market Bill. This is the legislation that would enable Ministers to override provisions in the Northern Ireland Protocol which were previously agreed under the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement last year.

The truth is that this process was always likely to end in a last-minute crunch. Years of bad-tempered negotiations and political drama have drained the well of trust on both sides. However, the hurdles to a deal are far from insurmountable—if political leaders on both sides want one.

One might have assumed that over 40 years of economic integration between the UK and Europe would have made for a relatively easy path to a trade agreement. Trade negotiators usually have to contend with powerful vested interests opposed to tariff liberalisation. But in this case the vast majority of businesses on both sides of the Channel want to maintain tariff-free trade. The UK and the EU will have almost identical regulatory regimes on January 1, 2021, so surely both sides could agree to recognise the rules in each other’s jurisdiction?

Alas, this is not a traditional trade negotiation. First and foremost, Brexit is a constitutional issue for both Brexiteers and Brussels: “Take back control” was not simply an effective campaign slogan. Equally, the EU’s view is that the UK’s legal independence must come at a high price in lost market access. All new trade arrangements will flow from these political realities.

Early on, the EU presented the UK with two models for the future relationship. Norway-style membership of the EU’s single market—abiding by the panoply of EU rules and regulations—or a looser, Canada-style free trade agreement, with greater friction at EU borders and greater freedom for the UK to chart its own course. Theresa May’s attempt to split the difference was publicly rebuffed by EU leaders at a Salzburg summit in September 2018 and led to ministerial resignations at home, including that of the current Prime Minister.

Since Boris Johnson’s election victory—on a mandate to “Get Brexit Done” and diverge from EU rules—the only plausible outcomes for the UK-EU relationship have been a Canada-style free trade agreement or none at all. Right now, the odds stand at about fifty-fifty between the two. 

The biggest outstanding hurdles to securing a free trade deal are fishing rights, rules on state subsidies and the governance framework of the agreement. The government’s big parliamentary majority and its willingness to refuse a “bad deal” have undoubtedly had the effect of shifting the argument towards the UK position on these issues. Equally, the EU has refused the UK’s more ambitious demands on market access for services and rejected the argument that car components from Japan used on UK assembly lines should be considered British. (This means some UK car exports could still face tariffs, even under a trade deal.)

Fishing’s political symbolism—in coastal towns from Boulogne to Grimsby—is outsized compared to its economic importance to either side. Ultimately, it’s not likely to be the deal-breaker. But the EU has so far turned down the UK’s request to move to a new regime of annual quota negotiations—a model the UK has just agreed with Norway.

On the other hand, the eight EU member states with significant fishing fleets will completely lose access to UK waters if there is no agreement at all, so cutting a deal is clearly better for them than the default, even if it falls well short of the EU’s initial position that its boats should retain the same access rights as they enjoy now.

Those in the know say the UK has offered a transition period under which EU fleets’ catch would be phased down over a number of years. This could point towards a compromise in which the UK regains a much greater share of future catch opportunities but EU fishing communities are assured of their rights over the medium-term.

Aside from fishing, agreeing a framework for the use of government subsidies, or “state aid” in EU parlance, is the major stumbling block. The EU appears to have walked back from its initial position—clearly unacceptable to the British government—that the UK should continue to be bound by EU state aid rules into the future, with the European Court of Justice having the final say in terms of enforcement.

So far, the UK has chosen not to spell out its bottom line. Senior figures in the Johnson administration clearly view industrial policy and strategic investment as important levers in delivering the domestic agenda to “level up” the regions of the UK and help them catch up with prosperous London. But how much of a problem could this be?

Well, the EU side should note that, traditionally, past governments have refrained from major interventions in the economy—and that the UK would need to radically increase its state activism to reach the levels of its continental competitors. According to the European Commission’s “State Aid Scoreboard”, the UK spent state aid equivalent to 0.34 per cent of GDP in 2018, compared to an EU average of 0.76 per cent. Meanwhile, France spent 0.79 per cent, slightly above the EU average, and Germany spent a much larger 1.45 per cent.

At a minimum, the UK will need to comply with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, but these fall far short of the requirements of the current EU regime. A UK statement in September simply said that it “does not intend to return to the 1970s approach of trying to run the economy or bailing out unsustainable companies.” The statement did add that “the UK will adhere to any international obligations on subsidies agreed under future free trade agreements.” So there’s a glimmer of light here. It should be possible for the UK and the EU to agree to principles on subsidies that would prevent trade distortion, such as commitments not to guarantee the debts of struggling companies or provide open-ended state bailouts.

But this issue is bound up with the broader question of how any commitments made in the trade agreement will be enforced. The EU wants an independent UK regulator to police decisions on subsidies. It also wants a new UK-EU dispute settlement mechanism that would enable either side to retaliate against any subsidies deemed to be trade-distorting by taking countermeasures, such as imposing tariffs. There would be a price to pay for high levels of state aid, in other words.

The prospect of the EU using such measures as a political tool to secure leverage over other areas of an agreement cannot be discounted. The UK should therefore seek to limit this potential for “cross-retaliation”. But in the final stages of negotiations, the primary objective from the UK’s perspective should be to depart from the EU’s desire to micromanage the UK’s subsidy policy by treaty. Dispute resolution mechanisms of this kind are not uncommon in trade agreements.

The final piece of the puzzle is the recent row over Northern Ireland. In short, the Northern Ireland Protocol, agreed last year, avoids a North-South border on the island of Ireland by giving Northern Ireland a special economic status—within the UK’s customs territory, but in regulatory alignment with the EU single market for goods. A UK-EU Joint Committee was empowered to iron out the practical details of how various provisions on customs procedures and tariffs are implemented, with the UK arguing for a light touch.

The UK believes that the EU is refusing to negotiate sensible easements to Great Britain-Northern Ireland trade in order to secure leverage in the free trade agreement negotiation. Hence the Internal Market Bill, described by the Government as an “insurance policy” to be used in the event that negotiations fail to address its concerns. What the Bill does, for better or worse, is illustrate that Brussels’ leverage is limited. Under the Protocol, it is UK officials and agencies who will be tasked with enforcing the rules. But realistically, how plausible is it that the UK would do so zealously in a scenario where there is no trade agreement and the EU is also insisting on a maximalist interpretation of the Protocol?

What the recent row has demonstrated is that a negotiated settlement on the Northern Ireland Protocol and the wider trade issues should be preferable for both sides compared to an acrimonious breakdown in the UK-EU relationship. Indeed, the controversy over the Internal Market Bill and the EU legal action against it could be entirely defused if a negotiated agreement can be reached.

The coming weeks may throw up yet more drama. No one can say whether a deal will be reached or not. But there is a plausible path to a deal and the outcome now rests on political decisions to be taken in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Dublin. 

Stephen Booth is Head of the Britain in the World Project at Policy Exchange.

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In The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016) Ben Lerner reflects on the enduring prestige of poetry and the widespread popular belief that poets have a purchase, however slight, on immortality. Further, that to be a published poet is to have one’s humanity objectively endorsed, if only by a handful of readers, many of whom are likely to be fellow poets. He argues that all poems are essentially exercises in failure because no amount of virtuosity can overcome the fact that (as he puts it) “poetry isn’t hard. It’s impossible”, and this is because the “abstract potential” of a poem is compromised the moment it becomes part of the world, a betrayal of the original impulse to write. All poets are destined to fail, and to fail as a poet is to fail not only artistically but also existentially. The stakes, in fact, are high.

In 1965, at the age of 27, the impecunious poet Ian Hamilton joined the Times Literary Supplement as a part-time “Special Writer”, later becoming the Poetry and Fiction Editor. During his eight years in the job he became embroiled in a fraught episode in our cultural history, the so-called “poetry wars”.

Hamilton had already made his mark as founder and editor of The Review, (1962-72) a poetry magazine much admired for its sharp, provocative criticism. The target was poetic mediocrity and the approach was quite merciless; one debut collection was briskly despatched as “toweringly pretentious, intricately boring and painstakingly derivative”.

He championed poetry that combined emotional intensity and intellectual precision, insisting that the perfect poem should contain “the maximum amount of suffering [and] the maximum amount of control”. Poems like his own, many of which are about his father’s death from cancer when Hamilton was a boy, or about his first wife’s severe mental illness. Here is “Awakening”:

Your head, so sick, is leaning against mine,
So sensible. You can’t remember
Why you’re here, nor do you recognise
These helping hands.
My love.
The world encircles us. We’re losing ground.

Hamilton’s voice is quiet, precise, tender and unconsoling—few poets could write like this, though many tried. Clive James, a regular contributor to The Review, observed in the final issue that Hamilton’s less-talented followers tended to produce:

. . . a new strain of super-resistant sub-microscopic bacterial poem that can bore you to death without showing you anything to fight against. Committing no blunders, such poems can’t be criticised.

Other poems certainly could be. Hamilton had been appalled when Penguin published The Mersey Sound (1967) featuring the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough, and even more appalled when the anthology sold more than half a million copies. We may detect an unpleasant whiff of elitism, protectionism and chauvinism in this reaction. Hamilton, who came from an unprivileged background, was a graduate of Keble College Oxford and the pop culture poems he derided were mostly by working-class writers who had attended art school rather than a university (McGough was the exception, having studied at Hull). Their work was unschooled and artless and, insisted admirers, all the better for it, more authentic. Clive James, noting this cultural shift, observed to Hamilton: “It’s better to be a half-witted Liverpudlian with a bedside manner than a mandarin with a sneer.”

Acomparable shift had already taken place in fiction following the critic Cyril Connolly’s complaint in 1955 that the English novel was characterised by three “colossal, almost irremediable” defects: thinness of material, poverty of style and lack of power. All three, he argued, arose from the fact that most published authors came from what he called (anticipating James) the mandarin class—a narrow social stratum with little experience of life beyond public school, Oxbridge and a few years’ professional dalliance in London or the provinces.

Things had changed by the end of that decade with the appearance of an all-male cohort of working-class writers with Northern roots, notably John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse and Stan Barstow. A briefly reinvigorated British cinema brought these new writers to a mass audience through a succession of gritty screen adaptations which, like their source novels, reflected rather than promoted social change, but these changes were profound and, it seemed at the time, durable. British poetry had to wait a decade for a similar change to take place.

Hamilton’s debut collection The Visit was published by Faber in 1970, a slim volume of 33 short poems, representing around half of the modest total he would publish in his lifetime. They are all memorable. This is “Newscast”:

The Vietnam war drags on
In one corner of our living-room.
The conversation turns
To take it in.
Our smoking heads
Drift back to us
From the grey fires of South-east Asia.

Subtle and unsettling, this snags and haunts the imagination, capturing a time and a mood with minimum fuss or apparent effort. The quality of Hamilton’s poetry has never been in any doubt, but his role as an influential gatekeeper was already looking less assured. He said at the time:

Most of what is out there today isn’t really poetry . . . It might be a form of writing that is engaging and sharp and entertaining, but it is not poetry. It’s important to make these distinctions.

But these were the very distinctions that were being swept away. Long-held critical assumptions supporting such distinctions were looking shaky; an unbridgeable chasm was forming between the kind of poetry approved by Hamilton and what was circulating in the mainstream.

Hamilton found himself increasingly out of step with the times and cast as a reactionary figure, although his position strikes one as more stoical than elitist. He saw something he truly cared about and fully understood, something at which he was preternaturally gifted and to which he had dedicated much of his life, successfully appropriated by (as he saw it) the untalented, the incompetent and the rowdy. The battle had been lost, although the war was far from over.

In 1971, a large number of poets associated with the country-wide British Poetry Revival (BPR), chief among them Eric Mottram, Bob Cobbing and Jeff Nuttall, became members of the Poetry Society, a rather stuffy organisation founded in 1909 and traditionally hostile to modernist poetry. Following elections, the radical anarcho-modernists took over, transforming the Society’s run-down Earl’s Court premises into a counter-cultural hub, subsidised by an increasingly alarmed and embarrassed Arts Council of Great Britain.

The BPR was in part a reaction to the conservative leanings of the “Movement” poets such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jennings and Thom Gunn, who featured in the influential anthology New Lines (1956) edited by Robert Conquest. They and the other contributors, all Oxbridge graduates, differed enormously as poets but had in common a general rejection of modernism and the experimental, and what they saw as the rhetorical excesses of 1940s poets, particularly the compacted obscurities of Dylan Thomas. White, middle class, mostly heterosexual, Europhobic, unsentimental but nostalgic, they strike the modern reader as cultural Brexiteers avant la lettre. BPR poets, on the other hand, were united in their commitment to the European avant-garde while influenced by earlier British modernists such as David Jones and Basil Bunting. (For a detailed and scholarly history of the period, Poetry Wars by Peter Barry is recommended.)

The battles between the establishment and the Poetry Society revolutionaries  were conducted through editorials, correspondence, at public readings and private meetings. There were rancorous exchanges at boozy gatherings in smoke-filled rooms (the majority of BPR poets were male), insults were flung, reputations trashed, friendships broken, bitter feuds initiated and conscientiously maintained. One observer compared the goings-on to “a knife-fight in a phone booth”.

With Mottram installed as editor, the Society’s magazine Poetry Review immediately became a showcase for BPR writers, to the dismay of many traditionalist subscribers. A snapshot of what was going on in Earl’s Court can be found in testimony given by an anonymous Poetry Society staff member to the 1976 Witt Report (the Arts Council’s investigation into the organisation), cited by Barry:

She said she did not know Jeff Nuttall very well, but when he had given a reading at the Society she had found broken eggs on the rostrum next morning, a tin of golden syrup underneath the piano, with a doll stuck in the syrup and there was talcum powder everywhere. Mr Nuttall had also run around in his underwear. There were only twelve people at the reading.

While siding with the Hamilton line on poetry I find the chaotic energy of the insurgents irresistible. I would have enjoyed Nuttall’s messy, subversive, Dada-inspired performance, like watching Vic and Bob host Antiques Roadshow.

Hamilton’s disenchantment with contemporary poetry informed plans for his last magazine The New Review (1974-1979), which would focus less exclusively on verse. A glossy monthly publication with the highest production values and a dazzling roster of contributors, it was a lavishly-funded establishment flagship that was despised by its many vocal critics. That it ran for five years is a tribute to the editor’s commitment because, like its predecessor, The New Review had its own destruction built in. The whole project was doomed from the outset because Arts Council grants, although generous, were payable in arrears only after each issue appeared, which meant the publication was permanently mired in debt. With bailiffs thronging the staircase at the Greek Street offices, Hamilton struggled valiantly to keep things afloat through what he later described as the “trashy years”, recalling “the raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love-affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty”. Clowns to the left of him; brokers to the right—there he stood, stuck in the middle.

The Society radicals were eventually ousted (or, in their view, staged a principled walk-out) in March 1977 and for the next 30 years or so mainstream English poetry would remain predominantly non-experimental and anti-modernist. A victory, of sorts, for the establishment. Mottram and his colleagues are still largely excluded from accounts of the period. But they cannot be entirely written off because, although the modernist tendency was certainly sidelined, subsequent decades saw the emergence of new generations of experimental poets with their roots in the dissident modernism of 1970s Earl’s Court.

Neither the conservative nor the radical poets of the 1970s were endorsed or promoted in the influential Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982; edited by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison, both New Review alumni), and this seemed to draw a line under the conflict. You might say the Hamilton side won the war but lost the peace, and that’s no bad thing. In the late ’80s and early ’90s a series of anthologies prompted fresh interest in the Revival poets, and increasing attention was paid to neglected British modernists. Among the most noteworthy publications to reflect the current pluralist landscape is Identity Parade (2010), an anthology edited by the late Roddy Lumsden, featuring 85 British and Irish poets and—perhaps for the first time, and significantly—more women than men. This volume supports a view that the future of adventurous anglophone poetry rests largely in the hands of the marginal, non-native, non-establishment outsiders who are radically reimagining what forms poetry can take.

Despite well-meaning claims by many, poetry is not for everyone. But it certainly can be for anyone, and today there are fewer barriers, if any, to sharing new work with readers—the internet has no critical gatekeepers. Instagram versifiers with millions of followers don’t snag my interest, but the contemporary spectrum can accommodate Rupi Kaur, J.H. Prynne and everybody in between.

The same divisions that led to the poetry wars resurface every few years, as yet another youngish combative poet claims that they “ruffle a few feathers” in the “poetry establishment” by not conforming to a supposed set of conservative values, values which they aim to overthrow before, in due course, becoming the establishment themselves. But the fight has gone out of both sides, if there really are sides any more. There’s a general acceptance that serious poetry is a broad church, although the clergy may sometimes outnumber the congregation.

Ian Hamilton died in 2001 and his posthumous reputation as a poet seems secure, with a definitive Collected Poems (2009) edited by Alan Jenkins and a forthcoming Collected Prose. There’s a fine website (www.ianhamilton.org) confirming his achievements. He has never failed as a poet, although he is no longer a charismatic cultural influencer, no longer the guv’nor of Greek Street, and he appears to have no literary heirs. He stands alone, missed, admired and respected, a school of one. 

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