THE CHINA MAIL, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1901,
Poets without Appointment
AT
T the top of 14 uncarpeted stairs in a Notting Hill mews lives Chris- topher Logue, poet. "Come up and have a drink," he yelled out of the window. I went up and lay down.
This was obligatory, because Logue owns one typewriter, 500 books, and almost no furniture. I lay on the bed. Logue lay on the floor. The only chair in the room was occupied by Burns Singer, a Scottish poet who chain-smoked cigarettes made out of loose tobacco, and remarked from. time to time: "Do ye not find the whisky in London terrible?"
Nobody seems its care about any modern poel nowadays ex- cept John Betjeman, who writes agreently is praise of battered toast and railway stations, aud became a best seller ninost By Appointment after Princess Mar- garet said: he liked his verse,
But what Arc 11:0 other fellows up to? flow do they live? I got
воле
Interesting
By
PETER
CHAMBERS
answers from Logue and Singer, article in the American teenage and later from an American, magazine Mademoiselle. Theodore Roethke, who Наз actually made poetry pay,
Money
£1
Christopher
writes Logur decce, aby porn about war, Eve
Son of and 10.30, Sarthampton civil servant, he was brought up by desuits,
Christopher League is a dark,
**1 now believe in the total barre, energetic man er 34, frittion of private property," he were an actor, I would tym he said. cast him as Shakespeare's Ingos
20
I has published hoir dozen books of poetry anil achleved 11 wkler reputation when he wrote the lyrles for the Court Theatre musicni Hayal "The Lily-White Boys,"
He got up off the floor, rattled some cual to the stove, and lay down again.
he
front teeth of Burns Singer as A gleam of gold shone in the
Arth home-inde "I actually made quite good cigarette. He said: "Of course, money then." said Logter Christopher believes that propa- the eight weeks the show ran 1 anda ani politics are part of earned £85 a week Bul Chat: poetry. represented six months' work, don't forget. Average it mit and you see I was really getting, less than a waiter."
A current book of poetry, "Songs.“ has rarueși Logue 4100, He was paid exactly that for one
Jaziers
"For me, it's different. It's 1'11 st like psychoanalysis, do no work for weeks and then write solidly for 12 hours. I think what Pn really seeing 43 the time is the source of Original Sin in myself.”
TAPE RECORDE SPECIALISTS
Logue leaped to his foet al this heresy and shouted: "Original Sin! What are you talking about?"
Lague looks like a man who would punch anybody on the But then who could punch Burns Sluger? A mass of gold hair frames his face, he has the air of a spiritualised Viking whom the bigger men left at home when they set out in their, long prowed sheps to raid England.
Flames
"Jimmy" to his friends, Burnis Singer Is actually the son of a Glaswegian mother and a Jewish salesman from Manchester. 1 count him the most Inflammable the English scene, be- Doet on
The way he showers entise burning tonero strands on his flossy gold beard he is bound to go up in flames one day.
In love, he wrote:--
I cunnot see
Sutler in another.
And every tear
I bruali aside
I find you hidden within it
like a bride*
He wrote that for Marle, the woman he made his bride Sye years ago. She is a New York- born Negress with A Harley- strect practice in psychotherapy.
Dreamers only part of the - time, poets show an
Grute interest in money, mainly be- cause of the difficulty they have in laying their bands on it.
This is the large economy size—the tape runs for.
10.000 honra,“
FINDLATER'S
DRY FLY
DRY FLY SHERRY
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.....A Superb Sherry
A gracious welcome to your guests
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GILMAN & COMPANY, LTD.
Most magazines pay £10 189. for a short poem, and the rates 31 the BBC go down to 10%, line for longer broadcast works. Poels write reviews andį do journalism to make a living.
"I'm never sloppy about money," said Christopher. Logue in a raging volce. "I want a car. I want to eat out in restaurants. You know who I'd like to be? I'd like 10 be
| president of U.S. Steel!"
Burns Singer, once a
Ash
chasing zoologis! at Aberdeen
Marine Laboratory, said: "ta Hke tu be Spyrus K. Skouras.
just fancy the glamour of work- ing in Glens."
Professor
The world does not owe poets
a living, but it pays more than a modest competence to Theodore
Roethke (pronounced ret-key);
a great shambling American poet big us a house and varning
enough money to live in one in
smari Belgravia during his
London visit.
Bah! Red
fellow-traveller!
GAG ON THE SERVICES
Thomas
The Spoils
of Success
MR. DONLEAVY AND MR.
PINTER ARE NOT EXACTLY
RUSHING TO GRAB THEM
THINGS have been happening so fast in the theatre that outsiders become insiders before their tempers have had time to hot-up. The attitude of the Establishment seems to be: if you can't beat 'em, let 'em join you.
As a result of this all-embracing liberalism, John Osborne is a power in the film industry, Arnold Wesker jumps from outsider to Brains Truster in two years, and Harold Pinter and J. P. Donleavy have knocked down the walls of the West End at practically the first bash.
All these writers, in varying degrees opposed to the present organisation of society, have been winners of the Evening Standard Drama Award.
Deprived of their wanderings in the wilderness, honoured before they have been able to digest the bitter fruits of neglect, these writers fuce a new kind of problem.
They are accepted, Battered and feted by a society they feel they ought to despise.
Dwarfing a glass of sherry with his big hand, 52-year-old Hochke told me: "My great year was 1959, when I picked up They must either bite the £10,000 in various prizes, includ-hand that feeds them ing sa award from the Ford Fundation.
champagne and caviare and
vilots
[!FREE!]
Bah! Capitalist fellow-traveller!
Cummings
London Express Service.
Wiseman's LIMELIGHT
life is not the the
Passing salt
stuff that is pumped out from the pulpit, from the Press, from Pinter's play is, he insists, the the stage, from radio, TV and story of a tramp who is given advertising." "As a working Professor of the statuetten of official re-charity, but does not know how
For Pinter, English at the University of cognition or they must acto accept it. He dismisses com- Washington, Seattle, I teach cept the
consequences of pletely the suggestion that his answer to a question, but poetry for £4,500 a year.""
becoming the new elite. It three characters stand for the id, question itself.
the ego and the super ego, or is a dificult choice. This that they stand for mankind, year's winners of the Even- Christ and God. ing Standard Drama Award! for writing are both in this difficult position. They are men trying to break down a door that is already wide open.
But the amount he gets by actually writing poetry and getting it published is only about £1,000 a year.
Journey
Enshrined
PICTURE BY MICHAEL WARD SUGA
Playwright Donleavy, visits, a rahearsol of his prize-winning play Folty Tales New York and talks to actress Susan Hampshire..
He is very conscious of the Intrusive nature of success, that it can deprive a writer of his
precious loneliness.
be
"But these are dangers," says, "that don't befall someone like me. Success and money. arouse in me no overwhelming gratitude, no special excitement.
"I am indifferent to the ma- terial or egotistical benefits of
me.
PEALKING
POINTS
We read to say what we have read.
-CHARLES LAMB,
He missed an Invaluable -
hold. his opportunity to tongue.
-ANDREW LANG
He insists that his play is as
Donleavy does not even recog- simple as it seems to be, but adds, in the same breath, that nise the existence of questions. success. They mean nothing to nothing is so complex as sim- Ho shrugs off the H-bomb as plicity,
something that does not concern his him. He consider it presump- "Fome can be most destructive Roethko's best man when he
He is revealing about methods of writing.
tuous for mankind to make such of talent. You can't write from married, was W. H. Auden, who
"My characters," he says.
a fuss about whether it will con- the point of view that you are sang his songs for more than six-
"when they begin to live, just tinue to exist or not.
a grent author worshipped by pence as the best-known British
take over. All I have to do La poet of the
It does not matter, except to millions. It is much more help- 10304. "But even
to follow them. They lead me. mankind, and if mankind is ful to the writer to be insulted Auden can't make a living just
"I never know where they are wiped out it will not be around occasionally. writing poetry," said Roethke. "I
Pinter, at the age of 30, is going to go, I just follow them to care. doubt anybody does, except recognised as the author of the because they are a bloody sight maybe Robert Frost."
Let's face it, poems will never strength of The Care-taker,
best play of the year on the more important than I am, and he says quietly, gently," only in American writers they become
ង they always change out of all manners. I don't think it's very professional successes," be as popular as football coupons, remarkable plece
whether we are all my original important
In the past, when people have and what America offers is just levitation, a play that floats conception of them.
blown up by the H-bomb. But I intruded upon his privacy at a POCKET CARTOON- do think it is important to pass pub, the outcome the salt when somebody asks fight in which the intruders are
laid not. you to."
"I am much stronger than I
of dramatic recognition
bigger subsidies.
without any visible means of As characters, poets range support. from rhyming layabouts w
saintly travellers who have em- barked on the greatest journey of all: the journey into the mind and spirit of man.
Gold
Donleavy, at the age of 34, is
from
Bombarded
"I do not belleve in morality."
He Has his principal relaxa- enshrined as the most promising "Of course I control them, I tlons as walking, good wine, playwright of the year on the have the last word, but I lot good food, writing and sex, strength of a play, Fairy Tales then have a very long plece of of New York, which will open rope....
He claims proudly that he has never worked is his life, by that he has Ils fasistence that his charac. which he means
In the West End the day after
he collects his award.
It is scarcely possible tur
Christopher Logue, who is a compulsive newspaper-reader, y en achievement. said: "I see myself as a falled Journalist." Jimmy Singer lick- ed a new cigarette togeiber and said: "Oh, no, man."
ward to follow any more quick-
What sort of men are they?
Jimmy falled to set his beard alight.
Simple
-
ters have nu symbolic meaning never done anything other than springs from a deeply ingrained write or paint. loathing for symbols, messages,
pat interpretations and capsuled truths.
"From when I was very
Isolated
..
*
"Success seems to destroy most
has been a
look," he confesses, "and in my student days I used to get into a lot of fights.
"My beard and my retiring, manner sorm to arouse a certain violence in people. I always try. to avoid it but the trouble is that the person who wins is regarded on the guilty party 1 tend to win."
Donleavy, who could fnitially
young," he says, "people have He has been married for 14 not get his novel The Ginger in Man published except as a ́por- been trying to convert me to years, has llyed the past 10 their point of view. At, no pre- Fulham and now has a house nographie book in Parla, and Neliber Is the kind of person vious time have
Pinler, whose playa, myɛily: people been in the Isle of Man.
ing alone.
are both men who are having
He may never set the world one might have expected from bombarded with quite so many He to a man who enjoys be more people than they chlighten..
tis work. Pinter, whore plays messages from so many different write from 11 to two each success. thrust upon therii:
on fire, or earn much money.
But Jimmy has looked deeper are spun in a delicate web of sources,"
Into the river than most of us. rusting scaffolding, has 'the toolt Ie rejects them all whether day," he says, "After lunch I They have been (fórbed Into
Ho is panning like
`a of a go-ahead shirt sølesman in they are subversive, subliminai go for walks until the evening. prospector, and those giraming the Charing Cross Road.
or sublime. He assertas
hardly ever talk to anyone, a kind of shotgun wedding with Donleavy, whose work is baw- "I don't believe in God. I don't Talk doesn't achieve anything. dy, violent and usually expur- belleve in solutions. I don't be "I have lived a completely, fame, and it is understandable gated, looks like one of the bros lleve in all that jazz about for-olated life for the Inst 10 years, that they should view such a thers Karamazov, and has a smile ward to the next horleon.
1 have my wife and my child- that Illuminates his whole par- "I don't believe in Sociallùm or; ren but I hardly ever son anyone union with miceleines" sonality by means of some" in- ratlonialler or psychology nr elee, Belyg 'a "writer, ls' Rectasar- terior iluorescence.
Pernil—I don't boltove any of the ily a solilary occupation.”-
traces he washes out from the daily allt of words, worda, words, are his own kind of gold.
---(London 'Keprara Etrolée).
and Al" by. Burns
Singer. Becker and Warburg.
***(LONDON (MÉYraná, ŠUTUTOR);
by FRIELL
“I redkon··bbe'll see soÍNE real, serfota: playing from The noi hoi goi tán rld o
nts handicap, tak