Bearing up

A footnote to Fleur Adcock, who died on October 10 at the age of ninety: she also wrote book reviews.

This will be no great surprise to readers whose memories stretch back thirty or even fifty years, to a time when this poet’s name would turn up quite regularly in the TLS, attached to some item in verse or prose. And it is the latter kind of short piece that is yet, so far as we know, to be gathered in book form.

Born in New Zealand in 1934, Adcock moved to London at the age of twenty-nine; her first poem published in the TLS, in 1971, “Stewart Island”, dramatically sets the natural beauty of her native land against the decision to emigrate. Soon after that came reviews that spoke of strong views on Australasian literature in general – on her fellow Kiwi escapee Katherine Mansfield (that “pioneering writer of fiction”), on Gwen Harwood (“one of Australia’s best kept secrets”), Judith Wright (“a powerful voice in defence of the environment and of Aboriginal rights”) and Les Murray back when he was writing as Les A. Murray (“Of the poets now writing in Australia … probably the most Australian and probably also the best”).

But there were also plenty of excursions into other territories (“[Margaret] Atwood cannot help writing well; but her poems are not as technically ambitious as her novels”). Always there was a knack for wielding the critical knife. This is from 1982:

Poems with meanings are going out of fashion in New Zealand; anything too easily comprehended is condemned as over-explicit, antiquated, timid and dull; in short, as British.

Adcock’s last poetic contributions to the TLS, forty years after the first, include a couple – all too easily comprehended, we fear – that draw inspiration from the computer age. Was Adcock, in her seventies, a pioneer of the poem about a Skype call?

The Cheltenham Literature Festival took place earlier this month. A brief visit gave us a few trivial points to reflect on. We had it confirmed, for example, that there are those who identify as writers who beg the question when they are just raising a question (do their editors agree?). An interesting expert on Japanese books in translation suggested that only three of Shūsaku Endō’s books have been translated into English – fortunately, this appears to be untrue. In a similar vein, it was possible to appreciate the warm response when a panellist who works in the books business announced that Nina Bawden’s novel Carrie’s War (1973) is to be redeemed from obscurity and reissued for Bawden’s centenary next year. We checked our facts: Virago reissued Carrie’s War in a “50th anniversary edition” only last year.

From that same businesslike panel, about literary estates and how to look after them, we learnt that the estate of Virginia Woolf, some years back, was approached by Mattel, the American toy company that makes Barbie dolls. Woolf’s great-niece, Virginia Nicholson, described the company’s proposal for a Woolf doll, to be accessorized with a miniature copy of Mrs Dalloway. The proposal was declined. There is no “literary” Barbie, we gather, apart from the one inspired by the primatologist and author Dr Jane Goodall. Children who play with such dolls shouldn’t dream of becoming a high modernist. A dentist or a pastry chef would do; perhaps an art teacher or an astronaut.

Cheltenham has also been playing host this month to the painting reproduced above, among others from the same quick-witted brush – that of the artist PJ Crook.

Reading of Byron’s bicentenary earlier this year, Crook spotted one of those many colourful stories about the poet: that as a student at Cambridge, he had kept a bear as a pet; the rules forbade dogs but not bears. (See Lord Byron’s Best Friends by Geoffrey Bond, 2013, for an account of the poet’s strong canophilia.) “On further research I discovered that the poet always loved animals and kept an ever-growing menagerie”, Crook writes. Percy Bysshe Shelley reported that the menagerie grew to contain

ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it … PS I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.

Shelley was probably pulling his correspondent’s (Thomas Love Peacock’s) leg. But others apparently bore witness to a Byronic crocodile, two geese he saved from the butcher’s block in Pisa, a goat with a broken leg, a tame wolf, a fox and a parrot.

True or not, it’s enough to set the artistic imagination racing. Cheltonians have until November 2 to catch Crook’s exhibition Byron’s Bear & Menagerie at the Paragon Gallery; outsiders should pay a visit to paragongallery.co.uk/gallery-1/pj-crook. Look out for other poetic fantasias/bestiaries – and, in the corner of a new painting called “Winning Weekend”, an avidly read copy of the TLS.

Literary pubs, a trawl (or crawl, as you prefer). Ann Lawson Lucas writes from Edinburgh to point out that, in seeking out the finest evocations of such establishments in literature, no one has yet mentioned “the most famous literary pub of all”: the Admiral Benbow in Treasure Island. Black spots all round. As you might expect, Robert Louis Stevenson is a “good source for literary pubs”; consider the “Hawes Inn at the Queen’s Ferry” in the fifth chapter of Kidnapped. Hence also the Spyglass, a pub “on the gloomy Thames”, evoked by Andrew Motion in his Silver: Return to Treasure Island (2012). RLS-land wouldn’t be the same without these necessary landmarks.

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