Parting Shots

Departure spawns its own mythology:
the tearful scene, a squalid Terminus—
she needs his promises; he wants ‘no fuss’—
one wistful kiss, a gauche apology.
Her script demands a clichéd gravitas:
the jukebox playing, as his silhouette
dissolves into the cinematic sunset:
‘Regrets, I've had a few!’ An emptied glass.
Then always for the loved one left behind,
the niggling doubts: this time he won't return,
he'll die, shack up with someone half his age,
come back quite changed; she fears that those who find
delight in not belonging always yearn
for solitude no woman can assuage.

I posted this on the 14th January 2002;  it was probably the result of some failed attempt to relieve a  crushingly depressing post festive slump. The starting point of the piece is Paul Theroux's travel book 'The Happy Isles of Oceania', his account of a canoe 'safari' through through the islands of the Pacific. I wonder if anyone reads Paul Theroux's travel books these days? On the whole I think current taste prefers travelogues which are humourous and entertaining - the hilarious and self-deprecating mode - popularised I guess by Bill Bryson, but drawing on a grand tradition going back to Mark Twain. Theroux's books are neither funny or self-deprecating, more serious, egotistical, culturally savvy and self opinionated - so right up my street you might think.

'The Happy Isles of Oceania' is different. Usually Paul Theroux's travel writing is ego-centric, but not confessional. The covers of the book act as a kind of parenthesis, the journey is described in vivid detail - situations analysed, chance encouters sketched, cultural references unpeeled; the writer's life outside of the journey, his family, friends, literary career largely ignored. The journey is the thing, the only thing. The exception to this is the opening paragraphs of his book about the Pacific.

"There was no good word in English for this hopeless farewell. My wife and I separated on a winter day in London and we were both miserable, because it seemed as though a marriage was over. We both thought: What Now? It was the most sorrowful of goodbyes. I could not imagine life without her. I tried to console myself by saying, 'This is like going on a journey', because a journey can be either your death or transformation, though on this one I imagined that I would just keep living a half-life.

 From habit, when I was alone, I slept only on the left side of the bed, and so felt lonelier when I woke up with a big space beside me. At last I felt so woeful that I went to my doctor."

In the same way as Coleridge's letter to Sara Hutchinson sparked off the thought  'I wonder what Mrs Coleridge must have thought about that?' inspired my sonnet 'Biographia Literaria', then the opening of this book prompted me to imagine how the other half of this inveterate traveller must have felt.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see how some of 'Parting Shots' characteristics were to become recurrent themes of mine. The he/she dynamic is well suited to the essentially dialectical structure of the form, in this case a loose variant of the Petrarchan. The snippet of popular culture and song lyrics which appears in the line, 'Regrets, I've had a few' was a device that I unconciously returned to. There's an odd mix of modernity with more obsure diction - 'shacked-up' seems at odds with 'assuage' or 'Terminus'. When four years later the poem won Cannon's Mouth's sonnet competition, Julie Boden, the competition judge, commented specifically on this aspect of the poem -

"the final word of the poem is 'assuage'. I am aware that this could alienate some readers as it is a word not often used these days. However it is exactly the right word for the job and has not yet entered the realm of archaism."

Grudging praise! I'm surprised she awarded me first prize.

Looking at Parting Shots now, it's not 'assuage' that strikes me, but 'Terminus'. I think this word takes me right back to the earliest days of my life with poetry. One of the rights of passage for a teenager in the late 1960's, long before you hit 16 and were allowed to ride a motorbike or have sex (both equally unlikely), or reached 17 and could learn to drive (Ford Popular - not cool) or at 18 (vote, drink and go to University - yippee!); years  before then, even before you were allowed to wear long trousers to school (aged 15, can you believe it!) at some point around  the age of 13 or so, you could swap your junior library tickets for adult ones. Good-bye to Rosemary Sutcliffe, Alan Garner and Arthur Ransome; hello to Dennis Wheatley, Ryder Haggard and yes... Ian Fleming - intruigue, derring-do and a hint of sex, what more could a boy want! So, I wonder what prompted this boy to venture out of the pubescent glow of the fiction section into the more arcane, cerebral and grown-up world of 'Non-Fiction'; what was so entrancing about the mysteries of the Dewey Decimal system; moreover, what was the particular allure of number 821.7.21 - English Poetry - Modernism?

Well, I can't remember why specifically, but I do recall the first three poetry books I ever borrowed  - a somewhat battered copy of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems, no jacket  with a scuffed blue hardback; a volume called 'The Real Life' or something by  Philip Callow - it had a photograph of a rather winsome young woman on the front cover with big eyes and dark hair,  a scrawny, elfin figure resembling Rita Tushingham, which may  explain why I chose it in the first place. I don't remember the poems much except they seemed 'gritty'. The third book, well, I think it must have been Whitsun Weddings - I seem to recall 'Days' and 'The Arundel Tomb' - so it could not have been anything else.  All this is a testament to the quality of Northumberland County Council Libraries; to be able to pick at random that range and variety of contemporary poetry in a small, one room library in a little market town in the middle of nowhere, today, such a thing would be unthinkable. Over the next few months I was able to read recent books by Thom Gunn (Moly), Sylvia Plath (Ariel)  and R.S, Thomas.

What turned an adolescent craze into a lifetime passion was a little serendipity. Carol, my elder sister, wrote poetry and became friends with the editor of 'Lines' a Tynemouth based small magazine supported by Midnag - the Mid Northumberland Arts Group. Geoff Holland,  published mainly local writers but did attract some better know poets too such as Jon Silkin and James Kirkup. So I came to know poets in the flesh as well on the page and Geoff encouraged me with my own writing. Carol recently had married and driving back one day from the cottage in Rennington, where she and Donald were living at the time they came across a portable typewriter lying amongst a pile of rubbish at the side of the road. For reasons that one cannot quite imagine it appeared to have been dumped from a car. The grey plastic case was somewhat damaged, the caps-lock mechanism was broken and it was ribbonless. Other than that it worked. Carol gave it to me.

At the time I had borrowed the 'Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse' from the library but I knew I could not keep renewing it month after month. So I saved my pocket money for a couple of weeks and headed straight to Coates, the local stationers and bought a 'Smith Corona' ribbon, a box of correction tabs, and a ream of the cheapest quarto-sized typing paper - then started to painstakingly type out, one-finger style, any poem that caught my eye from the Faber Anthology.

Of course, after more than forty years I can't recall exactly what I chose, I know there was some Wilfred Owen in there. I remember 'Strange Meeting' ended up with holes where all the 'o's' were, the typing paper was so tissue-thin. Eliot's 'Preludes', I certainly included, along with a  fair smattering of Thirties poets, Auden, Macneice - I was blown away by 'Bagpipe Music' and 'Sunlight in the Garden'. Keith Douglas' 'Vergissmeinnicht' moved me to tears. What happened I think, in the slow  process of typing word for word, the ritual of returning the carriage deliberately after each line and setting the tab key to suit the shape of each poem so it was centred on the page, is that the shape of poetry, the sound of poetry and the power of poetry became embedded in my mind in a way no amount of teaching could ever match. Soon phrases from poems were echoing around my brain like the recurrent riffs of 'head music' - 'The sunlight in the garden hardens and grows cold', 'A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps/And then the lighting of the lamps', 'Its dream still haunts to-day,/that brought us to a room/Caverous and lofty as/A railway terminus'.

'Terminus' - that word, how it lurked, waited, unused and forgotten, from the Spring of 1970 to a Winter's day in the next milllenium, where it re-surfaced and snuck into its rightful place in 'Parting Shots'. Novelists, I imagine are stalked by stories and characters; Poets are stalked by words and haunted by inner voices; neither are ever alone.