Many (W.S.) Graham issues to respond to here. First of all, a proviso to
Robin's recommendation of the Collected Poems. It's only in print in
hardback now at 25 pounds. There is a good paperback Selected from Faber at
a more reasonable price, or if you can wait till Spring 2003, I am editing a
New Collected Poems which should be out then (and will include the many
poems from the early collections which Faber left out of the Collected, very
much against Graham's will, as well as some of the uncollected and
manuscript poems.

Graham did admit to a Beckett influence, though he didn't go into details.
I've always thought there was something of Beckett's pessimism and humour in
the late poems, as well as the preoccupation with
unnam(e)ableness. And maybe Candice is right that the move from verbal
exuberance to sparseness can be characterized as a shift from Thomas's
territory to Beckett's, though there are all sorts of other influences in
the work too - and the end result has a very distinctive character of its
own.

Neither Graham nor Thomas was ever a member of the New Apocalypse, but they
are often lumped together as representative of the neo-romantic tendency in
British 1940s poetry. Henry Treece, co-founder of the group, wrote a rather
good short book on Thomas. Treece later became a writer of children's
fiction, and I was a big fan of his work when I was a boy, particularly the
Viking trilogy: _Viking Dawn_, _The Road to Miklagard_ and _Viking Sunset_.
The other founder, J.F. Hendry, has some admirers among more recent British
poets, I think - is he featured in Sinclair's _Conductors of Chaos_? I can't
remember. But the group's work on the whole strikes me as pretty
forgettable.

The 15-year gap Robin mentions usually comes up sooner or later in
discussions of Graham. Edward Lucie-Smith claimed in the introduction to his
selection from Graham in _The Penguin Book of Modern British Poetry_ that
_The Nightfishing_, appearing as it did in the same year as Larkin's _The
Less Deceived_, showed that Graham was not in line with the new dominant
tendency in British poetry represented by the Movement's plain diction,
irony etc. He was still doing his sub-Thomas tricks, and thus marginalizing
himself. The 15-year silence therefore represents the time he took to come
up with a new, more mature style. This argument has influenced everyone else
who has written about Graham (in a particularly insidious way, as most of
the people who respond to one or other of its variations have never traced
it to its source, so that it keeps getting distorted.) Tony Lopez's version,
in the only full-length study of Graham so far published, is that far from
marginalizing himself, Graham was silenced by the literary establishment,
who had no time for a poet influenced by modernism. A story often cited by
proponents of this view is that when Robin Skelton got in touch with Faber
in the 60s to ask them whether they intended to publish a new Graham
collection, they not only didn't know he was still writing but had assumed
he was dead.

In fact, Graham didn't stop writing in the 50s - 'The Dark Dialogues', one
of his most important poems, was written in that period as were one or two
others later published in 'Malcolm Mooney's Land'. It is true, though, that
his productivity dwindled for many years. I doubt if this was anything to do
with an awareness or interest in what Larkin and co were doing - in his
Cornish retreat, surrounded by avant-garde painters, he wouldn't have had
much exposure to fashionable anti-modernism. In any case I don't subscribe
to the thesis that modernism was ruthlessly eradicated from British culture
during that period, and there's no evidence at all that Graham's work was
suppressed by anyone. The moral usually drawn from the Skelton story is
ridiculous: if your publisher thinks you're dead, that's your fault, not
theirs - it was Graham's business to remind them he was still alive. No, it
seems that the slowdown in his creativity and the change in style have more
to do with the internal logic of his work and personality than it did with
other poets and publishers. the best explanation I've been able to come up
with is that _The Nightfishing_ itself (which is an extraordinary
achievement, and far beyond anything Thomas ever did) was the culmination of
that particular line of development, and that he couldn't go any further
without starting again.

Best wishes

Matthew


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 3:52 AM
Subject: Re: HG my name JG my game WS wont same


> Query to Matthew:
>
> I've just checked the dates, and there's a fifteen-year gap between _The
> Nightfishing_ in 1955 and _Malcolm Mooney's Land_ in 1970. Was Graham
> writing in those years?
>
> Seems as if there might be a parallel to the similar gap in Wallace
Stevens,
> after _Harmonium_, from which he returns with a much sparser and less-lush
> style (comparatively speaking!).
>
> Robin
>