William Curtis Hayward (1931-1967) published one novel and a handful of poetry pamphlets. The novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night (1964), is racy, Joycean, full of the burgeoning creative, sexual and radical spirit of the early Nineteen Sixties, but without flinching from the violence, boorishness and squalor that could also be part of the contemporary underground scene.
There has been a more recent reprint (2012) from Worple Press, with an essay by Kevin Jackson. As the publisher notes, Jackson ‘highlights . . . Hayward’s debts to Ulysses, an informing fascination with the occult, and a prophetic counter-cultural awareness in areas such as meditation, Tantra, communes and New Age environmentalism.’
His poems are in the tradition of William Blake, and of David Jones (with whom he corresponded): mystical, prophetic, melding a new mythology from ancient places and sources and from the contemporary and everyday. He was drawn to certain sacred shrines and citadels, which he believed could open out onto other planes of being.
His visions in the early Sixties foresee the rise of interest in ancient mysteries soon to come in the work of John Michell, Anthony Roberts, Janet and Colin Bord and others and in independent journals and zines such as Gandalf's Garden, The Ley Hunter and Northern Earth Mysteries.
Though some poems were published in periodicals, he also printed his work in frail pamphlets on a hand-printing machine at his Two Rivers Press. They include a set of four under the overall title of The Dance of Earth: Taliesen Burning, The May Hill, Jazz at the Angel, and Towards the Company of Light (c1963). Because these were fragile and probably not printed in large numbers, it is likely not many have survived.
Willi Hayward, as he was known, lived with his wife and three children in a cottage, Humblebee, near the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, in a sort of shabby-genteel poverty. The cottage was remote. They drew their own water and collected wood for the fire: light was from lamps and candles.
He and his wife befriended an Australian artist, Annette Macarthur-Onslow, found for her another remote cottage, the Round House, and helped her to repair it and put it to rights. She wrote and illustrated a book about the house and about the people and birds and beasts and woods and fields around (Round House, 1975), including warm recollections of Hayward and his family. This gives perhaps the best picture of the sort of life the friends were leading: often hard, cold, hand-to-mouth, but also at times joyous.
The Hayward cottage, Humblebee, is on a footpath route which also takes in the prehistoric barrow of Belas Knap. Not far away are the ruins of Hailes Abbey, once a place of great pilgrimage in medieval times, associated with Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the 13th century magnate who restored Tintagel, and who was crowned King of Germany at Aachen with the silver crown of Cologne, as a step towards his ambition to become Holy Roman Emperor, which he never attained. He is buried, his grave now unknown, at the Abbey. His son Edmund endowed the Abbey with a relic of the Holy Blood, and it was this that led to the pilgrimages.
The parish church opposite, older than the Abbey, has preserved tantalising phantoms of medieval wall-paintings, including a crudely colourful and vigorous bestiary of dragon, unicorn, cockatrice, mermaid, owl, hounds, hare, and even a winged elephant.
But Hailes was not the only sacred place in the countryside around. Hayward was attracted to the ancient and Roman remains in the area, but also to the natural shrines: woodland, hill-tops, valley streams.
Later he and his family lived further west in Gloucestershire, at Minsterworth, near the mouth of the Severn, towards the Welsh border, and he wrote about witnessing the Severn Bore there. Here he had a particular affinity for the nearby great green dome of May Hill, Longhope. Seven counties are said to be visible from it and, according to Hayward, seven planes of vision also.
William Hayward went to live in Ibiza (long before it was a popular holiday resort) and died there in 1967 aged 37. In 1979, the poetry imprint Agenda published David Jones’ Letters to William Hayward edited by Colin Wilcockson, based on the originals left to Merton College: Hayward had been writing a study of Jones’ The Anathemata. As well as Jones, Hayward was also a friend and correspondent of the neglected Ulster modernist and mystical poet John Lyle.
There were two posthumous booklets of poetry: Between Two Rivers: Gloucestershire poems, issued by his daughter (1999); and Islands of the Goddess: Poems of Ibiza (c. 2006). Worple Press hope to bring out a Collected Poems.
(Mark Valentine)
Many thanks for bringing Heyward to our attention. I, too, am a longtime David Jones devotee, having known at least three people who've written books on Jones--my old friend Elizabeth Ward, Kathy Staudt, Thomas Dilworth and I think one or two others. I reviewed Dilworth's biography for the Post and Liz Ward gave me a restrike of Jones's Jonah in the belly of the whale from his edition of "The Book of Jonah." Just recently, I discovered that the Folio Society has done a splendid facsimile of that book, which I also now own.
ReplyDeleteBut thank you again for these vignettes of the eccentric and neglected.