Brooding Youth - Eight Cambridge Saturnines

The salmon-pink book is very battered and stained. The white buckram spine has turned to the colour of wet concrete. The paper is peeling away, showing yellow pulp beneath. Something has been spilt – wine, coffee, tea – and forms a shape like a startled head. Inside, the name of a former owner crests a block of foxing, like a scurry of figures on some autumnal ridge.

Her name was Sheila Robinson, and she has added the date, December 1936. Below, a thick blurry pencil shows the price some bookseller valued this dishevelled book at, and got from me: £1.  On the second front free endpaper someone has written in swirling pencil five lines of verse, headed ‘A Vision’, invoking the Holy Grail, and signed ‘D.L.A.’ Probably this is David Arkwright, the first of the contributors: for this is an anthology: Thirty-One Poems from the Spenser Society of Cambridge University (Cambridge: W Heffer & Sons, 1936). On the rear endpaper of the book is a little scarlet sticker, the bookseller’s label of C E Brumwell, Bookseller & Stationer, 10 Broad Street, Hereford.

There is a cautious, obliging ‘Commendatory’ note by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: despite ferment among the young, we ‘may be sure that Castaly will run clear again: of which, to my way of thinking, this little book gives no little promise’. In a preface, the poets acknowledge help also from Mr John Masefield and others; and thank Mr Walter de la Mare, Mr Humbert Wolfe, Mr Clifford Dyment, Mr Gordon Bottomley and Mr Laurence Binyon for addressing them during the first year of their society’s existence. That’s a pretty impressive roll-call of courteous poets.

Eight of the society (all male) have contributed the thirty-one poems: of these, only one went on to become a widely-published poet. The verses show virtually no influence from The Waste Land or the other modernist poems of the Twenties, nor is there any obvious sign of the Poets of the Thirties (Auden, Day-Lewis, Spender, Macniece). None of the pieces seem to allude to current affairs: the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the ferments of Fascism and Communism, are absent. But some of the work has a distinct whiff of Nineties decadence, and the distant knell of Poe sometimes sounds: so one might suppose that these were rather aesthetical and saturnine young men.

David Arkwright’s is certainly a macabre muse, with a poem, ‘Hallowe’en’ about sad ghosts, another ‘The Atheist’ about a ritual in which the last to drink from a crystal cup is doomed, and a third, ‘Radnor Night’ about witches. There is also a poem to a lost friend, ‘G.H.T.’, about the fading of grief. These all have a certain gusto and dark glamour in the Poe and Swinburne mode.

A David Arkwright also appears as the co-author, with Basil Wood Bourne, of The Church Plate of the Archdeaconry of Ludlow. Diocese of Hereford. The rural deaneries of Bridgnorth, Burford, Clun, Condover, Ludlow, Pontesbury, Stokesay, Wenlock (Shrewsbury: W. B. Walker, 1961). This title seems to fit quite well with the poet’s interest in the Grail and the Welsh Border setting of the Radnor poem, so perhaps we may be safe to make the connection.

It is a 65pp pamphlet, and a copy available from a bookshop near Llandrindod Wells has ‘in front a letter from Prof Charles Oman on V and A Museum notepaper thanking Arkwright for writing this book, mentioning his own part in listing the Church Plate, "chasing up eccentric parsons" and telling of his successful opposition to the granting of a faculty for the proposed sale of 2 chalices.’ We seem to be in the world of War in Heaven by Charles Willians or The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen, where an ancient sacred vessel might be discovered in some remote church or farmhouse, or is being pursued by a suave diabolist.

The next poet, Winton Dean, contributes a vision of Aphrodite, a translation from Sappho, and a sonnet about ‘a fiery crystal’ seen on an island at sunset. He went on to become a prolific author of books on opera, especially on Handel and Bizet.

Derek Plint Clifford, who provided the most verses, has one quite vivid one on Atlantis, and another, ‘Fanfarronado’, which is rather Sitwellian. There are also two poems, ‘The Troubled Midnight’ and ‘Ten Chrysanthemums’, about a lost, ghostly lover, and an Arthurian poem about Lancelot and Elaine, ‘The Reaper’.  He published another book of poems with Heffer, Mad Pelynt and the Bullet (1940), and a solitary novel, The Perracotts, with The Hogarth Press in 1948. He also wrote a range of books about art, gardening, and connoisseurship.

The single most accomplished poem in the book is, I think, Christopher Gandy’s un-titled celebration of a classical statue retrieved from the sea and then from the soil (‘There is a hunger in me for what is old,/Delicate and distant; a boy in bronze’). This poet is probably the Christopher Thomas Gandy of King’s, who won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1937 for a poem entitled ‘The Thames’, but who seems not to have published any book.  He became a diplomat, and left his papers to the Middle East Centre of St Christopher’s College, Oxford.

Cecil Holmes was the most adventurous of the eight in terms of poetic form, if not of theme, with his spectral ‘Moonlight from the Window’, in semi-prose passages (‘stretch out your arms to/what is not there’): but nothing seems to be to hand about him.

Frederick Lill contributed three poems with distinct pagan overtones, including ‘Escape from Nymphs’ (‘Pan-erotic, green jackdaws chatter deep/In woods unsummered, haunted. Cracked sundials . . .’). There is a lush, Fleckerish style, and a certain cynicism about love and verse: but he too is not readily recognisable from the usual records.

By contrast, John Manifold, an Australian, who published here some distinctive, austere desert pieces, one on the kookaburra (‘sardonic ghoul’), became an eminent literary figure in his home country, collecting and publishing old songs (eg in The Penguin Australian Song Book, 1977) and continuing to write poetry, with a Selected Verse in 1948.

Joseph C. Skinner concludes the anthology with a single short piece, ‘Burnt Incense’, invoking Ushas, the Hind goddess of dawn. He does not seem to have published further.

Whether the eight poets continued to meet or ever corresponded after their Cambridge days, we do not know. Their work here does at least suggest a distinct interest among this coterie of Cambridge students in 1936 in the uncanny, macabre, pagan and mystical. 

Quiller-Couch, in avuncular fashion, detects ‘the brooding so natural and constant to youth’. But we may also wonder about the lingering influence at Cambridge of M R James and his followers. And it is also possible that the mood of the poems stems from the same interwar occult milieu that led to what I have called the Rise of the Metaphysical Thriller. In this somewhat forlorn and faded relic of visionary youth, at least, an interlude of traffic with the dark fantastic is preserved.

(Mark Valentine)