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)
