| Prologue
- What of N-O? |
| Late
one night in the 1930s, the barman of the upstairs wine bar
at Hennekey's, a pub in the Strand, called time. Emily Holmes
Coleman, an American who had published poems in transition,
the literary journal based in Paris, immediately leaped on a
table. From this perch, she declared the bar could not close
because two of the best living English poets, Norman Cameron
and Dylan Thomas, were present and wanted to continue drinking.
Dylan Thomas beamed with delight. Norman Cameron, embarrassed,
muttered "Come, come," paid the bill, and encouraged
his friends down the stairs and into the night. |
| This
anecdote catches Cameron in mid-career, in his natural habitat,
and in a characteristic posture. In some respects, though, the
anecdote is not characteristic of the 1930s. It betrays the
apolitical high spirits and the faith in the privileged position
of poetry that suggest a slightly earlier period, if not an
obliviousness to the demands of fashion. This anecdote, in but
not of a particular time, is typical of Cameron's poems and
his life. That this little story cannot now be firmly tied to
a specific date or even an exact year seems somehow fitting. |
| Still,
the precision of the location of the story provides a doorway
into Cameron's life and writings. Hennekey's became a favorite
watering-hole for him and his friends because of its proximity
to Bush House, also in the Strand. He was a successful, not
to say legendary, copywriter with J. Walter Thompson, the American
advertising agency with English offices at Bush House. William
Sansom, the novelist, who for a time shared an office with him,
described the scene at Hennekey's: |
When the office
closed, we would often walk along to a wineshop where goodish
cheap hock was served on heavy wood tables, and there I
met a number of Norman's friends - an astounded cherub called
Thomas, a clerkly-looking fellow called Gascoyne, eggdomed
Len Lye like an ascetic coster in his raffish cap, and many
more.
|
| Sansom
also noticed how the behavior of this convivial crowd set them
apart from at least some of their contemporaries: |
Unlike certain
other writers manqués back in the office, they did
not discuss literary theory or whine about their souls and
sensitivities - they made up things there and then, grabbed
down extraordinary stories and myths from the air, wrote
down doggerel and verse.
|
| This
shared love of spontaneous myth-making combined with a shared
aversion to literary theory, despite its apparent frivolity,
was the basis for a way of life. Dylan Thomas wrote to Vernon
Watkins about this way of life in March of 1936 from Cornwall: |
I was in London
for just over a week, and the same things happened there
that always happen: I kept roughly a half of my appointments,
met half the people I wanted to, met lots of other people,
desirable and otherwise, and fully lived up to the conventions
of Life No. 13: promiscuity, booze, coloured shirts, too
much talk, too little work. I had Nights Out with those
I always have Nights Out with: Porteous, Cameron, Blakeston,
Grigson, and old Bill Empson and all ....
|
| Thomas's
references to the conventions of Life No. 13 and to Nights Out
no doubt echo the kind of joking self-analysis the circle of
friends indulged in when they were out on the town together.
Cameron and a number of his friends certainly engaged in a running
joke based on the most famous of his advertising campaigns,
Night Starvation, a "disease" he invented that could
be cured by taking a cup of hot Horlick's Malted Milk last thing
at night. The parody of this campaign was called Night Custard,
a punning expansion of his initials and a pun on the name of
a popular artist of the time, McKnight Kauffer. What this mythic
substance was made of, the uses to which it could be put, and
the slogans and campaigns for selling it, varied widely; and
the people who took part in this "serial myth," as
Geoffrey Grigson called it, changed. Cameron, with one foot
in the advertising business and the other in the literary world,
seems to have been the single common denominator for the self-mocking
Night Custard campaign. |
|
|
|
