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| Prologue
- What of N-O? Continued |
| This
jokey, boozy way of life, while not the stuff of doctoral dissertations,
was an integral and important part of the literary life of the
period. Consider: |
| Emily
Holmes Coleman ties those who gathered at Hennekey's to not
only transition and the experimentalists in Paris, but
also to T.S. Eliot and Faber and Faber. She is credited with
camping out in Faber's offices until Eliot agreed to read the
manuscript of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, a book he eventually
published that is said to have had some influence on Dylan Thomas.
(Eliot made a sly allusion to this siege in his introduction
to the book: "... it took me, with this book, some time
to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole.") |
| Geoffrey
Grigson was the founder and editor of New Verse, certainly
the most energetic poetry journal of the period and arguably
the best. The publication's energy and quality owed something
to the editor's Nights Out with contributors. |
| David
Gascoyne wrote the first survey of Surrealism in English and
was himself a leading Surrealist poet. (Cameron, who translated
Rimbaud, a secular patron saint to the French Surrealists, went
with William Sansom to the International Surrealist Exhibition
at the New Burlington Galleries in June, 1936. Mr Thomas gave
a public reading of a postcard there. ) |
| William
Empson sends a tentative thread out from the crowd at Hennekey's
to connect them with Cambridge, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis,
Scrutiny, and all that. Samuel Hynes, an historian of
the literature of the 1930s, detected a hint of Nights Out in
Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral, published in 1935.
Hynes wrote of the essays in that book, " ...they amount
to an elaborate critical conceit, an intellectual's joke at
the expense of reductive communist critics." |
| Cameron
had been at Oxford with C. Day Lewis and W.H. Auden and published
poems in Oxford Poetry 1927, the volume they edited and
introduced with a solemn statement that Hugh Gorden Porteous
later described as an unofficial manifesto for the poets of
the Thirties. In addition, Cameron became a copywriter and a
contributor to New Verse only after he returned from
Majorca where he had temporarily lived with his friends, Laura
Riding and Robert Graves, linking the crowd in the Strand with
those who sought independence on that island in the Mediterranean. |
| More
importantly, Cameron's relatively few but distinctive poems
are clearly related to this way of life. Some of them, like
"Public-House Confidence" and "The Dirty Little
Accuser," grow directly from it. Others, in tone, diction,
and what might best be called stance, reflect the conversational
myth-making that made up such a large part of the life at Hennekey's
and elsewhere. But one of his slightest poems, with the arresting
title "Nostalgia for Death," said to have occurred
to him in a taxi at the end of a Night Out, shows the seriousness
that always ran like a current through the fun, the regime of
self-examination and self-criticism that helps to account for
the limited number of his poems and for the embarrassment he
displayed when Holmes Coleman publicly claimed for him a poet's
privilege: |
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Psychologists
discovered that Miss B
Suffered from a split personality.
She had B-1, B-2, 3, 4 and 5,
All of them struggling in one body alive.
B-1 got tipsy and B-2 felt ill,
B-3 got pregnant, B-4 paid the bill.
Well, that's enough of that. What about me?
I have, at least, N-1, N-2, N-3.
N-1 is a glutton, N-2 is a miser,
N-3 is different, but not much wiser.
Well, that's enough of that. What of N-O?
That is the N I'd really like to know. |
| N-O
here is explicitly a figure for his death, as the title of the
poem makes clear. But some of his friends and, therefore, readers
would have also seen in it a joking reference to Nights Out
and a dark spin on the Night Custard campaign. Beyond that,
a number of his friends knew that Laura Riding had nicknamed
him Zero, or Zero the Companionable, and would have been aware
of an echo of that nickname and the weight of affectionate criticism
it carried in this shorthand for his death. Witty and slight,
light verse, even doggerel if you like, the poem nonetheless
reflects a seriousness that is completely intermingled with
a joke, the private joke of existence, perhaps. |
| Norman
Cameron's life can be seen as a pursuit - if that is not too
strenuously purposeful a word - of this question, What of N-O?
That question helped to shape his life, to set him apart from
some of his contemporaries, and to prompt the composition of
a number of poems that readers have found unforgettable. |
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