Norman Cameron: His Life, Work and Letters
by
Warren Hope
 
  The poetry of Norman Cameron (1905-1953) has given delight without exception. Auden, who anthologised him while they were both still at Oxford, thought him the best poet of his generation. He never changed his mind. Though sometimes thought of as "school of Robert Graves", Cameron had in fact - as his close friend Graves was always eager to point out - formed his unique style long before he met Graves. He has for long been a pervasive influence on modern English poetry, and yet until now there has been no biography. Now the American poet and critic Warren Hope has provided what will prove to be the definitive account. Hope's critical biography is based on exhaustive interviews with everyone Cameron knew: James Reeves, Tosco Fyvel, Geoffrey Grigson. Martin Seymour-Smith, John Aldridge, Cameron's widow, and many more. Here told for the first time is the story of Cameron's troubled life: his relationships with Robert Graves, with the truly fearsome Laura Riding, with Dylan Thomas, and others. This is an indispensable book about an important poet.
  MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
 
  L Warren Hope, poet, critic and lecturer, is the editor of Norman Cameron's Collected Poems. He is the author of critical studies on Shakespeare and Larkin, and the editor of a number of literary and historical sources. He lives in Philadelphia where he raised his family.
 
 
  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.
      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:
 
    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.
 
  Warren Hope
 
    ISBN 1-871551-05-6 Price: £20.00
 
  Click here to read a review or Reserve your copy of this book now !   Norman Cameron - order here  

  Return to the Home page, or to the top of this page.