Talk for the Friends of the University Library I Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My talk here today revolves around the very particular case of the acquisition of Archive material of the poet, translator and publisher John Riley and I hope to share with you a sense of the intricate pathways down which one might expect to proceed in pursuit of the past. I say in pursuit of the past quite deliberately because when one reads the correspondence of a group of friends who were up at Cambridge at roughly the same time in the early 1960s there is an intimacy of communication which seems to place flesh upon the dry bones of biographical history which is a little akin to the world of the French Historical school, Annales. When one reads such immediate accounts of thoughts and events put down on paper, in a pre-electronic age, to be sent between friends who had gone different professional ways after leaving university and who now lived in different parts of the country, it is as though the vividness of that past possesses a moment of risplende: it shines. In order to get the context in place it is necessary to say a few words of biographical detail concerning not only John Riley but also two of his particular friends, Tim Longville and Michael Grant. John Riley was born in Leeds in 1937 and after doing A levels was called up for National Service, joining the Royal Air Force in 1956. It was during this period, some of which he spent in Germany, that he learned Russian. In 1958 he went to Pembroke College to read English, graduating in 1961. It was at Pembroke that he met Tim Longville who was also reading English and with whom he was to found the Grosseteste Press in 1966 and Grosseteste Review, the first issue of which appeared early in 1968. After leaving Cambridge John taught in primary schools in and around the Cambridge area before moving to Bicester, near Oxford. His first book of poems, Ancient and Modern, was published by Grosseteste in 1967. Some of these poems had already appeared in The English Intelligencer, the privately circulated poetry worksheet which ran over three series comprising nearly forty individual issues from January 1966 to April 1968 and which had been started by Andrew Crozier and J.H. Prynne. Crozier, a graduate from Christ’s College, had recently returned from SUNY where he had been studying under Charles Olson and was about to join the newly-founded English department at the University of Essex, at the invitation of Donald Davie. Prynne was, of course, a Fellow of Caius. In 1967 Riley and Longville published a jointly translated version of some poems by Hölderlin under the title In the Arms of the Gods. These attempts at translating the German Romantic poet can be traced back some years because in 1963 Riley had clearly sent some of them to Michael Hamburger at the University of Reading to sound out his views. The reply from Hamburger can be found now in this new Archive but let me just give you a sentence of two: ‘I have marked a few passages in this and in ‘The Archipelago’. As for your arrangement of the lines in the latter I’m sorry to say that I’m completely against it. You mention natural pauses for breath; but surely if Hölderlin wrote in long lines (and knew his job) the length of those lines bears some relation to his natural breathing in that poem. The impression your version makes on me is one of extremely short breath—a kind of gasping in verse, and H. had the longest breath of any poet I know, so that he had to overflow not only lines, but stanzas and sections. I am also against this kind of arrangement because it is modish and finicky. I can see the point of it in Pound, who started all this, because he was applying an imagist technique in long poems, so that his object was to give full weight to the individual image and phrase.’ Hamburger also goes on to express some despair at the publishing world of the time: ‘I am trying to find a publisher for my own Hölderlin translations—the fourth and last attempt and have almost given up hope of finding one in England. I think that you too would do well to look to America. In 1970 John Riley published What Reason Was, a collection of poems drawn from what he had been writing between 1967 and 1969 many of which had appeared in those magazines of the late Sixties which act as a type of record of an alternative scene to what some might regard as the mainstream: Resuscitator (edited by John James), Collection (edited by Peter Riley), The Park (edited from Essex and then Keele by Andrew Crozier) and Grosseteste Review itself. It was at about this time that he gave up school-teaching in order to devote himself more completely to his writing. He moved briefly to Cornwall and then returned to Leeds where he spent the rest of his life with the exception of a short but significant visit to Istanbul in 1973. John Riley was married to Carol in 1973 and in 1977 was received into the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1973 his volume of poems Ways of Approaching was published and it contained the first three sections of ‘Czargrad’, two of which were republished from Grosseteste Review and I shall say a little more about that poem in a moment or two. Riley’s last volume of poems to be published in his lifetime was That is Today (Pig Press 1978) before he was murdered by two muggers outside a pub in the Chapel Allerton area of Leeds on 27th October of that year. Tim Longville organised the publication of a volume of tributes to Riley, published in 1979, and then the Collected Works which appeared in 1980, some year and a half after Riley’s death, and it was here that the final version of ‘Czargrad’ appeared. As I mentioned, an earlier version of this central work had appeared as ‘Two Poems’ in the one-volume edition of Grosseteste Review 6 where it had attracted the attention of Jeremy Prynne who wrote to Longville thanking him for this latest issue of the magazine and expressing considerable interest in the manner in which this poem was progressing: For what strikes me is how openly placed the poem is to receive whatever fruits are ripe. Mostly up to now the forms have been very tight, with theology to match and the life within purged from these two margins. And now he can hardly finish a sentence! I can’t help thinking of some sweet rain falling steadily over the fields, gracefully immune to human denial; and JR moved even more than moving others, the elegist turning to psalms. Of course it will look like maudlin theism to some, cathected into the lyric stream, and the dangers of this are part of the risk we are part of: “the very name of Love is a sign of distinction, for Love is not established by one but by two, by the lover and by that which he loves…These Minds, therefore, that have been accounted worthy for they leave behind them every name that is called and distinct and defining, and now become nameless above name, and speechless above speech.” And yet and yet; Our own desires will be our true death. The development of this major poem which centres on an imagined Eastern Orthodox city, ‘shining a little with Byzantine gold, ambiguously holding out promise of true government, of true citizenship and held in mind-sight by tremulous energies of artistic creativity’ (Douglas Oliver, PN Review 20, July-August 1981) continued in Ways Of Approaching where a third section was added to the first two. This was work in progress and part of a fourth section was published in Grosseteste Review Volume 7 in the summer of 1974 before the completed section, in draft form, was sent to Grant for comment. The central place that this sequence held in John Riley’s mind is highlighted perhaps by the fact that when Andrew Crozier produced an anthology of ‘Ten English Poets’ for James Laughlin’s New Directions 32, published in 1976, Riley’s contribution was the first part of ‘Czargrad’ and the importance of the continuing development of the work was emphasised by Riley in an undated letter to Grant in which he suggested that ‘No, Czargrad has not progressed beyond part IV and is not liable to. My own small long dark night may have begun. It’s even impossible for me to imagine what it must be like to write a poem.’ However, in spite of that view, a letter to Grant from March 1978 opens with the comment ‘Czargrad seems to be sprouting a part five. Whether genuine extension or self-parody I know not, but since it does not seem to be available to me to write otherwise I’ll stick with it and see what develops.’ I am not aware that anything remains of these shoots unless they are the few lines which appear in the ‘Uncollected Poems’ section of Longville’s volume. The four sections that existed finally in The Collected Works present the reader with an intricate and pervasive exploration of the language of the spirit and they represent a remarkable achievement. It is worth noting here that the progress of the poem was followed by Iain Sinclair who wrote to Grant in November 1974 ‘Yes, I follow Czargrad with a keen eye. It is a work I greatly admire. Along with the Prynne opus. The way is the way on, putting muscle into the eye, taking courage in the breath. Fire is breathed into the straw by finding that these activities are not entirely solitary & crazy (for these times).’ In 1995 Carcanet published a Selected Poems of John Riley edited by Grant but since then, over the last nearly twenty years, there has been relative silence until part two of this brief talk. II In 2009 at a conference about the work of Charles Olson, held at the University of Kent, I met Michael Grant. He had recently retired from being senior lecturer in Film Studies at the university and was one of those involved in organising the conference. We quickly struck up a friendship which was doubtless fuelled by both being Caians, albeit with ten years between us, and both having been taught by Jeremy Prynne. We started to meet quite regularly and over the following months much conversation revolved around those early days of the 60s and Grant’s connections with Longville, Riley, Crozier and the novelist Tom Sharpe. Michael was trying to get his papers sorted out in preparation for a move of house and asked me to look after some boxes of what appeared, at first glance, to be a jumble of empty envelopes, letters, typescripts and other ephemera. Acting in the manner of a very basic secretary I started putting letters and envelopes together and sorting out the different correspondents and as I did so a picture started to appear. John Riley, Tim Longville and Michael Grant remained for many years in the habit of writing to each other about their own poetry as well as about what they were reading. In this wealth of correspondence I read about the setting up of the Grosseteste Press and the background to the publication of Grant’s own poetry, The Fair, which the press put out in 1967. Since I was myself engaged at this time with putting together the Andrew Crozier Reader for Carcanet and in looking through the enormous archive of correspondence which Crozier had meticulously kept the whole enterprise of a reconstruction of the past became increasingly fascinating. It also happened to coincide with the emergence of the University Library’s interest in setting up this new Poetry Archive. From mid-2011 things started moving pretty fast! Michael Grant was very pleased for his papers to be donated to this new Archive and it was he who initially suggested to me that I ought to enquire concerning what might have happened to those of John Riley. Where better to start on this trail which would lead back to 1978 than Tim Longville of course and my springboard was not an altogether promising one: a card from ten years earlier which Longville had sent to Grant telling him: ‘…no I don’t write poems. Haven’t done for years. One day the swine just upped & left me. No forwarding address. Nothing to be done. Not a fate I’m alone in, at least….I write very little of anything any more & what I do is mostly (prepare to laugh) about plants & gardens.’ Now Tim Longville had been involved in the anthology of poems, A Various Art, along with Andrew Crozier so when Crozier’s papers concerning the editing of that volume arrived her at the library it seemed to both John Wells and myself that the correct way to proceed would be to advise Tim of this. I wrote to Tim’s gardening-books publisher in July 2012 and received the following reply: ‘Dear Ian, Frances Lincoln passed your email on to me. It was courteous to let me know about the project, in particular insofar as it relates to A Certain Art. I can't think of any reason why I'd need more details than simply to know that it's happening’. This did not sound very promising but I wrote again mentioning that Michael Grant had donated an important archive of correspondence between himself, Longville and John Riley much of which centred upon both the setting up of Grosseteste Press and the writing of ‘Czargrad’to suggest that Tim might have interesting materials himself which he had kept from those days and the reply came swift and clear: ‘Sorry - not my sort of thing. That sort of academicisation of poetry via the endless accumulation in university libraries of what are in effect no more than laundry lists sends chills down my spine and always did. Infinitely better to let the naked reader confront the naked poem’. Over the following couple of months I started reading Tim Longville’s poetry with a greater sense of care and this led in turn to my writing a piece for PN Review on the early Grosseteste volumes of both him and Michael Grant. I intended this to be one of two pieces of writing, the second focussing on John Riley. When the article was published in March of last year it concluded with the comment that there was to be a companion piece relating to the work of John Riley and there was also the statement to the effect that Michael Grant’s archive of correspondence was soon to be added to the Cambridge Library’s Poetry Archive. I sent a copy to Tim and he wrote back: ‘Thanks for the copy of PN Review. The piece—and in this case the whole issue—does (still) seem very strange to me. Not my world, not (any longer, at least) me. It was generous of you to undertake it, though, even if I tend to think (don’t take this amiss) that attention given to your allotment would have been a more fruitful use of your time. I hope at least that Michael is pleased with how he figures in it: he should be. As for the John Riley piece: his widow is now in the last stages of M.S. and in sheltered accommodation, so may not even be able to read it (though friends may be able to read it to her) but I’m sure she’d like to see it. Perhaps you could send me a copy which I could pass on to her? Or if you’ll let me know when you have a publication date, I’ll let you have her present address if, as I assume, you don’t have it.’ Well, a few days further on Tim wrote again with the address: The Laureates, Shakespeare Road, Guiseley, Leeds and added ‘(She has always had a wry and dry sense of humour and was amused by the excessive appropriateness of that address for the widow of a poet’. I sent my article to Carol Riley and on May 1st last year received a letter from her: ‘Dear Ian, I apologise for my improbable address. The patron of my flat is Alfred Austin—arguably the worst laureate ever but a talented grower of impressive facial hair. John’s archive is packed in two large boxes. I’m afraid I cannot offer to bring them as I am a full-time wheelchair user…As John has no family as far as I aware, I would like to donate the copyright of both the archive and the work to the University Library. Can you tell me how to do this?’ Needless to say I contacted John Wells immediately and matters came speedily to a head. I spoke on the phone to Carol Riley and arranged to call on her in Guisely on May 13th, meeting John there. As we looked through the boxes it became increasingly clear that this was a find of considerable importance and I’m sure won’t mind if I quote his phrase to me ‘We’ve hit the jackpot!’ The boxes contained an extraordinary range of correspondence dealing with the setting up and early years of Grosseteste Press, the drafts of John Riley’s poems, his notebooks, unpublished translations of Mandelstam which was the last enterprise he was involved with thirty-five years ago. Carol Riley was delighted with the outcome and talking to her I quickly realised that this could all have gone so badly wrong: it is just possible that those boxes of papers and notebooks might have simply ended up being overlooked instead of being on display here today: a past brought back to now: risplende.