Novelist and biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Victoria Glendinning, continues to provide new details of how Henry Reed was perceived by his contemporaries, and his visit to Ireland in the spring of 1946. I have covered here, previously, how Reed spent two weeks at Bowen's Court, Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in County Cork. Now, in a recent collection of letters and diary entries by Bowen and her long-time lover, Charles Ritchie, Love's Civil War (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008, with Judith Robertson), we are privileged to discover more about how Reed's visit came about.


Star-crossed and married to other people, the collection's front flap provides some context for Bowen and Ritchie's relationship:


Henry Reed and Michael Ramsbotham traveled to Ireland in the spring of 1946, to celebrate Ramsbotham's demobilization from military service. While it's unclear if they traveled separately, or if perhaps Ramsbotham was already in Ireland at the time, in Bowen's letter we find Reed alone in Dublin, when he inquired if he might pay a visit. Bowen was already aware of Reed, as he had reviewed her collection of short stories, The Demon Lover, for The New Statesman in November of 1945. Bowen wrote to Ritchie:


So, Bowen was already acquainted with Ramsbotham, as well! And we see what might be construed as the beginnings of civil war in Reed's relationship with Ramsbotham, which would only last until 1950. At the time of this letter, Bowen was writing The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), her novel on wartime London.

In addition to her work on Bowen, Victoria Glendinning has published biographies on Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope, Rebecca West, and Leonard Woolf. Love's Civil War has just been re-released in paperback.

Did you know Henry Reed's play, Return to Naples, was part of the same radio series that produced Dylan Thomas's famous Under Milk Wood?

According to Peter Lewis, in his chapter on Dylan Thomas in British Radio Drama (Drakakis, ed., 1981), "The Radio Road to Llareggub," the feature series Return Journey consisted of twenty-four episodes broadcast on the Home Service and Third Programme between 1945 and 1951 (p. 92). In The Growth of Milk Wood (1961), Douglas Cleverdon says the series was originally devised by the BBC Features Department


Scanning the broadcasting schedules in The Times for those years finds these episodes:

• Eric Linklater to the Orkneys (October 31, 1945)
• John and Rosamond Lehmann on the Isle of Wight (April 13, 1946)
• Palace Court, Bayswater, revisted by Sir Francis Meynell and Viola Meynell (September 2, 1946)
• V.S. Pritchett, Return to the Fells (October 13, 1946)
• Edward Sackville-West to Knole (April 9, 1947)
• Dylan Thomas to Swansea (June 15, 1947)
• Stevie Smith to Syler's Green (August 5, 1947)
• Rayner Heppenstall to Strasbourg (September 16, 1948)
• Sean O'Faoláin to Cork (November 20, 1948)
• Christopher Sykes to Berlin (February 19, 1949)
• Henry Reed, Return to Naples (August 17, 1950)

W.R. Rodgers apparently also wrote for Return Journey, though I can't find the title. Mountpottinger, Belfast, perhaps? Several programs were produced by Stephen Potter, who may have created the series.

I've never shied from putting up bad reviews of Henry Reed's poetry. It's possible, even, to take some small, secret pride when Randall Jarrell calls Reed, in 1948, "a nap after dinner." Many critics find Reed to be too reminiscent of Auden and Eliot and, with the exception of his parodies, some even think Reed's work is altogether unoriginal, uninspired, or (like Jarrell) just plain tiresome. Still, almost without exception, most critics manage to find one or two poems which they can call insightful, unique, or skilled in execution.

Such is the case with Herbert Lomas, reviewing Reed's Collected Poems for The London Magazine in 1992. Lomas recalls, upon reading A Map of Verona in 1946, that he found Reed "boringly written." He then proceeds to rediscover all the disinteresting adjectives and adverbs, the "clichés and doggerel," and "dim" language. At times, Lomas almost seems to be reviewing the introduction to the Collected Poems, rather than the poems, themselves: everything Stallworthy finds praiseworthy, Lomas finds at fault.


Herbert Lomas was born in 1924, making him nearly Reed's peer; more so, perhaps, since Lomas served in the infantry during World War II, including two years with the Indian Army's Garhwal Rifles, in the North-West Frontier. At the outset of his review, Lomas admits he "rejoiced" at Reed's "Naming of Parts," which must been repeated like a pop song by well-read soldiers of the Second World War. Indeed, here is a poem by Lomas himself, with a familiar-sounding voice: "Lincoln, Autumn 1943."

Now, lest you think I am attempting some sort of argumentum ad hominem, I will add that Lomas does, in fact, have some very complimentary things to say about Reed's poems. "The Château"—which Lomas quotes at length—"has a plangent cadence, syntactical rhythms, a climactic long trail, and there is potential sublimity in the notion." This is Reed, "at his best." He is "extremely intelligent and gifted," and "no doubt charming," but his serious verse lacks, for Lomas, the smartness and surprising turns to be found in the humorous poems. Altogether, a not-entirely unfair assessment.

Henry might even see the humor in this: a bad review for his birthday.

A short review—too short to add to the criticism page, I'm afraid—of Henry Reed's Collected Poems. Rodney Pybus, in the Stand Magazine (Summer 1993), reviews Richard Hugo's Making Certain It Goes On, Thinking of Happiness by Michael Laskey, Threats and Promises by Rosemary Norman, HMS Glasshouse by Sean O'Brien, In the Echoey Tunnel by Christopher Reid, Pierrot by Harry Smart, The View from the Stockade by Landeg White, and Audrey T. Rogers' Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement, as well as providing this assessment of Reed:



It's nice to see recognition of "The Changeling," published only once during Reed's lifetime, in The Listener in 1950, which is now considered one of Reed's best poems. Stallworthy, in his introduction to the Collected Poems, calls it a 'brilliantly condensed autobiography,' that 'uses the changeling figure (from his mother's fairy-stories) and the family legend of noble descent to articulate a troubling sense of doubleness: true self and false self.'

Over on Yahoo! Music, I was shocked to find available, free for listening, all 118 poems from the album Best of Second World War Poetry (CSA Word Recording, 2007). Read by Rosalind Ayres, Phil Collins, Barry Humphries, Martin Jarvis, and Richard Todd, the anthology includes poems by Roy Campbell, Keith Douglas, Gavin Ewart, Sidney Keyes, and Terrence Tiller.


Reed is, of course, represented by the ever-present "Naming of Parts," read by the actor Martin Jarvis.

Individual tracks, or the entire album, are available for purchase from Rhapsody, and the Commemorative Special Edition CD set (shown above) is on the CSA Word website.

This evening, I'm reading Reed's old "Radio Notes" columns from the New Statesman, scanning for any personal information he might have let drop, in passing: vital clues to his haunts and hangouts, friends and visits, or activities. Here, for example, on October 25th, 1947, we learn he has been to see the controversial "Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures" at the National Gallery ("I wish that he [the director, Philip Hendy] could be allowed to appeal for funds which might help in getting the muck off some of the others"). On December 20th, Reed reports having recently attended a performance of Carrisimi's "most dramatic and beautiful work," the oratorio Jefte (at the Umbria Sacred Music Festival, possibly, in Perugia, Italy, the previous September?).

Then, in this last paragraph of the column for January 24th, 1948, there appears a paramount of name-dropping, blandishment, and cleverly phrased self-congratulation:


Between October and December of 1947, the BBC's Third Programme broadcast an eleven-part dramatization of Paradise Lost, produced by Douglas Cleverdon, who cast Dylan Thomas in the role of Lucifer. The program was not well-received, and reviewing it for his December 6th "Radio Notes" (.pdf), Reed was forced to invent the term "inauscultable" to adequately describe his disappointment:


Thomas's performance was a particular sore spot: "Week after week," Reed says, "we have had the voice of Dylan Thomas coming up like thunder on the road to Mandalay; rarely can such gusty intakes of breath have passed across the ether."

The new series which received a postcard from George Bernard Shaw, Second Opinion, was a show of audio letters-to-the-editor, consisting of correspondence from listeners concerning the Third Programme's talk and discussion programming. Following shortly after the final chapter, Reed participated in "An Argument on 'Paradise Lost'," broadcast Sunday evening, January 4th, 1948, which must have been something of an airing of grievances. It sounds as if Reed found, in Shaw's response to the conversation, more than ample vindication for his negative review. You can almost hear him patting himself on the back! I wonder where that postcard is, today. Buried deep in the BBC Archive?

Curiously, the humble postcard seems to have been one of Shaw's preferred methods of communication (Brown University Library exhibit), and he even had personalized cards printed, some with statements of his frequently requested views on such subjects as capital punishment, vegetarianism, and his failure to garner support for a new, 42-character, British alphabet (bottom of this page). Here's a postcard from Shaw to Ezra Pound in 1922, concerning the publication of Joyce's Ulysses (at Indiana University's Lilly Library):