http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/ Researching the British poet, radio dramatist, and translator Henry Reed (1914-1986), author of "Naming of Parts." en-us steef@solearabiantree.net (Reeding Lessons) Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:26:41 GMT Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:26:41 GMT steef@solearabiantree.net 60 http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/images/reedportrait.jpg http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/ 98 98 Reeding Lessons I'm a sucker for a good list poem. Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts" is a list poem, of the cockamamie, villanelle sort. A list poem that includes Henry Reed? That much better. The last one we had, I think, was Anthony Thwaite's "On Consulting 'Contemporary Poets of the English Language'," from the anthology New Poetry (1976), edited by Patricia Beer. Not surprisingly, this poem also comes from New Poetry (Julian Symons, ed., 1983): "Contemporary Dearth," by Valerie Blake. Blake has a little something to say about Dame Edith Sitwell's decision not to be included in Kenneth Allott's 1950 survey, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (something about which her brother Sachie, apparently, had no qualms): Contemporary Dearth Miss Edith Sitwell, from whose work I had selected two 'late' pieces for inclusion. . .felt unable to grant my request on the ground that this selection would not do her justice. . .Yeats and Eliot, Wyndham Lewis Lawrence, Joyce and de la Mare; John Heath-Stubbs and William Plomer Francis Scarfe and Edwin Muir. Sidney Keyes and David Gascoyne Williams, Charles, and Laurie Lee; Lawrence Durrell, Peter Quennell Herbert Read and Watkins, V. Normans Nicholson and Cameron Terence Tiller, Wilfred O.; Blunden, Rosenberg and Huxley Empson, Auden, H. Monro. Robert Graves and Alun Lewis Edward Thomas, Barker, G.; Michael Roberts, Dylan Thomas Fuller, Roy, Day Lewis, C. Siegfried Sassoon and Arthur Waley Andrew Young and Henry Treece; Heppenstall, R., and W. R. Rodgers Kathleen Raine and Louis MacNeice. Kenneth Allott, Stephen Spender Richard Church and Spencer, B.; Betjeman, John, Sacheverell Sitwell Henry Reed and Prince, F. T. Campbell, Roy, Charles Madge, Anne Ridler Patric Dickinson, Alan Hodge; Lehmann, John, and Laurence Binyon Warner, Rex, and Ruthven Todd. . . .As a result there is a gap, which I regret, in the representative nature of this collection. Kenneth Allott, Editor, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, 1950.[pp. 28-29]... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/contemporarydearth http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/contemporarydearth Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:26:41 GMT Reeding Lessons Henry Reed was very much in demand in 1973. He made at least three public appearances that year: the first, in May, was "Poets in Person" with Édouard Roditi, at the Poetry Society. In October, Ian Hamilton organized "The Poetry of War" at the Mermaid Theatre, with Charles Causley and Roy Fuller. On Tuesday evening, September 25, 1973, we find Reed at a reading hosted at The Pindar of Wakefield pub, bringing with him an "unpublished war poem" to share. This announcement appeared in The Observer on September 23: The Pindar of Wakefield could boast of being established in 1517, although the current building was constructed after a fire in 1878. A pinder (or pinner) was a person employed to impound stray cattle and to look after the pound. The pub takes its name from a traditional ballad about a mythical Wakefield pound-keep who resisted Robin Hood. As an underground music venue, its stage has been graced by the likes of Bob Dylan in 1962, The Pogues in 1982, and Oasis in 1994. In 1986 it became The Water Rats Theatre Bar, and it's now the Monto Water Rats: [Water Rats Theatre Bar, St Pancras, WC1, by ... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/thepindarofwakefield http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/thepindarofwakefield Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:17:34 GMT Reeding Lessons The place where our two gardens meet Is undivided by a street, And mingled flower and weed caress And fill our double wilderness Among whose riot undismayed And unreproached, we idly played, While, unaccompanied by fears, The months extended into years, Till we went down one day in June To pass the usual afternoon And there discovered, shoulder-tall, Rise in the wilderness a wall....Henry Reed's poem "The Wall," set to music by Professor Emmy van Deurzen. "The Wall" first appeared in The Penguin New Writing, in 1943. Emmy accompanies a bunch of poems with guitar on her YouTube channel, including Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," and Louis MacNeice's "A Prayer Before Birth" and "Sunlight on the Garden."... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/thewall http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/thewall Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:20:40 GMT Reeding Lessons Ages ago, back in 2007, I had a post about the critic and Eliot scholar, Dame Helen Gardner. Henry Reed had been a student of Gardner's at the University of Birmingham in the 1930s, and had introduced her to Eliot's poetry when he sent her a copy of "East Coker" in 1940. Gardner had credited Henry Reed in an article she wrote for the Summer, 1942 New Writing & Daylight on "The Recent Poetry of T.S. Eliot," saying that Reed had pointed out to her that some of the sea imagery in Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" may have come from the works of Herman Melville, and that 'the voice of Mr. Eliot's seabell is certainly like the sound of the Liverpool bell-buoy which Redburn heard as he sailed in to the Mersey.' This last is, of course, entirely incorrect. How do we know it's not true? Because Eliot tells us so. In her book, The Composition of Four Quartets (Oxford University Press, 1978), Gardner states: After the publication of Little Gidding I wrote to Eliot, wishing to let him know how much these poems had meant to me, and told him that Mr. Lehmann had passed on his remarks. He replied saying my article had given him 'great pleasure' and went onOnly two very small points occur to me. The first is that I have no such connection as you suggest with the house at Burnt Norton. It would not be worth while mentioning this except that it seemed to me to make a difference to the feeling that it should be merely a deserted house and garden wandered into without knowing anything whatsoever about the history of the house or who had lived in it. ... The other point is that I have never read or even heard of the book by Herman Melville.24 American critics and professors have been so excited about Melville in the last ten years or so that they naturally take for granted that everybody has read all of his books, but I imagine that bell buoys sound very much the same the world over.24 I had suggested, with acknowledgement to Henry Reed, that a passage from Redburn lay behind the close of Part I of The Dry Salvages, Eliot mistakenly assumed Henry Reed was an American Professor of that name.... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/kippled http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/kippled Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:33:49 GMT Reeding Lessons Here, in an announcement from the Manchester Guardian from November 5, 1945, we find Henry Reed a good deal north of his normal environs, giving a lecture on modern poetry near Withington, outside Manchester proper: The Lamb Guild, according to their website, was founded in 1938 by the University of Manchester's department of Extra-Mural Studies to make residential continuing education available to local adults through lectures, conferences, and field trips. The location given in the ad on Palatine Road is the Holly Royde mansion, which you can still see today via the magic of Google Maps.... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/lambguildhouseassociation http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/lambguildhouseassociation Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:55:35 GMT Reeding Lessons In 1971, the BBC issued two collections of Henry Reed's plays for radio: Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio, and The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio. The Hilda Tablet volume collects the plays A Very Great Man Indeed (1953); The Private Life of Hilda Tablet (1954); A Hedge, Backwards (1956); and The Primal Scene, As It Were (1958), including restoration of some "indelicate" scenes which had been censored or changed for broadcast. To mark the publication of the plays, Reed was interviewed by Christopher Ford for an article in the Guardian, "The Reeve's Tale" (Herbert Reeve was the bumbling biographer in the Tablet plays, you see). A retrospective of the plays and their broadcasts, the article features this wonderful photograph of Reed (poorly scanned, sadly), taken by staff photographer Peter Johns: Reed's quotes for the article amount to just a few paragraphs. Prodded about rumored accusations of libel from (the unnamed) composer Elisabeth Lutyens for his Hilda Tablet character (voiced by Mary O'Farrell), Reed deflects: As long as the characters are funny it doesn't matter who you're getting at.... In fact I'm not 'getting at' anyone, only myself—there's a good deal of aboriginal Hilda Tablet in me. The big revelation in the article is that Reed was actually working on an eighth Hilda Tablet script as late as 1968 (in his dedication for Hilda Tablet and Others, Reed says "Altogether, they totalled seven. The number is sometimes given as nine; but people exaggerate"): I was writing another, it was going to be called 'After a Certain Age'—I was writing it one night and the next morning Douglas Cleverdon, the producer, came round for some other reason and had to break the news that Mary O'Farrell was dead. She ... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/thereevestale http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/thereevestale Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:48:31 GMT Reeding Lessons This blurb appears in a publisher's advertisement in The Spectator for February 18, 1949. It's lifted, according to the byline, from a book review Henry Reed wrote for The Observer, on Gerard Hopkins' translation of selections from Proust (London: Allan Wingate, 1948). MARCEL PROUST A Selection from his Miscellaneous Writings Chosen and Translated by Gerard Hopkins'We have the charming experience of meeting Proust outside the turmoil of creation, chatting, confiding, preparing... the same character, the same voice, that come through the translation of Scott-Moncrieff come through Mr. Hopkins's no less sensitive versions.' Henry Reed, Observer. 10s 6d netNot only is this the first record I have of Reed reviewing this particular work, but it's actually the first clue I have to any Reed review appearing in The Observer, at any time. Are there more? I bet there are more. Tracking down a Observer review is going to be difficult. I don't know the date (but we can easily surmise it was sometime in late 1948 or January 1949), and I can't find a library within easy reach that has the paper from the 1940s, either in print or on microfilm. I'll check Book Review Digest, etc., and see if I can pinpoint it. (And what do we have, here? In The Guardian News & Media Archive catalog, is a record for a photograph of "Reed, Henry: Radio," in a file for "Prints by Guardian/Observer photographers.")... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/observerreviewclue http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/observerreviewclue Sun, 13 Nov 2011 14:28:11 GMT