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) Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:35:02 GMT Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:35:02 GMT steef@solearabiantree.net 60 http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/images/reedportrait.jpg http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/ 98 98 Reeding Lessons 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: The love affair between the writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen's death in 1973. Theirs was a passion that flourished in the heightened, dangerous atmosphere of wartime London that Bowen wrote about so vividly in her novels. When Ritchie's diplomatic career took him further afield — to Paris, Bonn, New York and Ottawa — the lovers wrote to one another continuously, sharing their hopes and fears, their boundless affection for one another, and their longing to be together again. Published for the first time in this exquisite volume, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie's remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal a passionate, intelligent, eloquent, strong-minded and wonderfully funny woman. They also reveal a man bewitched by her writer's mind and imagination, and by her adoring vision of him as a greater man than he ever felt hi... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/lovescivilwar http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/lovescivilwar Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:35:02 GMT Reeding Lessons 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 in order to lure writers of distinction into the radio field; they were commissioned to return to their native town, or to some other place that had powerful associations for them, and to write a programme about it, in the form of a semi-autobiographical talk interspersed by dramatized flashbacks, extracts from journals, actual recordings—anything, in fact, that might illuminate the theme.[p. 15] 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.... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/returnjourneys http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/returnjourneys Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:07:34 GMT Reeding Lessons 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, h... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/oldsoldiers http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/oldsoldiers Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:44:32 GMT Reeding Lessons 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: Poetry Chronicle II The Collected Poems (ed. J. Stallworthy; OUP, £20) of the late Henry Reed puts the lie to the notion that he was a one-poem poet ('Naming of Parts') who also wrote a brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot, 'Chard Whitlow' ('As we get older we do not get any younger...'). He wrote some first-rate drama for BBC radio in the great days of the Third Programme (e.g. The Streets of Pompeii, and the famous Hilda Tablet plays). While it is true that he published only one collection during his lifetime, A Map of Verona in 1946, it was still being reprinted twenty-five years later. Reed is part of post-war English poetry for what he wrote in the Forties and Fifties; it's good to have him in print, and to see 'The Changeling', 'The Auction Sale', and all five of the 'Lessons of War'. He wrote less than he should have done, but he is worth saving for his distinctive note of exclusion from and loss of love, paradise, fulfilment. He turned, as so many of his contemporaries did, to the Mediterranean for all it could offer that England couldn't — 'the Italian landscape of mythologised desire'. It is not only the soldier returning home at the end of 'The Changeling' to a lovely garden at dusk and a young wife in bed, but clearly Reed himself, who feels the force of rejection and disillusion at the close: '"All this is false. And I / Am an interloper here."' (Reed's homosexuality does not entirely account for the strength of his feeling.) This edition reprints his first book, adds abo... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/trueandfalse http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/trueandfalse Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:08:19 GMT Reeding Lessons Revue des Langues Vivantes, v. 14... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/copyandpaste http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/copyandpaste Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:16:44 GMT Reeding Lessons 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.... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/bestofsecondworldwarpoetry http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/bestofsecondworldwarpoetry Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:50:35 GMT Reeding Lessons 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: Second Opinion, discreetly and amiably presented by Mr. Frank Birch, has made an excellent and entertaining beginning. The proceedings opened with a postcard from Mr. Bernard Shaw about a discussion of Paradise Lost in which I had myself been privileged to take part. Modesty restrains me from divulging on whose side Mr. Shaw seemed to have been; what genuinely moved me was the thought that one's own humble mumblings had reached those ears at all. I have felt no comparable emotion since I gave up prayer.[p. 70] 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: New arts demand new words, and in its short day the radio has given us many, not always beautiful. Seeking during the last few weeks to compound a necessary word that should be at once inoffensive in sound, clear in meaning and traditional in formation, I have met with a philological difficulty. The transitive Latin verb auscultme, to list... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/postcardfrombernarddylansthedevil http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/postcardfrombernarddylansthedevil Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:11:01 GMT