01 Nov 2011 10:16:53
"A remarkable turn of events," says Reid. "None of my other books has had that sort of exposure or readership and I really wasn't prepared for it. A Scattering has got to a lot of people who read the story because it was also their story, if in slightly different terms. But its success has still come as a great surprise." Part of that surprise is due to the fact that both The Song of Lunch (CB Editions) and A Scattering (Areté books), came out from minuscule publishers.
Craig Raine's Areté magazine first published the poems that make up A Scattering. "And I jumped at the chance to make them into our first book," Raine explains. "It is undeniably tender, an important and touching subject and work of great, unobtrusive skill. It is what it's like to be in the room when someone dies and you love them and it is full of heartbreaking detail: the blanket in the ambulance that was a 'pragmatic red'. And while it is devoid of all the obvious pitfalls of sentimentality and doesn't splurge, it is a very piercing book."
Raine is a long-time friend and literary associate of Reid, going back long before they both emerged on the literary scene in the late 70s, spearheading the "Martian" poetry movement by which the familiar world was seen afresh through striking metaphors and images. Here's Reid observing a weightlifter in the 1979 poem "Baldanders": "Glazed, like a mantelpiece frog, / he strains to become // the World Champion (somebody, answer it!) / Human Telephone."
So while it might appear that Reid has broken out of the literary margins, throughout most of the 1990s he was in fact at the heart of the poetry establishment, occupying Eliot's chair as poetry editor of Faber & Faber. And it is Faber that will publish his Selected Poems this month. "They had been asking for some time to do it, but I don't really have that sort of retrospective instinct and so kept saying 'No thank you'. But when I won the Costa it became obvious that people were asking 'Where are this bloke's other poems?', so it would have been silly not to buckle down. In the end it was a less horrible process than I had anticipated. Of course there are some early poems – and some later poems, come to that – that one winces to see in print. But it wasn't difficult to pick out things I was pleased with, and it was interesting to see how the less mature me is definitely related to the more mature me."
Reid, now 62, says he was particularly gratified to rediscover "a sense of youthful energy that I'd forgotten about. Just trying things out for the sake of it. When you publish your first book you haven't really fixed a sense of yourself, and the writing of the poems is a way of doing that. I wanted to report on aspects of the world that other people hadn't really noticed. I thought I could see the world differently and wanted to record it. That idea some children have – that there is a gap between the world as you think it is and the world as it is evinced by your parents or schoolteachers or whoever – was quite strong in me. My work has obviously changed a lot over the years, but I think that slight subversiveness in my approach to the world was established pretty early."
Reid was born in 1949 in Hong Kong, where his father worked for Shell. He returned to the UK aged six to attend a "very old-fashioned prep school where there was a lot of English poetry from Palgrave's Golden Treasury and we were taught Latin grammar at a ridiculously early age, which, of course, eventually did prove helpful". He says the family home "wasn't especially booky, but there were things around". Most importantly a 1951 Punch annual, which he was initially attracted to for the drawings. He is a skilled artist, has had cartoons published and is currently seriously considering enrolling as an art student at St Martin's next year. "But the Punch annual also carried trivial little verses about things that were supposed to be funny, such as modern art. And that really was a major literary discovery – to realise you could do things with language involving rhymes and so on."
By secondary school he was writing some "absurdly pretentious stuff", but as soon as he won a place at Exeter College, Oxford, to read English in 1968 his poetry "went into hiding". He describes himself as a "wretchedly unhappy" undergraduate, with Martin Amis, an exact contemporary, one of the unwitting sources of this unhappiness. "Here was this fellow the same age as me who was 10 times smarter and more articulate, was a huge success socially and had strong opinions about writers like Tennyson, which he could back up with a clever gag. He was an amazingly mature 19-year-old, and being around his father and his father's chums had educated him rather better and faster than I had been educated."
Both Reid and Amis were taught by then postgraduate student Craig Raine, who nevertheless remembers Reid as possessing a certain toughness and his "own little pléiade of authors to which he referred. I remember him mentioning a poem by Wallace Stevens, which I went off and read. Teachers often say that they learn from their students, but mostly you don't. I really did learn from him. My entire interest in contemporary classical music came from him. He also introduced me to Stanley Spencer's art."
After Oxford, Reid received a small bequest from a godfather and decided "almost on the spot" not to get a job but to "have a go at this poetry business". He says that, at the time, "I'd got it into my head that English poetry was a rather dry and colourless discourse in the style of the Movement. I wasn't terribly interested in that manner of going about things." Instead he was reading poets from behind the iron curtain such as Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert and Vasko Popa, who had just been published in the Penguin Modern European Poets series. "It took me a while to understand why they attracted me. It was because, for their own political reasons and to outwit the censor, they talked about reality, but in slightly fantasised and disguised terms. There was a metaphorical and allegorical inventiveness. I liked the idea of speaking indirectly while still telling the truth. The question 'What's really being said?' has always fascinated me."
Reid began to get poems published in literary magazines such as the Listener, Ian Hamilton's New Review and the New Statesman, where Martin Amis was by this time the literary editor. "That was my first real base, but I still wasn't particularly comfortable in that scene. I would go to these lunches with Martin and Christopher Hitchens and Clive James, and they'd be tremendously witty and clever and worldly-wise, and I'd be cringing over my pasta wondering 'What can I contribute to this?'. It was a bit blokeish, which wasn't really to my taste, but I was glad to have experienced it."
He took odd jobs, including as a fly man at the Victoria Palace theatre and a part-time nanny for Claire Tomalin's son at their Gloucester Crescent home. "Alan Bennett lived across the way and Jonathan Miller was just down the road, ready to lecture you on any subject at any minute. But for the first time I did feel in my element, and I was working there when my first book was accepted."
It was also at Tomalin's house that Reid met his future wife, the actor Lucinda Gane. His own life had featured little in his early poetry, "but that did change with Lucinda, and I wrote the occasional love poem and some bits about domestic life which I, wrongly, thought no one had written about before". He says Lucinda once complained that he only wrote about her when she was ill or in bed. (He once noted "A bank manager's rapid signature / of hair on the bath enamel" on entering a bathroom she'd just vacated.) "But she didn't mind, really, and she was my first and most stern reader. There are quite a few poems I suppressed because they got her disapproval. She was very dismissive of writing that she thought evaded the issue or was coy or half-hearted."
His debut collection, Arcadia, was published in 1979 and won the Somerset Maugham and Hawthornden prizes. James Fenton's review of the book, alongside Raine's second collection, was headlined "Of the Martian School" and the name stuck. "Of course it never was a movement," Reid explains. "And whoever spotted that 'Martianism' is an anagram of Martin Amis was very clever, but it is completely irrelevant. The label was helpful in some ways and unhelpful in others. You do get some attention but you are also pigeonholed. I slightly fell into the trap myself and think if there is anything badly wrong with my second book, Pea Soup (1982), it's that it is an imitation of the first book. I could see the danger of thinking of oneself in those categorical terms. For a few years all my poetry looked like my poetry, which I didn't want it to look like. Eventually I found a sort of wiggly way out by writing someone else's poetry with Katerina Brac (1985)" – his "translations" of a fictional eastern European poet, the first of several personas he has periodically adopted ever since.
But in the mid-80s the world of work caught up with Reid. Raine, by then poetry editor at Faber, took a short break to finish a book and asked Reid to "mind the shop". "I said it couldn't be as easy as that, but he said come in and chat to the chairman, Matthew Evans, and he'll say yes and it'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. The publishing business wouldn't work like that today." Eventually Reid took on the job permanently and during his time there "kidnapped" several writers from other presses, including Simon Armitage, Hugo Williams and David Harsent, as well as bringing in new talent in the shape of Don Paterson and Lavinia Greenlaw. Reid also had to manage Faber's big beasts, and became close to both Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
"I was slightly daunted at the idea of working with Ted, but he was immediately engaging and charismatic, although not in the manipulative way that some charismatic people can be. He gave you his undivided attention and he expected the same from you, which was a very bracing experience. There was also an immediate and unguarded friendliness, so I was a bit surprised and very charmed."
Reid published Hughes's award-winning Birthday Letters, his poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath. "I had seen one or two of the poems and asked him if there were any more. He said there were but he was reluctant to publish. So when he did eventually bring the book round it did feel like quite a moment. He came to my house to deliver the manuscript and, while there was no actual ceremony, there was an element of ritual of him passing this work from his hand to his editor's hand. Of course, the second he was out of the door I was gobbling them down."
After Hughes's death his widow, Carol, asked Reid to edit the letters. "Carol had written to various people asking for advice on how to deal with future publications. Because I'd received letters from him and knew he'd written many more, I told her that the view of Ted would be completely changed by a swift publication of his letters. They present a side to Ted the myth just didn't allow for. In private he was quite frank and rueful about what he called the 'Plath fantasia', which is to say the great myth that had grown up about their relationship, which was inexact."
Reid left Faber at the end of the 90s, and his primary publishing outlet became his own imprint, Ondt & Gracehopper, which he set up with Lucinda. "Although I am lacking some basic publishing skills, such as knowing how to get things into bookshops, I have made money on everything we've published." He has mixed children's verse with his adult work and most recently published an anthology, The Art of Wiring, featuring younger poets – including his new partner, the Irish writer Róisín Tierney, whom he met a couple of years ago. But he's back with Faber for the publication of his Selected Poems and says his work there, especially with Hughes, has had an ongoing impact on his own poetry.
"Getting to know Ted's poems better than I had done, and thinking about him and his way of writing, has certainly been advantageous. Although there is no obvious Hughes note in my work, it does encourage you to be braver than you ordinarily would have been." He says that when he embarked on the poems that would become A Scattering he was "very conscious that I had to leave things behind in order to get to a new truth. Falling back on old mannerisms was not going to do the job. Every step of the thing had to be a step I wouldn't have taken otherwise. So you could say that Ted was a model for that. But without being sentimental, a bigger influence on the book was Lucinda herself."
He wrote the first section when she was alive, although ill, and showed her the poems, which were designed to tell her what he thought about missing her. After her death he waited before starting the subsequent section, set in the hospice. "But this clearly had to be the next subject. When I say I was guided by her, what I mean is that there were certain parts of A Scattering that show Lucinda at her weakest and unhappiest. But she really did have this demand for authenticity and getting to the truth in writing. That was in my mind. Should I have written about the terrible moment when she starts raving? A lot of people would have thought it was in poor taste and offensive to her memory. But the point is that she wouldn't have thought that. She would have said, 'It happened, so you write about it', and that really helped me through that section of the book."
