INTRODUCTION

Peter Redgrove’s work is exceptionally of a piece. He had one great theme, a transformed vision of the world which is at the same time an affirmation of neglected human powers. He explored this theme with extraordinary dedication and intensity, and at the same time his writing is an unusually complete revelation of the man. His voice is educated, even scholarly, well-mannered but with a note of what Philip Fried called ‘disciplined wildness’.^fn1 Both in person and in writing he had a genial, at times wicked, and at times bizarre sense of humour. His career was a sustained and heroic commitment to the creative imagination and his poetic style, matching the vision of which it was the expression, was at once exuberant and precise, fantastic and scientific. Unorthodox and challenging ideas are matched by minute and exact observation. So in one poem, characteristically titled ‘In the Pharmacy’, he asks his reader to entertain the idea that a ‘pupa cogitates’, but at the same time reveals the ‘floury wings’ and ‘fernleaf tongue’ of the moth. He once said that anyone who described him as a surrealist could never have looked through a microscope.

As a young boy he wanted to be a scientist. He had his own laboratory in the family home and when he left school, just short of his eighteenth birthday, he had won a State Scholarship and an Open College Scholarship to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. But this image of conventional success and promise was delusive. The young man was already troubled by obsessions that would, within months of leaving school, shatter the youthful scientist and, over the next few years, remake him as a poet.

Before going to university he had to subject himself to military service and, under the stress of the harsh regime of basic training, he had a nervous breakdown. Sexual obsessions, originating in his superficially conventional but deeply conflicted family life, and phobias about his health and sanity, overwhelmed him. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and, at that time, there was only one treatment for schizophrenia: Deep Insulin Coma Therapy. He escaped the army, but at the cost of a more extreme ordeal: daily injections of insulin, inducing a coma from which he was brought back by injections of glucose. He was subjected to this – later discredited – treatment fifty times.

The following year he went up to Cambridge but it became apparent that he no longer had any enthusiasm for pursuing a degree in science. During his years at Cambridge what absorbed him was not science but poetry. By his own, perhaps self-mythologising, account it was his first sexual experience that made him a poet. After making love a peace and silence came into his head, and into this silence his first poem, ‘The Collector’, which became the title-poem of his first collection.^fn2 An even more important poem of his Cambridge years was ‘Lazarus and the Sea’, which encodes the transformative effect of his insulin coma treatment. During those comas he had vivid dreams, in one of which he was ‘dead, and dissolved into the soil’.^fn3 When, setting out as a poet, he asked himself what authority he had, he remembered this experience:

I could say nothing of where I had been,

But I knew the soil in my limbs and the rain-water

In my mouth, knew the ground as a slow sea unstable

Like clouds and tolerating no organisation such as mine

In its throat of my grave.

Written at the age of twenty-one, ‘Lazarus and the Sea’ is an astonishingly authoritative and resonant poem, which may well have inspired Sylvia Plath to follow the example of using the figure of Lazarus in her poem inspired by aggressive psychiatric treatment, ‘Lady Lazarus’.

Redgrove was not isolated as a poet at Cambridge. Early in his second year he joined a poetry group run by a freshman, Philip Hobsbaum. Hobsbaum was soon convinced that his new friend was a genius, and Redgrove in turn credited Hobsbaum with having ‘that genius as a teacher that welcomes people on their own terms’.^fn4 It was also at Cambridge that Redgrove began his lifelong friendship with Ted Hughes. He later told Hughes’s biographer that from the start he looked up to Hughes as ‘a senior poet’,^fn5 but this was modesty born of their later contrasting fortunes: by the time he left Cambridge he had published ten poems, including one in the TLS, and started his own magazine, Delta, whereas Hughes published nothing under his own name, and did not even tell his closest friends that he wrote poetry until shortly before he graduated. Many years later Hughes wrote warmly to Redgrove of ‘how important you’ve been to me. You’ve no idea how much – right from the first time we met.’^fn6

Redgrove left Cambridge without taking a degree, but was able to marry the woman who had inspired him to poetry, Barbara Sherlock, a sculptor, and settle in London with a well-paid job in the publicity department of Odham’s Press. Thus began a long period of stress in which he attempted to reconcile the vocation of poetry, on which his life was centred, with earning a living in the commercial world. His father was a successful advertising man, and the jobs in publicity, journalism and advertising that Redgrove took during the next seven years were attempts to appease or emulate this domineering model of conventional masculinity who, Peter’s psychiatrist had shrewdly noted, did not understand, though he did his best materially to help, the son he loved. Peter’s loyalty had always been to his capricious, imaginative and sexually rebellious mother, though she had contributed materially to his psychological difficulties by confiding in him at puberty about her adulteries and abortions.

Philip Hobsbaum also settled in London when he graduated in 1955 and the student poetry group was revived to become The Group, a collection of poets who gathered weekly to discuss each other’s poetry with a critical rigour that Hobsbaum had learned from his Cambridge tutor, F. R. Leavis. As well as Hobsbaum and Redgrove, Peter Porter, Martin Bell, George MacBeth, Edward Lucie-Smith and Alan Brown-john were to be the mainstays. Although no-one else wrote quite like Redgrove, the Group provided him with a world of fellow-poets, and Hobsbaum, Porter and Bell were particularly supportive friends.

Despite working full-time (apart from a period of seven months in 1957 when he escaped to Spain with the help of a legacy) he wrote prolifically, as he was always to do – enough for him to bring out two volumes in quick succession: The Collector (1960) and The Nature of Cold Weather (1961). He wrote some wonderful and varied poems during this period: the haunting evocation of longing for a child, ‘Bedtime Story for My Son’, the poignant elegy for his brother who was killed in an accident, ‘Memorial’, the high-spirited comic dialogue ‘The Play’ and perhaps above all the prose monologue ‘Mr Waterman’, in which anxieties about sexuality, mental stability and the forces of nature are given memorably comic expression.

However, there is a sense that, for all the energy and commitment that he was putting into being a poet, Redgrove was marking time during this period: there is no clear advance on his undergraduate work, and he had still not written a poem better than ‘Lazarus and the Sea’. His circumstances changed in 1962 when he won a Gregory Fellowship at the University of Leeds. At Leeds he ran a poetry group, but for three years he was paid mainly to get on with his own work, and the result of this freedom was that he began writing with a consistently greater clarity, fluidity and coherence, and began more deeply to explore the preoccupations which drove him to poetry. Nowhere is this development more evident than in the long poem ‘The Case’, which draws on his personal experience of an Oedipal family situation to dramatise a consciousness torn in conflict between the mother-world of nature and the masculine-coded idea of God. Ted Hughes was one who detected in The Force (1966), and in ‘The Case’ especially, a new level in Redgrove’s writing: ‘the best & biggest thing you’ve done by far – in an altogether new dimension’. He singled out this passage as ‘a wonderfully sustained piece of truly musical writing’^fn7:

And I swam in the thunderstorm in the river of blood, oil and cider,

And I saw the blue of my recovery open around me in the water,

Blood, cider, rainbow, and the apples still warm after sunset

Dashed in the cold downpour, and so this mother-world

Opened around me and I lay in the perfumes after rain out of the river

Tugging the wet grass, eyes squeezed, straining to the glory,

The burst of white glory like the whitest clouds rising to the sun

And it was like a door opening in the sky, it was like a door opening in the water,

It was like the high mansion of the sky, and water poured from the tall French windows.

It was like a sudden smell of fur among the flowers, it was like a face at dusk

It was like a rough trouser on a smooth leg. Oh, shame,

It was the mother-world wet with perfume. It was something about God.

As an adolescent Redgrove had rolled in mud in a thunderstorm, the sensitivity of his skin exquisitely enhanced by the electricity in the atmosphere. He called this being ‘raped by thunder’,^fn8 and it was the beginning of a troublingly fetishistic sexuality (which probably had its psychological roots in his mother’s intrusive revelations and his rejection of his father’s domineering masculinity) but also of a belief in the possibilities of visionary awakening through enhanced senses. Something of this secret life had found expression in ‘Lazarus and the Sea’, but ‘The Case’ takes the visionary experience, and the religious questioning, much further, and marks Redgrove’s arrival as a major poet.

Something else happened at Leeds which affected the direction of Redgrove’s poetry. For ten years he had been loyal to Barbara, and striven to reconcile what were for him the often conflicting demands of poetry and family life. In Leeds he had his first affair, with Dilly Creffield, the wife of Dennis Creffield, the Gregory Fellow in painting and a close friend. In 1966 Redgrove moved with Barbara and their children to Falmouth, to take up a teaching post at the School of Art. This seemed to signal the end of the affair and a determination to repair the marriage – in the first poem that he wrote in Cornwall, ‘The Moon Disposes’, his companion is Barbara and the hoofprints signify the broken ring that they are trying to mend. But shortly afterwards he was writing poems with a very different significance, featuring a dangerously alluring woman who is also a muse – ‘Young Women With the Hair of Witches and No Modesty’ is the most accomplished of these.

Although he now had a salaried job again, his work for the School of Art suited and stimulated him, at least in the early years. It was a small, very ‘sixties’ institution in which it was possible for all the staff and students to know each other, and for a creative spirit such as Redgrove to be given his head. Many students later testified to the inspiration they drew from him. But, as his poems inspired by Dilly testify, his life was still divided, he was drinking heavily, and still troubled by his aberrant sexual preoccupation with mud and dirt. He later attributed the saving of his sanity to an unorthodox Jungian therapist, John Layard, who had recently settled in Cornwall. He heard Layard lecture, and his notes suggest that it spoke to some of his deepest preoccupations: Layard spoke of God feeding on our sins, and the serpent telling Mary that she was too clean. In a book based on one of his own case-histories he had written, ‘that which has hitherto been most feared or despised may be … transformed into spiritual strength’.^fn9 This was exactly what Redgrove wanted to hear, and shortly afterwards, on a sleepless night journey to London, he drafted the first poem that directly celebrates his own dark secrets, perhaps the most important poem in his oeuvre, ‘The Idea of Entropy at Maenporth Beach’. The author’s personal investment in the subject is superficially disguised by the fact that the protagonist is a glamorous blonde woman in a white dress. Does the speaker identify with the woman, or is he a voyeur, aroused by the sight of the woman covered in mud? The answer is both: Redgrove was a heterosexual man who desired to be a woman, for him personally the ‘Game’, as he called his dirt-fetish, was a route to escape from oppressive gender-identity; but above all, of course, the poem works beyond its author’s personal psychology, as an achieved metaphor for the acceptance of the darker side of the self:

Drenched in the mud, pure white rejoiced,

From this collision were new colours born,

And in their slithering passage to the sea

The shrugged-up riches of deep darkness sang.

Redgrove underwent therapy with Layard for eighteen months. He worked mainly by dream analysis but also, in the spirit of his first mentor the idealistic libertarian Homer Lane, encouraged his patient not only to act out his ‘Game’ but to sleep with as many women as he could. Not surprisingly the marriage didn’t survive.

But perhaps even more important than Layard was Redgrove’s meeting with the young poet and novelist Penelope Shuttle. Their relationship began in 1969, shortly before Redgrove and Barbara separated, and early the following year she moved in with him and one of the great literary partnerships began. Shuttle was the inspiration of Redgrove’s experimental novel, In the Country of the Skin (1973), which won the Guardian Prize for fiction, they published the joint poetry collection The Hermaphrodite Album, but most importantly they worked together on Redgrove’s first non-fiction work, The Wise Wound. This book was inspired by Shuttle’s own menstrual distress, but its subject was paradoxically to be more significant to him than to her. For the first time his poetic and scientific selves worked in harmony. He had always evaded the question of ‘discourse’ in poetry, claiming that it was something which could not be argued about, but now his poetry entered a new phase in which it was structured by a coherent vision, and he insisted on a continuity between it and his prose work. Moreover, while menstruation seems a bizarre preoccupation for a male writer (and it remained one for Redgrove till the end of his life), his work on the validation of this despised aspect of female sexuality helped him to develop a similarly ideological attitude to his own sexuality: menstruation was an equivalent for his ‘Game’.

His work became even more prolific and, especially in the late seventies and early eighties, with The Apple-Broadcast and The Man Named East, remarkably consistent in quality. His finest work combines a profound subjectivity, highly developed sensuous responsiveness and a scientist’s awareness of the natural world, with a syntactical fluidity that moves between these levels to create a multi-dimensional perspective:

The wireless at midnight gives out its hum

Like a black fly of electricity, folded in wings.

A moth like a tiny lady dances to the set,

The hum is light to her, a boxed warm candle,

This set has inner gardens full of light.

Our baby, like a moth, flutters at its mother,

Who mutters to her baby, uttering milk

That dresses itself in white baby, who smiles

With milky creases up at the breast creating

Milky creases, and milk-hued water

Hangs in the sky, waiting for its clothes,

Like a great white ear floats over us, listening

To the mothy mother-mutter, or like a sky-beard smiles

And slips into its thunderous vestry and descends

In streaming sleeves of electrical arms

To run in gutters where it sucks and sings.

(‘The White, Night-Flying Moths Called “Souls”’)

And there is always a current of humour, quiet in these lines, more uproarious in ‘Pheromones’, where the poet imagines that he has the olfactory powers of a dog and can distinguish the smell of all the users of the pub gents, including a tennis champion:

    my own genius mingles with that

Of the champion and the forty-seven assorted

Boozers I can distinguish here in silent music,

In odorous tapestries. In this Gents

We are creating a mingled

Essence of Gent whose powers

To the attuned nose

Are magnificent indeed

And shall affect the umpires

Who shall agree with what their noses

Tell them strides viewless from the urinal

Where the gentlemen sacrifice into stone bowls

In silent trance.

The productivity and consistency of his writing in this period were enhanced by a highly developed working method, which ensured that he never got stuck – as Philip Larkin once did for a whole year – on a single poem. He kept a journal in which records of his intimate life and dreams were interspersed with passing phrases and observations. He called these ‘germs’; examples are ‘The sparkling well: Fenten ow Clyttra’ and ‘Horus comes to meet you through this oil’, which developed into ‘From the Life of a Dowser’ and ‘The Proper Halo’ respectively. He practised ‘sealed writing’, not revisiting his journals for several months, then writing out and developing, in a separate notebook, imagery that struck him as promising. This book he would seal again before developing the imagery further into prose and finally verse drafts. By this method the composition of a single poem might cover several years, and he was always at work on different stages of numerous poems simultaneously.^fn10

From his first collection through to the mid-1980s he had been published by Routledge, a mainly academic publisher with a small poetry list who took a very hands-off approach to editing, and allowed him to design his collections more or less as he wished. However, for many years he was dissatisfied with Routledge’s marketing of his work, and when he learned that Robin Robertson, the editor at Secker, was interested in recruiting him he jumped at the chance. He felt that with Secker (In the Hall of the Saurians, The First Earthquake, Under the Reservoir) and subsequently Cape when Robertson moved there (My Father’s Trapdoors, Assembling a Ghost, From the Virgil Caverns and the posthumous The Harper) his books were more professionally handled. However, Robertson took a much more active role as editor than Redgrove was used to, and was decisive in his preferences. The last four Routledge books had each been over 130 pages long; the Secker and Cape books were less than half this length, and many of the poems Redgrove submitted were rejected. So from the late eighties onward he formed the habit of bringing out supplementary collections with Rupert Loydell’s Exeter-based Stride Books: Dressed as For a Tarot Pack, The Laborators, Abyssophone, Orchard End and Sheen. Penelope Shuttle continued this tradition after his death, when she published the overspill from The Harper with Stride as A Speaker for the Silver Goddess. Redgrove developed the idea that his work could only be fully appreciated by following this ‘alternative stream’ as he called it, as well as the Secker/Cape collections. He cherished the idea of a ‘Collected Poems’ in which both sides of his work would be represented. By selecting from every verse collection that he published, this volume tries to honour that wish.

In his last years he was still experimenting, and began casting his poems as what he called ‘stepped verse’, essentially the same as William Carlos Williams’s ‘variable foot’, with each line divided into three rhythmic units. He believed that this form had both aural and visual effects, controlling the breath when reading aloud, and carrying the reader’s eye forward to anticipate the narrative of the poem. He also believed that each column of verse could be read independently, though few readers have found much profit in this. Regardless of how one responds to the new form, Redgrove’s poetry retained its imaginative verve and precision to the last. ‘Reservoirs of Perfected Ghost’, which imagines a field of bluebells as ‘heaven is so full of sky/ it cannot hold it’, or ‘The Harper’ in which the circular ripples created by water-beetles are conceived as musical improvisations – ‘The music bends/ turning over and over/ in its helicals’ – are just two examples of how his imaginative vitality and freshness of vision persisted to the end of his life.

Neil Roberts

I

EARLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS

(1953–54)

II

THE COLLECTOR⁴

(1960)