Celebrations - William Plomer
William Plomer is slipping from memory and that is reasonable, as his poems certainly belong to an earlier era and I have the impression they were often whimsical or humorous, but he was successful in his day with good reason and there is pleasure to be found in his poetry provided due allowances are made for their age. For me, much of this is in the use of language, which he deploys so impressively, and it helps greatly that I was introduced to him this month by someone reciting aloud and from memory a sample of his work at a poetry evening (Arthur Maltby, I am fairly sure, in Lingham’s Bookshop, Wirral, UK).
In a lengthy poem called ‘Now’, he describes a widow in her house filled with objects that she values, and he gives her this thought, which I interpret as affectionate and respectful:
...I’ll prove less durable
than my Tudor spoon, my Hilliard,
or my melon-slice of jade.
Exquisite, isn’t it?
‘One hope I have, that these few pretty things
inherited or acquired, outlasting me,
may be cherished for what they are
more than for what they’d fetch.
Who, you may ask, is to inherit them?
Leaving the world, I leave them to the world.’There is nothing dated in this timeless experience of the way we can all attach memories to objects, giving them a value quite unrelated to their monetary worth. Decluttering is such a barbarous concept when it fails to appreciate the significance of things.
By contrast, his commentary in a number of poems on the sickening bureaucracy of South African apartheid [the poems were published in 1972 remember] remains sadly relevant today, not least since it is all replicated so dismally in Israel’s apartheid regime. For example he bemoans the abuse of language when white South Africans described themselves as Europeans and described black South Africans as non-Europeans.
What’s language for?
I’ll tell you what:
It’s not to call us what we are
But tell us what we’re not.
You can’t have a passport,
you’re not a non-black:
this permit to go is a
non-permit to come back.
The dead are non-living
the hungry non-fed:
don’t think because you’re non-unconscious
that you’re alive – you’re non-dead. His poem A Casual Encounter (In Memory of Cavafy 1863-1933) stands out – or to my mind this is so – within this collection for the sheer quality of its writing. Without knowing clearly what it was about, the poem simply drew me back a number of times until I decided to research it further. It turns out to have a decided link with apartheid South Africa, though it required some internet research to find the explanation in a document from the University of the Western Cape Research Repository.
https://repository.uwc.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10566/521/Field_Constantin%20Cavafy_2011.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y
There are layers to the significance it reveals and the least surprising is that the encounter in question was a sexual one:
“...In the early 1930s, William Plomer praised Cavafy's gentle, laconic irony, but noted that his work was not widely available in English. It would be 40 years before Plomer's poem 'A Casual Encounter' publicly acknowledged their shared homosexuality by recalling an anonymous but intense sexual experience...” This is all very well, but I am not sure about the term “recalling” as the encounter described in the poem does not seem very likely to have been between Cavafy and Plomer; instead, it appears to describe an encounter between an unknown subject and, perhaps, a street prostitute or at least a stranger:
...Cliff walls of warehouses;
no thoroughfare; at the end a hurrying
river, dragonish; steel gates locked;
emptiness. Whatever they said
was said gently, was not written down,
not recorded. Neither had need
even to know the other one’s name...In a note below this poem, Plomer writes
“I had some correspondence with Cavafy and dedicated a poem to him... he might have preferred the present offering.” Why would that be the case? Of course, Cavafy was by then long deceased but the wording says nothing about the two poets ever meeting. The Western Cape article suggests that the sexual encounter would have been typical of many experienced by Cavafy but I find it hard to think it was for this reason, or not simply for this reason, that the poem might have pleased him especially.
Moving beyond this to another layer then, the Western Cape article cited here concerns the impact of Cavafy on South African writers. On the one hand, though Cavafy was Greek, he lived in Alexandria in Egypt until he died in 1933 and addressed issues that were of concern to anti-apartheid activists in the Seventies. At the same time, the ANC and the Black Consciousness activists of the early Seventies were deeply hostile to homosexuals and in some respects the issues raised by artists referencing Cavafy anticipated developments that would come after the anti-apartheid struggle ended. So there would seem to have been something of a struggle taking place over the values to be adopted in the new South Africa once apartheid was defeated and possibly the act of publishing this poem in 1972 was an overtly political and significant act, contributing to this struggle over values and perhaps taking some personal risk to do so.
Okay that is already too much for my slender knowledge base, but what I am working to excavate from this diversion is a point about Plomer’s little book of poems. He appears to be writing amusing, even light hearted poetry, with a flavour of the dilettante. Even his political poems about apartheid are humorous. In reality, though, there is an undercurrent of something far more substantial and serious, far more engaged, hinted at in a line such as this:
Is that all? To you it may seem
a commonplace episode. Once was a man
who might not have thought so. To him
..... let me dedicate
this moth winged encounter, to him, to Cavafy himself.Perhaps I am just no longer capable of reading even poetry in a way that is not political. In time I will try to find out more about William Plomer. For all I know I may disagree with his views very strongly, though I would be surprised if that were so. However, reading this collection, I found Plomer’s gentle poems have a hard edge.
Tennis was thudding underneath the trees
on grass close-shorn.
A quick racquet flashed
the thump of a return,
and a young voice called the score
as if all was for the best
everywhere, not only on this marked out lawn.
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