A Failed Poet’s Confession
Blessings to be Counting (and Discounted)Part One: Growing up
Cerebral Problems: like everyone I experience what Freud's called ordinary unhappiness. It was short-lived. Brooding is useless self-indulgent. I had better things to do. Doctor/ Professor Drum at my birth confided to my father that I had a brain defect which would shorten my life. It was a misdiagnosis. My mother considered me normal in my development as soon as I could speak, although it was a delayed attribute. I could only talk at six and a half years.
Self-determination: as a child music was the only discipline, I had a natural bent for. But I turned my back on it as a career. I was more interested in sport. Having been considered the fool of the family I was complicit in this to avoid the pressure expectations put on my gifted elder sisters. This freed me for what I knew I wanted to do to make a living. Sport was amateur at the time so it couldn’t be that. I had some ability with words and numbers which allowed me scrape through exams and prompted my future. I was lucky to have an elder sister who encouraged me at difficult times (brought upon myself mostly by playing the fool too in school). Still, I determined my future, a zigzag progression by stealth to epidemiology and poetry. Counting verse line syllables and populations are not unrelated.
Freedom: I’m fortunate in being able to make life decisions myself from an early age. Family worries about my mental capacity and doomed health allowed me a free rein. Their ambitions for me were limited and were surprised when I survived to settle down to make a living in an unexpected career, juggling numbers, not unsuccessful in a small way. I was self-sufficient due to how they added up. Unlike poetry it pays.
Earning a living: I managed as a free-lance epidemiologist by plugging periods of work drought with mainly medical journalism. I proposed projects to health authorities and schools that were ignored by academics and that they identified as socio-politically essential. When I started out everyone in education was said to be left wing. The odd thing is that when Thatcherism came to power, it strengthened my hand. Even sometimes the civil servants would comment Mrs T would like that because it saves money. My emphasis was on cost-benefit and often contrary to the established order, economic-benefit. That is cuts.
The drudgery involved was mostly when I overreached myself and got the work quota wrong. I courted allies to protect my reputation by sometimes doing studies they recognised as compromising for professional reasons. By keeping my profile low, I got a reputation for getting away with indiscretions. I was able to disappear, not being an official part of the establishment order.
Writing: my reports and publications were simply written and understandable to non-academics. My partner M was an editor of talent and helped me avoid the pretentious or unclear. This went down well in committees I had to deal with (health authorities were a cross section of the community) . And led to journalist work in designing poster protocols for staff in hospitals, primary care, schools, old people’s homes and morning radio. I was lucky to be never bored because I could choose by and large what projects to do.
Management: that is until the last decade of the nineties when circumstances overtook me (a chief executive in areas I was more or less his unofficial assistant had a nervous breakdown and as I was well versed in its workings, I was required to extend my consultant role to a managerial one as Mrs T’s government wanted Guys Hospital to manage London health services. I wasn’t a leader by temperament, but I was not without ideas to keep Mrs T at bay. For instance, introducing methods of saving money through medically related rentals in central London which offset Thatcher cuts, and moving services out of general hospitals into public clinics (10% the cost per case). The conversion of the women’s hospital in Soho into a Community clinic was my foremost legacy, both as a training and service resource. It was still thriving twenty or so years on in 2017. But the novelty of being a big wig for a decade soon wore off (though I resisted the CE title and didn’t take the salary to avoid formalisation). A radical reorganisation of the NHS allowed me to get out before burnout with a full pension (six years before I was due to retire) and back pay as a consultant (with a capital C). I had been an acting as one on a modest senior epidemiologist salary. Upgrading me required an interview for the job I had been doing for twelve years, and I was anointed a consultant shortly before I retired by a panel of Royal College of Medicine professionals and health authority members. It was bizarre afterthought to a period of semi-official activity that was not without conspicuous results. Not least making friends in high places. The epithet used about me that I was an enthusiastic Irishman. I avoided the latter by not permitting being joked about my accent. Ignoring comment worked well and it stopped, at least to my face. As a result of being formalised as a consultant , my pension was generous.
Dependence: nevertheless, in many ways I made things difficult for myself. but to a purpose. Going with the flow was against my grain. While a degree of success got me recognised by my medical friends and Department of Heath innovators my inner life was compromised and alienated. I stopped participating in debate and disappeared off to be alone with books and cycling. I did not dress the part and rode a bike to meetings wearing combinations. Supporting friend applauded this as ecological but it annoyed the three-suit establishment brigade. Curiously the Department of Health was stocked with Scottish administrators. They liked my Irishness but never mentioned it. I was one of them in a way. As fellow Celts we were outsiders who spoke the same language .
Getting away with things: I concentrated on solo sports like cycling (squash leads to bad temper with opponents). The need to isolate myself from the crowd in bars, dancehalls and dinner parties goes back to my infancy. Partly because I didn’t want to be trouble as that put my loved mother in a bad mood. Loners are less likely to get into scraps. Breaking my arm while monkeying from the branch of a tree that snapped was concealed until she saw my pallor several hours after it happened. She didn’t scold me. But it started my interest in getting away with things, a perverse form of independence. Though in this case it caused more pain than pride or pleasure. That came later.
Exit Strategy: I developed independence when the notion of a management- controlled job became boring. And, indeed, I sometimes courted reasons to be my own man. Getting away with things could have become a dependence only with the luck I met up with M for whom independence was all. I could depend on her. Fortunately, we had different practical abilities and therefore could contribute to a joint life to our mutual satisfaction. However, in my paid work I satisfied the urge to tempt providence less. I ended up getting on with long-term fellow doers and it resulted in some collective achievements and a complicity, a form of social love. But it took time and times were changing. So, I planned my get away. It took me three years to gradually exit as I wanted to establish a staff that were more than capable of keeping things going even growing. It was exit without drums and trumpets. Only a few colleagues had an inkling. There were no farewell parties, but I left what I was managing in carefully chosen hands. My absence wasn’t noticed for a few months. The capable young ambitious took over.
Complicity: M and me travelled well together at home and abroad. Her intelligence was more reliable than mine due to her brilliant education and remarkable ability to remember what she read. This kept me humble when pride or conceit threatened.
Part Two: Growing Down
Literary Afterlife: I'm lucky to be still able to continue writing in my early eighties. And I’m not unhappy with what I’ve produced in the last 20 years as a full-timer. Excluding myself from the literary world has helped but it means I’ve lost high profile publishers and no doubt readers. I’m not going to be famous. But my work is out there in permanent form. Over twenty books and three more on the way. The only books that sold substantially were my monographs in medical subjects and translations of love poems from the Irish. I should mention Brazilian Tequila sells during football World Cups. I regret my autofictions like Light and Heavy Years aren’t widely read. The death of their publishers and subsequently their presses closed or changed hands, demoted my books to second-hand shops and street fairs.
Old Age: hasn't affected my mind and I’m told that I don’t look my age (except my hands which are withering). I will probably die on my feet still struggling to revise ideas, poems, and self-esteem. I will never appear distinguished. I see my literary peers in France looking the part on television. Dressed up in leisure wear and pleased with themselves. Youth bows to them. I’m afraid as a modish sage, I’m a dead loss. From my youth upwards I quite like being a silly fool. However, I have been sensible enough not to burden myself with anything consistent with what went before. I’m my own fool. Let posterity decide otherwise, if it will.
Port-Vendres: I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. It’s my last resting place. It has a microclimate in a beautiful part of the world opening to the sea and rising to the mountains. I'm a few minutes from the centre of town with its port. The locals seem to like me as no matter how I feel I exchange light remarks and know all their dogs’ names. Swimming is a short bike ride. Not having a social life, I can read more and watch DVD films while cycling my exercise bike. I eat out twice a week where I'm so regular that I'm almost family.
The staff in the public library discovered I write poetry because returning a book there was a hand-written poem on the back page*. They waived a fine when I admitted it was mine. Otherwise, I keep my literary life to myself. Few know I’m a writer, mostly well-off second homers on writer/reader groups who wouldn’t dream of reading me. When I have spare copies of my books. I deposit them in the book shop telling the owner that AY is a friend and doesn’t want money. Occasionally they sell one. I don’t ask who as mystery readers are preferable as you don’t have to ask their opinion and be disappointed by polite platitudes.
Sharing conversations on subjects I’m interested in writing about are rare. Scott Atran, the American anthropologist of terrorism has disappeared to Barcelona where his intelligence is appreciated. Harrington, a Canadian with an Irish passport, who used to drink with the Irish poet John Montague while living in Nice was good for a passing chat. He used to tell me his life-story but only got as far as 1964. He was born American but crossed the border to avoid Vietnam. He died last year. I got him a doctor’s appointment, but it was too late. I never spoke about my writing with him. A copy of one of my books would spoil his life-story. Mine was as a questioning listener.
There are occasional others that I meet by chance when they are passing through. Usually Irish and rugby is invariably the opening remark. I’m cautious with those in this category. I give them my latest book if they are readers. They are dutiful in response, but I suspect they’d prefer to be reading something else. Occasionally they can be too clever for me. A second homer mentioned that I was writer to an Irish rambler. ‘And a reader’ I interjected, wanting to avoid the precious, and he quickly gibed, ‘You mean, you read what you write’. Everybody laughed except me.
Port Vendres is a border town and an ideal place to retreat from the world. However, the age-related demographics (the high turn-over of deaths) once alarming, is now part of my life. I’ve begun to accept my mother was right. “Death is as natural as being born’’. You usually know it happens here when a familiar presence disappears from his/her usual haunts. Its strangely reassuring being the ‘natural course’. Death’s door is open, and one is welcome. It Includes me, I know.
Posterity: my 1970s literary repute is coming to a dead end as far as readers. Even friends have stopped remarking on my annual webzine. I’ve stopped caring if I leave a body of work in good condition. But I worry my literary executives may simply file them away in an archive and that will be that. I’ve never put my poems together in a selected volume*. I might get around to it if I didn’t get distracted by new poems. Still, I’m hoping to be spared four years by the Grim Reaper. I choose four as it’s a square number, two to the Second Power. My double prolixity can be squared.
Since the seventies, I’ve not been a notable figure in the literary world, being hesitant to promoting myself, and thus noticed. This has been a proud choice which has gone against me in getting reviews. But it has permitted me to write on despite the loss of M. She pushed my stories and essays successfully in the 1990s. But on leaving London she insisted that in my will I have a fund put by for posthumous publications. The choice of absenting myself goes back the 1980s when I found the change in literary mores from quality to commercial fashion gave me a twitch in the eyes, Particularly, first time novelists (young female blonds). M also supported my writing practically (spelling and grammar) and emotionally (time finding). It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be left alone in my old age. The loss of M, though more personal than literary, has left my reputation to a ‘happy few’. That's said, had I remained in London and M had survived I doubt that my late period would have been as productive.
Productivity: now effectively the body of my work has been completed, the incline/decline into silence with be a gentler slope, revising poems and clearing the deck. I don’t have money worries which I have my mother’s advice to thank (‘You’re a success if you don’t’). M’s Scottish prudence with getting value for money rather than spending carelessly, supplemented a reasonable pension and writing the odd obituary in a national paper (the best paid work. I had a list of writers I knew. Now nihil). My literary execs will have a financial legacy which they can use to contract out to an agent, if what I leave is good enough (something I can’t possibly judge). But my consolation is I've written what and how I wanted for better or worse since leaving a paid job.
My Future*: what’s next is perplexing as I won’t be able to decide. I may travel again as it appears I am in remission from cancer of the bladder. I might even appear at literary events. But am not counting on being invited. Most of my literary contacts are dead or well past their sell-by date and youth hasn’t shown any interest. On starting out there were lots of references to AY in the journals and papers. Now I can only expect an obituary, if any. Still, it’s not a bad life pottering with my verse, riding my bike and swimming, and reading favourite French writers in the original for the first time. As a last resting place, it’s not without its blessings. My most pressing regret is that I didn’t learn to cultivate friendships and sustain them. Work of the lit and paid kind came first. Result: I’m more isolated than is helpful or healthy. I’m given to brooding on what might have been. But one way or another I have only myself to blame. So, I feel better!
Somehow, I am always consoled by Rilke’s theory of solitude and art. I repeat it to myself when I feel the critical world has dismissed or forgotten me: ’Solitude exists in the dead of night when time has stopped. The surest way to fail in art is to put a clock on it, as critics invariably do. Solitude has no time. It is a condition that is making space for you, the writer, frees your spirit. Patience is all … To be an artist means to grow like a tree which doesn’t hurry its sap but stands at ease in the wind and rain of spring, knowing it will have its summer.’’ (Letters to the Young Poet)
The Present: living alone I am given to thinking up what to say when you meet people. And when I do, I can’t remember what it was and spend the time together racking my brains. People think I’m impatient to get away. Half-true. I can’t wait to get back to imagining the conversation we might have had if I remembered. I suppose that’s why I’m a writer not a social being.
But my unpublished poem Mister Misanthrope is exaggerated. True, because I don’t like some people doesn’t mean I hate them. But as a humanist I’m on the lukewarm side. I try to express it by being cordial to those I don’t like. When I’m being hypocritical, I tend to overdo it. It could be said I’m trying to buy love and affection. But I’m not sure I’m a recipient of either. On rare occasions though I have been surprised by their warm responses and know I don’t deserve it. And become abruptly rude. I’m my own worst enemy and friend.
In life I have too often wanted good or bad to be as I think them. It’s what suits me. Have I been a control freak who is convinced everybody else is no better? Perhaps I have arrived at my old Martin Chuzzlewit moment: his realisation that the selfishness he attributes to others is in fact his own. Dickens in his last novel achieved wisdom. Maybe I will before it is too late.
It's two years since I wrote this. Now the future is catching up with me, an accident broke my wrist, and the cancer reappeared necessitating radiotherapy which tired me out. Age too has caught up with me. I can walk but carry a cane as a fall back but the bike and driving a car are in the past. I am housebound and have several support workers. One who takes me for a swim twice a week. I have an extraordinary friend Del who organises everything, including me and the garden.
* My first and last poem will be
Failed Poet
My muse is out of fashion
as she likes to share a joke.
This makes me a failed poet.
Nevertheless, I bash on,
hoping the facetious ground
will crack open under me,
and the abyss is profound
enough for prefab tropes whose
import is deadly serious.
‘Don’t make me laugh’, my muse
amuses herself. ‘Fame for us
will be predictably
boring as ideal couples,
and the bottom line will be
a couplet.’ My muse chuckles,
‘Just leave the jollies prevail.
Our success will be to fail’.