Tall Tales of the Newcastle Poetry Revolution
Concerning a broadcast by Lee Hall
Abbreviated and expanded from a letter to the British-Poets e-mail list.
... I’m all in favour of linking that modernist development in English poetry in the 1960s to working-class history. As a result of the 1944 Education Act and post-war socialistic policies there was a release of working-class young people into higher education and thus more easily into poetry, which I think was responsible for a lot of the radicalism which developed then (and some of the conservatism). A surprising number of the “Cambridge” group for instance and other innovating poets of the late 1960s were working-class in origin, although by then the process was mature and must also include people like Ted Hughes and Roy Fisher. Such involvement has now become rare.
This broadcast exploited a history which attempted to appropriate this creative movement to a "northern" putsch which was actually no more than contributory and to do this it distorted the whole thing. It wasn’t that cosy regional version, and all sorts of fabrication and omission went on in order to make it seem like a Northumbrian revolution. It was in many ways collaborative, and the main player, MacSweeney, was well involved in what was going on further south before any of the events narrated took place. But every southern connection was methodically omitted, not to mention the appropriation of Wales, Ireland, Wordsworth and Whitman to the north-eastern enclave, all “northern”, all struggling for independence from southern oppressors. The meaning of “northern” in fact vacillated throughout between Northumbria and anything north or west of Birmingham.
For example there was a lot about Basil Bunting as the great original of this upsurgence, with his modernist lineage as part of the Pound and Yeats retinues, his contempt for “southrons” and the renascence of what he thought was Northumbrian tongue in Briggflatts, and his modernism was passed on to Pickard and MacSweeney and so into the future of British poetry. Then up pops Neil Astley and Yes, he says, I named Bloodaxe Books from Briggflatts, as if he were the publishing arm of the great northern vowel retention. Astley did not, in fact, publish Bunting and MacSweeney until they had become safe commercial propositions many years later (the latter in 1997). Meanwhile Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press of London England published the first edition of Briggflatts (1966), Bunting’s Collected Poems (1968), Pickard’s first book (1966) and MacSweeney’s second after the Hutchinson debacle (1971). Montgomery was a heroic publisher, but he wasn’t northern so he was wiped from the history.
I could list about 20 points like this. The greatest source of falsehoods was MacSweeney himself. His 1973 interview with Eric Mottram is already notorious for its mendacity, but two of the worst sections of it were broadcast without any corrective comment. He completely falsified not only the nature of the gathering of poets that took place at Sparty Lea in 1967, but also his own biography.
The account given was that the budding poet left school and became a journalist, and miracolo! found himself in the same office as Basil Bunting, whose poetical wing he was taken under and thus was formed a major arc of the great north-eastern modernist poetry event, conceived mainly as a rebellion against southern English and middle-class poetry, culture and persons.
My version is that MacSweeney left school and went into training as a journalist, as the programme said, but this wasn’t in Newcastle, it was in Harlow Essex, and it was while he was there that he got to know Jeremy Prynne, Andrew Cozier and the Cambridge lot. So he knew and was influenced by Prynne et al. before he ever met Bunting, and this was what turned him from a pop poet into a modernist. A fascicle of his first book The Boy from the Green Cabaret, 1968, appeared in the run of The English Intelligencer, the privately circulated worksheet of the “Cambridge” group, a year or two before Hutchinson published it. Furthermore the Oxford Professorship farce took place at this time and so the claims about being an innocent working-class kid from a back-to-back estate where culture was a foreign language seduced by a wicked London publisher into a disastrous publicity stunt is nonsense. He went into that with his eyes wide open having been advised against it (and against Hutchinson) by the “effete shits” (as he put it) of Cambridge.
[Haven’t been able to check every detail of the above paragraph but I feel quite confident about it].
In March 1967 Prynne and MacSweeney between them arranged for a meeting of poets in a couple of cottages owned by MacSweeney’s mother at Sparty Lea, high up Allendale. About 10 of us made our way there, hung around the area for a week or so, read poems to each other in the evenings, talked somewhat, and spent a fair amount of time in the pub at Allenheads. This has repeatedly been represented by MacSweeney and others as a violent occasion, in which several physical fights took place representing conflict between working-class and middle-class poets. He spoke of people attacking each other with chairs and bottles, it was “real fucking chaos”, he said, and all this was quoted in full in the programme. It was nothing of the sort. There was only one act of physical violence during the week at Sparty Lea, when Pickard deliberately drove his Landrover into the front wing of Prynne’s (uninhabited) car. I’ve checked more than once with others who were there and none of the fights that MacSweeney spoke of took place.
His claim that John James and other “real working class kids” present at the Sparty Lea event were inimical to Jeremy Prynne is untrue. Neither is there any truth in the statement that all these poets were under “direct tuition” from Prynne (any more than he was). There was a close association at the time which included Barry, but it wasn’t a classroom.
And both I and John Temple would like to know why we had to be stripped of our working-class / northern origins and education in order to figure as enemies in this fantasy of class warfare (John actually comes from Co. Durham).
This is the third time that I’ve tried to correct this version of Sparty Lea. The first was in the letter page of The Guardian following a sensationalist account by Gordon Burn. It begins to feel as if whatever anyone says the world, or the media version of it, is determined to believe it was one great punch-up between the northern workers with their wonderful open vowels and the tight-lipped snobs from Cambridge, like an episode from Billy Bunter. The event was also represented as a conflict between local, north-eastern, poets, and intervening southerners. There were actually no local poets at Sparty Lea except Barry himself and some one-day visitors including Pickard. It was organised as a get-together for the Cambridge lot, including Barry, who mostly knew each other only by post at the time.
I’ve never understood why MacSweeney told Mottram such things during that interview. Later, when alcohol had a stronger hold on him, he would ‘phone you in the middle of the night and tell you all sorts of nonsense which he obviously sincerely believed at that moment – that he was having a love affair with a beautiful 18-year old girl, that he had arranged an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro… But in 1973 I think he knew he was lying. Perhaps he was in one of his anti-Prynne phases, which he was subject to, as indeed anti-most-people at one time or another, and so cut him and the whole of southern Britain from the record.
I believe Basil Bunting came from a household which had domestic servants.
But the whole thing. I don’t understand that version of “working-class” and “ordinary” which deprives you of poetry and all cultural activity. It was never like that for me in Manchester nor for John James in Cardiff; we both consider that we came from a rich (if different) cultural environment. I think we had (different) notions of working-class advancement which would bring people to participate on equal terms in the finest things culturally and artistically, rather than wallow in and take pride in a squalid and brutal image which had been projected upon them from above (I think of MacSweeney’s line in obscene poetry here). It was about bringing people together rather than launching attacks on fortresses. For a century or more before the 1960s both rural and urban working classes had been increasingly involved in cultural activity which was an interweaving of local and national, especially in music (Handel and the Lancashire hand-loom weavers!!).
I feel that this whole perspective has been undermined, and diverted from the reality, by a pseudo-Marxist insistence on the local and working-class “community” as an antagonistic oppositional force, a form of understanding which is surely handed down from middle-class intellectuals.
It’s a pity because the programme was an exciting piece of radio documentary and in many respects its heart was in the right place.