News & Notes

The world’s oldest literary charity is 235 years old • In 1788 the Revd David Williams set up a fund to ‘aid authors in distress’, having learned that his friend Floyer Sydenham, an elderly translator of Plato’s works, had died penniless in a debtors’ prison.

This became the Royal Literary Fund, which has done writers untold good over more than two centuries. Coleridge, Kureishi, John Ash – genre is not an object: quality and need are the criteria. ‘Through our hardship grants and education programmes to WritersMosaic, our online magazine showcasing UK writers of the global majority, we have supported and worked with thousands of writers over the years.’ Edward Kemp, the Fund’s chief executive, shares seventy facts about their work, including these ten:

1. At his death in 1956 A.A. Milne left the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh to four beneficiaries: his family, Westminster School, the Garrick Club and the Royal Literary Fund.


2. Somerset Maugham, Rupert Brooke, Arthur Ransome and G.K. Chesterton left legacies to the Fund.


3. In 1806, Prince George (later King George IV) was invited to support the Fund and presented it with a house at 36 Gerrard Street, Soho.


4. The RLF digital archive lists every successful and unsuccessful applicant (3662) between July 1790 and November 1939.


5. The tenth applicant was the Chevalier d’Eon, the eighteenth-century soldier, spy and diplomat who ‘famously lived openly as a man and then from 1777, presented permanently as a woman. After a falling out with a superior, d’Eon published French diplomatic secrets in Lettres, memoires et negociations, one of the most scandalous books of the age’.


6. René de Chateaubriand, exiled in London, was a beneficiary.


7. The first woman to benefit (several times) from grants was Charlotte Lennox, Scottish author of The Female Quixote (1752).


8. The RLF’s Bridge programme of workshops was devised by novelist and memoirist Katie Grant to bridge the learning gap between school and university. Today, the Bridge team consists of sixty-four writers working in secondary schools, sixth-forms and further-education colleges across the UK. RLF Bridge Fellows have worked in some 800 schools and colleges, reaching over 30,000 students.


9. The longest-serving RLF Secretary was Octavian Blewitt, who joined the Fund in 1839, the year Charles Dickens became part of the committee: they did not always see eye-to-eye: Dickens called Blewitt ‘the Pious Octavian’ and ‘the Blessed Blewitt’.


10. Dickens had a tumultuous relationship with the RLF. He became Steward of the annual dinner in May 1837, was elected to the Committee in 1839, then barred from re-election for non-attendance.

A chill wind for global literature • The editors of the American magazine Agni wrote on 8 May: ‘It’s the common refrain right now, unfortunately: We’ve lost our Federal support. It’s true of so many who were working toward a stable new life in this country; it’s true of many who were fighting disease and food insecurity both here and abroad; it’s true of nearly everyone who proved the value of their work in civil rights or climate change to government agencies that once proudly supported them. It’s true of Agni now as well. It happened in the way we’ve come to expect this year: on a Friday night, after the week’s news cycle went quiet.’

The editors declared their intention to continue – a possibility which the demands on private charity may make impossible: ‘despite these challenges, we stand firm in our mission to amplify global literary voices and invite readers to explore a wider world through literature. This setback only strengthens our belief in the power of international literature, and our dedication to the community of readers, writers, and translators we serve.’ Agni was founded in 1972 and is more or less coeval with PNR.


Hollowed-out leadership • Andy Croft, poet and editor-publisher of the late lamented Smokestack Books, has published an anthology entitled Sausages! A new anthology of poems in celebration of Sir Keir Starmer KC. This is much more distinctive than the e-book Poems for Corbyn of 2015. That anthology included commissioned poems. By contrast, this collection ‘brings together 50 poets to mark the absence and emptiness of the current Labour leadership. The result is a kind of hollowed-out cultural artefact – fitting, we thought – that uses the form of an anthology to explore the space where vision, hope, commitment and meaning used to be.’ The poem is free from the Culture Matters website.


The Poetry Business at forty: Ann and Peter Sansom celebrate a milestone year • The Sheffield-based publisher The Poetry Business has reached the age of forty and deserves a loud bravo. Its journal The North, its books and pamphlets, its writer development work, its resilience when faced with crises of various kinds, make it a unique presence. It insists on its Yorkshireness. It thrives in Sheffield because of that city’s ‘strong sense of community’: poets attend each others’ readings, share information and advice, celebrate peers’ successes, everyone is supportive. ‘That’s a very Sheffield trait’, said Peter Sansom. ‘We let people into traffic here, rather than pushing our own way in! Poets are very proud of this collaborative and collegiate approach. It often exists in places where there have been hard times – it’s an ethical attitude hardwired into people. Maybe that’s why Sheffield is a city of sanctuary.’

The publisher – with its Smith|Doorstop imprint – dates from Peter’s days as research assistant at Huddersfield Polytechnic. ‘The Enterprise Allowance was offering £40 per week to get small businesses off the ground, so a lot of arts operations took advantage of that. I started in a Victorian arcade in the centre of Huddersfield, where there was a lovely attic office at a peppercorn rent. I’m not sure I really had any plans, my own first book had just been accepted, and I knew I loved poems and working with poets.’ That love has continued unabated. The imprint is responsible for more than a thousand titles. Its annual International Book and Pamphlet Competition is popular and it runs a hundred workshops a year. A recent project was The Coal Anthology, marking the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike. Ann Samson said, ‘Peter and I are both from mining families, so that project meant a huge amount to us. We feel strongly about being able […] to run events in libraries and other venues in places such as Selby, Barnsley or Rotherham where there might not always be much access to poetry. Five years ago, class was barely mentioned in publishing circles, so it’s good that it’s getting talked about more.’ Poetry is not a rewarding business for most. ‘Occasionally it crosses our minds what it would be like to have a “proper” job or a pension, but it’s usually only a fleeting thought. What we do is exciting and we get to work with interesting people and feel like we’re doing something meaningful. It’s really important to believe the work you do makes a difference.’


Faultlines of modernity • John McAuliffe writes: The Irish poet Paul Durcan has died, aged eighty. Durcan’s poems knew intimately the Irish hierarchies they mercilessly surfaced and sent up for five decades: he grew up in Ranelagh in Dublin, and had a difficult relationship with his father, a Circuit Court judge and the subject of coruscating poems. Durcan had been committed to a mental institution as a young man and did not complete his undergraduate studies at University College Dublin, but was part of a group of young poets, including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Michael Hartnett, who gathered around Patrick Kavanagh in his final years. While publishing his first books, he was a mature student, having returned to University College Cork to study Archaeology.

Those books, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), Teresa’s Bar (1976) and Sam’s Cross (1978), establish an everyday surrealism in their angular descriptions, offering alternative news headlines about contemporary Irish life and including entirely characteristic, now-famous anthology pieces, ‘Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin’, ‘The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious’ and ‘Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish Priest’s Parlour’. Subsequent books would include Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela (co-published by Raven Arts Press and Carcanet in 1983), Daddy, Daddy (1986) for which he won the Whitbread Prize, and a pair of ekphrastic books, Crazy about Women (1991) and Give Me Your Hand (1994), which invented monologues for the figures he found in both the London and Dublin National Galleries. Later books included the long poem Christmas Day (1997), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) and a serviceably extensive selected poems, Life is a Dream (2009).

Durcan’s work was attentive to the faultlines which modernity and prosperity exposed in Ireland. The poems both lovingly enumerate and relish mocking the hypocrisies he saw everywhere around him, and the work was at the heart of debates about revisionist history and Ireland’s modernization, with Edna Longley, Colm Tóibín and Niall McMonagle either editing selections or writing about his work and its impact. An astonishing performer of his own work, he held audiences spellbound wherever he read. He was, alongside Brendan Kennelly and Rita Ann Higgins, one of a group of poets who were popular media figures. Paul Durcan’s Diary (2003) collects his weekly radio broadcasts on Ireland’s main current affairs programme.

Durcan was a founding member of Aosdána and was Ireland Chair of Poetry (2004–07). His inimitable voice can be heard to great effect in ‘In the Days Before Rock’n’roll’, a duet with Van Morrison on the 1990 album, Enlightenment.


Nothing but a poet • In May the American poet Alice Notley died at the age of eighty. She was one of the second-generation New York poets, an identification she resisted along with other labels, though she was undeniably the widow and literary executor of Ted Berrigan. Her own experimentation was different in kind from his, moving towards reinvention of conventional forms (metre, for example), but transformed. She developed the conversation form with other, earlier individuals and practitioners, including her late husband. In some ways she resembles Bernadette Mayer, though it is hard to imagine confusing their work. She prospered from collaboration, creative and editorial. The author of more than forty books, chapbooks and pamphlets, she said of herself, in the third person, ‘She has never tried to be anything other than a poet’.


Semantic frugality • On 8 July the American poet, novelist and essayist Fanny Howe died. Howe has been a presence in the margins of PN Review, having contributed one poem – in 2004 – ‘House without Pity’, in her pared down lines characteristic of that period. She has appeared in essays by Marjorie Perloff and others, with an essay-length appraisal by Donald Kane (also in 2004) which concludes, ‘In many ways Howe stands alone as an American poet in her commitment to dealing with the “old-fashioned”, if by old-fashioned we are referring to a poet’s self-conscious exploration and evocation of a peculiarly religious vision. Howe’s link to American nineteenth-century transcendentalism; her alignment to a Western religious tradition that we can trace back to the work of Renaissance poets as well as to later writers including Gerard Manley Hopkins and perhaps even Eliot; and her displays of innovative poetic form add up to make Fanny Howe a necessary and original figure in contemporary American poetry.’ In 2022 Ian Pople dwelt in a PNR essay on her conversion to Roman Catholicism (her sister Susan went in the other direction, towards Protestantism) and its thematic and poetic consequences, insisting on her importance. A correspondent in 2014 described her as having ‘alarming affinities’ with the school of E.J. Thribb – due apparently to her short lines, semantic frugality and unironic manner. Her life, like her writing, risked challenging norms and her work was described as ‘a continual transition’ in formal and thematic terms.


Beyond commonplace values • The translator Angela Livingstone has died at the age of ninety. Masha Karp wrote on her life and work in the Guardian (22 June). Livingstone, as teacher and translator, was ‘known for playing a key role in making the most innovative works of twentieth-century Russian literature accessible to the English-speaking world. Her publications include edited selections of writings by Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva and masterful translations of their prose and poetry, among them Tsvetaeva’s “lyrical satire” The Ratcatcher and verse-drama Phaedra. […] She also published Pasternak: Modern Judgements (1969), a groundbreaking book of critical essays (in collaboration with the poet and critic Donald Davie), a monograph on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1989) and, late in her life, a collection of her own poems, Certain Roses (2017).’ Elaine Feinstein, Tsvetaeva’s best-loved English translator, reviewed Phaedra: her version ‘not only extends our understanding of a great Russian poet, but also illuminates the spirit of her translator, who is as little interested in the commonplace values of the everyday world as the poet she translates’.