Striking Sparks

Not until long after the dust had settled did I realize that the Battle of Earls Court Square, in which I played a significant role, had been preceded twenty years earlier by the Battle of Portman Square.

The ancient commander who lived through both skirmishes, Chevalier Galloway Kyle – the founder of the Poetry Society – could have told me all; but in his nineties he claimed to remember nothing. He had edited the Poetry Review, the Society’s magazine, from 1916 until 1947, when he handed it over to a pretty blonde 27-year-old Scot called Muriel Spark, who was offered the position of Editor solely because she had won first prize in the Society’s competition for a love lyric with – she confessed – a sonnet cold-bloodedly composed in a style she thought would impress the judges. The prize – two guineas – was important to an impecunious writer, as was the offer, with the post, of a free flat in Portman Square. That, for Spark, was a clincher. Alas, she never moved in – the first of a number of unpleasant surprises. Even before the publication of her first issue, Spark was in trouble with members of the Society’s Executive Committee. She insisted that the poems she published should be paid for: an unheard-of and revolutionary suggestion. The honour should surely be sufficient? Then, her first editorial began ‘Cannot we cease railing against the moderns?’ This was to suggest that her readers should be divested of a distinctive pleasure. The moment she began serious work, there was trouble with former contributors who found their submissions returned. A Miss Alice Hunt Bartlett of New York was puzzled and alarmed when her verses were rejected. She had never had any trouble with the previous editor, who had never failed either to publish her or to cash the cheque for $25 which always accompanied her submissions. Other former regular contributors wrote protesting letters, though unaccompanied by either cheques or cash. The most active member of the Executive Committee was Robert Armstrong. Spark published in her first issue a poem of his which had been accepted by the previous editor but failed to print his name on the magazine’s cover. He complained bitterly, in a letter on Civil Service notepaper which bore his title: Inspector of Taxes (Willesden District). He said that he was a well-known contributor to prominent Civil Service journals under such names as ‘Critic’, ‘Observer’ and ‘Dunrobin Goodfellow’: it was a surprise to find himself listed among the ‘other contributors’ rather than by name. He had been working hard ‘to put the Society and yourself on the map’, putting in ‘some groundwork with influential friends’, and to find himself so unrecognized was ‘a surprise’. Spark made the mistake of replying that if his only literary contributions had been published under pseudonyms, she did not consider that the absence of his name was necessarily a special loss to readers. She thus made a bitter enemy, and it seemed entirely possible that he was the source of a number of anonymous letters which began to appear, addressed to ‘The Editor’, and complaining desper-ately about everything to do with the Review. Armstrong engaged a number of lieutenants, prominent among them the editor of Birth Control News, Dr Marie Stopes, one of the Society’s Vice-Presidents, and the intimate friend until his recent death of Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde’s ‘Bosie’). She published scurrilous rumours about Spark’s private life, appearing at general meetings shrieking and shaking her fists. William Kean Seymour, who had wanted to be Editor, and who had done everything he could to obstruct Spark from the beginning, accused her of holding ‘underground meetings’ (for what purpose he did not reveal). Armstrong began ‘editing’ poems by obtaining proofs from the printers without the Sparks Editor’s knowledge and reported Spark to the Committee for writing letters to ‘her supporters’ on the magazine’s notepaper (his own were invariably written on Inland Revenue stationery). Meanwhile what seemed almost innumerable rejected poets wrote protesting letters to Lord David Cecil, the Society’s President, who tore them up. Spark battled on for two years then left, exhausted by the continual slow drip of opposition, sometimes swelling to a torrent. Pressed by the Council to resign, she chose to be dismissed, which meant she was at least then entitled to three months’ severance pay. Readers of her 1981 novel Loitering with Intent – in which the heroine works for the Autobiographical Association – will find a few incidents unmistakably derived from the Battle of Portman Square. Eighteen years later, on the basis of two slim – and I mean slim – collections of poems, I was suggested as a possible editor of the Poetry Review by its then Editor, John Smith. Had Muriel Spark’s memoir Curriculum Vitae been published in 1966 rather than 1992 I might well have thought twice before accepting the unpaid position. But as it was, I had no premonition of trouble at Smith’s introduction: ‘And this is the General Secretary of the Society – Robert Armstrong.’ Smith was a nice man, but he might have warned me. Armstrong was pleasant enough, hoping that I was ‘with it’. What he clearly meant was that he hoped I was without it. The lesson was swift in coming – not via a letter on Inland Revenue paper (which would certainly have worried me) but ‘just a word in my ear’ to the effect that some readers might find the poetry of Roy Fuller, Vernon Watkins and Anna Akhmatova not quite what they expected. My next three issues struck Armstrong forcefully in the cerebral cortex with poems by John Heath-Stubbs, Adrian Mitchell, George Barker, Christopher Logue, Ted Hughes and finally a 23-page poem, Ichor, by Gavin Bantock. Seeing this in proof, Armstrong summoned a meeting of the General Council to complain and was placated only by the offer of the President of the Society, Nevill Coghill (to whom I had cannily sent a proof), to write an introduction to the poem. His suggestion that ‘it is happy for us that our new Editor is a man of risks and discoveries’ may not have been quite what Armstrong had hoped for. As Muriel Spark had done before me I insisted that ‘if you’re a driver, you drive’ – that I would publish what I liked, and that the lady who wrote from the South of France complaining that the contents of the magazine were ‘sheer drivel that is an insult to the intelligence’ must simply be ignored. I clung on for five years, introducing a number of then young poets now celebrated. I can scarcely believe that I did all that work without a salary – editors of the magazine had never been paid, and I didn’t learn until years later that on my appointment the Arts Council had a grant of £500 a year for the Editor, linked to £1,000 for the General Secretary – conditional on the secretary not being Robert Armstrong. The offer was naturally refused. I was awarded a small ‘honorarium’ for the last two years – less than I could have earned by writing one sixty-minute radio feature. My memory of my time in Earls Court Square (where the offices were in my day) are by no means all unpleasant. The staff – the young women in the office (‘the girls’ of course, in those days) – were delightful, and almost shed a tear of sympathy when handing me every Monday the huge envelopes containing 500 or so unsolicited poems (as the only publication with the word ‘poetry’ in its title, the Review received everything from everybody). There were some notable readings connected with the magazine – I can still see Betjeman settled cosily before the fire with his newly published copy of High and Low, and an equally dear man, the wonderfully sympathetic later President of the Society, William Plomer, shyly reading his hilarious poem ‘The Flying Bum’. And there was the splendid 24 hours during which, in relays, a group of members read all 17 cantos of Byron’s Don Juan to celebrate the magazine’s successful campaign to have the poet commemorated in Westminster Abbey. Since my time, Poetry Review has continued under a series of editors, most of them poets, and has never regressed to the state of pale amateurism from which Muriel Spark started to rescue it. I made my mistakes – one of which was perhaps to devote a whole issue to the poems of Sacheverell Sitwell. But the hoo-ha that almost prevented that issue from coming out was the last skirmish of the Battle of Earls Court Square, and for Robert Armstrong a final defeat. Years later, in 1998, when Muriel Spark received a Golden PEN award, I offered her his posthumous congratulations. The air turned blue.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 61 © Derek Parker 2019