586
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Advice to the English," notes for the new edition of a textbook.
Pound mentions the London Library. In the Great War,
T.
E. Hulme
borrowed some books from the library and took them to the front:
and a shell buried 'em in a dug-out,
And the library expressed its annoyance
There was something admirable about a library that wouldn't accept
the Great War as an excuse for not returning books in good condition.
"England expects ... "The attitude was typical of England as a whole.
They weren't in any hurry to be friendly, like the Americans, but once you
were a member you had a definite standing, and they gave you the benefit
of the doubt. You could let a bill go unpaid for three months without getting a
nasty letter from the company. But
if
you turned out to be the kind of person
who didn't live up to the trust they had placed in you ...
I felt a certain guilt for receiving so many benefits and not paying
taxes. A strike relieved that feeling: for a week we sat in darkness lighted
only by candles and stood in line for candles at a shop down the road. People
were cheerful about it, especially the old ... it was like the blackout during
the war. Then everyone had pulled together . .. so different from London
now with its teddyboys and Wogs, and tourists elbowing you to get on the
bus.
That year the Oxford University Press published a book of my poems.
It
was reviewed in the English papers, and I was invited to give poetry
readings. I read at the Poetry Society in Earls Court Road and traveled to
Manchester and Newcastle. At the Morden Tower in Newcastle the audi–
ence came from a bar downstairs and sat around on the floor. It was a nice
change from reading at a university.
Once or twice when I gave a poetry reading I was asked why I used
colloquial speech and occasionally a cliche. Apparently they hadn't read
Chaucer. The English idea of a poem was an essay in rhyme.
It
did not go
beyond prose ideas into something imagined.
I read with Seamus Heaney on Thames Television. Germaine Greer
was also on the program. She talked about Sylvia Plath ... Sylvia was a
victim of male chauvinism. This was why she committed suicide.
People were talking about Sylvia Plath, especially in Primrose Hill, for
this was where she had lived and killed herself, in a house with a plaque
stating that Yeats had lived there. People who had known her dined out on
their version of the events leading to her death. A critic said that the only
kind of poetry that could be taken seriously these days, after the concentra–
tion camps and the atom bomb, was "extremist," the kind of poetry Sylvia
Plath had written. He placed her with other poets - Robert Lowell was the
best known - who wrote directly about their lives. They spoke of insanity,
