Collected Poems Read online

  Map in top-left pocket, crawling the long coffin

  Between bombracks and centre section

  No view of the world for forty feet,

  Parachute forgotten but who goes back

  At seventeen? Who thinks the air is not for him,

  Merlin engines all his own, strip map beckoning

  Through Death’s cathedral for a dwarf?

  Everything is there to open: the rear gunner’s turret

  For a technicolor backward view

  A track made good of woods and the botch of Leicester

  Railways of Rugby, the sandstone of Oxford

  The peace of Abingdon and first view of the Thames,

  Canals and rivers of new reality, calico tablecloth

  Hiding all in me, unseen from my chosen seat.

  Better not to know how I reached the far-back turret

  Of downdraught and upcurrents, eyes on the past’s

  Wide fan shaping my destination.

  A button put me side-on to the slipstream,

  An east-west variation of the view. People ignored

  The buzzing of our passage, engines hiding the silence

  Of a so-far buried life, looking over four guns

  Ready to suck all spirits up like fishes to a net.

  Cherish the distance between them and me

  But get inside the theatre of what goes on,

  Or open the door and tumble into space –

  No one would know I’d gone or where, destroying

  The homely panorama and my body.

  Death would not burn the spirit but I’d be off

  And out of the map, shoes, tunic and cap looted

  By gravity: Hello! as I spin, so glad to know you

  But I never will. There, I don’t belong,

  My place forever looking down and in.

  Alone, far back, to face the vanishing horizon squarely on.

  Dim as it is, don’t go, corrupted by haze

  Loving what I cannot reach. The theatre’s anatomy

  And madness missed, don’t care about a full cast waiting

  To come in order of appearance and perform their dreams,

  Ambition’s engine, curtains holding back

  Till the planet Lancaster divides the space

  And I return over empty bombracks to get born again.

  SHYLOCK THE WRITER

  Humanity is good to bait fish with,

  Salt fish that dries in the throat

  And needs vodka to turn it down.

  Such human quality pressed

  A jackboot onto his vocation.

  A mob was set on him whose rage

  Needed no stoking.

  A writer has eyes, hands, a heart

  A pen that sometimes scratches

  Like a rose-thorn at a gardener’s vein.

  He borrows words

  And lends them out at interest,

  Turns from each season and

  With no humility or ignorance

  Tells a story to keep the world quiet.

  DELACROIX’S ‘LIBERTY GUIDING THE PEOPLE’

  For the first few hundred yards

  They knew her as a shirtmaker

  Urging them over smoky corpses,

  And when they said enough was enough

  She climbed the lip of the barricade

  To lead them over.

  The world

  Was impossible to open with a bayonet

  That could not stop a cannon-ball in flight:

  Nor could her red flag light them

  Through a more than human darkness.

  Then, whoever she was, she became LIBERTY.

  No one knew when, by wonderful inspiration

  She stripped off her shirt

  And showed her bosom as a reminder

  Of what brought them out of darkness.

  Liberty, clothe your breasts

  With that red flag –

  I’ll love you then.

  Or let it guide the broken locomotive

  Not the mob.

  The boy with a pistol –

  A cannon-ball took off his leg.

  Your breasts gave liberty

  But cured his worship.

  Now he sells cheap pictures by the Louvre

  Of Mona Lisa and The Wreck of the Medusa.

  THE ITALIAN WOMAN

  An Italian woman talking to her lover

  On some far-off ocean

  Mellifluously

  From a villa in Liguria:

  When are you coming back?

  Shortwave static gruffed his voice.

  I thought it would be soon, she said,

  The scent of shrubs around her.

  I love you, he said, but Neptune rules.

  A sad laugh in her throat:

  Yes, I understand,

  So goodbye my handsome man,

  I love you too.

  The click of a telephone put down,

  Sea noise rushing back.

  Ah, love, I haven’t lost you yet.

  I love the sad laugh in her throat,

  Face and body never to be seen

  Nor flowers surrounding her.

  I congratulate my rival,

  And swing the needle onto other voices.

  THE LIBERTY TREE

  First of all

  The brambles had to be pulled out

  By the roots.

  With thick gardening gloves

  Against the spikes

  I burrowed around the tree bole

  And clasped them tight

  And tugged their stomachs

  Out of cosy soil.

  It wasn’t enough.

  I had to walk away

  Dragging the whole entanglement

  From topmost branches,

  Evergreen needles snowing me

  As claws protested.

  I got them down.

  And yanked them loose

  But it was slow work

  Then cut away the ivy

  Broke each brittle snake-branch

  From sucker tracks

  Halfway up and round the trunk,

  Some fingers

  More tenacious than an arm.

  Next it was the nettles’ turn

  Them I grasped low down;

  The taller they were

  The easier they came,

  Bunches of stings

  Cast out to die.

  Every parasite has its protection

  Stings or prickles

  Growing in alliance,

  Making it difficult to start.

  At last it’s done:

  The tree no longer burdened.

  Space cleared:

  The beauty of its trunk revealed:

  The biggest anaconda of them all.

  A tree with space

  Grows ten years in two,

  Breathing sky unhindered,

  Vibrations

  Running through both hands to say:

  People need freedom like a tree.

  NOAH’S ARK

  (On 12 January 1987, at 2230GMT, I took down an Italian news agency message in morse sent out specially to ships. The text said that Noah’s Ark was no longer to be found on Mount Ararat, and gave details. The report originated in Tokyo, and the following lines are based on it.)

  Earphones fed a message to the hand,

  Hurried writing came through pat:

  NOAH’S ARK IS NO LONGER FOUND ON MOUNT ARARAT.

  Words in Italian, sparks of Aaron’s Rod

  Rained across the page in morse

  Like intelligence from God:

  NOAH’S ARK IS NOT FOUND ON MOUNT ARARAT.

  Morse flowed like splintered glass

  The text unfinished, rattling on:

  BUT IN ALL PROBABILITY YOU WILL FIND NOAH’S ARK

  ON A HILL FIVE HUNDRED METRES HIGH

  ON THE BANKS OF THE TIGRIS BETWEEN SYRIA AND TURKEY.

  Rome International Radio informed all ships

  Swaying the emera
ld Atlantic waves

  Urgent news of Ararat,

  And Marconi operators wrote the gen

  And typed it with the morning news,

  Sailors with shocked eyes and lips atremble said:

  L’ARCA DI NOÈ NON SI TROVA SUL MONTE ARARAT!

  Perhaps Noah’s Ark had been not lost

  But one dark night dissected

  And put on donkeys for a secret destination.

  Hot-footed morse did not originate from God:

  A Japanese expedition from an Electronics Firm

  Led by YOSHIO KOU had combed

  The scrub of Chaldees with a Bible and a map

  Finally concluding that

  NOAH’S ARK IS NO LONGER ON MOUNT ARARAT

  Kids at school threw down their pens

  Church and Synagogue were worried

  And the Zurich bourse was flurried.

  But fact and inspiration tell

  How the Ark came on to Ararat because

  The navigation of the Pilot was spot-on.

  A dove and olive twig to guide the rudder:

  And travelling all night above Lake Van

  The snowy light was not one cloud of many

  But glinting Araratic glaciers in the dawn.

  Anchored by a terminal moraine

  Noah ordered animals and humans to disperse.

  God camouflaged the Ark from archaeologists

  Who scour the land with lamp and map.

  What YOSHIO KOU found by the Tigris

  Was not an Ark but a canoe,

  Though matters Biblical led him to state

  NOAH’S ARK IS NO LONGER BEACHED ON ARARAT.

  The story in the Bible’s better:

  Of how the Ark on Day Seventeen

  After the flood that God begat

  Bumped against the banks of Ararat.

  The Ark, in spite of YOSHIO KOU, lies under rocks

  On tufic Ararat, below a Turkish post

  That looks on Persia.

  I saw it in a dream, and sent a message back

  By telegraphic key

  Feet tapping to its rhythm on the mat:

  NOAH’S ARK’S STILL HIDDEN ON MOUNT ARARAT.

  A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

  Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

  So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.

  The Morse code he learned during this time stayed with Alan all his life; he loved listening to transmissions from liners and cargo ships (although he never transmitted himself), and whenever invited to speak, he always took his Morse key along. Before beginning his talk, he would make a grand performance of setting it up on the table in front of him and then announce that if anyone in the audience could decipher the message he was about to transmit, he would give that person a signed copy of one of his books. As far as I remember, this never happened.

  In Malaya, Alan caught tuberculosis—only discovered during the final physical examination before demobilization. He spent the next eighteen months in a military sanatorium, and was awarded a 100 percent disability pension. By then Alan was twenty-three years old, and it was not long until we met. We fell in love and soon decided to leave the country, going first to France and then to Mallorca, and stayed away from England for more than six years. That pension was our only reliable income until, after several rejections, the manuscript of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was accepted for publication. Afterward, Alan would say that during those apprentice years he had been kept by a very kind woman: the Queen of England.

  It is said that an artist must choose between life and art; sometimes Alan would tell whomever questioned him that after his first book was published and he became a recognized writer, he stopped living—there was not enough time to do both. I hope that was not entirely true. But writing was his main activity: He would spend ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, reading or answering letters when he needed a break from working on his current novel. And there were poems, essays, reviews—and scripts for the films of his first two books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and later others. He was extremely productive. But certainly he also enjoyed social life with our friends and going to concerts or the theatre. This was the heyday of the young British dramatists at the Royal Court Theatre.

  Now, in the 1960s, there was enough money for what we enjoyed most: travel, and although in the first few years our son was still a baby, we would spend up to six months of the year away from England. Alan’s books were translated into many languages, which meant that he was invited to many other countries, frequently to literary festivals, or sometimes offered the use of a villa or grand apartment for generous periods of time. I remember a stay at a castle in then-Czechoslovakia, where we were awoken every morning by a scream from our son, who had managed to get his head or hand caught in some part of the rickety crib that had been put in our room for him. We also spent months in Mallorca, in a house generously lent by Robert Graves. During our four years on the island we had become good friends with him and the Graves family.

  Time passed … the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties.… Every year or two a new book, a trip to another part of the world. Japan, India, the United States, Mexico, and Latin America: the range extended. I usually went with him, and as by then I also was having work published, sometimes the invitation was to me, and he would assume the role of consort.

  Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life we had then. But a year or two before his eightieth birthday, Alan told me he was not feeling well. It was always hard to persuade him to see the doctor; this time he suggested it himself. There were many hospital appointments for investigations and tests—the National Health Service was as excellent and thorough as ever—and a few weeks later the diagnosis came: There was a cancer at the base of his tongue. His suspicions were confirmed. Although he had continued to smoke his pipe (and the occasional cigar), now he stopped at once. The tragic program of treatments started, and the inevitable oscillations between hope and despair. Twice it seemed that he was cured; then it all began again. In April 2010, not long after his eighty-second birthday, Alan died. We had hoped he could die at home, but he needed the facilities of a good hospital. Months later, on a cupboard shelf in his study, I found the manuscript of Moggerhanger.

  Sillitoe in Butterworth, Malaya, during his time in the RAF.

  Sillitoe and R
uth Fainlight shared their first home together, “Le Nid”, while living in Menton, France, 1952.

  Sillitoe in Camden Town in 1958, soon after the publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  Sillitoe at his desk in his country house in Wittersham, Kent, 1969.

  Sillitoe in Berlin while on a reading tour in 1976.

  Sillitoe sitting at his desk in his flat, located in Notting Hill Gate, London, 1978.

  Sillitoe writing at his desk in Wittersham in the 1970s or ’80s.

  Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight at the PEN conference in Tokyo, Japan, 1984. They both gave readings at the conference, and Sillitoe was a keynote speaker, along with Joseph Heller.

  Sillitoe standing on the porch of his wife’s apartment in Nashville, Tennessee. He visited Ruth while she was a poet-in-residence at Vanderbilt University in January of 1985.

  Sillitoe (right) in Calais, France, with Jacques Darras (center), a French poet and essayist, August of 1991.

  Sillitoe in front of his and Fainlight’s Somerset cottage with his friends, American poet Shirley Kaufman and Israeli literary critic and academic H. M. “Bill” Daleski.

  Sillitoe on holiday in Penang, Malaya, in 2008. Sillitoe spent time in Malaya as a radio operator for the RAF in 1948.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Some of the poems were previously published and are taken from the following titles: The Rats and Other Poems, A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems, Storm and Other Poems, Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, Sun Before Departure, Tides and Stone Walls.

  Copyright © 1960, 1964, 1968, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1986, 1993 by Alan Sillitoe

  First US edition

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3503-3

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

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