Burning Through The Fade: The Poetry of Brian Jones PAUL MICHAEL McLOUGHLIN ROYAL HOLLOWAY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PhD THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis, the first extended consideration of the work of Brian Jones (1938-2009), serves as both a re-introduction to and a reassessment of his poetic œuvre. It considers the work for the most part chronologically, noting developments and changes of direction. After a brief introduction and a note on context, Chapter Two deals with Poems (1966), which was met with popular and critical acclaim, sold over a thousand copies in its first month of publication, and brought a young poet an unusual degree of media attention that focused on what was seen as a fresh approach to domestic and personal subject matter. Chapter Three discusses A Family Album (1968), a set of four monologues spoken by members of an extended working-class Islington family who all use the same verse-format. Chapter Four notes how, in Interior (1969), the male voice is largely replaced by the female as Jones extended his range and sought to avoid too obvious autobiographical associations. Chapter Five focuses on For Mad Mary (1974), which again includes the influential figure of the reclusive Aunt Emily, continued Jones's interest in the verse-sequence, and introduces poems written from a historical and public perspective. The Island Normal (1980), discussed in Chapter Six, draws heavily on contemporary England, the English Civil War and Aeneas's journey of re-creation from Troy. Jones returns to domestic concerns in The Children of Separation (1985) and to political matters in the last volume published in his lifetime, Freeborn John (1990), collections dealt with in Chapters Seven and Eight. New & Selected Poems (2013), considered in Chapter Nine, includes uncollected poems that issue from both the contentment he found with his second wife in Normandy, and a greater awareness of other poetries. By this time, Jones had more or less disappeared from any kind of critical attention. 2 CONTENTS LEGEND p. 4 INTRODUCTION p. 5 CHAPTER ONE A Note on Context p. 8 CHAPTER TWO Poems (1966): A New Voice p. 15 CHAPTER THREE A Family Album (1968): The Best Dictum p. 36 CHAPTER FOUR Interior (1969): Towards New Islands p. 58 CHAPTER FIVE For Mad Mary (1974): The Possibilities of Glory p. 82 CHAPTER SIX The Island Normal (1980): A Search for Poise p. 110 CHAPTER SEVEN The Children of Separation (1985): Unexpected Generosities p. 148 CHAPTER EIGHT Freeborn John (1990): All Trapped In What They Should Be p. 172 CHAPTER NINE Last Poems: Burning Through The Fade p. 215 Additional Material: Appendix 1 Reception p. 254 Appendix 2 List of Reviews p, 296 Appendix 3 Preparatory Questionnaire p. 301 Appendix 4 Brian Jones In Conversation with Paul McLoughlin: The Complete Transcript p. 304 BIBLIOGRAPHY p. 345 3 LEGEND Abbreviations for Publication References (P): Poems (London Magazine Editions 8, Alan Ross, London, 1966) (AFA): A Family Album (London Magazine Editions 16, Alan Ross, London, 1968) (I): Interior (Alan Ross, London, 1969) (P&AFA): Poems & A Family Album (London Magazine Editions, London, 1972) (TMH): The Mantis Hand and other poems (Arc Publications, Gillingham, Kent, 1970) (FMM): For Mad Mary (London Magazine Editions, London, 1974) (TSOTNL): The Spitfire on the Northern Line (Chatto Poets for the Young (General Editor: Leonard Clark), Chatto & Windus, London 1975) (TIN): The Island Normal (Carcanet New Press, Manchester, 1980) (TCOS): The Children of Separation (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1985) (FJ): Freeborn John (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1990) (IC-CT) ‘In Conversation with Paul McLoughlin’, recorded at the poet’s home in Kent on 4th July, 1998. The complete transcript: Appendix 3 (IC-PNR) ‘In Conversation with Paul McLoughlin’, PN Review 137, Vol.27 No.3 (January – February 2001) pp. 53-56 (NS): New & Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2013) London Magazine Archive: Brotherton Library Special Collections, University of Leeds, visited 29th October, 1997. (See also Fn.2, Appendix 1) Carcanet Archive: Carcanet Press & PN Review files in the Twentieth Century Archive at the John Rylands, University of Manchester Library, visited 15th April, 1996 and 11th March, 2011 (LM-Sbks) Undated and/or unattributed review cuttings seen only in scrapbooks formerly housed in a cupboard of the London Magazine garden office in South Kensington. British Library Newsroom embargoes and ‘blind spots’ have made identification sometimes elusive. 4 INTRODUCTION For the 10th Anniversary issue of the Review (Spring/Summer 1972),1 Ian Hamilton invited poets and critics to look back on the preceding ten years and comment on the state of poetry as they saw it. In his contribution to the resulting Poetry Symposium, John Carey cited Brian Jones as the most exciting new poet, beside Seamus Heaney, to have emerged during that period. By then, Jones had published three collections with Alan Ross’s London Magazine Editions, and the reprint of the first two in a single volume, Poems & A Family Album (1972), had been one of Stephen Spender’s Books of the Year.2 Poems (1966) went through three impressions in a year, selling over a thousand copies in its first month of publication, and prompting interest from the national press: Jones was the subject of a news article in the pre-tabloid Sun, for example. A fourth and final collection with Alan Ross, For Mad Mary (1974), was followed by three with Carcanet between 1980 and 1990. Both For Mad Mary and The Children of Separation (1985) were Poetry Book Society recommendations. And yet, in 1986, when Oxford University’s John Sheeran, a fan of both football and poetry, compiled a ‘British and Irish Poetry Rankings’, set out in four divisions like the Football League of its day, Jones was nowhere to be found.3 Poets can lose their way, of course, but the attention Jones attracted early on (including a number of television appearances) invites us to question quite why he disappeared from view. It cannot be said that Jones was critically ignored for his collections were widely reviewed, but he was not taken up by university English departments (nor did he teach in one). And although his work was occasionally included in anthologies, he rarely sent poems to magazines, the first collection of his requiring an acknowledgements page being The Island Normal (1980). When the publication of The Children of Separation (1985) was at a late planning stage, Jones asked for the poems to be returned to him because he had not retained anything like definitive 1 the Review: The State of Poetry – a Symposium (No.29-30 Spring-Summer 1972) 2 Stephen Spender, The Observer ‘Books of the Year’, 17th December, 1972 3 Poetry Review, Vol.75 No.4 (February 1986) pp.32/3 5 copies of them. None of this is the stuff of marketing ambition. In an interview, he acknowledged that, after ‘a period of silence’, he realized that it was the writing itself that was important to him: It is not important in terms of being published, or being loved, or being recognised, but the actual process of writing, of working at it, is absolutely vital for my life. It’s a process I uniquely value, and I feel unhappy if I’m not engaged in it. All the rest is incidental.4 How can a dedicated writer remain uninterested in publication? It is a position of selflessness that is more easily understood by those who knew the man, but there is reason to feel irritated by it, too. Brian Jones died in June 2009, leaving behind the manuscript of a ‘new’ book of poems written since the publication in 1990 of his last collection, Freeborn John. Some of the poems had appeared in PN Review, London Magazine, Navis and Poetry Review, but many had not been published anywhere. He spent the final decade of his life in Normandy with his second wife, Noëlle, and the happiness he found with her, and his discontent with the state of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Englands, explains, at least in part, his apparent lack of desire to publish in the latter half of his career. The second section of ‘From Voltaire’s Garden and Other Entanglements’ reads, in its entirety: When my neighbour (he lives a mile away) stopped at the gate to chat (so much to learn!) and asked whether I did not feel nostalgic for my homeland, I replied ‘I do, yes, but no more than when I lived there.’ (For a moment, I felt quite like my old self!)5 It is this ‘old self’ who populates and informs Jones early verse, and it is instructive to consider his journey in poetry from essential unease to the something more like poise he was to find later. The final poems of his life were not free from pain, but by now the pain was that of political frustration, or the pain of others, those voiceless or trapped or marginalized or resistant, like the Maquisards, and not the personal kind that had informed much of the early, highly-praised verse. This thesis, which constitutes the first extended engagement with Brian Jones’s work, is for the most part chronological in its approach. Thus, there are chapters on 4 ‘Brian Jones In Conversation with Paul McLoughlin, PN Review 137, Vol.27 No.3, (January- February 2001) pp.53-56. (IC-PNR) 5 Brian Jones, New & Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2013) p.221 (NS, 221) 6 each of his seven individual collections and an additional chapter on later, uncollected poems that appeared in poetry magazines.6 6 Some of these poems were eventually collected in Brian Jones: New & Selected Poems, op. cit. (NS) 7 CHAPTER ONE A Note on Context Al Alvarez's The New Poetry was first published in 1962, some four years before