Jamie Cameron

In 1966 Hugo Williams was standing in front of the panel of judges tasked with selecting winners of the annual Eric Gregory Awards, a prize given out for a collection by British poets under the age of 30. He listened to those before him persuade the judges of their plans for the prize money: PhDs, research trips to Europe, or other suitably academic pursuits. When he stepped up he was asked the same question. He told them he planned to put the money towards fixing the plumbing in the house he had just moved into with his wife and young daughter. One judge was particularly impressed by this unambitious practicality. ‘Larkin liked the sound of it,’ Williams recounts. ‘He thought I had my head screwed on right.’

Almost 60 years, and 15 collections later, I am sitting with Hugo Williams in the very same house plumbed by the generosity of that grant. It was bought for £5,000 in 1966, in the pre-gentrified borough of Islington. The house hasn’t changed much since then. ‘The plumbing was probably the last work that was done to it,’ he tells me. Inside, the decoration is distinctly 1960s. The kitchen where he makes us coffee could be a set out of Withnail and I. The walls in the hall and front room are busy with posters and artwork. ‘At the time it was very important to have stripped pine.’ He gestures down to our feet, ‘note the orange carpet.’

I am here to speak to him about his latest collection, Fast Music, as well as his time working for The London Magazine in the 1960s under the legendary editor Alan Ross. But writing about Hugo Williams comes with its own set of expectations. Almost every feature you can find opens with a comment about his deep-blue eyes, dainty bone structure and exquisitely coiffed grey hair – at this point a worthy rival even to David Lynch’s pompadour. What follows is usually something about Williams’ charm, which is almost naive in its insistence. He is the kind of person who you feel is just as anxious that the interviewer have a good time as the interviewer is that their questions are appreciated. ‘I was brought up to feel that your first duty in life was to be amusing,’ he says. ‘You probably think I’m being charming now, but I’m not like this normally.’

Hugo Williams’ poetry reflects this sense of personality as performance. His style is direct and autobiographical, often based around word play, gambits or set pieces. You will often find it described alongside some kind of caveat. Founding editor of the LRB Karl Miller wrote:

Hugo Williams is a very good poet. But we must not say so. Why not? Because he writes about being a child, about being the son of a film star (Hugh begat Hugo), and about having once (and always) been to a public school. Because he is not difficult to understand, and is enjoyable to read. And funny.

As we sit down in the living room with our coffee, his tone is relaxed, almost gossipy. I prepare to ask him if this mixed critical reputation bothers him. I mention that one critic described him as ‘the James Bond of English Poetry – apparently immortal.’ ‘I rather liked that,’ he tells me. This isn’t really a surprise; it’s a line that could have come out of one of his poems. But like the poems its humour belies its depth.

Not only does James Bond capture something of his suave, public school charm (he went to Eton, the fees paid by a loan from one of his father’s acting friends), and the questing eroticism of his writing (his T. S. Eliot Award winning collection Billy’s Rain details an affair which his wife found out about only after reading the collection), it also speaks to Williams’ belief in poetry as a form of popular entertainment. ‘I don’t get that sort of professional feeling about poetry at all, where it must be difficult,’ he says. He calls it ‘The Wasteland problem’. Instead, he likens poetry to theatrical makeup. ‘You make yourself more beautiful. You’re totting up your own abilities: talent, looks, everything. You’re basically making yourself more attractive to girls. Writing this magical stuff to dazzle them with.’

His relationship with poetry started with copying down poems into a notebook to give to his father as a Christmas gift. When he ran out of poems, he started to write his own pastiches. It wasn’t until he came across the New Lines anthology of Movement poets that he was genuinely excited by the prospect of writing poems himself. ‘I do remember discovering modern poetry and being shocked and surprised that it was still being written. I was certainly thrilled to find that it didn’t have to be poetic. That was a great relief.’

After this initial Movement period, he came under the influence of Ian Hamilton and his magazine, The Review. This era was marked by the kind of compact, declarative poems that Hamilton wrote himself – ‘it is where you break the line that counts’ – of which ‘The Butcher’ is usually held up as Williams’ outstanding example.

What we now recognise as ‘Williamsesque’ really emerged around the time of Writing Home (1985). The poems in this collection addressed many of the biographical details of his childhood that we take for granted as a definitive part of his style. In ‘Dégagé’, ‘clothes were a kind of wit’; in ‘A Parting Shot’, Hugo and his father look at ‘each other / in the three-sided looking glass, ranks / of opposing profiles fanning out round the room’; in ‘Tipping My Chair’, he was ‘a love-sick crammer candidate, reading / poetry under the desk in history.’ He ‘wanted to do nothing, urgently.’

The collection revolves most obviously around the figure of his father, Hugh Williams, a stage and film actor who once starred alongside Laurence Olivier and then later struggled to make ends meet. When I ask him about his father’s failed transition to Hollywood, he almost gets defensive. ‘You know, he did make one or two films out there, but I think there were too many people who were just as good looking as him.’ Hugh is the subject of some of Williams’ greatest poems. Their relationship was complex, his father flitting between rakish charm and quick-tempered cruelty. Sometimes he is the hero with ‘superior wit’ and ‘forty-seven suits’, other times he is the bully who empties a jug of water over his son’s head.

‘Walking Out of the Room Backwards’ is perhaps the finest example of this relationship played out in a poem. The final stanza could almost be read as Hugo Williams’ Ars Poetica; the inverted metaphysics of time exquisitely expressing the relationship of his poetry to memory, and how our preoccupation with the past can blind us to our futures:

The future stands behind us, holding ready
a choloform-soaked handkerchief.
The past stretches ahead, into which we stare,
as into the eyes of our parents
on their wedding day –
shouting something from the crowd
or waving things on sticks
to make them look at us. To punish me
or amuse his theatrical friends,
my father made me walk out of the room backwards
bowing and saying, ‘Goodnight, my liege.’

He has returned to the subject of his father in almost every collection since. I wonder if he thinks there is something those poems have failed to capture about the man? ‘I think maybe my gratitude. I have gratitude for what he wanted to do for me, because he saw I was a bit too retiring: blubbing all the time. But I just wasn’t his type. My father was a really upset person. I don’t think he liked being an actor much. His whole life was spent trying to scrape a living off the stage. In films that started out well, but then the war came along, and by the time he came out, tastes had changed.’

What really bothers him is having to use the word ‘father’ so much. ‘I think that does get you down,’ he says. ‘You think it’s all right the first time and then you realise you’ve seen it in the last seven poems: father, father, father. It looks a little bit egocentric.’

But the poems are not formless diary entries. You get a sense that what matters to him is poetic truth, rather than documentary fact. This is reflected in his approach to being interviewed. At various points he stops to tell me which things he says are particularly important: ‘Yes, you should probably get that bit in’. Another time he pauses mid-sentence: ‘Wait, I am trying to make something vivid…’.

‘I suppose I really had three fathers’, he says eventually. ‘Note that down.’ The first, his own, ‘[stomping] through the verse, either exquisite or waspish.’ The second, Ian Hamilton, the great influence on his early style. And the third, Alan Ross, editor of The London Magazine from 1961 until his death in 2001.

*

Alan Ross was born in Calcutta, India. The son of a former Lieutenant in the Indian Army. When, aged seven, he was sent to be educated in England, he spoke better Hindi than English. By the time he took over The London Magazine from John Lehmann in 1961, he had a reputation as an editor of eclectic taste, a talented cricket player and a raffish gentleman about town.

To Hugo Williams, Alan Ross was the stepfather of his childhood sweetheart. When it came to getting a job, Williams only knew what he didn’t want to do. With no university education, no desire to go into the family business and a single unmarketable obsession with poetry, he went to speak to Ross. ‘He said if you find out a bit about printing, you can join me when I take over from John Lehmann. So I went to the Brighton School of Printing and the next year I went to work at The London Magazine.’

Initially, his role was dubbed ‘advertising’. ‘I was the office boy,’ Hugo tells me. ‘I went through all the manuscripts, I answered the phone and answered the door, made the coffee. But my main professional job was calling up all the publishers trying to get a quarter page advertisement. And in those days there were many, many more publishers. You had to call them all up and tell them that you were reviewing one of their books or something, make them feel obliged to take a quarter page ad.’

I recently went through the archive trying to find Williams’ first published poems but ended up flicking through those early Alan Ross editions instead. They are compelling objects; with rich, primary coloured covers and the price – ‘three shillings and sixpence’ – typeset in the top right corner. Inside, there are kitschy adverts for Schweppes or Cadbury’s hot chocolate, across from a poem by Louis MacNeice or Sylvia Plath.

‘The chocolate thing may have been something to do with the fact Alan Ross married into the Cadbury’s family,’ Hugo says. ‘He was not like any literary type that you see in London now. Partly because of his money, well his wife’s money. Before that he was an ordinary sort of chap who had a bad, bad time in the Navy in the North Atlantic.’ In the Second World War, Ross was trapped in the hull of a ship, armpit-deep in water as the bodies of two gun crews washed against him. ‘He was very scarred by that.’

How would you describe him as a boss? I ask. ‘He had a very low boredom threshold, so you had to keep him amused.’ Your childhood must have been the perfect preparation? I suggest. ‘My father and him certainly got on very well. I suppose he was a throwback. There was no trace of the academic in him. He was completely hedonistic.’

I ask Hugo to expand on that word: ‘hedonistic’. He gives me a boyish grin. ‘Every evening he used to say, “Are you off now? Quiet or debauchery?” I’d have to decide which I was going to do that night. I’d say: “a bit of debauchery tonight I’m afraid.” I knew that would get him interested. “Oh what are you doing? Who is it this time? Who’s the lucky girl?” He was totally for all that kind of thing.’

Eventually, after Assistant Editor Charles Osborne left the magazine to become the Chief Literary Director of the Arts Council, Hugo was moved up from ‘advertising’ into the vacant role. And for the next nine years he ‘sort of’ did his job.

‘I’ve always been very lazy. Very slow. I think gradually I got more and more blasé.’ Alan Ross was very much the opposite. In fact, he often ran the magazine himself alone. He could be seen going to the post office in the evenings with huge handfuls of parcels, sending manuscripts back and books out for review. ‘I mean, I just couldn’t keep up with him, frankly. I used to take long lunch hours, turn up late, leave early. I even used the office as a fuck-pad!’ He qualifies this: ‘As did he!’

‘We had a couple of desks facing each other. One day we were sat there doing our ridiculous jobs. And he said something like: “It can’t go on Hugo. You’re going to have to go.” He sacked me. I burst into tears.’

*

One of the first poems in Hugo Williams’ new collection, Fast Music, ends in a similar fashion: ‘A photo of me crying / appeared in the school magazine.’ Same old Hugo, it seems. For long term readers it is rewarding to trace the echoes between this collection and his earlier work; sometimes lines, titles, whole stanzas reappear. In ‘Pennies from Heaven’, his father’s dressing room mirror gets another look, in other poems he looks back to boarding school, famous Soho venues, as well as the ‘longed-for lubricity’ of condoms left too long in trouser pockets.

Music is also central, both in terms of content and style. There are several nods to the Beatles, first in ‘Nowhere Man’ and then in a moving poem dedicated to childhood friend and accomplice Tara Browne. Other poems have an almost nursery-rhyme quality. ‘Heartbreakfast’, for instance, reads like a tragic-masculine Wendy Cope:

You were playing the critical part.
I knew what you would say:
‘If you don’t want to break your heart,
don’t bring it to me on a tray’

I ask Hugo if he is interested at all in the idea of ‘progression’ of style, in the same way fans might obsess over how the Beatles developed their sound from album to album. ‘I am trying to work out what progression would be,’ he tells me. ‘Besides from writing another poem. Presumably, I am progressing through my life. Presumably, there’s some trace of getting older. There’s certainly a trace of getting iller. An increased negativity of one kind or another.’

This awareness of his own ageing is the collection’s other great theme. The excavation of the self has long been a characteristic of Williams’ style, but it has always been done through the prism of his relationship with an other; a kind of mirror to reflect his image back, clearer, separated from its ego. But now the poet is older and his world has shrunk, the poems turn inwards and wrestle with the self without that buffer. In ‘Nowhere Man’ he writes, ‘I’m so sick and tired / of my own endangered company’, in ‘A Brilliant Trick’, ‘everyones hate you when you’re sick.’ And, most movingly, in ‘Probably Poor Later’: ‘you’d like to go out of course / to see if you still exist.’

‘I suffer from depression a bit,’ he tells me. ‘Especially at this age, it’s quite hard to lead an ordinary life because there’s various health issues that interfere with your desires. You wake up in the morning and feel depressed. You have to make this incredible effort to get out of bed, which I don’t remember making when I was younger. Sleep is a big temptation. Eating is the other huge temptation,’ he says, gesturing towards the biscuit he dunks in his coffee. ‘So this thought of “poetry”, another kind of enormous effort waiting in a very untidy room with lots of streams of need, the house falling down around my ears, and all kinds of duties that wait for me, that is very inhibiting.’

I ask what keeps him going to his desk in the face of this inertia. His focus, he explains, is on starting with ‘one word after another.’ ‘It’s almost like an indulgence. I feel like a spoiled child. Because you know, nobody cares. The money has never been any good. The thrill is seeing your name in print.’

We finish the coffee and return to gossiping about various editors and poets from across The London Magazine’s history. A new editor at a major British journal has just rejected a poem of his. ‘No-one liked it, which was rather upsetting.’ Just as I am about to leave, he stops again to recall something ‘vivid’. This time about Alan Ross. ‘When later on we got into that kind of “stoned poetry”, the French Symbolists and so on, we started to drift away from Alan Ross. He was insistent that one thing he wouldn’t publish was anything to do with drugs. He was extremely eclectic. But somehow rather, he just didn’t like that stuff.’

‘Then after I left – or he’d sacked me – and I’d been away for about 10 years without speaking to him, he sent me a card which had this heartbreaking phrase on it: “I think you neglect us…” I’ll never forget it. That could be my one development, perhaps, getting away from Alan Ross.’

We both look out the window, past the stripped pine shutters. ‘God, it’s a good job though isn’t it?’ Hugo offers. I tell him I feel the same way. We both agreed: you can’t beat it.
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Jamie Cameron was born in Swansea, Wales, and grew up in the Midlands. He is the Managing Editor of The London Magazine.