Poetical Polycules and Parodies

Many literati compete and jostle for our – and each other’s – attention through performance, posturing, faint praise, barbed reviews, inflated blurbs, and, these days, admiring social media tags. Most effectively, they adopt performative positions on public issues to signal their virtue, compassion, and humanity. In short, they are human: generous and petty, idealistic and competitive, capable of nurturing talent, being nasty, shutting out the wrong sort of voice – and best of all, performing virtue. Which, of course, makes them excellent entertainment for us mere readers.

History is rich in examples of such coteries. The Bloomsbury Group in London, the Algonquin Round Table in New York, the Inklings in Oxford and the Paris salons from Madame de Staël in the 18th century to Natalie Barney in the 20th. Barney’s “Fridays” ran for over 60 years (paused only by WWII) and attracted some of the most dazzling names in literature, art, dance, and music – including the salon-meister herself, Gertrude Stein.

The Harlem Renaissance flourished in part because of the salons that drew the artists and writers together. Madam C.J. Walker –  known for her hair care products – established a prominent presence in Harlem, particularly through her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, whose salon in their townhouse on 136th Street, was a cultural hub. 

“A’Lelia Walker had an apartment that held perhaps a hundred people. She would usually issue several hundred invitations to each party. Unless you went early there was no possible way of getting in. Her parties were as crowded as the New York subway at the rush hour – entrance, lobby, steps, hallway, and apartment a milling crush of guests, with everybody seeming to enjoy the crowding.” – Langston Hughes

Some coteries formed around charismatic or dictatorial academics – like the“Scrutineers” aka  Leavisites – followers of Cambridge academic F.R.Leavis.  Others formed around publishers – Faber under T. S. Eliot. 

Sometimes they even live together – as in the February House at 7, Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. Anais Nin called it the February House because so many of the inhabitants had birthdays in that month.

Inhabitants included W,H,Auden, Benjamin Britten and his partner, singer Peter Pears; Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, and the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, who was in the midst of writing The G-String Murders (1941), a mystery novel set among striptease artists.

After Lee and McCullers left, their space was taken over by the composer-writer Paul Bowles and his wife, the novelist Jane Bowles. 

Composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, choreographer George Balanchine, ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, artists Salvador Dali, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Paul Cadmus, writers Janet Flanner and William Saroyan, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and anti-Nazi refugees Klaus and Erika Mann were among the revolving cast of characters who gathered at the house until it was torn down to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the late 1940s.

Other less formal and close-knit groups coalesce around a pub rather in the style of the coffee house/ penny university culture of Dr. Johnson’s era. Think Dylan Thomas in what seems like all the pubs of Fitzrovia in the 1940’s and the White Horse Tavern in NYC. Think bars like the Lion’s Head Inn on Christopher Street in the 1960s. 

The famous London literary watering hole of the 1970s was the Pillars of Hercules a pub on Greek Street in Soho. This is where Ian Hamilton held court. He might buy you a drink, edit your copy on the spot, solicit unpaid work for The Review and steer you toward paid commissions at the Times Literary Supplement – where he was the literary editor. This was the setting Clive James immortalised as the “Gates of Hell” in Peregrine Prykke.

The critic James Wood includes an anecdote set in the pub in his study The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004):

One London lunchtime, many years ago, the late poet and editor Ian Hamilton was sitting at his usual table in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules. The pub was where much of the business of Hamilton’s literary journal, The New Review, was conducted. It was sickeningly early – not to be at work, but to be at drink. A pale, haggard poet entered, and Hamilton offered him a chair and a glass of something. “Oh no, I just can’t keep drinking,” said the weakened poet. “I must give it up. It’s doing terrible things to me. It’s not even giving me any pleasure any longer.” But Hamilton, narrowing his eyes, responded to this feebleness in a tone of weary stoicism, and said in a quiet, hard voice, “Well, none of us likes it.“[3]

This was the era when the Pillars of Hercules was frequented by many making their names on the literary scene including Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. Ian Hamilton was a regular. His literary magazine The New Review was based next door at no.11. For a while, the New Review group dominated London literature which drew occasional accusations of a ‘literary mafia’. Clive James entitled his second collection of literary essays At the Pillars of Hercules ( Faber and Faber in 1979.) 

Men like Ian Hamilton and Karl Miller (Ian Hammerhead and Klause Mauler as per Peregrine Prykke) – and they were almost all men – were the arbiters of taste, the power-brokers, the gatekeepers of literary reputation. The literary London they dominated offered something today’s scene appears to lack: a genuine sense of  cultural cohesion and community. When Roy Campbell punched Stephen Spender at a poetry reading in Bayswater, Louis MacNeice punched him back in a Fitzrovia pub. It was a small world. Maybe it still is, despite digital reach and the ersatz intimacy of the online.

Things are different though. Coteries, if they still exist, no longer shape the culture as they once did. The prize circuit – competitive and individualistic by design – dominates. MFAs, online fandoms, and curated award networks have replaced the old systems of literary patronage with something more diffuse, professionalized, and, perhaps, lonelier.

Given the upheavals in publishing and broader social shifts, you have to wonder whether that earlier era has vanished for good, replaced by social media’s algorithmic bonds and influencer circuits as a substitute for community. Is it more democratic? More substantial? More lucrative? Hard to say.

Where it’s all going is anyone’s guess. But one thing seems certain: the age of the literary clique, with all its flaws and pleasures, belongs to history now.

Meanwhile we have the wonderful saga of the Peregrine Prykke. 

And now landing in my lap – the joys of Making Cocoa for Kingley Amis,  Wendy Cope (1986). She too has some fun with Seamus Heaney but here she is with some T.S.Eliot:

The Waste Land: Five Limericks 

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me–
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

Thank goodness for large mercies. Long live the tradition of poets mocking poetry. Cups runneth over.

The Pain of the Poet

I sit by the window, I furrow my brow,
Awaiting the sparking of genius (somehow).
A teacup, untouched, cannot slake my thirst
For Art, you see, must always come first.

I ponder the stars and the plight of the bee,
And write a sestina on envy and tea.
My verses have meaning, obscure, and profound –
Though no one, as yet, has passed them around.

I scorn the profane and the merely commercial –
While secretly longing for praise universal.
Ah, poetry! Saviour, tormentor, and balm!
(Especially when I can quote Auden with calm.)