Editorial

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself – as it will seem to do –
With ‘I have saved this afternoon for you’
           T.S. Eliot, ‘Portrait of a Lady’

In October 1965 Elizabeth Jennings (the centenary of whose birth we mark this year) saved an afternoon for me. A friend had given me her latest Macmillan book. I wanted her to sign it. She was a tenant in a large first floor bedroom, if I remember, at the front of a North Oxford late-Victorian property, a prow of window jutting into the shedding trees of the avenue. Around the walls were helter-skelter bookshelves, a bed in a corner, maybe a little kitchen off, the bathroom shared. A hard sofa with cushions and stuffed animals – perhaps a doll? – faced the gas fire; behind the sofa a table burdened with books and objects. Elizabeth knew where everything was and laid her hand on the right book without hesitation. She made me tea – ‘I shall sit here, serving tea to friends’.

We talked, she signed my book, I prepared to go. She seemed a generous, eccentric woman of thirty-nine, a writer and quondam publisher, who had returned to Oxford to recover from anxiety and depression. My being an undergraduate and she a published poet did not matter at all.

As I prepared to go, she said, ‘What day will you come next week?’ What had started was going to continue. We wrote a date in our diaries and began four years of weekly visits. I was not alone in this experience: other undergraduate writers and readers were similarly enlisted into her world. Eight years on, she contributed to the first issue of Poetry Nation.

Silence is love, or just a glance,
Meeting of eyes, meeting of hands.
Each knows the other understands
Each thinks that none of this is chance.

‘A Love Poem’ appeared alongside an unsatisfactory poem called ‘Roman Poets’. She contributed to our pages for two decades. Most of the poems she wrote for PN Review were religious, focused on the Incarnation and on Easter (including a poem in the voice of Judas). One piece stands out for me. ‘The Child’s Story’ abandons conventional form and resorts to the irregular free verse that often led her astray but here decisively delivers a re-earned innocence:

When I was small and they talked about love I laughed
But I ran away and I hid in a tall tree
Or I lay in asparagus beds
But I still listened.
The blue dome sang with the wildest birds
And the new sun sang in the idle noon
But then I heard love, love, rung from the steeples, each belfry,
And I was afraid and I watched the cypress trees
Join the deciduous chestnuts and oaks in a crowd of shadows
And then I shivered and ran and ran to the tall
White house with the green shutters and dark red door
And I cried ‘Let me in even if you must love me’
And they came and lifted me up and told me the name
Of the near and the far stars,
And so my first love was.

Jennings loved Eliot above most of her near contemporaries, including Auden, though she never sounds like him or his generation of modernists. Her one major critical book, Every Changing Shape (1961), took its title from Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ in which the young male speaker in exasperation says, ‘And I must borrow every changing shape / To find expression...’, a perfect correlative for the objective correlative. Jennings’s book is about the directness that follows from a cunning obliquity in art, an indirection which can find direction out. Tell it slant, as Miss Dickinson advised, so long as it’s the truth.

Through Jennings some of the crucial lessons of Eliot were channelled to my generation. Her Catholicism and his Anglicanism have a residual charge in her work and example, and most of all, in the habits of reading she advocates, as preliminaries to real understanding and even to writing. On 24 January 1984 she wrote to me, ‘I will give you a very lofty analogy for poetry; it is like the Eucharist, words are spoken, a simple element is offered and the words transform that element. I think David Jones would go along with this.’ She relished being in the act of ‘creative prayer’, but she lost patience with the need to transcribe it up, to turn the deed into a text, an aftermath.

Introducing a later edition of Every Changing Shape, I wrote, ‘A spiritual element in her critical stance is her insistent knowledge of continuities in the language of poetry, its inescapable contingencies. “Poets work upon and through each other,” she declared. […] The natural, inevitable, interdependence between poets and poems is “the real meaning of tradition and influence”. This is not far from T.S. Eliot’s sense of the contemporaneity of all literature, and thus of its transcendence. For her this transcendence is not […] an aesthetic but a spiritual verity. The connection between Herbert, Traherne and Vaughan is more than a literary matter. It entails profound affinities not so much of temperament as of spirit. Her own connection with Eliot and with Hopkins, with Muir and Christina Rossetti, with Charlotte Mew and Rilke, is as patent as her loving inferences from Saint Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich are. […] In the end she comes down to a preference in poetry for a language of embodiment, containing rather than describing meanings: With this ring I thee wed rather than I give you this ring as a symbol of our marriage. Such containment, or enactment, in language – a function of rhythm, word-order, diction – can impart a spiritual dimension to work by secular writers, so that poems mean more than a poet intends, as if they have been touched by a grace which the poet inadvertently accesses and then cannot deny.’

In the years when I knew her best, she wrote copiously in lined foolscap notebooks. She wrote in them from back to front and, after Growing Points, when she felt a new book was due, she would give me twenty or thirty of these notebooks to sort through, select from and type up the poems. It was a kind of sacrament she performed once and left it there for someone else to translate into shareable form. In an obituary, I recalled, ‘She compared making poems to the practice of prayer, which reconciles an individual with the world outside. Self is subsumed in a larger stability. “Each brings an island in his heart to square / With what he finds, and all is something strange / And most expected.” Prayer and poetry also risk the terrifying world of shadows.” For her these shadows never fully cleared.’

At the end of the obituary I recalled her investiture, when she was awarded a C.B.E. by the Queen in 1992. ‘It was her habit in later years to wear plimsolls, socks, a woollen skirt, a knitted sweater and, in the street, a knitted hat. Before she went to the Palace, friends urged her to dress appropriately. She reassured us: she had bought new socks, a new skirt, a new jumper. Also, new plimsolls. A week or so after the investiture she joined me for lunch at Rules (her choice, she had always wanted to go there). She came in carrying six plastic bags and wearing the outfit she had worn to the Palace. The maître d’ had to be reassured: this was a great poet. A headline in The Times described her as ‘the bag-lady of the sonnets’. The effect was cruel, because to herself she never seemed eccentric, difficult, unusual. Out of confusion, anguish and pain she had drawn a humane, consoling body of poetry that will remain popular for generations. What could be more normal?’