Tambimuttu

David Gascoyne writes:
Tambimuttu died in a London hosiptal on 22 June as a result of cardiac arrest, having suffered a fall at his Bloomsbury HQ a few days previously.

Known to anyone with the least claim to his acquaintance as Tambi, his full name was Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu, and he was born in 1915 in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon. Having already published three youthful collections of verse, he arrived in England in 1938 to set about organising with singleminded enthusiasm the publication of Poetry London Magazine, with which his name became indissolubly associated. The second word of this title was in fact added only after the first two numbers had appeared. The first, which came out in the Spring of 1939 in the wake of a prospectus distributed at the end of the previous year, contained work by a score of contributors, including Walter de la Mare, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Lawrence Durrell, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Philip O'Connor and Nicholas Moore. Hector Whistler's original cover-design was of a calligraphically decorative nature, centering round an enigmatically baroque motif, which those who had set eyes on Tambi during his earliest London days recognized as a formalized representation of the Literary Editor, with the long, convoluted black coiffure characteristic of his Jaffna Tamil origins. The General Editor named on the cover of the first number was Anthony Dickins, the first of a series of faithful assistants.

The Sunday Times for the week following Tambi's ...