It’s an old story for people who’ve heard it before but significant for those who’re telling it for the first time: as a kid coming from a working-class area with no encouragement or access to any creativity (not just literature – no theatre, no galleries, no live music venue, no comedy clubs), the example of marginal figures meant a great deal – not just by what they produced, but in the way they comported themselves in a strange, sometimes hostile, context. On the wall in front of me there’s a poem by Cavafy. Commonly translated as ‘As Much as You Can’, the poem says that, although you cannot fashion your life (for life, read self) precisely as you’d want it, the least you can do is not ‘degrade it’:

taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social events and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

I’ve been collecting these hints and scraps of advice for years and the poetry of Geoff Hattersley, who died in June, forms a major part of that collection.

I first read him five or six years ago while studying for a PhD which involved another hero from the H-section of the shelf, Tony Harrison. Though I continue to love and admire Harrison, he began to strike me more as an insider’s outsider, comfortable in his discomfort with the centres of authority and permission. Hattersley’s relationship to these centres resonated with my own. According to the back of ‘On the Buses’ with Dostoyevsky, Hattersley lead a double life: ...