Chicago Review 46:1 
Spring 2000
 
 
 
 

TOM PICKARD
from Rough Music (Ruff Muzhik)
 
 
 
 
 
 

 A Work Conchy

Towards the end of 1965 the "success" of the Morden Tower was paralleled by pressure from the dole to get me into a proper job. It became increasingly intense and hard to handle. I started getting visits from National Assistance Board officers every other day to see if I was seeking work.

         thi sen an inspector roon
         each day of the week
         to see if am lookin for work
         but av got me coat on and walking the toon
         forst tryin to borrow a short. . .

        Up until then it had been a low intensity war between the dole and myself. They offered whatever work was available for a working-class youth without even the most basic qualification, and I refused it. They offered more work with vague threats, and still I refused it--citing my vocation as a poet--but there is no such category of worker in any modern state, and any work-shy element, they argued, could claim to be a poet. If I didn't accept a job then I would be penalised. My generation of school leavers were the first post WW2 babies to hit an already depressed job market. The North East was going through another of its depressions, and the dole queues were long. The authorities felt they had to fit me up with a job because I was yelping that I was a poet, the state's money was having to feed three mouths, and the National Assistance Board were putting pressure on them to get me off their books. We had brought a range of international poets to the tower and discovered a regular and new audience for them and had published a looseleaf pop-art one-off magazine devoted to Bunting, King Ida's Watch Chain, and his long poem "The Spoils"--both designed by Richard Hamilton. My mate Bunting was a great poet and he was showing me the ropes; I had to be a poet. The Morden Tower, situated in an unlit alley backing onto small factories emitting sulphurous fumes where prostitutes took clients for a quick turn, provided a focus for some of the finest talents in the region. Bryan Ferry, then a student at the Arts School under Hamilton, was a regular visitor, and Alan Hull the singer songwriter of the folk-rock band Lindisfarne was to give his first public performance there. Hamilton was working in his studio at that time on the reconstruction of the Duchamp great glass, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even and we took Creeley to see him and it in late 1964. The campaign to rescue Kurt Schwitters's "wall" from the barn in the Lake District where it was deteriorating and bring it to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle was also being organised by Hamilton. After Creeley's visit in 1964, he became an occasional visitor and a guiding hand. And the young badger-eyed Gordon Burn was a regular. He wrote in the Independent how he felt enabled, as a working-class school leaver, to come to the tower: "I was 16 in 1964. Pickard was only two years older, and from a virtually identical background (his father shoveled coal in the railway yards in Gateshead; mine worked in a factory on the Tyne). But whereas I was a conventional product of the system, a roll-on roll-off grammar-school achiever, he was already married to a beautiful older woman, Connie (a name throbbing with Chatterley connotations at that time) and four years into what he referred to as 'my working life on the dole'. . .the series of readings and 'happenings' were the first sign to me that writing could be something more than a set text to be slogged through with dutiful encirclings and underlinings and comments of 'v.imp' and 'signif' in the margins. . ."
        Clearly we were providing a much needed service outside of the institutions of learning and medicinal art. The rationale for investing public money in "the arts" was that it would "attract industry." The pompously named North Eastern Association for the Arts (NEAA) was peddling the argument that it could attract industry by making the perceived culturally barren region attractive to the managers of multinational companies by creating an environment where they could experience an artistic frisson while putting the bite on clients. And it would give their wives something to do in the evenings. The Morden Tower gave no comfort to that mind-set and neither was it physically comfortable. To accommodate the numbers who wanted to get into the readings required us to sit them on the floor, and sometimes stack them up against the circular walls. Brian Swann exemplifies the NEAA's state of mind when he recounts a conversation with the director (in 1974) who gave him the organisation's official brochure that was "full of imported arts," and Northumberland was still regarded as an "outpost of the empire." The director thought Bunting's attempts to acknowledge a Northumbrian culture "fatuous--he's got no followers and has had no effect. He is rather an eccentric--Northumberland is dead, and its so called folk-culture. . ." A year or so before local governments could be persuaded to set up this regional arts council, the architects of the scheme brought the playwright, Arnold Wesker, and other Centre 42 representatives to Newcastle to give a talk about culture. It seemed patronizing to me and we got into a curb-side argument with Wesker about the relative merits of sending a string quartet down a coalmine as opposed to the Animals playing in the Downbeat, or pit ballads, and the Beatles, for fucks sake. Youth was wriggling out of the cages and singing. What was art, anyway? We could do it for ourselves. Wesker probably argued that "rock and roll" was commercialised and therefore worthless, merely commodity. 
        The National Assistance Board thought poetry worthless and took up the war from the dole. I gambled that they wouldn't stop paying us the £9.10s per week, because there was a young child to feed. But, as an able bodied potential breadwinner, they told me, I had a duty to provide for my family, and refusing paid employment could certainly be seen as a failure to maintain them, which is illegal. My objection to work was as much pragmatic as principled: as a teenager without qualifications or skills I could earn most by labouring on building sites, as I had done up until the Ginsberg reading, but the pay was only £10 per week, whereas the NAB money was £9.10s. When the compulsory national insurance stamp was deducted along with bus fares to and from work there would be no improvement in our circumstances, we would still run up debts, go cold some days without coal, and hungry others. Being on the dole gave me time to read and time to write, time to spend with my baby boy, and time to spend with Basil on his lunch breaks over a pint upstairs in the Crown next to the old music hall, the Empire Theatre. On those occasions he'd read me a few new lines of Briggflatts from his notebook, cast a critical eye over what I'd been writing, recall an amusing incident from his life, ask about Connie, "canny lass," and the bairn. Or he'd give me a tutorial on Marie Lloyd, Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, Mina Loy or Whitman, and I'd go away, enthused, to buy or steal a volume of their work, only to be disappointed to find local booksellers had never heard of them. With a few notable exceptions the friendly academics from the Universities of Newcastle and Durham who occasionally attended the poetry readings knew little or nothing of their work either, and were familiar mostly with Eliot and Pound. Pound was considered a talented crank, but Eliot's star shone in English departments like the one gleaming over the Kremlin, and all an internee of the department was expected to do was polish it with his nose. His reputation and aesthetic value system could not be questioned. 
        One day I showed Bunting a letter from the Oxford Poetry Society responding to my refusal to read without payment and it outraged him. The society secretary told me that most people consider it an honour to read for them, and money was never mentioned. It was bad form. Basil was getting similar letters, and a few days later someone gave him a John Bull hand printing set with which he produced this: 

Thank you for your invitation; but I am not keen to read. Reading poetry is much like playing music. I find it hard to understand people who read who are too haphazard, with no matched or contrasted programme and no rehearsal. I think that people who pay to see films or hear concerts should pay no less for poetry, if they want it; but some are willing to sponge on poets who never think of treating a fiddler so. I believe readings will go on being sloppy till poets insist on proper pay and conditions.
        So I have fixed these fees for readings:
        In the North Country (Humber & Ribble to Solway Firth  and   Tweed)   forty guineas
        Elsewhere in Britain   eighty guineas
        Overseas 500 US dollars 
        -- -- -- -- all plus fare, bed and board.
        Most school societies have no money. I will oblige them if I can conveniently. Many student societies could squeeze rich colleges but don't. If you think your case is special by all means state it. (Letters addressed to Shylock may not always reach their destination.)

He was always sympathetic and knocked the self pity from my helpless rage at the dole authorities with a "What the hell! You keep at those poems and you'll have a good book in no time." Then he might break into a music hall song because we were next to the Empire Theatre, or a bawdy one from the First World War, assuming for the latter frowning eyebrows, a chin firmly set on chest and ponderous bishop-like scowl from which he uttered the brilliant trench profanities that inspired him to a howl of appreciative laughter. 
        On the days when I didn't have to visit the NAB office in the afternoon and tell them which factory or building site I had solicited for work that morning they would send an official to our home. He would step into the living room and unpack my file and sit uncomfortably in an upright chair, while I sulked sprawled in another. It was like being interrogated by a policeman. When he asked me what I had done the day before, I told him. 
        Writing is a hobby. 
        No it isn't--it's what I do, I replied, inadequately.
        You have a responsibility and a legal obligation to maintain your family. 
        It was difficult to argue with that. So much of what he said was true, and so much of my position was indefensible, that I only shrugged agreement with him. 
        Where have you been today? 
        Spinning him lies and uncomfortable about the necessity of doing so, I just wanted to tell him to get out of our home and mind his own fucking business, but I didn't because the baby had to be fed and the rent paid, so pretended just enough for him not to suspend payment of the benefit. I would continue to argue about my right to be a poet at the same time as pursuing half-heartedly some underpaid drudgery, and it worked for a while. But they were only momentarily convinced of the sincerity of my search for a job. They also argued, correctly, that it wasn't their responsibility to support arts organisations such as the Morden Tower by paying the organiser. There were other departments of government, local and national, to take care of that. This was true, but until the Arts Council of Great Britain, or the newly formed North Eastern Association for the Arts, or the city council's Cultural Activities Committee, saw me as a worthy recipient of their largess rather than as an embarrassment, the NAB were paying me. Somebody had to. 

§

The Lord Mayor, surprisingly, became an ally. Her son was coming to the tower regularly and she thought anything that kept him off the streets fine. He was an ex-pupil, or perhaps at that time still a sixth form pupil, of the Royal Grammar School, a fee-paying institution. He appears as an embarrassed guest in Don't Look Back when Bob Dylan visits Newcastle and our Lord Mayor doorstops the startled singer in his dressing room and introduces her son and his friend Harry. Recently elected she wanted to help and was pestering her colleagues on the City Council's Cultural Activities Committee to make us a grant. Her proposal was that I should be employed as a Youth Worker and paid £750 a year to run the Morden Tower as my parish, or youth club. The machinery of local government ground into action and a proposal was put on the agenda for discussion at the next meeting. About this time I heard that Edward Dorn was in the country so wrote asking if he'd come and read for us. He replied on the 12th of January saying he'd wanted to come "since Creeley told me of his visit there."6 The stakes were getting high and this was to be an important date for us. The Lord Mayor and the chairman of the Cultural Activities Committee, Mrs. Gladys Robson, magistrate, leader of the council, and later model for Bunting's satirical poke at municipal morons, "What the Chairman Told Tom," were to attend the reading to see what we were about and if we were deserving enough to qualify for financial assistance along with the amateur operatic society and the other worthy cultural activities supported by the city. Ed Dorn didn't really know what he was walking into. In a letter to Charles Olson he sets the scene: "They take things very seriously up there, have a thing called the North East Arts council which gives money pretty much all round, but not that freely because since it was discovered Tom lives on the dole while he is a POET 'at the same time' they took a closer look and thus the Lord Mayor, plus the Sheriff, of Newcastle came to my reading."

        Dorn was a tall, wiry, Midwesterner with a lived in face and was sharp as a blade. We were instantly comfortable with him. Bunting prepared me for the meeting with the council officials by suggesting that I curb my usual truculent impatience and treat Mrs. Gladys Robson with charm. She was partially receptive to his ex-wing commander charm because, although a bit raggy-arsed he was a cut above her. But she was clearly contemptuous of my poverty, aspirations, and frame of mind. We had met before when the Lord Mayor invited me to a civic reception they were holding for a visiting dignitary, thinking it, I suppose, a reasonable opportunity for me to network with members of the Cultural Activities Committee. But, alas, I had no social graces, and was un-diplomatically curious of the Lord Sheriff's official duties when he spoke to me wearing his ceremonial garb. Each link of the chain of office was stamped with the names of his predecessors, many of whom had exercised their right to be present at a scaffold. In a poem I preferred to see it otherwise: 

         The Lord Sheriff's gold chain
         sparkles with the names 
         of hanged men
         whose lifeless limbs
         dangle and decorate his chins. . .

When he told me that he could lock me up if I caused a disturbance in the town, I asked him who could lock him up? The question was pertinent because policemen at the Pilgrim Street nick had recently beaten up a few of my old school friends. I had been gathering information and making notes about the most notorious, Muscles, who enjoyed thrashing any of the young roughnecks unlucky enough to be arrested on Saturday night brawls in the Bigg Market, or who had been caught thieving. Prisoners were often punched or kicked unconscious by Muscles and at least one other officer. There was a great deal of violence at week-ends around that cluster of marvelous pubs in the Bigg Market and I would often turn sick at the sound of a bottle breaking or a table going over at the start of a barny. But that didn't justify the routine violence being meted out in the cells, where a number of men had been killed. About one-thirty on the morning of March 18th 1964, Muscles visited the ground floor flat where Connie and I were lodging with our four-month-old son, Mathew. He shone his torch into our window as we slept. Woken by their torchlight and laughter the baby woke us, so I went out and confronted them, thinking it was the lads being stupid. The police had come looking for Franky who would occasionally sleep on a floor there. The cops stank of alcohol and I refused to let them into the house without a warrant. Next morning I made this note of the conversation in a diary: 

        "What's your form?" Muscles asked. 
        "I haven't got one. What's yours?" 
        "Grievous bodily harm." The drunk one stumbled sideways.
        "Pensioner?" I asked. 
        "No, comedian, like you. We got a fifty quid fine and promoted." 
        His eyes were glazed. The police car radio was crackling and echoed in the unlit back lane. 
        "Listen, mister, we're going to be around all night so if there's a break-in, or trouble anywhere in Jesmond, we'll be straight through your window without stopping to open it. Baby or no baby."
        I go inside and bolt the yard door behind me. All night we could hear their voices in the back lane. At about three am they climbed over the wall and unbolted the door. Later, after going to sleep, we were woken again by torchlight flashing on our faces through the window.

        An art student friend of Connie rented the flat, and each room was sub-let to other students and us. Situated in the otherwise respectable middle class suburb of Jesmond, student flats were part of the landscape and their occupants' sometimes unruly behaviour was tolerated as part of the initiation into a professional life, or as the sowing of wild oats. We came from the other side of town, Blakelaw; and working class youths being exuberant is by definition delinquent. We had no business in that part of town unless we were housebreakers. Boy from Blakelaw in Jesmond equals intruder. The police were maintaining the status quo, and it confirmed all that my new Trotskyist and Anarchist friends were telling me, that the primary role of the police is to protect the propertied class. The great Russian dystopian writer Zamyatin lodged in Jesmond in 1915/16 and was so impressed with its stultifying uniformity that he named and located the mythical country of his satire of the English bourgeois, Jesmond. And Jesmond was where my mother had cleaned houses, both as a girl in 1916 and later in the '50s and '60s.

By Sunday the stone steps of the houses in Jesmond had as usual been scrubbed to a dazzling whiteness. The houses were old and smoke-blackened but the steps shone in white rows, like the Sunday gentlemen's false teeth. The Sunday gentlemen were of course manufactured at a factory in Jesmond, and on a Sunday morning thousands of copies appeared on the streets, along with the Sunday edition of the St Enoch Parish Gazette. Carrying identical canes and wearing identical top hats, the respectable Sunday gentle-men in their false teeth strolled down the street and greeted their doubles.
        "Splendid weather, isn't it?"
        "Oh yes, yesterday was far worse."
        Then the gentlemen listened to the Reverend Dewley's sermon about the tax collector and the Pharisee. Leaving the church, by some miracle they were able to find their own houses among the thousands of identical houses produced by the factory. They ate their dinner unhurriedly, talking to the family about the weather. Then they sang hymns with the family and waited until evening to go visiting with the family. 

I met those same policemen a week later when, after a row with Connie, I walked in the cool night air trying to regain my emotional feet. From my diary: 

        "Oy!" A small car full of large policemen and an Alsatian dog. The driver calls me over. "Oh, it's Mr Poet is it?" 
        "Mr Policeman." 
        "You shouldn't be out this time of night. Only puffs and thieves out this late, and you're not a thief are you?" I told them I was out for the air. 
        "You should walk in your own back yard if you have to." They were all squashed and sweating in the small vehicle.

It wasn't being out after dark that caused them problems. It was just being there. Several times during daylight, when coming out of the back lane that led to our home I would be stopped and searched by policemen who refused to believe that I lived there. A year later, Harry, a boy whom the Lord Mayor had "adopted" was arrested for possession of grass and kept overnight in the Pilgrim Street police station. He came to see me shortly afterwards badly bruised and told me that he had been beaten in the cells. The police said it was an epileptic fit. But he was terrified of having to go back and before his court appearance killed himself. 
        Mrs. Gladys Robson attended the reading because the Lord Mayor insisted. She had already cancelled two previous visits in her capacity as chairman of the Cultural Activities Committee and that meant our case being dropped off the agenda of their monthly meetings until she could attend. The delays were crippling for us, as the NAB was threatening either prosecution or a complete cut off of our benefit. The civic dignitaries came to the reading, which was well attended, and Dorn read superbly. Everyone behaved politely towards the officials, and they left satisfied that we were a going concern. The next days newspaper reported the event:

I SUPPORT BEAT POETS, SAYS LORD MAYOR.

The Lord Mayor of Newcastle joined 60 longhaired youngsters last night in a room above the old wall of the city, and listened to poetry. Later Alderman Mrs. Theresa Russell described the poetry reading at the Morden Tower as "absolutely fascinating. Alderman Mrs. Gladys Robson and myself were the only ones who had a seat. Everyone else sat on the floor, and were so quiet you could hear a pin drop. We were amazed that so many of them had come along despite the weather, and they were all so intent that the atmosphere was fantastic. I think the group is in as much need of support as any youth club, and it would be tragic if it were allowed to die." 
        But last night's reading--by Edward Dorn, an American--may be the last one. The organiser of the poetry sessions, Mr. Tom Pickard, aged 20, is to have his dole money and national assistance stopped. He says he will move to another town if need be to get enough money to support his wife and child. He has one last chance of keeping the tower open. He has applied to Newcastle Youth Committee, which meets today, for the group to become an affiliated "youth club." If the appeal succeeds he could be considered as a youth leader, and he could receive a regular salary for his work. After the meeting last night, Alderman Mrs. Russell telephoned Councillor B Abrahart, chairman of the Youth Committee. "I told him that I gave my wholehearted support to the group, and that I think it is something which Newcastle should be proud of."

We were hopeful, reading that, as Ed hurriedly got ready for the breakfast we'd been invited to at the Royal Station Hotel with the Lord Mayor. It was the first time I'd been inside that institution. We went up the ornate steps and into the dining room where the headwaiter showed us to her table. She sat with the majority leader in the National Assembly of Korea, Mr. Kim Dong Hwan. Ed, conscious of his duty, made polite conversation over coffee. A grumbling racist gentleman at the next table referred to the Korean as the bastard who had stolen his binoculars in the last war. He became quite abusive, until the Lord Mayor and the headwaiter moved him to another table. She apologised explaining that he was a Tory alderman and drunk. The Korean minister smiled indulgently, apparently ignorant of the offence.

"The Lord Mayor" invited me to see the town w/ her the next day which I did in her chauffeur driven Daimler limousine (cant have Rolls apparently because it wld bug the people who still remember Jarrow and might throw stones etc.) We drove thru Jarrow incidentally, scene of depression strikes and hunger marches where she pointed out to me (out the polished windows) what she called "the more interesting poverty." Dig that. I was, I assure you, speechless I mean my eyes sort of fell out and rolled around on the deep, posh backseat. But I don't want to make her sound that flippy. Aside from those arch defenses, she's a good socialist, and ran on that ticket --and in her study in the mayoral mansion she had pictures of Lenin, one signed, to her father and pictures of Engels. Her father was a famous Talmudic scholar. His books where elegant, dry things lining the walls. She's a dark handsome woman in her late 40s I'd guess. . .

        The Lord Mayor had a frigate launching on the Tyne to attend and she invited Dorn to accompany her. The invitation didn't extend to me so I said I'd see him back home later. 

. . .it was to be launched by a lady Hawkins, Lord Hawkins was there, an admiral (but not admirable) and a direct descendant from the pirate.13 My Lord Mayor was the guest of honor. She picked up another "distinguished" visitor to Newcastle "the prime minister of So. Korea" (which of course he wasn't and when I told her he was just a fink from a fink dictator, vassal state, she looked at me blandly and said--well that's all right, he's bright, handsome and should be the P.M. of S.K. and we'll call him that. So we did. It was a comic opera, this cat smiling because he dug so being prime minister and she wearing her cap and gold chain of office. Like I didn't even have on a tie which she didn't notice but the people at the launching did. Was anyhow trying to avoid the Korean because he was always trying to get to me with leading questions (he had been to America and wanted to talk that shit) and since I was interested in the power structure of a large English city and reasonably thot I might never get the chance again I didn't want to create a situation by telling him to fuck off etc. But he got taken care of when he got out of the limousine at his hotel--he caught his pant leg on the jump seat somehow and ripped it right up to the knee--there was a mighty blizzard outside and the last we saw of him was going into the hotel lobby his drawers blowing into the wind while the Lady Mayoress (the LM's daughter, and a real zingy one) and I rolled around on the back seat holding our sides. Meanwhile the Lord M. herself leapt out of the machine in a frantic sweat to try and console him. Like it was a predicament for her because it was all happening in her town, altho she couldn't stop laughing either. It turned out his spare pants were in the cleaners and she then went to a nearby shop and bought him a pair, guessing at the size. I'll give it to him tho, that inscrutable smile never left his partitionist face. The point is he didn't go to the launching and it was just we three. The launching was spectacular, the[y] had made an incision in the bottle of Champaign with a diamond Cutter but it still didn't bust the first time. But when she did go away I was standing lined right up with the runners and saw it all, very slowly at first so you cld hardly notice and then all at once fast, into the Tyne. A frigate, medium size I took it.14 3 cheers went up, really. Hip Hip etc and then the band struck up a rousing version of that tune from Bridge over The River Kwai. Then we all, "the launching party," went into the company's reception room as ten thousand Jarrow and Heburn workers streamed out of the gates for home, a swarthy sight indeed beside those lords and their ladies. We had Champaign and then there were many speeches by various genuine Sir Matthews, Georges, sprinkled with HEAH HEAHs when specific cliché was mumbled about the empiah, Britannia ruling the waves etc. After that (we stayed too long and it had to be pointed out to her honor that nobody could leave until she did, since she was the guest of H.) she did introduce me to whom she said were the most important people "this is professor Dorn, the brilliant and distinguished poet from America" at which the lords and ladies would extend the most incredibly gratuitous hand imaginable and smile something approximating a cat passing wind.

Later that day someone pointed out the editorial in the morning paper saying I should get a job. In our rush to meet the Lord Mayor, I'd not seen it. 

POETRY AND PROSE

To turn the Morden tower into a poetry centre was a spirited venture full of the fire and imagination of youth. An out of work teenager from a secondary modern D stream has played an important part in Newcastle's cultural renaissance. 
        In order to give the Morden Tower his full time attention, Tom Pickard relied on the £9 a week National Assistance and dole money to support his wife and child. Now that has been withdrawn and Mr. Pickard must either get a job or starve.
        However he does not see the choice in such simple terms. He has asked the North Eastern Association for the Arts for a salary as the Morden Tower's professional organiser, and he has approached Newcastle Youth Committee in the hope of getting a Youth Leader's wage.
       The Morden Tower may have to close down if neither of Tom Pickard's ships sail into harbor. This would be a great pity, but it does not improve his case for an added subsidy.
        Tom Pickard should take heart from the poetic achievements of such men as WH Auden, an ex-school teacher, Basil Bunting a newspaper sub-editor, and Wilfred Owen, a soldier in the trenches. It may be very prosaic for a poet to do a job of work but it helps to pay the gas bill.

        Dorn stayed on for a couple of days and we took him for a lunch time drink with Basil. "Basil Bunting is a fine old man, very funny the way he'll stare at you with this silly grin on his face, up close, and you think he hasn't got it until suddenly he makes his answer. A real, seedy old gent, but very straight, I liked him immensely, he hasn't any of that put-off porcelainity I thot Zukofsky had--."17
        Afterwards I asked him why he thought Eliot had refused to publish him. 

T.S. Eliot was the midwife who was constantly trying to kill the baby. He was the abortionist of the post-modern movement, he controlled who was going to be born and who wasn't insofar as he could--Eliot occupied the position of power and one of his strategies was to write essays and redefine what literature could be and was according to his own lights. Basil wouldn't have been a threat exactly. I mean what could threaten T.S. Eliot? But he certainly wouldn't have conformed to what Eliot wanted as a buttressing element in his own position in the canon. I mean you have to remember that in those days the canon hadn't even been questioned. It was assumed there was a canon and the canon was alright. Eliot was maniacal in the protection of his career. There's something very strange that I've never quite been able to figure out; he had this strange prescience about his own career, in the sense that some-how he managed to hit a mark down the way so far off that it's astonishing. His papers are going to be opened either the year after or the year before the Kennedy assassination papers in 2027 or 8. I mean that's just that's amazing that he could in a post-mortem sense opportunistically take advantage of such a mark on the board of time. I mean this is unheard of, it's unprecedented. It's quite amazing. Maybe he killed Kennedy--.

        Bunting was abhorred or ignored until the publication of Briggflatts when his skill and achievements became clear to a wider and discerning public. But why had he been so neglected?

Well there is this peculiar interregnum, a vacuum in his career, which is more notable than almost anybody you can think of. I think he was more than neglected, I think he was ignored, or perhaps even shut out in a strange way. He didn't have a self-promotion apparatus which most people who become famous in something so worthless as poetry have to have, and have to attend it pretty much every day. He was I think generally resented and an object of suspicion. Like when somebody is an adventurer and a poet, or a diplomat and a poet, or who has had other experiences than something that emerges from the academy. You know it's true that there are academic poets, but most poets have had some connection, whether academic or not it doesn't make any difference, they've come out of the academy somehow. I mean somebody in the academy has noticed and promoted them, or championed them and so forth. This has been the mark of the 20th-century. T.S. Eliot wasn't an academic, but I mean he was the ultimate academic, to the academy. He worked in a bank, he worked as a publisher, an editor, in all sorts of things but his care and protection coming from the academy made him the greatest academic of all. Basil had no protectors, no champions, no-one to look after him in the halls of power. It seems ridiculous to speak of the halls of power of poetry, but in those places where one's name is nurtured and generated and increased.

        He gave me a signed copy of his autobiographical novel, Rites of Passage20, with a hand drawn map to locate the geography for us. It is tenderly inscribed: "all about a place not so long ago and not all that different from Newcastle, but far." It has a chapter about an unemployment office, where a stuttering man frustrated with the bureaucracy, ends up shouting: 

WHAT KIND OF A MISERABLE GODDAM JAJOB IS IT ANYWAY-- POPOKING PEAS UP A AA RATS ASS?21

It was a gift I could appreciate. Dorn greatly helped maintain my resolve to plough on. We talked continuously. I railed, naively, about getting money for poets, and setting up a poet's union or some sort of organisation with muscle that could ensure proper payment for readings. Dorn was doubtful, but we chewed over the issues in the bars of Newcastle and shivering in the flat. He wrote to Olson: "Pickard. . .is really bitterly poor dig, one morning I woke up at his place and it was so damn cold I shook till my eyes finally opened, for the first time in too long I realized, I suddenly felt wide awake." Taking him to the railway station, we agreed to meet two weeks later at a gathering of poets in Nottingham, but he didn't make it. On March 2nd he wrote and explained why he'd not gone, using that vituperative wit that always made me laugh. 

I had gone the next night, after leaving Newcastle, to read for the Cunliff Relief Fund in CHELSEA Town Hall-- -- --those two incompetent pornographers. And that made me so dammed angry having just left your real need, and thinking of you and Connie up there, beside these two "Bohemian" types with their car and their crying need, and their fucking weak-assed "poetry" Oh God! All because of a few not very dirty words! I tell you it was too much and like all those Poetmeat people were very unfriendly to Helene and I who had taken some dam pains to get there. I unfortunately followed Mike Horowitz in the reading line up and that gyrating pseudo-twisting mother-fucker appalled me so completely I was nearly unable to read and as a matter of fact botched my own verse so much I had the unpleasant experience of hating it as well as myself--so, dig, I just couldn't get into that bag again so soon. And didn't want any of their godamned talks and mostly because I've heard it all before and did take seriously your own enthusiasm for the union-- -- --but nobody makes their living from poetry anyhow, Tom, and especially those types not hear letting go of the 4 or 5 pounds they have come to expect. . .And oh yes, I hear from Tom Clark that the black-face vaudeville team of Horowitz and Brown made off wid da swag as it was, ie in Nottingham--.

        By this time, the council had rejected the Youth Leader idea and the financial situation for us worsened when the Cultural Activities Committee took up the bugle call from the Journal and ran with it. 

Councilor Abrahart said he understood Mr. Pickard was receiving national assistance after his unemployment benefit was stopped. Now the NAB have threatened to stop payment because he is not seeking employment. He is arguing that he cannot do anything but this and would be unable to do it and work. I cannot understand why he cannot do a job of work as well as this. . .

..millions of people do a job of work and pursue other fields of work in which they are interested.

However they coughed up £150, enough, as Dorn pointed out, to encourage us to get into further debt. 

I have a sinking feeling when I think of the hours we devoted to that elusive prospect. My God how we creatures have a capacity to hope those types will actually get off their dead arses and do something. And that we knew especially they'd never do. But the damn horror is that the power types are not that different than those among us who look like their predicament is similar to mine, or more importantly yours. And there is no point in bullshitting
-- -- --I've been somewhat taken care of by this "society" in a more subtle way than Newcastle flirted w/you-- -- --a "job" say-- -- --get that man out of the gutter, or factory, or off the unemployment rolls, whatever--and a man like Geal Turnbull say, he was given a "profession"--my good friend Prynne, at Cambridge, he was "educated"-- -- --it's endless. Nobody gives it up tho--that is the thing to understand. I don't know at this point what it would be but something far more radical than a union has to be proposed. The union as we know it is a simple counter arrangement inside the Lord Mayor's little bag, and in there there is no opposition-- -- --Tory v Labour bullshit-- -- --there is no opposition.

        I was shown where no claimant goes, unless escorted in transit, as I was, through the inner office of the building, past rows of desks where clerks typed reports or studied a file of someone like me, to the foot of a narrow and steep staircase. It was wide enough for one person only, and the clerk ushered me to climb. My resolve weakened as I remembered a dream of just such forbidding stairs. This grubby makeshift building built to service makeshift people; this warehouse peopled with need. I mounted the first step conscious of being boxed in on either side and my retreat shut off by my escort following closely behind. The small room I entered from the top step had a low roof. Desks were laid out along three walls, leaving space for a chair in the middle, which I took to be vacant and waiting for me. I was told as much by following the eye line of the office manager. The desks were occupied by representatives of the disciplinary committee of the National Assistance Board, and were drawn from a range of institutions. One woman was a magistrate, another a city councillor, a trade union official sat between representatives of industry and commerce and a number of other worthy citizens. The manager was looking at a file in front of him while the others studied me. What did they see? An unmarried unqualified labourer that wouldn't work to feed his bastard and common-law wife, and who insisted that his job was poetry. After a while the manager raised his head and asked me to identify myself. When I spoke, in a dry voice, the others looked at their papers to check that I had got it right and the clerk made a note of my response. 
        As he began to formally notify me of my legal obligation to maintain a family, I interrupted the manager to ask who the rest of the people were. They knew who I was and I wanted to know who they were. A man introducing himself as a personnel manager in heavy industry introduced his colleagues whose names I noted in a book. Satisfied that protocol was re-instated the manager continued to remind me of the legal obligation to feed clothe and house my family and the consequences of failing to do so. Then the rest of the committee asked: what time do you get up in the morning, how do you spend your time, why haven't you got a job, why don't you want a job, have you no shame, where's your sense of responsibility? They spoke quickly like bingo callers chiseling bids at an auction of repossessed houses. I said I would like to be a poet and if I couldn't then I'd be a lighthouse keeper. And they went on to say we want to give you another chance before we cut off your money, we want to send you to a Rehabilitation Centre where you'll get back into the habit of working. I refused and they offered the alternative of a Re-establishment Centre, which I again refused. There was silence for a moment, a conferring of bowed heads. Finally, they formally cautioned me that unless I accepted their offer of a place at a Re-Establishment Centre they would prosecute for failing to maintain my family and the current mandatory sentence for a first offence was six months in jail. The course at the Re-Establishment Centre was also six months and when I asked what the difference was they told that the latter was voluntary. I left the office by the steep stairs on unsteady feet, went home and wrote as close a report of the encounter that I could. 

. . .Now about this poetry lark. I know it's only an excuse to idle because I've read your record. 
        Who wrote it? 
        We've got a lot of questions to ask you.
        Under the Geneva Convention I am only at liberty to give you name address and national insurance number. 
        We want you working.
        Do you have anything in lighthouses?
        This is not a travel agency. Now think of the fumes in my factory, they may have killed your father, but when you think long enough he breathed wealth. He breathed the fumes of capital. Money is dirty, very dirty. When you touch it many grubby hands have already handled it. Your father's bronchial phlegm coats pennies with brown slime. Paper money is covered in germs; people who work with money quite often get skin diseases. Your father's miserable frame coughed, choked, and ached its way to the grave, but not before he spewed a seed or two. Those seeds sank into mother energy, mother capital, mother drudgery. Your father's worm-eaten flesh is now purer than it has ever been. Work, son, is the only expression the working man is allowed. All of every man's fuel is needed for the fire. I am the stoker! I snatch children into my arms and teach them the meaning of fear! I instill pain! Galvanise terror! Manufacture respect! Create duty and weld it to drudgery. Industry is love! Industry is life! "Work," son, is the only word in the language I trust. All others are convoluted with meaning to confuse the ignorant man.

That piece of writing evidently hit its mark several years later because in a bulletin of the right wing business organisation, AIMS OF INDUSTRY, I was awarded their Bias Prize, the Bent Microphone. This ideological blacklist-compiling organisation watchdogs the media for anything other than a positive image of capitalism and circulates its members and other interested bodies with names of offending recusants. In late 1972 BBC-TV brought its art programme, "Full House," to Newcastle and commissioned me to write about the redevelopment of the city (involving massive corruption amongst councillors) "Words by Tom Pickard, poet, refer to the speculative boot being put into Newcastle." The BBC had also commissioned for the same programme an adaptation of an extract from Guttersnipe. 

This portrayed the views and values of a factory manager who believes the poet should be a labourer to breathe the fumes of capital. Industry is love, industry is life. Allusion made to the poet's father who died from the fumes and factory work--supposedly nobly, from the manager's view. This was the real dark satanic mills stuff that Dickens might have scripted if he had been alive.

        It was clear that I had to get the NAB off my back. There was no way I wanted a labour camp experience, to be taught the meaning of real work, or to be bludgeoned into a healthy work habit. I already worked, reading all that unintelligible poetry, wracking my spirit to reconcile the impulse to sing and celebrate the joys in my life or the injustices that I saw in the system. The editorial in the local paper suggesting I get a job provoked some anonymous hate mail, telling me to get work to feed my sniveling bastard and whorish wife. There weren't many like that, just enough to deepen the stress, and to induce paranoid speculation about just who, amongst our acquaintances, might have sent them. But the support we were getting from the Morden Tower audience, and from poets, kept us steady. In response to the snide editorial, already quoted, Jonathan Williams wrote to the paper on March 2nd and went straight onto the attack.

I have read your editorial of February 8th Poetry & Prose, with interest. As an American poet who recently read his work at the Morden Tower, as a publisher of poets, and as a critic of poetry, may I add a few remarks to the discussion of the Tower and Mr Tom Pickard. One gathers that poetry is not one of the refinements of life offered to youths in secondary modern school's D stream curriculum. Putting it plainly, it seems to me that there is a considerable amount of resentment in Newcastle that Tom Pickard concerns himself with the writing of poems and the running of the Morden Tower Book Room instead of being a day labourer ie what he was "educated" to be and what his "class" is supposed to limit him to being in the first place. A reporter for the Evening Chronicle expressed astonishment that I should walk into his office in my Burberry clothing ("a world famous poet--an American at that") accompanied by a "long haired unkempt teenager" namely Tom Pickard. Being poor twenty and used to insolence are three reasons for being unkempt. What is not unkempt is his poetic style. Mr Bewick's miniatures are no more refined. Northumberland should consider itself lucky to find another wild flower in its nettle patch. Few people nowadays like what they are doing: few care about anything much but their paycheck. This is particularly true of journalists, often incipient writers, so I am not surprised to read an editorial condemning Tom Pickard because he does not want to join the other pigs routing at the economic trough. I am much more surprised that members of the North Eastern Arts Association take the same attitude to the profession of poetry ie that it is not work. Very correct, it isn't! It is a form of ancient play-- -- --like religion and ballet & football. Playing with words in poems enhances life, even makes it possible for many. And it holds the world together in the mind. We assume that monks have enough to do, that they have a "vocation". They are asked to make no profit. We do not ask Nueryev to dig ditches in his white leather raincoat. The Arts Council of Great Britain pours huge sums into the performing arts in order to entertain the "cultivated" and keep social life whirling. The "uncultivated" pour huge sums into football in order to be entertained by the likes of Greaves, Osgood, and Charlton. And let them be ready for Saturday afternoon and not worn out from labouring. It is a question of what- you value. Poems have little currency. Paul Potts says some very accurate things in his autobiography Dante Called You Beatrice. "The work I did was not sufficiently valued by my contemporaries for them to arrange things for me, as they did for others. No real artist can make a living out of his writing, but often can make one because of it, I've never had a pound in my life that had more than seventeen shillings in it. . .If all the people I owe half a crown to suddenly turn up at the Albert Hall on the same evening there would not be enough room for a dwarf to get in." Orpheus, the first poet, was the gent who sang instead of spoke, played instead of worked, still he developed quite a following. As his man in Newcastle may, if given half a chance. There is plenty of work connected with Morden Tower and with poetry for Tom Pickard to do-- -- --if the community will recognise it as such. I disagree completely with the preachment of the last paragraph of the Journal editorial, all about the enlivening effect of drudgery all blessed by John Knox. I cannot see that the fact one is able to survive Belsen is any justification for being put there in the first place. What virtue is there that a man of Basil Bunting's formidable qualifications came back to his native country from Persia at the age of fifty and could do no better than a hack job on a Newcastle newspaper, forced to this by the need to feed and house a number of dependants? The local community (not to mention London, that Mecca of Establishment poeticules) made nothing of his genius for poetry. It now begins to, having been shown by a few Americans and young outsiders like Tom Pickard and Stuart Montgomery of the Fulcrum Press. Another question: why should Tom Pickard take heart that Wilfred Owen was forced into the trenches? Like many other people, he died there, and we are left with a handful of poems and a nice legend. It is true, finally, that a test of being a poet is remaining one and writing poems. The surrounding community would do well to lend its support as best it can, and not fret over the shiftless ways of poets. Edward Dahlberg gives us some good advice in his recent volume of aphorisms, Reasons of the Heart: "trust any devil but one who does not steal, cog, lie, pimp, or whore. Hard of heart is he who has nothing to show for his life but his virtues. I have not confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see."
 

Shrink 

The shrink gazed at me, then down at the notes from the GP who had referred me to him. He picked his nose absent-mindedly and rolled the hard snot into a ball between his finger and thumb. With his head down reading he flicked the hard ball off into the far corner of the room and I could hear it hit a metal filing cabinet. 
        Are you working? 
        Well, not officially, but I'm a poet so I'm working all the time.
        What kind of education did you have?
        Ah went to a secondary modern in Cowgate.
        What do you think of Tennyson?
        Crap.
        What about John Masefield?
        Crap.
        I suppose you like Philip Larkin?
        No.
        I see. He adds a note to my file and says without looking up from his task; Your doctor says you think you're being persecuted?
        They keep coming round the house. It's not a hallucination, I mean they're definitely after me. 
        If I was going to get a sick-note then I needed to convince him that I was being made unstable by the pressure, and anyway felt, if I didn't get from under it, I would go mad.
        They keep coming round the house, you say? He writes another note. How often?
        Every other day.
        That''s very regular, and very particular. Only every other day?
        The days they don't come I have to go and report to them.
        You seek out your tormentors?
        Some days they come to me and on others I have to go and see them. They only leave me alone at weekends because the bastards don't work then.
       Your persecutors don't work at the weekends?
       No. Do yours? I joked.
        His smile was indulgent and stuck to his face. 
       It's driving me crackers. I'm only human.
        Are they human?
        Its arguable.
        He made another note. Thinking he's taking me too literally, I add, well, they are human, obviously.
        How do they persecute you?
        They bang on the door, ask loads of questions, and threaten to send me to work camps. They're worse than the Russians.
        He looked surprised.
        The KGB?
        He was getting bizarre.
        Nar, the nash.
        The nash?
        The nab.
        The shrink nods knowingly.
        It's like a snatch squad is it? trying to nab you?
        Yeah, you could put it like that! The bastards. I can't stand the pressure anymore.
        After a while it became clear that he did not recognise the acronym and was still labouring under the illusion of a snatch squad of some kind. It was exhausting, but as I was about to unravel the misunderstanding, he interrupted. 
        Your doctor says, in his letter of referral, that you have seen other things as well. "A devil."
        The only way I could figure to get the NAB off my back was to register as sick and unfit for work so I told the general practitioner that I wanted to see a psychiatrist. When he asked why, I thought the quickest way to get to one would be to mention the hallucinations I'd had while taking opium, smoking dope and drinking Guinness, but omitting to mention the drugs that had induced them. And it worked; but having got to him, I wanted to forget it. Without waiting for an answer he wrote furiously into the file, lay back, clasped his hands together, pursed his lips and studied me. 
        I want to give you a sick-note.
       Thank fuck for that, I thought, that'll show the bastards.
        And I want to arrange for you to get some rest.
        He unpacked another indulgent and studied grin, excused himself and left the room. A nurse came in wearing a nervous slinky smile. 
        Doctor won't be long.
        He's a bit weird, isn't he?
        She laughed, and the shrink returned.
        Nurse, I've arrange for this patient to rest for two weeks, would you arrange an ambulance to take us to Saint Nicholas's Hospital? If you'll also cancel the rest of my appointments for this afternoon I'll accompany him. Meanwhile I want you to take these pills Mr Pickard--
        Hang on a minute. . . Am not gannin to the loony bin. I've got a family to look after.
        Wouldn't it be wise to seek asylum from your persecutors?
        Yeah, but the sick-note should do that.
        The Saint Nicholas hospital was a fortified lunatic asylum situated in the north of the city. It took another half-hour to persuade him that I wasn't going in his ambulance, and as a compromise promised to take the pills and come back in a few days time. Reluctantly the nurse took me to the pharmacy and dispensed the prescription of Largactil (phenothiazine). When I got home and opened the bottle I took one of the huge pills out and examined it. Never know, might get a buzz, so I swallowed it. When I woke up next day I couldn't get my mind to rise from a concrete swamp, or my limbs sufficiently mobile to get out of bed. Many years later a friendly GP showed me my medical file where the shrink, after one meeting, had written in large bold letters on the top of it "schizophrenic." So I figured if I just pretended to take the pills I'd be able to stay on the sick and that would get the NAB off my back. Seeking to be proactive I took the precious sick-note down to the Nab office and gave my name in to the reception clerk behind the iron grill and was told to sit and wait. This time I felt comfortable and almost smug. The piece of paper in my pocket would free me from these bullying officials and the giro would come without hassle. The sick-note was to be my equivalent of the notification of a university grant, or a sinecure. These officials would now have to get off my case. But they didn't.

* For all sources please refer to Chicago Review, Volume 46:1.