WILLIAM PLOMER
(1903-1973)
William Charles Franklyn Plomer, born at Petersburg, N. Transvaal, in 1903 and educated at Rugby School, was a farmer in the Stormberg and a trader in Zululand, and he also travelled widely, as he also lived at various times in Greece and Japan. . Between 1940 and 1945 he served at the Admiralty. A long list of books, including novels, short stories, biography, and poetry, stands to his credit, and he also edited the delectable Kilvert's Diary (1938-49) and a short selection of Melville's poems (1943). double Lives (1943) is an autobiography of great subtlety and interests.
Plomer's poetic output consists of seven volumes: Notes for Poems (1928); The Family Tree (1929); the Fivefold Screen (1932); Visiting the Caves (1936); Selected Poems (1940); In a Bombed House, 1941: Elegy In Memory of Anthony Butts; The Dorking Thigh (1945); A Shot in the Park (1955); A Choice of Ballads (1960); Collected Poems (1960); Taste and Remember (1966); On not Answering the Telephone (2008). He claimed himself that his "temperament and abilities are not those of a whole-time poet", and his real poetic originality, although there are some pleasant pieces in his 'serious' volumes, is to be found in his light verse and ballad satires ("That light verse can be serious it should not be necessary to insist..."). the satirical collections are The Dorking Thigh and A Shot in the Park. In a prefatory note to the earlier of these books, from which "Father and Son: 1939" and "A Ticket for the Reading Room" are taken, Plomer states:
These satires are concerned with points in human experience at which the terrifying coincides with the absurd, the monstrous with the commonplace. Such points are perhaps commoner in our time than usual, for we have seen horror and absurdity on an enormous scale ... The satires are intended to be read aloud, con br�o.
They should also be read with Auden's satirical ballads in mind and some of the early Betjeman pieces such as "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel". Plumber was less in love with his victims than John Betjeman, and he was less of a moral psychologist than the W. H. Auden of "James Honeyman", and "Miss Gee", but his effects are more pointed. "A Ticket for the Reading Room" ends rather weakly, but we could not resist such a poetic reflection of the seedy world of Graham Greene's pre-war novels.
A TICKET FOR THE READING ROOM
With a smile of secret triumph
Seedy old untidy scholar,
Inkstains on his finger-nails,
Cobwebs on his Gladstone collar,
Down at heel and out at elbows
Off he goes on gouty feet
(Where he goes his foxy smell goes),
Off towards Great Russell Street.
Unaware of other people,
Peace and war and politics,
Down the pavement see him totter
Following his id�e fixe.
Past the rowdy corner caf�
Full of Cypriots and flies
Where the customers see daggers
Looking form each other's eyes.
Past the sad but so-called Fun Fair
Where a few immortal souls
Occupy their leisure hours
Shooting little balls at holes,
Past the window full of booklets,
Rubber goods and cures for piles,
Past the pub, the natty milk-bar
Crowded with galactophiles,
Through the traffic, down the side-street
Where an unfrocked parson thrives
('Palmist and Psychologist')
Cutting short unwanted lives,
Through the shady residential
Square in which a widow runs
A quiet gambling-hell, or 'bridge club',
Fleecing other women's sons,
On the shuffles, quietly mumbling
Figures, facts and formulae-
Bats are busy in the belfry,
In the bonnet hums a bee.
At the Reading Room he settles
Pince-nez on his bottle nose,
Reads and scribbles, reads and scribbles,
Till the day draws to a close,
Then returns to oh, what squalor!
Kippers, cake and dark brown tea,
Filthy sheets and filthier blankets,
Sleep disturbed by mouse and flea.
What has the old man been doing?
What's his game? Another book?
He is out to pour contempt on
Esperanto, V�lap�k,
To fake a universal language
Full of deft abbreviation
For the day when all mankind
Join and form one happy nation.
In this the poor old chap resembles
Prosperous idealists
Who talk as if men reached for concord
With their clenched or grasping fists.
IN THE SNAKE PARK
A white-hot midday in the Snake Park.
Lethargy lay here and there in coils,
And here and there a neat obsidian head
Lay dreaming on a plaited pillow of its own
Loops like a pretzel or a true-love-knot.
A giant Python seemed a heap of tyres;
Two Nielsen's Vipers looked for a way out,
Sick of their cage and one another's curves;
And the long Ringsnake brought from Lembuland
Poured softly through an opening like smoke.
Leaning intently forward a young girl
Discerned in stagnant water on a rock
A dark brown shoestring or discarded whiplash,
Then read the label to find out the name,
Then stared again: it moved. She screamed.
Old Piet Vander leant with us that day
On the low wall around the rocky spacee
Where amid broken quartz that cast no shade
Snakes twitched or slithered, or appeared to sleep,
Or lay invisible in the singing glare.
The sun throbbed like a fever as he spoke:
"Look carefully at this shrub with glossy leaves."
Leaves bright as brass. "That leaf on top
Just there, do you see that it has eyes?
That's a Green Mamba, and it's watching you.
"A man I once knew did survive the bite,
Saved by a doctor running with a knife,
Serum and all. He was never the same again.
Vomiting blackness, agonizing, passing blood,
Part paralysed, near gone, he felt
"(He told me later) he would burst apart;
But the worst agony was in his mind --
Unbearable nightmare, worse than total grief
Or final loss of hope, impossibly magnified
To a blind passion of panic and extreme distress."
"Why should that little head have power
To inject all horror for no reason at all?"
"Ask me another -- and beware of snakes."
The sun was like a burning-glass. Face down
The girl who screamed had fallen in a faint.
Lethargy lay here and there in coils,
And here and there a neat obsidian head
Lay dreaming on a plaited pillow of its own
Loops like a pretzel or a true-love-knot.
A giant Python seemed a heap of tyres;
Two Nielsen's Vipers looked for a way out,
Sick of their cage and one another's curves;
And the long Ringsnake brought from Lembuland
Poured softly through an opening like smoke.
Leaning intently forward a young girl
Discerned in stagnant water on a rock
A dark brown shoestring or discarded whiplash,
Then read the label to find out the name,
Then stared again: it moved. She screamed.
Old Piet Vander leant with us that day
On the low wall around the rocky spacee
Where amid broken quartz that cast no shade
Snakes twitched or slithered, or appeared to sleep,
Or lay invisible in the singing glare.
The sun throbbed like a fever as he spoke:
"Look carefully at this shrub with glossy leaves."
Leaves bright as brass. "That leaf on top
Just there, do you see that it has eyes?
That's a Green Mamba, and it's watching you.
"A man I once knew did survive the bite,
Saved by a doctor running with a knife,
Serum and all. He was never the same again.
Vomiting blackness, agonizing, passing blood,
Part paralysed, near gone, he felt
"(He told me later) he would burst apart;
But the worst agony was in his mind --
Unbearable nightmare, worse than total grief
Or final loss of hope, impossibly magnified
To a blind passion of panic and extreme distress."
"Why should that little head have power
To inject all horror for no reason at all?"
"Ask me another -- and beware of snakes."
The sun was like a burning-glass. Face down
The girl who screamed had fallen in a faint.
References:
Websites:
Videos:
Bibliography:
Peter Alexander, 1989: William Plomer: A Biography. Oxford: OUP.
William Plomer, 1955: A Shot in the Park. London: Jonathan Cape.
������, 1960: Collected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape.
En espa�ol:
Joseph Pearce, 2009: Escritores conversos: La inspiraci�n espiritual en una �poca de incredulidad. Madrid: Palabra.
