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Afterword David Morley Charles Tomlinson was born on 8 January 1927 at his family home 34 Penkhull New Road, Stoke-on-Trent, the only child of Alfred and May Tomlinson. In 1930 the family moved to Gladstone Street in Etruria Vale, at the heart of The Potteries. It was for the young poet: ‘a land / Too handled to be primary – all the same, / The first in feeling’. He found it full of unsuspected possibilities: the shining surfaces of flooded marl pits, furnace-light reflected on canals, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a dentist’s waiting room. Stoke itself was heavily polluted. The house had for its view ‘the biggest gasometer in England’. Tomlinson’s mother and father took their son to a farm in Great Haywood where they would fish. Walking and fishing opened his eyes to the natural world, and to the notion that patience, contemplation, and ‘wishing the fish into the net’ had much in common with writing poems, an image for “capturing” he shared with his later great friend Ted Hughes. Tomlinson’s health suffered as a child. Aged ten, pleurisy and rheumatic fever kept him off school for two years and in bed for nine months. During his illness, he wrote some early poems after seeing squirrels from his window. His doctor diagnosed he would have a ‘tired heart’ for the rest of what he expected would be a shortened life. But Tomlinson recovered and, during the war years, attended Longton High School, Staffordshire, [motto: Renascor ‘I am born again’]. Education opened up a fresh world beyond the Midlands town. As Tomlinson commented to The Paris Review in 1998, ‘You need two good teachers in any school, which is what we had, to get through the message of civilization—the role schools are there to fulfil’. Gerhardt Kuttner, a German Jew and a refugee from Hitler, taught him German; and a Scot, Cecil Scrimgeour, taught him French. As a teenager, Tomlinson’s mind was opened to Racine, Corneille, Molière, Hugo, Baudelaire, Gautier and Verlaine; and to Schiller, Heine, Kleist, Carossa, Kant, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann. It was a challenging but invigorating curriculum that led Tomlinson to comment later in life, ‘It was that sense of belonging to Europe, which took root early in my imagination’. His fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Italian would later lead to him becoming the foremost champion of translated poetry 173 afterword
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in Britain, and an outstanding translator of poems by, among others, Attilio Bertolucci, Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado. The excellence of his schoolteachers informed his own virtuosity and generosity as a university teacher later at Bristol. While a teenager, Tomlinson met the head girl from the neighbouring school at an SPCK meeting and, later, at a dance on VE night. Brenda Raybould (b. 1928) went on to read history at Bedford College, London, followed by graduate work in art history at the Warburg and Courtauld institutes where her teachers included Ernst Gombrich, and the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt. Tomlinson himself won an exhibition in 1945 to Queens’ College, Cambridge, to read English and arrived ‘with Rilke in his pocket’. However, compared to the rich curriculum of school, Cambridge was an intellectual disappointment and his tutor disparaged Tomlinson’s passion for pan-European literature. Disheartened, he considered leaving to pursue a freelance career writing film scripts. Brenda, with whom he was in daily written communication, persuaded him to stay until he got his degree. The poet and critic Donald Davie returned from war service in the navy and became his tutor in his final year. Davie introduced him to a range of modernist American poets, including Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (his ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ became talismanic to the young poet), unleashing Tomlinson’s lifelong sense for the possibilities of a transatlantic poetry. Davie and Tomlinson formed a lifelong friendship (Tomlinson called Davie DAD, after the initials of his full name). Sharing their respective interests in modernist and foreign work and becoming allies in their advocacy for a more ambitious, international poetry, they taught each other. But what Davie chiefly taught Tomlinson was how to articulate the energy of English syntax: to develop and unfold ideas over sinuous and keenly-designed verse sentences: ‘to think via syntax’. In a later interview Tomlinson reflects that the power of the sustained sentence that he derived from his reading of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Cowper, came from ‘playing tunes on the verbal piano, variations on grammatic possibilities’. Tomlinson never forgot his debt to Davie, dedicating the poem ‘Instead of an Essay’: Teacher and friend, what you restored to me Was love of learning; and without that gift 174 afterword

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Afterword David Morley

Charles Tomlinson was born on 8 January 1927 at his family home 34 Penkhull New Road, Stoke-on-Trent, the only child of Alfred and May Tomlinson. In 1930 the family moved to Gladstone Street in Etruria Vale, at the heart of The Potteries. It was for the young poet: ‘a land / Too handled to be primary – all the same, / The first in feeling’. He found it full of unsuspected possibilities: the shining surfaces of flooded marl pits, furnace-light reflected on canals, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a dentist’s waiting room.

Stoke itself was heavily polluted. The house had for its view ‘the biggest gasometer in England’. Tomlinson’s mother and father took their son to a farm in Great Haywood where they would fish. Walking and fishing opened his eyes to the natural world, and to the notion that patience, contemplation, and ‘wishing the fish into the net’ had much in common with writing poems, an image for “capturing” he shared with his later great friend Ted Hughes.

Tomlinson’s health suffered as a child. Aged ten, pleurisy and rheumatic fever kept him off school for two years and in bed for nine months. During his illness, he wrote some early poems after seeing squirrels from his window. His doctor diagnosed he would have a ‘tired heart’ for the rest of what he expected would be a shortened life. But Tomlinson recovered and, during the war years, attended Longton High School, Staffordshire, [motto: Renascor ‘I am born again’]. Education opened up a fresh world beyond the Midlands town. As Tomlinson commented to The Paris Review in 1998, ‘You need two good teachers in any school, which is what we had, to get through the message of civilization—the role schools are there to fulfil’. Gerhardt Kuttner, a German Jew and a refugee from Hitler, taught him German; and a Scot, Cecil Scrimgeour, taught him French. As a teenager, Tomlinson’s mind was opened to Racine, Corneille, Molière, Hugo, Baudelaire, Gautier and Verlaine; and to Schiller, Heine, Kleist, Carossa, Kant, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann. It was a challenging but invigorating curriculum that led Tomlinson to comment later in life, ‘It was that sense of belonging to Europe, which took root early in my imagination’. His fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Italian would later lead to him becoming the foremost champion of translated poetry

173 afterword

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