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A cynic’s bargain could have shaped my life To end where it began, in detestation Of the place and man that had mistaught me. Charles Tomlinson and Brenda Raybould married on 23 October 1948 in Willesden. From this day on ‘they never made a move without each other’. Charles’s debt to Brenda was absolute: she shared his fidelity to art-in-life, a life that may have felt under considerable pressure given the legacy of his childhood illness. This burden, were it ever felt, never limited them: Tomlinson’s teeming oeuvre of poetry, essays, translations, editions, paintings, collaborations, as well as his academic duties, could never have been achieved without his wife’s unstinting support. The year that they married, Charles had decided to pursue a career as an artist having experienced an epiphany - a ‘conversion’ he called it - while viewing Cézanne in the Fitzwilliam Museum. His fascination with painting and painters continued later in his poems, with meditations on the processes of Van Gogh and Constable. Tomlinson concentrated on painting and graphics, and began to exhibit his work in galleries in London and Cambridge, while supplementing his living as a school teacher in Camden Town. Between 1948 and 1951, Charles confessed he ‘read a lot of Augustan poetry’. In 1951 he published a small poetry collection, Relations and Contraries, but was unhappy about its quality. One poem survived, in which a horse-drawn milk-float ‘clips by’ his windows at dawn. He wrote of it many years later, ‘…I was approaching the sort of thing I wanted to do, where space represented possibility and where self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality. The embrace was, all the same, a passionate one, it seemed to me…’. The eighteenth century, and Tomlinson’s reading of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, and Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, provided what he called ‘a good antidote to the effects of Dylan Thomas’s romanticism, for Dylan Thomas was still the voice which sounded in one’s ears as one sought for a contemporary style’. He was irked by Thomas’s verbal excess. Tomlinson desired precision, tonal balance, and civility of expression. American influences were beginning to define Tomlinson’s poetry 175 afterword
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as well as his poetics (he called it ‘a mental emigration’). Michael Schmidt  observed of Tomlinson that ‘Wallace Stevens  was the guiding star he initially steered by’.  Schmidt puts his finger on the two characteristic voices of Tomlinson that were developing in his earlier books, ‘one is intellectual, meditative, feeling its way through ideas’, while the other voice engages with ‘landscapes and images from the natural world’. In 1951 Tomlinson took up a post as secretary to Percy Lubbock, the critic and friend of Henry James, which took the Tomlinsons to Lerici in Italy. Five weeks into the post Tomlinson was dismissed, an episode he wrote about in ‘Class’: “Those midland a’s / once cost me a job / … I was secretary at the time/to the author of The Craft of Fiction”. The Tomlinsons were, however, given a villino adjoining the gardener’s house where Charles painted and wrote many of the poems for his collection The Necklace published by Fantasy Press in 1955. This appeared with an introduction by Donald Davie; the book greatly impressed the American critic Hugh Kenner and poet Marianne Moore. Leisure time in Lerici for the young, jobless couple was spent socialising with locals, and a friendship bloomed between the Tomlinsons and the poet Paolo Bertolani. This period is vividly brought to life in his candid book of critical reflections Some Americans (1981). For the young Tomlinson, Liguria gave him ‘so many of the elements of [his] moral vocabulary, the mysteries of light, sea, rock’. It also gave him a precise, sensuous, visual vocabulary. Once home from Italy, Tomlinson became a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol in 1956. In1958 they bought Brook Cottage, Ozleworth Bottom, near Wotton-under-Edge. A beck, prone to flooding, ran beside the garden. One of their neighbours was Bruce Chatwin who popped by between his globe-trotting. As Tomlinson recalled, ‘…those famous books of his underwent much discussion beneath this very roof’. Tomlinson’s poetry circles around themes of place and return: ‘Places for me’, he said, ‘have often been happy chances like rhyme’. Brook Cottage was the centre from which Tomlinson and his growing family flew on frequent international quests to meet and collaborate with fellow poets and artists throughout Europe, Mexico, Japan, Canada, and America. From the early 1960s to the turn of the century he was poetry’s Odysseus; and many of his poems are dedicated to the poets and artists with whom he made friends. His American adventure began with the publication of Seeing 176 afterword

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A cynic’s bargain could have shaped my life To end where it began, in detestation Of the place and man that had mistaught me. Charles Tomlinson and Brenda Raybould married on 23 October 1948 in Willesden. From this day on ‘they never made a move without each other’. Charles’s debt to Brenda was absolute: she shared his fidelity to art-in-life, a life that may have felt under considerable pressure given the legacy of his childhood illness. This burden, were it ever felt, never limited them: Tomlinson’s teeming oeuvre of poetry, essays, translations, editions, paintings, collaborations, as well as his academic duties, could never have been achieved without his wife’s unstinting support.

The year that they married, Charles had decided to pursue a career as an artist having experienced an epiphany - a ‘conversion’ he called it - while viewing Cézanne in the Fitzwilliam Museum. His fascination with painting and painters continued later in his poems, with meditations on the processes of Van Gogh and Constable. Tomlinson concentrated on painting and graphics, and began to exhibit his work in galleries in London and Cambridge, while supplementing his living as a school teacher in Camden Town.

Between 1948 and 1951, Charles confessed he ‘read a lot of Augustan poetry’. In 1951 he published a small poetry collection, Relations and Contraries, but was unhappy about its quality. One poem survived, in which a horse-drawn milk-float ‘clips by’ his windows at dawn. He wrote of it many years later, ‘…I was approaching the sort of thing I wanted to do, where space represented possibility and where self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality. The embrace was, all the same, a passionate one, it seemed to me…’.

The eighteenth century, and Tomlinson’s reading of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, and Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, provided what he called ‘a good antidote to the effects of Dylan Thomas’s romanticism, for Dylan Thomas was still the voice which sounded in one’s ears as one sought for a contemporary style’. He was irked by Thomas’s verbal excess. Tomlinson desired precision, tonal balance, and civility of expression. American influences were beginning to define Tomlinson’s poetry

175 afterword

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