CM: A Portrait

Abstract

I was in bed when Christopher Middleton first entered my life. I had been sequestered there for almost a month with a refractory spine. The drugs I took, pure codeine at one point, were such that I wept through the whole of World Championship Darts, so moved I was by those Apollonic figures, a band of ogres really, on the flickering television screen, and also by those sacrificial helpings of chips, sausages and baked beans that the audience consumed at their beer-towered tables. It was an aspect of English life that had completely bypassed me. The doctor, finding me in this blissful state, instantly put me on a duller regime. I was forced back to poetry. My literary life, insofar as I was able to pursue one, for my eyes swam all over the page, comprised a small pile of Middleton's books on the floor beside me. It was, in truth, my earliest acquaintance with his work, in particular the handsome 1969 Fulcrum Press edition of Our Flowers & Nice Bones. (Oh my, he's got a brain for titles.) I do not wish to give the wrong impression here, for Middleton is primarily a man of words, of words exquisitely bound together, but in my drugged state I was peculiarly receptive to his poem Birth of Venus, which reads in full: V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V Could I really have been pondering the absence of that single V, finding in this something at once symbolic and full of erotic promise, when my wife came in and dropped in front of me a letter postmarked Austin, Texas? I looked at the sender's name and address and then I glanced at the volume beside me. This, surely, was proof enough that I'd reached a purely hallucinogenic stage of my existence. I do not wish to beat on about the zeitgeist or the want of one or about how whatever it is we're slumming our way through now is notable for its absence of generosity, especially in literary matters, but here, giving me succour when it was most needed, was a letter from a stranger full of kind words about a poem of mine he had read in a magazine. The impression this made upon me, especially in my physical state, was incalculable. One should not make too much of a man's age, but it is rare to find poets of Middleton's years and stature giving unsolicited encouragement to poets younger than themselves. I think this also has to do with Middleton's own youthfulness, which, in his work, is characterised by restlessness for and a desire to stake out new territories. Age does not deter him--juvenescence excites. Could he be one of the few to have properly understood Pound's injunction: MAKE IT NEW? I believe so, for what he writes is a matter of what he requires; it is born of necessity: there is no concession to prevailing modes. The letter marked the beginning of a friendship whose rewards, for me, have been immeasurable. A few months later, in the summer of 1992, Middleton came to England and to supper at our place. I shall record these first impressions of the physical man because, to some degree, they mark the interior one as well. There is a curious manner to how he walks, almost as if he were wearing bedroom slippers, a sort of floating aspect to him, and, quite frankly, the impression he made was one of a rather cool dude. A medallion hung from around his neck and the belt buckle he wore was as large as a horseshoe. Well, I might dissemble a little. If the man who soft-shoed into our lives was a Texan of one's imagination rather than of the real world the manner and voice were English in a way most English people no longer remember how to be. I have never had the opportunity to observe him in his adopted milieu, of course, so perhaps I am mistaken. It may be that he orders his glass of milk with a drawl and that tumbleweed does indeed tumble through the streets of Austin. What a strange and equally not so strange place for him to be. I am sorry to dwell at such length upon a man's attire and how it conceals the man inside, but I think there is some aspect of this in Middleton's writing: the precise English that comes of a fine education, such as this country offered once upon a time, dressed up in some fairly exotic clothes. …