Collected Poems 
by Henry Reed, edited with an introduction by Jon Stallworthy.
Oxford, 166 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 19 212298 3
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Henry Reed was a sad man but a funny man, and his poems are funny or sad – often, as in the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious. He was in Seattle as a replacement for Theodore Roethke, the regular poet in residence, who had suddenly died. Whether Roethke had contributed to the routine work of the department I don’t know, but if he hadn’t Heilman did not regard his immunity as a precedent and was requiring Reed to give some lectures on the Brontës. Reed argued that he had been hired exclusively as a poet and declined to speak of these tiresome women. I came in when he was telling Heilman this, and also scolding him for referring to the novelists by the fancy name their father had affected in order to suggest a connection with Lord Nelson. ‘How can you ask me to lecture on the O’Pruntys?’ he shouted. But he did as he was asked. He and Heilman were, or became, great friends.

The secretary of the department had an affluent businessman husband, and they had taken Henry under their protection, driving him around in one or other of their Thunderbirds, labelled ‘His’ and ‘Hers’. Once we all four went to lunch in the revolving restaurant on top of the Space Needle, and when our hosts left to get on with their work they left us slowly spinning there, with plenty of champagne to get us through the December afternoon. Henry, having been funny, now grew sad, holding up a bottle and contemplating the label, Mumms Extra Dry: ‘Poor baby!’ he sighed. The conversation sinking into melancholia, I quoted the advice of Thoreau, ‘Do not be betrayed into a vulgar sadness,’ but he rejected it, pointing out that Thoreau’s crown of Thoreaus was remembering happier things. (He liked puns: Stallworthy points out that the epigraph to ‘Lessons of the War’ – vixi puellis nuper idoneuslet militavi non sine gloria – substitutes puellis, ‘girls’, for Horace’s duellis, ‘wars’. This is a better pun than the Seattle ones, especially as it subtly emphasises the heterosexuality of the implied author of ‘Lessons of the War’.) Later in that lost day we found ourselves in a deplorable bar, where we were set upon by resident puellae. ‘Surely they can tell I’m homosexual,’ he said as if puzzled, though quite how they could be expected to do so was obscure to me, and anyway there were ample other reasons for abstinence. The girls must have wondered what we were doing there, but so did we.

Back in London I would sometimes get back home after a hard day at the office and find him already there. He would invariably ask for Mozart and we would listen to one of the piano concertos. And he would invariably be moved as if coming upon a wonder for the first time: ‘Exquisite,’ he would murmur. ‘Who’s the pianist?’ ‘Still Ingrid Haebler, I’m afraid.’ Around eleven he would ask to be poured into a taxi, and so the evening would end with a long chilly wait at the rank in Rosslyn Hill.

I don’t remember much of his conversation on these occasions, except that he sometimes lamented his association with what had been the Third Programme. Much of his writing had been for radio: it included the successful series of comic programmes, seven in all, about the composeress Hilda Tablet and her associates; an adaptation of Moby Dick; and many translations, including some plays of Betti that were very well thought of at the time. The editor has exhumed good verse from Moby Dick and from some of the others, verse remarkable for its fertility and density, but in the Sixties it was hard to imagine a bright future for radio drama. Some of his translations reached the stage, but Reed was not cut out for television.

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Vol. 13 No. 24 · 19 December 1991

Henry Reed may have been fond of puns (LRB, 5 December) but his fondness is not illustrated by his epigraph to ‘Lessons of the War’. Vixi puellis nuper idoneus is in fact the unanimous reading of all manuscripts of Horace, duellis being nothing more than a 19th-century emendation by Franke.

Frank Walbank
Cambridge

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