Oh Hull

By MICHAEL CAINES

In 1996, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie wrote a review of four new books in the TLS, by writers who seemed distinguished by some idiosyncratic connection to their chosen territory. (Or whose territory had chosen and shaped them, you might say.) Between the ���short, unpretentious��� poetry of Siobhan Campbell and the ���fresh and exciting��� debut of Alice Oswald came a posthumous publication: How It Turned Out: Selected poems by Frank Redpath. His ���sustaining words���, Jamie noted, were ���Humber���, ���North���, ���Hull��� and ���friends���. She mentioned a ���fond and insightful��� introduction by Sean O���Brien which revealed that Redpath ���had little interest in publishing���. ���But How It Turned Out will ensure he receives some of the recognition he never sought.���

Well, a Redpath poem did receive a little belated recognition last week: it appeared in the TLS as a previously unpublished poem by Philip Larkin. That���s right: contrary to what we and the Larkin scholars who inspected it believed, ���In and Out��� isn���t by Larkin, after all. Yet it seemed so perfectly (too perfectly?) Larkinesque. And as Tom Cook wrote in last week���s issue, it ended up as two halves of loose typescript tucked into one of Larkin's archived workbooks at the University of Hull.

How did that happen?

As Sean O���Brien recalls (see his letter in the forthcoming TLS), it was back in 1982 that Douglas Dunn put together an anthology called A Rumoured City, celebrating the ���new poets��� of Hull. The young guns included Peter Didsbury, Douglas Houston, Ian Gregson and Sean O���Brien himself. There were contributions from a certain Frank Redpath. And Philip Larkin provided what William Scammell called ���one of his dead-pan prefaces���. That was in the TLS; Scammell thought Didsbury, Houston, O���Brien and Gregson were the ones to watch. Frank Redpath, meanwhile, had ���clearly modelled himself on Larkin���.

In fact, as Jean Hartley notes in Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press, and Me, Redpath was ���by far the oldest of the ten poets represented���. Born in 1927, a soldier in the late 1940s and then a journalist, he had produced a ���small but steady��� stream of poems since the 40s. Apparently, though, until Ted Tarling created the poetry magazine Wave in the 1970s, ���he had only once been able to bring himself to seek publication���.

A Rumoured City aside, it seems publication sought out Redpath in later years. Tarling would later publish To the Village, a collection of thirty-six Redpath poems, in 1986; the posthumous selection reviewed by Kathleen Jamie was the Rialto���s first venture into book publishing. Another poetry magazine, Stand, published Redpath���s ���I saw a child hold up his finger . . .��� a year later, with the sheepish comment, ���This poem has surfaced from the magazine���s archives where it may have spent some considerable time���.

Redpath���s print-shyness partly explains why outsiders could mistake him for just another of the post-Larkin crowd, as Phil Bowen did when he referred to the ���new poets from Hull��� in A Gallery To Play To: The story of the Mersey poets. And no, at the time of writing, Wikipedia doesn���t have an entry for ���Redpath, Frank��� or list him among the writers associated with that ancient city in the East Riding of Yorkshire. ���My day, thank God, unmentioned on the news���, indeed, as he once noted.

Insiders could tell a different story. Houston recalled that he was an ���extremely decent man��� who had written ���stories for children���s comics��� as well as poetry. It was on Redpath���s advice that another Hull writer, Peter Everett, got himself out and down to London. O���Brien gives some sense of his territory in ���To the Unknown God of Hull and Holderness��� (���God of the windy bus shelter and the flapping hoarding���; ���God of the infilled drainsite . . .���), which is dedicated to him. In a garden not far from the Humber estuary, meanwhile, a statue of the apostle Peter sits, heavily pondering his denial of Christ and his redemption, in Redpath���s words:

Once quicksand man, then called
A rock; three times denied
The name who gave my name:
The moving ghost filled all
My shifting, made me firm.

So credit where it���s most definitely due: to Sean O���Brien for recalling A Rumoured City (in which Dunn says ���In and Out��� ���evokes November in the moody long gardens of Hull���s Avenues district���) and setting the record straight.

The best part of the story, however, is this. Larkin didn���t have Redpath���s unqualified admiration ��� as O���Brien has recalled, the lesser-known poet ���once called Larkin a political ignoramus across the dinner table, and Larkin���s letters suggest that he was not far short of the mark��� ��� but it does seem that they regarded one another���s poetry very highly. Jean Hartley recollected how Larkin was publicly supportive of A Rumoured City, but privately much less complimentary about it. To Frank Redpath he said: ���Yours are the only poems in the book I would have been glad to have written���.

We cannot know if Larkin meant that, of course, but it���s a suggestive remark, given how securely ���In and Out��� could be identified as Larkin���s own, on the basis of both close readings and external evidence. As with their political views, though, it exposes the differences between the two of them as much as the similarities. Hartley continues:

���Frank���s initial response was to feel thrilled at being complimented by a poet whose work he so much admired. But the feeling changed to sadness as he thought of the words Philip had used, with their implication of increasing isolation from the work of the younger poets coupled with a wistful lament for a fulfilment which he was hardly ever again to enjoy.���

 

Update: Here's "In and Out" by Frank Redpath (not Philip Larkin), with a brief introduction by Sean O'Brien.