The Questing Beast.
The Questing Beast.
I feel like the questing beast as I make my way down to London to meet Richard Percival Lister for the first time. In one of the legends the patchwork beast pines for the chivalric knight who has grown too ancient to hunt him, and so, in his loneliness, sets off to search him out.
I enter the Underground labyrinth warily, having to cross London and change lines at Oxford Circus.”Serious Delays Expected” on the Victoria line alarms me, but I wait patiently and the first tube train rushes in.
I visit London rarely, but since the bombs of 2005 I’m sure something has changed. People on the Tube are conscious of each other, conscious of proximity and dependence. I see people offer their seats to others who might be in more need, people talk a little more, and people keep an eye on each other. There is a sense of shared frailty and togetherness.
Without incident I emerge at Holland Park. Adrienne has led me through a Google reconnaissance of the route I must take, so the streets look familiar. I get the odd feeling of this being the way home. I stop for a bottle of wine at an Off-licence I knew would be there.
At the top of the street I spot a little emissary looking out for me. That must be Meg, Richard’s good friend and support who has helped organise this meeting. I plant a kiss on her surprised cheek before she has time to say hello. Richard has been getting impatient.
As we enter the door of his flat Richard has already launched his tall, unsteady self into the air to grasp my hand and welcome me in. I know him immediately from the good likeness captured in the Elena Jahn Clough drawing on the back cover of “A Journey in Lapland.” He has a Sherlock Holmes-like mien enlivened with extra wit and brightness.
Meg organises us, sits us down, feeds us delicacies and opens the wine. The small sitting room is full of light. I am conscious of Richard’s own jewel-like paintings on the walls, of books, of the piano at my arm with music from Bach and Beethoven resting on it.
I am not at a loss, as I feared I might be, but talk too much, trying to give Richard some sense of what his writing means to me, and how others here on the Sphere are enjoying his work. He chuckles indulgently and surprises Meg by fluently quoting his own poetry back to me.
I tell him of the emblematic importance his poem “Ballade on Experience” has for me. Its refrain: “Everything has not happened to me yet” has become a guide for me. Its last lines prefigured our meeting:
“Most noble Prince, empanoplied and spurred,
Do not despair because we have not met;
Although my back is bent, my vision blurred,
Everything has not happened to me yet.”
We spend the next hour enjoying a heady ping-pong of lines from Richard’s poems. I tease him about his “genius”, and he acknowledges and accepts the appellation. We read his “Genius Defined.” From The Idle Demon.
Genius is a common factor found
In many widely different kinds of man,
As, for example, Plato, Petrarch, Pound,
Cervantes, Caesar, Socrates, Cezanne,
Marlborough, Milton, Mendelssohn, Mozart,
Puccini, Pushkin, Proust, Picasso, Poe,
Beethoven, Botticelli, Bonaparte,
Mohammed, Mendel, Michelangelo,
El Greco, Gorki, Gaugin, Goethe, Grock,
Defoe, Debussy, Darwin, Dante, Drake,
Canova, Casanova, Caradoc,
Bach, Belisarius, Bunyan, Buddha, Blake,
Tolstoy, Tertullian, Turner, Trumper, Tree,
Machiavelli, Moliere, and me.
We laugh a lot. We talk about Time, which is one of the great themes of his poetry. I read his “Tarry Awhile Time” to him and Meg. It has rich echoes of Marvell and Rochester for me. Richard loves Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals, and the Classics. His Grandfather passed on to him a depth of reading and a love of literature. I get the impression that, like me, Richard is mostly self-taught in literature. Unlike me, he is a self-taught linguist. He loves Dante and joyfully launches into the first Canto of The Divine Comedy to entertain us. I quiz him on some Kafka-like echoes I catch in his novel “The Way Backwards”. And yes, of course, he was reading Kafka in German at the time. I marvel; he is a natural for the Sphere. He may have lacked “circularity”, but would have found a “spherical” home here.
Richard describes his own formative experience of workshopping when he first lived in London with a group called “The Saturdays” which met in Wigmore Street off Oxford Street. It’s here I think he first began to develop his facility in verse. Each week a subject would be picked from a hat and the group members would each write a poem in fifteen minutes. Each had their own “Grey Book” of poems or ideas for poems. This is where Richard first began to believe in himself as a poet. Later on he told me he was encouraged by Siegfried Sassoon to collect and publish his poetry.
Richard has always enjoyed his visits to America, staying in Arizona and Michigan with friends. He has fond memories of New York and of publishing his poems in The New Yorker and spending many convivial evenings with its editor Howard Moss in Greenwich Village.
When I ask Richard to recommend his best novel for me to read he tells me “Ah, that will be “The Covered City”, an unpublished novel of mine.” This sounds fascinating: a novel set in a future when London is roofed over, and on that roof another city grows.”Not Science-Fiction” Richard quickly says, “a novel about people”. At the time publishers said it was too long, but when he rewrote it and cut it down it lost too much. Later on I see this large pale- blue manuscript sitting on a shelf in Richard’s bedroom. As Richard himself says, some of his unpublished, uncollected works “still haunt me.” It makes me hope that if I can play any small part in bringing these writings into the light then my quest will have been successful.
Richard continues to write poetry, although his main preoccupation from about 1980 has been painting. He writes elsewhere: “ In 1980 people started buying my paintings, so I took to painting in all the time I had available to me. Painting from then on occupied me happily and kept me alive for the next ten years.” He quotes Cezanne and Van Gogh as influences on his own art. His sense of colour is strong. The paintings I saw were jewel-like, almost Klee-like at times, verging on abstraction. The sense of enjoyment and pleasure in life shines through these paintings as it does through his writing. No wonder the paintings sold well!
Through his shared interest in painting with Meg, Richard has enjoyed many painting, walking and writing holidays at Bussas in France. He also still actively pursues his love of music: attending concerts and the ballet in London with Meg and friends. As someone wrote in a scrapbook of tributes for his 90th birthday, he truly is “a Renaissance Man.”
It has been a life-changing experience for me to meet Richard. He gives me a sense that all is still possible. He believes in life, and gets such pleasure from life while acknowledging its frailty. Like all of us he admits to feeling “low in the water” at times, yet his poems seduce and outwit time. He is a true gentle Knight and Troubadour. What does age matter? I quote the last two stanzas of “The Troubadour” from The Idle Demon:
His bones seek their Jerusalem; and mine
Creep yet another stage
By song and tourney and the crimson wine
Towards old age.
But age, for troubadours? A song not sung
Haunts me again, as in the straw I lie,
Knowing the world still young, myself still young,
And all Provence, and its wide sky.
I departed later that day, catching the train back to Sheffield, bearing signed copies, carrying unpublished poems, quite happy to have met such a remarkable man. I hope many more people will come to read him again and share the pleasure of his company. Richard remains frail, as we all are, but this “frailty” has lasted him for many years, and I hope for many more years to come. He is surrounded by loving friends, Meg’s grandchildren, and books. As I was leaving I spot “The Rings of Saturn” by W.G.Sebald lying on a shelf. A fellow-walker, thinker, writer. Richard is still reading, still writing, still keeping up-to-date.
I realise I have only scratched the surface of all we talked about, but I hope to meet Richard again and say much more. I will finish this piece with an unpublished poem from Richard written in October 2007:
Darling Death.
Come and get me, darling Death,
But not yet:
There’s a lot worth living for.
So don’t forget
To wait until I’ve drawn my very final breath.
And even then I might have more
To say or do before I go.
So
Be reasonably slow.
To be in haste
Would be in the very worst of taste.
There’s a great deal I have to do;
Some of it old, some of it new.
Some tales to tell, some pots to glue.
And even then, there might be more to come.
“O the brave music of a distant drum!”
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