A worthwhile and exciting quest, from the discovery of the first fewmets to the location of the very lair. May the final discovery not be a sad one.

Steve, thank you for the service you are doing for us and R.P.L. That ballade again strikes his individual note of lightness, deftness, cultivation and . . . a hint of another ingredient. Fascinating. What puzzles me is why he was, apparently, so little anthologised.

I've come across a mention of a book of his called The Oyster and The
Torpedo. Any idea if this is a verse collection?

Ah, I now see The Oyster and The Torpedo was in that British Library holdings list you posted, Steve.

Score beginning to look like around five novels, six or more travel books, possibly seven collections of verse?

A Conversation with Richard Lister.
 

Visiting Mr.Lister.

I enjoy my initiation into The British Library. I sign in at the registration desk. No coats allowed, no bags except clear plastic, no sharp objects...no pens! I have to go and buy myself a pencil from the shop! Then I have my photo taken (I look smug and beardy and pleased with myself) and they give me my Reader’s card. “Researching The World’s Knowledge” it says on the plastic card.

The most remarkable book I have ordered turns out to be “Me and the Holy Spirit” 1999, Pauline Dorricott Books. It is A4 in format and looks like a self-published book to me, which explains why I can find little trace of P.D. as a publisher.

The book is a humorous meditation on the Trinity, and why R.P. prefers the Holy Ghost to the other two. He likes the way all it seems to do is to, sometimes, fill people, or, sometimes ,not. Yet he feels it as “some pervasive influence in the universe.”

But what the book also talks to me about is how Mr.Lister is, or how he felt in 1999. He asks himself at one point: “What is left to me?” He answers:

“Reasonably good health at an enormous age; dozens of loving friends; a love of music in an age when it is on tap in the home at all hours; a taste for writing and painting and the ability to make a small but sufficient living if necessary; a small and unexpected legacy making it unnecessary to make a living at either, so that I can do both simply for fun; an agreeable, if rather small flat in W11 fifteen minutes walk from the park.
Few princes can have had so much to enjoy and so little to fear or resent.”

He talks about how, as a writer, although he made a living up to the 1980’s he was “never part of a Circle”, and feels that it has been this “lack of Circularity” that has seen his reputation sink away.

As I read I think of his description of his character Pellinew, from “The Questing Beast”: “Talking to Pellinew, you sometimes forgot that the world was real, and that its needs, in the way of rent or food, had to be attended to.”

I can imagine the friends of R.P. feeling the same way. I felt the same way surrounded by the purposeful hush of the great library. I look up for the first time and find a dark-haired girl scribbling at the next table. When I ask to borrow her pencil-sharpener she looks up briefly and whispers “Yes.” Sharpened, I continue to pencil more of R.P.’s words.

Now he seems to be talking directly to me:”about the age 55, when times were really rather hard, I decided that the only way of coping with life was to accept (as gladly as I could manage) what was sent and make the best of it. And this principle has served me so well that I am in no mind to abandon it.” I realise that I will be 55 in November this year a day before R.P. turns 96...I think he would be laughing at me now...

Our “conversation” continued for most of the afternoon. I learned more about his life. A failed first marriage, but then from the age of 70 t0 74 “four very happy years” with Ione. Then Ione died of cancer leaving R.P. without a partner again. He laments that he has spent a greater part of his life without this close companionship and love.

He writes movingly in “The Questing Beast”: “When you are possessed by a longing for someone in this way, the whole of life relates itself to that one, important thing. Then, in the course of time, the feeling dies away, and you can no longer recapture the greatness and reality of it.”
I enjoyed my afternoon in The British Library, deep in conversation with R.P. At the end of “Holy Spirit” he says that if there is a heaven he will not be “one of the saints” who go marching in. I feel sure that he would be among the princes, and that his princess, Ione, would be waiting impatiently for him.

Yet I hope he has many more years and is still able to “potter” round St.James’s Park chuckling to himself as he puts together another line of his sparkling verse.

Oh, and at the end he told me the meaning of life. What is it?
“It has none. Not of itself. You put your own meaning into it; and that is its meaning. Or if you say it is meaningless, so it is.”

This entire adventure is utterly enthralling! I love everything about him, especially his lack of circularity!

So he lives?? Lister lives?

His meaning of life reminds me firmly of Blake's dictum: As a man is, so he sees.

Wonderful YOU, Steve, for giving all this to us!

Cally

My (uncorrected advance proof) copy of The Oxford Book of Comic Verse (1994) has only two (2) items by Lister (1914 - ): 'A Toast to 2,000' and 'A Mind Reborn in Streatham Common'. He was born the same year as Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, and Henry Reed ('Naming of Parts' and 'Chard Whitlow' - a parody of Eliot). I think the comma in the first title would have been proofread out. Whoever did some proofing on this poem was very haphazard. Anyway, there is no 'The Revolutionaries', and the 'Toast' poem isn't on-line, so here it is for our ever-living poet in 2010 :

     A Toast to 2000

The century's no longer new;
The years to come seem very few.
Twenties and thirties, forties gone,
And now the fifties rumble on.
No use to grumble or repine,
The century's in its decline.

Now dawns upon the turning page
The fin-de-siècle, stuffy age.
Young men and maidens of this time
Will be the pillars of its prime;
These jocund children, bald and stout,
Will see its last convulsions out.

And we who saw the thirties through,
The hungry forties suffered too,
May linger, grey and comatose,
Within a few years of its close;
But not behold the strange new years
Charged with fresh follies and fresh fears.

Yet some Victorian, shrunk and thin,
Will see the year 2000 in ---
With fumbling mind, but changeless mien
Will ponder on the dear old Queen,
Under whose reign he first beheld
The frightening world, and wisely yelled.

There will he sit like any ghost
And drink to that New Year a toast,
Toast given by some pompous bore
At present playing on the shore.
Well may that centenarian fail
To grasp the meaning of the tale.

Questing
 

Steve,
Many others have thanked you before this, but, from me: Thank you so much for this thread, and for the tremendous amount of research (and sleuthing) you've done. I am so tickled by R.P.s poetry, and fascinated by what you've shared from his books. With your well-written and interesting posts, you've brought Lister's humor and playfulness, as well as his deeper insights to my attention, and now I'm a fan, of both him and you.

I was hoping you would let us travel along with you on your library adventure, and you did not disappoint! I'm now searching for my own copy of Questing Beast, and wish that I could take a peek at your penciled notes on “Me and the Holy Spirit.”

I'm a sucker for such simple, yet profound, wisdom! A great gift you've given me here, Steve.
Thanks,
Stephenie

Thank you again, Steve, for a remarkable and memorable post.

Some snippets from trawling booksellers on-line:

The Bsc perhaps ties up with the early piece below. 'The Rhyme and the Resaon' is on the theme of science and poetry. The music ties up with his writing the words for a mixed chorus and piano piece 'Felicity of the Animal World'. Among the novels seems to be 'Two Northern Stories' and possibly 'Good Wives'. There is also 'Nine Legends' 1991. 'A Muezzin From The Tower Of Darkness Cries' may be the American edition of 'Turkey Observed'. 'Allotments' appeared again in a very limited luxury edition in 1991 with a foreword by Alan Titchmarsh, the ubiquitous British gardening guru. There's a 20 page introduction to 'Gengis Khan' about the Mongolian language and RPL's research methods.

The Origin of Species
by R. P. Lister, 1948

At the bottom of a chasm
Long before the birth of Time
Lay a piece of protoplasm
In the paleozoic slime.

The mud flats oozed and bubbled,
And the vapors swirled and stank;
But his conscience was untroubled,
For he neither smoked nor drank.

The air was full of acid
And he breathed it all day long,
But his thoughts were calm and placid
For he never done no wrong.

Very humble was his station
He had never heard of Wells
Yet he fathered all creation
By the splitting of his cells.

Every nation small or splendid
(Even when of Nordic blood)
Is in point of fact descended
From that simple lump of mud.

From that humble organ's splitting
Came both crocodile and cow
Yet I cannot help admitting
They are very different now.

I'd like to point out that, for me, the greater part of my pleasure in this adventure lies is the easy grace of Steve's narration. Each entry in his diary of discovery has been a joy to read and I salute his craftsmanship. Thank you Steve, not just for the story but for the skill of the telling.

Listers seem to crop up everywhere onced you are sensitised. The following is from a geology site. Perhaps some Eratogeologist can tell us what the technical terms are about. (I hope that's enough discussion, Maryann.)

Incidentally, crops up in the London Gazette for April 1945 as an 'Honorary Flight Lieutenant' (if I've understood the entry correctly) so may have been in the RAF in the war.

The Judgement, by R.P. Lister, 1960

I dreamed the judgement came to me by night
They stood around my bed, severe of mien
And asked one question “what is enstatite?”

“It is an orthorhombic pyroxene,”
I said, and as I spoke I heard the jangle
Of planets crashing down the cosmic seas.

I added hastily: “It’s cleavage angle
is eighty-seven (more or less) degrees.
If it were fifty-six, not eighty-seven

We should, quite clearly, have an amphibole.”
At this they swept me, singing up to heaven,
Where angels’ hands received my battered soul.