[Steve Bucknell]

Sterling work, Jerome. Back from Corfu yesterday I've just been on the phone to Richard. I was telling him how much I enjoyed reading "The Questing Beast" on holiday, and how much my wife Adrienne enjoyed it too. I asked her to read it because I felt I was perhaps losing critical objectivity where R.P. was concerned...But I don't think so; like me she was laughing out loud at R.P's typical sharpness and wit.

It's excellent about life in wartime, about psychiatry and the search for love and meaning. Adrienne pointed out parallels between it and Rose Macauley's "The Towers of Trebizond". Richard agrees, and says he loved her work, and the paths of their travels seem to have crossed, though they never met. He has vivid memories of Trebizond in Turkey, and said "You must go."

I passed on our pleasure in discovering his poems. He really thinks this is wonderful; he thought "they had all been forgotten". I received a copy of his first novel "The Way Backwards" today (1950, Collins). It contains a dedication written by R.P. at the time; he remembers the people, friends of his first wife, and how they would watch cricket at Lords together after the war.

I hope to go to London and meet him in person soon. I have said I will send him a copy of this thread, and he was keen to see it.I passed on that people here were rediscovering and enjoying "The Idle Demon".

On a personal note I would like to thank Alex. Without the stimulus of having this lively and interested community at the Sphere I don't think I would have had the impetus to track down this most elusive and charming man.

[David Mason]

I just bought two of his books, a novel called The Rhyme and the Reason and a book about Marco Polo, which I'm dying to dive into. No time for pleasure reading till Xmas, though!

How pleasant to know Mr. Lister
who has written such volumes of stuff....

[Cally Conan-Davies]

His un-circular words never missed a
clean bull’s eye - a sphere in the rough?!

[Ed Shacklee]

Unfair, that Lister's grown anonymous,
part Clown, Bozo, part Bosch, Hieronymus.

[Steve Bucknell]

I've sent R.P. a copy of the thread today as he requested. I also received a copy of "A Journey In Lapland " through the post. This has a sketch of R.P. on the back-cover by Elena Jahn Clough, my first sighting of him! He looks down towards a page with a meditative pipe in his mouth.

The "Journey" looks great fun, and is illustrated throughout by R.P.'s Wainwright-like sketches of the landscapes he travelled through.

Cally! Are we talking Darts, Archery, Golf or some other game? I think we should be told.Circles? Spheres?

[Jerome Betts]

A trawl through his 71 New Yorker pieces that Janice's link gave access to reveals that 34 of them do not appear in either An Idle Demon or The Albatross

Were they ever collected? (Titles such as ''A Song Against Circles', 'The Spinning Earth' , 'On the Unreality of Toothache', 'Shakuhachi and Samisen' and many more.)

And that's just the New Yorker. How many uncollected gems are there from the Atlantic Monthly and Punch, like the latter's 'Taxidermy'?

Hope you can find out, Steve, when you meet him.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Jerome - I've become obsessed with Lister and circles since he spoke of his "lack of circularity" - which is so funny and charming, and profound, too.

And now you write he has "A Song Against Circles"?!! I must know it!!

You know the contemporary cliche 'to think outside the box or square'? Well it seems for Lister it must be circles - cliques, groups, conformities. I imagine him to be a genuine individual, a fair-dinkum non-conformist, living a decorous life.

I'd give a lot to read "A Song Against Circles"!!

[Mary Meriam]

A Song Against Circles

The circle is a thing of cold perfection.
.....Given the chance, a circle will go far,
But not in any definite direction,
.....And never more or less than 2πr.

Its impulses are never quite whole-hearted.
.....It starts, but, like a traveller ill-prepared,
It soon comes back again to where it started,
.....Having enclosed a space of πr2.

R.P. Lister


[that's 2-pi-r and pi-r-squared]

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Talk about 'ask and you shall receive'!!

Wonders never cease.

Gratitude, MM!!

[Jerome Betts]

Yes, thanks indeed Mary. Neat one. But where did you find it? Can you access the New Yorker or was it on the web somewhere?