People’s university careers ended and they disappeared; but Moore carried it on. He took it to London and collaborated with Tambimuttu.
IS:
Why wasn’t he actively engaged in the war?
PR:
He was a conscientious objector.
IS:
Did that mean he went to prison?
PR:
No, he had to go and work on farms in East Anglia, digging potatoes. That didn’t seem to last long; for the last years of the war he was commuting between Cambridge and London.
IS:
He thought of poetry as being his career? And then the war ended and it was all over?
PR:
Not very suddenly; it was a process which took the rest of the 1940s to work itself out. As the poetry-reading public increased, and became something more like Auden’s public, so Nicholas Moore’s personal readership diminished and diminished. A completely new set of poets had taken the situation over.
IS:
During the war, he lived in London?
PR:
No, he lived in Cambridge, and commuted to his work in Tambi’s office. He took no part in that Soho scene. He carefully steered clear of it. When he finished work, he went back home — and left the others to drink themselves insensible.
IS:
When did he move to Orpington?
PR:
That’s part of the great crisis which occurred to him around 1948. Unfortunately, this worsening literary situation happened to coincide with three or four other crises, which amounted to a total reversal of fortune.
IS:
Presumably, he wasn’t making any money from the poetry? Even when he was successful?
PR:
No, I shouldn’t think so: not much. Tambi was paying him, he’d got work. But very little specific payment for writing. But in 1948 everything, which had been going so rosily for him, collapsed in a short period. Only the poetry was not sudden. That was a slow haemorrhage of readership.
IS:
Wasn’t that, then as now, a general condition?
PR:
It affected a lot of people: Wrey Gardiner, David Gascoyne, and W. S. Graham (who ended up living in Cornwall, in penury). Perhaps George Barker too. Many of them left the country.
IS:
Was this normal, everyday indifference? Or did society need to revenge itself on them? Was there no longer the imagination to tolerate their very existence?
PR:
It’s difficult to know the basic reasons for this. But it’s to do with what the readership of poetry is, and their expectations.
IS:
The readership of poetry seems to consist only of other poets, the peer group, and those looking for a way into the racket. Was there ever a readership of people not involved in the practice of writing the stuff?
PR:
There was for Nicholas Moore and his associates during that one brief period. There was an intellectual following that was a continuation of the following the modernists had during the First World War, Pound’s and Eliot’s public. Their books were professionally produced by Poetry London and the Grey Walls Press. The reason these poets weren’t at Faber is that they thought they had their own publishers. Then, of course, those publishers collapsed; and Moore and his colleagues were left without a publisher at all.
There were also financial disasters. The supportive money from Moore’s family was no longer there. His wife, Priscilla, left him. Half his early poems are dedicated to her.
That was the big disaster for Moore; he was left with no wife — which devastated him. She went off with somebody else. No wife, no money, nowhere to live, no publisher. He was helpless: so he went down to London and found himself a job.
He’d always been interested in gardening, had become expert at cultivating new species of flowers. He got himself a job in a horticultural shop, a seed merchant’s. He was wandering around the West End and saw an advertisement in a tobacconist’s window for this flat in St Mary Cray, near Orpington. He took it, and lived there for the rest of his life.
He continued to work in this flower shop, commuting to St Mary Cray. He married a second wife, a very different sort of person. She was more of a local product, a daughter of the bourgeoisie of those suburbs.
The 1950s, as a period, is dark and obscure. He wrote less and less. He was on the train every day, into Victoria. Then there was a child. He was in a very difficult situation by the middle or late 1950s. His wife began to get mentally ill and couldn’t cope with looking after the children. He had to do all the work in the house himself, while struggling with other things, and doing some writing. He began to get very ill himself. The child, his son, was put out to a foster home. He found he’d got diabetes — which he had for the rest of his days.
IS:
When did he have his leg amputated?
PR:
That was much later on. He continued with the diabetes for quite a while, under treatment. But it gets worse, whatever happens. So that brought him, more or less, into the situation in which I found him.
He started writing again, in earnest, around 1965. It had become a totally private activity, although he always had hopes of making a ‘comeback’. He never gave up. He remained in touch with Tambi — who likewise had schemes, was going to make it back into the limelight. But never quite did, not properly.
IS:
He was more prolific than W. S. Graham, for example?
PR:
Oh yes, his method was to write: he didn’t think. His poetry wasn’t concentrated in the way that Graham’s was. But the poetry kept him alive, I believe.
IS:
Did he hope that at some point circumstances would turn around again? Did he feel it was an accident that nobody read him any more?
PR:
He might have thought that at first, but after thirty years… If he hadn’t kept going there would have been nothing at all.
IS:
Did he greet you warmly when you arrived?
PR:
Oh yes, various people had taken an interest in him before that. There was Barry MacSweeney. And, around the time he published Spleen, there was some short correspondence with Andrew Crozier and Jeremy Prynne. The thing was that Moore kept up to date with poetry. He was a subscriber to Grosseteste, and he bought Ferry Press books.
He was stuck out there in a wilderness, in outer suburbia, in the most dismal place you could possibly think of living in.
IS:
It wasn’t anywhere near a river? His writing is filled with images of water.
PR: