I think that started in Cambridge. The dream images are of the Cam. His father’s house was a few yards from it.
IS:
I wondered what his sense of that location, the place he lived in, was?
PR:
He thought it was an accident. A fairly pleasant place, when he first moved. His house was on the edge of the development, next to fields. But within a few years, of course, the whole area had been covered in suburbia. Nothing in sight except identical houses. He had really established a personal island, or islet, in the middle of a huge mud estuary.
There is no sense of movement. In Lacrimae Rerum there’s a dream sequence about wandering endlessly through anonymous streets: pavements the same, trees the same, round corners and up hills. That’s suburbia. It doesn’t crop up much in his poems, only at the end. He had an island, this dingy room in which he lived. He maintained all the things which had been part of that student enclave in Cambridge: jazz, cricket, gardening, modern art — also pots, especially Lucie Rie pots. He actually ate his dinner off Lucie Rie pots, which were worth thousands of pounds. And, occasionally, he broke one.
IS:
When you turned up… did Nicholas Moore see you as a messenger from the same tradition, a couple of generations on? An initiate?
PR:
He didn’t know I came from that background. I suggested it to him later on. But he had begun to feel pretty bitter about the whole poetry world. He didn’t sit there like a church father and calmly accept what had happened to him — as if he was a hermit in the desert.
There was a large sense that poetry is very important and was everywhere abused. He felt that what he was writing was important, and that the world was losing it. There was no access to the world. All he could do was keep on producing. In phases. Faster and faster. Until, as his illness got worse, it tailed off. He was in and out of hospital. There’d be two or three years with an upsurge of poetry. He always went to the same hospital, Orpington Hospital.
Writing was now physically very difficult. Diabetes affects your eyesight, you go nearly blind. He didn’t wear glasses. His vision was very blurred and minimal. It was a 1940s island, without television. Hospital meant the radio. You’re stuck in a bed for weeks and weeks. There’s nothing to do except put on your earphones. There’s only one station: Radio One. So he was caught listening to John Peel. It’s extraordinary. He sent poems to the BBC and John Peel. Peel had slight intellectual pretensions.
Nicholas Moore had built up a world which was not just poetically self-sufficient, it had to be culturally self-sufficient as well.
Of course, his wife was with him — but that was more of a problem than a help.
IS:
Did you visit him in hospital?
PR:
Only latterly, yes.
IS:
Did he know he was dying?
PR:
No, he’d been in so often. He didn’t look after himself. His cultural thing included good eating and good drinking. He wasn’t going to give these up just because he’d got diabetes. He was certainly not going to stop drinking wine. He was something of a connoisseur of wine. He ate himself through diabetes with French chocolate biscuits. He lived ten years longer than anyone in his condition would be expected to live; perhaps because of the drive that kept him writing poetry.
The diabetes got worse. He developed gangrene somewhere, along an extremity. In his remaining foot. There was talk of that having to come off. He was imprisoned in a wheelchair. But he still gardened. I’ve had terrifying descriptions of Nicholas Moore and his wheelchair, gardening with one hand, the chair tilting over at forty-five degrees, while he dug holes in the ground. He’d recently given it up when I first met him. The garden then became totally overgrown, grass sprouted up.
There was a move by the family to get him to Cambridge — which Moore strongly resisted. The reason he gave was that he couldn’t abandon his garden. The garden looked like a wilderness, but the pattern was still there, underneath. All it needed was weeding. This was a great creative work of his. He cultivated his own hybrids of irises and Michaelmas daisies and sempervivums. He had pieces of rock — limestone — which he said could not be moved to Cambridge. He’d have to stay there with his rocks, whatever happened. And yet, of course, a few weeks after he died the house was sold and the whole thing was razed, beyond trace.
He had a beautiful flowering cherry in his front garden, a rare Japanese cherry. I have never seen one before. It grew up beyond his floor and emerged in front of the window of the tenants upstairs — and had to be trimmed, because they said it impeded their view of the council houses. When the house was sold, the tree was uprooted.
IS:
He was living in a condition of sentimental exile, like Guy Burgess in Moscow?
PR:
Yes, an exile in which the postal services had stopped taking messages back to his native country.
IS:
What was his state of mind, in hospital, when you visited him for the last time?
PR:
He was under painkilling drugs, so he was speaking very slowly. He was most concerned that nothing should be lost. He didn’t think in terms of archives; when he’d written poems, he threw them on the floor. When we were clearing up the place, afterwards, there were poems everywhere: under the kitchen sink, stuffed into flower pots. He didn’t want any of them to leave the flat, even if they got screwed up and dirty.
IS:
The ‘Last Poem’, or (THE LAST POEM) as you have it, published at the end of Lacrimae Rerum… was that written at home, before he went to hospital?
PR:
It was written in his head. He wrote everything in his head, before he started to type it. He wrote very little in longhand, because nobody could read his longhand — not even himself.
He said the ‘Last Poem’ was in three parts. He told me what it was about. But it wasn’t very clear whether he was reciting or summarizing. He typed the first part, neatly. The second part he typed, roughly. The third part was still in his head. He was going to do that when he got home. He was concerned that it shouldn’t be lost. He mentioned this very particularly. But the third part is lost, yes. And will never be recovered.
In spite of the neatness of Moore’s cultural isolation, the work was a sprawl, a mess. He was producing these typescripts, all day long, which were utter doggerel; and casting them around the room, spilling things on them, and eating off them.
Writing was so difficult for him. He had to put his nose against the keyboard and type one letter at a time. It’s difficult to think of a poem when you’re doing that.
The last year, he almost stopped. There were too many problems. If I hadn’t come, and taken an interest, Lacrimae Rerum wouldn’t have existed at all, hardly any of it.
It’s interesting — you have to be metaphysical — but he makes continual reference to ‘islets’in his work. Which is a metaphor to him. He was living on an islet, a rock in the sea. Also, the seat of diabetes involves things called the Islets of Langerhans.