Remembering Wales’ solitary master of words
Neath Valley-based poet Chris Torrance died on August 21, leaving behind a legacy of brilliant words and friendships, writes Jenny White
THERE has been a flood of warm tributes for the poet Chris Torrance, who has died at the age of 80. The writer, who lived in an isolated cottage near Pontneddfechan, leaves a lasting legacy that goes beyond his printed words.
Born in Edinburgh in 1941 to a Scottish father and Irish mother, Torrance was raised in Carshalton, Surrey, and attended John Fisher school, Purley, until the age of 16, when he left to work as a lawyer’s clerk in London, falling in with a crowd who adored jazz and the American Beat writers.
“He worked in law for eight years, then spent five years labouring,” says his friend, the historian and writer Robert King. “He helped to start a small magazine called Origins/ Diversions, which stimulated an interest in poetry, and began writing in the mid-1960s.
“He soon became friendly with another young poet, Lee Harwood, whose influence was vitally important as Torrance concentrated on mainly contemporary US poetry, in particular the open-field poetry of Charles Olson and cohort, the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance.”
Torrance married Val Collett in 1968 and the pair moved to Bristol, then, two years later, to the cottage in Wales, where he remained for the rest of his life.
“I walked over the hills from Maesteg, to meet him for the first time and to offer him publication in the small independent press I was just launching,” recalls another friend, the writer and film-maker Iain Sinclair. “There was still a free-spirited utopian community around the Torrances and their farm cottage.”
Chris and Val separated in 1976, after which he led a solitary life that continued largely unchanged over the decades: he had no interest in the internet, phones, or other mod cons, preferring to communicate in person or by letter.
He tended his garden, kept a detailed log of the weather, and wrote poetry – most notably his series The Magic Door, which he started in 1970 and continued until his death; the collected works up until 1996 are now available as a single volume.
“As a poem, The Magic Door is by turns visionary, epic, and yet rooted in the everyday life that surrounded him, on the southern edge of the Brecon Beacons,” says his friend, the poet Phil Maillard. “It is certainly not without humour, or human drama. It is accessible. As a contemporary poem about Wales written by a resident non-native, it is comparable in scope and subject-matter to the work of the poet-artist David Jones.”
Another friend, the poet clare e. potter, agrees on the significance of this legacy.
“It’s a phenomenal body of work,” she says. “It’s such an important and illuminating contribution to literature, from which we can learn about myth and mysticism, expanding consciousness, friendship, and attention to the natural world and its cycles.”
Torrance was a modern mystic, fascinated by alchemy, ley lines, myths, legend and Eastern philosophy. He was largely self-educated, having never gone on to further education, and while his poetry has been widely revered, he was always an outsider.
“He was a highly significant writer who worked against the grain,” recalls another friend, the writer Peter Finch. “He did not get acceptance from the Welsh establishment, but he didn’t seek acceptance. As a result, it took great efforts to get him included in some anthologies.”
Nevertheless, he achieved a worldwide reputation, being published by mainstream publishers in London on a regular basis.
As Finch puts it, “Chris was no provincial writer. He had a reputation that went beyond our borders.”
While he appeared to lead a hermit-like existence, he had many friends who loved to visit his remote home.
“Visiting Chris was an event in itself,” recalls friend Eugene Dubens. “Crossing two fields and a small stream of Cwm Nant a warm welcome awaited all who made the pilgrimage to visit the river bard.
“One of my abiding memories of Chris is how he himself described his ‘slow migration west from London to Bristol and Wales’. Chris described his move to Wales as ‘coming to a place of myth and
enchantment’.”
Poet Ric Hool, another friend who often visited Torrance at home, has fond memories of his times there.
“Chris was convivial and generous,” he says. “Every visit to his isolated cottage was given over to salon-style discussions and there were no barriers to subject matter. Though a semi-recluse for the past 50 years, he was bang up to date on national and international issues, which might appear at odds with his choice of isolation and lack of television: he was an avid listener to radio.”
Every Christmas for decades, Torrance went for Christmas dinner to the home of Robert Tay, who runs a shop in the village; it was a tradition begun by Robert’s mother and happily continued by him.
“He was very knowledgeable,” says Robert. “He’d be quiet initially, but you could start a discussion on almost any subject at all. Chris used to meet the mobile library van at the shop, always with a rucksack full of books to exchange, and we’d have a cup of tea in the kitchen and have a chat, put the world to rights. We’d have very deep discussions about politics, wars, religion, you name it.”
Besides his writer friends and local friends, Torrance was adored by the students he taught as part of his work for Cardiff University’s extra-mural department for 25 years. He called his classes “adventures in creative writing” and travelled to the city by bus to teach them.
“I think he surprised himself at how good a teacher he was,” says Maillard. “He had charisma. He inspired numerous would-be writers with his informal, creative approach, the opposite of academic. His students related to him because he was no different to them. He was just an ordinary person who’d had an ambition to write, and had succeeded in doing so, through practice and inspiration.”
Beyond his teaching work, Torrance acted as a mentor for various writers. One of these is potter. “Chris was kind, unassuming, enlightened,” she says. “He touched many lives as both a poet and tutor, and everyone who knew him, loved him. Chris and I were friends for some years and he was also my mentor. We’d send one another poems we were working on and share them by the fire in his cottage or on Peace Lawn (his garden, which was a paradise, away from the noise, away from time).
“As Chris didn’t have a phone or a computer, communication with everyone was in the form of beautifully hand-written letters. When one would arrive, I’d be busting to open it and wait until I had the house to myself, or failing that, take his letter to the woods and open it with anticipation and a kind of dizziness. His letters were soul nutrition.
“He has guided countless people in so many significant ways: in my case, I was gifted instruction in the form of books he’d send, clippings from newspapers, ideas for edits for poems. But more than that, he was teaching me that there was also work to do on my sense of being, not just tending to the surface editing of words. He taught by example, showing the importance of knowing a place – as he did his garden with its owls and newts and foxes, flowers and abundant vegetable patch.”
Torrance’s work crossed boundaries and continually brought him new fans.
“It was a great thing, in recent times, to see how Chris, in performance, blew away the hipster audience at Stoke Newington – young enthusiasts who were meeting a different level of lyrical authenticity for the first time,” says Sinclair.
His output included recorded collaborations with musician Chris Vine, of Heat Poets, which can be viewed on YouTube – a gift that lives on after his death, along with his published works and the impact he had on those he met.
“It has been, for the last 50 years or so, an inspiration to me, to know that Chris was there, in the Neath Valley, living and working and bringing that landscape and its mythology to life,” says Sinclair. “In many senses, even though I grew up a few miles away, I knew that Chris was carrying through the task I would never be qualified to do. He brought classic open-field poetics to the territory.”
Dubens adds: “He leaves behind a great legacy both to those of us lucky enough to have had the privilege of knowing him directly and to those who have yet to discover the works of this master, who dedicated his life to poetry. But more than the material legacy of his books, it is the network of friends and those he inspired to write creatively that Chris valued most.”