Library marks centenary of Armistice baby whose poetry reflected his adopted land

The WMN’s longest serving art critic Frank Ruhrmund celebrates the life and work of a writer he came to know

It was eight days after the last shots had been fired in the First World War, that on 19 November 1918, the poet W S (Sydney) Graham first saw the light of day in 1, Hope Street, Greenock. He wasn’t to know then that he would spend the last nineteen years of his life, almost as far away from his native Scotland as he could get, in the West Cornwall village of Madron, where he was to die at the age of 67 on 9 January 1986, and where the cottage in which he had lived with wife and fellow poet Nessie Dunsmuir, now bears a plaque recording the fact, mounted and unveiled there in November 2006.

Walking by it, as I often do, never fails to remind me of the first time I met him. It was at a party in a friend’s studio in Newlyn. I had already been warned of how difficult he could be on occasion, so was prepared for the worst, which came almost immediately on meeting when he challenged me to a fight. Upon accepting his challenge and suggesting that we went out into the garden to exchange blows, he mumbled something in his thick Scottish accent and melted away; that was the beginning and end of our initial encounter. A complex character to say the least, in all fairness I must add that such aggression was but one side of him. Much later, when I knew him better, I received a letter from him thanking me for something I’d written in which I had described Gurnard’s Head, where he had once lived, as “Graham Country”. He was delighted, and wrote: “You have made a good thing for me. What can I say more? Good power to your writing hand.

Sydney.” It says everything for his style and sense of humour that he then signed it off with a kiss!

Although he became an apprentice draughtsman on leaving school, and was to study structural engineering at Stow College in Glasgow, his love of language, the pursuit of the word and the making of poetry, encouraged no doubt by the award of a bursary in 1938 that allowed him to study literature in that year at Newbattle Abbey College, remained of paramount importance to him. In the early years of the Second World War he worked at various jobs in Scotland and in Ireland, and it was when teaching near Galloway that he became close friends with a colleague, Mary Harris, whose family happened to own two gypsy caravans at Germoe in Cornwall. In 1943 the couple went there with the intention of leading a simple life, “growing violets and keeping goats”. Unfortunately, life became too complicated for their partnership to last, and Mary went back to Scotland while Sydney stayed in Cornwall. At the time, totally committed to poetry as he was, in a letter to his friend Edwin Morgan, he declared: “I am more alive and creative in my thinking and intellect than I have ever been. I have read more, there are more things I am surer of, I am more single and more constantly in my days as a poet.”

Aside from his domestic problem, the 1940s were to be pretty good years for him – 1942 saw the publication of his first book of poems, Cage Without Grievance, and this was followed by four more titles, among them The Voyages of Alfred Wallis in 1948. The year before that he received an Atlantic Award for Literature, lectured at the university of New York, and then spent a year on a reading tour of the USA. He firmly believed that “the first act of engagement of reader and poem was in reading aloud – this tested the syntax, pace and tone of poem and reader”.

A poet who was seen as part of the neo-romantic group that included Dylan Thomas and George Barker, he liked the Bohemian lifestyle of London’s literary scene so much that he moved to the capital, and it was there that he came into contact with T S Eliot, then editor of Faber & Faber, who in 1949 published Graham’s The White Threshold, and was to continue as his publishers for the rest of his life.

It was in 1954 that he returned to Cornwall, this time accompanied by his wife Nessie Dunsmuir. One with whom he had had an on/off relationship for several years, they were married in her home town of Blantyre. An accomplished poet in her own right, destined to be the woman behind the great man, she supported Sydney through thick and thin, and long after his death continued to promote his poetry. Six years before her own death in 1999, she was the prime mover in the publication Aimed At Nobody, a collection of works from her husband’s notebooks for which she wrote the foreword.

While Sydney was to live in various places during his forty or so years in Cornwall, those spent in Mevagissey, Gurnard’s Head and Madron were the all important ones. Although the first of them was to provide him with material for his long poem The Nightfishing, published in 1955, in which “he struck the sea bell as no one had done before”, he was to find that the area lacked the mystic atmosphere of Penwith and it was not long before he and Nessie moved to the far west. Despite not having lived in St Ives (the nearest Sydney came to that was when he was performing his coastguard duties at Gurnard’s Head, and when he and Nessie spent time, courtesy of Sven Berlin, in a cottage at Cripplesease), he was to become part and parcel of all that was happening on the post-war avant garde art scene in and around St Ives. A wild and woolly, pre-politically correct and health and safety free scene, one which gave a home to those who, like Sydney himself, were larger than life, it provided the Bohemian background he so admired and wished for. Regrettably, despite being championed by none other than the playwright Harold Pinter, he never received the recognition and acclaim that he deserved during his lifetime, but his reputation as a major modern poet has certainly grown since and he will be remembered, particularly in this part of the world, for his poems for the four artists – Alfred Wallis, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter.

An event to mark W S Graham’s centenary was held at the Makars’ Court in Edinburgh on June 14 this year, when a memorial stone to him was unveiled, and his daughter Rosalind Mudaliar donated his writer’s chair to the Scottish Poetry Library. Closer to home, another W S Graham centenary event is being held on Wednesday, November 21, in the Morrab Library, Morrab Gardens, Penzance. Entitled Sydney Where Art Thou? it will be presented by John Butterworth, with readings by John Truscott. the event begins at 2pm and entry is free.