Iain Sinclair: Biblio-voodoo

Iain Sinclair

Confronted by an obituary tribute to some person I’ve known and valued, I often think of the value J.H. Prynne placed on delivering extempore but pre-plotted eulogies for those who meant most to him. His fellow student and neophyte poet at Jesus College, Cambridge, R.F. Langley, accomplice in church visiting and European travels. His sparring partner and correspondent Ed Dorn. His mother, Muriel, amateur artist and late-published poet. He made them sing, and those who heard him realised that transcripts should be kept, recordings taken and made available. Lives were given context. I wondered how Prynne would have laid out the armature for his own obituary. Back in 2016, like a decommissioned field operative in from the cold, he gave a monumental interview to Jeff Dolven and Joshua Kotin for the Paris Review. A compulsive nightbird, Prynne charmed and exhausted his questioners. The published version was a teasing extract edited from enough material for a five-hundred-page volume. The famously private scholar chose this moment to consider his legacy, before a final decade of withdrawal into domestic space. And uninterrupted composition.

When news of the death of a treasured poet arrives, we suffer a cultural bereavement, recognition of a diminished habitat. The announcement comes, even when it has been anticipated, feared and accepted, as a jolt. The timing is always off. The medium of transmission is all wrong: a working-hours phone call, an email circular fired off to potentially interested parties. The messenger has the superstitious belief that publishing a death-event before the last breath has been confirmed, lips definitively sealed, might challenge its validity and stall or reverse the inevitable. The passing is not absolute until everybody knows of it and nobody holds up a hand in contradiction. There can be no reprieve now from necessary ceremonies, bureaucratic permissions. Peer group survivors contemplate their own mortality, before stepping outside into some indifferent garden. Or stretching a stiff arm to lift a totemic volume from the familiar shelf, checking that words are in the same order.

Among the warring tribe of unsponsored fundamentalist poets, rapping out samizdat communiqués from their self-imposed gulags, broadsheet obituaries are a rarity. A full flush – the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times – is a light-deflecting singularity. But there are special cases. As if to make recompense for the substantial reviews they never delivered, the major culprits gave generous space to Prynne, who died, aged 89, on 22 April. Single Tangle Mine, his final chapbook from Face Press, was delivered by his faithful amanuensis and post-2014 publisher, Ian Heames, just in time.*

The ultimate insult, given Prynne’s distrust of photographic capture, came when the obituaries in the Times and Telegraph were illustrated by a stolen agency shot of the affronted, winter-coated don on his wicker-basket bicycle, pedalling between engagements. Tails of silvered hair backlit. Half-moon spectacles sliding down his nose in rhythm with the raised eyebrows: eschatological horror. The bicycle trespass was forty years too late. It could have been lifted from Down Cemetery Road, the 1964 BBC Monitor documentary presented by John Betjeman, in which Philip Larkin, a very different librarian-poet, bicycle clips firm around trouser bottoms, obligingly wheels his way into the damp monochrome of a country church.

Prynne’s brief and unwanted celebrity followed the publication in 2004 of The Last of England? by Randall Stevenson, the 1960-2000 volume in the Oxford English Literary History. This harmless checklist, aimed at the examination market, provoked a venomous grapeshot broadside from John Carey, the Oxford University tribune for the common reader. ‘So satisfactorily postmodern that [the poems] achieve a complete “suppression of ordinary meaning”’, he fulminated in the Sunday Times. Which was true, but not necessarily a criticism, just the entry point for further engagement. Larkin, called on to scorn those vices, was Carey’s chosen gladiator. Stevenson’s measured praise of Prynne alerted media jackals who are always spoiling for a fight, for simple binaries: Prynne v. Larkin. Radio slot booked. Slightly stunned by the pace of this contrived squabble, I found myself in that three-minute slot before the half-hour news on the Today programme. I was debating with Professor John Sutherland, who accused Prynne, mistakenly, of being one of those ‘Language poets’. I could only blurt out something about the absurdity of treating these figures like talent show competitors. They belonged in quite distinct categories. It was like comparing electricity with nougat. Not bad for the Prynne side, but missing the mark for Larkin, who might stick in the teeth, but wouldn’t have any truck with confectionery from abroad.

After the obituaries, the catalogues: the market adjusts and moves on. Prynne engaged early with economics. ‘The pattern of bond and contract and interest,’ says the blurb on the flap of Kitchen Poems, published by Cape Goliard in 1968. The grey dust jacket with red lettering is a chart of infrastructure along the east coast of England, from the Wash to Eskdale. The German Ocean divided into squares for future exploration. A land denuded of natural features is marked for mining licences and oil farms. ‘The splintered/naming of wares/ creates targets for want/ like a glandular riot,’ Prynne wrote. The never satisfied hunger of solitary book collectors is alerted by their devices, day or night, whenever virgin desiderata sashay into the virtual marketplace. You can’t own it all: the scribbles, the secrets, the life of another. Competitive thesis-compilers pounce on some previously unrecorded annotation. The librarian balances diminished budget against gaps on the shelves that nag like a dental catastrophe. On its arrival in the post, the book catalogue is inviolate. Every item has been set in its ordained place, accurately described, perhaps flattered. Reputations can be made and unmade in a couple of lines. Everything is for sale. The catalogue outranks the overnight obituary as the ultimate authority. It is a reference point, a bibliographic curiosity or, in rare cases, a valued collectible in its own right, trading for more than any of the individual items gathered within.

Will Shutes of Test Centre Books, an experienced archivist, a book collector himself and a former small press publisher, knew all this before he launched his business. He tracked that fertile poetic period, somewhere between 1968 and 1979, when a bias towards experimentation and free exchange was still in play, accompanied by a glowering climate of collapsing civic structures, reckless ecological damage and non-specific but universal waves of pressure. Participants were now ageing, fading out, and their ‘libraries’, in whatever state, attic-stashed and rodent-nibbled, cottage-weathered, could be purchased. Veterans appreciated the market that Shutes was both creating and supplying. They were happy to cull surplus yards of inessentials. An informed operation based around the cataloguer’s interactions with the poets, Test Centre’s catalogues were seen as responsible and accurate. Collections purchased from the heirs of John James, Chris Torrance, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth, for example, were meticulously anatomised and assigned a monetary value. When there is only one copy left in the world, the single sheet nobody carried home is priceless. It only takes one committed collector to sustain a pyramid of minor dealers shaving their percentages.

With a near definitive selection of Prynne publications going all the way back to the disowned Force of Circumstance and Other Poems in 1962, and association copies acquired from the library of Crozier, a former Prynne student, publisher and collaborator, Shutes began to assemble his Test Centre tribute. He knew Prynne was unwell, but was assured, as he told me, by ‘people close to him’ that the catalogue would be regarded as a celebration. It would perform as a fragmented biography, a life revealed in the disguise of an illustrated chronological exhibition. The entries are minimalist, anecdotal after the fashion of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Beneath the scholarly apparatus, the history of the volumes, is that special magic of touch, friendship and feud. But a price has to be confessed, to provide a watermark for others to follow. Shutes has elevated the shopping list into a publication indistinguishable in appearance and flavour from one of the numerous chapbooks Prynne trusted to fellow poets and academic colleagues. Sandwiching the items for sale, on different coloured paper, are short responses and recollections from persons involved in the project. From the bookdealer-publisher himself and from Heames. From Mark Statham, a sub-librarian who worked with Prynne at Gonville and Caius College. From Nat Moore, a scholar tracking the story of Prynne’s special lending library. And from the artist Ben Varney, whose painting Landscapes (Life among Beams) provides the cover image. The catalogue’s title, Waymarking a Life, came from the half-title of the 1999 Poems. In that volume Prynne recorded his thanks to Crozier and others who ‘assisted some portion of this current bundle to take its place in the passage of years’ by designing and publishing his work. He acknowledged ‘the way that slices of text do waymark a life’. Until those slices come together in the great yellow butter-bricks of the substantial collections that followed the Poems published by Agneau 2 in 1982.

The first item was a surprise, a slap at preconceived notions. ‘LARKIN, Philip. The Less Deceived. Hessle: The Marvell Press, 1958. 8vo. Green cloth.’ In the first stage of his self-interrogating apprenticeship, Prynne is taking possession of the fourth edition of a lauded volume by a rival, who was never a rival, but who will in the future be weaponised against him. There is an ownership inscription made in characteristic black ink from his student days at Jesus. There are numerous pencil annotations and links to Thomas Hardy. There are tutting knuckle-raps: ‘No.’ ‘Crass.’ With the odd B+ sop: ‘Elements of a clear insight here.’ As Moore points out, Prynne, director of studies at Caius, kept two ledgers recording the volumes circulated from his own library, many of them improved with marginal commentaries. Some were dated on their return and stayed in the system. Others vanished. The Larkin was found in a Bristol bookshop. The loan history notes the item was circulated in 1963, then returned. In the 1970s, it was fit for discovery in an undisturbed stack. By 2026 it had been authenticated and made available for around the price of a week’s rent in a new-build Hackney studio apartment. Such matters are called fair trade or biblio-voodoo.

The Larkin is followed by Force of Circumstance and Other Poems. Prynne’s first book was put out by stolid publishers, Routledge and Kegan Paul, in 1962. An uneasy beginning, as he glossed in a letter to Charles Olson: the book was, he said, ‘96 per cent of no interest to me’. There would be no reprise in any of the collected editions. The influence of Prynne’s early mentor Donald Davie can still be traced. Prynne owed his Routledge introduction to this man. He respected him as a scholar, but said that Davie was someone who badly wanted to be a poet, and grafted for it, but just wasn’t. He had no intention of following that path. Out of duty, he agreed to a recorded reading for ‘The Poet Speaks’, a series sponsored by the British Council. It involved a polite, stiff-collared viva with Peter Orr. The fourth item in the catalogue is a bootleg cassette of this curiosity that passed through my hands. Prynne is forensically precise behind layers of defensive qualification. We could be listening, chins on cupped hands, to a crackling Bakelite radio. You can almost hear the tap of the inquisitor’s pencil, as he pushes gamely on, working down his list of formulaic questions. Rank and serial number only, Prynne gives nothing away: ‘I never thought of myself for one moment as a possible productive.’ He resisted the pressure to commit to poetry in his student days, until he found himself, solitary and marooned, during a long postgraduate year at Harvard, grazing from an automat and ploughing, in alphabetical order, along shelves of American poetry. It took a while to reach Frank O’Hara, Olson and Wallace Stevens.

Ian Brinton, retired from his role as head of English at Dulwich College, agreed to meet me for a conversation about Prynne’s childhood. He attended Bramble Wood School, the infant collective run by Muriel Prynne from the family home at The Glen, Farnborough Park, a private estate outside Orpington. Halvard Prynne, Jeremy’s father, was in the motor trade, an engineer, grand prix follower and enthusiastic photographer. He designed the family’s impressive mock-Tudor residence. The colour illustration in the Test Centre catalogue makes it look like an ambitious compromise, part-cottage and part-villa, in tune with the outwash of William Morris socialism. Muriel was a force in the community and a much-loved teacher. She took the children on nature rambles through the wood behind the house and made paintings of wild flowers. The Prynne parents collected young Brinton on Wednesday evenings, driving him to the table tennis club they ran in the village hall at Keston. It is not thought that Jeremy, who considered all sporting activities a dim palliative, time stolen from what matters, attended. He used the tedious bus ride to St Dunstan’s, his school in Catford, to disinter the works of John Milton. With supreme indifference, the future polymath had managed to fail his eleven-plus. Bill Wyman, future Rolling Stone, veteran among veterans, and classmate of Prynne at Bramble Wood, passed his eleven-plus challenge and sailed on to Beckenham and Penge County Grammar School. Prynne babysat Brinton, and later welcomed him to Caius, no first names. In later years, he offered collegiate hospitality and conversation. ‘We both loved gossip,’ Brinton said. He recalled in particular the steep, uncarpeted stairs at Bramble Wood. Reprimanded by Muriel for extravagant farting noises and threats to drop frogs down the dresses of little girls, he was encouraged to contemplate his sins on the bottom step. These were the stairs where Hal took a tumble. He was driven to Orpington Hospital with a badly swollen neck. Inadequately diagnosed and sent back home, he died shortly afterwards from a broken neck.

A committed advocate of the early work, Brinton had enduring sympathy for the suppressed Force of Circumstance. Prynne agreed at one point to allow him to reissue it. Then, confronted by the proofs, changed his mind. Brinton was interested in the common ground – landscape, American modernism, spare diction – between Prynne and Charles Tomlinson. Pressure to bring the two Cambridge poets together found them side by side at high table. And what did they talk about? Gardening. The Test Centre catalogue has a copy of Force of Circumstance inscribed to Tomlinson by the author. A nice association.

Much has been written about Compendium, the bookshop in Camden Town. It inherited its role and countercultural status, pushing the limits of legitimacy, from Better Books on Charing Cross Road and Indica on Southampton Row. At the end of the 1960s, I was part of a loose collective shooting an 8 mm film diary in London. A couple of months after our arrival in Hackney, I was rambling along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. Coming off at Camden Lock, I noticed a forlorn enterprise, like a market stall taking shelter indoors. I got the shot. A man, shirtless in a holed sweater, with a folding table of imported paperbacks and items from hip UK independents. He had the dispirited attitude of a student forced to sell his collection to meet the rent. I bought something, an Ed Dorn from Fulcrum Press, Gunslinger 1 & 2: ownership asserted on 17 February 1970. There would be many more Compendium inscriptions in the next decade. The man at the table was Nick Rochford, one of the proprietors. Overnight, as it seemed, a shop grew up around him. Shelves were constructed and filled. Categories delineated. It was a good period for people called Nick. The weekend cricketer and opera buff Nick Kimberley took charge of the poetry action and kept an eye out for French novels and American hard-boiled crime. Calls would circulate when the latest Raworth, Kathy Acker, Allen Fisher came out of the box. William Gibson, staying in a flat on the other side of the road, says that he caught a first glimpse of me, sack on back, trudging the pavement. ‘That’ll be Compendium again,’ his host said. Exchange rather than payment always. The first Compendium catalogue to carry poetry reviews appeared in the summer of 1971. John Wieners and Jim Carroll noticed by Peter Riley, Diane di Prima by Jim Burns, Lewis MacAdams, Gerard Malanga, Jeff Morsman by Crozier. And Prynne’s Brass evaluated by Martin Wright. The brass now required for this item in the Shutes catalogue, Crozier’s specially bound copy, numbered and signed, is £1500.

Travelling poets called in; some of them gave readings. Meanwhile, like a miraculous infestation, Compendium spread itself down both sides of Camden High Street. There was even a shop devoted entirely to poetry. Cruising the shelves, and stunned by this upturn in the cultural climate, perhaps slipstreaming traces of the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse, I paused at a Cape Goliard title I didn’t know: Kitchen Poems by J.H. Prynne. I took it home on the train, doubly suspicious. First because, annoyingly, this poet had stolen the title of my first book before I could get it to the printers, just off Balls Pond Road. And more significantly because the cover nudged at being an Olson rip-off, a more formal, more lecture-like reprise of The Maximus Poems, published by Jargon/Corinth in 1960.

Thus, my prejudice, my ignorance. On my first superficial reading of Kitchen Poems, I didn’t register that Prynne was assembling in more durable form dispatches written in heat as ‘news-items’, to be distributed rapidly by the English Intelligencer. There is a rich history here, radiating out from Prynne, Crozier and Peter Riley, and making contact with other scattered poets: Dorn, Davie, John James, Lee Harwood, Torrance and John Riley among them. A serious collection of Intelligencer issues, made by Brinton, is offered for sale in the Test Centre catalogue. Behind the ambition of this improvised project was an inevitable and necessary butting of heads, rivalries, disputes. All this came to the boil when the poets gathered at Sparty Lea, a group of Northumbrian cottages borrowed for the weekend from the family of Barry MacSweeney. His unreliable reminiscences identify who punched whom first. And why Tom Pickard drove his Land Rover into the back of Prynne’s Morris Oxford. Two poets together, side by side in a bar, is a grudging conversation about everything apart from poetry. A dozen under one roof is Homeric: class war, false gods. And an excuse for multiple legends.

Meeting one of the Compendium collective in recent days, I learned something about expansionist economics. That trestle table toured the music festivals – books on display, other products available on request. Profits laundered in real estate. The diversification of alternative capitalism. After Rochford went down for the second time, despite statements of support from Professor Eric Mottram and others at the trial, the workers at Compendium ran the show as a reduced single-venue operation. Kitchen Poems nailed the reality of insecure investment and hunger for territory. ‘That/of course is not expansion,’ Prynne wrote, ‘but acquisition … Otherwise it’s/purchase … what starts as irrigation ends up/selling the megawattage across the grid.’

The Damascene seizure – it really was like that epileptiform sunburst – arrived in a Primrose Hill bookshop where, three years earlier, I’d filmed Allen Ginsberg defacing his own poster and engaging with a local audience of around fifteen souls. The White Stones, published in 1969 by Grosseteste Press in Lincoln, is the one many faithful Prynne veterans return to, cling to, as they are swept away in the merciless torrent of late chapbooks. Rough-textured sage green cloth is decorated with a black frame containing a strobing nest of white pebbles or insect eggs. I got no further than the first page – ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’ – before I was a convert. ‘The century roar is a desert carrying/too much away; the plane skids off/with an easy hopeless departure.’ And these white stones, what were they? Heames, when I visited him in Cambridge, showed me a sharp flint, split to reveal a black interior, brought back from Hadstock. Prynne lived there for a time, in Pond House. He visited churches. He picked up stones for his mantelpiece. Before we moved off on our tour, Heames presented me with a small off-white pebble from the Hadstock location, not much bigger than the ones on the book jacket. He thought the title came from Revelation 2:17. ‘He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.’

Being in Dublin for four years in the early 1960s, and looking further west, rather than attending to what was happening in England, I missed out on the initial push from the English Intelligencer network. I didn’t notice Prynne’s fellow feeling for Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous composition, the apparent disinclination to revise. Like everybody else at the time, Prynne bought his copy of The New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen and published in 1960. He engaged with Olson’s manifesto on ‘Projective Verse’ and with Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. ‘Kerouac, for example, wrote about automatic writing, and it was all completely new territory – I’d never seen anything like it before,’ he told the Paris Review interviewers. ‘What’s more, it was full of energy and wackiness and innovation, and none of the English writers I had any knowledge of would ever have committed themselves to behaviour like that.’ The wildness in Prynne is not something that critics noticed, the obligation to let rip, take himself by surprise, and make every start a leap from the cliff.

When I met Prynne for the first time, taking in the invariable uniform, the polished black shoes, I considered another explanation of the title The White Stones. The lacuna in Prynne’s biography is his period of National Service before going up to Jesus College. Officer class, for sure, quartered in Germany. Fluent in the language, he took Olson to task for his reckless and insecure scholarship. Prynne owned what he said, tracking every syllable across cultures and borders to the roots. He said that Olson ‘vandalised his intellectual equipment’. A serious charge from a serious scholar. ‘It was very uncomfortable to me, because not only had I read all these German texts which he couldn’t read, but I’d studied as an undergraduate the Old Icelandic corpus, and I’d learned Old Icelandic as a language.’ I never heard Prynne mention his army days. Jeremy Noel-Tod, reminiscing in Poetry Nation Review, reported Cambridge rumours of service in a Polish tank regiment. In Eastern Europe he ‘could pass … for a German communist’. Were those white stones the ones squaddies had to paint, filling the dead hours, in military bases among the huts and cropped verges?

The request for a face-to-face audience with the mysterious Mr Prynne came from Christopher Bamford, a friend and colleague in mischief from Dublin. Chris, like most of our group, had moved west. But just a little further than the rest, the ones who settled in West Cork and Dingle. He was paying a visit from Massachusetts and telling me that he had tracked the poet down, making the fateful call to the porters’ lodge at Caius. We would take a slow train from Liverpool Street to the dank winter town where we had both been rejected as students, Chris at the hands of Kingsley Amis in his pomp, which gave him retrospective pride. As we stuttered across Hackney Marshes, my co-conspirator revealed his intention of inviting Prynne to become the guiding spirit of a community to be set up somewhere unspecified in England, in order to carry the torch of the scattered Black Mountain College. It speaks well of our nominated rector that he remained courteous, amused, while listening to this nonsense. He treated the deluded invaders as potential recruits for an already active network. Prynne always wondered if he would have accepted an invitation to join the staff at Black Mountain, concluding that ‘it was not an institution that I could have willingly associated myself with, partly because they were such bullies.’

That part of our pitch was rapidly set aside and the proper conversation, with gossip about poets and promises to exchange productions, began. It lasted for hours. Seeking a neat conclusion, Chris proposed that our utopian and interdisciplinary community could be left pending. He would return to America and initiate a formal correspondence across the pond. There were no letters. Chris went his own way, lecturing and translating, hosting Gregory Bateson, Kathleen Raine, Keith Critchlow and other seekers willing to hold hands in a circle of invocation. He did publish a series called Lindisfarne Letter, but none of these was addressed to Prynne.

I remember the trimmed grass, the neat margin of flowerbeds, where Prynne advised and instructed on planting, and occasionally stepped out from his nocturnal labours to dig the earth and do some covert planting of his own. And I remember Staircase I with the painted names of all the occupants, professors and doctors; Prynne as the sole ‘Mr’. Must be like surgeons, I thought, climb high enough and titles are shed like unnecessary decoration. A proposed doctorate on Hardy had been set aside. He was a fellow, established on his own terms. We stepped past the door of the Bateman Room, where Prynne invited visiting poets like George Oppen, Michael McClure and Dorn to read. He hosted convivial gatherings in his rooms afterwards.

After that first meeting, there were book exchanges and valued responses in that precise and unwavering black hand. Brinton told me that these letters were crafted; there were pencil drafts and careful revisions. Copies were always made for the files, the future. The first note, soon after our initial encounter, said that Mr Prynne was ‘happy to trade’. I sent him a copy of Muscat’s Würm, self-published by our small Hackney press, and would have received, in return, the much more elegant and substantial Into the Day – if I hadn’t already picked up a copy in Compendium. ‘Sorry you had to acquire your own copy by a more recently invented & more painful process,’ he wrote. Never having had, or even expected, a response to this kind of invisible publication, I blinked at the dazzle of Prynne’s language: ‘I like the sardonic glitter below the lintel & am not given to handing out fudge at parties.’ Or nougat. College wine flowed as sampled poets and Cambridge crew mingled after events. You might bump into a manifested anthology of those you had been reading. Or the son of Ezra Pound.

Those years were special, the lights were out, but the resistance, in language if not action, was now visible. Exchanges of persons as well as publications. Prynne made his recommendations. And sent poets to my door. John Wilkinson from a neighbouring squat. MacSweeney from across the river. On one astonishing occasion, late on a Sunday evening, the man himself rang our bell. He was, I suppose, breaking up a return to Cambridge from the family home in Kent. This was in keeping with the push to strengthen networks and get us all engaging with the books he put into circulation. We talked through the night, laying down a sediment I mined for decades to come. I discovered, after my guest sat through a session of 8 mm films, that he not only knew about Stan Brakhage, he had stayed in his cabin. Dorn was trying to finesse a cowboy script for Brakhage to put into production. It all connected now. Prynne also spoke about a voyage into the mist and ice, towards the Northwest Passage. This business of making impulsive journeys, driving through the night, defined the era. A car-sick passenger on a short hop across Cambridge, Prynne put in miles at the wheel on the roads of England. He drove MacSweeney, whom he mentored and supported, to Manchester, to rescue, for archives and future publication, all the extant poems of Mark Hyatt. He tracked John Clare, in company with Dorn, motoring to Helpston and on to Northampton and the gentrified traces of the General Lunatic Asylum.

What was noticeable was the way that Prynne championed outlier poets alongside the obvious members of the so-called Cambridge School. He liked independent spirits, who thrived without the benefit of university education and patronage. Hyatt was described by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, in their introduction to So Much for Life, a selection of his poetry, as ‘working class and queer … Romani; a small-time thief and sometime sex worker; incarcerated more than once; subject to electroconvulsive therapy; an intravenous drug user; illiterate until adulthood’. He overdosed, fatally, on sleeping pills and aspirin, ‘in a cave in rural Lancashire’ in April 1972.

Stepping away from grubbing as a law clerk in the City of London, Chris Torrance, another Prynne correspondent, worked as a municipal gardener in Bristol, keeping notebooks while slipstreaming the Beats and the Clifton pantisocracy. Contributing to small magazines such as the English Intelligencer gave him a certain visibility. Crozier’s Ferry Press published his first two books. Prynne’s delirious support was crucial for Green Orange Purple Red. In a response for Grosseteste Review he said: ‘The singing voice of such persuasive and dilated movement has not for a long time been heard in the land … The man walks in his sleep, yet he is there with almost abandoned precision: the sacred pornography of the hapless face is delivered up in that most delicate oriental drunkenness last found in the notebooks of Coleridge.’ Torrance’s work diaries swim in the rush of becoming a published poet and provoking praise beyond all fantasy: he knows that this bucolic Bristol interlude is temporary. He bided his time on the downs, before succumbing to temptation across the water in Wales. When Torrance moved to the remote cottage in the Neath Valley where he stayed for the rest of his life, Prynne kept up the exchange of books and letters. He offered institutional support for attempts at bursaries or employment. Shutes visited the cottage with an American bibliographer, a memorable experience for both of them, and later acquired and sorted the hard-weathered remnants of the cottage library. The relevant Prynne items are in the catalogue, their desolate condition a badge of pride. Prynne signed a copy of For the Monogram for Torrance in 1997 and sustained the high pitch of enthusiasm in a handwritten response to the gift of Torrance’s Southerly Vector/The Book of Heat: ‘Every word, pause and turn in it intensely poetic, an entire world pervaded with the eye of seeing and making, tongues of deep truth! It is more than time to say these things, as they are.’

In those days of floated communities, shifting loyalties, ephemeral production, the poets became publishers. Collisions at readings, heated correspondence, led to other forms of exchange: publication as conversation, publication as gift. Prynne’s Day Light Songs was written on 15 June 1968 and published, ‘stab-stapled’ by John James, in July. One-month delivery was part of the proposition, placing word-news into rapid if limited circulation. The copy in the Test Centre catalogue, ‘heavily rust-marked’, with staples recently replaced, has been inscribed to Torrance. Fire Lizard, written by Prynne on New Year’s Day 1970, was released from MacSweeney’s Blacksuede Boot Press in Barnet. Like so many others fired by their interactions with Prynne, I received books, including something rare and Sumerian from the private circulating library: read and return. A Night Square, the title Prynne gave to me at Albion Village Press in 1973, seemed to fit with the other items from poets’ presses. We were, all of us, neurotically careful at reproducing the trial copy he provided as a model.

In a letter to the filmmaker Colin Still in March 2016, Prynne explained, courteously and at length, why he was disinclined to read, perform or make recordings in England:

For a long time now I have been personally sceptical about the voice of the poet reading/performing his or her own writing … The problem is this: listeners who audit the occasion of a self-performance believe, typically, that the experience affords them some kind of enhanced access to an understanding of the text, through an encounter … In candid truth I don’t really believe in this. I think the poet’s voice is profoundly accidental and arbitrary … I don’t believe in the poet as a separate real entity, outside the domain of his or her work.

And then, with no fanfare, word got out that Prynne would give a reading at the Arnolfini in Bristol with Dorn. There were special circumstances: Dorn was dying and Prynne was his companion on a run to the west, to witness the solar eclipse of 11 August 1999 in Devon. With Chris Petit, I was making an unscripted and free-form film called Asylum, in which a virus was devouring cultural memory. Dorn was a major witness. We received permission to record the Bristol reading, which felt like a marker for our self-generating thesis. Cameras were set up, but could not be switched on until Prynne finished his introduction. He spoke with emotion about the journey the two men had made together. Dorn’s readings, over many years, contradicted Prynne’s assertion that the poet, inevitably, got in the way of the poem. Dorn occupied the poems, as always, until he was caught by chemical overload from prescribed palliatives. One review registered the charismatic presence in his white threads as Dennis Hopper morphing into Buster Keaton. Prynne’s subsequent reading was downgraded as schoolmasterly and difficult to track. Microphones had been switched off. In fact, Prynne was precise, without rhetorical tricks or preamble: he was doing everything possible to remove personality from the poem.

When we interviewed Dorn the next day, in a borrowed Georgian property in Bath, Prynne withdrew to his room. Dorn agreed it was a pity that the whole arc of the twinned reading hadn’t been caught, but felt that nothing could be taken away from the business of simply being there. Digging in his archive 27 years later, Petit discovered that on the night the camera was not switched off. This would have proved a valuable retrieval, but having been found, like so many mythical Prynne items, it vanished again. Nicholas Johnson, the poet and publisher who hosted the old friends, said that Prynne was punctilious in calling Dorn ‘Edward’. He told Dorn, Johnson added, that the last rock concert he attended was in 1968: the Velvet Underground. The two men made it to Devon. They watched the eclipse ‘on the playing field, looking across to Dartmoor’. Dorn died four months later.

The new millennium carried Prynne to China. Describing himself in the Paris Review as ‘a peculiar and extraneous Marxist’, he engaged with Mao, the man; with the biography rather than the consequences of his political philosophy. ‘That interest is written on the surface and in the crevices all over Kazoo Dreamboats,’ Prynne told his interrogators. The chapbook published by Critical Documents in 2011 really is a curious contraption, leaking high-octane fuel, steering locked, brakes shot. The open-sided clown car illustrated on the cover would never have been sanctioned by Jeremy’s engineer father. Prynne recognised that something viral was coming and ‘clocked into’ somewhere ‘modest’ and ‘cheap’ in Bangkok. Reams of paper, pencils. Laptop ‘to verify certain sorts of materials’. And one book. A 24-hour assault, following wherever that led. Coffee and ice cream at 4 a.m., then back to the den. ‘Did I write that?’ The best feeling in the world. His take on Chinese politics had the same quality. He ended a vivaciously atypical reading at the first Pearl River Poetry Conference, convened in 2005 and filmed and recorded by John Wilkinson, with a defence of the new and unstoppable consumerism: schools, hospitals, flats in the slipstream. More useful, he said, than the excesses of the Red Guard era. Not knowing that Prynne had taken temporary leave of Cambridge, I wrote to him, asking permission to quote a few lines in a fiction I was working on. The reply came by email. ‘I’m in China now, just arrived … I’m in Guangzhou at the moment, en route for Changsha, just today been inspecting a massive local meat market, amazing huge mounds of flesh and blood mostly still steaming, craving to be instantly consumed.’ He signed off with his new moniker: Lao Pu.

The migration had been inspired by Joseph Needham, a former master of Caius and a distinguished Sinologist. ‘He was a committed Taoist, a committed Maoist and a committed Christian,’ Prynne said. This was no rest cure sabbatical. Prynne lived and worked in Hunan and helped to facilitate the Pearl River Poetry Conference. He brought a choice group from England to consort with Chinese poets and scholars. At which point, as anyone watching Wilkinson’s video can see, Prynne’s black jacket/orange tie combo was set aside. Along with abstention from public performance and the Cambridge anathema on photographic representation. Wilkinson does a good job of straight documentation: readings, keynote speeches, muggy lecture halls, audience flapping handheld fans. The imported poets seem over-emphatic in delivery and shirts. They are attentive at panel discussions. Prynne, presented as the ringmaster, is enjoying himself. Expansive gestures redirecting elusive streams of heavenly water. ‘Misunderstanding abounded,’ he said. In a new place, he was a new man.

Short-sleeved blue shirt open at the neck, Prynne is a Conradian missionary figure advocating cultural trade. He flatters local prejudices. He speaks of the mingling of two great poetical traditions, the Chinese and the English, with only the Babylonians of Gilgamesh behind them, now ‘buried under the residue of American tanks’. In China, he says, corruption is an honourable tradition, now revived after the chaos of revolutionary purges. Strategically managed, it brings about a ‘race towards prosperity’, better lives for the peasants. At the lectern, he becomes the consummate performer. After delivering stately salvage from Brass, in single units with meaningful pauses, he concludes with an audience participation curtain call. Attendees are required to shut their eyes and wipe the interference of memory. He wishes they could be bandaged. They must imagine a blank screen on which every word from Prynne’s poem triggers a white light, a pulsing map of the cosmos. He’s too close to the microphone; it pops. Everything here is back to front, coming from the wrong side of the mirror. Is this man an AI replicant? Translations of Prynne’s books sell in considerable quantities. He appears as a judge on a popular television show in which jugglers and rappers compete for university places. His verdicts are fearsome.

Cambridge then. In time of drought, scorched grass in public places, green patches in private enclosures, the city belongs to that drop-out medical student, bored with dissection: J.G. Ballard. I was met at the station, the old one, not the halt for the satellite city of science parks, biotech companies and slick architectural affrontery lifted from Ballard’s Super-Cannes. Blank-faced capital ventures, with coffee outlets, had spilled around the old station too. The double ranks of waiting taxis spoke of a thriving economic environment for those who have bought into it. Heames, the man responsible for all those elegantly designed Face Press chapbooks, was giving me the tour. His custard yellow charity-shop T-shirt was stamped STAFF on the back. The botanical explosion of his shorts looked ready for sub-tropical conditions, for the beach or five-a-side football. His ponytail, swinging under a blue cap, kept him cool.

We walked by back ways, trending towards the river and avoiding the tourist-infested centre. Almost at once, we sampled the good life of the academic-bohemian fringes, encounters on restored Victorian terraces, sensible cars being loaded for expeditions to Norfolk churches. Heames nodded at the former Priory Road pub that was once the house and studio of Julia Ball, an artist collected by Prynne. Following the grooved drift Heames nominated – station to home, home to Prynne’s house, house to college library – I picked up something of the pattern of those last impossibly productive years. And the role he had played in making such intense engagement possible. There was a benevolent microclimate here, a couple of generations after the poetry wars of the 1960s and 1970s. It was calmer, steadier; a mutually supportive community drawing on books circulated by Prynne, on his teaching, his presence. The lamp burning in the night. Heames called regularly on Prynne, discussing form, finding the right setting for the poems. He told me about one near disaster from an earlier period when he was still based in London. A Prynne manuscript that should have arrived at Vallance Road, Muswell Hill went missing. The frantic publisher tried all the houses in his street, and the other Vallance Road in London, fearing that the precious item had detoured to the demolished family residence of the Kray twins in Bethnal Green. It was not as bad as that: the package had been held by the post office while they investigated a case of counterfeit franking.

The Heames property is in a quiet suburban street, close to the former Radio House, the research facility and factory of W.G. Pye and Co., which feels quite appropriate. Transmissions of another kind, using sophisticated risograph technology to facilitate limited editions, hand-crafted books of poetry. Glimpsed kitchens combined high-end fridges and coffee machines with street salvage. On our walk we came across a model village, like the estate where Prynne grew up, set out for redistribution. Ian persuaded me to carry away the cottage that looked so much like Muriel Prynne’s school at Bramble Wood. Sitting at a solid plank table, we drank our water from jam jars and our excellent coffee from brown ramekins. The straight path through the unbarbered garden, leading to the half-hidden printing shed, was laid out from rescued bricks trundled back in a wheelbarrow. Ian’s partner, Antonia Stringer, runs the riso studio and publishes the Earthbound Press poetry series, numbered editions of 52 copies, to which Prynne contributed. She also prints for Face Press. The mysteries of home production are both sophisticated and basic. The textured green wrappers for Which Scarf Match, Prynne’s penultimate title, were torn, with great precision, by hand.† The colourfully embroidered design with flying wool skeins, positioned on the title page, is from Suzanne Furmston, Mrs Prynne. It is absolutely the right choice.

After a halt at Varney’s garage-studio, a viewing of some of the layered paintings, we struck off to inspect Caius Library, where Prynne had been librarian, and Heames had run off subversive publications on the copying machine. The library in the Cockerell Building, originally part of the university library, was opened on 7 July 1997 by the Duke of Edinburgh, robed and glowering, with Prynne, in plain black gown, in attendance. More compulsory photographs. Prynne, arms folded, tight smile, is greeting Charles, future king, who is also grinning, left arm raised in four-finger salute. Indoors, among the stacks of the imposing first-floor library, Philip, arms behind back, hawkish glare, stalks the insolent stacks, with Prynne, eyes down, papers in firm grip, matching him stride for stride. And informing the royal dignitary, as in the presented brochure, that ‘beneath the august surfaces we have installed over twenty miles of new wiring, to carry the requirements of new systems of control and information.’ The Cockerell Building was a second kingdom. Prynne had offices on the first floor and in the Lower Library beneath. We inspected the empty vitrines where Heames had exhibited a collection of rare Prynne pamphlets and publications.

Back at the foot of Prynne’s staircase in Caius, for my first visit since his retirement to Ferry Path, I noticed that Prof. Zeitler now shared his space with the immortal ‘Mr Prynne’, tenure granted from beyond the grave. During the days when he was no longer able to work at Caius, pipes burst in the college guest room and water flooded down one wall, damaging books. Heames rescued a number of the Chinese scrolls. Zeitler has permitted, I don’t know for how long, the display of Prynne’s furnishings: his stones, crystals and artworks. It was as if nothing had happened in the fifty or so years since I first scratched at the double doors or waited on the window ledge outside for a tutorial to conclude. The self-portrait of Roger Langley, on nodding terms with Wyndham Lewis, has a beard-line shadow. Now I knew and recognised this man. And I appreciated how important the painting was for Prynne. He asked his father to photograph it. Langley delivered a portrait of Prynne at the same time, present whereabouts unknown. I remembered the fireplace and the curios stashed along the marble mantelpiece: the engravings, the photographs. Some of Prynne’s friendships were unexpected. Brian Catling was surprised to see him arriving at the annual Royal Academy dinner as the guest of the painter Rose Wylie. An alliance going back to childhood.

Taking stock of the art, the scrolls and panels on display in this room, I found a new approach to the late Prynne publications. A number of earlier readers had, to a degree, parted company with the project, retaining their sentimental attachment to The White Stones, Brass and The Oval Window, while still supporting Face Press by ordering the attractive volumes that poured out between 2014 and 2026. Taken together, the discrete items, all listed in the Test Centre catalogue, are a force field, as much complex paintings as books. My competence only carries me as far as recognising single pages as something not so far from the graphic conglomerations of Varney. We have to learn to read in a fresh way, all our senses alert. Which Scarf Match, delivered to Ferry Path in March 2026, concludes with the word ‘selvage’. I reach for the dictionary. Selvage is ‘the edge of woven fabric finished so as to prevent unravelling’. Which sounds, in every aspect, like a serviceable description of the case. The ultimate volume, Single Tangle Mine, put into Prynne’s hands twenty days before his death, ends with ‘phoenix’. Let’s begin there. Begin again. And begin better.

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Footnotes

Face Press, 11 pp., £13.95, April, 978 1 913010 48 5.

Face Press, 10 pp., £13.95, March, 978 1 913010 49 2.