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PAUL POTTS Jim Burns
I was first attracted to the writings of
Paul Potts when I came across some of his poems in
New
Lyrical Ballads, an anthology
edited by Maurice Carpenter, Jack Lindsay and Honor Arundel,
published by Editions Poetry London in 1945. I can’t recall where I
found the book with its tattered cover and dusty pages. Probably in
a second-hand bookshop and most likely in the 1960s. Second-hand
bookshops were plentiful in those days. Potts’ poems were what I
liked – straightforward and open in their sentiments. His work, he
said in one of them, was “To sing on-/Until the world is
Blackpool/in August/in the afternoon.” Reading this I thought how
the smart and successful would have sniggered at that reference to
Blackpool and its popular image as a gaudy playground for the
working-classes. But I grew up not far from Blackpool and went there
often, and I knew what Potts meant when he referred to “August/in
the afternoon” and its evocation of noisy, good-humoured crowds and
cheap entertainments. I wanted to know more about Potts, so over
the years I tracked down nearly all of the few books he’d published
and some of his contributions to magazines. And slowly began to
establish a picture of the man.
Although often referred to as Canadian, he
was born in Berkshire in 1911 to an English father and Irish mother,
but moved to Canada when young and was educated there and, after
returning to England, at Stonyhurst College. He also attended a
Jesuit college in Florence. By the 1930s he was in London and at
some point got to know George Orwell and the poet, George Barker.
His poems were published in
Poetry London
in 1939,
alongside work by Louis MacNeice, David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, and
Stephen Spender. His first collection,
A
Poet’s Testament, was published
by the Whitman Press in 1940.
It is now a collectors’ item. Potts
also wrote “Don Quixote on a Bicycle”, an insightful appreciation of
his friend, George Orwell, which appeared in
London Magazine and was
incorporated into Potts’ best-known book,
Dante Called You Beatrice
(Eyre
& Spottiswood, 1960), some years later. His poems were also
published in
New Masses, Poetry Quarterly,
and other magazines.
Potts was in the army during the Second World War, though there is
little available information about his length of service (it would
seem that he spent time in the Royal Ulster Rifles and
12th
Commando) and exactly what he did. Robert Hewison’s
Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1949-45
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) suggests
that he had been discharged “after passing through the Army’s
psychiatric hospital at Northfield, outside Birmingham”. Hewison
seems to have got this information from Rayner Heppenstall’s
autobiographical novel,
The
Lesser Infortune (Cape, 1953),
where Potts appears as a
“Canadian poet”, and Potts himself in
Dante Called You Beatrice says
that he was “invalided out”. It might be worth adding at this point
that Potts went to Israel in 1948 to support the Jewish struggle to
establish the new state. I don’t know if he took part in any actual
fighting, but being there was an expression of his deep feelings
about little countries such as Israel and the Irish Republic.
A second small collection,
Instead of a Sonnet
appeared
from Editions Poetry London in 1944.
Although
copies of this edition are scarce it has survived in a later
version, supplemented by an additional ten poems, published by Tuba
Press in 1978. I’m not going to over-rate the poems. Potts himself
said of them: “These few poems, if indeed they are poems at all, are
not terribly good. The poetry of the English language would be no
poorer without them and it is unfortunately no richer because of
them”. Many people would, no doubt, agree with Potts’ opinion of his
own work. But for all their faults, real or supposed, there is still
something about them that helps to overcome their problems. Perhaps
Derek Stanford, who knew Potts in the 1940s and after, summed it up
reasonably accurately: “Woodenness of statement and lack of rhythm
marred most of the small amount of poetry he published, but there
was a small percentage of it which by its economy and simplicity
overcame the poet’s technical awkwardness”. And as evidence he
quoted the complete, “Prayer to Our Lady”:
The opening lines of
Dante Called You Beatrice
essentially set the tone of the rest of the book: “This book is an attempt to tell a woman,
while I was standing on her carpet, asking her to marry me, just
what kind of a man it was who loved her, and what other love he had
beyond his love of her. Had she wanted my love she would have had to
share it, with all of the poor and each of the lonely.”
It’s said that the woman referred to was
Jean Hore, who rejected Potts and married Philip O’Connor but was
later diagnosed as schizophrenic and confined to an institution for
fifty years.
There is a section in
Dante Called You Beatrice
called “A House with no Address” in which Potts writes about his
love for her and his relationship with O’Connor who, like Potts, was
well-known in Soho and Fitzrovia. The friendship between Potts and
O’Connor is explored in Andrew Barrow’s
Quentin & Philip: A Double Portrait
(Macmillan 2002), which is about Quentin
Crisp and Philip O’Connor but has quite a few references to Potts.
It was a friendship that eventually foundered, with Potts seemingly
accusing
O’Connor
of exploiting
Jean Hore for her money, and O’Connor describing Potts as “a
complete scoundrel……He did everything he could to ruin Jean and me”.
Where does the truth lie with two extravagant characters like Potts
and O’Connor?
Potts published two more books which, in
tone and intention, were similar to
Dante Called You Beatrice,
and
can be seen as continuations of it.
To
Keep a Promise (MacGibbon &
Kee) was published in 1970 and
Invitation to a Sacrament
(Martin Brian & O’Keefe)
in 1973. There is a note in the
latter which says that another book,
A
Piece of English Prose, was due
to be published in May 1974, but there is no record of it ever
appearing. It was a fact that by that date Potts was probably too
deep into the alcoholism that would affect his capacity to settle to
sustained creative work. I’m not sure of the exact year, but at some
point in the late-1970s or early-1980s I happened to be in The
French and talking to Jay Landesman when Potts lurched past us.
Landesman said something to him about a promised manuscript and got
in response what sounded like a dismissive curse. Potts was clearly
drunk and in no mood to discuss anything coherently.
It may be that,
Dante Called You Beatrice
apart, what Potts will mainly be remembered for are his appearances
as a bohemian character who
crops up in numerous accounts of
Soho in the 1940s and 1950s. Derek Stanford devotes several pages to
him in his
Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs
1937-1957 (Sidgwick & Jackson,
1977) and indicates how volatile Potts could be at times, with
imagined slights bringing about smashed beer glasses and shouted
insults. Wrey Gardiner, in
The
Flowering Moment
(Grey
Walls Press, 1949), says: “I shall never sell out to the little
successful journalists. I shall always walk in the gutter with the
funny men with the humorous saddened eyes. Fred Marnau and Ruthven
Todd and Paul Potts have qualities that no other human beings I know
have. The qualities of the grandes pitres”.
Mentioning Wrey Gardiner inclines me to
point out that he’s another neglected figure whose effusive prose
style would not find favour today. He edited
Poetry Quarterly
and published
Potts’ essays about George Barker and the American, William Saroyan:
“William Saroyan is in love, in love with nearly everybody and
almost everything. Furthermore he uses his sleeve as a blackboard on
which to write his love letters. (P.S. - I like Saroyan very much
indeed)”. And Saroyan is one more writer who probably goes largely
unread these days.
Potts crops up more than once in Daniel
Farson’s
Soho in the Fifties
(Michael Joseph, 1987) where he’s noted as
frequenting the notorious Colony Club. Farson also mentioned Potts
in
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
(Vintage
Books, 1994) in relation to the Colony: “His appearance,
increasingly like that of a Soho wino, was tolerated with saintly
forbearance by Muriel as he smouldered and stank in the corner, for
he rarely washed. With her curious instinct she knew that he was all
right, a man of some worth in spite of his failure”.
There are anecdotes concerning Potts in
books about the Colony Room, though they inevitably frequently focus
on his misbehaviour. In Darren Coffield’s
Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia
(Unbound, 2020),
a recollection by Jay Landesman
perhaps explains the background to the encounter I witnessed in The
French. Landesman said that Potts had proposed editing an anthology,
Poems for Poor People,
and they discussed the idea: “His enthusiasm for the project
increased in direct ratio to the drinks I was buying. Before the
afternoon was over, we had a golden handshake. His advance was
possibly the lowest in publishing history…..£5 and free
Guinness…..We both knew the book would never happen, but I enjoyed
the liquid negotiations”.
Another book, Sophie Parkin’s splendid
The Colony Room Club 1948-2008: A History
of Bohemian Soho (Palmtree
Publishers, 2013),
also includes Potts, bringing in the dishevelment of his later years
and noting that “Philip O’Connor and Paul Potts were always cadging
drinks or getting angry and there was a lot of emotional behaviour
around”.
But it’s worth mentioning that
“Poet George Barker described his friend Potts as,” ‘that criminal
whose felony is to love everything a bit too much’, as well as
dreadfully poor, selling his poems for a penny on street corners and
often destitute, he was always welcomed by Muriel, despite his smell
and rags”. Incidentally, many of the references to Potts
describe his appearance as untidy, even dirty and smelly, but a
photograph by John Deakin, chronicler of Soho bohemia, taken in the
early- 1950s, shows a cleaner and smarter Potts.
As well as the various books and magazines
I’ve referred to, it is relevant to draw attention to
The
Faber Book of 20th
Century Verse (Faber, 1953,
with several later reprints), edited by David Wright and John
Heath-Stubbs, where Potts was represented with two poems. And
Michael Horovitz included an excerpt from
Dante Called You Beatrice
in
Children of
Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain
(Penguin Books, 1969), as if to
demonstrate that he had some similarities of mood or manner to
certain of the new poets and bohemians. Potts’ old sparring partner,
Philip O’Connor, was also in the anthology, no doubt for the same
reason. Paul Potts died in 1990. His last few years
had seen him more or less housebound due to ill-health and living in
what would be described as squalor. He died when he fell asleep
while smoking and set his bed on fire. Some of the obituaries
commented on his role as a Soho character, but others drew attention
to the books he had written during his better days. George Barker
thought that Potts’ real achievement was with his prose because “he
found it hard to conform to the rigours of verse”. He was right,
though lines from a simple poem by Potts stay in my mind longer than
most of the poems I come across in books and magazines:
When Potts died I was often publishing
reviews and poems in
Tribune,
the left-wing weekly paper in which he had appeared in the 1940s. It
seemed appropriate to commemorate his passing with a short tribute.
I make no claims for it as a poem – as Potts said, “The history of
the English language would be no poorer without it” - but it served
its purpose and I liked to think that in its directness and
simplicity it was not unlike some of what Potts himself wrote.
PAUL POTTS (1911-1990)
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