Ian Hamilton influenced a generation of writers, including McEwan and Amis. Christopher Tayler admires a collection of his poetry.
Ian Hamilton’s Collected Poems, published in paperback this month, is
what the poet, who died at the age of 63 in 2001, sometimes called a “slim vol”.
The meat of it – the poems he put between hard covers in his lifetime – takes up
62 pages; only one poem, a part-pastiche called “Larkinesque”, runs to more than
a page. For Hamilton as a “creative” writer, narrowly defined, that was it. “Not
much to show for half a lifetime, you might think,” he wrote in 1988. “And, in
certain moods, I would agree.”
Yet these sorrowing, hard-bitten poems about dying fathers, mad wives and the
rigours of the writing life, darkly impressive and moving as they are, get added
force from a wider myth around Hamilton, a myth in which their scarcity is the
point. That myth – a skein of Grub Street lore involving booze, women, football,
bailiffs and high-handed interactions with figures ranging from Stephen Spender
to Ian McEwan – is also brooded over, sometimes covertly, sometimes less so, in
his writings in prose, which are extensive, clever and very funny. Combined with
his activities as the editor of, among other things, the best serious magazine
of the Seventies, it all adds up to a body of work that makes him, it seems to
me in certain moods, one of the most interesting figures in British cultural
life in the second half of the 20th century.
Hamilton was born in Norfolk in 1938. His father, a civil engineer from
Glasgow whose middle name was Tough, moved the family to County Durham in 1951,
then died of cancer. “That was upsetting for a 13-year-old lad,” Hamilton later
recalled, “and then it became much more upsetting in my twenties when I began to
think more about him and what kind of life he had.” He learnt to speak
“sub-Geordie” and became obsessed with football, though a heart condition he was
diagnosed with – wrongly, it seems – kept him off the pitch. The English teacher
at his grammar school did his best to instil Leavisite values in his young
charges, with much talk of “sex in the head” and an extra helping of sarcasm.
One party piece involved Spender’s line likening pylons to “nude, giant girls
that have no secret”. “Even you lot,” this teacher would say, “might draw the
line at girls who looked like that.”
During his national service in Germany, Hamilton wrote two plays, quickly
destroyed, whose doleful titles – Like a Leper and Pity Me Not – amused him
later on. In 1958 he arrived at Keble College, Oxford. He seemed, to his
contemporaries, fully formed, with a sardonic (a key Hamilton word) sense of
humour, a soft voice and a Bogart-like way of speaking from the corner of his
mouth, later to be much imitated. He was, it’s widely attested, cool, though not
in the self-consciously temperate way advocated by the then-dominant Movement
poets. He started a little magazine, Tomorrow, for which, so the story goes, his
friend John Fuller wangled submissions from famous poets via his poet dad Roy. A
sheaf of poems, it’s said, came from Spender, only to be turned down.
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