 Hello, thank you. Yes, why not? Because it's quite an intimate room. That's lovely. My name is Astrid Williamson. It's wonderful to be part of the celebration of Christopher Locke. I'm going to sing a song that was in the film Poor Cow by Ken Loach and it's called Be Not Too Hard Not too hard for life is short and nothing is given to man Be not too hard when he is so for he must manage the best he can Be not too hard when he gladly dies defending things he does not own Be not too hard when he tells lies or if his heart is sometimes like a stone Be not too hard for soon he dies often no wiser than he began is short and nothing is given Be not too hard for soon he dies often no wiser than he began This afternoon's proceeding. It's great to have us with us, Astrid. Thank you very much indeed. My name is Rachel Foss and I'm Head of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone this afternoon to the library. For this event, the arrival of the poet in the library, a celebration of Christopher Locke. As many of you will know, this year marks the 10th anniversary of Christopher Locke's death and offers an ideal opportunity to look back on his life, his work and his legacy. An audiobook of his own reading of his best known work War Music, retelling of the Iliad that he worked on over a period of 45 years, has just been released by Blackstone Publishing. The audiobook was released in digital format via Audible on the 23rd of November and is available exclusively there for 90 days. It's going to be released on CD to all retailers and libraries on the 2nd of February next year. So the CD copies, and apologies for the merchandise plug this early on, but the CD copies on sale today that you'll find in the store outside in the auditorium are advanced copies which are exclusively available to you as attendees of this event. So I urge you to visit our store when you leave. You'll find also books and posters of Christopher's works available there too. We're also celebrating the arrival of the poet in the library in a very particular sense. I'm delighted to announce that Christopher Locke's archive has just been acquired by the British Library and it arrived in our building earlier this week in fact. It is a real honour and a privilege for us to be able to offer a permanent home for this wonderful collection which includes the phenomenally detailed notebooks and drafts relating to war music alongside personal and business correspondence, diaries and annotated books. The archive joins the library's ever-growing collections of contemporary literary archives alongside other acquisitions such as the archives of Hearthcud Williams, Bob Cobbing and Barry Miles and related collections within our sound archive, web archive and contemporary publications. It's a very fitting arrival and a very welcome one. And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Rosemary Hill for entrusting the archive to the library's care, for all of her commitments to the library throughout the process of acquisition and for all the time and effort that both Rosemary and Lawrence Ashton have dedicated towards making today's event a success. We're hugely grateful for Rosemary's friendship and Lawrence's too and we're looking forward to deepening that friendship with her as we work to make the archive available to everyone for research, inspiration and enjoyment in the months ahead. The acquisition would not have been possible without the generous support of the British Library's Collections Trust and I'd like to extend my thanks to all of the trustees for their entiring work on the library's behalf. It's a particular pleasure that we're in the excellent hands of Andrew O'Hagan for this afternoon. Andrew is going to be RMC. Andrew is a distinguished writer and journalist and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and to Granta magazine. He was nominated by Granta as one of the 20 best young British novelists. His recent novels are The Life and Opinions of Math the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe, published in 2010. The Illuminations published in 2015, which was shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize and his most recent novel is Mayflies. So welcome again to all of you. I think we're in for a fascinating afternoon and I'll hand over to you Andrew. Thank you Rachel and thank you Astrid. We'll be hearing more from Astrid later on when I'll take the opportunity then to introduce her properly. I'm Andrew O'Hagan. I'm editor-at-large of the London Review of Books. I think it's fair to say or perhaps not unduly unfair to say that the LRB has always had a rather eccentric relationship to poetry. Apart from anything else we have long believed in the blue pencil and many a distinguished poet has expressed surprise shall we say when the edits are offered of their much beloved and soon perhaps to be published poem. I remember Seamus Heaney's Chuckle of Acceptance. When Carl Miller, the then co-editor, suggested the word blether should be used instead of the word chatter related to the noise made by a Scottish sheep on a hillside by the way. I remember me having to impart the other news to a grand young poet that his poem was better if we removed the last line. But the paper liked the poems of Christopher Loog. They published several fragments of war music and both the seriousness and the musicality of the work was of a kind the editors liked. The reviews in the paper were not always so keen, it has to be said among adults, a certain Yale professor losing his wig over war music not once but twice. But that's the sort of thing that happens in literary papers and Christopher never seemed particularly bothered. He was a valued and admired contributor for many years. He had undertaken the war music project at the suggestion of Donald Karn Ross who was commissioning a version of the Iliad for the BBC. Loog's plan, and I quote him, was to retain the storyline but to cut or amplify or add to its incidents to vary certain of its similes and mostly to omit Homer's descriptive epithets. There's a high modernist brio to the work, to all of his work I think. And it's a living poem, an imitation of sorts war music full of quote interpretation paraphrase and a lot of Christopher's work will be remembered for its aliveness and the definite pulse of his own time. His place in post-war British literary life to say nothing of journalistic and political life is assured and the arrival of the poet in the library is a testament to that. In an era of soft careerism, if you'll allow me that phrase, we might admire the blaze and the individuality of a writer such as Christopher Loog. He was a one-off and you'll see today in full amplitude what that means. Ian Wilson once described Christopher as a sophisticated Bohemian who rejoices in the fact that he has never had a job. But he did have one. It was perhaps to remind us overall in an almost 18th century way that good writers work from the core of their own genius and never do they cut their conscience to suit the fashion of the times. So we're off. Let me introduce the first piece of film. In the early days of Channel 4, Christopher and the filmmaker and writer Rick Stroud came up with a series called Edible Gold in which at the end of each evening a poem, a passage from Shakespeare or some other short literary piece would be read by Christopher as the words went up on the screen like film credits. It was an alternative to the national anthem, which the BBC as many of you will know used to play at the end of their schedule. I should say by way of sidebar that in Scottish households at that time, Scottish Catholic households in particular, there'd be a rush to the television to switch it off as soon as the Queen came on. But that's perhaps a story for another occasion. In that series, Christopher included his own poem, Gone Ladies. Here it is. Gone Ladies. A version of The Ballad of Ladies from Former Times by François Villon. Where in the world is Helen Gone, whose loveliness demolished Troy? Where is Salome? Where the one licentious Queen of Avalon? Who sees my Lady Fontenoy? And where is Joan, so soldier tall? And she who bore God's only boy? Where is the snow we watched last fall? Is Thay still? Is Nell? And can Stem Eloise Orine, whose so by love enchanted man sooner would risk castration than abandon her, be seen? Who does Shaharazade enthrall? And who, within her arms and small, lies hard by Josephine? Through what eventless territory are Ladies Day and Joplin swept? What news of Marilyn, who crept into an endless reverie? You saw Lucrice and Jane, and she, Salvation's ancient blame it all, delicious Eve. Then answer me. Where is the snow we watched last fall? Girl, never seek to know from me who was the fairest of them all. What would Thay say if I asked thee? Where is the snow we watched last fall? Our next speaker, Christopher Reed, is well known as a poet and an editor. His, a scattering, written in memory of his wife Lucinda Gain, won the Costa Award in 2009, the first poetry book to win the overall award since Seamus Heaney. A poetry editor at Faber, he oversaw the final posthumous edition of Loge's Homer poem War Music, which appeared in 2015, bringing together the fragments of what would have been its final part to be called Big Men Falling a Long Way. Everyone, Christopher Reed. I first met Christopher over dinner at the house of a friend. He came with his wife, Rosemary Hill, whom I already knew. I came with my wife Lucinda. We seemed, he and the two of us, to hit it off, and all his likeable qualities, the humour and the charm, were on display. Only towards the end of the evening, Lucinda and Christopher fell into an argument and simply entrenched positions. Over the years that followed, I grew to expect the point in the dinner party at which Christopher would say something provocative or preposterous, then battle out the consequences with whoever felt the need to contradict him. His voice rose in volume. He would bang the table, and all his bonomies seemed to evaporate. He was clearly fond of an argument, and took the job seriously. But so, as he found on this occasion, did Lucinda. What was the argument about? I simply don't recall. It scarcely mattered. The time came to leave. Nobody was upset, and Lucinda and I went home, delighted to have made an interesting new friend. Quite early next morning, the phone rang and I picked it up. It was Christopher, who without preamble, blurted out, all I want to say to you is, I regard Lucinda as a very good thing. Then, before I could reply, he put the phone down. My own explanation for this was that Rosemary had insisted he call and apologise for his behaviour of the night before, but that he'd been thrown off balance by reaching me rather than Lucinda herself. Well, I was utterly charmed, as was she when I passed the message on. How could we not be? There was so much grace and gallantry in that simple statement, and we had no idea he meant it. Not everyone took to him in this way. I know people who found Christopher just too abrasive, too ferocious. He could appear downright rude. Our present poet Laureate told me years ago of a moment when Christopher approached him after a poetry reading. Simon, he said, you're a very good poet, but you have to do something about that boring voice of yours. Luckily, Simon found that the charm outweighed whatever offence he might have felt. Now, charm is an extremely difficult quality to measure or analyse. I have been puzzling over the matter in the last week or two while rereading Christopher's work in preparation for this brief talk. His memoir, Prince Charming, which happens to be one of the books I edited, presents the paradox in its clearest form because while it reveals many of the author's worst foibles and failings, the title proves thoroughly apt. How come? I think the answer may be twofold. First, the sheer candour of the narrative. The author's refusal to extenuate or find quiddling excuses for the more dislikable qualities he feels bound to confess there. It's brave and winning. He is as tough as could be on his past self and emerges the stronger for it. There is something heroic in his struggle to survive the worst in his own character. Besides that, though, there is the singular artistic achievement. I know of no other book in the autobiographical line that allows so much room for voices and views that are not the author's own. The effect is sometimes almost quarrel as he goes about soliciting the memories and judgments of those who knew him well in bygone days, some with very harsh and unforgiving accounts of how he behaved towards them. This quasi-coral treatment meant that great care had to be taken as we prepared the book for the printer to get the counterpoint of voices clearly audible. And much of my input was concerned with disentangling overcomplicated sentences and paragraphs so compacted that they made things hard to follow. By the way, the late Michael Horowitz once confided to me that he had asked Christopher how our editorial relationship worked. Allegedly, the answer was he puts lots of commas in, then I take them out again, which may be one way of describing it. Originality of technique in this instance seems to me to match one of the most significant features of Christopher's artistic practice. That is his ability, or should I say, need to collaborate with others. He managed this, moreover, without sacrificing any of his own strong artistic personality. From early days in Bournemouth, when he was desperate to seek out the company of young men as fanatical about literature as he was, he flourished best when joining forces. His major friendships in Paris were centred on the avant-garde magazine, Merlin, necessarily a collective endeavor. Returning to England, he found the Royal Court Theatre under George Devine, a hospitable and nourishing place to write. When the campaign for nuclear disarmament started, he gave himself energetically to that. His celebrated poster poems required artistic engagement with printers. He turned out film scripts for Ken Russell and acted in his films. His appearance at Horowitz's first great international poetry reading in the Albert Hall in 1965 was a public declaration of sympathy with a rebellious new poetic movement. And with a group of young British musicians, he tried out the possibility of marrying poetry to jazz. All these developments are accounted alongside the ups and downs and twists and turns of his private life in Prince Charming. They give the unmistakable impression of a man trying to find out where he truly belonged. Artistically, his arrival at that long foreplace is marked by his discovery of Homer's Iliad. As Andrew has just said, he was led to it by two classicists who happened to be working at the BBC, Xanthe Wakefield and Donald Kahn Ross. With much patient coaching, they got him started on the passage from Book 21 of the Iliad, the description of Achilles' fight with the River Scamander that was duly broadcast in June 1959 with Christopher himself reading it. You have to ask why they chose this passage in the first place and why Christopher eventually took to it with such relish. I can only speculate, but I can't help wondering if it wasn't the near impossibility of picturing a human warrior in hand-to-hand combat with a raging river that was the challenge he needed. It seems to me that many of the most exhilarating episodes in war music are those that attempt the outlandish and all but intractable. I'll give just one instance from Husbands, the only war music book that I had an editorial hand in. Incidentally, scholars consulting the newly acquired archive are missing a page. Oh, so he will certainly have better things to do than to identify the commas that I put in for Christopher to remove. But his willingness to consider advice from editors, notably my predecessor at Faber Craigrain and Paul Keegan, who followed me, may strike them as yet another aspect of his openness to collaboration. Anyhow, back to Homer. And the crucial moment when Helen's rival husbands, the Greek Menelaos and the Trojan Paris meet face-to-face in the field. Things come to a head. When... Things come to a head when Paris throws his spear at his enemy but misses. This should give Menelaos the chance to finish him off. Only Aphrodite, who supports the Trojans, cannot allow it to happen. Let me take it from the point at which Menelaos' spear strikes Paris' shield. As the 18-inch head hits fair Paris' shield and knocks him backwards through the air, bent like a gangster in his barber's chair, then thrusts on through that round and pins it plus his sword arm to the sand. The Greek is over him, sword high and screaming, now you believe me, now you understand. Smashing the edge down, right, left, right, on either side of Paris' face, and that's the stuff, that's the stuff pretty to watch. Queen Hera and Athenae shout as Paris' mask goes left, goes right, and from the mass, off with his cock, off with his cock, right, left. And on the wall, God kill him, Helen, to herself. As Menelaos happy now, raises his sword to give the finishing stroke and cheering, cheering, cheering, down it comes and shatters on Lord Paris' mask. No problem. A hundred of us pitch our swords to him. Yet, even as they flew, their blades changed into wings, their pommels into heads, their hilts to feathered chests, and what were swords were turned to doves, a swirl of doves and waltzing out of it in oyster silk running her tongue around her strawberry lips while repositioning a spaghetti shoulder strap. The Queen of Love, our Lady Aphrodite, touching the massive Greek aside with one pink fingertip and with her other hand lifting Lord Paris up, big as he was, in his bronze bodice, heavy as he was, setting him on his feet, lacing his fingers with her own, then leading him hidden in wings away. There's so much here that is characteristic of war music, from the literary marvellous, given as realistic and vivid a rendering as the poet can contrive, to the brutality of the fighting, which has as much excitement as any cinematic battle scene, to those special logian touches of impertinent and acrimism, like the gangster in the barber's chair and Aphrodite's shoulder strap. Perhaps less prominent, but slipped in here and there throughout the poem, is the quiet first person plural. A hundred of us pitch our swords to him, by which the poet places himself as one of many in the midst of the action. He is not just the narrator, he is a participant. This is where he belongs imaginatively, as he never did when he served in the British Army in Palestine, but was denied the experience of actual combat in the field. The compulsion to get closer to war, to understand it better in all its human and bigger than human aspects, must have been what drove him. It's certainly what makes war music such an urgent and overpowering piece of work. And it was Homer, his ultimate collaborator, the greatest of them all, and the most astutely chosen who allowed him to do it. Thank you so much Christopher. Harriet Walter is one of our greatest actors. Her film appearances include sense and sensibility, atonement, the young Victoria, the sense of an ending, and most recently, the Last Duel. On the box, we have seen her in Downton Abbey, The Crown, Patrick Milrose, Succession, Killing Eve. There's too many to mention. Harriet began her career in 1974 and made her Broadway debut in 1983. She won the Olivier in 1998, and has had a huge number of successes with the RSC and many other companies receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress. She also plays Prospero in The Tempest, as part of an all-female Shakespeare trilogy in 2016. To read from war music, please welcome Harriet Walter. My life crossed over with Christopher's at one very memorable for me six months in 1980 when we were doing Hamlet at the Royal Court, with Jonathan Price. And Richard Ayer had the rather inspirational idea to have Christopher play the player king and write his own version of the Paris and the Hécuba stories. And he did it with that. He sort of used to be a bit nervous about the acting. And I said, well, you speak your poetry so brilliantly. You know, there's no difference between acting and what you do. And so I'm going to try, and I hope you'll remember, his own gravelly sort of snarly but passionate voice when I read this extract. Now, I shall ask you to imagine how men under discipline of death prepare for war. There is much more to it than ornament and kicks from those who could not catch an hour's sleep waking the ones who dozed like rows of spoons. All those with everything to lose, the kings, asleep like pistols in red velvet. Moments like these absolve the needs dividing men. Whatever court and brought and kept them here is lost. And for a while they join a terrible equality of virtuous self-sacrificing free. And so insidious is this liberty that those surviving it will bear an even greater servitude to its root. Believing they were whole while they were brave. That they were rich because their loot was great. That war was meaningful because they lost their friends. They rise. The Greeks with smiling iron mouths. They are like nature like a mass of flame. Great lengths of water struck by changing winds. A forest of innumerable trees. Boundless sand. Snowfall across broad steps at dusk. As a huge beast stands and turns around itself. The well-fed glittering army stands and turns. Nothing can happen till Achilles wakes. Those who have slept with sorrow in their hearts know all too well how short but sweet the instant of their coming to can be. The heart is strong as if it never sorrowed. The mind's dear clarity intact. And then the vast unhappy stone from yesterday rolls down these vital units to the bottom of oneself. Achilles saw his armour in this moment and its ominous radiance flooded his heart. Bright pads with toggles crossed behind the knees. Bodies of fitted tungsten pliable straps. His shield as round and rich as moons in spring. His swords halfed parked between sheaves of grey obsidian which a lucid blade stood out leaf-shaped adorned with running spirals. And for his head a welded cortex, yes. Though it is noon the helmet screams against the light. Scratches the eye so violent it can be seen across three thousand years. Achilles stands. His stretches, turns on his heel, punches the sunlight, bends, then jumps and lets the world turn fractionally beneath his feet. Noon. In the foothills melons emerge from their green hideings. Heat. He walks towards the chariot. Grease waits. Over the wells in Troy Mosquito's hover. Beside the chariot leading the sacred horses watching his this day's driver or Tomadon cinch shake out the reins and lay them on the rail. Dappel and white the horses are. Perfect they are. Sneezing to clear their cool black muzzles. He mounts. The chariot's basket dips. The whip fires in between the horse's ears and as in dreams or at Cape Kennedy they rise. Slowly it seems their chests like royals yet behind them in a double plume the sand curls up is barely dented by their flying hooves and wheels that barely touch the world the wind slams shut behind them. Fast as you are Achilles says when twilight makes the armistice take care you don't leave me behind as you left my patroclus. And as it ran the white horse turned its tall face back and said Prince this time we will this time we can but this time cannot last and when we leave you not for dead but dead God will not call us negligent as you have done and Achilles shaken says I know I will not make old bones and laid his scourge against their racing flanks someone has left a spear stuck in the sand. Thank you Harry what a treat. I first came across Tarikali in 1984 I was 16 with his book Who's Afraid of Margaret Thatcher I loved it and I discovered more lots more books about Pakistan, Chile and the Stalinist legacy books about Bush resistance and his street fighting years his beautiful novels Islam Quintet as the years went on tackling Obama, Kashmir he has been a guiding light at the New Left Review and for many years a great contributor to the LRB he and Christopher were allies in the political scene in the 1960s and worked together on Black Dwarf Here he is Tarikali The first thing I'd like to say before discussing Christopher and his work in some detail that he belongs to a tradition in English radicalism and poetry which has existed for a very long time People tend to forget because there's not too much of it these days or for the last 30 or 40 years but there was a period in English history when Cromwell's Chief of Staff he would be called now but also Foreign Secretary Head of the Intelligence Services John Thurlow used to discuss all the intelligence reports coming in about the plots against the English Revolution that were maturing in Europe and sitting around Thurlow's table every Monday morning were John Milton Dryden and Drew Marvel discussing the documents analysing them discussing with each other notes being taken and moving on That was a period of course when a lot of poets and pamphleteers were if not part of the English Revolutionary tradition certainly sympathetic to it and the next phase of course as we know came years later hundreds of years later with the romantics who were also extremely political including Keats and who dominated the literary scene Keats, Shelley, Byron and I would say that Christopher himself comes very much from that tradition of reacting to events of seeing the world as it is, as it's going on and linking it to past events and that's how war music emerged Christopher used to send out little folias of it to friends and I was privileged enough to receive all of them till the book was actually published in complete stroke in a complete version an unfinished masterpiece and if you read war music as I had occasion to do a few weeks ago before a radio show it's incredibly striking and it hits you very hard how quite a lot of the descriptions already Christopher is writing this book at a time when a huge ugly war is waging in Southeast Asia the Americans are pulverizing bombing it every day and this war affects everyone not just in the states but all over because it's the first time a war has been televised and you see the bombs dropping and you see the napalm Keats burning with napalm rushing across and you see American journalists actually losing it on screen in live reports I will never forget Mollie Safer reporting for CBS and saying describing flamethrowers being used to burn a whole village burning women and children coming out, being killed mowed down and Mollie Safer says and this is what we are told is what fighting for freedom and democracy means so there were courageous journalists in the United States then in this country too who reported the war as it was so this was the atmosphere generally the political atmosphere in which Christopher was composing and writing war music and it didn't fail to have an impact on him and in fact there are references not so directly but indirect references to it as there are direct references to anti-fascist struggle during the Second World War you read a line in Suddenly Christopher mentions El Alamen the Battle of El Alamen so it's a great poem not simply in reminding us of what the Iliad was but also linked to what is going on today and at the 40 year war in Afghanistan futile useless war that has just come to an end there are of course there's no references to it as such but you can read references to what war does to a people that is what gives the poem its universality and its strength and its power and I think it's one of those universal poems about war which will be around for a long, long time I know and I've said this before that there were many young people who had never read or even heard of the Iliad who after reading war music went to read the original and learned a great deal about how ballads were written about how poetry was constructed and the oral tradition meant in societies and there is an element of that that you can read the poem but it really comes to life when it is being read aloud as we heard in Harriet's rendering in Christopher's own powerful renderings of it in the past now I first met Christopher in 1967 there was a very wonderful literary agent literary television agent in London called Clive Goodwin friend of many of us who got the idea one day to call a meeting of political activists left wing journalists playwrights poets to discuss launching a political cultural magazine which he said we really need and Christopher was very prominent in that who else was there at the first meeting Christopher Adrian Mitchell David Mercer Sheila Robotham myself Clive and Clive just said we've got to launch a magazine how we were going to raise the money we had and what was the magazine name of the magazine going to be we said we didn't want a boring state old name like socialist standard or this that and the other and Christopher said over my dead body so he went and spent a day at the British Library so it's quite nice this event is taking place in the British Library and came back the following week and said I've got it I have just found it and there's no other name that is possible so we said what is it he said the black dwarf so everyone guards Christopher and I still can hear his voice saying this magazine was set up by Thomas Wooler in 1819 there you go in Bishop's Gate and it's called the black dwarf because it was designed to be read by miners and they were stunted working in the pits and their faces were black when they came out after work because of the suit and so the title could have been the miner but Wooler called it the black dwarf and at the very top of it he appealed to Christopher every issue had a quote from Alexander Pope at the top which reads satire is my weapon but I'm too discreet to run amok and tilt at all I meet I only wear it in a land of hectares, thieves super-coggos and directors still pretty relevant and so we didn't have this then but we had Christopher's verbal account of it and so we all decided let's call it the black dwarf and we'd explain why which we did in a big broadsheet and it was great fun and joy actually the first year working on it and trying to raise money which we got there was I remember we had people, Clive was very good at that a whole bunch of artists Hockney, Keetai and gang came in and Clive used to have a big checkbook the black dwarf checkbook and I remember I think both Keetai and Hockney said we can't we don't have much money at the moment but we'll give you a painting so we got the paintings and then auctioned them and we had us going for about six or seven months and there was a general sympathy in the culture for a critical view and for a break with the 50s if you like and all the pedantry associated with that and I also remember Christopher stressing history at that meeting and saying he said this magazine was very modern in many ways it was in 1819 and he said there's a letter in which he'd found which was a letter from a lady saying it's now ten years since Tom Payne died and I'm looking for a letter which is still commonly published and I'm looking for information personal memories documents etc to biography of Tom Payne and Christopher said that is our tradition you know radical democracy which these people will never give us and fight and fight and fight and he often shocked people including young men and women who were from a different generation to him by the anger with which he expressed himself sometimes images that he conjured in terms of suggesting what should be on the cover or not and I want to read a poem he wrote and you know whereas war music as we all know took a long time to write and was never finished and who knows if it ever would have been finished but Christopher was also capable of coming up with a poem just like that you know sitting at a typewriter and typing it up and this is how he typed out I remember very vividly he came into the office once with a folding a piece of paper and he said that's for the next issue so I said before we talk about it I hadn't read it as yet I said Christopher I have to tell you a story a woman came into the office she's an artist she's a potter from Wales and she gave us a check for 250 pounds and said she could do this regularly at 250 pounds in 1968 was a lot of money for us you know raising funds for the paper and she'd come all the way from Wales to give it to us and he said well I'm very glad but why are you telling me I said because when I asked her we're thank you very much but why are you giving us this money she said Christopher Loog saved my life Christopher then went into a reverie saying where did I said yeah we asked her further and she said that he was in the south of France on one of the Cornishes looking at the sea and she was thinking of jumping and she said two guys came on a motorbike one of them was Christopher stopped and she said Christopher Loog came and talked me out of it now I said Christopher this is a very noble thing you did and he said I can't remember it at all so I said well that's fine but you know I won't say that to her because she's promised us 250 pounds a month so I've just remembered her name Fiona Armobrand and funnily enough I wrote a piece in the LRB where I mentioned this episode and I got a letter from her saying I'm still alive are you 100% sure that I told you I was thinking of committing suicide well I was 100% sure because it was something very striking she said I'm not so sure whether it was as straightforward in any case what happened was that Christopher pulled her back from the brink in a very literal sense the piece of paper he had in his hand was a poem and he'd done a rough design of it as well and the poem was called No Thy Enemy and he said to me I wrote this yesterday and it went into the issue of the next week and it is like this that's Christopher's design No Thy Enemy he does not care what color you are provided you work for him he does not care how much you earn, provided you earn more for him he does not care who lives in the room at the top provided he owns the building he will let you say whatever you like against him provided you do not act against him he's the praises of humanity but knows machines cost more than men bargain with him he laughs and beats you at it challenge him and he kills sooner than lose the things he owns he will destroy the world No Thy Enemy that's my part I'm now going to just briefly introduce another poem by Christopher called Why Shall Vote Labour in 1966 Tribune magazine then edited by Michael Foot a literary type and an old member of Parliament asked people who were broadly speaking sympathetic even very critical of Labour to contribute either an essay or a poem or something Christopher was asked and he did toy with the idea of writing a sort of typical left poem you know about poverty and this, that and the other but finally this is what came out and it's a poem which has been recited so many times at meetings and book fairs and literary festivals and political events for the last since he wrote it because it never gets out of date, especially the last sentence and then it will last as long as the Labour Party does I think but enjoy it I shall vote Labour I shall vote Labour because God votes Labour I shall vote Labour in order to protect the sacred institution of the family I shall vote Labour because I am a dog I shall vote Labour because upper class who raise anoint me in expensive restaurants I shall vote Labour because I am on a diet I shall vote Labour because if I don't somebody else will and I shall vote Labour because if one person does it everyone will be wanting to do it I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour my balls will drop off I shall vote Labour because there are too few cars on the road I shall vote Labour because I am a hopeless drug addict I shall vote Labour because I failed to be a dollar millionaire aged three I shall vote Labour because Labour will build more maximum security prisons I shall vote Labour because I want to shop in an all-weather precinct stretching from Yeovil to Glasgow I shall vote Labour because the Queen's Stamp collection is the best in the world I shall vote Labour because deep in my heart I am a conservative Eagle-eyed will have noticed there are some changes changes often by card but I am sure you have seen what you saw in the screen from what was recorded. Our next speaker is a composer and a professor of music at Sheffield University His collaboration with Christopher came about in 1983 as a commission from Durham University for a piece to be programmed with Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale It tells the story of a young poet to the city. Locke has always enjoyed collaboration with musicians His poetry and jazz record Red Bird, versions of poems by Nuruda came out in 1959 The rival has an epigram from the composer Hans Eisler The words are primary and the music is not secondary George Nicholson Thank you very much First of all I want to thank Rosemary for adopting the title of our piece for today's event That's very flattering, very nice What you see here is actually the original text of the arrival of the poet in the city which Christopher first conceived as a film treatment and it didn't lead to anywhere but it was published in this form a text that we finally used in the theatre piece I should say melodrama First of all I should say that I approached Christopher Locke out of the blue He didn't know who on earth I was and it was one of those moments when I pick up the phone I catch myself by surprise I've got a phone, Peter, I've got the phone Christopher Locke and I'd found his phone number and finally caught myself by surprise dialing the number and then I got that wonderful voice at the other end and I think at first he was rather guarded about the collaboration but as calmly as possible proposed what the project was going to be and he agreed subsequently I found out that sometime between that and our meeting he had got in touch with Stanley Myers and checked me out but I'd known of course that he had heard and I'd known that he'd collaborated with jazz musicians as early as the 50s and so I was keen to work with him on a very different sort of project I had, as Andrew just said this commission from Music Hall in Durham for a piece to pair with Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale it seemed at the time that I was writing lots of pieces to pair with pieces that Stravinsky had written because Stravinsky came up with all sorts of weird and wonderful combinations of instruments and actors and musicians and so on that called for some kind of collaboration with someone else to write another piece to make a program possible The Soldier's Tale was written in the First World War and it was conceived as a piece that could be taken on tour immediately after the war ended and of course the Spanish Flu put an end to their tour and it has a narrator two actors a ballerina and a little band of seven musicians so when we got together Christopher and I decided that we would have to write something which would be non-competitive with Stravinsky and Ramos who wrote the text for Stravinsky and we conceived of the idea of a melodrama and we got rid of the ballerina and the two actors and kept the narrator and the musicians and we opted for the melodrama which is a notoriously difficult form there are many casualties through history in this genre pieces that don't work because the collaborators haven't worked out how the music and the words are supposed to interact so I remember that our conversations which took place at his place in Notting Hill and mine in West Hampstead were mostly technical and I was trying to talk through the problems of notating an actor's part that could be performed with the musicians and in the end what happened was that I needed to notate some of the rhythms very precisely against the music and at other points the music cues the words or the words cue the music and there's a playful interaction between the two as the piece goes on in the first instance we had a wonderful actor Gavin Muir who could read music and who learnt the part quite easily and performed in the first run later on Neil Cunningham took on the role but finally the BBC wanted Christopher to do it for the recording and it was one of those cases where we had to go back to Newcastle with the Northern Symphony of Players and the BBC had not programmed any rehearsal time for me to work with the musicians and Christopher so I coached him on some of the text particularly the notated text because he couldn't read music however somewhere along the line a bit of magic happened because well I should say that the difficulty along the way was that it seemed like a rather unequal relationship in the sense that I could read his words but he couldn't read my music and so the way it worked was that he went away for several months produced the first bit of the text which gets the poet into the city and then stopped and I retreated for several months and wrote the music up to that point then we got together again to our delight it was actually the golden section in the piece it's about two thirds of the way through that we'd arrived at and I was trying to make the music palpable to him in whatever way was possible to read his text to me but I found that when we got back into the studio that I had heard the rhythms which he would use for the text and so the notated part of the score worked pretty well without rehearsal and that's the magic that I think happened in the collaboration we're going to hear the final minutes of the piece what happens is that the poet arrives in the city and then something appalling happens he is greeted by a horde of grotesques much more graphic in the original text than happened in our version of the piece this horde is led by a giant 12 foot housewife sitting on a mule and all kinds of grotesques accompany her including the kentish leopard and they basically run him down and maul him to bits and he gets older and older and older and they carry him off into the distance there's one of those logian transformations that happens to the the station itself the station turns into a desolate scene with dunes and it seems like in the middle of nowhere and at the very end of the piece the station returns as they've gone into the distance I should say that at some point along the way we decided we would embed Christopher in the piece even though he wasn't narrating it because we wanted a voice for the housewife who only says a few things and indeed the horde and she says here young master here here and we went to John Whiting's studio in Queen Square and recorded Christopher and treated his voice electronically and the tape part is an integral part of the piece the repetition of here here becomes a tape loop which runs through almost the whole of the extract which we're going to hear now and that's the echo of the horde crying here here gradually disintegrates but the rhythm of that gave me the tempo and the mood for the music that happens Christopher left me with the text that ends the station's play and I said to him what do they play and he made one of the musical decisions in the piece at that point he said oh I think it should be Amazing Grace don't you and yes subsequently I went to Waterloo Station what were they playing Amazing Grace a few weeks later I went to Waverly Station there was a train there and yes it was Amazing Grace with bagpipes to the four so that's real piped music if you like and so what I conceived of was the kind of sound that you get through station speakers where sometimes it's impossible to hear exactly what's going on so there are kind of as it were several different versions of Amazing Grace amalgamated together and I've also worked a sort of swan song in at the end because I thought the poet had a swan song here so there's a little illusion which you may or may not catch it doesn't matter if you don't anyway this is the very end of the piece I think we'll hear it now Taking the Coit from the Leopard's mouth the housewife skates it through the air over his head his shoulders to his waist and now he cannot move and now she writes it down and now they suckle him and now they lift him up and now he starts to age from 25 to 30 now 35 now 40, 45 now 50, 60, 65 I am engaged now 70 gone my mother is alone now 80 on and more and as they lift him up and carry him away here, here and move towards the streets and as they flow away into the streets all is re-changed birds peppers kelp the concourse in its crimes boulders and wire and its cues the doom the train the rushes, those who board who close their doors who sit and as the train pulls out the stations speakers play Thank you so much George Next up John Hegley is a poet performer and composer He and Loog got to know each other when Christopher was a guest on John's radio show and they became friends John's latest collection A Scarcity of Biscuit which by the way seems to be unimprovable as titles go was the product of his time as Poet and Residence at Keats House in Hampstead I don't know if there will be time today for John to discourse on the relationship between Keats and the custard cream I suspect not but I do know he is a work of Christopher's to perform so please welcome to the stage John Hegley Scarcity of Biscuit actually is a phrase of John Keats Rosemary has asked me to perform three pieces for you First one starts with festive tone British Library lets rock Oh come All ye faithful Here is our cause All dreams A one dream All wars Several wars Lovers have Never found Agony strain We who hate change Survive Only through change Those who are sure Of love Do not complain For sure Of love is sure Love comes again My partner Mel brought round to Rosemary actually a yule loge talking of sweet sweet things ok so the next piece I actually came by bus today from Hackney and at the bus stop I met Kath a friend of mine and she said where are you going and I said I was coming to read some pieces for Christopher and she didn't know Christopher loge and so I started to read her this and then the 476 came along so I didn't get to finish it but you get it in its entirety this is the old vark there's two bits in it which are newspaper headline so I'll go like that when it's the newspaper headline into the moonlit midnight out of his stateless hole set for an insect intake a common aardvark star depict this common aardvark glow by's of fiery rose long of tail of tongue of ear yet still of nose he sniffs the ermine moonshine he hears the vermin snore brisk as a whip the aardvark's tongue streaks from the aardvark's moor gigantic lick snuff's glow worm mid cloud engulfed mid air followed by a thousand ants an aardvark's normal fare a myriad of rotifers cruising a humid knit another half a thousand ants to keep him fat but fit an ounce of infant locusts a cache of millipedes another half a thousand ants and then then he needs rest on the trek through hunger to woo his mortal soul meekly the common aardvark goes back into his hole the aardvark my last piece of Christopher's and Christopher supported me and encouraged me and inspired me grateful um, this is uh, yeah I'm losing G last night in London airport I saw a little bin labeled on wanted literature to be placed here in and saw a roll of poem and popped it in and I'll say Christopher Loge thank you Rosemary thank you John Hegley, no scarcity of biscuit or any scarcity of any kind there Rosemary Hill is a cultural historian with a special interest in the 19th and 20th centuries and she's a contributing editor to the London Review of Books she's the author of God's architect V biography of Prussian which received many prizes there are actually prizes I won't go through them all but it included the James Tate Black Memorial Prize her latest book Times Witness History in the Age of Romanticism has been a book of the year this year she's a fellow of All Souls College she met Christopher in 1983 when she published some of his poems in Country Life magazine where Rosemary was then the poetry editor they were married in 1985 please welcome to the stage Rosemary Hill I'd like to start by saying that I didn't tell Christopher to ring up and apologize to Lucinda he did say to me once after some similar incident I'm very good at apologizing and I may have said you ought to be you've had enough practice well if I think we've got a picture actually of some files now there we are if every exit is an entrance somewhere else then the reverse is also true and so as Christopher arrives here at the library in the form of his archive he is also in another way left home the librarians came on Tuesday to the house in Camberwell which he and I shared for most of the 27 years of our marriage and somewhere on the journey from 1985 to NW1 he and his archive have undergone a change at home the notes for war music have for many years occupied two shelves in the downstairs front room in a somewhat motley and bumped at the corners series of files and ring binders some writers prefer indeed some writers insist on having identical notebooks but his love of stationery was as catholic as it was passionate and there are binders in many colours and there's one which has got a very it's very faded now a sort of cheery design in candy coloured shapes which is clearly meant to encourage that back to school excitement but the one I like best which he labelled general has Mickey Mouse on the front and on the back which is against a dazzling array of polka dots and stripes and it contains a selection of things I say he labelled it general so it's a selection of things that he thought might come in handy at various points in the poem there are newspaper cuttings with startling headlines and as we've heard all the way through he was always attracted to newspaper headlines he put them in poems like the one that John's just read and he put them into his fairly true stories in private eye and the stories that he kept for use potentially in war music included radiation panic in Greece life in the fun lane begins with your own set of wheels lemmings are not suicidal just hungry fleas unfairly blamed for black death and there are off prints as well of learned articles including the chariot right at on Kestos there are sections within the Mickey Mouse folder quite neatly arranged about thunder landslips, dust section on dust two chapters from a book about stuntmen and there's one small yellowing clipping that clearly came from a story that didn't make the front page and it covers the Dutch Defence Ministry's debriefing report after the fall of Shreverenitsa and it describes how the Dutch soldiers inside their armoured personnel characters inside their armoured personnel carriers heard soft repeated bangs as the fleeing Muslims were crushed under their wheels Christopher saw in Homer a way of refracting the horror of war a bit like Perseus using his shield to avoid looking at Medusa he wanted you to be able to see the violence without being blinded but never to have it blunted and all of this stuff is held together with glue interleaved and annotated with post-it notes as we saw earlier and here and there he's used a paper clip and so somewhere along the Euston Road a cheerful homely assemblage of work in progress has been transformed into an archivist nightmare or at least if not a nightmare certainly a challenge the conservation of the post-it note is now I am reliably informed a thing and of course home is different too there are empty shelves and there is nothing that a freelance historian and bookworms such as myself likes more than an empty shelf so in a way I am thrilled and also in a way I am sad as a historian you find that the past changes as rapidly as the present and in direct relation to it as you travel through time as when you travel through space the view changes some things look smaller others loom larger and at a certain point you see in the rear view mirror as it were your own past self my life with Christopher is also bound up among the clippings when I met him in the 1980s he hadn't done any work on war music for some years he'd been depressed and he'd lost momentum and I think he might not have gone back to it if I hadn't introduced him to Craig Rain who was my former boss on the short lived but absolutely brilliant literary magazine Courtault big by then was the poetry editor at Faber's and by the end of what was even for the 1980s an epic lunch Christopher had been persuaded to return to Homer and there were some other smaller bits of our life in there once I asked Christopher who was going into town to get me a lipstick and he was the sort of man who would do that he wasn't one of those men to hold your hand back holds it like an unexploded bomb he was very relaxed around women and things to do with women and he said yes of course what's it called and I said it's called All Day Permanent Red and we looked at each other and we thought there's a title and indeed it became the title of his version of books 5 and 6 of war music but there was of course as we've been hearing much more to Christopher's work his heyday in Tarik talked about this wonderfully in terms of productivity was in the 60s because he loved the sense of possibility which Tarik evokes so well you could do posters, you could do plays you could do films and the great Albert Hall poetry reading was got off the ground with a very few people and to publicise it Christopher's friend Kenny Carter an antique dealer in the Portobello Road got hold of a tank from Army Surplus covered it in posters and drove it through the centre of London couldn't do that now and then there were the protests and Christopher continued to be a great protester he was deeply opposed to the Iraq war and asked rather wistfully if there's going to be a demo and of course there was but by then he wasn't strong enough to march and it must be admitted that Christopher was never very keen on the actual marching and he did admit to me under close questioning that on the Aldermas and marches he and Ken Tynan went quite a lot of the way in a taxi and he was also he was engraved in a square for the great anti-Vietnam war protest but he spent a lot of the time up a tree just surprisingly quick things like that but although he was engraved in a square he was never anti-American and he was impatient with those who were his activism continued he sat outside this library in the Euston Road reading I shall vote Labour into the thunder of the traffic as part of a protest against the detention of Mordecai for Nunu but he was never anti-Israel what interested him what puzzled and indeed to some extent obsessed him the theme of a lot of his writing was the human condition why do people do these things why is there a national problem why is there cruelty to animals it's too easy to blame government or a nation or the forces of the establishment which are all just expressions of the same problem this was at the root of his exasperation with Christianity his promise of a happy ending of benign God ultimate justice had many gods and none of them were reliably benign an underlying theme in his poetry because of course I've looked at it to prepare for this event in a way that I've never quite looked at it before one theme is this endless damage that human greed does not just to ourselves but to what these days we quite often refer to as the planet and so just before I finish I'm going to read one of his less known poems sometimes that he suppressed this he didn't suppress it but it was on a poster which had so many spelling mistakes on it Christopher took a relaxed view of spelling but there were limits so this poster has not been circulated and it's called Salini's Anthem Salini is the Greek moon goddess the daughter of the Titans from the painted caves of lasco to the bounds of outer space what species goes so fast so far as the mighty human race and the animals co-operate in man's exalted feats the stronger ones he puts to work and the weaker ones he eats on the right hand private enterprise on the left the nine-year plan marching onward through the universe goes the family of man the last film that Christopher saw as it happened was Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and as I was driving him home I asked him what he thought of it and he went like that which he often did he came up okay but not great and I said but the filming of Paris was very good wasn't it did it not make you nostalgic for when you lived there and it was a bit of a silence from the passenger seat and then he said you know my darling I don't really do nostalgia and I said I know and that's why I love you so now as we go marching on with Christopher into his archival after life I hope that you will carry some of that spirit with you thank you perfect Rosemary thank you so much so everybody the poet has truly arrived in the library this is a place of learning and we've learned so much today I personally now know that next time I need a lipstick I'll be able to ask Rosemary to go into town and get it for me without being judged which is really useful it's been a stellar and adorable cast this has been put together very quickly and I want to thank all of you for the brilliance of your readings and performances you heard at the beginning from Astrid Williamson I'm very excited to be able to tell you something about Astrid before inviting her to close events today I've been a fan of hers for a long time you heard her sing Be Not Too Hard which was Donovan's setting of September song by the way she's from the Shetlands Astrid was founding member of Indie Trio, Goya Dress and has subsequently released eight albums the first Goya Dress's Rooms was produced by the legendary John Cale of the Weber Underground over the years she's collaborated as a vocalist with many artists including Johnny Barr and Bernard Sumner in their stages Electronic and the Stereophonics our next album Into the Mountains will be released in February 2022 so soon she'll play several live dates in the UK alongside the album release so we'll keep it locked for that it's lovely of you to have come today it's great to look at your faces please welcome back to the stage Astrid thank you Andrew that was lovely I didn't expect to have my schedule expressed I'll just check that we're in the right key oh dear you might well wonder what I'm sticking to this keyboard right now the song I'm about to finish off with is yes it is I'm sure it's done it for me do that transpose button yes it's a song called Bellini which I am promised a Bellini after this, thank god but it's got such a cast of characters when I try and memorise things I sometimes do cartoons because the little pictures stick in my mind and I have it on good authority even though I never had the fortune to meet Christopher Loog I have it on good authority to approve of my cartoon cheat sheet we have here so and Mickey Mouse made an appearance in Rosemary's reading so this is called Bellini and as I say I am not a jazz singer but I'm gonna really give it my best it was Annie Rosted originally and it's please imagine a jazz trio if you possibly can like gently Bellini if I could play with fire like Houdini it's like the man on the trapeze rhyme like Rambi you just have to take Nick and choose like Leopold Sartre I dedicated to Virgil great to see you all there's merchandise outside both books and posters thank you once again