Interesting correspondence with his fellow poet Terence Tiller, 1952-66

Hugh Gordon PORTEOUS

Beschreibung

Three autograph letters and one typed letter signed to Terence Tiller: 10pp. 4to &c, [London], (35 Norroy Road &c), 27 January 1952-23 May 1966 (with one initialled carbon-copy TL from Tiller to Skelton, 3 February 1966). Porteus 's first letter protests poverty: "I have no money, and no food, and no time. A week on white bread has made me ill . . . Ever since we first met on Cairo, you have been most kind and hospitable: I have not forgotten! But just now things are too difficult . . ." Employed at the BBC, Tiller produced Porteus's Dog River - "Selections from a dramatic verse-fantasy for broadcasting" - on 7 February 1952. Six months later Porteus writes in some desperation again ("I live in a dog kennell, the accumulated books, pictures, MSS of 3 decades are dispersed over half a dozen addresses"). Tiller deployed him in his Dante project in the early 1960s (Porteus's translation from Cantos 9-11 of the Inferno was broadcast on 27 January 1964) and asked for a blurb for the BBC's 1966 Dante volume. "It's always difficult to know what to say," responds Porteus. "I was born in 1906, and celebrated my sixtieth birthday last month. After three years at an art school I went into advertising, and was a pioneer copywriter in the twenties. Since then I've been a freelance journalist, written a great deal of art and literary criticism, a little poetry, quite a lot of translation of poetry from tongues I've never mastered . . . Of my only two published books, A Discursive Exposition (1932) broke new ground as a comparative examination of various kinds of descriptive writing then current, and was as much about Eliot, Joyce., D.H. Lawrence and others as about its nominal subject, P. Wyndham Lewis. And A Background to Chinese Art (1936) was the first book to explain the rudiments of Chinese calligraphy . . . What else, I wonder, might be relevant?" His "literary affiliations" began with T.S. Eliot's Criterion and he joined the staff of the New English Weekly under Orage . . . "Cairo you know about. Until Personal Landscape I d been chary of joining the Durrell syndrome. (Letter from Miller to Anais Nin says: 'it seems we were all wrong, after all, about Porteus' - just read that in a book today!) But I did succumb, after the War, to the wiles of Tambimuttu (P.L.) and later to those of Peter Russell I was one of The NINE . . ." When the Dante book appears, he is full of praise: "I was particularly delighted by John Heath-Stubbs: an expansion, but well justified. And Margaret [Bottrall]'s is really an extraordinary tour-de-force - dear Ronald, as might be expected, showing signs of being inhibited by knowing too much . . . Have you heard of Dr Theodore Stephanides? He flits in and out of the books of the Durrell Bros . . . as a legendary father-figure. About 10 years ago, when I was his present age, Larry introduced us. He lives in Kensington, a retired radiologist and world-famous savant of the little scientific quarterlies, and dines with me every Saturday possible. An amazing character . . . I feel the BBC should get him on record before he goes into dotage . . . Beard, carrion-crow umbrella, & USSR-length mackintosh & Homburg - a splendid figure!". Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 2EV100150

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