Fantastic Metropolis

I wrote to Bill, when he was staying in London, cataloguing the Eric Mottram archive (a monster task), and asked about his time in Cowley.

Now, as to the Grand Union, he replied, I can tell you much or little. It was one of the last canals to be built, unifying the country’s canal system into an Orion-like configuration (now the Kennet Avon is reopened, it literally spans from Thames to Severn Estuary as well as north to south). North of Uxbridge I am not too sure about; the settlement tends to get thicker around Uxbridge itself, and I was based at Cowley, about 2-3 miles south of Uxbridge, where there is a lock, a couple of bridges and a few coveted residential moorings. Near there too is the ‘Slough Arm’, an extra limb of water, which I used in ‘Rabbit Hunt’ and which is notable for the banks of refuse from Central London deposited there in the early C20^th.

The critic Kevin Jackson, visiting Griffiths at Seaham on the Durham coast, locates the poet as existing in ‘about the most cheerless Spartan dwelling I’ve seen since I stopped hanging around with graduate students.’ In other words, a beached narrow boat. A terraced cabin in a sea-coal settlement, a few miles south of Sunderland. The only incongruous item in this brick coaster was a grand piano. Griffiths, Jackson reveals, is a virtuoso. ‘He tells me he’s been playing since the age of three and, just before I left to catch my train, underwrites the claim by running effortlessly through a complex little piece by Bartok, LOVE and HATE rippling along the keyboard so swiftly that they begin to blur.’

Fading Hell’s Angel tattoos on the cuticle-chomped digits of a softly-spoken man: LOVE / HATE. Bill wheezes, enjoys a roll-up. Beneath all that scholarship—stately build disguised under lumberjack shirt and baseball cap—is a man of the river. Dr Griffiths fits very comfortably into the ruled margins of the Cowley moorings. A boat-dweller who hunts rabbits.

As someone who has survived a number of rackety voyages with percussionist and sound-pirate Paul Burwell, and other less competent skippers, I can vouch for the accuracy—and wit—of Bill’s Conradian scripts. Place gets at poet. The structure has to encompass sea shanty, camp fire yarn, hero tale; the hiss and spit of masterless men, rogue spirits who passed through Cowley. In the upheaval of the English Civil War, discharged soldiers, freelance prophets, took to the roads. There were meetings, debates; chapbooks and pamphlets were produced and distributed. Dissent worked its way around the western fringes of the capital; Enfleld, Iver, Kingston, Weybridge, Cobham. Griffiths’ associates, his tribal connections (from Hell’s Angels to the narrow boat survivalists), are aligned with traditions of independence, the freedom to roam and rant. In the shadow of grandiose civil engineering projects, scavengers camp out like seventeenth-century Diggers. In his letter, Bill spoke of ‘a family with houseboat and own view onto waste land near Heathrow’.

What is shocking, if not surprising, given the tight politics of the poetry franchise, the indifference of the world at large to language and imagination, is how inadequately Bill Griffiths’ work is known. He hasn’t, it’s true, solicited attention. The trajectory of life and career from biker youth, through a period as ‘guest worker’ in Germany, to the burning boat and the decamping to County Durham, remain a private matter; the ordinary accidents, as he would have it, of a life lived. Griffiths received the support of Professor Eric Mottram and the ever-enthusiastic polemicist Jeff Nuttall, but the broadsheets were otherwise engaged, proud of their bottomless ignorance. A collection that appeared from Paladin was very soon pulped and forgotten. The hundreds of chapbooks, the leatherbound volumes, the hand-coloured variants, pass around a small band of enthusiasts. This is a craftsman, a scholar capable of reinvigorating the language; a master of the weights and units of breath.

Reading the selection of Griffiths’ poetry that Clive Bush gathered for the anthology, Worlds of New Measure (1997), I began to superimpose those radical songs (“Troops, curfews, and reason”) onto the Colne Valley, our march towards Heathrow. Thirteen Thoughts as though Woken at Dawn by 150 Policemen in Riot Gear With Helicopter and Film Back-Up… Wandsworth (‘a turbulent river an offer of valium’). Star Fish Jail… The Hawksmoor Mausoleum.

Was it legitimate to read that decade of samizdat publication (1965-1975), poetry wars, readings above pubs or in disestablished chapels, as in any way analogous to the outpourings of the Dissenters (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters) in the years after the English Civil War (1646-1656)? Much of the dissenting rhetoric, a country on the cusp of republicanism, had the same primitive, Biblical, improvisatory meld of speech. Paragraphs were urgent and energised. With knowledge of coming defeat? Accepted truths were interrogated. Earth magic and antinomianism argued a rationale for independence, the overthrow of a Leviathan state of priests and landowners and kings.

At Packet Boat Lane, we came away from the tow path, twitchy to make contact with a road that went over the motorway, where a (disused) branch of the Grand Union Canal passed under it. The tarmac had broken up into sticky black granules, like a porridge made from coal. Tough spikes of grass pushed through the mantle. I lay, curved to the camber, to take a photograph; and would, if I could, have swum away to the west. The sounds of the road, as the M25 approached the tangled interchange with the M4, were compulsive; as complex and as many-voiced as a Bill Griffiths poem. A sound that was its own score.