Marsack Robyn - Fifty Fifty Carcanets Jubilee in Letters

with an introduction and interjections by
Michael Schmidt

edited by
Robyn Marsack

Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

This new eBook edition first published in 2019.

Cover image Jonathan Wolstenholme.

Introduction & interjections copyright Michael Schmidt 2019.

Editorial matter copyright Robyn Marsack 2019.

Letters copyright individual authors/their Estates 2019.

constitutes an extension of this copyright notice.

Book design by Andrew Latimer.

The right of Robyn Marsack to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 879 3

Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 880 9

PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 881 6

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

For Kate Gavron

My own connection with Carcanet Press began in 1981, when I approached Michael Schmidt with the suggestion that Carcanet re-publish the poems of Edmund Blunden. He said they had been wanting to do so and asked me to make a selection. When I delivered it to him in Manchester, I was enthralled by the nature of the operation in the small Corn Exchange office. Michael forgave me for tripping over a cord and wrenching a plug from the wall, which erased his mornings typesetting and in 1982 I joined the firm as a novice sales and marketing understudy, while hankering to be an editor. I worked out of Helen Lefroys spare room in London, had a spell at the Corn Exchange when Peter Jones was away in India, and then moved to premises in Southwark when Bob Gavron acquired Carcanet. The Folio Society kindly gave us an office in the corner of their building: my own desk at last, and a phone, and access to all sorts of publishing experience in kind colleagues there My connection with Carcanet continues, and so does the education in poetry it provides.

Mark Fishers 20th anniversary compilation, Letters to an Editor (Carcanet, 1989), proceeded along different lines from the current one, with 328 letters, several from the same writers over the years, no notes, and introductions to each locale Oxford, Cheadle Hulme, Manchester of the Press that are shrewdly informative. I was amused to read some of the reactions to the request for permissions to publish those letters, including this one from Patricia Beer (21 January 1989):

I am fascinated by the idea of an anthology of letters to Carcanet and in principle I am delighted with the possibility of being included in it. Im fairly certain that I havent said anything indiscreet in mine (though of course I shall be glad to be shown that I havent) but I do wonder if Ive said anything interesting lapidary comments or good jokes or anything like that and I shall be glad to be shown that I have.
[] is there anything else I can do? Shall I write a bestseller?1

James Atlas, nine of whose letters were included in the compilation, wrote to MNS on 16 May 1989:

I have just spent the morning reading through these letters; what a strange experience! I feel paralyzed with self-consciousness as I sit down to write to you now: to think that one actually writes about oneself, and leaves a public record even in private correspondence. Of course, no one will ever write my biography; but as I read these letters, I had many tumultuous thoughts: that Ive had an interesting life; that I did actually possess a certain degree of self-knowledge, though not enough to prevent me from doing things I shouldnt have done; that Im only slightly different now than I was twenty years ago; and that these letters, Im glad to say, might be of some slight interest to people interested in literature [] illuminate a little corner of literary life. It was fun reading them, remembering how happy and unhappy Ive been.2

Living authors have mostly been very obliging about allowing publication in this volume, even if they have had misgivings about their younger selves and opinions; we are very grateful to them, and also to authors executors/estates.

It has not always been easy to match correspondents with years: some correspondents would have provided letters of interest for every year; others, who have been really important to the Press, are nevertheless not represented here. As Stella Halkyard observed to me: its so interesting to see how significant numbers of writers seem to store up their best/ most lively writing for the work and seem not to want to waste it on mere letters, whilst for others their letters are all of a piece with the work.

In the present compilation I have tried to suggest, through the footnotes, the wider context of the letters, and the connections between writers and publications even so, not all the authors connected with the Press are mentioned. The bibliography, valiantly undertaken by Stella Halkyard, at least gives a sense of the range of each years publications.

I have standardised dating, references to PN Review and book titles within letters. Omissions or occasional emendations are indicated by square brackets. Michael Schmidt is referred to as MNS.

NOTES

1. Patricia Beer (192499) was brought back into circulation by Carcanet, starting with her Collected Poems (1988) and then her fiction and non-fiction in the 1990s.
2. James Atlas (1949-2019) was at Oxford on a scholarship exchange from Harvard when MNS and Peter Jones were setting up Carcanet. He went on to become a notable editor (at the New York Times), critic and biographer, first of Delmore Schwartz and later of Saul Bellow. His Shadow in the Garden: a biographers trail was published in 2017.

I.

Memory, over time, becomes more and more a collaboration between actual events, accretions and imagination. There are gaps which imagination plausibly bridges or supplies from hearsay. The main problem with my memory, apart from its increasingly tenuous hold on some parts of the past, is that it has very little sense of chronology. Before and after are reversed and therefore, sometimes, effect and cause. One thing is unarguably true: the world into which Carcanet Press edged uncertainly in 1969 is so remote from the present-day reality of poetry publishing as to seem a foreign country and, despite its technological poverty, in many ways more amenable to the innocent prospector than the present republic of poetry. We did things differently there.