West End Final by Hugo Williams
Faber & Faber, £9.99
Hugo Williams is probably as well known for his personal life – Bohemian Old Etonian with colourful love life, unmodernised house in Islington and unconventional marriage – as for his poetry. And although, given his penchant for confessional verse, the two may appear to be inextricably linked, it is the words which will endure.
His tenth collection continues the candour of Billy’s Rain, which won the TS Eliot Prize in 1999, and Dear Room in 2006. Yes, it is confessional but, as Karl Miller has pointed out, it is also a literary strategy: “It is the chronicle of a private life, but it’s also a performance. He’s from a theatrical family.”
Williams was born in 1942 into an affluent upper middle class family – his father was the actor turned playwright Hugh Williams, his mother Margaret Vyner, a model for Jean Patou in Paris before becoming an actress – which later fell on hard times. He worked for the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has made a precarious living as a poet and freelance hack, a career he writes about with warmth and wit in his fortnightly column for the Times Literary Supplement.
His father, perhaps inevitably, casts a long shadow across this volume – “I looked up from my plate / and saw the ghost / of my father’s smile / separating like milk / across the dining table” – and then there’s the old schoolfriend – “Tiny, old, completely bald” – “advancing towards me across the room, / as across the years, saying: / ‘You remember me, don’t you? / I used to be King-Wilkinson’.”
Because this is poetic autobiography, taking us from childhood and choosing “a suitable cane with which to be beaten” to the Old Coachman making his West End Final: “His girlfriend, half his age / thought he was the leading man. / He imagined her a virgin.”
Williams famously lives apart from Hermine, his wife of 44 years – she in France, he in England – but in Marital Visit she comes to stay and puts things away in the wrong place: “How typical of you / to give the Chinese teapot a last chance / to prove itself in company.”
He writes easily and wittily of “that just-fucked freshness clinging to their fur” and the world is always well observed: “How long ago and far away we look, / sitting together there without moving / in the dark train / that is travelling beside our own.” In My Wildest Jeans, and dreams, he admits: “I was only pretending to be dead.” But there’s a lot of literary life left in this old dog; it isn’t yet time for him to take his final West End curtain call.
Keith Richmond
