Under a marked stone waiting

We speak to a few of you now, but to many later,
And more still after both you and we have gone,
And we, through you, have left our devious traces:
Ciphers in caves or under a marked stone waiting
For a finder one day to decode, and show his friends.

In poetry I suppose I have an instinctive fondness for the overlooked, the underdog, the forgotten. I’m not sure where it comes from, but an early attraction to that scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the people led by Granger wander around reciting the books that they have memorised, remains a vivid memory from my teenage years. I have a subconscious fear that things will be lost.

Though Tessimond is engaged with ‘the unnoticed, the unnoticeable’ – the forgettable in a sense – I suspect that he felt somewhat differently to me about such things. Quality will always out itself in his poetry, and if it does not, it is of no matter. He champions the resilience of the good, the hard working, the stoic.

The above passage comes from a poem called ‘The Lesser Artists’. It is a title that strikes a chord, as Tessimond is pretty much overlooked today. He is sometimes anthologised, sometimes even graffitied (I once came across a misquoted fragment of ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’ scratched into the door of a public toilet in Durham), but the vast body of his work does not receive the critical attention it deserves. He is a minor poet, a lesser artist; but that is not to say that his work is small, or unimportant.

His literary executor Hubert Nicholson notes, in the introduction to the 1985 Collected Poems, Tessimond’s characteristic use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ in the poems. This is particularly key in the collection Voices in a Giant City, in which ‘The Lesser Artists’ appears, but as Nicholson notes:

[the poems] are not in the least egotistical. They are imaginative projections of himself into types, places, generalised Man, even God or Fate.

Yet here in ‘The Lesser Artists’ (as in the poems ‘The British’ and ‘The Neurotics’) it is ‘we’. It might imply Tessimond belonging to this group. The narrator acknowledges himself not as one of the big writers of his age, but as a small man, a faulted man. In an obituary written for him in The Times, his friend the critic George Rostrevor Hamilton said of him:

He was modest about his poetry, and sometimes thought it too small to be worth while. But over and above a dry wit and fancy, he had an exquisite feeling for words, meticulous but, like himself, without affectation. In his own way he was unrivalled.

It is Eliot’s Prufrock declaring himself as no Prince Hamlet, and the thing is: it doesn’t matter.

It does not matter if he speaks only ‘to a few of you now’, for his work will remain ‘under a marked stone waiting / For a finder one day to decode, and show his friends.’ That is the purpose of this celebration of Tessimond, a finder saying to his friends: “Look, this is some of the best poetry of the twentieth century.”

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond was born at 32 Devonshire Road, Birkenhead on 19th July 1902. He studied at Charterhouse, and later at the University of Liverpool where he won the Felicia Hemans Prize for Poetry. At the beginning of the Second World War he went on the run to avoid conscription, fearing that armed service would make him ‘intensely miserable’ and that he would prove to be dangerous to his fellow soldiers. Abandoning his home and job to avoid detection, when finally he tired of running and  submitted to a medical, he was declared unfit for service.

At the end of the war he inherited £4000 from the death of his father, half of which he spent on psychiatrists who declared that his parents’ lack of affection for him as a child was responsible for his sexual difficulties, the other half he spent on nightclub hostesses, striptease girls and models. Tessimond was subject to manic depression through this latter part of his life, for which he received frequent courses of electroshock therapy. His memory declined in his final years due to this and on 15th May 1962 he was found dead in his flat in Joubert Mansions, Chelsea having suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. He had been dead for two days.

He was cremated on 22nd May at Golders Green. In 1978 Bernard Levin wrote of him:

It was a quiet voice, which makes it easy to miss the resonances, but they are there, and although I doubt if he will achieve a widespread fame, I am sure that any future anthology of twentieth century English verse that does not include a sample of his work will be less complete, less representative and less valuable than it might have been.

It is the difference between fame and importance. It does not matter if Tessimond is not well known for he will remain for us, under a marked stone, waiting.

Comments

[Andrew Mellor]

What a wonderful way to divide your inheritance! I think someone should publish a study on 20th century artists who were found dead in their Chelsea flats. I can think of a few and there must be a few more - in a sense it would be a method of looking 'under marked stones'. Maybe I'm being too flippant...

[JRWB]

No, Tessimond (as we shall see over the next few days) enjoys the flippant. I think walking tours are needed. See dead Chelsea!

[SG]

the original title for the Neurotics was 'the neurotice' it referred to a specific person. As did 'She who would be a cynic'. I think the ailment he continually suffered was incurable hiccups - he was hospitalised for them.