The Filter^

The not-quite-fool

The Man in the Bowler Hat

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticeable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man you looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.

I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too often and seldom.

I am the man they call the nation’s backbone,
Who am boneless – playable catgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am graph, diagram,
Composite face.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.

We start our celebration with one of Tessimond’s most famous poems. Ironic perhaps that he should be noticed for a poem about not being noticed. It is a skilful piece that plays with everyday mundane expression against vaguer, loftier ideas. Notice the repetition: ‘The man’ ‘The man’ ‘The man’; in part it delivers to us the rhythm of the morning train, but also it is the wallpaper repetition of this figure, the hundreds of him filling every carriage, every morning. The past tense of this opening is playful; ‘The man who was the colour of the carriage’, we are informed. We are invited to remember him, to remember the colour of the carriage, but we are not given to recalling minor details.

It is an Everyman poem. This is Magritte’s faceless, bowler-hatted figure who represents all of us, here in our uniform failings:

I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too often and seldom.

It is the irony of his situation that is moving; there is no escape for the man in the bowler hat from living this way because it is his life. In a sense it is a commonplace idea; ‘too busy with living to live’ is a phrase that we’re perfectly likely to overhear someone say upon the train, but the final line of that stanza: ‘And wishes too often and seldom’ is more enigmatic. The pathos of David Brent’s character in The Office often came from the fact that he did have dreams, but they were the wrong sort of dreams. There is perhaps an element of that same thing in this; Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes is here; what we really need, and should hope for, is not the things that we actually desire in life.

We pity this man, don’t we? ‘Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch’, that is something we feel pity for. Though I am not sure if this man feels pity for it himself. The tone throughout is somewhat matter-of-fact, accepting of his lot, and the only times that a note of bitterness encroaches in the poem is when he resents the fact that he is not more successful in his working life:

[…] playable catgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

Here ‘man’ takes a capital M for the first and only time in the poem. That might indicate the Everyman nature of the term, this is Man against the much larger Gods of business who shape him out of clay perhaps; but that it happens here and not elsewhere in the poem is significant. The capitalisation adds a new stress to the word indicating the narrator’s resentment of his position; we spit the word out because of it. ‘Little’ is also capitalised, and we are invited to draw the two words together, form the insult for ourselves: call him a Little Man.

In this stanza, the ‘nation’s backbone’ stops being a term of praise and becomes a somewhat loaded insult – ‘Who am boneless’ – it is a really terrifically crafted phrase. That Tessimond selects the ‘am’ form of ‘be’ here (and not ‘is’), creates the astonishing impression of this man’s entire Being is formed of ‘bonelessness’. When we read it, it sounds unsophisticated, primitive; almost as if early man was wearing bowler hats inside his caves, but despite its grammatical clumsiness it does its job, which of course is what the man in the bowler hat is there to do.

I don’t wish to say too much about the rest; in a sense it is the immediacy of his poetry that is profound. We all understand what this is saying, we all perhaps feel, or fear, the sentiments of The Man. Let us just pause over the last line before we close however; the image of the ‘Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.’

The lack of punctuation here, the hyphenation of the first four words, all contribute in producing the smoothness of this stone in the physical form of the poem. The edges are brushed off by it. In another of Tessimond’s poems, ‘Invitation to the Dance’, he writes:

Enough, my brain, of these circles, circles.
    Cease caged enemy, cease.
Others have thought these thoughts before you.
    Peace, brain; peace.

It has all been written in books, and better.
    Come let the tidal sweep
Of the music run through our veins’ slow delta.
    (Sleep, brain; sleep.)

That idea of it all having ‘been written in books, and better.’ Of thoughts running in circles that are repeated through the ages, is prevalent in his work. It is that sense of permanence mentioned yesterday; some thoughts remain, others are cast aside. Here perhaps we are hearing the thoughts of Thomas Gray’s Elegy recycled again, that beneath any of the gravestones in the country churchyard, a potential Milton or a Cromwell might lay buried. For Tessimond, any stone might achieve the form of a statue if it is not worn ‘pebble-round’ by the world.

Permanence also comes in the form of the statue. Man strives to be permanent in the world, and that is perhaps his failing. In his poem ‘The Pathetic Fallacy’ Tessimond condemns man’s desire to ‘perpetrate / Magnification of himself / In iron and steel’. It is not the act of building that is at fault but the desire of man to magnify himself. It is the man in the bowler hat’s (cautious) desire also, to one day ‘dare to grow’.

Pebbles are perhaps less noticeable that statues, but they are often more pleasing.

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.

A.S.J. Tessimond: A Celebration

The 19th July this year marks the 105th anniversary of the poet A.S.J. Tessimond’s birth. Numerically it’s a pretty unremarkable anniversary, but Tessimond is a poet concerned with the unremarkable, so in the 15 days* running up to this, The Filter^ will be bringing you a celebration of the very best of this overlooked, Birkenhead-born poet.

*15 being a rather unremarkable number.