Almost entirely unknown in the United States, save perhaps for War Music, his acclaimed modernist interpretation of Homer’s Iliad, the British writer Christopher Logue (1926–2011) was one of the most unique voices to emerge from the gloomy wake of Britain’s post-WWII decline. Jailed for marching against nuclear proliferation alongside Bertrand Russel, Logue wrote porn in Paris in the 1950s, returning to London in the 1960s to produce a spirited and intensely earnest body of work that proved a timely antidote to the patriarchal provinciality of poets like Philip Larkin, whose poetry Logue once described as “genteel belly aching.” In the wake of the reissue of Logue’s Selected Poems by his long-time publisher Faber and Faber, a revisitation of this important figure is nothing less than overdue.
By the time of Logue’s death, his War Music remained unfinished, but in the forty-six years separating Patrocleia (1963) and Cold Calls (2005), respectively its first and final installments, Logue’s project drew a great many admirers, including George Steiner, Louis MacNeice and Henry Miller, to name only a famous few. Eliminating the centuries dividing the Trojan War and the Second World War, Logue’s vocabulary re-envisioned the Greek armies gliding “from parapet to plane to beach-head” as he transformed Homer’s epic into a jazzy performance poem, where heroes are “pistol-whipped” by envy and Prince Hector “jives” on his heel. Arguably, the true strength of Logue’s Homer lay in its translator’s desire to become the choreographer of battle-scenes, freezing the frame in order to draw out the moment’s bloodiness in the manner of a Hollywood director: “As the ax swings up, and stays, / Stays poised, still poised, and – / As it comes down: // ‘PLEASE GOD!’” If the universal praise heaped upon Logue’s Homer is any indication – David Wheatley deemed it “the great anti-heroic poem of our age” – it will very likely be remembered as one of the more outstanding renditions of the Iliad.
Nevertheless, as Logue’s interview with Shusha Guppy for The Paris Review made plain even as late as 1993, the near-universal praise heaped on Logue’s Homer has overshadowed what was certainly one of the most interesting poetic careers of 20th century Britain. Guppy’s very first question directly addresses this: “A critic once remarked that your Iliad is the work of your genius, while your own poetry is the product of your talent.” This is not a turn of events that one would have predicted looking at the young Logue in the 1950s. Vanishing off to Paris in 1951 after an undistinguished spell in the army, Logue remained in the French capital for a self-imposed five year exile, during that time associating with Alexander Trocchi’s short-lived journal Merlin and penning high-end smut for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. Logue’s pseudonym for the latter project, Count Palmiro Vicarion, gives some flavour of the bizarre, medievalesque poetry Logue penned during these years, some of which was collected in the slim volume Wand & Quadrant (1953) and its follow-up, Devil, Maggot and Son (1956). This medieval phase of Logue’s didn’t last long and almost nothing from those days is included in this Selected Poems of Christopher Logue, lovingly arranged by Christopher Reid in 1996 and now reissued. This is probably for the best since none of those dense, imagistic experiments, a halfway house between Pound’s troubadour experiments and Beckett’s short lyrical poems, have weathered well.
It appears we are indebted to Bertolt Brecht for Logue’s return to London in 1956, since the German poet reportedly dispatched the young Logue back to Britain in order to learn German and thus become useful to Brecht, who planned to take him on as an assistant, a plan cut short by the latter’s death that same year. This was probably the most important turning point in Logue’s life. Finding himself attuned to the era’s angry tune, Logue ditched his medieval rhetoric for the plainspokenness of protest poetry, taking part in CND’s earliest marches and sitting on the Committee of 100, Bertrand Russell’s anti-war group. Writing a series of songs for Annie Ross under the title of Loguerhythms, Logue took a cue from the Brecht-Weill collaborations to begin fashioning a musical, political voice that stood in sharp contrast to the conformist conventionality of the Movement poets. “When I was serving my country,” from the late 1950s, is a snapshot of Logue’s time in the army a decade earlier, and its realism is worthy of much of the best war poetry: “On the way to Port Said they showed me a photo: / an overhead shot from the side of a troopship / moored in the roads of Singapore harbour. / On the water below us, / a two-eyed bumboat heaped with souvenirs; / and in its bows a woman, naked, arms upspread, / hoping the seamed edge of a muslin sheet / that billowed outwards from her hands, and tugged / against the regulation belt strapped around her hips. / I am for sale, too! / they said she cried. / She must be dead by now. / And I am sure that what she cried was true.”
Unlike many of his literary colleagues, Logue spent a great deal of time with visual artists, performers and journalists, which might explain why so many of his more iconic works from the 1960s transcend the page and find themselves at home in unexpected mediums. It is often forgotten that Logue’s “I Shall Vote Labour,” inspired by the 1964 general election, where Harold Wilson’s party narrowly edged out the Tories, actually began life as a poster-poem, despite later appearing in the New Statesman. Employing the refrain, “I shall vote Labour because,” Logue deals his readers astute political observations peppered with a dash of surrealism, pointing out the fading differences between the mainstream leaderships of both parties and to the growing public disillusionment with politics:
I Shall Vote Labour
I shall vote Labour because
God votes Labour.
I shall vote Labour to protect
the sacred institution of The Family.
I shall vote Labour because
I am a dog.
I shall vote Labour because
upper-class hoorays annoy me in expensive restaurants.
I shall vote Labour because
I am on a diet.
I shall vote Labour because if I don’t
somebody else will:
AND
I shall vote Labour because if one person does it
everybody will be wanting to do it.
I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour
my balls will drop off.
I shall vote Labour because
there are too few cars on the road.
I shall vote Labour because I am
a hopeless drug addict.
I shall vote Labour because
I failed to be a dollar millionaire aged three.
I shall vote Labour because Labour will build
more maximum security prisons.
I shall vote Labour because I want to shop
in an all-weather precinct stretching from Yeovil to Glasgow.
I shall vote Labour because
the Queen’s stamp collection is the best in the world.
I shall vote Labour because
deep in my heart
I am a Conservative.
Finding himself on the masthead of Tariq Ali’s radical newspaper Black Dwarf – whose name Logue dug up at the British Library while browsing through old publications – Logue continued to produce his poster-poems, one of which, “Smash Capital Now” graced the walls of his one-time home Paris during the troubles of May 1968: “Know thy enemy: / he does not care what colour you are / provided you work for him / and yet you do!” A year later, when his first full-length collection of that decade appeared from Jonathan Cape, New Numbers (1969), the Logue on display in the book’s verse preface was entirely unrecognizable from the occult Parisian medievalist of the 1950s: “Not enough for me / that my poems shine in your eye; / not enough for me / that they look from your walls / or lurk on your shelves; / I want my poems to be in your mind / so you can say them when you are in love.” To ignore a poet as multifaceted as Logue is to essentially overlook many of the more interesting developments in late 20thcentury British poetry; in poems like “Professor Tucholsky’s Facts,” for instance, it is difficult not to see where Craig Raine may have found inspiration for his “Martian” poems in the 1980s:
Once upon a little planet,
a neat, provincial planet, set
deep in the galactic sticks,
there lived an interesting thing
called Man.
Man had two legs, and two Convictions:
one was called Luck,
which he described as Goodwhen things went Right.
The other one he used when things went Wrong.
This was called Religion.
This reissue of Logue’s Selected is highly welcome and those looking to connect the poems to the life cannot fail by consulting Logue’s Prince Charming: A Memoir (Faber and Faber, 2001), a perfect companion. May they find new generations of readers, not least of which because it is a shame to see Logue already better remembered for his War Music rather than for any of his own poems. While some of the energy Logue channeled in his original work may have found its way into today’s performance poets, his cheeky originality and earnest combativeness against the mainstream is utterly absent in his successors and as a result the work in this Selected Poems is probably more relevant today than it was half a century ago.
[Published by Faber & Faber in the U.K. on September 20, 2018. 160 pages. To be published in the U.S. in August 2019.]