Matthew Carr (U.K.)

Letter to Richard

Dear Richard

Happy birthday! And what an unexpected pleasure it is to be able to say that to you, more than fifty years after we first met, when you taught me English in my first year A Level year at what was then the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. I remember that year very well. Coming from a very repressive Jesuit boarding school to early ‘70s Cambridge was a bewildering and often disorientating culture shock, and insofar as I had any direction at all in those days it was related to the one clear desire which has never left me: I wanted to be a writer.

Of course, I had no idea what that meant, or how to go about it, or if it was even possible, but I have always remembered with gratitude how you helped set me on that path. You seemed to believe that it was possible — and also necessary. You once told me I had the ‘visionary gleam’. I suspect that was due to the drugs, poor diet, and teenage angst, but I appreciated it anyway. I also appreciated the range of texts that you brought to the classroom, at a time when the curriculum still allowed space for such deviations. In addition to working through the usual Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy, you would find time for some Verlaine, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Surrealist art, and poems by Cavafy, Odysseus Elytis, and George Seferis. 

In those days I also wanted to write poetry, and you encouraged me to pursue that — and helped me to believe that I could do it. You suggested that I form a writing group. In one of our conversations, you quoted Pope’s question/axiom to me: ‘To write well, lastingly well, Immortally well, must one not leave Father and Mother and cleave unto the Muse?’ I still have copies of the poems I sent you in my late teens, dotted with your honest but generous annotations (‘Good writing but get the clichés OUT.’ ‘Avoid overwriting.’ ‘Get EVERY word to count’). 

In the end I turned out to be a very different writer to the poet that you and I both imagined, but I stuck with it. I followed Pope’s advice, and yours. More than sixty years later, I’m still working at the clichés and the overwriting, still trying to find exactly the right words, still on the journey that, in part, began with you. So I wish you a very happy eightieth. I congratulate you for cleaving to the muse for so many years, and for producing such an astounding body of work with so many re-inventions. 

And I hope that you and I will both be lucky enough for me to be able to wish you a happy ninetieth.

With warm wishes,

Matt 

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