Anne Garvey  (UK)

Richard Berengarten: Appreciation

As the editor of The Cambridge Critique, I have been delighted to publish a range of Richard’s most recent poems over the past few months. He has something insightful to say about so much – from artists and singers exiled from Ukraine to the brilliant poignancy of his collection on ageing and death, The Wine Cup.

I first met Richard in the torrid times of 1977 at the institution known forever more as The Tech. Tom Sharpe had just brought out his most mordant masterpiece Wilt: the adventures of Henry Wilt, a mild-mannered teacher of literature at the fictional Fenland College of Arts and Technology, who gets involved in a murder investigation. The book branded the Tech indelibly. The activists, artists, poets and politicians who taught there, crowded into the infamous Room 107 were far more entertaining than Sharpe’s fiction. The urbane Tory historian David Weigell sparred with Kim Howells, later a Minister in the Labour government and haunted by the membership of the CP he took up to get the job. Harassed feminists stomped defiantly out of yet another encounter with our day-release pupils. Our remit was to bring a slice of culture into the lives of young working-class lads, and we stuck with it valiantly.

Richard was the Adonis of the Staff Room. He was, as he is today, magnetic, stylish and dedicated to literature. Never as committed a Marxist as most of the staffroom, he was nevertheless radical, original and daring. He believed in literature and most of all poetry. And people believed in him. He possessed then as now the quasi-demonic gift of the intense listener, irresistible to all but the most determined cynic.

At the same time, in 1975, Richard began the Cambridge Poetry Festival. It was a brilliant coup. He brought together poets from all over Europe and further, to be housed by local families with a literary bent – and for a week the streets and cafés of this sedate city were packed with these exotic intellectuals, with their cool clever badinage and fun late-night habits, drinking until dawn. It was exciting and adventurous. Lindy Beveridge, who was the Chair of the 1981 Festival, comments, “Richard gave it so much energy, he was ambitious not just for himself but for poetry. And it was a serious project – Clive Sinclair loaned his beautiful house for the opening.” And the poets enjoyed the casual hospitality of the homes they came to. Who else would have the chutzpah to launch such a memorable celebration of literature on the cloistered calm of Cambridge? But Richard had a foot in both camps. He was insider and outsider. He had a lively link in his old college, Pembroke, and he was able to walk that town/gown tightrope to the benefit of the arts everywhere in the city. Since 2005 he has been a Bye-Fellow at Downing, and Cambridge University Library handles his archive.

Since those harum-scarum days, Richard has accomplished so much internationally and within the usually hard to handle Cambridge University milieu. He remains a creative friend who never leaves anywhere without an improvement. He has probably forgotten, but he taught me to dive – not at any old swimming pool but into the Spring Arctic deep waters of Jesus Green lido. “Just keep at it” he commanded as I re-surfaced disappointed from my previous bellyflop. I am glad to see he has taken his own advice in the heart-warming collection The Wine Cup

So bottoms up! We may as well get by

By drowning fear – and spitting in Death’s eye

We lodge here for at most a hundred years.

That’s just the way things are, No cause for tears

Back to introduction here.

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