HOPE FOR CAMERON
by David Cameron
Norman Cameron:His Life, Work and Letters
by Warren Hope
Greenwich Exchange, London, 2000; ISBN 187551 05 6; £15.00

NORMAN CAMERON'S NAME IS ASSOCIATED with four key figures in
modern poetry: W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Laura Riding and Dylan
Thomas. He was a close friend of all except Auden, an admirer of his work who
published him in Oxford Poetry. When Cameron died in 1953 at the age of
forty-eight Dylan Thomas read his friend's poems in a Greenwich Village bar
to 'a remarkably appreciative audience' of 'truck drivers, longshoremen,
painters, sculptors, and writers'; Robert Graves and Laura Riding had been
estranged from one another for over a decade, though both would continue to
speak warmly of the tall Scot who had briefly shared their Majorcan life.
         At last there is a biography of this good and important poet. It is
Cameron's own poetic achievement that is the important thing, and his
biographer Warren Hope, a poet himself, understands this. He mentions in the
acknowledgements the assistance of a daughter who knew some of Cameron's
lines by heart at the age of seven. This book is no piece of hack-work, then, but
in patient and modest prose, behind which fires of conviction and dedication to
poetry burn, it conveys the essence of both the poet and the man.
          What claim can be made for the poems themselves? This is 'Forgive Me,
Sire' in full:

           Forgive me, Sire, for cheating your intent,
           That I, who should command a regiment,
           Do amble amiably here, O God,
           One of the neat ones in your awkward squad.

These lines, finely descriptive of the man though not conveying the full range
of Cameron's gift, are worth considering. Here we see portrayed an instinctive
rebelliousness that is in fact more ordered, less 'hysterical' (to use a favourite
Cameron word) than the authority being resisted. The target of this poem has
been identified as Robert Graves; Hope believes that Laura Riding is also being
addressed. The supporting evidence is that Cameron once said, in response to
a complaint that Riding behaved as though she were God, 'Maybe she is God.'
Yet none of this need be known by the ordinary reader. An extension of
sympathy occasioned by the verbal magic of the poem makes Cameron's
predicament the reader's predicament.
          'Forgive Me, Sire' points to the traditionalism, or conservatism, of
Cameron's technique. This may be one reason for his neglect. The early poems
of T.S. Eliot are always going to be preferred to Cameron's less ambitious
work. (And because his is a poetry of terse, dense statement, it is in some ways
more difficult than Eliot's, whose associative technique 'communicates before
it is understood', as Eliot said great poetry should.) Ambition was not one of his
vices. He did not even have his day when the conservative Movement poets
gained ascendancy. If he was, as Hope claims, a 'disciple' of Laura Riding, he
did not share her startling originality of expression or boldness of statement.
Technique does not manipulate emotion in his work: emotion informs technique,
which is how it should be with poems, of any sort.
          Though verses of his were published by Auden, he was not in any real
sense of 'the Auden generation'. He was repelled by the political extremism
that disfigured the interwar years - holidaying in his first wife Elfriede's
homeland, he witnessed early on the disgusting spectacle of Nazism and was
scathing of the German people because of it - but no flirtation with Bolshevism
inflated his reputation. He did not exclude political realities from his poetry,
however. 'The Invader' speaks of the 'Invader-outcast of all lands ... At once
the oppressor and the slave.' If he is not at his best in such poems, it is because
the sources of poetry in himself did not lie in this direction.
          Cameron's need for literary expression, Hope suggests, 'no doubt
coincided, as it often does, with the onset of puberty.' No doubt the origins of
the need went even further back. He was the son of a Church of Scotland
minister and a woman who had grown up mainly in Morningside, but he was
born in Bombay, his father having gone there to be military chaplain to a
Scottish regiment. He was sent while still a young boy to live with his maternal
grandmother in Edinburgh, with only his younger brother Lewis for company.
The sense of rejection must have been deep, even deeper when his loathed
grandmother packed him off to a family friend's house. His self-portrait in one
poem as 'cronelike in my self-motherhood' is not obscure. The death of his
father meant the return of his family and a return to grandmother. Prep school
in Nairn followed. The eleven year-old who arrived at Fettes on a scholarship
was tall, often feverish, physically awkward, and considered lazy: not unlike
the young Robert Graves. He didn't resort to amateur boxing to win respect, as
Graves had done: an amiable, if sardonic, sense of humour, combined with
literary precociousness, worked for him. The public school philistinism which
Graves endured was presumably not so rife at Fettes.
          A passage of the young Cameron's prose which appeared in the Fettesian,
describing 'a big, Gipsylike woman' seen on a Portobello tram erotically
licking a finger, elicits an intriguing comment from Hope: 'This description of
a casual vision ... is probably at the root of Cameron's impulse to write.' When
the gypsy scowls at the young protagonist and continues 'to work again upon
her finger', reality fragments for him into 'meaningless ... bright-coloured
hieroglyphics'. Perhaps only a poet-biographer would have picked up on the
significance of this. The erotic vision tainted by a sense of horror is not as
prominent in Cameron's poetry as it is in Graves's, but it is there. 'I fear you
and I fear you, barbarous Love,' he writes in an early poem. The very young
Cameron may well have been aware of a sexuality in women exceeding that of
his possibly genteel mother, a sexuality that became confused in his mind with
physical grossness. Possibly the awareness came in India: the foreignness of
'Love' is a theme in his poems and his life (none of his three wives was British).
          Cameron's Oxford years were not so unlike the usual experience of
student life. 'He sometimes got drunk at inconvenient times,' a fellow-student
observed. In one respect he was unusual, though: he was already an accomplished,
mature poet; some of the poems appearing in undergraduate publications were
as good as anything he was later to write. Crucially, he invited Laura Riding to
give a lecture at Oxford, and so met both Riding and Graves. They quickly
became friends.
          Hope's summary of the intense and often bizarre goings-on of Riding,
Graves and their friends at this time - which saw Laura Riding step out of a
fourth-floor window and cripple herself - will be the most puzzling part of the
book to many readers. They could do no better than to turn to Martin Seymour-
Smith's biography of Robert Graves for a fuller account. Riding nicknamed
Cameron 'Zero', perhaps sensing an inner void that he never quite filled, unless
the conversion to Catholicism shortly before his death managed this. 'Zero the
Companionable,' she writes in one poem 'Consoles unthinkable lusts.' Certainly
the two slept together.
          Riding and Graves accepted some of Cameron's inheritance money for
'real estate ventures' in their adopted island home of Majorca. Cameron had a
house built next to theirs, but a 'horror of Laura' caused him to return to
England, marry Elfriede, and get a job as an advertising copywriter. This was
how he was to earn his living, apart from a brief spell as a freelance writer, for
the rest of his life: his time during and after the war as a writer of propaganda
utilised the same skills. They were not the same skills as went into the writing
of poems, but Cameron was often to complain that this constant drawing on his
verbal talents left him too jaded for original work. Nevertheless, he was
considerably more prolific a poet as a London copywriter than he had ever been
in sunny Majorca as Riding's disciple. Amusingly, he was responsible for the
extremely successful Horlick's 'Night Starvation' campaign: this is the one
which so enrages the protagonist of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, who sees in it the very epitome of capitalist manipulation of a gullible
public. Cameron and Orwell were to become friends, and Orwell's death
profoundly affected him. Orwell's decency and integrity - as well as an
instinctive feeling for the Left in politics - were qualities present in Cameron
too. The sophisticated, if blunt-speaking, copywriter, who always drank
heavily, enjoyed long lunches and liked to throw parties, may have sunk into
dejection occasionally but never wholly into cynicism. He was attractive to
women, but while stationed in a propaganda unit in Italy in the latter stages of
the war he was content to let his 'old Adam' become 'atrophied with disuse'
rather than join the troops' stampede for Italian women while 'men were
fighting and dying nearby.'
          The most vivid section of Hope's book, paradoxically, is this account of
Cameron's time in Italy and then in Austria just after the war (he chose to work
with the Occupation Forces there, rather than return to England), a time when
Cameron often felt stultified and occasionally desolate, and poems were few
and far between. A generous selection of Cameron's letters from this time
contributes to the vividness. He did not lose interest in other people or their
particular stories, as the moving 'Via Maestranza' demonstrates. This is its last
stanza:
          We lodge upon the piano nobile,
          The gentry's floor. The cornice of my room
          Is decked with grinning faces in relief;
          The tiled floor bears a large masonic sign.
          And in this room a whisper down the street,
          'Let me in, Pietro! Quickly, the patrol!'
          Sounds loudly as though uttered by my bed.

In the late 1940s, back in London, Cameron revived his more colourful life of
the previous decade, partying and drinking with poet-friends such as Dylan
Thomas. David Wright has written memorably in verse of this bohemian
London scene, centred around the bars of Soho, and starring Dylan Thomas,
Patrick Kavanagh, George Barker, and the painters MacBryde and Colquhoun.
In an elegy for the latter, Wright speaks of the unstable writers and artists
congregating in the Wheatsheaf and other bars; he laments the encroachment
of expense-account restaurants into the area, contrasting the disorderly but
alive world of the writers and artists with the dead hand of business. Cameron
belonged to both worlds, and could turn the tables on the writer-artist, entitling
one poem which depicted the Graves-Riding set-up 'A Visit to the Dead'.
Against literary wrangling he invoked 'Laughter, like sunlight in the cucumber.'
A brilliant satirical poem, 'The Dirty Little Accuser', paints an unflattering
potrait of Dylan Thomas, 'With a cigarette on his lip and a shiny snout':

          Who invited him in? What was he doing here,
          That insolent little ruffian, that crapulous lout?
          When he quitted a sofa, he left behind him a smear.

This might seem disloyal, but Hope argues that Cameron's view of Thomas was
that of all Thomas's friends. It is not without affection, and when the Thomas-
figure claims that 'You and I are all in the same galere', the poem's conclusion
imples that there is some truth to this:

         Now that the little accuser is gone, of course,
         We shall never be able to answer his accusation.

If Hope is right, then Thomas's excellent and vitriolic poem 'To Others Than
You' (beginning 'Friend by enemy I call you out') is directed at Cameron.
         The materialism of Cameron's job may have produced an inner schism
in a man who was fundamentally a poet. He did not possess an absolute faith
in poetry such as Laura Riding possessed (but later abandoned). He was
conscious of the presence of evil in the world, conscious too that poets were not
always eager to reject it. He seems not to have possessed 'a nostalgia for evil',
as Robert Graves described this tendency in himself, but nor could he embrace
a politically-driven humanism. 'No Remedy' is the title of one poem. Feeling
ill rather than merely jaded in his forties, he gave up work when he had enough
money, and concentrated on translating Villon. His admired translations of
Rimbaud and Villon were labours of necessity, but not of the economic sort.
Spiritually, he had progressed from the adolescent rebelliousness of Rimbaud
to the Catholicism of Villon who wrote (in Cameron's translation):

         Preserve Thou me from such a wickedness,
         Virgin who bore, in unstain'd sanctity,
         The Host we duly celebrate at Mass.
         'Tis in this faith I mean to live and die.

         There was something Kafkaesque about Norman Cameron, a man who
liked to slip in alongside protesters in a demonstration for the feeling of
anonymity it gave him. Hope's prose is perfectly pitched to express just this
quality: it is unflashy and beguiling. 'Poems must be read or ignored,' he writes.
'And if we choose to read them, it is not primarily to note trends or identify
influences, but rather to hear something of the lives we lead that we can get from
no other source.' An end to the neglect of one of Scotland's finest poets is
overdue. In this book, his American biographer points the way.