Harold Massingham: a tribute

Harold Massingham, who died last year, had a big influence on my poetry at a crucial stage. This is a tribute to him.

I’d enrolled in his extra-mural class at Manchester University. I got in the lift to the second floor with a big bearded Anglo-Saxon of noble bearing. Was this the poet himself? I was too shy to ask. But it proved to be he.

The way he read aloud was a revelation. Rhythm, cadence, passion were all there. South Yorkshire too. He was generous in his comments on our work, but if you read between the lines you could tell what needed to be worked on. Another revelation was the amount of labour that could go into a poem. He showed us the worksheets for ‘Agnes Cassilda Adams’ (in whose kitchen the wallpaper ‘blebbed like wens’—marvellous phrase). The wodge of paper was a good half-inch thick. I still keep my worksheets, few of the packages as thick as Harold’s, but some not far off.

After the class, those who lived in South Manchester and beyond would join him in the Albert in Didsbury. In my second year he would invite me back to his home with a few pints inside us, to listen to Wagner. ‘A giant has the Ring!’ he told me excitedly. He was repainting the house meticulously, scraping clean every groove in every architrave and skirting. Several times I nearly missed the last bus to Bramhall.

I got to know his work through his collection Frost Gods. Even on the printed page his voice resonated, and still does, in my head. ‘Blood and cream bullion’ to describe a cow, for instance. ‘Humiliating thews’ for Beethoven’s stature. He also read to the class his unpublished poems, many of which were not collected until years later in Sonatas and Dreams. My pleasure in seeing it launched was short-lived—it was the day John Major was re-elected.

I once saw a school performance of Britten’s Noyes Fludde in which he played the Voice of God. I told him afterwards that I thought he was type-cast.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, my poem ‘English Rain’, which I read on Radio 3, owes almost everything to Harold Massingham. So thanks again, Harold, and if you’re up there, please look down, kindly as always, and bless my work.