To mark the publication of a new edition of the late U. A. Fanthorpe, Not My Best Side: Selected Poems (Baylor University Press), its editor John Greening shares his thoughts on one of the UK’s most popular poets. The essay is based on a talk given for the King’s Lynn Literature Festival in September 2024.
For UK readers, the book is available from Blackwell’s here.
John Greening
In 1978, a small independent poetry publisher in Cornwall brought out a first collection by a poet few had heard of: the name on the cover was U. A. Fanthorpe. The initials seemed to suggest here was another difficult, modernist male poet like W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot or C. H. Sisson, but it turned out this newcomer wasn’t a man at all, not an obvious Modernist and very seldom difficult. In fact, she was immensely readable. And Ursula Fanthorpe wasn’t young either, but rather what she liked to describe as ‘a middle-aged drop-out’. That first Peterloo collection was called Side Effects and when it came out almost fifty years ago, its cover displayed the same picture you’ll find on a new selection of her work I’ve just edited for Baylor University Press. The painting is by Uccello and shows St George saving a maiden from a dragon. It prompted Fanthorpe’s popular ekphrastic poem ‘Not My Best Side’, a triptych of monologues by the dragon, the maiden and the saint, which Harry Chambers shrewdly decided to print in full on the cover and which I’ve taken for the overall title of this Selected. If you don’t know the poem, it’s much reproduced online, but some of you may remember that after we’ve heard from the disgruntled dragon (‘The artist didn’t give me a chance to pose properly’) and the really rather excited maiden (‘It’s hard for a girl to be sure if / She wants to be rescued’), St George is given the last word, launching in like some medieval candidate for The Apprentice:
I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence.
And after more such testosterone-filled bragging about his ‘custom-built’ spear and ‘prototype armour’ he concludes:
Don’t you realise that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job-prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You’re in my way.
Despite a certain shift in mores since it was written in the early seventies (by a poet born the year after Hardy died and before the Thirties Poets had even emerged), the poem still comes across as a brilliantly witty piece of work. I was delighted, in fact, to discover how much it meant to the current Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alicia Stallings – another poet who prefers to use her initials, A. E. – who has provided a superb introductory preface to Not My Best Side.
Readers immediately took to this new voice and for some decades U. A. Fanthorpe was one of the most popular poets in Britain, appearing on the A-Level syllabus, even having a Selected Poems from Penguin – although she was always loyal to Harry Chambers until he finally closed his doors – at which point Enitharmon stepped in (itself now defunct). When Ted Hughes died in 1998, Fanthorpe was a strong contender for Poet Laureate. She had the same kind of popular appeal as Betjeman. Her poems are accessible and entertaining, but never patronizing; we feel she’s writing the way she wants to, without thinking too much about her audience except as anyone might in a personal conversation. She doesn’t hesitate to use an unusual or even obscure word or an oblique reference if it’s what suits the poem, but never just for the sake of it. The only things that need notes are some of the historical and cultural details and I’ve added a few to my new edition largely for the benefit of American readers to whom Ursula Fanthorpe is likely to be a completely new name. The poems in several of U. A.’s collections (she’s often referred to as just U. A.) are organized alphabetically by title rather than thematically and that’s what I decided to do for this new edition, which contains work from everything she published until her death in 2009, along with a good few posthumous volumes. To whet your appetite further (since I fear that in those fifteen years she has rather dropped off the radar) I’d like to offer here some examples of her different preoccupations.
U. A. Fanthorpe is known especially for that droll British sense of humour that makes ‘Not My Best Side’ so effective, but the anger in her poems has been less frequently acknowledged. It stems largely from her experience working as a temp, which included time at Hoover’s complaints department and for a chemical factory, but was chiefly as a receptionist in a psychiatric hospital. These were jobs she took after she gave up her post as Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies College, determined to devote her energies to writing rather than teaching. But in order for anyone to take her on she had to conceal her qualifications, which included a degree from Oxford. She certainly uses the work experience to good effect in her poems and what comes across very strongly is her frustration with the way some of her bosses behaved. As it happens, the early poem, ‘Administrator’ comes first in my A-Z selection and sets the tone admirably. It addresses a senior manager ‘Whose good deeds were always shady … who shook / With fright before committees, who always forgot / Your own authority’ and ‘Whose kindnesses were home-made, compensation / For your servile failure / To improve anything.’ It is a pretty damning satire and I fear that some of U. A.’s observations would strike a chord of recognition among today’s health workers.
One of the things I most admire about Fanthorpe (perhaps because I’m not very good at it myself) is the way she can capture a personality in a few words. Her innate sensitivity to people must have made her a great school teacher as must her sense of how to hold an audience, which I remember from the one occasion I saw her read – at a once distinguished poetry venue, the Sow and Pigs in Toddington. But she knew how little room for creativity is left when you’re a teacher and that menial job as a receptionist in Bristol at last allowed her time to study humanity in all its aspects. Many of her earliest poems are about the patients and staff she encountered.
It was during her lunch-hour at 1.20 on Thursday 18th April 1974 that Ursula Fanthorpe sat in the grounds of the hospital and wrote her first poem, ‘For Saint Peter’. It’s not a religious poem exactly, yet she was a religious poet in a very English way. She loved churches and church festivals and Bible stories, but also the notable figures associated with Christianity. There’s an entire sequence, for example, about William Tyndale. Ursula and her partner, Rosie Bailey, both in fact became Quakers – something she had in common with a surprising number of other significant British poets, from Basil Bunting to Philip Gross. Although my selection was made for an American publisher and emphasizes this spiritual side of her work, Fanthorpe is very much a grounded English poet from a rootedly English family. Her father was a judge, and her mother was descended from Roger Askham (the A in U. A.) who was tutor to Elizabeth I. Those of you who have read Fanthorpe will know how good she is at picking up on English idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, whether it’s our delight in queuing or complaining or discussing the weather or being apologetic or embarrassed or ironic. She also has a powerful sense of injustice: class is at the heart of her poetry just as much as it is in Simon Armitage.
Above all, U. A. Fanthorpe loves England’s history, its place names and legends, as demonstrated within the various longer poems I have culled from her individual collections, including a thirteen-part sequence Consequences in which Richard III features prominently (alas, she didn’t live to see his remains being uncovered in a Leicester car park). ‘Found on the Battlefield’ is the first poem of this remarkable sequence and it takes us straight to Bosworth, to a zone neither quite past nor present:
[…] The precious things, the crowns and golden chains,
Are dirtied, and the fine steel basinets
Rot in the caked and scummy ditches.
Toilet-paper standards flutter from the banks.This landscape is not given to forgetting.
Such memorable one-liners are another remarkable aspect of her particular talent, a useful gift if you’re trying to capture the essence of some famous historical event. ‘Driving South’, for example, begins with the unnerving line, ‘Nothing will happen to us all the way’ and it’s not long before we feel the shades of England’s bloodiest ever battle, Towton. But although she has a serious interest in England’s past and doesn’t hesitate to include grim details, Ursula Fanthorpe isn’t Geoffrey Hill, she’s one of us, observing the sign posts ‘like hands, bonefingered, endless’, but then stopping for petrol and looking for a rubbish bin. I think what made Fanthorpe acceptable and popular in a way rare since Betjeman was the fact she had a light touch: she was unpretentious and often very funny. British readers still tend to prefer their poets to have a sense of humour and it’s as much a part of the national make-up as being grumpy.
Fanthorpe can, of course, do grumpy and she understood what made people grumpy – even other poets, as in her wonderful metrical poem, ‘He refuses to read his public’s favourite poem’ which has an epigraph from Yeats’s friend, Dorothy Wellesley:
I think Yeats hated all his early poems, and “Innisfree” most of all. One evening I begged him to read it. A look of tortured irritation came into his face and continued there until the reading was over.
In fact, more than grumpiness, as I’ve already suggested, there’s that latent fury in Fanthorpe’s work and she actually claimed in an interview that anger is what sparked much of her poetry. Of course it’s restrained… often more like exasperation, as in ‘Either/Or’, a memorable and musical dissection of our obsession with simple binary solutions, in which the subtext is surely her own life as a gay woman:
Once in the age of Gold, poems began with O –
O rare, O fine, O sweet! But that was long ago.Then, in the age of Silver, If was the poet’s word.
‘Be a man’ was the message. And the people heard.Now in the age of Lead, poets don’t rate any more.
Instead the managers speak. Their theme is Either / Or.They say You’re X or Y. This is our decree.
You’re old, or else you’re young. Middle, or Working C.If you’re not rich, you’re poor; if you’re not gay, you’re straight;
If you’re not North, you’re South; you’re skinny, or overweight […]
Her best-known angry poem is very different. It concerns the building of a new road in Kent, which is the part of England where she was brought up, although she is more immediately associated with Gloucestershire. Perhaps that shire, with its echoes of Laurie Lee, not to mention Shallow and Silence’s orchard, has helped give her something of a reputation for cosiness; but the imaginative structure of ‘A Major Road for Romney Marsh’ shows Fanthorpe to be a pointed, unpredictable and surprisingly political poet. Carol Ann Duffy has written of her astonishment at discovering how subversive U. A. could be despite that ‘gentle and scholarly’ façade. She’s undeniably good at writing about ‘issues’, which is probably why this quasi-protest poem has turned up regularly in GCSE anthologies. There’s a simmering and bitter sense of injustice which bleeds into what she sees as damage to the language as well as the landscape ‘(It wants investing in roads, / Sgns syng T’DEN, F’STONE, C’BURY) // It is itself, and different./ (Nt fr lng. Nt fr lng.)’. She never loses her sense of humour or of proportion and generally prefers such irony or sarcasm to outright rage; but now and again in her work she comes close to boiling point. It’s particularly noticeable when she gets on to the role of women in society and what was expected of a young English lady growing up in the mid-20th century. There’s a poem, for example, about accompanying her mother and brother to the ‘boys’ outfitters’ in Guildford and watching her brother being kitted out in his school uniform like a young prince. Here she opts, in brackets, for dry restraint and the curt last lines say it all.
(And I know, without being told,
There’s a world enlisting him
That hasn’t a place for me.OK. I’ll make my own).
But there’s another side to all this that might not sit well with modern feminism. For example, in one of her many Christmas poems, ‘Someone’ (and ‘someone’ is one of U. A.’s favourite words) she conveys in plain rhymed verses, alternating four and five lines each, the simple, selfless hard work of whoever it was prepared the stable for Mary and Joseph. There are a good few Fanthorpe poems about cleaners and secretaries, female servants who are invariably sidelined or squeezed out by pushier men. She wants to give these women a voice, but also she wants to capture aspects of women’s life we instantly appreciate but which haven’t been shown before in verse. There’s a marvellous poem simply called ‘Women Laughing’, for example, and this is what readers love her for: the way she can nail so many familiar experiences with such wit and formal ingenuity and humanity and that sense of ‘Ah yes, I’ve noticed that too’ or ‘Oh, I recognize that feeling’. You’d think Philip Larkin had said all there was to say about church going; but then came that famous visitor’s book in Montacute Church which inspired the much-anthologized ‘Soothing and Awful’:
[…] A giggling gaggle from Torquay Grammar,
All pretending they can’t spell beautiful, concoct
A private joke about the invisible organ.A civilized voice from Cambridge
Especially noticed the well-kept churchyard.
Someone from Dudley, whose writing suggests tight shoes,Reported Nice and Cool. The young entry
Yelp their staccato approval:
Super! Fantastic! Jesus Lives! Ace!But what they found,
Whatever it was, it wasn’t what
They say. […]
As you’ll have gathered from my title, U. A. Fanthorpe is remarkably good at watching the rest of the world (no Rilkean introspection for her), and quite a few of her poems are about looking closely, about noticing – which in the end is what all poetry is about. I can particularly recommend the monologue by an attendant in the Orangerie, whose job is to watch over Monet’s water-lilies. It comes from a 1987 collection called, appropriately enough, A Watching Brief, but even in her very first book there was a poem which begins by telling us:
I am a watcher; and the things I watch
Are birds and love.
In fact, Ursula Fanthorpe watches a good deal more than this. I’ve always felt that writing poetry is about tuning in to the world. What a poet sees is captured because they bothered to notice it; and they also bothered to practise writing enough to be ready to capture what they’ve noticed in something other than cliché. We’ve all been to pleasant seaside towns and wished we could paint the scene. U. A. Fanthorpe knows just how to do it in her little watercolour of an out of season English seaside resort, ‘West Bay in Winter’:
Landscape of absentees, where nothing
Is in itself, but anticipates
Patiently the next coming.Landscape of withdrawn teashops, of shut
Pizzerias and doughnutteries,
Lavatories out of order.Brooding self-absorbed till Easter makes
Sense of immense carparks, hides duckboards
And sandbags for a season. […]
These opening stanzas have all the elements of poetry but rather than strict rhyme and metre (which she deploys with skill when she needs to) Fanthorpe uses repetition and other musical devices such as internal rhyme (‘Sense of immense’). We can hear her enjoying herself, having fun with the language (‘doughnutteries’ echoing around ‘lavatories’), but not in a way that feels like showing off. Indeed, such word-play is something many of us do when we chat and Fanthorpe is a very conversational poet. Yet she’s also a poet who is able to throw in a little light parody: not ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ but ‘Landscape of withdrawn teashops’. What a lovely adjective that is too: ‘withdrawn’ suggests at one and the same time English reticence, and something that’s become obsolete.
According to what the poem is saying, Fanthorpe’s rhythms speed up and slow down –
[…] Showers chase us, and mysterious light
Behind clouds falls on water we can’t
Quite see. Gulls alone mark us.Caravans turn their backs like cattle.
Laked fields lie apathetic. Only
The sea, that old ham, relentlessly
Goes on performing.
We almost crick our necks peering across the line break between ‘can’t’ and ‘Quite see’. There’s metaphor and simile, but it’s not grandly Metaphysical; rather, the sea is compared to some ageing actor, performing at the end of the pier perhaps. The caravans not only turn their backs, but they do it ‘like cattle’, which suggests typical seaside weather.
It’s important to be reminded that U. A. Fanthorpe isn’t always an upfront, easy-going, Betjeman-like poet. She’s read her Modernists and she’s capable of mysterious poems in which not everything quite adds up. I suspect she became conscious that she could sometimes be too safe, too dependent on the waking world and wary of that ‘doubleness’ Les Murray has said good poems require. It’s true she can generally be grasped at first reading, but although she’s not by any means an academic poet, Fanthorpe is often quite an allusive and literary poet, her subjects ranging from the Anglo-Saxons to the Brontës to Robert Frost. Shakespeare especially crops up a good deal and with him comes a very special theatrical and dramatic quality. U. A. is in her element, I think, when she’s writing a monologue (something Carol Ann Duffy undoubtedly learnt from) and it’s no surprise to find she’s drawn to Robert Frost – another poet once mistakenly assumed to be too straightforward and comfortable. Included in my new selection is a very touching poem about a Frost seminar in which the tutor has an unexpected guest in the class – a small child, who has to be entertained while discussion of the poems progresses. There are amusing references to some of Frost’s famous poems such as ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ set against the behaviour and reactions of a three-year-old:
[…] Mr Frost, who is dead, comes in black
On white. He has something to tell us.Both try hard. Felicity
Has drawn a house, silent
As thinking. Can we have a door?
She whispers. Mr Frost has brought a wallWith holes in it. The holes grow
Larger and darker as the sun
Walks round the room. Felicity
Opens her mouth in a yawn like a hole. […]
Like Frost, Fanthorpe has the common touch. She writes of things that interest us all but which no one has thought to write about before. There’s a poem about the fascination with the ancient loos in ruined monasteries (‘The Room Where Everyone Goes’). There’s one about the underground rivers of London. But she doesn’t baulk at the old familiar subjects. The difference is that when she writes about something that’s been written about many times before, she knows full well she has to be original. So rather than telling us how beautiful snow is, she captures its malevolent streak, calling it an ‘affable thug’, a ‘snuffer-out of difference’. Then there are the very mundane pursuits – reading in bed or doing the ironing or learning to tell the time.
Of all the well-known experiences covered by Fanthorpe, perhaps the job interview is the most instantly recognizable. As it happens, this poem ends my selection (by alphabetical serendipity). ‘You will be hearing from us shortly’ consists of a series of interview questions without answers. We are simply given the interviewer’s reactions. So, it begins:
You feel adequate to the demands of this position?
What qualities do you feel you
Personally have to offer?Ah
Subsequent responses to increasingly outrageous questions are greeted with ‘Indeed’ or ‘Quite so’ until (and we’ll let U. A. have the last word):
And your accent. That is the way
You have always spoken, is it? What
Of your education? Were
You educated? We mean, of course,
Where were you educated?
And how
Much of a handicap is that to you,
Would you say?
Married, children,
We see. The usual dubious
Desire to perpetuate what had better
Not have happened at all. We do not
Ask what domestic disasters shimmer
Behind that vaguely unsuitable address.And you were born – ?
Yes. Pity.So glad we agree.