Guest poet Matthew Paul visits the Understory. He shares a poem about painter Edward Burra (1905-1976), and explores with Charlotte why he wrote it.
Edward Burra at the Gaiety, Hastings, 1969
Sole punter for a children’s film he’s already calling
Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, Edward’s here to watch
pal Bobby Helpmann enter proceedings. His noggin
bang-bangs from too many Bloody Marys in another
late lock-in at the Pipemakers Arms. For restorative
purposes, he chomps a ‘fudge’ of squidgy, black hash –
his arthritic hands won’t furnish ‘asthma cigarettes’.
‘Lollipops, free today. Come along, kiddy-winkies!’
sing-songs Bobby’s Child Catcher, whose nose slopes
freakishly, like the bills of birdmen Edward painted
when tidal waves of Heinkels chevroned over Rye,
his ‘Tinker Belle Towne’. He cackles then smirks
at memories of the silent pictures he and his art-school
crowd adored; the title-cards’ cyphered innuendoes –
and in thankfulness for how utterly marvellous it is
to watch an old mucker hamming it up as the queerest
whip-cracking villain ever to demi-pointe black-leather
winkle-picker boots across the not-so-silver screen.
Matthew Paul, first published in Wild Court, 2024.
Charlotte Gann: I like the spirit of this poem, Matthew. It’s full of humour and nostalgia; and manages to bring the scene – Burra alone in the cinema with a hangover from that latest ‘lock-in at the Pipemakers Arms’, chomping on his ‘fudge’ of hash – vividly to life, for me.
I’m immediately drawn to any mention of Edward Burra. I read Jane Stevenson’s biography, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye – see Other Resources – some years ago, and found it immensely readable. (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher was definitely a figure of fear for me, too, as a child – though it was one of my brothers who most feared him, as I remember.)
Then there’s also the whole gay context for a poem set in that time (I note you’ve chosen ‘queerest’ as an adjective…?). And the Heinkels chevroning (brilliant) over Rye… And it ends on a note that lifts the poem out of itself, somehow, for me: that ‘not-so-silver screen’, i.e. what was really going on, behind all the glitter and pomp and camp? (And Edward Burra was something of an ‘Understory’ depictor, wasn’t he? In his choice of subject for his paintings, focusing on the pub, prostitutes, the so-called seedier underside of British life.)
These are long, full lines packed with detail – a very long way from haiku, which I know you also write. How did you arrive at the language? Weaving your way through Burra’s ‘voice’ and your own? Was that daunting? I know how he wrote – his spellings and humour, in letters to friends – was particularly characterful and entertaining…
And what even led you to write about him – or this precise scene – in the first place?
Matthew Paul: I’m very glad you like my poem and its spirit, Charlotte. To begin with your last question: I’ve long been fascinated by Burra; not just his endlessly amazing art, but how he lived his life – his immense creativity, penchant for frivolity, erudition and wit, masked by shyness and an unwillingness to revel in his recognition. He even had to be coaxed by his lifelong friend Barbara Ker-Seymer to visit his retrospective at the Tate in 1973-4 and he then ‘walked through [. . .] almost without pausing’ (from Jane Stevenson’s book, p.393-4). He should also be remembered as both a champion of black culture – the Harlem Renaissance and jazz – in an age of blatant, deeply systematic racism, and as a pioneer, in his late landscapes, of what might now be called eco-art. All of that in spite of a disability so serious that he was home-educated after prep school. And yes, his subject-matter was very much his own and he was never a member of any movements for long. That wilfully independent streak is perhaps his most attractive – and reflective – quality for me.
The scene of the poem is mostly of my imagining, but Burra was a film buff throughout his life, was friends with Robert Helpmann, and liked a drink and, in his later years, cannabis too; so all of that was appealing to me. Burra had designed the set for Helpmann’s 1944 ballet, Miracle in the Gorbals. I also wanted to touch on the strangeness of how Helpmann, as a Jewish gay man, was portraying a grotesquely long-nosed character based surely on a stereotyped imagining of a Gestapo officer. The film is one I can barely remember seeing as a boy, but I must’ve watched/endured a video of it hundreds of times when my children were young, and, funnily enough, the eldest, who was obsessed with the film, was never scared by the Child Catcher, but was terrified of Dick Van Dyke’s puppet emerging from a music box. For me, the poem tries to incorporate most or all of that, plus more besides.
I admire the Stevenson biography too, but in one crucial respect I think it’s lacking: in how she downplays his sexuality and its importance, to the point where she describes him as ‘asexual’ (p.52). From most of his close friendships (of both sexes), those wonderfully animated letters you mention, and from the representations in many of his paintings, it seems patently obvious that his sexuality was key. Maybe Stevenson is right that his disability, chronic rheumatism, prohibited him from having an active sex life; however, we’ll never really know, and in those pre-Wolfenden days, most gay people couldn’t afford to be anything but discreet about their sexuality, so I guess that was foremost among Burra’s Understories. Although I chose the word ‘queerest’ for both its meanings, my poem is unmistakably a deliberate attempt to emphasise his sexuality and how it informed his sensibility as much as it is about anything else.
It’s hard to know where narrative voice comes from, isn’t it? I often use the all-knowing, all-seeing third-person voice, because it’s a liberating device, and that’s how this poem starts out; in hindsight, though, I can sense that that voice does then merge with Burra’s own, almost as if I’m channelling him. I’ve written several poems in response to Burra’s paintings and about other artists, in which I’ve also experienced, subconsciously at least, that eerie sense of ventriloquism. I suppose the obvious question I should ask myself is why I didn’t just use the first-person perspective.
CG: Thank you, Matthew. That’s such a beautiful potted appreciation of Burra’s life and work…
So…yes, I guess, then, my follow-up question is along those lines… Something like – what of yourself do you find in Burra (or your other chosen ‘subjects’; other artists) that compels you to ‘inhabit’ them, in this way, in poems? (It seems a lovely way to ‘remember’ an extraordinary person’s life. But I wonder, does it also feel a responsibility, in some ways – to get them ‘right’?)
I like your line: ‘That wilfully independent streak is perhaps his most attractive – and reflective – quality for me.’ What do you mean by ‘reflective’ here?
MP: There’s invariably some kind of personal connection which makes me want to inhabit them. In this case, for the reasons I’ve already given, but also because of Burra’s contemporaneity and co-location with my paternal granddad, who was born, thirty miles west in Eastbourne, two years before Burra, but due to the latter’s precocious talent, they both ended up studying in Chelsea around 1921, Burra, then only sixteen, at Chelsea Polytechnic as it was then and my granddad doing teacher-training at the College of St Mark and St John. And Burra was from Playden, just north of Rye, where my paternal grandma’s forebears came from.
I think I meant by ‘reflective’, reflecting me! i.e. What I discern in Burra’s character of my own traits or state of mind – the wilful independence I talked about, and how that sometimes gets labelled as ‘maverick’ behaviour, as if that’s always a bad thing, or, worse still, as indicative of reclusiveness and/or some kind of intellectual snobbery. For all that Burra was seen as a recluse, he habitually popped up to London – and much further afield in the years before and immediately after the war. He even, at the time of the setting of this poem, became a drinking buddy of Judy Garland until she died later that year. (There’s another poem about that.) I admit that Burra’s mixture of quiet, thoughtful creativity interspersed by regular bouts of serious indulgence isn’t a million miles away from my own behaviour over the years, for better or worse.
The inclusion of the Heinkels was partially a nod to the other side of my family. In a poem called ‘Blue Baby: Blitz over Britain’, after Burra’s 1941 painting of that name, I recounted how my other granddad worked throughout the war as a nurse at St Thomas’, including fire-watching on the roof and ARP (Air Raid Precautions) duties, and I see something of that fortitude in Burra staying put in Playden. My mum was forever harping on about the war – they lived on the Becontree estate in Dagenham and she got evacuated twice, the first time with her mother and both siblings, the second time with her brother only. She was never shy of telling us about the trauma of the bombing, including the rockets, which she experienced in the years when she was back home. Consequently, it coloured my and my brothers’ own childhoods. It was almost as if we’d lived through it ourselves. I’m sure that was a common experience, and I realise it must have been nothing in comparison with those whose relatives were killed in the bombing or on active service; even so, the secondhand memory compelled me to try and write it out of my system.
Yes, I do think there’s a moral responsibility to convey biographical details with care. That’s not to say that there’s a duty to stick rigidly to the ‘truth’, insofar as that can ever be known about anyone’s life. It’s far easier, I find, to fictionalise events in, or aspects of, someone else’s life than it is my own – that ventriloquism again. In a film of Burra made during his Tate retrospective, he happily describes himself as not very forthcoming and I can empathise with that.
CG: I totally get that, Matthew. And also have a strong affinity with what you say can be dismissed as ‘reclusiveness’. Meaning, outside whatever’s perceived as mainstream, (extroverted?), ‘normal’, in the sense of according with current societal (poetic, even!) mores… Wilful independence, yes. I too find such characters infinitely appealing and inspiring. Sounds like you might have been friends with Burra: very happy to join him in the public for a glass or three…
So, Edward Burra is remembered at least partly for what and who he chose to champion in and by his work. Now you, in turn, are choosing (among others and other things!) to turn your focus on him.
MP: Sometimes I sense that some stories, and some people’s lives and experiences, certainly Burra’s, are so extraordinary that even the most straightforward accounts, whether ‘real’ or fictional, are bound to expose the Understories.
CG: Ah, that’s interesting… I’ve been reading a book about Adlerian psychology lately (The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga – see Other Resources); and it talks about a very broad, central definition of ‘community’. Here’s a couple of tiny extracts:
If other people are our comrades, and we live surrounded by them, we should be able to find in that life our own place of ‘refuge’. […] This sense of others as comrades, this awareness of ‘having one’s own refuge’, is called ‘community feeling’. (p. 160-161.)
Adler treats community as:
all-inclusive, covering […] the entire axis of time from the past to the future (p. 161)
I think I do get a strong sense of ‘community feeling’ from your poem – and from your careful recounting of grandparents and parents… in a kind of weave of connection. So, I wonder if this chimes, at all, for you?
(By the way, talking with you has reminded me of a small piece of feedback I got from someone in response to my collection Noir. The work, he wrote, ‘[…] keeps reminding me of Edward Burra (in domestic mood) and of Carel Weight.’)
MP: That’s really intriguing: I’ll have to re-read Noir in light of it. And there’s a fantastic Weight painting in Doncaster I look at every time I go to the gallery there – I ought to check out the rest of his oeuvre.
Those quotations from the book you’re reading absolutely resonate with me, so yes, that sense of community unbound by time very much chimes with me and underscores this particular poem – the thread of Burra’s friendships as well as my familial resonances – even though, on the face of it, it’s only imagining an individual on his own with the big screen and his thoughts and memories for company. We’re never really alone.
CG: No, threads and threads of connection everywhere: maybe we’re not… I know how immensely grateful I have felt to and for ‘artists’ whose work I really respond to. They can feel like real allies, can’t they – and maybe, even, hand on to us the courage to even try… (the novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton has been one big one, for instance, for me).
Thank you, Matthew, it’s been really good talking.
MP: Thank you, Charlotte – it has indeed.