A very English Bukowski: Phil Brown on Hugo Williams’ latest poetry collection

Hugo William, West End Final, Faber & Faber, July 2009. ISBN: 9780571245932. £9.99.

Meeting a friend in London after work, I asked if she could bring the two books of poetry which had arrived in the post for me, one of which was Williams’. She had clearly had a flick through both of them because when she gave them to me she said ‘I quite like this Williams bloke, but the other one seems a bit up himself.’ Is Williams the only poet who isn’t a bit up himself? No, but I would suggest that he is the most successful writer today whose work would be met fondly by both regular poetry readers as well as the slightly larger demographic of people who don’t spend their evenings congregating in pub-basements, sagely humming recognition whilst listening to a poem they don’t understand.

I’d been waiting eagerly for Hugo Williams’ latest book, West End Final, to hit the cyber-shelves ever since reading his collection Dear Room (2006). Here is a poet who, behind wry humour and poetic winks at the reader, takes the writing of poetry very seriously, yet he seems to work equally hard at making sure that his readers are never confused by his subject matter. Poetry has long been a medium accused of thriving on esoteric encryption and leaving its readers with an enigmatic sense of something-ness, and in this context Williams’ work feels uniquely successful.

Faber’s product description states that this latest offering “summons the poet’s past selves in order of appearance”. In this sense, this book serves as a pithy overture for Williams’ entire body of work. Here is a section from the poem, ‘Twins’:

I sat there as usual,
a fork in one hand,
a knife in the other,
and neatly, precisely,
divided myself in two.

In the context of summoning the poet’s past selves, we have here a brief return to the world of Dock Leaves (1994) and Williams’ much-quoted, iconic ‘Prayer’ which begins “God give me the strength to lead a double life./ Cut me in half.”

These returns to old subject matters and styles continue throughout the collection. ‘A Suitable Cane’, for example, in which a fairly standard scene of boarding school corporal punishment is depicted in a style not that far removed from Stephen Fry’s ‘Moab is my Washpot’, serves as a resurrection of the Williams of Writing Home (1985).

There is the definite sense in this collection, however, that he is summoning his past selves for the sake of dramatic exorcism. We have Williams the schoolboy, the son (to his father), the son (to his mother), the father, the husband, the adulterer and the self-conscious poet, all gliding past us with a velocity which leaves one expecting to hear the words ‘this train will not be stopping at the next station’.

In his resurrections, however, something has changed. Examine the opening of ‘Breakfast in Bed’:

How can she look at me this morning
after what I did to her last night?
I totally used her.
I made no attempt at foreplay.
I even forgot her name.
She was just a woman to me.

At such moments in the collection, we see Williams veer away from the persona of cheeky, affable adulterer which he has so beautifully cultivated throughout his oeuvre, and show the occasional flicker of being a sort of English, bourgeois Bukowski. One does certainly see the evidence in such poems that Williams’ earliest heroes were not poets but rock stars.

It would be entirely wrong to suggest that this collection is merely a fatuous memoir of past conquests with line breaks put in. There are poems in this book which surpass the poet’s previous achievements entirely. The sequence ‘Poems to My Mother’ is a rare achievement: a parental dedication which neither beatifies, like Lawrence, nor demonises, in Larkinesque fashion.

‘Poems to My Mother’ is a sensitive, affectionate portrait of a woman’s life in seven episodes, beginning with her culling her address book of deceased acquaintances and ending with an elegy for the woman herself. The most moving moment in the sequence is the fourth part, ‘Someone’s Girlfriend’, where Williams allows his mother to speak for herself in a monologue about meeting his father.

The lynchpin of the collection is ‘Slapstick’, where Williams adopts a new voice altogether, writing a dramatic monologue as the seminal clown, Joseph Grimaldi. Williams beguilingly enters the mind of a character with whom he feels a great affinity:

Every bone in my body had been broken
at least once
in the countless comic kickings
and pratfalls undertaken
in the name of comedy.

It is at this point in the collection that Williams encourages the reader, ten books down the line from his debut, to consider the damage done to the lives of people who want to be seen as ‘entertaining’. The great punch-line of Grimaldi’s life, so the legend goes, was

‘Reduced to performing in a chair,
I consulted a doctor,
who took one glance
at my doleful countenance
and referred me elsewhere.
‘There is only one thing for you, sir.
you must go and see Grimaldi the Clown.’

Part of me wants to believe that this poem was inspired by the poet going to see Watchmen, which also refers to this tragicomic story. What this poem does better than anything else Williams has written to date, is show the effects of being a public figure and the loneliness that comes with popularity in an entirely unpostured, human way.

His poem ‘West End Twilight’ gives a strong indication of the role this book plays within Williams’ back catalogue. The poem begins:

Hugo Williams sits looking somewhat
cowed and apprehensive in the tea rooms
of the Waldorf Hotel …

For all of his dramatic reinventions and self-mythology, this is the first time in Williams’ body of work in which he has candidly described himself in the third person. By giving his life an omniscient voiceover, perhaps we can sense that the writer has made the leap from theatre to cinema. What the third person does show is that Williams has turned himself into a product which he will gladly sell us, as long as we realise that ‘Hugo Williams the Poet’ is no more autobiographical than Berryman’s ‘Henry’. Although he would certainly make a much better guest at a dinner party.