Reading 7

“One night in my twentieth year Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard and I watched a TV play about a poet. Not a historical poet. It didn’t begin, ‘John Clare grew up in a rural setting’, and then give you a shot of a sheep saying baa. No, the poet was contemporary, and it seemed uncomplainingly minor, getting on in years now, and pottering about in and around his suburban semi-detached. The play was called He Used to Notice Such Things, and it was narrated by the poet’s wife.

“‘Cuthbert would take an orange from the fruit bowl and weigh it in his hands and examine the tiny stipples on its surface with a smile of childish wonder.’ That kind of thing. Old Cuthbert was the same in the street, like a medieval village idiot airdropped into a metropolis – utterly confounded by the sight of a bus, a letterbox, a telegraph pole…Jane was quietly sceptical, but Kingsley and I writhed and swore and sneered our way through the whole ninety minutes.

“For a long time now I’ve been wanting to get hold of Kingsley’s spirit and say, Dad, I’m sorry about this, but do you remember the TV play about that fucking old fool of a poet? Cuthbert? He Used to Notice Such Things? Well listen. It was trite and corny and thoroughly and comprehensively ballsaching – but it wasn’t wrong. Not wrong. To be a poet, to be a writer, you have to be continuously surprised. You have to have something of the fucking old fool in you.”

- Martin Amis, Inside Story (2020)