Ian Hamilton is a biographer, critic and poet. He was editor of the poetry magazine Review until 1972 and later of New Review. He is also the thwarted biographer of JD Salinger. Hamilton may have courted a career of literary obscurity up to a point (choosing off-beat subjects such as literary estates in his book Keepers of the Flame), but he will not succeed in becoming as elusive as his quarry. Especially not now that his friends and former colleagues have produced a Festschrift for his 60th birthday called Another Round at the Pillars.
Blake Morrison, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Christopher Reid, Clive James, Harold Pinter, Craig Raine and others press reminiscences on us as if thrusting a drink into our hands to toast their friend.
The book looks like a drab example of vanity publishing with its grey dust jacket and in-joke title, and I wondered what Hamilton (the notoriously deft Scissor Man of literary journalism) would have done with the book had he been editing it. I was surprised to find myself reading it at all-and then with such fascination. I was curious to get to the bottom of it. How often, after all, do literary people celebrate each other, let alone this band, most of them better known than their subject? Poets, in particular, are seldom moved to make benign collective gestures. I began nervously to fear that Ian Hamilton must be not just 60, but very unwell, too. Some essays seemed suspiciously close to obituary, a pile of pre-funeral bouquets left outside Hamilton's door. Reading between complimentary lines, it was also clear that some writers were doing their best to mothball their earlier reservations about Hamilton's poetry (Blake Morrison and Peter Porter are especially adroit at covering their own critical tracks. Michael Hofmann is the best chaperone to the poems).
Before writing this, I was assured by Faber that Ian Hamilton is in rude health and the book is what it says it is. It remains an unusual one-off, more conversation than biography, and in some ways more interesting. As each friend lights a candle for the birthday cake, a portrait emerges. Hamilton evidently was, and still is, somebody whom others want to please. As editor of New Review, he rendered his young contributors excessively self-conscious. Julian Barnes devotes much of his essay to recalling his own chagrin when at the Pillars of Hercules, the Soho pub where they used to convene, he chose the wrong drink (a gin and bitter lemon), while Andrew Motion flinches at the memory of himself trying to cut a dash by ordering a litre of wine. Craig Raine completes the picture by discussing the anti-hangover benefits of the cough linctus Benylin, as advertised by Hamilton.
These details may make the book sound trifling and boozily exclusive-and in one sense it is. It is a book for the boys (with not one female contributor), but it is also a distillation of the literary 1970s and 1980s in London and the essays are often more (unintentionally) revealing about the contributors than about their subject.
I admire Hamilton's prose, but had never seen his poetry. Another Round at the Pillars comes into its own when read in tandem with Sixty Poems. The effect of moving from one book to another is like leaving a pub and its uproar of competing voices, for the silence of the interior life where who drinks what could not matter less. This is Hamilton's entire poetic output. The best poems are about the mental breakdown of his first wife-who eventually committed suicide. They are not like Ted Hughes's prodigal Birthday Letters; rather, they resemble small pieces of broken glass: transparent, sharp, not boasting any usefulness. Unlike his prose, the poems are withheld as though each one had been forced reluctantly into life.
They are not, in my view, in the premier league of poetry (Hamilton is a keen footballer and may pardon the term). Some are hardly poems at all: they are too private, they talk to themselves, they don't want-or need-an audience. But they have, as their author does, authority. In a short poem entitled Biography, the last in the collection, he writes: "Who turned the page? When I went out/Last night, his Life was left wide open/Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:/The Middle Years./Now look at him. Who turned the page?" His friends would answer for him, if they could.
Another round at the pillars
Edited by David Harsent, Cargo, ?25
Ian Hamilton, Faber and Faber, ?7.99
