Private Lives, Public Follies

Many modern poets, whatever the quality of their work, do not try to recapture the ground annexed from poetry by the novelist and the prose playwright in the past hundred years. William Plomer, however, is a notable exception. His poems would often bear favourable comparison with sketches by Somerset Maugham. One notices first the variety of places which have supplied him with poetic material: Johannesburg, a flooded African river, a cave in the veldt, two Japanese hotels, a Greek café, a street girl’s flat in Maida Vale, the British Museum Reading Room, a beach at Ostend, a ski-lift in the Alps – each place the setting for a profound or witty poem; and infrequently Mr Plomer can be simultaneously witty and profound –

The rooms are crammed with flowers and objets d’art.
A Ganymede still hands the drinks – and plenty!
D’Arcy still keeps a rakish-looking car
And still behaves the way he did at twenty.

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A ruby pin is fastened in his tie.
The scent he uses is Adieu Sagesse.
His shoes are suede, and as the years go by
His tailor’s bill’s not getting any less . . .

‘The kindest man alive’, so people say.
‘Perpetual youth!’ But have you seen his eyes?
The eyes of some old saurian in decay
That asks no questions and is told no lies.

It may be that the highly relevant crocodile-image in ‘The Playboy of the Demi-World: 1938’ rose to Mr Plomer’s consciousness from a memory of South Africa, his country of birth. He is a satirist as profound as Horace or Juvenal; an all but vanished breed of poet. And his satire covers equally private lives and public follies. A certain lyrical fragility is evident in the later poems. The wit grows more urbane, and tragedy turns to pathos, as in the story of Margaret Mackintosh, the naiad of Ostend, who died from a surfeit of sea-bathing. But his best lines are carved on granite, evidence that a poet can be a man of the world and gain by it.

1961 (234)