Lost Things: Crichton Smith’s The Exiles ~ CookingFood.Org

Jon Sanders, Carcanet intern

One repeatedly surprising memory I have of the British Library is that of discovering an 1882 bus ticket inside a copy of Clive Bell’s Art. I was researching the influence of early twentieth-century art criticism on Virginia Woolf, and so the date of the bus ticket (the year of Woolf’s birth) particularly delighted me. The discovery was evidence not only of trans-historical reading habits (ever since I first found a train ticket in a neighbour’s copy of Orlando, I have made a point of using my own as bookmarks) but also that the ticket had been kept from 1882 to 1914, the date of Art’s publication. Had the ticket lain for these thirty-two years atop a neglected pile of unsorted items – as do the bus tickets in Roger Fry’s painting, ‘Essay in Abstract Design’ (created, incidentally, in 1914/15)? Had it transmigrated from one book to another, until resting finally in Bell’s radical history of Western art?

Exactly a year later I find myself at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, perusing a set of proofs for Iain Crichton Smith’s The Exiles (Carcanet, 1984). In the file I come across a copy of a production sheet sent to the printers of another Carcanet book, published a year earlier – Christoph Meckel’s The Figure on the Boundary Line: Selected Prose (trans. from the German by Harris and Woodruff, illustrations by Christopher Middleton). Like the 1882 bus ticket, the ostensibly unrelated document leads me to imagine a variety of connections: did the impulse to publish a collection of poems about travel and exile also determine the production of Meckel’s only Carcanet publication – itself concerned with edges and peripheries? Could Crichton Smith be alluding to Meckel’s title when he writes of ‘a crouched being rising over the horizon’ in the one poem in his collection that mentions German?

Discovery and rediscovery are part of Crichton Smith’s understanding of ‘exile’; for him, the concept is as much temporal as geographical. The figures in his poems that return from exile come from the past as well as far-away places: they move to and from Canada, Australia, Zimbabwe, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, the Elizabethan period and the Middle Ages. In this, Crichton Smith’s poems cover as broad a scope as Bell’s Art. Both texts look back over such a long period because they are concerned about what it means to live in the present.

I could here make a tempting application of the theory Bell proposes in Art (‘significant form’) to my experiences, argue that the ‘symmetry’ of my discoveries produces in me an ‘aesthetic emotion’ – the same as that when contemplating meaningful ‘combinations of colours and lines’. Yet this would be crudely anti-historical, contrary to the tenor of both writers’ ideas. Rather, I will simply make the observation, that just as it seems ironically appropriate for a bus ticket, enabling travel, and which continued to move through thirty-two years, to come to rest in Bell’s Art for nearly a century, there is something poignant, even melancholic, about my recovering Crichton Smith’s proofs and discovering the Meckel document from the vaults of a university library in the North West; the routine checks I undergo to see the texts, as if I were visiting a prisoner; my reading in The Exiles’ first poem, ‘Do not tell me where you have come from, beloved stranger’.

The Exiles is included in Crichton Smith’s New Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2011).

Jon Sanders is a final-year English student at the University of Cambridge.

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