Selected Letters: Nicholas Hagger's Letters on His 55 Literary and Universalist Works

By Nicholas Hagger

Nicholas Hagger’s literary, philosophical, historical and political writings are innovatory. He has set out a new approach to literature that combines Romantic and Classical outlooks in a substantial literary oeuvre of 2,000 poems including over 300 classical odes, two poetic epics, five verse plays, three masques, two travelogues and 1,200 stories. He has created a new philosophy of Universalism that focuses on the unity of the universe and humankind and the interconnectedness of all disciplines, and challenges modern philosophy. He has presented an original historical view of the rise and fall of civilisations, and proposed - and detailed - a limited democratic World State with the power to abolish war and solve all the world’s problems. Selected Letters draws together those of his letters (written over 60 years) that aid the interpretation and elucidation of his works. Many of his correspondents are well-known figures within literature, philosophy, history and international politics, and Hagger is in the footsteps of Alexander Pope in editing his own letters, which are in the tradition of Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, T.E. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Ted Hughes (one of his correspondents). They throw light on all aspects of Hagger’s vast output, and are required reading for all interested in following the growth of his Universalism, his literary development and his innovatory approach to universal truth. NICHOLAS HAGGER is a poet, man of letters, cultural historian and philosopher. He has lectured at universities in Iraq, Libya and Japan, where he was a Professor of English Literature. He has written 54 books. These include an immense literary offering, most recently King Charles the Wise and Visions of England (both also published by O-Books), and innovatory works within history, philosophy and international politics and statecraft. His archive of papers and manuscripts is held as a Special Collection in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex. In 2016 he was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize for Literature, and in 2019 the BRICS silver medal for ‘Vision for Future’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: O-Books
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789044423

Nicholas Hagger

Nicholas Hagger is the author of more than 50 books that include a substantial literary output and innovatory works within history, philosophy, literature and international politics and statecraft. As a man of letters he has written over 2,000 poems, two poetic epics, five verse plays, 1,200 short stories, two travelogues and three masques. In 2016 he was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize for Literature, and in 2019 the BRICS silver medal for 'Vision for Future'. He lives in Essex, UK.

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Selected Letters

To G.S. Goulding

Loughton, 14 July 1960, Ts

Dear Major Goulding,

I write to follow up my telephone call this morning seeking information concerning future employment in one of the civilian branches of Intelligence.

My background is as follows. I am 21. I have just completed my second year at Worcester College, Oxford. Faced with a period of a year before going up to Oxford, on leaving school (Chigwell School, Essex) I entered Articles with a firm of London Solicitors. At Oxford I read Law until Prelims (Law Mods is after two terms) and then changed to English. I will take my degree in English next year but will not go back to the Law. Having obtained deferment from National Service for the interim period of one year, I now find that I am exempted altogether by the Government’s provisions for those like myself born in the second quarter of 1939. My father is a local government officer in Loughton. At school I took and passed 3 A level subjects in Classics. I had a season in 1st-eleven Club Cricket for Buckhurst Hill, and have played football for the College 1st eleven. I don’t think anything else I might say is really relevant.

As regards the future, I am afraid I can only be rather vague. My French is far from fluent, and I only know enough of other modern languages to satisfy my basic needs. If possible however I should like to be fairly freelance,* and travel abroad. I would like to know if one of the Intelligence branches could make use of me this time next year. I would also like to know what scope they could offer me.

At the end of this month I shall leave to spend five weeks in Greece. My postal address will be Hotel Byron, Aiolou Street, Athens.

I am sorry that I cannot be more definite at this stage. I hope to hear from you in due course.

Yours truly, Nicholas Hagger

*In this fateful letter to Major G.S. Goulding of Intelligence Corps at the War Office NH was investigating a career in Intelligence as a freelance travelling abroad that would provide an income and give him time to write his literary works. The consequences of this letter would become apparent later.

NH’s works referred to: poems in Collected Poems 1958–2005 written while ‘freelancing’ abroad; My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, pp.114–115

To Frank Tuohy

Tripoli, 16 April 1969, Ts

Dear Frank,

One thing [Angus Wilson] said has made me reflect: one should not have an identifiable voice.* He said he couldn’t read [Graham] Greene because he knew what it was going to be like, and one shouldn’t aim to be different from others through a recognisable voice. You shouldn’t approach experience with a preconceived, ready-made notion of it, and to do so, he said, is to reveal your insecurity: you aren’t big enough to do something new each time and trust that there is a unity behind each new departure, and so you hide under the ‘identity’ of an individual voice. If you’re Greene, you impose yourself whereas you should efface yourself.

I have been much concerned with voice lately. In [D.H.] Lawrence’s case it was his strong personality (‘Bats’). In other writers’ cases it is a stance. Or just a way of looking. Rejecting stances, like the youthful Durrell I have found myself without a recognisable voice. And yet, when one is most doubting it seems that that way of doubting and trying to struggle through is me, which is Angus Wilson’s sort of position. Your voice is unmistakable. I can hear it as you read the sentence before the one before last. It is an unimpressed, rightly bored ‘A-aah’. And yet, is it you? Or is it a persona?

Please forgive the bluntness, I don’t intend to be personal.... What is one’s voice? Can it be oneself, with all the doubts and uncertainties of one’s reaction to a shifting society in which nothing is certain? Or does it have to be a confident stance-cum-persona: whether I believe it or not, my values are these and I’m damn well going to judge everything in terms of them, and the hell to those who don’t like it.

A voice, one was always told, comes after writing several things. Clearly everyone is himself. What taxes me is, to what extent should one try and be oneself? And can one have a recognisable voice if one asks questions and is deliberately too diffident to judge things in terms of value-type answers?

With love, Nick

*The novelist Angus Wilson had visited Tripoli in April 1969 to give a lecture at the University of Libya, and NH had interviewed and photographed him for the Daily News. In their discussion on voice Wilson took NH’s side against Tuohy’s recognisable voice. In this letter NH is tactfully presenting Angus Wilson’s criticism to Frank Tuohy.

NH’s works referred to: questing poems such as ‘The Silence’; poems in Selected Poems: Quest for the One

chpt_fig_001

Frank Tuohy

To Angus Wilson

Tripoli, 30 April 1969, Ts

Dear Professor Wilson,

It was very nice meeting you the other week. I did enjoy our conversations, and your lecture seems to have gone down very well indeed.

I am sending the article on you under separate cover. I am also sending a sadly unproofread article [by NH, with printing errors] on Our Lady of Garian, who is surely Marlene Dietrich. I enclose some photos of her for you to keep.

I have written to Frank Tuohy and I hope he gets in touch with you. If you are going to be in Libya again in the next year or so, please do write in advance, and I will be delighted to see to any hotel arrangements.

Yours sincerely, Nicholas

NH’s works referred to: ‘Barbary Shores’ in The Wings and the Sword, ‘Orpheus across the Frontier’ in The Gates of Hell and ‘Lady of Garian’ in Whispers from the West, all in Collected Poems 1958–2005; The Libyan Revolution

To Brian Buchanan

Tripoli, 4 May 1969,* Ts

Dear Brian,

I was delighted to get your letter today. I have been meaning to write for a very long time but... I have had to work from January until now without a break. The weather has been good: it is only in the last two days that it has got hotter than spring. Nonetheless we have to teach every morning. We only do 13 hours [a week], but the New Zealand Head of Department believes in the daily drip rather than the weekly dollop, and I have to set written work [homework] in each class. Having only Fridays off, I have less time than I thought I would have.

We are just about getting ourselves established after six months of phenomenal debts. You come out, they give you £100 advance and £500 worth of furniture (Bulgarian stuff saleable at £200 if you’re lucky) and that is that. Thereafter you have to borrow to buy things like fridge, cooker, etc. and the near £3,000 salary seems absolutely nothing. (I have had to pay £60 hotel bills, £150 on importing a car.)

We all like Tripoli, though we wouldn’t want to stay more than four years at the most, and possibly not more than two years. There is no Japanese restraint, it is the natural man, and you can’t get a word in edgeways during lectures there is so much group discussion. We are living in a good flat with garden and grapevine and orange tree some two minutes’ drive from the sea, under a mosque. Outside, a sandy track, sheep, goats, camels. Nadia [NH’s daughter] often plays at wearing the barracan, but she hasn’t got into it yet. Caroline [NH’s then wife] has been sketching slumbering Arabs to everyone’s admiration.... Recently we have broken into the Ministerial circle. In one week we attended three parties on the Minister of Petroleum’s farm; riotous, Profumo-type parties with Yugoslav Keeler-girls at which dinner was not served until 2.30am. Quite truthfully, the Minister for Youth fell off his stool when I told him to tell the King to abolish the barracan; the Minister for State for Prime Minister’s Affairs is very willing to discuss the date of the next war; the Governor of the Bank of Libya shoots up one arm and bawls out I am free, I am free, I am free. And on one occasion the Minister of Petroleum himself fell onto the floor and I had to heave him by the shoulders as if he were a sack of Covent Garden potatoes. All very disgraceful, and of course unknown to my colleagues, who would not be pleased at the thought of a 9-o’clock lecture being preceded by drunken farewells at 5am.

The last four weeks I have done some illegal moonlighting for a (Government-backed) English daily paper [The Daily News]. As ‘The Barbary Gipsy’ I have written two pages every Sunday, with photos, on Libyan life (historical places mainly) and, most forbidden of all, on the common Libyan people. As ‘The Sunday Corsair’ I have also written two columns, being outrageous against artificial, insincere, ignorant, snobbish, prejudiced foreigners who lack understanding. It must be arté, but at present I feel all-powerful. I quite openly pour scorn on consuls (time-servers under a repressive System) and Ambassadresses (she had a blonde ringlet wig – today’s paper), and although it’s supposed to be a dictatorship with a censored press, no one has said a thing. Possibly because the press is the Government Press. I have openly said that the barracan was introduced by the Hebrews (= Jews) and I frequently have digs at our earliest reader, King Idris himself. (He reads the paper in bed at 5 every morning.) The result: the Ministry of Information has asked me to write a book on Senussiism. Which of course I shall refuse to do....

Only three or four people in Tripoli know that I am The Barbary Gipsy, and the chief readers are the diplomats. It can’t go on for much longer.... For the first time since 1951, Libya has got a free press.... I have already printed five pictures of a nude that Angus Wilson drew my attention to during two afternoons’ conversation two weeks ago: a wartime mural-nude of Marlene Dietrich, dated 3/2/43: ‘Our Lady of Garian’....

All this is illegal because my British Council and University contracts forbid side-jobs.... All this is a preparation for the revolution here. I don’t know whether I told you, but our landlord used to be no.3 in the Army, and he was in Iraq for the Kaseem revolution, in Cairo for the Nasser revolution. He was forced out by the present Chief of Defence, who assassinated his number 2 in Benghazi. Tourists are still shown the bullet holes in the wall. He has quite a group round him, including the editor of the paper I am working for, and he still has a popular following. Another member of the group recently married the Crown Prince’s sister-in-law, which means that he now spends every weekend with the Crown Prince. Much to the delight of the group, as he is pushing members of the group for next P.M. [Prime Minister.] If it all comes off when the King dies, they will be paying me £15,000 a year for doing nothing, and some of them have said they will insist I am appointed Ambassador to Libya....

Regards to H.I.H. [His Imperial Highness Prince Hitachi, to whom NH was tutor in Tokyo], if you are still seeing him, and if you could thank Higashizono [Head Chamberlain] for his Christmas card... I would be very grateful.

Love from all of us, Nick

*Three-and-a-half weeks after writing this fateful letter to his former colleague in Japan, Brian Buchanan (an ex-lieutenant colonel), NH was approached by British Intelligence regarding his Libyan contacts, see My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, pp.250–251.

NH’s works referred to: ‘Barbary Shores’ in The Wings and the Sword, ‘Orpheus across the Frontier’ in The Gates of Hell and ‘Lady of Garian’ in Whispers of the West, all in Collected Poems; The Libyan Revolution; My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood; A Spade Fresh with Mud

chpt_fig_002

Nicholas Hagger and Brian Buchanan (left) on Nobe beach, Japan, c.1965

To Frank Tuohy

Tripoli, 20 September 1969, Ts

Dear Frank,

It was thoughtful of you to write. We have suffered the coup with the readiness to be conquered of the much-conquered Tripolitanians and are safe and well. It seems that we will stay until June, though the RCC (Revolutionary Command Council) are abolishing the use of English in street signs and documents, and nothing is certain. It was not in fact our landlord, despite a week’s rumours to the contrary: he is now being wooed back into the Army by the RCC, and his friends are hoping he’ll stay out until the next coup, when he will do better.

We didn’t hear much on 1 September, the soldiers all wore plimsolls. I was awoken at 5 by a volley of shots, but thought they were shooting stray dogs. There were more shots at 6.30, and all the hens squawked. At 9 I drove to the University. Mine was the only car on the streets, and I was able to jump every traffic-light. I thought there was another strike for the burning of the El Aqsa mosque. The University gates were closed, so I drove back to warn you know who [Caroline] to keep you know who [Nadia]* in, and then the shooting started. It went on for 48 hours non-stop. The first two hours were the worst. They said they were firing into the air, but it sounded as if a battle was going on at the end of our sandy lane: every kind of gun, all rounds live. It was a group of 40 junior officers who were behind it. The most senior was a lieutenant and they bluffed foreign Governments into thinking there was an ex-senior officer involved by announcing the name of our neighbour [Colonel Saad eddin Bushwerib]. The poor bloke was sitting at a café in Rome when the Libyan Ambassador came up to him and embraced him. You’re the new leader, your picture has replaced the King’s in our Embassy. Wha-AT? It must have been like those Cardinals informing Corvo that he was the new Pope. For three hours the man went round in a daze, his wildest fantasy become reality, and then he was told he was a nobody again. But when he landed in Tripoli they made him Chief of Staff to compensate. Anyhow, by noon that day the 40 had hoodwinked the Embassies, disarmed the police, shot those who resisted, put every officer over the rank of lieutenant in prison, put most civilians in prison, and rounded up the Ministers and confined them to barracks where they are not tortured (ex-PM Bakoosh’s feet must have got swollen through gnat bites). And so all those decadent orgies have come to an end. No more will those Ministers slip off stools shaped like saddles and lie poleaxed by whisky on a polished floor. Of course, it couldn’t last, all the Farouk and Profumo nonsense. It was so obviously oldorderish. Yet I knew them and liked some of them, and although one of them deserves to be shot, I must confess, I rather miss them and hope they don’t get strung up.

As to the nationalist lot that have replaced them, the so-called progressives; I have had a repeat of the China experience: justice seems terribly important until you have had it inflicted on you, and then you long for freedom and creativity. Thanks to this new national socialism for the workers (Slogans: Freedom, Unity and Socialism. Meaning: to be explained), we now have, wait for it, curfew from 9pm till 6am; I can now transfer 40% less of my salary; and doubtless to facilitate Unity and preserve the Freedom to be unadulteratedly Socialist, my newspaper has been closed down. But better still... there is total prohibition, and so efficiently is it being enforced that they have even found out about the supply, packaged overnight, under a heap of vegetables. No beer for 15 days, and stocks of spirits are running low. Oh, glory to the coup, er, revolution that liberated Libya from the tyranny of the past. All hail to the Glorious evolution. Let us flock and cheer/These smiling men who take away our beer.

China, and now to clinch it, this. Let [Prince] Charles rule twenty Scillies and fifty Ovals, in future I shall be passionately bourgeois. Freedom and creativity always come before justice, and the writer should not be an overthrower, but a keeper, and prodder, of the bourgeois conscience.

*

It was nice seeing you; talking in that clover field of yours and again in the George; I feel sad to think you may have sold TB [Tumbler’s Bottom, Kilmersdon] before we return.

We enjoyed England very much. I found the Colony [Colony Room Club, Dean Street, London] and joined and became Muriel’s [Muriel Belcher’s] blue-eyed boy. She introduced me to all sorts of people (non-writers) like Sir Francis Bacon....

My wife, who has been making our bread, and my daughter, who is trying to commit to memory long lists of tables, both send their love.

With love, Nick

*After 1 September 1969, Gaddafi’s revolution, all outgoing letters were censored and were written to avoid implicating named people.

NH’s works referred to: ‘Orpheus across the Frontier’ in The Gates of Hell in Collected Poems 1958–2005; The Libyan Revolution

To Frank Tuohy

Tripoli, 12 May 1970, Ts

Dear Frank,

I haven’t written for a long time. The reason is, I have had the worst... six months of my life. It’s very complicated, and I can’t explain it all now,* but Caroline and I got involved with the most attractive American couple in town. He had a huge salary, she had four children. In December he asked Caroline to marry him, and the American wife ended up next day living with me. We had plans to live in Madrid together, but four children.... She went back to the States at the end of December. Caroline and Nadia went to England, since when the American has ditched Caroline, who has rebounded off with someone else. I saw her on Malta last month, we will definitely divorce.... We will be living separately in London when I get back towards the end of July.

There is a lot more. Some very bright and interesting and floridly decadent people have been involved, but enough of that. I have known extremes of emotion I never dreamt existed,... incredibly intense, and the loss of nine years’ rootedness in Caroline has put me through every shade of grief and despair. I’m through it now, I think, just about. There is still prohibition here, it’s very difficult to get anything to drink, so I have adjusted to living alone the hard way; do my own washing, cooking, sewing, etc. I have now got myself down to a daily discipline of writing, and I have a lot to do. I have passed through what will probably be the most harrowing and formative experience of my life, and I am still only beginning to take stock.

I intend to spend the next year in England; one of the most upsetting things about the present situation is Nadia, she really tears me up inside. I plan to get a small flat in South Ken. I have now paid off my mortgage and the rent from my place (just under £10 a week) should pay rent in South Ken. My aim this year is to reinstate myself in the metropolis....

It would be nice if I could visit you for a day or two around the end of July, beginning of August, if you are still at TB [Tumbler’s Bottom] and will not be in the States. I have to leave Tripoli by 30 June, and I will drive back via Tangier and Spain, and will leave my car in Barcelona and visit a psychiatrist friend who was here, who lives in Minorca [Menorca]. I have little idea, therefore, when I’ll make London.

I spent two weeks in Egypt last February and went overland deep into the Sahara and got to Ghadames. Did you get to Cyprus?

Apologies for brevity. There is just too much to be reflective and weighty about at present, I daren’t start in a letter.

Love, Nick

*As described in My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, on Friday 30 May 1969 NH was asked to work for MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. In June 1969 he began arranging for a Czech nuclear scientist living in Tripoli to defect to the UK. The CIA became aware of this; they wanted the Czech to defect to the US. In July 1969 an American couple came to NH’s door, and after Gaddafi’s revolution of 1 September 1969 precipitated social activity which NH thought was linked to his work on the Czech. This monitoring invaded his marriage in December 1969. NH was unable to share any reference to his secret work with any of his correspondents. Despite the Americans’ attempts to persuade the Czech to defect to the US, NH beat off the competition and organised the Czech’s defection to the UK in June 1970.

NH’s works referred to: early poems in The Gates of Hell in Collected Poems 1958–2005

To Sandra Cameron

Tripoli, 12 June 1970, Ts

Dear Sandra,

The main news this end has been an encounter with the next Libyan delegate to the UN, one of Gaddafi’s young men. I was sitting with Ken and Margaret at 2am about two weeks ago..., and their front bell went. A plainclothesman with a Security card in English. It’s too late to be up, come with me.... Negotiations started in the sandy lane. I’d no idea we were all being taken to prison. At that point along came Mohammed, this very brilliant Robespierre who is connected with the RCC. In a great wide car. He asked us to get in, he drove us to his villa, put local beer and Scotch on the table, held a press conference. What did we think of Libya? He spoke of we whenever he mentioned the evolution (not revolution), so I let him have it: dictatorship, no freedom, you shouldn’t execute journalists. At this point Ken got so drunk he fell off his chair, and Mohammed went wild. He announced we would be executed. I said I thought it was a bad idea.... First he went to the phone and began ringing the police. Dissuaded, he rang the British Ambassador [Donald Maitland], at 4am: I will make the British Ambassador come here and execute you himself. Dissuaded again, he went and got a Luger, and we all sat round the table (Ken slumped) and drank local beer and discussed our execution. He insisted he was justified. We are against all civilised values. I: So you are, by definition, barbarian. He: "I am definitely going to execute you." At 5am he announced we could go, and we went.... He turned out to be a Baathist (you know, the Baathists are in power in Iraq, they like executions)....

An unhealthy violence seems to have entered life here since you left; and it is not just guns. I heard today that Dorothy (the dwarf) was asleep in Pat’s bedroom at 2.30am this morning when two Libyans raised the blind, broke the window, broke in and coshed her so badly that one of her eyes nearly came out. Whether it was robbery or revenge for associating with Wheelus [US Air Base] (which became Libyan yesterday) I don’t know....

Nicholas

NH’s works referred to: ‘A Death of Sorts’ in The Gates of Hell in Collected Poems 1958–2005; The Libyan Revolution

To Donald Maitland

c/o Loughton,* 30 June 1970, Ts

Dear Mr Maitland,

May I be so bold as to congratulate you on your appointment. Everyone agrees that it is an important one, and Tripoli is impressed and pleased.

As you will see from the enclosed photocopy, I have been thinking of going into politics. I am leaving Tripoli tomorrow by car, and on my return to London about 21 July I start looking for a job. I wonder if there are any full- or part-time jobs going (initially for a year, and presumably in a Party capacity) for young men of 31 like me. I am thinking of the ‘backroom boy’ type of job: the job of speech-writer, private secretary or policy-former for Middle or Far Eastern Affairs.

My experience in the first two of these I got in Japan. For three years I wrote speeches for the Governor of the Bank of Japan, and as he was deeply involved in the Asian Development Bank, many of them were on international political themes. I was also private tutor to H.I.H. Prince Hitachi for three years, and I helped plan his royal tour of Britain and I prepared him for his many meetings with Ambassadors, writing out lists of questions that he could ask. This post was more a secretaryship than a tutorship.

My value as a policy-former is based on practical knowledge of the Middle and Far East. In the case of the Middle East, I have lectured in Iraq as well as here [Libya], and I have been able to visit Syria, Jordan, the Lebanon and Egypt. I shall drive through the Maghreb this week. I can claim to know quite a bit about the Far East. I spent four years in Japan altogether, and I made a visit to China and wrote over a dozen articles for the British and American press. I was the first non-Chinese to get wind of the Cultural Revolution (see Encounter, December 1966). I was also able to visit Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore, Saigon, Cambodia and Bangkok.

I am not certain that your new post is a Party one, as opposed to a civil-service one. Please forgive me if I have been breaking the spirit of the constitution by discussing Party positions with a supra-Party public servant. In that case, I would be very grateful if you could pass this letter on to the relevant Party spokesman.

With apologies for troubling you, and thanking you very much, Yours sincerely, Nicholas

*This letter to Donald Maitland, UK Ambassador to Libya and newly-appointed Press Secretary to Prime Minister Edward Heath, was written and posted in Tripoli the day before NH left Libya, hence the c/o Loughton address. On 14 July 1970 Donald Maitland wrote back that he had passed NH’s letter to the Political Office in 10 Downing Street, as a result of which NH became Edward Heath’s ‘unofficial Ambassador’ to the African liberation movements.

NH’s works referred to: My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, pp.338–340

To Nadia Hagger

Monte Carlo, Monaco, 16 July 1970, Ms postcard

Dear little Nanny,*

How are you? I hope you are very well. I have driven through three of these places today: Cannes – Antibes – Nice – Cap Ferrat and now Monte Carlo. I am sitting where the X is, just outside the casino, where they are playing roulette.... Now I am leaving for Italy – Rapallo. I am going to try and see a very old man of 85 called Ezra Pound. He wrote a lot of poems. I don’t know whether I will find him, I don’t know his address. I wrote to him at ‘Rapallo’, and I hope he got my letter.

Lots of love, Daddy xxx (I will see you very soon now.)

*NH’s daughter Nadia was then 8. NH spent from 7pm until midnight with Ezra Pound on 16 July 1970, later this same day.

NH’s works referred to: visit to Pound in My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, pp.330–333

To T.H. Sadler

London (13 Egerton Gardens, SW3), 30 July 1970, Ts

Dear Mr Sadler,

Following our telephone conversation this morning, I would like to justify the material on Libya.*

1 September will be the anniversary of the Libyan Revolution, and you will clearly have to publish something on Libya on Sunday 30 August at least. You will have to do this because the last year has completely changed the international position of Libya. It has ceased to be the quiet, boring, oil-producing, pro-Western country that thousands of British subjects have visited, worked in, and remembered. It has moved from the West to Nasser and the East. It has expelled the British and American bases and is now accepting arms from Russia. It is now to be considered a sixth participant in the war against Israel, and in view of its leader’s war plan (to solve the Palestine problem by pan-Arab war) it must be considered one of the most militant participants. It is the new symbol of Arab unity. The Libyan leader dreams of one Arabia from the Atlantic to Iraq, and he has done much for Arab unity by visiting most Arab countries, and by organising the June war council of Arab leaders in Tripoli. On top of all this, Libya is a genuinely revolutionary country, in the sense that power has moved from one class to another on the French and Russian lines. In Libya there are all the phenomena of revolution: prohibition of alcohol, renaming of streets, changing of the calendar, the public wiping out of all English lettering etc. In keeping with other revolutions, Libya is very anti-foreigner. Last week it sequestrated the property and assets of 25,000 Italians and Jews, a racist move. Recently Libya has become very fanatical. Yet no-one I’ve met has any idea of the atmosphere in Libya at present, or how things have changed. People who lived there and left before the revolution seem to think it is pretty much the same as it was when they were there, and they complain that the only news they have had of Libya has been snippets.

This my article(s) will correct. I lived in Libya from October 1968 until 1 July this year. I lectured at the University of Libya, Tripoli, and in addition I wrote for an English newspaper, The Daily News, for 5 months until the revolutionary censor hauled me before him and warned me to stop. Before the revolution I went to wild, drunken parties with several ex-Ministers, for a period of 6 months. After the revolution I was an eye-witness of all the important events, and I made dramatic contact with one of the most powerful men in Libya (Editor of the government newspaper, no.2 of TV, in charge of watching foreigners, adviser to the leaders, currently Libyan delegate to the UN and therefore in charge of the Gaddafi war plan). This man announced at 4am one night, after I had been arrested, that I would be executed, and in three evenings of subsequent conversations I was able (at great peril, as the material will show) to get inside the mind of a man as fanatical as Robespierre.

I propose to unfold the story of the revolution through eye-witnessed situations. I will follow a diary form, beginning with the coup itself in September 1969 and ending now. This will enable me to show the development of the fanaticism, the increasing hostility to the West. But as I will not depart from personal experience into abstract comment, I will catch the atmosphere of the changes. No one here seems to know about the 48 hours of non-stop shooting that accompanied the coup, the two weeks of fear that followed as we awaited a Shalhi counter-coup. I will cover Gaddafi’s 16-October speech when he declared war on the bases with a volley of gunshots that lasted half a minute, I will cover the ‘Evacuation Day’ celebrations. I was the only European to march two miles behind Nasser on Christmas Day, and I attended the rally for the Arab leaders in June and got some pictures. I could go on in this vein for much longer.

I should mention that there will be two views of the leader, who twice visited the University and answered questions. I can also include something on the former Libyan Ambassador to Britain, who was kidnapped at gunpoint in October and returned to Tripoli; I interviewed him for The Daily News last August, four days before the coup. I should also mention that the political slant will be sensibly conservative, and should appeal to readers of your paper.

The point is, I have the material; you say how many words I’m allowed. And whether you’ll spread the material over two weeks (23 and 30 August) or whether you’ll do something really big on 30 August.

Looking forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Nicholas Hagger

*As a result of this letter NH met George Evans, Assistant Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and his article on the Libyan Revolution, ‘Libya under its Colonel from the Desert’, appeared on 30 August 1970.

NH’s works referred to: The Libyan Revolution

To John Ezard

London (13 Egerton Gardens, SW3), 31 July 1970, Ts

Dear John,

There are two coups. The first is to seize Aquarius, the second is to proclaim the revolution in Aquarius and get the idea accepted by the three or four most influential recorders of the poetry scene. Can you therefore bring a copy of Aquarius tomorrow evening and think how best to persuade [John] Heath-Stubbs to co-operate early next week.

As to the [poetic] revolution itself, I feel a lot of it concerns the role of the poet today. The role of the poet has always preoccupied poetic revolutionaries. Remember Shelley’s remark about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Pound, too, wanted to up-value the poet. Poetic revolutionaries add to the poet’s stature, just as political revolutionaries add to their country’s stature (China, Libya). And that is what we will do. Today, the poet is an average man, l’homme moyen sensuel, middlebrow. He writes about small things he experiences: flowers and animals and gardens, and rent-collectors. Things outside the self, which evoke a feeling, one that has to be modest, genteel, definitely ungrandiose. Or else he writes about things that are bigger, which are far away (Hiroshima, Vietnam); though still from the viewpoint of the common man. Yesterday that weed in glasses asked me why I travelled and I said "Because I want a whole vision (whole in the sense of total), and he looked at me and said, rather shocked, Oh, I don’t want a whole vision." That’s just it, he wants to stay behind his mental hedge, he is talking of the poet as an average man. We will regard the poet as a giant; as a man who is capable of a whole vision. And that means he must embody his culture and everything that has happened in the twentieth century: the breakdown of values, the wars, the motor car and urbanisation, the decline of the West and of liberalism, the Age. Politics, economics, art, philosophy, psychiatry, history, the poet must have been through all these, and being through them means experiencing them, i.e. being torn apart by them, having them stuck in his soul. He will experience them not as abstracts but as concrete situations, such as the average man could experience if he changed his attitude to living. For us, the poet will not be a dreamer, he will not have a Romantic imagination that creates its material in private. He will catch, in images, the whole of his Age, and the truth about what happens between birth and death. Experience in pictures, without myths or discursiveness or book-learning or other languages, that is what we’ll stick to. But what experience. By upgrading the poet we automatically widen the range of experience in poems. We will get in the whole of living, every state of mind there is between childhood, youth, adolescence, young manhood, middle age, and old age. We will do this by choosing as hero a legendary, epic quester; a man who lives through the best and the worst, and whose life in the poems adds up to a legend. This emphasis on the whole makes us Holists. By telling the story of a legendary search, we become poets of saga. Perhaps we’re the Saga-poets?

This change in the role of the poet will dominate our platform. All experience is part of a whole, so our subject-matter must relate to a whole; we will write poems that can be linked to each other to make a whole, and this will overthrow the short poem about a triviality as an entity in itself. In future it must be part of something more, part of a whole. We are trying to capture all experiences, so our form and technique must serve the same. The old strict Movement forms will be overthrown, ditto rigid metrical schemes, which are tiring to read at length. Against that, the formless drip-drip-drip of the naïve vers libre of the magazine poets, that will be overthrown. It has no cadence, no one is going to read it at length, it will become as irritating as a dripping tap. We will stick a washer in the magazine poets’ creative spring.

Our aim will be to get readers to read at length. Therefore we must vary speed and mood as a composer varies his symphony. We must avoid monotony. Our rhythms must be living ones, our diction must be modern, but.... The test is, will it read as an eternal experience in the next century, and we must be very careful of using contemporary slang or references (like Logue’s to Mr Anthony Wedgewood Benn) that will become obscure, and unrewarding, in the next century. In reading our long poems aloud, we must make use of silence, and there can be pauses of ten seconds between one experience and the next. As Holism is a dramatic medium, we should read aloud, but our audience must be an all-time one, and not a merely contemporary one.

Down with smallness! Down with triviality! Down with averageness! To the wall with anyone who says (using overthrown and outmoded criteria), It doesn’t come off, it’s too ambitious. The test of whether it comes off is whether the reader is interested in the thing as an organic whole, and if this idea is unfamiliar to the reader, then he’ll damn well have to learn it. He ought to, it’s in his interests to: the days of starvation will be over and he will now be getting a full meal. Let him learn to accept our revolutionary meat even though it tastes a little different from roast beef. Let us declare roast beef abolished if doing so will solve the hunger problem; and if there isn’t any beef to be had.

Please ponder.

Love, Nick

NH’s works referred to: ‘The Silence’ in Collected Poems 1958–2005; Selected Poems: A Metaphysical’s Way of Fire; Selected Poems: Quest for the One; Overlord; Armageddon

To Frank Tuohy

London (13 Egerton Gardens, SW3), 5 August 1970, Ts

Dear Frank,

I am going to try and visit you from Saturday 8 to Monday 10; this coming weekend. Unless anything unforeseen crops up (in which case I’ll cable), I should arrive some time during the afternoon of 8 August. Hope this is all right.

Pat Kavanagh [Tuohy’s literary agent] suggested The Sunday Telegraph and The Times [for an article on Libya]. She wants me to do the fixing up, though she will think up other names if these fail. I have started with The Sunday Telegraph, and have convinced the underlings that there was a case for publishing a long diary of Libyan events just before 1 September, the anniversary of the revolution. I see [Ralph] Thackeray, the Features Editor (who is now on holiday), on 12 August, and I have to persuade him.

I am living in a first-floor room behind Harrods. There are long French windows that open inwards from a black iron balcony, and the view from this desk is delightful: the gardens, a great sycamore tree (I think it is, though it seems to have nuts) and a white Georgian terrace with gas lamps the far side. The sun floods through the windows, and I am content to sit and type all day....

One necessary intermediary step... is to have a poetry revolution. And so I have launched one. The enclosed letter [to John Ezard of 31 July 1970], to a friend of 14 years who writes news and reviews under his own name for The Guardian, is a kind of manifesto. A lot needs to be added to it, but it is a start.... The first paragraph in the enclosed letter is now out of date, it followed a visit to Heath-Stubbs, the blind poet, between 11pm and 3am some time last week. I am now trying to contact poets who would subscribe to the ideas in the enclosed letter....

I think it’s time there was a change in poetry; there hasn’t been a significant one since 1956, and everyone I’ve spoken to seems to want one, and be sympathetic to the aims in the enclosed letter. (These include Ray Gardner, who does poetry for The Guardian.) In my case, the impetus came from that party in Turret [Bookshop], when I took my wine round the slim volumes and the magazines and was appalled at the badness of the stuff. It wasn’t just the pathetic smallness of the scope, the totally unsatisfying triviality. The entire bookshop was in a void between the Scylla of conventional metres, a ‘legacy’ from the Movement, and the Charybdis of formless vers libre of the one-word-a-line type. Only a revolution in subject-matter can fill that void. And what better than saga, the abbreviated biography, in experiences and feelings, of a modern hero living out a modern legend of self-destruction? And give 12 sagas a unifying theme, and write them accordingly, and make them about the same man, and set them in a great event like a war, and you are very close to epic. Possibilities....

Hope the novel is behaving itself, and see you on Saturday, Love, Nick

NH’s works referred to: ‘The Silence’ in Collected Poems 1958–2005; Overlord; Armageddon

To Paddy Manning

London (10 Brechin Place, SW7), 26 July 1974, Ts

Dear Paddy,

On Wednesday I took Nadia down to Sompting for her annual week there, and I stayed the night at Tuohy’s, in Brighton. He is far more knowledgeable about Edward Thomas than I am,* and during our 10 hours of discussion about the objective correlative in poetry, we had a look at Thomas, using his edition of the Collected Poems (Faber)....

Tuohy and I differed somewhat on the poems he picked out as being Thomas’s best: ‘Old Man’, ‘The Owl’ principally. Tuohy praised, quite correctly, the exactness of the observation. I felt they were a bit naturey, and I pointed out a tendency to write in poetic diction, e.g. the inversions at the end of the lines in ‘The Owl’: tired was I, in I went. These sound slightly unnatural today – a bit like writing ’twas instead of it was – but then no doubt everyone wrote like that before the First World War. In short, I felt that he is a minor poet because he takes his subject-matter from outside his back door, and because there is a weakness in his use of language. A major poet writes about the themes of his time – like Yeats, on whom Tuohy is writing a book at present – and a minor poet steers clear of the big issues. Leavis wrote of Keats that he was a major poet writing in the material of minor poetry, or words to that effect, and I think he meant the same.

It is strange how poets and writers go in pairs, especially in the twentieth century. E.g. Eliot and Pound, Yeats and Pound, Joyce and Beckett. The pair Thomas belongs to is Robert Frost, the American poet, and Thomas. Frost got him writing, and a no-good poet of the time, Wilfred Gibson, records Frost as bringing Thomas along to The Old Nail Shop in July 1914, together with their wives. (See Gibson’s The Golden Room.) Thomas is very like Frost, and you should read Frost and find out as much as you can about their friendship, visit where he lived.

The climate Thomas wrote in was, of course, the Georgian climate, which Eliot and Pound reacted against. It was as widespread then as the present Larkin climate is today, and was as poor. All the critics, e.g. Leavis in New Bearings in English Poetry, insist that Thomas is not a Georgian, that his resemblance to discredited Georgianism is superficial. You could explore that. [Stephen] Spender, in his book on Anglo-American relations (I was reading bits of it at Tuohy’s, but I forget the full title [Love-hate Relations: Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities]), says that Thomas has the ability to make the familiar strange, or something of the sort. I think that would make a good title for Thomas’s work. So many of the titles seem to be about simple natural things – what is outside his back door – that something to do with the familiar is bound to be about right. Finally, you could think about the objective correlative. Tuohy and I agreed, finally, on the law behind a good poem. There are three stages involved in the sausage-machine process: the poet’s experience; the object that he changes that into, which has to be different and which involves a generalisation of the experience into an image or a symbol or a persona, i.e. a distancing, a detachment; and the reader’s experience. Thomas was good at getting the second stage right, i.e. he changes his own experience into an image, like the plant outside his back door, ‘Old Man’, or ‘The Owl’. You could investigate the way he does it.

Thomas reads as though he lived in deepest Wiltshire all his life. It is a surprise to read that he was educated at St Paul’s School and Lincoln College, Oxford. He was a literary hack – Tuohy’s expression – for much of his life, i.e. he wrote books on topography and biography which were pure bread-and-butter books. His heart was obviously in his poetry, which wouldn’t have earned him a penny. (The Collected Poems came out in 1920, three years after his death at the age of 39.) He is a very remote figure. Neither Tuohy nor I can recall ever having seen a photograph of the man. As between us we have met just about everybody who is of any consequence in poetry this century, and who was alive in 1968, this is quite scandalous....

I think you will enjoy reading Thomas, especially as you have the country in common. I hope these few observations start you off on the right track.

With love, Nick

*Paddy Manning, a friend of NH’s first wife, had to write a study of Edward Thomas for an educational degree, and she asked NH for guidance.

NH’s works referred to: subject-matter and diction in The Gates of Hell in Collected Poems 1958–2005

To Frank Tuohy

London (10 Brechin Place, SW7), 30 July 1974, Ts

Dear Frank,

A belated thank you for putting us up last week, and two enclosures I do not want back, which came out of my time by the sea. Two differing attempts to pin down what a work of art is.

As to the one about you [‘An Aesthete’s Golden Artefacts’], please forgive anything that seems impertinent or presumptuous. My apologies if I have misread the nature of your genius, or misrepresented you in what appears in inverted commas. You of course did not say this last week; it is an amalgam of things I remember you saying during the last nine years.

I am pleased with the alchemist image, which seems to sum up the sausage-machine idea we discussed, and I do think you symbolise, in this poem, an interesting aestheticism, as contrasted with Scholar and Saint. It was only when I came to write this that I thought how much you have in common with the 1890s, about which you have often talked, though I hadn’t made a positive connection before.

I hope Ireland is profitable and enjoyable.

Love, Nick

NH’s works referred to: ‘Sompting Abbotts’, an early version of ‘A Stonemason’s Flower-Bowl’, and ‘Chester Court, Sussex Square’, an early version of ‘An Aesthete’s Golden Artefacts’, both in Collected Poems

To Geraldine Cash

London (10 Brechin Place, SW7), 16 October 1974, Ts

Dear Miss Cash,

It was very thoughtful of Alan Baker to have suggested that you should send me an entry form for the Keats Prize.* I enclose three elegies of the 21 I have so far completed.... I don’t know whether Frank Tuohy showed Alan Baker the one about Sussex Square [Brighton]....

I should mention that I am trying to go back to the elegiac tradition of the Latin love-elegies and of Marlowe and Donne, i.e. that these elegies are not, like ‘Lycidas’ or ‘Adonais’, about a person’s death. I have no space to write at length about my Stress Metre. This alternates between metre (e.g. pentameter) and stress (a 4-stress line counting primary, not secondary stress). The notation is complex, and I have taken the liberty of enclosing a carbon of each of the three elegies with the primary stresses marked in. You can disregard these if you wish.

I expect to have finished these elegies I have been working on, within the next month or two. They would make a volume, The Pilgrim in the Garden, and there would be a note on the Stress Metre....

Yours sincerely, Nicholas Hagger

*NH’s elegy ‘Brompton Oratory’ was one of the poems selected to be published in a de-luxe volume entitled Keats’ Prize Poems.

NH’s works referred to: ‘Chester Court, Sussex Square’, an early version of ‘An Aesthete’s Golden Artefacts’, ‘Sompting Abbotts’, an early version of ‘A Stonemason’s Flower-Bowl’, and ‘Brompton Oratory’, an early version of ‘A Mystic Fire-Potter’s Red Sun-Halo’, three elegies in The Pilgrim in the Garden in Collected Poems 1958–2005

To Brian Buchanan

London (10 Brechin Place, SW7), 12 December 1974, Ts

Dear Brian,

I haven’t heard from you for a year. I have often meant to write. I hope you have progressed well this past year. I have often wondered how you are getting on.

I have a new address, as you can see; a new wife; a new son; and a new job. 1974 has been a year of turning the earth. This new address is a flat just off Gloucester Road, two storeys and a roof garden overlooking Hereford Square and worth £35,000, though I didn’t pay that, buying it as I did in the three-day week. The new wife, Ann, is a good bit younger than I am (early twenties) and is a bit of a teacher herself, at primary school. The new son, Matthew, is only a few weeks old and has started the smiling stage. The new job is running an English Department of 28 in one of the largest girls’ schools in the country. This means I do the ‘A’-level course and the pick of the rest and generally tell everyone what to do without actually doing it myself as a ‘Head of English’....

I stayed at Tuohy’s flat at Brighton last summer, and wrote two of the 23 long elegies I have finished this year there. (One is about him.) 1974 has been a year of poetry for me. I am now getting a Collected Poems typed: every scrap I have ever done.

I would like to hear your news. I looked for you behind the TV cameras when President Ford made his visit, but saw His Imperial Highness only.

I have Nadia staying with me at present. She is here for a month, home from boarding-school in Yorkshire. Do you know Hunmanby Hall? It is a very good public school.... She is now 12 and has straight golden hair.

My best wishes to you and Keikosan. I have been toying with the idea of going into politics. It would be bad for my writing, and I am sure I won’t, but you never know, if I am offered a particular job that interests me I might find myself visiting Japan on a fact-finding mission. Though at present this seems unlikely. Anyway, trusting that we will meet again not so far hence, Love, Nick

NH’s works referred to: ‘Sompting Abbotts’ and ‘Chester Court, Sussex Square’ in The Pilgrim in the Garden, early versions of ‘A Stonemason’s Flower-Bowl’ and ‘An Aesthete’s Golden Artefacts’ in The Fire-Flower, all in Collected Poems 1958–2005

To Frank Tuohy

London (10 Brechin Place, SW7), 12 December 1974, Ts

Dear Frank,

I have been a very bad correspondent. I meant to write and thank you for the weekend we spent in your flat while you were in Ireland. I put it off, of course, until I thought you might be back, and then my new job temporarily closed in. That is now all organised, and clear again, and considerably better off than before, I look back to the summer with fond memories and belated gratitude. Margaret [Riley] visited us briefly while we were in Brighton. I really must introduce you some time.

I wonder how you fared in Ireland, and how the Literary Revival looks now. You have probably formed exciting conclusions about it, or perhaps you are sick to death of it and want to move on to something else.

Ann was delivered of a son in the end, Matthew. He is only a few weeks old and is now fit and well after a hair-raising birth. It was in Queen Charlotte’s, which has a fine reputation, and it was a forceps-and-suction effort, done hastily while I was there because there was a complication. The foetal heartbeat on the machine kept stopping, I was sent to wait outside and then called back in, and I... was very relieved when they got him to cry....

This Head-of-English job has proved less demanding than I had feared. I have a Department of 28, 26 of whom are women, and the art is to handle them all so there are no blow-ups and play one off against another without their realising it and generally get them to do all the work instead of taking all the responsibility on your own shoulders. I’ve got the knack of it now, especially manoeuvring through Minutes, and it really takes up less of my time than any other teaching job, though on paper it is a phenomenal load.... I have been reading Chaucer with my ‘A’-level girls, and Wordsworth’s Prelude, and next term we do Paradise Lost. All the long poets. I have Shakespeare’s Sonnets lined up, which should be interesting: a look at whether slandered meant [is] Laniered as Rouse claims it did.*

I have Nadia staying here for a month. She has completed a happy term at boarding-school (Hunmanby Hall, Yorkshire). She is 12 tomorrow.

Hope to see you in the New Year. Do ring if you are coming up to London. Matthew is a well-behaved baby who smiles a lot and cries mercifully little.

Love, Nick

*A.L. Rouse argued that the dark lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was Emilia Lanier, and that Shakespeare punned on her name (slandered, is Laniered).

NH’s works referred to: sonnets in The Gates of Hell in Collected Poems 1958–2005; Overlord; Armageddon

To Paddy Manning

London (10 Brechin Place, SW7), 6 February 1975, Ts

Dear Paddy,

Nice to hear from you. I haven’t consciously drifted apart. I haven’t been to Loughton very much recently, having more space (a two-floor maisonette) up here. My new job, Head of English with a Department of 27, keeps me fairly busy, and I have been working flat out in the evenings typing up a Collected Poems.... Since the end of October I have typed over 200 lyrics and sonnets – a quantity which leaves Edward Thomas, and Baudelaire, standing at 140 apiece – and this represents only a quarter of the poetry I have typed up since last August. And the end is still not in sight.

I quite agree with you about the superficiality of college courses. This is one reason why I (a) taught abroad – because you can go through a poem at a fairly leisurely rate there – and (b) absolutely refuse to consider any lecturing job in the UK. In the last two terms I have been able to spend several weeks on each of Chaucer’s Prologue, Wordsworth’s Prelude and now Milton’s Paradise Lost, three long works I have always wanted to read slowly and in depth. This is for the last year of the ‘A’-level course. At a college I would have had a week on each author, with the long works a mere part of the work done in each week. A virtual waste of time for anyone who is more interested in the way a poem works than in slick, quick judgements on different writers.

I was interested to read your Edward Thomas essay. I think it is magnificent of you to have been able to put in so much work and run the family. I have marked with a pencilled X all the places where you might be able to do a little practical criticism, and I have written pencilled comments. (I began using red ink, but it occurred to me that if I used pencil you could rub them out if you wanted to submit this MS as it stands.) Some of the comments are negative, some pro the passages you quote. They are intended to get you thinking. I feel you should justify your generalisations about Thomas with the odd line quoted in brackets to support them. I tell my ‘A’-level girls, Imagine you are in a court and you are QC and you make a statement about the accused – i.e. Thomas – before the judge. You must prove each accusation by reference to the accused’s behaviour. In this case, the behaviour is the text.

I don’t know whether you were told to write a certain quantity of words, but if you weren’t, you could tighten the essay up. One or two points are repeated as the essay progresses. I feel you take rather a long time introducing Thomas through his biography and his social life. You could make this more concise. This would mean that you would get to page 4 more quickly and this would suggest more concentration on the poetry later. You could also reduce the bit about the Georgians. It might be a good idea to split this essay into 3 or 4 sections, and do a new beginning taking a well-known poem and really criticising it, trying to answer the question Is he a good poet? on the evidence of one poem. This opening would be section 1. Then you could have the biographical information as section 2. You have a lot of quotations on the back of p.8 and on p.9. Perhaps you could write in a line or two to connect them with your practical criticism at the beginning. I think a really sharp opening would impress the reader straightaway that you are not going to ‘waffle’ and that you have thought about how good a poet Thomas is. Why not begin section 1 How good a poet was Edward Thomas? The strength of his verse can be seen in.... Then you quote a bit and point out how the rhythm is lively and the feeling fresh