By Merryn Williams
So many people are feeling miserable because John Lucas, a constant friend and with undiminished mental powers, is suddenly gone. He was 88, but he was still a ferocious worker and never wanted to slow down.
He was probably the last academic on earth who refused to use the internet. Books were his life (he also loved jazz and cricket), and he published around sixty of them, short and long: studies of Dickens, Clare, Arnold Bennett and Ivor Gurney; a memoir of the 1950s (he was an authority, too, on the 1920s and '30s); novels, poems, travels around Greece - I could go on!
But while some writers are interested only in their own careers, John constantly and enthusiastically made space for other people's work. Poets will be especially grateful to him for creating the splendid Shoestring Press in 1994. It really was run on a shoestring, and dozens of talented people were helped into print, and the press also brought a wider audience to the Georgians, Vernon Scannell and Ruth Bidgood.
John disdained the internet, instead firing off letters and postcards to all concerned (although his beloved wife Pauline did once drag him on to a Zoom). He would never have let himself be conscripted into an army or accepted a title. He loved "England, literature, cricket, criticism, history, teaching, publishing, politics, poetry, beer, jazz .... common experience, the regional and the radical, the demotic and the democratic, the poetics of saying what you mean and the politics of meaning what you say." He is going to be missed by, I do not exaggerate, hundreds of people, and I am still aching.
I don't know whether Shoestring will survive. But John's books are still there, and still worth reading, and I hope that some of us will soon be able to get together to share our memories of him.
No comments:
Post a Comment