Ian Hamilton

For quite a few of us, I’d guess, the name Ku Klux Klan suggests a rather creepy style of nightwear. When, as a boy, I first saw pictures of those Deep South nocturnalists in their crazy all-white strip, I had the notion that they had just sprung from their Alabaman slumbers, roused maybe by a sudden seizure of race-hatred, and had simply grabbed the nearest uniform that came to hand. A couple of peep-holes in the pillowcase and off we go a-lynching, so to speak. For a Northern English kid whose Beano routinely dressed its ghosts in bedsheets, these gangs of white-garbed spooks on horseback fitted easily into one’s line-up of night terrors. At the same time, though, they were nothing like as spooky as my Beano visitants. After all, I wasn’t black. Well, not black-skinned.

‘Fucking shit! It’s fictitious. Everything is fictitious!’ So said the pilot in charge of AeroPeru Flight 603 from Lima to Santiago. The date was 2 October 1996 and within a few moments Flight 603 would crash into the sea. When he spoke the pilot had just realised that he might shortly die. It had suddenly become clear to him that none of his cockpit instruments was working properly. The ‘air data’ he was getting from his dashboard panel were inaccurate, all wrong – ‘fictitious’. When he tried to slow down, his speedometer said that he was accelerating. When he tried to lose height, his altimeter insisted he was soaring. ‘Everything has gone!’ he yelled to the control tower at Lima airport. But the control tower could not help. The plane was ‘flying blind’. It didn’t know where it was or what it should be doing. The flight’s final seconds were recorded thus:

Yalden, Hammond, Stepney, Fenton (Elijah) and Hughes (John): where are you now? Ten of the 52 poets represented in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets fail to make an appearance in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. On its own, of course, this doesn’t prove a thing. At the same time I would guess that these poets are known about today – if they are known about today – simply because they were once biographised by Dr Johnson. Thanks to Johnson, and thanks also to the Dunciad, it has not been easy for minor figures of the 18th century to achieve absolute literary-historical oblivion. Fenton, Hughes et al do seem to have got closer to the final darkness than most other dunces of their day. Let us remember them for that.’

When Cecil Day Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he got – within days of the good news – a letter from his bank manager. ‘The whole Midland,’ it said, ‘rejoices with you.’ And this, it might be felt, comes close to summing up what’s wrong with being Poet Laureate. Since banks began, poets have received many letters from bank managers but few have been at all like Cecil’s. To send the Midland into raptures of this kind, a fellow would surely need to have done something rather seriously unpoetic.’‘

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered in his address book. He has lost his address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.