To the real poet the front of the Bank of England may be as excellent a site for the appearance of poetry as the depths of the sea.
Humphrey Jennings
How did four poets come to co-edit a book that now sits in university libraries under the classmark for “Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform”?
Five poets, actually, if you count its publisher (T.S. Eliot, editor at Faber & Faber). Or six, if you also include Ruthven Todd, who thought of himself as “the errand boy of the poetry of the Thirties” — and, in this case, compiled the index.
The book is called May the Twelfth (1937), and it was the first major publication of “Mass Observation” — a sociological movement that attempted to analyse twentieth-century British life through the minutiae of many anonymous diaries. In our century, these diaries have provided raw material for works of popular history.
But as originally conceived, Mass Observation was also an experiment in the democratization of poetry. Here is an extract from “Poetic Description and Mass Observation”, which appeared in New Verse magazine, February-March 1937:
The authors of the article were two young poets: Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings. Madge eventually became the first Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham after the war. Jennings, meanwhile, would become best known for his documentary film-making, before his early death in 1950.
In the 1930s, though, both were fascinated by the weird poetry of everyday life. Madge’s day job was as a journalist at the Daily Mirror, and one of his most notable poems is “Bourgeois News” (1936), a dream-like collage of deadpan statements (“As the day wore on, and the anti-cyclone began to withdraw to the Continent, three quarters of those present made for the door.”) Jennings worked with both word and image, and had contributed collages to the Internationalist Surrealist Group exhibition in London the year before.
Madge and Jennings were also enthusiasts for the intense prose poetry of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886), as quoted approvingly in the Mass-Observation manifesto: “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” [I alone have the key to this savage sideshow]. In 1937, they prepared to document their first “parade sauvage” en masse, with a “day survey” of a single date: May 12th, the coronation of George VI.
Among the literary friends they enlisted to help edit the resulting 400-page “report” were the poets William Empson and Kathleen Raine. As far as I’m aware, any observations Empson and Raine made themselves have not been identified. But Jennings’ entries have (as “CM.1”), and they exemplify the secret modernist poetry of the book, which follows the crowd rather than the ceremony, with an eye and an ear for anarchic juxtapositions — as though The Waste Land had become rolling news.
At some point in 1937, Jennings also wrote a brief surrealist text that he simply titled “Prose Poem”:
As the sun declined the snow at our feet reflected the most delicate peach-blossom.
As it sank the peaks to the right assumed more definite, darker and more gigantic forms.
The hat was over the forehead, the mouth and chin buried in the brown velvet collar of the greatcoat. I looked at him wondering if my grandfather’s eyes had been like those.
While the luminary was vanishing the horizon glowed like copper from a smelting furnace.
When it had disappeared the ragged edges of the mist shone like the inequalities of a volcano.
Down goes the window and out go the old gentleman’s head and shoulders, and there they stay for I suppose nearly nine minutes.
Such a sight, such a chaos of elemental and artificial lights I never saw nor expect to see. In some pictures I have recognized similar effects. Such are The Fleeting Hues of Ice and The Fire which we fear to touch.
Inspired by the elegantly drifting, disconnected cadences of this poem, and the collagist spirit of the times, I present a selection of sentences from Jennings’ diary of London on May 12th:
There was a thick ground fog or river mist, but clear deep blue sky above.
They have red, white and blue button-holes of real flowers and an official programme.
The leader of a Chinese party of about fifteen holds high a red flag covered with white Chinese lettering as a rallying point.
A police loudspeaker says politely “Those people standing on the King Charles Island will not be allowed to stand there.”
The smell of a Turkish cigarette.
Smart women discussing how to carry furs.
A man cries “Periscope! Don’t forget your periscope!”
At the corner of Glasshouse Street there is a single wooden latrine like a sentry box with a sacking curtain for a door, marked “Troops Only”.
As the troops go by a family point to the other side of the road: “That’s our window — the blue.”
A maid pulls back a muslin curtain to look at the people in the street.
The Mirror is having an enormous sale.
Against the uprights there are heaps of used white cardboard milk cups. They are reflected as they lie in puddles.
A tenor from a loudspeaker sings The Yeomen, the Bowmen of England.
Old women sit on stools under thorn trees.
A sergeant gives orders, and says “Bar the King — don’t stop him.”
Victoria. A glimpse of sun.
Electricians are testing the floodlights among the bushes.
Facing the lake two fat women sit on a park bench, smoking and looking at the pigeons: “That’s not what you’d call a white pigeon really.”
The roof of a gold coach comes into view past the end of a stand.
A woman sits alone in mud surrounded by the paper, her head in her hands.
“But”, says a girl, “I want to go home and go to bed.”
All this inside half a minute.
Every climbable tree has boys on it.
He swings the camera right round to have a look at the lenses, and back again, the umbrella revolving with the camera.
“Here comes somebody.”
Sheets of rain.
Coming down from Hyde Park Corner is a man with no hat, and his head right through the middle of an Evening Standard poster.
The statue of Byron shines in the rain.
“The way they wheeled on their hind legs!”
“I loved it when they put their bayonets through the balloons.”
He: “I feel scruffy.”
She: “So do we all.”
NOTES
Humphrey Jennings also carried a camera with him on May 12th. As can be seen in the photomontage below — reproduced in Kevin Jackson’s 2004 biography — he was particularly struck by the amount of waste paper in the streets (“inch deep”). A Joycean footnote to one of his entries in the book attempts a catalogue of rubbish:
Out of many possible studies of Coronation crowds, it seems worth while attempting to list the uses to which they put paper. Paper was used in newspapers, notices, tickets, maps, programmes, radio-lists, plates, drinking-cups, for wrapping cigarettes, knives, forks and food, as bunting, flags, house decorations, hats and suits of red, white and blue, for rosettes and streamers, in fireworks, in cardboard periscopes, for sitting on, for sleeping on, to shelter people from the rain, and when thoroughly wet the stuff was thrown about as a kind of bomb.
A collection of Jennings’ poems were published in 2021 by Dark Windows Press. I can’t find a publisher link for the book, but copies are still available online.
You can find about more about Jennings’ work as a film-maker, and watch some of his films, here: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-humphrey-jennings
A contemporary echo of the Mass Observation dream of everyday poetry that I’ve been enjoying recently is Kevin Boniface’s Round About Town podcast, which mixes incidents and images jotted down while delivering post around Huddersfield (“At the house on the corner of the estate, the man in his sixties is admiring his new St. George Cross windsock”). I’m looking forward to catching up with “Union Jack Bun Cases” this weekend: