A visit at the weekend to a local book fair yielded just a single Treece item: a slipcased copy of the Viking Trilogy, rebadged as A Viking Saga (Puffin, 1967), that I’ll save for a later post. I did however also pick up two Treece-adjacent items.
The first is Moon’s Farm and other poems (Faber and Faber, 1955) by the art critic and anarchist Herbert Read. There’s a number of personal connections between Read and Treece, not least in Read’s championing of New Apocalypse writers and his influence of Treece’s own anarchism. More on that at a future date. Five of Treece’s volumes for Faber and Faber are listed on the back of the dust wrapper.
The second book is by a writer I’d not previously encountered – George Sims, whose Poems was published by The Fortune Press in 1944. Fortune Press had also published Treece’s first book – 38 Poems – in 1940, and it’s likewise mentioned on the back of this book. So both writers were part of the small-press poetry world associated with The Fortune Press in the 1940s. Whilst Treece moved over to Faber and Faber, Sims went on to publish The Immanent Goddess (1947) with that publisher and was also included in Fortune’s 1949 Poems of the Forces anthology (which, oddly, does not include anything by Treece – perhaps for copyright reasons?).
When I opened Poems I was immediately struck by the quality of the paper, which is nice and heavy and has scarcely discoloured. This is a complete contrast to most books of that era, which were subject to war time restrictions and tended to use poor quality paper. The volume is very slim, however, just 24 text pages.
The other thing that drew me to Sims’s book is that it was signed twice by the author, on occasions 42 years apart! Presumably he had intended this to be a presentation copy but did not hand it over after the first signing in 1944 – according to his obituary Sims “was essentially a private and reclusive man [with] an offbeat sense of humour [who] did not suffer fools gladly: indeed it has been said of him that he refused to suffer them at all”. In 1986 it seems that he finally found two people who might appreciate his work. It’s fascinating to see how his handwriting changes over that period and I’m intrigued by his self-description as a “reformed man” – what was he referring to I wonder?
A bit of sleuthing leads me to conclude that the receivers of the book were the writer Julian Symons and his wife Kathleen, with whom he was friends. Symons was also published by The Fortune Press, in 1939 and 1943, and he and Treece are known to have corresponded, again justifying (to me at least!) the purchase of a book that’s Treece-adjacent.
When collecting books by a particular writer there’s always the temptation to stray into related territory. That can soon lead to an exponentially expanding collection correlated with a rapidly diminishing bank balance, so I try to resist that temptation But these two books – at £5 apiece – were bargains. I had actually spotted them the last time this fair set up camp in town but had passed; since then they’d weighed on my mind, so I was glad to see their slim spines still peaking out of a whole shelf of poetry and to be able to add them to my collection.
henry treece 