Joan Baez sings Henry Treece – no, really!

Posted on by Jeff Ollerton

This is one of those literary oddities that sounds made up until you go and check it. But it’s true: on her 1968 album Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time, social activist and folk musician Joan Baez recorded not one but four poems by Henry Treece, with Old Welsh Song appearing twice, as both opening and closing piece. On this record, Treece was not some marginal inclusion tucked away in the middle of the track list: he is one of the most strongly represented poets on an album that also featured much more famous writers such as William Blake, John Donne, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.

Although Treece is best known as an author of children’s historical novels, his first forays into print were as a poet and essayist. I’ll have more to say about that in future posts, but by the time Baez released Baptism, Treece had been dead for about two years, and his last poetry collection – The Exiles (Faber & Faber, 1952) – had appeared a decade and a half earlier. Indeed, following its publication, Treece more or less gave up poetry.

That immediately raises a first question: how on earth did Baez come across Henry Treece? There’s no evidence, at least none that I’ve been able to find, of any personal connection between them and the sleeve notes on the reverse of the album simply provide a potted biography. But Treece was by no means unknown in the United States by 1968. His poetry had been appearing there since the early 1940s, first in little magazines and small-press publications, then in book form. An American edition of his Collected Poems was published by Knopf in New York in 1946, and he also appeared in American anthologies, including Kenneth Rexroth’s The New British Poets in 1949. In other words, Treece’s work was available on American shelves, even if he was never exactly a household name.

The really interesting detail is that the poems Baez chose come from several different Treece books, not just one convenient anthology. One can be traced to Invitation and Warning from 1942, another to The Black Seasons from 1945, and another to The Haunted Garden from 1947. That suggests a genuine act of selection rather than a casual skim through a single volume. The most likely explanation, then, is not some lost meeting between Baez and Treece, but a literary route: books, libraries, publishers, editors, and the wider mid-century Anglo-American poetry network. Kenneth Rexroth may well have been part of that broader chain, since he helped introduce Treece to American readers and also has work on the same Baez album, but that remains informed speculation rather than documented fact. It’s intriguing to note, however, that Rexroth was active in the anarchist movement in the USA at the same time that Treece was flirting with anarchism in Britain. Perhaps there’s a political connection? Again, I’ll explore Treece’s politics in later posts.

The second question, of course is: how do they sound, what did Baez do with these poems? Let me start with what is arguably Treece’s best known poem, The Magic Wood, which frankly Baez and her collaborators make a bit of a hash of. This surreal, mystical piece about uncanny encounters in a strange woodland is best performed as a slow reveal – listen to this setting of Peter Capaldi’s reading, for instance. That version comes from a BBC Radio 4 programme presented by Neil Gaiman in which he describes the influence of this poem on his comic book series The Sandman. In contrast, Baez’s version is a gallop through faerie, as though she doesn’t really understand what’s going on and can’t wait to get to the end! In contrast, Who Murdered the Minutes is a much better fit to her voice and delivery. The two versions of Old Welsh Song that begin and end the record (and they are different if you listen closely) are likewise fine renditions of this short piece.

So yes: Joan Baez really did sing Henry Treece. And not by accident. Somewhere in the background lies a small but fascinating story of transatlantic literary circulation, of how a poet associated with a small, slightly obscure British literary movement, the New Apocalypse, found his way onto an ambitious late-1960s record by one of America’s best-known folk singers. Strange, unlikely, and entirely real.

The Celtic Tetralogy: publication dates versus historical chronology

Posted on by Jeff Ollerton

In the first post on this blog I discussed how I had come (back) to Henry Treece via the unexpected discovery of his Celtic Tetralogy, which was re-issued by the publishers Savoy in the 1980s. This sequence of historical novels is slightly unusual in that the order in which the books were published is not the same as the order in which their stories unfold in time.

The first book to appear (and indeed Treece’s first novel) was The Dark Island in 1952. Then, in 1956, came both The Golden Strangers and The Great Captains. It was another two years before Red Queen, White Queen followed in 1958. You can see the order of publication, based on the copies in my own collection, in the image above.

Read chronologically, however the sequence runs from The Golden Strangers, about the coming of the Celts to Britain, through The Dark Island, centred on Caratacus and the Roman invasion, then Red Queen, White Queen, which revisits Roman Britain through the rising of Boudicca, and finally The Great Captains, Treece’s stripped-down, post-Roman Arthurian novel. Like this:

So Treece did not build the tetralogy in neat historical progression; he assembled it more obliquely, moving backwards into pre-Roman Britain and forwards into Arthurian Britain only after beginning in the thick of Rome’s collision with the native peoples of the islands.

That mismatch tells us something about Treece as a novelist. He was less interested in writing a tidy sequence than in exploring a long age of cultural conflict: invasion, resistance, collapse and reinvention. The books gain extra force when read in historical order, but their publication order shows how Treece discovered this imagined Britain in fragments, circling around the great breaks in its story rather than marching through them step by step. Indeed, his second novel, The Rebels (1953), which I will deal with in a later post, is set in the 19th century.

Those copies from my own collection are all first editions, though they vary in their condition, especially the dust jackets. Only one of them – The Dark Island – is signed:

I’ve not been able to track down the Patricia Chisholm to whom the book was inscribed – she’s certainly not an obvious literary figure. She may well have been a private acquaintance of Treece’s, quite possibly from his Humber/Lincolnshire circle. A quick search of online newspapers suggests that The Dark Island was published in the summer of that year, so this is an early signature.

Signed copies of Treece’s first novel are relatively rare – I’ve not seen one listed on AbeBooks for some time, and when they do appear they command relatively high prices (£100+). The American edition of The Dark Island appeared in 1953 and it has a much nicer cover than the British version, with it’s standardised Gollancz-Yellow dust jacket:

Regardless of the order that you read them in (and they are all stand-alone novels) the Celtic Tetralogy is a fine series of books dealing with a fascinating period in British history.

Coming (back) to Henry Treece

Posted on by Jeff Ollerton

For those of us who were born in the 1960s, the name Henry Treece is a familiar one, even if, with the passage of time, we have forgotten it. Treece’s historical children’s novels regularly featured on junior school reading lists and in the offerings of book clubs such as the Puffin Club. That’s certainly how I first encountered this most British of writers, through an enjoyment of his Viking Trilogy – Viking’s Dawn, The Road to Miklagard, and Viking’s Sunset – three of the best books of the genre ever written, in my opinion.

As I grew older, these stories, and Treece’s name, faded from my memory, occasionally recalled as half-remembered fragments of school reading or the viking stories being a gateway into more adult books by Tolkien and Howard. Until one day, in the 1980s, I unexpectedly encountered Treece again, juxtaposed with one of my favourite fantasy authors, Michael Moorcock.

Moorcock had provided the introductions to new editions of four of Treece’s novels – his Celtic Tetralogy – published by Savoy Books. They are shown in the photo above and I’ll write a longer post about these in the future. For now it’s enough to know that I spotted them in the remainders pile in the book section of a local department store. Picking them up I was confused. These were not short, lightly framed stories for children, they were long, densely conceived adult novels. It was a revelation! I had no idea that Treece wrote for grown ups. I bought all four books, took them home, and read them.

So began my journey back to Henry Treece. Indeed, it was the start of a bit of an obsession with collecting his books and other publications. Forty years of collecting later it’s time to share this passion for Treece’s work, and the collection that I’ve accumulated over the years, with a wider audience. Because Henry Treece is, I feel, one of our most neglected writers. He’s remembered, if he’s recalled at all, as primarily a writer of fiction for kids. But there was so much more to him than that as I plan to show on this blog. As well as showcasing my own collection I’ll highlight the breadth of his work and how Treece influenced both his contemporaries and later authors.

If you’re a fan or a collector of Henry Treece I’d love to hear from you – comments are open, please do leave your thoughts. For now, though, I’ll leave the last word to Henry Treece himself, from his 1946 volume How I See Apocalypse, who defined himself as a writer:

“…who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter, and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety…”