Poetry

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. [UPDATE: Since I posted this yesterday I’ve learned that Symons founded a poetry magazine called Twentieth Century Verse that was published from 1937 to 1939. I’ve looked at the contents pages of all of those that are listed in the Modernist Magazines Project and I see no mention of Treece, however some issues are missing. I also found out that he edited a volume called An Anthology of War Poetry (1942) as part of Penguin’s Forces Book Club. I’ve yet to discover if Treece is included in the collection].

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.

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.

Recent additions to the collection: two Treece-adjacent books of poetry

Joan Baez sings Henry Treece – no, really!