Photograph of John Lucas copyright Graham Lester George
When Roy Marshall asked me, back in 2016, when I was going to stop mucking about and put a collection together, my reply was that I genuinely had no idea who I could send it to. I was realistic that the likes of Faber, Carcanet, Shearsman, etc weren’t going to touch me (I was too working class, too mouthy, too political) but the panoply of high quality small presses was staggering. Then, anyway. Some have fallen by the wayside since.
Roy suggested Shoestring Press, and gave me a primer on John Lucas: write to him (John didn’t use email), describe the project and enclose some sample work (Shoestring didn’t consider unsolicited manuscripts), and be prepared to spend some time deciphering John’s reply if it was handwritten. So I did, and with the caveat that there was some considerable work to be done, John provisionally accepted the collection. “I’m a very interventionist editor,” he warned me at the outset. He wasn’t kidding. The title was scrapped. I suggested another. It was cast aside. We eventually arrived at No Avoiding It. I can’t imagine it being called anything else now.
Individual poems were excised. Others were drastically reduced. A long fantasia on Marxism and the full English breakfast, ‘The Sausage That Killed Capitalism’, was reduced from six pages to four. It was an intense process. I did myself a favour and decided to leave my ego at the door and learn from John. Learn I did, and I owe him greatly. He gave me my first break, published four of my collections in eight years, and he made me a better poet.
I wanted to pay tribute to him here on Chainlink, but I didn’t want to dominate or define the dialogue. So I asked a group of very fine writers who all had a close association with John to share their thoughts and memories. Over to them …
Neil Fulwood
*
I hesitated far too long before sending the manuscript of my first collection to John Lucas. I had known him for thirty years and was aware of how acute a critic he was, and how honest he could be about a poem’s flaws. The suggestions he made were, of course, thoughtful and he was also – as always – prepared to enter into a dialogue about what worked and what didn’t.
I first encountered John when he and Joan Downar gave a reading at Beeston Library. He was reading from his award-winning collection Studying Grosz on the Bus and I was particularly struck by a brilliantly-managed and politically aware villanelle. Shortly after that I started teaching with him at Loughborough University and quickly discovered that although he was a distinguished professor while I was a mere hourly-paid part-timer, he would always be respectful of my views and make time to consider them. This respect he showed to everyone, regardless of social status, was one of his great distinguishing marks.
Through John I encountered many contemporary poets who he introduced at readings at Beeston’s Flying Goose Café and elsewhere. I particularly remember the Scottish poet Alexander Hutchison and the Dutch poet Toon Tellegen, neither of whom I would have encountered had it not been for John. And thanks to John I was present at one of the last readings ever given by Roy Fisher.
John was a generous-spirited supporter of poetry and a kind man. He will be greatly missed.
Kathleen Bell
*
It was by no means John Lucas’s most important achievement to have rescued my second poetry collection when my former publisher couldn’t take it on and pointed me toward Shoestring Press instead. But it was a big event for me; and, since then, John has been a supportive editor and publisher for three further collections. His approval could always be gratefully taken at face value because any criticisms were likewise delivered without undue beating about the bush!
Beyond our author-publisher relationship, I have “spent time with” John through his books – particularly his autobiographical writing, his wonderful study of cricketing rebels and his recent essays on friends & friendship. I’ve been happy to post his book reviews on London Grip (online Lucas appearances being rare indeed). And I’ve enjoyed his company and conversation at poetry events up and down the country.
In real life John exemplified a courtesy, integrity and sense of fairness that seems to invite the prefix “old-fashioned”. His fondness for the culture and country he grew up in was both nuanced and coupled with curiosity and openness – thus standing as a rebuke to the flag-draped parody of Englishness currently making such an exhibition of itself.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
*
I first met John fifty years ago, when he was my second-year tutor at Nottingham University. He was an inspiring figure – warm, generous and fiercely serious about reading and writing. I fell completely under his spell.
John was a constant intellectual presence in my writing life. He published three of my books at Shoestring, I published his Flute Music at Smokestack. I edited the Five Leaves festschrift for his seventieth birthday and dedicated Ghost Writer to John and Pauline. He read for me in Middlesbrough and I read for him in Nottingham. Over the years we exchanged many books; I reviewed some of his and he reviewed some of mine. I have a shelf-full of his books next to my desk.
We maintained an often illegible correspondence by post-card, about books and people and politics and poetry. In his last letter he asked me to send him the MS of my new collection, ‘assuming I’m still sunny side up come October’. And now, unbelievably, he isn’t.
I was, I suppose, always too much in awe of John ever to be able to think of him as a friend, but I loved him. And I know I am going to miss him terribly.
Andy Croft
*
The only person I ever heard my dear friend speak of with utter contempt was Professor James Kinsley, Head of English when the young Dickensian first came to Nottingham University in 1964, whom he attacks with uncharacteristic venom in the ‘Shoestring’s Commons’ compilation (‘a man who included among his many dislikes literature and students’). However, before I knew any of this abiding disgust Kinsley was something of a legend to me as he had been approached to be an expert witness in the Sex Pistols Indecency trial held here in November 1977. Questioned by John Mortimer QC, Kinsley testified to the long history of the apparently obscene word ‘bollocks’, bamboozling the local magistrates by appearing in his dog-collar, for he was also, surprisingly, an ordained Anglican minister. It therefore gave me impish pleasure to cast Professor Lucas as Mortimer in the first iteration of my play about the trial, with another Nottingham publisher, Ross Bradshaw, personating John’s erstwhile adversary. To my everlasting delight John asked if Shoestring Press could publish ‘B*ll*cks – A Word On Trial’ in which Kinsley emerges, ironically, as something of a champion in the cause of artistic freedom.
Michael Eaton
*
Don’t feel you have to write me an elegy,
there are probably far too many
on the go already. I’d rather you told
a joke or raised a glass with friends.
Don’t feel you have to say anything
now, or share that stuff I said about
the use and misuse of a certain word,
mention our last conversation where
I briefly gave my reasons for loving
George Herbert, expressed a view
on what fame did to poor Chet Baker
or shared an anecdote about a poet
that had us both in stiches until
I brought things to a close with a brisk
right, good to hear from you, better go
Roy Marshall
*
John Lucas was a one-off, a wonderful man, editor, mentor, friend. I first met him in person in the early 2000s, though I’d known him by reputation for some years before. He was an inspiration in many ways. As an author and academic I learned so much from him. As regards the latter, he’d wisely left institutional academia behind by the time I met him, but he came to represent a kind of lost ideal – a true intellectual, a living-talking library, and an antidote to the commercialisation, marketisation, banalisation, bureaucratisation, social-media-isation, HR-ification of Higher Education. He once told me that when they first brought in “module specifications” at one university, he filled in the form, listing “the overthrow of the capitalist system” as one of the course’s aims and objectives. What academic would respond like that now? He had such immense integrity and imagination, as well as empathy – a kind genius. Anyone who has read his remarkable novel Summer 1945 (to give just one example among so many) might see that, even without having met him. And I feel privileged to have known him both through his writing and in person. He was unique.
Jonathan Taylor
*
To be in the presence of John Lucas was to be enriched. He was immensely generous, knowledgeable and passionate about writing and the lives of writers. He also had a straightforwardness which was refreshing, and let’s face it he wasn’t shy to share his opinions on things. He was an honest man, and he took people as he found them. He had such an engaging way of talking about the business of being alive – and I remember really enjoying his talk and reading at Lowdham about life in the 1950s. I also remember him having a chat with a man at a party – a neighbour who’d popped in and certainly not there because of any literary connections – about everyday changes in their lives over the years. The price of fish to be exact! That’s my abiding memory of John: how good he was with people and how good he was about writing about people. I shall miss his handwritten notes. The personal flourishes in a digital world. The down to earthiness. The jazz. The poetry. The stories. What a loss, but how lucky we were to know him.
Maria Taylor
*
When I started at Nottingham Trent University in 2012, as a newly-minted lecturer in English and Creative Writing, John – Professor Emeritus – had a desk in an office on my corridor. It held a very old typewriter that appeared to be broken, and several skyscrapers of books. “Oh, he hardly ever comes in,” someone said. “But it feels like he’s here.”
I’d been in touch with John previously, but was new to Nottingham and we had never met. My first sighting of him was at Jazz and Poetry, a monthly event organised by his and my friend (and colleague) David Belbin. John would blast his trumpet melodiously during the jazz bits, then sit in the front row in his listening pose – head down, hand grasping chin – during the poetry bits, taking it all in and looking like he’d fallen asleep.
Slowly, then less slowly, I got to know this generous, blisteringly intelligent, kind, multi-talented giant of a man a bit better, and he ceased to be an enigma. A few years ago, I interviewed him for a series of interviews with poet-editors that I conducted for PN Review. He was perhaps my most entertaining and open correspondent. He didn’t bother with the internet, so every few days a new envelope would drop through my door. His responses were typed (on a computer, not that old typewriter – presumably an Amiga 64 or perhaps something steam-powered), because he knew his handwriting was terrible. So I’d sit at my computer, as I am doing now, and transcribe him, laughing or pondering or looking things up after almost every sentence. It’s a good way to slow-read someone, if they’re worth slow-reading. This was an interruption to a longstanding routine: we used to send one another notes, letters, occasionally books, three or four times a year, most recently this summer.
I also got to know John as a publisher: his Shoestring Press published a book of my reviews a year ago, at his suggestion, even though (as he told me) those sorts of books don’t really sell. He knew that the best things in life weren’t things. There was nobody else like him. I hope my life is half as well lived.
Rory Waterman
*
I’ve made a number of attempts to write a tribute to dear John Lucas—as colleague, publisher, and friend—but everything I say makes me imagine him cheerfully waving aside its absurdity. Well, let me briefly wave his modesty aside: he combined so many skills—as scholar, critic, historian, editor, publisher, teacher, poet, novelist, memoirist, musician—as would, by most sane measures, add up to greatness. I feel privileged to have known him. He will go on being one of my imagined, ideal readers, whenever and whatever I try to write.
Gregory Woods
*
Since this post was published we have had further tributes added as comments if you knew John and wish to participate simply add a comment below.
Chainlink Journal
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