HAVE PONY, WILL TRAVEL
[For Tony]
Eating, sometime in 1980/1, in the Szechuan Lau on Lockhart Road in Causeway Bay, a road running all the way into Wan Chai and The World of Suzie Wong where US GIs on R&R from Vietnam engaged in frequently truculent disagreements with their British counterparts. Tony’s favourite eatery. Fluffy white steaming hot hand-towels. Red table cloths. Red chilli-hot food. Red perspiring faces. The East is (well) red. At table with the late Martin Booth (a raconteur whose accounts, heavily embellished, were always delivered with great braggadocio) one of the first contributors to Shearsman and beginning one of his many re-visits to the territory where he spent almost seven of his early years between the ages of seven to seventeen. Muffled far-off roar of flame licked woks. Frosted glasses. Ice cold enormous bottles of Tsing Tao beer between us. Martin expatiating upon the virtues of poets turning to the writing of prose, as he had recently so successfully done with his novel Hiroshima Joe.
~
Rose-petal jam and scones. High tea in the plush lounge of the Mandarin (appropriately appellated) Hotel in Central District, Hong Kong Island, over the road from the modern Lego-like headquarters of HSBC where Tony spends most of his working days perched many stories above upon steel and glass. The urbane visiting English poet the late Charles Tomlinson congratulates me upon my, and almost Tony’s, first Shearsman volume. The conversation turns to Pound and, it being the East, Fenollosa. Then, just as quickly, turns to art. And Tony and Charles launch themselves into a passionate exchange of views upon Russian Constructivism. The rose-petal jam forgotten.
~
White table and chairs on a lawn overlooking the parabola of a small bay on a peaceful island in the South China Sea. Hot (mad dog) midday sun. Condensation forming rapidly on a chilled bottle of over-woody Wolf Blass chardonnay. Lunch: myself (contributor), Tony and the other expatriate editor of the literary magazine Imprint – destined to last only a year, but many of whose contributors (such as Roy Fisher, David Jaffin, Nathaniel Tarn and Gael Turnbull) would reappear later in the pages of Shearsman. So: a seedbed. And a site for all those ineluctable tensions affecting any joint editorial enterprise. Tony is uneasy at the political injudiciousness of placing the work of Count Potocki of Montalk in the same space as work by Doris Lessing, Robert Kelly and Fielding Dawson. I reach, again, to refill my glass from a bottle of rapidly warming chardonnay. The other editor fidgets noisily in his chair. Below in the bay the sound of a wave can be heard quietly withdrawing down the beach.
~
In Macau there was a little pink washed villa where the Portuguese Governor lived. It stood back off a praya lined with ancient banyan trees, where the sea lapped against the same stones it lapped against when Matteo Ricci set off for the imperial court in Pekin. Since then the diocese of newly won souls, along with commercial contracts, had expanded profitably. Not, however, into good works so much as into the dolour of freshly minted casinos: soul-banks. Here the secular under rather than after (unless you snitched or confessed) life of the Triads now held sway. And atop his pile of elegant masonry the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank’s top honcho here, a certain Mr Frazer, sat secure at night in his penthouse apartment reading the TLS and LRB behind a solid perimeter of bullet-proof glass.
~
On its ellipsis the earth tilts. It rotates. The seasons come round, following each other, one after another. And, in the vagaries of expatriate employment, too, one moves. Eastward, westward, northward or southward. To wherever the centre directs and commands one. So each week I found myself leafing through newspapers locating and cutting and stuffing into envelopes advertisements for positions in Hong Kong in Banking and trotting to the nearest post office to send them poste haste to Tony. To the cultural outback of a desiccated Middle Eastern kingdom where the heat was forever burning a hole, if not in one’s pocket – ‘hardship posting allowance’ – into the soles of one’s feet as they made contact each time with the earth. And to where returning expatriates would always quietly intone, as their flight attendant announced the local time so they might adjust their watches on landing: ‘turn your watches back a hundred years’.
~
In a curious irony – inversion – of events the apartment in which myself and my wife started our lives together high up among the bric-a-brac of high and low-rise on Robinson Road on Hong Kong Island, would turn out to be, after we had moved to our new island home in the South China Sea, the apartment where Tony’s first wife, after their separation, would start out on her life again as single. Enjoying a meal with her in that same apartment before we moved we were entertained by her accounts of how Tony was adjusting to his new posting and life in Kuala Lumpur and, particularly, to how some dark clouds were forming over his hesitation to take on and acquire all the accoutrements necessary there for the conducting of the role of an expatriate banker. What might those be? Namely, it seemed nothing more than the simple purchase of a suitable pony. For the purpose of pursuing business with a Raja over a chukka or two in an early morning game of polo.
[For Tony]
Eating, sometime in 1980/1, in the Szechuan Lau on Lockhart Road in Causeway Bay, a road running all the way into Wan Chai and The World of Suzie Wong where US GIs on R&R from Vietnam engaged in frequently truculent disagreements with their British counterparts. Tony’s favourite eatery. Fluffy white steaming hot hand-towels. Red table cloths. Red chilli-hot food. Red perspiring faces. The East is (well) red. At table with the late Martin Booth (a raconteur whose accounts, heavily embellished, were always delivered with great braggadocio) one of the first contributors to Shearsman and beginning one of his many re-visits to the territory where he spent almost seven of his early years between the ages of seven to seventeen. Muffled far-off roar of flame licked woks. Frosted glasses. Ice cold enormous bottles of Tsing Tao beer between us. Martin expatiating upon the virtues of poets turning to the writing of prose, as he had recently so successfully done with his novel Hiroshima Joe.
~
Rose-petal jam and scones. High tea in the plush lounge of the Mandarin (appropriately appellated) Hotel in Central District, Hong Kong Island, over the road from the modern Lego-like headquarters of HSBC where Tony spends most of his working days perched many stories above upon steel and glass. The urbane visiting English poet the late Charles Tomlinson congratulates me upon my, and almost Tony’s, first Shearsman volume. The conversation turns to Pound and, it being the East, Fenollosa. Then, just as quickly, turns to art. And Tony and Charles launch themselves into a passionate exchange of views upon Russian Constructivism. The rose-petal jam forgotten.
~
White table and chairs on a lawn overlooking the parabola of a small bay on a peaceful island in the South China Sea. Hot (mad dog) midday sun. Condensation forming rapidly on a chilled bottle of over-woody Wolf Blass chardonnay. Lunch: myself (contributor), Tony and the other expatriate editor of the literary magazine Imprint – destined to last only a year, but many of whose contributors (such as Roy Fisher, David Jaffin, Nathaniel Tarn and Gael Turnbull) would reappear later in the pages of Shearsman. So: a seedbed. And a site for all those ineluctable tensions affecting any joint editorial enterprise. Tony is uneasy at the political injudiciousness of placing the work of Count Potocki of Montalk in the same space as work by Doris Lessing, Robert Kelly and Fielding Dawson. I reach, again, to refill my glass from a bottle of rapidly warming chardonnay. The other editor fidgets noisily in his chair. Below in the bay the sound of a wave can be heard quietly withdrawing down the beach.
~
In Macau there was a little pink washed villa where the Portuguese Governor lived. It stood back off a praya lined with ancient banyan trees, where the sea lapped against the same stones it lapped against when Matteo Ricci set off for the imperial court in Pekin. Since then the diocese of newly won souls, along with commercial contracts, had expanded profitably. Not, however, into good works so much as into the dolour of freshly minted casinos: soul-banks. Here the secular under rather than after (unless you snitched or confessed) life of the Triads now held sway. And atop his pile of elegant masonry the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank’s top honcho here, a certain Mr Frazer, sat secure at night in his penthouse apartment reading the TLS and LRB behind a solid perimeter of bullet-proof glass.
~
On its ellipsis the earth tilts. It rotates. The seasons come round, following each other, one after another. And, in the vagaries of expatriate employment, too, one moves. Eastward, westward, northward or southward. To wherever the centre directs and commands one. So each week I found myself leafing through newspapers locating and cutting and stuffing into envelopes advertisements for positions in Hong Kong in Banking and trotting to the nearest post office to send them poste haste to Tony. To the cultural outback of a desiccated Middle Eastern kingdom where the heat was forever burning a hole, if not in one’s pocket – ‘hardship posting allowance’ – into the soles of one’s feet as they made contact each time with the earth. And to where returning expatriates would always quietly intone, as their flight attendant announced the local time so they might adjust their watches on landing: ‘turn your watches back a hundred years’.
~
In a curious irony – inversion – of events the apartment in which myself and my wife started our lives together high up among the bric-a-brac of high and low-rise on Robinson Road on Hong Kong Island, would turn out to be, after we had moved to our new island home in the South China Sea, the apartment where Tony’s first wife, after their separation, would start out on her life again as single. Enjoying a meal with her in that same apartment before we moved we were entertained by her accounts of how Tony was adjusting to his new posting and life in Kuala Lumpur and, particularly, to how some dark clouds were forming over his hesitation to take on and acquire all the accoutrements necessary there for the conducting of the role of an expatriate banker. What might those be? Namely, it seemed nothing more than the simple purchase of a suitable pony. For the purpose of pursuing business with a Raja over a chukka or two in an early morning game of polo.