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Close encounters… Annie Freud

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'Nom de Plume' by John Stammers | About | The poem
'The Best Man That Ever Was' by Annie Freud | About | The poem
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Introduction

Annie Freud visited the Scottish Poetry Library on 12 March 2007, to talk about a poem by John Stammers and a poem of her own.

Annie Freud on 'Nom de Plume' by John Stammers

What is it about certain poems that makes you feel that something profound is going on, and instils in you the desire to attune yourself to its profundity?

John Stammers's poem 'Nom de Plume' is one such: the reader says 'O yes, I've seen that or something like it... I've thought that or something like it… but what?' With its odd gentility of tone and sense of quixotic tilting at a graspable, yet ever-elusive, aesthetics, 'Nom de Plume' is supremely a poem for which T.S. Eliot's telling statement - 'Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood' - could have been coined.

Nom de Plume

The bunch of flowers in the vase, what are they called?
I'll call them Anstruthers for no other reason
than that. Someone has set them there
in a drastic tableau, an attempt to let them impose
their one iridescence on the view. Those Anstruthers,
I know I'll recall them, their fine, pointed petals like scalpels,
the way the powder and near-navy blues leak one into another
and the discreet green of their stiff stems and leaves:
I'll see them in my mind's eye (that odd concept
that always makes me feel like Cyclops). One day,
doing something quite mundane, l'll look at them
in the plastic time that holds such mementoes
and long after the implacable in-rush
of others into the room, none of whom will say,
'How beautiful the Anstruthers are, despite everything!'

John Stammers

From Panoramic Lounge-Bar (Picador, 2001), with permission of Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan UK.
© John Stammers, 2001.

About 'The Best Man That Ever Was'

This poem came about as the result of a dare, but when I came to write it, I found that it was already there, like someone waiting for me behind a door.

(Many years ago,when I first read Histoire D'O by Pauline Reage, I had a desire to write an erotic piece that somehow communicated a sense of going to the ends of the earth.) At the same time, while I was writing it, I was overcome by terror, like finding myself on a path strewn with fearful hazards and from which there was no turning back. It was so exhilarating!

The Best Man That Ever Was

I was never expected to sign the register
    as all was pre-arranged by his general staff,
but I did it out of choice and for the image that I made
    with the stewards and the bellboys,
my gloves laid side by side, and his Party rings that I hid
    from my family (it was torment, the life
in my family home, everyone smoking and rows
    about guns and butter at every inedible meal
and my aunts in their unhinged state, threatening suicide),
    and as I wrote my signature along the line
the letters seemed to coil like the snake
    saying, I am here to be with Him.

There were always little jobs to do
    in preparation for his coming - dinner to order,
consideration of the wine-list, hanging up my robe,
    a dab of perfume on my palms.
But it was never long before I found the need to pay
    attention to the corded sheaf of birch twigs
brought from home to service our love-making.
    How he loved to find it, ready for his use,
homely on a sheet of common newspaper
    A Thing of Nature, so he said, so fine, so pure.
He'd turn away and smooth his thinning hair,
    lost as he was in some vision of grandeur.

And having washed and dried his hands with care
    and filled our flutes like any ordinary man,
the night's first task would come into his mind.
    He'd bark his hoarse, articulate command
and down I'd bend across the ornamented desk,
    my mouth level with the inkstand's claws,
my cheek flat against the blotter; I'd lift my skirts,
    slip down my panties and sob for him
with every blow. And I saw visions of my own: daisies,
    sometimes brown contented cows, dancers' puffy skirts,
a small boat adrift on a choppy sea; and once a lobster sang
    to me: Happy Days Are Here Again!

He'd tut at the marks and help me to my feet
    and we'd proceed into the dining room
and laugh and drink and raise the silver domes
    on turbot, plover and bowls of zabaglione.
You'd think he'd never seen a woman eat. Once he took
    my spoon out of my hand and asked me, Are you happy?
I'd serve him coffee by the fire and tend the logs.
    He'd unknot his tie. I'd comb my hair.
He'd make a phone call to no one of importance
    and we'd prepare for rest. There never was a man
so ardent in the invocation of love's terms:
    liebling, liebchen, mein liebe, mein kleine liebe!

and always the same – and in the acts: the frog, the hound,
    the duck, the goddess, the bear, the boar,
the whale, the galleon and the important artist –
    always in the order he preferred –
eyes shut and deaf to the world's abhorrence
    churning and churning in his stinking heaven.
It's over. But it is still good to arrive at a fine hotel
    and reward the major-domo's gruff punctilio
with a smile and a tip and let the bellboys slap my arse
    and remember him, the man who thrashed me,
fed me, adored me. He was the best man that ever was.
    He was my assassin of the world.

Annie Freud

From The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007), with permission of Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan UK.
© Annie Freud, 2007.