UK Edition
Robert Nye, poet – obituary
Robert Nye, who has died aged 77, was a writer who, although better known for his novels, wanted to be remembered for his poetry.
That may yet be the case. Nye’s poems would appear and reappear in slim volumes, as if he spent much of his career revisiting and revising them. He held true to Yeats’s notion that unless these pieces seemed like a moment’s thought, “Our stitching and unstitching were as nought”. He once observed that “the writing of poems is based on a trust in inspiration – it happens – tempered by a mistrust for the actual poem when it has been written down.”
At their best, his poems have a timeless quality, particularly in his poems about love and the end of love. On the other hand, his novels can often appear as though they are situated in specific periods of the past. The best known of those, Falstaff (1976), which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was not the only one to be based on Shakespeare’s England; but Nye could not easily resist references to topical concerns, such as when Falstaff addresses the 1970s’ preoccupation with devolution (which he calls “Devil’s Lotion”). Although Nye was unlike Falstaff, the tone in which he presented the anti-hero’s “memoirs” was by turns expansive and introspective, in a way that reflected the author’s own complex personality.
In his poems, Nye was quick to puncture the bubble of inspiration. One has his grandmother – “grandam” – listening to a nightingale whose “passionate song” is “Keatsian and long”. “Then, when sufficient nightingale she’d heard, / Cried out: Right! Just you bugger off, you bird!”
In this way, Nye could temper an admiration for the past with a refusal to be seduced by it. He had an abiding interest in Joan of Arc, and, rather than beatify her, he would mock the attitudes that damned her. This was evident in early poems, as well as his novel The Life and Death of My Lord Gilles de Rais (1990), which Allan Massie called “the book [Nye] has worked all his life to write”. In it, the author is as frank about Gilles de Rais’ cruelty as he was elsewhere about his Elizabethan subjects’ ribald, Rabelaisian sexuality.
Still, the simplicity and elegance of his poems could transcend these worldly thoughts. One poem, about Doubting Thomas, exemplifies his need to capture a moment when he had grasped an idea. He was frank about the result, saying: “In my fever I thought I could understand all that Gnostic stuff. Now the fever has gone I have only the poem, without the understanding.” The poem stands, though, with its opening: “I heard a voice calling / 'Do not be afraid / For blessed is he / Who is what he was / Before he was made.’ ” The ending speaks directly of the poet’s own vocation, and balances the start: “God knows I don’t know / But now night is falling / I am what I was / Before I was made, / And this is my calling.”
Robert Nye was born in London on March 15 1939. His father was a civil servant, and in one of Nye’s poems he recalls a couple of visits to see dog races with him, which could well have fostered an early love of betting and the study of form. His mother was a farmer’s daughter, and one of 22 children. He was educated at Dormansland, Sussex; then Hamlet Court, Westcliff, in Essex; and finally at Southend High School.
He wanted to devote himself to writing without any more delay. Although his scholarship was always highly regarded (he compiled anthologies of sonnets, of Walter Raleigh’s poetry, and wrote reviews of poetry for The Times and fiction for The Guardian), he received no further formal education.
It was as well, then, that his leanings and attitudes towards poetry were instinctive. As he once wrote: “No good poem was ever written which was the product wholly of the poet’s conscious mind.” One of his favourite poems was a combination of words he dreamed at the age of 13, and this would reappear, little changed, in later selections. “It was after this dream,” he later said, “that I knew what I had to do for the rest of my life.” When he was 16, his work was already appearing in the London Magazine and Delta, although this was fussier, showing the influence of more stylised poets such as Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. Recapturing the innocence and straightforwardness of his early work was made easier, perhaps, by the arrival of the three sons he had with his first wife, Judith Pratt. He wrote stories for them, the first of which was March Has Horse’s Ears (1966).
Nye was given an exemption from National Service as a conscientious objector, but joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. He subsequently worked as a reporter, postman, gardener and milkman (as someone who later found it hard to master driving, he struggled with milk floats), but before long could claim that his principal calling was poetry, and that he “never followed any occupation which interfered with that vocation”.
He pursued this in Wales, having moved there in 1961. His first two books, Juvenilia 1 and Juvenilia 2, won the respect of critics and poets, and caught the attention of T S Eliot, who wrote encouragingly. Nye was clear that his work in prose was to support his family so that he could continue existing as a poet. As well as stories for children, he also notably adapted Beowulf for them in a volume called Bee Hunter (1968).
Between 1963 and 1965 he corresponded with the poet and artist Aileen Campbell, and soon they were exchanging poems. This led Nye to visit her on the Isle of Skye. On their first meeting, he seemed introverted; before long, though, Nye and Campbell would leave their families for one another and settle, first in Glasgow, and then in Edinburgh; Nye divorced and Campbell brought her two children with her. She illustrated his re-telling of Beowulf, and was commissioned to design the costumes and make the masks for the operatic performance of his mystery play, Seven Deadly Sins, at the Edinburgh International Festival.
In 1977 they moved to Ireland, following the success of Falstaff. A year later, Aileen went to Zurich to train to become an analytical psychologist. In County Cork, Nye enjoyed not only the quiet that helped his work but also the tax exemptions Ireland gave to artists. He died in a hospice there, where he was cared for by members of his family. For the last two years of his life, a stroke had stopped him from writing; but he had at his side his last collection of poems, Almost a Dancer, which was the work of which he was proudest.
Nye had a personality large enough to contain multitudes, and which was as varied and unexpected as his writing. He gave himself to the creativity that dominated his thoughts and actions, so he was as likely to be shy as he was extrovert and entertaining. Alcohol could sometimes ease social encounters. Although it took some time for him to recognise an addiction to drinking, he moved into recovery and abstained for the last 18 years of his life.
He was also a devotee of the turf and, while he could wager up to £1,000 on a horse, he mostly relied on good authorities and systems. He was a lover of dogs and walking.
If his life can be seen as a loyalty to his vocation, and an attempt to remain true to the visions from childhood that had set him on it, then the poem “Catching Leaves” is an illuminating expression of it: “The boy you were caught leaves that fell / From trees he could not name. / The man you are must try to tell / Rowan from ash, yet run as well / To catch each falling flame / And hope upon its fame.”
He is survived by his wife, their daughter and two step-children, and the children of his first marriage. All six children would spend summers together, drawing from the poet the full warmth of his personality.
Robert Nye, born March 15 1939, died July 2 2016