The End In Sight

It was in the old Skoob Books, the second-hand bookshop that used to occupy a corner of the Funan Centre in the days before it decided to style itself an IT Mall, that I came across a rather handsome copy of Desmond Graham's biography of Keith Douglas, the World War II poet, and decided that, since it was going for a song, it should be mine. Sadly it's taken me a few years to get round to genuinely owning the book (through actually reading it - the only way anyone can temporarily own any book); but happily I now do so, and have benefitted from an excellent read. 

I've come across the most famous of Douglas's poems with reasonable frequency over the years, I suppose because they are so eminently anthologisable: How To Kill, Simplify Me When I'm Dead, Vergissmeinnicht, Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Teagarden, being the obvious suspects - and what powerful poems they are, quite unlike anybody else. I was also aware that Ted Hughes was a big fan - he edited the selection from Douglas printed by Faber. So it was pretty obvious that KD was a poet of the first order, or very nearly so. And I suppose it was that awareness that fuelled my acquisition of the biography.

And curiously even in the last two or three years Douglas has kept coming into view for me one way or another. A colleague picked his poem Time Eating for an 'unseen' a little while ago. This was one I didn't know at all and it turns out to have been from quite early in the poet's career. Mind you, he only lived to be twenty-four, so nothing can be seen as exactly late. Then Behaviour of Fish... was featured in an IB workshop I attended recently. (To my surprise, no one, except the workshop leader, had come across it before, and there was me thinking it was regarded far and wide as a stone-cold classic.) So I was finally prompted to do more than just dip into Mr Graham's title in the Oxford Lives series.

It turned out to be several books in one: a fascinating portrait of the life of a reasonably well-provided for boy of the English middle class between the wars; an astute and sympathetic commentary on the development of an extraordinary poetic talent; a sometimes riveting account of a small but significant part of the experience of the Eighth Army in the Middle East, to name but three. But for this reader most of all it turned out to be a strange, protracted meditation on the certainty of an early death by both biographer and subject. Douglas's absolute, cold certainty that he would meet his end in the war is profoundly disconcerting, as is the fact that this strange assuredness seemed in no small part to fuel his peculiar genius.

The fact that the dates 1920 - 1944 are emblazoned on the cover of the paperback adjacent to Douglas's name couldn't help but act as a constant reminder of what little time he was given. A good reminder not to complain too much about growing old, eh?