Fergus Allen, 1921–2017

Fergus Allen – CBe's most senior author – died on 22 July, aged 95. His funeral was today.

‘To Be Read Before Being Born’:

No time is allowed for practice or rehearsal.
There are no retakes and there isn’t a prompter.
There’s only moving water, dimpled by turbulence –
And no clambering out on to the bank
To think things over, as there is no bank.

Fergus Allen: born 1921; father Irish, mother English; of a generation that largely subscribed to the view that the primary responsibility of a man, if that man chose to have family, was to work for the security and future of that family. (I may be assuming things here; but even if I am, I don’t think it’s a bad view.) He worked as a civil engineer, and when he retired from employment he was a first civil service commissioner; I too have difficulty in knowing from job titles what people actually do, but google it and you’ll find that no one gets to this job without a track record of long experience and deep integrity.

A perennial reader of others, he waited until his retirement to give his own writing the time and attention that it required. Fergus published his first poetry collection at the age of 72 with Faber; two more Faber collections followed before he was made, as he put it, to ‘walk the plank’; his next collection was published by Dedalus in Ireland, and then, from CBe, Before Troy (2010) and New & Selected Poems (2013). The latter has a foreword by Christopher Reid, who took on Fergus at Faber:

“… each new poem, each succeeding book, a fresh adventure. The vocabulary and diction have uncommon breadth, from the elaborately mandarin to the colloquial and slangy, and the range of voices extends from what we may – sometimes riskily – assume is the poet’s own voice to those of surprising personae.”

He liked Auden. He wasn’t far off being a contemporary of Auden. He spoke on Auden at the 2011 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and read his own poems (photo above) and was interviewed: they worked you hard at Aldeburgh, even if you were their first 90-year-old poet. In 2013 he read from his New & Selected to a packed audience in a café/bar in Brighton. Among others, he read the poem that begins ‘Annie’s pubic hair was beyond a joke’, and he read the early poem that retells the Fall as the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Guinness brewery in Dublin.

He was a poet acutely aware of pleasure and menace and mystery; a bracing tone, yes, but he laughed easily and well. Why is he not more widely known? Perhaps in part because he didn’t make a career out of literature; and when he did get noticed, there was too much attention to his age at the expense of the sheer excellence of the poetry.

Properly, 'Fergus Allen, CB, FRSL'. Establishment? He came to London for a lunch to celebrate his New & Selected; after the lunch, he and Joan, his wife, both in their nineties, scoffed at the idea of getting a taxi to the train station and insisted on getting the Tube.

Recordings of Fergus reading his poems are at the Poetry Archive.