Feature: Literature - Robert Nye
Published: 21 April, 2011
by JOHN HORDER
I HAVE an interest to declare in writing about Robert Nye in connection with Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23. We have known one another – mostly through snail mail and long- distance phone calls – for more than 55 years.
He lives now a reclusive life in County Cork.
We first met for a walk in Kew Gardens after I had returned from a stint in Cyprus as a photographer of funerals in the army in 1956. I had written to him after enjoying his poem “Kingfisher” in Alan Ross’s London Magazine.
Nervously, I showed him my first poem, “Mocio Among The Litmus Trees” – written on a train from Victoria to Purley when I was a 17-year-old schoolboy and re-discovered recently in the Pentameters Poetry Archive by Léonie Scott-Matthew, artistic director at the theatre.
Martin Seymour-Smith, who was to become Robert’s closest literary friend, included Robert in his comprehensive New Guide to Modern World Literature: “Robert Nye (born 1939) is a gifted novelist – but he is probably more gifted as a poet – whose best novels are his least well known.
“‘Falstaff’ (1976) was a popular success, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and The Guardian Fiction Prize in 1976 and is very bold [he means bawdy].
“Nye, a successful pasticheur, is original in spite of himself. His best novels are Doubtfire (1966), and The Voyage of the Destiny (1982), the latter about Sir Walter Raleigh.
“A few of his poems are very moving. He is much better than his frantically over-enthusiastic but attractively written book reviews suggest (of paperbacks for Tribune, novels for the Guardian and books of poems for The Times.)”
Dame Margaret Drabble introduced Robert to a Waterstones-sized audience in her editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
His greatest successes have been his last novel, The Late Mr Shakespeare (Chatto & Windus), which owes as much to Rabelais as “Falstaff” did. It has been dramatised twice on BBC Radio 4, mainly due to John Tydeman, Adrian Mole’s midwife, who first told the late Giles Gordon, the literary agent, about its existence over lunch at the Garrick Club.
It is narrated by Robert Pickleherring, an actor who delves into every nook and cranny of Shakespeare’s conception and demise, and everything in between, and played with panache by Jim Broadbent in the life-affirming Radio 4 version.
Robert’s finest poem, “A Valediction”, Shakespearean to its very core, has just been published in the Greville Press pamphlet Man, Dream No More of Curious Mysteries, selected by Anthony Astbury (£7.50):
There is no more to be said:
Soon enough you will be dead;
Soon enough an end of light
And then everlasting night.
There is no more to be done:
Nothing new beneath the sun:
Not a thing that you can do
That will make more sense of
you.
Cry then, cry beyond belief
Like that poor repentant thief
As he died at Calvary:
Jesus, Lord, remember me!