A life in books: Hugo Williams

'Deep in my heart I see poetry as a branch of the entertainment industry. I'm trying to do a song and dance act'
Hugo Williams
'You have to use everything you know' ... Hugo Williams at his home in Islington. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Hugo Williams is responding to a question asking whether he wishes he were more famous. His father and brother were famous actors, his sister married a famous actor and his mother was an haute couture model about whom Cole Porter riffed "You're the top, you're an ocean liner / You're the top, you're Margaret Vyner." His poetry is subtly alive to both the glories and the absurdities of popular culture so it is, he muses, a "can-opening" question: it goes to the heart of a "central problem lurking in the make-up of a writer".

As a baby, he was apparently "inconsolable" and wouldn't stop crying until his mother stroked his forehead. "By this analogy I should be hungry for fame," he goes on. "But it seems to me now that it is poetry itself which strokes my forehead, not people reading it." And poets are different from other people in that they remain inconsolable. "They have to go on bawling until they are specialists in their art." He once considered calling one of his books "Boo Hoo Hoo".

Although I asked Williams the question in the sitting room of the unmodernised Islington home where he has lived for the past 40-odd years, he chose to answer it in his column in the Times Literary Supplement. Then again, anyone who has read his work will know that the things that happen to Hugo Williams soon enough find their way into print. Even the most cursory trawl through his 10 volumes of poetry leaves the reader apparently familiar with his glamorous family, his father's bankruptcy, his school days at Eton and many other biographical minutiae, often including elements of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Especially sex.

Williams says it was Robert Lowell who first showed him that it was possible to write fruitfully about one's own self and family. "Life Studies was the great breakthrough for so many of my generation. It's forgotten now, but people didn't much write about personal matters before then. So I was actually well into my career before I started writing about mummy and daddy and all that." The progression felt natural, and he says he is always "staggered and amazed" when people say it must be painful to confront things about his past. "That was a lesson I learned so early as a writer that I can hardly remember learning it. You really can't start if you're not going to be completely honest. You have to use everything you know. Graham Greene's chip of ice is not a very attractive thing, so you do sometimes enter into a sort of doublethink: 'They won't like it, but they might like it more if it's well done.'"

But going back to that question about fame he does acknowledge enjoying an element of privacy in operating within the small worlds of poetry and London literary life. "It's fairly sealed off. I suppose if I were more famous my poetry would be examined in more detail and I wouldn't like that too much. My world generally treats things as poetry rather than potential articles for the News of the World." Maybe not the News of the World, but the Daily Mail features pages rediscovered an interest in poetry when his 1999 TS Eliot prize-winning collection, Billy's Rain, revealed an extramarital affair and included a poem describing Williams's response to his lover's orgasm: "Do you think I mind / when the blank expression comes / and you set off alone / down the hall of collapsing columns?"

"Ah yes, I was an old-Etonian love cad for a while," he sighs. But for all his apparent candour, Williams's work is not as straightforwardly confessional as it might appear. The late Mick Imlah praised his skill with "creative autobiography", and Hermione Lee has noted how he "developed and refined his signature tune of personal, regretful, laconic intimacy, apparently so artless and colloquial, actually so crafty and controlled". Blake Morrison, a TS Eliot prize chair the year Williams won, says that any writer who draws on personal material faces the question "Why should what happens to me be of the slightest interest to anyone else?" "And there's perhaps a feeling that someone with Hugo's background - famous parents, privilege, etc - is somehow disqualified because of it. I don't believe that. The questions Hugo asks are of universal resonance: who am I? Just the sum of my parents? An actor or performer, who wears different masks? A face in the mirror? Or something more substantial? And so are the themes he explores - childhood, love, sex, ageing and death. In any case, Hugo is far less confessional than he seems. The language is simple, and the tone artless, but I'm not sure we ever get the 'real' Hugo, because Hugo himself isn't sure who that is. Often, as he has owned up to in a TLS column, a seemingly direct autobiographical poem of his will be a lift from, or version of, some previous poet. And there's a surreal element to his work, which hasn't been sufficiently acknowledged."

Williams's latest collection, West End Final (Faber), is published this month. In it he again deals with highly personal subject matter relating to family, lovers and himself. "But writing a poem has never felt like expressing something I wanted to say," he explains. "I have the material - images, phrases, memories - but I then have to sort of collaborate with it and write a few lines before any meaning might come out. It's more like archaeology. Digging away until you find something. It has great excitement and is the most fun thing I do. I know it's very narcissistic to dig around your own life, and in a way it's similar to putting on make-up before going on stage. Maybe that's how I get in touch with my beautiful parents, by doing something that makes me more like them in an aesthetic way."

Williams was born in Windsor in 1942. Laurence Olivier, a family friend, sent a telegram congratulating his parents on his birth. He has younger siblings: Simon, who became a star in Upstairs, Downstairs, and Polly, who was married to Nigel Havers and died in 2004. But it is his parents, the 30s film star and playwright Hugh Williams and Margaret Vyner, who more often occupy centre stage in his work. His editor said that Williams had studied so many aspects of his father for so long that he'd become the equivalent of Cézanne's mountain. Williams says that lurking behind the new book is the fact that he, now aged 67, has overtaken his father, who died at 65, "so I feel a little like I'm living on borrowed time. There is a slight sense that it's all about death somehow."

For the adolescent Williams, the war, in which his father served, was a great divide. "It was like a theatrical curtain. On one side my father was young and glamorous in these films, but on the other side, my side, he was unsmiling, had grey hair and was telling me off about my table manners. Both my parents placed huge importance on appearance and being amusing. If you opened your mouth you'd better have something amusing to say. It didn't matter whether it was true or not, so long as it was lightly amusing. My brother was very good at this, but all I wanted to do was shout or cry."

He says that in hindsight his father was probably nicer, and they were closer, than his poetry might indicate. "I would like to think I was making friends with the old boy after all this time, but reading the book I don't think I really have. It's a shame that I don't have more nice things to say, because he really did look after me."

A poem in West End Final imagines if things had been financially different for his parents: "What a relief to see our Beerbohm caricatures / still hanging in the dining room / and the table still there / with the extra leaf being used." But despite his father's bankruptcy in the early 50s, Williams went to Eton - while there he published poems in the London Magazine - and then his father paid for him to travel around the world, which later provided material for his travel book, All the Time in the World. "Although there was some self-serving aspect, in that he sent me away to break a trust fund. But that didn't work out as the money was then invested in the Australian stock market just before a crash, so he lost as much money as he would have paid in tax if I had stayed at home."

That early publication in the London Magazine was "fantastic", Williams says, but "it was an old boy network thing. Those poems are terrible, but John Lehman at the magazine was an Old Etonian, and I was at Eton, and there was hardly any competition back then." Getting a job on the magazine in 1960 also involved some nepotism - the editor, Alan Ross, was the stepfather of his girlfriend at the time: "I say girlfriend, although I never actually touched her. Though I did love her." Another "great blessing" to his career was his father helping him to buy his Islington home, which freed him "from ever having to earn large sums of money. He sold his rights to the musical Charlie Girl, which he thought was crap, but it then ran for 10 years, so the house does have a certain amount of guilt attached to it."

Williams had discovered the Movement New Lines anthology in the local library while at school and remembers the excitement of hearing "these people talking in normal, rational everyday tones of voice." John Wain and Thom Gunn were favourites. "I realise now that I didn't understand Gunn, but I could smell the tone, which I was attracted to, and I reproduced it on a very shallow level."

Symptoms of Loss, his Movement-inflected debut collection, was published in 1965, the same year he married his French girlfriend, Hermine Demoriane. They have one daughter, the journalist Murphy Williams. Hermine moved back to live in France in the mid-90s after inheriting a house, and although they remain married they visit each other only occasionally. Williams says he "lives his own life" in London.

Carol Ann Duffy, reviewing Williams's Selected Poems in 1989, said the early work "was intent on containing emotion within a lukewarm, apologetic, legs-crossed Englishness which seemed to find itself ironically surprised that it was writing poetry at all". But by the time he published Sugar Daddy (1970), Duffy said, he had begun to find "his own responses to love, fatherhood, home and travel, a misfit-uneasiness which bends style to its own fascinating ends".

By the early 70s Williams had moved into the orbit of Ian Hamilton. "I was still doing this dry, would-be tough, Movement thing. It was affected by Philip Larkin, who knew better than I how to use his skills as a novelist and poet. Ian suggested that you didn't need the novel part of the poems. You could just have the poetry, the tip of the iceberg. So if Ian had written 'The Whitsun Weddings', you wouldn't have had all the marvellous stuff at the beginning, there'd just be the 'arrow- shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain'. I went along with it because he was the guv'nor. You liked whatever he liked. But I must have thought it was beautiful as well, I suppose."

But as the decade progressed Williams says these short poems "began to look a bit posey, so I must have tried to react against that and lengthen my stride and get in a bit of family stuff and humour." His bed-hopping travel book, No Particular Place to Go (1981), a search for a disappeared B-movie back-lot America, honed his comic skills, and collections such as Writing Home (1985), Self-Portrait With a Slide (1990) and Dock Leaves (1994) saw increasingly sophisticated examinations of his parents and his childhood. "So I tried to avoid too much 'boo hoo hoo' by putting on witty endings and throwaway titles. And what comes out is a kind of buoyancy despite the moroseness. I seem to have a gusto for life, and while I might see myself as this poor defeated person, I still obviously have this ability to keep going. Perhaps I was more ordinary and more resilient than I thought."

And also more successful. He had in fact been winning prizes since his debut collection landed an Eric Gregory award in 1965. But the TS Eliot prize for Billy's Rain and then the Queen's gold medal for poetry in 2004 "were major turnarounds in my happiness quotient. The Eliot was the greatest moment in my life. It made so much difference to my life and career. It's something you can show, like a rosette from a gymkhana."

The books since Billy's Rain - Dear Room (2006) and now West End Final - have looped back to events covered in earlier books to reinterrogate both the events and the poems that have memorialised them. In technical terms, he says, there is a lot of mixing up of voice and tense. "It needs thinking about. There are 'I' poems and 'we' poems and 'you' singular and 'you' plural poems. At one point I had a 'you' singular and 'you' plural on facing pages so I had to move them apart. And tenses are fantastically important and difficult. In fact 'Tense' might be a good title for one of my poems. It's pretty much all there in that one word."

He says the notion of "time collapsing" is not quite how he feels he lives his life, "but it is certainly how I write. And that jumping around has as much to do with the giving of pleasure as any kind of rational thing. People like to make connections, but they don't want you to labour the point. I think when people read what a relief it is that our Beerbohm caricatures are still there, they know that in fact they are not there. It's almost the same skills as light comedy acting. Suggesting things without screaming and shouting. Lightness of touch is all, which goes back to my failure over the dining table in the 1950s to make things palatable and elegant and debonair so that people would smile. I couldn't do that, but I could do poetry, and deep in my heart I do think of it as a branch of the entertainment industry. I'm trying to do a song-and-dance act. But I never set out to be a poet. It's more like a massive hobby that has got out of hand, a gradual slide from a way of not getting on with my life, to something that ended up as a way of getting on with my life."

Williams on Williams

Washing My Hands

Muddy water comes clear

and I see my hands as they once were

with dirt under the fingernails.

I'm putting the finishing touches

to a tangle of branches and leaves

jammed between two rocks.

The dam seems to be holding,

the stream backing up, overflowing its banks

I can take my hands away.

• From West End Final, published by Faber

This is a sequel to a poem from an earlier collection, in which I try to explain to my mother what I've been doing all this time so far away from home: "Making dams? she will ask. / "Or making poems about making dams?" I've just noticed that peculiar future tense cropping up among the present tenses, as if to make the question go on for ever. Tense was the problem with the later poem - how to suggest different times without changing tenses? I needed the dull present-tense title to make it clear that it is happening now, while "as they once were" ushers in the long ago, which also has to be in the present tense to get the metaphor going. Placing the poem at the end of the book exaggerates its meaning, almost obliging it to sum up. "Finishing touches" rams this home. Here are some life-tangles jammed between two covers, it seems to say: tangles which, if placed elsewhere would have been just branches and leaves jammed between two rocks, and still are really.

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