Now don’t miss that Seneca.’ Response to place and weather, literary reference, and slightly owlish observation in just three brief, faintly archaic sentences: that was absolutely typical of the man.įor all their rivalries and alignments, writers tend to be convivial and collegiate. Charles Causley certainly was. ‘Fitzgerald says in one his letters,’ he wrote, ‘how important it is to kick around ideas with one’s friends that the curse of the solitary life is the way ideas (some good, some dud) can lie on the chest and curdle like undigested food.’ He appreciated and supported the work of many contemporaries, often behind scenes and he conducted a lively correspondence with a large number of people. Hughes’s village just outside Okehampton. Home in his beloved ‘Lanson’ after staying with me the following year, he wrote, ‘Howling wind and rain arose as I approached the Cornish border. When I first visited Charles Causley in 1967, I took a small engraving depicting Launceston’s hilltop Norman castle and two figures walking along a winding track towards the town. Charles inspected it, unbidden inscribed it in his lapidary hand ‘Charles Causley walks with his muse’, and gravely gave it back to me.
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