Richard Holloway is one of the country’s most beloved thinkers, and he has turned to poets and writers for guidance and solace as life has gone on. David Robinson dives into The Heart of Things, this book created to offer lessons – in Richard’s words – who ‘know best how to listen, and teach us to listen’. 

 The Heart of Things
By Richard Holloway
Published by Canongate Books 

Sixty years ago, when I was eight, I travelled from one end of the country to the other to meet the man my mother’s sister had married. Uncle Jack was everything our family wasn’t – upper-class, rich, received pronunciation, effortless manners.  An elderly judge, he’d lost an eye in the Irish War of Independence (he was on the wrong side) and the left lens of his glasses was an opaque grey. My aunt – who was much younger than him and beautiful – warned us that he thought children should be seen and not heard and gave me emergency lessons in cutlery etiquette before introducing me to him. 

They were only married for a short while before he died, so I never really knew him. He left almost everything to his daughter from a long-ago marriage, but my aunt inherited his books. The year after he died, I came across something he’d written on the flyleaf of a poetry collection. ‘How cruel it is,’ I read, ‘that the old can still appreciate beauty.’ I don’t remember a single thing he said to me, but those words have stuck in my mind ever since.  

I was still a child, so I didn’t understand them as completely as I do now that I am nearly Uncle Jack’s age. But I understood enough. My one-eyed uncle was no doubt frightening if you were a prisoner before him or a child at his table who wasn’t sure how to use a fish-knife, but this poetry book – I can’t remember its title – had clearly unlocked something else within him. He was hurt, this small but apparently impervious pillar of the Establishment; hurt by looking back in old age at the tormentingly evanescent beauty of life.   

That particular sentiment is at the heart of Richard Holloway’s The Heart of Things too – his thirty-third and, he keeps threatening, final book, out in paperback this month, just ahead of its author’s 89th birthday. There is, though, far more to it than just an old man’s howl of regret. While most poetry anthologies just give you the poems, this one gives you the later chapters of a spiritual autobiography too.   

The earliest ones – about faith, obedience, and the surrendered life of monk and subsequent minister – were well covered in his wonderful autobiography, Leaving Alexandria. Even there, though, poetry had its place. When I first read it, I skipped past the epigraphs and assumed that the title was entirely straightforward; Alexandria in the Vale of Leven was where Holloway grew up, where Christianity first enchanted his teenage mind, and from where he left to be a novice monk in England. Only now, reading his anthology, do I realise that it also came from C. F Cavafy’s poem ‘The God Abandons Antony’, an extract from which was one of the epigraphs I’d overlooked and which is also included here: 

At midnight, when you suddenly hear 

an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly: 

as one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. 

Mark Antony’s plans have all gone wrong: he has been abandoned by Bacchus, is about to lose Alexandria and, by implication, Cleopatra, and faces defeat at the hands of Octavius. Holloway discovered the poem, he says, at just the right time – ‘when God was abandoning me or I was abandoning God’ – and it gave him courage.

Mostly, though, the poetry and writing he chooses have other messages. Because he no longer looks forward to the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ (as he points out, ‘certain hope’ is a bit of a contradiction), he often finds himself looking backwards at his life, as from the stern of a ship at its ever-widening wake.  In such circumstances, melancholy is inevitable, so no wonder it afflicts so many writers. Yet, as he says, maybe he’s got that the wrong way round and it is melancholy that makes them writers in the first place. But if it is, and if everything (including all poetry) will be lost to death, why bother writing at all? Why not just be melancholic? The answer – the bravery, elan, wisdom, regret and defiant celebration of life to be found in poetry – is precisely why Holloway finds it so necessary.  

His book’s subtitle is ‘An Anthology of Memory and Lament’, but although Holloway claims all he is doing is following Montaigne in ‘making up a bunch of other men’s flowers’, he is actually doing quite a lot more. Not only does each chapter end with a few lines of his own unpublished poetry, but the anthologised pieces aren’t just lumped together under loose themes but brought together in a persuasive line of thought. I nearly wrote ‘thesis’, but that would be wrong, because there’s nothing narrowly dogmatic about the book, so you’ll find for example John Betjeman writing about meeting death with hope, just as readily as Edna St Vincent Millay on facing it with defiance.   

For all that, there is a tide of ideas running through this book, and they do generally run in the same direction – towards the last things, death itself, and what we might miss most about life. Yet anyone who has ever heard Holloway talk about such matters, whether from the pulpit or book festival stage, knows that he does so with a wisdom and eloquence that can be strangely uplifting. It’s the same here. At the end of an extract, Holloway will often seize on a particular phrase and underline it by repetition (‘every poem, in time, becomes an elegy’ – Borges), or bring the whole poem back as part of another argument altogether, as he does with Mark Doty’s poem ‘Migratory’.  This is an effective technique, constantly drawing the reader into a deeper understanding. It also helps that there’s not a whiff of waffle or a drop of ‘poetry-speak’, just crystal-clear exposition.  I wish there could be more books like this, more personal, well thought-out and beautifully written anthologies, though that may well be another way of saying I wish there could be more people like Richard Holloway.    

There is, as I have mentioned, a lot of regret in this book: indeed Holloway admits that he loves the word itself (‘Like a good poem, it is its own meaning. Just say it softly: REGRET’). That much my Uncle Jack might have known all about. But towards the end, after the Cavafy poem, the book’s tone subtly changes. Writing about forgiveness (‘Jesus thought the unforgiven and unforgiving life were not worth living’), he points out how it can bring about ‘a certain lightness of being in spite of all that crushing weight of all that history pushing into and through us. Transcendence is the word.’ 

He concludes with a poem of his own that makes this very point. After tracking the formative memories of his life, it ends like this: 

Now as my own life
spools its last reel,
I’m still not sure
if Someone was behind it, 

like the projectionist 

In the old picture houses  

I went to and loved
as a boy. 

Maybe at The End, 

      somehow,
I’ll know. 

But wasn’t it great,
the show, I tell myself,
as the lights come up
and the curtains
start to close? 

It was, it WAS! 

AMEN. 

The Heart of Things by Richard Holloway is published by Canongate Books, priced £10.99.