Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue. Courtesy Faber & Faber.

Christopher Logue CBE (23 November 1926 - 2 December 2011) was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Life

Logue was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and brought up in the Portsmouth area, the only child of middle-aged parents, John and Molly Logue, who married late. He attended Roman Catholic schools, including Prior Park College, before going to Portsmouth Grammar School.

On call-up, he enlisted in the Black Watch, and was posted to Palestine. He was court-martialled in 1945 over a scheme to sell stolen pay books, and sentenced to 16 months imprisonment, served partly in Acre Prison. He lived in Paris from 1951 to 1956, and was a friend of Alexander Trocchi.

In 1958 he joined the first Aldermaston march, organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War. He was on the Committee of 100. He served a month in jail for refusing to be bound over not to continue with the celebrated 17 September 1961 Parliament Square sit-down. He told the Bow Street magistrate, "I came here to save your life. But, having heard what you have to say, I don't think the end justifies the means." In Drake Hall open prison he and fellow protesters were set to work - "Some wit allocated it" - demolishing a munitions factory.

Career

Logue was a playwright and screenwriter as well as a film actor. His screenplays were Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage. He was a long-term contributor to Private Eye magazine, as well as writing for Alexander Trocchi's literary journal, the Merlin.

His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems, later released as an extended play recording, Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry, backed by a jazz group led by drummer Tony Kinsey.

His poem "Be Not Too Hard" was set to music by Donovan and heard in the film Poor Cow (1967), and was made popular by Joan Baez on her eponymous 1967 album, Joan. Another well-known and well-quoted poem by Logue was "Come to the Edge," which is often attributed to Guillaume Apollinaire, but is in fact only dedicated to him. It was originally written for a poster advertising an Apollinaire exhibition at the ICA in 1961 or 1962, and was titled "Apollinaire Said", hence the misattribution.

His last major work was an ongoing project to render Homer's Iliad into a modernist idiom. This work is published in a number of small books, usually equating to 2 or 3 books of the original text. (The volume, Homer: War Music, was shortlisted for the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize.) He published an autobiography, Prince Charming (1999).

His lines tended to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography:

I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year

Many thousands of Englishmen,

Fists clenched, their bellies empty,

Walked day and night on the capital city.

He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the film A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965).

He appeared in a number of films as an actor, most notably as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's film The Devils (1971) and as the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977). Logue wrote for the Olympia Press under the pseudonym Count Palmiro Vicarion, including a pornographic novel, Lust.

Family

He married biographer Rosemary Hill in 1985. Logue died on 2nd December 2011, aged 85.

Recognition

Logue won the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award for Cold Calls.

Logue won the Paris Review / Bernard F. O’Connor Award.

He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to English literature.

In Popular Culture

There is a reference to Logue in Monday Begins on Saturday, a 1964 science fiction / science fantasy novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Magnus Red'kin, a character in the novel, quotes a fragment of a Logue poem:

You ask me:

What is the greatest happiness on earth?

Two things:

changing my mind

as I change a penny for a shilling;

and

listening to the sound

of a young girl

singing down the road

after she has asked me the way -

as a definition of happiness from his extensive collection, and complains that "such things do not allow for algorithmization".

Publications

Poetry

• Wand and Quadrant. Paris: Olympia Press, 1953.
• The Weakdream Sonnets. Paris: Jack Straw, 1955.
• Devil, Maggot, and Son. Tunbridge Wells, UK: 1956.
• Songs. London: Hutchinson, 1959.
• Songs from 'The Lily White Boys. Northwood, Middlesex, UK: Scorpion Press, 1960.
• New Numbers. New York: Knopf, 1963.
• Logue's A.B.C. London: Scorpion Press, 1966.
• For Talitha, 1941-71 (broadsheet). London: Steam Press, 1971.
• Twelve Cards. London: Lorrimer, 1972.
• Adecedary: Verse (with Bert Kitchen). London: Cape, 1977.
• Red Bird: Love poems. Guildford, Surrey, UK: Circle Press, 1979.
• Ode to the Dodo: Poems from 1953 to 1978. London: Cape, 1981.
• London In Verse. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982.
• Selected Poems. London & Boston: Faber, 1996.
• All Day Permanent Red. London: Macmillan. 2004. ISBN 978-0-374-52929-1. 

Fiction

• Lust. Paris: Ophelia Press, 1959.

Non-fiction

• True Stories. London: New English Library, 1966.
• Christopher Logue's True Stories from 'Private Eye'. London: A.T. Rushton, 1973.
• Christopher Logue's Bumper Book of True Stories. London: Private Eye / Andre Deutsch, 1980.
• Prince Charming: A memoir. London: Faber, 1999.

Translated

• The Man Who Told His Love: 20 poems based on Pablo Neruda's 'Los cantos d'amores'. Northwood, Middlesex, UK: Scorpion Press, 1958.
• Patrocleia: Book 16 of Homer's 'Iliad' freely adapted into English. Lowestoft, UK: Scorpion Press, 1962
  • published in U.S. as Patrocleia of Homer. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1963.
• War Music: An account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer's 'Iliad'. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981; London & Boston: Faber, 1988; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Kings: An account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer's Iliad. London: Faber, 1991; New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1991. ISBN 978-0-374-18151-2
• The Husbands: An account of Books 3 and 4 of Homer's Iliad. London: Faber, 1994; New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1995.
• All Day Permanent Red: The first battle scenes of Homer's 'Iliad' rewritten. New York & London: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003.
• Cold Calls: War Music continued. London & New York: Faber, 2005.

Edited

• The Children's Book of Comic Verse (illustrated by Bill Tidy). London: B.T. Batsford, 1979.
• Sweet and Sour: An anthology of comic verse. London: B.T. Batsford, 1983.
• The Children's Book of Children's Rhymes (illustrated by Bill Tidy). London: B.T. Batsford, 1986.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Audio / video

Christopher Logue Reads from his Poem "New Numbers" British Library 1999

• Red Bird (EP & LP). London: Parlephone, 1959.
• Audio Logue: a seven CD set of recordings, 1958-1988. Reading, UK: Unknown Public, 2001.
• Christopher Logue: Reading from his poems. London: Poetry Archive, 2005.

See also

• Translators of Homer
• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• Christopher Logue profile & 2 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Christopher Logue 1926-2011 at the Poetry Foundation
• Christopher Logue at PoemHunter (8 poems)

Audio / video

• Christopher Logue (1926-2011) at The Poetry Archive
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio clip
• Christopher Logue at YouTube

Books

• Christopher Logue at Amazon.com

About

• Christopher Logue at Faber & Faber
• Christopher Logue obituary at The Guardian
• "My Hero: Christopher Logue at The Guardian
• Christopher Logue Poet 1926-2011 Official website.
• Shusha Guppy (Summer 1993). "Christopher Logue, The Art of Poetry No. 66". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1929/the-art-of-poetry-no-66-christopher-logue. 
• A blog page on the Red Bird recordings
• Christopher Logue at the Internet Movie Database