John Whitworth, 1945–2019

John Whitworth’s poems are as smart and full of fun as a pair of glazed tap shoes. He is a wise and rueful virtuoso.  —Les Murray

It was sad and shocking news to read in Lucy Vickery’s Competition page in the May 4 issue of the Spectator that John Whitworth had died on April 20, aged seventy-four, almost in the same week as one of his admirers, our own Les Murray.

John Whitworth was a frequent contributor to both Quadrant and the Spectator, where he often featured among the winners of the odd fiver in the literary competition. In fact he had won some major poetry prizes worth more than the odd fiver: the Cholmondeley Prize in 1988, the Literary Review Prize for “Life at Eighty” in 2011, and the TLS Foyles Poetry Competition for “The Examiners” in 2007 and others, were, some of them, worth thousands of pounds.

His poems were witty, often downright funny, metrical, rhymed and well constructed. He said:

I write in rhyme and metre because … because that is what I do. That is the way poetry presents itself to me. I can’t write it any other way. I’m not at all sure I would want to, but even if I did want to, I couldn’t.

Here is “Life at Eighty”:

I like to loaf, I like to laugh; I like to read The Telegraph;

I buy it at the student rate, it tells me of affairs of state;

And on the state I meditate: I am a wise old fellow.

I potter in a world of prose; grandchildren tell me how it goes.

They drink and disco at the club; I soak for hours in the tub,

Careen my carcass, scrub-a-dub: I am a hale old fellow.

I mutter when I do not shout; in welly boots I splash about.

I walk on rainy afternoons; I dine on cauliflower and prunes,

And never mess my pantaloons: I am a clean old fellow.

A television haruspex; I like the violence; hate the sex;

I comb the Oxfam shops for togs; the country’s going to the dogs,

I chart it all in monologues: I am a stern old fellow.

The doctor gives me coloured pills to cure me of my various ills,

My smoker’s cough, my writer’s stoop, my lecher’s eye, my brewer’s droop,

My belly like a canteloupe: I am a sad old fellow.

A world of dew. And yet. And yet a world not easy to forget;

I cannot let it pass me by; I stop and look it in the eye;

And, as you see, I versify: I am a game old fellow. 

This poem encapsulates pretty well everything that attracted me about John’s poems when I first encountered one in Quadrant.

But it wasn’t “Life at Eighty”; I think it was “I’ll Be True” with its attention-grabbing first verse:

Goliath was big but he could have been littler,

Mickey could have been Mortimer Mouse,

Christ could have been a success as a victualler,

Chamberlain could have said bollocks to Hitler,

Coleridge could have just stayed in the house …

After his name first registered with me I was hooked and looked out for it from then on. In Quadrant, I was not disappointed, as from 2007 to March 2019 he had poems in most issues and usually more than one. His poems are so compulsively quotable it’s hard to stop. Here’s one from his last batch of three in the March 2019 Quadrant:

Natural Selection

Lungfishes clamber from the ooze,

And over countless aeons lose

Their fishiness and turn to frogs,

And in time’s course to cats and dogs

And elephants and harvest mouses

And voters in their little houses.

(That should have read, “And harvest mice

And voters in their little hice.”)

The last couplet is pure Whitworth.

He was also a master of the essay, especially when discussing one of his literary favourites, who ranged from Richmal Crompton to Patrick O’Brian and Ern Malley.

His poem “Angry Penguin” (Quadrant, January-February 2015), which incorporated some of Ern Malley’s phrases—

I hubble-bubble, the black swan of trespass

Where urchins pick their noses in the sun.

Mad monks incontinently chant their vespers,

I hubble-bubble, the black swan of trespass

On alien waters, fraught as chinese whispers,

As lights are doused and vanish one by one.

Black as my funeral hat, the swan of trespass

Makes urchins bloom like roses from a gun …

was followed by an essay, “Ern Malley, Wendy Cope and the Poetic Muse” (March 2015) in which, among other observations, he says:

Ern Malley’s poems were as bad as McAuley and Stewart could make them. They claimed to have written them over one weekend. They were rubbish … And yet there are words, phrases, sentences which have resonance. Why is that? One view is that the unconscious was at work producing images better than any McAuley and Stewart ever produced consciously. Or perhaps, however badly they tried to write they couldn’t help achieving sonorities, as it were, by accident. 

These musings reminded me that I had a book on the Ern Malley saga, Gary Shead: The Apotheosis of Ern Malley by Sasha Grishin, with illustrations by Gary Shead. I sent a copy to John who was so appreciative that to my delight he sent me back three of his own books: Being the Bad Guy (2007), Girlie Gangs (2012) and the anthology Making Love to Marilyn Monroe: The Faber Book of Blue Verse (1990), a comprehensive, entertaining and informative survey of the genre from “Eskimo Nell” to “The Ball at Kirriemuir” via Petronius, William Dunbar and hundreds of other inventive bards, including Whitworth himself. As well as introducing me to a cornucopia of his own poems not published in Quadrant, this exchange produced an enjoyable if sporadic email correspondence in which John encouraged my own efforts.

I found his poems and poetic philosophy (“my quarrel with a lot of poetry now is that it’s a damn sight too prosy”) closely akin to mine, his personality simpatico and his remarks on some rejected poems supportive. (“Don’t worry, it’s all subjective, that’s a perfectly good poem.”)

Perhaps I can close this tribute to a fine poet and a real gent with a verse from his poem “A Nearly Ballade of Poetic Misery” from Girlie Gangs: 

We’re the fag-smoking, balding, beer-swillers

Whose hearts never get to be trumps.

We would love to be young lady-killers

But we know we are lardy old lumps. 

Always when I opened a new issue of Quadrant I felt an extra jolt of pleasure if it contained something by John Whitworth. Now that pleasure will be decreased just a little by knowing there will be no more of his poems.

John Whitworth was born in India and graduated from Merton College, Oxford, and taught at the University of Kent. He lived in Canterbury with his wife Doreen Roberts and daughters Ellie and Katie.

Peter Jeffrey is a retired medical research scientist, a devoted reader of Quadrant and an occasional contributor who finds all of John Whitworth’s writing entirely sympathetic. The editors of Quadrant extend our sincere sympathy to John Whitworth’s family.