Snapshots of the City:
Reading the City manuscripts

Adam Piette

Roy Fisher’s City came into being through the Pound-like good offices of Michael Shayer who helped shape the poems into a collaged Paterson-like wild sequence. Before that intervention, Fisher had been experimenting with writing free floating lyrics about Birmingham - to which he’d returned whilst his father was dying in the late 1950s - as well as developing a curious visionary patchwork of a memoir-impressionist-novel called The Citizen. The prose/poetry alternations of City have their source in the splicing together of the lyrics and the visionary novelised autobiography.

The archive at Sheffield holds the drafts and manuscripts of the complex genesis of City and Peter Robinson will be publishing an edition of The Citizen, extracts from the important notebook Fisher used both to compose The Citizen and City, and a full account of the making of City through the different phases and mutations, including the 1961 Migrant Press pamphlet version that was largely Shayer’s editorial work, and a previously unpublished 1961-63 version that predated the definitive version that came into being with the Fulcrum Press Collected Poems 1968.

What the manuscripts afford one is a glimpse into the special genius Roy Fisher had for visionary clarity of composition working at varying composite levels of perception and imagination, what one might call a lucidity of affect, eye and reflection binding together language and urban vision into a complex. The blend of dark Romantic visionary receptivity with a documentary cool objective hard and clear sightedness makes City an apocalyptic text in its post-Romantic fervour, nerves and fibre, at the same time as it keenly registers the data of consciousness that records the archaic Birmingham in its death throes after the bombing and just as the developers were beginning their demolition work.

As his father lay dying, and as he trawled across the city at the ungodly hours of a jazz musician, Birmingham revealed itself as London had to Blake, as Prague had to Kafka, as Paterson to Williams, in its scary detail, its vivid debris and ruin, its undocumented vistas, perspectives, corners and nooks. The lucidity and clarity of the eye on the city records not as a camera but as an eye open to the neurosis going on: as both symptomatic citizen-creature of the city, and as diagnostic analyst of its social imaginary. That spooky doomy clarity of vision can be gauged in the manuscripts of The Citizen. In this scan from the archive, we have the section which forms the opening paragraph of City:

The clarity is there in the hand: measured, so readable, a beautiful calligraphy that matches the lucidity of the thinking through of the desolate scene. The text speaks of clarity: the bald curve of the hill ‘shows quite clearly here’; the script like that brilliant road, the manuscript lines stacked close too creating rough quadrilaterals of paragraph, with a ‘diffused and baleful’ prose lyricism that is aware of the hand’s cautious movement across the page (like those cars) in parallel to the motions of the eye across the waste land (there’s even a hint of enjambment and shift to the west of the page in ‘runs out towards / the west’).

The eye sees clearly with documentary depth of field, but the tongue speaks with the language of another age (there is a fin de siècle yellow flare to the prose), just as Birmingham still shines with the yellow light of the gas-lamps, still shining grimly as a 19th century city on the cusp of becoming ghostly spacetime.

The archive also gives us the immeasurable pleasure of being able to track Roy Fisher’s own editorial mind at work, especially in the labour spent turning the Migrant Press version into the astonishing sequence of the 1968 City. We can catch Fisher at his equally lucid work as editor in the following scan from The Citizen manuscripts, this from the important notebook which had been his impression-diary. We can see here Fisher boxing off an extract from the notebook which would end up in The City:

In the final poem, we have:

I look for things here that make old men and dead men seem young. Things which have escaped, the landscapes of many childhoods.

Wharves, the oldest parts of factories, tarred gable ends rearing to take the sun over lower roofs. Soot, sunlight, brick-dust; and the breath that tastes of them.

(The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010, p. 35)

Fisher takes the end of his second sentence and patches it into the first: the paragraph break performs the service of a conceptual colon, illustrating the kinds of things he means. These are refined down from the Dickensian list of buildings, the second, third and fourth sentences fused into two, jettisoning half the prose to leave a core residue that preserves the lyrical vocalisations (‘Soot, sunlight, brick-dust’), crafting a prose music from the prosaic - especially notable in the distillation of the Mallarméan-Rimbauldian ‘tarred gable ends rearing to take the sun over lower roofs’ from ‘Tarred gable ends, tenements made more stout than any of the lives they had held, rearing their windows to take the sun over lower roofs’. The cuts both fuse the prose into rhythmic units that sing and introduce the glint of enigma (the mysterious quiet violence of the dynamics of those gable-ends rearing and taking the sun).

The most dramatic change alongside the new material (‘wharves’ replacing the canal bridges, ‘many’ substituted for ‘uncountable’) is that shift from what is another item in the urban vision after the brick-dust, ‘the idle, unceasing wind of breath’, to the extraordinary cool and metaphysical phrase after the semi-colon: ‘; and the breath that tastes of them.’

The breath motif of City is an important one, gathering together an almost phobic sense of the collective panting of Birmingham’s population with a sense of the invocatory silent speech of the city which the poet-citizen is channelling. Here the breath turns from an item of the city’s environment registered rather melodramatically with the wind metaphor to a collective-individual exhalation that has incorporated the soot, sunlight and brick-dust and releases it into the city’s air as airy perfume and toxic cough.

The breath contains multitudes, is coloured by the city, by its brick and coal pollution, but also contains the sunlight, as though the visions the sun illuminates can turn into breath, into voice, and then into the text we are reading. This revision offers quite extraordinary delight, a real gift that I feel I have been given, out of the blue, out of the sooty ink and brickbat pessimism of City, by the archive Sheffield is so lucky to be able to host.