Andrew Motion has a notion
That his job’s a thankless task
He’d like some more appreciation
Is that really much to ask?
Being poet laureate Is so much fuss and strife
He says he’s glad he’s giving up
Blimey, Andrew, get a life.
Poor Andrew Motion. To his fellow undergraduates at Oxford he was known as
Bowel Motion. After a fling with one of his students, a tabloid dubbed him
Pelvic Motion. His scurrying between media spotlights earned the nickname
Perpetual Motion. Now, it seems, his unsung labours as poet laureate have
brought on Motion Sickness.
Mockery has often been the lot of the 55-year-old versifier, but nothing
compared to the derision that has greeted Motion’s lament last week that
writing for the royal family was “thankless” and gave him a case of writer’s
block. The Queen “never gives me an opinion on my work for her”, he told the
Ealing arts festival in London. On one occasion, he recalled, “the Queen
stopped me and said ‘Thank you’, but I have no idea if she really liked it.”
Writing for the royals had been “a hiding to nothing” and “very, very damaging
to my work. I dried up completely five years ago”.
He has only himself to blame. When he succeeded Ted Hughes in 1999, Downing
Street and the Queen assured Motion that he need not write anything, but
merely accept the laureate post as an honour. He could have emulated William
Wordsworth, who wrote not a single official verse. Instead, Motion threw
himself into the role of royal bard, working to raise the profile of poetry.
The upshot, say critics, is that as Motion nears the end of his 10-year term
in May he has produced not a single poem that the public can recall in the
way that they associate Sea Fever with John Masefield, The Charge of the
Light Brigade with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and A Subaltern’s Love Song with
John Betjeman – all previous laureates. Whereas the nation embraced Betjeman
as a teddy bear, most people wonder about the purpose of Motion.
Not so those who have known him since he was a Rupert Brooke figure with
classic good looks and a soft voice that invited listeners to lean closer.
Many of his admirers are women. “He’s terribly charming, beguiling and good
company,” said one. “He has the most wonderful quality of attention that he
gives people.” Another observed that he was “extremely dishy” and “has the
most beautiful smile”.
With two marriages behind him, Motion lives modestly in north London. When not
visiting schools, giving readings at literary festivals or building up the
Poetry Archive – a website on which dead and living poets read their work –
he sits on innumerable committees. He is also professor of creative writing
at Royal Holloway, University of London.
These laudable works cannot detract from the fact that Motion has never
written a memorable line in his life, claims one of his arch-tormentors,
David Sexton, literary editor of the Evening Standard. Sexton wrote last
week that the poem for which the Queen tersely thanked Motion was “a
stinker, like all Motion’s verse”. Composed for the Queen’s diamond wedding
anniversary, it began: “Love found a voice and spoke two names aloud.”
The problem, Sexton believes, is that little of Motion’s poetry makes sense:
“The metaphors don’t work and his adjectives don’t have any natural relation
to the nouns they are attached to. It’s like watching somebody who can’t
actually swim attempting the 100m freestyle over and over again.”
Some people cannot forgive Motion for dishing the dirt on Philip Larkin, his
mentor, in a 1993 biography that exposed the poet’s interest in porn and the
way he treated women. Larkin had taken a shine to Motion at the University
of Hull, where the former was in residence as librarian and the latter was
teaching English.
The older poet observed of his protégé: “Very tall, sissy voice, gentlemanly,
good looking. I quite like him.” However, he wrote to a friend in 1980 that
Motion was “not really tough enough – in his writing, that is”.
Motion had to tough out accusations of sexual harassment in his next academic
post at the University of East Anglia, where he succeeded Malcolm Bradbury
as professor of creative writing. Comparisons were drawn with Bradbury’s
novel The History Man, a satire about a lecherous university lecturer, after
Motion’s relationship with Laura Fish, a 37-year-old postgraduate student on
his course, came to light.
Fish claimed their brief affair began with Motion “blowing kisses” at her.
Among his 40 passionate e-mails, she alleged, he wrote: “My head is full of
a million wasps and bees, and one beautiful song bird.” The next day he
wrote: “Thank you again. And again. It was lovely to be with you yesterday,
lovely and tantalising and happy-making.” Motion’s flirtations with
attractive female students provided fertile ground for the tabloid press.
Although Motion admitted making “a fool of himself”, he claimed Fish was the
aggressor and lived “in a world of smoke and mirrors”. A university inquiry
cleared him of sexual harassment in 2001, but Motion did not escape the
consequences. For 16 years he had been married to Jan Dalley, arts editor of
the Financial Times and the mother of his three children. The couple split
up a year later.
Born in London on October 25, 1952, Motion was raised in a big white Georgian
house at Stisted near Braintree in Essex. His great-grandfather had founded
the Taylor Walker brewing empire and his father, Richard, was a brewer, too,
although he worked “at a desk, adding things up”. His mother, Gilly, was a
country lady – “beautiful, thin and elegant” – who rode to hounds and called
him “a lamp-post” because he was “no use at cuddling”.
“My family didn’t place great value on learning and there were few books in
the house,” Motion recalled. He fared poorly at Radley college until he
encountered a “brilliant” English teacher in the sixth form. Mr Way
introduced him to poetry – first Hardy, then Larkin, WH Auden, Heaney,
Hughes, Words-worth and Keats.
Motion was struck down by pains in his knees that required painful cortisone
injections, a fortnight’s stay at a London clinic and recuperation at home.
In his autobiography, In the Blood, he recalled: “Mr Way wrote me a few
letters saying get well soon and then, when I was ready, he sent me lists of
books to read, and ideas for essays to write.”
He was 17 when he enjoyed his first kiss with a girl called Julia. At the same
moment, by his calculation, his mother fell from her horse while pursuing a
fox, hitting her head. She never fully recovered and died nine years later.
“For most people,” he wrote, “childhood ends slowly . . . But my childhood
had ended suddenly.” It became the defining moment of his life. Poetry
served as “a retreat from my life and as a framework to understand its
miserable randomness”.
At University College, Oxford, he could not believe his luck when Auden
offered him a weekly session on poetry writing: “I worshipped him the other
side of idolatry and it was like spending an hour each week in the presence
of God.”
Motion’s first poems at school had been “hopeless word fountains”, but he
began to make a name for himself, winning the Newdi-gate prize for
undergraduate poetry. In 1980 he became editor of the Poetry Review for two
years before joining the publisher Chatto & Windus to start a poetry
list. By then his first marriage to Joanna Powell was heading for divorce.
Soon after Motion met and married Dalley, who was working as an editor at
Chatto. “They would give great parties at their house in Tufnell Park,” a
family friend recalls. “It was terrible when they split up.”
Motion’s appointment as poet laureate was attacked as safe and bland, with two
poets denouncing Labour’s choice as “a bag of shite” and “an
insult to the country’s intelligence”. Nobody could deny, however, that he
took his duties as “a flag-waver for poetry” seriously.
It might be tempting to blame Motion’s unmemorable efforts on the “butt of
sack” – 750 bottles of sherry – that come as official recompense along with
his £5,000 salary. But it turns out the sherry is a gift from the king of
Spain and the poet has been remiss in claiming it – Slow Motion, then.
