Gabriel Josipovici is a novelist, short-story writer, literary theorist and playwright.Here's the thing about quote puzzles-the quote amuses you or it doesn't. Such a volume would only confirm what all his admirers know, that his best work is among the best in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century. But I feel it’s a shame and hope very much that one of these days we may see a Selected Poems of Laurence Lerner on the shelves. I wonder if he made much of an effort to get his work published. He returned to England to find the friends who had been poetry editors of magazines and publishing houses had died or retired and a new generation in place who did not know him and were not interested in what he had to offer. Sadly, and to me inexplicably, he seemed to go out of fashion when he moved to the United States. Why ears can’t see and eyes can’t hear, or why Thinking is just the way the brain cells lapse Though in later life he liked to assert that he no longer wrote poetry, only verse, there are a few poems he sent me but never published which I cherish, such as the subtle and hilarious ‘Let’s Play Philosophy’, which begins: ![]() Never flashy, he was, like Edwin Morgan, the master of many forms: dramatic monologues such as the brilliant and disturbing ‘The Merman’ and ‘Written from Ypsilanti State Hospital’ Movement poems such as one of his favourites, ‘Strawberries’ and formal experiments (he would never have called them that or thought of himself as an experimental poet) like the poems that make up a.r.t.h.u.r., a collection ostensibly written by a machine. Eight further volumes followed Domestic Interiors, all full of well-crafted, highly intelligent, often funny and often moving poems. ‘If I did nothing else,’ he replied, ‘I would probably not write poetry either.’ Certainly his manifold activities did not seem to stand in the way of his poetry. I once asked Larry why, since he was such a fine poet, he did not devote more time to it. On retiring from there in 1995 he moved to Lewes, teaching more than ever on various adult education courses, walking the Downs with his friends and active in the Quaker community. By 1985, disliking the increasingly antagonistic politics of the era, he joined his friend and fellow poet Donald Davie at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. In the course of his many years at Sussex, though, he was frequently absent, taking up temporary teaching posts in France and Germany (he wanted to be able to speak and read the languages, and soon did), the United States and Canada. Attracted by the interdisciplinary nature of the new University of Susssex, he applied and was taken on in the university’s second year, 1962. They married in 1948 and, after a spell at the new University of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), they returned to Britain and Larry found a job at Queen’s, Belfast, where Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane were among his students. On a camping trip in 1945 he met Natalie, and they both promptly won scholarships to Cambridge, where Natalie studied for a phd and Larry (typically) for a second ba. He attended schools in Cape Town and then the University of Cape Town. Larry was born in South Africa in 1925 of a Jewish Ukrainian father and an English mother. The quip went in those days that it was no wonder the University of Sussex was able to attract the best students since it included luminaries with such names as Supple, Lively and Lerner. ![]() Larry was always at the centre of any gathering, talking, arguing, endlessly quoting (he and Stephen seemed to have an uncanny ability to remember whole poems verbatim, and not just in English). ![]() Gãmini Salgãdo had rejoined Larry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and Stephen Medcalf arrived at the same time as I did to rejoin his old Merton friend, Tony Nuttall. ![]() Larry was only one of a galaxy of brilliant and individual minds assembled by David Daiches in those early years. If Sussex are happy to employ someone like that, I thought, then it’s the place for me.Īnd indeed it was. He had also, I discovered, recently published a volume of poetry, Domestic Interiors, a novel, The Englishman, and a book of literary criticism, The Truest Poetry. In those days you couldn’t open a weekly like The Listener or the New Statesman without finding a poem or a review by Larry. I don’t think I ever told him, but one of the reasons I applied to the newly-formed University of Sussex in the winter of 1962 was that Larry was teaching there. Laurence Lerner remembered – by Gabriel Josipovici Also a lecturer, he taught in many universities around the world. Laurence Lerner, often called Larry, was a South African-born British literary critic and poet and novelist. Laurence Lerner was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.
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