01Oct
Brian Patten died yesterday. (30-09-25). And Just that same morning I had been talking about him to fellow poet Brian Hinton, sitting in the Autumn sun outside Dimbola - I’d known Patten since the Sixties - and yesterday evening Mary was scouring Facebook and announced news of his death - age 79, same age as me - and the overwhelming memory of our last meeting - at the 2015 memorial concert for IOW Festival a few years before - flooded into my consciousness. Me and Mary had been walking between the various concert, art and poetry tents, and were heading for a Robyn Hitchcock gig when I saw Brian Patten walking toward us across the grass - his arms held wide and a big smile on his face. We embraced joyfully, and that memory catalysed a wave of reflection of the love and kinship that encapsulated our 60-year-old relationship. I shall miss him - the fact that our friendship stretched over half a century - but amounted to no more than a couple of dozen actual meetings - doesn’t matter - it was the serendipity and cultural context of these meetings that I shall hold so dear. We bitched about the fact that our favourite pub and meeting place - the Prince of Wales in Notting Dale - had been demolished and they'd built maisonettes for merchant bankers in its place...
In the 1990s Brian Patten chanced to talk about our most important modern Island poet,- the surrealist David Gascoyne, who I met because of my friendship with Judy Lewis. Judy (in her sixties then) had been reading poems to the inmates at Whitecroft - then the Island's 'mental hospital' - and she read a Gascoyne poem (which one, I wonder?), and an elderly man in her audience raised his hand, and said: "I wrote that" - so in rediscovering Gascoyne, the recently divorced Judy fell in love with him, and determined that he should not go unrecognised for his lifetime achievements, she organised his come-back, got him awarded the Legion d'Honneur
So David and Judy initially lived in Yarmouth, then found a house in Northwood, where they were tracked down and visited by Brian Patten in 1980s-1990s.
So Brian Patten, of course I will miss the serendipity we enjoyed over sixty years or so - its like an ache ro realise this. Rest happy in your reputation and remembrances dear man.
memo: Do see Adrian Henri (another Mersey Poet) and his book on Happenings and Performances:
Gascoyne was a significant cultural figure:
Dali in Diving Suit at the first London Surrealist Exhibition, curated by David Gascoyne - with Paul and Nush Eluard, ELP Messens, Diana Brinton Lee and Robert Lee. 1936.
"The first major Surrealist exhibition in the UK was the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in London from June 11 to July 4, 1936, at the New Burlington Galleries. Organized by a committee including Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne, and Herbert Read, the exhibition featured around 400 works by leading Surrealists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí. The event was groundbreaking, drawing significant crowds and sparking widespread discussion about the movement's place in art and society. "
Gascoyne had played a major role in curating this show, and had
personally rescued Salvador Dali when the breathing apparatus for
his deep-sea diving suit had failed and Dali nearly died of asphixiation.
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