In this letter, one can see to what extent Eric Mottram was torn apart by his loyalty to his country and his cultural roots and the enticements of a more promising career earlier on... It might come as a surprise to many that he admired Anuerin BEVAN, the Welshman orator of the LEFT from an early age.

Department of English
King's College
University of London
Strand London W.C.1.
April 21, 1972
[addressed to Calle Augustin de Foxa 26, Madrid, Spain]

Dear Wignesan,

I gather you phoned again while I was at a conference of the BAAS [British Association of American Studies] in Durham -- which I said I would be at, actually... from the no doubt garbled letter which the old cow Chanter left, it seems you thought I had some plans for you.
[Mrs. Chanters was EM's landlady. She and I got along very well indeed, and she even tried unsuccessfully to stop me from going to Spain in 1967. She later raised the rent and EM was evicted -- the reason for their falling out.]
I haven't -- I wish I had, and I hope I gave no such understanding on the phone. I simply said if there was anything I could do I would. Your first paragraph strikes hom(e) -- the right to work, have a place, be free from menialities, free from publishers' shit, etc.. But this is not the case -- it is a capitalist competitive society to the very marrow and will remain so for a decade at least -- maybe more, in spite of signs of no-stalinist leftism gaining. You leave out so many reasons why you left things again and again that I cannot get you scene really straight. Spain is a bastard, so where's the surprise ? But I sympathize with your disgruntlement with the academic scene -- I've had it for nearly twenty years now, remember ? I exist at London without any kind of promotion at all for eleven years, please note -- plus endless promises: the scandal is now open, so there will be a change - I hope I have the guts to leave.

[Until then, EM got all his breaks from America: the invitation to spend a year at New York University, during 1965-66, from the Association of American Learned Societies - with a graduate teaching stint at Buffalo; he did confide in me then of an offer of a professorship at Rutgers University; teaching chores twice at Kent State University during 1968 and later, etc. His appointment as lecturer in American Literature at London U. was directly due to a recommendation from Professor Robert Earnest Spiller, University of Pennsylvania and the facility with which he remained in contact with matters State-side owing to Cleanth Brooks who was the Cultural Attaché at the US Embassy in London, not to mention the close contacts with the Beat Poets through Allen Ginsberg and his retinue...etc.]

Incidentally, if the british say legally you are British, where's the problem in claiming a passport ? You don't say in your letter - simply "a cleft thumb". There are no scholarships at King's for any damn thing, as I well know - everything is Dept. of Education and Science these days and terribly scarce even for our own students. Repeat: it is a capitalist country and a class system still.

By my "poutings" I take it you mean "spoutings". I wish they were: unfortunately they are more or less sweated out. To be brief: a book on Burroughs, a Rexroth Reader, a small Faulkner Profile, the Penguin Companion to US Lit. (with Malcolm Bradbury), two small poems volumes, and various articles regularly, and a small Ginsberg thing in booklet form this month, plus four issues of Poetry Review edited and much else. So it's been fine that way - it's just that what with this eviction order on me, and the job problems, I feel pretty bugged one way and another.

Thanks for the Spanish invite - I've never been and I'd like to but I'd better leave it open just now, things being so unsettled.
I was going to leave this to be completed later - but I'll send it: the reason is that I have contacted a friend of mine in the Spanish department here and she is going to let me know what she can. I'll write again.

Yours,
Eric

(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 1972_2023