More on Eric Mottram's literary endeavours and mine...

AIR-LETTER
Eric Mottram, King's College, University of London, Strand,
LONDON W.C. 2
January 9, 1962
Addressed to: Mr. T. Wignesan, P. O. Box 2211, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaya
15, Vicarage Gate, London W. 8
January 9, 1962

Dear Wignesan,

I hope this letter doesn't shock you into ….. [indecipherable word] of the bends or something malarial. It's really just to thank you for your delightful Christmas card -- and enquire how you are. Why in the name of all that's holy don't you write and tell me how you are getting on in your return to old haunts, birthplaces, hideouts, and how your anthology is coming along ?

[Stephen Spender, then the co-editor of "Encounter" in London, approached me during the recess of his tallk on "Ugly Beauty in Poetry" at Frankfurt, to ask me if I "write", and my response in the affirmative goaded him to invite me to send him my work. Hence began an exchange of letters which led to my accepting a round-trip to South and Southeast Asia for the Congress for Cultural Freedom: I also proposed the putting together of an anthology of Malaysian-Singaporean literature(s) which their centre in Paris agreed to publish. This's yet another example of my youthful naivety and/or gullibility, I must add. My widowed mother and younger sisters and brothers were plunged in the most dire circumstances.]

Shall we be seeing you soon in this chilly northern waste ? Or are you become a Malayan by residence as well as by nature ?

Life jogs along as ever with me -- I've taken on far too many articles and books and so I'm constantly feeling oppressed with work/and/or/pleasure. I'm off to America in April, all being well, but only for a few weeks this time. But I'm looking forward to it a great deal.

Gregory Corso was in London and I had lunch with him. And I nearly had a reunion with Norman Mailer but he had to hurry back to the States -- he wrote me a decent letter, however. My latest idea is an English volume of William Carlos William's poems, including all five books of "Paterson" -- but I'm not sure how to go about it yet. In any case, I have only just completed a hateful series of articles for a symposium -- ill-paid and laborious but it taught me (a) a lot about American poetry, and (b) never again to accept such drudgery on slave wages. For our local college magazine, I had a poem and a long article on continuity and discontinuity in the arts today -- and two more poems in the next issue -- I'll show them to you one of these days. I had a weird poetry-making bout in the mid-summer (madness).

Now I must get down to my Penguin. And more immediately leave home -- I'm off to dinner with Gung Wu and Margaret tonight. [ Wang Gung-wu was a colleague of EM in Singapore while his wife Margaret was EM's student.] Incidentally he was on telly recently, talking about Singapore -- or his voice was.

All the best -- and write if you can.

Eric Mottram

(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 1962-2023