Plain Old Mattress Ticking

Wendy Cope, Life, Love and the Archers: Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose

Two Roads, 320pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781444795363

reviewed by Gee Williams

Wendy Cope published her first collection of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, in 1985. But far from attaching herself to the brand of Amis senior, Cope has become a brand in her own right, strong enough to coax investment from the fiercest Dragons’ Den. I’m one of those delighted to spend my time on her, always sure of a favourable return. And I’m in good company. That first book has sold 180,000 copies, amazing for any poetry book, let alone a first, let alone by a woman, let alone funny. But I hate to hear her called funny even from my own mouth; to reread Cope at a bad time can help you over a malaise that’s been dogging you for months.

Life, Love and The Archers is a compilation of found pieces and journalistic commissions dutifully performed over the last 30-odd years. (Cope was for a period the Spectator’s television critic, though she found that watching the box soon became ‘unwelcome drudgery’.) That a stray story written for children finds its way into a book that includes a review of a BBC2 documentary about dance, a mention of Hayley’s death in Coronation Street and of seeing the former hostage and writer Brian Keenan in a car park shows how eclectic an assemblage this is. Interviews, personal essays and even the odd unsent letter are added. From the essays we learn that her childhood was pretty unremarkable; that she liked the things a million other apprentice human being have liked; that there were problems with mother, less so with father; that any dog taken into the Cope household was in for a short life and not a merry one; that there was a long-suffering therapist and the usual episodes of girlish naughtiness.

Do we need to know about writer’s lives? It seems we want to – hence their presentation, cut and pasted and packed in books in time for Christmas. But it’s hard to know what exactly we gain from collections such as Life, Love and the Archers. Cope admits that much of this material was never meant for publication and there’s no getting around it: her family/school/first love/teaching job is the plain old mattress ticking that’s intended for undercover work. This is especially clear when the prose is placed alongside the poems. Cope favourites such as ‘By the Round Pond’, ‘The Sitter’, ‘Valentine’ and ‘Idyll’ are classics, garments to be taken out and worn again and again.

But a word of warning to those planning to read the beautiful and romantic ‘Idyll’ aloud at a wedding: Ms Cope may feel entitled to her royalties. She certainly does when there’s money being made, as at literary festivals. Her essays ‘Price of Poetry’ and ‘All Rights Reserved’ are candid, unembarrassed and irrefutable on the subject of payment for work. She’s well aware that her clever, accessible poems are just the sort of product to be snaffled; they are the tiny but expensive bottles of Joy that easily slip off the counter and into the pocket. Except the electronic security is much slighter for poems. ‘My poems are all over the internet,’ Cope writes. ‘I’ve managed to get them removed from one or two sites that were major offenders… often the offending websites have no idea they are breaking the law. Neither do the people I meet every now and then who say: “I liked your poem so much I sent copies to all my friends.” I’m supposed to be pleased.’ You can almost feel the steam rising off the page. She is not hopeful that there is any remedy and has written a couple of witty, teeth-grinding stanzas on the subject that are quoted here.

In her prose as in her poems, Cope is very funny on the aspects of contemporary life we dismiss as surface but know and fear are the substance of hours and days: TV soap operas and Sudoku and the desire for a cigarette so powerful it could cause you to absent-mindedly walk under a bus. The presence of The Archers in the collection’s title refers to her addiction to the long-running serial and how the producers and writers of its latest storylines have enabled her to kick even this habit. (Cope has been boycotting The Archers since the death of beloved character Nigel Pargetter, ‘and unlike some of my friends I haven’t weakened yet.’) But it is on poetry and poets you come closest to the thrill of a genuine Cope. Tony Harrison performing on television begins with ‘lugubrious quatrains in a lugubrious Yorkshire voice’ but is soon captivating her with a display of ‘impeccable craft … never patronising and sometimes moving’. She attributes George Herbert’s particular eccentric voice to his ‘wonderfully playful delight in the poetic form and the fact that his poems are, at the same time, utterly serious’. She is similarly insightful on Douglas Dunn, AE Housman, Gavin Ewart and Philip Larkin. In her review of a 1990s biography of Anne Sexton (whose work I knew, whose history was mercifully a blank to me), Cope is unabashed about her ‘intense antipathy’ to the book’s destructive, monomaniacal subject but acknowledges that ‘there are good poems here’.

As for the rest of the pieces, you can always enjoy them as proto-poems. Her boredom/interest sine wave when watching football, the offer of a whole £50 to appear on the box (but only if she could come across as ‘lively’), charting a difficult relationship with Jesus and finding she was no good at games may all be genuine and enjoyable insights into the source of her work. Or not. Cope offers us what has snagged her attention, whether it be the moronic and outspoken categorisation of her as a Philistine by some unnamed male writer or the favoured snack of Joe Orton (sardines and rice pudding). All entertaining stuff. Do we miss a textual analysis of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung? Of course not. Better to wait for the poem, anyway: how the author died sitting on a sofa with his cat, his name an ear-rhyme for cauliflower.
Gee Williams is a poet, playwright, novelist and broadcaster. Her latest literary thriller, Desire Line, will be published by Parthian in June.