Roy Fisher: June 11, 1930 - March 21, 2017
Roy was an instinctive raconteur. He had a gift for finding the unlikely in the likely and having fun with it. Sooner or later comedy would invite itself into anything he related, though I don’t know that he ever sought to make you laugh, it was simply in the nature of things that it would. You knew he took as much pleasure telling a story as his audience did in listening. It’s there on films of his readings. He had this thing he did with the right side of his mouth which would twitch upwards with a flicker of a half-grin and recover its deadpan level before you’d had time to be sure you’d even seen it or read his tone. A nanosecond later he’d push his glasses back a fraction and continue as if the instant hadn’t happened. But your irony detectors would have been set to alert and you’d find yourself complicit in, or with, the narrative. An old trick of the stand-up comic to win a public but Roy can never have had to practise it. It grew naturally from his enjoyment of the quirks and curiosities and fascinating improbablity of the way people are. He amused while giving cause to muse.
Given how ungenerously fate dealt with him in the last decades of his life, his good humour had every reason to fray but it never did that I saw. Ask him how he was (knowing full well he was housebound and semi-invalid) and he’d write back, “wearing out – nothing that’s not meant to happen”. Send him some new photocopy/staple/glue publication, the handmade world of reproduction he partially inhabited himself, and he’d respond as generously as he would have had it been a 100 pages of OUP, a world he also inhabited, thanking you for the recent “spineless item”. His accent, which should have been Brum but never seemed so to me, wandered around somewhere that was probably the Midlands without ever being standard, cleaning the edges of consonants to the sort of detail that meant that though you might loosely identify his roots you couldn’t really pin them down. To my sense he spoke Idiosyncratic Fisher. He explained it all to me once and later on the same occasion gave me a book to take away. I’d got it home before I’d noticed his dedication “in plain English”.
One afternoon shortly after Ted Hughes had died the question of the laureate succession came up in a conversation. He probably knew personally the likely suspects. He had no judgement to make. It was inconceivable I suppose that he would have been invited though there is a clear form of address in his work that would have made him surely at least as suitable for the role as his friend Eddie Morgan was for the Scots equivalent. Joyce poured the tea. The telephone rang and Roy never missed a beat: “ah ha, that’ll be the queen”. He actually made himself laugh with that one. And when Joyce finally died after battling – truly, the right verb – cancer for years, I wrote to him to apologise for not being able to make it to the funeral. He replied that he of course didn’t expect me to travel from France and that he was planning to scatter her ashes on Chrome hill, the limestone knoll on the skyline behind his Derbyshire house, but he couldn’t that day. “There’s too much wind”, he wrote. “She’ll end up in Yorkshire”.
Though we were nearly neighbours for ten years and were in contact for almost forty, I’d never have presumed to call Roy a friend exactly. It would have seemed pretentious. He was a generation and some older, and I met him when he was already widely respected, doubly or perhaps triply Fulcrum-ed, a Keele professor, and I just a student. He was great company and friendly but I was at the reception on the ground floor while he was up there on the roof-garden. When he had the formal role of external examiner for a piece of work I did, he made the viva easy by announcing at the start that it wasn’t an exam, that what I’d written was fine for the purpose but that the university was probably more likely to pay his travel expenses if I were to correct the four proper names that were inaccurately spelt on one particular page. Well, they were the names of Polish academics, a Jewish immigrant art historian from eastern Europe and I still don’t know whether Duchamp has an ‘s’ or not. But he made nothing of such scruffy proofing. He knew it wasn’t the substance. I don’t know what else was said that day but I do recall that he finished by showing me some left-hand voicings that Thelonious Monk employed, using the windowsill as a substitute keyboard, and that Monk had nothing whatsoever to do with anything we’d been convoked for, he was simply someone that interested us both.
I had to get older and he has had to die for the permission to come through: I may not have seen him especially frequently but he was very obviously a friend. He simply had the kindness to let me find it out in my own good time. I hope he’s installed now along some bus-route behind a gasworks in heaven and looking down with a glint in at least one of his eyes at the thought of how ridiculously long it took me to be able to understand it. Apologies Roy, I’ll give you a call if you’d like to leave a number.
Roy I'm sorry
you know when
we did the Stern
dale garden
tour I never did
think to ask
what you had in mind
for all that rhubarb.
Forgive me. It would
have been so good
to have found out
direct & so telling.
Given how ungenerously fate dealt with him in the last decades of his life, his good humour had every reason to fray but it never did that I saw. Ask him how he was (knowing full well he was housebound and semi-invalid) and he’d write back, “wearing out – nothing that’s not meant to happen”. Send him some new photocopy/staple/glue publication, the handmade world of reproduction he partially inhabited himself, and he’d respond as generously as he would have had it been a 100 pages of OUP, a world he also inhabited, thanking you for the recent “spineless item”. His accent, which should have been Brum but never seemed so to me, wandered around somewhere that was probably the Midlands without ever being standard, cleaning the edges of consonants to the sort of detail that meant that though you might loosely identify his roots you couldn’t really pin them down. To my sense he spoke Idiosyncratic Fisher. He explained it all to me once and later on the same occasion gave me a book to take away. I’d got it home before I’d noticed his dedication “in plain English”.
One afternoon shortly after Ted Hughes had died the question of the laureate succession came up in a conversation. He probably knew personally the likely suspects. He had no judgement to make. It was inconceivable I suppose that he would have been invited though there is a clear form of address in his work that would have made him surely at least as suitable for the role as his friend Eddie Morgan was for the Scots equivalent. Joyce poured the tea. The telephone rang and Roy never missed a beat: “ah ha, that’ll be the queen”. He actually made himself laugh with that one. And when Joyce finally died after battling – truly, the right verb – cancer for years, I wrote to him to apologise for not being able to make it to the funeral. He replied that he of course didn’t expect me to travel from France and that he was planning to scatter her ashes on Chrome hill, the limestone knoll on the skyline behind his Derbyshire house, but he couldn’t that day. “There’s too much wind”, he wrote. “She’ll end up in Yorkshire”.
Though we were nearly neighbours for ten years and were in contact for almost forty, I’d never have presumed to call Roy a friend exactly. It would have seemed pretentious. He was a generation and some older, and I met him when he was already widely respected, doubly or perhaps triply Fulcrum-ed, a Keele professor, and I just a student. He was great company and friendly but I was at the reception on the ground floor while he was up there on the roof-garden. When he had the formal role of external examiner for a piece of work I did, he made the viva easy by announcing at the start that it wasn’t an exam, that what I’d written was fine for the purpose but that the university was probably more likely to pay his travel expenses if I were to correct the four proper names that were inaccurately spelt on one particular page. Well, they were the names of Polish academics, a Jewish immigrant art historian from eastern Europe and I still don’t know whether Duchamp has an ‘s’ or not. But he made nothing of such scruffy proofing. He knew it wasn’t the substance. I don’t know what else was said that day but I do recall that he finished by showing me some left-hand voicings that Thelonious Monk employed, using the windowsill as a substitute keyboard, and that Monk had nothing whatsoever to do with anything we’d been convoked for, he was simply someone that interested us both.
I had to get older and he has had to die for the permission to come through: I may not have seen him especially frequently but he was very obviously a friend. He simply had the kindness to let me find it out in my own good time. I hope he’s installed now along some bus-route behind a gasworks in heaven and looking down with a glint in at least one of his eyes at the thought of how ridiculously long it took me to be able to understand it. Apologies Roy, I’ll give you a call if you’d like to leave a number.
Roy I'm sorry
you know when
we did the Stern
dale garden
tour I never did
think to ask
what you had in mind
for all that rhubarb.
Forgive me. It would
have been so good
to have found out
direct & so telling.
Tony Baker