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Published: 12 August, 2010
by JOSH LOEB

TO have a couple of books out in two successive years looks as if I’m being very productive,” says Alan Brownjohn. “In fact, it isn’t the case. You could almost say that’s been my work for the past decade.” 

The poet and novelist, who lives in Belsize Park, possesses a fondness for self-criticism reminiscent of the character who bestrides the pages of  his latest collection, Ludbrooke and Others, which follows Windows On The Moon, a novel published last year. 

Brownjohn describes Ludbrooke – the charac­ter who features in 60 13-line poems in the book – as an alter-ego of sorts. A man in his 70s, he matches Brownjohn age-wise, but the writer warns against seeing his creation as simply a mirror image of himself. 

“The Ludbrooke poems are about a number of moments, little incidents and significant epiphanies,” he says. “I thought there was a comic take I could apply to these and started writing three or four Ludbrooke poems. Pretty soon I found I was writing one a week, and suddenly Ludbrooke became a fully fledged character standing in for me. I was not prepared to think ‘I am this Ludbrooke’. Some of the incidents are near to the truth, some are a long way from it. It is a series of fictions.” 

Brownjohn describes Ludbrooke as “an older man committed passionately, if somewhat sardonically, to the arts, travel, politics, women”. 

Many of the poems in the sequence describe the humdrum embarrassments and all-too-human failings that pepper the character’s existence. In the penultimate poem in the sequence, a receptionist at the hotel where Ludbrooke is holidaying informs him: “I see we are still washing your Oxfam shirt, sir. It has seen better days – few of them with you.” In His Chivalry, Ludbrooke pauses at a junction to allow a pretty woman to cross in front of his car, so as to get a better look at her. The woman crosses and thanks Ludbrooke for his “ambivalent courtesy” with a smile that says, “I have sussed you out”. 

“I like to think he has a degree of dignity,” says Brownjohn. “But he often gets the worst of it. He can’t pride himself on very much.” 

As well as the 60 “Ludbrookes”, the book contains 30 “others” – other poems written since 2004. 

The son of an Irish mother and a puritanical “upper working-class” English father, Brownjohn was evacuated to Cornwall, where he was taught by former Labour leader Michael Foot’s mother Eva in a Methodist sunday school (he still has his autograph book from those days containing the signatures of the entertainers he waited for outside the Lewisham Hippo­drome).

After grammar school he went to Oxford, where he was introduced to the poetry of Philip Larkin, with whom he later became friends. After establishing himself as a poet in his own right, he was sent on several British Council-funded trips to Ceausescu’s Romania – experiences that formed the basis of a novel, The Long Shadows.

He has always been politically engaged – he is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and was until recently secretary of the local branch of the Cooperative Party. On his wall is a small “No to the Lisbon Treaty” placard, although he is quick to declare himself a left-wing rather than a right-wing Eurosceptic.

However, Brownjohn’s political beliefs are not heavily present in his poems, which elude easy deciphering in the manner of his hero, WH Auden.

“Maybe they came across more strongly in my earlier work and have gone to ground,” he says. 

“If you read hard, you might still find them. But I don’t think my politics have ever come across very strongly in my work. I have often regretted it.”

A rueful sentiment that would not be out of place in the mind of Ludbrooke himself.

• Ludbrooke and Others. By Alan Brownjohn, Enitharmon Press, £9.99.