The enigma of Charles Causley

Patrick Gale, Mother’s Boy, Tinder Press (Headline), 406 pages, £20

Charles Causley is remembered as a sort of literary Alfred Wallis, a writer of deceptively simple ballad-form poetry; reviving his reputation now nearly twenty years after his death in 2003 perhaps inspired by the Covid fashion for sea shanties. 

The soft Cornish voice is still to be heard, notably on YouTube, reading his poetry:

Timothy Winters comes to school 

With eyes as wide as a football pool,

Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:

A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

Charles Causley himself stands out in the memory as a perpetually middle-aged schoolteacher with a comb-over, short-sighted eyes behind heavy glasses; a certain tendency towards sarcasm. Unlikely to inspire romantic sentiments in anyone.

Causley lived most of his life, apart from wartime service in the Navy, in Launceston in inland Cornwall. His father Charlie died young as a result of TB contracted during the First World War leaving the bookish Charles to live with his mother Laura.

Patrick Gale has written a 400-page novel, “a very loose retelling of the early life” of the poet. This has a best-sellerish family saga quality; the story zips along, the wartime action sequences are particularly readable and well done.

The central contention is that Causley was ‘in the closet’, ‘living a lie’ – an attempt to reclaim Causley, who never married, for the gay tribe.

Perhaps Patrick Gale would deny this and that his theme is there is more to sexual identity than tight jeans and high-energy dance music.

Certainly some of Causley’s poems, notably ‘Angel Hill’, hint at love between men.

He was musical but there is nothing to indicate he spent much time sobbing over Judy Garland records.

Laurence Green tells a very different story in his biography of Causley, All Cornwall Thunders at My Door. There were a number of tentative relationships with women; Causley disapproved of homosexuality among others aboard ship.

At the end of his life he expressed regret that he had never had children or grandchildren of his own.

These matters are not “complex”. They are really rather simple: without the relevant legal cases we would have assumed Parnell was gay – because he didn’t marry – and Oscar Wilde was straight – because he did.

Thus from the title on the book is carefully constructed. There are elements that come from Causley’s diaries and other archives, then there is the market to consider. Patrick Gale has worked within these constraints.

How much of this is tongue in cheek? There is an awful lot of laundry in this book. There are a couple of gay sex scenes, mercifully not too graphic, but an unpleasant amount of laundry. This is where all must suffer, gay or straight, sometimes in actual laundrettes, none of them beautiful.

Not that Causley ever did. He was upstairs typing while his mother was making the dinner. Laura Causley appears sturdy in photographs, not surprising after years as a washerwoman.

The young Charles Causley’s interest in the Left Book Club and the poetry of W. H. Auden simultaneously expressed sympathy for the working class while taking him away from it.

There is an amusing description of the gay scene at the Tinside Lido in prewar Plymouth: “sailors everywhere”. Charles Causley may have escaped to the fleshpots of the big city, but this is pure speculation.

There are jarring Americanisms and anachronisms: “Gussied up”, “schoolyard”, “judgmental”, “toasty”. Cub Scouts were Wolf Cubs up to 1966. 

The past is institutionally racist: only white people live there.

One imagines the publishing industry controlled by people like the character of Ping in Ed Riordan’s Week and that Charles Causley narrowly escaped being endowed with a black best friend growing up in Launceston before the Second World War. (“The thing is, Patrick, no black best friend – no publish novel. Think Bridgerton!”)

Do you want cinnamon on that? Well, it’s compulsory. The novel has certain required components, like a cup of Starbucks coffee. Diversity and inclusion are retrospective.

So firstly the dreadful old mother has to be given equal billing with her son on the cover – that ticks the feminist box. Phew!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m so politically correct when I got 300 pages into the novel and still no black characters I began to hyperventilate. What, no hip-hop! It was literally like living in the past.

Fortunately, Patrick Gale saves the day by introducing a fictional and tragic romance between Mrs Causley and a black captain in the U.S. Army during the war.

There are a few problems with this: there were no black officers in the U.S. Army during World War II. The commissioned officers in black units would all have been white.

In a note at the end of the novel Patrick Gale apologises for using the anachronistic term “black” to describe black troops. They would have hated it and insisted on being described as ‘Negro’ or ‘colored’ – words then embodying pride, now considered shameful, almost unmentionable.

(George Orwell said that ‘negro’ should always be written with a capital ‘N’ – as a sign of respect.)

I don’t want to weary the point, giving undue attention to an improbable episode clumsily spatchcocked into the novel; it does show how difficult it is to go back to the past. There are worse words than ‘negro’ and it would seem they were freely used at this time in the Royal Navy.

To sum up in the manner of a college lecturer: this is a thoroughly researched and readable account of Charles Causley’s early years. The flights of fancy and possible seeking of controversy are part of what make it interesting. We are still stuck with the post-Freudian idea that sexuality is the well-spring of creativity.

Patrick Gale has achieved a closely-observed portrait of Charles Causley, seen from the outside, like the drawing by Stanley Simmonds at the end of the book. Never quite getting inside his subject or recapturing his voice.

© Roger Howe

21 February 2022