Gregarious Poet Who Wrote Warning, the Nation S Favourite Postwar Poem

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/obituary-jenny-joseph-

OBITUARY

Jenny Joseph

Gregarious poet who wrote Warning, the nation’s favourite postwar poem

January 13 2018, 12:01am,The Times

For years Jenny Joseph was irritated that the lighthearted diversion she had written in 1961 would become her main legacy

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It is one of the nation’s favourite poems, but its writer came to hate it. In Warning, Jenny Joseph tells of a woman weighed down by responsibility who fantasises about dotty old age when she can wear purple dresses and red hats while behaving outrageously.

Lines such as “And run my stick along the public railings / And make up for the sobriety of my youth” resonated with anyone who had felt trapped by circumstance or by convention. People who did not normally read poems loved it and passed it on to friends; it became a favourite valediction at funerals. In 1996 Warning was voted Britain’s favourite postwar poem in a BBC poll, beating WH Auden’s Stop All the Clocks and Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. It was praised by John Betjeman and included in The Oxford Book of 20th Century Verse, edited by Philip Larkin.

Yet for a long time Joseph resisted the poem’s rise in the nation’s affections, blocking its inclusion in anthologies and refusing to read it in public. A tiny, gregarious woman whose outsize glasses gave her an owlish look, Joseph could not help feeling irritated that an earlier, almost throwaway poem overshadowed a more serious body of work.

Critics warmed to her first-person lyrical yet everyday observations, which were comforting and discomforting at the same time. One critic wrote that “she can delineate surfaces like a sculptor . . . yet with a startling undertow, a pull of unease which lies just beneath the texture like an artery beneath the skin.” Robert Nye wrote in The Times: “She writes poems full of mist and reason, poems strange in what they say but plain in the way they say it, poems rooted in an English tradition of passionate but quiet exactness . . . careful craftsmanship, an honest exploration of the human heart, and statement after statement that nags at the memory.”

Joseph was bracketed with Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson, but her sensibilities were challenged when Warning began to be merchandised on tea towels, mugs and birthday cakes. She was happy enough to pocket royalties, but she drew the line at the Red Hat Society, which was founded in America and was inspired by first line of the poem: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.”

The group of women of a certain age who would wear red hats and meet to have fun in the carefree vein of the poem developed into an international movement. Joseph never approved of it, claiming that their activities, which seemed to be a rallying call for feminist empowerment, did not represent what her poem was about.

The Red Hat Society rather summed up her frustration that the lighthearted diversion she had written in 1961 would become her main legacy.

Jennifer Joseph was born in Birmingham in 1932 to Louis Joseph, an art dealer, and his wife, Florence. She grew up in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, next door to Enid Blyton.

It was a non-observant Jewish household where books were debated at the dinner table. When she was seven years old she began to write fairy stories and verse to “hold the world”.

After the outbreak of war she swapped the “polite” countryside of the Chilterns for the wilder, more dramatic terrain of north Devon where she was evacuated, developing her observational powers and a lifelong obsession with watching the light change.

Joseph won a scholarship to read English literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, in 1950 and came top of her year. After graduating she worked as a journalist then moved to South Africa to write for the radical magazine Drum. She was asked to leave the country in 1959 because of her articles against the apartheid regime. Back in London she published her first collection, The Unlooked-for Season, which won a Gregory award in 1960.

Around this time she met a publican called Tony Coles and married him in 1961. Her husband was by now working in an old people’s home and she became fascinated by his tales about the strange and solitary behaviour of the residents. It gave her the idea for Warning. She viewed it as little more than a “dramatic monologue” and was pleasantly surprised when it was published in The Listener, thinking that would be an end of it.

In the meantime she brought up three children — Martin, Nell and Bec — and for a time was the landlady at the Greyhound pub in Shepherds Bush, west London, which her husband had inherited from his father. Her artistic life became separate from her marriage, which was increasingly unhappy. In 1971 she left her husband and with her children was given refuge for six months by a kindly lollipop lady. Joseph then settled in nearby Acton, in an area appropriately known as Poet’s Corner.

She was an inveterate listmaker, but her housekeeping could unravel, with forgotten pans burning dinners to a crisp and food brought to picnics in a suitcase. She dedicated one of her books, “To my children, preventers of literature, lifesavers”. She is survived by Martin, a theatre producer; Nell, a welfare rights officer; and Bec, a carpenter.

Although she formed close friendships with many fellow writers and poets, she shunned the idea of being part of a literary scene. She was more interested in passing on her love of literature as a lecturer for the Workers’ Education Association, teaching people who had not been fortunate enough to go to university or attend school beyond the age of 15, or even younger.

A woman of strong opinions untroubled by self-doubt, Joseph was an incessant conversationalist, savouring the words that passed her lips. She could be exhausting company; listening was not her finest quality. “She was like a bird pecking at a thought, then running with it, then another association,” said Neil Astley, her editor at Bloodaxe Books, which published her Selected Poems in 1992.

In 1974 Joseph allowed Warning to be included in her collection Rose in the Afternoon, and she began to recite it at literary festivals with a reading style that segued effortlessly from melancholy and anguished to humorous. On travelling to the Cheltenham Literary Festival she would gaze longingly out of the window at the Golden Valley, so she used proceeds from Warning to buy a 19th-century greystone cottage in the small town of Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire.

Here she embraced the old age she once imagined, describing it as “one race you can win”. She enjoyed pottering about, but resisted the temptation to “gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells”, as in Warning. She wrote from a desk overlooking a crowded garden of honeysuckles, roses and St John’s wort. It inspired a book about her garden through the smell of each month’s plants. Led by the Nose became a favourite with the blind and partially sighted. Joseph herself was blind for the last four years of her life. It was a cruel blow to a woman whose creativity was triggered by visual observation.

Persephone, written in 1985, was her favourite work, but she became reconciled with Warning, enjoying the opportunities it afforded her to lecture and recite throughout the world. “The old woman has been a very good passport,” she conceded. “I must admit to finding her a bit of a bore. But I’m not going to disown her now.”

In 1997 she finally gave permission for Warning to be published as an illustrated book. The poem accompanied her into old age, but the dress did not. “I can’t stand purple. It doesn’t suit me.”

Jenny Joseph, poet, was born on May 7, 1932. She died of natural causes on January 8, 2018, aged 85

Warning, by Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.