8 June, 2010
It was touch-and-go whether I would make CK Williams in time, and I thought about not trekking across London to Goldsmiths College. A bit of me was thinking: what if he’s horrible? I didn’t want my romantic idea of him as a sensitive, incisive genius to be shattered. And after all, he is only a man; how many famous people does one have to meet before one learns that?
In the end I decided to go, navigating the overland trains in the rush hour, folding myself around my folding bike and enduring the withering glances of London Bridge commuters. I braced myself for disappointment.
When I was young I always wanted to meet Woody Allen. I thought I too was a witty nerd; he would recognise that and we would be mates. Puhlease. I don’t hold with the child-molester view of Allen, the fallen hero. But I do know from reliable reports that Mr Allen is a quiet man who wears his celebrity uncomfortably. He doesn’t want to chatter over dinner with the likes of me, or wander with me down to the 59th Street Bridge, or any of the stuff I had floating around in my jejune twenty-something head. I know, had I met him, that I would have been disappointed. Better to watch Manhattan and enjoy it for what it is, not for whom Woody Allen might, or might not, turn out to be.
I have no doubt that another hero, Van Morrison, whose music is a part of my life, would disappoint me in the flesh. And when I met the folk/blues genius John Martyn (he was recording a track for The Talented Mr Ripley) I was pretty much struck dumb. His heart-stopping ballads are my daily soundtrack, but meeting him has not improved the experience. Similarly, I have had wet dreams (well, not quite!) about Keith Jarrett playing for me. In truth, he is a difficult character. His sublime London concert 18 months ago was marred for me by his autistic over-sensitivity to coughs emanating from the audience. He stopped playing and walked petulantly across the stage to a microphone, from which he berated us, claiming if we were truly listening, we wouldn’t be able to cough. In Umbria in 2007, Jarrett made headlines by abandoning a concert because someone was photographing him using a flashgun. His rage, even before he started playing, is something to behold.
Yet Keith’s capacity to explore the soul with a few black and white keys must be unrivalled in history. His soaring flights, his rampant rhythms, his exquisite, delicate melodies bring me ineffable joy.
This is a long-winded way of saying: don’t meet your heroes. Or rather, appreciate what they do and expect nothing more. Make no assumption about any other part of their lives. Therein disappointment lies.
Should one, then, meet the man behind the treasured poems? The answer, in this case, was yes. CK Williams is the man you’d hope him to be. Tall, softly-spoken, intense. As clever a man as you’ll ever encounter. He reminded me of the best philosophers I have known – the people who do Brainy for a living.
I’ll tell you two things about him, which I saw because I was late. I had to sit on the edge of the audience, and I had a side-on view. Firstly, CK performs his poetry. He has to stand to get himself in the right mood. (At one point, hot from the sun streaming in, he decided to sit. He just couldn’t read that way, and had to stand again.) What’s striking is that despite his height, he raises himself up in mid-flow, straining for more – what? Authority?
If it is authority he wants – and this is the second thing – he gets it. A number of women were in the front row, and from my vantage point I could see how they looked up at him, wide-eyed. As I am two-foot tall, I don’t see that very often. More’s the pity. How wonderful the dilated pupils, every well-wrought word savoured, how intimate and charged, as he teasingly announced yet another “sex poem”, frank and, like Jarrett, soaring, rampant, exquisite… until at one point I thought: this is a fully-clothed blow-job, this relationship between poet and audience, our hero rising and straining and… well, you get the picture.
Afterwards, he was appropriately spent. I was delighted to be invited to dinner, and had a lovely evening but – you guessed it – dinner was not the thing. It was the poetry. It was the performance. I would love to be “Charlie’s” friend – who knows? – but I know also that Charlie’s just a tired guy you have dinner with, a guy who frets about his taxi home. A guy in his seventies who, quite rightly, needs his bed.
Whereas CK Williams is somebody, something else. A shelf-full of insight, a thick volume of wisdom to be carried through life. Precious; perfect; mine.
