Cancer: Tom Raworth

Miles Champion on Tom Raworth's 'lost' book, Cancer

I am delighted that Carcanet is publishing Tom Raworth’s book Cancer, some fifty-two years after it was to have been published by Harvey Brown’s Frontier Press. Tom wrote the book in Colchester and Saratoga Springs, New York, between September 1970 and May 1971—that is, after completing the poems collected in Moving (1971) and before starting the sequence Pleasant Butter (1972). It was a luminous moment in his writing: he had been honing his craft for ten years—combining the Kerouackian notion of writing from what he didn’t know towards whatever he could pick up in the act, with a preternatural receptivity to the Spicerian outside (refracted through London air particularised by Michael Horowitz and New Departures) and an egalitarian sense of line and measure that might have evolved differently if not for the early friendship and influence of Piero Heliczer—and had been given an energising fillip, earlier in 1970, by the first of many visits to the United States. Taken together, Cancer’s three sections—‘Logbook’, ‘Journal’ and ‘Letters from Yaddo’—comprise an astonishing ars poetica, which Tom would refine with increasing ferocity in the ensuing years.

Harvey Brown’s funds for publishing Cancer, along with books by René Char and Herbert Huncke, among others, were spent on recreational activities of a highly enjoyable but resolutely ephemeral nature, and the ‘Cancer’ typescript languished in Frontier’s files until it was returned to its author by Brown’s business partner, Elizabeth Warner (Elizabeth Gontard, as she was then). In 1976, Alastair Johnston and Frances Butler’s Poltroon Press published Cancer’s opening section, Logbook, as a stand-alone volume, with artwork by Butler (happily, this handsome book is still in print: interested parties should head to Poltroon Press). At some point, Bob and Eileen Callahan expressed interest in publishing Cancer via their Turtle Island imprint, but things went no further (they did reprint Tom’s 1969 book A Serial Biography in 1977). And that was that, until Tom revised Cancer’s other two sections for separate publication in the 1980s (‘Journal’ in Acts, no. 5, 1986, edited by David Levi Strauss, ‘Letters from Yaddo’ in his 1987 book Visible Shivers, copublished by Leslie Scalapino’s O Books and Keith Shein’s Trike).

And so things remained until 2022, when a manila folder marked ‘Cancer manuscript – Tom Raworth’ turned up unexpectedly in a box of paperbacks Val Raworth was sorting through. The folder contained the typescript and an accompanying letter from Harvey Brown to Holbrook Teter, dated 2 January 1973, in which Brown praises Teter’s typesetting of Robert Creeley’s A Day Book for Scribner’s, and asks him to typeset Cancer. He also mentions that he is aware of a drawing of a skull by Michael Myers (Teter’s publishing partner in Zephyrus Image) that Tom thought suitable for the cover. Val and I discussed the advisability of publishing Cancer in its intended form after so many years, and with Tom now dead. We thought it worthwhile, all the more so in the unlikely event that we could locate Myers’s drawing. I asked Alastair if he had any ideas, and he suggested I write to Teter’s daughter, Olivia. Olivia told me that her mother, Joan, had sold some Zephyrus Image and related papers to the University of Delaware in 2008–9; I contacted the Special Collections archivist there, Dustin Frohlich, who, to my surprise, a day or so later, confirmed that the drawing—an atypical Myers work, which predates Zephyrus Image and was an assignment for a scientific illustration class during Myers’s only semester of college, at UC Berkeley in autumn 1969 (he dropped out when his teacher told him he was too good)—was indeed among their Zephyrus Image records. Our course was set, then, and Val and I agreed on Carcanet as our first choice of publisher.

I will always be grateful that Val was alive when Michael Schmidt accepted the manuscript for publication. While Cancer was the final estate-related matter Val and I discussed, it was the first book I worked on with Carcanet’s designer, Andrew Latimer, and I thank him for bringing a Teter-esque level of attention to every last detail. We were fortunate to have a sheet of Tom’s handwritten notes concerning the layout of ‘Logbook’ (also contained in the manila folder), and we have followed these as closely as is possible in 2024. It is perhaps a stretch to call Cancer Tom’s ‘lost’ book, as I do on the back cover, given that all three of its sections will be known to attentive readers of Tom’s work: ‘Logbook’, aside from its Poltroon publication, appears in As When (2015); a slightly different version of ‘Journal’ is included in Removed for Further Study, the double issue of The Gig (no. 13/14, May 2003, ed. Nate Dorward) devoted to Tom’s work (‘Journal’ is retitled ‘Notebook’ in both Acts and The Gig); and ‘Letters from Yaddo’ is included in Tom’s collected prose, Earn Your Milk (2009). Still, it—the ‘lost’ book—is a pleasing conceit, and Cancer is an anomaly in Tom’s bibliography, inasmuch as it had to wait a half century to see publication. (There are other unpublished works among his papers, but, with the exception of a handful of late poems, they are works that fell short in Val’s estimation—she was always the arbiter of excellence—and will remain unpublished.)

Inquisitive readers will want to compare the Tom of 1971—in the journal and letters—with the Tom of the mid-eighties who saw fit to revise these sections. It is of particular interest, fifty-four years later, to read precisely the same letters that Edward Dorn would have received from the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs.

Which brings us to the back cover, where I was pleased to introduce two very different but equally important people from Tom’s life: Rob Rusk and Claude Royet-Journoud. Rob was a wonderful photographer who, in Tom’s words, photographed “almost everything of interest” in San Francisco and Sonoma in the “bright years” of the mid-1970s; it is a double tragedy that the house fire in which he died, on 1 April 2019, also destroyed the bulk of his work. His photo of Tom on the cover is from 1976, give or take a few months. Claude surely needs no introduction on a blog such as this; suffice to say that his major work, the tetralogy Four Elemental Bodies, was published—in Keith Waldrop’s translation—in one volume by Burning Deck in 2013. When I asked him to write something for Cancer, he replied that he was embarrassed by his poor English and would regretfully have to decline. The four sentences that grace the back cover are the ones he included, by way of an afterthought, in the same email, as a PS. That’s Claude on the right below, with another close friend of Tom’s, Dominique Fourcade, on the left (the photo was taken by Michèle Cohen in her flat on rue Séguier, around 1982). And so we end where Tom would want, in the company of dear friends, eating, drinking and having fun.

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This week's blog is by Miles Champion, writing on Tom Raworth’s Cancer, which is published this month! Remember to use the code JNFB2025 for 20% off and free UK P&P.