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In an extended correspondence with me in my capacity as one of the editors of Bowra’s poems, PLF showed that he was much put out by the ones on himself, especially ‘The Wounded Gigolo’, which he felt was ‘a bit cracked’. He vacillated about the other poem, ‘On the Coast of Terra Fermoor’ (why did Bowra misspell ‘Fermor’?), but in the end voted against, no doubt partly influenced by the opinion of his late wife, Joan, who ‘thought that all the people mentioned in the collection would have been cut to the quick, however much they put on non-spoilsport faces.’ When James Morwood of Wadham visited him later in his Greek home to ask about his friendship with Bowra (on behalf of Leslie Mitchell, Bowra’s biographer), he found that the hurt of reading the poems was still smarting. To me PLF wrote: ‘Could Maurice’s shade ponder all this now, I think I might emerge as more of a saviour than a spoilsport.’
The poems were printed for the first time in the Wadham College Gazette earlier this month.Opposite is the second, less indecorous, poem, a romance about PLF’s wife, probably (according to Noel Annan) Bowra’s greatest love. Joan Eyres Monsell (1912–2003), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell, was a photographer; PLF became her second husband in 1968. Bowra described her as his ‘beautiful friend’, and Alan Pryce-Jones, her former fiancé, recalled her as ‘very fair, with huge myopic blue eyes’. Cyril Connolly, another admirer, attributed to the fictional Jane Sotheran (in his story ‘Happy Deathbeds’, not yet published in its entirety) Joan’s alluring physical qualities, including ‘enormous eyes of clouded violet-blue’.
Bowra’s literary models here are Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ (1892) and Edward Lear’s ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo’ (1877). Other allusions may be glossed as follows. ‘Carmichael’: members of the Cretan Resistance used ‘Kyr Michali’ (‘Mr Michael’) as a code-name for PLF. ‘Joel’: perhaps a fusion of ‘Joan’ and ‘Noel’. ‘Damozel’: from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s eponymous poem. ‘Poppy’: a reference to Thérèse (‘Poppy’) Fould-Springer (1908–53), who suffered from sporadic mental and physical illness, and married Alan Pryce-Jones after his engagement to Joan Eyres Monsell had been ended by her parents’ opposition (he had no clear prospects). ‘Rayners’: John Rayner (1908–90), features editor of the Daily Express during the 1930s, had been Joan Eyres Monsell’s first husband.
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