Companion book: The Poetry of the Forties in Britain.


Eddie Linden was born north of Ireland of Irish parents. He is the editor of the prestigious literary magazine Aquarius, which was founded in London 1969.

His publications include City of Razors (1980) poems, Who is Eddie Linden? (1979), with Sebastian Barker. Auto biographical account of a Catholic childhood in a Lanarkshire mining-village, and of later political involvements, notably with the CND, YCL and Communist Party.

Who is Eddie Linden? adapted for stage by William Tanner, received its first production at the Old Red Lion Theatre, Islington, London 1997.

He has contributed to the following anthologies: The Best of Scottish Poetry (1989 ed. Robin Bell), Life Doesn't Frighten Me at All (1989 ed. John Agard) & The Poolbeg Book of Irish Poetry (1979 ed. Shaun Traynor). -- from author website

by 1980, Linden was the editor of the literary magazine Aquarius, the author of a book of poems, and the subject of a biography, Who Is Eddie Linden, by Sebastian Barker. Eddie's own Age of Aquarius - everyone who has met him, even once, knows him as "Eddie" - came in 1969, when he launched his magazine. There is usually a rhetorical flavour to claims along the lines of "literature saved my life", but it can be taken at face value here.

"The magazine was my idea," he says of the journal that has produced chunky issues on Australian literature, the work of John Heath-Stubbs, and "The Poetry of the Forties". "It came out of poetry readings that we used to hold at the Lamb and Flag in Holborn. So many people came that the woman who ran it would say, 'Oh Goad, you'll make the floor fall in.'"

Eddie Linden is a slight, urgent man, with an expression of almost superhuman worry on his face. His speech customarily proceeds as a sequence of ejaculations. An unexpected amusing thought carries him off on a gale of unadulterated laughter, frequently brought low by a memory of pursuit by demons, accompanied by an elongated groan, "Oh Goad!", or an angry "Jeez!" "There was a lot of people suspicious of me. You wondered if they took you seriously. But I was being serious, by Jeez. I had a wee job in the library as a porter and I was saving up the money - I must have saved up about £70. That was to get the thing started. All I had to do was get the poems."

An editorial committee was formed, and included Heath-Stubbs and John Ezard, an arts reporter on the Guardian. The first issue was put together in a tiny bedsit in west London next door to the slightly less tiny one in which Eddie now lives, surrounded by boxes of Aquariuses past, biographies of writers, old editions of Scots and Irish poets, and evidence of an attachment to yellowing newspapers and supermarket carrier bags.

"There was an idea that I was illiterate. Even Heath-Stubbs, when I said I was starting a magazine" - here his familiar Glaswegian sandpaper modulates to a mock-posh smoothness - "'You can hardly read or write, Eddie.' Jesus Christ! I'm always startin'. I'm always learnin'. Now I can read. I can write! I was up against a wall all the way."

His struggles with the printed page have made him especially enthusiastic about the novels and poems that are dear to him. At some point in his youth, an uncle gave him The Green Years by AJ Cronin. "It was autobiographical, because Cronin was an illegitimate child, brought up in Greenock, and it was about growing up in a working-class environment. I wanted to get into more like that. I wanted more of Cronin. I then read Shannon's Way, which is all about studying to become a young doctor. That really was the first book that got me. Then I started on Dickens - oh, you'll know which one! The first I read was Oliver Twist. Again, I could identify myself with Oliver. And he gets emancipated. What's the word? Redeemed! Dickens always saves his characters. He redeems them, he brings them back. Then I came to David Copperfield. I couldn't get enough."

Living at the time in the mining country of Lanarkshire, where he had been brought up, he foresaw his own redemption in the Young Communist League. "At that time, the Communist Party had education classes - not just Marxist classes, but in Dickens, in Shakespeare - that was another discovery for me. Then there was the Workers' Educational Association. This was my way of getting away from that place and that life."

A brief visit to London in the 1950s gave him a glimpse of an existence that promised to be less lonely. He left Scotland in 1958 and had soon joined a literary group in Hammersmith. "For the first time I saw a play. I'd never seen inside a bluidy theatre before!" The play was Chicken Soup with Barley, Arnold Wesker's drama about a socialist Jewish family in the pre-war East End of London, facing the threat of fascism. "It was one of the most marvellous experiences of all my life. I went to see it for a second time, and I began getting more out it. It was an inspiring period then. There was the Aldermaston March, there was the Royal Court. There was big change about. It was very much the Angry Young Man period. And politics was part of it."

London was "a liberation", he says. "I could be something I wanted to be. I wanted to do something I had never done before. Poetry happened in London." In 1994, a play about the life of Eddie Linden himself was staged at a small Islington theatre, with Michael Deacon playing Eddie. Night after night, the subject took his seat among the audience and the familiar laughter was heard, between shouts of "That's true!" and "Jeez, that's me!"

He began writing poetry while in his teens, wrestling with his private alphabet to make it fit the puzzles of his upbringing. In London, he met poets such as Heath-Stubbs, George Barker and Peter Porter, who encouraged him and spared him condescension, which is about the only thing he resents. He has a striking manner of delivering his own verse, eyes closed and head raised to the ceiling, his voice assuming a bardic authority. Conversation swims into the opening of a poem: "There's a poem to the Dad, 'The Miner' - 'Your face has never / moved, it still contains / the marks of toil, deep in / blue,' and that'll come naturally to me. Not only did I write it down but it came naturally to remember it. I think I may have had that oral sense in me, coming from an Irish background." Other poets' work edges into his conversation, too, usually for its personal relevance. He treasures George Barker's "To My Mother" and its lines, "She is a procession no one can follow after / But be like a little dog following a brass band." Similarly close to his heart is Norman MacCaig's meditation on crossing the border between Scotland and England, "I sit with my back to the engine, watching / the landscape pouring away out of my eyes."

Both poets were friends, and both contributed to Aquarius. The 2002 issue (these days, Aquarius tends to appear at intervals of three to four years; the past three have been guest-edited by Professor AT Tolley, of the University of Ontario) was devoted to Barker and the Scottish poet WS Graham, who liked Eddie to shave him.

Whenever Eddie was in Edinburgh, MacCaig was ready to entertain, at home or in the Rose Street pubs where the Scottish literati gathered. There he encountered Hugh MacDiarmid, whose failure to yield a poem for Aquarius has not been forgotten, and other writers. "The first man I was introduced to was Sydney Goodsir Smith. But I got drunk and fell out with his wife and she hit me over the head with her handbag." Forty years on, he assumes a pose of remorse. "It was great, though, because I found that these people who were poets were recognising that I had talent to do things, to run a magazine."

In 1980, his own collection was published, taking its title from his best-known poem, "City of Razors". The poem is a skilful, impressionistic picture of the old Gorbals, each line doing its work to build a collage that depicts the worst of the place Eddie was eager to leave behind.

A tribute to Eddie Linden, Eddie's Own Aquarius, was published recently. It has been compiled by two friends, Constance Short and Tony Carroll, and has poems, recollections and drawings by Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Bruce Kent, Clare Short and Craigie Aitchison, among a host of others. More than one contributor makes reference to his "gentlemanly" qualities, sometimes overshadowed by anecdotes of a time when Linden was frequently drunk, loud and needy.

Nowadays he sticks to a far more modest drinking regime, and claims more than once, during a conversation in his bare-lightbulb room furnished with only one chair, that he is "happier than at any time before". He often visits Paris, where he is welcomed at his usual hotel, and several of his poems have been translated into French.

Had he had an ordinary upbringing, he says, "I might have been a schoolteacher. I might not even be running a magazine." The only person not to benefit from his forgiveness is the stepmother who shooed the 10-year-old from his home into the orphanage.

A part of him remains that helpless boy. "I know people will say it's psychological, but starting the magazine brought an absolute stability into my life. I just lived for the magazine. And then as it got better it started getting reviewed in the newspapers. People started taking me serious. And this was what I wanted. The thing that saved me - this creative thing - it changed my whole life."
-- "Redemption Song", Books, The Guardian