Reilly 299.

Silkin served in the Royal Navy (1942-1946). He was commissioned as a sub-Lieutenant, R.N.V.R. in 1943, serving in East Indies Fleet, Eastern Fleet and British Pacific Fleet aboard HMS George V and HMS Formidable, and ashore at Anderson, Ceylon (FECB). He was promoted to Lieutenant, R.N.V.R. He was demobilised in 1946 and returned to Cambridge.


Silkin, Jon (1930–1997), poet and editor, was born on 2 December 1930 in London, the only child of Jewish parents: Joseph Silkin (1904–1990), a lawyer, and his wife, Doris Rubenstein (1905–1996). His maternal grandparents, Harris and Matilda Rubenstein of Llanelli and Swansea, and paternal grandparents, Abraham Silkin (c.1865–1948) and Fanny Sopher (d. 1924), had left Lithuania to escape the pogroms. Harris Rubenstein, who started a wallpaper and decorating business, had been on his way to the United States of America when the ship stopped for water in Swansea, and he decided to stay there, establishing a connection with Wales that was important for Jon Silkin. Abraham Silkin had settled in the East End of London, where he ‘cleaned the toilets of the Synagogue, gave Hebrew lessons, and sold fruit off a barrow’ (Silkin, ‘The first twenty-four years’, 244). Joseph Silkin's elder brother Lewis became a clerk in the Millwall docks and then a lawyer, an MP, and the first Baron Silkin. Lewis's sons, Sam and John Silkin, became Labour cabinet ministers.

Jon Silkin was named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga. His early childhood was spent in Herne Hill and he attended Dulwich Hamlet School. His was a relatively secure, middle-class upbringing in a home which radiated warmth, intellect, political commitment, and Jewishness (his father organized League of Nations Union meetings on foreign affairs from 1937 to 1939 and specialized in naturalization proceedings for refugees, some of whom stayed in the Silkin household on their arrival in England). Aged seven Jon began his religious education at the synagogue and had Hebrew lessons for two years at home. In 1939 his school was evacuated to Kent, and in the following year he stayed with relations in Swansea, where he attended Parc Wern school before it too was evacuated. At Dolau Cothi in Carmarthenshire he spent a happy year with virtually no formal education. In the winter of 1941 he attended the Methodist public school Wycliffe College in Lampeter, but asked to be excused from Christian worship. He read the Jewish Bible and, even if he understood little, absorbed much of its language and rhythms. In 1945 he returned to London and attended Dulwich College, where he studied little, enjoyed athletics and rugby, became interested in music, and when music failed, turned to poetry. At fifteen he attempted to versify the book of Exodus and read John Milton, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce; he was expelled for truancy in 1947.

Silkin worked as an insurance clerk and a journalist in south London, before being called up for national service (he became a sergeant instructor in the education corps). He collected his early verse and poems written during army service into a privately printed volume, The Portrait and other Poems (1950), published just after he was discharged. Although required to be an army reservist, he refused to serve in the Korean War and was eventually released. He then found work as a grave filler in Fortune Green cemetery. He lived in, and was evicted from, various furnished rooms, and may have spent some time living rough. Sacked from the cemetery for sitting on a grave reading Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, he got a job with the National Cash Register Company, which dismissed him shortly afterwards for trying to form a union.

With £5 back pay in February 1952 Silkin started the literary magazine Stand, which he edited until his death. He also worked for a time as an English master in a boys' prep school, and between 1956 and 1958 he taught English to foreign students. He lived with Cynthia Redpath, with whom he had three sons. The death of their eldest son, Adam, informed his most famous poem, ‘Death of a Son (who Died in a Mental Hospital Aged One)’. John Berryman thought it did ‘not edge into the terror, but starts there and stays there … and it is as brave, and harrowing, as one might think a piece could be’ (Berryman, 317). His collection The Peaceable Kingdom (1954) was later judged by the critic Merle Brown as ‘the finest first volume of poetry written by a living English poet’ (Brown, 363). A further collection, The Two Freedoms, appeared in 1958. In the same year he was awarded the Gregory fellowship in poetry at the University of Leeds, where he took a first-class degree in English in 1962 (he wrote on himself in an open finals question), and then embarked on postgraduate work on the First World War poets.

In 1960 Silkin relaunched Stand, which had run out of money, with the encouragement of local benefactors in Leeds and the staff of the school of English, including Norman Jeffares and G. Wilson Knight. The magazine quickly established an international readership, publishing Samuel Beckett, Alan Sillitoe, and R. S. Thomas, as well as translations of Jean-Paul Sartre, Aleksandr Blok, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello, and writers he had known in London including Alan Brownjohn, Philip Hobsbaum, and Harold Pinter. Translators and poets such as Edwin Morgan, Michael Hamburger, and Christopher Middleton found Stand to be one of the most important outlets for their translations from Russian and German. The magazine took a ‘stand’ against apathy towards young writers, publishing early work by Ken Smith, who became co-editor in 1963, and Tony Harrison, as well as important poems by Geoffrey Hill. The Stand editors, with John Barnard and Andrew Gurr of the Leeds school of English, founded Northern House, a small press which published first collections by Smith and Harrison as well as Silkin's own Flower Poems (1964). In 1965, when Stand was offered funding by Northern Arts in Newcastle, Jon Silkin settled there. In that year his collection Nature with Man won the Geoffrey Faber memorial prize, and he visited America for the first time, teaching at the University of Denison, Granville, Ohio. He also visited Israel in 1966, which led to important relationships with Dennis Silk and Natan Zach, whose work he later translated from Hebrew. A further visit to America in 1967, and a year as visiting lecturer at the University of Iowa (1968–9), informed Amana Grass (1971), which also contains significant poems reflecting his visit to Israel. In 1972 Silkin produced Out of Battle, an influential study of the poetry of the First World War and one of the first of its kind.

In 1974 Silkin married Lorna Tracy, the American fiction writer whom he had met in 1968. Having met and corresponded with Edmund Blunden, David Jones, and Siegfried Sassoon, he anthologized The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979). He visited Israel again in 1980 as visiting writer at Mishkenot Sha'ananim, Jerusalem. He was Bingham visiting professor at the University of Louisville in 1981, and Elliston visiting poet at the University of Cincinnati in 1983. Silkin was also involved in a number of high-profile debates in the early 1980s. He relished controversy, and as part of his personal sense of commitment (best summarized in his introduction to the Stand anthology, 1973), he became involved in a prolonged debate with writers such as C. H. Sisson and Donald Davie, stimulated by implications in the post-war attitudes he saw as related to T. S. Eliot's famous claim in 1928 to be ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’. Passionately argued positions from Raymond Williams, Robert Conquest, Terry Eagleton, Michael Schmidt, and E. P. Thompson also appeared in Stand and PN Review in the late 1970s. In 1985 Silkin's edition of Wilfred Owen's poetry for Penguin was withdrawn because of Jon Stallworthy's objection that it contravened the copyright of his own edition. A lively discussion between Silkin and Stallworthy on the legalities of copyright was aired in the Times Literary Supplement, and Silkin's edition finally appeared in a revised form in 1995.

Silkin was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1986, distinguished writer-in-residence, American University, Washington, DC, in 1988, and literary fellow of Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association in 1990. In 1989 he published The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, co-edited with Jon Glover. After many years of writing, travelling, and working together as co-editors of Stand, Lorna Tracy and Jon Silkin were divorced in 1994. He formed a relationship with the poet Toshiko Fujioka (b. 1947) in Japan when he was foreign professor at the University of Tsukuba between 1990 and 1994. They returned to Newcastle, where Silkin edited Stand; it continued to attract internationally respected writers. In the early 1990s he was diagnosed with late onset diabetes and a heart condition.

Short and powerfully built, Silkin preferred clothes bought from markets at home or abroad. His black beard and hair (which he cut himself if it seemed necessary) were white in later life. He was a spellbinding speaker and continued to give readings in schools and arts centres until he was taken to hospital in Newcastle, where he died from a heart attack on 25 November 1997. He was buried at Bushey cemetery on 28 November 1997, with the stone setting on 29 November 1998. He was survived by his three children, David Emanuel, Richard Lindsay, and Rachel. Silkin was a prolific poet, still held in high esteem at the time of his death. He had just published the original The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry (1997), and had completed a further volume of poetry, Making a Republic. Some of his poems on his Jewish inheritance were collected in Testament without Breath (1998).

Jon Glover, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography