Freelancing

Adventures of a Poet

Hugo Williams

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780571296941
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist, working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the contemporary writer.

Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do, but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• What About Pleasure? Where Does that Feature in the Freelance Hierarchy?
• Green Carnations and Author-Baiting
• His Word against Mine
• The North Devon Farm Museum
• Wendy Cope Makes Cocoa for Hugo Williams
• Soho Revisited
• Rhyme, Reason and Arts Council Bursaries
• Five Go to Israel
• Mudlarks
• This is Your Life
• British Year at Sarajevo
• Old Etonian Anxieties
• What the Dickens
• A Festival Too Far
• Fred Green’s Red Biro
• A Walk through The Waste Land
• A ‘C’ For Creative Writing
• Cobham Hall, Kent
• My Brother’s First Novel
• Pope’s Grotto and Sister Mary Michael
• A Slight Improvement
• Secret Undercurrents in Culture and Society
• Tara Browne: A Lucky Man Who Made The Grade
• Paul Muldoon’s ‘Cuba’
• A Garden of Black and Red Sausages
• A Small-time Antichrist
• Alan Ross’s London Magazine
• Madrid, by the Hand of Goya
• Could This Be My Wife? Would She Make it down the Stairs?
• Armand Dupuis, 1892–
• The Stoned Rubbish School of Poetry
• An Intimate of Robert Graves
• Weldon Kees and the Academic Barbecues
• The Good Old Days
• The Colony Was for Lunch
• Anthony Astbury
• The Damaged Dressing-Gown
• Before She Met Me
• In the Footsteps of The Third Man
• Roistering
• The Bright-eyed Mariner
• The Smile on the Face of Gioconda Belli
• A Beige Plastic Gulag
• Short Pieces of Writing, which I Post
• The Philosophy of Women, or An Essay on Self-Confidence
• Blondin, Hero of Niagara
• Why Don’t I Work?
• Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cold War
• Un Petit Silex Sympa
• Hay-on-Wye
• Did the Manager Notice My Age?
• The Untamed Fashion Assembly
• Return from St Petersburg
• Breton Afternoons
• A Writing Course in the Dordogne
• Brighton Rock
• Margaret Vyner and the Perfumes of Jean Patou
• Hair Trouble
• Out and About in Women’s Clothing
• Paris at Its Perfect Greedy Smug Best
• Laurence Olivier Knew My Father
• Bob Castle and the Lock of Shelley’s Hair
• Glucovision
• The Remarkable Recording Briefcase
• The Jerusalem Poetry Festival
• A One-Minute Tour of Israel
• Mordaunt Shairp and The Green Bay Tree
• ‘Ted Hughes’
• Mr Ray Was Our Homosexual
• Afternoons in the Sack
• Some Block
• Letter from a Foreign Country
• The Last Summer in Albufeira
• Telephone, Stomach and Moustache
• Stavros Melissinos, the Poet Sandal-maker of Athens
• A Personal Development Holiday
• At the Grave of Rupert Brooke
• A Narcissistic Injury
• Sitting on Top of My Brother
• Margaret Vyner, 1914–1993
• Not so Easy to Accept the Laundry Basket
• Siamese Twins
• When Prose Talks to Poetry
• Being Entertained for a Living
• We’ve Got a King Who Cares for People
• My Conversion to Rome
• What the War in Bosnia is About
• Telephones
• Answerphones
• Male Model
• Return to Skyros
• A Short Bad Film about Violence
• Merry Stories and Funny Pictures
• Lucky to Be Alive
• Copyright