The Oxford Book of Death by D.J. Enright

A relic of Bloomsbury, Chatto combined high-minded and leftish opinions with adamant social snobbery. We made our ways back down the institutional corridor, and Dennis effected an introduction before vanishing back into the gloom.Ī few years later I was offered a job at Chatto, and Dennis became a colleague. ‘Yes, Norah, no, Norah,’ Dennis muttered, holding the receiver at arm’s length, and miming his response with much raising of the eyebrows and pursing of the mouth. Dennis shot bolt upright, as though he had been plugged into the mains, and a rasping voice came down the wire, rapping out instructions. We chatted about this and that while Dennis tamped and rodded his pipe but then, quite suddenly, the ancient Bakelite telephone on his desk let out a terrible shriek. He introduced himself in a self-deprecating mumble, and I followed him round bare, lino-floored corridors to his office, which boasted Utility furniture and looked across a well.

He was almost certainly clad in a green corduroy jacket, a fawn shirt, a green tie, fawn trousers and tractor-soled shoes. Then in his mid-fifties, Dennis Enright had rubbery, mobile features that seemed both comical and lugubrious and a quiff of graying hair that streamed from the top of his head like smoke in a high wind. On the agreed day I took an antiquated lift to the second floor, and after grappling with the gates I turned to find a pale, rumpled figure watching the proceedings with a sardonic grin. Day Lewis at Chatto, looking after the poetry list, the odd volume of lit crit, and even the occasional novel I was working as a shamefully ineffectual literary agent, and since I had somehow persuaded Chatto to take on a work by a don at Wadham, uncompromisingly entitled Genius, it was agreed that I should call in at their offices in William IV Street to meet Professor Enright and the famously ferocious Norah Smallwood, who had ruled Chatto with a rod of iron since the end of the War. He had returned to England in 1970 from Singapore, and after a couple of years as co-editor of Encounter, he had succeeded C. I first met Dennis Enright in the mid-1970s. Not one for slowing down, he finished his memoir ‘Injury Time’ the day before his death in 2002.ĭ.J. In 1981 Enright was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and became in 1984 Poet Laureate. By 1974 he was director of publishing house Chatto and Windus. He spent the best part of twenty five years lecturing abroad in Japan, Thailand and Singapore to name but a few of the Far East countries he explored. ĭennis Joseph ‘D.J.’ Enright was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic. Enright was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in.

The Oxford Book of Death by D.J. Enright