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poems. He prefers the verb “to Roger”; his sexual organ is a “sword”, a “ramper”, “my tom”; the woman’s is “her door”, her “slit”, “her warm covered queen”.
 
Determined to be taken seriously in this writing about sex, he intended the following as epigrams to the pamphlet:
 
“It was only a brief coupling, an act so insignificant that it’s difficult to see how the large concepts of pleasure and sin could ever be associated with it.” – Simone de Beauvoir.
 
“Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
 
“Men’s instincts are gross; women are in demand and always will be.” – Margo St. James, head hooker of US prostitutes’ organisation COYOTE ( Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics).
 
“No sex without responsibility.” – Lord Longford.
 
It is clear that John Tripp wanted these works and their potential publication to be taken seriously. He is at pains to balance the seriousness of the issues involved in sexual relations with the undeniable pleasures involved. [lxx] And those pleasures need to be recognised as implicated, if not strengthened, by the guilt felt in sexual conduct and the potentially serious social and personal repercussions of the act.

However it is a difficult tightrope to walk and the Contents list of “Intervals of Heat” immediately complicate and undercut those serious intentions, for here is a litany of naughtiness:
 
Sandbowl Thrusts
Conceit of Power
Military Ram
West Turret Lay
Grubb’s complaint
Angel in Cardiff
Acefinger
Jane Russell at the Old Beeb
Centrefold
Zip
Dalliance at Tinkinswood
The Cats of Palma
Diolch, Hector Fellatio
Reversal at Freshwater East
Horizontal Shuttlecock
Dream of Lush Ladies
 
That has the wit and humour of a Peter Finch found-poem-list.
 
As do the acknowledgements he gives, for some of these poems, he claims, were first published in – “Paradise”, “Red”, “Michigan Runner”, “Screwdriver”, “Knave”, “Madog”, “Cosmopolitan” and “Experience”. Well, at least “Madog” was correct for I published John in that short-lived magazine based at the Polytechnic of Wales. No other poems from Intervals of Heat were published in Wales, I think.
 
Judging these “Intervals of Heat” is as problematic as much of his other work. There is the sense of speed, the journalist’s snapshot impressions. There is the rough and ready, or not so ready, form or roughed up shape. [lxxi]The easy image and metaphor occur alongside glints of impressive originality.
 
“The Diesel to Yesterday” was still the train that John Tripp rode. There is a steady yearning for lost times, forgotten manners and customs and yet, at the same time, a willingness to gaze benevolently out from his carriage at the liberation of language, the freer expression of sexual mores and the liberation of women. The poet’s two love affairs as a mature man back in Wales seem to be characterised by genuine feelings and a healthy sense of equality. “The gnarled bard”[lxxii] was never to find solace in marriage or a settled home, there had been neither the time nor the opportunity for children, but he was, it appears, a sexually liberated romantic.
 
Of “Mrs Pankhurst’s granddaughter” who is “a sex grenade hurled out of the dust/of Victorian diaries…” he asks, “’Where have you been hiding for centuries?’” and notes that “She has wiped out…playing second fiddle to men.”[lxxiii] He is also disarmingly honest about the dangers of a self-deluding man inadvertently playing in “a good Thurber-style tragicomedy based on the male ‘change of life’ syndrome where the literate, passionate antihero, on his way to meet the devastating cleavage or micro-skirt, slips on a banana skin and chips a disc.”[lxxiv]
  
In “Intervals of Heat” and in other works, it is clear that Tripp’s sexual interests were by no means predatory; he sees sex as a game between equals. He is embellishing memories, no doubt, but is also anxious to celebrate his sexual history. The callow youth who was pulled away from the clutches of the prostitute by his knowing Redcap in the late 1940s was escaping a woman “used and misused again/by troops awash with booze…”; she was “”history’s doxy” A “Poor lady/abused to the end.”[lxxv] The Colonel’s step-daughter who becomes a prostitute in London and whose top stair creaks as Tripp enters is a victim of abuse, incest, it is rumoured. Hers has been “a passage of rumpled sheets.” He is aroused, then ashamed and angered by the situation.
 
Even in the earlier years as a journalist in London he realised
 
        What animals we were
        even inside our town suits
        through this interval of intense heat.[lxxvi]
 
And he follows the poem in typed manuscript with an explanation of this assignment as a freelance writer for “Truth” magazine to cover the visit of an American “Playboy” cover-girl: “we praised the girls even if we mocked the tinsel world they were part of. There was no cynicism in our responses to these remarkable beauties, who had to be seen to be believed, who invariably left us stunned.”
 
In “Zip” from Intervals of Heat he describes with some relish the predilections of “some kinks” but there is something less than prurient, something refreshingly honest about his own celebration of “the unzipping of a woman’s boot”.
 
        But me? Give me the ripping sound
        Of little bits of knitted steel
        Grooving like lightning down a boot
        Through soft and flexible leather.
 
And after a boring shift of night duty at “the Old Beeb” he remembers seeing “The remarkable California sexbomb” Jane Russell walking through the foyer to her waiting car,
 
        a long black Cadillac
        with coachwork by Vega of Madrid
        that would reach the Savoy within minutes.
 
        Stunned at the entire gorgeous marvel
        I remember my shades slid to the tip of my nose
        and something moved inside my trouser.[lxxvii]
 
Surely, that is more Leslie Phillips’s “Oh, I say!” than prurience. She was a remarkable woman and John Tripp celebrates her and details the glitz of that American-International lifestyle. In “Conceit of power” Tripp fails to follow through with sex after succeeding in inviting a beautiful Irish woman back to his “loft/at the dead end of town.”
 
        Try as I might
        the bad roger wouldn’t rise.
        She groaned and lit up a Benson,
        dropped back into her shift
        and kissed the culprit.
 
                     …leaving
        a red-faced spoiler frowning,
        much humbler with his power gone.
 
The poet is a player in the oldest game, but it is a level playing field and he catalogues his failings as well as his successes. It is so from the beginnings in his National Service days:
 
        The best looking cook I ever saw,
        she met me at the back of her kitchen
        after Lights Out, and we had it there
        against a brick wall. She was gifted
        in her method, helping a young soldier
        to pass his apprenticeship…[lxxviii]
 
Indeed, in all the poems from the Intervals of Heat sequence John Tripp is at least as much sinned against than sinning: and he delights in it. After a “West Turret lay” he asks –
 
        -         Are you OK, Rachel?
        -         What do you think?
        We buttoned, smoothed, combed and tidied
        then ran to beat the clock and keepers
        before the gates shut. If this
        was being wanton, wayward and reckless
        we liked it.
 
Life’s risks, the writer’s scribbles are both ploys to “beat the clocks and keepers before the gates shut.” That is what John Tripp’s two encounters with Sandeman Port man, decades apart, impress upon him. On the second occasion, on Tripp’s forty-third birthday Old Sandeman “ …had a Mini outside, a portable Japanese/television set and two blondes.” The poet, though his mouth is “an obsolete old Bren gun” has “covered many lines/with perishable verse, two weddings/three funerals, four friendships/ and the love of my life.” This time Sandeman creeps “backwards through the door, muttering, clutching his apparatus of frivolity.” Tripp says, “Oddly enough, I felt sorry for him.”[lxxix] And that indicates a degree of confidence, a sense that the writer has been working to some purpose. In what was to be his final commentary John Tripp looks back at his work and the core of its purpose: “I wanted, ideally, in my poems to create a terse, epigrammatic commentary on the Wales of today, its ramshackle beauty and sadness, its cultural and political predicament, its pride.”[lxxx] He certainly did that and, as I hope to have shown, he did more, reflecting on public and personal lives in the post-war years, the place of the individual in a post-industrial society and the stress and joys between men and women. He wrote, “A poet’s delight and sadness/must be feminine.”[lxxxi]

John Tripp was a writer of energy but variable quality and control; few of his contemporaries are not subject to a similar judgement. Both strengths and limitations are as exhibited in his uncollected, and unpublished prose and poetry, as they are in the published writings. And I have, I trust, worked to recognise and celebrate that. John may never have determined the meaning of apricot sponge, but he relished the taste. Perhaps he would have welcomed his judgement of Geoffey Grigson[lxxxii] as an epitaph for himself and his own work:
 
        Mark him, young poets in the city.
        He has much to teach, against the clock,
        packing beauty into the murk.


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[i] All poems quoted are collected in John Tripp – Selected Poems edited by John Ormond, ( Bridgend, Seren, 1989) SP unless otherwise indicated; or Collected Poems 1958-78 (Swansea, Christopher Davies,, 1978) CP
[ii] See “Farewell to a Shambles” for this and other details of his National Srvice in Planet 28, August, 1975.
[iii] “Lloyd George” The Loss of Ancestry (Llandybie, Christopher Davies, 1969)
[iv] “Is There Still Honey for Tea?” Passing Through (Bridgend, Poetry Wales Press, 19840
[v] “Lakeside” from Bute Park and other Poems (Cardiff, Second Aeon, 1971)
[vi] “A David Jones Mural at Llanthony” SP p97.
[vii] Nigel Jenkins has done research into the mythsn and facts of John Tripp’s education, particularly the Morley College years. See John Tripp in the Writers of wales Series, (Cardiff, UWP, 1989) pp. 23-28.
[viii] This and other early details are confirmed by the unpublished beginnings of a biography written (with dictation from John Tripp) by Fay Williams (Cornes) his companion in the early days after his return to Wales in 1969, a copy of which she kindly sent to me..
[ix] From “Indonesian Interlude” in Planet 22
[x] Passing Through
[xi] Planet 34.
[xii] From “Who’s In, Who’s Out” a poem from the Fay Cornes (Fay Williams) collection of mss shared with the present author in 2008.
[xiii] “The Last at Lucy’s”, a poem never collected, but published in Welsh Voices – an anthology of New Welsh Poetry ed. Bryn Griffiths (London, Dent, 1967)
[xiv] “Geoffrey Grigson at the Purcell Room” in The Inheritance File (Cardiff, Second Aeon, 1973.)
[xv] From the poem “Nash Point” in the Cornes collection of mss.
[xvi] John Stuart Williams’s introduction to Diesel to Yesterday (Cardiff, Triskel Press, 1966)
[xvii]An Anthology of Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1917-67 published by Dent in 1969 with an introduction by Raymond Garlick.
[xviii] Tripp had met her at a “Dial-a-Poem” recording with John Ormond in the January of 1970. (Confirmation of several personal details regarding this period have been supplied by Fay Cornes (nee Williams) in telephone conversations and correspondences with the author in 2008)
[xix] Fay Cornes writes: “I was still living at home with my parents when John and I met but, in January 1972, I bought a flat in Curlew Close, Whitchurch, which was just off Manor way. Obviously, John often stayed the night and enjoyed using the flat when I was at work if he wanted some peace and quiet to write. But apart from a toothbrush and the odd item of clothing, he did not move in and I never asked him to! At that time we both liked our independence despite being madly in love. In any case, I do not think he would have wanted to leave his father on his own. By the way, he often used to write letters to the Western Mail and South Wales Echo from Lloyd Llewellyn, Curlew Close, Whitchurch.”
[xx] See “Viriamu Jones Slept Here” in Planet 20. I think that the title was suggested by the John L. Hughes novel Tom Jones Slept Here which he had previously reviewed in The Anglo-Welsh Review Vol. 21. No 47, 1972.
[xxi] “Pontypridd Wedding” from The Province of Belief  (Llandysul, Christopher Davies, 1971).
[xxii] For this and many more insights and information I am, of course, indebted to Nigel Jenkins’s excellent volume on John Tripp in the “Writers of Wales Series” (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1989).
[xxiii] “The Governors” in TLA
[xxiv] Writing in Poetry wales (quoted by Nigel Jenkins p.56)
[xxv] Poetry Wales 15, Spring, 1980
[xxvi] In the interview from Common Ground ed. Susan Butler (Bridgend, Poetry Wales Press, 1985).
[xxvii] “Outsider?” from TLA
[xxviii] C.f. “The English at the Eisteddfod” in Planet 18/19. Also, my chapter “Grafting the Sour to Sweetness: Anglo-Welsh Poetry in the last twenty-five years” in Wales: the imagined nation  ed. Curtis, (Bridgend, Poetry Wales Press, 1986).
[xxix] Common Ground p191
[xxx] In Nigel Jenkins p100.
[xxxi] In The Anglo-Welsh Review No. 79, 1985.
[xxxii] The Anglo-Welsh Review  Vol. 18 No. 42, 1970.
[xxxiii] In “Night with the English Society” the poet feels that he had failed to connect with the undergraduates at Aberystwyth: “They wer so solumn and sad/that notjhing would do but my grey head/sacrificial on a platter, my screwed/mind and mushy hearty offered up in woe/from some solipsist room.” Cornes collection.
[xxxiv] From Preparations (Llandysul, Christopher Davies, 1980)
[xxxv] Quote from his childhood friend Peter Owen (to Nigel Jenkins – in NJ).
[xxxvi] “Pantmawr” SP p72.
[xxxvii] “H.M.S. Cassandra” in the selection Considering Cassandra (Llanrwst, Gwasg Garreg Gwalch, 2003). That incident aboard the naval frigate in Fishguard harbour informs John’s poem “Defence of the West” in SP pp 93-4
[xxxviii] From my poem “Thoughts from the Holiday Inn” first published in The Last Candles (Bridgend, Seren, 1989).
[xxxix] Jean Henderson in Planet  56, 1986.
[xl] It is interesting to note the significance of Valentine’s Day. Fay Cornes confirms that, “John was the most romantic man I’d met.”
[xli] Ibid.
[xlii] “Thoughts at Llandaff” from TPB.
[xliii] See of course Nigel Jenkins and also a more recent survey by Patrick McGuinness in The New Welsh Review No. 68, 2005 “Poetry at the Checkpoint”
[xliv] All published in Planet – numbers 39,30,43,36,49/50.
[xlv] As Jermey Hooker characterises him in his review of CP in The Anglo-Welsh Review No. 65, 1979.
[xlvi] Planet 15, January, 1973
[xlvii] Planet 5/6, Summer, 1971.
[xlviii] Even his final companion Jean Henderson does this in her account of their last day together when” He had mulligatawny soup and a roll, and myself fish and chips, most of the chips filched for a golden retriever and a tabby cat he welcomed extravagantly and who joined us at the fireside to make an instant family.” from “Tripp’s Last Day” in Planet  56, 1986.
[xlix] CP p.126.
[l] The Anglo-Welsh Review Autumn 1973, Vol.22 No 50.
[li] From “Casualty” a short story from Planet 17.
[lii] “Round the Poets” a review article in Planet 16.
[liii] These poems were in the possession of Jean Henderson who kindly gave me copies. It is probable that John Ormond read and rejected these for the SP.
[liv] Page 151 SP.
[lv] Arcade 10 - 20th March, 1981.
[lvi] John Tripp would have been delighted at the success of Jaci Stephen, who he knew as a young writer in Cardiff, in this work and dismayed by the abrupt ending of her Daily Mail column; the digitalisation point being cited as the reason for deeming the role of the tv critic redundant.