Victor Neuburg, A guide to the Western Front: a companion for travellers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988)

In 1933 Neuburg began editing The Poet’s Corner in the British newspaper the Sunday Referee which encouraged new talent by awarding weekly prizes. He may be best remembered as the “discoverer” of Dylan Thomas when he gave an award to the then-unknown poet who eventually had his first book of poems, titled 18 Poems, sponsored by the publisher of the Sunday Referee.

Extract

Today, the history of the area is remembered in the street names Vera's Walk and Sanctuary Lane and the houses known as Sanctuary Cottages. A memorial shelter remains, erected and decorated by Dennis Earle, containing boards telling the story of The Sanctuary. Bank holiday in that year was August 7. Either just before this visit or immediately after his return to Swansea, he wrote to Geoffrey Grigson, who had earlier that year begun publication of New Verse, probably the most important poetry magazine, with the exception of Poetry (Chicago), to be published in the English language so far in this century. To him he wrote: Victor E. Neuburg, The penny histories: a study of chapbooks for young readers over two centuries, illustrated with facsimiles of seven chapbooks (The Juvenile Library; London: Oxford University Press, 1968) SWANSEA, the town in which Dylan Thomas spent his first twenty years, or more than half his life, was in three ways a frontier: geographically, in that it is a seaport, and here was the junction between land and ocean; culturally, in that this was the meeting point of the Welsh and English languages, and it is to this that Dylan was referring when he wrote of Swansea’s “two-tongued sea"; socially, in that here lies the dividing line between the ancient, agricultural Wales of “the good, bad boys from the lonely farms” and the Wales of the mining valleys with their own particular and very vivid life. Such deepseated conflict can be destructive and stultifying, especially if it leads to mutual hatreds. On the other hand, it can also be highly stimulating to the questing mind. One of the functions, perhaps the most important and fruitful function, of the artist is to make a pattern out of chaos, to find an imaginative synthesis for the antitheses about him. And it was in the very nature of Swansea and of the Wales he knew that Dylan found one of his principal themes, for the divisions of the town passed, as it were, through his own body. He was a Welshman, but he was an English poet; no major English poet has ever been as Welsh as was Dylan. His instincts were those of a countryman, as is most of his imagery, yet he was happy only by the sea. Hopper’s book might be focused on The Vine Press, but it guides us towards much else besides. “My family has deep ties to Steyning,” he says. “The idea that Neuburg, this potently hedonistic figure resided there is fascinating to me. You can’t help but like him as a person and his reputation needs rescuing from the Crowley-Thomas axis. He did some beautiful wonderful work. And he lived in terror of normality.”

Victor E. Neuburg, 'Popular Education and Literacy', Local Population Stuies Magazine and Newsletter, no. 4 (Spring 1970), pp. 51-5 Sebagai produk budaya populer, tentu saja karya sastra ini banyak diminati oleh masyarakat luas. Karya sastra atau cerita yang disajikan biasanya memang dekat atau lekat dengan kehidupan masyarakat sehari-hari yang kemudian menjadi salah satu daya tarik dari karya sastra populer. Crowley and Neuburg evolved what would clearly be recognized today as some sort of D/s dynamic. There is no clear model and it does not look the same as D/s in the modern era. They were in practice far closer in time and culture to the Master/slave relationship described in “Venus in Furs” by Sacher-Masoch (1870) than “Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns” (1995). Ukuran kuantitas menjadi tolok ukur keberhasilan pemasaran buku dari sastra populer karena sastra populer memang sifatnya komersil atau dijadikan bahan dagangan. Sastra populer juga memiliki sifat yang lebih mudah dibaca dan dipahami karena hanya menyampaikan jalan cerita semata, sehingga yang terlihat hanya masalah itu-itu saja. There are a number of models for their relationship and a few bear discussion. Certainly they had a declared Master/aspirant relationship, and also an informal relationship with Crowley as older poet and mentor. The dynamics between them run deeper and bear considerably more exploration than allowed here, however because this important aspect of their lives together has been so poorly understood we will add some commentary.

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there were other troubles. For the Post he wrote a series of articles on the poets of Swansea. This was considered quite safe, and Dylan was given a free hand to say what he wished about the local bards, long dead and usually long forgotten until he dug up their literary remains for brief examination before final reinterment. Unfortunately, though, one local worthy was not dead. A Mr. Howard Harris arrived in an immensely bad temper at the Post offices. His anger was not lessened by the discovery that the critic who had so airily dismissed his life’s work was himself not yet age nineteen. Neuburg went on to fight in the First World War and by all accounts cut a ludicrous figure as a soldier. Afterwards, he lived in the picturesque Vine Cottage in Steyning, Sussex, where he set up the Vine Press. Using a handheld press, he produced several volumes of his own poetry: Lillygay(Vine Press, 1920), which included verse in Scottish dialect; Swift Wings(Vine Press, 1921), about subjects connected with Sussex; Songs of the Groves(Vine Press, 1922) and Larkspur(Vine Press, 1922), in which he occasionally broaches occult themes.He also printed the work of others, including Rupert Croft-Cooke’s Songs of a Sussex Tramp(Vine Press, 1922). The books were beautifully produced and employed a curious font with a wide W and linked double O. Reading Besant’s autobiography (which sadly only covers the first 44 years of her life, up to her conversion to Theosophy), you can’t help but feel that she would have been difficult to live with, but neither can you help being charmed by her candour and, above all, her sheer ‘heart’. And, in spite of the extraordinary journey (literal, as well as political and spiritual) of her life, it still seems that ‘you can’t take the girl out of the woman’. She describes how, in February 1875, she was trapped in a train compartment with a drunken man, on his way home from the greyhound racing. (At that time, there was no connecting corridor on trains, so you couldn’t move from the compartment between stations.) ‘Never before nor since have I felt so thoroughly frightened 11’, she writes, an astounding comment, considering all the amazing things she went on to do – but a revealing one. By the time he met J. F. C. Fuller, he was still disillusioned with Judeo-Christian faith, but had become a mystic. Fuller noted that Crowley had attended Trinity and introduced the two. Neuburg was 23, Crowley 31.

We discuss fagging to convey the degree to which a Master/subservient relationship was an endemic element of British public schooling in the late Victorian period, though perhaps not so brutal as in the earlier half the century, because it supplies a mold into which it is clear that Crowley and Neuburg to some extent fell without planning. Crowley was upperclassman and prefect, Neuburg underclassman.From those notebooks that have survived he published, in his lifetime, fifty-four poems, sometimes in their original form but more frequently in a revised form or even almost totally rewritten. It is again permissible to assume that some of the published poems, other than those in the British Museum typescripts, existed at least embryonically in the missing notebook. This means that of all the poems he chose to publish, over half were written, in at least their original form, before he ever left Swansea. During this same period he wrote all the “poetical” short stories which together formed the unpublished volume called The Burning Baby (1938). Novel merupakan bentuk karya sastra populer yang memiliki unsur intrinsik dan ekstrinsik. Novel memiliki isi lebih panjang dan kompleks dibandingkan cerpen dan tidak memiliki batas struktural dan persajakan. Novel menggambarkan dan menceritakan tentang kehidupan manusia yang berinteraksi dengan lingkungan dan sesamanya.