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Meary James Tambimuttu
‐
Tamil poet, writer and editor
Other names
Thurairajah Tambimuttu
Tambi
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Location(s)
London
W1T 4BL
United Kingdom
Place of death
London
Date of time spent in Britain
1938–49, 1968–83
About
A Sri Lankan Tamil from an affluent English-speaking Roman Catholic family, M. J. Tambimuttu arrived in Britain at the age of 22. Having already published three volumes of poetry in Ceylon, he soon immersed himself in the literary world of London’s Soho and Fitzrovia. Within little more than a year of his arrival he had founded the magazine Poetry London (1939–51) with the writer and musician Anthony Dickins. While Dickins' involvement quickly diminished, Tambimuttu edited the first fourteen volumes of the magazine and a number of books, as well as writing his own poetry. In July 1943, with the backing of publishers Nicholson & Watson (on the recommendation of T. S. Eliot, who was an admirer of his), he established Editions Poetry London, which published contemporary verse and prose, as well as art books, in hard cover. Tambimuttu was also a regular participant in the BBC radio series Talking to India during the Second World War. A man of charisma as well as a talented editor, he had an array of friends and acquaintances with whom he enjoyed the pubs and cafes of Fitzrovia.
Tambimuttu returned to Sri Lanka in 1949 then moved to New York in 1952, where he launched the magazine Poetry London–New York (1956–60) as well as continuing to publish short fiction and poetry of his own, and lecturing at the Poetry Center and New York University. In 1968 he returned to London, where he founded a final magazine, Poetry London/Apple Magazine, which had just two issues, and a publishing company, the Lyrebird Press. He died of heart failure in London in 1983.
Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, W. H. Auden, George Barker, Z. A. Bokhari, Hsiao Ch'ien, Venu Chitale, Alex Comfort, Ananda Coomaraswamy (his uncle), Walter de la Mare, G. V. Desani, Indira Devi, Anthony Dickins, Keith Douglas, Cedric Dover, Lawrence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Gavin Ewart, E. M. Forster, G. S. Fraser, Lucian Freud, Diana Gardner, David Gascoyne, Michael Hamburger, Barbara Hepworth, Augustus John, Fredoon Kabraji, Alun Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Richard March, Una Marson, Narayana Menon, Henry Miller, Henry Moore, Anais Nin, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Paul Potts, Kathleen Raine, Balachandra Rajan, Herbert Read, Keidrych Rhys, Francis Scarfe, Elizabeth Smart, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Stephen Spender, Marie Stopes, Alagu Subramaniam, Graham Sutherland, Dylan Thomas.
Songs of Youth (1932)
Tone Patterns (Colombo: Slave Island Printing Works, 1936)
Out of This War (London: The Fortune Press, 1941)
(ed.) Poetry in Wartime (London: Faber, 1942)
Natarajah: A Poem for Mr T. S. Eliot (London: Editions Poetry London, 1948)
(ed.) India Love Poems (New York: Peter Pauper Press, 1954)
(ed.) Poems from Bangla Desh: The Voice of a New Nation (London: The Lyrebird Press, 1972)
See also editions of Poetry London and Williams (below) for work by Tambimuttu.
Beckett, Chris, ‘Tambimuttu and the Poetry London Papers at the British Library: Reputation and Evidence’, Electronic British Library Journal (2009), http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2009articles/article9.html
Maclaren-Ross, J., Memoirs of the Forties (London: Alan Ross, 1965)
Poologasingham, P., Poet Tambimuttu: A Profile (Colombo: P. Tambimuttu, 1993)
Ranasinha, Ruvani, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Williams, Jane (ed.) Tambimuttu: Bridge between Two Worlds (London: Peter Owen, 1989)
Contributors' Talks File 1 (1941–62), BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading
Meary James Tambimuttu MSS, Add MS 88907, British Library, St Pancras
Keith Douglas MSS, Add MSS 53773–53776, 56355–56360, 60585–60586, 61938–61939, British Library, St Pancras
Richard March MSS, Add MS 88908, British Library, St Pancras
Reginald Moore MSS, British Library, St Pancras
Poetry London–New York records, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York
Northwestern University, Chicago
On the third day after my arrival in London in January 1938…I had already discovered Fitzrovia, and settled down at 45 Howland Street, maybe in the same house where Verlaine and Rimbaud had once conducted their stormy love affair…
...
The first friendships in a new environment have a special quality and meaning and it was at Peter’s party that I first ran across Anthony Dickins, Gavin Ewart, Stephen Spender and Laurence Clark, whose poems I have consistently printed in Poetry London although he was too J. C. Squire-ish and Georgian for most editors...
...
By the end of February 1939, when the first number of Poetry London had been in the bookstalls for a month, with the special souvenir cover drawn by Hector Whistler, nephew of James McNeill Whistler, who came to our chiefly Sibelius musicals at 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning with a steaming pot of hot coffee in his hand…our humble dwelling in Whitfield Street had been visited by many celebrities of today. We had a pre-publication visit from Larry Durrell and his brother Gerald…
...
And thus it was that I became a true Fitzrovian like my friends Augustus John, Roy Campbell, Gavin Maxwell, Elizabeth Smart and Kathleen Raine, all of whom used to visit Fitzrovia with me. But I had it in my soul a very long time ago.
M. J. Tambimuttu, ‘Fitzrovia’, Harpers & Queen (February 1975), pp. 223, 225, 229–30, 232
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
