But Not for Me

Collis Tollmann’s writing songs of love

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Collis Tollmann, the archive-crawler and fan of artists, was not perhaps destined to become a songwriter. He assured himself — and others in his letters — that he was, of course. That he could and would write songs with the best of them, better than any on the old Tin Pan Alley, better than any trapped in London garrets could possibly manage. That he had the music in his heart and mind; that he loved the music and the music loved him. But as so often with Tollmann, as I, his biographer, can attest, the rhetoric and the reality seldom met.

It is true — and can’t be denied — that Tollmann wrote songs. He got songwriting credits, credits with real bands (for instance ‘Pet Name,’ written for the Red Maxim Gun Collective in the early sixties and ‘The Snargle,’ a song recorded for Decca by Reggie Draws). And some of his songs were performed, and to decent notices. One song of Tollmann’s — ‘I’ve Got Something (to Hand Out in Large Numbers),’ which does not appear to have survived — was played, with some aplomb, by the local band Silks Ajax in Salford in 1961. The reaction, according to the local music press and Tollmann himself, was more than respectable.

Another Tollmann tune, ‘Let Me Count,’ was more ambitious. It was the first of a bid, said Tollmann himself, to adapt all of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet sequence into music of Tollmann’s own composing, with lyrics arranged and if necessary supplemented by Tollmann’s own hand.

This project was never completed, but there is no reason at all to believe that Tollmann suffered from a lack of will, or that — had things gone otherwise — he would not have made good on his promise. If it had all worked out, it is my belief that Tollmann would have done many of the things he said he would do. It was only and always what he referred to as ‘awful, dire circumstances, my enemy of the morning and of all time’ that made the all-too-common thing happen: a combination of distraction, digression, and the idea left unenacted, incomplete.

When Tollmann was in a loquacious mood — and he was sometimes — he would discuss his favourites. Sometimes, this list included living people — people Tollmann knew, got drunk with, people who lent him money. But more often, it was the dead with whom Tollmann believed himself to be in communion. He thought he was part of a great world-historical conversation, to which only the greatest artists ever born were permitted to take part, be they living or dead. (Tollmann maintained, with some self-aware irony, that he had been admitted into the discussion by a back door that did not properly close, by lapses of security that were as advantageous to him and him alone as they were deplorable from the position of the heavenly arbiters who made and surely enforced the rules.)

But participate Tollmann thought he did. Socrates was said to have claimed, as he neared his death by hemlock, to be writing poetry — for the philosopher said he’d been told by the gods in a dream to do so, and it was a pity to leave his abilities unexercised before his life’s work was to be judged by eternity. By the same logic, Tollmann was certain that he ought to write songs. That if he did not write songs the world would suffer. That there would be a great and terrible lack. That lambs might lie down with lions and thereafter eat them, and that horses would behave oddly, as they did in Macbeth — and other places.

To prevent all of this, Tollmann told himself, he must write songs. And not just any songs. It was love songs that the world needed, Tollmann thought. He had lived through a war, after all. So had most of his friends.

What the world needs now, Tollmann thought, was love, sweet love. And he was surely the man best placed to provide it.

What Tollmann most loved, perhaps, was himself, and his own self-perception. But beyond that, he loved concrete things as well as the occasional woman. He loved music, though his view of it was self-taught and eccentric. Tollmann got around. He could dawdle on some instruments fairly well but insisted on composing with the clarinet, an instrument he did not play. Some of his methods were unorthodox. Tollmann’s insistence that his lyrics be set in type, as if ready for publication by Faber, for instance, met with a little disapproval even in a world where artists were increasingly treated as geniuses and permitted fripperies and creative indulgence.

(It was suggested to me by a source who knew Tollmann in those days that Tollmann was to the popular artists of the day what Charles Manson was to the Beach Boys — a hanger-on, someone who did, it is true, get the odd songwriting credit, but whose influence it was always more politic to underplay and on occasion to deny. I have not been able to verify these claims and I include them here exclusively for the record.)

Tollmann’s great musical ambitions went unfulfilled, but the poetry that inspired them continued to inspire him. It is true that Tollmann had little time for poetry. But what poetry he had time for stayed with him many years.