Ruthven Todd

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Ruthven Campbell Todd (14 June 1914 – 1978) was a Scottish poet and novelist, known also as an editor of William Blake, and as an artist. (Ruthven is pronounced 'riven'.)

He was born in Edinburgh, and educated at Fettes College and Edinburgh School of Art. After a short spell in the office of his father, an architect. he worked as an agricultural labourer on Mull, for two years. He then started a career in copy-writing and journalism, while writing poetry and novels, based in Edinburgh, London, and Tilty Mill near Dunmow in Essex (later rented to Elizabeth Smart).

He was involved with the surrealists at the time of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. In London in the late 1930s he was on good terms with Wyndham Lewis, contributing to the Lewis issue of Julian Symons's Twentieth Century Verse, and being brought in to keep awake the dozing Ezra Pound, whose portrait Lewis was painting. (Symons includes a character based on Todd in his first detective story, The Immaterial Murder Case.)

During World War II he was a conscientious objector. Julian Maclaren-Ross in his Memoirs of the Forties tells the story of their encounter in the Highlander pub, in Dean Street, London, in 1943. The meeting got off to a sticky start, Maclaren-Ross having misheard 'Ruthven' as 'Reverend'.

But before I could apologize for having misheard the introduction, Ruthven Todd who now held a whisky in his hand said: 'I didn't get your name either. Who the hell are you anyway'?
I gave my name, Todd's whisky went down the wrong way, and when I'd patted him on the back he spluttered 'But I discovered you!.'
'I thought Cyril Connolly discovered me.'
'On my recommendation.'

He moved to the USA in 1947. There he had a position at the University of New York, and ran a small press, the Weekend Press, during the 1950s.

He settled in Majorca in 1958, where he died.

He wrote also under the pseudonym R. T. Campbell; he contributed to children's literature with the Space Cats series.

Space Cat (1952)
Space Cat (1952)

[edit] Works

  • Poems (1938)
  • The Laughing Mulatto (1939)
  • Over the Mountain (1939)
  • Poets of Tomorrow (1939)
  • Ten Poems (1940)
  • Until Now (1942) Fortune Press, poems
  • Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist (1942) editor
  • Poems for a Penny (1942)
  • The Acreage of the Heart (1943) poems
  • The Lost Traveller (1943)
  • The Planet in my Hand (1944, Grey Walls Press) poems
  • Tracks in the Snow (Grey Walls Press) (1946) criticism of William Blake, Fuseli and John Martin
  • Unholy Dying (1945) as R. T. Campbell
  • First Animal Book (1946) Thomas Bewick engravings
  • Take thee a Sharp Knife (1946) as R. T. Campbell
  • Adventure with a Goat (1946) as R. T. Campbell
  • Bodies in a Bookshop (1946) as R. T. Campbell
  • Death for Madame (1946) as R. T. Campbell
  • The Death Cup (1946) as R. T. Campbell
  • Swing Low Sweet Death (1946) as R. T. Campbell
  • William Blake: America, a prophecy (1947) editor
  • William Blake: Poems (1947) editor
  • Richard and Samuel Redgrave: A Century of British Painters (1947) editor
  • Christopher Smart: A Song to David (1947) editor
  • In Other Worlds (1951)
  • Love Poems for the New Year (1951)
  • Space Cat (1952)
  • Loser's Choice (1953) as R. T. Campbell
  • The Tropical Fish Book (1953)
  • Indian Spring (1954)
  • A Mantelpiece of Shells (1954)
  • Trucks, Tractors, and Trailers (1954)
  • Indian Pipe (1955)
  • Space Cat Visits Venus (1955)
  • Space Cat Meets Mars (1957)
  • Space Cat and the Kittens (1958)
  • Tan's Fish (1958)
  • Selected Poems of William Blake (1960) editor
  • Funeral of a Child (1962)
  • Garland for the Winter Solstice (1961) selected poems
  • The Geography of Faces (1964)
  • Blake's Dante Plates (1968) editor
  • William Blake: The Artist (1971)
  • John Berryman 1914-1972 (1972) broadsheet
  • Lament of the Cats of Rapallo (1973)
  • McGonagall Remembers Fitzrovia in the 1930s (1973)