James Michie, gentle genius

It is a measure of James Michie’s extreme modesty that most of the younger people who bumped into him in the offices of The Spectator probably hadn’t the foggiest idea who he really was.

They might see him reading in the afternoon, sitting with a glass of wine and a half-smile, in the room that led out to the garden. They might have met him on the stair, bearing a sheaf of scrupulously emended proofs.

They would have heard him addressed only as ‘James’, and the hordes of young thrusting proto-journalists who passed through the offices of The Spectator would have concluded that this was some kind of landmark of literary London.

He was plainly a man of great gifts. His headlines were lapidary, and swiftly produced. He seemed to be full of quips. His opinions seemed to be greatly valued by the editors.

Yes: they said to themselves, this is evidently some corduroyed bohemian wordsmith, some chum of Larkin and Amis — and they would hug themselves with pleasure at rubbing shoulders with such picturesque folk, and rejoice at whichever string it was they had pulled to secure their work experience.

James Michie, who died last week, was in reality one of the most distinguished poets and translators of the 20th century, the winner in 1995 of the Hawthornden Prize for poetry. He was also a publisher of great brilliance and originality, with a string of hits and scoops, from J.D. Salinger to Sylvia Plath to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not forgetting Sebastian Faulks.

For more than 30 years he incarnated the eccentric genius of the magazine as ‘Jaspistos’, the creator of the literary and poetic competitions whose objective was to show not just wit but also a mastery of verse — rhyming and scanning — and since he placed a premium on those skills, Jaspistos seemed to be fighting a lonely and glorious struggle against the loss of disciplines which once made English poetry great.