He's the poet who gets more headlines for his unorthodox love life than for his work, yet he can't seem to stop writing about it. Louise East meets Hugo Williams, who feels truly English only when in Ireland
It is brave of Hugo Williams to let another female journalist darken his door. The last two invited to interview the poet in his Islington home took great pleasure in describing the chaos they found - a bath still full of water; toppling, teetering piles of paper covered with a rug of dust; a copy of Your Prostate on the bathroom shelf.
I can't wait to get through the door and have a look at this squalor, but the journey from hall to back garden is something of a disappointment. His house is a little eccentric in spots - a downstairs room where he compiles scrapbooks is painted the exact pink of cheap strawberry ice cream and the kitchen appears to have remained untouched since 1966 when he and his wife first moved in - but for the most part, it's perfectly lovely.
Sitting in the overgrown garden, I compliment him on his courage under journalistic fire, and he laughs, "I quite like it really, a bit of knockabout." For it is not just Williams's actual dirty laundry which has come under scrutiny, but also the metaphorical stuff. Like his last collection, 1999's Billy's Rain, his new book, Dear Room, contains several poems on the subject of a five-year extra-marital affair he conducted with a woman called Carolyn.
When he showed Billy's Rain to his wife, a former tightrope walker called Hermine Demoriane, she apparently laughed. They are married still, although Demoriane has lived in France, where she run an arts centre, since 1993.
Williams was surprised by the level of interest in the distinctly unorthodox Williams menage but then, he concludes, a "wicked, adulterous old Etonian" does make such very good copy.
Doesn't the interest in his private life ever get intrusive? "Pff, not really," he says breezily. "Must be boring for darling Carolyn. Must be tiresome for her." Does she know there's a new collection? Williams looks uncharacteristically cagey: "I don't know." And what about your wife? "I just quietly forget to mention when the articles come out. She only expresses a mild interest." But there was no question of not staying married? "No, no. It didn't seem something we were overly bothered about. I never felt like it." At 64, Williams could easily pass for 50. He has those Mills and Boon good looks where his blue eyes cry out to be called "piercing", but is dressed in a very un-Mills and Boon get-up of faded Teenage Fanclub T-shirt and jeans.
Undoubtedly posh, with the upper-class horror of using the word "I", his background is actually more boho than aristo.
Hugh Williams, his father, was a 1930s heart-throb who propositioned his mother, a former model and actress called Margaret Vyner, when they were both on board an ocean liner bound for Broadway. She was drinking milk and he sent a note saying "Champagne's better than milk: why don't you join me?" Hugo's younger brother, Simon Williams, is also an actor.
Unlike most writers who take themselves very seriously indeed, Williams determinedly sketches himself as a scribbler benefiting from a run of good luck. Despite winning the TS Eliot prize for Billy's Rain, he happily refers to his own work as "light comedy" and even paints it as "lightweight, middle-brow sort of stuff", a description which would give other poets the vapours.
Conversational in tone, his poems poke and worry at memory and the past with a wry excoriating humour. In Prayer, a poem he dryly refers to as "my anthology piece" he fervently requests: "God give me the strength to lead a double life." The Times of Our Lives from Dear Room kicks off with the defiant, "The future can go and be / bloody terrifying on its own / for all I care."
"Clarity," he says firmly. "That seems to me important, although I've been accused of clarity so often, I'm rather sick of it." As to why he chooses to write in the confessional mode, he says, "Desperation really. I mean, what else do you use? The habit of poetry is to look into what you're doing yourself, there's nowhere else to look really. I've got an incredibly narrow outlook. I mean, just two or three subjects."
Which are? "Feelings about women and memories of the past." Returning to his extra-marital affair was never his intention: "I found I had some thoughts left over from the last one [ Billy's Rain] so I thought I'd give myself one more go and then call it a day."
Has it worked? "I have written a few poems for the next book," he says slowly, and when he laughs those blue eyes light right up. "But they look like they're going to be about the same thing." His working process is one he describes as "economical". He hoards up lines and ideas, transferring unused ones from poem to poem, and when he has a number of such lines, he types them all up on a manual typewriter, cuts them up and fiddles around with them until they seem to make sense.
"The end is very important. If there's an ending that seems to be connected to a beginning, I try and fill in the middle so it has some kind of rhythmic continuity." Self-expression, he says, has nothing to do with it. "It's the activity I want, the act of making something. I don't have anything to say but I need material to make a poem out of so I think, oh, that's nice over there or I'll make a poem out of yesterday."
Poetry writing the Williams way sounds rather like a game of literary fuzzy-felt, a simple matter of popping this here and that there, and I must admit I'm suspicious. It's not that I think he's making it sound easy in order to suggest it's secretly rather difficult, but I do suspect that he has a horror of sounding pompous or self-important.
Here is his own faltering description of his poetry: "Well I think it goes back to light comedy really, that Chekhovian, wistful timing, the balanced statement that is somehow aware of itself but is very much aware of not being a bore about things. You know. I think that's why the poems are so short - and I do feel sometimes that they're too short. My fear of banging on is a fault."
It's tempting to turn pop psychologist and trace the root of this to his childhood. Williams remembers his father coming home from the war when he was 3½; "I had this sinking feeling as soon as I saw him, because up to that point I had so many women at my beck and call - grannies, nannies, mummy. Then this stranger turns up who seems to have control of them all."
Times had changed and Hugh Williams's brand of professional smoothie had been replaced by actors playing boy-next-door. Forced into bankruptcy, the Williams family moved from rented house to rented house, eight in total, until finally Hugo's parents started to earn a living writing light plays.
It was, Williams says, "a wonderful childhood". Did he get on well with his parents? "Oh no. My mother, yes, she defended me but he was rather a strict, categorical sort of chap. It was okay if you were being witty or if you were being splendid in some way, but if you were being a bit tearful or a hypochondriac as I was, then it wasn't very popular. And why should it be?"
I ask whether he started writing a poetry in reaction to all that and Williams looks faintly horrified and says, "No, no". Yet he did, quite literally, first write poetry to please his father, putting together a hand-written anthology of poetry for a Christmas present and filling up the end of the notebook with pastiches of his own.
Increasingly though, the memories of his father which filled such collections as 1985's Writing Home are being supplanted by meditations on his own ageing. Both Billy's Rain and Dear Room contain poems called Last Things, the most recent incarnation a terrific poem depicting Williams's final deeds as a herd of skittery impala, waiting to break cover. "I'm 64, it's horrifying. I think when I get past 65, I'll be feeling better. I've got tremendous worries about being old. I think about it all the time which is stupid. No point."
For most of his adult life, Williams has compiled scrapbooks which now number more than 60, and just before I leave, we go to look at them lining the downstairs walls. His daughter, a 40-year-old journalist called Murphy, features prominently as do her children, Silver and Jesse. Flipping though one, Williams points at a photo and says, "Look! Poets!" as though spotting zebra, and yet another prompts the delicious, "There's my father, a real smoothie. There's me in short trousers. And look, a telegram from Larry!" It can only be, and of course is, from Laurence Olivier. Does he think about who he is compiling these for? He pauses a moment. "I don't imagine it'll be out of interest in me as a poet. In any age, there are probably only six poets who endure and I'm not one of those. I don't know really. It's a way of tidying up more than anything."
Finally, I take my leave with regret as Williams is such very good company. I ask him whether he comes to Ireland much.
"Oh yes," he says with some relish. "The thing about Brits going to Ireland is that when we go over there, we have a kind of authenticity we don't have when we're here. Suddenly we make sense. People like me, for example. I'm home counties. I've got the clothes. I've got the background. I've got the accent and I've got the poems. Everything fits together. It all makes sense in Ireland."
Dear Room is published by Faber, £8.99