Portrait of John Heath-Stubbs by Patrick Swift, oil, c.1960 (poor quality reproduction)


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...While he painted, Paddy talked about the stream of friends which flowed through his flat or whom he met in pubs. Hugh MacDiarmid had been there one morning; I regretted not having met him... John Heath-Stubbs at that time lived under a pavement round the corner, and made tea in a cavern too obscure for any but a half-blind man. It was and is unintelligible to me that so much learning can go with so little sight. One day I arrived to find his carapace beginning to take shape on another canvas, though it was still a little while before we met. For Paddy the human character exists, I suppose; at any rate when he had finished with them his sitters had betrayed themselves...
The world evoked by Patrick Swift's conversation was the natural antithesis of the one I inhabit. In it, people put the business of being poets or painters first and other things organized themselves round that. Paddy appeared to be able to manage this while holding himself equally responsible for his family. I greatly admired the economic nonchalance of this world...
- C.H. Sisson, On the Look-Out (a partial autobiography), p.31, Carcanet Press, 1989

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