Edge of the Orison Read online

  Stamford businessmen with a weakness for literature took Clare up: Octavius Gilchrist, gentleman grocer, and Edward ‘Ned’ Drury, bookseller, proprietor of a circulating library, cousin to the London publisher John Taylor. They sniffed at his verses, but recognised that the vogue for peasant poetry was still in the air. Taylor agreed. Last season's new face, the Cockney Keats, wasn't making much of an impression: go pastoral. First the work, then the man. Bring him to London. The decision was made by those with his best interests at heart. Clare submitted. In March 1820, accompanied by Gilchrist, he took the Regent coach from the George Hotel in Stamford to the Blue Boar in Holborn. The city of ghosts. His dream, his undoing.

  In Transit

  A great year, 1820. Clare's first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, is published by John Taylor. He marries ‘Patty of the Vale’ (leaving her at home with her parents, near Pickworth). He makes his first visit to London.

  A book cannot exist on its own, the author must also be published, brought to the place of publication, exhibited. Clare is puffed, patronised, dissected. Versions of his life are finessed into magazines. The poetry is a minor extension of personality: this season's wonder, a Northamptonshire Peasant (precursor of the Elephant Man). The process of splitting away from the generating landscape is begun. Octavius Gilchrist, Stamford grocer, contributor to London periodicals, is appointed his guide. Minder. Driver. Cultural pander.

  Up before first light, Clare began his day with a tramp of six or seven miles, Helpston to Stamford. A walk he did not need to register, it was already imprinted; he had done it so many times. He overtook earlier selves, plodding ahead of him. The village boy, on his errands, seeing shapes in the dark, Fen spirits, soul-stealers. The drunken youth returning to Burghley with fellow labourers, wall at a tilt, to sleep under a tree. Waking dew-soaked, creaking like leather. Clare is the supreme articulator of the mundane. Self-appointed laureate of a corner of disputed land, sometimes in one county, sometimes in another. He is obliged to act as clerk to the specifics of place; at whatever cost, he must transcribe the natural history of nowhere. His accounts of Helpston's flora and fauna become a series of brief lives, genealogies of lichen, snail shells, stones. His separate existence, divorced from these things, is an unstable fiction.

  Gilchrist accompanies the timid poet on his first expedition to the metropolis. He has arranged for Clare to lodge with his brother-in-law, ‘a German called Burkhardt’. An economic migrant, who kept a jeweller's and watchmaker's shop in the Strand, Burkhardt loved to astonish country folk with the sights of London. The greatest of them, happening on his doorstep, he missed entirely. An event too subtle to capture his attention.

  William Blake's landlord in South Molton Street sold his business in the spring of 1820. The Blakes, William and Catherine, decamped – books, pictures, sheets, portfolios, tools – to Fountain Court. Their final marital home was hidden away at the back of the Fountain Tavern in the Strand. Close to the river. Strange to think of the two poets, seldom connected in critical discourse, living for one week in close proximity. William Blake wandering out to collect his jug of evening porter. And Clare, famously thirsty, shaking off his well-meaning minders. It didn't happen. Not in the only version of Clare's biography that we can assemble from accounts left by scholars and documented witnesses.

  Writers are too deeply mired in fantasy to notice one another (except as rivals, caricatures, refractions of their own brilliance). Heads down, necks twisted: mud and stars. Two poets, in fortuitous conjunction, navigate trajectories through different cities that happen, just then, to be in one place. They are blind as comets.

  London is voices. Clare does well to stop his ears, to assert his singularity: that is what publishers require of him. In 1820, by way of mail coach, correspondence (paid for by recipient), by newspapers and magazines, London extended its sphere of influence, sixty miles out and more. The market town of Stamford was as near to the capital as decent men wanted to come.

  ‘Are you St Caroline or “George 4th”?’ Clare wrote to his co-publisher Hessey. ‘I am as far as my politics reaches “King & Country” no Inovations on Religion & government say I… Poor St Caroline she has seen much trouble & perplexity God forgive her.’ Squabbles of distant royalty engage Northamptonshire labourers and village gossips. Like Princess Di and her stiff husband, the diminutive cuff-twitcher, German princelings of Clare's time were figures stuffed with straw. An excuse for rustic pantomime. Punch and Judy. Hanoverian snouts leaking blue blood.

  Helpston pretends, for one night, to be London. ‘This night is the grand illumination for our City in honour of St Caroline,’ Clare asserts (in his letter to Hessey). ‘The woman that is to personate her majesty is a deformed object who is to be dressed in white.’ Clare's cottage window must be lit or it will be broken. Factions of court and city spill into dim countryside. Provincial centres channel hot news.

  Poor Clare is dragged in the other direction, towards the centre, a rhyming clown. He will travel with Octavius Gilchrist, literary vendor of hams and cheeses. London ‘held terrors he could not face’, claimed Edward Storey. But face them he did; back to home, eyes to the south. Watchful, tense. Rattled, shaken, suspended above the road. Out of his knowledge. The Regent coach, boarded in Stamford, at first light. The reluctant voyager interpreted a rush of unfamiliar sensations in a rational way. ‘The thoughts created such feelings in him,’ Storey wrote, ‘that he fancied he had changed his identity as well as his occupation, that he was not the same John Clare but some strange soul that had jumped into his skin.’

  Burghley House. Those walls. He had been possessed, once, by the achievement of James Thomson (initiated into verse). Then the escape with the deserting foreman, a walk, twenty-one miles, north to Grantham. Now this: jolting through literary and historical associations. ‘I have often read myself into a desire to see places which novelists and Essayists have rendered classical by their descriptions of th[eir] presence and other localitys rendered sacred by genius.’ Oliver Cromwell and the poet Cowper at Huntingdon. Robert Bloomfield at Biggleswade. (Clare meant to visit him, on his return journey, but the cash was exhausted and he hurried home.)

  Riding in comparative comfort as a paying passenger confers the responsibility of bearing witness. To a constantly shifting landscape. Clare, drawn out of Helpston, sonar echoes of wood and heath, mislaid his sense of self. New perceptions, a shift in the geology: a second soul gained entry. He impersonated the poet they expected him to be, his publishers, promoters, patrons. Before he had travelled forty miles, the sights and sounds that confirmed his former identity were dead to him.

  Coming south, an excursion as mad as Clare's, a four-day book-hunting tour that took in Carlisle, Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Durham and many lesser pit stops, I recognised Stamford as the starting point for a shift of my own: into fiction. The thing had been cooking for a long time. My feeling for this territory was informed by my relationship with Anna. The country around Stamford was attractive in a perverse way: the contrary of everything I knew and understood. John Clare was part of that difference. I looked at books, birthday gifts to my wife, where they sat, top-dressed in dust, on a red shelf. The 1956 biography by John and Anne Tibble. A new edition of The Shepherd's Calendar, which had been inscribed by a Glinton uncle (aunt's second husband): ‘For Anna, whose majority falls in the year of Clare's centenary.’ Volumes opened at whim: ‘His toil and shout and song is done.’ This was the Clare I steered respectfully around. The rustic verse-maker associated with David Gentleman woodcuts and English Heritage gift shops. Editors boasted of their ambition to ‘bring Clare back to the general reader’. To decent folk who join the society, do the walks and attend the lectures. The ones who plant midsummer cushions on a little-visited grave.

  I enjoyed my lost years as a book scout, doubling through the East Midlands, Lincolnshire and East Anglia, air bases, dormitory villages, barns stacked with plunder. Being out on the road, red-eyed, buzzing with caffe
ine, hammered by monologues, the nervous occultism of fellow dealers, was an excellent preparation: for what? For defacing notebooks, formulating skewed theories, misreading signs. Pre-fictional chaos. I abandoned my attempts to construct pseudo-epics that mingled (without distinction) poetry and prose. Bookdealing, I consoled myself, was a form of authorship: my Thursday stall at Camden Passage Market could be viewed as an exhibition of chosen texts. A modernist collage of found objects. Perfect-bound quotations to take home for cash. Being on the road was a willed dreaming, very much like the dipping into random books, the brooding on sofas, that preceded the furtive announcement of a poem.

  The town of Stamford was a portal. I kept coming back. It wasn't the bookshops, it was the setting. The desktop booklets I published, assembled from recovered jottings, were given away. There was, I knew very well, no other way of dealing with them. These effusions would rightly be called ‘occasional’. Postcards sent from unfestive locations to mislaid friends. One poem is titled ‘6 February 1982: Beyond Stamford’. A section of it runs:

  one breath later, a roadside pub

  sunk in fens, where Gothick poverty

  fed the English opium crop:

  the moon-faced idiocy of dazed mechanicals

  watching their entrails turn to water, high

  on turnips rotted in black overloam'd earth

  Lincolnshire reportage is extracted from a chapbook published in an edition of twenty-one copies. Sent free to unsuspecting colleagues. Sheer hubris on my part to produce so many. I knew all my readers. They had problems of their own. The next book ran to twelve copies. And the last, ten – with one extra made up for a new patron, Mike Goldmark of Uppingham, the madman who agreed to sponsor my first novel. A thin time, just then, for all of us. The Thatcher spectre had former poets cowering in their traps.

  Fiction, for me, begins right here. Incidents, borrowed from book-hunting trips, pressured into another form, a sensationalist account of something that didn't happen: stalled car (Volvo), coke-crazed dealers, sleeping landscape. A sudden turn off the Ai, coming south, left into Stamford.

  A cheese-coloured town, slicked over with fen sleet, damp as an abattoir coldstore, distinguished by a profusion of moulting snail-horn churches, their steeples discouragingly set with sharks' teeth.

  The chief book-hunter (real name, Martin, in unconscious homage to Clare's first biographer) suffers from stomach pains. Clare's distemper starts with heat in the belly. He complains (to Thomas Inskip, 10 August 1824):

  an acking void at the pit of my stomach keeps sinking me away deeper and deeper… the next thing for me to try is salt water…

  And again. To his publisher John Taylor (7 March 1831). Hopes (dashed) for a solution to the present crisis:

  I was taken 3 weeks back or more – with a pain at the stomach which would not go off & as it affected my head very much I felt alarmed & took a part of Dr Ds last prescription… but whenever I attempted to walk friction brought it on as bad as ever & the pain at my stomach started again… I awoke this morning with a burning heat in my fundament where the humour again made its appearance… I got tollerable rest but the pain at my stomach was more frequent in its attacks & I awoke in dreadful irritation… my future prospects seem to be no sleep – a general debility – a stupid & stunning apathy or lingering madness & death…

  I picked up on the tenor of Clare's correspondence, the packets sent to Taylor, by way of Stamford. Torrents of verse. Overdue bills. The early bounce gone from his language. A dead car. The Great North Road. Cold weather. So it begins, my introduction to fiction: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.

  There is an interesting condition of the stomach where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus: a condition spoken of, with some awe, by the connoisseurs of pathology as ‘hour glass stomach’.

  Waves of peristalsis may be felt as they pass visibly across the upper half of the abdomen… A boring pain recurs, beaks in the liver, even the thought of food becomes a torture; a description that starts at discomfort is refined with each meal taken until it colonises the entire consciousness, then copious vomiting, startling to casual observers, brings relief.

  An oaty puddle shines at the roadside, the imposing gates of Burghley Park. Regurgitated bile hangs from tough spears of grass. No other passenger sees it: future vomit melting the snow of a parallel Stamford. The travelling poet, John Clare, is not himself. He is neurotically alert for portents of coming damage, romancers who will exploit his memory. The coach jolts towards the Great North Road. It overtakes a stalled Volvo in which reprints of his books are so much ballast, among sacks of provincial trufflings that will be traded in London markets.

  Stamford, with its pretensions to society, its newspapers, its status as a spoilt university town, refused to appoint Clare as its salaried fool. Lord Exeter guided him, his muddy, creaking boots, down the endless corridors of Burghley House, making promises. But long before this, before London, Stamford had a mythic status, referred to in the ancient chronicles of Bladud of Bath, the English Icarus. Bladud was portrayed as the ‘Ninth King of Britain’. Philosopher. Magician. Leper and pig-keeper.

  Howard C. Levis published an account of Bladud of Bath. The British King Who Tried to Fly in 1919.

  Not only did Bladud try to fly, but he is the traditional founder of Bath, and, practising magic, produced the hot springs…

  He was sent by his father to Athens to be instructed in philosophy and the liberal sciences. Hearing of the death of his father, he returned home, bringing with him four philosophers, or, according to some authorities, teachers of the four principal sciences, and founded a university at Stamford in Lincolnshire, which was attended by a large number of students, and flourished until the coming of St Augustine, when it was suppressed by the Pope because of the heresies which were taught there.

  Bladud practised necromancy or magic, and taught it throughout his kingdom… He was incessantly performing marvellous tricks, and, to keep up his reputation, made wings of feathers, with which he attempted to fly at Troja Nova (New Troy) or Trinavantum (now London), but he fell on the temple of Apollo (which had been founded by his ancestor, Brute, when he built New Troy), and was dashed to pieces…

  Geoffrey Hadman's flight across England in the Auster was in keeping with local custom: heresy. Dream voyages. Mushroom-induced cloud visions. Stamford needs its spiked churches to keep out devils. The devils Clare knew and accommodated: Fen agues, heat in the stomach, sore fundament. Poor sleep. Walking early through wet fields, prospecting for language. ‘Clare is constantly wandering, in his circumscribed domain,’ said John Ashbery (in Other Traditions, his Norton lectures at Harvard), ‘but there is not much to see.’ Pinched reality is what Clare knows: flatness, huge skies, hidden streams. It is the going away, towards the overwhelming noise of London, that is the terrible thing.

  Here is a common sensation: spirit quitting or entering the body. By nostril, eye, navel. Heel. Aura pierced, worn away. Flight. Derangement. Having begun my novel with a rude invasion of Stamford, I couldn't shake free of the figure of Clare on the road. Carried south in a coach. Walking home to recover himself, to prove his memories. Even when I was describing other characters, shifting around London, they behaved like avatars of Clare. The shamanic march out of Essex.

  He is foaming, white spittle; he is chewing leaves torn from the roadside. He is talking in tongues, prophesying what has already passed. He is seeing nothing.

  ‘I hate Stamford,’ Clare wrote to Taylor (March 1821), ‘but am dragged into it like a Bear & fidler to a wake.’ He had seen London now, the experience had undone him. ‘My vanity is wearied with satisfactional dissapointments.’ Losing himself, the poet skulked among former drinking companions. A straw bear, out of season. Out of fashion. A fiddler waiting for the next funeral.

  London

  Early spring, season of Clare's recurrent unease. Madness
did not come on him suddenly, out of nowhere. Fourteen hours, on a strange road, travelling towards London: first light to last. ‘The road was lined with lamps that diminished in the distance into stars.’

  He watched labourers in the fields, a disturbing change of angle: one Clare stooped over brown earth, picking out stones, while another, newly privileged, stares back from the window of a coach. ‘I could almost fancy that my identity as well as my occupations had changed.’

  But they had not changed. He would still work for day hire, setting hedges, harvesting. One foot in the ditch. Until he was fetched home, to play the poet. The freak of fame. Until he was dragged to the city and cut loose, a bear searching for its fiddler.

  Life to me a dream that never wakes:

  Night finds me on this lengthening road alone.

  There were four visits to London and it was never the same place. Clare persuaded himself, as his acquaintance expanded, as he managed to walk between Fleet Street and Stratford Place (off Oxford Street), that the city absorbed him, tolerated his presence. Long before the steady stare of camera poles and CCTV monitors, he felt the prick of eyes on his skin. Watchers. Primed to spring trapdoors hidden in the narrows of Chancery Lane. Cannibal cellars. Blood drained from a wound in his throat. They left him dangling on a meat hook, a husk of dry paper. London was a scarlet nightmare.

  When I used to go anywhere by myself especially Mrs Emmersons I used to sit at night till very late because I was loathe to start not for the sake of leaving the company but for fear of meeting with supernaturals even in the busy paths of London & tho I was a stubborn disbeliever of such things in the day time yet at night their terrors came upon me ten fold & my head was as full of the terribles as a gossips – thin death like shadows & goblings with soercer eyes were continually shaping in the darkness from my haunted imagination & when I saw any one of a spare figure in the dark passing or going on by my side my blood has curdled cold at the foolish apprehension of his being a supernatural agent whose errand might be to carry me away at the first dark alley we came too