Edge of the Orison (12 page)

When I was a jobbing dealer, hitting Stamford, Clare was out of my league. I couldn't afford the cabinet. I worked the shelves, just inside the door, paperbacks and fiction deemed cheap enough to take its chances with ram-raiders in anoraks, unselective kleptomaniacs. One morning, at the start of a day's book trawl, I found a run of Colin Watson novels, crisp and clean, unsullied by the fingers of previous owners. Watson's shtick was comedy and sudden death; mysteries set in the flatlands, bodies draped over electricity pylons. Tales he delivered with the verve of Tom Sharpe. At his best, he was almost as good as Jack Trevor Story. He factored a strain of cynical, corrupted Englishness that I admired without reservation. Born in Croydon, a journalist and leader-writer for Thomson Newspapers, he knew where the bodies were buried and knew that life beyond the metropolis was still worth recording: ugly-lovely, lustful, ultimately absurd.

It turned out that the author had dumped the books, he was a friend of the proprietor. An action forged in the spirit of John Clare. The best writers, the ones with spiky independence and a voice of their own, finish up hawking unsold stock, discounted by bored publishers, door to door. I took everything by Colin Watson and arranged to visit him, out in Lincolnshire, on the road to Sleaford. West Street, Folkingham: the address. In the general direction Clare travelled, on foot, when he dragged himself and his bundle of books to Boston. Frederick Martin has the poet achieving this walk, Helpston to Boston, a distance of more than thirty miles, burdened with his sack, in a single day.

He walked all the way, and arriving in the evening of a beautiful day, ascended the steeple of the old church, just when the sun was sending his last rays over the surging billows of the North Sea. The view threw Clare into rapturous delight. He had never before seen the ocean, and felt completely overwhelmed at the majestic view which met his eyes. So deep was the impression left on his mind that it kept him awake allnight; and when he fell asleep, towards the morning, the white-crested waves of the sea, stretching away into infinite space, hovered in new images over his dreams.

Gaunt, sharp-featured, a little wary of the stranger on the step, Watson interrupted his work as a silversmith. Eyeglass. Tools in hand. He couldn't understand where it had gone wrong. His novels were well received – ‘Watson's portrait of the tawdry side of English provincial life is saved from bitterness by something rare in detective novels: a dirty sense of humour’ – and they'd even had a few moments of television time, with Anton Rogers (who used to come around my stall in Camden Passage, Islington, asking for books on fishing) as the detective.

The problem was that Watson, lese-majesty, had trashed Agatha Christie in an essay called ‘The Little World of Mayhem Parva’. Big mistake. Watson's Flaxborough, a credible setting, packed with ‘sentimental animal lovers, drunken journalists, randy aldermen, and corrupt doctors’, was all too real. Stamford, Boston, Helpston, Glinton. Lesser Peterborough at the turn of the Millennium. Folkingham in 1985.

Watson put away his instruments, took me upstairs to the living room. He had a vision, Lincolnshire inspired it, of epic tank battles, an H. G. Wells Armageddon. Machines crushing humans for the benefit of remote viewers. The future, yet again, recovered from Victorian or Edwardian science fiction. The pain of it was in his face.

He signed my books, we parted. He was astonished that his early first editions were a desirable commodity, while his current publications, the boxes of Book Club editions, filled his shelves. He would have to let the writing game go, it didn't pay. Concentrate on silver rings and decorative trinkets. The Helpston villagers, according to Frederick Martin, had the same advice for Clare. Give
up poetry, peddle jewellery, fancy handkerchiefs, patent medicines. And even then, they thought, he might be setting his cap too high. ‘They looked upon a bagman as a person of superior rank – decidedly higher than a poet.’

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 caffeine, 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.