Edge of the Orison (13 page)

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

His host, Burkhardt, led the poet to the river at Westminster Bridge, a hoped-for Wordsworthian epiphany. Clare's soul was resolutely dull; the nocturne, silver lights in liquid darkness, spurned. ‘I was dissapointed thinking I should have seen a fresh water sea and when I saw it twas less than Whittlesea Meer.’

Women parading the streets were of greater interest. Perfumed exoticism. So many and so magnificent. Burkhardt shocked Clare by revealing their trade. The weary, befuddled tourist couldn't get his bearings. Nothing was as it appeared. The Helpston poet imposed a system of equivalents on London. The Thames becomes Whittlesey Mere. Westminster Abbey is Peterborough Cathedral. St Paul's stands for Glinton spire. One of the gorgeous nightwalkers might be Mary Joyce. He refuses to venture in high literary stocks: London reconstituted as a wild geology of cliffs, crags, cataracts. No laudanum, no lakes, for John. The murky expanse of Whittlesey Mere, witnessed during that long, dull voyage from Peterborough to Wisbech, stayed with him in a way the muddy Thames never would. Clare was impervious to German metaphysics. His romanticism consisted of viewing prostitutes, in their nocturnal perambulations, as grand and stately creatures. In acknowledging prizefighters as poets. Poets as labouring men.

In John Taylor's Fleet Street office, Keats used the back of a letter from Clare to his publisher (litany of ill health, underpayment, bores of verse) to tinker with a draft of
Lamia
. Clare was unsentimental about his Cockney colleague's damaged lungs, his voyage to Italy.

‘I should like to see the fiz of the man,’ he wrote to Hessey (29 June 1820), ‘before he drops off and hope he will last till next winter when I shall hazard myself to town unaccompanied.’

Born in a Moorgate pub, Keats was the voice of London: and he had escaped. Broken away. Sickness. Foreign parts. The two poets never met. ‘Give my respects to Keats and tell him I am a half mad melancholly dog in this moozy misty country he has latly cast behind him.’

When Keats died, unsold stock piled high, Taylor presented Clare with a copy of Chaucer that had once belonged to the London poet. Clare's library grew until it threatened to overwhelm the limits of his wife's tolerance. His tastes were orthodox, his reading wide. He valued books as objects. He solicited gifts from other writers, from patrons. Promised many, he received few. One complimentary volume of Keats, gifted by Taylor, he sent back: to demand the poet's inscription. He badgered Peter de Wint for a drawing:

The favour requested & the liberty taken to request it being neither more or less than a wish to possess a bit of your genius to hang up in a frame in my Cottage by the side of Friend Hiltons beautifull drawing which he had the kindness to give me when first in London what I mean is one of those scraps which you consider nothing after having used them & that lye littering about your study

To keep the incidents of the city fresh in his mind, for future exploitation, Clare made shorthand notes. ‘Mem: ladys thronging the streets at night.’ He worked hard to flesh out his self-portrait as a premature flâneur. ‘One of my greatest amusements while in London was reading the booksellers windows,’ he confessed. ‘I was always fond of this from a boy and my next greatest amusement was the curiosity of seeing litterary men.’

Churches, theatres, the premises of John Murray (Lord Byron's publisher). Dues paid, Clare lost himself in the mob, the incessant scurrying of tradesmen, whores, beggars, loiterers. He was hustled
from place to place, room to room, patron to patron. They tried his conversation, Lord Radstock and Mrs Emmerson; they were short of a biddable peasant, rough trade with a bundle of unedited manuscripts. A non-insurrectionary poet who knew how to be grateful. They set up funds, they badgered publishers.

The first London excursion: novelty. Muffled in a long green coat, Clare comes to terms with the conditions of notoriety: being watched, gossiped over, tested. Frederick Martin tells us that he was ‘unwilling to play the part of a newly discovered monkey’. He remained unimpressed: by the tourist circuit, the gaudy of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. He dragged himself to one of Taylor's literary dinners. He met Hazlitt: ‘A silent picture of severity.’ J. H. Reynolds: ‘He would punch you with his puns very keenly without ever hurting your feelings.’ Henry Cary. Lord Radstock (admiral, Christian). And, by way of Radstock, the flutteringly determined poetess (and collector of poets), Mrs Eliza Emmerson. One empty chair: John Keats was ill.

The best of London was quitting it. A more comfortable coach ride. The Bull Inn at Ware. A serving girl who caught his eye. A sonnet. Clare's London poems, the residue of this visit, are prose. The notes of a survivor. Gossip, anecdote, confession. His new friends, concerned patrons, nudge him towards marriage with the definitively pregnant Patty Turner.

June 1822 brings Clare back to town: alone, unaccompanied, sensations sharper. Celebrity has curdled. His first book,
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life & Scenery
, has run through four editions. A second book is unpublished. The vogue for peasants is over, poetry is out of fashion. Clare sits in Taylor's window, in Fleet Street, and he watches. That property, on the south side of the street, to the east of St Bride's, is currently (2004) occupied by The Link, a mobile-phone franchise. ‘£20 off. Pay as you like.’ Curved window, dirty red brick. Cheap novelties.