Edge of the Orison (15 page)

He noticed a young girl, a figure borrowed from De Quincey: the spectre of Ann, the child-prostitute of Oxford Street. (‘Recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself.’) The portrait of the girl, her response to the melancholy event, is Clare's attempt at public reportage. This is how the city should receive a poet: with dignity and awe. Empty carriages. Heraldic shields. Black drapes over the urn which contains Byron's ashes (heart and brain removed at autopsy).

Monday, 12 July 1824: the fabulous hearse began its journey from St George's Street (Westminster) to a village church in Nottinghamshire. A bruising flash of recognition, poet to poet. Clare solicited an immediate transference of spirit (as Blake accepted the task of recomposing Milton, ‘correcting’ his errors). In the Epping Forest madhouse, he re-remembered Byron's
Don Juan
and
Childe Harold
and made them his own. Dr Darling, a well-intentioned man, suggested an alternative career for the stressed author. Cottage gardening? Orchard keeping?

Returned to wife and family, Clare wrote to his friend and supporter, the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham: ‘As for myself, I am as dull as a fog in November, and as far removed from all news of literary matters as the man in the moon.’

His last trip: 1828. A final consultation with Darling. Sickness was already part of the landscape: belly, eyes, head. Little sleep, early wanderings in the fields, prospecting for language that was no longer to be found. ‘Yet I know if I could reach London I should be better,’ Clare wrote to Taylor (his reluctant confessor), ‘or else get to salt water. Whatever Dr. Darling advises I will do it if I can.’

Too late. He is heavier now, body thickening, tongue too full for his mouth. ‘His forehead was so broad and high, as to have bordered on deformity.’

Patty struggles with another difficult pregnancy. He tries sulphur
baths, walks in Hyde Park (pretend country). He visits Cary in the British Museum and is ‘overawed by the quantity of books’. Not knowing that one day they would be removed and the circuit of the Reading Room dressed with fakes. (Or so a used-bookdealer from Charing Cross Road told me, volumes as furniture. Truck them in: yards of dross, dead libraries. We can't disappoint the punters, they expect that shock: that there should be so many books in the world. In one building. And none of them by John Clare.)

Frederick Martin has the poet noticing spring violets on Hampstead Heath and deciding, on the instant, to return home. He would try fieldwork. The city was done with him. If he came south again, he would be accompanied by attendants, carrying him off to High Beach. London, from the ridge of the forest, was a mirage. Helpston felt closer.

Early on the morning of the 16th of July, 1837, Clare was led away from his wife and children, by two stern-looking men, who placed him in a small carriage and drove rapidly away southward. Late the same day, the poet found himself an inmate of Dr. Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fair Mead House, High Beech, in the centre of Epping Forest.

WALKING

In the blue mist the orisons edge surrounds.

John Clare

Forest

You say ‘High Beech’ and I say ‘High Beach’, there is no correct answer to the riddle. Jonathan Bate favours ‘Beech’ (as he prefers ‘Helpston’ to Clare's ‘Helpstone’). William Addison, author of
Epping Forest, Its Literary and Historical Associations
(1945), opts for ‘High Beach’. Clare is an improvisatory, free-jazz speller. ‘Leopards Hill’, is his improvement on ‘Leppit's Hill Lodge’ (or ‘Lippitts Hill’, according to the OS map), the villa that housed the most troubled of Matthew Allen's patients, the ‘incurables’. Period illustrations, offering a white house surrounded by lawns and shrubs, use the title: ‘View of Leopard's Hill Lodge’. Authentic Lea Valley pastoral. Greenhouse, creepers, encroaching forest. English clouds. The only way Clare could gain access to such an estate was through the tradesman's entry: straight round to the potato beds, John. Moleskin trousers kneecapped with twine. Sharp thorns under blackened fingernails. Buttons struggling to confine a greasy leather waistcoat.

Leppit's Hill Lodge, photographed for the edition of
The Letters of John Clare
(1970 reprint), edited by J. W. and Anne Tibble, has a very different atmosphere. Dread. More Harry Price (ghost hunter) than M. R. James (connoisseur of mezzotints). James, scholar and establishment man, liked scaring the wits from his pupils with tales of demons, East Anglian entities summoned by whistle. He interrogated black-letter texts and woodblocks, waiting for that slender figure in the background, the man with the scythe, to slide forward. A dull print, examined with enough care, becomes a window into a discontinued narrative.

Harry Price, psychic investigator (Borley Rectory, talking mongoose), unloaded his kit and tapped the atmosphere for likely prospects. Leppit's Hill Lodge, as a monochrome print, is fearsome. Roof, position of door, brick porch: all wrong. Heaps of rubble in
overgrown grounds. This is one of those buildings that hang on beyond their time; shuttered windows, dark interiors nobody wants to disturb. Asylum. Isolation hospital. Articulate ruin.

Clare writes home (23 November 1837):

My Dear Wife

I write to tell you I am getting better I cant write a long letter but wish to know how you all are the place here is beautiful & I meet with great kindness the country is the finest I have seen write & tell me how you all are I cant write a long letter but I shall do better God bless you all kiss them all for me

Yours ever

my dear wife

John Clare

A brave, tremulous message dispatched by a boy who is away from home for the first time. Private school. Borstal. Contagious ward. National Service. Strange food, stranger company, not enough blankets. Cold showers, hikes in the forest. Putting a brave face on circumstances that are unlikely to improve.

Clare made a reasonable fist of his time with the Napoleonic War volunteers; comedy routines (like Justice Shallow's apple orchard troop), knockabout material for his journal. King's-shilling drunk (several times over). Obnoxious corporal punched on the nose. Oundle, where he was billeted in modest style, was on the clay, beyond Stilton; at the outer limits of known territory. He could walk home in a day.

When Anna's father, Geoffrey, was five years old, he disappeared from the farm: as Clare had done, when he set out to find the edge of the world. 1914: military bands were marching around the villages, accompanied by recruiting sergeants. Young Geoffrey Hadman followed them out of Glinton and was recaptured, hours later, on the road to Helpston: an underage volunteer for the trenches.

Epping Forest: new soil, new sounds. Special light. Clare perched
on a high ridge that offered the classic James Thomson view: river, fields, small farms, tower of the church of Holy Cross and St Lawrence at Waltham Abbey. A relief from the crushing phobias of the Northborough cottage. The regime is benevolent, he will ‘do better’.

He eats, grows sturdy. He potters in the kitchen garden, wanders through the forest. But he is still a prisoner. Constantly watched (even when the watchers hide behind trees). After the ‘escape’ Clare wrote to Matthew Allen, a courtesy, describing his walk out of Essex and asking for the return of books lent to women of the neighbourhood: ‘I dont want any part of Essex in Northamptonshire agen I wish you would have the kindness to send a servant to get them for me.’ A feigned passion for literature is a useful means of striking an acquaintance with the local author, the faded celebrity. Wives, and Essex women in general, were hereby forsworn: ‘I should [like] to be to myself a few years and lead the life of a hermit.’

The fault lay with a system based on surveillance. The rhetoric of freedom, announced with breast-beating sincerity, is exposed as a politic lie. Of the kind we have come to know so well: Lea Valley estates thrown up on poisoned ground. Liberty under law. No healing of a spirit that remains in bondage, despite the boasts of the keepers. The ones who have invested in green-belt real estate.

I can be miserably happy in any situation and any place and could have staid in yours in the forest if any of my friends had noticed me or come to see me – but the greatest annoyance in such places as yours are those servants styled keepers who often assumed as much authority over me as if I had been their prisoner and not likeing to quarrel I put up with it till I was weary of the place altogether so I heard the voice of freedom

Matthew Allen's establishment was hierarchically organised (wards beyond wards): three properties. Controlled liberties for those responsive to the notion of cure. Seclusion and restraint for loose women and stubborn, dirty men. Leopards Hill was the worst, a hideaway for self-soilers, screamers, non-citizens. (The
madwoman-in-the-attic syndrome. Hogarthian torments under the eaves of a white mansion. In brick outbuildings, styes.) Fair Mead lived up to its name, a country house; a pond with lilies, resident waterfowl. Springfield housed fifteen women. The local authorities signed the relevant forms: care and comfort in retirement from the world. A curtain of oak, elm, beech screening the worst of it. An easy ride back to town for duty visitors.

Allen, who had worked with the Quakers in York, an institution known as The Retreat, brought some of the patients south with him. He was a man of schemes. The sort of character who looks for property on the rim of London. Ethical front with aggressive marketing strategy. Soft Buddhism. Trim lawns, bright windows. Landscape prospects as the deal clincher. Fee-paying mad folk busied into craftwork, supervised gardening, bullied back to health. The uncooperative would be restrained, without malevolence, in one of the mean back rooms.

The life, at first, suited Clare. The new horizon, if he sat on Fern Hill, was seductive: ‘At the back of the chapple a beautifull retreat from a mad house.’ This forest was as disconcerting as the Fens, too much information rather than too little. Light filtered, ground soft underfoot. Woodier smells: clay mulch, leaf-mould, deer droppings. Sandy tracks throwing his compass out of alignment. He could dress himself in other identities, let in Byron, double-voice him, two sequences in parallel: ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Don Juan’. Letters to the outside world were capitalised. Sometimes he corresponded with his earthly wife, Patty. Sometimes with his spiritual bride, Mary Joyce. Each sentence suggests the title of a new poem. He is resolved, settled to his fate: ‘The Spring Smile's & So Shall I.’ He is irked: ‘For What Reason They Keep Me Here I Cannot Tell For I Have Been No Otherways Than Well A Couple of Year's.’ Essex and Northamptonshire are fixed in perpetual conflict. Clare labours. He grows plump and smooth, the docile rustic his patrons expect. He enjoys the company of Thomas Campbell, another inmate, son of the poet. He hoards rude fantasies about female patients, their house is a brothel of the senses.

Alfred Tennyson, another man in the wrong place at the wrong season, postpones marriage, cultivates a beard, endures the yelping of dogs. He is domiciled in High Beach, a rented house. He visits Allen, ventures capital in a scheme to develop a steam-powered wood-carving machine. He loses everything. Jonathan Bate reminds us that Tennyson spent time at Fair Mead, ‘occupying a status somewhere between patient and house-guest’. There is no hard evidence that he met Clare. The poets set their gaze on different Englands. If they coincided on forest walks, they kept their eyes down, scuttled for cover. Private language systems. A copyright on singularity.

Epping Forest was never a lucky place for authors. T. E. Lawrence acquired land on Pole Hill, a little to the south of High Beach, alongside the obelisk marking the line of zero longitude. He projected a retreat, a private press. In the dry summer of 1921, grass on Pole Hill was fired, the hut destroyed. A man called Vyvyan Richards, who taught at Bancroft's School in Woodford Green, stored Lawrence's books, his teak doors, shipped back from Jidda. Lawrence camped in the Pole Hill cloister but couldn't bring himself to live there. He preferred, like Clare, to slip identities. He tried ‘Ross’ for size, enlisting in the Royal Air Force. Then ‘Shaw’ for his move to the Tank Corps, the cottage at Clouds Hill in Dorset.

Writers kept coming, but rarely settled. Arthur Morrison, composing his
Tales of Mean Streets
, Jago warrens, riverside dens, tried High Beach as a necessary palliative. The poet Edward Thomas and his wife, Helen, rented a cottage near Paul's Nursery, between the Robin Hood pub and King's Oak. A winter interlude before his return to France, the trenches, death. He encountered Clare's work in the 1908 selection edited by Arthur Symons. He considered the process whereby the anima of Mary Joyce becomes the muse of the asylum poems. Mary died, unmarried, on 14 July 1838, the day after Clare's forty-fifth birthday. He had been at High Beach for exactly one year. Such anniversaries meant nothing. Clare's mind, according to Matthew Allen, ‘did not appear so much lost as
suspended in its movements by the oppressive and permanent state of anxiety and fear’.

He is comfortable, fed, supplied with books. He is removed from the burden of providing for his family and from the horror of love (children in sickness, ageing parents, unhappy wife). He works when he will, and is praised for it – but unpaid. He composes 1,600 lines of poetry and 1,500 lines of biblical paraphrase. Allen's asylum is a forcing house. Clare takes dictation from elsewhere. He makes few annotations on wild nature, electing to deal in topical satires and scatological barbs. Doctors, whores. Vulgar royalty. Newspaper scandals turned mad and loud. Poetry is a hot coal in the mouth. The
Athenaeum
publishes an appeal for funds: ‘The malady by which the poet is lost to himself has caused him to pass from the memory of others.’