Edge of the Orison (26 page)

Old Trelawny, irascible as ever, made a fiction of Shelley, a distorted mirror image. ‘He wrote his poems in the open air; on the sea shore; the pine woods; and like a shepherd, he could tell the time of day exactly by the light. He never had a watch.’

Richard Holmes has whetted my taste for relics. I want to view, in Northampton, the gathered volumes from John Clare's library, the notebook with ‘Journey out of Essex’. I want to gawp at his snuffboxes and his watch (he did have one). I'm fascinated by objects associated with the
Don Juan
legend: the spy-glass recovered from the wreck, the ‘mostly rotten’ books preserved in blue mud. It would be especially unnerving to handle these. The copy of Keats, borrowed from Leigh Hunt, spine split by being crammed into Shelley's pocket, was gone. Burnt. A ‘drowned’ notebook, salvaged by Captain Roberts, survives: ‘A quickening life from the Earths heart has (burst).’ The notebook was presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1946. The original is fading fast. It is harder to read than the photographic reproductions made in 1992.

The
Guardian
essay wraps up with a meditation on time. ‘What is the “time of death”?’ Holmes asks. He mentions the fact that Shelley's gold watch, like so many of his manuscripts and memorials, is now kept at the Bodleian. I knew that I would have to
break away from Clare, come at him from another direction: I made plans to visit Oxford. Anything to delay the writing of my book.

Oxford

‘Can you fix it for me to see Shelley's watch?’

I had one contact in Oxford, in academia, and I exploited it shamelessly. My man enjoyed a challenge, the opportunity to demonstrate his status, the ability to open doors that would otherwise require painful negotiation, explanatory letters, covering notes from publishers. Brian Catling, Head of Sculpture at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, was a prophecy come to fruition. Years ago, when I'd known him as a fellow labourer in breweries and dog patches, Limehouse graveyards, Ratcliffe kennels, I'd promoted him to professorial status in a novel called
Downriver
. I mythologised Catling as a committee man, enthusiastic diner; a social being who would never compromise the thing that mattered most, his work. Which was frequently out of sight, elsewhere (Norway, Iceland, Israel, Japan); or published in limited-edition chapbooks, abandoned (show over) in the nearest skip.

Catling was an old soul. In an old town. He was happy to facilitate my request. We would meet for lunch at a restaurant in a converted bank, a few doors up the High Street from the Ruskin School of Art. Then we'd amble over to the Bodleian for our appointment with the wondrously named Mr B. C. Barker-Benfield. Who would produce the drowned watch. Catling worked hard, doing the bureaucratic stuff, dealing with those pests, the students, but left time for gun clubs, haunting the Pitt Rivers collection, taking his boat on the river. That had always been his obsession, water; if he didn't drink much of it, he enjoyed nothing more than cruising the Thames, canoeing through Oxford's labyrinthine and overgrown backstreams, heading out into the North Sea with a paralytic skipper and a phantom crew.

Oxford is Fleet Street with a hangover: slower, longer in the
tooth. Nothing much happens in the tolerated gap between Uxbridge and Headington. (Somewhere to plant microwaved celebrities.) The road west is Thames Valley phenobarbitone, play country. You leave the metropolis with red contact lenses, a thick tongue, too much blood washing against the lid of your skull, and Oxford confirms it. The distance is just enough. Close your eyes, suck one of Catling's superstrength cough sweets, and you're there: among refused-entry colleges, a centre given over to war memorials, martyrs' crosses, bus stops and deep-trace cultural busking. Gargoyles leer. Gothic architecture preens. Heritage shops have run low on stock, lost their Americans. Professor Catling travels backwards and forwards, Oxford to London, family obligations, art business, on the coach: nursing a bottled Scottish nightcap. In town, he patronises taxis. ‘I gave up public transport years ago,’ he says. ‘Don't have the time for it.’

If I can't walk to Oxford, I'll drive. I like to feel the umbilical cord stretching. This is safe, this is still London. Cowley Road has the feral, dangerous charm of Clapton. You can buy the
Evening Standard
. Eat ethnic. Get tattooed, fixed up, mugged. Cross Magdalen Bridge and you'll be trampled by a conga of overexcited dons rushing towards the station, on their way to TV studios, bookshop events; the media hassle that proves their continued viability.

With this new hotel, the Old Bank, Oxford comes into line with Clerkenwell. Invisible cash converted into visible design. And back again. You no longer have to rely on the dreadful Randolph, with its embargo on courtesy, its complicated parking and time-warp dining room (bus queues of Bosch-monsters pressed against the windows). The Old Bank displays an original sketch by Stanley Spencer in every bedroom, corridors of Wyndham Lewis, Patrick Hughes, Sandra Blow. A catalogue is available at the front desk. You have to speak advanced Sewell before they'll let you near the Quod Restaurant, with its devastatingly slick service and novel food (you can eat it).

A cold, moist day: 20 February 2004. I spot Catling, ahead of me, weaving effortlessly through released office workers, newly risen
students. He might be a banker or one of the hotel's featured artists. I notice his doppelgänger in the City, Brighton, Cologne. It's my age, everybody looks like somebody else. The man with the thick silver hair, long black coat, moves with stately intent. A type. Touch his shoulder and prove your mistake. But, for once, I call the right name; we are nodded straight through to our table. An actor-manager of the old school, Catling throws off his coat, orders a pair of chilled vodka martinis and settles back to scan the menu.

Food taken, wine swilled, I produce a small collection of photographs from a recent tour, with Anna, through Clare country. There are things I want to show Catling. I have the prints arranged in a particular order. I click them down, one after the other, on the cleared table. An inscription on a Northborough grave. A child's toy in an unexpected location. A young girl riding a shaggy horse through the outskirts of an ugly town. Tall chimneys on the rim of a quarry. An unidentified skull (with snout) impaled on a stick. A canal seen through the smeared windscreen of a car. Ramsey Abbey in the rain.

A loose narrative carries us back to another expedition, undertaken thirty years ago. A strange period: auditory hallucinations, too much cider mixed with Russian stout, books beginning to be published. Much wandering, late and early, across London. Somewhere, it might have been the deserted Whitechapel Gallery or the Roebuck in Durward Street, I heard a voice say: ‘Ramsey holds the key.’ Which I took, for no good reason, to be a reference to Ramsey Abbey. That ancient island in the Fens.

We drove up the A1. Found the town and the church. But no key. Too rushed, I thought. We should have walked, allowed time for the right questions to form. Londoners in an amphibian environment, we paddled around unwelcoming streets: bakers of monumental loaves, funeral parlours, decayed warehouses servicing a dead river.

The rest of the afternoon, under lowering skies, we toured the Fens; Catling was not then much of a map-reader. Long, wet roads on raised banks above canals. Lone bungalows. Clumps of trees

standing forlorn in hedgeless fields, reclaimed from the water. We circled this unknown and unknowable territory, until we arrived at Ely. The spire had been a marker of sorts. Defeat.

Nothing was settled. That phrase, ‘Ramsey holds the key’, nagged. Stayed with me. Did it refer to a Scottish occultist or the poet (who had his place in Clare's library) ? Should I visit one of the other Ramseys? I tried a few without revelation. Then let it go, until now.

We discuss bears (remembering them from the window of the Ramsey undertakers, child memorials). And why people in such a flat landscape, with no experience of mountain and forest creatures, except as fairground freaks, should adopt the bear as totem. I quote
Clare's phrase about being dragged into Stamford like a bear to a wake. Why would that be? Dancing bears, I supposed, were exhibited at village fairs. But funerals? I recall the skinned and headless bears found floating in the River Lea. Catling says that his wife, Sarah Simblet, has an interesting notion about the potency of such animals in the Fen country. It's verticality in a horizontal world, the looming power. Like iron posts rising out of drained Whittlesey Mere. Like chimneys at the quarry's edge.

When I walked over to pick up my coat, the vertical Catling, smoothly ursine, had vanished. I found him at the bar, taking a quick shot, before we braved the Bodleian. There were a few minutes in hand. He suggested a look at the Shelley memorial in University College. A delightful notion. I am now an approved visitor, the treasures of the colleges are available. It is all slightly unreal, the arcana of Oxford, under the glaze of drink.

At the north-west corner of the Front Quad, Staircase Three, exposed in its chill nakedness, is the Shelley autopsy by Edward Onslow Ford. The effigy was carved in 1894, intended for the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (they declined the suggestion). The human Shelley was removed from Oxford University (after a few months of shooting, walking, pyrotechnic experiments and accosting women with babies), for publishing a pamphlet advocating
The Necessity of Atheism
. Shedloads of relics bring him back: letters, manuscripts (genuine and forged), locks of hair, snuffboxes, touched-up portraits. The Victorian necrophile apparatus. This was a second matriculation, initiated by Lady Shelley (his son's formidable widow); a matriculation in doctored memory, improved and improving biography. Atheist as secular saint: overseeing a sorority of drowned wives, suicided camp-followers, disappointed mistresses and sorry infants who gave up the ghost.

Shelley was painted less frequently than Clare: who lived long enough to be photographed. The Northampton peasant is recorded in his youthful pomp (the Hilton in the National Portrait Gallery), in maturity, in madness. The sole portrait of Shelley, by Amelia Curran, has to be adapted, fudged: for use as a future frontispiece,
a locket miniature for the lovesick. Shelley's likeness, vague as Shakespeare's, is as liable to misattribution. (He was lucky to avoid being turned into a novel by Anthony Burgess.)

What we want is a way of hiding the poetry, that difficulty, so we trade in the fiction of biography; selective quotation dresses a dramatic life. Dead as mutton, the veggie republican Percy Shelley is neutralised in satin-finish marble: a premature trust fund hippie. The accident of the boat wreck is rebranded as martyrdom. A chaos of wives, debts, bad karma, justifies the neurosis of composition.

The first boat that Williams and Shelley kitted out was intended to save them from the tedious walk between Pisa and Livorno. They sailed up the canal by moonlight. The boat capsized, foundered. The non-swimming Shelley was rescued.

Our ducking last night has added fire instead of quenching the nautical ardour which produced it: and I consider it as a good omen in any enterprise that it begins in evil: as more probable that it will end in good…

But fire, like the bright moon, was unquenched, it was waiting on the beach. Those leisurely cruises up the Thames – Marlow, Oxford, Lechlade – were no preparation for the Bay of Spezia. The sickly poet, advised by his medical man William Lawrence, had to choose between relocation to the English South Coast or another Mediterranean tour.

The Ford sculpture in University College offers a version of Trelawny's naked boy: Shelley, drained of blood, a hairless albino. Sprawled on a bed of salt. Rescued from quicklime. He is like one of those modelled wax exhibits in medical museums that Catling loves, a romantic conceit symbolising the death of poetry. Or the shift of poetry, from a medium that could factor complex scientific experiments, political theory, refractions of Goethe, to vapid song. Mourning crêpe and yellow waistcoats. Ford's Shelley is a radiant fish on a baroque mount (bare-breasted, drooping muse): better suited to cathedral aisle or catacomb. Horribly exposed and shameless in this Oxford cage.