Edge of the Orison (28 page)

This was a proper do, the kind now reserved for non-writing writers, faces with hovering PR accompanists: refreshments, a heap of books (‘returns’ on day release from the warehouse), folk milling around the display (lifting a title, reading the blurb, returning it to the pyre). We kept up the weather talk, motorway talk, until it became obvious that they were all employees. It was a duty, to play the crowd, drink the drink, nibble ostentatiously. A rep breezed in, to witness the debacle. I had the courtesy title then of ‘poetry editor’ for one of Rupert Murdoch's satellites, which meant that I approved hardbacks that would appear as paperbacks. And I initiated mini-anthologies, career retrospectives soon to be pulped. I couldn't find any of these on the shelves. Making conversation, I asked the rep why this was. ‘Do we publish poetry?’ he said.

Not one book sold. All the non-shows at the shop were already camped out in the round church, a nice cross-section of longhairs,
bright eyes (no pupils) and red eyes (deltas of blood). Benevolent occultists. Cashiered Hell's Angels. Dopers, anoraks. The pre and post sectioned. Scorch marks at the temples. ‘Carve here’ tattoos around the throat.

I read first at the Holy Sepulchre. I preached my profane sermon, quietly, making no real impression on the space. Then, as Catling delivered his coded-language formulae, sticky with nerve and edge, a man groaned. Climbed to his feet. And was rapidly expelled. To return with a revolver.

It was, Alan explained, an ordinary Northampton night. The intervention by this ‘homicidal medicine-head of local notoriety’ was a felt response to Catling's challenge: words nudge the world. The overexcited literary critic was beguiled into a pub, offered a drink. He smashed the glass, lunged at his minder's throat. Teeth were spat on to the floor.

Moore describes the outcome: ‘Thrown from the barroom in the wake of his attacker, to the street outside, Fred (the minder) found himself staring into the quivering muzzle of a gun and hoping that he wouldn't die between the Labour Exchange and the Inland Revenue, a victim of that local speciality, the stroll-by shooting… Slept downstairs with a sword that night, unconsciously sucked into the crusader aura of the church and the event.’

Warned of the psycho sniper, we dodged through the graveyard into a muted celebration; and, later, the Labour Club. Alan was a member in good standing. Old boys nursed their drinks in a narrow, sepia room. The bearded Northampton magus, recognised and saluted in London, was integrated into this dim and smoky scene; a figure no more or less extraordinary than any of the recreational pint-swallowers. Northampton was Moore's family. He eavesdropped on conversations and conspiracies, waiting, as we all do, for something to exploit.

Place expresses itself through the person you choose as guide: Northampton, in effect, had become a monologue or graphic script by Alan Moore. I hadn't been paying close enough attention. On
Tuesday, 12 August 2003, I returned. To meet Renchi. To stay at the hotel ibis. To inspect the Clare collection in the Central Library. To walk the bounds, the poet's last traces. What struck me about St Andrew's, the revamped Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, was the status of the hospital as a retreat, a green Arcadia, walled off from the seething, boiling dementia of the town. Lovingly-tended grounds were a respite from an excess of normalcy: Carlsberg Brewery, credit card towers, Church's shoe factory. Without knowing it, Northampton had sponsored Alan Moore as laureate.
Voice of the Fire
, a collection of twelve linked tales, was a grimoire of occulted imagination: myths, crimes, witch-burnings. Human legends of the Railway Club, the stolen crates of beer, eccentric uncles with amputated legs, played alongside particulars of geography, geology and gossip. John Clare's shoes might be kept in a glass case at the Central Museum, but you won't find a single copy of Moore's book.

What other notables, in the years after Clare, lodged in the Priory-style hospital? Sheiks, arms brokers, inconvenient royals? Rumours abounded: Dusty Springfield (drying out), Michael Jackson (hiding from the press). Lucia Anna Joyce, daughter of the other James (not the Glinton farmer). J. K. Stephen, Ripper suspect and Cambridge poet, was committed to St Andrew's in 1891. He died there, never having recovered from a blow to the head, received during a visit to Felixstowe. Stephen was a cousin of Virginia Woolf.

Emerging from the station, climbing Black Lion Hill, you appreciate St Peter's, a Norman church (key available from pub): beds of lavender, stone-flagged paths. The house where Cromwell lodged on the night before the Battle of Naseby. The railway station built on the site of the castle where Thomas à Becket was tried. The postern gate has migrated. Or so the plaques, the brochures, inform us.

The railway usurped the power of the river, but the Nene remains a presence, snaking around a hill town. The Northampton template is still visible, a loop of development emphasised on present maps: the noose formed by St Peter's Way, Victoria Promenade, Cheyne Walk, York Road, Broad Street, Horse Market. A town fixed by its
cardinal points: gallows at North Gate to Eleanor Cross on the London Road. A market square as generously proportioned, commercially sound, as a Flemish town. Such solidity of purpose demands its Bosch, its painter of demons: its Alan Moore. Along with a supporting cast from the bestiary: bin-bag Goths, discharged squaddies, minicab maniacs cruising for victims (somebody who will listen). A town of random violence. Of parks and pathways: scorched-foot walkers passing unscathed through floods of urgent traffic. Close streets. Old pubs with new signs. Libraries. Nightclub conversions. The county cricket ground. Northampton, above all, is a model of contrary opinions; a displaced capital, seat of alternative scholarship.

‘In the thirteenth century,’ writes Henry Bett (in
English Legends
), ‘as a result of quarrels at Oxford, a large body of students migrated to Northampton, and Henry the Third ordered the authorities of the town to receive them.’ Royal licence revoked, numbers of students migrated to Stamford: ‘where the lectures of the Augustinian and Carmelite friars were in high repute’. A tradition of hermetic knowledge was established: Stamford and Northampton. A curious door-knocker, which gave title to Brasenose College, survived for years in St Paul's Street, Stamford. The knocker, Bett claims, was identified ‘with the brazen head Roger Bacon made for himself by magical arts, which answered every question put to it’. When the head disappeared, the town became the oracle. Mad voices behind leather masks.

Northampton, unlike Peterborough and Oxford, has not been ruined by traffic, by planners. It can support Alan Moore in his terraced house. His cave of books and heretical impedimenta. ‘Seaview’, he calls it.

I lost Renchi. I met the right train, he was on it; we didn't recognise one another in this context. Our reunion was accomplished at the ibis. An hotel ibis is singular and universal, somewhere and everywhere; customised oddity, generic virtue. Breakfast is available, always, without attendants; fill a bowl, plot your day.

Northampton and Bedford, Renchi reckoned, should be treated as twins, river towns: darkness and light. Each with its own voyager: John Clare and John Bunyan. A tinker imprisoned on a bridge, a farm labourer kept in a park. Northampton sits on a limestone reef, the Jurassic Way from Bath to Lincoln; Bedford floats in water meadows. Alan Moore nominated Bunyan as the ‘first to chart the land of spirit and imagination lying under Middle England, mapping actual journeys undertaken in the solid realm on to his allegorical terrain’. I recognised the syndrome, but in reverse: towns were allegorical, peopled by ghosts. The fictions and parables, of Bunyan and Moore, were the only solid ground. Trust what you read, not what you see. My eyes, like Clare's, had skinned over: an inward gaze of virtual navigation. Suitable to towns with too much literature.

We had relics to inspect: Clare's shoes, his books. The death mask. If there was any narrative left, it would be delivered as a catalogue of solid objects, hidden in provincial libraries. I rang Alan Moore and arranged a meeting, later that day, at the portico of All Saints' Church: his suggestion.

As soon as we're moving, on foot, Northampton reveals itself: an illusion. Gold Street. The Guildhall. A display commemorating the day (8 June 1989) when ‘HRH the Princess of Wales received the freedom of the Borough’. Painted chart like a board-game: fame and death. The Guildhall, extravagant Gothic revival, does history as theatre: tableaux in alcoves, murals, starry ceiling. A single, tiled and flagged cell beneath the pavement, in which they kept Alfie Rouse – philanderer, accidental murderer, torcher of cars – before he was taken to Bedford and hanged.

There is a statue of a British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, remembered, if at all, for being assassinated; shot, at close range, in the lobby of the House of Commons, by John Bellingham (described as ‘a lunatic’). Perceval was once recognised, no minor distinction, as the most reactionary of nineteenth-century premiers. A cobweb spreads, unbrushed, from flared nostril to left shoulder. Dead flies trapped in sagging gossamer. The little finger of Perceval's left hand
has been snapped off, restored. Pink drips down white stone: a recurring wound. A motif nobody can be bothered to record, or celebrate.

Northampton librarians are used to Clare fanatics, bursting in without letters of authorisation, research permits; off-road relic-trufflers hoping to be pointed in the right direction, let loose among the stacks. We're not trusted with the original ‘Journey out of Essex’ manuscript, but we are allowed to crank through the microfilm version.

A cabinet of curios, at the head of the stairs, doesn't delay us. Postcard portraits. A bust by Henry Burlowe (plaster toshed to look like bronze). Numerous representations of beings who were never John Clare. A death mask like a wet sheet drawn over a sleeping man: closed lids (eyes without pupils), thin smile. The sharp chin of Mr Punch. A confirmation of absence. The municipal shrine is a secondary imprisonment, keeping the poet in Northampton, along with his papers, his much-prized library. Patty cleared the shelves. The books travelled, as he did, into a definitive exile.

The librarian's counter is high, heaped with papers and forms. She listens to my garbled request, permission to view Clare's books is immediately granted. I wait while the paperwork is completed. Above the desk are two oil portraits, titular Northampton worthies. Thomas Grimshaw's rather wild 1844 vision of Clare parodies the Spencer Perceval pose; left hand clutching lapel, head twisted to observe an approaching figure. The poet stands at the edge of a dark wood, a studio wood. His elevated brow is a kind of pregnant dome. The prominent overhanging eyebrows have been bleached. The beaked nose has butterfly shadows in place of Perceval's cobwebs.

The complementary portrait is of Charles Bradlaugh, atheist, radical, member of parliament. Another of Alan Moore's local heroes. Bradlaugh's statue, islanded in the traffic flow of Abington Square, black finger raised aloft, is a marker in Northampton's psychogeography. Drunks, Moore asserts, try to mount the patriarch from the rear: simulated statuary rape. Students paint footsteps
from plinth to Gents' urinal. Alan depicts the raised digit as: ‘pointing resolutely west towards the fields beyond the urban sprawl, assisting Sunday shoppers who've forgotten how to get to Toys ‘Я’ Us’.

Looking at Clare's books, such a modest bequest, so neatly fitted to a corner of the local history room, I thought again of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. Those who visited the rescued fairground freak, in his London Hospital apartment, brought books: to prove their liberality, his redemption. Clare's cottage library is contained in two, free-standing units. A dark wood cupboard and a set of glass-fronted shelves. There is some confusion about the provenance. The lady at the desk tells me that the cupboard belonged to John Taylor, Clare's London publisher. But this is not the case. It was another John Taylor, another publisher, a Northampton man. He bought Clare's books from the widow, Patty. They were transported, with papers and cupboard, to Helpston railway station. In two donkey carts. (As Clare's coffin travelled the other way.)

I scan the shelves, conscious of limited time: the meeting with Alan Moore. The first name to catch my eye is ‘Ramsay’. (Shelves have been arranged in alphabetical order, restored after Patty's face-down, book-on-book, Northborough stacking.) Could this be the Ramsay who holds the theoretical key? The clue I missed on my expedition with Brian Catling?

(1) Allan Ramsay:
Poems on Several Occasions
. In two volumes. Berwick, 1793. With ownership stamp: J* CLARE.

I carry the book to the readers' table, scour it, flick through the pages: nothing. A memorial to Clare's sympathy for light verse, the period when he became an elective Scot. No revelation. A sniff at the cloth. Phrase noted: ‘How vain are our attempts to know.’

I must proceed in a more methodical fashion, begin with the cupboard. It is too close: the presence of the dead man, the heat of the room. To learn anything of value, I would have to dedicate two years to the business: records of the asylum, critical essays.
Manuscripts examined under Renchi's magnifying glass. Try another approach. Go for the books with fingerprints, personal markings: Clare's confident signature. Name, place, date: ‘John Clare, Helpstone, 1820’. The optimism of that moment when his career was launched, his destiny revealed.

Fragments of letters tipped in. Presentation inscriptions from minor and forgotten poets. A coherent collection assembled in a Helpston cottage: poetry, natural history, science, rudiments of grammar. Treasures of an autodidact, a self-improver. In my time as a bookdealer I saw many attics, packed with scavengings of stalls and charity pits, brought together by men of modest means. (They were men, all of them.) Clare's library was no accidental heap. Volumes represented his tribute to contemporary poets (those from whom he could steal with advantage). Theology. Trigonometry (uncut pages). Biographies. Sermons. Base material from which a practical philosophy might be assembled. A working library, not a reliquary protected by initiates. Clare's forlorn bits and pieces, gathered from local sale rooms, haggled carts, left him exposed: peasant poet. A hanged man given for dissection to future anatomists.