Edge of the Orison (6 page)

Dorn. Manny Farber. Fassbinder: ‘Sat at the same table a couple of times, he was sweating in a heavy leather coat, wouldn't talk.’ David Gascoyne. Annie Giradot. Lord Gowrie. Gloria Grahame. Monte Hellman: ‘Played back a blank tape.’ Werner Herzog. Patricia Highsmith. Bo Hopkins: ‘Met him in a bar in LA, on his way to a wedding.’ Geoffrey Household. Anna Karina. Harvey Keitel. Kraftwerk. Howard Marks. Lee Marvin: ‘Interesting man, knew where he was, flat overlooking some stables.’ Ed McBain. Michael Moorcock. Robert Mitchum. Jack Nicholson. Jack Palance. George Pelecanos. Donald Pleasence. Derek Raymond. Nic Roeg. James Sallis. Martin Scorsese. Andrew Sinclair. Steven Spielberg: ‘Devouring a hamburger at ten in the morning.’ Terence Stamp. Sting. Francis Stuart: ‘That's right.’ Donald Sutherland: ‘Least actorly of actors, on his way to see Fellini.’ François Truffaut. Christopher Walken: ‘Strangest of them all by a country mile.’ Wim Wenders. Donald Westlake: ‘Can't see where those early books came from.’ Billie Whitelaw. Shelley Winters. Rudy Wurlitzer.

Enough. The road is too crowded now, city noises, dry hum of air conditioning in generic hotel suites: Petit waiting for Scorsese
in the wrong room. Cold coffee, remains of breakfast on a tray. Ghosts weary of playing themselves. Writers caught on the hop, terrified of giving the game away. Francis Stuart, toothless, bulb-nosed, admitting to everything: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett. The particular sound of white tyres splashing through puddles outside a restaurant in Berlin. Great days being wiped, inch by inch, as he stares, with no sign of recognition, at a dull landscape, a wet road.

As we approached Helpston, coming out of the woods, we spotted our first vehicle: a police car with a red stripe, parked, waiting. To warn off the unwary. Clare left here four times for London, days, weeks, mere excursions, but his list of celebrities could trump Petit, quality if not quantity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘His words hung in their places at a quiet pace from a drawl in good set marching order, so that you would suppose he had learnt what he intended to say before he came.’ Thomas De Quincey: ‘Something of a child overgrown, in a blue coat and black neckerchief.’ Charles Lamb. William Hazlitt: ‘For the blood of me I could not find him out.’ John Taylor (the publisher Clare shared with Keats). Henry Cary, Dante translator. J. H. Reynolds. Thomas Hood. Lord Radstock. Lord Milton. The Marquess of Exeter. Painters of the day: Peter de Wint, Rippingille, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Thomas Wainewright, forger and poisoner: ‘A very comical sort of chap.’ Scottish poet Allan Cunningham. And, unconfirmed, Alfred Tennyson (visitor to High Beach, Dr Allen's Epping Forest retreat). Plus those with whom he conversed in secret, the ones he would become in the asylum years: Lord Byron, Lord Nelson, Jack Randall the prizefighter. And Victoria's mother too, it must be assumed, when Clare announced himself the spiritual father of the young queen.

The poet's Helpston cottage is endlessly reproduced in engravings, postcards, watercolours, but it's not here. This whitewashed replica is an occupied home, a desirable property (convenient for Peterborough). The Clareness of the thing is an act of faith.

IN THIS COTTAGE JOHN CLARE THE POET WAS BORN JULY 13: 1793
THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY THE PETERBOROUGH MUSEUM SOCIETY 1921

What is it about dead poets, their huts and gravestones? What are we looking for? Sombre enthusiasts, joiners of literary societies, guided tourists: what do you want? The superstition of touch. Affection without responsibility. We dowse with slim pamphlets handed out by museums, special-interest maps. We've walked all these miles for a shrine we are barely capable of recording.

With his magnifying glass, Renchi examines the grain in the stone, the Clare plaque – and the face of the young man in the William Hilton portrait of 1820, reproduced on the cover of my paperback edition of the poems. Hilton's Clare is a PR cameo, a lollipop of delight. A noble peasant in autumn's country casuals. (Down the street is Helpston's Gothic memorial with its grudging quote: ‘THE GRAVE ITS MORTAL DUST MAY KEEP.’) What happened? This can't be the same person as the old gentleman with the high forehead? and bushy eyebrows, the private patient photographed in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The postcard with its oversize facsimile signature. The madhouse worthy looks towards us with narrowed eyes. Hilton's young man, pink in his cheeks, ignores our impertinent curiosity. He stares, unblinking, at an imaginary window.

I braved London's bright new National Portrait Gallery to witness the original Hilton painting, proudly hung with other Romantics of the ‘Late 18th and Early 19th’ centuries: Keats, Shelley, Byron, stern Wordsworth, Coleridge. High-toned company. William Blake. Cockneys and mountain men. Poets of family, education, private means: with access (when required) to conversation, credit at the chemist's shop.

Portraiture is the harbinger of mortality: if you are willing to
be painted, you are willing to die. The Hilton Clare, full-lipped, fine-featured, has something of the contemporary poet Lee Harwood: clear eyes set on a horizon we can't bring into focus. Harwood's work, from whatever era, twenty years old to sixty, is youthful and optimistic: open. Darkness, at the point in Clare's career when Hilton caught him, stays in the background, bistre and lampblack. The artificial night of the studio. He's proud of the long coat (so green that it's brown), the high, soft collar and that astonishing necktie or cravat, a de Kooning spasm of yellow and green and gold. An oily river leaking from his throat.

The Hilton image, computer enhanced, is everywhere. A slice of it dresses Jonathan Bate's definitive biography. This is the Clare so many readers want to know, the country boy in town, on the cusp of fame. Helpston, once indifferent or antagonistic to the Clare project, now searches for ways to exploit the memory. Poet and village, so they think, are indivisible.

Combing the attic for family material, clues to her father's boasted connection to Clare, Anna found an envelope addressed in her mother's hand to ‘63 de Beauvoir Road’. This was our first experience of Hackney, a communal house on the west side of Kingsland Road. A mid-Victorian speculation with ambitions to infiltrate Islington. ‘Special envelope – keep!’ That was the extent of Mrs Hadman's message. The envelope was the point of the communication. It must have been 1968, the year before we took the fatal step and moved east, never to move again.

175TH ANNIVERSARY OF BIRTH OF JOHN CLARE 13 JULY 1988 HELPSTON PETERBOROUGH

The post office franking machine got the date wrong by twenty years. And offered, as compensation, a grey-on-grey version of the Hilton portrait, cropped and reversed: Clare spun deliriously,
defined by dates he didn't want cut into his memorial slab. My mother-in-law, for whatever reason, was in Helpston on the day, 13 July, of the Clare anniversary. She may have been visiting the family grave in Glinton.

As the Hilton portrait flatters our notion of what a poet should be, imperfections smoothed, so Clare's Helpston cottage has shaken off its menial status, its smoky, small-windowed darkness. It stands back from the road as an extended white block, hung with flower baskets like a Routier-recommended restaurant. Roses climb the walls. Additional bedrooms, eyelashes of a Dusty Springfield luxuriance, bulge from crisp thatch above twinkling glass. The milestone Clare fancied for his grave decorates a welcoming mat of close-cropped grass, set in a bed of gaudy, freshly watered busy Lizzies.

In his book,
Literary Britain
, originally published in 1951, the photographer Bill Brandt swooped on ‘Clare's Birthplace’. The idea of this project was: characteristic scrap of verse on the left-hand page, place associated with poet on the right.

But painful memory's banish'd thoughts in view

Remind him, when 'twas young, what happy days he knew.

Punctuation and sentiment are over-refined: Brandt (secretive, self-inventing, perverse) contrives a theatrical composition to counter the upbeat message with Fenland gloom. Graded monochrome doctored in the darkroom. A creeping miasma of sullen harm. A low stone wall where the driveway now runs down the east side of the cottage. Absence of TV aerials and masts. No milestones set in flowerbeds, no winking bedroom windows in pristine thatch. The rear of the cottage, back then, suggested a turfcutter's shack. Clare remained in the limbo of libraries, his books carted off to Northampton, his snuffboxes to Peterborough. The shoes with the flapping soles were not yet holy relics.

Brandt's vision of literary England is: absence. Classical statuary in sombrous gardens, rocks in operatic slap, lowering clouds, effigies – scarcely a human figure in the entire collection. A water-reflected
stickman represents Parson Crabbe. (Clare mistrusted parsons. Crabbe, he reckoned, wrote about the peasantry ‘as much like the Magistrate as the poet’.) England as a park from which poets have been permanently banished, leaving behind some very nasty weather and enough architectural salvage to fill a Hoxton builder's yard.

Morning mist over warming ground is typical of Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Northampton: wretched conditions for airfields and motorways, a boon to photographers with a preordained vision. Brandt's suggestion is that the poet has just this moment stepped out. Clare, the peasant verse-maker, is never allowed to move beyond the Helpston perspective. The cottage looks on to a village green. The village is an island in a system of open fields, bordered on one side by low, wooded hills, the quarries of Barnack – and, on the other, by dark Fens, from which invaders, hobgoblins and Molly Gangs, will come.

In the afterburn of the Sixties, Clare's cottage was noticed by mid-Atlantic modernists: its potential as real estate was exposed. The poet Tom Raworth, acknowledged by his peers for his speed and sharpness of eye, had been packaged with the Clare lookalike, Lee Harwood. One of those three-poets-for-the-price-of-one Penguins. We all had the book, Liberal Studies would have collapsed without this convenient prompt. Harwood had contacts with the New York school (Ashbery, Koch) and Raworth was perpetually touring the States or signing in at some writers' punishment colony. Now, in the way of these things, the freelance life, he was at Essex University, outside Colchester. A friend and colleague of John Barrell, who published his Clare study,
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place
, in 1972.

Raworth remembers Barrell investigating original Clare manuscripts, pouring over enclosure maps for Helpston. The poet Donald Davie's influence was still felt in Colchester (an active Essex/Cambridge nexus): Thomas Hardy, Pound, the landscape-architecture of poetry. Primary research was back in favour: examination of documents, land registers, meditations on painters and
paintings. Along with, in the case of the modernist poets, scavenging of cultural ephemera: Hollywood clips, vintage postcards, kids' crayon drawings, French dialogue overheard and misreported. The dominant theory, adopted from a reading of the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, promoted ‘open field’ poetics. A system which sat nicely alongside Barrell's work on Helpston and enclosures. ‘The eye, snatched to the horizon, roams,’ Barrell said. Clare's work belonged in the closed system of traditional forms. When the circle of Helpston landscape, once open and common to all, was hedged and divided into a complex jigsaw, John Clare was one of the hedgers. He needed the work. The rest of his life would be a series of personal enclosures, from London drawing rooms to Epping Forest, to the imposed restrictions of the Northampton years.

Moving
, Raworth's 1971 publication, opens with a quote from Clare (placed against a page of coloured Camel cigarette packets by Joe Brainard). Icons of mass production find themselves in the company of lines from a famously grim asylum poem by John Clare: ‘I am’.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;

Even the dearest that I love the best

Are strange – nay, rather – stranger than the rest.

I'm not sure how many readers, at that time, picked up on Raworth's choice of epigraph; Jonathan Bate in his chapter on Clare as ‘The Poet's Poet’ doesn't find room for it. He traces an orthodox anthology of influence: Norman Gale, Arthur Symons, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, Robert Graves, Sidney Keyes, John Ashbery, Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Paulin, R. S. Thomas. Poets needing compensatory values in time of war, damaged rhymers and soil worshippers, thick in the tongue.

Raworth's ‘HELPSTON £9,850. STONE BUILT RESIDENCE’ takes an oblique, ‘open field’ approach. Snippet from
newspaper. John Barrell's eighteenth-century notion of ‘view’ acknowledged but found to be out of service: ‘the view is again unapproachable’. The Helpston cottage has become an illustration in an estate agent's window. Clare's father trying to make the rent from the sale of apples, years of debt, fear of eviction, has now been translated into an aspirational lifestyle. Brandt's Gothic shipwreck, submerged in fog (but solid, rooted in melancholy), becomes a colour print, a development opportunity. A Victorian terraced house in Hackney, at the time of Raworth's quoted price, would sell for around £4,000. Large properties in squares approved by John Betjeman could be found for £7,000. And Helpston's once-spurned peasant cottage, with ‘unapproachable’ views, commands almost £10,000.