by Alan Wall
Letters arrived all the time inviting him to take part in interviews regarding his Soho past. One arrived from a graduate student asking for the opportunity to talk to him about English surrealism.
‘English surrealism,’ he growled, throwing the letter on to the table. ‘He might as well write a thesis on English bullfighting.’
‘Wasn’t there any, then?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it was in the air when I was a young man, of course. There were even those of my circle who wrote what I believe was called surrealist verse. It was tedious enough then, and I’d have thought it entirely unreadable now, though I suppose people will go to the most extraordinary lengths to get themselves called doctor. I can’t help thinking that anything based on relentless novelty is tedious. The random and disconnected is only shocking for about two minutes, then it becomes completely predictable. It’s the battle between intellectual control and disorder that makes for interesting writing – or interesting anything else, if it comes to that. It seemed terribly exotic, of course, Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses. I suppose drugs seemed terribly exotic too, though we had to make do with booze on the whole. Not quite so exotic, though I don’t doubt we managed to be every bit as tiresome as most highly intoxicated people are.
‘Outside Fortnum & Mason, on a little wooden box on the Piccadilly pavement, an old fellow sits playing the harmonica. He’s been there day in and day out for the last thirty years, blowing and sucking and sucking and blowing. And he’s never been known to master a single tune. Every so often you might catch a glimmer or a fragment of something recognisable – “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, or “Once in Royal David’s City”, but never for more than three or four notes, then he’s off again, howling away at his discords. He actually has a number of different mouth organs, so that he can shift the key of these tuneless drones, for variety’s sake I suppose. Witty slogans are chalked on a board: All Music Half-Price Today and Quiet Please, Concert in Progress. He keeps a hat in front of him which always appears to have three coins in it. Never two and never four.
‘He strikes me as a living disproof of those devotees of the random who used to proclaim that an infinite number of monkeys left to themselves with typewriters would one day produce the collected works of William Shakespeare. What they would produce of course would be an infinite amount of gibberish. Issue them all with a harmonica apiece and you would probably bring about the collapse of the universe. The deafness of the gods. Oblivion.
‘Now, give me again that definition of final impenitence.’ I was as reluctant to talk Catholic theology with Fordie as he was to memorialise Soho with me, but he simply wouldn’t let me escape.
* * *
Thus did I settle down to life with Stamford Tewk: the endless conversations, the boiled eggs, the Chablis seven days a week. I even started to put on weight. Fordie’s diet might have been eccentric, but it was considerably more regular than what I’d grown used to in Tooting. So, at his insistence, I started to walk up to Richmond Park each morning when the weather permitted. I had to bring back with me a clutch of fallen leaves and we would match them up against the hand-coloured illustrations in his copy of The Botanist.
I even took to walking there sometimes in the early evening. My back had stopped giving me so much trouble. I might not have to use my TENS for a week at a time. This particular day it took me about twenty minutes to reach Pembroke Lodge. It was the beginning of autumn and I stood facing west. The air between me and the horizon was soaked through by what was left of the sun’s rays. The space about my head felt suddenly saturated with light. Down from where I sat I could still see antlered roots torn up by the Great Storm, and one or two charred corpses of trees, fingered by lightning. An occasional wood pigeon crashed out of the leaves; grey squirrels sprinted and posed; crow’s claws skirred over the flora’s debris. I picked up a leaf from the ones scattered about my feet. A fig like an outstretched hand beseeching from the anorexic stem of its wrist. Another one: the dead leaf of a smoke tree mottled into a small apocalypse of colour, like the carapace of a sinister tropical beetle. There was also a grape vine, parching into the shape of a drying estuary, its veins dehydrating swiftly into sand and sere. Pelham’s contemporary Christopher Smart made out the markings of the Hebrew alphabet in the barks of trees. Aleph and zayin and lamed and taw, etched there as a sacred lectionary. But then for him the blown spikes of the cornfield spelt out the Tetragrammaton every time the weather grew salty.
Then the children arrived, shouting, followed by a woman with a mobile phone pressed into her cheek. She laughed into it loudly and continuously. I stood up and started walking back home to Richmond. Home. I started to smile to myself. For over two months I’d hardly even thought about the Chilford papers, since it had become evident that Fordie would show them to me when he chose and not a moment sooner, presumably at the same time that he would begin to teach me the business. I had the curious feeling I was very nearly happy, except for the memories of Alice that still lamed my soul. She had taken precisely what she wanted and then gone. She had used one brief unkindness by me to walk away for ever. If I ever found my mind moving in the direction of acknowledging that she had only done to me exactly what I had done to every other woman I’d ever been with, namely stayed around until it no longer suited her, I then had to remind myself that I had paid for everything, cooked everything, driven everywhere, cleaned everything up. Alice had had an easy time of it with me, for all the thanks I’d received. Resentment. Was that resentment? Beware resentment, Fordie always said. Still, apart from Alice’s white snake still coiled inside me, I was almost at peace. When I arrived back, I let myself into the shop, and laid the leaves carefully on the table, and it was not until a few moments later that I found Fordie lying at the bottom of the stairs.
The Combination
Combination: The action of combining or joining two or more separate things into a whole.
Oxford English Dictionary
I bent over him and gently brushed his face with my hand.
‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ I said, but with what strength he still had, he held my arm and pulled me down towards him. My face was against his as he whispered his urgent words. I caught the mild reek of his wine breath.
‘No, Fordie, I can’t do that. Listen…’ But the pull on my arm represented an effort too supreme to ignore, I knew that. So I bent down as requested and heard his confession, and when he had finished I made the sign of the cross over him and said softly, ‘Ego te absolvo in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen.’ And even then, as I tried to pull away to call that ambulance, he held me and with another effort that cost him too much, he said, ‘Six six, four three, one two.’ I stared at him, not understanding, and I could see the life already ebbing out of his features. He said it again, each word separated by a void of his breath. ‘Six … six … four … three … one … two.’ And still not understanding, in my confusion I went to the table and wrote the numbers down on a piece of paper. I brought it back to where he lay on the floor and held it above his face. He managed to nod and close his eyes then. Finally I called the ambulance. Fordie died that night in the hospital. He had suffered a massive heart attack.
Back in the shop in the early hours of the morning, I realised as I stared blankly at that number amidst the scattered leaves I had dumped on the table that it was the combination to his safe.
* * *
More people turned up at the crematorium than I had expected. Even Charles Redmond and Josianne Thring.
‘We hear the bookshop’s yours now,’ Charles said, trying to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘We must come over some time. We could probably do a bit of business.’ And after drinks in the nearby pub, the usual chatter started up about editions and prices, and which poor sod’s stock was about to be sold off for a song to save him from liquidation, and whether they should all agree between them not to buy at the requested price
s anyway, thereby forcing them down even lower. And then it was all over, and I was back in Richmond sitting in a bookshop which was now mine in its entirety. I wished that it weren’t.
That night I dreamt that the amice was wrapped about my shoulders, and the alb flapping at my calves. I dreamt that I had prostrated myself as prescribed, and that the sacred laying on of hands had passed on to me the holy orders of priesthood. I was shaken awake by fear, though fear of what I couldn’t have told you, but what I woke to was the realisation that my first mass was still postponed for ever, despite the curiosity of my unorthodox absolving of Fordie for his sins. For some reason the smell in my nose was Alice’s hair, its tart mixture of peach blossom and turpentine, and it simply wouldn’t go away. I lay there and thought of Rome, that parish of ritual slaughter and consecration, where the smell of incense, however pungent, can never quite overcome the smell of the flesh.
One or two people started coming into the shop. I didn’t stop them. I was glad for the moment to have people around, even those I’d never seen before. A few of them asked where the grumpy old man was and I told them. Then they fell silent. One Friday afternoon the will was read and produced no surprises. Everything was as agreed, though the two hundred thousand I had paid him to become part of the business appeared to have vanished entirely. I couldn’t help wondering where it had gone so quickly, though the fact was, I suppose, it was none of my business. We had made a deal. It took me a few weeks before I opened the desk drawer and took out that piece of paper on which I’d written the combination to Fordie’s safe. By then the fridge was stacked with eggs and Chablis because I kept forgetting to change the weekly order.
Another week passed before I could face the safe’s contents. My first reaction when that heavy metal door creaked open was a profound shock of disappointment. I had been led to expect a stack of eighteenth-century papers crammed in there, of incalculable rarity and value. The legendary hoard. What I had sold my parents’ house to own. And instead there was one folder, a substantial one admittedly, but that was all. On the folder was written in Fordie’s hand: Chilford/Pelham. This had cost me a year of my life and one Tooting house. I remembered the last words of Fordie’s confession, but then I dismissed the words as scrupulosity. An excess of conscience at the moment of death.
I uncorked a chilled bottle of the Chablis and sat down at the desk where Fordie had always sat. Then I started to read.
A good bibliographer is a historian in miniature, chronicling the journeyings of certain texts through time and space, and Fordie was nothing if not a good bibliographer. And yet this wasn’t in fact bibliography, for what was being tracked had never become a book, or never yet anyway, though it soon became apparent to me that Fordie had meant it to, all the same, for what I held in my hands was evidently the book he had once started out to write. Why had he never mentioned it to me? And why, I wondered, had he never finished it? What had made him falter? In the meantime, I was now where he had once been, in that borderland between bibliography and philology, between textual criticism and biography, between religious belief and diagnosable mania.
Fordie’s writing was crabbed and difficult, and it took me a while before I managed to start reading it fluently. There was this uneasy preface:
It is certainly arguable that the eighteenth century gave us the terms of modernity with which we’ve had to live ever since. Somewhere between the bent and crippled Pope, wielding the weight of classical learning to crush his opponents with ridicule, and William Blake and his wife, naked in their garden as they attempted to recapture Eden, we still seem to be rediscovering our dilemma. Pope ridiculed the mad, but for Blake madness was simply the condition of the visionary – no more and no less. He has Cowper come to him in his vision and ask for lessons in insanity: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane?’ It is doubtful that the unfortunate Cowper would have wished to express the matter that way. There is one curiosity worthy of remark, though: how much more hate there is in the orthodox Roman Catholic Pope than in the outrageous antinomian heretic Blake.
Behind the perfect façades of the Augustan manner we can always hear the inmates’ cries at Bedlam. This is not a metaphor, it is actual fact. Many of the eighteenth century’s poetic voices speak to us from inside one species of asylum or another. Cowper raving, Collins in distress, Smart incarcerated, as Clare was to be later. Even Johnson, that massive arbiter of Augustan measure, in constant fear of madness, constantly praying to be saved the ultimate indignity of insanity. The great sloth that would descend upon him amounted to an autism of the spirit, whose sole antidote was the clatter and clamour of London. It was Johnson’s ‘vile melancholy’, which ‘made him mad all his life, at least not sober’, what he himself called ‘this dismal inertness of disposition’.
We have the dreadful prospect of Swift contemplating his end, knowing that he would die like a tree: from the head down.
If the study of the relatively unknown work of Richard Pelham might teach us anything, it might be to be wary of imagining that we explain much when we use words like melancholy, any more than we can approach the pathos of Nietzsche with his arms around that beleaguered horse in Turin by using the word syphilis. It is interesting to note how many of the Palladian houses built in England at that time had grottoes beneath them, as though acknowledging the Gothic terrors that accompany always the classical lines of perfect proportion.
The eighteenth century is not a distant time, not in this regard anyway. Remember how many of our own poets have been afflicted with the same conditions: madness, alcoholism, suicide. Hart Crane re-joining his sailors, Sylvia Plath, back in Pelham’s London, with her head in the gas oven, Lowell’s mind divided between the bottle and the psychotic ward, Berryman crashing through the ice on the Mississippi, Paul Celan diving into the Seine – poets do seem very fond of water when the time comes for them to leave us.
Then the first section began, a history of the manuscripts. It seemed that in his seclusion at Twickenham after his wife’s death, Lord Chilford had completed his study of Pelham’s melancholy condition and his madness. And then he had sent his essay to the Royal Society.
The President of the Royal Society at that time was Martin Folkes. His portrait had been painted by Hogarth. Folkes had gained a certain notoriety from marrying Lucretia Bradshaw, an actress much applauded at the Haymarket and Drury Lane. The History of the English Stage of 1741 called her ‘one of the greatest and most promising genii of her time’. Folkes took her off the stage though, the better to facilitate what he called her ‘exemplary and prudent conduct’. By the time Folkes died, she had been confined in Chelsea for many years, her mind having long since sunk into derangement. In the margin Fordie had written, ‘Seems as though Pelham was in good company then. Half of England was barking.’ According to Fordie, Folkes did not appear to have been one of the Society’s more inspiring presidents. The wits of the time had put it thus:
If ere he chance to wake in Newton’s chair
He wonders how the devil he got there.
There was a grand sale of the Folkes collection in 1756. The library, gems, drawings, coins and prints fetched between them the considerable sum for those days of £3,090 in a sale that went on for fifty-six days, and in amongst those items was Chilford’s study of Pelham.
It appeared that, as Lord Chilford’s noble family had begun its decline, so the line of Pelham began to prosper. Thomas Pelham, the poet’s son, returned from Ireland to London a wealthy man, having established for himself a lucrative practice as an architect in Georgian Dublin. Jealous of his family’s reputation, and probably at least partly at the bidding of his adored mother, he set about retrieving any biographical data concerning his father which might one day find itself set in print. Curll’s pamphlet was by that stage already a rarity, and the Pelhams wished Richard to be remembered as a poet of some distinction, not as an intermittently violent lunatic. It was Thomas Pelham who acquired the Chilford lot at the sal
e of the Folkes collection. And there he doubtless read of the ‘correspondence in my possession’ with his father, which Chilford off-handedly mentions in a footnote.
Lord Chilford would not grant Pelham an audience, despite repeated requests, but he did make him a curious promise: namely, that he would bequeath all the material relating to his father to him, so that it should all become his or his family’s shortly after Chilford’s own death, as long as no further attempt was made to contact him during his lifetime. This agreement was kept on both sides. In the intervening years Thomas Pelham continued busily about his appointed task, even tracking down the relevant portions of the Chelsea Asylum log for the period of his father’s incarceration.
As has been said, a great deal of the motivation for all this activity was undoubtedly propriety. The material was being gathered in by the family so that it might never again become available for public scrutiny or ridicule. A rumour of insanity in a family’s lineage was already becoming a grave social handicap. By the end of the nineteenth century the Pelhams were wealthy and established, and once more based in England. In the best Victorian tradition, business was used to finance scholarship, and Alexander Pelham became one of the most promising young scholars of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He also took it upon himself to edit the collected works of his forebear. His summers throughout the Edwardian years were spent at what was now the family seat, Guisely Manor in Oxfordshire, working his way through all the material Thomas had so carefully retrieved. After the edition finally emerged in 1912, the manuscripts were donated to the British Museum. Or at least some of them were. There were occasional references in the Clarendon introduction and notes which suggested other material had been consulted, material that seemed to have been made available to the editor alone. There was one particularly cryptic note which said merely, ‘If that scientific age treated him badly in life, it treated him no less disgracefully in death.’ This could be read simply as a protest against the oblivion into which Pelham’s reputation swiftly sank, but there might have been another way of reading it.
