It arrived, this seizure, disturbing intimations of destiny, as Clare walked back from the market town of Stamford, towards Barnack and his cottage at Helpston. The first Clare biographer, Frederick W. Martin, publishing in the year after the poet's death, turns the documented materials of a life into romantic fiction; a fiction extracted from Clare's scribblings, his papers. Extracted from a single visit to Helpston, interrogation of unreliable witnesses. Everything folds back into Clare's own telling, his autobiographical ‘sketches’. Freed from punctuation, memory flows, racing ahead of itself in accordance with the (future) Kerouacian recipe for spontaneous composition: first thought, best thought.
‘I think I was 13,’ Clare wrote. ‘Trifling things are never pun[c]tually rememberd as their occurence is never strikingly impressed on the memory.’
An acquaintance, a Helpston weaver, owns a copy of James Thomson's poem, The Seasons. Young Clare's immediate and intense desire is to possess this wonder. Stamford on Sunday morning, bookseller's premises closed. He bribes a lad to mind the horses he has been paid to watch over. Dereliction of duty. Early return, before first light, to the market town, waiting for the shutters to be thrown open: book secured for a shilling. Clare, not wanting to be observed in the act of reading, unconcerned about trespass, climbs over the wall into Burghley Park.
Let future romancers retell the episode as they will, following Clare's template. His rapture.
Weather? ‘Beautiful.’ (As summer mornings, in memory, always are.)
Scenery? ‘Uncommonly beautiful.’
Explainers improve on the poet's ravishment, his incident of unearnt bliss, the vagueness of light, setting, height of Burghley wall. The tree. Its welcome shade. ‘The beautys of artful nature in the park.’ Coming late, we want more. Who owned this park? Where were the gamekeepers? How did the canopy of leaves shimmer and dance? What were the smells and sounds? A callow youth hiding himself away while he allows the rhythms of Thomson's verse to affect his pattern of breath.
Be gracious, Heaven! for now laborious man
Has done his part. Ye fostering breezes, blow!
Ye softening dews, ye tender showers, descend!
And temper all, thou world-reviving sun,
Into the perfect year! Nor ye who live
In luxury and ease, in pomp and pride,
Think these lost themes unworthy of your ear
Showers of exclamation marks. Insidious commas. Nature personified. Mannerly verse interceding between observer and place, a technique for healing the complexity of the world. The peasant in the park, unprotected by family, costume, education, is shown another method of disappearing: into thickets of nicely lubricated language. A memory system of regular and irregular stresses.
‘I got into a strain of descriptive rhyming on my journey home,’ Clare reported. ‘This was “the morning walk” the first thing I commited to paper.’
And strain it was, agony. A colder sweat than his labours in the fields provoked. Grubbing at wrapping material, bills of sale, defacing paper with a slanting scrawl: the curse of poetry. Walking. To release the pressure. Inspiration arrived on the tramp, solitary expeditions. Frederick Martin has Clare appointing ‘an old oak, on the borders of Helpston Heath’ as his office. Caught short on some rough track, he would press his hat into service as a crude desk. ‘Inspiration seldom came to him in-doors, within the walls of any dwelling; but descended upon his soul in abundant showers whenever he was roaming through the fields and meadows, the woods and heathery plains around Helpston.’
‘Demons,’ said Ingmar Bergman, ‘don't like the open air.’ Poetry is the absence of demons, a rapt cataloguing of the natural world. Clare's Northamptonshire verses are burdened, according to his contemporary critics, with excess of description. If Helpston and its walkable circumference, up to that point in its history, had been uncelebrated, without language, John Clare accepted the burden of authorship. He became a scribe to locality. A poet in a place that had never, previously, had any use for such a being.
He was seen as clown, a clod, an unholy innocent achieving inspiration through drink or derangement. A conceit that surfaced, once again, in Edward Bond's 1975 play, The Fool. Bond's Clare, a mummer, frolics at the gates of the great house, a beaten savage with a choke of song in him. A beggar on the stony road. A beggar who refuses to beg. A lumbering, undersized bear with memories of its abdicated humanity. ‘I dreamt I saw bread spat on the ground.’
The season, the lull after the Napoleonic Wars, was ripe for it, a new peasant. Clare had taken the lure, his discounted copy of The Seasons (knocked down from 1s. 6d.); his first dealings with those vampires, the bookmen. Dust for blood. The addiction was on him, to the despair of Patty, his new wife: subscriptions to magazines, library debts, books gifted, books for study. Yards of poetry that would be heaped on a cart as soon as he was dead and gone.
In Burghley Park, ‘excited beyond his capacity for explanation’, young Clare plunged into Thomson (who made his verses for the favours of patronage, English landscapes dressed and flattered). Saccharine bites like acid into the enamel:
Come gentle Spring, ethereal Mildness come;
And from the bosom of yon dripping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.
The form of the poem, Clare recognised, was epistolary; you learn to compose a letter in verse, a letter to yourself. Peasant poets were a commodity, living fossils, respectful toilers who filled out the middle distance in one of Thomson's conceptual landscapes. London shops were heaped with rhyming peasants. Robert Bloomfield, cobbler and agricultural labourer. Stephen Duck, author of The Thresher's Labour. Kirk White, a butcher's son. They were lionised for a season, then permitted to decline, by gentle increments, into poverty; verses unmanned by the attempt to strike a properly deferential note.
Clare was more awkward: clothes, stance, size. Attitude. Deficient in humility. Short stature, tall brow, hair hanging to the shoulder: a suitable case for flattery by the commissioned portraitist, William Hilton. In his Napoleonic greatcoat (gift of the publisher John Taylor), Clare backed into a circle of candlelight. A countryman with stones under his tongue. Silent, often. And thirsty. When he talked, he talked; canny, discomforted, loud, shy, giving offence by accident or design. Custodian of the poetry that came to him by default. Covert things made public to his advancement, a handful of gold coins drawn from the deep pocket of Lord Milton. An investment fund subscribed by Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (future King of the Belgians and father of another Leopold, the slave-master who ran the Congo as a private fiefdom). The double-edged sword of charity. A gesture that sets a royal name in the almanac of benevolence. Small change lobbed at an English peasant poet by a dynasty that enforced a barbarous regime on colonial Africa. Leopold II, according to The Inheritors (a novel composed in tandem by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford), was ‘a philanthropist on megalomaniac lines’.
Clare saw workmen surveying ground for the railway that would revise Helpston and challenge the description he was trying to compose, the sounds, shapes, secrets. The railway from Matadi to Kinshasa that opened up the wealth of the Congo for Leopold was under construction when Conrad underwent his own heart of darkness, his trial as a riverboat captain for the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. The company agent at Stanley Falls, Georges Antoine Klein, feverish, sick with dysentery, was brought aboard Conrad's steamer, the Roi des Belges. He died on the voyage downstream and was buried at Tchumbiri Station.
Before the coming of the railway, before Clare's shortlived fame, few travellers made the journey from Helpston to London. Stamford, Market Deeping and Peterborough fulfilled the need for a market. If you required exotic produce, such as string, you walked to the convenient town. Clare's career turned on his desire for a blank ledger. A workbook produced to order by a local printer was a serious investment. A necessary first step in the poetry trade.
At the May Fa
ir in Deeping, John's mother bought him a pocket handkerchief (the kind he would later employ as an auxiliary suitcase for his London visits). The handkerchief was embroidered with a portrait of Thomas Chatterton and a few lines of complimentary verse. Up from the provinces, adrift in London: Chatterton, the boy martyr, was an icon to be hawked at country fairs. A dangerous model. Clare mopped his sweat on the Bristol poet's glamorous profile: involuntary possession. Faces pressed together, Chatterton's verses printed (in reverse) across that high, smooth brow. Clare's poem, ‘The Recognition’, as Jonathan Bate recognised, was an imitation of Chatterton: ‘written as if by the poet just before he poisoned himself with arsenic, at the age of seventeen, having been reduced to despair by poverty and neglect’.
The Deeping printer J. B. Henson offers a vanity deal: at a price. You pay, I publish. Flyers to distribute. The aspirant author is both excited and shamed; having to cobble together, stub of pencil, scrap of paper, an advertisement for himself. Frederick Martin appreciates Clare's native gift of poetry, but refuses to acknowledge the prose. It lacks structure, organisation of thought, he asserts. From another perspective, another time, I see those journals, letters, fragments of autobiography, as alert, fresh, sinewy. The best of their kind. They are the simplest way to catch Clare's voice, the modesty, the hesitation: the sudden rush of remembrance. It's a walking language, uncensored, immediate: going nakedly for what has to be said. Anecdote as essence.
I cannot say what led me to dabble in Rh[yme] or at what aged I began to write it but my first attempts was imitations of my fathers Songs for he knew & sung a great many & I made many things before I venturd to comit them to writing for I felt ashamd to expose them on paper & after I venturd to write them down my second thoughts blushd over them & [I] burnt them for a long while but as my feelings grew into song I felt a desire to preserve some & used to correct them over & over till the last copy had lost all kindred to the first even in the title
Such instincts were recognised, by villagers, as alien and unwholesome. Clare's mother would never, he says, have given him that handkerchief, with its melancholy token, if she had known that he would, one day, become a poet. Initiation begins as an urge to remake whatever is admired: ‘I was fond of imitating every thing I met with and therefore it was impossible to resist the oppertunity which this beutiful poem gave me.’
Composition undertaken in the open fields, reading under hedges, publication in town. Stamford with its raft of newspapers (Stamford Mercury, Stamford Champion, Stamford News), its mercantile and political interests, was a significant provincial nexus. Here was the third medieval university, the one that didn't happen: Oxford, Cambridge… Stamford. The right distance from London. The right geology: honeyed limestone. Cambridge colleges, like Ely Cathedral and Ramsey Abbey, emerged from Barnack quarries. Stamford was a once-wealthy wool town with a peculiar microclimate of resentment: suppressed university, disenfranchised scholarship, news from elsewhere. Pride without visible means of support. Factions. Spheres of influence. Drinking schools that never ventured from their own pubs.
Taken by his father, apprenticed to the big house, Clare was never comfortable. With his fellow gardeners, he escaped at night from locked quarters, out of Burghley Park: they patronised a Stamford dive called the Hole in the Wall. The apprenticeship was in drinking and whoring. The foul-tempered Burghley garden-master favoured another establishment. Clare was frequently sent, by this man's wife, to fetch him home. He was coerced into epic sessions, subjected to a boozer's sentimental charity. Slurred monologues that turn on a beat into violence. Stamford majored in civic amnesia, private sleights remembered for generations.
I've always felt, even before Anna's advocacy, that Stamford was the model of an English provincial town: hill, river, labyrinthine passageways, bloody-minded inhabitants dozing away the centuries with no great interest in life beyond the eight miles that have to be walked to work up a thirst. Bookshops of every stamp. Dealers who came off the Great North Road and lacked the imagination to move on. In Stamford you are far enough from London to spurn the place as a creation of the Devil. (Even if you are one of the fortunate few who are aware of its existence. The rest devise their own pleasures: bull-baiting, Christian fundamentalist sects, fleecing tourists.)
The London coach departed from the George Hotel. We stayed there once. Anna was delighted with a group of beet-faced farmers, razor-raw and scrubbed, convened around a long table. They were worn by (as much as wearing) hairy tweed suits in various shades of yellow and green. The table sagged under the weight of food, their pewter pots. They ate, heads down, in silence. You could hear teeth snapping bone. And feel the cold rush of the beer going down, half-a-pint at a swallow. Pleasure for the fraternity of agriculturalists was a solemn business. They finished, spoons down, on the beat; they rose as one. Retired to the bar, drinks secured, they relaxed. Roared. The formality of the dinner over, they were allowed to enjoy themselves.
The farmers would have been perfectly recognisable to Clare. He was astonished when his old Stamford contact, Ned Drury, returned from Lincoln for the Mayor's Feast, which followed the traditional running of a bull through the streets. ‘I would not go one Mile,’ he wrote, ‘to hear the din of knifes and forks and to see a throng of blank faces… that boast no more expression than a muffin.’
Stamford was always a town of books and booksellers. A newsagent with the usual clutter out front might carry, in his back room, a stock of miscellaneous secondhand volumes, a locked glass cabinet with pristine Sax Rohmer first editions in garish period jackets. A Vietnam War refusenik, veteran of New York's Peace Eye bookshop, could hide out, nurturing a massive De Quincey habit, in a stable yard by the river: Lucozade, ampoules and well-thumbed copies of Book Auction Records. Further up the hill, you would discover a long-established antiquarian dealer; the kind who might have patronised Clare – and then turned him away when he reappeared, hawking bundles of his own work, unwonted copies of that unwonted book, The Shepherd's Calendar. Visit the premises now, put the silver key to the lock of the private cabinet, and battered late editions of Clare's first book, odd volumes of the second (‘with all faults’), are prized exhibits. Alongside the John Speed maps from 1610 (handcoloured, 2001), the Helpston poet gives credibility to an anachronistic enterprise.
When I was a jobbing dealer, hitting Stamford, Clare was out of my league. I couldn't afford the cabinet. I worked the shelves, just inside the door, paperbacks and fiction deemed cheap enough to take its chances with ram-raiders in anoraks, unselective kleptomaniacs. One morning, at the start of a day's book trawl, I found a run of Colin Watson novels, crisp and clean, unsullied by the fingers of previous owners. Watson's shtick was comedy and sudden death; mysteries set in the flatlands, bodies draped over electricity pylons. Tales he delivered with the verve of Tom Sharpe. At his best, he was almost as good as Jack Trevor Story. He factored a strain of cynical, corrupted Englishness that I admired without reservation. Born in Croydon, a journalist and leader-writer for Thomson Newspapers, he knew where the bodies were buried and knew that life beyond the metropolis was still worth recording: ugly-lovely, lustful, ultimately absurd.
It turned out that the author had dumped the books, he was a friend of the proprietor. An action forged in the spirit of John Clare. The best writers, the ones with spiky independence and a voice of their own, finish up hawking unsold stock, discounted by bored publishers, door to door. I took everything by Colin Watson and arranged to visit him, out in Lincolnshire, on the road to Sleaford. West Street, Folkingham: the address. In the general direction Clare travelled, on foot, when he dragged himself and his bundle of books to Boston. Frederick Martin has the poet achieving this walk, Helpston to Boston, a distance of more than thirty miles, burdened with his sack, in a single day.
He walked all the way, and arriving in the evening of a beautiful day, ascended the steeple of the old church, just when the sun was sending his last rays over the surging billows of the North Sea. The view threw Clare into raptur
ous delight. He had never before seen the ocean, and felt completely overwhelmed at the majestic view which met his eyes. So deep was the impression left on his mind that it kept him awake allnight; and when he fell asleep, towards the morning, the white-crested waves of the sea, stretching away into infinite space, hovered in new images over his dreams.
Gaunt, sharp-featured, a little wary of the stranger on the step, Watson interrupted his work as a silversmith. Eyeglass. Tools in hand. He couldn't understand where it had gone wrong. His novels were well received – ‘Watson's portrait of the tawdry side of English provincial life is saved from bitterness by something rare in detective novels: a dirty sense of humour’ – and they'd even had a few moments of television time, with Anton Rogers (who used to come around my stall in Camden Passage, Islington, asking for books on fishing) as the detective.
The problem was that Watson, lese-majesty, had trashed Agatha Christie in an essay called ‘The Little World of Mayhem Parva’. Big mistake. Watson's Flaxborough, a credible setting, packed with ‘sentimental animal lovers, drunken journalists, randy aldermen, and corrupt doctors’, was all too real. Stamford, Boston, Helpston, Glinton. Lesser Peterborough at the turn of the Millennium. Folkingham in 1985.
Watson put away his instruments, took me upstairs to the living room. He had a vision, Lincolnshire inspired it, of epic tank battles, an H. G. Wells Armageddon. Machines crushing humans for the benefit of remote viewers. The future, yet again, recovered from Victorian or Edwardian science fiction. The pain of it was in his face.
He signed my books, we parted. He was astonished that his early first editions were a desirable commodity, while his current publications, the boxes of Book Club editions, filled his shelves. He would have to let the writing game go, it didn't pay. Concentrate on silver rings and decorative trinkets. The Helpston villagers, according to Frederick Martin, had the same advice for Clare. Give up poetry, peddle jewellery, fancy handkerchiefs, patent medicines. And even then, they thought, he might be setting his cap too high. ‘They looked upon a bagman as a person of superior rank – decidedly higher than a poet.’
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