Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  His host, Burkhardt, led the poet to the river at Westminster Bridge, a hoped-for Wordsworthian epiphany. Clare's soul was resolutely dull; the nocturne, silver lights in liquid darkness, spurned. ‘I was dissapointed thinking I should have seen a fresh water sea and when I saw it twas less than Whittlesea Meer.’

  Women parading the streets were of greater interest. Perfumed exoticism. So many and so magnificent. Burkhardt shocked Clare by revealing their trade. The weary, befuddled tourist couldn't get his bearings. Nothing was as it appeared. The Helpston poet imposed a system of equivalents on London. The Thames becomes Whittlesey Mere. Westminster Abbey is Peterborough Cathedral. St Paul's stands for Glinton spire. One of the gorgeous nightwalkers might be Mary Joyce. He refuses to venture in high literary stocks: London reconstituted as a wild geology of cliffs, crags, cataracts. No laudanum, no lakes, for John. The murky expanse of Whittlesey Mere, witnessed during that long, dull voyage from Peterborough to Wisbech, stayed with him in a way the muddy Thames never would. Clare was impervious to German metaphysics. His romanticism consisted of viewing prostitutes, in their nocturnal perambulations, as grand and stately creatures. In acknowledging prizefighters as poets. Poets as labouring men.

  In John Taylor's Fleet Street office, Keats used the back of a letter from Clare to his publisher (litany of ill health, underpayment, bores of verse) to tinker with a draft of Lamia. Clare was unsentimental about his Cockney colleague's damaged lungs, his voyage to Italy.

  ‘I should like to see the fiz of the man,’ he wrote to Hessey (29 June 1820), ‘before he drops off and hope he will last till next winter when I shall hazard myself to town unaccompanied.’

  Born in a Moorgate pub, Keats was the voice of London: and he had escaped. Broken away. Sickness. Foreign parts. The two poets never met. ‘Give my respects to Keats and tell him I am a half mad melancholly dog in this moozy misty country he has latly cast behind him.’

  When Keats died, unsold stock piled high, Taylor presented Clare with a copy of Chaucer that had once belonged to the London poet. Clare's library grew until it threatened to overwhelm the limits of his wife's tolerance. His tastes were orthodox, his reading wide. He valued books as objects. He solicited gifts from other writers, from patrons. Promised many, he received few. One complimentary volume of Keats, gifted by Taylor, he sent back: to demand the poet's inscription. He badgered Peter de Wint for a drawing:

  The favour requested & the liberty taken to request it being neither more or less than a wish to possess a bit of your genius to hang up in a frame in my Cottage by the side of Friend Hiltons beautifull drawing which he had the kindness to give me when first in London what I mean is one of those scraps which you consider nothing after having used them & that lye littering about your study

  To keep the incidents of the city fresh in his mind, for future exploitation, Clare made shorthand notes. ‘Mem: ladys thronging the streets at night.’ He worked hard to flesh out his self-portrait as a premature flâneur. ‘One of my greatest amusements while in London was reading the booksellers windows,’ he confessed. ‘I was always fond of this from a boy and my next greatest amusement was the curiosity of seeing litterary men.’

  Churches, theatres, the premises of John Murray (Lord Byron's publisher). Dues paid, Clare lost himself in the mob, the incessant scurrying of tradesmen, whores, beggars, loiterers. He was hustled from place to place, room to room, patron to patron. They tried his conversation, Lord Radstock and Mrs Emmerson; they were short of a biddable peasant, rough trade with a bundle of unedited manuscripts. A non-insurrectionary poet who knew how to be grateful. They set up funds, they badgered publishers.

  The first London excursion: novelty. Muffled in a long green coat, Clare comes to terms with the conditions of notoriety: being watched, gossiped over, tested. Frederick Martin tells us that he was ‘unwilling to play the part of a newly discovered monkey’. He remained unimpressed: by the tourist circuit, the gaudy of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. He dragged himself to one of Taylor's literary dinners. He met Hazlitt: ‘A silent picture of severity.’ J. H. Reynolds: ‘He would punch you with his puns very keenly without ever hurting your feelings.’ Henry Cary. Lord Radstock (admiral, Christian). And, by way of Radstock, the flutteringly determined poetess (and collector of poets), Mrs Eliza Emmerson. One empty chair: John Keats was ill.

  The best of London was quitting it. A more comfortable coach ride. The Bull Inn at Ware. A serving girl who caught his eye. A sonnet. Clare's London poems, the residue of this visit, are prose. The notes of a survivor. Gossip, anecdote, confession. His new friends, concerned patrons, nudge him towards marriage with the definitively pregnant Patty Turner.

  June 1822 brings Clare back to town: alone, unaccompanied, sensations sharper. Celebrity has curdled. His first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life & Scenery, has run through four editions. A second book is unpublished. The vogue for peasants is over, poetry is out of fashion. Clare sits in Taylor's window, in Fleet Street, and he watches. That property, on the south side of the street, to the east of St Bride's, is currently (2004) occupied by The Link, a mobile-phone franchise. ‘£20 off. Pay as you like.’ Curved window, dirty red brick. Cheap novelties.

  He perches, undisturbed, where so much business is transacted, a press of humanity streams below. He is positioned at one of the great crossing points of London. Fleet Street is the original connection, emphasised by Samuel Pepys (born alongside St Bride's, schooled at St Paul's), between the gated city and royal Westminster (king, parliament, court). Pepys, making his way home along this muddy highway, is tempted by a prostitute, a girl in the shadows. He goes with her, takes fright, says that he hasn't enough money, runs. (And records his humiliation. London insists on records being kept. The hot eyes of the future. I re-walk, compulsively, routes other men established.)

  All of this, the cocktail of human dust and stone dust, is available to the seated poet. John Clare, breath stopped, coexists with the crumbling figurines, gods and mythological presences in alcoves above jewellery shops, tobacconists, legal stationers. The city is freighted with code, Coade stone imitations: Mercury, Neptune, Minerva, bulls, bears, griffins. (Coade, in later times, move their operation to Stamford.) Livery companies, trade associations, fraternities. Fleet Street, bridging the Fleet River, an enclosed sewage ditch, runs parallel to the Thames, that old brown god.

  The Link: a window display of husks, bright plastic carapaces. Babble of electronic non-communication: so many of the walkers are not walking; they are muttering, mumbling, talking to themselves. Mad folk, pre-visioned by Clare. Hands against his ears to keep them stoppered. To hold the letters of the alphabet inside, in case they spill.

  Watch a street and you become it. You construct, if so inclined, a narrative: but you are also part of the witnessed event. You shape what you see. Clare suffers futures, future suffering, displaced persons struggling to set themselves on the right road. The view from Fleet Street, looking east, so busy in engravings and photographs – railway, smoke, interlocking carts – is botched: penance not pilgrimage. (St Paul's, in the summer of 2004, is wrapped like a convalescent. Christopher Wren's Temple Bar will be removed from its present obscurity in Theobald's Park, out near the orbital circuit of the M25, and returned to captivity in Paternoster Square. A heritage trophy. A lifeless version of itself: no gate, no psychic marker, not even a folly in a rich brewer's park. A naked and all too pristine freak. London, once again, reduced to an exhibition of fraudulent symbols.)

  Irritation of the eye. Clare is not used to sitting in windows, but he treats it like a job:

  on my first visit to London I had a glimpse of things as they are & felt doubtful on my second I had more dissapointments & in my last I saw so much mistey shuffling that my faith of the world shrunk to a skeleton & would scarce fill a nutt shell or burthen a mouse to bear it

  Pepys, Dr Johnson (stalking with the poet Savage), John Donne, Keats, Jack Kerouac (on his one recorded London hike), Edgar Wallace (whose plaque is across the busy
traffic, at the corner of Fleet Street and Farringdon Street): they are there and not there. Voices. Threadlike entities. Supernatural agents as involuntary glimpses of future times. In years to come, watching the watcher, Clare fanatics will stare at the arched window of the publisher John Taylor and insist on a glimpse of the vanished poet.

  Watching, walking, drowning. Clare couldn't delete what he knew, his seven-mile circuit of Northamptonshire countryside, by crouching at a Fleet Street window. The city would have to be mapped by a sequence of zigzag perambulations, mimicking a state of intoxication. That is how nineteenth-century London is to be understood: a town out of its head on drink. Resurrectionists and corpse-suppliers. Labourers who will push a body in a cart from Bethnal Green to Smithfield, to Southwark, to Soho. The hospital porter, the surgeon: falling down drunk. Gin, claret. Lawyers, judges, priests and hangmen: reeling, staggering, spitting red.

  Clare's final visit, February to March 1828, took place three years before the murders by the ‘London Burkers’, John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May. Easier to facilitate death's passage than to raid burial grounds. Less digging, more time to drink. To make a slow, wandering circuit of the pubs: while the victim (dosed with porter and laudanum) snores on the dirt floor of your kitchen. The orphans, street performers, vagrant children, who were murdered (made into art works, anatomical specimens), had no fixed abode: they were part of the drift of the city, the slipstream Clare now entered.

  He ventured as far as St Paul's; he promised to find material for Patty and his sister, Sophy. Such change as he carried in his pocket, so Jonathan Bate tells us, was given to ‘an African beggar’ outside the cathedral. Stall-holders and shopkeepers fleece the countryman. He expects this and is not disappointed. It gets him out of further marketing. He acquires a guide, Thomas Bennion, Hessey's porter. Bennion is a Londoner. Bennion is at his shoulder. Bennion likes a drink. Clare likes Bennion, understands him. He manages a letter home, the confirmation that he is elsewhere:

  My journey up ended very bad indeed – we went 20 miles and upwards in the most dreadfull thunder storm… but I am safe thats satisfaction enough – my respects to all and a kiss for Anna.

  Anna is special: firstborn, daughter. Patty is pregnant again. Clare floats (‘grass-green coat and yellow waistcoat’) between the fixed point in Taylor's window and his rovings with Bennion. ‘They went to raree-shows together,’ records Jonathan Bate. Literary dinners for the London Magazine set. Clare slept in different houses: Mrs Emmerson's little room with the skylight, a few nights with Cary in Chiswick (Hogarth's old property). He visited the grave of James Thomson in Richmond. He met E. V. Rippingille, the painter whose work he had seen in a shop window on that stolen Saturday, wandering through Wisbech. A youth whose wrists poked out of his sleeves.

  ‘Rip’, now based in Bristol, came up to town at regular intervals, nudging his career, taking on projects such as the group scene The Stage-Coach Before Breakfast. A conversation piece loud with celebrity. A precursor of The Colony Room (1962) by Michael Andrews. Or rock-vampire Ronnie Wood's corralling of the ghosts of the Ivy; the presently notorious (in their own estimation) herded into improbable conjunctions. Rip was ahead of the game: future icons, at breakfast, waiting on the celestial coach. The Wordsworths (William and Dorothy). Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A man, in coat and hat, umbrella under arm, staring into a mirror and discovering that it is a clock. This obscure traveller, preparing himself for the road home, might be Clare.

  Prizefighting. French actresses in Tottenham Court Road. Strategic retreats from soirées organised by Mrs Emmerson. Rip was Clare's boon companion, his agent of pleasure. He took the poet by the elbow and guided him into a different London. Another spiral of the labyrinth. Nights in Offley's tavern swilling Burton's Ale. Conversation among equals. No requirement to perform.

  Hot-faced, the sturdy peasant poet is presented to his peers. As he sees, so he is seen. His trajectory intersects with those of other persons worthy of biography. He encounters De Quincey. Frederick Martin cooks the fable:

  Mr. De Quincey being announced one day, just when they were sitting down to dinner, Clare quickly sprang to his feet to behold the extraordinary man; but was much astonished on seeing a little, dark, boyish figure, looking like an overgrown child, oddly dressed in a blue coat, with black necktie, and a small hat in his hand. Clare's astonishment became still greater when this singular-looking little man began to talk, not, as the listener innocently expected, of such abstruse subjects as he was wont to write on in the London Magazine, but in a banter about the most ludicrous and vulgar things.

  Eccentrics were De Quincey's stock-in-trade. He collected Clare as he collected ‘Walking Stewart’, a man who had lost his wits in epic hikes across Europe and Asia. Stewart owned a house, he published. He was one of those creatures, unrecorded, who drive the secret generators of the city by congenital restlessness, long days on the treadmill of the pavements. Men with black bags (women too) moving slightly faster than the rest of us; stale odour, steady stare.

  I met one such, as I was walking – I hadn't meant to take this route – from the Serpentine Gallery (Cy Twombly), through the park, Mall, Admiralty Arch, Trafalgar Square, Strand, Fleet Street. In search of Clare's window.

  Into my stride, I overtake window-grazers, mobile-phone gabblers, and am overtaken, in my turn, by appointment-keepers, Anzacs with tight shorts and rucksack destinations. A comfortable momentum is achieved, at which certain details are registered, but the freewheeling mind doesn't drag like an anchor; you are not caught up in anticipations of arrival.

  A gaunt man, respectably dressed (once, years ago), swept past me so effortlessly that I felt the breeze. He swung away towards the Embankment, the river. He had the black bags, as well as an ancient leather attaché case. I was tempted to pursue him, but understood that it was hopeless; he'd already gained a hundred yards, didn't concern himself with traffic, weaving through it, untouched. He might have been a lecturer, tenure not renewed. He touched things, railings, posts. He was weather-beaten; beneath the crust, fiercely pale. His path and my own (which contained unfulfilled projects, attempts to register John Clare's movements) were not complementary.

  The displaced lecturer was another Walking Stewart. One of the brotherhood that De Quincey knew so well. De Quincey is a walking writer; his prose bustles, gasps for breath, edits itself as it races on. He might travel from Manchester to London, on foot, to the Lakes, but he failed to keep pace with Walking Stewart and the robotic, disenfranchised walkers who keep the arteries of the city open.

  When De Quincey chanced on Stewart, near Somerset House (where I noticed my Quixotic pedestrian), the urban stalker told him that he was leaving that night for Westmorland.

  Thence I went, by the very shortest road… towards a point which necessarily led me through Tottenham Court Road: I stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham Court Road I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook Walking Stewart… There must have been three Walking Stewarts in London. He seemed nowise surprised at this himself, but explained to me that somewhere or other in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road there was a little theatre, at which there was dancing, and occasionally good singing.

  The fraternity of walkers, having no obligation to remember (or record) their journeys, are everywhere at once. They are immortal. Faces rust but they don't change: clear, burning eyes. London offers them the anonymity Clare could never achieve. In Helpston, he struggled to disappear into the landscape. Moving through London, he was everybody. And nobody. He lacked the terminology to describe what he was seeing. What he felt was happening to him.

  De Quincey places Clare, quite securely, in a cabinet of curiosities:

  In 1824, perhaps upon some literary scheme, he came up to London, where, by a few noble families and by his liberal publishers, he was welcomed in a way that, I fear, from all I heard, would but too much embitter the contrast with his own humble opportunities of enjoyment in the count
ry. The contrast of Lord Radstock's brilliant parties, and the glittering theatres of London, would have but a poor effect in training him to bear that want of excitement which even already, I had heard, made his rural life but too insupportable to his mind. It is singular that what most fascinated his rustic eye was not the gorgeous display of English beauty, but the French style of beauty, as he saw it amongst the French actresses in Tottenham Court Road. He seemed, however, oppressed by the glare and tumultuous existence of London; and, being ill at the time, from an affliction of the liver, which did not, of course, tend to improve his spirits, he threw a weight of languor upon any attempt to draw him out in conversation.

  French actresses, bare-knuckle boxers. Fellow poets. Clare was supplied with images and fancies that made domestic life in Northamptonshire difficult to endure. ‘I wish I could live nearer you,’ he wrote to Taylor (February 1825); ‘at least I wish London could be within twenty miles of Helpston. I live here among the ignorant like a lost man.’

  The third visit to London, May 1824, was made on the excuse of consulting Dr Darling. The city tormented him. Night walks were an agony, shifting between Taylor and Mrs Emmerson, visiting Charles and Mary Lamb in Islington. He lived in fear of that ditch, Chancery Lane: law, bankruptcy, high red cliffs. The wigs, the black gowns, books from which words leak. He paid to be cheated. A watchman led him home the wrong way, confirming his opinion of London. In daylight, he wandered: ‘trying to catch the eye of the most beautiful women’. Dr Darling advised: rest, not much reading, no excitement. Clare burnt, sweated. Rip was back in town. They visited the phrenologist Jean Deville. A cast was taken; Clare entombed in white plaster, breathing with straws up his nose like a parodic yokel. The bust was presented to Mrs Emmerson. It tumbled from its perch and was ‘shivered to atoms by the fall’. Pieces of the poet covering the carpet like white sand, scouring powder.