Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  He recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child (Allegra) rise from the sea, and clap its hands in joy, smiling at him. This was a trance that it required some reasoning and philosophy entirely to awaken him from, so forcibly had the vision operated on his mind. Our conversation, which had been at first rather melancholy, led to this; and my confirming his sensations by confessing that I had felt the same, gave greater activity to his wandering and ever-lively fancy.

  In so many texts of the Romantic era, there is a collective delusion: poets exploit images of drowning, naked Blakean babes crying for joy. Time is an unstable medium, devalued by prophetic dreams. Shelley, so Trelawny and other witnesses insist, is childlike, a boy. Hair flopping across his eyes, he is mired in voices; torrents of verse from which he must extract two or three serviceable lines.

  ‘I often saw him in a state of nudity,’ wrote Trelawny, ‘and he always reminded me of a young Indian, strong-limbed and vigorous, and there were few men who would walk on broken ground at the pace he kept up; he beat us all in walking, and, barring drugs and accidents, he might have lived as long as his father – to ninety.’

  As the excesses of Shelley's life began to unravel, the hours of his days ceased to be atomic and became oceanic: he developed a theory of time. None was available to him, his store was used up. He had lived so intensely, spent so recklessly, that he was now an older man than his father, his grandfather. ‘I am ninety years old.’ Poetry plea-bargains with an uncertain future. Always a weak bet: the poem as a machine for achieving immortality. Shelley bought it. Subtle mnemonics. Secret music that burrows through our defence systems like an intelligent virus. Original clichés laying their syrup over dull tongues. ‘He hath awakened from the dream of life.’

  Romantic poets, dying in clusters, killed the poetry franchise: and just at the point when John Clare was launching a public career. Keats, coughing his last in Rome, set the pattern. All his contemporaries were obliged to pen a tribute. (Mick Jagger, in gauzy drag, tried a cover version of Shelley, at the Hyde Park ‘Free’ concert: his immediate response to the face-down swim of Brian Jones. And the launching of a nest of conspiracy theories that would rival those generated by the wreckage of the Don Juan. Shelley's first wife, Harriet, carrying his child, also died in the park. By drowning herself in the Serpentine.)

  ‘Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.’ Shelley, in his ‘Fragment on Keats’, quotes the consumptive poet's chosen epitaph. Keats dies in 1821 and is buried in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. Clare writes a sonnet in his memory and sends it to their shared publisher, Taylor: ‘Just a few beats of the heart – the head has nothing to do with them.’ Shelley composes Adonais, while staying at Pisa, in June 1821. He is drowned on a voyage between Leghorn and Lerici on 8 July 1822. Trelawny adds a tag from The Tempest to Shelley's memorial stone. He burns his hand, pulling the poet's heart from the improvised funeral pyre on the beach. Byron swims out to his yacht, the Bolivar.

  Williams was grilled on an iron furnace, slowly, splashed with wine, oil and spices. The author of Don Juan decided to ‘try the strength’ of the waters that had robbed him of his friends. He swam until he became sick, a mile out. On his return, there was nothing left of Williams but ‘a quantity of blackish-looking ashes, mingled with white and broken fragments of bone’. Two years later, Byron died of a fever at Missolonghi. His funeral procession in London was witnessed by John Clare.

  Coming back to England, after the European tour that gave him the material for Childe Harold, Byron learnt that his Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews (‘Citoyen’) was dead. This ‘brilliant and witty’ young man had drowned in a river, having become tangled in weeds.

  Personal tragedies are mythologised, reported by such unreliable witnesses as Trelawny and Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin. Mary Shelley's memoirs of her husband, her edition of the poems, have to be tempered by the requirement of not offending Sir Timothy Shelley; and thereby forfeiting her small allowance. Continental Europe, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, was sticky with officers on half-pay. Disgraced society figures faffing about Florence under assumed names. Minor aristocrats and younger sons borrowing on their expectations. Most, it seems, had pretensions to write. They hunted extant wildlife with guns and dogs. But above all they hunted literary lions.

  In summer months, the English exiles liked to play at being sailors. Shelley with his skiff on the river, his paper boats. Marine doodles in the margins of manuscripts. Lord Byron commissioned the Bolivar to complement his exotic servants, Italian mistresses, catamites, horses, hounds, apes and cockatoos. Tales of the club-footed poet reached the young Clare in Helpston, at the time when he was considering an apprenticeship with the cobbler Will Farrow. Farrow's brother Tom had been a sailor. A sailor who kept a journal.

  Jonathan Bate:

  Only one passage stuck in Clare's memory: an account of a traveller who once sailed on a ship on which Farrow served, ‘an odd young man lame of one foot on which he wore a cloth shoe – who was of a resolute temper, fond of bathing in the sea and going ashore to see ruins in a rough sea when it required six hands to manage the boat.’ He was so demanding that ‘his name became a bye word in the ship for unnecessary trouble.’ The name – and this was the first time that Clare heard it – was Byron.

  By the time he is taken to High Beach, the asylum in Epping Forest, Clare is possessed by the spirit of Byron. He is recomposing ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Child Harold’ as parallel texts. Romanticism is dead, but the energies it sponsored are still active. The first two cantos of Byron's Don Juan, published in 1819, three years before Shelley's fatal voyage, can be interpreted as rehearsing the coming tragedy in the Bay of Spezia.

  Juan embark'd – the ship got under way,

  The wind was fair, the water passing rough;

  A devil of a sea rolls in that bay,

  As I, who've crossed it, oft, know well enough;

  And standing upon the deck, the dashing spray

  Flies in one's face, and makes it weather-tough.

  Juan is in flight: ‘steering duly for the port of Leghorn’.

  At sunset they began to take in sail,

  For the sky show'd it would come on to blow,

  And carry away, perhaps, a mast or so.

  Poetry, like the neurasthenic dreams of the Casa Magni, precedes human drama. A spectacular death will underwrite a legendary life, sell future volumes. It establishes a necrophile industry, a taste for epitaphs. As Richard Holmes concludes, in his Guardian essay, Shelley will have to be ‘undrowned’; recovered, reassembled. His biography, up to this point, has been forged from sanctified relics, provided by dutiful descendants, pious benefactors. A Catholic cult grows up around an avowed atheist. Museums and colleges manufacture shrines.

  Lady Shelley, wife of Percy Florence (Shelley's son), made a votive chapel of Boscombe Manor, the family home. She burnt letters, clipped out offensive passages, harried potential biographers. She designed an inner sanctum with domed turquoise ceiling, set with gold stars. Female visitors were advised to remove their hats. A memorial was shaped like a pietà. The boneless poet: a sacrificed corpse in Mary Shelley's arms. Letters, books, fragments of bone, locks of hair. The barbecued heart was wrapped in a copy of Adonais and laid in a silk-lined box.

  A pilgrimage to Italy was arranged for Lady Shelley and her son. She slept in the poet's room at Casa Magni, willing the visions that wouldn't come. Elderly fisherfolk were interrogated for their memories of the fatal voyage. Cultists wanted to prove that the Don Juan had been rammed by a Leghorn felucca, pirates after Lord Byron's gold. Spars and shattered oars: relics of the true cross. A ninety-three-year-old woman claimed to have witnessed the burning of the bodies on the beach. It was said that the ashes of the two gentlemen had been taken to England so that they could, by witchcraft, be brought back to life.

  Old Trelawny, irascible as ever, made a fiction of Shelley, a distorted mirror image. ‘He wrote his poems in t
he open air; on the sea shore; the pine woods; and like a shepherd, he could tell the time of day exactly by the light. He never had a watch.’

  Richard Holmes has whetted my taste for relics. I want to view, in Northampton, the gathered volumes from John Clare's library, the notebook with ‘Journey out of Essex’. I want to gawp at his snuffboxes and his watch (he did have one). I'm fascinated by objects associated with the Don Juan legend: the spy-glass recovered from the wreck, the ‘mostly rotten’ books preserved in blue mud. It would be especially unnerving to handle these. The copy of Keats, borrowed from Leigh Hunt, spine split by being crammed into Shelley's pocket, was gone. Burnt. A ‘drowned’ notebook, salvaged by Captain Roberts, survives: ‘A quickening life from the Earths heart has (burst).’ The notebook was presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1946. The original is fading fast. It is harder to read than the photographic reproductions made in 1992.

  The Guardian essay wraps up with a meditation on time. ‘What is the “time of death”?’ Holmes asks. He mentions the fact that Shelley's gold watch, like so many of his manuscripts and memorials, is now kept at the Bodleian. I knew that I would have to break away from Clare, come at him from another direction: I made plans to visit Oxford. Anything to delay the writing of my book.

  Oxford

  ‘Can you fix it for me to see Shelley's watch?’

  I had one contact in Oxford, in academia, and I exploited it shamelessly. My man enjoyed a challenge, the opportunity to demonstrate his status, the ability to open doors that would otherwise require painful negotiation, explanatory letters, covering notes from publishers. Brian Catling, Head of Sculpture at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, was a prophecy come to fruition. Years ago, when I'd known him as a fellow labourer in breweries and dog patches, Limehouse graveyards, Ratcliffe kennels, I'd promoted him to professorial status in a novel called Downriver. I mythologised Catling as a committee man, enthusiastic diner; a social being who would never compromise the thing that mattered most, his work. Which was frequently out of sight, elsewhere (Norway, Iceland, Israel, Japan); or published in limited-edition chapbooks, abandoned (show over) in the nearest skip.

  Catling was an old soul. In an old town. He was happy to facilitate my request. We would meet for lunch at a restaurant in a converted bank, a few doors up the High Street from the Ruskin School of Art. Then we'd amble over to the Bodleian for our appointment with the wondrously named Mr B. C. Barker-Benfield. Who would produce the drowned watch. Catling worked hard, doing the bureaucratic stuff, dealing with those pests, the students, but left time for gun clubs, haunting the Pitt Rivers collection, taking his boat on the river. That had always been his obsession, water; if he didn't drink much of it, he enjoyed nothing more than cruising the Thames, canoeing through Oxford's labyrinthine and overgrown backstreams, heading out into the North Sea with a paralytic skipper and a phantom crew.

  Oxford is Fleet Street with a hangover: slower, longer in the tooth. Nothing much happens in the tolerated gap between Uxbridge and Headington. (Somewhere to plant microwaved celebrities.) The road west is Thames Valley phenobarbitone, play country. You leave the metropolis with red contact lenses, a thick tongue, too much blood washing against the lid of your skull, and Oxford confirms it. The distance is just enough. Close your eyes, suck one of Catling's superstrength cough sweets, and you're there: among refused-entry colleges, a centre given over to war memorials, martyrs' crosses, bus stops and deep-trace cultural busking. Gargoyles leer. Gothic architecture preens. Heritage shops have run low on stock, lost their Americans. Professor Catling travels backwards and forwards, Oxford to London, family obligations, art business, on the coach: nursing a bottled Scottish nightcap. In town, he patronises taxis. ‘I gave up public transport years ago,’ he says. ‘Don't have the time for it.’

  If I can't walk to Oxford, I'll drive. I like to feel the umbilical cord stretching. This is safe, this is still London. Cowley Road has the feral, dangerous charm of Clapton. You can buy the Evening Standard. Eat ethnic. Get tattooed, fixed up, mugged. Cross Magdalen Bridge and you'll be trampled by a conga of overexcited dons rushing towards the station, on their way to TV studios, bookshop events; the media hassle that proves their continued viability.

  With this new hotel, the Old Bank, Oxford comes into line with Clerkenwell. Invisible cash converted into visible design. And back again. You no longer have to rely on the dreadful Randolph, with its embargo on courtesy, its complicated parking and time-warp dining room (bus queues of Bosch-monsters pressed against the windows). The Old Bank displays an original sketch by Stanley Spencer in every bedroom, corridors of Wyndham Lewis, Patrick Hughes, Sandra Blow. A catalogue is available at the front desk. You have to speak advanced Sewell before they'll let you near the Quod Restaurant, with its devastatingly slick service and novel food (you can eat it).

  A cold, moist day: 20 February 2004. I spot Catling, ahead of me, weaving effortlessly through released office workers, newly risen students. He might be a banker or one of the hotel's featured artists. I notice his doppelgänger in the City, Brighton, Cologne. It's my age, everybody looks like somebody else. The man with the thick silver hair, long black coat, moves with stately intent. A type. Touch his shoulder and prove your mistake. But, for once, I call the right name; we are nodded straight through to our table. An actor-manager of the old school, Catling throws off his coat, orders a pair of chilled vodka martinis and settles back to scan the menu.

  Food taken, wine swilled, I produce a small collection of photographs from a recent tour, with Anna, through Clare country. There are things I want to show Catling. I have the prints arranged in a particular order. I click them down, one after the other, on the cleared table. An inscription on a Northborough grave. A child's toy in an unexpected location. A young girl riding a shaggy horse through the outskirts of an ugly town. Tall chimneys on the rim of a quarry. An unidentified skull (with snout) impaled on a stick. A canal seen through the smeared windscreen of a car. Ramsey Abbey in the rain.

  A loose narrative carries us back to another expedition, undertaken thirty years ago. A strange period: auditory hallucinations, too much cider mixed with Russian stout, books beginning to be published. Much wandering, late and early, across London. Somewhere, it might have been the deserted Whitechapel Gallery or the Roebuck in Durward Street, I heard a voice say: ‘Ramsey holds the key.’ Which I took, for no good reason, to be a reference to Ramsey Abbey. That ancient island in the Fens.

  We drove up the A1. Found the town and the church. But no key. Too rushed, I thought. We should have walked, allowed time for the right questions to form. Londoners in an amphibian environment, we paddled around unwelcoming streets: bakers of monumental loaves, funeral parlours, decayed warehouses servicing a dead river.

  The rest of the afternoon, under lowering skies, we toured the Fens; Catling was not then much of a map-reader. Long, wet roads on raised banks above canals. Lone bungalows. Clumps of trees

  standing forlorn in hedgeless fields, reclaimed from the water. We circled this unknown and unknowable territory, until we arrived at Ely. The spire had been a marker of sorts. Defeat.

  Nothing was settled. That phrase, ‘Ramsey holds the key’, nagged. Stayed with me. Did it refer to a Scottish occultist or the poet (who had his place in Clare's library) ? Should I visit one of the other Ramseys? I tried a few without revelation. Then let it go, until now.

  We discuss bears (remembering them from the window of the Ramsey undertakers, child memorials). And why people in such a flat landscape, with no experience of mountain and forest creatures, except as fairground freaks, should adopt the bear as totem. I quote Clare's phrase about being dragged into Stamford like a bear to a wake. Why would that be? Dancing bears, I supposed, were exhibited at village fairs. But funerals? I recall the skinned and headless bears found floating in the River Lea. Catling says that his wife, Sarah Simblet, has an interesting notion about the potency of such animals in the Fen country. It's verticality in a horizontal world, the looming po
wer. Like iron posts rising out of drained Whittlesey Mere. Like chimneys at the quarry's edge.

  When I walked over to pick up my coat, the vertical Catling, smoothly ursine, had vanished. I found him at the bar, taking a quick shot, before we braved the Bodleian. There were a few minutes in hand. He suggested a look at the Shelley memorial in University College. A delightful notion. I am now an approved visitor, the treasures of the colleges are available. It is all slightly unreal, the arcana of Oxford, under the glaze of drink.

  At the north-west corner of the Front Quad, Staircase Three, exposed in its chill nakedness, is the Shelley autopsy by Edward Onslow Ford. The effigy was carved in 1894, intended for the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (they declined the suggestion). The human Shelley was removed from Oxford University (after a few months of shooting, walking, pyrotechnic experiments and accosting women with babies), for publishing a pamphlet advocating The Necessity of Atheism. Shedloads of relics bring him back: letters, manuscripts (genuine and forged), locks of hair, snuffboxes, touched-up portraits. The Victorian necrophile apparatus. This was a second matriculation, initiated by Lady Shelley (his son's formidable widow); a matriculation in doctored memory, improved and improving biography. Atheist as secular saint: overseeing a sorority of drowned wives, suicided camp-followers, disappointed mistresses and sorry infants who gave up the ghost.

  Shelley was painted less frequently than Clare: who lived long enough to be photographed. The Northampton peasant is recorded in his youthful pomp (the Hilton in the National Portrait Gallery), in maturity, in madness. The sole portrait of Shelley, by Amelia Curran, has to be adapted, fudged: for use as a future frontispiece, a locket miniature for the lovesick. Shelley's likeness, vague as Shakespeare's, is as liable to misattribution. (He was lucky to avoid being turned into a novel by Anthony Burgess.)