We shamble down St Giles Street, a tour of the Guildhall (decorations by a Moore ancestor, amateur artist, professional drinker): before our assault on St Andrew's Hospital. But first Alan sidetracks us into the Wig & Pen, a wannabe lawyers' pub, formerly known as the Black Lion. Before this Rumpole of the Bailey makeover, there was a ceiling painting, spirits of place: John Clare acknowledging Alan Moore. An art student's unknowing variant on Rippingille's conversation piece, The Stage Coach. A lick of paint obscures Northampton's culture heroes; they've vanished. And, in vanishing, have acquired the dignity of legend; something forged in tipsy memory.
Revamped pub signs are the tarot pack of county topography. Moore rescues the Labour in Vain, the hostelry Clare passed on Enfield Highway; where ‘a person coming out’ set him on the right track for the Great North Road. In Voice of the Fire, Alan places this refuge, which has never been found, outside time; an anomaly located by solitary travellers in states of crisis or extreme anxiety. A false oracle of the English road.
The car-burner Alfie Rouse, heading out of London towards the Northampton field where he will smash the skull of a man picked up in transit, visits a roadhouse called the Labour in Vain – in which he encounters an ‘old tinker with a funny stand-up hat’: the misplaced Clare. Eric Robinson and David Powell, editors of John Clare by Himself, admit that they have ‘no knowledge of a public house at Enfield Highway called the Labour in Vain’. Robson's Directory (1839) lists nine pubs. The mysterious ‘Labour in Vain’ is not one of them.
In less confident towns, we might offend the eyes of sober citizens; crowds would part, squad cars slow. Not here, not now. We've erred on the side of discretion, anonymity. Picture it. The black-vested Moore with his swinging stick, silver fingerstalls. He claws back a damp curtain of thick hair, reddish-brown hemp of Jesus length. Salt-and-pepper beard teased out like a Robert Newton pirate: Blackbeard without the burning tapers. Advancing through broken suburbs, he's the dead spit of one of the ‘Vessels of Wrath’; the fire demons depicted in Francis Barrett's The Magus (or Celestial Intelligencer) as ‘Powers of Evil’. The Magus is the magical primer Moore searched out in a Princelet Street attic, years before; a Whitechapel fantasy, a film. In performance, he became that thing: ‘The worst sort of devils are those who lie in wait, and overthrow passengers in their journeys.’
We straggle up the steady incline, away from the town centre: a carnival of mountebanks fleeing the plague. Expelled jugglers, confidence tricksters. Renchi: blue bandanna, long shorts, lightly bearded. Moore: striding out with upraised staff. And your reporter: sun-bleached cap from fisherman's hotel, desert jacket. A spook embedded in the madness. Traitor. Manipulator of fictions.
Moore announces that on his fiftieth birthday he will retire from mainstream comics, the grind. Give himself over to the twin disciplines of magic and the writing of prose, a sequel to Voice of the Fire. He has already signed away future income from Hollywood; the films of From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were nothing but aggravation. Court cases loom, million-dollar plagiarism suits brought by disgruntled careerists who failed to understand that invention has no copyright. The Faustian contract between graphic novels and movies is based on mutual cannibalism, brain-sucking rip-offs, canny lifts from the dead or the powerless. Ghostly legions of the reforgotten know that remakes are the only true originals.
‘There is a magical virtue,’ writes Barrett,
being as it were abstracted from the body, which is wrought by the stirring up of the power of the soul, from whence there are made most potent procreations, and most famous impressions, and strong effects, so that nature is on every side… and by how much the more spiritual her phantasy is, so much the more powerful it is, therefore the denomination of magic is truly proportionable or concordant.
As we walk, Alan unfolds, in a way that only a lifelong victim and lover, bridegroom of the town, could do, his account of certain buildings, certain people. Anecdotes. Family reminiscences. He grants Clare a chapter in Voice of the Fire: an exercise in ventriloquism pastiching the journals. But nothing carries you further, or deeper, than the poet's own prose; the slanted script we experienced in the library. The hospital was always the conclusion of the walk from London; a purgatory in which to shake free of identity, the compulsion to scribble. Spoil paper. Northampton was a good place for the eyes to lose their inward fire.
There was never to be a second escape. Mary was gone. Madness was the loss of her, the missing portion of Clare's soul. In a grubby asylum notebook, he inscribed the names of one hundred and fifty women. Mary Joyce was omitted. He sat at a window, for hours at a time, attempting to recall those faces, the lost harem of beauties; admired, forgotten.
William Knight, one of the asylum staff, a good friend, helped to preserve the Northampton poems, troubled fragments. The music of the Nene infiltrates the verse; rhythms of water, water memories.
Love's memories haunt my footsteps still,
Like ceaseless flowings of the river.
Its mystic depths, say, what can fill?
Sad disappointment waits for ever.
A second walk was impossible, flight pointless. There was nowhere to go. In two days, Clare could have been back in Northborough, having travelled across soft country, tracking the river. But he refused to consider escape, even when other inmates discussed their plans. That book was written. A new journey would undo it. Northampton was an occulted principality: the asylum its seminary, Dr Prichard its magus. Prichard could draw invisible wires from men's heads. He knew their thoughts because he planted them. Composing delusions, he was benevolent but absolute. Two runaways got as far as Hertfordshire before they were captured and brought back. ‘I told you how it would be, you fools,’ said Clare. He could wander freely through town, fields and woods, to Delapre Abbey: because he was psychically tagged. Branded. Watched.
St Andrew's was not the gothic prison of my imagination. A grim redoubt in which Clare was held, until he was leached from the memories of family and friends; put away for the crime of being addicted to ‘poetical prosing’. The asylum years were a sponsored exile, underwritten by Earl Fitzwilliam. The peasant poet was housed, fed, clothed, encouraged to write. That was the problem: kindly Mr Knight standing at Clare's shoulder, eager to carry off defaced paper; ready to mend broken sentences, repair rhymes. Prompts leading nowhere. ‘Clare,’ he reported, ‘will seldom turn his attention to pieces he has been interrupted in while writing: and in no instance has he rewritten a single line.’
The stout verse-farmer, Mr John Clare of Helpston, sat in his alcove; silent until approached, questioned about the sources of his inspiration. Rivers of deep image in which to drown. The natural world imitated by an invented language. Poetry came to him, was his strategic reply, as he walked in the fields. As he kicked his ignorance against clods of sodden earth. The fools nodded in sympathy, made notes, published the lie.
We could be invading a public school in Cheltenham: a hint of the military, honeyed limestone flushed in afternoon light. Neoclassical pediment. Pillared porch. Symmetrical blocks with regimented windows. A country house for a battalion of the moderately insane. Alan Moore poses for the snap, puffing out his chest, gripping his cane like an RSM's swagger stick.
Croquet lawns shaved in alternate bands. Crowded flower beds. Avenues of proper English trees: oak, elm, beech. The chapel in which they held, in 1982, the funeral service for Lucia Anna Joyce. She had been here much longer than Clare; a gaunt presence whose writings (including a novel) were destroyed by the Joyce Estate. Annulled. Denied. Clare, in the end, returned to source, the burial plot in Helpston. Lucia remains in Northampton, a cemetery on the edge of town; you notice the sign as you drive towards Corby and the A1.
The grounds are landscaped, leafy walks, broad paths. Golf, tennis. White figures stooped over croquet mallets. Why would you leave? St Andrew's is the best kind of hotel, every facility and no visible surveillance. Nobody to challenge our lack of credentials.
; Alan Moore is nudged back towards adolescence, when his school was just over the fence. Avoiding compulsory sport, Alan and his mates bombed around the perimeter of the hospital grounds on motorbikes. They swam in the pool. John Clare, between biographies, was in limbo. Lucia Joyce, in body if not spirit, was present. A remote witness to acts of trespass, mild testosterone hooliganism.
The bright boy, future graphic novelist, was expelled from the grammar school for selling LSD. False move. (Hallucinogenics, given the behaviour of most of the townsfolk, proved an unnecessary refinement. On one side of the hospital fence, pharmaceutical trade was punished; on the other, disciples of Dr Laing dished out superstrength doses.) Alan declined the standard career curve: crime as profession (with Thatcherite enterprise allowances). He prepared for a lifetime operating at the limits of the system, certified freelancer. Cards marked: disbarred troublemaker. Alan remembers the headmaster very well. After the school (founded 1541) lost its status, in one of those ill-considered policy shifts, the poor man hanged himself. A successor was nicked for fiddling coins from a slot-machine.
I ask Alan about ‘Beckett's Park’, which I noticed on the map; down by the Nene, between bus depot and Cattle Market Road. I was thinking about the second great love of Lucia Joyce's life (after her father): eagle-nosed Sam. I hoped the name of the park might commemorate his cricketing feats at the county ground; two first-class games for Trinity College, Dublin. But, no; Moore reckons it's a characteristically misspelt reference to Thomas the Martyr. Becket has a holy well in that part of town. My own instinct, after poking around All Saints' Church, is that there might be another explanation.
On the west wall, I found a memorial tablet to Mrs Dorothy Beckett (relict of Mr Thomas Beckett, late of Congleton in the County of Cheshire). Mrs Beckett, together with Mrs Anne Sergeant, provided funds for ‘cloathing and teaching 30 Poor Girls of this Parish’. Surely Mrs Beckett would be thanked, even when forgotten, by having her name attached to an obscure patch of grass?
I was approaching overload. Too many blank faces in asylum windows. Discussing Clare with Bill Drummond (writer, art activist, sampler of pop songs), he told me that he'd worked in St Andrew's as a male nurse. On the back of his enthusiasm for Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, he arrived from Corby and got himself a job. He'd been in the hospital while Lucia Joyce was incarcerated. There were tales to tell. He would take care of them in his own time.
We pause outside the Beckett-sanctified county cricket ground. ‘Eight tight, economical overs for only seventeen runs,’ while playing for an outclassed student side: useful. Scores, batting down the order at number eight, of eighteen and twelve. Above average for an English test player against Australia. Sam bowled at medium pace, reckons biographer James Knowlson. ‘Off-breaks,’ retorts Deirdre Bair. Call it: Derek Underwood on a sticky wicket. Beckett, the near-blind, left-hand bat. Slow to start, difficult to dislodge. Two appearances at Northampton got him into Wisden. The only Nobel prizewinner with this distinction.
Moore's contacts at St Andrew's report that Beckett made an annual pilgrimage, to visit Lucia – and also to return, for sentimental reasons, to the cricket ground. Certainly, in the last years, they corresponded. Beckett, prompted by Lucia, made a generous contribution to the nurses' fund. But it was a ghost play, this relationship in which human warmth and pain were so remote they belonged to textual exegetists, playwrights rewiring literary history. The principal actors, safely buried, were redundant: pale flames guttering in an antechamber. Reported sighs. Death rattles. A discontinued monologue.
‘Seaview’, Moore's house, is a self-curated museum, customised, by the author's continuing and growing success, into something like that terraced street in the Beatles' film Help. An attachment to class roots, memories of his grandmother in the now-demolished warren of Green Street (behind St Peter's Church), is reasserted by the employment of local craftsmen: carving figurines of Pan, intertwined serpents for the door, painting blue walls with glittering stars. Brickwork was pointed by BigJohn Weston, ‘former junky, former biped’; while the attic conversion was left to Fiery Fred (veteran of the assault at the poetry reading in the round church). Through this patronage, Alan has created a modest version of the Guildhall.
We sink gratefully into sofas and chairs, while mugs of tea are brewed. The set has been tidied by Moore's visiting daughters: otherwise it reminds me of a student house, a student of peculiar means and taste. A student of magical practice. Mounds of books and tapes. Hinged Tibetan skull. Nudes by Austin Spare. Enochian tables. Crowleyite wand. Clocks, tins, bottles. Family photos in frames. Hand-crafted Egyptian ritual mask with beak and feathers. Tiled fireplace with fake coals. I note, with envy, a lovely first edition of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland, bound in green leather.
Alan discourses on the migrating coffin of Princess Di. The tale is confirmed by two witnesses. One of the craftsmen improving his house had been working at Althorp when the cavalcade arrived. (Moore's relatives travelled out to the motorway to witness the most significant returnee since Lord Byron.) A second account was furnished by a member of Ayrton Senna's pit crew. They had been celebrating, all day, in a pub on the back road between Althorp and Great Brington. (A track success, apparently. Not Diana's funeral.)
Dead queens were always part of the climate, Moore reckoned. Di's black limo covered with petals. Queen Eleanor transported to London, her journey marked by funerary monuments. Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringhay. Catherine of Aragon in Peterborough. Unhappy women laid to rest in unhappy places.
Here's the story. The island business was a feint to divert trippers, necrophile tourists. The Althorp island was the burial ground of family pets: dogs, cats, monkeys. Dig deep enough for a human-size coffin and the hole will flood. A contingent of marines was supposed to have built a bridge, carried the coffin to the island, demolished the bridge, moved out. Neither of Moore's witnesses, on the day in question, saw any such activity. They reported a large black van heading down the back road to the church at Great Brington, the Spencer vault. Church closed, visible police presence. Diana laid, without fuss, alongside her ancestors.
Such unconfirmed rumours suit the town and our situation in it: trying to figure out how we can process all this stuff. At which point, happily, Alan's girlfriend (and sometime collaborator), Melinda Gebbie, drops in. Melinda, dark-haired, in loose, flowered dress, has a camera of her own: which she turns on us. Moore describes her as an ‘underground cartoonist late of Sausalito, California: former bondage model recently turned quarkweight boxer’. Now, alert to currents already stirred, the woman who has been ‘sucked in by this urban black hole’, helps shift the conversation away from conspiracies, mad walkers, to human enquiry. What happened to Lucia Joyce in Northampton? Can her silence be set against Clare's painful and garrulous exile? Visitors came to the hospital to pay their respects, to report on the poet's health. Biographies of Lucia cut out, abruptly, after she steps into the car at Ruislip and drives north, never to return.
Cousin Sam
And cousins, there never was a man with so many cousins.
Samuel Beckett
In the Northampton ibis, I dreamt; re-remembered. The drowning. Weaving back, no licence required, on my motor scooter: to Sandy-cove, the flat beside Joyce's Martello tower. Wet night. A tinker woman had been pulled from the canal. Drunk. The smell of her. My first and only attempt at artificial resuscitation, meddling with fate. Met with: green mouth-weed, slime, bile, vomit. Incoherent pain. Language returns, curses. Better left in water was the consensus of other night-wanderers: ‘Leave her be.’ World of its own. Woodfire on wasteground within sight of a busy yellow road. Bring someone back from death and you're landed with them.
Blame Alan Moore for this plunge into darkness. According to the journalist Jeremy Duns, Alan ‘converted to Gnosticism in the mid-1990s’ and was now a worshipper of ‘the Roman snake-god Glycon’. His terraced house was frequented by jewelled toads, black dogs bearing information
: ‘The world will end between 2012 and 2017.’
Lucia Joyce was drowning. Or recovering slowly, fighting for breath; fighting to remain in the shadows. James Joyce (always) and Beckett (at the beginning) constructed their works by a process of grafting, editing: quotations, submerged whispers. Correspondences. Joyce read other men's books only to discover material useful to his current project. Libraries were oracles accessed by long hours of labour: at the cost of sight. The half-blind Beckett, aged twenty-two, reading to a man in dark glasses (waiting for the next operation). A theatrical image reprised in Beckett's play Endgame. Which would be revived in London, 2004, to run alongside Michael Hastings's Calico. A drama about Lucia Joyce: the high-bourgeois family, her relationship with the callow Beckett.
Lucia, entering Beckett's room-cell at the École Normale, surprises him stepping from the shower. She dries him with a dirty towel. ‘I can smell sea water in your hair. You're half the swimmer you think you are. I know a great deal about drowning oneself.’
Echoes of Clare (writing to Taylor): ‘Yet I know if I could reach London I should be better, or else get to salt water.’
One of Lucia's cabal of expensive doctors, Henri Vignes, prescribed injections of sea water. To no evident effect. Beckett was a vigorous swimmer, in rough seas off Donegal. In the biographies, you'll find a photograph of him, with his brother, Frank, in the dunes; both smoking. Beckett dressed in heavy black boots, loose white shorts. Smiling sardonically: as if resting, between tank battles, on the road to Tobruk.
Michael Hastings proposes incest, real or metaphorical, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters: the shamed daughter hidden away. White purdah. Beckett, adopted son, takes Lucia's place in Joyce's workroom. Nora Barnacle, her mother, says that she has ‘never seen two more drunken men’.
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