The Hopkins Conundrum

by Simon Edge

  “Sorry, I’m such a show-off,” she says. “Did I get it right?”

  Putting his tea-cup to one side, he has pulled Alun Gwynne’s Collected Works out of his canvas knapsack to check. And yes, she has got it word for word. More than that, she has made it sing, so that he really does begin to see the seductive power of the swirling, rhythmic sentences. He can even convince himself that he understands the sense – of the first bit, at any rate, which seems to be about the clouds parting and the sun shining through on a nice day. And is it his imagination, or does she widen her eyes suggestively on the word desire? He is in danger of reddening like a teenager.

  But he is also quite scared. What kind of a machine must this creature be to know a great random chunk of the poem from memory like that?

  “Can you do the whole thing? I mean, completely off by heart?” he stammers.

  “No, just stanza twenty-six. You got lucky.”

  He’s relieved that she’s not such a machine after all, and maybe there is something special here if the line he identified as his favourite comes from the one verse she knows off pat. Then he realises she’s laughing at him again. Of course she knows the whole thing – why the hell would she just know that one part?

  “It’s a freak skill,” she shrugs. “I guess it’s so, like, hypnotic, it’s hard not to remember it. I know loads of the shorter poems, but the Wreck was the real challenge. Like Everest. You know, I had to do it because it was there?”

  Tim has never had any idea why anyone would brave avalanches, frostbite, lack of oxygen and the chance of death at the slightest false step just to say they’ve climbed a mountain – although on balance he would rather endure all that than try to learn this ridiculous poem. But he keeps that thought to himself.

  “How long did it take?” he asks instead.

  “I built it up over time. I found I knew bits of it and then started joining them together.” She laughs again. “I don’t get out much.”

  “I bet you do,” says Tim, then realises how creepy he sounds. He has been out of this game too long.

  “So, what is it about that line in particular for you?” she says.

  “What line? Oh, you mean the treasure? Nothing really, when there are such a lot of other… Like I say, you can’t really choose when the whole thing is so rich, can you?”

  “But there must be something that made you…”

  He panics again, but at that moment rescue appears in the unlikely form of the helmet-haired old lady, who grabs each of them by the arm and announces once more, with no apparent inkling that she has already said it to Tim: “You know, when I taught him for A-level I used to take my class into the woods to eat bluebells to help them understand the difference between inscape and instress.”

  “That’s brilliant!” says Tim’s new friend. “Inscape is all the things that make it unique, because God never repeats himself, and instress is the way we experience it, which can include tasting it, because that’s part of its uniqueness too. You didn’t poison the kids, though?”

  “Oh no, bluebells are quite safe to eat. We only lost one or two who got carried away and started eating wolfsbane. But they were trouble-makers anyway.”

  The woman laughs and turns abruptly away.

  “She is joking, isn’t she?” says Tim.

  “I hope so. I’m Chloe, by the way.”

  She holds her hand out. Her skin is soft but her handshake firm.

  “So you live around here?” she says.

  Tim tells her about the Red Lion, accentuating the bucolic aspects and playing down the catastrophic business performance of the empty pub.

  She says she has come over from Manchester way and has to be getting back soon because she doesn’t like driving in the dark. She’s also worried about falling asleep at the wheel and wishes they were serving coffee rather than just tea. Tim kicks himself that he still hasn’t picked up any ground coffee for his espresso machine. Idiot.

  “I’m sorry, otherwise you could have stopped by on your way,” he says. “Unless…”

  “Yes?”

  He has remembered he has a fridge full of Red Bull.

  “It’s disgusting stuff, I know, but it’s full of caffeine, so it keeps you awake.”

  “Actually I quite like it.” Her eyes are shining with merriment. “Especially with vodka. But yes, thanks very much. I’ll take you up on that.”

  Tim is glowing with pride as they make their way to the car park so she can give him a lift in her yellow Fiat Panda. For the moment, Barry Brook and all his works are completely forgotten.

  He is relieved to find that Alun Gwynne hasn’t burned the Red Lion down or flooded the bar. In fact he has managed to drum up a couple of customers, Hugh Pugh and another old boy in a flat cap. From the way he is slurring, he may also have broken his pint-and-a-half habit now that he can pull his own for free.

  All three men’s eyes are on stalks when they see who Tim has brought with him.

  Hoping against hope that none of them will give voice to the smut that they are clearly thinking – or if they do, that they will have the decency to do it in Welsh – he gives Chloe a quick tour. The place isn’t looking too bad in the afternoon sun and she says nice things about the ancient beams – not like the hideous Victorian ones at St Vowelless’s – and the view down the valley. He does his best to keep her away from Alun and the other two, and he almost manages it. But he has to turn his back on her for a moment while he roots in the back of the fridge for Red Bull – there isn’t normally much call for it – which is all the time that Alun needs. When Tim stands up again, she is getting the full works: slurred facts about the 800-year-old yew tree in the churchyard in the next village, the oldest brick-built house in Wales just down the valley, the prehistoric caves over the hill…

  “To be fair, most caves are probably prehistoric,” Tim butts in, “and I’m not sure Chloe wants to hear…”

  “Oh I do, it all sounds wonderful. I’d love to come back and see it all properly when I’ve got more time,” she says, turning pointedly to Tim, whereupon Alun winks and leers and gives him a thumbs-up over her shoulder.

  Tim takes her by the arm and steers her away from Alun before she can turn round and see, knowing that the old bastard will be wanting free drinks all week as his reward. But Tim is so pleased with the way the day has turned out, that he may even provide them.

  As she is about to go, Chloe proposes leaving him her email address. Tim can’t find anything to write on behind the bar and she follows him back into the kitchen – as much to avoid being left alone with Alun Gwynne as anything else, he suspects. Leaning over the kitchen table to jot it down, she spots his copy of The Poussin Conundrum.

  “Christ, you’re not seriously reading this crap are you?” she says. “And I thought you were a man of good literary taste!”

  Tim laughs, pleased that she shares his own gut reaction to Barry Brook’s conspiratorial drivel. She really is no Nadine. But it’s equally clear that he must not tell her why he has a copy of the book. That would mean coming clean about his real reason for turning up at the lecture today, from which she would immediately infer that all the stuff he fed her earlier about how much he loves the poet is a pile of crap. He’s not sure where this unexpected turn of events is going, but it would be a shame to mess it up needlessly. That’s the kind of thing the old Notso would have done, and Tim is trying not to be Notso any more.

  “Trust me, I hate it just as much as you do,” he says. That’s almost true: he hated himself for not being able to put it down. “No, er, someone left it in the bar the other night and I just brought it through. I haven’t chucked it out or anything because they may come back and I can’t bear to throw books away, however trash they are, you know? But yeah, no. Not me. I’d never, erm… No way.”

  “Good to hear it,” she says. “Okay, handsome. I’ll be in touch.”


  He grins to himself when she is gone. Sometimes he really isn’t so incompetent after all.

  North Wales, 1876

  Now that he had his scheme and his form, lines came to Hopkins at all hours of the day, and he developed a habit of jotting a note down as soon as he could, then pulling together the fragments whenever he had some ad lib time. The occasion of the poem was tragic; he must of course not lose sight of that. But it was thrilling to feel that he was putting his magpie mind to decent use at last, marshalling all those quirks of language that he had observed and collected so painstakingly over the years.

  He remembered trying to explain his personal theory of language, transcending etymology and onomatopoeia, to Dolben. Like everyone else, the boy had found it hard to grasp. Now finally this was his opportunity to demonstrate it properly, not as a linguistic theory, on which score he had failed to convince, but as a poetic tool. He would organise it into something majestic that would be truly worthy of its subject matter.

  Of course, it got in the way of everything else he was meant to be doing: study, contemplation, prayer and society with the rest of the college. He was distracted, and although he did his best to hide the fact, it really was hard to focus on some of the day-to-day affairs. This project was so much more engrossing. If he had a nagging voice in the back of his head telling him that his explosion of personal creativity was against the rules, and this wasn’t what the principle of obedience was supposed to be about, he managed to drown it out in the ferment of his own excitement.

  On the work grew, in a ramshackle rather than a linear way, with bundles of phrases here and there that were not yet enough to be stanzas, but had the clear makings of a path through the poem. Leaving them to germinate at their own pace, he put his greatest effort into polishing the early part, so that he would have a proper, confident template with which to continue. He had also realised that he was starting in the wrong place. On Saturday sailed from Bremen was a decent opening line for a stanza, but not for the piece itself, not as he now conceived it. If his ode were a painting, the shipwreck must of course occupy a significant area of it. But the frame should also surround a broader panorama, establishing God’s role as the Maker before narrowing in on the manner and mystery of this particular Taking Away. The theme of the enterprise, he saw clearly now, was knowing God. And since God was everywhere, there was no need to start in Germany.

  After three or four weeks, he was bold enough to try a section on Kerr as they walked on the steep path that linked the hillside terraces behind the college. Hopkins had written four or five stanzas out on foolscap which he had stuffed discreetly under his gown. Now he retrieved them and read them out in a shy voice, keeping his head down so that he could watch his step as well as follow the words. When he looked up, he thought he caught a look of panic in his friend’s eye.

  “Shall I read it again?”

  “Yes, old man. I’m afraid you have to make allowances for the slow brain of a literary simpleton. Read it out one more time, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  They rested on a seat on the top terrace, looking out at the valley under great rafters of clouds holding up the sky. If he were alone Hopkins would have wanted to sketch the formation, but not now. He started over on his recital, going slower this time, emphasising the stresses more boldly, as authorial pride overcame performer’s modesty. The intensity of it gathered inside him and he was moved by the sensual power of the words, as well as by the force of the feelings they described. He had to close his eyes when he got to the end of the last stanza of his little extract, not wishing Kerr to see how they brimmed with emotion. He disguised a swallow by clearing his throat, as if the recital had left him with a frog in it.

  When he opened his eyes, Kerr was frowning into his lap.

  “Oh dear,” said Hopkins. “Is it so very bad?”

  “No! No, no, no, by no means bad. Quite the contrary, not at all. It’s just that…”

  “Go on.”

  “You know I’m a lummox about these things, old man, so you mustn’t mind me. I don’t know where I got the idea… But I thought you were writing about the wrecked ship.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. I’m afraid I haven’t the brain for it, because I didn’t understand shipwreck from any of that. I heard some nautical words but I fear I missed the wreck altogether.”

  Hopkins smiled with relief. “The first part is autobiographical. I’m still quite a long way off the wreck.”

  “Autobiographical? I suppose that explains the first line, O God my master.”

  “Thou mastering me / God!… The line runs over so God is the first foot of the next line…”

  “Thou mastering me God,” nodded the other. “Much better the way you put it. It has a proper ring. That’s why you’re the poet and I’m the lummox. Carry on…”

  “Giver of breath and bread…”

  “Got it. That’s God. Easy to understand, even for a lummox. And then?”

  “World’s strand, sway of the sea, Lord of living and dead…”

  “Ah, now that’s where I begin to have trouble. Why is God the world’s strand? To my mind that’s a beach.”

  “Yes, it’s German for beach, and we ourselves say ‘stranded’, meaning beached or marooned. It can also mean a thread, you know, as in a strand of cotton, but in this case I am using it to mean ‘that which is beyond or around the world’, just as the strand is beyond and around a lake. Are you with me?”

  Here he was, explaining it all over again.

  “Just about, old man. But sway? I know the sea sways about, but what has the sway of the sea got to do with God? He causes it, of course, but the words don’t say that. They seem to say he is it.”

  “Well, yes, the sea does sway, and of course that’s apt given the subject of the poem. But it also means to influence or to govern, you know, as we say that someone holds sway, so it’s a way of saying that God controls the waves.”

  “But – forgive me, old man – that’s not quite the same part of speech. If you hold sway, that means you hold influence, so the sway is what you have, not what you are. Sorry, Hopkins, I don’t mean to carp. I’m just trying to explain why I find it all so hard. If you take liberties with grammar, there’s a danger that no one will know what you mean.

  Hopkins pulled out his watch. They had the Rector on Canon Law at three. “It is all about the impression,” he said. “You can convey a complexity of meaning without being slavish to grammar. Come on, we’re going to be late.”

  “I’m sorry, old man. I say this with the best of intentions. I hope you’re not put out.”

  “Of course not. I’m very grateful.”

  Hopkins turned to lead the way back down the steps. After so many years of not writing, he had forgotten how irritating it could be to show other people one’s work.

  As he lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, he imagined reading the same five stanzas to Dolben. Would that dear, lost youth have argued over syntax like a dull Latin master correcting fourth-form prep? He hoped not. Dolben was by nature rebellious, much more than Hopkins himself could ever be. He had scandalised his school and his family by roaming the countryside in the garb of a barefoot medieval monk. And even if his poetry tended to the trite, he was a dreamer, a creature of the spirit, who knew the value of letting his soul take flight and would surely have understood the point of turning a noun into a verb. He would never allow himself to be tethered by the stultifying conventions of English grammar.

  From imagining Dolben listening to his poem, it was a short step to walking arm-in-arm with him in the gardens of the college and enjoying the cloudscape. This happy caprice, unhindered by more realistic memories, such as Dolben refusing to reply to so many of Hopkins’ letters, carried him into a contented slumber. For once, Hopkins’ conscience allowed him to dream freely and untroub
led, swimming in the warm well – díng-dóng-béll – of imaginary rapture.

  North Sea, 1875

  The stricken ship might be aground on a sandbank fifty miles from the English coast in the icy cold of December, but the cooks had still managed to keep the kitchens going. At midday Marta knocked on Henrica and Aurea’s door to tell them all the women and children of the ship were invited to eat in the first-class saloon, while food would be sent to the men on deck or pumping in the hold.

  Henrica heard her young companion’s excited intake of breath without needing to turn round, and sure enough, when the stewardess had gone, Aurea clapped her hands with delight.

  “The first-class saloon!”

  For the first time in many hours, Henrica found herself laughing. The girl was so childish and had far more interest than she should in material luxuries. But she was indomitable. Unlike Henrica, she had not seen lifeboats washed away in the storm with helpless people inside them, so she did not have the same sense of the gravity of their plight. She had not heard from Lundgren, the agitated Swede, of the dangers that awaited them at high tide; for the moment, Henrica was keeping this intelligence to herself. So she was still able to enjoy those aspects of this nightmare that could be considered an adventure. If her so doing helped all of them keep their spirits up, so much the better.

  The first-class saloon was a larger and more luxurious version of their own dining quarters, with a softer carpet, plusher upholstery and fine gilding on the acanthus leaves of the painted marble columns. The steerage passengers shuffling in ahead of them were visibly awed by the finery, and they had to be encouraged by the serving staff to move into the room and not crowd the doorway. Henrica heard a fur-clad dowager complaining loudly that she had not paid through the nose to mix with riffraff, and she noticed the odd hostile glance in their own direction from some of the poorer women. But in the main the mood was of stunned exhaustion.

  There was room for everyone, because the ship was so empty, and the semblance of normality conferred by sitting at table made it almost possible to forget the gravity of the crisis. But the tilt of the gilded apartment was a constant reminder of their peril and, apart from Aurea, only the children seemed to have appetites. The young Hamms, a boy of six and a girl of four, were making the most of the opportunity to gorge on roast beef, suet puddings and an array of cakes that was wheeled out of the galley in brave defiance of the conditions.