Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  Drinks with Dead Poets

  A Season of Poe, Whitman, Byron, and the Brontës

  GLYN MAXWELL

  for Anna Leader

  Preface

  Every word, phrase or sentence spoken by the literary figures in this book is drawn verbatim from their letters, diaries, journals or essays.

  Words have been elided here and there, or slightly edited, the better to resemble speech of the passing moment, but I have at every point sought to preserve the tone and meaning – if not the immediate context – of the written words. For the sketches are not intended to be biographically accurate with regard to appearance, accent, attire or manner. Nor do they imply any personal hierarchy of poetic importance. They are animations of how it felt to encounter particular bodies of work, each of which has had a significant influence, whether aesthetic, intellectual, or even dreamlike, on my life as a reader and writer – in fact on my life as a life. As such, they are drawn in a spirit of reverence and good humour. They, like the village and the students and their mystified professor, are works of make-believe.

  Week One – September 26th

  I am walking along a village lane with no earthly idea why.

  I mean it, it’s raining, left foot, right foot, left foot miss that puddle, I know it’s a village lane because the sky is plentiful, albeit white – it all be white – and the cottages peter out a short way up ahead. Tiny front gardens for this pot and that pot, some tasteful wrought-iron lampposts till they end in the trees. Very few cars – actually none, not one. Looking back the way I came I have no clue where I just came from.

  I know it’s a village because a little corner-shop for anything’s coming up right now, the cluttered glass bay window seems to bulge out over the pavement as I pass it and am noticed by two conversing figures within and now I spy a grand little pub across the road. It has a crooked chimney and a red-and-gold sign. I’m at the four-ways, I suppose, the junction, the heart of the place. The grand little pub is called the Cross Keys, and it’s open, or its side door is, opening into grey-green light but I’m evidently dreaming so I may not need a drink at all.

  To my right the road curves away gently uphill towards trees, brown scruffy woodland, I can’t see all that far that way. To my left, now I look, the opposite way, I see a wide kind of boulevard marching off tree-lined, a broad oval green along its centre, plenty of large houses, white and pink and yellow and pale blue. A couple of hundred yards away there’s the black-and-white striped awning of some kind of inn. So there’s a pub, and there’s an inn.

  I breathe. I consider it to be afternoon, early afternoon. I consider it – probably – to be autumn. I consider myself to be dreaming, my clothes to be – a quick look – on, my mind to be sound. I wait for the place to disappear, go away, be batted away, for my dreams will never long allow me that glee of knowing the game – think what I’d get up to, I did that once! – but I’m just standing here in the drizzle.

  What would you do?

  *

  Its a free house, a warm dark empty pub with a saloon bar and a public bar. I stop inside: it’s today, I note with weird relief, it’s nowadays, not a day I saw coming but nevertheless it’s nowadays. That means everyone I know is somewhere. I cross the floor of the saloon bar where a fruit-machine is flashing all alone by the wall, fruits hurtle, fruits arrive, nobody wins, nobody dies. The carpet reeks with old beer. There are green lanterns in alcoves in the walls. There’s a fire look, someone cares.

  I hear a peal of laughter around the side of the bar and some youngish people are clustered round pints and half-pints. I’m not dead then. They have bags and coats and suitcases around them, they’re arriving or departing. They turn and stare at me or grin and look away as I near the bar, and it seems to me it’s all gone quiet. Am I meant to be saying something?

  Well I don’t say hello because I’m not that sure they’re real. Maybe that’s why I seldom do.

  At the God-given haven of any bar on earth I smile though no one’s there. No one’s – tending. So I admire the bewildering citadels of optics and my mirror-self’s there too in his black coat look, he seems rather more at home, not unsatisfied with arrangements.

  I will wait here till I know. Wait here till things change, till I remember where I’ve got to, till this bright white interlude makes sense and I can go. I scan the glossy okay menu avidly as a stocky man in green trudges up the steps from a stone realm below the floor.

  ‘What can I get you squire.’

  White wine please white wine.

  ‘Small or large.’

  Large, it’s raining. Also, do you have the papers?

  ‘No.’

  Right. No worries.

  ‘Look at ’em all just drinking in the day.’

  I’m – drinking in the day.

  ‘Students I mean.’

  Right.

  ‘£4.30.’

  Right, so . . . students. There’s a college here?

  ‘Yeah tell me about it.’

  I rather wanted him to tell me about it, but I liked the idea of pretending I belonged – if I did, maybe I would – so I nodded like I knew and took my large wine to a little wiped table in the corner, at the other end of a series of tables, the last of which was the students. They weren’t all young over there. There was an older woman with a gentle look and hair mildly tinted lavender, leaning forward to see, and a solemn lad with a bristly face, not a lad a bloke, throwing me a watchful look. The others, twenties, thirties, a group of- colleagues? A thin hunched boy with dark hair drooping over an eye. A tall pretty brunette with a big white woollen scarf she is turning round to look at me who cares they’re all departing. I would follow them to the station. If there’s a station.

  One of the younger ones had cropped scarlet hair, she raised a good-as-drained pint in my direction.

  ‘Just got here?’ she demanded, both charming and accusing.

  Just got here, I said, which was true, actually, and somehow sweet to say.

  ‘Don’t mind us, we’re getting acquainted,’ she loudly confided from the midst of them and went right back to doing just that. After which a couple of them kept clocking me and glancing away when I looked. I wondered what they were thinking, assuming they were real.

  I was thinking I don’t have my phone, I don’t have my shoulderbag, I don’t have a place to sleep. I think I need to find a hospital and ask for help – ‘Miss, sir, ma’am, doctor, I have a daughter and a life and two parents and two brothers, I was married, I’m a writer, I write books and plays, I do all sorts, my name is – I’ll come back to that I live in a long peaceful flat by a canal in Angel will you call someone?’

  I’ll do that, I think, say those words to someone soon, so I swig my wine and head out through the door, hearing one of the nonexistent people say Nice to meet you too, professor.

  *

  It’s not raining any more, it’s bright and cloudy with the puddles here and there, and off towards – work it out – the north-west there’s a patch of blue to be seen through the grey, white, and mauve clouds, some three whole differing races of cloud.

  Down here below, where I’ve no earthly idea, the four corners of the junction are occupied by the pub (north-east), the local shop (south-east), and a little square church (north-west). Diagonally across from me on the last corner is a business, an office of some kind, with a smart sign I can’t read from here and a lit room. The person working in there – it’s a young smartly-dressed woman I can see and the sign says Student Services – must have put the lights on when it was dark and rainy, she doesn’t need them now, but she goes on at her keyboard in there, typing obliviously, tilting her head to read something she needs. I just about make up my mind to make her acquaintance when I
’m aware of other movement, to my right, up the way leading north.

  Along that lane that leads off between the church of St what does that say Anne’s? and the Cross Keys, and a little way up to the right side, there’s a long gap between houses. I assume it’ll be allotments or a sports ground, it would be where I come from, but there’s more of it than that as I near it, much more, in fact it’s a fairly huge ploughed field stretching away from a low wooden fence. This is rather a small village, there’s an end to it right here. The field rises gently, rolls and reaches the vague brown woodlands quite a way away, far enough to be misty, and at the fence a dark-haired boy in a costume – a brunet, I suppose – is just standing there watching.

  Because he looks so ludicrous in his tall white collar and lilac cravat, so focused on the view of sweet nothing in particular, so haplessly wrong in this place at this time, I feel an instant connection, and – I don’t exactly approach him, I just stop some twenty yards or so away but also leaning on the fence and I too look at the great ploughed field for a while. The fence is strangely warm in my hands as if with heat he’s generating. Then I check I’m not dressed like he is. No my dreams don’t run to costumes.

  By the time I reach the boy he’s looking at the fields again and frowning. I find this a bit stagey, but fair do’s, he’s in costume, perhaps he’s sort of being someone.

  ‘Atkins the coachman’ he says, ‘Bartlet the surgeon, Simmons the barber, and the girls over at the bonnet shop say we’ll now have a month of seasonable weather.’

  Then he turns to me, this panel of experts having had its say.

  Right (I go) there’s a bonnet shop?

  He nods as if of course there is. Sniffs and looks back at the fields, which clearly impress him more than I do.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he says, a little softer and more to himself: a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner: on a certain day, read a certain page of full poetry or, or – distilled prose. . .’

  Distilled, yes,

  ‘Wander with it, muse on it, reflect on it, bring home to it, prophesy on it, dream on it till it becomes stale. . . when will it do so?’

  When? I – don’t know.

  ‘Never.’

  I guess not. Have you, um, are you doing that today, Master – ?

  ‘Keats.’

  Right. Right, obviously, good, so are you doing that today, the thing with the page of poetry? Musing on it? Like you say? Is good to do? John? Sorry is it John?

  He takes out a handkerchief and wipes his nose, sniffs, makes a pouting shape with his mouth but is also nodding, until he gathers to a sneeze and explodes and recovers, ‘Fifth canto of Dante. That one.’

  That one. Yep, it’s a good’un.

  I try to remember what’s in that one, while nevertheless nodding in awe at the magnificence of that one, and the boy who’s trying to be Keats looks out across the fields again.

  ‘In the midst of the world I live like a hermit.’

  Okay, because I’m dreaming I may as well go for it, as the high distant trees are tipped with sunlight – though I lose my nerve almost straight away –

  Season of mists and, mellow,

  (He looks at me sharply) ‘I can’t be admired. I’m not a thing to be admired.’

  Well. Me neither, man. Have a nice day.

  I nod politely and back away down the lane. I’m not a little hurt. I could have rather done with making a friend by the wooden fence there.

  Heigh-ho, I muse, I shall have a nice day regardless.

  And I do have friends here, there’s the barman who doesn’t like students for one, there’s that sceptical angel in the woollen scarf and there’s the lavender lady, the pale boy in the corner, and oh there’s the figure of the typist through the window in the room called Student Services. Slim pickings perhaps, but it’s not a normal day. I don’t need to be the pal of some frock-coated emo with his tousled head full of lines and limousines and Oscar speeches. I go striding to the office of Student Services, I am healthy, I sniff the cold fresh mulchy air and my pale old limbs are pumping, I am the captain of the afternoon, let’s say, I am at least involved with my fate.

  *

  Because every day of my life it’s the same.

  I begin at any dawn, have done nothing at all, known no one, thought nothing, written less, left no print. I light candles at my dark window, sit amazed on earth.

  I end way after midnight furred and groaning with acquaintance, banner headlines to forget, old stories, fond habits, love if there’s love.

  Then it all begins again.

  This is not the first day in my deck of fifty-two years when I’ve been puzzled as to where I stood and my best guess was heaven.

  *

  Student Services was probably in her thirties, had quite sensible fair hair in a ponytail, had a white blouse and a neat blue jacket. She was slightly plump, and frowning. As it’s a dream I could marry you, I was thinking. She stopped typing.

  ‘Better late than never!’

  I’m not late, I’m dreaming.

  ‘Traffic was it?’

  Yes. I – dreamed there was traffic.

  ‘It’s still traffic,’ she said, getting up from her desk and going to a drawer she slid outward and peered in. The sign on the desk said KERRI BEDWARD.

  Then I can’t help asking as she stoops to leaf through some file, her blue dolphin pendant jumping free,

  Your surname is Bedward, is it Welsh I’m Welsh, kind of.

  ‘It means son of Edward.’ By blood I am, mostly.

  ‘Pardon? This is you.’

  READING LIST for Elective Poetry Module

  3pm, Thurs, V.H.B. Prof: Maxwell.

  26th Sept. Keats.

  3rd Oct. Dickinson.

  10th Oct. Hopkins.

  17th Oct. Brontës.

  24th Oct. Coleridge.

  31st Oct. Poe.

  7th Nov.

  14th Nov. Clare.

  21st Nov. Yeats.

  28th Nov. Whitman.

  5th Dec. Browning.

  12th Dec. Byron.

  There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason in the sequence (I said) which Brontes? Which Browning? Why’s there nothing on my birthday?

  She was sitting down again drinking juice from a green bottle.

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  You wouldn’t?

  ‘It’s what you sent us.’

  Yeah right. Do you – know – there’s kind of an annoying kid dressed as Keats out there on the road by the big field, is it a sort of Keats festival you’re having this week?

  ‘I’m not having anything, just my vitamin blast,’

  I mean it really helps when you’re teaching someone to have his zombie lookalike wandering round the place. Will there be lookalikes every week?

  ‘You had a difficult journey.’

  No. No I didn’t. It was – easy. Thank you.

  ‘Seen your digs yet?’

  Ah!

  ‘Would you like me to show you them.’

  Very much. Kerri.

  ‘You’ve just time before the class.’

  The – class.

  ‘It’s in your hand.’

  READING LIST for Elective Poetry Module

  3pm, Thurs, V.H.B. Prof: Maxwell.

  It says elective, I’m going to the pub.

  ‘Elective for them, not you.’

  What’s VHB mean?

  ‘You’re in the village hall. Just over the road.’

  VH. What’s B?

  ‘It means you’re not in the hall, you’re in the side room. There’s a kettle. And the heater works. There’s tea and coffee and there was actually a Twix but I took it and ate it about an hour ago. I’m regretting that now.’

  I’m. I’m – teaching Keats in the side-room. To whom?

  When she didn’t reply I looked at her and she was making her finger go in circles, which I took to mean turn the white page over

  H. Barmen

  L. Bronzo
/>   O. Faraday

  C. Jellicoe

  I. McNair

  N. Prester

  S. Sharma

  B. Wilby

  ‘You don’t seem very prepared in a way.’

  I’m always this prepared.

  Upon which a young man came into the office from outside, working his wet blue anorak hood away from his beaming face.

  ‘Professor Maxwell! Raining raining, it’s me Orlando! Ollie, Ollie Faraday, remember? Remember from the class?’

  Ye-es. Yes I do. . . very much so.

  ‘I haven’t seen you since that wedding, I’m in your class again!’

  Yes. Why? Didn’t I teach you everything?

  ‘What? God no! Christ! (mind my French)’

  But I’ve nothing else to tell you. I was so much older then, you got it all, I retired, I went to heaven look, I met Kerri Bedward.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ said Kerri, ‘he had a difficult journey.’

  *

  I live in a – no I don’t – I am staying in a very pleasant bright attic room with the sloping ceiling and the cute slanting shelves of dark wood and a desk and a little tartan-blanketed bed and everything! A kitchenette, a tiny bathroom! I reach it – or have done, once so far – up a whitewashed spiral staircase, three floors. There’s a bedroom on the first floor, with the door open: it doesn’t look like anyone’s staying there. The next flight leads to me.

  This is perfect.

  ‘Seriously?’

  It’s down a little lane. From the Cross at the heart of the village you walk a little way north, you leave the church with the village hall behind on your left, the pub behind on your right. The field where the kid was dressed like Keats will come up soon on your right but before you get that far you take a little lane left, not a lane a path, with grass growing through the stones, you keep to this, okay, and mine’s the white house at the end, overgrown, where you can’t go any further – look I don’t know who on earth YOU is, I’m just saying there is a place I stay, and if this YOU were here, this is what I’d be telling this YOU, do you follow me?

  ‘Are you alright, you’re staring.’

  Sorry. Kerri. I’m getting used to things. I’ll look, you know, out of the window.