Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  ‘School, schools, a word never introduced till the – decay of the art has increased with the number of its professors,’ (this last word a glancing swipe at me, like it’s my bloody fault the word’s the same) ‘There’ve sprung up two sorts of Naturals - the Lakers, who whine about Nature ’cause they live in Cumberland, and the Cockneys, who are enthusiastic for the country ’cause they live in London.’ (The squeals of laughter that greet this practised crystal rather grate on me, as does his use of me as one of They, a professor; a prop to him, so I call out)

  This is because Keats doesn’t rate Pope, right? (and man that hits the mark, he’s placing his right hand over his glass, he’s taking a moment. . .)

  ‘Pope, Pope, the most beautiful of poets,’ he says, and all have quietened with him, he seems soothed by the very name: ‘his poetry is the book of life.’

  Look I love Pope (I say, ready for anything) but I love Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Shelley and Blake too. Christ I even love Byron.

  ‘You shabby fellow,’ he grins, raising his glass for me to raise mine, ‘don’t be afraid of praising me too highly, I’ll pocket my blushes,’ Well now you’ve done it! (I begin on my praises, but he hasn’t finished with schools,)

  ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge have rambled over half Europe, but what on earth have the others seen? When they’ve really seen life – when they’ve felt it – when they’ve travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of Middlesex, when they’ve overpassed the Alps of Highgate – then, and not till then, can it be permitted to them to despise Pope.’

  *

  Twas the season to be jolly, and twas the season to forget how precisely one thing led to another. My class arrived of course, indignant to have missed what they’d missed, and I seemed to be saying over and over this is nothing to do with me any more, as Lily and Heath and Ollie and the others shouldered into the group where they could, so that each stool sat two folks at least, and the armchairs either side of Byron seemed to bear about a dozen.

  ‘Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?’ the poet wondered, and Ollie exclaimed: ‘I am! I always will be!’

  At one point there was a poem in Byron’s hands, I think it came from Caroline, who was kneeling on the floor by the fire.

  ‘Second thoughts in everything are best,’ I heard him counsel her, ‘but in rhyme – third or fourth don’t come amiss.’

  At another time Nathan Perlman crouches beside him with a Selected Poems to sign, and Byron softly punches his shoulder: ‘When an American requests, I comply,’ he says, ‘these transatlantic visits make me feel as if talking with – posterity, from the other side of the Styx.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to wave, sir,’ Nathan beams, and now here came Isabella’s poem – she’d been furiously doing last-minute revisions without conceding an inch of her seat – Byron took the paper with a flourish, ‘Ah, my goddess of the armchair. . .’

  Isabella blushed the colour of the light, as the poet scanned and mouthed the poem. Then he stopped and looked steadily at his wine.

  ‘I wrote one sonnet before, but not in earnest, and many years ago. As an exercise,’ he said and was giving it back, and I feared for her, ‘I’ll never write another. They’re the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions.’

  By the time he got this far, Bella had turned her back and was rising, escorted by Blanche and Molly, away, and he addressed what followed to a girl I didn’t know, brown-skinned, hair golden-dyed, who had rotated to the neighbouring chair and nodded and sighed as if she understood his yawning explanation:

  ‘I detest the Petrarch soooo much, that I wouldn’t be the man even to have obtained his Laura – which the whining dotard never could,’

  And yet then, with Bella gone, he looked at the chair she’d left behind, grinned and told us: ‘I’ll be in love if I don’t take care. Çaira, ça ira. . .’

  *

  And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

  So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

  The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

  But tell of days in goodness spent,

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent!’

  Because yes there was a reading too, in the heated and lamp-lit, hollied-and-ivied, mistletoed village hall, the flock had truly wandered clear of my drunken shepherdry, and as Byron stood and bowed and bowed, and the full house thundered riotous approval, I heard him wonder ‘Where’s my goddess of the armchair?’ and there she was, Isabella Marsh, bravely revived in the third row, reassessing her new-found hatred of her horrid former idol, meeting his dark eyes with hers, and as the applause was fading, and no one seemed to be rising to the moment, I had a role left after all, here’s me ambling to the stage -

  Sir, that was magnificent! George Noel Gordon Lord Noel Byron!

  ‘Child of Harrow’s Pilgrimage,’ he sniffs, me and my damnable works. . .’

  There wasn’t a chair to be had, so, as he retired to the seat on the stage and fuelled his tankard with dark claret, I stood uneasily to one side, vaguely directing questions his way, but the thing went well enough. We were both buoyed up by the size of the crowd, and the spell in the pub had loosened all tongues.

  Ollie was quickest off the mark: ‘Is it true, man, you took a bear to uni?’

  ‘A tame bear,’ Byron specified, like it was, well, no thing, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was he should sit for a fellowship.’

  Ollie tried to follow up through the laughter, but ‘The answer delighted them not,’ Byron added, and Caroline pounced at the right time:

  ‘Sir, can you speak about the night at Gernsheim. . .’

  He pouted, looked blank, so she prodded:

  ‘The ghost-story night?’

  Then he got it, shrugged, ‘Ah, the ghost books. . . Mary Godwin – Mrs Shelley,’

  ‘Frankenstein!’ shrieked Lily, ‘were you like shit-scared when she told you that story?’

  He looked nonplussed, drank, set down his glass.

  ‘Wonderful work for a girl of nineteen.’

  Some of the women did some affable boo-hiss, but he’d no idea what their issue was, and corrected himself instead – ‘not nineteen, indeed, at the time,’

  ‘Why haven’t we heard of your story?’ Lily demanded, and for once I was thankful for the enquiry of a recent arrival – ‘Where d’you get your ideas, Lord?’ which I gladly transformed as I helped it along,

  Yes, what is poetry to you. Noel.

  ‘What is poetry?’ He sipped his wine and said, rather quietly after thought:

  ‘The feeling of – a former world and future.’

  *

  We were a great barnstorming gatecrashing horde on our way out into the patchy snow. I mean, I was invited, the Academy profs were, but someone had told Byron there was to be Yuletide tomfoolery at the Mappings, and nothing was going to stop him, as long as he could rail against the very idea of parties while the company crossed the green:

  ‘I don’t talk, can’t flatter, and won’t listen – except to a pretty or a foolish woman,’

  ‘Oh we got shitloads of them!’ cried Lily, and I was aware of Bella and her mannerly friends all grimly embarrassed right behind us but hook or crook it was Glyn’s bloody turn:

  ‘Don Juan, mate, I’m telling you, funniest poem in the language,’ and the effect of praise proved yet again timeless:

  ‘Is it not good English? Confess, you dog, is it not good English!’ He hugged me and shoved me away and turned so he was walking backwards, five young women giggling in his wake as he roared for a joy that was equally timeless – ‘Is it not life? Is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who hasn’t lived in the world?’ Then he stopped, they almost fell against him, and he clasped them, cast them off again, one by one by one – Blanche – ‘Fooled in a post-chaise?’ – Molly – ‘In a gondola?’ – Bella – ‘Against a wall?’ -Blanche again – ‘
In a carriage? On a table? Under it?’

  *

  Clyde Mapping and Angela Wilbery Mapping broke out into twin grimacing smiles of welcome as they opened the door to two dozen of us. I was one of the few who was actually invited, but once Lord Byron, in his black fur cloak, cried ‘Better late than never, pal!’ and the students started flooding past him, force majeure and Christmas spirit were bound to carry the day.

  ‘I am amazingly inclined,’ he now informed all those in earshot, ‘to be seriously enamoured.’

  And soon Mr Noelship, charming most of those he passed, and his company of falling angels – who took the pained English politeness of the hosts for a free ride on anything – had overrun their splendid kitchen, blaring out thanks whenever they eased past, shouting whatever was coming to mind. I just kept on walking down the hallway to a door. I opted for the great outside, on a tiled patio under the heavens, with Orlando Faraday and Iona McNair, a centering couple for a centrifugal evening, to await whoever else might stumble on us here.

  *

  And now that we were sitting down, and the mayhem raved and babbled on in the bright house through the glass partition, we began to feel time quickening, term rolling to its end.

  They were leaving tomorrow too, they said, on the last of three trains that would come throughout the day.

  When? 8.17, 12.17, 4.17, Ollie was reading from a scribbled note. What would happen after those? How would they know? They hadn’t been here either. They’d spend the Christmas nonsense up in Fife and the New Year nonsense in London. The sound of these plans was so soothing I felt no need to ask my thousand things. Life here, now I think of it, had been better than my questions. They’d be coming back for spring, would I be? Don’t know, all depends.

  We three stayed where we were. Heath and Roy and Mimi came. We saw Lily and Caroline head out to the back garden, perch on a snowy bench like birds, huddle and drink from a bottle, talking.

  ‘Poor Lily,’ said Iona,

  ‘It’s the sauce,’ said Roy Ford, ‘Sami’s told her she got to quit.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ Heath said, ‘it’s the whole lifestyle deal, all the meet-the-family shit.’

  What, are they finished?

  No one knew.

  From inside we heard a peal of Academy laughter. Then, in the lull that followed, elsewhere, close by, the conversation of two smoking silhouettes: ‘I can promise you good wine,’ drawled the one we recognized, ‘and if you like shooting, a manor of four thousand acres, fires, books, your own free will, and my indifferent company. . .’

  ‘Fuckin’ Guardian Soulmates,’ was Heath’s take on this.

  *

  The Mappings were too polite to kick us out, we’d have grown old sitting there, remembering our term together, the high times, the troubles. It was Noel who broke the thing up. When he joined us out on the patio with his entourage, all the fiction girls hysterical with tinsel in their hair, Ollie stupidly asked him about that time he swam the Hellespont?

  ‘I plume myself on this achievement!’ he bellowed, ‘hour and ten minutes! – in humble imitation of Leander – though no Hero to receive me on the other side. . .’

  And so it was that one of the fiction girls, one of these several auditioning Heros, started yelling about the lagoon, the Ferry Boat Inn that might be open late, the wooded isle out there with the huts, and what do you think, two hundred yards? Three hundred? No way! LET’S SWIM OUT THERE AND PARTY!

  *

  It was one of those suggestions there was no one to gainsay. He wanted to see it, they wanted to show him, he wanted to do it, and the rest of us, kind of, wanted to leave the stoical Mappings alone to their Christmas clearing up. So those of them who were up for it hurried on ahead, along the East Cross Lane that would wind us back towards the village. I hung behind with the same crowd who’d sat the party out on the patio. On either side of us the large houses were lit or very dark, two or three ludicrously strung with Christmas lights: Santas, reindeer, elves, the works. In a gap between houses I saw the pitch-dark space of our library, the canvas covers gleaming darkly from the thaw, I wondered what state the books were in.

  Barry was there somehow. I hadn’t seen him at the party, but there he was, arm-in-arm with all-singing all-dancing Lily, and when she took a break to dance in a ring with Heath and Roy and Ollie and inevitably all fall in a pile in the shuvelled roadside snow, I thought I’d ask him something:

  Barry.

  ‘Señor. . .’

  Why do you always ask where poets get their ideas? It’s like – your only question.

  ‘Why? because well, why now, because: because I don’t know where people – get – ideas. Where they go to, sort of thing. I don’t, myself, have them.’

  That’s because you’re holy. You visit lonely people. That’s a better idea than I’ve ever had. Or will ever have.

  ‘Ooh, still time to have it, teacherman!’

  Don’t think so, feller, don’t think so.

  *

  When we reached the Cross, where the pub was desolate and silent, and the village hall well-nigh unbearably deceased, we saw a clump of someone on the bench by the churchyard wall. Lord Byron and his swimming-crew were yelling and clamouring far beyond the village green by now, on their way between the college buildings down towards the lagoon, but we’d seen whatever it was, so we had to do something.

  We stepped nervously to the bench. The bearded portly man! -the sketching fellow – had fallen asleep, was snoring and burbling, his coat pulled up around him, his face in his beard and his beard on his chest. His bowler hat had rolled clear onto the ground. Ollie picked it up and brushed it, put it on himself.

  ‘Poor guy’ll freeze, where does he live?’

  No one knew. Barry thought his name might be Eddie, that’s all he knew.

  I thought you knew all the lonely people (I said)

  ‘You don’t know if he’s lonely,’ Barry reasoned in response.

  Then I remembered the first-floor room at my digs, the one that was always empty. It took five of us to lift the chap up from the bench, and as he stood he seemed to revive, mumbling softly to himself:

  ‘Most beautiful, nice people, no life is ever lost.’

  ‘We’re going to find you a bed, Mr Eddie,’ said Ollie, setting the hat back on his head, ‘you can’t stay out in the snow now, can you,’

  ‘You’ll catch your death, love,’ Iona yawned.

  ‘So thankful for a change,’ he said, and as the odd fellow could more or less walk, Ollie and Iona and Roy were enough to help him down the lane towards my digs.

  It’s unlocked! (I called out after them) the first-floor room, it’s empty.

  ‘Don’t wait for us,’ Ollie called back from their good deed, ‘we’re calling it a night, man.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Roy, turning with a grin, ‘my people don’t do swimming.’

  ‘Mine don’t either in fucking December,’ Mimi observed, finally getting her roll-up lit.

  *

  If, in the month of dark December,

  Leander, who was nightly wont

  (What maid will not the tale remember?)

  To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

  Just do it, as they say.

  And off they ludicrously shiveringly go, plunging in screaming in their underwear at one? two? in the morning, Lord Byron, Bella Marsh and Blanche and Syrie, Kerri Bedward and Delphine, while Barry Wilby gathers their clothes with a chuckle and sets sail in their wake in his rusty bobbing boat, to help them out if they get into difficulty. Heath’s climbed in too, hauling Lily down beside him wrapped in Caroline’s dufflecoat: nobody thinks she’s capable of swimming it. Caroline’s long gone.

  I can’t remember the last thing our Noel said that night, or cried out joyfully from the rolling deeps – there was certainly some howl of articulate pleasure accompanied by a great plurality of shrieking and splashing – because Mimi, abandoned on the shore with me, chose that exact same moment to assert: ‘This i
s lame, Max, let’s do something else.’

  *

  We walked, or rather, we went for a walk. Planned it, chose a route, started out. It was gone the middle of the night, clouded over, nearly starless. The only light was street-lamps here and there in the distance, and the snow gazing back the great grey-orange of the sky. Along the lakeside southwards we went, behind the college houses over icy trails and bike-paths, seeing the looming silent blocks of Benson, Cartwright and De Vere, then on along beside the meadow where once we had our picnic, on we went, round the side of frozen tennis courts towards the railway station, from where we saw, away on the dark white hillside, the mouth of the railway tunnel.

  What train you getting tomorrow d’you think.

  ‘Dunno. You?’

  The first one.

  ‘You’ll never make the first one.’

  I’m not going to sleep tonight.

  Ts that something you control, Max.’

  Not really no.

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  It being what.

  ‘Y’know, hang out till the sunrise.’

  Agreed, we walked in silence up from the station back towards the Cross. There isn’t far to walk in our little village.

  It’s here.

  ‘What’s here.’

  This is the place.

  ‘What place.’

  It’s here where I – where I – began being here.

  ‘Mm-hm what you just, materialized.’

  Yes Mimi I just materialized.

  ‘Okay. I was gonna say let’s do some 2P-3P, but it sounds like you started early.’

  I don’t need anything. I don’t do anything. Oh I do get plot ideas from inhaling amyl nitrite,

  ‘Do you. Moving on,’

  The weirdest things develop, you can’t imagine,

  ‘Can’t I, what star d’you think that is.’

  *

  It’s not twinkling, it’s a planet.

  ‘It’s a star. It’s twinkling twinkling Max,, you know the song, jesus.’ It isn’t twinkling, it’s moving, it’s a plane. It’s a plane, oh my god there are planes in the sky, there are OTHER PLACES ON EARTH!