Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  What we want is a way of hiding the poetry, that difficulty, so we trade in the fiction of biography; selective quotation dresses a dramatic life. Dead as mutton, the veggie republican Percy Shelley is neutralised in satin-finish marble: a premature trust fund hippie. The accident of the boat wreck is rebranded as martyrdom. A chaos of wives, debts, bad karma, justifies the neurosis of composition.

  The first boat that Williams and Shelley kitted out was intended to save them from the tedious walk between Pisa and Livorno. They sailed up the canal by moonlight. The boat capsized, foundered. The non-swimming Shelley was rescued.

  Our ducking last night has added fire instead of quenching the nautical ardour which produced it: and I consider it as a good omen in any enterprise that it begins in evil: as more probable that it will end in good…

  But fire, like the bright moon, was unquenched, it was waiting on the beach. Those leisurely cruises up the Thames – Marlow, Oxford, Lechlade – were no preparation for the Bay of Spezia. The sickly poet, advised by his medical man William Lawrence, had to choose between relocation to the English South Coast or another Mediterranean tour.

  The Ford sculpture in University College offers a version of Trelawny's naked boy: Shelley, drained of blood, a hairless albino. Sprawled on a bed of salt. Rescued from quicklime. He is like one of those modelled wax exhibits in medical museums that Catling loves, a romantic conceit symbolising the death of poetry. Or the shift of poetry, from a medium that could factor complex scientific experiments, political theory, refractions of Goethe, to vapid song. Mourning crêpe and yellow waistcoats. Ford's Shelley is a radiant fish on a baroque mount (bare-breasted, drooping muse): better suited to cathedral aisle or catacomb. Horribly exposed and shameless in this Oxford cage.

  The autopsy aspect seems quite modern; the way that the sprawling, flaccid Shelley is a minor detail in a grander composition. The space in which the monument is contained is part of the argument: a drained pool (out of Leighton), a drowning chamber, an operating theatre for a poet whose heart has been ripped out. Dry leaves have blown through iron gates (which are intended to exclude students and pranksters). They dress the base of the monument, scattered rose petals. Acanthus leaves are gilded. English Romanticism atrophies into Hammer Films Gothic: part theatre, part ritual (botched). The scale is wrong. A diminutive corpse lying on its side, ready to donate a kidney. A plump, unemployed muse contemplating her navel.

  Professor Catling, the sculptor who doesn't sculpt, recognises the ensemble (stiff, slab, plinth, pool) as a potential location for performance. For voice. Recently, he has been afflicted by an entity he calls ‘Large Ghost’. A being who ‘signs its presence in tricks, enigmas and predictions, small visions, jangling keys, blood spots hours before the accident; haiku of mortality’. Energy escapes from mute stone, from slow meat. And Catling is preternaturally alert to its passage. His poetry is abrupt, spare, briskly purposeful. Shocking. It snatches at breath and never wastes a word. No padding, no fat. No apologies.

  Sad and foreign: a shaved panda,

  a twin of violence coying

  in its buff squint.

  Two gentlemen in very tight suits, one with spectacles, one without, lurking in a doorway: Mr Barker-Benfield and a colleague. The quadrangle of the Bodleian. An enclosure in which I once watched John Thaw do his walk; a hobbled equine kick that struggled to disguise a malfunctioning leg, as he investigated yet another Oxford massacre (an assassination during the encaenia procession). You never know when one of these ceremonies will erupt out of the cobbles and courtyards; even the likes of Professor Catling are expected to perform, dragged up in robes, ratty trimmings. They march, stern or stoic, through a mob of dull watchers, lazy cameras.

  Scooting up stairways with Barker-Benfield is rather like being in an episode of Morse: finger the guilty man. For failing to appreciate real ale and choral song. Chippy remarks are hedged by inverted commas. This is a viva for which I'm horribly underprepared. If I was expecting a cobwebby attic, creaking muniment chest, I was rapidly disabused. A small hot office. A locked stationery cupboard. The kind of storage boxes in which VAT returns are kept. Then, before I caught my breath, two pocket watches of immaculate provenance are set on the desk. My challenge – fail and we'll see nothing more – is to decide which watch belonged to Edward Williams and which to Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and gent.

  Catling steps back. The archivists smirk. It falls to me, the outsider who made the nuisance request, to do the business. And in that instant I realise how stupid I've been. The Richard Holmes essay, ‘Death and Destiny’, seemed to suggest that Shelley's watch had been recovered from the body of the drowned man. How so? The watches gleam like golden eggs. They haven't been dug from quicklime, preserved in mud. The frisson I solicited, death rattle, loss of heat, was not available. Laid out for inspection were two sober relics, left behind at the Casa Magni when the voyage to Leghorn was undertaken.

  Visiting an exhibition of literary manuscripts in Ferrara, November 1818, Shelley said: ‘You know I always seek in what I see the manifestations of something beyond the present and tangible object.’

  I studied marks on the surface of the desk; vinegar-grey leather pitted with deep scratches. What other relics had been examined, fondled, lovingly evaluated by B. C. Barker-Benfield?

  One watch had a case and a heavy, serrated ring (by which to attach it to a chain); the other was plainer – more elegant? I didn't hesitate. I stepped forward, twitched a sleeve, made a mysterious pass over the meticulously positioned objects. I felt the heat on my open palm. The riddle was simple. A low murmur: ‘Ah yes.’ A grunt. ‘This one,’ I said. ‘No question. Shelley.’

  The library men were impressed. Now all the treasures of the Bodleian were available to us. They scuttle about, sliding open drawers, unwrapping packages, smoothing tissue. It was like a divvy-up between consenting antique-dealers in Camden Passage: expensive clutter smothers the neutrality of the stilled watches. Rather nasty stuff. A bloodstone. A seal with Shelley's coat of arms. An oval onyx Judgement of Paris. An amethyst engraved: ‘Mary Shelley’. The date-letter on the watch-case is 1814. This instrument, Barker-Benfield surmises, replaced the one Shelley sold in Paris. The desk is littered with potent scrap: gold chains to tangle around the legs of a drowning man. The watch is a mechanical heart to balance in the palm of your hand.

  How had I worked my magic? A trick, of course. The watches gave out at different times, death being susceptible to the laws of relativity. I remembered the Holmes article, his inaccurate assertion that Shelley's watch had ‘stopped at precisely sixteen minutes past five’. The plainer watch said: eighteen minutes past two. Shelley's fat gold job, from which heat could still be dowsed, was fixed at eighteen minutes past five. Perhaps it had gained a couple of minutes since Holmes carried out his research? Time leaked very slowly in this hot room. My photographs of the watches are fuzzy, Dali-soft. The witnesses have aureoles of flame emerging from the necks of their close-buttoned suits.

  We touched sheets of manuscript corroded with brown ink. But, once the connection with the drowning, the beach barbecue, the visions and presentiments of the Casa Magni, was lost, my involvement with the relics was polite. A draft of Frankenstein was produced as the curator's final flourish. Mary's holograph with Shelley's revisions and editorial suggestions: ‘A pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.’

  We take it in turns to view the pages. Mary's phrase about ‘the dreams of forgotten alchymists’, Barker-Benfield reckons, could be ‘a specific echo of the Oxford visit of 1815’.

  Frankenstein (or, The Modern Prometheus) was another workable Clare metaphor. ‘I continued walking in this manner for some time, endeavouring by bodily exercise to ease the load that weighed upon my mind… My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me.’ Dr Frankenstein and his creature walk. Compulsively. The monster, assembled from spare parts, ex-human quotations, is ano
ther Clare. He speaks, moves, suffers. Patrons and medical men revise him to suit their picture of what a peasant poet should be. Grateful. Innocent. Sober.

  The Frankenstein manuscript had been part of a successful bicentennial Shelley exhibition: first editions, relics. Barker-Benfield wrote the catalogue. Now something on the Godwins is proposed. Budget: three and a half million. Small change. Three is already in place. Can Catling help to make up the shortfall? Favour for favour. The professor pats his pockets, coughs. Time to be moving on. Lectures, engagements. See what he can do.

  Where next? The cigar shop on the High, obviously. Another privileged space. Private cabinets. Humidifiers. Rituals of subservience and discretion. Even the wall displays are occulted: scarlet triangles and swords on a Montecristo lid, the Masonic symbolism of enlarged dollar bills. Catling rummages, fondling the goods, sticks of dynamite. He's not smoking these days, not really, a modest Cohiba will suffice. Gold band like undersized wedding ring: Habana, Cuba.

  We're back in the flat above the sculpture studios, last night's feast on the table; whisky bottle for the prof, wine for me. We plot a boat trip, down the Nene from Peterborough, reprising Clare's adolescent voyage to Wisbech. Catling thinks he can get his cruiser, by easy stages, to Northampton. Then, through almost fifty locks, to Peterborough. It will take most of the summer.

  We watch the video version of a film by Philip Trevelyan, The Moon and the Sledgehammer. Which shifts, very neatly, as Catling knows it will, between my pursuit of John Clare and my fondness for the work of the playful documentarist, Andrew Kötting. (Who has recently relocated to St Leonards. Given his preoccupations, an inevitable exile.)

  The film witnesses a submerged family in a Sussex forest. English eccentrics, who tend traction engines, are languaged in ways the rest of us, chewed over by urban life, have put aside. My cigar is a soggy stub. Certain passages of this epic are, no doubt, replayed. We are spared interventions by the director, gibbering by presenters. Faces. Voices. Black kettles. Shotguns. Stubbled cheeks. Rollups grafted to rubber lips. A woman, illuminated by real and imagined sleights, speaks of the harshness of her hidden life. Mad monologues achieve the condition of poetry. A floating moon. A bloody hare. Solitaries, cohabiting in an extended family, wait for a chance to escape. Or kill. Or make their song.

  The only way to get anywhere near this profligate blend of inbreeding and seclusion is on water. Water slows time to a walking pace. Catling's proposed Fenland boat trip will resolve our confusions, float us free of duty, the necessary mundane of everyday life. John Clare travelled by water, as an initiation, and was refused. He marched to the sea with a sack of his own books. Many hours of his life were spent beside rivers. Northampton was a river town, served by the Nene. Northampton kept the notebook with the journal of Clare's walk. I would go there next.

  Northampton

  John Clare returned to Northborough, to the home that was not a home, the wife who was not a wife, children (actual and imagined): the existential pointlessness of freedom. ‘Poet's Cottage’ was a future teddy bear reservation, a twenty-first-century toy shop waiting to happen. It didn't belong to him and it never would. Northborough was a dark place on the edge of a greater darkness, it was not Helpston. He was out of his knowledge and out of work. He had betrayed his heritage by celebrating it. He was condemned by the journal he kept. The walk from Epping Forest divided him from his former self, left him playing out time: an unscripted performance. Three and a half days on the road cancelled the four London visits, the memories accepted and authenticated by family and friends. Clare's walk confirmed his non-existence, a fugue of forgetting.

  Mary Joyce, dead Mary, was the only constant in this mental landscape: a muse to be reclaimed. She was the force of the last poems written by Clare as Clare, before other selves, Byron and the rest, absorbed him; before the no-self of Northampton. ‘The vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems.’

  Patty tried him and found him wanting, a stranger, a man of unpredictable moods and uncertain temper. His melancholy was a potent infection. He would walk out with one of his sons; it was a leave-taking between generations, the living and the dead. He might prowl the confines of the garden: as a rehearsal for the grander spaces of Northampton, woodland overlooking a river. The despair clutching his heart might be a matter of sluggish blood, diet, thyroid deficiency; treatable dysfunctions of body chemistry and inheritance. Poisoned dreams. There is fear here, the inability to walk further into the fields. Watchers. Doctors' men. Clare's intelligence struggled with crushing circumstance and composed an apologia, a settling of accounts.

  A letter to Matthew Allen:

  I should [like] to be to myself a few years & lead the life of a hermit – but even there I should wish from one whom I am always thinking of & almost every Song I write has some sighs & wishes in Ink for Mary.

  A meditation on ‘Self Identity’:

  I shall never be in three places at once nor ever change to a woman & that ought to be some comfort.

  ‘Autumn’: an elegy for a known and loved horizon, after which he could be disposed of, locked away, trained in oblivion. A mental flight before banishment.

  The plot of meadows now dont look bigger then a large homestead & the ponds that used to seem so large are now no bigger then puddles & as for fish I scarcely have interest enough to walk round them to see if there is any… Now the man is putting off his boat to ferry over the water where an odd passenger may now & then call to be ferried over the lake to the other bank or high road.

  The ferrymen came, came for him. Parson Mossop reported on Clare's ‘want of restraint’. Patty applied to Earl Fitzwilliam of Milton Hall. The Northamptonshire peasant poet, certified by two doctors, Fenwick Skrimshire of Peterborough and William Page of Market Deeping, was removed to the recently built Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Where he would be kept for twenty-two years, the rest of his life.

  If he journeyed along the axis of the Great North Road, he was allowed to return. The road was his spine. Sideways, crab fashion, to the east? By river? This too was permitted. Sent home from Wisbech as: ‘unfinished’. But the lurch, south-west, to Northampton, could never be rescinded: meat thickened on the bone, before melting in dissolution. No more to be said. Fate accepted: a necessary dole.

  The one thing I knew about Northampton, walking up the hill from the railway station (where I'd failed to meet Renchi), was that I'd got it wrong. My previous visit, fifteen years earlier, left me with a grievously warped impression; twitched by reading Alan Moore's serial novel, Voice of the Fire. It was Moore who invited me in the first place: a signing at a local bookshop, followed by a poetry reading in a Templar church, the Holy Sepulchre. With Brian Catling. Another Northampton virgin. (According to Moore, bears were kept at ‘the top end of a lane’, near the church.)

  The bookshop event was salutary; it disabused me of the notion that I might, one day, sell a book outside London. Until you've been there, somewhere like Northampton, you don't understand the system. I used to imagine that published novelists made livings comparable to bus conductors (remember them?) or postmen (another anachronism); new titles, pre-computerisation, would be distributed throughout England, after having been reviewed and promoted.

  This was a proper do, the kind now reserved for non-writing writers, faces with hovering PR accompanists: refreshments, a heap of books (‘returns’ on day release from the warehouse), folk milling around the display (lifting a title, reading the blurb, returning it to the pyre). We kept up the weather talk, motorway talk, until it became obvious that they were all employees. It was a duty, to play the crowd, drink the drink, nibble ostentatiously. A rep breezed in, to witness the debacle. I had the courtesy title then of ‘poetry editor’ for one of Rupert Murdoch's satellites, which meant that I approved hardbacks that would appear as paperbacks. And I initiated mini-anthologies, career retrospectives soon to be pulped. I couldn't find any of these on the shelves. Making conversation, I asked the rep why this was. ‘Do we publish poetry?’
he said.

  Not one book sold. All the non-shows at the shop were already camped out in the round church, a nice cross-section of longhairs, bright eyes (no pupils) and red eyes (deltas of blood). Benevolent occultists. Cashiered Hell's Angels. Dopers, anoraks. The pre and post sectioned. Scorch marks at the temples. ‘Carve here’ tattoos around the throat.

  I read first at the Holy Sepulchre. I preached my profane sermon, quietly, making no real impression on the space. Then, as Catling delivered his coded-language formulae, sticky with nerve and edge, a man groaned. Climbed to his feet. And was rapidly expelled. To return with a revolver.

  It was, Alan explained, an ordinary Northampton night. The intervention by this ‘homicidal medicine-head of local notoriety’ was a felt response to Catling's challenge: words nudge the world. The overexcited literary critic was beguiled into a pub, offered a drink. He smashed the glass, lunged at his minder's throat. Teeth were spat on to the floor.

  Moore describes the outcome: ‘Thrown from the barroom in the wake of his attacker, to the street outside, Fred (the minder) found himself staring into the quivering muzzle of a gun and hoping that he wouldn't die between the Labour Exchange and the Inland Revenue, a victim of that local speciality, the stroll-by shooting… Slept downstairs with a sword that night, unconsciously sucked into the crusader aura of the church and the event.’

  Warned of the psycho sniper, we dodged through the graveyard into a muted celebration; and, later, the Labour Club. Alan was a member in good standing. Old boys nursed their drinks in a narrow, sepia room. The bearded Northampton magus, recognised and saluted in London, was integrated into this dim and smoky scene; a figure no more or less extraordinary than any of the recreational pint-swallowers. Northampton was Moore's family. He eavesdropped on conversations and conspiracies, waiting, as we all do, for something to exploit.