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Talking About John Clare TALKING ABOUT JOHN CLARE RONALD BLYTHE TRENT BOOKS 1 TALKING ABOUT JOHN CLARE 2 3 Ronald Blythe Talking About John Clare Trent Editions 1999 4 By the same author A Treasonable Growth Immediate Possession The Age of Illusion Akenfield The View in Winter From the Headlands Divine Landscapes The Stories of Ronald Blythe Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War Word from Wormingford Published by Trent Editions 1999 Trent Editions Department of English and Media Studies The Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane Nottingham NG11 8NS Copyright (c) Ronald Blythe The cover illustration is a hand-tinted pen and ink drawing of Selborne, by John Nash, by kind permission of the John Nash Estate. The back cover portrait of Ronald Blythe is by Richard Tilbrook. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. Printed in Great Britain by Goaters Limited, Nottingham ISBN 0 905 488 44 X 5 CONTENTS PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABBREVIATIONS AND PRINCIPAL SOURCES I. AN INHERITED PERSPECTIVE II. ‘SOLVITUR AMBULANDO’: CLARE AND FOOTPATH WALKING III.CLARE IN HIDING IV. CLARE IN POET’S CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY V.CLARE’S TWO HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY VI. THE DANGEROUS IDYLL VII.THE HELPSTON BOYS VIII. THOMAS HARDY AND JOHN CLARE IX.‘NOT VERSE NOW, ONLY PROSE!’ X.RIDER HAGGARD AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF CLARE’S WORLD XI. EDMUND BLUNDEN AND JOHN CLARE XII.PRESIDENTIAL FRAGMENTS XIII. KINDRED SPIRITS XIV. COMMON PLEASURES INDEX OF NAMES 6 For R.S. Thomas 7 Preface Out of love and respect, and fellow feeling, it is often poets themselves whose celebration of a particular writer points the rest of us to his worth. A poet friend introduced me to Sidney Keyes, and Keyes brought me to John Clare. When in 1982 Edward Storey and those involved in the creation of a John Clare Society asked me to be its President, I felt that my pleasure in this, our greatest English rural voice, had come full circle. For eighteen wonderful summers I have come to Helpston to talk about him, and for many years before this Clare crept into other lectures, a quiet genius who knew his place. Last year, 1998, Kelsey Thornton and John Goodridge invited me to collect up some of this talk and put it into a book. Editing it took me back to that long succession of July days in Helpston, and ever-increasing Clare companions, and to one of the best things which has happened to me as a writer, to be President of such a distinguished Society. Talks tend to roam—it is their nature—whilst essays keep their place on the page, so my Clare is digressive and associative, and deeply personal. He surprises us all by the riches which constantly appear as we read his work and remember his unenviable life. There is no end to him. Ronald Blythe 8 Acknowledgements ‘An Inherited Perspective’ and ‘The Dangerous Idyll’ were first published in From the Headlands (Chatto and Windus, 1982); ‘“Solvitur ambulando”: Clare and Footpath Walking’ and ‘Presidential Fragments’ in the John Clare Society Journal, 14 (1995) and 11 (1992); ‘Thomas Hardy and John Clare’ in Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, ed. by Charles P.C. Pettit (Macmillan, 1996); ‘Rider Haggard and the Disintegration of Clare’s World’ in A Farmer’s Year by H. Rider Haggard (Century Hutchinson (The Cresset Library), 1987); and ‘Kindred Spirits’ in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. by John Goodridge (The John Clare Society and the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994). 9 Abbreviations and Principal Sources By Himself John Clare By Himself, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington and Manchester: Mid-NAG and Carcanet, 1996) Early Poems (I-Ii) The Early Poems of John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger (two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) Later Poems The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger (two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) Letters The Letters of John Clare, ed. by Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) Middle Period John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period 1822-1837, ed. by Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Vols I-II, 1996; Vols III-IV, 1998). Natural History The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. by Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Prose The Prose of John Clare, ed. by J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, reprinted 1970) Selected Poems and Prose Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) Shepherd's Calendar John Clare, The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. by Eric Robinson, Geoffrey Sumerfield, and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 1993) Summerfield John Clare, Selected Poetry, ed. by Geoffrey Summerfield (London: Penguin, 1990) 10 11 CHAPTER I An Inherited Perspective: Landscape and the Indigenous Eye Inaugural lecture given at the Nobel Symposium to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Swedish Royal Society in September 1978. The Symposium was entitled ‘The Feeling for Nature and the Landscape of Man’. ‘Any landscape is a condition of the spirit,’ wrote Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his Journal Intime. As a Swiss he could have been reproaching all those British intellectuals and divines who abandoned what their own country had to offer by way of transcendental scenery, the Lake District beginning to lose its efficacy as a spiritual restorative by the mid nineteenth century, for the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn. Any landscape is a condition of the spirit. A few months ago I happened to glance up from my book as the train was rushing towards Lincoln to see, momentarily yet with a sharp definition, first the platform name and then the niggard features of one of the most essential native landscapes in English literature, John Clare’s Helpston. I had not realised that the train would pass through it, or that one could. It was all over in seconds, that glimpse of the confined prospect of a great poet, but not before I had been reminded that he had thrived for only as long as he had been contained within those flat village boundaries. When they shifted him out of his parish, although only three miles distant—and for his own good, as they said—he began to disintegrate, his intelligence fading like the scenes which had nourished it. Of all our poets, none had more need to be exactly placed than John Clare. His essential requirements in landscape were minimal and frugal, like those of certain plants which do best in a narrow pot of unchanged soil. I observed this tiny, yet hugely sufficient, world of his dip by under scudding clouds. A church smudge—and his grave an indefinable fraction of it—some darkening hedges, probably those planted after the Enclosure Act had stopped the clock of the old cyclic revolutions of Helpston’s agriculture, thus initiating Clare’s disorientation, a few low-pitched modern dwellings, and that was all. It was scarcely more impressive in Clare’s lifetime. A contemporary clergyman, gazing at it, said that ‘its unbroken tracts strained and tortured the sight’. But not the poet’s sight, of course. This it nourished and extended with its modest images. He liked to follow the view past the ‘lands’, which he disliked because of the way they overtaxed the strength of his slight body when he laboured on them, to where the cultivation dropped away into a meeting with heath and fen. From here onwards the alluvial soil swept unbroken to the sea. It was this landscape of the limestone heath, he said, which ‘made my being’. And thus it was in this practically featureless country that genius discovered all that it required for its total expression. From it Clare was to suffer a triple expulsion. The first entailed that fracture from his childhood vision of his home scene, 12 something which we all have to endure. The second was when the fields and roads of Helpston were radically redesigned in 1816, evicting him from all its ancient certainties. The third, and quite the most terrible, was when it was arranged for him to live in the next village, a well meaning interference with an inherited perspective which, in his special case, guaranteed the further journey to Northampton lunatic asylum. To be a native once meant to be a born thrall. Clare’s enthralment by Helpston presents the indigenous eye at its purest and most naturally disciplined. By his extraordinary ability to see furthest when the view was strictly limited, he was able to develop a range of perception which outstripped the most accomplished and travelled commentary on landscape and nature, of which in the early nineteenth century there was a great deal. He had no choice. He did not pick on Helpston as a subject. There was no other place. As a boy, like most children, he had once set out from his village to find ‘the world’s end’, and got lost. so I eagerly wanderd on & rambled along the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemd to forget me and I imagind they were the inhabitants of new countrys the very sun seemd to be a new one and shining on a different quarter of the sky (By Himself, pp. 40-1) is how he described this adventure in his autobiography.
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