1 Jack Clemo 1916-55: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Clay Phoenix’ Submitted by Luke Thompson to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English In September 2015 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. 2 Abstract Jack Clemo was a poet, novelist, autobiographer, short story writer and Christian witness, whose life spanned much of the twentieth century (1916- 1994). He composed some of the most extraordinary landscape poetry of the twentieth century, much of it set in his native China Clay mining region around St Austell in Cornwall, where he lived for the majority of his life. Clemo’s upbringing was one of privation and poverty and he was famously deaf and blind for much of his adult life. In spite of Clemo’s popularity as a poet, there has been very little written about him, and his confessional self-interpretation in his autobiographical works has remained unchallenged. This thesis looks at Clemo’s life and writing until the mid-1950s, holding the vast, newly available and (to date) unstudied archive of manuscripts up against the published material and exploring the contrary narratives of progressive disease and literary development and success. When Clemo wrote his own biography, he interpreted the events of his life as though they were a part of a predestined pattern established by God, plotting a course that gave his life special meaning. But as well as moulding events into a particular narrative, Clemo omitted some key features of his biography, including the cause of his disabilities. This thesis, a detailed study of Jack Clemo’s life and writing, returns to the original source material to reconsider this self-interpretation and justification, and to establish some of the details Clemo and his family sought to censor. 3 4 Contents List of Illustrations ……………………………………………………………. 5 Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………..... 6 Notes and abbreviations ……………………………………………............ 8 Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 10 Chapter I ………………………………………………………………………. 20 Chapter II ……………………………………………………………………… 44 Chapter III ……………………………………………………………………... 76 Chapter IV ………………………………………………………………......... 126 Chapter V ……………………………………………………………………… 171 Chapter VI ………………………………………………………………......... 215 Chapter VII ……………………………………………………………………. 238 Chapter VIII ……………………………………………………………………. 284 Chapter IX …………………………………………………………………….. 306 Chapter X ……………………………………………………………………… 338 Appendix I ……………………………………………………………….......... 353 Appendix II …………………………………………………………………….. 364 Appendix III ………………………………………………………………. ...... 366 University of Exeter’s Special Collections Library Key ………………....… 367 Bibliography of works by and about Clemo ………………………………... 374 Other Works Cited …………………………………………………………….. 390 5 List of Illustrations Frontis portrait by RL Knight 1. Trethosa Pit 2. Tolbenny Dry Kiln 3. Goonvean Sand Tip 4. Bloomdale Dry 5. Reggie and John Clemo, Montana, c.1910 6. Eveline, Reggie and the baby Jack, 1917 7. Clay Pit and Incline 8. Reggie Clemo and friend ‘on a ranch’, 1911 9. Eveline and Jack Clemo, c.1920 10. Trethosa School, 1922 11. Jack, Eveline and Reggie, doctored image. 12. Clemos at the Beach, 1930 13. Jack with Pets, 1929 14. Clemo, 1926 15. Bertha Polmounter and Eveline Clemo, 1935 16. Clemo with Early Novel Manuscript, 1935 17. Clemo on the Scilly Isles, 1937 18. Clemo with Notebook, 1935 19. Eveline and Jack on the River Fal, 1937 20. Clemo’s Diary, 1936 21. The Clay Verge Manuscript. 22. Clemo with Wilding Graft on Publication Day, 1948 23. Clemo Portrait, 1949 24. Clemo, Spark and Eveline at Stourton, 1950 25. Evacuees at the Cottage, 1944 26. T. F. Powys and Clemo, 1950 27. Jack and Eveline with Violet and Fran Allen, 1950 28. Charles Causley and Clemo, 1961 29. Daniel Hoffmann and Clemo, 1961 30. Clemo and Lionel Miskin, 1957 31. Clemo and Pat Jenkins, 1957 32. Clemo ‘Reading’ The Invading Gospel, 1959 33. Clemo and Mary, 1963 34. Jack and Eveline, 1966, by Ander Gunn 35. Clemo and Miskin in Mevagissey, 1963 36. Clemo and E. W. Martin, 1966 37. Jack, Ruth and Eveline, 1968 38. Causley, Jack and Eveline at the Wedding, 1968, by GWF Ellis. 39. Jack and Ruth Clemo on their Wedding Day, 1968, by GWF Ellis. 40. Eveline, 1975 41. Ruth and Jack, 1980, by Paul Broadhurst 42. Ruth and Jack, 1978, by John Chard 6 Acknowledgements The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded my research. Without their support none of the uncollected poems, published in Archipelago, PN Review and in the present text, would have emerged. Nor would the forgotten dialect tales, which are due to be published as A Proper Mizz-Maze by Francis Boutle. And, most prominently, I would not have had the chance to edit the Selected Poems of Jack Clemo, published by Enitharmon and introduced by Rowan Williams in 2015. During the writing, Tim Kendall and Nick Groom, my supervisors, were especially helpful, as were Christine Faunch, Angela Mandrioli, Gemma Poulton and Sue Inskip of the Special Collections Library of the University of Exeter, and Jo Moore of Wheal Martyn Country Park and Museum. I am grateful to the following people for their time, correspondence, and for sharing their personal collections: Father Benedict Ramsden, Sophie Bateman, Pat Moyer, Norman Stone and 1A Productions, Sally Magnusson, Paul Hyland, Cliff Moorhouse and the Manchester Academy of Fine Art, Stan Dobbin, Dennis Hall of Inky Parrot Press, Kim Cooper at the Cornish Studies Library, James Whetter and The Cornish Banner, Donald Rawe, Michael Williams, Malcolm Gould, Derek Giles, Ivor Bowditch, Bodmin Library, Alan Kent, Heather Martin, Heather Spears, Michael Spinks, Peter Woodward and the Sterts Theatre, John Hurst, Gemma Goodman, Emma Mason, Kym Martindale, Andrew Symons, Charles Thomas, Alan and Margaret Sanders, Frances and Ray Brown, Grace Gribble, Preston Gribble, Jennifer Pursall, Barbara Luke, Shirley Ball, Maria Willcox, Tony Jaspers, Alwyn Marriage, Eileen Funston, June Trethewey, Margaret Brearley, David Mabey of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical 7 Medicine, Felicity Warner, Resurgence magazine, Trevor Vacher Dean and the Dorset Year Book, Tony Martin, Len Barnett, David Stark, Romer Mynne and the Savage family, Jean Rafferty, Michael Hanke, Esther and Roger Race, and L. Michael Kaas of the Mining History Association, Colorado. Letters from Cecil Day Lewis to Jack Clemo and the poem Emily Brontë appear by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of C. Day Lewis. Thanks also to Bruce Hunter for permission to use Charles Causley’s letters and poetry. Causley’s ‘Homage to Jack Clemo’ may be found in both Survivor’s Leave and in Collected Poems. For permission to use the images, as well as the University of Exeter’s Special Collections Library, I am grateful to Ricky Knight, the Cornish Studies Library, the China Clay History Society, Ander Gunn and Paul Broadhurst. I have been unable to trace the photographer John Chard, who is believed to have taken photo 42. I have also been unable to discover any estate for the Dorset writer and friend of Clemo’s, Monica Hutchings. It is likely that Hutchings took photographs 25, 26 and 27. Two people who helped in different ways have sadly died over the three years taken to complete Clay Phoenix: Paul Newman and Brenda Angilley. Paul was a writer who helped with initial thoughts and ideas while I was putting together proposals. He produced many works relevant to this subject, including The Man Who Unleashed The Birds, reviewing Frank Baker and the artistic circle surrounding him in mid-twentieth-century Cornwall. Brenda Angilley died the same year, 2014. Brenda appeared on the documentary film Roots of my Story, having known Clemo as a girl. She also appears throughout Clemo’s writing and was a significant influence on Confession of a Rebel and The Clay Verge, two of Clemo’s most remarkable works. 8 Notes and Abbreviations The most useful resource has been Exeter’s Special Collections. However, reference numbers for individual files are long and cumbersome and I found that they disrupted the text too much, so I have abbreviated them and added a key. For example, the Special Collections reference for correspondence regarding A Different Drummer would normally read ‘EUL MS 68/PERS/1/1/8’. In my system, it is simply ‘P9’, the ‘P’ showing that it comes from the collection described as ‘Personal Papers’. Similarly, the ‘Literary Papers’ of Jack Clemo begin with an ‘L’, the Charles Causley papers begin with a ‘C’, the A. L. Rowse papers with an ‘R’, and the E. W. Martin papers with an ‘M’. The key appears in the back. References to the Wheal Martyn archive are relatively few and tend to be shorter, so they have been kept as they appear in the archive record. Clemo’s handwriting is difficult to read, so much so that it has been used by the Special Collections Library to illustrate the problems that can face someone working with archive materials. Over the three years of reading Clemo’s handwriting, I have come to decipher the great majority of it, but occasionally a word has eluded me. When I have been unable to interpret a word completely, I have marked it with question marks in square brackets: [??]. When I believe I have deciphered a word, but am not completely certain, I have put the word in square brackets with question marks either side of it: [?example?]. It will be noticed that in quotations I use ellipses both within and without square brackets, either . or […]. This is to differentiate the ellipses used by Clemo from those used by me. The ellipses without squared brackets are Clemo’s own, while the ellipses within squared brackets are mine.