Jack Clemo: Poet in White Silence, a Critical Analysis, & Stripping the Cadaver, a Collection of Poems

Jack Clemo: Poet in White Silence, A Critical Analysis, & Stripping the Cadaver, A Collection of Poems. Rosemary Ada Sandford Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Newcastle, Department of English Language, Literature and Linguistics August 2011 Abstract This is a hybrid thesis in two parts, one critical and one creative. The first chapter of the critical part examines selected poems from Clemo’s first five collections, beginning with The Map of Clay (1961), containing three series of poems written over twenty years, followed by Cactus on Carmel (1967), written after he became deafblind. After marriage at fifty-two he wrote The Echoing Tip (1971), Broad Autumn (1975), and A Different Drummer, (1986). The chapter examines the impact of his mother’s religion, his environment and limited education, his attacks of childhood blindness, and the onset of deafness at nineteen on the development of his poetry. It traces his internalised conflicts, and projection of emotions in relation to disability, onto some subjects, and explores the way Clemo’s poetry widens in scope after marriage, moving away from a harsh, narrow religious perspective, to a more tolerant and ecumenical outlook. Chapter Two concentrates on Clemo’s penultimate collection, Approach to Murano (1993). It follows the further development of his thought after he moved to Weymouth in 1984, and visited new places, including Venice. It looks at how he met the challenge of writing descriptive poetry about places never previously seen, and his dependency on his wife to interpret his surroundings. Chapter Three is concerned with his final collection, The Cured Arno, posthumously published in 1995. This includes poems written about his second visit to Italy in 1993. It examines his need to resolve life-long conflicts, and to confirm the validity of his religious and aesthetic ideas. There is an introductory chapter linking the critical section with the collection of poems. Part One of the collection, Stripping the Cadaver, engages with Clemo and with deafblindness. Part Two is a more personal body of work exploring the same themes. i Dedicated to David O’Brart, MD FRCS FRCOphth, his colleagues and the staff at South Wing Eye Department, St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. ii Acknowledgements I am grateful for the wise guidance and help of my Supervisors, Professors W. N. Herbert and Sean O’Brien. The support and encouragement of my daughter, Samantha, and my sons, Jason and Crispin, and my colleagues at Deafblind UK is much appreciated. I am also very grateful for the help and support of the Disabled Student Service at Newcastle University, and Student Finance England. My particular thanks go to my fellow candidates whose assistance was invaluable: Dr. Michelle Superle, Dr. Katherine Farrimond and Emma Short. iii Table of Contents Page Introduction 1 Early Life 2 Chapter 1. From The Map of Clay to a Different Drummer 6 The Map of Clay 6 The Clay Verge 8 The Wintry Priesthood 18 Poems from Frontier Signals 23 Cactus on Carmel 33 The Lake District Poems 45 Wiseman’s Methods of Communication with Clemo 46 The Echoing Tip 49 Broad Autumn 57 Clemo: Disability, Sex and Marriage 63 A Different Drummer 66 Chapter 2. Approach to Murano 74 Part One 75 Part Two 83 Part Three 91 Part Four 97 The Move to Weymouth 103 iv Part Five – Seven Poems on the Visit to Venice 105 Clemo’s Personal Construction of Other Lives 114 Chapter 3. The Cured Arno 124 Portraits, Places and Events 126 Home and Marriage 140 Poems Associated with the Second Visit to Italy 144 Conclusion 162 Collection 168 Introduction: Linking the Critical and the Creative 169 Stripping the Cadaver, A Collection of Poems 196 Bibliography 272 v Introduction This thesis examines selected poems from Jack Clemo’s seven poetry collections in order to chart the development of his thinking and ideas as expressed in his creative work. References to his autobiographical writings have also been used to help to clarify his often complex and conflicting ideas. It questions how a socially isolated and poorly educated boy, growing up in poverty in the Cornish clay district, became a prolific writer. He produced two autobiographies, three published novels, a book stating his religious beliefs, and seven collections of poetry over five decades. Most of his poetry was written after he became deafblind. Clemo’s sense of separation from others, of being a misfit, is tracked through his poems. While his eventual and longed-for marriage at fifty-two brought some resolution, his later work continues to record his internal battle. The influence of Robert Browning’s work, and his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, runs as a motif through Clemo’s writing as he was convinced that he would have a similar marriage if he maintained Browning’s optimistic outlook. Other influences came from a number of female figures, both children and adults, who took the role as muses during his youth and middle age. Some of Clemo’s work shows a disturbing sexualisation of young girls when a young man, and this manifests even in his later life. This thesis also traces his ambivalent attitude towards his deafblindness which includes denial of the significance of his disability, and contempt for other disabled people. This can be seen in the projection of powerful and conflicting emotions that he transfers onto some of the people he takes as subjects for several poems throughout the collections. Despite being deafblind for so many years, his verse contains vivid descriptions that are rich in sound and sight, and this work examines how he achieves this, and who helped 1 him. The thesis attempts to answer how these and other diverse factors become incorporated into his substantial body of work, and the ways in which his ideas change and develop over time. Early life Clemo was born within the clay-mining area of Cornwall in 1916, and spent much of his life in considerable poverty. He had two attacks of blindness at the ages of five and twelve. At nineteen he became deaf, and while he recovered a little hearing in later years, he was unable to hear speech. After recurrent sight problems, he became blind in 1955 at the age of thirty-nine. The cottage where Clemo was born had no electricity or running water. At the back were the clay-pits with their heavy industrial machinery, smoke belching chimneys, constant noisy traffic, and the heaps of clay-waste that featured in much of his early poetry. In front were green fields with the distant Foxhole Beacon rising from a heath.1 Clemo said himself that his work showed ‘a preoccupation with frontiers – the boundaries between religion and sex, mysticism and morals, creed and art, personal intuition and objective truth’. He considered he was forced to write about these subjects ‘by spiritual and emotional stresses, often hereditary conflicts’.2 The contrast between the two views served as a metaphor for Clemo’s sense of borders, of being caught between different visions. They symbolised the split between the spiritual and the natural, or fallen world. The constant destruction of the countryside surrounding his home by the clay industry became a metaphor for the power of God destroying evil, and inspired some of the angry anti-nature and anti-beauty poems found in The Clay Verge section of The Map of Clay. Clemo’s 1 Jack Clemo, Marriage of a Rebel, 2nd edn (Sevenoaks: Spire, 1988), p. 21. 2 Ibid. 2 spiritual and mental landscape was strictly binary, and this provides insight into the different conflicts indicated above, and expressed in so many of his poems. These include the conflict between the religious and the aesthetic, the choices made by an artist between God and the world in creative work, and the tensions between spirituality and sexuality. His attitude to his disabilities also shows considerable conflict between his acceptance and his denial of their impact and importance. These hereditary conflicts can be understood to have their roots in his perceived differences between his ‘good’ Christian mother, and his ‘bad’ pagan father who died at sea at the end of 1917 during the First World War. Clemo’s widowed mother, Eveline, had received her religious instruction through the Trethosa Bible Christian chapel where her father preached. Andrew Symons, a co-editor of The Awakening: Poems Newly Found, a collection of Clemo’s very early verse, explains that the Bible Christians were a Methodist sect, founded in 1815. They promoted Wesleyan revivalism and political radicalism throughout Cornwall and Devon. They took the Bible as their sole authority. Symons also says that Clemo’s supernaturalism came from his mother. Eveline Clemo told Symons that it was ‘twuz liberal theology that killed the preachin’ and materialism the congregation’.3 When Clemo had his first attack of blindness at five years old, his mother turned to the Bible and read a passage from Isaiah that included the words “thy children shall be taught of the Lord”.4 Clemo’s writings, including his poetry, can be read as a testimony to the truth of his mother’s revelation in which they both firmly believed. This can be seen as keeping within the Puritan 3 Andrew C. Symons, ‘Jack Clemo: Poet, Novelist and Autobiographer’, The Expository Times, 121:5 (2010), 229-233 (p. 230). 4 Jack Clemo, Confession of a Rebel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), p. 21. 3 tradition of receiving direct communication with God, without the intervention of clergy, through reading the Bible. Linda Anderson gives a perceptive insight into the processes involved. Quoting Peter Carlson, she says: ‘The pattern they were taught, they sought for; the pattern they sought, they experienced’.5 The Invading Gospel, first published in 1958 and revised and republished in 1986, was written while finally losing his sight and immediately afterwards.

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