What We Can Know, page 2
But this could not settle the matter. The evening may have once been a private affair, but it no longer was. The issue was not a lost birthday poem read after dinner, it was what the poem by its non-existence had become: a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence. Blundy’s choice of form, it was said, told all. A corona was an ornate anachronism in the twenty-first century. The poem, through no merit of its own but the folly of its admirers, had leapt its bounds to plunge into the mire of political economy, global history and suffering. Comparisons with the ‘immortal dinner’ of 1817, so the argument went, were baseless. Wit is largely the preserve of the agile-minded young. There was no one at the Blundys’ that evening who could have matched Leigh Hunt or Keats, only four years from the end of his short life. No one in that well-appointed barn could have competed with Wordsworth for learning, memorised verse or force of personality.
And so the debate has limped on, and the fame of the Blundy evening has grown through the years as cities, landscapes and institutions have drowned or withered. But so much information, in countless strata of unimportant detail, has survived. It could bury us. Many scholars have suffocated under the weight of trivial facts. We know, for example, that Francis Blundy was fond of apples. He had a good supply each late summer and autumn from the generous neighbour with an orchard. There are three Blundy poems about apples, the best known of which is often anthologised. ‘On Floral Street’ is about a long life shrinking, gradually divesting itself of friends, family, possessions – and ultimately, meaning. The central image is of a street juggler Blundy saw once in a quarter known as Covent Garden. In place of balls or clubs tumbling in the air, there were apples. The juggler snatched a bite out of each as it descended, until there were barely visible pieces of rotating skin and flesh, memento mori circling above his head. As a finale, the juggler tossed the remnants up high into a vertical column, tilted back his head, opened his mouth wide like a welcoming god – then nothing remained but the performer’s bow. So it went, a merry poem about death.
After he had walked away from his conversation with Vivien, Francis ate his apple as he sat at his desk and made the notes towards a first draft of ‘String’. By his elbow was the gift, a large rectangle of vellum, bought from the only producer of treated calfskin in the country, William Cowley of Newport Pagnell. On it Blundy had written in minuscule handwriting and black, durable ink a fair copy of the long poem he had put through many drafts over the previous five months. There were about 2,500 words on a single expanse of beaten, softened skin. ‘A dead animal has conferred novel sensuality on my words. Now they are alive.’ Also on the desk was a length of green silk ribbon. He had promised himself in a notebook (dated 2013–14 in box number 110 in the Snowdonia archive) that he would destroy all his notes and drafts so that his gift would be uniquely precious. After he had read it aloud, he would roll up the vellum, secure it with the ribbon, make a short speech and present it to Vivien.
He thought the poem was among his best. He looked forward to reading it that evening among friends and he would not need to rehearse. He had given many readings of his work to audiences in dozens of countries during the previous forty years. People thought he read well. He didn’t adopt the derided high-priest sing-song of Yeats or Eliot’s bogus crooning, and he despised the shambling apologetic tone that was the current fashion. He liked to be dramatic. He could be urgent or humorous or scathing by turns. He was gratified to read somewhere that he appeared to have a hundred modes at his disposal. Like his contemporaries, James Fenton and Alice Oswald, he knew his poems by heart. To come away from the microphone, go to the edge of the stage, to look into the eyes and minds of his audience as his baritone words flowed between the expressive swoop of his hands, to perform – was what he liked.
For this birthday present – he rarely gave gifts, but this one was also for himself – he had chosen another kind of performance, a Renaissance (some say rococo) form, a sequence of sonnets governed by demanding rules of composition. The medium pleased him. Vellum has served well the Magna Carta (now in the Mendips Historical Collection) for nine centuries. His shrunken handwriting, which he could not read without his glasses, ended just before the bottom of the page, in the right-hand corner and had ‘an ancient, permanent look’.
A corona was a formidable undertaking. This one consisted of fifteen sonnets. The last line of each had to be repeated in the first line of the next. The fifteenth sonnet, the ‘crown’, must repeat the first lines of the preceding fourteen and make sense. Francis had chosen the Petrarchan sonnet form: two stanzas, the first of eight lines, the second of six. The rhyme scheme was the traditional ABBAABBA CDECDE. Simple enough. The task was to write a long poem – conventionally addressed to one honoured person – that flowed naturally and did not buckle under the constraints of the rules. Blundy believed he had succeeded. We know this from a triumphant entry in notebook 2014–15, box 111. ‘Concede the fact. My fifteen are superior to John Donne’s humble seven.’
He wrote, ‘That morning I lifted the parchment from the desk and brought it close to my nose. No smell of blood or flesh. Only the faint memory of a boarding-school inkwell sunk into a lidded desk of gouged obscenities. I felt the friendly weight of the skin in two hands. I don’t remember when I last felt so innocently, serenely, unambiguously pleased with myself.’
He would have been satisfied but not surprised to learn that a century later his ‘Corona for Vivien’ would still be discussed. Perhaps not satisfied if he had also been told that the one copy in existence vanished. As far as we know, his wife has been its only reader. He must have assumed that the poem was bound to leak out and be published, if not in his lifetime, then inevitably after his death.
During his lifetime, some critics compared Francis Blundy’s poetry to T. S. Eliot’s. It was a shallow comparison based on a strain in only a few of Blundy’s poems that lamented, as Eliot had, a supposed rupture in civilisation between feeling and the intellect that could never be repaired. But there were other parallels. Both poets had a Vivien in their lives, however spelled, and, on the surface, a comfortable kind of English existence that masked turmoil and carelessness with the lives of others. Of things ill done and done to others’ harm. They shared a dangerous fate that all writers should hope to avoid. It was expressed by one critic, a contemporary of Francis, who, writing about the popularity of literary biographies, regretted a trend towards a fascination with the life but not the work. The affairs and penury in the lives of poets, the drunken lost weekends, professional jealousies, status anxieties and crises of self-doubt relieve a wider readership from engaging with the poetry.
3
Blundy’s Vivien, unlike Eliot’s, was not mentally ill. She was in the kitchen peeling potatoes. That we know what kind of potatoes these were raises again the matter of information. Burden or deliverance. Last year a respected scholar pointed out, self-evidently, that Vivien and Francis Blundy are as remote from us in time as Oscar Wilde was from the Blundys. By the late Victorian era, letter-writing and journal-keeping were highly evolved, but as one reaches back through time, before the Penny Post, the evidence of daily life thins out. By the time you reach the beginning of the seventeenth century, you are reliant on a handful of well-off and well-connected individuals, often aristocratic, with leisure to record quotidian existence or the goings-on at court. On the Barn’s bookshelves were a dozen biographies of Shakespeare, and another thirty covering the lives of other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. These books contrived to convey a fair degree of intimacy with their subjects. But Shakespeare’s case can stand for the rest. We still know very little about him. The cultivation and examination of the self, as represented by the character of Hamlet – a revolutionary moment in world literature – had yet to be translated into a general habit of reflective journal-keeping. Handwritten letters tend to get lost. Though printing technology existed, there were no newspapers that took an interest in the lives and thoughts of mere playwrights. The author interview was a long way off. Traces of Shakespeare’s existence are mostly to be found in public records. He bequeathed centuries of dispute. He was an atheist, no, a Catholic. He kept a much-loved second ‘wife’ in London. He travelled to Poland. He didn’t write those plays.
However, our biographers, historians and critics, whose subjects were active from about 2000 onwards, are heirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’, ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines. We have inherited almost two centuries of still photography and film. Hundreds of Francis Blundy lectures, interviews and readings were recorded and remain available by way of the Nigerian internet. All his newspaper and magazine reviews and profiles exist in digital form. In 2004, when the Blundy phones became cameras, pictures of the Barn, its interior and the surrounding countryside proliferated. Neither he nor Vivien was active on social media accounts, but they sent thousands of digital messages during the later years of their lives. These track daily trivia, give an accurate record of friends and acquaintances, of poems completed, and trace the rise and dip of mood. They tell us of Vivien’s sorrows and regrets and all she wanted to let her sister Rachel and close friends know about them. We too can watch the daily news that troubled her contemporaries, the diverting scandals, the ancient sporting triumphs. We know everything that passed between Francis and his agent, publishers and translators, accountant, doctor and solicitor. Even his and Vivien’s browsing habits are now obtainable. Messages sent by end-to-end encryption have been laid bare. As our dean once said in a speech, we have robbed the past of its privacy.
From the mid-1980s, in the expectation, lavishly fulfilled, of selling his archive to a library, Francis kept copies of all letters sent and received. The Barn library was catalogued and put online. Husband and wife kept journals. We know their voices well, their clothes and their faces changing through time. The differences between their private and public selves are apparent. Scholars see, hear and know more of them, of their private thoughts, than we do of our closest friends.
Even so, there are obvious limits to our understanding. An email or text rarely carries as much interesting subjective reflection as a thoughtful nineteenth- or twentieth-century letter. When Francis and Vivien stepped out of the Barn on a summer’s morning and looked about at the rich and tangled growth along the valley, they were not so completely estranged from the kind of landscape Shakespeare knew whenever he rode westwards from London by way of Oxfordshire to the family home in Stratford. If the Blundys could ignore the far-off rumble of combustion engines when the wind blew in from the east, they could experience an environment essentially unchanged and described by an unbroken 500-year tradition of poetry. All around were the narrow country lanes, surfaced by then rather than muddy or dusty, but following the same ancient routes, overhung by the same kinds of trees. The wildflowers were largely replaced by nettles. Populations of birds, butterflies and small mammals were vastly reduced but in theory they could, with good management, have returned. Over the next hill might be a line of pylons or an industrial chicken farm. The peace could be wrecked by the whine of a chainsaw or the scream of a low-flying jet from the nearby military airbase, but on various points of the compass were the distant steeples and Norman towers of village churches almost a thousand years old, and across the landscape lay a jealously preserved latticework of old footpaths that ran through woods, across the last remaining meadows, alongside impure streams. They too, in theory, could have been rescued one day. As long as one stayed out of towns and cities, there was a continuity which must have shaped the understanding of a poet, and which is not available to us today. Too many absolute ruptures, cultural and physical, cut us off from Shakespeare. The Blundys and their contemporaries lived with a sense of proximity to him which they took for granted and which we can never recover by digital means.
Still, we know more about the twenty-first century than it knew about its own past. Specialists in literature pre-1990, like our university colleagues along the department corridor, know only as much about their writers of interest as scholars in Blundy’s time did. The wells, always meagre, were drunk dry long ago. For them, no new facts, only new angles. And still, they talk of their 500-year-old subjects, playwrights and poets, as if they knew them as neighbours. Up at our end, ‘Literature in English 1990 to 2030’, we have more facts and possibilities of interpretation than any of us could articulate in a dozen lifetimes. For the post-2030 crowd, which is most of the department, there’s even more. If civilisation manages to scrape through the next century as it scraped through the last, then we’ll need to find another hundred metres of corridor.
So, we know that 108 years ago, in 2014, the potato Vivien Blundy held in her hand to peel for supper on her birthday was of the Rooster variety. ‘I prefer them for roasting,’ she had written recently to her sister Rachel. We can assume that the matter of her husband’s absent birthday greetings was settled over a light lunch.
The first guests, Graham and Mary Sheldrake, would be staying the night and they arrived in the late afternoon. The sky was still cloudless, and sunset that October day was not until six. In the orange glow of a low sun, the brick and timber Barn, the stone dairy and their surrounds should have looked glorious to the visitors from London. But they didn’t. There was a crisis. According to Mary’s emails, they rowed bitterly during the three-hour journey. It was banal enough. For almost a year, in the face of her persistent questions and accusations, Graham had denied having an affair. Now, recklessly, and enraged by the heavy, slow-moving traffic, he had become impatient with her and his own lies. She wanted to know so he told her. Take that! In fury, she announced the end of the marriage. They emerged from their car with a terrific slamming of doors. Graham stood a few paces away with his back to the Barn as if to take in the view, its brilliant autumnal glow, while he gathered himself for the unavoidable social moment, the friendly embraces, chatty questions about the journey, then tea and scones. Everything he did not want. Mary managed the transition with ease. She felt triumphantly released, as one might after winning a tough game of chess. Like a dancer she flitted across the gravel towards the Blundys’ front door. She too was having an affair, which Graham, so busy with his own, did not suspect. It was ideal. She could guiltlessly dissolve the marriage (she was prone to guilt) and, in time, live with Leonard, an architect. She would text him as soon as she was alone.
Graham, also a prolific emailer, still facing the blazing trees, was regretting his confession in the car. He had omitted to tell Mary that he had terminated his affair with June Thompson three months before. In his irritation, he had thought it would have sounded too much like an attempt at a reconciliation, which was bound to fail. He turned and thought his wife looked young at fifty-three, and pretty and light on her feet as she let out a whoop and wrapped her arms around Vivien’s neck. Soon, he was embracing her too, and then his old friend Francis. After they had been shown their usual room and had unpacked and were strolling about the garden with Vivien, Graham grew increasingly suspicious of Mary’s gaiety. He excused himself from the company and went indoors to the guest bedroom, where he found her handbag on the floor of a wardrobe. He reached for her phone. It took less than five minutes to come across Leonard. Before he could absorb the shock or return the phone to the bag, Mary had entered the bedroom.
But their story is less of a concern than their states of mind which, in turn, directed their separate responses to the birthday Corona. Mary Sheldrake was among the most successful novelists of her generation. Translated around the world, winner of all the usual prizes, almost a national treasure. Her writing was minimal, all descriptive colour stripped out, too cautious for any fictional tricks, false histories or false trails. Some found her ‘too intellectual’ and lamented the dryness of tone and absence of sex or love in her novels. Others delighted in such tales as that of the convoluted kidnapping where the victim turns perpetrator, a financial fraud by which all prosper and all are innocent, and famously, a popular kitchen device, a microwave, that evolves a form of malign consciousness. Twenty years after her death she was still popular, after which, tastes or needs changed and she was forgotten and now she is known only to a handful of academic specialists. Her story of complicated bank theft was derived from Graham, a personal financial advisor who seemed to have few or no clients and no money of his own. His interests were wine, cooking and golf, a game which took up a lot of space and became impossible to justify once the sea invaded the land. The general assumption was that Mary paid for his pastimes.
They were a popular couple. In company there was a merriness and daring about them that literary people liked. G-and-M, as they were known, had a taste for unusual recreational drugs and often enlivened an evening with a psychotropic novelty, a micro-dose too new to be illegal, from a laboratory near Big Sur, California. Rumours still went about of an inventive sex life, even as the couple approached their sixties. It was believed by insiders that Mary kept her novels sexless to guard her privacy.
4
While Vivien took a phone call from one of the delayed guests and had tea with G-and-M, Francis was having a shower. He knew his own processes and outcomes well enough to be convinced he had written ‘something exceptional, of beauty and resonance’. As he stood under an insufficient trickle, for the shower pump had failed,
