What We Can Know, page 23
He said he would start with a poem he had recently completed. Then he waited for a half-minute until he had complete silence, and it was in this frozen hiatus that he caught my eye. It happened in a slow-motion double-take. The line of his leisurely pale grey gaze passed through mine, and two seconds later flicked back. I thought I saw a barely perceptible nod as we exchanged a look, as if he was already agreeing to or deciding on something. Pure fantasy. I was gratified by the glance but no more than that. Blundy was merely instrumental to my scheme.
He was famous for knowing his work by heart, but this one he read from a sheet of paper he took from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was an end-of-the-affair poem, a sonnet that held to the Shakespearean form, rhyme scheme and final couplet included. It was densely written and on first hearing, difficult to follow. Surely, a tribute to the master. Its central conceit was that an affair or marriage that ends resembles a whole life. He and his lover do well to stop short of blundering senility. After a small-hours brawl they decide on ‘mutual euthanasia’, though they ‘forgot to slaughter the regret’. Now it is too late to go back, for that life is done. Regret is all they have. The poem was too grammatically convoluted to strike the right melancholy tone. But I was not sure. When he was done, Blundy stood to attention, glaring at his listeners as if he could force from them total comprehension, slavish appreciation. The audience knew not to clap. Or they did not dare. He was like the concert pianist who remains motionless over the keyboard, hands still poised, after the final chord has died away. Blundy exhaled loudly through his nostrils and began to introduce the next poem. He was a frightening bastard, I thought.
He read two more poems, both familiar to me from recent reading, and then he sat with Kitchener for a short conversation. Harry’s questions were as convoluted as Blundy’s sonnet but stripped of verbiage and attitude they amounted to the usual stuff. How did a poem begin to form? What were the respective roles of memory and invention? When and how did Blundy know a poem was finished? Who were his first readers? There was weariness in Blundy’s curtailed responses. He had been questioned too many times. Kitchener appeared to weary him too. The man who had championed the Blundy opus in two critical books was a useful idiot. Harry had found a fine place for himself in the literary culture, shaping Turnbull’s poetry list and praising a man he envied and personally disliked. Grandly, the poet did not answer the last question about first readers. Instead, he went back to the lectern and, without introduction, recited another poem. We all knew this one, ‘In the Saddle’, and I knew the poems that followed, but even as I admired them, I had doubts. I read more poetry than most. Some of Blundy’s was long and required sustained and focussed attention. Not seeing the words of a poem on the page were to me a form of blindness. I was a reader, not a listener. The audience appeared rapt. When literary heroes hold forth, the atmosphere gets churchy, but I wondered if many in the Sheldonian were daydreaming like me, thinking about what they would be doing next. I was imagining a paper plate of finger food at the reception. Then I would be ready to make my move.
An hour and twenty minutes passed before Kitchener announced that there was just time for a few questions from the audience. The silence was tight. No one wanted to risk asking something daft. At last, from the front row, an elderly lady with a bent back spoke up and asked Blundy what he thought of Tennyson.
He said, ‘What do you think?’
She straightened as she said proudly, ‘I believe he was a genius, one of our greatest poets and nothing will convince me otherwise.’
Blundy clapped his hands and laughed. It was not an act. ‘I’m so glad. I agree with you completely. “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven.”’
Famous lines from my favourite Tennyson poem, and generously spoken. The applause rose as Blundy stepped away from the lectern to go and shake the woman’s hand and start a conversation with her. He had brought the event to a close, stealing that customary privilege from Kitchener. It had ended well.
I was among the vice chancellor’s guests as we filed down the narrow stairs to the basement reception room. There were more than eighty of us in the wide room, not so select a company as I had expected. In the roar of raised voices I had the impression of general release. School is out. No more poems. I felt that way too. Francis Blundy was facing a horseshoe of respectful male students. I saw Harry Kitchener at one end of the long drinks table, talking to a historian I knew. I went to the other end, took a glass and moved to make sure I was in Kitchener’s sightline. I looked around, hoping to spot waiting staff with trays, or paper cones of miniature fish and chips. A woman, a Russian-literature specialist from my college, came by and asked after Percy. It turned into a cheerful exchange. Her husband had died a few years back of motor neurone disease. Of course, there was emptiness and grief, she said, but only at first. On the far side was freedom after the heavy duties of care. In summer, a year after her bereavement, she and friends rented a dhow with a local captain and three-man crew and spent six weeks dawdling through the Dardanelles, stopping to explore islands. There were barbecues on deserted beaches. After a swim by moonlight, she had, at the age of sixty-seven, tried marijuana for the first time and loved it. I told her I would feel guilty even thinking about such pleasures. She laughed and said that she could see that I meant it. But I was still young, she told me, and there were adventures waiting for me.
She lifted my spirits. I stood patiently through the vice chancellor’s welcoming speech and the great poet’s measured response. I made my way through the throng towards him. Yes, I would rent my dhow right now.
The students were determined to keep hold of Blundy, but as soon as he saw me he said, ‘Aha. Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse us.’
He watched them as they dispersed. ‘Nice kids. Read more than I had at their age.’ Then he turned to me and when I shook his hand and told him my name he said, ‘Ah, John Clare.’
Encouraged, I said, ‘I won’t tell you how brilliant that was because you’ll have heard it enough. Instead—’
He cut me off by spreading his palms and shaking his head.
I had been about to flatter him with a technical question.
‘Look, Vivien. Have dinner with me.’
There it was – done. Or half done. I said, ‘What about the vice chancellor?’
‘I bailed out last week. Anyway, he needs to get to Heathrow. Just say yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll go now, if you don’t mind. I’ve had enough here.’
‘Shouldn’t you say goodbye to Harry Kitchener?’
He nodded. ‘But don’t get caught up.’
We made a wide arc around the edge of the room to avoid his fans. As I followed him, I recalculated. His first poem, the sonnet, suggested that he was between affairs and available. Getting out of long book-signings and post-reading dinners with local worthies and organisers was routine. I was as instrumental in his scheme as he was in mine. I was at least forty minutes ahead of schedule. It was going too well and I should have been suspicious, not of the poet, but of fate. Someone in the crowd put a hand on his elbow to detain him but he kept going. For all my shifting about, I was still not certain that Kitchener had seen me. If he hadn’t, all the better now.
He had moved only a few feet from the drinks table. I did not know the elderly couple he was talking to. As we approached the group, I kept close to Blundy’s side to make matters clear. I had my reward. Harry saw us and before he could prevent it, his mouth opened just enough to part his lips, then he recovered and forced them into a smile of pleasant welcome.
‘Maestro. They ate from your palm.’
‘You were solid as a brick, Harry. As always. We’re about to head off, so …’
‘Let me introduce you. This is Charles and Edna Grosvenor, who might be lending the Ashmolean a Willem Kalf.’
‘Ah, the Golden Age,’ Blundy said as we shook hands with them. ‘Will there ever be another and will we know it?’ And then he added, ‘And this is my friend, Vivien Greene.’
I found myself saying, ‘Nice to meet you,’ as I shook my ex-lover’s hand. It was limp in mine, and cool and sticky. Strong emotion? I hoped so. I let Blundy do the rest. He merely raised a hand, made a farewell nod in the direction of the Grosvenors and put an arm round my shoulder to steer me away. More beseeching hands snatched at his arm as we went back along the edge of the crowd. Blundy was brisk. ‘Misha, sorry, have to rush. Let me know how it goes.’ There were similar brush-offs until at last we emerged onto Broad Street in relative solitude.
*
On the short walk to the Randolph, he took or made three quick phone calls. Mildly offended, I kept my distance. After the third, he stopped and muttered as he bent over his phone, ‘I’m turning this bloody thing off.’ In the end I did it for him and at the same time tried to show him how. He would not have it. ‘That stuff is torture to me.’ Then he began an exasperated account of time wasted doing events like the one he had just left. Prompted by phone technology, he was talking himself into a bad humour.
‘Boring travel, hard work, no pay. They think they’re doing you a favour, paying for your hotel.’
‘Why do it then?’
‘I’m not. Two more and I’m stopping.’
This was when he told me, just as we came to the hotel entrance, that he had found a buyer for his London house and was doing up a place in the country, fifty miles west of Oxford. ‘A new life!’ As he talked, we headed not to the dining room but up the stairs, to his room on the first floor. I said nothing and followed him in. His hosts had at least spent money on his accommodation. We were in a comfortable suite with a lurid floral carpet. On a polished round table were flowers, a bottle of wine, a jar of stuffed olives, mixed salted nuts, a bowl of fruit and a welcome note in copperplate on a card from the management. I sat on a deep sofa with the nuts while Blundy opened the olives and drew the cork and described his rural retreat. A barn of unbelievable dimensions. All around, a rural paradise. His architect was a genius. When the balloon glass was in my hand, he picked up the hotel phone and asked for room service. Was Dover sole OK, he asked me over his shoulder. That done, we clinked glasses. Anticipating his new life and ordering dinner had improved his mood, and mine improved with it. Now that I had delivered the blow to Harry, I was wondering if I had to go much further. Dinner yes, for I had not eaten since breakfast. But I had seen the pretentious four-poster bed and its mock-medieval drapes, I had listened to the prickly poet’s resentments and expensive barn-conversion plans, and I was wondering how I might painlessly slip away after the fish and tiramisu.
But the evening changed direction, as it was bound to. Courteously, my host sat across from me on a hard chair and asked me about myself. I explained that I was on extended leave from teaching to look after my husband. Blundy’s mother had also suffered from Alzheimer’s, and though his sister Jane and her first husband had done most of what he called the daily stuff, the heavy lifting, he had been very involved. A protracted nightmare, we agreed, and an open question whether it was worse to be the patient or the loving carer. We compared experiences of the mood storms, the disorientation, the pathetic disintegration of a personality. I lamented my constricted and ever-shrinking world. Percy and I were in the same prison, suffering in different cells. Blundy said that was his sister’s experience too. He described how his mother on two occasions became lucid again, completely herself, asking concerned questions about the family, whose names she recalled without difficulty. Then, after a few minutes, she sank away from them again. She was, he said, like a drowning woman breaking the surface to gulp the air for the last time. I said that if Percy had a moment like that, it would frighten me. It would be like a haunting. Blundy disagreed. He had been there for the second bout of lucidity. It came two days before she died. His mother drew him and Jane towards her and knew exactly who they were. She thanked them and whispered goodbye. It was a miracle, it was joyous. If it should happen to me, I was bound to treasure it, he insisted. Neurologically it was a mystery. Those memories were clearly there but inaccessible to the sufferers. Some researchers thought the phenomenon might offer a clue to useful therapies. I recalled Percy’s lost morning and said I could not help thinking of it as his first symptom, though medical science said otherwise. Blundy thought we all experienced some version of Percy’s amnesia. Nearly all of life is forgotten.
Our dinner arrived and we shifted to a table at the other end of the suite. We moved on to dementia and madness in general. I said that in my early twenties I believed there was a redemptive and creative element to madness. At that time I was close to the tragedies of the children of older friends, gifted teenagers who became schizophrenic, delusional, paranoid – frightening and self-destructive states that inflicted misery on their respective families. That cured me of romantic notions about creativity and insanity, even as I became interested in John Clare’s work. His most famous poem was written in the Northampton insane asylum. Blundy, like his brother-in-law and like me, was a prolific quoter. He murmured the sad hypnotic lines: ‘I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows? / My friends forsake me like a memory lost. / I am the self-consumer of my woes’. I said that there was no point pretending Clare was a misunderstood depressive. In later life he was seriously delusional. He claimed he was Shakespeare. But I accepted that he and a few others, including Van Gogh, were exceptions to the rule that psychotic states were terrifying disorders and generally nothing good or wise came out of them.
Blundy said that when he was nineteen, he was severely disappointed in love. He took himself off to a borrowed cottage on the north Norfolk coast. He had never taken drugs before but had come into possession of five tabs of LSD. Each one, he had been told, was a ‘major trip’ and it was advisable to start with a quarter or an eighth. In a dark state, he swallowed all five and within an hour ‘I entered hell’, and it got worse and lasted not just hours but more than a year. Even then, he was not completely free. Sometimes, without warning, the experience would burst in on him and he would return to a state of terror. After that first hour, everything he looked at – the clouds he saw through a window, the ceiling beams, the dark fireplace – bore a message for him personally of infinite malice. A bush at the window gestured accusations in the wind and blamed him for not killing himself. His hands became independent of his will. He knew that if he let them creep up his chest, as they kept trying to do, they would surely strangle him. He did not dare go outside for help. Obscenely gesturing trees were waiting for him. He was huddled on the living-room floor, his hands clamped between his knees, trembling and mute with fear when a knock sounded on the front door. He heard it open, then heavy steps. A giant lizard with green and blue markings and bloody mouth came right into the room, walking unsteadily on hind legs. It turned on him a look of loathing and swore at him in a language he did not understand. It was clear that he was about to be eaten alive. He screamed continuously until the creature retreated. Now, it too waited for him in the garden. He learned later it was the cleaning lady from the village.
The lizard made me laugh and I could not stop. It was not nerves. I was having fun. Fortunately, he was laughing too. I was in danger of wetting myself, so I stood and went in the direction of his pointing finger to find the bathroom. There I recovered and splashed my face in cold water. When I looked in the mirror I was pleased to see how young I looked. I felt young too. I reckoned that I had not laughed in two years.
When I returned to my seat, Blundy said, ‘For eighteen months I was in therapy. I took a year out of my degree course. Mentally, I was badly shaken up. But at least this ridiculous humiliating episode taught me what madness is, what a psychotic paranoid delusion is. The entire universe of objects and people are threatening you with hateful messages. Everything makes horrible sense. You see patterns of dark significance where there are no patterns, no significance, no darkness. You shrink before the world. No good art can come of that. So I bless sanity, and I don’t care about the definitions. We know sanity when we can think about and act coherently in the real world, the one that we share. To hell with relativism.’
Staff came in to clear the plates and set out the dessert. I noticed how little we had been drinking. After more than ninety minutes of conversation, the bottle was two-thirds full.
When the waiters had left, I said, ‘But you can be sane and bad.’
‘Surely. Rational people can do a lot of damage.’
‘It’s a narrow band. More like a tightrope. Easy to fall off.’
Blundy poured himself some wine at last but put barely an inch into his empty glass, then he passed the bottle to me. As if playing a defensive game of chess, I poured a similar measure.
He said, ‘I’m not sure about that, Vivien. There are many ways to be sane.’ We were silent for a minute. ‘But I like your tightrope. Good or great art might come when the artist thinks he’s about to fall, or when he’s had an encounter with madness but still knows what’s real. Like Blake.’
‘Like Sylvia Plath.’
He paused again. I thought he was about to disagree, but he said, ‘In the second half of the twentieth century there was no better volume of poetry than Ariel. She had her deep disturbances, but only a rational mind could find her kind of poetry to communicate them, the beauty and the terror, the violence …’
‘Not all dark,’ I said. ‘“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”’ Following his lead, I forced myself to first-name him. It did not sound right. ‘Francis, were your very devout parents insane?’
‘Good question.’
We ate the sugary dessert while he thought, and this was where the conversation turned and we talked into the night about our families, that deep well, the shifting story which, even as the years pass, still needs to be rewritten. We had been around the subject many times together, Rachel and I. We summoned our indictments, anger and remorse. Our brother – spoiled brat, druggie disaster, redeemed and living happily with a talented agreeable man – came in for it too. The day might come when, simply to be free, we might dump our gripes in favour of misty celebration of our parents. I already acknowledged that they had rescued me. I was expert at talking about my family, but I was waiting for the poet to go first.
