What We Can Know, page 9
The poem was ready to be launched – but not quite yet. By this time, Harriet Gage was the mother of three, a small child, a toddler and a baby, and still living with Chris on Observatory Street. Her career in freelance journalism was, understandably, on the slide. Now she stirred. She gave an ‘I was at the Second Immortal Dinner’ interview for a follow-up piece by the Times journalist. Out of that came, eventually, a commission from a rival paper, the Guardian, for a full-length piece, and Harriet rose to it superbly.
Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of twentieth-century psychology. That did not stop people from relying on their own or from believing in the recollections of others, if it suited. Harriet’s memory absorbed her circumstances and her convictions. She had faded from the Blundy circle, but not from any falling-out. She adored her children, was immersed in their care, no longer had any decent clothes, and had found that motherhood had drained her of ambition and self-confidence in the world outside the home. She had no time or energy to ‘keep up’, to read books or newspapers – if she tried, she was asleep within minutes. The prospect of a smart, opinionated evening at the Barn was intimidating. She would have nothing to say, and Francis could have no understanding of her kind of life. She would be a disappointment to Vivien, who had such hopes for her future. Harriet would not have wanted to face her perceptive questions.
Outside of her intense, constrained existence, Harriet had one interest that consumed and angered her. It could never send her to sleep, and its urgency sometimes overwhelmed her. The Derangement – not that she would have known the term. For all the international conferences, and the promises of politicians, the madness continued. She belonged to two organisations and sometimes managed to write short pieces for their magazines or websites. When she could get Chris to have the children – he worked hard – she attended meetings of the Oxford local branch, and she went on marches. Other people’s indifference to the issue infuriated her. The poem, or rather, her memory of the poem, was the sponge that soaked up her concerns – the future that her children and all children must inherit. The reading of the Corona was now three years behind her. Accurate recollection of a densely written poem, heard not read, had faded for all who were there. Conviction and perhaps parental fatigue helped to make that recollection especially porous for Harriet. Another factor could have been her rekindled journalistic ambition. A national newspaper was giving her space for a long piece, and she had a message.
The children tended to wake at different times through the night. She was still breastfeeding her eight-month-old baby. Invigorated, ‘on a strange high’, working through the night at the kitchen table, she snatched her writing sessions during the periods when all three were asleep. In the morning, Chris stayed home with the children while she worked upstairs in the bedroom, hunching low over a laptop, which she balanced on the unmade bed. When she was done, she printed out her copy downstairs, fed the baby, went back up to scrawl her corrections and second thoughts, typed them in, printed out, corrected again, typed in – and filed. She had turned in the requested 2,500 words in a day and a half. The features editor emailed back within twenty minutes, delighted, even excited. Harriet was in an elated state. Lack of sleep must have played a part. She ‘hugged and kissed my husband and did a belly dance in the kitchen while Todd and Jack laughed and shrieked’.
She knew it was the best piece she had ever written. It is unlikely that she knew Francis had fallen seriously ill around this time. She drew on her earlier profile of him. The October 2014 gathering she dramatised as being ‘tense with expectation’, which the rest of the company may not have remembered. When the great poet began to read from a roll of vellum, they fell under a spell and no one could move. It was hard even to breathe. Their thoughts were no longer their own. The words, the images, the unearthly music of their ruthless truth, bore the listeners away, as if in a dream. Harriet enlisted Francis to her cause. His poem was a j’accuse of those who would, in her words, ‘shrivel nature by slow roasting’. It exalted love – for people, for the living world – and promised love’s victory over destructive forces who cared nothing for earth’s beauty and whose gods were money and power. Amor vincit omnia. Harriet described the ‘wondrous moment’ when the poet presented the poem to his wife. But the sensational core of the article, its journalistic hook, were its concluding questions, which other newspapers, broadcasters, social media and bloggers began to pursue: where was the poem and why, after three years, had it not been published? Why had Blundy not spoken of it? Who else had read it? Had someone offered money to suppress a masterpiece?
13
Even if Vivien never read her birthday present, never even untied the scroll, everything I’ve learned about her suggests that she did not destroy the poem. At the least, by having it intact, her options remained open. More to the point, she loved Blundy’s poetry, she admired the Corona even as it troubled her, and she did not possess the necessary arrogance or stupidity to deny history its chance to form a judgement. She may have preferred not to be its dedicatee, but she accepted that ‘time would neutralise the association’. She had a passion for poetry in general and would never destroy a major work to satisfy a personal animus or because she was disappointed in her marriage. Apart from the diary entries, we have her emails. She wrote to her sister that the thought of the poem, ‘just its green ribbon’, brought on ‘a peculiar form of turmoil’. In milder terms she wrote five days after the reading that the poem was ‘beautiful but hard to think about’. A week later, off the subject, ‘We should have adopted. He was against. A child would have knocked him flying off his pedestal.’
In early November she recorded in her journal a few trips to London to see Peter. ‘Francis wants to talk about the poem. He wants praise. There’s much to like and there are some lines I can quote back to him, but I’m not being completely honest because my own feelings are in a mess. Anyway, after each exchange he seems satisfied, but then he comes back for more.’ Vivien supposed she could not blame him. ‘He put so much into the poem. I’m under pressure to be grateful, and I suppose I am.’ Perhaps she was fortunate that Francis was in his study for ‘almost every waking hour with his keyboard clattering’. We know that he was writing his essay ‘Wings and Shackles’, about the role of form in poetry as liberation and constraint. There is nothing in Blundy’s papers about unhappiness in the household. That was not his kind of subject. Instead, he records a feeling of relief to have finished with the strictures of the corona form. ‘Time for some free verse. Or call it by its real name, prose with line breaks.’
Vivien wrote in her journal a short paragraph that has received over the years a fair amount of scholarly attention. We cannot know whether this was a draft of a letter that was lost or never sent, or a note towards a conversation that might or might not have happened.
I came into your life after a lecture as an admirer, a fan. I promoted myself to secretary, but we never got beyond that. I gave up my career and that was my decision. I’ve been happy to cook your meals, write and post your letters, wash your socks, discuss your work. I entered your life. You never entered mine. Your poem reminds me to ask – is this all about to change?
Vivien had asked the sort of question that many women posed who, like her, came of age in the 1970s. She was forty years late. ‘I’m a certain kind of female academic. In the domestic politics of women’s space versus male entitlement, I’m a late developer. I’m also a natural housewife, a compulsive tidier!’ Despite her hopes, life went on as before. Francis worked, Vivien read, gardened and continued to serve her husband. ‘What’s the alternative?’ she asked herself. ‘Ask him to cook?’ Her visits to London increased, though there is no record of the meetings with Peter. In early December she moved her clothes and toiletries into the guest room and, without discussion, she and Francis began to sleep separately. It suited them both. As we age, she might have told friends, unbroken sleep unravels to become an intermittent affair. Francis and Vivien needed at different times to be reading or listening to the radio in the small hours. At almost 6,000 square feet, the Barn allowed much privacy and was comfortable and warm in winter. It was too inconvenient to go elsewhere. Among the final entries of Vivien’s 2020 journal, her last, she scrawled some barely legible words: ‘4m out from a long seedge’. Some scholars believe she was recollecting being under siege from Francis about his poem. But the wilful misspelling is inexplicable and there is no mention of a four-month siege in the 2014 journal.
The empty tranquillity of their lives was broken in February 2016 by the sudden, shocking news of Harry Kitchener’s fatal heart attack. Jane’s emails from Scotland to Vivien in that period were distraught and the two friends grew closer. At that point, Harry’s papers were at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness, soon to move to its annexe in Fort William. If Vivien or Francis had allowed him to take a copy of the Corona, it would have gone with the rest. He was buried in the Glenuig cemetery and six months later there was a memorial service in Oxford. It angered Vivien when Francis said he did not intend to go. Too upsetting. She tried to persuade him. He should be there for his sister’s sake, and for the brother-in-law who was also his close friend, the man who had most eloquently promoted his work. She went alone. After the service and speeches in St Mary’s Church, she and Jane spent two days together. There is no record of what they discussed.
The following year, days after Francis had been given the diagnosis of the illness that would kill him, Harriet’s Guardian piece appeared. Francis was already in pain, and he was furious. Francis’s agent and the publisher’s publicist were inundated with requests for interviews and demands for answers. Where was the Corona poem? Then there appeared an anonymous blog that went viral. It informed the world that one of the oil giants had paid Blundy $100,000 for the rights to his poem and it would never be seen. Francis asked Vivien if she would object to the poem’s publication. She told him she did indeed object. There was a shouting row, she said to Jane, but she recorded nothing in her journal. Two days passed and she discovered that the drawers in her desk had been turned over. She said nothing.
Because Francis Blundy would not feed the frenzy with an interview or comment, it began to ease after several days. His pancreatic cancer took twelve weeks from diagnosis to death. Since he had been reluctant to see a doctor and submit to tests, it must have been working on him months before. Vivien confirmed for herself that the outcomes were poor for this disease. She was ‘immobilised by despair’. As he began to fade and shrink before her, following a round of chemotherapy which he did not intend to repeat, he worked all the harder and barely ate. He was eager to see friends, including his agent and publisher, but he would not have Harriet Gage in the house. He spent time alone with nephew Peter. Vivien rallied and distracted herself by cooking for everyone. Francis would watch his visitors eat while he sipped a white wine and said very little, except on a couple of occasions to speak calmly about death. He was not complaining. He was sixty-seven and had gone ‘a decent stretch’ and was lucky to have lived the life of a published poet and to have found love with Vivien. He was looking at her when he said this. ‘I couldn’t meet his eye, I felt so ashamed,’ she wrote to Jane.
Soon, the necessary morphine, in mounting doses, obliterated his capacity for work. He did not mention the Corona to Vivien again. That she would not allow it to be published to please Francis and refute the conspiracists might suggest that she had already given the scroll to Harry or someone else. Or her heart was untypically hard. During his last three weeks he was, she wrote, ‘a muffled consciousness, hardly himself, shockingly thin’. He sometimes rambled in a low murmur, returning often to an old slight from 2013 when he was not invited to speak at Heaney’s funeral. Then he appeared to rally and lay propped up in bed, correcting what would be his three last poems. Jane was on her way down from Scotland by the night train from Fort William to be with her brother and to comfort Vivien. She was due into Euston at eight and would reach the Barn before midday. When Vivien looked in on him at 9 a.m., Francis was asleep. At ten she looked in again and he was dead. He lay on his back, arms raised above his head as if in surrender. At last. Thankfully, his eyes were closed. She liked to think he had bestowed truth on that old white lie of the obituary pages – ‘peacefully in his sleep’.
This statement was from a respected anti-censorship organisation: ‘If the late Francis Blundy took cash from a fossil-fuel lobbyist in exchange for his silence on the climate emergency, it would be a bad day for freedom of expression in this country.’ And here was the head of a large publishing group: ‘We don’t know if he was bought out by Big Oil, but if he was, I’d never read a word of his again.’ If, and more ifs. A thin tissue of hypotheticals barely protected Blundy’s posthumous reputation. But there was scepticism too. An economist writing in the Financial Times offered some common sense: ‘The notion that the oil industry would care a hoot what a poet, however eminent, has to say about global heating is fatuous beyond belief.’ But for a while the idea hung in the air like a bad smell. Three years later, in 2020, an Italian scholar wrote, ‘That Blundy took money for silence was an internet meme that had no basis in fact. It was lodged in the public mind immediately after H. Gage’s article appeared in the Guardian. The mystery is why Vivien Blundy did not speak out in defence of her husband. She had a copy of the poem. She could have told the world what was in it and why it had not been published.’
This was reasonably put. In those dying days, when the media gale hit the Barn, the publicist advised Vivien to pull the plug on the house router. She was glad to. Francis was suffering and had to be protected. She told him the internet was down, but he did not seem to care. He was working on his poems or dozing on morphine. Vivien wrote emails on her phone and sent them by a weak signal from a hillock in the field above the garden. The drawbridge was up. Everything in the Barn was centred on Francis and his declining strength, and on his visitors, and everyone’s distress. The oil-bribe rumour began to seem irrelevant. For an educated readership who loved Blundy’s work, the story was just another piece of shameless disinformation. For those who believed the tale, it added to the poem’s lustre. If it was worth paying a large sum to suppress, it must be an extraordinary, powerful work. When had poetry ever mattered so much?
As for Vivien, here was the surprise. Within a year of Francis’s death, after the funeral, after the big memorial service in Southwark Cathedral, the television documentary and the updating of his Collected Poems, she arranged to let the Barn out. On her last day there, with all furniture gone, the rooms stripped bare and the tenants due to move in later that month, she and Peter dug a hole in the garden to bury the dog, a terrier called Jack that had died two days before. The grave was next to Jack’s mother, Kip. Vivien moved to Scotland to live with Jane Kitchener, and they stayed there together in the Glenuig cottage for the rest of their lives. Peter visited her a few times and Rachel went regularly over the years. Vivien was happy to be absorbed into a new milieu and landscape. She ignored all enquiries from academics or the press. With Jane she explored the wilderness of Moidart, the Rough Bounds. Between them, she and Jane held all, or nearly all, the Blundy secrets. When Vivien died in 2038, her papers went to the Bodleian in Oxford to join the Francis Blundy archive. Three years earlier, Jane had died. What happened to her private papers is not known.
I return to the loud week that followed Harriet Gage’s article. The poet was sealed off from the world, but it did not take the media long to track down the other guests at the Second Immortal Dinner. John Bale and Tony Spufford would not comment, nor would Graham Sheldrake. Chris Gage referred everyone to his wife, and she was laid low with guilt at what her article had inflicted on a dying man. She would not talk.
Only Mary Sheldrake was prepared to give an account. She had recently published a novel in the new style that she had promised herself and it had not gone down well with critics or readers. The flat and colourless tone they expected and loved was missing. The clichés remained, but they were not enough. Her approach had changed radically, and she and her publisher had forgotten to change the readership. Mary guessed she would have to revert. She may have thought that until then, she should keep up a presence in the press. She told interviewers she remembered every minute of the evening and that she had been ‘transfigured’ by it. She agreed, the poem that Francis read described the natural world beautifully and if we were to value what we have, and do whatever it took not to lose it, then to that extent, it certainly could be seen as ‘a climate-change poem’, though she would not have thought to use that term. When she was asked if she could remember hearing Blundy talk about the issue, she paused before saying that she knew he had strong opinions about it. I admire her tact.
14
Something extraordinary and wondrous happened and it was here, now, not in 2010 or ’14 but in our muted present. On a hot day in June, Rose and I went swimming after our last classes of the day. It was early evening and the air was warm and creamy on the skin. A smell of baked earth and herbs rose from under our bare feet as we crossed the grassy slope that gave on to the sandy bay below the faculty accommodation towers. We passed the lifeguard station and its single eucalyptus tree. The beach, a wide horseshoe of fine pinkish yellowish sand, was deserted but for a bunch of students playing volleyball half a mile away at the far end where the chalk cliffs begin. We stripped off and walked into the sea hand in hand. Usually, I lower myself in inch by inch. This evening the calm water gave a welcoming caress, and when it was deep enough, I collapsed into its embrace. We swam a couple of hundred metres from the shore, out across the sea grasses, gliding through translucent water, over the occasional sea turtle, to where we knew a sandbank rose without breaking the surface. The incoming tide was at its midway point, and we were standing in water chest-deep.
