What We Can Know - 12

A literary work, like a small child, may take a long time to achieve a fully independent life. Or it might have no life at all. We know from Blundy’s journal entries and emails to Harry Kitchener that the poet was pleased by his reading of ‘A Corona for Vivien’ and remained proud of his achievement. He wrote, ‘CfV – it works’ and underlined the words twice. If he committed the poem to memory, we have no evidence that he wrote it out after he had destroyed all previous versions. Many scholars before me have been to Snowdonia to look for a draft or references to one and there’s no trace. It seems Francis kept to his plan. Vivien was to have the only copy. Francis responded warmly to Harry’s ecstatic praise and the matter of the biography was dropped.

In the mid-1990s, Harry and Jane bought a cottage in north-west Scotland, close to the coastal village of Glenuig, not far from Loch Moidart. They went frequently and loved it there, so much so that when he died of a heart attack in 2016, Harry’s papers went to the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness. A couple of years later, the university opened an annexe in Fort William, and the Kitchener archive moved there. In 2039, just three years before the Inundation, Harry’s papers were moved yet again to the new University of Ardnamurchan, safely perched in the heights around Mount Roshven, only a few miles from the old but submerged Glenuig cottage. Nothing of Harry’s that was in electronic form is in his archive and his papers are not accessible online. Scottish scholars in the humanities showed no interest in H. Kitchener, an English second-homer who never, in prose or poetry, expressed any engagement in Scotland’s affairs, its history, landscape or literature. Even as the Corona’s fame spread, no serious scholar troubled to visit the archive. Then the Inundation and social chaos isolated the UoA in the far north-west. For southern Blundy scholars, the journey became too hazardous.

I assumed there was a quantity of valuable material in the Kitchener papers, possibly even a draft of the Corona. If it were as close as Snowdonia or even the Pennines, I would have gone long ago to the Ardnamurchan peninsula. But from our place to UoA is 600 miles. A passport is necessary and can take months. Forty years ago there was a direct ferry to the north by way of the open seas, but that no longer runs. The so-called inland route involves many unpredictable changes of vessel along the way and is a long and expensive expedition. Once you gain the Lake District Archipelago, there are treacherous shallows, powerful tides and rumours of lethal whirlpools. It is said that predatory gangs come shooting out from any of the countless hidden inlets on powered skiffs to deprive you of your goods and perhaps your head. There is no safety until the rough Sea of the Central Belt is reached. But once that is crossed and the comforts of New Glasgow are behind you, the same dangers repeat, especially as the boat skirts wild Rannoch Island. In all, not a journey for a desk-bound academic. When I said that to Rose, she told me the dangers were overstated and the journey would be good for me. It became a running joke. She accused me of cowardice. I accused her of wanting me dead.

But here I must pause to reflect on a subject of deep sentiment, of a familiar feeling I can no longer suppress. Typing the words ‘the Lake District’ … In my teens I became absorbed in the poetry of Wordsworth, the notebooks of his sister Dorothy and their youthful friendship with Coleridge. I was in love with simple Dove Cottage. They became mine, those 900 square miles of mountains and lakes, those ‘rocks, and stones, and trees’. Submerged long ago, they remain a familiar terrain, boundlessly free, one that I can almost convince myself I remember. It comes without warning, like a slap – nostalgia, though that can hardly be the word for a place I never saw. But it strikes, deep in my chest, a curious pleasure-pain of longing, delight, sadness. I think those who love our accumulated centuries of literature feel this most.

And it’s not only the Lakes. Simply writing those place names – magical Swindon! – brings on a sweet melancholy. Oh, to have been there, when strawberries and oranges came in winter as a matter of course. Even to set down a date – 2010! To have been alive then in those resourceful raucous times, when the sea stood off at a respectful distance, when you could walk in any direction as far as you liked and keep your feet dry. When you might see and hear the real Francis Blundy in proud Huddersfield – 1994, in the town hall. This longing for what was never known and is lost needs its word, something beyond nostalgia, which pines for what was once known. It’s not quite an affliction, but nor is it a resource. That pleasure-pain is emotionally disruptive, it wrecks concentration. I happen to know one of its most exquisitely evoked descriptions. I read it many years ago as a research student and it has never left me.

I was twenty-two years old and had not yet settled on a subject for my doctorate. I had been chosen to read a paper to a seminar on the art of biography. Browsing through the stacks, I came across a book by the writer Richard Holmes. I knew of him as an eminent biographer in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, during a golden age of biography. But I did not know this early book, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer .

I eased the hundred-year-old hardback from its shelf in the manner I’d been taught. So many books have been lost. The cover showed a painting by Hans Thoma. I looked him up. A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painter of idyllic pastoral scenes who was untouched by modern movements in art and favoured – though hardly Thoma’s fault – by Adolf Hitler. This book’s cover showed The Wanderer . A gentleman with shoulder bag, straw hat and walking stick is strolling along a rising stony track near a stream. Both sides of his route have been cleared and the trees have a bedraggled, etiolated look, a foretaste of the deforestation to come.

I read the book at my carrel in two days. Among its many treasures is an account of a journey on foot the eighteen-year-old Holmes took in the Cévennes, southern France, tracking the same route taken by his hero, his ‘friend’, Robert Louis Stevenson a hundred years before. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was Holmes’s bible. He stopped in the same villages as Stevenson, tried to keep to his exact route on the old country tracks and slept like him in the open, ‘ à la belle étoile ’. As he walked, he constantly referred to his copy of Stevenson’s book. In the early 1960s, the last remnants of the ancient French peasantry hung on in the rural fastness of La France Profonde. Holmes chatted to local people along the way, pitting his schoolboy French against the twangy southern accent, aware that Stevenson’s French was near perfect. Both men covered the 220 kilometres in twelve days. At every point, Holmes was conscious of Stevenson’s progress, whether he was ahead that day or behind. Most often, he struggled to catch up with his hero’s rapid pace. And always, Holmes was intensely aware of his presence, his humour and resilience, his way of seeing and recording, and even the details of his equipment, including his eighty-page notebook. It was partly a twelve-day tutorial in the craft of writing.

One evening, after walking through a heavy storm, Holmes crossed a bridge over the River Allier to enter the village of Langogne. It appeared to him a cheerful place, with its eleventh-century church and medieval market. But Holmes, footsore and exhausted, was gripped by a feverish idea that would not let him go, a blend of hallucination and hope: Stevenson would soon be arriving. The young man retraced his steps to the bridge and stood there a long while as darkness began to fall. He removed his hat in preparation for a formal greeting. Passers-by gave him odd looks. Bats started swooping over the river. Then he saw, fifty yards downstream, picked out against the fading gleam of the western sky, the old ruined bridge into town, the one his dear Stevenson would have crossed. Holmes was bereft, close to tears. ‘There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this ruin was the true, sad sign.’

This is the feeling I’m attempting to describe. The waiting figure on the modern bridge is me. The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved. When too few understood how sublime their natural and man-made worlds were. Professionally, I’ve spent a lifetime getting on intimate terms with people I can never meet, people who really existed and are therefore far more alive to me than characters in a novel. I have tried to embrace what is ‘beyond my reach in time’. For example, I think I might have loved Vivien Blundy. Perhaps she is the one I would be waiting for as light fell and the bats dipped over the river. I might have married her. I have come to admire and love her agile, inward mind, her honesty, her learning, her tender care for Percy, even as she longed to be free. Holmes too could have been my dear friend, just as Stevenson could have been his. That fervent longing and melancholy on the new bridge is what I feel when I read of their carefree treks across a glorious but demanding terrain, my true sad sign of a lost world that I have come to know too well. The Cévennes region is now one more archipelago, with steep wooded massifs rising from silent islands, perhaps beautiful, in its way, if you did not know what it once had been. For many years, since the war with France, travelling there has been hazardous, given the strength of local feeling. Even if that were not the case, I could never go. It would make me forlorn to think of the youthful shades of Stevenson and Holmes, those bright and hardy spirits, striding the country tracks somewhere below my boat’s prow.

But to return to Blundy’s Corona and its journey towards an independent life; the long-term goal is to discern the difference, the chasm that divides the poem as it really was from what it became in the culture. A hopeless task, perhaps. We start with shreds. A Kitchener-to-Blundy email on Christmas Day 2014 extends the thoughts of his October handwritten letter.

I’m torn between thinking of it as, above all, a crown you set on Vivien’s head in honour of a long love; or as a celebration of nature’s glories, not only a lament for what we have mindlessly killed, but a passionate reminder of what is still there and must be loved; or a prolonged, sad bugle call to bring us back to ourselves and our approaching end, which we should face calmly and with gratitude for our luck in having existed at all. As you read that night, I thought the valedictory tone was predominant and it moved me. Now, I’m not so sure.

It is not clear if Harry had possession of the poem at the time of writing. Like Vivien and Francis, he had a good memory for poetry, and he may have taken notes at the reading. If he had asked Francis or Vivien to see the poem or make a copy – and he would have longed to read it – then the request was made in person or over the phone. There is nothing in her papers or his, in emails, letters or journal entries, that touch on such a request. In December, when he wrote to Blundy, he had only thirteen months to live, the last four of which were spent in the cottage at Glenuig. Jane Kitchener’s anguished messages of grief suggest that being so far removed from the best medical care may have shortened his life. In January 2015, Harry wrote to the Times Literary Supplement , and perhaps this could be said to be the beginning of the Corona’s odyssey, which was to take longer than Odysseus’ twenty years and is not concluded yet. The pretext for the letter was a review-article about the art and changing fashions of reading poetry aloud. Harry’s letter gave a brief sketch of Blundy’s reading of ‘an unpublished poem, a sonnet sequence, to a gathering of family and friends’. He initiated in passing the association with Keats and Wordsworth’s ‘immortal dinner’.

This privileged listener was convinced on the night, and remains so, of the poem’s greatness. Its bold reach will establish it as Francis Blundy’s monument. It will be seen as a priceless gift, an astonishing work of warmth, understanding of nature’s fabric, and of technical mastery. All of us were moved, and when the last joyous lines had been read, no one could speak. On that evening last October, as momentous in its way as Haydon’s famous supper of 1817, reading in solitude and silence could not have evoked in us such powerful feelings. As Jim Craigmore notes in his article, no poet today reads with such restrained power and emotional insight as Blundy. The art of reciting poetry needs to be taken more seriously by our younger generation of apologetically mumbling bards.

There was no follow-up to the letter, no stir of impatience to read the poem. Among those who would have cared, Kitchener’s assumption that it would be published must have become general. The Corona would be out soon enough, included in Blundy’s next collection, and meanwhile literary life slogged on. Fifteen months passed. Someone wrote on an obscure blog an unsigned piece on the Immortal Dinner, and quoted from the TLS letter ‘… as momentous in its way …’ For the first time, the words ‘Second Immortal Dinner’ were used. The contributor’s name has not been discovered. Vivien and Francis’s email inboxes show four enquiries about the poem. Neither replied, perhaps by agreement between them, perhaps separately for very different reasons. By that time, Harry was dead. Jane Kitchener was not known to the literary world. She stayed up north and after finding some useable clay on a hike, founded the Smirisary Pottery, a local success. Another year passed and at last a young journalist, recently employed on The Times and keen to make an impression, started digging. Again, Vivien and Francis refused to talk to him, or even reply. The piece came out under the headline, ‘Francis Blundy’s Precious Gift’.

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?