What We Can Know - 2

I saw Drummond heading my way. It was mid-morning and many had left their desks for acorn coffee in a communal room. As he came closer, I winced. The archivist must have thought I was in Snowdonia for a holiday.

He leaned over my partition. ‘Tom. About the numbers.’

That again. ‘Sorry. I completely forgot.’

In Vivien Blundy’s last journal, in the right-hand corner of the penultimate page, was what looked like a phone number, 05144 142418. But the area code didn’t exist. No one but Drummond was interested. He thought we could work on it together. I wasn’t drawn but I had said on my last visit that I would take his problem to our Communications Department. It was an empty promise, which I immediately forgot. I would be wasting my time. It was also depressing to visit what we in the humanities called ‘the other side’. The Science and Technology buildings were vast and beautiful compared to ours.

‘I’ve had an idea. Might interest you.’

‘Of course, but not now Donald. Got to get on.’

‘Quite. After dinner perhaps.’

I nodded. He did not appear offended as he left. I wondered if he was used to people turning him away. Suppressing my guilt, I went back to my long-ago world.

When public interest in the Blundy dinner began to spread, there was much righteous media scorn. The National Press Library in the Pennines holds a lot of it. It was not the poetry that fascinated people at first, it was the guest list. Most barely noticed or cared, but a minority took issue. They did not like the ‘Barn set’ – straight, white, an influential and comfortable literary elite drawn from the London–Oxford axis. Why, journalists and bloggers asked themselves, this preoccupation with a gathering of elderly, self-satisfied mediocrities? This was even worse than the long-forgotten Bloomsbury obsession. Twelve years after the event, an article in the Telegraph , a national newspaper, made a defence. It was a private party, with no social obligation to regulate its own composition. The Blundys invited mostly friends they had known for years and had known them before they published. Blundy ranked with Seamus Heaney as one of the greatest poets writing in English in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Granted, one of Blundy’s friends was the novelist Mary Sheldrake, and another guest was his editor and brother-in-law Harry Kitchener. But two of the guests were gay, two were well under forty, none was rich or had political influence and half of those present had never published at all.

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.