What We Can Know - 3

B lundy’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.