What We Can Know - 6

F irst-year students of literature or history who come to our department at the University of the South Downs have no interest in history. They prefer things that are new, like the latest toys and novelties of Nigerian pop culture. The few that make the effort are surprised to discover how approachable the past is, and how easy it is to understand the voices of historical figures. We like to tell them that their surprise should be all the greater. Writing in the late twentieth century, the poet James Fenton made the same point. Poetry and prose from the mid-sixteenth century onwards could be read without a dictionary. So, in Fenton’s and Blundy’s time there was already a continuous, 450-year tradition of comprehensible literature in English. That continuity, of course, stretches to include us. We on our sleepy overlooked archipelago-republic are the proud inheritors of that tradition. We introduce the students to Wyatt’s most famous poem, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’. They have little trouble understanding that ageless refrain of low and high culture – she loved me, now she doesn’t. Always a good moment then to introduce the kids to the pleasures of rhyme royal and the joys of the iambic pentameter. We teach the orthodoxy, as demanded by the dean, but no one really believes that iambs form the basic rhythm of natural spoken English – look at all the trochees in this sentence. By their stresses, even iambs are trochees. That’s another matter – and there are three more.

Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries there were, obviously, changes in diction. What’s remarkable in our time is how minimally English has changed, despite the upheavals of wars, pandemics, nuclear exchanges, the catastrophic Inundation and the Derangement driving scores of millions northwards out of Africa into Europe. There is, as Adam Smith might have said, a great deal of ruin in a planet.

In our recent seminar series, ‘Blundy and his Circle’, the students were aroused from their stupor when they discovered how the various characters seemed so credible, and they came to know Blundy well, his voice, his moods and his changes over a lifetime. It was interesting to linger during one session on certain differences and similarities between now and then. All those about to sit down at table in the Barn that October evening in 2014 would live past their mid-sixties. Average life expectancy today is sixty-two. Then as now, cancer, heart disease and dementia were what did and do for most. The Blundys and their guests lived in what we would regard as a paradise. There were more flowers, trees, insects, birds and mammals in the wild, though all were beginning to vanish. The wines the Blundys’ visitors drank were superior to ours, their food was certainly more delicious and varied and came from all over the world. The air they breathed was purer and less radioactive. Their medical services, though a cause of constant complaint, were better resourced and organised. They could have travelled from the Barn in any direction for hours on dry land. But scientists like nephew Peter would have known nothing of ‘our’ elegant and apparently poetic unified field theory, or of how to make cheap, edible protein from atmospheric carbon dioxide and cultivated soil bacteria. It would be a good while before nuclear fusion was a commonplace, at least in Nigeria.

We discuss with our students the causes of this constancy in the language. There are various theories as to why we are at a virtual standstill. The department prefers the view that the past, in print and on the internet, has such accumulated weight that it holds our utterances steady, even as it comes close to crushing us. What has happened in English is also observed in Arabic and Chinese. That the past teaches us how to speak and write is the emphatic version of this view. In English, approximately 30,000 classics of literature, television and film press in on us, with more to be rediscovered. Vastly more numerous are the barely lesser works. In literature and the performing arts, the modes of transmission have changed, but most works are in the business of expressing or investigating the human lot, and these are just the fictional domain. There are even more classics of documentary, history, nature and science writing, biography, politics, anthropology, on and on, a bottomless well of treasures. Then all the highly informative trash, as well as diplomatic traffic, legislation, trade agreements, pornography, legal business, instruction manuals, industrial regulations and, beyond those, billions if not trillions of ordinary everyday digital personal exchanges, of fads and viral wonders, scandals and abuses and the torrent of each day’s news. It is hard now to regret that artificial intelligence did not add substantially to the pile before man-made disasters slowed its progress. The mighty past wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind and rain on limestone cliffs.

So, we know with pleasing immediacy, from routine messages of thanks to the Blundys, that the famous dinner of 2014 went well. The slow-roasted quail with ceps must have been a success. The note from Mary and Graham was more effusive than the rest. In the chilly guest room, mindful of the authentic but porous lath and plaster walls, they had spent a night of quiet bliss. Mary, telling all to her journal, wrote of ‘the slowest, most languorous and silent sex conceivable’. She had been right first time. When their eyes met, Graham had been seized by rapture at the prospect of erotic liberation. It was, he told his wife, a swooning sensation that for a few seconds had rendered him deaf to other voices in the room. He had turned to speak to Francis to tame an uncomfortable erection.

We have a general sense of topics the company discussed while they ate. Jane Kitchener wrote about it to a close friend, also a potter. The other sources are Vivien and Harriet Gage. The table was round, an encouragement to general conversation. The Olympic Games of two years before in east London still shimmered in memory. They had enjoyed seeing Queen Elizabeth II appear to leap from a helicopter, and children en masse bouncing on hospital beds. The Russian annexation of Crimea in February came up, as it had before. The view round the table was almost unanimous, as far as one can tell, with Francis dissenting and Vivien remaining silent. Crimea had always been Russian. Didn’t Pushkin go there to write? Surely, Ukraine was so vast it could afford this small triangle of land. It was hardly worth risking a Third World War to reclaim it. Francis insisted that the Russians should be forced to withdraw, otherwise they would be tempted to greater aggression. Eight years later, when Russia invaded Ukraine and a new chapter in European history began, the record shows that the other guests forgot their earlier views.

Just before they sat down to dinner, the anxious parents had phoned the babysitter again. All was well. From there, the conversation, like most, proceeded by a process of free association. After Todd, then child-raising and tiredness. Then tiredness and forgetfulness. Someone reminded the table of how, not long ago, the prime minister, a Mr Cameron, had accidentally left his eight-year-old daughter behind in a pub. Emerging from him, as from a matryoshka doll, a French president, M. Hollande, unpopular even among his supporters within weeks of being elected. That was how it once was for the leader of a country that stood in constant readiness to storm the Bastille. From a foreign leader to an embassy, the Ecuadorian one in London, which had granted asylum to Julian Assange, an Australian who had leaked sensitive information online. A difficult man by all accounts, but his threatened extradition raised important issues of press freedom. Surely, Harry Kitchener said, he must be protected from a lifetime’s solitary confinement in an American prison, a cruel and unusual punishment.

Francis typically dominated the table talk, but tonight, after the Crimea discussion, he was subdued. He was surprised how nervous he was. ‘I kept in my sightline the dining-room clock. Just visible behind it was one end of the scroll. Whenever I looked, I felt my stomach tightening.’ He was impressed by what he had achieved with his Corona, but its importance was also a burden. Would it, could it be understood? He thought ‘it might need footnotes, sensible, helpful ones, unlike Eliot’s at the end of The Waste Land ’. He believed that this work equalled or surpassed Eliot’s poem, and that was why he was so jittery. In the history of poetry, it could be a turning point. On first hearing, no one apart from Vivien and Harry would grasp his Corona’s significance.

The conversation was interrupted by Harry Kitchener tapping the stem of his wine glass with his knife. He would make a short speech before proposing a toast, this time to Francis, who was to read a birthday poem. Harry had been described in a newspaper as ‘the taste-making editor-dandy’. This probably meant no more than that he dressed well and, for a poetry editor, drove an expensive car. It was general knowledge that he was consistently unfaithful in his marriage. It was a mystery, so the gossip ran, that Jane put up with him so calmly. But she had thrown him out more than once. She took him back, it was assumed, because she wanted to keep the family together for the sake of their three children. Harry promoted his brother-in-law’s poetry, but he was jealous of him too. The word was that the editor was always competing with his poet and always losing.

The evening presented a difficulty for Harry. For the past two years, he and Francis had been talking about the biography Harry would write. He had recently decided he ‘was not the man for this’, and he had not yet told Francis. There was bound to be an unpleasant scene. His guilt might explain why his speech was, in Vivien’s record, ‘over the top, fulsome to the point of satire’.

In an email to a friend, Harry described how uneasy he felt as the company fell silent and looked at him with pleased expectation. The Kitchener papers are with the University of Ardnamurchan at Roshven in north-west Scotland. These days, it is a long and possibly dangerous journey and as far as I know, no English Blundy scholars have made it up there. Beyond the references he made in emails, we have no further access to Harry’s thoughts about his speech or the poem that followed. It is possible that, as a dedicated editor, Harry spoke in good faith, or self-serving pride in ‘his’ author. According to Vivien, he described Francis as the best poet now writing in English … standing at the summit of a great humanist tradition … lyrical intensity, boundless irreverence, delightful humour … returning poetry to the rhythms of everyday speech while achieving extraordinary density of meaning … above all, the indispensable seer for our times who—

Suddenly, with a loud scrape of his chair, Blundy was on his feet and trembling, not in anger but excitement. His face was flushed. He stretched out a hand to prevent his friend from saying more.

‘That’s it. Thank you, Harry. But enough, enough! The evening is for Vivien.’

He strode to the marble mantelpiece and pulled out the scroll from behind the clock. He stood close to where Vivien sat. He gasped in irritation as he fumbled with the knotted ribbon. At last, he unrolled the vellum. He took deep slow breaths while he pulled his glasses from the breast pocket of his shirt, then he quickly scanned the first lines and closed his eyes. Calmer now, and looking round at them with a thin, distant smile, he began to read.