What We Can Know - 8

T he varieties of silence are as numerous as those of speech or thought. Or of listening. After Francis had read the last word of the final line of the final sonnet of his Corona, there were ten distinct silences around the table. The poet’s was the simplest. Francis reported in his journal ‘a return to earth, to the present, to the self I had forgotten for twenty minutes’. He experienced a pleasant sensation of emptiness and exhaustion. He had nothing more to say, and he did not wish to hear anyone else. The matter was complete. While the room remained silent, he rolled up the vellum, looped the ribbon around and secured it with two neat bows. He may have had in mind lines from his early poem about a garrotting in the Spanish Civil War: ‘with the transferred competence / of lifelong shoelace-tying …’ He stepped around his wife’s chair, stooped to kiss her and presented his gift.

She pressed it against her and whispered to him, ‘Thank you. Thank you darling.’

As Francis walked stiffly towards his seat – he had a glass of champagne in mind – there was a sound, a suppressed sob. It came from Harriet as she lifted her hand from her wet face, half smiled at the others and began timidly to clap. With relief, the rest joined in, including Vivien, and the applause grew louder and there were murmurs of ‘terrific’ and ‘beautiful’. Easier to applaud than to attempt something apt. To drink as they had, then listen to fifteen sonnets in Blundy’s condensed style was a cruel demand. Helpless daydreaming was inevitable. But the sense of a serious historic occasion was not diminished. Everyone loved the poem. Much of what follows is drawn from journals, emails, various social media, a handful of letters and some reasoned supposition.

Harry Kitchener stood to lift the magnum and fill the poet’s glass and went round the table. When all glasses were filled, Francis proposed a toast to Vivien. Then Harry proposed a toast to Francis and the Corona. The silence, instantly forgotten, had lasted as long as thirty seconds, according to an email Vivien wrote to her sister. Loudly toasting the poem – only Vivien and Harry knew it as a corona – was all anyone could think of. What had brought Harriet to tears, as she explained later to Chris as they headed home to relieve the babysitter, was the gorgeous music of the words and the evocation of companionable love, and love of teeming nature. ‘So warm,’ she said as she drove, ‘so luscious and tender and wise. And so threatened with death. I felt it pouring all over me and I wanted to shout for joy and terror all at once. When it ended, I had to keep my big mouth shut.’

Chris nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’ Poetry had a lowering effect on him. Classical music too. Their cultural weight and solemnity and self-importance oppressed him. He suspected that people were subtly bullied into faking appreciation in order not to appear uneducated fools. Long ago he had proposed this to Harriet. She was so dismissive and irritated that he never mentioned it again. Among the craftsmen and women, marquee erectors and roadies he worked with, string quartets and sonnet sequences never came up. Stoically, he kept his suspicions to himself. But during the reading, his attention was briefly held by the poet’s word ‘proscenium’. It set Chris wondering how he would organise the transportation of some scenery flats from a children’s theatre in east Oxford to a similar theatre outside Carlisle. It was a cost and logistical problem which he was determined to solve. Neither theatre had any money. The van he could get for almost nothing was too small for the flats. He could call in a favour and borrow a truck and drive it up north himself. He would pay for the petrol too. He knew that Harriet would approve. He did not notice the recitation ending or the silence that followed. What brought him back to the room was Harriet’s little sob. He was happy to join in the applause and was the first to murmur ‘beautiful’.

Graham Sheldrake had remained focussed for the first few minutes. He felt obliged as a house guest to give his host his full attention. Or the appearance of it. At the emergence of a rotund father-figure and then a certain significant phrase, something about a fracture, he started to wander. A crack now lay across his existence. If the marriage was over … or was it? Untracked minutes later he forced himself back and discovered he was lost. Francis was outside a church porch, when not long before, he had been contemplating a swim in a river with Vivien, if it was her. So … in which case, if the marriage was over, he was under no obligation to resume with June. She probably would not want him … manager at the golf club, a wonderful woman, but sort of … and Mary herself might like some kind of informal, occasional … By the fire it had been hard to read her mood.

He came back at last to the dining table, into an alarming silence. It was over and they were sitting there like mannequins. For such a worldly, easy-living man, he had a refined sense of social obligation. He thought someone ought to say something, for the sake of an old friend. He and Vivien had gone to such trouble. The hospitality, as always, was splendid, and they were the only ones staying over. In desperation, Graham was close to saying he liked the bit about the church. But it may have been a house. Or a pub. There was also that crack, but in what? Not in a marriage. It might have been between sickness and health, or youth and age. When lovely Harriet started the applause, he could have leaned across the table to kiss her.

Many years before, Tony Spufford had published a guide to the wildflowers of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It was long out of print. The illustrations, though exquisite, were line drawings. In the bookshops there were now colourful books on the same subject at half the price. His was more scholarly, and botanists and Shakespeareans preferred his edition, but that made little difference to sales. In the Oxford house he shared with John, there were still a dozen copies on the shelves and Tony sometimes gave one, specially dedicated, to a botany colleague he admired. When Francis spoke of honeysuckle in his second sonnet, Tony thought of Shakespeare’s ‘over-canopied with luscious woodbine’ and Clifton Darke’s drawing. And then, as more meadow, woodland and riverbank plants appeared in the poem, some with beautiful and accurate descriptions, the professor suddenly remembered – Francis knew nothing about plants. Tony was a practised reader and knew to separate the implied narrator from the poet. Sometimes they overlapped and parted in the same poem, but could they diverge so wildly throughout and be emotionally honest? Once, in Tony’s presence, Francis had called a dandelion a but-tercup. When corrected he had muttered, ‘Same difference.’ When Vivien was away, the houseplants suffered. Some withered and died.

It was a trick then, impressive, probably legitimate. The poet wore a gorgeous mask. His apparent expertise was easily and rhythmically born, lightly folded into the lines with close observation and melodic grace. There was a clumsily symbolic Lord of Nature figure, set for destruction, but otherwise these were songs of seductive complicity. But Tony could not free himself from an ungenerous thought. This was fraudulent, it was fakery. Francis had no love for the things his poem seemed to love. Or was this an aspect of the murderous destruction that seemed to permeate the poem? The professor knew all the flowers of the poem’s first five sonnets, and he could never have conjured them so vividly. The poetry would have been easier to dismiss had there been coldness in Blundy’s pretence, but it was fondly intimate with the living fabric. Better not to have known the poet personally. Like drifting clouds over a full moon, Tony’s musings occluded sonnets six to fourteen. He listened to the fifteenth but could not be moved. When it ended, he sat in silence with the rest. The poem was accomplished, he was sure, but he could not eliminate a thread of dark feeling which he identified, as the applause began, as contempt. He clapped all the harder.

As soon as her brother began his reading and the social moment was in temporary suspension, Jane Kitchener tumbled inwards into self-reproach complicated by familiar sibling resentment. It was bad enough to have seen Mary drop the salad bowl she had made for Francis and Vivien, but her own shouted expletive shamed her. She knew that in this vaguely bohemian milieu no one minded, but she minded, and she thought her brother did too.

But Jane had deeper reasons for shame. She and her brother had a strict upbringing by the standards of the time. Their parents were observant High Anglicans. Francis, two years older, shrugged off the wasted hours of Sunday school and extra Bible classes more easily than Jane. In her mid-teens she had turned her back on the entirety of her parents’ beliefs, but by late middle age had come to accept that she was shaped by her past and could do nothing about it. This was who she was. She did not believe, but she could not bear to read or listen to atheists, and crude expressions made her wince.

Jane entered the well-trodden labyrinth of fondness and resentment towards her brother, one she could never escape. The azure bowl she had made for him had been one of her best. It gleamed. Its faint lack of symmetry was its charm, its human touch. When she presented it before the wedding, he did not acknowledge it. Their childhoods together had been corrupted by imbalance. She had helped him with all that interested him – joining in to build his ‘camps’, collecting stones for his deafening polisher, pretending to be passionate about his favourite football team. But nothing of hers – music, running, clay modelling, wood carving – featured for him. He could not see what she did, or what she did with and for him. Even books, once her passion, were his in adult life. He had stolen them from her.

That she rejoiced in his talent and success was a continuation of their childhood pattern. He had never visited her studio, never asked about her work, did not read the article she sent him from a local paper about her exhibition. When Francis came to dinner, it was to talk to Harry about Francis’s work. She resented being introduced to people as Francis Blundy’s sister. Now Jane was expected to listen awestruck to his latest and join the adulation. This was the self-denying arrangement fixed in place since she was five years old.

She knew herself well. Her grudges surfaced because she had no choice – she loved her brother and longed for him to return her love. She had spoken to Harry about her feelings. He pretended not to understand. ‘Just tell him how you feel!’ But he quietly worshipped and resented Francis too.

At the dining table she drifted back into the reading. Unaccountably, an old man was lying face down in lush wet grass at the foot of a waterfall or was it a flight of stone steps? Jane was of a mind to stage her own form of rebellion. At last, the poem ended. During the silence she was determined not to speak. When Harry proposed a toast to Francis, she raised her glass to her lips, but she did not drink.

Francis was on his first sonnet and John Bale was thinking again about the snake and how touched he had been by the elderly couple who brought it to his practice at the end of a working day. They knew it was a grass snake and were not afraid to handle it. But when the woman went to lift it out of its cardboard box, John put his hand on hers to dissuade her. It was a spinal injury. It would be hazardous to move the patient. Though the creature was conscious, he thought that it would die and that he should wait for the couple to leave before putting it down. But as they said goodbye, they promised to be back the next day to see how their snake was doing. Such faith in him was touching. He cut away the sides of the box – he was unable to afford an assistant yet – and carried the snake on its cardboard tray into the operating theatre. It was a large barred grass snake, over three feet long, probably a female. The distinctive black and yellow collar and the black bars along its flanks were vivid under the theatre lights. Her eyes, black encircled by orange, seemed to be on him as he made his first inspection. The damage was in two places, both, fortunately, towards the tail, and not as bad as it looked. A bike, not a car. Snakes have an impressive capacity for axonal regrowth and neurogenesis from special cells in their spines. The immune system would kick the process into action. John administered an anaesthetic and sedative, phoned Tony to tell him he would be late home, scrubbed up and set to work with special cement, repairing what he could of the broken, feathery bones of the vertebrae, then stitching the wounds.

He worked for two hours, seized by a familiar passion, when rescuing a particular animal stood in for all that was important in his life: keeping his struggling practice together, maintaining his loving relationship with Tony – the best thing that had ever happened to him – and doing his best for his younger brother, who suffered from MS. The three elements of his existence were grafted into the body of a serpent, and therefore she had to be returned to full health. It drove him on, this mode of metaphorical thinking – and it often worked. The couple, Sam and Jackie Bryant, came the next day to check, and again a week later to take the patient home in a grass-lined aquarium, into their convalescent care. He wrote out instructions on diet and the rest. Earthworms would have to do. A month later they were back and together, vet and clients, drove after work to Wytham woods. He chose a quiet corner away from the main tracks, and not far from a pond. For ten minutes the snake lay still before sliding slowly into the undergrowth. When its tail vanished at last, the trio gave a cheer. On the way back, they stopped at a Thameside pub, the Trout, for a celebratory beer.

During drinks before dinner, it had bothered John when everyone had chuckled at the idea of his performing surgery on a snake. Reptiles had as good a claim on health as people did. When the poem ended and Francis was rolling up and securing the scroll, John returned to the couple, Sam and Jackie. He was a retired train driver, she a retired dental nurse. Now they volunteered a day a week at the practice. They fed the inpatient animals, tidied, cleaned, cut the grass and weeded the beds in the front garden. He and they had shared an intense concern, and it bound them. There was a lesson in this. If you could care for a damaged creature as biologically remote from you as a snake, then other closer human matters would fall into place. Startled by a sound, John joined in the applause.

As Francis reached the end of his third sonnet, Mary Sheldrake, who had immediately thrilled to the poem, reflected as she had before, that poetry, not the novel, was literature’s indispensable form. The spoken or written poem was as old as literature, perhaps as old as speech, with roots in song, in the rhythms of daily life and the body’s pulse, in the hunger to catch the passing moment and to glorify love. It was not a generous concession she was making, but an uneasy one. Poetry, it was said, was the senior service. She had sat with novelists on onstage panels and contributed to the usual extravagant claims for her art, but it was the poets who made the book of life. The novel was the froth of recent centuries. It had developed to meet the needs of intelligent, privileged women excluded from formal education and meaningful work. Indeed, ‘work’ was the word Jane Austen and others used to describe womanly hours of incessant and pointless embroidery as they chatted about their neighbours. And so, Mary insisted, the novel grew into the paradigm of higher gossip. Love, marriage, adultery, contested wills – the stuff of neighbourly fascination. It took modernism to shake the novel up (Mary had no regard for Tolstoy or George Eliot) and offer it higher aspirations and bolder claims.

Such thoughts often led Mary to turn on herself. She had crouched, but so gainfully, in modernism’s long shadow, riding on the waves of Virginia Woolf’s powerful wake. The Sheldrake style was so impenetrably bland that readers, academics included, mistook it for the hard gleam of postmodern profundity. Lulled by her public reception, she thoughtlessly deployed clichés, which were eagerly read through the prism of irony. The prose was empty of simile, metaphor or any extravagance of invention. She had turned her lack of a visual sense into a declared aesthetic. Her characters were not short of, but beyond, emotional complexity, their diction weirdly wooden, their motivation, or lack of it, unexplained. Her landscapes and urban settings were featureless. Taking no risks, she suspended her fictions above place and time, immune to any reasonable measure of their truth, sealed off against the mess of daily life.

She had suffered before from moments of self-loathing such as this one (Francis was on his ninth sonnet. A strange man resembling Falstaff had appeared) but she had pressed on with her writing as usual. She couldn’t go on, but she went on. Who wouldn’t? She was accepted as having written one masterpiece after another. The state would soon honour her as a dame. ‘The sunshine of critical reception and readers’ applause warm her fraudulent heart,’ she wrote of herself in a notebook, in a style not her own. She had thought she couldn’t change, that she didn’t dare, but now she was going to. The poet’s lines were flashing by her, but one sensual aside caught her attention. On a hot day, the couple, obviously Francis and Vivien, step out of the house barefoot onto the terrace to cross the lawn and respond keenly to the coolness of summer grass on their soles after the warmth of York stone. Mary was impressed by the rich invocation of a tactile and sensuous moment.

As Francis read, her admiration swelled. She would abandon the arid geometry of her fiction. The poet was reminding her, she wrote later, how good writing could be. She wanted his vitality and bright invention, but the spur was not only aesthetic. The recent turmoil, the thrill of momentous rupture, of breaking with Graham while wanting him, the possibilities of change and freedom in her life contributed to a sensation that rose through her, from the perineum to wherever in her brain these resolutions were located, a delicious, mad, tingling certitude. Later, at home, a sceptical inner voice told her that all she had in mind was an affair with this or that person, including her husband, and a possible furtive embrace with the amoral, easy-living ways of conventional fictional realism. Absolutely no need to have involved her perineum.

After Harry Kitchener’s speech in praise of Francis had been forcefully interrupted by him, there was nothing for Harry to do but relax and sip the wine John and Tony had brought and watch as his brother-in-law fumbled with the tube, or whatever it was he had taken from behind the dining-room clock. There was a pencil and notebook by his glass. He liked to keep up with Blundy’s work, but Harry was clearer than ever – he was pulling out of the biography. Francis was too controlling. He would want to see drafts of every chapter. The past would have to be sanitised. The slightest reservation about his work enraged him. It was madness to have considered signing up to years of trouble that was bound to spread through the family. Harry disliked confrontations. There would be an unpleasant scene, but he had his own ambitions and could hardly be expected to commit to a biography simply to avoid his brother-in-law’s fury.

He recognised the corona form, having tried long ago to write one himself in seven stanzas. He had given up. We know his reactions from the letter, not an email, he wrote to Francis five days later. It survives in the Blundy archive. Harry’s suave ironies drop away in favour of overstated praise. Pulling out of the biography might be rendered a little less stormy.

The opening sonnet, Kitchener announced, rings out like ‘an Angelus bell’, a summons to total concentration. It has a magnificent, assured tone of triumph – ‘like the poker player behind his castle of chips, revealing at the end of play his royal flush’. Here, it is a set of promises: ‘memory, mortality, the elusive nature of time, and of poetry itself. You caught it, Francis – the natural world in the symbol of a fertility figure. We love him even as we destroy him. Beauty and murder.’ The assurances of religion are evoked, then fondly dismissed. Consciously, but fleetingly, ‘you summon your spirit companions – the great poets, Donne and Herbert, Wordsworth and Keats, old hats made new’, and then ‘your bow to Wallace Stevens and “Credences of Summer”. I’ve never forgotten how we used to quote it … “The physical pine, the metaphysical pine […] Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.”’ Glancing but generous references. It wouldn’t matter if other readers could not place them. ‘The sinewy disruptions of the poem’s iambic tread are Shakespearean, the Shakespeare of his late phase, when he was about to drown his book’, and in all the poem’s reflections, in the ‘hallucinatory splendour of lush nature observed in miniature’, there’s the ‘same valedictory quality, a farewell, but with regret and fondness – love for everything that lives, the ruin we inflict, as if we’re watching the slow death of an old friend’.

Further on in this long letter Harry wrote, ‘Francis, it’s a glorious love poem, a hymn to Vivien.’ How striking, Harry wrote, working from memory or his notes, were the lines evoking a swim the couple take together in a river, through a gorge. Could it be the River Wye before it joins the Severn, he wondered, or in France where they went once, the Tarn or the Hérault? Then he was ‘entranced’ by the lovers in the porch of a rural English church, about to be married, and no one there but the vicar, whose words from the King James Bible ‘they love but do not own’. Harry had a sense of a ‘face drifting upwards, formed from the dust of a billion torn petals. A persecuted man, the figure of Jesus perhaps, is being sacrificed.’

Then the couple as they grow older, love altered but still love in the face of an end from which they will not avert their gaze. ‘They must accept what Eliot called the gifts reserved for age .’ Fifteen sonnets, their ornate technical demands ‘breezily met’, and ‘the last sonnet so magnificently and coherently summoning the rest, truly your crown’. In the gathering momentum of the poem’s ending, Francis summoned not only Eliot but the grandeur of landscape from Wordsworth’s The Prelude and MacCaig’s songs to the Flow Country, both threatened, as if by Plath’s lyrical despair. ‘Your corona is a monument to a threatened biological civilisation. It’s not only the poem’s brilliance that strikes me, but its greatness.’

On the same day that he wrote his letter, Harry started an email which he did not complete or send. He stored the message in his drafts and must have forgotten it was there. ‘In love? We must be mad. But I don’t think we’. No salutation, no addressee.