The story “The Poet”2 is of particular interest because of our contemporary fascination with appropriations. In addition, it reads like a prefiguration of an incident in Vita’s own life.
In February of 1949, just before leaving for Spain, Vita sent to the Poetry Review a poem called “The Novice to her Lover”; the poem was published in the June/July issue. Then in November, she recommended Poems 1935–48, by Clifford Dyment, for the King’s Medal for Poetry, and therein she found a poem very like her own. It may be that she had read his poem, “St. Augustine at 32,” previously in 1934, in St. Martin’s magazine, and she certainly had read it later, in 1944, when he had included it in his book The Axe in the Wood, for she commented on it then approvingly. John Gawsworth, the editor of the Poetry Review, mentioned this to the New Statesman. They followed up on the peculiar incident, much to Vita’s distress: this “odd story,” she called it. Clifford Dyment’s poem and hers appear almost identical except that, in Vita’s poem, a nun is writing rather than a monk. There was consternation on both sides, quite understandably, and the story becomes all the more interesting in considering the gender shift within “The Poet.” In any case, it reads like a forewarning of how she was likely to absorb the words of another poet unconsciously.3
The Dyment affair seemed very mysterious to Vita, who wanted to give it a romantic twist, and it is of no less interest to the contemporary reader, whatever explanation can be given.
“THE POET”
I first saw him sitting at a little table outside a cafe in Italy. He was alone, and I knew him instantly for a poet by his wild eyes, his tumbled hair, his sensitive nostrils, and his weak but beautiful mouth. He wore a faded blue shirt and a pair of blue linen trousers, with his bare feet thrust into heelless espadrilles. At the moment when my eyes first fell upon him he was gazing sorrowfully into a glass of beer. I imagined that in those translucent amber depths he sought, perhaps, some simile for a mermaid’s hair—the cafe was situated on the shores of the Mediterranean—but after a prolonged contemplation he beckoned to the waiter and said in Italian: “There’s a fly in this beer. Take it away.”
I was disappointed. I had been so certain he was a poet and that he was English. His appearance was so romantic, the lonely fishing village was so romantic, too: just the place for a poet, with its little harbour and the painted boats swaying softly on the dark green water, and the Mediterranean beyond, and the fishermen’s houses in a semicircle, the colour of tea roses and tulips, and the nets hung out to dry, and the lovely hills rising behind, silvery with the olive trees. Now it seemed that he was a native, a native, a peasant perhaps, come down from the hills to catch the evening coolness of the port and to drink his glass before climbing back to bed: a native, a peasant, unlettered, and a materialist into the bargain. As I watched him, he rose, and slouching away he vanished through a little green door into a neighbouring house. I heard him coughing as he went.
On the following evening I saw him again in the same place. His glass of beer stood beside him, his elbow was propped on the table, his cheek was propped on his hand, and he was reading in a small book bound in calf, the pages slightly foxed. I passed behind him and looked over his shoulder. He was reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, in a seventeenth-century edition. My spirits revived. I felt that my assumption had been justified.
As I sat down at another table and ordered my vermouth and seltz[er], unfolding my Daily Mail meanwhile rather ostentatiously, I felt rather than saw that he had raised his head and was glancing in my direction. I bided my time, paying no attention. Presently I heard, as I had known I would hear, the scraping of his chair on the tiled floor. He was edging himself towards me. He wanted to enter into conversation. I cursed myself for a brute as I heard his first apologetic cough develop into a terrible, a heartrending attack of coughing. I flung my Daily Mail aside, and hastily poured him out a glass of water. “By God, you’re ill,” I said.
He put his handkerchief to his lips and brought it away stained with red. “Ill?” he said, and stretched out a shaking hand. “There’s death in that hand,” he said with a twisted smile.
That jarred me. I had dramatized him to myself, heaven knows, but that he should dramatize himself was more than I could bear. I was divided between distress at his ill-health and disgust at his exploitation of it. In consequence I spoke rather briskly, asking him what ailed him—though it was clear enough.
He was ready to talk. He hadn’t spoken his own language for three months, he told me. He had come to Santa Caterina to die. He thought it couldn’t be long now, but he didn’t mind: he didn’t care for life, so long as it gave him time to accomplish that which he must accomplish. He thought he had done his best by now and was quite ready to go.
And what, I asked, was he so anxious to accomplish?
“I write poetry,” he said, quite simply this time.
He was twenty-five years of age, he told me, and his name was Nicholas Lambarde. That seemed to me a good name for an English poet, in the tradition of Kit Marlowe, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and the rest. English poets had nearly always been endowed with good names, and Nicholas Lambarde might figure as honestly in an alphabetical index as the others. But, although I keep an eye on poetry, I had never heard of him. A mere name was not enough to make me take him on trust. What poetry, I asked, had he written? Had any of it been published?
No, he said, he had never bothered about publication. He cared nothing about contemporary fame. Posterity was the only thing that counted, and about posterity he had no doubt at all. He began then to talk of his poetry, dashing his hands through his hair; he talked extravagantly, lyrically; but somehow—although I am skeptical, I think, by nature, and not readily impressed—I couldn’t feel that he was boasting in a void, or that the claims he made were in any way in excess of their justification. I couldn’t explain to myself why he thus immediately convinced me. Perhaps his very scorn for present fame did its part, a scorn so rare and so manifestly genuine. At any rate, when he told me that he had that morning written a real poem, a true contribution to English literature, I believed him. And, in a way, as my story will show, I was right. He had.
He held very definite and vigorous views about poetry. He couldn’t abide the modem school of défaitisme and despair. He couldn’t feel—dying man though he was—that life was little more than the sloughed skin of a snake, or a rustle of dry leaves, or a parched land without water, or whatever the metaphor might be. Nor did he feel that poetry was the proper vehicle for metaphysics, any more than fiction was the proper vehicle for propaganda, sexual or sociological. He held that poetry ought to spring from its own soil and break freely into leaves, like a tree, with a suggestion of sky above and of roots beneath, drinking deeply in the earth. He believed profoundly in the technique of the craft, and held that the first use of technique was to suggest, by association, far greater riches than were actually stated by the words. In fact, rapturously though he expressed himself, he displayed a considered judgment and talked a great deal of sense.
He never read poetry nowadays, he said, for fear of being influenced, though, of course, he added, he had read through the whole of English literature in his early youth.
Every now and then he broke off to cough and to dab his handkerchief against his mouth.
Well, I stayed on at Santa Caterina. Nicholas Lambarde, invisible in the daytime, appeared regularly every evening at the café, ordered his glass of beer, joined me at my table, and talked poetry to me, while the stars came out, and the lights of the harbour dropped their plummets into the water. I watched him growing a little paler, a little thinner every day. His fits of coughing became more frequent and more violent. Still, when I exhorted him, he impatiently brushed aside my importunity and went on with what he was saying. The only important thing in the world to him was poetry. Death did not matter, health did not matter, nor time, nor fame, nor money: I never met anyone who lived so intensely or so continuously the life of the spirit. I can see him now, with his burning eyes, his unshaven chin cupped in his hands, and the stained handkerchief crumpled between his fingers, as he leant across the table, talking, talking.
One evening he said that he would like to ask me a favour. He had no friends and no relations, he said, and the only thing that bothered him was the disposal of his manuscripts after he was dead. He had thought of consigning them all to a literary agency, but that seemed an insecure thing to do, for who could guarantee that any literary agency would find him a publisher? Poetry did not pay—he knew that—and he feared that the eventual fate of his poems might be the waste-paper basket. On the one hand, you see, he was curiously sane. On the other, he was absolutely confident that in, say, a hundred years’ time he would be recognized as the head of English song. He made a possible exception in favour of Shakespeare, but admitted no other rivals. If, that is to say, he had his chance, and that must be my business. In short, he asked me to act as his literary executor.
Of course, I accepted. No one could have refused him, and I was, as you may imagine, consumed with the desire to read these poems of which I had heard so much. Often though I urged him, he would never show me a line, but putting on an expression at once arrogant and secretive, would reply: “All in good time! You’ll see, you’ll see.”
It was on a morning in early May that a fisher boy came breathlessly to find me, saying that the Englishman had died during the night: would I please come at once? I had never before penetrated into Lambarde’s lodging, and it was with an uncomfortable sense of intrusion that I mounted the rickety stairs and stood upon the threshold of his room. I had not expected to find him surrounded by many possessions, but neither had I been prepared for such utter barrenness and poverty. He himself lay upon, not in, the bed, dressed as usual in his faded shirt and trousers, as though he had flung himself down in the last fatal access of coughing—for the sheets and counterpane were stained with a deeper flood than ever had been stained his pitiable handkerchief. One glance round gave me the complete inventory of the room. A pair of brushes, a comb, a razor; a bunch of wild jonquils stuck in a bottle, some shoes, a few books, mostly tattered. That was all I could see. But there were papers everywhere strewn over the bed, over the one table, and even over the floor—separate sheets of foolscap, some closely covered, some scrawled with but a single line, tossed aside, blown by the breeze into some neglected corner. His landlady, who had followed me upstairs, doubtless thought that she read criticism in my glance.
He would never allow her to tidy, she said; sometimes for weeks together he had locked the door and she had been unable to enter his room; and once, when she had ventured to pick up some of his papers and place them on the table, he had flown into the most terrible rage, so that she thought he would expire on the spot. It was comprehensible, she said, with the Latin peasant’s understanding of the artist: the poor young man was a poet, and poets were cursed with that kind of temperament; one could not expect a stag to browse mildly like a cow. And she looked at him, lying upon the bed, with a compassion that forgave him all his trespasses.
But now he could prevent nobody from picking up his papers and arranging them on the table. It was, indeed, precisely what he had asked me to do, yet I did it with a sense of guilt, induced, no doubt, by my own knowledge of my own curiosity. Outwardly I was executing the wishes of a dead compatriot: in reality, I was gratifying the meanest of our instincts. Yet why should I blacken myself unduly? I love letters, I respect genius; I had lent a sympathetic ear to an unknown poet for weeks past; I had upset all my plans on his account. It was only fair that I should have my reward.
And yet, I swear, it wasn’t only my reward that I thought of—the reward of discovering a new master of English verse. I honestly wanted to do my best by that proud, lonely, flaming creature who had lived for nothing but his art.
I persuaded the good wife to leave me, and, alone with the dead man, I fell to my task. You must believe me when I say that I have seldom been more excited. At first I was puzzled, for many of the writings were so exceedingly fragmentary; there were scraps of scenes from plays, whose characters bore names in the Elizabethan tradition—Baldassare, Mercurio, and the like; there were a few verses of what appeared to be a ballad; there were some ribald addresses to Chloe and Dorinda; there was the beginning of a contemplative poem on solitude. I fancied from all these that he had been practising his hand at the art of parody, for he had hit off the Elizabethan manner exactly, and the manner of the ballads, and of the Restoration, and of the early nineteenth century. Whatever else he had been, he was certainly a skilful parodist; I was sure that I had read something very like his play-scenes in some minor work of Kyd or Shirley, I couldn’t remember which. But I turned over his poor papers impatiently, in the hope of coming on one of those poems of which he had said to me, “Lord! I’m tired, but I did something good today, something really first class. I’m pleased.”
And I found them. I found the really first-class things. He was quite right: they really were first class. He had taken an enormous amount of trouble, putting his pencil through word after word, until he got exactly the word he wanted. That was the extraordinary thing: the amount of trouble he had taken in his search for perfection, carving each phrase laboriously from his brain, working it out like a puzzle; I could imagine him sitting there at that same table, concentrated, rapt, dissatisfied at first, and finally triumphant; I could imagine him springing up at last with a cry of triumph and pacing about the room declaiming the magnificent stanzas to himself. It had been a terrific effort, but he had always got it right in the end.
One of his first drafts ran thus:
Fair star! I would I were as faithful as thou art,
Not in sole glory piercing through the night,
But watching with unsleeping lids apart
eremite
The restless ocean at its patient task
Of slow erosion round earth’s aged shores.
The pencil had been dashed through the last two lines, and he had substituted with scarcely a check:
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.
Yes, I thought, no wonder he was pleased with that; no wonder he had come down to the café to tell me had had done something really good!
And there were other passages which had worried him considerably:
But after me I seem to hear
The wheels of Time near
A fiery spirit? bright and swift
The Earth like Danae
Like Danae the Earth
Under the stars the Earth like Danae lies.
But he had got that right, too, nearly the whole of it; except one line, for which he had left a blank.
I sat back and stared at his papers. What had gone wrong in that poor muddled brain? What fantastic trick had memory played upon him? I remembered how he had told me that he had quite given up reading the poets now, “for fear of being influenced,” though he had read them extensively as a boy. Influenced, indeed! the irony of it!
And yet, you know, I still maintain that a poet was lost in him. I found among his papers one sonnet, which, with the obvious though partial exception of the first line, I have so far been unable to trace to anybody else. It is not the kind of poetry which brought him downstairs to tell me that he had done something “really good”; it is, indeed, only a sonnet of a type which could be turned out in dozens by any competent rhymester, soaked in the conventions of English literature; the octet may pass muster, but the sextet is poor, as though scribbled down in a hurry; and probably I exaggerate the merit of the whole, being privy to the absolute truth which inspired it; but such as it is, it may very well stand as his epitaph:
When I am gone, say only this of me:
He scorned the laurels and the praise of men,
Alien to fortune and to fame; but then
Add this: he plunged with Thetis in the sea;
Lay naked with Diana in the shade
He knew what paths the wandering planets drew;
He heard the music of the winds; he knew
What songs the sirens sang; Arion played.
Say this; no more; but when the shadows lengthen
Across the greensward of your cloistered turf,
Remember one who felt his sinews strengthen
And tuned his hearing by the line of surf.
One who, too proud, passed ease and comfort by,
But learned from Rome and Hesiod how to die.