Something unexpected in an English churchyard: ‘A poet is born not made.’ Translated tag from the Latin poet Horace. Words cut by shallow strokes into John Clare's weathered tomb-lid: BORN NOT MAD. The E being lost, lichen-blotted. Pinkish-grey stone acts like an ornamental stopper on a perfume bottle. No fuss, no rhetoric. A slimline burial. The remains of a dead poet, his venom neutralised, posted into the ground like a tax return. Other Clares (not his wife or children) are scattered around, lolling with Stanley Spencer abandon, blithely awaiting the day of judgement. Open for inspection. The south-east corner of the burial ground of St Botolph's Church, Helpston. Helpston-next-to-Heaven. Next to nothing. These days, if you commission the monumental mason in Crow-land, it will cost you £1 a letter. A good way to learn concision. E is the missing letter from the name of the village in which Clare was born: Helpstone, removed from Northamptonshire and given to the Soke of Peterborough. Made, mad. Helpstone, Helpston.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN CLARE
THE NORTHAMPTONSHIRE PEASANT POET
BORN JULY 13 1793 DIED MAY 20 1864
Peasants were already, post enclosure, a diminishing resource. As were poets after the boom years of those death-courting Romantics. Keats, Shelley, Byron: all gone between 1821–4. Coughing, spitting blood, bitten by foreign bugs. Drowning in salt, drowning in earth. The grim reaper scoured the Mediterranean, the Grave Tour. Lay down your markers, boys, wherever you find a flat surface.
Body brought back from Northampton by railway, the only journey Clare ever took in such comfort. In 1864 there was a functioning station in Helpston, opening the village to the wider world, making it ready to receive the remains of this exiled native. (He was laid out, overnight, at the Exeter Arms. And would have enjoyed that, a final jolly: suffering the foolish babble of the clowns, his neighbours. Clare's face was visible to the curious, a rosy death mask. Respects paid through glass. Pub breath clouding the porthole, the small Nautilus window in his oak submersible.)
Years before, in the fields, he had seen men out by Royce wood with poles, chains, measuring instruments, surveying his secret country for the coming railway. This island, edged against water, the huge skies of the Fens, was about to be breached. Its integrity ruptured: wetlands drained, open fields organised into new geometries – which called for new roads (Helpston to Glinton), for iron ladders to let the world in. The hidden places among woods and copses and beneath bridges, the trees into which he climbed, would no longer be secure.
There is no advantage in any man authoring his own life, predicting his future; it has already been told, warped, misappropriated by future biographers, special-interest pleaders, eco-romantics and fellow poets. Men such as Edmund Blunden, who used the intensity and detail of Clare's verse as a way of distancing the noise of the First War. Awkward memorials in every English village. Sculpted anthologies of sentiment. All these ‘rescuers’ of reputation would fix Clare to one place on earth: Helpston. Village as eye. Farms and cottages form a cluster like a ring of covered wagons, a focal point around which open fields spread. Roads were Roman, or they were drovers' tracks, footpaths, green ways flattened by habit.
Clare tried to be the architect of his funerary monument, but it didn't happen. BORN NOT MAD. Horace revised by harsh winds, soft stone. Directing his obsequies, ahead of the event, Clare asked to be put to earth on the ‘North side of the Church yard just about the middle of the ground where the Morning and the Evening sun can linger longest on my grave’. At other times, brooding as poets will on his necessary end, he fancied the shade of a sycamore tree. That position was taken. He was interred on the south side, returned to his parents, the sympathetic claustrophobia of cottage life. Returned to a period when he read his first poems out loud and pretended that they came from printed books. Death's narrow chamber was as busy and close as the smoky birthroom at the dreamlike border of his memory.
The epitaph that Clare composed was posthumously edited (yet again) into silence: ‘HERE Rest the HOPES & Ashes of JOHN CLARE.’ No takers for that one. Forget it. ‘A poet is born not made.’ Helpston gets its retaliation in early, the triumph of environment over visionary experience. Letters cut in stone like a copyright notice.
In St Botolph's churchyard you'll discover no sorcerer's grave warmed by morning and evening sun, no comfortable sycamore, but a granite jewellery box exposed to respectful eyes; a sharply angled roof, a set of dim symmetries endstopped by triangles and matching trapezoid panels. In life as in death, Clare fell victim to self-serving Victorian patronage. Tab picked up, so it is rumoured, by Earl Fitzwilliam. The grey village of Helpston, despite the Clare memorial paid for by public subscription, the poet's grave, plaque on cottage, never became a theme park. The Soke of Peterborough is not America, not yet. There is history enough to spare without pantomiming one sorry life. Nobody has the energy to work up the franchise. Nothing disturbs that sense of torpid, Middle English amnesia, thatched lives, the slow rotation of heavenly bodies: a place where it is hard to stop yourself floating outwards towards a hazy horizon, the hum of distant traffic on the dual carriageway.
Four years after his marriage to Martha Turner, just as the world began to know him, on the cusp of fame, visits to London, interested parties arriving with unwonted gifts, Clare saw himself, as Ronald Blythe reports, ‘leaden with anxiety and thinking of death’. In his journal he issued instructions for his tomb.
I wish to have a rough unhewn stone something in the form of a mile Stone so that the playing boys may not break it in their heedless pastimes with nothing more on it then this Inscription
HERE Rest the HOPES & Ashes of JOHN CLARE I desire that no date be inserted there on as I wish to live or dye with my poems & other writings
Milestones stayed on the Great North Road, honouring the ghost walk, his true memorial, while the furniture of Clare's grave was invested with proper decorum. The peasant poet was wrapped in a paper shroud, thousands of lines of unpublished verse; hundreds of others emerged in ‘improved’ or bowdlerised revisions by well-meaning meddlers and promoters.
In 1820, on his first expedition to London, that primary disorientation, Clare did the tourist circuit and visited Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. On 13 June 1989, Ted Hughes unveiled a Clare memorial, and Ronald Blythe, President of the John Clare Society, gave an address. He said that Clare's ‘enthralment by Helpston presents the indigenous eye at its purest’. The village, a bright lens in a circuit of fields, heathland, ponds, woods, had nominated its ideal viewer, its chosen voice. ‘By his thrilling ability to see furthest when the view is parochial,’ Blythe claimed, ‘he was able to produce a range of perceptions which outstripped in their accuracy and authority all the literary attitudes to the countryside current in his day.’
The poet was the one chosen out of all past and future generations of Clares, labourers, parish clerks, railwaymen, to forge the memory system known as poetry; a refinement or written version of the folk songs his father knew and played. The gift for fiddling at wakes or weddings, for cash, was inherited from John Donald Parker, the itinerant Scotsman. And remained an important element in Clare's character, an excuse for sitting in the corner, playing for the company: rescuing songs, rather than inventing them.
The facts of such a life, exposed, teased out, become myth: a myth interwoven with the history of place. John Clare, the feebler of a pair of twins, was born in a heatwave (the weather we experienced on our walk from Epping Forest; green shade recklessly squandered for open roads and empty fields). In July 1793, the thermometer stayed in the eighties for ten or eleven days. A twin sister, Bessy, potential muse, the poet's ‘lost half’, dooms John to his quest; his guilt at surviving, at being male. Curses him with the impossible burden of explaining and justifying his presence on earth. Bessy's firmer resolution took her out early. The male twin, the survivor, fitted into a pint pot. ‘What years of sorrow I had never seen,’ Clare wrote. Wishing he had been spared that bruising passage, from salt to light.
‘A gloomy village,’ he characterised Helpston, ‘on the brink of the fens.’
Parents: illiterate ‘to the last degree’.
Cottage: a thatched loaf, close, cramped.
Father: Parker Clare, proud possessor of a first name given in memory of the absconding John Donald Parker. A bastardy without shame. ‘My father was one of fates chancelings who drop into the world without the honour of matrimony.’ The Clare grandmother, daughter of the Parish Clerk, untroubled and unhusbanded, lived to the age of eighty-six.
Mother: Ann Stimson. Eight years older than her husband, daughter of the town shepherd from Castor, Ann had four children, two living beyond infancy. Clare considered the lack of siblings, at a time when families often to fifteen were common, a blessing. More space, fewer mouths to feed: less suffering. Castor and its common land, running towards Marholm and Werrington, was another country. Six miles off.
Parker Clare laboured, peasant for hire, with a shared dwelling and shared garden (productive of Golden Russet apples). He was established in his place, status somewhere below that of ‘cottager’ (keeper of cow or pig, cultivator of vegetables). A noted local wrestler, strongman. When he began to fail, bent with rheumatism, Fenland damp eating into his bones, Lord Milton sent him to Scarborough, the Sea-Bathing Infirmary, for rest and recuperation. Trying to save on expenses, Parker walked part of the way home: exposure to English weather brought back the pains and ‘reduced him to a more deplorable state than ever’.
Husband and wife: their affections, their troubles. Her sharpness, his mulish strength. They appear, now, to a reader of my prejudices and enthusiasms, as emblematic figures from a Beckett play, harshly sentimentalised, short on text: the Nagg and Nell (of Endgame) confronted by the wonder of this weak and willing child. His gifts, his differences. They are timid of exploitation. Of standing out. Ann Clare, when coins can be found, secures an education at the church school in Glinton, for both children, John and his sister, Sophy.
John Clare is hungry for it, books, the knowledge his mother believes to be a kind of witchcraft. Clare meets the children of tenant farmers. He meets Mary Joyce, daughter of James. He flings an unripe walnut in the churchyard, strikes Mary in the eye: myth. As in folk legends, the bond is made and the long price will have to be paid. Memory, highlighting such fantastic episodes, shorthanding the complex excitements and longueurs of childhood, inclines towards fiction: metaphor. Walnut, eye. Initials carved in soft stone above the church door. Walks to a bridge, the limits of knowledge, the beginning of the drowned lands.
Figures silhouetted and seen from behind. Childhood sweethearts. Mother at the cottage door. Father and son. A broad-shouldered, sturdy labouring man and his short, slight son (who would gain weight, bulk, ruddy cheeks in the asylum years). John Clare works at threshing in the winter barn with his child's flail. He works in the fields. Parker Clare, broken down, on parish relief, hobbles out to fill holes in the road. John looks for hedges to hide behind, somewhere in which to breathe without others hearing the sound.
By routine, small joys, a circuit of walks, the horizon is fixed. If a child died, another in the family would inherit its name. The poet's sister, Sophy, married William Kettle, and gave birth to two Johns. Clare's great-grandfather, the Parish Clerk, another John, fathered four sons with the same name. Three dead Johns who failed to reach their fourth birthday, before the last of them lived out a reasonable span of twenty-eight years, and married another Mary. It's not a failure of imagination: think of Helpston as a village in a wooden box, thatched cottages, church, public house, cows, sheep, and enough figures to dress the set, act out dramas of rural life. Johns and Marys, all of them. The chain stretches back, before enclosure, for centuries, with just enough fresh blood, if you're lucky, to avoid inbreeding and idiocy. Scroll through the census entries for the nineteenth century, somewhere to the east of Peterborough (say, Whittlesey), and check that final column: a deluge of ticks in the space left for the dumb, halt, lame, mad.
Clare's vision, the stages of enlightenment and self-knowledge, opens with journeys on foot (later by coach) that carry him away from his heart-place, the village of Helpston.
Childhood: a day's excursion, ‘out of his knowledge’, to Emmonsales Heath. A missing village lad, before the time of tabloid sex monsters, whipped on his return.
Early adolescence: confused, passions too large for his small frame. ‘Gloves to hide my coarse hands… out grown my coat and almost left the sleeves at the elbows.’ Travelling down the Nene to Wisbech. Failed audition as lawyer's clerk. Overprepared, awkward in kitchens. Wandering free, while he waits for the return trip, in a foreign town: bookshops, faces.
Late adolescence: unconvinced rebel, docile runaway. Escaped gardener. Over the wall at Burghley, hiking to Grantham and Newark-on-Trent. Disorientation: ‘I became so ignorant in this far land that I could not tell what quarter the wind blew from & I even was foolish enough to think the suns course was alterd & that it rose in the west & set in the east.’
Hangdog return, stealing away in the night, ‘ninepence half penny in debt’. A hard trudge back to Stamford, rough sleeping under the trees. ‘The rhyme fell thick in the night & we was coverd as white as a sheet when we got up.’
Young married man: drawn by the gravity of future fame to London. A cure for all ills. Four trips to the city he would never learn to love. Theatres, drink, prostitutes, society. Ghosts, demons. Literary ladies and admirals. Possession by the spirit of Lord Byron.
A final road: High Beach to Northborough. Wiping memory, putting London in its place: as a remote and cruel abstraction. Tramping instead of riding. The solitary figure on the endless road, sleeping with his head to the north, is a provocation for future walkers. Those who, hearing footsteps, cannot leave them alone. The ones who think that tracing a sleepwalker's journey will show them how to write.
Then it struck me. ‘A poet is born…’, the pious tag on Clare's gravestone, echoed a passage in his work. Trapped in the claustrophobic regime of Epping Forest, in that great year, 1841, before the horror overwhelmed him, he moved from witness to visionary. He affected, and was affected by, place and weather. He registered a violent storm on 15 July, five days before he started walking: ‘Roll on, ye wrath of thunders, peal on peal/ Till worlds are ruins and myself alone.’ The fool becomes Lear. The road, if he can find it, now that those tricksters, the gypsies, have gone, will lead him back to an earlier self. To his wasted paradise. Possessed by Byron, or playing that game, he launched the satire of Don Juan. Corrupt politicians, unfaithful wives, addled eggs. ‘I would MP's would spin less yarn.’ Wellington, Melbourne. Hot little Vicky and her German husband. The poem of the world, cooked in the madhouse, begins with a stark declaration.
‘Poets are born’ – and so are whores – the trade is Grown universal: in these canting days