Ex Sepulchro Dracula Surrexit

It looks rather as though my amazing friend Professor Purplepen has seen something shocking on the other side of the meeting room at The Rugby Tavern, Great James Street, Holborn, but this turned out to be the only clear photo I took from her lecture on (as you can see) 'Dracula and Classical Antiquity' to the Dracula Society yesterday. Red-papered and decorated with sporting prints and old caricatures by Spy and the like, it was a room which yearned to be smoke-filled, but of course wasn't: instead it was crowded with enthusiasts and at one stage piled with food. I ended up seated next to the remains of the buffet during the talk and it was all I could do to restrain myself from grazing from them to the point of illness.

We think it's the first time we have managed to meet in 11 years, though are not entirely sure: the last occasion seems to have been when the Professor and a friend succeeded in visiting me at The Ruin, Grewelthorpe, during my week there back in 2008. She drew my attention to a quotation in the lecture from Eusebius, a wonderfully Gothic peroration about demons, not strictly included for my amusement but which nevertheless could have been.

Every now and then there was a rumbling from the hallway outside as though a tumbril of heads was being transferred, but was probably only a trolley of glasses, and on two occasions I went through the bar downstairs they were playing Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The Mark of the Maker

My friend the Heresiarch once accused me of ‘living in a medieval never-never land’, and it’s true that, when the music emanating from the little ghetto blaster in my university bedroom wasn’t Siouxsie and the Banshees, it was the Walkman Classics recording of the Carmina Burana. I remember calling up from the Bodleian’s bookstacks the great facsimile edition of the Carmina and musing on what the original would be like. A lot of my actual studies concerned the Middle Ages, though none of it, necessarily, medieval poetry. That was decoration, or, more strictly, a deeper layer.

In the middle of this time I heard a programme on the radio: the Wednesday Feature on 24^th May 1989, it seems, in which Brian Redhead profiled Helen Waddell. She was, I learned, the translator of the Carmina (in fact, only some of those lyrics), a figure of great intellect who never quite achieved what she should have done, and whose academic career was curtailed at its outset by the demands of an invalid stepmother, and at its end by illness. The Wandering Scholars was her masterpiece, bringing to the public a world of medieval lyric whose existence the generally informed person had barely suspected before (it was only several years after its publication in 1927 that Carl Orff began setting selections from the Carmina to music, but there doesn’t seem to have been any connection). Only intermittently attached to any university, Waddell trampled the boundaries between disciplines as though they were of no relevance: she was a poet, historian, novelist, dramatist, editor, translator. She melded into my sense of the Middle Ages, a sweet concoction which was being fed by other streams, including music a little more accurate than Carl Orff. The mingled scent of blood and roses. Brian Redhead didn’t talk about her Christian faith a great deal, as I remember, but that phrase used about her by a relative which gave her first biography its title – that she bore The Mark of the Maker – was evocative enough to stamp itself into my mind.

Years later I came across a copy of that book, written by Waddell’s friend Monica Blackett in 1973, and yet didn’t read it. It’s mainly composed of letters and has an unintriguing misty reticence about it – despite its date it seems to come from an era twenty years before, never defining, for instance, the relationship between the writer and her unhappily married publisher Otto Kyllmann (it was a non-physical love affair that led to their sharing a house until Helen became too ill). And Waddell herself retreated into the recesses of my mind.

What brought her back out again recently? I think it was just that I wanted to clear my mind with some biography and took The Mark of the Maker off the shelf. That led me to Dame Felicitas Corrigan’s fuller account of Waddell from 1986 which had also been mentioned on Radio 4, though I can’t say that I heard about it then.

It’s hard to exaggerate the literary superstardom which Helen Waddell enjoyed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, all the more stunning for the fact that she, and so many of the people that meant much to her, are now almost completely forgotten. Nobody, including its author, expected The Wandering Scholars and its companion volume Medieval Latin Lyrics to take off the way they did; the reception for her novel Peter Abelard was near-rapturous. For a few years she was one of the most feted figures in the kind of high society that liked to sprinkle a few academics around to transmute the tinsel of glamour (and power – Stanley Baldwin became a friend) into the more precious metals of knowledge and culture.

And there was weight enough there to do it. Waddell knew her stuff, for sure, but what made the difference was that she could write her stuff. Combined with a tremendous breadth of range which could bring apparently disparate facts and artefacts to bear on a single narrative and tease out nuances which a less magpie mind might miss, she had a deep imaginative sympathy with her subjects, whatever they were, even when – as with John Milton – she found them fundamentally uncongenial. She could breathe in a topic until, like a kind of menthol, its scent suffused her and out of that she wrote. Recovering from fever and tended by the sisters of the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1924, she underwent a strange experience in which she became the ill-fated lover of Peter Abelard, Heloise, not as a young woman but in her old age as Abbess of the Paraclete, with Abelard twenty years dead. This vision, if that’s what it was, enabled her to take on the business of writing their story, finally emerging in the novel of 1933, with all the emotional near-drowning that entailed. It was a hazardous undertaking which made great demands of her and left her exhausted, but what fruits it bore.

I now read Waddell’s prose, even the letters Sister Felicitas quotes, and find myself almost scorched by that incandescent passion, that tremendous love of souls, both the ones she knew in life and those she touched through her studies. At times I want to give up any writing at all, so bright hers burns. Through it all was threaded her faith: she never left the Ulster Presbyterianism that raised her, but combined it, tensionless, with a Catholic spirituality – how could so sensitive a medievalist do otherwise? I could joke that such a mixture makes her a sort of honorary Anglican.

From the late 1940s Waddell’s memory began to fail her and that towering intellect succumbed to what we would now automatically term dementia. And here Sister Felicitas (no milk-and-water nun herself, by all accounts) produces the most Christian gloss of that cruel disease I know, so I quote it in the hope it may be useful:

In a world delirious with the invention of more and more powerful weapons …, filled with hoarse noises, … is it not at least conceivable that the Creator of man should, so to speak, demand hostages to overpass time and space, and to dwell beyond the reach of intellect …, in silent solitude in God’s presence? These tithes given to God are called to cease being workers and thinkers, and to plunge instead into the deep silence of their own incommunicable selfhood and spirit to encounter the living God, entirely other yet mysteriously immanent at the inmost centre of every human heart He has created.

One of Helen Waddell’s last translations had been the deathbed prayer of another scholar, King Alfred’s tutor, great Alcuin of York, written as the English Dark Ages dawned into the Middle:

And now,

Beside the shore of the sail-winged sea

I wait the coming of God’s silent dawn.

Do thou help this my journey with thy prayer.

And there are no better words to conclude than those, which are both his, and hers. 

Dorset Gramarye: Elisabeth Bletsoe's 'Landscape from a Dream' and the lyrics of PJ Harvey

There is no end to the things I don’t read enough of, but poetry is among them. For some time I’ve been haunted by the memory of a particular slim, self-published book of poetry by a Dorset writer I read in my mid-teens and one of whose lyrics has stayed with me ever since. I used to have it written out, but those notes are long since gone and I no longer know the name of the author. I had the library in West Howe, where I found it all those years ago, chasing it up for me, but they couldn’t identify it.

I decided to source some more Dorset poetry and ordered a series of books. I already knew that very probably the most remarkable of them would be Elisabeth Bletsoe’s Landscape from a Dream, a small 2008 collection which, from the extracts I found online, promised to be excitingly dense and interesting. And so it was: Ms Bletsoe has an intense, firm, allusive style that reminds me of my favourite poet of all, Geoffrey Hill, whose work I always admire even if I don’t entirely understand everything. Hill’s English is a language at war, but Bletsoe’s is even more militant: as opposed to his Classical, elegiac formality, her restless dissatisfaction with what English can currently do compels her to bend words out of shape, to scour dictionaries for weaponry, and sometimes to invent her own out of verbal fragments. I find myself having to read her poems with a dictionary at one hand to machete my way through the often botanical, anatomical and scientific terms: one small excerpt, ‘Interlude/The White Room’ furnishes sulcus, nephological, aquarelle, pruinate, and sintering. I sort-of guessed all this. But Elisabeth Bletsoe had a surprise in store for me.

Landscape is a brutal journey through a bloody but jewel-like visionary Dorset, with poems hung off that baleful figure, the Ooser; the illustrations of birds in the medieval Sherborne Missal; and Thomas Hardy’s heroines, among others. The final two poems in the book, ‘Cross-in-Hand’ and ‘Rainbarrows’ are both in that last category: they take elements of the Dorset landscape, and re-imagine the experiences of, respectively, Tess Durbeyfield and Eustacia Vye, two Hardyan women who both end their novels dead, victims of the society against which they have had the temerity to assert their own identities. The Cross-in-Hand, an unexplained pillar which sits by the roadside at the top of Batcombe Down looking over the Blackmore Vale, is where Tess swears never to ‘tempt’ Alec D’Urberville again – a lot of good that will do her. The Rainbarrows at Puddletown are the site of a November bonfire and squat on the heart of the great heath that Eustacia Vye both hates and is captivated by. Here, Elisabeth Bletsoe’s allusions and references are pressed into service to examine the fatal self-assertion of both women. What allusions they are, too: from Milton to Mishima to Hellraiser (the ‘lament configuration’) to Lady Gregory’s ‘Donal Og’ to Gustav Holst, to an essay by Florence Nightingale.

And there is also pop. Partly, the function of several song lyrics rifled for the verse is to provide images which clearly occurred to Bletsoe and which she couldn’t better: so we have Echo & the Bunnymen’s ‘killing moon’ and ‘your port in my heavy storm/harbours the blackest wave’. There’s also Bjork’s lovely androgynous line ‘Venus as a boy’ which expresses something about Eustacia Vye in a way Hardy could never have put. And then – and we now approach my point – there’s the way at the start of ‘Cross-in-Hand’ that Tess calls attention to her own ‘work-strong arms’.

PJ Harvey fans will have been brought up with a little start at this point. As we all know, ‘Sheela-na-gig’ begins

I’ve been trying to show you, over and over:

Look at these, my child-bearing hips

Look at these, my ruby-red ruby lips

Look at these, my work-strong arms, and

You’ve got to see my bottleful of charms …

Well; the phrase, you might think, is short and not completely outré, so you might dismiss it as a coincidence, until you spot in ‘Rainbarrows’ the line ‘O to be your stunning/Guide’ which can only be a borrowing from Harvey’s ‘Hair’ (the original line is ‘O to be your stunning bride’); that’s supported by Eustacia Vye’s ringing cry ‘I will call my ship VICTRIX’ – of course in the novel she dies by drowning – which by now must recall PJ’s parallel line ‘take a ship, I’d christen her Victory’. Finally, back in the poem ‘Cross-in-Hand’, Tess reaches Evershot, where in the novel she finally rejects any hope of a reconciliation with Angel Clare, and says

Swallows shuttle mandorlas of sound, dreamnets diverting my prayers for a softening, a break in fixation. Waiting defines me. Also a deliberate turning away before the goal is reached. Reinventing myself. Flowering myself inside out. A hedge of floating calices: bride-wort and wound-wort.

‘Fruit flower myself inside out’, Harvey keens in ‘Happy and Bleeding’, the subtlest and most heartbreaking song on her first album. And opening from the Harveyan text, Tess sets her face towards death: her own and others’.

This is more than set-dressing, showing off, or a felicitous phrase borrowed from a lyric: this is taking someone else’s words and using them to prise open a completely separate narrative, slamming them together and seeing what happens. ‘Sheela-na-Gig’’s presentation of a woman rejected by a man who scorns her physicality and messiness could, despite its uneasy humour, be a modern gloss on Tess: Bletsoe takes that idea and turns it back on Hardy’s novel. ‘Happy and Bleeding’ (in so far as it’s ‘about’ anything) is an ambiguous, conflicted account of the aftermath of sex in which the whole sexual history of the human race seems to bear down on the narrator: whatever PJH meant by that line (written, after all, when she was in her very early twenties), it’s a suitable one for Tess to appropriate and misuse to express a new sense of self-assertion.

You will note that all these tender thefts are from one album, Dry. This was the recording that Polly spent a lot of time denying was ‘feminist’ in intention, a statement (or set of statements, given how she repeated it) that’s given rise to some controversy. I’m not getting into that discussion here, because to a certain extent it doesn’t matter. Merely to insist on the validity of certain sorts of experience has a revolutionary effect, and these poems show how PJ’s texts can be taken and related to other texts in a way that functions feministically, no matter what she may have intended in 1991. This is clearly where Bletsoe is coming from, in any case.

And of course the fact that these are all borrowings from a Dorset singer adds another front to the warfare Bletsoe is engaged in. Unlike some of PJ’s texts, Dry doesn’t have anything clearly to do with the county: imaginatively it’s rooted somewhere else. But Bletsoe shoots its lines like fecund arrows into the Dorset landscape where they bury, root, bud and bloom like Aaron’s rod: they belong there, it seems.

Music and novel are made to converse, and pronounce together a new argument. It’s not far from the kind of textual alchemy PJH herself would one day engage in for Let England Shake. A sort of witchery it is, and Elisabeth Bletsoe has something of a witchy Kate Bush about her, if you could be more witchy than La Bush already is. I may well have to call in at Sherborne Museum one day, see if she’s on duty, and congratulate her. 

Talking Gothic

Last Thursday I and a group from the LGMG went to the Kitschies event at Blackwells Bookshop in Charing Cross. The Kitschies are an annual award in the field of genre fiction which appear to be the marketing brainchild of the producers of a brand of rum, and this year focused on Gothic, aiming to stimulate discussion about the nature of Gothic fiction. We were a very small proportion of the audience of 60 or 70 gathered to listen to John Courtenay Grimwood giving a reading, Marcus Hearn and Christopher Fowler talking very entertainingly about Hammer films, line up for a tot of rum (which I couldn't partake of it being a breach of my Lenten discipline), and walk about talking to a variety of people. Tanith Lee was there - I remember reading all of her books in the school library when I was about 15, but decided not to tell her this. Instead I spoke to Jonathan Rigby, the author of English Gothic and American Gothic; he complimented my on my new tie pin, which bears, I had to admit, the Seal of Rassilon. I'm not sure he was very impressed by that. We thought on balance that the event was a bit oversold (not many 'labyrinthine halls' or indeed 'shadowy figures' in evidence, unless you counted ours) but it was rather amusing. I caused great consternation by actually trying to buy a book which turned out not to be 'on the system'.

Shelley's Ghost

This is Shelley's copy of Sophocles, found, so the story went, in the trouser pocket of his drowned body, but more likely from the trunk of his belongings rescued from the wreck of the Don Juan. It was one of the things on display in 'Shelley's Ghost', the exhibition at the Bodleian Library exploring the way the Shelley family attempted to shape their own and the public's perception of the poet's memory and legacy. There was a nice mixture of memorabilia and literary remains (it's not easy to make 19th-century letters on their own interesting display material), although I did find the layout and scheme of the display rather confusing ('Did you work out which way to go around it?' asked Dr Bones. However, it could have done with a bit of increase in the emotional volume. I got the impression that the life and death of Shelley hung over his family for decades afterwards and the relics are evidence of an intense, lasting relationship with the dead. We're told that it was Shelley's daughter-in-law, rather than his straightforward son and heir Sir Percy Florence Shelley, who became entranced by his memory. Why was this? What about this woman made her so determined to champion her long-dead father-in-law's case? Or was it something about Mary?
What also comes across remarkably is that this was a family already memorialising itself before Shelleys death had even occurred. More objects are constructed from snippets of human hair - Bysshe's, Mary's, John Keats's, and other friends' - than I could easily count. Was this conscious creation of faintly creepy keepsakes common among people of that class and time, or was it just the Romantics who went in for it so heavily?
The most moving item was surely Mary's notebook of thoughts she kept after Shelley's death, titled 'The Journal of Sorrow, begun 1822. But for my Child it could not end too soon'. Anguished, angry, desperate and hysterical reflections and outbursts scratched on thick paper, scrawled, underscored or crossed out. Why did she not destroy it? Did she consciously intend anything to be done with it?

St Pancras Churchyard, Kings Cross

I was in London today on a little tour of wells and springs (and the sites of lost ones). My starting point was Old St Pancras church, which used to have its own well in the vicinity, long since swept away in the changes made to the area when the railway terminus was built in 1868. Given that this will be the starting point of another walk for the LGMG, I was pleased to find the churchyard is such a Gothic place. There is the wonderfully flamboyant sundial memorial to that great Victorian philanthropist, Baroness Burdett-Coutts ...

...; there is the grave of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; there is the mausoleum of Sir John Soane; and in one corner is the Hardy Tree.

The architect responsible for supervising the work preparing for the creation of the station in the 1860s was Arthur Blomfield. He had little stomach for clearing the graveyard of Old St Pancras, and gave that task to his young assistant to handle, a young Dorset chap called Thomas Hardy. It must have fitted his temperament admirably. The story goes that Hardy planted an ash sapling near the edge of the graveyard, or rather what remained of it, and arranged some of the now-superfluous gravestones around it. The plaque on the fence around the Hardy Tree doesn't go that far, stating only that the stones 'were probably moved around that time'; but the tree has clearly had time to grow around some of the nearest stones. The site has a strange beauty, and a moving quality as a memorial to all those souls whose remains were disturbed by the construction work - perhaps this was Hardy silently acknowledging a debt, and not just to them but also to all the poor inhabitants of the Somers Town and Agar Town slums who were summarily turfed out by the landlords after the Midland Railway bought the land. Hardy would have paid them grim notice as well.