Back to Painshill

It is fully twenty-one years since I was last at Painshill Park, with Dr Bones on that occasion. That was blazing summer, but a rainy weekday ('holy well weather') works just as well to follow the walks, wonder at the follies, and muse around the lake. Here and there I could glimpse other visitors, but no more than a dozen of them.

On our last visit the Grotto - the largest in the country - was still being restored and on walking through it it's boggling to remember that it had been entirely ruined, the roof falling in during the 1940s. In fact many of Painshill's features were even more ruinous than they were intended to be, as the garden's designer Charles Hamilton did things as cheaply as he could, often using timber painted to look like stone - and even then he couldn't repay the colossal sums he'd borrowed (from the bank run by his fellow gardener Henry Hoare of Stourhead) without selling the estate and having to leave the very landscape he'd created. The Painshill Trust has in many cases not just restored the follies and features, but actually reconstructed them. 

I'd not really noticed what a superb composition Painshill is - how carefully the views are arranged, how skilfully the experiences are built on until you reach the fairytale Gothic Tower right at the far end of the estate, how the lake is constructed to look like a huge expanse of water here, a tranquil pool there, or a river in a third place, because you never see it in its entirety. It doesn't count as a 'Gothic Garden', but it's a huge delight.

As you approach the Gothic Tower you can hear the A3 thundering just beyond the trees, which explains part of Nia Broomhall's strangely moving poem displayed outside:

Poetry Reading

A little while ago Lady Arlen was kind enough to send me a copy of her first proper volume of poetry, Shouting at Crows. I put it in the lavatory. This is not a statement about its quality, because I make a habit of having one book of poetry there and consulting it each day. I've always enjoyed poetry, and have produced the odd lyric now and again which has even appeared here, but I generally think there is too much writing of poetry and not enough reading of it so I don't regard that as something I should spend time on.

The predecessor of Shouting at Crows in this respect was Colin Simms's Goshawk Poems, which I bought at the Post Office in Garrigill while I was on holiday last Autumn: it was one of a set of volumes in the window wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the damp. I boggled at the sheer amount Mr Simms has apparently managed to write over his career as a biologist and an observer of birds: this book alone runs to about 140 pages, and his oeuvre includes dozens of similar volumes. And I did find it quite hard to batter my way through: it strikes me, dreadful though it might be to someone who spends a lot of time watching them, that there's only so much you can say about goshawks, and I would really rather read about people. Lately, in fact, leaving PJ Harvey's baleful Orlam to one side, my poetic excursions have been a bit unsatisfying. The Collected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, which Lady Arlen herself bought me years and years ago, was shocking old tripe and it was no surprise so little of it was ever published. Mary Barnard's lucid, Sappho-like lyrics were enjoyable but not quite as sparkling as I expected. I found Bedouin of the London Evening by the mythical Rosemary Tonks almost impenetrable. Revisiting Thomas Hardy increased my respect for his industry and inventiveness but I felt little warmer towards his work. My favourites remain Geoffrey Hill, who you may well have heard of, and Elisabeth Bletsoe, who you almost certainly haven't.

In this company, I rather liked Shouting at Crows, with its meditations on pain and loss in the small, domestic, hidden, and unstated. I wonder whether the next adventure, Jeremy Reed's Patron Saint of Eyeliner, will be as worthwhile?

The Manner of Our Departure

It was a beautiful, elegaic moment as Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor regenerated yesterday evening into – well, if you don’t mind spoilers, an earlier version of herself. And every Dorset native will have been squee-ing to see where she chose to watch ‘one last sunrise’ – the unmistakable outline of Durdle Door on the Purbeck coast. My first thought was how lovely it was, and my second how aghast the Dorset emergency services would be at the prospect of viewers thinking it might be fun to try and recreate the moment. Sure enough, the Lulworth Estate which owns Durdle Door has denounced the BBC’s ‘duplicity’ (now that’s a strong word) in not telling it what the request to film at the limestone arch would actually produce. There’s no safe way along the top of the headland and people have been badly injured diving off it. Unless you actually have access to a TARDIS, it’s best admired from a distance.

‘It’s such a shame you can’t pick the date, time, place and manner of departure, isn’t it? Well, you can in some sense, but that’s obviously more likely to be a messy route, and I don’t like mess’, mused Ms Kittywitch to us the other day. Ms K, who has battled a bewildering variety of medical dangers since before her heart-and-lung transplant at the age of 13, now faces a new diagnosis I can barely remember, and a new drug which might buy her another X years or finish her off with an allergic reaction. She is right, though I would choose not a sunrise on Durdle Door (or indeed chucking myself off it), but a rainy late afternoon on Chesil Beach, the ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ of the Lyme Bay seas on the shingle. I can’t see how that could be managed, though, and might have to settle for Dorothy Parker’s more realistic option: ‘O let it be a night of lyric rain/And singing breezes when my bell is tolled’.

Most of us will be ushered from this earthly existence as part of a medical drama. On Thursday night I was called to the hospital to see Edgar: Jackie, his wife, apologised for calling me on my day off once she realised that’s what it was, but I’ve learned that you mustn’t delay these things if you can help it, and had we left it to Friday morning Edgar would have been unresponsive. It was hard to understand him, beyond the single word 'Amen'. His operation months ago to correct an essential tremor was successful but his enjoyment of it never materialised as his recuperation was interrupted by a fall and broken ankle, pneumonia and finally a fatal infection. That’s how it goes. Not for most of us the singing breezes or the crashing waves, but the quiet of a ward side room and the hiss of an oxygen mask, and as much faith as, with God’s grace, we can muster.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Review, PJ Harvey, 'Orlam' (Picador, 2022)

When Polly Harvey was four, she found a dead lamb in the woods near her house: the crows had pecked its eyes out. At home, her parents had just bought Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and had it on the turntable endlessly. Thereafter, she said, that record never failed to make her feel physically sick; though it took until the 2010s before she would admit in interviews why it did. Harvey takes this horrible experience and spins out of it her second collection of poetry, Orlam.

Her protagonist Ira-Abel Rawles is nine, and lives in the fictional Dorset village of UNDERWHELEM – in the text, it’s always capitalised, as though in a print transcription of Domesday Book. It’s a place where females and animals are never safe from predation of different kinds. Not that Ira thinks of herself as female, as her double name suggests – she’s a ‘not-gurrel’, she insists, a ‘wether on the nether-edge’ who should have been born a ‘tarble tup’, and who identifies with Joan of Arc as well as the lambs she has a reluctant hand (literally) in castrating. That sexual ambiguity will not protect her. All this also opens out of Harvey’s childhood, though I hope not much of the rest of the story does, or I doubt she’ll ever be able to show her face in her home village of Corscombe again (1).

I say ‘story’, and that is what Orlam is – a verse novel spanning a calendar year and written, as the quotes so far make clear, in old Dorset dialect mainly lifted from William Barnes’s 1886 Dictionary; so the ‘tarble tup’ Ira imagines she might have been is, in what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, a ‘tolerable ram’. Readers should not imagine that Harvey would actually have heard much of this during her real 1970s Dorset upbringing, beyond perhaps the odd word: instead it’s a very conscious anachronism that allows the author to prise open Ira’s experience, its earthy Anglo-Saxon shapes generating a very particular relationship between that, the landscape, and the people around her. The dialect doesn’t entirely lift us away from West Dorset in the 1970s – the jerrycans and sheep-dip chemicals see to that – but it gives that setting a depth and resonance which makes it seem a landscape of myth.

Ira creates her own myths, to cope with the horrors she encounters. The dead lamb’s eyeball becomes Orlam, her guardian spirit, floating over the fields on its trailing optic nerve; in the only place she finds refuge, Gore Woods, she meets the bleeding Civil War soldier Wyman-Elvis and his entourage of ghosts, and the Ash-Wraiths, the shades of every child who has ever played there. She ‘scratches’ out her myths, her sorrows and enmities, writing to take control of what she undergoes. She needs these spectral allies, because she has few enough among the human residents of Underwhelem. She loves her mother, but her mother is neglectful and absent; she loves her grandmother (called Mary, like Harvey’s own), but Mary is dead, and hovers over the hollow lane; she adores her elder brother Kane-Jude, but he betrays her (predestined by his names, Cain and Judas). The rest, from Ira’s drunken, inadequate father Chalmers-Adam, to Emerson-Dogger Bowditch who rapes her in the Red Shed, are deserving objects of her scorn and hatred. She casts spells against them (apparently successfully in her father’s case), and makes songs to defend herself. It’s a mythology woven from plants and wildlife, the details of sheep-rearing, Shakespeare, pop songs and weather rhymes, Christian imagery, and Dorset folklore (2), and makes a heady enough mix – though the intoxicant isn’t good old Dorset cider, but the cheap whisky and Palmer’s bitter served up in Underwhelem’s grotty pub, the Golden Fleece.

I often find that I have to reorientate myself to get into a new PJ Harvey album, and this book turned out the same: it took me three reads before it really gelled. It isn’t hard to read: you can tackle it quite quickly, and in fact I think it helps to read it quickly, once you’re familiar with the rich but restricted vocabulary of the dialect. Polly’s mentor Don Paterson’s simultaneous ‘English’ translations of her words are best ignored as they will mislead you into one particular reading of a multivocal text. I found at first that the poem’s conventions, such as the capitalisation of placenames and the fabricated names of the characters, separated me from the emotion it should have contained, but after repeated readings those distractions faded. And they may only be Ira’s imaginings anyway, though Harvey has been rightly non-committal about that. So I got there, in the end.

But it is brutal. ‘Sex and death all roundabout/Sonny with ‘es eyes pecked out/Scoff the vlesh vlee and the yis/This is how the wordle is’. Ira excepted, all the living characters are grotesques, who seem to exist only to cause others pain, notably her. The miasma of horror barely lifts, whether it’s the dramatic hideousness of the pervert forester John Forsey dressing as the Dorset Ooser, or the more prosaic terrors of the new school term, which Ira dreads so much she throws up on her teacher’s shoes. The Christ-figure (that’s how Harvey describes him, not me) Wyman-Elvis hands The Word to Ira – in Presley’s phrase, love me tender, a marker of hope amid the evil, but she finds it hard to hold onto it. For all Orlam’s skill, its near-relentless morbidity is wearing, as though Harvey is working through something. Mind you, if this still doesn’t represent the mature outworking of her poetic voice, what might be to come?

The book ends with a recapitulation of its first lyric, ‘Prayer at the Gate’, in almost Christian terms:

So look before and look behind

At life and death all innertwined

And teake towards your dark-haired Lord

Forever bleeding with The Word.

By now, the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, Ira’s mother seems to have resurfaced, her father appears to have succumbed to the curse Ira laid on him, and the ghost of her childhood has joined the Ash-Wraiths while she carries on into a more knowing near-adolescence. And that’s as optimistic as Orlam gets. It is, I think, a brilliant achievement, but hard to take, and even harder – for me, yet – to love.

(There haven't been that many reviews of Orlam yet, either because people don't know what to make of it, or hate it but are too polite to say so. You can have a look at this one, or this, or this.)

1.Earnest Pollywatchers heard drafts of these poems as far back as 2017 when she read them at King’s Place in London. They've hardly altered, but where they have it's weakened the specific local references. So the early version of ‘Black Saturday’ described Ira and her brother playing war in ‘Luther’s Coppice’, a real location in Corscombe; in the book, this has become ‘Blaggot’s Copse’.

2.I especially like the references to the Red Post which in the book is ‘UNDERWHELEM’s hanging post’ (p.75). There are four real Red Posts in Dorset, roadside waymarkers, and because nobody really knows why they are coloured red, you can make up what you like. I think of them as the mystic axial points around which the county revolves, which rivet it into its past. The nearest to Corscombe is at Benville Bridge. 

Owlen (= 'roaming about at night')

A woman wanders through a wood, or a setting with the appearance of a wood, making odd gestures and talking about dead sheep and thrushes, and wearing a dress with an eyeball scrawled on it. Were we not aware that she is PJ Harvey and therefore an emissary of the powers beyond, we might simply assume that she was nuts. Our heroine was performing at the (slightly abortive) livestreamed Glastonbury Festival: not singing, but reading poetry, another couple of offerings from what we all still hope is the forthcoming collection ‘about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset’. But then it’s been forthcoming for four years now …

The poems were trailed as being ‘in Dorset dialect’. This is interesting, because Dorset dialect is not something anyone now uses, nor has used for a very long time. Remember I am a mere six weeks younger than Ms H, and, though I grew up in suburban Bournemouth rather than a village just northeast of Beaminster, my mother’s family in particular come from pretty close by there, in south Somerset, and they were all farm workers and the like: one of my mum’s cousins lives just round the corner from the Harvey quarrying business on Ham Hill. PJ’s accent, too, always strikes me as quite gentle (though she stresses it a bit in the Glastonbury performance), much more so than some of my relatives’. Nor is there even just one uniform Dorset accent: Polly clearly has the West Country rhotic ‘r’ in her speech – at least she often does – while I grew up without it, and it’s not that prevalent on the east side of the county anyway. In his 19^th-century Dorset dialect poetry, which she surely has in mind, William Barnes spells the name of the county Dosset, as though it has no ‘r’ sound at all; certainly not the ‘Darzet’ of general non-West Country imagination. You don’t hear that until you get to Cornwall.

I can’t remember anyone from my childhood using dialect words, either: rather, the older generations spoke what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, just with an accent. The closest they came to it was my grandad’s insistence on referring to rats as ‘longtails’; but that smacks more of superstition than general usage, a bit like the reluctance of Portlanders to name the rabbits that undermine the quarries, instead describing them with any number of circumlocutory epithets. In early 1970s Corscombe, I suppose, some of the old farm workers may have used the dialect words they picked up from their grandparents, calling ewe-lambs chilvern or the meal in the middle of the day your nammet – ‘noon meat’; but by coincidence I’ve just read Thomas Hardy’s introduction to his Selected Poems of William Barnes, published in 1908, and even then he laments the demise of the old Dorset speech thanks to mobility and education, and the condescension of the well-to-do. I can’t imagine ‘Dorset Dialect’ was very prevalent even in the Blackmore Vale nearly fifty years ago.

William Barnes used dialect to emphasise the dignity of the Dorset people he worked with as schoolmaster and priest, the relevance of their outlook and experiences. Harvey isn’t doing that; nor does she seem to be using it to recall a culture the tail-end of which she may have brushed against in her childhood. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness of the old Dorset speech becomes an incantation, a means of piercing through normality into a heightened awareness of nature and a soul’s place in it: a way of meditating on identity and feeling, the opposite but equal of what Elisabeth Bletsoe does with her poetry of complexity and technical naming.

Goo on an' publish, Polly!

Nu Gothic in Verse

A couple of months ago I found myself in a little basement room beneath a vegan café (what else?) near Covent Garden for a book launch. The Emma Press makes tiny, pretty and loving volumes of poetry, and other excursions into the realms of writing and publishing for no return. Various poets came up to the mike to read, either works from the book or other pieces, and by the time they'd finished I reckoned I was the only person in the room who wasn't a poet or a poet's friend or partner. It was jam-packed, but it was a very small room.

I bought both small books, the Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse, and Siofra McSherry's Requiem, a poem cycle framed around the texts of the requiem mass and the illness and death of the author's mother. Both raise the question of what you think Gothic is. Requiem's subject matter brings us face to face with pain and sorrow but that isn't Gothic in its own right, notwithstanding the cover's grinning skelly based on a carving at Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The anthology, in contrast, spans that skewbald combination of menace and excitement that sits at the centre of the Gothic web: tales of Golems, witch bottles, Bluebeard, 'the sweet/subtle tang of old skool Goth' open vistas into other realities, the suspicion picking at our sleeve that our everyday understanding might unravel any moment, and enjoying the idea. 

I most appreciated Charlotte Eichler's three poems: 'The Coffin Calendars', in the voice of a model posing for Polish coffin-maker Lindner's annual extravaganza of weird glamour; 'The Balloonist', about the death of Lily Cove at Haworth Gala in 1906; and a poem which imagines a convent of nuns keeping pet blackbirds and eventually their songs merging, which nearly got me misty-eyed. That third poem isn't in the book, or in Ms Eichler's collection Their Lunar Language, which I thought it would be as it concerns the relations of humans and nature. I wonder where one might find it.

Escaping the Void

Years ago in Goremead I met Hari and Peter. They didn't worship at Goremead Church but had been members of a tiny independent chapel at the far side of the village. Peter had been a teacher and missionary many years before, but had lost his faith and by the time I met him had the beginnings of dementia. I had a couple of conversations with him about what Jesus had actually been on about. 'I don't believe in him any more,' said Peter, 'but I just can't forget about this man. I still love him.' His eyes glistened. Peter recovered his faith a few weeks before he died, and how much this must have been a relief to him and probably those around him too became clear from a volume of poetry Hari sent me after Christmas, compiled from Peter's papers after his death. I began reading them as a break in the middle of the Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, whose relentless Orkney-ness does wear one down after 250 pages. But Peter's verse is not light relief. In fact it makes Thomas Hardy read like Spike Milligan. Meaninglessness and existential angst sprawl over every page: the Void doesn't so much stare back from the book as leap out and shake you round the neck. 

On the train taking me towards my meeting with S.D. last week I found myself trying to answer the question I encourage every Christian to try to answer for themselves, that is, What is it Jesus has done for you? There are general theological answers to this involving sin and redemption, but they didn't play a great role in my conversion, shockingly. If I'm honest, I can't say my sense of the cussedness and wrongness of things, the dark fault line that runs through all our human endeavours and so often turns them to the bad, formed a problem over which I fretted and to which God was 'the answer'. In fact, what Jesus rescued me from, if anything, was the horror of meaninglessness, and reassured me that I and everything around me mattered, on a cosmic level.

I knew about that, but sitting waiting for my connection at Clapham Junction revealed something else. I often say that without Christ we would not know what love truly is, but I hadn't seen the connection between this theme and the existential one. There was a time (very occasionally there still is) when I would look around at my fellow human beings and see what Dr Bones would once have called a parade of meat-puppets, busy microbes doomed to die and striving to ignore the fact. A lot of Peter's poems were about that. But if there was a God, and meaning, and love was possible, and he loved me, then he loved all these silly beings too despite their frailty, frail and silly in ways not much different from the ways in which I am frail and silly. And that meant I couldn't regard them so negatively any more. Jesus not only gave me an example of love, not only taught me what love is, but even made it possible. He made it possible for me to sit at a busy railway station and smile, and dance inside for joy. He not only rescued me from meaninglessness, he rescued me from contempt. 

God knows how I explain that to anyone, though.

No One Expects

So far, the Diocese hasn't posted anything on its webpage about the Clergy Conference. From its Twitter feed you would certainly discover that one of the speakers was Dr Ellen F. Davis of Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, who took us through a passage of 1Kings and the book of Ruth, and you can find a picture of Fr Malcolm Guite, the poet, who spoke about the interrelationship of poetry and faith. There is a reference to the third speaker, Bishop Philip North of Burnley, but it comes from a retweeted tweet from a priest attending, not from the diocese itself. We'll see how eventually it gets reported.

Bishop Philip turned up on Wednesday morning and began unremarkably enough, talking about finding grace in unexpected places. He led us through Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem 'Felix Randal' and pointed out how the people to whom priests minister also minister grace to them, and we all smiled and nodded. We recognise that. It made us feel good.

Hopkins discovered grace among God's poor, went on Bishop Philip. That's the way God always works. Renewal and revival starts with the poor, the marginalised. It doesn't come from the centre. Neither does cultural change more generally. The poor are where creativity begins.

So isn't it a shame, a scandal, that the Church of England seems to exercise an option for the rich? It's churches in poor areas, on the margins of cities and towns, that are allowed to run down and get shut. It's those areas that can't fund clergy. Some dioceses sit on hundreds of millions of pounds of inherited assets while the newer ones - which are mainly the ones in poorer parts of the country - have pitiful resources in comparison. The diocese of London is pointed to as a model of church growth, but so it should be, not just because of immigration but because of resource: 'if you've got a church hall in London, you've got a children's & families worker because your rents will pay for one. If you've got a church hall on an estate in Stoke-on-Trent all you've got is a headache paying for its maintenance.' Our practices suck initiative and leadership out of poor communities, making them dependent recipients of charity directed at them from outside. The Church's recruitment procedures make it especially hard for working-class candidates to find their way through unless they get converted into middle-class book-learners in the process; 'we're producing a monochrome institution of white evangelical graduates'. 'God will renew the Church. Renewal is inevitable. But if we want to be part of it rather than looking in from the sidelines, we have to alter the balance fundamentally in favour of allowing the experience of the poor to penetrate to the centre.'

Well. You must bear in mind that most of the audience listening to the bishop were, er, white evangelical graduates. What he was saying was also diametrically opposed to what the Diocese of Guildford is doing: its new Parish Share system will penalise small churches in favour of large ones which are all, funnily enough, evangelical, and which will in future have a far greater role in 'helping' small churches develop - which is what else but enforcing the sort of hegemonic church culture he was complaining about. But he still got a lot of applause. Morally, it couldn't be argued with, and for the rest of the conference people wanted to talk about little else. In a Q&A session Il Rettore, attending his last conference before he retires, stood up and told Bishop Philip how his speech had redeemed his previous 34 years of conference-attendance to that point, unreconstructed Corbynite as he is. And the little knot of Catholics felt a bit less isolated. At the final plenary session our diocesan bishop set his face into a grin and chose to refer not to Bishop Philip's case in as many words but to his insistence that renewal was inevitable and people shouldn't talk about the Church 'declining'. That's a message everyone likes to hear.

I like Bishop Philip's vision of what the Church should be; my issue is that it never has been that, it's never been a place where the experience of the poor has been the organising principle. That evening I lay in my bed reading about how some of the Cistercian monasteries of medieval England and Wales, rather than setting up in wilderness and waste and colonising them as the cliché is, actually achieved the spiritual 'solitude' they craved by simply clearing away the existing inhabitants of an area. I thought about the sudden upsurge in Christian adherence in the Roman Empire after Constantine converted, or the Slavs being mass-baptised at swordpoint by Prince Vladimir of the Rus. God may well always bring spiritual renewal through the poor, but where the Church has most spectacularly 'succeeded' it has often been precisely where it sits lightest to what it says it believes. It has always, always absorbed and institutionalised the organising principles and assumptions of the world around it at the same time as preaching the exact opposite.

The miracle - and it truly is that - has been that the Church also always holds within itself the radical contaminant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, forever subverting, calling to account, and undermining its own practices. Perhaps we heard an instance of that at The Hayes this year. I don't hold out much hope that the experience of the margins can become the framing principle of the centre, and it may be that the Church of England has actually served God's purpose for it: 'renewal' may well pass us by in the end. But it certainly will if that marginal experience is stifled. It can only be kept alive by acting counterintuitively, by exercising an option not just for the poor, but for the unexpected, the irrational, what does not make immediate best sense.

Festa Caterinae 2017

Like last year, the weather was beautiful for Mid-Day Prayer at the Chapel of St Catherine at Guildford; unlike last year, the congregation included no dogs or under-fives. Earlier on in the day we'd had Mass at Swanvale Halt, and I was as ever hugely grateful for the good souls of the parish who turn out loyally so that I can observe the feast of my patron saint, especially when one was a gentleman who only joined us from the most extremely hard-line Protestant church locally a couple of years ago. There always seem to be six of us present, no matter when the mass is, or what day St Catherine's Day falls on. Next year it's a Sunday; I have a fantasy of saying Mass in the chapel at Abbotsbury, but it may remain no more than that.

The Wheel

In the chapel, Christ's Athene

Holds her wheel

Like a weapon,

Its riveted and silvered blades poised to plunge

And part the millrace of my poor flesh

Like the Red Sea.

‘It wasn’t like that’, she insists,

‘It really wasn’t. Look:

I set it turning, ever-so-gentle -

And all the mute hues of the hills

Are fired by the gold of heaven.’

‘You’re right,’ I say, wide-eyed,

And return down the long hillside to my car

To go on,

Branded with the sign of light.

Gratuitous Views

A last little holiday post, from that land of fast-receding memories.

Red sky over the roofs of Burton Bradstock.

Marshwood Vale panorama - from the Beaminster road near Salwayash.

Wet ploughed field near Symondsbury.

Lyme Regis. 

For all I know, on this perpetual seafront

The girl who reaches me the ice cream

(Organic from the Marshwood Vale)

Could be an angel - 

And this bright day my ever Elysian,

Curved to the sea.

I’ve done this enough, after all. Perhaps

I’ve been here beyond my memory,

Beyond being wrapped up warm against the wind,

To when I was otherwise and not yet and barely at all.

It will not matter if I wear

My Springtime panama or my Autumn black:

I last less long than the smooth cream, and the kiss of the sea

Leaning in and back, and in and back.

I’m needed nowhere else, 

I can stay. 

Southwards from the footpath between Bothenhampton and Burton Bradstock. 

The lookout shelter at Bexington Knoll. We always used to point this out whenever we drove on the coast road between Bridport and Abbotsbury, but this was the first time I've ever been there to look at it. It's one of the places where PJH took Seamus Murphy in 2010 when they were figuring out how their working relationship was going to function, and shooting some portrait photos (which Seamus wasn't used to then). 

A bold and possibly mad fisherman on Pulpit Rock, Portland. 

And, a long way from Dorset, Bamburgh Castle seen across the low water from Lindisfarne Island. 

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.