Desk Notes No.23

A forgotten novel and the nineteenth century poet John Clare

Feb 25, 2024

Dear friends,

Bulb season has begun. Purple crocuses, big yellow daffodils and miniature narcissus are bringing welcome colour to my somewhat bleak plot, ricocheting off the timid, slate grey hellebores. Nestled under the mock orange, by the greenhouse, a little patch of snowdrops are feeding the early bees. This time last year I wrote about the collection of snow drops on display at Calke Abbey — I’m still amazed by the variety of such a simple species. In the raised beds I assembled last autumn, the green shoots of tulips are beginning to appear, a fresh start and a comforting sign of good things to come.

Those of you who follow my social history account on Instagram, will know that I spend a great deal of time with my head stuck in old books and newspaper archives. Since taking a course on the lyric essay last year, I’ve been working on a series of literary collages using ‘found material’. I hope to share my first with you later this month — you might have noticed I’ve renamed the newsletter to reflect this new direction. These Desk Notes will still continue and, later in the year, I’d like to write some pieces taking a closer look at how artists, writers and filmmakers recycle and adapt found material in their work.

In days gone by people collated their literary foraging in ‘commonplace books’. Much like a scrapbook, these were a place to record and annotate quotes, passages and ideas that made an impression on the keeper. Even poetry and images could be pasted in. The pursuit of ‘commonplacing’ was especially popular with women who were shut out of patriarchal education systems. Commonplace books were a place to collect their reading and ideas, an expression of individuality — intellect, experience and emotion. Sometimes pages were headed with a general subject, like love or grief, with space left to transcribe relevant text. As writers and readers we find ourselves doing similar things today, often using the things we discover in our own lives and work. Commonplace books are so incredibly personal that the poet W.H. Auden described his as, “a sort of autobiography,” that revealed the “architecture” of his mind, “the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about.” I suppose these Desk Notes are my own kind of commonplacing and I would like to thank you so much for reading and subscribing to them.

Print — Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell (1928) published by Persephone Books

Screen — By Our Selves, an avant-garde documentary about the nineteenth century poet John Clare, directed by Andrew Kötting (2015) and now showing on MUBI; paired with John Clare Selected Poems, edited by John Bate, published by Faber and Faber

Print

Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell (1928) published by Persephone Books

I recently received the gift of Brook Evans, an overlooked novel by Susan Glaspell brought back into print by Persephone Books. I knew little of what to expect, only that it was published in the same year as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I wrote about last month. It makes a wonderful companion piece.

The love story of engaged couple Naomi and Joe is arrested as the novel opens, by his sudden death in an agricultural accident. Naomi is left single and pregnant, pressured into marrying local preacher Caleb Evans who agrees to raise the child as his own. In the second of five short volumes, Glaspell allows us to see the resulting marriage through the eyes of the child, Brook. The tension between husband and wife seeps through in terse dialogue, something Brook senses but cannot fully understand. For Naomi, Caleb is weak; a man who got the woman he wanted the only way he could, by coercion. Brook sees him differently; as a selfless, noble man — a man of integrity. Who Caleb really is, Glaspell leaves her readers to judge.

Lurking in the subtext of the novel is time itself; time that changes our perspective. Exploring the effects of Naomi’s love affair over three generations, the novel reveals parents and their children in perpetual misunderstanding. Naomi is desperate to rescue Brook from religious conservatism; to give her to life and to love. “God is on the other side,” she pleads desperately as Caleb’s Christianity restricts Brook’s own romantic experience. Suppressed by her own parents, Naomi wants to offer Brook the opportunities she missed. She fails to allow for Brook’s own differences — her own individuality, her relationships, and desires.

I’m once again reminded of the ideas in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure which also seems to explore the collision between love and Christian duty; to explore life as love. Does Jude belong to Sue because they love each other? Or does Jude belong to Arabella, the wife he loathes, but to whom he was joined by God?

“Is there anything better on earth than that we should love one another?”

“I can’t bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live in their own way.”

For Sue and Jude, marriages based on practicality, financial convenience and lust are all equally sordid. And love has little do with shame.

This separation of love from shame, underpins Naomi’s feelings about herself and her relationship with Joe. Her innocence lies at the heart of Glaspell’s novel. Naomi sees no other possibility than Joe’s mother being blissfully happy about her pregnancy — for a part of Joe is still living in the world. Instead, she is attacked as a liar and a “trollop.”

“Words Mrs Copeland had said were like something crawling on her. Strange she had not herself thought it that way — the shame.”

“So this was what was come of that beauty. It was here she could not understand. Remembering the summer nights when she had been, not only happy, but as if let in where goodness and beauty were hers, remembering, not alone mad love, but moments of gentle goodness… ‘I must be stupid,’ she told herself. ‘Something has happened in my mind. I am not seeing things the way other people see them.’”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Lady Chatterley:

“In the short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire…”

Both novels present fierce reactions to Victorian sentiments about women and sexuality. Life as love.

Screen

By Our Selves, directed by Andrew Kötting (2015) now showing on MUBI

John Clare Selected Poems, edited by John Bate, published by Faber and Faber

“John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad.”

This cruel line echoes brutally through Andrew Kötting’s avant-garde documentary about the neglected nineteenth century ‘peasant poet’. In 1841, while residing at the High Beach asylum, John Clare escaped, making a four day, 90 mile journey through Epping Forest to Northampton in search of his lost love Mary Joyce. By Our Selves recreates his journey.

Using folk traditions as a gateway to the surreal, By Our Selves is a strange, disorienting piece of cinema, atmospheric and contemplative. The camera revolves 180 degrees through the forest canopy until trees grow down from the sky; people in animal masks loiter in the foliage; birdsong dissolves into percussion — “the forest creates acoustic hallucinations.” Shot almost entirely in black and white, the richness of the landscape evoked so beautifully in Clare’s poetry, is bleached and muted. A reflection, perhaps, of Clare’s loneliness and detachment, portrayed here by a silent, tortured Toby Jones. By 1841, writes Clare’s biographer Jonathan Bate, Clare’s nature poetry had become, “characterised by a feeling of exposure” and “self-identifications with shy and vulnerable creatures.” In By Our Selves, author Alan Moore speaks of Clare’s withdrawal:

“He seemed to treat the world and specifically the asylums perhaps as a kind of sensory deprivation tank, even if only unwittingly. The light was stopped from his eyes. He thought that people were pulling his language out through his ears. That he was being stripped of almost everything, certainly his identity.”

The narrated prose is Clare’s own - both his poetry and memoir - read by Freddie Jones. Haunting vocals from I am, a 1970 BBC omnibus drama in which Jones played Clare, flow over over the eerie journey. The present pushes in heavily, the landscape much changed. Clare crosses railway lines, roads, car parks — a reminder of time’s relentlessness. Observing Clare in these environments seems to offer something of his own feelings of alienation; misunderstood by the world around him; his poetry failing to sell as well as it ought. “I am the self consumer of my woes,” reads Freddie, “the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems.” I wonder about the world’s unfitness for sensitive people, whose art society gladly consumes, while chewing up and spitting out the artist.

“My illness was love, though I knew not the smart,
But the beauty of love was the blood of my heart”

Happily, the collisions between real life and the interior life of the film also make for delightful comic interludes. Along the way, psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair pauses to interview writers, academics, and actors about Clare’s life and work. As Clare, Toby Jones is always on the edge of these encounters, gazing confusedly, worn out, detached, at passers-by. In his Recollections of Journey from Essex Clare remains on the outside, the antithesis of crowds:

“It now began to grow dark apace and the odd houses on the road began to light up and show inside the tenants’ lots very comfortable and my outside lot very uncomfortable and wretched — still I hobbled forward as well as I could and at last came the Ram. The shutters were not closed and the lighted window looked very cheering but I had no money and did not like to go in.”

It is a memory of hunger, poverty, exhaustion, homelessness — of separation from the safety of the familiar. Clare was a “miniaturist,” writes Bate, whose severance from his home village of Helpston marked the beginning of his mental decline. When he died at the age of seventy in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Clare’s last words were, “I want to go home.” It seems only fitting to leave you today with his poem I am.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; 
My friends forsake me like a memory lost: 
I am the self-consumer of my woes— 
They rise and vanish in oblivious host, 
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes 
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed 

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 
Into the living sea of waking dreams, 
Where there is neither sense of life or joys, 
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; 
Even the dearest that I loved the best 
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest. 

I long for scenes where man hath never trod 
A place where woman never smiled or wept 
There to abide with my Creator, God, 
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, 
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie 
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

Found Material

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