With this post, I conclude my week-long stint as guest blogger for Best American Poetry. It has been a pleasure writing for this venue and for this audience. My thanks to David Lehman for the invitation, and to the staff for keeping an eye on the technical side of things–and for reading what I wrote.
Ron and Ruth were talking about Thomas Aquinas. As soon as
we walked through the door, after Ron introduced Ruth and me very briefly, Ron
had said, “Ruth, there’s a question about Aquinas I’ve been wanting to ask; let
me ask before I forget.” And then the two of them were off and running into a
theological thicket where I could not follow and frankly did not want to.
Nothing against the Heavenly Doctor, mind you: I’ve read a
pound or two of Aquinas in my time, though I’ve never found him terribly
appealing (Augustine and Duns Scotus are more my speed, not that it’s a horse
race). But Ron’s question was something very specific about a particular
passage in the Summa Theologica. I
was lost before the question was out of his mouth. Ruth, on the other hand,
rode it like a surfer rides curl; she could quote chapter and verse, and
pursued the problem Ron raised as adeptly as a trained theologian. As we sat
down, the small room filled with the intensity of their talk. Ignored for the
moment—for about twenty minutes in fact—I looked around
were visible. Beyond them there was a brightening of the air, a sort of aura,
that indicated water that I could not see from here; we were not far from the
shore. This description might indicate we were in a balmy sub-tropical region,
but in fact it was Weymouth in the United Kingdom; the water just out of sight
below the window frame was the English Channel. As Ron and I had driven into
Weymouth, I had noted the presence of palm trees along the beach with surprise:
this hardly seemed the place for them; and indeed they hardly seemed to be
prospering. Yet there they were—and they were just one among many surprising things
about this place, and this day.
We were in the living room of a modest flat, what in the UK
is known as a “bedsit”: an apartment consisting of a living area/kitchen, a
bedroom, and a bath. It was sparsely but comfortably furnished, and completely
anonymous, except for the fact that the rectangular area in which we sat was
completely lined with built-in bookshelves: cabinets below, and shelves to the
ceiling, all filled with well-used books. I naturally began to scan titles.
There was a heavy preponderance of theological books and related philosophical
titles (one shelf sagged under thick Aquinas tomes). There was also an extensive
and eclectic, but poetry heavy, collection of literary titles; Gerard Manley
Hopkins was especially well represented.
As Ron and Ruth talked on—he in his quiet Oxbridge/Irish
accent, she in her working class London one—I fell into a sort of fugue state.
It had been a fascinating day. I was near the end of an eleven-month residency
in Devon, where I’d been teaching at the University of Exeter; Ron Tamplin was
my colleague there, a poet who taught literature. He was an erudite man of
great personal sweetness and charm, and we’d become fast friends; today, as a
farewell gesture, he was taking me on a tour of places he thought I ought not
to miss.
*
visit to T.S. Eliot where his ashes are interred in the austere St. Michael’s,
commemorated by a plaque on the wall (“In my beginning is my end, in my end is
my beginning”). From there we made our way to Stinsford to pay homage to some
of the remains of Thomas Hardy. As is well known, only his heart is buried
there, in his first wife Emma’s grave and in the soil of the Dorset he loved,
while the rest of him is in Poet’s Corner in London. Emma lies under a
dignified white monument, on the end of which the presence of Hardy’s heart is
indicated by an inscription which begins “Here lies the heart of Thomas Hardy”
and ends “His ashes rest in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey.”
hour or so, neither Ron nor I was anxious to linger once we’re looked over the
stone and the grounds a bit. As we walked back toward his car, Ron said, “Local
legend has it that Hardy’s heart is not buried there at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they say that, after Hardy’s heart was brought down
from London, it was placed in a pan on the kitchen table at his home nearby,
and a dog ate it.”
there instead.”
revealed a vital difference between Americans and the English, Ron?”
and buried the dog; that way the heart would actually be there.”
Ron nodded solemnly. “You’re right. And an Englishman would never kill a dog. For any reason.”
Years later, I ran across this legend again, in somewhat
different form. This time it was a cat that ate the heart, and a pig was killed
to replace it. I reject this variant on aesthetic as well as pragmatic grounds,
but the other story I fully embrace, even though it is probably altogether a
fabrication.
outside Dorchester. Maiden’s Castle is a bewilderingly huge and complex Iron
Age earthwork fort, complete with a maze; the only way in and out of the fort
is through the maze. The highest ramparts are over twenty feet high, and the
fort is built on a hill; there would have been wooden walls on top of the
ramparts, so that defenders within, high above the maze entrance, could have
attacked enemies easily as they stalled in the twisty passages below. Overall,
in its magnitude and complexity, the forbidding strategy of its construction, Maiden’s Castle was a perfect objective
correlative for Aquinas’s Summa
Theologica.
*
The library in the Weymouth bedsit was not enormous, as the room was not very large,
but it was splendid in its way. It contained many titles I would not, myself,
have collected, but every book there was clearly weighty of content, carefully
selected; furthermore, there was not a book on any shelf that did not show
signs, even from where I sat, from long and careful use. This was not a casual
collection, nor was anything present for show: this was a workroom, and the
books were respected tools, well maintained but nonetheless worn with the work
they had done. It was, in short, my favorite kind of library, one in which
function—and hence thought and knowledge, not to say actual wisdom—is the only
principal.
Charles Spurgeon,
Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, T.F. Powys—Powys! I’d read a couple of his
weird, occult novels, but here were his theological works—and D.H. Lawrence:
lots of Lawrence. And yes, here
was the local copy of the Summa
Theologica: a leather-bound set in five volumes, running I suppose to over
three thousand pages, the spine of each creased with repeated opening and
closing, the gold leaf titles worn by the touch of hands. The effect was vastly
more pleasing than the look of brand new unread volumes.
Suddenly seized with an unnatural desire to read every word of Aquinas’s
masterwork, I was on the verge of jumping up from my chair and making a
beginning.
But just then Ruth exclaimed, in her broad London accent,
“But oh my, Ron, how rude we’re being! There’s Terry sitting, bored to tears
with us, and we’ve forgotten why he’s come!” She leapt to her feet, stepped
over to me, and took my hand. “Terry, now it’s time you met Jack!”
She turned me a bit in my chair by the force of her
energetic enthusiasm, and suddenly I became aware that, sitting in
the corner was a tiny man. “Tiny” is perhaps an overstatement, but his posture was so imploded by—what? inanition, or just gravity?—that he seemed to take
up no space at all, and I had completely
failed to notice he was there. He was neatly dressed in corduroys and a brown
cotton shirt; he wore a corduroy cap. His hands were folded in his lap, and his
head was inclined toward them. For all the notice he gave anyone or anything in
the room, he might have been asleep.
“Ron!” Ruth exclaimed. Her voice was loud, with a Cockney
edge that made it hard to ignore, but the main in the chair did not move a
muscle nor turn a hair. “Ron, will you say hello to Jack?”
“Oh, Ruth, no,” Ron said, “I couldn’t. I’m no good at it.”
That response struck me as odd, but before I had time to
inquire, Ruth said to me, “What about you, Terry? Will you say hello?”
“Of course I will,” I said. “But how do you do it?"
“It’s simple,” she said. She stepped across to the man and
took his right hand in hers, holding it palm up. He allowed this gesture, which
might to some have seemed an abrupt indignity, without protest or even visible
awareness of it; he might as well have been a mannequin. “You take his hand like
this, and then you take your finger and write whatever you want to say to him
in big block letters, like so.”
Holding his hand, she wrote in his palm, saying slowly and
loudly, for our benefit, the words she was writing: “J-A-C-K,” she said. “R-O-N
A-N-D T-E-R-R-Y A-R-E H-E-R-E.”
tell him I say hello.”
“R-O-N S-A-Y-S H-E-L-L-O,” Ruth wrote and intoned. Jack
again inclined his head; he fluttered his right hand weakly toward the room in
general, a wave to Ron.
try?”
*
speaking to anyone who has known his name. In the UK, he is not exactly famous,
but he has a devoted following among poets and poetry lovers, perhaps chief
among them my friend Ron Tamplin, who idolized him and loved him. It was Ron
who—having first gauged my interest in and passion for such poets as Gerard
Manley Hopkins and Eliot–had introduced me to Jack Clemo’s work, and as I had
warmed to it, he promised me a trip to meet the poet.
In Clemo’s poems I discovered a gnarly, spiritual, formal
sensibility akin to Hopkins in some ways and alien to it in others. Clemo’s
life in no way resembled Hopkins’s; indeed it in no way resembled the life of
anyone I could think of. And while Clemo’s poems are not
“confessional”—indeed he often wrote dramatic monologues from the points of
view of saints and others—his life, like the life of any poet, is richly
implicated in his work.
Born in 1916 to working class Cornish parents, Clemo lost
his father early on; his parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and Clemo’s
father enlisted in 1917, never to be seen again. Reared among tin miners and
clay-kiln workers (his father had been one), Clemo lived in the shadow of his
mother’s rage toward his vanished father, and of her religious zeal. She was a
“dogmatic Nonconformist,” a designation that, in early twentiety-century
Cornwall, basically meant a strict fundamentalist Protestant, a Puritan of
sorts, refusing to conform to the aegis of the Church of England.
childhood—the few biographical accounts are at variance in dating these
matters—he became ill with a disease that the Cornish doctors found mysterious.
He had, at this stage, bouts of blindness, of deafness, and of paralysis which
came and went unpredictably and, evidently, untreatably. At the age of 13 he
was taken out of the public schools, being deemed too sickly to remain; what
became of his education beyond that point is hard to say, but my assumption is
that he was from that point forward self educated; he never attended
university. Somewhere along the way he read D.H. Lawrence, and found validation
both in Lawrence’s genius and in his background. Like Lawrence, he set out to
write both fiction and poetry; he published a novel, Wilding Graft, in 1948, and in 1949 a memoir, Confession of a Rebel.
sporadically plagued his boyhood became permanent. Blindness continued to come
and go, but in the mid-1950s it came and stayed, so that by the age of 40 Clemo
was both deaf and blind. From then on, though he published more prose, his
output was primarily poetry; his bibliography lists ten volumes.
was able to write it at all—for the incisiveness of its spiritual quest, for
its closeness to the weird Cornish landscape and Cornwall’s working class, and
for its formal beauty. Like many blind poets (think of Borges in his old age),
Clemo gravitated to traditional versification and fixed forms, though likely
even had he kept his sight he would have written that way: it suited him
(copyright issues make it impossible to quote Clemo poems online; I refer the
reader to his or her own resources to discover his powerful and fascinating
corpus, but in the US it’s hard to find; my university library contains not a
word of Clemo).
*
At 72, when I met him, Jack Clemo had small, even delicate
hands that showed little sign of his working class background. I don’t know to
what extent the young Clemo was able to engage in manual labor; if he’d been
able to do it, he’s have done it, but his illness may have kept him from it.
Photos of Clemo from various times in his life, paradoxically, show a robust, even
elegant-looking man, but the Jack Clemo I met was neither. What the state of
his health was then I don’t know, but he had only six more years to live, and
seemed older and more frail than his age.
Ruth said to Jack: “T-E-R-R-Y W-A-N-T-S T-O S-A-Y
H-E-L-L-O.” Clemo gave his small quick nod.
In the palm of his right hand, I wrote, more slowly and
deliberately than Ruth had done, “Mr. Clemo: I admire your work very much, and
I’m very glad to meet you.” Clemo closed his hand, took it from me, and placed
it in his lap again; otherwise, he didn’t react.
I said to Ruth, “I’m not certain I did that right.”
“Let me see,” Ruth said. She was utterly cavalier about her
handling of Clemo; she snatched his hand up again and said “T-E-R-R-Y S-A-Y-S
H-E A-D-M-I . . . .”
In a firm, resonant, somewhat too loud voice, he declared, “I know what Terry said!”
Of course, of course, of course: he could speak perfectly
well. Up until that moment, he had simply chosen not to do so.
*
From that point until Ron and I departed a couple of hours
later, the conversation became general, as they say in old novels, and animated. Clemo was a very eloquent man. Ruth pulled a chair beside him, held
his hand in his, and translated at breakneck speed whatever any one of us said;
likely she and Clemo had evolved a shorthand of some kind over the many decades
of their marriage. Ron and I had a good many things to ask, and it was not long
before I felt, as Ron so clearly had for a long time before, that I had met one
of my Maestros.
an old manual typewriter that he’d had for ages; he pointed to where it sat on
a small typing table in the corner. He didn’t want a new one; he knew the touch
of this one too well for that. Did he revise? Of course! Did Ruth read drafts
of his poems back to him? No, he remembered them. “He remembers them all,” Ruth
said. “He can go back six drafts and pick up a variation on a line.” Did Ruth
proofread his work for him? Yes, but it was hardly necessary. “He never makes a
mistake,” Ruth said.
familiar with Clemo’s poems, at one point said, “Ruth, there’s a poem of Jack’s
that I saw years ago in a magazine, but I don’t think it’s ever been in one of
his books; I wonder if you have a copy,” and he told her the title. “I don’t
know,” Ruth said, “but Jack will.” She wrote quickly in his palm, and he lit
up. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “You remember that orphan, do you! I like that one as
well. Yes, I have it. Just a second.”
directly across the room. Beneath the bookshelves on that side, there were four
double-doored cabinets, eight doors in all. He opened the fifth door from the
left. The whole cabinet was filled with boxes of the sort that reams of typing
paper come in, all exactly alike. He knelt down and counted, feeling as he
went: three rows over, five boxes down: this one! He opened the box, which was
filled with what might have been a ream of typing paper, except every sheet had
a poem on it. He pulled out the ream and quickly counted his way into it. Aha!
There you are; this is the one you want.
“Yes,” Ron said, “that’s it.” It was like a magician’s card
trick, except that for Clemo, it was just the way he was in the world. There
ensued a lengthy conversation about the poem, which was about, yes, Thomas
Aquinas.
Hearing that name again, I looked up again at the five
volumes, the three thousand pages, of the Summa,
and suddenly a lightning bolt hit me. How did Ruth Clemo know so much about
Thomas Aquinas? Ron had told me that Ruth was just what she seemed: a
working-class Cockney woman from inner-city London. Arguably the most
intelligent person in the room, Ruth had no doubt been denied, like Clemo,
access to higher education; she and Clemo had married in 1968, long after the
doors of Clemo’s perception had shut down for good. I have no idea what the
course of their reading was like, before that date or after it, but the
evidence of that edition of the Summa
seemed clear enough: someone’s hands had worn that gold leaf away; and the
freshness of both Jack’s and Ruth’s acquaintance with the material made it
clear that the last reading of it was not so very long ago.
pages of Aquinas’s Summa into the
palm of someone’s hand, by the time you are done, you are an expert. Whether or
not Jack Clemo would be able to leap up and leaf instantly to a given argument
of Aquinas’s on page 2,356 of that work, I don’t know, but I’d bet my life that
Ruth could.
written in their hands.
gift Ron Tamplin wanted me to take away. What Jack and Ruth held in their hands
was what every poet ought to have: the world’s poetry, and—whatever you may
mean by the word—God’s, written letter by letter in the skin: thus earned.
*
At a certain point, it became clear that Jack was restless.
“Ah, it’s time for Jack’s walk,” Ruth said; “he has to have it every
afternoon.”
And as it was getting late, Ron and I agreed we would walk
the Clemo’s out, then return to the car for the drive home.
the sky. We walked alongside the Clemos; Ruth was tucked snugly against Jack,
protectively I thought, but it hardly seemed necessary; Jack clearly knew
exactly where he was and where he was going. We were chatting about nothing as
we walked; Jack alone was silent. Suddenly he shook himself loose from Ruth,
turned at a smart right angle, and walked off the sidewalk out onto a lawn. He
took four steps, paused, and then held out both hands, forming a circle with
his thumbs and his middle fingers. It was for all the world as if he were about
to put an invisible crown on the head of an invisible king who knelt before
him.
His favorite palm tree was right there where he’s standing. He’s saying
farewell to it.”
Looking down, I could see the remnant of the tree, sawed off
flush with the ground. The placement of his hands was exact: if the tree were
still where it once stood, his hands would encircle it perfectly.