John Clare in Hiding: ‘He Hides and Sings’
In his poem ‘The
Botanist’s Walk’, written at High Beach, Epping, Clare says of the nightingale
‘She hides and sings’, which I have often thought might well be a description
of himself - ’He hides and sings’. Clare brought to a fine art the old village
practise of vanishing in the local landscape. A village was, still is in some
ways, the least private place on earth. A native village left one exposed and
naked. To have kept an important side of oneself from the eyes and ears of the
neighbours would have amounted to genius. To be ‘different’ as Clare was
different was disastrous. In Suffolk we called it ‘sticking out’. As we know,
John Clare stuck out a mile, sometimes miserably, often not caring. Both tough
and sensitive, both profoundly native and yet not belonging, he would
occasionally rail about the locals, with their ceaseless gossip and prying,
though never with surprise. They were the price he paid for living in paradise.
He would play down the latter when away from Helpston and apologise for coming
from such a dull place, and every now and then, when at home, he would lash out
in ferocious criticism of its meanness, cruelty, injustice and grimness, such
criticism being the anger he felt towards those who defiled their own nest, so
to speak.
From boyhood on Clare led
a double life at Helpston, a now you see me, now you don’t existence. During
the course of giving a lecture on Francis Kilvert at Hereford, and mentioning
Clare, someone spoke of the poet’s east midlands, seen from the train, as being
‘a featureless plain for miles and miles’. But then his country was Kilvert
country, the Wye Valley, the distant Black Mountains, a delectable border land,
although as we know from Kilvert’s Diary, a region with its own enchanting, and
sometimes terrible, hideaways. A few weeks before this Alan Cudmore and myself
had stopped for a picnic by the side of a lane just a couple of miles from
Helpston, by chance at a spot which neither of us had noticed before, to find
ourselves all at once in a situation of classic John Clare secrecy. There was a
group of oaks which would have been full grown in his day, a rutted grassy
waste, an empty green lane - and a nightingale in full song. One could have
watched the bird or read a book or written verses for hours on end without
being seen by a soul. There are villages all over eastern England, like
Helpston, which although seemingly laid out on a level which denies shelter or
hiding place to those who needed to escape from the community, are full of
spots where one can totally disappear.
There is a theme, an obsession,
a burning necessity, which runs throughout Clare’s poetry and prose, that of
going into hiding. Not that he was alone in doing this. Such a disappearance
trick was one of the great arts of the noisy, nosy, inquisitive old
countryside. William Hazlitt, of whom Clare wrote a sharply observed profile,
had practised such hiding away since he was a boy at Wem, when he would read
all day long in the long grass, shutting his ears to cries from the manse. Not
long ago I passed my neighbour idling at the far edge of his field and told
him, ‘Your wife is calling you.’ ‘I know she is,’ he replied. John Clare had to
get out of earshot and out of view in order to see and hear. At Dr Allen’s no
doubt rackety asylum with its inmates, attendants and servants, he wrote:
O
take me from the busy crowd,
I
cannot bear the noise;
For
Nature’s voice is never loud;
I
seek for quiet joys.
It was at High Beach that
he wrote a disturbing poem on how a patient from the asylum would affect the
world outside.
I
went in the fields with the leisure I got
The
stranger might smile but I heeded him not
The
hovel was ready to screen from a shower
And
the book in my pocket was read in an hour
The
bird came for shelter but soon flew away
The
horse came to look and seemed happy to stay
He
stood up in quiet and hung down his head
And
seemed to be hearing the poem I read
The
ploughman would turn from his plough in the day
And
wonder what being had come in his way
To
lie on a molehill and read the day long
And
laugh out aloud when he finished his song
...Fame
bade me go on and I toiled the day long
Till
the fields where he lived should be known in my song
One day Clare lists his
own ecstasies, imaginations and hopes. Here is inventory of delights - delights
which he shared only with some of his fellow Helpstonians but which he believed
should be shared by all. Orchis hunting. Gipsies. Old stone pits fringed with
ivy. Gathering cowslips for wine. The pleasure of waiting in a spot to hear the
song of the nightingale. Waiting for a lover. The successive growth of flowers
- he means the discovering of a certain flower, such as the white violet, in
the same place year after year. The pleasures of fair-going in boys. The
pleasures of cutting open a new book on a spring morning. The pleasures of
lovers walking narrow lanes. House-warming customs. Birds-nest building. Larks.
The pleasure of the shepherd making marks to tell by the sun the time of the
day. The pleasure of the boy angling over the bridge, and of boys stripping off
to jump over a cat gallows. The pleasures of schoolboys climbing the leads of
the church to cut their names there. The pleasures of pelting at the weather
cock. The pleasure of an old man taking a journey to see his favourite oak
gathering into leaf.
Clare’s study of natural
history began in solitude but it eventually opened out into consultation, the
more so when Taylor his publisher suggested that he wrote a ‘Selborne’ for
Helpston. Where the village was concerned, his learned interest in plants and
birds made him less strange than his regularly vanishing into the wilds to read
and scribble. It had no idea how sacred Helpston itself was to him, and that
his vanishings were like the withdrawal from the crowd of a contemplative who
needed to feed on silence. Just before the fatal move to Northborough so like
was he to his ‘successive growth flowers’ that he might well have been off to
Botany Bay - he wrote defensively ‘There are some things that I shall regret
leaving, and some journeys that I shall make yearly - to see the flood at
Lolham Briggs, to gather primroses in Hilly Wood, and hunt the nightingale’s
nest in Royce Wood, and to go to see the furze in flower on Emmonsails Heath.’
In lieu of what was soon
to befall him at Northborough, we can see in this constant listing of his
birthplace’s secret glories in what he called his ‘solitudes’, and the
intellectual and sensuous responses which they accorded, his own statement of
what he knew he possessed, even in the madhouse, his true identity card. There
it was, the interior document which showed half his life in the blessed woods
and fields, half his life in hell.
O
could I be as I have been
And
ne’er can be no more
A
harmless thing in meadows green
Or
on the wild sea shore
O
could I be what once I was
In
heaths and valleys green
A
dweller in the summer grass
Green
fields and places green
A
tenant of the happy fields
By
grounds of wheat and beans
By
gipsies camps and milking bield
Where
luscious woodbine leans
I
wish I was what I have been
And
what I was could be
As
when I roved in shadows green
And
loved my willow tree
To
gaze upon the starry sky
And
higher fancies build
And
make in solitary joy
Loves
temple in the field
At Helpston Clare sought
different solitudes, one for nature study, one for ‘escape’, one for
inspiration, one for reading, one for bliss. The uncultivated region beyond the
enclosure, the Holes and Hills at Barnack, the muddles and sunken ponds, all
became a set of outdoor rooms where he could safely close the door on noise and
intrusion. He is the human nightingale who hides and sings.
While
I wander to contrive
For
myself a place as good
In
the middle of a wood
There
aside some mossy bank
Where
the grass in bunches rank
Lifts
its down on spindles high
Shall
be where I choose to lie
But other things
belonging to what might have been often intrude into these hides, such as Mary
Joyce’s voice, whose ‘beautiful tone . . . made loneliness more than alone’. It
was often the fate of the religious who went to hear God in desert silences to
hear instead some other, unbearable, voice.
John Clare frequently
rationalises his need to hide with that of the wild creatures. ‘Nightingales
are very jealous of intrusions and their songs are hymns to privacy’. He often
sees himself like ‘the time-killing shepherd boys whose summer homes are ever
out of doors’ and he celebrates their workaday (and workanight) freedom in two
splendid poems. He likes the idea that ‘The pewits are hid from all sight but
the allseeing sun’ and that the martin cat ‘hides in lonely shade / Where
prints of human foot is scarcely made’, that the hedgehog hides beneath the
rotting hedge, and that ‘each nimbling hare / Sturts quick as fear and seeks
its hidden lair’. Though the robin seems to be fond of company and the haunts
of men, and makes no secret of its dwelling. Yet when he writes ‘The Robin’s
Nest’ he makes it a poem to solitude. Helpston, slogging away on the land,
finds him timewasting and problematical. Often in village terms he is a skiver.
Even when sharing its normal toil.
I
homeward used to hie
With
thoughts of books I often read with stealth
Beneath
the blackthorn clumps at dinner hour
The village would have
understood that other stealth which he wrote about. Until quite recently the woods
and meadows were erotic. Noting a daisy in some flattened grass, Clare wrote:
Might
well e’en Eve to stoop adown and show
Her
partner Adam in the silky grass
This
little gem that smiled where pleasure was
Arm-in-arm courting along
the footpaths and lanes was the public statement of the clandestine lovemaking
which took place in the secret tangles and wastes. One day Clare would write,
wryly, ‘The pleasures of youth are enjoyed in youth only’.
Soon he would be
obliquely describing himself as ‘the man of science’, and with some
justification. His publisher James Hessey had recommended him to read Gilbert
White. Not that Hessey ever had any great faith in what Clare might do in this
direction, but it was a percipient notion all the same. Yet there were dangers.
‘I would have you be careful how you venture into prose . . . You may injure
your poetical name by a prose attempt’. But as Margaret Grainger points out in
her The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, publishers like John
Taylor and James Hessey could have had little or no comprehension of the
intellectual field into which Clare had been taken by Edmund Artis and Joseph
Henderson. All three of them had become indeed ‘men of science’. Helpston
itself positively welcomed the news that Clare was collecting information on
birds and beasts and flowers, and was eager to contribute. ‘The winter before
last one of Phillips draymen of the common brewhouse Stamford, when coming to
Helpston, saw a strange bird in Pilsgate meadow . . . a schoolmaster was at a
public house and tho he had Pennants History he declared that he was unable to
call it by its name.’ It could have been a young heron or a gannet. As for
Clare’s prose, it is frequently electric. He is the master of the startled
moment, of the confrontation between himself and the surprised creature which
he is stalking. He is not at all like Gilbert White. Although he now is ‘the
man of science’ he remains the birdsnesting boy and the bird-like hiding poet.
It often embarrassed him to be caught-out doing youthful things when he was a
grown-up. ‘I feel almost ashamed of my childish propensities and cannot help
blushing if I am observed by a passing neighbour’.
With a possible John
Clare’s Natural History of Helpstone on the stocks, and with the locals finding
it an acceptable task, his excursions need no longer be fugitive. When the
village saw him, day after day, and even late at night, making for his hides,
it made sense to them. They chose to forget that their man of science had been
notorious for loving ‘each desolate neglected spot / That seems in labours left
forgot’. Or in other words the poet’s relief at finding a place which neither
plough nor woodman, railway navvy nor roadmaker had violated. It thrilled him
to the heart to discover some unreclaimed spot. He moved stealthily among these
wastes which had become nature’s own enclosures in acts of consecration. ‘The
sacredness of mind in such deep solitudes we seek - and find’. He joins what he
calls their ‘heirs and tenants’. He wrote, ‘I felt it happiness to be /
Unknown, obscure and like a tree / In woodland peace and privacy’. And he is
intrigued by seeing the behaviour of someone, such as the cow boy, who gives
vent to his feelings when he thinks himself unobserved.
Absorbed
as in some vagrant summer dream
And
now in gestures wild
Starts
dancing to his shadow on the wall
Feeling
self-gratified
Nor
fearing human thrall
It was of course this
habit of lying low from childhood which made John Clare a naturalist. He was
from the very beginning on the level of ‘different insects passing and
repassing as if going to market or fair, some climbing up bents and rushes like
so many church steeples, and others getting out of the sun and into the bosom
of a flower’.
Soon he would be hidden
away until the end of his life, though not in solitude. That must have been the
worst horror of it. He wrote himself out of this worst of all isolation, and
incessantly, to bring back the old hiding places, a girl’s voice and the wild
birds’ songs, and an uncontaminated air. He had always loved the Book of Job
and now he tasted its despair. In ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’, among his finest
achievements, he states:
-
How subtle is the bird she started out
And
raised a plaintive note of danger nigh
Ere
we were past the brambles and now near
Her
nest she sudden stops - as choaking fear
That
might betray her home so even now
We’ll
leave it as we found it - safetys guard
Of
pathless solitude shall keep it still
See
there shes sitting on an old oak bough
Mute
in her fears our presence doth retard
Her
Joys and doubts turns all her rapture chill
Sing
on sweet bird may no worse hap befall
Thy
visions than the fear that now decieves.
Talking About John Clare (Nottingham: Trent Books, 1999) p.39-47.
© Ronald Blythe
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