Clare : Letters and Life
The Letters of John Clare. hditeti by J. W. and Anne Tibble. (Routledge and Kegan Paul. 305.) Green Shadows : The Life of John Clare. By June Wilson. (Hodder & Stoughton. zits.) WHEN Southey wrote somewhat patronisingly on uneducated poets in 1831 he did not even mention the Northamptonshire peasant John Clare who had already published three of his four volumes
of verse. The novelty had worn off ; so had the acclamation that deflected an honest countryman into the feverish paths anq financial worries of a literary life. A few more years were to see him in
an asylum, not fully understanding who he was or why he came to be there. The show was over. Only in recent years, since Mr.
Blunden began his discoveries in 1924, his it been appreciated that Clare was far more than a pastoral rhymer and that his best work was written when, by a prose reckoning, he was out of his mind. This aspect of Clare still awaits the treatment that some psychiatrist
is sure to devote to it. For the rest, the biographical and critical tail that lengthens behind alt writers of importance is developing
sturdily. After Mr. and Mrs. Tibble's detailed Life in 1932, and Mr. Grigson's recent study of the asylum poems, we have now for the first time a collection, running to over 300 pages, of all the available letters. We have also, from Miss Wilson, the first biography of that routine or secondary type which dishes up the published facts again in readable form. The Tibbles are still appealing for outstanding manuscript material to be disgorged, so that a good deal more, in verse and prose, may be expected. A word first as to the make-up of the new volume. Most of the letters, like the examples Mr. Blunden gave with Clare's life sketches, are written to his publisher, John Taylor, whose family in recent years passed on its manuscripts to the Northampton Public Library. These and other groups containing the asylum letters have never before been published in full, but they have been accessible for reference and quotation—in which way they were used by the present editors in their Life. With their usual care and scholarship they now present them chronologically, uncorrected and under- punctuated as Clare wrote them ; but graced with a curious double system of annotation whereby stars and daggers direct the reader to the foot of the page, and in other cases numerals send him to the end of the volume.,With all this, there is no clear indication of which passages have already been published. Further, any reader happen-
ing not to know Clare'S life-story is unprovided with the briefest summary, so that to the final " Why I am shut up I don't know " he will have to add " Nor when nor on whose authority." To this the editors may reasonably answer that nobody will or should Make Clare's acquaintance through his correspondence. In the end it may—they hold that it does—produce a secondary illumination: " something of the same 'living ' quality as in. his poetry." Much of it reflects the far more mundane struggle to make a living. For the countryman this artificial product of ink and paper was almost his damnation. The perpetual harassment of petty business matters may well have pushed him nearer to the insanity that awaited him.
The question arises: Was it wise to afford Clare the full majesty of separate publication, as distinct from the " life and letters " granted to-second-rank personalities ? Is not his correspondence,. compared with Byron's. Lamb's or Keats's, distressingly thin ? The
cause is not only in Clare's limited outlook but in his limited circle. The subjects and addressees have their part in it. A poet is rarely winged when addressing his publisher: to whom his verses become something to be measured off and grouped into a volume with an audience to catch. Taylpr himself was a man of temperament and an autocrat who thought nothing of knocking his author's more ragged verses into saleable shape. (Just how much of Clare is Taylor would be an interesting matter to explore.) Clare was acquiescent ; and Taylor did become more than a publisher and evoke something beyond a business correspondence. He was the confidant of Clare's physical ills, down to the most intimate and distressing symptoms, and the man he was to lean on increasingly as life became a burden and loyalties grew weaker with the years.
The asylum letters, written to his son Charles and others between 1837 and 1860 (four years before Clare's death), cannot fail in their own strange, blundering appeal, as the`wandering mind gropes back to the old names he half remembers in the village, or tells a mythical woman in an unsent letter that he is writing new cantos of Byron's , poems. The illusion of Mary Joyce, his boyhood's love, as a " first wife first love and first everything " has long been known ; but the full wonder of this period, that checks our sympathy with "a mind o'erthrown " and turns it to respect, lies in remembering what poetry went with it. Now, when his own and others' identities are misted, when irritations about money, publication and bodily pain have slipped away, the poet is uncoupled from the observant peasant, to reach, whether as Shakespeare, Byron, Clare or any other, the utterance of high poetic truth.
Some day the dreaded Ariel touch is likely to invade biographies of Clare. For the present Miss June Wilson is happily free from popular and sentimental treatment. Her fault lies rather in the too literal chronicling of year-by-year events ; the reader feels that,
sympathetic to her subject, she remains outside it, where Mr. and Mrs. Tibble, in their earlier biography, were illuminating and intense. To sum up Clare's tragedy as the strain bittween town and peasant life is to over-simplify. His loneliness is something at once mor,: comprehensive and less definable. The poetic side is not Miss Wilson's province ; but she usefully assembles facts and copious
Previous page
