Arms and the man himself
Christopher Howse
COLLECTED POEMS by John Meade Falkner John Meade Falkner Society, Greenmantle, Main Street, Kings Newton, Melbourne, Derbyshire DE73 8BX, £15, pp. 88, ISBN 0954779908 Everybody who reads John Meade Falkner’s novel The Nebuly Coat thinks he has discovered something extraordinary that he has to tell his friends about. So it has gone on, since 1903 when the novel was written, always recommended, never quite famous, impossible to film, sometimes in print. The title is obscure (it’s heraldic) and it is not really possible to explain usefully what it is about: a town and its cathedral, yes, for no novel rivals it for a sense of place, and the strange people caught up in its fate.
Falkner himself took a coat of arms almost the same as the hero/anti-hero of the novel, so perhaps we can expect to find something of him in his fiction. (There is the quite different kind of novel Moonfleet, and the ghostly tertium quid The Lost Stradivarius.) But one of Falkner’s contemporaries said that ‘he makes his conversation a shrouding veil for his thoughts’. Certainly it comes as a shock to readers of his novels to discover that John Meade Falkner was an armaments manufacturer.
Then, he lived at an awkward time (1858-1932): a Victorian until middle age, far too old to fight in the Great War. His prose has the vigour of Stevenson; his poetry has no modernist tricks. (Ballades still figure among his collected poems, on Burford and the Lincoln Wold.) To seek for autobiographical clues in the poetry, of course, is not an obligation. It is just that, since we know he was a man unlike others, there is some point in not taking, or leaving, the poetry quite at face value.
Sometimes he reminds us of Betjeman, and not only in his verse form and his English churchy vocabulary. A. N. Wilson points out in his introduction that the reference in ‘After Trinity’ would be impenetrable to present-day Anglican theological students: ‘We have sung, O where shall wisdom?/ Thick paper, folio, Boyce.’ True enough. I saw a three-volume 19th-century edition of William Boyce’s Cathedral Music on sale the other day in the SPCK shop by Westminster Abbey cloisters. They wanted £900 for it, so it must seldom nest on the melamine shelves of theological students.
Falkner’s subjects are historical and topographical — the seaside ruin of Bridlington Priory; a Roman villa at Chedworth; a forgotten photographer of Oxford. (Falkner had written Murray’s Guide to Oxfordshire and a history of the county too.) He was a mediaevalist and palaeographer, and by a strange provision in his will he left Pope Pius XI £500.
In ‘Cistercians’ (which he sent in 1920 to the forbidding St Loe Strachey, for long the editor of The Spectator, with a stamped envelope in case it was not wanted), Falkner pictures the cultivated landscape and the regular way of life these reformed Benedictine monks brought.
Compline with Qui cisternas, Exsurge with the lark.
The novice Ad lucernas, The old monk in the dark.
The old monk dreams and drowses, The young monk sings the scale; The grey Cistercian houses Pack all the wool for sale.
In one of his helpful notes, Kenneth Hillier, the secretary of the John Meade Falkner Society (which has printed this book well on good paper), suggests that ‘Qui cisternas’ is a play on the Cistercians’ place of origin, Citeaux, where the Romans had a reservoir. No doubt this is right, but I suspect there is also a reference as obvious to anyone who has sung the Latin hours of the Church as Boyce is obvious to English ecclesiologists. Cisterns are often referred to by ancient spiritual writers, in anagogical exegesis of the Old Testament (Jeremiah 2:13, for example), but I cannot find them being taken up in prayers at compline. Perhaps a reader could help, for the second edition.
That is a mere puzzle, but no one captivated by the larger enigmas of John Meade Falkner will want to be without his poems.
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