AND ANOTHER THING
England's a fen of stagnant waters but autumn turns all to gold
PAUL JOHNSON
Early on Sunday morning I struggled up a lane made horribly muddy by the cows and set up my painting stool and things on a little knoll which commanded a prospect of enchantment. To the left was a creamy farmhouse with its protective cluster of rus- set buildings, old-fashioned smoke drifting lazily into the still sky. In the foreground, small copses of trees were beginning to blaze their colours. Then, stretching to infinity, were emerald fields becoming first ultramarine, then mauve as they receded to the Bristol Channel and the Welsh coast, wreathed in vaporous mists. Above, a gigantic blue and gold sky, with wafer-thin clouds fighting for their lacy existence as the sun rose higher. Incurious sheep eyed my activities drowsily before turning to munch again, complacently unaware they are now worth less than a pound apiece, liable any moment to be ignominiously slaughtered and buried in a pit to save the bother of rearing them.
I tried to cultivate the detachment of those stoical sheep, turning my back on the world with its public outrages and private sorrows, rejoicing instead in the seasonal glory of autumn. It will still be displaying itself light-years after we have gone and even the records of the events which dismay us have crumbled into electronic dust. As I painted, I repeated to myself Keats's 'Ode to Autumn', which I know by heart, having decided many years ago that it was the sad little poet's finest effort, indeed the nearest thing to a perfect poem I know. I have been looking at a photo of the manuscript and noting the deft touches with which he embellished it. Thus the clouds become 'barred' and 'bloom' the 'soft dying day', while the swallows are no longer 'gathered' but 'gathering', a neat example of Keats's regard for exact truth.
I love reading accounts of Keats's short but fruitful life and have many such vol- umes, the latest being a fine biography by Andrew Motion. In 1818, the year before he wrote 'Autumn', Keats had started an 'Ode to May', and written six beautiful lines about how he intended to conduct his writ- ing career. He then abandoned the poem on hearing that Leigh Hunt had just published one on the same subject — a ludicrously inadequate reason for us but sufficient for Keats, who was achingly insecure in some ways. The fragment has, however, one memorable line, in which Keats says that the true poet needs nothing but nature and can be 'Rich in the simple worship of a day'.
This reliance on nature to soothe the wounds inflicted by a man-made world and make good hopes deferred or opportunities lost or the fact of failure is, as it happens, a theme more suited to autumn. Its colours, textures, scents and activities speak of decay and gathering up and making do with what we have — its mood is resigned rather than expectant. So when Keats came back to his thought a year later in the autumn of 1819, he was ready to produce a great poem, and did so. The words and images are wonder- fully serene, conveying satiation and con- tentment and making autumn appear the crown of the year, with its granaries full, its fruits huge and 'ripe to the core', its 'clam- my cells' of the bees brimming over with honey, the cider-presses 'oozing', all living things 'drowsed' with the fumes of poppies.
In fact Keats wrote this magical poem, each word of which is precious, when he had every reason to feel despondent. His family worries, as Motion says, were acute, and his personal fears beyond his power to exorcise. Being trained in medicine, Keats must have known by this point that his health was not going to improve fundamen- tally, that his life was bound to be short in any case, and that just to prolong it a spell he would have to change his happy-go- lucky existence as a bohemian poet in Lon- don and seek the sunshine abroad, aban- doning all hopes of love and marriage.
Then again, to a gentle radical like Keats the year had been ominous: much distress in town and countryside alike, visible evidence of undernourishment and want of all kinds. A great popular gathering at St Peter's Fields in Manchester had alarmed the mag- istrates and solid citizens and had been dis- persed by yeoman cavalry with needless loss of life. The poor were desperate, many young men were angry and ready for vio- lence, the propertied classes were terrified, the old, the weak and vulnerable despaired of the future. Ministers, reviled on all sides, 'Knowing me I'll be dead to the world after lunch.' felt helpless and feared assassination — indeed, a few months after the poem was written a plot was discovered to slaughter the entire Cabinet in cold blood. The minds of thinking men were gripped with the ide- ology of Malthus, in which the inexorable rise in population was answered by equally inexorable wars, plagues and famine. No one was then to know, least of all poor Keats, that a new wave of prosperity was already lapping England's shores and that the swelling tide of economic progress and parliamentary reform would wash away the blood of Peterloo. Thus he turned to nature for consolation and reassurance. And he found it. We, who read his poem, find it too.
So I painted the farmhouse, the copses, the huge sky and the indifferent sheep, and thought about Keats, dead two years after he wrote his poem, aged only 26. Autumn came early in the lives of many gifted crea- tures in those days when tuberculosis scythed through the young, especially those in their teens and twenties. Tom Girtin, our greatest watercolourist, was already dead of it, with Bonington, almost his equal, soon to follow. Gericault, supreme among French painters of the epoch, was another victim and Weber, who might have sur- passed Beethoven had he lived, was already beginning to cough his heart out. Yet, as I repeated Keats's lines to myself while my brush flew across the paper, he seemed quite real and alive to me, the felicitous pictures his words conjured up mingling and blending with the actual fields and sky and bird-life before my eyes. We forget the background of personal and public distress against which he wrote, or are unaware of it. Instead, we savour his voice in our ears, and thank him for his genius.
Golden autumn weather, which we enjoyed on Sunday and still enjoy as I write, is a providential blessing, to ease the iron and the lead of life. I find the news infinite- ly depressing, England not so much a fen of stagnant waters as Wordsworth put it, as an open sewer, with a corrupt and corrupting press daily depositing its fetid contents in our laps. Keats's mood in 1819 is mine too, today. But, like him, I can fly to the infinite resources of a nature which is serene, pure, unchanging except within its own perpetual rhythms, above all endlessly beautiful. Recording it last Sunday, however inade- quately, made me feel 'rich in the simple worship of a day'.
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