Hello friends.
Recently, I have finished reading Jonathan Bate’s biography of John Clare. The Northamptonshire poet has long held a mystique for me which I was keen to probe. I knew some of the bare facts and epithets: “peasant-poet”, “lunatic-poet” and so forth, but I was keen to learn about the man for myself.
In the chapter of Ulysses known to readers as “Scylla and Charybdis”, a character says that the life of Shakespeare is essentially of no material interest: “I mean, we have the plays… As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has said”. It is true that, in a post-Barthes world, critics have tended to favour close analysis of texts over biographical speculation, but I would argue that the life of Clare contains enough facts and holds sufficient interest to deserve investigation.
The first thing to say on this front is that Jonathan Bate is a first-rate guide for anyone wanting to embark on a similar project. Not only does he quote liberally from contemporary sources, including the poems, he also has a remarkable, empathetic imagination, often drawing the reader’s attention to the various side-lined or maligned figures and inviting us to imagine their particular feelings. Perhaps he is most adept, however, when treating Clare’s descent into later-life psychosis. As someone who has entered this mental state twice and spent time in a mental hospital, I found Bate’s sensitivity to Clare’s situation and his reluctance to agree unquestioningly with the popular belief that he had schizophrenia heartening. More than this, though, I thought the ways in which Bate describes Clare in the initial grips of psychosis—not least how he was essentially not fully “mad” when he went to the Essex asylum for the first time—to be moving. It is moments such as this which I hope to weave into one of the psychosis short stories that I am writing.
But, excellent as Bate’s book is, I don’t want to focus on his depiction of Clare in this entry; I want to take a look at the man as I found him. The reader should be warned that the following comes from no profound knowledge of Clare’s works and not a great deal of immersion in the historical context. What I hope it can provide, however, is an honest response from one sufferer of what we would now term “bipolar disorder” to another. I want to respond to Clare’s words, Clare’s insanity and the good and bad of the man. Above all, I want to explain how Clare can curiously invade that region just below the surface of the skin and how I feel I have entered into a sort of chrono-social relationship with him.
I suppose I should first state what I mean by chrono-social. By this term I mean that, not unlike the way in which a parasocial relationship is a relationship in which you feel you know someone intimately who you have never met (internet celebrities are, for clear reasons, subject to this more than most), so a chrono-social relationship is, like mine with Clare, one in which I feel a connection to a man separated by two hundred years, whom I have only heard described and never met. Yes, it’s a bogus term, but I can’t think of a neater way of describing the kinship I began to feel with Clare when reading the biography and poems.
Clare’s love seemed unbounded and not reserved only for his human peers. He adored nature with a sort of religious fervour. One of the key points which Bate returns to again and again is that, while many of the Romantic sect felt they knew nature intimately and depicted it honestly, Clare was a step above them in this regard. He actually did know nature and the labourer’s toil first-hand. Clare seems to have felt this advantage himself. Here he is describing Keats’s nature poetry:
his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described. (p. 189)
For all that, Clare never seems conceited or resentful of the London writers of his day. Certainly, the ones whom he met—including Lamb and Coleridge—caused him no small degree of tongue-tied bashfulness. But for these artists, who were in mutual admiration, it sounds like snobbery had no place.
Upon the death in impoverished obscurity of Robert Bloomfield, Clare is known to have written that “neglect is the only touchstone by which true genius is proved”. (p. 192) Later in life, this sort of thinking led Clare to express the view that “idle fame” is of no importance and that he would rather have his poems “be joined with nature in what he calls ‘the eternity of song’”. (p. 404) This idea is similar to one held by some interpreters of Clare’s madness. In their view, Clare’s claim to literally be Lord Byron or to personally have known poets he never met conceals an element of truth. All poets share a common craft, and so Clare’s delusions about who he was were seen as extensions of this fact. For there is, according to these critics, only one poetic voice that all poets attune themselves to.
I am reminded at this point of two rather haphazard things. The first is perhaps overtly logical, the second a bewildering offshoot of something I experienced during my psychosis.
I shall therefore expound the more logical thing first. I see Clare’s wish to be joined to an “eternity of song” as rather a wonderful idea. This harkens back gently to Tolkien’s world of Arda (Middle-Earth) being sung into creation, but more than that I am reminded of something Bill Evans said of his piano playing. According to him, if his playing was good enough, even if he were playing by himself behind closed doors, someone would eventually discover him. This sentiment has a kind of antithetical kinship with Clare’s “eternity of song”. For, on the one hand, Bill Evans, well over one hundred years later, was after the notoriety and recognition which the later Clare had decided he was not. On the other hand, the recordings of Bill Evans are surely part of the same “eternity of song”. Had they never been recorded, they would still be so, of course, but what if Clare had only thought his poems and never written? In both instances, the “eternity of song” would be richer, but our experience of it far poorer.
When I was psychotic for the second time I was thinking about things like this rather a lot. In my mind, there was some sort of heavenly hard drive to store all of the events happening on earth at all times. Because I was psychotic, this only really reflected inwards onto what I was doing at any given moment. I was convinced that I could communicate in mystic ways with those in this space. So, a passing comment from my granny about a relative of hers would suddenly pertain to not merely her own family, but also to C. S. Lewis’s, or maybe Paul McCartney’s &c. This period of interpretive “playfulness” was short-lived and more upsetting than it sounds, but it really reached its fullest extent in my ability to misinterpret lyrics. It is this that links my illness back to Clare’s wish to be immortalised not in print, but in his “eternity of song”. When I was falling ill for the second time, I had been listening to Fleet Foxes’ album Shore a lot. In particular, the first two tracks were on something of a loop, both literally and in my mind. I found their lyrics to be very pure poetry in my psychotic state, but it was the following extract from Sunblind that led me to this conclusion at the time:
For Richard Swift
For John and Bill
For every gift lifted far before its will
Judee and Smith
For Berman too
I've met the myth hanging heavy over you
Don’t you see it?
No, not the play on myth/mist hanging heavy… there’s something in the third line.
Ok, I’ll tell you.
It required psychosis for me to misinterpret this lyric and thus to hear it as dwelling within the “eternity of song”. What if I were to write this line as I heard it: “For every gift lifted far before—it’s Will”? This was, to my mind, proof that there is only really one poet, one poetic voice and that we all merely tune into it when listening to, reading or writing “poetry” in all that that word can come to mean. For the line for me was cut short before the rhyme of “Bill” and “will” to allow for an aside from the mind of Shakespeare himself, channelled through Robin Pecknold—the frontman of Fleet Foxes. I can still remember the thrill of hearing and (mis)understanding that “it’s Will”. I think of this now as the thrill of discovering “the eternity of song” for myself. Shakespeare, I believed, hadn’t stopped writing when he had died in the early seventeenth century, he had merely ascended into what I now would call the “eternity of song” and his words had woven into the best poetry still being written. I hope this delusion has been cogently enough expressed to follow. If it seems far-fetched, please remember it is a recollection of the thought-ramblings of an inflamed mind, not a piece of analysis.
But perhaps I can illustrate how, though crazed, these thoughts were almost the logical conclusion of my undergraduate studies. Take these lines of Clare’s:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye—
Its only bondage was the circling sky. (p. 316)
I read these lines when fully recovered from my psychosis. And yet, my mind was transported immediately and fancifully to a line from Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man: “And but for the sky there are no fences facing”. Is this not the exact sentiment Clare was expressing? Not that Bob Dylan might have had, like Clare, the Enclosure Acts on his mind when writing exactly, but the comparison of a sky to a fence is so apparently arbitrary and yet so peculiarly similar that it set my mind racing. Isn’t almost all criticism in general only the sane version of a psychotic tendency to tap into such connections? My tutor pointed out that my psychotic interpretation of texts was part of the same skill I had been developing and, similarly, Bate speaks kindly of Clare’s madness:
The act of living vicariously through the writers whose works one admires is a mild form of madness, little more than an extreme version of the imaginative empathy that is at the heart of all good reading. (p. 484)
So we make links, we forge ahead with ideas and theories and we locate what one of my supervisors called “crises” in texts… And on and on and on…
One of the things that Bate captures so marvellously is how Clare fought through the worst of his depressions and psychoses with beautiful poetry. You would almost forget that the following piece of verse was written about his daughter during one of the worst depressive episodes:
In sudden shout and wild surprise
I hear thy simple wonderment
As new things meet thy childish eyes
And wake some innocent intent. (p. 248)
In the six months that followed my second psychosis, I underwent the worst depression I have yet experienced. Clare had bouts of it that lasted over a year and he has described them in ways that so connect with my own experience that it’s like he has been there with me:
my insides feels sinking and dead and my memory is worse and worse nearly lost… I cannot reconcile my own mind what to do, for I think my disorder incurable because I feel as I never felt before in my life and further I cannot feel much better—if I do it's only for a day or two and then I am as bad as ever. (p. 255-6)
That despite his feelings, Clare could still envelop his daughter with love at this time, and even stretch himself to tutoring a local pauper boy in maths, is quite amazing. The mind in psychosis and depression becomes quite unavoidably “selfish” (more accurately self-preservatory) and I can remember whole days passing in my despondency when I could summon the energy to do nothing but watch hour-long YouTube videos of someone playing Mario Kart. This is not to compare myself directly and unfavourably with Clare, but more to hold onto the goodness of his heart in trying times.
If there is one thing above all that I will try to cultivate from having read Bate’s book, it is some of Clare’s fondness for the natural world. Clare’s eye for nature was so amazingly perceptive, but it was also so caring. I may not be able to nurse birds back to health or re-spend a childhood skipping amongst the fields, but I can try to appreciate the country surrounding me on a deeper level than before. Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two about the trees, the birds, the clouds. Experience and enjoyment is found in the poetry, but it is also found in the things themselves:
Solitude was the most talkative vision I met with—Birds bees trees flowers all talked to me incessantly louder than the busy hum of men and who so wise as nature out of doors on the green grass by woods and streams under the beautiful sunny sky—daily communings with God and not a word spoken. (p. 480)
- Angus