With this post, I conclude my week-long stint as guest blogger for Best American Poetry. It has been a pleasure writing for this venue and for this audience. My thanks to David Lehman for the invitation, and to the staff for keeping an eye on the technical side of things--and for reading what I wrote.
Ron and Ruth were talking about Thomas Aquinas. As soon as
we walked through the door, after Ron introduced Ruth and me very briefly, Ron
had said, “Ruth, there’s a question about Aquinas I’ve been wanting to ask; let
me ask before I forget.” And then the two of them were off and running into a
theological thicket where I could not follow and frankly did not want to.
Nothing against the Heavenly Doctor, mind you: I’ve read a pound or two of Aquinas in my time, though I’ve never found him terribly appealing (Augustine and Duns Scotus are more my speed, not that it’s a horse race). But Ron’s question was something very specific about a particular passage in the Summa Theologica. I was lost before the question was out of his mouth. Ruth, on the other hand, rode it like a surfer rides curl; she could quote chapter and verse, and pursued the problem Ron raised as adeptly as a trained theologian. As we sat down, the small room filled with the intensity of their talk. Ignored for the moment—for about twenty minutes in fact—I looked around
We were in the living room of a modest flat, what in the UK is known as a “bedsit”: an apartment consisting of a living area/kitchen, a bedroom, and a bath. It was sparsely but comfortably furnished, and completely anonymous, except for the fact that the rectangular area in which we sat was completely lined with built-in bookshelves: cabinets below, and shelves to the ceiling, all filled with well-used books. I naturally began to scan titles. There was a heavy preponderance of theological books and related philosophical titles (one shelf sagged under thick Aquinas tomes). There was also an extensive and eclectic, but poetry heavy, collection of literary titles; Gerard Manley Hopkins was especially well represented.
As Ron and Ruth talked on—he in his quiet Oxbridge/Irish
accent, she in her working class London one—I fell into a sort of fugue state.
It had been a fascinating day. I was near the end of an eleven-month residency
in Devon, where I’d been teaching at the University of Exeter; Ron Tamplin was
my colleague there, a poet who taught literature. He was an erudite man of
great personal sweetness and charm, and we’d become fast friends; today, as a
farewell gesture, he was taking me on a tour of places he thought I ought not
to miss.
*
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they say that, after Hardy’s heart was brought down from London, it was placed in a pan on the kitchen table at his home nearby, and a dog ate it.”
Ron nodded solemnly. “You’re right. And an Englishman would never kill a dog. For any reason.”
Years later, I ran across this legend again, in somewhat different form. This time it was a cat that ate the heart, and a pig was killed to replace it. I reject this variant on aesthetic as well as pragmatic grounds, but the other story I fully embrace, even though it is probably altogether a fabrication.
*
The library in the Weymouth bedsit was not enormous, as the room was not very large, but it was splendid in its way. It contained many titles I would not, myself, have collected, but every book there was clearly weighty of content, carefully selected; furthermore, there was not a book on any shelf that did not show signs, even from where I sat, from long and careful use. This was not a casual collection, nor was anything present for show: this was a workroom, and the books were respected tools, well maintained but nonetheless worn with the work they had done. It was, in short, my favorite kind of library, one in which function—and hence thought and knowledge, not to say actual wisdom—is the only principal.
Charles Spurgeon,
Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, T.F. Powys—Powys! I’d read a couple of his
weird, occult novels, but here were his theological works—and D.H. Lawrence:
lots of Lawrence. And yes, here
was the local copy of the Summa
Theologica: a leather-bound set in five volumes, running I suppose to over
three thousand pages, the spine of each creased with repeated opening and
closing, the gold leaf titles worn by the touch of hands. The effect was vastly
more pleasing than the look of brand new unread volumes.
Suddenly seized with an unnatural desire to read every word of Aquinas’s
masterwork, I was on the verge of jumping up from my chair and making a
beginning.
But just then Ruth exclaimed, in her broad London accent, “But oh my, Ron, how rude we’re being! There’s Terry sitting, bored to tears with us, and we’ve forgotten why he’s come!” She leapt to her feet, stepped over to me, and took my hand. “Terry, now it’s time you met Jack!”
She turned me a bit in my chair by the force of her
energetic enthusiasm, and suddenly I became aware that, sitting in
the corner was a tiny man. “Tiny” is perhaps an overstatement, but his posture was so imploded by—what? inanition, or just gravity?—that he seemed to take
up no space at all, and I had completely
failed to notice he was there. He was neatly dressed in corduroys and a brown
cotton shirt; he wore a corduroy cap. His hands were folded in his lap, and his
head was inclined toward them. For all the notice he gave anyone or anything in
the room, he might have been asleep.
“Ron!” Ruth exclaimed. Her voice was loud, with a Cockney edge that made it hard to ignore, but the main in the chair did not move a muscle nor turn a hair. “Ron, will you say hello to Jack?”
“Oh, Ruth, no,” Ron said, “I couldn’t. I’m no good at it.”
That response struck me as odd, but before I had time to inquire, Ruth said to me, “What about you, Terry? Will you say hello?”
“Of course I will,” I said. “But how do you do it?"
“It’s simple,” she said. She stepped across to the man and took his right hand in hers, holding it palm up. He allowed this gesture, which might to some have seemed an abrupt indignity, without protest or even visible awareness of it; he might as well have been a mannequin. “You take his hand like this, and then you take your finger and write whatever you want to say to him in big block letters, like so.”
Holding his hand, she wrote in his palm, saying slowly and loudly, for our benefit, the words she was writing: “J-A-C-K,” she said. “R-O-N A-N-D T-E-R-R-Y A-R-E H-E-R-E.”
“R-O-N S-A-Y-S H-E-L-L-O,” Ruth wrote and intoned. Jack again inclined his head; he fluttered his right hand weakly toward the room in general, a wave to Ron.
*
In Clemo’s poems I discovered a gnarly, spiritual, formal sensibility akin to Hopkins in some ways and alien to it in others. Clemo’s life in no way resembled Hopkins’s; indeed it in no way resembled the life of anyone I could think of. And while Clemo’s poems are not “confessional”—indeed he often wrote dramatic monologues from the points of view of saints and others—his life, like the life of any poet, is richly implicated in his work.
Born in 1916 to working class Cornish parents, Clemo lost his father early on; his parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and Clemo’s father enlisted in 1917, never to be seen again. Reared among tin miners and clay-kiln workers (his father had been one), Clemo lived in the shadow of his mother’s rage toward his vanished father, and of her religious zeal. She was a “dogmatic Nonconformist,” a designation that, in early twentiety-century Cornwall, basically meant a strict fundamentalist Protestant, a Puritan of sorts, refusing to conform to the aegis of the Church of England.
*
At 72, when I met him, Jack Clemo had small, even delicate
hands that showed little sign of his working class background. I don’t know to
what extent the young Clemo was able to engage in manual labor; if he’d been
able to do it, he’s have done it, but his illness may have kept him from it.
Photos of Clemo from various times in his life, paradoxically, show a robust, even
elegant-looking man, but the Jack Clemo I met was neither. What the state of
his health was then I don’t know, but he had only six more years to live, and
seemed older and more frail than his age.
Ruth said to Jack: “T-E-R-R-Y W-A-N-T-S T-O S-A-Y H-E-L-L-O.” Clemo gave his small quick nod.
In the palm of his right hand, I wrote, more slowly and
deliberately than Ruth had done, “Mr. Clemo: I admire your work very much, and
I’m very glad to meet you.” Clemo closed his hand, took it from me, and placed
it in his lap again; otherwise, he didn’t react.
I said to Ruth, “I’m not certain I did that right.”
“Let me see,” Ruth said. She was utterly cavalier about her handling of Clemo; she snatched his hand up again and said “T-E-R-R-Y S-A-Y-S H-E A-D-M-I . . . .”
Of course, of course, of course: he could speak perfectly
well. Up until that moment, he had simply chosen not to do so.
*
From that point until Ron and I departed a couple of hours later, the conversation became general, as they say in old novels, and animated. Clemo was a very eloquent man. Ruth pulled a chair beside him, held his hand in his, and translated at breakneck speed whatever any one of us said; likely she and Clemo had evolved a shorthand of some kind over the many decades of their marriage. Ron and I had a good many things to ask, and it was not long before I felt, as Ron so clearly had for a long time before, that I had met one of my Maestros.
“Yes,” Ron said, “that’s it.” It was like a magician’s card trick, except that for Clemo, it was just the way he was in the world. There ensued a lengthy conversation about the poem, which was about, yes, Thomas Aquinas.
Hearing that name again, I looked up again at the five volumes, the three thousand pages, of the Summa, and suddenly a lightning bolt hit me. How did Ruth Clemo know so much about Thomas Aquinas? Ron had told me that Ruth was just what she seemed: a working-class Cockney woman from inner-city London. Arguably the most intelligent person in the room, Ruth had no doubt been denied, like Clemo, access to higher education; she and Clemo had married in 1968, long after the doors of Clemo’s perception had shut down for good. I have no idea what the course of their reading was like, before that date or after it, but the evidence of that edition of the Summa seemed clear enough: someone’s hands had worn that gold leaf away; and the freshness of both Jack’s and Ruth’s acquaintance with the material made it clear that the last reading of it was not so very long ago.
*
At a certain point, it became clear that Jack was restless. “Ah, it’s time for Jack’s walk,” Ruth said; “he has to have it every afternoon.”
And as it was getting late, Ron and I agreed we would walk the Clemo’s out, then return to the car for the drive home.
Looking down, I could see the remnant of the tree, sawed off flush with the ground. The placement of his hands was exact: if the tree were still where it once stood, his hands would encircle it perfectly.
