BIOGRAPHY: BRIAN LYNCHreviews The Poet's WifeBy Judith Allnatt Doubleday, 396pp, £16.99
POETS DON'T have to be able to read and write. The first songs, after all, were sung before paper was invented, by people who never went to school. The concept, then, of the peasant poet says less about both peasantry and poetry than it does about those who conceived it. John Clare (1793-1864) was such a poet, and in the romantic history of the art – is there any other? – he also had the significant advantage of being mad. This is not a negligible amazement: the parsonical aristocrat who was often his inspiration, William Cowper, wrote The Castaway, one of the finest poems in the language, while he was, seemingly, entirely insane.
Judith Allnatt has had the good idea of seeing Clare through the eyes of his wife. The esteem in which he held her is evident in his poem Patty of the Vale: "Low and humble though her station,/ Dress though mean she's doomed to wear,/ Few superiors in the nation/ With her beauty can compare".But the verse, like the beauty, is skin-deep. In the prose of the whole story, Clare, as well as thinking he was Lord Byron, was sexually rapacious, promiscuous and obsessed with another woman, Mary Joyce.
In the church of the Cambridgeshire village of Glinton, near to Helpstone, where Clare was born, his name and Mary’s can still be seen scratched onto a stone doorway. Although Mary was then only nine years old, Clare continued to love her all his life and refused to believe she had died young. This passion understandably aggravated Patty, and the aggravation wasn’t helped by Clare referring to her, the mother of his six children, as one of his “fancies”.
The difficulties were further added to by the fact that the Clare family, plus his parents, were crammed into a two-bedroomed cottage in Northamptonshire, one step away from starvation. Allnatt is good on these domestic realities, and she is well-read, too, on the wider social history. She writes, for instance, a convincing description of a steam-driven plough carving through earth “baked hard as a ship’s biscuit” and overturning the livelihoods of local labourers. In addition, she understands the importance of the enclosure of common lands and the law that aimed to prevent the poor from gleaning the harvest.
Unfortunately, she is less good on the psychology of the poet and the depth of the talent that produced some 3,000 poems and a mass of occasional writings. Nor does she adequately convey Clare’s astonishing success as a poet: in his mid-20s he was a best-selling author, the recipient of aristocratic patronage, the boozing buddy of Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Charles Lamb.
It can be argued, though, that Allnatt restricts her view to what could be seen through the eyes of her narrator. But there are problems here too: I don't think she likes Clare much as a man, and her over-literate Patty is a bit of a milksop, a hard done-by Aga mammy, not so much a Tess of the D'Urbervillesas a St Teresa of Outer Suburbia. Allnatt takes up, for example, the theme of Clare's sexual relationship with Patty, indicates that she gave him the cold shoulder, but then leaves it unresolved. The language, too, inclines to the mimsy, and the dialogue is wooden. Clare may have written, "I feel that a string in me is vibrating that has never been plucked before", but I doubt he ever said it. On the positive side, "starnels", "pleaching", "horkey" and "clemmed" are just a few of the many fascinating dialect words that star these pages. When Judith Allnatt loosens up and gives her Goody Two-Shoes characters the boot she will, no doubt, do better work.
Brian Lynch’s novel The Winner of Sorrow (New Island) is about the poet William Cowper
