The poet and the vision

Talking Sense Spring 2003

When Jack Clemo died in 1994 he had become one of his generation’s best landscape and visionary poets. Friend, biographer and fellow-poet Michael Spinks describes his compelling life and work.

The young Jack Clemo’s life might have seemed already stripped down to its essentials. He was born two years into the First World War. His father was killed on board ship by enemy action, and he and his mother had to make do somehow in the small granite cottage perched on a harsh, weathered ridge in mid-Cornwall. Just before his fifth birthday Jack suffered his first attack of blindness. He emerged sour and withdrawn and perplexed at the warring nature inside himself, acting out the battle between his father’s dissolute character and his mother’s unswerving faith.

These struggles were played out as he wandered day after day on the moors and roads around his home and across the ever-expanding clay workings that surrounded them. At thirteen, unfit for schooling, he rebelled against his religious upbringing, abandoning himself to daydreams and fitful, black moods. Aged nineteen, he was overcome by deafness.

Anger prompted him to engage in years of intense correspondence in the county press, arguing an erotic and mystical philosophy that was part of his personal torment but also arose from the need to make people take notice of him. Resolution began with his conversion – an acceptance of what he called ‘the invading gospel’ – but produced a further dual vision. By 1938 he was convinced that he should be a writer, and that he carried a divine vocation to marry. That he and his mother and her disabled sister lived in near-poverty, that Jack himself had become an unkempt and wild misfit, and that he had written nothing other than his newspaper letters and a couple of sad verses, was not, in his eyes, sufficient reason to doubt God’s declaration.

One Sunday afternoon, in February 1945, he came back to the cottage from clambering around the clay-works to write, “quite effortlessly, some lines which I knew at once were the finest poetry I had ever penned”. This was his poem ‘Christ in the Clay-pit’, a stark shout of defiance and trust, with its opening lines of questioning, ‘Why should I find Him here/ And not in a church, nor yet/ Where Nature heaves a breast like Olivet/ Against the stars?’ Jack Clemo had found his voice and his style. The subject, he would have said, found him.

Finding his voice

That poem, together with others from the same period, formed his first collection of published verse, The Clay Verge. A sequence he put together in the same year, 1951, won a Festival of Britain prize. He had always hoped, rather, to be a novelist. A novel he had written over ten years earlier was finally accepted (with an anxiety which brought on further fogging to his eyesight) and came out as Wilding Graft, receiving an Atlantic Award. By 1954, though, blindness enveloped him and he remained blind and deaf for the rest of his life. Two other of his early novels have also appeared, The Shadowed Bed and The Clay Kiln.

Though he dismissed the parading of the solely autobiographical in verse, his poetry gives a compelling insight into the outworkings of the life. The early poetry is savage, often seeming to be inhuman, pitting the will of man against that of God and screaming for man to lose. There he employs the landscape and industry of the clay-works that surround and hem in the damp, dusty cottage. ‘Keep far from me all loveliness,’ he pleads.

His theme, though he learned to love the natural world, was the debt we owe to God for His sacrifice on the cross. Twisted into this demand is the quest for resolution of his other vision, that of marriage. ‘Blind trust and blind suspicion/ Combed the dark rocks fruitlessly’ he confesses in one poem, losing in love once again. At the bitter conclusion of a tempestuous engagement, Jack received a letter from Ruth Peaty, a Londoner then living in Dorset.

Courtship and love

The story of their courtship and their marriage the following year, 1968, is captured in Sally Magnusson’s book Clemo: A Love Story. The celebratory poem ‘Wedding Eve’ written for Ruth made his new bride cry when she read it that evening:

October hush enfolds
The fruits of a creed’s battle, of a bond
More real to me than time.
Pews rest in starlight and the hills climb,
Dune-muffled, to this house which holds
The crisp ring and the key beyond.

The poetry changed – softer, calmer – and took stock of the changed, shared circumstances. A more public Clemo appeared. He returned to church attendance and, in 1970, was crowned ‘Poet of the Clay’ at the Cornish Gorsedd. At the age of sixty five he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Further changes occurred in 1984 when Jack and Ruth moved to Weymouth. Even though Cornwall and the landscape of his earlier life continued to act as touchstones for his writing, he was never one to dwell in the past. ‘I am,’ he remarked, ‘a poet without nostalgia’, and he rejoiced in tackling the new terrain: ‘The miles-long heap/ Has no angles or splinters: the pebbles, fawn or grey,/ Shine smooth, rounded like eggs’.

A heretic in Florence

The most startling and unexpected change to his writing came from two invitations to visit Italy late in his life. In 1987 he visited Venice and in 1993, the year before he died, Florence. A blaze of more colourful verse burst out of him, finally integrating his own personal drama in with the sweep of faith, landscape and history. In ‘Heretic in Florence’ (his ironic title for himself, of course) he looks back at the stench of the dry, gaping river Arno, and its ‘cure’, and sees in it a metaphor for his own release from merely barren art. The poem also reveals the mixed means by which he took in his perceptions. The laborious writing on the hand, the readings from the Braille library, correspondence from friends, and memory and inspiration all combine to produce the words that present the vision.

Despite the disabilities, the poems are rich in sight and sound, revelling in the senses and pitching just the right word or phrase to make us re-see the glories, and the horrors, of the world around us. Sitting with Ruth, facing the river at Fowey, he notes: ‘Swans preen in their white grace on the river;/ Clay-trucks are massed on the railway line/ That bores past wood-clumps and powdered jetties…’ The fiery Clemo, on the other hand, responds to the Cornish painter Alfred Wallis with the lines,

Did I hear a pit-blast too, sand-waggons rumbling?
Is he there? Or was it only the sea
Thundering in from God and Godrevy?

Clemo gave us a new poetic landscape, with metaphor and realism held in perfect tension. The poet Charles Causley, who was also his best man, called him a genius, and claimed him as one of his generation’s best landscape poets. A recent survey highlights the range of dramatic monologues he produced, from Luther to Blake. Jack’s wife prizes particularly the love poems. He is also, I think, one of the finest Christian poets of the twentieth century.

From ‘Heretic in Florence’

Creative minds may trespass, leave the soul
Dry as the Arno bed that gaped each summer
Before Dante’s day and even while da Vinci
Plotted to cure the unruly river
Which gushed, flagged, whimpered, turned the cadaverous mud –
As art does when proudly scorning
Heaven’s grace, Church-tracked or elemental.

How far can God’s grace move the beholder
Of mere cold skill or twisted vision?
I sense the fringe, an electing flow.
Summer heat has sucked churches, galleries
And the river bridge I stand on,
But there’s no whimpering trickle, no silent bed:
The cured Arno sings in freedom.

Jack Clemo’s Selected Poems was published in 1988, as were the subsequent two volumes of verse, Approach to Murano and The Cured Arno, by Bloodaxe Books.

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