SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (21 page)

After my lunch with Blink
I went home feeling terribly agitated, perhaps suspecting some of what was to
come. My wife was in the hall arranging some flowers on the hall table. At that
time we lived in an apartment block on the edge of Hampstead Heath which was
called Isopod One and had been designed in the international style, along
socialist principles, by a famous architecture collective called the Isopod.
There had once, before the war, been a communal canteen on the ground floor
that had served nourishing vegetarian meals for sixpence and a bar where there
had been folk concerts. It’s derelict now.

‘How
was your lunch with Blink?’ she asked.

‘Catastrophic.’

‘I said
you should have gone to Claridges.’

‘No,
not in that way. Well, in that way too, but the most extraordinary thing. Caspari
and Millipede are being taken over by the German Poison Gas Corporation or some
such, so I’ve told them I’m leaving.’

I had
married for the second time to a much younger woman. My new wife, Annabelle,
was taller than myself, blonde, sweet-faced, with wonderful straight posture
that emphasised her perfect breasts, and she had always had terrible trouble
getting men to have sex with her. Fellows at the university she went to were
always finding her in their beds after parties, looking all tousled and saying
things like ‘Oh I’m just so tired, can’t I stay the night here? We don’t have
to do anything, honestly, we can just hold each other.’ Or she was constantly
taking up the bizarre pursuits of men she fancied, such as real tennis or
robotics, in order to get closer to them; it didn’t work, though she could
probably have designed a tennis-playing robot long before Pete Sampras came
along.

On the
other hand my first wife, Frances, had been a small bandy woman with a
substantial moustache and a fine collection of moles who had, sometimes
literally, had to beat men, especially Arthur Koestler, off with a stick (which
he had liked very much indeed).

My
first wife Frances had abandoned me soon after I became famous with my first
collection of poems, saying that she found celebrity ‘tacky’. She went to live
on a kibbutz in Israel which collapsed in violence because of the sexual
tension she generated. After that Frances had wandered the Middle East and the
ructions she caused were a powerful factor in the rise of Muslim
fundamentalism.

My
young wife Annabelle had married me because I had felt her up at a bottle party
in Mayfair without her begging me to. It was a surprise to me and all in our
circle when she gassed herself, after I had left Caspari and Millipede and no
other publisher would take me. Nobody knew that my fame had been so essential
to her, most assumed instead that she’d been having an affair with Ted Hughes.

In
truth we would have been able to stand me losing my publisher but it was the
court case that really did for us. Now we live in more crack-up conscious times
and it is well known and understood that those under stress, often without
knowing they are doing it, find that they have been stealing little things,
shoplifting in other words. Even back then, if I had been caught walking out of
Fortnums with a jar of pickled walnuts under my coat they might not have
pressed charges but the Zoo felt they could not be so understanding. Also I had
my accursed ubiquity to blame, for one of the many tasks outside poetry that I
had taken on was my own regular radio programme broadcast on the Home Service,
called
The Moral Low Ground,
on which each week I would deliver an
extemporised lecture, entirely without notes, on some aspect of the decline of
manners and morality in society: unmarried mothers, hire purchase, lack of
civility in daily life, association footballers earning more than ten pounds a
week — plus shoplifting, of course. And although the penguin had suffered no
injuries, indeed it was me who had been badly pecked underneath my coat, at
Wandsworth Crown Court the beak sent me down for three months and I was
pilloried in the press for hypocrisy and animal cruelty. This last charge
particularly hurt since I had always been a keen supporter of animal rights and
I think in my stress-addled mind I was only taking the penguin home because it
looked cold.

With no
wife, I sold the flat in the Isopod and with all of my savings bought this
little house in Lyttleton Strachey. To exile myself, to punish myself, to not
have to come face to face with an old friend in the Strand. I retained the best
of the furniture from our Hampstead apartment, at that time the exemplar of
restrained urban taste: Hille couch and armchairs in wood and moquette, Heals
sideboard in sycamore, an original Ercol dining-room set, Luminator lamps from
Arte Luce, Aubusson needlepoint rugs. All as incongruous as myself in what was
little more than a rural council house built for the chauffeur of the Manor
House, now itself converted to apartments. And I kept my clothes, which also
looked out of place in their new bucolic home.

Yet
along with my hunting rifle and an ugly PVC hat Larkin had given me that I’d
never liked, I seemed to have left the ability to write poetry back in London.

Once my inspiration had
been lost and I had come to this place I still stuck to the working routine of
a poet. For thirty years, on weekdays, for three hours in the morning and three
hours in the afternoon I sat at my G-plan desk in the middle, small bedroom,
which looked out over the fields at the rear of the house and wrote …
nothing, basically nothing: the odd line sometimes, a fragment some days; whole
poems once or twice convinced me at lunchtime that my gift had returned and as
early as the same afternoon they would be revealed as complete rubbish. Once,
over four days of fevered creativity, I definitely wrote something that was
quite good. Unfortunately it had already been written a hundred years before by
the Victorian sentimentalist Coventry Patmore.

Except
now was different. In the last two months I hardly dared look at it, hardly
dared contemplate it, but something real had come back. After thirty years of
being mute a tiny feeble voice had begun to hesitantly speak its lines. I
couldn’t quite hear what it was saying but I sat each day at the desk in that
middle bedroom, grandly named my study, which overlooked the asbestos sheds
into which Sam crammed whatever animal it was most profitable for him to abuse
that year, and listened closely to what it was trying to say to me.

And
what it wanted to talk about was what had been in front of me all along, it was
the view out of my study window. When I first arrived, sitting at the same desk
and looking out of the same window, the view was of a patchwork of small fields,
some edged with trees, one with a large pond in the middle and over to the far
left of my vista was a very charming coppice of ancient broadleaf native trees.
Now there was nothing except a vast single expanse of bright yellow rape. (Who
named it that? Was it someone with a sense of humour?) Such vivid colour, the
shade of an RAC man’s protective jacket, always seemed out of place to me in
the English countryside. Over the years the hedges had started disappearing,
the pond was filled in and I could still remember the dreadful day they started
the destruction of the coppice. So from diversity had come uniformity, from
variety, monotony. It was the same when I went on one of my walks in the
neighbourhood: years ago one guaranteed pleasure was hearing and seeing all the
different birds — now with the hedges and lots of the trees gone you could walk
for hours and hear only the odd wood pigeon. There seemed to be lots more paths
back then too, so you could take a turning you’d never spotted before and go on
not knowing where it would take you. Now all the local paths seemed to have
been tarmaced and they all led to more or less identical housing developments.
The realisation crept up on me that my journey from youth to age had been like
that —       from an abundance of options to none, from countless choices and
the promise of an infinity of unknowns to a straight path leading inexorably to
the last remaining unknown, the grave.

The
poem taking shape in my head was to be an epic or perhaps more accurately a
long meditative poem in the style of Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ or ‘The
Excursion’. I had toyed at first with giving it narrative form, giving my ideas
the form of a story, but after some weeks wrestling with an everyman character
and his life journey I realised that this was unspeakably banal. Further weeks
passed while I re-read some of the greater epics, including Seamus Heaney’s
translation of ‘Beowulf’. I must admit the reviews for this had made me wildly
jealous: ‘Heaney has chosen the plain prosaic yet subtly cadenced vernacular of
his Northern Irish roots as the poetic voice into which he renders the
Anglo-Saxon epic. He evokes the highly alliterative texture of Anglo-Saxon
verse … brilliant, genius’ etc., etc. And then the bloody thing was a huge
best-seller! A lot of those buying it seemed to think he had made the story up
himself. I wondered whether I should just translate ‘Le Chanson de Roland’ into
the clipped cadences of a Second World War officer and pass it off as a modern
comment on war rather than attempting the great original task ahead of me. I
calmed myself down by re-reading ‘The Iliad’, ‘The Odyssey’ and of course ‘Paradise
Lost’. This last seemed, given the subject matter of my poem, an obvious verse
form to follow. But since one object of poetry is to arouse emotion, to induce
a certain state of being, to enlarge the imagination into unvisited realms, the
stanza form and threatening rhythms of Milton’s epic did not fit my aim of
rousing both melancholy and anger in my reader. The cadence and the emotional
emphasis were not what I wanted.

Then,
while tending my vegetables, I recalled that for Rimbaud a poem usually first
took place in his mind through some folk tune running through his head. He was
inspired first by the impelling sense of rhythm, and I wondered for a while if
what I had to say could be said in a simple ballad form. I worked with this for
a while but realised that it was not subtle enough for the whole poem, though I
thought it might work for the middle section. The dawn of false hope. I
realised I was being inevitably drawn to the rhymes and rhythms of the ‘Divine
Comedy’. A vague idea had stirred while I was reading Louis MacNeice’s long
poem ‘Autumn Journal’ written in tercets, but it was while reading Part II of
T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ that it struck me that, though unrhymed, the poem
was also written in tercets, the form favoured by Dante. The pace is subtle but
relentless — exactly the mood I wanted to convey in my own epic. Dantesque
terzarima has stanzas connected by rhyme (aba bcb cdc… and so on), each canto
of the ‘Divine Comedy’ ends with a quatrain linking with the preceding tercet
thus: uvu vwvw.

I could
use this to emphasise the inevitability of what has preceded and the compelling
necessity of what is to come.

When he came he was
wearing the most ridiculous clothes.

As I
said before it really was rather a bother that this Million Pound Poet was
calling round at all but I couldn’t turn him away.

Excessive
politeness appears to be a common disease of the early twentieth century which,
like polio and scarlet fever, has largely been eradicated from modern society
but I am too old to have been inoculated. I could no more have turned him away
than I could be intentionally cruel to a penguin.

Though
I was sure that my poem was the real thing at last, progress was still
painfully slow. I seemed to need the long hours of solitude that had once been
torture to me to bring out the shy voice, it didn’t seem to want to come out if
there was somebody else in the room, indeed if there was even somebody coming
to visit. A note or a scrambled thought was the yield of most days and that
left me as drained and wan as if I was having chemotherapy. Now I hadn’t even
been able to achieve that modest output for fretting about my visitor.

I got back to the house
only a few minutes before he came, even though I had spent all morning fussing
about the tea spread.

At 7
a.m. Sam had rapped on my door and, looking over his shoulder like some drugs
courier, he had wordlessly handed over a big box still warm from the ovens of
an all-night Franco—Morrocan patisserie that he knew about, situated on the
industrial zone of St Malo. Then at almost the appointed hour I felt it somehow
wasn’t quite enough, so with only ninety minutes to go I got on my moped and
rode into the nearest place that still had shops, which was Towcester. There I
planned to buy four of a special kind of small cheesecake that was made only at
this one cake shop called Mr Pickwick’s Olde Tea Shoppe at the northern end of
town next to The Saracens Head Hotel, which was visited by Mr Pickwick in
The
Pickwick Papers.
Cheesecakes that only came from one shop in all the world
had to mean a pretty impressive tip-top teatime spread, even better than those
that Pablo Neruda laid on. I was lucky, I got the last cakes. You had to get to
the cake shop quite early and then be quite ruthless in the queue because they
ran out of Towcester cheesecakes quite rapidly, always, I have to say, to the
total bemusement and bewilderment of the cake-shop staff who were as shocked as
anyone to find that there were suddenly no more of the special cheesecakes
left. I had once suggested that they might like to consider the option of
baking some more cheesecakes. The head woman just shouted, ‘No, we’re out! We’re
out of cheesecakes! Have a big Lardy cake or a Belgian Bun, why don’t you!’
Then all the staff had run into a back room where they hid till I had gone
away.