Brief Encounter with the Real Thing

Boons back to antiquity were from a Somerset village near Taunton, so for the next several weeks I wandered back and forth across southern England, sometimes tramping, sometimes bussing, sometimes with my thumb out.

On the lookout for tachyons, you might have said.

I did a cathedral binge from Canterbury across to Exeter and from Winchester up to Gloucester. For a week I picked apples at an orchard in Kent. I was at Stonehenge and Avebury, at several castles, abbeys and manor houses, feeling the concavities worn into flagstones, nosing the pissy smell in a castle corridor, testing the weight of some launder-woman’s flat-iron from the reign of Victoria. Sometimes I was footsore, sometimes I was sodden, and all the while I hoped some essential substance that would inform the art I was intent on following was finding its place in me.

“Historical novels, young man,” decided an elderly woman who picked me up near Salisbury and took me to her home to dry off. I had chattered to her about the varieties of Victorian flat-irons. “Look at Georgette Heyer!”

“Maybe.” Her solution seemed too coarse for the thing on my mind, for all she had taken my well-being to heart, as others did each day of my wandering.

Aware I had written little over the months beyond my journal, one late afternoon I bought a bottle of cider, burrowed into the centre of a roadside coppice, and laid out my sleeping bag, then as dark fell, wrote stanzas by the light of my torch.

Rhee’s presence infiltrates blue space.

Rhee will not let me see her face.

She works beside me in this place.

Is Rhee quite young or is she old?

Her threads are everyday and gold.

Her pattern nets the shifting world.

The criss-cross lines her patience sews

Glitter like lines between the stars,

And some are mine and some are hers.

Rhee leans, intent, her fingers move

Across the cloth where we must live.

Rhee loves us, but returns no loves,

And all she makes Rhee coldly saves.

My tangled attitudes toward Rhee, Eva, Henry formed the inchoate substance behind this portrait of a fate-woman. I titled the thing “Love Poem”, sensed the piece had allowed me to bust through some constraint that hitherto had obscured my writing. I stayed awake half the night, thrilled with myself, breathing the leaf-mould, listening to the small night noises, the occasional car. Later, when I returned to Australia, I would fictionalise the name to another monosyllable and sell it to a journal. K’ching, k’ching.

And I tried to understand the dynamic of its making. Strong cider was involved in the first instance, and the coppice life of England’s South Downs maybe, together with those poets of coppice life—John Clare, W.H. Davies, Ted Hughes—my echolalia as Henry would have called them. Of course my notebook shows a mucus of crossed-out words where the stanzas had arrived uncertainly like all new life. What did that matter if the sensation felt like truth? I drained the cider bottle. I may have slept a little. Long before any shop selling breakfast had opened I was on the road, heading west.

I lived on water-biscuits, cheese, apples, the occasional hamburger. To keep decent for the English motorists who picked me up I clambered fences and used the changing room showers at sports-grounds to wash myself and my clothes, reading in some cranny until the clothes had dried. I learned how to come into a market town at evening and note the places where I might lay out my sleeping bag to be dry and unmolested. Once I woke to find the haggard face of a tramp scrutinising me, saying something unintelligible, whether greeting or threat. Another time I woke in the night and saw two badgers trotting by me quite close, and on a third occasion walked through a field of grazing deer that appraised me, their fine jaws chewing the cud. I tramped for miles across the closely farmed countryside, along its narrow sunken lanes, and paths frothy with Queen Anne’s lace. Boon the Arcadian, I believe I have never been so physically fit.

And in these weeks I fell in with two people who, in a manner of speaking, knew me.

The first of these I met in Devon one overcast afternoon. A youngish fellow in a hire-car stopped and got out. He had an Australian accent of the patrician sort and told me he reckoned he had recognised me. Was I not the Australian poet, Henry Luck? There were blackbirds twittering in the hedgerow, a cow mooing in the field, and he had his hand held out in greeting.

“Boon,” I corrected him. “I’m the other one.” And after a pause, I said, “And you will be Dennis Vaigh at last?”

He supposed he was, he laughed, and we were shaking hands, marvelling, driving away down the lanes, exchanging accounts of how we had missed each other all across Europe. Had he received his proof pages? Apparently not, but he intended to revise the entire book anyway because he was unhappy with it.

“Are we not too imminent for that?”

“My poems can only ever be ready,” he glanced at me with a tolerant smile, “never imminent.”

“Henry could have said that,” I told him, and asked what was the quality he most prized in poetry.

“Ambiguity,” he said immediately, giving me this time the look of deep conviction. “The dance between the real and unreal.”

“I might have guessed that,” it was my turn to laugh.

He was lean as a wraith, fluid in his movements as he drove the car along the lanes. His hair was lank, his jaw-line suggesting the frail skull beneath, and he wore a green velvet jacket with open-necked shirt.

“It’s a relief to find you are real,” I remarked next. Yes, he said, he was doing a writer-in-residency at Exeter University, had made useful contacts.

One of these, he disclosed, was the English poet Ted Hughes, who lived in these parts, and as a coincidence he was on his way to see him. Perhaps I would like to come along?

Must I admit how my heart leapt at this prospect of encountering—let me be blunt—a poetry celebrity? I accepted, adding that I was a fan of his work.

“Only thing is,” Dennis warned, “whatever you do, don’t talk to him about poetry! TH” (as Dennis called him) “is very touchy about this. He says it unstrings the tensions one needs to write it. I tend to agree. Talk to him about fishing, ancient religions, or modern Australian art.”

“Honour bright,” I consented.

Soon we drove into the small town of Crediton and entered a pub where I was introduced to a fellow of shy, watchful aspect whose burly stature was further bulked by the fishing jacket he wore. He had just come from some angling. His North Country accent gave to his utterance both intentness and musicality, while his manner combined shyness with a glowering ferocity. This was entirely how I might have imagined the presence of the man who had written the poems identified with his name, so I could do nothing, as it were, but drink in his presence.

Dennis and TH appeared to be on familiar terms. Beers arrived, our chat ranged on the allowable topics. Mindful of the ban on poetry, nonetheless I wanted somehow to communicate that I had read the spellbinding animal poems of Lupercal, Wodwo, etc, so edged the talk toward fauna and hedgerow life by describing my tramp-like existence of recent weeks. Jokingly I mentioned the backaches from lying on the hard ground all night and lugging a rucksack all day.

Backache! There was a topic.

Abruptly TH had risen to his feet. “Lie down on the floor!” he commanded me. “On yer back! Lie down!”

He was keen to show me something, and so I assumed the urgency of his directive to be within the province of poetry. Arranging myself on the floor of the pub, abruptly I became a centre of attention as heads at nearby tables turned to watch. TH got down on the floor beside me and thrust the flat of his hand under the small of my back.

“Croosh ma hand.”

I attempted to flatten my posture to effect this.

“Harder! Croosh it like yer were a steamroller!’

I pressed down with all my might and held this position until I could feel the muscles begin to ache.

“Ah’ll tell yer what yer feelin’. New muscles deep down in the caverns of yer being. They’ve probably been asleep for years.” I was permitted to relax the posture for some moments. “Now again! Croosh me,” the louring, oddly shy presence ordered, as though nothing in the Universe were more important to him at that moment.

This floor exercise was the oddest thing I ever did for Australian poetry. I flattened my spinal column as though I meant it, sustained the posture for some moments, released it, and kept this up until I began to sense a veritable muscle ache deep in the caverns of my being. TH resumed his chair, and I assumed I now had leave to do the same.

“What was that about?” I ventured.

It was explained to me how the human body was strung with muscles designed to keep the spine upright, and how, through modern use, those that brought the torso forward had become over-developed. By contrast, those designed to pull it back had grown slack from disuse. “The Deity made a design flaw,” the shy, fierce voice contended, and described his own adventures in the backache business.

And how could I disbelieve those Yorkshire vowels and consonants, recognise in them the phonemes from poems like “October Dawn’, “Hawk Roosting”, “November”?

Dennis brought the beer over in pints. I contributed money and lost count of the glasses. I was aware of wanting to pay some homage to the louring fellow for how his poems had enriched me, and yet here I was, trying to locate that remote place in myself, free of mentor echolalia. Why the impulse toward this obeisance? As the afternoon wore on my head became dizzier. Then the famous man rose to leave and Dennis, it seemed, was clearing out too. Only now would I have been glad to lie down on the floor under the table.

“Before you go,” I touched TH on the sleeve, and saw Dennis shake his head ever so slightly in dissuasion. But I was impelled to blurt something, so told the man I thought his poem “An Otter” was a stunner, and quoted some lines:

Gallops along land he no longer belongs to:

Re-enters water by melting.

The famous poet looked at me for some moments with his long face, then set his powerful jaw, shook my hand and said it had been a pleasure.

And in that instant I saw he did not have a clue what my homage was about, while Dennis’s cautionary expression had altered to become a suave smile. We quitted the pub. Dusk had come down upon Devon. Dennis and TH got into their respective cars and left in different directions, neither convenient to my own. I shouldered my pack and wobbled off through the houses of Crediton, which was a well-named town.

After my return to Australia, I hunted down a photograph of Ted Hughes, which confirmed for me he was not the man whose hand I had tried to crush. Later, I met a woman academic from the University of Exeter and described my experience. Did the poet have impersonators, I asked. It had been known, she replied carefully.

As for Dennis Vaigh? I would like to catch sight of the fellow again. His masquerade, opportune as it had been, had required some bravado. But Dennis had achieved his own remoteness. He was more on the chat side of literature than evident in actual works of art. His book of poems never appeared in the Arden Poetry Series, and is probably still being revised.

That night I walked off down the lanes, confused by the imposture, and my sense of letdown at not having been in the presence of the authentic poet. Why should his poems not be sufficient? Some expectation of mystery had been toyed with, and I could not help think Dennis Vaigh knew what he was doing.