Edge of the Orison (47 page)

We had achieved a satisfactory conclusion. Now I could let the story go. Daniel Sinclair of Ramsey, a person with an unknown life, a gravestone, had been absorbed into the invented Daniel Santa-Clara of José Saramago's novel. My obsession with doubles, doubled narratives, was brought at last to ground. Jimmy Stewart, freed from the fixed trajectory of Anthony Mann's westerns, from landscape, was named in gold letters on a black slab; an altar overlooking the yellow, evening fields of Middle England.

But I was wrong. You may have realised, as Michael Moorcock did, when he read an early proof of my book, that I had the wrong James Stewart. The actor had commanded a squadron, flown bombing raids over Germany, but not from here. His base was on the far side of the A1, closer to the sea. Stewart was born in 1908. Lieutenant-General James T. Stewart was fourteen years old when his namesake made his movie debut in
The Murder Man
. Both flyers, both in England at the same time. Our mysterious taxi driver, bringing us to his favourite shrine, vividly recalled those local legends, Stewart and Clark Gable. Figures who had stepped down from the screen to attend dances and church fêtes. Mike Goldmark, the gallery owner from Uppingham, told me that he once lived in Polebrook Lodge, Stewart's wartime home. We remember what we want to remember and forge our own autobiographies. The Clare I found will not be your John Clare, nor the poet Geoffrey Hadman claimed as a relative. The track we travelled, coming from London, is no longer Clare's Great North Road. Through error, perhaps, we arrive at a richer truth: in the telling is the tale. The trance of writing is the author's only defence against the world. He sleepwalks between assignments, between welcoming ghosts, looking out for the next prompt, the next milestone hidden in the grass.

Edge of the Orison: Peterborough's gravitational field

Hadman Family Tree

Further Reading

John Clare,
Poems of John Clare's Madness
, ed. by Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1949)

—
The Shepherd's Calendar
, ed. by Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London, 1964)

—
Selected Poems
, ed. by Elaine Feinstein (London, 1968)

—
The Letters of John Clare
, ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble (New York, 1970)

—
Selected Poems
, ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble, repr. (London, 1976)

—
John Clare
, The Oxford Authors, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford, 1984)

—
John Clare by Himself
, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester, 1996)

—
Selected Poems
, ed. by Ian Hamilton (London, 1996)

—
John Clare: The Living Year, 1841
, ed. by Tim Chilcott (Nottingham, 1999)

—
A Champion for the Poor (Political Verse and Prose)
, ed. by P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester, 2000)

—
John Clare, Selected Poems
, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London, 2004)

William Addison,
Epping Forest, Its Literary and Historical Associations
(London, 1945)

—
The Old Roads of England
(London, 1980)

Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard,
We Are for the Dark
(London, 1951)

Jean-Philippe Antoine, Gertrud Koch and Luc Lang,
Gerhard Richter
(Paris, 1995)

John Ashbery,
Other Traditions
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000)

Peter Astley,
Comings and Goings
(London, 2002)

Deirdre Bair,
Samuel Beckett: A Biography
(London, 1978)

B. C. Barker-Benfield,
Shelley's Guitar (A Bicentenary Exhibition)
(Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1992)

John Barrell,
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1730–1840): An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare
(Cambridge, 1972)

Jonathan Bate,
John Clare: A Biography
(London, 2003)

Samuel Beckett,
Endgame
(London, 1958)

Henry Bett,
English Legends
(London, 1950)

Renchi Bicknell,
Michael and Mary Dreaming (A Walk along the Michael and Mary Lines…)
(Alton, n.d. [1998])