{"id":93179,"date":"2016-01-05T12:03:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T17:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93179"},"modified":"2016-01-05T12:54:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T17:54:49","slug":"in-the-madhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/05\/in-the-madhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Madhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"stlukeshomeforlunatics\"<\/a>

Saint Luke\u2019s Home for Lunatics, where Christopher Smart was confined for more than five years<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on\u00a0George Jackson\u2019s\u00a0<\/a><\/em>Soledad Brother, here<\/em>.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In an agrarian or preindustrial Britain, a brilliant young man bristles at his assigned vocation. After reading insatiably for years, he starts publishing odd, distinctive poems that cause a local stir. Urged to settle down, he instead experiments with more startling writing and shows more worrying behavior. His wife and family, understandably troubled but also driven by some unsavory motives, arrange for him to be sent to a madhouse, where confinement turns out to be much more to his harm than to his good. As his mental and physical health declines, his poetry starts to develop more radical formal arrangements. It also takes on a new tone: a strange, arresting combination of de-sexed innocence, bitter wisdom, childlike whimsy, and intensity of focus. Well after his death, as literary critics start pillaging the past for works of inadvertent modernism, his surviving poetry becomes a source of inspiration for a new generation of writers by whose books he\u2019d have been equally fascinated and baffled.<\/p>\n

This account corresponds roughly to the lives of both John Clare (1793\u20131864) and Christopher Smart (1722\u2013\u201971), though it ignores much of what set the two poets apart. An archetypical urban poet, the son of a bailiff, Smart spent years on Grub Street writing satires, poems, attacks on his contemporaries, and flurries of hackwork, much of it under pseudonyms. Years earlier, when he started his career as a brilliant (if eccentric) divinity student at Pembroke College, he\u2019d already received a thorough grounding in the classics. Clare, an agricultural laborer who lived and worked in Britain\u2019s East Midlands during a period of rapid industrialization, grew up to a family of poor tenement farmers and went to school only sporadically. No less intelligent and formally imaginative than Smart\u2019s, his poetry was as closely informed by Helpston\u2019s birds, flowers, and folk songs\u2014he might have been one of Europe\u2019s earliest ethnomusicologists\u2014as his predecessor\u2019s was by the gospels, the classics, and the Grub Street press.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s these two poets\u2019 shared misfortune to be remembered as mad visionaries. The truth about their mental health is hard to fix. Smart scholars have speculated that he suffered from manic depression. (\u201cI have,\u201d he wrote, \u201ca greater compass of mirth and melancholy than another.\u201d) At various points, Clare reportedly claimed to be Sir Walter Scott, Lord Nelson, a famous prizefighter, the victor of Waterloo, the newspaper editor and poet James Montgomery, Shakespeare, and Lord Byron, whose poems he ransacked for inspiration during his imprisonment. The magisterial long poems both writers worked on while institutionalized\u2014Clare\u2019s \u201cChild Harold\u201d (after Byron) and Smart\u2019s \u201cJubilate Agno\u201d\u2014are indeed startling, immoderate, obsessive, sporadically delusional, and always thrillingly unfixed. And yet they\u2019re too full of clever self-presentation, dirge-like sorrow, and knowing humor to be the naive ravings for which they\u2019re sometimes taken.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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John Clare.<\/p><\/div>\n

An insatiable autodidact, Clare was not only a largely untutored poet but also a self-guided botanist, an amateur ornithologist, and a collector of popular songs. His first books of verse can almost be read as elaborate taxonomies on birds, rodents and plants, so set is he in each case on capturing what makes a given species remarkable. A poem like \u201cAngling\u201d describes its subject with such precise detail that it could be used as an instructional manual: the finding of the right spot, \u201chalf shade half sun\u201d; the casting of \u201cthe strongest line\u201d first; the shiver of anticipation when the float rustles on still water; the efforts of control required whenever one \u201cdraws a flat and curving beam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clare wrote those early poems in the late 1820s, after two decades during which the landscape of rural Helpston had been radically transformed. The movement to \u201cenclose\u201d previously communal land into larger, privately owned farms magnified Britain\u2019s agricultural production, but for Clare it was a moral disaster. In addition to displacing many of the gypsies and tenant farmers about whom he wrote some of his most admiring poems, it also dramatically disrupted the area\u2019s fragile ecosystem. Jonathan Bate has argued persuasively that Clare was less a political radical than a staunch patriot, one whose love of his country was inseparable from his attachment to its flora, faunae, and soil. It was both an act of dissent and a gesture of national pride for Clare to protest that, in Helpston, \u201cscarce a greensward spot remains \/ and scare a single tree.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Clare\u2019s star rose in London\u2014where he was too often celebrated as a kind of rustic natural endowed with strange, unconscious gifts\u2014his depression and anxiety worsened. He was married to Martha Turner, or \u201cPatty,\u201d the third woman he courted as a young man. The first had been his classmate Mary Joyce, with whom he\u2019d been smitten as a teenager. As his unhappiness deepened, he lingered distressingly over his memories of Mary; eventually, he became convinced that he\u2019d been taken from her side by force and that, \u201cto save trouble \/ I wed again and made the error double.\u201d<\/p>\n

Literary success hardly came easily to Clare, who was accustomed to life as a rural laborer; given his few publishing connections and his history of odd jobs, it\u2019s striking that he was able to attain the fame that he did. When he was institutionalized for the first time, now as a voluntary patient, it was in High Beach, a progressive, comfortable asylum in Epping Forest run by the eccentric psychologist Matthew Allen. It\u2019s unclear when, exactly, High Beach became a prison for Clare rather than a retreat from the marital pressures, money troubles and bouts of writer\u2019s block he endured at home. Whatever the tipping point was, by July 1841 it made sense for him to write about encountering a gypsy on a walk and considering the man\u2019s offer to help him \u201cescape from the mad house.\u201d High Beach had become the kind of place about which he could write, in a ballad embedded in the first page of \u201cChild Harold,\u201d that \u201csummer morning is risen \/ and to even it wends \/ and still Im in prison \/ without any friends.\u201d (He did, in fact, escape in 1841 and return home; he was removed and reinstitutionalized only months later.)<\/p>\n

\u201cChild Harold\u201d became a kind of endless repository for Clare\u2019s later interests and obsessions. Structurally, it\u2019s a songbook in which ballads and hymns occur between sections of rhymed verse. Its mood is subject to constant brightenings and darkenings, patches of radiant optimism and longer passages of deep gloom. Its many nature sketches include some of Clare\u2019s densest, richest phrases: the \u201cgreen bushes and green trees where fancy feeds \/ on the retiring solitudes of May,\u201d or the lake that \u201ccurves with wrinkles in the stillest place.\u201d Its tone is that of a devotional song, but the object of Clare\u2019s devotion shifts from segment to segment and even verse to verse: we might be reading a song of praise to God that evolves into a hymn to the Northampton landscape and from that into\u2014most often\u2014a worried rhapsody for Mary.<\/p>\n

The poem begins with a bold statement of intent:<\/p>\n

\n

Many are poets\u2014though they use no pen
To show their labours to the shuffling age
Real poets must be truly honest men
Tied to no mongrel laws on flatterys page \u2026
\u2014The life of labour is a rural song
That hurts no cause\u2014nor welfare tries to wage
Toil like the brook in music wears along\u2014
Great little minds claim right to act the wrong \u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Did Clare believe that he was a \u201ctruly honest man\u201d? Was he in fact ever convinced that he\u2019d been doubly wed, or that he was Lord Byron? Not only are questions like these impossible to answer, simply indulging them makes one less inclined to credit Clare for the clever, sophisticated kind of rebellion that \u201cChild Harold\u201d acts out. Against a rural England that was increasingly privatized and enclosed, Clare insisted that poetry was a space in which a mind could luxuriate in delusions, slap itself awake, lull itself back into blissful introspection, and veer suddenly from hope to despair. \u201cMy love was ne\u2019er so blessed as when \/ it mingled with her own,\u201d a typical passage from \u201cChild Harold\u201d runs, \u201cbut now loves hopes are all bereft \/ a lonely man I roam.\u201d Then, however, you come to the odd pleasures of the next stanza\u2014<\/p>\n

The Paigles Bloom in Shower\u2019s In Grassy Close
How Sweet To Be Among Their Blossoms Led
And Hear Sweet Nature To Herself Discourse \u2026
For Such Delights Twere Happy Man Were Born<\/p>\n

\u2014and you give up trying to hold the poem to a tone. It was as if, by multiplying the moods he could inhabit, varying his voices and refusing to edit or repress his romantic fancies on the page, Clare was reconstructing in his imagination the kind of sprawling, inefficiently organized landscape he\u2019d been denied outside it. \u201cFrom her sweet thralldom I am never free,\u201d he wrote in the poem\u2019s last pages, \u201cyet here my prison is a spring to me \/ past memories bloom like flowers where e\u2019er I rove \/ my very bondage though in snares\u2014is free.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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Christopher Smart.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nearly a century earlier, Smart had been equally moved by the thought that a prison could be a spring. If Clare\u2019s prison writing showcases the many shapes, meters, and moods that a long poem can assimilate, Smart\u2019s demonstrates what a long poem can do when it\u2019s shackled to as restrictive a set of formal conditions as possible. The ballads and songs in \u201cChild Harold\u201d were folded into the poem like clippings tucked into a notebook; Smart\u2019s \u201cJubilate Agno\u201d is a meticulously organized dictionary of possible subjects, identified by proper names, classed into two categories (every line of the poem begins with either \u201clet\u201d or \u201cfor\u201d) and enumerated with unvarying persistence and speed. The first of the poem\u2019s surviving fragments comprises an inventory well over a\u00a0hundred lines long of figures chosen to \u201capproach the throne of Grace\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Let Enoch bless with the Rackoon, who walked with God as by the instinct.
Let Hashbadana bless with the Catamountain, who stood by the Pulpit of God against the dissensions of the Heathen.
Let Ebed-Melech bless with the Mantiger, the blood of the Lord is sufficient to do away the offence of Cain, and reinstate the creature which is amerced.
Let A Little Child with a Serpent bless Him, who ordaineth strength in babes to the confusion of the Adversary.
Let Huldah bless with the Silkworm\u2014the ornaments of the Proud are from the bowells of their Betters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Smart\u2019s seven-year confinement in a string of asylums\u2014notably the private Saint Luke\u2019s and, later, a cheaper, dingier house run by one Mr. Potter\u2014had less to do with his mental health than with a cluster of other factors. Under a number of recurring Kierkegaardian pseudonyms, he wrote hundreds of bawdy, barbed pieces at the expense of England\u2019s political elite. He quarreled often with his sinister, well-connected father-in-law; he was financially unstable; maybe most damningly, he was persistently drunk. (\u201cHe walked into the alehouse,\u201d his friend Samuel Johnson quipped, \u201cand came home in a wheelbarrow.\u201d) When he\u2019d been drinking he would fall victim to the fervid, dramatic praying fits that so alarmed his relatives and friends, whom he\u2019d \u201ccall,\u201d one remembered, \u201cfrom their dinners, or beds, or places of recreation, whenever impulse towards prayer pressed upon his mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

This prayerful spirit animates \u201cJubilate Agno,\u201d which is, whatever else, a piece of devotional writing. Like Smart\u2019s later prison poem \u201cA Song to David,\u201d it insists that humankind is constantly surrounded both by divine works and by the machinations of \u201cthe adversary.\u201d It lavishes attention on the range of sacred offerings it\u2019s possible to make. (\u201cLet Hashum rejoice with Moon-Trefoil. \/ Let Netophah rejoice with Cow-Wheat. \/ Let Chephirah rejoice with Millet. \/ Let Beeroth rejoice with Sea-Buckthorn.\u201d) And yet if it\u2019s a poem designed to fill its readers with due reverence for God, it goes about its job in an odd, roundabout way. More often, the glories Smart calls attention to are those of a distinctly human creation: the English language, with its daunting variety of names and categories, the range of possible puns it allows, and the plain delight of playing it, musician-like, for a crowd. \u201cFor my talent,\u201d Smart wrote in Fragment B3 of \u201cJubilate,\u201d \u201cis to give an Impression upon words by punching, that when the reader casts his eye upon \u2019em, he takes up the image from the mould which I have made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smart\u2019s celebration of his cat Jeoffry, who was practically his only regular friendly contact for long periods of his imprisonment, is justly famous for its whimsical wordplay. A more direct expression of Smart\u2019s linguistic felicity is the miniature dictionary of rhymes that comes earlier in the same fragment:<\/p>\n

\n

For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight.
For the dissyllables such as able table &c are the fiddle rhimes.
For all dissyllables and some trissyllables are fiddle rhimes.
For the relations of words are in pairs first.
For the relations of words are sometimes in oppositions.
For the relations of words are according to their distances from the pair.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Some lines down Smart writes cryptically that \u201clanguages work into one another by their bearings,\u201d offering as proof that \u201cthe power of some animal is predominant in every language\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek.
For the sound of a cat is in the most useful preposition \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4’ \u03b5\u03c5\u03c7\u03b7\u03bd .
For the pleasantry of a cat at pranks is in the language ten thousand times over.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That the English language already, in a sense, contained all the puns, lists, word combinations, and pranks that could be done with it was a powerful thought for Smart. It led him to run through the alphabet and feel out its contours letter by letter (\u201cFor A is awe, if pronounced full. Stand in awe and sin not. \/ For B pronounced in the animal is bey importing authority. \/ For C pronounced hard is ke importing to shut\u201d), or to say that the bull was \u201ca creature of infinite magnitude\u201d simply because \u201cthere are many words under Bull.\u201d (\u201cFor Beetle is under Bull. \/ For Toad is under bull. \/ For Frog is under Bull, which he has a delight to look at.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Reading Smart back-to-back with Clare suggests two paths for prison poetry to follow. On one, a poem records the free movements of an idiosyncratic mind; on the other, it\u2019s a compulsive recitation of names and facts. Neither side of this distinction always holds firm; Smart could be led, like Clare, by mischievous impulses and whims, just as Clare could be a finicky compiler of information. In every instance, they both staked their work on the thought that it was not in the nature of language for it to be used as a device for suppression, coercion, or control. In Fragment B of \u201cJubilate Agno,\u201d Smart pictured himself as a whale hooked and speared for, presumably, using language too liberally or inventively. (\u201cFor they work on me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others.\u201d) Clare likewise rebelled, in his disregard for punctuation and his eager curiosity about Helpston\u2019s folk songs, against the notion that English followed rules that couldn\u2019t be overstepped. \u201cA person may be very clever at cutting trees and animals on paper,\u201d Clare wrote in a Smart-like register midway through a short prose rant about the tyranny of grammar, \u201cbut he is nothing as an artist and a person may be very clever at detecting faults in a composition and yet in the writing of it may be a mere cypher him self and one that can do nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where John Clare was confined.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em><\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n