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On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The spring day was warm and tranquil, and the journey had been smooth though, as everyone discovers, sleeping in a sitting position on a slatted wooden bench is an ordeal. I walked two miles up a picturesque track towards the water-and-gravity-powered funicular. Four library users joined me and we small-talked as we were carried a thousand feet up the mountain in the creaking polished oak carriage. I ate supper alone in the library canteen and afterwards phoned my friend and colleague, Rose Church, to let her know I had arrived safely. That night, I slept well in my cell of a bedroom. It did not bother me, as it had on my first visit, to share a bathroom with seven others.
After breakfast, one of the assistant archivists, Donald Drummond, showed me to my carrel. His domain included my period, 1990 to 2030, and he took a strong interest in my topic, the ineptly named Second Immortal Dinner and its famous lost poem, ‘A Corona for Vivien’ by Francis Blundy. It was useful to have someone fetching this and that from the stacks, but Drummond’s well-intentioned manner, his habit of pausing mid-sentence after minor words like ‘of’ or ‘the’ while letting his mouth hang open, made me tense. I suspected that he was ferociously clever. He spoke too often of his fourteen-year-old niece, a maths prodigy. He wanted to pick my brains, which suggested he was writing something of his own. I made matters worse by being exaggeratedly pleasant to conceal my aversion.
As requested, he brought to my desk the twelve volumes of Vivien Blundy’s journals from her archive, which, for reasons scholars have never resolved, once rested marsupially within her husband’s. As soon as I was alone, I opened the airtight folder and found volume five. I turned to page thirty-two. I needed to see this again. ‘Things are settled between Francis and me. I’m mostly happy here. An achievement.’ She is referring to the tragic case of her first husband, Percy Greene, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
She believed Francis loved her and, though neither was young and he was ten years older, they had ‘a decent sex life’ and there was always plenty to talk about. Nowhere in the journals does she regret marrying the great poet, though he spent much time in his study. Elsewhere she writes, ‘I wonder if I sometimes enjoy disliking him.’ By volume seven they had been married nine years. Early on, she had kept herself ‘sensible’ researching her second book, which she abandoned. When she had her job at Oxford, she had published a scholarly biography of the poet John Clare, a reworking of her doctoral thesis. She had enjoyed teaching. Several years later, her situation prompted wonder among her friends. By her own successive decisions, she had ended up above a small valley in rural Gloucestershire, without paid work, four miles from the nearest village, in a cavernous barn with 7,000 books. She would never have guessed that she would abandon a career, a vocation even, to serve another’s genius.
One early afternoon in October 2014, ‘with a strong wind roaring in a tree beyond my window’, Vivien Blundy was in her study, which was in a converted old dairy separate from the Barn. She was probably making a shopping list of ingredients for the meal she would cook the following day to celebrate
her birthday. She would serve the dishes at a gathering to which eight friends had been invited. She would have already devised the placement. Later in the evening they would listen to her husband read a long new poem, which was to be her present. The shopping and cooking were not acts of self-effacement. Vivien had a generous nature, and she liked to please. She enjoyed producing a well-turned meal. An orderly household gave her satisfaction. Francis had never pressured her to become his secretary, never encouraged her to disengage from her career, though it clearly suited him. At each successive move, she had made decisions for her own good reasons, though they seemed weaker now. The process took years. She was once a don, a candidate for a professorship, then she was part-time, then an occasional lecturer at an American summer school and working on the second book until she accepted it was going nowhere. Abandoning it was a liberation. She always felt herself to be in control. But it surprised her how, in caring for her first husband, and then in the name of freedom, of disenchantment with the university administration or of delight in the poetry of Francis Blundy, she had emptied herself of ambition, salary, status and achievement.
Perhaps it was by default, a failure to make provision in time, that her journals ended up among the poet’s papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, later Snowdonia. A long time ago, a librarian had sorted husband and wife into separate boxes placed side by side. I have paid close attention to Vivien’s sporadic and sad references to her first husband, Percy, a violin maker whom she nursed tenderly and who died after a bad fall. Many entries are bafflingly mundane and fail to tell Blundy scholars and others what they most want to know concerning the evening of her birthday, the famous poem dedicated to her, and what happened to the special copy – the only copy – that was the gift Francis presented to her after reading it aloud.
We can assume that on the afternoon of her list-making, she drove eight miles to the market town of Cirencester to collect from the butcher
‘five brace of prepared quail, unnaturally plump’. She would wrap them in bacon and roast them in red wine and herbs, along with ceps picked in the beechwoods of the Chiltern Hills and brought to the Barn by a friend. She also bought eight pounds of potatoes for the oven and, in the same greengrocer, three cauliflowers whose florets she would cook in a large paella pan with ‘olive oil, garlic, chopped green chillies, anchovies, cherry tomatoes, black pepper, thyme and breadcrumbs’. Those were the days.
On the way home, the single-track country lane was blocked by an oak sapling brought down by the October gales. In the Severn Estuary, winds had gusted at 105 miles an hour. She and another motorist, a farmer she vaguely knew, lifted the tree clear and ‘set it down in the long grass tenderly, like a corpse, which I suppose it was’.
Among the homely details are sporadic intrusions, bleak, faint cries of honest feeling, generally overlooked by the Francis Blundy hounds. I turned to an example now, also in volume five. The handwriting tips forward and is smaller than the rest. The punctuation is freer. ‘I’ve never hated him. Never! But.’ You might try to guess at the truncated final sentence or gaze at the middle letter of ‘but’ as though it might swing open on its hinges to reveal a peephole through which you could see a disappointed heart, reduced by lost opportunities.
Beyond the recipes, gardening notes, mentions of their nephew Peter, Vivien makes frequent references to the weather as the Barn years passed. A succession of mild winters oppressed her. For three weeks in one February, the temperature did not fall below nine degrees. She couldn’t remember when she last saw icicles hanging from a gutter. Even snow was unusual. She noted the premature appearance of daffodils, of her roses, of the apples and pears in a neighbour’s orchard. She is relieved when the stream below bursts its banks and floods the meadows, ‘just as it should’. Two years later she is indignant when she sees that its clear water has turned ‘a disgusting milky green and smelled’. Run-off from the farms or a sewage discharge or both.
Neither she nor Francis was what they called ‘political people’. They would not have joined with the local environmental groups, or the anglers and ramblers to protest and campaign for change. It was enough to observe and make a journal entry. Vivien keeps a lookout for the ‘usual hedgehogs’ and is disappointed. She is outraged by the badger culls. The strong winds that now streak down the valley make her irritable. When a short heatwave in July tops thirty-five degrees, she writes that it is ‘impossible to sleep at night’. These various anomalies were not gathered into a larger pattern of concern for a changing climate or degraded nature, though a word she uses about the heat – ‘sinister’ – suggests that she was beginning to take a larger view and was troubled.
The birthday was her fifty-fourth. Apart from the shopping, we know little of the preparations for the evening that would come to be known as the Second Immortal Dinner. The first, so named by its host, the painter Ben Haydon, took place at 22 Lisson Grove, London on 28 December 1817. Among the guests were William Wordsworth, John Keats and Charles Lamb. According to Haydon’s account, written and no doubt polished up more than twenty years later, it was an evening of wit, profundity, laughter, sarcasm and goodwill. There was a fine account of it in a highly regarded book by P. Hughes-Hallett published in 2000. It is likely that Vivien started preparing the night before, perhaps by tidying and cleaning the dining room and fetching greenery from the garden to make a table decoration. A visitor to the Barn the year before wrote a description of her doing just that one Saturday evening ahead of a Sunday lunch. As she did most afternoons after four, Vivien would have attended to the poet’s business – the letters and emails from scholars and fans, invitations to speak, good causes wanting Blundy’s support, complicated summaries from his agent of anthology rights. Younger guests especially were surprised by the domestic arrangement whereby an educated bookish woman took on so many tasks. Francis would no longer drive, so she took him everywhere he wanted to go. She cooked, she cleared
away, she washed the dishes while Blundy worked, read, talked or dozed. She topped up the drinks for him and his visitors. In her mid-sixties, she was still mowing the lawn, in winter she brought in the logs. A woman friend said in an interview years later, ‘It was medieval serfdom out at their place and after a while you got used to it. If you offered to help, Vivien cheerfully refused. Francis never stirred from his chair, never did a thing. I don’t think it crossed his mind that the household, the meals or even the state of his underwear might have something to do with him. He was, after all, a genius.’
The friend who gathered the ceps heard that interview and wrote a light-hearted piece for the Spectator, a weekly political magazine. The men, the young poets, who came to sit at the master’s feet, were quietly envious of Blundy’s ‘no-finger-lifted life. It was common among the generation that came of age in the 1950s and early 60s and, of course, in every generation before it, for the men,
especially the writers, to sit back and dream while the women busied themselves around the house. No one complained or even noticed. Then, poor chaps, along came feminism’s second wave in the early 1970s, determined to sweep away such civilised arrangements.’ The Blundys were genteel survivors from another age and, according to the writer: ‘The awkward truth was, she was a good deal happier and physically fitter than he ever was. She was bound to outlive him.’
The records show that by 14 October the wind had dropped and the day was cloudless and warm. The thermometer on the north wall of the old dairy would later give a high point of twenty-three degrees. That morning, while Vivien was in the garden cutting late roses for the table, the postman appeared in his van and brought a heavy parcel which he kindly carried into the kitchen. It was addressed to Francis. She guessed what it was. She also guessed that someone had made a mistake and thought it was Francis’s birthday, not hers. Before lunch she showed the package to Francis and removed the wrapping for him. It was a rectangular box in pale wood with a sliding lid, like an oversized pencil case. As she opened it, he groaned.
He believed he had everything he needed, and he did not need much. A gift not only represented clutter, it took up room in his thoughts as one more distracting obligation of gratitude, as an unwanted requirement to think of someone else, of their goodwill bearing down on him like a low cloud. Vivien generally wrote his thank-you letters, which he sometimes signed. But this was different, a magnum of champagne from their nephew, Peter. He was in Pasadena, California at the Huntington Library for a conference on loop quantum gravity. No one understood what that was, despite Peter’s patient explanations. Francis believed he had grasped what ‘background independent’ meant but had already forgotten. It was decent of Peter to tell them, one summer’s evening when they sat out in the garden, that barely a hundred people in the world really understood LQG.
He or his mother had arranged for a wine shop in Oxford to select and send the bottle. Blundy was relieved. The champagne was not from some young poet wanting his work read. Vivien, irritated that her husband had not wished her a happy birthday, recorded this exchange.
He said, ‘Better stick it in the fridge.’
‘There won’t be room. I’ll put it in the ice bucket later. Or in the chest freezer. As long as I can remember.’
Francis probably took an apple from a bowl as he left the kitchen. He went along the passage to his study to write something down and make the final preparations of the birthday gift. The papers fill 135 document boxes. I hadn’t called them up from the stacks on this visit, but I had already made notes on October 2014. Most of the entries concern ideas for poems, working notes and drafts, and thoughts on his own processes. References to other people are rare. Family dramas,
personal relations never make it into his field of consideration. On the day of the Corona dinner, he clearly remembered something of Peter’s descriptions. He was making notes towards his poem ‘String’.
Space and time are woven from minuscule loops into a fabric a trillion trillion times finer than silk. The loops are as small as physics allows things to be.
Over the page he acknowledges some of the serious players in the field.
Ashtekar, Rovelli, Smolin, like expensive brands of gin…Apparently, the field of speculation is ‘the nature of the universe’. In which case it’s also a matter for poetry. The impenetrable concepts don’t need to be understood to be made to sing. Not necessary to know anything about the brain to enjoy a sonnet or a sunset. A black box! But if Wystan got his mind round physics, then who can’t? ...
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