I had never heard of the poet George Barker but I was sent on a Barker odyssey recently by my favourite Sunday Times columnist India Knight.
‘Read Notes from the Henhouse, she said, ‘by Elspeth Barker. She was the wife of George Barker, who was the subject of By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.’
I had read the latter title and was intrigued. After some research I learnt that George Barker was a renowned poet in the mid-twentieth century. He was mentored by TS Eliot, who was an editor at Faber, and he drank with Dylan Thomas. All of which adds considerable weight to his literary credentials. Looking along my poetry shelves, I find I have a copy of Penguin Modern Poets volume 3 which includes work by George Barker and Charles Causley. It must have been the latter that I was interested in at the time. There are however plenty of George Barker poetry titles still available on Amazon and Biblio.
So, George Barker was a Roman Catholic who had 15 children by 3 or maybe 4 women. Whilst with his first wife Jessica, the writer Elizabeth Smart fell wildly in love with him, having first loved his poetry. She paid for George, Jessica and their family to travel to America where they all lived for some years, Elizabeth bearing 4 of George’s many offspring. As their love affair faded, not quietly but noisily, drunkenly and argumentatively, Elizabeth Smart produced what has become a cult novel, a prose poem called: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. This is an uncomfortable read about loss. At the end the reader feels exhausted, grazed and bloodied. It is the most excoriating account of love that doesn’t last that I have ever read. When first published, the book was hardly noticed but when reprinted in the 1990s it gained a small but significant following. The title of the book references Psalm 137: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.’ The Jews are remembering Jerusalem, from their captivity in Babylon. Maybe Smart wanted to communicate a similar depth of longing. There was also the Boney M song of the late 1970s, but we won’t follow that pathway right now. Smart goes on to use the responses in the Song of Songs to demonstrate her love for Barker. This device makes for a very unusual and affective passage.
‘ What relation is this man to you?( My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.)’ It continues in the same fashion.
Back in England, where Elizabeth followed at some point, George met Elspeth and eventually set up home in rural Norfolk with her. 5 children followed as well as a chaotic, impecunious, drunken but apparently very happy family life. Elspeth and George eventually married but not until Jessica died, as George’s religious beliefs prevented any idea of divorce. A moral compass that allows a variety of sexual relationships, the production of very many children but not divorce is a strange one I think.
Thus we reach: Notes from the Henhouse, which is the book India Knight recommended at the start of this journey. Elspeth earned her living as a writer, journalist and classics teacher and continued to do so after George Barker died. This book is appealing just to look at, great cover and endpapers and then a fascinating selection of essays from all parts of Elspeth’s life. They are quirky, sometimes funny, stylish, well written and frequently reference the classical education that Elspeth experienced, growing up in the Scottish Highlands.
The home life that is described and referred to is bohemian, undisciplined, chaotic, warm and loving. It occurred to me that this was reminiscent of the Durrell family in Corfu but transplanted into chilly, muddy, rural Norfolk. For anyone brought up in a conformist, rather staid, ‘normal’ type of family setting, to read about a large, disorganised family where the cat sits on the kitchen table licking the butter is fascinating and seems just the stuff of stories.
Elspeth published just one novel in her lifetime: O Caledonia, the title taken froma Walter Scott quote. Her genre is a strange one, it has been called autobiographical fiction. As I read the book there was a clear overlap between this and several of her Henhouse essays but what was real and what imagined was anything but clear. I felt that the life of Janet, our heroine in ‘Caledonia,’ closely mirrored the early life of Elspeth. Both Janet and Elspeth were outsiders, frequently misunderstanding social situations and retreating to books for solace, ( sometimes truly taking them into the Henhouse ) and to Greek and Latin for the comfort of linguistic rules. I have known those who find great satisfaction in conjugating Latin verbs and being familiar with all the declensions. For both the real and the imaginary, animals were a happy substitute. They are accepting; they don’t ask questions; they don’t judge. Thus Elspeth had a pet pig and Janet bonds with a baby jackdaw. The writing is so engaging that I couldn’t stop reading. Dysfunctional families are endlessly fascinating but maybe that is a value judgement I should not be making. If everyone is safe and happy then who am I to say the set up is dysfunctional, even if people forget to take exams or the fridge is empty!
In ‘Caledonia’ the 16 year old Janet comes to a grisly end but I’m glad to say Elspeth Barker in real life does not, living a long life in her particular patch of Norfolk countryside. One thing that decided me on following through and reading this book was the fact that it had a lengthy introduction by Maggie O’Farrell, she of Hamnet and much, much more. I love her writing and if she liked Elspeth Barker then I felt confident I would too.
Ali Smith called ‘Caledonia’: ‘The best least known novel of the twentieth century.’ She is right. Thank you India Knight for sending me off on this juicy, satisfying, literary voyage.