Extract: What We Can Know

On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marl- borough 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.