Awful Pleasure
Peter Naim Bland x Capel Lofft the Younger
‘Harry Fainlight told me he’s straight | I think that’s a bunch of shit’ — Ted Berrigan, ‘Buggery’ in Bugger, ed. Ed Sanders (Fuck You, 1964)
‘ “In the end he identified himself so completely with Authority that he became unemployable, he took too much upon himself, he felt too free to make executive decisions, even if he was only the doorman. When he was summoned during the war for selling confectionary at black market rates without coupons — he sold it by the quarter pound to anyone who expressed conservative sentiments — he ranted against Socialism and red tape. When he was arrested for soliciting on the street he pleaded with tears in his eyes that he was only trying to control a queue.” ’ — Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book (Calder, 1963) p.27
When I started writing these essays a couple of years ago, having brought my long poem Queen Christina to a shareable state and feeling ready to address new projects after an extended period of retreat, my intention was to document my research in the Cambridge School Poetry Archive at the University Library. My first scheme was to collect and write about the work of Peter Bland, later known as Peter Naim Bland, a contributor to the little magazines and small presses of the later 1960s, who by the mid-1970s had disappeared from the scene. He had never been central to anyone’s idea of what was going on in the poetry of his period. But J.H. Prynne had once included Peter’s work in a reading list of the essential British poetry of the 1960s, and did his best to gather up and archive Peter’s poems as though they were worth looking after. He contributed to notable magazines like Peter Riley’s Collection, and collaborated with Barry MacSweeney on a pamphlet called Joint Effort in 1970. Prynne carefully shepherded the printing of Peter’s book Passing Gods with Ferry Press in the same year, instructing its publisher, his former student Andrew Crozier, on the content and design of the text. I liked Peter’s letters, which were written out in capital letters in biro or felt tip pen and composed in an unpolished, overdriven style. I thought he might have been unfairly neglected or screened out of the picture, and I recognised the life I met with in his work and letters as one touched by many of the same forces that have shaped my own. Peter’s poems have certain qualities that I like and admire, though I’m not going to introduce or appraise his work in this essay. So I started clumsily transcribing Peter’s letters, making quick, expressive judgements about them in my comments, trying not to feel too hampered by my own fears of exposure and inadequacy, and not worrying too much about the manic pace I had set myself in starting out.
This soon became a struggle. Peter was a difficult subject and, without quite understanding why, I found myself abandoning the work before it had really started. People weren’t comfortable talking about him, at least not to me, and the life documented in the archive turned out to be more troubling than I had anticipated. Peter was born in 1942, left school at 15, and wandered from Hornchurch in Essex to London in the early 1960s. There he had been absorbed into the radical underground, where casual sex work and junk culture met revolutionary politics and dissident intellectualism. Young men like Peter, typically identifying as bisexual or straight, would drift in from provincial England to hang around central and west London, providing sexual service to older guys in parks and public toilets for the cash to get high, squatting in the city’s already dwindling stock of disused and abandoned buildings. Through the influence of his lover and guide Lee Harwood, by whom he would remain sweetly awestruck throughout his formative period, Peter developed an interest in contemporary poets, holding an especially fervent admiration for the work of Harry Fainlight, one of the champion writers of that scene. Harry is sometimes still remembered for his performance at the Poetry Incarnation happening at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1965 — not for any special quality of his work, though his poetry up to that point, shared in New York underground magazines like Ed Sanders’s Fuck You and Ted Berrigan’s C, has been widely said to warrant more attention than it has generally received, but because his reading was disrupted by interventions from the floor, and the whole sorry incident was recorded for posterity in the Peter Whitehead documentary of the event, Wholly Communion. ‘Love! Love! Love!’, moans the Dutch beat laureate Simon Vinkenoog into the smoke and quiet of the giant room, as Fainlight falls into dismayed perturbation halfway through a reading of his psychedelic prose poem ‘The Spider’. ‘Come, man, come!’ screams Vinkenoog, fired up with phobia and aggression, eyes boggling as though he has been possessed by a Kubrickian demon. Alexander Trocchi, acting as the MC of the event, tries to bully Fainlight from the stage, like a senior officer in the college cadets wrangling a whipping boy from the parade ground, as Ginsberg hectors his protégé from the sidelines. ‘Read! Just read the text! Read the text!’
The whole episode is like a scene from nightmare. The slight and delicate Fainlight is reduced to a twitching panic. It is painful to watch the crafted persona he has worn to pass among the bohemians breaking open to reveal the endemically frightened and brittle person beneath. He didn’t really belong there. His weird blend of apocalyptic intensity with a rather dated, almost Edwardian style of thought and expression made him a discordant presence in the the Lower East Side inner circle. Born in New York but educated at English boarding schools, Fainlight was a Cambridge graduate in English Literature and a direct contemporary of Ted Hughes at Pembroke College, whose work of the 1960s Fainlight’s later poetry resembles quite closely in some respects. His sister, the poet Ruth Fainlight, would marry the socialist writer Alan Sillitoe, one of Hughes’s most staunch early friends and supporters, and in fantasy I imagine Harry being faced, like one of Sillitoe’s cameo characters, with a stark choice between these two opposing worlds, the worlds of Ted Hughes and Allen Ginsberg, each requiring from him the repudiation of the other, until Simon Vinkenoog’s abuse makes the decision for him. Harry would violently suppress his own early poetry following the Albert Hall catastrophe, and Ruth, in a biographical note introducing a posthumous Selected Poems published in 1984, appears to condone a rumour that Harry had literally torn a book collecting his underground work from the press. The legacy of this act, the immediate impetus for which was surely a reflex of his public shaming at the Albert Hall, lies across the broken body of his work like an open wound. Of two little poems printed in Charles Plymell’s NOW NOW magazine out of the Bay Area in 1965, one, a chaste and mysterious lyric fragment on narcissism, Harry’s constant theme, titled ‘Aristo’, survived to be canonised in his authorised works. The other, titled ‘A.D.’, was suppressed: ‘Xmas eve displays a fat red | Dick in a urinal’, the poem begins, not chaste or mysterious at all. His fragmentary lyric sequence of cottaging erotica, ‘O London’, first published in Fuck You in 1963, was dispersed in his posthumous publications into discrete poems, its more explicit sections scrubbed out completely. The writing which emerged over the remaining years of his life after 1965, to be published along with the expurgated salvage of his early poetry in a couple of modest booklets after his apparent suicide in 1982, was lifeless and defeated, though there are scattered moments of scuffed beauty. His characteristic works of that period present images of imperilled nature in unornamented verse, their frequent and obvious allusions to famous poems typical of a young man of Fainlight’s culture trying to make sense of a disorienting life by using his own little store of poetical resources to organise a reality he can’t otherwise cope with. Like many English poets of his type and sex, from P.B. Shelley onward, he carries Wordsworth with him like a blighted talisman, a symbol for the betrayed hopes in which his first poems were seeded. But its charm is nowhere near powerful enough to relieve the shame that controls him, a deep disgust with his own life which has been nailed into his spirit by psychosocial mechanisms primal as poetry itself.
He didn’t know it, and would wonder about what had happened to Harry in his letters to friends over following years, but Peter Bland’s poetry was born in the moment when Harry Fainlight’s died. ‘I HAD NO REAL INTEREST IN POETRY TIL MID ’65’, he told J.H. Prynne in one of the extended personal letters he sent over the course of their correspondence, which began with warm exchanges about music and poetry in 1967 and ended in 1972, when Prynne sent Peter on his way with a gift of ten pounds, solicited by the younger man as a loan toward some almost certainly fictional Spanish adventure. It’s difficult for me to look at this period of Peter’s life, though not so difficult as I imagine it was for him to live through it, on probation for drug-related offences, suffering from hepatitis and gonorrhea, and lurching from one temporary dwelling to another with his girlfriend Julie Dry in tow, not only because of the pity and frustration it naturally stirs, but because I see in his failure and desperation a painful image of my own. Incorporated into the English Intelligencer circle through his connections with Lee Harwood and Chris Torrance, Peter was out of place and out of his depth among the Cambridge poets. But he was a feral hustler through and through, hungry for what he guessed could be bartered from these more polished and resourceful people. Peter had been addicted to heroin since 1963. He was not able to care adequately for himself, and leeched horribly from the energy and kindness of the people around him. He fantasised about going to university, perhaps to Sussex like his hero Lee, though he had little notion of what that would require or entail, and no realistic plans were ever formed. With the touchy pride of the excluded and maligned, he preferred instead to pretend that he found the very idea that he would ever do the kinds of things which normal people did contemptible. In 1968, he projected a pamphlet with Bill Butler’s Unicorn Books, an underground gay press and bookshop based in Brighton, run by the former bookseller of Better Books on Charing Cross Road, whom Peter had done some work for in the past, but the scheme didn’t come off. Peter would later accuse Bill of stealing his work, while ‘MASQUERADING AS THE HIPPIES MARTYR’, or so he complained to Prynne in a bout of performative bombast. Peter lived a rough life and treated other people poorly, but rejection hurt him nonetheless. He lost his manuscripts and typewriter to eviction and homelessness. He slept under the trees in Epping Forest. Prynne, who must have felt he was intervening to save Peter and his work from a potentially fatal collapse, as he would try to save Mark Hyatt and others in later years, took his work seriously, sent him books and advice, and introduced him to Barry MacSweeney, reasonably imagining that the two extremophiles might find something in common. They shared a brief and passionate friendship, close enough that MacSweeney would feel the need to insist in later letters that they had never been lovers, over the course of which Barry developed a loathing for Peter which he appears never to have given up. Peter would continue to try and stay in touch with Barry over the course of the 1970s, sending him new work on paper and cassette, and writing him letters from the vantage of a rehabilitation that never seemed either complete or completely sincere. Peter was not without an insight into his own character and condition, but he was also extremely vain, and the letters of apology and explanation he sent his former friends over the period of his ostensible recovery are never completely free from his habitual tendencies toward bitter recrimination, empty promises, and delusive boasts.
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‘By liking others and respecting their suffering, he did not hate himself. He considered it infantile to hate onself, to analyse motives, take oneself to pieces with dislike and hold one’s nostrils at the smell. It would mean splitting himself in two, and the part which did the splitting had no real interest in it except self-hatred which, like self-love, is a flame that shrivels you up.’ — Alan Sillitoe, Raw Material (1972)
My best childhood friend lived in a dilapidated rented cottage in the village of Troston in Suffolk, where he slept on a bedless matress and survived on pop tarts and microwave chips. He stayed there with his mum, who worked as a nurse, his older brother, who was a religious zealot belonging to a predatory evangelical Christian cult in Bury St. Edmunds, and his mum’s abusive boyfriend. He was a breathtakingly talented illustrator, who at twelve could imitate the work of our heroes in fantasy art, Ian Miller and John Blanche, with an astonishing facility. I can still clearly recall some of the images he made, the compositions filling the pages of his drawing pad with the gleaming armour and ripped physiques of their subjects. I would give up much I’ve seen since to look on those drawings again. Not long after my family moved away from the area, my friend and his mum were forced to move into a mobile home on a caravan site a couple of villages away. We used to play truant and roam the countryside together, bathing in hidden waters, getting stoned in the woods, and trespassing in the hunting estates of the gentry. A little way along the road lived another beloved friend, at Troston Hall — a sixteenth-century manor house with decorative herringbone brickwork, a gravel drive behind baroque wrought iron gates, and a modern swimming pool among the ancient trees in its grounds. I loved these two friends more than I can express. I was a vulnerable and misfit child, uprooted from a northern working class community, which I loved, and transported to the East Anglian countryside, which I did not, who had learned to distrust adults from an early age. I was unable to take instruction or cooperate with other children in organised activities, and though I could read somewhat precociously, I didn’t feel any sense of special achievement or pleasure in doing that. All I really wanted was a complete absorption in something or someone to relieve the exhausting agitation which otherwise defined my inner state. These friends were my protectors and heroes, whom I loved above all others because of the patience with which they tolerated and forgave my excessive desire to be fascinated by them. Years later, I heard that my friend at Troston Hall had committed suicide, and drove out to Suffolk to weep at her grave. When I arrived at the churchyard, I saw that I’d been misinformed, and the fresh stone at my feet bore the name of her younger sister.
Troston Hall had formerly been the manorial seat of the Loffts, a family of Whig grandees who lorded over their corner of west Suffolk between the Glorious Revolution and the Great Reform. Its most notable occupant was Capel Lofft the Elder (1751-1824), a radical lawyer, poet, and man of letters associated with proto-left-wing political organisations such as the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information, which promoted a programme of democratic social and legal reforms between its founding in 1780 and its suppression during a government crackdown on liberal sedition in 1794. Lofft was recorded by the diarist Henry Crabbe Robinson, who heroised him among the greatest intellectuals of the age, as one of the only four men he knew in England, along with William Godwin, John Thelwall, and William Hazlitt, to grieve over Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo: ‘They anticipate a revival of ancient despotism in France’, Robinson scoffed, ‘and they will not acknowledge the radical vices of the French people, by which the peace of Europe is more endangered than the liberties of the French are by the restoration of the Bourbons’. (Diary, 1869, I.491) Lofft had sacrificed his legal career in protest against the execution of Sarah Lloyd, a teenage domestic servant who had been convicted in 1799 of conspiring with her abusive boyfriend and his gang to rob and murder her employer at the village of Stanton, another of the Lofft family’s hereditary fiefs, a few miles from Troston. Capel Lofft, who had abandoned his work as a barrister in the 1780s, took the bench as a magistrate for part of Sarah’s trial, and accompanied the condemned girl on the wagon that carried her to the place of execution in Bury St. Edmunds. There he fulminated against the government in such vitriolic terms, singling out for particular invective William Henry Cavendish-Bentick, Lord Portland, the venal and sadistic Tory Home Secretary who refused to hear petitions for mercy on Sarah’s behalf from Capel Lofft and his friends, that he was dismissed from the magistracy. Lofft’s major literary works include The Praises of Poetry (1775), a very accomplished Collins-esque verse essay on historical poetics composed in varied metres, and Eudosia (1780), a poem of visionary empiricism aglow with progressive social conviction. He produced a de-Bentlified edition of ‘Book the First’ of Paradise Lost (1799), accompanied by an ambitious commentary on Milton’s verse, incorporating reflections on the ways in which morphology and orthography influence developments in interpretation, with a system of scansion for marking and measuring Milton’s use of silence. In 1814 he published a vast anthology of over a thousand Petrarchan sonnets titled Laura, also the name of his daughter, who had turned ten that year, including dozens of his own, and over thirty by Sarah Finch Lofft, Laura’s mother. As a literary publicist, he took a particular interest in promoting poets from labouring backgrounds, through his connections with Thomas Hill’s Monthly Mirror and the radical publisher Vernor and Hood, and though it’s easy to sneer at the selective largesse of a man who also enclosed extensive tracts of the land he inherited, closing off ancient footpaths and arrogating the commons into his estate — albeit that he probably saw this as an ultimately progressive development of the productive capacities of the region’s agriculture — his legacy in this work remains among the most significant in English literary history.
This is primarily because Lofft was the patron of a shoemaker called Robert Bloomfield, who had migrated to London from Troston’s neighbouring village of Honington, and would become nationally famous for The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem (1800), one of the most reprinted literary texts of the nineteenth century, which in a kinder timeline might have remained a celebrated poem down to the present day. Lofft arranged for the publication of this work with Vernor and Hood, and wrote a biographical introduction drawing clear connections between the social injustice faced by skilled workers such as Bloomfield, and the maladministration of labour and property by men of his own class. Lofft was also instrumental in promoting the career of the precociously gifted Henry Kirke White, a Nottingham butcher’s son, who in his late teens, faced with a life of scribal drudgery as an attorney’s assistant, had felt the call to Christian ministry. White was helped by his patrons and supporters, including the famous Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to enter as a student at St. John’s College in Cambridge, where the stress of constant study in the teeth of precarity drove him, in the understanding and terminology of the time, to madness, and an early death among fits of delirium at the age of twenty-one. Henry’s wasted life provoked one of Robert Southey’s most memorable works in prose, an 1807 memoir prefacing his edition of White’s Remains in two volumes, in which Southey, who had also been raised in a modest home, attacked the cruelty and stupidity of the poetry industry for its luxuriant indifference to the suffering of the young people whose lives it complacently consumed. Southey was especially touched by the contrast between the circumstances of Henry’s death and his self-representation in the poem ‘Clifton Grove, A Sketch in Verse’ (1803), as the ‘visionary boy’ running wild in the woods who witnessed a summer storm at night beneath the trees: ‘With secret joy, I view’d with vivid glare, | The volley’d lightnings cleave the sullen air; | And, as the warring winds around revil’d, | With awful pleasure big — I heard, and smil’d.’ (p.7)
Capel and Sarah Lofft’s youngest son, known as Capel Lofft the Younger, was born in 1806, by which time Lofft the Elder had adopted a life of studious retirement at Troston Hall, having been hunted from the public sphere by his enemies. Young Capel would also become a poet and radical, abandoning a fellowship at King’s College in Cambridge in order to marry and travel the revolutionary world of the 1830s. He wrote two recognised works, the first a remarkable book of educational psychology, Self-Formation: Or, the History of An Individual Mind (1837), the second an epic incitement to popular insurrection, Ernest, or, Political Regeneration (1839). The title of Self-Formation curiously anticipates the name Mary Wordsworth would give William Wordsworth’s untitled posthumous poem addressed to S.T. Coleridge, The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem (1850), and though this is probably a coincidence, it at least suggests the depth to which Capel had internalised Wordsworth’s idiom and style of thought in his own reflections. Self-Formation comprises frequent quotations from and allusions to Wordsworth’s poetry, but actually Lofft seems to have taken the title of Self-Formation from the ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’ that make up the third volume of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711), which would surely have been found among the books in his father’s extensive library, remembered in Self-Formation as ‘large, indisciplined, and oppressed with its own weight, like a barbarian army’. (p.22) Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shaftesbury commonly used compound terms to describe the inward action of the self, though he attributed the origin of ‘self-formation’ to the Aristotlean term autoschediasm. This word, occasionally loaned into English, usually with the satirical implication that its speaker has an excessive regard for his own learning, is found in several places in the Poetics, where it refers to objects which have been improvised from extant resources, as Aristotle claimed tragedy and comedy had developed autoschediastically from ‘the prelude to the dithyramb and the prelude to the phallic songs’ of pre-Aeschylean festal drama (Poetics, Cap. 4, 1449a.9, trans. W.H. Fyfe) — though for Shaftesbury not only the drama but the whole of Attic culture were to be regarded as an outcome of ‘the natural production, and Self-Formation of the Arts, in this Free State of ancient Greece’. (‘Third Miscellany’, Characteristicks, III.p.139.n) The pattern of the birth of a higher culture from the dialectic of nature and liberty in ancient Athens represented for Shaftesbury a form, a model on which the British state and its subjects could be remade on an elevated basis — as more natural, more beautiful, and more free — so long as the realisation was elegantly extemporised, infused with that heightened taste in which Shaftesbury’s works were intended to educate his readers.
Shaftesbury’s ideal philosopher, the gentle Theocles, rhapsodist of the crowning work of Characteristicks, ‘The Moralists’, invokes nature in a passage of numerous prose, as he and his guests come upon what the dialogue’s narrator Philocles calls ‘the sacred Groves of the Hamadryads’ on a morning walk. (II.p.343) He invites his companions to contemplate with him a ‘noble oak’, using its example to develop a neo-platonist argument for the entire universe as a self-forming system. As a child, Capel Lofft the Younger also conversed with nature through its impressive local avatars, the ancient trees of Troston. ‘We used to go and visit them’, Young Capel recalls of his ‘ivy-mantled’ interlocutors early on in Self-Formation, ‘I and my little sister, and call them our aunts, and uncles, and grandfathers, and greet them accordingly. We fancied, from all our hearts — such is the potency of faith in children — that there was a spirit in their leaves, waking up at our presence, and murmuring in its complacency; that, in short, they were well pleased to see us, though to talk with us would ill beseem their gravity’. (p.18) For most of European history, even right up until the period at which poets began to romanticise such images, as ancient woodlands were being enclosed and cleared throughout the British Isles to supply the demands of empire, little Capel and Laura would not have been considered fanciful for speaking to the ancient oaks of Troston in expectation of some answer. What had become childish and poetic in Romantic modernity was religion and law in ancient Europe, and while the Gods of Asia spoke to their prophets on mountain tops, in caves, and wastelands, as British eighteenth century antiquarians liked to observe, imagining some continuity of worship between the oracular priests of the Hellenic world and the druids of the insular Britons, the most ancient oracle of Zeus, where the voice of the deity could be heard by the devoted, was sanctuaried in the Sacred Grove of Dodona.
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‘And O! if yet ’twere mine to dwell | Where Cam, or Isis winds along, | Perchance, inspired with ardour chaste | I yet, might call the ear of Taste | To listen to my song.’ — H.K. White, ‘To My Lyre’, Clifton Grove (1803)
‘British poetry is I am afraid a butchers shop, a quality which has given it connections with a street mob possessed of similar intentions upon a broader scale, the mixture of the two has fed the mass media with a potent brew which has infected world culture with its policy .. the future outlook such a structure posits is that of a borovian fantasy.’ — Harry Fainlight, Not Sleeping Just Dead (privately, 1979)
For Capel Lofft the Younger, as for many men of his period and education, including Wordsworth, the encounter between the poet and the sacred grove or ancient oak presented a figure for thinking about the threshold between nature and the human, and the development of deeper faith, higher consciousness, and new language from their interaction. The scene is repeated in various ways throughout his work. The knight Hermann, hero of Ernest, in the crisis of his quest, addresses a venerable oak in a passage of swaying verse, alternating a longer and a shorter line, not quite in common measure but not quite out of it either, in ‘Book VIII’ of the epic: ‘Nature, all I had I gave it thee, | Tell me, wilt thou | As I gave it quite free, even as free | Requite me now?’ (p.170) But in this case nature has already given Hermann everything that he has and is, and cannot answer him, or give him more. Wordsworth’s poetry is also full of significant trees, elms wrapped in mayday ribbons, oaks and yews monumentalising ancient rites and ceremonies, like the plant in his 1810 sonnet ‘The Oak of Guernica’, devoted to the tree beneath whose boughs the Castilian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella had signed a treaty guaranteeing the liberties of the Biscayan nobles in perpetuity, unifying the kingdom of Spain. In that poem the tradition that the oaks of Dodona had powers of speech is gently mocked as a credulous delusion. But some of Wordsworth’s own trees are given voices, like those in Lyrical Ballads’ ‘The Oak and the Broom’, a bitter-sweet dialogue in which the oak consoles his own mortal fears by reflecting on his coming verdure: ‘What cause have I’, he asks of the companion growing under him, ‘To haunt | My heart with terrors’ — before he topples over in a spring storm, pushed from his crag by the upsurging broom. More often they mean voicelessly, like the trees of the hazel grove in ‘Nutting’ that haunt the adult poet in memory when he recalls ‘The silent trees and the intruding sky’ which broke into the forest canopy through the wounds left by his eager gathering. Wordsworth teaches that nature has a voice, but that it speaks in us, and not to us — although the implicit distinctions here never become absolute, and Wordsworth plays quite freely with their boundaries and terms, in part because while Wordsworth doesn’t believe in their necessity, to avow this disbelief explicitly would risk confessing to that deism which had, from the standpoint of the middle-church Anglican orthodoxy to which Wordsworth was deeply committed, tainted the reputation of Shaftesbury and his movement.
From the circle of archaic trees emerge primal terrors along with poetry and laws. As Capel Lofft the Younger assembles the symbolic materials from which he will extemporise his bildungsroman in the first movements of Self-Formation, he recalls the carved oak wainscoting of Troston Hall, an extensive freize of ‘grotesque heads and figures, the combats of clubmen with wild beasts, the rampant goats and couchant unicorns’. These images, graven in the wood of the same trees whose forms delighted him in the garden, along with the family portraits that lined the central stairs, at once stirred and horrified him. ‘I could sooner have torn my eyes out than look up to them’, he recalls. ‘These pictures for a long time were things of mystery to me; problems for my imagination; a set of mutes in formal and fantastical attire, interposed between the living and the dead; messengers from the material to the spiritual’. (p.3-4) Later in the narrative, the monstrous images concealed inside Troston Hall would be reincarnated as the Tory youths with whom Capel was forced to spend his adolescence after being dispatched from Suffolk to Eton to complete his education. When his classmates discovered that his father was a man of note in the democratic opposition, Lofft the Younger found himself ‘marked for their persecution. Day after day, and often half-a-dozen times in a day, I was taunted with the fact, and teased by their malignity’. (p.280) When as an adult he encountered one of his tormentors at a gaming table in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Lofft claims to have confronted the man, ‘and poured out upon him a flood of abuse, a determined devilry of spirit, such as I had never before even imagined’. (p.282) This speech terrorised his childhood abuser so thoroughly that, according to Lofft, he fled without a word of rejoinder.
His father’s invective, the powerful phrases lisped and murmured in what those who knew him remembered as a feeble voice, unequal to his wonderful gift for spontaneous oratorical composition, had not been enough to save Sarah Lloyd from a terrible death, her hands bound tight, or to inaugurate an English popular republic, or to put an end to the reactionary arrogance of the Duke of Wellington and his party. The shame of the father had become involuted in the formation of the son, stiffening and twisting the flow of free autoschediastic development, and I’m not sure Capel the Younger was ever able to smooth out that knotting in reality. But in fantasy, which I think is where this tale of vengeance belongs, as a kind of solution to Capel’s childhood ‘problems for imagination’, he is able to confer upon himself a magical language which can compel objects, including human objects, to obey his will, commanding them to speak or stunning them into silence. It is telling that Ernest’s hero Hermann, naturally an exemplary poet as well as a virtuous philosopher and warrior, imagined the apex of true poetic vocation as the power to silence the universe through the force of his ‘tide of song’. (‘Book XI’, p.252) ‘Childishness is poetry, and poetry is childishness’, (p.19) Capel asserted in Self-Formation, and there is a tenacious acuity in this. Lofft the Younger’s revenge fantasy is a poet’s fantasy, and a child’s fantasy, not only because he is driven to recriminate against injustice, and was a wronged child in a cruel world, but in a deeper sense — because of how important in childhood self-formation, and the growth of the poet’s mind, are those powers within the self that not only arouse and modulate, but that mute and authorise speech. So let the sacred grove stand as a symbol for the archaic listening circle, the scene where nature speaks its first poetry in the mouths of oracles and children. But let it also be recognised that listening is not all that happens in sacred circles, as Harry Fainlight learned. Bitter experience teaches that the poets’ circle is also a killing ground, a place of madness and sacrifice, a control system for containing and screening those it captures. The circle of the sacred grove, perceived from this conceptual elevation, becomes the outline of that pool in which the verbal child enchanted at his own vocality meets his silent image, and into which he falls, to be reborn as a silent open mouth of another golden flower among the whole alarming host of us.
Sometimes the circle of nodding ears opens and closes on the poet, like the mouth of a fish bubbling the meniscus of the pool, sucks him in, and spits him out. And just as the beats spat out Harry Fainlight, the Cambridge poets spat out Peter Bland. In 1970 Peter and Julie became involved with the Beshara Community, a westernised Sufi organisation formed around the charismatic teachings and philanthropy of Bulent Rauf, a Turkish-British nobleman of the old Egyptian aristocracy, and sometime husband of Princess Faiza of the house of Muhammed Ali, associated with counter-revolutionary activism in the cause of the deposed monarchies of the post-colonial near east. Beshara had compounds in in France, in Gloucestershire, in London, and in Scotland, where exiles from the streets like Pete and Julie would mingle with establishment figures, New Age intellectuals, and bourgeois bohemians. Frequent visitors included other figures from the London underground poetry scene, such as Sylvester Houédard, a noted experimental poet and Dominican friar. Curiously, its members also included the childhood best friend of my own father, whom I accompanied on one of his several visits to the community in Scotland in the early 1980s. These personal connections are uncomfortable, in ways I am not quite able to explain, though I had begun this essay in the hope of learning more about them. But vague and hazardous as its associations seem to me, Beshara would become the focus and salvation of Peter’s life over the next ten years. His Sufism was sincerely meant, and the Beshara community gave him a home, caring responsibilities, and perhaps for the first time in his life a stable centre, secured by an esoteric faith not very different in its tenets to that of Shaftesbury’s Theocles, from which he could begin to work on his dependencies. In this he had the close personal support and guidance of Bulent Rauf, whom Peter understandably idolised as his master and saviour. With Rauf’s encouragement, he also pursued new accomplishments in poetry, and in the early 1970s began to make progress on an extended poem called 1st Journey. Peter was very proud of this work, a trippy ‘autobiography in the light of dervish esoteric teaching’, as he called it in his last letter to Prynne. The poem, which Peter eventually planned to extend over eight parts, its design in outline not unlike Wordsworth’s incomplete epic cycle The Recluse, included a visionary imagining of the nativity of a new poet’s voice, born from mirrors in a sacred grove, which is reproduced in Handout of Tears 13. It was composed in snappy rhapsodic verse reminiscent of the more pungent passages of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, though it was perhaps Peter’s least derivative writing up to that point. He made tape recordings of himself reading it aloud, which he circulated among his erstwhile readers, and continued to seek opportunities for its publication. He wondered if it might be a basis for making some kind of grant application to the Arts Council, and it’s easy to imagine Peter entertaining fantasies of becoming a nationally famous poet, a proto-punk Wordsworth for the Aquarian enlightenment. But instead of opening a space for Peter in the ring, the poem only served further to alienate him from his former friends, who neither shared his interests in Islamic mysticism and the occult, nor sympathised with the sense of vocation Peter had discovered in his spiritual jihad, and the circle which had drawn close to hear him tightened up, and pushed him out, into oblivion.
Luke Roberts’s Living in History (2024) contains an excellent account of the Harry Fainlight disaster in the context of the British gay rights movement, with special reference to the work of Lee Harwood, to which this essay may be considered a supplement.
My thanks to the staff of the Manuscripts and Rare Books reading rooms at Cambridge University Library for their generous expert assistance.