Jack Clemo's Jukebox

It might seem a peculiar idea to be considering the music a deaf man listened to, but bear with me. Before he went deaf, and then blind, Clemo enjoyed music. He and his mother both played their little pump organ in the cottage quite competently, and Clemo loved the old Sankey hymns. He had a good memory, and even when he was deaf he would play these hymns in his head over and over, like a favourite record. That organ was destroyed in 1951, and Clemo’s blindness overwhelmed him soon after. His health was so poor – his ears, eyes and heart – that doctors prepared him for the worst and he believed he was going to die. Initially, he sank into a terrible gloom. Instead of getting better, as he had expected, his suffering increased, and instead of getting married, he was distanced further from society and conversation. This was not what his faith had led him to expect.

Then the American ‘hot gospel’ movement of the mid-1950s penetrated the darkness, with news of Billy Graham’s dramatically successful ‘Crusade’ at Harringay, followed by the healer Oral Roberts’ ministries in England and the evangelical child star Renee Martz’s vibrant tours with her trumpet. In the midst of such an optimistic mood, Clemo made a leap of faith and spent £13 on a gramophone. He was ‘stone deaf' when he bought it, he writes in his diary, and it was really the only extravagant purchase he had made. Most of their life Jack and his mother had lived poorly and frugally on her war widow’s pension, until Jack published his first novel, autobiography and a small volume of poetry. £13 was a considerable sum to spend on such a thing, especially as he could not hear.

Nevertheless, they set it up by the sofa, and Jack’s mother went to St Austell to buy the 7” single of Renee Martz’s first release, ‘The Song that God Sings / The Large, Large House’, and a record by George Beverly Shea, probably another 7” single, ‘How Great Thou Art / America the Beautiful’. Shea’s baritone was a regular feature of the Billy Graham Crusades, and Clemo found that when he pressed his ear against the machine and turned it up, he could just about hear the rumbling of Shea’s hymn. Martz, meanwhile, was just a little squeak. But then:

One day in November, when I had a cold, I blew my nose and felt a squelching sensation deep inside my ear – and I heard myself cough. I hurried to fetch Renee Martz’s record, and a few minutes later stood spellbound, listening to her clear strong voice soaring amid a thunder of jazz.

That Clemo was able to hear the music was remarkable, though there was no real ‘thunder of jazz’. ‘The Song that God Sings’ is straight pop gospel, though ‘The Large, Large House’ had an upbeat, swinging accompaniment. This is Clemo’s only experience of jazz, it seems, which is relevant to his writing. In the poem ‘Lunar Pentecost’ we find ‘God’s jazz-drums’ and ‘The beating jazz-fire’, while in ‘Homeland’ we read of ‘Christ’s ragtime sacrament’. Does it make a difference to the poetry that Clemo did not know of real jazz? Perhaps not much, but reading the verses with a sense of the syncopated rhythms of ragtime is a different experience from reading them with the tamer pop gospel and hymnal jazzy rhythms in mind. He wrote these poems in the heydays of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis. Clemo invoking jazz in this age is as generically offbeat as a contemporary poet invoking G-Funk or grime to make a point when their awareness of rap begins and ends with Pete McSweet.

Anyway, Jack loved the gramophone and from archival references, the following is the peculiar playlist of vinyl I’ve built so far:

Renee Martz - The Song that God Sings / The Large, Large House

Renee Martz – Revivalist Songs

George Beverly Shea - How Great Thou Art / America the Beautiful

Jo Stafford and Gordon McRae – Whispering Hope / A Thought in My Heart

Redd Harper – I’m a Christian Cowboy

The Harringay Choir – To God be the glory, great things He hath done

Beethoven – Ninth Symphony

Beethoven - Missa Solemnis

Japanese Folk Songs – (likely ‘Katsumasa Takasago – Flower Dance (Japanese Folk Melodies)’)

Bach - Unknown

He had, in addition, a great number of hymns on vinyl by unspecified choirs and singers, with favourites including ‘Just as I am’, ‘And can it be’, ‘My Redeemer Liveth’ and ‘Breathe on me, Breath of God.’ The last of these was played at his funeral and memorial services in 1994.

The folk music is probably the surprise entry, and this was sent to Jack by his friend, the poet and travel writer James Kirkup, in 1968, when Kirkup was living in Japan. It was certainly not Jack’s favourite album.

The record player was an important character in Clemo’s life. The Martz records were played in the hope that a connection with the divine might be reinforced and healing effected. On New Year’s Eve, often he would stay up after his mother had gone to bed, playing those gospel tunes in the granite cottage and praying. And it had another function. You could vary the volume of a record player, so Clemo could listen to things he would otherwise be unable to hear. In the early sixties he would ask a girlfriend to record her voice onto vinyl, and later he would record noises in the landscape on his tape player, so he could play them back at volume, his head against the speaker, listening to the sounds of people and places normally withdrawn from him. In a typically unique way, Jack’s gramophone reconnected him with the world.

The Poetry of Sister Mary Agnes

I’ll assume you don’t know Sister Mary Agnes. She was a contemplative nun of the Poor Clare monastery at Lynton in Devon during the 1970s, so no reason why you would. But she was also a poet. During her time at the monastery, Agnes put out three slim volumes: Daffodils in Ice (1972), No Ordinary Lover (1973) and A World of Stillnesses (1976). They were published on small, modest presses, Workshop (who published Andrew Motion’s debut collection the same year as Agnes’s) and Thornhill, and they were well-received. The television seemed to enjoy the novelty of Agnes being a nun, with both the BBC and Westward Television airing features. Meanwhile, the literary establishment welcomed her too, Cecil Day Lewis and John Betjeman both expressing admiration, as well as the children’s writer Elizabeth Goudge (said by JK Rowling to have been a direct influence on the Harry Potter series). Goudge wrote the foreword to Daffodils in Ice.

I came across Sister Mary Agnes through her correspondence with Jack Clemo, now held in the University of Exeter’s Special Collections. The letters suggest she left the monastery in 1976, around the time of her third and final collection, A World of Stillnesses, following a breakdown. She writes first from hospital, then from several different addresses around London and Oxfordshire.  A few years later, she tells Clemo that she is unable to return to the convent and she is considering writing her autobiography. Her feeling of contact with God, she says, remains as real and intimate as ever.

The poetry is almost all nocturnal or crepuscular – night-thoughts of intimacy, loss and abandonment – melancholia of the old thermoscopic sort – with beautiful symbolic imagery and a strong sense of mystical longing.  Although there are only three volumes to compare, the writing changes markedly. The sense of loneliness heightens, and the sense of identity seems to weaken. The poems themselves shed their titles more often than not, and it becomes uncertain where one ends and the next begins. It is difficult not to read these later poems in the context of Sister Mary Agnes’s breakdown.

The following three poems are from Daffodils in Ice. They will not give an adequate sense of the potent quietude and depth of each little volume, but perhaps they give enough to intrigue. 

Daffodils in Ice

Frost, moon, snow – silent fall, soul-musical.
Christ's hand, outstretched to bless,
sheds silver over all.
His scars, his ring – his marriage band
are daffodils
in ice.


All Night I have Lain Awake at Your Side

All night I have lain awake at your side,
                  God of night.
The moon's pale course
has been as the turning of a leaf,
or as the breath of a moth
over my lashes
before the first bird
burst like a bud the crystal empire
and dispersed the clarity of mystery.

For the taste of night
was delicious to my mouth
and the stars, as cones
sprinkled over the dark conifer of night's folds.
Now there remain
whispers of the hillside
murmuring through my ears,
as, blind,
I wander through the valley of day.


Song

I met you in the morning, when rays were long,
and sealed my patterns in mist;
we left at night,
our day being all compressed
as breath on glass, or as diamond of frost.
The sinking sun blessed its approaching sleep;
shadows of trees arose to dance,
and, whispering in my ear before I slept,
caused me to dream you had crept
to my side.
But when day came
I was alone and wept.