This article was written for The Cornish Banner and published January 2015. The Banner has kindly given permission for it to appear on my blog. All letters and diaries can be found in the University of Exeter's Special Collections Library. Thanks to Special Collections for permission to use the Clemo material and to the RCM for permission to use the Rowse material.
(Paintings of Clemo and Rowse, by Lionel Miskin)
Two of the most indigestible writers of the
twentieth century came from the St Austell area. A. L. Rowse was born at
Tregonissey in 1903 and was the elder of the two. Jack Clemo was born during
the Great War, in 1916, just a few miles west, at Goonamarris.
As well as sharing a geography, Clemo and Rowse were both working class men,
and both were confident of their genius. They also both produced autobiographies
in the 1940s, Rowse in 1942 and Clemo in 1949. It was a productive decade for
Cornish autobiographical writing, with J. C. Trewin and Anne Treneer adding to
the list of regional life writing classics, with their respective Up from the Lizard (1948) and Schoolhouse in the Wind (1944). Rowse,
Trewin and Treneer all engaged with Clemo in one way or another. Trewin had
published Clemo’s work in his West
Country Magazine, as well as writing about the young man in a series of
self-conscious letters to and from his friend H. J. Willmott in the 1950 London-Bodmin. Anne Treneer, meanwhile,
offered one of the more inappropriate, if predictable, reviews of Clemo’s
poetry in the Cornish Review,
admiring ‘the immense force of feeling’, but regretting that there was not more
about ‘the singing of the larks’.[1]
In spite
of the similarities between Rowse and Clemo, they were in other ways worlds
apart. Most glaring among their differences was the question of faith. Clemo’s
faith was the core of his outlook, his optimism and hope, with Christ the
grounding of all of his ambitions and expectations, whether romantic, literary
or medical. Rowse, on the other hand, was an atheist. Clemo’s gonzo
fundamentalism informed a quiet and nuanced stance on homosexuality [2] while
A. L. Rowse was known to be gay. Clemo declared himself not only a poor
academic, leaving school at the age of twelve due to illness (though officially
at age thirteen due to bad results, poor attendance and the absence of any
desire to continue), but he was also anti-academic and anti-intellectualism, a
position explored in all of his non-fiction, most notably in The Invading Gospel. Rowse, on the other
hand, was a proud and renowned academic by profession, a Doctor of Letters and
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, as well as of the British Academy and Royal
Society of Literature.
Reading Rowse’s diaries, one might not imagine Clemo
had any impact on his life at all. He is scarcely mentioned. Nevertheless, when
Clemo emerged onto the literary scene with a trilogy of remarkable works – the
novel Wilding Graft, the
autobiography Confession of a Rebel,
and the collection of verse, The Clay
Verge – the already established Rowse offered immediate support,
writing on 31 March 1948.[3]
Dear Mr Clemo,
I thought of writing to
you some months ago when I read a poem of yours that struck me very much. Since
then, Mr Latham of the Macmillan Co. of New York has told me of your novel,
which greatly impressed him, and wanted me to get in touch with you. He very
much wants to know my impression of your novel – in case I may be able to help
in putting it across over there. (I hope you don’t mind me putting it like that,
for it is the book’s own remarkable quality that will carry it.)
I have at last got hold of a copy and am enthralled
by it. I am still in the midst of it, very much moved by it, especially by the
character of Garth. That’s quite right, isn’t it? I am afraid I am a very
unprofessional reader of novels and don’t think much of most contemporary ones.
But I love this one. There are all sorts of things I long to ask you about it –
if you can bear to have a meeting. Can you? I should very much like to meet
you, if you are free one day this week. What about Saturday? Is that any good?
I’d be delighted if you cared to ring up and fix it. The house is quite easy to
find: five minutes walk along Porthpean Rd from the Duke of Cornwall. You may
not want to come - which would make me sad, for I long to know about the book
and you.
Forgive the address: I don’t properly
know your address.
Yrs sincerely
AL Rowse.[4]
That Rowse wanted Clemo to telephone him shows that
he was unaware of the progression of Clemo’s disabilities – his continued deafness, weak heart and alarmingly failing sight being the
most prominent at this time.
The ‘Mr
Latham’ of Rowse’s letter was Harold Latham, the Vice-President of the Macmillan
publishing company. He wanted to publish Clemo’s Wilding Graft in the United States, though he did not like the
title and wanted to change it to ‘Clays of Meledor’, a suggestion Clemo
resisted. The importance of American interest to Clemo was enormous. He
believed, to some extent, that America was his spiritual home, and in an
unpublished poem he writes that if you, the reader, want to understand the
roots of his story:
You must search the
bleared West, its forensic night:
Prairies and
headstocks, reeling streets.[5]
Clemo hoped and had faith in his transatlantic
success. America was the root of his problems, he believed, and Providence might offer their remedy from the same source. Not long after Rowse’s first note, Clemo remarked in his diary: ‘I
believe I’ll be like Browning more fully appreciated in the U.S. than in
England.'[6]
On 1
April, the day he received Rowse’s letter, Clemo recorded in his diary his
surprise that the arch-atheist Rowse had enjoyed Wilding Graft: ‘I’ve had a letter from AL Rowse, more sympathetic
than I expected’.[7] He replied that same day, ever punctual with his correspondence:
Dear Mr Rowse,
Many thanks for your
appreciative letter regarding my novel Wilding
Graft. I had feared that, if you did read the book you would be repelled by
the “mystical religiosity” which has grieved some of its reviewers. But I think
it’s obvious that I detest religious humbug
as much as you do – I’m closer to Hardy and T.F. Powys than to conventional
sectarian Christians, and in the character of Garth Joslin I’ve tried to
suggest the only kind of faith I feel to be still valid. It’s an extreme,
solitary vision, and I don’t suppose I’d have developed it had my education
been normal. I finished my schooling at the age of 12 through an attack of
blindness, and a few years later began to suffer deafness, which confirmed me
in a ‘village hermit’ life of meditation similar to Powys’s. (The note in the
current Bookman gives a general
sketch of my life and temperament.) It is therefore impossible for me to make
fresh contacts – I’m sorry to disappoint you, for I do appreciate your
generosity and would gladly accept your invitation if I were still able to
converse with anybody. This unrelieved loneliness is part of the price I’ve had
to pay for my independence and for any originality that may exist in my work.
All discussion of my writings with literary friends has to be done through
correspondence. I’ve already supplied the MacMillan Co. – via my agents – with
full biographical details for use in promoting the American edition of Wilding Graft, but I daresay your
opinion of it would help them, as you are the only product of the clay district
whose name carries any weight with the reading public. Anyway, I’m grateful for
this personal message of appreciation.
Yours very sincerely,
Jack R. Clemo.[8]
Clemo was self-conscious about his disabilities. He
had been practically deaf for well over a decade, and since 1947 his eyesight
had been declining, with ever worsening spells during which his sight was so
bad and the pain so great that he was ‘unable to read’, as he repeatedly noted
in his diaries. Gradually, over the next few years, it would decline to a permanent white-blindness.
It is notable
in these letters that while Rowse praised Clemo for his writing, Clemo offered
little commentary on Rowse’s work, though he was familiar with it, having read
Rowse’s A Cornish Childhood twice
already and owning a copy of Poems of a
Decade. (The fact that Clemo owned a book in the early 1940s and kept it
until his death shows that it was of some significance. Otherwise, it would
have been sold on to make room for more important volumes.)
Rowse
replied enthusiastically again and with equal punctuality, on 2 April 1948,
repeating his praise and elaborating on it:
I have been knocked
sideways by [Wilding Graft]. I have
been very much moved – the book has filled my mind these last few days. The
intensity of it is the great reward you have for the isolation and loneliness
in which you live. ... This novel is a wonderful one: well worthy to be a
descendent of dear Hardy. More than that I could not say; for you may know that
I worship him.
He emphasises the local history they shared, and
repeats a query Sir Arthur Quiller Couch had offered years before, when Q had
been sent one of Clemo’s juvenile novels at the end of 1939. Rowse here adds a
little of his notorious relish:
You know so much more
about the life of the people than I, are
they really like that? You give a terrible portrait of them in the book … You
must know pretty well what I have always, or for so long, felt about them:
their hypocrisy, their narrowness and meanness …, their back-biting and
ungenerosity, their love of doing some-one down… But are they really so
appalling, do you think, as you see them? ... I know how disgustingly crude
they can be – or rather must be: for I don’t allow these people to come within
a 100 yards, I had almost said miles, of me.[9]
Clemo reads loneliness into Rowse’s criticism of
‘the people’, remarking in his diary: ‘I do feel sorry for him, crying out for
understanding and fellowship … I’d expected Rowse to sneer at the book, yet he
hails me as a fellow saint who will be stoned with him.'[10]
In this
long letter, Rowse offers a few factual corrections to Wilding Graft, including pointing out that the Truro monument to which
Clemo refers is of Richard Lander, not of Henry Martyn. It was a mistake Clemo
corrected in subsequent editions. Rowse also acknowledged having read
Clemo’s provocative letters to the Cornish
Guardian: ‘I remember your writing emotional-religious lrs to the paper
years ago when I was a Labour candidate: they then seemed to me rather confused
… and I couldn’t make head or tail of them.’
Clemo’s
swift response was again overwhelmingly about himself, and some of the natural
antagonisms between Rowse and Clemo are suggested:
You owe so much to the
schools, while I’ve struggled through without their help, and with a vision
they would have tried to destroy … I was too slovenly to have the sorts of
ambitions that could be frustrated, content with the primitive and childlike
levels, the flashes of intuition of an untrained mind. You, on the other hand,
seem always to have felt the itch to escape from all that, to be civilised and
adult. This difference of mental texture explains much: it explains why I can
depict the people as harshly as you do on paper without ever wishing to get
away from them in real life.
Clemo writes of his latest book:
It’s an autobiography –
as different from yours as it could possibly be, much more raw and elemental:
no story of struggle for scholarships … but a record of spiritual and emotional
upheavals which drove me out of Methodism (I was reared in strict Nonconformity
and never lost my respect for the best type of Nonconformist, the Sam Jacobs
type: even you admired him), into
various forms of pantheism and at last to my present faith.[11]
Clemo is referring to Confession of a Rebel, which was published the following year. It
is as prickly a work as Rowse’s A Cornish
Childhood.
This
letter from Clemo, which largely continues in the vein of self-concern with
some added criticism of Rowse, appears to have cooled the correspondence. Other
than occasional cards apologizing for the lack of any reply, Rowse waited over
three months before responding. He had, however, continued to support Clemo’s
work, sending copies of the novel to his own contacts, like Howard Spring, and
providing reviews. Indeed, it was after Rowse’s radio review of Wilding Graft that Helena Charles, the
first leader of Mebyon Kernow, went out immediately and bought three copies;
one for her, and two to give to friends. This would be the start of another
interesting correspondence and relationship.
After a
shorter letter in July 1948, the correspondence with Rowse was discontinued
until the following year, when, on 16 September 1949, Clemo sent Rowse an
inscribed copy of Confession of a Rebel,
again comparing their personalities:
I wonder which of us is
the typical Cornish Celt? I fancy the answer must be ‘Neither,’ though you
probably come nearer to it than I do. I’ve been pushed away from Cornish
interests by abnormal circumstances … Your ‘Celtic’ elements are disciplined
and disguised by French clarity, while mine are submerged under Teutonic
dogmatisms.
It is fascinating and consistent to see Clemo
defining his ‘nature’ as brutish and primitive, and also that he considers the
influence of bloodlines to be so sophisticatedly schematic. In Confession of a Rebel, as well as in the
1951 essay ‘The Hocking Brothers’, Clemo wrote that his literary talent
probably derived from the Hockings, who were distant cousins of Clemo. The
familial relation, however, was very weak: Clemo’s father’s mother’s mother’s
father was the Hockings’ father’s father. There was little shared ‘blood’, and
none of it, of course, was from the literary siblings themselves, but rather
from their ancestors. Clemo adds to his statement that he has ‘felt a spiritual
force working against the natural tendencies and turning me into something
quite different from what Nature meant me to be.'[12] This is a reference to the pivotal struggle Clemo perceived at this point
between the ‘Natural fate’ into which all are born and the alternative divine
predestination of the converted Christian.
Three
weeks later, Rowse replied, congratulating Clemo on the autobiography, which he
declared ‘a success’:
You have said what you
meant to say and in a way that comes straight through to the reader. It is a
complete revelation of you, and that – whether sympathetic or not – is what an
Autobiography should be.
Again, there is the gentle hint of antagonism
agitating the waters in this letter, though it never fully surfaces. It is a
long epistle, in which Rowse notes that Clemo’s published criticism of
academics is ‘not worthy of you now’. But perhaps most attractive is Rowse’s
defence of his old benefactor, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. In Confession of a Rebel, Clemo had
attacked the recently-deceased writer and academic a number of times, firstly
dismissing Q’s fiction as ‘unreadable’, ‘dry historical romance’, and then
claiming that he had returned The Art of
Writing to the library ‘unread’, because ‘I recognized its chilly
lecture-hall atmosphere as a threat to the spontaneity of my individual moods’.[13] The real cause of Clemo’s antipathy was that Q had not championed him the way
he had championed Rowse. Clemo had ‘heard of his generosity to talented Cornish
boys, his determination to give working-class youngsters of promise an equal
opportunity of educational advance’,[14] and so in 1939 he had posted Q a copy of an over-drafted novel, ‘Private Snow’.
In Confession, Clemo writes of Q’s
‘refusal’ to help, and of how Q had treated him ‘as a decadent who was best
left to struggle alone’. This, Clemo concludes, ‘is disturbing proof of the
limitations of the educational system [Q] represented.'[15] Rather than championing Clemo, we are told, Q ‘returned the manuscript with a short
letter of criticism’, and he is further condemned for ‘not mentioning to anyone
his personal opinion of me’.
In fact,
Q’s letter to Clemo has survived, and his account of it in Confession is unfair, the quotations manipulated and the generosity
of Q’s response considerably reduced. Clemo had sent him a poor manuscript of a
tired theme, and Q had considered it very carefully, offering more feedback
than it possibly deserved. Rowse, of course, knew Q well, and Clemo’s account
did not ring true. In his response to the criticism in Confession, Rowse began: ‘One can completely understand how deeply
disappointed you were. And yet you must be just to him.’ Q had, writes Rowse,
‘the most beautifully developed and balanced character of any one I have ever
known’. There follows a long tribute to Q’s excellent character, during which
Rowse recommends to Clemo that he must ‘be kind to [Q] in your thoughts, as he
was the kindest man who ever lived: not at all chilly and academic as you
think.’ Moreover, Rowse explained, writers receive a great many manuscripts
from budding authors and it was kind of Q to have replied at all, let alone
with such consideration. ‘So again, be kind to the world of civilised culture,
that is itself so much kinder. All the happiness of my life is bound up with
Oxford; all the unhappiness with Cornwall.'[16]
In his
13 October 1949 response, Clemo continued the discussion, concentrating on
academia and schooling:
I can understand that, from
your standpoint, my prejudice against the academic world must seem unworthy.
Yet … I was originally excluded by my temperament, my genuine lack of that kind
of ability. I was debarred from a secondary school education by the fact that I
failed to pass the examination, so I could have achieved nothing in the
scholastic sphere even had I not been physically handicapped.
This was intended as a reply to Rowse’s suggestion
that Clemo was too hard on academics and academia, but it goes no further than
to say that an academic life was not open to Clemo himself, or would not have
suited him. It is an interesting response. Rowse’s problem had been that Clemo
dismissed academia and intellectualism as such, as though it were one musty
homogenous mass. That is, Rowse’s criticism was objective, suggesting that one
can’t criticize all of academia, all academics and all institutions simply
because one was not suited to it. It would be like making a moral case against
people who eat cabbage just because one finds the taste of it repulsive or it
gives them wind. Clemo’s sometimes solipsistic approach to logic and argument
poses possibly the most serious barrier to the study of his prose. That is, he
uses logic and appeals to logic and direct experience, while at the same time
derogating logic, empiricism and the intellect when they do not suit his
premise.
In the same letter, Clemo once more compared
his autobiography with Rowse’s:
I bought [A Cornish Childhood] just after it was
published, as I’d begun jotting notes for my own autobiography and thought I
might find in yours a few useful tips on this kind of writing. I did find much
helpful stimulation in your book, though of course when I came to write my
Confession I found I had to do it in my own way, which wasn’t much like yours.
Again, the unclarified antagonism. It is in this following
phrase, too: ‘I’ve often wondered why I
take such a Henry Fordish view of history – but I suppose we all have a
weakness for dismissing as “bunk” something which really isn’t.’ In the context
of the letter, this seems like a dig at Rowse’s irreligiousness. Or in the passing
comment, when Clemo describes how he was laid up ‘with an attack of eye trouble
brought on by an accidental blow in the eye which I got while romping with one
of my little girl friends: very characteristic. No life could be less “adult” –
and therefore less like yours – than mine is.'[17]
There
appear to be no further letters from Rowse to Clemo, and it is quite possible
that from this point on Rowse sent only brief cards in response to Clemo’s
requests, when he responded at all.
In 1949, Clemo was appealing for money. He was
concerned for his future, with no new novel forthcoming and being unfit for
work, both deaf and very poorly sighted. Cecil Day Lewis suggested that Clemo
should apply for a Royal Literary Fund grant, with A. L. Rowse a supporter of the petition. On the same day Clemo received this letter from Day
Lewis (17 November 1949) he wrote to Rowse asking for help. Rowse agreed, but
when in three weeks’ time the letter of support had not arrived, Clemo began to
chase him up: ‘I should be glad if you could let me have your letter of
recommendation to the Royal literary fund as soon as possible’.[18] He added that, on top of this letter of support for the RLF, if Rowse could write and send a further letter of recommendation
for Clemo’s failing novel, The Shadowed
Bed, that would also be a great help. Once more, Rowse agreed and acted,
but ten days later he received yet another letter. This time, Clemo was asking
Rowse to write on his behalf in support of his being given a Civil List
Pension, because ‘my handicaps will prevent me from being a prolific writer’.[19] But
a General Election was looming, and Rowse was too busy with it to help. He
suggested Clemo write again when it was all over. Clement Attlee was re-elected
for Labour on 23 February 1950, and soon after, the following arrived:
Dear A. L. R.,
Now that the Election
is over I am wondering what steps are being taken about the Civil List Pension.
I hope a start has been made, for it looks as if I shall need it pretty badly.
My new novel has not been accepted yet, and the Literary Fund committee decided
to pay me only half the £200 grant this year, so I’m just scraping along on £2
a week, which doesn’t give me enough comfort or security to tackle any work
that demands prolonged effort.[20]
In May, Clemo wrote to Chatto & Windus what the
publishers called ‘a rather pathetic letter’. He was asking them to chase Rowse
for his letter of support. But Rowse was losing patience, seemingly fed up with
the constant appeals for his help. He may have felt that he had offered Clemo a
lot of support already – praise for Clemo’s writing, letters supporting
financial appeals, reviews of his work, negotiations with American publishers,
recommendations, and so on. But Clemo had offered nothing, not even a pleasant
word on any aspect of Rowse’s work. There is no sense in Clemo’s diaries or
other correspondence that he was even aware that it might have been polite to
offer some sign of friendship, appreciation or camaraderie. Rowse was an
opportunity, the means to an end. He had made the literary and academic
contacts that Clemo desired.
Often,
Rowse wrote slim private commentaries in the margins of letters he received,
usually critical of his correspondent. Against this one from Chatto &
Windus he wrote only: ‘I did get him one
grant'.[21]
While Clemo’s demands might seem impolite and even
self-centred, his vulnerability should not be underestimated. Clemo’s health
was in desperate decline and he was dependent upon his ageing mother for just
about everything. It must have been terrifying. The initial literary success of
Wilding Graft and the encouragement of
Cecil Day Lewis had led him to believe that financially he and his mother would
not need to worry about having to scrape by on her war widow’s pension and
odd-jobbing anymore, but long term solvency depended on Clemo’s ability to continue writing – especially novels,
which sold and paid better than poetry. However, Clemo would never write another
original novel after Wilding Graft.
No new plots revealed themselves and he could only tinker with those older
works of the 1930s, a fact that caused him considerable anxiety. He needed
help. His mother could not navigate the literary world, and nor could he, as he
could hardly write a letter without her and could not hold a conversation without
her writing out the words of any interlocutor into the palm of his hand. How
was Clemo to perceive the nuances of conversation, the physicality of
relationships, intonation and delivery, when he could not hear any speech or
see a smiling face? He had entered into the world of publishers, agents,
journalists and reviewers, a world dominated by old friendships, meetings and
contacts, though Clemo himself was unable to forge friendships in the usual way
and unable to participate in these meetings. He was deaf, blind, Cornish and
working class. In the scramble for position, notice and preference in such a
London-dominated industry, Clemo was at a practically insurmountable
disadvantage. This is to say that while Clemo can come across as stiflingly
needy in his correspondence, it is because he genuinely depended on the help
of others. It is a testament to his tenacity and ambition, as well as to his
literary ability, that Clemo succeeded at all. It is also testament to the
quality of his literary friendships. Cecil Day Lewis was commendably sensitive
and generous when dealing with Clemo during the publication of those first
three books. Charles Causley, too, was definitively kind and his impact on
Clemo’s career probably crucial. Theirs was a lifelong friendship.
Rowse,
on the other hand, though sympathetic to Clemo, was not a patient man.
Certainly not as patient as Causley, their mutual friend. All references to
Rowse later in Clemo’s life were faintly critical. In 1976, for example, Clemo
wrote in a letter how Cornish literature had been ‘dominated by the academic
sceptical tradition begun by Quiller-Couch and carried on into black atheism by
A.L. Rowse.'[22] Two years later: ‘As a writer I have always felt lonely in Cornwall, having
nothing in common with Q’s humanism or Rowse’s rationalism or Anne Treneer’s
tolerant scepticism.'[23]
Neither
Rowse nor Clemo were straightforward men, and Clemo was probably unaware that
Rowse continued to help in small ways – ways that did not put him out. For
instance, Rowse contributed to a fund being raised to buy him a new typewriter
at the end of the 1950s, a fund started by Charles Causley, who in his first
letter to Clemo had connected these two St Austell men, writing: ‘I think the
“Confession” – with A.L. Rowse’s autobiography – the two most important books
to come out of the west of England ever.'[24] As
well as Causley, Rowse and Clemo shared another contact, Lionel Miskin, the
extraordinary artist who befriended many local literary men when he was living
at Mevagissey. Miskin painted both of them, though the strange figure of Clemo
in the cottage and clayscape seemed to work better, and Miskin made more than a dozen paintings and drawings of him. But aside from brief and uncommitted
moments such as these, and the tribute Rowse paid Clemo on his death in 1994,
it seems that once Rowse had turned his back, he barely thought again of Clemo.
To me, their
simultaneous proximity and distance invites a new way of placing poets and of
writing the map. There might have been much common ground – splintered
sexualities, ambivalent geographies, displaced identities, literary ambitions
queerly nurtured in poor clayey soil, and so on. They even shared literary
favourites, like D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. But some of this common ground
had scarred them, made them incompatible.
The
relationship between Rowse and Clemo was short-lived and uncomfortable, but it
is almost incredible that these two men should have come so close to friendship
at all, considering the force of each man’s character. And it is doubly
incredible that their complete interaction should be recorded as it has been. This
is both the curse and the gift of studying Jack Clemo. There are, on the one
hand, few recordings of him speaking, no spontaneous interviews or
conversational anecdotes, and he will always be hidden behind the crafted word.
But equally, his inability to converse means that practically every interaction
he had was committed to paper, and this remarkable meeting between two of our
most interesting and awkward writers has been preserved in all its seething,
subtle curiosity.
[1] The Cornish Review, number 9, winter 1951.
[2] Sexuality was at the core of Clemo’s worldview. He was not especially homophobic, but his faithful ambitions and personal desires were markedly heterosexual, Christian marriage being an early goal and ideal. In later life, Clemo would remark that he did not like ‘gay exhibitionism’ (in the 1990 interview with Felicity Warner), and in 1981, after reading Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Clemo noted that it was a ‘deeply moving novel’, but ‘overloaded with Lesbian propaganda’ (note the capital ‘L’). Clemo’s interview with Felicity Warner can be found in the University of Exeter’s Special Collections Library, reference EUL MS 68/PERS/1/4/4. The 1981 diary is EUL MS 68/PERS/2/44.
[3] The date of the letter is clearly 1948, a fact supported by the postal stamp as well as by cross-referencing with Clemo’s personal diaries. However, when Jack’s widow Ruth edited the archives, she crossed out 1948 and wrote 1947. It is not clear why, though it is one of many questionable and distracted editorial impositions she has made on the collection.
[4] The letters from Rowse to Clemo were kept in a box of ‘Letters from Literary Men’. They are in Exeter’s Special Collections, reference EUL MS 68/PERS/1/4/2.
[5] This is from an unpublished poem of Clemo’s from 1961, entitled ‘Inheritance’.
[6] Diary, 8 May 1948. EUL MS 68/PERS/2/11.
[7] Diary, 1 April 1948.
[8] EUL MS 113.3.
[9] ALR to JC, 2 April 1948. EUL MS 68/PERS/1/4/2.
[10] Diary, 3 April 1948.
[11] JC to ALR, 4 April 1948.
[12] JC to ALR, 16 September 1949. EUL MS 113.3.
[13] CoaR, 136.
[14] Ibid. 169-70.
[15] Ibid. 170-71.
[16] ALR to JC, 4 October 1949.
[17] JC to ALR. 13 October 1949.
[18] JC to ALR, 9 December 1949.
[19] JC to ALR, 19 December 1949.
[20] JC to ALR, 27 March 1950.
[21] Chatto to ALR, 2 May 1950.
[22] 22 October 1976.
[23] JC to Donald Rawe, 13 October 1978.
[24] Causley to Clemo, 19 October 1951.
