The Great New Zealand Vortex

Blast 2 (1915)

I

Waaal, bo – what wuz yu thinkin when yu sed as Ez wuz gone BUGHOUSE? Yeats sed that one time BeFORE the WAR at Wyndham’s / in ’12 or 13 or thereabouts. We wuz drinking TEA … and Wal Clarke sed az he could break a window with his TONGUE, and done it. Where is ol Wal – still barkin’? He warn’t too smart, but MIGHTY crazy ... [1]

Each new volume of Ezra Pound’s correspondence brings surprises, and one advantage of the piecemeal way in which they’ve been issued is the ever more thorough and detailed annotations. Professor Timothy Cross adds, in reference to the passage above:

[Wal Clarke: Walter Emil Clarke (1887-1942), New Zealand poet and pamphleteer, associated with the Blast group in London 1912-14].

I was intrigued by this mention of a New Zealander associated with Pound, Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and the other leading lights of London Vorticism – especially the bizarre detail of breaking “a window with his TONGUE” (somewhat reminiscent of Robert Graves’ story “The Shout”), so I decided to try and find out more about him.

First, a series of negatives: he is not mentioned in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature; nor the Companion; nor is he accorded an entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. No local Encyclopaedia contains information about him. These were not unexpected absences, but I was more concerned when I discovered that neither the Auckland Central Library nor the University Library contained any of his publications. That there were some was proved by the following entry from the online catalogue of the Alexander Turnbull Library:

Clarke, Walter E. (1887-1942), poet and pacifist, author of Puriri Treats (1912), The Manacled Muse (1921), Marx in Mahurangi (1933), and (posthumously) A World Away (1947).

Only the last of these volumes was actually held in the collection, so I sent for it without delay. I should say at once that A World Away, subtitled The Literary Remains of W. E. Clarke, proved disappointing. There were some rather pallid lyrics from the 1920s, Marxist propaganda verses and manifestos from the ’30s (mostly of a sub-John Cornford type) – nothing remotely Vorticist. One example should suffice:

I am a pipe the wind blows through,
This figure cannot dim
Inconsequential
Eremites of sorrow, or that twice-
Delivered tale
Of sufferings deluded from a fool. …

– “Inconsequential” [2]

Where evidence is fragmentary, only fragmentary reconstruction is possible. Certain parts of Walter Clarke’s life will, I suspect, remain an enigma forever. Those who knew him all appear to be dead, and the few pieces of information I have been able to gather might almost apply to different people of the same name, so discordant are they. I shall nevertheless present them in sequence, with as much explanation and as little speculation as possible. I have been unable to find out anything about his family or antecedents, which leads me to suspect that “Walter E. Clarke” may have been a pseudonym, but this is only a guess.

My next step, accordingly, after examining A World Away, was to attempt a literary “fix” on Clarke by examining the major literary memoirs, diaries and collections of letters from the immediately pre-war period during which Professor Cross implies that he was resident in London. To be sure, 1912 is too early for Vorticism proper, but presumably, like the other members of the group, he worked his way to it through Imagism or one of the other poetic movements of the period. Given the title of his pamphlet Puriri Treats, he may have begun as some kind of Georgian pastoralist. This remains doubtful, since (as I intimated before) there are no surviving witnesses to this portion of Clarke’s career.


II

The presence of lovely woman can add a charm to a sewer, though I should hesitate to take a female acquaintance into such a place until I had first made the journey. – T. W. Knox, The Underground World: A Mirror of Life Below the Surface (1877) [3]

A little combing of indexes for the principal writers of the period produced the following results:

1. Wyndham Lewis to C. R. W. Nevinson (30/3/15):

   I remember asking you distinctly not to give my address to that exhibitionist Clarke. I had enough of his ravings back in the days when such things were in fashion, and I really cannot be expected to put up with them now. His kunstprosa “Fens of the Future” is enough to make a French carthorse gag … Liked his biting Ford that time, though. (Rose, 97) [4]

A distinctly oral picture of Walter Clarke was beginning to build up – biting Ford Madox Ford, barking, breaking windows with his tongue …

More to the point, since the second issue of Blast was being put together at this time, it is to be presumed that Clarke wished to be considered as a contributor. C. R. W. Nevinson – “always a dark horse,” as Lewis himself put it (33) – had already blotted his copybook with the “real” futurists by assisting with some of Marinetti’s performances at the Rebel Art Centre. Perhaps this incident over the address was some kind of revenge on Nevinson’s part for Lewis’s over-reaction to that defection.


2. Going back in time a little, we have Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey (23/3/13):

   Ottoline does have an element of the superb. She has swooped down on some poor hapless swain from the Antipodes whom she is trumpeting as the greatest thing since “The Hound of Heaven.” He was there with his wife, an extraordinary buxom creature who knitted from beginning to end of the soirée and had nothing to say beyond “Knit one, purl two.” Clarkie – that is how one addresses him, apparently – Clarkie sat there leering at the three of us, and eating bath buns from a little bag (he is a vegetarian). I recall little of his conversation, except for a disquisition on the curative effects of cow-dung when applied to wounds. Leonard became angry at this, and the evening broke up in some disorder. [5]

It appears from this extract that Lady Ottoline Morrell had a taste for New Zealanders even before her better chronicled involvement with the egregious D’Arcy Cresswell. The presence of a wife upon the scene is interesting, though. She is never mentioned after this one pre-war reference. Does the information about cow-dung denote a rural background? The couple were certainly never invited to Russell Square, perhaps as a result of Leonard Woolf’s disapproval.


3. Finally, more dubiously, there is T. S. Eliot to Ezra Pound (2/2/15):

   On the way out of Dolmetsch’s I was accosted by an extraordinary ragged person in shorts and Edward Carpenter sandals who told me he was a close friend of yours. He had apparently been lurking there to watch the dancing. I didn’t catch the name, but I should imagine you will be able to recognise him: cadaverously thin, red hair, a strange champing jaw, and an accent that is next door to incomprehensible. He told me he had seen my “King Bolo” verses and attempted to read me a series of similar efforts of his own about a Big Brown Kween and her various exploits in some place beginning with a “P”. Managed to shake him after a bit and retired in despair. (Eliot, 1998, 85-86) [6]

Can there be any real doubt that this was Clarke? Strange accent, red hair, walk shorts, bad verses about a place beginning with “P” (Porirua? Papatoetoe?) – were there any other New Zealanders of comparable notoriety in London in 1915? Of course, this puts his return to the colonies a little later than is implied by Cross’s note, but that is no real obstacle.

These three passages are the only substantial references I could discover to Walter Clarke during his glory days in London, and the fact that he is referred to by name (and different names at that) only in the first two may explain their having hitherto escaped the attention of researchers. None of his compositions from the time appear to have survived.


III



… the celebration
of the black mass that casts
the shadow of a red mass. [7]

I first met the poet in 1938, at the instigation of Rex Fairburn, who told me that he was the only real died-in-the-wool leftist he’d ever heard talk any sense. I was struggling at the time between the rival attractions of Marx and Major Douglas (doctrines so eloquently expounded in Fairburn’s “Dominion”), and the recommendation held a lot of weight for me.

He was living at that time in a little out-of-the-way house in Herne Bay, and seemed to have no contact at all with the literati of Auckland. Certainly he never made his way across the harbour to Frank Sargeson’s bach, though one would have thought that the two men would have had quite a lot in common. For, like Frank, he was an eager subscriber to English literary journals. His shelves were heaped high with copies of Grigson’s New Verse and Lehmann’s New Writing. New Country, New Directions, New Currents … anything with the word “new” in the title.

As he ushered me through the front door, the first thing that struck me was an immense poster stapled to the back wall: “BLAST PORIRUA!” it proclaimed in black capitals, followed by a series of other “Blasts” and “Blessings” in regular rows. “My salad days …” was his wry riposte when I commented on it to him, and he appeared unwilling to discuss this strange work of art any further … [8]

I am quoting from the preface to A World Away, written by the editor of that memorial volume, one Winifred Cannon, who (one suspects) may well have been romantically involved with Clarke, at the time in his early fifties. The other comment she makes about this visit offers us one last glimpse of the real Walter Clarke, now left hopeless, penniless and wifeless by the shores of Auckland Harbour (soon, alas, to be lifeless also: he shot himself in the head in 1942):

Our conversation that day was punctuated by extraordinary outbursts of yodelling on his part. At one point this reached such a pitch of intensity that the window-frames began to rattle and seemed on the point of bursting open. Their failure to do so seemed to disappoint him greatly, and he was only brought back to the point of our conversation by my asking for another watercress sandwich.


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My attempts to track down any heirs or relatives of Walter Clarke or his wife (never referred to after that one mention by Virginia Woolf) proved unavailing. When I turned the angle of my search to his last admirer, Winifred Cannon, however, my luck improved. A few weeks after having advertised for news of her in the New Zealand Herald and Listener, I was rewarded by a phone call from her one surviving relative, who spoke to me on the understanding that he would not be identified in any way.

I shall not, accordingly, give even his approximate address or location except to say that it was in one of the western suburbs of Auckland. As I drove out to see him that weekend, I did wonder why he would insist on such elaborate precautions. Were there family traditions about the poet? Had Winifred in fact been Clarke’s lover in those final days in Herne Bay? Was there (most tantalising thought of all) a treasure-trove of letters and manuscripts still lurking in the attic?

The approach to the house, set in a three-hectare lifestyle block, was long and muddy, and it took me quite some time to negotiate it on foot. As I reached the foot of the rather tangled garden a few dogs began to bark, and I was soon surrounded by a snarling posse. Their master did not appear until I had knocked on the door at least a dozen times. His right foot was wrapped in a bandage, which explained his tardiness. The faint odour of decay in the air implied a certain laxity in his housekeeping arrangements; however, I thought it politic to accept his offer of a cup of tea.

Our conversation was, at first, a trifle stilted. No, he had never heard of anyone called Wal, or Wally, or Walter Clarke. No, he did not know very much about his aunt, and what he did know he was not sure she would have wanted him to pass on to strangers. At a venture, I asked him if he had ever heard of Blast.

“Blast! You mean all those old posters and things. Yeah, they were hers all right, and I kept ’em upstairs for years – blasting this and that in big black letters. You should ’a come around a couple of months ago, though. I was clearing out a lot of old junk, and I found those posters, and I asked the school teacher to come and have a look at ‘em. Just old junk, she said – might as well be burnt … Dunno, though, didn’t we keep one or two?”

I listened with mounting horror to this recital, trying very hard not to show my dismay at the thought of a series of Vorticist posters from pre-war London (or possibly, if these were the “BLAST PORIRUA” ones, from immediately post-war New Zealand), preserved carefully across the generations, falling prey finally to the ignorance of a local secondary-school teacher.

“Vortex. That was it. The great New Zealand vortex. It was plastered all over them. I know, ‘cause I used to go up and read them when I was a kid – just for fun – till me mum found out and told me that it was dirty stuff and that they only kept it because Auntie Win had said that they’d be worth a lot of money some day. Is that it? Were they worth anything?”

I hastened to disabuse him of this notion, adding that these old pieces of paper – as well as any letters or books that might have come down to him from his aunt – would certainly be of great interest to libraries and literary scholars.

“Well, I s’pose I could take a look. I don’t hold out much hope, though. Me mum didn’t hold with keeping letters and photos, and I think she burnt most of those before she died. D’you want me to take a look around for you?”

Resisting the temptation to scream out “YES!”, I tried to convey how welcome this would be with as much nonchalance as possible. The approximately ten minutes I sat there, balancing a tea-cup on my knee, while he blundered and bashed about upstairs may have been the longest in my life. The wraith of Walter Clarke seemed to be floating before me, mocking and taunting, holding out his tongue and threatening to bite me if I flinched.

“Nah. Nothing. Told you so. Sorry to drag you all the way out here, but Auntie Win always said they’d be worth a bit; but then, she was a crazy old bat, always reading those funny old books with funny square letters – Russian, she said it was – and no better than she should be, Mum said. Dad always said that she was a Communist, and that she’d get us all in trouble if we went to see her, so I only saw her a few times when I was real small …”

He seemed genuinely apologetic over his failure to turn up anything to justify my “trouble” in coming all the way out here, and I felt that it was not just over the potential loss of revenue, either. He was clearly a little lonely in his large, malodorous dwelling. I was just on my way out when he suddenly exclaimed:

“There’s the stuff in the outside dunny, o’ course. I haven’t really looked since we had the flush put in, but they might still be there …”

It seemed a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, rejecting his half-hearted offer to show me the way, I waded through the weeds and paspalum at the back of his section to the old fibrolite long-drop. The brightness of the day receded into darkness as I pushed my way into the ramshackle construction. Affixed to the back of the half-rotten door, weathered but still faintly legible thanks to the blackness of their ink, were a few torn sheets of paper, perhaps from the very same poster susceptible Win Cannon had seen all those years ago, entering that shack in Herne Bay … 






IV

What then, are we to make of the career of Walter E. Clarke? More an exhibitionist than an artist, he obviously felt deeply his failure to make an impression on the culture of his age.

And yet, show-off though he undoubtedly was, we are left with some memorable impressions of a young man on the make in literary London: skiting to Yeats and Pound about his abilities as a vocalist; ferreting out the elusive Wyndham Lewis in the chaos of the zeppelin-torn city; biting poor flabby Fordie; getting, finally, so badly on Leonard Woolf’s tits (scarcely a difficult feat), that Bloomsbury was barred to him forever.

Win Cannon’s mini-memoir concludes as follows:

I never knew the precise circumstances of poor Walter’s death. I was in Melbourne at the time, attending a conference of the Australasian-Russian friendship society, when I heard he had shot himself in the head. It may well have been an accident, as he sometimes gave shooting exhibitions for the local children, and had a habit of shooting at the electrical insulators on telegraph poles which got him into trouble on several occasions.

In any case, it was agreed on my return from Australia that I should attempt to collect materials for a memorial volume worthy of his many years of literary endeavour. There were, unfortunately, very few manuscripts left in his house when I revisited it, and I have therefore been dependent on the verse and prose pieces sent out to his many correspondents over the years. His books were not merely out-of-print, but for all practical purposes unattainable …

Red-haired in his youth, he was, when I met him, still a fine figure of a man – tall and lanky – and with a “fine leg” in shorts. He always went barefoot or in sandals whenever possible, and had a fine disregard for bourgeois styles in dress as well as art. I shall always look upon my association with him as one of the privileged memories of my life. [9]

For my own part, perhaps the most poignant of the many images evoked by his story is that of a young zealot riding his old ramshackle bike down Lambton Quay, pausing every so often to paste up another sheet of “Blasts” and “Blessings” – pacifist, vegetarian, revolutionary, only begetter of the Great New Zealand Vortex … sole remaining prophet of that Future soon to be swallowed up by the trenches of France.




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Notes:



[1] Pound at St. Elizabeth’s: Letters 1947-1959, ed. Timothy Cross (New York: New Directions Press, 1995), 236.




[2] A World Away: Some Literary Remains of Walter E. Clarke, ed. Winfred Cannon (Auckland: Griffin Press, 1947), 21.




[3] Quoted in Walter E. Clarke, Cento (Kaukapakapa: Kamen Press, 1941), iii.




[4] The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose, revised by C. Hamilton (London: Methuen, 1991), 97.




[5] The Question of Things Happening. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1912-1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson & Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 18.




[6] The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1988), 85-86.




[7] A. R. D. Fairburn, Collected Poems, ed. Denis Glover (Christchurch: Pegasus, 1966), 15.




[8] Cannon, op. cit., 3-4.




[9] Cannon, op. cit., 6-7.



References:



• Cannon, Winifred, ed. A World Away: Some Literary Remains of Walter E. Clarke. Auckland: Griffin Press, 1947.
• Clarke, Walter E. Cento. Kaukapakapa: Kamen Press, 1941.
• Cross, Timothy, ed. Pound at St. Elizabeth’s: Letters 1947-1959. New York: New Directions P, 1995.
• Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922. 1988. Rev. ed. London: Faber, 1998.
• Fairburn, A. R. D. Collected Poems. Ed. Denis Glover. Christchurch: Pegasus, 1966.
• Graves, Robert, Collected Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
• King, Michael. Frank Sargeson: A Life. Auckland: Viking, 1995.
• Knox, Thomas W. The Underground World: A Mirror of Life below the Surface. Hartford: J. B. Burr, 1877.
• Lewis, Wyndham. Blasting & Bombardiering. 1937. Rev. ed. 1962. London: John Calder; New York: Riverrrun P, 1982.
• Nicolson, Nigel, & Trautmann, Joanne, ed. The Question of Things Happening. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1912-1922. 1976. Rev. ed. London: Hogarth P, 1998.
• Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. 4th ed. London: Faber, 1987.
• Robertson, R. & Wattie, N., ed. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Oxford UP, 1998.
• Rose, W. K. ed. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. 1963. Rev. ed. by C. Hamilton. London: Methuen, 1991.
• Sturm, Terry, ed. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature. 2nd ed. Auckland: Oxford UP, 1998.
• Trussell, Denys. Fairburn. Auckland: Auckland UP / Oxford UP, 1984.




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evasion 2 (4) & (5) (2003)


[26/2-10/5/97 & 4/03]

[3685 words]

[Published in evasion 2 (4) & (5) (2003)];
Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004): 67-82.]

Jack Ross: Monkey Miss Her Now (2004)




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