The brick tunnel drops into darkness. My nightlight gives a feeble glow. Illuminates the veins in my hand. The door, designed to withstand bomb blasts, creaks; threatens to close behind us. The underground complex is rumoured to stretch for miles, with hidden entrances in various parts of town. Fifty or sixty yards in, we hit water. We’re really not equipped for this, we’ll have to come back on another occasion. The tunnel divides, branches off; there are cell-like sidechambers.
By the dying candleflame, Renchi scratches the outline of his M25 drawing on the damp floor. He’ll return, with drummers, sand, chalk — and the pebbles from St Ebba’s cemetery. We’re quite relieved to have an excuse for a retreat to the pub.
A figure in a suit, standing on the embankment, spots us. He makes no challenge, doesn’t move. But when Renchi and his troop pitch up for their shamanic ceremony, the tunnels are definitively sealed. The schematic drawing has to be laid out, over several hours, on the ramp.
The Amato pub, in the early evening, is varnished, brassy; occupied by check-jacket and mustard corduroy equestrians. It’s generous of them to let us in. We don’t talk horseflesh and we’re not cranking up for a serious session. We’ve walked past mansions with complicated ironwork gates, past stables and fields of cattle with designer coats, cleaner, less ostentatious than Hollywood wives.
Drink in hand, day’s ration of Romanticism digested, Doc Wallen recalls his childhood: Carpenter hasn’t got the monopoly poly on Wordsworthian soliloquies. Louisiana. Wallen’s father was a surveyor for an oil company. In a house by the bayou, dim figures moved at night, circling the bed. A Southern Gothic dreamscape. Faulknerian shadows: grandfather, spurned by the detested son to whom he had left the farm, died where he lay. An unremoved corpse, busy with maggots, in a nest of rat-filth.
Such images infect the pub. Peter Carpenter speaks of William Hayward, a troubled life that brought him, inevitably, to Epsom. If the tale is not properly told, the man fades away; the legend is discredited. We allow ourselves to become identified with those we promote, so that the manufacture of another writer’s biography is a gloss on our own. Present neglect supports elective obscurity. The reappraisal of a vanished reputation must initiate a turn in the biographer’s fortune. These exercises move between literary archaeology and psychic vampirism.
I listen to Peter’s fragmentary account. I read pamphlets of Hayward’s poetry and I obtain a copy of the novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night. This was published by Heinemann in 1964. He was in good company; other titles promoted (on the back of the dust-wrapper) include Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun and Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January.
The cover illustration is a solar disc floating over three very serious bohemians: clean hair and anoraks (male) and trowels of eye-shadow (female). We are revisiting the Lawrentian Spring (CND and rented cottages), before the Summer of Love. Bran Lynch, an uncocky and self-doubting Ginger Man, hanging on to the 1,000-foot contour in the soft limestone country of the Cotswolds, wanders on set ‘wearing the overcoat of a literary critic and a pair of army socks’. Hayward’s comedy is stoic, melancholy; the world squeezes his heart. He has the pulse of the land: ‘Sheepcrunch. The iron blathering of tractors. And the sun aggressing through the cracked window.’
The weekend party sours into its Monday aftermath, spill and chill and mismatched underwear, sticky tea grains in a burnt saucepan. A ‘large, genial negro’ called Shiner makes an uncomfortable entrance (current sensibilities on red alert): Shiner has possession of a black Jaguar car. Has he ‘borrowed’ it? ‘What you mean, boy? I hired it. Been working on the motorway. An’ Roz likes a bit of speed. That so, honey?’
She ‘blushes’. We blush. But, if we’re old enough, we’ve lived through such fictions before, seen the period awkwardness drop away, found surviving strengths. Class shapes the narrative, not race. Hayward doesn’t like cities, or the transport infrastructure. ‘Innumerable family cars were being eased out of congested garages onto congested roads… There would probably only be a few hundred injured in this rush, and those certainly the least deserving.’
The cold cottage, the bothy, the borrowed lodge: somewhere remote, out of it, to contemplate — what? The impossibility of salaried employment, urban life, relationships? Thin sunlight on barren fields, a dreadful silence: ‘It was so quiet she could hear the copulation of flies.’ Hayward’s characters, like the author, are oppressed by their ability to articulate, explain, use language.
Lynch cracks and is removed to a fictional version of the Epsom hospital in which Hayward himself had once been incarcerated. The hospital has its snobberies, hierarchies of incompetence. Robotic table-tennis and ECT are compulsory. ‘Everything was quiet, sunny, calm, but below these obvious suggestions of the air a hint of indescribable horror and violence.’
Within parkland, behind high walls, in an environment policed by burly men in white coats (NCOs left over from recent wars), Lynch encounters ‘the burning’. ‘With clinical assistance he cut his way back into sanity, but the shadow of the greater reality was never far from his mind.’
The asylum as rite of passage — through brain-shock, redirected lightning — goes back to Mary Shelley. And to Hayward’s contemporaries, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. To Ken Kesey. To Carl Solomon (dedicatee of Howl), to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘starry dynamo’. And Harold Pinter’s Aston (in The Caretaker): ‘Then one day they took me to a hospital, right outside London… They used to come round with these… Idon’t know what they were… they looked like big pincers, with wires on, the wires were attached to a little machine.’ Hayward, shocked in every way, every sense, is closer to the Gloucestershire poet/composer Ivor Gurney (and David Jones) than to the excited Laingian rhetoric of the Sixties. He associates himself with the landscape in which he lives, with forms of traditional knowledge. He fears: love and its loss.
His angst feeds in that dark ditch of the English imagination, the First War: in missing it. The guilt. Edward Thames spending a final, shivering winter in an Epping Forest cottage. Hayward’s bland Cotswold escarpment lacks shellholes, blackened tree stumps, bones poking from mud. Hayward faces: ‘The dilemma of those who are chosen to speak, but dare not. The trivial escape via sheer sensation, or the terrified plunge into the narrowing corridor of psychosis. With the increasing urgency of the voices on one side, it is scarcely possible not to crack.’
Hayward’s sense of place is respectful. Districts are recalled by a few precisely observed details. Epsom is vividly present in the walk that only a patient or hospital visitor would recognise, our green way between gulag and station. Locals, so Peter Carpenter informed us, know these byways as ‘The Slips’.
Released from confinement, Bran Lynch ‘took a narrow footpath that ran behind the backs of absurd villas towards the centre of town’. His delusions couldn’t be contained in a complacent Surrey town. ‘His particular kind of illness was a bit much for provincials to cope with. Even his insanity, it appeared, was metropolitan.’ City: madness, voices. Country: incubation or denial of visionary experience, silence.
Lynch, the dreamed double, walks Hayward’s walk: as we walked it, the same geography.