Note that when you go to Dulwich it is not enough on coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts about those sweet fields into a sentimental and Dulwich looking whole No but considering Dulwich as the gate into the world of vision one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer.
Shoreham is still a removed place, a cleft between close hills. We felt its shadowy, covert nature — dark cottages, tangled orchards; it was damp, folded in on itself and its history. Otford was more exposed, caught at a sharp angle between two motorways, M25 and M26. Shoreham was hidden. A sudden turn, a drop in the road, and out of nowhere we’re up against the church and the river.
The old High Street was dead. Victorian shops kept their shape, but no longer had a purpose. There was nothing to sell. In 1914 there were twenty shops in the village, now there is one. The only active concern is a small house that, from May to September, doubles as an Aircraft Museum. Relics from the Battle of Britain. The operators have a box of leaflets at their door, soliciting ‘aircraft parts, uniforms, eye witness accounts of any aircraft shot down over Southern England during World War II’. The Paul Nash moment is always a possibility in the Kentish woods and fields: the shattered fuselage, the opaque cockpit containing a skull in a flying helmet. A wristwatch around bone.
Renchi has found someone to interrogate: a man (with unnaturally black hair) wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue, sleeveless sweater. A uniform of sorts. Renchi, who lives in the country, recognised him as a postman. In Hackney, we’ve forgotten that such occupations still exist. Even here the post office is a private house, its ancient logo another heritage decoration. The postman points the way to Palmer’s cottage.
Although it looks the part, and we invade the grounds to fire off a fusillade of photographs, this is not Palmer’s cottage: SAMUEL PALMER SCHOOL OF FINE ART. The house, Reed-beds, is where Australian artist Frank White set up his school in 1958. Timber-framed, lead-windowed, with cross beams, panels of blackened flint, the school is altogether too much: Palmer’s life as it should have been.
Renchi won’t buy it. Usually the first to invade any property that comes our way, he stays in the road. ‘Arty,’ he growls — when I photograph the heavy, moist apples that hang low in the orchard behind the house. The whole set is a commentary on Palmer, and Palmer’s Shoreham, and nothing to do with the man or his work. Teaching was the bane, the anguish of Palmer’s married life: it was the only way of generating a small income, hours of drudgery. It saw him banished to West London and Redhill. Letters, from now on, would be about bills, money, American stocks: ‘the kind of people we are obliged to associate with — and from whom I get pupils’.
Palmer lived in a dirty and dilapidated cottage known as ‘Rat Abbey’. And then at Water House. When he came with Tatham to the Valley of Vision in the spring of 1826, it was an escape, a chance to play at being ‘Ancients’. As with Pre-Raphaelites, Arties and Crafties, hippies, the paradigm was lost in the past: medieval, Gothic — without plagues, torture, hunger and ice. Discretionary poverty. Cider. Bread. Cheese. Nuts. Green tea. Optional peasants bringing in the hops. Poverty which, in Palmer’s case (as with so many of Notting Hill’s countercultural elite of the Sixties), was underwritten by a small private income and a property portfolio. A legacy from his grandfather allowed him 5s. 2d. a week. His Shoreham holdings included: ‘a Dwelling House Two Tenements… another Dwelling House… containing Seven Apartments and Pantrys, and Seven Sleeping Rooms above; also sundry Timber Built Sheds and a small Barn and Stabling’. William Yates, a wheelwright, paid a yearly rental of £21 — ‘of which Samuel Palmer always returned One Pound, and this in spite of the opening of the London Chatham and Dover Railway in 1860 with possible developments for the Shoreham Valley’.
Coming away from the small room where Blake and his wife lodged, off the Strand, the Ancients took Shoreham as the realisation of a (misunderstood) pastoral idyll. These door-knob kissing sentimentalists tumbled, by accident, through the gilded frame. And entered a Valley of Vision.
Palmer to Richmond, November 1827:
I have beheld as in the spirit, such nooks, caught such glimpses of the perfumed and enchanted twilight — of natural midsummer, as well as, at some other times of day, other scenes, as passed thro’ the intense separating transmuting heat of the soul’s alchymy, would divinely consist with the severe and stately port of the human, as with the moon thron’d among constellations, and varieties of lesser glories, the regal pomp and glistening brilliance and solemn attendance of her starry train.
This ‘intense separating transmuting heat of the soul’s alchymy’ is what Palmer chased — even when the result was a portfolio of waxy, impacted views and willed visions. The claustrophobic tightness of his compositions reflects the hermetic self-satisfaction of the Darent Valley: moons become blades, elm and beech and oak are pressed into bloodless rituals. Treat the Shoreham paintings as unlocated eclogues and they are revealed as Christmas cards, labels for honey jars; but track them to source, bringing some of Linnell’s Calvinistic exactitude to the task, and the window opens.
The Ancients, sneaking about in thunderstorms, hiding in hollows, tramping the woods at night, were suspect. ‘Extollagers’, the locals called them: conjurers, mountebanks. Their three-legged camp stools were taken for magical instruments. Suspicions were justified. Hymns in cornfields. Shakespeare’s witches summoned to Jenkin’s Neck Wood.
Parodic fecundity. Plump apples. Legless sheep like cottonwool maggots. Church spire as pyramid. ‘The clouds drop fatness,’ Palmer wrote on the mount of The Valley Thick with Corn. The yokel in the fields doesn’t labour, he reads a book: as if the harvest were to be brought in by the proper order of words, by magic. Such prolix ripeness makes its contrary inevitable: virus, pestilence, burning pits.
Blake’s visions were anchored in the ordinary. They happened. Angel trees. Voices. Visitations from the mythic dead. They dropped in, his gods, when it was convenient for the Lambeth artisan to receive them, when the day’s work was done. Glistening fleas with bowls of blood. If they made a nuisance of themselves, they could be dismissed.
The walk, the journey out, was Palmer’s method. If he pushed hard enough, he would surely arrive at the Valley of Vision. It was there to be found — beyond Forest Hill and Bromley. Visionary tourism. Of the kind we practised; linking place with place, going with the drift, meandering through burial grounds and golf courses.
‘It is not enough coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts.’ I knew that Palmer was right; the uniting of parts was beyond me. What should I make of Palmer’s visit to Hackney? He hadn’t wanted to go, to stay with a Welshman in Pembroke House, a private asylum. But he was obliged by the overweening pressure of Celtic hospitality — and his hope that ‘a day at Hackney from which I cannot get off will give me fresh vigour for a new set of work’. Rural Hackney, a suburb of market gardens and madhouses, captured Samuel Palmer — for one night only. He was interrupted, dragged away from a half-finished drawing; brought to sleep in a house of troubled dreamers. Hackney and Shoreham were twinned, in order to promote future pilgrimages. ‘Fresh vigour’. The kind of journey that exists only if it is worth recording.