Free After Bathing at Baxters by D. J. Taylor

turnip wine and talk about his mother back in Frisia.) For a time I considered alternatives – at one point I nearly lit out for Merovingia where something like a literary scene was supposed to be happening, and there was a time when I seriously thought about becoming a monk in Ireland – but gradually as time passed these drawbacks mattered less. They mattered less because by now I had made an important decision about my career. Naturally, in a trajectory that had already lasted several thousand years. I had made important decisions about my career before. There was the decision to get involved in this whole business in the first place (that was back in the days of Cuneiform, which everybody thought was a dangerous innovation that wouldn’t last); there was the decision, made about the end of the first millenium B.C. that tragedy was pretty much played out as an art-form, and there had been various other minor shifts and adjustments in perspective. But this was something different. It involved – let us be frank about this – re-evaluating my whole status, eyeing up the entire rag-bag of writerly aspirations. It happens to us all, no doubt: you look back at what you’ve written in the past, you sift through the unpublished stuff, argue with yourself over its merits. I spent a year or two doing that, out on the Norfolk flats with the wind sweeping in from Jutland, and it was the most depressing period of my life to date. At its close I took the contents of the goatskin bag which had accompanied me thus far on my travels – everything, the poems, the plays, the letters from Horace and Propertius, and threw them in the river. Then I went back to the byre, found Snorri and got stupendously drunk.
    After that, nothing. Silence. A void. Five hundred years and not a paragraph, not a sentence. Nothing at all. Even now, gazing backwards, I stumble for an explanation. It wasn’t that I lacked offers. All the big names of the period sidled up at some point to enquire if I’d collaborate: Bede, Guthlac … It wasn’t that one lacked suitable material: after all, what with Offa, the Danes, rape, pillage and the beginnings of English nationhood (which was what Alfred liked to call the handful of third-world villages he bullied into paying him taxes) there was plenty going on. You weren’t stuck for things to write about in those days. Fundamentally I suppose – and I don’t want to sound pretentious about this – I was out of sympathy with the zeitgeist . For one who had known Petronius and partied with Plautus all this was pretty small beer. The Homers were showmen, who might have been overly concerned with where the next flagon was coming from, but at least they were artists. By contrast, Anglo-Saxon literature, if you could call it that, was painful in its ineptitude, its meagre scale; all dumb riddles and battle tactics. Later on I would watch knowingly as scholarly acquaintances – Skeat, Tolkien – puzzled themselves over the Finnsburh fragment, always wanting to whisper: ‘Boy, you should have seen the bits which didn’t survive.’ I had hopes of Bede for a while – I wintered out in Jarrow a couple of times – but the guy had no artistry, no sense of what was a legitimate literary device and what was a ham effect. I can remember arguing with him for hours about the scene where the sparrow flies in through the banqueting hall, but no, Bede wanted metaphor, he wanted symbolism . The scene stayed: I quit.
    Naturally there were compensations. There were a few public commissions up for grabs – name that church, write this poem about my father – and a fair amount of royal patronage, but it was difficult to get worked up about the subject matter. Alfred versus the Danes? I’d seen the sack of Troy, and this was the equivalent of two shepherds waving sling shots at one another. A paean to Offa’s Dyke? I’d been around when they