This begins in the early 1990s, when Tom and Laurie Clark invited friends and supporters to submit an original A4 artwork for inclusion in a fund-raising group exhibition at Cairn Gallery, Nailsworth. My contribution was an image taken from a favourite book, British Moths and their Haunts by L. Hugh Newman (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1949). What I liked was that the large photographic plates concentrated not on the moths, but their haunts: the mysteriously empty backgrounds that specific moths might or might not invisibly patrol. I captioned the image I chose from the book, of a length of hedgerow, with a variation on the quote from Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of birdsong”.
In 1995, Harry Gilonis suggested his Form Books imprint might edition a card on the occasion of the publication of my An A-Z of Bird Song, soon to be jointly published by Coracle and St Paulinus. I had borrowed the “haunt” images again for the book, captioned obliquely with quotes on the evasive qualities of birdsong. It seemed appropriate to use the other half of the Cairn piece, the Pater misquote, for the Form Books card. At the time I had a stock of card samples from GF Smith paper-merchants, with flecks of colour suggestive of birds’ egg markings, and the postcard appeared on this in four colourways: grey, olive, cream and white, with the text printed letterpress in a single line across the front.
Fast forward to 2018. In November, I received a postcard from David Bellingham, published by his WAX366 imprint. “All art constantly aspires to the condition of conversation” appeared in a single line across the front of the card, while the back listed its provenance: the original quote, ascribed to Walter Pater, 1877; my variation, 1995; and “All art constantly aspires to the condition of birdsong in a variety of colours”, Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1997.
I wrote to David Bellingham to thank him, and told him what I knew about the Finlay connection. In 2015, I had been looking through the Wild Hawthorn Press back catalogue and found listed in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s output for 1997 a set of four cards, on grey, olive, cream and emerald, titled Birdsong, with my Pater misquote in a single line across the front. I bought a set, and found on the back of each the rider “in a variety of colours”, together with an acknowledgement to my original. I told David that I had been surprised, firstly to discover the existence of these cards, secondly that Finlay, being such an enthusiastic correspondent (and one who might have inspired the version of the quotation on David’s own card), hadn’t sent me a set. I had been in touch with him intermittently over the years, and had last seen him in 1995. I was also a little taken aback that he had bothered to publish what was little more than a gentle dig at my solecism of editioning a card in four different colours without rationale.
And that would have been that, except that in 2019 I had a sort-out of some of the boxed material that had followed me as I moved between nine different flats and houses since 1995. On top of one box was an envelope hand-addressed to me at the house where I had lived between 1996 and 2003, in Coalport, Shropshire. Inside was a set of the Ian Hamilton Finlay Birdsong cards. I looked back at the envelope and saw that it was franked 7:45 pm, 28 April, 1997. The handwriting I now recognised as Finlay’s, and the back of the envelope was rubber-stamped with his Stonypath address. I have no memory of receiving the letter, or of opening it. I do not know why it appeared on the very top of a box of unsorted miscellaneous items, or why it had not been put in the box where I keep the rest of my Finlay correspondence.
Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, so it is far too late for redress. I wonder if the next step in this series might be a card printed in one line across the front: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of perplexity”.