Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy …
Why is anything special? Either everything is special, which is absurd. Or nothing is special. Which is meaningless.
10th July 1857:
How we flatter the humble nymphalidae—and delude ourselves. The Peacock. The Painted Lady. The Red and White Admiral. The Purple Emperor. How we clothe them in splendours they cannot heed and wrap them in tender sentiments they cannot share: how sad, that they open their gorgeous wings but to die. The Purple Emperor, who seems to us such an illustrious fellow, wears (as my little Lucy unwittingly reminds me) but the common garb of his tribe, and takes no thought for the hereafter. Can there be heroes and worthies among the lepidoptera? Surely not, since it is only the knowledge of death that breeds the desire of its transcendence. Timor mortis conturbat me. So one might say our need of distinction follows from our fear of extinction and all our dreams of immortality are but the transmutation of our dread.
It is getting cooler. I feel the coolness — being a convalescent invalid, having felt death’s chill fingers. It is always a problem: when to go in. Sometimes, despite the coolness, I have lingered out here in the garden, my upturned tray on my knee, till it is almost impossible to write.…
And maybe it’s not posterity I seek at all. Since I have already essayed the dread bourne, whereas, for most, posterity is the goal that looms, cryptically, on its other side. Maybe this is posterity. Maybe for me it is the other way round. Maybe it’s anteriority (if such a thing exists) I’m looking for. To know who I was.
There is still the sound from the river, as of a perpetual, festive brawl, but this will quieten as the evening draws on. The darkness will fall. And then that vengeful lout who haunts the febrile dreams of us begowned and pampered pedants will start to prowl. So you think you are special? (No, I don’t.) Well I am special too. You can put mind over matter? Well, I can put matter over mind. Turn the one into the other. Easy. With the toe of a boot, or a broken bottle. Or a bullet. Or a bottle of pills.
What can Darwin tell me that is new? That nothing in this world is fixed, that everything is mutable? But poets have been saying this for centuries. Isn’t that the very theme of poetry? “Even such is time …” That over millions of years by a process of infinitesimal variation an ape will turn into a man — though, as things go, that is nothing, a mere recent innovation. That Nature is a veritable graveyard littered with failed prototypes, in which Man, who is not the point of the plan, since there is no plan, will surely find his place. But he cannot tell me why what was here yesterday is gone today, or why, when so much has been brought about over so long and so much life has sprung from so much life, a person can become, in an instant, a thing.
It is beyond belief. Beyond belief. In the greyness of that winter morning (the glib punctuality of daylight), I wanted, a grown man in the full maturity of some fifty years, to ask that other, naïvest of questions: and if, in an instant, a person can become a thing, why cannot a thing become a person? I wanted her body to know I was there. I wanted her body to hear me speak. To answer. I wanted to say, just like people do in cheap dramas: “Don’t! Please! Come back!” I wanted to say — as if it really were some (convincing) death scene—“Ruth, stop acting! Please. Stop acting.”
21
So let me tell you (with special benefit of hindsight) about what might have been, what very nearly was, my last day on this earth.
The scene: a June afternoon; this college; my venerable Fellow’s chambers. Outside, rain is sluicing down — one of those vertical, seemingly immovable midsummer downpours which fall from a swollen sky and fill even covered spaces with a damp, sticky breath. The light is leaden. The lamps of study are lit. I sit reading (Darwin: the chapter on Instinct) by my venerable Fellow’s fireplace. Beside me, on the coffee table, my working copy of the Notebooks and scattered notes thereon. The gas fire is on, not because its warmth is needed, but to dry a pair of socks that dangle, pinned by a glass ashtray, from the mantelpiece, just to one side of John Pearce’s implacably ticking clock. I have just been out (my last mortal errand — cigarettes and coffee) and been caught, in leaky shoes, in the onset of the deluge. To counteract the heat of the fire, a window is half open, so that the room is full of the not unpleasing orchestration of the rain.
A quarter to four by John Pearce’s clock. When you are sitting at home by the fire … A knock on the door. I open it, in bare feet, a cigarette in one hand, a pencil behind one ear: the perfect picture of incommoded scholarship.
“I was just passing. Shelter from the storm?”
Now I think of it (this hindsight), that climb up my spiral staircase (ah yes, the stealthy chatelaine) cannot have failed to remind her of that earlier foray, years ago, to Potter’s office. Why else, on this wet and lethal afternoon, should she have described to me that very episode — given me the full, sorry saga of her and Potter? So the whole exercise (if that is the word) was a sort of re-rehearsal of that former, ostensibly scholarly assignation — with me in the role of the plausible tutor.
Ah — Katherine, isn’t it? Do come in. Now, what was it? Of course — Arthurianism in Tennyson. Well, you have come to the right place, my dear. Spiral staircases and genuine Gothic features. And the fireplace, you notice, a genuine piece of neo-Gothic pastiche, dating from Tennyson’s own time. Who shall we pretend to be? Lancelot and Guinevere? Perhaps not. Merlin and Vivien? Yes, I fancy myself as a beguiled wizard.…
Seduction by a female agent. The thing is obvious. No one “just passes” my corner of the College: there are gateways, courts, medieval intricacy. And, beneath her rain-spattered raincoat, there is a dress that no one casually wears at four o’clock on a wet afternoon: downy-soft, charcoal cashmere; well above the knee, figure-hugging; a row of winking buttons from nape to small of back. The legs are black and sheer (this is Gabriella’s sable costume upgraded). There is a single, thin silver chain round her neck. There are high-heeled shoes — damp and flecked with grit (should I suggest she kick them off?). The legs (I notice) are good legs, but without verve, as if she is not used to showing them. But this gives them a certain — appeal.
“You’re working — I can see. I’m disturbing you.”
“No, no. Please …”
I take her coat. She has left an umbrella weeping on the stone landing, but strands of her hair are wet; there is a drop or two on one cheek (it might have been arranged, this rain). She enters my room with an air of simultaneous premeditation and precipitateness, as if someone, perhaps, has gently pushed her, as if she is stepping on to the stage of some bizarre and potentially disastrous initiative test. And I am meant to guess, perhaps, that it’s all a performance, that it isn’t her idea; and therefore — out of sympathy — co-operate? But perhaps she is intent on not failing this — audition. Perhaps this wouldn’t be happening if Ruth hadn’t been an actress.