Thus woven into Masters’ “first death” in New Forest, I perceived an equation between plantation overseer and hunted beast, between the prince of the colony and the soul of all sliced creatures, between the enigma of love or jealousy and the emotion of the hunter/huntress elevated in space to alter our conception of complacent tradition in the heights as in the depths.
I shall return to the stages of his “first death” from time to time in this book. Masters had acquainted me with these in many a conversation, but even so I remain in the dark about certain matters and shall need to seek him out, to consult his ghost, and discuss the matter of controversial first death with it (ghost) and with him (mask). Why “ghost” seems a gloved thing and “mask” pitiless/pitiful flesh-and-blood I do not immediately understand. Nevertheless the distinction — however enigmatic — is necessary if the genius of Carnival is to do justice to parallel gloves of emotion upon spirit-hand and spirit-face.
His second death in London in 1982 was a climax for which he had longed since 1957, in order to fulfil a design that could only be achieved within parallel animalities or parallel universes of sexual fate and emotion.
Within a week or two of his passing (an old-fashioned concept I brought with me from New Forest) and the enquiries launched by Scotland Yard, I learnt through one of my “leaves of grass” or Whitmanesque democratic informants that Jane Fisher — the woman with the raised hand and lightning brow who had accompanied him into his flat — had been questioned along with other tenants of the building.
She said nothing whatsoever about visiting Masters but time was to prove that she had. She had risen from bed, dressed hastily, tiptoed out of the room and left him asleep. She was confused and agitated to be plucked from nowhere, as it were, to play a major and crucial role. In her confusion she left the door to his apartment ajar. The intruder entered in the wake of her shadow. Masters awoke at that moment to cement a climax he had long nursed in his heart. He was convulsed by pain. His chest throbbed. He tried to spring at the stranger but fell back in bed. Fate could not have been more co-operative. The intruder was alarmed at the wild mask of the dying king but it addressed him, it imbued him with his part in the play, his signal to act. He seized the dagger and thrust it into the ageing seer who conspired now with royal fate. And with royal freedom. The intruder too wore a mask. He and Masters were related to each other within a labyrinth of rehearsals, a labyrinth of Carnival innocence and guilt within a deeply troubled, violent age. They were to become my guides on the beach and into the cave of character-masks and dreams and through many realms.
THREE
“I am a mudhead though I ride high in your estimation, biographer,” Everyman Masters confessed to me. His words invoked the Atlantic foreshore of New Forest, South America. It was a complex gateway into the underworld of the cosmos. Sometimes it was littered by husks of coconut sculpted to reflect a straw caricature of the human brain, at other times to invest that caricature with lopsided genitals of the mind of place the human brain was. Sometimes it was a theatre of branches and trees, eroded, riven by the action of wind and wave. Etched into these, etched into branch or tree, one sometimes came upon the skeleton of a fish or the staring eye of a button to be pressed in the gallows of species.
“All in all,” said Masters, “you need to seek a gateway here into the underworld, and overworld of the cosmos, an Orinoco-esque or Dantesque gateway.” He wept to my astonishment. “Mud, mud, everywhere and not a loaf to eat. New Forest mud is body and bread projected by the denizens of the underworld. The race of mudheads, if I may so describe my forebears, appeared in post-Columbian times, they were the renaissance of Carnival to compensate the inexplicable demise of El Dorado, the golden man and idol of kings. He ate from golden dishes and bathed in golden waters. So many cultures in ancient America vanished without rhyme or reason, leaving their treasures like heaps of straw on the floor of palaces and temples. Were they slain by Doubt or by Famine?
“I was born in 1917 and was scarcely nine when I began to reconnoitre the foreshore, and to seek the button in the eye of the fish.”
His voice ceased but the foreshore that I knew (I had run there too as a child some twenty years or so after his time, his childhood) rose vividly into my mind. The button in the eye of the fish Masters had pressed projected me up. It was a kind of atomic wheel, atomic fiction rather than deed, in the light years of innocent creatures one rode, sometimes up, sometimes down. He had put his finger on the wounded eye of a hanging creature and uplifted me, whereas before I had stood low and raised him without being conscious of the wound — bird’s broken wing, or leviathan pupil — I had touched, on beach or foreshore, to imbue him with the myth of ascent.
I saw him far below me now like a ghost in space whose light years reached me nevertheless across fictional time. He picked his way on the mud of the foreshore. He was nine years old. He crawled gingerly. Crabs scuttled as he moved, their white legs of Carnival and their shadowed backs shining with the gloom and the pallor of El Doradan nebulae. It was as if I perceived him in another age, an age that was close to the execution of the golden man by Doubt or Famine. And yet he remained a child of the 1920s. A wild and glorious cherry tree suddenly sprouted. I saw it distinctly and yet it existed within a capacity to fade or vanish. How had that wild glory of a tree centuries ago, in the age of El Dorado, subsided into a relic of the 1920s! Unidentifiable relic it would have been were I not aware of it as it originally was.
So too Masters seemed a relic, child and relic, young and ancient, child of the 1920s, child of our century, yet an ancient king, the king of a vanished realm. His subjects were crabs on a South American foreshore, nebula-crabs. I paused as I wrote to reflect upon the constellation of the hunted in the hunter Masters had previously invoked in my book, the eye of the fish in the hanged fisherman upon a wasteland tree. Each ancient relic or stump on which the eye of the fisherman was drawn, each shell of a crab sculpted there, each skin of an animal or cell planted there, addressed me now as susceptible to the glory of Carnival tree, or gallows of god, that could ravish the knowledgeable heart.
I had scarcely dwelt on the thought of such glory when I doubted my inspiration. It seemed suddenly desolating to dream of parallels of glory within gallows stump and relic, within crab and fossil. All I could now discern within my “knowledgeable heart” was the anguish of a child who crawled on a beach beneath me. He had cut himself on a bone, I suddenly saw. He staunched the blood with a rag; it was a new beginning overshadowed by uncertainty, the uncertainty I felt over the origins of kingship. I (though still aloft on the wheel of fiction) reached down and sought Doubting Thomas’s hand then to help young Masters, young mudhead, yet to thwart him in my disbelief. Thomas of New Forest Carnival made a rough gesture, perhaps it was involuntary, and tore the rag. Thomas, in this incarnation cultivated by Carnival tradition, was an older cousin, twelve years old at least, who had accompanied the nine-year-old boy-king in the game they played of light-year wheel and gallows susceptible to glory and to hope …