Ever After

20

The sun is beginning to sink. The shadow of the bean tree creeps over the lawn. Across the river, the towers and turrets, the little twinkling arched and latticed windows, take on their evening aura. These ancient walls. These hallowed groves. So ripe with the steady defiance of time, with the presumption of mind over matter. So evocative of the King of Navarre’s other-worldly schemes, of Berowne and Longaville and Dumaine: “a little academe, still and contemplative in living art …”

“Worthies, away!..”

It was my mother who first warned me, invoking the examples of vainglorious grandfathers and great-uncles, against the ruinous desire to outwit mortality. And, having heeded her advice so far as to rush, spontaneously, into death’s arms and having returned from its apparently escapable embrace, what can I say about this old and terrifying bugbear, mors, mortis? That it turns you (surprise, surprise) into a nobody. That my little bout with it has left me with a ghostly disconnection from myself — I am wiped clean, a tabula rasa (I could be anybody) — and a strange, concomitant yen, never felt before, to set pen to paper.

O death-defiers of this world! O luminaries, O immortalists! To leave one’s mark! To build a bridge, christen a theory, name a pear, write a book. The struggle for existence? Ha! The struggle for remembrance.

So I am in it too, this race for posterity? I succumb, just like Matthew, to the jotting urge. But who are they for, these ramblings? And who am I, to seek to go on record? I don’t even have Matthew’s agony of conscience (and why should I envy him that?), which is as obsolete now as that ichthyosaur he met up with on his summer hols.

“Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, live regist’red …”

But it was she who wanted fame, not me. I was content to be the happy stagehand; I could attend rehearsals. Yet who doesn’t want to leave behind some token, some trace, some reminder, some plea? Usually, it’s children. But we had no children. Too busy finding fame — or just happy without them? But, in any case, it’s not so simple — so it seems — this begetting of children.

Who am I? Who am I? A nobody. An heirless nonentity. What’s more — a bastard.

Consider, for contrast, my fabled ancestor, brave Sir Walter, born long before Providence was declared invalid, setting sail from Plymouth (him too) with never a qualm. By my time of life (is that the phrase?) what had the little lad of the sea-shore not achieved? Discovered new lands, founded a colony, won queenly favour, tackled the Spanish Armada. Been soldier, sailor, discoverer, explorer … “Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare …”

Ah, what a thing is man.

Actually, what was he doing, aged fifty-two-and-a-half? He was cooped up in the Tower of London. I make no comparisons. These ancient walls: the storied stones of the Tower. But what does he do with this forced confinement? Makes a virtue even out of incarceration. Puts pen to paper. Writes a History of the World. No less. From Adam and Eve until— And schemes and dreams. Of Eldorado. No less. Of a land of gold, an earthly paradise in the far, far west. O brave new world!

And ever mindful of his image, of how caged lions draw the public, takes care to show himself now and then, like Napoleon on the Bellerophon, to the awed citizenry of London. There he walks on the battlements, the old, proud sea-dog, in the years that Shakespeare’s tragedies were first staged: the “last Elizabethan,” the one-and-only Renaissance man, living proof that anybody can be anybody, since this fellow was everybody: discoverer, explorer, colonist, courtier, scientist, historian, philosopher, wit, dandy, ladies’ man, physician, chemist, botanist, tobacconist, potato merchant …

And poet.

Our mothers’ wombes the tiring houses be

Where we are drest for this short Comedy …

Life after Darwin: As You Like It, or What You Will. But even those long-vanished Elizabethans, who’d never heard, poor ignoramuses, of Newton, Darwin or the splitting of the atom, and whose history books began with the Creation, were not so sure of the Life Eternal that they did not invest heavily — and profitably — in that other eternity: fame. A bumper crop of fine old worthies. The age was thick with them. And the poets! Never so rich a hoard. An Eldorado in verse. Poetry. That still other, verbal eternity. The so-called divine spark. That thing for which Darwin lost all taste.

It is true (we know now) that we are descended from the apes. And it is true that an ape, set before a typewriter and given a time-scale of infinity and an eternal factor of randomness, might eventually bash out the sonnets of Shakespeare. But, by and large, it is just as well and a good deal neater that Shakespeare appeared when he did to do the job. Which leaves a host of questions still wide open. How Shakespeare came about in the first place (why he didn’t go into sheep farming or die, aged two, of scarlet fever), and why, though Shakespeare is all things to all people, we cannot all be Shakespeares. Why some are poets and some are not. And why not all poets are also explorers, adventurers, courtiers, etc. — all things in one. And why there should be this stuff called poetry, to begin with, which strikes our hearts at such a magic angle. And why there should be certain things in this random universe which cry out to us with their loveliness. And why it should be poetry that captures them.

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.”