I went to the window — partly because it was my intention to be brazen, partly in order to gasp for air. I heard my mother’s startled “Good God!”; Sam’s “What the—?!” They both leapt from their seats. My mother tried to beat out the fire with a hastily folded News of the World, while Sam, telling her to get out the way, took the lid from the coffeepot and emptied its contents over the wreckage. Only then did they look up. My mother was a picture of exasperated accusation, as if I had simply spoilt a promising day, but Sam was already making for the house in an unprecedented rage. I sat calmly on my bed. He appeared in the doorway, and checked himself momentarily — either because my composure unnerved him or because of the fog of smoke filling the room. As he paused I had time to see — through the murk — that though his face was twisted with anger, it was also blanched with horror. It was the look of a man whose direct thoughts, whose worst fears, have been exposed.
“You little son of a bitch!” he yelled. “You little goddam son of a bitch!”
Through the open window my mother must have heard. And I wonder now how much Sam supposed he was uttering the truth.
7
But I have not told you yet about complication number three. I have not told you the third reason why my reception here has been such a mixed affair. I am referring now to my pretensions in the field (forget, for a moment, the Pearce manuscripts) which is properly my own. Namely, English Literature.
This is not a simple case, I should make clear, of inadequacy on the one hand and condescension on the other. I am not unequipped. I have read some books in my time, and I was for some ten years, as I may already have hinted, a lecturer in English at the University of London. Even when I abandoned that to become Ruth’s manager — a move which earned me at first as many frowns in the theatrical world as my reappearance now in the world of scholarship has done — I did not lapse. I was — you may have noticed, if you ever looked closely at your theatre programmes — a “literary consultant” (whatever that means) to certain productions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and not merely those in which Ruth appeared.
In short, the love which Tubby Baxter fired in me has never faded. There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on — a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. Even when I left it to enter — what? the real world? the theatre? — I acted with shrewd and miserly husbandry. I made sure there was a good stock of that other world still stored in the barn (the little library I set up in our Sussex cottage — while Ruth learnt her parts). Waiting for winter. I paid the real world the solemn respect of supposing it might not be real, and I paid happiness the compliment of supposing it might not last. “Call no man happy …” Isn’t that what literature says?
I did all these things. And, you see, I was right, I was prepared. But none of it helps you. Not one little bit.
So when Sam came up with his little arrangement for me …
I appreciate that from the point of view of these hallowed precincts my claims must seem paltry. I am not proud. I do not seek eminence (does my mother hear me?). All my life I have been — quite literally so in recent times — a man behind the scenes. A one-time academic who never aimed at professorship, a poetry lover who never aspired to poetry. All this, I’m sure, given the Ellison Endowment, would have been tactfully overlooked, even cheerfully indulged. But what has put the learned noses out of joint is the so-deemed simplicity of my actual views on literature. My latter-day return to scholarship has not, it seems, displayed any gathered maturity. Apparently, word has got out that in those tutorials of mine (which now seem to be a thing of the past) I have been doing little more than urging my students to acknowledge that literature is beautiful — yes, the thing about a poem is that it’s beautiful, beautiful! — and other such crude, sentimental and unschooled tosh.
Now, I admit that in my former days I could wrap this around a little more. I still can. I admit that if you stop at such a view you hardly leave the way open for those lengthy critical discussions and erudite commentaries which are the mainstay of the professional study of literature. I admit it is stating the obvious. But why shirk the obvious? Literature doesn’t, after all. A great deal of literature — why not be frank? — only states the obvious. A great deal of literature is only (only!) the obvious transformed into the sublime.
So is it a trick? Is it the case that if we can take it apart and discover that all there is is the crashingly commonplace, we are no better off than we were before? I don’t think so. I think (perhaps I should say now “thought”) there is something really there, something that comes out of the obvious. Something beyond the obvious.
Why should the simplest, tritest words (excuse this extemporary lecture) touch us with pure delight? “My true love hath my heart and I have his.” Why do the most tired and worn (and bitterest) thoughts — the thoughts we all have thought — return to us, in another’s words, like some redeeming balm?
Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
So? We all know this. We have heard this before, and we would rather not dwell, thank you, on the subject. But the words hold us with their poise, their gravity — their beauty. They catch us up and speak for us in their eloquence and equilibrium, and just for a little moment (are you listening, my fine Fellows, my prize pedants?), the obvious is luminous, darkness is matched with light and life is reconciled with death.
I rest my case.
(And, by the way, the words were penned — on the eve of his execution, they even say — by a putative ancestor of mine, Sir Walter Ralegh.)
Where is Tubby Baxter now? I should blame him, or thank him, for setting the whole course of my life. For if I hadn’t succumbed to this lifelong addiction, this lifelong refuge of literature, I would never have become, via my stepfather’s maledictions (“You like books so much, pal — you better learn how to eat them!”), a starveling student, perched in the chilly eyrie of a bed-sit in Camden, living, indeed, only on poetical nourishment and the irregular and surreptitious cheques (“Flesh and blood, darling, flesh and blood”) my mother sent me. And if I had never become a starveling student, I would never have been impelled, despite those maternal subsidies, to seek casual, nocturnal work to support my daytime studies. And so might never have entered, as part-time bar assistant and general dogsbody, a tinselly little temple of illusion, a den of late-night delights, called the Blue Moon Club in Soho.
And so (but aren’t these things meant to be?) would never have met her.
I see him now, that former, unformed self of mine. That spectral, prehistorical being. Hunched in the aura of a reading lamp (but what has changed?) like a creature suspended in amber. Like a creature still in embryo. Neither in nor out of the world. He is free, he is proud. He has Hamletesque pretensions: “You would pluck out the heart of my mystery …” He is studious, he is callow. His head is in the clouds. But the days are coming when the poetry will come alive. When the books will turn inside out. When the sighs and raptures and entreaties of all those love-sick bards will no longer seem like wishful thinking. And all those dubious and apocryphal mistresses, all those impossible and enslaving Cynthias, Julias and Amaryllises, will no longer seem like moonlit phantoms, like paper dreams.