When finally the priest is all out of material, the man from simple peasant stock pulls the old switcheroo when he contends that surely a much harder struggle comes in the denying of one’s righteous self; in getting past all the self-righteous, sanctimonious bullshit that the Wesley outfit revels in. Seeing that he’s got Hervey on the moral ropes, the backwoods slugger presses his advantage: “You know that I do not come to hear you preach, but go every Sabbath, with my family, to Northampton, to hear Dr. Doddridge. We rise early in the morning, and have prayers before we set out, in which I find pleasure. Walking there and back I find pleasure; under the sermon I find pleasure; when at the Lord’s Table I find pleasure. We read a portion of the Scriptures and go to prayers in the evening, and we find pleasure; but to this moment, I find it the hardest thing to deny righteous self. I mean the instance of renouncing our own strength, and our own righteousness, not leaning on that for holiness, not relying on that for justification.”
Hervey later cites this moment as a bolt of sudden understanding from the clear blue Weston Favell sky. Before long he decides to follow the rustic’s example and at last meets up with Philip Doddridge. They become firm friends, and with the help of Doddridge-convert Dr. Stonhouse, who’s “a most abandoned rake and an audacious deist”, found the first infirmary outside of London. It turns out that Hervey’s closeness with the evangelical dissenting Christians in the Doddridge gang is what earns his dismissal from John Wesley’s Holy Mob. The elbow Studs is leaning on sleeps with the fishes, is completely numb, but he’s too caught up in the case to ease off now. The dots are all connecting and the puzzle-pieces are all falling into place. The game’s afoot. He shuffles through the last leaves in his heap with mounting eagerness and finds an unexpected essay linking Hervey with the birth of the Gothic tradition. Studs, who’d thought his earlier musings on the sumptuously morbid Hervey’s Goth credentials were a cynical conceit, is stunned. He’s seen more crazy hunches in his long career than Notre Dame cathedral — there was that time he was sure Roman Polanski would cast him as Fagin if he just wrote the director a brief letter stridently insisting on it — but to have one of his long shots finally limp in across the finish line is an unprecedented novelty. Dizzy with newfound confidence in his abilities he reads on, hardly daring to believe his luck.
If Studs is understanding this correctly, the inordinate morbidity of Hervey’s writings which the Wesleyans had so deplored turned out to be a maggot-eaten inspiration for his literary contemporaries. The persistent theme of human transience compared with the eternity of God was taken up by other theologians such as Edward Young and by the poets of the nascent Graveyard School like Thomas Gray, becoming such a major influence upon the writings of the day that William Kenrick wrote:
’Twas thus enthusiastic Young;
’Twas thus affected Hervey sung;
Whose motley muse, in florid strain,
With owls did to the moon complain.
From what Studs can make out, this was fair comment, at least in so far as it pertained to later writers of the Graveyard School, who weren’t much bothered by the business about God but were completely smitten by the atmospherics and the props, the owls and bats and skulls and crumbling headstones. This was at a moment when society was slowly starting to clean up the nation’s graveyards for the purposes of physical and mental hygiene, clearing out the mouldering bones and simultaneously banishing the ever-present smell and the immediate idea of our mortality beyond the margins of accepted daily discourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the grim actuality of death displaced from ordinary life, this was also the point at which our culture first began to make a titillating fetish of the deathly and funereal. Commencing where the less religious and more genuinely ghoulish authors of the later Graveyard School left off, writers like Horace Walpole and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis would take Hervey’s sombre iconography and use it to adorn their decomposing European castles or their morally subsiding monasteries. The gothic novel and indeed the whole late eighteenth-century gothic tradition would appear to have its origins in the consumptive Hervey’s spiritual preoccupation with the tomb.
As lengthening headstone shadows slither purposefully through the cropped grass towards him, Studs attempts to weigh up all the implications of this latest evidence. He knows that if it’s on the level it puts Hervey squarely in the frame as the elusive Mr. Big behind far more than just the gothic novel. Until Walpole, Lewis, Beckford and their fellow frighteners arrived, the only form of novel which existed was the comedy of manners — Goldsmith, Sheridan and later on Jane Austen — with the advent of the gothic novel being also the first genre fiction. Almost every subsequent sub-category of imaginative writing is therefore derived from gothic literature and thus from Hervey’s first mould-culture texts; sprung from the moss and lichen of his first sepulchral narratives, Studs realises. Sure, the classic ghost tale is an obvious example, alongside the burgeoning horror and supernatural genres which grew out of it, but that’s not where it ends. The field of fantasy would have to be included, as would science fiction with its genesis in Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein. And then, of course, there are the Decadents, caught up in the sublime deliriums of heir apparent to the caliphate of Vathek and the riches of Otranto, Edgar Allen Poe. And Poe — the idea hits Studs with the force of bourbon before breakfast — Poe set his Chevalier August Dupin to solve the murders on the Rue Morgue or the mystery of the purloined letter and in doing so precipitated the detective story. He attempts to take it in: the bone bulb from which germinated every heartless rain-lashed midnight, every knockout blonde with a sob story and each stuttering electric sign is resting maybe fifty feet away, just south of the communion table in the chancel. Every dining-room denouement, every double-cross. It’s one hell of a thing.
This gothic business, though, has got him thinking once more about Bauhaus and the movement’s modern reinvention during the end credits of the 1970s. As Studs recalls, it had been the eclectic David J who’d first suggested many of the eerie tropes which would one day prove the salvation of the black lace and mascara industries. And yet, as widely-read as the peculiarly ibis-like bohemian intellectual undoubtedly had been, Studs doubts that any eighteenth-century Christian killjoys found their way into J’s vehemently other-directed syllabus. The Bauhaus bassist, he concludes, would have known nothing about Hervey when he was intuitively laying out the ground-plan for the most bewilderingly long-lived youth cult of the modern era. The exploding belladonna, lilies and pressed roses which accompanied Northampton’s twentieth-century gothic blossoming came into being without any reference to or knowledge of Hervey’s origination of that style more than two hundred years before. Unless this is no more than an evocative coincidence, the implication would appear to be that both of these traditions and the sensibilities that shaped them have arisen from those singular inherent qualities within the town itself; the gothic view as an emergent property, as a condition of Northampton. That would explain everything about the place, its churches, murders, history and ghostly monks. That would explain its writings and its music and the nature of its people, everyone from Hervey to Ben Perrit, from John Clare to David J, with Studs and Little John and Alma Warren somewhere on the grotesque spectrum in between them. Little John alone reprised the gothic movement in one tidy package, what with the malefic dwarf being a staple of the genre and John’s background making him appear almost an escapee from Beckford’s Vathek, brought here from the djinn-swept terraces of Ishtakar in far Persepolis, a crooked grandchild of the demon-sultan Eblis. Studs is just about as close to inner satisfaction as a spent and used imaginary private eye can get. It all makes sense. He flips through the remaining pages with mounting impatience.