Of squandered Nourishment
Others in heavy Vase
Raise darkly scented Wine-
This warm and squirted White
In solid Pot-was mine-
And now a paradox
A bleaching blot, a stain
Of pure and innocent white
It goes to Earth again-
Which smelled of summer Hay
Of crunching Cow-Divine-
Of warm flanks and of love
More quiet, more still-than mine
It runs on table top
It drips onto the Ground
We hear its liquid Lapse
Wet on soft dust its sound.
We run with milk and blood
What we would give we spill
The hungry mouths are raised
We spill we fail to fill
This cannot be restored
This flow cannot redeem
This white's not wiped away
Though blanched we seem
Howe'er I wipe and wipe
Howe'er I frantic-scour
The ghost of my spilled milk
Makes my Air sour.
Chapter 20
I press my palms on
Window's white cross
Is that Your dark Form
Beyond the glass?
How do they come who haunt us
In gown or plumey hat
Or white marbling nakedness
Frozen-is it-That?
Their remembrances haunt us
A trick of a wrist
Loved then-automatic-
Caught at and kist
Gone now to what melting
Of flesh and bone
Infinite Graces
Bundled-in One
Do not walk lonely
Out in the cold
I will come to you
Naked and bold
And your sharp fingers
Featly might pick
Flesh from my moist bones
Touch at the quick-
My warm your cold's food-
Your chill breath my air
When our white mouths meet
It mingles-there-
-C. LAMOTTE
Ordinarily, Mortimer Cropper would not have minded how long it took to wear down Sir George. In the end he would have been there, sitting inside the dilapidated mock-castle, listening to the little woes of the invalid wife (whom he had not met but imagined vividly; he had a vivid imagination; it was well regulated of course, his major asset in his craft). And at night he would have turned over the delectable letters, one by one, searching out their hints and secrets, passing them across the bright recording eye of his black box.
But now, because of James Blackadder, there was no time for patience and finesse. He must have those papers. He felt real pangs, a kind of famishing.
He gave his lecture, "The Art of a Biographer," in a fashionable City church whose Vicar liked people to come, and eclectically made sure they did, with guitars, faith-healing, anti-racist rallies, vigils for peace and passionate debates on the camel and the eye of the needle, and sexuality in the shadow of AIDS. He had persuaded the Vicar, whom he had met at an episcopal tea party, that biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it's human. A form of religion, said the Vicar. A form of ancestor worship, said Cropper. Or more. What are the Gospels but a series of varying attempts at the art of biography?
He saw that the lecture, already scheduled, could be used. He wrote discreet letters to various academies, friendly and inimical. He rang up the Press and said that a major discovery was to be unveiled. He interested the directors of some of the new American banks and financial institutions that were expanding in the City. He invited Sir George, who did not reply, and the solicitor, Toby Byng, who said it would be very interesting. He invited Beatrice Nest, and saved her a front-row seat. He invited Blackadder, not because he thought he would come, but because he liked to imagine Blackadder's annoyance at receiving the invitation at all. He invited the US Ambassador. He invited the radio and the television.
Cropper loved lecturing. He was not of the old school, who fix the audience with a mesmeric eye and a melodious voice. He was a hi-tech lecturer, a magician of white screens and light-beams, sound-effects and magnifications. He filled the church with projectors and transparent cages of promptings which helped him, like President Reagan, to orchestrate with impromptu naturalness a highly complicated presentation.
The lecture, in the dark of the church, was accompanied by a series of brilliant images on the double screens. Huge oil-portraits, jewel-bright magnified miniatures, early photographs of bearded sages among broken arches of Gothic cathedrals, were juxtaposed with visions of the light and space of Robert Dale Owen University, of the sparkling sheen of the glass pyramid that housed the Stant Collection, of the brilliant little boxes that preserved the tresses of Randolph's and Ellen's woven hair, Ellen's cushion embroidered with lemon-trees, the jet brooch of York roses on its cushion of green velvet. From time to time, as if by accident, the animated shadow of Cropper's aquiline head would be thrown, as if in silhouette, across these luminous objects. On one of these occasions he would laugh, apologise, and say half-seriously, carefully scripted, there you see the biographer, a component of the picture, a moving shadow, not to be forgotten among the things he works with. It was in Ash's time that the intuition of historians became a respectable, even an essential, object of intellectual attention. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life At this point in the lecture Cropper had himself lit again, briefly. He spoke with careful simplicity.
"Of course, what we all hope for and at the same time fear, is some major discovery that will confirm, or disprove, or change at the least, a lifetime's work. A lost Shakespeare play. The vanished works of Aeschylus. Such a discovery was made recently when a collection of letters from Wordsworth to his wife were found in a trunk in an attic. Scholars had said that Wordsworth's only passion was his sister. They had confidently called his wife dull, and unimportant. Yet here, after all those years of marriage, were these letters, full of sexual passion on both parts. History has had to be rewritten. Scholars have taken humble pleasure in rewriting it.