Apart from bookshelves, the wallspace shows maps like beds of flowers: a street plan of Nottingham, a large-scale trench-map of the Gommecourt salient in 1916, marked by the advancing death-lines of the Sherwood Foresters, a relief chart of Deception Island, and a topographical map of Israel flanked by the Mediterranean and the Jordan River — different regions I cannot shut my eyes to.
Books and life and maps and ink, and time to write and think and dip in my pen before pulling it across the paper with my left hand: can any truth come out of that? A writer writes what he likes, and it is vital that he does so — anything from theology to pornography, from politics and comics to sapphics and classics — no matter what world-system he lives under. Every man’s truth is his own secret, but the only secret he can afford to have is that he has no truth.
62
Feckless Celts wandered across the face of Europe from the Caspian over the Carpathians, from Bavaria to Brittany, only to be pounded into a dull and baffled astuteness when they reached Albion, from which they soon lost the will to get free but not the picturesque desire to do so.
I was surprised to read a recent newspaper article in which some true-blue English person was quoted as saying that as far as she was concerned all Celts were foreigners. Being more than half Celt I thought there might be some truth in it. Indeed I hoped there was, for such a way-out Little English idea could explain the yearning for travel I have often too plainly felt — the need to get away from it by rail, road, or even bicycle, to walk out on foot if the worst came to the worst.
The pictures reflected in the eyes of Joseph and his brothers were of landscapes not people. Their religion was freedom, but because society totally stamped on it they could only worship in secret, like a resistance movement that had lost all hope, as if realizing that direct access to the life they craved would blow them either to pieces or into paradise. When the raw material started to eat its own raw material they would move, but somehow their courage never allowed them to start chewing. Freedom pointed in the wrong direction, and their lack of courage became a means of self-preservation. They needed to communicate with themselves but had no way of achieving it.
The generous and lecherous spirit of the eighteenth century, crushed for more than a hundred years by the descending death-trap ceiling of tight-arsed Victorian hypocrisy and repression is at last trying to break free. It did not begin in Joseph’s life, though his melancholia came from thinking it was time to start pounding off the lid, but not being able to.
At school I was once taunted as a foreigner because my name was thought to be Italian. I did not mind this, though fought successfully against it since I refused to be humiliated for any reason. My father’s idea that the family way back in time had come from Italy was only another of his flights of fancy. How my surname originated I’ll never know or care about but, foreigner or not, if I were split down the middle by God’s axe the Celtic part of me might happily turn into the Eternal Wanderer and walk purposefully away, glad to get out of this island and into the world before all Celts were rounded up and marched off to the gas chambers.
In a way I was flattered by the woman’s remark. Having wanted to leave home and country almost from the cradle I nursed a secret ambition to be a foreigner, to become a man without nationality or passport but with the freedom to drift wherever I wanted. Shed of all ties and connections I would go my way alone on the travel-lanes of the world, a ghost of selfishness wallowing in so much land he eventually sees no people in it, and whom in turn nobody sees, a man so gripped by his infatuation for the form and smell of the earth that all love goes from him except inordinate fondness for himself.
It is an impulse to be resisted, though to desire such freedom is innocent enough because it keeps me imprisoned in an inner turmoil conducive to the act of writing. That is one way of doing it, after all. On the other hand, to actively pursue that vast and empty form of liberty would be an escape route into the death of the soul. Such a release from the anchored spirit could be done as a religious exercise perhaps, but since I am not one of the faithful it would turn it into an act of negation. My main purpose on earth is to be myself, which means getting closer to people, not away from them.
I circle around and spiral down, conjuring more dreams out of myself, numberless demons, becoming more empty, or more calm. If I believe my spirit is formed by my parents and their families — plus that alchemical mixing that can never be explained — the zig-zag switch-about for truth must go on, not to fill the emptiness of which I am not afraid, but so that the more void the emptiness becomes the more alive it gets with that potent electricity of the mind that keeps a person free of cant, lies, and tyranny.
When the different streams of my grandparents come flowing in I feel indeed that I am the product of a mixed marriage, the crux of two merging deltas, and if I ask in this white heat why I became a writer I say that the poetry comes out of the Burton side of the family, while the force that pushes it through is drawn from my father’s.
Everything which concerns these various relations has some truth, whether or not I was directly involved in it. To detail the sum of these items is a circuitous way of pointing out traits which might bear on my own half-buried character, and with this in mind it is impossible to say which particular person I favour or ‘take after’, though I plainly attached myself most to those who had some skill and knowledge to impart: to Frederick the designer and artist, and to Burton the farrier.
63
Deception Island lies in a particularly eruptive area of the Antarctic Ocean and is all that remains of a volcanic cone suddenly pulled under by some insufferable whim of the earth. Most of it, except for whaling buildings and a scientific station, is composed of mountainous ash and ice, peaks, crevices, and sheer walls dropping into the sea.
The crater is not quite a full circle of land. It is broken at the mouth, part of its lip having gone with the general subsidence, leaving a gap so that its final shape is of a distorted horseshoe — a long way from the perfect specimen done by Burton in his prime which presses down the pile of written sheets on my table.
As unpredictable as a volcano, Burton created a primeval shoe-tool for the sacred horse, with iron that had been scraped out of the earth itself. Taking his piece from the fire he pounded the burning ore and made sparks live and die, plying his weight over the shape it was going to be. As he gripped the tongs and held his hammer, no thought entered his mind to spoil the meeting of anvil and nascent horseshoe. They came together with the built-in skill of his craft, producing an object he would set against the finest of any other smith.
During the Great War, when meat was scarce, Burton would not eat the horse-flesh which was sold in the shops, nor allow it into the house. The idea of it horrified his family as well, as if to consume such meat was little different to cannibalism. He loved horses, having in his trade learned to control them more thoroughly than any woman. His hatred of the canine species (above all other animals) may have been because the dog was once a wolf, and the mythical enemy of both horse and man.
When man tamed the horse, blacksmiths made iron shoes for it, drove the nails in through seven holes for each foot, making twenty-eight all told — one for every day of the complete moon — that the horse pressed to the earth as a testament to man’s dependence on the soil and the glowing guardian of the night sky.