Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  DR VON HALLER: You were never reconciled to her?

  MYSELF: You doubtless have some family, Doctor. You must know of the currents that run through families? I’ll tell you of one that astonished me. It was Caroline who told Netty about the approaching marriage, and Netty broke into a fit of sobs—she had no tears, apparently—and said, “And after what I’ve done for him!” Caroline dropped on that at once, for it could have been proof of her favourite theory that Netty killed Mother, or at least put her in the way of dying. Surely those words couldn’t have simply referred to those shirts she’d ironed so beautifully? But with her notion of “her place” it wouldn’t be like Netty to think that years of service gave her a romantic claim on Father. Caroline couldn’t get Netty to admit, in so many words, that she had put Mother out of the way because she was an embarrassment to Father. Nevertheless, there was something fishy there. If I could have Netty in the witness-box for half an hour, I bet I could break her down! What do you think of that? This isn’t some family in the mythic drama of Greece I’m telling you about; it is a family of the twentieth century, and a Canadian family at that, supposedly the quintessence of everything that is emotionally dowdy and unaware.

  DR VON HALLER: Mythic pattern is common enough in contemporary life. But of course few people know the myths, and fewer still can see a pattern under a mass of detail. What was your response to this woman who was so soon proprietorial in her manner toward you?

  MYSELF: Derision tending toward hatred; with Caroline it was just derision. Every family knows how to make the newcomer feel uncomfortable, and we did what we dared. And I did more than spar with her when we met. I found out everything I could about her through enquiries from credit agencies and by public records; I also had some enquiries made through underworld characters who had reason to want to please me—

  DR VON HALLER: You spied on her?

  MYSELF: Yes.

  DR VON HALLER: You have no doubts about the propriety of that?

  MYSELF: None. After all, she was marrying considerably over a hundred million dollars. I wanted to know who she was.

  DR VON HALLER: And who was she?

  MYSELF: There was nothing against her. She had married a serviceman when she was in the W.R.N.S. and divorced him as soon as the war was over. That was where Lorene came from.

  DR VON HALLER: The retarded daughter?

  MYSELF: An embarrassing nuisance, Denyse’s problem. But Denyse liked problems and wanted to add me to her list.

  DR VON HALLER: Because of your drinking. When did that begin?

  MYSELF: In Pittstown it began to be serious. It is very lonely living in a small town where you are anxious to seem quite ordinary but everybody knows that there is a great fortune, as they put it, “behind you.” How far behind, or whether you really have anything more than a romantic claim on it, nobody knows or cares. More than once I would hear some Pittstown worthy whisper of me, “He doesn’t have to work, you know; his father’s Boy Staunton.” But I did work; I tried to command my profession. I lived in the best hotel in town, which, God knows, was a dismal hole with wretched food; I confined my living to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, which was about what a rising young lawyer might be expected to have. I wanted no favours and if it had been practical to take another name I would have done it. Nobody understood, except Diarmuid, and I didn’t care whether they understood or not. But it was lonely, and while I was hammering out the character of David Staunton the rising criminal lawyer, I also created the character of David Staunton who drank too much. The two went well together in the eyes of many romantic people, who like a brilliant man to have some large, obvious flaw in his character.

  DR VON HALLER: This was the character you took with you to Toronto, where I suppose you embroidered it.

  MYSELF: Embroidered it richly. I achieved a certain courtroom notoriety; in a lively case I drew a good many spectators because they wanted to see me win. They also had the occasional thrill of seeing me stagger. There were rumours, too, that I had extensive connections in the underworld, though that was nonsense. Still, it provided a whiff of sulphur for the mob.

  DR VON HALLER: In fact, you created a romantic Persona that successfully rivalled that of the rich, sexually adventurous Boy Staunton without ever challenging him on his own ground?

  MYSELF: You might equally well say that I established myself as a man of significance in my own right without in any way wearing my father’s cut-down clothes.

  DR VON HALLER: And when did the clash come?

  MYSELF: The—?

  DR VON HALLER: The inevitable clash between your father and yourself. The clash that gave so much edge to the guilt and remorse you felt when he died, or was killed, or whichever it was.

  MYSELF: I suppose it really came into the light when Denyse made it clear that her ambition was to see Father appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. She made it very clear to me that what she insisted on calling my “image”—she had a walletful of smart terms for everything—would not fit very well with my position as son of a man who was the Queen’s representative.

  DR VON HALLER: In effect she wanted to reclaim you and make you into your father’s son again.

  MYSELF: Yes, and what a father! She is a great maker of images, is Denyse! It disgusted and grieved me to see Father being filed and pumiced down to meet that inordinate woman’s idea of a fit candidate for ceremonial office. Before, he had style—his personal style: she made him into what she would have been if she had been born a man. He became an unimaginative woman’s creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage. She reopened the whole business of the Staunton arms because he would need something of the sort in an official position and it looked better to take the position with all the necessary trappings than to cobble them up during his first months in office. Father had never told her about Maria Ann Dymock, and she wrote boldly to the College of Arms, and I gather she pretty much demanded that the arms of the Warwickshire Stauntons, with some appropriate differences, be officially granted to Father.

  DR VON HALLER: What did your father think about it?

  MYSELF: Oh, he laughed it off. Said Denyse would manage it if anyone could. Didn’t want to talk about it. But it never happened. The College took a long time answering letters and asked for information that was hard to provide. I knew all about it because by this time my old friend Pledger-Brown was one of the pursuivants, and we had always written to each other at least once a year. One of his letters said, as I remember it, “This can never be, you know; not even your stepdame’s New World determination can make you Stauntons of Longbridge. My colleague in charge of the matter is trying to persuade her to apply for new arms, which your father might legitimately have, for after all bags of gold are a very fair earnest of gentility, and always have been. But she is resolute, and nothing will do but a long and very respectable descent. It is one of the touching aspects of our work here in the College that so many of you New World people, up to the eyebrows in all the delights of republicanism, hanker after a link with what is ancient and rubbed by time to a fine sheen. It’s more than snobbery; more than romanticism; it’s a desire for an ancestry that somehow postulates a posterity and for an existence in the past that is a covert guarantee of immortality in the future. You talk about individualism; what you truly want is to be links in a long unbroken chain. But you, with our secret about Maria Ann and the child whose father might have been all Staunton, know of a truth which is every bit as good in its way, even though you use it only as food for your sullen absalonism.”

  DR VON HALLER: Absalonism; I do not know that word. Explain it, please.

  MYSELF: It was one of Adrian’s revivals of old words. It refers to Absalom, the son of King David, who resisted and revolted against his father.

  DR VON HALLER: A good word. I shall remember it.

  (14)

  The time was drawing near to Christma
s, when I knew that Dr von Haller would make some break in my series of appointments. But I was not prepared for what she said when next we met.

  “Well, Mr Staunton, we seem to have come to the end of your anamnesis. Now it is necessary to make a decision about what you are going to do next.”

  “The end? But I have a sheaf of notes still! I have all sorts of questions to ask.”

  “Doubtless. It is possible to go on as we have been doing for several years. But you have been at this work for a little more than one year, and although we could haggle over fine points and probe sore places for at least another year, I think that for you that is unnecessary. Ask your questions of yourself. You are now in a position to answer them.”

  “But if I give wrong answers?”

  “You will soon know that they are wrong. We have canvassed the main points in the story of your life; you are equipped to attend to details.”

  “I don’t feel it. I’m not nearly through with what I have to say.”

  “Have you anything to say that seems to you extraordinary?”

  “But surely I have been having the most remarkable spiritual—well, anyhow, psychological—adventures?”

  “By no means, Mr Staunton. Remarkable in your personal experience, which is what counts, but—forgive me—not at all remarkable in mine.”

  “Then you mean this is the end of my work with you?”

  “Not if you decide otherwise. But it is the end of this work—this reassessment of some personal, profound experience. But what is most personal is not what is most profound. If you want to continue—and you must not be in a hurry to say you will—we shall proceed quite differently. We shall examine the archetypes with which you are already superficially familiar, and we shall go beyond what is personal about them. I assure you that is very close and psychologically demanding work. It cannot be undertaken if you are always craving to be back in Toronto, putting Alpha and Castor and all those things into good order. But you are drinking quite moderately now, aren’t you? The symptom you complained of has been corrected. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Yes, though I had almost forgotten that was what I came for.”

  “Your general health is much improved? You sleep better?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will not be surprised or angry when I say you are a much pleasanter, easier person?”

  “But if I go on—what then?”

  “I cannot tell you, because I don’t know, and in this sort of work we give no promises.”

  “Yes, but you have experience of other people. What happens to them?”

  “They finish their work, or that part of it that can be done here, with a markedly improved understanding of themselves, and that means of much that goes beyond self. They are in better command of their abilities. They are more fully themselves.”

  “Happier, in fact.”

  “I do not promise happiness, and I don’t know what it is. You New World people are, what is the word, hipped on the idea of happiness, as if it were a constant and measurable thing, and settled and excused everything. If it is anything at all it is a by-product of other conditions of life, and some people whose lives do not appear to be at all enviable, or indeed admirable, are happy. Forget about happiness.”

  “Then you can’t, or won’t, tell me what I would be working for?”

  “No, because the answer lies in you, not in me. I can help, of course. I can put the questions in such a way as to draw forth your answer, but I do not know what your answer will be. Let me put it this way: the work you have been doing here during the past year has told you who you are; further work would aim at showing you what you are.”

  “More mystification. I thought we had got past all that. For weeks it seems to me that we have been talking nothing but common sense.”

  “Oh, my dear Mr Staunton, that is unworthy of you! Are you still scampering back to that primitive state of mind where you suppose psychology must be divorced from common sense? Well—let me see what I can do. Your dreams—we have worked through some dozens of your dreams, and I think you are now convinced that they are not just incomprehensible gases that get into your head during sleep. Recall your dream of the night before you first came to me. What was that enclosed, private place where you commanded such respect, from which you walked out into strange country? Who was the woman you met, who talked in an unknown language? Now don’t say it was me, because you had never met me then, and though dreams may reflect deep concerns and thus may hint at the future, they are not second sight. After some exploration, you came to the top of a staircase that led downward, and some commonplace people discouraged you from going down, though you sensed there was treasure there. Your decision now is whether or not you are going to descend the staircase and find the treasure.”

  “How do I know it will be a treasure?”

  “Because your other recurrent dream, where you are the little prince in the tower, shows you as the guardian of a treasure. And you manage to keep your treasure. But who are all those frightening figures who menace it? We should certainly encounter them. And why are you a prince, and a child?—Tell me, did you dream last night?”

  “Yes. A very odd dream. It reminded me of Knopwood because it was Biblical in style. I dreamed I was standing on a plain, talking with my father. I was aware it was Father, though his face was turned away. He was very affectionate and simple in his manner, as I don’t think I ever knew him to be in his life. The odd thing was that I couldn’t really see his face. He wore an ordinary business suit. Then suddenly he turned from me and flew up into the air, and the astonishing thing was that as he rose, his trousers came down, and I saw his naked backside.”

  “And what are your associations?”

  “Well, obviously it’s the passage in Exodus where God promises Moses that he shall see Him, but must not see His face; and what Moses sees is God’s back parts. As a child I always thought it funny for God to show His rump. Funny, but also terribly real and true. Like those extraordinary people in the Bible who swore a solemn oath clutching one another’s testicles. But does it mean that I have seen the weakness, the shameful part of my father’s nature because he gave so much of himself into the keeping of Denyse and because Denyse was so unworthy to treat him properly? I’ve done what I can with it, but nothing rings true.”

  “Of course not, because you have neglected one of the chief principles of what I have been able to tell you about the significance of dreams. That again is understandable, for when the dream is important and has something new to tell us, we often forget temporarily what we know to be true. But we have always agreed, haven’t we, that figures in dreams, whoever or whatever they may look like, are aspects of the dreamer? So who is this father with the obscured face and the naked buttocks?”

  “I suppose he is my idea of a father—my own father?”

  “He is something we would have to talk about if you decided to go on to a deeper stage in the investigation of yourself. Because your real father, your historical father, the man whom you last saw lying so pitiably on the dock with his face obscured in filth, and then so dishevelled in his coffin with his face destroyed by your stepmother’s ambitious meddling, is by no means the same thing as the archetype of fatherhood you carry in the depths of your being, and which comes from—well, for the present we won’t attempt to say where. Now tell me, have you had any of those demanding, humiliating sessions in Mr Justice Staunton’s court during the past few weeks? You haven’t mentioned them.”

  “No. They don’t seem to have been necessary recently.”

  “I thought that might be so. Well, my friend, you know now how very peculiar dreams are, and you know that they are not liars. But I don’t believe you have found out yet that they sometimes like a little joke. And this is one. I believe that you have, in a literal sense, seen the end of Mr Justice Staunton. The old Troll King has lost his trappings. No court, no robes, a sense of kindliness and concern, a revelation of that part of his anatomy he kee
ps nearest to the honoured Bench, and which nobody has ever attempted to invest with awe or dignity, and then—gone! If he should come again, as he well may, at least you have advanced so far that you have seen him with his trousers down…. Our hour is finished. If you wish to arrange further appointments, will you let me know sometime in the week between Christmas and the New Year? I wish you a very happy holiday.”

  3

  My Sorgenfrei Diary

  >> >> >> >> << << << <<

  Dec. 17, Wed.: Wretched letter from Netty this morn. Was feeling particularly well because of Dr Johanna’s saying on Monday that I had finished my anamnesis so far as she thought it necessary to go; extraordinary flood of energy and cheerfulness. Now this.

  Seven pages of her big script, like tangled barbed wire, the upshot of which is that Meritorious Matey has at last done what I always expected him to do—revealed himself as a two-bit crook and opportunist. Has fiddled trust funds which somehow lay in his clutch; she doesn’t say how and probably doesn’t know. But she is certain he has been wronged. Of course he is her brother and the apple of her eye and Netty is nothing if not loyal, as the Staunton family knows to its cost—and also, I suppose, to its extraordinary benefit. One must be fair.

  But how can I be fair to Matey? He has always been the deserving, hard-working fellow with his own way to make, while I have hardly been able to swallow for the weight of the silver spoon in my mouth. Certainly this is how Netty has put it to me, and when Father refused to take Matey into Alpha and wouldn’t let Matey’s firm handle the audit of Castor, she thought we were bowelless ingrates and oppressors. But Father smelled Matey as no good, and so did I, because of the way he sponged on Netty when he had no need. And now Netty begs me to return to Canada as soon as possible and undertake Matey’s defence. “You have spent your talents on many a scoundrel, and you ought to be ready to see that a wronged honest boy is righted before the world”; that is how she puts it. And: “I’ve never asked you or the family for a thing and God knows what I’ve done for the Stauntons through thick and thin, and some things will never be known, but now I’m begging you on my bended knees.”