Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  He had had three friends, of whom the man in the picture was one. They had wanted to have their portraits painted, but they could only afford for one of them to sit for an artist. They pooled their money and drew lots. The young man won. He had his portrait painted. Soon afterwards he died, like T.E. Lawrence, in a motorcycle crash. Richard Negus had thus inherited the portrait. On the wall of his college rooms, Richard Negus had a reminder of the impermanence of youth, the loss of promise; this picture looked on as he taught generations of bright young things the literature of their ancestors, the language of Bede and of Caedmon.

  It was then that I decided that I would go to Christ Church to read English; it would be some months before Richard Negus would decide the same. Certainly, I had a formal interview with the other Students at the end of Michaelmas Term later that year. There was no question that my Old Shirburnian tie had swung it; it had not, but the recommendation of Richard Negus’s old student Peter Prior, and a polite, rather awkward tea, which had an air of happening in an air raid shelter – a protected space, encroached by dangers – had begun it.

  *

  As I am now, a young English fellow in an Oxford college, so was she then. The daughter of the Jewish refugee Oxford historian Hans Eisner, she was born to brilliance, to be brilliant: Didi Eisner.

  Didi Eisner is to me a tallish, striking woman, who wears her radicalism with an assured dignity and the optimism of youth. An English academic with a genius for psychiatry. She is the change she wants to see. She was then what I am now, a young Oxford fellow in English, with all the promise and responsibility that that brings. A promise for the future; a responsibility to the past.

  We met in her rooms in St John’s College. To learn about Ruskin and the stones of Venice. To me, not being born to the stones of Oxford, this seemed at first at one remove from the main event. The fact of the University, with its architecture and history, was the end in itself. It took me some time to learn that there was a world beyond Oxford and its colleges, a history which had happened not always because Oxford was there. At Sherborne we had been taught to believe, in our Oxbridge classes, that Oxford was the event itself, an end in itself. Now I had Ruskin and Italy to comprehend in my life. Didi Eisner was the gatekeeper to a whole new, urgent and expansive world.

  *

  I am in Accident and Emergency. Someone found me on my staircase. Paralysed and vomiting. A normal night for the students of Christ Church, where it was possible to take a heroin overdose and not be lost. But this was different. I had done something to myself, taken too much alcohol, surely, but also something else. Benzodiazepines. A lot of them. There is a rush and a modulated enquiry. Can I remember what I had taken? How much had I taken? The real questions would come later, but for the moment there was a body in spasms, vomiting air to the air of the A&E department of the night-time, some way from the Meadows of Richard Negus, and the polite discourse of promise.

  *

  How had this happened? Why had this happened? I knew, but I was not telling anyone.

  I was the Mendelssohn of suicides, dying young, dying brilliantly. My first attempt at sixteen was my Octet, precocious and studied brilliance. I was never to achieve such perfection again, partly through a weariness and a realization that it could not be done better, or done again in the same way.

  At sixteen, late at night, in my bedsit study in Abbey House in Sherborne, I had reached a maturity that I would not reach again. I had been performing that Hilary Term in Sir Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. That powerful expression of the movement of the soul from here to eternity.

  I can no more; for now it comes again,

  That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain,

  That masterful negation and collapse

  Of all that makes me man.

  … And, crueller still,

  A fierce and restless fright begins to fill

  The mansion of my soul. And worse, and worse,

  Some bodily form of ill

  Floats on the wind, with many a loathsome curse

  Tainting the hallowed air, and laughs, and flaps

  Its hideous wings

  And makes me wild with horror and dismay.

  O Jesu, help! pray for me, Mary, pray!

  Some Angel, Jesu! such as came to Thee

  In Thine own agony …

  On such rapture was I to make the journey. I was not to know that I would often take it, and never to know that I had arrived. The Mendelssohn of suicide was to die in that attempt. All other attempts a mockery of lost youth and the suicidal ambitions of a schoolboy.

  Beer, washed down with vodka, washed down with gin and benzodiazepines working God’s purpose out in a young, convulsing body. I wanted to die. I was going to die. I had been rushed to the school sanatorium, found with an unexplained and sudden illness, in spasms on the floor of my room. Unexplained, and no one suspected anything. I knew, but I wasn’t telling. I knew that if the overdose didn’t kill me, the toxins in my blood would, leading to liver failure and a slow, agonizing death. I yearned for a slow, agonizing death.

  How long had it been? An hour since they found me, plus eight hours since I had taken the tablets. But all that was a distant memory. That sound comes again, that sense of ruin, which is worse than pain, that masterful negation and collapse of all that makes me man. That sound has something of the eternal in it, and something of the night, last night. What to do now? Don’t tell.

  Now I am being rushed in a battered Citroën C5 across the hills from Sherborne to Yeovil, to Yeovil District Hospital. They do not know what is wrong. All I have to do is to keep quiet, not to tell. The minutes are agonizing, the hours will be surprisingly dull, with nothing to do, no purpose except to say nothing and to keep them from hearing the music in my mind.

  Surrounded by whiteness, and cleanness, and people wanting to live, I mark the time until I know I have been successful and that I will die.

  A phone call. The scout has found a tablet under my bed in Abbey House. They do not know what it is. Do I know what it is? Had there been more? Had I taken some? Had I taken more? (Had I taken enough?) I prevaricate, but my body is racked with a dry retching and I am tired, so tired. I had not thought that this would happen. What should I do? Peter Prior arrives with the tablet, having borne it over the top of the Dorset Downs for inspection by the team at the hospital. They do not know what it is. Can I last out, last out to die?

  Peter Prior comes across to my bed. I must tell them, he says.

  What to do? I panic, but know that I hold the cards in this situation. Can I lie once more? If I can lie, then I can live. I decide to acquiesce. There is no other word for it. I was complicit in that failure, the first of many. I had been precocious, but precocity was not enough in the hands of an inexpert participant, grasping after death.

  I compromise. I try to retain some dignity. I ask for one thing in return: that my family is not told. I am surprised to hear that they will not be told. I will … but first there is business all around me. A comic friendly knowingness; ‘I told you so’ laughs around my hospital bed. A quiet reassurance that what I have done is not a problem, that it will all be all right. I hear the music on the hospital radio and my memory of an insistent tune, of the song of the night before, silently dies, and leaves me to live.

  *

  There is no shame in not dying, I discover. Not dying is a powerful argument for living in the world. A teenage overdoser in a hospital bed in Yeovil has a powerful argument for living, and a power over death, over other people. I will be here, not here, again. In other hospital beds, at other times. In many hospital beds: in Paris, in Prague, in Oxford, in Sussex. Pursuing the realization of a dream, the power of the question of life in an examination in which no one but me knows the answers.

  Now come other questions, questions of motive. No one has died, but there must be a motive for the death. Urgent, insistent questions. Again and again, this time more gently. Why? I know, but I am not telling. I am safe in my hospital
bed. My family lives in Sussex, ignorant of the plaything that their son has made of life.

  A day passes, two. I have visitors. My housemaster, the chaplain, my friend Jerry Hedge. No one is saying anything, but already the wheels have been put in motion. There is the question of what is to be done. I cannot stay in a state of emergency for ever. What happens next: something breaks, a promise. Somehow I am cajoled into welcoming my family back into my life. In this clinical environment there had been no room for them, but they remain a fact.

  My mother arrives, in a flurry of friends, urgently conveying her in her ignorance and distress from Sussex. She is not judgemental, she only wants to reassure, and to be sure that it will not happen again. That is a promise I cannot give, but I give it anyway.

  The chaplain has an idea, which spreads from person to person. A solution: Pilsdon Manor, the farmstead near Bridport, at the foot of a hill, where the boys of Sherborne go before they are confirmed, to encounter the vagaries of life, will become my home for the next six months. There is general agreement. This is what to do in this situation. The reassurance of the bourgeois encompasses me in its wide arms and offers me a home in which to rebuild my life.

  My father flies by helicopter to Dorset, arrives at the Manor. Kind, but not enquiring. Reassuring rather, that all will be well.

  There are quiet, tentative talks in the garden, and time spent in the chapel, with its modern stained glass and its carved quotation from T.S. Eliot.

  ‘In my end is my beginning.’

  Time passes. The Anglican Church does what it does and offers answers which were not the answers to the questions asked, not asked. I know, but I am not telling. I return to Abbey House for a day or so, to collect my things. I take the few tokens of my childhood from my study and transport them to the Manor. I leave my friendships behind, but they follow after, visiting me on the South Downs of Dorset, wrapped in a thick veil of illicit smoke – a shared transgression among teenagers who have yet to find the strength of their will – while the schoolmasters pretend to look on.

  Mrs Kathleen Stoughton – ‘Matey’ – the House matron sees something on the day I return to Sherborne, and it plants a seed in her mind which will not grow, because I will not cast the light of truth on it. She sees Fogarty in the yard, handing me money. How he has got into the schoolyard, or what he is doing, or why, no one knows. That money is payment for a lost childhood and years of lies and broken promises. It is the price he pays for a lie that poisons the next quarter century of my life.

  *

  We are in the bedroom, upstairs in the presbytery in Midhurst. I stand in the doorway, anxious. The Canon looks at me. I look back. Not now, not this once. He gestures at my feet, meaning me to take off my shoes. I comply. I am complicit in this. He gestures at the bed. I move towards it. He grabs my hand, squeezing it, moving it around in the air between us. This is not friendliness (I think). I am not part of this, of that. He sits suddenly on the bed and drags me towards him He releases my hand then pulls me towards him I briefly catch his breath in the air between us glancing at my face He stands up He pushes me down I fall on the bed awkward His hand reaches out covers my ear pushes my head down on the sheets An oath He releases me for a moment then reaches down towards my trousers tugs at them pulls them down towards my feet with my pants I am on my face feeling the boniness of his fingers then the boniness of him in me in me There is a movement of sorts of which I am part not part I am not responsive in this responsible for this There is more movement on the bed that bed I move slightly up and down the sheets with the rocking action an action which pains me There is breathing in the air behind me deep breathing then a release a relief. I lie on the bed, feeling the stickiness of the semen on me. Go and wash yourself now, then wait for me downstairs.

  *

  I think of Hattie, my goddaughter. Nine years old in her blue school blazer, with her fragile grasp of London, where she lives, and of the world. I dream of empires for her, empires of the mind, as yet unconquered, without aggression. I leave Oxford to her, I will give Oxford to her. I will divest myself of my kingdom and leave it to her.

  Delicate, in a floral dress. I think of her eventual corruption, her perfection, and I wish her a kingdom other than mine, my knowledge. This is the child – ecce puella, ecce homo – will she see me, see me for what I have been and for what I have become, a young fellow in an Oxford college, a young man without innocence, but innocent in his love for a nine-year-old girl?

  The innocence of the child. The ignorance and lack of malice in the child. The hebephile was a youth once too, learning that the body contains the universe of creation. The hebephile loves youth, youth on the verge of conquest, of being conquered. He does not move on, unlearn the lessons of his adolescence, he lives them. Perhaps. Child, father.

  *

  I had read an article from last year in the TLS that morning:

  The Queen Anne period saw a vogue for the index as an instrument of political warfare, a weapon which cost one Tory minister an election, and which was ranged against one of Johnson’s predecessors as a Spectator editor. The fashion for satirical indexes had begun in 1698, when the poet and lawyer William King contributed a four-page table to the second edition of Charles Boyle’s attack on the King’s Librarian, Richard Bentley. King’s index, inserted at the back of the book, was entitled ‘A Short Account of Dr. Bentley by Way of Index’, and sure enough, each of the headwords relates to some aspect of Bentley’s low character: his ‘egregious dulness, p. 74, 106, 119, 135, 136, 137, 241’, for example, his ‘familiar acquaintance with Books that he never saw, p. 76, 98, 115, 232’, or his ‘Pedantry, from p. 93 to 99, 144, 216’.

  King’s index is a rather wonderful twofold attack on Bentley – as Isaac D’Israeli once put it, it is ‘at once a satirical character of the great critic, and what it professes to be’. Thus, part of its fun is that those page references are real ones. If we follow the reference to ‘His Collection of Asinine Proverbs, p. 220’, we do indeed find ourselves on a page where Bentley is accused of repeating the same proverb – about an ass – at two different points in one book. So the surface-level joke of ‘A Short Account of Dr. Bentley’ is that a reader really might need to check the details of some particular facet of Bentley’s awfulness, and knowing Boyle’s book to contain the material but pushed for time, be delighted at the provision of a functioning index. At the same time, the ‘Short Account’ is also a covert attack on Bentley for being an ‘index-scholar’, a pedant whose scholarship is based on ‘alphabetical learning’ – looking things up in tables – rather than a real affinity with the works of the ancients.

  I am an academic, a bibliographer and index-maker. But, like King, my indexes are not only there to tell people where to find things, but to tell them what I think, would like them to find.

  Lintot, Bernard,

  creator of the English literary canon, 5, 11, 12, 22–25, etc.

  My indexes are an exercise in constructing posthumous reputations. They direct the reader to what is said, to be said, about an individual. They are careful, carefully thought out things, complete in themselves, insofar as they can be complete. Today I will construct an index to my thoughts, to my memories, to these paper cuts.

  Am I a good indexer? I hope so, but that does not make me a reliable narrator. I am parti pris in the index of my own life. I cannot help this, everyone is. Everyone is partial to their own concerns, and the indexes to their lives are constructed not with what knowledge they have but with what knowledge they would have people know. The index is a secretive but public occasion. It constructs the self-constructed self. Am I a fine narrator? Am I a good indexer to this narrative of my life? Even my scholarly honesty and my good-natured frankness will not stop my prejudice, my prejudices in favour of myself, my self, from building an index which will tell the world of my illness, and the cause of it.

  *

  The beating heart of the Anglican Church gives me a strength to live again. A confession which is not my
own. Through Pilsdon Manor, through Nicholas Ferrar’s dream of Little Gidding and the faith on which that was based in the seventeenth century – which Eliot knew – I learn to live another life. Gone are the smokes and ruins of high Anglicanism, instead a simple faith of quiet reassurance that all will be well, that all can be put right, and all will be put right.

  I return to Sussex, to my family, before returning to Sherborne to complete my studies. It is a time of learning, without learning. I have learnt to be quiet. I learn to lie.

  I am not without my teachers. Fogarty has the powerful righteousness of the Church behind him and again reigns in my life. All my actions are controlled by him, my thoughts are controlled by him. What I say, what I can say, is delimited by this tall, dark man.

  *

  It has been a month now since Tonson published The Campaign by Joseph Addison (I think): on 14 December 1704. Oxford has been in ferment. This is a poem that will last, as the victory by the duke of Marlborough, which it celebrates, will last. This land has been ‘storm-tossed’ before, but in an age with less to regret perhaps.

  So when an angel by divine command

  With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,

  Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,

  Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;

  And pleas’d th’ Almighty’s orders to perform,

  Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

  What a year was 1705! This year (to me). In this year, this, the greatest image of the eighteenth-century baroque, tastefully turned out by a young Oxford Fellow: Addison, that quintessence of excellence. Youth, promise, poise, control and the making of the English literary canon – it was all here then, is now.

  *

  Fogarty arranges for me to see someone.

  ‘What happened, Stephen? Why are you here?’

  This is the voice of Dr David Chance, a psychologist whom the Canon has appointed to help me rebuild my life. I struggle for air. Now is the time to speak, for me to speak.