I am high up now, moving slowly alongside the balcony of the Radcliffe Camera. I think about all the names from the eighteenth century engraved on the glass there, where no one can see them now. Such assumption, passing into posterity. The music is indistinct far below me. The rafts of light, shining up from the quads, are magnificent, filling the evening with intense rightness. This evening belongs to the college.
Now, this moment, at the apex of the turning wheel, I feel a total stillness and a quiet. In my white tie and tails, I expect everything of the world, for it to acknowledge me and my place in it, this evening, alone. I cannot hear the music at all below me now. I know that all is right in the world, for me at least. In this moment of reassurance and expectation I can expect nothing more than this (I think), I feel that I have arrived at an acceptance of things, as the wheel turns, is still for a moment, above the dreams and expectations of a generation.
*
I understand enough Latin, the language of conquest, and Anglo-Saxon, the language of a worried nation which is not yet a nation. My club of failed suicides saves itself for a future which has not yet been constructed. I am no longer the Mendelssohn of suicides. I am a new music which I can slowly but certainly bear to listen to. The truth of my childhood is now the handmaiden of posterity. This. This small world on the edge of the Sussex Downs, where unspeakable things happened, is the beginning of a new nation. The language is English, and in my marketplace is found all literature, at least the literature of England. That is my haven. Oxford is now, as it always was in my mind, my home. Whole vistas of possibility open out to me as I step over the threshold of the Bodleian Library into the chill embrace of the January evening, worlds of meaning as yet unknown to me cry out for discovery.
*
one dark night. one dark. one dark night. fired with love’s urgent longings – ah! the sheer grace! – one dark. one dark. dark. dark. night. fired with love’s. with love’s. urgent. urgent longings.
That music, that noise
– ah! the sheer. sheer grace – dark. dark. urgent. urgent. longings. I went out unseen. my house now being all. being all stilled. in darkness. in darkness, and secure. in darkness and secure. by the secret ladder. disguised. in darkness and concealment.
That music again. Insistent. Urgent.
in darkness, and secure. by the secret ladder, disguised. in darkness and concealment. my house being now all stilled. – ah! the sheer grace! – one dark. one dark night. fired with love’s. with love’s. with love’s urgent. longings. – ah! the sheer grace! – fired with love’s. with love’s. with love’s urgent longings. in darkness. in darkness, and secure by the secret ladder, disguised. in darkness and concealment. love’s urgent longings. let us rejoice and be pleased in Him. In darkness and concealment.
amen. men.
This is true.
I gently remove the hand – Fogarty’s – from my thigh it comes back it moves towards my groin I do not want this to happen again I can’t breathe I’m only little this is wrong I’m scared I can’t breathe I’m all by myself with this man he tells me to go upstairs I have no choice I am electric
This is true.
My back is awkward I move and this causes a sudden penetrating force the weight is inside me and intense and above me behind my back green and beige a mirror with an open door in it
I am electric
*
My day’s work done, I pass along St Giles, up by the church. I see him, without his greatcoat. The man from this morning. Shivering in the night, begging for some small change. I check my pockets. I have none.
I’m too self-conscious to go to the Old Parsonage for a coffee, my intention. I look down the long wide street of St Giles past the Eagle and Child to the Taylorian. Christminster and its inhabitants. Oxford!
*
Yesterday, I went back to Midhurst. I walked down the lanes and past St Mary’s Presbytery in the cool, grey light of the Sussex winter. How small it seemed, and ordinary. Hardly hidden, as you might have expected, behind its low, red brick wall, with its church and the white marble statue of Christ in the gardens.
I was struck by how mundane the details of evil are. That, I suppose, is what is shocking about them. A man, a boy. A house, a bed. How very ordinary, and extraordinary too.
How many winters have passed since yesterday! The truth will tear up those fine lawns, rock that sacristy. The church there will sing the dual antiphony of soiled innocence and long-to-be-regretted indifference. In the pale, weak light of John Henry Newman’s ‘English spring’, it will sound throughout Sussex, which harboured it and hid it, with sadness and sorrow.
I remember the oil painting of St Peter’s Basilica on the wall in the presbytery. It is not the presbytery but St Peter’s which in my mind is the setting for what happened to me. That has something to match the scale of what happened. I worry that I have made rape seem like an aesthetic experience. That is not my intention. But the tools of aestheticism – the Kantian sublime – are all I have to describe the exquisiteness of the horror and order of what happened.
*
I return through the night to Jericho and my small flat, my home. One, two tablets. Four, nine tablets.
I turn in for the night. It’s quiet outside. Inside soon I’m sleeping. I dream as I fall asleep and think as I dream. My day is done now, for the day.
*
I do not believe in ghosts (I think). I am alone in my bedroom in Oxford, at night. I see him there, not quite seen there, reaching over me, his hand holding down my arm and tracing a figure on my skin. It is an old man’s hand, but it is ageless to me. I hear him whispering in my ears, but cannot catch what he says, that man. I am tense with expectation and fear. I am not a child reliving the trauma of the distant past, but a forty-year-old man, terrified by a man sometime since dead, in this room, now.
I do not believe in ghosts (I think). I wonder at this, this preoccupation, this occupation of my mind by this man.
*
‘Do you think Canon Fogarty is God?’ Dr Richard Gipps asked one day.
I thought about this carefully for a moment.
‘A god,’ I replied.
I thought then of the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods, and of Fogarty being a violent god, the god of violation. There was some comfort to think of this immortal influence on my life being diminished to a godhead. What had this god done to me, done in this mortal world to a child? Why had he done it? It seemed to me that there was something of the eternal in his actions, of an immense and endless evil operating in the world, a boundless malevolence.
And yet he was civilized. He operated also in a world of intricacy and considered thinking. The canon law was his realm, in which he was able to advise and deliver judgements on how people should conduct themselves in this interface between the immortal and the body. Literature, language, music, the civilized arts were his, this minor god of ruination. He instilled in me a love of them, and then a dread of them, of what they meant to me. I worked now in a world where they needed to be explained and understood, but what I needed to explain and understand was Fogarty. I knew how; I wondered why.
‘A god’, I thought, sadly, terrified at the world in which I live.
*
(I think) I’m more interesting than I’m interested. Reading this, this love letter to my friends, my work, to Oxford, you might wonder that I have any friends at all, or whether Oxford might not be unlovable. You are not the only person to have thought of that – I wonder myself. I am not here to be liked, but to be believed and understood. If I had had a relationship, known what it is to be loved by a man, then … But I have not, and am the product of three authors: Fogarty, yes, but also Swift and Waugh. I am not a child of Wodehouse, although I revel and divert myself in his childhood world.
As I say, loving cancer means never having to say that you are sorry. But I am sorry, sorry that this happened to me, to anyone. But it did happen. This, my history of the English literary canon is also my perverse lov
e-hate letter to the authors of my being. I would like to end on a note of universal love, of triumphant vindication and exultant all-conquering reconciliation, in English, the all-conquering language of love, but, as I say, in the end all are compromised here at the limits of evil, which I have known in Sussex. Which I know here, now, here in the dark heart of England.
A few words a victory, a sentence an impossible thought? This is my victory, my impossible thought: I would like to end on a note of optimism, in this story about love. The English spring for me has been a time of renewal, though the relationship at the heart of it is cancerous. That is my tale of love. Am I in recovery, remission, I wonder? I would like to hope so, but cancer is a life sentence. It can always come back.
This book has been the work of a few idle hours, sitting in the quiet comfort and dark visibilities of the Bodleian Library. It has been a pleasure to write what I know most about, and although I may not have spoken the truth, I have been truthful.
When I finished the Curious Incident, I was exhilarated and saddened: exhilarated because of the deftness of the conclusion, saddened because Christopher had his complex life, with its complications, still to live beyond its pages. We must all do this (I think).
*
It has taken scarcely any time at all to write this, my disquisition on the English literary canon, but in fact it is the result of many years of writing, and not writing. First, there was the sensation: I can’t breathe. Why? What was it that was so awful? Then months, years, of careful, considered thinking about this. I can’t breathe – so simple and yet so denying of life, of living, the essential requirement for living.
There were the thoughts, straightforward enough: he dropped his pants. He put his penis in. A bare narrative of sorts, with verbs; at least it was being verbalized. Then came the feeling. It hurt. So much hurt, and so few words to put it in. The vocabulary of English is expansive, is expanding, but it seemed, at least at first, not to be enough to encompass what had happened. It hurt.
So, Dr Richard Gipps and I started. First with the sensations, of stickiness, of the in-ness of the action, the act of someone being in one. That was the violation, of body, of mind. But the mind came first, first of all. The violation was mental, and then we found it was also intellectual, theological, and in fact, historical. But that last fact is only now, now as I record the actions of what happened in Sussex in the 1980s, becoming true. This is an historical document, speaking out, writing out what happened under the watchful, not watchful eye of the bishop of Arundel and Brighton.
It was complicated. At least at first. It is complicated even now, now after all these years of discussion, of thinking, and of more discussion. Something cosmic, of the order of creation, had happened to me. That it is hard to comprehend. That there was created in that moment, those moments, a theology of violation, of the child wronged. Something spectacular in its scope was begun, a series of thoughts set in motion in the bedroom, in the study, in the confessional. At the heart of it was the creator, in that moment of creation, the divine being was made complicit in the actions of a disturbed but orderly man in Sussex, a man cloaked in the blackness of his church. He was not at the English College in Rome then, but was he very far from it? It too was made part of what happened, made part of the weft of my life. That institution, which I have never seen, will never see, was made complicit too in these creative destructive acts.
So, Dr Richard Gipps and I continued, carefully reconstructing the self from the waste years. These were not the ‘wilderness years’, they were about wasted years, of missed opportunities, chances to be reborn. The word was made flesh and the word was man. Flesh, that simple encarcasement, something instinctive, feeling, with thoughts and emotions, unthinking, unfeeling, was made urgently present to me.
The presence of the other. The other man, but not the other man I wanted or welcomed, although I accepted that in that strong, intellectual, theological thinking being was something of the order of creation. Was this what it was all about? This abuse, this violation? Was that the reason for existing in the world, to be made flesh, to be made man. Was this what it meant to be a man?
I can’t breathe
That, that denial of the very force for life was the only absolution I ever received in that study in Sussex. It hurt. It hurts still. It hurt then and it will always hurt, this, that.
*
I sit at my desk, think, and write a letter to myself from myself for the morning and place it in my pocket.
*
All the urgency is gone now. I have done it. I have created an historical document, which puts the record straight about what happened in Sussex in the 1980s. I can set it to one side for the moment, having done it. Now I can get on with living my life, with the work I have to do, with Dr Gipps; academically. It is wonderful to think that I have created something so clear and honest about what happened. But that is not my life, which is to be lived now. I have had the sense that I spin a lot of discs in my life of which this was just one. Now, for the moment, that disc can continue to spin of its own accord. I am glad that I wrote it, that it is written. All the urgency of it, of this day, has gone, now that it is done, for now. It has been a protracted labour and the child is not what I expected, but is wonderful. It is me.
Today was the day it all came right. Unbidden, as I sleep I deconstruct the self.
Sleep now, sleep. Rest, rest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With thanks to my family and friends Michael Caines, Richard Clay, Hugo Evans, Joanna Gray, Phoebe Griffith, John McTague, Verity Platt, and Claudine van Hensbergen. For encouraging me as a mentor and doctor, I should like to thank Dr Richard Gipps. For seeing some potential in this book, I should like to thank my brilliant literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, and Sophie Scard. For their diligent and fine editing of this book, I should like to thank Dan Franklin and Bea Hemming. For the preparation of the manuscript, I should like to thank Ana Fletcher. For her elegant artistic work, I should like to thank Suzanne Dean. For help with the Czech, my gratitude is due to Standa Zivny. For help with the French, my gratitude is due to Michèle Mendelssohn. I should like especially to thank Felicity James for her constant encouragement.
The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint material from the following copyright holders. While every effort has been made to acknowledge copyright holders, if any have inadvertently been overlooked the publishers would be happy to correct this in future editions.
Caitlin Moran, ‘He wired us to ourselves’, The Times, 2016 © Caitlin Moran. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN
T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, The Poems of T.S. Eliot, two vols., ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 1.193 © The Estate of T.S. Eliot
Dennis Duncan, ‘Hoggs that Sh–te Soap, p. 66’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 January 2016, 14–15 © Dennis Duncan
Rupert Shortt, ‘Encoded’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 July 2015, 8–9 © Rupert Shortt
Peter Fitch, ‘What it means to be a servant’ [http://peterfitch31.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/what-it-means-to-be-servant-reflection.html accessed 14 January 2016] © Peter Fitch
INDEX
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Ackermann, Rudolph, 128
Addison, Joseph, 15, 68
The Campaign, 68
The Spectator, 14–15
Africa, dark heart of, 31; see also Haggard, H. Rider
American Hospital, Paris, 96–97
Anglican Church, 14, 39, 61, 67
Anglo-Saxon, 175
Anne, Queen, 64
Ap Gryffyd, Matthew, 132–33
Arundel and Brighton, bishop of, see Murphy-O’Connor, Cardinal Cormac
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 147
Goldberg Var
iations, 165
Bacon, Sir Francis, 86
Bayley, John, 130
BBC News 24, 129
Beaumont Street, Oxford, 11
Beckett, Samuel, 105
Bede, 62
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 147
Beerblock, 100
Bentley, Richard, 64–65
Berkeley, George, 86
Bernard, Gerard, 5, 16, 18, 23, 34, 37, 60, 70, 77, 83, 94, 103, 136–137, 145
death, 103, 127, 144,
Bernard, Helen, 23, 29, 40, 77, 103, 104, 143,
caring nature, 104
Bernard, Margaret, 5, 16, 17–18, 23, 34, 60, 77, 103–04, 121, 127, 135, 136–137, 142, 143, 144, 146
absolution, 104
strength, 103
Bernard, Stephen, 9–10, 15, 48, 69, 77, 149
and bipolar I disorder, passim
and confession, 20, 28, 34, 73–74, 147, 185
and ketamine, 7, 112, 115, 116–119
and Roubiliac’s bust of Pope, 74
and Sherborne School, 14, 38, 39, 43, 51, 53–54, 55, 60, 61, 67, 80
and the multiverse, 7, 106
appearance at twelve, ix
constructs the self, 3–6, 9, 48
email to Dr Richard Gipps, xi
estrangement from the Roman Catholic Church, 38, 40, 137
flat in Oxford, 3–7, 24, 127, 128–129, 180
Junior Research Fellowship, 40
library of, 159
on biography, 43, 170–71
on children, 104, 108–109
on Latin, 17, 18–19
scholarship to Sherborne School, Dorset, 14
statement to the police, 32–41
suicide attempts, 54–58, 96–97, 109
wit, 44, 47–48
see also Sherborne School, Dorset; Oxford, University of
Paper Cuts Page 11
