It was one of those long June days that lovers of Scotland treasure, when Burningbush alternates between sunlight and fog-shrouded mystery. Though I had been there only twice before, the town seemed deeply familiar. With its winding streets, cathedral ruins, and stone houses built in centuries past, it cast an immediate spell upon me, and I enjoyed a leisurely walk from the train station reminiscing about my previous visits. On my way to the inn where I would stay, I stopped at a store recommended by a friend to look for golf memorabilia. The owner, a lively, sweet-faced lady in her seventies, was disappointed that she didn’t have a photograph I wanted of Bernard Darwin as a member of the 1922 Walker Cup team, the first to visit America. He was her favorite golf writer. Did I know that he was the grandson of Charles Darwin?
“Yes,” I replied. “Have you read his Links of Eiderdown?”
“Isn’t it beautiful!” she said, looking over her horn-rimmed glasses. “More people should read it. And do you know The Mystery of Golf by Arnold Haultain?” When I said that I did, she seemed impressed. “Do you enjoy philosophy?” she asked. I said I’d written a book about golf that had some philosophy in it.
“Oh!” she said brightly. “What’s it called?”
“Golf in the Kingdom. But it was published fifteen years ago. You wouldn’t have heard about it.”
“Now Mr. Murphy!” she scolded. “It’s set here in Burningbush. Of course I’ve heard about it.” I was flattered, but afraid to ask if she had any copies for sale. “Have you read it?” I asked. She said that she had, and I asked if she’d known Shivas Irons.
“No,” she sighed. “I moved here after he left. What an extraordinary man he must have been. Was he everything you said he was?”
“As the years go by, he seems even more amazing. I’m looking for clues to his whereabouts.”
“So you think he’s still alive?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. When I was here last, in 1970, no one knew where he was. He’d be in his late sixties or early seventies now.”
“Well,” she said, “I might have a lead for you. A gentleman from Edinburgh, a Mr. Hannigan, comes here for books from Mr. Irons’s collection. I have his address.”
Startled, I asked how such books came into the store’s possession.
“People have them. Every now and then we get one. Each has that special mark.”
“What mark?”
“Didn’t you see it? That insignia? Didn’t you describe it in your book?”
“No. I didn’t know his books were marked.” I was amazed at my good luck. “Can you draw it for me?”
She led me to the back of the bookstore, sat behind a little desk, and wrote Hannigan’s name and address on a slip of paper. Then she drew this mark above Hannigan’s name:
“Is it a caduceus?” I asked.
“I think it’s his initials, with two S’s mirroring each other.”
“He was left-handed and could do mirror-writing,” I said. “Maybe he made the mark with both hands. But what does the second S stand for?”
“I don’t know. It’s too bad we don’t have one of his books to show you. Leave us your address in case we find one.” She stood abruptly, with an energy that belied her years. “Ah, but I have something else you might like! Here, let me find it for you.” She crossed the store and took a book from a shelf of rare editions. It was a handsomely bound but well-worn tome, published in 1893, entitled Golf: Its Roots in God and Nature. Turning its yellowed pages with care, I saw that its author was one Mortimer Crail, a professor of Greek philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. These chapter titles caught my attention:
“In Praise of Slowness in Love and Golf”
“The Mutual Entailment of Virtues in Aristotle, the Stoics, and Golfers”
“The Unmasking of Atheists in Golf”
“The Platonic Ideas as Exemplified in the Circularity and Other Archetypes of Golf”
“On the Reconciliation of Dreams with Actual Shots”
“Ectoplasmic Phantasms on Golf Courses”
“Ochema: The Subtle Body in Golf”
Ochema is a word used by ancient Greeks to represent the spirit-body. I turned to the chapter with that title, and found a catalog of terms used by Neoplatonists to describe the vehicle of subtle matter in which the soul travels in ecstasy, dreams, and the afterlife. Crail related each of these terms to golf. Astroeides, for example, a word for the spirit-body in its “star-like” aspect, was equated with the “shining face, physique, and emanation of Angus Pattersone, the golf champion of Fife.” Simulacrum, which refers among other things to the soul’s mirror-imaging of the flesh, should be used by golf instructors to emphasize the fact that “mind and body have an immortal marriage, in brain and muscles now and the ochema hereafter.” Crail seemed to have brought considerable erudition to his subject. The book was an astonishing encyclopedia of connections between golf, human nature, God, and the life to come. There was even a chapter on the fairy faith, with reports of brownies observed on Scottish links, and a discussion of apparent demonic possession during a tournament for pairs at Muirfield. The madness of the game had surfaced again in this Scottish professor. Though I’d ventured into such territory in my own book, Crail had gone beyond me. Turning to the chapter titled “The Unmasking of Atheists in Golf,” I read:
The game irresistibly leads to prayer. You have only to think of your most recent outing. Perhaps you felt a prayer of gratitude after a beautiful shot, or of supplication, or of spontaneous conversation with God. Every golfer on occasion blames Deity for golfing misfortune. No golfer escapes the urge to pray. The impulse is involuntary, constant, and irreversible.
A portrait of Dr. James Sterling, celebrated by The Honourable Company for his successful litigation for the rights of golfers on the Musselburgh Links, depicts the gentleman, who was famous for his militant atheism, kneeling in front of a bush. It is much debated whether Dr. Sterling was kneeling in prayer or looking for his ball. Like the rest of us, atheists are driven to prayer by the game. Golf’s peculiar stress induces the Platonic anamnesis, as the soul remembers its origins. The game unmasks our deepest nature, which is rooted in God.
I turned to a passage on the Platonic Ideas. “More than any other sport,” Crail wrote, “golf dramatizes the noetic archetypes. Its circularity expresses Perfection. Its rules reflect the True. Its etiquette embodies Goodness. Its fairways reveal eternal Beauty.”
“Isn’t it a wonderful book!” said the lady. “Would you like to buy it?”
“It’s unusual,” I said with hesitation. “Have you read it?”
A dimpled smile appeared on her round and lively face. “Every chapter!” she said. “Even the ones with Latin and Greek.”
“He must have been a dedicated golfer. I didn’t know you could find so much Platonic philosophy in the game. I mean … well, it’s a long way from Plato to golf.”
“Not in Scotland!” she exclaimed. “If he lived here, Plato would play.”
Her remark made me think of Immanuel Kant. It was inconceivable that he would play, whether he lived in Scotland or not. And what about Hegel or Schopenhauer? I couldn’t picture them on the links. “Well, Plato was an athlete,” I murmured. “But it’s hard to see him teeing it up.”
Turning to Crail’s essay on slowness, I found a long comparison of golf with erotic love written in an elevated style punctuated by vivid anatomical details and sentences in Latin and Greek. Playing golf with calm recollection, the professor wrote, produces bedroom ecstasies as yet unsuspected by the human race. But to receive such grace, one needs to make a deliberate stand—in both golf and sexual concourse—against “the momentum of habitual rapidity.” According to Crail, each of us is “fixated upon a limited version of the life to come” and for that reason cannot experience “the full splendor of golf or the wedding bed.” Indeed, we are a collection of cells that behaves like a “thundering buffalo herd.” Because “our chief exemplar is always the person we were just a moment before,” most of u
s cannot slow down sufficiently to hit a golf shot or caress a lover properly. With stately cadence, Crail described the right way to stroke an iron, a drive, a putt, a cheek, a breast, a stomach, a thigh.
Reading these elevated but explicit instructions, I was suddenly aware that the lady was watching me. She stood nearer than she had before, her eyes magnified by her horn-rimmed glasses. Could she tell what I was looking at? Deciding that she couldn’t, I continued to peruse Crail’s golf erotica. Because certain holes are female, he wrote, they have to be approached with special care. Their undulations, like the curves of a lady’s physique, “should be caressed with the eye before play begins, lovingly embraced in the mind before any blows are administered to them.” This principle was especially evident on the final hole of a links then famous in East Lothian, which ran between long, gentle rises that converged at the green. “It is a difficult hole to penetrate,” he wrote. “The terror it causes male golfers can only be understood if one recognizes its female soul, which threatens annihilation.”
Without my noticing, the lady had moved closer and was reading the chapter with me. “Isn’t it romantic!” she said with surprising boldness.
“Romantic?” I said, pretending innocence as I turned to another page. “It’s certainly big. I wonder who published it.”
“Let’s see.” She helped me find the title page. “The Crail Press. It must have been a family business.” She finally moved away, and I continued to leaf through the yellowed pages. There were soaring passages on the ontology and ethics of golf, on the connections between the game and mesmerism, on certain relations between the number eighteen and the hierarchical triads of Neoplatonic philosophers. Did Crail actually play? I wondered. Had golf’s frustrations driven him to these speculations? During a faculty golf tournament at Stanford University, a noted physics professor had suffered a manic episode in which he claimed to understand the secrets of string theory and multidimensional space. Perhaps Crail had experienced a similar inspiration.
Then I turned to his description of an apparent demonic possession that happened on the Muirfield Links in 1892, during a competition for man-woman pairs sponsored by the Edinburgh Company of Golfers. It involved a barrister from Edinburgh named Stewart Garrick and his wife, who were matched against a Major James MacDougall of the Cold stream Guards and his fiancée, Anne Forbes, a great-niece of Mrs. Garrick. The barrister’s wife, Crail wrote,
had a famous and vicious wit, which she frequently used against her husband in public. Mr. Garrick, a stern and exemplary figure, a model of probity in the courts and leading member of the Scottish Church, who is celebrated for his occasional lectures on Moral Theology at the University of Edinburgh, was well-known for playing with only three clubs. Miss Forbes, a great beauty who was much admired it seems by Mr. Garrick, with Major MacDougall made a formidable team in such competitions. In this match, the Major and Miss Forbes won every hole until the infamous incident on the tenth green.
As their losses had mounted, Mrs. Garrick’s remarks to her husband had grown increasingly venomous, causing either consternation or mirth among the approximately seventy onlookers. After their loss on the ninth hole, with their match in immediate jeopardy, Mrs. Garrick loudly declared that Mr. Garrick needed a new set of balls, to which Mr. Garrick responded with quiet solemnity by asking if she would lend him hers. They did not speak again until the foursome reached the next green, where Garrick began swearing profusely.
The eminent gentleman, it is said, exhausted the entire Scottish lexicon of curses, uttering words in Gaelic as well as English while viciously beating the fairway with his putter. During his tirade, which would last for fifteen minutes, Mrs. Garrick forfeited the match, and with Miss Forbes and every female onlooker, as well as several men in attendance, returned to the Muirfield Club House. The men who remained attempted to pacify Garrick, without success, until three of them began to curse in the same wild manner. One of these gentlemen, a Mr. James Ramsay of Edinburgh, was a frequent partner of Garrick’s at golf, and the remaining onlookers believed he was trying with misplaced good fellowship to give his friend’s embarrassing behavior a semblance of normalcy. But he was then joined by two other men in a grievous display of rage and profanity. Those who watched said they had never witnessed such a frightening spectacle. Mr. Ramsay, like Garrick a person of impeccable reputation, later said he had felt possessed. Never before, and never since, had he felt such anger toward his wife, who with a group of their friends had watched the match until Garrick’s seizure.
But the most arresting feature of the episode was not the cursing. In the midst of it, there appeared a phantom hovering directly above the unfortunate Garrick. Subsequently, about half of those present claimed to have seen it, though there were different accounts of its aspect and activity. Some thought it resembled Mrs. Garrick. Others took it to be a double of Garrick himself, and a few declared it to be a demon. It is beyond dispute that approximately half the onlookers saw this disembodied spirit. Some attributed the entire incident to group delusion, some to demonic possession, some to the cumulative effect of golf’s frustrations upon the four men, while others thought it might have been caused by the mushrooms served that noon at the Clubhouse.
In my judgment, the incident gives further evidence of golf’s power to elicit those supernormal events lately studied by the Society for Psychical Research and its leading theoretician Frederic Myers. Using Myers’s felicitous language, the apparition might have been the result of psychorrhagy, that is, the spontaneous hemorrhaging of psychic contents, in this case so strong that it formed a phantom. Such an eruption might have come from Garrick himself or from his wife, each of whom appeared to harbor murderous impulses toward the other. According to Myers, all strong emotion can be directed subliminally to the production of supernormal functioning.
Reading this passage, I thought of my own experience while playing with Shivas Irons. I, too, had seen a phantom which, like the apparition at Muirfield, had produced different reactions among various onlookers. But I had repressed my memory of it and hadn’t mentioned it in Golf in the Kingdom. And here again was Frederic Myers! For several years, I’d sensed that the way to Shivas went through him.
Suppressing my excitement, I asked the lady how much the book cost. Almost certainly, bargaining would be necessary. But she wasn’t a business type. “Why, there’s no price listed.” She pointed to the back of its front cover. “Even though there’s this dollar sign.”
“Is that a dollar sign?” I asked. “Or is it Shivas’s mark!”
“Well!” she exclaimed. “Is it? There’s only one S. No, I think it’s a dollar sign. Here, you can have it for thirty dollars.”
With a sense I was robbing the store, I paid her and waited impatiently as she put the book in a paper bag. “It makes me happy to think you have this.” She smiled sweetly and squeezed my arm. “Oh, and give me your address. Maybe we’ll get another book from Mr. Irons’s collection. And remember to look up Mr. Hannigan! He’s looking for Mr. Irons, too.”
Outside, fog was curling through the streets. I hurried my steps to The Druids’ Inn, where I had made a reservation. Finding Crail’s book was an omen, I thought, a sign that this trip might produce important discoveries. In my room, I read Crail’s entire account of the Muirfield episode, which he related to other visitations on golf courses. According to the learned professor, the royal and ancient game—like long sea voyages and mountain climbing—had a remarkable history of phantom figures. But more than ninety years had passed since Crail had published his book, and no one else to my knowledge had explored this phenomenon. Was there an unconscious conspiracy of silence about it? Even though several sportspeople, including two well-known players in the National Football League, had told me about similar visions, I had never written or talked about the apparition I’d glimpsed at the end of my golf round with Shivas Irons. Recalling the dramatic stories people had told me about phantoms in sport, I was amazed at my selective memory. Maybe I could
recapture the experience more fully when I revisited the eighteenth hole.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BURNINGBUSH CLUBHOUSE, a stately grey building constructed in the early nineteenth century, overlooks both the first tee and the eighteenth green. Viewing it on this foggy summer afternoon, I was flooded by memories of my visit in 1956. I could hear the resonant inflection of Shivas Irons, smell the fragrance of heather and surf as it wrapped me round that day, and feel the same uplifting mood.…
Our playing partner MacIver, dressed almost like a cleric in black and white, had set a compelling example for me. His unpretentious approach to the game, his simple devotion to the practices his mentor gave him, had helped me play with a relinquishment of hopes and regrets I’d never experienced on a golf course. On the thirteenth hole the state had deepened, and now, as I walked down the eighteenth fairway, it suddenly intensified. All at once, a veil dropped from my consciousness. Addressing my ball, I knew that everything—the club, the grass, this human flesh—was fundamentally light and awareness. What held it all in place? I wondered. What kept us from falling through the ground? As the ball rose toward the pin, I felt the air it passed through. Light was holding light. The evening sky, my companions, the clubhouse cohered in a thrilling but tenuous embrace.
With the slightest shift of volition, it occurred to me, I could reach through the shaft of my club. By turning my mind subtly, I could alter my atomic patterning. I paused, sensing the terror that lurked in these perceptions, then picked up my golf bag and walked to the green. MacIver was approaching his ball, and Shivas held my gaze for an instant. It was clear that he knew what I felt. MacIver sank his putt, and Shivas nodded to indicate that it was my turn.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 2
