I was in the dark. I felt no roof above me nor walls on either side. There was only a floor, solid enough but covered with a kind of grit which crackled when I walked. Strangely enough, though I could see nothing, I felt safer, less threatened than I had been since my time in the garden of the dead. I walked forward, knowing no direction, caring for none, pleased only that I made conscious progress, of a sort. It was a long while before I thought I saw a light, albeit a grey one. Moving forward the light resolved itself into a figure that was walking towards me, still too dim and distant to identify. When I stopped it stopped too. I tried raising an arm, it raised a mirror image of my arm. Was I walking towards a looking glass, then? I shouted, but my voice met a dead acoustic so that I could barely hear myself speak. I began to run towards it and it ran too. The next moment my head crashed into glass. It was a mirror, but a thin one, because I was now walking through it and found myself in a dimly lit space, surrounded by images of myself.
Behind and before me to my left and right my reflections stretched away into a dull green distance. I began to feel trapped once more, but there must be a way out. If there had been a way in, then there must be a way out. Indeed there was. As I was feeling my way around this hall of mirrors which were on the floor and the ceiling as well, I found a break in the long smooth surface. Here was a passageway, but it too was walled and floored and ceilinged with glass reflections of myself. The atmosphere in it was even more oppressive than the hall, but I resolved to walk down it, because it might lead somewhere.
I thought that it was strange that I could see all these reflections of myself and yet I could detect no source of light. I paused to consider this, studying myself closely.
The most visible part of me was my face and I came to the conclusion that whatever light there was in this strange environment was coming from my own head. I was wearing the costume that I wore in the theatre but the material was not so lustrous as I had thought it was, the sequins and pearls that studded the velvet brocade of my doublet no longer shone. I saw too that my make-up was crude, turning my face into a mere mask, a mockery of myself.
The passage led to more halls of mirrors, more passages, some long, some short, some vast, others confined. In these mirrors the images of myself seemed strangers to me. The costumes I wore were constantly changing. I recognised them as belonging to roles I had played, or those that I aspired to play. Once I caught sight of myself in the careless Regency elegance of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. I stopped before this image longer than the others and slowly the shame of it began to engulf me.
Each image I encountered was not myself, but a projection of myself, a wish fulfilment. Once I caught sight of me dressed as Cleopatra. The resemblance to my mother shocked me.
I stopped, I tried to keep silence but found that the beat of my heart had filled the chamber with monstrous echoes. Where else might I go now, surrounded at last by these travesties of myself? Long moments passed while the beat of my heart slowed to the reverberation of a great funeral drum.
The last mirror image was the moment of final realisation, I suppose, though an understanding had been growing on me for some time. I saw before me in the mirror a form of myself dressed in a billowing white ballet shirt, a pink velvet doublet and purple tights. On my head was an extravagantly plumed hat of purple velvet that surmounted a wig of blonde curls. I held in my hands a rose which was as red as my rouged lips that pouted in a dead white face. The expression on that face was loathsome. I saw in it all the self-importance and self-delusion of my young life. I, as Romeo, the star, the great actor, the idiocy of it all. I was not he.
Then came the decision. I retreated to one wall of the great reflecting chamber and running as fast as my legs and my heart would allow me, charged down the hall straight at Romeo while he ran like a fury to meet me. We collided in a crash of broken glass, and a million starry shards shattered across me as I fell through the fractured mirror and into space. Down I went, down a tunnel towards a light, bright and clinical and uninspiring, but a light nonetheless. Then with a convulsive leap as it seemed to me I landed on an operating table, gasped, vomited, opened my eyes and found myself surrounded by masked medical men and women. I tasted the sourness in my mouth and was almost blinded by a shaft of pain in my head, but I knew for the first time in my life that I was alive again. Someone said, fatuously, ‘Hi, Romeo!’ I gasped for breath and vomited again. I felt safe, and matter-of-fact once more, but I knew my name was no longer Romeo.
Sartre was wrong, you know. Hell is not other people; hell is no-one but yourself. But again, that is not quite true either. Hell is the false self that I met and broke that day. The I that has survived is plain Horace Parsons; the I that perished, that died and went to Hell, was Romeo Cavendish. And that has made all the difference.
THE ENDLESS CORRIDOR
Before my book about him was published you could be excused for never having heard of William Sotheran. God, that sounds arrogant! I apologise—No, I don’t! It’s a fact.
If you had known about him before then, it would almost certainly have been through an eight line quotation of his verse in a celebrated essay by Thomas De Quincey entitled ‘Of Art and Madness’ in The Edinburgh Review of December 1823:
I roamed the endless corridor of Fame,
To seek a niche, a statue, or a name;
But none could find that might belong to me:
I wondered if I was, or e’er could be.
We have our hour and leave a fleeting trace:
A stone-carved name, a tear upon a face;
Even before our mortal frame’s decay
The stone has cracked, the tear is wiped away.
These lines and a few more besides can sometimes be found in old anthologies or books of quotations. They come from a poem of about 1,500 lines entitled The Castle of Oblivion which was published in 1817, the year of its author’s death.
That date, 1817, I am almost ashamed to say, was what really started it. If you are, like me, a young academic, at the start of her career, you will be all too aware of the need to publish. You simply cannot climb the greasy pole in the world of scholarship without having at least one ‘seminal study’ to your name. In addition, it has become increasingly necessary for you to have what is called ‘impact’; in other words you must make a discovery or come up with an idea that is noticed in the world beyond higher education. An article in one of the broadsheet Sunday papers, or better still a radio or television program, preferably with you as presenter, will do the trick. Then you will become an asset to your university or college; you will be valued; you will be promoted. Fail to make an impact and you become expendable. That is why I embarked on a study of the poet William Sotheran, with the bicentenary of both his death and the publication of his major work looming.
I lecture in English Literature at Wessex University and I specialise in the Romantics. As you can imagine the subject has been fairly well covered. You can’t move for studies of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the like. The trick is to break new ground, to find some minor but significant figure who has not been ‘done’ before. So I thought my luck was in when a couple of years ago I stumbled on Sotheran.
Briefly, William Sotheran (1793-1817) was the younger son of a baronet, Sir Selwyn Sotheran. He was well connected, his mother being a Wellesley and a sister of the Duke of Wellington. It was perhaps from her side of the family that he inherited the urge to excel from an early age, which he did. At the age of eighteen he composed a tragedy in verse, Belisarius which showed such promise that it was accepted for performance at Covent Garden with John Philip Kemble in the title role. (It lasted three nights.) At Oxford he continued to write verse, and, after Oxford, took holy orders, the traditional career choice of the aristocratic younger son. But he seems to have been of a restless temperament, and in 1816 he embarked on a tour of the continent, then recovering from the Napoleonic wars. Shortly after his return in January 1817, he began to show signs of mental instabilit
y. Then in August of that year while travelling by mail coach from London to Bath to take up a position of curate in the parish of Fonthill, he made an unprovoked attack on a woman with whom he happened to be travelling. Family influence saved him from criminal prosecution, and he was confined to a private asylum where he died a few months later from causes unknown. Syphilitic dementia has been put forward as a possible cause.
Shortly before his death, his best known work The Castle of Oblivion was published. I won’t go into detail; you will have to read it yourself because I genuinely think it is worth reading. I am not promoting it simply to further my academic career. But if you are going to understand or believe what happened to me I have to say something about it. De Quincey, in his famous essay, while admiring it, obviously believed it to be the product of an unbalanced mind, but I am not so sure. True, the poem was published while Sotheran was in an asylum but we have no idea exactly when he wrote it, though a rather oblique reference in the poem to Waterloo and Napoleon’s final exile fixes the date of composition as no earlier than 1815.
It is in the form of an allegorical epic. The hero, sometimes referred to as ‘the poet’, but in other parts of the poem speaking in the first person, is in the process of climbing a mountain which in one passage is called Parnassus. It is clear that the actual mountain in Greece of that name is not intended, and that Parnassus is used for its mythical association with Apollo and the Muses. The Poet meets with various adventures on his way up and when he thinks he is very near the summit, he suddenly finds that the whole of the top of the mountain is crowned by a great and ancient fortress, the eponymous Castle of Oblivion. The poet enters the castle and there things get very weird indeed. The poem begins to resemble a contemporary Gothic novel of the most lurid kind and the hero has a succession of horrific and bizarre escapades involving flying skeletons, giant toads dressed as monks, strange shifts in perspective, and, worse still . . . No! You’ll just have to read it for yourself! Eventually the poet makes his escape but the experience has shattered him and he retires to, as Sotheran puts it, ‘a hermitage obscure’, there to live out the rest of this life, the final couplets reading:
Down lonely paths in some sequestered glade
Where yew trees cast their melancholy shade
He wanders now, a neighbour of the dead
His deeds dishonoured and his verse unread.
It is on the basis of the episodes in the castle that De Quincey decided that The Castle of Oblivion must be the work of someone who was already insane. Nowadays our view of what is sane and what is not is more nuanced and besides, I think I can grasp a kind of meaning behind all that strangeness. Or I thought I could. Maybe. Where was I?
Well, it is almost two years ago now since I began seriously researching Sotheran, and, almost immediately, I had the most extraordinary piece of luck. Luck? Was it luck? Oh, hell, judge for yourselves!
I had gone to London to visit the British Library which holds the only extant printed copy of Sotheran’s tragedy Belisarius. It’s pretty hard going, as most verse dramas from the early nineteenth century are, though it is an astonishingly accomplished piece of work for an eighteen year old. The only sign of real dramatic life comes in the final act when the great Byzantine general Belisarius is seen blind, forgotten and disgraced, begging at the Pincian Gate in Rome. (This was a popular legend beloved of painters and opera composers: history tells a different story, but never mind.) His last speech ends as follows:
For Time, the only conqueror at last,
Extinguishes the lamp of glorious fame
And with a shrug of his great sable robe
Enfolds the world in universal night. (He expires.)
Even in this early work Sotheran seems to have had an almost pathological obsession with fame and the transience of reputation. We imagine it is only our age that is celebrity obsessed, but we are wrong. I was beginning to think that I had the key to his character and art. I made notes; I jotted down quotations. I experienced the thrill that all academics feel when they believe they have a thesis, an original focus for their studies—a book!
I emerged from the British Library at around five. It was an inky October evening. The sky hung low and threatened rain; in spite of which I was feeling rather exultant. Then, as I was crossing the Concourse with the great bronze statue of Newton in it, a male voice just behind me said:
‘Hey, madam! You dropped this!’ And a grubby copy of the Daily Mail was thrust into my hand.
Madam! I am thirty two; I am unmarried and I have never been called ‘madam’ in my life before. And I never read the Daily Mail! Nobody at Wessex University would allow themselves to be seen dead with the Daily Mail: it’s The Guardian or nothing.
I caught only a brief glimpse of the man who had given me the paper. He looked like some sort of tramp. I had an impression of lank, straggling hair over a long rusty black greatcoat and dark, lugubrious eyes. By the time I had recovered myself sufficiently to repudiate the doubtful gift, he had shuffled off somewhere. I might have thrown the wretched newspaper into a nearby bin, only I had a long train journey back to Wessex ahead of me and I felt in need of some light reading after the adolescent glooms of Belisarius.
As it turned out, what with the crowds on the underground, a delay in a tunnel, and a consequent rush to catch the 5.30 from Paddington, it was only when I was safely on the train to Morchester that I had the leisure to look at my Daily Mail. I began to leaf through it irritably, now thoroughly angry that I had meekly accepted it from a total stranger. To add to my annoyance, I noticed that it wasn’t even today’s newspaper: it was two days old. I was just about to throw it away when my eye caught a headline.
NONE OF YOUR ‘FRACKING’ BUSINESS SAYS PEER
As it happens, my partner Julia is head of Environmental Studies at Wessex and so naturally I take an interest in such matters.
Apparently a certain Lord Glimham was allowing a company to prospect for shale gas on his estate and the locals, assisted by various environmental groups, were objecting strongly. Glimham had responded to their protests dismissively by saying that it was ‘nobody else’s ******* business’ and this had inflamed the situation still further. A photograph of his Lordship showed an overweight, red-faced, truculent looking person of about fifty in a tweed Norfolk jacket; an easy man to hate, I thought. Then, further down the page a paragraph made my heart jump.
In the nearby village of Glimham Parva there have been various demonstrations. Lord Glimham’s effigy has been burnt on the Green and the inn sign of the local pub, The Sotheran Arms, has been defaced, Sotheran being Lord Glimham’s family name.
Could it be . . . ? I got out my tablet and began to google frantically. Yes, it was the same family. William’s elder brother George had been a cabinet minister in Sir Robert Peel’s 1841 administration and was consequently raised to the peerage. He took his title from the family estates at Glimham. The present Lord Glimham was the fifth Baron and still lived at the ancient family seat of Glimham Hall where William Sotheran had been raised. Could there still be papers relating to William Sotheran in the ancestral home?
As soon as I got back to my flat in Morchester I began to compose a letter to Lord Glimham. It was my partner Julia who suggested that I should gently hint that it might improve his Lordship’s tarnished image if it were known that he was helping me in my researches. I sent the letter on University of Wessex headed notepaper but I included my own mobile number and email address.
To my amazement, only two days after I had sent the letter, I had a phone call on my mobile.
‘Glimham here. What’s all this about William Sotheran?’
The voice was loud, braying, assertive—why do posh people have such loud voices?—but I detected a certain hesitancy, a vulnerability even, under the bluster. Arrogance is nearly always a carapace. Within a few minutes I found I was being invited down to Glimham the following Friday. When I told Julia about it, all excitement, she looked at me quizzically.
‘You�
�re not going to leave me, are you, for this William Sotheran?’
It was a joke, of course, and we both laughed, but I thought that Julia spoke not entirely in jest.
At the gates of the Glimham estate I encountered a huddle of protesters watched over by a single glum policeman. There was a smattering of young people, but most of them were very middle class retired types with grey hair. They had Thermos flasks and camp stools with them for rest and refreshment. They shouted ‘No more fracking!’ at me as I passed through the gates and onto the long drive up to the house. I felt vaguely guilty that I had not responded to them in some way.
I drove through a mixture of park and farmland until, in a dip, I found Glimham Hall. It was not an architectural gem: a plain Queen Anne box of red brick, like a doll’s house, with a few ill-advised Victorian additions and excrescences. As soon as I was parked on the gravel drive in front of the Victorian limestone portico Lord Glimham in his green tweed Norfolk jacket emerged to greet me. I had taken the trouble to arrive precisely at the time agreed.
I had not expected to like Glimham, and I didn’t, but at least you knew where you were: some way beneath him admittedly. He treated me rather as if I were a high class plumber come to look at his drains. He ushered me into the drawing room where his wife, a skeletal blonde who might once have been beautiful, offered me a small cup of coffee and then never spoke again.
‘To tell the truth,’ said Glimham, who was not one for polite preliminaries. ‘We don’t talk much about William in the family.’ It was as if William Sotheran were still around, a disgraced uncle perhaps. ‘But I think we have some papers relating to him. Do you suppose they could be valuable?’
The Ballet of Dr Caligari Page 15
