by WALL, ALAN
I started to read deeply about the history of the order, and in my devotion to the eminent Dominican thinkers I soon grew attached to the apophatic theology of Father Victor White. His inverse manoeuvre of the soul described how all that could ever be said of God was what He wasn’t; that no positive assertions about the deity could be made at all. The sole thing we might achieve here in this sublunar realm was a self-conscious nescience, a negative theology. All any of us could know with certainty was what we didn’t know. This beguiled me, even though it stood in some ways as a rebuke to my own historical studies. I wanted to know more about what I couldn’t know. I felt properly baffled. My incomprehension had its own part to play, since the blanks inside my head and soul had evidently been ordained. All I wanted to do was to fill them in, but without committing the capital sin against time.
‘What exactly is intellectual ascesis?’ I asked my confessor in his room in Blackfriars one day. Father Geoffrey was an enormous man, who looked affably mountainous in his white preacher’s habit. He laid his head back against his chair and spoke.
‘Simply the stripping away of the inessential from the world of thought, so as to enable the true perception of reality. Even the sanctum sanctorum can become so crammed with sacred furniture that one becomes blind to the original purpose of the space. What dear Victor White was talking about was how we must empty our lives so we may discover the fullness of which they are capable, since this particular plenum needs all the space in the world for its expansion; it cannot co-exist with the clutter of our usual preoccupations. You must be emptied to be filled; he who loses his life shall find it.
‘As for negative theology, St Thomas really summed it up, you know, centuries ago: Hoc est ultimum cognitionis humanae de Deo; quod sciat se Deum nescire: here is the ultimate in the human knowledge of God; merely to know that we do not know Him.’
I went to mass each day. I took the communion bread on my tongue. I blazed with a brief sensation of holy nothingness. Transubstantial. The white disc melted slowly in the dark moist cave of my mouth. And I even began to derive a curious comfort from catachetics. After all, why did God make me? It’s a reasonable question.
11
‘I sometimes think,’ my tutor said one day, ‘that you might have been better off studying another subject. Something more explicitly scientific, perhaps something more exactly provable. You show such a scepticism in regard to factuality.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I revere factuality. My teacher Mr Crawley always said so. He thought I came close to mixing it up with religion. It’s just I can never really believe I’ve found it.’
The two essays I had written which had impressed my tutor the most were neither, strictly speaking, historical, something that bothered and amused him in equal proportions. The first had been a short history of secret writing, a subject my entanglement with the Elizabethans had obliged me to look into, and the second an account of how the The Tempest and The Alchemist, written within a year of each other, took diametrically opposed views of alchemy and alchemists, the one crediting the activity with virtue, a noble and austere virtue, the other with nothing but vice, a seamy jamboree of chicanery. It was the distance between the saintly John Dee and his iniquitous scryer, Edward Kelley, the distance between praying and being preyed upon. My tutor had found it an intriguing study of the subjective position in history.
‘Let me put the matter another way,’ he started, puffing away busily as he lit his pipe. ‘Given that factuality in the study of history can never be more than a tissue of probabilities, an interleaving of varying accounts which can nevertheless be collated in such a manner that one finally arrives at a certain point in the past and says, “It appears to have been thus,” I still wonder if you might not have settled more easily into one of those fields which can truly end their expositions with a flourish of QEDs.
‘I’ve often thought, by the way, that Wittgenstein would have been happier had he stayed with aeronautics. I daresay the rest of us would have been the poorer for his choice – though, who knows how much aerial flight might have benefited – but he himself had a mind of such steely precision, combined with such a craving not merely to know but to know with certainty, that perhaps a life among men of a similar disposition, all practical minds engaged on practical tasks, might have spared him much torment.
‘It’s as though you’re always searching for another body of evidence underneath the body of evidence. This missing body, what is it, Sean, that you think could conceal it so effectively?’
‘Transparency,’ I said without hesitation. ‘That’s the best way to be invisible.’ That was the way my mother’s life had vanished, while her body remained visible. That’s the way I’d found her, so they told me, since the memory had gone entirely into that labyrinth within.
* * *
In the summer vacations I found a job in a dehydration plant a few miles south of my grandparents’ home. Fresh vegetables were driven in at one end and dried out to shrivelled seeds on hot metal beds, before being doused in a shroud of chemicals, then bagged up and hidden in the warehouse for nine or ten years. I was working on Chemical Control and realised in the middle of a shift that the sodium sulphide valve had jammed. The legal limit of this poisonous preservative per batch was 0.2 per cent. The batches now registered 2.5 per cent. I went hurtling down the lines between the hot-beds and shouted at the shift manager to close them down. He stood staring at me in silence as I mapped out the extent of the catastrophe.
‘This shift is about to win a record bonus,’ he said smiling, ‘but perhaps you’d care to go round and explain to each one of these fellows why they’re no longer going to get it.’ There were some big lads raking those beds and I didn’t find the idea at all attractive, so I wandered off quietly back to my gauges and kept my mouth shut. He was in fact a trainee manager: white wattle lightweight panama hat, lightly freckled milky skin and a softly spoken southern voice. He had stared with incredulity one day when he saw the book I was reading as I sat waiting for my chemicals to mix: Alchemy and the Elizabethans. The riddle assigned to me for the duration of my life was, I suppose, already being inscribed. Hieroglyphs were forming on the inside of my skull, whether writing over the ones already there or merely joining them.
Some time later I heard our man explaining to a young worker (female, as it happens, and pretty) about his intermediate factory training, and how he’d soon be heading back to college in Hertfordshire, and how management was essentially all about responsibility, responsibility was the main thing really and, surprised as much as he was at my own sudden temerity, I leaned across in my baggy overalls and my peaked white cap and said, ‘I suppose you’ll be out there in eight years’ time explaining to people why they’re all getting poisoned from eating Miller’s Peas, will you? You’ll tell them all about the stuck valve and the bonus and the rest of it, given your great sense of responsibility.’
Next day he put me on spraying duties. The colouring powders they used (to make the soups in those slick little bags still look like food when water gets added after so many years) would cake up on their pallets, technicolour scenes of lunar squalor, and in the hot weather wasps would gorge on them. More wasps than I ever knew existed. Cloudfuls like locusts in a film about the Midwest, where the man stands helplessly waving at the end of a field as the skies above him darken and buzz. And I stood there in my beehive suit and visor squirting poison at them, until they turned and went for me. One of them got through. I left at the end of the week. I couldn’t stop thinking about those hidden poisons in the warehouse, silently about their business, rearranging the atoms with a hidden grin, day after day, year after year.
12
I once compiled a list of all the things I didn’t do at Oxford: punt, row for my college, attend a May Ball, eat strawberries and cream on the banks of the Isis, wear a boater, get a First, act in a Jacobean drama. What precisely did I do, I find myself asking now, apart from studying that curious mixture of darkness and light which is
the bridge between Elizabeth’s England and that of King James? Well, I managed to come across my first mention of the School of Night, so the seed of crime was already being planted. There was something about the phrase that enticed me. It produced a thrill, almost one of recognition. What was it? What did it mean? What had once been studied so intently in the dark? This might sound ridiculous, but I knew, even then, that I was being given my life’s assignment. I’d known it would come, known ever since I was little that a puzzle awaited my solution and that solving it was what I was for. We’ll have to come back to this: I can’t explain everything now. I learnt later all the terms that can be employed to describe this condition of mine, but they’re all misguided, because none of them can accept one indispensable premise: that what I’m saying happens to be true.
The literal source of my lifetime riddle, whose tail is now at last uncurling as I turn the pages of the books on the table before me, is this: a single reference, a quote from Love’s Labour’s Lost, found originally in Thomas Bridewell’s book about Walter Ralegh’s circle. I quoted it to my tutor the next day, as a paradigm of historical knowledge, or rather as a paradigm of its absence, whenever you most need it. The School of Night.
‘Your subject, Sean, I can see that,’ he said, as he unfolded another map. Not his, obviously. So I started looking into the matter more closely. So closely, in fact, that I was soon doing little else.
There has only ever been one known use of the phrase, in Shakespeare’s play, and the truth is that when history summons whoever Shakespeare was to answer for himself, which is to say to explain whatever heresy of hopelessness or expectation he has been seen to exemplify lately, by whoever his newest band of enemies are, his ghost will doubtless plead the text’s unworthiness and point to four centuries of exegesis, a squabbling line of editors and scholars whose snaking succession only goes to show that there simply isn’t evidence enough to hang a cat. Because between whatever Shakespeare wrote and the words ascribed to him today falls a mighty shadow.
All the same, my starting point was Love’s Labour’s Lost – since I could have no other. Upstairs in the Bodleian I worked away at the sources. The quarto text dates from 1598, though some say it is no more than a prompter’s or actor’s copy, corrupt beyond reconstitution. However this may be, the quarto is all we’ve got, since that is the primary evidence, even though, like the legendary directions on the road to Dublin, it might have been better not to start from here.
It was, we are told, ‘imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby’. W.W., I soon discovered, stands for William White, who had set up in business by himself in 1597, which did not give him long to practise before posterity landed him with his mighty task. Sadly, the evidence strongly suggests that he had never been much of a printer in the first place. Ballads and other ephemeral matter, read briefly or even sung in the tavern and then swiftly binned, seem to have been his stock-in-trade. With those, it is safe to assume, the rubric and typography were seldom of the first importance.
The text he bequeathed us is so incompetent, so riddled with errors both intellectual and mechanical, that the kindest supposition is that William White’s print shop was still being built at the time this job arrived. The compositor responsible gives the impression of being semi-literate and partially blind, or perhaps merely permanently drunk. He doesn’t appear to know how to use his own type-cases. He has often inserted the wrong letters in his stick, and even when he has the right ones the letters end up loose in the chase and fall out once the press has started rattling, and if the movement of the press didn’t dislodge them, then the dabbing of the ink-balls did, pushing the unsecured type out of the formes and on to the floor. Shakespeare’s words were coming astray even as they were being set; his text was falling apart at the exact moment of its translation to the printed page. The later the pull, the greater the debasement.
So in a text in which wrong becomes woug, and Ione Love, it is hardly surprising that any crux will provide endless possibilities for dispute. And so it has proved. The crucial lines for me were these:
O paradox, Blacke is the badge of Hell,
The hue of dungions, and the Schoole of night.
Creative emendations have not been slow in coming and school has been changed in one edition after another: to suit, scowl, stole, soil, to almost anything in fact except what it says, the School of Night. But, for the purposes of my study, I had to assume that in this one instance the compositor, despite himself, had it right; that School of Night was precisely what Shakespeare intended, even though there was simply no way of proving it. Short, that is, of the momentous discovery of an unknown and undiscovered text.
The School of Night. So the reality of this glittering cohort of human daring and folly, which was said to surround Walter Ralegh, hung by a single thread, thin and bright as gossamer: one half of a disputed line in Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost. They were a group of men who had renounced the company of women so that they could give their lives over entirely to study. Other phrases had been used to describe them, including Robert Parsons’ ‘school of atheism’, but the School of Night was what intrigued me. It conjured the danger, the secrecy, the notion of a truth so bright it must be shrouded in darkness. These were men with very dangerous ideas. Some of them spent most of their lives in prison. Some of them died at the hands of the State. They were careful that the words they shared with one another were never made public, and they never have been. The contents of the notebooks before me now have not been understood by a single human being between Hariot’s day and mine. And I have just made out another entry:
When we knew that Kit Marlowe was to return to Star Chamber for questioning, we spoke of the possibility of him disappearing; living elsewhere and otherwise; continuing his important work in secrecy.
I can still remember my tutor’s monologue as he descanted on the long and often troubled marriage between evidence and belief, how history is always and everywhere whatever is forever gone before us, so that what we are left with is never history itself but merely its study, the pursuit of that which has already disappeared over the horizon. I could never understand why he seemed so cheerful about it and occasionally wondered if perhaps he might have been right about my choice of subject after all. But if a man can’t travel into the past for certainty, then where is he supposed to go? At first I panicked when I realised that there were no documents to confirm there even was a School of Night, a group of dark and fearless intelligences, exploring with scepticism everything previously deemed unapproachable in any mode other than venerable credulity. Then I accepted the riddle as a gift. By now all my certainties about Shakespeare had disintegrated, except for one: that whoever wrote the works of William Shakespeare, it wasn’t the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare. In regard to the authorship question I was at sea, and not always above the waves. It was almost enough to make you turn away from the past altogether and put your faith in the present instead. Which is perhaps why, when Dominique Grayson invited me into her college bed, I accepted the offer with barely a backward glance towards Sally and the feelings I’d once had for her, now squandered in the recklessness of passion. Her passion for my friend Daniel. Daniel Pagett. Dear dead Dan.
13
In my last term I gave my talk to the Historical Society on the history of Renaissance alchemy. Charlie Leggatt was there, drunk but characteristically articulate.
‘They were searching for a world of slaves and gold. They just thought alchemy was a cheap way of getting there, that’s all.’
‘Ralegh never wanted slaves,’ I said. ‘He never treated anyone like slaves.’
‘He treated the Irish like slaves. Butchered them in their hundreds. Never even expressed a moment’s regret. You might at least make an effort to solidarise with your own coreligionists from darker times, Sean.’ Charlie always did have the last word in any dispute.
By then Dominique and I were already preparing to leave for London. I had my job at the BBC an
d Dominique her place at the Tavistock, where she would train to be a therapist. She had arranged for us to live in part of a house in Swiss Cottage, owned by one of her father’s friends. The students from my college year were about to disperse into a gallimaufry of vocations and employments: communications, commerce, education, industry, advertising, banking. Many went into the City, some I suppose into permanent exile and a few on to the dole. There was a rumour going the rounds that Henry Willoughby, whose face seemed to be carved out of lard, his delicate nose like the tip of a fin emerging from it, had joined MI5. Later still I heard he’d gone to Belfast. Intelligence work. Undercover.
But I nearly forgot. There was one other thing I never did when I was at Oxford and that’s find out what it would have been like in the company of Daniel Pagett, because Dan never actually arrived.
* * *
Dominique was small. Her black hair fell in natural ringlets across her cheeks and forehead. The effect of such an abundance of dark curls against her sun-mottled skin, and her delicately hooked nose, reminded me of a painting I’d once seen. Maybe of a madonna, but a madonna who was a street girl or a peasant. Just possibly, it might have been a courtesan, but it was almost certainly fifteenth-century Italian, though Dominique, as she soon informed me, was twentieth-century Anglo-French.
She was so light that with one hand round her shoulders and the other in the small of her back I could lift her momentarily off the bed, before we both fell again upon one another. Her jackknifed legs had the delicacy of a grasshopper’s when they ankled my thighs. On our second night together, I lavished my tongue on her breasts until they glistened with moisture in the dark.
