Black Marsden

by Wilson Harris

  What a waste, I thought. I wanted to call out to her but stifled my cry and retired into Old Tolbooth Wynd. When I calculated they had gone some distance I resumed my way along the pavement. The phantasmal voice in my sleeve kept murmuring—What a waste. What a waste. What a waste.

  It was the word waste which seemed a sigh and then a snarl in cowl or sleeve to invoke a vision of Marsden standing within Jennifer Gorgon. “Set me as a seal upon thine heart … love is strong as death … jealousy is cruel as the grave….” It all flashed up and died away again but it lasted long enough for me to ponder upon Jennifer’s pale young man also standing within that terrifying complex of love. Had he been projected from Black or Fierce Marsden? Had Marsden’s phenomenon of personality—phenomenon of unconsciousness and implacable love—so engulfed Jennifer that when she was away from him (even for a day or an hour) she sickened without knowing it and her glowing maternity-desiring body was intent upon or obsessed by dismembered or anaemic presences like foetuses of soul? Perhaps Black Marsden had implanted in her his cradle or gaol or bed within which or upon which she was ridden by his eunuchs, his longing for fulfilled heirs of spirit which held her captive therefore as current frames or substitutes of his unfulfilled dream (or hers).

  I was astonished by the power Marsden possessed—power so real it was too real to be proven since it saturated and therefore voided all instruments of proof. And yet I felt with all my heart and mind there must be a way to wrest her from him.

  *

  When Goodrich got home (his mind obsessed with Jennifer’s pale rider or ghostly young man) he found a letter on the table in his bedroom. It was from Marsden and ran as follows:

  “My dear Goodrich,

  You will recall I hope our conversation a fortnight ago on Tabula Rasa. How to create an atmosphere in which piety and decorum rub shoulders with the underground and every erasure of pattern brings a fascination with death—with a murdered past—or brings a measure of concentration upon an intricate reborn labyrinth of resources within which the boundaries of conquest, conquest of public/private space, conquest of problematic being, grow ever more pertinent to the Dark Ages. I mean our Dark Ages—twentieth-century global man.

  We discussed you may remember Knife’s part as a poor beggar. And I have also gathered from Jennifer that you know of her part as Salome. Lots of intriguing complications here so be on your guard. I am glad to say the mechanics of my production are shaping up and I have a prospect for rehearsals in the Grass Market. Before that, however, we would need to purchase some preliminary costumes, masks etc. I have calculated that £2,000 would be a help at this stage. A down-payment on a place, material for costumes, and actors’ salaries.

  By the way a word about Harp. (His actual name is James Harpe.) He is in Canada at the moment and should be with us quite soon. He is an independent artist—a very rare commodity these days as you know. I love dear old James. He has a private income—small but adequate—and therefore he will stay in a hotel in Edinburgh when he arrives. Mrs. Glenwearie has kindly made some inquiries.

  As you know he has the reputation of a musician rusting in a garret. But this doesn’t really meet his case. You will judge for yourself when you meet him.

  Yours, M.”

  Goodrich opened a drawer and wrote out the desired cheque, sealed it into an envelope and left the room. The house was silent. Mrs. Glenwearie was away for a couple of days. He made his way up to Marsden’s room on the second floor, tapped on the door but received no reply. He slipped the envelope under the door and was possessed by the sensation as he did so that there was someone in the room after all.

  He coughed out loud and his voice rang hollowly in the corridor. He was tempted to push the door open and had, in fact, already put his hand upon the knob when he saw his features stretched and torn and eerie and reflected in the old-fashioned brass knob, polished religiously by Mrs. Glenwearie. It looked like an extraordinary spatial doodle: enormous brow, sprite-like face running down into a concertina image—compressed torso and feet which held him now at bay in his own house; and he desisted from pushing the door open at the last moment with a sense of hollow relief, the relief of purgatory. Perhaps abnormal wealth creates a leprechaun self-portraiture. And purgatory creates an anomalous dimension of privacy.

  *

  He came into the sitting-room a few days later to hear Jennifer saying to Marsden: “Mardie, I think you’re drinking too much. Much too much. Where do you get the money from?” Doctor Marsden swung towards Goodrich. “Ah Goodrich,” he cried. “I’ve missed you the past day or two. That deep diary of yours I imagine.” His eyes glinted. “I was about to give Jennifer and Knife my impressions of the role of John….”

  “In the context of virtuous Salome?”

  “Why, of course, my dear boy. A knock-up—or is it mock-up?—of the Baptist.”

  “Knox the Baptist,” said Knife matter-of-factly.

  “Ah,” Marsden warned, “Knox is an immense figure. Each age secretes afresh the most ancient treasures and anomalies of freedom.” He picked up a large volume from the table behind him entitled John Knox by Jasper Ridley. “Do you know”—he glanced at the portrait on the cover—“that this portrait is said to be a portrait of someone called Tyndale which hangs, I believe, at Magdalen College? But in Ridley’s view it is actually a likeness of Knox.”

  “What do women’s liberation make of Knox?” asked Knife and he grinned at the ceiling.

  “What do women make of John the Baptist? They never cease to love him. In virtue or love lies a certain animus of history—a certain necessity to conceive real dragons….”

  “Do you mean,” said Knife, grinning still, “that love of freedom makes a virtue of intolerance?”

  “Read the times in which we live side by side with ages past. Freedom is a baptism in rivers of blood.” He flung open the Book of Knox and read:

  “Despite his intolerance, his dogmatic adherence to every word of scripture, and the tyranny of his Church Sessions, (he) was a great contributor to the struggle for human freedom…. The personality of Knox, magnificent and terrible, has fascinated and appalled posterity. The aristocratic eighteenth century condemned him; the puritanical and radical nineteenth century admired him….”

  Black Marsden stopped abruptly, slammed fast his book, and sipped the tall amber liquid at his elbow (left elbow, bar sinister, Goodrich thought).

  “It is vital, Jennifer,” he said drawing close to her, “that you conceive the dragon of freedom as you play Salome. Conceive or visualize likenesses in our own time if these help.” His brow was knitted, corrugated. His cheeks seemed to bulge and sink into the physiognomy of a map—watersheds, rivers and valleys writ small but arresting and dangerous. His beard or forest fell and concealed his throat and extended upwards along his temples in wild but still decorous rings—a combination of savagery and urbanity. He stepped back at this moment and concealed his body behind a large red chair draped with a unique and rich combination of sackcloth and ashes he had bought for Tabula Rasa. He stretched his hands up and sideways as though the map of his features had acquired wings.

  He quoted John Knox:

  “I find that Athalia, through appetite to reign, murdered the seeds of the kings of Judah. And that Herodias’ daughter, at the desire of a whorish mother, obtained the head of John the Baptist.”

  The words issued from him with such startling conviction in this age, though far removed from that age, that he stood like one possessed by a devil or by a saint. His archaic/modern lips, Goodrich felt, were turning red as dark cherries where Knife had slashed into his beard which dripped now (in the theatre of action he evoked) not with blood but with greying winters. It was the strangest climax he rehearsed and Jennifer Gorgon was held by this: schooled, as it were, to a point of resolution. Affected, however, by a hint of anti-climax, of world-weariness perhaps he could not wholly suppress. But whatever reservations she may have had about the riddle of his performance—intense reality or intense unre
ality, intense vividness or intense vicariousness—she was animated by a virtuous crescendo of blood which addressed her across the ages.

  Goodrich glimpsed her with the scarecrow eye which now possessed him: she stood upon the brink of a new and inevitable mainstream rebellion of soul—a new cult of fascination with freedom. Marsden continued, blissfully unaware apparently of the spell he had cast upon all:

  “God, for his great mercies’ sake, stir up some Phinehas, Elias or Jehu, that the blood of abominable idolaters may pacify God’s wrath…. Delay not thy vengeance, O Lord, but let the earth swallow them up; and let them go down quick to the hells.”

  He stopped now and stepped away from his scarlet and black slate and Goodrich discerned upon the unique and rich material compounded of sackcloth and ashes which draped the chair in the room, intricate scenes stitched in black thread and therefore so reticent in background as to be almost invisible until one’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkroom/backcloth dimensions implicit in the scarecrow. He could see also—as his eyes grew accustomed to the strange reticent fabric of catastrophe—the huge head of John the Baptist woven into the globe. At first, he wondered, would it send a delicious shudder through Salome/Jennifer as though those blind eyes could see emotional tumbling rivers, emotional fires, passions unleashed in volcanoes within which whole populations tumbled?

  It was an intensely modern dream enacted from West to East as well as within epic abortions—stateless refugees/planned or engineered castaways.

  “Look,” Marsden said, softly pointing to the intimate and intricate scenes draped across my Goodrich sitting-room until everything became an anomaly. “What could be more modern, more consistent with act-of-man slate as well as act-of-god slate? Now, Jennifer,” his tone changed and he gave her a stick of chalk, “don’t be afraid to sketch. It’s rich stuff and everything you do can be erased.”

  “Sketch what?” asked Jennifer.

  “Why, sketch how he sees you.”

  “How he sees me? What do you mean?”

  “It’s your triumph, Jennifer. That’s what I mean. The head of John the Baptist is yours. The ball is in your court. Whatever he says, whatever archaic or modern dubbing we put on his lips—whatever fierce dubbing we use—and for that matter it could be selective speeches from contemporary figures in the New York Times or the London Telegraph or Reuter’s despatches—whatever words I dub on those lips, it’s the eyes in the head which count in the end, which speak. How do they see you, Jennifer? You are our resurgent Gorgon, our twentieth-century fascination with freedom. How do those eyes address you? How do they see you, Jennifer? Go on. Sketch….”

  Jennifer held the stick of chalk in her hand. A tide of defiance began to rise slowly within her, almost inevitably from the canvas in which Marsden sought to immerse her. Love, hate, love, hate. Now with sudden perversity she drew a square box with a slit running down the middle. Marsden sipped his drink, sensed the rising tide in her. “Is that all, Jennifer?”

  “He sees me as a pillarbox,” she said drily. “An old pillarbox—Martian female perhaps—but a pillarbox all the same. I suppose he’s right. I consume everything nowadays.”

  “What do you consume?”

  Jennifer thought a little, hardened herself against the Master. “The post is free,” she said at last. “Once you lick the right stamp. Anything, everything goes into it. This morning I received a book (from whom I haven’t the slightest notion) entitled”—she paused deliberately—“How to Fuck.” She spoke almost unflinchingly, Goodrich thought, and looked into the eyes of John the Baptist with a strange yet child-like cynicism.

  6

  Harp arrived a few days later. I was the only one in and I ushered him into the sitting-room. He insisted he had had a late breakfast at his hotel and all I could persuade him to have was coffee. He was a chain smoker and with subtle rings, which dissipated themselves into the high ceiling of the room, wreathed himself in evanescent hills and valleys. He could hardly have been more than five feet two inches tall. His legs were short and his arms long. He wore a long white overcoat—semi-military, semi-medical.

  His face, however, charmed and delighted me beyond measure. Perhaps the kindest most unpredictable face I had ever seen. A face and head which may have been dug up from some forgotten workshop of the gods where it had lain discarded on the ground or condemned as useless ages ago; so much so that his hair looked white and trodden and there was a kicked look to his chin—a kind of unpolished stubble where the feet of the elements had trod.

  He seemed the representation of technical vicissitudes of feeling which sought endlessly to cope with an interminable mopping-up operation across a giant landscape, an enigmatic landscape that was bound to dwarf him in a sense.

  He spoke of his environment and of the seasons. One vignette he drew was an evocation of late September. The trees around his house were clothed in a symphony of colour, yellows and reds and scarlets; and long flitting shadows of clouds, light as a feather in the water, mingled with a palette of sun.

  He developed his sketches and evoked such an intimate canvas of his backgrounds that we stood there at the edge of an enormous blend of intensely blue water and sky, enormous spectrum of sky and water, until night fell and we struggled down the hill and up again with wood to light a fire in the middle of the earth. To live in a house in the wilderness (cold sky) is like tunnelling a cave into the earth (cold earth) and the ghosts of fires or stars long-dead are rekindled.

  “Do you know, Harp,” I said. “Here we are in a house in Edinburgh. And the globe itself seems to be at our fingertips. I have never seen you before. And yet the fact remains that I feel as if we have known each other from the beginning of time. It’s another of Marsden’s phantoms or fascinations.” I nodded with a kind of submission to Marsden’s mirror or globe.

  Harp nodded too, his face swept by a backlash of feeling—mopping-up, preserving relationships. “If we probe and reflect and think we may discover we are related, Goodrich.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “It’s one thing to evoke a magical commonwealth (all races, all times). It’s another thing to prove it. Tell me. Who is he really? Who is Doctor Marsden?”

  Harp’s face was besieged by a sudden passion for self-abandonment—mopping-up as well as preserving and screening intimate relations within the ghostly family of man. I waited.

  “My father’s name was Hornby,” Harp volunteered, and appeared to go off at a tangent.

  “Hornby,” I said. “That rings a bell. There was a John Hornby. I’ve read about him. George Whalley wrote about him. I quote: ‘the way he died has raised obstacles almost insurmountable to anybody who wishes to discover the true nature of that vivid and desolate man’.”

  “End of quote,” said Harp with his mopping-up smile again. “Imagine Hornby’s ghost tapping out fiery morse in the heart of a Canadian wilderness.”

  “Was he a legend or was he a man?” I asked. “What do we know of him? I have read that he was quite amiable, even gregarious as a young man but all that changed as he grew older and became addicted to solitariness, courage and endurance. He died on an expedition into the Arctic in the late nineteen twenties.”

  Harp looked sad. “My father’s name was also Hornby. Unsung, unmourned who died on the same day, the same year as the other legendary John Hornby.” There was a self-mocking air of gentle tautology in Harp’s voice.

  A sudden silence descended like the ticking of a heart in the sun, ticking of a clock in the room, in the snow. And now all at once, in response to Harp’s tangent, I could feel a certain winged shadow of time, a certain winged stage of time settling around me within the commonwealth of man sponsored by ancient Marsden.

  I could see upon my inner book, whose pages now seemed to turn backwards, an immense white world in the scarecrow literature and workshop of the gods, a world of falling snow, landscape upon riverscape of snow, treacherous works and poems of ice: a single false step out there in that creation of a wilderness was hell.


  I felt I had been transported there into the intimate wildernesses Harp painted and stood face to face with Hornby himself.

  “When it falls like that,” Hornby said, “we’re in for the blackest spell. An almighty freeze-up. Madness to put a foot out of doors. But I am mad. You appreciate that, Goodrich, don’t you? You picked me up in a winter abbey….”

  “Not you, Hornby. I picked up Marsden far away from here.”

  Hornby grinned. “Marsden and I belong to a family of man incessantly seduced and fascinated by the nature of survival. Half-medical, half-military. There are also poets and magicians and religious guys, my dear Goodrich, in our family who sleep in ice and snow like Pavlov’s metaphysical dogs. Survivor hubris. Do you follow? Let me explain. I had no choice, Goodrich, as time went on (and I found myself despairing of expedition after expedition) but to become a loner. In that way I sought to bridge the distance between two legends—the famous Hornby and the obscure Hornby—the famous Marsden and all his dead mates. My mates were all dead too, you see. It was obscene in a sense to be alive. I would reproach myself—Die Hornby die. And I understood the anguish in a black man’s cry—Burn baby burn. Snow lady snow.” He glanced at the window now and I felt myself drawn back into his Arctic night as if we were steeped in psychologies written into forecasts of the weather. “Why, it’s easing up a bit, Goodrich,” he said to me. “A bloody miracle. Thank god for that. Let’s imagine, Goodrich,” he went on reminiscing as he waited for the snow to stop, “some namesake of yours stopping you in the street and saying to you—you’re GODRICH, aren’t you? Give all you possess to me. I am the poor. I have had no luck at the Pools. I am the poor. Give baby give. Pour Godrich pour.” He glanced at the window again. “Thank god it’s really easing up outside. A bloody miracle. Sometimes it’s really too much. They make too much snow up there. As I was saying, Goodrich. Fanaticism is glorious on the stage. Let down all the fake wildernesses and catastrophes you like. But I wouldn’t really dream of asking any Godrich (despite anything I may have said to the contrary) to surrender his last deadly farthing of ice…. Why, it’s stopped. It has really stopped snowing at last and I shall venture outside….”