Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  GERONTIUS

  James Hamilton-Paterson

  For Ronald Blythe

  Contents

  Title page

  Dedication

  Foreword by Colin Matthews

  Author’s Note

  A train was travelling northwards …

  He is to climb at last.

  The jerk woke the sleeper …

  It was when, in response to the bugle …

  It is the moment between dusk and dark …

  The next morning …

  Hempson and Pyce …

  Edward, exploring …

  The gale blew …

  Promptly at eleven …

  That night the wind dropped …

  Later that night …

  As he had gone about his rounds …

  The night as most of the passengers …

  The unfamiliarity of shipboard days …

  Edward also spent time in his cabin …

  So of course he sat in vain …

  In token of the latitude …

  The shipboard ritual …

  Next morning …

  Very early next day …

  From then on …

  Like many of the others …

  The pretty settlement of Santarem …

  Frau von Pussels had be posting a notice …

  She laid down her pen …

  A spotless cream panama hat …

  But within half an hour …

  Miles Moss arrived punctually …

  And an afternoon sitting on deck …

  He crossed the Atlantic in full retreat …

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Foreword

  by Colin Matthews

  Gustav Holst takes a cycling holiday in Algeria; Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, opens a grocery store in Pennsylvania; György Ligeti considers a move to Reigate; Edward Elgar takes a trip down the Amazon River. All true, if hard to believe, but the last of these is perhaps the strangest.

  Elgar’s life is copiously documented, both in his correspondence and by his biographers, but his seemingly impromptu decision to sail to Brazil in the late autumn of 1923 is (or was, until the publication of Gerontius) little known, and features nowhere in his surviving letters. His friend W. H. Reed recalled in Elgar as I Knew Him that

  he came back very full of his experiences; but the Amazon impressed him less than the fact that in South America … the opera house was the handsomest and most important building in the town … it was after this trip that he began to talk to me of opera and the possibility of his composing one.

  The opera that he eventually began to work on intermittently in the 1930s, but never completed, was The Spanish Lady, after Ben Jonson. But it was an exception to the rule: Elgar had largely turned his back on the musical world after the death of his wife in 1920, and seemed to have little focus to his life. His daughter wrote that it was characteristic of him that he ‘could cheerfully spend hours over some perfectly unnecessary and entirely unremunerative undertaking’. The Amazon venture was probably no more than a way of passing the time.

  In seizing on this lacuna in Elgar’s biography, James Hamilton-Paterson presents a convincing picture of a world-weary composer who professes no interest in music, either his own or anyone else’s. He is at pains, often to the point of rudeness, to disassociate himself from his fame; abhorring small talk, he has very little in common with his fellow passengers, and his main preoccupation during the voyage is the analysis of sea water through the microscopes he has brought with him. This bemuses the steward, Pyce, whose job it is to throw a bucket over the side of the ship to provide samples. ‘I think he’s mad,’ says Pyce to the Captain, one of the few on board with whom Elgar strikes up some kind of relationship; to his delight he is allowed to steer the ship for a few moments.

  He does make some friends: a young artist, Molly Air (picking up on the pun, Elgar immediately offers to pass the marmalade imaginaire), is planning to stay in Brazil to paint tropical landscapes, and she has some success in penetrating the carapace that Elgar has built around himself: ‘I’m just bored beyond bearing that wherever I go people feel they’ve got to talk about music, music, music. Damn all music!’ To this outburst she replies, ‘That is probably the most childish thing I ever heard a grown man say,’ and sweeps off. Elgar grudgingly accepts that he has gone too far, and they are soon reconciled; their circle expands to include a young airman, Fortescue, who is hoping to make a career out of surveying the Amazon jungle. Other passengers come and go; two respectable, middle-aged ladies are revealed as professional card sharps; the eccentric ship’s doctor jumps overboard.

  The unexpected coup de theâtre of the book takes place when the ship reaches its final destination, Manaos. James Hamilton-Paterson offers a hint of what he has contrived in his introduction, but it would not be fair to give away anything more. It is pure invention, and has no basis in fact. Yet it allows the author to dig more deeply into Elgar’s character than anywhere else in the book. We may think we have come to learn something of the gruff, bluff composer, but we know only the half of it. Elgar’s self-protective shell is punctured, and he finds it far from comfortable.

  How true to life is this imagined picture of the composer? By the time that Gerontius first appeared, the long-held opinion of Elgar as old-fashioned, nationalistic and pompous, a much-decorated friend of royalty, had largely been dispelled. A closer reading of the music, and of the life, revealed instead a depressive, hypersensitive composer, something of a hypochondriac, aware of his worth but with a perpetual chip on his shoulder. He had married above himself – his wife Alice was a general’s daughter, whereas he came from ‘trade’ (his father was a piano tuner). As a Catholic he was an outsider twice over. He certainly accepted honours – they elevated his status, but it is unlikely that they meant anything much beyond that. In the journal which James Hamilton-Paterson invents for him, Elgar writes of ‘all those dratted honours of mine – those meaningless bits of gold and ribbon I pretended to covet for Alice’s sake’.

  The imaginary journal feels completely authentic. Here he is complaining about his most famous tune:

  curse every one of its bars … How I’ve come to detest the thing! You can’t joke with the public: they know nothing but what they do know is always enough to hang you. All my music has now shrunk to that single tune … [it has] become a perennial excuse for a national bellow.

  Elgar was all his life prone to such negativity, even – perhaps especially so – at times of greatest success. In a letter written immediately after the completion of The Music Makers in 1912, at a time when he was at the height of his powers, his mood is one of utter despair:

  I sent the last page to the printer … I wandered alone on to the heath – it was bitterly cold – I wrapped myself in a thick overcoat & sat for two minutes, tears streaming out of my cold eyes and loathed the world.

  In the Gerontius journal, he picks up on the lack of success of this favourite among his own works, the most personal music that he ever wrote:

  It’s better than anyone knows about the apartness of the artist but all they can find to say is that it is a pot-pourri of self-quotations, as if I’d run out of inspiration & concocted a potboiler from the scattered corpses of previous works … Oh bitter, bitter.

  Bitterness surfaces from time to time in these pages, but mostly the mood is one of gentle melancholy – just like so much of the music, in fact. But there are moments when he rouses himself, and finds enjoyment in this unexpected trip. And all the while he reflects on his life, his achievements (or, in his eyes, the lack of them) and on the futility of music as a profession. In spite of which the sea inspire
s him to take out a sketchbook.

  The music that Elgar sketches on the voyage is related to a strange dream that he has on the train journey to Liverpool, his port of embarkation. It is a dream of the desert and the hermit Simyun (better known to us as Simeon Stylites, the fifth century saint who lived for nearly forty years on a platform on top of a pillar). This enigmatic dream is fleetingly recalled throughout the book but never explained. And although Elgar is pleased with his sketch it will lead nowhere: the sketchbook accidentally accompanies his journal when he throws it into the sea on the way back home.

  *

  The lives of composers who have, to all intents and purposes, retired from composing make for disturbing reading. Biographies that have detailed the successes and failures of a flourishing career understandably run out of steam when there is so little to write about, and ten or more years may be compressed into a handful of pages where previously they would have occupied several chapters. So it is with Elgar, and also with his contemporary Sibelius.

  The parallel with Sibelius’s last decades – he stopped composing not long after Elgar, but lived on until 1957 – and Elgar’s fading years is a striking one. Although their music has little in common – they were each probably only barely aware of the other’s achievements* – both had the same tendency to rail neurotically against fate and to rue the circumstances that had made them national figures, unable to play the roles expected of them. Both men retreated from the world; both worked fitfully on a final unachieved symphony; but whereas Sibelius destroyed his, Elgar only talked of doing so.

  A novelist would find it difficult to make a narrative out of the bleak uneventfulness of Sibelius’s final thirty years. The life has turned into something akin to a black hole from which nothing of interest can emerge. Who would have imagined that anything could be made out of Elgar’s decline? Or that such an unpromising subject could reveal so much truth, and allow a story to be told with such insight and understanding?

  Colin Matthews 2017

  * They avoided each other when The Music Makers and the Fourth Symphony shared the same programme in Birmingham in 1912.

  Author’s Note

  This novel starts from an event: a six-week journey to the Amazon which the sixty-six year-old Sir Edward Elgar made late in 1923. Almost nothing is known about this trip. It is not certain why he decided to make it although impulsiveness and restlessness were characteristic of him. What he said and thought and did in those weeks are a matter for fancy. Such is a point of departure for a work of fiction, as it was for Eduard Mörike nearly 140 years ago when he began Mozart’s Journey to Prague.

  The issue of truth in a novel whose central character is a man who did once live is not easily settled. Elgar was an artist whose life and music have been documented by modern biographers and scholars such as Percy M. Young, Michael Kennedy, Jerrold Northrop Moore and Diana McVeagh. Theirs have been my reference works.

  My greatest debt, though, is to the music. It is much – and boringly – debated whether it is permissible to infer biographical facts from a composer’s music. Yet that morbidly sensitive Englishman who experienced every note he wrote and could describe one of his own works as ‘the passionate pilgrimage of a soul’ is somebody this listener feels he occasionally inhabits more or less without presumption. Those affinities for people we could never have met are the more pungent for their element of invention. On this basis, then, the novelist proceeds with all due recklessness. I have deliberately taken a liberty by turning the shadowy Helen Weaver, to whom Elgar was briefly engaged in his twenties, into a more substantial character capable of bearing narrative weight. In so doing I have given her a new nationality and a background quite different from that of a Worcester shoe merchant’s daughter. For the rest, I tried to be as factually correct as was interesting.

  *

  When I investigated the Booth Line records for this particular journey a couple of very minor discrepancies with received Elgarian scholarship did come to light. These concern the cruise ship herself, RMS Hildebrand. Firstly, the various ship’s logs and documents which are still preserved show her captain’s name was J. Maddrell, whereas Elgar biographers who mention the trip at all invariably call him ‘Mandrell’. Secondly, a story is sometimes quoted to the effect that the weather was so bad on the first part of the outward leg that the Hildebrand’s pilot could not be put off at Holyhead and had to be taken on to Madeira. This is odd because Madeira was the third port of call. The first was Oporto, the second Lisbon, both of which were major ports with a constant traffic of vessels belonging to the Booth Line and various other British companies. Madeira was seven hundred miles further on: for a Liverpool-based pilot needing immediate passage home it makes no sense. The implication is that on this particular trip the ship missed out the first two ports and went straight to Madeira. It didn’t, however. The Hildebrand’s log (which lists the dates and times of arrival and departure at every port) shows that not only did she call at Oporto and Lisbon but took exactly as long getting there as she always did – not what one might expect were the weather as bad as is always stated.

  So one wonders about the source of this curious, but quite unimportant, incompatibility of accounts. It looks as though the information might originally have come from Elgar himself. He could well have mis-remembered the captain’s name, while far younger men proud of their fortitude have been known to exaggerate the storms at sea they have survived. Nobody bothers to check a returning traveller’s tales for veracity at the time, certainly not over such trivial details. Thus may a novelist sixty-four years later speculate on them affectionately.

  *

  To my acknowledged indebtedness to the authors named above I should like to add my sincerest thanks to David Peate of the Booth Steamship Company Ltd and Janet Smith of Liverpool City Libraries for their great courtesy and help.

  A TRAIN WAS travelling northwards from London through the grey squalls of a winter’s afternoon. From a corner seat in one of its carriages a man watched his country with the scurried perspective of a railway traveller: crossing fields at a bias, chipping off the corner of a hill, barked at by sudden brick walls and engulfed in tunnels. Desolate suburbias came and went and the tarred telegraph poles kept pace. As daylight diminished rain streaked the glass at flat angles, blurred and wobbled the scene, pooling at the corners of the pane in trembling pockets. It occurred to this man (who had dog hairs on his otherwise immaculate trouser cuffs) that he had spent much of his life in a compartment, alone and quite still, while outside it an activity called travel went on whose images beyond the window – ever different, always the same – represented not distance but time flashing by. Days, months and years had reeled past until here he was towards the end of a lifetime not going anywhere at sixty miles an hour.

  After a while he fell asleep and sleeping dreamed a vivid dream. Later, when events brought back the inessentials of this dream, the fragments had about them a satisfactory, vatic air as if they were true parts of the man he believed himself to be.

  *

  He is to climb at last.

  Although from his father’s house it appears amid the rockfield no bigger than a candle, this column has surely cast an immense shadow across his life.

  He begins the climb. Even at this early hour of morning the sun is bald and white. Above him the cedarwood rungs recede into blue glare against which the coarse stone column tapers upward.

  ‘Get on, boy,’ shouts Rahut from near his heels. ‘D’you think you’re the only one?’

  The words of this corrupt acolyte ought to bully away the last of the dreamer’s confidence. He has been declared a day-tripper, no longer someone who has tirelessly observed this limestone candle for years and in all weathers, far enough away to imagine the spiritual flame blowing from its tip night and day in invisible rags like a beacon summoning worshippers, sceptics, the curious, the petitioners, the humdrum devout from all corners of the world. This unseeable smoke from a man’s blazing soul has wafted like
incense across the skies of Syria and Cilicia. At festivals such as Sniffing the Breezes entire parties of picnickers walk from Antioch to sit on the ground at a respectful distance, singing impious songs about spring, eating dates and idly spitting the stones in tiny trajectories towards their saint. For Simyun is indeed their saint; and while it is permissible for them to treat him with a certain familiarity and spit date-stones at him from a mile away it is a big mistake for outsiders to be heard scoffing. Tourists do well to leave their witty remarks at home in Athens or wherever it is they come from with their noisy manners and bundles of biscuits stuck all over with sesame.

  Climbing this ladder to this man today, now, is a terrifying honour. Yet shouts from below the dreamer remind him that so far as Rahut is concerned this ascent is not the end of many years’ living in Simyun’s illustrious shadow. Rahut sees only another petitioner he has vetted for his master’s monthly ration, one more in a succession of climbers whose coins he has pocketed. For this Rahut is comptroller of Simyun’s portals. He admits the world to his master’s presence, exercising at times a quirky capriciousness. If now and again he allows a beardless village nobody up the ladder it is because he has already turned away some rotting archimandrite or fabulous sage who has crossed seas in a leaky boat just to ask the saint’s advice. The locals often wonder if Simyun knows about the money Rahut is making. Not only is there the matter of audiences. He also permits the concessions of traders and hucksters whose stalls ring the column’s base from far enough away that their cries cannot disturb Simyun’s meditation. It is Rahut who chips pieces off the column for them to sell and it is Rahut who gathers those rarest and most prized relics of all, the scented blackish coprolites which every month or so the saint lets fall to the sand beneath. Men have crossed deserts for weeks just to acquire a single fragment of these potent, fragrant truffles. They are embodied in lockets, rings, reliquaries, medicines; it is said there is enough healing in a single one of Simyun’s bowel movements to cure the ailments of the entire world.