Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

The logistical problem was clear enough: how to fly a slow, methodical grid pattern over areas which lacked not only fuel but even clearings in which to land. Other than a dirt strip on the outskirts of Manaos itself the only reliable landing areas for a thousand miles were the rivers themselves. Accordingly he had brought pontoons for his aeroplanes but had not yet been able to test them to find out whether the machines would unstick with a full load of aviation spirit in the additional tanks he had fitted. Then, of course, a floating log or half-submerged alligator … The possibilities for disaster were without number. And every disaster, over and above its physical threat of injury or death, carried with it the sure penalty of bankruptcy. He sighed; but it was only the equivalent of the involuntary grunt a man makes when lifting a heavy weight. Neither resigned nor daunted Fortescue and his friend Johnny Proctor had lived the kind of lives in which such were familiar terms, to the extent that all forms of speculation could be subordinated to the proper making of plans. Altimeters were accurately set, a full kit of tools carried.

  When not in his cabin he was often in the ship’s library trying like Molly to learn Portuguese or browsing through the few books devoted to the area in the ‘Geography and Exploration’ section. Secret Rites of the Amazon Tribes soon provided him with an abundance of excellent reasons, in addition to those he already had, for not wishing to crash land in the jungle. An Economic and Regional Geography of South America, on the other hand, told him nothing despite its title’s sweeping omniscience. ‘By far the greater part of the Amazonas region remains wholly unexplored by white man, and it is to be doubted whether the tribes known to inhabit certain riparian zones have any systematic knowledge of their region’s topography, still less the desire or ability to assess that region’s possible economic value.’ The map of Amazonas included in this unhelpful chapter was even blanker than his large-scale flying maps which, for all their own areas of white, did at least have patches of local detail supplied piecemeal from the reports of other pilots, recent expeditions and the like.

  Fortescue replaced the book and took down another entitled Where Day Breaks Never. This was an excitable little work purporting to be the account of an expedition which had started down the Madeira River and then wandered off along one of its tributaries, the Aripuana, more or less due south of Manaos. It was not clear what the members of this expedition had thought they were doing. They appeared to spend most of their time making endless trouble for themselves and anyone else they encountered, from capsizing the canoe containing their only medical supplies to skirmishing with Indians ‘whose hostility was, however, not proof against our trusty Winchesters which soon knocked the fight out of them and left their ramshackle village more peaceful, no doubt, than at any time since its construction.’ As he skimmed the pages he seriously wondered whether the whole account had been invented in a quiet house in Berkshire: it was too suspiciously a compendium of every explorer’s tale, its sensationalism too studied. The only interesting thing he found in it was the identification of a remote range of mountains almost on the Bolivian border as those which Colonel Fawcett had photographed in 1908. It was this photograph Conan Doyle had seen and which had suggested to him his story The Lost World. Fortescue noted this chiefly as a coincidence; the unexpected recurrence of the topic of Conan Doyle and photographs so soon after their luncheon in Madeira was curious. There was nothing else to be learned from a book like that, however, so he opened his Portuguese grammar instead.

  Edward also spent time in his cabin, either at his microscope or writing his Journal. Otherwise he roamed the ship, something of a lonely figure, a look on his face both inward and slightly expectant as if somebody he had known might come around the corner or straighten up from the rail next to him.

  Once Captain Maddrell asked him whether he was making the journey out of interest or in order to visit someone. Edward had told him he was badly in need of inspiration, citing the forthcoming Empire Exhibition at Wembley for which he had at least to write a March and possibly more besides. The Captain put at his disposal a bare day cabin which he claimed he never used and which, unlike Edward’s own, had outside it a small private section of deck and rail where he might escape social pressures whenever he wished. Edward accepted this offer gratefully and soon was spending daily hours in a deck-chair beneath the shade of the port wing of the bridge, staring out over the ocean with a manuscript notebook and propelling-pencil on his lap.

  And there, as it often had, the sight and sound of water in motion began to produce its familiar effects. Great things had come to him from the voices of the Severn, the Teme, the Wye and many other English rivers. The Arno and the Tiber had added their note to In the South; the Rhine had spoken to him of his devotion to Schumann and the mainstream of the German classics. It did not occur to him to wonder whether this late journey to see the greatest river in the world contained a measure of longing, even of desperation; he simply lost himself in the dazzle of scud before his eyes. It raced along the base of the dove-grey iron wall but even a few yards out from the ship’s side slowed and thinned into lattices and marblings which, effervescing themselves into nothing, briefly mantled the purple sea with whites and greens. It fled and fled; it fell behind and became wake; its ripples dissipated. The staring eyes saw nothing, but the impression of passage leaped vividly through them into the mind. He began to hear things in the motion. Even from the rumble of engines beneath the water-line rose suggestive pitches, voices, notes. His fingers tightened on the pencil. There was as yet no tune, but the lively space for one was being created.

  How many times over the years, working late into the night in order to meet some rehearsal deadline or a scheduled first performance, had he not gone to bed and been unable to sleep for the insistence of these very spaces? There were often no tunes, only this clamorous framework into which marvellous music might be fitted: an immanence of rhythm, a sense of paragraphs, blocks of feeling and a glimpse of a shape two blank pages ahead unmistakably in his hand but as yet unreadable. And ever since he could remember, a flow of water could also create this ache and expectancy, this melancholy engagement with everything of him which mattered. Here were no human faces, no loved voices, no thoughts. Those could be allowed to intrude later, if need be, to domesticate or make poignant raw inspiration. Later on could come the title, the affectionate dedication or the quoted stanza by way of preface, all the scholarly jokes, concealed anagrams and word-play which put a literary gloss on abstract sounds. But at this earliest moment there was no contamination, only the pure and murmurous emptiness which encased itself and shone. And as an exhausted bell-jar in a sunny laboratory draws water into itself and begins to fill, so the old composer’s hand at last and of its own accord began to write.

  He sketched in short score, which is to say on two staves as if for piano. But the sounds he heard were not those of the piano, a workaday instrument of limited tonal possibilities which interested him scarcely at all. Ob. he jotted above the top line at one point, then Hn. Already at this moment of the first sketch he placed the hairpins of crescendos and diminuendos, the characteristic tenutos over notes he wanted stressed, the detailed dynamics which always were as much a part of what he heard as the notes themselves. On impulse he added a third stave above the other two halfway down the page and scrawled Tenor above it: there was suddenly the sound of a voice but he could not hear the words. The atmosphere in which it sang was quite clear to him, however. The voice fell upon an immense hush, a pristine emptiness in which light was steadily growing. Lost in this breathless dawn, yet central to it, was the suggestion of a figure – maybe raised on some sort of pillar – whose isolation both created the emptiness and was created by it. It was a desert landscape which filled the aural horizon. The unsleeping figure was not greeting the dawn: his tingling declamation seemed concerned with something else. But what? Unexpectedly, somewhere beneath his tower’s base, a silver propelling-pencil wrote a short motif and added Solo Tpt.

  Edward sat back, gradually understandi
ng what it was he had heard. That trumpet motif seemed familiar … Of course! The Shofar call from The Apostles which he had once thought of carrying over to the planned oratorio The Last Judgement. He read through again what he had just written, hearing the full orchestral sound rise from the grey pencilmarks, the tenor soloist soaring above. The line of the voice had something in it akin to Mary’s great aria ‘The Sun Goeth Down’ in The Kingdom, but in place of that scena’s ravishment was a strange chill. Empty pianissimo harp chords, widely spaced and plucked all at once rather than spread as arpeggios, were placed against oboes above and muted trombones below. Somewhere in that space vibrated a desolation he had never quite written before.

  ‘I say,’ he murmured, shivering as if something malign had risen from the scud alongside and briefly blocked the sun. ‘I wonder what that is? I say …’ He recognised at once that it was authentic. Nobody knew better than he the devices which came to him most readily – and which he was most powerless to stop – when inspiration had thinned or dried up altogether. He had not needed the damned critics to remind him of such things, like that puppy in the Pall Mall Gazette who had written ‘It is as difficult for Elgar to leave a sequence as it is for a bicycle to leave the tram lines.’ That had stung. But this – he looked again at the sketch on his knees – had not a sequence in it, not a hint of a nobilmente tune. What it did have was the unmistakable Elgarian note. Where it had come from all of a sudden he had no idea – from the water itself, maybe – but it had done so without his having to turn to the dog-eared and much-thumbed sketch-books of his youth. That in itself was heartening. It was obviously no good for this Wembley march nonsense, but while it lasted it was a definite resurgence of a once-familiar thing.

  Years ago he had written to his Malvern architect friend Troyte Griffith that something ‘took him back to boyhood’s daze’. In the letter the ‘daze’ had been a mere homonym, a pun, a fanciful mis-spelling such as the Victorians loved and which had peppered the letters of men like Edward Lear: familiar words in fantastic guise (such as that painter’s succulent Mediterranean phyggs). But in its unconscious garb the daze of boyhood had been real enough. It had come to him as he lay on his stomach on a drifting punt, fingers trailing sunlit water, dreaming open-eyed as his directionless craft nudged the hoof-pocked shallows beneath the bank and slowly swung its other end out into the stream, setting him off again now facing the other way. Backwards or forwards, who knew? It was the tiniest details which stole into the mind and stayed: the brilliant green flecks of duckweed now captured and towed along in the still inch of water next to the wooden hull, half-adhering to the amber varnish … The daze of wind on top of the Malvern hills when the clouds paced their own shadows across the counties whose quilt of fields retained its pattern of mediaeval shapes. The fleeting bruises of shade across that gentle landscape were a daze: the high melancholy of what cannot be grasped or ever stopped. The sense of height was a daze: the exalted roaring of the sky poured through him and filled him … Walking home through lanes little more than sunken paths between towering creamy plates of umbelliferae, drowsy with pollen and bees. Dazed with the feeling of incommensurable things and with the prospects of success which must surely attend anyone pierced by such thrills. And finally the daze of sound in the organ loft as his inadequate fingers tried to re-create what he had heard. River, hill and lane: they ran like water through his mind and left behind on scattered sheets of manuscript crooked rivulets of notes which glittered like mud-flats draining in the sun. Why were there no great English composers, at least not since Purcell? Was the German countryside really so much better? For surely it could only be that which determined the quality of a nation’s music. Very well then; he would see.

  But the overweening self quickly forgets its nation. The creative urge does not march beneath a flag although it may from time to time astutely invoke its shade. Edward’s England became not quite anybody else’s. Now and then people thought they recognised themselves and their landscape in it as crowds might glimpse their own reflections, faithfully distorted, in the polished paintwork of a State coach as it passed or in the glassy lacquer of a monarch’s hearse. The cheers sounded; the handkerchiefs fluttered and fell; then almost immediately there was nothing to see but a little dust in the air and nothing to think but that something of moment had passed them by, something which left their heads ringing and a slight desire to weep. It was not England which had passed in its disguise but Edward, whose dreams were of his countryside and not of their country.

  And he had written his landscape down as it had come to him and where he had found it. But bit by bit what seemed a rich spaciousness had begun to reveal aspects of monotony. Surely his entire imagined world could not be voiced by that single note of elegiac lyricism? No: there was plenty of briskness of a healthy outdoor sort on which he set, perhaps, an exaggerated value as if grateful for a plausible defence against accusations of unseemly emotionalism. But over the years, with that self-assessment which thorough artists often carry out whose brutality far outstrips any critic’s candour, the thought had come in secret: My emotional range is limited. Impossible to confide in Alice. Her job as she saw it from the beginning had been to take a stern line with self-doubt. For her, success was a matter of course and greatness not marginally less so. A genius could walk undeferentially with the shades of Wagner and Brahms. Edward had reviewed in his head the voluminous works of Wagner and Brahms and found a reassuring uniformity of tone in all of them.

  But something had begun to change for him a year or two before the war – from the moment, in fact, that Alice had deemed it time to make a second, victorious assault on the capital and they had bought ‘Kelston’ in Hampstead (which he had promptly re-named Severn House). The telephone rang; bills came; people came; the war came. On the increasingly rare occasions he managed to obtain access to his private landscape he found it parched: it supplied little and most of that he had seen before. A modern art-form provided him with a horrid image. On one of his earliest visits to the cinema he watched a sequence which included two funny men in a compartment of an American train. It was only after a minute he noticed with a jump that the scenery beyond the carriage window was recurring. He was at first amused by the adroit trick; then he was overtaken by an oppressive despair which confounded him completely and spoiled the rest of the film. The image of an endless strip of backcloth being rolled round and round by men in shirt-sleeves standing on packing-cases behind it returned to him as many times.

  He was not a man to bear desertion without having to announce loudly how glad he was at last to be free. Of course there was no private landscape. The music-makers and the dreamers of dreams could finally wake up to the poisonous Eden in which they had so foolishly laboured and to the whore Music who had led them so long by the nose. This Doll Tearsheet of a muse, who capered to fashion and the pit, hoisted her skirts so her audiences drank odours and howled for more – more jigs and waltzes and quadrilles and salon tunes and now apparently for something called the Charleston. Well, he wanted no part of it, washed his hands of it with the air of a man who compulsively rinses them after merely glimpsing something unclean on the floor …

  This wretched man, this man of exquisite sensibility masquerading as fit company for bloodstock fanciers: how could there not now come to him the troubling shade of his dead wife? Had she not for thirty-one years sedulously urged her beloved Edu to cavort with the whore? Had she not firmly detached his fingers from test-tubes, kite-strings, handlebars, steering-wheels, golf-clubs in order to place them once more around his pen? Worse, had Alice not herself faithlessly slipped away, deserting him when he was stranded well past the zenith of popular acclaim and in a world far beyond any he loved or recognised? Precious, dishevelling treason! No wonder he could not have said how he viewed the rusting gate which had finally slammed on his lost domain. Was it a glare or a gaze of longing he sent into that land which lay beyond the barricades, whose trees he could still glimpse with between them the wistful gli
tter of river? And if it was longing after all, how much more easily placated was the world from which he gazed if he changed that longing into disgust!

  Yet now aboard the Hildebrand, really without trying very hard, a hand that was his had sketched a page or two of its own volition. It was a hand which had written virtually nothing since it put the last notes to the Cello Concerto in 1919, nine months before Alice’s death. Yet somewhere in mid-Atlantic amid the hypnotic dazzle of his passage something old had stirred and the hand, itself full of an old cunning, had responded.

  The years had depressed him too firmly to allow anything as crudely doomed as excitement but he did find himself looking forward to luncheon. He screwed back his pencil and glanced at his watch. It was ten past three. For a moment he was put out but the feeling was swiftly replaced by one of pleasure. The unnoticed passage of time was authenticating; it reminded him of many years ago.

  VI

  Began a scribble (?what?) this morning. Perhaps after all the ‘spark of that which has consumed me’ did leave something, a final bleak ember. V. spare but good & potentially big. Not the opera, tho’. Perh. pt. 3 of trilogy. I know I long since rejected him but Judas does still haunt me now & then. There’s something in that tragic & maligned figure which makes him full of heart. I believe I really gave up The Last Judgement because the idea bored the living daylights out of me. But poor Judas – I still think Archbp. Whately got him right. Surely Judas had no idea that he might actually betray Jesus by what he did because he was convinced of his Lord’s miraculous power. He was certain that Jesus wd. use this power to prevent his own arrest & arraignment, thereby convincing both the Jews & Romans that he was truly King & not of this earth. This makes him devastatingly human, a proper tragic figure instead of the accepted symbol of cynical greed & betrayal. His remorse & suicide wd. be a real musical challenge – a scene of immense potential power – as he realised that the awfulness of what he had done was due to a failure of thought & not of heart. He had presumed to anticipate the Son of Man, but the ways of Heaven were disastrously not his. There were to be no magic tricks or chicanery to bring about the Kingdom … In any case at this moment it’s enough for me to be thinking of a few cramped notes again even if they don’t lead anywhere & even if they did make me miss lunch. I’m damn well not going to miss dinner. As I write this sentence I’m dressed & waiting for the First Trump.