by Robert Nye
Accept that in the attempt to make sense of my past and my present I’ve made a fool of myself. Not even that. Each lie, each stab at the truth, each contradiction, all and everything in this parcel of confusions, does not serve to ‘make’ me a fool. My book reveals me as the fool I am. This truth-besotted fool, this dunce of dreams (whose most self-deceiving dream was that he ever could play the rôle of a man of action), this senseless soul pouring himself out in one cancelling confession after another only to discover— What? That there was nothing to discover in the first place. Nothing in the first place. Nothing in the last place. No first place. No last place. No end and no beginning. Only the voyage. The voyage of the destiny.
And how much of what I have written about that voyage reads like a dream! The voyage of my Destiny, yes, and the voyage of my destiny. Other people mere ghosts. Only the voyager real. I have written about my life as if I have dreamt it. Is that how it was? Is that how I need it to be?
Some poet (it must have been Marlowe) once told me he wanted his life and his work to be one mighty music.
Well, this work of my life has no music. Even I can hear that. No music Just notes struck at random. All jangling discordance. Mere noise. The sound of a spirit in torment.
My book is not a book. It is a bonfire of myself. I am consumed in it. Dear reader, my son, may you see something by the light cast from your father’s burning bones. Something he cannot see. Something. Anything.
*
It is not the contradictions and confusions that appal me most. Oh no. Lord God, it is these wicked certainties. I can forgive myself my blunderings, my fumblings. Only You can forgive me this running of mine from one absolute illumination of ‘the truth’ to the next, and the next. Now I have it! Now I have it! Now… Now Never
Abandon this one-man ship of fools on its faithless quest for certitude. Its sail is the sin of pride. Its keel is despair.
My soul, you are water. Be thankful. You won’t burn in hell
*
So, Bess. Some small honesties. Not the Truth. Just a few home truths from abroad. Do I love you? I don’t know.
I miss you sorely. But that’s a different matter. There is an element of enjoyment in this missing. My heart (if I have such an organ) needs a diet of absence. I never felt more tenderly regarding you than when debarred your company. Shut away in the Tower all those years - how I loved you! But when King James, in his infinite mercy, allowed you to come to me Well, Carew was conceived there in my cell, but what happened afterwards? You took to driving right into the Tower in your private carriage, as if you owned the place, as if you owned me. That made the King furious, of course. He soon put a stop to it. What you didn’t know was that your visits often irritated me. I would long for them, wait for them, look forward to your arrivals with the keenest feelings of what I thought love and true expectation. But then, when you were with me, you were never quite the woman I’d been waiting for. I’d find myself bored by your prattle. I’d long to be alone again. You’ll remember one particular occasion — You had Carew, still a baby, in your arms, Wat, a sullen embarrassed boy, tugging at your gown. (He knew! Wat always knew his unnatural father! Those quick eyes of his would catch me sneaking glances at the clock, while you noticed nothing.) You went on and on - about money, about Sherborne, about the loss of our lands, about estates. Carew wailing and puking, Wat all fidgets, my head ringing with your endless harangue of complaint. I think that was the only time I let you see my loss of temper. You wept. I had to comfort you. I felt ashamed. It ended with everyone in tears: cold father, bitter mother, screaming infant, and young son shouting that he wanted to go home. Poor Wat! He never had a home, and he knew it. Poor Bess! Neither did you, and you thought you had. You hated Durham House, you always said it was too draughty. (What you really resented, I suspect, was that the Queen had given it to me.) As for Sherborne - when I didn’t busy myself with builders there, I absented myself in other ways, usually at sea. As for Broad Street -I daresay you will have noted that in these pages I never found the heart to refer to it as anything more than a house. Bess’s house. My wife’s house in Broad Street. I can’t regard it as my home. Home, as they say, is where the heart is. Sir Walter Ralegh isn’t sure he has a heart.
You, Bess, have a fine heart, a great heart, a splendid heart. Bear my destruction gently, and with a heart like yourself.… Yes, I recall those words I wrote to you, when I lay in prison at Winchester, betrayed by lying enemies into the hands of the King, convicted of treason, expecting my execution the next morning. Beg my dead body, I wrote also, which living was denied you
O my dear Bess, who denied you that body? Why, madam, I did!
I always loved you most when you were not there. I could write to you tenderly, beautifully, when I thought I’d never see you again. From the Tower, shut away from the world and your person. From Guiana. From the ends of the earth.
But when you were near, close at hand, within arms’ reach - was I ever as loving? I doubt it. One eye on the clock in my quarters in the Tower, I longed most for solitude, my books, my papers, my little hut which was allowed me for the conducting of my chemical experiments. Imprisoned in myself, the Tower suited me. Oh, I complained, wrote petitions, begged this one and that one in high office to intercede with his Majesty and grant me my freedom. But I always enjoyed being able to complain, and freedom is probably not my element.
I suffer from this strange disease, you see. My attitude to you is a symptom of it. How to define that sickness? It has no name. It drives me always to reject the real, the immediate, unless my circumstances give me cause to bewail my lot. For more than half my life I have lived in such a way as to maintain a distance between myself and the objects or the persons of my love.
Consider this voyage: I have spent it most in talking to Carew. But when I meet Carew, when he stands there before me, grave-eyed, actual, will I spend all day talking to him? Unlikely. After an hour or two, the old itch of boredom will be on me. I shall wish myself a thousand miles away. And even in those first hours, ITI say little. Can I claim I love the real Carew Ralegh, with his cough and his stammer? I feel something, I feel much - but not enough to dignify with the name of love. I love the idea of my son* Not the same thing as loving him.
And poor Wat. Dead Wat. To be blunt: how intolerant I was of him when he was alive. His death made it easy for me. I felt then (at last) like a father. My son had to die to break through to me. I like the dead. I get on well with them.
Bess, my wife, you are married to a dead man. A man in whom the heart is atropHicd. That’s about the length and breadth and depth of it. Can you live with such knowledge I will you bear this news of my self-destruction gently, and with a heart like yourself? I think you might. O my Penelope, you were always a match for this sick Ulysses. You are made of stronger stuff than snow or silk. If ever I had a heart, then it was you.
But true Love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning; Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.
I wrote that once, long ago. Is it true, what it says? I don’t know any more, but I doubt it. All I’d claim now is what I’d claim for the confusions and contradictions (and, yes, the certainties so uncertain) that have disfigured this, my present writing. That it was true to my own state of mind at the time when I wrote it. And perhaps that I spoke truer than I knew. One of your eyes will not weep, Bess, the one that sees through me. Sees that this ‘durable fire’, this proud obdurate thing ‘from itself never turning’, is nothing like an image of ‘true Love’. It is your absent lover at his tricks, that’s all. Making perfection of his own inadequacies, an ideal out of impotence, a burning lie.
I am sick. I am old. I shall soon be dead.
Would to God I could ever-just for a moment! - turn away from myself, and look at you.
*
Remember, if you can, our happiest days. Those years when our love was a secret we kept from the Queen. Surely, you’ll say, he loved me the
n. Simply, wholeheartedly, with a love that had no need of this complicated diet of absence to feed it?
Bess, I can’t answer.
I don’t know.
I’m not sure about anything.
If I am to be honest, then I must say that for my part the shadow of the Queen fell over us. Danger lent spice to our dalliance. Each secret encounter was both sweetened and sharpened by risk. And the times in between were like absence. I could see you, you could see me, but there was this barrier between us. We had always to pretend, to dissimulate, for fear of Elizabeth’s suspicion. I had to seem cold, you indifferent. Thus the normal flow of feeling was baulked from the start.
Understand: I’m not blaming the Queen for this. On the contrary, it suited me, that situation. Oh, it suited me very well; much better than marriage. Because (I suspect) it gave me excuse for a play-acting coldness which could express the real coldness I felt. Not that I knew it was real. That’s the point. At the time, all those years, I did blame the Queen. I could tell myself and you that I would love you utterly, if it were not for her. Now I have my doubts. Seven years! Would a man really in love have managed (as I did) to keep that love secret so long from Elizabeth? In her own household? Where she had eyes and spies everywhere?
But perhaps Elizabeth knew and didn’t care? Didn’t care because she knew me better than I knew myself? Knew about you, and Anne Vavasour, the others—? I cannot believe it. Sufficient to say that her fury only broke on our heads when she learned of the marriage That I had married you because you were already pregnant by me About your child, my son Damerei, who then died—
Enough. I can’t write of this.
One confession, Bess.
In the very month that Damerei was born, I wrote a letter to Secretary Cecil. I denied that we were married at all! I protest before God, I said (and may God and you forgive me, Bess), I protest before God there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.
But, again, did I write truer than I knew?
I lied to Robert Cecil, trusting the Queen would believe it.
Perhaps I did not lie to God or myself.
There was none on the face of the earth that I wanted to be fastened to in marriage. There was not. And there is not.
Bess, my wife.
*
A last word. Very brief. But I must say it.
The Queen’s shadow came between us in another sense.
Christmas in her Palace at Greenwich, 1584. She dined in the Presence Chamber. My Lord Leicester there, the Earl of Oxford, Lord Charles Howard. Many others. I forget. But it was the night when she shamed Hatton. Shamed him by pointing at me, pointing with her finger at my face, and when he asked why she pointed, Elizabeth said (laughing) that it was only because I had a smut on my cheek, and licked her handkercHicf, and beckoned me to kneel down at her feet that she might wipe it off—
But I wiped it off myself, which did not please her.
They laughed. Leicester, Cecil, Howard. They all laughed. So Elizabeth laughed too. All laughed save Hatton.
I laughed. Not at Hatton. Not at anything. Just because the others laughed. I compelled myself to laugh. I knew what they thought. I knew what one or two of them knew. That I was now her man. The Queen’s lover. And knew that those one or two (Leicester certainly, and Hatton) knew what that meant. The service she now had of me. A service of smut and handkercHicfs. Or lickings. Wipings.
Which service the Queen had of me that night in the Privy Lodgings.
All as usual.
Only, afterwards, I left her, self-disgust was so great. I forget what excuse it was I offered. Most likely, none was needed. When Elizabeth had drunk wine and feasted well, once was enough. I gave her the single libation of myself. She slept. I went.
I went out. I walked down through the gardens. That dark night. No moon. Not a star in the sky. Frozen fountains. Snow hard as iron underfoot.
You remember the snow, Bess?
It came falling from the branches where you stood with your back to the tree. Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter! Forget me, Bess.
28
18 May
Et Virtute!
What courage?
Keymis called me, in my dream, an arrant coward.
I am not that. I fought well enough at Cadiz. But if I am not a coward, then what am I? Something worse, I fear. A man who has acted the hero. If despair begets courage, then I have been brave in my time. But there is a greater and more lively courage, which springs from nothing else but an assured confidence. That I have never had. I played as if I did. The play’s nearly done.
I no longer count the miles.
I leave latitude and longitude to Mr Burwick.
The ship sails on.
We can’t be far from Ireland. For some, journey’s end.
*
What is our life? A play of passion,
Our mirth the music of division.
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the searching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest.
Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest.
*
I just watched the Indian catching a rat in a bottle. (His fever passed quickly. A deliverance he attributes to his leaf!) The rat must have been starving, there’s so little left now in Mr Taverner’s galley or our stinking ship’s store. It ran out from the coils of the anchor cable, down the foredeck, right across the main deck. The Indian was sitting in the ship’s boat, lashed to port. He was drinking an inch or two of rainwater, collected in the bottle. The rat flashed past his foot, dodging round sweeps and spars, swerving first this way, now that, jumped into the firebox and out again, running fast, tail lashing, desperate to discover some new hiding place. It didn’t. The Indian went after it. He ran faster. Leaping over the port cannon, he got ahead of the rat before it reached the binnacle. He scooped down with his bottle. The rat ran into it. He plugged a bung in the bottle-neck and brought me his prize. The younkers at the pumps applauded wildly. Or perhaps it was ironically. I don’t know. The Indian moved fast. That much is certain. He moved fast and he thought fast. To catch the rat in the bottle was to catch it whole. He tossed the bottle up in the air and caught it again. Then he brandished it in the sun, his face triumphant. I observed that the rat was already at choking point, half-dead of its own foul breath in the prison of the bottle.
‘What for?’ I said.
‘For you! For Guattaral!’
It crossed my mind that he mocked me. That he offered me this rat in its glass prison as a symbol of myself. Or perhaps of him.
Not so.
‘What should I want with a rat?’ He rubbed his stomach. ‘Eat it? Are you mad, man?’
‘I can skin it and cook it for you. A good strong rat. For Guattaral’s dinner.’
No jest. He was serious. He assured me that he’d dined on rat meat. That it tasted like;—
But I didn’t let him tell me what it tasted like. I thanked him. I said no. I said, if he wanted, he should eat it.
And now there is this smell of cooking from his cabin —
My stomach heaves.
I must add yet more bile to the sea.
*
Later. Yet now I am quite glad of this vile incident. It proves, if nothing else, that his world is not mine. Our destinies have crossed, mine and the Indian’s. There have been times on the voyage when I thought him a sort of looking-glass in which I could see my own soul reflected, when his words seemed to speak for me, telling me what I must learn.
That was not all illusion. But here we part.
There is no way Sir Walter Ralegh must dine on a rat!
*
Bess dreamt of a golden man that night before I sailed for Guia
na. But her emperor, all sticky with gold dust, turned into Queen Elizabeth! Ergo: There is no sense in dreams. Know this, then, Carew Ralegh. Keymis lied. Your father is a lame and hobbling hero. A bad actor in a part too grand for him. Not the same thing as a coward. Not at all. You are the son of a true man. A man who, in his own respect, despises death, and all his misshapen and ugly forms. I showed that at Cadiz. Intramus! I shouted to Essex. Intramus! Intramus! In we go.… ! And Essex flung his hat into the sea with joy, and we went in, and I led the attack. Two fleets in the narrow neck of the harbour. Pitched battle from dawn until dusk. And when I got past the Spanish galleys, answering their salvoes with blasts of a trumpet, I anchored right up against their galleons. Three hours they bombarded me. I did not flinch. I gave them as good as I got. I bestowed benedictions of fire upon them. And when they saw me coming to board them, those Spaniards slipped their anchors and ran themselves aground, tumbling into the sea heaps of soldiers, so thick, as if coals had been poured out of a sack. And two of their galleons fired themselves, and if any man had a desire to see hell itself, it was there most lively figured. Was Keymis at Cadiz? Keymis was not. Keymis did not know me. Keymis lied. I longed with all my heart to go with Wat. I could not go. My fever would not let me. They would not let me, Keymis and my squabbling captains. They trusted no one else to remain at Punto Gallo. To keep their rear from attack, to guard the rivermouth. Run will I never, I told them. Intramus! In we go ! Wat, Carew, my sons, I wish you had been with me. I wish you could have seen me at Cadiz. That was no dream. I did not act amiss.
*
The ship is still idling along, lolling listlessly in a breeze which one minute blows like a cracked bellows and the next minute doesn’t blow at all.
Never have I seen anything more full of colour than when the North Atlantic sun stands on the rim of the world at daybreak.
Correction. Only one thing.
Essex’s chopped-off head.
*
All that stuff about gold and the Indian. Was I mad? What the hell does it matter?
