The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Anyway we were both interested in our hobbies, he in his Existentialism and I in my literature. I mean in the novel and in poetry. He has always respected my mind and I have respected his. I have never written anything creative of course. How could one have the temerity to add to what is already there, unless what one writes is necessary? And I have never felt the pressure of the necessary. I listen to a great deal of music. I hear the note of necessity even in the flawed opulence of Wagner and overwhelmingly in the apparent simplicity of Mozart. But never within myself. I even wonder why he has decided to write his book. It is in a way unlike him to commit his dreamed perfection to paper. I know that he has taken a certain pleasure in the composition of examination papers and the preparation of notes on French writers but I never thought that he would actually write a book. Certainly not on anything as complicated as Existentialism.

  More recently he has been moved to hospital where he has been getting intensive radiation treatment. I hate hospitals but I have been going to see him every Sunday afternoon. His bed is at the far end of the hospital, in a very distant ward, and I pass old people staring into space with dull eyes. His table beside the bed has the usual assemblage of grapes and oranges: no one ever dreams of bringing him a book to read. But in spite of the heavy atmosphere, relieved only by the sparkling presence of the nurses who know he is doomed, he has managed to finish his own book. We talk about various things. Once we had a long discussion on Keats and wondered how far tuberculosis animates the creative soul. He seems to think it does, though I feel it almost blasphemous to think that without the presence of tuberculosis Keats would never have been a great poet. Still, he lies there in all that white. He knows he is going to die. I suppose being an existentialist – for he holds the beliefs that they hold – he will die in a different way from those who do not hold such beliefs. He sees neither priest nor minister. I sit in my rather shabby coat – for the ward is sometimes rather cold – beside his bed. I do not think about justice or mercy. What use would there be in that?

  His long haggard face, like one of those windows that one sees in churches, is becoming more and more refined each time that I visit him. The book, it seems, will be his last justification. It may be that he thinks he will posthumously justify his life to his wife, if the book turns out to be a good one. I know that she couldn’t care less, as far as the content goes, but in his strange way he loves her. What could she know of the literature of France? It is only people like himself who have shed the world who can know about literature. In fact he is beginning to look more and more like a saint as the weeks pass. The pure bone is appearing through the flesh. One day I almost said to him, ‘What is it like to die?’ but I caught myself in time. In any case the nurses are often hovering about. Some of them are pupils whom he has taught. He told me that one of them (one of the dimmer ones in fact) had gone to the trouble of speaking to him one day in halting French. He felt that this was a compassionate gesture and so indeed it was. His eyes filled with tears as he told me about it. ‘And yet,’ he said wonderingly, ‘she couldn’t do French at all.’ I don’t think he told his wife about the incident.

  He was of course a perfectionist when he was teaching. ‘No, no, no,’ he would shout, ‘that is not how you say it. Not at all.’ I could hear him two rooms away. ‘Listen again. Listen. You must always listen. Listen to the voice.’ And he would say the word over and over. The inflexion must be exactly right, the idiom must be perfect. Perhaps it was that lust for perfection that brought on his cancer. His own daughter had been one who had not flourished under his teaching (she was intelligent but rebellious), and his wife had never forgiven him for that. ‘But,’ he would say to her, as he told me, ‘she isn’t as good as the others.’ However it happened that one of the others had been the daughter of one of her bitterest enemies and how could one expect that she could reconcile herself to his honesty? ‘Women,’ he would say to me, ‘can’t be impersonal. You cannot ask that of them.’ How much futile quarrelling was concealed under that statement. For his daughter was now working in a shop, Frenchless, resentful, single.

  How and why had he taken up Existentialism? I don’t know. Was it perhaps that he was driven towards it by the absurdity of his own life? How can one tell why some writers and systems of thought attract us and others don’t? (The other night I had a visitor from the chess club and there were two tarts on a plate, one yellow and one pink. I asked him which one he wanted and he said the yellow one. I myself had preferred the pink one. How can one explain that?) He hadn’t of course been in the war either. And neither had I. (Yet I suppose the system of Existentialism, if one can talk of it in terms of a system, emerged out of the last war.) We had that in common. But there are differences too. For instance he has a good head for figures. I remember the marking system he once worked out in order to be fairer to candidates. The headmaster couldn’t understand it and so it was left in oblivion. I couldn’t understand it either.

  And so he is dying in this ward with the walls whose paint is coming off in flakes. And quite a lot of his former pupils visit him. It is surprising how many of them have done well for themselves. I do not mean that they have done well materially (though many have done that as well). What I was thinking of more precisely was that they have kept their minds true to themselves. One of them is now a Logic Professor in America and a leader of thought in his own field. I can’t say that all of them have done as well as that but at least they have kept their integrity. What is even more striking is that they bring their wives along with them, however briefly they may be in town. He lies there like a medieval effigy, hammered out of some eternal stuff, and he listens to them and they listen to him. He has a great flair for listening and they tell him a great deal. In his youth he used to take them on expeditions, sometimes to France, and he and his pupils would talk into the early hours of the morning under other skies. Naturally, I wonder whether he did this because he wished to get away from his wife. I think this is partly true though perhaps he did not realise it himself. He did far more of this extramural activity than I ever did. I have never liked people as much as he has done. I have never had any warmth of nature. It has always struck me as strange that such perfectionism could be combined with such a liking for people.

  He hasn’t really had much in his life, an embittered wife and daughter, and that is all, apart from his schoolwork. And his book. That is not really very much to bear with one into the darkness of the absurd. Yet what else could he have done? How could he have known in those early days that his wife would turn out as she did? How could he have done other than take the side of his inflexible perfectionism against his daughter? Some men are lucky and some are not. I think one may say that he was not. Though naturally he doesn’t believe in luck. I remember one revealing incident. There was a boy who wasn’t able to get into university because his French was weak. He spent all his spare hours with him after school for weeks and months and managed to get him a pass in the examination. A year afterwards, the boy was working in a bar, he had simply gone to pieces after he had reached university. He had done no work at all. That was bad luck. Or was it bad judgement?

  He is lying there and his book is finished. He has spent all his time on that book since his enforced retirement. He spent many years on it before that. He will take it with him into the final darkness. It may perhaps be a present for his wife, his last cold laurel. He may hold it out to her with a final absurd gesture, his lips half twisted in a final smile. To leave such as her the last product of his mind, the one least capable of understanding it! That would certainly be irony. Even now she may be thinking that she can make a little money from it. How else could one think of a book, of anything, but in terms of money?

  I have been reading it. In fact I have read it all.

  Last night I did not sleep. I read and reread the book. I searched page after page for illumination, for a new insight. The electric light blazed into my tired eyes, the bulb was like one of his sleepless eyes. Was it like a conscience
? I revolved everything so slowly. O so slowly. After all we are human beings, condemned to servitude and despair. We are rags of flesh and bone though now and again pierced by flashes of light. I looked round my own monkish room. After all what had I done with my life? I didn’t even have a wife or daughter. I thought of the world around me and how people might condemn me if they knew. They would condemn me out of their own shallowness, precisely because they were committed to no ideal and walked swathed in the superficial flesh. In fact at one time during the night while I was studying a page for the third or fourth time I heard on the street below the music of a transistor, though I could not make out the words of the song that was being sung. I supposed it was something to do with love and had travelled here from Luxembourg.

  But not merciless love. No, love with all the mercy in the world. Love that would forgive anything because there was in the end nothing to forgive. Love that had no knowledge of the knife. But only of the tears. The light blazed on page after naive page. He had been too long in teaching. His mind had adjusted itself to immature minds. It was as if the book had been written for a Lower Fifth Form. All had been explained but all had been explained away. Sartre and Camus had lost the spring of their minds, the tension, they had been laid out flat on the page as his own body had been laid on its white bed. All was white without shadow. There was no battle. The battle had been fought elsewhere. The battle had been fought against his wife and daughter in the real world of money and teaching and jobs. The energy had gone into that. I stared for a long time at the book. After all, were we not poor human beings? After all, what was our flesh against the absurdity of the skies?

  I walked to the hospital carrying the book. It was a June day and the birds were singing and the air was warm. The windows of the hospital were all open and the air was rushing in, scented and heavy. The whole world was in blossom. On the lawn there were some old people in chairs being sunned and tanned before being replaced in their beds. The sky was a mercilessly clear blue without cloud. I walked along the whole length of the ward and he was waiting for me. He would want to know what I thought immediately.

  I handed him the book. I said to him quite clearly, aware of everything, ‘It’s no good, James. It’s just no good.’ The book lay between us on the bed. ‘It’s too naive,’ I said. ‘There are no new insights. None at all.’

  Without a word he held out his hand towards me. And then he said equally clearly, ‘Thank you, Charles.’ I felt as if we were two members of a comic team as I heard our names spoken, two comedians dancing on a marble floor somewhere far from there.

  He didn’t say anything else. We started talking about other things. Three days afterwards he was dead. When I heard this I stared for a long time out of the window of my flat as the tears slowly welled in my eyes. No one can ever know whether he has done right or wrong. I stared around me at the books and they stood there tall and cold in their bookcases. I went and picked up a Yeats but I could find nothing that I wanted and I replaced it among the other books.

  At the funeral the wife ignored me. Perhaps he had told her not to publish the book and she had guessed what had happened. Simmons was with her and he also ignored me. Later I heard that he had been advising her to get it published. I thought that if James had been alive this would have served as a true example of the absurd, his wife and Simmons in such an alliance. The two of them stood gazing down into the grave at the precious despised body and mind disappearing from view, she rigid and black, Simmons large and stout. As I turned away my shoes made a dreadful rustling noise on the gravel.

  The Exorcism

  I have just finished wrestling with a saint and I am very tired. For it is clear to me that a saint may act as a devil in his human affairs and because he is a saint may easily lead people astray. For one may think that one is imitating the saint when one is in fact imitating the devil in the saint. But . . . I think it is the tiredness that is making me go on like this and I had better begin at the beginning.

  I am a Professor of Theology at a college in Edinburgh. I am a round, rather fat, good-natured and, I think, nice man. When I wake up in the morning I am nearly always happy, for I exist in a harmony which I believe is the harmony of God, His universal music. I have never doubted this. Not that I ever had any special dramatic experience which proved that this harmony existed, I have always known it. Perhaps my secure childhood had something to do with it, a large rambling house, a garden in which the birds seemed always to sing, a father who was ample and good-humoured, and a mother who, loving him, loved me as well. I suppose really there is something to be said for success in the world and my father, himself a Professor of Theology before me, was successful in that he was doing the work which like myself he was born to do. Happy this kind of succession, and lucky those who benefit from it. He was not a tortured man: on the contrary, like me he existed inside the divine music whose notes were composed of books, garden, a loved wife, sunny days, and nights without the necessity for remorse. Sounds emerge from childhood, of pots humming on cookers, of mowers whose sleepy hum enchanted the June days, of laughter, of a pervasive busy world in which I budded and blossomed. Sights I recall of trams rocking down their rails, of the castle ancient and magical and theatrical on its hill, of colours almost excessively clear in a northern light.

  So I grew up admiring my father and followed him as naturally into his world as if I had been born to do so. My student days were happy, I loved books and I recall sitting in gardens in white flannels reading theological and Latin books while the bees hummed about my deckchair. I don’t suppose all those days were like that but that is how I recall them. There were poignant thorny moments as when my father died, closely followed by my mother. I married a woman rather like my mother and settled into my college world, a perpetual student, loved, I think, and loving. I think I may say that I have exercised a beneficent influence and that through me others have been brought to hear the harmony which composes the world. I can think of few people who have been as lucky as me. I have never suffered from the obligatory fashionable angst so zealously pursued in literary reviews, and that is because I have never divided man into body and spirit: both seem to me to form an indissoluble whole. I have never wished to do any other work than I do, or to be other than I am. Why should I be other than happy?

  In general my students have been normal like myself. They have studied here, and thereafter gone out into the world to transform it according to their lights, and to bear with them, into whatever gaunt or lovely corner, an echo of the music which they have heard while briefly, almost too briefly, we have been together. Many of them, whom I have been conscious of, have gone on to the sombre battlefields of the world and I have often received letters which revealed minds and souls at the edge of sanity, frenzied notes which spoke of the devil and his fierce diamond will opposing them in the night as well as the day. I have felt it my duty to answer all these letters and to restate from this calm place the beliefs which have sustained me and my father before me. At times I have felt that perhaps I also ought to be in those embattled places but my inner voice has told me that my best work is being done where I am. And so all was well till I encountered Norman MacEwan.

  Now Norman MacEwan was from the islands, and I had better make quite clear at the beginning what I thought of him, and what I knew of the environment that had created him. First of all, he was very pale and intense and neglectful of his appearance. There was a bony aspect to him and a disharmony of clothes. His collar was often soiled, his tie disarranged, his hair long and floppy. He was not at all clever: on the contrary he had to work very hard at his books to keep up, but that may be because he had the kind of mind that needs to fasten on words and ideas till he has finally torn the flesh from the bones. He had no distractions that I know of, at least in his first year; he had no interest in music or the theatre or the cinema, and he read no books except the ones that were recommended. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons he would go out preaching to local layabouts. I once saw him nea
r Princes Street Gardens, his hair flopping in the breeze, his right hand jabbing downwards through the air, all intensity and vivacity, while past him there walked a trampish looking man in a long overcoat whose shoulders and head were crowned with pigeons.