The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Of course he had come from an environment different from mine. In the bleak islands God is a hard schoolmaster, with the cane always ready to lash at the poor hand. He is the thorn and the lightning, and not at all the civilised artist or composer. He forgives no one and certainly not the introverted divinity student such as Norman MacEwan, only son of a widowed mother whose husband had spent his days and nights in a haze of drink, disoriented and Celtic, though whether this was endemic or whether it was reaction to his wife’s harsh religious beliefs, who will now know? All this I found out from a minister friend of mine who came from the islands. But at the time I saw in front of me a bony tense unhappy boy who certainly did not hear the harmony I heard and was, I thought, impatient with the civilised books I lent him, and which he chewed at into the early hours of the morning. He seemed to be searching for some other harmony, some bleaker blacker globe of a harsher drama than I could supply him with.

  I took him to the house one evening but I am afraid that he said very little and was so nervous that he spilt his tea all over the carpet and finally rushed out, head down, as if he had committed some unforgivable sin.

  It looked to me at this early stage as if he would quite simply exhaust himself. I had the impression that he neither ate nor drank, that he spent his days rushing along the street (coat flapping, for he wore a long unfashionable brown tweed coat), that he felt he had found himself in a city rather like Sodom, attractive and terrifying and seductive, and that there was no place for him in the college at all. No place in the world even. I must confess that I wondered at times whether in fact he would take to drink as his father had done, but I hadn’t quite realised how deep his mother’s prohibition had bitten. In fact she sometimes came down to see him and to make sure that he was keeping to the right path. I never met her myself but I heard that she appeared in a black coat, remorseless and rigid and unyielding, and had a number of things to say to the landlady about certain aspects of her boarding house.

  I may say that I was rather worried about him. I felt that his spirit was beating steadily against his flesh, as his own island waves beat against the cliffs, and that this force would destroy him if it did not find its form. He sat sulkily on the bench along with other students but at no time did his face flower into visionary understanding, nor did his clumsy bony body relax. All the time he seemed to be searching for some gift that I could not give, and by his undeviating remorseless stance adding a contemptuous gloss to my lectures. I grew almost to dread him as if he were my conscience accompanying me continually in visible form. I had in fact nothing to offer him at all. For the first time in my life, I felt almost in despair. I avoided his eye, and my words gradually lost their resonance, confronted by that stony gaze. My own inner harmony was being steadily dislocated. Till one day the miracle happened.

  At a certain stage in the course I felt it obligatory on me to tell my students something about Kierkegaard though he is not in fact a theologian (if he can even be called that) who appeals to me much. I feel that in a sense his biography intrudes too deeply and that there is a certain fake element in his nature which I cannot quite focus on. However, as I explained to my students that day some of Kierkegaard’s ideas, as well as some of the biographical data which I thought necessary to inform them of, I saw for the first time that stony gaze become intent and almost glowing. I have never in my whole life seen such a total conversion proceeding so nakedly before my very eyes. I can even recall the smells of that day, the varnish from the desks, the freshness of the green leaves penetrating the open windows, the scent of blossom. Truly a harmony of the natural day and of ideas as well.

  I told them of how Kierkegaard’s father had cursed God on a hill in Jutland, of his success in business as a hosier, of the nickname Soren Sock which had been cast at the hunchback boy at school, of the brilliant dandy who had kept the salons laughing, of the affair of Regine, whom he had been engaged to, and finally of the ideas, the world of the aesthetic and the ethical giving way to that of the existential. I told of the early Socratic irony, followed by the crucified tormented exhortatory prose, of the pseudonyms which were sloughed as he progressed, of the consciousness of power and the exceptional, of the death bed scene where he had expressed his happiness. All this I told them, and as I spoke I felt I had done a terrible thing, that I had introduced this boy to a saint so flawed that he might destroy him. But may I say how much I envied Kierkegaard at that moment, that he could affect a human being so much, that out of the death of the spirit he could bring him alive again? I was fair to Kierkegaard though I myself feel that he demands too much of men, that he has in fact divided the harmony of the body and the spirit, and reintroduced a terrible medievalism into the world.

  Still, how can I forget how the boy’s face brightened as if at last and for the first time in his life he had entered on his kingdom and come home?

  When the lecture was over he came up to me and asked me if I could lend him some of Kierkegaard’s books. I gave him some and he thanked me and then rushed slantingly away with that walk of his as if he were breasting a high wind, bearing his treasures with him. I shivered slightly wondering how that strong salty food would affect him, and it was as if I was frightened, as if across the lecture room had fallen a dark chilly shade. If my memory is not deceiving me I think that even on that day he was wearing his long trailing brown tweed coat.

  I may say that after I had loaned him the books I didn’t see him again at my lectures for a week or two. I was rather worried about this but when I asked a fellow lodger of his – also a student – if there was anything wrong, for I still had the feeling that I had done something irretrievable, he assured me that there wasn’t but that MacEwan was still reading the books. It was a beautiful summer and, uneasy as I had been made by MacEwan’s presence in my class, I didn’t set out to investigate further. As I lectured to my students that month of May while the world of nature blossomed around the walls of learning – so that the ivy itself seemed to be in bloom – I felt Kierkegaard’s presence as an intrusion, as if the devil himself had entered the Garden of Eden.

  In any event I didn’t see MacEwan again till after the vacation. I didn’t know what I had been expecting to see, for his gaunt thorny presence had been forgotten during the long hot summer when I had relaxed from the book on which I was working, a history of the college. I had perhaps thought that in the Jutland of the islands he had become more thistly and sullen than he had been before, that the narrow intensity of his nature had been made more extreme and perhaps sharpened into a bitterer stake. It has always surprised me on my visits to these islands that such a paradisal landscape can produce such unhappy unstable men.

  However, I was quite amazed to find that when MacEwan joined my class I did not recognise him. His hair was still as long as ever but it looked combed. Instead of a tie he was wearing a silken floppy reddish scarf mottled with green. He was even clean-shaven and altogether in his brown sports jacket he looked summery and almost radiant. The sullenness had disappeared from his voice which now sounded mocking and alert. He gave me back my books and said how much he had enjoyed them. I asked him whether he wished to discuss anything in them but he said, almost with a patronising smile, that he didn’t, as if he had decided to assign to me the part of the vacuous liberal churchman in Kierkegaard’s demonology. I can’t say that I liked him any more than I had done previously, but my dislike now was founded on different causes.

  Nor did his transformation stop there. The essays he wrote for me became lighter and what I can only call flippant, and he developed a gift for the superficial epigram such as when in one of them he said that the church was no longer even the opium of the masses, it wasn’t even their cup of tea. I was brought up short by this statement because its style didn’t seem to be his at all. It was rather as if a dandyish imagination, brittle and heartless, was beginning to speak through him. Even his writing blossomed into flowery ornamentation, which had once been gaunt and rigid and vertical. He began to introduce
quotations from poets and novelists and to my surprise I learned that he had been reading Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. But more surprising than that was that he suddenly began to take part in plays, favouring world-weary sophisticated parts. He would typically be standing in corners of the stage, letting fall witticisms as he languidly smoked a cigarette. He even joined the Debating Society and would deliver short startling brittle speeches which often contained attacks on the contemporary church. At one which I attended I heard him remark that if, as Eliot had written, the whole world was a hospital endowed by a ruined millionaire, inflation had certainly made things worse. It was this kind of remark both arresting and shallow that antagonised and puzzled me. I couldn’t understand how one who had come from his environment could effect such a transformation in his personality. I gathered that he had ceased to write home and that he even spoke of the islanders in a mocking manner. His father too had, according to him, been an atheist. My impression had been that he was just a drunkard. In class however he remained silent when he condescended to come. A lot of the time he didn’t appear to be listening at all, at other times he listened but smiled in a world-weary manner, as if he was contemptuous of the quality of my mind. I found this rather irritating since I knew that my own mind was much more powerful than his (though still mediocre) but as I have sometimes encountered students of this kind, that did not in itself worry me. What began to worry me was that he would talk of his acting – this information I got from his fellow lodger again – as if he were a second Olivier and of his debating as if he were a second Demosthenes. In fact, I must admit that I was rather confused.

  However, for the second time, something happened which encouraged me. Apparently he had started going out with a girl. As a matter of fact, the girl was a student and I happened to know her because her father was a Councillor, a man affable enough but not, one would say, imaginative. She was what one would call a nice girl (she was in fact studying Arts with a view to becoming a teacher) when one means that she is quiet and undistinguished. Her talent wasn’t really for scholarship but rather for domestic and more mundane affairs. As her mother was dead she looked after the house and sometimes had to arrange dinners for her father’s guests. She was a dark-haired girl who nevertheless looked presentable enough but who was rather silent in company, and the social functions must have been agonising for her. She played the piano rather well but in a sentimental manner, and was very good at arranging flowers in vases. In another century she would have married young and made a good wife and mother, but in this one it was decreed that she should study Latin and History in order to teach children. She was, I think, fond of her father who was a rather pompous vacuous man with a loud booming voice but kind enough in his way, and fond of his daughter. They lived in a large house set in an extensive area of ground in an exclusive area of the town, that is to say, not far from where I live myself.

  Naturally I don’t know very much of what went on between her and Norman and much of what I shall say will be guesswork though part will be information which I gained one way or another. If one wonders first of all where he met her, then, as far as I could find out, it was at the dramatic society where she acted as a maid in one of the more sophisticated plays that was staged. If one wonders what she saw in him, then it must be that at this stage she may have been attracted by his dandyish negligent manner and by that slightly alien sensitivity which one often finds in islanders. If one wonders what he saw in her then it must be that she was the type of girl who would listen uncritically to him, admire him, and be easily deceived by the plumage without seeing to the bone underneath. I cannot imagine what they would talk about but I am sure that the talk would have mostly come from him, for he had grown to like the sound of his own voice. As I say, my knowledge of the girl was not very deep. I had occasion to see her father because I am on a committee which has been set up to preserve the area in which I live from the erection of a particularly horrible office block. I had talked to her a few times and then as the office block became more threatening I had visited him oftener and seen her more frequently. I must say that she blossomed as time passed, there was more purpose about her motion, she talked to me once about the future in a more involved way than usual and she even asked me some questions about ministers’ wives. (I assumed that this had something to do with Norman MacEwan.) She had a very earnest nature and one felt that where she gave her heart there would be no disloyalty and no shadow of treachery. One day we talked briefly in the garden of her house; her hands were folded in her lap while on a branch in front of us a bird’s breast vibrated with the intensity of its singing; and as she talked and I looked at her, I felt less tranquillity than fear. (By this time of course she knew that I was Norman’s teacher and whatever he had said to her about me, probably unfavourable, she knew that I was at least close to him.) I don’t know why I felt such fear. I knew that MacEwan wouldn’t have visited the house much if at all, and that he would not have impressed the father, for I was sure that he would be rather gauche, rebellious in a half-baked manner or superciliously showing off his learning. Still, MacEwan had looked much happier recently in class, and more human. He had even spontaneously thanked me for the loan of some books and the ironical note was no longer so evident in his essays which seemed to have a more pervasive warmth than in the past. Indeed they began to show signs that he was thinking in terms of a possible future and of the real world and his responsibilities in that world. He would discuss more mundane matters such as one might imagine a minister being involved with. Thus on the whole I was encouraged.

  One day quite by accident I happened to meet the two of them in the College grounds. MacEwan had taken her along to show her over the college. He was I thought rather startled when he saw that I knew her, and he looked at me in a considering manner after he had found this out. I asked her what she thought of the college and I noticed her turning to him as if she expected him to tell her what to say. He mentioned something about Cambridge in a large manner and I said diplomatically that MacEwan was promising enough before he met her but that now I was sure his promise would be fulfilled. She smiled at me gratefully. I was rather worried at the way in which she responded so naively to his rather florid pronouncements (for he was acting the lord of the manor a bit) and wondered if it was perhaps the authoritarianism of the islands that she was responding to as indeed she responded to her overbearing father. I asked in an indirect way whether he had been at their house yet but apparently he had not. I thought he was going to say something contemptuous about councillors but wisely he didn’t. On the whole I got the impression that he liked her and perhaps even loved her, that he liked showing off before her (he had a long monologue about his performance in a play by Wycherley), and that she looked on him with a certain reverence. That was the last time I saw them together. I remember I looked back as I was leaving and I saw him bending over her as she sat on a bench. It was almost as if he was whispering in her ear and I was disturbed by an image which sprang out startingly in front of my eyes in that place of leaves and shadows. It occurred to me that I knew little about either of them but what little I knew did not dispose me to augur a confident future for either of them, or both of them together.

  I didn’t see her again till she came to see me on an autumn day. She seemed agitated and looked as if she had been crying. In her hand, screwed up, she was carrying a piece of paper which after she had given it to me I discovered was a letter from MacEwan. I don’t know why she came to me, unless it was that perhaps I might know something more profound about the writer than others did. It was a very abrupt letter but the handwriting was rather shaky. When I say that it was abrupt I don’t mean that it was short but the tone of it seemed abrupt. I noticed that the handwriting had changed again and was what I can only call a compromise between the tall stiff calligraphy he had affected at the beginning and the flowery ornamental script he had been using more recently.

  It read as follows:

  Dear Helen,

  After much r
eflection and deep anguished thought I have come to the conclusion that our affair cannot prosper. I feel in myself that which is exceptional striving to break the bonds which limit it. More and more I wish to break off my dandiacal existence and enter the world of the spiritual which calls me with its continual note. I feel condemned to be like a single tree in whose branches no birds are fated to sing. When I started going out with you it was because I had succumbed to my feelings of loneliness. I was wrong to do that. I should never have allowed myself that weakness since I do not belong to myself. I belong to the world of the spirit and the spirit will not let me be. I cannot bring myself to use the word ‘husband’, it seems so alien to me. Nor can I use the word ‘wife’ which others can so glibly use. My lips can’t form either of these words. I do not want to be an exception. I wish to marry like everyone else but I feel that I’m different. Why else can my lips not form those words? I feel it would be better if you were to find someone more ordinary than me, someone who would provide you with love and who would not be continually thinking of the world beyond this one. I think it would be better if we did not meet again, however anguished this must make me. Please do not think that I do not love you. That is not it at all. On the contrary, I love you very much as far as my nature is capable of love. But I feel that my road must be a lonelier one, a more difficult one. Perhaps some day we shall meet again. I shall always think of you.