Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  But life does not go on. That was what Bill learned in London, and if it had not been for the fact of his arrest one night on suspicion of stealing the plaster-cast mermaid that had vanished from the foyer of the seamen’s hostel where the tramp had found a temporary lodging, he would have taken the train north to Scotland, to pursue his mission there. As it was, he found himself back in the routine devised by the Giants, forced to postpone his plans for the future, and to resume his pretended life as an obedient moron.

  In his imagined wanderings, Bill fell in with characters burdened with information fundamental to his education and to mine. There was the constructivist architect Miastotkin, who had unfurled for Bill’s instruction—and my instruction too—his plans for the total destruction of London. There was the composer of musicals and seaside medleys, Harry Bile, whose settings of William Blake had been chosen to open the Chelsea Flower Show two years before. There was Mick, the rag and bone man, Auntie the acrobat and Sam Hibbard in his flasher’s mackintosh, who had taught the art of growing vegetables on an allotment under the railway. From all of these I learned—politics, philosophy, music, modern history, topics bundled together by Bill as ‘the arts of survival’. And there was Father Ryszard, the Polish priest, who had been a ground officer with bomber command in the Second World War. Father Ryszard’s stories, of Poland under communism, of Nazi criminals hidden at that very moment in our suburb, were related with an urgency and conviction that quite belied their implausibility.

  “I returned to Poland,” Father Ryszard had said one night (he and Bill were working as ice-cream vendors in Birmingham at the time) “at just the wrong moment after the war, when the communists were hunting down the patriots who had fought the Nazis and the ruined country was being wrapped in human skin as a gift for Comrade Stalin. I had no thought then of entering the priesthood, could hardly say that I was a believer, and spent my spare time chasing girls, as we all did. It was a few weeks after VE day that I underwent a change of heart. I was stationed then in an old-fashioned market town where wizened old geezers made furniture from the local beech trees, and quaint traditions like Morris dancing and maypoles were maintained as symbols of England’s right to exist. There was a camp on a neighbouring hillside where the Polish airmen were housed, and by way of ministering to our manifest moral deficiencies we had been provided with a Roman Catholic priest, a sad old man called Father Brendan Murphy, who had been brought over from Ireland for the purpose, following his retirement from a country parish. Father Brendan was a heavy drinker, who would spend his evenings in the Coach and Horses Inn, presiding, with the help of his flock, over a constant flow of beer and Irish whiskey. Towards ten o’clock, as the pub emptied and the next day’s agenda dawned on those unfortunate enough to have one, Father Brendan would begin to talk, often interrupting himself with astonished cries as the visions revealed themselves, usually on the opposite wall, but once in the face of Millie, the bar-maid, for whom he had a tender affection. It was these visions that were my downfall. For after a while I began to share in them. ‘See there,’ Father Brendan would cry, ‘the Holy Virgin herself, sorting her knitting needles’; or ‘You wouldn’t believe it, the Angel Gabriel himself talking to Jan Kowalski there; as though it could do any good. And what’s that in his hand? An electric saw? Good Heavens.’

  “At first the visions were random in just that way, odd intrusions of the miraculous that served no purpose other than to cast doubt on the reality of our surroundings. Gradually, though, they took on a distinct narrative form, and it was in this way that they sucked me in. The Holy Virgin ceased to fuss around with knitting and darning and baking cakes, and began to make definite pronouncements about the way the world was going. ‘Listen,’ Father Brendan would say, firmly gripping my arm, ‘she is telling us about the war in Japan.’ And sure enough, into the silence that followed—for it was late and we were alone in the corner of the saloon bar—there intruded a soft female voice, speaking Polish. But it was not about Japan that she was speaking. She murmured for a while, soothing nonsense of a vaguely religious kind. And then she mentioned the village of Podgorze, my village, and the plight of my mother who had no one to protect her since my father’s death from tuberculosis two years before. I began to reason with her—how could I go home now, when my status in the British air force would be a death sentence in the Communists’ eyes? I proved irrefutably that I was of the greatest use to mankind and to the church as a member of the ground staff of Bomber Command, and Father Brendan, for whom I purchased a double whiskey as an encouragement, pleaded the case on my behalf.

  “But the Holy Virgin was having none of it. She intimated that I was to return to Poland in the guise of a Roman Catholic priest, and as it happens the vestments and rings and chasubles were all to hand and already lodged with Father Brendan who would lend them to me forthwith, which he did, gladly exchanging his clothing for mine and disappearing thereafter from the camp where we were housed and leaving me to improvise my new identity as best I could.”

  You will ask whether Bill believed this story of Father Ryszard’s, and the answer is of course that he didn’t, and that in any case it did not matter since at that moment two police officers had approached the ice-cream van that Father Ryszard had borrowed from a neighbour and arrested him as an illegal immigrant. It was only later, while rehearsing a play by Ionesco for the Théatre du cornichon in the Latin quarter, that he had time to reflect on the meaning of Father Ryszard and the significance, not for Bill and me only, but for Europe as a whole, of the mad Polish resistance to communism. And here, leaving everything once again in the air, Bill took the opportunity to explain to me the real meaning of Ionesco’s surrealist theatre as he saw it, the place of surrealism in the literature of post-war Paris, and the significance of the theatre in enabling the French to express their guilt feelings about the war, without ever making them so clear as to amount to a real confession. From this topic, it was but a small step to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the theory of the pour-soi as the néant.

  I owe my education almost entirely to Bill. His Scheherazadelike stories, which never concluded but opened brackets within brackets in a constant flow of information, were designed to create between us a relation of tense complicity, as the only ones in the know. I was to share his secret vision, which was a vision of time and its meaning, a vision of the catastrophe of the modern world, in which nevertheless there was rescue available if only I would entrust myself to him. His stories described the possible worlds in which Bill existed just as he is, but somehow purified, real but washed clean of the facts. They were illustrations of those lines in his favourite poem, which tell us that “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.” Bill became a symbol of the present: a vivid shining of the Now, which seemed like a candle burning with all the past Nows of our civilization, and made from human tallow. Although the twisted figure in the scuffed old armchair could easily be mistaken for an abject failure, the appearance was entirely deceptive—such was the burden of his words. Beneath the broken-seeming exterior was a vital and creative soul, and soon that soul would burst from its ruined chrysalis and take me with it into the skies. All that was necessary was patience. I had to trust him, in some way to give myself to him, and I sat in my corner of the garage dimly apprehensive as to what my commitment to Bill amounted to and what price I would soon be called upon to pay.

  Bill lent me books: Eliot, Joyce, and Beckett; Goethe, Heine, and Rilke; Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Maupassant. He played through his collection of records, and soon the love of Beethoven and Mahler had displaced all lesser loves—I knew that I must study music. There was an old upright piano in our house, the legacy of an aunt who had died. I began to work out melodies and chords, and to teach myself the rudiments of theory. Bill told me he could play a little, and I asked him to give me a lesson on our old piano. He greeted the suggestion with horror.

  “Impossible,” he said. “Not there. This is where
I live. On a temporary basis, you understand, but live nevertheless.”

  I bullied my parents, and they agreed to pay for lessons, which I received from old Dr. Jackson, the organist at the Anglican church. Within three months I had my fingers under control and was teaching myself to sight-read, devouring volume after volume from the public library, whose unvisited music section contained all the classics in out-of-date editions. Bill was gratified by my progress, though he never heard me play, there being no piano within the ambit of his permitted excursions. For six months, we would meet at his house on bridge nights, or in his garage on my school-free afternoons. Along with his autobiographical stories, he would entertain me with descriptions of my ignorance, and parsimonious hints as to how I might be cured of it. Soon I had the impression that he was indeed winding me into the fiction in which he lived. I was no longer Michael Sillitoe, but ‘Michael Sillitoe’, a character in a story by Bill.

  During the summer holidays, we would often spend the days together reading his “curriculum for castaways,” and I wrote one or two essays, which I did not dare to show to him, but which pleased me with their posturing sensitivity to things half understood. By the time I returned to school in September to prepare for the Cambridge entrance examination, I had begun to adopt his cryptic dialect.

  I had discovered in the town library a strange little periodical called Die Reihe, edited by Ernst Křenek, one of those difficult and impossibly intellectual composers who emerged from the Viennese twilight with dictatorial imperatives directed at the rest of mankind. The journal was considered so important by the cognoscenti that it appeared simultaneously in German and English. It told me that the classical tradition of music had come to an end, that tonality had reached a crisis, and that the language of music must be forged anew. I asked Bill what this could possibly mean, and he explained, standing with his back to the lace-curtained window and conducting himself with vast waves of the arms.

  “All art must renew itself. To repeat the old gestures, the old styles, the old devices, is to lapse into cliché. What was once fresh and full of meaning becomes dead and empty like a shell.”

  “So you think the musical tradition is finished?”

  “Tradition is the slant of things, leaning against the wind. It doesn’t cease just because the dead leaves are blown away.”

  “You’re avoiding the question,” I said.

  “No. I am rephrasing it. Listen.”

  And he put a record on the turntable. It was the last movement of Mahler’s ninth symphony—a piece so sublime, to my way of thinking, that I felt the existence of an absolute divide between those who had heard it and those who had not, like the absolute divide between the saved and the damned. I was all the more astonished by Bill’s words, which he delivered in a vehement whisper above the great G-string melody for the first violins.

  “Listen to that turn—the way it lingers around the single note, dwelling on its putrefaction. Horrible! Horrible! And here it comes again, caressing the dead, necrophilia in music, and this dead thing a child! Someone else’s child—stolen as a sacrificial victim.”

  Suddenly he snatched the needle from the record.

  “Of course it wasn’t always like that. The turn was a beautiful ornament in Bach, a delicate piece of stitching in Mozart, a source of boundless energy in the first movement of the Emperor concerto. And then came Wagner, and a premonition of twilight. The Liebestod—the first welcoming of death in music—and the farewell to the old musical language.”

  I confessed that I had not heard the Liebestod, and Bill turned to stare at me, as though noticing my presence for the first time.

  “Tomorrow you will not be going to school,” he said. “We shall sit here and listen through Tristan. And since you read music, we shall follow it with the score.”

  Bill swept the room with his eyes.

  “You need to know what is really wrong with this place and time. You need to know how much is fake.”

  For the first time, I bridled against Bill’s regime of absolutes. Was it my fault that I had been reared in ignorance? I looked at him angrily, and he instantly lowered his eyes.

  “I know. You’ve got to live. Why should you see things my way? Look at old Bill, you’re thinking—a prisoner, an invalid, a moral cripple. And he tells me everything else is fake.”

  I was distressed by these words. It had not occurred to me to doubt Bill’s vision—on the contrary, every day left me more persuaded of its truth. Bill was an invalid, but only in the way that soldiers might be invalids. He had done battle with the world and been honourably wounded. And he had seized from the world its secrets, which he was sharing with me.

  “I do see things your way, Bill. It’s why I’ve changed. Just don’t expect more than is possible, that’s all.”

  The next day I played truant from school—it wasn’t difficult, since I had finished my A-levels, and was left to my own devices, on the assumption that my devices had the same goal as the school’s, namely Cambridge. But I didn’t go immediately to Bill’s. Something was on my mind—something that I couldn’t put into words. Three years before, I had been confirmed in the Church of England; our family assumed that, once you got into the right position, this was a useful move, like castling in chess. It relieved you of the need to go to church, much as becoming a shareholder relieved you of the need to work for the firm. It also put God permanently on your side. For a brief moment, I had been moved by the Anglican rite, and I suppose the Book of Common Prayer must have penetrated my unconscious thoughts—whence came that sudden and devastating sense of recognition on hearing Four Quartets, if not from the memory of Cranmer? Some of this had come back during my lessons with Dr. Jackson, who had a touching love for the old hymns and chants and words, and who never failed to remind me that the music of Bach, which we studied together, was written in praise of our Saviour.

  Interesting people were rare in our part of the world, and you encountered them only by chance. Our clubs and societies were designed to endow brainless hobbies with an aura of neighbourliness; people with visions of the higher life had to nourish them in private. Their situation was not desperate, for the Third Programme provided lectures, plays, poetry, and high-minded comment, along with serious music. And I suppose we were all to some extent creations of the old BBC—even Bill, whose contempt for the world echoed the patrician attitudes that floated on the air-waves. Nevertheless, you could not encounter a cultivated person without a feeling of complicity, of mutual secrets, and a shared but unspecified danger. There was a freemasonry of the elect, and even if you never overtly mentioned it, this very fact conditioned what you said or did together. So it was with Dr. Jackson, into whose book-lined cottage in the old part of town I would make my way each Wednesday evening, to subject my musical skills to judgement.

  Dr. Jackson was in his early fifties, a quiet bachelor who had been an organ scholar at an Oxford college. Failing to obtain a fellowship, he had returned to his mother’s house, bringing the books, records, and beliefs acquired at Oxford. His mother died, and thereafter he lived by teaching the piano to the half a dozen kids whose parents saw the point of it. A frugal lifestyle and studious piety had endowed his features with an air of saintliness. The mild grey eyes never stared or demanded, but looked always shyly upwards from beneath a rose-coloured brow, on which a crown of white hair shone like a halo. The long straight mouth was sheltered behind a salt-and-pepper moustache, and would venture a smile before every utterance. Dr. Jackson dressed correctly, in worn-out tweeds, with a gold watch tucked in his waistcoat, and a green silk handkerchief, which he never used, carefully arranged in his top pocket. He was quietly spoken, and his words were punctuated with long, thoughtful silences, as though he feared to speak out of turn, and was waiting for a sign. To me he was always gracious, never explicitly mentioning, but merely assuming, that I shared his musical passions. He had a curious way of inserting information sideways into your mind—not stating what he wished you to know, but merely pro
mpting you to recall it.

  “Makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it, the A flat in the bass, straight after the F sharp in the bar before.” (He was going through the first prelude in the Forty-Eight, note by note as he always did.) “Of course you’re familiar with the controversy, whether there isn’t a bar missing—Czerny gives us one, with G in the bass and a C minor arpeggio above, but you wouldn’t want that, I dare say, being much more of a modernist than poor old Czerny.” (After a long pause, listening to my swallowed silence, he would continue.) “It probably sounds mad to you, but I like to compare that A flat with the C sharp in the first theme of the Eroica—the note from elsewhere. Watch out, it says, music is full of surprises—you think you’re on firm ground and—Good Heavens!—you’ve stepped on a trap door and are falling through keys you never dreamed of.”

  And he would conclude with a self-deprecating chuckle. From such lessons I would go straight to the town library, in order to discover for myself what Dr. Jackson had revealed through pretending that I already knew it. Nor were his asides about music only. To each of Bach’s fugal subjects he gave a name from Shakespeare: the C minor in Book I was Malvolio, the C-sharp major Portia, the E-flat minor Cordelia, and so on. And by assuming that I knew exactly what he meant, he led me in the most original way to read and remember Shakespeare, and to acknowledge as I did so the profound oneness of the artistic enterprise, which, whether in words or tones or paint, was always exalting our condition and redeeming it.