Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  “Of course. Next Wednesday. I promise. And I’ll do some homework first, so that you won’t need to explain everything.”

  “Thank you Michael,” he said, as he walked away.

  But we never did listen to Tristan. For a week I shut Bill from my mind, applied myself to study, travelled to Cambridge, and returned, the exam over, with a simulacrum of resolve. I went round to Bill’s on the Wednesday not to hear Tristan but to say goodbye. But he had got there first. The door was opened by his mother, a middle-aged lady in a stiff blue suit, with a thin stiff face like a nurse. She did not look at me directly, nor did she invite me in.

  “I’m afraid Bill’s not here,” she said. “You must be Michael.”

  I agreed with that much at least.

  “He’s gone, you see.”

  Her voice was without expression, as though announcing the news on the radio.

  “Where to?”

  “Oh well, you see, he kept falling down. The doctor said he should see a specialist. So we took him to the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “Saint Thingamejig’s, I keep forgetting the name, over the other side of Croydon. But you see, they don’t want visitors. Not yet.”

  She sounded relieved. Clearly the decision had been made to erase Bill from the family archive. I hesitated for a moment, searching for an appropriate remark.

  “Well,” I said. “If you talk to him, tell him I came round.”

  “Yes, I’ll tell him that,” she said, with a nod of the head, as though glad of the inspiration.

  I walked back slowly to our house, with a strange hollow feeling, as though life had suddenly run out of me. That Friday the local paper carried the headline: “Mental patient falls from hospital roof.” The description of the dead man left no doubt that it was Bill. My only thought as I read was to wonder how he could have climbed up there. Surely security was not so lax?

  The letter of acceptance from Cambridge came four days later. During those days I had kept to my room, neither reading nor thinking nor feeling, like a creature waiting to be born. The news from Cambridge awoke me. I took my passport, savings book, some clothes, and a copy of Rilke’s poems and left one morning before dawn. The note on the kitchen table promised a letter every month, but gave no explanation. For I had no explanation.

  Nor do I remember much of those nine months of wandering. Some things, scenes, and faces, come back to me. And there was one serious affair—at least, I suppose it was serious, since it lasted several months—long enough for me to learn German from Ulrike, who was a student in Düsseldorf, and who fed me and housed me in that dreary town until I left without a goodbye in the middle of her exams. I did not mean to be heartless; I did not mean to be anything—meaning and being were both on hold, as I drifted in a kind of sealed vacuum through foreign parts and strange attachments. I earned money here and there—muck-spreading on an industrialised farm near Hanover, dishwashing in a restaurant in Kessel, playing twelve-bar blues in a Düsseldorf Biergarten—which is how I met Ulrike. And I sent a postcard home each month, with a somnambulistic greeting. But inside me was a uniform blankness—a vast flat desert, beneath the surface of which strange things were constantly shifting and adjusting. Fear, horror, grief and guilt had all sped away in the relentless glare of nothingness. And when I read in Heidegger that das Nichts nichtet—that Nothing noths—I knew exactly what he meant, and cherished the thought as my own.

  For I was still reading, immersing myself in the past—not the past of England, but the past of Germany, whose ghosts had been walled in behind towers and tenements, whose pavements cringed beneath my feet with their buried secrets, whose people sped into the future with empty faces, like blank sheets of paper in the wind. Ulrike had been baptised Magdalena but had renamed herself after the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof. She believed that Germany would rise again only when the ruling class had been decimated, in acts of exemplary violence. To me it didn’t seem much of an improvement on the Nazi view. But I observed her from behind a screen. I was never close to her, not even in bed, and curiosity played only a small part in our relations. Ulrike wanted it that way. She had a business-like approach to things, and would calculate the number of murders needed to destroy the bourgeoisie with the same bureaucratic pedantry that she applied to writing an essay on social statistics or exploring scientific sex in accordance with the newly published manual of Dr. Comfort. She accepted me as a factor in her calculations, was pleased that I had no feelings, and allowed me to drift beside her, just out of reach.

  Not that I was always with her. On the contrary, I wandered for weeks at a time, taking my books and a sleeping-bag, hitching lifts, living rough, eating rye bread and sausage in the streets of ugly towns whose names I never learned, watching the life which is no life of a nation that has lost its memory, and been forbidden to mourn. I read the German classics, explored museums and cathedrals, studied Burckhardt and Ranke, and conjured corny pictures of the vanished Germany with which to compare the present void. I became something of an alienation expert, moving from place to place in search of nowhere, mingling with the crowds as they played moronic games in stadiums, and sitting among whey-faced youths as they pumped their veins with heroin in the public parks. Time stood still for me—whole days would pass in which I thought nothing, observed nothing, felt nothing save the blistering rays of Nothing in my soul.

  Only one part of me seemed to grow during those vacant months, and that was my love of music. The Düsseldorf Marxists were disco-fans, and Ulrike was no exception. Disco formed the background to everything she did, and her bedroom was plastered with pictures of her favourite lesbian trio: the Bo-Bo Girls, whose costume was black leather, bare nipples, dark glasses and Kalashnikovs. Had Ulrike fulfilled her greatest ambition and gunned down a judge in front of his family, it would have been with a Walkman on her ears and the Bo-Bo Girls singing their hit number, “Ich hasse dich.” Everywhere in Germany I heard the jug-a-jug rhythm and tuneless monody of disco, and this reinforced the sense of my apartness—as though I had been elected to remember the musical tradition that these barbarians refused to inherit. The judgement was snobbish and unfair: but how was I to know that I was not the distinguished exception I took myself to be, but merely one among millions, most of them German, who heard with impotent outrage this all-pervasive antidote to music and grieved in their hearts that the greatest achievement of their civilisation was soon to be lost?

  Ulrike lived in a block of flats, two miles from the centre, next to a Technische Hochschule. The school had a Bechstein grand, standing in a wide-windowed hall full of dust and chalk and the group smell of children. The old janitor—a mild man with twinkling blue eyes and a grey moustache, who had doubtless been a loyal Nazi when loyal Nazis were required—allowed me to play the piano after hours. There was a cupboard containing sheet music, and when I was not sleep-walking through the ruined landscape of Germany, I was fixed to this spot. Beyond the tall wide windows everything was blank and incomprehensible. Here, in this place that was visited outside school hours only by me and by God, I re-discovered the inner life. I came to know the sonata repertoire. I played through two-hand reductions of the Beethoven symphonies, and vocal scores of the Mozart operas. I rediscovered Bach, and felt what must have been my only spasm of real emotion during those months of nothingness.

  One evening, fighting my way through the first E-flat minor fugue, there arose within me the image of Dr. Jackson in his scuffed old tweeds as he leaned across me at the keyboard. He had showed me how that innocent theme works its way through inversions and elaborations to its final statement in double time, becoming defiant and dignified without losing its childlike simplicity and ineffable sadness. For him it was the musical image of honesty, which is why he called it Cordelia, and there was a kind of confession in his voice when he said this. I imagined a forlorn and adolescent love, to the memory of which he had consecrated his celibate existence. And recalling Dr. Jackson in that empty hall in Düsseldorf,
as the summer storm-clouds gathered outside, and a thin shaft of sunlight brushed my fingers on the keyboard, I dissolved in tears. For a whole hour I wept, not knowing for whom or why. And the strange thing is that, while I thought of Dr. Jackson, of Linda, of the Church at Etticombe, even of my parents and their dormant being, I did not think of Bill. Not once during my months in Germany. Not thinking about Bill was an unconscious policy, my body’s way of getting through.

  And the policy lasted through my first year at Cambridge, a year spent sleep-walking between lecture-rooms and libraries. I had been admitted to read natural sciences, specialising in biochemistry. But I changed at once to English, less for the subject’s sake than for the ease with which I could ignore it. Indifferent to politics, I joined no debating society, no discussion group, no political movement. Without talent for the theatre, and with only an amateur competence at the piano, I kept my culture to myself, hiding from my contemporaries the inner thoughts that secretly distanced me from them. For more than a year I strove to be as like my college neighbours as I could, imitating by turns their Rod Stewart haircuts, their Bob Dylan posters, their desks piled with fanzines, their Rasta dialogue. I learned bass guitar, and even joined an amateur pop group, playing sequences that kicked their way into my soul like gangs of hooligans, but whose stupidity I would have denied if need be under torture.

  Real music was my guilty secret. I would listen to it alone in the middle of the day, after my neighbours had left for their lectures, when a kind of sultry domesticity reigned on our staircase, and the drab girlfriends of the night before rose one by one from their sheets to pad around the bathroom.

  I hid my culture even from my supervisor—a dreary Marxist called Hargreaves, who lived in the Eastern suburbs among nappies and toys and back issues of the New Left Review, and who associated English literature, English history, English art and music, and the very idea of England, with the class oppression symbolized by Cambridge. It was thanks to Dr. Hargreaves that I ended my first year with a dissertation of consummate fatuousness on the Liverpool Poets, having written essays on Barthes, Saussure, and Kristeva, meticulously reproducing the Parisian gobbledygook prescribed for the course in “literary theory,” and adding faint sarcastic asides about the poverty of English literature and the madness of Dr. Leavis. All this I did in a state of denial. For there, right in the centre of my psyche, was the place where Bill sat wrapped in grief, waiting like some Homeric ghost for the blood that would once again bring life and love and understanding.

  Then one day, on a dank November afternoon in my second year, after I had changed my course of study yet again, I came across an article in the Allgemeine Musikalischer Zeitung of 1928, on Spengler and Schoenberg. I sat in a cubicle, high up in the University Library tower. The window overlooked the Backs, and the afternoon mist was rising from the river Cam, veiling the colleges, and curling around the finials on the roof of King’s College chapel—that majestic structure which had sailed proudly from the age of faith, to run aground in a place of treachery. The scene had a peculiar Cambridge melancholy—the melancholy of celibate dreams and stone-built isolation, of collegiate solitude and the chill damp air of the fens. And it blended in my thoughts with the text that lay open before me.

  Written in a formal, stilted German, the article angrily repudiated the twelve-tone system, as the triumph of “civilisation” over “culture.” This regimented, mathematical, law-governed, and unfeeling system, the author wrote, was the enemy of natural music—the music that arises spontaneously in the culture of a people, and which expresses their will to live, to propagate, to claim the world as their own. And the author referred approvingly to Spengler, whose thesis that civilisation begins when culture dies, seemed to contain a warning addressed to the entire German nation. Nor did he neglect Schoenberg’s Jewishness, and the “Magian” spirit that expressed itself through this alien music. The Faustian soul of Western man, the author wrote, soars free and with infinite aspiration in the endlose Melodie of Wagner, but is enslaved and humiliated by serialism, which, with Talmudic finickiness, binds the soul of music in its chains.

  The doom-laden thoughts seemed to rise from the page, to mingle with the Cambridge mist, and to pour their poison over the world beyond the window. And suddenly I recalled that damp October morning back home when, my head full of this same intoxicating nonsense, wanting the disaster cherished by Spengler to be my disaster too, I had heard the unceasing footsteps in the street below. And I remembered that it was not Spengler or Eliot or any of my cultural heroes who had made me conscious of the twilight, but Bill, whose belief in the end was also an inward determination to resist it; and I discovered that I had loved and admired him right up to that moment when I opened the door to find him strung like a puppet from the dawn sky.

  I was overcome by remorse. Had it not been for my coldness of heart, Bill would have been alive and on the road to recovery, perhaps visiting me in Cambridge and taking pleasure in my studies. It was Bill who had deflected me from science, who had offered culture as my icon, who had shown me that our world can be known and understood through music. It was to Bill that I owed my decision first to read English, and then to change after a year to music, maybe one day to pursue an academic career. And it was Bill’s obscure remark about Mahler that had awoken me to the life of the mind.

  I remembered Bill’s head, his fragile cranium and taut translucent skin, the long prehensile fingers moving above it as though exploring a halo of pain, and I was astonished to think that I could have been frightened of him, that I could have responded to him with something other than admiring and pitying affection. And yes, it is possible to admire what you also pity: Nietzsche was wrong about this, as he was wrong about everything, as wrong and corrupting as Spengler.

  I left my books in the library and walked with a strange new wakefulness towards my college digs on Jesus Green. I packed up my books and clothes, and telephoned home. I was leaving Cambridge, I said. Probably I would work in London; maybe go for a job in publishing. My parents, who understood this decision no more than they understood all the other events and non-events that had destroyed their timid hopes for me, nevertheless listened with meek surrender, and agreed to fetch me in the car. Conversation had long since died between us, and the silent journey around London was filled with my mourning for Bill. Only one thing could help me, which was to make contact with him somehow, to fight for him, to see him rise again within me, offering his forgiveness.

  My bedroom at home sickened me. The school clothes in the wardrobe were somehow shamefaced, as though I had caught them in the act of being just the same, going over and over in privacy and darkness the rituals that I had chosen not to remember. The stale odour of guilt still clung to them, and I shut the door on them as though concealing a crime. I moped for a day or so, reading nothing, occasionally walking past Bill’s house, where china dogs stood in their old position in the window, framed by the same mustard-coloured curtains of a vaguely abstract design. Then I came across an advertisement in our local paper from a rehabilitation centre for the mentally ill, asking for volunteers. I arranged an interview and arrived at the Victorian red-brick building in Croydon in a serious mood, eager to do for a stranger what I had refused to do for Bill.

  I was shown into a large bright office which, but for its size, resembled the rooms of my Cambridge neighbours. A large poster of the Beach Boys had been stuck with blue tacks to the wall above a long modern desk piled high with football magazines. A low coffee table stood in the middle of the room, bearing a squash racket, a can of Newcastle Brown, and a copy of a body-building magazine. A metal filing cabinet stood against one wall, its side covered with stickers from the Socialist Workers’ Party, and its drawers lying open and empty. The large sash window gave on to a pleasant street of Victorian houses, with white stucco facades and pollarded lime trees. There was a faint smell of stale cigarette smoke—so faint, however, as to suggest a previous occupant, who had moved on from this place, as everyone did in
time. Furniture, equipment, decoration, even smell seemed provisional, temporary, without the burdens of ownership or purpose. I stood alone in the room, and the light seemed to expand around me. The crazy impression arose that this was my home, that I belonged here, that this would be the centre of my existence. I pictured myself coming each day into that light-filled centre, from which my good works would radiate outwards over a grateful world. I belonged here, where none had belonged.

  A young man entered and greeted me with a short self-confident “Hi!” He was stocky, shabbily dressed in jeans and dun-coloured cardigan, with unkempt red hair and a faint sprinkling of beard. His pouchy blue eyes fixed me for a moment, and then wandered towards the desk. A row of silver earrings in his left ear caught the light from the window, and twinkled above the punctured skin, which was white, lifeless, and cheesy.

  “So you want to help us,” he said. “That’s good. Do you realize what you’re taking on?”

  I began to reassure him, but he interrupted me.

  “I mean, do you realize what a state we’re in? It’s just incredible. The country is falling apart. Rampant capitalism. Greed. Profiteering. Wherever you look, just self, self, self. What do you make of it?”

  “Well, I suppose I...”

  “The incredible thing is, nobody cares. Just a few of us, working at the bottom of the pile, trying to pick up the pieces. But only a temporary measure. It’s like putting plaster on a flesh-wound, when the insides have been shot to bits. What this country needs is a—fuck, someone’s been at my papers.”

  He was sifting through the pile of football mags, extracting letters, scraps of paper, and what seemed like closely typed minutes of a meeting. After a moment’s agitation, he settled down again to his theme, standing at the desk with his back to me, and turning every now and then with a rapid and unfriendly glance.