The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  Each of them profoundly unhappy, they saw and felt the division between them grow wider, and eventually she left him for a New Zealand airman who, in the last weeks of the war, had been shot down and badly burnt. Crippled and disfigured, he wanted only to go home and manage again his broad sheep-farm on the Canterbury Plains; but doubted his self-sufficiency.

  ‘So I am going with him,’ said Joyce one day. ‘You don’t need me — or you won’t admit you need me — but he does. I can be useful to him.’

  ‘Do you love him?’ asked Hector.

  ‘I think so — and I know I shall.’

  ‘But me?’

  ‘How can I love a shadow? A shadow that retreats when I approach it!’

  ‘That is my direction now,’ said Hector. ‘I am in full retreat.’

  He felt her departure as a new injustice, and when, a few months later, his father went to prison, convicted of fraud, his flight from the world found physical expression. He had become a partner in the firm that published his three volumes of poetry, and subsidies from his father had kept it afloat. Now the subsidies were cut off, and the firm went bankrupt. Grateful for so good an excuse, Hector retired to a remote village on the west coast of Scotland.

  His return was greeted with the warm approval of his fellow-countrymen, who did not know his reasons. There was, in consequence, smug satisfaction in the thought that another writer had discovered the falsity, the hollow notes and hollower heart of London, and come back to the solid reality and creative warmth of his own country. Hector said nothing to correct this false but happy assumption, and the admiration he had won by his poetry was greatly enhanced by the visible proof of his patriotism and sound good sense. Or by what was generally supposed to be evidence of those qualities.

  His admirers were disappointed, indeed, by his failure to produce almost immediately, in the quickening air of Wester Ross, another volume of Gaelic verses; but their faith in its eventual appearance was undimmed. To make a living, however, Hector was writing detective stories which he published under the name of Fay Lafarge: it being well-known that a woman’s name on the jacket of a roman policier was a guarantee that the deceptions in the story would be conscientiously done. One of these tales, which he wrote with unexpected ease, was outstandingly successful. Fay Lafarge became a celebrity — he supplied a photograph and a convincing story of her life — and Hector, safely hidden behind her distinguished features and dynamic personality, received a couple of substantial cheques. In the freedom they gave him, he wrote his play The Wheelbarrow, and presently met Jane Telfer.

  She reminded him of Joyce, and he fell in love with her. He resisted his impulse, but felt resistance sharpen his appetite; or his curiosity. And when, though reluctantly, he became her lover, he found disappointment — and was exasperated by his failure to isolate and overcome the causes of disappointment. The greatest service Jane did him was to give him an audience. There had been no one, for many years, to whom he could talk with the unbuttoned freedom that love bestows, and it was a relief to talk, even to an audience that failed to understand him. But, on the other hand, she raised the ghost of an old perplexity.

  Of the Joyce he had conceived from poetry and separation, and the Joyce who had come home from Washington, he had been able to make no single image. He had found no lens, of imagination or understanding, to bring them both in focus. The reality he had created, and the reality that had matured in absence, had troubled him as if he were afflicted by double vision. And now the Jane he imagined, and the Jane who came to visit him, bewildered him in a like manner. Not only did they revive a memory, but they repeated an experience.

  To his liaison with Jane he brought an image that he had conceived in his own mind, and found another image that had been conceived elsewhere, and more vitally, some twenty-two or twenty-three years before. The two images were irreconcilable. As irreconcilable as the two aspects of his wife Joyce. And sometimes, in his unhappiest hours, they all came into his flat together.

  This happened on the morning after he had dined with Max Arbuthnot — it was a Monday morning — when they came to his breakfast-table. There were four of them, strangers to each other and all stared at him with eyes that accused him of dreadful faults. Two of them with pity asked, ‘Why have you misconstrued us?’ and two with scorn demanded, ‘Why could you not appreciate us?’ But all were alike in their answer to the lame defences that he tried to offer. They all rejected his arguments. Two with pity and the others with scorn — but all refused to believe what he told them.

  They danced, for his torment, a ghostly quadrille. Impalpable, insistent presences, they stood in the four corners of his room and mocked him. He tried to read, but they came up behind him and leaned across his shoulders …

  The morning passed before Hector could escape these unsubstantial but obsessive visitors.

  Then, in the early afternoon, he remembered that he had accepted an unpleasant responsibility. All responsibility he now found unpleasant, but this especially so. He would never have consented to it had his judgment not been weakened, his amiability most falsely enlarged, by the richness of Max’s hospitality. He disliked the poet Burns, and detested in particular the ease of his sexual enjoyment. But now, having been seduced at a convivial table, he was committed to a critical examination of what appeared to be Burns’s own handwriting, and of several pages of obscene verses whose brilliance, to any half-critical eye, proclaimed their paternity as certainly as a Hapsburg lip. He had to sign an affiliation order, and by honouring his promise to do that, he might escape his tormenting images.

  From an untidy writing-table he took the manila envelope that already he had twice forgotten, and that Simon Telfer had brought again, and leaving his flat, crossed with impatient speed the windy intersections at the west end of Princes Street. He looked round, but no ghosts followed him, and he marched with swift purpose under the south side of the Castle, hurried down the Lawnmarket, and strode frowning to the imposing new doors of the National Library. He climbed its broad stair, still without pause, but in its spacious and well-lighted reading room was halted suddenly by the intense respectability of two elderly ladies and a Nigerian student who, at the nearest table, raised reproachful eyes from the huge tomes before them to reprove him for his abrupt and noisy entrance.

  His task, he realized, was delicate. He could not break in upon this scene of quiet and decent study with a demand for all the known copies of The Merry Muses. He could not collate the several editions of such notorious indecency within walls that were so heavily and multitudinously furnished with books of reference to every subject upon earth except indecency. It would be utterly improper to expose sixteen pages of bawdy manuscript, shining like the neon lights on a Hong Kong brothel, in a company that included a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, three young women who were studying psychological statistics, a vice-president of the Scottish P.E.N. Club, two solemn students from Ghana, and an American with a crew-cut who was writing a thesis on St Columba. If those papers lay open to the air, the infection of their appalling genius might be released to contaminate with its licorous odour all these gentle scholars. One or other of them, walking to a shelf to learn when Spinoza died or what Schopenhauer said to Schelling — what Lao Tze had written of living with nature, or C. P. Snow of the second law of thermo-dynamics — might even pause and over his shoulder read, in passing, what Burns had written of Lizzie Paton’s resilient buttocks — and how would scholarship withstand that shock? No, no, he could not pursue enquiry in these surroundings. His task was clearly impossible. But then he remembered Mr Greenshaw.

  Mr Greenshaw was an assistant librarian of genial temper and judicious mind. Hector had once met him in a pub in Rose Street where he was drinking stout with three Edinburgh poets who were trying to convince him that a poet’s first and only duty was to be true to himself.

  To which Mr Greenshaw had replied, ‘But according to Pascal — of whom it has been said that his Pensées are not bad for a França
is — the self is hateful — and that, of course, is why all autobiographies are lies … ’

  ‘Pascal,’ said the tallest of the poets, ‘did not know us.’

  ‘Even for a generalization, the statement is imprecise,’ said the shortest. ‘To whom is the self hateful? I think we can ignore God.’

  ‘A subjective judgment, uttered in the dark ages before the discovery of the subconscious, has no more value than speculation on the sea-route to the Indies before the discovery of America,’ said the middle-sized poet.

  ‘I must agree with you all,’ said Mr Greenshaw, ‘and still confute you — and of course confute myself — with the reply: Diseur de bons mots, mauvais caractère. Or, in other words, a clever tongue ought to be hung.’

  At that point Hector had joined them, and conversation took another channel. And now, remembering Mr Greenshaw, he asked if he might see him, and was presently received in a small, dark room furnished entirely with incunabula. Hector, with a rapid glance at his surroundings, decided that a librarian of Mr Greenshaw’s status could be trusted as fully as any lawyer, priest, or family doctor, and having pledged him to secrecy, disclosed his whole purpose.

  Mr Greenshaw was immediately helpful. He summoned subordinates, and quickly there appeared on his table five copies of The Merry Muses — two of them almost identical in appearance with that which Hector had brought — half a dozen examples of Burns’s handwriting, a ponderous bibliography and some other volumes, and for ornament, a portrait of Mrs Burns.

  ‘Wives of great men all remind us that we ourselves could have done much worse,’ he said. ‘But Jean was an exception. How few are frolicsome but faithful! And Jean was both. Beautiful and bountiful, long legs and a singing voice. — Robert Burns is not my subject, not my period, but living in Scotland one cannot, of course, avoid him, in a critical way. I always bring Jean into the conversation to make sure I shall not regard him as what we now call “under-privileged.” I should think not! — But now the verses: these newly found and, I am sure, delightfully offensive verses. Where are my spectacles?’

  ‘Hot stuff!’ exclaimed Mr Greenshaw, a moment later. ‘And oh, the privilege of being dead! If these lines had been written by a living hand, how abominable they would be! But in their tombs — why, Plato is never sullen, Cervantes never petulant, and Burns can never be reproved. — No, no, don’t interrupt me.’

  ‘Priapus on horseback!’ he said at last. ‘What appalling vigour! Non equidem invideo, miror magis — I don’t envy him, but what a man! And the formal excellence, the dexterity of the verses, the way he tucks thought and image (unhallowed thought and improper image) into their little stanzas — oh, it’s beyond all praise. And he, thank heaven, is beyond our blame.’

  ‘You feel quite sure it was Burns who wrote them?’

  ‘There’s no doubt of that. Genius never hits the same target twice, and no one else was made in Burns’s image — for which, perhaps, we should be gently and unobtrusively grateful. Yes, these are Burns’s own, and his hand wrote them. Look at the other examples of his writing: I’m no expert, but I’ve no doubt that Jean knew the hand above those down-strokes.’

  ‘And this volume of The Merry Muses: is there anything to suggest where it came from?’

  ‘Nothing, so far as I can see, but the verses addressed to “Honest Smellie.” ‘

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘You ought to know that. He was a friend of Burns, one of the founders of the Crochallan Fencibles, and editor of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One of those miscellaneous scholars. Dirty in habit, and ill-tempered when not in a convivial mood. I forget when he died.’

  Mr Greenshaw consulted another book, and presently said, ‘Now listen to this: “Many letters of Burns to Mr Smellie, being totally unfit for publication, and several of them severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.” — That’s from his biography, by Robert Kerr. But these verses may have survived the burning. Smellie died in 1795, and clearly he had friends, if not relations (I’ll look into that) who were conscientiously interested in what he left. One of them, I suppose, conscientiously decided to save the verses from the flames that consumed the letters. Perhaps Robert Kerr himself. I must see what’s known about him. — But where did Max Arbuthnot get the book?’

  ‘That I don’t know. He said his lips were sealed.’

  ‘Not for nothing. It’s worth a lot of money.’

  ‘What sort of value would you put on it?’

  ‘It’s a difficult question. There’s a market for Burns and a market for indecency. If you could find a rich buyer who goes shopping in both, he might pay a fantastic sum for it.’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds?’

  ‘When you think of the prices that are paid for foreign stamps and French Impressionists, perhaps ten thousand isn’t impossible. But the Library won’t pay you that.’

  ‘I must take good care of it,’ said Hector, and stood up, prepared to go. But Mr Greenshaw seemed reluctant to let him leave, and with an air of diffidence very unlike the ready geniality of his usual manner — or perhaps with the wistfulness of a man whose interests not many share — he asked, ‘Do you ever look at the earliest of printed pages? At your predecessors on the shelves of the amateur and the scholar — or on the table of a lady of fashion? They’re very handsome, some of them, though much too big until Manuzio thought of a sensible size.’

  From a shelf he took a heavy Virgil printed in Venice in the 15th century — a volume of the Specula from Strasbourg — laid them on his desk, opened them at random — and for some minutes spoke with nervous intensity of the huge appetite for learning and entertainment that the invention of printing had disclosed. In fifty years, he said, perhaps as many as twenty million books came off the brand-new presses, and all in small editions of two or three hundred. The classics, of course, and ponderous tomes like the Specula, and any amount of rubbish. Rubbish from the very start …

  Hector, though grateful to Mr Greenshaw, found it difficult to show a proper interest in his lecture. The atmosphere of a library depressed him. He who with infinite pain— by subjecting the harvest of intolerable emotions to the winepress of an inordinate discipline — had squeezed out three books only (such small and slender books) endured in a library the sensation, as he supposed, of a coral-insect that unexpectedly had acquired the capacity to see, in its entirety, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. All of it made — as was a library — by coral-insects. And what importance, in that huge creation, could a single insect claim? A limy pin-head in the ocean, or in the miles of shelving that ten thousand books encumbered: and that was not enough. Not enough to take pleasure in achievement.

  So, to escape from the Library as quickly as decency permitted, Hector asked Mr Greenshaw to come and have a drink with him in his flat. And still Mr Greenshaw revealed an odd nervousness. He now seemed relieved to know that Hector was going, but clearly wanted to see him again. He said yes, at once, to the invitation, but then protested that he could not leave the Library for another hour — and, as he talked, he returned to their shelves the large volumes to which he had drawn his visitor’s attention, and from his table took The Merry Muses, the manila envelope, and deftly inserting the book into its cover, gave it to Hector.

  ‘In an hour’s time,’ he said, ‘or I may be a little later. But if I may come then … ’

  ‘I shall expect you,’ said Hector, and with the contented feeling that he had done all he had been asked to do, walked back to the mews behind St George’s Church. There, an hour and a half later, Mr Greenshaw arrived. But no sooner had Mr Greenshaw been given a drink — when Mr Greenshaw, seeing the manila envelope, unopened, lying on Hector’s untidy table, had just said, ‘You really should lock that up. Haven’t you a safe?’ — than the ship’s bell at Hector’s blue-painted door was loudly rung, and Hector, going down to see who his next visitor might be, found Jane in the mews.

  She came upstairs, and promptly took a dislike to
Mr Greenshaw. She let it be seen, and after an uncomfortable quarter of an hour Mr Greenshaw left them. Then Jane said fiercely to Hector, ‘You kept Simon here till nearly three o’clock. Three o’clock in the morning! And when he came home, he was drunk.’

  ‘Surely not! He was quite sober when he left here.’

  ‘He ran into the gate-post and crumpled a wing of mother’s car. He wouldn’t have done that if he’d been sober.’

  ‘Accidents do happen.’

  ‘Especially when a man’s drunk! But what I want to know is what you and Simon were talking about.’

  ‘The war, I think … ’

  ‘Were you talking about me?’

  ‘No, certainly not.’

  ‘But you were talking together for hours and hours!’

  ‘It was a long war … ’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Simon said. But in all that time — in all that time, did you never even mention me?’

  ‘No, I’m sure we didn’t. We found we had a lot in common … ’

  ‘You’ve got me in common,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘That isn’t true,’ said Hector. ‘It was never true, in reality.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘What I found in you — or what I had hoped to find — can’t have been what Simon found.’

  ‘You found what you wanted!’

  ‘If I were to tell you I didn’t, you would only say … ’

  ‘I’d say you were lying! Or else you were looking for the impossible! If you were looking for something that no woman could give you, then I’m not to blame for disappointing you.’

  ‘But if Simon found what he wanted, he was probably looking for something else.’

  ‘Simon’s a better man than you are!’

  ‘That I admit. I’m sure he is. And because of that… ‘

  ‘Are you going to tell me that you’re his friend now? Simon’s friend, and not mine?’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop us being friends … ’

  ‘But we were lovers! I was unfaithful to Simon because of you — there was no one else, there never has been anyone else, but you and Simon — and now, you say … ’