Murther and Walking Spirits
(7)
SO, FOR THE MOMENT I have seen the last of my father. My father! I never thought of him in this way. But then, who really knows his father, or his mother? In our personal dramas they play older, supporting roles, and we are always centre stage, in the limelight. And Professor James Pliny Whitney Frost, who is cast as Polonius in this provincial, Canadian Hamlet – probably a very different creature, if one knew more about him. Polonius must once have loved, before he became a wise counsellor to King Claudius and so an old ass to the Prince. After all, he begot the fair Ophelia.
On this amazing screen I have seen the Sphinx-smile that torments young Brochwel, and I have seen that identical smile on the lips of a dozen young women. Saw it, now and then, when Esme smiled in just that way. What does it mean? A comprehension beyond the wit of the protesting lover, or simply nothing at all, or What on earth does he think he is talking about? There is a gap of understanding that the extremest achievements of Feminism will never bridge. Women love, too, and love deeply and often bitterly. Women understand the body better than men do. Men bully it or neglect it, but women take it into full partnership. So, when a woman is simply the screen on which a man throws some fantastic image from within himself, what has the woman to do with it, and what is she to make of it? Julia – a pretty girl, and no fool – is to be pitied, I think. She has to carry a burden which she has not asked for, but which she cannot quite bring herself to thrust aside, because her body, too, makes its demands, and love is very flattering. Not a goddess or a cock-teaser, as Brocky sees her, but another creature, locked in another life.
St. Helen’s sleeps by the water. Not so the household in Scenes from a Marriage which the Sniffer is watching and which I now glimpse from the corner of my eye. In that film the couple are at it hammer and tongs, rolling on the floor, punching and jabbing like gutter children. Decidedly not my couple. Not Rhodri and Malvina, who have never exchanged blows in all their married days and would be horrified at the thought of descending to such rough-house. Am I mistaken or has physical violence come up the social ladder? Every day one reads in the papers of well-placed people who have fought with fists and flying crockery over some marital point of difference. In St. Helen’s Rhodri and Malvina are asleep in their separate rooms, for Auntie Min has a bed with Malvina, who might need her in the night, and Rhodri’s habit of waking at three o’clock to read and drink milk and eat arrowroot biscuits would certainly be disturbing.
How unlike themselves people look when they sleep. Or do they look like their real selves, or the selves they do not exhibit when awake? The merry man who sleeps with a fixed scowl, the beauty who pouts discontentedly – surely there is some truth in their sleeping faces? Is it the body’s memory, surely as real as the mind’s, that reveals itself in sleep? Is it the chaos of the dream world, upon the surface of which some buried recollection rises, then sinks again? Rhodri, as I see him in his big bed, looks not successful, not the lecturer of the improvident Jimmy King, but a wistful man, rather like the boy who passed those wretched days on the Courier. Malvina looks noble, which astonishes me; her high arched nose, without its accustomed pince-nez, is almost eagle-like. Auntie Min is, quite simply, a baby; a sad baby, quite unlike the fatly smiling, covertly snooping, jealous, biddable Min of the daylight hours. And Brochwel sleeps like a youth not quite twenty-one, wearing no signs of a breaking heart.
Is his pain, therefore, nothing but romantic affectation? No, but I sense that in Brocky there is much of the survivor, something of the spirit of Anna Vermuelen, who will not be downed by misfortune, however painful.
Is his aching desire for Julia an illusion? Not in the least. It is quite real, but it is not altogether what he thinks it is. It is a rite of passage, an introduction to full manhood, just as surely as if in some primitive society he was obliged to go through a brutal circumcision with a stone knife, or in the classical world to endure an alarming death-and-revival ceremony that would make him a partaker of one of the ancient mystery cults.
Brochwel was my father and, although I never knew him any better than any man knows his father, I see now what it was that made him a successful professor, and a man with a reputation based not on The Faerie Queen, with its wondrous assemblage of noble knights, cruel temptresses and impossible loves, but on the works of Robert Browning, the great poet of the ambiguities of human experience. Do the ancestors, fleeting and heavily cloaked, visit us in sleep and speak in voices partly understood?
VI
The Land of Lost Content
THESE FILMS ARE becoming uncomfortably personal. I am not unstirred by what has gone before. I felt anger and danger and anxiety with Anna Gage; I was saddened by the vicissitudes of the Gilmartins, for every rags-to-riches tale is a new one, and the later drop from riches to rags is always deflating; the bitterness of William and Virginia McOmish woke my pity. William – that wretched creature, a soured idealist. Virginia, that hater of Venus, what would she have been in our more liberal age? But these tales wore the softening garb of distance, of “period costumes,” of folk unknown, though I understood now how powerfully they lived – or had lived until the Sniffer pulled his bludgeon out of its elegant casing – in me. But Malvina was my grandmother, and to think that she had once been thirty, and had felt the awful approach of Old Maidery so keenly that she had even been prepared to lie – no, not quite lie – to hint – about the necessity for getting married, seemed to me to violate everything I had ever felt about her, or about grandmothers in general. A grandmother ought to be a monument of probity, and a doubtful grandmother is almost like a counterfeit coin – certainly was so in the WASP world of my childhood. And Rhodri – how well I remember my eighth birthday, when he gave me a five-dollar bill, and shook me by the hand; until then he had always kissed me when we met, and that handshake marked an important step in my journey toward manhood; I was now too big a boy to be kissed by my grandfather. Could this confident old man, who wore such fine clothes and smelled of French toilet-water, have been the unhappy boy who suffered a descent into Hell when he became an apprentice at the Courier? Had that deep, still musical voice in which he spoke once been the silvery tenor that went straight to the heart of Malvina, secretary to Mr. Yeigh, and seemingly so impregnable behind her silver pince-nez?
Quite the most troublesome figure was my father. That the man I knew as wise should once have been so confused, so bamboozled by Cupid, so befooled by a girl, so dominated by his instructors, so wanting in self-determination, was unbearable. What had given him strength? What had hardened this seeming putty into steel? Was I to learn?
How far was this voyeurism to go? I knew now the shame of the sons of Noah when they beheld their father’s drunkenness.
Yet – was I really such an unreflecting, uncomprehending jackass when I was alive that I supposed the sufferings and inadequacies of humanity came for the first time in my own experience? No; not wholly. But I had never applied what I knew as general truths to the people without whom I should never have experienced life; I had taken them for granted. As McWearie used to say, one’s family is made up of supporting players in one’s personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.
McWearie used to talk a lot about the personal drama. He liked to call it the Hero Struggle, and when I protested that the term was grandiose for what he was describing he rebuked me with the sharpness of a Scots schoolmaster banging his ruler down on the fingers of a stupid boy.
“You’re that dangerous class of fool, a trivializer, Gilmartin! To the human creature nothing that gets strongly to him is trivial. It is all on the heroic scale, so far as he can grasp it. What a fuss about the Oedipus Complex – the fella who wants to possess his Mum! What about the Hercules Complex – the fella that must grapple with his Twelve Labours while his wife and kids go by the board? What about the Apollo Complex – the fella that thinks you can have all light and no releasing darkness? And women – our towns and villages are j
ammed with Medeas and Persephones and Antigones and God knows who not, pushing their wire carts in the supermarkets unrecognized by anyone but themselves, and then probably only in their dreams. All engaged in the Hero Struggle!”
“So far as they can grasp it,” said I, to cool him.
“They don’t have to grasp it, you gowk, in the sense you mean. They just have to live it, and endure it so far as they can bear. You suppose you’re a thinker, Gilmartin, and what you are is a trivializer because your thinking isn’t fuelled by any strong feeling. Wake up, man! Come alive! Feel before you think!”
That seems to be what I am doing now, as I watch these amazing films, so much better than any I ever saw when I was a critic. I am back in the Fun House, for the last day of the Festival, with Allard Going, that combination of villain and low-comedian in my personal drama, on which, so far as the world is concerned, he dropped the curtain with a rush.
(2)
THE FILM LEAVES ME no time to speculate. What is this? Far from the frowsty library at St. Helen’s, and the noise tells me at once that this is war. A bombardment is in progress. What I see is a small cellar under a ruined house; some remaining timbers provide a roof for part of it, and under this are huddled five men. They are Canadian soldiers – gunners from the symbols on their shoulders – and they are trying to snatch some rest after their day’s work of manning the guns that attack the German artillery which is now returning the attack with professional accuracy. There is nothing unusual in the situation. A certain amount of night bombardment is to be expected. This night the Germans seem to have a better focus on their work and shells are dropping very near. But what is to be done? Run to some other cover, farther in the rear? The risk is just as great as if they stay where they are. Under regular bombardment, men become fatalists. If it finds you, it finds you, and if it doesn’t, you man your own guns for the return match.
One of the five is my father, Brochwel Gilmartin. He is nervous, but not afraid. The prevalent fatalism has claimed him. He wants to sleep, knowing that sleep in such noise is impossible. But he composes himself to rest as well as he can, seated on a heap of debris, wrapped in his overcoat, and with a Balaclava helmet over his head, upon which his tin hat is somewhat absurdly placed. The bombardment will probably last for half an hour, and already twenty minutes have passed.
Suddenly, the unmistakable hissing, whistling sound of an approaching shell. Nearer it comes, and it will explode somewhere very close. With a heavy thump it lands dead in the middle of the cellar, and lies partly buried in the earth, but still visible. A big one.
The five men freeze, their eyes fixed on the monster. They are beyond mere fear, for they know that instant death is at hand, and all their bodies and souls and minds are waiting. How long? Nobody can say. A few seconds, at most. Then it is obvious that owing to some unaccountable chance the shell is not going to explode, and dissolve them in red rain. Or not at once. Without a word they scramble out of the cellar and run.
Each runs in a different direction, and I see only Brochwel, pelting along what had once been the street of an Italian hamlet until, when he has run possibly half a mile, he sights a church that he has observed several times during the last week. It is a ruin, but quite a lot of the walls are still standing. He does not enter the ruin, which could be dangerous, but seeks shelter in the churchyard.
What he finds is the wreckage of a tomb. Not a grand tomb, set up for some nobleman, with his armorial bearings carved on it and perhaps a stone figure or two, but a lesser tomb of the sort that is built above the ground, so that the corpse does not have to be lowered into the dampness and possible flooding from the nearby river. These affairs are sometimes called altar tombs. This might have been the tomb of some minor local grandee, a wealthy notary or a man with a good vineyard. It cannot be less than a hundred years old, and was never built to sustain bombardment; although it has not been struck directly, one side has fallen away, revealing the cavern within. It is into this that Brochwel creeps, and makes himself as comfortable as he can.
Is it the lawyer or the lawyer’s wife whose bones and ruined coffin he disturbs? Pardon me, signora, if I creep into your bed. Nothing personal intended, I assure you. Your virtue is perfectly secure with me.
It is not, he reflects, a bad hole. “If yer knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” A First World War joke, that has endured. He knows of no better hole. Dampish, but not wet, and out of the wind, and alone, which is a great thing. For him, one of the chief trials of war is that it is never possible to be alone, and his temperament requires a certain amount of solitude. Not that he is morose, or misanthropic. He gets on well with his fellow gunners who are, he finds, recruited chiefly from men who would, in civilian life, be working for the telephone company, or the hydro-electric power company, or in some similar high-grade technical jobs. Men of excellent character; men of superior intelligence; men who are, he soon learns, fully as complicated in their real nature as himself, the young university teacher. But if Brochwel found himself fighting, eating and sleeping with the members of the Royal Society, he would still need to be alone from time to time. O beata solitudo, O sola beatitudo! And here, in the tomb, he enjoys this luxury, undisturbed by his quiet companions. If only there is no serpent, no scorpion, sharing these quarters, he is lucky indeed.
(3)
I, THE PATIENT looker-on, know where he is probably better than he does himself. This is the Italian Campaign of March 1944, and the Allied Armies in Italy, under the command of the redoubtable Alex (which was what his troops from Britain, the U.S., India, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Poland, Italy, Brazil and Greece called their commander-in-chief), are pressing toward Rome. The present obstacle is the Gustav Line, anchored at Monte Cassino, which Field Marshal Albert Kendring is defending with tenacity. The town of Cassino is in ruins, as is the great Monastery that towers above it, but the German line holds. It cannot hold out forever, but it will block the road to Rome as long as it can, and machine-gun pillboxes, mobile steel pillboxes, anti-tank emplacements and now and then some bitter hand-to-hand fighting are giving the Allied Armies a hard time. But the Gustav Line must break, at last. Meanwhile these regular bombardments are routine warfare.
Brochwel can never wholly reconcile himself to the fact that the gunners, of whom he is one, are hurling shells one, two, three and even five miles at troops they cannot see, and whose position they discover by a variety of ingenious devices which he does not pretend to understand. To fight men one will never see – is this modern war? Indeed it is. He has always known it, but now he comprehends it. His job is to do what he is told, which is to stand at a large affair like an architect’s desk and calculate how, and where, his particular group of guns must fire. Do they hit anything? He hopes so, and if they do he will know it in time. If they are falling short, and endangering the Allied troops ahead, he will undoubtedly hear it at once. He is a minor figure, doing an important job like many others, but without personal initiative. He does as he is told.
He likes that; likes it very much. To know what is to be done, and to do it with all the efficiency he can muster, as part of a huge organization, is luxury. He understands, without approving, what the German Reich has been doing for so long. Obeying orders, without any necessity to ask questions or have reservations, can be deeply satisfying. Alex is running the show. Our Leader.
Brochwel knows this rather better than the men around him, for he has been, until recently, doing a job at Headquarters, likewise in a minor capacity. Without having seen the great commander more than a few times, and at a distance, he has been on the inside of the great campaign, where many like him also serve in what would, in time of peace, be thought of as lesser office jobs.
Then what is he doing lying in a tomb with a long-dead lawyer and his wife, under bombardment?
(4)
BROCHWEL IS YOUNG, though older than when last I saw him, and he is romantic. Intelligently romantic. Nothing of the D’Artagnan about him. But he has decided t
hat he must see service not as a superior clerk, which is the sort of thing his Army betters think befits a man with an excellent education and poor eyesight, but as a man in battle. “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,” said Dr. Johnson, and Brochwel is very fond of the great Doctor’s sturdy wisdom. So, a soldier he will be, in the true sense. He will confront the foe. By some wangling – for he knows a few people in the right places – he has managed to get himself transferred to the gunners, and here he is. Miserable though it may be, and deprived of the regular solitude that is so much a necessity of his nature, he does not regret the change. Does not even regret the danger, for, although he will take every precaution he can against being killed, he will risk even that in order to be part of this experience. So far as he can achieve it, he is in the thick of the great events of his time. He does wish, however, that he could see the men he is trying to kill.
Unlike most of the gunners, he knows what he is firing at. In his student days, seeing as much of Europe as he could manage in two months, travelling by bicycle, now and then by train, with a pack on his back, he had visited the great Benedictine fortress of learning at Monte Cassino. There he had seen what was on display of the 1400 great patristic and historical codices, marvelled at the vast library, the treasures, the evidence of long custodianship of Western culture, gained some understanding of what the Benedictine Rule had meant in bringing discipline to intellectual life, sensed the reluctance of the monks of the Middle Age to destroy Greek manuscripts which they did not comprehend and suspected of intellectual enormity – had learned indeed what could be learned from guidebooks and guides who were talking to tourists who could not be expected to understand or sympathize with much of what Monte Cassino had meant in creating the North American life of which they were proud, but unthinking, partakers. What he had seen had seized his imagination sufficiently to keep him in the town of Cassino for several days, in order to learn more.