What he had learned, and what he now recalls as he lies in the lawyer’s tomb, a part of the force that has reduced the great monastery to rubble, gives him hope. What if the monastery has been knocked down, once again? Has it not been knocked down in the past by the Lombards, the Saracens, the Normans, suffered a great earthquake and been knocked down once more not long since – yesterday as history goes – by the French in 1799? The treasures of the monastery have undoubtedly been spirited away as soon as the present invasion of Italy became a certainty, and will return again, and the great walls will be raised as soon as the present war is over. The splendid Doors of Desiderius will once more be put in place. The substance of Monte Cassino may be beaten to rubble by bombs, of which previous despoilers had no understanding, but the spirit of Monte Cassino is unconquerable. And of that spirit he, Brochwel Gilmartin, a humble instructor at Waverley University in far-off Canada, is a partaker, and will be so as long as he lives.
(5)
GOD BE PRAISED for the ingenuities of modern film! As my father reflects on what he knows I, the patient looker-on, see it revived in a score of images on the huge, many-imaged screen. Just as well, for I did not know what Brochwel knew, and his musings would have meant little to me if I had not been able to see Lombards, Saracens, Normans, French and all the other wreckers at their work, and had not had it brought home to me that they were all, surely, the same men, different in dress and weaponry, but as one in their determination to break down civilization wherever they found it. Always in history there are those who are impelled, by reasons they think sufficient, to ruin, in so far as they can, what the patient, indefatigable warriors of civilization and culture have built up, because they value other things and worship other gods.
This is the history of civilization; building, wreckage, and rebuilding, century by century. Not because civilization conquers in a series of jerks, but because it never rests even when it is apparently thrown down.
Nor are all the despoilers men of war. Some are men of meddlesome idealism, like those who sought, in the nineteenth century, to remove all the scholarly treasures of Monte Cassino to an up-to-the-minute National Library in Naples, where they could be cared for by industrious technicians according to the most advanced archival principles of the day. And who was the doughty fighter who put a stop to that nonsense? None other than William Ewart Gladstone, a British Prime Minister and a staunch pillar of the Church of England. An extraordinary champion, surely? But Gladstone was a most uncommon politician because he was a man of imagination. His concern was certainly not inspired by the splendour of the Abbot of Monte Cassino, who had been for centuries one of the great swells of the Church of Rome, answerable only to the Holy See, and privileged to wear seven different precious mitres in succession whenever he celebrated Pontifical High Mass. As the lion-like face of Gladstone flits across the screen before my eyes, I see in him a man possessed by the romantic continuity of history and of intellectual persistence. Seven precious mitres are very fine in their way, but they are best understood as symbols and adjuncts of the continuity of spiritual and intellectual tradition.
Did that tradition really stem from the great St. Benedict of Nursia? Brochwel (I cannot be quite so free with my father as to think of him as Brocky: I leave that name to parents and old aunts) certainly does not think so. When Benedict – not then a saint but an energetic zealot – decided to found his monastery, he chose the place on Monte Cassino because it was the site of a temple of Apollo that had survived into the sixth century of our Christian Era. Benedict’s first act was to smash the image of the god and destroy his altar. Benedict was himself one of the smashers.
Did he utterly banish Apollo from Monte Cassino? He thought so, but we may wonder now if the Apollonian spirit did not live on, under the Benedictine robe. Things are never so clear-cut as even a great sage like Benedict believes them to be. Did not his sister, later known to the pious as Saint Scholastica, set up her nunnery five miles away, and meet with her brother once a year to discuss holy matters? Hindered as it was by the difficult five-mile journey, the feminine spirit still asserted itself at Monte Cassino, and one wonders whether Apollo, wherever he was, did not smile that it was so. Even Benedict could not drive femininity out of the realm of the gods, though he might banish it five miles away from his House of God.
The light of the spirit, as Apollo knew then, and probably still knows, was not the privilege of a single sex, and Benedict and his followers had to pay a heavy price because that idea never occurred to them. Nevertheless they travelled far, walking as they did, on one leg.
(6)
WHAT IS HE, Brochwel Gilmartin, lying awake in somebody else’s tomb, unable to sleep after the bombardment, and his astonishing escape from death – what is he? A young Canadian. A tiny cog in a vast machine devoted to the apparent destruction of a great monument of culture, one that has no significance for the warriors but that of an impediment in the Allied march upon Rome. Brochwel is a man fated by his time to be one of the wreckers, though he hopes, if he survives the war, to return to his Canadian university job as one of the builders. As a Canadian, he is inescapably a provincial, like the New Zealanders who were the first to reduce the great monastery to rubble. But we provincials, he reflects, have our place, and an important one, for we are not beguiled by the notion that the fate of mankind and of human culture lies wholly in our hands. These others – the French, the English and even the Poles – probably enjoy some such delusion. The Americans certainly do, for they are natural-born crusaders, forever in the right, even when they are least aware of what they are crusading about. But we provincials, who are compelled by a dozen reasons, some of them not wholly mistaken, to tag along in such crusades as this, are also in our way the patient lookers-on in these political and cultural convulsions, and perhaps we have cooler heads when it comes to weighing the importance of what is being done.
No, I am not Prince Hamlet … A literary tag, highly appropriate for the young professor.
If I survive this war, thinks Brochwel, I shall still be standing on the doorstep of my life and my career, whatever that may prove to be. What sort of world have these smashers and destroyers made for me?
A world without faith. Or so everybody says. The century past has been a great age of the God-killer. Nietzsche, who was as mad as a hatter, but had some arresting madman’s ideas, and without our splendid madmen our culture would be a pretty arid affair. Freud, who asserted with the persuasive cunning of a powerfully gifted literary man that all faith, all belief, is an illusion, bred of childhood fears. Bertrand Russell, who has no time for faith, but all the time in the world for a variety of Noble Causes, and innocently believes that their nobility resides wholly in their usefulness to mankind. They all want to bring everything down to that – to Man.
Can one blame these greatly gifted, persuasive people, if they were sick to death of the faith that has sustained a large and influential portion of the human race for nearly two thousand years? How does it show itself? Is not Christianity edging close to senility? Christianity: an essentially Oriental and Mediterranean structure of belief that begins to spring at the rivets when it is stretched around the globe among people in cold climates. A belief that cannot be reconciled to any workable system of government, or economics, but which others say has none the less revolutionized our notions of a just society, and brought compassion into a world that possessed only the scantiest notion of any such thing. Argument along these lines can go on forever.
One thing, however, is radiantly clear to Brochwel: if he gets out of this mess with a whole skin he cannot embrace the reductive spirit of his age. The reductive spirit that shows itself so trivially in trivial people, and has made some of the most persuasive thinkers of the past century embrace a man-centred world, will not do for him. He does not want a world that prates solemnly about Science, without any understanding of the doubts that haunt great scientists. Science, which seems to offer certainty, is the superstition of ignorant multitu
des, who think it means toothpaste and tampons. The hungry sheep look up, and are fed foul air and poisonous garbage. Eng-Lang-and-Lit, the joy of his life, never grew in that soil. What can he believe?
(7)
THE MANICHEES had an idea that was by no means absurd. Theirs was a world that lived under the heaven of the Warring Brothers, Ormuzd and Ahriman, or call it God and Satan, if that pleases you better. The brothers were of wavering but almost equal power, and they slugged it out for the domination of our world. Sometimes Ormuzd the Light One seemed to have the advantage, but never for long, because Ahriman the Dark One would gain a fresh hold, and all the splendours of Light were endangered and some were extinguished.
Of course Christianity wanted nothing to do with such an idea and condemned it as a heresy. Christianity rested firmly on the idea that the Right must always triumph, and Christianity knew beyond any doubt what Right was. But these awful, wrenching wars in which we embroil ourselves are far more easily understood in the Manichean figuration than in the socially concerned sentimentality into which Christianity appears to have fallen. Christianity, now too much a kingdom of this world.
Am I a Manichee, Brochwel asks himself. Thank God I don’t have to answer that question. I take refuge in what I believe to be the Shakespearean world-outlook: credulity about everything, tempered by scepticism about everything. Credulity and Scepticism, my Warring Brothers.
I, the patient looker-on, I, Connor Gilmartin, son of this young man whom I now see at a time in his life which far antedates his begetting of myself, find that I am laughing. Yes, laughing for the first time in all this Festival of deeply personal films. Laughing for the first time since my funeral. How can I help it? Brocky – I feel that I may call this young man Brocky, since he is not yet my father – is no philosopher, and certainly no theologian, but is he not the better for that? He is open to contradiction on just about every point in his reflections that I have overheard, and seen projected as images on the screen that is the correlative of his mind. He is really not much more than a boy, and loaded as he is with Eng-Lang-and-Lit he has had small experience of life, although this war is maturing him rapidly and roughly. But I like him – love him, indeed – as I never did when I knew him simply as my father. He is not the slave of his intellect; he has a heart and – what am I saying – a soul.
Has death and my personal Film Festival brought me to a belief in souls? I cannot recall ever having thought much about souls before, for when I lived I was undoubtedly one of the people Brocky has been thinking about – the spiritual illiterates. Though my body is unquestionably gone-cremated – everything that drove the engine and steered the course seems still to be with me, and I can’t think of a better word for it than soul. We live and learn, yes. But we die and learn, too, it appears.
For how long? Surely I am not to go on forever, looking at recreations of my nearer forebears in all their variety and vicissitude? An eternity of movies – I can’t face it. Stupid thought: I have no choice in the matter.
There seems to be an interval in the Maxim Trilogy, the masterpiece of Leonid Trauberg that the living audience is watching. They have had Youth of Maxim, and Return of Maxim, and now there is a pause before The Vyborg Side. The Sniffer is walking toward the foyer, where he will exchange guarded commonplaces with his fellow critics. They never talk about the film they are watching. Somebody might snatch a precious idea or simply a good phrase. They eat dry sandwiches and drink the thin white wine that seems to be bottled solely for such occasions. They retire to the restrooms and I recall that in Shakespeare’s day such an interval was frankly called “a pissing while.” Now the critics return morosely to their seats, and the Sniffer sits sighing at my side.
(8)
THAT IS MY FATHER, certainly. But not the young soldier. No, this is a professor, forty perhaps. And who is that melancholy-looking man with whom he is talking across a table?
Of course, I know that room. It is the library at Belem Manor, my grandfather’s Welsh home, where I once spent a weekend as a boy of twelve, on my first trip to the Old Land where my parents were doing some research in the British Museum. How well I recall my astonishment at how big it was! It was on a quite un-Canadian style of amplitude.
What a change this is from the crowded little house in Trallwm, where I saw grandfather as a boy; the stuffy quarters above the tailor’s shop, where so many Gilmartins and Jenkinses somehow found places to rest their heads. This room – how shall I describe it – is so handsomely got up with fine upholstery, linenfold panelling, velvet curtains, antique furniture and a heavily carved marble fireplace that it provokes an aesthetic indigestion. Its presentation cannot be described in terms of interior decoration; it is the spirit of a very rich fruitcake, made habitable. Or so it was when my grandfather lived in it. Now, as the two men sit on either side of the big desk, it seems diminished, and the room is not bright, although there is full autumn sunshine outside.
“How exactly would you wish us to describe the house, Mr. Gilmartin?” says the melancholy man.
“Victorian Gothic, I suppose,” says Brochwel.
“I should recommend something else,” says the man. “That is not a term we like to use. The associations are, let us say, unfortunate.”
“But that’s what it is,” says Brocky. “We think the architect was Barry, who designed the Houses of Parliament, you know.”
“Well – that’s not the best association, either,” says the man. “Not many people would care to live in the Houses of Parliament. Except the Speaker, of course. He does so rent-free.”
He smiles a wan smile at his little joke.
“This isn’t the original house, of course,” says Brocky. “It’s on a very old site. Used to be an old black-and-white manor, some of it dating from the time of Robert de Belème.”
“Aha. Historical interest. That’s a bit better. Roger de – ?”
“Robert de Belème. He was Master of Horse to Henry II.”
“Do you recall the date?”
“Henry II reigned around – oh, 1160ish – I think.”
“Better and better.”
“Robert de Belème bred fine horses for him. Had a big farm hereabout; the King was mad about Spanish horses. This was a stud-farm.”
“Very good. And a manor?”
“Yes. That’s why the house is called Belem, of course. And the village is Belem-en-le-Dyke. Offa’s Dyke, that was.”
“Don’t recall Offa.”
“Well, he was a king of Mercia about – I think – 750. Built the Dyke to keep the Welsh out, or to show them where they were supposed to stop. Not that they did. There’s still a few hundred yards of the Dyke on this property.”
“I see. Well – we don’t have much call for history as early as that. Queen Elizabeth is about as far back as house-purchasers usually like to go.”
“Archaeologists are very interested, Mr. Crouter. They come here all the time for a look, and sometimes for a dig.”
“Ah, but archaeologists are rarely purchasers, Mr. Gilmartin. Scholars, you see. Not well-off. We’re talking pretty big money, here. When it comes to house-property archaeologists rarely rise above what we call an Old World Cottage. Something half-timbered, and easily convertible to modern dwelling. Not destroying the authentic atmosphere, of course, but quaint. Now you couldn’t call this place quaint, could you?”
“Not unless you call the Houses of Parliament quaint. But I have always understood that your people sell everything and anything.”
“Oh, of course we do. Butler and Manciple can, and do, sell residences all over the kingdom. We yield to no one.”
“Then what’s the objection here?”
“No objection. None whatever. But of course we have a strong sensitivity to the pulse of the market-place, and I won’t pretend to you that we could consider this place a property of the very first class – first-class demand, I mean. No suggestion that it isn’t a splendid place – in its own way.”
“Then what’s th
e trouble?”
“There will be no trouble, Mr. Gilmartin. Butler and Manciple never think in terms of trouble. But a top price might not be practicable. Its location, you see.”
“But for something like eight hundred years it has been considered rather a good location.”
“No, Mr. Gilmartin. I’d better explain. In the real estate business, you see, we always say that there are three primary concerns in selling a property. Location, location and again, location.” Once again Mr. Crouter smiles his ghost of a smile, at this much-admired house agent’s joke.
“And you don’t like the location?”
“Not me, Mr. Gilmartin. Our buyers. The buying public. Look, I’ll tell you how it is. People with substantial money to spend on a property nowadays are predominantly business people – London people – and what they are looking for is some place not more than fifty miles from London. For weekends, and easy holiday-access. For entertaining their business friends. Now I’ve seen a castle, especially if it has a moat, go for a really big price. A plum, in fact. But only if it’s in the Home Counties or close to the London area. An Elizabethan manor – especially if Queen Elizabeth ever slept there, ha, ha, and she was certainly a great lady for sleeping around – in a royal sense, of course – we can place one of those in a jiffy. A nice William-and-Mary, or a Queen Anne, or a Georgian – no problems there. There is a very big movement at present in restored vicarages. You understand; big places with grounds, that vicars can’t keep up, now that gentlemen with private money have pretty much ceased to go into the Church. A fine vicarage is catnip to plenty of people slightly below the country-house level of income.”