Manticore

  —Thank you for being frank. Are you any more ready than Liesl to throw some light on the answer of the Brazen Head?

  —Let me see. Yes, I am certainly “the man who granted his inmost wish.” You would never guess what it was. But he told me. People do tell me things. When I met him, which was on the night of his death, he offered me a lift back to my hotel in his car. As we drove he said—and as you know this was at one of the peaks of his career, when he was about to realize a dream which he, or your stepmother, had long cherished—he said, “You know, sometimes I wish I could step on the gas and drive right away from all of this, all the obligations, the jealousies, the nuisances, and the relentlessly demanding people.” I said, “Do you mean that? I could arrange it.” He said, “Could you?” I replied, “Nothing easier.” His face became very soft, like a child’s, and he said, “Very well. I’d be greatly obliged to you.” So I arranged it. You may be sure he knew no pain. Only the realization of his wish.

  —But the stone? The stone in his mouth?

  —Ah, well, that is not my story. You must ask the keeper of the stone. But I will tell you something Liesl doesn’t know, unless Ramsay has told her: “the woman he did not know” was my mother. Yes, she had some part in it.

  With that I had to be contented because Liesl and a workman wanted to talk with him. But somehow I found myself liking him. Even more strange, I found myself believing him. But he was a hypnotist of great powers; I had seen him demonstrate that on the stage. Had he hypnotized Father and sent him to his death? And if so, why?

  Later: That was how I put the question to Ramsay when I cornered him this afternoon in the room he uses for his writing. Pargetter’s advice: always go to a man in his room, for then he has no place to escape to, whereas you may leave when you please. What did he say?

  —Davey, you are behaving like the amateur sleuth in a detective story. The reality of your father’s death is much more complex than anything you can uncover that way. First, you must understand that nobody—not Eisengrim or anyone—can make a man do something under hypnotism that he has not some genuine inclination to do. So: Who killed Boy Staunton? Didn’t the Head say, “Himself, first of all?” We all do it, you know, unless we are taken off by some unaccountable accident. We determine the time of our death, and perhaps the means. As for the “usual cabal” I myself think “the woman he knew and the woman he did not know” were the same person—your mother. He never had any serious appraisal of her weakness or her strength. She had strength, you know, that he never wanted or called on. She was Ben Cruikshank’s daughter, and don’t suppose that was nothing just because Ben wasn’t a village grandee like Doc Staunton. Boy never had any use for your mother as a grown-up woman, and she kept herself childish in the hope of pleasing him. When we have linked our destiny with somebody, we neglect them at our peril. But Boy never knew that. He was so well graced, so gifted, such a genius in his money-spinning way, that he never sensed the reality of other people. Her weakness galled him, but her occasional shows of strength shamed him.

  —You loved Mother, didn’t you?

  —I thought I did when I was a boy. But the women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.

  —Did you sleep with her?

  —I know times have changed, Davey, but isn’t that rather a rum question to put to an old friend about your mother?

  —Carol used to insist that you were my father.

  —Then Carol is a mischief-making bitch. I’ll tell you this, however: your mother once asked me to make love to her, and I refused. In spite of one very great example I had in my life I couldn’t rise to love as an act of charity. The failure was mine, and a bitter one. Now I’m not going to say the conventional thing and tell you I wish you were my son. I have plenty of sons—good men I’ve taught, who will carry something of me into places I would never reach. Listen, Davey, you great clamorous baby-detective, there is something you ought to know at your age: every man who amounts to a damn has several fathers, and the man who begat him in lust or drink or for a bet or even in the sweetness of honest love may not be the most important father. The fathers you choose for yourself are the significant ones. But you didn’t choose Boy, and you never knew him. No; no man knows his father. If Hamlet had known his father he would never have made such an almighty fuss about a man who was fool enough to marry Gertrude. Don’t you be a two-bit Hamlet, clinging to your father’s ghost until you are destroyed. Boy is dead; dead of his own will, if not wholly of his own doing. Take my advice and get on with your own concerns.

  —My concerns are my father’s concerns and I can’t escape that. Alpha is waiting for me. And Castor.

  —Not your father’s concerns. Your kingdoms. Go and reign, even if he has done a typical Boy trick by leaving you a gavel where he used a golden sceptre.

  —I see you won’t talk honestly with me. But I must ask one more question; who was “the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone?”

  —I was. And as keeper of his conscience, and as one who has a high regard for you, I will say nothing about it.

  —But the stone? The stone that was found in his mouth when they rescued his body from the water? Look, Ramsay, I have it here. Can you look at it and say nothing?

  —It was my paperweight for over fifty years. Your father gave it to me, very much in his own way. He threw it at me, wrapped up in a snowball. The rock-in-the-snowball man was part of the father you never knew, or never recognized.

  —But why was it in his mouth?

  —I suppose he put it there himself. Look at it; a piece of that pink granite we see everywhere in Canada. A geologist who saw it on my desk told me that they now reckon that type of stone to be something like a thousand million years old. Where has it been, before there were any men to throw it, and where will it be when you and I are not even a pinch of dust? Don’t cling to it as if you owned it. I did that. I harboured it for sixty years, and perhaps my hope was for revenge. But at last I lost it, and Boy got it back, and he lost it, and certainly you will lose it. None of us counts for much in the long, voiceless, inert history of the stone…. Now I am going to claim the privilege of an invalid and ask you to leave me.

  —There’s nothing more to be said?

  —Oh, volumes more, but what does all this saying amount to? Boy is dead. What lives is a notion, a fantasy, a whim-wham in your head that you call Father, but which never had anything seriously to do with the man you attached it to.

  —Before I go: who was Eisengrim’s mother?

  —I spent decades trying to answer that. But I never fully knew.

  Later: Found out a little more about the super-chess game this eve. Each player plays both black and white. If the player who draws white at the beginning plays white on boards one, three, and five, he must play black on boards two and four. I said to Liesl that this must make the game impossibly complicated, as it is not five games played consecutively, but one game.

  —Not half so complicated as the game we all play for seventy or eighty years. Didn’t Jo von Haller show you that you can’t play the white pieces on all the boards? Only people who play on one, flat board can do that, and then they are in agonies trying to figure out what black’s next move will be. Far better to know what you are doing, and play from both sides.

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  Dec. 23, Tues.: Liesl has the ability to an extraordinary extent to worm things out of me. My temperament and professional training make me a man to whom things are told; somehow she makes me into a teller. I ran into her—better be honest, I sought her out—this morning in her workshop, where she sat with a jeweller’s magnifying glass in her eye and tinkered
with a tiny bit of mechanism, and in five minutes had me caught in a conversation of a kind I don’t like but can’t resist when Liesl creates it.

  —So you must give Jo a decision about more analysis? What is it to be?

  —I’m torn about it. I’m seriously needed at home. But the work with Dr von Haller holds out the promise of a kind of satisfaction I’ve never known before. I suppose I want to have it both ways.

  —Well, why not? Jo has set you on your path; do you need her to take you on a tour of your inner labyrinth? Why not go by yourself?

  —I’ve never thought of it—I wouldn’t know how.

  —Then find out. Finding out is half the value. Jo is very good. I say nothing against her. But these analyses, Davey—they are duets between the analyst and the analysand, and you will never be able to sing louder or higher than your analyst.

  —She has certainly done great things for me in the past year.

  —Undoubtedly. And she never pushed you too far, or frightened you, did she? Jo is like a boiled egg—a wonder, a miracle, very easy to take—but even with a good sprinkling of salt she is invalid food, don’t you find?

  —I understand she is one of the best in Zürich.

  —Oh, certainly. Analysis with a great analyst is an adventure in self-exploration. But how many analysts are great? Did I ever tell you I knew Freud slightly? A giant, and it would be apocalyptic to talk to such a giant about oneself. I never met Adler, whom everybody forgets, but he was certainly another giant. I once went to a seminar Jung gave in Zürich, and it was unforgettable. But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a superprofessor. All men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character…. Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people’s troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don’t you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

  —I’m no hero, Liesl.

  —Oh, how modest and rueful that sounds! And you expect me to think, isn’t he splendid to accept his limitations so manfully. But I don’t think that. All that personal modesty is part of the cop-out personality of our time. You don’t know whether or not you are a hero, and you’re bloody well determined not to find out, because you’re scared of the burden if you are and scared of the certainty if you’re not.

  —Just a minute. Dr von Haller, of whom you think so little, once suggested that I was rather inclined toward heroic measures in dealing with myself.

  —Good for Jo! But she didn’t encourage you in it, did she? Ramsay says you are very much the hero in court—voice of the mute, hope of the hopeless, last resort of those society has condemned. But of course that’s a public personality. Why do you put yourself on this footing with a lot of riff-raff, by the way?

  —I told Dr von Haller that I liked living on the lip of a volcano.

  —A good, romantic answer. But do you know the name of the volcano? That’s what you have to find out.

  —What are you suggesting? That I go home and take up my practice and Alpha and Castor and see what I can do to wriggle crooks like Matey Quelch off the hooks on which they have been caught? And at night, sit down quietly and try to think my way out of all my problems, and try to make some sort of sense of my life?

  —Think your way out…. Davey, what did Jo say was wrong with you? Obviously you have a screw loose somewhere; everybody has. What did she find at the root of most of your trouble?

  —Why should I tell you?

  —Because I’ve asked, and I truly want to know. I’m not just a gossip or a chatterer, and I like you very much. So tell me.

  —It’s nothing dreadful. She just kept coming back to the point that I am rather strongly developed in Thinking, and seem to be a bit weak in Feeling.

  —I guessed that was it.

  —But honestly I don’t know what’s wrong with thinking. Surely it’s what everybody is trying to do?

  —Oh yes; very fine work, thinking. But it is also the greatest bolt-hole and escape-hatch of our time. It’s supposed to excuse everything…. “I think this … I thought that…. You haven’t really thought about it…. Think, for God’s sake…. The thinking of the meeting (or the committee, or God help us, the symposium) was that….” But so much of this thinking is just mental masturbation, not intended to beget anything…. So you are weak in feeling, eh? I wonder why?

  —Because of Dr von Haller, I can tell you. In my life feeling has not been very handsomely rewarded. It has hurt like hell.

  —Nothing unusual in that. It always does. But you could try. Do you remember the fairy-tale about the boy who couldn’t shudder and was so proud of it? Nobody much likes shuddering, but it’s better than existing without it, I can assure you.

  —I seem to have a natural disposition to think rather than feel, and Dr von Haller has helped me a good deal there. But I am not ambitious to be a great feeler. Wouldn’t suit my style of life at all, Liesl.

  —If you don’t feel, how are you going to discover whether or not you are a hero?

  —I don’t want to be a hero.

  —So? It isn’t everybody who is triumphantly the hero of his own romance, and when we meet one he is likely to be a fascinating monster, like my dear Eisengrim. But just because you are not a roaring egotist, you needn’t fall for the fashionable modern twaddle of the anti-hero and the mini-soul. That is what we might call the Shadow of democracy; it makes it so laudable, so cosy and right and easy to be a spiritual runt and lean on all the other runts for support and applause in a splendid apotheosis of runtdom. Thinking runts, of course—oh, yes, thinking away as hard as a runt can without getting into danger. But there are heroes, still. The modern hero is the man who conquers in the inner struggle. How do you know you aren’t that kind of hero?

  —You are as uncomfortable company as an old friend of mine who asked for spiritual heroism in another way. “God is here and Christ is now,” he would say, and ask you to live as if it were true.

  —It is true. But it’s equally true to say “Odin is here and Loki is now.” The heroic world is all around us, waiting to be known.

  —But we don’t live like that, now.

  —Who says so? A few do. Be the hero of your own epic. If others will not, are you to blame? One of the great follies of our time is this belief in some levelling of Destiny, some democracy of Wyrd.

  —And you think I should go it alone?

  —I don’t think: I feel that you ought at least to consider the possibility, and not cling to Jo like a sailor clinging to a life-belt.

  —I wouldn’t know how to start.

  —Perhaps if you felt something powerfully enough it would set you on the path.

  —But what?

  —Awe is a very unfashionable, powerful feeling. When did you last feel awe in the presence of anything?

  —God, I can’t remember ever feeling what I suppose you mean by awe.

  —Poor Davey! How you have starved! A real little workhouse boy, an Oliver Twist of the spirit! Well, you’re rather old to begin.

  —Dr von Haller says not. I can begin the second part of this exploration with her, if I choose. But what
is it? Do you know, Liesl?

  —Yes, but it isn’t easily explained. It’s a thing one experiences—feels, if you like. It’s learning to know oneself as fully human. A kind of rebirth.

  —I was told a lot about that in my boyhood days, when I thought I was a Christian. I never understood it.

  —Christians seem to have got it mixed up, somehow. It’s certainly not crawling back into your mother’s womb; it’s more a re-entry and return from the womb of mankind. A fuller comprehension of one’s humanity.

  —That doesn’t convey much to me.

  —I suppose not. It’s not a thinker’s thing.

  —Yet you suggest I go it alone?

  —I don’t know. I’m not as sure as I was. You might manage it. Perhaps some large experience, or even a good, sharp shock, might put you on the track. Perhaps you are wrong even to listen to me.

  —Then why do you talk so much, and throw out so many dangerous suggestions?

  —It’s my métier. You thinkers drive me to shake you up.

  Maddening woman!

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  Dec. 24, Wed. and Christmas Eve: Was this the worst day of my life, or the best? Both.

  Liesl insisted this morning that I go on an expedition with her. You will see the mountains at their best, she said; it is too cold for the tourists with their sandwiches, and there is not enough snow for skiers. So we drove for about half an hour, uphill all the way, and at last came to one of those cable-car affairs and swayed and joggled dizzily through the air toward the far-off shoulder of a mountain. When we got out of it at last, I found I was panting.

  —We are about seven thousand feet up now. Does it bother you? You’ll soon get used to it. Come on. I want to show you something.

  —Surely the view elsewhere is the same as it is here?

  —Lazy! What I want to show you isn’t a view.

  It was a cave; large, extremely cold as soon as we penetrated a few yards out of the range of the sun, but not damp. I couldn’t see much of it, and although it is the first cave I have ever visited it convinced me that I don’t like caves. But Liesl was enthusiastic, because it is apparently quite famous since somebody, whose name I did not catch, proved conclusively in the ’nineties that primitive men had lived here. All the sharpened flints, bits of carbon, and other evidence had been removed, but there were a few scratches on the walls which appear to be very significant, though they looked like nothing more than scratches to me.