Wilson Harris - The Angel at the Gate

Her foreboding inspires her to visualize him lying dead on the street and to embark for Bale in the diminutive funeral of an age with Jackson, the Jamaican, and Khublall, the Hindu.

This brings me to the prime matter of the change in Mary’s automatic fiction.

Jackson and Khublall are a new range of character that immigrate, so to speak, into Mary’s book. They come more into play in Chapter Six after the expedition to Bale.

Jackson owes something to letters from Mack the Knife that Mary read as a child, letters in which he mentioned his first marriage to a New Orleans woman (whose daughter Jackson married).

Both names (Jackson and Khublall) also appear in Marsden’s papers in which he reports on his stay in Jamaica and the time he also spent in India.

What fascinated me about Mary’s portrayal of Jackson and Khublall is that in tone they relate to Stella — Stella the mutual facet of Mary herself (if I may so put it) — and at the same time possess another rhythm that is closer to Marsden’s inner personality. One is reminded of Joseph Barber in the matter of soil and roots of love but Jackson’s and Khublall’s kinship to Marsden is quite different and not at all as obvious as Joseph Barber’s is.

Khublall and Jackson have an independent life as marked as Stella’s and they mirror a mutuality of cultures that Marsden cultivated. But in essence, however clothed, the resemblance and kinship are there as expressive of Mary’s bond to Joseph.

Jackson’s “enchantment with the womb” lays bare Marsden’s beard-cloaked body — his “fatherhood” and “motherhood” of the people he serves. And the bizarre proposition that comes into Chapter Six that he (Jackson) is possessed by the notion that he is the mother of the child that his wife bears becomes understandable.

Khublall incorporates an aspect of father-confessor, father-inquisitor, as well as involuntary proclivity to feudal age, in his relationship to Jackson through Marsden.

It was clear to me that the marked changes in Mary’s automatic fiction coincided with “Joseph’s withdrawal”, as it were, into “fictional death” to create a curious marriage between himself and Mary (who also began to withdraw symbolically from her own narrative).

That marriage gave birth to a mutuality of cultures that brought new dangers, new potentialities, new temptations, that are visible in the remainder of the book.

It also brought a new confidence to Mary that Marsden fostered. He pointed out that she need have no guilt in the exercise of her talents. He drew her attention in Chapter Seven to W. B. Yeats’s A Vision which came into being through Yeats’s wife and her automatic informants.

That day in late March when Marsden narrowly escaped the bale that sped towards him from an overturned lorry found Jackson also within a small heap of pedestrians who had leapt aside in time. He and Khublall were closest to Marsden and for an instant Marsden looked at them with eyes that seized them. So Jackson dreamt in a split second as the bale crashed open and he felt himself a ghost in a bird’s eye mist of bodies on the pavement of the city. Then he recovered as if he had fallen from a great height. This was the remarkable ex-priest of whom his father (Jackson sen.) had spoken in Jamaica. There was a clamour, a path was cleared…. Marsden was taken away in an ambulance.

Jackson jun. and Khublall were making their way across Shepherd’s Bush Green towards Wood Lane. “It’s nothing,” Khublall was saying. “The mildest of mild heart attacks. Just shock. They may not even keep him in, the hospitals are overcrowded, give him pills and send him home.”

“He knew us,” said Jackson consulting the sky in the region of Planet Bale which was now lost to him in the opaque light of pale noon that concealed the stars.

“Nonsense,” said Khublall. “We knew him. Who doesn’t know Marsden of Angel Inn? Your antecedents and my antecedents were taught by him in India, the West Indies, South America, USA, Africa, everywhere. And we still feel attached to him. Sometimes it’s as if nothing’s really changed….”

They crossed into Wood Lane and made their way past a bus depot and towards the BBC studios and Sebastian’s pavement of scripts in White City.

“Everything’s changed,” Jackson said. “I feel it in my bones. I feel it in the pit of my stomach.”

They both lived in the neighbourhood of North Pole Road (the name reminded Jackson of the Northern Lights he once saw pouring out of space like supermarket powder from Joseph’s hand at the mouth of the St Lawrence river on his way from Montreal to Marseille thirty years ago in 1950). Both men were educated night porters, carriers of subjective cargo. Jackson had studied literature and history at the University College of the West Indies in the late 1940s. Khublall was versed in Hindu lore. Thus they were qualified to cast their net into a river of sorrows encircling the globe. Late March had brought them redundancy notices and six months’ pay. They made their way into a sports ground opposite the old LMR railtrack. The ground was deserted except for the ubiquitous jogger and a group engaged in punting a football.

They sat on a bench under a lime tree and stared across the open ground towards a built-up area half-a-mile away in the vague direction of Willesden Junction.

Khublall and Jackson were casualties of history and they suffered from a mild paranoia, mild inflations of the psyche akin to unpredictable angel or mental fire in the middle of the day or night. It was as if they were both afflicted — Jackson in particular — by states of tidal emotion (camouflages of love or the fear of love) that were more complex than they themselves knew, and which were the grievous substance of bird’s eye mist of proportions of historic fall in the funeral of an age affecting colonial peoples as it affected an entire civilization, through religious or ex-religious peoples for whom the nature of loyalty to state or church — to man or woman or god — the nature of all attachment within tradition — was in crisis.

Jackson’s camouflage was the tall African hairstyle that he now cultivated. Khublall’s was the shaven head he never ceased to shave — and which marked him out as a holy man — in fair weather or foul.

“Everything has changed,” Jackson repeated softly. “I sometimes believe I am threatened by the very forces I used to serve.”

“You should consult Marsden.”

Jackson was staring now into the opaque light of the sky in the region of hidden Bale where he thought he detected a flashing bird’s wing.

“No bird but something of an old spiritual goat is Marsden,” said Khublall with affection yet teasing malice of the ancient East. “He’s on our side. He knows our temptations, our lusts. The young women who go to his Inn! Rumour exaggerates of course but I hear they’re attractive….”

“My father was an old goat,” said Jackson laughing stiffly. “Died from it. Too much of a good thing. Too much love. Nothing spiritual with him though. Pure and simple Pan. Pan — he used to say — has not only hooves to trample the serpent’s brain but he dances to a drum, sometimes a trumpet, sometimes a piano, sometimes a clarinet and sax. The nature-voices of goat.” Jackson grew pensive. He tried to be gay, to smile. “Did I tell you of Mack, my father’s best friend?”

Khublall pretended he’d never heard the tale.

“Mack was younger than my father. At least ten years. In 1950 Mack was forty-five, my father fifty-five. I was just twenty-four….”

“That means you’re now as old as your father was in the middle of the century.” Khublall spoke as if this constituted a milestone or celebration. “We must declare a holiday.”