Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

The ground of duty Goodrich knew from past experience was a religious question with Mrs. Glenwearie. If her sister recovered she would return but if she did not or became bed-ridden she would have no alternative within her own lights but to relinquish her situation as his housekeeper.

Goodrich knew that if this happened he would miss her very much. A picture floated it seemed from nowhere into his mind as he put down her letter, of old chateaux in France and titular houses in Britain where at each turn of the road a sculptured sentinel from the past stands watching the world of the present. And written into that vigil was the notion of duty or loyalty to laird or king or party.

It seemed incongruous that he should identify Mrs. Glenwearie’s good works with that vigil; the vigil of the nurse, the vigil of duty with estates of power; yet so it seemed to him now as he contemplated her by the sick-bed of her family. A curious melancholy consistency was there in a series of postures rooted in identity and frozen into a paragon of duty extending from château to cottage.

It was the irony of the situation that wrapped itself around him now. He stood on the eve of giving an answer to Jennifer, and Mrs. Glenwearie had been conveniently or inconveniently whisked away and frozen, as it were, into a picture of duty.

There was a logic here — an intuitive logic towards which one could grope on this level of fascination with corresponding events. The translation or transformation of Mrs. Glenwearie may have been implied the very moment, some months ago, she had conceived flash-bulbs in the sitting-room turned on in — or upon — naked Jennifer by Marsden — Marsden disguised as Camera: a walking camera like a deacon of the cinema fully clothed, fully dressed, who invaded Goodrich’s dreams until Knife slashed the cloth.

In Goodrich’s book every correspondence of events within an individual life was an implicit and secret dramatization of buried universal themes within objective existence. For what was objective existence in the long run but a series of common-or-garden situations? For that reason it was an easy trap to view Mrs. Glenwearie’s voyage to the sick-bed of her family as another common-or-garden inevitability divorced from bizarre conjunctions involving Deacon Camera, Jennifer, Knife etc.

But the very expression “inevitability” gave the game away and implied a pattern, a pattern of far-flung devious subconscious intelligences at work through the day-to-day normal situations of each individual in society. It was the exposure of that pattern which interested Goodrich. For without some degree of exposure, inevitability would become both an all-consuming ritual principle and a forgotten bias of fate in the affairs of men.

Thus he could see in his private theatre or premises all the elements of crisis which plagued a civilization. Written into the most common-or-garden vigils were the pressures of time. Mrs. Glenwearie had been drawn to the door of death — as had he (Goodrich) been drawn to the narrow pass leading to Namless Town — and as had he (Marsden) been drawn to play a kind of depleted role in a hiatus of knowledge. A hiatus or depletion which had become the stigmata of a universal bridegroom whose persona was civilization. A civilization that had left its impress in almost every crook and cranny of the known world. A civilization that had been showered with gifts, resources, materials beyond the wildest dreams of societies in earlier centuries. A civilization therefore which invited a kind of disaster (as with every bridegroom of fate wedded to universal resources), a kind of backlash from those cultures which had given all they possessed, and from “nature” which had been drained of so much….

Thus to stand at the door of death in a composite terrain of profound imagination or in a common-or-garden station of existence determined by history was to be visited — however subconsciously — by the intimate pressures of an age piling up across generations (disease, starvation, alarming pollution, overpopulation etc. etc.). To be visited also by a necessity for decision beyond mere vigilance — how to relate oneself to oblivion — wasted resources, wasted lives etc. — and extract from it a caveat restraining technological hubris. How (in some degree of genuine humility) to come to grips with the bridegroom’s executioner through a decision related to a half-open, half-shut door to lives on this planet. How at the same time within instrumental measures — birth-control gift horse etc. — to opt for life as a never-ending river of sweetness, fountain of love….

This immense variable drama was related to oneself however far one fled from a so-called centre of things. It might pass over one’s head like a tide of oblivion. But one’s very obliviousness to it was part of the fabric, part of the comedy of the fabric: a blessing in disguise for some who were relieved of anxieties, a curse for others who were plagued to the end of their days by their ignorance or helplessness or complacency or historical complicity in the disposition of common-or-garden particular resources….

*

Jennifer had arranged to see her doctor in the afternoon and Goodrich set out in the morning of the same day to make a few purchases. In confessing to being plagued by enormous questions he had become aware that he was also plagued by the denuded figure or shadow he sometimes became. His jackets were inclined to be over-casual, rather worn-looking, old-looking for a man with half-a-million pounds in the Bank. His shirts too had remained stubbornly bloodless against the extrovert styles of the day. (For a long time he had had his eye on a flaming pink cravat and a scarlet shirt but every time he ventured into Princes Street to buy these, somehow he couldn’t summon up the courage.)

Then there were his trousers which never seemed to keep their crease the way other men’s did. For ages too he had worn a pair of comfortable boots despite Mrs. Glenwearie’s protests that he should get himself something smarter for a change.

No wonder people did not see him in the street. It was a marvellous discipline in invisibility but the time for a change was at hand. He was reminded of a passage in Stevenson’s Amateur Emigrant which told of practising upon the public by:

“going abroad through a suburban part of London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat…. The result was curious. I then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male creatures of their own station; for, in my humble rig, each one who went by me caused a certain shock of surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my normal circumstances, it appeared, every young lady must have paid me some passing tribute of a glance; and though I had often been unconscious of it when given, I was well aware of its absence when it was withheld. My height seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed me like a dog. This is one of my grounds for supposing that what are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what are called the lower; and I wish someone would continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.”

It was a nice remark— well-regulated female eye —Goodrich thought, and it rang a deep bell in his mind associated with the seeing eye, the unseeing eye, the personalization of blind or visionary society written into unwitting status or rank as an intercourse of fates.

To retire into invisibility was to invite the most secret correspondence of all — the most secret flowering garments of all. To breach fate in some degree…. Goodrich was all of a sudden disconcerted by the weight he placed on his newfound relationship of trust with Jennifer Gorgon. Disconcerted by the desire to externalize it into a ready-made flamboyance…And yet as he made his way into a shop in Princes Street he felt a kind of laughter, a kind of delight and acquittal from overburden at the prospect of buying something made of flame, made of fire, in an inner cautionary rather than outer exhibitionist sense.