Wilson Harris - Black Marsden - A Tabula Rasa Comedy

I was astonished by the power Marsden possessed — power so real it was too real to be proven since it saturated and therefore voided all instruments of proof. And yet I felt with all my heart and mind there must be a way to wrest her from him.

*

When Goodrich got home (his mind obsessed with Jennifer’s pale rider or ghostly young man) he found a letter on the table in his bedroom. It was from Marsden and ran as follows:

“My dear Goodrich,

You will recall I hope our conversation a fortnight ago on Tabula Rasa. How to create an atmosphere in which piety and decorum rub shoulders with the underground and every erasure of pattern brings a fascination with death — with a murdered past — or brings a measure of concentration upon an intricate reborn labyrinth of resources within which the boundaries of conquest, conquest of public/private space, conquest of problematic being, grow ever more pertinent to the Dark Ages. I mean our Dark Ages — twentieth-century global man.

We discussed you may remember Knife’s part as a poor beggar. And I have also gathered from Jennifer that you know of her part as Salome. Lots of intriguing complications here so be on your guard. I am glad to say the mechanics of my production are shaping up and I have a prospect for rehearsals in the Grass Market. Before that, however, we would need to purchase some preliminary costumes, masks etc. I have calculated that £ 2,000 would be a help at this stage. A down-payment on a place, material for costumes, and actors’ salaries.

By the way a word about Harp. (His actual name is James Harpe.) He is in Canada at the moment and should be with us quite soon. He is an independent artist — a very rare commodity these days as you know. I love dear old James. He has a private income — small but adequate — and therefore he will stay in a hotel in Edinburgh when he arrives. Mrs. Glenwearie has kindly made some inquiries.

As you know he has the reputation of a musician rusting in a garret. But this doesn’t really meet his case. You will judge for yourself when you meet him.

Yours, M.”

Goodrich opened a drawer and wrote out the desired cheque, sealed it into an envelope and left the room. The house was silent. Mrs. Glenwearie was away for a couple of days. He made his way up to Marsden’s room on the second floor, tapped on the door but received no reply. He slipped the envelope under the door and was possessed by the sensation as he did so that there was someone in the room after all.

He coughed out loud and his voice rang hollowly in the corridor. He was tempted to push the door open and had, in fact, already put his hand upon the knob when he saw his features stretched and torn and eerie and reflected in the old-fashioned brass knob, polished religiously by Mrs. Glenwearie. It looked like an extraordinary spatial doodle: enormous brow, sprite-like face running down into a concertina image — compressed torso and feet which held him now at bay in his own house; and he desisted from pushing the door open at the last moment with a sense of hollow relief, the relief of purgatory. Perhaps abnormal wealth creates a leprechaun self-portraiture. And purgatory creates an anomalous dimension of privacy.

*

He came into the sitting-room a few days later to hear Jennifer saying to Marsden: “Mardie, I think you’re drinking too much. Much too much. Where do you get the money from?” Doctor Marsden swung towards Goodrich. “Ah Goodrich,” he cried. “I’ve missed you the past day or two. That deep diary of yours I imagine.” His eyes glinted. “I was about to give Jennifer and Knife my impressions of the role of John….”

“In the context of virtuous Salome?”

“Why, of course, my dear boy. A knock-up — or is it mock-up? — of the Baptist.”

“Knox the Baptist,” said Knife matter-of-factly.

“Ah,” Marsden warned, “Knox is an immense figure. Each age secretes afresh the most ancient treasures and anomalies of freedom.” He picked up a large volume from the table behind him entitled John Knox by Jasper Ridley. “Do you know”—he glanced at the portrait on the cover—“that this portrait is said to be a portrait of someone called Tyndale which hangs, I believe, at Magdalen College? But in Ridley’s view it is actually a likeness of Knox.”

“What do women’s liberation make of Knox?” asked Knife and he grinned at the ceiling.

“What do women make of John the Baptist? They never cease to love him. In virtue or love lies a certain animus of history — a certain necessity to conceive real dragons….”

“Do you mean,” said Knife, grinning still, “that love of freedom makes a virtue of intolerance?”

“Read the times in which we live side by side with ages past. Freedom is a baptism in rivers of blood.” He flung open the Book of Knox and read:

“Despite his intolerance, his dogmatic adherence to every word of scripture, and the tyranny of his Church Sessions, (he) was a great contributor to the struggle for human freedom…. The personality of Knox, magnificent and terrible, has fascinated and appalled posterity. The aristocratic eighteenth century condemned him; the puritanical and radical nineteenth century admired him….”

Black Marsden stopped abruptly, slammed fast his book, and sipped the tall amber liquid at his elbow (left elbow, bar sinister, Goodrich thought).

“It is vital, Jennifer,” he said drawing close to her, “that you conceive the dragon of freedom as you play Salome. Conceive or visualize likenesses in our own time if these help.” His brow was knitted, corrugated. His cheeks seemed to bulge and sink into the physiognomy of a map — watersheds, rivers and valleys writ small but arresting and dangerous. His beard or forest fell and concealed his throat and extended upwards along his temples in wild but still decorous rings — a combination of savagery and urbanity. He stepped back at this moment and concealed his body behind a large red chair draped with a unique and rich combination of sackcloth and ashes he had bought for Tabula Rasa. He stretched his hands up and sideways as though the map of his features had acquired wings.

He quoted John Knox:

“I find that Athalia, through appetite to reign, murdered the seeds of the kings of Judah. And that Herodias’ daughter, at the desire of a whorish mother, obtained the head of John the Baptist.”

The words issued from him with such startling conviction in this age, though far removed from that age, that he stood like one possessed by a devil or by a saint. His archaic/modern lips, Goodrich felt, were turning red as dark cherries where Knife had slashed into his beard which dripped now (in the theatre of action he evoked) not with blood but with greying winters. It was the strangest climax he rehearsed and Jennifer Gorgon was held by this: schooled, as it were, to a point of resolution. Affected, however, by a hint of anti-climax, of world-weariness perhaps he could not wholly suppress. But whatever reservations she may have had about the riddle of his performance — intense reality or intense unreality, intense vividness or intense vicariousness — she was animated by a virtuous crescendo of blood which addressed her across the ages.

Goodrich glimpsed her with the scarecrow eye which now possessed him: she stood upon the brink of a new and inevitable mainstream rebellion of soul — a new cult of fascination with freedom. Marsden continued, blissfully unaware apparently of the spell he had cast upon all:

“God, for his great mercies’ sake, stir up some Phinehas, Elias or Jehu, that the blood of abominable idolaters may pacify God’s wrath…. Delay not thy vengeance, O Lord, but let the earth swallow them up; and let them go down quick to the hells.”