Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Athletics were supreme on the College curriculum but attention was paid to the humanities and the sciences in the race of scholarship.

Mr Becks, a black Grenadian educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, was the Latin master; a brilliant scholar and the recipient of many prizes. Unlike the other masters who drove cars or cycled on ancient bikes, he walked to College along Brickdam from his home. He always wore an immaculate white suit and a white cork helmet such as overseers donned when they climbed into the saddle to ride through the sugar-cane estate on the other side of the Crocodile Bridge. He strode at a beautiful pace that Philip would have envied.

A year or two before Masters enrolled, Mr Becks had taught both Latin and Greek, and though Greek had been withdrawn, he referred perfunctorily on occasion to Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. They had become relics in the cave into which scholarship-masks upon Masters and me ran. In his first year Everyman read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Caesar’s accounts of his invasions of Gaul and Britain.

“Latin,” Mr Becks said non-committally (or was it perfunctorily?), “is a dead language.” Masters was taken aback. He confided to me an anecdote of a precocious composer who wrote his first symphony at the age of seven but was astonished to learn that the keys of his piano were ivory relics from the cave into which music-masks run. Young Masters — though an adept of the cave of my dreams — was equally ignorant. He stated bluntly that Latin was the language of Philip Rodrigues. Was ignorance bliss in poking unintentional fun at Philip, in visualizing him as an imperial speaker, in attributing to him a sacred tongue, a sacred art, a sacred science within a colonial cave that stifles originality and breeds fear. How sacred is fear, how sacred is hypocrisy? Mr Becks rebuked him. The priests and engineers of Spain, he conceded, still conducted solemn Latin masses for the pagan soul of the New World. Masters was intrigued to learn of a new Latin dictionary that blessed the pagan mysteries of surrealism, jazz, aeroplane and radio.

But a nagging doubt remained. What was a dead language? Did surrealism, aeroplane, jazz, radio become instant dinosaur relics within an embalmed language? He asked Mr Becks.

“Latin helps us with modern tongues,” Mr Becks said evasively. “Think of the many words with a Latin root. Latin is an exercise of logical faculty. Latin has beauty and order.” He saw that Everyman was waiting for a reply to his question. “There are technical reasons, technological revolutions,” he hesitated as if unsure what a “technological revolution” was in the museum of progress, “that may explain the low profile or so-called death of a language. Latin still conquers souls.” He spoke grandly with a hollow flourish.

“And aeroplanes and radios?” Masters asked.

Mr Becks blinked uncomfortably. He spoke up all at once. “Language is, or should be, as much an art as a tool or a medium of tools. We need to question, to say the least, the innermost resources of language through the creative imagination, in the creative conscience. Such questions sometimes evolve into profoundest answers to the plague of robot intelligence. A living language is a medium of imaginative death as well as imaginative rebirth and life. It is a medium of creativity in morality. Fiction as much as language dies otherwise. I myself read nothing but mediocre novels and poetry. It is better to be on the safe side, to assume there is no hope. One is then in line to be promoted to the top of the robot league in entertainment, learning and politics.”

The class had been listening, yet not listening. And Masters was more fascinated by Mr Becks’ discomfort and uneasiness as he spoke rather than by what he actually said. Was Mr Becks a sick man or a prime white-coated skeleton in the cave into which we had run? He seemed fearful of his innermost thoughts as he uttered them. He seemed to glance over his shoulder at the running false shaman who might take umbrage at what he had said. It was clear that a class of indifferent college boys was the only audience he possessed, the only stage on which to air his heretical views. Were they really heretical — I wondered — or were they a kind of defiance within a cave assembly of young skeletons who did not understand what he was saying? He was safe indeed. He returned to uttering eulogies of Latin, its beauty, its order. Then he sought vulgar relief by launching into an anecdote about a recent holiday in France.

Masters gained confirmative insight into Mr Becks’ skeleton-soul when he learned that P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste was the Latin master’s favourite novel. Or so he broadcast to all and sundry in the masters’ staff-room. Was it the innate aristocratic vulgarity of Beau Geste that appealed to him, the hidden or unconscious satire on princeling-overseers? Was it the romance of the French Foreign Legion, the inefficiency and corruption, the ingredients of adventure? Did all these in their remoteness from the Latin age serve paradoxically to reinforce a resemblance, an immortal resemblance and a mercenary code? I wondered at Mr Becks’ subconscious mind in the cave of Beau Geste.

The English master, Mr Delph, was an Australian educated in England and Italy, a rolling stone with little moss who slipped through and beyond the cave. Or so one dreamt. His lack of moss stood in contrast to Mr Becks’ elaborate masquerade. They shared an understanding. Mr Delph adopted Mr Becks’ theorem of creativity and morality and pursued this seriously and genuinely. As a consequence Mr Becks secured tenure as an important influence in New Forest education. Mr Delph secured the sack as a blackboard rebel. He was caught red-handed not with Beau Geste but with Brave New World. Huxley’s novel had been banned in New Forest though no one knew why. No one had read it.

In 1931, as if he anticipated the sack, Mr Delph gave Masters several As for English composition. His habit was to inscribe a list on the blackboard and to request his students to incorporate it into a story. One such prophetic list, straight from the oracle’s blackboard mouth in the cave, ran as follows: marble woman, burning schooner, crocodile, milk, Magna Carta, Bartleby’s widow.

Mr Delph sometimes struck a match in the cave to light his pipe and comment with some elaboration on each relic. He rhapsodized over “Magna Carta” and “Bartleby’s widow”.

Mr Quabbas was by no means Australian, nor was he Grenadian. He was New Forestian, of mixed blood; his natural caution (he was a born spy) — and his graphic definition of Antipodes — made him kith and kin to Grenadian/English Becks and to Australian/Italian Delph.

“Feet to feet — click ,” he said. “That is Anti-po-des.” He would chant to the cosmic Boys and trace the egg of the globe with gesturing hands at the heart of the cave. He indicated there were souls dressed in boots standing diametrically opposite each other. Then as the egg contracted until it disappeared, the Antipodean boot souls of foetal humanity drew together and clicked like a time bomb. Was it, I asked the dead king, a shadow variation of tap-dancing Magna Carta ladies and barons in Aunt Alice’s wonderland?

Mr Quabbas was a teacher who seemed to defy all categories. (He sometimes lectured on mathematics.) His bulky frame dipped and crouched like the incarnation of many a shy and stern creature. He was hard. He marked his students hard. He was gentle. He taught Masters the geography of Europe, particularly of Great Britain; nothing at all of the Americas, but his silence here was sometimes deafening. He never spoke of the deepening 1920s–1930s depression in New Forest. It was rumoured, however, that he contemplated writing a book for initiated students into the complexities of New Forest sugar and its abortive status in the eighteenth century when it gestated and failed to emerge in radical fictional alignment and twin ship with Boston tea and the birth of the American Revolution.