Alan Moore - Jerusalem

As he’d suspected, there’s more to this holy-roller Hervey character than meets the eye. Born to a preaching family at Hardingstone and in the shadow of the headless cross, the first King Edward’s monument to his dead Eleanor, James Hervey gets packed off to grammar school during 1721 when he’s aged seven. Studs thinks this unreasonably young when everybody he knows went there only after passing their Eleven-Plus, but he assumes that educative practice in Northampton was a different animal nearly three hundred years ago. Hell, education in the town had always been of an entirely separate species to that elsewhere in the country. Back there in the 1970s and 1980s the town’s children had been casually subjected to an educational experiment involving a three-tier system and the introduction of a ‘middle school’, attended for a few years in between the junior and senior establishments and therefore doubling the dislocation and disruption to which pupils in pursuit of learning were subjected. Unsurprisingly the scheme was a conspicuous dud and had been quietly dumped some years back, with a generation of Northampton school kids written off as no more than collateral damage. Still obscurely nagged by the “aged seven” business and the sense that there’s unanswered questions hanging over the prestigious boys’ school, Studs reads on.

A decade later, at the age of seventeen Hervey goes up to Oxford where he runs into John Wesley’s clique of proto-Methodists, a bunch of cold-eyed pious young punks known disparagingly to their fellow students as “the Holy Club”. Studs nods in weary recognition. That’s the way it is out on the mean streets of religion these days, decent kids forced into joining one gang or another, not because they want to but because they figure it improves their chance of spiritual survival. But then, once they’ve been sworn in, once they’ve kneecapped a Baptist as a part of their initiation, they find that it ain’t so easy getting out again. That’s how it goes with Hervey. For a long time there he’s Wesley’s top enforcer as the most successful writer in the Holy Club, but soon he’s hankering to set up his own racket. Rumours get around that he’s developing a soft spot for the evangelicals and that he calls himself a moderate Calvinist, which ain’t what Wesley wants to hear. There’s plainly an almighty shoot-out brewing, and when Hervey publishes three volumes of his Theron and Aspasio in 1755 it’s like he isn’t giving the great hymnist any choice except to take it to the street. Wesley denounces his former lieutenant’s work as antinomianism, an old-fashioned heresy which holds that everything is predetermined, and before a guy can say a paternoster the air’s full of theological hot lead. Hervey’s outgunned and takes one in the faith, is trying to return fire in Aspasio Vindicated when consumption finally decides he’s ready for his dirt-nap at the age of forty-five. John Wesley, who’s been piling on the pressure from the cover of his pulpit even when his target’s clearly dying, finally reads Hervey’s posthumously published refutation of his hatchet-job and in a wounded tone declares that Hervey has died “cursing his spiritual father”. Wesley makes sure that he gets the last word; puts a round into Hervey’s posterity. That’s Methodists, Studs muses. They’re methodical.

Stretched on the grass among the sparsely distributed headstones in the pale May radiance he realises he’s enjoying this, this day-pass from his city of ongoing dreadful night. It’s a surprise to find that sunlight isn’t always striped. Somewhere a blackbird sings like an interrogated felon and the temporarily non-noir detective turns the drift of his attention to the next of the assorted reference pages, which appears to be by a foot-soldier from the Wesley mob. Ostensibly a Hervey profile, it paints Theron and Aspasio ’s author as the stumblebum whose florid literary style contributed to a decline of taste in English letters, somebody whose pompous prose had a degenerative influence on nearly all the other preachers of his day “save the robust John Wesley”. As a demonstration of the author’s point regarding Hervey’s vulgar affectations and impoverished ideas, a small slab of the Weston Favell rector’s writings are reprinted. Understanding that these will have almost certainly been chosen to best show off Hervey’s flaws, Studs prods his slipping spectacles back to the top of his toboggan-run proboscis and starts reading:

I can hardly enter a considerable town but I meet a funeral procession, or the mourners going about the street. The hatchment suspended on the wall, or the crepe streaming in the air, are silent intimations that both rich and poor have been emptying their houses, and replenishing their sepulchres.

Reclining as he is propped on one elbow and thus unable to marshal either shoulder into any kind of shrug, Studs lets his overgrown vacant-lot eyebrows and wasp-chewing bulldog lower lip perform that function in their stead. Sure, Hervey’s stuff is sombre in a decorative way, but that don’t mean it’s for the birds. He personally rather likes the business with crepe streaming in the air and wishes he got lines of dialogue like that. He wishes he got lines of dialogue, period. Focussing upon the print again, he carries on with his assessment of the dead divine’s rhetorical abilities:

There’s not a newspaper comes to my hand, but, amidst all its entertaining narrations, reads several serious lectures of mortality. What else are the repeated accounts — of age, worn out by slow-consuming sicknesses — of youth, dashed to pieces by some sudden stroke of casualty — of patriots, exchanging their seats in the senate for a lodging in the tomb — of misers, resigning their breath, and (O relentless destiny!) leaving their very riches for others! Even the vehicals of our amusement are registers of the deceased! And the voice of fame seldom sounds but in concert with the knell!

Yeah, now, see, admittedly, that’s pretty morbid. And the last few sentences, where Hervey’s gone bananas with the exclamation marks, they read as though he’s hammering his fist down on the pulpit, or maybe a coffin lid, for emphasis. Studs can see how material like that could be a buzz-kill. With contrived dramatic timing the sun slides behind a cloud and everything is overlaid by a dot screen of half-tone grey. The final two lines might have been contrived with Studs himself in mind. The vehicles of our amusement, many of which he’s appeared in, are indeed the registers of the deceased, are chiselled cemetery credits that roll on forever, miserable ledgers of extinguished stars. As for the voice of fame he doubts he’ll recognise it even if he ever gets to hear it, which he definitely won’t if Hervey’s on the level and it sounds in concert with his knell. Actually, that would be okay, once he’s considered it. Most people only get the knell.

Its brief sulk over with, the sun comes out again. The next sheet in his slender pile presents the lyrics from what must presumably be Hervey’s only extant hymn, Since All the Downward Tracts of Time : “Since all the downward tracts of time/ God’s watchful eye surveys/ O who so wise to chose our lot/ Or to appoint our ways?” Studs likes the fatalism, which he feels would sit well in a Continental Op or Phillip Marlowe outing, the idea that all our future dooms and disappointments are already written and just waiting for us patiently further along the highway, on the downward tracts of time. He figures he and Hervey could at least agree upon the direction of travel, and supposes that this must be all the antinomian predestination bullshit which brought matters to a head between John Wesley and his former sidekick. Nearby, bees are mumbling imprecations to the year’s first flowers as Studs continues working his way through the stack of data.