Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  Cold showers, and sudden storms. Murphy-O’Connor in some ways failed the Church, himself, and me in his actions in Sussex in the 1980s and ’90s. I lived the consequences of his inaction. Of a Church believing against all odds that it was not the eye of the storm but the ‘English spring’ in which it was living. This account is my account of what it was like to live in an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of bright promise and budding hopes. This is the grim reality of the English spring, found in the half-lit bedroom of a troubled man in Sussex.

  To some, Murphy-O’Connor’s bold title will form an accurate measure of the degree to which his musings disappoint. Apart from the crisis over clerical child abuse, which the Cardinal handles with due contrition insofar as it reflects his poor judgement as a diocesan bishop, the book is more a chronicle of sun, light breeze and scattered showers than of the storms …

  This is the grim reality of the English spring, found in the pages of a literary journal reviewing the apologia of a man who lived in Sussex.

  *

  Now, I cannot remember how I ended up in all those beds, in all those hospitals, shattered, a broken man. Hopeless, I could not then dream of a world in which I could make a mark, rather I was marked out for nothing by the world, not being for it.

  Now, as I lie in my hospital bed, shattered, I cannot remember how I have managed to end up here, in the ketamine clinic at the Warneford, a man with hope, unbroken. I am marked out for something (I think), being now – keenly – for the world.

  *

  What will survive of me is my books, those I wrote and those I owned. I own a remarkable collection of books, some have said the best personal research library in Oxford. I own hundreds of Lintot’s works and all the editions of all the poets whom he published. When I die the collection will be bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, where it will have the shelf mark ‘Bernard’.

  Fogarty had paper-like, soft, bookish fingers and bony paper-white teeth, but I do not often think of them now when I feel the paper of a book. I feel, when I think of Fogarty, paper cuts. The incision of a caress. For some years, paper and stickiness and boniness were the only physical sensations I could feel. Now I feel electric – everything, everyone, everywhere – enervated with a glory which defies the past, not just the touch of paper, the sight of white blank pages, and the emissions of the Canon. I ask again, is it possible to love cancer, to be in love with it? The answer must be yes. When you love what rots you, what irradiates you, you gain an enviable power over it and it cannot harm you any longer.

  Malone, he after whom the Malone Society is named, was a fine textual editor. He made many startling discoveries in his edition of the letters of Dryden and his work as an editor is a rare example of excellence in the obscure land of scholarship. His letters and books are to be found in the Bodleian Library, where one day my letters will be found, each with their own shelf mark. I have a great affinity for Malone. Lamb knew the pleasures of an Oxford library, the happenstance discoveries of books and men in them, but Malone created part of that library, his life’s work – his books and letters – are to be found there, ripe and rich and waiting for discovery. I have edited a lot of letters, and there is an art to having one’s letters edited. That art is not to leave behind too much. Of Dryden’s letters there are few, of Lintot’s there are fewer. By their absences they are recorded in the annals of their times and by that act of recording they shape our perceptions of their times.

  Some men burn their letters and by all accounts they are right to do so. By limiting what they leave behind, they delimit the scope for enquiry. Scholarship may seem like an infinite world with infinite possibility, but mankind cannot bear too much reality. The art is in leaving enough behind to leave them wanting more, not everything, as they do not want to know everything, just a few indications that you lived in the world and thought about it.

  *

  Bernard Lintot, bookseller

  Bernard Lintot was, in conscious rivalry with his contemporaries the Tonsons, the preeminent bookseller of the early eighteenth century, towering over the rest. It is not surprising that Tonson has received the most critical attention of any bookseller in the period, but Lintot’s promotion of the works of Alexander Pope, starting with the publication of the twenty-nine-year-old poet’s precocious Works in 1717 was to establish him as a bookseller of considerable importance in the creation of the English literary canon. His publication of Shakespeare too was significant, yet these efforts would have been meaningless, in the long run …

  *

  The English literary canon is not all that is best, it is all that has lasted with the imprimatur of the future stamped on it. What is the canon? Is it a valid construct? Looking back on my life, for me it is what has lasted of my intellectual history. Now I write something in the canon, rewrite literary history, have found the ‘lost Augustan’: Nicholas Rowe, a writer who owes his rightful place to me.

  Nicholas Rowe was a child of the Williamite dispensation and the first Poet Laureate of the Hanoverians. His work is almost unknown today, for all his excellencies as a writer. He is the most important writer in England between the death of John Dryden and the arrival of Alexander Pope. He bequeaths us some immortal lines

  Guilt is the source of sorrow, ’tis the fiend,

  Th’avenging fiend, that follows us behind,

  With whips and stings …

  He also gave the world the figure of ‘Lothario’, the arch seducer. Rowe’s reputation was high in his lifetime and for much of the eighteenth century. Only in the last century did his plays fall out of the canon. I have rediscovered him and placed his work again before an appreciative critical audience. What do people remember about Lothario? His seduction of an innocent. What do I remember? As I noticed when I watched The Fair Penitent being acted, the body of Lothario lies dead on the stage for all of act five. Lothario is dead for a long time. Fogarty, the seducer of children, was no Lothario, but I will make sure that he is dead for a long time.

  *

  I only recently began to write this, under the cover of writing, in the Bodleian Library. I do not write of the unchained troubles of the heart. I do not think that I have anything of the eternal in me either, a soul. Nor anything approaching munificent wisdom for all ages either.

  A fool – now a professor – once told me that there were only ten things left to be said about English literature, implying that I was not saying any of them. Well, he was not reckoning on this, my discourse on the creation of the English literary canon.

  *

  I said I would return to Swift. What Swift achieved was mastery of his unbidden, disquieting voice. That to me is a badge of honour. That is the voice of the modern, unencumbered by superstition and ignorance, the daring to speak the silences of eternity. Now I have said the little I have to say about Dryden, Pope, Swift, Hardy and Joyce (nothing), and the others, I can turn briefly to Swift’s successor: Evelyn Waugh.

  Waugh knew the bitter fruits of comedy and what it was to be an author. He became a Catholic and welcomed into his world the troubles of the cruel world of a comedy found in a handful of dust. He turned the moderns on themselves and found them wanting. What he wanted was to live in a world that lived on the carapace of his creations, the world of P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse, and the perfection of him, is found in his unspoken moral universe, of good deeds in a naughty world. There, like Waugh and Orwell, I find a kind of comfort, the generous solicitude of the servant for a child-man; a kind of modern Christ, the ultimate servant giving his life that we might live. Perhaps. While we all admire Bach’s Goldberg Variations, what we listen to is often jazz.

  *

  My work done for the day and curious I look on the internet for relics of the past which has so occupied me today. Oddly perhaps, after all these years, I have never looked up Fogarty on the internet. I am slightly surprised by what I find.

  What it means to be a servant! A reflection on Canon Fogarty R.I.P.

  In the early hours of Monday
Morning a great friend of both the diocese and this parish died Canon Fogarty. After over 60 years of dedicated service to the diocese and this local area he will be sadly missed. I have spent some of the week as the news filtered out listening to people remember him and with my reflection on the Gospel this weekend have been able to see why people have remembered him so fondly.

  The Gospel readings speak of being a servant to others. To be great in the Kingdom of heaven means to be a servant to others. The word servant has many negative connotations to it. We may think of the servants in the programmes such as Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs but the Christian servant is more than this idea of being a paid servant for a Lord or Lady. To be a servant in the Christian sense is a privilege and also a responsibility it means to be with people through both good and bad times. Jesus wanted to stress that it was not about having power and position ‘This is not to happen to you’.

  It is being able to be open enough not to be shocked by what you both see and hear. We all have this vocation, as a parent we are servants to our children. It is also very important in the ministry of a priest.

  As priests we have the immense privilege of walking with people, sometimes for a short time, through the joys and sorrows of life. I know from what people have told me that the Canon did this countless times. He both buried loved ones but also baptized others and walked with them as they grew up. There was a succession of young people who would seek the canon to go through their work for languages and [he] took a keen interest in their further studies. I am sure [they were] like me seeking that little touch of wisdom we so often get from those who are older than us.

  To be a servant then is also about thinking about others and not your own desires, they come second to the needs of others. It is about giving respect and equal dignity to all those whom we come in contact with.

  I have learnt, sometimes the hard way, that to be servant for others is both hard and sometimes very frustrating. But, if we live a life of service to others we are living the authentic Christian way. We look to others who have gone before us, recognizing that they too are sinners and in need of God’s love and learn from them.

  *

  Penetration. Of the body, of the mind. An act, and an art. A small masterclass in delicate, but physical, caring, but uncaring, violation. The penis incarnating a theology of abuse in the unwillingly responsive young body. The physical fact annihilates, destroys. The pain, the humiliation. And afterwards, the shame. The blood on the sheets, and later, in my bedroom, on those sheets. Something utterly, exquisitely debilitating. To get from the bedroom to the study is a challenge for the twelve-year-old boy, uncertain of the next move in this break-out role. The locomotion, lavation, ablution, then absolution. A kind of narrative of imperfection leading to perfection. And a pained, sore private part of the body, of the self, telling of the utter violation of the individual, not yet a man. Chosen because he is not yet a man, but chosen because he is not yet a boy either.

  *

  ‘This is not to happen to you.’

  *

  Latin. The language of the Church, the language of canon law. The law does not protect the child, the man protects the child.

  *

  confessor, n.

  Etymology: < Latin confessor, and its French repr. confessor, -ur, Anglo-Norman -our (modern French -eur), agent-noun < Latin confite¯r¯l to confess v. (In sense 2, Old French had also confes < Latin confessus one who has confessed.) The historical pronunciation, < Anglo-Norman and Middle English confe'ssour, is 'confessor, which is found in all the poets, and is recognized by the dictionaries generally, down to Smart, 1836–49, who has 'confessor in senses 2, 3, con'fesser in sense 1b; for these, Craig 1847 has 'confessor and con'fessor; but con'fessor is now generally said for both.

  1. gen. One who makes confession or public acknowledgement or avowal of anything.

  b. of a crime, sin, or offence charged.

  2a. techn. One who avows his religion in the face of danger, and adheres to it under persecution and torture, but does not suffer martyrdom; spec. one who has been recognized by the church in this character. (The earliest sense in English.)

  3. One who hears confessions: a priest who hears confession of sin, prescribes penance, and grants absolution; the private spiritual director of a king or other great personage. Often pronounced /'kɒnfɛsɔː(r)/in the R.C. Church.

  *

  What went wrong, what went wrong in Midhurst in the 1980s? What went wrong with me, in the town of Blessed Margaret Pole, witness to the truth of the ages?

  To be a servant then is also about thinking about others and not your own desires, they come second to the needs of others. It is about giving respect …

  I will show no respect, except to the truth. This is an experiment in autobiography. This may seem an odd comment, so please forgive me, but I am actually finding the piece very interesting as a work of biography. The use of word play, its prose structure, and the examination of language and power are effective in framing such a period in my life.

  Biography is such a strange genre. It is often tacitly assumed that the subject retains full agency over the events of their life. What I have presented is a form of biography where the subject loses agency in a most violent way, and yet the act of writing allows him to take some of the power back. I see the piece as partly a comment on biography. One could describe it as postmodern, in that only the biography creates the agency for the subject of the biography.

  *

  Canon Dermod Fogarty. The servant of the Church. I name you now, now and for ever. You Lothario, you will be dead a long time. I excoriate and curse you. I imprecate you. The English literary canon. I am the creator of the English literary canon. There are two ways of pronouncing the word confessor in English and both mean rape to me: confessor, rape.

  *

  There is little that is said of Wodehouse. In literary criticism now there is little appreciation of the jouissance, the verve of comedy. There is no forgiveness here in the Faculty for the unforgiving hectic clash of characters in an unreal world. Waugh we can live with, the innocence of Wodehouse is too much to bear. A harsh light spreads itself over the existence of Wodehouse, an existence which I have not yet mentioned, but which in my flat always finds a home.

  Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Waugh spoke to the ages, but Wodehouse, if he speaks to any time, speaks to the present in which one reads him, to the moment, outside time. He is the ‘new Augustan’, the laureate of a better time. The rill of his voice contains a perfection I do not fully understand. His modulations, his idiolect, casts up the promise of an eternal sunshine. I eagerly listen to the syncopations of his time and place, and relish his welcome into a world without responsibility unto anything but the code of one’s public school and the moral insistence of a maiden in distress.

  I did not think that I would end with an encomium on one of the finest writers of the last century’s favourite author, on a moral order which ceased to exist even before Waugh was born, and which even he knew, they both knew, was a confidently uttered untruth. Perhaps we all yearn for the past to come to perfection in the moment, which is what Wodehouse achieves, and what Waugh sees him as achieving. Even when Wodehouse wrote, there were few earls in New York, and fewer aunts worth writing home about. But if writing home about things is half the pleasure, it is most of the accomplishment. This new mode sits easy on my shoulders, but uneasy lies the head that wears the crown of autobiography. Have I said all I have to say? Enough. Does anyone want to hear more? Enough already. Do I regret writing out at last? As that most insightful of writers, Pontius Pilate, said,

  ‘What I have written, I have written.’

  *

  It is the evening of the May Ball. I have changed into my evening clothes and am feeling the full weight of expectation behind me and my white tie and tails. I have dined out at the Old Parsonage, coming into the college for the dancing. Like every May Ball I have ever been to, I have no partner, which is unusual. These balls are eve
nts for brilliant, young, entitled couples, one of which I have never been in. I am the only person not to have a partner this evening, and feel the lack, but also a solitary dignity and a thrill at the promise of it all.

  I move under the magnificent gate of the college into the evening. All around me is the loud reassurance of privilege. The men look very fine in their tails (I think). There is something uncomfortable to me about such opulence. I wonder what we have all done to deserve this, what the men and women of Oxford have ever done to deserve this.

  The music has already started. In the Main Quad, on the lawns, a small orchestra is perhaps unwittingly playing a song of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On no other night would people choose to listen to this. The lights are astonishing. I know everyone as I move through the evening. Everyone is connected to everyone else, and will be for the rest of their lives, having shared this moment of utmost privilege. I catch conversations, rich with delight, as I move, acknowledging others from my singleness.

  In the distance, in the corner of Radcliffe Square, there is a ferris wheel slowly picking up the promise of the evening, with a view over the college, the Bodleian Library, and the University Church. I walk back out of the college and towards it. The wheel catches me up in the joy of the moment. I am alone in my box, being lifted up past the quiet confines of the empty library. The chapel to my left tinkles with the sound of champagne glasses.