The God of the Labyrinth

by Colin Wilson

  Alastair and I tried to lift the chest down the ladder, but it was too heavy. We decided to leave it. We marched triumphantly down to the drawing room to announce the discovery, and caused a gratifying amount of excitement. I left them to troop off to examine the chest, while I drank a glass of iced lager, then went and had a shower. When I rejoined them, they had piled bundles of papers and ledgers on the hearthrug, and were looking through them. I glanced through their finds, but could see nothing of importance.

  Dinner was half an hour late. We ate large amounts of pheasant and woodcock and drank Beaujolais; after which we all became sleepy and retired to the lounge to drink coffee and watch the television news. At nine thirty, I asked if I might use the telephone; I had not contacted Diana since we left London.

  The line was a good one; I could hear her as clearly as if she was a mile away. I told her the news—that I had found some of Glenney’s papers, but nothing that looked promising. I asked her if she had any news.

  ‘Not much. There’s a letter from a girl who wants you to go and live with her in Miami. And a man who wants you to write a book denouncing computers. And there’s a note from a man called Corner who says he’d like to meet you next time you’re in London.’

  ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘K—O—R—N—E—R.’

  I shouted: ‘What! What’s his first name?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Shall I find the letter?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  A few minutes later she was back, and reading it to me. It was Otto Körner, the man the Dunkelmans said had been deported. He was living in West Hampstead. He said that he had read my letter about Esmond Donelly in The Times Literary Supplement and that he would like to talk to me about him. He gave his telephone number.

  When she rang off, I rushed into the drawing room, chortling and waving the paper with Körner’s address. I felt this was a major breakthrough—not so much because I expected Körner to know anything about Esmond that I didn’t already know; but because I felt the gods were on our side. Miller was almost as pleased as we were about it; he was beginning to get caught up in the ‘quest for Esmond Donelly’. He said: ‘Why don’t you call him right away?’ I needed no urging. Five minutes later, a voice that sounded like a comic German professor was saying heartily:

  ‘It iss very goot that you reeng, Mr Zorme. We haf much to discuss.’

  I said: ‘I saw the Dunkelmans in London two days ago. They told me you’d returned to Germany?’

  ‘What! They know that is not true! You must not trust them . . .’ He went on for ten minutes about the Dunkelmans, frequently relapsing into German. He ended by strongly advising me never to see them again. I wanted to find out what he had against them, so I said mildly that they seemed a harmless couple. He shouted:

  ‘What? Harmless? Why, that man is a murderer.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure. He is a murderer. He marries a rich girl in Switzerland and boils her body in a glue machine. At this time he is owner of a glue factory. He marries this girl—although he is already married—and after a few weeks, she disappears. Then a doctor analyses a sample of his glue and says it is made of human bones. But they cannot prove anything. He gets three years in prison for bigamy.’

  The story sounded so revolting as to be unbelievable. (In fact, I later discovered that Körner had kept back the most horrible detail—that Klaus had cut off her flesh with a razor in small slivers, and fed it to his pet piranha fish.) I talked to Körner for a few minutes longer, and promised to call on him on my way back to Ireland. He said: ‘Good. I hope you stay in London for a few days. I have much to tell you.’

  That sounded promising. I went back to give Angela the astonishing information about Klaus Dunkelman, and we ended by describing our visit in detail to our host and hostess. We omitted what happened after.

  I was so tired that I went to bed early. But I was awake at seven the next morning. Wearing my overcoat, I sat on a low stool in the attic, and carefully removed every bundle and ledger from the chest, placing loose sheets in a neat pile. I had been searching for half an hour when I came across the first promising find: a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon, and addressed in a round, girlish hand to ‘Horace Glenney Esquire, Ferdinandstrasse 9 (der haus von Herr Jülich), Göttingen’. These were letters written by Fiona Guthrie to Horace Glenney, beginning in February 1767—a month after he had come close to seducing her. They were the letters of a girl in love; moreover, a girl who felt herself to be engaged. The letters are full of gossip about her home, his sister Mary, a dog he had given her. I found them pathetic to read because they made her real—a schoolgirl in love for the first time, a girl who has allowed her lover certain liberties because she can refuse him nothing, and who believes that he thinks about her as continually as she thinks of him. One of them has a note from Mary: ‘I hope the girls there are as ugly as donkeys.’ Horace seems to have replied at length, and mentioned Esmond with too much enthusiasm, for Fiona writes: ‘I am sure your friend Esmond Donelly is a good and [illegible] student, but [I] really cannot admire him without having met him. . . . I would rather hear details of your own doings.’ Apparently Horace spent too much time praising Edmond.

  The following Christmas (1767) they seem to have had a quarrel about a maidservant: ‘I wish I could understand why you should want to touch so greasy a creature’: which no doubt explains why Fiona retained her virginity for another year. It must have been a frustrating Christmas for Glenney after the failure of his attempted abduction at Osnabrück.

  I laid Fiona’s letters by for more careful study, and went on emptying the chest. Nearer the bottom, it seemed to be less dis­ordered, and account books were piled up in one corner. I took all these out and, when the last one had been removed, saw a black metal box buried under bundles of paper. I tugged it out, and found it to be about eighteen inches long and nine inches deep. It was unlocked. I opened it and found myself looking at a handwritten title page: ‘Letters from a Mountain’, by George Smithson, D.D. I found the notebook I had been using for my Donelly material. As I thought, the published edition of Letters from a Mountain was by Reginald Smithson. But the pamphlet on the ‘evil Society of the Phoenix’ was by Henry Martell and George Smithson, D.D. This was published ten years after the novel. Yet Glenney had changed the author’s Christian name. The inference was that Glenney had written the pamphlet before the novel, and had altered the name on the novel so as not to duplicate that already on the pamphlet.

  I picked up a handful of sheets at random and glanced through them. And almost immediately, my eye caught the words ‘society of the phoenix’. I read the context. There could be no possible doubt; in the original manuscript—and the elisions and alterations made it clear that this was the original—Glenney had referred to the ‘Society of the Phoenix’, not, as in the published version, the Order of the Vulture. Obviously, he had decided to change it—or been persuaded to change it. I took out the whole manuscript from the tin. The sheets on which it was written were not regular in size; but the ones at the bottom were notably smaller than the rest. Then I saw they were not part of the manuscript. They were in Esmond Donelly’s handwriting. The first one began:

  My dear Glenney,

  I beg you to believe me when I assure you, upon my most solemn word of honour, that you are wrong to fear for my safety. I can also assure you that you are completely mis­taken about the nature of our society. It is not ‘secret’ in the ordinary signification of that term. Would you call the Royal Society ‘secret’? Yet a beggar who found his way into one of its meetings might believe they were talking in some strange language to cloak their true purposes.

  I had discovered something that I had often daydreamed about in the past week or so: definite evidence of Esmond’s association with the Sect of the Phoenix.

  Trembling with excitement—and the damp cold of the attic—I made my way bac
k to my bedroom, clutching the tin box. I used the bedside phone—which our host had thoughtfully installed—to ask the kitchen if I could have a light breakfast sent to my room. No one disturbed me, although I heard Alastair pass my door on his way up to the attic. And during the next hour I learned more of Esmond Donelly than I had learned in all my weeks of research.

  I shall not quote these letters in full, for obvious reasons of space: they would occupy some fifty pages. The story I pieced together from them was briefly this. Esmond had learned of the existence of the Sect of the Phoenix from two sources: Rousseau, and Restif de la Bretonne. The latter was himself a member, as Esmond discovered later. Esmond had already evolved ideas that were close to theirs, as we have seen—and as these letters make very clear. He knew the Sect existed, but he had no idea where to seek it. So he brought out the Observations upon France and Switzerland, with the device of the phoenix on the cover, and the brief account of their history attributed to a Lutheran pastor (who never existed). We know what happened then. He received the device of the phoenix in the mail. And who was his first actual contact with the Sect? Absurdly and amusingly enough, it was the girl who first initiated him into the delights of love: his sister’s maid Marie, or Minou. Minou had continued her career of ardent nymphomania in Paris, and had become the mistress of a member of the Sect, who saw in her disinterested worship of the male genitals the true spirit of a devotee.

  Glenney and Esmond were close friends. But Glenney lacked the essential quality of a member of the Sect: the disinterested pursuit of sex as a supra-personal experience. Esmond suggested him as a member; and Glenney spent two days in Paris with Esmond and Abdallah Mumin (who appears in Letters from a Mountain as Abdallah Saba—Glenney chooses as a surname that of the Grand Master of the Order of Assassins). What happened is not clear, except that Glenney quarrelled with Esmond and left in a rage. Two months later, he and Esmond met again in London, and made up their quarrel—largely, apparently, at Glenney’s instigation. It was on this visit that they met Mary and Charlotte Ingestre, the daughters of the Earl of Flaxstead, who were staying with Esmond’s second cousin, Elizabeth Montagu, and they made a joking compact to wed the two girls, and to share their favours between them. At some point, Glenney induced Esmond to tell him something about the Sect of the Phoenix. In London, they also met Restif again—and the result was another quarrel, or rather, another outburst of fury from Horace Glenney. (All this confirmed my earlier guess that there was, on Glenney’s side, a strong homosexual element in the rela­tionship.) Glenney hired a Grub Street hack to do his research, and wrote the pamphlet ‘On the Evil Society of the Phoenix’. Esmond got wind of this, and persuaded Glenney not to publish. Glenney agreed, and devoted the autumn of 1772 to the seduc­tion of Mary Ingestre, while Esmond laid successful siege to Charlotte. But in November there was a further quarrel; Glenney returned to Scotland, and wrote the Letters from a Mountain between December and the following February. He wrote to Esmond to tell him that, while his promise bound him not to publish the pamphlet, he felt that fiction was a different matter altogether. (And what was all this but an attempt to claim Esmond’s attention at any cost?) The result was the long letter from Esmond that I found in the back of the manuscript.

  For many years, you and I have been friends—nay, brothers. Many’s the bottle we have emptied together, and many’s the wench whose virtue we have loosened by a judicial mutuality of shakes and caresses. Why, then, do you choose this time to doubt me and accuse me of double dealing? What has happened to the brotherhood we swore in the inn at Heidelberg, when I had run a loutish fellow through the arm, and you had slashed t’other above the eyes and so blinded him?

  These reminders of past friendship, of meals eaten together and women seduced together, sound false coming from Esmond. Horace Glenney was of coarser stuff, and he knew it. What he was now doing was tantamount to blackmailing Esmond, and both of them knew it. Their relation had been that of master and disciple. They came together when the brilliant Esmond had just discovered the delights of the female body, and he preached his gospel of seduction with the fervour of a revolutionary. We have seen how Glenney responded—in the episode of Fiona and Mary. From the list of names Esmond mentions, we can infer that the two of them shared a great many mistresses at Göttingen. But Esmond was not fundamentally interested in sex as such. For him, sex was the key to a mystery, and it was the mystery that interested him. Temperamentally, Horace Glenney bore many resemblances to Casanova—whom he met once in Utrecht. He liked the good things of life, and he loved women. He could not understand why Esmond, his master in the art of seduction, should not live in England’s capital and take up the Hell Fire Club where Sir Francis Dashwood had left off. For Glenney, this London—of Sheridan, Wilkes, Dashwood—was the most fascinat­ing place in the world: cockfights, horse racing, bare-fist boxing (a fairly new sport), nights at Drury Lane, the company of beautiful women. What more did Esmond want? Why had he become such a spoilsport? Their joint seduction of the Ingestre sisters revealed that their partnership was as irresistible as ever. And who was this formidable Arab who spoke perfect French and who seemed inseparable from Esmond? When Esmond finally confessed that the man belonged to the Sect of the Phoenix, Glenney was appalled. Esmond had often spoken to him about this brotherhood; it had fascinated him ever since Rousseau had mentioned it. Glenney had never really believed in its existence. And now Esmond was a member! That explained everything. Esmond was no longer a carefree seducer because he had fallen into the hands of a secret society run by sinister foreigners, of whom this giant and scarred Arab was an example. Glenney’s reaction was a mixture of fear, anxiety, and jealousy—with the last predominating. He talked openly around London about the Sect of the Phoenix—this must be where Johnson picked up the gossip about Esmond—and wrote his pamphlet. If Esmond had been less loyal, he would have returned to Ireland and broken with Glenney. Instead, he tried to placate him. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that he tried to make Glenney understand the changes that had taken place in him since their Göttingen days.

  I have always been of the opinion that this world is at bottom magical, and that if we are not magicians, the fault lies in ourselves. Diderot makes d’Alembert say: ‘Why am I what I am? Because it is inevitable that I should be.’ I have always asked myself: ‘Why am I what I am? For it seems to me the most arbitrary thing in the world.’ I might be anything or anywhere. My form is no more fixed than is that of a wisp of smoke rising from a fire. On a still morn­ing, the smoke may seem as stable as a column of marble; but we know that the slightest breath of wind will change its form and disperse it into the atmosphere. I sat one morn­ing on a bridge and watched the cataract that descends near Mont Blanc; and was struck suddenly by the reflection that men are surrounded by forces they fail to understand, yet have the vanity to suppose themselves as enduring as the rocks. In the days when men were hunters and fighters, they had no time to stagnate; they understood their own nature; they did not mistake smoke for marble. And in that respect, they understood the world better than M. Diderot or M. Voltaire understands it. Only a fool would wish to return to the state of Numidian savages; and as to myself, I am neither a hunter nor a fighter. But I had long observed that when my battering ram sinks into its predestined home, whether it be between the thighs of a titled lady or a stable-maid, it becomes self-evident that this world is rich, warm and infinite. The blindness falls from my eyes, the heaviness from my senses, and I see at once that man has allowed him­self to be robbed of his birthright. But if this magic vision is my birthright, why should I be content to accept it in disjoined fragments, as a dog snaps up scraps of meat tossed upon the floor by its master? It is mine; shall I not seize it and hold it?

  This I have always believed. And I know enough of theology to know that this birthright is that which was lost to men through Adam’s sin. But how may we hope to find that which was lost unless the search be systematic? I have always believed there must be a way to
recover this lost power. Now I have discovered that there are men who have devoted their lives to the search for this way, and can teach me something of their methods. Can you truly believe that such men are evil, that their intention is to ensnare my immortal soul? And what would it signify even if this were true? For neither you nor I believe that the soul can be ensnared, except by dullness and too much concern with the unimportant.

  No, I am after more important quarry than the maiden­heads of infatuated girls.

  But what exactly did the Sect of the Phoenix do? Esmond expresses its basic aim in one sentence: ‘Our purpose is not to degrade and pollute religious feelings with venery, but to raise venery to the level of a religious feeling.’ But how was this to be done? Esmond is deliberately obscure; he had reason to dis­trust Glenney. But it is clear that when he came to Golspie—in April 1773—he told Glenney a great deal more than he was willing to set down in writing; and Glenney, in turn, wrote down some of this material with the intention of using it eventually in his book. I think it is impossible to doubt that Glenney always intended to publish the book. I personally am reluctant to con­demn him. The novel is a remarkable achievement, in spite of its absurdities; one might almost say that it constitutes Horace Glenney’s chief claim upon the interest of posterity. Can a writer be blamed for deciding not to destroy his best work?

  From Glenney’s notes—which I shall summarise rather than quote at length—it seems clear that the Sect of the Phoenix had much in common with the Rosicrucians or Freemasons. There was a Grand Master, who was a kind of pope, and who was elected by a committee known as ‘the dominoes’, presumably because they wore hoods with a short cloak, of the kind worn at masquerades. Each country had only one domino—in France, it was the writer Choderlos de Laclos, author of Liaisons Dangereuses. Esmond later became the domino for Ireland.