by Sam Taylor
Morley, Daniel Morvan, Jaime Mullerat, John Mulvey, Simon Murch, Herman Mussert, Lucy Neville, Sylvia Nofsinger, Jeremy Novick, O’Hanlons, Toru Okada, Will Oldham, The Olde White Harte, Steve Ovett, Lucy Owen, Richard Papen, Margaret Parkes, Martin Paul, John Peel, The Pink Palace, Pliny the Younger, The Polar Bear, Ford Prefect, Dan Pritchard, Qfwfq, Thomas De Quincey, Daniel Quinn, James ‘Malcolm’ Reilly, Gareth Rigby, Rock City, Antoine Roquentin, Steven Rose, The Roundhouse, Tomas Ryal, Mr Ryder, Oliver Sacks, Saint Augustine, Daniel Schachter, Michel Schmitz, Niquette Schmitz, Clare Sears, Rebeka Shaw, Leonard Shelby, The Sherwood Ranger, Karen Smart, Gavin Smith, Mark E. Smith, Dawn Sobota, Diana Spencer, Neil Spencer, Bruce Springsteen, Geoffrey Sonnabend, The Station, Anna Stead, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jocelyn Targett, Keith Taylor, Margaret Taylor, Matthew Taylor, Milo Taylor, Oscar Taylor, Patricia Taylor, Paul-Emile Taylor, Duncan Thaw, Wendy Timmons, The Tower, Dave Lee Travis, Trie FC, Clare Tryon, Jennifer ‘Breg’ Tryon, Lucy Tuck, Mary Ann Tuli, Nicholas Urfe, Paul Vanags, Anja Vendrig, Jorrit Verweij, Michael Vignal, The Vodka Bar, Stephen Wakeland, Burhan Wazir, Mr Webster, The Wherehouse, Mr White, Murphy Williams, Jonathan Wilson, Willy Wonka, Valentine Worth, Nicola Wyatt, Steve Xerri, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, Tora Young, Zhivago’s.
And to everyone and everything else that, in one way or another, influenced this book, but whose names (or existence) I have forgotten . . .
1 ‘M was permanently and deeply scarred by his upbringing. On many occasions he was heard bemoaning the fact that his parents had bequeathed to him the worst of all possible fates: they had, by behaving at all times reasonably and lovingly, made certain that they could not be blamed in any way for the nightmarish mess that was M’s adult life. They had deprived him of the one thing all true artists need in order to write out their demons: a scapegoat.’ The Labyrinth, tr. H. Mann (New York: 1974), p. 24. philosophy, fame and guilt - five elements which would come to dominate his life in various ways.
2 Elberg was engaged at the time to a French aristocrat called Laurent de Silva, though this engagement was broken soon after.
3 According to several (unsubstantiated) reports, she died in a train crash in 1930.
4 On one occasion Ryal ‘woke up’ while walking the streets of a strange city (Amsterdam) in broad daylight with no recollection of his actions or whereabouts during the previous five days.
5 Tomas Ryal, On the Impossibility of Remembering, tr. H. Mann (New York: 1970), p. 3.
6 See G.L. Wise, ‘Tomas Ryal: His Life, Parts One and Two’, Literaria Magazine , May 1986, and M. Trewvey, ‘The Philosophy of Murder: Did Tomas Ryal Kill a Fellow Student?’, Bizarreland Quarterly, June 1993.
7 Gregor Ryal died in 1925.
8 Collected Letters, tr. A. Lee-Yun (London, 1980) pp. 95-6.
9 The Labyrinth and Heaven and Hell, both of which were written in the 1960s and published posthumously.
10 A theory he ‘disproved’ on several later occasions, but somehow never entirely convincingly, at least not to himself, as he seemed haunted by the idea in his final years.
11 It is notable that nothing Ryal wrote in ‘Oh Why Do I Feel So Alone?’ would cause the slightest stir were it to be published now, in our self-regarding and the resistance effort in first Czechoslovakia and then France, but that was after several years of illness and regret. He contracted pneumonia during his final winter in England, as did his then girlfriend, Irene, a young dairy maid on an adjacent farm. She died; he survived. Ryal apparently never spoke or wrote about this period, but there are (admittedly cryptic) suggestions in The Labyrinth and in some of his letters that Irene was pregnant when she died, and that the two of them were planning to bring up the child together. atomised present; his observations on the individualistic impulse in society have been made to seem brilliantly prescient by the passage of time.
12 For a full account of Ryal’s heroic exploits in the Czech and French resistance, see Tomas Ryal: A Life by Hugh Mann (New York: 1988), pp. 171-205.
13 Ryal is also supposed to have written a symbolical fantasy novel, title unknown, in the style of J. R. R. Tolkien or Mervyn Peake. There are references to this book in several diary entries from 1965 onwards, but no such manuscript was ever found.
14 For details of this quest, see the highly recommended In Search of a Lost Genius, by Felice Berger and John Graves (London: 1963).
15 In Search of a Lost Genius, pp. 282-3. According to Ryal’s essay, The Trial is ‘a book of absolute fear’ and The Castle ‘a book of absolute hope’ - and the second ‘is by far the more terrible. Why? Because it has no end. The torturing hope is never resolved. In The Trial, death comes as a relief; in The Castle, the words run out, halfway through a sentence, with no sign that K’s hope is dwindling in the slightest. Rather it seems to grow, his hope; it goes on and on, feeding on scraps of nothing, growing ever larger and more monstrous, eating him up from inside. Were it ever to be resolved, the disappointment would come as a relief, but the horror of hope is that it does not die. It lives as long as we do. And this is why, for me, The Castle is more terrible, and more true-to-life: because none of us has ever experienced death; none of us has ever felt that true, lasting relief. Our condition is K’s condition: the grim, blind, teeth-grinding tension of someone who believes that they are getting closer, ever closer, to finding the key to it all.’
16 This Freud-inspired essay, ‘The Double-Sided Mirror’, posits the provocative theory that Larkin and Borges are literary representatives of the ‘twin poles of existence’; that everyday life is always experienced as either Larkinesque (mundane, banal, futile, miserable; a work-oriented adult world of reductive and observable ‘reality’ ruled by the rational Superego) or Borgesian (dreamlike, imaginative, random, infinite; a playful, childish world of emotional and perceptual ‘fantasy’ ruled by the irrational Id), and that quite often we switch between the two ‘from hour to hour or even second to second’. The example Ryal used was a bookshelf - ‘on the one hand a simple object manufactured from wood and filled with books - simple objects manufactured from paper - and on the other hand, the memory of each book on the shelf read by the perceiver, the thoughts and fantasies released by the reading of the book and the memory of the book, the memories of the time when the book was read, the way the sight of the bookshelf and the wall behind it make you feel, depending on the light and the time of day and your mood, etc’.
17 This intuitive vision of human experience as a dualistic process of ‘permanent dreaming with interruptions of reality’ has, like several of Ryal’s ideas about the mind, since been proven scientifically sound, at least in its broad outline. Rodolfo Llinas and his colleagues at New York University, comparing the electro-physiological properties of the brain in waking and dreaming, suggest a single basic mechanism for both - a ceaseless inner talking between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, a non-stop interplay of image and feeling, irrespective of whether there is sensory input or not. When there is sensory input, it is integrated into the dreaming to generate waking consciousness. Thus waking is a kind of dreaming; a dreaming influenced (to varying degrees) by external reality. (Ryal, of course, was not the first philosopher to suggest such an idea. Variations on this concept can be traced back to Plato and even beyond, while in more modern times Schopenhauer came up with perhaps the most striking analogy, when he wrote that life and dreams were pages from the same book, and that to read them in their proper order was to live, but to leaf through them randomly was to dream.)
18 ‘We think of our faces as whole and in harmony, everything neatly symmetrical, yet this is a lie. Study the face of the most beautiful person you know. Now published, Ryal had already been working on his ‘autobiographical novel’ The Labyrinth for three and a half years. A year later, midway through the third draft, he finally abandoned this and, driven to despair by the vague uncertainties of his memory, wrote On the Impossibility of Remembering. ------ cover half their face. Now cover the other half. One of those half-faces is hideous, confess it. Each
of us has an evil eye; an eye half-closed by the world; an eye made ugly by the ugly things it has seen. That is not surprising. The miracle is the other eye: the good eye; the eye that sees the world, and is seen by the world, as it did when you were a child - with the same wide-open wonder and innocence . . .’ As persuasive as these words are, it was the startling juxtaposition of two photographs that made the essay such a succès d’estime: a photograph of Ryal at nineteen and another, in exactly the same pose, of Ryal at fifty-nine. In the first his eyes are quite similar in shape and expression; in the second his left eye is a battered, malignant squint, and his right eye almost completely unchanged despite the passage of forty years.
19 To be pronounced ‘new man’.
20 Fittingly, the epigraph to the chapter on the Mneman came from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: ‘I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? . . . But if I’m not the same, the next question is, “Who in the world am I!” Ah, that’s the great mystery.’
21 On the Impossibility of Remembering, pp. 112-13.
22 The latter may well have been brought on by his slowly deteriorating eyesight. By the time of his disappearance in 1970, Ryal is said by Felice Berger to have been ‘almost entirely blind’; a condition which must surely have contributed to the nagging fear that he was, as he phrased it in Solitude, ‘all alone in the universe’.
23 Tomas Ryal: A Life, p. 402.
24 Ryal’s American biographer Hugh Mann speculates that Ryal was taking LSD during this period. While this is in many ways a plausible and attractive hypothesis - it would explain many aspects of the author’s behaviour, as well as the uncanny visions described in his book - there is absolutely no evidence to support it. LSD was, at the time, still a relatively new drug, and its use was far from widespread. And let us not forget that Tomas Ryal was, by this point, a sixty-six-year-old man living miles from any city in a gardener’s cottage in rural Austria. On the grounds of probability alone, the suggestion ought to be ruled out.
25 Commenting on the two famous twentieth-century definitions of Hell - Sartre: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’; Eliot: ‘Hell is oneself,/ Hell is alone, the other figures in it/ Merely projections’ - Ryal drew the bleak conclusion that ‘Hell is the inevitable, heartbreaking, self-evident truth that Eliot and Sartre are both right. Hell is oneself and Hell is other people. Hell is nothing more nor less than a perfect reflection of life, ourselves and the world - with no distortions or concealments - looked at unflinchingly and remembered, always, in every detail. In other words, although we live in Hell, all the time, it is only in rare, indescribable moments of insight that we recognise this. Our forgetfulness, our stupidity, our blindness are all that save us from the eternal abyss, the endless black-walled labyrinth.’
26 Tomas Ryal, Hell, tr D. Hyde (London: 1975), p. 330. According to Hyde’s commentary, the black door represents death, and the white door madness.
27 It was identified from Ryal’s dental records.