by Alan Moore
If Studs is understanding this correctly, the inordinate morbidity of Hervey’s writings which the Wesleyans had so deplored turned out to be a maggot-eaten inspiration for his literary contemporaries. The persistent theme of human transience compared with the eternity of God was taken up by other theologians such as Edward Young and by the poets of the nascent Graveyard School like Thomas Gray, becoming such a major influence upon the writings of the day that William Kenrick wrote:
’Twas thus enthusiastic Young;
’Twas thus affected Hervey sung;
Whose motley muse, in florid strain,
With owls did to the moon complain.
From what Studs can make out, this was fair comment, at least in so far as it pertained to later writers of the Graveyard School, who weren’t much bothered by the business about God but were completely smitten by the atmospherics and the props, the owls and bats and skulls and crumbling headstones. This was at a moment when society was slowly starting to clean up the nation’s graveyards for the purposes of physical and mental hygiene, clearing out the mouldering bones and simultaneously banishing the ever-present smell and the immediate idea of our mortality beyond the margins of accepted daily discourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the grim actuality of death displaced from ordinary life, this was also the point at which our culture first began to make a titillating fetish of the deathly and funereal. Commencing where the less religious and more genuinely ghoulish authors of the later Graveyard School left off, writers like Horace Walpole and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis would take Hervey’s sombre iconography and use it to adorn their decomposing European castles or their morally subsiding monasteries. The gothic novel and indeed the whole late eighteenth-century gothic tradition would appear to have its origins in the consumptive Hervey’s spiritual preoccupation with the tomb.
As lengthening headstone shadows slither purposefully through the cropped grass towards him, Studs attempts to weigh up all the implications of this latest evidence. He knows that if it’s on the level it puts Hervey squarely in the frame as the elusive Mr. Big behind far more than just the gothic novel. Until Walpole, Lewis, Beckford and their fellow frighteners arrived, the only form of novel which existed was the comedy of manners – Goldsmith, Sheridan and later on Jane Austen – with the advent of the gothic novel being also the first genre fiction. Almost every subsequent sub-category of imaginative writing is therefore derived from gothic literature and thus from Hervey’s first mould-culture texts; sprung from the moss and lichen of his first sepulchral narratives, Studs realises. Sure, the classic ghost tale is an obvious example, alongside the burgeoning horror and supernatural genres which grew out of it, but that’s not where it ends. The field of fantasy would have to be included, as would science fiction with its genesis in Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein. And then, of course, there are the Decadents, caught up in the sublime deliriums of heir apparent to the caliphate of Vathek and the riches of Otranto, Edgar Allen Poe. And Poe – the idea hits Studs with the force of bourbon before breakfast – Poe set his Chevalier August Dupin to solve the murders on the Rue Morgue or the mystery of the purloined letter and in doing so precipitated the detective story. He attempts to take it in: the bone bulb from which germinated every heartless rain-lashed midnight, every knockout blonde with a sob story and each stuttering electric sign is resting maybe fifty feet away, just south of the communion table in the chancel. Every dining-room denouement, every double-cross. It’s one hell of a thing.
This gothic business, though, has got him thinking once more about Bauhaus and the movement’s modern reinvention during the end credits of the 1970s. As Studs recalls, it had been the eclectic David J who’d first suggested many of the eerie tropes which would one day prove the salvation of the black lace and mascara industries. And yet, as widely-read as the peculiarly ibis-like bohemian intellectual undoubtedly had been, Studs doubts that any eighteenth-century Christian killjoys found their way into J’s vehemently other-directed syllabus. The Bauhaus bassist, he concludes, would have known nothing about Hervey when he was intuitively laying out the ground-plan for the most bewilderingly long-lived youth cult of the modern era. The exploding belladonna, lilies and pressed roses which accompanied Northampton’s twentieth-century gothic blossoming came into being without any reference to or knowledge of Hervey’s origination of that style more than two hundred years before. Unless this is no more than an evocative coincidence, the implication would appear to be that both of these traditions and the sensibilities that shaped them have arisen from those singular inherent qualities within the town itself; the gothic view as an emergent property, as a condition of Northampton. That would explain everything about the place, its churches, murders, history and ghostly monks. That would explain its writings and its music and the nature of its people, everyone from Hervey to Ben Perrit, from John Clare to David J, with Studs and Little John and Alma Warren somewhere on the grotesque spectrum in between them. Little John alone reprised the gothic movement in one tidy package, what with the malefic dwarf being a staple of the genre and John’s background making him appear almost an escapee from Beckford’s Vathek, brought here from the djinn-swept terraces of Ishtakar in far Persepolis, a crooked grandchild of the demon-sultan Eblis. Studs is just about as close to inner satisfaction as a spent and used imaginary private eye can get. It all makes sense. He flips through the remaining pages with mounting impatience.
There’s an interesting piece from a biography of Hervey by one George M. Ella, which describes the Weston Favell visionary’s Theron and Aspasio in terms that make it sound more like a piece of modernist or possibly post-modern writing than a dialogue concerning Christ’s imputed righteousness first written in 1753. Massively long by modern standards, Hervey’s work apparently shifts in its style and its delivery with each new chapter, hopping from one mode or genre to another and including “narrative description, scientific records, inner monologue, anecdotes, autobiography, eye-witness reports, pen-portraits, short stories, sermons, linguistic studies, nature portrayals, journals, poetry and hymns. There is also much in the work that is reminiscent of a modern film-script.” Studs reflects that he should maybe add the beatnik avant-garde to the already-lengthy list of literary forms which seem to owe their M.O., which is flatfoot talk for modus operandi, to James Hervey. His respect for the extravagantly miserable divine is growing by the moment. Studs would like to see one of these modern pantywaists even attempt a work as grand and various as that.
He’s right down to the Wikipedia entries for both Hervey and Northampton School for Boys now, sprawling on the churchyard turf between the sparse chimes of the early afternoon. Neither of the remaining files appear to Studs to be particularly promising, and yet upon inspection both documents demonstrate convincingly how wrong a guy can be. The first, Hervey’s internet résumé, while in the main it offers nothing Studs has not already learned from other sources, plainly states that Hervey was not just someone whom William Blake had heard of and referred to in a solitary painting, but was rather one of Blake’s two main spiritual influences with the other one being Immanuel Swedenborg. The hovercraft-inventing angel confidant who once asserted that such creatures know nothing of time, whose missing head was rumoured to be propped against the optics at the Crown and Dolphin, with Northampton’s foremost fatalist, both stirred into the Lambeth lad’s ideological genetic mix; become his paranormal parents. Studs thinks back to the Blake plate he studied at the library, the solitary human figure at the bottom centre of the image, back towards the viewer and face hidden as he gazes up at the funereal saints and angels gathered there above him, obviously meant to represent Hervey himself and yet with the averted features lending to the character’s interpretation as an everyman, paused on the brink of a marmoreal hereafter which renders tuberculosis, flesh and human brevity irrelevant, a figure at death’s door refuting loss and time. Or, possibly, Blake didn’t know what Hervey looked like, in which instance the appended line engraving offers Studs a slight edge on So
uth London’s beatific bruiser.
Gazing from the poorly-printed image, Hervey might be taken for a magistrate saving the lack of judgement in his calm, still eyes; saving the faintest twitch of humour at one corner of the primly pursing lips. The contour hatching that defines the village rector’s pleasant features, razor sharp lines eaten into steel by aqua fortis, breaks down to a pointillist particulate in the blotched reproduction although the fine details of complexion remain visible. What seems to be a wart is artfully positioned at the outer edge of the left eye, a feature Studs feels is a mark of some distinction in a man, while riding the right cheekbone is a mole or, judging from its perfect Monroe placement, some kind of cosmetic artificial spot. Given the almost prideful lack of vanity displayed in Hervey’s choice of resting place Studs feels this latter possibility is something of a long shot, although there remains a certain prissiness or femininity to Hervey’s face which makes the beauty-mark hypothesis seem almost plausible. It’s more than the peruke or periwig or whatever the hell it’s called that Hervey’s wearing in the picture, it’s the air of gentleness and receptivity the man exudes.
Studs thinks back to a passage from his recent readings upon Hervey’s time in Oxford, where the fledgling preacher had become the close friend of another Holy Club inductee, one Paul Orchard. Even the guy’s name was fruity. During one of Hervey’s intermittent bouts of ill health in his middle twenties, he went down to live with Orchard for two years at Stoke-Abbey in Devonshire, where the two men drew up a contract vowing to watch diligently over one another’s spiritual wellbeing. While this isn’t as suggestive as, say, Jeremy Thorpe’s billet-doux to Norman Scott, it seems to speak to a male friendship that went some way beyond hanging out and taking shots at beer cans. Taken in the light of Hervey’s lifelong bachelor existence, dwelling with his mother and his sister right up to the early, breathless end, Studs gets the picture of a man with certain leanings that could never have been expressed physically and so were sublimated in a somewhat overheated love of Christ and Christian fellowship. It would seem safe to say that in his general manner just as in his florid literary style, James Hervey was a touch theatrical.
This only leaves the Boys School scuttlebutt, the casual afterthought material, which is predictably where Studs at last gets his transcendent roulette moment. The astonished croupier gasps “Incroyable!” and as Studs is sauntering away from that last chip he’d tossed dismissively onto the table he’s called back and laden with his unexpected winnings. He is studying without enthusiasm an unprepossessing summary of the establishment when the detail that’s been right under his nose the whole time reaches out and hits him in his face until it isn’t even ugly anymore. It’s what’s been gnawing at him ever since his earlier drive-by reconnaissance of the imperious brick building on the Billing Road, and it’s there in the printout’s second line, just underneath the recently-adopted smug school motto promising A Tradition of Excellence, where it says Established 1541.
Northampton’s School for Boys was nowhere near the Billing Road at its inception. Founded by Mayor Thomas Chipsey as the ‘free boys grammar school’, it had initially been some way further west and situated in a street to which it had, Studs realises belatedly, given its name: in Freeschool Street, Ben Perrit’s erstwhile home down on the Boroughs’ edge, where the eponymous school was located for some sixteen years. Erected when Henry the Eighth was on the throne it had been moved in 1557 to St. Gregory’s Church, which at the time extended into Freeschool Street, suggesting that the relocation wasn’t too demanding. Situated in the same place until 1864, this would have been where Hervey studied from age seven to age seventeen back there in the 1720s. A stray comment which Studs must have skimmed somewhere amongst the other evidence comes back to him, a casual pronouncement by John Ryland, a contemporary of Hervey’s and his earliest biographer, to the effect that Hervey’s childhood place of education had been little better than a down-at-heel charity school. Studs nods, grave and perversely photogenic. Given that it was down in the Boroughs it’s unlikely that it could have been anything else but a well-meant attempt to generally improve the district’s juvenile unfortunates, even back in the rowdy sixteenth century. Northampton, with the ancient neighbourhood that once was its entirety, would have been some few hundred years into a somehow purposeful decline by then, punished and scorned by earlier Henries. For his own part, Studs suspects that the blacklisting of the town goes back much further, possibly to local anti-Norman insurrectionary Hereward the Wake, a figure not unlike the locally connected Guy Fawkes in that he’s been banished from the history lessons just as surely as the town itself is banished even from regional TV weather maps. If the grandfather of the Gothic movement had to spend his formative years somewhere then the Boroughs was undoubtedly the perfect cradle, full of lice and fatalism.
Studs has found the smoking gun. He levers his numb carcass from the grass like someone opening a bone umbrella. Brushing irritably at the ghost-green trimmings clinging to his leather jacket he retraces his steps through the sparsely populated cemetery and in passing notices the yokel-noir effect of pinstripe shadows falling onto sunlit paving through a churchyard gate. A black smudge on the lens of afternoon he makes his way back to the baking Coupe de Ville, air shimmering over its hardtop in a layer of hot jelly. Clambering inside he hums the windows down to cool the mobile oven off before he roasts, and once more fails to come up with a hard-boiled way of buckling his seat belt. Maybe if he spat contemptuously on the dashboard halfway through the operation, or perhaps coined some particularly pungent simile for how it’s often difficult to get the metal fastening into the plastic slot? Like “it was harder than a twenty-stone Samoan drag queen doing Chinese calculus in … some …” He’ll work on it.
Remembering that he still has his reading glasses on, Studs carefully removes them and returns them to an inside pocket before firing up the engine, whereupon the smoke-grey Duisenberg roars out of Weston Favell, a land-bound torpedo heading for the distant heat source of Northampton’s centre by the shortest route available. The hamlet’s still-deserted streets are an abandoned set, their ochre stonework only painted background flats that are now folded up and put away into the compact space of a smeared rear-view mirror. Thundering along the Billing Road he screeches past the modern incarnation of the Boys School, non-existent prior to 1911, and his self-recrimination at not tumbling to a solution sooner has the sour taste of brass knuckles in the teeth of victory. For a noir private eye like Studs, of course, this is the perfect outcome. Unadulterated triumph is unthinkable when the real satisfaction of your chosen occupation lies in ethical, emotional and physical defeat; in the acknowledgement, with Hervey, that all cases closed or mortal glories are made insignificant in their comparison with the big sleep.
An afternoon sun left too long to steep has stewed the light so that it has more body and a slight metallic aftertaste as it pours, off the boil, on the asylum and the cemetery’s untidy marble overgrowth, onto the hospital that Hervey had helped Philip Doddridge and John Stonhouse to establish. Executing a left turn at the unhurried traffic lights beside Edward the Seventh’s stained bust with its birdshit coronet, Studs coasts down Cheyne Walk past the hospital’s maternity facilities, his progress halted by another set of lights down at the bottom of the hill near Thomas Becket’s drinking fountain. Childbirth, martyrdom, twisting together in the dull steel spines of Francis Crick’s half-hearted Abington Street monument, the sexless superheroes spiralling up in genetic aspiration under undecided weather, flight frustrated and their heels forever rooted in the monkey street. A light descends in stages through the signal’s pousse-café, from grenadine to crème-de-menthe, and Studs is gliding on Victoria Prom with Beckett’s Park and the generic supermarket forecourts that are understudying an unwell cattle-market, smearing by him on his left. Once past the Plough Hotel at Bridge Street’s lower end, down in the Saturday night blood-sump, he negotiates an unexpectedly byzantine series of right turns before arriving in the parking ar
ea which backs on to the Peter’s Place arcade in Gold Street. Once again he pays, displays, and leaves his possibly gang-tagged Corvette hunched on its chewed-up asphalt slope beneath the big bowl full of valley sky. Removing from the vehicle enclosure through its lowest exit, narrowly surviving a traverse of the dual carriageway there at Horsemarket’s rank monoxide foot, he skulks around the slow curve of St. Peter’s Way towards the raised and unkempt patch of grass that had once been the western reach of Green Street, where he clambers two or three feet from smooth pavement onto ragged turf and takes the Boroughs from behind.
The shabby and demoted former neighbourhood green rises to the rear of Peter’s Church, its limestone wrinkles and discoloured liver spots all presently erased by flattering solar gold. First raised in timber by King Offa as a private chapel for his sons in the ninth century, rebuilt in full Gothic effect by legacy-aware Simon de Senlis during the twelfth or eleventh, the near thousand-year-old structure drains all markers of the present from the grassy incline that it trails behind it. Mugging devils in eroded eaves regard him as he labours uphill through the weeds, their stone eyes bulging, their frog lips distended with anxiety at his approach, paralysed apprehension of the gargoyle competition which he represents. For his part, the ascent across a timeless and deceptively sun-burnished wasteland to the ancient place of worship makes him feel reduced to a transparently ill-fated academic in some smugly awful narrative by Montague Rhodes James. Asthmatic laundry, steroid spiders, Gypsy kids with switchblade fingernails, all waiting for him in the largely disused edifice ahead. Now that he thinks about it, M.R. James and the whole English