INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
The Whirlpool
“There are those rare books that… challenge and captivate the imagination to such an extent that once you have entered their universe you forget all else. [The Whirlpool] is one of these.”
– La Quinzaine Littéraire (France)
“Urquhart’s dreamy, circular prose draws the reader in as surely as her characters are pulled to their destiny by the inescapable suction of the whirlpool. Highly recommended.”
– Library Journal (U.S.)
“… the prose seems to take on a special sheen, as though le mot juste had an incantatory power beyond its literal meaning.”
– Montreal Gazette
“A strange and sensual novel… Miss Urquhart is a special writer, worth watching.”
– New York Times
“Urquhart is above all a writer of sensual feeling…. This is indeed a powerful and accomplished book.”
– Toronto Star
”Her exploration of the meaning of patience and loneliness and the influence of place on people’s emotions is subtle and penetrating – prose with the depth of poetry.”
– Booklist
“Surprising, ambitious and tender-hearted.”
– The Observer (U.K.)
“Jane Urquhart has created a fascinating fiction….”
– Ottawa Citizen
BOOKS BY JANE URQUHART
FICTION
The Whidpool (1986)
Storm Glass (short stories, 1987)
Changing Heaven (1990)
Away (1993)
The Underpainter (1997)
The Stone Carvers (2001)
A Map of Glass (2005)
POETRY
I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace (1981)
False Shuffles (1982)
The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (1985)
Some Other Garden (2000)
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright
This book is for Stuart MacKinnon, with thanks
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many friends who encouraged and advised me as I worked my way through the several drafts of this book: Janet Turnbull for fishing it out of a whirlpool filled with many other manuscripts; Geoff Hancock for his continued support over the last several years; Stuart MacKinnon, Virgil Burnett, Rikki Ducornet, and Michael Ondaatje for their careful readings; and finally Ellen Seligman at McClelland & Stewart, without whose tireless efforts this novel might never have been finished at all.
Also, deep gratitude goes to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their financial support.
Parts of this novel were inspired and informed by Julia Cruikshank’s diary, published in 1915 and entitled Whirlpool Heights: The Dream-House on the Niagara River.
Short sections of this novel appeared in slightly different form in Descant; Canadian Fiction Magazine; Poetry Canada Review; and Views from the North: An Anthology of Travel Writing (Porcupine’s Quill).
Prologue
In December of 1889, as he was returning by gondola from the general vicinity of the Palazzo Manzoni, it occurred to Robert Browning that he was more than likely going to die soon. This revelation had nothing to do with either his advanced years or the state of his health. He was seventy-seven, a reasonably advanced age, but his physical condition was described by most of his acquaintances as vigorous and robust. He took a cold bath each morning and every afternoon insisted on a three-mile walk during which he performed small errands from a list his sister had made earlier in the day. He drank moderately and ate well. His mind was as quick and alert as ever.
Nevertheless, he knew he was going to die. He also had to admit that the idea had been with him for some time – two or three months at least. He was not a man to ignore symbols, especially when they carried personal messages. Now he had to acknowledge that the symbols were in the air as surely as winter. Perhaps, he speculated, a man carried the seeds of his death with him always, somewhere buried in his brain, like the face of a woman he is going to love. He leaned to one side, looked into the deep waters of the canal, and saw his own face reflected there. As broad and distinguished and cheerful as ever, health shining vigorously, robustly from his eyes, even in such a dark mirror.
Empty Gothic and Renaissance palaces floated on either side of him like soiled pink dreams. Like sunsets with dirty faces, he mused, and then, pleased with the phrase, he reached into his jacket for his notebook, ink pot, and pen. He had trouble recording the words, however, as the chill in the air had numbed his hands. Even the ink seemed affected by the cold, not flowing as smoothly as usual. He wrote slowly and deliberately, making sure to add the exact time and the location. Then he closed the book and returned it with the pen and pot to his pocket, where he curled and uncurled his right hand for some minutes until he felt the circulation return to normal. The celebrated Venetian dampness was much worse in winter, and Browning began to look forward to the fire at his son’s palazzo where they would be beginning to serve afternoon tea, perhaps, for his benefit, laced with rum.
A sudden wind scalloped the surface of the canal. Browning instinctively looked upwards. Some blue patches edged by ragged white clouds, behind them wisps of grey and then the solid dark strip of a storm front moving slowly up on the horizon. Such a disordered sky in this season. No solid, predictable blocks of weather with definite beginnings, definite endings. Every change in the atmosphere seemed an emotional response to something that had gone before. The light, too, harsh and metallic, not at all like the golden Venice of summer. There was something broken about all of it, torn. The sky, for instance, was like a damaged canvas. Pleased again by his own metaphorical thoughts, Browning considered reaching for the notebook. But the cold forced him to reject the idea before it had fully formed in his mind.
Instead, his thoughts moved lazily back to the place they had been when the notion of death so rudely interrupted them; back to the building he had just visited. Palazzo Manzoni. Bello, bello Palazzo Manzoni! The colourful marble medallions rolled across Browning’s inner eye, detached from their home on the Renaissance façade, and he began, at once, to reconstruct for the thousandth time the imaginary windows and balconies he had planned for the building’s restoration. In his daydreams the old poet had w
alked over the palace’s swollen marble floors and slept beneath its frescoed ceilings, lit fires underneath its sculptured mantels and entertained guests by the light of its chandeliers. Surrounded by a small crowd of admirers he had read poetry aloud in the evenings, his voice echoing through the halls. No R.B. tonight, he had said to them, winking. Let’s have some real poetry. Then, moving modestly into the palace’s impressive library, he had selected a volume of Dante or Donne.
But they had all discouraged him and it had never come to pass. Some of them said that the façade was seriously cracked and the foundations were far from sound. Others told him that the absentee owner would never part with it for anything resembling a fair price. Eventually, friends and family wore him down with their disapproval and, on their advice, he abandoned his daydream though he still made an effort to visit it, despite the fact that it was now damaged and empty and the glass in its windows was broken.
It was the same kind of frustration and melancholy that he associated with his night dreams of Asolo, the little hill town he had first seen (and only then at a distance) when he was twenty-six years old. Since that time, and for no rational reason, it had appeared over and over in the poet’s dreams as a destination on the horizon, one that, due to a variety of circumstances, he was never able to reach. Either his companions in the dream would persuade him to take an alternate route, or the road would be impassable, or he would awaken just as the town gate came into view, frustrated and out of sorts. “I’ve had my old Asolo dream again,” he would tell his sister at breakfast, “and it has no doubt ruined my work for the whole day.”
Then, just last summer, he had spent several months there at the home of a friend. The house was charming and the view of the valley delighted him. But, although he never once broke the well-established order that ruled the days of his life, a sense of unreality clouded his perceptions. He was visiting the memory of a dream with a major and important difference. He had reached the previously elusive hill town with practically no effort. Everything had proceeded according to plan. Thinking about this, under the December sky in Venice, Browning realized that he had known since then that it was only going to be a matter of time.
The gondola bumped against the steps of his son’s palazzo.
Robert Browning climbed onto the terrace, paid the gondolier, and walked briskly inside.
Lying on the magnificent carved bed in his room, trying unsuccessfully to partake of his regular pre-dinner nap, Robert Browning examined his knowledge like a stolen jewel he had coveted for years; turning it first this way, then that, imagining the reactions of his friends, what his future biographers would have to say about it all. He was pleased that he had prudently written his death poem at Asolo in direct response to having received a copy of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” in the mail. How he detested that poem! What could Alfred have been thinking of when he wrote it? He had to admit, nonetheless, that to suggest that mourners restrain their sorrow, as Tennyson had, guarantees the floodgates of female tears will eventually burst open. His poem had, therefore, included similar sentiments, but without, he hoped, such obvious sentimentality. It was the final poem of his last manuscript which was now, mercifully, at the printer’s.
Something for the biographers and for the weeping maidens; those who had wept so copiously for his dear-departed, though soon to be reinstated wife. Surely it was not too much to ask that they might shed a few tears for him as well, even if his was a more ordinary death, following, he winced to have to add, a fairly conventional life.
How had it all happened? He had placed himself in the centre of some of the world’s most exotic scenery and had then lived his life there with the regularity of a copy clerk. A time for everything, everything in its time. Even when hunting for lizards in Asolo, an occupation he considered slightly exotic, their appearance seemed somehow predictable; as if they knew he was searching for them and assembled their modest population at the sound of his footsteps. Even so, he was able to flush out only six or seven from a hedge of considerable length and these were, more often than not, of the same type. Once he thought he had seen a particularly strange lizard, large and lumpy, but it had turned out to be merely two of the ordinary sort, copulating.
Copulation. What sad dirge-like associations the word dredged up in the poet’s unconscious. All those Italians; those minstrels, dukes, princes, artists, and questionable monks whose voices had droned through Browning’s pen over the years. Why had they all been so endlessly obsessed with the subject? He could never understand or control it. And even now, one of them had appeared in full period costume in his imagination. A duke, no doubt, by the look of the yards of velvet which covered his person. He was reading a letter that was causing him a great deal of pain. Was it a letter from his mistress? A draught of poison waited on an intricately tooled small table to his left. Perhaps a pistol or a dagger as well, but in this light Browning could not quite tell. The man paced, paused, looked wistfully out the window as if waiting for someone he knew would never, ever appear. Very, very soon now he would begin to speak, to tell his story. His right hand passed nervously across his eyes. He turned to look directly at Robert Browning who, as always, was beginning to feel somewhat embarrassed. Then the duke began:
At last to leave these darkening moments
These rooms, these halls where once
We stirred love’s poisoned potions
The deepest of all slumbers,
After this astounds the mummers
I cannot express the smile that circled
Round and round the week
This room and all our days when morning
Entered, soft, across her cheek.
She was my medallion, my caged dove,
A trinket, a coin I carried warm,
Against the skin inside my glove
My favourite artwork was a kind of jail
Our portrait permanent, imprinted by the moon
Upon the ancient face of the canal.
The man began to fade. Browning, who had not invited him into the room in the first place, was already bored. He therefore dismissed the crimson costume, the table, the potion housed in its delicate goblet of fine Venetian glass and began, quite inexplicably, to think about Percy Bysshe Shelley; about his life, and under the circumstances, more importantly, about his death.
Dinner over, sister, son and daughter-in-law and friend all chatted with and later read to, Browning returned to his room with Shelley’s death hovering around him like an annoying, directionless wind. He doubted as he put on his nightgown that Shelley had ever worn one, particularly in those dramatic days preceding his early demise. In his night cap he felt as ridiculous as a humorous political drawing for Punch magazine. And, as he lumbered into bed alone, he remembered that Shelley would have had Mary beside him and possibly Clare as well, their minds buzzing with nameless Gothic terrors. For a desperate moment or two Browning tried to conjure a Gothic terror but discovered, to his great disappointment, that the vague shape taking form in his mind was only his dreary Italian duke coming, predictably, once again into focus.
Outside the ever calm waters of the canal licked the edge of the terrace in a rhythmic, sleep-inducing manner; a restful sound guaranteeing peace of mind. But Browning knew, however, that during Shelley’s last days at Lerici, giant waves had crashed into the ground floor of Casa Magni, prefiguring the young poet’s violent death and causing his sleep to be riddled with wonderful nightmares. Therefore, the very lack of activity on the part of the water below irritated the old man. He began to pad around the room in his bare feet, oblivious to the cold marble floor and the dying embers in the fireplace. He peered through the windows into the night, hoping that he, like Shelley, might at least see his double there, or possibly Elizabeth’s ghost beckoning to him from the centre of the canal. He cursed softly as the night gazed back at him, serene and cold and entirely lacking in events – mysterious or otherwise.
He returned to the bed and knelt by its edge in order to say
his evening prayers. But he was completely unable to concentrate. Shelley’s last days were trapped in his brain like fish in a tank. He saw him surrounded by the sublime scenery of the Ligurian coast, searching the horizon for the boat which was to be his coffin. Then he saw him clinging desperately to the mast of that boat while lightning tore the sky in half and the ocean spilled across the hull. Finally, he saw Shelley’s horrifying corpse rolling on the shoreline, practically unidentifiable except for the copy of Keats’ poems housed in his breast pocket. Next to his heart, Byron had commented, just before he got to work on the funeral pyre.
Browning abandoned God for the moment and climbed beneath the blankets.
“I might at least have a nightmare,” he said petulantly to himself. Then he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Browning awakened the next morning with an itchy feeling in his throat and lines from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound dancing in his head.
“Oh God,” he groaned inwardly, “now this. And I don’t even like Shelley’s poetry anymore. Now I suppose I’m going to be plagued with it, day in, day out, until the instant of my imminent death.”
How he wished he had never, ever, been fond of Shelley’s poems. Then, in his youth, he might have had the common sense not to read them compulsively to the point of total recall. But how could he have known in those early days that even though he would later come to reject both Shelley’s life and work as being “too impossibly self-absorbed and emotional,” some far corner of his brain would still retain every syllable the young man put to paper. He had memorized his life’s work. Shortly after Browning’s memory recited The crawling glaciers pierce me with spears / Of their moon freezing crystals, the bright chains / Eat with their burning cola into my bones, he began to cough, a spasm that lasted until his sister knocked discreetly on the door to announce that, since he had not appeared downstairs, his breakfast was waiting on a tray in the hall.
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