The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  It’s irrelevant to a proper understanding of a novel written in 1961, and yet it’s inescapable that we in 2011 will respond to Stanton and his role in the story in the light of recent events. The ruthless search for hidden enemies; the men and one woman gathered into Stanton’s net, kept hooded and shackled in their cells in what we might call “stress positions”; a rapidly assembled military court set up to try them, some guilty to a degree, some not, but all of them—given the national mood and Stanton’s ceaseless drive for vengeance and power—without a hope of understanding or effective defense; and in the end the country altered forever. “The Civil War had made it an Imperium.” Is it possible for fictions to become retrospectively allegorical?

  Even if you are generally well read in American fiction of the last century, it is very likely that this is the first book of Stacton’s you have opened; you may well never have heard of him. Even as Time included him in its list, the article noted that he was “as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, thirteen novels.”

  He is “a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon,” the article said—but he was not a Nevadan, and his outfit was not exactly a working cowboy’s. (The only photograph I remember seeing of him when I was first reading his books was taken in London, and shows a handsome young man in all-white cowboy rig, sitting in a chair turned around Western-style, with a rugged smile and teasing eyes: I suddenly understood something about him, and perhaps about the books I’d read.)

  Stacton’s self-description for Contemporary Authors does say he was born in Minden, Nevada, to a couple he names Dorothy and David Stacton, but in fact he was born Lionel Kingsley Evans, or possibly Arthur Lionel Kingsley Evans, or later Lyonel, on May 27, 1923, in San Francisco, where he went to high school and, until World War II intervened, to Stanford.[2] In the war he was a conscientious objector, though on just what grounds I don’t know. In 1942 he began using the invented name “David Stacton”— he told a friend that a writer ought to have a two-syllable name with a staccato rhythm. It wasn’t a pen name—he changed his name legally. His first book (after a slim volume of verse) was a biography of an eccentric Victorian traveler; his first novel, Dolores, was published in London in 1954—British publishers regarded him as a more salable commodity than the Americans. His characteristic historical novels begin with Remember Me, a novel about Ludwig II of Bavaria, like Akhenaten a still being within an elaborate self-made prison-palace. The range of his others is remarkable: sixteenth-century Japan (Segaki, 1958); Renaissance Rome (A Dancer in Darkness, based on the same lurid story as John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, and similarly nightmarish); the career of Wendell Willkie, of all people (Tom Fool, 1962); the Thirty Years’ War (People of the Book, 1965, his last published novel). Despite slight sales, he did attract a small but devoted readership—in Italy he was introduced to the critic and aesthete Mario Praz (The Romantic Agony), who was thrilled by his novels; he compared Stacton to Walter Pater, a high compliment in some circles, but wondered why Stacton, so tall and handsome, needed to play a role with his cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat.

  A man, then, who knew something about performance and pretending, but who had either little taste or little ability for the standard ways American novelists have of making the money needed to keep writing. The poet and translator David Slavitt, in the most substantial critical study of Stacton’s work I know of,[3] repeats the Minden, Nevada, story and retails a piquant anecdote about Stacton’s arriving by plane to be a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University, in complete though apparently not entirely convincing drag, and departing (prematurely and after a row, it seems, which Slavitt doesn’t report) in his white cowboy suit, with chaps and eye shadow. Between coming and going, he seems to have worn standard preppy attire for this his only such appointment. Instead he eked out his income with pulp fiction, written under pseudonyms. Though books like Muscle Boy, as Slavitt notes, “have had an odd Nachtleben among Queer Read fans and collectors of kitsch,” he finds it sad that Stacton, “a writer of signal refinement,” had to “grind out” such stuff.

  I wonder if this isn’t somewhat backward. Stacton wrote his potboilers and the books that he wished to be remembered by not only at the same time but with the same hand, and his literary novels exhibit methods and techniques that he, and many other pulp writers, commonly used.

  Let Him Go Hang, by “Bud Clifton,” was published in 1961, the same year as The Judges of the Secret Court. Like the last third of Judges it’s a courtroom drama; like Judges it uses an omniscient narration that visits in turn many consciousnesses both major and minor in the story. And like Judges it is about the cruelty of justice in the hands of power. Here the jury is being seated; Jan, one of the panel, is called:

  She swore. The others swore. Then they sat down. The judge told the clerk to call a jury of fourteen. Since there were thirty-six on the panel, that meant that twenty-two would have to go home without seeing justice done, or satisfying their curiosity, or whatever they were there for. Jan almost wished she was one of the ones who could go home. This was too much like a game, and a vicious one at that.

  But hers was the first name called.

  Compare a moment in the courtroom in Judges. Spangler, the man Booth asked to hold his horse while he was in Ford’s Theatre, is listening to the testimony against him:

  He began to see how easily a man could be hanged for trying to help a friend. He didn’t see that it was his fault. You don’t usually ask a friend if he’s done anything criminal, before you help him.

  Now they were talking about whether he wore a moustache. He didn’t bother to listen. He’d never worn a moustache in his life.

  That was what would save his life.

  Robert Nedelkoff has calculated (using the timelines that Stacton, in James Joyce fashion, appended to his literary novels) that most of Stacton’s books were written quickly—some in three months, none in more than nine. That’s pulp-fiction speed. Of those that I have read, most are uncomplicated as narratives: they move steadily forward in time order, as though the writer himself also moved forward page by page without looking back. This is not solely the method of the paperback writer—the esteemed Spanish novelist Javier Marías makes a point of never looking back, never altering what he first laid down—but it seems to connect these two threads of Stacton’s work.

  Likewise the cold-eyed epigram, the summary judgment, the revealing aside to the reader, that in pulp novels make for rapid storytelling. “She was a tough nut to crack, chiefly because there wasn’t much inside her,” writes Bud Clifton. The reader turning the pages of a Western or crime novel can be expected not to take notice of these common tricks, but Stacton refines them in his other novels into a highly individual and supple method impossible not to notice. In Judges the aphorisms eventually come to seem just as much a part of the material and sensory fabric of the story, just as physical, as the crush of spent matches underfoot, or the smell of violet pomade in Edwin Stanton’s beard, or the bells rung for Lincoln, “solemn, insistent, and unnecessary.” Because the story shaped by them is a true one, they have a different role than in the crime fiction. Are they just? Are they so, in the light of these actual events? They make us restive; we shy away from the bleakest ones. Reflective, contingent, hidden from the characters themselves, it is these summations, not Stanton’s certainties or the thoughts of Lincoln or even the perspectives of history, that are the judgments of the secret court.

  At most they could hope for mercy or reprieve. But of what use was mercy? What use was reprieve? The soul has no reprieve. The best one can hope for there is an extended sentence.

  David Stacton died at the age of forty-four, in a small town in Denmark. The Danish medical examiner first named the cause as a heart attack, then later as “unknown.” If Stacton ever gains or regains the stature as a writer I think he deserves, his brief life in all its disguises and ambiguities will be a biographer’s t
orment and delight. His oeuvre, unlike his foreshortened life, is necessarily complete: as with Mozart’s or Keats’s, the work can be seen to have a shape, a progress, a youth, and a maturity that the creator himself doesn’t. Not until Stacton’s work is easily available as a whole can that shape be discerned, the influences on it sorted out, and Stacton given a place in the American canon. It could be guessed now that that place will be as outlier, his books seen as an intersection of certain modes of popular fiction with a unique sensibility, appearing from the first fully formed and unchanging over time. (Compare, say, Thomas Love Peacock, or—Slavitt’s hint—Ronald Firbank.) Perhaps—as undoubtedly queer (in the original sense) as they are—their fanship will always be narrow, though intense. But that judgment is not for us to make; the court of literary fame and obscurity is secret, and though there is pardon there is no appeal.

  —JOHN CROWLEY

  [1]Time reviews and articles were at that time unsigned.

  [2]I first learned what I know of Stacton’s life, his career, and the reception his books received from Robert Nedelkoff, an independent researcher and Stacton devotee.

  [3]“David Stacton,” Hollins Critic (December, 2002).

  THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT

  for Philip Bagby,

  gentleman, scholar, Virginian,

  and the best of good friends

  Obit 1958

  to remember him

  I have been studying how I may compare

  This prison where I live unto the world:

  And for because the world is populous,

  And here is not a creature but myself,

  I cannot do it.

  Richard II

  Prologue

  Gramercy Park is the most wistful and the gentlest of the New York squares, and the Players Club is one of the handsomest buildings in it. But the man who once lived in that house had the face of an exalted Punch. Not even he knew quite how he had come to look like that. Yet, since he recognized the resemblance, he spent his life these days not in the present, but the past, trying to define to himself— though never to others, for he had great dignity—that moment when fear had become resignation, and resignation the patience and the will to die. Except for his daughter, Edwina, he wanted no more Booths.

  Down the corridor, outside the room of his now dead friend Barrett, with whom he had quarrelled, consoled, and acted for so long, there was an aeolian harp. He refused to have it removed.

  At unexpected times, when a gust of wind blew through the top floor corridor, the harp would hum to life. Then he would say: “Listen, Barrett’s coming.” People would think that remark part of his premature senility. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t even irony, for though he was a gentle man, he had not the education or the character to take refuge in irony. It was just a fantasy. He was not unduly given to a belief in God; he was willing to accept death as final; but he found it a little warming on a cold day to think that there might be someone waiting for him, and Barrett, at least, had always been fond of him, despite their quarrels.

  For everything had been taken away from him. Even more as a man than as an actor, he had been forced to lead too many lives.

  Yet despite the watchful sadness of that face, Edwin Booth was an amiable man, the doyen of his profession, respected and well liked. It was not, the world felt, his fault. The world had forgotten all about it. Neither did he feel it was; but he had not forgotten all about it, so there were some things he preferred to remain silent about, some things he could not find a name for, and so could not dismiss.

  In 1892 he found a name for them.

  That was a year before his death. For several years he had lived at the Players Club, on the top floor. Now his daughter was married, the members of the club were all the family he had. The club itself gave him somewhere to go. That was one reason why he had founded it.

  He was only fifty-eight, but life had left him feeble. He dined downstairs in the club restaurant. Once or twice a year he went to the theatre, as though he were visiting an unfamiliar country. Occasionally, very occasionally, he went for a short stroll about the square, an almost transparent figure, a little hesitant about the next step, but with nothing hesitant about the eyes.

  Sometimes, alone, he looked in the mirror and saw nothing but that pair of eyes. Like poor Johnny, who had abused his voice, and so could not use it, he could no longer speak with ease. But he could see.

  The Sargent portrait, which by illusion showed him in his prime, hung over the mantelpiece in the common room downstairs. At nine o’clock he sailed upstairs, in the invalid lift they had installed for him, to the top floor. Up there, in the empty room overlooking the park, were the real memorabilia of life as he had had to live it, even more elusive, if anything, than the tactful epitome Mr. Sargent had created downstairs. There was even a portrait of Johnny, tucked away in the alcove beside his bed.

  On this particular night he could not sleep, and neither could he settle on anything to read. He found the room overcrowded and oppressive, and even the reassuring presence of someone, at least, in the house, for it could not be called a home, downstairs in the public rooms, did not help, as he had designed it to do.

  He did not want to think. He did not even want to look at all these cluttered images of his own past on the walls. So he settled down to the works of Miss Althea Lathrop Lee.

  It was about midnight. Miss Althea Lathrop Lee (Mrs. Henry Ferguson Lee, as her covering letter explained), who had known his sister Asia in London (not very well, he imagined. Nobody had known Asia well), had sent him a verse drama in five acts.

  Goodness only knew why. He was retired and he had no influence. Nor did he enjoy the thought of reading it, for he was a tragedian by profession. He had played all the standard Shakespearian parts and a good many melodramatic ones besides, for bread and butter. Richelieu, for instance, or Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts. He knew very well what to make of a verse drama in five acts.

  Essentially the play was the story of a beautiful Protestant girl who defied Torquemada. The hero, since it was a tragedy, died in act five. The heroine, except, no doubt, in the dressing table mirror of Mrs. Henry Ferguson Lee, could scarcely be said to live at all.

  He had not been concentrating on her unrhymed pish-tush for an hour, he realized. He had only been turning the pages. But the title she had given it haunted him. She had called it The Judges of the Secret Court.

  Why had he never thought of that before? For that was what had given him that look of a terrified Punch, and now the resignation of a scarecrow worn out and thrown away: he had seen the Judges of the Secret Court.

  Yet no one sees them. Rather he had become aware of them.

  He had always been aware of them, even before Johnny; even before he had had to give up everything to become the keeper of that untrained bear, his father. It was something all the Booths were aware of, those judges.

  They made everything so simple. For if we are too selfless to believe in God, and yet remain somehow devout, we are very much aware of the Judges of the Secret Court. We cannot see them, nor do we know who or what they are. But they are there: the whole world is a courtroom, every life is a trial; if we are guilty, we stand there condemned; if we are innocent, for the procès is French, we have to prove it. But who can prove it? for in fact no man is innocent at that bar. He is always accessory, willynilly, before or after some fact.

  Nor is the guilt apparent, even afterwards, in our sense, for no sentence is ever passed, no jury sits, no judgment is handed down. It is merely that we plead, we plead, we plead. Because, compared to our factual crimes, the rape of the soul seems to us no more than petty theft, there is no jury to appeal to. There is not even a Supreme Court, to set a precedent by means of any single case it may judge apt to define the law. For there is no law. There are only the judges, cold, remote, and indifferent, though not without a certain pawky humour, who sift papers, peer down at us, yawn with boredom, cannot even hear us, and no doubt reach an exact
, impartial decision of which we never learn, but which we suspect seldom if ever agrees with our own or the world’s view of the case.

  He had spent his whole life in that courtroom, with his family, with his acquaintance, and with himself, which was worst of all. His walls were hung with exhibitions for the prosecution, except that there is no prosecution, just as there is no defence. They were all guilty. They were guilty of being themselves. So they would have been pulled down in any case.

  The actual count did not matter, for the debate before that Presidium turns not upon what one does, but what one is. Yet, though no one ever mentioned the matter in his presence, he knew that for convenience, to himself and to the world, if not perhaps to the Secret Judges, the evidence was focused upon that one day, 14th April 1865. And upon Johnny, who would be a gentleman, but was only a Randy Dan.

  For even now he could not bear to think of Johnny, portrait by his bed or no.

  Part One

  I

  He could see it now: they were a little mad, the Booths, though each in a different way. For like the Sephardic Jews, in the London their father had fled from, and their father was the maddest of the lot, they would be gentry when they were not, and therefore they lived apart, in a world of their own, where the pretence was actual, and made forays into the other world, the unreal one the rest of us live in, only to fetch supplies, going down into the world as the rest of us go to the village, to do their shopping, and perhaps to prove to the tenants that the master was still alive.

  It was Junius Brutus the Elder who had begun all that. He was mad as a hatter, but just as lovable, and what in another man would have been called insanity, the children and their mother conspired to call “your father’s indisposition”.