The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  His snow-maiden! His Snow White Goddess!

  Two: Of angels and oystercatchers: the home campus

  MONDAY: (BLOODY MONDAY). Reply from Registrar, i.e. Promotions Advisory Committee, i.e. HOD (blame him? Not altogether. But, yes) to say application for Promotion to Associate Professor declined—this in the week of turning fifty, turning the corner, going over the hill, the landscape of eternal Senior Lecturerhood (‘Specialist in Commonwealth Modernisms’) stretching away. Fate, you desert flower, you mercenary, you crippled smith, you fucking fairy—you are not kind. Does the Applicant’s present (and pioneering) work on the poetry of Alban Ashtree count for nothing? Or was it considered by those magisterial unworthies, sheersmen, ball-breakers, punks-on-high, that Ashtree’s being Canadian rendered him less significant than … etc., etc. Shakespeare, yes. Wordsworth, certainly. T.S. Eliot, why not? Witi Ihimaera, perhaps? But Alban Ashtree? Never heard of him!

  Well, you dark darlings in your committee-corner: that is something that may change; and it may be ‘the Applicant’ who will bring it about. At least he doesn’t propose to give up on Ashtree. Not yet.

  He? Notice, please (as he has himself just noticed) that in this journal, only now taken up, not touched since his leave as ‘Distinguished Visitor’ to the Quinton campus, Alberta, Canada, interrupted it, the discourse is past its second, and now well into its third, paragraph—and still no I pronoun; no first person. This has not been policy; not decision or design. Does it tell something about its author, his state of mind?

  ‘His’? Let him be ‘he’, then (and let there be light!). Is such possible? A diary in the third person? ‘He did this, he did that …’ ‘He’ short for Henry. ‘Henry’ long for the ninth letter (in caps) of the alphabet. Henry Bulov, otherwise (or once) known as ‘the Fly’, and reminded of it, as recently as this morning, by Kevin on the balcony. Kevin-in-his-socks O’Higgins—drainer, Leftist, old schoolmate: ‘What’s all this Bulov bullshit, Henry? You were Blow then; you’re Blow now.’

  No use telling him that Bulov was the family name; that Grandfather changed it during the 1914–18 War, when anti-German sentiment ran rife; that Henry went back to it long—thirty long—years ago.

  Kevin knows. The change unsettles him. He wants his past undisturbed, and if Henry Blow is part of that past Henry Blow should not be erased by a stroke of the pen. Or is it just that Kevin likes to think of his old mate as the Fly?

  ‘How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten’—and Kev liked to add, ‘as the Blow flies!’

  3 JULY: THEY, KEVIN AND ‘HE’ —third-person-Henry—looked at old drainage maps this morning. Karaka Crescent: once Violet Crescent. There must have been a small stream down here, dry in summer, flash-flooding in winter. Now drains run in what was the stream bed. Kevin’s team is putting in new pipes, separating sewage and stormwater; having problems because the fill is soft—trench sides collapsing, buried logs (big ones) blocking the digger, chainsaws grinding and groaning and stalling eight feet below lawn-level. Days of work lost. Kevin grumbles.

  Working at home a couple of mornings each week, Henry talks to Kevin when he stops for coffee. Invites him, bootless, up on the balcony. Even Kev’s socks shed mud-flakes. Their talk is what K calls ‘ketchup’. Henry explains: ‘Alban Ashtree was a Canadian poet killed in an avalanche in the Austrian Alps. I study his work—have written about it and will write more.’

  Kevin explains: ‘I left the Party years back—have a new wife.’ More than that—much more; but that is what it comes down to.

  Kev’s first wife was the hard-and-fast Marxist, though he used to deny (still does) that she talked him into it. Says his Marxism came from the heart. ‘What would you expect? Dad a wharfie locked out in ’51; Mum first woman vice-president of the Labour …’ (Something-or-Other. Henry, author of these notes, can’t remember) ‘… Council.’ That was in the days when Labour meant ‘the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange’.

  Kevin left university to ‘join the workers’. ‘Undergrad’ became ‘Undegreed’, as he wrote to Henry a few months later, and then ‘dungareed’. Worked as a drainlayer. Became a contractor; bought equipment, diggers; ‘graduated’ to heavy machinery, got rich, went broke, learned to lay off workers, got rich again …

  Now he looks around his old mate’s modest house, full of books, paintings, the academic detritus of decades. Always nods thoughtfully, appreciatively. ‘It’s nice.’ You could see it this morning—he wouldn’t mind living like this rather than in the steel-and-glass palace up on the Remuera ridge he bought with Wife-2, Cheryl. She’s a modern young businesswoman, something to do with the stock exchange (Futures Market?), with padded shoulders and a briefcase.

  ‘I’m still a Marxist.’ (This was Kev on the balcony.) ‘In theory. It’s just that in the real world theory’s got no battalions. No bullets. No balls. You with me?’

  And yes, Henry was ‘with him’, if the question meant did he understand. ‘In practice,’ Kev goes on, ‘I just hate fucking unions, mate. I’ve had to deal with them. And welfare state bludgers. And Polynesian whingers. And especially I hate white liberal wankers.’

  4 JULY: LAY IN BED this morning (‘he’ did) wondering is he still a ‘white liberal wanker’, and if he is how is it that he doesn’t dislike Kev? No. Worse than that—likes him; likes him even when he says those unacceptable things … Something to do with authenticity? The plain man speaking the plain man’s mind? Maybe, but Kevin’s not ‘the plain man’—not really.

  Remembering school and Kevin. Chess. Crossword puzzles—more and more difficult ones, filled with anagrams. And swapping books—Edwin S. Ellis, James Fenimore Cooper, Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Kingsley, John Buchan, Baroness Orczy, Conan Doyle—stories (fuckit!)—was reading ever better?

  And the experiments they did together in mental telepathy: communicating colours and numbers with a success rate beyond statistical probability …

  Thinking about overhearing Kevin’s team ribbing him in the trench about ‘a hard day’s night’ with Cheryl, twenty years younger. Remarks about ‘shagger’s back’ and being ‘saddle sore’. And then Kevin telling him discreetly, up on the balcony away from the lads, that his new sex life is ‘very nice and relatively quiet. Cosy.’

  Strange to have old mate Kevin and his team digging up the front lawn!

  Re. Ashtree’s death—paste Xerox from Mountain Safety Manual here:

  Avalanche rescue: In most avalanche accidents rescue of trapped victim(s) depends on the action of the survivors. Organised rescue from afar usually turns into a body recovery. Fifty per cent of avalanche victims suffocate if not uncovered within 30 minutes. Survivors must not panic, but must note with respect to fixed objects—trees or rocks—first, the point on the slope where the victim was caught, and second, the point where last seen.

  Sliding snow flows like water, faster on the surface and in the centre than on the bottom and at the sides. When an avalanche follows a twisting channel the snow and the victim conform to the turns.

  After an escape route has been chosen and lookouts posted to watch for further slides, the rescue party hurries down the victim’s path, scuffing their feet through the snow to uncover clues—items of gear, or his avalanche cord. They look around trees or outcroppings which might have stopped him, and beneath blocks of snow on the surface.

  They shout at intervals, then maintain absolute silence while listening for a muffled answer.

  Henry listens to the silence. The white slope glistens in the winter sun. Ice drips from the fir trees. The echo of the survivor’s call goes down the mountain slope and across the valley, and comes back from the other side. There is no ‘muffled answer’ out of the beautiful treacherous snow. Thirty minutes, and then suffocation. The last of the poetry is squeezed out of Alban Ashtree.

  FRIDAY (EVENING): THIS MORNING over coffee, Henry talked again to Kevin about Alban Ashtree. And about crosswords. They had a shot, as in the old days,
at making anagrams. Tried avalanche. The drainlayer came up with ‘a leach van’. Did it in his head. The Senior Lecturer (for life?), who always suspected Kevin was smarter, used a pencil and took longer, but produced ‘have a clan’.

  As in, for example, ‘Four down (9): Have a clan in the Highlands? Be careful.’

  The advantage of this clue (they agreed) is that the experienced crossword solver, alert for an anagram, won’t at first know whether ‘have a clan’, ‘highlands’, or ‘be careful’ contains the nine letters in which the wanted word is concealed.

  Same coffee break/smoko Kev pointed out that Alban is an anagram for banal. Henry replied that Kevin is an analogue for cunt. Kev thumped him one on the upper arm. They were back in the lower sixth.

  SAT: ASHTREE’S LAST POEM sequence looks very ‘post-Modern’—double-margin (i.e. some lines justified left, some right); lack of ordinary punctuation; fractured grammar and syntax; forward momentum and a sense of a voice speaking straight out of the text. Yes. But when all that’s set aside, what is offered the reader? Stories, really. Anecdotes. Can too much be made of the narrative element? Maybe; but much more likely to make too little, it so easily passes unnoticed. (In lit. as in life everything becomes Story.)

  Henry mentioned this to Kevin yesterday. Kevin said ‘The Big Bang theory never made sense to me. Why should everything start from nothing?’

  End of conversation. Now, writing it down, Henry wants to give ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ capital letters. ‘Why should Everything start from Nothing?’ And (he asks himself) how is it that drainlayer Kevin’s remarks often seem not quite intelligible, but pertinent? He was always like that.

  8 JULY: HENRY’S CALL at HOD’s office. HOD had just been notified that Henry didn’t get promotion. Wanted to say he’d supported him ‘to the hilt’. ‘Et tu, Brute!’—that sort of ‘to the hilt’, Henry wondered; and it may be supposed HOD saw Distrust Writ Large on these paranoid features because he said no more—went straight to his filing cabinet and pulled out the confidential memo he’d sent to the Promotions Advisory Committee. Double embarrassment for Henry, because HOD had said such nice things, especially about the work on Alban Ashtree. He (HOD) has been on the phone this morning to find out what went wrong. Thinks Henry’s case was spoiled by the English Department’s own rep on the committee, the little theorist whose name eludes Henry. He is reported to have told them that Henry Bulov said ‘Fuck theory’ in a department meeting. This turned the woman from Sociology against. And then the Maori rep, who had been ‘for’ because he thought Ashtree was a Native American, changed his vote when the theorist told him it wasn’t so—Ashtree was purest Anglo. It had been a near thing, but that had turned it around.

  All hearsay, HOD points out; nothing of these meetings is supposed to be reported, so there’s nothing to be done. But for the record (what record?) Henry Bulov did not say ‘Fuck theory’ in a department meeting (though he thinks it often enough). All he did was to report, by way of an amusing anecdote, the graffito he saw on the Quinton campus: ‘Theoreticians are Saussure they know everything, but they know Foucault about anything.’

  Late-at-night (when dark postscripts make best sense): Note that among personal belongings of Alban Ashtree, found in his Quinton office after news of his death came through from Austria, was a small squarish automatic pistol and some rounds of snub-nosed ammunition—a luggage label tied to it, the name Alban Ashtree and address printed on one side; on the other, ‘DRINK ME’. It’s idle to speculate, but …

  TUESDAY: FILM SOCIETY (Anne likes to forget the law, Henry to forget literature). This week it was Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, about two angels whose beat (wingbeat) is Berlin. They’re benign but their world is black and white. At first you see it only as they see it. Then there are brief moments when you see the human world—in colour, which both of these angels crave. One opts out of angelhood and joins the human race. Now it’s all colour, with only flashbacks to the drabness of the angel experience. The ex-angel is obsessed with a beautiful trapeze artist (cf. Picasso?). When they meet and fall in love she makes a speech about a new world, which sounds like the old one, with colour and biology, men and women, love and sex and rock music and cities and vividness and action—except that now it’s to be a world without angels.

  The War (the big one) belongs in black and white, like old newsreels. The burning cities, the dead laid out in rows among the rubble, the living searching among them for familiar faces, the piles of fallen bricks and smashed concrete, the swastikas, the Jews herded into gas chambers—how is it that Wenders sees all that as the world of angelicism? Because (Henry decides) it came of a belief in solutions—‘final solutions’. The angelic order and the theoretical abstract were Nazism’s close cousins. Germany went the whole way—burned right through to reason’s nonhuman end. It did the unspeakable and learned there was no escape from death, only a vacation from it, taken in hell. The price of life’s full colour range is acceptance that it is subject to limit, imperfection and death; that the temporal is temporary. Also (he tells himself, excited by these thoughts) that eternity is only the Other by which time defines itself.

  Henry walked out into the night wondering what it would be like to feel there really was a new world beginning; that the angels had had their day; that people would learn to live in their bodies, which meant in their minds too, but minds as parts of bodies, not minds as winged instruments of escape, space vehicles, chariots of vain hope.

  11.7: ANOTHER XEROX FROM the Mountain Safety Manual:

  When something has gone wrong swift action may be less effective than correct action. On the mountains, once any person is beyond voice range, the party has lost control over his subsequent actions. So there must be no hasty separation. Everything must be planned, prearranged, including what every member is to do under every conceivable circumstance, until he has completed his part in the rescue.

  Anne, reading over his shoulder, asked, ‘Aren’t there any women in them thar hills?’ He told her there is, or there was, something called (he thought he remembered from an age-gone-by) the generic pronoun which is, or was, genderless—as in ‘He who hesitates is lost.’

  Anne said, ‘Thanks for that, he,’ ruffling his grizzling hair.

  Since then he has been sitting here imagining Ashtree looking up, pausing to watch the avalanche snow sweep and swerve and flow down the mountain slope; and then, too late, making a run for the side of the gully. ‘He who hesitates …’ Or did Ashtree stand there saying ‘Come and get me, Asshole!’? Was he suicidal? Is that how the last poems, the ones about the Snow Maiden, should be read—that his Muse was Death? Why else the pistol, and the tag with ‘DRINK ME’ printed on it?

  Also this morning came a letter from friend John E., experienced mountaineer (he once nearly died dangling at the end of a rope in a crevasse, winter-climbing on Mt McKinley in Alaska) now living in Seattle. John says he has heard nothing of the accident in which Ashtree died. Asks was Ashtree with a party or (would he have been so foolish?) climbing solo? John will ask climbing friends to check on it. He goes on, ‘The mountains in Austria are lovely, on a New Zealand scale. Avalanches certainly happen there, usually in winter and spring. Warnings go out, but people still get caught. This last spring we were on Monte Rosa (Switzerland) from the Italian side. Climbed the second highest peak in Europe by a spectacular route with an Italian guide, our communication being pretty much restricted to musical terms—presto, lento, bravo, etc.’

  At the bottom of the letter he has done a black-and-white sketch (is he an angel?) of a mountain landscape with dark rock faces, white snow slopes and fir trees.

  THURS 12TH: LAST NIGHT’S video: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The world is a lunatic asylum. Every bureaucracy, every human institution, is a lunatic asylum. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is there in the bin because he has too much life for what’s conceived to be the common good. Like an over-spiced soup he must be diluted. Those experts who sit around a table deciding his fate are hi
s Promotions Advisory Committee. McMurphy, they say, ‘may not be psychotic; but he’s dangerous’.

  McMurphy’s breaking of the rules is pure energy, ‘eternal delight’. He bounces back from shock therapy with all his old chutzpah; but that only ensures worse is in store for him. His violence, when it comes, is ‘protest’—moral indignation. Oh, Henry, you have been there! Even if only as metaphor, those desperate calm corridors are known to you. You have spent half a century looking into the cold eyes of Nurse Ratched, your country’s tutelary goddess. How is it that you don’t carry the final scar, the spiritual lobotomy? Or (frightening thought) has it happened and you don’t even know?

  (EVENING) ANNE IS PREPARING for depositions in her murder case. She has brought home documents and a book of forensic photographs (in colour!). Henry takes a few quick looks and winces away. She has become (almost, she says) used to them. He reads the three separate statements made by the accused. In the first he says a strange man wearing a feather earring did the killing. In the second he says he did it himself; says, ‘I was growling like an animal.’ In the third he says it was done by the wife of the deceased. The Crown case is that the wife persuaded him to do it, rewarding him in bed, before and after. The accused is seventeen. Anne intends to argue for the Defence that the second statement should be set aside because at the time he made it he was asking to have his mother with him and the police refused.

  Now Henry has just had a longer look at the photographs. The dead man is Polynesian, but in death the brown skin has faded to a sickly grey. He has huge wounds which have been stitched because he didn’t die at once. The stitching looks rough, as if done by a maker of fishing nets.