by A. N. Wilson
And on they sailed to the Cape, which they reached at the end of October, and where they spent a little over three weeks.
1784
GEORGE’S MARRIAGE BEGAN, AS IT WOULD END, WITH another man squeezed between them. Therese had begged George to allow her to bring Assad on the first part of the wedding journey. She had seemed, as the wedding day approached, so unwilling, so regretful about the whole idea of marrying, so taciturn, that George had actually felt glad of Assad’s company; a third party was someone to whom they could both talk. In bleak East Prussian inns they had talked of Rousseau, of Werther, of Göttingen friends . . . The coachman was plainly unable to ‘make out’ the trio. Were George and Therese brother and sister, and was Assad her sweetheart? There was no obvious family resemblance. George at thirty was a small man, thin, with springy hair which appeared to sprout haphazard from his head rather than to ‘grow’. His skin had never recovered from the scurvy he had contracted on board the Resolution. It was greyish, pitted. Many of his teeth had fallen out during the scurvy attack and those which remained were orange verging on mahogany in tone. Therese, with lustrous thick black hair and a high colour, had a squint. In all their years of marriage George never knew beyond question whether she was looking at him with one eye or avoiding his gaze with the other.
There exists a condition of self-consciousness in which memory plays a part, but which is not in itself memory. Time, if not suspended, has ceased to move in chronological order. In the smelly old leather coach bound for Vilnius, his right shoulder bruising the left shoulder of his bride, he remembered, but more accurately re-entered, all but re-enacted, the many journeys with his father, above all that uncomfortable journey down the banks of the Volga in ’66. To use the simple word ‘memory’ of a bundle of associations summed up in the coach of his wedding journey would suggest a temporal sequentiality, and would also suggest conscious or total recall. It was not that he said to himself —This foul coaching inn twenty miles east of Warsaw reminds me of one near Danzig where I threw up and where Vati picked that quarrel with the local constable . . . Or, this moment when my wife – how strange that phrase is – my wife! has repeated her (German) words slowly as to an idiot or to a recalcitrant child asking for an omelette rather than the ‘baked eggs’ swimming in rancid fat which had been proffered by a filthy Polish hand. It recalled the inn at Harwich when slowly and three times Reinhold had enunciated in heavily accented English —I said that for stale fish vill ve not pay – words which mine Host of the harbour-front’s King’s Arms at first did not understand and then would not accept. Now, in Poland, his adult stomach involuntarily knotted itself into the same embarrassment. In Harwich in his late teens, he’d blurted out to the waiter —The fish was stale, we couldn’t eat it! Now, his Polish less certain than his English, he suggested an omelette, or failing that, bread and cheese. It was almost as if the same waiter stared in puzzlement as if to ask —If you know my language why didn’t you speak up earlier?
The English waiter had said – Farndja tungven? It was only about an hour after hearing the syllables that George had realized what they had meant. For a moment, in ’84 in Poland, revisiting this moment of ’70, consciousness had floated. The sensation involved recall but it was not a simple act of memory. Just as the slave boy in the Meno appeared, by his grasp of mathematical principles which he had never been taught to carry within himself the recollection of some prenatal – indeed preconceptual – spiritual existence, a soul’s memory of eternity before the putting-on of human flesh, so George sometimes felt that real life, his soul’s essential, timeless being, were like a collection of loose drawings in a portfolio; could be rearranged in any order. Here he was sketching the penguin in a limitless expanse of Antarctic whiteness, possessed by a feeling of ecstasy – whether induced by the extreme cold or by the Holy Ghost, or both – who was to say? Here was one rude waiter bringing filthy food, and here is another. He knew, of course he did, that events occurred in order but their significance was not necessarily temporally sequential; nor was the mood induced by the experiences, and if he asked himself, in that coach journeying eastwards with his bride, why he felt quite so wretched, the answer might have been a semi-articulated belief that the same experiences come round and round like the grotesquely painted animals on a carousel. Though he’d never been married before, he felt, as he sat beside his wife of ten days – here we go again.
Perhaps we learn how to be married, as we learn speech and manners, by copying our mother and father? Perhaps the children of those unsuccessfully married cannot hope themselves to be happy in wedlock? If marriage, like language, is a learnt knack, then Reinhold Forster resembled one of those who had passed a lifetime in a foreign land without bothering to converse with the natives, nor learning much more than a few phrases in which to command waiters or servants to bring food or wash clothes. That there had been physical intimacy between his parents George recognized – it was attested by the existence of himself and his siblings. Of friendship between Reinhold and Justina there was none. As the coach rattled eastward, however, George the married man could not attribute all his misery to his father’s example. Quite enough had happened in the previous two weeks to make anyone unhappy: Therese’s declaration in the days before the wedding that she passionately loved Assad – one of the librarians who worked for her father at the University.
She named him ‘Assad’ after Saladin’s deceased brother in Nathan the Wise. Lessing’s play was ‘all the rage’ among Therese’s circle of friends, and the young bluestockings – all daughters of academics at Göttingen and nicknamed die Universitätsmamsellen – eagerly passed it from hand to hand, aware that its central idea – the equivalence of Judaism, Islam and Christianity – was offensive to the fuddy-duddies. Assad, whose real name was Friedrich Meyer, could not have looked less like an Arab prince. The twenty-six-year-old blonde man had rosy cheeks and those easy, German good looks – good skin, good bone structure. Of course, his passion for Therese fed a passion for Lessing, and they quoted chunks of the poet to one another. Only a few weeks before, as her hateful father ponderously reminded her, she had been madly in love, ‘sick, body and soul’ – her old dad cruelly quoted to her from her diary which his wife (her, even more hateful than Dad, stepmother) had read while tidying her bedroom – for another young man. Oh, how she hated them! Oh, how she hated the stepmother’s philistinism —What good is reading to a girl? You’ll never get a husband with your nose always stuck in a book! Her father, the old philologist, weakly acquiesced in this view, partly because he never dared stand up to the bitch, and partly because he genuinely despised novels, and disdained her taste for Richardson, or Rousseau’s Emile, or The Sorrows of Young Werther.
At fourteen, the girl had appeared enraptured with George Forster. Even his ugliness had recommended him, for the teeth had fallen out during his world-encompassing voyage and the skin had become pock-marked while he had painted boobies and petrels, while he had escaped icebergs, endured tropic heat, seen naked savages dancing before their carved fetishes, run from the Anthropophagi in New Holland.
She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, and I lov’d her that she did pity them.
But there was the world of difference between the fourteen-year-old girl, listening to the travellers’ tales of the celebrated scientist from Kassel University, and a twenty-year-old woman, married to the man, with his appalling breath!
—She’s lucky to get any man, with that squint of hers.
That had been one remark by the stepmother. Overheard. And it was not George’s fault that the woman had said it – but it had made Therese hate not her father’s wife – she hated her already, always had done – but the man they had chosen for her. Therese knew this wasn’t true – not wholly true. She knew ‘they’ had been initially dubious about her growing intimacy with George. She knew that one of the bonds she had with him was that both she and George wished to escape their fathers. Once Professor Heyne, however, had accepted young Profes
sor Forster as a potential sonin-law, it had come to feel like an arranged marriage, something stitched together by the men behind her back.
Unable to bear her hatred, hurt by it more than he knew what to do with, he had acquiesced in all her whims. It was actually he, George, who proposed that Assad should accompany them for the first leg of their journey east. Rather than protesting at her supposed ‘love’ of the man, rather than asserting his authority, telling her that she was not his – all of which might have persuaded her that he needed her, loved her – he had proposed that Assad came in the coach. Much of the time – for there really had not been room for the three of them to travel comfortably – George left the pair together inside while he shivered beside the coachman on the box above, pulling his collar about his ears and holding his tricorn hat by the brim lest it be carried by the wind that blew, cruel and uninterrupted, from the faraway Urals across the relentlessly boring wastes of East Prussia. Though it was only September, it felt, with every mile they lurched east, as if they were entering a winter of eternal dark and cold. Why had he been so acquiescent in her childish crush on Assad? No ‘real man’ would have done that. Frozen not only in body but in thought, and doggedly not listening to the Polish coachman’s flow of anti-Russian, anti-Protestant, anti-Jewish, anti-human rant, he attributed his weakness of willpower to ancient habits of mind in which he had always suppressed his emotions, said the opposite of what he felt: this was the habit engendered by being Reinhold’s travelling companion since early boyhood. He knew there was an absurd melodrama in self-pity. Yet, loving his father had been the tragedy of his life, not least because – a fact which dawned on him only when he had left Reinhold in England and, as a young academic, came to take up his post at Kassel University in ’78 – he did not very much like his father, perhaps never had. The fact was too shocking to admit, until he had been free of Reinhold, and to the end of his life George did not like to articulate the fact. If he did not like him, however, this was a minor detail, for from a time which pre-dated conscious memory, he had learnt to love Reinhold. It had skewed love for him. His idea of intimacy was with one he did not like, with one for whom, internally, allowances had perpetually to be made. Therese’s refusal of his bedroom advances in that succession of awful inns – Posen, Warsaw, Bialystock – his acceptance of this refusal – what had this been except, in part, a continuation of life with Reinhold, in which over and over again, George had learnt never to complain at being given the uncomfortable side of the bed, or eating the less palatable of two cutlets brought to a table? Later, when different tactics were tried, when at an inn near Bialystock, he had become angry, and he had forced himself on her, torn at her nightdress and pulled it upwards to reveal her pubic tendrils which made him wild with lust, she had wept. He tried to rape her but it would not work – it simply wouldn’t penetrate her – and her tears made him revisit emotions which were terrifying. His uncontrolled rage had not been with her alone as she both frustrated him and, at one and the same time, filled him with pity, but also with Vati, who seemed to be in the room beside them, oppressing him, dismissing his amorous propensity not only as an outrage against bourgeois Lutheran virtue but as an interruption to work. Thus, in Tahiti, ‘We need more drawings of those plantains – you can swim any time of your life – you might never see those plants again!’
While nearly every man aboard the Resolution had bathed in the blue water, and many of them gambolled with the island beauties, nakedly and uninhibited, George had sat, with his thick woollen stockings, buckled shoes, cotton shirt, worsted vest and coat, drawing the Tahitian flora.
Sometimes, quite explicitly, Reinhold would exclaim,
—Aargh! It disgusts a man. The way these human beasts behave! Twenty times in my head have I written a letter to my Lord Sandwich. A letter. That a Captain in the Royal Navy could allow such passions to rampage through a ship. Why, a petty thief is flogged on the main deck before all his shipmates, these people. But they go unpunished when they . . . when they . . . Has the Captain no control over these beastly impulses?
It had never been explained how Captain Cook could have restrained the amorous instinct itself as it surfaced in nearly a hundred sailors who had not seen a woman in months. George could never imagine, either at the time, or in his memory, whether Reinhold knew what it was like for his son to set eyes on so many naked women in Tahiti. Clearly he wanted to protect the boy, to preserve his virtue . . . And his own, perhaps? But his manner implied that only wild beasts, depraved creatures, could be charmed by the hair-tossing smiles, the open, white-toothed invitations, the firm round breasts of these young women. To the end of his life George would be haunted by them. The habit of Onanie to which even before the voyage he had become addicted was now fuelled by thoughts of those laughing girls. Their black hair reaching to the small of their backs, their laughter and evident enjoyment of life. Respect for and love of his father, fear of the desired object – for the island girls terrified him, and the effect they had upon him shook his being. These experiences conspired to twist and mould his unexpressive temperament.
So it was, as he sat, squeezed and cold against Therese as they rumbled together eastward to the wretched future, sat opposite her in unpleasant inns, sometimes trying to catch, sometimes to avoid, the glance which came from one or other of her squinting eyes, or lay sleepless beside her in flea-infested mattresses, that their soul-journey was not merely one which trundled painfully towards the future but also one which dragged with it the inescapable past, all its frustrations, angers and disappointments. Hence it was, sitting beside a grumpy, tear-stained twenty-year-old Therese with her tired head on his shoulder, and his conscious mind telling him he was sitting with a young bride, that his soul was trundling along the same rutted track it had always followed, the companion of the inescapable father. Others might have learnt to love as the Tahitians apparently loved, naked and smiling in the southern sun. George had learnt to love all right, but his love-object had been his father, so that love for him could not exist without the accompanying emotions of irritation, guilt, frustration.
They’d married, George and Therese, both agreed upon this on those occasions, over the eight years they were together, when they were able to talk about it, to escape their fathers. The paradox of the situation was that, although they hardly ever saw Reinhold – who was by now established as a Professor at Halle, for the whole eight years – he remained omnipresent in the one place in which he was as firmly entrenched as in the best cabin on the boat – inside George’s head. Professor Heyne, on the other hand, whom they saw quite often, and with whom, when they did not see, they maintained a copious correspondence, was a man whom eventually Therese could put behind her – though perhaps this process of release was not complete until she had also escaped her husband and her unhappy marriage.
When she was thirteen, still smarting from her mother’s death (which happened when Therese was eleven), and her father had married the twenty-five-year-old stepmother she hated, one of the Professor’s friends said – in her presence – staring at her as if she were nothing better than a joke,
—Herr Hofrat, she’s an ugly little thing, eh? She’ll either have to make her way through comedy or by her wits.
—Don’t speak to me of her wits. They’ll scare off the men. That’s what Georgine [the hated stepmother] says. Says we must send her to a boarding school where she can forget some of the things she’s read. Tells me I should lock up my book-case and keep the key hidden!
That large grey book-case! Behind its criss-cross grilled doors and its dusty grey silk was concealed what – once discovered – could never be undiscovered. Its secrets could defy the best endeavours of cruel silly mistresses trying to make her read vapid French fables. She had already read Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, and – to her the most intoxicating of all the encyclopédistes – the Baron d’Holbach. Even before she had read ten pages of Le Système de la Nature she had known what it was going to disclose – it was actually a secret sh
e had known for some time. Its truth had come to her in church, attending the interminable Sunday morning services with her father and her siblings. When her mother became ill, and the pastor came to assure Professor Heyne that God loved his poor flushed, wheezing consumptive wife, Therese had known that the words were meaningless. Reading the Baron d’Holbach merely confirmed, in the most heady, most joyous way, that her hunch was right. Some of the other encyclopédistes, such as Voltaire, persisted in saying that the machinery of the universe demanded the existence of . . . a clockmaker. Therese asked herself – what if it was a mistake to look for a Cause? What if Nature simply was? What if Spinoza was right and Deus was simply a word for Nature? If HE were to ‘exist’ it was impossible to use such a word of HIM without inverted commas; we would have to reconcile ourselves to living in a universe presided over by a monster of Cruelty, who wanted her charming, funny mother to be dying of this terrible disease – wanted her to have lost her babies – one a stillbirth, one killed by a smallpox inoculation – wanted all this and, not content to make her mother suffer so, sent the pastor to the door to say that the First Cause had sent all these horrors upon them out of love.
Therese never said a word about her secret to her father – though she whispered about it to the other Universitätsmamsellen, some of whom thought she was merely parading it as an exhibitionist trick, an affectation, and some of whom thought it was wicked. Only when she read Baron d’Holbach did she know she was not alone in the world.
Her parents’ marriage had been a love match. Therese had watched the love die, in the mother, and in the father continue its reproachful burn. She believed that Christian Gottlob Heyne went on loving his first wife – she was also Therese – until he died in 1812. No doubt he could not help loving her, but everyone else in his family – especially his daughter – felt as if they were being punished for the mother’s inability to love their father with the slavish passion he bestowed upon her. The stepmother made pretences – she openly regarded hers as a marriage of convenience. She kept house for the ‘old Professor’ – as he had become in her eyes (he was after all twice her age) – and shared his bed. He gave her the house and money. One of the reasons Therese hated her stepmother was that she made her father happy.