The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  —Stephen Dedalus, June 16, 1904

  In the books, it’s a real estate nightmare; Raleigh’s lordly house and estates awarded to him were now swept away, his many titles and privileges discounted. He had written clever sonnets, failed at setting up the colonial settlement in Virginia, introduced the potato to Ireland, deported the Irish as slaves to the West Indies; then, to patch a tattered reputation, he set sail with a hundred Englishmen to discover the place called El Dorado. How does a life so documented become a costume drama? A naïve question you’d say, but you’re not here to keep me in line, manage the facts. Sir Walter’s legend outwits history.

  Godlike in naming the new world, he embellished the many pages of The Discoverie with maps of mountains and rivers, the exotic customs of each stop along his way in the Empyre, titles of tribes, names of chieftains. He returned with the glitter of marquisate in worthless schist to ornament his big book with authenticity, most particularly when reporting the wonders of Manoa, a city never seen. And if Peru had so many heaps of Golde, whereof those Ingas were Princes, and that they delighted so much therein, no doubt but this which nowe liveth and raineth in Manoa, hath the same humor, and I am assured hath more abundance of Golde, within his territorie, than all Peru, and the west Indies. Writing his way out of failure, his account is hearsay of a crystal city, rumor that a secret door in the side of a mountain, when opened, would reveal the treasures of El Dorado. War had depleted the Queen’s coffers. Sound familiar? Ordered to bring back gold, he had only a book writ out in a bold bluff of words. That there might be little or no gold was contemplated before he set sail: the report of his Caribbean adventure would then be worse than a lie, a fiction. He lived in disgrace, though not for writing his Discoverie, a best seller. The Faerie Queen—bloodless in old age, blanched as we see her on-screen—passed, as we now say. The Elizabethan world over, the Stuarts were now free to find cause. King James committed Raleigh to the Bloody Tower on a conspiracy charge long delayed. Sir Walter collaborating with the Spanish! Not likely. Confined in comfort, he turned to the possible certainties of science. Something like a gentlemen’s club in the Tower: poets dropped by for a visit; chemists worked their experiments in half-light cast through narrow windows. Aubrey tells us that here the mathematician Hariot wrote to Johannes Kepler on the refraction of light, solving the mystery of rainbows. Lady Raleigh lived comfortably with her husband, Wat, and their servants. The prisoner wore elegant cloaks, lace ruff at his throat. By a little shed next to his garden, he worked on his herbal elixirs and the desalination of seawater. In this pleasant confinement, he wrote The History of the World; how’s that for reach? Can we understand that in the entanglement of what was now Jacobean politics, the King demoted Walter to schoolteacher, sent his son to be tutored by his prisoner? The History was in part a textbook for Prince Henry, who loved working with Walter, did not love his father. Imagine the young prince leaving the great world of the Court for the Tower to read along with the scholar who began his course with the Creation, proceeded ever onward, invoking the wisdom of Aristotle, Virgil, Sir Francis Bacon. The myth maker Ovid, of course. Yes, Sister Philomena, Sts. Paul and Augustine were among those called upon to verify Raleigh’s version of First Days, which has a geography beyond our schoolroom imagination, as in a chapter: That Paradise was not the whole earth, as some have thought, making the ocean to be the fountain of four rivers. Mapping Eden, spinning the globe, sweeping the ancient nations of the world into the timeline of each day’s lesson. Turn back and you will find politics in the Preface. A pair, these two, Prince and tutor devoted to the stories that give the lie to the Divine Right of Kings, to the very King, Henry’s father, who was the historian’s jailer. While the other boy, Wat, took himself off, attempting to get bloodied as a soldier in imitation of his father. The Historie of the World ends in 168 BC, long after the expulsion from Paradise, the waters parting, the Flood, the glory that was Rome, though before Cleopatra put the asp to her wrist, before the year of our Lord, before the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria, before St. Anselm proposed his ingenious proof of the existence of God. We may wonder, plying our search engines, how Walter knew so many stories—of Egypt and Macedonia, the Golden Fleece, the trials of Ulysses. He’d been to Oxford, ever bookish, don’t you know? But that doesn’t answer the question how he proposed that the Ark rested upon some of the Hills of Armenia, or How the Romans were Dreadful to All Kings. He borrowed heavily from the library of the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton. We can imagine the couriers toting these precious volumes from Westminster to the Tower; even presume that Cotton assisted in the writing as did Thomas Hariot, and of equal merit, a clergyman, Dr. Burrel. All, or the greatest part of the drudgery of Sir Walter’s History, Criticisms, Chronology, and reading Greek and Hebrew authors, were performed by him for Sir Walter . . . so says Benjamin Disraeli in a spirited debunking of the encyclopedic work which bears neither footnotes nor acknowledgments; copyright four centuries down the lane, but we need not speculate about The Historie of the World ending abruptly. The Prince, gone swimming—just a boy skipping school—drowned in the polluted waters of the Thames. The tutor’s job ended. History came to its close, a provoked and provoking entry in the new book culture, another best seller for Walter.

  He was now twelve years in the Tower. Antony would not die of love. Rome would not fall. There would be no room at the inn of some little Christmas Carol town until Sir Walter thought to spring himself with a sequel, a second search for El Dorado. Raleigh’s proposal: once more for the gold! James I bought it. Sir Walter, now old and ailing, was up for the fund-raising, not for the voyage. I believe the writer of The Discoverie was taken in by his own story spun of dross. He could turn its pages, Imprinted at London by Robert Robinson, 1596, to find, in the sparkle of his own words, marcasite turned to gold. How pleasurable to open a book of our own making. Or how shameful, until he thought to spring himself with a sequel. That war, this war depleting the treasury, as with Columbus’ repeated search for El Dorado.

  Never should have begged and borrowed so liberally from his wife’s fortune, to commission the ships. Still, he was sprung from the Tower. He took the Product with him, his son Wat still yearning to be a soldier in the grand manner of his father, his once upon a time hero who now sent him off with the faithful Lawrence Keymis, an Oxford professor who gave up a scholar’s life for belief in gold, who had sailed with Walter first time to Guiana. Never should have Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter sent your boy up the tricky Orinoco. Sweet Sir Walter had mapped his bailout from the Tower by pure conjecture, the historian rewriting his past. Old soldier with a hacking cough, cruising the waters off Trinidad, old gardener searching out botanicals for his elixirs, idling while Keymis and his son were long gone on their adventure, days slipping by on their quest.

  Time is displayed in a half dozen places in our bourgeois mother lode here at the El Dorado—on the bedside table, pantry wall, computer screen. In the corner cabinet, each hour my father’s self-winding pocketwatch guards my mother’s handiwork—her clay figures of Joseph, Mary, Babe in a cradle—time on my computer and on my wrist the sleek, numberless museum watch you gave me years ago. It’s half past whatever as the morning hours of my incarceration slowly tick by; no wonder that in Trinidad, waiting for word of good fortune, time stretched long and lonely for Raleigh. Will that kid ever come home? Surely you remember me sleepless, waiting for our girl’s key in the door. Well, time had stopped for Wat, an ordinary mortal, ordered to stay clear of the Spaniards his father taught a harsh lesson at Cádiz, the enemy who, after the century of bloody battles, were now to be pals. King James desired more than diplomatic relations with the handsome Spanish Ambassador, more than close friendship. But Wat, up for a fight, provoked the Spaniards, was ambushed, the bare truth of it according to Keymis, who killed himself having failed as the boy’s protector, his suicide a great sin against God according to Walter, who cruelly condemned him, which supports Sister Philomena’s claim, fantastic and gi
rlish, that the Courtier was Catholic. She turns from me, flips her veil so as not to soil it with chalk dust as she approaches the blackboard, or not to hear me complain: How was he a Catholic, Sweet Sister, when often charged as an atheist for liberal views?

  When Sweet Sir Walter wrote to Keymis, the moment of forgiveness had passed; and in a letter to Lady Raleigh: I was loth to write, because I knew not how to comfort you, and God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now. This was the true end of his spirit. We may find it painful, his story carrying on and on. Home again, home again, nothing to show but debts and pre-Columbian trinkets plundered from the Spanish, you know. I’d rather not tell the story of his feigned sickness, or his botched attempt to escape across the Channel to France with that pair of fancy stays, just give in to gossip. The King, a fop troubled by his loss of the Spanish Ambassador, as well as his unpopular rule, moved in on Walter’s case, tried him for trumped-up crimes, old and new. Back to the Bloody Tower, a short stay.

  Never loved by the Irish, those with recall of his ruthless injustice when, still the Queen’s favorite, Raleigh ruled over them. Sister Philomena might find cool comfort in more than the legend of his cloak thrown on a puddle, if she ever thumbed through an early chapter of his Historie to discover That man is (as it were) a little world: a digression touching on our mortality. Though he is loved for the soft spoken reserve of his last days, and for revising an early love poem to his wife, writing it out in his Bible. In my confinement, I search for your Viking Portable Elizabethan Poetry with a broken spine.

  Even such is Time, which takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

  And pays us but age and dust,

  Who in the dark and silent grave,

  When we have wandered all our ways,

  Shuts up the story of our days,

  And from which grave, and earth, and dust

  The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

  Each line a penance. And Walter is loved for his dignity as he was led to his death. Dressed in black silk and velvet for heaven and history, he spoke to the crowd: So I take my leave of you all, making my peace with God. I have a long journey to take and must bid the company farewell. He felt the honed edge of the ax. This is sharp medicine, but it is a sure cure for all diseases.

  Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it, but those are Will Shakespeare’s words, the butcher’s son, as Aubrey noted, an actor of some merit who was writing of another soldier’s death.

  Daybook, November 20, 2007

  The old pipes will not splash our way till four. Inconvenient for laundry, and for infants, a new crop wheeled through the lobby. We have multiplied. I nod until my white moon face comes into focus to fetch their smiles. Family, mostly a friendly sort here, though I am wary speaking of family: you, my love, the correction officer my brother, the dear departed, and grandchildren who live nearby are fair game. But I will not puff with pride or disapprove of our grown children, run to third-person honesty in tattle time. Two out of three are killing themselves with nicotine. The stepdaughter dresses as if she is sixteen, not fifty, knows the names of the supporting actors on cop shows. One fuses bok choy with tamarind while he performs the lost art of joinery; the third, my own, educates me with a subscription to ARTFORUM.

  See here: the self-reflexivity of modernism versus artist as criminal Duchampers. We’re let loose to plunder the world, don’t you see, quo-quo-quoting. You even quote yourself!

  When we lived on 10th Street, pre-El Dorado, we saw Duchamp every day. He crossed the street early to put in his time at the chess emporium. He gave up art long before you were in third grade.

  All three children run, lift weights, are given to excessive self-preservation. They are sure I court sedentary death in the clutter of my back room, that my addled head will slump onto the keyboard or I’ll fall to my death reaching to a top shelf for a book I didn’t really need, did I? Need that shard of information—Mercury lent his winged shoes to Perseus. Bulfinch’s Mythology, weighty, slipped out of my grasp. I tottered, scattering the El Dorado clippings, New York Times, May 23, 2005: more residents ante up for the Democratic Party than in any other apartment house in the city. Head shot of Natalie Wood cast as Marjorie Morningstar in film of that name taken from the novel: Puttin’ on the Ritz, the Morgensterns moved down from the Grand Concourse to the El Dorado. Gene Kelly, male lead . . . but really who cares if his theatrical snare captured the heart of an enchanted Jewish princess?

  I’ve come down on this day for the tour. To give thanks for the etched-steel elevator doors, for the gilt and silver trim—sort of Egyptian or Aztec—on the lobby’s high ceiling, for the marble fireplaces of no place like home and the latest generation of deco furniture, and for the imperial desk from the set of Duck Soup (Groucho Marx, loony president of Freedonia). I head back through our Promenade, where the mural of El Dorado lures the eye to a slick mountain of gold. First stop: Perseus. You see, it was necessary to reach over Calvino and Cather, above Austen and Auster, where mythology lives with those fairy tales aforementioned. Turn round in the soft light of the lobby and you will find his statue in an alcove stippled in gold. There on a marble pedestal, Perseus holds Andromeda in a swoon. She’s had a wretched time, but is now free of her shackles. He sports those winged boots borrowed from Mercury, wings on his hat, too. He’s flown down from up, up and away, or so we suppose, to be cast in the heroic moment, has saved the beautiful maiden from the Sea Monster. Her chains dangle. His bloody sword is cast down on the rocky shore where an elegant little scallop shell rests in the pebbles. Sculptor unknown who captured the moment of the young god falling in love. Till her hair fluttered in the wind, Perseus thought she was turned to stone. Misplaced but homey, the statue in its gilt cubby has nothing to do with El Dorado myth or décor. A middle-classy bronze to claim the residents were once acquainted with the classics, not Seventh Avenue, not talking heads or rock stars, nor fans of The Andromeda Strain, New Age nuts fearing the galaxy just beyond ours. The Greek lovers in the lobby, fellow inmates can’t possibly know, are distant relations to The Angelus, the bronze girl praying as the bells ring midday devotion in our dining room, an item that once held its place of honor in Bridgeport. In that grandfather’s house with a broad staircase, she stood on a landing set before a stained-glass window, Tiffany of sorts. Grandpa had arrived at art. When the bells toll, the idealized peasant says her prayers.

  Ordered the turkey?

  Absolutely. An intentional turkey. How can a sixteen-pounder have slipped my mind? I rise to my duties, order the bird. It’s the once a year call to the kosher butcher, some belief left from your childhood, though belief, as such, is far from your mind. Custom, you call it, a custom that a rabbi’s surveillance improves the drumstick that you favor. The slaughter of the innocent fowl is clean according to a Son of Abraham, who kindly puts up with my lives of the saints, and at this time of the year with Advent Calendars I order for the little kids. Each day they will flip open another link of the story. Not the story, you say, giving advent your reality check. The dominant narrative is Pokémon cards, iPod shuffles—few candy canes in Santa’s pack. So much for Mary approached by the angel of the Lord: Do not be afraid.

  Ever cheery, the weatherman predicts sleet mixed with rain. You were right about the wind stealing through the old iron windows. Heat sucks the soul out of my struggling plants that will not be watered today while the children’s terrarium flourishes, sweating in tropical splendor. I do morning e-mail—Cleo, Ed, GK, Bin and Paul tracking me down. To all: I’m on El Dorado duty. Park not allowed today. Item: Sinclair Lewis lived in a vast apartment in the south tower gussied up at great expense by his lady love, Marcella Powers, who lived in Little Towers, perhaps a cubby tucked in line B. He called our El Dorado Intolerable Towers, though he could see the East River and the Hudson, the whole island spread before him. It wasn’t Main Street, or Minnesota, Just “29 floors up in the air.” Lofty loneliness, don’t I know. Old friends still able
to board his battered airship came round for cocktails. Americans had received his message. We are moral bumpkins, bewildered Babbitts, lynch men of hope. He’d made his move on Fascism in ’35; about time, said his wife of those days. It Can’t Happen Here was a comeback novel written five years after the Nobel, in which a Vermont journalist turns from passive belief in this country to active disillusionment, protests grandly, is sent to prison by Minute Men. You may see in Lewis’ description of his hero’s study, with few deletions and updating, a semblance of my own.

  It was an endearing mess of novels, copies of the Congressional Record, of The New Yorker, Time, The Nation, New Republic, New Masses, and Speculum (cloistral organ of the Medieval Society), treatise on taxation and monetary system, volumes of exploration . . . the Bible, the Koran, the poetry of Sandburg, Frost. . . .