The Holy Ghost, called nowadays the Holy Spirit, was sometimes referred to as the forgotten person of the Blessed Trinity. Not only did I never forget him; he was by far my favourite of the three divine persons. When I was in my tenth year and attending a school conducted by a different order of brothers from those mentioned earlier, my class teacher was a young layman who was in love with the Virgin Mary. He claimed no more than to have a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, as he mostly called her, but I, who was continually falling in love with personages known to me only from illustrations in newspapers or magazines or from fictional texts – I never doubted that my teacher was truly in love. More than thirty years later, while I was reading some or another passage in the fiction of Marcel Proust about the odd ways of some or another character in love, I remembered that my teacher of long ago would use any pretext for bringing the name of his beloved into classroom discussions. I sensed that my classmates were embarrassed by our teacher’s special devotion, as he called it, but I felt a certain sympathy for him. I was not in love with Mary, but I felt as though I ought to have been so. Of course, the name Mary hereabouts denotes a mental image. My trouble was that I had never seen on any picture or statue of Mary such a face as I was apt to fall in love with. More than ten years later, I saw too late just such a face as would have won me over earlier. I have not forgotten that this paragraph began as an account of my liking for the Holy Ghost.
At about the time when I was reading for the first time one after another of the novels of Thomas Hardy, a younger cousin of mine showed me a book that he had received as a prize for his results in Christian doctrine at the same secondary school that I had attended a few years earlier. The title of the book, as I recall, was The Great Madonnas. The contents included the reproductions of photographs of numerous paintings and statues of Mary from many countries and many periods of history. The image that I fell in love with was of a young woman with dark hair and a pale complexion. Had I seen that image only a few months before, when I was still a faithful churchgoer, I would have been able to think of myself, at last, as having a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin just as the young man, my teacher, had had. But the image of the dark-haired young woman was not lost on me; it became for me the image-in-my-mind of the chief female character of whatever novel by Thomas Hardy I was reading at that time. As for the one or two novels that I had read before I saw the compelling image, whatever earlier images of female characters had occurred to me were gone from my mind as soon as I had seen the dark-haired madonna, who was thenceforth my image-heroine.
The title of the painting the reproduction of which had so affected me was Mater Purissima. This, as I knew, was a Latin phrase equivalent in English to Mother Most Pure. The painter was an Englishman of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century whose name I forgot almost as soon as I had read it. Although the reproduction was in black and white, I was sometimes able to visualise a coloured version of the image of the young woman. It occurs to me today that the original of the painted image may well have been posed so that her face and shoulders were lit by a broad shaft of sunlight that had reached her by way of some or another translucent window high above her and out of the scope of the painting. In my coloured version this light would surely have been a rich red-gold. The young woman was depicted as being clothed in an ankle-length robe with a transparent veil over her hair and holding a dove in each hand. Her hands were so positioned that each dove rested against one of her breasts. When I first took note of these doves, I supposed them to be sacrificial offerings that the young Mary was obliged to make in some or another ritual soon after she had given birth to the child Jesus. However, I was like most members of my church in knowing little or nothing about the Jewish religion, and so I soon found other connotations for the doves. (I seem not to have noticed what I most notice now when I recall the image-birds: their improbable docility; they rest comfortably in the hands of the young woman with their own rounded breasts suggesting the shape of what lies hidden behind them under the folds of the young woman’s robe and with their bright eyes focused, so it seems, on the same point of interest that the Most Pure Mother looks towards. Their pose is absurdly calm; they bear no resemblance to any of the struggling, frantic birds that I sometimes tried to hold as a boy.)
The young teacher with the special devotion to Mary had once read, so he told us, that she was the daughter-in-law of God the Father and the wife of the Holy Ghost. I was startled at the time by the word wife. I considered it unseemly to think of Mary even as the wife of Joseph. The teacher’s bold statement stayed in my mind, however, and was the cause of my acquiring in later years a cluster of odd images that helped me comprehend the mystery of Mary’s having conceived the Son of God. The formula most often used in the liturgy had Mary conceiving by the power of the Holy Ghost. I seem to recall illustrations of a young woman with her head bowed while the Holy Ghost hovers above her in the form of a dove, which was the image most commonly used to illustrate the presence of the third person of the Trinity. I have never learned the origin of the connection between the dove and the Holy Ghost, but for many years I never questioned its appropriateness. In the streets and gardens of the suburbs where I spent much of my childhood, one of the most common birds was a species of dove introduced long ago into this country from Asia. During spring or summer, I would often watch a male dove courting a female by fluttering in the air around her while she, seemingly indifferent to him, perched on a wire or a branch. The fluttering might last for ten minutes before the male would try to mount the female while she clung to her narrow perch. Invariably, he failed. He would likewise fail at one after another later attempt. If ever I witnessed a successful mating between two doves, I must later have forgotten it, which seems unlikely. I believe rather that I had never enough time or patience to go on watching the birds. The dove that was the image in my mind of the Holy Ghost was a more splendid bird by far than the suburban doves; his plumage was orange-red like the tongues of flame that had been the visible sign of his presence when he appeared to Jesus’s disciples in the upper room at Pentecost. But for all his fine feathers and his divine powers, he went on fluttering, whenever I brought him to mind, far above the bowed head of his virgin-wife.
Although I saw the illustration of the painting Mater Purissima only two or three times, I never afterwards doubted that a certain image-face in my mind was derived wholly from my few inspections of the black and white illustration. Nearly forty years after I had last looked into my cousin’s book, and while I was reading one or another biography of Thomas Hardy, I found among the illustrations in that book a reproduction of a black and white photograph of a young woman whose face seemed to me identical with the face of the young woman holding the doves. The young woman photographed was an actress who played the part of Tess Durbeyfield in a dramatisation of the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles during the second decade of the twentieth century. The dramatisation was done under the supervision of Thomas Hardy himself, who was at that time even older than I am as I write these words. Hardy was deemed by his wife and by others to have fallen in love, during the eighth decade of his life, with the young actress, who was fifty years his junior. He declared to several persons that the actress was identical in appearance with the image in his mind of the fictional character, Tess Durbeyfield.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, I was prompted to look again at the photograph of the young actress and to compare that image with the image presently in my mind, but then I recalled that I had sold most of my books before moving from the city where I had lived for most of my life to this township near the border. I had sold the books because this house where I now live is a mere cottage with space for only a few hundred books. I had sold the books also in order to keep faith with myself. For some years past, I had claimed that whatever deserved to be remembered from my experiences as a reader of books was, in fact, safely remembered. I had claimed also the converse of this: whatever I had forgotten from my experiences
as a reader of books had not deserved to be remembered. By selling my books, I was declaring that I had got from them whatever I had needed from them. I had therefore no business to be looking back through any biography of any writer of fiction in search of any account of any image that he had kept in mind while he wrote. And even if I should happen to notice, at some time in the future, on some or another bookshelf in some or another house where I am a visitor, a certain biography of Thomas Hardy or a certain book about so-called madonnas, I should avoid looking into the book for fear of obliterating a mental image that was not a mere copy of details seen long ago on a page of a book but proof of something I had for long wanted to believe, namely, that my mind was the source of not only my wants and desires but the imagery that tempered them.
Since I wrote the previous paragraph, I have travelled to and from the capital city where I lived for most of my life. I travelled there in order to visit my grandson and his parents and the only two friends of mine that I still care to visit. In the house where I stayed for two days and nights, the windows of the three main rooms are bordered with panels of what I intend to call from here on coloured glass. (I am so ignorant in these matters that I do not even know whether the terms stained glass and leadlight glass refer to the same thing, which is to say that I do not know whether the glass in the churches where I sometimes supposed as a boy that to pray was to see on the white of one’s soul the rainbow-coloured shafts from the windows of heaven – whether that glass is the same as the glass in the upper panes of the window that overlooked my bed last night and on the preceding night: the window the blind of which I felt compelled to pull up after I had lain down, so that I could learn before I fell asleep how the glow from the streetlight outside was changed before it fell on me.) Of course, I had noticed and admired these panes in the past, but during my latest visit to the house I was thinking often of this piece of writing, which had come to an end, for the time being, at the last words of the previous paragraph. I was thinking also of the window in the small church near this house and of the question why the sight of the murky glass in that window had set me writing this report, as I call it. Thinking thus, I looked often at the upper panes as though they might suggest something of meaning.
I had intended to pull down the blind before I fell asleep, but I woke at first light with the bare glass above me. (The window was without curtains.) In the design nearest my face, the coloured pieces seemed meant to represent stems and leaves and petals, but their effect on me was more than should have derived from mere likenesses of parts of plants. I glanced several times at the glass from the sides of my eyes. This way of looking at notable sights has sometimes taught me more than gazing or staring. Then I looked directly at the glass but with eyes almost closed. This had the effect of blurring some of the boundaries between plain and tinted areas, so that the sky outside seemed mottled with pink and pale orange in the same way that the sky had been mottled on certain mornings during my last weeks of secondary school, more than fifty years before. Those were the last few mornings of spring and the first few mornings of summer. My alarm clock woke me before sunrise. The others of my family were still asleep. I washed and dressed quietly and then sat at the kitchen table in such a way that I could see the eastern sky through the window. In front of me were my set texts for the matriculation examination in Latin: the Agricola of Tacitus, one of the books of Virgil’s Aeneid, and Cicero’s De Divinatione. My class had been badly taught for year after year in Latin. Several of the religious brothers assigned to us in earlier years had seemed to know less Latin than the most able few in our class, of whom I was one. In our second year, we had been assigned a lay-teacher who was a trembling alcoholic unable to learn our names or to write on the blackboard.
Our teacher in our final year was competent enough, but by then I had become accustomed to teaching myself. For a few hours each night, I studied my other subjects, in which I was well versed. Then I went to bed early and afterwards rose early to study Latin for two hours while the house and the neighbourhood were quiet. During winter and for much of spring, the sky outside was dark, but during the last weeks before my examinations the sun rose while I sat over my Latin books. By then, I felt confident. I had almost mastered my set texts. Even the most difficult passages in the Virgil were becoming clear to me during the first bright mornings of summer, and while I read and translated with growing elation, the Latin text itself seemed attuned to my mood. The long journey of the Trojan exiles was almost at an end. On a certain morning, even before the sun had risen, the heroes of the poem divined, if not saw, the first hint of their dreamed-of destination.
Iam rubescebat stellis aurora fugatis
This single line of the Aeneid sounded several times in my mind while I was writing the previous sentences. I believe the English equivalent of the Latin to be: The stars had now been put to flight, and the dawn was reddening.
I had almost mastered the reading and writing of the Latin language by the early summer of a certain year in the mid-1950s, but today, more than fifty years later, I can recall only that one line from all that I read and wrote in Latin during a period of five years, and I can think of no more worthy task for me at present than that I should set out to discover why this one line stays with me and why sometimes nowadays, here in this border district, four hundred kilometres from the place where I studied Latin on a few summer mornings long ago – why the sight of certain colours in the sky in the early morning will still sometimes cause me to recite with elation:
Iam rubescebat stellis aurora fugatis
As I remember it, the day when the dawn reddened was the day when the Trojans, after years of wandering, had their first sight of their true homeland. In spite of everything, against all odds, the travellers had reached their destination. How could this not have stirred a seventeen-years-old schoolboy, especially when he learned of it through the medium of an epic poem in a language other than his own on one of the last mornings before he himself set out on what he thought of as a journey towards a homeland-of-the-mind; before he put away his textbooks for the last time and became free to read whatever books he chose.
In his second-last year in school, he was placed first in the class in English. He received as his prize a large, single-volume history of English literature chosen for him, he assumed, by his English teacher. This was a religious brother, a man that his prize-winning pupil neither liked nor disliked and seldom thought of in later years except in connection with a certain anecdote that he still remembered in detail fifty-five years later. In one of their first English periods for the year, the brother had warned his class not to be too much influenced by their religious beliefs when answering questions at their final examination. The boys who heard this advice had been taught for years past to be proud of their religion and to miss no opportunity for declaring their beliefs to the world, but they did not find their teacher’s advice in this instance strange or unsettling. They knew that the persons marking their papers at public examinations were likely to be high-school teachers or university tutors: persons from the secular system, as the boys would have called it; persons likely to be agnostics at best and atheists at worst, and perhaps even sympathetic to communism.
The anecdote mentioned in the previous paragraph was as follows. The brother, the boys’ English teacher, was on the way to completing an Arts degree with a major study in English at the university that was then the only university in the capital city in a suburb of which was the boys’ school. (The boys were not all dismayed to learn that their English teacher was less qualified than any comparable teacher in the so-called secular system; the boys understood that their own school received no funds from any government and that their teachers paid for their own training.) The brother had been required, during his second year as a university student of English, to write an essay discussing some or another comment on the poem Paradise Lost, by John Milton. Whether or not the brother had discussed the comment, he had taken the opportunity to point out in his essay what
seemed to him the most noticeable and the most reprehensible matter to be understood from the poem; he had pointed out that the narrator of the poem, whom he identified as John Milton, was on the side of Satan, or the Devil. The tutor who assessed the brother’s essay had awarded it a mark below Pass but had invited the brother to submit an amended version. The brother had then submitted an amended version of his essay and had been awarded a mark within the range of Pass.
When the schoolboy mentioned earlier had first heard this anecdote, he had not felt urged to pass judgement on either the brother or the tutor. The boy knew nothing about the university or what might have taken place there. He had travelled so little that he had never seen so much as a distant view of the university, which was in a suburb far from his own. A few years later, if the young man who had been the schoolboy had recalled the anecdote he would have considered the brother a fool, first because he believed in the reality of a personage that he called Satan or the Devil, second because he felt obliged to preach against any affront to his religious beliefs, and third because he had tried to judge a poem on moral rather than aesthetic grounds. Some years later again, when the man who had been the young man was a part-time student of English at the university he sometimes recalled the anecdote and was of the opinion that the brother ought to have been awarded for the first version of his essay a mark within the range of first-class honours, given that he had reported in that essay his honest, unfeigned experience as a reader, which was something that the man’s tutors and lecturers seemed unable or unwilling to do.
Border Districts Page 3