by A. N. Wilson
But then there’s narrative – so different from drama – and here am I, knowing so much more than you all do about what Digby was going through that day of the Thomas Hardy class, when we were going to discuss whether The Mayor of Casterbridge was a tragedy in the same way, or the same sense, as, say, Oedipus Tyrannus. And by now I am so much more than a Chorus, I’m in this story, or at least, I so much want to be in it, because . . .
Well, because I am starting to realize that I am falling in love, falling in a way I had never done before, not with anyone else.
These classes had been a tremendous success – I think I’ve already told you that. Looking back, I wonder whether half the reason for this was that we were all genuinely stimulated by Digby and Barnaby’s brilliance – their range, their depth, their cleverness. Partly, though, for at least some of the class – I’d say most of us – the interest of the hour was hugely quickened by speculation on the theme of themes. How far had they gone? What stage had the relationship between them reached?
Funnily enough, although some of the gossips and matchmakers were so obsessed by this question, they actually knew remarkably little about either of the two protagonists of the drama which was playing inside their heads. Many of them, for example, were amazed, quite a bit later than the day I am describing, when they found out about Stig – Barnaby’s little kid, aged six. And I can’t actually remember when I found out all the details. But I’ll set some of them down now, so you don’t turn round and say that this narrative has been arranged to trick you, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire. You are going to say that in a minute, I know, and then you go flicking back asking yourself how you could have been so dumb, and realizing that the narrative is UNRELIABLE. Mine isn’t – honest – except in so far as a human being can’t know everything, and clearly, she can’t tell you all she knows all at once. That’s why I just want to get some of this Barnaby/Bar/Stig stuff out of the way. So you know. He told me some of it himself – during the month when we had our ‘thing’. But some of it I don’t think I knew at this stage – found it out later.
He and Stig’s mother, a woman called Bar Melville, had been the reason he had broken up with Deirdre Hadley. He had liked living with Deirdre. I think I’ve said that. They were good together. Deirdre is quite a bit older than Barnaby, but that wasn’t – was it? – the reason he was unfaithful to her? He liked to think he was less vulgar than that. I like to think so, too. He told me once, when we were lying there together and having one of those conversations you have when you haven’t got any clothes on and you have just slept with someone, he sometimes wished he had been to a therapist. During his twenties, it had seemed normal to sleep with any woman who made herself available. And plenty did. Then, while he was still finishing his PhD, and lodging at Deirdre’s house in Harrow, he had started sleeping with her. It had been really nice. He was happy in a way he could not quite have imagined before it all started.
They had found that they were a couple. It had gone on two or three years. Then he’d met Bar at a Christmas party for graduates at the University. Barbara and Barnaby. They’d made jokes about one another’s names. Poor little sheep who had lost their way, Baa, baa, baa. She had long red hair, and lips like Swinburne’s Dolores (the cruel/Red mouth like a venomous flower). A few drinks did the rest. He felt guilty about it, but he began a clandestine affair. She’d become pregnant. They both decided it would be madness to try to live together. They had nothing in common. She had been doing a Master’s in Business Studies and wanted to do something or other in IT. He’d never actually listened to what it was she wanted to do with her life, but it was the sort of thing he could not even imagine, let alone take an interest in. Something grown-up and lucrative. They did the decent thing, he and Bar, and agreed to bring up their son as best they may, posting him to and fro every week or so. Poor little chap. It worked, for as long as Bar was in Aberdeen, but when she left and got an even more lucrative, even more boring job in IT in Carmichael, she had more or less abandoned Stig to live with Barnaby most of the time. They never exactly quarrelled about money, though there were a number of acid telephone calls from Bar when she considered she’d paid more than her whack for clothes, new trainers, holidays for the little fella.
Deirdre had been very much wounded. Devastated, in fact. But, being Deirdre, she had soldiered on. Bar and Barnaby (it was ridiculous, their names) stopped sleeping together months before Stig was even born. Deirdre would have been perfectly happy to welcome Stig into her home, and bring him up, with Barnaby. In many ways it would have been the ideal solution, especially in the last two years when Bar had moved back to Carmichael. But Bar was having none of it. She made a kind of enemy of Deirdre, demonized her, said it wasn’t a suitable environment for her son to be brought up in. No one really knew what she meant by this, but Barnaby rather weakly capitulated. He moved out of Deirdre’s house in Harrow. Got an apartment near the centre of town. Looked after Stig more often than the boy’s mother did, especially after Bar got married to a man who lived in Carmichael and who already had two kids of his own and who she’d been two-timing with Barnaby. In fact, it was several months since Stig had seen his mother.
Deirdre still loved Barnaby, and they still met from time to time. Deirdre had been a celibate since Barnaby moved out. There had been no substitute. How could there be a substitute for love? That was her view. He’d taken a different line – well, men would. There had been a queue of women ever since, including me. Our love life – sex life would be a more accurate term – had been, well, mechanical. Once, though, afterwards, when we were lying back together, we’d told each other the story of our earlier bedroom experiences – which is how I know about him and Deirdre, him and Bar. Funnily enough, although I was so much more closely involved with Barnaby than most of the other students in the class, it was the thought of Deirdre which really consumed me at that point. It was really weird, lying there with no clothes on, all those years after being taught Woolf by her, and finally understanding that Badley Dreary was a Woman, someone with feelings. I felt such a little baby, realizing how much I was still happy keeping most people as stereotypes in my mind – former teachers and older people especially.
It’s actually a mistake, that lying back with no clothes on and blabbing about former lovers. It’s the way half the secrets of the world get told, but it is not a kind way, and we learn and disclose things that way which we shouldn’t have. Better to be a bit mysterious and not tell the current lover about her or his predecessors. Even I, who had not the smallest intention of having a serious relationship with Barnaby, felt a bit jealous of the fact that he clearly regarded the thing with Deirdre as the most serious relationship in his life. I could see why Bar could not cope with this. The others knew nothing of this, and I did not enlighten them. They wanted to jabber about Barnaby and Digby. And I did not want to join in with that either, because of the feelings which, so SO surprisingly, were creeping up on me. I’d never felt like this about a woman. I’d never felt this way about another human being. I supposed it was what all the poems and operas were about. I’d thought they were describing things which I had already experienced, only exaggerating the feeling for effect.
Anyway – back to that day when we had all come to Banks clutching our paperbacks of The Mayor of Casterbridge. I’ll step back now, become a Chorus again, or the impersonal voice of the novelist, and just narrate – as if I knew what was going on inside Digby’s head. Maybe even a little bit of what was going on in some of the other heads in the class. We’ll see.
Banks, as some of you will know, is a couple of miles out of town. Digby had taken the bus to the suburb of Cheltenham and done the rest on foot. She intended to go back to town in the college shuttle, a minibus which did the journey every few hours. On her way, she was efficiently ticking off, inside her head, the themes which had already been covered in the Tragedy seminar. She liked the way this semester’s group were progressing, and the way that she and Barnaby hopped about from theme to theme
. At the same time, as an experienced university teacher, she was aware that some members of the class were really engaged, some were lazy and just cruising, and others – these were the ones who caused concern – could be getting so much more out of the course, if she and Barnaby just slowed down a bit and maybe recapped at the beginning of each seminar, asked some of the basic questions which, for the previous twenty years of her life, she had been trying to answer, in her book, in her articles, and in her many reviews, tutorials and lectures.
Is it helpful to define a tragic hero? Is there any mileage in Nietzsche’s distinction, in The Birth of Tragedy, between Dionysian and Apollonian? Is tragedy essentially religious? Essentially irreligious? Barnaby would tend to supply answers to these questions by drawing upon the tragedies of Shakespeare, though he also made plentiful allusions to Racine, to Seneca, to the Greeks. Digby was not bound to Euripides but her brief was to answer the bigger, broader questions with reference to particular Euripidean plays. She was pleased that it was a lively, popular seminar, sometimes becoming almost too large to be manageable. And it worried her that Barnaby was too flip, too easy in his responses. It had always been a principle of Digby’s, both in academic and in personal life, to leave some questions unanswered, and, more, to discover that some questions, which had always seemed perfectly simple, to be, for that reason, unanswerable.
Barnaby was wearing an open-necked blue shirt and jeans. Digby wore a white shirt, a navy blue jumper, a simple blue denim skirt, thick black tights and grey Converse. (Sorry, I know I am meant to be the impersonal narrator here, and not barging in, but I’d never noticed before how amazingly, meltingly, erotic thick, slightly woolly tights can look on a pair of someone else’s legs which you are simply longing to have wrapped round your own waist.) Barnaby kicked off the class with an overview of Hardy’s Pessimism. Since none of us had read The Dynasts, he told us about this long ‘drama’ about the Napoleonic wars – a play so long that it was never meant to be performed except inside our heads, and whose hero or antihero, in a way, is Providence. The odds are stacked up against human beings in Hardy. And then Digby bounced in with the old jibe that Hardy was the Village Atheist brooding over the Village Idiot. She went on to apply to Hardy what Wordsworth had said of Goethe’s poetry – that it was not inevitable enough. The odds were stacked up against the characters in a really artificial way. One of us then demonstrated this by giving a (pretty plodding) account of the plot of the novel – how Michael Henchard the hay-trusser sold his wife to a sailor for five guineas, and then, in his penitence, foreswore drink, went on to become rich, only to lose everything again. Thanks to the nature of things, or thanks to the plot which Hardy had artificially created?
Then the discussion broadened out again, and one of the students returned to the theme which had been the theme of Digby’s first class: namely that tragedy, by its nature, undermines conventional views of morality. It makes us think that moral conventions are contingent. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of Good and Evil, where we get them from, whether Laws, civic laws and conventions, reflect some big external general law – the will of God?
—That’s right, Digby was saying, and it’s very hard to argue against Nietzsche’s view that all these tragic figures – whether in Shakespeare or in the Greek canon or in Wagner – are overturning conventional morality.
—There’s the passage, said Melanie, a young woman with long bunches and very bright red lipstick, where Nietzsche says that, watching Macbeth, we are not horrified by his murdering his way to power, we exult in it. Tristan isn’t a morality play designed to put you off committing adultery, it exults in adultery.
—In Daybreak, said Digby, for the benefit of those who had not read the Penguin Nietzsche Reader, which was, she suspected, about as far as Barnaby had ever got in exploring the mind of the tormented visionary of Basle.
—That’s right, said Barnaby, with perhaps rather more emphasis than he would have given his response had the observation been made by one of the men in the class. Digby’s eye took in Melanie’s skinny jeans and tight sweater. I could see from his expression, and from Melanie’s, the way they were both thinking.
—Tristan und Isolde is a good example of what we’ve all been trying to establish is the nature of tragedy, said Digby. It deals with the absolute insanity, the arbitrariness of love. This comes upon Tristan and Isolde out of the blue, just as it casts a spell over Phaedra in Hippolytus. In all three cases – Tristan, Isolde, Phaedra – the figures who are overcome by Aphrodite or the Love-drug cannot help themselves . . .
We all noticed that she was no longer addressing the class, so much as making a speech to Barnaby. Or that was how it seemed. She was staring at him, almost singing an aria at him. Or that was how it looked to me – but then, I was by then singing an aria to HER inside my tousled mousey head. I was, like, on the verge of actually coming out and saying it: Look, people. Can we just stop for a moment, stop talking about Wagner, Hardy, the gods, whatever, and ask ourselves – have we ever known the swirling danger, the wild music, the total insanity of true love ourselves, ’cause, I thought it was all a sort of fiction, and now I’m feeling it, like I never felt it before, and you all think it’s a kind of joke, wondering whether Digby will get off with Barnaby or the other way round, but for me this stuff has become really, REALLY serious and I think my heart is about to break.
Sorry, reader! I promised that this was meant to be a bit of impersonal narrative here, and I’m stepping on stage before my cue. Won’t happen again. Not in this chapter, anyhow.
—The tragic poet will not take sides against life – it is an adventure to live! Barnaby/Tristan further exclaimed. They might as well have been singing it to one another at full Wagnerian belt.
’Cause she – Digby – went really, really red. It was almost funny, actually. The matchmakers would undoubtedly, over coffee afterwards, have subjected this wonderful exchange between their two tutors to a full post-mortem analysis over coffee in paper cups.
That is, had it not been for the fact that in that precise moment, the seminar room shuddered. There’s a big bookcase at the end of the room, with bound copies of literary periodicals – the PMLA, the MLR, Scrutiny, and so forth. The back wall suddenly began to throw these lumpy volumes across the floor. I narrowly dodged a bound Modern Language Review, for the years 1982–6, the size of a big dictionary, which was hurtling towards my head. It was as if an invisible giant had got into the room and started roughing it up.
There had been a great rumbling BANG. Students on one side of the long table, round which their discussion took place, were thrown backwards, and on the other side, forward. About a dozen of them were on the floor. Several had wet themselves and more than one was screaming.
There was no time, no opportunity, for self-control. Their bodies were being thrown. Digby’s diaphragm would be badly bruised for weeks, as she was hurled against the sharp table edge, but instinct made her stretch, stretch across the table as she was thrown towards it. Barnaby, opposite, had been thrown out of reach; but it was towards him that she was reaching. Nothing like an earthquake for sorting out your priorities. Digby was thinking something quite simple – I do not want to die before I have had the chance to make love to you.
And as I looked at her, I was thinking exactly the same. Not about Barnaby! Not about Barnaby who, as I’ve already told you, was a nice chap and a good shag as shags go. But I wanted more than shagging, I wanted to make love. It’s different. Maybe Euripides and Digby were right and it is those capricious gods who make us love. But we are the ones who make love. And I wanted to make love to lovely Digby, the beautiful, the beloved. I wanted to kiss the white nape of her neck, and stroke her back and shoulders, and . . . Oh, my dear, I wanted it all so much. So much.
*
That WAS the minor one, back in the winter – 7.5 that one was. Quakes of that magnitude had wiped out entire Italian cities. For reasons which the geologists are still puzzling out, the shift in the
tectonic plates, some forty miles away from our city, only caused relatively minor damage. In the University, for example, the Forster Building – housing the Modern Language and Literature department – a big grey brutalist structure built of rough-hewn concrete and plate glass – was the only building to suffer truly severe structural damage. One of the heavier concrete door-lintels collapsed in the atrium. It would have caused fatality had anyone been underneath, and the structural engineers were doubtful, after the Quake and the aftershocks had subsided, whether the building would survive. It had been evacuated, and the library of the Modern Language and Literature department was now being housed temporarily in the Longden Building, a flint-knapped neo-Gothic Victorian quadrangle which had completely withstood the Quake.
All over our city, however, the Quake had done its damage. Winchester and Devon were the worst-affected of the suburbs. We were relatively lucky in Harrow. Some of our windows were broken, but the house was still standing when Mum and I got back that evening. No one in the entire city of Aberdeen had been killed, but many had been forced to move out of their homes. Thousands of houses would have to be demolished, or to undergo such substantial repair work that it was touch and go whether a rebuild would not, in the long term, be the more economic option.
Many roads had cracks in them. Many of the buildings in the centre of town were now windowless, and it took us all days to sweep up the broken glass.
There had been a great upsurge of good, civic behaviour. Students on social media had tweeted and facebooked up an army of volunteers within minutes, literally, of the first rumble, and every badly affected area soon had its band of young people in shorts, shovelling the liquefaction, helping the infirm out of their damaged properties, and, in the surviving local buildings – church halls, and the like – making tea, wrapping blankets round poor bony old shoulders, and generally being good. And there were no deaths. And for some people, that was an occasion to thank the Management.