The Angel at the Gate
WILSON HARRIS
For Margaret,
Rowan and Laurence
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, should I fade in the strength of his
stronger existence? Is beauty nothing
but beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear?
From ‘The Duino Elegies’ by Rainer Maria Rilke
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
From ‘East Coker’ by T. S. Eliot
The dialectic of the sacred permits all reversibilities; no “history” is final. History is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and diminution. But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly.
From ‘Shamanism’ by Mircea Eliade
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Note
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Copyright
Note
I was approached by Father Joseph Marsden, a year or so before his death in June 1981, to analyse and interpret the automatic writing of his secretary and patient Mary Stella Holiday, an assumed name we adopted to avoid embarrassment for the person concerned. I worked on The Angel at the Gate under his supervision and had virtually finished the book when he collapsed and died suddenly.
The materials with which I worked were drawn not only from automatic narratives but also from notes Marsden had compiled in conversation with Mary Holiday. Some of these conversations were conducted under hypnosis.
There was a series of underlying rhythms in the automatic narratives through which unconscious motivation was mirrored in a variety of objects such as wheel, shawl, bale, chariot, and in flowers and the animal kingdom. I mention this briefly to make clear why these assume the proportions they possess in The Angel at the Gate.
Marsden approved of the procedures I adopted and felt they were consistent with the truths of the narrative. I owe him a great deal in the construction of this “fiction”. He helped me interpret the musical compositions by which Mary it seems was haunted from early childhood. There is no doubt that he assisted her profoundly to steer a path through a desolating period of her life and that her debt to him is enormous. On the other hand, he made no bones of the insights he gained from her and the debt he owed to her which possessed a darker rhythm in past generations when one of his white antecedents had purchased a black antecedent of hers in eighteenth-century Angel Inn behind St Clement’s Church in the Strand.
Mary suffered from a physical and nervous malaise as The Angel at the Gate makes clear. Through Marsden—the medical care he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which gave scope to her “automatic talents”—that illness became a catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional life for “Stella” (apart from “Mary”) in order to unravel the thread that runs through a diversity of associations in past and present “fictional lives”.
I was astonished at the sudden, clairvoyant perception of Marsden’s death that comes at a particular moment in her automatic narratives. That clairvoyance is associated with the rhythms of a mirror that seem to enfold “presences” and “absences” around the globe. Marsden submitted himself to her, so to speak, as the target of a variety of masks with which she clothed him but the clairvoyant perception of his death was a strange climax between them in which his “fictional death” matched her “absences of self” through which she descended into a series of characters—their limitations and follies—drawn from associations of childhood in her father’s letters to her mother before she was orphaned or abandoned at the age of seven.
Her insights seem to me extraordinary and the characters she creates I have deemed “fictional” as I have no means of checking the letters and childhood associations from which they may actually derive.
She had, at one stage, contemplated leaving her husband and child but in the end succeeded in placing a variety of stressful legacies into perspective. This gave her a means of coping with despair. Marsden left his private fortune to her. This has now become a source of “good works” and a means of helping victims under threat of “possession” by daemonic powers.
W.H.
One
Sebastian Holiday read the note in his hand for the twentieth time with pride in his hollow senses when he came to the three phrases—“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John”. Then he began from the beginning all over again—
Sebastian,
Have taken 80 no 90 valium tablets. Can’t carry on. Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John.
Stella
He folded the note with care as if he almost feared the dry ink would blot, and placed it in his breast pocket, then sank into a chair with half-collapsed springs that faced a couch across the room; over the couch a huge Jean Harlow poster had been pinned to the wall.
His eyes were bright, yet curiously blind, body grew hollow in the pit of the chair this late February afternoon; the year was 1981.
The light seeped through the curtained window to give a sheen to the walls of the room that matched Sebastian’s eyes. The Jean Harlow print was suffused with the ghost of the winter sun. Sebastian felt himself descending into that pooled ghost as if everything conspired to mask his innermost emotion. He gripped the arm of the chair as if it were materialized script in a book of riddles; the broken springs on which he sat were less the fabric of a chair and more a half-sunken, half-floating boat. The glimmering pool stroked baby John’s toys (the child was close on three years old) along the wall running at right angles to Sebastian’s boat.
Wooden lorries rather than boats were beached on their sides against a train with which John loved to play. Trains were his greatest amusement. He sometimes converted the lorries into carriages that he pulled and tugged behind an imaginary engine on imaginary tracks around the room. Then there was the skeleton house that John also was fond of, a sophisticated toy, with rooms that could be scanned, or re-assembled, through ribbed apertures, collapsible doors and windows. In one skeleton room a dentist leaned over a sailor, in another a barber trimmed a bearded man, in another guests had assembled for a feast presided over by a cat John had seated at the head of the table. The front door bell suddenly pealed. Mary had forgotten her key. Sebastian arose from the boat of his chair above skeleton house and imaginary train.
“Such a beautiful evening,” Mary said to him at the front door. “It will soon be dark.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the sky which was pale rose and smoke.
“Oh yes,” said Sebastian, but he saw nothing himself except the smudge of an aeroplane drawn across the fluid light above the houses on the other side of Dolphin Street.
Mary was now inside. She closed the door behind her and switched on the light in the corridor leading to the sitting room from which Sebastian had come.
“You needn’t worry about John,” she said gently. “Mothe
r’s keeping him until Stella’s back. I must remember to collect his toys. How is Stella?”
It was now almost three days since Stella had been rushed to a hospital within an hour of taking the valium; the tablets had been drawn from her stomach in the nick of time before they had penetrated the bloodstream.
“She’s still flat on her back staring at the ceiling,” said Sebastian in a curious voice. Was it muffled remorse, muffled self-pity, that struck an echo in Mary’s heart? “Asking to see me and you all the time …”
I can’t bear to visit … Mary thought but she remained silent. They were now in the kitchen and she was rummaging in a bag of potatoes, carrots and greens. “I’ve bought some ham,” she said. Sebastian watched her, unseeingly it seemed, as she extracted the vegetables and peeled them swiftly. “I may be late tomorrow, Sebastian. Can you cope?”
“Of course I can cope,” said Sebastian. “I’m not a bloody child.”
“Not a child,” said Mary. “And yet I arrived last night to find you sitting like wood in the darkness without a light on in the entire house. Oh Sebastian, sometimes I feel we’re children playing, all of us, at being mature.” She was astonished she had said so much. It was the shadow of recent events speaking in her.
“Speak for yourself,” said Sebastian. He extracted the letter from his breast pocket.
Oh not that again, thought Mary. You’ve read it to me at least a dozen times. But she listened patiently nevertheless.
“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John.”
Mary’s eyes looked back to Stella’s through Sebastian’s as he finished the letter and looked at her with a shadow on his face that seemed to mirror all three. His eyes were deceptively open but their threaded look, threaded faces, disconcerted her. Were they kind, universal eyes or cruel, universal eyes that she and Stella shared with him? Whose eyes was she seeing? What a question to ask silently of “eyes” she thought she knew that suddenly mirrored the veiled darkness of the community of the world as if one of John’s imaginary trains flashed through a darkened, urban landscape, lights on darkened stations in an unreal pool of place, an unreality all the more disturbing in that it had been created by oneself, though how or why one could scarcely tell, Mary felt.
Why did Stella’s note written in a moment of helplessness, a moment of suicidal depression, enter him (penetrate his bloodstream) like a transfusion of pride? Did pride spring from the helplessness of others masquerading as perverse love for one’s accomplishments, for one’s apparent strength? She must ask Father Marsden. He was the only one who knew of the perversity, yet mystery of love.
Two
Sebastian was incapable of killing a fly, Mary knew. Violence saturated magazines and films but it left him drained. It left him in need of perverse affection. To strike a blow was to confess to his debilitation and need. Mary had witnessed some of the pathetic, yet shocking, scenes between Sebastian and Stella, and sometimes she dreamt she could see the epic devil of divine need of attention in his eyes when he and Stella quarrelled until Mary was enveloped in their claustrophobia. Claustrophobia was descent into the womb, into the devil’s foetal gun or foetal knife that needs to kill another it loves in the mother of space. Needs me! thought Mary. Needs the same woman broken into wife and sister. If Stella dies, something in me dreams that it needs to die to find another route back to life.
The devil’s need of affection and attention came to a sudden, ironic climax in Stella’s attempted or staged suicide after an unhappy quarrel. Then it was that the devil popped out of Sebastian’s eyes and became absolutely real. He came upon Stella’s letter half an hour after she had taken the pills, she was lying curled into a ball in bed, John was asleep, Mary was at her mother’s. All Sebastian had to do to achieve his wife’s death was nothing, the simplest thing in the world. Leave her alone. Go for a long walk. Do nothing.
“Instead he rushed from the house,” Mary told Father Marsden, “as if the devil were at his backside, phoned for an ambulance and sat with Stella on the way to the hospital after asking a neighbour to keep an eye on John.”
“Ah,” said Father Marsden, “nothing surprising in that, my dear Mary. Your brother was possessed by the angel of need he himself invoked. Death is like birth; it is landslide one invokes to make oneself into a loved giant as one runs to meet it and to stay it.
“Sebastian’s hell is to be possessed by the angel of perverse need of love he invoked in wishing his wife dead. One man’s greedy or murderous wish for love touches us all—the ramifications are infinite. Self-created universe. Self-created limbo. When his wish was answered, his legs multiplied. They turned into the wheels of an ambulance, they became proud of themselves, obsessed with the riddle of love that motivates many a hospital founded by repentant millionaires. It’s an old story, old as daemons and gods we have forgotten.”
“Oh! I hadn’t realized …” said Mary.
“Realized what?”
“Why, that Sebastian may yet turn into a good man, even a god; he may become the founder of paradise.”
Father Marsden laughed with (rather than at) his student. The annunciation of humour was as unconscious of parody of the sacred as the birth of charity was sometimes unconscious of the devil of guilt. They sprang from uncanny remorse, uncanny hope, and comedy of everlasting spirit. In Mary’s naïveté, Marsden knew, lay the grain of uncanny hope in a bewildered world, the grain of ambivalent paradise in every loved giant.
It was eleven on that third evening since Stella’s attempted suicide that Mary and Sebastian turned in after “looking at the news”: President Reagan speaking of his budget, food kitchens in famine-stricken Ethiopia and the fossil-television bodies of starving children, reports of a mysterious light in the sky that American military personnel had first interpreted as an atomic trial in South Africa until they came to identify it, though still uncertain, with a passing meteorite, scenes of coffins of victims of a fire borne to their grave in Dublin, Ireland …
A time of fires, a time of famine, thought Mary, as she undressed. Within the past week or so one had been inundated by fires. There had been a fire in New Cross Road, London, where a birthday party was being held, resulting in the death of thirteen young West Indians. There had been the Dublin inferno, a dance hall on fire. Another blaze had consumed a hotel in the gamblers’ paradise of America, Las Vegas….
Mary gently lifted the covers and slipped in beside Sebastian. It was habit with them from early childhood into adolescence to sleep side by side on occasion, sometimes once or twice a month when they were adult. Stella was startled at first when she married Sebastian but accepted it as one accepts the gravity of innocence and as a natural, however bizarre, regression into the womb of space. She was two years older than they, thirty-five to their twin thirty-three. Their naked bodies did not touch. Mary’s was as smooth as silk, Sebastian’s roughened in places from the labouring jobs he occasionally did, digging trenches, brick-laying, hospital portering, shirt-less in many weathers of body and hollow mind. He had had a tough time since he had lost his job as an electrician in 1978. He had worked for broken stretches since then within which he would collapse like a marionette and subsist on the dole for staccato—apparently gestating—periods during which he fought with the need for attention to restore his self-respect. He fought within a darkness ignited by ambivalent love, ambivalent hatred of Stella and Mary. (Sebastian scarcely uttered a word about this—he had little vocabulary with which to do so—but Mary was convinced that this interpretation of his behaviour gave “meaning” to his “meaningless” lusts, “meaningless” hatreds. Who could know better than she the transparent polarization of kith and kin, yet twin, married bodies, they inhabited?)
Their bodies did not touch in essence, Mary knew, uncertain in what degree she was dreaming of herself or of frustrated Stella. Perhaps baby John had been conceived within the unconscious embrace of brother and sister (rather than husband and wife) and Stella’s discovery of her pregnancy
just over three-and-a-half years ago was as startling as if a phantom cuckoo had deposited an egg in Mary’s (rather than Stella’s) body.
Mary dreamt that she lay in Sebastian’s mind dreaming of the foundations of paradise. A butterfly arose out of Dolphin Street kitchen and garden and its wings succeeded in drawing Mary and Stella together into the rhythm of a pulsating creature Sebastian sought to kiss and to kill at wishfulfilment stroke. He was astonished that wished-for fire under the dress of earth had drawn wives and sister-populations into a live butterfly which flew close to his eyes and mouth with the food of its wings. At first it seemed the soul of bread, the soul of possession, in a violent universe. He began to play a majestic lament to quintessential bride, quintessential property.
Mary woke abruptly. The vividness of her dream left her weak. She shivered almost imperceptibly; the butterfly in her blood warned of the curse that was soon to come. Another two days or three, perhaps four. The light of the ashy, winter morning seeped through the vaguely mud-coloured curtains. She was relieved to find Sebastian had not actually moved. He was a foot or two away from her, sound asleep, snoring at her side. Nothing to match the majestic lament of the flute he had played. Such were the anti-climactic foundations of paradise in Dolphin Street. Mary was relieved, then amused, but despite everything, despite nameless fears, despite sordid chorus, despite a deprived feeling at the pit of her stomach, there remained a sensation of the majesty of the flute that had entered her body—the body of time—since creation began. Sister and wife as catalyst for child and mother. In the grey light and ash of winter—inchoate, pre-menstrual genesis of the sun—life sought intercourse with death’s sleeping brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, in every stricken place around the globe that cohered nevertheless into endangered paradise.
The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) Page 1