The faint march and conversion of an age had commenced. Feminine hollow and evolutionary brain beckoned from Planet Bale. Three angels accompanied the procession. The first was Khublall. A carving of him, Mary recalled, stood over the bath in Angel Inn. The carving moved now in that faint mirror of fire, womb of mind, towards Bale. The second angel was Jackson. Mary had never seen him before. He was a Jamaican who lived in North Pole Road beyond White City. Jackson was ascending a faint ladder into the womb of history. The third angel was Wheeler, Don Juan of science. His mistresses were flesh, the faintest inch of flesh upon a distant planet, the faintest woman to be screwed out there in the universe.
Khublall mourned not Marsden but the wife nineteen years old he had lost in India after seven years of marriage. The imprint of his mourning was his clean shaven skull. In mourning his lost wife he provided a counter-balance to Mary’s tears for her Joseph to focus the mutual fire or genius of Indian Lucy and Angel Inn Mary. That mutuality addressed Joseph as he lay on the pavement on the point of death. Khublall and Jackson were passing —Marsden seized the knob of Khublall’s head. Mutual human stick rather than mutual animal carpet (that Stella had trodden in crossing to Mary) to fly around the guilty globe and up into space.
Jackson, the Jamaican angel, wore an African hairstyle. Marsden had seized it as an extension of his beard. His beard had been plastered on the pavement when the bale from the lorry struck. It swam in the shadowy blood of the pavement. Jackson tended to run and to crawl in spiral coagulations. His mixed qualities were wing and root, ladder of space; a craving to fly, a disposition to fall back into the soil. The time was ripe for him to visit a source of pregnant memory that would link him to dualities in Sukey Tawdrey and Lucy Brown.
Wheeler had been chosen as a random humanist to set Khublall’s Hindu funeral fire into curious perspective.
They were landing now on Planet Bale, the funeral of an age had commenced, the oddest conversation of an age, seed of the conversion of an age within a black Jamaican, a self-centred Hindu, a Don Juan of science. It was, to say the least, an unpromising start on the face of things to converting the multitude of banalities that ingrained the pavement of the psyche, that encircled the marble of the globe seen from lofty Bale. But faint beginnings are the only authentic shock of reality.
Marsden’s concave body was the gateway into Bale. Mary recalled Sebastian’s hollow trunk as the gateway into Dolphin Street. A neo-physical eye (or accumulation of obsolete structures to mimic the dead or greet the unborn) was planted on Bale to warn of the horrors of an atomic age and to assess magnifications one had taken for granted on Earth. On Planet Bale everything was equally magnified but for a different reason; to portray a fire that reduces “size” into “qualitative mystery” (or nothing at all) rather than “quantity-for-the-sake-of-quantity”.
In that qualitative approach to mesmeric quantity, they found themselves looking up to a mountainous brain with its smooth, bare, skull-like expanse of head turned backwards from a neck of land to expose a low beard of burning trees. It was as if the brain or head he left on the city pavement had been sliced from the region on which it stood in flashing wake or atomic accident to be driven instantly forwards upon the pavement into what seemed a great distance in the porous eyes of broken body. As a consequence they saw—as they had never seen before—the implications of invisible fire as the womb of mind in space. Constellations of random rock or skull shimmering through Mary’s body that had been lit by grace, by prophetic grace and simultaneous warning, simultaneous capacity for conversion of deeds to avert catastrophe… Wheeler’s eyes almost popped out of his head. Khublall remained non-committal but he too was moved more deeply than he wished to say. Jackson felt a profound tremor in the pit of his stomach.
Khublall saw his young bride all over again. He reached out but could not touch her in Mary’s body. Perhaps what he saw was the ash of her robe, the funeral pyre. He shook his head. He had learnt not to cry over the lessons of fate. After all, his wife’s death, by every commonsense Asian calculation, scarcely mattered upon a crowded continent teeming with millions and millions and millions of lives, and yet its very insignificance was a measure of holy atom in shaven skull. The world fell apart for him the day that she died. That a single death amidst millions of meaningless lives should brim with such grief in him was a measure of despair, of insignificance and waste that were oppressive; it was also a reflection of faint person one sees again and again in the womb of fire who is intelligible not only to despair but to prophetic seed of endangered millions and millions in a nuclear age.
Wheeler’s scientific brain was a neo-puritan tool to enjoy the flesh of the cosmos but to reduce leprous or leprotic gaieties, carnival plague. Yet with each reduction of carnival plague, that very brain—in its borrowed spoil or womb of fire—hatched automatic technologies upon which sick gaieties throve afresh in even more seductive apparel. The reduction of plague seemed therefore ultimately meaningless except in the degree that a quality of terror linked Wheeler’s science to Khublall’s mystical despair, a quality of terror that was the seed of conversion within all mutualities, the fire of fanaticism and the fire of humility, the fire of glory and the fire of sacrifice, the fire of hubris and the fire of true pride.
Jackson was intent on returning to earth and had placed his foot on the ladder. From the height on which he stood, the pavements of cities seemed to run parallel in ascent and descent to the rocks of Bale, hills uncoiled into plains, a bird’s eye glitter and mist of proportions ran through the breath of the crowds, crowds with the steam of factories, football grounds, the lighter steam of offices, the variegated steam of cinemas; crowds laughing, it seemed, with one half of a collective face, crying involuntarily with the other half, the individual fall or ebb in tidal collective hypnosis. That individual ebb and flow was Jackson’s body raised like a slightly fluttering feather far up in space. It unravelled the masquerade. The torment remained but an equation existed between material excess and the birth of prophetic spirit.
The walls of the ravine from which he needed to descend to return to Earth were flanked by sculptures he had never seen before. First came sculptures based on acquisitions of material pride so borne—they seemed from where he stood—on the back of aerial fire that they seemed magical creatures of daemonic insight into beauty and intelligence. Pride was the materialization of inner fire as well in bird’s eye glitter and mist of proportions arising from collective torment on earth; pride was increment upon increment of fire into stable form, and stability—the virtue of stability—became a masquerade aided and abetted by intelligence and beauty. Yet there was true pride however buried in a camouflage of glittering ambition.
The bird’s eye mist helped to make it strangely clear.
For it raised in Jackson’s mind the following question: where lay the essence of beauty, the essence of femininity in Mary’s fire? Had Mary incorporated into herself multi-faceted mirrors born of fire, so that one aspect of herself was so brilliantly attired, it caught something of the male animal, the exuberant feather, the exuberant colour of male birds and male creatures?
Had he (Jackson) in seeking to fly from Bale incorporated into himself something of the female animal, the female bird in nature, sober dress, the shrinkage, the reduction of blaze or colour? Was this a sign of his conversion, or of his fear, was it a sign of pregnant memory in him and that he needed to look through the flame of time in Mary’s mirrors back across the years, to look back like Khublall into his marriage and into the birth of a child he had called a “daughter of Man” and whom he had lost?
* My translation of Mary Stella Holiday’s automatic fiction now approaches stage that reflects a marked change in the materials on which I worked.
That change actually began in the encounter with Stella at the hospital gates following which Mary started to refer to Marsden by his Christian name, Joseph.
It is interesting to note that one of the first signs of this intimacy, so to speak, occurs w
hen Joseph Barber—the chauffeur who drove her to Stella’s hospital—appears. Joseph Barber has the vestige of a beard and a shadowy resemblance to Marsden. He is an inferior, however good-natured, aspect of Marsden. He “feasts on her legs” Mary reports. He is the messenger who declares that Marsden’s roots run deep in eccentric Joseph Barber lust as well as in the marvel of Joseph Marsden selfless affection. Thus in the midst of her distraught state on meeting Stella at the hospital gates arises a capacity to return to Angel Inn and perceive Marsden not only as a “father” but as “Joseph”, the man of profound, human stature who cares for her.
It is this catalyst—this identification of Joseph with all worlds, common-or-garden, metaphysical, as well as heavens above—that brings into play in Mary’s automatic book the expedition to Planet Bale that follows this interval and is promoted by her clairvoyant perception of Joseph Marsden’s death.
She arrives at Angel Inn, finds Marsden in bed after a shock he receives on the street, and is filled with foreboding as she perceives his coming death (he actually dies in June as I mention in my prefatory Note).
Her foreboding inspires her to visualize him lying dead on the street and to embark for Bale in the diminutive funeral of an age with Jackson, the Jamaican, and Khublall, the Hindu.
This brings me to the prime matter of the change in Mary’s automatic fiction.
Jackson and Khublall are a new range of character that immigrate, so to speak, into Mary’s book. They come more into play in Chapter Six after the expedition to Bale.
Jackson owes something to letters from Mack the Knife that Mary read as a child, letters in which he mentioned his first marriage to a New Orleans woman (whose daughter Jackson married).
Both names (Jackson and Khublall) also appear in Marsden’s papers in which he reports on his stay in Jamaica and the time he also spent in India.
What fascinated me about Mary’s portrayal of Jackson and Khublall is that in tone they relate to Stella—Stella the mutual facet of Mary herself (if I may so put it)—and at the same time possess another rhythm that is closer to Marsden’s inner personality. One is reminded of Joseph Barber in the matter of soil and roots of love but Jackson’s and Khublall’s kinship to Marsden is quite different and not at all as obvious as Joseph Barber’s is.
Khublall and Jackson have an independent life as marked as Stella’s and they mirror a mutuality of cultures that Marsden cultivated. But in essence, however clothed, the resemblance and kinship are there as expressive of Mary’s bond to Joseph.
Jackson’s “enchantment with the womb” lays bare Marsden’s beard-cloaked body—his “fatherhood” and “motherhood” of the people he serves. And the bizarre proposition that comes into Chapter Six that he (Jackson) is possessed by the notion that he is the mother of the child that his wife bears becomes understandable.
Khublall incorporates an aspect of father-confessor, father-inquisitor, as well as involuntary proclivity to feudal age, in his relationship to Jackson through Marsden.
It was clear to me that the marked changes in Mary’s automatic fiction coincided with “Joseph’s withdrawal”, as it were, into “fictional death” to create a curious marriage between himself and Mary (who also began to withdraw symbolically from her own narrative).
That marriage gave birth to a mutuality of cultures that brought new dangers, new potentialities, new temptations, that are visible in the remainder of the book.
It also brought a new confidence to Mary that Marsden fostered. He pointed out that she need have no guilt in the exercise of her talents. He drew her attention in Chapter Seven to W. B. Yeats’s A Vision which came into being through Yeats’s wife and her automatic informants.
Six
That day in late March when Marsden narrowly escaped the bale that sped towards him from an overturned lorry found Jackson also within a small heap of pedestrians who had leapt aside in time. He and Khublall were closest to Marsden and for an instant Marsden looked at them with eyes that seized them. So Jackson dreamt in a split second as the bale crashed open and he felt himself a ghost in a bird’s eye mist of bodies on the pavement of the city. Then he recovered as if he had fallen from a great height. This was the remarkable ex-priest of whom his father (Jackson sen.) had spoken in Jamaica. There was a clamour, a path was cleared…. Marsden was taken away in an ambulance.
Jackson jun. and Khublall were making their way across Shepherd’s Bush Green towards Wood Lane. “It’s nothing,” Khublall was saying. “The mildest of mild heart attacks. Just shock. They may not even keep him in, the hospitals are overcrowded, give him pills and send him home.”
“He knew us,” said Jackson consulting the sky in the region of Planet Bale which was now lost to him in the opaque light of pale noon that concealed the stars.
“Nonsense,” said Khublall. “We knew him. Who doesn’t know Marsden of Angel Inn? Your antecedents and my antecedents were taught by him in India, the West Indies, South America, USA, Africa, everywhere. And we still feel attached to him. Sometimes it’s as if nothing’s really changed….”
They crossed into Wood Lane and made their way past a bus depot and towards the BBC studios and Sebastian’s pavement of scripts in White City.
“Everything’s changed,” Jackson said. “I feel it in my bones. I feel it in the pit of my stomach.”
They both lived in the neighbourhood of North Pole Road (the name reminded Jackson of the Northern Lights he once saw pouring out of space like supermarket powder from Joseph’s hand at the mouth of the St Lawrence river on his way from Montreal to Marseille thirty years ago in 1950). Both men were educated night porters, carriers of subjective cargo. Jackson had studied literature and history at the University College of the West Indies in the late 1940s. Khublall was versed in Hindu lore. Thus they were qualified to cast their net into a river of sorrows encircling the globe. Late March had brought them redundancy notices and six months’ pay. They made their way into a sports ground opposite the old LMR railtrack. The ground was deserted except for the ubiquitous jogger and a group engaged in punting a football.
They sat on a bench under a lime tree and stared across the open ground towards a built-up area half-a-mile away in the vague direction of Willesden Junction.
Khublall and Jackson were casualties of history and they suffered from a mild paranoia, mild inflations of the psyche akin to unpredictable angel or mental fire in the middle of the day or night. It was as if they were both afflicted—Jackson in particular—by states of tidal emotion (camouflages of love or the fear of love) that were more complex than they themselves knew, and which were the grievous substance of bird’s eye mist of proportions of historic fall in the funeral of an age affecting colonial peoples as it affected an entire civilization, through religious or ex-religious peoples for whom the nature of loyalty to state or church—to man or woman or god—the nature of all attachment within tradition—was in crisis.
Jackson’s camouflage was the tall African hairstyle that he now cultivated. Khublall’s was the shaven head he never ceased to shave—and which marked him out as a holy man—in fair weather or foul.
“Everything has changed,” Jackson repeated softly. “I sometimes believe I am threatened by the very forces I used to serve.”
“You should consult Marsden.”
Jackson was staring now into the opaque light of the sky in the region of hidden Bale where he thought he detected a flashing bird’s wing.
“No bird but something of an old spiritual goat is Marsden,” said Khublall with affection yet teasing malice of the ancient East. “He’s on our side. He knows our temptations, our lusts. The young women who go to his Inn! Rumour exaggerates of course but I hear they’re attractive….”
“My father was an old goat,” said Jackson laughing stiffly. “Died from it. Too much of a good thing. Too much love. Nothing spiritual with him though. Pure and simple Pan. Pan—he used to say—has not only hooves to trample the serpent’s brain but he dances to a drum, sometimes a trumpet, so
metimes a piano, sometimes a clarinet and sax. The nature-voices of goat.” Jackson grew pensive. He tried to be gay, to smile. “Did I tell you of Mack, my father’s best friend?”
Khublall pretended he’d never heard the tale.
“Mack was younger than my father. At least ten years. In 1950 Mack was forty-five, my father fifty-five. I was just twenty-four….”
“That means you’re now as old as your father was in the middle of the century.” Khublall spoke as if this constituted a milestone or celebration. “We must declare a holiday.”
“Right. The holiday wheel of sobering age comes round again and again. Who said that? I can’t remember. But it sounds okay to me. When one has knocked around as I have … It was Mack who got me a cheap passage out of Montreal to Marseille in 1950. I’d gone to Canada straight from University College to try my luck but things were slow and I elected, god knows why, to come to England by way of the Mediterranean. I suppose it was my elder brother beckoning, he’d enlisted and died in the Royal Air Force. Shot down in a raid over Bremen.” Jackson stopped. His face was veiled. “I’ve never been able to locate his grave. He’s one of those with a blank tombstone. Perhaps his bones are at the bottom of a ditch or a lake and will lie there in an ocean of time. Now where did I read that? Sounds too grand for my brother! Mack also had a wife in England, by the way, and a baby daughter called Stella. She’d be in her early or mid-thirties today. I’m not sure. He also had a grown-up daughter (an earlier marriage) twenty-three or twenty-four, and she was singing under the name of Sukey Tawdrey in a band in Europe. A luscious strip-tease, a beautiful slut. Nothing new in that. He said I’d find her in Marseille and he gave me a letter. It was fate. Within a year we’d had a daughter. I used to wonder when I settled in England whether that child—Mack’s granddaughter—and his English daughter Stella would meet. There wasn’t more than a couple of years or so between them. Four or five at the outside. I’m a stickler for dates and years though much else is retreating into a mist. Perhaps they have met in paradise wherever paradise parks itself nowadays. Perhaps they’ve stood on the grave of the unknown soldier of paradise, a random grave possessed of many faces, the face of the master and the face of the servant. What has Donne said about it or is it Paul in his letters to posterity? I used to dream of bringing them all together, the living and the dead….” He stopped and poked Khublall in the ribs, then stared at his shaven head. “In the 1950s I used to cut my hair close, Khubbie Old Boy. Not as damned close as you …”
The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) Page 9