RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  WHICH HOPE WE HAVE AS

  AN ANCHOR OF THE SOUL

  BOTH SURE AND STEADFAST

  FAITH IS THE SUBSTANCE

  OF THINGS HOPED FOR

  THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

  To one side stands a memorial dedicated to Sir John Franklin and his expedition, listing the crew lost on his ships Terror and Erebus. Overlooked by shards of marble ice – from which, as Woolf imagined, the explorers looked out ‘to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars’ – a disconsolate figure in mittens and boots mourns one of the lost, found by an American expedition in 1869 and whose anonymous remains are interred below, an unknown warrior of the Arctic.

  Leaving this sombre interior, I cross to the Painted Hall and walk into a bursting polychromatic lightbox. Floodlit by huge windows, its vast murals are as vivid as a colonoscopy. This echoing space, where Melville watched the inmates dine, was a truly extravagant interior for such an ordinary purpose, created by the architects Wren and Hawksmoor and the artist James Thornhill. Its opulent canopy, a Technicolor trick of the eye, is animated with classical gods, monarchs and emblems of the four known continents – Australia was yet to be discovered – with New England represented by a Native American in a war bonnet; soaring across the walls are cosmological symbols of the seasons and stars. Washed by grey London light, the effect of this panoply is overpowering, sending the visitor below scurrying across the black and white tiles like a beetle.

  And at the point at which any sacred place would be dedicated to a saint there are two brass plaques let into the floor. One commemorates Vice-Admiral Collingwood; the other, his fellow commander. For three days in January 1806, thirty thousand souls trooped into this chamber, its windows boarded up and its murals deadened with black crêpe, lit by hundreds of candles. It was a sepulchral stage set, directing all eyes to the hero whose disembowelled corpse lay in a black-velvet-covered coffin studded with bronze symbols of a sphinx, a crocodile and a dolphin; heraldic familiars from his victories to accompany him into the afterlife.

  The sheer press of people threatened to throw the arrangements into disarray; the authorities feared a riot. On 8 January Nelson’s coffin was placed on a barge and rowed up the Thames to the Admiralty, accompanied by so many vessels that one could have stepped across them from one bank to the other, and passed under bridges so crowded that bystanders fell off and drowned as a result of their eagerness to see the last of their saviour.

  Brought to shore at the Whitehall Stairs, the bier was carried on a funerary car shaped to resemble Victory, complete with glazed stern and a figurehead bearing a victorious wreath. The procession was so long that its end hadn’t left Whitehall by the time its beginning reached St Paul’s; all the while, it was watched by murmuring crowds. Inside the cathedral, another Wren interior, a huge tiered wooden arena had been built to accommodate the congregation. The sound of military bands playing a tune to Psalm 104 – ‘Yonder is the sea, great and wide | which teems with things innumerable, | living things both small and great. | There go the ships, and Leviathan which thou didst form to sport on it’ – swirled around the Whispering Gallery, which was lit by one hundred and sixty Argand lamps burning whale oil.

  Then, in a final piece of theatre which to one newspaper smacked of a ‘stage trick’, the coffin was lowered directly through the floor of the nave to the crypt below. Sir John Moore would have harrumphed. At that point, the sailors of Victory came forward. They were supposed to fold the colours and lay them on their commander’s coffin, yet such was their fervour that they tore the flag into pieces, the scraps of red, white and blue becoming relics of a man who had been translated into a myth.

  Meanwhile, a few miles away, William Blake was at work on his own mystical tribute – The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations of the Earth – in which the admiral rises naked and transcendent from the dead, an Apollo arrayed on the coils of a sea monster.

  Three years later, as Blake displayed his finished picture in his brother’s Soho shop, the river received another body. In 1809 a ‘wonderful large fish’ was seen south of Greenwich at Sea Reach.

  This leviathan – a seventy-six-foot-long fin whale – was shot, taking four hours to die, before being displayed at Gravesend: a suitably-named site, where the grey mud is the colour of a Weimaraner, where Pocahontas died of disease before she could return to Virginia, where Mayflower dropped down with the tide on her way to Southampton, and where Franklin’s Arctic explorers would attend their last service at a waterside chapel. Thousands viewed its carcase.

  It seemed each generation summoned its own sacrificial beast up the river. In October 1849, Melville’s arrival in London was preceded by another whale, laid out on the front page of the Illustrated London News below a report on the Irish famine, as if he had imagined it out of his future story. Labourers had seen something dark floating on the water, ‘when suddenly the violent plunging and dashing of one end of it intimated to the men that it was some living monster of the deep’. The fifty-eight-foot fin whale ‘made desperate efforts to obtain its freedom’, but was duly lashed with ropes and dragged onto the beach where, ‘by the aid of a sword its life was dispatched, and the men then set about inclosing it for exhibition’.

  The rain is pouring down at the end of an Indian summer as I cycle into the car park off Trafalgar Road, Greenwich. An anonymous warehouse stands before me; it might contain frozen foods or car parts. I sign in, deposit my soaking rucksack, and am conducted by Amy and Louise into a cavernous, climate-controlled space. Amy, who is from Pennsylvania, is lamenting London’s lack of an autumn. She strides to one of the giant racks and pulls out a wire grid on wheels. Hanging from it rather haphazardly, as if it had just been found in a skip, is a large gilt frame; and within the frame, a full-length portrait of Nelson painted by Leonardo Guzzardi to commemorate the Battle of the Nile in 1798. It was this victory which earned Nelson his chelengk – along with enough booty to please any pirate, including another diamond-set tribute from the Russian czar, a sable pelisse from the grateful monarch of Sardinia, and the dukedom of Bronté from the King of Naples.

  In Guzzardi’s painting, commissioned for the sultan in return for his gift, Nelson stands resplendent in dress coat and white breeches, as bedecked as a Christmas tree. One arm points out of the frame to the enemy fleet he has destroyed. The other, of course, is lacking; his empty sleeve lies across his breast, both useless and potent. His stance is balanced; as the two curators note, it is that of a dancer rather than a fighter. ‘Everything in the eighteenth century was about the legs,’ Amy tells me. To modern eyes, the hero’s shoulders slope inordinately; all attention is focused downwards, in an unmistakeably sensual manner.

  I see an entire era anew. It’s like being given access to a secret code, only to realise how obvious it was all along.

  Nelson slips one slender leg in front of the other. His pose reminds me of Mr Turveydrop, the dancing master in Bleak House, a pomaded relic of the Regency, usually to be found ‘in a state of deportment not to be expressed’. The classical ideal, says Amy, was to look like a marble statue.

  But all this civilian distinction, more suited to a ball than a battle, is dispelled by Nelson’s face. Only in this portrait are his wounds so visible; it is more pathology than painting, like a medical illustration from the Royal College of Surgeons. Running from his hairline to his eyebrow (half of which has been shaved off) is an insane Ahabian scar – as if he’d been struck by lightning – a zigzag rip which left a flap of skin dangling in front of his already blind eye, exposing his skull.

  This living Nelson is a damaged, emaciated, asymmetrical figure. As the skin fell over his face during the battle, blood pouring into his eyes, he collapsed into the arms of Captain Edward Berry and was carried below, crying, ‘I am killed, remember me to my wife,’ and calling for his chaplain. Stitched by the ship’s surgeon in dim light, the repair is not an invisible one. Any dandy would have reprimand
ed his tailor for such work.

  Nor was it the first time he had nearly died. In an expedition to the Arctic as a fifteen-year-old coxswain, Nelson had leapt onto the ice to shoot a polar bear whose pelt he wanted as a present for his father. In the legendary scene, he discharged his weapon, missed, and only a chasm opening up between him and the beast preserved him. ‘Never mind,’ Southey had him say; ‘do but let me get a blow at this devil with the butt-end of my musket, and we shall have him.’ Nelson was, said Southey, feeble in body but affectionate in heart. In India he fell victim to a disease which defied diagnosis and left him ‘reduced almost to a skeleton’, unable to use his limbs. In the Caribbean, having avoided being bitten by a venomous snake, he drank poisoned water that left ‘a lasting injury upon his constitution’ according to his doctor; perhaps he was a victim of the same vodou which poisoned Bro’s moonlit dolphin. He then contracted dysentery, which rendered him so helpless that, like Elizabeth, he had to be carried to and from his bed, ‘and the act of moving him produced the most violent pain’. Even his family seemed prone to dramatic tragedy: in 1783 his sister Anne ‘died in consequence of going out of the ballroom at Bath when heated with dancing’.

  Nelson was so attuned to his own mortality that he had a coffin set upright in his cabin behind his dining chair. He was forever rehearsing his noble fate, falling and rising and falling again. He was one long wreck. The year before the Battle of the Nile, when his arm was smashed by a musketball at Tenerife, he told his sixteen-year-old stepson Josiah standing next to him, ‘I am a dead man.’ After it was amputated, his arm reappeared as a phantom limb: feeling his own ghostly fingers pressing into his palm, Nelson declared he’d discovered ‘direct evidence of the existence of the Soul … For if an arm can survive annihilation why not the whole person?’ In Moby-Dick, as he lies sleeping with Queequeg’s arm around him, Ishmael is scared by the childhood memory of his sleep-deadened hand; while Ahab, feeling the tingle of his own lost leg, muses on the absence: ‘How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? … And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!’ The age invented Nelson: a Creature of his constituent parts; or already a resurrected god, as Blake saw him.

  Amy and Louise are busy on the other side of the room. Working a sort of windlass, Amy opens up a floor-to-ceiling unit and, with Louise’s help, takes out three white body-length bags, one after the other. Carrying them as carefully as orderlies might lift a patient or a cetologist a dead porpoise, the two women lay them on the table. One by one, their shrouds are unwrapped for my benefit.

  Out of that bright whiteness, in the fluorescent-lit laboratory interior, the god is revealed in wool and thread and metal. The intense, almost black navy cloth is revealed under the kind of light it would never have seen in its occupant’s lifetime, its lustrous darkness enhanced by rows of gold buttons two centuries have failed to dull. The mattness of the material, which lies so flat, is heightened by these gilt bursts. It is in these contrasting qualities that the essential power of these garments lies. Over the next two hours we talk over the three coats like doctors at a bedside, moving from one to the other as our assessments are made. Every detail, every loop of gold thread, every delicate stitch is discussed and diagnosed as we admire artefacts as finely engineered as any ship of the line.

  Opening up the first – the undress coat worn by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, as seen by Melville and Hawthorne two centuries ago – Amy shows me the fine linen lining, darkened at the neck and lower down by rusty brown stains. Nelson’s blood, she says matter-of-factly, even though she is as aware as Hawthorne, her fellow American, was of the ritual power of those words. Flipping the coat over with Louise’s help, like a nurse administering a bedbath, Amy points out a greasy horizontal smear on the back, just below the collar. It is the tideline of Nelson’s pomade, left behind as his pigtail brushed back and forth while its owner issued commands and exhortations. This honoured raiment is a grubby, scabby rag, a reminder of the messy business of being human. It would normally be Amy’s signal duty to expel any organic substance from such an important item. Here it is her task to preserve Nelson’s memory and conserve his genetic residue, as if he might at some future point be regenerated when England needed him again.

  But then, the cloth itself is impregnated with the subtle oil of Spanish Royal Escurial merino sheep, their fleeces coated with mud which dried en croute to preserve their lanolin, producing wool so prized that English visitors would be taken to see the crusty ruminants as if they were a stop on the Grand Tour, as essential as any Michelangelo statue carved in marble. This fabric, with its threads finer than human hair, absorbed the indigo dye that enabled the colour known as navy blue, advertised in the eighteenth-century press as the patriotic shade to wear in wartime; an austere, deluxe colour, the same deep blue which adorned Beau Brummell’s dandiacal body. Once milled, felted and pressed, the cloth lay so neat and tight that it needed no hems. The raw edges of this coat are just that: raw, still bearing the cut marks of the tailor’s scissors, shaped out of his art with exquisite precision.

  History takes over. Nelson steps out from Luzzardi’s canvas, leaving a human hole in the canvas, to lie on the melamine table for our intimate examination. The effect is fixating, sensual; the cloth lies around the admiral’s absent body as a fabric memory, all curves and flaps and seams and pleats. The tailors – Gieves of London, Meredith of Portsmouth – worked late into the night by candlelight focused through glass bulbs, filled with water rather than electricity, to create these miraculous constructions.

  There’s a naval strategy to this design: the sweep of the lapel, the rise of the collar, the arch of the pockets; they too contain codes. These are maritime coats, made for the sea, amphibiously adapted from the land and worn with white woollen breeches for warmth and ease of movement. They might be soaked with seawater, but such outfits were never washed. Shoulders would be sponged, breeches brightened with pipe clay; I daresay they’d have stood up of their own accord. The pleated skirts swung as Nelson walked, an echo of the extravagant attire of the macaronis of a generation before. Rather than set or follow fashion, military garb absorbed and slowed it down, incorporating it into its own masculine flash. Any other man covered in such fine cloth and gold lace – cuffs as weighed down with gold thread as any chunk of gold chain – might be regarded as offensively flamboyant. No one could accuse Nelson of that, at least not to his stitched-up face. Yet the implicit swagger of those skirts combined with his torn face, his scars, his missing arm and eye to create an autofact as reconstructed as his vessel; an elegant man of war at home in a salon with his mistress, at a torchlit gothic party thrown by a noble pederast, or on a lurching deck, dealing death. As Amy says, such a costume civilised a hired killer. A murderer in the ballroom.

  As we work through the three coats, I continue with my questions, as I would over the necropsy of a cetacean. What is this for, why is this there, what does that mean? Why all this gold thread and silver wire, sequins and shiny green foil, so brilliant and ersatz that they might have been confected from the wrappers of a tin of Quality Street? The three Nelsons laid before us are eloquent of his stature as well as his status: the narrow-cut shoulders, the nipped-in waist, the length of the coat are evidence of a short man, five foot six inches tall. I long to slip my arms in those slim sleeves and feel the skirts sway and bounce like a kilt; to be constrained by its tight chest and back; to be a hero, just for a minute or two. Yet for all the finery of these items, they are overshadowed by one last detail. In each coat, Nelson’s redundant right sleeve – which goes unlined, in a random act of economy – ends in a thin silk loop, fixing the empty reminder of a former skirmish to his coat front; as much a badge of honour as any of the other awards sewn there.

&n
bsp; Our audience with the admiral is over. As Amy and Louise fold the clothes like valets returning their master’s attire, I notice a sequin fall out of one coat – a dull tarnished disc, like the scale of a fish or a lizard’s eyelid, a bit of stardust. I consider licking my finger and dabbing it up as an illicit memento. Instead, I do my duty and point it out to Amy, who tucks it back into the cloth. The coats vanish back into the collection. The unit rolls to a close with a click, and we sign out of the building.

  In old age, Melville’s youthful trips to Greenwich and Portsmouth came back to haunt him. They were the holding places for his last story, as if he had been saving them up. His visits to those ports, which had precipitated the triumph and failure of his great white whale, rushed back like a late tide. With them they brought the body and soul of the Handsome Sailor, washed ashore at his feet.

  Billy Budd is a work of poetry only pretending to be prose. It was written as an elegy from the end of Melville’s life, long since spent on land as a customs inspector on the banks of New York’s East River. It is a melancholy, beautiful tale, seen through his personal, and a greater, history; the momentous century he lived through, yet which in many ways passed him by. Melville was always at sea, in his head. You could see it in his eyes, as if the ocean pooled in them, as if his eyes had become the sea.

  In his 1923 essay on Herman Melville, D.H.Lawrence saw the American as ‘the greatest seer and poet of the sea’, ‘half a water animal … a modern Viking’. He had, said Lawrence, ‘the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness. He isn’t quite a land animal. There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they said he was mad – or crazy.’ He was the outcast and the sensor, like Thomas Jerome Newton, Martin Eden, and Jay Gatsby, a lost, lone figure, all at sea. ‘For with sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvellous wireless-station, he registers the effects of the outer world … of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact.’