The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  With sincerest regards,

  Norman MacEwan.

  (The name was signed with a large flourish.)

  At that moment I knew what I must do. I took the almost weeping girl out to my house in my car and left her with my wife. As we drove along I would look sideways at her and notice how now and again tears would brim her eyes and deep in my heart I cursed MacEwan. When I had left her in the house after explaining the situation to my wife in a few words, I got into my car and went in search of my student. I remember staring bleakly at the autumn trees that lined the side of the avenue and wondering whether I had the strength for the confrontation that was necessary. I had never before been called to such a task and perhaps my resources were not equal to it.

  I found his flat in a crowded part of the city and rang the doorbell. A large woman with a Roman nose came to the door and when I asked her if MacEwan was at home admitted that he was. I asked her if I could see him. She said she would get him but added that he might be working as he had come in late the previous night. I waited stubbornly, feeling the tides of anger rising steadily in me, far away from my own quiet avenue in the centre of the turbulent city.

  After an almost insulting interval, Norman appeared at the door. We stared at each other in a hostile manner but I was pleased to see that he looked haggard and unshaven.

  ‘I should like to see you on a matter of some urgency,’ I said and my voice sounded pompous even to myself. ‘Not here,’ I added. ‘I should be glad if you would come for a drive in my car.’

  ‘If you like,’ he said quite casually, his ill face sullen and bristly.

  In silence we got into the car. I said nothing at all and neither did he as we drove out from the centre of the city and headed towards a quiet area where there was a wood in which I often walked when I wished to think. He stared rigidly ahead of him and I with gritted teeth concentrated on my driving, trying to think how I might open our conversation later.

  Finally we reached the wood and I got out and he followed me. The trees were in glorious golden foliage and now and again I could hear twitterings from the trees. Once I saw a grey squirrel scampering up a trunk half in shadow and half in sunshine.

  I stopped and thrust the letter at him. He glanced at it knowing what it was, and handed it back without speaking.

  ‘What does that letter mean?’ I said to him, my anger rising again.

  ‘It means what it says,’ he said in a voice which was almost impertinent.

  We came to a bench in the middle of the wood where there was a sunny clearing and I said to him, ‘I would be grateful if you would sit there for a moment while I talk to you. I think better when I’m walking up and down.’

  I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts and then I said to him, ‘First of all, I should like you to tell me what you think of me.’

  He looked startled for a moment and then said quite finally, ‘I believe that you are interested in comfort. I believe that you have betrayed the church.’

  ‘And what then do you believe the church should be doing?’ I asked him.

  ‘I believe,’ he said in the same positive voice, ‘that the church should be much more extreme than it is. I believe in sin, I believe in hell. I do not believe in fatness and port.’

  ‘And now do you mind if I tell you what I think of you?’ I told him, catching at that moment a glimpse of a pheasant of the most incredibly complicated stained glass colours walking through the wood.

  He nodded bleakly, his stubbly face seeming more hollow-cheeked than usual in the varying sunlight and shadow.

  ‘Well, then,’ I said with the same conviction as he had shown, ‘I think you have a mediocre mind.’

  He made as if to say something but didn’t, though a nerve in his jaw quivered.

  ‘You asked for honesty and truth,’ I said to him, ‘and I am giving it to you. You have a mediocre mind in that there is not in it the slightest glimmering of originality. Oh, I know that you have your dramatic and debating successes and that now and again you bring to birth with premeditated labour a bon mot or two. I know all that but that is not originality. I am not original,’ I said. ‘I am mediocre. The difference between us is that I have recognised this but you haven’t. Of course you’re young and it is hard for you to accept what I’m saying but you will have to eventually. If not now, then later.’

  He gazed at me with his stony gaze though now and then I saw the nerve twitching in his jaw. He was no Isaac to me and I no Abraham (as in the story by Kierkegaard) but I was determined on this murder, this necessary murder, just the same. I must not be moved by pity of his pallor, that was irrelevant.

  ‘I said,’ I continued, ‘that you have a mediocre mind. If you accepted this you might do better. There are very few people with original minds. You are not one of them.’ Suddenly I lashed out at him, ‘You are no Kierkegaard.’

  There was a silence in which I heard a cuckoo crying its double note, pure and excessively joyful.

  ‘Let me refer you to your letter. Do you know that you have used in it a phrase by Kierkegaard, that phrase about the lonely tree? Kierkegaard’s “solitary pine”. That was the phrase he applied to himself after he had jilted Regine. Tell me something,’ I said. ‘Why did you turn to drama after you had been so strict and inward in your early days here?’

  He did not reply but looked straight ahead, tense and pale.

  ‘Shall I tell you all of it? Well then, you read that Kierkegaard in his youth was interested in the theatre, that he was something of a dandy given to bons mots. That was why you changed, wasn’t it? You were imitating him, weren’t you?’

  He still said nothing.

  ‘I believe that was quite deliberate and conscious on your part,’ I said. ‘But that part wasn’t evil. That was harmless enough. I repeat, that part was harmless enough.’ I waited for him to speak but he still said nothing. In that wood there was a dead colour about his skin, a ghostly almost fishlike hue.

  ‘Shall I tell you what was truly evil?’ I continued as if hammering nails. ‘You discovered Helen. Where did you meet her?’

  There was no answer. A greenness from the leaves mottled his white face.

  ‘You set out to meet her. You set out to find a girl who would fulfil the correct qualifications of your story. She must be the daughter of a Councillor. Oh, I know that Regine’s father was not a councillor in our sense of the word but perhaps you didn’t know that. You waited till you found someone who would love you and who would be normal and unambitious and conventional. That I consider evil. For why did you set out to find her? You did so in order that you might jilt her so that you might fulfil the law of Kierkegaard for that was exactly what he did. He went further than you in that he engaged himself to Regine, and when broken-hearted she wrote to him he sent her a cold letter and went out of his way quite deliberately to show himself to her in a cold light.’

  Suddenly he burst out, ‘It was necessary, to continue the life of the spirit.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘I believe that Kierkegaard was grossly mistaken. I believe that he acted in a criminal manner.’

  ‘Criminal?’ He stood up at last facing me and vibrating like a gaunt bird. ‘Criminal! How could the foremost genius of his age be a criminal? A saint?’

  ‘I say criminal,’ I repeated, ‘because I mean criminal. Whenever did the life of the spirit demand that one destroy a human heart and its faith?’

  ‘Christ Himself left his mother,’ he said fiercely.

  ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘was God. His mother was only the momentary flesh he inhabited. But in any case Christ did not elaborate a whole net of deceit.

  ‘I repeat, Kierkegaard was a criminal. He imposed himself on this girl, so much younger than himself, and having done so, he withdrew from her. Spirituality does not excuse the criminal.’

  He turned away from me as if implying that I did not understand what I was talking about.

  I went on, ‘And what will happen to you? I have already said tha
t you are no Kierkegaard. What sort of life will you live? Alone? You don’t even have the resource of literature to hide you from reality. You are not a genius. You are an ordinary person. You do not belong to the world of the exceptional. You haven’t the strength to endure that world. You are not wounded enough. Listen,’ I said, ‘listen to the birds. Look at the loveliness of this wood. Why don’t you enjoy the world? Because one is committed to the church one doesn’t need to be wretched all the time. You,’ I said, ‘are possessed by a flawed saint. Possession, that’s what it is. As if one were possessed by a devil.’

  He turned round and faced me full in the light. ‘Possession?’ he said. ‘How can one be possessed by a saint?’

  ‘You are possessed by that part of the saint which is the devil. Listen,’ I said, ‘have you read Kierkegaard? Have you read of his intolerable loneliness, of his penance? Have you read of the time when later he met Regine on the street? Have you read his words: “If I had had enough faith I would have married her.”? Did you realise the terrible genius that could have made him endure all that? You haven’t got that gift. And only that gift is enough. Without it you cannot take up the burden.’

  He sat on the bench and put his head in his hands. I waited but did not touch him. I said, ‘She loves you, you know. The two of you could be happy together. You could be married. People do that every day. It’s not an intolerable burden. I myself have been married for many years. It is not the end of the world. And what will happen if you don’t marry? Helen will be tormented.’ Suddenly at that moment I was possessed by an almost medieval vision. I don’t know what caused the power to rise in my breast. It may be that the leaves all about me and Norman in his pose of the brooding monk reminded me of a missal where such pictures are shown, but I shouted in a loud voice:

  ‘Kierkegaard, come out of this man! Leave him to his own life. He is not like you, he doesn’t have your terrible gifts. Leave him alone.’

  There was a long silence in the woods through which after a while I again heard the throb of a bird’s song and then I was aware that Norman was sobbing, that his body was being shaken and torn as if by a snake that writhed deep within him. I forced myself to watch him, calling on all the resources of harmony and happiness that I had, so that it was as if for a moment I saw my father’s shade encouraging me with large benignity. The sobbing continued for a long time, then Norman raised his exhausted white face. He looked at me and there was no longer in his eyes that impudence and intolerance. They were in fact calm and tired.

  I looked at him for a long time knowing that the agony was over. It was a victory but an empty victory. And even in the midst of the victory how could I be sure that this was not indeed a second Kierkegaard, how could I be sure that I had not destroyed a genius? How could I be sure that my own harmonious jealous biography had not been superimposed upon his life, as one writing upon another, in that wood where the birds sang with such sweetness defending their territory?

  I looked down at him white and exhausted. The exorcism was over. He would now follow his unexceptional destiny.

  Macbeth

  I think it must be a detective I am talking to, or who is talking to me. He belongs to what is laughingly called the real world. He is a greyish man and this is a greyish room, not unlike a dressing-room I was in once when I was starting on my career, and he is on the whole quite kind. He speaks to me as if I were a child, which is perhaps what I am. That may be why I thought Greta was in love with me though she wasn’t. I have often thought that certain people were in love with me though they never were. Perhaps that is one of the occupational hazards of being an actor. And maybe it is because I am a child that I thought Duncan, no, I mean Charles, was simply an old man when in fact he was so much more. I thought that if I could kill him on stage I ought to be able to kill him in reality. The detective doesn’t understand that, he lives in the real world, and he almost certainly has a wife and children, both of which I have lost because of Greta so that now I am a tramp in a grey room. I got the play the wrong way round and even Butler deceived me. The lust I suffered from, the lust . . .

  Why is he asking me such banal questions? My name, doesn’t he know it? Does he never go to the theatre? Has he never heard of Ralph Cameron? Has he never seen it in lights in this merciless city which I have often walked through at night, obsessed by lust and injustice? That that old man should have Greta as well as everything else, his genius, his fame! That that beautiful dark harmonious woman should belong to him, as well as everything else! And his flattery of me. What did it mean after all? Nothing. And night after night I killed him on stage with his grey hair, his grey face. And night after night I nearly killed him in reality to the applause of my insatiable invisible audience. And night after night she whispered in my ear, ‘Kill him, kill him, and you will be king.’ I left my wife and children because of her, I left my terraced house, the grapefruit in the morning, the suffocating doors and windows because of her. And she would say to me in that world beyond the stage, ‘Later, later I will leave him.’ And she would tell me he was impotent, though hardened in kingship for so long. I mounted her in hotel rooms when he was not supposed to know, though he did know, and I didn’t know that he knew. And if he hadn’t known Butler would have told him. Butler, my Banquo. I dug my spurs into her beautiful black body. And ‘Later, later,’ she would say, in that country of Macbeth, bare ruined foggy Scotland, from which I myself came those many years ago. We played each other’s murderers and victims, she Lady Macbeth, I, Macbeth, and her old husband the old swaying Duncan.

  He is of course – I mean Charles Lawson, her husband – our greatest actor. He is better than Gielgud, has more daring. His Duncan – what can one say about it except that it is perfect? When I stab him, just before I stab him, having entered the room from my mistress’s, his wife’s, room, he opens his eyes at me and smiles. He smiles into my face, he isn’t asleep at all when I stab him, and at that moment it is as if he is surrendering to the new king. The smile is saying, ‘Take the kingdom, take the throne, and much good may it do you.’ The critics raved about that moment, that slow half mocking smile, and then I stabbed him as if his smile had to be eradicated from the face of the world, since one could not live if such a smile were possible. And then along that shadowy corridor I returned to his wife, my mistress, and we embraced on stage in a feverish passionate embrace as we had done in hotel rooms so often before. And now I am alone, I have nothing, I am being questioned in a place very like the first dressing-room I ever had. All sound and fury signifying nothing.

  He was my master, he found me in Scotland, and he brought me to London, he taught me everything, he taught me how to speak, how to stand and do nothing, how to stand and do much. He didn’t want to play Macbeth. ‘I am too old for the part,’ he said, and he smiled at me his fanged genius smile. But then he is a man possessed by perfection. Possessed. How clearly I now see that.

  The grey man opposite me is saying,

  ‘You played the part of Macbeth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Charles Lawson played the part of Duncan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Mrs Lawson played the part of Lady Macbeth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is West Indian, is she not?’

  ‘African.’ (Sometimes I swear her body had a bluish tinge like a grape.)

  ‘And she was your mistress?’

  Why should I answer that? It seemed to be so. For her I left my wife and family, for her I sought the kingship of my native land. Wherever we went all turned and looked at her, that was one disadvantage. She was a queen, far more than I was a king. ‘Genius,’ she would say, ‘is difficult to live with. He is obsessed. How can one live with an obsessed man?’ How indeed? My wife gazed at me as if poleaxed across the breakfast table. And how I pitied her. Christ in heaven, how much I pitied her and how much I pitied myself! For my lust and my loss were so painful to me. ‘A giant’s robe upon a dwarfish king.’

  ‘Macbeth is a
play about sex,’ Charles would say, for he directed as well as acted. ‘Macbeth has to prove his manhood. That is what the play is about.’ And I would look at her and smile. How often had I proved my manhood on her. I was dying of proving my manhood. She in her black skin, wearing her white panties. Panties for a queen. ‘Sex,’ he would repeat, almost panting, ‘that is what the play is about. She offers him herself if he will kill Duncan.’ And he would smile his aged crocodile smile, his dry face cracking like a desert. Thus that autumn passed. In the afternoons I would kill him in my dreams and in the evenings I would kill him on stage with my loving trusty dagger. Never again such happiness and such anguish. That she should love me, that she should show me she loved me. I learned about her in reality, I explored her body, and what I learned in reality I would put into practice on the stage. But I knew nevertheless that something was wrong and some nights I would walk the streets of London, those merciless lights, and know that I was lost. I would ache for the barrenness of Scotland. The autumn had bare boughs and no birds sang.

  And once in a pub I confided in Butler, my Banquo, and he said: ‘I’m terribly sorry, old boy, but everyone knows about it.’

  ‘Does Charles?’ I said.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so, old boy.’ He’s six feet four inches tall and later in the play I kill him, stabbing at his cool remote unhelmeted head. ‘You can’t help it, old boy,’ he said, but he went and told Charles. I, on the other hand, believed in the truthfulness of art, I mean I believed in life as if it were art which of course it isn’t, though this grey detective who is making notes doesn’t know that. I believed that people, especially in the same profession, shouldn’t go around telling tales on each other. I now know that art has its politics too, as autumn has its songs. And I returned to Scotland in spirit to get my theatrical queen, I who had left there poor and distressed so many years ago till Charles, I mean Duncan, rescued me. He had saved me and I had repaid him by sleeping with his wife. Still, what else could I do? The doom was on me. From the first day I went to his house and she served up drinks with some sort of tall collar round her neck. And he said, ‘My wife,’ and glanced at me. That old man and that young black woman. It was incredible, it was obscene.