Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  I found Copernicus and Giese in the great hall of the castle, seated in silence in tall carved chairs on either side of the enormous hearth, on which, despite the mildness of the evening, stacked logs were blazing fiercely. The windows, set high up in the walls, let in but little of the evening’s radiance, and in the gloom the robes of the two still figures seemed to flow and merge into the elaborate flutings of the thrones on which they sat, so that to my bruised perception they appeared limbless, a pair of severed heads, ghastly in the fire’s crimson glow. Copernicus had put himself as close to the blaze as he could manage without risking combustion, but still he looked cold. As I entered the arc of flickering firelight, I found that he was watching me. I was weary, and incapable of subtlety, and once again I ignored my own injunction to go carefully. I held up the manuscript and said:

  “I have read it, and find it is all I had expected it would be, more than I had hoped; will you allow me to take it to Nuremberg, to Petreius the printer?”

  He did not answer immediately. The silence stretched out around us until it seemed to creak. At length he said:

  “That is a question which we cannot discuss, yet.”

  At that, as though he had been given a signal, the Bishop stirred himself and put an end to the discussion (discussion!). Had I eaten? Why then, I must! He would have Raphael bring me supper in my room, for I should retire, it was late, I was ill and in need of rest. And, like a sleepy child, I allowed myself to be led away, too tired to protest, clutching the manuscript, baba’s favourite toy, to my breast. I looked back at Copernicus, and the severed head smiled and nodded, as if to say: sleep, little one, sleep now. My room looked somehow different, but I could not say in what way, until next morning when I noticed the desk, amply stocked with writing implements and paper, which they installed without my knowing. O the cunning!

  *

  A thought, which I find startling, has occurred to me, viz. that I was happy at Löbau Castle, perhaps happier than I had ever been before, or would be again. Is it true? Happiness. Happiness. I write down the word, I stare at it, but it means nothing. Happiness; how strange.

  When the world, which is populated for the most part by fools and hypocrites, talks of being happy, really it is talking about no more than the gratification of hunger—hunger for love, or revenge, money, suchlike—but that cannot be what I mean. I have never loved anyone, and if I had money I would not know what to do with it. Revenge, of course, is another matter; but it will not make me happy. At Löbau, certainly, I knew nothing of revenge, did not even suspect that one day I would desire it. What am I talking about? I cannot understand myself, these ravings. Yet the thought will not go away. I was happy that summer at Löbau. It is like a kind of message, sent to me from I do not know where; a cipher. Well then, let me see if I can discover what it was that made me happy, and then maybe I shall understand what this happiness meant.

  *

  Quickly the days acquired a rhythm. In the mornings I was awakened by the sombre tolling of the castle bell, signifying that in the chapel the Bishop was celebrating Mass. The thought of that strange secret ritual of blood and sacrifice being enacted close at hand in the dim light of dawn was at once comical and grotesque, and yet mysteriously consoling. After Mass came Raphael, sleepy-eyed but unfailingly gay, to feed and barber me. He was such a pleasant creature, and was happy to chatter or keep silent as my mood demanded. Even his silence was merry. I tried repeatedly to elicit from him a precise description of his duties in the Bishop’s household, for it was apparent that he held a privileged position, but his answers were always vague. It occurred to me that he might be old Giese’s bastard. (Perhaps he was? I hope not.) Sometimes I had him accompany me when I went forth to take the air in the woods below the walls, but after that he was banished from my side and warned not to appear again with his distracting ways till evening, for I had work to do.

  The astronomer who studies the motions of the stars is surely like a blind man, who, with only the staff of mathematics to guide him, must ; make a great, endless, hazardous journey that winds through in-j numerable desolate places. What will be the result? Proceeding anxiously for a while, and groping his way with his staff, he will at some time, leaning upon it, cry out in despair to Heaven, Earth and all the gods to aid him in his anguish. Thus, day after day, for ten weeks, beset by illness and, worse, uncertainty regarding the purpose of my labours, I struggled with the intricacies of Copernicus’s theory of the movements of the planets. This second reading of the manuscript was very different from the first deceptive glance, when, entranced by music, I went straight to the heart of the work, and cheerfully ignored the details. Ah, the details! Crouched at my desk, with my head in my hands, I did furious battle with them, moaning and muttering, weeping, laughing sometimes even, uncontrollably. I remember in particular the trouble caused me by the orbit of Mars, the warlord. That planet is a cunt! It nearly drove me insane. One day, despairing of ever comprehending the mystery of its orbit, I rose and dashed in frantic circles about the room, crashing my head against the walls. At length, when I had knocked myself near senseless, I sank to the floor with laughter booming in my ears, and a mocking voice—I swear it came from the fourth sphere itself!—roared at me: Good, Rheticus, very good! You have found what you sought, for just as you have whirled about this room, just so does Mars whirl in the heavens!

  As if all this were not enough, I spent the evenings, when I should have been resting, locked in endless circular arguments with Copernicus, trying to persuade him to publish. These battles took place after dinner in the great hall, where a third carved throne had been provided for me before the fire. I say battles, but assaults would be a better word, for while I attacked, Copernicus merely cowered behind the ramparts of a stony silence, apparently untouchable. A remote grey figure, he sat huddled in the folds of his robe, staring before him, his jaw clenched tight as a gin trap. No matter how hot the fire, he was always cold. It was as if he generated coldness out of some frozen waste within him. Only when my pleading reached its fiercest intensity, when, beside myself with messianic fervour, I leaped to my feet and roared frantic exhortations at him, waving my arms, only then did his stolid defences show a trace of weakness. His head began to jerk from side to side, in a clockwork frenzy of refusal, while that ghastly grin spread wider and wider, and the sweat stood out on his brow, and, like a girl teasing herself with thoughts of rape, he peered down into the depths of the abyss into which I was inviting him to leap, hugging himself in horrified, panic-stricken glee. Sometimes, even, he was pressed so far that he spoke, but only in order to throw an obstacle in the path of my merciless advance, and then he was always careful to seize on some minor point of my argument, steering well clear of the main issue. Thus, when I put it to him that he had a duty to publish, if only to demonstrate the errors in Ptolemy, he shook a trembling finger at me and cried:

  “We must follow the methods of the ancients! Anyone who thinks they are not to be trusted will squat forever in the wilderness outside the locked gates of our science, dreaming the dreams of the deranged about the motions of the spheres—and he will get what he deserves for thinking he can support his own ravings by slandering the ancients!”

  Giese, for his part, liked to think of himself as the wise old mediator in these one-sided debates, and waded in now and again with some inane remark, which obviously he considered immensely learned and persuasive, and to which Copernicus and I attended in a painful polite silence, before continuing on as if the old clown had never opened his mouth. But he was happy enough, so long as he was allowed to say his piece, for, like all his breed, he saw no difference between words and actions, and felt that when something was said it was as good as done. He was not the only spectator on the battlefield. As the weeks went by, word spread through the castle, and even to the town and beyond, that free entertainment was being laid on each evening in the great hall, and soon we began to draw an audience of clerics and castle officials, fat burghers from the town, travelli
ng charlatans on diplomatic missions to the See of Kulm, and God knows what all. Even the servants came creeping in to hear this wild man from Wittenberg perform. At first it disturbed me to have that faceless, softly breathing mass shifting and tittering behind me in the gloom, but I grew accustomed to it, in time. In fact, I began to enjoy myself. In the magic circle of the firelight, immured in the impregnable fortress high above the plain, I felt that I had been lifted out of the world of ordinary men into some rarefied aetherial sphere, where nothing that was soiled could touch me, where I touched nothing soiled. Outside it was summer, the peasants were working in the fields, emperors were waging wars, but here there was none of that, all that, blood and toil, things growing, slaughter and glory, bucolic pleasures, men dying—in short, life, no, none of that. For we were angels, playing an endless, celestial game. And I was happy.

  —And if that is what is meant by happiness, then I want none of it.

  * * *

  I am getting on, getting on, yes indeed; I am at Löbau still. My arguments won through in the end, and although it was in his own way, to be sure, and on his own terms, Copernicus capitulated. The first hint that he was ready to negotiate in earnest came when one evening he began out of the blue to babble excitedly about a plan, which he knew, he said, would meet with my enthusiastic approval. I must not think that his unwillingness to publish his modest theories sprang from contempt for the world; indeed, as I well knew (I did?), he bore a great love for ordinary men, and had no wish to leave them in ignorance de rerum natura if there was any way in which he could enlighten them. Also, he had a responsibility toward science, and the improvement of scientific method. Having regard to all this, then, he proposed to draw up astronomical tables, with new rules for plotting star courses, which would be an invaluable aid not only to astronomers but also to sailors and map-makers and so forth; these, when he had prepared them, I could take to my printer at Nuremberg. However, I should understand one thing clearly, that while the computational tables would have new and accurate rules, there would be no proofs. He was well aware that his theory, on which the tables would be founded, would, if published, overturn the accepted notions regarding the movements of the spheres, and would therefore cause a hideous commotion, and he was not prepared to lend his name to the causing of such disturbance (my italics). Pythagoras held that the secrets of science must be reserved for the few, for the initiates, the wise ones, and Pythagoras was an ancient, and he was right. So: new rules, yes, but no proofs to support them.

  This would not do, of course, and well he knew it, for as soon as I began to put forward my objections he hurriedly agreed, and said yes, it was a foolish notion, he would abandon it. (I confess that, to this day, I still do not understand why he put forward this nonsensical plan only to relinquish it at once, unless he merely wished to signal to me, in his usual roundabout way, that he was now prepared to compromise.) The subject was closed then, which small detail was not, however, going to deter Giese from voicing his objections, the formulation of which, I suppose, cost him a mighty effort that he was fain to see wasted.

  “But Doctor,” he said, “these tables would be an incomplete gift to the world, unless you reveal the theory on which they are based, as Ptolemy, for whom you have such high regard, was always careful to do.”

  To that, Copernicus, who had once more retreated dreamily into himself, made an extraordinary answer. He said:

  “The Ptolemaic astronomy is nothing, so far as existence is concerned, but it is convenient for computing the inexistent.”

  But having said it, he recollected himself, and pretended, by assuming an expression meant to indicate bland innocence but which merely made him look a halfwit, that he was unaware of having put forward a notion which, if he believed it to be true, made nonsense of his life’s work (for, remember, whatever they may say about it now, his theory was based entirely upon the Ptolemaic astronomy—was indeed, as he pointed out himself, no more than a revision of Ptolemy, at least in its beginnings). So profound an admission was it, that at the time I failed to grasp its full significance, and only felt its black brittle wing brush my cheek, as it were, as it flew past. However, I must have perceived that something momentous had occurred, that part of the ramparts had collapsed, for immediately I was on my feet and crying:

  “Let me take the manuscript, let me go to Nuremberg. We must act now, or forever keep silent—trust me!”

  He did not answer at once. It seems to me now, although I am surely mistaken, that there was a vast audience in the hall that evening, for the silence was enormous, the kind of silence which only comes when the multitude for a moment, its infantile attention captured, stops yelping and goggles with mouth agape at some gaudy, gimcrack wonder. Even Giese held his peace. Copernicus was smiling. I don’t mean grinning, not that grin, but a real smile, faint, quite calm, and full of cunning. He said:

  “You say that I must trust you, and of course I do, indeed I do; but the journey to Nuremberg is long, and hazardous in these times, and who can say what evils might not befall you on the way? What if you should lose the manuscript in some misadventure, if it should be stolen, or destroyed? All would be lost then, all my work. This book has been thirty years in the writing.”

  What was he about? He watched me with cold amusement (I swear it was amusement!) as I wriggled like a stranded fish in my search for the correct, the only answer to the riddle he had set me. This was different to all that had gone before; this was in earnest. With great care I said:

  “Then I shall make a copy of the manuscript, and take it with me, while you retain the original. That way, the safety of the book is assured, and also its publication. I see no further difficulty.”

  “But you might lose the copy, might you not, and what then? Rather, here is a plan: go now to Nuremberg, and there write down an account of the book from memory, which I have no doubt you could do with ease, and publish that.”

  “But it has already been done!” I cried. “You yourself have written an account, in the Commentariolus—”

  “That was nothing, worse than nothing, full of errors. You must write an accurate account. You see the advantages for us both in this: your name shall gain prominence in the world of science, while the way shall have been prepared for the publication later of my book. You shall be a kind of—” he smiled again “—a kind of John the Baptist, the one who goes before.”

  He had won, and he knew it. I bowed my head, signifying defeat.

  “I agree,” I said. “I shall write this account, if it is in my power.”

  Ah, his smile, that little smile, how well I remember it! He said:

  “This is a splendid plan, I think. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, yes—but when will you publish De revolutionibus?”

  “Well, when I consider the matter, I see no need to publish, if you ensure that your account is sufficiently comprehensive.”

  “But your book? Thirty years?”

  “The book is unnecessary.”

  “And you intend—?”

  “To destroy it.”

  “Destroy it?’

  “Why, yes.”

  How simply and cheerfully it was said! How convincing it sounded!

  *

  Thus was conceived my Narratio prima, which in the thirty-six years since its publication has gained such fame (for him, not for me, whose work it was!). I have not given here a strictly literal account of how I was inveigled into writing it, but have contented myself with showing how cunningly he worked upon my youthful enthusiasm and my gullibility in order to achieve his own questionable ends. That nonsense about going at once to Nuremberg and writing the account from memory was only a part of the trap, of course, a condition on which he could without harm concede, and thereby appear gracious. Anyway, he had to concede, for I had no intention of leaving his side, having heard him threaten (a threat which, I confess, I did not take seriously—but still…) to burn his book.

  I began the writing that very night. Copernicus’s boo
k is built in six parts, each part more intricate, more difficult than the one before. By that time I was thoroughly familiar with the first three, had some grasp of the fourth, and only a general idea of the last two—but I managed, I managed, and the Narratto prima, as you may judge, while it is not so elegant as I would wish, is yet a brilliant piece of work. Who else—I ask it in all modesty—who else could have made such a compressed, succinct account, in so short a time, of that bristling mesh of astronomical theory, who else but I? And was I aided in my herculean labours by the domine praeceptor} I was not! Each evening, when I had finished work for the day, he came with some flimsy excuse and took away from me the precious manuscript. Did he think I was going to eat it? And how he dithered, and fussed and fretted, and plucked at my sleeve in his nervousness, hedging me about with admonitions and prohibitions. I must not mention him by name, he said. Then how could I proceed? A theory without a theorist? Was I to claim the work as my own? Ah, that made him bethink himself, and he went away and thought about it for a day or two, and came back and said that if I must name him, then let me call him only Doctor Nicolas of Torun. Very well—what did I care? If he wanted to be dubbed Mad Kaspar, or Mandricardo the Terrible, it was all one to me. So I wrote down my title thus: