A Maggot - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  I shall be before Your Grace very soon upon his reading of this dispatch, and his to command. In closing now, I beg Yr Grace to accept my most respectful sympathy for this unhappy conclusion upon inquiry; and ever the most sincere assurance of untiring diligence in all his affairs, from his humble servant,

  Henry Ayscough

  * * *

  FROM THE ROOM outside there comes a murmur of voices, mostly female, a group waiting quietly for some event; though the event of this twenty-ninth of February, as it happens, has taken place, and the three men present, Wardley, Hocknell, John Lee, are but new admitted from where they were recently sent, which was to stand in Toad Lane outside. Rebecca lies alone on the rough bed in the inner cellar; on her back, her face spent, impassive, seemingly almost sullen now it is over. It is noon, a strange time to be abed, and already she would rise; yet knows she cannot and must not. Of a sudden the voices outside cease; they listen. Now there is a shadow in the door, and she cranes her head up. John Lee stands there, with the new-swaddled baby clasped tight in his right arm, posing for a picture of a man at a loss; a picture he does not lessen : by removing his hat, slowly and as if by reluctant afterthought, before this echo of afar greater birth, though in similar humble circumstances. She looks only at what he holds cradled in his right arm. His grave and awkward-peering face would seem to be about to announce the end of the world; but then again, by afterthought, it shows the ghost of a wintry smile.

  'All is well, thee?'

  'Most well, husband.'

  'I prayed for thee, and her new soul.'

  'I thank thee.'

  And now he steps forward and taking the new-born infant, as absurdly tight-bound as a parcel, in both hands passes it down to the hands raised to take it. The appalling custom of swaddling was, among the more emancipated (and thanks to the philosopher Locke), already near its end; but not yet, alas, among the poor. The blacksmith-seer watches while the parcel is set beside her. She stares at it with that strangely paradoxical intensity, halflove, half doubt, both objective and subjective, both certain and wondering, of the young mother first faced with what has come from inside her ... this long-drowned creature risen from the ocean depths, yet miraculously still alive. It is very plainly not divine; its face crinkled, obstinate, still more in the sea than the air. It opens its eyes for a long moment, it seems almost stunned by the revelation of this wretched and shadowy world it is born into; yet already there is a hint of azure, of vacant sky, in them. A time will come when people shall remember those eyes, their blue candour and their brisk truth, that was far from vacant.

  John Lee replaces his broad-brimmed hat.

  'I have bought thee both a handsel.'

  She takes her eyes up from the child, and smiles faintly, secretly incredulous at such secular grace.

  'What be it, then?'

  'But a bird. Would thee see?'

  'I would see.'

  He turns and goes back into the other room; then returns at once holding a small square object, swaddled with cloth as the child, and which he holds by an osier handle. Now he holds it above the bed where she may see, and pulls the cloth away. It is a goldfinch, in a tiny wicker cage, barely seven inches square. The brilliantly coloured little bird takes alarm and flutters against the brown bars.

  "Twill grow more tame, and sing.'

  She reaches up her free arm, timidly, to touch the minute cage.

  'Thee must hang it by the door, in the light.'

  'Aye.'

  And he stares still for a time at the bird, which now cowers in a corner, as if it means more to him than the face beside Rebecca's on the bed. But then he swathes the cage in the cloth again and holds it down by his side.

  'The Lord has given me this last night a name for her.'

  'How a name?'

  'Mary.'

  'I promised the Lord she shall be Ann.'

  'Wife, thee must obey. We are not to deny the gift. It spake clear.'

  'I deny no gift.'

  'Yes, thee would. It is not fit, at such a time. What the Lord has given, we must receive.'

  'What else was given?'

  'That she shall see the Lord Jesus come again.'

  'We may call her both.'

  'Two names is vanity. One sufficeth.'

  For a moment she says nothing, staring up at him. She looks down at the rough blanket that covers her. 'I tell thee, John Lee, when the Lord Jesus come again, He shall be She, and the mother must know Her name.'

  He stares down at her without answering, uncertain whether such levity deserves reprimand or is so far-fetched it may in these circumstances be ignored. At last he stoops and lays a clumsy hand upon her shoulder, a quarter in blessing, a quarter in forgiveness; and a full half in sheer incomprehension. Like so many seers, he is blind to the present. He straightens.

  'Sleep. And when thee wake, thee'll know to obey.'

  He leaves, carrying the cage; and for a moment or two more the young woman on the dark bed still stares down at the blanket. He speaks in a low voice outside, perhaps something about the goldfinch. There is a silence, then the voice of the bird, from by the cellar door: a silvery little tintinnabulation, its flight-call, piercing the sombre rooms like sunlight; and conscience-piercing also. But William Blake is yet to come.

  Now Rebecca looks down at the tiny creature in her arms. There is something of a wonderment in her eyes, at this other, this intruder into her world; she bends and very gently kisses its pink and wrinkled forehead.

  'More love, Ann. More love, my love.'

  The infant's features begin to contort, a preparatory paroxysm to crying. It begins to bawl. A few seconds later, its mouth brought for a first time to the mother's breast, the bawling has stopped. Outside, the low voices start again. Rebecca nurses, with her eyes closed, sunk within feeling, this affirmation of her selfness no words she knows can describe, or that she would have had describe even if she knew them. For a moment she opens those meek brown eyes and stares into a dark corner of the room, as if someone stood there watching; then closes them again. After a while she begins slightly to rock, and there comes the barely perceptible sound of a hum. She has begun a slow lullaby, the baby lies stilled. It is very simple, and seems to be of two repeated phrases only.

  Vive vi, vive vum, vive vi, vive vum, vive vi, vive vum ... it is clear they are not rational words, and can mean nothing.

  Epilogue

  READERS WHO know something of what that Manchester baby was to become in the real world will not need telling how little this is a historical novel. I believe her actual birth was two months before my story begins, on 29 February 1736. I know nothing in reality of her mother, and next to nothing of various other characters, such as Lacy and Wardley, who also come from real history. They are here almost all invention beyond their names. It may be that books and documents exist that might have told me more of them in historical terms than the little I know: I have consulted none, nor made any effort to find them. I repeat, this is a maggot, not an attempt, either in fact or in language, to reproduce known history.

  I have the greatest respect for exact and scrupulously documented history, not least because part of my life is (in a very humble way) devoted to it; but this exacting discipline is essentially a science, and immensely different in its aims and methods from those of fiction. I have mentioned Daniel Defoe (who died in 173 r) only once in these pages; which is poor recognition of the admiration and liking I have always felt for him. A Maggot is not at all meant to be in any direct imitation; he is, in any case, inimitable. To following some of what I take to be the underlying approach and purpose in his novels, I happily confess.

  My text is maggot also in how it came to grow from that primitive image of travellers I mentioned at the beginning. One day one of the mysterious riders gained a face; that is, by chance I acquired a pencil and water-colour drawing of a young woman. There was no indication of artist, simply a little note in ink in one corner, which seemingly says, in Italian, 16 July 1683. This precise
dating pleased me at first as much as the drawing itself, which is not of any distinction; yet something in the long dead face, in the eyes, an inexplicable presentness, a refusal to die, came slowly to haunt me. Perhaps it was the refusal to die that, improbably in all other ways, linked this real and unknown woman with another and known one I had much longer respected; and whom you have just seen born.

  Such gross inconsequence, jumping from a picture of a seventeenth—century Italian woman (and prostitute, I have a strong suspicion) to the memory, later in history, of a remarkable and saintly English one, must defy all normal notions of how one goes about making a novel. At the least I owe it to those readers whose ears have not pricked at the name Ann Lee, nor know what she became far outside these pages in the real world, to end with a word about her, my other presiding spirit.

  * * *

  A convinced atheist can hardly dedicate a novel to a form of Christianity. None the less, this one was partly written out of a very considerable affection and sympathy for the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers, of which Ann Lee was the founder. To most people now, I imagine, Shaker means little more than a furniture style and an ultra-puritanism superficially akin to the asceticism of some monastic orders (such as the Cistercian) from the opposite religious extreme. Orthodox theologians have always despised the sect's doctrinal naivety; orthodox priests, its fanaticism; orthodox capitalists, its communism; orthodox communists, its superstition; orthodox sensualists, its abhorrence of the carnal; and orthodox males, its striking feminism. I find it one of the most fascinating - and proleptic - episodes in the long history of Protestant Dissent.

  This is not only for social and historical reasons. Something in Shaker thought and theology (not least in its holding that a Holy Trinity that has no female component cannot be holy), in its strange rituals and marvellously inventive practical life, in its richly metaphorical language and imaginative use of dancing and music, has always seemed to me to adumbrate the relation of fiction to reality. We novelists also demand a far-fetched faith, quite often seemingly absurd in relation to normal reality; we too need a bewildering degree of metaphorical understanding from our readers before the truths behind our tropes can be conveyed, can 'work'.

  England had already, of course, had an age of outspoken dissent (and self-discovery) in the 1640s and 1650s; Ann Lee's came late, historically. Only a very few years after she was born, in the April of 1739, a dissatisfied yet ordained priest in the Church of England stood on Kingsdown, a hill then outside the city of Bristol, and spoke, rather than formally preached, to a large and happenstance gathering of the Bristol poor, consisting mainly of miners and their families. Many of his listeners began to weep, others were so disturbed and moved they fell into a catatonic trance. To be sure they were very rough, illiterate, easy to work upon; such cathartic phenomena are now both anthropologically and psychologically well understood. But on Kingsdown something more than the speaker's charisma was involved. Quite simply his audience was being given light. It was as if they had all been blind or (as many of the miners truly had) living in darkness till then.

  I suspect we owe quite as much to all those incoherent sobs and tears and ecstasies of the illiterate as to the philosophers of mind and the sensitive artists. Unorthodox religion was the only vehicle by which the vast majority, who were neither philosophers nor artists, could express this painful breaking of the seed of the self from the hard soil of an irrational and tradition-bound society - and a society not so irrational it did not very well know how much it depended on not seeing its traditions questioned, its foundations disturbed. Can we wonder the new-born ego (whose adolescence we call the Romantic Age) often chose means to survive and to express itself as irrational as those that restrained it?

  Now I hate modern evangelism, with its spurious Madison Avenue techniques and general loathsome conservatism in politics. It seems almost always unerringly based on the worst, most backward side of Christianity, an insidious supporter of whatever is retrograde in contemporary thought and politics; and thereby denies the very essence of Jesus himself. Nor do I think any better of this same trait in many other religions, such as Islam. But what happened with John Wesley (the man above) and Ann Lee and their like in the eighteenth century is quite different: an emotional enlightenment beside, almost in spite of, the intellectual (and middle-class) enlightenment the siecle de lumieres is famous for. They had, Wesley by his energy and transparent strength of conviction, Ann Lee in her obstinate (and immensely brave) determination and her poetry - her genius for images - a practical vision of what was wrong with their world. Ann's vision was more thoroughgoing than Wesley's, a fact that we may attribute in part to her sex, but perhaps above all to the fact that she was uneducated; that is, unsullied by stock belief, learned tradition, and the influence of the other kind of enlightenment. At heart people like Ann were revolutionaries; one with the very first Christians of all, and their founder.

  Their efforts (especially John Wesley's) were, as always, one day to breed a narrow-minded bigotry, an inward tyranny as life-stultifying as the tyrannies they first tried to end, or fled from. But I speak here of that first fuse, that spirit that was in them at the beginning, before the organized business of religious conversion and gaining adherents en masse came, and dimmed and adulterated their fundamental and highly personal example and force. One of the saddest ironies in all religious history is that we should now so admire and value Shaker architecture and furniture, fall on our knees like Mies van der Rohe before the Hancock Round Barn; yet totally reject the faith and way of life that made these things.

  The Shakers had purely English roots, but were very soon persecuted out of England. In Manchester the real Ann Lee was first to be a mill-girl, then fur-cutter for a hatter, then a cook in an infirmary; she was to marry (Abraham Stanley, another blacksmith) and to bear four children by him, all of whom died young. . She set out for America in 1774, accompanied by only a tiny handful of fellow-believers. Her husband deserted her almost at once there, and for several years her 'family' were harried as much as in England. The growth, maturity and decline of the United Society all took place in America. Much of both the fixed dogma and the practices of the Society in its gathered communities was developed after Ann's death in 1784, by disciples like Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright; but behind all (not least in the great revival of the 1840s) lie the seeds of Ann's very special personality.

  It is easy enough now to dismiss much of the aftermath of her memory, the spirit drawings, the 'dictated' songs and music, the trance states, as naive religiosity, and at least partly a product of the sexual abstinence for which the Society was famous (and whose dangers it was well aware of, in terms of the 'conversation' and other rituals it evolved to compensate for that deprivation). A similar wild and suspect religiosity may be found before Ann's time, in those early French Prophets whose names I have Wardley cite.

  Yet something haunts the more serious side of the United Society's life that cannot be so easily dismissed. It is an aspiration, a determination to escape mere science, mere reason, convention, established belief and religion, into the one thing that excuses an escape from such powerful social gods, the founding of a more

  humane society ... all that is conveyed in 'more love'. It was almost as if Ann Lee and the early Shakers foresaw that, if not Antichrist, then certainly Mammon, the universal greed in each for more money, for more personal wealth and possession, would one day rule this world and threaten to destroy it. Our present world is as deaf as poor Dick to Anne's appeal for simplicity, sanity and self-control. 'Gathered' or community Shakerism is now virtually extinct, its faith too plain, its rules too radical, for twentieth-century Adam and Eve. Yet for me something else in it does not die.

  Dissent is a universal human phenomenon, yet that of Northern Europe and America is, I suspect, our most precious legacy to the world. We associate it especially with religion, since all new religion begins in dissent, that is, in a re
fusal to believe what those in power would have us believe - what they would command and oblige us, in all ways from totalitarian tyranny and brutal force to media manipulation and cultural hegemony, to believe. But in essence it is an eternal biological or evolutionary mechanism, not something that was needed once, merely to meet the chance of an earlier society, when religious belief was the great metaphor, and would-be conforming matrix, for many things beside religion. It is needed always, and in our own age more than ever before.

  A historically evolved outward form, adapted as in a plant or animal to cope with one set of conditions, is doomed when a new set appears; as in my view not only the United, but Western society as a whole, only too plainly shows. What the Shakers 'crossed', or condemned, in the society and world they had to inhabit may seem to us quaint and utopian, their remedies hopelessly unattainable today; but some at least of the questions they asked and the challenges they flung seem to me still unanswered.

  In so much else we have developed immeasurably from the eighteenth century; with their central plain question - what morality justifies the flagrant injustice and inequality of human society? - we have not progressed one inch. One major reason is that we have committed the cardinal sin of losing the old sense of mediocrity: that of a wise and decent moderation. It is betrayed in the way we have twisted and debased the word (as our sense of individual self has grown) to its modern sense. This is the hidden price, as in the Greek gift at Troy, put by nature upon our twentieth-century consciousness of and obsession with self. A species cannot fill its living space to absurd excess in number; and still so exalt excess, the extreme, non-mediocrity, in the individual. When excess becomes synonymous with success, a society is doomed, and by far more than Christ.