by Toby Litt
Ghost Story
By the Same Author
Adventures in Capitalism
Beatniks
Corpsing
deadkidsongs
Exhibitionism
Finding Myself
Ghost Story
TOBY LITT
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
HAMISH HAMILTON
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2004
1
Copyright © Toby Litt, 2004
The moral right of the author has been asserted
‘The Hare’ has previously been published in Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2003
‘Foxes’ in Heat 3, New Series, 2002 and Matter, issue no. 3, 2003
Lines from ‘The Watershed’ from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Random House Inc.
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
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EISBN978–0–141–91346–9
For Leigh
BRING A LIFE TO BREATH;
GIVE A GIFT TO DEATH
STORY
THE HARE
1
For some little while now I have been chasing a hare – buck or doe, I do not know; never yet have I managed to come close enough to check. It is lanky, manky, and quite as rapid as its name. This past month I have pursued the hare through a gallery, my memory, some postcards, and a half-dozen books. In recent days, the hare has gone to earth in the British Library; and it is here – seated on this chair, at this desk – that I would like to re-commence the chase. (Please excuse the Victorianism of my voice, but I can at present see no way other to make the approach – this task being so obviously illegitimate. I intend, for once, as an improvised Victorian, to ignore the wraiths of contemporary thought; unobjectifiers, soul-suckers.) I will, in this great library – cavernous yet luminous – on this wooden chair, at this wooden desk, attempt to hunt the hare haphazard; to examine the quotidian grasses, to sniff the wind of correspondence, to trace the found tracks of the intentional, to crumble or squidge the meant droppings, and to come – eventually – into the real presence of a real living literary animal-idea, and not kill it.
WALES
Allow me, immediately, to digress; I should like to recall my first encounter with a hare – whether or not it was this same hare I now chase I do not know: I will assume that it was. We were in Wales for our summer holiday: mother, father, myself, and my sisters, Georgina and Charlotte. I was at a guess eleven. The antiques trade (my father’s) must have been down that year; we usually went to campsites in France, staying in tents that someone else erected – pitched at the start of the season and struck at the end; we never had to touch a belay. This year, it was Wales instead. We were, at the hour I am concerned with, visiting a farm just outside Cardiff, I think; picking up some keys, perhaps. I remember two sheepdogs, an old and a young, both of which we children were warned not to stroke; they worked, were not pets. Whilst whatever transaction it was was taking place, I took myself off for an explore. There was a barn, high-full of hay-bales; and, standing in the farmyard, in the thick of its smell, I looked (bored) across to an abruptly rising hillside opposite – where for the first time stood the live hare. It was long and potential-fast, sometimes upright, and here a later quotation intrudes: Auden’s ‘Near you, taller than grass,/ Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.’ I realise now, in setting this down, that Auden may not have meant a hare at all; just as likely a rabbit or a man. But, more likely still, Auden was happy – in his early ambiguity – for the reader to infer whatever they wished. And here, the crux left of the watershed, I have from the first wished a hare. In all its liveness, I can’t have watched the original Welsh hare for more than a half-minute. Something happened, perhaps it detected – so fine its tremulous senses – my watching, and at a slender lope it was off, up, over the hill, out of sight. It gave the odd baroque to its straight, but was going where it was going and that was for definite. There isn’t much else to be remembered from the holiday. We immediately left Cardiff and drove to a farm where the farmer’s wife fed us a roast every day: Saturday was beef, Sunday lamb, Monday chicken, and so on through pork, duck, and goose (not hare); on the last of the seven days we all of us wondered what variety of animal she had left that she could possibly roast (we were sick of roast), and the farmer’s wife treated us to an encore of beef. I remember the farmer and his farmhands harvesting with tractors the corn, and this later was the seed of ‘Moriarty’ – a story from my first book. I remember going up alone into the grain store, and this became the source of a cancelled section of deadkidsongs. A day or two before we left, the farm bull got loose, and was only a four-bar iron gate away from me – its erection pointing toward the plain cows in a nearby field; it had already broken through one dry-stone wall in its quest of lust. The following year the antiques trade revived, and we holidayed in Corsica.
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I am certain the hare is somewhere here in this library, perhaps in many of its places at once – for hares, unlike rabbits and men, are not limited to a single, logical location. There are books through which I know, even before I order and open them, it will have passed. Brewer’s Phrase and Fable – in which I learn ‘It was once thought that hares were sexless, or that they changed their sex every year.’ Buck or doe, even the hare does not know. Another book I consult contains the first literary hare I pursued: Kit Williams’s Masquerade – which began and became a world-wide search for a buried leporine effigy, fashioned (by him) of gold and jewels. Kit himself, unkempt arts- and craftsman, lived a couple of villages along the ridge from Ampthill, ‘where the Princess lay’ (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene I, line 28); Ampthill, where I grew up. He buried his golden hare in Ampthill Park, at the foot of Katharine’s Cross, set there as memorial to the locally popular Queen, imprisoned in the castle pending divorce by her heir-hungry husband, Henry. Queen, not Princess.
ENGLAND
My next encounter face-to-face with the hare – though there must have been many now-forgotten glimpses after Wales – was at University. Oxford, in this as in all things, was a perversion; the hare, here, was paraded in its most debased form: jugged. It was also undercooked, by the worst college kitchens in the city, and caused just by itself a small student revolt against the contempt with which our college (Worcester) treated us. The Food Rep, exploiting the jugged-hare incident, and bringing about a brief improvement in the quality of our meals, was the following term elected President of the Junior Common Room. Like all revolutions, ours met disillusion the
moment it paused. During the former Food Rep’s time and term in office, it was discovered the college had been surcharging all undergraduates on the electricity in their rooms, illegally, since the Second World War. With power of bankruptcy over Worcester College, the President, representative of our revolution, made not even a few polite requests.
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Joseph Beuys, about whom I first read at University, performed How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare in 1965 at the Schmela Gallery, Düsseldorf. The gallery in which the hare made its most recent reappearance, late last year, was Tate Modern. In a room dedicated to Beuys, I came across a copy of his Drawings for Leonardo’s ‘Madrid Codex’ – a woman-hare, my sketch of which I reproduce below.
A few weeks later, whilst we were visiting some friends of ours in Sheffield, my girlfriend suffered her second miscarriage. I attempted to distract myself, in a hiatus of respite, by glancing through John Lehmann’s The Craft of Letters in England – a copy of which, for some reason, was kept on a shelf in the upstairs toilet. Here I found a reference to Jocelyn Brooke, author of ‘two impressively morbid short novels’. On coming to the great library a short while afterward, I ordered up a book by Jocelyn (buck or doe?). It turned out not to be a morbid novel, but a morbid book of verse. The one decent poem was ‘The Song of Isobell Gowdie’s which contained the lines: ‘I shall go into a hare,/ With sorrow and sighing and mickle care/ And I shall go in the Devil’s name/ Till I come home again.’
SCOTLAND
The library at this moment resembles nothing so much as a forest – an enchanted forest. And as I notice this, the chairs of the reading room begin to push up in strange columns, and the desks to spread out and settle, as if through long decay. I stand up, step back. I am not as amazed as I feel I should be; transformations were only to be expected. When the trunks of the desks finally touch the whitewashed ceiling, it shows itself to be wrought out as a thick leaf-canopy. I know it is only at night that the library is this empty, and so it occurs to me that an amount of unconscious time has passed. I am awake, definitely, without the excuses of dreaming. The moonbeams are the only infrequent light here – prinking through the canopy, slicing down in crisp diagonals. The air is almost balmy, and as the beams wink out and zip back, I can tell that the moon is riding high in a cloud-chased, cloud-ragged sky. The library now resembles nothing so much as the cover of the copy of C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian which I was given to read at Alameda School, Ampthill. The desks have now subsided entirely into the needle-thick forest floor – which, spongy and spicy, beds out a silence that makes steps sound as thuds and thuds as thrums. Although I have no reason to go in any direction, I decide to head toward where the Issue & Return counter once stood. As I walk, I remember and recite the words of the poem, the words taken from Isobell Gowdie’s confession, her spell: ‘I shall go into a hare,/ With sorrow and sighing and mickle care/ And I shall go in the Devil’s name/ Till I come home again.’ I myself do not turn into a hare, despite reciting them twice more – thrice in total. But I do sight a rapid-moving summat up ahead – a horizontal streak, appearing in front of and disappearing behind the vertical rhythm of the treetrunks; a real rubato, a pulse. It is the hare, I am sure: I decide not to sprint after it, that would for both of us mean humiliation. (The chase is waiting.) Instead, I call out to it; I call out a name I am far from sure it has or will answer to: ‘Isobell!’ A hiatus. It is as if there had been a spell and I have uttered the counterspell: the streak stops, in a sighted gap and also in the gaze of a moonbeam, becoming a haunch-supported tower of fur. Its ears are searching for the second sounding of its name, which I then make: ‘Isobell!’ The hare turns in my direction and hurls its senses toward the source of its loud denomination – all of them falling on me at once; I am savoured, and even also somehow caressed. A third time, in fairytale fashion, I call the hare to me (‘Isobell!’) – and in obedience to the law of three, she comes; not so close that I can touch her, but closer than ever – in a living, inedible form – before. How am I sure she is a she? Sure because confirmation confirms sureness, and because I can’t be I if she isn’t she. ‘I want to speak to you,’ I say. ‘You can’t,’ she says, in a soft Scottish voice, ‘without you put on the coat.’ As she says it I see it: though I can’t be completely sure but that it appears at that moment; hanging from a low, hooklike branch – a long coat fashioned from the pelt of surely the largest hare that ever lived. Sans hesitation, I step across to it, lift it heavily off the hook and punch my arms into its forelegs. As I do so, I notice that long ears dangle from the hood. No sooner is the coat upon me than it begins to shrink, until coat becomes pelt – and I feel my clothes dissolving beneath it, like meat in the spittle of a fly. I realise that as well as being on the cover of Prince Caspian, I have also come to where the Wild Things are. (If I am Max, I am relieved to know that I shall be getting home before my dinner grows cold: it was all a dream, while a cliché from outside, is a reassurance when within.) Something else is altering, too: I feel my internal organs lengthen and tumble into place, like grains of tobacco rolling in a cigarette paper. It is from inside out that I realise I am changing, going as Isobell Gowdie at her trial said she did, into a hare. The trunks of the trees give me some marker against which I can judge my height; the hare I am becoming is up high on its haunches, but still its eyes are only four feet off the ground. Sounds stumble toward me, from the deep darkness of the enchanted forest – it feels not as if my hearing is improving but as if the world is rearranging itself so that far is now near. I realise, too, that there are many more noises on the very cusp of audibility – ones I can sense, sense the danger of, but not clearly depict to myself. These almost-sounds are the most useful, as they are those made by predators aspiring to silence. I hope at this moment that I will be able to retain such a developed sense when eventually I return to my human form, though cities would be unbearable. But then I realise, and it is the first time I feel horror, that I may have become a permanent hare. The realignment of my muscles feels dreadfully like the relaxation that I have been my whole life yearning toward, as if my new body were a hot bath of fragrant water in which I had just lain myself down. Isobell, the hare, turns and runs away from me into the enchanted forest. Awkwardly, I follow her – finding my way down the tunnel of her fourfold footfalls; awkward, I am, because I neither know how to move this imposed body nor do I have any idea of hare etiquette. I am the buck, she the doe – should I follow or not follow? I do not know. Is there already romance between us, by mere meeting? And if so, what will it need to be – a courtship of ludicrous dance followed by long monogamy proven to science by grief and pining after death? I realise as I come within sight of her scut that with each step onward I feel less awkward and more afraid of the awkwardness I would feel if returned to human form. We run for a long time, downhill, through a hollow that never seems to find a further edge. A librarian carrying a book strolls along between the wide, wide trunks of the trees of the enchanted forest. He does not seem in any way lost, although as he goes he is gazing upward toward the canopy in wonderment. Wherever he is he is a long long way away from the Issue & Return counter. I have time, a little time, to think, and I realise that it is only now, transformed, that I know the forest as enchanted; though I should, of course, have known before. The library also, I sense, as if it were one of the almost-sounds, is or was an enchanted place. The recognition of enchantment comes, though, not because I myself have become an enchanted creature (which should be proof enough), but because I am now alive in a different version of the world – more alive, and the world in turn seems more of a world; more keenly etched, more exactly sounded, and above all more powerfully scented. This sense (twitching my new nose) only fades in slowly, as we descend, like walking into a mist, and I believe I can understand why: if the intensity of smell-upon-smell-upon-smell had overtaken me in one instant, it might have killed me, or rendered me – at the very least – inane with shock. It would have been like, I can only think to say, being transported, i
n one’s sleep, into the tympani section of an orchestra halfway through the ‘Ode to Joy’. Isobell has now become easily traceable through her scent, which I find the most delicious of all those attempting to impress themselves upon me. Symphonic music is the best analogy with which I can attempt description: a low bass hum of forestness, of accreted scent (there are many dead things buried here); fleeting piccolo notes that spatter me for a moment and then evaporate – like petals brushed across one’s eyelids; and all the sounding tones in-between, the pungent dungs, ghostly fungi, motherly mosses, cinnamonesque barks. We have reached the bottom of the hollow, the size of which I can no longer estimate – I sense around me extents of forest that may be due to distance or merely to an almost overwhelming intensity of added sensual detail. ‘Here we are not at home,’ says Isobell. ‘We would like it elsewhere more.’ And I know where – exactly where she means, to the very hedge and angle and grass-blade; her longing has conveyed itself to me or, more likely, was in me already only waiting to be called forth. I remember that great receptacle and distillation of English nostalgias ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’: ‘Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand/ Still guardians of that holy land?/ The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,/ The yet unacademic stream?/ Is dawn a secret shy and cold/ Anadyomene, silver-gold?/ And sunset still a golden sea/ From Haslingfield to Madingley?/ And after, ere the night is born/ Do hares come out about the corn?’ This, though, is not the summit of Brooke’s past-love, that Everestine peak is crumpets for tea. But just before his death, young Rupert returned for a second and greater thrust at the same image: ‘A wind of night, shy as the young hare/ That steals even now out of the corn to play,/ Stirs the pale river once, and creeps away.’ Am I a young hare? I realise that I have no idea. And yet, I feel something more than nostalgia in Brooke’s conjured corn: it is an intensified, sensualized homecoming – just as Isobell’s spell promised: ‘Till I come home again.’ And I remember the miscarriage in Sheffield, the sorrow and sighing and mickle care. I grieve again, at great speed that is in no way cursory, for our two lost babies. ‘Where is the Devil?’ I wonder – if we are going in his name, why doesn’t he show himself, or does he show himself only in my altered form? I think, for one awful instant, that I may be losing the instinct of language – for a memory of corn overwhelms me, and it is as if the susurrus of each stem rubbing against each sister stem – all stupendously audible to the long, leporine ears with which I seem to have heard it before – it is almost as if this breeze-borne, breeze-created sound were orgasm. ‘We do not belong here,’ I say back to Isobell, although I still have no proof or agreement from her that Isobell is who she is. Now that I am as she, her lankiness has become the shape of archetypal desire and the musk of her manky scut, catnip. As one, we move: her thoughts inhabiting my body, my will prompting her muscles; the ground begins to rise, the far side of the hollow finally reached.