The Manticore Read online

  "Must the workmanship always be superior? If something is to be said, must it always be said with eloquence and taste?"

  "That's what they teach us in the Art Club. I mean, if it's not well done it's no good, is it?"

  "I don't know. I've never been able to make up my mind. A lot of modern artists are impatient of technical skill. It's one of the great puzzles. Why don't you come and see me after the meeting, and we'll talk about it and see what we can find out."

  This led to seeing a lot of Father Knopwood. He used to ask me to meals in his rooms, as he called a bed-sitter with a gas ring in a cupboard that he had not far from the church. He wasn't poison-poor, but he didn't believe in spending money on himself. He taught me a lot and put some questions I have never been able to answer.

  The art thing was one of his pet subjects. He loved art and knew a lot about it, but he was always rather afraid of it as a substitute religion. He was especially down on the idea that art was a thing in itself – that a picture was simply a flat composition of line and pigment, and the fact that it seemed also to be Mona Lisa or The Marriage at Cana was an irrelevance. Every picture, he insisted, was "of" something or "about" something. He was interesting about very modern pictures, and once he took me to a good show of some of the best, and talked about them as manifestations of questing, chaos, and sometimes of despair that artists sensed in the world about them and could not express adequately in any other way. "A real artist never does anything gratuitously or simply to be puzzling," he would say, "and if we don't understand it now, we shall understand it later."

  This was not what Mr. Pugliesi said in the Art Club at school. We had a lot of clubs, and the Art Club had rather a cachet, as attracting the more intellectual boys; you were elected to it, you didn't simply join. Mr. Pugliesi was always warning us not to look for messages and meanings but to take heed of the primary thing – the picture as an object – so many square feet of painted canvas. Messages and meanings were what Father Knopwood chiefly sought, so I had to balance my ideas pretty carefully. That was why he got after me for laughing at the Boy Scout picture. He agreed that it was an awful picture, but he thought the meaning redeemed it. Thousands of boys would understand it who would never notice a Raphael reproduction if we put one in its place.

  I have never been convinced that he was right, and was shocked by his idea that not everybody needed art to be educated. He saved me from becoming an art snob, and he could be terribly funny about changes in art taste; the sort of fashionable enthusiasm that admires Tissot for thirty years, kicks him out of the door for forty, and then drags him back through the window as an artist of hitherto unappreciated quality. "It's simply the immature business of assuming that one's grandfather must necessarily be a fool, and then getting enough sense to realize that the old gentleman was almost as intelligent as oneself," he said.

  This was important to me because another kind of art was coming to the fore at home. Caroline, who had always had lessons on the piano, was beginning to show some talent as a musician. We had both had some musical training and used to go to Mrs. Tattersall's Saturday morning classes, where we sang and played rhythm instruments and learned some basic stuff very pleasantly. But I had no special ability, and Caroline had. By the time she was twelve she had fought through a lot of the donkey-work of learning that extraordinarily difficult instrument that all unmusical parents seem to think their children should play, and she was pretty good. She has never become a first-rate pianist, but she is a much better than average amateur.

  When she was twelve, though, she was sure that she was going to be another Myra Hess and worked very hard. She played musically, which is really quite rare, even among people who get paid big fees to do it. Like Father Knopwood, she was interested in content as well as technique, and it was always a puzzle to me how she got to be that way, for nothing at home encouraged it. She played the things young pianists play – Schumann's The Prophet Bird and his Scenes from Childhood, and of course lots of Bach and Scarlatti and Beethoven. She could wallop out Schumann's Carnaval with immense authority for a girl of twelve or thirteen. The mischievous little snip she was in her personal life seemed to disappear, and somebody much more important took her place. I think I liked it best when she played some of the easier things she had learned in earlier years and fully commanded. There is one trifle – I don't suppose it has much musical value – by Stephen Heller, called in English Curious Story, which is a very misleading translation of Kuriose Geschichte; she really succeeded in making it eerie, not by playing in a false, spooky way, but by a refined, Hans Andersen treatment. I loved listening to her, and though she tormented me horribly at other times, we seemed to be able to reach one another when she was playing and I was listening, and Netty was somewhere else.

  Caroline was glad to see me at weekends, because the house was even gloomier than before our mother died. It wasn't neglected; there were still servants, though the staff had been cut down, and they polished and tidied things that never grew dim or untidy because nobody ever touched them; but the life had gone out of the house, and even though its former life had been unhappy, it had been life of a kind. Caroline lived there, supposedly under the care of Netty, and once a week Father's secretary, an extremely efficient woman from Alpha Corporation, called to see that everything was in good order. But this secretary didn't want to be involved personally, and I don't blame her. Caroline was a day-girl at Bishop Caimcross's, so she had friends and a social life there, as I did at Colbome College.

  We rarely asked anybody home, and our first attempt to take over the house as our own soon spent itself. Father wrote letters now and then, and I know he asked Dunstan Ramsay to keep an eye on us, but Ramsay had his hands full at the school during those war years, and he didn't trouble us often. I rather think he disliked Carol, so he confined his supervision to questioning me now and then at school.

  You might suppose my sister and I were to be pitied, but we rather liked our weekend solitude. We could lighten it whenever we pleased by going out with friends, and people were kind about inviting us both to parties and such things, though during the war they were on a very modest scale. But I didn't want to go out much because I had no money and could get into embarrassing positions; I borrowed all I could from Carol but didn't want to be wholly in her clutch.

  What we both liked best were the Saturday evenings when we were together, because it had become the custom for Netty to devote that time to her pestilent brother Maitland and his deserving young family. Carol played the piano, and I looked through books about art which I was able to borrow from the school library. I was determined about this because I didn't want her to think that I had no independent artistic interest of my own, but as I looked at pictures and read about them, I was really listening to her. It was the only time the drawing-room showed any hint of life, but the big empty fireplace – the secretary from Alpha and Netty agreed that it was foolish to light it during wartime, when presumably even cord-wood was involved in our total war effort – was a reminder that the room was merely enduring us, and that as soon as we went to bed a weight of inanition would settle on it again.

  I remember one night when Ramsay did drop in, and laughed to see us.

  "Music and painting," said he; "the traditional diversions of the third generation of wealthy families. Let us hope you will both become discriminating patrons. God knows they are rare."

  We didn't like this, and Carol was particularly offended by his assumption that she would never do anything directly as a musician. But time has proved him right, as it does with so many disagreeable people. Carol and Beesty are now generous patrons of music, and I collect pictures. With both of us, as Father Knopwood feared, it has become the only spiritual life we have, and not a very satisfactory one when life is hard.

  Knopwood prepared me for Confirmation, and it was a much more important experience than I believe is usually the case. Most curates, you know, take you through the Catechism and bid you to ask them about anything you
don't understand. Of course most people don't understand any of it, but they are content to let sleeping dogs lie. Most curates give you a vaguely worded talk about keeping yourself pure, without any real hope that you will.

  Knopwood was very different. He expounded the Creed in tough terms, very much in the C. S. Lewis manner. Christianity was serious and demanding, but worth any amount of trouble. God is here, and Christ is now. That was his line. And when it came to the talk about purity, he got down to brass tacks better than anybody I have ever known.

  He didn't expect you to chalk up a hundred per cent score, but he expected you to try, and if you sinned, he expected you to know what you had done and why it was sin. If you knew that, you were better armed next time. This appealed to me. I liked dogma, for the same reason that I grew to like law. It made sense, it told you where you stood, and it had been tested by long precedent.

  He was very good about sex. It was pleasure: yes. It could be a duty: yes. But it wasn't divorced from the rest of life, and what you did sexually was of a piece with what you did in your friendships and in your duty to other people in your public life. An adulterer and a burglar were bad men for similar reasons. A seducer and a sneak-thief were the same kind of man. Sex was not a toy. The great sin – quite possibly the Sin against the Holy Ghost – was to use yourself or someone else contemptuously, as an object of convenience. I saw the logic of that and agreed.

  There were problems. Not everybody fitted all rules. If you found yourself in that situation you had to do the best you could, but you had to bear in mind that the Sin against the Holy Ghost would not be forgiven you, and the retribution would be in this world.

  The brighter members of Knoppy's Confirmation classes knew what he was talking about at this point. It was clear enough that he was himself a homosexual and knew it, and that his work with boys was his way of coping with it. But he never played favourites, he was a dear and thoroughly masculine friend, and there was never any monkey-business when he asked you to his rooms. I suppose there are hundreds like me who remember him with lasting affection and count having known him as a great experience. He stood by me during my early love-affair in a way I can never forget and which nothing I could do would possibly repay.

  I wish we could have remained friends.

  6

  People jeer at first love, and in ridiculous people it is certainly ridiculous. But I have seen how hot its flame can be in people of passionate nature, and how selfless it is in people who are inclined to be idealistic. It does not demand to be requited, and it can be a force where it is obviously hopeless. The worst fight I saw in my schooldays was caused when a boy said something derogatory about Loretta Young; another boy, who cherished a passion for the actress, whom he had seen only in films, hit this fellow in the mouth, and in an instant they were on the ground, the lover trying to murder the loudmouth. Our gym master parted them and insisted that they fight it out in the ring, but it was hopeless: the lover ignored all rules, kicked and bit and seemed like a madman. Of course nobody could explain to the master what the trouble was, but all of us supposed it was a fight about love. What I know now was that it was really a fight about honour and idealism – what Dr. von Haller calls a projection – and that it was a necessary part of the spiritual development of the lover. It may also have done something for the fellow who was so free with the name of Miss Young.

  I fell in love, with a crash and at first sight, on a Friday night in early December of 1944. I had been in love before, but trivially. Many boys, I think, are in love from the time they are able to walk, and I had cherished my hidden fancies and had had my conquests, of whom Toad Wilson was by no means the best example. Those were childish affairs, with shallow roots in Vanity. But now I was sixteen, serious and lonely, and in three hours Judith Wolff became the central, absorbing element in my life.

  Caroline's school, named for a Bishop Cairncross who had been a dominant figure in the nineteenth-century life of our Canadian province, had a reputation for its plays and its music. Every school needs to be known for something other than good teaching, and its Christmas play was its speciality. In the year when I was sixteen the school decided to combine music and drama and get up a piece by Walter de la Mare called Crossings. I heard a good deal about it because it had a lot of music and four songs in it, and Caroline was to play the piano off stage. She practised at home and talked about the play as if it were the biggest musical show since Verdi wrote Aida for the Khedive of Egypt.

  I read the playbook she had to work from, and I did not think much of it. It was certainly not in the Plain Style, and I was now much under the influence of Ramsay's enthusiasm for unadorned prose. It was not a Broadway kind of play, and I am not certain it is even a good play, but it is unmistakably a poet's play, and I was the most deeply enchanted of an audience that seemed, in a variety of ways suitable to their age and state of mind and relationship to the players or the school, to be delighted by it.

  It is about some children who are left to their own devices because of a legacy. They have an aunt who has strict educational theories and expects them to get into hopeless messes without her guidance; instead they have some fine adventures with strange people, including fairy people. The oldest child is a girl called Sally, and that was Judith Wolff.

  Sally is very much a de la Mare girl, and I don't think I ever saw Judith except through de la Mare eyes. The curtain went up (or rather, was drawn apart with a wiry hiss) and there she sat, at a piano, precisely as the poet describes her in the stage directions – slim, dark, of mobile face, speaking in a low clear voice as if out of her thoughts. She had a song almost at once. The illusion that she was playing the piano was not successful, because the sound was plainly coming from Caroline backstage, and her pretence to be playing was no better than it usually is. But her voice made shortcomings of that sort irrelevant. I suppose it was just a charming girl's voice, but I shall never know. It was a voice that seemed to be for me only in all the world. I was engulfed in love, and I suppose I have been in love with Judith ever since. Not as she is now. I see her from time to time, by chance; a woman of my own age, still gravely beautiful. But she is a Mrs. Julius Meyer, whose husband is an admired professor of chemistry, and I know that she has three clever children and is an important figure on the committee of the Jewish hospital. Mrs. Julius Meyer is not Judith Wolff to me, but her ghost, and when I see her I get away as fast as possible. The David Staunton who fell in love still lives in me, but Judith Wolff – the girl of the de la Mare play – lives only in my memories.

  Judith had two songs in Crossings. She acted as she sang, with a grave natural charm, and was much, much, much the best of the girls in the play.

  There were people who thought differently. As always at these affairs, there were people who thought the girls who played masculine parts were wildly funny, and I suppose that when they turned their whiskered, carefully made-up faces away, and we saw their girl-shaped bottoms, it was funny if that is where you find your fun. There was much applause for a small blonde girl played the Queen of the Fairies; she acted with a sweetness which I thought painfully overdone. There was a ballet of fairies, very pretty as they danced through a snow-scene, holding little lanterns; there were plenty of parents with eyes only for a special fairy. But I saw nothing clearly but Judith, and in justice to the audience generally I must say that they thought that she was – always excepting their own child – the best. For the curtain call the stage was filled with the whole cast, and also the inevitable clown assembly of mistresses in sensible shoes who had helped in some way, looking as such helpers always do, too big and too clumsy to have had anything to do with creating an illusion. Judith Stood in the centre of the first line, and it seemed to me that she was aware of her popularity and was blushing at it.

  I applauded uproariously, and I noticed some parents looking approvingly at me. I suppose they thought I was clapping for Caroline and was a loyal brother. Caroline was on the stage, certainly, holding the score of the music
so people would know what she had done, but I had no eyes for her. After the party for the cast and friends – school coffee and school cookies – I took Caroline home and tried to find out something about Judith Wolff. She had been surrounded by some foreign-looking people whom I supposed to be her parents and their friends, and I had not been able to get a good look at her. But Caroline was full of herself, as always, and demanded again and again that I reassure her that the music had been suitably audible, yet not too loud, and had supported the weaker singers without seeming to dominate them, and had really carried the ballet, who were just little girls and had no more sense of rhythm than so many donkeys, and had indeed been fully orchestral in effect. This was egotistical nonsense, but I had to put up with it in order to bring the conversation around to what I wanted to know.

  Weren't they lucky to get such a good girl for the part of Sally? Who was she?

  Oh – Judy Wolff. Nice voice, but dark. Brought it too much from the back of her throat. Needed some lessons in production.

  Perhaps. Good for that part, though.

  Possibly. A bit of a cow at rehearsal. Hard to stir her up.

  I considered killing Caroline and leaving her battered body on the lawn of one of the houses we were passing.

  Caroline knew I wouldn't have noticed, because it was a fine point not many people would get, but in Sally's Lullaby in Act Two, at "Leap fox, hoot owl, wail warbler sweet," Judy was all over the place, and as Caroline had a very tricky succession of chromatic chords to play there was nothing she could do to drag Judy back, and she just hoped it would be better tomorrow night.

  You cannot have a sister like Caroline without picking up a few tricks. I asked if there was any chance that I could see the play again on Saturday night?

  "So you can go and moon at Judy again?" she said. In another age Caroline would have been burnt as a witch; she could smell what you were thinking, especially when you wanted to conceal it. I set aside plans for burning her then and there.