The Lyre of Orpheus Read online

  He is doing well. Of course he has to find some words that will carry the plot they have created for my Arthur. It is not precisely the plot I would have wished for. It smells a little of the present day—their present day. But it is not bad. It is more psychological than I would have dared to make it, and I am happy with that, for I was rather a fine psychologist, in the manner of my time. My uncanny tales were not just fantasies to amuse young girls on an idle afternoon.

  But Darcourt has had a really good idea. Whenever he can, he is drawing on the writings of a true poet. A poet not very well known, he says, but I would not know about that for I never read English with real understanding, and English poetry was an unknown country to me. But I like what he has fished up from his unknown. How right he is not to tell anybody who his unknown poet is! If they knew, they would want to stick a finger in the pie, and too many fingers in pies are the utter ruin of art and the curse of drama. No; let the secret remain a secret, and if anybody wants to ferret out the secret, good luck to them and probably bad luck to him.

  All artistic tinkering and monkeying is slave’s work. I know. Once I undertook, as an act of friendship, to do something of the sort. I made a version of Shakespeare’s Richard III for my dearest friend, Ludwig Devrient. It almost cost me that friendship, for Ludwig wanted all sorts of things that my artistic conscience revolted against. But Shakespeare wanted it thus, I would say, and he would shout To hell with Shakespeare! Give me a great effect here, so that I can take the audience by the throat and choke it with splendour! And then, in the next scene, you must arrange matters so that I can choke them again, and reduce them to an admiring pulp! My dear Louis, I would say, you must trust your poet and you must trust me. And then he would say what I could not bear: Shakespeare is dead, and as for you, you do not have to go on the stage with a hump on your back and a sword in your hand, and win the battle every night. So do what I say! After which, there was nothing for me to do but get drunk. Ludwig got what he wanted, but Richard III was never one of his greatest roles, and I know why. After it was over, the audience came unchoked, and the critics told them that Ludwig was a barn-stormer and a mountebank. Whom did he blame, then? Shakespeare, of course, and me along with Shakespeare.

  I like Darcourt, and not just because I pity him. The old Gypsy woman says he will be greatly rewarded, but old Gypsy women can be wrong. Who heeds a librettist? At the party after the performance, who wants to meet him? At whose feet do the pretty ladies fall? Whose lapel do the rich impresarios seize, clamouring for more, and greater, works? Not the librettist.

  The old Gypsy is wrong. Or else I do not know as much about this affair as I hope I do.

  Anyhow, I must bide the event, as Shakespeare says. Or does he? There are no reference libraries in Limbo.

  6

  Darcourt’s Christmas holiday was a success beyond his hopes. His hotel in the north woods pretended to be a simple chalet, but was, in fact, luxurious, giving him a large room with broad windows looking down over a valley of pine forest; a proper room, with a desk and a good armchair in it, as well as the bed, and—rarest of hotel blessings—a good light for reading; a chest of drawers, a closet for his clothes, and a bathroom where there was provision for everything he could need, and in the form of a bidet and a frank notice warning him not to put his sanitary towels down the plumbing, for things he did not need. With a sense of deep content he unpacked and hung up clothes that gave no hint of his clerical character; he had invested in two or three shirts sufficiently gaudy for a country holiday, and some handsome scarves to tuck into his open collar. He had a fine pair of corduroy trousers, and, for long walks, boots that were, he had been assured, proof against cold and wet. He had two tweed jackets, one with leather patches on the elbows, sure signal that he was an academic, and not an academic of the sort that likes to ski, or slide downhill on a luge, or engage in casual conversations about nothing in particular. There were young people among the guests, who wanted to do these things, and older people who wanted to sit in the bar and pretend that they would prefer to ski, or luge; but the discreet lady whose job it was to see that everybody had a good time knew Darcourt at once for a man whose idea of a good time was to be alone. So he was civil to his fellow guests, and obedient to the convention that required him to make remarks about the weather, and smile at children, but on the whole he was left to himself and settled to two weeks of his own company with a deep sense of gratitude.

  He walked after breakfast. He walked before dinner. He read, sometimes detective novels and sometimes fat, difficult books that primed the pump of his reflections. He made notes. But most of the time he brooded, and mused, and looked inward, and thought about being the Fool, and what that might mean.

  The Fool; the cheerful rogue on a journey, with a rip in his pants, and a little dog that nipped at his exposed rump, urging him onward and sometimes nudging him in directions he had never intended to take. The Fool, who had no number but the potent zero which, when it was added to any other number, multiplied its significance by ten. He had spoken truly in Mamusia’s cellar when he said that he believed that everybody had a personal myth, and that as a rule it was a myth of no great potency. He had been inclined to see his own myth as that of a servant, a drudge, not without value, but never an initiator or an important figure in anyone’s life but his own. If he had been asked to choose a card in the Tarot that would signify himself, he would probably have named the Knave of Clubs, Le Valet de Baton, the faithful, loyal servitor. Was not that the character he had played all his life? As a clergyman, loyal to his faith and his bishop until he could stand it no more and outraged nature had driven him to become a teacher? As a teacher, generous and supportive to his students, the administrative assistant to the head of his college, doing so much of the work for so little of the acclaim? As a friend, the patient helper of the Cornishes, and their crack-brained Cornish Foundation, which had embarked on such a foolish exploit as giving form to an opera that existed in no more than a few ideas, scribbled in pain by a dying man? Oh, the Knave of Clubs to the life! But now Mamusia had declared as true what he had for some time felt in his bones. He was something better. He was the Fool. Not the servitor, napkin in hand, at the behest of his betters, but the footloose traveller, urged onward by something outside the confines of intellect and caution.

  Had he not felt the truth of it? Had those promptings that had led him to the Sun Pictures, and the sealed portfolio in the National Gallery hoard, not come from somewhere not accountable to reason, deduction, scholarly craft? Was not his biography of his old friend Francis Cornish, which he had undertaken as an act of friendship, and chiefly to oblige Maria and Arthur, blossoming into something that none of Francis Cornish’s heirs could have foreseen? If he could piece out the jigsaw that placed the figures in Grandfather McRory’s photographed chronicle of Blairlogie (unlikely cradle for a work of art) in the great composition called The Marriage at Cana (dated as circa 1550 and attributed to the unknown Alchemical Master), would he not have established Francis as, at worst, a brilliant faker, and at best an artistic genius of a rare and eccentric breed? And how would he have done it? Not by being a crook, stealing from a library and a gallery, but by being a Fool and acting on a morality not to be judged by common rules. He was the Fool, the only one of the Tarot figures who was happily in motion—not falling as in the Tower, not endlessly revolving as in the Wheel of Fortune, not drawn ceremonially by horses as in the Chariot, but off on foot, bound for adventure.

  This sort of self-recognition does not come to a man in his forties in a sudden flash. It offers itself tentatively, and is rejected as immodest. It asserts itself in sudden, unaccountable bursts of well-being. It comes as a joke, and is greeted with incredulous laughter. But in the end it will not be denied, and then it takes a good deal of getting used to. Without being self-deprecatory, Darcourt had the humility of a man who had, with his whole heart, embraced the calling of a priest. He was a priest in the tradition of Erasmus, or the ungovernable Sydney S
mith, who was said to have jested away his chances of a mitre. He was a priest of the type of the mighty Rabelais. But was not Rabelais a true priest and also a Fool of God? Was he, Simon Darcourt, professor, Vice-Warden of his college, unpaid dogsbody of the Cornish Foundation, and (he sometimes thought) the only sane man in a congeries of charming lunatics, really a Fool of God? He was too modest a man to greet such a revelation with a whoop and a holler.

  It was thus he mused while taking his long, solitary walks through the pine forests that surrounded his hotel. He was not one of those people—do they exist anywhere except in books?—who think in a straight line, with unescapable logic. Walking helped him to think, but that meant that walking allowed him to bob up and down in the warm bath of a mass of disjointed reflections. The warm bath had to be reheated every day, and every day the conclusion came a little nearer, until it became a happy certainty. His fellow guests, incorrigible gossips as people in a resort hotel always are, sometimes asked each other why the man with the leather patches on his elbows seemed so often to smile to himself, and not in answer to their smiles; and why, once or twice, he laughed softly but audibly while he was eating at his lonely table.

  It was in the forest that he fared farthest in his astonishing recognition of what he was and how he must live. Canadians are thought of in the great world—whenever the great world thinks about them at all—as dwellers in a northern land. But most of them dwell in communities, large or small, where their lives are dominated by community concerns and accepted ideas. When they go into their forests, if they are not there to exploit the forests by chopping them down, they are there to rush downhill on skis, or bob-sleighs, to strain after accomplishment in winter sports, to make decorous whoopee at the bar or on the dance floor when the day’s exertion is over. They do not go into the forests to seek what they are, but to forget what they suspect themselves to be. Sport numbs the concerns they have brought with them from the towns. They do not ask the forests to speak to them. But the forests will speak if they can find a listener, and Darcourt listened, as he trudged the solitary trails that had been ploughed out among the huge pines, and when—without an apparent breath of wind—powderings of snow fell from the trees onto his shoulders, he heeded the deeper suggestions which had nothing to do with the world of words.

  He did not think only of himself, but of the people from whom he was taking a holiday. What a muddle of concerns had been set in action by Hulda Schnakenburg’s apparently innocent desire to piece out some manuscript notes of music, in order that she might gain the doctorate in her studies that could lead to a place in the world of her art! Arthur’s desire to escape his world of business and figure in the world of art as an intellectual and a patron; Geraint Powell’s opportunist scheme to launch himself as a director of opera on an imaginative level; the seduction of Hulda Schnakenburg by the amoral but splendidly inspiring Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot; the recognition of Clement Hollier, fine scholar and renowned paleo-psychologist, as a man wholly at sea when faced with any imaginative notion that was not safely rooted in the dark and ambiguous past; the bitterness of Professor Penelope Raven, when confronted with an aspect of herself which she had disguised for half a lifetime; the uprooting of Maria, who was trying to balance her obligations as the wife of a very rich man, bound by the conventionalities of such a fate, against her inclination to become a scholar and get away from her Gypsy heritage; and of course that baby, still an unknown factor, though a living creature, who would never have come into being if Hulda, snooping through some musical manuscripts, had not come upon the skeleton of Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. They were driven by craving, of one sort or another, and if he were really the Knave of Clubs he was the servant of their craving. But suppose he were the Fool, driven by no craving but ready to follow his path, confident that his destiny and the mischievous little dog at his heels would guide him—was not that a vastly finer thing? The Myth of the Fool was a myth indeed, and he would live it as fully and as joyously as in him lay.

  He had revulsions of feeling, as a man undergoing a great change must do. What on earth was he doing—he, a modern man, a trusted instructor of the young, a servant of the university as a temple of reason and intellectual progress—abandoning himself to an old Gypsy woman’s blethers about the Tarot? If this was thinking at all, it was thinking of a superstitious, archaic nature. But then—it was so seductive, so firmly rooted in a past that it had served pretty well for millennia before the modern craze for logic. Logic, which meant not logic as a system applicable to whatever lay under the domination of inference and the scientific method, but debased logic, a means of straining out of every problem the whisperings of intuition, which was a way of seeing in the dark. Mamusia’s hunches and her Tarot were only channels for her intuition, which, combined with his own, might open doors that were closed to logic. Let logic keep its honourable place, where it served man well, but it should not take absurd airs on itself as the only way of settling a problem or finding a path. Logic could be the weapon with which fear defies fate.

  A word kept popping into his head which he had heard Gunilla use when she was introducing Schnak to the finer realms of musical composition. Sprezzatura. It meant, said Gunilla, a contempt for the obvious, for beaten paths, for what seemed to be obligatory to musical underlings; it was a noble negligence, a sudden leap in art toward a farther shore that could not be reached by the ferry-boats of custom.

  Such leaps could, of course, land you in the soup. Had not Arthur’s sprezzatura, arising probably from the first symptoms of mumps—the higher temperature, the irritable malaise—landed them all in this ridiculous opera venture? Was it a noble leap, or a plunge into the soup? Only time could show.

  Was it part of the Arthurian myth, into which the Cornish Foundation seemed to have strayed, and which needed a great questing king, betrayed by his closest friend and his dearly beloved? Behind the time which was so imperiously signalled every noontide by the great observatory at Ottawa, and binding upon a million human activities, there lay the Time of Myth, the time of the mind, the habitation of all those nine plots of which he and Gunilla had spoken, and the landscape of quite another sort of life. Surely it is in the mind that we humans truly live, as animals do not; the mind, which is not the creature of the clock but of those moving planets and that vast universe whose mysteries are still, in the main, unknown to us?

  Moonshine, thought Darcourt. Yes, perhaps it was moonshine, which the amateur logicians held in contempt because it threatened so much they held dear—their timorous certainty which was, when all was weighed up, certain of so very little. But they despised moonshine because they never looked at the moon. How many of the people he knew could, if asked to do so, say in which phase the moon was at the time they were questioned? Did the Fool travel by moonshine? If he did, he was in a happy state of confidence about where he was going, which very few of those who never looked at the moon seemed to be.

  It was a fearful adventure to put off the servitor’s livery of the Knave of Clubs, and put on the motley of the Fool. But had Darcourt, in all his eminently respectable life, ever had a real adventure? That was what the Time of Myth seemed to be urging him to do. When the time comes for truth to speak, it may choose an unfamiliar tongue; the task is to heed what is said.

  When he left the forests to return to his life and its burdens, Simon Darcourt was a changed man. Not a wholly new man, not a man one jot less involved in the life of his duties and his friends, but a man with a stronger sense of who he was.

  (2)

  IF THE OPERA VENTURE seemed madness to Darcourt, it was more and more true and compelling to Schnak and the Doctor, who now had enough completed music to be nipped and tucked and patted and dowelled into an opera score. The final form had not been achieved but it was in sight. Not one of Hoffmann’s themes and rough notes had been neglected, and the important part of the music rested upon them. But inevitably there were gaps, seams to be sewn and then concealed, bridges to be contrived to get from
one piece of authentic Hoffmann to another. These were the tests that would show Schnak’s quality. The Doctor suggested nothing, but she was quick to reject anything Schnak produced which seemed unworthy or unsuitable to the whole. Developing and orchestrating Hoffmann’s notes was child’s play to Schnak; finding Hoffmann’s voice in which to devise her new material was a different matter.

  The exactions of the Doctor and the exasperation of Schnak made life a hell for Darcourt. His job was to tinker scraps of language into appropriate lengths for the music which was written every day, and changed every day, until he lost all sense of a coherent narrative, or intelligible utterance. Sometimes the Doctor scolded him for the banality of what he prepared; sometimes she rejected it because it was too literary, too hard to comprehend when sung, too obtrusively poetic. Of course the Doctor, who was an artist of considerable quality, was merely expressing her dissatisfaction with herself and what she could squeeze out of her pupil; Darcourt understood that, and was prepared to put up with it. But he was not ready to take snarling impudence from Schnak, who assumed she was privileged to be rudely capricious and exacting.

  “This is shit!”

  “How would you know, Schnak?”

  “I’m the composer, I suppose?”

  “You’re an illiterate brat! What you call shit is the verse of a poet of great gifts, slightly adapted by me. It’s utterly beyond your comprehension. You take it and be grateful for it!”

  “No, no, Simon; Hulda is right. It won’t work. We must have something else.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know what else. That’s your job. What is wanted here is something that says the same thing, but says it with a good open vowel on the third beat of the second bar.”

  “That means reshaping the whole thing.”

  “Very well; reshape it. And do it now, so we can get on. We can’t wait till tomorrow while you brood over a dictionary.”