Black Marsden Read online

  Black Marsden

  (a tabula rasa comedy)

  WILSON HARRIS

  For

  MARGARET

  this book which carries a memory or two of places we have visited

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Copyright

  If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,

  Every nighte and alle,

  Sit thee down and put them on;

  And Christe receive thy saule.

  If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gave nane,

  Every nighte and alle,

  The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;

  And Christe receive thy saule.

  If ever thou gavest meat or drink,

  Every nighte and alle,

  The fire sall never make thee shrink,

  And Christe receive thy saule.

  If meat and drink thou gavest nane,

  Every nighte and alle,

  The fire sall burn thee to the bare bane;

  And Christe receive thy saule.

  An Ancient Ballad

  I have two souls …, the one being all unconscious of what the other performs.

  The Private Memoirs and Confessions

  of a justified Sinner by James Hogg

  The frequency in Scottish literature of “theme and variation”, duality, split personality demands an explanation, which at best can only be tentative. Several recurrent traits … may perhaps have gone to produce this phenomenon. One is the intense preoccupation with character, with which is linked a relentless curiosity, an insatiable desire to enter into other people’s minds. (Such a tradition) usually is not satisfied with outward appearances; (it) worries what may be behind the surface. Then there is the subjective impressionism so characteristic of Scots and Gaelic poetry…. The whole thing can be seen from different angles, as a whole series of variations on a single theme. From the beginning, (this) poetry showed a combination of two or more seemingly irreconcilable qualities: of high pathos and everyday realism, of stark tragedy and grim humour, of high seriousness and grotesquerie, of tenderness and sarcasm … effortless transition from mood to mood … frequent change of level … diverse poems and mock elegies…. This emotional and intellectual dualism—the “Caledonian Antisyzygy”—may possibly have been reinforced by the schizophrenic tendencies of a nation which came to use one language to express thought, another to express feeling. It may also have been hardened by the stern intellectual discipline of Calvinism; and, as the impact of the Reformation gradually wore off, people may have become increasingly conscious of the latent emotional and moral dualism implicit in the overt contradiction between the Scottish Sabbath and the Scottish Saturday (or Friday) night. Yet it would be clearly wrong to explain the underlying dualism simply, or even chiefly, in terms of them. At any rate, the problem of a strangely subjective vision of reality is dominant….

  The Scottish Tradition in Literature

  by Kurt Wittig

  Am I a thingum mebbe that is kept

  Preserved in spirit in a muckle bottle?

  Hugh MacDiarmid

  So I haunted the City of your dreams….

  St-John Perse in Anabasis (translated by T. S. Eliot)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to authors and publishers as follows: Oliver and Boyd Ltd for quotations from The Scottish Tradition in Literature by Kurt Wittig; The Clarendon Press for quotations from John Knox by Jasper Ridley; The Bodley Head Ltd for quotations from Haunting Edinburgh by Flora Grierson; Penguin Books Ltd for quotations from The Legend of John Hornby by George Whalley; Faber and Faber Ltd for quotations from Writings from the ‘Philokalia’ on Prayer of the Heart translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer; Cassell and Co Ltd for adaption of a quotation from Highland Days by John Gordon.

  1

  I came upon him in a corner of the ruined Dunfermline Abbey of Fife like a curious frozen bundle that may have been blown across seas and landscapes to lodge here at my feet. On the journeys I had made through Fife last year I had been aware of the harlequin cloak of the seasons spread far and wide into strange intimacies and dissolving spaces. For example I had looked down upon the sea from another ruined abbey at Culross; I recalled evenings bridled by early lights along the Firth of Forth; all this seemed at times sunken into a transparent film or subaqueous world. The ancient palaces and corridors I visited were an extraordinary and naive cradle of kings woven nevertheless into complex, sometimes implacable legend. This combination of naive and complex features was true of kings whether in pre-Columbian America or pre-Renaissance Scotland or Europe. The idea obsessed me and I found myself at liberty to trace its contours around the globe since winning a fortune from the Football Pools.

  A half-frozen spectre of a man it was who appeared now at my feet in a corner of the winter Dunfermline Abbey. His beard was savage and black and icy and consistent with a wildness of nature that literally pierced me as our eyes met. It was an uncanny twist or stab from within myself as if I knew him though I had not seen him before.

  I had hardly dwelt properly upon this when the knives in his eyes turned into quills. Something to do with the glinting threads of light that laced the Abbey in the winter afternoon. It was self-surrender, I thought, rather than self-conquest which had been inscribed there upon a living mask. I had read of magicians who slept in ice or snow. It was this aspect of strange immunity to the elements and strange immersion in the elements—half-pathetic and sorrowful, half-ecstatic and joyful—that became now a kind of vivid black humour, deepset and unique as a late dazzle of sun.

  I leant forward and addressed him. Smoke rose from my lips. He shuddered a little. “Are you all right?” I said. I felt awkward and unfree. He sensed my embarrassment as well as fascination and grimaced with pain to intimate to me that my inner frame corresponded with his shuddering stiffness as though one disability sparked the other.

  “All right,” he replied. “All right.”

  We were curiously united within a human mist or ground of shared predicament. He looked doubled-up and spectral; no longer did he glint with knives and quills but his bent back had turned into a harp and I had been metamorphosed into a kind of rib or spring stretched by the deepest pull of fascination towards a condition of marvel.

  *

  This was the beginning of my curious and ambivalent friendship with Doctor Black Marsden—Clown or Conjurer or Hypnotist Extraordinary. As if that winter afternoon the strangest invisible Gorgon or Muse, ancient as the face of the globe, had turned her head towards us and fascinated us beyond words. I was in process of projecting from within myself upon him—as he simultaneously projected his mysterious frame of associations upon me—an assortment of instruments ranging from a knife to a harp.

  It was an uncanny idea (I felt myself stricken to the bone by the disease which I had already characterized to myself as ‘condition of marvel’—my conscription by the fortunes of history into a patron of the arts): uncanny to dream that a Gorgon or Muse, ancient as the face of the globe, had long fascinated us—without our being aware of it—and bound us into conserving and fleshing within ourselves the ritual skeletons of civilizations (walking knives or bent harps).

  The Gorgon or Muse, Doctor Marsden said, was the open-ended mystery of beauty—flesh into stone or vice versa.

  The Walking Knife, Doctor Marsden said, was both straight and twisted as love or death.

  The Walking Harp, Doctor Marsden said, was an essential ruined cage wit
hin ourselves/cradle of music/vibrating touchstone….

  So he spoke and I listened.

  A month or two later with Spring his words began to blossom and take shape. He had accepted my invitation to return with me to my house in Edinburgh (and stay as long as he liked) the afternoon I had stumbled upon him in a corner of the ancient Dunfermline Abbey….

  The first to arrive was the beautiful Gorgon of Marsden’s open-ended circus of reality. Marsden had dug her up from some appalling dive in London where her life-blood and talent were draining away. Knife (another poor gifted devil in need of succour) would follow in due course. Then Harp (a bewildered musician rusting in a garret). They all needed shoes and hose and meat and potatoes. Marsden laughed cheerfully. Then became grave. And gentle. “It is no accident we met,” he said. “I am a doctor of the soul and you are a patron of the arts. A rare combination.”

  There was a pause and a gust of wind shook the window-panes of the house. Then he introduced the Gorgon who had sailed into my sitting-room and deposited her spring coat. “Filthy,” said Marsden pointing to the coat which seemed quite stunning and fashionable to me. “Now take the dress she is wearing—the more one sees the less one sees. Her name is MORE-AND-LESS.” He laughed again. “You wouldn’t believe what an infinite labour of love it is.” He stroked her dress. “Seamless my boy. Half-an-inch here. Then half of that half again making a quarter. Then half again of that quarter making one-eighth. Then one-sixteenth. Then one-thirty-secondth. Ad infinitum. God knows how old the thing is and why it doesn’t fall to pieces on her back.”

  The beautiful Gorgon smiled and said, “You’re such a joker, Mardie. It’s a new outfit as well you know. Bless you for the cash.”

  “Don’t bless me,” said Doctor Marsden. “Bless him, your patron and host.” As he spoke he snapped his fingers. I felt a curious thrill or shock strike the back of my neck and unaccountable laughter welled in my throat. Then a hypnotic bulb switched on and off in my skull like variegated lights in a television studio. “It takes lots of divine money to put on a show.” As Doctor Marsden’s hypnotic voice rose and faded the bulb switched on again. I now saw the beautiful Gorgon plain as a fashion plate wired to a guillotine in a glossy magazine studio. A long dress fitted her like a tube. The bulb switched off. I felt now that if I unscrewed the top or head from that revolutionary French fashion plate and looked down into the dark tube or garment she wore at the light of her soul within, I would, in fact, be seized by the open-ended mystery of beauty which revealed and concealed all its intricate parts ad infinitum. So that the woman within was rendered invisible and her charms became a light at the end of the longest tunnel on earth through which one’s senses ran like sand or sea or blood.

  Black Marsden was staring at me intently. I felt myself on the verge of collapse—thrilled to bits as the newspapers say. Like someone who was part of a gigantic hourglass or sea of faces around the globe hypnotized to the brink of love or fear, desert or ocean, mimic creation of catastrophe. “You flaked out,” said Marsden enigmatically, “in the middle of a scene. As you were tipped into the tunnel.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. “What tunnel?”

  “Ah,” said Marsden, “the tunnel of civilization. O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark. It’s part of the jargon of the trade. The commerce of love. Gorgon.”

  “Where is she?” I cried. “Where has she gone?”

  “I sent her off on another shopping spree,” said Marsden briskly. “But she’ll be back never fear. She’s our skylight to eternity.” He gave his croaking laugh.

  2

  Mrs. Glenwearie was my housekeeper. If I were to sum up her solid attributes (wholly opposite to the Gorgon fashion plate Doctor Marsden had dug up from the dive in London) seven words would suffice—a woman with a heart of gold. She was nearly sixty and in excellent health. She kept my large house scrupulously clean. I possessed three floors. The ground floor comprised a spacious sitting-room, a good-sized dining-room, a study, a rather large kitchen, bedroom and lavatory; the second floor was divided into four good-sized bedrooms and a large bathroom; the third floor made available a small sitting-room, bedroom and bath—Mrs. Glenwearie’s quarters.

  Face to face with Mrs. Glenwearie one morning I was fascinated once more by an inventory of virtues, household virtues, hearth and home (all that money could buy). I was the luckiest of men I reasoned to get someone like her for forty pounds a month. Not only was I abnormally lucky in winning a considerable fortune from the Pools which gave me the key, as it were, to placate heaven and hell (by feeding many a poor angel and devil) but for a man without a family I possessed in Mrs. Glenwearie the nearest whole-hearted substitute nature could provide.

  As I basked now in the glow of her temperament it seemed Marsden did not exist at all until Mrs. Glenwearie herself asked after him. The fact was she had seen him the evening he arrived like an ancient ghost from the Abbey. When I brought him to the house I thought I might keep him out of her sight. Or if she did see him make her think he was nothing but a fly-by-night beggar. But she had seen him again the very next morning large as life. Then, with the arrival of the Gorgon Spring she had been conscious of peculiar burgeonings in my part of the house.

  Mrs. Glenwearie addressed me as “Mr. Goodrich”, “Mr. Goodrich dear” or “sir” as the fancy took her. (My name is Clive Goodrich.) She preserved a kind of sunny-faced acceptance of her “place” (as employee to employer) which, however, never blighted our relationship. (I am sure I had become not only her privileged ornament but a kind of adopted sou as well.) Nor did it lessen the shrewd labyrinth of conversation always at the edge of her tongue. I was greatly fascinated by this. A healthy fascination I supposed when I recalled another compulsion in my blood towards the Gorgon clothes horse of French fashion whose bars or open-ended frame Marsden had christened “skylight to eternity”.

  “Oh Mr. Goodrich dear,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “that woman is a flighty-looking one. Sailing about your house as if she owned it. She must have spent a pretty penny on her clothes. A bonnie Spring coat draped over her arm. And her dress fit for a Queen. A royal treat she is I’m sure.”

  “But flighty-looking you think, Mrs. Glenwearie?”

  “Aye, true enough. Flighty-looking she is,” said Mrs. Glenwearie. (Did she think “tart”, I wondered.) It was left to me to fit together royal treat and flighty-looking and to wonder, in fact, how entangled was the moral with the aesthetic judgement. Did moral fascinations breed dangerous Queens or dangerous Queens moral fascinations?

  “Did he take many pictures of her, Mr. Goodrich?”

  “Did who take many pictures of whom, Mrs. Glenwearie?”

  “That Doctor Marsden. I saw him take his flash-bulb camera from his room to the sitting-room. There came a flash through the half-open door and a minute or two later I saw another flash on the window to the street as I was on my way to the butcher’s up the road.”

  “I didn’t see anything. I hate flash-bulb cameras,” I said suddenly as if Mrs. Glenwearie had touched a deeply embedded nerve-end of sensation (or the crippling of sensation) to which I rarely confessed within the chopping and changing lights of space. “It’s an allergy of sorts I suppose. Space allergy. Though I must confess I absolutely love the open sea and the sky. Storms, however, can do peculiar things to me. Makes me feel sometimes I’m in a faint tunnel with frozen lightning at the far end. It’s too ridiculous for words.” I was given to this kind of rambling absurd improvisation or confession to my housekeeper.

  “It isn’t ridiculous at all, Mr. Goodrich dear. My late husband was a sufferer. He would glare at me and threaten to sneeze his head off if I dusted a carpet under his nose. You need to take greater care of yourself, sir. Sometimes I think you take too much on yourself, I do indeed. The oddsbodies you bring into the house at times. It fair unsettles you.”

  “Abnormal luck calls for abnormal insurance, Mrs. Glenwearie. It’s better to pay than perish.”

  “I confess I don
’t understand a word of that, Mr. Goodrich. But, och, it’s not for me to say. I suppose you know your own business best.”

  3

  I lay in bed that night and turned over in my mind my conversation with Mrs. Glenwearie. She said she had seen Doctor Marsden take his flash-bulb camera into the sitting-room. I had no recollection of this. Mrs. Glenwearie had seen it. She said categorically she had seen it. Actually set eyes on it. I repeated the words like dogma. Dogmatic circumstantial evidence. A secret doubt began to sprout in my mind.

  With a snap of the fingers, so to speak, judges had sent innocent men to the gallows on dogmatic circumstantial evidence. A strange light now shone down the longest tunnel on earth in my mind as I put the pieces together and recalled how Marsden had snapped his fingers at me and the curious hypnotic sensation which enveloped me then like a blow falling on the back of my neck.

  One sees and still does not see, feels and still does not feel. I should have questioned Mrs. Glenwearie more closely. Did she know or recall the exact time she had seen Marsden with his camera? She had intimated in our conversation that it was around the time she set out for the butcher’s. Now as a rule this happened in the mornings. But I had known her on occasions to go in the afternoons.