The Carnival Trilogy Page 3

  TWO

  News of the death of Everyman Masters in the summer of 1982 was a great shock to me and to my wife Amaryllis. We were younger than Everyman by fifteen years but he had been a close friend for as long as I could remember. He and I sailed from New Forest in 1957 on a converted French troop-ship that offered us economic berths to Marseilles from where we made our way to London. I was twenty-five then, he was forty. I began that very year to compile notes of his life. In the wake of the news of his death in 1982, I was possessed by lucid dreams that intermingled fact with imaginative truth.

  Amaryllis ascended above the stage of Carnival and said to the dead king Masters that he should return into my fiction and become my guide into the Inferno and the Purgatory of the twentieth century world. I dreamt that his Carnival body, slightly burnt mask, slightly smoking dagger of Napoleonic age, had come to light out of a cave of darkness when his cleaning woman visited his apartment. She screamed. The police came masked in alligator skin. He had been stabbed by an intruder. Nothing had been stolen. There was money in drawers. Untouched. Ornaments, pictures, clothing. Untouched. There was a glove and a fur coat on the floor. They had been pulled from a wardrobe but flung to the ground. The fur coat was stained with blood.

  A dagger is a tool one associates with cloaked assassins and the necessity for complex security around every larger-than-life personage, great phallic masks, presidents, millionaires, upon the stage of history. Masters was a plantation king, he had been an overseer on the estate of New Forest.

  I remembered his drunken command to me on his birthday, when we sat in the pub for the last time. “Write a biography of spirit as the fiction of my life.” He was poking fun, as usual, deadly serious fun. It was then that he mentioned the woman he had seen moving into the apartment above his a week before his birthday. She had lifted her hand to her forehead and thrown back a shock of coal. Her brow was elongated. It was an involuntary gesture, yet obscurely premeditated. The whiteness of her skin shone like human lightning. And I recalled as he spoke Orion’s severed hand in the Inferno painted on a wall of his bedroom. It was a severed hand like a glove over Masters’ body. A woman possessed it, New Forest Jane Fisher; she had inserted her hand into the glove. Were female hand and male glove tokens of addiction to the androgyny of the hunt, addiction to hermaphrodite beasts, dragons, slain by he-knights and she-knights of old?

  Thus woven into Masters’ “first death” in New Forest, I perceived an equation between plantation overseer and hunted beast, between the prince of the colony and the soul of all sliced creatures, between the enigma of love or jealousy and the emotion of the hunter/huntress elevated in space to alter our conception of complacent tradition in the heights as in the depths.

  I shall return to the stages of his “first death” from time to time in this book. Masters had acquainted me with these in many a conversation, but even so I remain in the dark about certain matters and shall need to seek him out, to consult his ghost, and discuss the matter of controversial first death with it (ghost) and with him (mask). Why “ghost” seems a gloved thing and “mask” pitiless/pitiful flesh-and-blood I do not immediately understand. Nevertheless the distinction – however enigmatic – is necessary if the genius of Carnival is to do justice to parallel gloves of emotion upon spirit-hand and spirit-face.

  His second death in London in 1982 was a climax for which he had longed since 1957, in order to fulfil a design that could only be achieved within parallel animalities or parallel universes of sexual fate and emotion.

  Within a week or two of his passing (an old-fashioned concept I brought with me from New Forest) and the enquiries launched by Scotland Yard, I learnt through one of my “leaves of grass” or Whitmanesque democratic informants that Jane Fisher – the woman with the raised hand and lightning brow who had accompanied him into his flat – had been questioned along with other tenants of the building.

  She said nothing whatsoever about visiting Masters but time was to prove that she had. She had risen from bed, dressed hastily, tiptoed out of the room and left him asleep. She was confused and agitated to be plucked from nowhere, as it were, to play a major and crucial role. In her confusion she left the door to his apartment ajar. The intruder entered in the wake of her shadow. Masters awoke at that moment to cement a climax he had long nursed in his heart. He was convulsed by pain. His chest throbbed. He tried to spring at the stranger but fell back in bed. Fate could not have been more co-operative. The intruder was alarmed at the wild mask of the dying king but it addressed him, it imbued him with his part in the play, his signal to act. He seized the dagger and thrust it into the ageing seer who conspired now with royal fate. And with royal freedom. The intruder too wore a mask. He and Masters were related to each other within a labyrinth of rehearsals, a labyrinth of Carnival innocence and guilt within a deeply troubled, violent age. They were to become my guides on the beach and into the cave of character-masks and dreams and through many realms.

  THREE

  “I am a mudhead though I ride high in your estimation, biographer,” Everyman Masters confessed to me. His words invoked the Atlantic foreshore of New Forest, South America. It was a complex gateway into the underworld of the cosmos. Sometimes it was littered by husks of coconut sculpted to reflect a straw caricature of the human brain, at other times to invest that caricature with lopsided genitals of the mind of place the human brain was. Sometimes it was a theatre of branches and trees, eroded, riven by the action of wind and wave. Etched into these, etched into branch or tree, one sometimes came upon the skeleton of a fish or the staring eye of a button to be pressed in the gallows of species.

  “All in all,” said Masters, “you need to seek a gateway here into the underworld, and overworld of the cosmos, an Orinoco-esque or Dantesque gateway.” He wept to my astonishment. “Mud, mud, everywhere and not a loaf to eat. New Forest mud is body and bread projected by the denizens of the underworld. The race of mudheads, if I may so describe my forebears, appeared in post-Columbian times, they were the renaissance of Carnival to compensate the inexplicable demise of El Dorado, the golden man and idol of kings. He ate from golden dishes and bathed in golden waters. So many cultures in ancient America vanished without rhyme or reason, leaving their treasures like heaps of straw on the floor of palaces and temples. Were they slain by Doubt or by Famine?

  “I was born in 1917 and was scarcely nine when I began to reconnoitre the foreshore, and to seek the button in the eye of the fish.”

  His voice ceased but the foreshore that I knew (I had run there too as a child some twenty years or so after his time, his childhood) rose vividly into my mind. The button in the eye of the fish Masters had pressed projected me up. It was a kind of atomic wheel, atomic fiction rather than deed, in the light years of innocent creatures one rode, sometimes up, sometimes down. He had put his finger on the wounded eye of a hanging creature and uplifted me, whereas before I had stood low and raised him without being conscious of the wound – bird’s broken wing, or leviathan pupil – I had touched, on beach or foreshore, to imbue him with the myth of ascent.

  I saw him far below me now like a ghost in space whose light years reached me nevertheless across fictional time. He picked his way on the mud of the foreshore. He was nine years old. He crawled gingerly. Crabs scuttled as he moved, their white legs of Carnival and their shadowed backs shining with the gloom and the pallor of El Doradan nebulae. It was as if I perceived him in another age, an age that was close to the execution of the golden man by Doubt or Famine. And yet he remained a child of the 1920s. A wild and glorious cherry tree suddenly sprouted. I saw it distinctly and yet it existed within a capacity to fade or vanish. How had that wild glory of a tree centuries ago, in the age of El Dorado, subsided into a relic of the 1920s! Unidentifiable relic it would have been were I not aware of it as it originally was.

  So too Masters seemed a relic, child and relic, young and ancient, child of the 1920s, child of our century, yet an ancient king, the king of a vanished realm. Hi
s subjects were crabs on a South American foreshore, nebula-crabs. I paused as I wrote to reflect upon the constellation of the hunted in the hunter Masters had previously invoked in my book, the eye of the fish in the hanged fisherman upon a wasteland tree. Each ancient relic or stump on which the eye of the fisherman was drawn, each shell of a crab sculpted there, each skin of an animal or cell planted there, addressed me now as susceptible to the glory of Carnival tree, or gallows of god, that could ravish the knowledgeable heart.

  I had scarcely dwelt on the thought of such glory when I doubted my inspiration. It seemed suddenly desolating to dream of parallels of glory within gallows stump and relic, within crab and fossil. All I could now discern within my “knowledgeable heart” was the anguish of a child who crawled on a beach beneath me. He had cut himself on a bone, I suddenly saw. He staunched the blood with a rag; it was a new beginning overshadowed by uncertainty, the uncertainty I felt over the origins of kingship. I (though still aloft on the wheel of fiction) reached down and sought Doubting Thomas’s hand then to help young Masters, young mudhead, yet to thwart him in my disbelief. Thomas of New Forest Carnival made a rough gesture, perhaps it was involuntary, and tore the rag. Thomas, in this incarnation cultivated by Carnival tradition, was an older cousin, twelve years old at least, who had accompanied the nine-year-old boy-king in the game they played of light-year wheel and gallows susceptible to glory and to hope …

  Before pursuing the game the two boys played, I must stop for a moment to reflect. I was jolted, shocked by what I had felt and seen, by most painful inner revelation in the construction of Everyman Masters’ life (or lives and masks). Profoundest sorrow hit me. Did the hand one projects into games of fiction to help the child or master one portrays also serve to thwart? Did the hand with which one seeks to heal also destroy? It came as a shock to see the rag, to see Thomas’s cousinly hand so raised in the game it seemed bent on proving the resurrection of the child El Dorado from slain gold. It was a hand that appeared to sift – I reflected again – a cruel currency or enterprise of economic proof, economic crusade, across the ages. It was a hand in the process of evolving, I saw, into the shadow of past and future sacred/profane cannibal and assassin. And therein it revealed an essential paradox, I reflected again, within the nature of uncertainty, the uncertainty that seeks proof and needs to tear every rag, re-open every wound, until it becomes fascinated by blood, old and new.

  I am curiously glad, gentle reader, to pause and confess to all this, however bitter-tasting it is. For in so doing, so confessing, I begin to feel the obsessional neurosis of “proof” that haunts our civilization. In New Forest Carnival Thomas I perceived the seed of the saint and also of the involuntary assassin or revolutionary. I was shocked by this disclosure. It addressed me both subtly and powerfully within the labyrinth of innocence and guilt through which Masters was taking me. Masters himself was to be pursued all his life by visible and invisible giant hunters whose shadows lay everywhere in skeletons of the Inferno that adorn the gateways into the underworld and the overworld. I had seen myself the button of the fish on the foreshore, the nucleus of atomic giant.

  What was strangest about the role of Doubting Thomas in the Carnival of New Forest was his proximity to giants, broken giants, uneasy giants, partially slain giants. He grieved over them (even when he thwarted them), served them through masks of sobriety and rage by sifting the currency of the estate of the world in order to prove the depth of the wounds inflicted on humanity. But that was not all. Thomas sought to prove … Prove what?

  Prove the seed or bone of royal genesis; prove a game that started in childhood – mostly forgotten – hope; prove that royalty or glory (however contested) is other than mere fallacy or privilege, and the torn rag with which Everyman wrestles may actually still bind up the wounds of time …

  Thus Thomas’s Carnival new world/old world masks were fraught with ambiguity, the ambiguity of the saint and the revolutionary manqué. I was unsure of Thomas, unsure of labels, but I loved him and felt his predicament inwardly and keenly. I knew I was ignorant of the inner problematic of sainthood as of the religious torment in touching a wound that may fertilize a Carnival bond with frustration, anguish, jealousy, violence, in subject cultures. He seemed to me as indispensable a guide through the Inferno of history as Masters himself was.

  Even though buried in reflection, in past tenses and present tenses, I had not lost sight of the game on the beach. Thomas had relinquished the rag and was seeking to persuade the boy-king to abandon the game. But he insisted on going on. It had been a trifling cut, he said, pointing to the sharp bone on the beach.

  I saw now that the bone was shaped like a knife from El Doradan Carnival.

  “A seed sometimes cuts into the masked lip of a bird, the lip within the beak, as a bone cuts into the spirit of a child, the spirit within the flesh. But the axe, where is the shaman’s axe that slices and shapes the monument in the seed, the galaxy in the bone?”

  He crawled on with the precocity of age and childhood, nine years old, nine centuries old, and came at last with Thomas in his shadow, in my shadow as well, falling from the sky with its wheel of lights, to the wild cherry tree that had been reduced to blackened limbs and stumps though I had seen it, or thought I had seen it, in all its original glory. This was the primal gateway into the underworld and overworld of the cosmos. The light that bathed it infused it, all at once, with the sensation that it grew downwards, that its roots were up here in space, its branches down there in the earth.

  I looked around for the axe that had cut the tree, as the bone had cut the spirit of childhood into light-year bandaged ghost, and thought I discerned it far out upon the retreating tide when a glimmer of sun upon a wave transfigured the ocean into lilting, sighing, singing sharpness. That was the shaman’s axe! It was he (El Doradan shaman or space-priest) who had axed the tree a long time ago and sculpted from it El Dorado himself, El Dorado’s retinue, his court, his wives, his children, his huntsmen, his fishermen, his peers, his civil servants.

  All had come alive under the subtle liquid blow of the axe, and I recalled Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea breathing all of a sudden under the chisel. So too had the wood, sliced from the cherry tree, turned to gold then to flesh-and-blood.

  Were axe and chisel and bone the same liquid tool across parallel light years? I seemed to see it all save that the shadow of uncertain voice or lilt of the cosmos, in all carven broken things, persisted. Masters and his disciple had crawled on the beach, even as the axe sharpened the rhythm of the tide, and the chisel and the bone shone, but I wondered whether they were living sculpted being, whether – despite the fact that the cut or the slice of original shaman may have engendered freedom – a pattern of falsehood masked the truth to promote an automatic procession riveted in reflexes of fascination with violence, reflexes of false brutal axe, brutal greed, the greed of power, the greed of possession.

  They stopped. Thomas crawled away into a sea-wood in pursuit of a colourful crab. Masters remained alone. I felt a shiver run through my veins as through his wound still bound with a rag. To crawl or to stop in mindless attachment to the instrument of power that fashions one’s nerves is to appear to live in freedom, yet not to live in freedom’s consciousness of the sorrow of pain in genesis, the slice, the cut, the blow that dis-members, yet may occasion one to re-member.

  I felt divisions of sorrow within that blow, divisions of true shaman or creator and false shaman or manipulator of defeated cultures. I felt divisions of sorrow within a universal genius of love that seems at times in pawn to a universal seducer of humanity.

  Yes, I had projected parallel fictions of “doubt” into space in shadow characterization (as though “space” were an entity to be sculpted like “wood” or “marble”), I had felt profoundest sorrow hit me, or reshape me, and I knew that the fiction of Memory (of re-membering, or reconstitution) lay in complex truths and falsehoods that could ape each other’s divisions within the unfinished stroke of genesis and creat
ion.

  The tree or stump of a gateway into the underworld and the overworld was a crucial rehearsal and alignment of truth and falsehood, and I felt myself now related to it as though through it; through its aerial roots and earthen branches I discerned a stranger, an intimate stranger, approaching young Masters. I have personified parallel existences of “doubt” in this spiritual biography. How should I personify Memory in an intimate stranger, Memory the male rather than the female persona at the heart of Carnival?

  Ask young Masters why he suddenly ran from the man who approached him and invited him to go for a walk; he was tempted but he ran.

  I say “ask” – ask the bandaged light-year ghost, ask him whether his fright may have been occasioned by rumours of a rapist on the prowl along the foreshore. I have checked a newspaper of the 1920s (the New Forest Argosy) and found several columns on a rapist that a child could have read. And indeed it would be easy to advance such an explanation for Masters’ fear of the stranger who addressed him. Equally easy it would be to say that he had been warned by his parents and teachers. But the inner facts are different. I questioned him closely. He ran for “reasons” that were “irrational”; his flight was more eloquent than rumour or news, it spoke the language of the unconscious. He had received no caution – conventional caution – against strangers. He had read nothing in the New Forest Argosy.