The God of the Labyrinth Page 17

  Shortly thereafter, Judith heard from Delphine. She was engaged to marry a local lawyer. Esmond was not mentioned in the letter—which was probably written under the supervision of Delphine’s mother; but there was a sentence: ‘With how much delight I recall our happy hours of conversation in the old barn.’ Judith was puzzled by the sentence; she had never been in the old barn with Delphine; Esmond understood. The absurd thing was that he had almost forgotten Delphine; he certainly had no desire to become her husband. Yet the letter filled him with jealousy and misery. He recognised that this was absurd, that he didn’t love her, that he had been fortunate to avoid further involvement. It made no difference; every time he thought of their caresses in the ruins of the abbey or the hay barn, he experienced a violent sense of loss, made more unbear­able by his recognition that it was the result of having nothing else to think about.

  In February, he was ill for three weeks with some gastric germ, and his thoughts dwelt constantly on death, and on the corruption of the grave. He read Johnson’s prayers, brooded on Rousseau, and suddenly caught a glimpse of the Truth that had always eluded him. Rousseau said that what is natural is good, that evil springs from man’s sophistication, from his interference with Nature. But is not mind itself an interference with Nature, an artificial product? The animal needs only as much mind as is necessary to overcome its everyday problems. Man has developed intellect to serve his laziness, to create a warm, comfortable civil­isation; then, having created it (it is interesting to realise that Esmond thought of his own century as the last word in civilised sophistication), he has nothing to do with himself but think. And every thought takes him further from Nature.

  But what horrified Esmond was the suspicion that this explained his own nervous exhaustion and boredom. His intelligence had condemned him to a sense of unreality. Doctor Johnson stood before him as an appalling example of what happens when a man is too intelligent: a lifetime of despair and self-torment, with brief flashes of well-being. Esmond began to consider seriously whether he would not be better off dead. ‘Everything I looked at reminded me of my misery. Just as any memory of a lost mistress brings a pang of despair, so almost any natural object could remind me of my lost innocence. The ruins of the abbey reminded me of death; the muddy stream made me think of drowning; the bare trees reminded me of a gallows; the baying of a dog put me in mind of funerals. And objects that aroused no specific association—a saucepan, a horseshoe, a book—could bring a stifling despair that was like grief.’

  One rainy night in late February, Esmond sat in bed and con­fronted this sense of hopelessness. If his body felt no gratitude to be in a warm room, when the wind shrieked outside, would it be aroused to some response by the rain itself? He got up and dressed, pulled on a heavy coat, then slipped out of the house. It seemed that his worst fears were realised. The wind made him cold; but he continued to feel indifferent to the discomfort. He walked to the abbey, and sat in the shelter of a wall. Although his feet were wet, the thought of a warm fire failed to bring a spark of pleasure. Cows were taking shelter under the wall; he envied them because they would appreciate the shelter of a warm, dry barn. He wondered how much cold and discomfort it would take to arouse him from his stupor of indifference.

  He walked back to the house, now soaked and cold. Passing the barn, he suddenly recalled Minou and Delphine—and experienced a flash of pleasure. He went into the barn to re­capture its smell. An old horse snorted and breathed heavily. He climbed up to the loft, and found there was still a pile of hay there. He moved it behind the sacks; then took off his wet clothes, and covered himself with the prickly hay. This was the spot on which he had lain between Delphine’s thighs; as he lay there, re-living the experience, drowsiness overcame him, and he fell asleep. The last sound he heard was the snorting and champing of the horse below.

  His night in the barn was a turning point. In early March, the weather suddenly became warmer. Esmond went for a walk over the muddy fields, revelling in the sun, suddenly alive to everything. He stood by the muddy River Maigh, and wondered why he had never noticed how fascinating the ripples were. He was healthy and he was nearly seventeen; in a few months he would be setting out on the ‘grand tour’. There would be many more Minous and Delphines. . . . In his journal for March 23, 1765, he writes:

  What I find myself utterly unable to comprehend is how human creatures can fail to see the blessedness that is every­where in Nature? What strange disaster has blinded our eyes to the most plainly observable of all facts? What dark god presides over this labyrinth of our human destiny, watching us in case one of us should by accident find his way out into the supreme simplicity of Nature?

  Two weeks before he set out for Dublin, and then Paris (April 17, 1765), he was involved in another brief love affair. On a visit with his father to one of the tenant farmers, he saw the man’s thirteen-year-old niece, who was living with him. The girl was extremely pretty. Esmond spent a night dreaming about her, wondering how he could see more of her. But the conquest proved to be easier than he expected. The girl came over the next day to bring eggs. Esmond walked home with her, and arranged an assignation for that evening. She was fascinated by him, and put up a minimum of resistance; although a virgin, she had had some previous sexual experience. On that first evening, Esmond was allowed to explore her breasts and thighs; the following afternoon, he met her in the barn, and took her maidenhead on the same spot on which Delphine had lost hers. During the next two weeks they met as often as possible, spent many more hours on the sacks in the barn, and swore eternal fidelity. But in this case, Esmond knew he was not in love. The ease of the conquest brought almost immediate disappointment. The girl was as pretty as ever, yet when he re-read his journal entry about the first time he saw her, it struck him as another of Fate’s saturnine jokes, another proof that human beings are trapped in a labyrinth, whose god is a supreme confidence trickster.

  On the morning of April 17, he took the Limerick-Dublin coach, and experienced keen satisfaction as the hills and fields of Munster receded behind them. This time, at least, the god of the labyrinth was defeated; the love affair had broken off before there was time for the bitter after-taste to creep in. It was then, on the thirty-six-hour journey from Limerick to Dublin (120 miles!), that Esmond formulated one of his central ideas: that life is a battle against the god of the labyrinth. He seemed to think of the god as a cross between an enormous spider and a fat man with pointed ears. And the field he would choose for the encounter would be the field of sex. . . .

  Reading of Esmond’s journey to Dublin suddenly reminded me of Clive Bates, the grandson of Isaac Jenkinson Bates. It was true that I now had more than enough material to complete Fleisher’s edition of Memoirs of an Irish Rake. I had earned my $15,000. But this was no longer important. There was too much I wanted to know about Esmond—and when the book was pub­lished, a great many other people would be equally curious. The field would be flooded with researchers. I wanted to find all there was to be found before the rush started. Esmond had begun to obsess me. Volume two of the Journal ended as he left London for Boulogne on May 28, 1765, but surely it was impossible that he could have ceased to keep journals after that time? There were many questions I wanted to answer. What about the ‘murder’ of Horace Glenney, and the rumours about Esmond and Lady Mary? What about the ‘affair’ with the three sisters? Why did Dr Johnson dislike Donelly? And what of this ‘Sect of the Phoenix’, of which I had stumbled upon such tantalising hints?

  Two days after I arrived back from Dr O’Hefernan’s, I received a postcard from Miss Tina. It said: ‘Eileen has a bad cold, but she has asked me to tell you that Esmond’s literary executors were the Rev. William Aston and Lord Horace Glenney, sincerely, Tina Donelly.’ For a moment, I was baffled. Aston, yes; I had already guessed as much. But how on earth could Horace Glenney be Donelly’s literary executor when he predeceased him? I was strongly tempted to jump into the car and drive off to Castle Donelly, for my readi
ng of the journals had made me curious to see it again. But I had already written to Clive Bates to tell him I intended to go to Dublin the following day, and the thought of so much travel depressed me. I picked up the phone and got through to Castle Donelly. Miss Tina answered. The problem about Horace Glenney was cleared up in a moment. This referred to Horace Glenney junior, the son of Esmond’s friend. Miss Tina said:

  ‘I suppose it’s common sense, really. I mean, if he was in love with Mary Glenney . . .’

  ‘But are you sure he was?’

  ‘Not quite sure, of course. My father once told Eileen some­thing about it, but she can’t talk at the moment.’

  ‘Do you happen to know where Lord Glenney was shot?’

  ‘At his home in Scotland, I believe.’

  I thanked her and hung up. As far as I could see, that disposed of the story that Esmond murdered Horace Glenney; if there was even a suspicion of such a thing, would he have asked Glenney’s son to be his literary executor?

  I was feeling very cheerful as I set off to drive to Dublin the next morning. This was not entirely connected with Donelly. I had intended to travel by train, so that Diana could have the use of the car, but on the previous day she had seen an advertisement for a second-hand Landrover. I felt we could now afford this, so we bought it on the spot. I knew it was absurd—the way that some quite small event like this can start a glow of optimism that turns into a bonfire; but the very absurdity fascinated me, and started my creative instincts flowing. The drive eastward also delighted me, and reminded me of when we first came to live in Ireland and spent our days exploring the country. And now it struck me that all that matters in human existence is a certain intensity of consciousness, of meaning, and that we must discover the trick. When I bought this car, it had an automatic choke, and the damned thing would cut out almost as soon as I began driving, so that the engine would stop on the first hill into town. So our local garage fixed an ordinary hand-choke instead, and now I keep it out until the engine is warm enough to take the hills comfortably. But if I wake up in the morning with my mind cold and dull, there is no mental choke I can pull out until the engine is heated up. I often spend hours, or even days, trying to cudgel my brains into a state of intensity, trying to work up the inner-pressure to settle down to writing. To some extent, I have discovered the trick: ten minutes of intense, total concentration, involving the whole being—my muscles as well as my brain. As I do this—if no one interrupts me—I can almost watch the pres­sure of my consciousness rising, until things no longer seem dull and neutral. It is exactly like having your first drink of the evening—that warm glow that is not situated in the stomach, but in consciousness.

  And now the strange thing happened—a thing I cannot possibly convey to the reader, but which I can at least try to describe. The thought came to me that this was how Esmond had felt as he set out on his wanderjahre in 1765. And then two images fused together in my mind. One was of Esmond setting off in the coach from Limerick—something I had dreamed about in the night. The other was the image of the trees on Long Island, suddenly looking as if they were cast out of phosphor bronze, as Beverley bent over me. This latter image was very strong. I could smell Beverley’s scent, feel the warmth of her bare breast against my cheek. And with these two images came an explosion of delight. What human beings want is to achieve these moments of freshness and intensity, and not to lose them every time their attention wanders. They want continuity of consciousness. And supposing a man said to himself: ‘It is obvious that nothing is as important as this: from now on I shall devote my life to the search for this intensity and con­tinuity . . .’? And I knew, beyond all possible doubt, that some­thing like this had passed through Esmond’s mind on that morning drive from Limerick. How? Because I had lived with Esmond for weeks, until I knew how his mind worked.

  And now, without any sudden change, any feeling of vision or inspiration, I had a hallucinatory feeling of being Esmond. It was absurdly strong. I knew I was driving through a small hamlet called Fardrum, a few miles beyond Athlone, and that I intended to stop at the pub at Moate for a ham sandwich and a draught Guinness. At the same time, I was seated beside the coachman on the box of a jolting coach, smelling the lathery sweat of the horses and the clean air of an April morning, as well as the tang of peat smoke from the clothes of the driver.

  There was something very odd about the vividness of this image. It was not ‘imaginative’ in the ordinary sense: I was not somehow ‘intending’ it. It was as if something had moved close to me, like a train passing the train in which I happened to be sitting, and giving me a sudden intimate glimpse into a passing carriage. And all this did not surprise me. It seemed a natural part of the upsurge of delight. My mental pressure was high. The sky was a rather cool blue, and I felt as though it were an immense sheet of cool water. It struck me with sudden total certainty: time is an illusion. It is not an absolute state. If you are an insect sitting on a leaf that is swept down a river, you might think that it is inevitable that trees keep passing you and receding behind you, that by their very nature trees only last a few moments, and the only unchanging reality is the ripple and splash of the water. But the bank is real, and if you could get off your leaf on to the bank, you would find that it is quite solid and permanent.

  As soon as I had this picture of time as something illusory, and of the reality of the world through which it flows, I saw my own childhood as something I could reach out and touch, just as I can open a book to a page I read an hour ago, or make a tape recorder rewind to an earlier part of the tape. And it struck me that Esmond’s life was no more distant; a mere two centuries ago, two lifetimes. Our trouble is the feebleness of consciousness, which fluctuates like the electric current from a worn-out battery. If we could replace this with a new battery, the mind could stride across centuries. . . .

  I stopped at Mike Kelly’s for my Guinness; it is a quiet, old-fashioned pub, with low beams, and a turf fire in the hearth. I asked for a ham sandwich, and the landlady’s daughter replied that I should have it piping hot from the oven: and in fact, the great chunks of flakey ham were steaming. Having served me, she went out, leaving me alone. I looked around, and reflected that, but for the electric lighting, this place probably looked much the same in the days of Esmond Donelly. And then, even clearer than before, I had the sense of becoming Esmond Donelly, or leaning over and looking into his consciousness as he swung past me. This time, with my senses fortified by the smell of ham and the taste of the stout, I made an effort of will to hold the sensation. For a moment it eluded me; then, as I relaxed and did not try to force it, it came back again: a combination of smells, feelings, ideas. And then, quite suddenly, it seemed to focus, and everything became clearer. Esmond’s consciousness somehow coincided with mine, so that I could look back on his past, on Delphine and Minou, and on the pretty farmgirl called Eillie (short for Eileen). What is more, this last name was new to me; Esmond refers to her in his diary as E——, perhaps afraid of compromising a girl who lived so close. And this excited me. I was not naïve enough simply to accept that I had some­how ‘become’ Esmond. I knew too much about the dream-like workings of the mind to make any such assumption. Who has never composed music or poetry in his dreams, or created situa­tions so strange that they seem to be someone else’s invention? If I could ever confirm that the girl’s name was Eillie—and it was not impossible if I could find more of Esmond’s journals—then I would be certain that this strange experience was a form of second-sight, not a waking dream.

  I resisted the temptation to drink more Guinness—knowing that it would make me drowsy—and drove on as soon as I had eaten my ham. I did not want to relax. What I wanted was to deepen this feeling of insight, of meaning. Twenty miles outside Dublin it started to rain, and I forgot about my concentration, suddenly enjoying the sweep of the windscreen-wipers and the pattering of the great warm drops. And then once again, without any effort, I ‘became’ Esmond. The houses
and shops of Maynooth suddenly startled me, as if I had never seen them before. But as I drove past Carton—the great eighteenth-century house that once belonged to the Dukes of Leinster—I realised that I knew the place. I had been inside it. Of course, ‘I’ never had; it was Esmond who had been there as a guest of his schoolfriend Robert Fitzgerald, Marquess of Kildare.

  All the time, as I drove into Dublin along the Conygham Road, I experienced this effect of ‘double consciousness’. If there had been someone in the car with me, I would have said: ‘This used to be the Chapelizod Road in 1765, and here it became Barrack Street.’ But before I entered the old Barrack Street, I was driving along Wolfe Tone Quay, and experiencing mild surprise to find myself already beside the Liffey. In 1765, I would have had to proceed from the cobbled Chapelizod Road into Barrack Street, with the river visible over the Long Meadows to my right, and then along Gravel Walk, at which point I could have turned right on to Arran Quay—at that time, the most westerly of the Dublin Quays. I passed on my right the street—whose name Donelly had forgotten—that led down to Bloody Bridge. At Grattan Bridge I was tempted to turn right, forgetting that I could continue to O’Connell Bridge; in Donelly’s day, Grattan Bridge (then called Essex Bridge) was the last point at which one could cross the Liffey. I was bound for the Shelbourne in St Stephen’s Green; Donelly, when he went to Dublin in 1765, proceeded to the ‘Dog and Duck’ in Pudding Row (now Wood Quay), the hostelry run by Master Francis Magin. (I knew this from his journal, although I had forgotten it.) There he ate a supper of Boyne salmon and roast lamb, washed down by a large quantity of sweet beer of low alcohol content, and then fell asleep in a comfortable first-floor room to cries of ‘Any hare skins or rabbit skins?’ and ‘Dublin Bay herrin’s’. It was all so vivid that I found myself taking the wrong turn at College Green, and having to make a detour to get to the Shelbourne. In my room there, I opened a bottle of Volnay I had brought with me—although it was only half past four—and found myself less troubled by these odd double-exposure effects. Even so, I only had to close my eyes to see clear pictures of a Dublin that was in many respects like the one I could see out of my window (although in those days Stephen’s Green was surrounded by a hedge and a ditch, not railings)—that was certainly just as crowded and noisy—but whose streets were mostly cobbled, and whose houses seemed cleaner and more dignified. It also stank—particularly in midsummer—of sewage and fish. And the masts with furled sails that crowded the Liffey produced an effect that was not unlike Canaletto’s Venice. After my third glass of wine, the ‘double exposure’ faded altogether, and it struck me that Sheridan Le Fanu might have written a powerful and gloomy story about the double-tenancy of a human brain by two men of different centuries. I could even see that, viewed by a tempera­ment like Le Fanu’s, it could have been a frightening experience. But then, Le Fanu’s basic outlook was defeated and negative. And this is the only fundamental question.