‘The Second Coming’? There was some sniggering from the rough beasts, which I expected, and ignored.
Which led us to Golde, who had been lying in wait with ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, which he read ponderously, until he got to the final lines, which he smothered in lascivious relish.
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I . . .
‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
There was a silence that I would hesitate to call pregnant.
‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I find this very intriguing, but I’m not sure I understand entirely. Could you guide us through it?’ The class closed ranks in quiet expectation and for a moment I had their full attention.
‘What exactly is the nature of your problem, Golde?’
‘Well, sir, I’m not sure whose problem it is. It might be that Jane is just crazy, like it says, and bishops are only bishops, aren’t they? But perhaps Yeats was a little confused about such matters? Wasn’t there a bit of a problem with that woman he fancied?’
‘Maud Gonne.’
‘Ah, sir: Maud today, and Gonne tomorrow. It’s no wonder she ran a mile if he told her he wanted her in the – ’ He pretended to consult the poem. ‘Oh yes, sir, “the place of excrement”.’
‘Wanted? I see no mention of desire.’
‘What do you see, sir?’
‘I see a reference – perhaps you might think about this – to pitching a mansion.’
He was ready and waiting. ‘Oh I have thought and thought, sir. It seems a very uncongenial place to build a house.’
There was a mass guffaw, which I allowed to peak and settle down.
He wasn’t finished. ‘After all, sir, there’s plenty of arseholes in mansions, but there can’t be many mansions in – ’
By this time I had joined in the laughter. For a schoolboy, it was a masterful act of deconstruction, and his comic timing could hardly have been improved.
‘I must admit, Golde,’ I said, ‘that I’ve always had my doubts about that line. There seems something unparsable about it, something personal perhaps. But I agree with you – ’
‘In what way, sir?’
‘It’s crap.’
He looked proud, but humble.
‘But Golde, perhaps you and Jane have something in common?’
‘Are we both crazy, sir?’
‘No, you are both fools. But she is a wise fool, like the one we studied in King Lear, if your memory stretches back to last term. Whereas you are just as foolish, and not at all wise.’
‘Tell me why she is wise, sir, and I am not.’
‘Because she is trying, in her way, to assimilate the tragedy of getting old, and inhabiting a body that was once luxuriant and is now decaying. Whereas you are just being a smart arse.’
It was a bit unfair. He’d done very well, and the exchange had left me with an increased respect for him, and a diminished admiration for Yeats. Funny old Willie.
Respect for Golde was rare, and unlikely to abide. He was physically unprepossessing – small, weak, whey-faced, curdled as a bowl of yoghurt left in the sun – and his fellows tend to turn on such creatures with a ferocity that makes you think William Golding underplayed his account. But my description makes him appear insignificant, whereas Golde was as memorably repellent as Tolkien’s Gollum, given over to obsessional nocturnal habits, stroking his Precious, fingering and fondling his ring. You could imagine him trailing a spool of viscous liquid behind him, like a snail.
It was reprehensibly easy to turn against such a boy, who was universally despised, teased and diminished. If there had been keystrokes to do it, the boys would have reformatted his disc. I ought not to have colluded in this, but the temptation was irresistible. I consoled myself that, like many boys who are relentlessly bullied, the poor chap found an identity in his victimhood: being the butt of jokes and worse was presumably better than not being noticed at all.
I carried on with my evangelical enterprise for years, too many years, indulged the recurrent Goldes, allowing Crazy Jane her yearly pilgrimage into instructive madness. The premise was clear, obvious, and unchallenged by man or boy: reading exposes us to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.
It was an inspiring notion, and I tried to live by it, and to teach my boys to do so as well.
Unfortunately it was wrong.
I cannot go on, like this. I cannot go on. Passing the dying days. Remembering, thinking, justifying. Assembling bits of stories, making stupid jokes – logical, scatological. For what? Nothing assuages the pain of being. Faced squarely, it unmans and unmasks; evaded, it undermines and casts a shadow.
Sitting in my study, thinking. I think, therefore I am not.
All you can truthfully say, anyway, is that thinking is going on. But who is doing it? I’m the last person to say, or to know. Silly old fool, gorged on the saturated fatheads of philosophy, putting Descartes before des horse.
Thinking is the opposite of being. And it is so boring. Thoughts are the dullest things, they leave a funny taste in the mouth.
It is impossible to say just what I mean. There is nothing to be done. I shall do nothing. Nothing will come of nothing, it lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm. Nothing is what I am used to, what I have, what I choose.
Nothing is better than love.
Do not go gentle into that good night . . .
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dark, doubly dark.
The boys did not understand this. Understandably. Everyone gets this wrong. This is not a poem about death, though that blubbery piss-artist’s father is old now. That’s a metaphor, and this is literal – his father is going blind. That’s worse. Bang! God curses him with blindness, but he is going to die soon anyway.
When I imagine being blind, a groan involuntarily escapes me and I shudder. Not figuratively. I am a claustrophobe, the sort who begins to claw at the door if the Tube gets stuck – pauses even – in a tunnel for more than fifteen seconds. In a foolish desire to see if I could train myself into slowly increasing tolerances of discomfort, I once asked Suzy to lock me in a darkened closet, and to stand outside and count to twenty, loudly. By the time she reached seven I was banging desperately on the door. She knew better than to tease me, even for the extra thirteen seconds. When I emerged, I had somehow managed to cover myself in sweat.
I cannot bear movies or novels in which someone is buried alive, perhaps by a sadistic kidnapper who entombs his prey underground in a coffin, with only a tiny duct of air to breathe. Or perhaps she – it’s always a she, isn’t it? – is locked in the boot of a car for hours, or days. Annihilated in the dark, helpless, stripped of air and movement and light. I wouldn’t rather be dead – I would be, soon. A heart attack perhaps? Or merely a fright paralysis so crippling as to stifle life. The triumph of the darkness.
He is the Prince of Darkness. Not Satan, who has been given rather a bad name in this respect. He is a man of integrity, the Devil: if he promises your bowels will boil, get ready to burble. What you see is what you get. Yet his is merely High Octane Badness. Evil is