The Voice That Thunders, page 3
My military service had made me lose confidence in my motives. I could no longer be certain whether ambition was being driven by a love for Greek or by a disguised wish for power, or both. If it were Greek I wanted, then I could as well settle on Orkney, where, at least, the tide delivers free coal twice daily from the bunkers of the scuttled German fleet. Being a Professor entailed, along with power, a lack of freedom, which was more than important to me.
I had read my Republic: “The biggest loss, if a man himself will not rule, is to be ruled by someone worse.” And John Stuart Mill: “The proper person to be entrusted with power is the person most unwilling to accept it.” But I had left the army swearing never again to oblige anybody to do anything against their will. The army’s “Man Management” course had confirmed me in this, where we were told that it was better to give an order, and to get it wrong, than to vacillate, and get it right. I had put this theory into practice one morning when I had deployed a troop of artillery along Guildford’s busy High Street. As the traffic locked, and the police grew acerbic, and my fellow cadets sceptical, and no other members of the Royal Regiment appeared, I became more nonchalant and at the same time forceful; until one of the drivers took me aside and said: “Look, Sir, we’re supposed to be on Salisbury Plain. It always is on Tuesdays.”
I later worked out that, having arrived at the wrong coordinates, if I had fired the guns, and they had been accurately laid, I should have eliminated my Officers’ Mess at Aldershot.
It was not only the experience of the army that made me question my motives and my future. The disturbance went much deeper. Simply, the price was too great. In order to fulfil one part of myself, I should have to kill the other; and that I could not, would not, do. To become a whole, mature and educated human being, I had to unite my divided spiritual self I felt an anger, at once personal, social, political, philosophical and linguistic. I knew, even as I sat on the tree stump, that to express that anger directly would be negative and destructive; and I came from a family of makers, not breakers. The anger had to be a creative act.
Close by the tree stump was a stone wall. My great-great-grand-father, that Robert of the ophicleide, had built it. He had done more than that. There were tales about him, a whole culture, that must not be lost but that no one would bear witness to. He had cut a road through rock with a chisel. He had rung the bells for Saint Mary’s church, and had seen to the building of the Hough Wesleyan chapel, led its music, composed it even, “while,” he said, “listening to the zephyrs in the trees: always in the minor key”. He had formed the Hough Temperance Band, as it was called on Sundays. During the week, they were the Hough Fizzers, and would go busking around the farms at night for money to spend at the Bull’s Head. The same man played under Sir Charles Hallé in the great period of Manchester’s Liberalism. Wherever the music was, there he would be.
The tales of him were endless; some struck a desperate note. He had once won an argument about the shape of Australia by drawing a map: not necessarily the map: a map. It was enough that he had drawn one. Given his undoubted intelligence, the implications of loss are tragic. I sat on the tree stump and looked at Robert’s wall. I had to read it.
The Hough is an area at the foot of Alderley Edge, a wooded scarp in Cheshire. It has a ferocious caste system. There are four farming families, who interbreed without any apparent harm. Then there are the craft families, the Houghites, who service the community. Below the Hough stretches Lifeless Moss, bad land, fit only for the hovels of the unskilled families, the Mossaggots, and now the houses of Manchester’s stockbrokers. The Houghites have a terrible fear of being polluted by the Mossaggots. I was not allowed to play with their children. Yet Robert Garner’s favourite daughter Mary fell in love with Joseph Clewes, Mossaggot, and had a son by him. Robert forbade the marriage, expelled his daughter, and he and his wife brought up the boy, my grandfather Joseph, themselves. He was thus a “grannyreardun”; and the shame of his birth affected the rest of her life. In the words of my grandfather, “She never put her bonnet on again.” That is, she never left the confines of the garden. She felt the taint of Mossaggotry till death.
There is a particular pride amongst the Houghites. Each generation feels obliged to better, or do other than, the one before. It is called “getting aback of”. And what could Joseph get aback of with such a grandfather?
Joseph was very intelligent. He was so intelligent that the Vicar allowed him to leave school at the age of nine, three years early, because he had learnt all that was required of his future station: he could read, and he could write and he could count. And he got aback of old Robert. He became a smith, or rather two smiths, by being apprenticed twice: as a blacksmith, who works in hard metals, and a whitesmith, who works in soft. “The smith’s aback of beyond!” he used to say. “Who else can make the tools?”
Joseph’s intelligence went partly into his work. He developed skills that he would not teach his apprentices, secrets of applied metallurgy that died with him. He was also obsessed by number. It was exactly a mile from the house to the smithy, and he told me, when he retired, that he had ridden his bicycle the equivalent of two and a half times around the circumference of the earth at the Equator, between home and work. In the First World War, he had used fifteen tons of iron in making thirty-three thousand six hundred shoes for eight thousand four hundred horses. And he had a hobby.
In the days when the London Omnibus Service published a timetable, he would memorise it, and subscribed to each revision, so that he was always up to date. He went to London only once, and my grandmother said it was like having her own private limousine. She saw all of London, and never had to wait for a bus, because Joe carried everything in his head. It was another chilling waste, more complex, but no better, than drawing an alleged map.
My grandfather and I got on well. A craftsman never praises, but there was a rough warmth towards me, and I would spend hours in the glow of his smithy, sharing a keg of beer, listening to his exploits and the scandals of the village.
We met at a point that neither of us could have seen. During the Second World War, children had to have their names on all their clothing, and my grandfather stamped mine on the wooden soles of my clogs with the punches he used for labelling farmers’ milk churns. “I reckon I’ve come near on writing a book with these,” he said.
I was fortunate enough to be ill for most of my primary school years, sometimes spectacularly so. I was in hospital with meningitis when I learnt to read. It was the back page of the Knockout comic, alas now long defunct, but quite as good as the Beano and the Dandy. The back page was Stonehenge Kit, the Ancient Brit, who every week had to overcome the wiles of Willie the Wicked Wizard. And, one awesome day, I realised that the little bugs in the balloons related to, and commented on and expanded the pictures in the frames. From that moment everything was swallowed whole. Understanding didn’t matter. I binged on words.
When I was recovering at home, my teacher Miss Bratt arrived with a pack of reading cards for me, because she was troubled that I should be falling so far behind. I remember my mother conducting a filibuster at the door, so that Miss Bratt would not see me lying on the sofa, reading Dombey and Son. And, at school, inside my Milly-Molly-Mandy class reader, would be hidden Tarzan of the Apes or The Saint Goes West.
What I saw of school I hated. And what they saw of me was liked no better. I did not further my cause. I was either not present in school, or, though underperforming through frustration, top of the class when I was there. I was helped a great deal by the BBC Schools’ Service, for which, in order not to miss an episode, I learnt how to fake symptoms of complex diseases, and by my maternal grandmother’s eight volumes of Arthur Mee’s 1908 Children’s Encyclopaedia, with which I was as thorough as my grandfather had been with the London Omnibus timetable. When I did appear at school I would endear myself to my comrades by drawing detailed sections through a volcano, to their great interest; as a result of which I discovered, at an early age, that I was a natural athlete, because they never could catch me between the school gates and home.
At a later stage when I went before the War Office Selection Board for them to decide whether or not I was “officer material” Arthur Mee was invaluable to me. Among the tests of our abilities was one that was critical, where we were individually responsible for the success or failure of our team in the solution of a problem. I was not sanguine about the moment when I should be given my task. It turned out to be Arthur Mee’s “How-Does-Mary-Get-the-Eggs?” (Vol.1, p.116.)2 I was canny enough to go through the motions of thought before solving the problem, and that, I later discovered, was one of the two reasons why I was recommended. The other was an answer I gave in the all-important interview. When I later met the officer who had conducted it, he remembered me because in the years he had done the job, he said I was one of the only two would-be cadets who had given an honest answer to the question: “Why do you want to be an officer?” I said, “Because I can’t stand wearing these hairy shirts.”
A craftsman never praises. “Eh, dear!” my grandfather would say. “I don’t know what there is for you to get aback of, youth! What do they learn you?” And I would try to counter, to show that I had some worth: “‘Suomi’ is Finland. On stamps. Grandad.” “Yay, but what about the coefficient of expansion of brass?” said Joseph.
When I first went to Manchester Grammar School, having been entered for the exam by a perceptive teacher, my family was, in the abstract, delighted that I was going to “get an education”, just as I might have been going to get a car. For them, it was a concrete object. None of us was prepared for its effect. That deep but narrow culture from which I came could not share my excitement over the wonders of the deponent verb. To them it was an attack on their values, an attempt to make them feel inferior. A shocking alienation resulted, which we could not resolve. Only my grandfather sat, and watched me; and listened. He said little, but at least he did not attack. Then, when he felt the time was ripe, he delivered his coup de grâce, from which, once heard, there is no retreat.
He uttered two precepts. They are absolutes. The first was: “Always take as long as the job tells you; because it’ll be here when you’re not, and you don’t want folk saying, ‘What fool made that codge?’.”
The second was worse: “If the other feller can do it, let him.” That is: Seek until you find that within you that is your unique quality, and, having found it, pursue it to the exclusion of all else and without thought of cost.
It was staring me in the face. It was Robert’s wall. On it was carved his banker mark, the rune Tyr, the boldest of the gods. When the Aesir went to bind Fenriswolf with the rope Gleipnir, which was made of the sound of a cat’s footsteps, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the longings of a bear, the voices of fishes and the spittle of birds, Fenris would not allow himself to be bound unless one of the Aesir put his right hand in Fenris’ mouth as a token of goodwill. Only Tyr was willing to do so. And when Fenris was bound, and helpless, he bit Tyr’s hand off at the wrist, which is still called the wolf’s joint. But had Robert known this? Was it a part of the Craft and Mystery of his trade? Or was it simply that an arrow is easy to carve? Yet he had got the proportions of it right; and we were all left-handed.
I loved Oxford, but it was not the wall. The wall was mine. Oxford was not mine. The rune was mine. It claimed me. Whatever it was that I was going to do with my life, it would have to be done here. This was my unique place. I owned it, and it owned me. There is no word in English to express the relationship. In Russian, the word is “rodina”; in German, “Heimat”. And there, on the tree stump, by great-great-grandfather’s rune and wall, I saw my “rodina”, my “Heimat”. This is what I must serve, as no one else could. This is the integration of my divided selves. Here is the site of the creative anger. Here I get aback of smith and stone-cutter and all of them. So, after a period of reflection, at three minutes past four o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, 4 September, 1956, I began to write a novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and I have been writing ever since.
One of the first things I discovered when I began was the esoteric meaning of “getting aback of”. Whether it be building walls, mending kettles or writing a book, the activity is the same: it is the pursuit, through dedication, of the godhead. Such an indwelling calls for a clear understanding of what the nature of literature is and of what the story serves. The story that the writer must reveal is no less than the truth. And by “truth” I mean the fabrication through which reality may be the more clearly defined.
I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not for instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, “literature” is: words that provoke response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is but an option.
Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.
It is a paradox: yet one so important that I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth.
I am using the word “myth” not as meaning “fiction” or “unhistorical”, but as a complex of story that, for various reasons, human beings see as demonstrations of the inner cause of the universe and of human life. Myth is quite different from philosophy in the sense of abstract concepts. The form of myth is concrete always, yet it holds those qualities that demand of the human mind that it recognise a revelation of the function behind the world. Revelation is not always the same as total understanding. It can be a request such as Oliver Cromwell offered to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” Myth is not an invitation to be cocky as to what the Holy Ghost may have in mind. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.”
It is one of the main errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the “original form” of a myth can be separated from its miraculous elements. “Wonder is only the first glimpse of the start of philosophy,” says Plato. Aristotle is more explicit: “The lover of myths, which are a compound of wonders, is, by his being in that very state, a lover of wisdom.” Myth encapsulates the nearest approach to absolute truth that words can speak. The wall and the rune. If the young man on the tree stump is a Parzival, “to get aback of” is the Quest of the Grail.
The most searching examination in the world is a blank sheet of paper and no questions. But there is excitement. There is purest joy. Each book requires intense research in areas hitherto not perceived as being related, in which the writer may start off ignorant but must become expert.
With the novel I have just finished, Strandloper, I have had to be knowledgeable in, along with much else: the Celtic cult of the human head; the symbolism of English mediaeval stained glass; the thieves’ language of Cant; the neurology of the human brain, especially in its relationship to the optic nerve; the survival of animism under the nose of the Church; the attitude towards literacy in the late eighteenth century as a result of the French Revolution; heraldry; Australian Aboriginal philosophy . . . It was ridiculous, absurd, then, but the excitement and the joy and the creativity occur at the point where those connected themes are seen, for the first time in the mind of man, to be one. And, at that point, the book waits. And the other feller couldn’t do it.
Because of my nature, I find “spiritual” and “creative” to be synonymous. I am not exclusively a Christian; but, for me, work is prayer. So, in pleading for the nurture of creativity, in life and in education, I plead for the nature of the spiritual. I cannot separate the two. And, in this nurturing, I see particular aspects to challenge you; for the child needs your help if the creative element is to thrive. The first is that you will receive children to whom your culture is alien. For “Houghite”, you may equally read “Shi’ite”.
I can best illustrate this from personal anecdote. My maternal great-grandfather, William Jackson, worked at the same paper mill in Tamworth for seventy years. He died aged ninety-three in 1942 and I went to spend the summer with my grandmother, his daughter. William Jackson was a Fabian, but his knowledge was that of an autodidact. For me, aged seven, the result was a treasure house, a magpie’s library of unrelated books. And I was still bingeing. My great-grandfather had helped to found the Tamworth Co-operative Society, and had, through his long life, always been socially and mentally vigorous.3 Therefore, in a hot July and August, I swallowed The History of the Co-operative Movement, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Elements of the Fiscal Problem, The Golden Bough, Hone’s Popular Works, the corpus of Thackeray and of Spenser, Carlyle, Swift, Dickens; British Battles at Sea, Nietzsche’s Human All-too-Human, The Living Races of Mankind, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, The South African and Transvaal War, Capital: from the German and Engel’s Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Then I found myself in the middle of wonders: a Hindu epic poem of some forty-eight thousand lines, called Ramayana. Here were demons and gods and magic and talking animals and shape-shifters and mountain movers. Now I did not binge. I read. And, when I came to the final paragraph, I felt my heart stop.
