Letters (41 page)

“He calls himself a Don Quixote inside out,” Jane declared—and I observed to myself
(a)
that it bespoke a wistful detachment on Harrison’s part to see
himself
so, and
(b)
that it would have to be he, or some literate doctor, who so saw, since Jane herself carried no freight of literary reference. What I could not appreciate at second hand was the aptness of Harrison’s self-description: not only did he (so he was persuaded) mistake, in his “enchantment,” giants for windmills and soldiers for sheep, instead of vice versa—that is, he madly imagined that in “his” (George III’s) madness, Windsor Castle looked like Tidewater Farms, and the royal coach-and-four like a Lincoln Continental—but he informed me, in our first extended conversation, that “George Third the First” had actually made notes on
Don Quixote
at Windsor during
his
first mature seizure, in 1788, when also he had remarked to William Pitt (my husband’s ancestor, by the way) that having been disgracefully defeated in his first American war, he must needs be “a second Don Quixote” to involve himself in another.

Thus he could cast Jane, unflatteringly, in the role of homely Queen Charlotte, whilst “in his madness” perceiving and relating to her as Jane Mack, a handsome creature from another life in another time and place. Their son the vicious ingrate Prince of Wales, to spite and shame his father, carried on as a radical commoner named Drew Mack, wed to a “toothsome blackamoor wench”; their daughter Princess Amelia had not only died, but scandalously gone on stage under false names afterward to conceal the fact, etc. Only two people in the court were exempt from this double identity: His Majesty’s old friend Todd Andrews, whom he compared explicitly to Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, and his new friend—“the son [he] should have had,” his “Duke of York,” the “proper Prince Regent, when it comes to that”—who “never humoured [his] madness, because he shared it”; an “18th-Century courtier trapped in 20th-century America”…

Reg Prinz. Todd Andrews declares the name is, if not its bearer’s “real” one, at least an alias well antecedent to Harrison’s: a coincidence doubtless turned to account, but not an ad hoc imposture. Its young bearer had an established early reputation as an avant-garde
cinéaste
before his application to the Tidewater Foundation for subsidy; as he was not given to conversation, and spoke cryptically when at all, the most he could be taxed with was his not vigorously denying a role he most certainly did not “play.” For some reason Harrison had been taken with him on sight, and Jane acknowledged that while Prinz readily accepted all proffered support for his cinematic activities, he could not be accused of exploiting Harrison’s esteem. His visits to Redmans Neck were in part as a planning consultant to Marshyhope’s Media Centre, the directorship of which he had declined; and in part out of an apparent interest in Harrison himself.

I met His Majesty that same evening, Mr Prinz not till several months later. The original George III in his distress was often physically out of control; required constant attendance by Dr Willis and company; often needed restraining by strait-waistcoat (Willis calls it in his journal “the &c”; George himself referred to the restraining chair as his “coronation chair”); and suffered concomitant bodily infirmities. Harrison, until the twin strokes that blinded and killed him, was in rosy health and amiable temper, a little heavy but by no means obese, withal rather handsomer at seventy than he’d been in his forties, when I first met him at Capri—though not, like Jane, preternaturally youthful. And he was as entirely in control of himself as his complex dementia allowed: certainly in no way dangerous to himself or others, and inclined more to manic fancies than to manic projects. Therefore he needed very little supervision; his company was agreeable, and his conversation, if often saddening, was civilised and frequently clever. Not to disgrace, by his ubiquitous “delusions”
(e.g.,
that Cambridge, England, was Cambridge, Maryland, or that his ministers were trustees of the Tidewater Foundation), the monarchy he held in such esteem, he ventured off the “palace grounds” only reluctantly and never unaccompanied. The “affairs of the realm” he gladly turned over to the queen and ministers aforementioned, though he still opposed the idea of installing Drew as prince regent. And since, “in his madness,” those crucial affairs were translated into such hallucinations as Marshyhope State University College, His Royal Highness into a minor American industrialist named Harrison Mack, Jr., he conscientiously attended to what was represented as the news and business of those hallucinations, and could talk as knowledgeably about Lyndon Johnson’s administration as about John Adams’s and Napoleon’s.

From all this one might imagine that, pragmatically speaking, he was not mad at all. But though his conduct of affairs “in
this
world,” as he put it, was in the main responsible and judicious, his identification with mad King George was more than an elaborate, self-cancelling whimsy. Harrison
suffered
from the duplicity of reality, as it were; events and circumstances that he could not “decipher” into Georgian terms, and thus deal with on their own, alarmed him, lest he mishandle them. And if his nightmares (and infrequent daytime seizures) were learnt from the history books—like George, he fancied he had seen Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; imagined London flooded, and would rush in the royal yacht to rescue “certain precious manuscripts and letters”; signed death warrants for “all six of [his] sons,” etc., etc.—the terror and anguish they caused him were heartfelt.

My own knowledge of the period was cursory at that time, but I remembered that Fanny Burney had held some post in the royal household (she was in fact 2nd Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte) and that, about the time of the king’s first major attack and the publication of her epistolary novel
Evelina,
she’d commenced a diary of her observations and reflections on the grave event. It was my thought to represent myself, if Harrison should press for such representation, as Mrs Burney: I knew her writings only slightly, but Harrison (and G. III) in all likelihood knew them not at all—Cervantes and Fielding were
their
only novelists—and the role seemed congenial enough. I suggested and explained it to Jane; she approved, but hoped no fiction would be necessary, as she’d alerted Harrison to my coming, and he’d remembered me affectionately.

We arrived at that great gracious house on its point of hemlocks and rhododendrons, as if one had driven into a Maxfield Parrish print, and were directed by the costumed maid and nurse (Dr #2’s idea) to His Majesty in the music room. Harrison, comfortable in navy blazer and white ducks, rose beaming from the harpsichord—he’d become, predictably, a great lover of Handel, and was playing Delilah’s mad-song from
Samson
—bowed slightly to Jane, whom he addressed as “Madame,” turned then to me, and, as I wondered fleetingly whether to curtsey, raised my hand to his lips and fell to his knees before me! Tears of joy started down his plump tanned cheeks; he cried passionately:
“Sanctissima mea uxor Elizabetha!”

Jane was as startled as I, whose career as 18th-Century novelist (like my career as 20th-) died a-borning. When we got the man off his knees and back into English—which he spoke now as rapidly as his prototype—we learned to our dismay that while his madness made him confuse me with Germaine Pitt, a dear this-worldly friend of his whose husband had been an even dearer friend of Jane’s, he was unspeakably happy to be reunited with his precious… Lady Pembroke! Had we known then what I took the first opportunity to learn from the royal library and apprised Jane of forthwith, we’d have been even more dismayed: Lady Elizabeth Spencer, Countess of Pembroke, had been Queen Charlotte’s Lady of the Bedchamber; her husband the count was George III’s lord of the same and son of his Vice-Chamberlain of the Household. Originally a Marlborough, she and the king had been childhood sweethearts, and she had remained close to the royal family ever after, though she was never among the king’s few mistresses (like Harrison, George was disinclined to adultery) and was a faithful attendant of the queen. But during the attack of 1788—by when she was past fifty, and a grandmother—even more so in his subsequent seizures, George persuaded himself that he had always loved her, and her only…

Harrison got hold of himself soon enough to be unembarrassing, even charming, through aperitifs and dinner, when he pleasantly set forth to “Jane” and “Germaine” what Charlotte and Eliza already knew: the biographical facts above, minus his obsession. He condoled more genuinely than Jane the death of my Jeffrey; he recounted in amusing circumstantial detail anecdotes of Capri in the late 1930’s and of Cheltenham in the 1780’s, and complained good-humoredly of the side effects equally of
Tincture Thebaicum
(prescribed by Dr Sir George Baker against the wishes of Dr Willis) and of Parnate (prescribed by Shrink #1 against the wishes of Shrink #2). He respectfully disagreed with Dr Alan Guttmacher of Pikesville, Maryland—an acquaintance of the family and author of
America’s Last King
—that “it is the total absence of pathological abnormal ideas that distinguishes the healthy from the morbid mind”: a question-begging definition, in Harrison’s view, though he was surely not claiming his own mind to be healthy. And he could not but wonder whether Guttmacher’s own psychoanalytical thesis—“George III feared that, like the Colonies, his thirteen children would revolt and break away from him one by one”—would not have been adjudged pathological by the royal physicians: not because he Harrison had only two children (and was certain of the paternity of but one of those, he added meaningly), but because his thirteen American colonies had broken away all together, not one by one, and because by his own best insight his troubling identification had not been loss of colonies with loss of children, but loss of colonies with loss of
college: i.e.,
the “loss” of Tidewater Tech to the state university system a year since, from which his most conspicuous mania dated. He went on to praise “Jane’s” business sense, beauty, and patience (she hadn’t batted a cool blue eye at that reference to uncertain paternity; but it seemed to me she was not so much patient as invulnerable even to comprehension of such allusions); then he rewelcomed me to Windsor with another toast in fluent and rapid Latin, which he reported later to have been to the health
“conjugis meae dilectissimae Elizabethae: praeteritas futuras fecundarant.”

Within the fortnight it took me to find decent lodgings in Cambridge, the alarming depths of Harrison’s obsession with me—rather, his new obsession with George III’s old obsession with Lady Pembroke—became clear, as did its complexity. In his most lucid moments (from our point of view), for example, he would tenderly explain that “Harrison Mack’s” attraction to “Germaine Pitt” had no doubt been occasioned by His Majesty’s mad passion for Elizabeth Spencer, but that he had been secretly fond of me ever since Capri, and I was not to imagine that he did not love the hallucinated “Lady Amherst” in her own right. I urged Jane to permit me to break off all contact with him; she assured me that his madness was too complete, as was her preoccupation with Mack Enterprises, for his ravings
(sic)
to bother her at all; if they made
me
uncomfortable, I should do as I saw fit. Accordingly, I busied myself at the college, making ready for the fall semester and confirming, with sinking heart, how far from Toronto—not to mention London and Paris!—I had come.

Marshyhope’s library was a bad joke; its faculty would not have been hired by a good private high school; its students would be drawn from the regional public ones… I reminded myself that I had not come there to further my professional career, and that the Library of Congress was a mere two hours away by bus; and I consoled myself with the one bright feature of the intellectual landscape, Joe Morgan, a man I quite admired and could easily have more than admired had he shown the slightest personal interest in me. The fellow of that name in your
End of the Road
was a rationalist Pygmalion, a half-caricature, sympathetic only by contrast with the narrator; if he was the prototype of my new employer, time and bereavement had much improved him. President Morgan was intelligent, learned, and intense, but not obsessive. He took his administrative duties seriously and discharged them efficiently, but he was in no way officious or self-important. Roughly my coeval, handsomer now than when I’d met him five years since, he was as alone and isolated on Redmans Neck as I. One might have imagined…

But hospitable as he certainly was, cordial, sympathetic, free of “hang-ups,” as the children say, and neither unmasculine nor cold of manner, his emotional life remains a closed book to me: either he was without physical desires, or he gratified them with such utter discretion that even his enemies could find no ground for innuendo in that line. I wonder, as I write, where Morgan is now; whether his disappearance from Amherst College has anything to do with the failure of some exquisite self-control he had not even suspected himself of having tightly exercised for a dozen years, since his young wife’s death from an experience I am too familiar with!

Well. He was wearily amused at Harrison’s delusion that he Morgan had betrayed Tidewater Tech into the state university system; he explained to me (what I set forth in the postscript of my first vain letter to you) his worthy ambitions for the place and his confidence that, unless Schott and company carried the day, Marshyhope could become, not just another third-rate community college, but a quite special and admirable research centre. But (unlike the priggish fellow in your novel) Morgan had what amounted to a tragic, if not an altogether pessimistic, view of his aspirations: he would not be surprised, he told me, if Harrison’s association of Marshyhope with the mutinous American colonies had been inspired and encouraged by A. B. Cook, in John Schott’s behalf. Nor was he very sanguine of prevailing against them in the matter of the Tower of Truth. But he was not certain of defeat, either, and on that basis (I have not even mentioned his quite Jeffersonian respect for the net good judgement of ordinary people) he proceeded.