Wild Geese Overhead (24 page)

He awoke in the cool sunny air, his eyes casting quickly about him.

“I'm so sorry. I didn't know you were asleep.” Mrs. Armstrong came back with the tea tray, for she had started quietly retreating.

“I must have been asleep,” he said thoughtfully. He looked at his watch. “Not for over two hours?”

She smiled at his amazement. “Well, you haven't moved for over two hours anyway!”

“Really!” He got up, still with wonder upon him. Then he looked at her. “That's been the most wonderful sleep I have had in all my life.”

“Just because you needed it! Now a cup of tea will freshen you up.”

“You are kind to me. I don't deserve it.”

“Perhaps that's why you're getting it,” she said, making her joke, but flushing a little with pleasure.

He finished his tea and saw the last of the cigarette smoke float away on the air.

This was life, and there was this always behind everything, this sun and air, this warmth, this light. It was no vision. It was simple reality. It was where the deeper self rose up and took the air. Not an escape from reality. On the contrary, an escape from the sensational, the phenomenal, the changing irritating surface, back to calm certainty, to this surprising fact that here, at last, is myself. Here is Will Montgomery, this simple living animal with the sun on its skin, and with the cunning sunny mind inside, this is his native place, whence he sallies forth to Mac's mud and Joe's faith.…

How far away had he got from his solemn reading? What could it mean to him now? Particularly that bit about—where was it? Yes, here; in the “Conclusion” to
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
by T. S. Eliot. He became excited as he read it: “I know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility, or anaemia, may (if other circumstances are favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing.… To me it seems at these moments, which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something
negative
: that is to say, not ‘inspiration' as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers—which tend to reform very quickly.”

There followed a reference to a footnote “in confirmation of my own experience”. The footnote was a quotation from the poet Housman's
Name and Nature of Poetry
and Will consumed it eagerly: “In short I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process; and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal so cleverly with the matter as the oyster, is the latter; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting.”

And Mr. Eliot's comment: “I take added satisfaction in the fact that I only read Mr. Housman's essay some time after my own lines were written.”

So manifestly—for the scholarship of these men was enough—the implications behind their fascinating confessions had not been worked out by any one, much less co-ordinated.
There
was a subject for a fellow who had vaguely hoped to write a book called
Definitions
!

Will smiled, and when Mr. Eliot went on to find his experience “a very different thing from mystical illumination” he immediately doubted that “very different”. What did he mean by “mystical illumination” anyhow? When was illumination in the mind “mystical”? When one thought of God or something high and mighty? But nonsense, because the final feat of the mystic was to realize his deeper self, to apprehend it calmly in a condition of light. It was this light or illumination that mattered. Into this light might come an apprehension of the nature of God, but also, and equally, an apprehension of the nature of the world or of the strange crawling movement of a man's bowels. Unless they were seen in the same quality of vision, in the same tempo of apprehension, they were not seen or illuminated at all.

And in any case, the very essence of the mystical movement, that uprising of the deeper self into freedom, was characterized precisely by “the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear.…” The envelope opened out and he was freed. Yes, yes, he saw Eliot's point in a way. To call this experience
negative
was no doubt understandable enough in the context, with its implications, under illness, of bodily passivity and automatic acceptance; but surely to goodness than the “breaking down of habitual barriers” there could hardly in fact be anything more
positive
? Clearly Housman's “the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting” was a better recorded memory of the reality, a more graphic description. The experience itself was pleasurable despite the illness, and the agitation and exhaustion that followed on the effort to record the essence of the experience (the poetry) were natural.

Will had had typhoid fever in his 'teens, and he knew that this curious experience in illness, noted by these two poets, was common enough (if not, of course, its recording in “automatic writing”!). It generally happened when the illness had burnt out the clotted physical pains that thickened the head or sickened the vitals, and the body, thus purged by its fevers, entered upon convalescence. Often a most delightful time, cool and pleasant and full of long thoughts. The note of a bird beyond the window went over the gardens, and over the fields, and over the mountains. “Far away” had something added to it as a flower has scent and memories. Quite naturally you could listen to silence, not merely to the different kinds of silence in the sick-room, in the house, and outside the house, but to other remoter silences that these led to. Your mind could have the most intimate times with itself. It could hear the voice of a child, or the voice of a saint. And when a vision, particularly a dramatized vision with, of course, oneself as principal actor, became a trifle too intense, then the head fell back, a cold dew on the forehead, and one let the vision drown in a complete passivity.

All that was commonplace; and Will's first impious thought was that Housman, waiting to get ill before he could write poetry, was like the Chinaman burning down a house to get roast pig. The illness burnt down “the habitual barriers”. But why wait for illness? Presumably because the barriers were too much for him in health. Will smiled. Acquiring an illness seemed an expensive way of writing a poem! Not only that, but manifestly illness reduced vitality, and poetry-making is a creative act, and every such act needs concentration and pith (whence the “agitating and exhausting”). Illness might well reduce the vitality to so low a pitch that the remembered sensation was
negative
!

Eliot said that the poetry he wrote at such times could not be distinguished by others from the poetry he wrote in health. (Roast pig being roast pig however contrived?) But—for a chance shot!—how perilous then the use of the word
negative
by him, because a critic with a penchant for school logic might be tempted to apply it in a description of all his poetry. Which was absurd; ergo his
negative
was inexact, italics an' all!

What did seem to emerge was this: if it were possible to break down the barriers in a state of health, then with the maximum vitality available for creation, the negative should fade in the glow of the positive and the whole conception and performance be “enlarged in a wonderful manner”.

Was Shakespeare able to break down the barriers almost at will? What the normal man so graphically calls the “flatness” of life—could Shakespeare, at will, see it with a stereoscopic eye? Had he developed the technique for this? (leaving alone for the moment the question of a descriptive “gift”).

Develop a “technique of sincerity”, said Richards.

Why not?

Why not develop a technique for any experience that had already proved real and that depended for its repetition solely on the individual mind? If thorn-trees and a bird sufficed for stage properties to-night, then almost anything in nature should suffice for to-morrow—or, anyway, for next time.

The trouble would be in overcoming the terrific inertia that Will now saw was so powerful in life. We would almost do anything rather than do that. Write poetry, even! Or go in for the most difficult analysis! Because so often—nearly always—in both occupations we are writing or working
on
something, executing a task, not
breaking through.

Which began to cast a new light on
Man's loneliness
(
the isolation of the human situation
). Literally to cast
light
on what was sombre or sunless there!

From this simple point, his thought went on to quite intricate argument, which, like Mr. Eliot's “automatic writing”, seemed to produce itself. And the ease in this intricate thought, its subtlety and power, the way in which, so to speak, he kept up with it, gave him a pure delight, somewhat like the delight a man must get moving amid the higher mathematics. There was in it, too, something of the physical sensation of flight. And though he had to think in words and sentences—there being no other way—yet his mind did not have to complete its sentences, or, rather, it used sentences, a turn of thought, as he himself used grammalogues in shorthand. The very swiftness of the movement, as in skating, permitted the making of intricate figures or arabesques with certainty and poise. You must have speed before you can loop the loop!

Until he suddenly thought: What about getting some of this down on paper? When at once he breathed heavily and lay back, for the experience had been “agitating and exhausting”! He wasn't just in the pink of condition. But that would come!

He got up, and strolled slowly into Jenny's garden, and at once experienced the feeling of her being both present and absent. Even more so than if he had come on her clothes in a room. Sly devil that he was! for he had found out a few hours ago from Mrs. Armstrong, very inadvertently of course, that she was expecting Jenny as usual on Saturday. And this was Thursday. Quite clearly from Mrs. Armstrong's tone, Jenny would have told her before this had she not been coming, had she been going away for the weekend.

Whence all the mystical illuminations!

He laughed softly at himself and eyed the bishopweed. If Jenny did not come after all, that should prove a fair test of the illumination? You watch your eyes! he said to the bishopweed, and, taking the four-pronged fork from its small dilapidated shelter, he started to dig the weed up. He could always arrange with Mrs. Armstrong to let it be understood that one of the farm hands had had a free hour or two!

Working slowly, he became absorbed in the job, and when his back ached too much, he would squat down on his heels, following the endless white roots with his bare hands through the loosened earth. He liked the resistance of the earth, the choked feeling in his nails. His hands burrowed like moles.

Jenny came into his mind. Then suddenly he had a strong feeling that she was in the garden, so strong that he could not turn round. He fumbled after a white root, pulled it out, straightened up, and slowly faced about with the wary “innocent” action of one who did not want to precipitate a blow. And Jenny was there.

He felt the blood rush to his face and stood awkward and helpless, trying to smile. After one swift glance at his face, she looked at what he had been doing. She seemed not at all awkward, except for a calmly suppressed annoyance or anger.

“Fine evening,” he suggested.

“Yes,” she answered shortly, glancing around at her various blossoms and clumps.

He looked down at his heap of white weed. Dammit, he wasn't stealing her garden from her!

“Sorry,” he said drily, his face going pale. “I'm not trying to help you. I'm working for Mrs. Armstrong, who can't meantime put one of her men on the job.” He couldn't stick the fork in the earth and walk away. That would be too dramatic. So he turned his back to her and started working again unhurriedly.

After a little, half-turning to throw weeds on his clump, he saw her wandering down the garden, looking at her possessions, one by one, as if she had come to say good-bye to them. A slow sinking sensation beset him, following an instantaneous intuitive conviction that she
was
saying goodbye to them. Not good-bye for ever, but good-bye to a life, a relationship, with them, now about to be broken. It would be a different Jenny who would come back after the week-end was over. For the moment he had no feeling that he was being absurdly romantic, even fantastic. On the contrary, the sweetness, the wholeness, of her secret virginal girl's life broke over him with a fragrance that drained the life out of him. He half-turned in his work so that he could dimly see her. At the bottom of the garden, by the gate, she stood quite still. Her face, out of focus, was blurred and pale. She stood so long that he could hardly bear it, but he kept on working stolidly. She could not go! She came back and started working with her bare hands in the earth.

In a little while Mrs. Armstrong's voice called them to supper. “Coming!” Jenny answered, in a clear assured voice. He waited until she had gone, then went slowly down.

Mrs. Armstrong would have rallied him about his work in the garden if Jenny had mentioned it. Obviously Jenny hadn't. “Jenny turned up all of a sudden. She's full of excitement.”

“I thought I noticed her.”

“Yes. Came back for her heavy country shoes. Apparently we're not going to see her this weekend.”

“Oh. Going away?” asked Will negligently.

“Yes. Some of them are going hill-climbing. The break, I told her, would do her no harm. Though I must say I'll miss her. She's such good company.”