Death’s visitations in the lower stages of society do not generally call forth much, if any, public notice, even in a country district. In the case of Garner, a humble stone-cutter, we find something of an exception to the general rule. He was born, brought up, and he lived until his death at the old cottage at the foot of the Edge, near the Hough Chapel. While following with zeal his humble trade, he associated himself with finer things in leisure hours. He was a lover of music. The old Hough Band owes its existence in no small measure to Garner. In numerous other ways were he and his music noticed and known. He was not only a ringer and a singer, but he and his ophicleide will be missed at sacred gatherings about the district.1
WE ARE ADDRESSING ourselves to “The Development of the Spiritual”, and one cause of my having a claim to your time and attention today has its beginning not in 1996, but in 1893, which is the date of the obituary notice of my great-great-grandfather, Robert, a part of which I have just read to you.
My father kept the fragile cutting in his wallet, and would take it out and declaim it with pride: pride that the family name had got into the local newspaper. For me, aged about nine when I first heard it, there was only an unarticulated sense of imprisonment, of condescension. And no one could tell me what an ophicleide was.
Now I’m going to tell you a story.
If you don’t like, don’t listen, as Russian fairy tales begin: but once upon a time, not near, not far, not high, not low, beyond thrice nine lands, beyond the tenth kingdom, a young man sat on a tree stump. His name was not Jack, but Alan, because the young man was me.
I sat in turmoil. The trouble was that within me were two people. One was the son of a family of rural craftsmen. They had shaped the place in which I had grown; everywhere I turned, their hands showed me their skills; yet my hands had no cunning; with them I could make nothing, and my family despaired of me.
The other me was different. He was not the first of that family to be intelligent, but he was the first to be taught. I had gone to Manchester Grammar School and to Oxford University, to be made adept in Latin, Greek, Ancient History and Philosophy: to be versed in Western Classical Humanism. And in this world I had flourished, and had long had one ambition: the Chair of Greek at Oxford. But something had gone wrong.
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.
Thus ends Ramayana, revered by Brahma and made by Valmiki. He that hath no sons shall attain a son by reading even a single verse of Rama’s lay. All sin is washed from those who read or hear it read. He who recites Ramayana should have rich gifts of cows and gold. Long shall he live who reads Ramayana, and shall be honoured, with his sons and grandsons, in this world and in Heaven.
So that’s how he’d done it. William Jackson had read Ramayana. I could live to be ninety-three. But I had to look to myself. Sons and grandsons were cared for. No mention of great-grandsons. I’d better get going. “All sin is washed from those who read or hear it read.” I could save the world. At least I could save Tamworth. I ran upstairs, opened the front bedroom window onto the street, sat on the sill, and, like some Hindu muezzin, summoned the people of Tamworth to hear Rama’s lay. I went on till my voice cracked. And my grandmother, wise and wonderful woman, said nothing throughout my daily sustenance of me, Tamworth, world, and cosmos. For it was not time wasted. By repetition, I began to see patterns more than of gods with blue faces, flying monkeys, and many-headed demons. I saw, emotionally, more than one way to market. So, in our multiracial society, ought you.
The second aspect of creativity, which is the opposite of the first, is that you should be prepared for the effect of the education you offer on the background of the child. An immigrant family is an obvious area for circumspection, but just as explosive, and maybe more, is the middle-class English, when the child outgrows the family. How many books does the worldly man of affairs have in his house, and what is their tendency; and how is the child to convey to that parent that the universe may not be simply the sum of its material reserves, and success may not lie only in their exploitation for financial gain?
Thirdly, be on the look-out for overt, perhaps disruptive, creativity, and adapt yourselves to its needs rather than expect it to be moulded to fit existing preconceptions. There is your creativity, and it is your right: the bringing into being, new as a book, of the child’s own spiritual nature, not the replication of others. Originality and individuality, in a trained mind, not corporate compliance will be essential to spiritual survival as Homo sapiens sapiens. For we are drifting, or being seduced, into another species: Homo inanis materialis.
Despite our daily observation to the contrary, I assure you that children are, by nature, spiritual beings, until we destroy through our example. In my own field of language I remember, and still can see, there being no problem here. A child knows, whether it be in the traditional structure of fairy tale, or the special use of an archaism, when the Mystery is engaged. “Once upon a time,” or “Hear what comfortable words Our Saviour Christ saith,” the child notes the cue and enters in. It is a truth that the Church itself seems to have lost sight of, along with much else.
I assert and would argue that we, child or adult, retain what comfortable words Our Saviour Christ saith, where our betters think we shall not.
And He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
Compare this.
He began to address them. And this is the teaching He gave. “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. How blest are the sorrowful; they shall find consolation. How blest are those of gentle spirit; they shall have the earth for their possession.”
The former is literature written and translated by poets. The latter is tin-eared jargon by committee. The Beatitudes have been rendered bêtise.
In every language, literature, culture, of every time and place that I have met, the spiritual is set apart from the secular in some way, as a sign that we are entering a sacred space, a sacred time. It is done by one, or both, of two means: by ritual introduction and by a change of style, which is usually slightly out of date in grammar and syntax. And, at the finish, we are formally released into secular time and space. It can be a mere signal: “Once upon a time . . .” and “They lived happily ever after, until the Soviets came to power.”
It can be epic. Vergil’s Aeneid: “I sing of arms and a man . . .”, closing with, “. . . but coldly droop the limbs, and, with a sigh, the soul, stripped of worth, slips out under shadow.” Homer’s Iliad begins with the invocation: “Sing, goddess, of the accursed rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles . . .”, and ends, twenty-four books later: “Thus they performed the funeral rites of Hector. There came an Amazon.”
The Odyssey: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many wanderings . . .” and finishes: “Pallas Athene, daughter of goat-skinned Zeus, appeared in the shape and voice of Mentor, and made peace again between the two sides.”
The folkloric technique of entry and exit into and out of sacred time is used in the Bible, often to the delusion of commentators, especially those more inclined to fundamentalism.
St John’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
“In the beginning” is, in New Testament Greek, “en archē”, which is more the equivalent of “Once upon a time”, not “At the Big Bang”. And the Gospel ends with the traditional release: “If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”
It is not a Mediterranean ornament. In thirteenth-century Iceland, the one hundred and fifty-nine chapters of Njal’s Saga begin: “There was man called Mord Fiddle, son of Sighvat the Red” and they reach their stark, formal close with: “And there I end the saga of the Burning of Njal.” The sense of myth, even in history, is shown to be a special truth.
Often, especially in the preliterate societies, where every act tends to be linked to the spiritual, the whole structure changes at times of high ceremony. Among the Batak of north-east Sumatra, the men use a language that has no semantic links with their tribal, domestic speech, when they go out to fell camphor trees, which have a religious significance.
It is an example of what we appear to be losing: awareness of the risks inherent in the spiritual by its linking of timelessness with Time. It is a task for poets. Unless you know something of what others believe, it is not possible to appreciate the harmonics of your own belief.
For professional purposes, and out of an appalled fascination, I collect specimens of outstanding vacuity that try to replace the simple and the true. I rest my case on this, which I saw in a headmistress’ study, in beautiful calligraphy, framed, and hanging on the wall beneath a crucifix.
The Lord is my Pace setter, I shall not rush.
He makes me to stop for quiet intervals.
He provides me with images of stillness which restore my serenity.
He leads me in ways of efficiency through calmness of mind,
And His guidance is peace.
Even though I have a great many things to accomplish each day, I will not fret.
His timelessness. His all-importance will keep me in balance.
He prepares refreshment and renewal in the midst of my activity;
By anointing my mind with His oils of tranquillity.
My cup of joyous energy overflows.
Truly harmony and effectiveness shall be the fruits of my hours,
For I shall walk in the Pace of my Lord
And dwell in His House for ever.
There, in one clear example, is your spiritual obligation to literature: root out the reductive; seek excellence; pursue the numinous. And, along with a disciplined intellect (for one is no use without the other) give to the children their imaginations, their unique imaginations, of which they are being robbed with totalitarian intensity by the trash around them. I do not want to have sat on that cold tree stump in vain.
But the threat to the spiritual is not insular. It is global.
I first became aware of it twenty-five years ago, when my Japanese translator, Chozaburo Ashikawa, said to me that the Japanese world of business, men he called the new samurai, was intent on removing Japanese culture, and that the ethos was being built into the state system, so that in two generations the criterion would be success in trade. The Arts and non-applied Sciences were to disappear. Money and power were to be the goals. I could not accept the objectivity of his claim, until that Judas euphemism “vocational education” oozed into the language.
Now schools have begun to send me, instead of an enthusiastic or a questioning response to their reading, dour critiques of my novels couched in grotesque language, exercises designed to give the children practice in the writing of commercial English. The children are put up to this by teachers, themselves victims of traumatised ideologues of the Sixties and Seventies, and therefore not guaranteed to be coherent, to punctuate or to spell correctly, as their accompanying letters show. Truly, who will guard the guardians?
Should it not be a matter for gladness, for consolidation, rather than for criticism by the likes of cultural vandals and political levellers, that I, who grew up speaking the dialect of the Gawain poet, drinking beer in a smithy at the age of six, in a community that has a living Arthurian oral tradition, should also be able to save the good people of Tamworth, and, “while following with zeal his humble trade”, to find out ‘How-Mary-Gets-the-Eggs’, to be able to come within an ace of demolishing my Officers’ Mess, to draw on the wisdom of Racine, and Heine, and Pushkin, and Sappho, and Catullus, and Tacitus, and Thucydides, and Plato, and Wittgenstein, and Darwin and Jung; and to have read all Homer and Vergil; and to be able to set those wonders beside the wonders of quasars and quarks; and so to encompass the spectrum of our social and cultural diversities and to hand them on to the future not only as a spectrum, but as a rainbow and a religious, a creative, act?
Furthermore it is hard to find anyone who can understand the necessity for Latin in a Western society that has pretensions to civilised learning. There is a fine irony here. I spend time in Russia, where Latin has become a prized item of the syllabus.
Could it be that Russians have long realised that the way to understand a people and its culture is through its literature, which is why they are the world’s best linguists? I know, from conversations, that they see our recent educational theories as barbarism, when it is considered more “relevant” to be able to order a gin and tonic in Frankfurt than to look into the heart of Goethe.
I am not immune. In my ninth year of a novel, my publisher and my agent suggested to me that I should abandon it, having spent enough to no purpose, and forsake “literature”, and become instead a “popular” writer, cashing in on my established name by producing sequels to, and making series of, the earlier books on which that name was built. It is not “quality” now, but “commodity”, that is in demand, the immaculate rubbish that we produce so well. No matter that it would render sterile the existing work, the life that produced it, and bring about my artistic and spiritual death. Houghites, R.I.P. Instead, I jettisoned publisher and agent.
The novel was finished in a little under twelve years. My grandfather would have found such statistics perhaps interesting, but irrelevant; as I do. The book exists. That is enough. From being a chaotic dance of the synapses, now it cannot be lost.
The novel is based on the true story of a Cheshire bricklayer of the eighteenth century, William Buckley, whom we should now call a Gifted Child, but who was transported for life to New Holland because of his precocity. He set off to walk home; met, and was received by, the oldest culture of the world, and one of the most sophisticated; adapted to it, and became a spiritual leader and healer, and then, after thirty-two years, he prevented a massacre of opportunistic, entrepreneurial Europeans that his People met, the contact with whom led to the People’s physical extinction. But William could not express his wisdom except in a language that no Englishman considered worthy of learning.
Of the language of William Buckley’s People, ninety words were recorded; yet they tell us much. Seventeen were the names of animals; seventeen the names of weapons; thirty-four, parts of the body; twenty, natural phenomena; two adverbial sentence modifiers: yes, no; three adjectives: good, bad, plenty; four verbs: eat, sleep, drink, walk; one imperative: hurry; one complete sentence: where are the niggers? And one answer: dead.
The single point of communication of this mix of philosopher, archbishop and Fellow of All Souls with the whites was the dialect of a twenty-year-old bricklayer. Is it the truth within such imagery, the myth, that attracted me, autobiographically, in the first place, that is now causing interest in the book, subconsciously, and the spiritual concern? Would Elidor II, Owl Service III, which the accountant-ridden publisher and agent were urging upon me, even if I would, or could, have written them, have caused so much as a flicker of an intelligent eyelid?
I find myself wondering whether my unschooled bricklayer is saying something of a more universal concern, which I was protected from seeing while writing his story. For the man was creative, was spiritual; and is now disturbing. He exemplifies what is beyond the reach of the swords of the new world samurai, that shifts and twists and dodges every fatal thrust: the mercurial Trickster of creativity. There are no stratagems, no guard against the illogic of the innovative leap. Creation is not in the Philistine accountant’s vocabulary. He is the other feller, and he cannot do it. It confounds him. For creativity is risk. As the determination to walk home from New Holland was risk; and its reward a theophany.
I am not decrying the profession of accountancy, only its appropriation of competence in every field. And if, as it looms, we are entering on a period biased towards materialism at the expense of progress, then we are in the hands of the accountant, a spiritual Ice Age, where all will be frozen and there will be no risk, and, without risk, no movement, and, without movement, no seeking, and, without seeking, no future. Darkness will be upon the face of the deep. We must get aback of this.
Through creativity, spirituality, we shall; but it must be promoted, and given its head; which is the reason for my coming here today.
From my differing awareness, I sense something that you may not yet. Especially amongst artists (which is why, quite prudently, the Russians have always had the tendency to shoot us), resistance is growing. Consciousness is on the move. Something is at work in the world: a general recognition of a crisis of the spirit, of the banal and the shoddy, in human affairs. It is universal, and it must be met. Recently, an Australian Aboriginal shaman warned me: “The Great Serpent has woken. Jarapiri stirs. The earth shakes. And the warriors are gathering.”
And that’s about the top and the bottom of it. The whole beggaring cheese. I’ve given you a story, not too long and not too short, just the length same as from you to me. I’d tell you more, gladly; but that’s as much as I know.
1 This lecture was first delivered at the the Annual Conference of The Society of Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools, at Breadsall Priory, 6 March 1996 (an extended version of the address given to the Headmasters’ Conference, Cambridge, 1991).
2 Solution p. 232.
3 He was also an Equalized Independent Druid, but that’s another story.