English Professor

Francis Gearon Liam

Description

The Fires at Max Gate, Professor Dante Blythe's biography of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), would not be the last word on the Victorian novelist. There was always room for more speculation. Yet, any material evidence of controversy was burned in the author's garden at Max Gate, Thomas Hardy's residence since 1885. The fires, destroying all personal papers of a writer who became as controversial as he was acclaimed, were ignited initially by Hardy late in 1927 and, early in 1928, after the author's death by his second wife, Florence. Two things obsessed Blythe about Hardy: why had Hardy ceased writing novels at the heart of his literary fame in 1885, just as he and his first wife, Emma, moved into Max Gate? And what, nearly half a century later just before his death, was the last of the great Victorians trying to hide in those fires in the garden of Max Gate? Blythe's long-held hunch is of a connection between the end of a novel-writing career and the fires. Blythe's tenacious investigation takes him back into his own history and to his first love, Beatrice Lambe, and to where they had first met one winter's night beside that lake on those stately grounds of Clay Castle.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528989190
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T he E nglish P rofessor
Liam Francis Gearon
Austin Macauley Publishers
2021-05-28
The English Professor About the Author Copyright Information © I The Fires at Max Gate I II III IV V VI VII VIII II Clay Castle I II III IV V VI VII VIII III The Fossil Beach I II III IV V VI VII VIII
About the Author
Liam Francis Gearon is a senior research fellow at Harris Manchester College and associate professor at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. A docent of the University of Helsinki, Finland, he also concurrently holds posts as conjoint full professor at Newcastle University, Australia; and as extraordinary professor at North-West University, South Africa. Liam is also visiting professor at the Irish Institute for Catholic Studies, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. With a doctorate in English literature, he is the author or editor of over forty books.
Copyright Information ©
Liam Francis Gearon (2021)
The right of Liam Francis Gearon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528989183 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528989190 (ePub e-book)
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First Published (2021)
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As much of the holy Realm
as in my memory I could treasure up,
shall now become the subject ...
– Dante Aligihieri, Paradiso
I The Fires at Max Gate
I
Her scent flows across the indecent plane of memory. Ask me what of consequence I ever achieved except to love her. And I will say that all other appetites, all the false consolations of the university, waned before the happiness I felt in waking beside her. I grew older and ever thin thinking of the yellow-haired girl and of her grey-blue eyes, she and I on the lake, rowing out there to the edge of time, from the days when it snowed in winter.
As a young man, I knew everything when I knew her. I knew this. How a meteor crashes and destroys a species of reptile, leaving a boy more than a hundred million years later to fall in love with a girl beside a lake.
She might recall things differently that New Year’s Eve in England, on those frosty estate grounds of Clay Castle, that late evening. However we look at it, though, she had been watching me as I stood at the shore of the lake, the night my life changed, the way people’s lives no longer seem to change, or mine at least, when an icy breeze froze the snowy winter air, and from the edge of ancient trees I heard, and hear still, the woodland softness of her voice.
“Don’t you like parties?”
There was the crack-crack of dead winter twigs as she stepped from the forest edge, standing close enough for me to feel the heat from her breath warm on my neck, her body intimate and spectral, like the ghost of a passion already ephemeral, impossible to capture or contain.
“No,” I said, “I don’t much like parties.”
“Me neither, to tell the truth.”
“It’s good to tell the truth.”
“Most people don’t even know they are lying.”
“Maybe they don’t…” I said.
“Maybe,” she laughed. “What a strange conversation to have at a party. Shouldn’t we be talking about, I don’t know, about nothing, isn’t that what most people talk about?”
“There’s a lot to be said about nothing.”
She smiled. I have never yet seen a smile like it. She looked at me, and I looked at her.
“Have you got a drink?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I’ve stopped drinking.”
“Why? Charlie hasn’t. I wish he would. I am sure we could find a bottle if we wanted, if you wanted to start drinking again. Charlie always has a litre in the boathouse, you’ve met my brother.”
“I like Charlie.”
You were supposed to pity, not like Charlie. He was a painter who had lost his sight, a blind man who carried on painting, no longer able to see either colour or canvass or the forms that his violent brushstrokes took. He had lost his sight that year. Not in patriotic combat, but from straying drunkenly in the path of the last heavy flight of pheasants he would ever see.
“Yes, yes, I like Charlie, but…”
She shivered in her gold satin party dress, a white mohair jacket covering her shoulders. Only now, writing this has it struck me that she came out that night to find me. She stopped and started another sentence.
“Did you ever read that book where the consul in Mexico is an alcoholic and keeps drinks around the garden, Under the Volcano ?”
She laughed. Under the Volcano had been published in 1947 and was regarded then, many winters after, as a manual of sorts.
“I have read the book,” I said.
“Well?”
“I didn’t like it.”
“No?”
“No, the wrong people died in it, and for the wrong reasons.”
“You are funny,” she said.
There was a silence which neither of us seemed inclined to fill.
“You work for my Father.”
“I do.”
I liked Horace for his kindness to one who could offer no advantage.
“You’re Dante.”
“You’re Bea.”
She smiled.
“You seem sad,” she said. “Was watching you…”
Either she blushed or midnight did, and I fell in love with her.
The minutes remain a still life in the gallery dedicated to her memory. And I saw the hand of a poet write her name.
“Did I miss midnight?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but there will be another.”
We were young then, as young as anyone ever was.
“Dad says your parents were historians.”
“They were.”
“Are they not historians now?”
“No,” I said, “my parents are no longer historians.”
I had heard of her history. She was a girl who retreated from parties. She was a girl who found me at the wooded edge of a lake in winter.
“Shall we row out?” she asked.
I smiled. She smiled too.
I looked out over the acres of black water, a quintessentially Victorian feat of engineering to improve the pastoral.
“Now?” I asked.
“When else is there? It’s dark, it’s going to snow! Look, perfect.”
She was.
We walked towards the boathouse. A badger scuttled in front of us. She took fright and grasped my arm.
At the boathouse, it was a choice between the Lakes and the Norwegian. I had been working on the estate for three months or so by then, since September – the beginning of that final year at Oxford – and knew about boats. Water lapped inside the boathouse. There was little light, a night dependent upon shadows, and a moon seduced by snow clouds. We took the Norwegian. She stepped into the boat. I joined her, released the ropes, pushed an oar against the jetty, we moved slowly through the shallows. Towards the lake’s centre, a small island had been created, deciduously dense, leafless branches frozen now, a monkey puzzle the island’s only conifer. I could see the turrets of Clay Castle, the outline of outbuildings, the old lighthouse. She was a ghostly silhouette, her face the promise of a future.
It snowed, lightly, as memory might, with ill-defined night-time edges. White flakes landed on her blonde hair. She reached to catch falling snowflakes, her smile the trace of life itself. That snowfall still, as soft and as elegiac as it did then.
I kissed her. After the kiss, we were silent.
With words I forget, she broke the silence.
Then I heard a young man’s voice shout her name, a thick drunken voice. The young men I knew as contemporaries had their distinctive jarring sound, rattling loud and intemperate. The jingoistic cant of the time –war had been won – was the triumph of good over evil by people who knew little of either.
I don’t know if we could be seen.
The terrible sense arose that he had expectations of her that would be fulfilled that New Year’s night.
The spell was broken, the world disenchanted, the snow no longer magical. I rowed instinctively to the boathouse. There was no one there. Even I was not there. I made her go.
“I’ll call you,” she said, in retreat, disappearing into snowflakes down the lane towards the Hall.
I tied up the boat, water lapping on cold winter hands; and, these decades on, I hear her voice still, calling.
She did not call, not in those next few days, nor the remaining winter.
The frost seemed to fall with intentional cruelty that it could not have meant. I carried on working for Horace, witness to the matrimonial battles he had with Penelope. I got stoned with Charlie.
Oxford was not so far by train. Horace would take me to Exeter station in the beat-up old Bentley. Tired of Balliol and the opinionated vacuity of the Union, enriched by reading everything, I retreated from Blackwell’s to read alone on dry benches beneath rained on trees at the banks of the Cherwell. I did not suit Oxford. I was a boy inclined to wild habits and private devotions, thrown upon the infinite mercy of the great unknown.
After my parents drowned, I had been removed from Barnes and the school I attended beneath Richmond Hill, and was adopted by some charitable people in the West, a medieval-sounding place called Monkton Wyld, across the Dorchester Road from Charmouth and Lyme. The Edwardian house was surrounded by meadows and woodland, an acre of well-tended lawn and flowerbed. From my bedroom, I could glimpse the Golden Cap.
I loathed it there, leaving at seventeen for good reasons. I wished to kill and yet had no desire to be a killer. I lived rough and read and was content, I slept on the beach, which would determine every chapter of my life, even life as a sometime reviled biographer of Thomas Hardy. In the early month