Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [14]
‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’
The appropriate response can have been rarely returned.
‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’
One of the firmest tenets – so Moreland always said – in the later teachings of Dr Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than ‘magic in action’. There had just been an example of that. Orlando Furioso had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney’s were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that – with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life – a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney’s view – also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh – that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as ‘dead’, there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the ‘liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies’. Perhaps Vaughan’s words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls’ T-shirts.
In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if – like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh – somewhat in the rôle of Hamlet’s father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon. An event some days later again brought forcibly to mind these lunar rescues from the Valley of Lost Things. This was a television programme devoted to the subject of the all-but-forgotten novelist, St John Clarke.
Above all others, St John Clarke might be judged, critically speaking, as gone for good. Not a bit of it. Here was a consummate instance of a lost reputation – in this case a literary one – salvaged from the Moon, St John Clarke’s Astolpho being Ada Leintwardine. Keen on transvestism, Ariosto would have found nothing incongruous in a woman playing the part of the English duke. Maidens clad in armour abound throughout the poem. Ada Leintwardine, as a successful novelist married to the well-known publisher, J. G. Quiggin, could be accepted as a perfectly concordant Ariosto character. In any case she had latterly been taking an increasingly executive part in forming the policy of the firm of which her husband was chairman. Quiggin used to complain that St John Clarke’s novels (all come finally to rest under his firm’s imprint) sold ‘just the wrong amount’, too steady a trickle to be ruthlessly disregarded, not enough comfortably to cover production costs. Nor was there compensatory prestige – rather the reverse – in having a name in the list unknown to a younger generation. In fact Quiggin himself did not deny that he was prepared to allow such backnumbers to fall out of print. Ada, on the other hand, would not countenance that. Her reasons were not wholly commercial; not commercial, that is, on the short-term basis of her husband’s approach.
Ada’s goal was to have a St John Clarke novel turned into a film. This had become almost an obsession with her. Ten years before she had failed