Remember Me (2 page)

From our vantage in 2012, just as many years have passed since Stacton’s untimely death as he enjoyed of life. It is a moment, surely, for a reappraisal that is worthy of the size, scope and attainment of his work. I asked the American novelist, poet and translator David Slavitt – an avowed admirer of Stacton’s – how he would evaluate the legacy, and he wrote to me with the following:

As mentioned above, it was in 1957 that Stacton set himself on the path of taking historical personages and themes as his near-exclusive focus.
Remember
Me,
about Ludwig II of Bavaria, he first floated to Charles Monteith as:

After the delivery of the first draft Monteith certainly pressed Stacton on the cutting, re-shaping and shifts of emphasis that he felt would be essential to the novel’s creative success. ‘[Y]ou have set yourself here one of those supremely difficult literary undertakings’, Monteith wrote to Stacton in 1956, ‘where complete success is the only kind of success worth having.’ Stacton, though declaring himself ‘fussy as a hen about this book’, was good enough to take Monteith’s major points (even the unglamorous counsel that the ideal length for a novel to be priced at
15/-was
approximately 80,000 words).

Remember
Me
is by no means ‘lubricious’, but through Stacton’s refined, rich and evocative prose it certainly does conjure a sense of Ludwig’s inner world, including his famously suppressed sexuality. The mental universe of ‘The Mad King’, with its complex sensitivities and creative passions, emerges as one exquisitely ill-suited to the cut and thrust of politics; and Stacton traces the path toward
Ludwig’s downfall with considerable sympathy. ‘Reliving another man’s life is not always so agreeable’, he wrote of his long labours over
Remember
Me.
‘But this, too, is part of the magic of Bavaria … a landscape slightly mad, but altogether loveable. I hope I have been able to catch a little of its feeling here.’ This would be to make the most modest estimation of his achievement, for
Remember
Me
is a stunning work, the first of Stacton’s novels to suggest that truly great things might lie ahead.

Richard T. Kelly
Editor, Faber Finds
April 2012

Sources
and
Acknowledgements

This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

I
t sometimes happens that when we can find no comfort among the living, we turn for advice to the dead. Most of us have friends in history. But the dead are eager for life. As soon as they sense our sympathy, they invade us and take us over utterly, until we can no longer tell whose life we are living, ours or theirs. Yet the tyranny of history is not without certain benefits. It can teach us wisdom. It can soothe us tenderly. It can console us for the burden of ourselves.

Thus it was that three years ago I found myself
entering
into the mind and soul of someone else, an experience both peculiar and strange.

I had come to Munich, that city that so loved its rulers and so hated everything they did. I was alone. I leaned over the parapet of a bridge across the Iser and watched the progress of a dirty swan through a thin mist of rain. It had escaped from the pond built for it, and had
ventured
on the river. Usually swans are graceful: the posture of this swan was not. He was searching for something, though I could not see for what. For some reason I did not want to see for what. I furled my umbrella and yet remained there, not caring about the rain. I was in Bavaria at last, although I did not quite know why I had always felt impelled to go there.

It was Oktoberfest, and I was deeply moved and a little shaken. It seemed that there was something in Munich that was asking to be spoken. It was like black magic, turning white.

So in Munich I did not notice the fashionable shops; the inner courtyards, or the stout ladies in pastry shops imitating the chatter of some Vienna of the mind; but only saw the desolate bombed squares, the massive ruins of that Northern Florence invented by Ludwig I, a parochial yet imperial wilderness where, in the great state square, at dusk, with the gutted shells of splendour all around them, now only leather motor-cyclists spun in the dim light of some moth-like game. Here the grass grew wild where it had once been disciplined. Munich has the unmistakable air of a place accustomed to rule. It has it most near the Theatinerkirche, in these
bomb-shattered
ruins made permanent by an overgrowth of weeds.

I did not want to linger long, but no matter what I did, I should go to Nymphenberg. Actually by Nymphenberg I meant two other buildings there.

When I did go it was alone, in the rain, the soft, gentle, melancholy rain that turned the landscape purple pewter. I got off the trolley at some distance from its ultimate
terminus
, and walked along the motionless canal into which the rain dissolved, scuffing the brown and yellow autumn leaves which damp had moulded into patterns of its own. I was sad, yet content, for all my life I had known that one day I would walk down this canal, towards this palace.

Here, I knew, was an answer waiting to a question framed when people of my temperament were first born, a special, shy, negative answer as important as an
affirmation.
That question has no words. As I walked beside the
canal, a desiccated leaf solemnly detached itself and eddied down to the water, where huddled also swans.

Then, in the great circular parterre, there was
Nymphenberg
, behind its flowers, filling one with the shock of the expected. How Dutch it looked, a Teutonic Regent’s Park, but parochial once more, and curiously childish, with its horseshoe of similar villas for the attendant nobility of yesterday, surrounding the vast but somehow maternal country house.

I did the usual things. I went to see the Museum of Carriages in what was once the riding ring. The day was grey and overcast. There was not much light, and
because
of the rain one approached the past through slowly separating veils. In that low shed lies all of Ludwig II Wittelsbach, his carriage when he rode, his carriages. That was what I had come to see.

Here and there in the gloom was the glint of gold: the noisy but comfortable state coach surmounted by the crown he did not want and was afraid of; the carefully glassed-in and crimson cushioned prison of a state
occasion
. But there were other carriages, too: the small sleighs whose figureheads hold always aloft a dusty lantern, long unlit, articles for laughter and pleasure, for affection in the snow; the marriage coach that was never used; the cutters, the light dashing barouches, all there, horseless, immobile, but crisp as yesterday.

For some reason these carriages were deeply moving. The German tourists felt that and they wept, for they weep easily. Ludwig was not loved, and the unloved have an inexorable power. I could not stay with those carriages driving relentlessly nowhere. I could not stay with those Germans. I fled outside, around the palace, to the Amalienberg.

In that little placid palace garden it was still raining.
This seemed appropriate, for in the heart it often rains, and the Amalienberg is a palace of the heart. Deep in its heart the world must sleep alone. The Amalienberg knows that secret. I fled for good.

So that, having gone from there, I stood on the bridge over the Iser, while behind me toy bands in children’s uniforms went wanly tootling through the streets; and watched the swan, that curious, bedraggled, yet
determined
swan, battling against the upstream current.

It seemed to me that Ludwig was all around me, and that he stretched out his hand. I took that hand, for that was what I had come to Munich to do; and I asked the question that he always asked, and to which he seemed to have found the answer.

What is love?

So insistent was that question, that for a while I seemed to inhabit him and to relive his experience.

That experience began one day long ago, in a country that can no longer be found on any map, on a late
winter’s
morning sometime in the 1860’s. But in one way or another it has happened at one time or another to almost everyone, and happens still.

L
ife burns us away with a fine omnivorous rush, even though subjectively the years seem banked. But when does the fire catch? In his case it caught in 1864.

11th March 1864 was an important day to the citizens of Munich. Their old king Max was dead, and their new king Ludwig would that morning take the oath to the constitution which in Bavaria was equivalent to a
coronation
.

Of Ludwig they knew only that he was young and handsome, and so they were prepared to feel young and handsome themselves. There would be street dancing and heavy dinners. After that they would go home. For the moment they had no worries. They slept.

Clouds lay over the city like a folded napkin. The
napkin
opened and the light poured down. It was the dawn of what must surely be a favourable day. They stirred. They stretched out an arm. They had no terrors, for there was no unrest in the city, and no danger of assassination
whatsoever
.

Nonetheless there were more troops in barracks than usual. In part this reflected the German love of order; in part it showed the German love of uniforms. In any event it explains why the citizens remained unaware of the body in the Iser.

It was discovered by two bored young policemen on early duty, who conveyed it to the morgue. The youth was not yet twenty; the river was extremely cold; he had not been dead for long; the swans had not yet discovered him; and he was extremely handsome. Clearly it was a case of suicide. The matter was hushed up only because the authorities could see no point in causing any public annoyance on the morning of the constitution oath.

There are, however, several ways of committing suicide, and among these the destruction of one’s own body is merely the simplest, the least important, and the soonest over with. To destroy the self takes much longer, and is totally beyond the provenance of our guardians.

Such at any rate were the thoughts of the coroner, who finding himself up so early, was in the garden of his house watching the progress of the two puppies of his terrier, Triebschen.

The first puppy was a melancholic. The second was the good doctor’s favourite. It was like a child and his one desire was to keep it from harm. He picked it up and let it slide yelping happily through his fingers. He held it in his hand, reverent for a moment to feel the quick confident life there, and then set it back on the gravel path and let it gallop with a drunken toddle towards its mother’s dugs. It was white with two black spots.

The process of weaning had begun. The mother growled. The puppy stopped and cocked its head. The other puppy heard, shuddered, and squinched down
under
a geranium. It had already learned better. The white puppy shrugged, cocked its head once more, sniffed, yawned, and bounded forward. The mother swatted it with her left front paw. The white puppy scittered across the path and came up against the geranium.

Usually it bounded up again. Now it lay there silently,
watching. The process of weaning was not pretty. The good doctor stooped and picked the white puppy up. He felt for it bitterly. He held it in his hand, soothing it, stroking its tiny ears, and making faces at it. But he was too late. Even in his hand the puppy did not feel quite as it had felt only a minute before. Something had changed. Forgetting the runt under the geranium, the doctor took the white puppy indoors and gave it warm milk with a little melted butter, but even that did not seem to cheer it up very much. He was sorry. Taking the puppy he went upstairs to wake his wife.

He was a Swedenborgian, and it seemed to him that the sadness of the puppy in some way tied up with the body he had been wakened to receive, for he believed it quite possible that all events are symbolic, if only we could find the person to whom they had meaning, for they often occur in lives to which they are not pertinent, as though they had been mislaid. But events can happen to anyone, and search his memory though he did, he could not see how these applied in any way to him. And he was quite right. They did not. With a sigh of relief he continued up the stairs. Idly it occurred to him that he was probably the only person awake in Munich who was worrying about the nature of love. In this, however, he was not quite so right. He paused on the landing and went into his wife’s room. It was becoming day.

But the light in Bavaria is sudden, bright, and
treacherous
. From definition it shifts rapidly to a high, shadowy gloom. The corners of the Residenz Palace were full of shadows, which leapt from chair to chair. The palace seemed to be waiting. The walls listened. The court was alone. And in that peculiar ancestral light it was cold and damp.

In a small bedroom that was little more than a
dressing
-room
an agile boy lay in bed, too active to sleep, but too frightened to get up. Pomps had come upon him very suddenly. For years he had been stuffed with knowledge, as though he were a Strasbourg goose tethered in a cage, but of wisdom he had learned none, except for the sad wisdom of the watchful young. He did not feel like a king. He felt like a boy. He did not know what would happen to him next.

All he had to do was to walk down a corridor, mount a dais, take an oath, and listen to a speech he had not even written. Yet his bed was clammy with too much tossing, and he knew the reason. It was because once he was King, he would be more alone than he had ever been, for a king cannot expect love. Everything else he may have, but not that, for love can exist only between equals, and he has none. He would not be Ludwig any more to
anyone
. He would only be Ludwig II von Bayern.

He had a sudden vision of his father, an impersonal beard in a court uniform, and of his mother, an alien in her own kingdom, whose most personal act it was to be allowed to wash teacups with her own fingers, at her summer chalet, as Marie Antoinette had played
dairymaid
at Versailles. Neither could help him now. The one was dead, and the other was dead to him. Nor was there anyone else for him to love. He thought of his governess and of his friends. He had no friends, and Fräulein
Meilhaus
was married now. He could only write her letters. If a prince is too sensitive to put up with the love of sycophants, where can he find love?

He had a secret. He thought he knew. He had a name he would soon be able to utter, for he could only love greatness, and for years now greatness to him had had but one name.

But as he lay in bed, that name did not help him, even
though he repeated it in silence to himself. For the self has many secrets, the greatest of which is the secret of its own nature, and that it would take him many years to learn. As the years went by in single file he would ask them each a question, and it would always be the same question. He could not know that now.

Against a side wall of his bedroom stood a dusky Venetian mirror in a frame of tasseled swags. It was an old mirror, of lead glass from which the mercury had fallen away in strips, leaving a mottled, distorted image of the past. From where he lay he could see it now, but it was not himself he saw reflected there. It was his brother Otto, peering out at him from the silent mirror world. It was the face of an abandoned faithful dog. The eyeballs rose too high against their upper lids. If even Otto could not be with him, then he would indeed be alone.

He waited for his servants to come to dress him, and he had ugly thoughts. He had always thought that to become King would be to force understanding from the stones around him, and to move in a celestial company. But it was not like that. There was no company at all.

It is, of course, socially considerate and convenient that we should be unable to share our sorrows; but that we should be unable to share our joys is a crime against the human spirit. He was permitted so few human acts, that even childhood seemed snug behind him now, like a shore he was leaving. As King, he foresaw, he would be permitted even fewer. Once on that sea, and it might be dangerous to seek a port.

He threw back the covers and leapt to his feet. The parquet was icy. As he stood up a knocking began at the door, at first deferential, and then peremptory, as
servants
always are. They had come to dress him, and he
was not ready for them yet. Perhaps he would never be ready. He looked angrily round the room and then told them to come in. It was too soon. His father’s body was scarcely cold.