The Black Halo (20 page)

I walked to the hospital carrying the book. It was a June day and the birds were singing and the air was warm. The windows of the hospital were all open and the air was rushing in, scented and
heavy. The whole world was in blossom. On the lawn there were some old people in chairs being sunned and tanned before being replaced in their beds. The sky was a mercilessly clear blue without
cloud. I walked along the whole length of the ward and he was waiting for me. He would want to know what I thought immediately.

I handed him the book. I said to him quite clearly, aware of everything, ‘It’s no good, James. It’s just no good.’ The book lay between us on the bed. ‘It’s
too naive,’ I said. ‘There are no new insights. None at all.’

Without a word he held out his hand towards me. And then he said equally clearly, ‘Thank you, Charles.’ I felt as if we were two members of a comic team as I heard our names spoken,
two comedians dancing on a marble floor somewhere far from there.

He didn’t say anything else. We started talking about other things. Three days afterwards he was dead. When I heard this I stared for a long time out of the window of my flat as the tears
slowly welled in my eyes. No one can ever know whether he has done right or wrong. I stared around me at the books and they stood there tall and cold in their bookcases. I went and picked up a
Yeats but I could find nothing that I wanted and I replaced it among the other books.

At the funeral the wife ignored me. Perhaps he had told her not to publish the book and she had guessed what had happened. Simmons was with her and he also ignored me. Later I heard that he had
been advising her to get it published. I thought that if James had been alive this would have served as a true example of the absurd, his wife and Simmons in such an alliance. The two of them stood
gazing down into the grave at the precious despised body and mind disappearing from view, she rigid and black, Simmons large and stout. As I turned away my shoes made a dreadful rustling noise on
the gravel.

I have just finished wrestling with a saint and I am very tired. For it is clear to me that a saint may act as a devil in his human affairs and because he is a saint may easily
lead people astray. For one may think that one is imitating the saint when one is in fact imitating the devil in the saint. But . . . I think it is the tiredness that is making me go on like this
and I had better begin at the beginning.

I am a Professor of Theology at a college in Edinburgh. I am a round, rather fat, good-natured and, I think, nice man. When I wake up in the morning I am nearly always happy, for I exist in a
harmony which I believe is the harmony of God, His universal music. I have never doubted this. Not that I ever had any special dramatic experience which proved that this harmony existed, I have
always known it. Perhaps my secure childhood had something to do with it, a large rambling house, a garden in which the birds seemed always to sing, a father who was ample and good-humoured, and a
mother who, loving him, loved me as well. I suppose really there is something to be said for success in the world and my father, himself a Professor of Theology before me, was successful in that he
was doing the work which like myself he was born to do. Happy this kind of succession, and lucky those who benefit from it. He was not a tortured man: on the contrary, like me he existed inside the
divine music whose notes were composed of books, garden, a loved wife, sunny days, and nights without the necessity for remorse. Sounds emerge from childhood, of pots humming on cookers, of mowers
whose sleepy hum enchanted the June days, of laughter, of a pervasive busy world in which I budded and blossomed. Sights I recall of trams rocking down their rails, of the castle ancient and
magical and theatrical on its hill, of colours almost excessively clear in a northern light.

So I grew up admiring my father and followed him as naturally into his world as if I had been born to do so. My student days were happy, I loved books and I recall sitting in gardens in white
flannels reading theological and Latin books while the bees hummed about my deckchair. I don’t suppose all those days were like that but that is how I recall them. There were poignant thorny
moments as when my father died, closely followed by my mother. I married a woman rather like my mother and settled into my college world, a perpetual student, loved, I think, and loving. I think I
may say that I have exercised a beneficent influence and that through me others have been brought to hear the harmony which composes the world. I can think of few people who have been as lucky as
me. I have never suffered from the obligatory fashionable angst so zealously pursued in literary reviews, and that is because I have never divided man into body and spirit: both seem to me to form
an indissoluble whole. I have never wished to do any other work than I do, or to be other than I am. Why should I be other than happy?

In general my students have been normal like myself. They have studied here, and thereafter gone out into the world to transform it according to their lights, and to bear with them, into
whatever gaunt or lovely corner, an echo of the music which they have heard while briefly, almost too briefly, we have been together. Many of them, whom I have been conscious of, have gone on to
the sombre battlefields of the world and I have often received letters which revealed minds and souls at the edge of sanity, frenzied notes which spoke of the devil and his fierce diamond will
opposing them in the night as well as the day. I have felt it my duty to answer all these letters and to restate from this calm place the beliefs which have sustained me and my father before me. At
times I have felt that perhaps I also ought to be in those embattled places but my inner voice has told me that my best work is being done where I am. And so all was well till I encountered Norman
MacEwan.

Now Norman MacEwan was from the islands, and I had better make quite clear at the beginning what I thought of him, and what I knew of the environment that had created him. First of all, he was
very pale and intense and neglectful of his appearance. There was a bony aspect to him and a disharmony of clothes. His collar was often soiled, his tie disarranged, his hair long and floppy. He
was not at all clever: on the contrary he had to work very hard at his books to keep up, but that may be because he had the kind of mind that needs to fasten on words and ideas till he has finally
torn the flesh from the bones. He had no distractions that I know of, at least in his first year; he had no interest in music or the theatre or the cinema, and he read no books except the ones that
were recommended. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons he would go out preaching to local layabouts. I once saw him near Princes Street Gardens, his hair flopping in the breeze, his right hand jabbing
downwards through the air, all intensity and vivacity, while past him there walked a trampish looking man in a long overcoat whose shoulders and head were crowned with pigeons.

Of course he had come from an environment different from mine. In the bleak islands God is a hard schoolmaster, with the cane always ready to lash at the poor hand. He is the thorn and the
lightning, and not at all the civilised artist or composer. He forgives no one and certainly not the introverted divinity student such as Norman MacEwan, only son of a widowed mother whose husband
had spent his days and nights in a haze of drink, disoriented and Celtic, though whether this was endemic or whether it was reaction to his wife’s harsh religious beliefs, who will now know?
All this I found out from a minister friend of mine who came from the islands. But at the time I saw in front of me a bony tense unhappy boy who certainly did not hear the harmony I heard and was,
I thought, impatient with the civilised books I lent him, and which he chewed at into the early hours of the morning. He seemed to be searching for some other harmony, some bleaker blacker globe of
a harsher drama than I could supply him with.

I took him to the house one evening but I am afraid that he said very little and was so nervous that he spilt his tea all over the carpet and finally rushed out, head down, as if he had
committed some unforgivable sin.

It looked to me at this early stage as if he would quite simply exhaust himself. I had the impression that he neither ate nor drank, that he spent his days rushing along the street (coat
flapping, for he wore a long unfashionable brown tweed coat), that he felt he had found himself in a city rather like Sodom, attractive and terrifying and seductive, and that there was no place for
him in the college at all. No place in the world even. I must confess that I wondered at times whether in fact he would take to drink as his father had done, but I hadn’t quite realised how
deep his mother’s prohibition had bitten. In fact she sometimes came down to see him and to make sure that he was keeping to the right path. I never met her myself but I heard that she
appeared in a black coat, remorseless and rigid and unyielding, and had a number of things to say to the landlady about certain aspects of her boarding house.

I may say that I was rather worried about him. I felt that his spirit was beating steadily against his flesh, as his own island waves beat against the cliffs, and that this force would destroy
him if it did not find its form. He sat sulkily on the bench along with other students but at no time did his face flower into visionary understanding, nor did his clumsy bony body relax. All the
time he seemed to be searching for some gift that I could not give, and by his undeviating remorseless stance adding a contemptuous gloss to my lectures. I grew almost to dread him as if he were my
conscience accompanying me continually in visible form. I had in fact nothing to offer him at all. For the first time in my life, I felt almost in despair. I avoided his eye, and my words gradually
lost their resonance, confronted by that stony gaze. My own inner harmony was being steadily dislocated. Till one day the miracle happened.

At a certain stage in the course I felt it obligatory on me to tell my students something about Kierkegaard though he is not in fact a theologian (if he can even be called that) who appeals to
me much. I feel that in a sense his biography intrudes too deeply and that there is a certain fake element in his nature which I cannot quite focus on. However, as I explained to my students that
day some of Kierkegaard’s ideas, as well as some of the biographical data which I thought necessary to inform them of, I saw for the first time that stony gaze become intent and almost
glowing. I have never in my whole life seen such a total conversion proceeding so nakedly before my very eyes. I can even recall the smells of that day, the varnish from the desks, the freshness of
the green leaves penetrating the open windows, the scent of blossom. Truly a harmony of the natural day and of ideas as well.

I told them of how Kierkegaard’s father had cursed God on a hill in Jutland, of his success in business as a hosier, of the nickname Soren Sock which had been cast at the hunchback boy at
school, of the brilliant dandy who had kept the salons laughing, of the affair of Regine, whom he had been engaged to, and finally of the ideas, the world of the aesthetic and the ethical giving
way to that of the existential. I told of the early Socratic irony, followed by the crucified tormented exhortatory prose, of the pseudonyms which were sloughed as he progressed, of the
consciousness of power and the exceptional, of the death bed scene where he had expressed his happiness. All this I told them, and as I spoke I felt I had done a terrible thing, that I had
introduced this boy to a saint so flawed that he might destroy him. But may I say how much I envied Kierkegaard at that moment, that he could affect a human being so much, that out of the death of
the spirit he could bring him alive again? I was fair to Kierkegaard though I myself feel that he demands too much of men, that he has in fact divided the harmony of the body and the spirit, and
reintroduced a terrible medievalism into the world.

Still, how can I forget how the boy’s face brightened as if at last and for the first time in his life he had entered on his kingdom and come home?

When the lecture was over he came up to me and asked me if I could lend him some of Kierkegaard’s books. I gave him some and he thanked me and then rushed slantingly away with that walk of
his as if he were breasting a high wind, bearing his treasures with him. I shivered slightly wondering how that strong salty food would affect him, and it was as if I was frightened, as if across
the lecture room had fallen a dark chilly shade. If my memory is not deceiving me I think that even on that day he was wearing his long trailing brown tweed coat.

I may say that after I had loaned him the books I didn’t see him again at my lectures for a week or two. I was rather worried about this but when I asked a fellow lodger of his –
also a student – if there was anything wrong, for I still had the feeling that I had done something irretrievable, he assured me that there wasn’t but that MacEwan was still reading the
books. It was a beautiful summer and, uneasy as I had been made by MacEwan’s presence in my class, I didn’t set out to investigate further. As I lectured to my students that month of
May while the world of nature blossomed around the walls of learning – so that the ivy itself seemed to be in bloom – I felt Kierkegaard’s presence as an intrusion, as if the
devil himself had entered the Garden of Eden.

In any event I didn’t see MacEwan again till after the vacation. I didn’t know what I had been expecting to see, for his gaunt thorny presence had been forgotten during the long hot
summer when I had relaxed from the book on which I was working, a history of the college. I had perhaps thought that in the Jutland of the islands he had become more thistly and sullen than he had
been before, that the narrow intensity of his nature had been made more extreme and perhaps sharpened into a bitterer stake. It has always surprised me on my visits to these islands that such a
paradisal landscape can produce such unhappy unstable men.

However, I was quite amazed to find that when MacEwan joined my class I did not recognise him. His hair was still as long as ever but it looked combed. Instead of a tie he was wearing a silken
floppy reddish scarf mottled with green. He was even clean-shaven and altogether in his brown sports jacket he looked summery and almost radiant. The sullenness had disappeared from his voice which
now sounded mocking and alert. He gave me back my books and said how much he had enjoyed them. I asked him whether he wished to discuss anything in them but he said, almost with a patronising
smile, that he didn’t, as if he had decided to assign to me the part of the vacuous liberal churchman in Kierkegaard’s demonology. I can’t say that I liked him any more than I had
done previously, but my dislike now was founded on different causes.