Patronage

PATRONAGE

J.P.Hooper


I
“Don’t you see, Singer, that you can’t just cut yourself off here. It’s one thing to go out collecting folk tales. Another to live like some kind of medieval lord. Ivory towers indeed.”

“I think the solitude will do me good. I’ve done a good bit of walking already. Contemplation. The thing is starting to take shape.”

“But haven’t you been listening? Your commitment is to this generation. They are your audience, not the dead who cannot hear. Do you care nothing for the developments in art and philosophy I’ve been expounding this past hour?”

“I will write regardless of the tides of fashion. A long poem, a narrative poem, the work I have set myself.”

“An epic? The mode is already outdated.”

The two men were seated facing each other in a tower room where the only source of light was the red glow of a fireplace. In its bright glow, Myers’s face appeared luminous, like a stained-glass saint’s. He had features of a severe cut, with a tonsured forehead and upright white collar, making him resemble a clergyman. The second man, who had retreated more into the shadows, was dressed in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, with silk kerchief tied around his neck and a cane at his knee.

The man with the priestly look spoke again. “Look, Singer, we’ve been friends since Wynyard days. It is natural, therefore, that I be concerned for your wellbeing. Your mind is utterly made up, I can see that. But I just can’t let go of the thing. Will you lock yourself up here until the phantoms start to appear? Will you go out looking for fairy rings? It’s your appetite for supernaturalism that worries me. These peasants are liable to get under the skin, with their fancy and nonsense.”

“There’s the matter of inspiration…”

“Is it essential that you believe in fairies and goblins, in the whole variety of peasant gobbledygook, if you are to write the thing?”

Singer laughed. “You are trying to make me come out and say it! All right, I believe in hobgoblins. I have gathered enough evidence for their existence.”

“Myth, you know, Singer, contains its own truth. The moderns know that. You don’t have to abandon it all and regress into romanticism. One can say one believes in myth, without actually believing that Hercules plucked the golden apples, or that Siegfried washing himself in dragon’s blood gave him the speech of birds. The truth of the tale is another thing. But without cultivating detachment? Without some ironic distance to keep things in their proper perspective?”

Singer came forth from the shadows. His eyes gleamed white; his face had an obsessive look. He blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke into the stale air of the tower and looked up at the stairwell, hidden in darkness.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Why do I sense foreboding in those words?”

“I have a patron.”

Myers leaned back in surprise. “So there’s money in this?”

“Not just money. Food. Bounty.”

“Hand to mouth? Does he, or she, give you your daily bread in exchange for a few lines of verse? I see the medieval temperament has overtaken you completely. Who is this mysterious figure?”

“I do not know, exactly.”

“You’ve not met?”

“I’ve some contact with his, shall we say, representative. He gives me money – no final figure has been disclosed, but it is surely enough to live in comfort for the rest of my days. And food too.”

“Some local landowner, then. A landed gent, with a taste for high, lofty verse. They are always sentimental. Need I say you are selling your talent?”

“I came here, as I said, to write an epic. He has commissioned such a work.”

“I see. Then you will dwindle into obscurity, your work locked away in some private library, unknown to the world. Well, if that is what you want. I cannot say I blame you, from a certain point of view. There is no money in verse these days. One has to slog it away at the office, or in the lecture hall. I myself could not survive otherwise. Still, I hold out a hope that when all this is over, you will return to us, when this intoxication has finally left your blood. Now I must be going. I regret I cannot stay the night, but I have another engagement as I said, and besides I fear I may come down with a similar affliction. Wait till I tell the others. A watchtower. A wood and a lake. No other habitation in sight. I fear we have lost you, Singer.”

Farewells were exchanged. Myers, seeming over-eager to retrieve his things and be gone, disappeared into the gloomy dark, the drone of his motor car cutting through the enveloping silence of the trees. Singer, left alone at the entrance of the tower, shut the door and returned to the fireplace to think.


II

The next morning, Singer was up when the first birdcalls echoed in the neighbouring wood. The lake gleamed cold and clear, and in the stream at the foot of the tower foaming white water rushed under the little bridge. Singer had a desk pushed under his study window, and he looked up only occasionally into the bright autumn morning, his pen scribbling feverishly on page after page of foolscap paper. He wrote in flowing, calligraphic script, with fine, delicate characters here and there embellished with sweeping flourishes. “There is no need,” he thought to himself, “to take such pains with the handwriting, since it’ll be translated. But it seems fitting.”

He continued until well after midday, with scarcely a thought for breakfast. Indeed, it was only when the inspiration seemed to dry up, and he leaned back exhausted in his chair, that the pen was finally laid down. “That is the end of it,” he said aloud, as if to the air surrounding him. “As good as I can tell it.”

On reaching the ground floor, he left the room with the ashes of last night’s fire and crossed the hallway to the kitchen. When he opened the cupboards he barely blinked in surprise to see them newly laden with all kinds of foodstuffs: rosy red apples, baskets of ruddy cherries, potatoes, turnips, radishes, stalks of kidney beans, bacon, cheese, a jar of wine. He made his breakfast straight away on the kitchen table, gorging himself as a man does on a feast.

“Is it only my fancy?” he asked himself. Myers would say so. The truth was he had never tasted the like. The city food to which he had been accustomed could not compare. The cherries seemed to burst in an ecstasy of fruitfulness, and the wine lingered deliciously on his palate, its very aroma evoking distant vineyards and soft, airy southern breezes.

In the early evening, after he had returned from a walk on the forest paths, he remembered to check the basement room beneath the tower. The chest was still there, this time more than a quarter full of coins and notes, some in the local currency, some in currencies unknown to him, but doubtless originating from foreign lands.

During his walk in the woods he had read the note – though that is hardly the word, for the script was too elegant for such a term, possessing a delicacy perhaps greater than his own. Written on crisp white paper, it ran thus:

Our lord was happy as with the first. All harkened to the words you wrote. How can he tell these things with such vigour, he told me afterwards, one who has not lived and breathed them. Such were the days of his youth. Of course, he supplies you with the material, as per our agreement, but it is your telling that fills him with such admiration. Think further on the proposition he put forth to you.
T.

The evening was a restless time, as was now accustomed. He simply did not know what to do except go out for another walk, this time along the length of the lake; and night found him back in his study, reading from the ancient poets he had always loved, though they no longer left him feeling sated. “I have drawn my inspiration from a deeper well than they,” he declared to the enveloping silence around the flickering candle. “Though I make no claims for my rendering. But sure it is that if the inspiration be a finer thing, the work also emerges richer.”

When night was long underway, he retired to his bed, taking up again the pages he had written that same morning, placing himself under the edict that they must be returned to the study, as had been agreed.

He fell upon their words with fervour: were these all his own? Certain it was that the line between inspiration and invention is thin, and when the vision is so inspired one can look on one’s own work with admiring wonder, for it does not seem to come from us but from the very world’s soul. “Yet it still is my own,” he said, letting the words fall upon the still air. “My invention, my own craft, no matter the vision that gave it rise. I am right to take delight in this work, for it is in its rendering, in its essential genius, my own. The material from which the work of all great artists is woven comes from the world’s soul, or from the circumstances in which it is made, but the artist stands supreme in that he has shaped whatever raw material he may be given into art.”

He read on the page, in his beautifully wrought letters, the following fragment from his long account of unseen things:

“Far beyond the mortal regions of the earth
He moved,
Far from those whose life is but a brief space,
And whose tales, though grasping for immortality,
Are received by oblivion in the end.
Into undiscovered, shadowy, twilight regions
He ventured,
To the ends of the earth where the stars are washed
By seas rimming the world,
And treasures guarded by fabulous beasts,
Wait upon the bold discoverer.”

He found himself wondering, yet again, about the strange tongue it would be rendered into: for the emissary who visited him had told him that the work was being translated into another language. His pride in the craft of his own words made him doubtful that the translation would capture more than just its spirit; but when he’d voiced such doubts the emissary had assuaged him with assurances that the work was being done properly, and well, so that not a single nuance of the original escaped the translator’s eye.

Reluctantly he removed the pages to the study before retiring, and anxiously awaited sleep, barely mindful of the creeping cold that always seemed to emanate from the walls of his tower room.

And when sleep did come, it brought the expected vision, the next chapter of an account he had been witnessing since settling in. First, he found himself, as if he were really transported to another place, blinking feebly in a light that was many times brighter than the daylight of his own world. He was in the region of the western stars, near the borders of the world, where the tide washed against a vast horizon of infinite blue-black space. It was the place where he had left the tale before. In front of him stood a group of shining figures, dressed in armour that seemed to capture and reflect back the starlight, their leader, one who was taller and nobler than the rest, standing over a felled beast, the look of victory on his face undimmed by the pains of battle.

“He leaves no children to lament him,” their leader spoke into the pure air. “Unsullied were those works, and free of jealousy and spite, ere the world fell into darkness.”

In the days that followed he continued to dream, he received visions of vast, perilous seas, and white ships that sailed even to the ends of the earth, full of the bounty of unknown regions. And each morning, when at last he was sated, he woke in a fever of sweat, and wrote down all he had seen, and shaped it into fine, lofty verse, that scarce was tainted with the crude, melancholy materials of the world he had turned his back on.

The praise of his patron reached him every morning. “Our liege can scarce believe that you were not there with him, on those voyages into unknown regions, or in the deep veins of the earth which have never seen the light of the sun. How can you record these things?” Such was the tenor of the emissary’s notes each morning.

Still it was with reluctance that he gave up each instalment of the epic poem to the writing desk after the day’s work, only to find it removed the next morning, when he commenced writing. “Is nothing of this to be left me?” he thought, bitter that if the work was left to endure, it would not be left to him to see it.


III

A full season’s worth of the visions having passed, Singer found himself of an afternoon standing on the lakeshore, looking down at the expanse of covering ice. He was wrapped in his greatcoat, for the chill of that lonely place, which at first he had barely registered, was by now starting to get into his bones. He took from his pocket the most recent of the emissary’s notes, this one reading:

“The work darkens, even as its delights move towards excess. It is as expected. Excess of joy, excess of pain, these are the things our liege has known. Tears that will be shed until the world’s end. Laughter that rings from its first birth pangs to its expiring. Your doubts reach us. You cannot write these things, you say. The dreams now leave you broken, and you are slower to put pen to paper, even to record them as prose. Do not fear for your sanity, for sanity is measured by your mortal world’s fickle sense of propriety. One cannot receive even a heady vision of the immortal world without being touched by it. Write on, until the work is complete.”

He folded the paper into his pocket and stood gazing out at the frozen lake. As was now his wont, he found himself speaking his thoughts aloud. “I wanted escape,” he said. “Escape from this sickened world. I thought that the fairy world would ease all my woes. But truly it is no escape. There, in that place, among those high, immortal ones, there is greater joy, and greater loss. Grief and joy mingled together. I have seen all the pale fairy king has seen, and now it leaves me with a longing, and an unfathomable regret, that no experience in this dreary world could have prepared me for. But, tell me, if I am to go mad with the longing for past ages, if I am to record these latter days, when the king, as I have seen, sits in august melancholy, what is the cure? The words I have committed are lost to me. Memory of the dreams remain, creating this longing, but the art I have made of it, art that might soothe the longing, cannot be mine. What am I to do?”

The silent winter air pressed around him. What indeed could he do but wait, and receive yet another vision, once sleep had taken him, and hope that his thoughts would be answered by the emissary at the proper time.

In the five months since Myers’s visit he had seen barely another soul; only the occasional farmer or carter glimpsed far away, avoiding parlance with one they deemed, he instinctively knew, to be touched by the fairy realm. “I must appear the epitome of the eccentric lord,” he mused, “closed up his tower, a magician even, whose magic brings ill luck. How far I have come from the bright young man whose first poems excited such admiration, whose company was sought out by all the shining minds of the day.”

If the bounties that met him each morning, the food that tasted of another realm, suddenly stopped, he knew he would starve. He had nothing to keep him in sustenance but the gifts of the fairy king. The money he no longer cared for: he had long ago ceased all correspondence. The words of the edict came back to him now, as he stood upon the shore:

“Write what visions you receive, crafted into verse that befits the matter of these things, and leave it on the desk at each day’s ending, so that the tale may be finished. You will be well rewarded for these labours, but remember that the work belongs to your patron, not to you. Such are the conditions set down. You may not preserve even a single part of the poem you are to write.”

Remembering this, the melancholy he now shared with the king, who sat in his dim woodland court waiting for the end of things, reached deep into his soul. Returning to the tower, he skipped his evening meal (he was losing his taste anyway, for food of any kind no longer seemed to sate him), and, sitting at the desk in his study, looked sadly over the day’s work until he came to the following words:

“What regions of the earth are left to us? What lands lie undiscovered, what beasts lie unslain and treasures unplundered? Is this all the bounteous world has to offer? I have stood upon the limits of the world, at the very space where the seas fall into the oblivion of space, and yet longing fills me. I long for all that once was, for the continent that once existed unconquered, for those that now lie slain. Now, what remains for me? Is it to sit in these silent, echoing halls, listening to the account of my past deeds, until Time finally unravels its last threads?”

He awoke the next morning a devastated man. The dream of the night before had been the most mournful yet, a vision of a king who was pining towards a death that would not come, surrounded by his weary subjects, listening to bards recount tales that had been exhaustively sung, and which Singer had already recorded. But one moment in the dream had shaken him more than the idleness of passions spent; one glorious starlit night the king had risen from his throne and, stepping down from the dais, had spoken thus:

“It is long since I noticed the beauty of the stars. They, at least, endure in constancy, undimmed and unwearied by loss, which even our immortal hearts have not been fit to escape. They will burn until the world’s ending, and when the time comes for their light to go out they will extinguish without regret.”

Striding the length of the clearing, the king had continued: “Call upon the shipwrights. I fear they have forgotten their craft, that it is lost, and if it is so they will have to learn anew what they have forgotten. Bid them build a ship, so that all who are loyal to me will set sail on a last voyage, roaming the seas until Time is no more. It shall be a ship that the sea will not break; such were the craft of old.”

Silence followed, and the courtiers merely looked at one another, as if they no longer remembered how to act. Then one of them spoke up:

“What if we set sail, my liege? Where shall we go? What lands are the left for us to see? We sit in grave memory of what once was, and if we go out upon the world as it is, the loss shall be greater increased, for we shall see first hand how diminished the world has become, and despair that all that once was noble has passed away. Surely this court, and the memory of old days, are all that is left us. If we leave this place, our hearts will be darkened for ever more.”

“Nevertheless, do as I command. Bid the shipwrights commence work.”

There was much muttering all the length of those days, as the noise of saws and hammers carried into the clearing, and great trees fell on the edge of the forest.

Singer had woken, full of the doubts expressed by the courtiers. This, he was certain, was to be too much: to record the king’s last voyage, encountering a world that had fallen into ruin. For what difference could there be between the world he had known, the world he had escaped, and the world the king was shortly to encounter in the dream?

The edict spoke out against him again. “Do not fear for your sanity. Write on until the work is complete. But remember that the work belongs to your patron, not to you. You may not preserve even a single part of the poem you are to write.”

Sitting down at his writing desk, he commenced the business of setting the whole thing to verse, a verse that had increasingly become filled with the most high, aching, melancholy beauty. He wrote under a weariness, as if a stone was tied to his hand, as if with each word his heart was becoming more laden with sadness. But when he came to the moment when the king had risen from the dais, he suddenly stopped. For a moment that seemed stretched infinitely, the pen remained untouched on the paper, and the tale simply hung there, cut off in the midst of the telling.

“I cannot go on,” he told himself. “For this will be the end of me.”

First, and without thinking too much of the consequences, he took another piece of paper from the drawer and carefully copied out what he had already written, willing himself not to dwell on the tale itself, but simply the marks on the paper. It took great concentration, but he was able to see only the words themselves, and to clear his mind of their meaning, for the duration of the task. He had already decided that he would leave the ream of paper on the desk as the king demanded, but that it would remain unfinished, whatever the consequences might be. Perhaps because he knew he was breaking the edict by doing this, he had also decided to keep this last record of what he had written, in order that he might preserve some final trace of the work, before he was expelled from the arrangement and the term of patronage ended.

“It is little enough for all my labours, but I will keep it by me,” he told himself.

The day was given over to walks around the lake and in the forest, in which, somehow, he managed to keep his mind relatively free of the dreadful end of it all.

The sense of longing and loss, which for so long had troubled him, was also diminished, and he felt relieved to finally look on the beauties of the place unsullied, as he had once done.

When night came, he gave a last check that the unfinished pages of the manuscript were in place on the study table, and also that the transcript he had made was secure in the desk draw. Then he went to bed, and found that sleep fell upon him with great suddenness, as it does for a man weary from labour.


IV

The next morning he heard the sliding and cracking of ice on the walls of the tower. Looking out his bedroom window, he saw a great region of ice and melting snow. On the lake, the ice had cracked in enough places, and there were little pools of lakewater where wild duck were sporting.

For a while he did nothing but gaze out the window, content to look out on the clear, cold beauty of the place, landlocked as it was by winter, happy that the work that had so consumed him was over.

Finally, when the morning was already maturing into afternoon, he took it on himself to make his way to the study. Would the pages still be there, unclaimed because unfinished, or some wrathful note be waiting for him? Had it all been some feverish dream, as it now seemed to him, from which he had finally awoken at last?

He turned the handle of the door and stepped silently into the cold, still air of the room. At first he took in the bare stone walls, and noted how little light penetrated the place from the single arched window, a lone candle having been his aid to illumination on dark mornings.

His eyes passed along the sparse furnishings, and alighted at length upon the oak writing desk to which he had committed so many months of his life. The papers were gone. In their place was a single piece of parchment, the note he had been expecting.

Of course it had been no dream. He had known as much already, in the deep veins of his being.

Taking up the parchment unread, he made his way down to the hallway and into the kitchen. Gingerly opening one of the cupboard drawers, he was at once disturbed by the sight that met him:

The foods were still there, but whereas before he had found his cupboards restocked to bursting every morning he had deigned to check, this time the unseen hand had brought no fresh supply: the remains of some fruit and vegetables were scattered over the shelves, having been there evidently for some days, and already in the process of rotting. The smell was rancid, and ushered him out of the kitchen at once. How long was it since he had eaten, he wondered? Although he tried, he could not remember the last time he had sat down to dinner, despite the taste the immortals’ food had once held.

While he was crossing the hallway once more he noticed what had escaped him the first time: a letter had been pushed under the door, and lay half hidden by the doormat. He had almost forgotten the existence of a local postal service, and the memory of Myers’s letters, which he had left unanswered in the fever of his work, suddenly reminded him that he was not so cut off as he had come to believe.

From the handwriting, he saw at once that this was another of Myers’s, no doubt the first for several months. Then, as his eyes strayed to the Oxford postmark, he noticed that the letter had been posted a full two months earlier. What had taken the post so long? No doubt it was because of his isolated location, the infrequency at which the postal service passed this isolated spot.

No, that was not it. Was it conceivable that the letter had lain there all this time, unnoticed, while he went on with his work? Opening it, he read.

“Dear Matthew,

The months go by and still no reply. I am starting to be worried about you. What is keeping you up there? Winter’s upon us, and to be frank I fear for your survival, since you never displayed much flair for gardening. I could mention the fact that I am publishing another book in February, but that would be frightfully vain of me, so I’ll keep tight-lipped about it until the reviews come in. Debating society a hoot. Seems you are not alone. A few romantics and Supernaturalists holed up here, ever keen for a bout. You should come and join their ranks.

I’ll keep this short because I’m packing a parcel of supplies to keep you from starving to death. If you die before it arrives, I trust the postman will do the decent thing.

Ever yours,
William.

He couldn’t help smiling at the letter. But what had happened to the parcel? An idea, at first merely a whim, took him, and in a few moments he found himself outside, clearing the mounds of snow and ice that still clung to the walls around the door. There was a little shelf, now covered with snow, to the left of the doorframe, which he’d noticed before; just the sort of place a postman would leave a parcel if the tower’s inhabitant wasn’t at home, or else was indisposed.

He realised that he had struck something solid as soon as the spade cleft through the snow. Myers’s parcel lay encased in a block of ice and snow, its contents doubtless preserved from perishing, even though two months had passed since its arrival.

He took it into the sitting room and let it melt before the fire. In the meantime there was still the letter, the letter from the king’s emissary, which that morning he had been reluctant to read. With the logs on the fire kindling to life, he sat down in the armchair and unfolded the parchment.

This is what it said:

“As of this day, the king’s time of reflection and retirement in his forest halls has ended. This morning he took ship on the shifting seas, under the changeless stars, and will sail eternally until the world’s ending. He knows that much is lost, and the world fallen to ruin, and that that which once was cannot be again. Yet there might still be some battle that goes unfought, some shore still untrodden, some caverns of treasure still unmined. He wishes to thank you for the record you made of past days that cannot be again, and would have you know that these coming days will be for some future chronicler to record, if such a one can be found, if ever the need for reflection comes upon his people, and if such wanderings ever cease. Now he bids you go out once more into the world, but cease not in longing, for without it in its proper measure the end is truly despair and the withering of all hope. Such bounties that the world can offer are yours, if you can but learn to take them. Cast aside the last words you have written, for they are not needed by you or by him, and lie untouched and unread in the empty halls of his repose.

Timeus, servant of the high king.”

Singer rolled up in the parchment and, after a moment’s reflection, cast it into the fire. He wondered whether he should do the same with the transcript, and later did so, after copying just a fragment, the king’s word of command, the pronouncement of his final voyage. Realising that Myers’s package still needed some time to thaw, he went out walking in the woods near the lake, observing the land in the last bonds of winter.

Later that evening he would write a reply to Myers’s letter, long delayed, thanking him for the bounties he had sent, and announcing his return, and warning him that the exponents of Romanticism should expect to count one more among their number when they convened for the new term.


“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are”

Tennyson, Ulysses.