Angels and Insects (39 page)

Alfred Tennyson did feel something stir in his room. He felt that mixture of excessive atmospheric stillness and pricking in the skin which he was accustomed to refer to as ‘an angel walking on my grave’ though he knew very well he was conflating two superstitions, the angels whose silent passage overhead caused table chatter to cease at twenty minutes before or after the hour, and the prescient shiver induced by someone treading the clay which at some inexorable future moment would be grubbed up to make space for his mortal remains. He also felt attention somehow on his hand, so that he stopped trying to do up his buttons and held it up as though it was some strange, separate creature he had got hold of. Its fingers were long and brown and still sinewy. There was no puffiness or plumpness, though he had overheard Emily Jesse observing tartly that since he married he had never lifted a finger to help himself. Some of the fingers were stained mahogany by his smoking. He was afraid he perhaps carried its powerful aroma with him unnoticed. His nostrils would never again be innocent of it, as an ostler’s nostrils no doubt perceived everything through a warm haze of hair and sweat and horse-piss and horse-dung. It was a good smell when it was, so to speak, alive, and less good when it was cold. Like the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day, he thought, burning and fragrant, then stale remains, old dottle, a good word, ‘dottle’. Perhaps he stank? He lifted the ends of his fingers to his nostrils. He heard the buzzing of little flying fragments of language that hung around his head all the time in a cloud, like the veils of living and dead smoke, like the motes of dust that hung in shafts of sunlight, ‘thick-moted’ as he had so beautifully described them. ‘Let me kiss that hand,’ he heard, and answered, ‘Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.’ Or if not Lear, Lady Macbeth. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
this little hand.’ Or John Keats. ‘When this warm scribe my hand, is in the grave.’ Or worse, that fragment of his:

He remembered Arthur frightening him with that in the owl-dark moon-glimmered bedroom at Somersby, with its two little white beds. ‘That makes life worth living,’ Arthur had cried in his enthusiasm, ‘that a man should write so well, with death staring him in the face, such a defiance is noble—’ He had made his own image of the dead hands, in Arthur’s poems, that he was proud of. It had the cheating life of the lifeless, his image.

Hands moving, like weeds, like flotsam, the tumble of drowned flesh, he had caught the rhythm of the tumble. It was Arthur’s hands he had remembered most sharply, afterwards, of Arthur’s life. Arthur’s handclasp had faded on him like a diminishing, then guttering, candle, over forty years. He looked at the old pads on his fingertips and touched them with his other hand. A curious smoothness had glossed his knuckle-skin, the lines of life effaced, the opposite of what had happened to his mouth and brow. He had remembered the feel of Arthur’s palm warm against his own, Arthur’s eager grip. This was where Arthur met and temporarily mixed with him, in the English gentleman’s grip. Manly, alive, a renewal of touch. Meeting and
parting. After the terrible letter, he had been savagely tormented by the fact that his hand still anticipated that grip. He had made fine poetry of that haunting, too, fine poetry. He had hundreds of letters. ‘I too have had
exactly
that sensation, I must tell you, Sir: “I should not feel it to be strange.” Your percipience is a great comfort, I thought you would wish, perhaps, to know.’

That had been early, when it had been impossible for his body and feelings to know what his poor brain had instantly accepted. He had imagined the ship touching land and the passengers descending.

That was accurate enough, but long ago, long gone. Arthur had died inside his own body and soul, gradually, gradually, like the slow death of a tree, an inch here, a string of cells there. When Arthur was first dead, the sudden recall of his bodily presence, an impatient motion, an alert look, had been pure torment. And then, perversely, in proportion as flesh and blood gave way to shadow, he had tried to hold his friend back, to flesh out his imaginings, to see the unseen. But Arthur had gone on dying.

Frederick and Mary and Emily invoked lost forms and spirits, but he himself was afraid and repelled, afraid of being cheated by flecks of canker on the matter of his own brain, repelled by morbidity. ‘I shall not see thee,’ he had asserted once or twice, firmly and terribly, taking toll of his loss. Some kind of mystic union, light in light, ghost in ghost, might be possible beyond the veil, but his hands would remain empty, feeling blindly for absence.

He remembered a day when he and Arthur had talked all day long on the lawn at Somersby, of the nature of things, of creation, of love and art, of sense and soul. Arthur’s hand had been a few inches from his own, on the warm grass among the daisies. Arthur had talked of Keats’s sensuous imagination, which created beauty, and Keats said might be compared to Adam’s dream of the creation of the Woman from his own bloody ripped-out rib, ‘he awoke and found it truth’. And he, Alfred, had seen in his mind’s eye, not Milton’s Adam, but Michelangelo’s, with his limp hand livening at the power, the electric power, that arched across from the fingertip of the clouded God to his own. Arthur had said how
daring
that was, how shocking, and how right. ‘ “O for a life of sensation rather than thought!” ‘ Arthur had said, in the Somersby sunlight, and had gone on to read out of the wonderful letter:

Arthur had gone on talking of Dante and Beatrice and the making sensuous of Heaven in the journeyings of the
Divine Comedy
—‘we must surely, in the very different cases of Keats and Dante, Alfred, take the pulsions of earthly Love as a faint figuring—a
faint prescience—a faint foreshadowing—of Divine Love—do you not think?’

And he himself had lain back in his creaking chair, leaving his trailing hand where it was, imagining Paradise and loving Arthur, and feeling such happiness, such unaccustomed happiness for a blackly morbid Tennyson, in his skin and flesh and bones, that he could only smile, and hum assent, and hear the air full of singing words that were the unformed atoms of his own creation to come.

Michelangelo had been a lover of other men. He himself had told Arthur, more than once, jokingly, that he loved him as Shakespeare had loved Ben Jonson, ‘this side idolatry’, and both of them had found in Shakespeare’s sonnets line after line that could be offered to the other as a gift, or a grace, or an assurance. He knew the fruitless fire they flew round, without burning their wings, without being shrivelled, and he knew too the terrible misconstruction to which his exact exposition of the full extent of his pain and longing in Arthur’s poems had laid him open. Arthur’s father had disliked their love and had written slightingly, after Arthur’s death, and before Alfred had ventured to let Arthur’s poems see the light, of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Henry Hallam had destroyed Alfred’s letters to Arthur. He knew very well what Arthur’s father feared and suspected, though he had never once allowed Arthur’s father to see in his face, or hear in his voice, any acknowledgement of his suspicions, any disquietude. He had learned young and early to cloak everything he felt, every uncomfortable perception of his own or others, with an impenetrable mist of vagueness. For eight years he had squirted black vague ink at his dearest Emily, like a retreating squid. He had never by any the smallest twitch of irritation replied to the personal message he detected in Henry Hallam’s magisterial dismissal of the sonnets, though he had told others, repeatedly, that the sonnets were noble. He was doubly cloaked, now, in the distracted vagueness of genius and in the thick cloak of the respectability of his Age, of which he had somehow or other become an exemplary citizen. There had been bad moments when he was younger, when critics had mocked his unwary phrases, his description of his ‘darling room … with thy two couches soft and white.’ When Arthur’s poems had first appeared, anonymous as they still, in a sense, were since he had never allowed his name to appear on the title page, one critic had written that he had spent ‘much shallow art’ on ‘an Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar’. There was now almost more liveliness in the salted rawness of the wound that slick phrase had inflicted than in the remembered touch of Arthur’s hand. He had never—however great his success—got over his wincing despondency over harsh criticism. Another reviewer had thought he was a woman. “These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.’ It was true, it was true, he had called himself, over and over, Arthur’s widow, but that was only in the spiritual sense in which his soul, his
anima
, was bereaved. He
believed that all great human beings encompassed both sexes, in some sense. Christ, the Son of God, the object, in Arthur’s Theodicaea Novissima,’ of the Creator’s Divine Love and Longing, was both male and female, in that he was God incarnate, he was Wisdom and Justice, which were male, and Mercy and Pity, which were female. He and Arthur both, this was his conception, had their womanly aspects, for ‘pitee renneth soone in gentil herte,’ which only increased their poetic sensibility, their manly energy. But there were things he abominated. Things Arthur abominated. Things he was sure secretly appealed to the diagnostician of the Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar. Men should be androgynous and women gynandrous, he had noted felicitously,
but
men should not be gynandrous nor women androgynous.

He had made an epigram ‘On One Who Affected an Effeminate Manner’:

Pretty neat, he thought, deftly put. An epigram was a kind of bonbon, one moment it wasn’t there, the next it was popped into your mouth and turning round and round, smooth and sweet. People thought he was an innocent old creature, he was well aware. They humoured him, they protected him. But he knew more than he said, that was a politic way of going on in this straitlaced time, and he was a child of an altogether less innocent time. He and Arthur both knew of the proclivities, and more than proclivities, of the elegant Richard Monckton Milnes, their Cambridge contemporary, whose interest in beautiful boys kept bubbling to the surface of his and others’ talk. He knew, too, from Arthur, of the carnal passions that drove William Gladstone to prowl the streets at
night in search of
those
women, and to repent in agony afterwards. A sensual man, Arthur had said of Gladstone, who had loved bright Arthur at Eton, as Alfred had loved him at Cambridge. Arthur was not a sensual man. He loved in a romantic glow. He had written in Arthur’s poems