Letters to a Sister (34 page)

‘The world of Chaos has become real to us. What takes shape before us corresponds absolutely with that state which to the Christian is Hell, and it is this that has become part of the inner world of Man's soul.'
⁸

[In] Hieronymus Bosch's Hell pictures ‘We see dark gulfs, empty stretches of earth and sea that seems to tell us how utterly God has forsaken them, the desolation of empty
cities, strange hideous places…. Above all we see ruins, we see them continually'.
⁹

‘As thou long since wert pleased to buy our drowned estate,
Taking the curse upon Thy self, so to destroy
The knots we tyed…
So let Thy grace now make the way
Even for Thy love…'

(Vaughan)
¹⁰

‘The Protestant is left to God alone. For him there is no confession, no absolution, no possibility of an
opus divinum
of any kind. He has to digest his sins by himself…. Bad conscience has all the unpleasant characteristics of a lingering illness which makes people chronically uncomfortable. But because of this the Protestant has a unique chance to realize his sin to a degree that is beyond the reach of Catholics, since confession and absolution are always at hand to ease excess of tension. The Protestant is left to his tensions, which can go on sharpening his conscience. Conscience, and in particular a bad conscience, can be a gift of heaven, a veritable grace if used in the interests of the higher self-criticism…. When we have done something that seems inexplicable, we need the sting of a bad conscience and the powers of discrimination that go with it, in order to discover the real motives of our behaviour. Only thus do we become capable of seeing what motives dominate our actions. A bad conscience spurs us on to discover things that before were unconscious, and in this way we can cross the threshold of the unconscious and take cognizance of those impersonal forces which make us the unconscious instrument of the mass-murderer in man. A Protestant... is defenceless against God and no longer protected by walls or communities and he has a unique opportunity for immediate religious experience…. The experience may well crystallize into a new God-image, into an access of religious feeling. It requires
considerable courage to accept oneself just as one is, to face up to oneself. Also, the approach to the unconscious may give rise to panic terror. When his personal experience of God threatened to become too dangerous, Angelus Silesius
¹¹
almost fell over himself to get into the Catholic Church in order to escape the unconscious powers…. The non-Catholic
interiorizes
heaven and hell, and feels religious experience more profoundly in his own soul.'
¹²

Kurt Leese
¹³
asks, ‘Is a new
Götterdämmerung
about to begin?'
¹⁴

Conversion.
Odd phenomenon. Not really Anglican; nothing about it in Prayer Book, whose liturgy and collects aren't in tune with it, but with a slow and fitful trying. Really a nonconformist approach; language strange to Anglicans. ‘Trusting in Christ's death.' ‘Accepting Christ.' Not trying to get nearer to him. ‘Four years ago I became a Christian; I accepted Christ. Now I know I am saved by His blood. I may sin again and again, but my sins are no longer held against me, I am redeemed.' Such language has no meaning to ordinary church people. What is history of this view? Why have nonconformists inclined to it?

‘How wonderful!'

‘Do you drive a car, bicycle, ride, bathe, travel, work, go upstairs, go on buses and trains, dine out, see plays, read, write, etc. How wonderful!'

‘Why yes. Don't you?'

‘Oh yes,
I
do.'

‘It seems an ordinary human activity, surely—not really wonderful, would you say?'

And, when put like that, they could not say why they had thought it wonderful. But Danby knew that they thought it was odd of her, at her age, to be doing anything at all except sitting in a bath chair, for they supposed she must be well on in her sixties, and finished but for getting into her coffin. It would never do, they thought, if the elderly were to get about, competing with the young for places on buses and trains, taking up the road with cars and bicycles, the sea and swimming pools with elderly swimmers in need of rescue, the publishing houses with the stupid books they have written, the theatres with plays, the cinemas and restaurants and parties with people who no longer need to enjoy themselves, for this is a thing they should have finished with years ago; they have, in fact, had it.

‘I don't,' said Danby, ‘see why I shouldn't go on behaving like an ordinary human being, and doing what I like.'

‘It's wonderful the way you know how the young talk.'

‘Not in the least. They talk all round me, and it seems to me more or less the way we all talk. Do people begin to talk in a quite different way after they are forty? I didn't.'

‘But then you're wonderful.'

Danby left them to it; she was tired of them.

Blackmailer, who suspected accident. Someone they know

...

Danby offers everything, her love, all she has, except the truth…: ‘You must tell me the truth (you must sell me the truth)'…

Quiet, cynical man called Francis Park, a writer, who had been ill reviewed and mocked by Guy, and is in love with Danby…

Children: Jane, Guy's sister, and Chris (10 and 9), whose friend Jimmie had been killed. Determined to discover who did it…

Henry and Emily lose figure [of number plate] off car which stranger finds in road and blackmails them with.

Budgerigar
repeats telephone number he hears most often. It is found by friends of owners, who recognise number, and know who rings it….

Venetian Ghosts:
Hobhouse,
¹⁵
Byron, Shelley, Corvo,
¹⁶
Leigh Hunt.
¹⁷
Lady Blessington.
¹⁸
Henry James. Sisters in
Aspern Papers
(in which campo was house?). Horatio Brown.
¹⁹
Lady Layton.
²⁰
Doges, Popes. Marco Polo, Browning, Ruskin, Hare,
²¹
Colleoni.
²²
P.E.N. Congresses. Hemingway. W. D. Howells
²³
…

Sukey
was in love with Byron, and hunted for all his Venice dwellings, especially the one with animals on ground floor (Palazzo Mocenigo)
²⁴
... [In the]
Casa Mocenigo (Nuova)
‘Byron's room' is room where he worked; mosaic floors, valuable pictures … Front door only by gondola (or swimming). Large courtyard, where he kept the animals? He slept on ground floor. View over canal. Rather dark upstairs room, large, beautiful. Engraving of it with Byron sitting at table, in Drawing Room Scrap Book (Album) 1847. Also poem about him by Lord John Manners.
²⁵
Sukey knows it
by heart, and quotes it. Also ‘I rode one evening with Count Maddalo.' Lido no longer ‘a desolate waste'
²⁶
…

‘I should have liked to follow him about as his page. I wouldn't want to sleep with him, but if he wanted me to I would do it. But it would spoil things for me. All this going to bed

[Sukey] hoped that Emily, having lost Henry, won't turn to Byron ‘on the rebound'.

‘You can have Shelley,' she said.

‘No thank you,' said Emily. ‘He must have been a nice, angelic bore. I couldn't use him.'

Sukey sighed. ‘I was afraid not. Well, of course there's always [T. S.] Eliot. You do adore him, don't you? So do I. We can share him.'

‘And I've got John Cleveland,
²⁷
too,' Emily said….

‘I wish I was a Catholic, like the Bun-Flanagans always used to be. Catholics see visions and spirits and phantoms. If I was one, I might see a vision of Byron in Venice, coming out of Palazzo Mocenigo with a lot of his animals. Perhaps he'd see me and smile, or wave his hand. Or he might frown and shoo me away. But anyhow I should have seen him. My aunt in the convent near Skibbereen sees visions. She told me she saw the Virgin Mary one day, in a blue cloak, and she said my aunt was to pray for Pa and me and Tim, that we should all come back to the Church. So she has prayed ever since for us, but it's done no good so far. She asks Mary to give us the gift of faith. Wouldn't it be awful if I suddenly got it? I should never dare to tell Pa.... The church doors are like women's magazines, all in a fuss about what we ought to wear. Long sleeves, long skirts, high necks. Goodness, one can't pack special clothes to take abroad just to go into churches. Why are Catholic churches so clothes minded? Anglicans aren't, are they?'

‘No, they couldn't care less what we wear.'

‘Well, if ever I look like getting the gift of Faith, just remind me of this clothes business and I'll snap out of it. I wish they'd tell me what to wear, but they don't seem to bother about that. Do you think it's Mary's fault, and that she tells them about correct church fashions? I don't believe Jesus Christ would have cared, do you? I mean he was kind of simple and fair-minded, and he didn't make special rules for women. In Malta, girls and women are told to dress in a Mary-like manner. Like in the pictures of her, I suppose. It would look terribly odd.'

‘Our towns are copied fragments from our breast,
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.
'
²⁸

VENICE:
²⁹
Malamocco,
engulfed by sea at beginning of 12th century.
Torcello,
once full of churches, palaces (all gone but the cathedral, church and campanile which stand alone among yellow fields, vines, and gardens, peasants' houses and thatched boat shelters) now the cemetery of an older life. [It was once]
Altinum novum,
[the home of] refugees from Altinum [one of the cities] destroyed by Attila. Tragic ghost at its heart. Cicadas. Once important city. Some medieval traces left of the old piazzas, calles, churches, canals. The main canal still spanned by the ruined bridge of the Diavolo. But ‘the gran' piazza with its little group of buildings' is all that is left…. The neighbouring islands were named after [the] gates of Altinum. After [its] destruction the fugitives returned to bring to Torcello the stones of destroyed city. Pulpit steps of duomo, Greek relief. Madonna in the apse.
Murano.
San Donato and its pavement, [which] rivals S. Mark's—‘beauty of designs, harmonies of precious marbles,
porphyry and verd-antique, serpentine and
marmo greco
and Verona'—[but is] much ruined and despoiled. Madonna in the apse, grander than the one of Torcello in her dark robe worked with gold, the feet resting on luminous fire. She draws us to worship. Murano was pleasure-ground of Venetian nobles. But fell with the fall of Republic
³⁰
; ‘palaces snatched away piece by piece, fell into irrecoverable ruins'. Only one still has remains of splendour—the Cà da Mula. Glass works begun at end of nth century. Convent front of San Cipriano, brought here from Malamocco in C.9. Its façade ‘stands up nobly from tangled garden. Central arch has Byzantine tracery; above it is frieze of Renaissance Roman-Byzantine symbols sculptured in stone discs in walls of cloister' …

San Marco
mosaics: Precious marbles and stones;
diaspro
(radiant and full of light);
breccia adriana di Tegoli,
harmony of greens;
porpora
(red);
verde antico
(green);
diaspro sanguinoso,
dense green spotted with crimson—sanguinary jasper.
Miracoli
³¹
: Coloured marbles of walls. Choir raised above nave by marble steps. In choir, great cross of porphyry and serpentine in apse. Company of sea youths and maidens. On pillars, birds, lizards, ears of corn, serpent. Slabs of marble in walls, Carrara cream and white,
marmo greco,
Verona red; dusky gold and colour of ceiling.
Ancient houses,
by Ponte Widmann, and Ponte
Pasqualigo.
We leave the Miracoli on our right, cross Rio Santa Marina and Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo, and pass into Rio del Teatro, with [the site of]
Marco Polo's
palace on our right. ‘This corner is one [of the] most beautiful in Venice. Rich in palaces and fragments of ornament, and strange interplay of lights from ways that converge here. No spot in Venice so full of ancient mystery, the gloom, the light, the sound of water ways.'
Palazzo Gussoni,
Rio della Fava. Early renaissance. Rich sculptures. Stone barbican supporting upper storey overhanging Calle
della Fava. At juncture of Rio della Guerra with Rio del Palazzo is
Casa dell' Angelo,
with sculptured angel on wall. Remains of fresco under projecting roof, with figures of women (Tintoretto).
Cannaregio
in north Venice, with Campanile of
Madonna dell' Orto
(white statue) looking out over city and lagoon. Abbazia della Misericordia and garden of
Casa degli Spiriti.
Abbazia is one of most beautiful ruins in Venice. Built 939.

‘And of course,' said Emily, ‘you had a rather queer family, your uncle, Danny, being a cannibal in Cork.'

‘In the Congo. I expect we
are
rather queer.' Sukey looked complacent. ‘I'm sure Pa is. You knew his father came from a back street in Skibbereen.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, wouldn't you? A front street in Skibbereen is dull enough, but a
back
street—you couldn't even see the traffic from my grandfather's bakery. So he came away, and never looked back. But it's made Pa rather queer, knowing about Skibbereen and how awful it was, and always frightened it might pull him back, or us. So he never lets us go there. Tim and I went over secretly last year, and really it was quite fun. But not to stay long in…. Cork is very religious, and it's full of crazies. My great aunt that's a nun in Malta is as queer as a coot. But of course she's a right to be, at her age.'