The White Dominican (2 page)

We enter the main story, which is told in the first person by Dovecote himself. He is an orphan, abandoned as an infant on the steps of the local church, but soon is adopted by the dominant figure in the town, Baron Bartholomew von Jöcher, Freeman and Honorary Lamplighter. The town itself is never named. It lies downstream from the capital of the country, which is not named either. Only Paris – which is also the name of the fraudulent impresario who is the real father of the Beatrice figure we are soon to meet – can be recognized as a place inhabiting mortal history. The river comes north from the capital, almost completely encircles the town, and departs south-ward; on the neck of land separating the river flowing north and the river flowing south is the Baron’s house, which has been occupied by his family for something like thirteen generations. Each new generation of von Jöchers abandons the floor occupied by its predecessor, and moves upwards within the house, which must therefore, like so many labyrinth-portals to other worlds, be bigger inside than out. The town itself – empoldered by the river and guarded by the house whose occupants are themselves Guardians of (and Aspirants to) the Threshold to the upper levels – seems utterly secure.

Within this polder, at the top of this ladder of generations of Guardians, Christopher grows up. He finds he is the Baron’s true son. He falls in love with the girl who lives in the house next to his. Her name is Ophelia. She too has difficulties in relating her nature to her corporeal parentage: her ostensible father, the town’s coffin-maker and a man mentally damaged from the time his own father buried him alive in a coffin as a punishment, is not her father at all. Her true father, the reprehensible impresario Paris with his camp aristocratic mien, and her mother, the failed whorish actress, connive in repression and bad faith. But she transcends her corporeal bondage, she returns Christopher’s love, and – as any reader experienced in Meyrink will know from the fact of that love for the protagonist, and from her name – she soon dies, voluntarily. But by then Christopher has undergone night journeys into occult realms; he has been told that he is destined to become transfigured, to rise from the top of the Tree of the Lamplighter family into true reality; and he treats her death as a confirmation of betrothal.

To this point, in
The White Dominican,
we have been gifted with scenes of epiphanic calm which alternate with “real-world” episodes of Dickensian splendour (Meyrink translated Dickens earlier in his career) whenever the lovable, duped coffin-maker comes into view. From this point onwards, in passages that shift levels of import as do dreams, we are invited to follow Christopher into his inheritance. Some of the terms of that invitation are couched with a didactic precision some readers may find distressingly liturgical, because Christopher’s ascension is that of a magus, cloaked in arcana; but the flow of the ascent is irresistible.

And the visitations of the Medusa, the corporeal world, in false likenesses of the dead Ophelia, have a power that easily transcends the doctrinaire sexual Manicheeanism through which Meyrink articulates his vision of “the impersonal force of all evil, using the mute forces of nature to conjure up miracles which in reality are only hellish phantasms serving the ends of the spirit of negation.” But “the head of Medusa, that symbol of the petrifying force that sucks us down,” has no final sway, and the chymical marriage will ultimately be consummated, in some realm the pages of the book cannot reach. So be it.

We may baulk at some of the terms in which it is put. But it is his final word. After this novel came only the alchemical tales published as
Goldmachergeschichten
[“Tales of the Alchemists”] (1925) and the intermittently brilliant
Der Engel Vom Westlichen Fenster
(1927); translated by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 1991 as
The Angel of the West Window],
about Doctor Dee; neither book coins a new metaphor to replace the Medusa. It seems clear that for the Meyrink of the post-War years, the image of the Medusa was definitive. The Medusa, it is possible to think, was nothing less than the entirety of the world which opened its maw to sensitive men and women in 1914. The Medusa, whose image he unforgettably presented to his readers, stares upon us through every newsreel the century has disgorged. It is the tetanus which fixes us upon the wheel of time. It is surely not Gustav Meyrink’s fault that, for most of us, there will be no chymical marriage.

John Clute

GUSTAV MEYRINK THE WHITE DOMINICAN

From the Diary of an Invisible Man

“X or Y has written a novel.” What does that mean?

It is quite simple: he has used his imagination to portray people who do not really exist, has invented experiences for them and woven it all together. In broad terms that, or something like it, is the general opinion.

Everyone assumes they know what imagination is, but there are very few who are aware of the remarkable forms of imaginative power that exist.

What is one to say when one’s hand, usually such a willing tool of the mind, suddenly refuses to write the name of the hero of the story one has thought up, and insists on choosing a different one instead? Is it not enough to make one pause and ask oneself, “Am I really the one who is ‘creating’ this work, or is my imagination merely some kind of receiver for supernatural communications? Something like what is called, in the sphere of wireless telegraphy, an aerial?”

There have been cases of people getting up in their sleep at night and completing pieces of writing, which, tired from the day’s toil, they had left unfinished, and finding better solutions than they would probably have been capable of when awake. People tend to explain such things by saying it was done by their subconscious, which is usually asleep.

If something like that happens in Lourdes, they say the Mother of God came to their aid.

Who knows, perhaps the subconscious and the Mother of God are the same thing?

Which is not to say that the Mother of God is simply the subconscious, no, the subconscious is the ‘mother’ of ‘god’.

In the present novel a certain Christopher Dovecote plays the role of a living person. I never succeeded in finding out whether he ever actually lived; he certainly did not spring from my imagination, of that I remain convinced. I say that openly, even if there is a danger people will think I am only saying it for effect.

This is not the place for a detailed description of the way this book came to be written, a brief sketch of what happened will suffice. In order to give that, it is unavoidable that I should talk about myself, which I will do in a few sentences, for which I hope the reader will forgive me.

I had worked out the whole of the novel in my head and started writing it down when I noticed – but only when I read through my draft – that I had written the name ‘Dovecote’ without being aware of it. But that was not all. As the pen moved across the paper, whole sentences changed and came to express something completely different from what I had intended. It developed into a duel between myself and the invisible ‘Christopher Dovecote’ in which he ultimately gained the upper hand.

It had been my plan to portray a small town that lives in my memory; what emerged was a completely different picture, a picture that is much more vivid to my mind’s eye than the one I had actually seen. Eventually there was nothing for it but to give in to the influence that called itself Christopher Dovecote, to lend him my hand, so to speak, to write down his story and to cross out everything that came from my own ideas.

If we assume this Christopher Dovecote is an invisible being who in some mysterious way is able to impress his will on a person of sound mind, then the question arises, why is he using me to describe his life-story and the process of his spiritual development?

Is it from vanity? Or to create a ‘novel’?

I leave it to each reader to reach his own conclusion and keep my own opinion to myself.

Perhaps soon my case will not be an isolated one; perhaps this ‘Christopher Dovecote’ will guide someone else’s hand tomorrow.

Something that appears unusual today might be an everyday event tomorrow.

Perhaps it is that ancient, yet ever-new insight which is beginning to manifest itself:

Each single action here on earth

Accords with nature’s rule;

“I am the author of this act” –

Thus speaks the self-deceiving fool.

and the figure of Christopher Dovecote is only a harbinger, a symbol, the visible form assumed by an intangible force?

Of course, the idea that man is a mere puppet on a string is anathema to the know-alls who are so proud to think of themselves as lords of creation.

One day as I was writing, with these ideas running through my mind, I suddenly thought, ‘Could this Christopher Dovecote perhaps be something like a being that has split off from my own self? An imaginary figure that has taken on independent, if transitory, existence and which I, without realising it, have brought into the world, as is said to happen to people who believe they see apparitions and even converse with them?’

As if this invisible being had been reading my thoughts, he immediately interrupted the story and used my hand to insert the following strange answer:

“And you yourself, sir,” (this formal address from one so intimately related to me sounded like mockery) “you and all those humans who assume they are individual beings, are you anything other than ‘chips’ off some greater self, off the great self that is called God?”

Since then I have spent much time reflecting on the meaning of this extraordinary question, for I hoped it might provide the key to the mystery surrounding Christopher Dovecote. At one point I thought my ponderings were leading me somewhere, but then I received another bewildering message. It read:

“Every man is a dovecote, but not everyone is a Christopher. Most Christians merely imagine they are. The white doves fly in and out of a genuine Christian.”

From then on I gave up all hope of ever solving the mystery, and at the same time I abandoned the idea that perhaps – following the ancient theory that human beings have several incarnations on earth – I might have been this Christopher Dovecote in an earlier existence.

What I would most like to believe is that what guided my hand over the page is an eternal force, free, self-sufficient and liberated from all constraints of shape and form; but sometimes, when I wake from dreamless sleep in the morning, I see, between eyeball and lid, like a memory of the night, the image of a white-haired, clean-shaven old man, tall and as slim as a youth, and for the rest of the day I cannot get rid of the feeling that that must be Christopher Dovecote.

This feeling is often accompanied by the strange idea that he lives beyond time and space, and that when death shall stretch out its hand to take me, he it will be who will enter on the inheritance of my life.

But what is the point of such reflections, which are of no concern to other people? There follow the revelations of Christopher Dovecote, in the often fragmentary form in which they came to me, with nothing added or left out.

For as long as I can remember, the people in the town have maintained that my name is Dovecote.

When I was a boy, trotting from house to house in the twilight, bearing a long pole with a glowing wick at the end to light the lamps, street-urchins would march before me, clapping their hands and singing, “Doo'cot, Doo'cot, diddle diddle Doo'cot”.

I did not get angry with them, even if I never joined in.

Later, the grown-ups took up the name and used it whenever they wanted something from me.

It was different with my first name of Christopher. That was written on a scrap of paper which was hanging round my neck when I was found one morning as a tiny baby, naked on the steps of St. Mary's. Presumably my mother wrote it before she left me there.

It is the only thing I have from her, and that is why I have always regarded the name of Christopher as something sacred. It has imprinted itself on my body, and I have borne it through life like a birth certificate issued in eternity which no one can steal from me. It kept on growing and growing, like a seed emerging from the darkness, until it once more appeared as what it had been from the very beginning, fused with me and accompanied me to the world of incorruptibility. Just as it is written, ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible'.

Jesus was baptised when he was a grown man and fully aware of what was happening: the name that was his
self
came down to earth. Nowadays people are baptised as infants: how can they grasp the significance of what has happened to them?! They wander through life towards the grave, like puffs of mist that the wind drives back to the swamp; their bodies decay, and they have no part in that which will rise again: their name.

But, insofar as any man can say of himself “I know”, I know that I am called Christopher.

There is a legend current in the town that St. Mary's was built by a Dominican, Raimund de Pennaforte, from donations sent by unknown people from all over the world.

Over the altar is an inscription, “Flos florum: thus will I be revealed after three hundred years.” A painted board has been nailed over it, but it keeps on falling down; every year on Lady Day.

It is said that on certain nights of the new moon, when it is so dark you can hardly see your hand before your eyes, the church casts a white shadow on the black market square. That is supposed to be the figure of the White Dominican, Pennaforte.

We children from the Home for Orphans and Foundlings had to go to confession for the first time when we were twelve years old.

“Why did you not come to confession?” the Chaplain barked at me the next morning.

“I did go to confession, Father.”

“You're lying”. Then I told him what had happened:

“I was standing in the church, waiting to be called, when a hand waved to me, and when I entered the confessional I found a white monk there who asked me three times what I was called. The first time I did not know; the second time I knew, but forgot before I could speak; the third time a cold sweat broke out on my brow, my tongue was paralysed, I could not speak, but a voice in my breast screamed, ‘Christopher!' The white monk must have heard, for he wrote the name down in a book, and pointed to it and said, ‘Henceforth you are entered in the Book of Life.' Then he blessed me and said, ‘I forgive you your sins, your past and your future ones'.”