The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, should I fade in the strength of his

stronger existence? Is beauty nothing

but beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear?

From
‘The Duino Elegies’ by Rainer Maria Rilke

                 There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

From
‘East Coker’ by T. S. Eliot

The dialectic of the sacred permits all reversibilities; no “history” is final. History is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and diminution. But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly.

From
‘Shamanism’ by Mircea Eliade

I was approached by Father Joseph Marsden, a year or so before his death in June 1981, to analyse and interpret the automatic writing of his secretary and patient Mary Stella Holiday, an assumed name we adopted to avoid embarrassment for the person concerned. I worked on
The
Angel
at
the
Gate
under his supervision and had virtually finished the book when he collapsed and died suddenly.

The materials with which I worked were drawn not only from automatic narratives but also from notes Marsden had compiled in conversation with Mary Holiday. Some of these conversations were conducted under hypnosis.

There was a series of underlying rhythms in the automatic narratives through which unconscious motivation was mirrored in a variety of objects such as wheel, shawl, bale, chariot, and in flowers and the animal kingdom. I mention this briefly to make clear why these assume the proportions they possess in
The
Angel
at
the
Gate.

Marsden approved of the procedures I adopted and felt they were consistent with the truths of the narrative. I owe him a great deal in the construction of this “fiction”. He helped me interpret the musical compositions by which Mary it seems was haunted from early childhood. There is no doubt that he assisted her profoundly to steer a path through a desolating period of her life and that her debt to him is enormous. On the other hand, he made no bones of the insights he gained from her and the debt he owed to her which possessed a darker rhythm in past generations when one of his white antecedents had purchased a black antecedent of hers in eighteenth-century Angel Inn behind St Clement’s Church in the Strand.

Mary suffered from a physical and nervous
malaise
as
The
Angel
at
the
Gate
makes clear. Through Marsden—the medical care he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which gave scope to her “automatic talents”—that illness became a catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional life for “Stella” (apart from “Mary”) in order to unravel the thread that runs through a diversity of associations in past and present “fictional lives”.

I was astonished at the sudden, clairvoyant perception of Marsden’s death that comes at a particular moment in her automatic narratives. That clairvoyance is associated with the rhythms of a mirror that seem to enfold “presences” and “absences” around the globe. Marsden submitted himself to her, so to speak, as the target of a variety of masks with which she clothed him but the clairvoyant perception of his death was a strange climax between them in which his “fictional death” matched her “absences of self” through which she descended into a series of characters—their limitations and follies—drawn from associations of childhood in her father’s letters to her mother before she was orphaned or abandoned at the age of seven.

Her insights seem to me extraordinary and the characters she creates I have deemed “fictional” as I have no means of checking the letters and childhood associations from which they may actually derive.

She had, at one stage, contemplated leaving her husband and child but in the end succeeded in placing a variety of stressful legacies into perspective. This gave her a means of coping with despair. Marsden left his private fortune to her. This has now become a source of “good works” and a means of helping victims under threat of “possession” by daemonic powers.

W.H.

Sebastian Holiday read the note in his hand for the twentieth time with pride in his hollow senses when he came to the three phrases—“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John”. Then he began from the beginning all over again—

He folded the note with care as if he almost feared the dry ink would blot, and placed it in his breast pocket, then sank into a chair with half-collapsed springs that faced a couch across the room; over the couch a huge Jean Harlow poster had been pinned to the wall.

His eyes were bright, yet curiously blind, body grew hollow in the pit of the chair this late February afternoon; the year was 1981.

The light seeped through the curtained window to give a sheen to the walls of the room that matched Sebastian’s eyes. The Jean Harlow print was suffused with the ghost of the winter sun. Sebastian felt himself descending into that pooled ghost as if everything conspired to mask his innermost emotion. He gripped the arm of the chair as if it were materialized script in a book of riddles; the broken springs on which he sat were less the fabric of a chair and more a half-sunken, half-floating boat. The glimmering pool stroked baby John’s toys (the child was close on three years old) along the wall running at right angles to Sebastian’s boat.

Wooden lorries rather than boats were beached on their sides against a train with which John loved to play. Trains were his greatest amusement. He sometimes converted the lorries into carriages that he pulled and tugged behind an imaginary engine on imaginary tracks around the room. Then there was the skeleton house that John also was fond of, a sophisticated toy, with rooms that could be scanned, or re-assembled, through ribbed apertures, collapsible doors and windows. In one skeleton room a dentist leaned over a sailor, in another a barber trimmed a bearded man, in another guests had assembled for a feast presided over by a cat John had seated at the head of the table. The front door bell suddenly pealed. Mary had forgotten her key. Sebastian arose from the boat of his chair above skeleton house and imaginary train.

“Such a beautiful evening,” Mary said to him at the front door. “It will soon be dark.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the sky which was pale rose and smoke.

“Oh yes,” said Sebastian, but he saw nothing himself except the smudge of an aeroplane drawn across the fluid light above the houses on the other side of Dolphin Street.

Mary was now inside. She closed the door behind her and switched on the light in the corridor leading to the sitting room from which Sebastian had come.

“You needn’t worry about John,” she said gently. “Mother’s keeping him until Stella’s back. I must remember to collect his toys. How is Stella?”

It was now almost three days since Stella had been rushed to a hospital within an hour of taking the valium; the tablets had been drawn from her stomach in the nick of time before they had penetrated the bloodstream.

“She’s still flat on her back staring at the ceiling,” said Sebastian in a curious voice. Was it muffled remorse, muffled self-pity, that struck an echo in Mary’s heart? “Asking to see me and you all the time …”

I can’t bear to visit … Mary thought but she remained silent. They were now in the kitchen and she was rummaging in a bag of potatoes, carrots and greens. “I’ve bought some ham,” she said. Sebastian watched her, unseeingly it seemed, as she extracted the vegetables and peeled them swiftly. “I may be late tomorrow, Sebastian. Can you cope?”

“Of course I can cope,” said Sebastian. “I’m not a bloody child.”

“Not a child,” said Mary. “And yet I arrived last night to find you sitting like wood in the darkness without a light on in the entire house. Oh Sebastian, sometimes I feel we’re children playing, all of us, at being mature.” She was astonished she had said so much. It was the shadow of recent events speaking in her.

“Speak for yourself,” said Sebastian. He extracted the letter from his breast pocket.

Oh not that again, thought Mary. You’ve read it to me at least a dozen times. But she listened patiently nevertheless.

“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John.”

Mary’s eyes looked back to Stella’s through Sebastian’s as he finished the letter and looked at her with a shadow on his face that seemed to mirror all three. His eyes were deceptively open but their threaded look, threaded faces, disconcerted her. Were they kind, universal eyes or cruel, universal eyes that she and Stella shared with him? Whose eyes was she seeing? What a question to ask silently of “eyes” she thought she knew that suddenly mirrored the veiled darkness of the community of the world as if one of John’s imaginary trains flashed through a darkened, urban landscape, lights on darkened stations in an unreal pool of place, an unreality all the more disturbing in that it had been created by oneself, though how or why one could scarcely tell, Mary felt.

Why did Stella’s note written in a moment of helplessness, a moment of suicidal depression, enter
him
(penetrate his bloodstream) like a transfusion of pride? Did pride spring from the helplessness of others masquerading as perverse love for one’s accomplishments, for one’s apparent strength? She must ask Father Marsden. He was the only one who knew of the perversity, yet mystery of love.