A Man of Genius by Janet Todd Page A

‘Should we go to the theatre?’ he said abruptly.
    â€˜To that pitiful place? It’s for fools,’ said Robert. ‘They might as well wear Grecian masks for all the feeling they show. There’s been nobody since Garrick.’
    â€˜Did you ever see him?’ asked John Humphries.
    â€˜Of course not. That’s why he was so great. You didn’t need to.’
    Lydia felt her moment of escape disappearing. She looked from one to the other and tried not to catch Ann’s eye, assuming a woman who kept such company would be no help.
    â€˜We usher in our own theatre,’ said Robert.
    â€˜Such innocence. To think of theatre speaking in the head as you do,’ said Frederick Curran. There were tears in his eyes as he looked at Robert. At least she thought so.
    â€˜Innocence doesn’t speak, it is infans ,’ said Robert. ‘It is impervious, pointless, almost unborn.’
    Suddenly Robert sang out in a resonant baritone a line from the Latin hymn to the martyred innocents. He stopped abruptly.
    â€˜I think,’ said Richard Perry, ‘that we who are alive are a bestiary. We live in a zoo.’
    â€˜We want ecstasy but can’t reach it or hold it if we could,’ saidFred Curran mournfully, his slurring tensely controlled.
    â€˜Ecstasy is blind,’ said Robert, ‘we want clarity rather. That’s the point of art, it blazes and clarifies, not intoxicates.’
    Fred Curran looked abashed. ‘We are all emissaries of something else,’ he muttered.
    The candles were spluttering. They had not been replaced. When more drink and food arrived it was nearly dark. They set to consuming it, continuing to speak to the group, to each other, or to themselves, it did not seem to matter. Polyphony or just cohesive noise?
    She said things she didn’t remember because she mainly remembered the words of others. How deep the melancholy had been!

6
    S ometimes he seemed short of money, perhaps when his allowance had run out. She was never quite sure where this came from. His family – the maligned Catholic progenitors in County Cork, or a Dublin relative? He borrowed freely from his friends. They were never grudging. She remembered saying so.
    He gave generously, indiscriminately, to beggars. Then his face went moist as if he identified thoroughly with them or with his own act. He gave too much to the wrong ones. Wasn’t this more generous, more profound than her calculating way, thinking of deserts?
    Imagine, he said, that our words, the truths of philosophy, could form sentences that had physical substance. Marble words. He’d said ‘concrete’ before. Was it the same meaning if not the same substance? How about it, Ann?
    He held her waist and swung her round her tiny room, dislodging her papers on her writing desk and scattering them on the floor. They’d been placed ready for the printer’s devil. She hoped he wouldn’t pick them up and read. When he didn’t, she was in a tremble he would tread on them. She really couldn’t write that stuff again. Besides, all her quills were blunted and would spit ink.
    â€˜It’s not the words that are the things, don’t you see?’
    No, of course she didn’t. Did anyone else know what it meant, really meant?
    She’d told him now that she lived in splinters. A shame of course, but she could live with shame. He’d no such need and certainly no practice.
    She mentioned Caroline and Gilbert – delicately, she hoped – and he didn’t probe. She wanted to repeat more of Gilbert’s words because, though not at all to the point, they’d lodged in her child’s brain. Perhaps he might explain or modify them and the emotion they’d begun to raise.
    He said he’d severed himself from his past. Yet it repeatedly rumbled into view, the boyhood, the potatoes, the priest, the garish altar, the raucous faith, the easy politics of resentment.