6. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 185-246

XI-XV

_____

Now comes a shift in narrative. Up to now, the narrator has pretty much stayed out of it, but in Chapter XI he decides to tell his own story, and to talk about his omniscience: why he is privy to so much "that passed between the protagonists at private interviews -- aye, and the exact thoughts and emotions that were in their breasts." This is Beerbohm in a little metafictional joke, of course: jostling the novel-reader's complacent acceptance of the conventions of the genre, which he has already tweaked with his hints as to the outcome of the plot.

Zuleika ("The lady after whom I have named this book") is still alive, the narrator informs us, "and well known to some of you personally, to all of you by repute." The assumption, then, is that his readers already know about "that episode in her life which caused so great a sensation among the newspaper-reading public a few years ago." Beerbohm is, in short, pretending that his novel is really a history and that he is a servant of history's muse: Clio.

Clio, it seems, has grown bored and frustrated with history. "She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle's, that tragedy was more philosophic than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been." When the novel was invented, she became a devoted reader, "and after the publication of 'Clarissa Harlowe' she spent practically all her time in reading novels." When Hermes told Zeus about "Clio's secret addiction to novel-reading," he decided to use it to woo her. And then "it occurred to her how fine a thing history might be if the historian had the novelist's privileges." She asked Zeus to bring this about. He argued that letting historians have the power of access to the intimate thoughts and actions of historic figures would put too many novelists out of work, but he agreed to let her try it just once.

So when Clio spotted Zuleika boarding the train for Oxford, she whisked the author to Parnassus, where Zeus "stretched his hand over me, and I was indued with the promised gifts. And then, lo! I was on the platform of Oxford station." So throughout the incidents he has been recording in this book he has been able "to float all unseen, to float all unhampered by any corporeal nonsense" through the events he has recorded. Except that after Zuleika dumped the pitcher of water on the Duke, he betrayed Clio's trust and "gave the Duke of Dorset an hour's grace. What were his thoughts in that interval, what words, if any, he uttered in the night, never will be known. For this, Clio has abused me in language less befitting a Muse than a fishwife. I do not care. I would rather be chidden by Clio than by my own sense of delicacy, any day."

Instead of keeping watch on either the Duke or Zuleika, he floats out to his old college to observe its residents, and watches one of them making out his will, leaving everything to Zuleika, another writing a suicide note to his father. And he reflects on the peculiar character of "the Oxford spirit":

Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of action. But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts of them slain seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given to them in their heyday.

The spirit of Oxford is "mysterious, inenubilable." (It means "incapable of being cleared of clouds; inexplicable.") As a consequence, the mass suicide being contemplated by its undergraduates is no threat to it: "Not Oxford was menaced. Come what might, not a stone of Oxford's walls would be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours would be undone, nor lost a breath of her sacred spirit."

So the narrator floats back to Judas College where, before looking in on the Duke, he visits Noaks's room and finds him lamenting that he's too young to die. "It did not seem to strike him that quite half of the undergraduates who contemplated death -- and contemplated it in a fearless, wholesome, many fashion -- were his juniors." Finally, the narrator sinks through the floor to the Duke's room below and discovers that the Duke has caught a cold. And that he's furious with Zuleika, whom "he must hate with a fathomless hatred." Moreover, the idea of dying for her is odious: "Of all deaths, the bitterest that can befall a man is that he lay down his life to flatter the woman he deems vilest of her sex."

He tries to write in his diary -- amid bouts of sneezing -- but the words fail to come. Suddenly he decides that he won't die after all. That would be the best revenge:

She, she, the hyena woman, would be the fool. No one would have thought of dying for her, had he not set the example. Every one would follow his new example. Yes, he would save Oxford yet. That was his duty. Duty and darling vengeance! And life -- life! 

And he leans out of his window and laughs "outright into the morning; insomuch that the birds in the trees of Trinity, and still more the Emperors over the way, marvelled greatly."

At eight o'clock in the morning, Katie, the landlady's daughter, is sweeping the steps when Zuleika's maid, Mélisande, arrives with a letter for the Duke. Katie, who takes an instant dislike to Mélisande, refuses to take it up to him -- "His Grace is no called before nine o'clock" -- but offers to put it on his breakfast tray, though she closes the door in Mélisande's face. Undeterred, Mélisande drops the letter through the mail slot.

When the Duke reads the letter he finds an apology from Zuleika and a plea for him to come around before lunch with The MacQuern. She has added a P.S. -- "Please burn this." The Duke laughs: "Why there was nothing, not one phrase, to compromise her in the eyes of a coroner's jury!" Then he ponders how to reply: "how to administer her punishment the most poignantly." He considers writing a letter in which he will return the two pearl earrings she has given him, but concludes it would be more fun to watch her expression when he returns them. "Yesterday he had been her puppet, her Jumping-Jack; to-day it was as avenging angel that he would appear before her.

As he leaves he meets on the doorstep a telegraph boy. The message says, "Deeply regret inform your grace last night two black owls came and perched on battlements." Though he had been resolved not to die, the omen changes his mind. He sends a reply: "Prepare vault for funeral Monday."

He could not, he told himself, face Zuleika now. As artist, he saw that there was irony enough left over to make the meeting a fine one. As theologian, he did not hold her responsible for his destiny. But as a man, after what she had done to him last night, and before what he had to do for her to-day, he would not go out of his way to meet her.

He considers going straight to the river and taking care of what had to be done. "No, that would be like running away." But then he sees "a female figure coming quickly round the corner." He takes it to be Zuleika, and walks away rapidly. When she quickens her pace, he begins to run, until he slips on a piece of orange peel -- the gods had placed it there to trip up the Master of Balliol -- and falls. The woman, who catches up with him, turns out to be Mélisande with another letter from Zuleika. He tears it up unread and sends Mélisande away.

He goes into a chemist shop where his wounds are tended to. He speculates "that the gods had intended the accident to be fatal, and that only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady's-maid." And then he becomes aware that he has a cold, and wonders, "had he escaped a violent death only to succumb to 'natural causes'?" The chemist mixes up a cold remedy and tells him he should take a teaspoonful every two hours. It makes him feel so much better that he asks if it would be more effective if he took two teaspoonfuls every hour. The chemist cautions him not to do so. "The Duke yielded. He fancied, indeed, that the gods had meant him to die of an overdose." Then he has another brush with death: a speeding butcher's cart, and "smiled a sardonic smile" at this delivery from his fate.

On the street he encounters Oover and "remembered the awful resolve of Oover, and of all young Oxford." He begins to think of it as his mission to dissuade these others from killing themselves, but when he tries to persuade Oover of "the loss that your death would be to America and to Oxford," the Rhodes Scholar is having none of it.

"America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of you can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to destroy yourself.... And you're right, Sir. Love transcends all." 

He suggests to Oover that he might have changed his mind about killing himself, but Oover says it would prove that "all those yarns I used to hear about the British aristocracy were true, after all. I should aver that you were not a white man." When challenged, the Duke is forced to admit that he is planning to die today, but Oover doesn't have time for further details: "It's just turning eleven o'clock, and I've a lecture. While life lasts, I'm bound to respect Rhodes' intentions." And he hurries off.

The Duke ponders the irony of his situation.

If he could say "Behold, I take back my word. I spurn Miss Dobson, and embrace life," it was possible that his example would suffice. But now that he could only say "Behold, I spurn Miss Dobson, and will not die for her, but I am going to commit suicide, all the same," it was clear that his words would carry very little force.... He must die in the manner that he had blazoned forth. And he must do it with a good grace, none knowing h was not glad; else the action lost all dignity. 

He encounters "an average undergraduate," whom because of his averageness he addresses as Smith, even though the young man says it's not his name. "'Generically it is,' replied the Duke. 'You are Smith to all intents and purposes." And he tries to engage "Smith" in a Socratic dialogue about suicide, until the young man finally just walks away. The Duke "remembered that even Socrates, for all the popular charm of his mock-modesty and his true geniality, had ceased after a while to be tolerable.... The Duke recoiled from what he took to be another pitfall. He almost smelt hemlock."

After more attempts to persuade, even to bribe, undergraduates into not killing themselves, "He found himself in the precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the little open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness of human life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would have hesitated to utter." But the crowd seems so hostile to his sermon that he worries that this is "yet another trap laid for him by the gods" and that "he might be dragged down, overwhelmed by number, torn limb from limb."

He meets The MacQuern, "with a large but inexpensive bunch of flowers," and tells him he won't be joining him for lunch, but that as far as he knew Zuleika still planned to be there. Then he realizes that he's hungry and goes to the Junta to order some sandwiches. Then, seeing the portrait of Nellie O'Mora, he decides to order a glass of port instead, forgetting about the sandwiches. But he feels the medicine bottle in his pocket, realizes that he is fifteen minutes overdue for his dosage, and calls for a wineglass and a teaspoon, fearing that his failure to take his medicine promptly might prove fatal: "'Every two hours' -- the directions were explicit. Had he delivered himself into the gods' hands?" He measures the medicine into the wineglass and toasts Nellie O'Mora, making amends for his previous lapse from tradition.

He realized, however, that to Zuleika he owed the tenderness he now felt for Miss O'Mora. It was Zuleika that had cured him of his aseity. [i.e., independent existence, like God's]  She it was that had made his heart a warm and negotiable thing.... Now he knew that the secret, the open secret, of happiness was in mutual love -- a state that needed not the fillip of death. And he had to die without having ever lived.... Death would lose much of its sting for him if there were somewhere in the world just one woman, however lowly, whose heart would be broken by his dying. 

And then he remembers that Zuleika had told him his landlady's daughter was in love with him. "Here, possibly, was a maiden to mourn him." So he decides to take his lunch in his room. But there he is met by "Zuleika Dobson at his feet, at his knees, clasping him to her, sobbing, laughing, sobbing."

8. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 195-234

From "No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal ..." through "... Oh, Dad."

_____

Things begin to get even more confusing in this chapter, in which the narrator shifts from old Adam to Hermes without a clear break between the two, reflecting, I suppose, the merging of "infinities" that is at the heart of Adam's theories. "My equations," he tells us, "spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there." Adam thinks again of his relationship to Benny Grace: "I raged for certitude, he was the element of misrule." More and more, Benny seems to be the yin to Adam's yang, the id to his ego. And Adam now regrets what he (they?) achieved: 

A savour had gone out of things, the air was that much duller, the light that much dimmed. We could not comprehend it, at first, this darkening of the world that was our doing -- it was, after all, the opposite of what we had intended.... My final series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes, was the combination that unlocked the sealed chamber of time. The sigh of dead, dank air that wafted back in our faces from the yawning doorway out of what had been our only world was not the breath of new life, as we expected, but a last gasp. I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail.

And so this great discoverer has wound up enclosed in his own body, in the attic of an isolated house, some distance from an isolated railway station. (At Arden there seems to be no telephone, no television, no Internet, no connection to the outside world but a broken radio that young Adam is trying to repair.) He thinks of himself and Benny as "the overman in his overman's cape and tights flashing through the ether with his fat sidekick clinging on for dear life to his neck. Or was it the other way round, him flying and I clinging on, for dear life." ("Overman" is of course the literal translation of Nietzsche's Übermensch, here given the garb but not the name of Superman.) He recalls adventures with Benny -- the overman in the underworld -- among "drabs and cutpurses and the odd Gretchen searching forlornly for her Faust." (Earlier, Hermes described himself as "Faust and Mephisto rolled into one.")  

Then Benny introduces him to Madame Mac, whose relationship to Benny remains unclear: Benny calls her "my old lady," which could be mother or mistress or wife. They met in Rome, where Adam is receiving "the Borgia Prize, founded in memory of gentle Cesare, peacemaker and patron of natural sciences and the arts." (This is not quite the reversal of history that Banville executed with Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, but few would refer to Cesare Borgia as "gentle.") Madame Mac turns out to be a large woman whose hand, when he shakes it, "had the cartilaginous smoothness and faint heat of a bird's claw," and whose "face, appeared wider than it was long, with a great carven jaw and an almost lipless mouth that seemed to stretch from ear to ear and managed to be at once froggy and almost noble. Her skin was greyish-pale and looked as dry as meal." She is the widow of "the honourable Mr. MacSomebody, a wealthy invert with delicate lungs, ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Somewhere to the Holy See." She has devoted the wealth she inherited from him "towards the betterment of mankind in general and in particular the encouragement of the physical sciences." 

The next time he sees Mrs. Mac (though he's confused about whether he saw her more than once) she is dying in an Alpine sanitarium (cf. The Magic Mountain). Benny reassures him, "'There is no need for you to worry,' he said, frowning in the direction of my knees. 'Everything will be all right.' How portentous he made those simple words sound. I nodded, still saying nothing. Why was he reassuring me, when he was the one who would shortly be bereaved?" Why indeed?  The episode trails off into enigma, as Adam's thoughts turn to Ursula and their children. He notes that he "never allowed Ursula to meet Benny or Madame Mac," possibly because "she is something of a priestess of the pure, and in those two, or in the idea of them at least, she saw personified, I think, all the temptations of the base world and its steamy pleasures." Not that he tells us of any steamy pleasures involving Madame Mac. As for his and Ursula's children, they "were a surprise to me.... The boy I found particularly alarming, and not just because he was the first.... The girl was altogether different, lying there still and watchful.... By the time she arrived the boy was a big fellow already, cautious, secretive, solitary. He was frightened of me, just as I was frightened of him." 

Did I, do I, love them? ... Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods -- well. Perhaps that is my trouble, perhaps my standards are too high. Perhaps human live is simple, and therefore beyond me, due to my incurable complicating bent.

As we recall, Zeus had his own problems as both parent and child. And the identification of Adam with Zeus gets a little snug here. 

He admits that he has not been a good husband. (Zeus had that problem, too.) "I mean, my wives have not been fortunate in me. One I drove to drown herself, the other I drove to drink.... I treated my children as adults and my wife as a child.... I do not know when she began to drink in earnest.... She is discreet, none more so; she is an artist of discretion." 

And then there is a gradual transition. He says, "I cannot think any more, for now." And he reflects that "Adam is the one who will care for Ursula when I am gone.... Look at him now, following her into the kitchen." Which of course the Adam who is dying in the upstairs room can't do. Yet we get a precise account of what's going on in the "big stone room" down to the "Faint putrescent smell of gas from the stove." This begins a segue to Hermes's point of view. Adam mentions Benny's statement that old Adam would not die, but Ursula is vague and disengaged, so he leaves the room. Ivy enters, and tells her that Duffy has proposed marriage, which puzzles Ursula: "About what?" she replies. And Ivy leaves the room to hide her tears. 

Or rather, Hermes, who has suddenly and abruptly taken full control of the narrative again, hustles her out of the room. "O Hecate of the triple way, is it all my fault, for taking on Duffy's form and giving poor Ivy the notion taht she was being significantly spoken to in that moment over the milk jug? If so, I shall have to speak to him, too, and put some mettle into him. I thought it was all fixed --what were they doing at the lunch table if not fixing it? My name must not be Hermes after all." So his name is Adam? And all of this business is taking place in the mind of a comatose man? It's a possibility.

In any case, Ursula is confused: "Lately she has been having what seem to be hallucinations -- she prefers to think of them as waking dreams." She goes back to the dining table to clear away what's left there and finds Helen sitting "in a cane armchair in front of the glass wall, smoking a cigarette and looking out into the garden frowningly." Benny and Roddy are out in the garden. Ursula chides Helen for smoking in the house, and Helen responds that she doesn't protest when Roddy does it. Ursula says that Roddy's a guest, and Helen changes the subject to Benny, asking who he is, "What does he want?" "He wants Adam," Ursula replies, then grows confused: "Oh, I don't know what I mean. He's just someone Adam knew." When Ursula tries to take away the ashtray, "Helen snatches it aside and glares at her." Ursula notices Helen's ring: "some kind of whitish metal set with a flat lozenge of polished black stone in which a curlicued initial A is carved." But when she suggests that the A stands for Adam, Helen corrects her: "'No,' with a shake of the head, quick, dismissive. 'Amphitryon. The title of the play I'm in. Or it could be A for Alcmene, my part. He said it was for luck but in the theatre you're never supposed to wish anyone luck.... He's such a sap,' she says complacently, suppressing a yawn, 'your son.'" 

And then there's another blurring of narrative identity. Hermes (?) follows Ursula and Helen to the kitchen:

I glide invisibly behind them along the passageway, still sniffing after Helen's feline scent. Who am I now? Where is my Dad? Enough, enough, I am one, and all -- Proteus is not the only protean one amongst us. 

In the kitchen, Hermes feels Zeus plucking at his sleeve: "I can feel my father's burgeoning itch as together we rush after her from the kitchen into the music room and out by the french doors where she almost collides with her husband coming in from the lawn." She is startled by what he has to say: that he's been thinking about their moving to Arden. She greets the suggestion with scorn and tells him she's going for a walk. When he asks if he can come with her, she replies, "Your mother is drunk again.... I think you had better look after her." For a moment she thinks he is going to hit her. "You see how my Dad does it, putting all sorts of fancies in their heads to distract and confuse them? She begins to recall something from her dawn dream of love and then does not." And so she keeps going and Adam lets her go. 

She notices Benny and Roddy watching her, and she stops to ask Roddy for a cigarette. As she and Roddy walk away together across the lawn, she asks about Benny "-- who is he, do you know?" But Roddy says only, "When you came along he was in the middle of telling me some rigmarole, about Greece, I think it was, about being up in the mountains there, doing something or other. I could make no sense of it." As they walk along together, she thinks of herself as "strolling along this path under trees in the middle of a summer afternoon, like one of those women in Chekhov" and that Roddy "seems ... more like a character in a play than a real, living person." 

She is convinced that by an accumulation of influence the parts that she plays, even when the characters are petty or wicked, will gradually mould and transform her into someone else, someone grand and deep and serious.

She meditates on her "affinity" to Roddy, that he is "hollow, a thing of potential more than actual presence" and that she too is "pure potential, in a state of perpetual transformation, on the way steadily to becoming herself, her authentic self." She looks back at the house, which she sees as 

more like a church than a house, but a church in some backward, primitive place where religion has decayed into a cult and the priests have had to allow the churchgoers to worship the old gods alongside the new one.

And she finds that they are nearing the wood she had seen from the bathroom window, "the one she has never been able to find before." They enter it and find "a little bower, under a low, vaulted roof of ivy and brambles and sweet woodbine and other things all tangled together." Roddy identifies it as the location of "the famous holy well." It is a "pool of water, brimming and still, like a polished dark metal disc set on the ground." There are rosaries and pictures of people hanging on the bushes around it, and Roddy tells her that the locals come there to pray and that old Adam had tried to keep them from doing so -- another attempt to isolate the place. 

They sit on a bench there and Roddy asks her, "Do you not feel the presence of the god?" Except that Roddy seems not to be Roddy anymore; his "voice when he speaks is large yet makes a soft, a tremulous sound."

"You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you'll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You'll thnk you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you'll weep for nothing, pine for what's not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you."

Roddy has been possessed, but by whom? He kisses her, to her surprise, but suddenly the spell breaks. He realizes what has happened and wonders, "What is that medleyed music in the air, of pipe and tabor, bugle and flute, what voices chanting as the radiant cavalcade departs?" He apologizes. She slaps him. "He is only himself now, the god having abandoned him." But as he tries to speak, "A whiplash crack of thunder sounds directly overhead and seemingly at the level of the treetops." And Hermes thinks, "Oh, Dad." Is the thunder Zeus's angry response to someone else's moving in on Helen? Like Pan?

6. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 142-175

From "What indeed? Were I able I would rear up ..." through "... my Dad shambling eagerly in her warm wake."

_____

There's a disjunctive moment when the "I" of the novel suddenly shifts from Hermes to the old Adam, lying in his bed and becoming aware of the presence in the room of Benny Grace, with whom he has a "long and intricate" history. "Has he come to harangue me in my last straits, to tell me I am going about dying in the wrong way?" He remembers a terrifying nightmare from early childhood in which he was alone on a bare rock in a becalmed ocean, frightened that everything would tip and cast him into the abyss. The association with Benny, however, is unstated.

As he thinks about "this damnable false night in which my wife has condemned me to live," Petra goes and opens the curtains. "Perhaps that is Ursula's intention, keeping me in the dark so I will not notice the light failing. But I do not want to breathe my last in this room." He feels the vibration as Benny approaches the bed. Benny notes that Adam hasn't changed: "'Still the black hair,' Benny says, 'the noble profile.' Again he gives his snuffly laugh. 'The original Adam.'"

Adam calls Benny "my shadow, my double, my incorrigible daemon," and recalls that they met "in the far north" when "Bellicose Sweden ... was on the warpath again, united in yet another expansionary struggle with her encircling neighbours." He doesn't recall what country the meeting took place in, but he remembers sitting next to a woman named Inge or Ilsa -- "I shall settle for Inge." He became aware of Benny "as a pair of hoof-like feet and two fat thighs clad in rusty black ... and those whorled ears daintily pointed at their tips." Adam was still in mourning for Dorothy.

This was in the early days of the great instauration, after we had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck's constant for what it really is.... I was in the vanguard of the new science and already an eminent figure.... My Brahma hypothesis ... posited the celebrated chronotron, ugly name ... for an exquisite concept, time's primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation.

It was Benny, he notes, who called it the "Brahma hypothesis" and the "chronotron."


Benny leaves the bedside and goes to the window where Petra is standing, "and begins to explain to her my theory of infinities." Adam notes, "From the day she was born I favoured her over my son, that poor epigone -- he was here earlier, blubbering by my bedside --- yet now I think I was perhaps as unfair to her as I was to him, in singling her out as I did." In Adam's "theory of infinities ... everything endlessly extends and unravels, world upon world." Benny tells Petra that Adam resolved the problem of "the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else's equations and made them null" and that he posited "an infinity of infinities ... all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there." So in the world of this novel, Mary Stuart beheaded Elizabeth Tudor, cars run on seawater, the Greek gods are hanging around, and Robert Oppenheimer failed to create the atomic bomb.


Anyway, at this first meeting with Benny, Adam goes with him to waterfront bars and winds up "panting, in wild disorder, with a split lip and a sleeve torn half-way out of my jacket." And the next day he flies south in a seaplane with Inge. But Benny kept turning up.

I did great things. I scaled high peaks -- such silken ropes, such gleaming grapnels! -- and always he was there, scrambling behind me. That was then. I made a world -- worlds! -- and afterwards what was there left to do but wile away the day of rest, the interminable, idle Sunday that the remainder of my life has been. So why has he come?

And so ends the second division of the book.

Hermes, it seems, has been asleep -- "Must have dropped off for a minute there. I am getting as dopily drowsy as my old Dad." Benny has gone out into the garden and has taken off his shoes and socks, revealing that his feet are like pig's trotters, blunt and pink with the toes all bunched together and the nails thick and tough as horn." Lunch is being prepared and Ivy Blount is setting the table in the conservatory, whose glass panes Hermes describes because he knows "the secrets of every trade and skill; I am, you might say, a Faust and Mephisto rolled into one." Ursula is in the kitchen, peering out at Benny and recalling "the first time Adam told her about him. Deep winter on Haggard Head and the two of them standing side by side in his study." (Haggard Head, which sounds like a place name, is unlocatable.) "Until today she suspected he was Adam's invention, an alibi for his love affairs." Adam had told her Benny was "a mischief maker and a rogue" and that he "was the part of himself he had suppressed in order to become what he became."

She thinks about what will happen when Adam dies: "there are the children to consider; she will have to take care of them, Adam no less than Petra. She thinks Adam's wife will leave him.... Petra would grow increasingly crazed but perhaps more quietly, more secretively, while Adam would pass his days pottering about the house, mending things that do not need to be mended." Young Adam comes in and stands behind her with his hands on her shoulders and they look out at Benny, who has covered his bald head with a handkerchief knotted at each corner. Adam remembers -- apropos of what? -- when he was a boy he discovered dozens of empty whiskey bottles in the hedge near the unused privy behind the house. When they talk about the fact that Benny and Roddy will be there for lunch, she says, "A full house!" and adds, "Your father won't be pleased."


"Speaking of fathers, mine is waking up, at long last," Hermes interjects.


Ivy enters with a satin pillow that Rex has chewed up. Ursula observes that Rex "has been impossible since Adam's illness." Young Adam goes back to work on the radio he was tinkering with earlier, though he has decided it's futile: even if he repairs it, his father won't be able to listen to it. "They will never speak again, the two of them, his father will never have another opportunity not to call him by his name." He decides suddenly to go out and talk to Benny, hustling his mother along with him. Zeus joins Hermes in watching what's going on.

How glad I am that only I can see him, in the preposterous get-up he insists on as the father of the gods come to earth, the gold sandals, the ankle-length, cloud-white robe held by a clasp at one shoulder, the brass hair and wavy beard and lips as pink as a nereid's nipples. Honestly.

But Zeus is less interested in what's going on with Adam and Ursula and Benny than in where Helen is, so Hermes -- "Only sometimes am I omniscient" -- goes to look for her. He finds her just as she comes across Roddy, who "is handsome, too, in a thinned-out, strained sort of way. He has the appearance of a painting that has been over-cleaned, brilliant and faded at the same time."

They are in the music room, where they talk about the play that she will be acting in: "She cannot think, she says, why the play is called after Amphitryon, since Amphitryon's wife, Alceme [sic], her part, is surely the centre of it all." (The misspelling of Alcmene, otherwise properly spelled in the novel, is unexplained.) She tells him that the version they're doing is set at "Vinegar Hill, at the time of the Rebellion," which took place in 1798, and reinforces the suggestions that the setting of the novel is Ireland. And she tells him that the play "was written only a hundred years ago, I think, or two, in Germany." Kleist's Amphitryon was written in 1807, and the suggestion is that Helen's beauty is more substantial than her brains. (Earlier, in the section narrated by old Adam, we were told that though Goethe is "entirely forgotten now," Kleist is "sublime.") As Helen leaves the room, "what she takes to be Roddy's eyes on her is in fact my Dad shambling eagerly in her warm wake."

3. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 57-80

From "Old Adam plunges, a pearl-diver ..." through "... 'That milk,' I said, 'is gone sour.'"

_____

Old Adam recalls his boyhood "in the humpbacked town above the estuary." It's a beautifully detailed vignette whose verbal finesse evokes Joyce's Dubliners. And while it verges on nostalgia, with memories of blowing soap-bubbles with a clay pipe and his mother's weeping three tears into the flour mixture for the cake she is baking after his father's death, it also provides a vivid contrast between the texture of human life and the disembodied existence of the gods. It also neatly characterizes Adam, whose awakening mathematical passion is reflected in his absorption in precisely mixing the flower, salt and baking soda in the bowl his weeping mother hands him.

Every grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly, the particles of salt and baking soda spaced just so throughout the flour, each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it, a solid, three-dimensional white field supporting a dense and uniform lattice of particles of other shades of white. And what about the flour itself, no two grains of which were alike -- how could that be completely mixed, even if there were no other ingredients present in it, making their own pattern? And how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved? -- how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder? 

The gods brought order out of chaos, and now Adam is trying to do the same.

His "lavishly ugly" aunt arrives to help complete the Christmas dinner that Adam's mother has insisted on having despite her husband's death, and she brings him a box of puzzles made out of twisted wire. Adam solves them easily, "which caused his aunt to sniff and frown and make a humming sound." He is able to separate the puzzles because "his mind would become for a moment a limitless blue space, calmly radiant." And he demonstrates a similar facility with magic square puzzles, which make him think, "How could fifteen be different from fifteen? And yet the difference was there, a sort of aura, unseen but felt, like air, like warmth -- yes, yes, we gods were with him even then." He is a boy tormented by the "impossibility of accuracy" and the nature of time:

Does time flow or is it a succession of stillnesses -- instants -- moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbreaking wave? Or is there only one great stillness, stretching everywhere, in all directions, through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite, listless sea? ... Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate. 

Meanwhile, Zeus "is in a sulk" because young Adam and Helen are making love. And love, Hermes tells us, "is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death." Love is something the gods "did not intend, foresee or sanction." And their attempts to simulate it are debilitating and exhausting, which is why Zeus is sulking. "Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known."

The exaltation of sex -- or as Hermes refers to it, "this mess of frottage" -- into love baffles the gods: "how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not." Hermes thinks he knows, and that Zeus fails to recognize, that "They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one's eyes. It is immortality they are after." Zeus had left Hermes in charge of making sure that "he was not disturbed at his illicit amours" -- copulating with Helen -- so it is Hermes who made sure that Adam was wakeful and left his wife's bed.

Helen, we learn, has miscarried a year ago, but she has managed to reconcile herself to the loss in part by transferring some of her maternal emotions toward Adam, who "wants to be his father, reducing life to a set of sums. But Adam is softer than his father, and younger than the old man ever could have been, and love, not logic, is his weakness." Zeus has made her think that he is Adam while at the same time wanting her to think he is her lover and not her husband, so he tries to persuade her to remember him as separate from Adam -- and fails. Hermes observes,

It seems worse for him each time, which is supposed to be impossible since nothing may change in our changeless world, either for good or ill. Perhaps he really is dying, perhaps the pursuit of love is killing him, and this is why he so fiercely persists, because he longs for it to kill him. A dying god! And the god of gods, at that! Ah, mortals, hae a care and look to your souls, for if he goes, everything goes with him, bang, crash and done with at last, his Liebestod become a Götterdämmerung. 

Hermes has played hooky from his duties, however, and visited Ivy Blount in her cottage, disguising himself as Adrian Duffy, the cowman. Ivy is suspicious of Duffy because she suspects he is after her cottage, "a grim two-storeyed edifice with a steep-pitched slate roof and narrow, arched window-frames painted a shiny and peculiarly unpleasant, even sinister, shade of blackish green.... Those green window-frames are still troubling me, I wonder why." We learn that although "Ivy's face is long and sharp and her unruly brown hair resembles a rook's nest [and] the first blush of youth has long ago faded from her cheeks, she is possessed of a peculiar, subtle beauty." Moreover, she "has a sweet voice, ... light and mellow" and "used to speak three or four languages, thanks to her time at a Swiss finishing school" that she was forced to leave "when the family's fortunes went wallop."

Hermes/Duffy takes a swig from a mug of milk that turns out to be sour. "I had never tasted sour milk before; I shall not taste it again." We learn that Duffy, too, has a cottage on the other side of the hill that he used to share with his mother, "a rough-edged baggage generally considered to have been a witch" until she died last year. Duffy/Hermes tells her it needs a new roof, which confirms her suspicion that he has his eye on her house. So she thwarts any designs he may have made: "'If you have something to say to me,' she said, in a voice that had a noticeable shake to it, 'come out and say it, then.'" But Hermes "had nothing to say. I was just amusing myself, toying with one of my creatures, as so often is the way."