Frequent Hearses Read Free

Beaumont and Fletcher), and he’s published a nasty little book which purports to prove it. He believes that Dryden was impotent, and that incestuous relations between Emily and Bramwell were responsible for Wuthering Heights. In fact, I’m inclined to think that he believes that it was Bramwell, and not Emily, who actually wrote Wuthering Heights… But all that’s by the way. The point is that Giles Leiper has ideas about Pope, too. Do you know the Ode to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady?”
    “Dr. Johnson,” said Humbleby with the cautious deliberation of one who treads slippery conversational ground, “interpreted it as an apologia for suicide.”
    “So he did. And—”
    “But I like it,” said Humbleby, suddenly enthusiastic. “I like it very much indeed. ‘What beck’ning ghost,”’ he intoned dramatically, “‘along the moonlight shade Invites my something something something glade. ‘Tis she!—but why that bleeding—”’
    “Please, please.” Fen fished a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his coat and lit one. “Your recollection of the piece seems to be very indistinct. I’d better explain what it’s about. It concerns—”
    “There’s not the least necessity—”
    “It is an Elegy to a girl who has killed herself as a result of being—um—callously deserted by her husband. The poet—”
    “I remember it very clearly,” said Humbleby. “Very clearly indeed.”
    “The poet, in addition to deploring this situation, announces his belief that vengeance will overtake not only the husband, but the whole of his family as well.”
    “‘While the long funerals,”’ chanted Humbleby in solemn antiphon, “‘darken all the way.’”
    “Blacken all the way, blacken… The girl may have been a Mrs. Weston, by birth a Miss Gage. But that’s conjectural. The poem was almost certainly a mere imaginative exercise, and there’s not the smallest evidence that Pope was in any way personally involved. Which brings us to Giles Leiper.”
    “Brings us, at long last, to Giles Leiper.”
    “Leiper believes, along with his other fatuities, that Pope was personally involved. Not long ago, in fact, he wrote an article in some tawdry journal or other stating his conviction that Pope had had an affair with this girl, and that that was why he was so upset about her death. ‘Are we to understand,’” Fen quoted with repugnance, ” ‘that a poem as deeply felt as this was no more than a callous exercise in versification? Is it not much more in accordance with our knowledge of poets and poetry to assume that Pope was intimately interested in the lady?’”
    “Well, isn’t it?” said Humbleby, taken genuinely unawares.
    “No, it isn’t. And even if it were, there’s not, in this case, the smallest justification for imagining that Pope’s connection with the girl was anything but platonic… Anyway, it’s this supposititious affair that the film is chiefly about—though a lot of other things come into it, of course.” Fen considered these, not without pleasure. “There’s Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There are Addison and Swift—Swift is depicted as walking about the country all day, writing Gulliver, thinking erotic thoughts about Stella, and having little preliminary or proleptic fits of madness. There’s also, and somewhat anachronistically, Bolingbroke.”
    Humbleby chuckled. “And Dryden and Wycherley,” he said, “and Handel and Gay and Queen Anne. I mustn’t miss this film. How far has it got?”
    “It’s not on the floor yet.”
    “On the floor?”
    “Yes, I’m sorry: their damnable jargon is infectious. I mean that they haven’t actually started making it yet. We’re still at the stage of script conferences.” And Fen glanced at his watch. “There’s one this morning—which is why I’m here.”
    Humbleby threw the end of his cheroot out of the window. “You’re not in a hurry, I hope?”
    “Not specially, no. Before I go, tell me what you’re doing