The Judges of the Secret Court Read Free Page B

tricks, but Stacton refines them in his other novels into a highly individual and supple method impossible not to notice. In Judges the aphorisms eventually come to seem just as much a part of the material and sensory fabric of the story, just as physical , as the crush of spent matches underfoot, or the smell of violet pomade in Edwin Stanton’s beard, or the bells rung for Lincoln, “solemn, insistent, and unnecessary.” Because the story shaped by them is a true one, they have a different role than in the crime fiction. Are they just? Are they so , in the light of these actual events? They make us restive; we shy away from the bleakest ones. Reflective, contingent, hidden from the characters themselves, it is these summations, not Stanton’s certainties or the thoughts of Lincoln or even the perspectives of history, that are the judgments of the secret court.
    At most they could hope for mercy or reprieve. But of what use was mercy? What use was reprieve? The soul has no reprieve. The best one can hope for there is an extended sentence.
    David Stacton died at the age of forty-four, in a small town in Denmark. The Danish medical examiner first named the cause as a heart attack, then later as “unknown.” If Stacton ever gains or regains the stature as a writer I think he deserves, his brief life in all its disguises and ambiguities will be a biographer’s torment and delight. His oeuvre, unlike his foreshortened life, is necessarily complete: as with Mozart’s or Keats’s, the work can be seen to have a shape, a progress, a youth, and a maturity that the creator himself doesn’t. Not until Stacton’s work is easily available as a whole can that shape be discerned, the influences on it sorted out, and Stacton given a place in the American canon. It could be guessed now that that place will be as outlier, his books seen as an intersection of certain modes of popular fiction with a unique sensibility, appearing from the first fully formed and unchanging over time. (Compare, say, Thomas Love Peacock, or—Slavitt’s hint—Ronald Firbank.) Perhaps—as undoubtedly queer (in the original sense) as they are—their fanship will always be narrow, though intense. But that judgment is not for us to make; the court of literary fame and obscurity is secret, and though there is pardon there is no appeal.
    â€”J OHN C ROWLEY
    [1] Time reviews and articles were at that time unsigned.
    [2] I first learned what I know of Stacton’s life, his career, and the reception his books received from Robert Nedelkoff, an independent researcher and Stacton devotee.
    [3] “David Stacton,” Hollins Critic (December, 2002).

THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT

for Philip Bagby,
    gentleman, scholar, Virginian,
    and the best of good friends
    Obit 1958
    to remember him

I have been studying how I may compare
    This prison where I live unto the world:
    And for because the world is populous,
    And here is not a creature but myself,
    I cannot do it.
    Richard II

Prologue
    Gramercy Park is the most wistful and the gentlest of the New York squares, and the Players Club is one of the handsomest buildings in it. But the man who once lived in that house had the face of an exalted Punch. Not even he knew quite how he had come to look like that. Yet, since he recognized the resemblance, he spent his life these days not in the present, but the past, trying to define to himself— though never to others, for he had great dignity—that moment when fear had become resignation, and resignation the patience and the will to die. Except for his daughter, Edwina, he wanted no more Booths.
    Down the corridor, outside the room of his now dead friend Barrett, with whom he had quarrelled, consoled, and acted for so long, there was an aeolian harp. He refused to have it removed.
    At unexpected times, when a gust of wind blew through the top floor corridor, the harp would hum to life. Then he would say: