The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) Read Online Free
Author: Wilson Harris
Was art, was revolution, was entertainment , but a veil over the humours of the human/animal body? Had nothing changed since archaic woman menstruated, became pregnant and gave birth to a masterpiece, a daemon baby, a daemon Heracles possessed by serpents which he strangled in his cradle?
What was the human distinction between p (for a twentieth-century entertainment poster) and imperial shilling (with which to expel “greate Bellyed” mother and yet to purchase endangered child and trickster of cradles)?
All of which reminded her that it was time to ascend the bridge of space by catching a bus and flying to Marsden’s Angel Inn in Hammersmith.
She had become acquainted with Father Marsden in the winter of 1976 when she answered an advertisement in an evening paper calling for a secretary/research student to work with him on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A knowledge of English literature—it was stated—would prove an asset. She continued working for several months after she became pregnant in June 1977 and then returned when John was six months old. Marsden kept in touch with her all the time. He was much more than an employer, he was her witch-doctor, her priest, her newfound master. His house became a bridge into other worlds and an elaborate cave of the womb over which she was invited to preside and to bleed her hopes and despairs through hypnoses of creativity within which he seemed to bind her and liberate her. She spied multiple humours of body and bandaged soul. In that cave of Angel Inn The Tempest raged close to Wuthering Heights , The Ancient Mariner stood with Ulysses, Pygmalion seduced Darwin on the Voyage of H MS Beagle Round the World. Mary changed H MS Beagle to Beatle Submarine.
Thus Mary’s arrival was as much a historic event as if she were herself another book of fictions in conversation with those he kept on his shelves, in his drawers and numerous cabinets, numerous living masks in the volume of riddles of spiritual blood he was compiling. Transfusion was part of his original (rather than revolutionary) art. It created a subtle, therapeutic no-man’s land or accent upon cross-cultural humanspace between “possession” and “possessed”. She knew of (but had not met) the “no-man’s land writer” he had employed to assemble his notes and the characters she herself was creating—in conjunction with his masks—into a book of “fictional lives”. “What is he like?” she had once asked but had received a dusty answer worthy of his accountant except that his eyes seemed to vanish yet sparkle with benign humour, benign principle that sometimes one needed to “divide and rule”.
Today was Friday—it was Father Marsden’s morning for shopping—so she knew she would arrive at the Inn before he got back. (On occasion—upon Fridays—as she had implicitly confessed, she had stumbled upon Marsden or his extraordinary accountant in Goldhawk Road or Shepherd’s Bush market.)
Angel Inn existed in a quiet, residential backwater off the busy Hammersmith area, not far from the old St Paul’s schoolground. There were lime and horsechestnut trees in Marsden’s street all bare and singularly beautiful now as living sculptures of winter. Spirit of place possessed not only the ribald artifice of Goldhawk Road but unselfconscious naked integrity of winter lime or catalyst of seed preceding spring. Cross-cultural winter and spring.
Mary arrived at the gate, made her way to the door along the flagged path through the garden covered with a sprinkle of blossom, minute snowdrops. She was surprised to find the door ajar and wondered if Marsden was in. She entered and made her way along the thickly carpeted corridor towards the great study on her left. It was an enormous house that seemed to echo with whispers, and the corridor itself ran far past the study into deep interior rooms that Marsden kept locked. The door of the study like the front door was ajar. She entered (it too was red-carpeted
What was the human distinction between p (for a twentieth-century entertainment poster) and imperial shilling (with which to expel “greate Bellyed” mother and yet to purchase endangered child and trickster of cradles)?
All of which reminded her that it was time to ascend the bridge of space by catching a bus and flying to Marsden’s Angel Inn in Hammersmith.
She had become acquainted with Father Marsden in the winter of 1976 when she answered an advertisement in an evening paper calling for a secretary/research student to work with him on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A knowledge of English literature—it was stated—would prove an asset. She continued working for several months after she became pregnant in June 1977 and then returned when John was six months old. Marsden kept in touch with her all the time. He was much more than an employer, he was her witch-doctor, her priest, her newfound master. His house became a bridge into other worlds and an elaborate cave of the womb over which she was invited to preside and to bleed her hopes and despairs through hypnoses of creativity within which he seemed to bind her and liberate her. She spied multiple humours of body and bandaged soul. In that cave of Angel Inn The Tempest raged close to Wuthering Heights , The Ancient Mariner stood with Ulysses, Pygmalion seduced Darwin on the Voyage of H MS Beagle Round the World. Mary changed H MS Beagle to Beatle Submarine.
Thus Mary’s arrival was as much a historic event as if she were herself another book of fictions in conversation with those he kept on his shelves, in his drawers and numerous cabinets, numerous living masks in the volume of riddles of spiritual blood he was compiling. Transfusion was part of his original (rather than revolutionary) art. It created a subtle, therapeutic no-man’s land or accent upon cross-cultural humanspace between “possession” and “possessed”. She knew of (but had not met) the “no-man’s land writer” he had employed to assemble his notes and the characters she herself was creating—in conjunction with his masks—into a book of “fictional lives”. “What is he like?” she had once asked but had received a dusty answer worthy of his accountant except that his eyes seemed to vanish yet sparkle with benign humour, benign principle that sometimes one needed to “divide and rule”.
Today was Friday—it was Father Marsden’s morning for shopping—so she knew she would arrive at the Inn before he got back. (On occasion—upon Fridays—as she had implicitly confessed, she had stumbled upon Marsden or his extraordinary accountant in Goldhawk Road or Shepherd’s Bush market.)
Angel Inn existed in a quiet, residential backwater off the busy Hammersmith area, not far from the old St Paul’s schoolground. There were lime and horsechestnut trees in Marsden’s street all bare and singularly beautiful now as living sculptures of winter. Spirit of place possessed not only the ribald artifice of Goldhawk Road but unselfconscious naked integrity of winter lime or catalyst of seed preceding spring. Cross-cultural winter and spring.
Mary arrived at the gate, made her way to the door along the flagged path through the garden covered with a sprinkle of blossom, minute snowdrops. She was surprised to find the door ajar and wondered if Marsden was in. She entered and made her way along the thickly carpeted corridor towards the great study on her left. It was an enormous house that seemed to echo with whispers, and the corridor itself ran far past the study into deep interior rooms that Marsden kept locked. The door of the study like the front door was ajar. She entered (it too was red-carpeted
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