The Chymical Wedding Read online

  Praise for The Chymical Wedding

  “A splendid winner – a stylish, gripping story of alchemy across the ages.”

  Sunday Express

  “This dazzling novel left me stunned… The Chymical Wedding is about passion, poetry, pagan impulses, the soul’s striving to escape from its mortal fetters, and much, much more… a modern masterpiece.”

  Daily Mail

  “The very craziness of the Hermetic Quest is turned into a sane metaphor, representing a glimpse of how symbolic the world already is, how much it is made in our image, littered with fragments of our dreams.”

  London Review of Books

  “It is bold and generous, as few English novels are today… He has the measure both of a society completely determined by Christian orthodoxy and one, equally alarmingly, without any fundamental certainties at all.”

  Sunday Times

  “The effect is of a rich, symbolic maze: an artificial entertainment, full of surprises and incidental pleasures.”

  The Independent

  “So elegantly constructed that whichever way you turned it the pieces slipped into new patterns, like the rainbow fragments of a kaleidoscope.”

  The Guardian

  The Chymical Wedding

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

  London House

  243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

  Surrey TW9 2LL

  United Kingdom

  www.almabooks.com

  The Chymical Wedding first published by Jonathan Cape Limited in 1989

  First paperback edition published by Picador in 1990

  This new edition, revised and with a Foreword by the author, first published

  by Alma Books Limited in 2010

  © Lindsay Clarke 1989, 2010

  Cover images © Getty Images and Corbis

  Cover design: Rose Cooper

  Lindsay Clarke asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-114-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  THE

  CHYMICAL

  WEDDING

  LINDSAY CLARKE

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 The Green Man

  2 The Figure in the Stone

  3 The House Of God

  4 A Disagreement at the Rectory

  5 In Dreams

  6 Approaches

  7 The Lady’s Name

  8 A Season of Ice

  9 The Firing

  10 Symbolic and Diabolic

  11 Meetings

  12 The Hanged Man

  13 The Keepers of the Keys

  14 The Gesture of the Secret

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  The appearance of a new edition of The Chymical Wedding has given me the opportunity to correct a few errors of detail that have troubled me since the book was first published in 1989. That turbulent year saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, which only a few years earlier had seemed to threaten life on this planet with imminent destruction. At first sight, this romance of alchemy set in rural Norfolk may appear far removed from the realpolitik of world affairs, but the seeds of its story were first sown out of concern for the critical state in which we found ourselves in the early 1980s. In particular, my inability to find a convincing way to allay a child’s night-time fears of thermonuclear disaster led to an almost sleepless night of my own, when I was visited by the dream of the Keepers of the Keys, a dream which I later gave to Alex Darken in the penultimate chapter of this book. Like the potent images of the alchemical process itself, that dream arose from those unconscious, archetypal levels of our being which underpin all our lives and which we ignore at our peril.

  By now it will be clear that my interest in alchemy did not begin solely as a matter of intellectual curiosity. At a time of crisis in my life I found that its numinous imagery spoke more directly and more vividly to what felt like an urgent process of personal change than did any of the rational, largely abstract language with which I had previously tried to manage difficult aspects of my experience. So the writing of The Chymical Wedding eventually became a matter of personal necessity – but when I set out to tell the story, I had not yet recognized that a novel about alchemy would also have to be a work of alchemy if it was to carry conviction. Not surprisingly, therefore, I soon found myself getting lost again and again, like the alchemists before me, inside a bewildering labyrinth of images, as both the book and its author underwent a sometimes gruelling, sometimes exhilarating process of transformation. On many occasions during the three years before the work was complete, I wondered how such a story could ever be of interest to anyone else, particularly in the materialistic culture of the sceptical 1980s. So it came as both a relief and a surprise when I emerged at the end of the final draft to discover that many others, both as individuals and in groups, had also been finding a meaningful imaginative relationship to alchemical imagery during the course of that time.

  The world has changed a great deal since those days, but the deep archetypal conflicts with which the themes of this book are concerned remain dangerously unresolved. We need only listen to the news to be reminded how the peaceful life of the planet is continuously violated by the failure to hold contrary forces in creative tension, allowing them instead to split off into destructive conflicts which spread the seeds of further conflicts to come. The fissive power of nuclear weaponry, the shadow of which still hangs over all of us, is the terrible emblem and final menace of such failure, and far from being a merely philosophical issue of the sort we might dispute to our hearts’ content, the alchemical problem of the reconciliation of the opposites remains a matter on which all our lives may finally depend.

  Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose dream-life furnished material for Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, declared in his lecture on ‘Science and Western Thought’ that he considered “the ambition of overcoming opposites, including a synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity to be the mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age” (quoted in Quantum Questions, edited by Ken Wilber, Shambhala 1985). My hope is that, as well as finding and entertaining new readers, this reissue of The Chymical Wedding might encourage them towards an imaginative understanding of the claims that such a myth makes on us, and to do what they can for its wider realization in the world.

  Meanwhile, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini, my editors at Alma Books, for their faith in this book and their willingness to make it available once again.

  – Lindsay Clarke

  The Bell House, 2010

  The Chymical Wedding

  For Maddy

  “Is not this, perhaps, the secret of every true and great mystery, that it is simple? Does it not love secrecy for that very reason? Proclaimed, it were but a word; kept silent it is being. And a miracle too, in t
he sense that being with all its paradoxes is miraculous.”

  C. Kerenyi,

  Introduction to a Science of Mythology

  “Reality favours symmetries and slight anachronisms.”

  Jorge Luis Borges,

  The South

  1

  The Green Man

  In that part of the world the sky is everywhere, and the entire landscape seems to lie in abasement under its exacting light. It gets into church towers and between the narrow reeds along the river’s edge. It glances across undulant acres of barley and beet, and takes what little the flints have to give. Everything there feels exposed, so keeping secrets is hard. It’s not the easiest place in which to hide.

  Also, if you don’t have a car, it’s quite difficult to get about. In fact, the journey to Munding was simpler a century ago. These days the train takes you only as far as Norwich, then it’s a leisurely bus ride through some of the roomier parts of the county to the marketplace at Saxburgh, and there’s still a four-mile walk along the lanes to Munding. Just outside the village you cross the old branch line: its rails have been scrapped, its sleepers disturbed and the small halt closed. So much for Victorian progress!

  I was in no hurry. Looking down from the bridge at the silent gravel bed I reflected that the journey across England had been quite long enough to make specific a sense of banishment. By the time I reached the village my defection was complete.

  It was a late spring afternoon in the early ’80s. I was twenty-seven then.

  The name of the cottage was painted in white on a spruce-green ground: The Pightle. There was something diminutive, almost elfin, to the ring of it. The name matched the dumpy lime-washed walls and poky interior. It matched my mood.

  The Pightle was built of wattle and daub, timbered throughout in oak, with a reed thatch cocking a snook at the world from either gable end. It was set in a stand of beech and chestnut a quarter of a mile from its nearest neighbour. The small garden at the front was already overgrown enough for a hen pheasant to risk nesting under a clump of fern. At the rear the cottage overlooked the water meadows on the wilder fringes of the hamlet and you could see the round flint tower of Munding St Mary’s glinting in the sunlight across the stream. The windows were leaded and small; even at midday the rooms were shady, almost dark. The Pightle felt perfect for my needs at a time when I was no longer sure what my needs were.

  Shortly after my arrival I was puzzled by a noise that grated the air outside like the tearing of tin. Then I recognized it: someone somewhere was feeding a lot of pigs.

  There was a gale on that first night. It rolled out of a starry sky, a crass wind racketing among the trees and, though there was no rain, lightning floodlit the window glass behind the blind in quick bright pangs. I counted the seconds till the thunderstroke. Eight, nine miles away.

  I lay awake for a long time thinking how strange it was that the quiet lane should be so turbulent by night, and queerer still that I should be lying on this brass bed, listening to the flux and the way the timbers of the house creaked like a ship.

  When I slept, I slept badly, dreaming myself ringed by a band of crazy women, their eyes bright with malignant purpose. They wanted to change me, refashion me to their taste through some ordeal of humiliation. And when I woke again I was troubled by the dream, and the gale still shuddered about the house, and I lay there thinking how complicated it is to be a man.

  “Go to Norfolk,” Clive Quantrill had said. “The cottage is there, I shan’t need it this summer, and it could do with an airing. So could you. You’re all fouled up with other people. Be on your own for a time. Get clean.”

  Clive was my publisher as well as my friend, and perhaps in that order. His press had barely covered its costs on my first collection, but he’d gambled on a second which did better. I’d done my best to make both slim, softback volumes intact and chinkless – too guardedly so, according to at least one reviewer. And, yes, there were moments when one would rather be a kitten and cry mew, but the responsibility remained to be as good a poet as one could. Especially now that everything else was in pieces. Clive’s offer was a moment’s grace. I took it.

  After all, there were few constraints on my time. I had been released from my job at the Polytechnic. My salary would be paid through till the end of the summer, so money was not yet a problem. Also I knew I could have the job back if I wanted it.

  But once you’ve stepped out onto the wire it seems paltry to think of the net below.

  Clive had warned Bob Crossley that I’d be coming. He was a retired psychiatric nurse, a widower, living on his own down the lane. Like Clive he was a foreigner in the village, and kept an eye on The Pightle for him. He had a blotchy nose, a balding head and the newcomer’s enthusiasm for local history.

  Pightle was a local word, he said, of unknown origin. “It means a small enclosure. A sort of croft, or smallholding, I suppose.” He told me how he’d looked up the tithe maps in the county archive and found that The Pightle, like most of the land round there except the Easterness Estate, had once belonged to King’s College, Cambridge. “Maynard Keynes sold it all off when he was bursar there, invested the proceeds in stock. Made a fortune for the college out of properties that brought in a pittance. Clever man… if you approve of capitalism?”

  I said, “I gather you don’t.”

  “Tory heartland, this,” he regretted. “They haven’t heard that feudalism is over. I’m a lone voice on the Parish Council.”

  “Can’t let them have it all their own way.”

  He smiled, encouraged, “If only…” then shrugged. “The motto of this county is Do Different, but not many of us do. Will you be about here long?”

  “A couple of weeks. Maybe longer. I’m not sure yet.”

  “Not much social life in Munding. You might find it a bit dull… without a car, I mean. Only one bus a week.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Mind you, the Feathers keeps country hours… no bobby here, you see. And it’s a decent pint.” He sized me up again. “You can always drop in on me if you’re at a loose end. I can do with some intelligent company…” Bob was that brand of exiled Yorkshireman who, on meeting another, assumes instant affinity, but my smile disappointed him: take no interest in me, it said; pin no hopes.

  There was, however, a tactful soul under his cardigan and plaid shirt. “Well, if there’s anything you need,” he said as he left, “you know where I am.”

  From my bedroom window I could count the towers of four churches. Only they and the scattered spinneys were vertical. All else lay supine – acre after acre of barley and wheat, patched here and there with the yellow dazzle of the mustard fields. Outside The Pightle one was as exposed as the rat flattened to the narrow road by a passing car.

  Munding was what the locals call a “pig village”. When the wind veered it smelled of cabbages and the sties. There was a little shop which doubled as the Post Office crammed into a converted front room of the house of its owner, Mrs Jex, a comfortably proportioned woman who knew everyone’s business but mine. There was a row of council houses tacked on to the end of the street, their brick injuriously red against the cooler colours of the landscape. Most had corrugated iron shacks at the back in which chickens and rabbits were kept, and one had several cars in bits and pieces parked across the front garden. Almost all the older houses had been refurbished as commuter homes and retirement cottages: pink-washed plaster, timbers exposed, roofs rethatched. Unless you counted the church, there was no other community centre but the pub. The primary school had been axed and sold off for conversion, so there were no sounds of children around. It was a quiet place except when the din of aircraft out of the nearby base at Thrandeston shattered its sky.

  Those first few days I slept late and walked a lot, and wherever I walked I seemed to stand at the centre of a vast circumference of space, as though the pace of my tread was matched by the turning of the earth under my feet. The margins of the lanes were laced with cow-parsley and
you could smell wild garlic in the hollows. There were larks and plovers over the fields, and the tall blue days seemed amazed by their own candour. My introspection insulted them. I knew it, just as I knew that Bob Crossley was injured by my dance-step distance from his advances, but there was a thing on my mind that resisted such exposure. It needed solitude. Cover.

  I took to the little copses and the gloomy carrs, the places where starlings thronged, where willow and alder brooded over a flooded marl pit or hankered for the river’s edge. I had the engrossed, purposive air of a man looking for something – which, in a way, I was; for among the many pieces into which my life had fallen there was one that seemed to offer some rudimentary promise of renewal. It was that I was after.

  I called it the Green Man.

  Day after day the figure prowled my imagination. I could sense him there, almost smell him, in his rough green fell; yet whenever I came close he stole from shade to denser shade where the trees packed deep. All I knew about him for sure was that he was a woodland-dweller, so it was inevitable that the search should take me at last through the forbidding perimeter of barbed wire into the Great Wood to the north of the Easterness Estate.

  There, noble beeches, three or four hundred years old, were ranged almost equidistant at its heart. They were still spectral in a smoky woodland mist, and not yet canopied in full summer green. Boughs dripped in the silence. The beech mast crunched beneath my feet. Pheasants whirred away at my approach, and if the hares were crazy in the spring then I was crazier – Alex Darken, escape artist of the moral universe, dropped like a leveret on the run in the middle of the Norfolk deeps.

  And it was not that I expected to encounter him out there – in the flesh, so to speak, this clumsy, feral creature sired sometime in the dark between the Fifth Day and the Sixth, and neither man nor beast. But this, if ever, was the season of the Green Man, and this almost medieval wood was Green Man country. If I looked long and quietly enough he might one day shiver into focus, print himself across the page, and I would know then what kin he was to me, and whether he was likeliest to injure me or aid.