Absolution by Patrick Flanery Read Free Book Online Page B

If you prune it in spring it won’t flower,’ she mutters to herself, and returns to my question. ‘It was Milton’s argument – reading unchosen works. “He who is made to judge … upon the birth, or death of books … had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious.” But for such a man – or woman, we should certainly wish to say – “there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing Journey-work … than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books,” or something like that. It has always seemed a logical and worthy argument, to me at least. I think I credited him.’
(Later, I check the transcript of the interview against Milton’s text and am impressed by her memory for quotation.)
‘And Milton argues that censors are typically “ignorant” and “imperious”. Would you say that was true of those who workedas censors in this country under the old government?’ It’s an unsubtle question and I wish I hadn’t asked it, or had found a different way to phrase it.
She’s silent, stills her hands, draws her head up, looks at me for a second only and then out the window. Something’s been mis-communicated. The gardener is back at the already compact bush, cutting again. Clare opens the window, calls out to him with a lengthy preamble, bows of the head, and what I take to be a questioning reply from him, an uncertainty about her earlier direction, or uncertainty about its wisdom. She replies, more forceful, hurried, and then the shears are on the grass and the gardener has trudged off across the lawn to an unseen part of the garden. I look at my notes and hear her head move, the window close; glancing up I find her eyes fixed on my face with a sadness that surprises me.
‘There is no mystery, really, about who served on the Publications Control Board, as it was called. There were, as you no doubt know, even some cases of writers who worked as advisory readers – minor poets and novelists – as well as a number of academics, a fair number. Perhaps that – the academics, I mean – is not so surprising. But there are periods for which almost no reports survive, so we may never know entirely who served the Board, who was complicit. The writers who worked as censors were not, as one might rather perversely hope, compelled to do so, coerced into the activity and the role of censor, but because they believed in the rightness of what was being done, or else believed they might make the process a little less philistine, hoping to subvert the system from within. Their reports make for depressing reading. As a definition of the common (meaning the usual ) type of censor – let us say, for the sake of argument, that it includes those people whose complicity may have remained secret – I would not disagree with Milton’s statement.’
I’m transfixed by her speaking voice, by the shapes her mouth makes, the sharp planes of her face and the fine geometry around her eyes. At the conference in Amsterdam I almost didn’t meether, thinking it would be better for us not to do so. I told myself that I feared the person could never match the words on the page, that I was afraid she would disappoint, that I would never achieve the kind of intimacy I desired – or not intimacy but rapport, a friendliness possible only between equals. Aside from her brittleness, she is, I’m beginning to think, exactly the person her works suggest. There is no disappointment in that respect.
There was and is a greater fear. I packaged it up with old tape and tied it with fraying string. I did a bad job of it. I can feel it trying to escape.
The gardener comes back for the shears, leaving the already compact bush alone for now. I see Clare watching him, trying to pretend a hadeda ibis has caught her attention. It’s clear this is a ruse, either for my benefit or the gardener’s. She has no interest in the hadeda or any other bird, except a bird she might conjure in her imagination. The