Serendipity E-Book

Marcus Attwater

• Herausgeber: Mijnbestseller.nl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 98

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

THE TELLER OFTEN TELLS THE TALE HE WANTS TO HEAR… "Why, given its sad ending, did my not-quite-ancestor choose this particular story? I wonder whether he had noticed the same tendency as I have: how young men – specifically pairs of young men – from Greek myth go missing in modern accounts. There was a time when every hero was provided with a boyfriend as a matter of course, as all these respectable Englishmen with their classical educations knew full well. And yes, they usually died, for pathos was an integral part of this cult of the beautiful youth. And 'cult' is not too strong a word: there was a Roman emperor who turned his lost boy into a god, and you can go see his face in any half-decent museum of antiquities." Hippasus is one of the lost boys of Greek myth, unknown even to most classicists. Inspired by the fortuitous discovery of an earlier attempt at reconstruction, the narrator embarks on a new examination of the evidence in the hope of rescuing from obscurity an appealing story of broken vows, mistaken identity, confusing oracles, young love— and a dragon.

Leseprobe

Serendipity

A Tale in Four Reconstructions

Marcus Attwater

ISBN: 9789403635439

© Marcus Attwater 2018

Cover design by the author. Images: Shutterstock

www.attwaterbooks.nl

serendipity /sɛr(ə)n’dɪpɪti/ n. the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. □ serendipitousadj.serendipitouslyadv. [coined by Horace Walpole (1754) after The Three Princes of Serendip (now Sri Lanka), a fairy tale]

The Concise Oxford Dictionary

Chapter 1 - Things unlooked for

It is late July and the weather is hot. The heat is not of the muggy English variety with thunder at the end, but the Mediterranean kind: clear blue skies and unrelenting sunshine. There haven’t been more than a few drops of rain for weeks, and the air outside smells of hay, not because there are any farmer’s fields nearby, but because the grass is drying where it grows. This is deckchair-in-the-garden weather, it is not the time for old books and deep thoughts. But here I am, in the library, writing. I chose the library not through some authorly conviction that it is the best place to work – it is not very well stocked in any case – but because, bar standing at the bottom of the garden with your phone in the air, it is the only room in this place with a decent internet connection, and I want to fill the gaps in my account as quickly as possible.

What I had intended to write during the holidays – if the weather had been more conducive to rational thought, and I had not become hopelessly tangled in my subject – was an article on the lost boys of Greek myth. Very briefly, my thesis was this: after centuries of church-led heteronormativity and decades of feminist enlightenment we expect stories to be about men and women. In any given story, we assume male-female relationships – sexual and familial – to be the most important ones. But Greek myth, of which we still have so much, originates in a society in which women were simply less important than men, and consequently relationships between men would receive the most attention. This means that our view of their stories is skewed (or even more skewed than we already realise). Sometimes we just may not get the point. Sometimes we elevate a less important aspect of the tale at the expense of what earlier tellers found significant. And that is just the stories we still tell. We have also had centuries of selection, of deciding what to include in the introduction, the dictionary, the notes to Homer and Virgil. And it is the stories about love and friendship between men which have suffered disproportionally from this selection. We remember Ariadne, whom Theseus knew only briefly, and we forget Pirithous, with whom he shared his life. There must be stories we do not know at all.

The problem is that ‘lost’ is the operative word here. When one’s argument depends on what is not there anymore, or at best overlooked, it is hard to build a decent case. I couldn’t decide what form the article should take, where the emphasis should be. I wanted to write about the stories themselves, but also about how they are shaped by our expectations and engagement. I didn’t want to import a lot of social history, since it was the myths I really needed to talk about, but I found myself writing about politics and patriarchy. The piece was growing longer and longer and I was liking it less and less. In the end I pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind and decided to do something else entirely. I went to Attwater House.

I had already decided to come here for a short stay, and it would be a good opportunity to find out something more about my not-quite-ancestor, the last Lord Attwater. This house used to be his, before it became a friendly everything-cared-for hotel for people who want to get away from it all, including television and social media. It is a little staid, truth be told: I am by some margin the youngest person here, and I am nearer forty than thirty now. But it is a wonderful place to work, uninterrupted by anything except meals and walks in the park.

I knew the first time I came here that I was distantly related to the Attwaters who had lived in the house in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the last lord’s biographer contacted me that I became interested. In fact, Tilda Norman never actually became his biographer, because she decided the life of this obscure English lord mostly taken up by various intellectual pursuits wasn’t going to be of interest to the modern public (‘not enough enemies and not enough sex’ was how she put it when we met). Attwater knew some other mildly interesting people (one of whom, the man he shared lodgings with in London early in the century, was described by Tilda as ‘ridiculously elusive’), wrote some articles which are known to the select few who study, say, dithematic Germanic names or the genealogy of the house of Navarre, and all in all appears to have been the kind of dedicated scholarly amateur occasionally thrown up by well-to-do English families. The only really startling thing about his life is that he was not English at all. He was born the only son of Grand Duchess Adelejda of Zugd, heir to a tiny eastern European principality which was annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1900, when the Grand Duchess and her son escaped to England to continue their lives in exile. The title of Lord Attwater he inherited through his paternal grandmother, who was English (it was her grandfather who was also my ancestor).

Having learned that I could not help her, and having decided there was not going to be a book in it after all, Tilda kindly let me have the material she had collected: a few photographs, a bundle of things Attwater himself had written, and some letters he received from others. There are two or three autobiographical pieces from his early years in London, neatly typed, the articles he published in various journals, and several small notebooks with jottings in his distinctive handwriting (very small and round, nothing like the sloping cursive hand taught in English schools). They are the rough drafts of articles and letters, with the odd poem and other not obviously connected material, such as sketches of family trees. His way of working and putting down his thoughts appears very familiar to me, and for that reason I don’t really like to look in the notebooks. I certainly wouldn’t enjoy having anyone look in mine, and it feels intrusive reading the thoughts Lord Attwater meant only for himself. But I brought the notebooks with me when I came here, with the idea of at least roughing out a chronology of his life, and it was a list of names in one of them which first caught my eye. It consisted of the titles of some tragedies by Euripides, not all of them extant: Hippolytus, Chrysippus, Phaethon, Hippasus. Seeing them there together I laughed out loud, startling the only other person using the library. Who would have thought? Returning to the references for Attwater’s published articles Tilda had given me, it turned out there was one from 1921 titled In search of ‘Hippasus’: new light on a forgotten story. Attwater had, nearly a century ago, collected all the evidence for one of my lost boys. But although I found the article fascinating, I was still determined to let the modern interpretation of Greek myth rest for the time being, and I put it aside to see if I could find out more about Attwater’s family and his life in England.

Despite the period furnishings of the house (if one does not inquire too closely which period), I wasn’t really expecting to find evidence of Attwater’s life still lying around here. But since this is obviously a house with a history, and those staying here are generally of the type who are interested in that kind of thing, there is a lot of documentation available downstairs in the guests’ lounge. In particular there is a scrapbook, meticulously assembled in the time before glossy brochures, let alone websites, with newspaper cuttings and photographs featuring the house and its inhabitants. Looking through this, and already disappointed it had no pictures of Lord Attwater himself, I lingered on the pages documenting the 1910s and 20s, the time I knew he had actually lived in the house. The most striking picture on any of these pages was a small snapshot of a very young man, standing in front of what must be the same copper beech which still graces the garden (the corner of the house is just visible in the background). He is dressed in a fairly close-fitting white jumper and trousers, and is loosely holding a cricket bat. His hair (hard to judge the colour in faded black and white) is sticking up slightly at the back, and he looks a bit startled, as if he has only just noticed the photographer and hasn’t made up his mind yet. There is no hint of a smile on his lips, but although the overall impression is of someone a little lost, he does not look unhappy about it.

The person who compiled the scrapbook has titled it ‘cricket in the garden, 1920s’, but there is no indication who the boy might be and who else was at the cricket (I don’t think Attwater played). The other photos on the same page are no help. One shows a whippet-like dog lying alert on the steps to the front door, the other a woman getting out of a car in front of the same steps. This one is out of place, since judging by the car and style of dress, it was taken some years before the war. Under it the same hand has written ‘Lady Attwater visiting her son’. Clearly whoever was kind enough to create this book for their guests wasn’t going to be put off by a lack of knowledge. The family resemblance confirms that the woman in the photograph is indeed Attwater’s mother, but the Grand Duchess was never Lady Attwater. Remarkably, to judge from the rest of the available documentation, the new owners of the house appear not to have known about their predecessor’s origins. So where finding more about Attwater was concerned, all this wasn’t much use. But the photo of the boy was intriguing. It was also coming unstuck at one corner, and it was the easiest thing in the world to tease loose another and see if there was anything written on the back. There was, in a small neat script I had already come to recognise:

Pip, May 1920

Detaching it completely, I brought the photograph into the manageress’s office, begged the use of the scanner they do not admit to having, and made a copy of both sides. I then cut out the copy, pasted it into the scrapbook, and tucked the original print in one of Attwater’s notebooks. Well, I thought that was where it belonged.