The Course of the Heart (1992) is my favorite novel by M. John Harrison. It remixes at least four of his short stories that I've been able to identify—"The Great God Pan," "Small Heirlooms," "The Quarry," and a few stray glints from "The Incalling"—with Gnostic magic and chronic illness and the fall of Constantinople and the history of the twentieth century and things that are at once beautiful and terrifying and mundane, like flowering blackthorn, novels in progress, and the smell of roses. The unnamed narrator is probably no more unreliable than Harrison's usual, although I find him sadder than similar figures in "Anima" or Light. Surfacing throughout his narrative are passages from the supposed work of Michael Ashman, "a minor travel writer who had walked across Europe in the late Thirties," apparently as obsessed as two of the protagonists with chronicling the aftereffects of the Coeur, the mysterious kingdom that existed once in the overlap between the World and the Pleroma, whose devastating fall in the fourteenth century is the original of every lost country of the past, echoing and re-echoing through Constantinople, Burgundy, the Wars of the Roses, even, these characters believe, into the wreckage of the present day.
For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later 'Michael of Anjou'), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog . . . "What had happened? The Coeur would no longer let itself be known, though it did not perhaps breathe its final breath in the world until they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head."
An entire genealogy constructs itself between the last Empress of the Coeur and Pam Stuyvesant, who along with the narrator and her sometime-husband Lucas Medlar participated decades ago in a ritual that neither of them can recollect, except that it involved the Pleroma and a disturbing magician named Yaxley and it has left all of them haunted in different ways, only some of which they speak about. Instead they tell each other the story of the Fall of the Heart, the two well-attested sons of the Empress and her "shadowy daughter, whose name may have been Phoenissa," their increasingly quotidian descendants who can still be tracked through the world whenever "the Coeur flare[s] up again like a firework in the genetic material of its heirs":
"He died in 1638. His sons Leo and Theodore fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. With them—though Theodore, falling among the Royalists at Naseby, was said to have cried out, 'Oh, the shiny armor!'—the Coeur withdraws itself again. Leo, less of a lion than his brother, became a pineapple planter in Barbados. Towards the end of his life he was warden of his parish church, and you can see his grave there as Michael Ashman claims to have done. Of his son Constantine we know nothing at all except that he came back to live near Bristol, where he changed his name to St. Ives, married twice, and left a daughter to whom he gave the eerie name of Godscall: this little girl, traditionally, is the last of them.
"Whatever happened to her, she carried in her bones the cup, the map, the mirror—the real heritage of the Empress, the real Clue to the Heart."
Last night I started reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958). It got off to a bit of a rocky start with me,1 but then I ran into this passage right before I fell asleep:
I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster's mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire. The last emperor—Constantine XI Palaeologus Vatatses—died fighting in the breach on the day the imperial city was captured by Mohammed II. In another book I have told the story of the tomb of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados, whose granddaughter, Godscall Palaeologue, vanishes from historic record as a little orphan girl in Stepney or Wapping, her father having died at Corunna in 1692. Her imperial descent is based on the supposition that the emperor was survived by a third brother, a shadowy figure called John, as well as by the historically verified Thomas and Demetrius, joint despots of Mistra. There is no point in retracing here the slender putative thread of his line through Italy, Holland, Cornwall, Barbados, Spain and the East End of London. If John existed, which is open to question, this little girl may have been the last imperial princess of the house of Palaeologue. Alas, at the end of the seventeenth century she disappeared forever into the mists and fogs of the London Docks.
My knowledge of Byzantine history is comparatively crap: I had not realized there were such clear originals for the Coeur and its Heirs. I had actually thought of Leigh Fermor when I encountered Harrison's Ashman, because I had read Between the Woods and the Water (1986), but I had assumed it was my limited exposure to travel literature of the mid-thirties. I love finding this sort of thing out. Also, I'm glad someone did something with that kind of haunting loose end of history, even if I learned of it in reverse.
1. Seriously, Jews in Greece are not that exotic. On the other hand, the frontispiece is a pen-drawing of the legend of Thessalonike: a split-tailed siren with a ship in one hand and an anchor in the other, asking ποῦ εἴναι ὁ Μεγαλέξανδρος;;—Where is Alexander the Great?? The correct answer is helpfully written on the same page: ὁ Μεγαλέξανδρος ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει, Alexander the Great lives and is king still. She was his half-sister, before she threw herself into the sea. She'll sink your ship if you tell her he's dead. That's a good way to start a book.
For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later 'Michael of Anjou'), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog . . . "What had happened? The Coeur would no longer let itself be known, though it did not perhaps breathe its final breath in the world until they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head."
An entire genealogy constructs itself between the last Empress of the Coeur and Pam Stuyvesant, who along with the narrator and her sometime-husband Lucas Medlar participated decades ago in a ritual that neither of them can recollect, except that it involved the Pleroma and a disturbing magician named Yaxley and it has left all of them haunted in different ways, only some of which they speak about. Instead they tell each other the story of the Fall of the Heart, the two well-attested sons of the Empress and her "shadowy daughter, whose name may have been Phoenissa," their increasingly quotidian descendants who can still be tracked through the world whenever "the Coeur flare[s] up again like a firework in the genetic material of its heirs":
"He died in 1638. His sons Leo and Theodore fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. With them—though Theodore, falling among the Royalists at Naseby, was said to have cried out, 'Oh, the shiny armor!'—the Coeur withdraws itself again. Leo, less of a lion than his brother, became a pineapple planter in Barbados. Towards the end of his life he was warden of his parish church, and you can see his grave there as Michael Ashman claims to have done. Of his son Constantine we know nothing at all except that he came back to live near Bristol, where he changed his name to St. Ives, married twice, and left a daughter to whom he gave the eerie name of Godscall: this little girl, traditionally, is the last of them.
"Whatever happened to her, she carried in her bones the cup, the map, the mirror—the real heritage of the Empress, the real Clue to the Heart."
Last night I started reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958). It got off to a bit of a rocky start with me,1 but then I ran into this passage right before I fell asleep:
I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster's mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire. The last emperor—Constantine XI Palaeologus Vatatses—died fighting in the breach on the day the imperial city was captured by Mohammed II. In another book I have told the story of the tomb of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados, whose granddaughter, Godscall Palaeologue, vanishes from historic record as a little orphan girl in Stepney or Wapping, her father having died at Corunna in 1692. Her imperial descent is based on the supposition that the emperor was survived by a third brother, a shadowy figure called John, as well as by the historically verified Thomas and Demetrius, joint despots of Mistra. There is no point in retracing here the slender putative thread of his line through Italy, Holland, Cornwall, Barbados, Spain and the East End of London. If John existed, which is open to question, this little girl may have been the last imperial princess of the house of Palaeologue. Alas, at the end of the seventeenth century she disappeared forever into the mists and fogs of the London Docks.
My knowledge of Byzantine history is comparatively crap: I had not realized there were such clear originals for the Coeur and its Heirs. I had actually thought of Leigh Fermor when I encountered Harrison's Ashman, because I had read Between the Woods and the Water (1986), but I had assumed it was my limited exposure to travel literature of the mid-thirties. I love finding this sort of thing out. Also, I'm glad someone did something with that kind of haunting loose end of history, even if I learned of it in reverse.
1. Seriously, Jews in Greece are not that exotic. On the other hand, the frontispiece is a pen-drawing of the legend of Thessalonike: a split-tailed siren with a ship in one hand and an anchor in the other, asking ποῦ εἴναι ὁ Μεγαλέξανδρος;;—Where is Alexander the Great?? The correct answer is helpfully written on the same page: ὁ Μεγαλέξανδρος ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει, Alexander the Great lives and is king still. She was his half-sister, before she threw herself into the sea. She'll sink your ship if you tell her he's dead. That's a good way to start a book.
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