The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [153]
54 From here the novel descends into bathetic implausibility and stock literary referentiality: the lovers find each other again, and eventually walk hand in hand into Byron’s lake at Newstead Abbey in an act of liebestod! A modern-day Hero and Leander! Or Tristan and Isolde or Rosmer and Rebecca! (Or, in real life, Heinrich Kleist and Henriette Vogel, Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte, Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia, et al.)
Here is what I suspect occurred, based on NXB’s second recurring dream, various drug-induced hallucinations, and medical records from Queen’s Hospital in Nottingham. When Miss Teresa Crandall was nineteen, doctors found a marble-sized lump in her breast, which a biopsy showed was cancerous. Subsequent tests revealed that the cancer had spread to her spine and liver, which meant that surgery could not fully remove it. She was referred to Dr. Evelyn Nichols at Queen’s for chemotherapy. Tests on the tumour showed that it was insensitive to hormones—which ruled out the blocker Tamoxifen. A scan showed that three tumorous deposits had spread from the breast to the bones in the neck, and four to the liver. With aggressive chemotherapy, it was possible to shrink these metastatic deposits, but no amount of radiation would destroy every cancer cell in her body. The prognosis was dire, in other words. The treatment would be palliative; at most, she had two years to live.
NXB’s second recurring dream, and several of his hallucinations, contain a powerful sequence of him running away from a building, sometimes a church, sometimes a town hall. During one hallucination, induced by phencyclidine, the once-lionised actor and author scrawled the following words on the laboratory floor:
Mr. and Mrs. Galahad Santlal
are obliged to recall their invitation
to the marriage of their daughter
Teresa Crandall
to
Norval Blaquière
as the latter is a vile, black-hearted bastard
According to my researchers, the Registrar of Camden Town Hall is certain that NXB did not show up for the wedding ceremony, and equally certain that Miss Crandall did. After her tests at the hospital, she boarded the train to London as promised. NXB was doubtless hiding in a bar, or brothel. He cravenly backed out of his own wedding, in other words. And when he reconsidered, and returned to Hucknall unannounced a year later, it was too late. A week before he arrived, Teresa Crandall took her own life.
NXB’s inability to commit is thus not related to his mother’s betrayal, as NB conjectures, or to a girlfriend’s, as SD believes. It relates to his own betrayal.
55 NXB was about to say “Claude Jutras” (see note 14). By a grim coincidence, Alois Alzheimer discovered the disease exactly one century ago, after performing an autopsy on the brain of the once-fair “Augusta D,” a woman in her fifty-sixth year from Frankfurt.
56 See note 9. As indicated in the Foreword, I am leaving this and other instances of calumny intact, as they enrich the psychological portrait of NXB. With regard to his earlier comments on Lord Byron, I should point out that NXB suffers from “created dramatic identity syndrome,” a form of schizophrenia, modelling his behaviour on, or assuming the identity of, certain historical or fictional figures. He has moved, for example, from Astérix, Baudelaire and Poe in his childhood to fin-de-siècle Decadents in his twenties, to Regency rakes in his thirties. See my Le Double psychologique en art: de Cervantes à Cocteau (Memento Vivere, 2000), in which, en passant, I compare NXB with Rameau’s nephew, whom