The Judges of the Secret Court (3 page)

Likewise the cold-eyed epigram, the summary judgment, the revealing aside to the reader, that in pulp novels make for rapid storytelling. “She was a tough nut to crack, chiefly because there wasn't much inside her,” writes Bud Clifton. The reader turning the pages of a Western or crime novel can be expected not to take notice of these common tricks, but Stacton refines them in his other novels into a highly individual and supple method impossible
not
to notice. In
Judges
the aphorisms eventually come to seem just as much a part of the material and sensory fabric of the story, just as
physical
, as the crush of spent matches underfoot, or the smell of violet pomade in Edwin Stanton's beard, or the bells rung for Lincoln, “solemn, insistent, and unnecessary.” Because the story shaped by them is a true one, they have a different role than in the crime fiction. Are they just? Are they
so
, in the light of these actual events? They make us restive; we shy away from the bleakest ones. Reflective, contingent, hidden from the characters themselves, it is these summations, not Stanton's certainties or the thoughts of Lincoln or even the perspectives of history, that are the judgments of the secret court.

David Stacton died at the age of forty-four, in a small town in Denmark. The Danish medical examiner first named the cause as a heart attack, then later as “unknown.” If Stacton ever gains or regains the stature as a writer I think he deserves, his brief life in all its disguises and ambiguities will be a biographer's torment and delight. His oeuvre, unlike his foreshortened life, is necessarily complete: as with Mozart's or Keats's, the work can be seen to have a shape, a progress, a youth, and a maturity that the creator himself doesn't. Not until Stacton's work is easily available as a whole can that shape be discerned, the influences on it sorted out, and Stacton given a place in the American canon. It could be guessed now that that place will be as outlier, his books seen as an intersection of certain modes of popular fiction with a unique sensibility, appearing from the first fully formed and unchanging over time. (Compare, say, Thomas Love Peacock, or—Slavitt's hint—Ronald Firbank.) Perhaps—as undoubtedly queer (in the original sense) as they are—their fanship will always be narrow, though intense. But that judgment is not for us to make; the court of literary fame and obscurity is secret, and though there is pardon there is no appeal.

—J
OHN
C
ROWLEY

[1]
Time
reviews and articles were at that time unsigned.

[2]
I first learned what I know of Stacton's life, his career, and the reception his books received from Robert Nedelkoff, an independent researcher and Stacton devotee.

[3]
“David Stacton,”
Hollins Critic
(December, 2002).

for Philip Bagby,

gentleman, scholar, Virginian,

and the best of good friends

Obit
1958

to remember him

Gramercy Park is the most wistful and the gentlest of the New York squares, and the Players Club is one of the handsomest buildings in it. But the man who once lived in that house had the face of an exalted Punch. Not even he knew quite how he had come to look like that. Yet, since he recognized the resemblance, he spent his life these days not in the present, but the past, trying to define to himself— though never to others, for he had great dignity—that moment when fear had become resignation, and resignation the patience and the will to die. Except for his daughter, Edwina, he wanted no more Booths.

Down the corridor, outside the room of his now dead friend Barrett, with whom he had quarrelled, consoled, and acted for so long, there was an aeolian harp. He refused to have it removed.

At unexpected times, when a gust of wind blew through the top floor corridor, the harp would hum to life. Then he would say: “Listen, Barrett's coming.” People would think that remark part of his premature senility. But it wasn't. It wasn't even irony, for though he was a gentle man, he had not the education or the character to take refuge in irony. It was just a fantasy. He was not unduly given to a belief in God; he was willing to accept death as final; but he found it a little warming on a cold day to think that there might be someone waiting for him, and Barrett, at least, had always been fond of him, despite their quarrels.

For everything had been taken away from him. Even more as a man than as an actor, he had been forced to lead too many lives.

Yet despite the watchful sadness of that face, Edwin Booth was an amiable man, the doyen of his profession, respected and well liked. It was not, the world felt, his fault. The world had forgotten all about it. Neither did he feel it was; but he had not forgotten all about it, so there were some things he preferred to remain silent about, some things he could not find a name for, and so could not dismiss.

In 1892 he found a name for them.

That was a year before his death. For several years he had lived at the Players Club, on the top floor. Now his daughter was married, the members of the club were all the family he had. The club itself gave him somewhere to go. That was one reason why he had founded it.

He was only fifty-eight, but life had left him feeble. He dined downstairs in the club restaurant. Once or twice a year he went to the theatre, as though he were visiting an unfamiliar country. Occasionally, very occasionally, he went for a short stroll about the square, an almost transparent figure, a little hesitant about the next step, but with nothing hesitant about the eyes.

Sometimes, alone, he looked in the mirror and saw nothing but that pair of eyes. Like poor Johnny, who had abused his voice, and so could not use it, he could no longer speak with ease. But he could see.

The Sargent portrait, which by illusion showed him in his prime, hung over the mantelpiece in the common room downstairs. At nine o'clock he sailed upstairs, in the invalid lift they had installed for him, to the top floor. Up there, in the empty room overlooking the park, were the real memorabilia of life as he had had to live it, even more elusive, if anything, than the tactful epitome Mr. Sargent had created downstairs. There was even a portrait of Johnny, tucked away in the alcove beside his bed.

On this particular night he could not sleep, and neither could he settle on anything to read. He found the room overcrowded and oppressive, and even the reassuring presence of someone, at least, in the house, for it could not be called a home, downstairs in the public rooms, did not help, as he had designed it to do.

He did not want to think. He did not even want to look at all these cluttered images of his own past on the walls. So he settled down to the works of Miss Althea Lathrop Lee.

It was about midnight. Miss Althea Lathrop Lee (Mrs. Henry Ferguson Lee, as her covering letter explained), who had known his sister Asia in London (not very well, he imagined. Nobody had known Asia well), had sent him a verse drama in five acts.

Goodness only knew why. He was retired and he had no influence. Nor did he enjoy the thought of reading it, for he was a tragedian by profession. He had played all the standard Shakespearian parts and a good many melodramatic ones besides, for bread and butter. Richelieu, for instance, or Sir Giles Overreach in
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
. He knew very well what to make of a verse drama in five acts.

Essentially the play was the story of a beautiful Protestant girl who defied Torquemada. The hero, since it was a tragedy, died in act five. The heroine, except, no doubt, in the dressing table mirror of Mrs. Henry Ferguson Lee, could scarcely be said to live at all.

He had not been concentrating on her unrhymed pish-tush for an hour, he realized. He had only been turning the pages. But the title she had given it haunted him. She had called it
The Judges of the Secret Court
.

Why had he never thought of that before? For that was what had given him that look of a terrified Punch, and now the resignation of a scarecrow worn out and thrown away: he had seen the Judges of the Secret Court.

Yet no one sees them. Rather he had become aware of them.

He had always been aware of them, even before Johnny; even before he had had to give up everything to become the keeper of that untrained bear, his father. It was something all the Booths were aware of, those judges.

They made everything so simple. For if we are too selfless to believe in God, and yet remain somehow devout, we are very much aware of the Judges of the Secret Court. We cannot see them, nor do we know who or what they are. But they are there: the whole world is a courtroom, every life is a trial; if we are guilty, we stand there condemned; if we are innocent, for the
procès
is French, we have to prove it. But who can prove it? for in fact no man is innocent at that bar. He is always accessory, willynilly, before or after some fact.

Nor is the guilt apparent, even afterwards, in our sense, for no sentence is ever passed, no jury sits, no judgment is handed down. It is merely that we plead, we plead, we plead. Because, compared to our factual crimes, the rape of the soul seems to us no more than petty theft, there is no jury to appeal to. There is not even a Supreme Court, to set a precedent by means of any single case it may judge apt to define the law. For there is no law. There are only the judges, cold, remote, and indifferent, though not without a certain pawky humour, who sift papers, peer down at us, yawn with boredom, cannot even hear us, and no doubt reach an exact, impartial decision of which we never learn, but which we suspect seldom if ever agrees with our own or the world's view of the case.

He had spent his whole life in that courtroom, with his family, with his acquaintance, and with himself, which was worst of all. His walls were hung with exhibitions for the prosecution, except that there is no prosecution, just as there is no defence. They were all guilty. They were guilty of being themselves. So they would have been pulled down in any case.

The actual count did not matter, for the debate before that Presidium turns not upon what one does, but what one is. Yet, though no one ever mentioned the matter in his presence, he knew that for convenience, to himself and to the world, if not perhaps to the Secret Judges, the evidence was focused upon that one day, 14th April 1865. And upon Johnny, who would be a gentleman, but was only a Randy Dan.

For even now he could not bear to think of Johnny, portrait by his bed or no.

He could see it now: they were a little mad, the Booths, though each in a different way. For like the Sephardic Jews, in the London their father had fled from, and their father was the maddest of the lot, they would be gentry when they were not, and therefore they lived apart, in a world of their own, where the pretence was actual, and made forays into the other world, the unreal one the rest of us live in, only to fetch supplies, going down into the world as the rest of us go to the village, to do their shopping, and perhaps to prove to the tenants that the master was still alive.

It was Junius Brutus the Elder who had begun all that. He was mad as a hatter, but just as lovable, and what in another man would have been called insanity, the children and their mother conspired to call “your father's indisposition”.

“Your father is not himself today,” Mary Ann would tell them, and for that matter tell the world, except that the world knew it already, and that Mary Ann seldom ventured any farther from home than Baltimore.

They had a great deal to forget, the Booths, but they never forgot their roles, any more than their father did, and for three generations they always played the same parts. Shakespeare was where they belonged; to them those plays were a corridor of mirrors, redecorated by Cibber and Garrick, and for “your father is not himself today”, they automatically supplied the two apposite definitions of “Richard is himself again”, and “I am myself alone”.

And they could all remember their Grandfather Richard, a pretentious drunk, cowered by expatriation and the excesses of his own son, stalking them down. The longer he was dead, the stronger became their one residuary image of him, tall and crapulous, stalking them through the dark house, in the clothes of a gentleman of thirty years ago, musty and foodstained, but for some reason without shoes, his untrimmed toenails clacking against the rough boards of the flooring, so they always knew when he was coming to accuse them in the dark, but had no way to stop him, even after his death, for in their nightmares they could still hear him approach.

He had had such burning eyes. They all had burning eyes.

Even as a child Edwin, and only Edwin, had guessed what they would come to. The knowledge gave him the most haunted eyes of the lot. For, being the sanest, he was the worse concerned with their insanity; the most detached, he could best see what it was that happened on a stage. He had watched his father often enough from the wings to know, even as a child, that the stage is a naked parable. It does not make us, but it shows us, what we are. From
Julius Caesar
and
Richard III
, his father had come soon enough to the madness of
King Lear
. In the repertoire there is a part waiting for everyone, his own part, from which, once he has reached it, he can never escape. He did not want to see those parts discovered. He certainly did not want to see his own.

Yet on the stage or off, they played their parts. His sister Asia was already Cordelia, and always would be. His mother, though she meant well, and he was fond of her, was already as ominous as Queen Margaret in
Richard III
, and as unreal to him. And he had been thrust on the stage, whether he would or no, first through the drunkenness of his father, and then, in the Gold Fields of California, because there was no other trade he knew.