The Gap in the Curtain

THE GAP IN THE CURTAIN

JOHN BUCHAN led a truly extraordinary life: he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician, publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perth in 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took a scholarship to Oxford. During his time there – ‘spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery’ – he wrote two historical novels, one of them being A Lost Lady of Old Years.

In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George’s Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan’s literary output was remarkable – thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers – ‘shockers’ as he called them – were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.

John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.

STUART KELLY is an author, broadcaster and writer for Scotsman Publications and the Guardian. He is the author of Scott-land and The Book of Lost Books, and has contributed to The Decadent Handbook, Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and the Scottish Government’s Introducing Scottish Literature.

This ebook edition published in 2012 by

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First published in 1932 by Hodder & Stoughton

Introduction copyright © Stuart Kelly, 2012

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-238-2

Print ISBN: 978-1-84697-224-9

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Introduction

The Gap in the Curtain is such an odd novel – a hybrid of social satire, political intrigue and science-fiction thriller, as if H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and the Anthony Trollope of the Palliser novels had attempted a collaboration – that it could only have come from an equally multifaceted man. Memorably described as a ‘Presbyterian Cavalier’ by biographer Andrew Lownie, John Buchan was fifty-six when The Gap in the Curtain was published in 1932. He had produced a best-selling novel each year since 1921, was an MP, representing the Combined Scottish Universities, and had, that year, been made a Companion of Honour to George V. His position, socially and critically, was secure enough to allow him to experiment; and the result is both the weirdest and most quintessentially Buchan-esque of his novels.

The Gap in the Curtain takes the form of a long prologue and then five distinct but interconnected novellas narrated by Sir Edward Leithen, who was introduced in The Power House and had also appeared in John Macnab and The Dancing Floor. It opens at Lady Flambard’s Whitsuntide house-party in the Cotswolds, where Leithen mordantly notes the difference between the participants: ‘we were the oddest mixture of the fresh and the blasé, the carefree and the careworn’. Among the saturnine guests are Leithen himself, the financier Arnold Tavanger, the politician David Mayot, the love-lorn Charles Ottery and a newcomer, Sir Robert Goodeve. All of them, along with Reggie Daker, a charming young gadabout who managed to fall from his horse and sustain a mild concussion, are invited to participate in an experiment proposed by one of the other guests: the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Professor August Moe. Moe, it transpires, has discovered a method to see the future. Each of the subjects catches a glimpse of The Times for the tenth of June, one year hence. The five novellas reveal how each of the men deal with the scrap of foresight: Tavanger has seen news of a major merger; Mayot has seen a political leader – referring to someone as Prime Minister who is not Prime Minister at the moment; Reggie will apparently be leaving on a trip to Yucatan; and Goodeve and Ottery see their obituaries. The conceit allows Buchan to explore many of his favourite themes; most notably, the nature of courage.

The idea of acquiring knowledge of the future provides unique challenges and opportunities to an author. In 2009/10, one of the most talked-about new television series had exactly the same premise as Buchan’s novel. FlashForward, based on a 1999 novel by the sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer, posited a global moment of precognition, where the sober FBI detective experienced himself drunk and hunted, the faithful wife found herself with another man and some people saw nothing at all. The series producers lacked the gift they gave their characters: it was cancelled after a single season. Nevertheless, the series posited the same kinds of emotional responses as Buchan does. Does one embrace the future, attempt to elude it, work to cause it, try to change it or simply resign oneself to it? FlashForward’s explanation for the phenomenon involved such modern concepts as quantum entanglement and Buchan was no less cutting-edge when it came to providing an intellectual architecture to his story.

Professor Moe – his name, incidentally, means tired, weary or jaded in Dutch – is never, thankfully, explicit about his procedure, nor can Leithen make much sense of the graphs and equations with which he is confronted. The process involves meditation, a kind of tincture, avoiding eating anything which once ‘possessed automobility’, some speculations on brain physiology and – a point which is, I think, crucial and to which we will return – the fact (concealed from the subjects) that Moe will die during their transport. The departure of his soul is the rending of the veil that provides the gap in the curtain.

Moe’s views about the nature of time have a more immediate source. In 1927, an Irish aeronautical engineer called J. W. Dunne published An Experiment with Time where he recorded instances of precognition, premonitory dreaming and déjà vu, and then sought to explain these occurrences through a new theory of time. Dunne believed that the ‘flow’ of time was a by-product of human consciousness and that in fact, past, present and future existed in a simultaneous state. Sally Flambard in Buchan’s novel summarises Dunne and Moe’s position: ‘He thinks that Time is not a straight line but full of coils and kinks. He says the future is here with us now, if we only knew how to look for it.’ Like Moe, Dunne believed that hypnagogic states were conducive to dislocating the observer from normal modes of perceiving time, and that, as Leithen says, ‘it involved many new dimensions’. ‘Time – all time – is with us now’ is Moe’s succinct description of his insight, and it exactly matches that of J. W. Dunne.

Dunne’s work attracted the attention of other authors at the time. J. B. Priestley’s plays, Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here Before (also 1937) all attempted to use Dunne’s more flexible concept of time to introduce both dramatic ironies and alternate time-lines. T. S. Eliot is sometimes thought to have been alluding to Dunne’s theories with the lines from Burnt Norton (1936): ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.’ It was a major influence on Jorge Luis Borges’ friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, by name in The Dream of Heroes (1954) and thematically in Morel’s Invention (1940). That Buchan had read Dunne seems hinted at when Leithen says he had ‘been reading lately about telegnosis’.

Buchan is too astute a novelist to take a current idea and naively use it as a premise for the more interesting human and moral aspects of a story, and this holds true for A Gap in the Curtain as well. Moe is almost preternatural from the beginning, ‘one of the biggest men I have ever seen’ with a curious lock of hair on an otherwise bald head. He has ‘the brooding power and the ageless wisdom of the Sphinx’. His illness, and power, are mentioned constantly; and it is his presence and then absence, more than the strictures on vegetarianism, the ‘intercalated cell’ and the ‘mildest drug . . . as innocuous as a glass of tonic water’ that triggers the action. Moe’s beliefs are referred to as ‘mystical’ as often as they are ‘scientific’; Leithen refers to the man himself as ‘demonic.

There had been a very famous previous book on seeing one’s own future. Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm was published in book form in 1919 as part of the collection, Seven Men. In it, ‘Beerbohm’ tells the story of a poet, the titular Enoch, who makes a pact with the Devil to go forward one hundred years, to 3 June 1997, from ten past two to seven, into the Round Reading Room of the British Library and read what future writers make of his work. All he can find is a single reference to a story by Max Beerbohm about ‘an immajnari karrakter kauld Enoch Soames – a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im!’ (an imaginary character called ‘Enoch Soames’ – a third-rate poet who believes himself a great genius and makes a bargain with the Devil in order to know what posterity thinks of him!) Beerbohm’s story is echoed in one of Buchan’s conclusions: ‘our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven . . . if he [man] knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup’.

Matters theological were definitely on Buchan’s mind as he wrote The Gap in the Curtain. In 1930 he had published, with George Adam Smith, The Kirk in Scotland. As James Robertson has observed, The Gap in the Curtain is a meditation on free will and predestination, with ‘Time’ being substituted for ‘God’, written by an author deeply imbued with Calvinist thinking. At the time of writing the novel, Buchan was an elder in St Columba’s Church, London, and would, the next year, become the King’s Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. That Buchan could take up that position was due, in part, to the 1929 reconciliation between the United Free Church of Scotland and the Church of Scotland; his father had been a Free Church minister. Although many of the contentious issues separating the Kirk and the Free Kirk had been matters of governance and patronage, the earliest theologians within the Free Kirk had been deeply influenced by scholastic Calvinism. Although Pamela gives a spirited defence of Free Will – when the depressed Charles says ‘You can’t stop what is to be by saying that it won’t be’ she replies ‘Yes, you can. That’s the meaning of Free Will" – the actual picture is rather more complicated.

In Predestination, Calvin wrote: ‘If God controls the purposes of men and turns their thoughts and exertions to whatever purpose he pleases, men do not therefore cease to form plans and to engage in this or the other undertaking. We must not suppose that there is a violent compulsion, as if God dragged them against their will; but in a wonderful and inconceivable manner he regulates all the movements of men, so that they still have exercise of their Will.’ In the Institutes, this is even more clear: ‘Man, though acted upon by God, at the same time still acts.’ A surface reading of The Gap in the Curtain would make the book seem utterly deterministic. All five of the prophetic visions will come true. But the manner in which they come true, and the responses of each of the five protagonists to their precognition, leaves ample room for Free Will as well. Any moral judgement of the characters depends on how they used their own Free Will within the context of the determined outcome they foresaw. Like the narrator of Eliot’s Dry Salvages, each of them could say ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’.

Tavanger has the universe’s only cast-iron piece of financial speculation; that a ‘combine’ will be announced. It gives him a new lease of life as he sets about acquiring as many shares as possible in one of the companies, only to realise that acquiring control of the companies without controlling the scientific processes that render them valuable is meaningless. He is Buchan’s great Stoic, for whom the game is almost more important than the prize. Although humbled, he neither regrets the adventures nor bemoans his missed chances. Another source lurking behind The Gap in the Curtain may be Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 poem ‘If . . .’, and Tavanger exemplifies the lines:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss:

By contrast, Mayot plays the arch-Machiavellian, using his insight that a new Prime Minister will be elected to manipulate the situation to his advantage. Mayot is by far the least likeable of the five – some of Buchan’s pronouncements on career politicians more given to currying favour than upholding principles might have been written about the 21st-century denizens of Westminster. Mayot does not realise that others have volition as well; and fails to imagine that one of his colleagues might have what is pointedly described by Buchan as ‘a vision like Paul on the road to Damascus’. Nevertheless, the experience is ironically educational. Another character, after the revelation, says of the chameleon-like politician, ‘I must say I rather respect him for backing his fancy so steadily. He was shrewd enough to spot the winner, but not the race it would win.’ Fate turns Mayot into a more honourable man than he actually was.

Reggie Daker’s narrative is a moment of comic relief, in a serious novel studded throughout with gleeful asides and pithy turns-of-phrase. Reggie’s first reaction to his premonition is simply to dismiss it as impossible: not only has he no intention of going to Yucatan, he has no intention of going anywhere. Reggie bears more than a passing similarity to Bertie Wooster, and his genius – ‘to make an art of English life’ – is co-opted by the mildly ferocious Verona Cortal and her family into a kind of mercantile, ersatz simulacrum. Almost as if to compensate for the rigorous Scottish inclination of the philosophical themes (Buchan wryly comments that one of the side-effects of Moe’s treatment is the participants lack a sense of humour or metaphor – they became ‘unconscious Caledonians’) Buchan revels in the Englishness of England throughout: the fly-fishing stretches, the hunts, the clubs, the house-parties, the stately piles, the sheer climate of England. Reggie, of course, by the end wants nothing more than to escape from the clutches of the Cortals, and heads straight off to Yucatan on a whim. He cannot escape his destiny, and could not imagine that he would embrace it so willingly.

Before turning to the two more sombre sections, it is worth noting what an exceptionally horsy novel The Gap in the Curtain is. Very early on, Leithen says, ‘It is easy enough to be a carthorse, and it is easy enough to be a race-horse, but it is difficult to be a cart-horse which is constantly being asked to take Grand National fences’, and almost every character is either on horseback or has equine images applied to them: Reggie – of course, a keen if incautious horseman – sees ‘a hint of fetters’ in Verona’s eyes; Charles snaps ‘the way a race-horse suddenly goes wrong’; Tavanger ‘wins the first race by a short head’; in the political debate the opposition ‘search out the joints in the harness’. It is not, I think, too speculative a leap to link the preponderance of equine imagery with Buchan’s Calvinistic approach to determinism: we can champ at the bit, but the ultimate direction is determined by the rider.

Goodeve’s section is by far the most melancholy, and in it Buchan anatomises the sin of despair. Goodeve is initially presented as the most interesting and attractive of the five characters, a progressive who maintains that one ‘must resist the pull of his ancestors’. By the end, he is alone, surrounded by portraits of those ancestors and self-committed to a death as untimely as theirs. That Buchan’s theology was fully worked out, and not merely an expedient narrative device, is proven by one almost heartless passage. Goodeve decides against taking a boat-trip – and dies on the expected day. Buchan notes that the boat he was due to sail on sank with all hands. The inevitability of destiny is writ large. Goodeve’s problem is that the foreknowledge of death leads him into anomie. His promising career comes to nothing – but there was nothing stopping him being even more promising in the time he had left. One of the book’s darkest deployments of euphemism and irony is Goodeve’s maiden speech as an MP. It is a triumphant success (as he knew it would be), but his career falters thereafter. He seems not to have realised that an obituary that only cited his maiden speech might be tactfully making a comment on the rest of his career. Goodeve’s only act of will is to will himself to death.

The section concerning Charles Ottery is a pendant to and refutation of Goodeve’s timor mortis. Charles is not less afraid of death, but his fear leads him through apathy into risk-taking, bravado, self-destructive indulgence, and finally, through love, to a great and profound serenity. Buchan writes: ‘His own predestined death had been put aside as too trivial for a thought, but now suddenly Death itself came to have no meaning.’ One does not require a strict diet, guru-like physicist and mysterious medicine to have an absolutely certain foreknowledge of one future event: that we will all die. The Gap in the Curtain is about this more than anything else. Buchan’s response is clear. Charles writes in his diary: ‘I have been an accursed coward’, and the words ‘courage’ and ‘brave’ occur more and more frequently towards the end. The old bore Folliot’s one saving grace in the novel is the realisation that the Goodeves can face death in hot blood but not with equanimity: ‘They had spirit, if you like, but not fortitude.’ The five studies offer versions of recklessness and endurance, fortitude and daring, and resolves on courage.

Buchan died eight years after publishing The Gap in the Curtain. In his professional life he would go on to some of his greatest achievements (the Governor Generalship of Canada, elevation to the peerage, and membership of the Privy Council). In his writerly life, he would still produce novels such as The Island of Sheep (the final Hannay novel), The House of the Four Winds (the last Dickson McCunn novel) and The Free Fishers (his farewell to historical fiction), as well as numerous biographies. But The Gap in the Curtain is like the opening notes of the finale. His most significant late work, and his last, Sick Heart River, brings back Sir Edward Leithen, this time facing death himself, and it seems to expand on and deepen part of the final section of The Gap in the Curtain. Charles Ottery decides during his year of wrestling with the inevitable that ‘if he went into the wilds he might draw courage from that primeval Nature which was all uncertainties and hazard. So in August he set off for Newfoundland alone’ – exactly what Leithen will do in that final, astonishing novel. In this novel so full of wit, ingenuity, intrigue and insight, the most memorable image is of the boat in the mist, with some passengers dancing to jazz music while others look out into the brume. Buchan had begun to look into the brume himself.

Stuart Kelly

2012

To

Sybil And Lambert Middleton

Contents

1. Whitsuntide at Flambard

2. Mr Arnold Tavanger

3. The Right Honourable David Mayot

4. Mr Reginald Daker

5. Sir Robert Goodeve

6. Captain Charles Ottery

ONE

Whitsuntide at Flambard

‘Si la conscience qui sommeille dans l’instinct se réveillait, s’il s’intériorisait en connaissance au lieu de s’extérioriser en action, si nous savions l’interroger et s’il pouvait répondre, il nous livrerait les secrets de la vie.’

BERGSON, Evolution Créatrice

‘But no!’ cried Mr Mantalini. ‘It is a demn’d horrid dream. It is not reality. No!’

DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby

Whitsuntide at Flambard

I

AS I took my place at the dinner-table I realised that I was not the only tired mortal in Lady Flambard’s Whitsuntide party. Mayot, who sat opposite me, had dark pouches under his eyes and that unwholesome high complexion which in a certain type of physique means that the arteries are working badly. I knew that he had been having a heavy time in the House of Commons over the Committee stage of his Factory Bill. Charles Ottery, who generally keeps himself fit with fives and tennis, and has still the figure of an athletic schoolboy, seemed nervous and out of sorts, and scarcely listened to his companion’s chatter. Our hostess had her mid-season look; her small delicate features were as sharp as a pin, and her blue eyes were drained of colour. But it was Arnold Tavanger farther down the table who held my attention. His heavy sagacious face was a dead mask of exhaustion. He looked done to the world and likely to fall asleep over his soup.

It was a comfort to me to see others in the same case, for I was feeling pretty near the end of my tether. Ever since Easter I had been overworked out of all reason. There was a batch of important Dominion appeals before the Judicial Committee, in every one of which I was engaged, and I had some heavy cases in the Commercial Court. Of the two juniors who did most of my ‘devilling’ one had a big patent-law action of his own, and the other was in a nursing-home with appendicitis. To make matters worse, I was chairman of a Royal Commission which was about to issue its findings, and had had to rewrite most of the report with my own hand, and I had been sitting as a one-man Commission in a troublesome dispute in the shipbuilding trade. Also I was expected to be pretty regularly in the House of Commons to deal with the legal side of Mayot’s precious Bill, and the sittings had often stretched far into the next morning.

There is something about a barrister’s spells of overwork which makes them different in kind from those of other callings. His duties are specific as to time and place. He must be in court at a certain hour. He must be ready to put, or reply to, an argument when he is called upon; he can postpone or rearrange his work only within the narrowest limits. He is a cog in an inexorable machine, and must revolve with the rest of it. For myself I usually enter upon a period of extreme busyness with a certain lift of spirit, for there is a sporting interest in not being able to see your way through your work. But presently this goes, and I get into a mood of nervous irritation. It is easy enough to be a