Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that proving a negative is as good as a positive.
For the best part of a fortnight we (AI & I) [If you say that in a swing rhythm sort of way it does sound like one of those inane choruses in a Eurovision failure) have been working on a piece of micro-research into my long-ignored thesis on Huxley from 50 years ago.
I have fixated on a footnote, and on the person who is the subject of that footnote. The relatively famous bit of my literary concern is linked to Huxley’s first (published) novel Crome Yellow. The footnote mentions someone who as far as I was concerned was lost to history.
Not lost if you have the will and the time to delve. Very gradually the character (indeed he was a character in the Peacockian novel that Huxley wrote) began to emerge from the shadows of forgetfulness.
We knew that he was a Rector, and a Rector of the parish of Garsington at the time of Lady Ottoline Morell and her coterie of the literary and the famous, but everyone else in the novel was much more famous than he, and their reputations have largely survived from the dizzy days of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – together with representatives from a generation that was somewhat older. Researching the others was easy – I have books on them. But the humble Rector was not so easy to ¡find out about.
So the search began. American born-again fundamentalist on-line libraries actually had copies of some of the book that the rector had written – apocalyptic consideration of some of the more sensational books of the bible looking forward to The End Days – spiritual catnip to the Evangelical Right Wing of those who call themselves Christians.
Of course, the tract that I wanted, and which Huxley had allegedly used as the basis for a whole chapter in his novel, was NOT online and so the hunt for a copy somewhere began.
As we began to draw up some sort of biography for the rector, we discovered that he invented a ‘stay’ for a bell – this stay allowed the bell to be . . . well, I did go into the details of what the thing did and looked up a whole vocabulary of bell ringing to try and understand its function and even when onto the website of an old foundry that had used the damn thing extensively, until another fragment suggested that the guy who invented this device was not the guy that we were researching. Suddenly a whole fascinating aspect of the rector’s personality was snatched away.
Such is the state of the information available on line, even though we are now questioning the previous attribution, we are not absolutely sure and so instead of dismissing a week of work, we have put an academic question mark next to it: awaiting further clarification.
I have now contacted the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, and Oxfordshire History Archive, a foundry, a bellringers society, and numerous other sources all from the comfort of my computer in Castelldefells. My questions and requests have been sent to locations in three continents, to booksellers, enthusiasts, and academics.
Self-indulgence personified!
And, you never know, there might be some answers.
Eventually!
