The Calligrapher
A gripping story of modern-day love and old-fashioned revenge. He is not quite as clever as he thinks he is. She is smarter than she seems.Jasper thinks that he has found the perfect life. A world-class calligrapher and a serial seducer, he is happily transcribing the immortal songs and sonnets of John Donne for his wealthy patron. But when a shameless infidelity catches up with him, things begin to unravel. Worse still, one afternoon the perfect woman turns up beneath his studio window and he realises that he will have to abandon everything to win her.Brilliantly written, stylish and very funny, ‘The Calligrapher’ is about the difference between men and women, about deception and honesty, and the timeless pursuit of love.
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THE
CALLIGRAPHER
EDWARD DOCX
To Emma
‘Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit;’
John Donne
‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of
durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.’
Vladimir Nabokov
‘He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all –” ’
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Contents
12 The Dream (‘Image of her …’)
28 A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day
I might as well confess up front that I am in league with the Devil. It’s not a big deal – a stint of social nihilism here, a stretch of marital sabotage there – and I’m afraid it goes with the job. Seek for long enough and you will find that most human pursuits have a patron saint; but, of all the arts in the world, only calligraphy has a patron demon. His name is Titivillus. And he is a malicious little bastard.
Imagine a medieval monastery – somewhere in the high Pyrenees, say, with a great arched gate and tall white stone walls. In one corner of the cloistered courtyard there is a tower. Up the spiral staircase, nearer to the light and away from the damp, is usually to be found a large, round room. This is the scriptorium. And here, seated on stools, bent over their desks, arranged in a horseshoe around the senior supervisor, the armarius, are the monks.
In their right hands they have quills, and in their left they hold their knives. They work in silence and the only sound is their breathing and the continual rasp of their nibs across vellum. Despite their elevation, the light is dim and the older brothers are squinting. But there is no question of burning a fire or even a candle because the safety of the rare and sacred manuscripts is far more important than the monks’ mere earthly comfort.
Every so often, one of the brothers will raise his hand to signal the armarius to bring him additional quills, another pot of ink or some more skins. The knife, a treasured possession, will be used to pin down the undulating page at the point of writing as well as to sharpen the pen (hence pen-knife); but now and then, and with a bite of his lip, a monk will also have to use it to scratch out a mistake.
These mistakes are what Titivillus lives for.
He is a short, low-ranking demon, with a pot belly and a puckered, petulant face. Most of the day, he skulks about the corners of the scriptorium, sometimes sitting on his swag bag, other times scratching at his pointed ears or picking his nose with his stubby fingers, but he is always watching, always alert. Best of all he likes those errata that neither monks nor proof-readers notice and that survive in the new manuscript unchecked, to be reproduced by the next generation of scribes; but slips of the pen so big that the calligrapher must start the entire page again are also welcome – because these set back the Work of God.
Every night, after it has become too dark for the monks to continue and they have left the scriptorium for vespers, Titivillus carefully collects all the mistakes into his sack and drags them down to Hell, there to present them to the Devil so that each sin can be registered in a book – against the name of the monk responsible – to be read out on Judgement Day.
These unsatisfactory (some would say unfair) arrangements continued for more or less a thousand years – until the Renaissance flared across Europe and the calligrapher’s lot began to turn from bad to worse. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the monks found themselves being forced to work at a furious pace, on and on into the darkness in order to meet the ferocious demand for manuscript copies from the newly founded universities. Before long, sick of the blind rush, the brothers were desperately looking for ways to evade responsibility for the burgeoning number of flaws in their work and so save their ever-more imperilled souls.
Now Titivillus saw his chance.
He offered the holy scribes an eternal bargain: personal absolution from their sins in return for a secret guarantee that the number of mistakes would continue to increase dramatically. As the errors were already out of control, the monks gladly agreed.
Thus Titivillus became the patron demon of calligraphers: he kept their sins hidden and he rescued them from Hell.
Human endeavour, however, was having one of its periodic sprints, and by 1476 William Caxton (who learnt his filthy disgusting ways in Cologne) had set up his printing press in Westminster. All too soon, it looked as though Titivillus’s deal was worthless.
