Back in No Time. Brion Gysin

sent him away advising him to recheck his figures for a few months. Dom Griphen came back later and said that he had made no mistake. He attempted to reassure the abbot, explaining that one could continue to divide the day into twenty-four hours, but that it was the day itself which was at fault and that threw the hours, minutes, and seconds out. A simple adjustment in the minutes, a fraction of a second here and there, would correct this age-old error. The abbot remained adamant. He could do nothing until Rome had spoken. Dom Griphen almost dared suspect that the abbot was trifling with him. He pleaded that the daily correction itself would not be too large; a trial ought to be given it.

      The abbot, however, considered the matter closed, and called one of the younger monks to him, ordering him to pursue his mathematical studies, and prepare himself to become an astronomer. He gave him his blessing and intimated that he hoped it would be possible to put the observatory into his hands before the equipment had become completely obsolete.

      It was some time before the monastery noticed any change in the habits of Dom Griphen. He considered the daily error to be a small one, but one in which he at least could not remain. He asked another monk, whose hobby was watchmaking, to make him a clock according to his specifications. The hands were to make two revolutions of the dial each day, but they were to move more quickly and clip a fraction off each hour. The clock would then tell the correct time: his correct time. When the clock was finished, he proceeded to live according to the time which it indicated. At first the difference was so minute that he appeared at meals or at devotions at the same time as his companions. Yet slowly and inexorably he parted from his fellows, drawn further and further away by time itself.

      At first he came a little early for some of the ceremonies, and then he began to come later and later for others. He came so late that he seemed to be coming early for still another duty, until there was no way in which one could check just which duty he was fulfilling. Soon the whisper went around, snatches of surmise gabbled from behind breviaries, harsh words said from the corners of pious mouths. Nevertheless, primitive people respect madness and pamper madmen, saying that they are blessed, and so it was within the monastery walls. Brother Griphen continued to live by his time. It played occasional tricks on him—but does it not play tricks on us all?

      As the brethren hurried along the cloisters to sing in the new day which begins after each midnight, they often met Dom Griphen with a candle going off to his lunch or breakfast. He sang vespers when they sang matins. His lauds and his antiphonies were indistinguishable. As the years rolled on, his time would nevertheless draw him, like some returning comet, back into their orbit, and for a while his actions would coincide with the pattern of their lives, until one day they would notice that he was moving off again to his midnight meals and sunlit sleep. He sometimes went and sang alone in the church as his clock bade him, and otherwise fulfilled his duties most scrupulously.

      He made great looping circles through the seemingly straight line of life in the monastery. He was an awesome creature, like a man from another planet, and I remember him well as in old age he shuffled around the drafty corridors or moved slowly over the gravel paths to his observatory.

      In spite of his double unworldliness, he was well aware of the younger monk, who was by now verging on middle age, to whom the abbot had given the mission of preparing himself to take over the observatory. He knew very well that this younger man was filled with only theoretical knowledge of the stars and filled too with a longing to get his hands on the telescope which Dom Griphen had never allowed him to touch. This idea filled his last years with rage and bitterness.

      One summer morning, three hours after sunrise, Dom Griphen walked through the monastery gardens with death holding his elbow. But even death could hold him upright no longer when he collapsed just inside the abbey church, where the monks were droning out their Latin hymns. He fell to the stone floor and died. The rival astronomer assisted those who carried him to his cell. This last charitable act, undertaken mainly because he had hoped to find the key to the observatory under the robes of the dead monk, was a mistake. As he looked toward the garden he saw a pillar of smoke rising straight up into the summer air, and by the time he reached the observatory, it was a furnace dripping hot metal. Dom Griphen had reversed the telescope, arranging the great magnifying glasses in such a way that by the time he had reached the church the first pale rays of the sun had converged on his papers and caused them to burst into flames. He had forestalled his rival.

      

To Master—A Long Goodnight:

      The Story of Uncle Tom, A Historical Narrative

      To Master—A Long Goodnight (1946) was Gysin’s first book, published by Eileen Garrett’s Creative Age Press in an edition of one thousand copies. After his transfer from the American paratroopers to the Canadian army during the war, he met Tex Henson, great-grandson of Josiah Henson, the real-life model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, who had settled in Ontario, Canada, and founded agricultural communities among the former slaves. Subtitled The Story of Uncle Tom, a Historical Narrative, the book draws on Henson’s own account of his life (written before the decline of his Canadian ventures, while he was still a touring phenomenon), as well as extensive additional research, in an effort to understand the measure of Henson’s complicity in what came to be seen as the negative representation of Uncle Tom. Covering Henson’s entire life till his death at a ripe old age, the narrative goes on to show how that image from the popular novel ultimately affected Henson’s own reception in the world, how the real life and the fiction intertwined as a lesson and warning for later generations.

      The book also stands as an early marker of Gysin’s lifelong interest in history, and his ability to make connections between different cultural and historical currents. His insight and sensitivity to the subject of race relations were rare for a white man at the time, perhaps a benefit of his non-American origins. As a result, the work gained him entry into black intellectual circles for years after. An appendix not excerpted here, “A History of Slavery in Canada,” made up the final third of the book.

Don’t Chase after Me

I’m on my way to CanadaWhere everyone is free.So Goodnight, Old Master,Don’t chase after me.—Slave Song

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      When this story was told by its hero, he called it Truth Stranger Than Fiction, for Harriet Beecher Stowe had modeled the principal character in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin upon an earlier account of his life. Under her hand a metamorphosis took place, in which the fictional character of Uncle Tom grew to such strength in the popular imagination of the troubled time that it shouldered aside, and seemed to condemn to obscurity, the human counterpart from which it had sprung. The man was robbed of his personality and almost of his name by a character in a novel, which came to be such a symbol of the inevitable struggle about to take place that those who lived too close to the event to be able to see it in perspective might well mistake the symbol for the cause.

      This book is about Uncle Tom, the man and the symbol, and inevitably, therefore, it is an attempt to analyze the society which created him. It is not a book against any individual; nor is it a book against the original Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson; but it is a book against the attitude to which the term, Uncle Tomism, has come to be applied. It was written in the army, in barracks before “lights out,” in hotels, in trains, and in those libraries which could be reached on weekend passes. For that reason there are undoubtedly faults of scholarship and lacunae in research, but there is no apology for the intention of the book, except inasmuch as it might be misconstrued by living members of the Henson family, some of whom were the author’s comrades in arms in the Canadian army. The writer wishes to assure them that no personal disrespect is intended and feels sure that a certain objectivity—a great deal of good along with some bad—will be found throughout the story.

      The life of Josiah Henson is illuminating because it shows how a man was formed in slavery and in freedom. Lewis Clark, himself an escaped slave and the author of a narrative from which Mrs. Stowe borrowed some of her material, said, “Slavery was a curious blend of force and concession; of arbitrary disposal by the master and self-direction by the slave; of tyranny and benevolence; of antipathy and affections.” The escape