conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Dollie, Melpham, Gilbert\'s entitled Anglo-Saxon Attitudes?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: The novel deals with the significance of two connected events that happened on the same day, long before the opening of the novel.\nThe first was the excavation of an ancient and valuable archaeological idol, a phallic figure unearthed from the tomb of an Anglo-Saxon bishop Eorpwald, known as the "Melpham excavation".\nGerald has long been haunted by a drunken revelation by his friend Gilbert, who was involved with this excavation, that the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated to embarrass Gilbert\'s father.\nGilbert told Gerald that he put the idol there.\nGerald, while feeling that his friend was telling the truth, pushed the matter to the back of his mind and tried to forget about it.\nHe now feels ashamed that he, a history professor, has never had the courage to try to resolve the matter one way or another.\nThe second is that Gerald Middleton fell in love with Dollie, Gilbert\'s fiancée, and had an affair with her when his friend went off to fight in World War When Gilbert was killed at the front, Dollie refused to marry Gerald.\nHe ended up marrying a Scandinavian woman named Inge but continued his affair with Dollie, who became an alcoholic.\nGerald and Inge later separated.\nAnglo-Saxon Attitudes is full of side-plots and coincidences and contains a host of eccentric characters.\nSome of these characters are Gerald\'s family.\nRobin his eldest son, is a womaniser who cannot decide whether to leave his wife or his mistress.\nKay has an unhappy marriage and a deeply embittered view of her father, whom she appears to blame for everything that has gone wrong in her life, including her withered hand (which was actually caused by her mother).\nGerald\'s estranged wife, Inge is a grotesquely deluded woman who cannot bring herself to acknowledge her younger son John\'s homosexuality or her daughter\'s physical disability.\nGerald feels responsible for Dollie\'s plight and for those of his children.\nHe feels that the knowledge of his complicity over the Melpham affair has drained his morale and made him withdrawn and indecisive.\nThe novel begins with him resolving to make good the \'bloody shameful waste\' of his life, by investigating the Melpham affair and making peace with Dollie.\nHe also attempts to develop better relationships with his grown-up children and with Inge.\nBy the novel\'s end, Gerald achieves a measure of peace with his past.\nHe persuades Dollie to come forward with a letter from Gilbert\'s father\'s colleague, Canon Portway, proving that the Melpham incident was a hoax; then he and Dollie begin a platonic friendship.\nHe gives up on achieving good relations with his family.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first three paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
  Gerald, on arrival, edged towards the french windows to get some air, but Madame Houdet, seeing him alone, thought, Ah! the poor man, he is old and knows no one, and, as there was a lull for a moment in her surveillance of the servants, she came over to him. 'Ah! you are sad, Mr Middleton,' she said; 'you are thinking of your dear Lilian.' Whereas Yves had attached the most dubious motives to Gerald's visit to Merano, his mother had ascribed it to the flickering embers of an old romance.
  Gerald looked at the ravaged, old, rouge-flecked face and thought, Good God! the poor old thing's genuine. He said, 'I'm sure it must have been a terrible shock for you. I could see how much the villa meant to you even in the short time I was there.'
  It was not the most tactful choice of words. Beads of caked lipstick trembled on Stéphanie's lips in her agitation. 'Oh, I do not mind, believe me, that Lilian left me nothing. I am old and, after all, a granddaughter is a granddaughter, however little she did for Lilian. But, for Yves, I mind — yes, very much. It was not so nice for a young attractive man to spend his time with an old woman. But he was always willing to stay and give the pleasure of his young company to Lilian. She knew that life had not been kind to my boy. She should have left him something.'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'Dollie moved easily and quickly about like a girl, laying the table and fetching dishes from the kitchen as she talked'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Dollie moved easily and quickly about like a girl, laying the table and fetching dishes from the kitchen as she talked. She smoked continually. The meal, to Gerald's surprise, was good and the cottage very clean. 'Yes,' she said, watching his gaze, 'you can eat off my floors if you want to. Do you remember how filthy the flat used to get? Poor old Mrs Salad. She must have been the worst char in London.' Gerald winced slightly. 'Oh I didn't mean I wasn't happy then. They were top-hole times. The old girl and I still exchange greetings at Christmas,' she said.
  Gerald would have continued gossiping all day, but when luncheon was finished, Dollie said, 'What on earth's all this about business? Most people mean they want to borrow money. At least that's what I would mean. But you can't, you've always been rolling in the stuff.'
  Once again Gerald told his story. To be telling it to Dollie seemed a final release, the culmination of the long mental struggle. He was, therefore, a bit disconcerted when she said, 'I think you'd better skip the history part, old dear, except where it's essential to what you have to say. I never did understand it very well, though when I was with you I used to think I had a glimmer. But now when I hear you say that you've been worrying all this time about something that happened umpteen years ago, it makes me rather angry. It seems so absolutely piffling.'
  Feeling like a clergyman searching for a modern parallel in a sermon, he began, 'A few moments ago, Dollie, you said that you liked work to be well done. Well, you see...'
  But she cut him short. 'Oh, don't worry to explain, Gerrie. I'll take your word for it that it's important. As far as I can see, what you're getting at is this — Gilbert faked the burial as one of his ghastly jokes, mainly to spite the Pater. The Pater knew about it years afterwards but never let on for fear of seeming a fool. And the same goes for old Portway. That Barker man helped Gilbert, and he and his daughter blackmailed old Portway over it. Is that what you're saying?'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But what of the general historical significance of the burial of Eorpwald? Here, I think, we must speak with the greatest circumspection. One, at least, we now know of the great disciples of Theodore, one of that great band of Missionaries, who completed and made sure of the conversion of our country to Christianity, had feet of clay. So much the existence of the wooden idol in Eorpwald's tomb merely allows us to say. This discovery, however, can say nothing to us that impairs the general picture which we have received from Bede. There is nothing here to lessen the impression of solidity which we have always seen in the work of Theodore, of Hadrian, and of Wilfrid, nothing to suggest that the work which was symbolized and sealed at the Synod of Whitby was other than complete. The backsliding, if indeed it can be fully called that, of Eorpwald has nothing in common with the wholesale apostasies that marked the earlier conversions of the Augustinian mission, with the defections of Essex and East Anglia, with King Redwald's setting of idols in the Church of God. Eorpwald's is a singular and peculiar case, and one for which his anonymous chronicler's mention of the charges of sorcery would have prepared us, had we not refused to countenance any evidence that was not comprised by Bede. The circumstances, too, of Eorpwald's life are exceptional. He came from a pagan people, a people who had already once apostatized. It is true that he received his training in a monastery, it is true that he was associated with the great Wilfrid in the conversion of the South Saxons, but he was never of the hard core of Theodore's disciples; we have no evidence that he received any training at Canterbury, let alone at Rome. Hadrian trusted him, it is true, and chose him to convert his own people, but there is nothing to suggest that Eorpwald's faith at that time was not a deep and noble one. He returned to his people and converted them and their king. We now can guess that in that conversion he fell into compromise and from compromise into sacrilege. It is a tragic and singular story of who knows what atavistic impulse working in a man of pagan background. Nevertheless, it is the story of an individual, a theme better suited to literature than history. Without other examples of such apostasy, we cannot even say that the forces of paganism in the late seventh century still had any real hold upon the converts of that age. We can only speak of one man, and that man a member of the most remote of all English kingdoms — the East Folk. The durable, deep conversion that Theodore brought from Rome, the conversion that ended paganism in this country until the coming of the Northmen, the conversion which at the Synod of Whitby decided that the English people should belong to the civilization of Europe, remains untouched by the strange circumstances of Eorpwald's burial. Nothing which is revolutionary for the historian in this discovery — not the unique discovery of an Anglian fertility god in English soil, not the unique discovery of a Christian tomb with pagan relics, and that the tomb of a bishop — has changed our general picture which has been given us by the brilliant sense of history, the steadfast truthfulness of Bede. The lesson of Melpham is a double one — the essential correctness of our historical knowledge only strengthened by exceptions to the rule and the need, for all our great debt to Bede, to be open to the flickering gleam thrown back on those dark times by the uncertain lights of late traditions.
  The qualities that Theodore's men brought with them from Rome were exactly those which England needed if she was going to become more than an eccentric fringe of the civilized world, a last gleam of half light before the darkness of uncharted waters. Theodore, Hadrian, Wilfrid, and their generation had gifts more valuable than the most precious spices or Mediterranean works of art to give to the disordered kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Courage they had in plenty, great zeal and singleness of purpose, but the Celtic missionaries had these, perhaps in greater, certainly not in less, degree. But the Roman missionaries had more: they had organizing ability and political sense and stern intellectual discipline. In these gifts they were the heirs of a Rome older than perhaps they realized; and it was with these gifts rather than with any superiority of argument about questions of tonsure or the date of Easter that they won the day at Whitby. With a sense of organization and with superior culture they brought this remote island into the civilized world, as two centuries later Alfred with the same qualities gave her her first real political unity.
  It is a strange story, indeed, that of Eorpwald. The boy who so hated the dark gods of his people the East Folk that he dared the perils that beset wanderers in those lawless times to seek Christ among strangers. The man who ended his days a bishop, the converter of his own people to the Faith and who had yet returned to the dark gods he had once fled. We do not know the monastery in which he received his learning, but we may guess that he was a lover of intellectual discipline or Abbot Hadrian would not have favoured him, and of zeal and organizing ability or he would have been no companion of Wilfrid, and of culture or he could not have built the cathedral at Sedwich. Yet all his zeal, all his political sense, all his learning did not keep him from a compromise that led to apostasy. In the months after the excavation of his tomb I had leisure and inclination to speculate much on the discovery at which I had assisted and again and again it was the irony and the strangeness that struck me. How did the mind of this man work who was buried with the Cross and with a darker, more sinister deity? How did the tradition of his apostasy regarded as sorcery live on side by side with the tradition of his sanctity to be chronicled obscurely in the thirteenth century? The story has endless overtones, not the least strange of which is the removal of his coffin to Melpham. When the Northmen struck savagely at the land of the East Folk in 867, the priests, zealous for their beloved founder, carried Eorpwald's coffin and buried it secretly at Melpham. How terrified they would have been could they have stood with me on that marshy land on a warm July morning over one thousand years later and seen that their precious burden was a temple to the same unspeakable idol as was worshipped by the terrible barbarians from whom they were fleeing. Yet, when all is said and done, it is not against Eorpwald, the tragic failure of the Roman mission, that we have to set the attractive figures of Cuthbert and Aidan, but against Wilfrid, that statesmanlike figure of the success of Rome. Cuthbert with Aidan are but sweet sidetracks, as Eorpwald is a dark side-track; the highway runs from Theodore and Hadrian and Wilfrid through Boniface to Dunstan and Lanfranc, the broad track of ecclesiastical history.
  That view of history surely is not far from the one whose influence is presenting us with the terrible menace we face today. The inevitability of history, the grovelling before the face of power have not proved so beneficent to mankind that we need regard as so worthy the scholarship that is concerned with nothing but the victor's story. Truth surely must once again be the historian's goal. But now I think I hear another critic's voice — the facts known to us from that dark age, he says, are too few, too sparse to allow us to create new general pictures of that time, we must be content with small pieces of research, with the minutiae of Dark Age history until good fortune brings us some new fact to work upon. There, let me say, I entirely agree. It was for this reason that I devoted my time for twenty years to the editing of cartularies, the examination of the texts of Anglo-Saxon land grants and literary riddles.
  A pamphlet entitled 'The Melpham Burial', published today by the Historical Association of Medievalists, gives a concise account of the present view of scholars upon this much disputed Anglo-Saxon antiquity. It now seems clear beyond doubt that the heathen idol found in the coffin of Bishop Eorpwald in 1912 was placed there as a practical joke by Gilbert Stokesay, who assisted his father in the excavations. The full story of this lamentable affair will probably never be known. It is clear, however, that both Lionel Stokesay and Reginald Portway became aware of the fraud during the nineteen-twenties. Devotion to his son's memory appears to have blinded Stokesay to his duty as a scholar; the reason for Portway's acquiescence in this deplorable silence remains obscure. A note of personal sadness marks Professor Middleton's narrative when he deals with the conduct of these two eminent historians. It is a sadness which all who honour Clio must inevitably share. The wretched fraud should not make us forget that the idol itself may well be a unique example of a heathen god unearthed from English soil. Eorpwald, however, whose faith has been so sadly impugned all these years, is now vindicated from all charges of backsliding. By a curious coincidence the exposure of the fraud comes at a time when pagan relics being associated with Christian burial has been once again brought into consideration by the present excavation of Aldwine's grave in Heligoland. Final verdict on this important archaeological discovery must await the definitive report of Professor Pforzheim, the eminent archaeologist in charge of the excavation.