Edward Docx

The Calligrapher


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      THE

      CALLIGRAPHER

      EDWARD DOCX

       Dedication

      To Emma

       Epigraph

      ‘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

       Cover

       Title Page

       Epigraph

       8 Love’s Diet

       PART THREE

       9 The Damp

       10 Negative Love

       11 Air and Angels

       12 The Dream (‘Image of her …’)

       13 Song

       14 Love’s Alchemy

       15 The Message

       16 The Apparition

       17 The Good Morrow

       PART FOUR

       18 The Dream

       19 Love’s Growth

       20 The Legacy

       21 Song

       22 The Ecstasy

       23 The Canonization

       PART FIVE

       24 Farewell to Love

       25 The Curse

       26 Twickenham Garden

       27 The Broken Heart

       28 A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day

       29 A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning

       30 Woman’s Constancy

       Acknowledgements

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Titivillus the Devil

      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