son and heir #5: epiphany
My Richard has only really taken on a life of his own now that I've begun writing about him alive, rather than as a dead person Hal is remembering. It's a good challenge to write about someone whose dates of life and death don't conveniently align with a broader historical narrative. King Richard II of England defined a period of history just by being born and dying; my Richard didn't.
Richard Lancaster was born on the sixth of January, 1970, three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in England. During the gay golden age of the 1970s he was only a child. He went through adolescence -- first at a Catholic boys' boarding school in rural Yorkshire, then at Oxford -- as the AIDS crisis unfolded. He didn't have an innocent youth. He knew what HIV was, and how it was transmitted, before he contracted it. He lived long enough to benefit from combination antiretroviral therapy, and he died in the 2000s, after the tragedy plays of the epidemic had already been written. The tragedy of my Richard, I suppose, is that he's someone who experiences an absolute need to play out a story of himself, but the story he finds the most true is the worst.
I’ve never found much pleasure or hope in fiction about people being Good. Sin — by that I mean cruelty, judgment, apathy, unrighteous anger — comes easily. If a person appears to be perfectly Good, it is only because you are not looking hard enough, or at the right angle. There will always be someone who feels that your good deeds do not outweigh your bad ones. And it’s worthless to believe oneself to be good, because that’s what all the worst people believe. Attempts to redeem the victims of prejudice through fiction always seem, in the end, simply to redraw the line between those who do not deserve to suffer, and those who do. Absolution is granted to those who only believed they deserved to suffer because they subscribed to philosophies which the story rejects: ‘He was unhappy because he believed it was a sin to love another man, but then he learned the truth, and was saved. He was surrounded by people who thought wrongly and so hated him; then he left them and found people who thought correctly and so loved him.’ What right does a story have to demand its characters submit to its own moral philosophy in order to be relieved of pain? Why should it be considered liberatory to construct a narrative in which freedom from suffering is only granted through a demonstration of sufficient virtue? Isn't that just Christianity again?
Richard’s selfhood is granted to him by a set of beliefs according to which he cannot help turning against God just by living. Contrition is necessary for salvation. To atone is to suffer. In the mortal world, he is better by birth than almost every other living person; before God, he’s just another sinner. He believes his illness is a punishment from God, and he believes, as the Henries do, that by suffering he is purging himself of evil. Having been born on Epiphany, he believes he is meant to be adored. Adoration is different from love: it implies a distance between subject and object. Richard is loved by God, adored by ordinary people. There is always a hierarchy. The three wise men knew well enough to adore the Prince of Peace.
I think this compulsion to reenact the tragedies of previous generations is something the historical Richard II felt, too. Advent is a penitential season; to celebrate Christ's birth is also to anticipate his inevitable death. Richard knew what happened to Edward II and his favourites -- did he hear the rumour about the hot poker? -- and instead of avoiding Edward's mistakes, he tried to have him canonized. He lavished favours on Robert de Vere and Simon Burley knowing that they might be killed as gruesomely as Gaveston and Despenser. The stain would appear on the souls of their killers, not on Richard's. Richard might have imagined a descendant of his own trying someday to canonize him. I went to his tomb, and I didn't witness any miracles there, and he didn't have any descendants, but I'm rewriting his life anyway. Sorry, Richard, or you're welcome.