January 31 - Saint Alan Alexander of Daphne and Vespers

The bees of Ashdown Forest do not know mercy.  Neither have they heard of pain.  They buzz ceaselessly in their innocent wood seeking innocence, for the bees are cruel and their lack of knowledge derives from their inability to reflect on and articulate their nature, but the innocence they seek possesses the ability but not the necessary experience.  The bees provide the experience.

Sarah Maria Heginbotham wandered from her Weald home, weary and full of figs, on April 13 1881, to the tut-tut of the titmouse and the tat-tat of the tufted tit-tyrant.  She wandered in the wild Weald and smelled of woads and whortleberries.  She lay herself down on a patch of yellow welds to dream but not to sleep, and the bees smelled her and removed her gingham and cotton hand-me-downs and the Great Bee stung her in her honey pot.  So it was that on January 18 1882 she gave birth to St. Alan Alexander, who suffered estrangement from wife, son, bear and bee; humiliation from the nature of his surviving work, which spoke of timeless truths but was denigrated by the self-righteous powers as unworthy of adults on their own; who felt possessed by his creation and wished it, its companions, innocence, owls, roos and forests dead.  He spent his last years as an invalid, unvisited by his children, ignored by his wife, and bereft of mistresses.  Yet his four books of verse and stories tower above the daily common forgettable literary buzz, the pretensions of sophisticates and the sophistication of stuffed and unloved scholars, stinging the knowledgeable with innocence, the innocent with knowledge.  He painted the grey landscape between childhood and adulthood with colour, precision, distinction and sadness.  It is the landscape we live in and the landscape we see when we die.

St. Alan Alexander was transmogrified to a honey pot illustration in the Ernest Howard Shepard Memorial Collection in the Library at Babel on January 31 1956.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 20 1996.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.