But he has fallen asleep. He will say 7 had forgotten my fulfilment, ignorant that sleep and fancy were the cause of my sufferings.’
He says’My sleeping experiences do not matter.’ Come, leave such asses to their meadow. Because of a necessity, man acquires organs. So, necessitous one, increase your need…
The Master Rumi of Balkh, born A.D. 1207
Sufis believe that, expressed in one way, humanity is evolving towards a certain destiny. We are all taking part in that evolution. Organs come into being as a result of a need for specific organs. The human being’s organism is producing a new complex of organs in response to such a need. In this age of the transcending of time and space, the complex of organs is concerned with the transcending of time and space. What ordinary people regard as sporadic and occasional bursts of telepathic and prophetic power are seen by the Sufi as nothing less than the ßrst stirrings of these same organs. The difference between all evolution up to date and the present need for evolution is that for the past ten thousand years or so we have been given the possibility of a conscious evolution. So essential is this more rarefied evolution that our future depends on it.
IDRIES SHAH. The Sufis
Chapter One
Martha was suddenly not so busy. For one thing, she was no longer a conduit through which vast quantities of food from the markets of London reached the family table. For another, she was not a character in that adolescent morality play where adults have to speak through masks chosen to represent Oppressor’ or ‘Exemplar’ or ‘Horrible Warning’. When she was with Francis, Paul, Jill and the rest, she was able to feel herself, and to say what she would herself want to say; she communicated with Francis, Paul, Jill, and not with some anguished or raging usurper. In short, ‘the children’ had grown up. Suddenly, it was as if friends were meeting after a long separation, when Francis, Paul, Jill and the rest dropped in to talk, or to have a meal with Mark, Martha, Lynda: there was a tenderly wry curiosity as to what ‘now that was all over’ they were all really. like. The wryness was a tribute to the now past (but necessary?) anguish. And also, partly, to that feeling of something having been got over, done with, worked through.
‘We’ve done that, have we? ’ Martha, or Mark or Lynda might say to each other; and one of them would reply: ‘And now what’s next?
They did not know; but did know it would be a stage on in what had been completed in themselves as well as in the children. To have worked through, to have stood firm in, that storm which was the young ones’ adolescence was, after all, to have been made free of one’s own.
To have said patiently for years: I was like this, I did that, I felt that and this; Francis, Paul, Jill and the rest-they were me, I was what they are; well, for the opportunity to do this, the old ones owe a debt to the young. But this, of course, will not be understood (this particular variation of wry love) until the young ones come to that point where they must turn around and face towards their own past in their children. And so it is in this remarkable traffic between parents and children that there are, as it were, a whole series of post-dated, promissory notes in the currency of a contained and patient love that come due one after another when one least expects them: ‘So I’ve done that, have I? I’ve worked through that? ’ Or, if you like, it’s as if those apparently dead plants, that look like blackened bits of twig clinging to dry rock in countries where the rains are infrequent, suddenly, as the water fills them, become a lively brilliant green.
Which is not at all to say that the lives of any one of the young ones ran smooth or conventionally-how could they? On the contrary, not one of them, or their friends, had any intention of behaving as (so Margaret insisted on reminding them) previous generations behaved. That is, they did not say: I want to be a soldier, a sailor, a ploughman, a thief, or even a bank manager or a civil servant. They had all become brilliant freelances each with a dozen talents. None cared, or so it seemed, about rewards or successes: none foresaw a solidly supported middle-age, or, if they wished for that, did not work towards it.
They were driven, it was obvious, by precisely that same private passion, or need, which caused Lynda, or Martha, or Mark to ask: ‘We’ve done that, have we? ’ As if there was a generation where not an occasional person, but dozens of people, very many indeed, worked with that process of being stripped, being sharpened and sensitized, which uses the forms of ordinary life merely as tools, methods.
For instance, Francis. He supposed he was a man of the theatre; but a pattern continued: when he reached a moment of success, he refused it, or drifted away from it. In the little theatre, where he had been earning his few pounds a week and conscientiously learning what he could, he had been offered, Graham Patten’s influence assisting, a production of his own. He was to choose the play he wanted to do, choose the actors-make that step forward out of being nothing in particular. He was very young of course-but as Graham said: ‘To have scaled the heights, as I did, at twenty-five, was an achievement, but now, when to be young is everything, it is the least one can expect.” But while Francis did not exactly refuse, the production didn’t come to anything. He wondered if perhaps London wasn’t seeing too much Shakespeare; he asked if London really needed another production of Ibsen or Chekov; he talked about a play written by a girl who was a friend of a friend: then Jill was sick, and he took her for a holiday, and while he was there, he wrote some sketches, and some songs, for a new revue. He had already become involved with a show called ‘satirical’ and was friendly with the new talents, whose faces were known, through television, to millions of people. Francis had almost been one of them: or rather, the face and talents of ‘the clown’, that childhood personality found in himself and brought out for this purpose, had been, briefly, commented on. He was offered a chance to be one of a team, working on a new television show. It was not that he ever said no, or sounded anything but enthusiastic. On the contrary, he did some writing for it and contributed some ideas. But when it came to the point, he was not there. He was with Jill. Or he was in Mark’s study, correlating facts and figures, getting ideas, from the walls and ceiling of that room for use by his friends. Or he was talking to his father, or to Martha. He complained that he had not known he was satirical until the newspapers told him he was. He complained he felt entirely in a false position: he was experiencing not only present annoyance, but past anguish: he was being forced to remember, to live through again, that part of his childhood when his father had been an enemy of the State. Now, it was with his father, and the two women with whom his father had shared that time, that he explored the present. He kept repeating, even while his face twisted up with the effort that went into making himself face what he remembered, even while he went pale, and sweated, that he was glad that had happened, he was glad he had learned what was possible. For, knowing what was possible (so he seemed to suggest), why bother with being a successful director at twenty-one, or even a satirist?
For some people the stripping process begins so young it is as if an announcement has been made: Don’t trouble with anything else; this is what you have to do. The word satire used as it was being used, gave him first experience as an adult person of the senselessness of the processes which govern us: he had suffered the cruelty of them passively as a child; now he was trying to understand that paradox that in spite of (because of?) society’s never having been more shrilly self-conscious than it is now, it is an organism which above all is unable to think, whose essential characteristic is the inability to diagnose its own condition. It is like one of those sea creatures who have tentacles or arms equipped with numbing poisons: anything new, whether hostile or helpful, must be stunned into immobility or at least wrapped around with poison or a cloud of distorting colour.
The process is the same under a variety of guises. There is a new phenomenon, or one conceived to be new: the creature, sullenly alerted, all fear, is concerned for only one thing, how to isolate it, how to remain unaffected. The process is accomplished, in this society, through words. A w
ord or a phrase is found: communism, traitor, espionage, homosexuality, teenage violence-for instance. Or anger, or commitment, or satire. The organ (which is that part of the creature ostensibly supposed to function towards self-understanding, the Press, the cinema, television, and the talk that goes on among people who influence society) finds a word for something that threatens.
Anarchy, irresponsibility, decadence, selfishness-into this box, behind this label, gets put every kind of behaviour by which the creature is made nervous, much to the surprise, or the annoyance, of the people so described, or labelled. Finally, the process becomes ridiculous even to the creature itself-quick, quick, a new word, a new label, ‘commitment’, perhaps? ‘mysticism’? Anything that will stop the process of thought for a time, anything to sterilize, or to make harmless: to partition off, to compartmentalize.
Francis, after days of the slow, involuted self-questioning by which he achieved his decisions, said he supposed he did not wish to be ‘a satirist’. Which did not stop him writing for his friends. Just as, his sliding into a decision not to direct the offered play, did not stop him working on at the theatre as conscientiously as he had been doing.
His centre, then, his growing-point, was not where his ambition might conceivably be? Where then?
It was with Jill, whom he had begun by championing and helping, and ended by loving. He was, the family supposed, living at home, since he retained his rooms at the top of the house, and indeed was often in them. But his emotional life was with Jill. She lived in a large flat in a part of London that only four years ago had been sordid, but was already fashionable. Francis paid the rent for the flat. Jill would not take money from Phoebe, who anyway did not have much to give her. Jill no longer hated her mother, and had forgotten the years of what Phoebe remembered as cruel persecution. Jill was ready now to be friends. More: she longed for a mother. But Phoebe did not understand this; she saw Jill’s way of life as a continuation of the adolescent girl’s need to provoke her, Phoebe. Jill, shortly after the abortion nearly three years before, had got herself pregnant again by the same man, the jazzman from the West Indies. Asked by Phoebe and others why she had had the first abortion, she replied: ‘That was only to make everybody happy.’ Jill was bringing up the little girl, to whom she would refer, if there was any chance of Phoebe hearing about it as ‘my little piccaninny’. She had had another baby since, no one knew whose. Francis said it was not his, but assisted Jill to bring both children up.
Mark did not forgive his son for loving unreasonably-as he had done, and was still doing. That is to say, he would not accept what Francis was doing as something which he had to do: he continually argued against it. So that Francis would spend hours with his father talking about their work, about what united them most-their concern for the future; but when Mark mentioned Jill, the boy would excuse himself and leave. It was with the two women that he talked about Jill.
Lynda said: ‘But Francis, you’re like your father. Look at me!’ And she offered herself frankly for his inspection, with her pain-made face, her shabby greying hair, her burnt and rusty fingers.
‘Yes, I think I am very like him.’
‘Yes. But the point is, can’t you get through that one quickly? ’
His smile acknowledged his understanding of this, their way of seeing him.
‘How? ’
‘One can get stuck, one gets bogged down …’
‘Are you, Lynda? ’
‘Yes. Unless I can move out-get out. Be independent. I must try.’
Lynda said this to Martha, and to her son. But not to Mark: the dreams of these two so-long married people were absolutely opposite.
‘And if you can’t? ’
‘Then I’ve been defeated.’
‘Really? As simple as that? ’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘And you, Martha? What are you doing? ’
‘I’m paying off debts.’
‘Still! And now we’re all grown up? ’
‘I don’t know what it is I’m waiting for-something.’
For Martha, knowing that there was a step to be taken, had no idea where to look for it. It was under her nose, of course. It always was-the next step. But she couldn’t see it.
‘The thing is, ’ she had insisted, still tried to insist, ‘we have to work through what we’ve been given-of course. There’s no way of getting round it. But don’t spend your life at it.’
‘As my father is? You know that’s what you are saying? ’
Lynda said: ‘Jill’s me-if you like, Jill was inevitable because you were landed with me for a mother; but that shouldn’t be for all your life!’
‘You start growing on your own account when you’ve worked through what you’re landed with. Until then, you’re paying off debts, ’ said Martha.
He asked again: ‘Why do you want me to do so much better than my father? Why should I? ’
This, it seemed, for the time being was where he wanted to take a stand. He had an extraordinary love for his father-all protective, as if Mark were his son. He seemed concerned, often, that his father should be saved from the nasty realities of life. Mark was not told, for instance about the difficulties of the ménage with Jill. It was Lynda who visited that flat, saw that Jill had clothes for the children, and some kind of family support. For Mark thought that Jill was ‘neurotic and inadequate’ and Margaret Patten was always descending on the couple with advice.
‘Francis! You can’t marry her, she’s your cousin.’
‘I didn’t say I was going to marry her.’
The truth was, he wanted to marry her, but Jill shared with Lynda a sad self-knowledge as to her incapacity for ordinary life, and did not wish to marry Francis. She did not love Francis, she said. Perhaps she would never love anyone. What was love? she asked. What she had seen of that quality people called love did not make her respect it, or them. But if Francis wanted to live with her, she had nothing against it.
‘Well then, ’ said Margaret, ‘why go on with it? ’
‘You mean you want me to marry and settle down, is that it. Granny? ’
‘There was a time when I looked forward to being a grandmother, ’ said Margaret. ‘I am your grandmother, after all.’ She had recently made the jump from ex-beauty to elderly lady: tactfully (she believed) putting on an erect body and crisp white curls, like a uniform suitable for one’s age. But there was something wrong: her movements were all sinuous, insinuating, and her great eyes were anxiously dependent, like a young woman’s. She needed reassurance. She needed that other people should see her life as she herself did.
‘You mean, Granny, that I should get married just once, and have let’s see now, two children? Three? Four? And have a house in the country and a house in town? And what else? ’
‘I don’t see your point, ’ she admitted, defiant. ‘I’ve not said my way of life is anything to be copied, have I? ’
‘Why not say it if that’s what you feel? As a life goes, it’s as good as may be. But it’s not my life, is it? ’
There appeared on the television a couple of weeks later a sketch: ‘She’s as good as may be.’ It was written by Francis, and showed an elderly literary hostess who chased all the new young lions of London with the refrain: ‘I may not be good for much, but I’m good enough for you.’
Margaret saw the show, and before it was over had telephoned Francis at the studios.
‘Darling Francis, this is your granny.’
‘Oh, hello, Granny.’
‘I rang to ask you to dinner-no, not just you, darling, I can have you any time, but you and your clever young friends.’
‘Why not, I’ll ask them.’
Margaret then laid on the biggest, smartest dinner party she could manage, serving up those ‘names’ among the older generation of Lions who had most volubly and maliciously criticized the young ones, with the young Lions whose reputation for iconoclasm was greatest. It was all a great success: they liked each other, and their criticisms, malice
and iconoclasm would thereafter be much modified. She had, in short, performed her function, which was to help along London’s work in making a homogeneous whole of literary and political and artistic society. As for Francis, he left immediately after dinner, to return to Jill who he said had a headache-thus sticking to his point, and saying that hers was not important to him.
‘Don’t you want to get rich? ’ she would inquire. ‘All you clever new people seem to find it so easy? ’
‘Not in the least, ’ Francis would reply. ‘Shouldn’t you be after Paul, not me? ’
‘I’m sorry if you think I’m after anyone …’
Paul, not yet twenty, was well on his way to being rich. The third floor where he still lived was more than ever a repository for beautiful and strange objects which he might use briefly to sleep on, sit on, dress from, but which were always in the process of being bartered or sold. From this enterprise he had put in the bank about three hundred pounds. But he announced he was looking for ways to make some ‘real’ money.
He was very much a part of the new young London, concerned, or so it seemed, more about clothes and furniture than anything at all. Clothes and furniture were Paul’s meat and drink-so it seemed. A dress shop? Décor? He considered these, but settled for neither. Meanwhile he had met a girl at a party-very young, pretty, and newly in London. Her name was Molly Grinham and she wanted to be a singer. She sang well enough, with her looks and her quality of put-upon bravery which he told her was marketable. He was fond of her. He dressed her, changed her hair, organized singing lessons-or rather, voice production lessons, not the same thing, and gave her a new name, Sally-just that, suggesting an orphan child with big lost eyes. Her parents were grocers in Tunbridge Wells. Paul had just introduced her to a new pop group and it seemed she might be offered a job with them, when another intending impresario saw her and suggested a deal. There was no reason for Paul to lose his head: his rival had no more to offer than he had. But he lost it badly. He wrote her a letter full of reproach: our friendship, what I’ve done for you, etc. It included the sharp frightened phrase: ‘… and in the terms of our contract…’ At no point had Paul suggested any return for what he was doing for her; for one thing, this was not how he felt, when he was at his best. But the girl, upset and frightened, showed the letter to her new admirer. This youth took the letter to a lawyer-one of the just-within-the-law dealers that were making a fortune in this new London. Paul got a vaguely threatening letter. He found a lawyer of his own: sharp, semi-shady lawyers licked their lips. The first Mark heard of it was when Paul came to ask for £200. If he, Paul, paid £200 into the hands of a certain lawyer, then ‘the matter would not be proceeded with’. What ‘matter’? What had Paul done? But he was in a panic, a little boy again, petulant, vituperative, out of control. Mark saw his own lawyer. It appeared that Paul had in fact behaved stupidly. He had turned up outside Sally’s flat in the middle of the night, shouting about betrayal, the police, goodness knows what. After kicking the door a bit, and bursting into tears, he had run away. Mark said to Paul he was being blackmailed and should do nothing whatsoever. But the affair had gone beyond any sort of sense. Paul wanted £200. Paul felt that if he gave the lawyer £200, he, Paul, would be safe. Safe from what? Paul could not say. Besides, Paul ‘heard’ that if Sally had £200 her new promoter could more easily get her a job with … But, pointed out Mark, Sally would not get anything like £200. It would more likely be £50, by the time the lawyers had taken their cuts. It was no good. Money is never anything but a fantasy currency: it doesn’t exist. Never was this truth shown more clearly than in this affair of Paul’s £200 which, as he said afterwards, ‘started him on his way’. For one thing, he already had £300 in the bank. But that money was the result of some years of patient work; buying and selling with expertise. It wasn’t fairy gold, like the £200 which never even reached the point of being figures on a cheque.
The Four-Gated City Page 57