On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  “Deary me!” I said, “you boys are a bundle of laughs. As though your rain hadn’t depressed me enough, I now have to listen to your scare stories.”

  “It might help you to think,” said Bonetti-MacDonald.

  “To think?” I objected. “I do plenty of that. I spend almost every waking hour thinking about how to make money. That’s why I’m rich and you chaps haven’t got more than a few thousand pounds between you.”

  “To think about human existence and its betterment,” Hamilton-MacNiff persevered.

  “Why would I want to do that? That would be meddling. We’re all here to look after number one, and if we could peer into your three brains one by one, we’d find that, behind all the rhetoric, this is exactly what each of you is after. It’s just that you’re not very good at it. Envy,” I cried, “just envy. You’d love to be as rich as me.”

  “You poor unfortunate gentleman,” said Crawford-Mackenzie.

  “Not poor. Definitely not poor. And the happier for it.”

  “You must have a few hundred thousand in the bank, Charles,” said Bonetti-MacDonald, “after the publication of Bountiful Booze and Road to Perdition.”

  “Never counted,” said Crawford-Mackenzie snootily, “one should never count one’s money. Money looks after itself, in my opinion.”

  “My God,” I said, “you really are from another time. Money doesn’t look after itself. Never did. Certainly doesn’t now. I considered you a fellow Tory.”

  “I am,” Crawford-Mackenzie said. “Don’t you know that the most bitter and significant differences are to be found within parties and not between them?”

  “I’m not that interested in politics, to tell you the truth,” and I wasn’t lying, although I did find their politics fascinating in their absurdity.

  Hamilton-MacNiff could not sit still in his chair, and he leaned across to me in his enthusiasm, “Charles is a very special kind of Tory in this Tory-free nation: he is a Romantic Jacobite, more interested in the politics of two and three hundred years ago, than growth figures and the performance of the stock exchange. Idealising the past isn’t that different from idealising the future. I like to think of him as one of us; nothing to do with you people at all.”

  “I think your judgement,” I said, “is clouded by friendship and friendly rivalry. It is not the product of clear analysis, something you writer fellows aren’t that good at. I have no idea what a Romantic Jacobite might be, and have no desire to be enlightened on the subject. Scottish politics were always more Byzantine than most, and life is a short affair.” A statement, I have to admit, that was based on absolutely no knowledge of their politics now or at any other time. It’s amazing how a certain delivery and self-belief can give an impression of expertise and even wisdom.

  I could feel them bristle. It was such fun. Almost as good as being up a hill and blasting off at the fauna. Unfortunately the peer of the realm thought that he had to come to my rescue: “The universe of the ideal and the imagination might have its place in the arts, but for practical men like Peregrine and myself it is only a diversion.”

  I think that I was perhaps part of the absurdity of the situation, and not just an onlooker. Lord Macmillan wanted to talk the kind of voodoo economics that drives me up the wall. There is no one more Thatcherite than a New-Labour politician, and when they become lords, they no longer have to pay lip service to left-wing politics. They pursue the board room more determinedly than anyone else and their belief in free markets has no bounds. The fact is, all that political economics – macroeconomics as Lord Macmillan of Archasamby no doubt calls it – is of no interest. The far from predictable business of knowing how to make money in the banking system is enough for me and, while I’m hugely thankful to Thatcher for sorting out the unions and making it possible for me to become much richer than I otherwise would have, I can’t say that I ever liked the grocer’s daughter or her absurd Churchillian pretensions. But every now and then, you need a politician like her and, for a generation or two, you’re fine. The proof is precisely in all these Labour politicians who practically stalk you. In their youth, they wouldn’t have given a chap like me the time of day, and now they want to hang on my every word. Of course, you have to humour them: invite them to dinners, flatter them, wrap up your ideas in their repulsive, nonsensical politically-correct jargon, and that sort of thing. Small price to pay, but it is a bit nauseating when one pops up while you’re trying to have a quiet and diverting holiday in one of the most rain-soaked parts of the world. Well, it had seemed like a good idea.

  “You two talk as though the credit crunch never happened” were the words Hamilton-MacNiff used to interrupt me, and I was very glad of his overdue interruption.

  “Shop talk is always dull,” I said with urbane civility. “And how rude of me, particularly in the light of our host’s excellent whisky and the scintillating conversation.” Not scintillating enough to prevent Bumper from falling asleep near the fire. “Do you think the credit crunch to be a game-changer then?”

  “Certainly,” said Hamilton-MacNiff, “you’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise.”

  “Would you?” I feigned interest and surprise, and then added in a different key, “Do you take time out from writing novels and poetry to reflect deeply on the economic crisis? Can you think of a way out of it?”

  My sarcasm went down badly. They like to fight amongst themselves, these writer fellows, but they stand together against the outsider. “There isn’t a solution,” he returned, “capitalism is inherently dysfunctional. The only solution is to change society.”

  “Do you agree with this?” I asked Crawford-Mackenzie. “Surely not.”

  “I agree that this society is not sustainable, but I feel we need to move back to a time of hard work and sound values.”

  “Here we go,” Bonetti-MacDonald finally joined the fray. “What would those times think of people who get up at four in the afternoon and start on their first whisky immediately after their toast and tea?”

  “Writers are always an exception,” Crawford-Mackenzie produced a beguiling smile that was both smug and complicit.

  “Sounds elitist to me,” said Hamilton-MacNiff.

  “I am an elitist,” Crawford-Mackenzie laughed, and I had to agree with him.

  “Our society,” I said, “has produced unprecedented levels of liberty and affluence. So what do you people want to put in its place?”

  “Paternalism,” said Crawford-Mackenzie. “A free market, yes. Or at least freeish. But a responsible society in which those who know best can work freely in the interests of the whole.”

  “And how would this work?” I asked. “I hate to spoil the party, but isn’t this pie in the sky. That society is gone forever.” Lord Macmillan of Archasamby snorted with laughter.

  “I’m not a constitutionalist,” Crawford-Mackenzie said defiantly and quite reasonably. “We need to create a society that knows where it is going – and not too far. How we do it is not something I feel obliged to answer.”

  “How very convenient,” I said, also quite reasonably. “Have we any other offers at this sale of the utopias?”

  “A return to the post-war consensus,” Hamilton-MacNiff showed his colours. “A return to Keynesianism and full employment. A return to high growth, the welfare state and good universal and free education.”

  “Ah, so one wants to return to the distant past and the other to the recent past,” I was getting into my stride, as though I had just caught sight of a stag on the brow of the hill – a perfect shot, as long as I make the approach carefully and quietly. “I thought that writers were supposed to use their imagination.”

  “Communism,” said that wilful Hans Bonetti-MacDonald.

  “Communism?” I pretended to be shocked, but my heart leapt with joy. This was one I would enjoy tearing apart. “Doesn’t that also belong to a recent past that feels more ancient than Crawford-Mackenzie’s Romantic whatever-its-called?”

  They laughed, I’ll give them
that. Even Bonetti-MacDonald, clearly the radical of this crew.

  “Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union was your great victory,” he said, “and the West even found a way to make money from it, although the human cost turned out to be high for the ex-Soviet citizens. But communism will always be one of the options. I don’t say that it will prevail. There has been too much soothsaying, but the idea cannot be eradicated. In fact, defeat can lead to victories. Have you never heard of Pyrrhus of Epirus?”

  Actually I have little time for people who say, “Have you never head of …?” – particularly if they end the question with the name of a Greek general or Greek anybody, for that matter. I had vaguely heard of a “pyrrhic victory”, so I said, “Of course, the Battle of Epirus.” And they laughed knowingly. Well, they have little else to do in their lives but collect pointless factoids. I had clearly failed to wing it, and I wasn’t going to pursue the matter. “I’m surprised that you can defend a state that had such a terrible human rights record.”

  “It was never about human rights,” Bonetti-MacDonald got on a high horse he was clearly well acquainted with. “America trumpeted the Helsinki Agreement, even as it brought back the chain gang. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, it’s time to admit that in some areas it was spectacularly successful. I do not speak of its grotesque crimes against humanity – principally its own citizens and indeed its most fervent supporters – because that should be obvious. There were other lesser evils in the Soviet Union, which arrived there earlier and have become increasingly familiar aspects of modernity everywhere.”

  “I thought you were a communist,” I was getting a little confused.

  “I am. Productive capital and, in particular, land should belong to the commonality. Those evils arrived in the Soviet Union not because it was communist, but because it was, briefly, the most modern society there was, even as it struggled to feed its people under the blows of three dozen foreign invasions. Perhaps these evils of modernity can never be reversed. Perhaps we should learn to live with them, but why should we pretend that they don’t exist?”

  “How preposterous!” I shouted, practically unable to process the absurdity of his arguments. “What possible connection could there be between our current democracies and the murderous and unnatural regime that called itself the Soviet Union? The self-proclaimed socialist state, but really a malign and shambolic parody of a Western empire.”

  “Of course there were disagreeable aspects about the Soviet life, and under Stalin’s criminal regime there was worse, but many of those disagreeable aspects were innovations that have been transferred to our capitalist societies in quite recent times. Advanced techniques of mass advertising were first developed in Russia in the twenties. Gorky’s obsession with the plain language of working people is everywhere in our press, TV and now almost every other media. The Soviets invented rule by the focus group, by testing ideas on samples of workers and peasants. The idea stinks, because the minute you form such a group, they cease to be typical. Besides this is not rule by the majority, but rule by the uninformed, by those who do not care, by those who reply on a coerced impulse to a question they very probably have never posed themselves.”

  “Is that it?” I sighed with unalloyed boredom.

  “No, there’s more. There’s the rule of a semi-educated and bullying bureaucratic class that armed with some branch of pseudo-science or real science misapplied pokes its judgemental nose everywhere. To challenge their current truths is defined as madness or at least as childish obtuseness. There’s near total conformism in the media. Now that CCTV and Google drones can observe us everywhere, there’s a level of surveillance that never existed in the Soviet Union, but only in that great caricature of it, 1984. Was Orwell satirising Soviet communism or modernity as it would evolve? The capitalist state is everywhere, but worse, it often acts with impunity through a privatised agency.”

  “Our societies may not be perfect,” I admitted, “but our people can think what they want and do what they want.”

  “Can they?” continued Bonetti-MacDonald, “Can they now? Civilians are always compromised with the regime under which they eat and sleep. They commit small acts of evil in the pursuit of petty interests, whilst armies commit great evils often in the name of great ideals. Soldiers make sacrifices in an artificial morality where aims are pure, whereas civilians act heroically in the real world of lesser evils. That is why we should be fearful of all militaristic language – it is the language of over-simplification. But the Soviet Union had settled down, and was trying to create a civil society within socialism; what right had we to step in and subvert it?”

  The man was deranged, but I continued to engage: “The problem was equality itself. Stalin was an egalitarian, was he not?”

  “So you think it takes an egalitarian to introduce equality. What a strange idea! To change the world either for the better or for the worse, you need men of conviction who will do anything – anything, I tell you – to make their certainties real. The trick is to get rid of them once the change is complete, as the Athenians did with Themistocles, who helped consolidate democracy and fought off the Persians. And the interesting question is: does the idea make the man or the man the idea? Geoffrey, with his love of dialectic, will say it is a bit of both, but I know that the idea moulds the man, and does so roughly, as a clumsy child moulds a piece of clay. The man, however powerful he is, is a plaything of the idea, and he ends up doing unimaginable things, by which I mean things he could not have imagined. His dreams become a nightmare, and caricatures of themselves – but still they inspire. Hope and despair go hand in hand, and lead us towards their uncertain future.”

  “Enough of politics,” said his lordship, whose expression had become increasingly concerned as the conversation developed – concerned in the manner of the modern politician, with his head tilted slightly to one side, indicating empathy no doubt. His facial expression skilfully and indeed unbelievably combined indulgence and moral outrage. “I’m sure that Peregrine didn’t come all this way to get a political lecture on the wonders of the Soviet Union. I would have thought that we moved on from that long ago. You’re all writers and I think that’s why Peregrine came to see you.” He turned to me to digress politely, “Shame about the weather. I hope you weren’t too disappointed.”

  “Actually,” I uttered with theatrical moroseness, “I would have preferred to be visited by three or four footballers, actresses, beauty queens or TV cooks. Having said that, the conversation has been unexpectedly entertaining if somewhat bizarre, and the whisky has been unreservedly good. My advice to you all, though, is that you should never travel too far from your straitjackets.”

  Crawford-Mackenzie chortled, Hamilton-MacNiff was insulted and Bonetti-MacDonald laconically delivered that old cliché: “It takes one to know one.”

  His lordship, clearly unused to conversation that didn’t fit a template, was so much at a loss that he just ignored what I had said and continued to announce his arbitration: “Given that he came to see writers, I suggest that you discuss writing.”

  “Start there, and it could go anywhere,” said the ever loquacious Bonetti-MacDonald. “I thought I was coming round for a few drinks. Turns out I have to earn them like a performing seal.” He flapped his arms at his side and made a noise vaguely reminiscent of a seal’s bark. He was the only one who found this amusing.

  Hamilton-MacNiff, the class swat, took up the challenge, but did not raise his arm and I’m not sure teacher would have liked his turn of phrase: “The novel is fucked. It has run out of things to say.”

  “Not at all,” said Bonetti-MacDonald. “It’s going through a bad patch, and will return as strong as ever. This has happened in the past.”

  Hamilton-MacNiff, intelligent and aloof, sneered and said, “The world changes but Hans will always live in the nineteen-sixties, the decade before he was born. If only that were the case. The corporations that now monopolise the book industry and the demise of the Net Book Agreeme
nt mean that the blockbuster will take over, genre will reign and innovation will end.”

  “Rubbish,” said Crawford-Mackenzie, waking from a reverie, “who cares about the Net Book Agreement. Leave that stuff to the accountants. The world changes much less than you think and you shouldn’t get too obsessed about the technology that appears to dominate our lives. Of course, it changes things – mainly for the worse – but ultimately we all have to sleep, eat, work, make love, possibly reproduce, grow old, fail and die. That always accounted for ninety per cent of what it meant to be a human and it still does. You both accuse me of believing in a golden age, and perhaps there was for humanity, but the novel is a different thing. The novel thrives on misery and exploitation. How else did Tsarist Russia produce such fine literature? And how else did the most terrible years of Stalin’s repression produce the same result? The novel has work to do at the moment, and when that’s the case, it will always find a way to renew itself.”

  “I agree with both of you – to some extent,” said Bonetti-MacDonald. “Yes, there is more continuity than we currently think, because we’re dazzled by the strangeness of technological change. It is also true that the novel thrives in some conditions and not in others. Our times are not good for the novel, but I don’t think the problems are primarily about the book market.”

  “What are they then?” said Hamilton-MacNiff, so wearied he seemed to have trouble in articulating his jaw. Perhaps this is an argument they revisit often – when in their cups.

  “The humanistic discourse I associate with the novel has perhaps run its course,” said Bonetti-MacDonald. “As a teenager I was politicised by a passage in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which concerned an aristocratic child’s inability to empathise with the poor who surround him in nineteenth-century Moscow. There’s a book by Ian McEwan which attempts to do the exact opposite: the central character – perhaps representing the author’s views – muses about the tramp who disfigures the square below his house. He feels sorry for the penniless man in a perfunctory manner, but goes on to say that this is an inevitable state of affairs: in the jungle of life, there must be losers. Presumably McEwan has earned his right to pass on his genes through the brilliance of his novels – but what if he had been born before the invention of writing or printing or the novel itself; what if he were to be born in a hundred years when, according to Geoffrey, the novel will be dead – the fact that they’ve been announcing the death of the novel for decades does not mean that it won’t die one day; what if he were born in times when it’s impossible to collect royalties and everything is pirated?”