Birthday Party
Page 23
“I don’t see why any art should survive,” he answered. “When society changes, art must change or perish.”
“But society changes in a circle,” I suggested. “The literature of the French Revolution must have seemed very old-fashioned to Balzac, while he probably admired a good deal that was written further back.”
“It’s true,” he said, “that till to-day we’ve never had a successful revolution. But we have one to-day in Russia, and we shall have one in England to-morrow. Besides, you’ve forgotten science—science practically applied. That’s going to change things whether you like it or not. It is changing things. Every day it smashes some form of individualistic conceit, and paves the way for the mass-evolution of the social organism.”
“I’m sick of science,” I said. “Except for the invention of anæsthetics, which we aren’t allowed to buy, I doubt if it has made life any pleasanter.”
He laughed triumphantly.
“There you go! Because perhaps it hasn’t made life any pleasanter for you, you say you’re sick of science.”
“Isn’t that a good reason?”
“Do you really think the function of life is to make itself pleasant for you?”
“In one sense, yes. In another sense, I know life is quite indifferent to me.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t. It’s watching you the whole time, waiting to see if you’re going to make yourself pleasant to it—in other words an efficient link in the life-chain—an efficient member of the community.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Well, the community won’t very much longer be able to put up with inefficient members. They’re too much of a luxury nowadays.”
“But it used to put up with them—if I must admit that I’m an inefficient member of the community.”
“The community used to be unscientifically run. Now science has taken a hand things are going to be very different.”
“I wish, instead of talking about the ‘community,’ or ‘society,’ you people would say, ‘Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown and Mr. Robinson.’ It would sound so much more human. After all, society exists for its members, doesn’t it? It’s only a public convenience—like a club, I mean.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t. The members of a society exist for society. Just as the cells in your body exist for your body. If they don’t do their job properly, if they develop individualities and personalities of their own, they become cancer-cells, and have to be cut out. In the same way, members of society who develop personalities and individualities are cancer-cells in society, and will have to be cut out.”
I said, “What book did you get that from?”
“I don’t know. It’s quite a commonplace metaphor in our propaganda. Let me get you another drink.”
“Thank you. I see you maintain that man exists for society, and not, as I’d always thought, society for man. What does society exist for, then?”
He put the drink—another strong one—on a little table by my chair, and said, “Society exists for life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that society is the most efficient means for the carrying on of life, and as such is bound to survive and become intensified.”
“Till the individual becomes nothing but an ant?”
“If necessary. If reducing him to that level is the most efficient basis of social organisation, I have no doubt whatsoever that he will become an ant.”
“Do you think that desirable?”
“What does it matter whether it’s desirable or not, provided it’s biologically necessary?”
“I should have thought it mattered a good deal. Do you regard life—any kind of life—as an end in itself? Life, just in quantity, with no notion of quality? What value has life, considered by itself?”
“It has the only value—survival value.”
I paused. There were so many things I could say. What did he mean by survival? Survival only in time? Is something that lasts a hundred years necessarily better than something that only lasts ten minutes? Is the life of a tortoise better than the life of a may-fly? To take this view was like taking mere size as a criterion of excellence—or mere numbers. I wondered how far he could possibly be sincere.
“And what,” I asked, “when you’ve got life going to the uttermost—when you’ve peopled the earth till there’s standing-room only—when you’ve peopled all the planets and all the stars? What then? What is the end? Why bother about it all? Unless the people who are going to live and die during those ages have a chance to develop personalities of their own and to stand outside the ghastly process and form their own reality and get contact with it in their own individual ways?”
He said, “They will be in contact with reality, if they’re efficient members of society.”
“Simply as ants, or cogs in a machine? I don’t see that. Have you nothing more to offer me? Not even a distant vision of perfection?”
“Why should I have?”
“Because life is so meaningless without one.”
“Well, if it is?”
“It becomes a nightmare.”
“Well? Perhaps it is, to people like you. Personally, my own view is that one rubs along better by adapting oneself to life as it is than by going against it. However, life doesn’t care whether I rub along well or badly, so long as I serve my purpose.”
“Then why don’t you adapt yourself to the capitalist system, which happens to be the prevailing mode of life in England today?”
“Ah, that’s asking me to take too short a view altogether.”
“Yet you won’t let me take a very long one.”
“I won’t let you look forward to the Infinite. That’s a very different matter.”
“Tell me, are you a Communist on scientific or humanitarian grounds?”
“Both, though I realise that, ultimately, it’s the scientific grounds which count. As the most efficient of possible biological developments, Communism is inevitable.”
“If it is, why bother to help it forward?”
“Because I’m more comfortable if I adapt myself to the future than if I try to live in the past.”
“Then personal comfort is a legitimate motive?”
“It’s one of life’s baits. Mind you, life doesn’t want you to be comfortable, any more than society does. If it turns out that individual suffering makes for an efficient society, the individual will have to suffer. In fact, I’m afraid that endurance of a certain amount of bodily pain probably has a social survival-value. If it has, we shall all have to undergo, say, half an hour’s torture every day, just as in time vivisection will almost certainly be practised on human beings. The fittest survive. The law of survival is the one law we know—and, ultimately, the only value worth recognising.”
I felt I had borne enough, and finished my drink at one gulp.
“So you really think,” I said, rather offensively perhaps, “that all our instincts, all our hopes and aspirations, all our private realities—and there is no reality which is not private—must be measured and valued by this one biological law. You think, because very feebly you’re learning to recognise the glands without which we couldn’t have emotions, that emotions can be ruled out as perceptions of reality. (You might as well say that the value of a rosebud is the manure round the rose’s root.) You think that what survives, should survive. Science, to you, is the only means of knowledge. For the sake of science (mind you, the very rudimentary science of 1936, which contradicts the science of 1886 and will itself be contradicted in 2006) you’re prepared to blot out in one blow the living influence of the past, all our traditions, all the sanctity of our age-long experience. Shall I tell you my vision of the future? You will find it very different from yours. In my future you will have a world not over-populated, so that the individual, in the course of his
long life, will have all the privacy he requires for contemplation, and all the space he requires for the extension and development of his personality. There will be so much to browse upon—all the loveliness of the past, the vast treasury of the arts—not temporary propagandist arts, but those arts which are eternal bridges to reality. The individual will browse upon these arts, and upon his own direct personal realities also—which spring upon us from a host of intimate feelings and sudden convincing glimpses of nature. By nature I don’t want you to think I’m indicating nature on a bold, picturesque or panoramic scale. Size doesn’t count. A few matches littered in the dust on the floor of an inn-parlour, one leaf hanging from a twig in autumn, a muddy path leading to a farm gate—these and such other images are quite sufficient for my purpose. As I have said, there will be so much for us to browse upon that action will seem superfluous and impertinent—at best, an unpleasant necessity. As for this science which gives you people such a thrill, we shall very soon get bored with it. We shall take it for granted that every year we can fly ten times as quickly as we could fly the year before. We shan’t really want to fly anywhere. We shall accept, perhaps, certain bodily conveniences which leave us freer for meditation, but we shall no more regard science as a fit object for our emotions than we now regard the sewage-farm.”
“In Russia——” he said, and I said, “I dare say. I’m giving you my vision of the future—a future of contemplation rather than action, and of feeling rather than theorising, a future which lives on the past and doesn’t bother itself about progress, a future in which life moves more and more slowly, like a clock running down, on whose face each hour is marked as longer and lovelier than the last—till finally, time stands still, and all our troubles are over.”
I tried to take a drink, but my glass was empty. He got up quickly and refilled it for me.
“Well,” he said, “if that’s your vision of the future, I’m afraid you’re going to spend the rest of your life having a series of disappointments, if nothing worse.”
“I’m going to die,” I said, “but at least I have a vision. I have something inside me that is an end in itself, and I shall have lived in contact with that something. It’s more than you have, in your miserable biological world, with your pathetic belief that reality is a scientific subject, accessible by science. And by what science? Yesterday’s, to-day’s or to-morrow’s? They’re not the same. What do you know, yet, of deeper causes and deeper effects? (If the law of cause and effect holds good at all. I hope it doesn’t.) What entitles you to try to remould humanity for the sake of a scientific experiment, divesting men of every attribute which distinguishes them from animals? Wait till your science is as old as our traditions before you put it into practice. Why, you didn’t even foresee the rise of Fascism! I’ll tell you about your science. I’ll give you a little scientific lecture, which may be new to you. You know that plants need water?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know that in every so many parts of ordinary water there is a tiny drop of another substance called Heavy Water?”
“I seem to have heard of Heavy Water.”
“Well, without this infinitesimal proportion of Heavy Water, ordinary water is less fitted for maintaining plant life. And inside this heavy water there is a still heavier water—I suppose you’d call it Tritium Oxide, Heavy Water being known as Deuterium Oxide. I don’t think they pretend to know yet what the effects of Tritium Oxide are, but it may turn out to be a very important substance—even essential. And other discoveries may be made within Tritium Oxide. My point is that you, with your conception of society, with your imperfect rudimentary science, would have regarded Heavy Water as a dangerous antisocial abnormality. You would have said, had you been head-gardener to the community, ‘We can’t allow this wasteful monstrosity to exist. What we want is water, not Deuterium Oxide—that freakish piece of individualism.’ And you would have trotted out your metaphor of the cancer-cell, and run the Heavy Water off into a concentration camp. You’d have done the same with the first proton that misbehaved with an electron—the first amœba that struck out for itself, the first monkey who tried to walk on two legs. Talk of the intolerance of the Old Testament or the Catholic Church! You’re fifty times as intolerant, and fifty times as ignorant, because you would gaily sacrifice the known to a half-digested theory—the freedom of the individual soul to the discipline of an ant-hill.”
He heard my last few sentences impatiently, and asked, “What book did you get that Heavy Water business from?”
“A botanical magazine I found on a table in the morning-room here.”
“Oh, yes. My aunt has them sent here, and reads them when she comes to stay. Is that the end of your lecture—or should I call it parable?”
“Yes. Though I could elaborate it a good deal.”
“Rather a case of the Devil quoting Scripture, isn’t it?”
“Well—if it is?”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t convince me. I still know that the only possible values are biological values. The fittest survive. A fit nation will beat an unfit nation. An organised nation will beat an unorganised nation. And the best organisation is quite obviously Communism.”
“Regarded purely as an economic theory, or as a spiritual theory as well—forgive the word ‘spiritual’?”
“From both and all points of view—the spiritual theory being, ultimately, irrelevant, since the desire for spiritual values arises either from faulty upbringing or faultily functioning glands.”
“If you had argued purely from the economic standpoint,” I said, “and only attacked economic individualism, I might have been prepared to concede a good deal. But when you say that there is no other level, when you deny that individuals are ends in themselves and assert that they are valuable only as links in the chain of life, then I cannot and will not give you an inch. It’s death you are offering, not life—you with your talk of biological values. It’s death to the soul, death to the spirit, death to me as a person. What do you offer in exchange?”
“I offer you the enjoyment of the rhythm of the mass-mind.”
“The mass-mind! Usually manifested in lynchings and panics, I believe.”
He turned savagely upon me. “At any rate, it’s better than your miserable little warped ego. Why should people slave away and subsidise you so that you can go mooning about your inward reality and matches on a pub floor? What use are you? What right have you to ask for anything? You with your talk of the importance of property, and tradition and privacy, and quality being better than quantity and all the other mumbo-jumbo of your class! Why should I bother to listen to such stuff, any more than I bother to read your twopenny-ha’penny novelettes? Why should——”
I was so startled by his outburst I nearly dropped the empty glass I was holding in my hand. Then, almost deliberately, I threw it at his head. It missed and struck the glass in the china cupboard and smashed it. He jumped up, went straight to the door and slammed it behind him. I sat where I was for five minutes—ten minutes—half an hour—I don’t know how long. I had begun to cry.
3
It was crying that saved me from fainting. I’m glad I didn’t faint, or I’d have been carried to bed, or sent away in an ambulance—straight to Dr. Ebermann’s clinic. I was wiping my eyes, when the door opened and Dora came in.
She said, “Stephen, Ronnie has told me.”
I was irritated by a silly look of drama on her face.
“Has he told you we both lost our tempers?” I asked.
“You know that with you, Stephen, it was more than a loss of temper. It was a complete breakdown of self-control. It’s exactly what you did at your school, when you threw the ink-pot at the window—or what you did at Boschurch, the night you threw the plant-pot at Catherine Rusper. I can’t take the responsibility any more. It’s too much for me. I ought never to have let you stay here.”
I jumped to my feet.
“You’ve done that,” I shouted. “You, Dora! Well, you and your stepson are a pretty pair of sneaks. You don’t want me in this house? All right. I’ll go. I’ll go now.”
I went to the door and she shrank away as if I were going to hit her.
“Oh, Stephen,” she said, “why can’t you be like other people? You always were a worry, both to Daddy and to me. There is something wrong with you. Why won’t you let yourself be cured?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I answered. “If you suppose I’m going to my bedroom so that you can lock the door on me, till——”
Then suddenly I felt it was quite futile to talk to her any more, and, in the middle of my sentence, I walked downstairs, took my cap from a peg in the cloakroom and went to the front door. At the top of the stairs, pale against the dark panelling, I saw Dora’s horrified irresolute face. Before she could come down, or even speak, I opened the front door, went through it and slammed it behind me.
When I reached the end of the long drive, I realised that the rain had almost stopped. A good thing, I thought; for I shouldn’t have to give the footman two suits to dry in one day—if I ever came back, that was. On reaching the road I hesitated, and then walked in a direction which I imagined to be northward—the opposite direction to that by which I had arrived from Busley station—full of hope, even then, though it was the hope of despair. Now I was hopeless. I had done for myself.