‘Are we ready?’ he asked, emerging from the men’s room. The whisperers separated hastily. They all trooped through into the lecture room. From Willoughby’s haversack there peeped still the bottle of milk. He sat down at the desk and thrust his legs out; there followed an uncomfortable pause in which a restive audience, already offended by the fact that the lecture was starting half an hour late, began to shuffle its feet in a very hostile way, until someone suddenly realized that Bates, who was, of course, to introduce the speaker, was still down at the station. ‘You’d better do it,’ said Professor de Thule to Treece. Treece got up and advanced to the podium. He summoned up a few hasty words. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we’re delighted to have with us Mr Carey Willoughby, who needs no introduction from me. He is one of the so-called novelists of the new movement . . . I mean, one of the novelists of the so-called new movement . . .’ Loud guffaws burst from the student body, interrupting the rest of the statement. The so-called novelist played to the gallery: ‘You see, they’re all agin me,’ he said. Treece concluded in hot embarrassment: ‘. . . So, then, here is the author of the best-selling novel, Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ – he uttered these absurd words with distaste – ‘Mr Carey Willoughby.’ Willoughby rose from his lolling position and went over to the lectern. He removed the top of it and leaned over familiarly, so that the whole of the top half of his body lay across the table. ‘I didn’t prepare anything for this little do,’ he said lazily, ‘because I’ve talked to poetry societies before, and I’ve usually found that the last thing in the world they’re interested in is poetry. I mean, they may be interested in reading their own poetry, which isn’t what I mean by being interested in poetry, or they may have come to meet someone else’s wife, or have someone to listen to while they’re knitting. So I mean, if there’s anyone who doesn’t want to hear this, just shout out. I mean, we’ll do what you want to do. I could tell jokes or something.’ Nobody answered. ‘Well, come on,’ said Willoughby. ‘Is there anyone really interested in poetry?’ Hands went up all over the place. ‘He’s right out of pantomime, isn’t he?’ murmured Mavis de Thule, wife of the Professor of History, rather amused by all this rhetorical trickery.
‘All of you?’ cried Willoughby. ‘My God! Well, let me ask you this, then – why?’
No one answered.
‘Well, come on, then, why?’
‘Because it’s delightful,’ a brave fat girl in the front row finally said.
‘Brother, oh, brother,’ said Willoughby, for this was just what he wanted. ‘You aren’t interested in poetry at all, believe me. You people are all alike. Sometimes I could just sit down and weep. You want poetry to entertain you – it’s escapism, it’s like television and you don’t even need an aerial. There are people, all over England, people like me, sweating our guts out to write poetry that really means something, that’s the crystallization of our hard-won experience, and it’s like talking to the floor. How many people here like modern poetry? How many people here suspect that it’s a clever trick, or find it too obscure to be pleasing, or think things have gone downhill since the Victorians?’ There was a general murmur of assent from many of the townees, who had come in for the occasion. ‘I thought so,’ cried Willoughby. ‘Of course, the truth is that if you don’t like modern poetry you don’t like poetry in any real sense at all, because poetry is an exploration of the human spirit of a given time. This is about you, and if you don’t like modern poetry, let me add, you don’t like yourself. It’s hard work. So what? We aren’t doing it to amuse, you know. The poet is exploring your universe. Ezra Pound once said that the artist is the antennae of the race, though the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists. I quote from memory.’
Treece leaned across to de Thule and commented: ‘I’ll bet he always does.’
‘But do you trust your artists?’ cried Willoughby.
An old lady in front of Treece turned and beckoned to him. ‘He’s such fun, isn’t he?’ she murmured. ‘Yes, isn’t he?’ said Treece.
‘Not that it’s trust he wants. He just wants a modicum of attention; he wants people to read his verse, not for its charm, but for its tidings. The simple fact is, of course, that the world doesn’t like poets. They’re dirty, they cause trouble, they’re bad house guests, they cheat, they lie, they fornicate. They question the values people live by. They challenge your view of the world, and that’s the supreme insult. They don’t even like you. And you return the hate in full measure, because they’ve gone beyond the order and respectability of your lives and found the principle of disorder there. Chaos looms up. So you make them pay. That’s what poetry is, but you wouldn’t know it, because it’s obscured by all the culture phoneys, the weekend reviewers, the advertising agency intellectuals, the teachers of English . . .’ here Treece winced ‘. . . who look in poetry for everything except what is so completely there.’
Willoughby went on like this for a while, waving his hands loosely and explaining that every poem is a mature human experience, an attack upon the indifference of matter, and the reason that in the beginning was the word was that the word was of matter yet more than it (or something like that). He kept saying, as he talked about poetry, that he was not going to talk about poetry. Then in the end he appeared to realize that he would have to, because people don’t put up with being insulted for ever, even if they like it at first. So he picked up his Army haversack and, still pretending that he had not prepared a thing, he said: ‘Well, let’s see what we have here.’ He put in an inquisitive hand and removed the milk bottle (he explained that he was tubercular and had to drink a pint of milk every day) and three pairs of discarded socks (he explained that he was gastric and had to change his socks regularly – perhaps these two illnesses are cited against the wrong precautions, but then he had them, and in some ways they were, one felt, him), and he got a sheaf of papers, which turned out to be poems – his poems. To Treece, who pursued literature intently, seeking to distil from it deeper and more searching explorations of the human fabric, and to preserve at all costs the purity and integrity of thought and art, Willoughby’s rancour was quite out of key. Willoughby’s poems were full of ambiguities; you listened to them in the way that you listened to low music-hall comedians, knowing that what they said on the face of things wasn’t the joke at all, and that, moreover, the joke lay in the disparity between what was said and what was meant. In other words, Willoughby’s poems were a thing you had to be in on; some of the audience were in, and some were out. Willoughby saw this, and berated the audience again for a few minutes. Then he asked for questions.
STUDENT: I wanted to ask you, because I see that some of the other people in this new movement . . .
WILLOUGHBY: There is no movement.
STUDENT: But I thought . . .
WILLOUGHBY: Sorry, no movement. All made up by the Literary Editor of the Spectator.
STUDENT: Well, what I wondered was this: some of the other poets in . . . I mean, that have been associated with you have come out on record as being of the opinion that Dylan Thomas’s reputation is excess . . .
WILLOUGHBY: That phoney! Any more questions?
MAVIS DE THULE: Well, Mr Willoughby, I’m sure we’ve all of us read all the things you’ve written with great interest and pleasure, poems as well as novels, and I suppose we ought to take what you’ve said cum grano.
WILLOUGHBY: Cum what?
MAVIS DE THULE: Grano. Latin. But what I felt I had to ask you after hearing your most fascinating comments was, what public do you have in mind when you write? Other poets?
WILLOUGHBY: That’s a fair question, lady, and I’d say: about three other people who’ve gone to the trouble to ask themselves what it is I’m trying to do.
MAVIS DE THULE: What are their names?
At this point Treece saw the need to intervene. ‘I’m sure Mr Willoughby’s speaking metaphorically,’ he said, and Willoughby nodded cheerfully, ‘so now I’d like to wind up this I feel unforgettable oc
casion. Before I do, though, there’s one question of my own that I’d like to put to Mr Willoughby, and that is: tell us, do you write more than you read or read more than you write?’
Treece knew that this was rather naughty, and it sounded ruder than he had even intended; but then Treece was not himself, for he had the wit to realize that, with his little faux pas in introducing Willoughby, he had committed himself irretrievably to being of the new movement himself – he was certain to be in Willoughby’s next novel. The question, at any rate, struck home: Willoughby blushed like a student called to account by his tutor, and he passed the remark off by playing to the audience. ‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘You have no friends in this game. In this game you just have to have merit. And I never did have much of that.’ The meeting closed amidst widespread hilarity.
II
Willoughby was, in a sense, right, of course; someone should have warned him that the Vice-Chancellor was to invite him to dinner. But really he did not seem too much put out that he was the only person present in Army-surplus khaki trousers. ‘At least,’ said the Vice-Chancellor, in a frantic attempt to put him at his ease, ‘at least, my friend, you have a pocket at the knee.’ Willoughby (who was thinking that if ever they decided to make a film of the life of G. K. Chesterton, here was the man for the part) really did not need putting at his ease; he was at it already. Indeed, he commanded the whole conversation throughout dinner; it was his views on the fetid quality of Shelley and Byron, his view on the modern decline of letters (he had written two well-known novels, and the royalties were scarcely enough, as he put it, to keep him in condoms), his views on the need for a national theatre (preferably in some place that challenged the hegemony of London, like Nottingham or Derby or Stoke), his views on this, on that, that dominated the meal. If there were views to be had on anything, he had them. He was at an advantage, of course, in the fact that he took none of the main courses. He was the only one present, he averred, as he took the five or six tablets that formed his meal, who would, barring accidents, live to be one hundred and twenty.
‘I’m a layman, of course, Willoughby,’ said the Vice-Chancellor weightily, ‘but tell me something, will you, that our literary friends here’ – he beamed wholesomely at Viola Masefield and Treece, who were also present and were drinking Blue Label Bass because the staff was tacitly expected to leave the hock for visitors – ‘will doubtless think I ought to know already. But even a Vice-Chancellor can’t know everything about all his subjects, or we shouldn’t need to employ these chaps to do a bit of teaching for us. The question is, just what the hell are your books about?’
‘Life and how it’s lived,’ said Willoughby, taking Dr Masefield’s hand and holding it under the table, ‘and, by implication, how it ought to be lived, and why it can’t be lived properly any more.’
‘You people are slippery fishes,’ said the Vice-Chancellor. ‘You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can’t understand it. You’re all the same. Well, a plague on your abstractions. Facts, my friend, facts.’ He poured himself more wine. ‘Answer me this, then: why don’t your novels have proper endings, why aren’t they resolved, why don’t people die or live happily ever after?’
‘There are times when we see our friends plunging headlong into disaster, and there is nothing we can do about it, except accept the fact that it is probably we who will suffer more than them; they will never know about it.’ So it was with Treece now. There was no way of intervening to make this little speech sound more subtle than the simple, naïve thing that it actually was. Treece shut his eyes and withdrew from the conversation.
‘You can get that sort of book at the Public Library,’ began Willoughby.
‘I can get any sort of book at the Public Library. I know the Librarian,’ said the Vice-Chancellor, who liked it to be known that he knew everyone and could get anything done. ‘What I want to know is why yours aren’t like that?’
‘Because I’m not trying to butter up my public,’ said Willoughby. ‘With my sort of book there’s no resolution, because there’s no solution. The problems aren’t answered in the end, because there is no answer. They’re problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It’s not a beautiful world.’
‘Why not?’ demanded the Vice-Chancellor’s wife stoutly.
‘But look, why do that?’ asked the Vice-Chancellor. ‘That’s like saying, “I’ve got stomach ache. You should have it too.” ’
‘It’s meant to be,’ said Willoughby. ‘What you’re trying to say is, “Sit down. You’re rocking the boat.” Look, here’s the artist, dissatisfied and, stringy, sitting on the outside of everything, watching the world going on like some spawning slum. Here’s the boys with the big fat fannies slapping everyone on the back and saying, “You’ve never had it so good.” What can the poor old novelist do? He’s not after more wages or more fun or more programmes on the telly. All he wants is to change the world. Things seem to get worse. What else is there but anger and frustration? He can’t work for a new world, because what it calls progress he calls decline. He just sits on his arse too, like everyone else, but it’s a thin angry arse and he doesn’t sit so comfortably.’
Treece took a nervous look at the Vice-Chancellor, from his hue as furiously angry as any modern young man. He did have a fat fanny, and he was really an Edwardian, and he believed that if it hadn’t been talked about at the Café Royal, it wasn’t really life. What he couldn’t understand was this: in his youth he had had opinions, and been regarded as liberal, almost a Bolshie (he had supported women’s suffrage and once had chained himself to the railings outside the Houses of Parliament; it had been a Sunday – he was busy every other day – and an old-fashioned English Sunday at that, with simply no one around; no one tried to arrest him, or ask him what he was doing; what people passed him took no notice, as all decent English people do when something queer is going on; in the evening he got very hungry, and his tummy, which was a big one even then, for people ate more in those days, rumbled dreadfully, so he got out the key from where it was hidden in the lining of his jacket, and unchained himself, and went away). Now he had opinions, and he was regarded as a Tory; and what mystified him was, they were exactly the same opinions, so how do you account for that?
‘Are you married, Mr Willoughby?’ asked the wife of the Vice-Chancellor. She had not understood a word of all that had been said, but she had cottoned on to one thing, as women do, and this was that Willoughby was playing footsie under the table with Viola Masefield.
‘I don’t suppose he believes in it,’ said the Vice-Chancellor in disgruntled tones.
‘Well, why buy the cow,’ asked Willoughby reasonably, ‘when you can steal milk through the fence?’
‘I suppose Mr Willoughby is what they call an angry young man, is he? He seems to talk so loudly,’ whispered the Vice-Chancellor’s wife to Treece, whom she was rather inclined to blame for all this. ‘Angry?’ said Treece. ‘He’s livid.’
‘Ah well, the young, you know, the young,’ murmured the Vice-Chancellor’s wife. ‘Quite,’ said Treece. ‘Still, I must say I’m rather glad I’m not the head of his department.’
‘Academic people chatter so,’ said the Vice-Chancellor’s wife. ‘They’re so articulate that one wonders simply how they do it. One wouldn’t mind, one rather likes it, since one doesn’t have to talk oneself; but one rather wishes one could lie down, just now and then.’
III
Treece had invited a few people back, that evening, to meet Willoughby, and when they returned, after nine, from dinner at the Vice-Chancellor’s, there they all were, on his doorstep, shivering and rubbing up against one another to keep warm.
They entered in a group and, Treece observed with alarm, Willoughby at once and without invitation disappeared upstairs. Who would follow? wondered Treece. Willoughby had been behaving quite oddly in the car coming back; there was a cro
wd, and someone had to sit on someone’s knee, and of course Viola sat on Willoughby’s. Then somehow, from under Viola, Willoughby had managed to produce a hip-flask and ‘Anyone care for a snort to wash his mouth out, after that?’ he asked. He then went on to tell stories about what a poor teacher he was, always forgetting to bring books into class and failing to mark essays and dropping off to sleep in tutorials. ‘Have you ever thought of taking up writing fulltime?’ asked Treece, again rather naughtily, since he was patently seeing the matter more from teaching’s point of view, than from writing’s. ‘Where would he get his material?’ asked Viola with a laugh; it wasn’t, however, the sort of thing that Treece could laugh at. Being transmitted into art was not, he was sure, his function in life.
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