Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Willoughby sat up, and flattened his hair down with his hand, and there he was, ready. He went upstairs and presently Treece could hear him shouting down: ‘How modest can you get? Do you know there isn’t a mirror in this house that comes down below the waist? That’s why you never say anything. You’re wondering all the time whether your bloody flies are fastened.’

  Presently he came downstairs drying his hands on his handkerchief. Treece had intended that they go out for lunch, but Willoughby bridled and insisted on cooking a meal. He said a man should be able to cook for himself, and be self-contained. He went and looked over the food that there was in. ‘Honestly, you live like some old spinster,’ he said. ‘All that front, and then at home you don’t eat anything. You’re what I call flabby genteel.’

  It was a poor meal. And there was flour all over the drawing room, from Willoughby’s cake-making, and fat all over the kitchen wall. As they ate Willoughby took tablets and reflected on what he called ‘the protocol boys’, who, he said, ‘made him want to puke.’ ‘All these bastions of tired morality; all these little books on Housman. Some day the big bang’s going to come, and you’ll all wonder what hit you. But you’ll just look at one another and say nothing, because it sounds rather like the toilet flushing and no one mentions that. You know, I’d like to go back to the Vice-Chancellor’s house and stick my head though the window and shout: “Life is not a bowl of cherries.” Just that.’

  ‘You mustn’t identify me with him,’ said Treece. ‘His and mine are different worlds. We really have very little in common.’

  ‘One always dockets old people together, I suppose,’ said Willoughby. ‘They’re all one generation to me, I’m afraid. You know these old dons at Cambridge who sit over the port and say to one another: “Yes, there was someone once, wasn’t there . . .” This sums up my seniors, and it’s another way of life, these civilized old gentlemen amateurs, full of charm and kindness, so frighteningly pathetic, saying that literary criticism is horrid and offensive and still, now, talking about Principia Ethica. I wouldn’t do there, you know. All sherries taste the same to me; they’re all like cold tea. I only know two kinds of cheeses, mouse-trap and blue. I think it would be terrible to have to live in Sicily. I’ve never read Sainte-Beuve. I don’t think that by not having a servant to do all those things of life that don’t really matter I’ve lost everything. Nor do I think that by not being able to go to those old country house weekends of the early years of the century I missed the most brilliant and civilized gatherings of persons that ever existed. I know this shows on me. I’m not civilized, I’m no gentleman, I don’t know a great many languages and I’m not erudite in any field, I respect that old sort of scholarship and love of learning, but it’s no good to me. You see, that’s how we’re different.’

  ‘Not so very different,’ said Treece. But Willoughby did not hear this, for Merrick’s horn sounded in the driveway. Viola was already in the car and Willoughby sat beside her. ‘What are you talking about this afternoon, Carey?’ she asked. ‘God knows,’ said Willoughby, settling in the car and putting one arm around Viola. ‘Don’t tell Him. Tell us,’ said Viola reprovingly. ‘Oh,’ said Willoughby carelessly. ‘I’ll think of something.’ ‘Charming man,’ said Viola, looking over at Treece; and she winked.

  Merrick, sitting behind the driving wheel with his county cap on, looked a real rat. Viola once pointed out a profound truth about Merrick, and that was that all his friends had inflatable lifejackets. It could rain for forty days and forty nights and you wouldn’t catch them bending. All they needed, as Viola pointed out, was bulletproof inflatable lifejackets and they needn’t have a care; all eventualities were catered for. Actually, of course, they had their lifejackets because to a man they all of them had dinghies, and went sailing at weekends; but it was somehow appropriate that these people, the self-engrossed middle classes (the other side of the coin from the civilized liberal middle class that Treece saw as the salt of the earth), should be so guarded. However, the amusing truth about Merrick was that he was, in fact, vaguely communist. He was a walking personification of Jenkins’s dictum that you could, always, have your cake and eat it. He was the enlightened landowner breeding lamp-posts so that the mob would have something to hang him on. And, as Treece expected, and feared, he did not make exactly a good impression on Willoughby.

  It was a bright, sunny afternoon as they drove on through the Midland countryside, splashing through the water-splashes, roaring through the villages. All over England, in just such large country houses, once the homes of the nobility, as they were going to, associations of computing-machine operators and folk-dance societies hold weekend conferences, playing parlour games in the evenings and having practical jokes with lavatory paper in the dormitories. Mr Schenk, with his extra-ordinary organizational talent, had once again persuaded the AA to make large yellow signs, saying POETRY CONFERENCE, which they bracketed up all over the Midland counties. Unfortunately, on the same day, there was also a POULTRY CONFERENCE, and this was signposted too, and many an ardent poetry-reader that day ended up at the wrong house, amid clucking birds, while dung-covered farmers kept arriving at the poetry conference and slapping their leggings with riding crops.

  At the entrance to the hall, Schenk and Butterfield were waiting to greet them, looking rather frightened as they weighed up Willoughby and wondered whether today was going to be better, or worse, than yesterday. Willoughby removed his arm from around Viola’s neck and got out of the car. Willoughby was speaking that afternoon, and Treece the following morning, while the afternoon was given over to a Brains Trust which included on the platform Willoughby, Merrick, Viola, and Treece again.

  At three o’clock Willoughby’s lecture began. He commenced by standing up and asking if anyone had a copy of the collected verse of Wallace Stevens. No one had; the first blood was to Willoughby. He went on to announce that his subject for the afternoon was: were artists, and particularly poets, insane? There was a splutter of applause from the audience, who were all poets, and would have hated it if people had not thought they were insane; that is, they knew they weren’t, but they liked for the common man to think that they were. Willoughby then began to talk about Philoctetes, a social discard, marooned on a desert island because he had been so socially dissolvent as to have a wound in his foot that stenched abominably. He was marooned by his fellow Greeks on the way to the Trojan War, and ten years later they found that they needed Philoctetes’ magic bow, given him by Hercules, in order to finish off the war. Willoughby was clearly talking about his own symbolic foot (he said the wounded foot was a castration symbol, and that Henry James had a bad leg, an important fact to remember when you read his work; but Willoughby did not look very castrated to Treece), and he told how crafty old Ulysses, a great businessman, had come to the island and tried to bargain with Philoctetes for the bow. Treece knew that Willoughby was getting all this from a book by Edmund Wilson, and he hoped that Willoughby was at least going to credit his sources (the first thing Treece had been told in the academic world, as a simple freshman, had been: a gentleman always credits his sources). Finally, said Willoughby, Ulysses had had to accept the wound with the bow, the wound as a condition of the bow, for the thing that made Philoctetes abhorrent and separate from other men also made him powerful . . .

  ‘Why?’ demanded a woman with a flower-pot hat – the woman with the flowerpot hat, in fact. ‘Why does the bow go with the wound? Why didn’t Ulysses wait until he was asleep, and take the bow, and leave him on the island?’

  Willoughby stepped back as if struck; now they had upset him, you could tell. ‘This is the last time I do you an analogy,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Well, it’s right, isn’t it?’ cried the bronzed Woman’s Journal woman, stirring Treece’s soul by her very presence and action.

  ‘What a low-down lot you are,’ said Willoughby. ‘But of course, that’s what people would do these days. Do do. Who’d be an artist these days? You’re like a pack of vultures. Have you
ever seen it when a poet dies? It’s like a night of long knives. He wasn’t a good man, he was rude, he was promiscuous . . .’

  This was all just his kind of thing. The audience, pleased that he was insulting them again, just like yesterday, nodded in agreement. They were all in fact civilized, human, good-hearted people who, had Philoctetes come to them with a bad foot, would have bathed it, and not even mentioned that it smelled, and put him in their car and driven him down to Dr Scholl’s shop, and paid for the treatment. If only, you felt of them, Van Gogh had been alive, so that they could have sewn his ear back on.

  It was a hot day; flies buzzed in the air. Treece coddled his knees in his arms and smiled at the members of his poetry class who were there and who noticed him. He waved cheerily to Emma, who was present and sitting on the other side of the room. A few people in the audience were peering out rather uncomfortably through the windows at the parkland beyond. Willoughby was not having this: ‘Listen,’ he cried and the errant heads swung back. Willoughby was making so much noise now that gardeners were peering curiously in at him through the long Georgian windows. Treece’s mind began to drift away into more glorious spheres; there was no place for militancy in his view of literature. For Treece literature’s function lay here: as a humanist he pursued the record of experience as he pursued experience itself, seeking to distil from it more searching exploration of the human fabric, to chart new worlds in the universe in which human sensations are played out; he looked searchingly into the ocean to see what sort of channel was made by the human passage across the world. All that Willoughby said of literature was not of his literature at all. But in feeling the challenge, he also felt the failure. He had not learned very much. His passage had left nothing. He had never really come to grips with the world, after all. And now it was getting rather too late.

  Willoughby was closing, now, still talking of how the world paid out its maladapted ones, for the fact was, he said, that society regarded cultural things not as living appurtenances of its world, but as dead things, museum pieces, and it would rather have the work of a dead artist than a living one; people paid a king’s ransom to buy pictures by painters who had been left starving by their contemporaries. His point was that the world was mad, and the artist sane; but all madmen think this, and likewise all artists. He read from a letter of Van Gogh’s, when he had nothing and expected nothing. Nothing was, he said, what he got. Van Gogh was mad, yet everyone who looked hard into his pictures found in them the most painful kind of sanity. The words of the letter ran: ‘How can I be of use in the world? Cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good? How can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects? You see, that is what preoccupies me constantly, and I find myself imprisoned by poverty, excluded from entering on certain work, and certain necessary things are out of my reach. That is one reason for not being without melancholy, and then one feels an emptiness where there might be friendship and deep and profound affections, and one feels a hideous discouragement gnawing at one’s very moral energy, and fate seems to block up all the instincts of affection, and a flood of disgust rises to choke one. And one cries out: “How long, my God?”’ And yes, cried Treece within himself, how long? Life was a dry and cruel estate without love, without thought of the future, without care and responsibility.

  And he looked across at Louis Bates, who, along with several other students, was present just for the afternoon, and he thought of Willoughby’s cry that the artist’s madness was grown out of the most painful kind of sanity. Bates did not look harrowed; he approved of what was said, as his applause showed, as if he actually knew that what had been said would vindicate him. He realized that Bates had seen something in the discourse other than what he had seen; that what lay before his eyes was of the romantic figure of the poet, Shelley-like . . . no, Christ-like. This was not what Willoughby meant, Treece felt sure; he was talking of the lot of the plain and ordinary man who carries the burden of being an artist, not of the great soul and the huge spirit.

  Butterfield rose and asked for questions. A lady from the poetry society thanked Willoughby for the good advice about being a poet. What she wanted to know was, did he think there were enough openings for poets to publish nowadays, what with John o’ London’s ending and all? This was how all poetry society meetings ended, in Treece’s experience. Willoughby asked the audience if they were not living in a fool’s paradise. There were, he said, more poets actually writing poetry than there were reading it. He asked why they didn’t just give up and go home. With this thought, they all dispersed for their tea.

  Treece retired to his room after tea in some upset. He felt himself assailed by a violent unrest, a positive physical discomfort, a sense of loss, though he could not say what was lost or whence the feeling came. It was a sense of having uprooted himself and cut himself off from any vigorous way of life, this, and an oppressive loneliness. He realized that the last few days and weeks had passed in a kind of arduous, strained state, in a painful intensity; he could scarcely remember what he had done over these weeks. He felt challenged; he needed somewhere to turn, someone to love. He crossed over to the mirror and looked at himself, and was impressed by some change in his appearance: his face seemed strained, his eyes puffed, and his hair drier and rougher than usual; there were rather a lot of white hairs. He was sure he was ill, and that the illness, if not physical, was then mental. For weeks he had been threatened with a kind of paranoic depression, in which the universe seemed to him unerringly hostile and all persons appeared creatures fully separate from himself yet in communion with each other; they were there and here, alone and unwanted in their counsels, was he. Events conspired with persons to belittle him. He thought of the previous evening, when he had been the odd man out, sitting with his back to the others and sneering up his sleeve at the jazz-lovers. He thought of his hideous sense of incapacity on the evening when Eborebelosa had been attacked. How unlike people seemed to him, how great the immense human estrangement, how little they shared any common ground, how momentary and evanescent their contacts as they passed and repassed each other. And how he wanted to see that his fate was shared. Treece was sufficiently under control to see that this sense of intense dislocation was not a normal condition of his human relationships, but an exaggerated form; his depression was, he felt, psychotic. The prevailing sense of a conspiracy, which disturbed him most, the feeling that fate and persons were organized together to achieve his personal downfall, that everything was working actively and deliberately against him, was paranoic; he knew it was and yet, he found himself insisting, wasn’t it true, wasn’t it true?

  In the evening there was a poetry reading; then they played parlour games, in one of which Treece found himself, for no good reason that he could recall, wrapped from head to foot in toilet paper and swaddled like a mummy, and then released again. He endured all this in a decidedly grudging spirit and wished that, like Butterfield and Willoughby, he had had the good sense to sneak off to the nearest inn when the poetry reading ended. Finally, he managed to get a moment alone with Emma. He took her outside, and they walked down to the pub. It was a warm night. He said: ‘Will you come up to my room tonight?’ ‘Oh Stuart, how can I?’ cried Emma. ‘It’s terribly risky. Someone will see me.’ ‘Of course they won’t,’ said Treece. ‘They’re all very tired. They’ll sleep like logs. And you can say you’re going to the toilet. You’re in a single room, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘Well, I’ll come there then, if you won’t come to me,’ he said. ‘It’s very important, you see. I want to talk to you.’ ‘Very well,’ said Emma. ‘I’ll come to yours.’

  It was after one when she came. Treece lay fully dressed on the bed smoking, eaten by his ungovernable depression. ‘I know this was foolhardy,’ he said when she was there, ‘and it was hard for you. I’m sorry. But I just had to see you, Emma. I want to marry you.’

  ‘Why, Stuart,’ cried Emma surprised. ‘Whatever put that idea into your head?’

  ‘I don’t know. Willoughby,
I suppose. You know, I never really thought that new men could happen to me. I always felt that mine was the last generation. But it’s not, is it? I’m middle-aged, and set in my ways. I’m nearly forty. I can’t even cook myself a proper meal. And Willoughby can, and he’s in his twenties. I feel so painfully lonely. I suppose I always wanted to settle down, but just never knew how you did it. I’ve never possessed anything. Every stage of my life up to now has seemed a temporary arrangement, that didn’t warrant purchasing or possessing, but hiring and borrowing. Not to have love – that’s the most terrible thing. Not to be loved by anyone, or to have any love of your own and spend it in the world. I mean, the love we give to women is part of the force of passion we have for the world. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Emma. She sat silently for a moment on the bed.

  ‘Well?’ said Treece.

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Stuart, I’m very flattered, but I can’t,’ said Emma. ‘You don’t want to marry me; you just want to marry. I’m a perfectionist. I can’t make do with that.’