The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Charles was slower and less apt. He was given extra lessons, in Dr. Susskind’s lodgings in a house just behind the Women’s Hospital, between Euston and St. Pancras. It was true that Susskind was a good enough teacher to see not only what Charles didn’t understand, but how and why he didn’t understand it. He explained, in his soft German voice, just what was blocking enlightenment. At first he didn’t talk to Charles about anything other than maths. Then, one day, he said

  “You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.”

  “What I can’t see—what I really can’t see—is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time. How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see—and get told what the Bible says about the poor—and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats—and eating huge beefsteaks—I can’t see it.”

  “I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you.”

  So Charles Wellwood read Prince Kropotkin’s Appeal to the Young, which called on young doctors, lawyers, artists, to consider how they would live and work in the light of the horrors of starvation, disease, and desperation in the world of the poor. Its prescriptions for the good life were vaguer than its fierce calling-up of the bad. It called on the young to organise, to struggle, to write and publish about oppression, to be socialists. It did not say how the desired revolution could be brought about. Charles went back to Dr. Susskind and asked if he had more such books. The two looked at each other, the German gentle and quietly excited, the English boy tense with abstract need, his face white, erupting on brow and cheeks, his eyes hungry.

  He asked Susskind if he was a socialist. Susskind replied that he was an Anarchist. He believed the world would be better if all authority, all hierarchy, all institutions were abolished. There would come a revolution. After that, harmony, all giving to all and accommodating all.

  Something in Charles was wary of the prophetic enthusiasm of this. If goodness were really easy and natural, how had authority ever come about? He had read News from Nowhere with a certain scepticism. He was not sure it was possible to return to mediaeval pastoral and abolish the machine. He was coming to believe that the Todefright Wellwoods were not real socialists, were not confronting the problem head-on. For one thing, their house was full of things made in small quantities by poor men for rich ones. He had heard his own father sneer at Morris & Co. for selling vastly expensive fabrics and tapestries with golden age and paradisal foliage on them. Somehow they slid away from the horrors they should be confronting.

  He said as much, as best he could, to Susskind, who said how wise he was, that Mr. Morris himself had called himself a dreamer of dreams, born out of his due time. Peter Kropotkin believed in the printing-press. Maybe Charles would not believe this, but not far from where they were was just such a press, producing a monthly revolutionary paper called The Torch of Anarchy. It might interest Charles to know that the paper had been founded by three young people—still children really—from a famous poetic family, by Olive, Arthur and Helen Rossetti, when they were younger than Charles was now. The press had recently moved to a stable loft in Ossulston Street—but had produced powerful revolutionary literature from a room in the basement of Mr. William Rossetti’s house—a basement in which everything was painted blood-red, said Joachim Susskind, smiling over the absolute enthusiasm of the young Rossettis. He said, timidly, that he could give Charles some copies of this pamphlet, and even take him to see the press at work, if he felt he could go there. He himself helped out when he could. He loved mathematics as much as revolution, so he could not give up his college work. Statisticians and mathematicians would be welcome in the new order. Professor Pearson was not unsympathetic, though he inclined more to Karl Marx’s socialism than to Kropotkin’s anarchism. Indeed he had changed his name from Charles to Karl, to show his respect for the thinker.

  Charles wanted to see the press. He wanted to see work being done, to change things. No one thought to question him at home, if he said he was going to visit Dr. Susskind. And so, one afternoon, the two of them set off for Ossulston Street.

  Ossulston Street stank. The gutter ran with yellow horse-piss, and the road was almost solid with caked dung. Charles walked gingerly, trying to keep his shoes clean, and wondering whether clean shoes should be of any concern. The offices of The Torch of Anarchy were in a loft above a stable, behind the “jugs and bottles” door of a dingy public house, The Bay Tree. Joachim Susskind and Charles had to negotiate a kind of midden to get to the wooden stairs that led to the loft. As he went up, Charles suddenly remembered Humphry’s midsummer speech about the poor man who picked and ate undigested oats from stuff like this. This was what he ought to know about. He followed his tutor through a ramshackle door into a long wooden shedlike room, full of dust, floating in the air, thick on the heaps of literature and pamphlets which covered almost all the floor. There were strong smells in this dusty air—tobacco smoke and tobacco juice, human odours of thick sweat and excrement, a pervasive smell of sour milk, and another of rancid fat. And the smell of dog, though he could see no dog. There was also a smell of sour beer. A man in a greasy jacket was scoffing fried bread and bacon scraps from a newspaper on what appeared to be the plate of the printing press, at one end of the room. There were two or three little groups of people, none of whom appeared likely to be the young Rossettis. One group was talking fast and intently in Italian. One consisted of three people on a bench, against which leaned a hard placard. “The Day of the Beast Is Upon Us.” At one end of the room was a mattress, where someone—or more than one person—was snoring thickly under a heap of tattered cloth and a bundle of flags. Susskind said to the eating man that he had understood that Comrade Bartlett would be printing. He had brought his promised article on the German anti-socialist laws. He had brought a young man who was interested in anarchist ideas. Comrade Bartlett said his hand was too black with ink to shake the new Comrade by the hand, and asked his name. Charles said his name was Karl. He said he would like to help. Comrade Bartlett swept his meal off the press and began to ink it. Charles/Karl found himself worrying intensely about his clothes, at which the inhabitants of the loft appeared to be staring. His shirt was clean and starched, his jacket was pressed and expensive. He looked wrong and moreover he was going to get dirty, and be in trouble at home. He was saved by Joachim Susskind, who produced a workman’s apron from his bookbag and gave it to Charles, with a smile of complicit understanding.

  Charles was not sure if he would go back to Ossulston Street, after that first visit. No one paid him much attention. He worked as hard as he could, and came away with a sheaf of leaflets and pamphlets to read. But he did go back, again and again in the early part of 1896, as much because he respected Joachim Susskind, as because he felt he was meeting the real working class. He was not sure that these people were the real working class. He was sure that Herr Susskind—who now addressed him as Karl—was concerned about the working class. And he liked The Torch, when he read it. He was given various issues, which were illustrated by moving drawings of despairing women, by Lucien Pissarro. It contained writings by Leo Tolstoi and Peter Kropotkin, commemorations of the martyrdom in 1887 of the Chicago Anarchists and a debate between Quaker pacifism and the advocates of violence and propaganda by the Deed. It advertised reprints of Morris’s Useful Work vs. Useless Toil and attacked the Prince of Wales for the size of his clothes bill. It also carried tales from The Arabian Nights, and German fairytales by Otto Erich Hartleben. Karl read the instructions on HOW TO HELP.

  Take a Dozen copies of each issue of THE TORCH and try to sell or distribute them.

  Leave copies of THE TORCH and other literature in railway carriages, waiting rooms, tram cars, refreshment houses and other places for the public to read.

  Get newsagents to sell THE TORCH.

  Turn up at meetings to support the speakers and assist
with the literature.

  He acquired a set of clothes for Ossulston Street, which he kept in Joachim Susskind’s rooms—some old leggings, a frayed jumper, a jacket from a pawn shop, a workingman’s cap, which he pulled over his eyes, enjoying the feeling both of disguise and of becoming some other person. All this was conducted most discreetly by the tutor and his pupil—they didn’t discuss, or plot, these refinements, they simply happened. They did discuss whether it would be “a good thing” for Karl to go out into Hyde Park, or anywhere else, to sell bundles of The Torch, and they decided that he could do so, if he kept away from places near Portman Square. Susskind and Karl wandered many London streets at times when Charles was thought to be doing homework, or joining in rambles, mildly discussing imprisonment and execution, and whether the planting of bombs was a duty or an act of irresponsibility. Those who had gone to the scaffold in Paris and Chicago were brave martyrs. They had had “no alternative” Susskind said, and Karl agreed. But they agreed also that they were not, themselves, natural killers. Susskind said, padding along Baker Street, that he should like to believe reasonable persuasion was enough.

  One evening, at a meeting in Ossulston Street, to discuss this very issue of the requirement of a violent response to the violence of oppression, Karl had a shock. There were more people there than usual—some new Comrades had arrived, having been smuggled out of Russia. When they came in, Vasily Tartarinov came with them, wearing the suit he always wore to teach Latin and Greek to the boys. Charles/Karl sat in a dark corner with his cap pulled down. He did not know what his parents might do to him if they found out how he spent his time. He did know that Joachim Susskind would be treated as a traitor, and probably lose his job.

  The meeting eddied about. Long speeches were made, and the man with the placard said that since the Day of Judgement was coming almost immediately there was little to be said for bothering to kill people. They would all soon be overwhelmed. A kettle of tea was provided, and poured into cracked and greasy cups. Tartarinov came past Karl. He said “Good evening,” formally and distantly. Karl looked up at him. Tartarinov winked, and refroze into formal strangeness.

  At their next tutorial meeting Tartarinov greeted Tom and Charles as usual, and as usual, tartly, praised Tom’s translation at the expense of Charles’s. They were still working on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, where the hero, having broken off the golden bough, descends to the Underworld to interrogate his dead father. They had reached the passage where the Sibyl and Aeneas come to the vast elm, where false dreams hang from the branches like bats, and shadows of imagined monsters hiss and gnash their teeth. The Sibyl prevents Aeneas from turning his sword on the bodiless, flitting lives, their forms only transitory and vanishing. Tartarinov chanted the Latin in a lusty Russian accent.

  et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas

  admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae,

  inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras …

  Tom saw in his mind’s eye gradations of shadowy matter, thicker and thinner irreality, coiling like steam from a train or smoke from a chimney, but in the dark, under dark branches, cava sub imagine formae. Charles was annoyed by the enthusiasm of Tartarinov’s declamation. Charles saw nothing. Nothing was in his head. These things were unreal things, Gorgon, Harpy, Chimaera, things from childhood. No-things. He wanted another sign from Tartarinov, another wink for his secret self from the anarchist who had perhaps blood on his hands, who was far from his homeland because of his belief in his cause. But Tartarinov appeared to be truly obsessed with this old dead poetry in an old dead language. This man was double, Charles thought, a man with two faces and two minds, however whole-hearted he looked. And so was he, Charles/Karl, becoming double. His secret made him think of himself as invisible, a subtle being who thought his own thoughts and had his own purposes, whilst the outward boy said the banal things boys do say, about cricket and prep, about birds’ nests and punishments. This led him to wonder whether Tom was double, and if so, what was in the secret Tom. He thought perhaps Tom was not double. Tom appeared to take Tartarinov—and Charles himself—at face value, gently.

  Once the idea of secret selves had begun to spread little roots in his mind, he began to look at everyone differently, half as a game, half as a dangerous piece of research. After the morning with Tartarinov he walked with Tom along the road past the woods and onto the Downs, where Toby Youlgreave had his cottage, which, he insisted, had once belonged to a swineherd. Toby was coaching the boys for the general essays they would have to write. It was a cold crisp winter day, with frost on the ground and snow in the air. They wore caps and mufflers and woollen gloves. Toby gave them mugs of tea, and toasted them crumpets at his inglenook hearth. The floor of his small sitting-room was populated by uneven pillars of stacked books, on some of which previous mugs of tea had stood, and butter had been smeared. He had set them an essay on “Dreams” and told them to take that word any way they liked— dreams, nightmares, daydreams, hopes for the future. He had said they would need to find vivid examples of whatever they chose. He made them read out what they had written, as though they were in a university tutorial. Tom read well, clearly, without expression, a little too fast. Charles paced himself, listening to his own argument. He liked to argue, even about dreams. Tom had chosen to write about real, night-time dreams, what they felt like, what they meant. Charles, who knew Tom would do that, had deliberately chosen the moral and political meaning of the word, the dream of justice, the dream of a future life, Utopia. Tom wrote about the sensation of dreaming, and distinguished between those dreams in which the dreamer is neither actor nor watcher but a kind of looker-on, like the voice of a storyteller in a story. Almost commenting, but not quite, because all the same you were sort of helpless, you couldn’t make decisions in dreams, but you did know you were in them, and that you would wake to the real world. Sometimes you tried to stay asleep, to see what would happen. Then there were the dreams you were really in and had the sensation that you couldn’t get out—dreams of being buried alive, or told you were to be hanged tomorrow (he had that one often) or dreams where you were being pursued, and the beast you thought was behind you turned out to have gone about and around, and was waiting for you at the end of the corridor. It was odd that the dreams you were completely inside were almost all bad dreams.

  Not all, said Toby Youlgreave. You might dream—he hesitated delicately—that you were loved by someone—or that someone dead was living after all, it was all a mistake.

  In that case, said Tom, waking would be as dreadful as dreaming the bad dreams.

  Charles wondered if Toby’s secret was to do with love. With the sex instinct. He kept coming back to it, though that might be because he got so wound up in poetry all the time. There was an awful lot of love, and sex, in poetry. It made Charles’s skin prick, but he wasn’t sure he cared for it. Flather, he thought, using one of his nanny’s old words. Flather. Toby’s secret is some sort of flather.

  His own essay had been a rather perverse, but certainly clever, demolition of the dream of the good life in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and the kind of communities associated with it, who wore hand-printed skirts and ate vegetables. He wrote that the dream of Heaven had always worried him because it was so boring—there was nothing to do—and the dreams of Heaven on Earth, going back to the land, living in vegetable gardens and little plots of flowers, with no machines to be seen anywhere, struck him as a sleepy refusal to look at real problems and make real plans about what to do. He quoted Morris against himself

  Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time

  Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

  He was indeed, wrote Charles/Karl censoriously, “the idle singer of an empty day.”

  His anger stirred in his sentences, making them alternately blunt and incoherent. Toby Youlgreave set about benignly to sharpen and point them. He said these points were perhaps best not made in a scholarship exam for a very privileged school.

 
Toby waited for a comment—from Tom, not Charles—and Tom said, thoughtfully, that he feared that was what he was, a dreamer. Toby Youlgreave looked at the darkening cottage window in the late afternoon, and said, almost to himself, that that was what they all were, living so pleasantly, dreamers. Have some treacle tart, he said, mocking himself gently. I made it specially for you two. How do we get out of dreamland? Hic labor, hoc opus est, he said.

  Tom took the entrance exams, that July, in a kind of dream. Olive was worried for him, but he was himself unworried: maths was maths, Latin was Latin, he knew what he had to do as he knew how to throw a cricket ball or steer a bicycle. He wrote an essay on Keats—“My Favourite Poet”—for Marlowe, and an essay on “The Characteristics of the English” for Eton. Marlowe accepted him: Eton rejected him: both schools accepted Charles. It was faintly disturbing to Tom to be rejected. He was not used to it. Charles’s parents decided he would go to Eton. They bought him a new bicycle. Charles slid away, in some anxiety, to consult Joachim Susskind. He said it had to be against his principles to go to Eton. Susskind, surprisingly, encouraged him to go ahead. The world was imperfect, he said. One boy could not change it by refusing to be educated. He should go to Eton and learn to argue, and observe the ruling classes at their most absolute, and consider how to thwart their purposes. We must be wise as serpents, he said, quoting Jesus Christ, who was, he claimed, the first Anarchist, and not adding the corollary, harmless as doves, because he was still thinking of the propaganda of the Deed, and whether or not it was right to strike symbolic blows. Susskind was excited by the banishment of the Anarchist groups from the Socialist Second International, meeting that summer in London. The Anarchists refused political action. Susskind was not sure where he stood on this, either. Bakunin had said Germans made bad anarchists because they wanted simultaneously to be Masters and Slaves. There was a German kind of orderliness to Susskind’s anarchism, at war with a German liking for carrying things to extremes.