by A. S. Byatt
She saw Simon before he saw her: beyond Ben, a drooping, horribly significant figure. Her stomach turned, and for a moment she thought of simply going away. Ivan at her elbow said, ‘Come and meet our guest personality, Ju.’
Simon looked up, his eyes folded behind his cheek-bones. He said, ‘Why, Julia,’ and then, surprisingly, came half-way across the room and kissed her. Julia, who would have found this gesture normal in any of the other men present, clung to him, trembling.
‘Simon and Julia were childhood friends,’ said Ivan with his Chinese grin.
‘This is your life,’ said Percy. Ben, Percy, and Gordon grinned too.
‘Simon.’ Julia let him go and gathered herself. ‘I’ve watched every one of your programmes all the way through. It gives one a funny one-way feeling of being in touch. But you’ve really been gone for ever. I honestly never dreamed you’d ever come back. Are you all right?’
He nodded, screwed up his face, peered at her intently, and said rather vaguely, ‘Yes, of course. And how are you? How is Cassandra?’
‘She’s well,’ said Julia carefully. Simon said nothing. Julia made an effort to elaborate. ‘She’s not very much changed. Not very much. She’s a don, you know, in Oxford. One doesn’t change as much as one thinks one is going to,’ she offered.
‘No. But I suppose you’re both —’ he looked round the room, took a gulp of gin, considered his own feet, waved his hand, ‘I suppose you’re both a bit more normal now.’ He laughed. Ivan laughed loudly. Percy and Ben and Gordon laughed. Julia said with aplomb, ‘Well, a little bit more normal.’ But her cheeks, like his, were burning. It was an odd thing to have said.
Ivan poured gin and said, ‘It depends what you mean by normal, Simon. From what I know of them, they’re both monsters.’ He laughed again. Simon’s gaze rested on him and returned to Julia. Julia was suddenly possessed by the fear that Ivan intended to embark on a description of her book, and could think of nothing to say to stop this happening. She looked at Simon in despair; his flaming, chequered face, with its pimples, and the small, livid scars of countless bites even on the eyelids. I felt about him, she thought, oh yes, I did feel.
‘How is the rest of your family?’ Simon went on, doggedly. ‘How is your father?’
‘He died. In February.’
‘I’m sorry,’ cried Simon, in sudden, gawky, anguish. ‘I’m sorry.’ He twisted away from her and wrung his hands. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘That doesn’t matter. One can’t go on and on being sensitive. I mean, one’s got to talk, of course one has. One’s got to get over things.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Simon, leaning towards her with sudden intensity. ‘Do you find it easy? Do you find … do you find … tell me, Julia—’
‘Time to talk about snakes,’ Ivan said. ‘You can talk about each other later.’
The team sat together on a set of Arne Jacobsen chairs which they had chosen from a furniture exhibition together, and watched through several of Simon’s films. Julia was appalled and moved by these all over again, seeing them as a series of simple, perfected images, which she did not understand, and whose meaning she would rather not formulate. There was the husk of snakeskin, the dry, perfect mask of the animal which had rolled itself away sleekly elsewhere, the dead, butterfly-sucked pig, the anaconda coiled in a black pool under a milky froth of water-blossoms, its patterned skin blending with lights and shadows, the small constrictor which swallowed a white rat whilst Simon expatiated on its throat muscles and the scaly, pale tail twitched, protesting, out of the mouth corner. Once or twice she looked at Simon, who stared, apparently fascinated, at himself, blinking nervously and fiddling inexpertly with a cigarette.
Afterwards Ivan said, ‘Now, I want a tape of a good general discussion of these films, with all of you throwing out any ideas at all you may have, and we’ll see what we can make of them. I’ve been talking to Simon here about this, but I thought I’d go over the ground a bit just to give you a line on where to get started.
‘Now we’ve had a lot of stuff on this programme about what sort of areas of human experience can be treated in different media. We’ve had Philip Larkin saying he used to think you could write a poem about anything and now he thinks there are specifically poetic subjects, and all that lark. Now the telly’s an almost virgin and unexploited art medium and we’ve said nothing about it – bar that vile and acrimonious discussion of what differences there might be between television drama and live drama. Now, I think the really worked out documentary is something unique in our time. I think it’s more important than it may appear to be, for reasons I’ll give you. But the first thing I want to say is, there are documentaries and documentaries. Some are just higgledy-piggledy thrusting of indiscriminate information at a voracious public. Some are something else. I find Simon Moffitt’s programmes deeply moving – deeply moving – as I find a work of art. I don’t know if the rest of you feel that.
‘Now, the first thought I want to put in your heads is: we’ve got over-compartmentalized in the way we approach life. We see some things as art, some as science, some as information and so on. One of the bad things about this is the way the arts have got so refined. Abstract paintings, symbolist poems, musique concrète, novels full of symbols not people, we all know what I mean. Now, I’d have said one thing that characterizes our culture is a hunger for facts. A tremendous need to understand, to map out, to believe in the solid world we live in. Art doesn’t give it as it used to. Indeed, it tries to fight facts – self-destroying mechanical sculptures, Pop Art making cigarette machines look absurd, or hallucinatory, that sort of thing. Now, look, now, look, people can’t take this. They’re reading more and more biography, popularized science, psychological case histories, travel literature, if you look at what they like on the telly – educated and uneducated, they all go for Z Cars – it’s something that reproduces a reality they recognize. Now, once the artist – oh, think of the Flemish painters, think of the Victorian novelists – used to delight in reproducing the details of the world he lived in. But not any more. What documentary art we’ve got is a bit flat and uninspired. But what about our real documentaries? The film’s the only art medium now where things’ve not got self-conscious to the point of self-parody or almost private meditation. Perhaps we artists ought to spend more time in the company of people concerned at first-hand with facts. Or perhaps we aren’t the real artists any more. Perhaps people like Simon Moffitt are. So I want us to analyse what we get out of these films.’
Julia looked at Simon, who, with shaking hands, lit one cigarette from the butt of the last.
Gordon Bottome said, ‘I take your point, Ivan, about our lives having become over-compartmentalized. I should say, regretfully, that this is necessary. We can’t hope in a life-time to begin to come to grips with a large part of the areas of knowledge or the ways of life we know are available. But we should perhaps make a conscious effort to be less exclusive. In the seventeenth century any sort of treatise could be literature, could be art. Think of The Compleat Angler. Or, a medical compendium, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Or, a wrong-headed scientific venture, Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus. Or Bacon. I can’t imagine any modern arts department looking at the current equivalent of those, however well written. Not that most of them are, regrettably, well-written. Our culture has indeed become divided. Our language is a blunted instrument.’
He looked around the group. Percy said, ‘Yes.’ No one seemed anxious to develop his point. After a moment he said, ‘We might do better if we saw art as a technique, not a mystique. In the seventeenth century, if you said ‘He wants art” you didn’t mean “he hasn’t got a special vision of special meaning in life”. You meant, “He lacks the power to make what he says coherent and meaningful and pleasing.” If he went back to that, we might even be able to take in – some of us – scientific and technological subjects we now shy away from as if they smelled.’
Ivan said, ‘What do you think, Simon?’
> ‘Me? I – I can’t say I think much about presentation. No, I can’t say I do.’
There was a silence.
Ben said, ‘I want to take issue with you, Ivan. I don’t like your point about art having got so refined. You sound all regretful about it, as though it did it on purpose, and could be stopped if you lectured it a bit. I don’t like Gordon’s view of art as a technique not a mystique, either. Technique’s only useful as a means to presenting a vision of life. Art’s a vision. It’s got to be, or it’s nothing, get that? And in our time art’s almost pure vision, we try to see things as they are, essentially, not as they first appear to be. Now, you’re way off the mark with all this about hunger for facts. We’ve got far too many facts in our life. They crush us. Pop art and self-destroying machines are a guerrilla warfare on the part of the spirit against these deadly soul-destroying facts, get that? You can’t get away from it, Ivan, modern man sees himself as essentially a victim of his environment – wherever you turn, you find thinking people writing desperately that they know their lives are like hallucinations, they know this is not all the truth, but —’
‘Ben, that proves my —’
‘Shut up a minute. Art gives expression to this vision. That’s what it’s for. Now, as far as a documentary goes, I’m going to produce the old bromide. The photograph destroyed once and for all the need for naturalistic art. Just as I suspect sociology and telly documentary are destroying the naturalistic novel,’ he glared at Julia, ‘the realistic play, the war epic, taking the meaning out. We don’t need to reproduce any more,’ he glanced at Simon, ‘every wart, every pimple. The time for that’s gone by. No, look, what an artist could make of Moffitt’s stuff – by bringing his own individual vision to bear on it – would be something like this.’
There was always a large easel for Ben’s ‘visual’ demonstrations of his points. Ben sketched now, hastily, lucidly, a formalized pattern of teeth, across a swelling curve, crossed by a limper curve recognizably derived from the rat-tail. He drew also a pattern of flecked white coils with an escaping black coil, geometric, but recognizably the moulting snake, and then a multiplicity of black and white formalized snakes facing each other in a geometric dance across the paper. ‘That’s the feeling it all gives me. One thing inside another, positive and negative, engulfing and escaping, darkness and light. That intensifies —’ He sat down.
‘Simon?’ said Ivan.
‘I – I hadn’t seen it that way. I – no – I hadn’t seen it that way.’
‘Does it mean anything to you?’
‘Not – not much. Not – that is —’
Ben was drawing a pattern of pot-hooks. Percy said, ‘I’d rather look at the original films. There’s more there.’
Gordon said, ‘I’d have said what Ben did to those snakes was only an extreme version of what Simon was doing in any case. “Art”, in my sense. Selection, perspective, emphasis, explication. Take, for instance, that magnified shot of the eyes, before and after the casting of the skin. That was making some sort of a point. Or take the almost miraculous shot of the – the new snake – through the skin of – of the old. Simon was telling us something he thought, there, and using – ah – artistic methods.’
‘Yes, and, you know,’ Percy burst in excitedly ‘don’t you think it’s all being vaguer than what Ben did, as well as more immediate, increases, as it were, the significance.…’
‘It depends what real significance there is. I mean,’ this was Gordon, ‘we’ve got to stop talking about how Simon conveys “meaning” and talk about what he means. If anything. Why should he think it important to show us snakes? Or we think it important to watch them? Ben clearly does?’
Simon made his first contribution. ‘Those snakes are real snakes,’ he said. ‘You watch a snake eating. You watch it eating. First, you watch that.’
‘O.K.’ said Ben. ‘So you watch it.’
‘Well, you might just be curious about how it does it. Why not? You might just want to know.’
‘Well, that affects you,’ Percy said.
‘It might not. Why should it? Why should it be anything to do with you? It’s filling its own stomach. We don’t know what it feels like. It’s simply there. I – I wanted simply to – learn, to measure.’
‘Simon —’ said Julia urgently.
‘Scientific knowledge —’ said Simon, ‘the thing in itself —’
Percy burst into speech. ‘No, honestly, you can’t get away with that. I mean, with all this rubbish about the pathetic fallacy. Snakes are absolutely weighed down with meanings for the average man – you kept referring to them quite naturally on your programmes – death and rebirth, evil and healing, water and light, oh, you know, and sex, look at your Freud.’
‘Everything and nothing,’ said Ivan.
‘What I like about your films as opposed to Ben’s drawings is that the thing itself is there. It’s more than the sum of the meanings. That’s what I mean by vagueness. Now, why shouldn’t the thing itself really “mean” something? Since it has had these mythical meanings through the ages, why do we suppose science is the only truthful way of approaching it? All this impersonal measuring and weighing and annotating. You don’t talk like that on the air, you know, or people wouldn’t listen the way they do. You don’t talk as though the snakes were irreparably not part of – of our world. As though measuring was our only relationship with them. It seems to me just as much a pathetic fallacy to pretend we can have an impersonal and neutral relationship with – Nature – that it’s entirely alien – as to pretend it simply reflects our passing moods. We’re part of it.’
‘You are confounding science, art, and religion,’ said Simon.
‘Why not?’ said Percy.
‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus,’ said Ben, leaning back in his chair.
‘Why for Christ’s sake can’t someone say something useful?’ said Ivan.
Julia said, ‘To return to what Gordon was saying. And Simon being an artist and showing us his view of snakes. Isn’t it important that we see so much of him? And hear him talk? We see across his personality. We can’t just take him out of the picture. We ought, indeed to find out why he’s in it. What do you think, Simon, what would you say drives you to – this work?’
Simon looked hunted. ‘I like snakes. I – I suppose I’m a naturalist because I – I wanted something neutral to do. Something’ – he blushed – ‘where curiosity was simply curiosity.’
‘And innocent?’
‘Yes,’ said Simon quickly.
‘You don’t think,’ said Percy, ‘that you went in for snakes out of any subconscious preoccupation with evil, do you?’
‘Or sex?’ said Ben, nastily.
‘Julia tells me,’ said Ivan, ‘you used to want to go into the Church.’
‘You can make anything of me,’ said Simon, ‘as you can make anything of snakes. But I don’t like it. I didn’t come here to be psycho-analysed. I came here to discuss my work. My work,’ he said. ‘Results, tables of figures, so on …’
He was crimson.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ivan, ‘if anyone realizes how very little of what’s been said is any use at all. Banal or high-flown, and Simon might just as well not have been there for all the use you’ve made of him. You might try to speak up, Simon, if you wouldn’t mind – we really can’t afford diffidence, you are our guest personality, we’ve got to hear more of you. Now, let’s start again. And let’s keep it simple and concrete, will you?’
Julia, before the final recording of the series of simple and concrete questions and answers they had worked out felt blind, panicky stage-fright, of a kind she had almost grown out of. What was left of what they had said was largely Ben’s drawings, Percy’s musings on the myths underlying the snakes – Simon had been induced to expatiate, scientifically, on one or two of these – and her own questions about the effect of Simon’s personality on his choice of occupation. Ivan had extracted from Simon a series of grudging statements about these. It was less a dis
cussion than a slightly hostile interview, by now.
Julia’s dressing-room was hot, full of mirrors and boxed light. Sweating, she retouched lipstick and mascara in one of the mirrors. Ivan came in and closed the door behind him. He put his arms round her.
‘Let go. Get off. You’ll mess me.’
He let her go. ‘So I saw your meeting.’
‘I hope you were edified.’
‘Oh, by you, yes. You must have been a lovely schoolgirl. Gordon says he’s a mistake. Says we won’t get much life out of him.’
‘Gordon can talk.’
‘Gordon will talk, don’t worry. What will you do now?’
‘Go and talk about his art. That he says isn’t art. I wish you’d leave me alone.’
‘Now, now.’ He said, crossly, ‘I wish anyone had seen my point about the immediacy of television. About its being a perpetual self-consciousness.’
‘Well, it’s not a very nice one most of the time.’
Julia was always startled to find that people like Ivan took seriously programmes like The Lively Arts, since this accorded so badly with the rest of their personalities, and with most of the programmes put out by the television in general, and indeed with The Lively Arts itself. She felt momentarily guilty at not having lived up to expectations that Ivan, in some part of his mind, clearly had.
Ivan said, ‘Well, anyway, he kissed you.’
Julia, who had thought this herself, did not want to discuss the point.