Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘What do you feel when you read one of your poems?’

  ‘If I’m lucky, relief that it doesn’t seem any worse than it seems. Often, I wonder what on earth I meant, but I don’t try to remember. Or it just doesn’t register in any way.’

  ‘No pleasure? Pride in achievement?’

  ‘Achievement? No, nothing like that.’

  Having learnt how easily a revelation of real interest could stem the most torrential flow of confidences or confessions, Sue tried to keep up her bright, nurse-like tone. ‘Another over-simplifying question, I’m afraid, Mr Potter: why do you write poetry?’

  ‘No, I think it really is a simple question. Or perhaps I just mean the answer I personally would give’s quite simple. I write poetry to be able to go on living at all. Well, not quite at all, but to function as a human being. I’m afraid that doesn’t sound very simple now I’ve said it. I’ll have to risk you putting me down as pompous and sorry for myself. When I was working in that timber yard, my life started being a burden to me. Not just the life in the yard, but the whole of my life. It happened quite suddenly and I’ll never know why. Nothing had gone wrong; I was happily married, in a secure job and earning enough to keep the two of us in reasonable comfort – we’ve never had the luck to have any children, but it wasn’t that either. I stopped being able to enjoy anything or see the point of anything. I felt bad from morning to night every day. Then, after about a month, some words came into my mind and straight away I felt a little better. I forget what they were, but they brought more words with them and they made me feel a little better still. By the time the words stopped coming I felt at peace. I wrote them down on the back of a delivery note – I do remember that – and it was only then I woke up to the fact that what I’d done was write a poem. The moment I’d finished writing the words down I started feeling bad again. Not as bad as just before the words started coming, but still bad. The next day I felt a little worse, and the day after that worse again, and so on for another three or four weeks until another lot of words started turning up. It’s been like that ever since.’

  ‘This feeling bad,’ said Sue, telling herself that after all she was a journalist – ‘can you describe it any more fully?’

  ‘No. If I could I would, believe me. I don’t know what the poems have to do with it, either. I tried once not writing the poem down, but all that happened then was that I forgot it and started feeling bad again, so the only net result was that I was a poem short. Of course, if you look at it in one way, it’s all rather like that business they call occupational therapy, where people weave carpets to take their mind off themselves and their problems. The point there is that it doesn’t make any difference to anybody whether the carpets are any good or not. I’ve been wondering for over thirty years, on and off, if it’s the same with my poems.’

  The placid, rather monotonous voice stopped as Bowes shoved his stocky bulk squarely between the other two and let off a long burst of click-and-buzz. He had been well within earshot for some time, but his assumption of his own total primacy over anybody interviewing or being interviewed had its helpful side: he was stone-deaf to all talk not directly about sex, cars or photography. Sue thought Potter might have guessed something of the sort. She used the couple of minutes’ interval to complete, in her own semi-shorthand, a nearly verbatim account of what Potter had said in the last four or five. She was certain that the information in it had never been divulged before.

  Clearly and succinctly, Bowes now intimated that they were all to move indoors, to where Potter worked. Potter said he worked nowhere in particular, or everywhere, though there was a little table where he occasionally wrote things down, and Bowes answered that that was what he had meant.

  They entered a low-ceilinged room that quite a few people would have felt inclined to call a parlour. By a window giving on to the front garden there was a characterless table and a hard chair with a flattened cushion. On the table Sue saw a cheap scribbling pad, one of its sheets detached and showing evidence of writing on the side not in view: no doubt that morning’s poem. Bowes at once set about assembling an indoor cairn on a larger, oval table: a biscuit-barrel and two empty decanters from the sideboard, ornamental mugs and pottery figures from the mantelshelf, a multi-tiered cake-stand complete. The general style of these, and of other objects in the room, was in a current fashion, but that would be coincidence; they must be survivals of what the Potters had bought when they were first married in 1924, or had come by from their parents. To judge from his behaviour, and the shakier evidence of his work, Potter was not a man to care for or notice what was around him.

  Sue moved to a small bookcase that held the expected complete works in the expected new-looking condition, and a few dozen other volumes, mostly paperbacked and all, or all of those she could take in at a glance, by authors she had never heard of. Potter’s reading habits were well enough known, but she judged that a short trot over familiar ground would give him time to adjust to the change of scene and, with luck, to prepare himself for further revelations.

  ‘Do you read a lot, Mr Potter?’ asked Sue, while Bowes began setting up his lights and reflectors.

  ‘Not a lot, no. I’ve never really taken to it. Either it’s in you or it isn’t is how I’d put it, and it doesn’t seem to be in me. Oh, I quite enjoy books about Poland and Samoa and places like that where I’ve never been, but that’s about as far as it goes.’

  ‘No poetry?’

  ‘Yes, a little from time to time, just to see what other people are doing. I sometimes buy one of those anthologies.’

  ‘Who do you like particularly?’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say. The standard seems to be so high, it’s amazing. Let’s see, I like Christopher Logue, John Betjeman, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Basil Bunting, John Berryman, Roy Fuller, John Lennon, Sylvia Plath, Fats Larwood, Robert Lowell . . . And Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden, of course. But, as I say, so many people are good.’

  ‘But surely—’ Sue cut herself off, realizing she could not say any of the seven or eight things she wanted to say. ‘Surely you prefer some of those names to others?’

  ‘Not . . . not really.’

  ‘I see. Have you any, what our readers would call hobbies?’

  ‘You mean how do I spend my time. I do quite a lot of walking; there’s still some country left round here. I have to answer quite a few letters, and then my agent rings me up. And in the evenings my wife and I play halma or something, or we watch television.’

  ‘In the chair, please, Mr Potter,’ said Bowes opportunely, setting off the equivalent of a smallish, slow-burning phosphorus bomb. ‘That’s lovely. Doing very well.’

  Potter sat on for a few moments, seeming to shrink a little physically in the glare. Then he said, ‘As I was telling you, Mrs Macnamara, I keep wondering about those poems of mine. The people who weave those carpets have had other things in their lives. They’ve done other things. They’ve been builders or lawyers or sailors or mothers or lorry-drivers or something. Or they’ve told jokes very well or got drunk a lot or . . . had a lot of women or played tennis or travelled or helped other people. I couldn’t have done some of those things and I didn’t want to do any of the others. I’ve never done anything but write poems. So if the poems are no good my life’s been wasted.’

  ‘Oh, but everybody agrees they’re good. I was reading—’

  ‘Not everybody. I don’t agree for one. I don’t say I disagree, but I don’t agree. And unless I’m very much mistaken, neither do you.’

  Sue could find nothing to say. She flinched at a sudden click-accompanied movement of Bowes behind her shoulder.

  ‘Good.’ Potter nodded approvingly. ‘Well, my dear, I was afraid all that was going to sound pompous, and it has. And not only sounded pompous. I think I must have got more conceited as I’ve grown older. It’s conceited of me to wonder whether I’m anything more than somebody who’s been lucky enough to be able to make up his own occupational therapy without any help from
outside. But it’s a bad bargain no matter how you look at it.’

  ‘Could I have you writing, please?’ ordered Bowes from the shadows.

  ‘Of course,’ said Potter, taking out a felt-tipped pen and doodling quite convincingly on his pad. ‘It’s a bad bargain even if the poems are good. Whatever that may mean. From my point of view, nothing at all could compensate for getting on for forty years of feeling bad with a couple of days of not feeling so bad and ten minutes of feeling all right thrown in about once a month. There’s a very good young doctor in the town here who took over not so long ago from the fellow I’ve always had. He reads a bit of poetry and he says he likes what I write. I’ve told him a lot of what I’ve told you. He takes my point about occupational therapy and he says I sort of psychoanalyse myself through my work so that I can carry on. But I’m fed up with carrying on. He’s got every pill under the sun in that surgery of his, and he says he could probably find one that would make me feel all right most of the time, but it would probably, at least as probably, stop me wanting to write poems, or having to write poems. I’ve been holding out against that for about six months. Conceit again, I suppose. But I’ve decided I’m too old to be conceited any more. I’d like to feel all right for the rest of my life and never mind the poetry. So I’m stopping it, the poetry. In fact I have stopped. This one this morning was the last. Tomorrow morning I’ll be off to see that doctor and he’ll start me on what he calls a course. I’m really quite excited about it.’

  ‘Now I’d like you looking as if you’re looking for inspiration,’ said Bowes.

  Potter raised his head and eyes to the ceiling less like a looker for inspiration than a man inwardly calling for celestial vengeance on some other party.

  ‘Can I print that?’ Sue recognized that the question she had been trying to frame, about why she was being told all this, had been answered. ‘About your giving up poetry?’

  ‘Oh, certainly. After all, this is an interview.’

  ‘You realize it’s news?’

  ‘News? Well, some very funny things seem to be news these days, don’t they? Do you want to telephone your editor?’

  ‘No thank you,’ she said, having, as he spoke, faced and solved a dilemma: whether to approach as soon as possible the parent newspaper for whose colour magazine she regularly wrote and had come here today, or to say nothing and allow her report of the interview, adorned with Bowes’s efforts, to appear as planned in (perhaps) four months’ time. If Potter told his piece of news to the representative of some other journal in the meanwhile, a lot of people would be cross with her, and her article, with its climactic point already common knowledge, might suffer severe cuts or even not appear at all. But that was just as likely to be its fate if she took the first of the two courses open to her, and she recoiled from the prospect of seeing an abbreviated, garbled and vulgarized version of her material under some such heading as ‘Veteran Bard Lays Down Pen’. It must be the second alternative, then, with the comforting thought that, since nobody on the magazine was inquisitive enough to read copy on the look-out for possible news items, or indeed for almost any other reason, the laying-down of the pen might very well rest securely in its context until her publication day.

  ‘Is there going to be much more of this?’ asked Potter, who was still looking, in fact glaring by now, high over Sue’s head. ‘I’m afraid I find it rather tiring.’

  ‘How many more, Pat?’

  ‘Nearly there. Another couple.’

  That meant a dozen or so, but a quick dozen. For the second time in five minutes, Sue searched for a remark. Finally she said,

  ‘You must think of the thousands and thousands of people to whom you’ve given pleasure.’

  ‘Yes, I do try to sometimes. It’s true I get a lot of letters saying some very nice things, and believe me I’m not at all ungrateful, but—’

  ‘Could you relax and look out of the window as if you’re thinking?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Potter, setting a new lower limit to the amount of dryness the tone of a human voice could carry without its being altogether imperceptible. ‘But, as I was going to say, I have wondered if the pleasure people say I’ve given them mightn’t have prevented them from coming by some much higher kind of pleasure from other writers of poetry who really are good. I expect all this pop music prevents some youngsters from ever appreciating Brahms or Elgar.’

  ‘You must know that’s not a fair comparison, Mr Potter. And I don’t think it’s true anyway, your example.’

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t, my example. There’s no way of knowing.’

  ‘Right, that’s it,’ said Bowes. ‘I’ve got some first-class ones there. Thank you for being so patient, Mr Potter. I can tell you’re a pro at this job.’

  The lights went and for a second or two the room seemed dark; then Sue saw it was only late afternoon outside. Bowes started disassembling his equipment while Potter, on his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor. Sue waited until Bowes had gone out to the car and then said:

  ‘I don’t want to poke my nose in, but what are you having for your dinner tonight?’

  ‘Cornflakes and a couple of sardines, I thought. And a bottle of light ale.’

  ‘But that’s not enough. You must have a proper meal. Something hot.’

  ‘I can’t be bothered.’

  ‘May I see your kitchen?’

  ‘Yes, it’s just . . . through the . . . in here.’

  In one corner of the small room was a tiny larder containing a good deal of tinned and cartoned food and very little fresh food. Sue made a selection from the tins, found two Spanish onions that seemed to have started to lose weight, decided that some cold boiled potatoes must be harmless despite their appearance, and looked round for a frying-pan.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Potter as if the preparation of a meal were genuinely strange and wonderful to him.

  ‘Do you like corned-beef hash?’

  ‘I like all food, but I don’t see—’

  ‘I’ll just have a word with Mr Bowes.’

  The word, or words, told Bowes that Potter wanted to add some information in total confidence. Tractable as ever outside the photographic sphere, Bowes at once said he would go and have a pint at a pub he had noticed a couple of hundred yards back down the road, and that Sue could join him there at any time she might fancy.

  Back in the kitchen, Sue found Potter standing, presumably by chance, exactly beneath a well-patronized fly-paper that hung from the ceiling. He said,

  ‘I don’t want you to go to any trouble on my account.’

  ‘It’s very little trouble.’ She set about peeling and slicing the onions. ‘It’s a small return for all the help you’ve given Mr Bowes and me. Now I’m going to cook this to the point where all you have to do is warm it up before you eat it. Can I trust you to do that?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.’

  Nothing more was said for some minutes, while she went on with her work. Then he asked abruptly,

  ‘Would you consider staying on here a little while and sharing the corned-beef hash with me?’

  ‘I’d like to, Mr Potter, but I’m afraid I’ve—’

  ‘No, of course, yes, I quite see.’

  The immediacy of his interruption showed her in the plainest terms that he had taken her to be simply blocking off the possibility of a return to the question he had put to her in the garden. She turned away from the gas stove, went over and took him by the hand.

  ‘I shall have to go quite soon, Mr Potter,’ she said slowly, ‘because I have to be back in London in time for my husband to take me to the theatre. Do you see now?’

  He nodded, not perfunctorily, and moved towards the window. She worked on through another pause, which again he broke.

  ‘Mrs Macnamara, I want to ask you a fact, but you must understand I need it just as a fact, nothing more. What’s your Christian name?’

  ‘Susan, but I’m always called Sue.’

&nbs
p; ‘Is that s, u, e?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He left the room and stayed away until the hash was nearly ready. When he came back he was carrying a sheet, now folded in two, of the paper she had seen on his table.

  ‘I think you’ll know what this is, Mrs Macnamara. I’d like you to accept it as a very small mark of my esteem, and as a way of saying thank you for being so sympathetic and understanding.’ (A careful rehearsal of this in the parlour was not very difficult to imagine.) ‘Please don’t look at it until you’ve left here,’ he went on, holding the paper out to her. ‘There are no surprises, but I’d just rather you didn’t.’

  ‘You’ve made a copy of it, have you?’

  ‘No. I never do that.’

  ‘But what about your wife typing it out? I can’t walk away with a unique copy. Suppose I lost it? And what about publication?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll lose it. If you really want to, perhaps you could type it out one day and send a copy to my agent’ – whom he named – ‘and a carbon here. Addressed to my wife. Please take it.’

  She took the sheet, faintly warm from his hand. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘There’s nothing that needs to be said. I’ve thanked you with that and you’ve thanked me by making me this splendid meal. Is it done? How do I heat it up?’

  ‘Ten minutes on a half gas’ll be enough.’

  ‘Just as it is. I see. Now I mustn’t keep you from your husband; I expect you’re late already. Where’s that young man got to?’

  ‘He’s waiting in the pub.’

  ‘Good, so you’ll be able to get back to London all right. It’s been a great pleasure meeting you, Mrs Macnamara. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Potter,’ she said as they shook hands on the doorstep.

  At the gate she looked back, but the door had already shut. Four telegraph poles away in the direction of the town Bowes’s car was parked by an inn-sign. She began to walk slowly down the road towards it, wishing she had been able to think of some leave-taking message to Potter that would not have been either sickly or stilted, deciding to write him a letter the next day, then taking the sheet of paper from her handbag and unfolding it. The writing was in soft pencil, clear and commonplace. It read: