Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  UNBORN

  From summer evenings, gazing

  heartrise always ahead, there,

  book and dream,

  reaching out,

  ten miles of fields of raw daffodils

  streets engines advertisement hoardings

  all raw,

  myself raw,

  but certain.

  Swept now, swept

  book

  dream

  field

  street

  engines cheerfully off or rusted

  hoardings ablaze or demolished

  nobody there

  Not unfound

  not unreached, unborn

  unfated

  Dear illusion with the bright hair

  all swept aired lit plain known listed

  swept

  At the foot were a couple of lines in the same hand, written upside down. She turned the sheet round and read,

  To Sue Macnamara with the kindest regards possible

  from Ted Potter

  That last was the product of something like ten minutes’ thought, she said to herself, and written upside down to avert the risk of reading a single word of the poem.

  II

  The poem stayed in Sue’s mind for the rest of the evening and, though diminishingly, much longer, both as a poem and as an amalgam of less clearly definable things: a piece of self-revelation that might fall anywhere between compressed but pondered autobiography and record of a passing mood, a gift to herself offered out of considered or unconsidered politeness, desire to return a favour that might or might not have seemed unimportant. Typing it out next morning inevitably forced her to read it as a poem a good deal more closely than (she admitted to herself) she had ever read a Potter poem before.

  It was probably this closeness that made its theme effortlessly plain to her – and this, in turn, suggested an unpalatable reason for Potter’s success with critics and public: he wrote in a way that looked and felt modern, or at any rate post-Georgian, but with a certain amount of effort could be paraphrased into something quite innocuously traditional, even romantic. And the reader’s self-satisfaction at having made his way through apparent obscurity could easily be transmuted into affection for poem and poet.

  In ‘Unborn’, at any rate, Potter, or some version of Potter, was just saying that an ideal he had pursued since youth had turned out to be not unrealized but unrealizable, because its object had never existed. What that object might have seemed to be was less plain: ‘dear’ along with ‘bright hair’ certainly suggested a woman – or a man, though nothing in his other works, or in gossip, or in what she had seen of him bore out that interpretation, which she discarded promptly and for good. But then, the brief and unspecific image of the ‘dear illusion’ might so easily refer not to a person at all, but to some abstraction dimly seen as a person, and almost any abstraction of the nicer sort would fit: love, happiness, beauty, joy, adventure, self-respect, self-mastery, self-sufficiency, God . . .

  With the typing done and checked against the original, Sue knew ‘Unborn’ well, and the knowledge was, again, unpalatable. For a moment she felt cross with it: taken out of its drunkard’s or dotard’s telegraphese and put into plain English, conventionally assembled instead of sprawling hither and thither over the page, it would have shown itself up, she suspected, as being not only traditional but trite. And in what sense might (or could) the daffodils be raw? And were the hoardings ablaze with colour or literally on fire? And were there not too many ‘-ings’ in the first half-dozen lines, and had ‘hair’ been intended to rhyme with ‘there’ in an otherwise rhymeless poem, and however that might be was it anything better than slack to let ‘aired’ in so soon afterwards? And ‘heartrise’ (what a word, anyway) taken with ‘ahead’ was somehow . . . Was just the sort of thing poets got rid of in revision.

  Sue felt bad about raising these objections, even though she would always keep them to herself, which made it odder that the nearest imaginable comparison to how she felt was, it turned out, how she would feel if she were to show up a child’s ignorance publicly. Had Potter not given her the manuscript there would have been no issue, but he had, and she had met him and listened to him, and so the poem took on the quality of a friend’s muffled cry of distress without, unfortunately, ceasing to be a poem in its own right and demanding to be read as one. The only course was to try to forget its text while remembering its existence. She locked it away in a desk drawer among other keepsakes, wrote covering letters to go with the copies for Potter’s agent and Mrs Potter, and then settled down to write to Potter himself. This final task proved less disagreeable than she had feared: she was thankful to be able to say with truth that she had been moved both by the gift and by reading what she had been given.

  The following month, she sent Potter a proof of her piece. It came back unamended with a short handwritten note complimenting her on her accuracy – ‘though you make me sound more clear-headed than I am sure I can have been’ – and adding that the corned-beef hash had been delicious. About the same time, ‘Unborn’ was published in the Listener; she did not read it. After several more months, more than she had been led to expect in the first place but fewer than she had in fact expected, the magazine printed her article; she did not read that either, merely scanning it for cuts and mutilations, a virtually separate activity in somebody of her experience. There were, for once, no cuts. Bowes had, as always, produced pictures that were technically excellent and artistically sub-modish, though there was one indoor shot of Potter at his table that recalled him sharply: well enough, anyhow, for the fuzzy-edged bulk of an Edwardian tea-caddy, looming in the extreme foreground, to seem no worse than irrelevant. The news – it was news, since he had revealed nothing of it in the interim – the news of Potter’s decision to put away his pen drew no public attention at the time. Those to whom it might have seemed important either ignored the interview altogether or failed to extricate such a disclosure from its context of travel advertisements and illustrated recipes.

  Something else Sue omitted to read, or to reread, during this period was any of Potter’s other poems. She shied away from the strong possibility of finding that she felt as uneasy about them as she had about ‘Unborn’. In the winter, the magazine sent her to South America to do a series on what it called the cultural life of the chief cities there. With her went not Bowes, but a photographer of the alternative sort, the sort that took at most one photograph of every subject, and she slept with him a certain amount. Potter began to fade from her mind. Then, almost exactly a year after she had been to see him, she came across his name in an arts-page headline in a Sunday paper.

  Edward Arthur Potter (she read), who according to rumour (in plain language, according to an authentic statement in another journal, she thought to herself) had taken a vow of poetic silence, must have gone back on it, for his publishers were to bring out in the coming autumn a collection of his recent verse. There seemed to be hopes of some commemorative event – an official dinner, an award – that might go a little way to offset the shameful lack of attention so far paid a man described as arguably Britain’s greatest living bard. The report closed with a passage of largely directionless rancour about the neglect of Potter in particular and almost everybody else in general.

  The news pleased and worried Sue. Potter deserved recognition as a – well, at least as someone who had devoted the better part of his life to writing poetry, even if, or even though, recognition of the sort in view might not appeal to him much. On the other hand, it did seem very likely that the pills from the hand of the young doctor had failed to do their job, that Potter was back on his self-administered version of occupational therapy and that he was again spending nearly all his time feeling bad.

  Worry about others’ concerns, like pleasure on their account, needs regular renewal if it is not to fall away; the summer brought Sue fresh assignments and a falling-away of her worry and pleasure in the case of Potter’s prospective award/dinner. But, in due time,
award/dinner became award-dinner in a real sense. A body claiming, in its title, to superintend our culture announced that Edward Arthur Potter was shortly to receive a special prize of £1,000 to mark the publication of his latest book, Off, and to attest to his status as premier lyrist in the English language. The cheque, together with an ornamental certificate designed by a leading designer, would be handed over in the course of a function at a Regent Street restaurant famous until only a few years back for its food and service. A week after seeing this report, Sue got an invitation to the award-dinner. Stapled to a corner of the lavish card was a strip of flimsy which bore, in smudged carbon, a bald statement to the effect that this favour had come her way at Mr Potter’s personal request – thus conveying, with masterly economy, the organizers’ helplessness in the circumstances to prohibit the attendance of somebody they themselves would never have dreamt of asking along.

  On the night, Sue left her husband contentedly watching television and appeared at the restaurant, the main bar of which turned out to be given over to the Potter occasion. She had arrived early, but there was already a fair-sized group round the man of the hour. Experience of such gatherings suggested her first move: getting one drink down her and another into her hand. There were plenty of recognizable faces, perhaps too many, not more than half of them belonging to the world of letters in even the most charitably extended sense of the phrase. A sports commentator, a girl who made boots, a television bishop in mufti, a man who not long before had covered half a mile of cliff near Dover with paint of various colours – all sorts of people who surely could not be famous just because of what they did, who did nothing else but what they did and who were famous all the same. Not only that: when she began her career, what had slightly astonished Sue at affairs of this sort was the number of old contemptibles, of those whose claim to fame, if any, dated so far into the past that they could more than safely be dropped. Tonight she was struck by the number and contemptibility of new contemptibles, persons categorically unfit (on all but the most trend-crazed reckoning) to be invited along to see Potter honoured. Thirty-three next year, she said to herself.

  Having beaten off an embryonic pass by an elderly small boy who turned out to be a concrete poet, Sue made her way over to a couple of journalist acquaintances. The Press had come along all right. So had its visual auxiliaries: cameras flashed every few seconds. Somebody who ought to have been flashing away with the very, very best of them, but who did no more than drink and chat, was Pat Bowes, to whom Sue turned. He kissed her genially and said,

  ‘You’re looking smashing, Macnamara. Great lot here tonight, aren’t they?’

  ‘You look all right too, Bowes. Where’s your camera?’

  ‘At home. I’m here because I’m so distinguished, not to work. Mr Potter’s personal request.’

  ‘Me too. No notebook, thank God.’

  ‘Nice of the old lad to ask me along. I mean it’s obvious why he got hold of you, with you making that hit with him, but he needn’t have asked me.’

  ‘Well, you were nice to him the day we went there.’

  ‘No I wasn’t, love. I’m always a right bugger with my sitters, you know that. No, he asked me because he didn’t like to think of me probably finding out you’d been here and thinking he hadn’t bothered to remember me. I call that really nice.’

  Sue nodded.

  ‘What I don’t understand is about this book. He told you he’d packed it all in. End of the road kind of style. He didn’t strike me as the sort of bloke who’d change his mind about a thing as important to him as that.’

  ‘Nor me. I don’t know what’s happened.’

  ‘We won’t find out tonight. The chances of a quiet confidential word with the guest of honour are, I would say, remote in the extreme. Not because of him – he’d much rather have a good natter with you than talk to all these important sods, but they’ve brought him here and they’ll hang on to him. Anyway. Have the mag been on to you about Peduzzi?’

  ‘No, what about him?’

  ‘They will. Famed Macnamara–Bowes team spotlight yet another feature of the cultural scene. A pretty far-bloody-flung feature too. He’s filming in Ceylon till the end of the month, they said, then a short stop-over in Italy before he takes off I forget where. I’d sooner do him in Ceylon myself, of course. Could you work it?’

  ‘How long would it take?’

  ‘I’d say five days minimum all in. He isn’t sitting on his arse in Colombo, you see. There’d be ox-cart stuff before we could get to him.’

  ‘I’ll check and let you know.’

  A vague plum-in-throat bawling emerged from the ambient uproar and resolved itself into, ‘Mrs Macnamara, please. Mr Bowes, please.’

  ‘Christ, we’re being paged,’ said Bowes. ‘Butlered, rather.’

  ‘Mr Potter,’ said the functionary, looking from one to the other with open incredulity, ‘would be obliged if you would join him for a few minutes.’

  Her first real look at Potter that evening showed a small neat dinner-jacketed figure without any of the soup-stains or shave-traces that might have been expected; she guessed the reason when she recognized his agent close to his side. There were a great many introductions, starting with the cultural bureaucrat in overall charge and the leading literary critic booked for the main speech

  – more leading, this one, than the leading designer of the certificate (who was also about the place) in the proportion of a knighthood to an OBE. There would have been still more introductions if Potter had not cut them off by taking a long time over saying how glad he was to see Sue and Bowes again.

  ‘Is Mrs Potter here this evening?’ asked Sue.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s not in the best of health.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Bowes.

  Potter moved closer to Sue and said quietly, ‘In fact there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her. I just thought it would be better if she stayed away. You’ll probably see what I mean by the time the evening’s over. It’s not her sort of thing at all.’

  ‘No, well . . .’

  ‘Have you seen my book yet, Mrs Macnamara? Have you, Mr Bowes? No, not a great many people have, outside the committee and so on. But there’s a copy for everybody beside their place at dinner for them to take home, if they still want to after they’ve heard me speak. Anyway, I hope they give it a glance. I shall be most interested to hear what people think of it, more interested than with any of my previous books.’

  There was a nervous jocularity in his tone and manner that Sue found mildly strange, until she noticed the glass of whisky in his hand and reflected that, for him, large parts of the evening would be an ordeal, and of an unfamiliar kind. Then he said to her, again in an undertone:

  ‘Would you have a quick drink with me afterwards, Mrs Macnamara? Upstairs, in a little place called the Essex Room. I’ve spoken to one of these chaps about it. We’ll be breaking up quite early.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Potter, I’d love to.’

  ‘Good . . . Mr Bowes, I’m afraid I never thanked you for taking such magnificent photographs. I was going to write to you, but then I got bogged down with one thing and another, and then it seemed too late.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Glad you liked them.’

  Here a Cabinet minister interposed himself between Sue and Potter, of whom she saw nothing further until the party, two hundred or more strong, was settling itself down at the couple of dozen large tables in the dining-room, a slow and lubberly process. Potter was among bureaucrats and critics and other poets and their wives halfway across the room from Sue. The first course, already in position, was pieces of tinned grapefruit apparently strung together on fine thread and adorned with a tattered cherry. She picked up the copy of Off that indeed lay by her plate and began, without eagerness, to glance through it.

  The poems, she saw quite soon, did not really look like Potter poems, which, within wide limits, had always had a characteristic shape on the page, sprawling and staccato at the same
time. The new ones did not much look like one another, either. From glancing through, she turned to reading. On an early page she found a piece in heroic couplets after the manner of Dryden – a long way after, she found, because it turned out to convey no meaning whatever at any point, could have been thrown off, dashed down as fast as his hand would travel over the paper by someone solely concerned with filling up iambic pentameters that rhymed. Beside it, ‘Unborn’ was a model of sober clarity. But ‘Unborn’ was not beside it, in the sense that it was not (she double-checked) in the book. Had it been one of a number of rejects, part of the whey thrown out when the cream was skimmed off for a new volume? In their interview, Potter had implied clearly that he reprinted in hard covers everything he wrote. Well, he might have omitted the poem in deference to a desire on his wife’s part not to see the immortalization of that rival-figure, the bright charmer with the . . . Sue tried to remember: dear charmer with the bright hair – no, not charmer. Dear something, though.

  At this point she found that somebody had taken her grapefruit away and put some fish where it had been, while somebody else (probably) had poured her some wine. She tried to eat and easily succeeded in drinking. She also thought. This was made a little easier for her by her absorption until just now in Off: her neighbours’ attention had been pre-empted by their further neighbours, and throughout the meal she got away with saying almost nothing, either to the disc-jockey on her left or to the plain, horse-oriented jockey on her right. From time to time she looked at Off again. One poem, or ‘poem’, she encountered ran: