Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  How and why had he taken up Existentialism? I don’t know. Was it perhaps that he was driven towards it by the absurdity of his own life? How can one tell why some writers and systems of thought attract us and others don’t? (The other night I had a visitor from the chess club and there were two tarts on a plate, one yellow and one pink. I asked him which one he wanted and he said the yellow one. I myself had preferred the pink one. How can one explain that?) He hadn’t of course been in the war either. And neither had I. (Yet I suppose the system of Existentialism, if one can talk of it in terms of a system, emerged out of the last war.) We had that in common. But there are differences too. For instance he has a good head for figures. I remember the marking system he once worked out in order to be fairer to candidates. The headmaster couldn’t understand it and so it was left in oblivion. I couldn’t understand it either.

  And so he is dying in this ward with the walls whose paint is coming off in flakes. And quite a lot of his former pupils visit him. It is surprising how many of them have done well for themselves. I do not mean that they have done well materially (though many have done that as well). What I was thinking of more precisely was that they have kept their minds true to themselves. One of them is now a Logic Professor in America and a leader of thought in his own field. I can’t say that all of them have done as well as that but at least they have kept their integrity. What is even more striking is that they bring their wives along with them, however briefly they may be in town. He lies there like a medieval effigy, hammered out of some eternal stuff, and he listens to them and they listen to him. He has a great flair for listening and they tell him a great deal. In his youth he used to take them on expeditions, sometimes to France, and he and his pupils would talk into the early hours of the morning under other skies. Naturally, I wonder whether he did this because he wished to get away from his wife. I think this is partly true though perhaps he did not realise it himself. He did far more of this extramural activity than I ever did. I have never liked people as much as he has done. I have never had any warmth of nature. It has always struck me as strange that such perfectionism could be combined with such a liking for people.

  He hasn’t really had much in his life, an embittered wife and daughter, and that is all, apart from his schoolwork. And his book. That is not really very much to bear with one into the darkness of the absurd. Yet what else could he have done? How could he have known in those early days that his wife would turn out as she did? How could he have done other than take the side of his inflexible perfectionism against his daughter? Some men are lucky and some are not. I think one may say that he was not. Though naturally he doesn’t believe in luck. I remember one revealing incident. There was a boy who wasn’t able to get into university because his French was weak. He spent all his spare hours with him after school for weeks and months and managed to get him a pass in the examination. A year afterwards, the boy was working in a bar, he had simply gone to pieces after he had reached university. He had done no work at all. That was bad luck. Or was it bad judgement?

  He is lying there and his book is finished. He has spent all his time on that book since his enforced retirement. He spent many years on it before that. He will take it with him into the final darkness. It may perhaps be a present for his wife, his last cold laurel. He may hold it out to her with a final absurd gesture, his lips half twisted in a final smile. To leave such as her the last product of his mind, the one least capable of understanding it! That would certainly be irony. Even now she may be thinking that she can make a little money from it. How else could one think of a book, of anything, but in terms of money?

  I have been reading it. In fact I have read it all.

  Last night I did not sleep. I read and reread the book. I searched page after page for illumination, for a new insight. The electric light blazed into my tired eyes, the bulb was like one of his sleepless eyes. Was it like a conscience? I revolved everything so slowly. O so slowly. After all we are human beings, condemned to servitude and despair. We are rags of flesh and bone though now and again pierced by flashes of light. I looked round my own monkish room. After all what had I done with my life? I didn’t even have a wife or daughter. I thought of the world around me and how people might condemn me if they knew. They would condemn me out of their own shallowness, precisely because they were committed to no ideal and walked swathed in the superficial flesh. In fact at one time during the night while I was studying a page for the third or fourth time I heard on the street below the music of a transistor, though I could not make out the words of the song that was being sung. I supposed it was something to do with love and had travelled here from Luxembourg.

  But not merciless love. No, love with all the mercy in the world. Love that would forgive anything because there was in the end nothing to forgive. Love that had no knowledge of the knife. But only of the tears. The light blazed on page after naive page. He had been too long in teaching. His mind had adjusted itself to immature minds. It was as if the book had been written for a Lower Fifth Form. All had been explained but all had been explained away. Sartre and Camus had lost the spring of their minds, the tension, they had been laid out flat on the page as his own body had been laid on its white bed. All was white without shadow. There was no battle. The battle had been fought elsewhere. The battle had been fought against his wife and daughter in the real world of money and teaching and jobs. The energy had gone into that. I stared for a long time at the book. After all, were we not poor human beings? After all, what was our flesh against the absurdity of the skies?

  I walked to the hospital carrying the book. It was a June day and the birds were singing and the air was warm. The windows of the hospital were all open and the air was rushing in, scented and heavy. The whole world was in blossom. On the lawn there were some old people in chairs being sunned and tanned before being replaced in their beds. The sky was a mercilessly clear blue without cloud. I walked along the whole length of the ward and he was waiting for me. He would want to know what I thought immediately.

  I handed him the book. I said to him quite clearly, aware of everything, ‘It’s no good, James. It’s just no good.’ The book lay between us on the bed. ‘It’s too naive,’ I said. ‘There are no new insights. None at all.’

  Without a word he held out his hand towards me. And then he said equally clearly, ‘Thank you, Charles.’ I felt as if we were two members of a comic team as I heard our names spoken, two comedians dancing on a marble floor somewhere far from there.

  He didn’t say anything else. We started talking about other things. Three days afterwards he was dead. When I heard this I stared for a long time out of the window of my flat as the tears slowly welled in my eyes. No one can ever know whether he has done right or wrong. I stared around me at the books and they stood there tall and cold in their bookcases. I went and picked up a Yeats but I could find nothing that I wanted and I replaced it among the other books.

  At the funeral the wife ignored me. Perhaps he had told her not to publish the book and she had guessed what had happened. Simmons was with her and he also ignored me. Later I heard that he had been advising her to get it published. I thought that if James had been alive this would have served as a true example of the absurd, his wife and Simmons in such an alliance. The two of them stood gazing down into the grave at the precious despised body and mind disappearing from view, she rigid and black, Simmons large and stout. As I turned away my shoes made a dreadful rustling noise on the gravel.

  The Black and The Red

  I ARRIVED HERE last night at 9 p.m. and I am writing this in my room at the lodgings.

  The journey was pleasant. I was in my bunk on the boat—the bunk you ordered for me—but in the early morning—about six—I had an impulse to go on deck. I passed a steward in white as I walked, rather unsteadily, down the corridor in that sort of sick smell one gets on board ship. The morning was chill, with much sea stretching freely away. I felt my hair lifting gently in the breeze, and then saw it—the sun—ve
ry red, like a banner rising over Skye. There was no one on the deck except myself. I have never seen anything so beautiful—that sun rising through the mist, very red, very raw.

  When we landed at Kyle there was a great screaming of gulls, porters hurrying past with barrows, smell of rolls and butter from the restaurant. My mouth felt foggy somehow. And then I saw my first train. It was long and brown, the colour of mahogany or that kind of reddish-brown shoe polish I sometimes get. I sat down in one of the rather dirty carriages which at the time was empty but later three boys entered. They were of my own age, perhaps, if anything, slightly older.

  I discovered that they were students at the University too. They were reading brand-new Penguin crime stories while I had a copy of Homer, which surprised them. They were rather amused at the newness of my case which was on the rack above me. I think they were also amused at my scarf and tie and blazer. They do not seem to appreciate what is being done for them. However they are friendly. One of them—the most interesting—is called George. He is stocky and redhaired and quite irreverent. He studies medicine and calls one of his lecturers The Spinal Cord. It turns out that he is in the same lodgings as me. I like him.

  The countryside through which we passed is divided into geometrical sections—for farms—some squares, some rectangles. Sometimes it’s straw-coloured, sometimes lemony yellow, and sometimes green, but very orderly and beautiful, comparing very favourably with the untidy patches at home. It looks very rich and fertile. Nothing of interest happened on the journey except that my companions tried to buy my dinner for me but I refused. They had all been working during the holidays and had plenty of money. One was at the Hydro-Electric, George at the fishing. His father comes from Kyle and is skipper of a fishing boat.

  A train seems to move much more slowly than one thinks. I could hear the pounding of the wheels but I was still seeing the same fields. After a while the others curled up and went to sleep. But I didn’t sleep. Sometimes I read Homer to the thunder of the wheels. It’s strange how unprotected people look when they are asleep.

  At ten o’clock we entered the station, but before that I could see the lights of a great city. George and I went out together into the confusion. I was going to order a taxi but George would not hear of it. We climbed the steps into the glare of the light and went in search of a bus. After dashing across the street—or rather after I had dashed across the street—we found ourselves at a big cinema—much bigger than the one in Τ—with winking lights of different colours, some violet, some purple.

  Sitting on the stone pavement with his back against the wall was a beggar, his cap—containing a few pennies—beside him, and he himself staring blankly into space. At that moment I was terrified. I put my hands into my pockets as if to steady myself and would have given him a pound if George hadn’t said:

  ‘Don’t be a fool. He’s better off than you are. He’s not blind at all.’ But George put a two-shilling piece in his cap: I didn’t give him anything—I don’t like people who lie.

  When we arrived at the house the landlady came to the door. She is smallish, plump, with a Roman nose. She is said to be greedy for money but perhaps that is scandal. She looks very inquisitive and it is said that her favourite words are: ‘Youse students with all the money.’ She has a husband who works on the taxis and two children. I saw one of them. He was plump and dressed in white shorts, white socks and a white blouse. He looked at me without speaking, his thumb in his mouth.

  Last night, as I was lying in bed watching the lights of cars traverse the walls and the ceiling and listening to the patter of footsteps on the street, I thought I heard someone whistling a Gaelic tune. But it wasn’t a Gaelic tune at all.

  Your loving son,

  Kenneth

  Yesterday was my first day at the University. I travel by bus leaving at 8.30 a.m. The distance is about three miles.

  The University—a place of bells and ivy—fronts a rough road, curiously enough in one of the ugliest parts of the city, so that it appears like an oasis. There are many notice boards with green baize and notices all of which I have read. Some of them are announcements of prizes, others of the formation of societies (I doubt whether I shall have time to take part in any of these). There is of course a large library with ladders, and a librarian so tall that she doesn’t need a ladder.

  My first lecture was Greek. I climbed the wide stairs, my nostrils quivering to a strange smell. It was in fact the smell of varnish, and I later saw the typical watery waxy yellow. I sat at the back during the lecture—we are studying Sophocles—feeling the sun warm on my neck and watching the shadows of the leaves dancing on my desk. However, I didn’t have time to do that for long.

  Our lecturer is a rather small man with a half-open mouth like that of a fish and he seemed to me to be in some vague way untidy. (I don’t know quite what I expected—perhaps a flourish of trumpets and a great man in red robes, but that wasn’t what came.) He kept saying: ‘Now this may be Greek to you, gentlemen …’ Sometimes after saying this he would look out of the window and stand thus as if he had forgotten us. I noticed a curious smile on his face, like water round a stone. He speaks rather slowly—his hands behind his back—and I found it quite easy to write down everything he said. In the shops there is quite a large variety of notebooks and I have bought half-a-dozen, as I foresee much writing. There are thirty students in the class, more men than girls as one would expect. Many of them spend much time taking coffee in the Union and talking intensely. I go to the library. Most of them are far ahead of me at the moment.

  There is one thing. For some reason I feel freer here. At home somehow or other I felt constricted. Do you remember how old Angus used to ask me those pointless riddles?

  I am sorry to hear about the squabbles in the church. This money-grabbing is distasteful, and black. I think you should go out more.

  Please don’t talk about me to people so much. One doesn’t know what might happen.

  My second lecture was Latin—here we are doing Catullus and my lecturer is called Ormond. He is different altogether from Mulgrew—the Greek one—Ormond is more like a businessman, with bright fresh cheeks, a successful-looking man who sways back and forward on his heels when he is talking. He looks kind and self-possessed. Curiously enough, he wears a waistcoat, but on him it doesn’t look old-fashioned. He talks quite fast and it takes me all my time to keep up with him.

  I haven’t been out at night since I came. Apart from George there are three other lodgers, a lady lecturer at the training college, a young girl who works in a shop, and a man of about 28 who’s very keen on motor-cycles. The landlady doesn’t like him much as his hands are very oily most of the time. However he has the most cheerful face imaginable and he talks in a very quaint slow way except when he’s speaking about motorcycles.

  As for me I work at night sitting by the electric fire. Sometimes the landlady comes in, rather unnecessarily I think, and looks at me as if she were going to say something about working too hard but she doesn’t actually say anything. Once however she did say that I ought to go out more. George says this work and close-sitting by the fire are not good for me, and not profitable for my landlady! He is a very pleasant person, George.

  The landlady can’t be so bad after all. She took us in to see TV night before last. It was the first time I had seen TV and she was very surprised by this as also by my answers to her questions on life at home. George however looked more serious.

  It is now 10.30 p.m. and I have to translate some Sophocles.

  By the way I don’t know whether George drinks or not. I have never seen him drunk if that’s what you mean.

  Your loving son,

  Kenneth

  This afternoon George and I went for a long walk and this in fact is probably the first time that I’ve been out since I came. After leaving the house we turned left down the street with its silvery tram rails. It was a fine warm afternoon and we saw many people strolling, some with dogs. After a while we turned left again
towards Hutton Park. At the entrance to this park are great wrought iron gates and flowers of many colours arranged very cleverly to read WELCOME. I wondered how this was done but George wouldn’t tell me, and didn’t appear to be interested. He was telling me a story of a visit to the mortuary recently. The body of a young boy of 19 had been found drowned in the River Lee. In his cigarette case they found a note which read: ‘I am tired of being drained of my blood.’ That was all. Yet he apparently had adoring parents.

  This park is near a cemetery which is orderly and has some green glass urns containing paper flowers. It is almost too orderly, like streets.

  When we entered the park I saw that it had swings on which children were playing. In other parts of the park fathers were playing football with their sons, teaching them. One of them was showing his little son how to kick a ball, and though he appeared amiable seemed to me to be exasperated. Many of the balls were rainbow-coloured. We also passed a great startling peacock with purplish plumage like a bride’s train. He was superb and alone and, I thought, completely out of place, unable even to fly.

  We lay down on the grass (having removed our jackets) in the warm day. For the first time in three weeks I was completely relaxed. I had taken a book with me—about Catullus—but I didn’t read it. I watched small white clouds passing over me and heard birds singing in the trees (for there are many trees in the park). Our white shirts were dazzling in the light. George went for some ice-cream and we ate it and talked.