Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  ‘I do hate all that politics based on image.’

  He waited a moment, but she seemed content to listen, staring at the shore. He shrugged.

  ‘How else could Madison Avenue function? They have no built-in standards. Which makes them wide open to every huckster, literal or political, who’s around.’ Again he waited, then went on. ‘All the sales talk about total freedom being the greatest human good. Even though it’s as clear as the stars up there that for the last hundred years total freedom has meant the freedom to exploit. The survival of the sharpest at making a quick buck…’ He took a breath, then looked at her. ‘And this is absurd. You’re making me carry coals to Newcastle.’

  Her head bowed, a ghost of a smile. She said nothing for a moment, and when she spoke, it seemed almost to herself, or to the night.

  ‘I wish we could find out why they don’t want to go back.’

  This time his new resolution did not help: he felt deflated. He had been talking too much to please her, and in terms of the widest generalization; while she thought only of two people somewhere on that same boat—whose views he knew she must see were simplistic, whose language she had listened to, as he had, as a professional pianist listens to an untalented amateur; yet would not admit it.

  ‘I don’t think that would be too hard.’

  She spoke as if to explain. ‘I was reading my booklet on the fellaheen before we had our drink.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She hesitated. ‘How for five thousand years they’ve been given nothing, ignored, exploited. Never helped at all. Apparently not even been studied anthropologically until very recently.’

  ‘And?’

  Again she hesitated. ‘What I really felt at Karnak today. Whether the way we lucky few live now is very different from those past lucky few. In terms of what’s really going on outside.’

  There was something unusually tentative in her voice, as if she half expected his scorn.

  ‘But someone has to pour the symbolic waters, Jane. For the poor devils outside as well.’

  ‘Except that at the moment there’s an appalling and literal drought. I don’t see much use any more in symbolic waters.’

  ‘Civilization? Scholarship, art? Everything we both felt about the Herr Professor this afternoon. They all come from inside the walls. No?’

  ‘I’ve heard that argument so often at Oxford. The supposed barbarian hordes as justification for every kind of selfish myopia.’

  ‘I don’t defend that. But if you start regarding all complex feeling and taste as a crime, you surely also start forbidding all finer knowledge as well.’

  ‘If only it didn’t cost so much.’

  ‘But is the guillotine the answer? They do need the Herr Professors. Even us, in a way. As we are, for all our faults.’

  Her eyes followed a winged white ghost, a disturbed egret.

  ‘I just wish that so many of that “us” didn’t deny the primacy of the need. See privilege as an axiomatic birthright.’

  ‘We can’t all be activists, Jane.’ She said nothing, and he went on. ‘I think certain intellectual climates also have to be preserved. Disciplines. Knowledges. Even pleasures. For when the revolution’s over.’

  That seemed to silence her, finally, though he couldn’t decide whether it was because he was being conceded a point or because she gave up trying to convince him. But then he stole a look at her profile, and sensed something else. It did have a kind of withdrawnness, a thinking to herself in the night; but not what he was looking for, the smallest sign that she wished they were not having this conversation. Something else in it had already puzzled him: her tentativenesses, hesitations, veerings, silences. He had supposed she must be used to much more sophisticated discussions, viewpoints, arguments in such matters. Something of Anthony’s mind and manner of discourse must have brushed off on her through all those years, the outward as well as the inward of a philosopher’s widow. He had thought it perhaps a kindness to him, a dubious one, not very far removed from just that secret condescension she had accused them of showing to the young American couple.

  But now, in their silence, it dawned on him that perhaps he was being kept less at a distance than he imagined, that precisely what he believed he was being denied was being granted: that is, she was revealing feelings, confusions, not intellect; longings, not propaganda. And he began to divine something else, that the more precise huge step she was unable to make was between a personal sympathy for her Marxist, or neo-Marxist, ideas and the public manifestation of them in practical, organized form. It was not difficult to trace her fears there back to her Catholic days; to see a parallel between the conflict of Marxism as a noble humanist theory and Marxism in totalitarian practice and the same conflict between personal Christianity and the dogmatic vulgarities and naiveties of the public Church of Rome. That must be the great stumbling-block in her: the fear of seeing personal feeling and judgment once more traduced. It was an important insight for Dan, for he was hiding something from her himself. Against expectation Lukacs had not sent him rapidly to sleep that previous night in Cairo; and his split feelings there had been very similar to the ones he had just ascribed to her—he had felt personally drawn and publicly sceptical, approved a number of general premises, doubted their political consequences. In the here and now he guessed at an undeclared but fundamental similarity of situation. It was strange, almost like an invisible hand reached out to touch and reassure him.

  She spoke out of the blue.

  ‘Tell me about Andrea, Dan.’

  He smiled down at the water. ‘That’s an odd change of subject.’

  ‘Not really. She’s another American couple I’ve only played games with. Or listened to Nell playing games with.’

  ‘You’re not cold?’

  ‘Not if we walk up and down. This air smells so clean.’

  So they began to walk up and down the deck between the empty chairs, and he told her about Andrea: her faults, why he had liked her, why they separated, why he thought she had killed herself. Finally they went into the lounge and had a cup of tea, a shade self-mockingly, being staid old British; side by side on a wall-bench. But the conversation continued and shifted imperceptibly to what had gone wrong between him and Nell… at least in daily and psychological terms. They were both carefully objective, and he talked about himself as he talks here, in the third person; a rather blind and willful young man, still in full flight from his adolescence. He thought of telling her about his other and unforgivable infidelity with the British Open, but it was too near the knuckle, to the day of the woman in the reeds.

  On the other side of the lounge the Barge-borne Queen seemed to have attracted a kind of court. Four or five of the other French passengers sat at a table with him. His young Ganymede, in an expensive-looking suit, with a black shirt open almost to the navel and a scarf tied winsomely round his neck, kept going to a jukebox in one corner. Dan and Jane fell at last into silence, watching this menagerie opposite.

  ‘What are they talking about?’

  ‘I can’t really hear with that thing pounding away. I think it’s about modern art. Painting.’

  ‘Dear old Frogs.’

  ‘One disputes. One is very logical. One shows off one’s rhetoric. Above all one is much more civilized than that ludicrous Anglo-Saxon couple opposite.’ She nudged his arm. ‘What a pity you didn’t bring a bowler hat.’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be with them?’

  ‘Absolutely. And I’m going to bed.’

  She gave him a little smiling look, and touched his hand; then stood.

  ‘I’m not staying here alone. That boy looks dangerously bored to me.’

  But outside the lounge he let her go down to the cabins on her own. He felt unsleepy, and went out on deck again to smoke a last cigarette. But he turned back inside as soon as it was finished. The night, the stars, the onwardness, were somehow depressing now; monotonous, meaningless. He saw, through the glass doors of the lounge as he passed d
own to his cabin, that the French group had dispersed. Only the Queen and his companion remained. They sat on opposite sides of the table. The older man seemed to be reproaching him for something; and the boy, who was facing the door, stared sullenly down at the table between them.

  Nile

  The six days of their cruise were to flow almost indivisibly one into the other, as the placid yet perpetual river itself swam past its banks. The Nile and its landscapes they grew quickly to love—to love again, in Dan’s case. Its waters seemed to reach not merely back into the heart of Africa, but into that of time itself. This was partly the effect of the ancient sites, and of the ancient ways of life of the fellaheen villages and fields they saw as they passed: the minarets and palm-groves, the women with their water-jars, the feluccas, the shadufs and saqiyas—the great gaunt pole-dippers, the waterwheels ringed with earthenware pots and driven by a donkey or an ox; but its origin lay in something deeper, to do with transience and agelessness, which in turn reflected their own heightened sense of personal present and past… a thing they both agreed they felt.

  The river moved and the river stayed, depending on whether one saw it with the eye or the mind; it was the Heraclitean same and not the same. It was the river of existence, and it reminded Dan of those magnificent opening verses in Ecclesiastes, of which most people remember only the phrase ‘Vanity of vanities’, but which had always, perhaps revealingly, seemed to him—it had been a favourite lesson choice of his father’s—unintentionally comforting. The earth abideth for ever; and there is no new thing under the sun. They both noted these Biblical echoes, how often they had sudden memories of the misunderstood yet haunting imageries of childhood. They decided it was because the river, like the Bible, was a great poem, and rich in still relevant metaphors.

  These usually had some visual objective correlative, of course; but just as there are passages in the Bible that must touch even the most convinced atheist, the Nile did seem to possess a metaphysical charm beside its more obvious physical ones. It cleansed and simplified, it set all life in perspective. The memory of its hundreds of generations, its countless races—all that had eternally vanished beneath its silt—sobered and dwarfed, cut the individual down to less than the tiniest granule of sand in the endless desert that haunted the skylines behind the cultivated valley. Yet so many of the great stream’s moods and lights and vistas were ravishingly beautiful, especially at dawn and dusk; and seemed to justify the very life its ageless indifference, its mere geographical being, denied. Jane and Dan found themselves not entirely able, despite the poverty, the bilharzia, the thalassaemia, and everything else, to pity this antediluvian peasant world.

  A group of women bathing, like classical Greek statues under their wet outer garments, or watering, or washing clothes at the river-edge, would look up, laugh, retreat from the inrushing wake as the opulently white ship passed. At first, when this happened, they felt a guilt, as if they were part of some royal cavalcade cantering through a medieval hamlet, or looking out of the windows of some moving Versailles. Before the inevitable battery of cameras when they were close inshore some of these women would turn their backs, or with a Moslem dignity, both simple and grave—and sometimes faintly mischievous, since the younger girls would flagrantly peep, evoking harem and zenana, through their latticed fingers—veil their faces with crossed hands until the intruders had passed. And then there came what was almost an envy of the simplicities of life in this green and liquid, eternally fertile and blue-skied world; just as some denizen of an icier, grimmer planet might look on, and envy, Earth. Before certain such idyllic pastoral scenes, one’s own over-complex twentieth-century existence could seem like a passing cloud-shadow; a folly, a mere result of climatic bad luck. Jane recalled Montesquieu—and they wondered whether all Western ‘progress’ wasn’t just a result of having to fill in a historical wet afternoon. One morning, when they were leaning over the rail in sunlight, she decided on an adjective for the river. It was wise; both in itself and to what it bore.

  Then there were the other passengers, who also spoke parables of a kind. Dan and Jane derived a constant interest and amusement from observing them—and their own reactions to this polyglot microcosm on which they were temporarily marooned. If the Nile was human history, their ship was a pocket caricature of the human race, or at least the Western part of it. There was a certain mixing, after the first day, between the two main parties, the French and the East Europeans. During the cruising between sites, they shared a common mania for photographing and filming. When there were photogenic subjects on both banks, the crowded sun-deck became absurdly like a scene from a Tati film, as the tyranny of the lens and cries of excitement pulled the would-be Cartier-Bressons frantically from port rail to starboard, and back again.

  Dan used his own Nikon very little, and only then for the kind of snapshots, of Jane, of the odd view, for her to show at home, that he might just as well have taken with an Instamatic. A lifelong avoider of other tourists, he had forgotten the extent to which every man is now his own image-maker. It was almost frightening, this obsession with capturing through one sense alone, and one that required (at least at the level Jane and he watched every day) so little thought or concentration: a mindless clicking. It encouraged the clicker not to think; not to imagine; not to remember; above all, not to feel. Perhaps it was the ultimate privilege, on that ship already loaded with unfair advantage of a cultural and economic kind: merely to duplicate seeing, to advertise in some future that one had been there. He said all this to Jane, who mocked him for being a traitor to his own medium.

  The next day she came up to him at the site they were touring, with a pretended downward glance of contrition.

  ‘Dan, I know it’s most terribly vulgar and philistine, but I wondered if you could just duplicate my seeing. That frieze over there.’

  He took the photo she wanted, but sniffed at her. ‘I’m still right.’

  She smiled. ‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’

  On deck during the cruising, all this photography, this comparing of cameras and impressions and backgrounds, gave an air of international comradeship. But the English pair found the East Europeans too guarded, on the defensive, the French too hedonistic and self-centred—duty obsessed the one group, pleasure the other. This wasn’t without exception. It soon got about that Jane spoke French, and some of the East Europeans spoke passable English. Everyone showed off about their knowledge of foreign languages.

  There was a quiet Czech mining engineer, who had spent the war years in Scotland, and whom Dan and Jane got to like; and two young Frenchmen, a professional photographer and a journalist, who were doing an article on the cruise for some illustrated magazine. They both spoke fair English, and combined Gallic charm with a certain cynicism about life that Dan approved. There were very few young people on the cruise and these two rather took up with Dan and Jane, as if they were more amusing than their compatriots; or perhaps it was just to exhibit their anglophilia. They confirmed Jane’s initial guess at Luxor—the young journalist, Alain, contemptuously slashed the back of his fingers down his jaw when the subject came up one day. He found his own national contingent rasant, distinctly tiresome and boring and offensively conservative. Like most well-educated young leftists, he retained an unhealthy respect for style. But he shared Dan and Jane’s growing feeling that the fellaheen were as interesting as the ancient sites, and they forgave him. He and his colleague also shared their amusement over the preposterous Barge-borne Queen and his boyfriend. He was apparently a well-known art critic and man about fashionable Paris; he had known Jean Cocteau and never let anyone forget it. The boy, ‘Carissinio’—-Jane and Dan found they were not the only ones who bestowed nicknames—was Italian.

  The French in fact interested them most, perhaps because of their marked greater individualism, the transparency of their self-centredness. It was hard to decide whether they were a nation left behind by, or in advance of, the rest of Europe. They could seem sometimes like antiquate
d peacocks beside the sober, solid East Europeans; individualists fighting a last lost guerrilla war against the necessary uniformity of the global future. At other times they seemed the epiphany of what the British themselves had been timidly trying to become over the last three decades—de-puritanized self-obsessed and self-indulgent… all that the word ‘British’, with its connotations of national duty and the sanctity of the done thing, had once proscribed. Occasionally Dan imagined this contemporary human comedy under Kitchener’s fierce blue stare. From that professional point of view he welcomed the experience, not least because he had already in his script ‘gone long’—in what he now suspected was a lucky hunch—on the Fashoda incident of 1898. Major Marchand, the intrepid French soldier-explorer who provoked it, had already taken his fancy, and he began to see him a little with their young journalist friend Alain’s mobile and dry-tongued face; and how he could present the whole confrontation as a twentieth-century pulling of the nineteenth-century lion’s tail. Britain and Kitchener had won the political issue, of course; but Dan began to see ways of making it clear that the imperialist cause was even then lost.

  He argued about it with Jane one evening: whether the acute new awareness of self—its demands, its privileges, its rights—that had invaded the Western psyche since the First World War was a good thing or a largely evil consequence of capitalist free enterprise, whether people had been media-gulled into self-awareness to increase the puppet-master’s profits or whether it was an essentially liberalizing new force in human society. Predictably Jane took the first, and Dan the second view. He thought it meant finally more honesty in human affairs, though he secretly told himself he could hardly argue anything else, given his lifelong (and altogether rather French) respect for his own decisions and desires; while Jane saw so many carrots dangled before donkeys. She couldn’t even see useful demolition being done, and he accused her of wanting a society as rigid as the old, if founded on different concepts of duty and national destiny. But it was a matter of her feelings about feeling: worship of self channelled all feeling inward, and that was suicidal in an age where the world clearly needed outwardness.