‘He knew then?’
‘Oh yes. He’s always known. There couldn’t have been any relationship otherwise. You work too close together on site and you have to live with each other for months or even years on and off.’
‘What does he think?’
‘Finlay finds all manifestations of human behaviour fascinating, and of almost equal value. He’s got a wife and two children he keeps in Cambridge. That way he stays a happily married man. The job’s his main interest. I don’t know how she feels about it all. She’s probably a woman who finds most of what she needs in her home and family, and then they haven’t any money worries and there’s always something to do in a university town. Anyway I said you worked for the museum and then he asked if you could draw on site. I said I was sure you could but I’d ask and give him a ring tomorrow. It’s a bit of a rush but now he’s got his grant he’ll want to be off as soon as possible. I know him. You can, can’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Did you tell him what I’d been drawing lately?’
‘Yes. He liked that. Thought it was a great joke. Said he wasn’t sure if the Etruscans used them but with an expert on tap we’d probably soon find out.’
She looked at him for a moment and then, ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why suddenly like this?’
‘You will come won’t you? Tell me you’ll come and then I’ll try and explain.’
‘Of course I’ll come.’
‘It’ll be stinking hot. Perhaps you won’t like it.’
She laughed. ‘Quite honestly I can’t think of anything I’d like better at the moment than to go off to somewhere completely different, where you can be yourself as you should be and yet be doing the sort of job you should. It’s what I’ve wanted, you just don’t know how much.’
His face cleared. ‘That’s alright then. You’ll get on with old Finlay in a distant sort of way. He’ll probably treat you much the same way as he does his own wife.’
‘How does he treat you?’
‘Oh he’s got some mad idea that he and I are very similar, even look a bit alike he thinks. It’s a difficult relationship to define. You’ll see. Most people’d say it couldn’t exist, that you can’t have a relationship without sex coming into it somewhere but I honestly think this one’s different. That’s partly why I’ve never been able to settle for anything less because I knew it was possible.’
‘Will you tell me now?’
‘If I can. I’ll try. It isn’t just Finlay turning up like this of course. It helps; it solves the immediate economic problem of how and where but I think I was due for a change anyway. It would have come somehow if you know what I mean, because I was ready for it. You know that don’t you? What you want to know is why am I ready now, at this particular point in time, when I haven’t been before. I’ve known it was coming, that there was something going on inside that would lead to a change like I said to you the other day. Going away helped the process on a lot, and then one or two things happened today that have happened dozens of times before, a lorry driver wanting me to cook the books with him, something Alice said, the words of a song going through my head, the way the mechanics laughed among themselves when I went into the repair shop; all bits that fitted together. I have to go back a few years to tell you how it all started before you can understand. When I first found out about myself I wasn’t shocked or frightened as some people are. Instead I looked around for an idea that would cover the situation, make sense of it. You’d say it was a typical reaction of course, just what you’d expect of me. Anyway I conceived this idea of the rockpool, of the gay world as a universe in little where you could find all the human processes, life and death and love, rich and poor, successful and otherwise, moral and a-moral, just as in a pool on the shore you can find crustaceans and fish, dozens of different forms of plant and animal life in as many colours, a microcosm if you like. And you can sit beside the pool day after day studying them until you become an expert in your own little field. Then I found I wasn’t studying them from a distance, from a nice safe seat on the rocks but swimming about down there among them, subject to all the same laws and problems and I accepted this for a long time because at the back of my mind there was another idea too which I can’t explain without either being drunk, and then it doesn’t matter, I wouldn’t care, or sounding so pretentious I couldn’t bring it out in cold blood. But it’s something to do with involvement and what Steve’s father, the vicar, would call suffering. Does any of this make sense to you?’
‘Go on.’
‘For a time this was right and necessary because I still had enough consciousness of what I was doing for it to be valid but gradually I began to lose that consciousness and become a tiny organism in the life of the rockpool, gasping for an existence like all the rest, adding to the problems instead of helping to solve them and just as frightened of the open sea as everyone else. We’re terrified of what’s out there, of the competition, of being laughed at, of having to stand up and hold our own and so we make this little world for ourselves where we can be safe and comfort each other with what a dreadful life it is and how handicapped we are until being queer becomes a full-time occupation and there’s none left over for anything else. But it’s a fallacy. There’s no such thing as a microcosm. You’re walking along the shore and you come across the rockpool. You think it contains all you want, all varieties of human experience and just as you’re becoming thoroughly absorbed in it a great wave washes over it and you realise it’s not complete in itself, it’s only part of the whole and all the little fishes who’ve been swimming frantically round and round, and the crabs who’ve been hiding under the stones half buried in the sand with only a pair of frightened eyes peering out, have to make a run for it out into the open sea because that’s the only place they’ll ever grow up, and the only ones who are left in the pool are those who’re too slow-moving, too firmly attached to their rocks and their way of life to get out. We’re part of society, part of the world whether we or society like it or not, and we have to learn to live in the world and the world has to live with us and make use of us, not as scapegoats, part of its collective unconscious it’d rather not come to terms with but as who we are, just as in the long run it’ll have to do with all the other bits and pieces of humanity that go to make up the whole human picture. Society isn’t a simple organism with one nucleus and a fringe of little feet, it’s an infinitely complex living structure and if you try to suppress any part of it by that much, and perhaps more, you diminish, you mutilate the whole.
And there’s one more thing, just one more. Not only can you say that the microcosm doesn’t exist but it shouldn’t exist because it’s an idea that springs from the fragmentation of experience and knowledge. We don’t learn do we? We develop all our sciences, archeology, cosmology, psychology, we tabulate and classify and cling to our sacred definitions, our divisions, without any attempt to synthesise, without the humility to see that these are only parts of a total knowledge. I suppose it’s hard when you can’t even begin to touch most fields of human activity today. Coleridge was the last man who was supposed to have read almost every extant book wasn’t he and even he wouldn’t be able to keep up now. But somehow we ought to be able to keep the idea of the totality of experience and knowledge at the back of our minds even though the front’s busy from morning til night with the life cycle of the liver fluke.’ He paused for a moment and then went on, ‘Some people would say I’m running away, refusing to acknowledge the facts of our life as they are, not taking my share in the common suffering but that’s not true. I’m not running. I’m just taking up my whole personality and walking quietly out into the world with it. We’ll see what happens.’
‘It’ll be alright,’ she said. ‘I know it’ll be alright.’
‘How do you know?’ he said, and then he laughed. ‘I’m going to stop asking that question.’
EVENING. The set is in semi-darkness. Spot on centre, Cy lean behind the bar polishing glasses which she holds up to the light from time to tim
e. She is singing quietly to herself. Charlie comes from a door off Right, crosses to the fruit machine and begins to feed in sixpences, pulling the handle mechanically, dispassionately after each one, occasionally collecting from the open mouth below. There is the sound of a car drawing up outside and then the slam of the door. Feet are heard on the wooden stairs Left leading down from the street. A figure, anonymous in pants and jacket enters jauntily. The lights go up a little with a faintly greenish glow. The figure crosses to the bar, feels in a pocket and brings out a coin which it puts down carefully on the counter. Cy looks up from her glass, nods and moves towards it. The evening is beginning.
AFTERWORD
The Microcosm began as all my books do with a hand-sized idea which gradually swelled to fill my whole inner horizon. The difference was that this was an idea for a non-fiction book, a treatment of female homosexuality which would delineate the state of the heart in the early sixties when we were presumably in the middle of a sexual revolution towards a more open society.
To this end I took a tape recorder to a number of women forming a grid of age, class, occupation and geographical spread, typed up the interviews, wrote a synopsis and chapter headings and passed the lot to my agent, Jonathan Clowes, to peddle. When he had collected a series of rejections from the major non-fiction publishing houses, including Hutchinson who had published my first two novels, he passed on an invitation to lunch and discuss the project from Anthony Blond of Blond and Briggs. Money, and lunches, were in short supply so I went along.
Blond’s message was quite clear: no reputable house would commission me to write a non-fiction book on such a risky subject because I had no academic qualifications in the sociology or psychology of sex. Why not then write a novel about it? He would pay me £15 a week for as long as the job took, even if it was two years.
Even as he was talking I could see at once how the material might become a novel. £15 was security; not riches but enough to live on. I felt that rush of excitement that comes with a new idea. Scenes and characters began to shape themselves in my head and then I heard what he was saying, for his mind had been working along those lines too and he was suggesting the kind of novel he would like to commission, and what he thought should be in it. Lunch turned into drinks from which I went away with my head buzzing to ring my agent and report. I didn’t take the £15 a week, and Hutchinson who had an option on my next novel published The Microcosm when it was finished. However I shall always be grateful to Anthony Blond for his initial suggestion because it did more than turn me from a non-fiction to a novel idea. It gave me the opportunity to think more deeply about the nature and structure of novels themselves.
I had more or less given up novel reading at the age of eleven when our girls’ school syllabus required us to move on from Sir Walter Scott to Austen and the Brontës, which represented for me a declension from the free imaginative life of the individual to the narrower world of a woman’s supposed place in the marriage stakes, though much later I was to come to admire Austen for other things. From eleven until just pre-university when I discovered Woolf and the two Joyces, James and Cary, my passion for literature was largely expressed through plays and poetry. As I’ve told already in the preface to the Virago Modern Classics edition of That’s How It Was I was persuaded to begin my first novel virtually against my will. The second had followed almost automatically on commission but I had begun to find linear narrative very limiting.
I resisted the then received doctrine that ‘the novel’ had been invented at the beginning of the eighteenth century for a new middle-class female reader with time on her hands, and chose rather to emphasize its roots in earlier fictions in myth, saga, romance and fairy tale. I wanted to use a language for fiction that was capable of rising to poetry, and that had all the sinewy vigour and flexibility of the London demotic I had been brought up on. I saw and still see an energized realism as a literary mode in which concrete images function like metaphor in poetry. I wanted a structure in which the parts would take their meaning from being juxtaposed to each other rather than chronologically consequent on each other. I wanted a novel that could put on any dress not just a sober suit; it was possible on stage and I thought it should be possible on the page too. I invented for what I wanted to do the term ‘a mosaic style’ that would break the tyranny of linear narrative, and that consciously harked back to Joyce.
The Microcosm seemed an ideal place to try this out. I had a subject calculated then to make any publisher nervous: why not fit it with an equivalent style and structure. The result was to be dubbed by one critic ‘wilfully experimental’. It gave me however the freedom to be within and without my characters at the same time and to include not only a geographical spread but also historical reconstruction, pastiche, as part of the book’s thesis that there’s nothing new under the sun.
It was only when the letters began to arrive that I realized that I had tapped into that deep well of loneliness in which thousands of women still felt themselves to be sunk. Some wrote and said I had changed their lives and given them courage to be openly themselves which was a frightening responsibility. Others asked for the names of clubs and organizations which would ease the loneliness. Many were married with children. One in her seventies wrote that although it was no doubt too late for her to find a partner she felt liberated by the mere fact of seeing her sexuality evoked in print.
Since then feminism has moved in and on, and the model for The House Of Shades has closed. Women now see their aspirations mirrored more in the Black struggle for equality than in a politicized psuedo-homosexuality. The closet and the ghetto however haven’t been dismantled and for many people the problem of how to be homosexual in a heterosexual society remains almost as acute as ever, in a country where tolerance of eccentricity is used as a justification for conformity, and where young adults of the same sex can still be prosecuted for ‘behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace’ by kissing at a bus-stop.
Maureen Duffy, London, 1988
About the Author
was born in Worthing, Sussex, in 1933. Educated at the Trowbridge High School for Girls, Wiltshire, and the Sarah Bonnell High School for Girls, she took her degree in English at King’s College, London, in 1956. She was a school teacher for five years, and in 1962 she published her first novel, That’s How It Was, winning immediate acclaim. Since then she has published twelve novels: The Single Eye (1964), The Microcosm (1966), The Paradox Players (1967), Wounds (1969), Love Child (1971), I Want to Go to Moscow (1973), Capital (1975), Housespy (1978), Gor Saga (1982, dramatised by the BBC as First Born, 1988), Scarborough Fear (1982, as D.M. Cayer), Londoners (1983) and Change (1987).
She has had six plays performed and has published four volumes of verse. Her Collected Poems 49-84 appeared in 1985. Maureen Duffy has also written a critical study of the supernatural in folklore and literature: The Erotic World of Faery (1972), a biography of Aphra Behn, The Passionate Shepherdess (1977), a social history, Inherit the Earth (1980) and an animal rights handbook, Men and Beasts (1984).
With Brigid Brophy she made and exhibited 3-D Constructions, Prop Art, in 1969. She received the City of London Festival Playwright’s Prize in 1962, was co-founder of the Writers’ Action Group, joint Chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain 1977-78 and its President 1985-88.
Maureen Duffy lives in London.
Copyright
Arcadia Books Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co., Ltd 1966
First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster 1966
Reprinted by Virago Press 1989
This Ebook edition published by Arcadia Books 2014
Copyright © Maureen Duffy 1966, 1989, 2014
Maureen Duffy has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781909807914
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The Microcosm Page 35