He couldn’t hear a word of what was being said on the TV owing to the roar of conversation around him, two men in particular with their arms lovingly around each other singing Auld Lang Syne. How natural they were! How the tears sprang unbidden to their eyes as they dreamed of some lost world which they had once inhabited, probably some slum in the city. At any rate they were lost in the moment, surrendered to it; poured into it as water into a vase, swaying together, arms round each other, their unshaven faces lit by a distant romantic glow. Damn you, Dixon, he thought, why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you go back to your study?
4
THE FOLLOWING DAY there was a ring at Tom’s doorbell (the only one of the two bells that actually worked) and Seumas Crawford came in. Tom could never understand why Seumas took it into his head to visit him now and again. Was it because he genuinely thought that he had a future as a writer or was it simply that he had nowhere else to go at those particular times? They had been in the same class many years before, but Seumas was now a university lecturer which represented some sort of success, and certainly a reasonable amount of money. It wasn’t a particularly good university but it wasn’t a terribly bad one either. Sometimes Tom envied Seumas, at other times he was appalled by him.
Seumas wore a red velvet jacket and had bright curly hair: he looked like a flawed and slightly girlish Renaissance man; sometimes he reminded Tom of a youth he had seen in a painting lounging against a tree with a field of flowers all round him. He quite liked Seumas but he knew that he didn’t know anything of life. He had left school, gone to university and had stayed at university. His whole life had been involved in education. He was a bookish aesthete. And Tom didn’t think that he was particularly bright.
“May I see it?” said Seumas, glancing at a rumpled page which Tom had thrown from the typewriter in a fever of inspiration and which was drifting in the draught which came in under the door. Bars of cold sunlight lay across the dulled flowery carpet.
“I should prefer not,” said Tom. He really didn’t like other people looking at his work before he had finished. It was like someone touching the hem of his garment and taking some of the virtue from him. That was why he liked staying where he stayed. No one in the building could be accused of knowing anything about the arts. Below him there stayed an old man who lived by himself and had a large dog which snapped at him whenever he took it out for a walk. Tom thought this rather odd, that this man had this dog for years and yet he looked untamed, baring his teeth and snapping at his master when he took him out. He never actually bit him but looked as if he might. Very odd that. Still he supposed that everyone had to have some being to which he must connect, on however minimal a leash. The only trouble was that the dog looked really fierce and dishevelled and he barked continually which made him appear more dangerous and menacing.
“Whatever you say,” said Seumas. But he looked so disappointed that Tom immediately relented. “Oh, all right,” he said, but he felt at the same time that he had betrayed something in himself and that life was composed of these little betrayals, not major ones. “I couldn’t care less. It’s not important anyway.”
Seumas unfolded the crinkled page and read it as best he could since the typing wasn’t very professional.
It read as follows:
One day at about three o’clock Dixon entered the Art Museum and stood there gazing at the paintings. There were not many that he liked really. They all looked very strange and odd and even malevolent, some of people with little heads like berries, some showing strange rooms with men crouched in corners in lilac paint. As he stood there—he had come in the first place because he was bored of his flat already and he couldn’t get going on his book—he saw standing by a glass case full of stones a young girl wearing a hood and a coat. She was holding one of the stones in her hands: she looked very remote. She reminded him of someone but he couldn’t think who. He decided to talk to her because there was no one else there. And he also felt alone. What he wanted above all was someone to talk to. Sunday was a terrible day. In any case this was the only place open on a Sunday, this Art Gallery. He wanted to say something brilliant to her so that she would immediately recognise his quality. He was afraid of telling her his name because she might not have heard of him, though she looked educated. Something about her, some deep pathos, attracted him. It was partly to do with her profile and the line of her back. It made her look like a lady in a pre-Raphaelite painting. She looked defenceless and at the same time she looked interesting. He …
“I stopped there,” said Tom, “because I couldn’t get any further.”
“Hm. A bit repetitious, I’d say,” said Seumas. “Have you ever read the account of the meeting in Anna Karenina? That is how to handle things, I think.”
Seumas was one of those lecturers who have no idea how to evaluate literature and are therefore continually comparing passages from one book with passages from another book. He had no qualms about comparing, for instance, the scene in the cave in A Passage to India with that in Kidnapped and pointing out significant parallels, not even omitting to mention the difference in the physical appearances with regard to the different areas inside which they were located. The death of a consumptive in Tolstoy he would compare with the death of Little Nell in Dickens, and point out linguistic parallels and “echoes”, quite unconscious of the fact that the first had originally been written in Russian. He would write and say things like, “What precisely we have here is the beginning of a trend in the work of Sherwood Anderson.” Every author became for him in the end the equal of every other author and his main occupation in life was to find, if he could, parallels in scenes, sentences, paragraphs. He was like a cartographer tracing strata, rifts, canyons in a wholly undifferentiated landscape. He would write monographs with titles like The Use of Painting in Stevens and Oscar Wilde. He drew attention to the image of the castle in both Kafka and the Arthurian Legends. He didn’t really believe that Kafka had actually read the Arthurian legends: rather he seemed to think that there was a common stuff of which all books, no matter what their date in history, consisted. It was difficult to dislike him because he was always so enthusiastic and so innocent.
“Hm,” he said, “a bit like Malamud or Bellow, I would say. Something about the sentences. Some way in which they move carelessly without art and yet with art. I would say something urban.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” said Tom because he didn’t have any beer and he couldn’t understand how anybody could talk like that.
“No, thanks. I thought I might drag you out. I’m due to give a talk on Sunday. I thought you might like to come. And we could have a drink.”
For the thousandth time Tom wondered why Seumas bothered to visit him. Was he really a failure like himself? Did the others in the department despise him? Or did he really think that Tom was going to write something good and did he perhaps feel that he ought to be in on it from the beginning?
Or was Tom the only person who would listen to him? Tom always looked on him as on a child. How would he have done at that labouring job for instance in the islands that summer? Not very well presumably. Or that road-making job?
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Oh, The Novel as a matter of fact. I thought I would talk about The Novel. I think you might be interested. It’s a group of teachers. It will pass an afternoon for you. They are usually good audiences. Very polite.”
Or was it that Tom was a reminder of his past when he had been a star pupil in that crummy school, the dux who did so well in the bursary Competition so that they had got a half holiday out of it those many years ago? He could still remember the waving of bags, the cheering. For a moment he felt a certain pathos as he looked at this perennially youthful figure, whose main work in life was to draw parallels across a map of literary stuff, and sensed something tragic there. The eyes looked tired and baggy and the bright clothes a gay façade behind which there was overwhelming boredom and failure. The lecture wou
ld almost certainly be terrible, awful, hellish, dull, like a PhD thesis. But he might get a drink out of it and on the other hand Dixon had again ground to a full stop. Nothing could be done about him for a long time. He was sure that Dixon would not know anyone like Crawford anyway. Not people with shallow minds, with this mishmash of stuff in their pointed heads.
He thought: Perhaps I’ll never get this novel—but he stopped there. One must never even think things like that. For if he didn’t write, what could he do? Become a postman, a labourer, an assistant manager in a third-rate hotel? Become a—
No, he felt that he could write. It was just that there was a bluntness that he would have to overcome. He would have to arrive at an easy artifice. He would have to believe strongly enough in the world of make-believe. Behind him he felt the ironic gaze of Dixon, precisely watching him, like a fixed star.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll go. Have you your car? Will you call for me?”
“Of course,” said Seumas. He was very fond of his car, very precise about its performances. He drove carefully and read all the books on the handling of cars. He was terrified lest some day he should have an accident, though not because of physical fear but rather because of proved inefficiency in the “real world”. Having an accident in a car was not exactly the same as making a wrong judgment on a writer, even a dead one. He had simply never connected the two worlds. Since he had bought the car he had tracked down many references to cars in literature and had got hooked for a time on the works of Scott Fitzgerald which had in turn led to comparisons between the loner in The Great Gatsby and the tradition of the Cowboy in American literature. He was meditating a brief pamphlet on the artists and writers who had been killed in car crashes, including Camus and Pollock. He thought an analogy could be established between the blurred canvases of action painting and the world of “reality” seen from a car travelling at high speed.
Tom was practically the only person he could talk to. He didn’t like the people in his department, feeling that they were frivolous and inadequately informed and dangerously open to the poisonous effluvium of the pop world. They never kept up with the latest American critical books. They made intuitive simplistic judgments. He partly looked on Tom as someone he might rescue. Consider that life he led, alone in his flat, doing odd jobs now and again, wearing that silly smelly old khaki coat. (Did he look on himself as some sort of metaphysical soldier? There was something in Wallace Stevens about that.) There was an admirable strength about his single-mindedness. Not that he was a good writer, at least as yet, but at the same time there was a moral weight about him. Still there had been that little poem he had shown him once. That had been quite nice. Influenced certainly by Williams (The Wheelbarrow in fact it had been called) but still interesting.
Perhaps there was a slim hope that Tom might in fact emerge some day as a discovery and he himself might write a little preface to his work. There was always that possibility.
He left with the knowledge that Tom at last would be in the audience for his talk.
After he had gone Tom went back to his typewriter. However, he was destined to be interrupted again.
There was a ring at the doorbell and when he answered it, it was the woman from across the landing with a jar of jam.
Her name was Mrs Harrow and she was a small, dark, bespectacled, dynamic woman who had been divorced, as she had told him once, from her husband who worked in a bar. She had one son who never came to visit her but had cleared off north one day with his guitar, his clothes, and all the money he could find in the house.
“I thought I’d bring you some jam,” she said. She never came into the flat and he had never invited her in, except once or twice when he had come to the flat at the beginning she had somehow managed to enter under some pretext that he couldn’t remember.
She seemed to be convinced that he was starving and that her mission in life was to act like an emissary from Oxfam, bringing him gifts of shortbread, scones and jam at fairly regular intervals.
She would sometimes say to him, “I heard you typing till all hours last night,” though for such a statement to be true she would have had to have supernatural hearing since he couldn’t imagine anyone hearing him typing from across the landing.
“Thank you very much,” he said, holding the jar carefully. He hardly ever ate any jam. Sometimes he would buy a loaf and throw it out without touching it. He had no refrigerator and milk went sour on him. The cupboard was often full of rotten apples and oranges. At times he would find himself inexplicably short of tea and sugar.
For lack of something to say he asked, “How is your house going?” She said she had bought a big flat with nine rooms which she intended to use for taking in lodgers, preferably students.
“I’m wallpapering it,” she said, “at the moment.”
“You’re doing it all yourself?” he said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into his voice.
“And painting it,” she said. “I’m hoping to get some students. I’ll sell this place of course when it’s finished.”
He had the feeling that she couldn’t succeed in her project, that it was merely a dream, and that she wasn’t businesslike enough to keep the flat going. Sometimes in fact he wondered whether it was not all a fantasy, and that she didn’t have this flat at all. After all, where did she get the money from? He had heard that she had been a receptionist in a hotel for many years, and receptionists weren’t highly paid.
“I’ll have to buy some furniture,” she added. She had already told him that she would get most of the furniture cheap at sales. He imagined vast rooms furnished with different kinds of chairs and tables like the detritus of an insane mind, and students sitting about on antique beds studying philosophy. He thought of her busily scouring the city for wardrobes and sideboards. “I shall paint one of the bedrooms green,” she said. “Green is such a restful colour. I shall have to do the painting myself. Painters are so expensive.”
She had a fixed idea that if she got students the tone of the establishment would be automatically raised and it would become elegant and chic. He could have told her that she might have difficulty in getting money from students. Also that they might be very noisy.
She was really a very odd person. Every morning she would leave the house in her brown fur coat which looked as if it had been bitten by nocturnal animals, and return in the late afternoon. Perhaps she had been wallpapering her house. Or perhaps there was no house at all. In that case he couldn’t imagine how she was spending her time.
“I could pay all of it off, in ten years,” she said. “My bank manager told me.” She said this as if she owned the bank manager.
“What are you working at now?” she asked him shyly.
“Nothing much,” he replied.
He was convinced that she would tell her friends—if she had any—that there was a famous author living near her and that he spent his time typing furiously in the pursuit of masterpieces.
“Of course,” he could imagine her saying, “the house is in one of the better quarters of the city.”
He wondered what she would do if he volunteered to help her with her painting and wallpapering and for a moment he nearly did.
“Well, I hope you like the jam,” she finally said, half turning away. He thought, perhaps Dixon would stay in her house, perhaps he could become one of her lodgers, perhaps he would fall in love with her. Now that would be an idea. Dixon wouldn’t like her, he was sure. Especially if there were students. But the image was very strong, of Dixon writing busily in one of her rooms, while she tiptoed about in a devout silence, and made tea for him and told him of her life, of “reality”. The image was so strong that for a moment he forgot that she was real and Dixon imaginary.
“Well,” he said again, “thank you for the jam.”
“I suppose you’ll have to get on with your work,” she said.
“I’m afraid so,” he said with an assumed pathos as if he were an Atlas of literature.
“Well, ma
ke sure you take your food,” she said. “One of these days I’ll bring you some home-made oatcakes.”
“Thank you,” he said, again assuming his small-boy voice.
“Well …” She turned away.
“And I hope you’ll get your wallpapering done all right,” he added.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’ll have no bother with that. I’ll have it ready in the summer.”
This time she left and went into her own flat. He retired into his room, looked for a considerable time at his typewriter, and decided that he wouldn’t do any more writing. He put the jam jar in the cupboard and promptly forgot all about it. Then he switched on the TV.
But he couldn’t settle to watch the programme. He couldn’t get the image of Dixon out of his mind. Where was he at that precise moment? What had he done to himself? He imagined him leaving his house and settling in at a flat, carrying with him his typewriter and going back furtively for some of his books. He would certainly need his books. They would all belong to the eighteenth century, epigrammatic and formal. Montesquieu would be one of the authors. The trouble was that he himself hadn’t read Montesquieu. In fact, when he thought about it, it was difficult for him to get into Dixon’s mind. Perhaps Dixon wouldn’t be able to write at all. Perhaps he needed the abrasiveness of his wife. Perhaps without her he would die. He would certainly have to meet this girl. Mrs Harrow wouldn’t do. Mrs Harrow was the type of woman who had probably destroyed her own happiness by ambition: her lowly station was not enough for her. She would dream at night of owning a hotel and not merely serving in one.
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 3