I stood looking at it and the woman behind me who had been silent said quietly, ‘I didn’t put it there; it was there when I came.’
‘I don’t mind it,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’
I took the room and that night I moved in after bidding goodbye to the cook.
‘Good luck to ya, anyway,’ she said. ‘I got nothin’ against ya. “Live and let live,” that’s my motter.’
6
From a boarding house bedroom, however drab it may be, you can hear sounds of life coming from other rooms. Boarders move, whistle, sing, talk, open drawers; their footsteps can be heard in passageways. The sounds embrace you in a unity, establish a similarity of purpose that pushes back the confining walls and lets in the strength of men to sustain you.
A rented room sits in a vacuum, isolated from life. It is steeped in resignation. Loneliness, with thin fingers, reaches out to touch you as you enter the door. You move to the sounds of your own unshared living and they become echoes without meaning. I was always restless when alone in my room. I had imagined it as a setting for development where, in reading and study, I would lay the foundations I felt were necessary to support my buildings of words.
I wrote a few short stories but they were merely depictions of particular experience with no extension of comprehension to some universal truth and they were rejected by editors, though for other reasons as I soon learnt.
One editor I visited, a rare man who had written me a letter of encouragement, showed me a black and white drawing of a woman in evening dress leaning nonchalantly against the pillar of an enormous ballroom talking to a young, handsome man in an evening suit. She was holding a cocktail glass and was smiling up at him.
‘Could you write me a story in which this picture could be used as an illustration?’ he asked me. ‘I’ve paid for it but never used it. She could be in love with him.’ He waved his hand in a gesture that suggested the inevitability of this factor in the story. ‘He could love her but feel that some incident in his past makes him unworthy of her. No, wait a minute! Her father at one time had been partners with his father in a shady business deal but she doesn’t know this. This young fellow has devoted his life to clearing his father’s name but in doing so he will have to ruin her father’s reputation. Something like that. Mix them up, then straighten them out. Those are the sort of stories the public wants. You can do it.’
I couldn’t do it. I wanted to picture life as it was and by inference show it as it should be. Reflection on the reasons for rejection of my stories drove me into a passion of reading and for a while I disregarded the life around me and escaped into books where authors, who had flung themselves into life with wonder and understanding, ennobled man with the truth they had found in their searching.
I was drugged with their pictures while turning my back on my own, those pictures of mine awaiting a pen to release them. But the pen I wielded could only be guided by a thousand hands I had yet to clasp.
Reading could not help me to write. I read Moby Dick and for days I kept thinking of its sweep and power. I walked past women with tired eyes pushing perambulators in which the faces of babies glowed from amidst a covering of vegetables, past bottle-ohs shouting their presence, past arguing men at hotel corners, past squatting children fondling pups, past lovers; but I was on the sea.
Books illuminate the lessons learnt from life, explain what one sees and feels, give meaning to experience but cannot supply the fuel from which creative work is fired. Life does that—living, seeing, hearing, absorbing …
I began spending most of my evenings in the city, eating at cafes with Arthur, going to dances with Paul. Paul became engaged to Jean who, realising his possibilities as a permanent companion, had decided to make a steady husband of him when they could afford to marry. I sometimes went to the pictures with the two of them but to me the streets presented a more exciting picture and I wandered round the city taking notes.
During the day I worked at the Crown Casket and Joinery Company as head clerk, a position I had occupied for some time. Though the wages were low the job was permanent and I could work without the constant fear of losing it, a fear that had haunted me since first I started working.
The Company manufactured coffins, door-frames, window-frames and wood mouldings for builders. Its coffins (‘all employees of this company are requested to use the word “casket” instead of “coffin” when referring to the company’s product’) were exclusive and expensive. Only people with high incomes were able to purchase them. The Crown Company were the first casket manufacturers to introduce imitation metal coffins in bronze, gold and silver with a stippled, plaster of Paris surface, hand-rubbed to give the metal effect.
The men who stippled the coffins with a spray-gun were supplied with a free pint of milk daily as required by law. (‘… to wash the powder off yer lungs,’ explained Ted Boston, spitting into a handkerchief.)
The owner of the company, Mr Richard B. Bodstern, was a tall, erect man who walked like a Grenadier Guard. He inclined his body from the hips in greeting and stood at attention with lifted chin when listening to those addressing him. He rarely smiled, his expression was stern, his manner aloof.
I felt that he lived in a world of images. In this precise world born of his conditioning, doctors looked and acted and spoke as befitted men preserving a status removed from ordinary people. Lawyers were expected to behave as his image of them dictated. For him professors, architects, plumbers, grocers, barbers, workmen should live and behave according to rules demanded of a society which could only survive by such distinctions and of which he was a guardian.
Those who deviated from the image he had established as fitting for them were suspect. They had moved out of their class and were a threat to him. Check up with society’s rulings, seek explanations, lock the safe, close the door! Or move away from them to the unchanging, respectable and dignified life amongst contented images where revolt was unknown.
There could be no equality with the lesser images in his world where individual talent was crushed under the demands of society’s purpose.
That those who differed from him could be his equals was impossible. Equality did not exist between people of opposing ideas. Sameness was equality to him, conformity … It embraced clothes, food, amusements, friends, the worship of God. Conform and be protected from isolation.
If you merged yourself with the people, differing from them yet working with them in an individual contribution to a common good, you had escaped from service to the elect. This was fatal to his advancement.
He faithfully followed the image of the company managing director he had fashioned for his guidance. The image guarded his home against visitors not on his level of importance. It selected his friends. It bought his black limousine. It gave him a feeling of privilege, of power, of superiority. He believed it was himself.
Although he saw in me a resemblance to his image of a head clerk it was not convincingly demonstrated and this troubled him. He wanted absolute efficiency in his staff. I gave an illusion of efficiency which he accepted as truth but his periods of faith in me were divided in their continuous sequence by gaps of doubt in which he called me to his office for a lecture.
‘Your future,’ he once said, ‘lies in your own hands. There are great opportunities for you in this company. Mr Sneep (the accountant) will be retiring in a year or two and his high position will then become vacant. If you apply yourself diligently to your work I see no reason why you should not by then be fully equipped to apply for the position. You are conscientious and honest but you lack ambition. That is your great weakness. Yes, that is your weakness. You lack dedication.’
He strode the length of the office gazing at the floor while savouring the pleasure that accompanies a display of magnanimity. He faced me again with chin lifted.
‘Devotion to your task, the application of all your abilities to reach perfection in your work—these are the qualities you must strive to attain. The good accountant becom
es so much a part of the firm for which he works that the success or failure of both are bound together as one. They have a common aim—the welfare of the business.
‘Work does not cease when you leave this office,’ he went on, his tone changing from the deliverer of rhetoric to the adviser of a friend. ‘Always remember that. Most of my outstanding successes in business have been formulated when driving to and fro from my office. I have worked out systems of improvement when lying in bed.’
He stood there pleased with his thoughts and I stood before him.
‘This career as an accountant you have selected as your life’s work is an inspiring one. See that you make it so.’
He would talk for a long time. He enjoyed these lectures and while he talked I thought of many things.
Back in the office I would take a piece of paper and design a form upon it. Some neglected part of my mind was adapted for working out impressive forms on which to tick this and that, of devising short cuts to a desired result and I could work out a system of recording—in which I had little faith—that was impressive as a point of consideration.
I handed them to him as peace offerings. It gave him ideas and he worked on them.
These contributions of mine to office and factory efficiency made him feel I had possibilities. He was a systems expert. He was constantly seeking a more economical way of running the office and the factory by the introduction of cards, forms and filing systems that would eliminate unnecessary labour. Once having introduced the system it rarely satisfied him for long. He found pleasure in changing it. Each change assumed advances in his workmen’s capacity to fill in with accuracy the complicated forms he designed. Many of them were incapable of or resented doing this and systems were continually breaking down or demanding simplification to make them effective.
Instruction memos were given to foremen who, with steel-rimmed spectacles perched low on their noses, studied them in rooms littered with shavings and sawdust or packed to the roof with coffins.
‘Never rest on your laurels,’ he warned his foremen. ‘Seek for improved methods in your section.’
Those who ignored the memos were subjected to a lecture delivered with controlled anger and suggestions of dismissal.
But they were never left to brood in their rooms. Mr Bodstern believed that though an employer must frequently speak severely to his men he must never leave them to go home with feelings of resentment. To ensure this he made it a practice to seek out, later in the day, the man he had lectured and to pay some tribute to his work or his character. A friendly smile, a pat on the shoulder, were, he felt, most effective in re-establishing a friendly relationship that harsh words had shaken. Thus his employees were to him problems to be solved, not human beings to be helped.
Behind his selection of men to put into practice his plans for building a huge and profitable business was an influence that few suspected—his wife. She had sometimes visited the factory, been introduced to the foremen and observed the men at work but I had never met her. I only knew that all those to whom she had spoken loved her, though their extravagant praise of her always ended in expressions of wonder that she had ever married Mr Bodstern.
Mr Bodstern invited me to his home for dinner. This complete departure from normal practice surprised the office staff but was explained by attributing to him a resolve to find out what his wife thought of me.
He took me to his home directly after work. I sat back on the seat of his long, black car and looked out at the street over which I walked each night and morning. I noted the hard places, the easy places and the rise at the end of the street where tiredness always began closing in on my limbs after the long walk. I glided past them now without effort. It made me long for a car.
Mr Bodstern’s home had a drive from the gate to the house. It curved amid trees and shrubs and ended in a circular area of asphalt fronting a veranda curtained with creepers. Mrs Bodstern was waiting at the doorway as we climbed the steps. She was a bright, bird-like woman animated by some deep happiness and with eyes that would suddenly discover delightful things in people.
She kissed her husband with affection, placed a hand upon my shoulder as if she were welcoming an old friend and showed me into a room of big chairs and a deep carpet where I sat down before a log fire.
Mr Bodstern went to his study and Mrs Bodstern busied herself in the kitchen. But every few minutes she appeared at the door to speak to me. Her friendly manner and the tone of her voice suggested she and I understood each other perfectly and there was no need to set about establishing a relationship that already existed.
In a little while she had me united with her in a partnership that had as its object the pleasing of Mr Bodstern. She told me what she had prepared for our dinner, ending a description of some meat dish with the words, ‘I’m sure Mr Bodstern will love it, aren’t you?’
I felt sure he would.
I did not enjoy the dinner. The relationship between Mr Bodstern and myself had been established under conditions that only allowed a master and servant attitude to exist between us. This relationship allowed the exchange of remarks that suggested equality but in reality such remarks were merely evidence of Mr Bodstern’s conviction that a rationed display of friendliness was essential in keeping an employee satisfied. It gave the employee confidence, pride and increased his desire to please.
My presence at his table demanded he introduce a balance between friendly remarks and employer reserve. He had to retain our office relationship while acting the part of host to an equal. Without his wife’s help he would have found it difficult to do this but he compromised by handing over the friendliness to her while he looked on benignly.
He removed himself from this situation after the meal was over, retreating to his study and leaving me to be entertained by Mrs Bodstern who sat before the fire with me and talked about books and music and Mr Bodstern.
‘He seems a very stern man,’ she confided in me, ‘but he is really the most lovable person. I am very lucky to have such a husband.’
I felt he was the lucky one but I could not tell her this. To have paid her such a compliment would have been an impertinence. She did not need it.
Or did she? Maybe the impression she knew her husband created in others took from her some pride in herself and she sought from me a recognition of a wishful image that would restore it. A tribute to her husband would be a tribute to her.
I do not know what impression I made upon her. She did not make me feel I was being subjected to her judgment and because of this I talked freely to her about my experiences. I told her I wanted to write books.
‘I’ve often wished I could write,’ she said. ‘I suppose everyone does. It’s a stage people go through. They imagine the things that happen to them have never happened to anyone else and they want to write the story of their lives. It’s sad I think. So much waste of effort. Very, very few people have experiences worth writing about. They live lives like ours in which nothing happens. They are never contented with what they are doing.’
She looked at me smiling. ‘You must be contented with life as it is. Dreams will never get you anywhere. Unless you apply yourself to the work for which you are suited, how can you make money?’
She patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t you see that? Happiness is all around you. You apply yourself to your work and you will be rich some day.’
I wanted to say to her, ‘I’m not interested in making a lot of money’, but I knew she would think I was lying.
‘My husband says you will make a very good accountant,’ she added.
Mr Bodstern could have no such conviction unless it were revealed to him by scientific tabulation of all the factors psycho-analysts, vocational advisers and text-books on character analysis decreed as essential to the perfect clerk. He wanted these factors displayed on complicated forms where ticks were symbols of rationality and crosses the marks of rejection. Confronted with such a form, suitably ticked, his personal reactions to the clerk it dissected were con
verted into an equation that fitted the job with the man.
It was this point of decision he sought a fortnight later when at his request there appeared in the office Professor Byron Boggs, a professional vocational adviser whose services at a nominal figure were in demand by companies controlled by executives seized by the current craze of selecting staff for advancement by the application of a rudimentary knowledge of psychology.
The office staff had never heard of Professor Byron Boggs, had no idea that this smartly-dressed man with the clipped, confident manner and the pale thin hands was about to interfere with their future.
Mr Bodstern called me into his office and introduced me to Professor Boggs who in a preliminary demonstration of his power and skill in establishing the relationship demanded by his profession said sharply to me, ‘What is your name again?’
I told him.
‘And you are the …?’
‘Head clerk.’
‘Good.’
He nodded an ending to this required humiliation and stood back from me breathing his satisfaction.
Mr Bodstern was doubtful about the method he had just witnessed. His knowledge had not yet encompassed this process for anticipating and subduing revolt. He straightened himself in a removal of misgiving and said to me, ‘Professor Boggs is here to question the staff on matters we regard as important to the welfare of the firm. I want you to arrange for each member of the staff to be interviewed by Professor Boggs in the traveller’s office. Would you arrange this immediately!’
I went out to arrange it.
Though puzzled as to the object of Professor Boggs’ visit I suspected that he was here to interrogate us for the purpose of discovering whether we were suitable for the jobs we held. Upon his reports our jobs depended.
While arranging the order in which the staff should meet him I pondered on the best answers to incriminating questions he might ask me. I was certainly not suited for the job I held. He had already put me on the defensive but I was determined to regain the initiative.
In Mine Own Heart Page 6