by Archie Hind
‘With my complex desires . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Andrew! I’m just a hick. Just a plain simple guy. Sometimes I think I’m too stupid to have anything complex about me.’
‘You’re a bloody weirdie.’
‘I don’t know why you’re always saying that. Just because I’m not a bloody engineer. You’re not just a bloody engineer yourself come to think of it.’
Mat picked up a long twig from the pathway and smacked at the iron railing. ‘Ha!’ He laughed. ‘Ha! A weirdie.’ He smacked at the railing again and the crumpled dry leaves scattered from the end of the twig. ‘Along this way.’ They walked over the miniature stone bridge which spanned a burn and then turned along a dirt path which went under some trees. At the end of the path they sat down on a cold bench.
‘What I’d like to do at Ne’erday is to go to bed after a few drinks – you know. A good meal, a few drinks and then to bed. Instead of all that mess. You could get up in the morning with the whole day before you.’ Mat didn’t quite know what he meant, nor did Andrew enquire, but sucked away at his pipe. There was a loud crack as a twig snapped some place and round about them the dusty sparrows were fussing stupidly over something hidden in the grass or buried somewhere in the frozen dirt path. Their wings made a gritty scuffling sound on the hard earth. Mat gazed at the fissured bole of a tree and looked up, blowing smoke and condensed breath at the dry twigs which poked up into the sky.
‘If the whole world were reduced to the size of a billiard ball it would be much smoother,’ he said.
Andrew had probably never thought of this but his head went back and he stayed silent a minute calculating, checking that Mat’s statement was approximately correct. He nodded assent.
‘It disturbs me to think that the world might become too small and that our activities on it might have something unnatural and reducing about them.’
Andrew pointed to the sky with the stem of his pipe. ‘There’s plenty of room up there.’ Mat made a disgusted grimace.
‘When I went out East on a boat it was this that I loved. You’d look at a boat far, far away on the horizon. Not even a boat but a smudge of smoke away far in the distance and it looked so far that it might have been halfway round the world. What I liked was to round the curve with the boat’s screws churning away for hours and you knowing that you were going, say as fast as a tram car, and in half a day you’d pass round that curve, passing the old rusty tramp. And then away in the distance is another curve, another smudge of smoke, another stretch of sea. You can go on like that for days and days. Of course it’s easy to reduce all that space. All you need is a jet plane. You point its nose at the Atlantic, zip – spin round the curve for an hour and zip – you’re bang on top of America. But what I liked when I was on that boat was to savour every inch, hug every yard, conserve every mile. I used to look over the side of the ship and watch the dolphins swimming on the bow-wave and I’d be glad that I wasn’t going any faster than any living animals. Then I used to say to myself, “the world’s big”.’
‘The psychologists explain this, though it usually happens with time.’
‘Of course with time. Except that it’s much easier to reduce. You don’t need jets or combustion engines. You don’t have to invent anything. You only have to get up late some morning with all your routine knocked up and when you think about it time starts to go at a horrible speed. Or you remember something, something which is perhaps important to your life that happened say two years ago. And if there has been nothing happening between then and now, an event or a series of events which relate to that importance, then the two years can become all squeezed up and become like a second.’
‘It’s supposed to be a sign of reduced vitality in the organism.’
Mat looked at Andrew with his dark robust looks. He had served his time as an engineer, then late in life had taken a grant to go to University and now he was contentedly sitting at night studying his vectors and calculus and nuclear theory and refusing any temptation which would lure him away from his goal whether it was the proffered cigarette, the odd night out at the pictures, a line of thought or study which threatened to become too interesting, or the wee girl in whom he had become interested.
‘I never make plans,’ Mat said, ‘for tomorrow doesn’t exist. Besides it’s far too near.’ This remark sounded relevant to Mat. ‘Do you ever worry about time?’
‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘Never.’ Mat could almost by an act of sympathetic imagination feel like him, with his healthy human long slow days. As he sat looking at his tough face he felt that he almost envied him. ‘Reduced vitality?’ he asked, like a patient naming a symptom suggested to him by a doctor.
They kicked their heels in silence for a while. Mat idly wondered how he could describe the freezing park around him when everything about its clamped-up frozen appearance seemed to deny the sensuousness out of which words came. Across the path there was the bole of a tree all black and fissured and around it the ground had been tramped as hard as concrete and the grass all worn. Down at the end of the little valley in which they were sitting he could see the park railings through the trees. He couldn’t think of a word, but felt such an awful absence of language that his tongue and palate felt all dry and gritty, a numbness, as if everything in the world had become stuck.
When Mat looked up Andrew was pointing up the path, and he looked round to see a jaunty figure coming along the path.
‘Alec,’ Andrew said.
Alec and Andrew had known one another all their lives and they were close friends. Mat had come to know both of them when he came back from the army. Alec had at one time won a grant to go to Ruskin College in Oxford and he had a certain amount of intellectual sophistication. He read the weekly reviews and tried to encourage Mat to do so. He was a self-confessed fellow traveller. He had light brown hair, a high colour, a pointed bony nose. He smiled with his mouth twisted in a highly infectious way; his laughter was infectious also and he had been known to reduce a whole company of people to near hysteria by this quality of his laughter. Mat was very pleased to see him. He felt that their company, Andrew’s healthy doggedness and Alec’s bubbling energetic merriment, would ward off something. He knew that they suspected him of some weakness, a lack of self-sufficiency for which his desire to write was a compensation. He made up for this in their eyes by being able to keep up with them in their long logical discussions. In actual fact, although he was quicker and more mercurial than they were in discussion they often found to their surprise that he had much more stamina than they had, though they never ceased to disbelieve this slightly. Alec waved to them, then came up and stood before them with his hands in his coat pockets and his usual grin on his face.
He started to tell them of a book he had been reading. Oblomov it was called, by a Russian author named Goncharoff, pretending some difficulty in pronouncing these names. Neither Mat nor Andrew had heard of the book. The description which Alec drew of the book was really comical. It was full of sordid descriptions which Alec had invented for himself. Later, when they had read the book, it didn’t seem quite like Alec’s description of it. It was about a man, Alec said, who lay about in bed all day, spilling tea on the blankets, burning the sheets with his cigarettes, while the dust fell in clouds round about him, the paper rotted and peeled from the walls, the spiders festooned the cornices, the candelabra, the corners with great black cobwebs, the silverfish ate the books, the rugs mildewed and Oblomov lay waiting for the flood tide, the momentous decision, the apocalyptic message, the cataclysmic revelation, which never comes. Alec began to hint at the psychological aspects of Oblomov’s behaviour which he thought the author intended as a satire on the kind of beliefs held by Mat. On the value of immediate gratification for instance. Mat didn’t seriously or whole-heartedly subscribe to these beliefs, but he did chance his arm with ideas which seemed to them to be pretty wild. He had once suggested to them that the end of immediate gratification would be to preven
t moral corruption. His idea was really quite unlike hedonism and had rather more in common with Sartre’s idea of the inauthentic existence, although it was less clear in Mat’s mind. They agreed with him that the rebel was the highest human type. Democratic Socialism was the greatest social idea. Yet in this society a man is recognised for what he is by what he does. He has a label on him. Doctor, lawyer, physicist, labourer, clerk. If you are born to humility and feel rebellion there are two things you can do. One is to wait carefully, plan, study, educate yourself so that in the end you can wear your label and become one with your peers, no longer humble. Or else you rebel, you demand immediate recognition of the fact that you are a man – a person. This is a question of pride, and there is a lovely paradox here for in your pride you are forced, if you stay with the principle, to accept humbly, more to demand the immediate recognition of every other man’s right. ‘That’s why I’m an artist,’ Mat would say, ‘because an artist is recognised by what he is rather than what he does.’ The simplicity of these ideas were later to appal Mat. He would hesitate too on the word ‘artist’, as he felt he couldn’t confidently claim to be an artist until he had done something, nor did he notice the contradiction except as a general feeling of unease.
‘Freud says that art is a compensation for failure in life and that this act of compensation is similar to the – well, say the doctor’s study. In fact you are doing the same thing in a different way.’
‘No,’ Mat said, ‘because the artist judges the creative success of his work by itself and not by his success in the world.’
‘So does the doctor, surely, his success as a doctor is counted by the number of patients he cures, the success of his work.’
‘Oh, but there’s a difference.’ For a moment Mat’s thoughts were disturbed by a sudden sense of the cold. A cold wind blew down the little glade and the bare twigs cracked. ‘It’s – you know, laymen, us, and the doctors, we have the same standard of judgment – the health of the patient. No cure – no success. But the artist? How many artists are there – best-sellers – the sort of people who have achieved success, their drives satisfied, recognised by the world – who are a hollow sham?’
‘Let me see?’ Alec said. ‘There must be some.’ He rubbed his chin, looked upwards reflectively. ‘You mean like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence . . .’
‘Ach,’ said Mat, shivering with the cold. Then he pounced on an idea, ‘Look – capital is the crystallisation of man’s labours. An educated man is the crystallisation of other men’s labours – his teachers, lecturers and that. In other words – a piece of capital.’
‘Well, a work of art is the crystallisation of a man’s experience – like a piece of capital.’
Mat sawed at the air with his hand, screwing his face up. Beneath all this gauche wrestling with these hard jagged ideas he had a tenuous grasp of something much richer. There were other thoughts, difficult and more complex, but only vaguely illuminated in his mind. He would have liked to stop and think about them. ‘My idea of immediate gratification is that in revolt . . .’ His voice trailed off.
They were all lip-service Marxists, but they were all equal in their embarrassment at the idea of economic determination which lurked beneath Marxist thinking. This conflicted with so much else that they thought and assumed.
They rose, their limbs creaking from sitting on the cold bench. It was too tough a nut to crack sitting on a cold bench in a freezing park. Alec and Andrew went forward up the path and for a moment Mat stood and looked at the slow trickle in the burn. He made a mental note of Alec’s speech when he had told them of Oblomov. ‘There was this man, Oblomov – a character – who lay stinking in his kip all day . . .’
The others were walking along the path now some distance away. Mat lit a cigarette and felt his mouth dry and gritty. When they were talking he had felt a desperate urge to come to some resolution, so that he’d say: ‘That’s the way it is, now we can do this.’ He wanted to have some idea that would have some feeling around it. He must be like Alec’s description, Mat thought. Then he realised what had long escaped him about the difference between himself and the others. It was simply that he did not evaluate himself. He knew his own weaknesses as well as the others did, but he simply accepted them, for they were his own. For a while he wondered vaguely if this was pride, laziness or complacency. Then he ran after Alec and Andrew up the path, his muscles stiff with cold. He couldn’t think of any idea which would warm the park.
4
THE NE’ERDAY HOLIDAYS had passed, the four precious days frittered away with the upset routine, meals at all sorts of strange times and dutiful visits to relatives. Mat felt a vague sense of anxiety at this time, and the anxiety remained. He remembered how he and Helen had made plans about their marriage. They had imagined a house of their own, Helen cooking fantastic meals, cosy nights by the fire, long slow evenings with the clock ticking slowly and Mat sitting writing, and their friends would all come and sit and eat open sandwiches, drinking coffee and talking; and music, listening to the Vienna Philharmonic under Fürtwängler on the gramophone. Instead of the vicious knockout drinks like whisky and gin they would drink wine and there would be talk, witty, relaxed, and coruscating with ideas. Out of all this Mat was sure he could write brilliant and exhilarating books. He had the young man’s sense of the particularity of his thoughts, their uniqueness, and he would think like André Chenier when knocking at his head, ‘There’s something there’. They would gather round them a circle of friends, young, modern, talented, and their whole lives would be lived in a glow of creativeness and love.
Any young man is a bundle of possibilities, and the world which is before him is like a city seen at night with its lights shining and its gay noise; this world is a beckoning, tempting thing. You can become anything – Mat could remember the great marathon runner whom he had seen as a child at a sports meeting, and he could remember the cheers and the glory, the great wave of sound which followed the athlete after he had plodded in agony into the running track; he could remember the tiny figure of the famous centre forward running out from beneath the stand at Ibrox Park, out into the middle of the stadium and how as he stood enrapt on tiptoe his throat choked as the voices of the fans rose into a magnificent roar.
And there had been moments like this which he had shared himself, watching the oval ball’s queer stuttering movement like a bat against the sun, taking it from an awkward bounce and twisting and dodging and finally being slammed down by a fourteen-stone scrum-half, the ball in his outstretched hands just six inches beyond the line and bang between the sticks. And afterwards coughing and gasping, his mind gone and the tears streaming from his eyes as the team pummelled and thumped him with joy and the team supporters shouting and his Commanding Officer running on to the field to shake him by the hand.
He could remember the excitement of his last exams at school when he had sat reading the test papers and was aware that what he knew was more than what was really required and he had sat writing, thinking only of perfection, striving to probe, not just a passable result, but a hundred per cent mastery of his subject.
Footballer, sprinter, scientist, artist, scholar. All the possibilities of mastery and skill. All these possibilities which glitter before you like a set of lights. Not just a set of bewildering choices, but a rich flowering and opening out – girls, riches, glory, ease, skill – all the rich glowing life of adult freedom and responsibility.
Yet shades of the prison house! He had read only recently that a sprinter is past his best at the age of twenty-one, and he had thought with an irony that reflected a hidden discomfort that that was one possibility to be scored off the list. And with this formal acknowledgement which he made that it was now too late for something went another more subtle change in the consciousness itself. That dew-dropped leaf seen fresh and new with only its greenness and wet is now seen through a haze of memory and association. The physical world comes to us again and again until we become tired of it and for moments become just
a little bored and satiated. The adult, of course, responds to this change by going further afield. His desires become more complex, richer; and it is here that he is often drawn up short, feels the violent tug of the curb, when all this theoretical latency becomes circumscribed by the bald, brutal facts of his own individual existence. He begins to feel a slight anxiety; he finds it irksome when the little pangs of boredom come along that he has nowhere to turn. Maturity has many reserves and Mat didn’t feel irked all that badly at first. Just a vague sense of anxiety. At the beginning of the new year they started to look for a house.
And so commenced a long trail round the factors’ offices, scanning advertisements in the paper, reading through the cards posted up in newspaper-shop windows among the advertisements for folding prams, electric razors, fur coats (as new), three-piece suites, wringers, babies’ cots, electric gramophones (hardly used), following the trail to derelict old houses kept by shabby widows, or spinsters in dressing-gowns, with rusty baths, greasy cookers and peeling mauve wallpaper; among the derelict lodging house clientele – the bachelor salesmen who cooked for themselves, the potty old maids, the young arrogant clerks, the transient labourers – all the atmosphere of seediness or petty immorality. There were the crisp spotless bedrooms with respectable landladies, fingers hooked ready for the money, or the already crowded working-class house where they had to make room for the sake of the money. They saw young flashy property agents who could tell at a glance if they could afford to pay key-money. There were dozens of flights of stairs in city offices and dozens of shaking heads through sliding glass windows.
Mat and Helen didn’t lose hope. They spent long nights walking through the streets under the lamplight, talking and dreaming, Clear nights, with the lights of distant houses twinkling in the dark and the open sky above and the vague outline of hills away to the south of the city; walking over the golf course fairway.