Hopeful Monsters

by Nicholas Mosley

  The audience who had arrived at the gap at the back of the stage were again looking up; the girl and her lover had moved away from one window and had appeared at another: they had half undressed: they seemed to have got even nearer to bed. The other members of the cast now appeared at windows and on balconies in the faqade and began to throw down on the audience, or act as if they were throwing down - what? - arrows? boiling oil? It seemed just pieces of screwed-up paper. But no one was laughing. Franz and Minna and the Nazi boys had moved up towards the stage. I had stayed behind on the grass in the courtyard.

  You know those memory theatres of the seventeenth century in which people used to act dramas to help them to try to remember what they might be about - it was difficult to remember at a time when there were so few written stories. Well, it is always difficult, perhaps, to know what one is about even when everything seems

  to be happening all at once; but there seemed to be something here showing this; even if it was to do just with what turns up. You said 'Hullo.' I said 'Hullo.' I mean there you were, yes, in the courtyard, having come up beside me. I said 'I thought you had gone.' You said 'But I came back.' I thought I might say - Why? But it was as if we were the man and the girl who had come across each other again outside a newspaper building. I said 'Wasn't the play wonderful?' You said 'Yes.' You had taken me by the arm. We were standing watching the facade of the castle which was like the backdrop to a theatre. You said 'This is what you meant by what you are talking about also happening?' I said 'Yes.' I thought - And you have turned up. Then - But this is what we can't talk about: so what happens now? You said 'Shall we go?' I said 'Yes, let's.' We turned to go out of the courtyard. There was all the violence behind us on the stage. You said 'I wonder if we should just go to bed.' I said 'Oh we will sometime.' You said 'Yes.' We were going out of the castle: there was the path up into the hills; there was a path down to the village. You said 'As a matter of fact, I still do have to catch a train, but I thought it vital to see you just one more time.' I said 'Yes, I do think it is vital to know that I could see you one more time.' You said 'But it is all right now?' I said 'Yes, it is.all right now.' You said 'I have missed one or two trains.' I said 'You can catch one now.'

  We had begun to walk round the outside wall of the castle towards the village. We stopped underneath a wall at the side of the castle: we were somewhere beside, or at the back of, the restored fagade where there were the actors besieged by the crowd; where there was the noise of banging and shouting. I thought - Oh it is the noise of people besieged in their own heads! I leaned with my back against a wall and you began kissing me. I thought - We will not stay with each other; we will not be apart; we will balance the world on its tightrope. There was an opening slightly above us in the wall of the castle; it was some sort of window; figures had appeared at it; they were leaning out. I thought - They are going to throw down confetti? rose-leaves? bags of flour? A voice said 'I wonder if you two could possibly be of some assistance?' We looked up. There was a man and woman leaning out of the window: they were wearing dressing-gowns. I thought - They are actors? Not-actors? They are gods looking down? You or I said 'What?' The man said 'There is someone in here who has been injured by a brick; also there is a child who has to catch a train.' I thought - There is

  someone who has been injured and - . Then - This is ridiculous. The woman said 'I wonder if you could possibly take the child, and call for a doctor in the village.' I said 'I am a medical student, perhaps I can help.' The woman said 'Perhaps you can.' You said 'And as a matter of fact I am going to the station so I can take the child.' Then - 'I know this sounds ridiculous.' The man said 'That would be very kind.' I thought - Oh well, if the world is on a tightrope, things might be likely to have to turn up. I said 'How can I get in?' The man said 'We can pull you up.' The woman said 'And we can lower the child.' You said 'Abracadabra.' I thought -Oh but one day we will be used to it. Then - But didn't we think we wouldn't have a child? The man and woman had turned from the window: they reappeared with a girl of about eight or nine. The woman said 'Can you catch her?' You said 'Yes.' The girl wore a tartan skirt and long white socks. I said 'And where is the person who has been wounded?' The man said 'He is inside.' I thought -But hurry, we must hurry: it is everything making sense that is not bearable! The child was being lowered into your arms. The woman said 'She's got her fare and she knows which train to go on.' I thought - Oh of course. I raised my arms for the man and the woman to lift me up to the window. You said 'Goodbye.' I said 'Goodbye then.' You said 'Goodbye.' Then - 'This is quite like an opera.' I said 'It is not like an opera.' You said 'Oh no, it is not like an opera.' The man and the woman were pulling me so that I could get in at the window. I said 'I'll see you then.' You said 'I'll see you.' When I looked in at the window there was a dark vaulted room with a body lying on a bed: when I looked down at you, you were standing on the pathway holding the hand of the good-looking child. I thought - We have known each other a day, we have not even been to bed, and we seem to have a child.

  You are right that at Cambridge we had not previously paid much attention to politics, though I remember the General Strike of 1926, which occurred during my last year at day-school. We boys were lined up and marched off in military fashion to a train which took us to help unload ships in the docks at Harwich. We took this incursion into politics as a holiday away from school: I think most middle- and upper-class people took the General Strike as the chance for a holiday away from school - what fun to be a docker or an engine-driver for a few days away from the ghastly restraints imposed on the middle and upper classes! At Harwich there were cranes and trolleys like huge toys; we larked about; we thought -So this is the grown-up world! At the far end of the quay a group of dockers came to watch us.

  I did wonder - But this is politics?

  In Germany, I suppose, there were people learning to sing sad songs and carry torches to bonfires.

  In the autumn of 1930 I went to my father's college in Cambridge. There were the old men like bees or wasps moving in front of the fagades of ancient buildings: somewhere inside were the distillations of honey or of poison from flowers. In going to the university at Cambridge I was, of course, hardly getting away from my family: I was in some sense even coming back to it, since I had been away for four years at boarding-school. I do not remember much about this time at school: it was to do with the distillations, I suppose, by which upper-middle-class Englishmen enable large parts of themselves to remain as schoolboys.

  But no one gets away from their schooldays, or indeed from their families, except by what grows in the mind; and this goes on for the most part in the dark.

  There is a Freudian theory that any young man who in childhood has been the undisputed favourite of his mother goes through life with the feelings of a conqueror. Well, I did not consciously want to be anything so vulgar as a conqueror: but I did imagine, yes, that I had got away from my upbringing and my family.

  I felt I had been helped in this by the strange dark girl who had risen sword in hand, as it were, from the mists of that lake in the Black Forest: whom I loved; but whom I did not feel ready to take on on a mundane level.

  I remember that we talked about politics, you and I: were you not closer to Communism at that time than you remember? (You imagined you had got away from your mother?) You certainly

  showed your antipathy to those Nazi boys: I suspected at first that you did not go down to the performance of the play in the evening because your friends had joined up with them - or was I even then being too modest? You showed some antipathy to me when I suggested that in the cannibal-race of the Western world these Nazis might play the part of scavengers, garbage-collectors, to clean the mess up. But then was not this the sort of thing that was being said by the Communist friends of your mother's?

  In Cambridge before 1930, it is true, we did not know much of either Communism or Fascism. It was the fashion, I suppose, to say about Russia 'Of course, the experiment might go either this way or that.' And
about Italy 'At least Mussolini makes the trains run on time.' Reactions amongst students were influenced by the contempt we had for what we saw and read of politicians at home. These seemed to be like dinosaurs already half fossilised in rock: we thought - Hurry on, ice-cap, come down from the pole.

  I would say to my mother 'Freud doesn't seem too optimistic about the chances of social improvement.'

  My mother would say 'Truth after all does not depend upon the chances of improvement.'

  I said to my father 'But if there is no guiding principle in evolution, then why should one form of behaviour be any better than another?'

  My father said 'Science and ethics belong to different worlds.'

  I would think - But might not this attitude be like that of the dinosaurs just before they were caught by the cold?

  But then I would think of you, my beautiful German girl: whose legs as they moved within your skirt were like the clappers of a bell; the memory of whose mouth still sometimes took me by the throat so that it was as if I could not breathe. I thought - There are connections here beyond the reach of the scientific world; sailors are lured to rocks by sirens; rocks are where fishes and humans crawl out on to a new land.

  In Cambridge, young men put their heads into the sand of scrums on football fields. Old men stood and watched them as if they themselves would leap in and be blind.

  Oh yes, I felt as if I were an agent in occupied territory. But what was the agency? What was it for? Who were the other agents? (Of course, you.)

  Indeed one should not stay too long in the company of someone whom one feels is a fellow agent: there is such work to be done!

  When I first went to my father's old college I had rooms on a staircase on which there were also the rooms of a man called Melvyn. Melvyn was a short chubby man with a round face and a high domed forehead and eyebrows that went up to a point in the middle like those of a stage devil. My rooms were above his, so that I had to pass his door when I went up the stairs. He would leave his door open when he was inside his room so that it was as if he wanted to be on show for whoever would look at him. Within this frame he would appear to be posing in various tableaux: the student at his desk; the aesthete reclining on his chaise-longue; the visionary at the window; the eccentric flat on his back on the floor with a pillow under his head. I would think - It is as if, yes, he is doing these performances because he is like one of those particles that might not exist unless someone is observing them. Then - Or is it I who make up such patterns into which people have to fit; if I did not, might I not exist?

  Or - But I wonder about this, and they do not?

  One morning in the middle of my first term I was going up the stairs and through Melvyn's open doorway I saw that he was lying half on and half off his chaise-longue as if he were ill; his shirt was open at the neck and half out of his trousers; one arm trailed towards the ground where an empty glass had fallen on its side. I thought -This is a tableau to which I am supposed to guess the reference: The Death of Nelson? The Suicide of Chatterton? I went on up the stairs. When I came down again some fifteen minutes later Melvyn was still in the same position. I tried to work out - Well, of course he does this to attract attention: but then don't people who try to kill themselves also do it to attract attention? I went in. I thought I might wander round his room and appear to be interested in the books that were on his shelves; then, if it were a game, I would not have appeared to have been a fool; I would not have rushed like an ambulance man into a charade.

  On Melvyn's walls there were posters depicting heroic Russian workers: there were scrolls in the form of strip-cartoons illustrating the life of Lenin. I thought - Perhaps this is why I am being lured into this room, so that there can be observed my reactions to the life of Lenin. Then - But what if I am a fly; do I not want to study the life of such spiders?

  There was a smell coming from Melvyn so that I was aware of him even when I had my back to him. The smell was of stale wine,

  unwashedness, not quite of death. I wondered - By a sense of smell, people might be tested on what they think of Lenin?

  I went and stood by Melvyn. His small cherub's mouth had a slight encrustation round it. It was like the opening to a waste-pipe that had been blocked.

  After a time Melvyn opened one eye and said 'Kiss me, Hardy.'

  I said 'Yes, I thought of that.'

  'What did you think of?'

  'The Death of Nelson.'

  He said 'England expects every man to do his duty.'

  I said 'I was just passing the door of your room.'

  He said 'Do you know what my nanny used to call "duty?"'

  'No, what - '

  He said 'After breakfast, every morning - that's what Nanny used to call "duty".'

  He reached for the glass that was on its side on the floor. Then he sat up and pointed to a bottle of wine that was on a table behind him. He held out the glass. I took the bottle and poured out some wine. He drank.

  I said 'Have you been to Russia?'

  He said 'Why, are you a policeman?'

  I said 'No, but I'd like to go there.'

  He said 'You know how one loves policemen!'

  I moved off round the room again. On the shelves there was a set of books bound in black leather which had no titles nor lettering on the spines. I wondered - They are pornography?

  I said 'Do you have contacts in Russia?'

  He said 'Oh do say you are policeman!' Then - 'You're not allowed to ask a direct question.'

  I came and stood by his chaise-longue again. I looked down. I thought - I am trying to find out what is his interest in Communism: he is trying to find out whether or not I am homosexual.

  There was no formal Communist organisation in Cambridge at this time: the first Communist cell was set up in 1931. But I had become interested in Communism when I had been in Germany: I had talked about it with you, my beautiful German girl. You had told me something of your early life; of your mother. Of course, I had wanted to know more.

  On the other hand there was an age-old and now quite open tradition of homosexuality at Cambridge. In fact it was so unfashionable not to be homosexual that people were apt to pretend

  to be homosexual when they were not. I had already gathered, of course, that Melvyn was homosexual.

  I sat down on the edge of Melvyn's chaise-longue. I said 'Can I have a drink?'

  He said 'You come in here - you break into my room - '

  I said 'You like that, do you?'

  He said 'You prima donna you.'

  I poured some wine into another glass. I thought - He is one of those people who like going down to the East End of London and getting themselves beaten up?

  Then - This would not mean that he could not be a Communist.

  I said 'I guessed The Death of Nelson. That means I can ask you a direct question.'

  He said 'What do you want to ask?'

  I said 'Are you a Communist?'

  He said 'You think people tell the truth when they're asked a direct question?'

  I said 'No. But you won't answer. And you have the stuff about Lenin on your walls.'

  In the days that followed I saw quite a lot of Melvyn. In the evenings I would go for a drink in his room and enter into the game of Let-us-talk-wittily-in-riddles-because-then-we-need-never-feel-committed-to-whatever-has-been-said. But then I would remember - Did not we, you and I, say something about truth landing up in riddles?

  Melvyn was such an obvious type of stage devil: his charm was that of Mephistopheles; he played tricks with words because the only value he recognised was that of manipulation.

  I would try to remember - What was it that those beautiful earnest Germans were saying about Mephistopheles and Faust? That they are manifestations of the same person? That it is in a decadent world that dark forces get split off from a person and are put into the hands of others?

  - In a healthy world one would see that they are in the hands of oneself?

  Melvyn did from time to time seem to talk
seriously about this interest in Communism and Marxism, but still as if he were an actor performing a serious part. An actor conventionally uses his skill so that an audience will not ask questions about reality: I thought - But we, you and I, would always want to ask questions about reality.

  Melvyn would say - 'But it is quite simple. There are a few people getting big money for doing almost no work. There are many people getting almost no money for doing very hard work. It is obviously in the interests of the majority therefore to introduce a system in which people are paid for the value of their work.'

  I would say 'Why?*

  He would say 'Why what?'

  I would say 'Do you think people are interested in choosing what would rationally be to their advantage?'

  He would say 'All right, irrationality indeed has hitherto been prevalent in primitive societies - *

  'But now it need not be - '

  'No.'

  'What if the need to have a hard time is built into human nature?'

  'There is no such thing as human nature. Human beings are conditioned by the nature of their work: their system of work is not conditioned by human nature.'

  'Then what about you?'

  'What about me?'