Can the Gods Cry?

by Allan Cameron

  “Listen, you have lectured me for long enough. Allow me to speak. Capitalism in its various forms has provided for us very well. If you don’t like it, you are welcome to go and live in Cuba. There are plenty who would change places with you.” He gets to his feet and opens the study door to wave us down the stairs.

  “How dare you?” says my reader as soon as the Filipino maid has closed the front door behind us, “You invited me along to an interview with an eminent writer and then just lectured him. I know no more about him now than I did beforehand. You blew it, and I am not happy about being used in this way.”

  She’s right of course, and I am covered with confusion and embarrassment. Neither of us have, of course, paid any money to travel to the great man’s door, but I have so far inflicted 6,692 words on her (ah, the wonders of modern technology; before Microsoft, I would have had to count the words one by one). I owe her an apology: “You are quite right, reader, but it was only when I started the conversation that I realised that I have no idea why he thinks what he thinks. He rails against the ‘dimwit left-consensus’, but nowhere in his book does he give us any idea of what that really is and why he detests it so much – apart from its dimwittedness, about which, he assumes, the reader is already convinced. And, in spite of his protestations, this can only mean that he believes himself to represent the current consensus. I don’t represent the consensus, so I have to elaborate.”

  “That’s all very well,” my reader looks at me with an expression of mixed frustration and intelligent indulgence, “but does it always have to be about politics?”

  “Of course not, literature is not just about politics, but it is also that. Literature is everything and says nothing definite, because its job is to spread doubts and not beliefs. When Jaan Kross wanted to speak about Stalin and the dominance of Russia, he wrote about the czar and his madman, and who is a writer if not someone fool enough to speak to power.”

  “But we live in a democracy,” the reader inflects her voice to imply a question.

  “We live in a freer society and we can say what we want, but there is still a price. Have you heard of Randall Swingler?”

  “No,” she replies.

  “Nor had I. It seems he was a prominent writer in the thirties, but his membership of the Communist Party appeared to have put an end to that in the forties and fifties. This has recently been confirmed by a release of MI5’s papers.”

  “So we’re just half free?”

  “I suppose so. But perhaps absolute freedom and justice can never exist anywhere – and if they could, I don’t know that they would last for long. But the fact that we are corruptible does not mean writers should stop examining our corruptibility.”

  “So you’re a bunch of sanctimonious prigs,” she smiles.

  “Indeed, and self-serving ones, but we have a function. And the reading and study of literature change society; they give it a heart and undermine consensus. Wolfe Henry makes fun of crime novels – whose familiar plots are designed to reassure, even if the explicit violence revolts. He’s right about that. We human beings are not termites, which simply start to swarm and rebuild their mounds when crushed under someone’s boot. Faced with cataclysmic events, of which we had many in the last century, we react both individually and socially, and we rebuild in pain, in hope and with imagination. Literature celebrates this even as it lays bare the horrors of which we are capable. Literature and particularly its now dominant form, the novel, are inherently humanistic, in the wider sense of the term. The demise of what is now called the literary novel will deprive society of its sensitivity.”

  “That’s something I cannot deny. But I still don’t see why we need all this politically explicit stuff.”

  “We don’t. We need everything – all the great muddle of ideas. But when reviewers speak of dissidents biting the hands that feed them and writers are chummy with the powerful, you have to put up your hand and say that this is not what literary culture should be like. Would Shelley have liked a Castlereagh who interviewed nicely? Does a political cartoonist give a politician a kinder face just because the politician bought him a drink at the pub? Christ, our actors are now more politically active than our writers.”

  “You have a point,” she admits, “but next time, get someone else to do your note-taking.”

  “Look,” I say, “I’m sorry about the interview. He eluded me. I couldn’t transfer him from his pages to mine, partly because the image of the television celebrity always got in the way. I hope I haven’t put you off and I promise to get back to fiction on the next page.”

  “This has been fiction too, silly,” she laughs and leaves for the Underground. She’s right, of course, and, conceited fellow that I am, I fancy that my reader is more intelligent than Dan Brown’s. “Pochi ma buoni,” the Italians would say.

  The Sad Passing of Chris Cary

  Garry Lochrie has been drinking since the post came. He drinks and then he stares at a photo in a small magazine, and then he drinks some more. He laughs. But then the absurdity makes him angry too. The picture proves what he already knows: he is a defeated man, and worse, everything that he has held dear has been defeated too. It has been defeated by those whose sensitivities go little further than the sense of camaraderie that feeds off death – the death of the disinherited of this earth.

  The Old Middletonian is a scrappily edited collection of nostalgia, glorified pasts, and prejudices so deep that they could bury a person in their heavy material of smugness and cruelty, a deadly combination. And indeed Lochrie has been buried alive ever since he went to Middleton Military College. Since then, life has been a struggle and his movements slowed by the weight of something he cannot and will not examine too deeply. He has, it is true, started to write a novelised version of this story, but that too has turned out to be painfully slow.

  He based the story around his main persecutor, Chris Kray, whom he intended to make more interesting and more intelligent than he really was. The fictional character he created has, or had until now that he starts to fade, a conscience – a stunted one, but a conscience nonetheless. This fictional Kray, whom he has renamed Chris Cary with only a slight adjustment, is an ambitious man capable of cruelty and indeed incapable of compassion, but one who does not hide his evil from himself. He is driven more by ambition than by the real Kray’s emptiness which Lochrie has never been able to understand. An emptiness totally unsuited to fiction which has its own logic, precisely because emptiness is so inexplicable, so utterly terrifying in its banality. Now that Kray’s photo is before him, Lochrie’s vague memory of his unremarkable features becomes more real: Kray and Cary separate, and never again will they come back together. Cary has become a fictional character deprived of a story in which to pulse with the bare minimum of imaginative potency. Kray lacks the necessary intricacy to take Cary’s place in the novel. The real character is more two-dimensional than the fictional one.

  Torturers are perhaps thought of as fat men with bad teeth, bad breath and a drink problem – or in other words, men who actually resemble Lochrie himself. The real Kray, as Lochrie now recalls, was a tall, athletic man whose weak expression stopped him short of handsome, in spite of the blue eyes and blond hair of which he was so proud. He wore the expression of someone who has no soul – or that is how Lochrie likes to describe Kray’s emptiness.

  Lochrie pours himself another whisky and walks to the window that looks out across Glasgow’s violated cityscape, whose destruction in the sixties had accompanied his own. He enjoys a sweet moment of melancholy, as he remembers his childhood holidays in the city before he was sent off to a military school by his father, an ex-army doctor who had set up a practice in the city’s West End, not far from the squalid high-rises where Lochrie now lives, but socially half a planet away. Destruction removes an object to a part of the memory that is like a shrine, a place where inaccessibility becomes a kind of mystic yearning. These are the pleasures of passing years, the only compensations for our defeats, and he sips th
e agreeable bitterness of his whisky. Tomorrow, he knows, depression will set in, but for now the whisky and the photograph are setting his mind buzzing.

  Lochrie chortles – he isn’t quite sure why. His wryness feels a little forced, but there is indeed a humorous side to all this. Why does he care? It feels as though the anger of his youth is also being removed to that shrine of mystic loss and eventual oblivion. Once he could not accept oblivion, but now oblivion holds few fears. To lose his sense of compassion and outrage would once have been to lose his humanity and thus himself. Perhaps he chortles because he is still here and that makes him feel good. Lochrie knows how to enjoy being in this world precisely because he is clever enough to understand what happened to him, and therefore to keep it to himself. But then, with his unending mental restlessness, he sometimes feels that keeping it all to himself may have damaged him – particularly in a generation in which everyone talks so freely of their woes.

  His life has taken such a different turn from that of Kray’s. Thank God. Lochrie lived in a Florentine dormitory with Arab guest-workers; Kray went to Oman to fight Arab insurgents. Lochrie loved the generosity of Arab culture; Kray would only have acknowledged its existence to stress its inferiority, its backward “medieval” nature. Lochrie and his Arab friends would have shared their last meal with each other; Kray wanted to kill them – not them in particular but them in general. As the rich go shooting grouse in Scotland, so Kray went to Oman – to a war Lochrie read about at the time, and whose cruelty he can remember. Of course, where else could Kray’s callousness have been given such a free rein? On secondment to a regime that was inherently brutal, as so many of the other British officers have admitted in their memoirs. Underneath the photo, the interviewed Kray is quoted as boasting, “We did what we had to do and were able to report back that the job was done and done well.” The British burned villages, poisoned wells, killed livestock and cut off food supplies, while also resorting to Churchill’s tactic in Iraq, the bombing of the civilian population, who were forced to live in deep caves. Knowing Kray, Lochrie is certain that the non-specific and euphemistic nature of “what we had to do” hid brutality, torture and summary death. It meant the exercise of massive military superiority over those who did not submit to imperial diktat. The opportunities for cruelty would have been limitless, and the risk slight. Those who fell into Kray’s hands would have had little chance, while there had been limits to his treatment of Lochrie.

  They used to march him in for punishment two or three times a week, and Kray had ceased even to bother with presenting a charge: “You’ll have put your hands in your pockets some time today, even if I haven’t seen you; so you’re on hook.” “Hook” was the informal punishment handed out by “cadet officers”, the senior boys or prefects in the pretence world of a military school. For an hour, the cadet officers would take it in turns to shout at Lochrie, and then they would cane him. Initially these punishments were due to Lochrie’s forgetfulness and inability to dress smartly, but then something odd started to happen: he lost control of his own body when it was put on display before the panel. First his hands would shake, then his legs and terrifyingly even his whole body. It was as though an engine had started to run and was shaking his flesh, while he desperately tried to steady it. This was the real punishment, because it made him look a coward. He simply could not control that involuntary movement of his body. After this, of course, he was far too entertaining not to punish on a very frequent basis. Kray became more vicious, and started to take a run with the cane, drawing blood on most occasions. The first thing Lochrie did when he got back to his dormitory was to see if there were any red lines in his pants and then he would count them. He wasn’t particularly bothered either way; he was used to being hurt physically. He had been selected for the boxing team “because he had guts and knew how to take punishment”. He had been at boarding school since the age of six, so he understood only too well what it is to be punished. What he could not bear was having his body out of control for others to laugh at. On the night before he ran away from school, he had returned to the door of the “mess-room” where the punishment was administered, so that he could listen to them. Chief Cadet Captain Kray never said a word, because Kray was empty of all things, most particularly words and ideas. Cadet Leader Hill was sniggering at the way Lochrie trembled from head to foot, and asked what they should have Lochrie back for, the following week. No one answered that question; they dwelt on different aspects of the night’s entertainment. There would be time enough to make that decision.

  On one occasion, Kray exposed himself to his only defeat in all the time he persecuted Lochrie. He liked to call the offender a worm, and in order to extract a further humiliation, he shouted, “Lochrie, you’re a worm. What are you?” When there was no reply, his white, white skin turned red with genuine emotion, which proved that for Kray, at least, this was never a game, but a way of life – a way of being. “I said, ‘Lochrie, you’re a worm.’ Lochrie, what are you?”

  If it had ever come to an all-out verbal conflict, Lochrie would have won, as he did in this little skirmish. “You can cane me, if you want – even if I haven’t done anything. You can shout at me, and call me anything you like,” and he felt a little pompous but they were vying for the pompous high ground. And he lied, “but you will never affect the way I think of myself.”

  Kray was furious. His face was now deeply flushed; only his expressionless blue eyes remained cool. “Lochrie, you creep, tell me what you are. Tell me you’re a worm.” When nothing happened, he turned to the panel of cadet officers and encountered their embarrassment. Their expressions told him not to push the point any further, so he started to prattle about self-discipline and how he was punishing Lochrie for his own good. From then on, the punishment followed its usual course.

  Lochrie studies the photo, and sees many interesting clues carelessly left behind in what was clearly meant to be a monument to camaraderie. The men in the photo are smiling with varying degrees of self-consciousness, with the exception of the Arab driver who is sullenly and dutifully holding the wheel, presumably to emphasise his role, because he could not have been driving the car in that moment. Apart from the fact that the photographer must have been directly in front of the car, all four men are sitting on the jeep’s front seat, so the third man is sharing the space of the driving wheel with the driver. Kray is in the middle of the three British officers and has his arms loosely around his two companions. On Kray’s other side, another old Middletonian sits with studied insouciance. Kray himself is recognisable because, even on this happy occasion, his face has no expression. In front of them, these boys have placed an automatic rifle as an emblem of their hunting expedition. Of course, it must have been a temporary position, because it could not have stayed on the bonnet once the jeep moved off. The published photo, whose width is far greater than its height, must have been cropped just under the gun, and Lochrie could not help wondering about what had been excised and for what reason – whether there had been captives or even dead bodies piled against the radiator as trophies in an original unpublished version. Surely something has been removed from their favourite picture. Surely such a posed photograph had a purpose – surely it was a souvenir of “what they had to do”.

  Lochrie tries to grasp onto the fading vision of Cary, his fictional Kray who became a New Labour politician much later in life. He always thought that Kray would never have had a chance to indulge his cruelty more fully in adult life. The imagination never learns; it holds to a belief in humanity that has no justification. Lochrie likes to complicate things, but this article speaks only of a dull simplicity – that always wins. He felt that New Labour had gone over to the mindset of Middleton School and the mediocrity of its hopeless imperial yearnings – that it had stooped to the basest jingoism in its treatment of immigrants and asylum-seekers. He was, of course, right, but the guilt of New Labour is not in the sullied work of these psychopaths – it is in their ability to avert their eyes and ignore w
hat such men do in the name of our country. And not just New Labour: the Secret War in which Kray participated was “fought” during Wilson’s prime-ministership – the government that so honourably refused to get involved in Vietnam.

  A few days ago, Lochrie read in the newspaper of a former SAS soldier who was denouncing the illegal tactics adopted in Iraq. He was not the first in this Iraqi war, but such things would have been unthinkable at the time of the Secret War. Indeed it appears that generals and soldiers are now more concerned about human rights than Labour backbenchers. Perhaps Governments got a little worse, and armies a little better over the thirty-year interval. Their policing roles have perhaps slightly increased their humanity. Indeed, behind the dramatic changes of that generation lies only a measured shift in cultural attitudes: an improvement here and a deterioration there. Of course, the difference in the scale of the war then and the war now is enormous; what was a spark is now a conflagration. Then Lochrie believed in a better future, and Kray was busy organising a worse one. And now we live with the outcomes of Kray’s victory, which will be of little interest to him, because he has had his chance “to show off his professional skills” and can now bask in the company of equerries, brokers and landowners who will marvel at his stories of how he took on the adoo with much derring-do.

  For Chris Kray has told the school magazine that Dhofar “was an opportunity to prove one’s mettle against the common enemy, communism,” and Lochrie was then a communist. He read The Communist Manifesto during the period in which he was being persecuted by Kray. It gave him hope and a means to interpret a complex and brutal world although, always a sceptic, he had never applied that interpretation rigidly, which is why, he thinks, he has been able to keep faith with socialism, albeit a socialism now weighed down with pessimism that only whisky can cure. Drinking himself to death seems an entirely rational choice: most other medicines also shorten your life.