by Paul Ableman
‘Come and see my place. I’m moving out.’
Reluctantly, with almost a premonition of the burden of thought the wan little American was about to lay upon me, but unable, without giving offence, to reject the proposal, we had accompanied him. The room had been impossible—cheap but not cheaper than at least tolerable living quarters that I had found myself in the past. I sensed that while he really was relatively indifferent to aesthetic considerations, he also rather preened himself on his indifference, that, one might almost say, he took an aesthetic pleasure in it.
‘Like it? Want me to tell the landlord?’
When I told him, with rather defiant candour, that I thought it squalid, he merely shrugged but instead, as I had hoped, of dismissing us, he made us a cup of coffee and later began to talk. Without actually refuting Nelmes, without raising his voice, and only occasionally casting a brief sideways glance at Charley’s face (haughty, large-nosed, marmoreal face), he was nevertheless, I think consciously and with some satisfaction, making my friend look ridiculous. And he succeeded. Simply by factually analysing and describing, from personal experience, the operation of those economic and material forces that dominate our century, he made poor Charley’s Baptist, rural, relatively cultured (quote Shakespeare) personality seem indescribably insular and superficial—hopelessly inadequate to grapple with the world as it had become.
‘Yes but—but—that’s all very well but——’ poor Charley was reduced to sputtering in the end, trying to interpolate a plug for ‘ordinary community feeling’ and ‘simple reverence’, but, pressing my lips, fascinated and repelled, trying to adjudicate impartially, I felt that Charley’s ethics were of the nursery not the world.
I have read—the idea crops up quite often in general speculative works of recent times—that the communal pride of man has suffered several nasty blows in its journey towards acceptance of a scientific environment. We were progressively robbed of cosmological pre-eminence by Copernicus and Galileo and others until we ultimately found ourselves sitting on a negligible little planet tied to a mediocre star in a suburban part of the galaxy. Biological exclusiveness was vulgarly dismissed by Darwin who admitted monkeys and worse into the family circle. In the life of the individual, however, the really hard knocks are supposed to be sexual (and, of course, the first invitation to ‘go on! Touch it!’ can have a distinctly disturbing effect on the psychic equilibrium). But what about cultural trauma in the life of the individual? While it is fairly easy to see how sexual trauma, expending itself ultimately at a pre-cultural level is probably without incisive significance for philosophers and historians, it is less easy to see how the individual (after all, each one of us must toil painfully, in his mental life, up the long evolutionary slope) can escape cultural trauma. Anyway, I didn’t. I can remember quite distinctly the first horrid confrontation, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, with modern cosmology: how for days the little earth wobbled under my feet, how the inhuman tensions of illimitable space seemed to be sucking my body apart, how every activity became utterly pointless, without meaningful relation to the vista these diabolical popular astronomers opened before one. And if it is suggested that this form of shock is restricted to the more sensitive, the more imaginative, the more thoughtful members of the community, the answer is that all stimuli are felt in direct proportion to the delicacy of the receiving apparatus. Undoubtedly there are people, millions of them, quite possibly the majority who could read popular astronomy for hours, or perhaps it would be more convincing to say, who, if they could be induced to read popular astronomy for hours, could then step out and dribble a ball across the park, or make tea for the family, or do whatever prescribed job came next, without a ripple of dismay troubling them. This only means, surely, that they are susceptible at a different level. We know from our century’s inexhaustible treasury of sexual case histories, most of them (their grave, scholastic authors disinclined to detect, in their own activities, the least pull of the currents they consider themselves to be objectively analysing) delicious erotica barely marred by science, that an experience with an uncle which quite unbalances Elaine merely bores Margaret, that James prays obsessionally for weeks over his mere mental turmoil in response to Rodney’s suggestion while cheeky young Freddy, Rodney’s intended next victim, only jeers. In the same way, surely, we can see that what would be cultural trauma to one (the bewildered recognition, say, that foreigners are human) would be merely background knowledge to another while the latter’s ordeal (the mutability, perhaps, of conventions) would be quite beyond meaningful impact on the former.
Eddy’s dialectics (not the authentic, military triad, but informed, objective talk about economic factors in the contemporary world) were one of my cultural traumas. I felt sick for days, actually physically depleted and run down. My teeming and various fellow men ceased to be acquaintances or incalculable strangers but simply units of economic activity. Of course, it was all known. It had all been analysed and charted. One thought one’s aspirations, desires, fears and those of one’s friends, were objective and real and they were just reflections of the prevailing modes of production, metabolic waste products of the economy. Determinism, the python of the mind, settled its loathsome coils about me again.
How dreary the world becomes, viewed through the monochrome glasses of a universal system or philosophy. Curse these greedy, authoritarian minds who want it all—to take it all—every glint and glance, the pebble and the cathedral, the thought and the star, and incorporate them all in their imperial design. And thank God (thank something) for the relativists, for the exponents of ambiguity who see, bathing, enriching, penetrating all phenomena that purposeful mystery which is ‘becoming’.
I suppose there was no real danger of my essentially lyrical mind succumbing to Eddy’s already disavowed but still potent, or anyone else’s, absolutism, at least for long. But as I strode through the clockwork city, which his ideology had turned London into, struggling, with quite inadequate reserves of knowledge, to regain values uncontaminated by alleged necessity, I felt, for some days, lost and adrift. Gradually, of course, I recovered variety and quantity, saw that if all things belong in a certain class, then nothing does, for all that has been done is to provide a synonym for totality. From meaningless movements, from the self-ascribed status of mere social flotsam, I gradually reacquired not confidence in myself (I have never had that), but at least appetite for life.
And now when I want to show this thing—how the faces and voices of my youth are glimpsed in memory through the interstices of a huge lattice composed of headlights and traffic lights and neon signs, of wheels, girders and glass, of banner headlines and the dancing motes of the newsreel and television screens, heard in the intervals between the roar of motor bikes and lorries, the shriek of aircraft, the boom of loudspeakers, the clatter of machines and more how these faces and voices seem to belong to a different order of reality from the background against which they are perceived and thus to be incapable of interpreting or representing it—my intractable mind persists in calling up one unrepresentative scene: a slight, greying, ‘de-Stalinized’ American turning to buy drinks. I was sitting reading a weekly review. It was mid-afternoon. The bar-room of the Writers and Artists Club was crowded and, glancing up in response to a shadow or a thought, I saw Sybella, whom I knew slightly, leaning forward with a wrapt expression and Eddy turning to order drinks.
Us? So little really happened to any of us and yet—so much was happening….
For about a year I knew Ned Collins well. Hard to recollect now the solicitous and yet unreserved interplay of our minds, the current of immediate sympathy that came on whenever we met and easy to analyse, retrospectively, the destructive elements in the relationship. Superficially, these concerned externals, the fact that he was, in a modest way, a national figure and I was a nobody, that he had numerous interesting friends and, apart from him, my own acquaintances were mostly drifters, misfits, aspirant, but inadequately-endowed artists and writers, that he ha
d plenty of money and I often had too little for dinner. And yet it is perhaps significant that on the occasion on which I became consciously aware of the more profound disruptive elements we were in a relatively isolated situation and one removed from the operation of the factors I have listed above: the West Coast of Ireland….
At nights we stayed, on two occasions, in, by my standards, opulent hotels eating fowl or sea-fresh fish and drinking vintage wine, on three occasions in cottages located only after much voluble consultation with local people, and once, engulfed by a sudden, blinding tempest (the wind-sharpened rain stinging like hail), miserably in a covered, stone sheep cote. On this occasion, the still-turbulent but calmer dawn (no rain but torn, racing clouds and the urgent rustle of the swollen breakers up the little, shingly inlet beneath us) brought us, stiff and shivering, after a virtually sleepless night huddled together under coats on the dung-knobbly floor, out with our comfortless map to plod inland the six miles to the nearest village, a hot breakfast and four hours of sleep in the mercifully-hospitable village inn, before setting off again. On other mornings, after a substantial breakfast, buoyantly shouldering our rucksacks, we set off along the cliffs—I who hadn’t been out of London for years and Ned who normally exchanged the metropolitan neon and motors of the English capital only for those of another—avid, progressively greedier for sea, cliff and cloud, for solitude, the footpath winding ahead over unbroken grassland.
And yet—Ned was paying for the trip—oh, I contributed a few quid, what was left of my holiday pay after settling back room-rent, but substantially it was his treat.
One evening, a little while before the trip, sheepishly, even a little humiliated, having seen Ned two or three nights already that week and having resolved to stay at home and work that evening, the temptation had become too strong and, after a breathless dash to the bus-stop, I had arrived at his chic flat off Hyde Park at nearly ten.
He had been telephoning, laying back comfortably (at least this was the position he assumed after admitting me) on a sort of sofa let into the striped wall with the telephone to one ear and a pencil-scrawled, memo book in his free hand. He must have been talking to his office, or one of his offices. He worked for a number of journals and also broadcast and appeared on television. I forget what the call was about but it must have been relevant to the holiday he had been prospectively mentioning for some time for, taking me by surprise, although I should by then have been inured to the deliberately casual way in which he raised matters of moment, he murmured, adding another scrawl to his pad after he had hung up.
‘Shall we go to Ireland?’
I gazed at him blankly for a moment, uncertain and then increasingly pleasureable interpretation of his remark gathering in my mind, while he put down the pad, swivelled off the sofa and went to mix two whiskys and soda at the desk where he kept the bottle and siphon. Then I found sufficient presence of mind to murmur, through a little snort of excited laughter:
‘Yes!’
Certainly! By all means—to Ireland, to that marvellous, last leg of the scenic world which, I then recalled, Ned had mentioned appreciatively (although I had assumed that he knew Galway and Sligo and Mayo and Clare only by reputation) several times recently. Although an understanding, a friendship, had been developing, becoming at once richer, more intricate and easier, for months, this invitation to share more than casual encounters or vagrant calls was quite unexpected and I remember feeling that evening, over more whisky and soda, as he specified his intentions, a walking tour down the West Coast, in greater detail, extraordinarily, almost romantically happy.
‘I haven’t got any money,’ I had soon protested.
‘I have.’
‘You going to pay?’ I had insisted, ‘for everything?’
‘As long as you don’t require bearers or banquets, yes. It has not escaped me, old chum, that you’re insistently broke.’
‘Well—it’s—it’s bloody good of you——’
We were too close for Ned either to tactfully ignore or facetiously deflect my emotion and he had responded by looking me in the eye with a wry and affectionate smile, and murmuring, ‘I like you.’
‘It’s really rather good! It really is—rather good’—something like this was the refrain which later, not having missed the last bus but (from superfluity of nervous elation which would have made the wait and the interminable sit intolerably oppressive) having elected to walk home, propelled me in fierce, leaping strides, metaphorically, and once or twice actually, skipping across the twinkling, singing, night-mellow park, ‘after all, it is—isn’t it? Don’t you think? Rather good—really?’
The cars, full of amiable people, piloted by secret benefactors of the race, charged with realizing dreams, skimmed past and, hovering in the gloom of the barracks wall, fair and cheerful women ministered willingly to the blithe needs of healthy men. In the great hotels, purged of ambition, arrogance, lust for possessions, liberated from the cramped perspectives of great careers, the affluent and strong planned a Wellsian future of gay co-operation, ‘in fact, rather—well—good, don’t you think?’
Incapable, perhaps because it would have touched stronger and more vulnerable layers than he had exposed, of equalling Ned’s ingenuous admission, I had looked away, picked up my whisky glass, mumbled something and soon, as soon as I had dared, gone on to something else. And although I don’t think I consciously related my euphoria, during that ecstatic walk home, to its potent source, nevertheless, blazing above all my thoughts, like the crowning motto of a triumphant faith, hung the glowing words: ‘I like you.’
Ned—I think—I wasn’t in love with you? Was I? Certainly, I kept seeing your quizzical features in my mind and would have gladly hugged your stocky, strong body, but—more? Purposeful voluptuous contact? And yet—might not my inner revulsion at the thought express not a horror of deriving the impartial spasm of release from a similar being, of physical, homosexual love, but the same kind of etherealization of love with which, in the village, I had longed to hold radiant little Elly Brown’s hand and walk with her while recoiling from, or refusing to admit it into my thoughts, the notion of anything more. I had certainly been in love with Elly Brown, for a whole, anguished summer, watching her chattering down the street with a group of coarse, unworthy friends, once finding myself, mute and paralysed, beside her in the stationers while she had judiciously requested ‘a packet of envelopes, please—blue ones’. It had been my tortured devotion to the oblivious Elly which had driven me from Edna, causing me to discover in our previously uninhibited frolics an almost bottomless degradation. Elly—suddenly trilling with laughter as I stared at bicycles, causing me to cringe inwardly in the terrible certainty that she knew me for a clown.
I had first seen Ned in a pub, the ‘Starling’ I think, on an evening when I had had little attention to spare from tremulous anticipation of a new conquest (Mary Spender, a big blonde, willing and brainless slut whose leg, hindered periodically by merely formal slaps, I was exploring under the table) for participation in the political discussion that was taking place, or, later, for consideration of the intruder into the discussion, Ned Collins. I had, however, even then been struck by the pallor of his mellow and arresting features, a pallor which may have been emphasized by, as it certainly contrasted strikingly with, the shock of raven hair which fell about his face, and also a whiff of his personality had penetrated the steamy chamber of my lust.
Mary moved in on me, into a little flatlet I had in Duck Street and helped to sweeten a rather tedious, but languidly pleasant, period of my life. And Ned? Someone told me that he was a journalist—probably Clark—it was the sort of thing he would have known. And then—snowflakes, and honey light streaming out of the bar of the ‘Starling’—probably about a year later. Jock Taverner discoursing on fisheries and the superior Scandinavian exploitation of the incomparable herring. And to lighten the burden both of the ‘great herring fleets’, trawling, drifting, stalking the fish, heaving, bobbing, and the painful realizat
ion that Jock Taverner was not really the exhilarating companion one had somehow always believed, lurching into the pub in his sea-going navy sweater and tobacco beard, but a pedantic bore, had come, sandwiched between two undergraduates, into the cheery saloon, a blithe, ice-sequined, herring-fresh damsel with a roving eye and a dancing smile. And that eye of hers had roved persistently to a far corner, concealed by the dense throng, where, I knew, was a cushioned bench in a bow window. I had worked up a certain amount of both curiosity about, and jealousy over, the hypothetical occupant of the bench, since, during one of its more general excursions, I had held the prospecting eye for a few moments and then, insufficiently competitive it seemed, lost it again to the seductive bench. Later, in Jock’s rolling wake (‘let’s have a look in the “George”—no one here.’), as we had passed the lovely girl, I had had a glimpse of the source of the attraction and discovered it to be ‘that bloody journalist—what’s his name?—Ned Collins’. That was the second time I saw Ned and the flavour of my absurd competitive resentment tainted the third—or was it perhaps that I defiantly resurrected and intensified what had originally been a mere wry shrug to clothe a defensive attitude?
The bus hurtled up the long crescent on a mild May afternoon. I had mounted the bus at the start of the crescent. While waiting for it, I had noted that the cinema opposite was showing a film called ‘Danger Palace’ and had smelled petrol as several gallons of it were injected into a saloon car. All afternoon I had been sitting in my room trying to think, for poetic purposes, of courage and thinking instead of girls’ genitals. After three or four platitudinous thoughts about courage, I had attained the relatively superior notion of a man daring to dispel a friend’s creditable image of him in the interests of no more than candour, only to have the concept merge insensibly into a memory of Edna, at the age of eight, discarded knickers beside her, flat on her back with her hands on the inner muscles of her thighs pressing her splayed legs still further apart. And then, defences breached, and the familiar stress of desire again working its preparatory physiological changes, the voluptuous images had cascaded down.