Life in the West tsq-1 Page 24

  How is Pippet Hall to survive? I must keep it on, it must remain a going concern. It enshrines history more effectively than any book, any monument. The present generation, with its inverted snobberies, despises anything of cultural wealth, but surely that attitude, that little ice age of the spirit, won’t last. The trouble is, I’ve no heart to go on without Teresa. Poor girl, poor jade! Terrible to imagine oneself offended.

  There is no way in which one can give up in life, short of committing suicide. I’ve no quarrel with that. Falling on your sword is honourable, if you really have reached a dead end.

  But that’s not for me. I’m as corrupt as anyone. I’d rather take Selina back to the Hall and fall on her. Iron out her bitterness. She has a fine spirit. She communicates.

  Beautiful woman. Damned politics.

  Part-Serb. It would be splendid to replenish the Squire stock with Serbian blood, as old Matthew Squire did with German blood. Brave buggers, the Serbs. None braver. I’m not too old to start another family.

  But almost.

  And sod you too, Pelli…

  ‘You may perhaps think my view of a critic’s function rather old-fashioned, but I am more interested in appreciation than classification. The reader must be borne in mind. Readers of SF are most struck by its originality although, if they read too much of it, they complain of unoriginality, and find they enjoy it less and less. This is because they have ceased to look for the other qualities SF possesses.

  ‘Goethe’s Faust is by no means the first story of a man making a deal with the devil; Shakespeare’s Hamlet is after all just another renaissance play on the common theme of revenge. Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is just another tale of a chap who is off-balance getting a ride in a spaceship. But it is only when we look at these works in another light that we see their individual qualities — although we must always remember that they are interesting because they are also about a chap dealing with Mephistopheles, a chap trying to avenge his father, a chap getting a trip about the galaxy. Each of these three experiences goes straight down like a taproot of a tree into the awareness of the age which engendered it.

  ‘I should add here, if the remark is not obvious, that it doesn’t matter a bit that nobody has had a trip about the galaxy and maybe never will. Neither has anybody held a dialogue with the devil or a conversation with the ghost of their father. But this essence of the unlikely aligns SF with some striking monuments of literature — the imaginative and non-realist vein. I believe that Isaac Asimov is wrong, despite his great authority and reputation, in claiming that the space race justified SF. It needs no such justification. Our admiration for Cervantes’s Don Quixote would not be heightened if we found that some old knight had actually had a fight with a real windmill. The quality we admire is imagination, not realism.

  ‘This is where SF breaks from the old style of the nineteenth-century novel, and where it pleases the young and dismays the old. The novel no longer has novelty, but SF has, though we should maybe despise facile novelty just as we are suspicious of a new model of automobile — the last model may have had better qualities, if less chrome. One indicator of the novel’s lost impetus is that novels have become rather inward-looking and a bit provincial, at least in Germany and England. In the US, things are a little better, though how many new Russian novels have you read with interest lately?… Well, never mind. Arts need freedom.

  ‘Critics of the novel of a previous generation, such as Ortega y Gasset, held the idea that one prime function of the novel was to portray character and its development. The view is still echoed unthinkingly in the seats of orthodoxy.

  ‘The fact is, people just don’t believe in character, or in development for that matter, in the old way. Two world wars, the inroads of psychology, the increasing fate of man as a statistic, or a consumer, or just as a faceless speck of proletariat so beloved of Marxist jargon — all such factors have transformed us into fragmented beings. The container of custom has been shattered.

  ‘First cinema and then television have also profoundly affected the novel. Also inflationary economies have directed many impoverished novel-writers to more profitable fields. That non-literary consideration must be taken into account when you sum up today’s state of play. Yet SF has flourished; ill-winds for the novel have proved good winds for SF. That’s true especially of this decade, when cinema and television have actually fed the appetite for SF.

  ‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics — he may not even have a sex life, poor chap — is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character — because that’s how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’

  Good old Herman. An attempt to think things out and express the results clearly. Amazing how you can meet a stranger and love him after two days. Quite a brave man, too, under his resigned veneer.

  Not a bad fellow to have with you in the slit trench when the shit’s flying. That’s the acid test. Herman and Vasili.

  Rugorsky is a real character. Extraordinary — choosing a German and a Russian to fight with you in a slit trench. How our thoughts have been formed by war… Not so many years ago, I’d have been fighting against Herman. And in a few more years will probably die fighting against Vasili Rugorsky.

  The idea — even the irony of it — doesn’t terrify me, as maybe it should. Better fight and die than give in. You defend your own territory. You fight for your own hearth, your own home, your own country. Something the modern generation believes silly. They’ll find out too late when the chips are down. You fight for England. It is atavistic, but the human race hasn’t evolved beyond that yet. If you aren’t prepared to defend, someone else will attack.

  Of course, if the You-Foes are real and contain aliens from another planet, the whole course of human history becomes changed. Perhaps that’s why so-called civilized people are reluctant to believe in flying saucers; they are felt to be inappropriate, a discord. The orchestra’s playing Borodin’s Second Symphony; suddenly more musicians enter and start playing Mozart.

  If the aliens are hostile… Well, we shall have a situation where Vasili and I will be sharing a slit trench.

  I still can’t make him out. Wrote a poem called ‘Winter Celebration’, likening the Soviet system to a medieval feast. Medieval starvation, more like. Exiled by Stalin, then possibly reprieved and disappeared for a while. Disgrace, atonement… Sounds like a typical Ruskie existence. That chap at the consulate, Parker-Smith, thought that Rugorsky might possibly defect. Not here, but in Rome when we’re flying back on Monday. Interesting. If that’s what he intends, he may feel he knows me well enough to flash a warning signal. Perhaps I shall have to help him.

  I wonder what Selina’s doing. Will she be dining with me this evening? If not, then perhaps Herman and I can rustle together Cantania, Morabito, the two Frenzas, and even d’Exiteuil, if he’ll speak to me. We’ll have a meal and some drink. Vasili, too. I’d rather talk to him than listen to any Western left-wing nonsense. Actually, I’d rather talk to him than anyone here, except Selina perhaps.

  A drink would go down well. Old Herman does go on.

  ‘Charles Dickens’s novels are among the first to reflect the atomization of modern society brought about by metropolitan life. The faces in his novels are glimpsed vividly — often with nightmare vividness — but briefly, before they disappear. They are known from the outside. SF carries this process further. We see people only in relation to the unknown. The strangers have moved in.

  ‘Some people praise the logic of science fiction. But I am more interested in the kind of SF which creates mythical
beings, robots, monsters, androids, aliens, machines, creatures from the future or the id, revenants, voices from other dimensions, which proliferate in SF as nowhere else. They are a clear indication of the struggle going on within twentieth-century man. In no other form of literature are they so freely allowed on parade.

  ‘Surely in the future men will see SF as the literature of our time. I am well aware that much of SF is rubbish, like much of ordinary fiction, written for retarded children by superanuated children, but there’s no reason why we should pay attention to that end of the spectrum. As we still listen to the ancient Greek myths, so men of the future will care for ours, which define technological man. We have no reason to doubt that the first tellers of the Greek myths were scorned in palace and court. The new is never welcome. So SF is scorned today in high places.

  ‘The distinguished founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, who is with us in Ermalpa as our guest of honour, has spoken of our task as “exploring the familiar”. That clever phrase describes pretty precisely what SF does. In paradoxical manner, the best stories present Today in a disguise which reveals it nakedly as it is. That is a true imaginative function. Emmanuel Kant has shown how the power of our imaginations, the power of mental picture-making, is essential to us if we are to understand the world. Otherwise, we can’t recognize any object, for objects are only intelligible as members of a class, of classes of vehicles or of whatever you wish. SF helps us to distinguish ourselves as one phenomenon among many, and our planet as one among many, and our lifetime as one among many. It opens the windows of our fancy and can give us a true perspective. For example, it banishes an obsolete socio-economic theory, which has gained some ground here and there, which claims that human beings can profitably be divided into abstractions labelled “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”.

  ‘But instead of quoting Kant, for I don’t want to seem nationalistic, I will finish by quoting the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, because he says something in hisDefence of Poetry, written at the beginning of last century, which describes with vivid accuracy the plight of today from which a study of science fiction can free us.

  ‘Shelley says,

  We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionately circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

  ‘I believe we have to live with that slavery, at least for a while. But SF, I know from experience, is one way of making it tolerable.

  ‘Thank you for listening to me.’

  As Frenza asked for questions or additional statements to be limited to a duration of five minutes, Rugorsky wrote a note and pushed it over to Squire, making it slide across the green baize, one fat finger simultaneously propelling and holding it captive.

  The note consisted of four words. ‘But Shelley is dead.’

  It was difficult to decide on Rugorsky’s meaning. An idle joke. Or perhaps a positivist Soviet rejection of the poet’s negative remarks. Possibly even a threat of some kind. People did die, and that wasn’t pleasant. As Selina’s Serbian father had died…

  Inner vision could fly northwards, away from the Mediterranean, over the Alps and France, across the Channel, across England, to Pippet Hall in the heart of the Norfolk countryside, could enter there undetected and find its way up to the children’s playroom, the old wooden room now painted white which — in the days when it was stained with brown varnish — had been home for Tom, Adrian, and Deirdre.

  Striking in through the windows in the room’s brown varnish days, the sun had lit it till it glowed like the interior of a honey-pot. Each worn yellow floor-board had an individual character and an individual role. In winter, a coal fire burned in the grate.

  Next to the grate was a cupboard with a lock mechanism which worked only with difficulty. Inside the cupboard was a secret compartment where Tom stored a few personal possessions. At the back of the compartment was a large tin box with its own lock. The box contained, along with precious things like cigarette cards and postcards and a penknife with bone sides, a fat red notebook on which was printed the one grave word, ‘MEMORANDA’.

  To the playroom one day, impelled by grief, together with a certain sense of dramatic intensity, Tom had gone, removing his red notebook from the recesses of the cupboard, and writing in it in black crayon, ‘March 12th, 1937. Daddy Died.’ From then on, the words being so desperately final, he wrote nothing more in the notebook.

  The notebook still existed. So did that entry. So did the death.

  John Matthew Squire had bestowed on his eldest son a love of arts and shooting and the countryside which lasted all his life. John Matthew Squire’s death had bestowed on the son who found his body a sense of violence and frustration which equally had never worked itself out of his system.

  The arrival of the refugee Normbaums, like crows gathering at a battlefield, had proved the herald of a great violence, the war. The war. Growing up, going to school, knowing always that tremendous actions involving courage and hardihood were taking place not a hundred miles away. Hearing the planes roar over the rooftops at night — all of Norfolk was an aerodrome. The intense love for Rachel Normbaum. Puberty. Fondling her in a quiet room, an erection flaming against her thigh and the intense astonishment, mingled with pride and annoyance, when, at the touch of her fingers, semen spurted over his grey trousers. Something to do with being a soldier. Preparing to join the struggle, to leave school, to get into Europe, to taste that traditional harsh life of war — waiting, fighting, killing, marching, winning, going hungry, enjoying the fruits of conquest — women, booze, good companionship, self-glorification. Then Berlin was taken and the war collapsed.

  Tom Squire was just too young to fight. He had missed the biggest initiation rite of the century. The allied armies were being disbanded. Detumescence had set in.

  On the surface, he was relieved. Below, frustrated, disappointed. Oh, to have liberated Paris!

  Only to his Uncle Willie did he make his real feelings known. Uncle Willie had friends in London, connected with the county. Young Tom Squire was on National Service, and completing his preliminary square-bashing at Aldershot, when he was posted for special training at a camp near Devizes. After some tests, he was transferred to M16 to a department specializing in overseas operations. The Cold War was tightening its grip on the world. Men like Squire were needed.

  He was given leave. A friendly man drove up to Pippet Hall; later, Squire met the friendly man in Whitehall. Following a hot tip, Squire applied for a job with a consortium of manufacturers who were interested in new export markets. He got the appointment and went to night school to learn Serbo-Croat.

  War-battered Europe was putting itself together again. The Americans, with a gesture of unique generosity, launched the Marshall Plan. Britain, its overseas investments exhausted after paying for the war, set to work cheerfully on an export drive. The war had been won; now they were to win the peace.

  The frontiers of the peace were already established. The Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, and the luckless nations of the Continent found themselves either on one side or the other; with one exception. The nation of Yugoslavia.

  Although Yugoslavia was communist, there were remarkable differences between it and the other communist countries. Their leader, Tito, was a national hero and had conducted a formidably courageous war against the Nazis; he became a popular peacetime leader, and was not imposed on the country by the Soviet Union. Britain had supported Tito during the war; Churchill had made wise decisions there; so a friendship of sorts remained possible across barriers of ideology.

  The BIA (British Industries Abroad) opened an office in Belgrade and attempted to develop trade wi
th the Yugoslavs only a comparatively few months after the official cessation of hostilities. On their staff was a young secretary, Thomas Squire, with a briefing to travel to all regions of Yugoslavia looking for trade. He had the perfect job for undercover work.

  ‘You may not like Yugoslavia very much until you settle in,’ Squire’s head of department said. ‘After that, you’ll hate it.’

  Squire loved it. There was something in this mountainous country — particularly in Serbia — in its songs, in its turbulent history, which corresponded to the violence trapped in his own nature. Moreover, a war was still going on, a war of minds. As an impoverished and broken economy picked itself up, the nation fended off its enemies. The Yugoslavs were intensely nationalistic, intensely suspicious. Foreigners were constantly watched.

  Belgrade, the Serbian and national capital, was at that time a city in ruins. Of the housing that remained, much was old and substandard; the energetic rebuilding was new and substandard. Greyness and cold prevailed. Filth, disease, misery, mud, flowed like blood through the ruptured veins of the capital. Food was short. It was all that Squire desired; here was the harshness and challenge of the world war he had missed.

  A Serbian girl called Roša came his way. He knew she was an agent. He embraced her as eagerly as he did his new life. In her pallor, her treachery, her nakedness, she was a paradigm of her country.

  ‘Obey your operating orders, whatever they are,’ he said — he rapidly became fluent in Serbo-Croat, ‘but make me part of you. Let’s do everything. Be extreme. Involve me, involve me!’

  He thought she loved him in a way. She tried to dye her hair blonde, with disastrous results. They both laughed; then she fought with him and wept. Her parents had been shot by Nazis for some petty offence. The country was an armed camp. The army built roads, bridges, bicycle factories. Ferocious drink- parties took place in which people fell out of windows and died. Roša got drunk and sang folk songs about the centuries of Turkish tyranny, the beauty of Serbian hills, and red wine spilt on white tablecloths. Her voice was like zeppelins crashing. It made him weep.