A Man of Parts (9 page)

– But the alliance didn’t last
.

– No.

– Why was that?

– Several reasons, which seem obvious in retrospect, but weren’t at the time. We agreed that the poverty or near poverty in which most people lived was intolerable, and that wealth needed to be redistributed by the state taking over many of the functions and resources of capitalism and private land ownership. We both believed this could be accomplished by legislation rather than revolution. But the Fabians put their faith in something they called ‘permeation’ – that is, they would put forward these ideas in print and public debate which would gradually permeate the thinking of politicians and the main political parties. ‘Gradually’ was the operative word.

– Hence the name of the Society
.

– Yes, named after the Roman general, Fabius Cunctator, ‘Fabius the Delayer’. That choice of name tells you a lot about the Society. I think at heart they never really wanted a socialist state, especially the more prosperous members. They liked to think that they were helping to bring it about in the distant future, but the idea of actually living in it, without servants for instance, without private property, secretly frightened them. I was more impatient. I wanted to get something
done
.

– You were willing to give up Spade House, and your servants?

– I wouldn’t have had to give up the house, under the sort of system I envisaged. I would have simply paid rent to the state, instead of owning it. And as for servants, I explained in
Anticipations
how rational house design and labour-saving devices – central heating, electric sweeping machines, automatic dishwashers, and so on – would make them unnecessary.

– But you still have servants yourself
.

– Well, we haven’t got a socialist state, or anything like the technologically advanced society I envisaged. You can’t catch me out like that! I was often criticised by people on the Left, especially in the Labour Party and the Trade Union movement, for enjoying a high standard of living while calling myself a socialist, and I always gave the same answer: I’m ready to surrender my privileges at the same time as everybody else, and in the meantime I don’t see what use it would be to deprive myself of them voluntarily. My greatest extravagance was working countless unpaid hours for the socialist cause.

– You say you were impatient to get things done. What did you think the Fabian Society should do?

– Well initially I thought they should work more actively with the Labour movement, put up candidates for Parliament, but I changed my mind about that later. I judged that the Labour Party as long as it was controlled by the trade unions would always be a fundamentally conservative force, obsessed with improving wages and conditions in the workplace, never fundamentally questioning the nature and organisation of the work itself. More and more I came to the conclusion that progressive change would only come about by empowering a new political elite, a body of dedicated managers with a scientific education who would run the state.

– Those you called ‘Samurai’ in
A Modern Utopia
? The guardians of the World State
.

– Yes, but the idea was already adumbrated in
Anticipations
as the ‘New Republic’. Later I called it ‘The Open Conspiracy’. It was always the same idea, the vision of a just and rationally governed global society from which war, poverty, disease and all the other ills of human civilisation would be eliminated.

– But not for everybody. Not for the chronically poor, unemployed, sick, retarded, criminals, addicts of drink and gambling – what you called ‘the People of the Abyss
’.

Suddenly the interviewer sounds more like an interrogator.

– No, not for them. People physically or mentally incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities for a happy, useful life, would have to be …

– Eliminated?

– Well, they couldn’t be allowed to be parasites on the rest of the community, obviously. They would have to be discouraged or prevented from breeding.

– As you wrote in
Anticipations
: ‘To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped by their fecundity
.’

– Exactly.

– And you also wrote: ‘the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss … will certainly be the most powerful or dominant nation before the year 2000.’ Isn’t ‘poisons’ a rather shocking suggestion?

– You’ve taken that out of context. Listen to the whole passage: ‘
The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions, death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the most powerful or dominant nation before the year 2000
.’

– Which one will that be, do you think?

– I’ve no idea. Not Britain, by the look of it. Maybe China, if they can cure their passion for gambling.

– But ‘poisons’ … Aren’t you advocating murder there?

– I was thinking of something like euthanasia, painless voluntary termination. Such people, for whom there is no hope of a happy fulfilled life, would be persuaded that death was a preferable alternative. ‘Poisons’ was an unfortunate choice of word, one I’ve often regretted. It’s been thrown in my face many times, especially recently, with these reports that the Nazis have been gassing gypsies and mental defectives.

– And Jews. Mostly Jews, in fact
.

– I’ve never regarded the Jews as collectively undesirable. I state that quite categorically in
Anticipations
. Here, on
see here
: ‘
I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people take up against the Jews
.’ And I go on to list all the things that people object to about Jews and argue that you can find them equally in other races. I’m anti-Zionist, but not anti-Semitic.

– What about on the next page: ‘
As for the rest, those swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? As I see it
…
they have to go
.’ Go where? Did you mean die, or be killed?

– Die, or die out. It’s obvious that the earth cannot support a desirable quality of life for all its inhabitants if the global population goes on expanding as it is at the moment, especially in parts of Africa and the East. There will have to be a world authority capable of controlling population growth by one means or another: contraception, sterilisation, euthanasia. If that doesn’t work, famine, or war provoked by shortages of food and water, will bring about the same result more brutally.

– Did the Fabians object to these parts of
Anticipations
?

– Not that I recall. In those days eugenics was rather fashionable on the political Left.

– So that wasn’t why you fell out with them?

– No. It was more a matter of policy and personalities. And sex. Basically they couldn’t take my views on sex, or not so much the views themselves as the fact that I acted on them.

– How was that?

– It’s a long story.

IT IS A
very long story, one that began years before he ever heard the word ‘Fabian’, and it is another voice that tells it in his head, not an interlocutor or an interrogator or an interviewer, but a novelist, a novelist both like and unlike himself in earlier years when he wrote quasi-autobiographical novels, novel after novel, about men who were seeking some kind of explanation of what was wrong with the human world and what might be done to redeem it and how they might take a leading part in that redemptive process – religious language which superficially might seem to contradict his lifelong hostility to institutional religion, the repressive, fearful Low Church Protestantism of his mother, for instance, or the reactionary dogmatism of the Roman Catholic Church, but he has always regarded his sense of mission as essentially religious, often puzzling or scandalising his secular friends and acquaintances when he so described it. Any devotion to an idea that subordinates the individual’s aspirations to the collective good, the idea of socialism for instance, or the idea of a World State, is in his opinion essentially religious. It does not entail allegiance to a Church, or even a God, though there was a period in his life, embarrassing to recall, when he attempted to co-opt God into his programme for saving the world from self-destruction, in books like
God the Invisible King
, published in 1917, one he has never taken down from his bookcase to sample, well aware that he would not be pleasantly surprised.

The best of his novels about men seeking to understand what was wrong with contemporary society, and to find some useful role for themselves in it, was
Tono-Bungay
, published in 1909; in fact he regards it as his best novel of any kind, judged by normal literary criteria. The novels that followed were more polemical and discursive, and, with the exception of
Ann Veronica
, which was centred on its heroine, their heroes were so humourlessly high-minded that he privately referred to these books as his ‘prig’ novels.
The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends, The Research Magnificent
were some of their titles, all about men progressing from youth to maturity who were to some extent idealised versions of himself: taller, more handsome, from a higher social class, and considerably more punctilious in their relations with the opposite sex. These men invariably experienced a conflict between their personal sense of mission, whether intellectual or political, and their desire for union with a particular woman. Usually the woman proved to be an obstacle to the fulfilment of the mission, which could only be overcome by her being converted to it or by dying or by some act of renunciation by the hero.

Women, and his relationships with them, had been at the heart of his difficulties with the Fabians. There were differences of opinion about political ends and means between himself and the leading lights of the Society which were always likely to be causes of conflict, but it was his sexual conduct that provoked the final breach and continued afterwards to dog his lone efforts to make the world see sense. The women, and the relationships, were recognisably reflected in the novels – recognisably, but not truthfully. The element of lust, so important in his own sexual life, was almost entirely missing from these books, only occasionally discreetly hinted at and mostly veiled by high-romantic love talk in which the phrase ‘
Oh, my dear
…’ figured largely, the ellipsis gesturing towards intensities of emotion which the reader was obliged to imagine unassisted. The satisfaction of lust could not, of course, be truthfully described in fiction without inviting prosecution as a pornographer, and he was not one of those modern novelists, like James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, who had striven to extend the boundaries of the permissibly explicit. Although
Ann Veronica
had been denounced in the press and from pulpits as a depraved and depraving book when it was published in 1909, that was because the virginal young heroine frankly declared she wanted sexual union with the married hero, not because of any description of their eventual enjoyment of it. In that respect the novel was as pure as the Lambs’
Tales from Shakespeare
. In fact he had never felt any urge to describe the sexual act and its variations in his fiction – it was the sort of discourse he preferred to keep private, confined to love letters and pillow talk. Even the secret Postscript he had written to his autobiography, a memoir of his sexual life to be published after his death by his executors when all the women mentioned were also deceased, was not revealing about what he did with them in bed. That was partly because the manuscript was typed up by Marjorie, and there were limits to how much information of that kind even an honest man, unashamed of his sexuality, wished to share with his daughter-in-law. The novelist in his head has no such inhibitions, but what interests him is not the mechanics of copulation but the operation of sexual desire in a man’s life, his life, how it could sometimes be a mere blunt brutal impersonal need for a woman, almost any tolerably attractive woman, assuaged in minutes, and at other times focused obsessively on a particular woman with tormenting pangs of longing and jealousy that lasted for months and years, disturbing and disrupting the serious business of improving collective life.