Babel Tower (16 page)

Hugh Pink’s letter has changed Frederica’s marriage. She is accustomed to telling herself her marriage is unhappy, but she is also accustomed to blaming herself for this. She made a wrong decision, she did not take account of the circumstances, wise little remarks of this kind she makes constantly to herself, mixed with more shapeless moanings of boredom or frustration. She does not blame Nigel yet for her unhappiness, although she is constantly angry at his long absences, and at his failure to see what she needs, by which she means
work
, not too well defined, but
work.
She is ready to explain that she loved him because he was different, but that this has not transformed her. She is still Frederica. She is ready to explain this, but the conversation never happens, for Nigel is not a talking man. She tells herself that she should have known this. Poor Frederica is so desirous of being responsible for her own fate. Human beings invented Original Sin because the alternative hypothesis was worse. Better to be at the centre of a universe whose terrors are all a direct result of our own failings, than to be helpless victims of random and largely malevolent forces. This is bad because I didn’t think hard enough, says Frederica to herself. She is distressed by Nigel’s letter-snatching, both because it is his first real act of aggression against her—not listening is not always aggression—and because it makes him look ridiculous. She is upset by how silly he looked, reciting Hugh Pink’s words in that childish, finicking voice. She needs to love and want him, even if she does not like his friends, his family, his life. She likes him to look secret and dangerous. Not silly.

Hugh Pink’s letter brings about other changes. Just when Nigel is for once at home and watchful, Frederica receives a spate of letters from old friends. These are unsolicited—she has written to no one—but she fears that Nigel may imagine they are all responses to desperate, or affectionate, messages from her. He watches her read them. He snatches no more, but he asks who they are from. She tells him. All your friends are men, he observes again, truthfully. Once he says, “You wouldn’t like it if all my friends were women.” “I wouldn’t mind,” says Frederica staunchly, but her imagination works for a moment on his absences, and she sees that she would mind. “It’s just a peculiarity of my education,” she says, placating. Nigel does not answer.

One letter is from Alan Melville.

Dearest Frederica,

Hugh Pink says you would like to hear from us, and told us all where you were. We all drank your health in the Lamb and Flag, Tony and Hugh and I, and one or two others. Hugh says you are living in a Country House, with woods and fields. I cannot see you doing this, but should like to, as I’m sure you do it very spectacularly, as you did everything. Do you have a collection of paintings in your house? I am thinking of writing a book on early Venetian art, and there are some surprising faces and places from those perpetual golden worlds hidden away in the corridors and the grey northern light of the English
House. I don’t earn a living by this kind of thing, yet, so I teach—not in a school, like Hugh, but in the Samuel Palmer School of Art, in Covent Garden. I teach Art History to painters and potters and industrial designers and weavers who think they don’t want to know about Giotto or Titian in case I make little dents in their Originality—they are all Sons of God, of course, even the most slavishly derivative. You would like to see this place, it would interest you.

Hugh isn’t very good at describing buildings and people. He
noticed
some yew trees, a staircase, a ha-ha and some teacups but gave me no real idea of your surroundings or of you. He did mention your very beautiful son. Why didn’t you send a card with a stork, or a silver basket of dragées? I am good at Country House sort of people nowadays—shall I come and see you?

Another is from Alan’s close friend Tony Watson. In the old days, when they were room-mates, Frederica used to call them the chameleon and the fake, for Alan, a child of the Glasgow slums, had a blond, agile, classless social charm, and Tony, the progressively educated son of a distinguished Marxist man of letters, had a whole repertoire of working-class tastes and mannerisms, and an assiduously cultivated accent, part-Birmingham, part-Cockney. Tony’s letter is longer than Alan’s, and more affectionate, although it is Alan to whom Frederica feels more attached. It is with Alan that she has best negotiated real friendship, she considers, without any danger of falling into sexual abjection, instability or bullying. She has wondered from time to time if he is queer.

Dear Frederica [says Tony],

I gather you are in need of amusement. There is plenty here, what with the Election hotting up, and lots of dancing—twist, shout, shake, everyone’s got dislocated spines or ankles, it’s an epidemic. I wrote a piece on the Mod Clubs for the
Statesman
—you wd. appreciate my Leavisite analysis of the Lyrics of the Who—as you would appreciate my Italian trousers—tho’ come to think of it, you never had any musical sense, and then again maybe you are twisting away somewhere in some swish night club and don’t need me to report on the latest sounds. I wish we hadn’t lost touch.

Seriously, though, the Election’s the thing. I’m working hard in Belsize Park, leaflets, doorsteps, the lot. The atmosphere is electric—in
places
, honesty leads me to add—there are whole reaches of the Labour Party quite as staid and stuffy as the Shire Tories you seem madly to have decided to settle amongst. I shall have to rely on you to be the
agente provocateuse
of a one-woman
Revolution amongst the bulls and the milk churns and the saddle-soap and all the braying. Tread carefully, Watson, you idiot. I go up and down promising a New Morality and a New Technology and no more nasty scandals with call-girls, trousersdown ministers, no Masked Men in frilly aprons with horsewhips, but good honest Liverpudlian economists and clean men in white overalls making
useful classless things
to bring about equality quicker and quicker (the washing-up machine as an agent of revolution goes down a treat on the North London doorstep, esp. to the larger part of the workers, i.e. women, trapped in unpaid sloggery and dirty dishwater).

I’ve got quite a bit of political reporting into the papers—two pieces in the
Mirror
, three in the
Statesman
, one in the
Manchester Guardian.
Witty breakdowns of long dull speeches, résumés of election meetings in unvisited places, that kind of thing—I’m making a name for myself, I think—but the real place to be these days is Television, you know—this is the first Election where it will play a major part—poor Lord Home (well, Sir Alec, but it sticks in my throat or ballpoint) has a face like a skull and ill-fitting teeth and you can see these trivial matters nailing down the coffin-lid tighter and tighter on every doorstep, which of course delights me, but I don’t like the mindless malice. They call him Skullface and say he glares at them—like the Evil Eye. The TV’s a Magic Box, Frederica, and its power is only just beginning to stir. I must get into it, I must get on it. Words are wonderful but
passé—that’s where the power is
, girl, and I’m going there. Your heavy friend from the Socialist Club, Owen Griffiths, has got in on the Labour Party Press Relations, and can be seen from time to time grinning obsequiously on the silver screen—do you watch the box, my dear, or are you above such vulgar amusements in your pre-industrial Retreat? I’ll say for Griffiths he’s understood the essential thing, which is that the box is
small
—he’s teaching people with the instincts and training of rabble-rousers to be urbane, and intimate, and say things quickly and not repetitively—a lot of them find it
so hard
—no Great Rally rhetoric for yr. fly Welsh boyo—he gets to tell the big nobs where they go wrong and what they do best—he’ll go far, I predict—but I’m not sure how serious his
principles
are—

Hugh says you’ve produced a sprog. Difficult to imagine, frankly, but I suppose you handle it with your usual mix of frowning determination and
nerve.
I meet all sorts of people these days. Old friends were made slower and deeper. We love you, Frederica, come and visit us, come and play, come and
work
for Victory if you’re allowed. (I suspect you’re not. Now then, Watson, watch it!)

Do you remember
Comus
? Do you remember the brilliant person who organised
all
your admirers to come and see you perform—always resourcefully—a débacle? Well, the same extraordinary skill has set in motion a kind of
leaflet-dropping-campaign amongst the cows, to show you’re appreciated. Chin up, and imagine a big, hot kiss from

Tony

My dear Frederica,

It is not often I write a letter, but I gather one is in order. So here speaks a voice from the past, and I very much hope from the future, to say,
very
discreetly now you are a married lady of substance, do you remember a motorbike, and a quite
bloody
hotel in Scarborough, and my willingness to help out with your more esoteric problems? And a beach in the Camargue, and the terrace at Long Royston, and the smiles of a summer night, and your clear young voice (well,
I
remember your voice,
you
can only hear from inside your head, it is the one voice you
will never hear
, I can tell you professionally). “I will be still as stone, I will not bleed.” The
timbre
of that voice is gone, inevitably, along with the lights in the trees, and I very much fear the renaissance of the Verse Drama, and will not come back, which is sad.

What are you doing? I am still riding two horses—both aimed at the stars—it cannot go on, I tell myself, I shall tumble in all my pink frills into the sawdust in the ring, to change the metaphor—I work as hard as two men, and have two lives. I have my lab. at North Yorkshire, in the Evolution Tower, where we are doing some very interesting work on the construction of vision, the perception of shapes, visual memory from birth, and that sort of thing. I see yr. brother from time to time, who is involved both with the microbiologists and the new neuroscientists, whose work of course impinges on my own psychological experiments on
active
brains—they think very highly of Marcus, do Abraham Calder-Fluss and Jacob Scrope, you will be glad to hear. Our idealistic Vice-Chancellor still holds to his vision that all Knowledge is One, and we do talk to each other across institutional boundaries, more than in most places of research. So I tell them that my Other Life—my secret, shameful flirtation with the magic Box—is really One with my serious analysis of how the human brain constructs and recognises faces and boxes, and they more or less buy it, because I do good work, and have good assistants.

I have been making one or two rather elegant little Arts programmes about art and perception, recently. Do you ever watch? You can hardly begin to imagine what
will
be possible to the screen—to the Box—of art and thought in the next ten or twenty years. We have a cultural instrument in our hands wch. can—which will—transfigure the way we see the world, and so the way we live, for good or ill. Probably for ill—knowing the deep human need for inertia, for ease, for non-thought, but the moment I write that, I see that the opposite is also true—it is human to
need
complexity, difficulty, thought, and
the Box provides it, in its way. This is a more serious conversation than we have ever had, do you realise—because I can’t see you, I’m not distracted by your face and your presence, so I say what I think. Written culture, not Box Culture, sweet Frederica, soon to be relegated to museums and dusty bookshelves. I will tell you a secret—you can’t think in language in the Box. It
has to be
thought with images, associations, quick flickerings of form. The public fear is that the Box will be used by powerful manipulators to control the Masses—like Huxley’s Soma—but that’s not what interests me. It
could
be done, but anyone ingenious enough to do it would get bored with wanting to—I mean the scientists, of course, not the politicians, who are simple souls. What interests me is that these new thought-forms will change the
molecules in our minds
and what they do and can or can’t do—and Shakespeare, and Kant, and Goethe and even Wittgenstein will be just too creaky and hard to bother with—
for better for worse
, Frederica, I make no judgement.

I didn’t mean to embark on all that. I meant to write a ponderously gallant letter to a vanished flame, and to say, come back to us, come and see us, come and
talk.
There’s a pilot programme of a TV game guessing literary quotations being made—and as always, they’re desperately short of any women who know any quotations—now you aren’t a famous writer or anything but you
are
quick-witted and presentable and you know a hell of a lot of quotations—so if you find yourself in London for a bit—give me a ring, I know the producer.

I am told you have a son. What a responsibility. I’m not sure I shall ever be fit to undertake it.

Look after yourself. Write to me. Whilst language is still a valid means of communication.

My love and homage,
Wilkie

Dear Frederica,

I have only just learned that you have a son, so am writing belatedly to congratulate you, and hope you are happy—you vanished rather suddenly from our midst. I think of you often, and do hope you are happy.

As for me, I work in educational television, producing little scenes from various plays and analyses of them. It’s not wholly satisfactory, because one never gets to grips with a complete play, and even as teaching it isn’t satisfactory because I never see the children I am addressing, but it is a pleasant enough life, and my colleagues and the actors I meet are agreeable, and so it goes on. I am not writing at present, though I have one or two ideas, both for television plays and for the theatre.

The most interesting thing that has happened to me is an invitation to be part of a Government Enquiry into the teaching of Language. We have had our first Meeting—we are chaired by an anthropologist who seems reasonable enough so far, and are a mixed bag of well-meaning persons—teachers, linguists, writers, broadcasters, a forensic psychologist and a physicist. We have a heavy programme planned of visits to schools and colleges, and huge heaps of Evidence are already coming in to be studied with care. I have written to yr. father asking him to give his views. He is the best teacher I have ever worked with, or met, and his mixture of down-to-earth practicality and high ideals is what we need, I think. Professor Wijnnobel, the NYU Vice-Chancellor, is one of us, tho’ he is not the Chairman—as he is a grammarian, it was felt he might be too
parti-pris
I suppose to weave conflicting views together.