The Fourth Pig (7 page)

Once you've destroyed something the gods loved, destroyed something

That should have been eternal. No use, the Furies get after you.

Pretty soon, boy, they'll have you down

And rip your guts out.

And it isn't much of a step from shooting Indians

To shooting strikers. It isn't much of a step

From exterminating the Indian civilisation to exterminating

Your own.

And who will weep on the grave, who will put Fifth Avenue

In a glass case? Who will be there to contemplate? Only the Furies

In their black shirts and red shirts, dancing the Horst Wessel Carmagnole?

Will they be there? Or nothing?

Or is it possible

That a few Indians may come back, slowly, out of the Reservations,

Out of the Pueblos, smiling a little, a little,

Stretching their arms a little, looking about them a little?

And they will begin putting things in order, letting the decent earth

And the decent rivers eat up what they will, letting iron rust

And concrete crumble, and the old bodies of Fords

Be grown over quietly with brambles where in time will nest

Oriole and cardinal.

And they will dance the rain dances and bring back the rain

To the parched deserts which the settlers' ploughing made

Out of the buffalo lands. And they will watch the forest growing,

Slowly and softly growing on the eroded mountain sides,

Till the top soil comes back. And there will be no newspapers

To eat the forests. And there will be no advertisements

On the trunks of the forest trees. And the Indians will move quietly

About the forests, with their minds full of patterns.

And there is no doubt they will be a hundred per cent

American …

GRAND-DAUGHTER

(For Stella Benson and
The House of Living Alone
)

Last week I was looking through some of the political books of the nineteen-thirties. It is queer reading those old books now, careful, angry, unhappy books in hard red covers with sad black lettering. All the authors, with their prefaces and tables of statistics and careful indexes, speak of the new times which they tried to foresee, as though it would all make a great difference to people; but they never saw what kind of a difference it was going to be. Most of the people who wrote those books were economists, poor things, or else a special sort of historian which existed then, who was trained to see just one particular kind of event, like a truffle-pig. And those who were capable of seeing other sorts of events such as we can see now (Brailsford for instance) were rather ashamed of this side of their minds. There were also, of course, the physicists and to some extent the biologists and biochemists, though the latter were usually humbler, having rather less immediate contact with the technocrats and a good deal of sympathy, because of their manual technique, with the factory workers.

My grandfather on my mother's side must have read dozens of these books; he even wrote one or two. They must have affected him considerably. I take it they made people gloomy and over intent on that side of life, and must have made them feel inferior and changeable compared with the figures and statistics which strode about over their heads. I should have hated living then!
Yet I expect my grandfather believed in it all, or at any rate thought there was no other kind of thing which could better be believed in.

His wife, my grandmother, was very much laughed at for saying that the industrial revolution had destroyed magic. She was of course a Marxist, as most of them were, and preferred seeing things in economic terms. It was plain to her that play of any kind must have been exceedingly ill-thought-of in the moral system of a ruling class which had made its position by making other people work for it, and, to some extent, by working itself. Magic was one step beyond play. And so the whole idea of magic had become immoral—it had in fact arrived at the stage of immorality where people cease altogether to believe in a thing—and serious, moral people such as socialists did not use the word at all. But my grandmother managed to use it to herself, and she could at least see in a kind of apologetic, theoretical way, that good magic, being essentially democratic, could not work itself out in a pyramidal society of haves on a basis of have-nots, but must at best go underground and at worst turn into something evil and individual and undemocratic.

It was rare for anyone to see even that much. Most people were hopelessly under the sway of the economists and the early technocrats. So, when my grandmother once said that she wanted socialism so as to set magic free, they all laughed at her. But yet she did not wholly believe in it herself. She must have felt that it was the same thing as the Good Life, which is of course only half the truth.

My grandparents on the other side presumably did not even read the gloomy old books, or very rarely; in general they were
too tired and under-fed and ignorant to read much unless it had been predigested for them. Still, perhaps they read bits of them sometimes. It's hard to picture at all how they lived; one has to make a great effort and find the right sympathetic formulæ before one can begin to understand their lives. However, it is quite worthwhile doing. Then one can arrive at the crushing dullness of their routine of existence and their consequent inability to look forward at change. Those two other grandparents of mine were both Labour Party members, as they called it, which meant in a way that they wanted new times to come, yet they never thought of these new times as being different in detail from what had already been experienced.

Yes, I suppose it all happened curiously differently from any way that anyone in, say, the nineteen thirties, supposed. None of them foresaw the technocrats, not at least with anything like accuracy. Still less did they foresee how the final cracking-up of the pyramid would happen. I expect they were all so dried-up and unhappy and resentful that they had to see it wrong. I very much doubt, even, whether many of them had the sense to be happy when it did come—but so differently from their intentions. Perhaps they'd all been longing for the chance to hit back, poor dears, for themselves or others, and of course there was none of that.

Probably even someone like my mother's mother was deeply surprised when, for instance, the dancing started. She used to dance as a young woman—or so one gathers from old letters—but as she grew older and more involved, so that kind of thing dropped out of her way of life. Any dancing which she or her husband might have taken part in was the curious individual
dancing of the epoch, in which couples crossed and crossed one another's pattern or purpose and each one of a couple could be separate in thought and feeling, even without pleasure. It seems so plain now, that no sensible person ought to have been astonished at the connection between the new democracy and the great patterns of dancing that spread out from London and Birmingham, but yet it appears that they were.

One takes all these things for granted so much that it is hard to think oneself back to their viewpoint. The fundamental which they never saw is, I take it, the plain fact (given the nature of the Universe) that if one thing is altered everything is altered. It only remains to discover the key thing or things; but these are sometimes so apparently incongruous that educated people used to dislike taking them seriously. No doubt in the very old days, magic—for why not stick to a good word?—was practised by men and women who did not know what they were doing, often did something else by mistake, and were anyway frightened of the possibilities of their own technique. The early evidence is proof of this. As magic, with the decline of even agricultural equality, came unstuck from its place in society, so the practisers of magic came to be unsocial or anti-social persons, and by the end of the nineteenth century “magic,” such as it was, had mainly got into the hands of a particularly nasty type of person, with whom decent members of society would not associate, and whom they could not trust to tell the truth.

Besides this there was, during my grandmother's time, another thing which worried people. I wonder if I can explain it! Historically, it seems clear, their morality had become increasingly rationalist—due no doubt very largely to the instruments of precision
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; but that is neither here nor there. They were very proud and anxious about this rationalism of theirs, which was still a symbol of their only recent freeing from the primitive (though of course not really earliest) tyrannies of kings by divine right and the various organised priesthoods and religions. All intelligent, forward-thinking people, even in the so-called imaginative professions, insisted on the recognition of their rationality and put it constantly into their talk and writing. If they had not done so, they would have been ashamed to face their own technocrats and economists! Yet, of course, that was not the whole of life. They would naturally not allow the other side to be pointed out to them by priests; but occasionally a doctor, and very rarely some writer whom they trusted, was allowed to do so. But the difficulty was that they saw this other side taking shape in several comic, but extremely unpleasant and dangerous, group madnesses, such as that which affected the Fascists in Italy or the Nazis in Germany. What they did not, apparently, realise, was that the Nazi irrationality—or perhaps anti-technocracy?—was only successful because it gave some solid fulfilment to a definite need in human beings. The rationalists stupidly feared and hated this need (exactly as an earlier generation feared and hated other kinds of needs in human beings) and refused to satisfy it decently and creatively. Yet, if in the end the new thing had not happened, had not, as it were, cracked and pushed up through the unencumbered soil of democracy and equality, this evil reflection of the other side might well have lasted for generations, instead of dying out as rapidly and completely as it actually did in Germany and elsewhere.

It seems very odd that a woman like my grandmother could not have seen this clearly and plainly and been able to explain it convincingly to her generation! Was she in some way ashamed? Or could she just not quite believe in it? Presumably, until it happened, it could only be a hypothesis. All she could hope to say with any conviction was: there may be going to be something of this kind, if we can make a set of circumstances which will allow it to happen. And then, of course, she got so involved in making the set of circumstances (which meant, for her at least, taking political action towards equality) that she could not keep her eyes open, even, for the small signs which must have been apparent, of the kind of life which was about to come. If she had been less involved in the making of those circumstances and more able to look, it would have meant that she cared less for the idea of change. And at least I am certain of one thing: that she
did
care.

As to my other grandmother on my father's side, she didn't have time to think at all, poor darling. When people talked to her on her doorstep about equality and democracy, or rather about “the triumph of the Labour Party,” she pictured a secure job for her husband, cheap food and shelter, and perhaps less hard work for herself. She never seems to have considered the possibility of happiness. And so when it came she found she couldn't quite accept it. There must be something wrong, some catch. I can remember her old, wrinkled face, always full of a kind of surprised disapproval which I couldn't understand at all until I began learning history and became aware of the generations of misery taken for granted, which had made those eyes and mouth. She outlived my other grandparents; a working woman was bound to be pretty tough, and she'd been that for forty years.

Yes, it must have been terrible living then, in that hopelessness of any real difference, with that sense of being stuck which must have oppressed them all. When it was all going to be—not easy, but at any rate, simple. As we, now, have come, through our well-wishing of those before us, to understand.

THE FANCY PIG

There used to be a pig on Princes Risborough hill:

A fat white sow on the road, lying quite still.

Every time I went there, and most of all at night,

I thought I should see that pig in my yellow headlight.

But every time, at the top, there had been no pig there,

Only beech hedges in the cool, waiting air,

Only leaves stirring in the dark air's flow,

And this time again my Thing had let me go.

What was the pig of mine, this fancy pig,

With light hairs on her hams, and her udders big?

Was she once a real sow in a Bucks farm-yard,

Then pork, ham, trotters, pig's fry and lard?

Or was she something in me which I so needed to kill

That I had to grow her a body on Princes Risborough hill?

Or was she something else that was neither me nor her

But a stray twist of fancy on a chalk road's blur?

For all I know, she may be lying there still,

Waiting these seven years on Princes Risborough hill.

For I never go there now, by day nor yet by night,

With clutch and brakes and steering, and yellow headlight;

I never go there now, where often I have been,

The long beech-twigs lightly brushing my wind-screen.

But some other woman, with pigs in her to kill,

May have run down my fancy sow on Princes Risborough hill.

THE SNOW MAIDEN

Once again the Snow Maiden was born, the daughter of January and April. Once again she was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again, for her safety, her parents sent her to live amongst the mortals.

She was boarded out at five shillings a week by the Poor-law authorities, and her name was Mary Snow. She was pretty enough to eat, blue eyes and curly hair, as yellow and shiny as a Caution Stop, whenever her foster-mother—Mrs. Smith her name was—a good old sort, and so was her man, Mr. Smith, a tram-driver for the Corporation—whenever she'd time to help Mary give it a wash. At school everyone liked Mary Snow, and some of the big girls were always wanting to baby her up, but she wasn't having any. There'd been a bit of a fuss about her scholarship, her being a Poor-law kid and all, but her school teachers kicked up no end of a bother till she got it all right. Clever she was, too, and most of all with what's not common in a girl, and that's mathematics. The teachers used to talk her over with one another over their lunches, and they all said they'd never seen anything like it.