The Revolt of Aphrodite (2 page)

“Shall we talk syllogistically, Nash, or just talk? Causality is an attempt to mesmerise the world into some sort of significance. We cannot bear its indifference.” Tears came into his eyes,
comico-pathetic
tears, left over from laughter turned sour. “I know you are sick of your job, and just about as ill as I am, if I
am
ill.” He blew out a windy lip and gave me a cunning sidelong glance. “You sound as if you have been playing with R.N.A. It’s dangerous, Charlock. You will miss a step and go sprawling among the archetypal symbols.
We’ll have to reserve you a room in Paulhaus.” That was the firm’s private mental asylum. “It is true” I said “that I wake up with tears pouring down my face, sometimes of laughter, sometimes of plain tears.”

“There, you see?” he said triumphantly. He crossed and
uncrossed
his legs. “You had better take some action smartly, go on a rest cure, write another scientific book.”

“I am off to Tahiti. Gauguin was here.”

“Good.”

“Inventors are a happy laughing breed.” I stifled a sob and yawned instead. “Nash, is your laughter a cry for help?”

“Everyone’s is. When do you go?”

“Tonight. Let me give you lunch.”

“Very well.”

“The glands all down one side are swollen—the sense of humour is grossly inflamed. Let us go to Poggio’s.”

He was pouring out Chianti when Vibart put in an appearance—my publisher, purple with good living: a kind of tentative affability about him whenever he spoke about the book he wanted me to write for him. “The age of autobiography.” He solicited Nash’s good offices in the matter. He knew too that over all these years I had been dribbling into recorders of one sort or another. A friend of twenty years’ standing I first encountered here, yes, in Athens: dear old slowcoach of a horse-tramway buried in some minor proconsular role with his cabinets of birds’ eggs. And here was Vibart persuading poor Felix to quit quasars and debouch into memoirs. I drank deeply of the wine and smiled upon my two friends in clownish gag. What was to be done with them?

“Please Charlock” he was fearfully drunk.

“Let those who have a good bedside manner with a work of art throw the first stone.”

“Nash, can’t you convince him?”

“Flippancy is a form of alienation” said Nash rather to my
surprise
; nevertheless I could not resist making dear Vibart sing once more “The Publisher’s Boating Song”. We were always asked to leave when he did this. I beat time with my fork.

To my surprise, despite angry glances, we survive this outburst. Vibart has just been acclaimed Publisher of the Year by the Arts Guild; he owes his celebrity to an idea of breathtaking simplicity. Who else would have thought of getting Bradshaw translated into French? The effect on the French novel has been instantaneous. As one man they have rallied to this neglected English genius. Vibart bangs the table and says in a sort of ecstasy: “It’s wonderful! They have reduced
events
to
incidents.
It’s truthful to your bloody science, Felix. Non-deterministic. In Nash’s terms it would be pure catatonia. Hurrah. We don’t want to get well. No more novels of the castration complex. Do you like the idea of the God of Abraham advancing on you with his golden sickle to cut off your little—your all too little bit of mistletoe?” He points a ghastly finger at Nash, who recoils with a shudder. “Nevermore” continues my friend thickly. “No more goulash-prone Hungarian writers for me, no more
vieux jew
,
I spit on all your frightened freckled little minds. I’m rich! Hurrah. Bookstalls display me which heretofore were loaded with nothing but blood-coooling sex-trash. No more about sex, it’s too boring. Everyone’s got one. Nastiness is a real stimulant though—but poor honest sex, like dying, should be a private matter.”

His voice failed and faltered; I noticed the huge circles under his eyes. His wife committed suicide last month; it must do something to a man’s pride. One says one is not to blame and one isn’t. Still. Quickly change the subject.

We could see that he was rippling with anxiety, like wet washing on the line. Said Nash unkindly, “He needs a rest, does Felix, O yes.”

Yes, this was true.

Yes, this was true.

I remember Koepgen talking of what he called the direct vision, the Autopsia. In a poem called “The relevance of thunder”. In the Russian lingo. “Futility may well be axiomatic: but to surprise
oneself
in the act of dying might be one way to come thoroughly awake, no?” I let out another savage growl. The waiters jumped. Ah! They are converging on us at last.

Later, leaning out of the taxi window I say in a deep impressive voice. “I have left you a message written on the wall of the Gents at Claridges. Please go there and read it.” My two friends exchange a glance. Some hours earlier, a bag-fox drunk on aniseed, I had written in my careful cursive, “I think the control of human memory is essential for any kind of future advance of the species. The refining of false time is the issue.” I did not leave any instructions about how to deal with the piggybank. It was enough to go on with for people like Nash. I waved them goodbye in a fever of health.

In the southbound train I read (aloud) the Market Report in
The
Times,
intoning it like a psalm, my breast filled with patriotism for Merlins.

On the blackboard in the senior boardroom of Merlin House I had left them some cryptic memoranda for their maturer deliberations like

They will take it all seriously. So it is. So it is. Really it is.

Watching the trees go by and the poles leap and fall, leap and fall, I reflected on Merlin and on the F. of F. The Fund of Funds, the Holy Grail of all we stood for. Nash had said so often recently: “I hope you are not thinking about trying to escape from the firm, Charlock. It wouldn’t work, you know?” Why? Because I had married into it?
Vagina
Vinctrix!
At what point does a man decide that life must be lived
unhesitatingly
?
Presumably after exhausting every other field—in my case the scientific modes: science, its tail comes off in your hand like a scared lizard. (“The response to shadow in the common flat-worm is still a puzzle to biologists. Then again, in the laboratory, inside a sealed test-tube the gravitational pull of the tides still obtains, together with the appropriate responses.”)

Yes, he was right, I was going to try and free myself.
“Start”
Koepgen used to say wryly, sharply, lifting his glass, little drops of ouzo spilling on to the cheap exercise book which houses the loose nerve ends of poems which later, at dead of night, he would articulate. “Tap Tap, the chick raps on the outer shell in order to free itself—literature! Memory and identity.
Om.”

* * * * *

B
ut before leaving I did what I have so frequently done in the past—paid a visit to Victoria Station, to stand for a while under the clock. A sentimental indulgence this—for the only human fact that I know about my parents was that they met here for the first time. Each had been waiting for someone quite different. The clock decided my fate. It is the axis, so to speak, of my own beginning. (The first clocks and watches were made in the shape of an egg.) Seriously, I have often done this, to spend a moment or two of quiet reflection here: an attempt perhaps to reidentify them among the flux and reflux of pallid faces which seethes eternally about this mnemotopic spot. Here one can eat a dampish Wimpy and
excogitate
on the nature of birth. Well, nothing much comes of this thought, these moments of despairing enquiry. The crowd is still here, but I cannot identify their lugubrious Victorian faces. Yet they belonged I suppose to this amorphous pale collection, essence of the floating face and vote, epitome of the “90 per cent don’t know” in every poll. I had the notion once of inventing something to catch them up, a machine which solidified echoes retrospectively. After all one can still see the light from technically dead stars…. But this was too ambitious.

Perhaps (here comes Nash) I might even trace my obsession with the construction of memory-tools to this incoherent desire to make contact? Of course now they are a commonplace; but when I began to make them the first recording-tools were as much a novelty, as the gramophone appears to have been for primitive African tribes in the ’eighties. So Hippolyta found them, my clumsy old black boxes with their primitive wires and magnets. The development of memory! It led me into strange domains like stenography, for example. It absorbed me utterly and led me to do weird things like learning the whole of
Paradise
Lost
by heart. In the great summer
sweats of this broken-down capital I used to sit at these tasks all night, only pausing to play my fiddle softly for a while, or make elaborate notes in those yellow exercise books. Memory in birds, in mammals, in violinists. Memory and the instincts, so-called. Well, but this leads nowhere I now think; I equipped myself somewhat before my time as a sound engineer. Savoy Hill and later the BBC paid me small sums to supply library stock—Balkan folk-songs for example; a Scots University collected Balkan accents in dialect in order to push forward studies in phonetics. Then while messing about with the structure of the human ear as a sound bank I collided with the firm. Bang.
Om.

Victoria, yes: and thence to the bank to transfer funds to Tahiti. Then to my club to pick up mail and make sure that all the false trails were well and truly laid: paper trails followed by vapour trails traced upon the leafskin of the Italian sky. Then to drift softer than thistledown through the violet-chalky night, skimming over the Saronic Gulf. Charlock on a planned leave-of-absence from the consumer’s world. Second passport in the name of Smith.

As might have been expected I caught a glimpse of one of the firm’s agents hanging about the airport, but he was not interested in the night-passengers, or was waiting for someone else, and I was able without difficulty to sneak into the badly lit apron where the creaking little bus waited to carry me north to the capital.

The taste of this qualified freedom is somewhat strange still; I feel vaguely at a loss, like a man must who hears the prison doors close on his release after serving a long sentence. (If time had a watermark like paper one could perhaps hold it up to the light?) I quote.

Yet the little hotel, it is still here. So is the room—but absolutely unchanged. Look, here are the ink stains I made on the soiled marble mantelpiece. The bed with its dusty covers is still hammock-shaped. The dents suggest that Iolanthe has risen to go to the bathroom. In the chipped coffin of the enamel bath she will sit soaping her bright breasts. I am delighted to find this point of vantage from which to conduct my survey of the past, plan the future, mark time.

Iolanthe, Hippolyta, Caradoc … the light of remote stars still giving off light without heat. How relative it seems from Number Seven, the little matter of the living and the dead. Death is a matter of complete irrelevance so long as the memory umbilicus holds. In the case of Iolanthe not even a characteristic nostalgia would be
permissible
; her face, blown to wide screen size, has crossed the
continents
; a symbol as potent as Helen of Troy. Why here on this bed, in the dark ages of youth…. Now she has become the 18-foot smile.

Junior victims of the Mediterranean
gri gri
were we; learning how to smelt down the crude slag of life. Yes, some memories of her come swaying in sideways as if searching deliberately for “the impacted line which will illumine the broad sway of statement”.

The grooves of the backbone were drilled in a tender white skin which reminded one of the whiteness of Easter candles. On the back of the neck the hair came down to a point, a small tuft of curl. The colouring of Pontus and Thrace are often much lighter than those of metropolitan Greece—vide Hippolyta with her ravenswing darkness and olive eye. No, Io had the greyish green eye and the hair tending towards ash-blonde which were both gifts from Circassia. The sultans used to stock their harems with toys such as these; the choicest colourings were such, lime-green eyes and fine fair curls. Well, anyway, these tricklings through the great dam of the past cannot touch her now—the legendary Iolanthe; she may have forgotten them even, left them to litter the cutting rooms of gaunt studios in the new world. For example, I had trouble to get her to shave under the arms; in common with all girls of her class, the prostitutes of Athens, she believed that men were aroused by an
apeswatch
under each arm. Perhaps they were. Now however when she raises her slender arms on the screen like some bewigged almond tree the pits beneath them are smooth as an auk’s egg.