Everyone talks about everything, I said to H., everything is up for grabs. There’s everything to be said and nothing that cannot be talked about. They put questions to me, I said to H. They ask me things and I am meant to reply like an expert. I am meant to have an opinion on what divides madness from badness, or on animal rights – I am meant to speak first of all, and to speak on everything. To speak in the calm voice of the expert – assured, speaking for reason, speaking for all, and making arguments for anyone to follow and understand. Sure, I can make a show of my own doubts and hesitations, I said to H., I can proclaim my modesty and my lack of expertise on this or that, but I should be able to speak, I said, and that first of all. To discourse on this topic and then that, on the immortality of the soul and the origins of mathematics – to speak of all and for all, to give voice to what would divide this from that, the reasonable from the unreasonable. I am made to speak, I said to H., but I cannot speak – I will not. I have hardly anything to say, it is true, I was never any good at debating – I lack the skills, the speed, the memory; I am not quick.
They listen, I said to H., and I am meant to speak – I protest, they take my protests for false modesty and I know required of me is to join what I say to the speech of experts, to take my place in the virtual community of wise men and wise women and the community of those united in taste, for whom music means Schubert and literature Dickens, for whom there is only decline, and the twentieth century is a long sorry episode. How assured they are! How tranquil! We are in decline and they love decline. We are in twilight and they love the twilight. But really, they say of wild moods and turbulence, isn’t it all a bit much – a bit – French? We don’t have to be like them, do we? And I am supposed to smile and say, why of course not! Thinking to myself: what is meant by them, by us?
And when these men finally discover film when they finally admit televisions into their houses, it is the golden age of Hollywood they love – they protest about the decline of script and story and stars and speak of Now, Voyager and Bringing Up Baby. But I still keep my place among them, I said to H., there’s still in me that conditioned reflex which allows me to join them in speaking of decline and going-under, the twilight and the coming end. No doubt it is because they represent to me the opposite of the world from I wrenched myself, I said. No doubt there is still too much reverence in me, and thankfulness for the teachers and educators who picked me up and gave me home among their books. Yes, I benefitted from their generosity; they gave me a great deal; I was their charge. There’s no doubt of this, and I am thankful. And what they expected from me was to speak with them of decline, of a horrible sensationalism and the decline of verse. I was supposed to speak of the novel’s end and music’s end and the horror of pop and the esotericism of Boulez and the unlistenability of Messiaen, I said.
So we spoke, my benefactors and I, over the nights, over the weeks, over the years, one armchair facing another, one man speak to another, one older, one younger – one assured, resting in all the weight of culture, cradled by it, content in his taste and his discernment, certain and fluent, the other without a word of his own in his mouth. So we spoke together in their flat-mausoleums to faded culture – or rather, they spoke, I listened – they discoursed, I studied, he held forth and I was the echo chamber of their words. They spoke on the immortality of the soul and the clash of civilisations, on the ethical challenges of stem-cell research and on Dryden’s neglected dramas. They spoke of the inability of anyone to read – ‘they haven’t the skill’ – or to pick up this or that Biblical reference or Homeric reference.
Always the decline, I said to H., always the great going under. So I listened, and the embers burnt on the imitation fire and they educator nodded and approved when I nodded and approved. ‘Quite’, you learnt to say; ‘quite so’ – just like Socrates’s interlocutors ‘yes, Socrates’. The evening passes in a million ‘quites’. And in the corner of the room, volume turned down, the television showed some TV show. As a kind of temptation. So they could rest in the contentment that I could only watch it, like them, with disgust – that I now had good taste enough to be inoculated from Friday night television.
But they were generous, I said to H., understand that. There was a time when the house of books was paradise. The books piled to the ceiling, the piano, the records – the antique clock: all this was paradise when I worked in the world. I would examine each book on the bookshelf – the complete hardback edition of Trollope, two complete editions of Dickens, every reissued Everyman edition – it was marvellous, life itself. And in those hours we would speak and drink Aqua Vitae and I would be played symphonies by composers whose name I had never heard and send me home with gifts of books and music. My pronounciations of French, German and Italian titles would be corrected; librettis would be summarised and this or that pianist would be spoken about in great and generous gusts. How marvellously they could speak, this benefactor, that benefactor! What great gusts of speech! What knowledge! It was splendid to listen, to sit back and listen, to be present at a performance, to be struck dumb with wonder, to have left work and the misery of work and to come to this – this still unvanished world, this island of culture, this demi-paradise of music and books, this cave of a house set back from the wide, vile world.
I’m tired of old men, I said to H. Tired of the end, the endless end – the whole story of a world coming to an end and culture on its last legs and the great collapse and the great barbarism. The other day on the phone to a benefactor I heard myself say: but you don’t understand the conditions under which we work – you don’t see the question is not, why are books so bad?, but what are the conditions of production that determine their badness? I heard myself say: – I’m not defending the modern culture-industry, the modern university; I’m justifying nothing, but you have to see what’s on the end of your fork, how it was made, the conditions of its manufacture. And my benefactor said, surprised at my animation, – I shall think of you as a gladiator in the arena. And I said – yes, that’s how it is, even as I thought to myself, he thinks I’m being touchy, he thinks I believe he’s getting at me. I said, there are no scholarly ladies and gentlemen anymore – oh, perhaps at Oxford, but nowhere else. You can’t compare yourself with us, I said. And thought to myself: he thinks he’s wounded my pride, he who noted my desire to write in what he called brown style and who noted my inability to sustain a written tone – he to whom I sent my book when it came out and who I rang to say: I’m sorry – it’s terrible, I know -.
On the phone, I said, – you really have no idea; you’re not in a position to see. I had to raise my voice to be heard. Had to raise it against the marvellous streaming of a voice that belonged to a world and a culture that was never mine. To raise my barbarous voice against what had taken me in as a barbarian and sent me out, like Kafka’s ape, as something like an educated man – yes, his voice, their voices, the benefactors, the culture-experts, the decline-lamenters, their voice, all speaking as one, their conjoined voice with its plenitude and its mellifluousness, their voice and its confidence. Their one voice and what bore it – the richness of culture in its depth and its breadth, that great marvellous river in which everything was alive, which flowed intact from the Bible and from Homer through all the literature of all Europe and all its music. Their voice fluent in the tounges of Europe, ancient and modern that spoke as though from the other side of the window.
I thought: his old culture has died inside me. What have I to do with that world – what can that world mean to me? I do not inhabit it; it is not my element – what I have learnt I have done so by imitation – my voice is a borrowed voice, my writing style that of the ape who types with too-big fingers. I thought as I spoke: you have Europe, the unity of Europe, it speaks in you, it flows through you, but I am on the other side, in the world and up against the world. You have Europe, jolly, joshing Europe with your laughing knowing mockery of the French and the Germans whose great literatures you know and runs through you! I thought: Europe is all yours, old, old Europe in which you can pass as a traveller would have passed in the late nineteenth century!
I thought, the car parks and the town centre mall are the thick rind that has laid itself on top of the old world. I thought, the company cars pass over the crust that has formed across the face of the old world. I thought, the hi-tech industrial estate is built on ashes. I thought: some writers have seen it. Some writers understand. I said so. – But they were very cultured, says my old friend, my benefactor. ‘They were very cultured’ – yes, yes, but what they endured saw culture turned inside out, saw Europe become ashes and old Europe burnt away, saw death omnipresent and war omnipresent. And they sought to hollow out culture itself, to despise literary depth and literary richness, to loathe the triple-decker novel and the four movement symphony, to paint the wounds and the howling, to film the end of the end. How could I not love what despised what I despised! How could I not love what hated what I hated! – You won’t understand this, I said. You won’t see it, you’re not in the right position. – But you’re not exactly suffering, he said. And I said, – it’s not a question of suffering, but of hatred. And I thought: this is what Britain becomes in me. How contortedly, miserably British I am! How laughably 80s-schooled and 90s-broken British! How marvellously and happily broken! How thirsty for the books and music already baked in the fire to come! I thought, perhaps I understand nothing at all of art, of film, or books. I thought, perhaps they are just for me the opaque screen that is like the concrete rind that has formed across the surface of the earth. I thought, perhaps they are just the door of the world, the one which will not open, but on which are scratched dreams of the fire-to-come, the great revenge, the end of the end.
For the apocalypse is coming, I thought. They’re building robot warriors – think of that! Building robot tanks and drone fighting machines! Old Europe and its poets (‘Europe is unthinkable without its poets’ – Kundera) has gone under. The world is going under. There is the flat plane of the battlefield, and the battlefield will be everywhere. But what apocalypticism is this? Perhaps only the reflex of one who can only resent what he thinks he does not have and does not deserve. Who supposes he will be the cockroach that will survive the new wars. Who thinks, it is nice to be so reduced, so concentrated, and to scuttle under the feet of those who do not see the world has already destroyed itself. Who thinks, the apocalypse is already here, why do they not see it? Who thinks, the books are on fire and the concert halls are on fire, and only that art survives that is already baked to nothing. Who thinks, soon the fire will consume nothing but itself – not a sun, but an anti-sun, and these cockroaches will crawl hard-shelled over its surface, happy in its flames, happy that the world is burning and that they were right all along.
How stupid I am!, I said to H., how foolish! I haven’t understood anything at all, I said. It’s passed me by, all of it, all art, all philosophy. I’m an apocalypticist, I said to H., a resenter. I can only speak in generalisations, only read what is already in my breast, only speak in great dark gusts, mirror image of the men in culture who suppose they live in the twilight of art. I want to think it’s like Alcibiades’ betrayal of Athens, I said, that it’s like Phaedrus’s desecration of the Eleusian mysteries! It is the great betrayal, I said, the great devlishness, fallen angels fighting real angels, the battle around the throne! But in the end, it’s nothing, I said to H., another great gust, another garrulousness. The world is the world is the world, I said to H., think on that. It’s all the same as it was yesterday, the same Morrisons, the same roundabout, the same Kentucky Fried Chicken. We all run up against the same world, I said. The rind is getting too thick, I said, there’s concrete everywhere and nothing hatching. There’s no apocalypse, I said, no great unveiling, and that’s the trouble. The same thing bothers me as my benefactors, I said. In the end we are the same, and the world is the same, and that’s what appals us. Great gusts of conversation and nothing said, I said to H. All I say to you is as nothing, I said. The world is the world is the world, I said. There will be no end just as there was no beginning. It’s Bracknell all over again, I said. The Roman Empire never ended I said.
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