Peacocks

In a small town such as the one where I grew up, there are unless you are especially gifted, few opportunities to be engaged by learning, by culture, all that – what a marvellous sight for us, and rare, to see a whole bookshelf full of books, with titles familiar and unfamiliar, where one book would lead you on to another, one after another, until strand is joined to strand in a great luminous web.

Wondrous diwali – wonderful those feasts of light that burned in those houses where full bookshelves were found, or low rows of albums – of jazz and classical music, for we were able to negotiate the worlds of popular music by ourselves. Culture there and all at once – spines turned outward to your look, album sleeves pulloutable and inspectable: lucky those who lived in the worlds of books, or music, and who knew their way in that foreign country.

Curious to visit houses were they were taken for granted, those worlds, and were nothing special to remark upon: yes, there are books, albums, all this …Visiting relatives in the old country, I remember a friend of theirs inviting me to his flat as they had never been invited, to inspect the great rows of books, of albums, and to let me look through them.

Ravel’s songs, I remember them. Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc; Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis. And a book about Greenland – photographs of wintry expanse, and samples of Greenlandish writing – long words, very long, and not, to the eye, like Danish. And wasn’t I taken by a percussionist to watch the orchestra rehearse at Tivoli? He showed me the branches he used to perform one symphony or another by Nielsen.

And I think it must have been that summer when, walking around Humlebaek I listened to Sibelius on my personal stereo – taped from an album given to me by another friend whose flats were lined with books, with albums …

Culture, that world, books and music and ideas – conversations that were linear, and were not scattered in all directions. Witty conversations, too. And moments when, all of a sudden, attention would turn to you and you were to shine, as though you were the repository of all hope.

For they were older than me and felt themselves to belong to a vanishing world? Wasn’t I to continue what their sons and daughter would not? And so I became an heir of sorts, and there was shone on me the whole light of their attention. Now I could let them speak of the great decline they felt was taking place around them. Weren’t their books and records shored against a world which I did not quite occupy?

Much later, an old friend of mine from those times (from those circles) found herself living in the big house of a professor, a teacher and their family. She was a guest there, and for some months (a year? how long?). And she told me, in her room, sitting on the round-backed whicker chair that she felt she’d cheated her way into another world.

Wasn’t she happy there? She was – the new daughter in a house where there were only sons. A daughter – they redecorated a room for her, and I was allowed to stay, now and again, a favoured guest for they thought, the parents, that I was part of a world to which they should convey their houseguest.

For how long was she there? I remember conversations around the great table in the dining room, where each would have a turn to speak, and each, in that turn, would have to shine somehow. I was glad to have read some popular accounts of physics, for that was one topic at the table that night – and wasn’t I congratulated for drawing the father, who never said much, into animated conversation (a beachball tossed between us)?

I think it was on that visit, or was it the next one, that I was deemed a suitable son-in-law for the new daughter, and weren’t we sad, my friend and I that that could never be! The evening – either that night or another – tore itself apart. It was not our world, or the price of its admittance was too high.

She, for her part, was not attracted to men: didn’t they know that? They knew, but perhaps they hoped for something else. Hope for her, for the life to which I was to convey her. It was a benign hope, a loving hope, but that evening was torn down the middle, she leaving the table suddenly to go up to her room, and I, who had noticed that (where else was the centre of my attention? Nowhere else, not ever) spoke on, to deny there was a tear.

Not long after, she left, but not before, one afternoon, we watched Mirror together, she wrapped in her duvet, and then after, took me round the garden of that vast house, with its iron gates, its lawn. The mother, we remembered later, wanted her sons to be creative – everyone must create, that was the imperative. This was beautiful, but they were rich, or so they seemed to us – rich and their lives had begun to flower in the 60s, when there were jobs for those with degrees, and large houses to be bought by them for little.

And who were we, who hardly belonged to that world, and had to make our own way in dimmer times? I think I dreamt of finding conversation as I would read of it in books – light, airy, where each, confidently, let what they said lift into the air – where everyone kept the conversation buoyant, bouncing it wittily between them like a beachball.

And in the meantime? There were at least books in which such conversation bounced. And didn’t I come to prefer zipping my fleece up to the top and going around like anyone else, speaking to say little, giving nothing in particular away and only falling back occasionally into the world that seemed to announce itself then, when I was young and full of hope?

It is true I resist them now, what friends of that time are still alive because they cannot be like anyone else, their great peacock tails fanned out: culture: their entitlement: it is marvellous, but these are different times, and who can speak of creativity now? You need a big house for that, and iron gates to keep the world away.

Meantime – and there is only the meantime, the time between – there is the sober business of living amidst the great collapse, knowing the world went mad some years ago. Isn’t it enough to find a few hours of the day to set against that madness, and friends to laugh at it with?

Reading Bourdieu much later I realised that what we found then in books, in music was a mark of distinction – a cultural capital was necessary to make of our retreat from a world we disliked a kind of jewelled cave. All the jewels of culture should be stowed there, shining. We knew we were in retreat, but it was a marvellous one. Books around you – albums –

Nowadays my flat is bare, or nearly so, and I got rid of those thousands of collected jewels. Happiness, but this is perhaps because I did find my way eventually into a world where such jewels are alive between us, that it is even ordinary to speak, if not of what was once regarded as canonical, then of the world they were once deemed to occupy.

A vanished world, an empty cupboard – I like this revenge we have taken on our youth and our youthful dreams; I like our new politicised realism. That world is torn, and wasn’t it always thus? We’re outside the iron gates, and in the world. Now and again, a peacock’s feather will remind you of those who seemed once to belong to a vanishing world – of the heirs we were, that we might have been.

Somewhere, I know hundreds and hundreds of books will be left to me. Hardbacked collected works – literature, in English, from all ages, stacked in a flat whose walls are shelves, and where in the lounge, there is even a smaller set of shelves, until there are only two seats on which to sit, right at the centre, but only if you lift the books from them first.

When I visit I turn the pages of the new books he has found. It is marvellous, always marvellous. But the arms of the clock in that same room have not moved for many years. Once, there were held mock concerts there, LP recordings of old 78s, so you could hear Sibelius conducting Sibelius, and mock programme notes and even an interval, with drinks – Aqua libra on a metal tray.

You were to listen in silence. I was a school leaver, lost in the world. Here, in a teacher’s flat was still something to learn, great bookshelves reaching into the sky, box sets of operas lined up alphabetically, new books piled all around. Wasn’t it there I was read The Man With The Blue Guitar – read, and the whole thing: that was welcome. And Sunday Morning! And The Emperor of Ice Cream!

There was an edition of Steven’s letters to look through. A few hardbacked Ivy Compton Burnetts. The old world, the marvellous world as in a spread wide peacock’s tail. Curious, years later to stay on a farm were the peacocks were pests, coming begging for breakfast, with their tiny heads and massive, scaly feet. Not suited for the world, not really.

And was I? Were we, because there were always a few of us gathered at this house or that, back then in our small town. Wanting – what? To share in a life that was moving away – did we sense it? Or perhaps, as I sometimes feel, it has moved nowhere, and it was that the likes of us were to be excluded.

We were admitted for a time – a golden summer – and then, I think, the door was closed. Or was it, for a whole period, the 60s, the 70s, the door was open wider than it would be again, and they, too, our hosts, found their way into the enchanted kingdom?

I will say for myself that I never felt entitled to that kingdom, not really – and that I do not today. I was not permitted that identification; I was never given body and soul as I imagine, or hosts were. Or perhaps this, too, is a phantasm, that I speak as one committed as they never were and never had to be, they for whom culture and art was the aether in which they moved as if through clouds of perfume.

Did they need to make the slightest effort? Were they not always natural heirs to a kingdom that will be forever theirs? But now there bubbles up in me a kind of dull resentment: why isn’t it mine what was theirs? And isn’t it my resentful kind who will inherit the kingdom, smashing their way through the museums and shouting in the concert halls?

But resentment is just a petty dependency on what one affects to despise. Perhaps the peacocks still stalk about untouched; perhaps there are less of them now, and growing fewer, and soon there will only be one, dragging its tail, disconsolate.

Finishing Henry Green’s Pack My Bag, I know I should never like to write of that uncertain time when the gates seemed to open and full bookshelves made me full of hope. One never likes to have been naive. With whose dreams was I burning? Whose lit torch was I?

Perhaps Bourdieu would say it was to separate myself from others that I went through those gates – to render myself distinct, gathering feathers for my own peacock’s tail. And no doubt for others I was a peacock as those hosts had been for me, and still am, although I vow to give books to those who want them rather than let them stand tall on bookshelves, rearing up as the whole of Culture rears in them, a thousand horses.

Nowadays we all wear zipped up fleeces, and our books lie in careless piles, and none of us are experts, and none of us is young. How I have loved to read Green and Woolf and Lawrence! How it was that those books seemed, by their very existence, to fan out a miracle! Wasn’t that always my excuse for my unwillingness to judge: that it was enough that there were books and that there were writers: that this already was enough?

Years ago, I lent you Mirror and you lost it, my treasured tape, and then forgot I even lent it. Then, years later, but still years ago, you gave me a bought copy and not one taped from the TV one enchanted Valentine’s Day when we wanted to feel that you liked men. We met on a deserted campus – do you remember? No: I am the one who was given to remember, I am the archivist in whose memory there are still peacocks and a house with iron gates and your redecorated room with a high round-backed whicker chair.