Authors: Christopher Isherwood
Grant Lefanu’s heroism, on this occasion, consisted in
his defence of the book at the risk of his academic neck. For a very important and senior member of the STSC faculty had previously appeared as a witness for the prosecution and had guaranteed the book dirty, degenerate and dangerous. When Grant was called to the stand and cross-examined by the prosecuting attorney he begged, with his shy smile, to differ from his colleague. At length, after some needling and after having been cautioned three times to speak up, he blurted out a statement to the effect that it wasn’t the book, but its attackers who deserved the three adjectives. To make matters worse, one of the local liberal columnists gleefully reported all of this, casting the senior faculty-member as a reactionary old ass and Grant as a bright young upholder of civil liberty, and twisting his testimony into a personal insult. So now the question is, will Grant get his tenure prolonged at the end of the academic year?
Grant treats George as a fellow-subverter, a compliment which George hardly deserves, since, with his seniority, his licence to play the British eccentric and, in the last resort, his little private income, he can afford to say pretty much anything he likes on campus. Whereas poor Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.
‘What’s new?’ George asks him, implying: What has the Enemy been up to?
‘You know those courses for police students? Today a special man from Washington is addressing them on twenty ways to spot a commie.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Want to go? We might ask him some awkward questions.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Four-thirty.’
‘Can’t. I’ve got to be downtown in an hour.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Too bad,’ George agrees, relieved. He isn’t absolutely sure if this was a bona fide dare or not, however. Various other times, in the same half-serious tone, Grant has suggested that they shall go and heckle a John Birch Society meeting, smoke pot in Watts with the best unknown poet in America, meet someone high up in the Black Muslim movement. George doesn’t seriously suspect Grant of trying to test him. No doubt Grant really does do such things now and then, and it simply does not occur to him that George might be scared. He probably thinks George excuses himself from these outings for fear of being bored.
As they move down the counter, ending up with only coffee and salad – George watches his weight and Grant has an appetite as slender as his build – Grant tells about a man he knows who has been talking to some experts at a big firm which makes computers. These experts say that it doesn’t really matter if there’s a war, because enough people will survive to run the country with. Of course, the people who survive will tend to be those with money and influence, because they’ll have the better type of shelter, not the leaky death-traps which a lot of crooks have been offering at bargain prices. When you get your shelter built, say the experts, you should go to at least three different contractors, so nobody will know what it is you’re building; because, if the word gets around that you have a better-type shelter, you’ll be mobbed at the first emergency. For the same reason, you ought to be
realistic and buy a sub-machine-gun. This is no time for false sentiment.
George laughs in an appropriately sardonic manner, since this is what Grant expects of him. But this gallows-humour sickens his heart. In all those old crises of the twenties, the thirties, the war – each one of them has left its traces upon George, like an illness – what was terrible was the fear of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival. Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will be quite natural for Mr Strunk to gun down Grant and his wife and three children, because Grant has neglected to lay in sufficient stores of food and they are starving and may therefore possibly become dangerous and this is no time for sentiment.
‘There’s Cynthia,’ Grant says, as they re-enter the dining-room. ‘Want to join her?’
‘Do we have to?’
‘I guess so.’ Grant giggles nervously. ‘She’s seen us.’
And indeed Cynthia Leach is waving to them. She is a handsome young New Yorker, Sarah Lawrence-trained, the daughter of a rich family. Maybe it was partly to annoy them that she recently married Leach, who teaches history here. But their marriage seems to work quite well. Though Andy is slim and white-skinned, he is no weakling; his eyes sparkle sexily and he has the unaggressive litheness of one who takes a great deal of exercise in bed. He is somewhat out of his league socially, but no doubt he enjoys the extra effort required to keep up with Cynthia. They give parties to which everyone comes because the food and drink are lavish, thanks to Cynthia’s money, and Andy is popular anyhow and
Cynthia isn’t that bad. Her only trouble is that she thinks of herself as an Eastern aristocrat slumming; she tries to be patrician and is merely patronising.
‘Andy stood me up,’ Cynthia tells him. ‘Talk to me.’ Then, as they sit down at her table, she turns to Grant. ‘Your wife’s never going to forgive me.’
‘Oh?’ Grant laughs with quite extraordinary violence.
‘She didn’t tell you about it?’
‘Not a word!’
‘She didn’t?’ Cynthia is disappointed. Then she brightens, ‘Oh, but she
must
be mad at me! I was telling her how hideously they dress the children here.’
‘But she agreed with you, I’m sure. She’s always talking about it.’
‘They’re being cheated out of their childhood,’ Cynthia says, ignoring this. ‘They’re being turned into
junior consumers
! All those dreadful dainty little creatures, wearing lipstick! I was down in Mexico last month. It was like a breath of fresh air. Oh, I can’t tell you! Their children are so real. No anxiety. No other-direction. They just bloom —’
‘The only question is —’ Grant begins. Obviously, he is starting not to agree with Cynthia. For this very reason, he mumbles, he can barely be heard. Cynthia chooses not to hear him.
‘And then that night we came back across the border! Shall I ever forget it! I said to myself, either these people are insane or I am. They all seemed to be
running
, the way they do in the old silent newsreels. And the
hostess
in the restaurant – it had never struck me before how truly sinister it is to call them that. The way she
smiled
at us! And those enormous menus, with nothing on them that was
really edible. And those weird zombie busboys, bringing nothing but glasses of
water
and simply refusing to speak to you! I just could not believe my own eyes. . . . Oh, and then we stayed the night at one of these ghastly new motels. I had the feeling that it had only just been brought from some place else, some factory, and set up exactly one minute before we arrived. It didn’t belong
anywhere
. I mean – after all those marvellous old hotels in Mexico – each one of them is really a
place
– but this was just utterly unreal —’
Again, Grant seems about to attempt some kind of a protest. But this time his mumbling is still lower. Even George can’t understand him. George takes a big drink of his coffee, feels the kick of it in his nearly empty stomach, and finds himself suddenly high. ‘Really, Cynthia my dear!’ he hears himself exclaim. ‘How can you talk such incredible nonsense?’
Grant giggles with astonishment. Cynthia looks surprised but rather pleased. She is the kind of bully who likes being challenged; it soothes the itch of her aggression.
‘Honestly! Are you out of your mind?’ George feels himself racing down the runway; becoming smoothly, exhilaratingly airborne. ‘My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set foot in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk!
Unreal!
American motels are unreal! My good girl – you know and I know that our motels are deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use that idiotic jargon, for the very simple reason that an American motel-room isn’t
a
room in
an
hotel, it’s
the
Room, definitively, period. There is only one;
The Room
. And it’s a symbol –
an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like – for our way of life. And what’s our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you’ve got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. . . . The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We’ve reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that’s the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can’t ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the Europeans call us inhuman – or they prefer to say immature, which sounds ruder – because we’ve renounced their world of individual differences, and romantic inefficiency, and objects-for-the-sake-of-objects. All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines. Naturally, they never give up, they keep trying to subvert us, every moment, with their loathsome cult-propaganda. If they ever succeed, we’ll be done for. That’
s
the kind of subversion the Un-American Activities Committee
ought
to be investigating. . . . The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained – and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out, “these people are zombies!”. They’ve got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are
able to live like this because, actually, they’re a far far more advanced culture – five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter. Essentially, we’re creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That’s why we’re completely at home with symbols like the American Motel-Room. Whereas the European has a horror of symbols because he’s such a grovelling little materialist —’
Some moments before the end of this wild word-flight, George has seen, as it were from a great altitude, Andy Leach enter the dining-room. Which is indeed a lucky deliverance, for already George has felt his engines cut out, felt himself losing thrust. So now, with the skill of a veteran pilot, he swoops down to a perfect landing. And the beauty of it is, he appears to stop talking out of mere politeness, because Andy has reached their table.
‘Did I miss something?’ Andy asks, grinning.
A performer at the circus has no theatre-curtain to come down and hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, unsparkling, unfollowed by spotlights yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him – they are all watching the clowns – he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds him any more. Very few spare him a single glance.
Together with this anonymity, George feels a fatigue come over him which is not disagreeable. The tide of his vitality is ebbing fast, and he ebbs with it, content. This is a way of resting. All of a sudden, he is much, much
older. On his way out to the parking-lot he walks differently, with less elasticity, moving his arms and his shoulders stiffly. He slows down. Now and then, his steps actually shuffle. His head is bowed. His mouth loosens and the muscles of his cheeks sag. His face takes on a dull dreamy placid look. He hums queerly to himself, with a sound like bees around a hive. From time to time, as he walks, he emits quite loud prolonged farts.
The hospital stands tall on a sleepy by-passed hill, rising from steep lawns and flowering bushes, within sight of the freeway itself. A tall reminder to the passing motorists –
this is the end of the road, folks
– it has a pleasant aspect, nevertheless. It stands open to all the breezes; and there must be many of its windows from which you can see the ocean and the Palos Verdes headland and even Catalina Island, in the clear winter weather.
The nurses at the reception-desk are pleasant, too. They don’t fuss you with a lot of questions. If you know the number of the room you want to visit, you don’t even have to ask for their permission; you can go right up.
George works the elevator himself. At the second floor it is stopped and a coloured male nurse wheels in a prone patient. She is for surgery, he tells George, so they must descend again to the ground floor where the operating rooms are. George offers respectfully to get off the elevator but the young nurse (who has very sexy muscular arms) says, ‘You don’t have to’, so there he stands, like a spectator at the funeral of a stranger, furtively peeking at the patient. She appears to be fully
conscious, but it would be a kind of sacrilege to speak to her; for already she is the dedicated, the ritually prepared victim. She seems to know this and consent to it; to be entirely relaxed in her consent. Her grey hair looks so pretty; it must have been recently waved.
This is the gate, George says to himself.
Must I pass through here, too?
Ah, how the poor body recoils with its every nerve from the sight, the smell, the feel of this place! Blindly it shies, rears, struggles to escape. That it should ever be brought here – stupefied by their drugs, pricked by their needles, cut by their little knives – what an unthinkable outrage to the flesh! Even if they were to cure it and release it, it could never forget, never forgive. Nothing would be the same, any more. It would have lost all faith in itself.