Point Counter Point (50 page)

Since reading Alverdes and Wheeler I have quite decided that my novelist must be an amateur zoologist. Or, better still, a professional zoologist who is writing a novel in his spare time. His approach will be strictly biological. He will be constantly passing from the termitary to the drawing-room and the factory, and back again. He will illustrate human vices by those of the ants, which neglect their young for the sake of the intoxicating liquor exuded by the parasites that invade their nests. His hero and heroine will spend their honeymoon by a lake, where the grebes and ducks illustrate all the aspects of courtship and matrimony. Observing the habitual and almost sacred ‘pecking order’ which prevails among the hens in his poultry yard—hen A pecking hen B, but not being pecked by it, hen B pecking hen C and so forth—the politician will meditate on the Catholic hierarchy and Fascism. The mass of intricately copulating snakes will remind the libertine of his orgies. (I can visualize quite a good scene with a kind of Spandrell drawing the moral, to an innocent and idealistic young woman, of a serpents’ petting party.) Nationalism and the middle classes’ religious love of property will be illustrated by the male warbler’s passionate and ferocious defence of his chosen territory. And so on. Something queer and quite amusing could be made out of this.

One of the hardest things to remember is that a man’s merit in one sphere is no guarantee of his merit in another. Newton’s mathematics don’t prove his theology. Faraday was right about electricity, but not about Sandemanism. Plato wrote marvellously well, and that’s why people still go on believing in his pernicious philosophy. Tolstoy was an excellent novelist; but that’s no reason for regarding his ideas about morality as anything but detestable, or for feeling anything but contempt for his aesthetics, his sociology and his religion. In the case of scientists and philosophers this ineptitude outside their own line of business isn’t surprising. Indeed, it’s almost inevitable. For it’s obvious that excessive development of the purely mental functions leads to atrophy of all the rest. Hence the notorious infantility of professors and the ludicrous simplicity of the solutions they offer for the problems of life. The same is true of the specialists in spirituality. The profound silliness of saintly people; their childishness. But in an artist there’s less specialization, less one-sided development; consequently the artist ought to be sounder right through than the lopsided man of science; he oughtn’t to have the blind spots and the imbecilities of the philosophers and saints. That’s why a man like Tolstoy is so specially unforgivable. Instinctively you trust him more than you would trust an intellectual or a spiritual specialist. And there he goes perverting all his deepest instincts and being just as idiotic and pernicious as St. Francis of Assisi, or as Kant the moralist (oh, those categorical imperatives! and then the fact that the only thing the old gentleman felt at all deeply about was crystallized fruit!), or Newton the theologian. It puts one on one’s guard, even against those one thinks are probably in the right. Such as Rampion, for example. An extraordinary artist. But right in his views about the world? Alas, it doesn’t follow from the excellence of his painting and writing. But two things give me confidence in his opinions about the problems of living. The first is that he himself lives in a more satisfactory way than anyone I know. He lives more satisfactorily, because he lives more realistically than other people. Rampion, it seems to me, takes into account all the facts (whereas other people hide from them, or try to pretend that the ones they find unpleasant don’t or shouldn’t exist), and then proceeds to make his way of living fit the facts, and doesn’t try to compel the facts to fit in with a preconceived idea of the right way of living (like these imbecile Christians and intellectuals and moralists and efficient business men). The second thing which gives me confidence in his judgment is that so many of his opinions agree with mine, which, apart from all questions of vanity, is a good sign, because we start from such distant points, from opposite poles in fact. Opinions on which two opponents agree (for that’s what essentially, and to start with, we are: opponents) have a fair chance of being right. The chief difference between us, alas, is that his opinions are lived and mine, in the main, only thought. Like him, I mistrust intellectualism, but intellectually I disbelieve in the adequacy of any scientific or philosophical theory, any abstract moral principle, but on scientific, philosophical and abstract-moral grounds. The problem for me is to transform a detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred. The theme was developed by Burlap in one of those squelchy emetic articles of his. And there’s a good deal of truth in it, in spite of Burlap. (Here we are, back again among the personalities. The thoroughly contemptible man may have valuable opinions, just as the in some ways admirable man can have detestable opinions. And I suppose, parenthetically, that I belong to the first class—though not so completely, I hope, as Burlap and in a different way.) Many intellectuals, of course, don’t get far enough to reach the obvious again. They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will. You’ve got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the nonintellectuals have always remained. And one must hasten to make it clear that these nonintellectuals aren’t the modern canaille who read the picture papers and listenin and jazz and are preoccupied with making money and having the awful modem ‘good time.’ No, no; one isn’t paying a compliment to the hardheaded business man or the low-brow. For, in spite of their stupidity and tastelessness and vulgarity and infantility (or rather because of all these defects), they aren’t the nonintellectuals I’m talking about. They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted—that there’s an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather
is
the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive and emotional part of man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable. The low-brow of our modern industrialized society has all the defects of the intellectual and none of his redeeming qualities. The nonintellectuals I’m thinking of are very different beings. One might still find a few of them in Italy (though Fascism has probably turned them all into bad imitations of Americans and Prussians by this time); a few perhaps in Spain, in Greece, in Provence. Not elsewhere in modern Europe. There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago. But the combined efforts of Plato and Artistotle, Jesus, Newton and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn’t of course the same as the obvious of the nonintellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don’t have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.

Being with Rampion rather depresses me; for he makes me see what a great gulf separates the knowledge of the obvious from the actual living of it. And oh, the difficulties of crossing that gulf! I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life—the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism—is its easiness. It’s the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. It’s incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology, than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one’s fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one’s friends and lovers, one’s wife and children. Living’s much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children—and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don’t die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it’s much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That’s why (among other reasons) there’s such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. Some drown their sorrows in alcohol, but still more drown them in books and artistic dilettantism; some try to forget themselves in fornication, dancing, movies, listening-in, others in lectures and scientific hobbies. The books and lectures are better sorrow-drowners than drink and fornication; they leave no headache, none of that despairing
post coitum triste
feeling. Till quite recently, I must confess, I took learning and philosophy and science—all the activities that are magniloquently lumped under the title of ‘The Search for Truth’—very seriously. I regarded the Search for Truth as the highest of human tasks and the Searchers as the noblest of men. But in the last year or so I have begun to see that this famous Search for Truth is just an amusement, a distraction like any other, a rather refined and elaborate substitute for genuine living; and that Truth-Searchers become just as silly, infantile and corrupt in their way as the boozers, the pure aesthetes, the business men, the Good-Timers in theirs. I also perceived that the pursuit of Truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favourite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality. But seeking Truth is much easier than learning the art of integral living (in which, of course, Truth-Seeking will take its due and proportionate place along with the other amusements, like skittles and mountain-climbing). Which explains, though it doesn’t justify, my continued and excessive indulgence in the vices of informative reading and abstract generalization. Shall I ever have the strength of mind to break myself of these indolent habits of intellectualism and devote my energies to the more serious and difficult task of living integrally? And even if I did try to break these habits, shouldn’t I find that heredity was at the bottom of them and that I was congenitally incapable of living wholly and harmoniously?

John Bidlake and his third wife had never definitely or officially parted company. They simply didn’t see one another very often, that was all. The arrangement suited John very well. He hated everything in the nature of a fuss, and he was the enemy of every definite and irrevocable contract. Any arrangement that bound him down, that imposed responsibilities and kept him in mind of duties, was intolerable to him. ‘God knows what I should have done,’ he used to say,’ if I’d had to go to an office every day, or get work done by a certain date. I think I should have run amok after a few months of it.’ Of marriage he had always consistently disapproved. Unfortunately, however, he could not have all the women he wanted without marriage. He had had to enter into no less than three of what he called, in Ciceronian language, ‘those inopportune and obscene compacts.’ The idea of divorce or an official separation was hardly less disagreeable to him than that of marriage; it was too definite, it committed you. Why not leave things to settle themselves, instead of trying to give an arbitrary shape to them? The ideal was to live, emotionally and socially speaking, from hand to mouth—without plans, without a status, in good company of one’s own daily choosing, not the choosing of others or of some dead self. ‘Sleeping around’—that was how he had heard a young American girl describe the amorous side of the ideal life, as lived in Hollywood. Its other aspects might be lumped under the head of ‘waking around.’ The unideal life, the life which John Bidlake had always refused to lead, was that which consisted of waking and sleeping not ‘around,’ but definitely here or there, day after day, according to a fixed foreseeable schedule that only death, or at the least the act of God or the king’s enemies, could alter.

With his third wife John Bidlake’s relations were, and had been for years, most satisfyingly indefinite. They did not live together, but they were not separated. They rarely communicated, but they had never quarrelled. John had been sleeping and waking ‘around’ for upwards of twenty years, and yet they met, whenever they
did
meet, on friendly terms; and if ever he desired to refresh his memories of the landscape of the northern Chilterns, his arrival at Gattenden was accepted without comment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The arrangement entirely suited John Bidlake; and, to do him justice, he was grateful to his wife for making it possible. He refrained, however, from expressing his gratitude; for to have done so would have been to comment on the arrangement; and a comment would have brought a touch of destructive definition into a situation whose fragile excellence consisted precisely in its virgin and beautifully unsullied vagueness. Few women, as her husband gratefully recognized, would have been willing or even able to preserve the indefiniteness of the situation so chronically inviolate as Janet Bidlake. Another wife would have demanded explanations, would have wanted to know where she stood, would have offered the irrevocable choice of peace or war, life in common or separation. But Mrs. Bidlake had permitted her husband to fade out of their married life without a quarrel, with hardly a word. And his brief spasmodic re-entries were accepted by her with as little comment. She had been from childhood more at home in the fictitious world of her invention than in the real. As a little girl she had had an imaginary sister who lived in the signal-box by the level crossing. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, her inability to distinguish between the testimony of her senses and that of her fancy had often resulted in her being punished for lying. Pictures and books gave a new turn to her imagining, which became less personal and more classically artistic, literary and speculative. From sixteen onwards she was an inhabitant of the country of art and letters and was little more than a reluctant stranger in mere England. It was because she had imagined John Bidlake a spiritual compatriot that she had fallen in love with him—artistically, poetically in love—and consented to become his wife. Her parents, who considered him only as a fellow-subject of the Queen and attached more importance, in the circumstances, to his career as a husband than as an artist, did their best to dissuade her. But Janet was of age and had the obstinacy of those who can simply retire from the plane on which the argument is taking place, leaving the opponent to waste his energy on a mere untenanted body. She ended by doing what she wanted. When she discovered, as she discovered only too soon, that there was very little connection between the admirable artist she had loved and the husband she had married, Janet Bidlake was restrained by a very natural pride from complaining. She had no wish to give her relations the pleasure of saying, ‘I told you so.’ John slept and woke ‘around,’ faded more and more completely out of conjugality. She held her peace and herself retired for consolation into those regions of artistic and literary fancy, where she was native and felt most at home. A private income, supplemented by the irregular and fluctuating contributions which John Bidlake made whenever he remembered or felt he could afford to support a wife and family, allowed her to make a habit of this foreign travel of the imagination. Elinor was born a year after their marriage. Four years later an ulcerated stomach brought John Bidlake home, a temporarily reformed character, to be nursed. Walter was the result of his still domestic convalescence. The ulcers healed, John Bidlake faded away again. Nurses and governesses looked after the children. Mrs. Bidlake superintended their upbringing dimly and as though from a distance. From time to time she swooped across the border dividing her private country from the world of common fact; and her interferences with the quotidian order of things had always a certain disconcerting and almost supernatural quality. Incalculable things were liable to happen whenever she descended, a being from another plane’ and judging events by other standards than those of the common world, into the midst of the children’s educational routine. Once, for example, she dismissed a governess because she had heard her playing Dan Leno’s song about the Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg on the schoolroom piano. She was a good girl, taught well and supported a paralytic father. But great artistic principles were at stake. Elinor’s musical taste might be irretrievably ruined (incidentally Elinor resembled her father in detesting music); and the fact that she was very fond of Miss Dempster made the danger of contamination even greater. Mrs. Bidlake was firm. ‘The Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg’ could not be permitted. Miss Dempster was sent away. When he heard the news, her old father had another stroke and was picked up blind in one eye and unable to speak. But Mrs. Bidlake’s returns from imaginative travel were generally less serious in their results. When she interfered with the practical business of her children’s upbringing, it was usually only to insist that they should read classical authors usually considered incomprehensible or unsuitable for the very young. Children, it was her theory, should be brought up only with the very best in the way of philosophy and the arts. Elinor had had
Hamlet
read to her when she was three, her picture-books were reproductions of Giotto and Rubens. She had been taught French out of
Candide
, had been given
Tristram
Shandy and Bishop Berkeley’s
Theory of Vision
when she was seven, Spinoza’s
Ethics
, Goya’s etchings and, as a German text-book,
Also sprach Zarathustra
when she was nine. The result of this premature introduction to the best philosophy was to produce in Elinor that slightly amused contempt for the grand abstractions and highfaluting idealisms, which had come to be so characteristic of her. Brought up at the same time on the unexpurgated classics, she had acquired in childhood a complete theoretical knowledge of all those matters which it is thought least suitable for the young to know. This knowledge had reinforced rather than tempered the coldness and practical incuriosity about all amorous matters which were natural to her; and she had grown up in a state of well-informed and superficially cynical innocence, like one of those Shakespearean heroines, whose scientific and Rabelaisian speech accompanies actions of the most delicately virtuous refinement. Mrs. Bidlake was a little distressed by Elinor’s irreverent attitude towards her cherished fancies; but, wise in her way, she did not comment, did not try to reform, only ignored and retired, as she had ignored her husband’s shortcomings, had retired from the realization of them into the happier realms of art and imagination. There can be no cancellation of accomplished facts; but for practical purposes a conspiracy of silence is almost as effective as cancellation. Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not. When John Bidlake arrived at Gattenden, a sick man made sicker by dejection, terror and an all-absorbing self-pity, Mrs. Bidlake passed over in silence the fact, upon which she might so easily have commented: that he only came to her when he needed a nurse. His room was made ready, he settled in. It was as though he had never been away. In the privacy of the kitchen the housemaids grumbled a little at the extra work, while Mrs. Inman sighed and Dobbs was massively and Anglicanly indignant over old Mr. Bidlake’s treatment of his wife. At the same time all felt a kind of gloating pity for the old man. His disease and its symptoms were talked of in lowered voices, religiously. Aloud, the servants might grumble and disapprove. But secretly they were all rather pleased. John Bidlake’s arrival broke the daily monotony, and the fact that he was going to die made them all feel somehow more important. To the domesticities of Gattenden his approaching death gave a new significance. That future event was the sun round which the souls of the household now meaningfully and almost stealthily revolved. They might grumble and disapprove, but they looked after him solicitously. In an obscure way they were grateful to him. Dying, he was quickening their life.