Point Counter Point (62 page)

‘Do you mind,’ said Illidge faintly, ‘if I lie down for a minute. I’m not feeling well.’

It was nearly eleven before Philip Quarles appeared at Sbisa’s. Spandrell saw him as he was entering and beckoned him to the table where he was sitting with Burlap and Rampion. Philip came limping across the room and sat down beside him.

‘I’ve got messages for you,’ said Spandrell, ‘and, what’s more important,’ he felt in his pocket, ‘ the key of your house.’ He handed it over, explaining how he had come into possession of it. If the man knew what had happened in his house that evening… ‘And Elinor’s gone down to Gattenden,’ he went on. ‘She had a telegram. The child doesn’t seem to be well. And she expects you to-morrow.’

‘The devil she does!’ said Philip. ‘But I have at least fifteen engagements. What’s wrong with the boy?’

‘Unspecified.’

Philip shrugged his shoulders. ‘If it had been serious, my mother-in-law wouldn’t have telegraphed,’ he said, yielding to the temptation to say something amusing. ‘She’s like that. She’ll. take a case of double pneumonia with perfect calm and then get terribly excited about a headache or a pain in the belly.’ He interrupted himself to order an omelette and half a bottle of Moselle. Still, Philip reflected, the boy hadn’t been very flourishing these last weeks. He rather wished he hadn’t yielded to the temptation. And what he had said hadn’t really been in the least amusing. Wanting to be amusing—that was his chief literary defect. His books would be much better if he would allow them to be much duller. He sank into a rather gloomy silence.

‘These children!’ said Spandrell. ‘If you will go in for them….’

‘still, it must be wonderful to have a child,’ said Burlap with proper wistfulness. ‘I often wish…’

Rampion interrupted him. ‘It must be still more wonderful to
be
one. When one’s grown up, I mean.’ He grinned.

‘What do you do about
your
children?’ asked Spandrell.

‘As little as I can. Unfortunately they have to go to school. I only hope they won’t learn too much. It’d be really awful if they emerged as little professors stuffed with knowledge, trotting out their smart little abstract generalizations. They probably will. Just to spite me. Children generally do spite their parents. Not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously, because they can’t help it, because the parents have probably gone too far in one direction and nature’s reacting, trying to get back to the state of equilibrium. Yes, yes, I can feel it in my bones. They’ll be professors, the little devils. They’ll be horrid little scientists. Like your friend Illidge,’ he said, turning to Spandrell, who started uncomfortably at the name and was annoyed that he should have started. ‘Horrid little brains that do their best to suppress the accompanying hearts and bowels.’

Spandrell smiled his significant, rather melodramatically-ironic smile. ‘Young Illidge hasn’t succeeded in suppressing his heart and bowels,’ he said. ‘Not by a long chalk.’

‘Of course not. Nobody can suppress them. All that happens in the process is that they’re transformed from living organs into offal. And why are they transformed? In the interests of what? Of a lot of silly knowledge and irrelevant abstractions.’

‘Which are after all quite amusing in themselves,’ said Philip, breaking his silence to come to the rescue of the intellect. ‘Making generalizations and pursuing knowledge are amusements. Among the most entertaining, to my mind.’ Philip went on to develop his hedonistic justification of the mental life. ‘So why be so hard on our little diversions?’ he concluded. ‘You don’t denounce golf; so why should you denounce the sports of the highbrows?’

‘That’s fairly rudimentary, isn’t it?’ said Rampion. ‘The tree shall be known by its fruits. The fruits of golf are either non-existent, harmless or positively beneficial. A healthy liver, for example—that’s a very fine fruit. Whereas the fruits of intellectualism—my God!’ He made a grimace. ‘Look at them. The whole of our industrial civilization—that’s their fruit. The morning paper, the radio, the cinema, all fruits. Tanks and trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mond—fruits again. They’re all the result of the systematically organized, professional intellectualism of the last two hundred years. And you expect me to approve of your amusements? But, I tell you, I prefer bull-fighting. What’s the torture of a few animals and the brutalizing of a few hundred spectators compared to the ruining and befouling and degrading of a whole world? Which is what you highbrows have done since you professionalized and organized your amusements.’

‘Come, come,’ said Philip. ‘The picture’s a little lurid. And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results.’

‘They
are
responsible. Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition. After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane. A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science. He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one, And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration. For of course,’ he added parenthetically, ‘the fruits of your amusements aren’t merely the external apparatus of modern industrial life. They’re an inward decay; they’re infantilism and degeneracy and all sorts of madness and primitive reversion. No, no, I have no patience with your precious amusements of the mind. You’d be doing far less harm if you were playing golf.’

‘But truth?’ queried Burlap, who had been listening to the discussion without speaking. ‘What about truth?

Spandrell nodded approval. ‘Isn’t that worth looking for?’

‘Certainly,’ said Rampion. ‘But not where Philip and his scientific and scholarly friends are looking for it. After all, the only truth that can be of any interest to us, or that we can know, is a human truth. And to discover that, you must look for it with the whole being, not with a specialized part of it. What the scientists are trying to get at is nonhuman truth. Not that they can ever completely succeed; for not even a scientist can completely cease to be human. But they can go some way towards abstracting themselves from the human world of reality. By torturing their brains they can get a faint notion of the universe as it would seem if looked at through nonhuman eyes. What with their quantum theory, wave mechanics, relativity and all the rest of it, they do really seem to have got a little way outside humanity. Well, what the devil’s the good of that?’

‘Apart from the fun of the thing,’ said Philip, ‘the good may be some astonishing practical discovery, like the secret of disintegrating the atom and the liberation of endless supplies of energy.’

‘And the consequent reduction of human beings to absolute imbecility and absolute subservience to their machines,’ jeered Rampion. ‘I know your paradises. But the point for the moment is truth. This nonhuman truth that the scientists are trying to get at with their intellects—it’s utterly irrelevant to ordinary human living. Our truth, the relevant human truth is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they’ve got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the nonhuman truth isn’t merely irrelevant; it’s dangerous. It distracts people’s attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory. For example, it’s an established nonhuman truth—or at least it was established in my young days—that secondary qualities have no real existence. The man who takes that seriously denies himself, destroys the whole fabric of his life as a human being. For human beings happen to be so arranged that secondary qualities are, for them, the only real ones. Deny them and you commit suicide.’

‘But in practice,’ said Philip, ‘nobody does deny them.’

‘Not completely,’ Rampion agreed. ‘Because it can’t be done. A man can’t abolish his sensations and feelings completely without physically killing himself. But he can disparage them after the event. And, in fact, that’s what a great number of intelligent and welleducated people do—disparage the human in the interests of the nonhuman. Their motive’s different from that of the Christians; but the result’s the same. A sort of self-destruction. Always the same,’ he went on with a sudden outburst of anger in his voice. ‘Every attempt at being something better than a man—the result’s always the same. Death, some sort of death. You try to be more than you are by nature and you kill something in yourself and become much less. I’m so tired of all this rubbish about the higher life and moral and intellectual progress and living for ideals and all the rest of it. It all leads to death. Just as surely as living for money. Christians and moralists and cultured aesthetes, and bright young scientists and Smilesian business men—all the poor little human frogs trying to blow themselves up into bulls of pure spirituality, pure idealism, pure efficiency, pure conscious intelligence, and just going pop, ceasing to be anything but the fragments of a little frog—decaying fragments at that. The whole thing’s a huge stupidity, a huge disgusting lie. Your little stink-pot of a St. Francis, for example.’ He turned to Burlap, who protested. ‘Just a little stink-pot,’ Rampion insisted. ‘A silly vain little man trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency there was in him, only succeeding in turning himself into the nasty smelly fragments of a real human being. Going about getting thrills of excitement out of licking lepers! Ugh! The disgusting little pervert! He thinks himself too good to kiss a woman; he wants to be above anything so vulgar as natural healthy pleasure, and the only result is that he kills whatever core of human decency he ever had in him and becomes a smelly little pervert who can only get a thrill out of licking lepers’ ulcers. Not curing the lepers, mind you. Just licking them. For his own amusement. Not theirs. It’s revolting!’

Philip leaned back in his chair and laughed. But Rampion turned on him in a fury.

‘You may laugh,’ he said.

‘But don’t imagine you’re any better, really. You and your intellectual, scientific friends. You’ve killed just as much of yourselves as the Christian maniacs. Shall I read you your programme?’ He picked up the book that was lying beside him on the table and began to turn the pages. ‘I came upon it just now, as I was coming here in the ‘bus. Here we are.’ He began to read, pronouncing the French words carefully and clearly. ‘_Plus un obstacle materiel toutes les rapidites gagnees par la science et la richesse. Pas une tare a l’independance. Voir un crime de lese-moi dans toute frequentation, homme ou pays, qui ne serait pas expressement voulu. L’energie, le recueillement, la tension de la solitude, les transporter dans ses rapports avec de vrais semblables. Pas d’amour peut-etre, mais des amities rares, difficiles, exaltees, nerveuses; vivre comme on revivrait en esprit de detachement, d’inquietude et de revanche_.’ Rampion closed the book and looked up. ‘That’s your programme,’ he said to Philip. ‘Formulated by Marie Leneru in 1901. Very brief and neat and complete. And, my God, what a horror! No body, no contact with the material world, no contact with human beings except through the intellect, no love…’

‘We’ve changed
that
a little since 1901,’ said Philip, smiling.

‘Not really. You’ve admitted promiscuous fornication, that’s all. But not love, not the natural contact and flow, not* the renunciation of mental selfconsciousness, not the abandonment to instinct. No, no. You stick to your conscious will. Everything must be
expressement voulu
, all the time. And the connections must be purely mental. And life must be lived, not as though it were life in a world of living people, but as though it were solitary recollection and fancy and meditation. An endless masturbation, like Proust’s horrible great book. That’s the higher life. Which is the euphemistic name of incipient death. It’s significant, it’s symbolic that that Leneru woman was deaf and purblind. The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth. Poor creature! She had some excuse for spirituality. But the other HigherLifers, the ones who haven’t any physical defect—they’re not so forgivable. They’ve maimed themselves deliberately, for fun. It’s a pity they don’t develop visible hunch-backs or wall-eyes. One would know better who one was dealing with.’

‘Quite,’ said Philip, nodding, and laughed with an affectation of amusement that was meant to cover the embarrassment he felt at Rampion’s references to physical disability. ‘Quite.’ Nobody should think that, because he had a game leg, he didn’t entirely appreciate the justice of Rampion’s remarks about deformity.

The irrelevant loudness of his laugh made Rampion glance questioningly at him. What was up? He couldn’t be bothered to discover.

‘It’s all a damned lie,’ he went on, ‘and an idiotic lie at that—all this pretending to be more than human. Idiotic because it never comes off. You try to be more than human, but you only succeed in making yourself less than human. Always…’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Philip. ‘“We walk on earth and have no need of wings.”’ And suddenly he heard his father’s loud voice saying, ‘I had wings. I had wings’; he saw his flushed face and feverishly pink pyjamas. Ludicrous and deplorable. ‘Do you know who that’s by?’ he went on. ‘That’s the last line of the poem I wrote for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, when I was twenty-one. The subject was “King Arthur,” if I remember rightly. Needless to say I didn’t get the prize. But it’s a good line.’

‘A pity you didn’t live up to it,’ said Rampion, ‘instead of whoring after abstractions. But of course, there’s nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions. He knows by experience how lifedestroying they are. The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride. He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he’s got feet. It’s when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They’re ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other.’