A Test to Destruction (56 page)

That evening Phillip went to London to a meeting of the Parnassus Club in Long Acre. He was accompanied by Julian Warbeck, who insisted on calling at several pubs on the way up. The meeting took place in an upstairs room of a ricketty house. The lecture was on
The
Decadence
of
the
pre-Freudian
Novel,
by John Crowe.

The Chairman was the lady founder of the Club, a doctor’s wife from St. John’s Wood. She began by saying that Mr. Crowe’s powerful, almost—she might say—revolutionary novel as set in Cornwall, the country of his adoption. Mr. Crowe was a genius, from whom a very great deal would be heard in the future. He had been many things in his life, all of which had given him valuable experience; he had also been a policeman, who had resigned from the Force when he saw what brutal suppressions, chicanery, and bullying went on behind the blue lantern. He wrote plays as well as novels. His plays in her opinion were better than Shakespeare’s, because nearer to universal truth of the ordinary man.

Mr. Crowe then rose to speak. He wore a red tie and had an untidy mass of grey hair. Before the war, he said, he had acquired an acre of land on the coast beside a small bay in West Cornwall, where he had built with his own hands a cottage, mathematically a cube. The roof and walls were made of corrugated iron, which he said, he had covered with tar, and so had roused the ire of the
local middle-class nonentities who considered that the country belonged to them by right of their money.

Several people laughed, but he went on, “This was a one-man attempt to strike a blow at bourgeois domination of architecture, to show up the decadent monstrosities of suburban villadom springing up like toadstools along the coast to house retired
petit
bourgeois
urban business gents with no eye for true beauty, but only for the pretty-pretty based on puritanical sex-suppression, the sort of men like a late Lord Mayor of Birmingham, or it might have been Cardiff, who caused a Greek marble figure of a nude woman, on the stairs of the Town Hall, to be draped from the neck downwards in a Kate Greenaway length of material, because, said the Mayor, ‘Every time as my wife cooms up these ’ere stairs to see me in me parlour, she ’as to turn away ’er ’ead for very shame’.”

More laughter. Julian, beside Phillip, began to gnaw his nails, while uttering little grunts of disdain.

“That pot-bellied business gent should have been tarred and feathered,” went on the lecturer, adding that no doubt Freudians would see in his own tarred cottage a symbol of revolt against such materialists. “Perhaps it was! But I left out the feathers!” More laughter.

“We in this Club, as artists—writers, painters, musicians, sculptors, even journalists—have a duty to isolate ourselves from these materialists who now fill Parliament with rows of hard, stupid faces, putting money first, and denying all true expression of the inner life of the people. We need to come back to the simple truths of nature. My cottage, which as I said was inevitably criticised by the local bigwigs, is nevertheless strictly in keeping with the bleak landscape, and the bleaker inhabitants, of West Cornwall. We need not only regional artists, not only regional protests against the invasion of the pretty-pretty, but an attitude of unflinching realism expressing the beauty of stark human truth. For the war has blown to hell all the old fanciful ideas of the pretty-pretty, the romantic nonsense based on sexual inhibition.”

He sipped water.

“During the winter I live in Willesden, and see more beauty in the railway lines from the bridge above the Junction than there is in Tennyson’s ‘haunts of coots and fern——’”

“‘Hern’,” called out Julian, projecting the word meticulously through his front teeth. “‘I come from haunts of coot and hern.’”

“‘Hern’ or ‘fern’, it’s all tripe to me! Anyway, what is ‘hern’?”

“A heron,” said Phillip, thinking that the lecturer wanted to know the answer.

“Perhaps you are thinking of Coutts, the hard-faced banker?” enquired Julian, satirically.

“Order, if you please, at the back!” said the lady who had founded the Club. “In any case, Tennyson is a wishywashy poet. But shall we allow the lecturer to finish what he has to say before we have a discussion? Do go on, please, Mr. Crowe.”

“Yes, as I was saying, I see more beauty in railway lines, mathematically correct, and laid by the sweat of the underpaid worker on whose back the plutocrats live, than in pseudo-lyricalism—the stale old symbols of frustration in wet and squelching walks through a bleak countryside—after which the Georgian poetaster has his muffins and gold-laced slippers by the fire, and then imagines something he has not seen, a mere titivation of his imagination. For the working men and women who live there, or exist there, are condemned to live in primitive conditions, and so they are in a mess, psychologically speaking, where every life is a stone from which when you turn it over lots of filthy little things crawl out, metaphorically speaking. Incest is common, inbreeding has produced idiocy——”

“Speak for yourself,” remarked Julian, in a loud whisper. “Where were you born?”

“No more interruptions from the back
if
you please!” said the Founder.

“I was born in Willesden, if you want to know!” said the lecturer. “Anyway, what has that got to do with what I am saying?”

“Then why don’t you write about Willesden? You and Herr Freud might together turn over some of those beautiful railway sleepers.”

“Mr. Maddison, I really must ask you to tell your guest to leave if he cannot behave himself!”

Phillip did not dare to reply, he was shaking with silent laughter.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” continued John Crowe. “An irregular row of dustbins down a back area of a town holds more beauty for me than a Turner sunset, or all the piffle in J. C. Squire’s umpteenth volume of
The
Georgian
Book
of
Poetry.
Who reads real new literature like T. S. Eliot’s
The
Waste
Land
? Or Wyndham Lewis’s
Tarr
,
and
Blast
?
Who reads James Joyce, or D. H. Lawrence? Or the works of Barbusse or Lenin? Instead, trash reigns, such as the music of a mushroom baronet called Elgar. What is his music but the expression in sound, or rather in noise, of the black top hat, the black frock coat, the black Rolls-Royce, the black hearse, the black-robed priest with his black-bound Bible? To me, they are all outward symbols of ingrowing toe-nails of the mind!”

“Do you include your black-tarred residence in West Cornwall? Or is that a bunion?” asked Julian.

“I treat that remark with the contempt it deserves!” cried the lecturer hotly, “as coming from a bourgeois reactionary. But I shall not attempt to argue with him. Ladies and gentlemen, my point is that all the arts of the Victorian and Edwardian eras were decadent, and it is up to us today to use new forms which are in keeping with the new renaissance. Take painting. I say that the daubings of Lord Leighton are no better and no worse than the Lord Tennyson in his
Idylls
of
the
King
—work only fit for the dustbin, the work of mushroom peers tamed by the hypocritical
haute
bourgeoisie
with their gods of hypocrisy, respectability, and humbug, all based on money, with their overladen tables, over-staffed flunkies, and over-loud jewellery on their wives, concubines, and mistresses! Freud is the answer to these parasites upon the arts! In the future,” he cried, running a hand through thick grey hair, “poetasters and decadents like Tennyson, Swinburne, Francis Thompson, Alfred Austin, Wordsworth, and even Shakespeare himself, with his ragbags of plots, will be seen for what they are, feeble men who were sexually ignorant and certainly decadent, whose works should be put in their proper place, which is a clinical museum, among other exhibits of the dark ages, such as the Iron Virgin of Nurnburg, the thumb-screw, the rack, the—the——”

“Tomahawk,” suggested Julian.

More laughter.

“That remark isn’t so frivolous as the speaker intended, for the tomahawk is equally barbarous with the bomb, the bayonet, and the gas-mask, all symptoms of a hypocritical Christianity, paternal tyranny, and the boiled cabbage with roast cow-beef on Sunday!”

“What about beer?” enquired Julian, as the lecturer sat down.
“Are you for or against beer as a symbol of hypocrisy, respectability and humbug?”

The lecturer popped up again. “I don’t drink beer myself, but I would defend to the death the right of anyone else to drink it if he wants to!”

“Have you finished, Mr. Crowe?” asked the Founder.

“He looks thoroughly finished from here,” declared Julian. “If he ever began,” he added.

“You are a joker, I see,” remarked the Founder, “and do not take Literature seriously. Fellow members, we have listened to Mr. Crowe I am sure with great interest, and some of you will be wanting to give us the benefit of your views, no doubt.”

Julian stood up. He had arrived with seven or eight pints in him, and had passed, in the process of assimilation, from scoffing to humorous-truculent mood.

“I have listened with growing amazement to the dismal cawings of Mr. Crowe, and I have three observations to make. One. When Mr. Crowe uses the metaphor of
ragbag
to describe Shakespeare’s plots, I can only regret that the corvine and carnivorous lecturer has no ear for music.

“Two. This disciple of Freud has had the infernal impudence to suggest that Swinburne is not only not a true poet, but that he is decadent and
bourgeois.
I can only say that I have never heard such infernal impudence combined with such utter bosh ever before in my life, and the sooner the lecturer buys a pair of nail-scissors and tackles his own spiritual feet, and then puts himself and all his works in one of his beautiful dustbins, the better it will be for the world in general and this club in particular, otherwise it has no hope for today, let alone for tomorrow.

“My third and last point. The speaker is himself an example of the common
petit
bourgeoise
non-conformist attitude rejecting
petit
bourgeoise
morality which begins in the home. Apart from that, I would like to ask, why is it always the middle-classes which damn the middle-classes? Now I am going to get some beer.”

“And I hope you will not come back!” said the Founder.

“Don’t worry, madam,” retorted Julian. “The wild stallions of the lady novelist’s stock-in-trade will not drag me back to this rookery.”

*

Thomas Turney was buried beside his wife Sarah, his eldest son Hugh, and his daughter Dorothy in the yellow clay of Randiswell cemetery, among thousands of white marble tombstones
and wreaths of withered flowers on new clay mounds; for many people in the district had died of what was called the Spanish influenza.

Afterwards the Will was read by Joseph Turney, the youngest son, to near members of the family—Hetty and her three children; Joseph Turney’s wife, Ruth; and his son Arthur, who had left school recently and was now in the Firm; Aunt Liz and Polly Pickering, visitors from Beau Brickhill, who had come to offer comfort to Hetty, and to Maudie, the lonely daughter of Sidney and Dorrie Cakebread. Cousin Maudie was a young woman of Phillip’s age, dark like her mother, and with Dome’s quiet and reflective manner.

They sat in the dining-room with its heavy mahogany furniture, familiar oil paintings, and the pair of ebony elephants with ivory tusks—the absent Charley’s gifts of long ago from South Africa—standing on the dark green marble shelf above the fireplace, while Joseph Turney prepared to read the Will. Mr. Leppitt, the solicitor, had not been invited to do this, Joseph declared in his somewhat huffyfluffy voice, for the sake of economy.

“In the absence of Leppitt I cannot tell you the value of my dear Father’s estate, until it is proved in course of time, but in my opinion it should reach an expected total of between thirty and thirty-five thousand pounds.”

“I didn’t know Gramps was so rich, did you?” said Elizabeth to Phillip.

“I never thought about it,” he replied, hoping that he had not been left anything.

“The Estate is subject to certain duty-free legacies. Our dear Father appointed myself and Hetty to be the trustees, with Leppitt, I need hardly add.” He cleared his throat loudly. “My dear Father has left
£
500 and his house ‘Wespaelar’ to Henrietta Eliza Maddison. He has left his diamond ring to our absent brother Charles, in Africa; and
£
500 and his house in Cross Aulton, where I am domiciled, to me, Joseph Fitzgerald Turney. Excuse me.”

He took a red silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, and having unfolded it, fitted it to the end of his long nose, from the nostrils of which brown hairs protruded and touched his moustache. Having blown a trumpet note he folded the red handkerchief, put it back in its pocket, and said: “What about a glass
of sherry? Liz? Hetty? I know Ruth won’t, so it’s no good asking her. Arthur, help the ladies. Ruth, did you remember the Osborne biscuits?”

“Yes, and I brought some charcoal biscuits for you as well.”

Hetty refused a glass of sherry, saying it did not agree with her liver. “Do you mind if I ask Miss Cole to make some tea, Joe? Or shall we wait until you have finished? What do you think? Oh, very well. Elizabeth, be a good girl and ask Miss Cole, will you, dear.”

“I want to hear the Will read, Mother! It’s all very well for you, you know what’s in it already!”

“Uncle will wait for you, I’m sure.”

“Quite so, Sis.”

Phillip was already at the door. He had never heard his uncle address his mother like that before; he saw them again as two rather pathetic small children, beginning life all over again without their Papa.

“Tell Miss Cole not to put in more than three spoonfuls, will you, Phillip?”

“Don’t forget one for the pot,” said Joseph. “For luck,” he added.

“Ask Miss Cole for a jug of hot water as well, will you, dear?”

“Very well, Mother.”

“Has Gramps left Miss Cole anything?” asked cousin Maudie, while Phillip was in the kitchen.