Lanark: a life in 4 books (72 page)

“You seem to be complaining,” said Lanark. “I don’t know why. Nobody is forcing you to work with print, and all work involves some degradation. I want to know why your readers in their world should be entertained by the sight of me failing to do any good in mine.” “Because failures are popular. Frankly, Lanark, you are too stolid and commonplace to be entertaining as a successful man. But don’t be offended; most heroes end up like you. Consider the Greek book about Troy. To repair a marriage broken by adultery, a civilization spends ten years smashing another one. The heroes on both sides know the quarrel is futile, but they Continue it because they think willingness to die in a fight is proof of human greatness. There is no suggestion that the war does anything but damage the people who survive it.

“Then there is the Roman book about Aeneas. He leads a group of refugees in search of a peaceful home and spreads agony and warfare along both coasts of the Mediterranean. He also visits Hell but gets out again. The writer of this story is tender toward peaceful homes, he wants Roman success in warfare and government to make the world a peaceful home for everyone, but his last words describe Aeneas, in the heat of battle, killing a helpless enemy for revenge.

“There is the Jewish book about Moses. It’s very like the Roman one about Aeneas, so I’ll go on to the Jewish book about Jesus. He is a poor man without home or wife. He says he is God’s son and calls all men his brothers. He teaches that love is the one great good, and is spoiled by fighting for things. He is crucified, goes to Hell, then to Heaven which (like Aeneas’s peaceful world) is outside the scope of the book. Jesus taught that love is the greatest good, and that love is damaged by fighting for things; but if (as the song says) “he died to make us good” he too was a failure. The nations who worshipped him became the greediest conquerors in the world.

“Only the Italian book shows a living man in Heaven. He gets there by following Aeneas and Jesus through Hell, but first loses the woman and the home he loves and sees the ruin of all his political hopes.

“There is the French book about the giant babies. Pleasing themselves is their only law so they drink and excrete in a jolly male family which laughs at everything adults call civilization. Women exist for them, but only as rubbers and ticklers.

“There is the Spanish book about the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance. A poor old bachelor is driven mad by reading the sort of books
you
want to be in, with heroes who triumph here and now. He leaves home and fights peasants and innkeepers for the beauty which is
never
here and now, and is mocked and wounded. On his deathbed he grows sane and warns his friends against intoxicating literature.

“There is the English book about Adam and Eve. This describes a heroic empire-building Satan, an amoral, ironical, boundlessly creative God, a lot of warfare (but no killing) and all centered on a married couple and the state of their house and garden. They disobey the landlord and are evicted, but he promises them accommodation in his own house if they live and die penitently. Once again success is left outside the scope of the book. We are last shown them setting out into a world to raise children they know will murder each other.

“There is the German book about Faust, an old doctor who grows young by witchcraft. He loves, then neglects, a girl who goes mad and kills his baby

son. He becomes banker to the emperor, abducts Helen of Troy and has another, symbolic son who explodes. He steals land from peasants to create an empire of his own and finances it by piracy. He abandons everything he tires of, grabs everything he wants and dies believing himself a public benefactor. He is received into a Heaven like the Italian one because ‘man must strive and striving he must err’ and because ‘he who continually strives can be saved.’ Yah! The only person in the book who strives is the poor devil, who does all the work and is tricked out of his wages by the angelic choir showing him their bums.
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The writer of this book was depraved by too much luck. He shows the sort of successful man who captains the modern world, but doesn’t show how vilely incompetent these people are.
You
don’t need that sort of success.

“It is a relief to turn to the honest American book about the whale. A captain wants to kill it because the last time he tried to do that it bit off his leg while escaping. He embarks with a cosmopolitan crew who don’t like home life and prefer this way of earning money. They are brave, skilful and obedient, they chase the whale round the world and get themselves all drowned together: all but the storyteller. He describes the world flowing on as if they had never existed. There are no women or children in this book, apart from a little black boy whom they accidentally drive mad.

“Then there is the Russian book about war and peace. That has fighting in it, but fighting which fills us with astonishment that men can so recklessly, so resolutely, pester themselves to death. The writer, you see, has fought in real battles and believed some things Jesus taught. This book also contains”—the conjuror’s face took on an amazed expression—“several believable happy marriages with children who are well cared for. But I have said enough to show that, while men and women would die out if they didn’t usually love each other and keep their homes, most of the world’s great stories
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show them failing spectacularly to do either.”

“Which proves,” said Lanark, who was eating a salad, “that the world’s great stories are mostly a pack of lies.” The conjuror sighed and rubbed the side of his face. He said, “Shall I tell you the ending you want? Imagine that when you leave this room and return to the grand salon, you find that the sun has set and outside the great windows a firework display is in progress above the Tuileries garden.”

“It’s a sports stadium,” said Lanark.

“Don’t interrupt. A party is in progress, and a lot of informal lobbying is going on among the delegates.”

“What is lobbying?”

“Please don’t interrupt. You move about discussing the woes of Unthank with whoever will listen. Your untutored eloquence has an effect beyond your expectations, first on women, then on men. Many delegates see that their own lands are threatened by the multinational companies and realize that if something isn’t quickly done the council won’t be able to help them either. So tomorrow when you stand up in the great assembly hall to speak for your land or city (I haven’t worked out which yet), you are speaking for a majority of lands and cities everywhere. The great corporations, you say, are wasting the earth. They have turned the wealth of nations into weapons and poison, while ignoring mankind’s most essential needs. The time has come etcetera etcetera. You sit down amid a silence more significant than the wildest applause and the lord president director himself arises to answer you. He expresses the most full-hearted agreement. He explains that the heads of the council have already prepared plans to curb and harness the power of the creature but dared not announce them before they were sure they had the support of a majority. He announces them now. All work which merely transfers wealth will be abolished, all work which damages or kills people will be stopped. All profits will belong to the state, no state will be bigger than a Swiss canton, no politician will draw a larger wage than an agricultural labourer. In fact, all wages will be lowered or raised to the national average, and later to the international average, thus letting people transfer to the jobs they do best without artificial feelings of prestige or humiliation. Stockbrokers, bankers, accountants, property developers, advertisers, company lawyers and detectives will become schoolteachers if they can find no other useful work, and no teacher will have more than six pupils per class. The navy and air forces will be set to providing children everywhere with free meals. The armies will dig irrigation ditches and plant trees. All human excrement will be returned to the land.

I don’t know how Monboddo would propose to start this new system, but I could drown the practical details in storms of cheering. At any rate, bliss it is in this dawn to be alive, and massive sums of wealth and technical aid are voted to restore Unthank to healthy working order. You board your aircraft to return home, for you now think of Unthank as home. The sun also rises. It precedes you across the sky; you appear with it at noon above the city centre. You descend and are reunited with Rima, who has tired of Sludden. Happy ending. Well?”

Lanark had laid down his knife and fork. He said in a low voice, “If you give me an ending like that I will think you a very great man.”

“If I give you an ending like that I will be like ten thousand other cheap illusionists! I would be as bad as the late H. G. Wells! I would be worse than Goethe.
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Nobody who knows a thing about life or politics will believe me for a minute.”

Lanark said nothing. The conjuror scratched his hair furiously with both hands and said querulously, “I understand your resentment. When I was sixteen or seventeen
I
wanted an ending like that. You see, I found Tillyard’s study of the epic in Dennistoun public library, and he said an epic was only written when a new society was giving men a greater chance of liberty. I decided that what the
Aeneid
had been to the Roman Empire my epic would be to the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Republic, one of the many hundreds of small peaceful socialist republics which would emerge (I thought) when all the big empires and corporations crumbled. That was about 1950. Well, I soon abandoned the idea. A conjuror’s best trick is to show his audience a moving model of the world as it is with themselves inside it, and the world is not moving toward greater liberty, equality and fraternity. So I faced the fact that my world model would be a hopeless one. I also knew it would be an industrial-west-of-Scotland-petitbourgeois one, but I didn’t think that a disadvantage. If the maker’s mind is prepared, the immediate materials are always suitable.

“During my first art school summer holiday I wrote chapter 12 and the mad-vision-and-murder part of chapter 29. My first hero was based on myself. I’d have preferred someone less specialized but mine were the only entrails I could lay hands upon. I worked poor Thaw to death, quite cold-bloodedly, because though based on me he was tougher and more honest, so I hated him. Also, his death gave me a chance to shift him into a wider social context. You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy.
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This makes you much more capable of action and slightly more capable of love.

“The time is now”—the conjuror glanced at his wristwatch, yawned and lay back on the pillows—“the time is 1970, and although the work is far from finished I see it will be disappointing in several ways. It has too many conversations and clergymen, too much asthma, frustration, shadow; not enough countryside, kind women, honest toil. Of course not many writers describe honest toil, apart from Tolstoy and Lawrence on haymaking, Tressel on house-building and Archie Hind on clerking and slaughtering. I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of unconsidered ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like
commonplace
and
ordinary
have the significance which
glorious
and
divine
carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?”

“I think you’re trying to make the readers admire your fine way of talking.” “I’m sorry. But yes. Of course,” said the conjuror huffily. “You should know by now that I have to butter them up
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a bit. I’m like God the Father, you see, and you are my sacrificial Son, and a reader is a Holy Ghost who keeps everything joined together and moving along. It doesn’t matter how much you detest this book I am writing, you can’t escape it before I let you go. But if the readers detest it they can shut it and forget it; you’ll simply vanish and I’ll turn into an ordinary man. We mustn’t let that happen. So I’m taking this opportunity to get all of us agreeing about the end so that we stay together right up to it.”

“You know the end I want and you’re not allowing it,” said Lanark grimly. “Since you and the readers are the absolute powers in this world you need only persuade them. My wishes don’t count.”

“That
ought
to be the case,” said the conjuror, “but unluckily the readers identify with your feelings, not with mine, and if you resent my end too much I am likely to be blamed instead of revered, as I should be. Hence this interview.

“And first I want us all to admit that a long life story cannot end happily. Yes, I know that William Blake sang on his deathbed, and that a president of the French Republic died of heart-failure while fornicating on the office sofa,
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and that in 1909 a dental patient in Wumbijee, New South Wales, was struck by lightning after receiving a dose of laughing gas.
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The God of the real world can be believed when such things happen, but no serious entertainer dare conjure them up in print. We can fool people in all kinds of elaborate ways, but our most important things must seem likely and the likeliest death is still to depart this earth in a ‘fiery-pain-chariot’ (as Carlyle put it), or to drift out in a stupefied daze if there’s a good doctor handy. But since the dismaying thing about death is loneliness, let us thrill the readers with a description of you ending
in company
. Let the ending be worldwide, for such a calamity is likely nowadays. Indeed, my main fear is that humanity will perish before it has a chance to enjoy my forecast of the event. It will be a metaphorical account, like Saint John’s, but nobody will doubt what’s happening. Attend!