Life in the West (32 page)

Now I suppose the Marxists feel the same way. What’s wrong with all
that
, apart from its high boredom factor, is that it is presented as the Ultimate. There’s no ultimate in human affairs, or won’t be for many thousand million years, we hope. Surely a proper study of the future would vanquish ideology? There’s only a process, forever continuing. Eternal artistries of circumstance.

Meanwhile, on the humdrum level, I have offended Jacques. That outburst was unpardonable. Or was I feeble to apologize? Am I secretly afraid of losing his friendship? I suppose I am. But I did speak badly out of turn. I’ll write him a letter of apology, leave it in his letter rack. He is a nice man, I am fond of him. That distinction he made between upper and lower Marxism just made me mad — as it would have done Marx himself.

My affairs are a bit of a cock-up. On Monday I go back to England — to what? Teresa, you will never never know what you’ve done to me. I kicked out the girl I loved for your sake, didn’t I, because I loved you more? What else did I have to do to appease you?…

I should have stayed in the bar and had another drink. Why does old Herman look so nervous?

Selina. What did Jacques say about her? Has he been trying to make her?

I suppose he also has his private reasons for being angry. Wife at some conference or other, fears that this one may flop…

We’re all being ground down by some ghastly historical process. It’s better when you’re young because you think the process is remediable by action, political action, picketing power stations, or a bullet. I did. My son does. His son will. History in a nutshell… Fuck it all. Thighs. Thighs. No wonder that thighs are so perennially popular, and don’t get less so as you grow older…

No name with whatsoever emphasis of passionate love repeated that grows not faint at last. History is our attempt to retain that passionate love, to commemorate what has gone. Thus we extend our lives. Science fiction, I suppose, extends our lives into an imagined future…

How is Pippet Hall to survive? I must keep it on, it must remain a going concern. It enshrines history more effectively than any book, any monument. The present generation, with its inverted snobberies, despises anything of cultural wealth, but surely that attitude, that little ice age of the spirit, won’t last. The trouble is, I’ve no heart to go on without Teresa. Poor girl, poor jade! Terrible to imagine oneself offended.

There is no way in which one can give up in life, short of committing suicide. I’ve no quarrel with that. Falling on your sword is honourable, if you really have reached a dead end.

But that’s not for me. I’m as corrupt as anyone. I’d rather take Selina back to the Hall and fall on her. Iron out her bitterness. She has a fine spirit. She communicates.

Beautiful woman. Damned politics.

Part-Serb. It would be splendid to replenish the Squire stock with Serbian blood, as old Matthew Squire did with German blood. Brave buggers, the Serbs. None braver. I’m not too old to start another family.

But almost.

And sod you too, Pelli…

‘You may perhaps think my view of a critic’s function rather old-fashioned, but I am more interested in appreciation than classification. The reader must be borne in mind. Readers of SF are most struck by its originality although, if they read too much of it, they complain of unoriginality, and find they enjoy it less and less. This is because they have ceased to look for the other qualities SF possesses.

‘Goethe’s
Faust
is by no means the first story of a man making a deal with the devil; Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
is after all just another renaissance play on the common theme of revenge. Frederik Pohl’s
Gateway
is just another tale of a chap who is off-balance getting a ride in a spaceship. But it is only when we look at these works in another light that we see their individual qualities — although we must always remember that they are interesting
because
they are also about a chap dealing with Mephistopheles, a chap trying to avenge his father, a chap getting a trip about the galaxy. Each of these three experiences goes straight down like a taproot of a tree into the awareness of the age which engendered it.

‘I should add here, if the remark is not obvious, that it doesn’t matter a bit that nobody has had a trip about the galaxy and maybe never will. Neither has anybody held a dialogue with the devil or a conversation with the ghost of their father. But this essence of the unlikely aligns SF with some striking monuments of literature — the imaginative and non-realist vein. I believe that Isaac Asimov is wrong, despite his great authority and reputation, in claiming that the space race justified SF. It needs no such justification. Our admiration for Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
would not be heightened if we found that some old knight had actually had a fight with a real windmill. The quality we admire is
imagination
, not realism.

‘This is where SF breaks from the old style of the nineteenth-century novel, and where it pleases the young and dismays the old. The novel no longer has novelty, but SF has, though we should maybe despise facile novelty just as we are suspicious of a new model of automobile — the last model may have had better qualities, if less chrome. One indicator of the novel’s lost impetus is that novels have become rather inward-looking and a bit provincial, at least in Germany and England. In the US, things are a little better, though how many new Russian novels have you read with interest lately?… Well, never mind. Arts need freedom.

‘Critics of the novel of a previous generation, such as Ortega y Gasset, held the idea that one prime function of the novel was to portray character and its development. The view is still echoed unthinkingly in the seats of orthodoxy.

‘The fact is, people just don’t believe in character, or in development for that matter, in the old way. Two world wars, the inroads of psychology, the increasing fate of man as a statistic, or a consumer, or just as a faceless speck of proletariat so beloved of Marxist jargon — all such factors have transformed us into fragmented beings. The container of custom has been shattered.

‘First cinema and then television have also profoundly affected the novel. Also inflationary economies have directed many impoverished novel-writers to more profitable fields. That non-literary consideration must be taken into account when you sum up today’s state of play. Yet SF has flourished; ill-winds for the novel have proved good winds for SF. That’s true especially of this decade, when cinema and television have actually fed the appetite for SF.

‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics — he may not even have a sex life, poor chap — is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character — because that’s how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’

Good old Herman. An attempt to think things out and express the results clearly. Amazing how you can meet a stranger and love him after two days. Quite a brave man, too, under his resigned veneer.

Not a bad fellow to have with you in the slit trench when the shit’s flying. That’s the acid test. Herman and Vasili.

Rugorsky is a real character. Extraordinary — choosing a German and a Russian to fight with you in a slit trench. How our thoughts have been formed by war… Not so many years ago, I’d have been fighting against Herman. And in a few more years will probably die fighting against Vasili Rugorsky.

The idea — even the irony of it — doesn’t terrify me, as maybe it should. Better fight and die than give in. You defend your own territory. You fight for your own hearth, your own home, your own country. Something the modern generation believes silly. They’ll find out too late when the chips are down. You fight for England. It is atavistic, but the human race hasn’t evolved beyond that yet. If you aren’t prepared to defend, someone else will attack.

Of course, if the You-Foes are real and contain aliens from another planet, the whole course of human history becomes changed. Perhaps that’s why so-called civilized people are reluctant to believe in flying saucers; they are felt to be inappropriate, a discord. The orchestra’s playing Borodin’s Second Symphony; suddenly more musicians enter and start playing Mozart.

If the aliens are hostile… Well, we shall have a situation where Vasili and I will be sharing a slit trench.

I still can’t make him out. Wrote a poem called ‘Winter Celebration’, likening the Soviet system to a medieval feast. Medieval starvation, more like. Exiled by Stalin, then possibly reprieved and disappeared for a while. Disgrace, atonement… Sounds like a typical Ruskie existence. That chap at the consulate, Parker-Smith, thought that Rugorsky might possibly defect. Not here, but in Rome when we’re flying back on Monday. Interesting. If that’s what he intends, he may feel he knows me well enough to flash a warning signal. Perhaps I shall have to help him.

I wonder what Selina’s doing. Will she be dining with me this evening? If not, then perhaps Herman and I can rustle together Cantania, Morabito, the two Frenzas, and even d’Exiteuil, if he’ll speak to me. We’ll have a meal and some drink. Vasili, too. I’d rather talk to him than listen to any Western left-wing nonsense. Actually, I’d rather talk to him than anyone here, except Selina perhaps.

A drink would go down well. Old Herman does go on.

‘Charles Dickens’s novels are among the first to reflect the atomization of modern society brought about by metropolitan life. The faces in his novels are glimpsed vividly — often with nightmare vividness — but briefly, before they disappear. They are known from the outside. SF carries this process further. We see people only in relation to the unknown. The strangers have moved in.

‘Some people praise the logic of science fiction. But I am more interested in the kind of SF which creates mythical beings, robots, monsters, androids, aliens, machines, creatures from the future or the id, revenants, voices from other dimensions, which proliferate in SF as nowhere else. They are a clear indication of the struggle going on within twentieth-century man. In no other form of literature are they so freely allowed on parade.

‘Surely in the future men will see SF as the literature of our time. I am well aware that much of SF is rubbish, like much of ordinary fiction, written for retarded children by superanuated children, but there’s no reason why we should pay attention to that end of the spectrum. As we still listen to the ancient Greek myths, so men of the future will care for ours, which define technological man. We have no reason to doubt that the first tellers of the Greek myths were scorned in palace and court. The new is never welcome. So SF is scorned today in high places.

‘The distinguished founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, who is with us in Ermalpa as our guest of honour, has spoken of our task as “exploring the familiar”. That clever phrase describes pretty precisely what SF does. In paradoxical manner, the best stories present Today in a disguise which reveals it nakedly as it is. That is a true imaginative function. Emmanuel Kant has shown how the power of our imaginations, the power of mental picture-making, is essential to us if we are to understand the world. Otherwise, we can’t recognize any object, for objects are only intelligible as members of a class, of classes of vehicles or of whatever you wish. SF helps us to distinguish ourselves as one phenomenon among many, and our planet as one among many, and our lifetime as one among many. It opens the windows of our fancy and can give us a true perspective. For example, it banishes an obsolete socio-economic theory, which has gained some ground here and there, which claims that human beings can profitably be divided into abstractions labelled “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”
.

‘But instead of quoting Kant, for I don’t want to seem nationalistic, I will finish by quoting the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, because he says something in his
Defence of
Poetry
, written at the beginning of last century, which describes with vivid accuracy the plight of today from which a study of science fiction can free us.

‘Shelley says,

We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionately circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

‘I believe we have to live with that slavery, at least for a while. But SF, I know from experience, is one way of making it tolerable.

‘Thank you for listening to me.’

As Frenza asked for questions or additional statements to be limited to a duration of five minutes, Rugorsky wrote a note and pushed it over to Squire, making it slide across the green baize, one fat finger simultaneously propelling and holding it captive.

The note consisted of four words. ‘But Shelley is dead.’