Point Counter Point (19 page)

‘Not only you. All these people.’ With a jerk of his head he indicated the other diners. ‘And all the respectable ones too. Practically everyone. It’s the disease of modern man. I call it Jesus’s disease on the analogy of Bright’s disease. Or rather Jesus’s and Newton’s disease; for the scientists are as much responsible as the Christians. So are the big business men, for that matter. It’s Jesus’s and Newton’s and Henry Ford’s disease. Between them, the three have pretty well killed us. Ripped the life out of our bodies and stuffed us with hatred.’

Rampion was full of his subject. He had been busy all day on a drawing that symbolically illustrated it. Jesus, in the loin-cloth of the execution morning, and an overalled surgeon were represented, scalpel in hand, one on either side of an operating table, on which, foreshortened, the soles of his feet presented to the spectator, lay crucified a half-dissected man. From the horrible wound in his belly escaped a coil of entrails which, falling to the earth, mingled with those of the gashed and bleeding woman lying in the foreground, to be transformed by an allegorical metamorphosis into a whole people of living snakes. In the background receded a landscape of hills, dotted with black collieries and chimneys. On one side of the picture, behind the figure of Jesus, two angels—the spiritual product of the vivisectors’ mutilations—were trying to rise on their outspread wings. Vainly, for their feet were entangled in the coils of the serpents. For all their efforts, they could not leave the earth.

‘Jesus and the scientists are vivisecting us,’ he went on, thinking of his picture. ‘Hacking our bodies to bits.’

‘But after all, why not?’ objected Spandrell. ‘Perhaps they’re meant to be vivisected. The fact of shame is significant. We feel spontaneously ashamed of the body and its activities. That’s a sign of the body’s absolute and natural inferiority.’

‘Absolute and natural rubbish!’ said Rampion indignantly.’shame isn’t spontaneous, to begin with. It’s artificial, it’s acquired. You can make people ashamed of anything. Agonizingly ashamed of wearing brown boots with a black coat, or speaking with the wrong sort of accent, or having a drop at the end of their noses. Of absolutely anything, including the body and its functions. But that particular shame’s just as artificial as any other. The Christians invented it, just as the tailors in Savile Row invented the shame of wearing brown boots with a black coat. There was precious little of it before Christian times. Look at the Greeks, the Etruscans.’

The antique names transported Mary back to the moors above Stanton. He was just the same. Stronger now, that was all. How ill he had looked that day! She had felt ashamed of being healthy and rich. Had she loved him then as much as she loved him now?

Spandrell had lifted a long and bony hand. ‘I know, I know. Noble and nude and antique. But I believe they’re entirely a modem invention, those Swedishdrill pagans of ours. We trot them out whenever we want to bait the Christians. But did they ever exist? I have my doubts.’

‘But look at their art,’ put in Mary, thinking of the paintings at Tarquinia. She had seen them a second time with Mark—really seen them on that occasion.

‘Yes, and look at ours,’ retorted Spandrell. ‘When the Royal Academy sculpture room is dug up three thousand years hence, they’ll say that twentieth-century Londoners wore fig-leaves, suckled their babies in public and embraced one another in the parks, stark naked.’

‘I only wish they did,’ said Rampion.

‘But they don’t. And then—leaving this question of shame on one side for the momen—what about asceticism as the preliminary condition of the mystical experience?’

Rampion brought his hands together with a clap and, leaning back in his chair, turned up his eyes. ‘Oh, my sacred aunt!’ he said. ‘So it’s come to that, has it? Mystical experience and asceticism. The fornicator’s hatred of life in a new form.’

‘But seriously…’ the other began.

‘No, seriously, have you read Anatole France’s
Thais
?’

Spandrell shook his head.

‘Read it,’ said Rampion. ‘Read it. It’s elementary, of course. A boy’s book. But one mustn’t grow up without having read all the boys’ books. Read it and then come and talk to me again about asceticism and mystical experiences.’

‘I‘1I read it,’ said Spandrell. ‘Meanwhile, all I wanted to say is that there are certain states of consciousness known to ascetics that are unknown to people who aren’t ascetics.’

‘No doubt. And if you treat your body in the way nature meant you to, as an equal, you attain to states of consciousness unknown to the vivisecting ascetics.’

‘But the states of the vivisectors are better than the states of the indulgers.’

‘In other words, lunatics are better than sane men. Which I deny. The sane, harmonious, Greek man gets as much as he can of both sets of states. He’s not such a fool as to want to kill part of himself. He strikes a balance. It isn’t easy of course; it’s even damnably difficult. The forces to be reconciled are intrinsically hostile. The conscious soul resents the activities of the unconscious, physical, instinctive part of the total being The life of the one is the other’s death and vice versa. But the sane man at least tries to strike a balance. The Christians, who weren’t sane, told people that they’d got to throw half of themselves in the waste-paper basket. And now the scientists and business men come and tell us that we must throw away half of what the Christians left us. But I don’t want to be three-quarters dead. I prefer to be alive, entirely alive. It’s time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.’

‘But from your point of view,’ said Spandrell, ‘I should have thought this epoch needed no reforming. It’s the golden age of guzzling, sport and promiscuous love-making.’

‘But if you knew what a puritan Mark really was!’ Mary Rampion laughed. ‘What a regular old puritan!’

‘Not a puritan,’ said her husband. ‘Merely sane. You’re like everyone else,’ he went on, addressing himself to Spandrell. ‘You seem to imagine that the cold, modern, civilized lasciviousness is the same as the healthy—what shall I call it?—phallism (that gives the religious quality of the old way of life; you’ve read the
Acharnians
?) phallism, then, of the ancients.’

Spandrell groaned and shook his head.’spare us the Swedish exercisers.’

‘But it
isn’t
the same,’ the other went on. ‘It’s just Christianity turned inside out. The ascetic contempt for the body expressed in a different way. Contempt and hatred. That was what I was saying just now. You hate yourselves, you hate life. Your only alternatives are promiscuity or asceticism. Two forms of death. Why, the Christians themselves understood phallism a great deal better than this godless generation. What’s that phrase in the marriage service? ” With my body I thee worship.” Worshipping with the body—that’s the genuine phallism. And if you imagine it has anything to do with the unimpassioned civilized promiscuity of our advanced young people, you’re very much mistaken indeed.’

‘Oh, I’m quite ready to admit the deathliness of our civilized entertainments,’ Spandrell answered. ‘There’s a certain smell,’ he went on speaking in snatches between sucks at the half-smoked cigar he was trying to relight, ‘of cheap scent…and stale unwashedness…I often think…the atmosphere of hell…must be composed of it.’ He threw the match away.’ But the other alternative—there’s surely no death about that. No death in Jesus or St. Francis, for example.’

‘In spots,’ said Rampion. ‘They were dead in spots. Very much alive in others, I quite agree. But they simply left half of existence out of account. No, no, they won’t do. It’s time people stopped talking about them. I’m tired of Jesus and Francis, terribly tired of them.’

‘Well then, the poets,’ said Spandrell. ‘You can’t say that Shelley’s a corpse.’

‘Shelley?’ exclaimed Rampion. ‘Don’t talk to me of Shelley.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘No, no. There’s something very dreadful about Shelley. Not human, not a man. A mixture between a fairy and a white slug.’

‘Come, come,’ Spandrell protested.

‘Oh, exquisite and all that. But what a bloodless kind of slime inside! No blood, no real bones and bowels. Only pulp and a white juice. And oh, that dreadful lie in the soul! The way he was always pretending for the benefit of himself and everybody else that the world wasn’t really the world, but either heaven or hell. And that going to bed with women wasn’t really going to bed with them, but just two angels holding hands. Ugh! Think of his treatment of women—shocking, really shocking. The women loved it of course—for a little. It made them feel so spiritual—that is, until it made them feel like committing suicide.
So
spiritual. And all the time he was just a young schoolboy with a sensual itch like anybody else’s, but persuading himself and other people that he was Dante and Beatrice rolled into one, only much more so. Dreadful, dreadful! The only excuse is that, I suppose, he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t born a man; he was only a kind of fairy slug with the sexual appetites of a schoolboy. And then, think of that awful incapacity to call a spade a spade. He always had to pretend it was an angel’s harp or a platonic imagination. Do you remember the
Ode to the Skylark
?” Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert!”’ Rampion recited with a ludicrous parody of an elocutionist’s ‘expression.’ ‘Just pretending, just lying to himself, as usual. The lark couldn’t be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no! That wasn’t nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse. It had to be a disembodied spirit. Bloodless, boneless. A kind of ethereal flying slug. It was only to be expected. Shelley was a kind of flying slug himself; and, after all, nobody can really write about anything except himself. If you’re a slug, you must write about slugs, even though your subject is supposed to be a skylark. But I wish to God,’ Ramplon added, with a sudden burst of comically extravagant fury, ‘I wish to God the bird had had as much sense as those sparrows in the book of Tobit and dropped a good large mess in his eye. It would have served him damned well right for saying it wasn’t a bird. Blithe spirit, indeed! Blithe spirit!’

In Lucy’s neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public. The more the merrier was her principle; or if ‘merrier’ were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously distracting. Within five minutes of her arrival, the corner in which Spandrell and the Rampions had been sitting all evening in the privacy of quiet conversation was invaded and in a twinkling overrun by a loud and alcoholic party from the inner room. Cuthbert Arkwright was the noisiest and the most drunken—on principle and for the love of art as well as for that of alcohol. He had an idea that by bawling and behaving offensively, he was defending art against the Philistines. Tipsy, he felt himself arrayed on the side of the angels, of Baudelaire, of Edgar Allan Poe, of De Quincey, against the dull unspiritual mob. And if he boasted of his fornications, it was because respectable people had thought Blake a madman, because Bowdler had edited Shakespeare, and the author of
Madame Bovary
had been prosecuted, because when one asked for the Earl of Rochester’s
Sodom
at the Bodleian, the librarians wouldn’t give it unless one had a certificate that one was engaged on
bona fide
literary research. He made his living, and in the process convinced himself that he was serving the arts, by printing limited and expensive editions of the more scabrous specimens of the native and foreign literatures. Blond, beef-red, with green and bulging eyes, his large face shining, he approached vociferating greetings. Willie Weaver jauntily followed, a little man perpetually smiling, spectacles astride his long nose, bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage. Behind him, his twin in height and also spectacled, but grey, dim, shrunken and silent, came Peter Slipe.

‘They look like the advertisement of a patent medicine,’ said Spandrell as they approached. Slipe’s the patient before, Weaver’s the same after one bottle, and Cuthbert Arkwright illustrates the appalling results of taking the complete cure.’

Lucy was still laughing at the joke when Cuthbert took her hand. ‘Lucy! ‘ he shouted. ‘My angel! But why in heaven’s name do you always write in pencil? I simply cannot read what you write. It’s a mere chance that I’m here to-night.’

So she’d written to tell him to meet her here, thought Walter. That vulgar, stupid lout.

Willie Weaver was shaking hands with Mary Rampion and Mark. ‘I had no idea I was to meet the great,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the fair.’ He bowed towards Mary, who broke into loud and masculine laughter. Willie Weaver was rather pleased than offended. ‘Positively the Mermaid Tavern!’ he went on.

‘Still busy with the bric-a-brac?’ asked Spandrell, leaning across the table to address Peter Slipe, who had taken the seat next to Walter’s. Peter was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.

‘But why in pencil, why in pencil?’ Cuthbert was roaring.

‘I get my fingers so dirty when I use a pen.’

‘I’ll kiss the ink away,’ protested Cuthbert, and bending over the hand he was still holding, he began to kiss the thin fingers.

Lucy laughed. ‘I think I’d rather buy a stylo,’ she said.

Walter looked on in misery. Was it possible? A gross and odious clown like that?’

Ungrateful!’ said Cuthbert. ‘But I simply must talk to Rampion.’

And turning away, he gave Rampion a clap on the shoulder and simultaneously waved his other hand at Mary.

‘What an agape!’ Willie Weaver simmered on, like a tea kettle. The spout was now turned towards Lucy, ‘what a symposium! What a—’ he hesitated for a moment in search of the right, the truly staggering phrase—’what Athenian enlargements! What a more than Platonic orgy!’

‘What
is
an Athenian enlargement?’ asked Lucy. Willie sat down and began to explain. ‘Enlargements, I mean, by contrast with our bourgeois and Pecksniffian smuggeries…’

‘Why don’t you give me something of yours to print?’ Cuthbert was persuasively enquiring.

Rampion looked at him with distaste. ‘Do you think I’m ambitious of having my books sold in the rubber shops?’