CHAPTER X

 

'A regular technique,' Spandrell repeated.  'One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking they're âmes incomprises.'  He was boastfully generalizing from the case of poor little Harriet Watkins.  If he had just badly recounted his affair with Harriet, it wouldn't have sounded such a very grand exploit.  Harriet was such a pathetic, helpless little creature; anybody could have done her down.  But generalized like this, as though her case was only one of hundreds, told in a language of the cookery book ('one chooses them unhappy' - it was one of Mrs Beeton's recipes), the history sounded, he thought, more cynically impressive.  'And one starts by being very, very kind, and so wise, and perfectly pure, an elder brother, in fact.  And they think one's really wonderful, because, of course, they've never met anybody who wasn't just a city man, with city ideas and city ambitions.  Simply wonderful, because one knows all about art and has met all the celebrities and doesn't think exclusively about money and in terms of the morning paper.  And they're a little in awe of one too,' he added, remembering little Harriet's expression of scared admiration; 'one's so unrespectable and yet so high-class, so at ease and at home among the great works and the great men, so wicked but so extraordinarily good, so learned, so well travelled, so brilliantly cosmopolitan and West-End (have you ever heard a suburban talking of the West-End?), like that gentleman with the order of the Golden Fleece in the advertisements for De Reszke cigarettes.  Yes, they're in awe of one; but at the same time they adore.  One's so understanding, one knows so much about life in general and their souls in particular, and one isn't a bit flirtatious or saucy like ordinary men, not a bit.  They feel they could trust one absolutely; and so they can, for the first weeks.  One has to get them used to the trap; quite tame and trusting, trained not to shy at an occasional brotherly pat on the back or an occasional chaste uncle-ish kiss on the forehead.  And meanwhile one coaxes out their little confidences, one makes them talk about love, one talks about it oneself in a man-to-man sort of way, as though they were one's own age and as sadly disillusioned and bitterly knowing as oneself - which they find terribly shocking (though of course they don't say so), but oh, so thrilling, so enormously flattering.  They simply love you for that.  Well then, finally, when the moment seems ripe and their thoroughly domesticated and no more frightened, one stages the dénouement.  Tea in one's rooms - one's got them absolutely used to coming with absolute impunity to one's rooms - and they're going to go out to dinner with one, so that there's no hurry.  The twilight deepens, one talks disillusionedly and yet feelingly about the amorous mysteries, one produces cocktails - very strong - and goes on talking so that they ingurgitate them absentmindedly without reflection.  And sitting on the floor at their feet, one begins very gently stroking their ankles in an entirely platonic way, still talking about amorous philosophy, as though one were quite unconscious of what one's hand were doing.  If that's not resented and the cocktails have done their work, the rest shouldn't be difficult.  So at least I've always found.'  Spandrell helped himself to more brandy and drank.  'But it's then, when they've become one's mistress, that the fun really begins.  It's then one deploys all one's Socratic talents.  One develops their little temperaments, one domesticates them - still so wisely and sweetly and patiently - to every outrage of sensuality.  It can be done, you know; the more easily, the more innocent they are.  They can be brought in perfect ingenuousness to the most astonishing pitch of depravity.'

      'I've no doubt they can,' said Mary indignantly.  'But what's the point of doing it?'

      'It's an amusement,' said Spandrell with theatrical cynicism.  'It passes the time and relieves the tedium.'

      'And above all,' Mark Rampion went on, without looking up from his coffee cup, 'above all it's a vengeance.  It's a way of getting one's own back on women, it's a way of punishing them for being women and so attractive, it's a way of expressing one's hatred of them and of what they represent, it's a way of expressing one's hatred of oneself.  The trouble with you, Spandrell,' he went on, suddenly and accusingly raising his bright pale eyes to the other's face, 'is that you really hate yourself.  You hate the very source of your life, its ultimate basis - for there's no denying it, sex is fundamental.  And you hate it, hate it.'

      'Me?'  It was a novel accusation.  Spandrell was accustomed to having himself blamed for his excessive love of women and the sensual pleasures.

      '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 loincloth 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, of 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!  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 modern invention, those Swedish-drill 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 moment - 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 Thaïs?'

      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'll 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 were sane, told people that they'd got to throw half of themselves in the wastepaper 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 know 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 umimpassioned 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's elses, 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 slugs, even though your subject is supposed to be a skylark.  But I wish to God,' Rampion 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!'