CHAPTER SEVEN

Consisting of roast lamb and assorted vegetables, diner provided a slight reprieve from the ideological tension and mutual antipathy which had sprung-up between the two men in the lounge. But only, alas, a slight one! Although their conversation was somewhat muted by preoccupation with food, the close proximity into which they had been thrown by the relatively small circular table at which they were sitting caused them to feel psychologically uncomfortable, especially Peter Daniels, who felt the physical closeness to his ideological rival as a kind of humiliation and personal betrayal. But for the women, he would have got up from the table and sat himself down, plate in hand, on one of the spare chairs the far side of the dining-room (which in any case wasn't a particularly large room), in order to be delivered, in some degree, from the oppression of social intimacy with his political enemy. Indeed, he would have refused to eat dinner altogether! But, of course, such a refusal would hardly have pleased his hostess, who had put so much effort into getting it ready, and so he was obliged to resign himself, like Matthew, to the rather trying situation which circumstances had forced upon him. Taking refuge, as far as possible, in the meal itself was the only solution, it seemed, to present itself to either man's imagination.

Yet the women, though scarcely on the best of terms with each other, were not prepared to allow the occasion to sink into a boorish silence, interrupted only by the mundane sound of chewing and swallowing, but made an effort to lift it above the merely bestial level by indulging in a little sporadic conversation, Gwen especially doing her best to raise the atmosphere slightly, her sociability doubtless owing something to the fact that she had not been present throughout the greater part of the male-dominated conversation in the adjoining room.

Nor altogether surprisingly, the principal subject of their conversation was the new school term and the likelihood of their having to work harder then than during the previous one, which, despite the summer exams, seemed to them more like an anti-climax to the year. Linda Daniels, in particular, was especially anxious to improve the quality of her teaching next term, since she felt that it had somehow suffered from her generally poor health in recent months, while Gwen, though not over-complacent about her own past teaching record, was confident that her talents would stand the test of time and be adequately rewarded when the next batch of examination results were due, come Christmas.

The men listened in solemn silence, rather bored by the topic under discussion yet secretly grateful, all the same, for something external to cling-on to and relieve them, slightly, from the psychological pressure of their mutual antipathy. Matthew might have questioned Linda Daniels about her teaching of physical education had he not been constrained to silence by the brooding presence of her husband, who seemed equally disinclined to ask questions of Gwen. All in all, dinner transpired to be more of an ordeal than a pleasure and, when it was over, both men were relieved to drift as far apart as possible, even if this meant they were obliged to enter into conversation with the women instead.

However, it wasn't about school life that Matthew talked, as he found himself being escorted back towards the lounge by Mr Daniels' attractive and curiously-interested wife, but about art and, in particular, his art, upon which he proceeded to enlarge to the extent that circumstances would permit. It was evident that the women were determined to prevent a repeat performance of the bourgeois/proletarian antagonism by keeping the men apart (not that they had any desire to remain together!), Gwen likewise having battened-on to Peter Daniels' arm and escorted him in the opposite direction from Matthew, so that they would be out of harm's reach.

To be sure, this arrangement soon proved to the mutual satisfaction of both parties. For it wasn't long before, warming to Linda's curiosity and spurred-on by the wine he had dispatched at table, Matthew forgot about his antipathy towards her husband and immersed himself in the subject to-hand - one that was always most dear to him, since the focal-point of his life's endeavour. He explained how he was striving to make his art more transcendental by using minimalist techniques and exploiting the application of synthetics, like acrylic, nylon, and plastic, in order to divorce it still further from natural origins or influences.

Linda listened attentively. She recalled what he had said earlier, about the synthetic nature of his art, and inquired a little more deeply into some of the subjects he had touched upon - namely, the fact of the superconscious and its relation to the inner light. She was also curious to learn who his chief influences were, who he particularly admired.

Matthew deliberated with himself a moment, as though the answer to this question required a meticulous mental sifting through dozens of possible names, before replying: "Of the painters, I think probably Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian have had the greatest influence on my development, especially the latter, whose Neo-Plasticism I particularly admire. He was very spiritual, you know. Very committed to reflecting the effects of urban environments on the psyche, to making his work as internal and abstract as possible. And, of course, he was a mystic to boot - a theosophist. From the modern viewpoint, a tremendously significant and important artist! Not one of your anti-science and anti-technology types, by any means. Nor a traitor to evolution and bourgeois apologist, like certain other so-called modern artists. Very much a believer in the big city and its spiritualizing effects upon our lives. Very much an artistic leader."

"Yes, I do know a thing or two about him actually," Linda revealed, smiling appreciatively. "He painted a work entitled Broadway Boogie-Woogie, didn't he?"

"Correct. One of his most complex and famous works, paying due tribute to New York, the city he admired above all others," Matthew confirmed.

"And what about Ben Nicholson?" she asked, anxious to keep the conversation on the same rails. "How did he influence you?"

"Well, in pretty much the same way," the artist replied, "that's to say, by being so transcendentally abstract and pertinent to the times. I particularly admire his relief work, especially the more formalized and geometrically congruous examples of it constructed largely in the 'thirties; though it has had less overall influence on me than his minimalist still-lives, which were to set the tone, to some extent, of my meditating figures, in which only the bare outlines, executed in acrylic on a monochromatic ground, are allowed to emerge. That gives them a kind of transparency which emphasizes the spiritual over the material, you see. Makes them pertinent to the superconscious and therefore to transcendentalism. If I were more egocentric, on the other hand, I would undoubtedly have filled them in with various corporeal elaborations and embellishments, so they'd look more like traditional portraits of seated figures. But such a procedure wouldn't really have established me as a modern artist, or enabled me to consider myself one of the spiritual antennae of the race. It would simply have shown that I was backward, lagging behind the times, and therefore not entitled to consider myself a genuine artist. For such an artist is less a person who can paint well or elaborately, displaying all manner of complex techniques, than a person who is relevant to the age and best capable of illustrating the nature of that age.... Which is why, in my opinion, an artist like Ben Nicholson is greater than, say, Stanley Spencer, who, though possessing a technical facility that suggests true greatness, lacks real relevance and is effectively anachronistic. At times, you would hardly think he lived in the twentieth century, especially where his Christ at Cookham works are concerned. Yet there could be no doubt in your mind that Ben Nicholson did. For most of his work is appropriately abstract and therefore indicative of a society biased towards the superconscious. Thus, bearing in mind the criterion of relevance, one can only conclude Nicholson to be the greater artist. Indeed, I'm inclined to regard him as the finest British artist this century, bearing in mind his sustained commitment to transcendentalism."

"Even finer than Graham Sutherland?" Linda queried.

"Certainly more consistently abstract than Sutherland," Matthew opined, "which isn't to say that the latter's work is relatively inconsequential. On the contrary, I'd place it above Stanley Spencer's any day. Yet, unlike Nicholson's best work, it strikes me as mainly being a kind of secular art, a machine art which brings to mind strong connotations with works by Matta, Tanguy, Wyndham Lewis, and even that arch-surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, with his elaborate contraption in Locus Solus for making a mosaic out of hundreds of teeth."

"I'm afraid you've gone a little out of my depth," Linda confessed, feeling slightly puzzled. "I know there's a kind of jaggedness to some of Sutherland's works, if that's what you mean."

"Yes, at times a rather fearsome jaggedness," Matthew confirmed, smiling weakly. "Which fact doubtless owed something to his experiences as a war artist, a recorder of the frightful destruction which assailed London during the Blitz. But, even then, his work is largely abstract, and that's the important thing! It couldn't have been done by a nineteenth-century painter, not even Turner. And it doesn't necessarily imply horror and disgust with modern life, like so much Expressionist work. Indeed, you can judge whether art is good or bad not simply in terms of relevance to the age but also - and no less importantly - in terms of whether it accepts and encourages progress or, alternatively, rebels against it, mistaking progress for regress."

"How d'you mean?" Linda asked, with a puzzled look on her pretty face.

"Well, I mean whatever rebels against the rise of technology and science, the expansion of the city, and other related phenomena, considering such developments pernicious to the welfare of mankind, is essentially bad art," Matthew responded almost matter-of-factly. "For it misleads people by giving them the impression that things are either worse than or not as good as they really are; that instead of progressing, we're indulging in a kind of suicidal regression which it's in the interests of art to point out and, if possible, correct and/or stem - assuming it were still possible for people to respond to it in terms of a desire to correct and/or stem. I mean, there's inevitably a point at which such pessimistic art becomes merely fatalistic, with no other motive than to record the degree of that fatality, in relation to society, as the artist perceives it. Perhaps it's mostly like that? I don't know. But one thing I am sure of is that such art is bad, because it has turned against the age rather than accepted it, and accordingly refused to see the changes which have come about as manifestations of evolutionary progress. One gets the impression that the artists concerned are either too stupid to recognize progress when they see it or, alternatively, are bourgeois apologists, hirelings of a reactionary establishment who regret the decay of traditional, egocentric values. Whatever the case - and they may even be both - their art isn't what I would regard as a reflection of the age but, rather, a distortion and denigration of it, and that's bad! It can cause a lot of confusion in people's minds, and not only directly, by attacking the modern world, but indirectly, by turning away from it. A truly great artist, however, can only be loyal and relevant to the age, not reactionary or anachronistic. He doesn't seek oblivion in some imaginary Golden Age of the past, or endeavour to resurrect certain aristocratic values long after they've ceased to have any applicability to the times, but forges ahead, content in the knowledge, like Mondrian, that life is gradually changing for the better, remaining faithful, again like Mondrian, to the exigencies of evolution, and not either stagnating in a stasis of perpetual dualism or reverting to a context of pre-dualistic sensual and material one-sidedness. The true artist is ever the advocate of his age, not a rebel against it! And if the age demands that art becomes a reflection of truth rather than a propagator of truthful illusions or illusory truths, well then, truthful his art must be, no matter how anti-traditional it may appear to the philistines!

"The representative art of the past hundred years, including that of the novel," he went on, growing in confidence, "testifies to the mounting influence of the superconscious at the expense of the subconscious. It aims at truth and light, not their negation. In literature it takes the form of Flaubert and Zola rather than Huysmans or Wilde. It adopts a scientific detachment, an impersonality and impartiality towards the facts under surveillance. That humility and painstaking patience before the phenomena of existence which is the hallmark of the true scientific temper - what is that if not a reflection of our mounting allegiance to the superconscious at the expense of mere egotistical self-indulgence? Was it something that Descartes or Leibniz really understood? No, they lived in an egocentric age which was as much governed by illusion as by truth. They wouldn't have understood the patience and self-effacing intellectual humility of a Pasteur or a Darwin. Still less would they have approved of the literature of Flaubert or Zola or any of the other great moderns. Admittedly, they might have approved of Tolkien in some measure, but that's only because he was one of the most unequivocally illusory writers who ever lived, an exponent of bad art, or art that defies the transcendental preoccupation with truth which characterizes our age and propagates a species of illusion which stands out like a literary sore thumb in the march of evolutionary progress! Just as politics has its Hitlers, so literature has its Tolkiens. It also has its D.H. Lawrences and John Cowper Powyses. But that, I think, is really quite another story!"

"In what way?" Linda eagerly wanted to know, becoming puzzled.

"Oh, in a variety of ways actually," Matthew rejoined, pulling a wry face as though to indicate his distaste for the subject. "I mean, from the viewpoint of relevance to the age, D.H. Lawrence was a very bad artist, a deplorable novelist. His rebellion against science and technology, post-Christian transcendentalism, the city, and so on, was thoroughly misguided and unenlightened, eventually leading him to a kind of neo-pagan acceptance of nature and belief in sex as a mode, nay, the principal mode of salvation, like Wilhelm Reich, his rather more sophisticated German counterpart. Whether in regard to The Plumed Serpent or Lady Chatterley's Lover or, indeed, half-a-dozen other novels, one is led to the conclusion that he was one of the most reactionary and worldly writers of his time. The very fact that he ended-up virtually worshipping the 'dark gods of the loins', or whatever it was, speaks for itself. Instead of being among the ideological antennae of the race, as a genuine artist should be, D.H. Lawrence became a kind of tail to it, a down-dragging influence who related to pre-dualistic criteria, as germane to a pagan age, in which the senses predominate, under the auspices of subconsciousness, in response to the sensuous presence of untrammelled nature. One could hardly be more anti-modern than him, not even if one were intent upon propagating a philosophy of nature-worship, or Elementalism, like John Cowper Powys, who, to judge from his elementary books, wasn't the most genuine of artists either!"

"Wasn't he the one who wrote In Defence of Sensuality?" Linda tentatively commented, recalling to mind the only J.C. Powys title she knew.

"So I recall," Matthew admitted, a faintly ironic smile appearing on his thin lips in response to Linda's prompting. "Hardly the kind of book to have appealed to someone like Mondrian, who was truly modern. But Powys was essentially a bourgeois anachronism with a strong admiration for people like Rousseau and Wordsworth, and consequently much of what he wrote is irrelevant or contrary to the trend of evolution, including his paradoxical belief in a two-faced First Cause, which he would have us all ambiguously responding to in an appropriately grateful or defiant manner, depending on our circumstances at any given time! Not quite the religious viewpoint that Aldous Huxley grew to endorse, is it? But, then, artists of Huxley's calibre are few-and-far-between anyway, so one can't be particularly surprised!

"For every genuine and truly modern artist," Matthew continued, unconsciously slipping into a terminology more congenial to himself, "there seems to be at least a dozen sham ones - men who lack both the nerve and the ability to come properly to terms with their age. Powys and Lawrence are simply two of the more conspicuous examples of bad artists, and not simply because of what they wrote but also in terms of how they wrote. I mean, the most significant twentieth-century novels aren't those which tell a story, and thus promulgate fictions in one context or another, but those which are overtly autobiographical and/or philosophical, and thereby attest to the swing of the literary pendulum from illusion towards truth. To produce fictions, in this day and age, is contrary to the dictates of transcendentalism and liable to result in one's being branded an anachronism. A novelist who gives us something approximating to traditional literature, with plot, characterization, long descriptive passages, narrative, and so forth, is equivalent to a painter who produces representational canvases, or a composer whose music is tonal and harmonic, or a sculptor whose sculptures are figurative. He isn't truly contemporary, for his head is full of traditional criteria and it's precisely those criteria which, in their classical objectivity, are no longer relevant. By not relating to the foremost developments of the age he reduces himself to the level of an anachronistic dilettante, and consequently whatever he does is of little evolutionary import. His storytelling, accomplished or otherwise, will simply make for bad art or, rather, for no art at all, insofar as former criteria of literature no longer apply - except, that is, in the popular context, where they both intimate of cinema and to some extent serve the insatiable hunger of the film industry for narrative productions. As a victim of atavistic inheritance or historic class-fixation, his work will simply be out-of-place. It may be as good as if not better than novels used to be when the canons of illusion applied. But that won't alter its irrelevance to the present by one jot! At best, one can congratulate him for his ability to emulate past masters, his antiquarian capacities, but hardly anything else - least of all his refusal or inability to satisfy the demands of contemporary art! For, these days, the artist is very much, to repeat, a man of inner truth and light, not their objective negation!"

"Which is presumably what you are?" Linda concluded sympathetically.

"I hope so," said Matthew, blushing. "At least I try to be such as much as possible, though only, of course, within the spheres of painting and sculpture, which are my principal concerns. As to literature, I don't apply myself, since unable to practise three professions simultaneously. But I had a friend who was a novelist and a very progressive one, too! He used to write more philosophically than autobiographically, but he also experimented with a variety of radical techniques, including a species of verbal abstraction which aimed at depriving his work of intelligibility."

"How d'you mean?" Linda queried, not altogether unreasonably in the circumstances.

Matthew hesitated a moment before replying. For he was obliged to stifle a degree of amusement at his late-friend's expense. "Well, he wanted some of his writings to directly parallel, so far as possible, the development of abstraction in painting and music, since he believed that, due to commercial pressures, literature had fallen behind the other arts in this respect," the artist at length responded. "For instance, he would write sentences like 'This munching got or placing use cat to their run taken over shoes,' or something of the sort. I can't remember his exact verbal constructions but, anyway, words were arranged in such fashion as to avoid all sense or, at any rate, as much sense as possible."

Linda had to giggle at the mention of this, which sounded somehow crazy to her. "You mean to say he used a kind of automatic writing technique!" she doubtfully exclaimed.

"No, since he often deliberated over his choice of words for hours on-end," Matthew revealed. "After all, when you write automatically you still find yourself making some kind of sense here and there. Familiar words and phrases hang together. But he wanted to reduce meaning as much as possible in order to be thoroughly abstract, and this he systematically endeavoured to do, though mostly in short poems, which were really Mallarmé ten or twenty times over, so to speak. Not the sort of thing that would have appealed to Tolstoy, who failed even to make any sense of Mallarmé, but arguably compatible with a kind of avant-garde abstraction which the French poet seems to have anticipated. Anyway, before his death - he was killed in a road crash early last year - my late-friend was working on what he called an avant-garde supernovel, using this abstract technique of his, which he regarded as more radical than anything James Joyce or William Burroughs had ever done. Had he lived to finish the work, I'm confident it would have been the most revolutionary example of literary abstraction ever penned or, rather, typed. Yet such wasn't to be the case, and, so far as I know, the world still awaits a novel which purports to make as little sense as possible."

"Maybe that's just as well!" Linda commented, offering Matthew a wry smile.

"Well, however nonsensical the idea may seem," he rejoined, "it has a certain contemporary relevance, insofar as similar if less radical experiments have already been made. Yet, in a way, the idea of breaking-up meaningful language is no less significant than breaking-up or transcending representational form in art or diatonic melody in music, and corresponds to the same post-egocentric urge. I, for one, wouldn't be at all surprised if we abandoned language altogether, in the future, and resorted to pure awareness and non-verbal contemplation as a means to enlightenment. After all, if early man, grovelling in the dirt of prehistoric survival, was beneath language, not having evolved to a civilized framework, why shouldn't late man be above it, having evolved beyond such a framework and, thanks to his mastery of the machine, entered a non-verbal epoch primarily dedicated to the attainment of spiritual salvation. It seems a perfectly credible contention to me, at any rate. And I'm convinced it would have seemed no less credible to Aldous Huxley, who was an advocate of pure contemplation, or 'cleansing the doors of perception' through the removal of verbal distractions. For the trend of evolution is certainly in the direction of spiritual salvation, as our growing allegiance to the inner light adequately attests, and, as such, it's to our advantage to transcend the constraints of language in due course, since it has no relevance to 'the peace that surpasses all understanding', i.e. intellectuality."

"No, I guess not," Linda conceded doubtfully. "Though it seems unlikely that we'll outgrow our verbal preoccupations for some time yet, even if certain avant-garde writers are anxious to break up language at present."

"Oh, I quite agree," Matthew admitted, smiling. "Yet that isn't to say the attempts which are currently being made to transcend such preoccupations are without justification or meaning. They're essentially symptomatic of a long, slow process of de-verbalization upon which the modern world would seem to be embarked, not arbitrary indulgences imposed upon society out of mere whim or in consequence of a fad. They're bound to have a significant influence upon our future development. For the more godlike we become, the less need we'll have of language. If the beast is beneath speech, then the god is very much above it. And modern man is closer to becoming godly than to remaining beastly."

"Yes, though some modern men are evidently less far removed from the beastly than others," Linda Daniels averred, jerking her head back in the general direction of her husband, across the far side of the room.

Matthew automatically smiled and nodded his head in tacit confirmation of Linda's suggestion, which left him agreeably surprised and even flattered. He hadn't expected her to be quite so sympathetic to himself and contemptuous of her husband, and was somewhat relieved to discover that his preconceptions about her, in regard to Peter Daniels, had been proven inaccurate.

Indeed, judging by the interest she had shown in his art, it was difficult not to conclude that Linda was a very different type of person from her husband, much more culturally and temperamentally akin to himself. He was certainly intrigued by her and glad to have someone intelligent and sympathetic with whom to talk for a change, someone who, unlike Gwen and even Mrs Evans, suggested a wavelength similar to his own. And he was well aware, as he sat opposite her, no more than three feet away, that she was a more attractive woman than Gwen, not to mention Gwen's mother, who, though far from unattractive, was probably a little past her prime.

Yes, he liked the look of her richly plaited hair, dark-brown eyes, aquiline nose, and nobly shaped lips, which suggested refined sensuality. He also liked her dark-green satin minidress, which was eye-catchingly décolleté, and the ample contours of her breasts, which were not without a certain seductive charm for him. And then, too, her voice had a pleasing resonance, a feminine depth and huskiness to it which was far from devoid of sensual overtones. All things considered (or, at any rate, as much of her as he could see), she struck him as of superior physical quality to Gwen and much too good for the reactionary fool to whom she was married.

He wondered how she had got herself hitched to him in the first place, though he had no intention of asking her about it while Peter Daniels was still in the flat, even if at a fairly safe distance from them both, and with the suggestion of being too engaged in conversation with Gwen to be in a position to overhear anything. Still, there was always the possibility that he could find out in due course, say, through inviting her over to his flat or studio one evening. After all, if she was as interested in his art as she appeared to be, why not invite her over to scrutinize it close-up, and thus have the opportunity to discuss art in more congenial surroundings? Particularly since, according to what he had already learnt about her, she was something of an artist herself, with distinct leanings towards abstraction and the avant-garde in general?

Yes, it would be refreshingly tonic to have a kindred spirit to address, if not undress. He was always on the lookout for understanding, and Linda Daniels, with her attentive nature, seemed more than adequately qualified to provide it, even if she was less of an artist than a schoolmistress. At least she had a progressive disposition, which was more than could be said for a fair number of professional artists - sculptors no less than painters. Yes, he would definitely invite her over!