CHAPTER
THREE
Following dinner early
that evening, Gwen and Matthew went out into the large back garden to get some
air and soak up a little of the sun which was now bathing it in a pool of soft
light. They took a couple of deck chairs
and found a pleasant spot over by an imposing cluster of rhododendrons, which
stood to the right of the garden at a distance of some thirty yards from the
house. It was really Gwen's decision to
sit there, for she hated to sit in the centre of the garden, where there was a
total absence of plant life and one felt exposed to prying eyes all around
one. Only by its edges, where the
flowers and bushes were reposing in loosely arranged beds, did she feel any
degree of complacency, born of the privacy they appeared to provide. Besides, she liked the scent of the plants,
which was particularly pleasant where they were now sitting. The centre of the garden, about which only
pale grass grew, seemed to her relatively barren and devoid of life.
"I trust you didn't find dad too trying during dinner?"
she gently inquired of Matthew, after a few minutes' respectful silence had
fallen between them in the refreshing presence of temperate nature.
"No, not really," he replied, more out of a
mechanical response to her probing statement than an honest answer. He looked at her half-humorously, as though
in ironic deference to the fact that Mr Evans had been more upsetting before dinner than during
it. Indeed, it might have been truer to
imply that Mr Evans was pretty upsetting whether or not he was talking. But he had no real desire to compromise her
over the thorny issue of her father, limiting himself, instead, to a
good-natured dismissal of the matter, as though it were of small account. For anything more serious would probably have
led him to get up and make his way back to the station there and then, in order
to be free not only of Gwen's father but of Gwen herself, who wasn't exactly
the most kindred of spirits, either. Yet
he didn't want to make a scene of it, to treat this experience too seriously. Better, on second thoughts, to treat it with
a kind of scientific detachment, as though one had been entrusted with the
responsibility of studying, at relatively close-quarters, a species of life
which, though personally abhorrent to one, it was nevertheless necessary to
treat with a modicum of respect, if only to complete one's studies. It might, after all, lead to some as-yet
unimagined revelation. At least it had
already led to a better understanding of Gwen, which was something.
"I really ought to have warned you, in advance, of what my
father was like," she remarked sympathetically. "But I wasn't altogether sure of how he
would react to you. Besides, I was afraid
that you might not have agreed to come here, had I given you prior warning
about him."
Matthew smiled dismissively.
"Oh, don't worry yourself about it," he advised her. "I didn't exactly expect him to be an
exact replica of myself. He's entitled
to his views, after all, even if I can't share them."
There ensued a further short period of silence, before Gwen
asked: "What d'you think of my mother?"
It was a question Matthew had half-expected, but he still
blushed slightly as he replied: "She seems quite pleasant really, quite
polite and friendly; though I haven't yet had a chance to form a clear
impression of her. Like you, she tends
to keep quiet when Mr Evans is speaking."
"Yes, that's true enough," Gwen admitted. "She's not a particularly talkative
person anyway, even given the fact that dad doesn't exactly encourage
conversation. He mostly keeps to himself
in the house."
"Don't your parents get on very well together?"
Matthew asked, partly in response to this remark and partly from a vague
premonition to the contrary.
"No, not for the past five or six years," Gwen
revealed, blushing slightly.
"Largely in consequence of dad's poor health - his fits of
depression and bad heart, his liver and bronchial trouble - which seems to have
come between them and isolated them from each other to a certain extent. Not that mum's health is entirely good. But she does at least fare better than him,
as a rule."
"She certainly looks well," Matthew candidly
opined. "And young, too. Indeed, I was more than a little surprised to
learn that the woman who answered the door to us was in fact your mother. She seemed more like an elder sister."
Gwen smiled faintly and then said: "Yes, she's only
seventeen years older than me actually.
But that, too, is one of the reasons why my parents don't get on as well
as they formerly did. For dad is ten years
her senior and tends to behave as if he were a member of an older generation
... which, when you consider the nature of his health, effectively appears to
be the case. It's as though he has
already crossed the threshold into old age, while she has hardly entered middle
age."
Matthew couldn't argue with that observation! "And you're their only child?" he
conjectured.
"Yes, though mum lost two children prematurely, and I had
a brother who died of pneumonia at six," Gwen answered on a note of
sadness. "He was two years younger
than me."
"I'm sorry to hear it," said Matthew, respectfully
deferring to convention. "It must
have been rather upsetting for you."
"Yes, for a while," Gwen admitted. "But more so for mum, who was very fond
of him. She had always wanted a
boy." There was a tinge of
self-pity in her voice, as though indicative of the fact that, as a girl, she
had rated lower in her mother's estimation and grown to resent it. But she didn't say anything else about the
subject, and Matthew tactfully refrained from further inquiry.
Indeed, he was secretly gratified when, instead of continuing
the conversation along other lines, his girlfriend relapsed into one of her
characteristic silences, abandoning her face to the sunlight, which caused it
to take on an almost angelic aura of transcendent spirituality, like Rossetti's
Beatrice. To be sure, there was
certainly something Pre-Raphaelite about her at this moment, something ethereal
and not-quite-there. Yet such an
illusion was quickly dispelled from Matthew's mind as she turned her face to
one side and caught some shadow from the nearby rhododendrons. Now she was simply Gwendolyn Evans again,
devoid of spiritual nobility, the daughter of a provincial bourgeois. Her attractiveness, suddenly released from
transcendent pretensions, assumed more earthly proportions. But for her delicacy of build, one might have
taken her for an average sensualist.
Instead of which, one had no option but to acknowledge her for the
dualistic compromise she was - both sensual and spiritual in approximately
equal degrees.
Turning his gaze away from her impassive face, Matthew focused
his attention on the detached house in front of them, the rear windows of which
glinted in the soft sunlight. Its
perfectly conventional middle-class respectability suddenly became a source of
annoyance to him as he recalled, not without a pang of regret, that he had
allowed himself to be drawn into a context for which he had no real sympathy
and absolutely no desire to emulate in his own life - namely, the context of
bourgeois compromise. For the fairly
large house that his vision now embraced stood as a symbol to him of most of
the things he was in rebellion against and preferred not to see. It stood, above all, as a symbol of the class
which had come to power after the aristocracy and now prospered on the sweat of
the proletariat. Yet it also stood as a
symbol, in large measure, of the class which took the middle road between the
aristocracy and the proletariat, and signified a kind of midway stage of human
evolution. Not as materialistic as the
former nor as spiritualistic as the latter, the bourgeoisie were resigned to a
compromise formula which, while leaving them cognizant of the fact that
excessive wealth was a grave obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, precluded
them from relinquishing the benefits of materialism to any appreciable extent,
least of all to an extent which made them candidates for spiritual
enlightenment personally!
Quite the contrary, the bourgeois was very firmly, now as
before, a creature of the middle road, the dualistic material/spiritual
compromise which found its religious home in Christianity and its political
home in parliamentary democracy. If his
house wasn't as grand as an aristocrat's, well and good! He had no great difficulty living with that
fact. But to suggest to him that he
should go one stage further up the ladder of human evolution and relinquish
private property altogether, resigning himself to life in a comparatively small
council house or flat, would be tantamount to depriving him of his very
existence, and such a suggestion would meet with very little approval! Indeed, it would probably meet with
none! For the bourgeois was not an
animal which could turn itself into a proletarian, any more than an aristocrat
was an animal which could turn itself into a bourgeois. If a bourgeois was spiritually superior to an
aristocrat, he was yet spiritually inferior to a proletarian, and could never
alter himself one way or the other. By
his very compromise nature, he was condemned to the twilight stage of human
evolution in between the darkness and the light - a perfectly legitimate
position while the twilight was inevitable, but an increasingly questionable,
not to say untenable, one the more the twilight changed to light and society
accordingly progressed away from its former dualistic compromise towards a
stage of life that transcended dualism, a stage in which only proletarian
criteria were relevant. As a creature
that signified a kind of dovetailed combination of aristocratic and proletarian
elements within him, the bourgeois could never emerge from the moral
twilight. If it came to an end under the
sway of an increasingly strong barrage of light, the bourgeois would perish
too. He wasn't capable of living solely
in the light, for it would be a refutation of his other half, an abnegation of
his dualism. No, he could only flourish
and perpetuate himself while the twilight prevailed. Once it had gone - whoosh, no more bourgeois!
Whatever pertained to the light was proletarian; was man become
wary of materialism and living in smaller houses, smaller apartments, or flats
because he was too evolved to require large-scale property, because, in other
words, his superconscious predominated over his subconscious rather than
existed in a balanced compromise with it; was man born and bred in the city,
away from the sensuous influence of nature; was transcendental man. Yes, but not the bourgeois, not Christian
man. There could be no question of his transformation. This house, sparkling in the sunlight, was
destined to be superseded world-wide - and in a sense already had been - by a
less materialistic scale-of-values.
In the overall progression of evolution through approximately
three stages ... from a dominating materialistic class to a liberated
spiritualistic class via a worldly compromise class, this house undoubtedly
signified something morally better, higher, and more humane than the typical
aristocratic dwellings which had preceded it.
It was certainly less glaringly materialistic than the huge castles,
palaces, and country houses favoured by the nobility. It was not the repository of so many
possessions, and such possessions as it housed were generally of a less-ornate
and expensive variety than those favoured by the overtly materialistic
class. They were unlikely to distract
the eye from spiritual preoccupations to anything like the same extent as those
possessions which had been specifically designed to glorify matter. The library, for instance, would not be
nearly so large or contain as many weighty and expensively-tooled,
leather-backed books. On the contrary,
it would be of moderate proportions, containing, at most, a few thousand books,
and most if not all of those less-expensive hardbacks would have been read, not
simply owned for the mere sake of collecting or signifying the extent of one's
wealth and/or materialistic power.
Indeed, there may even be, among the ranks of such bourgeois
tomes, a few paperbacks, as befitting an age in which the spiritual
predominates over the material and a book is accordingly judged more by what it
contains by way of intellectual or cultural nourishment than with what care or
materials it was made. Yet it was highly
unlikely that such a library would house any great number of paperbacks. For the bourgeois would not want to deprive
himself of hardbacks to an extent which made his collection lack a certain
amount of materialistic elegance. Oh,
no! If he instinctively looks down on
the extensive materialism of an aristocrat's library, he yet shies away from
the prospect of relinquishing his taste for hardbacks to the extent required by
a proletarian library, in which, one may surmise, only paperbacks would
exist. Furthermore, he would not wish to
reduce the number of books in his collection, either. For the few thousand he owns seems to him
more becoming than the mere 500-odd books to be found in the average
proletarian collection. After all, his
house is somewhat larger than the average proletarian dwelling, and therefore
it's likely that his library will have to be correspondingly larger, if it
isn't to look ridiculously out-of-scale with its surroundings. As the man of the middle road, he knows
exactly where he stands. His library,
like just about everything else about him, is somewhere in-between the
alternative extremes. It corresponds to
stage two of human evolution.
Yes, and although Thomas Evans wasn't the most scholarly or
bookish of middle-class people, it could certainly be said of his library - which
Matthew had taken a glance at prior to dinner - that it represented the
requisite compromise of scale and favoured books in-between the extensive
materialism of the previous historical class and the intensive spirituality of
the ultimate one. Nothing extreme would
be found there!
A gentle sigh beside him caused the artist to abandon his
philosophical reflections and turn his attention back towards Gwen who, with
eyes closed, seemed perfectly resigned to the absence of conversation and only
too happy for a chance to vegetate in the warm evening air, feeling the caress
of the sun upon her upturned face, which had assumed a mellow glow. Watching her thus, seemingly oblivious of his
presence beside her, Matthew experienced a moment of tenderness towards her and
gently but firmly placed a hand on her nearest leg, just above the knee and
below the rim of her pale-cream skirt, which she had drawn-up slightly in
response to the sun. This presence of
his hand on her flesh caused her to smile in a subtly sensual way, yet she kept
her eyes closed. She looked perfectly
complacent, like a softly purring cat - submerged in soft sensuality. At any other time Matthew would probably have
raised the rim of her skirt until her thighs were completely naked and her
panties exposed to view, content to focus his attention upon that part of them
behind which her crotch would be gently stewing in its own sexual gravy,
leading a kind of vegetable existence of its own - soft and languid. But in the back garden of her parents' house,
what with the prospect of someone spying on them through one or another of the
rear windows, he had to resign himself to gently patting her nearest leg
instead, not exposing the outer reaches of her more private parts to his tender
gaze.
And this he continued to do even after his thoughts had once
more turned away from Gwen's body and become entangled in intellectual matters
again, this time concerning the architectural innovations of Gottfried Semper, the
nineteenth-century German architect who occasionally designed buildings with a
view to reflecting different stages of architectural evolution - the façade
beginning on the ground floor with a coarse appearance and ascending, through
successive floors, to a smoother one, with a corresponding change of materials
in the overall construction. At present,
Matthew couldn't remember very much about the man from what he had read, some
years before, in the local public library; though he knew that, if he were an
architect bent on illustrating evolutionary transformations from one floor to
another, he would adopt a somewhat different approach from Semper - one
emphasizing the growing predilection for the light which characterized our
evolutionary struggle.
Thus, taking the façade as its most representative component,
his projected building would have a row of small windows on the ground floor
spaced at regular, if quite distant, intervals, so that the overall impression
was one of darkness or, rather, of the ego - that fusion-point of the
subconscious and superconscious minds - under subconscious dominion. The subconscious would be represented by the
concrete, the superconscious by the windows, and the ratio of the one to the
other would be approximately in the region of 3:1. Thus the ego of pre-dualistic man would be
represented as a predominantly dark phenomenon.
Aristocratic materialism would have the advantage.
With the first floor, however, indicative of stage two of human
evolution, the ratio of concrete to windows would be transformed into a
dualistic balance, so that the increase in window space came to signify a
greater degree of superconscious influence, commensurate with bourgeois
consciousness, and the overall impression was accordingly of an ego balanced,
in twilight compromise, between the dark and the light. In this section of the façade, the percentage
which the material aspect had lost would have been gained by the spiritual one. Heaven and Hell would be kept in dualistic
equilibrium.
Not so, however, with the second and final floor,
representative of the third stage of human evolution, in which the ratio of
concrete to windows or, rather, of windows to concrete had become the converse
of that exhibited on the ground floor, and the light of the superconscious
accordingly prevailed over the darkness of the subconscious in the ratio of
3:1, reducing the material part of this upper section of the façade to but a
quarter of the total space. Here, then,
it would be the turn of proletarian man to advertise his predilection for the
light, his ego being decidedly under the sway of the superconscious and thus
partial to a spiritual bias. Here, on
the second floor, human evolution attained to its climax. And after that - well, it only remained for
proletarian man to transcend his humanity altogether, namely by dispensing with
the remaining influence of the subconscious, for him to enter the post-human
millennium and thus become divine. In
the meantime, however, a lot of work to be done, not least of all in using more
window space than hitherto, which is to say, than the bourgeoisie could
countenance!
Such, at any rate, was the plan Matthew thought he would put
into architectural operation, were he an architect bent on expanding and
refining upon the techniques first propounded by Gottfried Semper. Indeed, he might even do a variation on that,
in which the façade of his evolutionary building, while retaining the
respective ratios of concrete to windows on each floor, was less part of one
house than indicative of three different buildings built one atop the other -
the one on the ground floor, so to speak, three times as large as its top-floor
counterpart, while the one in the middle, suggestive of bourgeois compromise,
signified a sort of cross between the other two.... Or, alternatively, to
conceive of such a wedding-cake building as one house in which three separate
apartments, viz. an aristocratic, a bourgeois, and a proletarian, were arranged
in vertical juxtaposition, the overall pyramidal shape of the building
indicative of the diminishing scale of materialism as one approached the top
floor. Thus one could speak of an
aristocratic floor, a bourgeois floor, and a proletarian floor, each of which
reflected the aforementioned evolutionary transformations in the psyche. It would be an evolutionary building more
comprehensive and profoundly significant than anything of which Semper had ever
dreamed!
The sight of Mrs Evans emerging from the house suddenly put a
stop to further musings on Matthew's part, bringing him sharply back to the
provincial surroundings in which he somewhat ironically found himself. She was crossing the lawn in their direction,
heading, it appeared, for Gwen.
"It looks as though your mother has something to tell
you," Matthew softly remarked, for the benefit of the tranquil figure
beside him.
"Oh?" She
opened her eyes and cast the approaching figure an inquisitive glance. She didn't appear too disconcerted by this
interruption.
"Your friend Linda's on the phone," Mrs Evans informed
her, as soon as she came within speaking distance.
"Oh, really?" Gwen responded in a genuinely surprised
tone-of-voice. "I hadn't expected
her to phone today." She got up
from her deck-chair and turned towards Matthew, who was on the point of getting
up himself. "You needn't disturb
yourself, Matt," she reassured him.
"I won't be long."
"No, and if Mr Pearce doesn't object, I'll keep him
company in your absence, Gwendolyn," said Mrs Evans, simultaneously
sitting herself down in the space just vacated by her daughter. "We mustn't allow him to feel neglected,
must we?" She smiled at Gwen, who
impulsively reciprocated, before setting off at a fairly brisk pace for the
waiting call.
Strange things can happen, for all of a sudden Matthew found
himself transformed from a rather bored and meditative dreamer into an alert
and sensitive companion of Mrs Evans. It
was as though, with the change of woman beside him, a new lease-of-life had
suddenly been instilled into his veins, making him conscious of himself as a
man for virtually the first time that evening.
"Just the perfect weather for being out here, isn't
it?" Mrs Evans observed, as she turned her dark-green eyes on the artist.
"Most assuredly," he agreed, nodding profusely. He might almost have blushed with shame for
the (what seemed to him) too conspicuous response to her sensual presence
beside him, the too-lingering consciousness of her beauty, tempered, as it was,
by a whiff of patchouli perfume which mingled almost surrealistically with the natural
scents of some nearby shrubs. A little
extra daring on his part and he would have cast a glance over her pale-blue
skirt to the dark nylon-stockinged knees, as though to obtain a better idea of
her beauty and achieve a more comprehensive assessment. But such daring, he felt, would expose his
consciousness of her as a sensual being to an extent which could only have
compromised him further, and he lacked the courage or audacity to indulge it. Besides, she might have taken offence,
considered him ill-mannered, and embarrassed him as never before. No, it was not for him to play the gallant
where Gwen's mother was concerned, even if she did possess an uncommon degree
of feminine beauty.
"I must say, I was quite intrigued by some of the things
you were saying to my husband before dinner," Mrs Evans revealed. "Especially by the types of
transcendental motifs you're currently painting. It sounds rather fun."
Matthew felt agreeably flattered. "Yes, it's certainly a new direction in
my art, as in my sculpture too," he averred.
"You're also a sculptor?"
"Well yes, at least to some extent. I mean, I'm first and foremost a painter and
only secondarily a sculptor, so to speak.
But I enjoy the one as much as the other." Which wasn't quite true, though he could
hardly elaborate on his reasons for preferring painting to sculpture at the
moment.
"What sort of things do you sculpt?" Mrs Evans wanted
to know.
"Well, quite a number of things actually. Doves, for instance. Symbols, one might say, of the post-Christian
religious impulse."
"Not copulating doves, by any chance?"
"Er, no. Not like
the ones favoured by Jacob Epstein, and not particularly like Barbara
Hepworth's, either. Exclusively single
doves with outstretched wings, like they were gliding through the air. Spiritual doves rather than simply sensual
ones."
"And how big are they?" Mrs Evans asked.
"Oh, about life-size, which is to say, quite small,"
Matthew informed her matter-of-factly.
"But I occasionally vary the scale, sometimes making them as large
as a football, sometimes reducing them to approximately the size of a cricket
ball. The smallest ones are the hardest
to do, but they provide me with a fresh challenge, which is basically why I do
them."
Mrs Evans smiled admiringly.
"And what else do you do?" she pressed him.
"Oh, figures meditating, seated cross-legged on a small
pedestal or cushion, as in my paintings," he revealed, blushing
slightly. "There are only a few of
those at present, but they signify a development which I intend to expand on
over the course of time, provided they meet with public approval. Otherwise I shall be stuck with an
unmarketable product. However, all this
is a comparatively recent development, not at all typical of my sculpture in
general, which, in any case, tends to be less representational, as befitting
the age."
"You mean, it's abstract?" Mrs Evans conjectured.
"Essentially biomorphic, like the sculptures of Henry
Moore and Jean Arp, two of my principal influences," Matthew declared,
smiling. "Like Arp, I generally
tend to work to a small scale, using marble or lignum vitae. Yet, unlike him, I don't quite possess the
talent for naming works with such poetic skill or imagination! His titles are really quite surreal, you
know, usually having no apparent bearing on the nature of the work itself,
which, in any case, is pretty nondescript.
Besides, he's such a great sculptor - as, of course, is Henry Moore, who
is really the sculptor of our
time."
"Really?" responded Mrs Evans excitedly. "I'm afraid I know very little about
either of them, though I've seen photographic reproductions of one or two of
Moore's works, which, however, I could make neither head nor tail of. I mean, why so abstract?"
"Simply because it's relevant to the age," Matthew
replied at once. "We've gone beyond
the merely representational, the truth-to-nature school, as one might term the
more traditional sculptors. Admittedly,
there are exceptions - sculptors, for instance, like Jacob Epstein and David
Wynne, who are generally more traditional in their approach to sculpture, more
given to representations of one sort or another. But sculptors like Moore and Arp are, on the
whole, more representative of the times.
Indeed, even they are being surpassed now, since they pertain to a
generation whose approach to sculpture was less transcendent than the leading
sculptors of my generation, like Phillip King and Bruce Beasley, who, naturally
enough, have taken sculpture one stage further in its evolution."
"In what way?" Mrs Evans queried.
"Well, it's not easy to say in a few words," Matthew
confessed, frowning gently, for the reverse of a critic like Mr Evans was not
particularly easy to accommodate either, "but, fundamentally, it comes
down to the fact that they've dispensed with such natural materials as marble,
stone, and wood, and constructed lightweight sculpture out of synthetic
materials, like plastic, fibreglass, plexiglas, and acrylic, which tend to make
their works transcendentally superior to those of their predecessors. Superior on account of the fact that they're
made from synthetic materials and also because they're less heavy, less solid -
altogether more lightweight in appearance.
They often have an effect of expanding space and dissolving or
disintegrating matter, making careful use of light and transparency,
perspective and positioning. For
instance, Dan Flavin has constructed sculpture from fluorescent tubes, which
aptly illustrates what I mean by the more transcendental nature of contemporary
sculpture. At times it tends to merge
with Kinetic Art, and it can be difficult to tell them apart - Kinetics
sometimes making use of light, as in the work of Takis."
"I'm afraid you're going way above my head," Mrs
Evans protested, offering him a revealingly bewildered facial expression. "I've never even heard of such
sculpture, never mind seen it! Yet what
especially puzzles me is why the transcendental? Why the use of synthetic materials?"
Matthew had to smile slightly.
It was always the same with average people. Why this, why that, why not something
else? And, just as often, why not
something better? In Mrs Evans' case it
was evident that her ignorance was partly a consequence of her husband's
hostility to such things, since an investigation of modern art and sculpture
wouldn't have been encouraged or tolerated by the philistine in question. And, of course, some of his prejudices had
rubbed off onto her in any case, making her almost as suspicious as him of
contemporary trends. She was, after all,
a bourgeois, even if a very attractive and relatively pleasant one. Yet the question she had raised was begging
for an answer.
"Well, it just so happens that, being a comparatively
recent development, synthetic materials haven't been used in this context
before," Matthew obligingly informed her.
"Now as the genuine artist is always ready to avail himself of new
procedures, indeed is virtually compelled to, it follows that the use of
synthetics appeals to him. However, one
could also claim that the tendency towards enhanced artificiality is a
consequence of modern man's environmental severance from nature, and is
accordingly justified on that account.
We live at such a remove from the country - and consequently from its
influence - in our great cities, that it becomes increasingly difficult for us
to relate to natural patterns and correspondingly unattractive. Hence the rise of non-representational art
this century, with the use of synthetic rather than natural materials. We wish to achieve a victory over nature, and
the more our cities evolve and the more civilized we become, the greater, by a
corresponding degree, is the magnitude of that victory. You see, the city itself is essentially a
victory over nature, a something apart from and in opposition to it, and everyone
who lives in the city partakes of and, sooner or later, relates to that
victory. At one time, in the far-off
days of our earliest civilizations, we were dominated by nature, under the sway
of sensuous phenomena to an extent which made us very little different from the
beasts. But, fortunately, we continued
to pit ourselves against it, to assert the uniquely human world over the
impersonal and often hostile natural one, and gradually we got the better of
it, evolved to where we are today - participators in an advanced civilization,
anti-natural and/or transcendental men.
Needless to say, most of this has come about within the past 150 years,
since the Industrial Revolution and the consequent expansion of our towns and
cities to their current gigantic scales."
"I think it's all evil," Mrs Evans opined, a gentle
though earnest frown of disapproval on her brow. "All this severance from nature which
urban life seems to signify, it isn't good."
"That's where I believe you're wrong," Matthew
retorted, if in a relatively gentle way.
"It isn't as bad as might at first appear." Yet he was conscious, once more, that he was
speaking to a female bourgeois, a bourgeoise, not to a proletarian, and that
his words were consequently wasted on her.
For the bourgeoisie, he had little need to remind himself, were ever a
compromise between nature and civilization, the sensual and the spiritual, and
accordingly they had little taste for the big city, which, in both its
extensive and intensive artificiality, constituted a threat to their integrity
- indeed, a refutation of their very existence.
The bourgeoisie could only tolerate life in the big city provided they had a country or
suburban house to return home to in the evenings, after their office work was
over and done with for another day. They
were constitutionally able to manage this kind of compromise, and the bigger
the city professional commitments obliged them to frequent, the more they
preferred a correspondingly extreme rural retreat. Oscillating between essentially proletarian
and aristocratic environments, they retained their class integrity and were
relatively content.
Yet they would have been still more content if, as in Thomas
Evans' case, business could have been conducted in a medium-sized town and it
wasn't therefore necessary to oscillate between radical extremes - his house
being situated in a pleasantly residential section of town and affording him a
welcome relief from its busy main streets.
For the bourgeois was traditionally a man of the town rather than the
city, and although he could cope with the latter in small doses, i.e. for the
duration of his working day, he felt much more at-home between the
closer-to-nature walls of the town than in the large-scale artificial
environments of the city. Having both
nature and civilization within easy reach was, after all, more reassuring for a
dualistic mentality than being isolated or threatened with isolation in one or
the other. To a bourgeois, extremes were
equally fatal. Not to be countenanced! And, as Matthew Pearce had been reminded, Mrs
Evans couldn't possibly countenance them.
She saw advanced civilization as evil - like D.H. Lawrence, who, in this
respect, was fundamentally a bourgeois, despite his partly proletarian
origins. And there was nothing that
Matthew could do or say to convince her otherwise. No use telling her that the artificial
environment was a passport to the post-human millennium, to the ultimate
victory of the spirit. The post-human
millennium wasn't something to which a bourgeois could relate. In the journey of man from the beastly to the
godly, the bourgeois could go no further than two-thirds of the way up the
ladder of human evolution, having a life-span, so to speak, that lasted
throughout the time when the ego was in its twilight prime. Beyond that, he would cease to be a bourgeois
- indeed, cease to live. No wonder the
prospect of a post-human millennium met with no sympathy or encouragement on
his part! It was a refutation of him!
"And do you also sculpt in or with the aid of synthetic
materials?" Mrs Evans tentatively inquired of Matthew, as though the
possibility that he did so was a kind of evil to be held against him.
"Naturally," the 'sculptor' replied, somewhat
paradoxically. "After all, I'm a
member of the younger generation of artists, and so I should be
contemporary. There isn't much point in
trying to emulate Moore or Arp now, if you see what I mean. As an artist, one should be a sort of
spiritual antenna of the race, no matter in what medium one happens to
work. For if you write or paint or
sculpt or compose in a style that's outmoded, you're either a reactionary or a
dilettante, and therefore not strictly necessary. In fact, you're more than likely to be a
curse, assuming, of course, that you're given an opportunity to advertise
yourself. So you've got to be up-to-date
if you hope to achieve anything worthwhile, and one of the best ways - if not
the only way - of assuring that you are up-to-date is to live in the big city and thus
relate to the foremost spiritual thrust of the age. You can't reflect late twentieth-century
civilization if you spend most of your time in a village."
"No, I suppose not," Mrs Evans conceded
begrudgingly. "One would simply
relate to the surrounding environment."
"Precisely!" Matthew confirmed. "So if you're to become a bona fide artist,
you've got to relate to an advanced environment, it's as simple as that! And if, having once related to it, you
subsequently abandon it for something lower, like, say, a small town, the
chances are that you'll gradually come to relate more to the spirit of the town
and consequently cease being an advanced artist. You might well end-up an unenlightened
dilettante, consciously or unconsciously praising the shit out of nature and
bourgeois values generally."
It wasn't too difficult for Matthew to see that Mrs Evans had
been slightly wounded by this, though she did her best to conceal the fact by
distancing herself from the latter part of his previous remark. But, as usual, he couldn't resist the
temptation to be true to himself and speak his mind. If the bourgeoise in her had been offended,
it was just too damn bad! He had no
intention of betraying his allegiance to something higher on account of
her! After all, people who did that
remained victims of the status quo and not potential or actual victors over it.
"And do you have these, er, advanced works in your
"Yes, at least to see such of them as I haven't already
sold," Matthew answered, somewhat surprised by the nature of her second
question. "Why do you ask?"
"Simply because I'll be in
Matthew was indeed surprised.
"Well, please take the opportunity," he responded, a shade
nervously under pressure of the regret that was now pervading his soul, like a
dark cloud, for having mentioned the stuff in the first place. "I'll be at hand most of next week, so
you can come whenever you like."
"Thanks," Mrs Evans responded with alacrity. "I look forward to seeing them,"
she added, principally alluding to his sculptures, though also unconsciously
including his paintings. There was a
pause, before she continued: "It will probably be on the Wednesday. It's in the Highgate area of north London
that you live and work, isn't it?"
"Yes," confirmed Matthew, who then verbally supplied
her with the address of his studio.
"Right," said Mrs Evans, making a mental note of
it. "I shouldn't have any trouble
finding my way there. I'll get a taxi up
from the
Mrs Evans' blunt frankness had the effect of making Matthew
blush slightly. "I don't normally
see Gwen during the day in any case, because I have my work to do," he
assured her. "She stays in her
Chelsea flat or goes out visiting friends, only coming-up to Highgate or
meeting me somewhere in the West End during the evening. Admittedly, she has spent a day or two in
my flat, but the studio is situated in a different building, some two hundred
yards away. So even if she were to be in
Highgate during the day next week, I wouldn't see her until the evening. As it happens, I believe her new school term
is due to start fairly soon, so she's likely, as a teacher, to be more
preoccupied with preparing herself for that than with traipsing around after
me. She has her own work to do, after
all."
"Yes, I'm sure she has," Mrs Evans agreed, with what
seemed to Matthew like a small sigh of relief.
Then, turning her attention in the direction of the house, she
exclaimed: "Ah, here comes Gwendolyn now!
My word, that was quite a long phone conversation, wasn't it?"
"Just under twenty-five minutes," the artist
estimated, consulting his digital watch.
Gwen arrived back fairly flushed. "Sorry to have deserted you for so long,
Matt," she said in a lightly apologetic tone-of-voice, "but I haven't
heard anything from Linda for a few weeks because she's been unwell, so I felt
it incumbent on me, as her colleague, to chat her up a bit."
"No problem," he assured her, smiling thinly. "Your mother has kept me
company." Which was, to be sure,
obvious enough.
"Well, I'd better leave the pair of you to your private
devices again, assuming, of course, you want to stay out here," Mrs Evans
remarked, getting up from the deck-chair on her daughter's return. She looked at both of them with searching
eyes.
"For a little longer, I suppose," said Gwen. "Provided you're not bored with it,
Matt."
"No, not particularly," the latter responded. "While the sun's still up, we may as
well continue to take heathen advantage of its vitamin-shedding warmth a while
longer."
"Yes, I guess so," Gwen agreed. And with that, she sat down and closed her
eyes upon her mother's retreating form.
