The arty-farties, what a lot! Personally I’ve always kept a wide berth. And the worst of them are writers. So I have to tell you about the motley crew I met on the Isle of Archasamby last summer. A rum affair, and that’s for sure.
I’m a doer, not a talker, so this does not come easy. How did it happen? Well, I went to do some shooting on the estate of our old school chum Bumper Jones. A fat kid with jug ears, extravagant freckles and an obsession with Black Sabbath. His father was a brewer. Now, I’m not the type who likes to waste his time; I like to get out there and bag them from day one. It started to rain as soon as I got there, and it was unrelenting. We did go out in the wet on the first morning, but frankly it was miserable. The following day we sat around and played Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, while imbibing some damn good whisky or ooshka baya as they call it there. I always say, “Drink the local tipple and you get the right type of hangover for wherever you are.” But on the third day, this became a bit of a bore. Really, what do the natives do in a place like this? No shops to speak of. No clubs. No women you’d want to sleep with or have on your arm in smart society. No smart society. No money circulating and making you and others rich. That last one of course is all the attraction. Even a City gent like me has to get away from it now and then. Recharge the old batteries.
The day after that, I had to get out of the house. Bumper, it’s true, has a damn good house. A Victorian statement of power. Of course such places really need a large crew of chambermaids, preferably pretty, but Bumper doesn’t make serious money and can’t afford chambermaids, pretty or not. So there are just a couple of old ladies who come in three days a week for a bit of desultory dusting. Bumper asked his guests to help with the washing-up, which was a bit thick. I refused of course. “Bumper,” I said, “I haven’t touched a dishcloth in forty years; not since I went to stay with my demented grandmother at the age of sixteen, and I can tell you, I did not like it. I have no intention of taking up dish drying at my age.”
Bumper looked offended as Bumper often does. But that just makes me go on the attack: “Bumper, another thing I’ve been meaning to tell you: what sort of entertainment have you put on for your guests? I’ve been here for three days now, and apart from the odd glass of good whisky, it has been a complete disaster. Now, what are you going to do for us?”
Bumper has always been a bit wet. Inherited the brewery business from a father who was as wet as he is. Not just wet, but boring too. Still, they are called Jones, so what can you expect? So, instead of getting angry over my outburst, he became terribly, terribly apologetic. Vomit-makingly apologetic. A regular Uriah Heep. He would see what he could do and so forth.
Back he came with two glasses of whisky and an idea, which actually turned out to be quite a good one if you are into that sociological kind of thing. Well, it was a change, and I got to see how some curious chaps like to pass their time. “Jonathan,” he said, “I’ve thought of something to get you out of the house. I’ve just been on the phone to Crawford-Mackenzie.” He paused as though he expected a reaction.
“The author,” he said.
“Never heard of him,” I clarified.
“You must have heard of Crawford-Mackenzie. The famous writer. He wrote an autobiographical masterpiece called The Road to Perdition, and his Bountiful Booze in Barra was turned into a highly successful movie.”
I hate it when people try to fill my brain with such rubbish. “Never heard of him,” I insisted.
Bumper looked a little put out, and less certain of his good idea. “Well, he is famous, and he lives down the road. And I thought you would like to meet him.”
“What are the alternatives?”
Bumper shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay then. When are we going?”
“Ah well, this is the interesting bit. It turns out that he is having a couple of writer friends over at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, and he’s got a house guest who is some kind of scribbler too, although I couldn’t quite understand where he fits in.”
Clearly Bumper and I have different ideas of what is interesting.
“One,” he continued, “is a likeable chap who does travel books and writes funny poetry. Geoffrey Hamilton-MacNiff he’s called. His I Crossed the Channel is an aloof and fanciful study of just how strange the French really are.”
“What about the other one?” I asked hopefully.
“What other one?”
“The other writer?”
“Oh well, you won’t have heard of him. No one has. A strange fellow. Bit of a leftie. Hans Bonetti-MacDonald. His Golden Symposium is a dialogue between Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha and John Lennon.”
“Bit of a rum do.”
“Heap of shit actually. I only read it because he lives over on the other side of the Island. If you ask me, the fellow isn’t all there, but all sorts wash up here. I don’t know how the locals can put up with it.”
Well the prognosis was not good. But what can a chap do? In the absence of any other entertainment and with another three days of torrential rain likely to follow, I decided to join the fun.
At four the next day we all set off. I almost changed my mind. Why, I said to myself, would I want to listen to a few arty-farties sounding off? Who knows if this Crawford-Mackenzie fellow’s whisky is as good as Bumper’s? But out of inertia, I let myself be drawn along. Good job too. Quite a scene it was.
I was well equipped for the weather, but Bumper, who lives on this sodden island all year round, only put an anorak over his tweed jacket, so the legs of his corduroy trousers were soaking by the time we reached the home of the writer everyone had heard of, except me. It was an agreeably plain early nineteenth-century house – a Telford manse, I was told – and it combined Presbyterian solidity with middle-class cosiness. A high wall surrounded the house, and a tall birch tree stood proudly in a corner of the front garden – an unusual sight on this treeless and windswept island.
Well, Crawford-Mackenzie’s secretary met us at the door and ushered us in to a small but welcoming hall that smelt of damp wood and dusty carpet, which seemed appropriate to the spartan but comforting antiquity of a house to be visited but not lived in. We were told that Crawford-Mackenzie was only just getting up. So we sat around and she brought us some whisky. Hamilton-MacNiff was already there and complaining about how slowly people move on the Isle of Archasamby, but he didn’t seem to move much himself. In fact he seemed to spend his time on absurdly long, solitary walks across deserted areas and sitting around in bars observing other people while they were pausing for a quick drink. I’m not sure how he can make a living, but clearly his parents can afford to keep him. They may not have sent him to Eton like us, but they apparently could afford some minor public school.
Crawford-Mackenzie came in wearing his dressing-gown, and he is quite a character. He belongs to another age, and only in that remote spot could such an intractably old-fashioned man of indisputable intelligence survive and even flourish. He smiled cordially at me and Hamilton-MacNiff. “Geoffrey, good to see you,” he said in a deep, sonorous but rather subdued voice. To me he said nothing as, clearly in early-morning mode, he had no idea who I was, which was the first surprise of the evening.
The first conversation of note concerned the islands. Crawford-Mackenzie has strong – and somewhat barmy – opinions on this subject, and this was good because in itself the question was of no interest to me. The other writer, Hans Bonetti-MacDonald, had just come in. He, too, looked like he had swum to the house underwater with his clothes on. He had removed his boots on entering, and a blackened toe was protruding from one of his once white socks. His dark hair was turning grey, but he could not have been over forty. He sat down heavily in an armchair, as though he were in his own house, and, having caught his breath, he looked up at Crawford-Mackenzie and said, “Hi there, Charles, good to see you again.”
Crawford-Mackenzie seemed genuinely pleased to see him. He said, “And it’s always a pleasure to see you, Hans. Help yourself to whisky. Dorothy left the tray in the corner.” What they had in common, God knows.
Hamilton-MacNiff returned to what appeared to be his favourite subject: the supposed indolence of the natives. Crawford-Mackenzie seemed angered by these speculations, but he was too much of a gentleman to deny or attack them. Instead he came up with his lunatic thesis: “But it’s the place that makes them like that, damn it! It’s the west wind that makes them so distinct. It bludgeons them constantly and they survive. Only the toughest can avoid being twisted and stunted by the endless power of the wind. Like the trees. Of course, it always saps your strength: that is why the Gaels are lazier than the Shetland Islanders; that is why the Gaels are more reflective and creative.”
“Oh, please, do we have to talk in endless stereotypes,” Bonetti-MacDonald remarked drearily, taking his first sip of whisky.
“You’d prefer to be hemmed in by every politically correct prejudice against prejudice,” Crawford-Mackenzie laughed. “That is why you’re so boring, Hans. Do they have a west wind in Italy?”
“Of course they have a west wind. Everyone has a west wind. In fact the Italians have special names for three winds: the northwesterly Maestrale, the northerly Tramontana which brings the cold and damp down from the mountains, and the Scirocco which carries the hot, dry and sometimes dusty air of the African desert.”
“Small wonder the Italians are a befuddled people. Better to be battered always from the same direction.”
I was delightfully confused by these people. At this stage, principally by their strange names, so I made my first foray into their madness. “Why just the Italian winds, Mr. Bonetti-MacDonald? You must be an expert in German ones too.”
“My mother was half-German and half-Gael, and my father Italian. I never learnt German; nor did I ever live in Germany.”
“An exotic background.”
“Hardly” was his curt reply.
“How did you end up here?”
“I inherited my maternal grandmother’s croft. One place is as good as another.”
“I see that you like to make your own way in life,” I said sarcastically.
But he replied, “I do.”
Then he took a real swig of his whisky, squared towards me and smiled provocatively: “Who do you vote for?”
“Do you need to ask?” I answered a little stiffly – you know me when I pretend to be offended.
“I do. You see I’m always looking for interesting people who defy their own stereotypes.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, then. I vote in accordance with what is expected of me. I vote Tory. How could I vote for anything else?”
“Well, I thought there was a good chance of your being Lib-Dem or UKIP, just for the hell of it. But surely someone like you could now go with Labour? Why not? Very reliable – for you!”
Now I was enjoying myself. The little twit was getting wound up. I stretched myself as though I were supremely comfortable, not only in Crawford-Mackenzie’s baggy and badly sprung armchair but also in the whole of my worldly existence – as though I had never felt a moment of panic, pain or loss, which of course I have, and I asked expansively, “Why is it that human beings so often believe mistakenly that, whatever our political, religious and philosophical differences, we all share a common morality and thought process? That’s the reason for your insane but rather touching faith in persuasion through sound reasoning. I’m not political like you people. I’m not political at all. I don’t even like the Tories. They’re venal and often stupid. People shouldn’t vote for people because they like them.”
“I can agree with that – at least in part – but why do you vote for them?”
“You’re right, I do find Labour very reliable these days, and they should be let into government every now and then, just to stop them from feeling hurt and restless – and going off into a leftward tailspin. But how can I put it? – When the Conservative Party is in power, it is as though God is in His heaven and everything and everybody is in its proper place. And the proper place for the Tories is in government, even though most of them are jumped-up shopkeepers or old Etonians too stupid to find a proper job.”
Perhaps this conversation would have wandered on. Perhaps I would have really riled them. Fate or chance had decided otherwise: we had an unexpected visitor. Lord Macmillan of Archasamby is a tall, cadaverous man. He is energetic and intelligent, and has an almost religious belief in the omniscience, perspicacity and bountifulness of a single entity: himself. In this he differs little from most politicians. And these are necessary men: someone has to take unpopular decisions and coat them with a sugar of lies. Of course this is a trade that requires lashings of self-deception. I call a spade a spade, as does Bumper in his hesitant self-deprecating way. So do these writer fellows in their absurdly tortuous, show-offy way. But a politician must call it by another name, and believe in whatever distortion circumstance demands. How that must poison their lives, poor things.
The body language was fascinating. Lord Macmillan was in a hurry and clearly wanted to speak to the master of the house – alone. I also got the impression that he did not take a liking to Hamilton-MacNiff, who he didn’t know, and detested Bonetti-MacDonald, who clearly he did. When I was introduced to him, his face brightened up wonderfully, and he squeezed my hand hard with all the strength from his thin but sinewy arms. “I’ve always wanted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Kentley,” he said.
“How do you know of my existence,” I asked wearily.
“Our government was very conscious of the city’s importance. I made it my business to know who the movers and shakers were.”
“Call me Peregrine,” I said coldly. I cannot stand New Labour politicians. They have no taste.
He of course was only too pleased to make a great display of his newly acquired status. It was to be Peregrine this and Peregrine that all evening. And he did stay once he was aware of my presence.
Bonetti-MacDonald was continuing the conversation without us, and they were still talking about these people called Gaels, who quite frankly I had never heard of. “The Gaels, like all other minority cultures in Europe, will only be Gaels for as long as they keep their language. If they lose it, they will be like everyone else – and any pretence to retain their distinctiveness will be a stupid ethnic myth. No one’s ethnicity is distinct, only their culture.”
“You lot are not Gaels,” said Lord Macmillan dismissively, “so what can you know about it.”
“We’re more Gaelic than you are,” the three writers replied in unison, and somehow their English, public-school accents made this statement sound ridiculous. There followed a long, heated and rather scholastic debate about what constituted a Gael and what did not. It appeared that Lord Macmillan came from the main town on the island and did not, in fact, speak Gaelic, while the three writers lost points ethnically because none of their fathers were Gaels: a Lowlander, an Englishman and, good heavens, an Italian.
“Do you mind me adding a note of reality to your discussion?” I said grandly, and you know how I enjoy lording it up, as though I cared a damn. “Surely in this globalised world in which people are migrating by the million from one continent to another, there can be little point in arguing over whether a person is wholly or one-quarter Gael. Does it really matter if this person speaks or doesn’t speak a dying language? Sorry if I say things as they are, rather than as they appear to you in your febrile imaginations.”
“Peregrine, you’re quite right to bring them back down to earth,” said Lord Macmillan, who had been denying the right of his fellow human beings to pronounce on a particular subject if they didn’t come from one-hundred-per-cent island stock.
Hamilton-MacNiff was off from the blocks before his New-Labour lordship had finished talking: “You think we’re guided by our imaginations? How wrong can a person be? We’re guided by the overriding problems of our time – the global ones and the local ones. For centuries – millennia perhaps – we’ve been trashing this ball of molten rock coated with a thin layer of solid rock and earth, but only now that pollution is reaching critical levels are we giving the question any thought – and we’re reacting far too slowly. Humanity has not invented a system capable of conserving our shrinking world, and probably never will. We spend billions on preserving old buildings and ancient artefacts, but when a corporation dumps toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, a judge issues a super-injunction to protect the culprit: could we get further away from a proper tutelage of the environment that sustains us?”
“Deary me!” I said, “you boys are a bundle of laughs. As though your rain hadn’t depressed me enough, I now have to listen to your scare stories.”
“It might help you to think,” said Bonetti-MacDonald.
“To think?” I objected. “I do plenty of that. I spend almost every waking hour thinking about how to make money. That’s why I’m rich and you chaps haven’t got more than a few thousand pounds between you.”
“To think about human existence and its betterment,” Hamilton-MacNiff persevered.
“Why would I want to do that? That would be meddling. We’re all here to look after number one, and if we could peer into your three brains one by one, we’d find that, behind all the rhetoric, this is exactly what each of you is after. It’s just that you’re not very good at it. Envy,” I cried, “just envy. You’d love to be as rich as me.”
“You poor unfortunate gentleman,” said Crawford-Mackenzie.
“Not poor. Definitely not poor. And the happier for it.”
“You must have a few hundred thousand in the bank, Charles,” said Bonetti-MacDonald, “after the publication of Bountiful Booze and Road to Perdition.”
“Never counted,” said Crawford-Mackenzie snootily, “one should never count one’s money. Money looks after itself, in my opinion.”
“My God,” I said, “you really are from another time. Money doesn’t look after itself. Never did. Certainly doesn’t now. I considered you a fellow Tory.”
“I am,” Crawford-Mackenzie said. “Don’t you know that the most bitter and significant differences are to be found within parties and not between them?”
“I’m not that interested in politics, to tell you the truth,” and I wasn’t lying, although I did find their politics fascinating in their absurdity.
Hamilton-MacNiff could not sit still in his chair, and he leaned across to me in his enthusiasm, “Charles is a very special kind of Tory in this Tory-free nation: he is a Romantic Jacobite, more interested in the politics of two and three hundred years ago, than growth figures and the performance of the stock exchange. Idealising the past isn’t that different from idealising the future. I like to think of him as one of us; nothing to do with you people at all.”
“I think your judgement,” I said, “is clouded by friendship and friendly rivalry. It is not the product of clear analysis, something you writer fellows aren’t that good at. I have no idea what a Romantic Jacobite might be, and have no desire to be enlightened on the subject. Scottish politics were always more Byzantine than most, and life is a short affair.” A statement, I have to admit, that was based on absolutely no knowledge of their politics now or at any other time. It’s amazing how a certain delivery and self-belief can give an impression of expertise and even wisdom.
I could feel them bristle. It was such fun. Almost as good as being up a hill and blasting off at the fauna. Unfortunately the peer of the realm thought that he had to come to my rescue: “The universe of the ideal and the imagination might have its place in the arts, but for practical men like Peregrine and myself it is only a diversion.”
I think that I was perhaps part of the absurdity of the situation, and not just an onlooker. Lord Macmillan wanted to talk the kind of voodoo economics that drives me up the wall. There is no one more Thatcherite than a New-Labour politician, and when they become lords, they no longer have to pay lip service to left-wing politics. They pursue the board room more determinedly than anyone else and their belief in free markets has no bounds. The fact is, all that political economics – macroeconomics as Lord Macmillan of Archasamby no doubt calls it – is of no interest. The far from predictable business of knowing how to make money in the banking system is enough for me and, while I’m hugely thankful to Thatcher for sorting out the unions and making it possible for me to become much richer than I otherwise would have, I can’t say that I ever liked the grocer’s daughter or her absurd Churchillian pretensions. But every now and then, you need a politician like her and, for a generation or two, you’re fine. The proof is precisely in all these Labour politicians who practically stalk you. In their youth, they wouldn’t have given a chap like me the time of day, and now they want to hang on my every word. Of course, you have to humour them: invite them to dinners, flatter them, wrap up your ideas in their repulsive, nonsensical politically-correct jargon, and that sort of thing. Small price to pay, but it is a bit nauseating when one pops up while you’re trying to have a quiet and diverting holiday in one of the most rain-soaked parts of the world. Well, it had seemed like a good idea.
“You two talk as though the credit crunch never happened” were the words Hamilton-MacNiff used to interrupt me, and I was very glad of his overdue interruption.
“Shop talk is always dull,” I said with urbane civility. “And how rude of me, particularly in the light of our host’s excellent whisky and the scintillating conversation.” Not scintillating enough to prevent Bumper from falling asleep near the fire. “Do you think the credit crunch to be a game-changer then?”
“Certainly,” said Hamilton-MacNiff, “you’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise.”
“Would you?” I feigned interest and surprise, and then added in a different key, “Do you take time out from writing novels and poetry to reflect deeply on the economic crisis? Can you think of a way out of it?”
My sarcasm went down badly. They like to fight amongst themselves, these writer fellows, but they stand together against the outsider. “There isn’t a solution,” he returned, “capitalism is inherently dysfunctional. The only solution is to change society.”
“Do you agree with this?” I asked Crawford-Mackenzie. “Surely not.”
“I agree that this society is not sustainable, but I feel we need to move back to a time of hard work and sound values.”
“Here we go,” Bonetti-MacDonald finally joined the fray. “What would those times think of people who get up at four in the afternoon and start on their first whisky immediately after their toast and tea?”
“Writers are always an exception,” Crawford-Mackenzie produced a beguiling smile that was both smug and complicit.
“Sounds elitist to me,” said Hamilton-MacNiff.
“I am an elitist,” Crawford-Mackenzie laughed, and I had to agree with him.
“Our society,” I said, “has produced unprecedented levels of liberty and affluence. So what do you people want to put in its place?”
“Paternalism,” said Crawford-Mackenzie. “A free market, yes. Or at least freeish. But a responsible society in which those who know best can work freely in the interests of the whole.”
“And how would this work?” I asked. “I hate to spoil the party, but isn’t this pie in the sky. That society is gone forever.” Lord Macmillan of Archasamby snorted with laughter.
“I’m not a constitutionalist,” Crawford-Mackenzie said defiantly and quite reasonably. “We need to create a society that knows where it is going – and not too far. How we do it is not something I feel obliged to answer.”
“How very convenient,” I said, also quite reasonably. “Have we any other offers at this sale of the utopias?”
“A return to the post-war consensus,” Hamilton-MacNiff showed his colours. “A return to Keynesianism and full employment. A return to high growth, the welfare state and good universal and free education.”
“Ah, so one wants to return to the distant past and the other to the recent past,” I was getting into my stride, as though I had just caught sight of a stag on the brow of the hill – a perfect shot, as long as I make the approach carefully and quietly. “I thought that writers were supposed to use their imagination.”
“Communism,” said that wilful Hans Bonetti-MacDonald.
“Communism?” I pretended to be shocked, but my heart leapt with joy. This was one I would enjoy tearing apart. “Doesn’t that also belong to a recent past that feels more ancient than Crawford-Mackenzie’s Romantic whatever-its-called?”
They laughed, I’ll give them that. Even Bonetti-MacDonald, clearly the radical of this crew.
“Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union was your great victory,” he said, “and the West even found a way to make money from it, although the human cost turned out to be high for the ex-Soviet citizens. But communism will always be one of the options. I don’t say that it will prevail. There has been too much soothsaying, but the idea cannot be eradicated. In fact, defeat can lead to victories. Have you never heard of Pyrrhus of Epirus?”
Actually I have little time for people who say, “Have you never head of …?” – particularly if they end the question with the name of a Greek general or Greek anybody, for that matter. I had vaguely heard of a “pyrrhic victory”, so I said, “Of course, the Battle of Epirus.” And they laughed knowingly. Well, they have little else to do in their lives but collect pointless factoids. I had clearly failed to wing it, and I wasn’t going to pursue the matter. “I’m surprised that you can defend a state that had such a terrible human rights record.”
“It was never about human rights,” Bonetti-MacDonald got on a high horse he was clearly well acquainted with. “America trumpeted the Helsinki Agreement, even as it brought back the chain gang. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, it’s time to admit that in some areas it was spectacularly successful. I do not speak of its grotesque crimes against humanity – principally its own citizens and indeed its most fervent supporters – because that should be obvious. There were other lesser evils in the Soviet Union, which arrived there earlier and have become increasingly familiar aspects of modernity everywhere.”
“I thought you were a communist,” I was getting a little confused.
“I am. Productive capital and, in particular, land should belong to the commonality. Those evils arrived in the Soviet Union not because it was communist, but because it was, briefly, the most modern society there was, even as it struggled to feed its people under the blows of three dozen foreign invasions. Perhaps these evils of modernity can never be reversed. Perhaps we should learn to live with them, but why should we pretend that they don’t exist?”
“How preposterous!” I shouted, practically unable to process the absurdity of his arguments. “What possible connection could there be between our current democracies and the murderous and unnatural regime that called itself the Soviet Union? The self-proclaimed socialist state, but really a malign and shambolic parody of a Western empire.”
“Of course there were disagreeable aspects about the Soviet life, and under Stalin’s criminal regime there was worse, but many of those disagreeable aspects were innovations that have been transferred to our capitalist societies in quite recent times. Advanced techniques of mass advertising were first developed in Russia in the twenties. Gorky’s obsession with the plain language of working people is everywhere in our press, TV and now almost every other media. The Soviets invented rule by the focus group, by testing ideas on samples of workers and peasants. The idea stinks, because the minute you form such a group, they cease to be typical. Besides this is not rule by the majority, but rule by the uninformed, by those who do not care, by those who reply on a coerced impulse to a question they very probably have never posed themselves.”
“Is that it?” I sighed with unalloyed boredom.
“No, there’s more. There’s the rule of a semi-educated and bullying bureaucratic class that armed with some branch of pseudo-science or real science misapplied pokes its judgemental nose everywhere. To challenge their current truths is defined as madness or at least as childish obtuseness. There’s near total conformism in the media. Now that CCTV and Google drones can observe us everywhere, there’s a level of surveillance that never existed in the Soviet Union, but only in that great caricature of it, 1984. Was Orwell satirising Soviet communism or modernity as it would evolve? The capitalist state is everywhere, but worse, it often acts with impunity through a privatised agency.”
“Our societies may not be perfect,” I admitted, “but our people can think what they want and do what they want.”
“Can they?” continued Bonetti-MacDonald, “Can they now? Civilians are always compromised with the regime under which they eat and sleep. They commit small acts of evil in the pursuit of petty interests, whilst armies commit great evils often in the name of great ideals. Soldiers make sacrifices in an artificial morality where aims are pure, whereas civilians act heroically in the real world of lesser evils. That is why we should be fearful of all militaristic language – it is the language of over-simplification. But the Soviet Union had settled down, and was trying to create a civil society within socialism; what right had we to step in and subvert it?”
The man was deranged, but I continued to engage: “The problem was equality itself. Stalin was an egalitarian, was he not?”
“So you think it takes an egalitarian to introduce equality. What a strange idea! To change the world either for the better or for the worse, you need men of conviction who will do anything – anything, I tell you – to make their certainties real. The trick is to get rid of them once the change is complete, as the Athenians did with Themistocles, who helped consolidate democracy and fought off the Persians. And the interesting question is: does the idea make the man or the man the idea? Geoffrey, with his love of dialectic, will say it is a bit of both, but I know that the idea moulds the man, and does so roughly, as a clumsy child moulds a piece of clay. The man, however powerful he is, is a plaything of the idea, and he ends up doing unimaginable things, by which I mean things he could not have imagined. His dreams become a nightmare, and caricatures of themselves – but still they inspire. Hope and despair go hand in hand, and lead us towards their uncertain future.”
“Enough of politics,” said his lordship, whose expression had become increasingly concerned as the conversation developed – concerned in the manner of the modern politician, with his head tilted slightly to one side, indicating empathy no doubt. His facial expression skilfully and indeed unbelievably combined indulgence and moral outrage. “I’m sure that Peregrine didn’t come all this way to get a political lecture on the wonders of the Soviet Union. I would have thought that we moved on from that long ago. You’re all writers and I think that’s why Peregrine came to see you.” He turned to me to digress politely, “Shame about the weather. I hope you weren’t too disappointed.”
“Actually,” I uttered with theatrical moroseness, “I would have preferred to be visited by three or four footballers, actresses, beauty queens or TV cooks. Having said that, the conversation has been unexpectedly entertaining if somewhat bizarre, and the whisky has been unreservedly good. My advice to you all, though, is that you should never travel too far from your straitjackets.”
Crawford-Mackenzie chortled, Hamilton-MacNiff was insulted and Bonetti-MacDonald laconically delivered that old cliché: “It takes one to know one.”
His lordship, clearly unused to conversation that didn’t fit a template, was so much at a loss that he just ignored what I had said and continued to announce his arbitration: “Given that he came to see writers, I suggest that you discuss writing.”
“Start there, and it could go anywhere,” said the ever loquacious Bonetti-MacDonald. “I thought I was coming round for a few drinks. Turns out I have to earn them like a performing seal.” He flapped his arms at his side and made a noise vaguely reminiscent of a seal’s bark. He was the only one who found this amusing.
Hamilton-MacNiff, the class swat, took up the challenge, but did not raise his arm and I’m not sure teacher would have liked his turn of phrase: “The novel is fucked. It has run out of things to say.”
“Not at all,” said Bonetti-MacDonald. “It’s going through a bad patch, and will return as strong as ever. This has happened in the past.”
Hamilton-MacNiff, intelligent and aloof, sneered and said, “The world changes but Hans will always live in the nineteen-sixties, the decade before he was born. If only that were the case. The corporations that now monopolise the book industry and the demise of the Net Book Agreement mean that the blockbuster will take over, genre will reign and innovation will end.”
“Rubbish,” said Crawford-Mackenzie, waking from a reverie, “who cares about the Net Book Agreement. Leave that stuff to the accountants. The world changes much less than you think and you shouldn’t get too obsessed about the technology that appears to dominate our lives. Of course, it changes things – mainly for the worse – but ultimately we all have to sleep, eat, work, make love, possibly reproduce, grow old, fail and die. That always accounted for ninety per cent of what it meant to be a human and it still does. You both accuse me of believing in a golden age, and perhaps there was for humanity, but the novel is a different thing. The novel thrives on misery and exploitation. How else did Tsarist Russia produce such fine literature? And how else did the most terrible years of Stalin’s repression produce the same result? The novel has work to do at the moment, and when that’s the case, it will always find a way to renew itself.”
“I agree with both of you – to some extent,” said Bonetti-MacDonald. “Yes, there is more continuity than we currently think, because we’re dazzled by the strangeness of technological change. It is also true that the novel thrives in some conditions and not in others. Our times are not good for the novel, but I don’t think the problems are primarily about the book market.”
“What are they then?” said Hamilton-MacNiff, so wearied he seemed to have trouble in articulating his jaw. Perhaps this is an argument they revisit often – when in their cups.
“The humanistic discourse I associate with the novel has perhaps run its course,” said Bonetti-MacDonald. “As a teenager I was politicised by a passage in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which concerned an aristocratic child’s inability to empathise with the poor who surround him in nineteenth-century Moscow. There’s a book by Ian McEwan which attempts to do the exact opposite: the central character – perhaps representing the author’s views – muses about the tramp who disfigures the square below his house. He feels sorry for the penniless man in a perfunctory manner, but goes on to say that this is an inevitable state of affairs: in the jungle of life, there must be losers. Presumably McEwan has earned his right to pass on his genes through the brilliance of his novels – but what if he had been born before the invention of writing or printing or the novel itself; what if he were to be born in a hundred years when, according to Geoffrey, the novel will be dead – the fact that they’ve been announcing the death of the novel for decades does not mean that it won’t die one day; what if he were born in times when it’s impossible to collect royalties and everything is pirated?”
“Of course,” said Hamilton-MacNiff, “you can’t use literary talent to validate Darwinism. The trouble with isms is that you’re expected to reject them or swallow them whole: of course there’s evolution; that has been proven beyond all doubt. It may well be that survival of the fittest is one of the most important drivers for evolution, but it cannot be applied to everything in the natural world, and certainly not to human society as it is currently organised – for a period of time that can have had no effect on our genetic make-up. Darwinism applied to modern capitalist society is the new eugenics.”
“Yes, yes,” replied Bonetti-MacDonald, “that may well be. I’m not interested in all that macro stuff. Leave that to the scientists and other bores. The novelist must be a humanist: he has to be on the side of that tramp, he has to understand how that condition could happen to any one of us.”
“I doubt it,” I said, but they ignored me as they got angrier with each other.
“The poet,” said Bonetti-MacDonald, “dresses up the banal in fine clothing. This is not a criticism of poetry, which is much more artistic than the novel. So the prose-writer has to make up for being prosaic by being more profound. He has to dig around ceaselessly to find an idea that’s original, which today means the idea behind an idea behind another idea. The novelist has to start with the tramp, who is a tragic figure condemned to an early death amongst great wealth – while hypothermia drains his potentially healthy body, the guys with the healthy genes, or is it bank balances, are kept alive even into extreme dotage when perhaps they’d prefer to die if only they’d retained the powers of speech to communicate that preference.”
“You can’t say that the novel is anything,” said Crawford-Mackenzie, “it’s not inherently humanist and it’s not inherently anti-humanist. It can be anything. Its only limitation is that it can’t be wholly anything; there has to be a conflict.”
I had been half aware of the presence of a strange individual: scrawny to the point of anorexia, he seemed slightly uncontrolled in his movements. Occasionally he would grin, as if in relation to some internal dialogue. It had been impossible to know whether or not he was following the conversation until he suddenly intervened in a tremulous, slightly high-pitched voice – not without a certain authority – that came from God knows where. Perhaps from a peculiar form of detachment, which emerged as the evening progressed. “These writers are too tall to see what’s going on, too relaxed to feel how life can sting and to clever to write a fool’s part.”
I must have looked a little surprised.
“Have you not been introduced to the fool?” asked Bonetti-MacDonald.
“No,” I answered, “isn’t that title a little cruel, however much it might appear to accurately reflect reality?”
“He was the one who claimed the title as his own,” Bonetti-MacDonald explained. “He boasts that he is both a fool and a coward, but I’m not convinced that he’s any more foolish or cowardly than the rest of us.”
“Clever,” I said and translated the concept into business-speak, “what they call ‘negative sell’.”
“Not at all,” the fool objected, “I’m not guilty of affectation – possibly the most corrosive force in society because it’s so widespread. It may be that I haven’t yet achieved a state of total folly and cowardice, but this achievement is not a boast but an ambition.”
“He’s the author of several books,” Bonetti-MacDonald continued to speak up for him.
“All of them unpublished,” the fool said proudly, renewing his inane grin.
“So you too have a passion for writing,” I said condescendingly, realising that the fool enjoyed a degree of respect in this company.
“Why not?” he said. “Any fool can write.”
“You think the other writers are too political?” I asked him.
“Not at all. I think they are too theoretical – too settled in their beliefs.”
“But can you go on forever not knowing and never reaching a conclusion?”
“Well, yes and no. You have a point. Although a writer should not conclude, he should invent a new way of not understanding in each of his books. We write to push things away. Folly is also a state of restlessness.”
The conversation with him was most amusing thing so far. I wanted to encourage him, but had little grasp of the subject. “Are you part of a school or do you want to found one?”
The fool laughed his unsettling laugh as if I had intended to joke and he were lauding the subtlety of my witticism. “You clearly know the answer,” he said irritatingly. “Post-modern novelists treat the novel as though they had invented it. Cleverness is fine. There is a place for cleverness, but without folly it is worthless.”
“What does that mean?”
He looked at me with surprise.
“Simple,” he said, “if you write a novel to examine the human condition, you have to be in the novel and suffer with it. If you write a novel to examine the novel, you have to be outside it and unfeeling. By making what I said this explicit I am almost guilty of what I’m criticising: the obsession with form within a form.”
“You seem pretty obsessed with form yourself,” I observed.
“You have a point. We become what we criticise, and what we praise eludes us.”
“You guys make my head spin,” I said with a degree of duplicity. I was enjoying myself and wanted to flatter them. “I can’t wait to get back to the office and relax my brain a while.”
“You think we’re bad? You should try the poets,” said Hamilton-MacNiff. “Complete loonies.”
The whisky was beginning to have its effect on my mind, and I was careless of my company. “Poetry, never had much time for it, but as we’re in male company let me recite my favourites: ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.’ Anyone want a cigar, by the way?” I extracted my cigar box from my jacket pocket. “Only the best.” They looked at me with disgust, I suppose. Why they take these things so seriously, I have no idea. I hadn’t quite exhausted my stock of the Barrack-Room Ballads: “‘For the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins.’ I’m just trying to lighten up the conversation,” I pleaded against their increasing anger.
The fool jumped up shaking with fury; he pointed his finger at me and screamed over-dramatically, “You’re an arse!”
“Why?” I asked quietly, with a hint of menace. Never had this happened to me before. It took a fool to present me with this … truth? No, but an interpretation clearly shared by others. I noticed that Bumper Jones was enjoying the scene, and I remembered for the first time during my stay that he had never invited me; I had invited myself. Only Lord Macmillan defended me, but he did so mutedly: “Steady on,” he muttered – an expression he must have picked up in the Upper House.
“Because your purest excretions come out of your anus. Your mouth, for instance, produces the foulest faeces ever expelled from human orifice.”
“Hold on,” I stood up, the alcohol was firing up my anger.
He stood his ground, but free of menace. There was no cruelty in his eyes, just outrage. The beast within me saw the weakness and reacted quickly: my fist was lifted and about to begin its trajectory towards his chin when a strong hand grabbed my wrist. I turned and saw it was Charles Crawford-Mackenzie, the famous author I’d never heard of. He had a surprisingly vice-like grip, and said coldly and succinctly, “Do not hit my guest!” I relaxed my own arm, and felt something akin to shame.
Now it was the fool who stepped forward: so close I could feel his breath on my face and could only just focus his smile, the one that is halfway between inane jocularity and insanity.
“Are you a king?” he asked, the warmth of his breath slightly perfumed with whisky.
“A king?”
“Well, I have this coin, a pound coin,” he held it up. “This woman’s head appears to be that of a queen, as she wears a crown – of wealth and not of thorns. Now, you are wedded to the coin, I think, so you must be a king.”
“There is some logic in his thought,” said Bumper Jones, “he starts from a false premise and ends up with a distorted truth.”
I felt the alcohol drain from my mind, and another emotion I rarely feel assailed me, that strange and eventful evening: I felt alone and out of my own tribe; I felt that my views had no allies. I was the alien amongst that alien people.
“But what does the coin mean?” I asked, never one to give in quietly.
“It means so many things, and how we love things that mean many things.”
“And what are they?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Why not? I’ve heard plenty of twaddle today. A little more won’t do any harm.”
“Well, first of all it represents itself: money as a form of exchange. That’s banal, but not unimportant.”
“Okay, let’s move on to the more interesting stuff.”
“It represents the inability of the creative mind to be itself in this society.”
“That figures. But why should the creative mind – by which I suppose you to mean arty-farty self-expression – be exonerated from the rigours of the market? If no one wants your stupid books, why should anyone publish them?”
“I haven’t been published, remember, and I have no desire to be published…”
“That’s your first lie!” I cried exultantly.
“Well done,” said the fool with a grin, “you’re a bit of a fool yourself. Who would have thought it? I should have said that I don’t have desire enough to be published. You see these three published authors: only one of them ever made any money for himself and his publisher, but all three practise a degree of self-censorship to please their public or their public as the publisher perceives it.”
The other three writers looked uncomfortable with the new direction of this conversation, which was quietly releasing me from the corner I’d got caught in. Of course, Crawford-Mackenzie was the least bothered, partly because he does make money and partly because he takes himself less seriously.
“Don’t think,” the fool was becoming too tiresome for a fool, “that I write obscurely: I write to pursue the only truth a fiction writer can attain, a truth that fits into a square inch,” and he held up his pound coin, “anything bigger than that simply falls apart. We leave the explanation of the universe to non-fiction writers.”
“All well and good,” I said, now feeling my way back to control of the situation, “but this is just for you guys. It’s of no interest to the rest of us.”
“Not at all,” he said mildly, “I was speaking not only of writing, but of all creative activity. And everyone has a creative mind, so it concerns all humanity.”
“I think humanity wants to eat first. What else does your coin represent?”
“The commodification of everything, including those mainstays of human existence: love and friendship. It means the death of conversation and the birth of networking.”
I didn’t pursue that one. Surely no relationship can be entirely free of each participant’s self-interest. Where would the fun be? These people don’t see the beauty of market and its ability to rule our lives dispassionately. “And …” I asked.
“The fascination it exercises beyond our wants. If you let this coin lead you on, your desire for it will outstrip your wants. You will want more financial wealth than could be justified by all your real and imagined wants in a very long life time multiplied by misery you inflicted on yourself and others to acquire it. Still more strangely, your desire for wealth will banish your other desires that were the original cause of your desire for wealth.”
“Peregrine, what do you think of our island?” asked Lord Archasamby, who had had enough.
“It’s wet,” I said.
“But the storm’s over,” said the fool, who promptly stood up and left the room without further comment.
“I was thinking more in terms of your view of our culture, language and landscape. How long have you been here?” his lordship simpered.
“A few days. And I’ve formed no opinion at all of your island. I didn’t come here on an anthropological field trip – but for some rest and entertainment.”
“We still have a community here,” said Hamilton-MacNiff.
“When people talk about community,” said Bonetti-MacDonald, “they mean a local hierarchy – to which they very probably belong.”
I had no desire to follow more of their sophistries; I preferred the incomprehensible fool. “Bumper, where’s the fool gone?” I asked, now wholly relaxed with the epithet. Bumper nodded to me and took me out into the hall.
“Are you missing the fool already?” he smiled.
“He’s entertaining in his own way,” I said.
We climbed the stairs that spoke of both frugality and relative wealth. The occasional stair creaked appropriately and the walls displayed original paintings of Highland scenes devoid of any human presence. A small window revealed the view from the back of the house: a hill that stubbornly bore up its load of sodden peat bog topped with heather and the dark green of their wild grasses and rushes. The storm had broken and a bright but feeble sun shone on the dampness of the rock and sloping ground. Does it take courage to live here? The land itself appears to express defiance.
Bumper pointed to a door at the front of the house, and as I opened it, he went back downstairs without another word. Even when the door was fully open and I could see him busy scribbling at a desk, the fool made no attempt to acknowledge my presence. Bizarrely I felt a little diminished and unable to go forward, I coughed to draw his attention.
“You can come in, if you must,” he said, still refusing to turn his head in my direction.
I came up to the desk and took out a wad of notes – amounting, I would say, to about two thousand pounds – which I placed on the desk. He continued to write. I pushed the pile of money in his direction until it was almost under his nose, which quivered as though it had detected a bad smell. He stopped writing and still did not turn in my direction. He was motionless and the hand holding the pen was frozen in the air, the absurd pretension of a mind entirely alien to my own. I got the message and gave in first by removing the money and replacing it in my jacket pocket. Only then did he turn to me and say, “I knew that you would try that on.” He smiled and put his pen down. “What can I do for you?”
“Just came for a chat. What are you writing?” I asked and he removed his arms from the desk and sat back in his chair to allow me to read:
What are we fighting this war for? – asked Abram Davidovich – Russia, so vast and empty, cannot win against those little countries, dense with worn and emptied souls, and the clatter of harsh, unthinking machinery snorting steam like metallic monsters tamed by self-important men who bustle far off in luxurious offices and courtly edifices of surplus wealth purloined.
“Heavy stuff. Not the kind of thing you take down to the beach then?” I laughed.
“I rarely go to the beach,” he said. Was this the literalism of the zany or just a desire not to engage?
“And what is this obsession with Russia?” I asked.
“I admire Russia because Russia admires literature. I like the fact that there literature matters because it’s about what matters. It’s not entertainment, but an integral part of life.”
“I doubt it. You’re sure that videos, satellite TV and internet porn aren’t a more integral part of their lives now?”
“I’ve heard that they still read a lot. But it’s difficult to know what’s happening in Russia outside Moscow and St Petersburg – the green zones of Western affluence. Who knows what benefits of modernisation have been brought to Russia, along with MacDonalds, unemployment and child prostitution?”
“What are you actually writing about?”
“Human tragedy. The heroism of mortals. The complexity of moral decisions.”
“How dull. Any sex?”
“None.”
“Isn’t it a little grandiloquent?”
“You’re right. That’s why it doesn’t work in context. This character would have thought like this, but this is not the way he would have expressed himself. To write is to delete, to stop short and to avoid.”
“But you always find room for your favourite theme. Money is bad, and greed the only evil.”
“Of course greed is not the only evil. If a man wears his love of man like a badge of honour and uses it as an excuse to wag his finger at others, then it is merely a vanity, another form of self-love. There are many paths to egotism. Even the ascetic who lives a seemingly selfless life is vain, if looking in the mirror he smiles and says, ‘I am a good man.’”
“So you agree with me in condemning all this do-gooder nonsense,” I asserted, led on by the fool’s erratic mind.
“No, not at all. To struggle feebly against the forces of evil and to feel the tragic sadness of this earth are the primary purposes of this life. Everyone does these things to some extent. It’s beyond the powers of a poor fool to assay the purity of other people’s emotions. Only God knows that…”
“If God exists.”
“…if God exists. We cannot know if God is there to know, but we are born or brought up to want that final judge or justice. Even if there is no God, is it not divine, or does it not at least make us intoxicatingly alive, to struggle free of necessity?
“Animals are governed wholly by necessity,” the fool continued, “and free will draws humanity towards God, because only through free will can humanity enter a moral universe – a new and separate existence. But the eternal gods cannot have morality either, because morality – quite strangely – is also created out of the contingency of necessity. In other words, absolute free will is as inimical to morality as is necessity, and morality can only exist where there is a mixture of these two opposites. If God exists, then He is a combination of free will and the tragic contingency of this world.
“Not only disease, diet, DNA, environment and chance govern and constrict us, but also the ideology we live within: consumerist capitalism drives us back down towards the animals and we elect to be no more than our mere wants. Earlier capitalism secularised morality, but in many ways made the moral choices starker and more complex.”
I pulled up a chair, sat down and looked at the man: “You’re a queer fish,” I said, “and I won’t argue with you, because I hardly understood a word you said. This much I did get: you reject material wealth. Perhaps it isn’t envy, I’ll grant you that. But do you look in the mirror and say ‘I am a good man’?”
“Then I would really be a fool in every sense,” he laughed. “I live the way I do because it makes me happy. No more, no less.”
I always say, “Distrust a man who says he’s happy.” I say this with good reason: it is a claim I often make myself, and I know myself not to be trustworthy. But I did not say this; perhaps I should have. Instead I wanted to lower the tone of our conversation, but that isn’t easy with the fool. “So what will you write about next?” I asked.
“Death,” he said, and I should have guessed. “Writing these stories has made me think about death. It starts to occur long before the heart stops. My feelings are more leaden, and my energy is low.”
“Was it ever high?” I asked.
He smiled: “Even lower.”
“A slow death then,” I exchanged his smile.
“Yes, maybe the slowness of my death will cure me of my folly. Maybe there’s a post-modern writer in me yet – who will rise up sullenly from the moulted skin of joyous folly to give vent to atrophied emotions.”
The fool is the most harmless of these four writers, as you’ve probably guessed. But he’s also deceivingly entertaining, and I cannot trust him because I cannot understand him in any way.
“Why do you write then?” I asked, “to predict the future or to examine the present?” This was the moment when I decided that I really had to tell you about this lot.
Like putting a coin in a vending machine, asking the fool a question results in him spitting out your chosen flavour. “The future? Don’t ask me. It is surprising how many cannot see what’s happening in the present. The future is and always will be utterly beyond our comprehension, although we must always plan for it if we are to live decently in the present.
“Those who do not listen to the rumble of the distant future, but play with the received truths and prejudices of their own times should at least be aware of the immediate future, if they are to succeed: they’re like the young men at the Pamplona bull run – they wait until the last possible moment to shelter from the new oncoming wisdom that will demand a new conformism. This activity requires skill, good reflexes and bravado, but personally I can never see the point of it.”
“So you write to change the present,” I sneered, always uncertain of what I thought of that elusive fellow.
“Nothing so grand. To mutter in the wind. To subvert it perhaps. But only by questioning and pointing to the many gaps in our knowledge. A literary work should produce a plurality of interpretations – and a compromise between the reader’s mind and the author’s. If there is to be a struggle for progress, it will be through information. Great minefields of lies will have to be cleared, and many will succumb to the cruel lacerations of black propaganda. In this literature will play an auxiliary role in a wider struggle of whistleblowers and leakers against power, which is ruthless and shameless. I am not optimistic, and if there’s to be no progress, it’s better for the individual to withdraw from society and think.”
“You’re remarkably frank with the enemy for someone who takes his role so seriously.”
“Is it taking oneself too seriously to demand the right to mutter in the wind?”
“Well, put it another way: you have been generous to discuss your ideas with someone who clearly doesn’t share them.”
“To people like Charles Crawford-Mackenzie and myself, it’s much more fun to chat with people we disagree with. Charles and I agree on very little, except the utility of disagreeing.”
“What do you think of that Eyetie?” I asked, suggesting complicity and pressing for a division.
The fool looked at me sharply, and I immediately realised he was not fool enough not to know I was winding him up. “Bonetti-MacDonald has interesting things to say. None of those three downstairs are interested in provoking the bull of oncoming fashion. They’re more interesting in pricking the elephant of power and then doing a runner. Sadly the elephant doesn’t even notice, being fully aware that rational argument barely affects the manner in which humans consort with each other. All three of them believe too much in improving society and too little in the chaos and madness of mankind. This is the charming disease of rationalism.”
Exasperated, I said, “At least they believe in something they can communicate. You never have the courage to take a stand on anything. This conversation would have been more useful if you had explained what you actually want and how to get it.”
“You don’t come to a fool for answers, only for questions.”
“And I don’t believe you’re such a fool, either.”
“What is a fool if not someone who doesn’t understand anything, and I don’t understand anything. Ergo, I am a fool.”
I shook the fool’s hand warmly – God knows why – and went downstairs in search of Bumper. He was already in the hall, and getting ready to go. I togged up as well and asked where the others were.
“In the garden. Big event. That fine-looking tree in the corner came down in the storm.” We went out into the garden and two men in blue overalls – neighbours we were told – were busying around, one with a chainsaw and the other putting the cut wood into a neat pile. Hamilton-MacNiff was helping out in his usual desultory manner and Bonetti-MacDonald was inspecting the shape of the tree rings in each cross-section, as though it were a question of great moment. Our host was joking in Gaelic with the man wielding the saw, who could probably have done without the interruptions. They had started in the middle of the tree to open up the pathway it fell across, and it was now clear for us to go. Everyone was engaged with the tree incident – for them it was like a 100-point fall on the FTSE-100. We waved to them by way of a peremptory leave-taking. As we left the garden, I heard Crawford-Mackenzie say in a low but clear voice, “Who was that creep? Yes, I know he’s a friend of Jones’s, but what does he do? Used-car salesman?”
I heard laughter and Geoffrey Hamilton-MacNiff said in a louder voice, “Come off it, Charles, you know that’s not the case. Big bucks there.”
But I cannot say that I dislike them. Actually Crawford-Mackenzie was a pleasant enough chap, and this made me think about the circular nature of the likes and dislikes in that room. Writers admire politicians and seek out their company in the hope that they can influence them with their crackpot ideas, while politicians find them absurd, rootless non-entities. Yet politicians like Lord Archasamby love bankers because they went into politics to exert power, and discover that the real power is held by people like me. We bankers, however, find politicians venal, and although, as men of the world, venality does not shock us, there is nothing more pathetic than the venality of jumped-up moralisers who are always looking over their shoulders at some ill-defined public opinion. Yet in our hearts we also know that our power, which undoubtedly brings us great wealth and security, does not give us real control over events or even understanding of them. We’re attracted to writers because part of us envies the freedom of their world of ideas, however ineffectual, self-deluding and often escapist it may be. They of course dismiss us, because our kind of power is not power they desire, comprehend or even find intellectually interesting. I am not talking just about ridiculous people like the enjoyably obnoxious Bonetti-MacDonald, I also mean upright and pleasantly eccentric writers like Crawford-Mackenzie, in particular, although Hamilton-MacNiff seemed a good sort, in spite of his leftie tendencies. Not, of course, that I will ever have time to read any of them.
There is something professional about Lord Archasamby, but that is deceiving. There is a hardness in him, the hardness of a businessman or financier like myself, but I don’t adopt an air of moral superiority. If you pursue an amoral existence, you should be honest enough to put aside all moral codes. My amorality, or some may call it immorality, is quite sincere, just like these writer fellows. Their ideas are not real, but their sincerity cannot be doubted.
They’re a curious type of fauna, and like any species in danger of extinction they provoke a nostalgic regret that approximates to compassion, but isn’t. It is too weak to provoke any kind of action or reaction. When the last of them dies, it will mark the end of a pointless rebellion that cost too many lives. I like these ones because they amuse me, but if they were flourishing, I would be the first to insist on their extirpation, whatever the human, ecological or financial cost. In the sixties, seventies and even eighties, we had them bombed, napalmed, shot, thrown from planes and killed individually and anonymously in the night. Nothing to be proud of, but it had to be done. We won, and I cannot see us ever being challenged again. We can pursue our own business, which is what we were put into this world to do. The silly leftist ideology never took account of human nature.
Out on the road I saw for the first time the view down to the sea: an expanse of white sand, whose magnitude defied reality, stretched out to a shore of bright turquoise, where the shallows reflected the whiteness of that sand and mixed it with the pure blue we could see further out to sea. Visibility was as heightened as previously it had been diminished: the extremes between the different ways the same landscape dressed itself seemed almost supernatural.
“Nature,” I exclaimed. “Nature trumps it all, including itself: the tree, the view and sudden change of weather. Where is man in all this? Like a limpet clinging to the rock.”
“You don’t say,” said Bumper with distaste. “You came all the way from London to tell me that?”
“That’s the point. In the city you can forget about nature, even as you walk through a leafy park. That’s subservient nature; this is nature triumphant.”
“Well then, you’ve learnt something on your trip north.”
“I have, Bumper, I really have, and not just that. I’ve learnt that not all the world thinks like me, and I’ve learnt that I’ll be damn glad to be back home, amongst my own hubbub, my own certainties, my own tribe – my own delusions. It has been much more fun than I would have thought, Bumper, but I won’t be back.”
“Very sensible. It’s good to be reminded of who you are not, but only occasionally – otherwise it becomes unsettling.”