MAX CALLED ME as soon as I got back to London from seeing my father. He adored Father—who adored him in return—and he wanted to hear my impression of his health. So I took a cab to Ladbroke Grove, despite Jane’s insistence that we couldn’t now afford such luxuries.
He was not wearing his spectacles when he opened the door to me, and his reduced eyes made me squint. Max “looks like a man in three acts,” as Peter used to describe him. His head is rather narrow, his shoulders of average width, and his pelvis quite broad. The heavy, broad-based body suited him when, as a teenager, he liked to pose as the real sceptic, the slayer of fraudulent emotion and slack thought. On Pilgrim’s Path, during meetings of our grandly named Pitmatic Philosophical Society, Max used to narrow his bespectacled eyes as he lit a Dunhill, and seemed to smother untruths by slumping over them. I can still see him in my mind, seventeen years old, heavily sagging under the oak tree and saying to me, “Is that true? Can you verify it?”
Just as Colin and Belinda think fit to serve tea from a Thermos, so Max, who resembles his parents more than he knows, presents the strangest food at his flat. Naturally, the only alcohol he had available, when I arrived, was a deformed plastic flagon of ouzo and a bottle of Domecq amontillado. I sat in his kitchen as he blundered good-naturedly among his cupboards, emerging at last with a plate of crackers and a
huge tube of Primula cheese spread, lain alongside the crackers with apparent dignity like a sceptre.
“Stop, stop! Why don’t we just cut our losses and go round the corner to the pub?”
“Why?” asked Max, in obvious bewilderment. I took pity on him, and gently lied.
“I need whisky, that’s why. I’ve been in Sundershall—army rations as far as drink goes.”
“That’s fine, then. I need cigarettes.” Max used to drink alcohol when we were younger; now he feeds mainly off coffee and Coke. I sometimes think that the only thing Max is worldly about is tobacco; he is still loyal to Dunhills. The broad packet, rosette-red on the outside with icon-gold innards, so that the box always glows like a medal, obviously still pleases him.
We walked down Max’s street and turned onto Ladbroke Grove, which was mad with people, most of them menacing.
“It’s a while since I’ve been here,” I said.
“The atmosphere is always … basically a race riot just beginning or ending.”
“Max, are you quoting yourself?”
“Not … yet,” he said brightly.
Max speaks frustratingly slowly. It’s not halting speech, because he has such a clear idea of where he is going; he is simply being very careful with language. I used to love his earnest, slightly showy silences—he is a terrible exhibitionist in his quiet way—when we were teenagers: Max, measuring out words as he measured out everything, sagely, intelligently. But nowadays his portly intermissions seem controlling, a way of keeping his audience in the theatre. I have to struggle neither to complete his sentences nor to bridle at his reticent authority.
“This is an amazingly grim place,” I shouted—we were entering a crowded pub. Even to a smoker it seemed deadly: the thick air was a hanging traffic of grey, produced, it seemed, by every single human in the room.
“Why?” asked Max, blinking.
“Well, is there anyone in this pub not smoking? It’s like the entire French nation on a night out.”
“I’ve never noticed,” said Max. “It’s where I get my cigarettes, that’s all. But, Tom, you don’t like pubs anyway. You’ve grown pub-phobic. Living with Karl for all those years … did that to you. They’re too proletarian for you, too easy. The juvenility of beer is offensive to you, you only like bottles with … years on them.”
“I do like pubs,” I said, as we made our way to the only free table, “I just don’t like beer.”
“Well, today was a column day for me and I have earned my pint.”
“What was it about today?”
“Boring stuff. A piece about how we’re no longer inventive as a nation. Blah, blah. You’ve read it a hundred times, by … diverse hands.” Max pushed his spectacles back up his nose, a gesture I am fond of.
“It’s not boring to me,” I said. Was Max really shy, or did his reticence contain a kind of condescension? Would he have swallowed the fruit of his efforts so swiftly with fellow journalists? Perhaps behind this apparent modesty lay the ghost of my “failures”—not only the unfinished Ph.D., but the unwritten obituaries. He was trying to spare me the exhibition of his success.
“I am capable of following an argument,” I said. Max blinked at me, became uneasy.
“I wasn’t … I wasn’t implying that you weren’t a worthy
audience. But the piece itself is ordinary. Two hours flat … is how long it took me.”
Max was in several ways more “philosophical” than I was as a teenager. But at Oxford (then dominated by logicians) he found philosophy unexpectedly difficult. He used to ask me for help, and I largely wrote his big end-of-term essay on Aristotle (which humblingly received a B minus). To the delight of his horrid father he switched to classics. After Oxford, he decided that he wanted to be “in the real world,” and became a reporter for a newspaper in Bristol, followed quickly by a similar job in London, at The Times. One week, he offered to write a column in place of the star columnist, who was on holiday, and the editor liked the piece so much he was given his own space. I still have a copy of that first column. The news of Max’s precocious success—at a time when I was still living at Uncle Karl’s and just starting on the Ph.D.—spread fast, and it was in fact my mother who phoned me to tell me that I should go out and buy The Times. I was excited as if for myself, without any stirring of envy. I remember wondering why I was not at all envious. I concluded that I felt happy because Max was succeeding for both of us. A locket of the purest provincial atavism broke in my hand and released an intoxication; it was Sundershall Max, pitmatic Max, who was appearing in The Times.
And there was his name opposite the venerable letters page. The date was October 13th, 1984. Max was twenty-four. He was much less conservative than he is now, and his article was quite a fierce attack on Mrs. Thatcher, and on the speech she had just delivered at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, where the IRA had sent her an inconvenient, hotel-collapsing gift. Mrs. Thatcher was undeterred by the IRA bomb, of course, and pressed on with her
speech, which was largely about the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire miners, who had been on strike for seven months, protesting pit closures. Some of the miners had dared to return to work, and these few, this happy band, were cheered on by the Iron Lady: “They are lions! Men and women like that are what we are proud to call the best of British.”
The subtlety of Max’s article lay not in his attack on Mrs. Thatcher, whom he faulted for the “almost cinematic luridity of her political vision (in the land of the blind, the lady wearing 3-D spectacles will be queen),” but for the way he suggested that such was the natural inertia of British life, the future of the coal industry would be exactly the same whether the miners went on strike or not. This inertia he blamed on an age-old tussle between “anger” and “melancholy.” Max seized on Mrs. Thatcher’s phrase “the best of British,” and asked what “British” really meant. To Stendhal, wrote Max, a Briton was “only fully alive when he was angry.” But as far as de Quincey was concerned, wrote Max, the British were essentially “melancholic.” Both de Quincey and Stendhal were right, Max said. He argued that English history had always oscillated between acts of anger and ideas of melancholy; and that sometimes these opposing tendencies acted against each other at the same time or in the same person. And this is how we British like it, he said. It means that nothing gets done, which is what we want. But along had come Mrs. Thatcher, an “angry” woman, determined to wreck that slothful balance.
Since that first explosive success, Max has written steadily, once a week. I have cut out many of his columns, because for a long time I thought about writing an analysis of what I did and didn’t like about them. He sounds, at times, inauthentic, aping the confidence of older men. And I think he
writes too much. The pundit should not become a hack. Max’s fluency, his amazing capacity to write something every week, is a danger. His recent work has seemed especially routine to me. But Max’s readers obviously don’t agree with me, to judge from his burgeoning popularity. And certainly I should not be trusted on this matter. Not only because of what Jane told me last Christmas about him, but because of a general sad feeling I have that Max is no longer playing on my side.
But in the pub, last September, Max was sweetly—or diplomatically—modest.
“Look, Tom, I don’t want to grizzle on about myself,” he said. “And surprisingly enough your dad is much more interesting to me than my latest column. Which you can read tomorrow anyway.”
“Oh, Dad’s fine, of course.”
“Did he seem changed? Is he weaker? How is your mum?”
“Yes. No. Fine. To each question respectively.”
“What’s wrong with you? Anyone would think that … it was your heart that had gone into arrest.”
“You’re quite right,” I said. I couldn’t say to Max what I wanted to, that his reverential respect for my parents had always irritated me. I should have been more understanding. His parents, after all, were Colin and Belinda Thurlow. It was no surprise that he had transferred his affections from them to Peter and Sarah Bunting.
“But he did seem changed?”
“Yes. Thinner, older, I suppose. But only to the trained eye. I doubt most people would notice anything significant.”
“Well,” said Max, “I’m pretty … au fait with the way he looks and speaks.”
“Max, you were last in Sundershall about a year ago. Or was it two years? I forget.”
“But every time I go I drop in to see your parents.”
“As I was made to do this time, to your parents.”
“I didn’t know that! Why didn’t you say? How was … the Crassus of the North?” Max sometimes called his father Crassus, after a figure of the same name in Pliny (“not the famous Crassus,” Max told me), who was apparently celebrated in the ancient world for never having laughed.
“Your parents were grilling me about your column.”
“As if they care.” Max pushed his spectacles back up his nose, then ducked into his gravy-coloured beer. His eyes, just above the raised rim of the glass, bore magnifiedly on me.
“Oh, they care all right,” I said. “I think they’re proud of you actually. But too proud to admit their pride. They might even be secretly reading you for all I know.”
“Mum once told me that Dad had confessed to reading me very occasionally in the periodicals room of the university library.”
“So there you are.”
“No, Tom, they can be intermittently proud and still totally opposed to what I do. Apart from the fact that I’m a journalist, nowadays they also don’t like the … progress of my politics. Last time I was there, Dad and I argued about the function of newspapers, while Mum and I argued about Thatcher and the liberation of the Eastern bloc. So I stay away, and I think, actually, that my columns are the better, the bolder, for my knowing that they are entirely unread in Sundershall. Absence … makes the … art grow stronger, I suppose.”
“You’re not unread in the vicarage. My parents are always going on about you. The Times is their paper.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Well, do be sorry for one thing. I wish you hadn’t mentioned those obituaries to them. Dad turned it into a joke to use against me, and it just enabled him and Mum to sharpen the comparison they already like to make between us.” I did find it hard to forgive Max for wantonly spreading the news about my failed assignments.
“Oh, I didn’t think those obituaries meant so much to you, or else you would have written them, right?” Max was being inscrutable.
“Well, they didn’t mean very much. It was journalism, I could have written them in a flash.”
Again Max looked at me with his magnified eyes.
“I don’t mean it like that, you know I don’t. I meant that I could have written them without any difficulty. It’s simply that I have very little time at the moment. Very little time! I have to get this Ph.D. finished.”
“Fine. Fine. I know you have to complete the Ph.D. Certainly I wouldn’t have mentioned them if I had thought that … the powers-that-be in the vicarage would use them against you. So what was your dad’s joke?”
“He said that it was a good thing that the obituaries were still unwritten, since obviously my not writing them was keeping the subjects alive. Very droll.”
Max laughed at this, and exclaimed: “I do love your dad!”
“I wish I had written those obituaries. Hegley will have recommissioned them now.”
“I can check if you want,” said Max eagerly.
“Forget it. It’s very nice of you. Truly. And, yes, I could have done with the money. You bet. Jane and I had another row last night. We’re going to have to start economizing. You should approve, Max. We’ll have to learn how to be good monetarists.”
“Well, yes, Thatcher’s monetarism was a good thing, but as far as personal finances go I think that one should always try not to spend less but to earn more instead.”
“Oh, thanks for the advice. What if I am one of those people who earns less while spending more? Is there a name for that?”
“Yes, there is. Monetary laxist, that’s what you are.”
“What?”
“In economics, there’s a term, ‘monetary laxist’—for people who are lax with the … monetary flow. I like the sound of it. Vaguely … medicinal.”
I felt a familiar surge of warmth for Max, as his slow, clever words, spaced by exhalations of smoke, sounded across the table.
“It’s no laughing matter. Right now, Jane and I are always at each other’s throats. She blames me for not bringing in any money. The burden for earning is entirely on her.”
“You can appreciate her position, then? It’s very difficult for her. I bet she’d love to give up the teaching and just play.”
“What’s she been saying to you?” I asked quickly.
“Nothing at all,” said Max. “Nothing at all.” I thought he said this a bit too certainly.
We both drank, and then had little to say to each other. After a while I began again:
“You know I told you about this other project I have in mind?” Now I was the one speaking slowly.
“Yes, it’s the … bag you’re currently into.”
“The bag … You’re teasing me.”
“Could be.”
“Well, Jane has no appreciation of it, I’m sure. That’s why we are arguing at the moment.”
“Have you mentioned it to her?”
“Yes, just before I went north.”
“What did you tell her it was about?”
“I didn’t really tell her anything. I said to her that it was something I was thinking about, when in fact I’ve been filling notebooks with it for months. I had to have some explanation for what I’ve been doing.”
“So how do you expect her to … appreciate it if she doesn’t know anything about it? I can’t ‘appreciate’ … poltergeists, or Bombay.”
“You wouldn’t appreciate it, either, probably,” I grumbled into my drink.
“That’s a non sequitur.”
“Pitmatic!” I said, smiling at Max.
“I’m sure I would appreciate it if you deigned to show any of it to me.”
“Actually—I have a few pages with me. I brought them.” I suddenly felt very shy. I removed four folded pages from my jacket pocket. They were about Kierkegaard. Max looked very pleased, and said:
“This is the first thing you have shown me since—when?—I can’t remember. Can I read them now?” He started to read, and to give him time I went to the lavatory. The filthy blocked urinal displayed my bubbling piss for me. Behind me, in a cubicle, a man said again and again to himself with great vehemence, “Bollocks! Bollocks! That’s complete bollocks!” When I returned, Max exclaimed:
“It’s all about Jane, not about Kierkegaard.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Here, and here, and throughout.”
“Oh God, I meant to cut out the references to Jane before I gave the passage to you.”
“Keep them in,” said Max.
“For whom? It doesn’t have any readers.”
“I can think of one reader—in the … medieval sense.”
“You’ve lost me … Oh … bloody hell that’s a nasty joke.” I laughed.
“Not at all. Isn’t God your intended reader?”
“But I don’t believe in Him.”
“Yes you do,” said Max. “Yes you do.”
“No I don’t. Why are you so anxious to prove that I do? You’re not secretly scurrying to church yourself, are you? If you have revelations to make, please be gentle with me.”
“No,” replied Max. “I’m not going to church. But I think as I get older that no one is really ever an atheist. Everyone believes.”
“Oh, I see,” I said sarcastically, “it’s sort of unavoidable, rather the way that mysteriously I always seem to have a recent cut or bruise somewhere on my shins. I don’t know where the hell I got it, I don’t remember bumping into anything, I’m not in any pain, but always there’s this scab on my shins. Religion is like this. Is that what you mean?”
“The scab of religion! Tom, I can see you getting worked up. Your voice has risen. You don’t need to. I’m not about to … fall on my knees. I’m just probably moving towards the idea that since religion is a human creation, and its form is man’s, then … everything in it is at least as true as we are.”
“Ha. I never did believe in your atheism. You’re a closet Christian.”
“No … neither closet nor Christian. But I don’t think that religion is … a machinery of propositions, to be argued with, fought with, and disproved. It’s away of life, a series of habits. Practices rather than knowledge, facts of existence. If a peasant woman kisses an icon, you can’t say that she is wrong to do this. It’s like farming. People have always gathered the harvest in a certain way, and this can never be … wrong, even if newer and quicker methods are invented which supersede it. Or like music. You can like or dislike a piece of music but you can’t call it wrong. It is not only … pointless to argue with this, it is … meaningless to argue with it. Am I right?”
“Why meaningless?”
“Because the desire to pray, like gathering the harvest, is a need, a hunger, not an idea. You can argue with an idea, but you can’t argue with a hunger. Nor … should you.”
“I reject almost every word of what you just said.”
“Well, you would, or you wouldn’t be writing a Book Against God.” Max smiled.
“It’s nonsense. First of all, music, when I last looked, has not caused centuries of wars. Nor has farming. At least, not as a timeless business of cultivation and harvesting. But religion has. Ergo, this hunger, this ‘need’ you talk about, contains ideas about which people have cared enough to go to war. The peasant who kisses an icon before embarking on a journey does so because her tradition tells her that to do so will guarantee her divine protection and blessing, as a man might nowadays cross himself before his plane takes off into the air. How come that isn’t a proposition? In your scheme,” I continued, “how would one ever be converted, as Paul was, and how would one ever lose one’s faith, as I did? As we did! To find or lose a faith is to find or lose belief in a
series of propositions and guarantees, laid out by Jesus and the Gospel writers.”
“It’s not a contract! Anyway, there we’re a bit different,” said Max. “I … never had a faith to lose.”
“Well, neither did I, really.”
“That’s not true. You had something, then you lost it. At fourteen or fifteen. I remember you telling me about it. Most of all you had your parents’ faith, and that … had to be fought.”
“Oh, I’m not fighting their faith. Definitely not.”
“No? Oh, this is getting good. We haven’t done this for a while. What are you … staring at?” asked Max.
“There’s a large fly sauntering across the table. Christ, look at it!”
“Tom, it’s a … fly. A fly.”
“You know how I feel about insects.”
“A fly, Tom, a fly.”
“I will have to liquidate it. It’s disgusting.” I slapped the table with the beermat; the fly veered away, then cheekily landed once again on the table, pausing to sharpen its front legs. I tried again with the beermat. Again the fly evaded me and returned.
“I can’t sit here with that insect,” I said. Part of me sincerely meant what I was saying—I do loathe insects very much—and part of me was quite happy to use my hatred of insects as a way of ending our discussion.
“This is a phobia you are going to … have to control,” said Max.
“Indeed, that’s what Jane says. But in the meantime, let’s go, shall we?”
Max was right: it was a joy to be arguing with him again, as we used to. But our meeting left me a little suspicious.
Max seemed to be crossing over to the other side, joining the group of people we used to call, when we were boys, “the God-talkers.” And when I look back at our conversation a year later, I notice how cleverly he avoided the real subject: Jane.