“But that is Culture,” said Sutcliffe in his most reproachful manner. “Or if you prefer, ERUTLUC. You see, we have never been interested in the real world – we see it through a cloud of disbelief. Ni eht gninnigeb saw eht drow!” He intoned the phrase majestically and explained that it was simply the backspelling of “In the beginning was the Word!”
“So we are back to culture, are we?” she said. “And we are not the only ones. Lord Galen is being deeply troubled by the word as well.”
Blanford said, “I know. He has been to see me about it. But first let me tell you about Cade my manservant who has started to encounter him at night when he prowls about the city. Cade, when he is deeply thinking, puts on an extraordinary facial expression which reminds me of that sculpture by an artist whose name I have repressed called ‘Romulus and Remus founding Rome’. That is how intense it is. Then after a time he clears his throat and says, ‘Sir, may I speak?’ and when I nod, goes on, ‘I saw him again last night!’ A hush. ‘Him who?’ I ask and he says with slyness, ‘Lord Galen. He was in one of the houses. They were laughing at him. They asked me if he was really a Lord because he calls his balls his “heirlooms”. Of course, I said, that’s why he is worried about their performance. He ’opes for a son and heir. I trust I was right, I done right.’ ‘Cade, you done right.’ ‘Thank you, Master Aubrey.’”
“I shall ask Toby to take Galen to the Swiss perverts’ restaurant where they only serve fried grapes in order to break down your reserve. Is he really worried about his heirlooms?”
“No. It’s to do with culture. And it is very human and touching. He has been told to see man in the raw!”
Indeed there was a good deal of truth in this, and it had largely come about because of Galen’s latest and most illustrious appointment.
He sidled into Blanford’s room at the clinic looking like the Phantom of the Opera; there were dark circles under his eyes. He was slightly out of breath and very much out of composure as he cast about for a way of expressing his disturbed feelings. “Aubrey!” he said, with a suspicion of a quiver to his underlip, “I felt that I must consult you, and I hope you will have time to hear me out. Aubrey, I am at a great crossroads in my professional life.” He sat down on a chair, and placing a briefcase full of books on the floor at his feet, fanned himself with his hat – as if to quell the fires of anxiety which were consuming him. “My dear Lord Galen, of course,” said Blanford with a rush of affection and sympathy, and put out his hand which Galen grabbed and shook with gratitude. “What is it? What can it be?”
Galen allowed his breathing to rediscover its normal rhythm before unfolding his tale. “Today, Aubrey,” he said at last, “I am at the top of the tree, I have the plum job of all – I am the Coordinator of Coordinated Cultures!” He waited for it to sink in before continuing, “And yet I can’t for the life of me discover what culture is, what the word I am in charge of means. I know that I pass for a well-educated man and all that. But I am supposed to work out a report which will deal with the whole future of the European book, for example, for we control all the paper. Someone has to decide what is good of our culture, and that is me. But how can I decide if I don’t know what it is? And from every side they come bringing me what they call ‘cornerstones’ to look at. ‘You must include that in your recommendations, it’s a cornerstone,’ they keep saying. I am surrounded with cornerstones. And some of them – well, I have never been so disgusted in my life.” He groped among his affairs and produced a copy of Ulysses by Joyce. “Aubrey! Upon my honour what do you think of this … this cornerstone?”
“I can see your dilemma,” said Aubrey, thinking of the scabrous parts of Joyce’s masterpiece. But to his surprise what Galen said was, “It’s the most anti-Semitic book I have ever read. Absolutely virulent.” Aubrey was quite bemused for he had never read it in this way. “Just how?” he asked in genuine perplexity and Lord Galen hissed back, “If as they tell me the earliest cornerstone was Homer with his hero Ulysses, representing the all-wise and all conquering traveller, the European human spirit so to speak, why this book is a wicked take-off of Homer, a satire. According to Joyce the modern Ulysses is a Dublin Jew of the most despicable qualities, the lowest character, the foulest morals; and his wife even lower. This is what our civilisation has come to …” He made the noise which is represented in French novels phonetically as “Pouagh!”
He poured himself a very stiff whisky and made a forlorn gesture of impotence, as if invoking either the sky or perhaps the shade of Joyce himself to descend and resolve his dilemma. But Blanford was genuinely aroused by this extraordinary analysis, the first of its kind, and lost in admiration mixed with astonishment that such insight came from someone like Galen. In a flash his mind seized on the notion and fitted it into a scheme which might satisfy a philosopher of culture of the kind of Spengler. European Man as the gay artificer Ulysses who had endured until Panurge took up the tale once more and made it live. And then the Dionysiac force gradually spent itself and the Spenglerian decline and division set in. Expiring volcanoes went on smoking with names like Nietzsche, Strindberg, Tolstoy, but the ship was going down by the stern … Lord Galen was there, floating in the sky with his arms outspread, a look of agonised perplexity on his face, crying, “Our culture! What is it? I wish someone could tell me.” In his hand another “cornerstone”, another virulently anti-Semitic analysis of European culture with its bias towards materialism and the inevitable exploitation of the underprivileged by the “capitalists”. Céline! The form of Lord Galen settled once more like a moth upon the end of the bed to continue his exposition. “Now at last this beastly war caused by that rotter Hitler is actually coming to an end and we can hope for peace, we can work for peace. Aubrey, my dear boy, can’t you see what hope there is in the air? A real hope! But if our culture goes on being celebrated by fanatical anti-Semites we shall end in another bloodbath – O God. My goodness, what have the Jews done to merit it? After all we gave you our bomb to drop on the Japanese. Our very own bomb which we could have kept to ourselves, or else charged you an enormous royalty on its use while keeping the patent private. Don’t you see? But this problem came at me head on when I got my new post. For about ten years, as far as we can see, there will have to be some sort of priority system of control for paper stocks. Not only sanitary paper, Aubrey, but also school textbooks as well as newspapers and books of art. Above all ‘cornerstones’. The question to ask oneself is always ‘Is it a cornerstone or not? If not, out!’ The whole thing has become a nightmare and has caused the whole of my committee days of acrimonious argument, and myself anxiety and sleeplessness. But I owe it to European culture to get it right. I must pass the books which are fruitful and proscribe those which aren’t. But how to decide? It’s all very well to suggest, as someone did, that we might get a book like this Ulysses rewritten in a more acceptable and forward-looking manner by someone like Beverley Nicholls, but that would be interfering, and I don’t hold with mere temporising measures. You cannot rewrite a cornerstone or even bowdlerise it; I quite agree and would never condone it. But how to be sure what is what? I received a petition from the committee which said: ‘In our view our Chairman for all his experience of commerce and diplomacy has a somewhat narrow view of culture and ordinary life. In our view he should perhaps go out into the world a little and see man as he is, in the raw, in order to judge the culture of which he is only a part.’ I try not to get too easily nettled and I accepted the criticism in good part. Well, I must go out more into the world. But first I rang up Schwarz and asked him if he knew why everyone was so anti-Semite, and he said, yes, he did. It was because of monotheism and monolithic radical philosophies based on the theory of values. It was Judaism, he said, that irritated everyone so. He added that I was behaving like a paranoid minority syndrome in allowing myself to get upset. Aubrey, I have been called many things in my time but never a syndrome. I rang off in despair. This is what you get when you search quite disinterestedly for the meaning of a word
like culture in our time.”
He halted the recital of his woes in order once more to avail himself of the whisky which, Blanford remarked, he now drank in heroic doses, hardly diluted. It was obvious that this intellectual adventure had shaken him, had even pushed him into having recourse to the bottle more frequently than was his wont. “And then what?” said Aubrey, torn between amusement and sympathy for his friend. Galen groaned. “Schwarz,” he said, “has got an amazing idea that the Jews created racial discrimination by their Chosen Race policy and their refusal to dilute the superior blood of Israel by mixing it with inferior brands. Isn’t that very strange?” Aubrey said, “Well, it’s one way of looking at it. It could be true like in India; the top dog complex creates instant Untouchables – which is what the gentiles are for strict Jews. Am I wrong?” Galen knew nothing of India. “Jews are not all Untouchables, on the contrary they are very generous, though of course they bargain and like to know where their money goes. But the Jew is generous, quite an easy touch in fact!”
There seemed no point in pursuing this line of thought, based as it was on a typical misunderstanding. “You win,” said Aubrey, abandoning the train of thought, and with a smile Lord Galen stretched out along the end of the bed and, metaphorically, put his head under his wing and went to sleep, looking rather like an old rook snoozing on its nest.
But he went on talking with his eyes shut – burbling, rather, for there were patches of free association as well as gaps in the slow sequence of his rambling. It was as if he were talking not to Aubrey but to his Maker. For example, at one point he raised his head and still with closed eyes exclaimed passionately, “No Gentile could have invented double-entry bookkeeping!” accompanying the thought with a gesture of fearful vehemence. Now, however, he subsided into sleep with a somewhat fatuous smile on his face and whispered, “It was all this that led me to the pouf of Mrs Gilchrist. A young diplomat in search of profound sensations agreed to accompany me. I did not know of her international celebrity at the time – apparently like so many things in our time she is a chain store, and has branches all over India, Turkey, Greece, France and Eastbourne. She literally breeds girls for the diplomatic and military markets. I seemed to impress her very favourably; she said I had majesty. She was of uncertain age and with heavily tinted hair combined joviality and hysterectomy in equal parts. For a moment I almost thought I might love such a woman – Aubrey, they were right, I was in need of wantonness. She was, said my young diplomat friend, thoroughly representative of the age and the culture, so I could go ahead and explore on an empirical basis. There was a lot of talk about Lective (hic) Finities – another cornerstone by Goitre. I didn’t follow but pretended I did until she hopped back on the nest. Then I was lost in the night of her hair – afternoon, rather, it was bright red. But lost, lost to reason. I had heard of whirlwind romances before but never realised fully. I tell you this, Aubrey, because I don’t want to hide anything from you, I want your views on culture. And besides, you know all, for in the midst of this adventure who should I meet but your man Cade who said to me, ‘Lor’ bless you, Milord, what are you doing in a place like this? With Mrs Gilchrist! It’s like fucking a dead mouse.’ He is a coarse and narrow-minded man and doesn’t know what it is to empty some dull opiate, as my young diplomatic friend puts it. But things went from bad to worse for when we returned to what Mrs Gilchrist called the winter garden there were a lot of half-dressed people dancing in a marked way, some with few if any clothes. One young man in an apron and a boater, who had a flower behind each ear, stubbed out a cigar on my forearm without asking permission. The pain was terrible. I still have the scar. Another dressed in next to nothing forced me to waltz and gave me a bite on the cheek which kept me from the office for a week. Mrs Gilchrist said it was nothing, just a love-at-first-sight-bite. I was by now in an advanced condition of intemperance and not much able to look after myself. But I was making mental notes all the time. She had covered my neck in what in such circles are known as suçons d’amour, blue marks. But she seemed proud of me for I heard her proclaim, ‘Celui-là a des couilles superposées.’ I wondered what my committee would say if they could see me. Well, whose fault was it? There was a kind of fight, and an influx of policemen and it was then I saw your man, who kindly helped me to the door. I found myself in the street sitting on the pavement with my opera hat beside me – someone had jumped on it – and being bandaged by some of the nicer girls: but of course they were going through my pockets and wallet. However, I had taken the precaution of carrying very little money and no personal jewellery of value; my signet I left in the office safe. So that all in all, while I was shorn, it was not completely. My diplomatic friend put me in a cab and – against my will – took me to another dingier place where I got stuck in the lavatory and was kicked by a curate. I protested, whereupon my friend said, ‘Are you a man of the world or no?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Well then!’ I didn’t see his point.”
There was a long pause, some snoring and the dazed voice once more took up the tenuous thread of what now seemed to be a jag lasting over weeks; perhaps it was just the confusion in the telling. “O my God! how she talked and talked about culture. And I kept telling myself that I must remember everything in order to report to the committee. O my God!” He groaned again and wagged his head on his shoulders.
“Thelème!” he said once more. “I don’t suppose the name means anything to you. An abbey somewhere in Provence, the abode of perfected felicity! It is now called Cuculotte in the Gard, centre of the hot chestnuts trade. Mrs Gilchrist sometimes goes down at Easter with her mother. Her belly is cloven with the devil’s hoofmark, but her sex is as smooth or smoother than a surgeon’s glove. Sometimes she turns down the lights and does horoscopes. She can see auras, she can overhear states of mind. When I told Sutcliffe this he said, ‘Let everyone make his personal noise for the braying of donkeys is sweet to the ears of the Creator!’ Cuculotte, she saw it so clearly in a dream. There is a woman waiting for me there who looks like the Virgin Mary but is really called Cunégonde – another cornerstone. A hole-and-cornerstone. Ha! Ha! My diplomatic youth again, the poor cynic. I last saw him standing naked, on Mrs Gilchrist’s upper balcony, arms wide as he declaimed, ‘Hear me, ye sperm-coaxing divinities, for I am afflicted by scrotum fever and I bring ye my purse of Fortunatus!’ The Swiss fire brigade had to get him down with a ladder and I expect he has been rusticated already. O God, Aubrey, all this because they said I had not lived enough.
“But Ulysses, that odious book, what is one to do? Toby says that all energetic wanderers descend from Dionysus, they are really gods of wine which gives warmth and motion and curiosity. The wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Gil Blas, Panurge – O my head spins with everything I have been hearing!”
Aubrey thought with a pang of the long nightmare of Joyce’s struggle to get his work published – eighteen years – and said, “You must not blacklist him, whatever you find to say against it, you must not index Joyce. The Catholics already did, and he was a secret Catholic as much marked as old Huysmans ever was. Hence the heavy liturgical type of prose exposition with its gruesome echoes and parodies of what he could not forget. No, it’s rich in church furnishings, and the function of Bloom is to desecrate the Church, to shit on the High Altar. You are lucky if he doesn’t recite the Creed as he shits. No, it’s a real cornerstone.”
But this time Galen slept and did not hear; faint snores escaped his lips though he still smiled at some cherished memory; and it was during this period that the shadow of Sutcliffe tiptoed into the room, finger on lip, and took up an amused position in a nearby chair, whispering, “Is it okay for me to be here – or is he confessing all?”
“Nearly all. He speaks of a Mrs Gilchrist whom I seem to have heard of.”
“Of course. Those songs. The first scowling clap brought back from Gallipoli by the Anzacs was claimed by one of her girls. The song was plaintive – Will she give you the cherry off the cake, Mrs Gilchrist?”
“I never h
eard it.”
“I could bring her to have tea with you; she probably does massage as well.”
“Thank you, my friend, but no.”
“With me too she waxes mystical and speaks movingly of the Third Eye, Troisième Oeil as she says with a classy twitch. But what really concerns her is the Troisième Jambe of men – those who had it were marvellous. ‘Quel homme fascinant, il est géomètre’, she would coo. Or else, ‘un homme spécial; il est chef de gare mais il a des qualités de coeur!’ She is what our ancestors would call an adept of splosh-fucking. As Cade would say, ‘She’d fuck the tiles off the roof if you let her.’”
“I did not know you had shared this tremendous binge of Galen’s.” Sutcliffe nodded and said, “The real life of Geneva, capital of Calvin, goes on there. Toby found it, and it proved so restful that he often takes his knitting down for an hour and just sits, listening to the banter of Mrs Gilchrist’s girls. It is the hub of this Spenglerian capital where one sees that our civilisation is the weary little monkey which sits atop the barrel organ and proffers a tin cup for alms while the organ-grinder is a large Jewish gentleman of urbanity. Toby says that Freud is the only honest Jew, just as Socrates was the only honest Greek. Yes, I have been sharing in the quest for the Golden Fleece – if I may call it that. And a fine job he has made of it. He has discovered that when the love of lamb cutlets is universal the reign of benevolence will begin. A thermonuclear Jehovah is watching over us!”
“There’s a hellish lack of continuity in what you say.”
“It’s good sense but somewhat diluted with whisky. It will all get clearer and clearer – now that you have admitted to yourself that I exist – or rather that you only exist in function to me! Socrates only existed in Plato’s mind, Freud only in Jung’s, that’s how the whole thing goes. It’s a chain gang. Sam once had a limerick about the matter which went:
The Avignon Quintet Page 108
