He felt distaste and resentment. Because of their exclusiveness.
He decided to look at the other rooms of the club. Along a corridor he heard piano playing. Sloppy piano playing. He followed the sound into a small carpeted room with glass cases containing a few books fallen like dominoes. A few dusty trophies. Over in the far corner in the half light Becker was playing the piano, his drink on the piano seat beside him.
He felt obliged to say something now he’d entered the room.
‘Practising for that job as jazz pianist?’ he said.
Becker looked at him but didn’t say anything. He kept on playing, slopping his head with the tune. His bow tie seemed to fit the part.
He stood and listened. He realised that Becker wasn’t going to talk while he was playing. He drifted over to the books – yachting records. Joshua Slocum. Peter Heaton.
Becker stopped playing and drank from his glass.
‘What do you know about jazz, Mr Teacher?’
‘Very little – the Negro struggle …’
Becker didn’t say anything in reply.
He felt dismissed. He felt he’d been assessed and dismissed. Becker began to play again.
He stood there half listening to the playing, but Becker’s eyes didn’t return to him, didn’t further acknowledge his presence. Becker sang in a deep imitation of a negroid voice, snatches of song, but not for him, not for any audience. Occasionally Becker would look in his direction but not at him.
He became aware of his own body, his feet, legs, torso, hands, arms, neck and head, standing there in an upright position on a floor, in a club, in a town, on an orbiting planet – standing in stark isolation as the world orbited the sun. He didn’t belong with Becker’s playing. He didn’t belong with the trophies. Or with the crowd out side. Even his wife – he was not in contact with his wife.
He listened to the playing but always thoughts about himself pushed in between him and the music. Not that the music was easy to listen to. It broke and fumbled with Becker doggedly retracing his fumbling.
He stood there, not having the urge to do anything else but stand. Realising himself unacknowledged by anyone.
His thoughts were not anything more than pings of discomfort and a rasping uneasiness. He desperately wanted to be pleased with himself. Standing at the Yacht Club with Young Liberals dancing around him, out of place, argumentatively drunk and no one to argue with. He felt distinctly displeased with himself.
He wanted to assert himself with Becker. With Becker especially. Because he was American. For some reason he felt free to say anything to Becker, no holds barred. But Becker had eluded him. He could not snare Becker.
Becker’s and his eyes met. Becker held the stare and sang at him and then looked back to the keys. Becker had sung the song against him.
He felt he had to go. Again he didn’t know whether to try to indicate goodbye to Becker. He watched for an opportunity but it didn’t come and the playing stopped him from saying anything.
He gave a slight shrug and left the room.
Just outside the door he heard Becker say, ‘I didn’t want to be a jazz pianist. Or a brass pivot gun. Because I’m the Coca-Cola Kid.’
He stopped. So Becker had been aware of him. But nothing came to his mind to say to Becker. Despite an aggressiveness the statement was full of some sort of appeal. It deflected attack. But he couldn’t respond because its special appeal was too subtle, and he was too blurred with drink. He was opposed to Becker, but he wasn’t game enough to risk being wrong or embarrassed with Becker. So he walked on. Becker would think he hadn’t heard.
Out in the bright noise he was able to merge with the crowd and did not feel as intensely isolated.
He played another dollar in the poker machines and won sixty cents.
He wasn’t socially acceptable or socially adroit and he didn’t claim to be or try to be. So what? There was something phony about a ‘good mixer’ – a good mixer had to smother his real reactions. He didn’t have time for niceties or phoniness. Other things were more important.
After a while he moved back to his wife and the others. They chatted.
His wife said, ‘You’ve been great company tonight.’ The wound opened again.
Then the band played the anthem. He hadn’t realised it was so late.
‘Have a drink for the road,’ Kevin said, ‘if you’re in our party.’ Friendly sarcasm.
‘Where have you been all this time?’ his wife said, annoyed.
‘Looking over the club – listening to the American playing the piano.’
‘The mythical American – was he reciting Kipling again?’
‘Masefield.’
‘Why didn’t you bring him over if he was so captivating?’
‘He was drunk.’
‘You’re not?’
The crowd was a criss-cross of unravelling knots. The band was shaking spittle from their instruments, unscrewing mouthpieces.
A sudden movement attracted his eyes. A young man in a dinner suit with thick blond hair had changed from a party-goer into an official. He was walking urgently through the crowd with a steward. They went through the doorway to the men’s lavatory. Outside in the hall, on the edge of the unravelling crowd, a couple of stewards had taken off their bow ties and they were stacking chairs.
Kevin came over with the drinks and as he handed them around he said, ‘A fellow tried to hang himself in the men’s – they cut him down in time.’
He sensed it was the American and tightened.
His wife said, ‘He’s still alive?’
‘Yes – just – an American –’ Kevin turned to him. ‘Must be your American.’
‘The Coca-Cola Kid – Becker.’ He was galvanised. For the first time that night he felt lifted out of his isolated preoccupation.
‘The one you were talking to?’ his wife said, her voice loud with the shock of it.
‘He was playing the piano about half an hour ago – I was listening to him.’
The crowd had smelt the event and were looking towards the lavatory. Murmuring questions.
‘He was blue in the face,’ Kevin said. ‘They’re rushing him to hospital. A steward told me he was quite a mess when they cut him down.’
They drank their last drinks watching the lavatory but the American was not carried out.
‘Must have taken him out the back way,’ Kevin said.
‘He told me Coca-Cola was a common noun,’ he told them, and being English teachers they smiled.
They moved towards the door. ‘He didn’t seem suicidal – just drunk,’ he told them.
Outside they separated from Kevin and Gwen. He said to his wife, ‘Seemed just another genial American,’ and then added, ‘the man who presses the bomb release, lynches the Negro, drops the napalm is just another genial American – good fun at cocktail parties.’
His wife didn’t comment.
As he started the car he said, ‘I suppose working for Coca-Cola would be enough to make you want to kill yourself.’
‘Come off it,’ his wife said, irritably.
‘A victim of a personality-destroying system,’ he said, niggling her.
‘Must you always be so doctrinaire?’
‘I hope he dies,’ he said, goaded further, driving hard over the cattle grid at the gate.
‘Kim!’ She turned towards him. ‘Don’t be so heartless.’
‘You’re getting soft,’ he said. ‘How many Asians starve to death so the Americans can drink Coca-Cola?’
He swung hard but hit a bad bump.
An empty bottle on the floor of the car rolled wildly under their feet.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ she said, slightingly.
He ignored it.
‘Things aren’t as simple as you sometimes see them,’ she said. Then, lighting a cigarette, she laughed derisively. ‘You’d have fainted if they’d carried the body out.’
‘Lenin never watched executions,’ he said, accelerating on the straight roa
d towards the scattered light of the town.
He saw her snort and look out her window across the corn fields, turning completely away from him.
THE CABARET
The Cabaret Voltaire – a fin-de-siècle fable
It is now more than eighty years since the Dada movement formed around the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Although those movements which flowered then through the liberation of Dada have long died, their ghostly influences move about the art world and live on in the minds of romantic art students and the ever-youthful ageing eccentrics who inhabit the art world. Occasionally while travelling one comes across such people, especially in the far-flung parts of the new world, still living, who claim vague connections to these lost movements. Some of these people seem still driven by these long dead concerns.
Ghosts of Art, (1987) by J-P. Dufour-Feronce.
Who can resist a smile at recalling that in Zürich in 1916 Lenin lived across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire …
October 50, 1990.
Talking to Machines; Jadedness and
Layabout Ants; the Tragic Evanescence of Technology;
an Offer of the Services of the Cabaret Voltaire.
You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now but if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.
I assume that you recognise my voice and I will proceed to state my business. Just letting you know again that the Cabaret Voltaire has nominated me as their envoy and made my services as chairperson available for next year’s festival. I have had no reply from you to my earlier proposal so I will leave this message as a reminder. One query before I briefly outline my ideas for the festival: your assistant left a message on my personal machine at the Cabaret Voltaire’s answering machine saying that he ‘did not like talking to machines’. Will you ask him why not? How could he find my message ‘dissuasive’? The Cabaret Voltaire choir sings the answering message to make it receptive. Do people expect the Cabaret Voltaire to be against the telephone answering machine? I remind you that we have a very strong Futurist component at the Cabaret Voltaire who keep us on our toes and I myself am a fin-de-siècle person. Maybe people resent telephone answering machines because they have to talk nicely to them. Something there is that does not love a telephone answering machine. About the March of the Arts – I thought that was one of my better ideas but I haven’t heard back from you on that. I am happy to shoulder my load. I could be Chief Marshal of the March of the Arts and also chair a panel. As I imagine the march, each author will be dressed as the title of one of their books and so with the other arts. I want the authors to wear paper suits made from photographic enlargements pages of their books. Before I go on, there is something else about the telephone answering machine that I want to say. In his poem ‘Mending Wall’, Robert Frost says that when replacing stones on the wall he and his neighbour used spells – talked to the stones, saying, ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned.’ It occurs to me that the telephone answering machine is something of a wall, albeit a friendly wall. Robert Frost’s neighbour says that good fences make good neighbours. Good greetings on a telephone answering machine make good telephone neighbours. But as Frost says, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down’. I suppose some people do not like the wall to joke. There will always be those types. The telephone answering machine could be seen as the dog Cerberus barking at the gates of Hades. The dog Cerberus didn’t stop people coming into Hades – he stopped people going out. The telephone answering machine is Cerberus trying to prevent the people who come down the dark tunnel of the telephone from getting away. It holds them by their voice, seizes them by their throat. But to return to the matter at hand, the March of the Arts … The musicians could come as musical instruments or dressed as compact discs. The painters could ‘wear’ a reproduction of their paintings or be ‘framed’ themselves. I’ve sketched out a chief marshal’s costume for myself if you would see your way clear to making a contribution to the tailor’s bill? It has been suggested that there is no room for jadedness in the nineties. At the Cabaret we see the coming fin-de-siècle as very much a time for a return of jadedness. And of course the Cabaret is a home for many of the bohemian groups from the earlier part of this century now willing to fill a role in these changed times. At a recent seminar at the Cabaret Voltaire, we heard the results of a French study of an ant colony which showed that twenty-five per cent of the ants stood around doing nothing or pretended to be doing something, or just drank short blacks and smoked Gauloises. The ants were flown from South America to Paris and numbers were microscopically glued to their backs. Researchers removed the non-productive group to see what would happen to the productivity of the colony. The places of the jaded layabout ants were taken immediately by twenty-five per cent of the remaining colony. We at the Cabaret felt this confirmed a need in society for the jaded bohemian. I’d be happy to run a panel discussion about jadedness and the coming fin-de-siècle. Another thing which has preoccupied me has been the false solidity of technology although I rush to say to the good Futurists that it is not an anti-technology position. No, I talk about the promise of new technology more in sadness than with hostility. The new technology comes squeaking out of its white moulded packaging, squeaking with importance, with instruction books and attachments. It says, ‘I will make your life anew. I will make you into a giant.’ We find a special place to put the new technology, we buy a stand for it. But within a month the advertisements say that the new equipment is now superseded, no longer state of the art. Within six months it shows signs of wear, a clip comes off, it shows itself as frail and mortal. There are suggestions that additional attachments will make it come good again. Finally, it becomes part of the furniture, we forget to put its cover on. It breaks. It is cheaper to buy a new model than to have it repaired. It dies in a cupboard. The Tragic Evanescence of Technology. I could manage a panel on that. I await your call.
Chairpersonship – one small query.
You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now but if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.
Having not heard back from the festival office I wish to inform you again that as an envoy of the Cabaret Voltaire I would be happy to chair a panel session at the festival this year. I want the festival to understand that I would, of course, be happy to work within the guidelines. To clear the air – about that ruckus last year after I found two young people in the audience using personal stereos or ‘Walkmen’. In retrospect, I may have over-reacted. I did then what I believed had to be done as a chairperson. I left the platform, strode to where they were and tore the earphones from their ears. I was, I thought, making a statement on behalf of civilisation as I knew it. I now apologise. I have changed my position on personal stereos. The Council psychologist was correct: I was suffering technological threat, I acknowledge that now. And I was being anti-Futurist as well. The Council psychologist has counselled me on this. She said that the personal stereo is portable privacy. I now realise that a person can, at the same time, listen to music and pay attention to a panel discussion of our finest writers. The Council psychologist also says that it is the laying of another track onto my consciousness. Not that someone like me needs another track laid onto their consciousness. I already have a very busy head. She says though that the personal stereo can also be used as a way of ‘cleaning the head’. She is to show me how to do this at our next counselling session. If I could get the addresses of those two young people I will write a note of apology to them. I don’t want that incident held against me when you are drawing up the program for the forthcoming festival. If appointed chair I do understand that my role is simply to keep an eye on time, arrange the order of speakers, and of course, introduce the speakers. One small query: order of speakers. Withou
t making things too complicated, I have to say that I don’t like alphabetical order. Computerised linguistic studies show that alphabetical order contains an Anglo-bias and apart from that, it does, over a period of time, give some writers unfair precedence professionally. I don’t think it is stretching things to say that the reason writers such as Auden, Djuna Barnes, e.e. cummings, Dreiser and T.S. Eliot spurted ahead is that they are in the first five letters of the alphabet. Well, they spurted ahead in their day. They may not be tops at present. Tell me if you think this is obsessional or whether I have a point. There is a tendency to remember names that come first in the alphabet because at festivals they’re the writers who always get the audiences that are fresh and awake. If we decide to reverse the alphabetical order we are quickly into a double bind. When you do this you draw too much attention – often unfavourable – to the non-Anglo names, those ‘funny sounding’ names. You find yourself down among the Zindels and the Yevtushenkos. One way around it is to split the alphabet at M, so we start off our speakers M to Z and then go A to L. I could live with that. This should be done for the next twenty-five years to redress the injustice done to the second half of the alphabet. UNESCO could take this up. I don’t want to make too much of it but I would appreciate a ruling from the Council on another small thing. It’s just not right any more with panels to go ‘women first’. What can I say? As the honourable suffragette members of the Cabaret Voltaire have so effectively argued, it is old-order chivalry to go women-first. Nor do we get around it by having men go first. Our women members say that it is ‘feminist chic’ to do that. And there is nothing more uncomfortable in these fin-de-siècle times than a male who, in some tangled way, is painfully overtrying to win approval for ideological correctness. Again, the female/male/female/ male arrangement is out, too. It’s the trap of the bourgeois dinner party seating which reinforces the pernicious assumption that we all live in a world of heterosexual couples. Or that everyone has a friend to go out with. Without making an issue of it I would like to get away from gender in order of speakers. Maybe the easiest way is for me to suggest to the panellists that they dress gender-neutral. Is that overstepping the guidelines? I don’t see how it could be construed that way. I’ll simply suggest that the speakers wear caftans, or something like that. Could the Council perhaps make a small contribution to the purchase of the caftans? Or better still we could run them up at the Cabaret Voltaire. The speakers could slip them over their street clothes when they arrive. It strikes me that this could be good standard practice for the festival. As another approach it would also help if we could avoid naming the speakers at any time. I suppose the Council would consider that going too far? Again, on the order of speakers, it strikes me that the best thing would be to use a simple voting procedure. We would need to distribute slips of paper and pencils. We couldn’t expect more than 500 people to attend so the whole thing is quite manageable. It shouldn’t take long for the paper and pencils to be snappily handed out, for returning officers to be appointed, and for the slips to be gathered in and quickly counted. It can be done in a flash. Maybe teams of school children could be present to help with this. I would like to buy the paper and be reimbursed for it later, because I know what paper is best for this sort of thing – old Workers’ Educational Association training. It must be paper which is not readily available and must have an identifiable undisclosed watermark to avoid falsified ballots. Standard procedure. We could get 500 pencils through government stores so there is no problem there. A little suggestion: the pencils could be kept in a shoe box for next year. My reason for suggesting secret voting is to protect speakers from the ignominy of getting no votes at all, which might happen with a show of hands. While the Council is considering this they might give me guidance on the voting system. I don’t want to make a big issue out of this but I favour the Hare-Clarke proportional voting system rather than first-past-the-post. What frightens me about a simple vote is that it might give a result that is strictly alphabetical or a result where the crowd puts the ‘ethnics’ last. To avoid unpleasant outcomes I should, as chairperson, be given some ‘discretion’ with the final result. It should perhaps be basic to all this to first determine what the audience is there for and while they are voting on order of speakers it might be simple and expedient to get some idea of what their motivation is through a simple survey. Just what the hell does the audience think it’s doing at festivals? Playing spot the celebrity? Maybe we could give them a short test questionnaire on literature. Or is that making everything too hard? I’m not suggesting that we throw people out, although on second thoughts, why not just throw out those members of the audience who do not come up to scratch? Just joking. The question of smoking. I don’t know what the other chairpeople intend to do, but this is how I intend to handle it this year. I’ll shift all the smokers down the back of the hall and non-smokers to the front. I’d like ten strong pedestal fans, which could direct the smoke to the rear of the hall and out the windows. Outside the hall, school children with hand-held fans could be used to disperse the smoke away from the nearby office blocks thus avoiding the problem of passive risk. The pedestal fans could be positioned at the dividing row between the smokers and non-smokers. It’s simply a matter of moving a few chairs. As for the panel, I propose to have smoking periods and non-smoking periods, alternating during the session, say fifteen minutes for smokers and fifteen minutes for non-smokers. I will ring a small, unobtrusive bell on the ten minutes (as a foreshadowing of the change of period) and then I will ring it again on the fifteen. This way we can get around it without too much bother or interference with civil liberty. Again, in the interests of the non-smokers I would ask for five pedestal fans to be placed in front of the speakers to blow the smoke behind the dais – again, school children could stand behind the speakers with hand-held fans directing the smoke out of the hall. I suppose if someone is going to raise the question of the children’s health we could give them gauze face masks. Perhaps a couple of nurses could do this and their presence in uniform would demonstrate our concern about this issue. Maybe a few paper weights, too, would be a good idea for the panellists’ papers. Another minor matter. I sense that there is bad feeling around about the ‘celebrity’ concept. I don’t want to chair panels that are selected because the writers are ‘popular’ or ‘important’. Spare us the tyranny of brilliance. We have to get away from the ratings notion in the arts. A few unknown or critically dismissed writers would be good on a panel. I don’t mind doing a panel of totally-unheard-of-writers. This links up nicely with my idea of not naming the panellists. Talking of ‘issues’, isn’t it about time we stopped reducing everything to topics and issues? The world is a wonderfully irreducible, deranged place and to force it into session topics is really intellectually demeaning. I’d like no ‘topic’ for my session if that’s OK with the Council. I am currently interested in the creative silence, the conspicuous absence. I would like to evolve these into a session. I would like to have a hall full of people who were just pondering. That would be a breakthrough. Finally, I have one thing which really worries me. It is the question of level. It could be edged up. I think that good chairing can keep the pressure on both speakers and the audience, get the thing to a higher orbit. I’d like to do some gentle prodding while the panel is speaking – if indeed there is any ‘speaking’ as it is generally understood. Nothing disruptive, just parallel discourse, a counterpoint. I’d probably stop the speakers now and then with a Socratic intervention, the subversive incursion. I’d like to blow a whistle when I think a speaker is straying or is trying to fudge. It can sometimes be done sotto voce into the microphone while the panellist is speaking. I think any intellectually honest panellist would welcome it. I like to think that chairpersonship can be a statement in itself. I hope we can put last year’s festival problems behind us and go on together into the future. Write to me care of the Cabaret Voltaire.
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