A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Not among Lesbians, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re quite coming on, Cass,’ Fulke said tolerantly. ‘Never an impure thought used to be your line – although I did once or twice hear you called a boot-cupboard type. Don’t tell me you’re becoming troubled about sex? Does it rear its dirty head in the night?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. If you want to know, I have regular wet dreams about struggling to get between the legs of naked girls – and extremely indecent and intermittently sadistic reveries or fantasies or whatever they’re called, as well.’

  ‘How very shocking!’ Fulke, if not really shocked, was genuinely surprised by this frank communication. Hitherto, his brother had been notably buttoned up on such topics as this. He was a theoretical type, Fulke reflected. Perhaps amid much inadequate performance he was going to retreat upon extravagant words. ‘How more than shocking! And what does your infallible Church say about such goings on?’

  ‘The Church isn’t all-round infallible. It’s mere ignorance to suppose it claims to be. The Church is pretty awful, as a matter of fact, and always has been. Fortunately, there’s the Faith.’

  ‘I see.’ This, Fulke realised, must be the modish thing to say among Caspar’s Oxford co-religionists. His brother was always anxiously up to date, at least on ideological fronts. ‘Well, what does the Faith say about licentious imaginings?’

  ‘It’s rather complicated, I believe. I’m going to discuss it with Father Fisher at the Chaplaincy.’

  ‘That should be most stimulating. Have you discussed Existentialism with Father Fisher?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But I’m a little changing my views there. Have you read Camus, Fulke?’

  ‘I’ve read a novel about a plague at Oran, which came out a couple of years ago. Quite good. At least not all balls.’

  ‘I’m thinking of something rather earlier: an essay called Le Mythe de Sisyphe. It sets out his position, and has impressed me very much. I can see Jaspers in it, and perhaps Heidegger too. But I don’t think Camus is really an Existentialist. And Monsieur Sartre agrees with me.’

  Caspar Ferneydale had shown considerable enterprise in getting twice to post-war Paris, and even more in securing for himself, as a well-conducted and intellectually precocious youth, the occasional entrée to certain quite imposing literary gatherings. It had thus come about that he had actually been presented to the distinguished writer he had just named. So nowadays, even in familiar conversation, he always said ‘Monsieur Sartre’ where others would say simply ‘Sartre’, thus contriving to intimate the existence of a personal acquaintanceship which he wished, nevertheless, to be understood as judiciously respectful on his part. Fulke was a good deal impressed by his brother’s achievement in even precariously making this exalted grade; he owned a shrewd awareness of what is known in sporting circles as ‘class’; and he was quick to recognise its evidences both in the writing of fiction (which he found an absorbing subject) and also in various fields he knew comparatively little about. ‘My Achilles heel,’ he had lately told Caspar, ‘is an unwholesome respect for my betters.’ Whereupon Caspar had looked surprised – but had then immediately said, ‘Yes, that’s perfectly true.’

  Both the brothers were now on their feet and prowling in an unco-ordinated way about the room, which with its two big windows was large enough to admit of this exercise without danger of collision. Perhaps because as boys they had put in a good deal of time playing fast-moving games together (sometimes to the admiration of the little Penelope Rich), or perhaps for obscurer reasons, each tended to induce a kind of physical restlessness in the other. At the moment, however, Caspar had the motive of inspecting whatever Fulke had recently been adding to his possessions in college. He told himself as he did so that Fulke on a similar quest in New College would be shamelessly rifling drawers and peeping into cupboards, contending that it is by detective work like this that one can best fulfil one’s duty to discover as fully as one can just how other people tick. Caspar himself was content to examine books, gramophone records and pictures. The books were becoming numerous and were notably miscellaneous. Many were in French, for there was common ground between the brothers here.

  ‘Why do you never have much poetry on your shelves?’ Caspar asked curiously.

  ‘I don’t like black marks straggling about a page. My eye bounces off anything that doesn’t show a good straight margin right as well as left. It makes me feel the printer hasn’t done his job – justifying his type, or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘How silly can we get.’

  ‘All right, Cass. Poetry can do nothing that can’t be better done in prose. Metre was invented mainly to make remembering easier before Homer and all that crowd had got round to inventing writing. But also because it sends you half-asleep, so that you’re the less able to distinguish between sense and nonsense. Think of that awful Paradise Lost. Nasty rubbish driven home by the banging of tom-toms in the jungle. But some people like it that way. “Poetry gives most pleasure when none too intelligible.” Coleridge or a similar pundit said something like that.’

  ‘Not quite like that. And to my mind poetry is a high-powered engine for exploring reality.’

  ‘How very grand!’ Fulke, who had been gazing absently out of a window, turned round and nodded quite soberly. ‘Of course I agree that’s the general idea of literature: what they call imaginative literature, that’s to say. Finding out. But it has to keep to experimental method.’

  ‘Oh, lord! Is this experimental psychology again?’

  ‘Yes, it is. The novelist or the playwright – and nobody else is worth considering – is most definitely an experimental psychologist. He devises and sets up his experiment – such and such a clutch of chaps in such and such a situation – and then observes and records what happens.’

  ‘You can’t believe such balderdash, Fulke. Nothing happens that your writer doesn’t make happen.’ Caspar was seriously concerned. ‘He has to provide out of his own head all the dynamism required. It’s his own intuitive sense of how human character and motive work that he’s “recording”, as you call it, all the time.’

  ‘Well, yes, Cass – but it comes to rather the same thing. The myth of the characters taking charge and dictating to their creator does have some validity. It simply means that the novelist or whosoever has acquired – and it’s a matter of ceaseless observation and experience – what the trick-cyclists call insight. And that he has to obey it. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘I think I go quite a long way with you, Fulke. Only I’m not at all sure that the novelist or dramatist gets his characters quite that way. Or not at his most effective that way: by observation and whatever. I think it’s rather a matter of his giving an airing to sundry alternative selves. He had elected his own personality, you know, from a whole heap of stuff offering. But he lets others, still stirring in him, have a spin. Herbert Read says—’

  ‘Bugger Herbert Read! He’s just another of your idea-mongers.’

  ‘Have you read The Green Child?’

  ‘Yes, I have. Alpha in its rum way. But he wrote it in time off from concocting stuff to muddle heads like yours. Get on with saying something for yourself, Cass.’

  ‘Very well. I say the great writer gets his characters not by peering through key-holes, but by a process of projecting upon the page his perhaps unacknowledged selves. It’s what Coleridge meant – since you’re so fond of quoting him, Fulke – by calling Shakespeare myriad-minded. And Yeats by cribbing from him and talking about many-minded Homer.’

  ‘So Iago can be called one of Shakespeare’s unacknowledged selves?’

  ‘Oh, decidedly.’

  ‘And so can Desdemona? We seem to be back with the wily serpent sex. Poor old Shakespeare had a gaggle of wenches bottled up inside him?’

  ‘Of course you can express the thing grotesquely if you want to, Fulke. But at least it’s an observed fact that a great many abundantly creative people have been noticeably bisexual. I’ve been reading an interesting chap who ha
s a good deal to say about that. And he says the incidence is to be remarked not merely in artists of one sort or another, but in geniuses in general. Christ, for example.’

  ‘Heavens above! What does your Father Fisher think of that one?’

  ‘We happen not to have discussed the matter.’ Caspar had been a little disconcerted by this question. ‘At least it’s an interesting theory.’

  ‘Interesting tommy-rot.’ Fulke had become abruptly impatient. ‘Who said “now Master up, now Miss”?’

  ‘Alexander Pope. He makes it rhyme with “vile antithesis” – which is rather intolerant, I think. But he was speaking of a chap who was no sort of artist or genius at all.’

  ‘Isn’t it just that everybody is a bit bisexual, at least in a phylogenetic way? You need only bare your manly chest to prove the point, Cass. And no doubt the fact is revealed at times in impulses as well as tits. But it’s a completely boring and useless one when you come to talking about literature and art and what-not. The only important thing there is to know what’s tiptop, and to go for it.’

  ‘To manage that successfully, you have to be tiptop.’ Caspar was now regarding Fulke curiously. He had suspected for a long time where his brother’s ambition lay, and now here it seemed to be. ‘And that’s where one comes to the limiting factor in your theory of the novelist as working from observation and experience. If what he is capable of observing is only the superficial levels of human behaviour, and if his experience is largely bookish and second-hand, then his end result will be conventional and stereotypic. It may be highly amusing and even brilliant in various ways. Aldous Huxley, you know. But genuinely exploratory it simply will not be. Only high art reveals – creates knowledge, if you like, as the great scientists do.’

  Caspar, who had delivered these pronouncements ruthlessly, and with a confidence perhaps born of his recently acquired French connections, suddenly came to a halt before a picture on the wall. It was a small painting by Modigliani of not at all a small-seeming salmon-pink nude girl. Caspar paused for a moment to make sure it wasn’t a colour-print, but indeed an original properly to be confronted with stupefaction.

  ‘Good God!’ he then said. ‘It’s a Modi. How on earth have you come by it?’

  ‘I bought it from a man.’ Fulke, whose manner had been rather sombre during the latter part of this colloquy, became amused again. ‘Is that what your Parisian friends call him – Modi?’

  ‘It’s another ambiguity for you, or at least a pun. Maudit. The poor chap was very much that. Fulke, you must have given everything you had in the bank for it.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I find it rather a surprise. If you were to become a writer—’

  Caspar broke off. ‘Or let’s come clean. It’s what’s in your head, and you’re bound to make it. But I’d think of you as working, broadly speaking, in the tradition of realism. Madame Bovary and Boule de Suif and The Old Wives’ Tale. I’m not quite clear about the appeal to you of a chap like Modi.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. You don’t half put me among the swells.’ Fulke was grinning with an unwonted nervousness. ‘But, you see, I like eclectic skills. Reaching out to this and that and putting something rather fresh-looking together. But then it has to look, as we were saying, tiptop.’

  ‘Is that what Modigliani manages?’

  ‘Obviously. Botticelli and Benin sculpture, Tuscany and the Heart of Darkness. You have to be a swell to manage a synthesis like that.’ Fulke was standing before a window again. ‘Would you like to see my tutor? If so, there he is.’

  Such an abrupt change of subject didn’t greatly please Caspar, who felt that he and Fulke had been on the verge of establishing a new relation of confidence. But he joined his brother at the window. The view was dominated by an ancient building known formally in the college as the New Library, and about to round a corner of this was an elderly man in cap and gown clutching half a dozen books.

  ‘Watch!’ Fulke said.

  What was to be watched was the odd sight of this learned pedestrian apparently caught up and driven off-course by a tremendous gale, which obliged him to pursue a circuitous route quite alien to his intention.

  ‘Why on earth does he behave like that?’ Caspar asked.

  ‘Every day he remembers just in time that a chunk of the library may come down and flatten him into a pancake. You can see what it’s like: a ruined Greek temple at Paestum or somewhere, but in considerably worse repair than that. It has been crumbling for several centuries. Dr Johnson mentions it, as a matter of fact, in a poem you probably know, since you like the stuff. Here falling houses thunder on your head. That’s why this college is familiarly known as the House, of course.’

  ‘Is it really dangerous?’ Caspar judged it unnecessary to take notice of much of this routine nonsense, familiar to him in Fulke’s talk. ‘It certainly looks as if it is.’

  ‘Lord, yes! It carried off three of our dons only this winter. But more keep coming forward – which is remarkable, considering the ghastly life they lead. Which must be the more excruciating to have to listen to, I sometimes wonder: the sort of silly-clever essay I concoct weekly, or the abjectly moronic ones turned in by most of the other young gentlemen? I suppose, Cass, you realise you’ll have to become a don yourself? Unless, that is, you renounce the papists, take Anglican orders, and succeed that old donkey, Henry Rich. It’s the right thing for a younger son.’

  ‘And what about you as an elder one? Do you imagine yourself following a squirarchal life at Mallows?’

  ‘Certainly not. Not even if there’s going to be a squirarchal life there to follow – which I begin to doubt. Of course notre père keeps his cards damn close to his chest, and I haven’t managed to discover anything very positive by poking about.’

  ‘What do you mean – poking about? You’ve actually been asking people to tell you the state of the business, and so on?’

  ‘Naturally I have – and I’ve been keeping a look-out for letters lying around, too. Consenting to live in ignorance, you know, is the cardinal intellectual sin. Or so I think. We might have another of our clever little chats about it.’

  ‘You’re pretty awful, Fulke. You really are.’

  ‘Perhaps so. But the point is that I suspect there isn’t going to be much coming our way. Father is almost certainly living most reprehensibly beyond his means. He’s already yattering about my being called to the bar.’

  ‘It seems to me not a bad idea – and I believe a lot of writers have begun that way.’ Caspar was uncomfortable before this turn in the conversation. ‘Incidentally, who do you think was dining at our High Table last night? Henry Rich himself. And it didn’t seem to be as anybody’s guest. He struck me as just loose around the place, under his own abundant steam.’

  ‘I suppose he’s a New College man – and before that I’d say he’d been what they call a Harrovian of the old school. Didn’t he call on you, Cass, and engage in theological disputation?’

  ‘There’s no reason to suppose he knows I’m up at New College. But I ought to have called on him, as a matter of fact. Quite some time ago, I mean, to tell him I was signing off his conventicle. It would have been the civilised thing to do, and I’ve no wish to offend him. That’s quite a decent kid of his, although I expect she’s being brought up as a little snob and prig. The trouble with Rich is that it’s hard to take him seriously.’

  ‘I’ve just thought of an experiment with him,’ Fulke said, suddenly interested. ‘A little like the one with Mrs Whitty, but better.’

  ‘It might easily be that.’ Caspar disapproved of his brother’s experiments, which he regarded as no more than offensive practical jokes. Mrs Whitty was a widow, and presided over the Mallows post-office and primitive general store. Several years before, Fulke had contrived to circulate in the village a rumour to the effect that Mrs Whitty had come into a substantial inheritance from an American cousin, but was for some perverse reason keeping dark about it. A number of the male inhabitants of Mallows found this
intelligence as noteworthy as they were designed to do, and Fulke had particular hopes of Bill Sheen the thatcher, who had seduced a sufficient number of village girls to be presumably ready for any regular union carrying advantageous consequences in the serious concerns of life. Unfortunately very little had come of this in the end, but for weeks Fulke had entertained himself with close observation of what he supposed to be a developing comedy.

  ‘I’d send our man of God—’ Fulke began.

  ‘Your man of God.’

  ‘I’d send my man of God a telegram, and manage to be in the post-office when it arrived, so that I could innocently offer to take it up to the vicarage myself. And then I’d observe closely the successive emotional states educed in this muscular Christian by the news.’

  ‘Just what news?’

  ‘The telegram would announce that Rich’s brother and all five of his nephews had perished in a marine catastrophe. In other words, it would be the Reverend Sir Henry Rich, Baronet of somewhere-or-other, who stood before me. I’d condole, but also offer my respectful felicitations. One auspicious and one dropping eye, as Shakespeare has it. What do you think of that?’

  ‘A shade lacking in subtlety, perhaps.’ For a moment Caspar considered the adequacy of this mildly ironic reply. ‘Or rather, just too bloody stupid and oafish for words. And the telegram, I imagine, might take you before the magistrates. If it did, the only question in their minds would be whether you were too old to send to Borstal.’

  ‘Do you know, Cass, I’m afraid all that is perfectly true?’ Fulke was not at all offended by this brotherly candour. ‘Nevertheless, the theory of the contrived test or confrontation remains an interesting and perfectly valid one. Hamlet, again! Think of the play scene.’

  ‘Superb experimental psychology, no doubt. But don’t, by the way, try out anything of the sort on me, Fulke. Not if you’d avoid a bloody nose, old boy. But thanks for the drink.’