On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  “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.”
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br />   “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?