Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  He was always passive, not easy to excite, and she began to feel that she was artless. She was afraid that he was tired of her, or self-conscious and ashamed, and she blamed herself; she wanted to do what he liked and when he liked. At the same time she knew she was up against something harder and more difficult than this, up against some quality in himself which he only half perceived. Afterwards when he went he seemed to hurry away, as if he carried some positive burden of guilt. ‘What is it?’ she asked. He never really knew; in part it was disappointment, part a desire to escape, part a sense of human mortality. Perhaps too (he began to suspect) he was overtired, or ill, or out of stamina, for the whole world seemed colourless, and not simply times like these.

  There were other things that pained Emma. One was that their relationship had simply no cultural life; it existed only in her room and not in the world outside. It had no social quality or face except there, it had no places, no public images. Viola Masefield had begun to invite her to parties, and she had met Tanya, whom she liked; sometimes Treece was at these parties, sometimes not, but there was never anything to show that they were anything other than teacher and student. Viola thought that she was the girlfriend of Louis Bates; indeed, she began to observe in Viola a kind of possessive curiosity about the matter.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time you let this Louis Bates business drop?’ demanded Viola one evening.

  ‘Why?’ demanded Emma in reply.

  ‘Well, you’re only wasting your time and his. You can’t marry him, can you?’

  ‘No,’ said Emma honestly.

  ‘Then why don’t you tell him so?’

  ‘But why can’t I marry him? That’s the problem. I don’t even know.’

  ‘Oh really, Emma,’ said Viola. ‘You aren’t fascinated by his charm, are you?’

  ‘He doesn’t have any,’ said Emma.

  ‘It isn’t his appearance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Quite. I think he ought to have an X certificate.’

  ‘But that’s not fair; that’s not a reason.’

  ‘I know; you must have the reason. Honestly, Emma.’

  ‘But I must.’

  ‘Well, then, surely it’s that he’s too wrapped up in himself. He just doesn’t understand people; therefore he offers them nothing. Emma, you’re stupid about this, you know. You have this saint complex. You always want to help lame dogs over stiles. You should keep away from people like that. They drag you down. You have to stay away from people who can’t give you anything, or otherwise you destroy your own potential. It sounds cruel, but it’s a truth of existence that everyone accepts.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Emma miserably.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Viola firmly. ‘Think about it. Surely, vitality of personal relationships is all; it’s all there is. Life is catalysed by knowing interesting people. That’s where the vivid moments come from. And there just isn’t time for bores and fools.’

  ‘And Louis is one of those?’

  ‘Louis is a fool. I don’t just mean that he does silly things. There’s something entire and complete about his foolishness. He renders things absurd by doing them. He renders you absurd by your interest in him.’

  ‘But isn’t it just because we can’t take his seriousness seriously? There’s surely nothing wrong in being serious.’

  ‘That just isn’t the issue, though,’ said Viola. ‘I have nothing against seriousness, or naïveté, or adolescent romanticism, all of which things Bates has. He thinks he’s a latterday Rimbaud, his soul an open sore, and all he wants is a nice, soulful woman to kiss the wound and make it well. For Christ’s sake, what year is it? He carries his soul around in a paper bag as if he’d just bought it at Marks and Spencer’s; but you can’t live like that now. A lot of water has flowed under Robert Bridges since then. I once made the mistake of talking in front of him about William Blake and his wife, reading Paradise Lost naked at the bottom of their garden: and, my God, you could see he was thinking: when can we go and do it?’

  ‘But I mean, what about Rimbaud and Blake – do you call them fools as well?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Viola. ‘It’s a question of modes of the mind that are fitting. Theirs was an age of the heroic, and ours is an ironic mode. Rare spirits just aren’t our cup of tea, in spite of D. H. Lawrence. Louis is one of these people who want to live so intensely. They want an orgasm every time it rains. Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic nodality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?’

  ‘I think you know him a lot better than I thought you did,’ said Emma, ‘but even so, he has nobody. We all think like that. We make a victim of him. You may find this stupid but I respect him.’

  ‘Yes, so do I, in a perverse sort of way,’ said Viola. ‘I’m full of good things to say about him, though you wouldn’t believe it; he’s sensitive, intelligent, intense, rare . . . but once you’ve said all this, you have to add one more thing, always, and that is to say, he’s a fool.’

  ‘Well, he needs a friend,’ said Emma. ‘I just don’t want the sexual bit, though; if it weren’t for that, I could be his friend.’

  ‘You can’t just be friends with a man and stop at that,’ said Viola. ‘There are other emotions involved, always. Friendship between men and women is the stage before courtship; either you go on or you let it drop. When people get to know you they feel deeply about you.’

  ‘But why do they feel sexual love?’

  ‘Perhaps people are simply lacking in imagination nowadays,’ said Viola. ‘I don’t know; I think it’s a very good way of getting to know people.’

  ‘You see, I need men friends, because men are so much more intelligent than women, with ideas I mean, and I respect that. I liked Mr Eborebelosa; he was gentle and warm. I even like Louis Bates. So . . . why is one able to hurt people one likes, so callously?’

  ‘It’s one of the privileges of being a woman,’ said Viola. ‘One of the very few.’ ‘But I don’t want it, I don’t want that kind of power over people,’ said Emma. ‘It makes me feel like some Belle Dame Sans Merci, who takes love without giving it.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to listen to me,’ said Viola. ‘You’re an intelligent woman. And I have no special dispensation on insights.’

  And this was the extra dimension of her affair with Stuart, for a guilt about Bates, about Eborebelosa, pervaded all they did. Both knew it. The image of Louis, standing helpless under Viola’s onslaught at the ball, truly at a loss for once and speechless under its violence, was the last sight she had of him for some time. He was, Stuart told her, working very hard, and doing well. All there was beside was a queer, pathetic letter that she could not answer:

  Dearest Miss Fielding – I am writing this note as you obviously don’t want to see me. Of course there is no reason why you should. I am not suggesting you are cruel, because you probably don’t realize what sort of person I am, and the effect this has on me. Women do not like a man who is direct with them, I know, but often they blind themselves by romantic ideals to what is important. However. When we parted last term, I went off with a tear in my eye, unable to stop thinking of you. I tried to do some Beowulf, all through Christmas, but it was not any use. My tears were not because you had hurt me, but because I had meant all I said and could not really do without you, and I would have to. It is a stupid phrase of course because one can do without, but there seems no pleasure in going on, for you see when one has thought all one’s life that there is no one of one’s sort, and then there is and that person does not find one her sort as well, that is awful. What is love? Who knows? But whatever it is I have got it. Let us say that one likes some people more than others, perhaps because of some generosity in their view of man, some sensation that in them life is well lived, and one likes the aspects of oneself they bring out. Let us call all this, and the associated comfort and pleasure, love. For this is what I feel.

  Will you ever soften? Will you ever let me ta
ke you out for a little visit to the cinema, or perhaps you would come up to my room and I will entertain you there. There is not much in the way of cocoa, cakes, etc., but we can talk there and not be disturbed. I would like to talk to you, seriously.

  Your friend,

  Louis Bates.

  It was silly, of course, yet there, amid the stupidities, were such generous compliments and warm appraisals. ‘Some generosity in their view of man, some sensation that in them life is well lived’ – what greater human testimonial could there be in the world than that? If he only knew how awful she was. Yet she had done enough to prove it, to him more than anyone. And a sense of an enormous betrayal came over her as she thought of this phrase, which was her aim and yet showed up, at its cruellest point, her failure. She didn’t show the letter to Stuart but somehow he was still there, between them, and they both knew it. On him their guilts focused, and with him their civilized pretensions – one hoped it was not true, one feared that it was – fell down.

  II

  Who was it that always tore pages out of Essays in Criticism? Professor Treece, penetrating into the Senior Common Room for tea, had found the new copy, mutilated as usual. He picked it up and shook it, scarcely able to believe his eyes; the world, he felt, was tumbling to pieces about him; people – people he knew, people he took coffee with, even – were chipping steadily away at its hard, round moral core. Consider the circumstances: the Senior Common Room, entered only by persons of faculty rank; a serious intellectual review, of interest only to highly educated specialists. He was surrounded, it was clear enough, by intellectual crooks and vagabonds, people cultivated enough to teach in a university and read this, yet boorish enough to tear it up before anyone else had read it. That was the thing; the wooden horse was inside their gates; the enemies were within the town he had thought so well protected. Who was it? Any of these somnolent figures, sipping lethargically on their tea, could be the one. The soft, refined, civilized atmosphere of the Common Room suddenly curdled; he looked again at the copy of ‘Bateson’s little effort’, as he was wont to call it, as if he could not believe the mutilation there. Moral decline drifted everywhere around him in the air, like the stench of drains. One could only – the fact had to be faced – suspect a conspiracy, an overall challenge to the moral universe. There was no other way to perceive it.

  ‘Conspiracy!’ This was the first thought that had come into Treece’s mind when he learned that the University literary society had invited Carey Willoughby, the novelist and critic and . . . well, there was so much; he did everything . . . to lecture to it. Treece had been sitting in his room at the University that morning, under the most normal of circumstances, spraying his bookshelves with insecticide, when there had been a knock at the door and the head of Louis Bates had appeared round the jamb. Treece asked him to sit down, and he advanced into the room and did so genteelly. There was a pleased smile on his face. ‘I wondered whether you had a spare bedroom,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’ asked Treece.

  ‘Mr Willoughby, the novelist, you know, is coming to lecture to us, and he said that you were a friend of his and would probably put him up.’

  ‘I’ve never met the man in my life,’ said Treece.

  ‘But that’s not what he said in his letter,’ said Bates.

  ‘Then it’s his word against mine, isn’t it?’ said Treece rather angrily.

  ‘You see, frankly, we can’t afford to pay his hotel bill,’ said Bates, ‘because we’ve got so many other speakers coming this season. There’s Eliot coming, and Harold Nicolson, and I don’t suppose he’ll be satisfied with steak and chips and a bottle of Bass.’ Louis Bates was now Chairman of the student literary society, and he was really making a rather good job of it. He had been proposed by Oliver, and since he was Oliver’s candidate he had gone unopposed, for Oliver had no small influence. Apart from one or two unfortunate incidents – a refusal to present a bunch of chrysanthemums to a lady novelist who attacked Shelley, and a fondness for dismissing the rest of his Committee and running things solo – Bates’ régime was passing off very impressively. As Treece had grudgingly to admit to himself, Bates had been clever in obtaining Willoughby, who was fashionable and was on television more often than not.

  ‘Very well,’ said Treece, unwillingly. ‘For one night?’

  ‘Well, three, actually,’ said Bates. ‘Mr Schenk and Mr Butterfield have got him as a speaker at the Poetry Weekend.’

  ‘He’s going to be there too?’ cried Treece.

  Treece’s qualms were fully justified. As he had told Bates, he did not know Willoughby personally, though he had heard a great deal about him through the inter-university grapevine; but the process clearly operated in reverse, for the whole point was, to be blunt, that Willoughby, who obviously employed a large body of spies engaged in collecting stories and anecdotes for him to put in his books, had written up a long tale about Treece. He was in there.

  After Bates had gone, Treece had gone storming down to see Viola Masefield, who was Treece’s consultant on the younger generation. ‘Do you know this man Carey Willoughby is coming here?’ he demanded.

  ‘That bastard?’ said Viola. ‘How nice.’

  ‘I suppose he’s rather a bright man, but he seems to me unnecessarily malicious. I read his novels.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t read modern novels,’ said Viola. ‘You should; I’m glad to see we’re converting you.’

  ‘You are not converting me,’ cried Treece furiously. ‘All the modern novel seems to have discovered since Lawrence is that there are some people in England who change their shirts every day. I knew that already. I don’t need to read modern novels.’

  ‘But you should,’ said Viola.

  ‘Why?’ cried Treece. ‘I read this one because someone said I was in it. And I am. Do you realize that the story about the professor who left the script of one of his articles among some student essays, and another tutor gave it C minus, is about me? Someone must have told this man. Even down to the bit about, “This is good lower second stuff.” It was B minus actually. That makes it worse.’

  ‘Poet’s licence,’ said Viola.

  ‘What sort of man can he be? He makes one feel thoroughly unsafe.’

  ‘Oh Stuart, don’t fuss so,’ said Viola maternally. ‘You play right into Carey’s hands if you let him know that you think he’s betrayed you. He’d like you to think that.’

  ‘He’d what?’ shouted Treece. ‘You know, I just don’t understand you people. I don’t understand how he thinks. I don’t understand how you think. I believe you told him that story.’

  ‘I did, actually,’ said Viola.

  ‘He’s staying at my house,’ cried Treece. ‘I suppose he’s only coming because he’s short of ideas. Why else should he come to a place like this?’

  ‘Perhaps to see me,’ said Viola.

  ‘Well, if I were you, I’d be careful,’ said Treece.

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ said Viola.

  Treece blushed and fired his parting shot: ‘Have you seen his title?’ he cried. ‘What’s that supposed to be? “Contemporary Poetics: Adumbration and Exegesis.” Why doesn’t he just call it “Modern Verse”?’

  Treece left and went up to the Common Room, feeling that if he had learned anything about the younger generation, it was not what he wanted to know. Viola had betrayed him, and Willoughby had done his best; and now someone had been at work on Essays in Criticism and stabbed him in the back there too. The ordinary laws of sound human contact were slipping; and the people who were selling out were those within the citadel – one’s own friends, people one invited to one’s home, people who did not destroy aimlessly but with a philosophy of life that comprehended destruction. To Treece, the existence of people, of liberal intellectuals, like himself was infinitely precarious, infinitely unsure, and infinitely precious. The kind of intellectual purity he stood for was a tender blossom that had little or no chance in the bitter winds of the world. Sometimes you could do n
o more than thank God that there were people such as he was, thought Treece in no spirit of self-congratulation; he simply meant it. But those who live by the liberalism shall perish by the liberalism. Their own lack of intransigence, their inevitable effeteness, betrayed them. Already liberal intellects like his own found themselves on the periphery. The end was coming, as people like him had less and less of a social function, and were driven out into an effete and separate world of their own, to the far edge of alienation. It was on communication that they depended, and the channels were being closed from the other side; and in the tearing up of Essays in Criticism Treece saw the end of the liberal tradition.

  He looked about him, and observed that his neighbour in the next armchair was the sociologist Jenkins. He could, he reflected, have lighted on no better person to explain the changing scene to him; Jenkins was supremely au fait with the contemporary world. It was said that Jenkins was so conscious of being in the fifties that, if you asked him what day it was, he would answer: ‘Oh, it’s the nineteen-fifties.’ He was working, he had told Treece a few days before, on discontent, because there was a big market in discontent things just now.