Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘What else have I missed?’ asked Treece belligerently.

  ‘Middle-class youth reacting against the cultural barrenness of the suburbs. Coming to the town to seek a cultural centre . . .’

  Across the room Treece suddenly noticed Walter Oliver, sitting in the midst of a rather strange and tattered group of apparent bohemians. ‘That’s the Gang,’ said Jenkins. ‘All pseudo-writers, pseudo-painters, pseudo-philosophers, who take over all the paraphernalia of bohemianism, but rarely actually produce anything. What I admire is their dedication. They really mean to do something. But those who do always seem to break away.’

  Oliver saw him and waved a hand. ‘Got any cigarettes?’ he shouted.

  ‘Shall we join them?’ said Treece.

  ‘All right,’ said Jenkins. ‘But do you know what a steamer is?’

  ‘No,’ said Treece.

  ‘Well, you’re one,’ said Jenkins. ‘You know how steamers come into port, and are unloaded, and then sail off again. This is one of the ways that these people live. They unload you and you sail off. Be careful.’

  ‘Ah, you finally came,’ said Oliver when they had crossed to the other table. ‘Good evening, Herr Jenkins.’ He looked back at Treece and said: ‘If you’ve got some cigarettes, I’ve got some matches.’ Treece produced a packet of cigarettes and Oliver took it and handed it round the group. ‘That’s what’s known as buying in,’ said Oliver.

  ‘How’s your novel?’ asked Treece.

  ‘I’m stuck,’ said Oliver. ‘I’d just finished the dedication and then I didn’t seem to know what to say next.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Treece.

  ‘Oh, it’s much better to be writing a novel than to have finished one.’

  ‘I had hopes of you, Oliver.’

  ‘Oh no, I’m finished, written out,’ said Oliver urbanely. ‘I’m so finished it just isn’t true. I’m one of the derrière garde. It’s a new twist. Hey, I thought of something interesting the other day. Do you realize that the title The Holy Bible is probably out of copyright?’

  ‘Well?’ said Jenkins.

  ‘Well, you could probably use it again for something else,’ said Oliver. He belched. Oliver had spitting friends, belching friends, and farting friends; that is, he rated people by how natural he was prepared to be in their presence. It was very hard to get to be one of Oliver’s farting friends. He didn’t take easily to people. He had no time for people who seemed to him to be fribbles. He demanded the strictest standards of conduct. He had really warmed to Treece and Jenkins.

  ‘You should see Louis Bates’s novel,’ said he to Treece.

  ‘Is it good, then?’

  ‘It’s . . . well-typed,’ said Oliver. ‘And it’s got me in it.’ ‘You recommend it, then?’ asked Treece. ‘It’s one of these knee-stroking novels,’ said Oliver. ‘What are they?’ asked Treece. ‘Oh you know, all pale young working-class men, reading Shelley to one another and saying, “Art thou pale for weariness?” and girls who softly stroke their own knees and say, “You know, you’re a very strange person.”’

  ‘What do you think of Bates?’ asked Treece.

  ‘I think he’s good,’ said Oliver. ‘Of course, he’s a fool.’

  At Treece’s other side sat a man who wore on his upper half only a dirty vest, buttoned up to the neck. He now put on sunglasses. ‘Can’t bear the light,’ he said in Treece’s ear. ‘Have to stay in all day and sleep. Then they come and fetch me and bring me out at night. Want to buy a cello?’

  ‘No; I don’t play,’ said Treece.

  ‘I’d come round and play it for you then,’ said the man. ‘You buy it and I’ll come every night and play it. Where do you live?’

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ said Treece wisely.

  The man reached out and took up a cello case and, opening it, he twanged the instrument. ‘Just listen at that tone,’ he said proudly. ‘Terrible, i’n’ it?’ ‘Put it away,’ said another man. ‘Bloody thing, who’d be stupid enough to buy a thing like that?’

  ‘This fella here,’ said the man with the cello gesturing towards Treece. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No. I don’t want it,’ said Treece.

  ‘You lay off him,’ said Oliver roughly. ‘He’s my friend.’ He turned to Treece and said: ‘Don’t you buy anything off them, anything, no matter how good it looks.’

  ‘Friend of yours, then?’ said the man with the cello, pointing to Oliver.

  ‘A student of mine,’ said Treece.

  ‘Him a student?’ asked the man. ‘I thought he was a racingcar driver.’

  ‘He may be as well,’ said Treece.

  ‘You a teacher? What do you teach?’

  ‘English,’ said Treece.

  ‘Good,’ said the man, who, Treece, saw more clearly, was only about twenty-three or twenty-four. ‘Will you read some poems of mine? You won’t understand them, but you might be able to get them published. Here, buy me a cup of coffee, will you?’ He called over the waitress. ‘Two cups of froth, please, Rita?’

  ‘Have you got any money?’ asked Rita.

  ‘He has,’ said the man, and, turning to Treece again, he asked politely: ‘Read much?’

  ‘Yes; it’s my job,’ said Treece.

  ‘You see this belt,’ said Walter Oliver on the other side of him, opening his jacket and taking off a leather belt. ‘It was made by the Prince of Wales’s bootmaker. Of course, the day we’re all waiting for is the one when the Prince of Wales claims his boots are made by Walter Oliver’s belt-maker.’

  ‘Is there a Prince of Wales?’ demanded Jenkins. Nobody knew. ‘That’s an interesting index of our sense of democratic responsibility,’ said Jenkins brightly. People were now beginning to wonder whether Treece and Jenkins were not completely insufferable.

  ‘I’m an anti-monarchist,’ said the man next to Treece showily. ‘Why?’ demanded Treece. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it’s such a waste of money.’ ‘If they substituted anything else, it would be equally expensive,’ said Treece. ‘Well, perhaps I’m a monarchist after all,’ said the man. ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’

  ‘I can forgive the monarchy everything except Annigoni,’ said a man who painted: you could tell he did; the paint was all over his clothes.

  ‘Of course, monarchy gives cachet to the class system and the nobility,’ said Jenkins.

  ‘But can one be more democratic than we are?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘America is,’ said Jenkins. ‘America is constantly in flux, and laid open to alteration. We really aren’t. Of course, in time we will be, because we’re only too likely to reproduce America’s experiences, thirty years later.’ Most of those present were communists, and they took this rather hard, hearing America praised. To some it was the first time it had happened. They responded violently and pointed out that at least England had the Welfare State. But, as Jenkins pointed out, they themselves were waifs from the Welfare State; they refused to have their names written down, and didn’t pay Health Insurance, and the Army somehow never got to know of their existence. ‘That’s the trouble with the Welfare State,’ said the man next to Treece. ‘They want everyone in. Of course, you can stay out if you’re clever. But one of the great injustices of our time is this: supposing you’re married, and you want to leave your wife, like I did, and disappear. Now you’d think in any sensibly run society a man could do that. But you try it and see what happens. It’s impossible to change your bloody name any more. If you get stuck and have to work, you need a bloody card from your last employer. The income tax is after you. That’s what started me off like this. I was quite willing to work then. I hadn’t discovered my genius. But my point is this: tramps are necessary. Avenues of escape are essential. So why doesn’t the Welfare State pay tramps to go on being tramps, instead of trying to find ’em work? What’s all this about work? People don’t realize how important tramps are. They challenge the assumption that you’ve got to be housed and propertied and well-dressed to live in the modern world. I could be like that i
f I wanted. I was the best pork-butcher in Ilkeston. I outclassed everybody. But I don’t choose. This is what I chose, the hard way. I read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and I realized I was something more than a butcher. I saw the light. Let me tell you my story. I think it’s without exception the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard . . .’

  But Oliver interrupted. ‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said, ‘how working-class intellectuals thrive on Nietzsche? They all do. It’s the power complex. They’re all supermen. They all think they’re Jesus Christ risen again. They all want to change the world. Sometimes I just want to run away and keep bees. I get tired of the manifold voices of truth buzzing in my ears . . .’

  ‘There’s only one way to shut that fellow up,’ said the cellist, spiteful because of the interruption, ‘and that’s tell him he looks ill.’ He addressed himself to Oliver: ‘Do you feel all right?’ he asked him. ‘Your face has gone yellow.’

  ‘My God!’ said Oliver.

  ‘Much remains to be told,’ went on the cellist, turning back to Treece. ‘I realized, as I said, that I was a genius. It explains so much. Why did people despise me? Why was I so alone? Actually I wasn’t actually alone. I was living with this Negress, a huge creature she was, with breasts so high up she could rest her chin between them, but spiritually I was alone, and ununderstood. I read Henry Miller. I saw that I was a rebel. Of course, rebels are never loved. You’ve heard of Rimbaud, Baudelaire? I was of that ilk. However, as it happened, it isn’t love us rebels want; it’s money. There should be a levy for rebels and poets. Every time those people sit down in their cosy armchairs at the telly they should be made to drop a shilling in a box for rebels.’

  Treece sat there, with his washed hair and thin fingers, and asked himself: What can you do? The coffee machine hissed savagely at him. He wanted to escape from the place. He felt like a useless butterfly. The ground began to open beneath his feet; he found himself dispossessed, as if he were alone in a big city, circulating among hostile formations of passers-by. He wanted to see Emma. Dejection seeped like sludge into his spirits as the cellist went on uttering his history into his ear. The crowds in the coffee bar seemed all at once to be the busy world about him, the people who were in on things, the people with jobs, the people with a sense of mission. Their lives were full of matter; they were in the class system; they were social functionaries. He alone did not feel a part of Jenkins’s schemes and overall patterns; he was an alien in the universe; while everyone else’s blazer and moustache were class symbols, it seemed to him that his hat was just a hat, his suit an ordinary unsocial suit and his tie an innocent, uncommitted tie. He felt alone, he felt as if he had no tenure in the world, as if every moment came to him, alone of men, unexpectedly. He felt that he wanted not just to be with Emma, but more: to be involved with her, to be in love with her, to be a social group of two. And he suddenly wished that Emma was here, to be turned to.

  He decided to go. Jenkins seemed happy enough in this company, and so Treece went alone. He walked down to the market place to get a taxi. A crowd was gathered there, among the deserted stalls; a fight was going on. Several teddy boys had set upon a man who was on the ground at the centre of the milling group. The assailants jostled their way through the crowd and trotted off down a side street. A moment later, as if at a signal, two policemen appeared and scattered the crowd. ‘Always too late, aren’t you?’ cried a little man. ‘Always stay out of the way until it’s over. That’s the cops every time.’ ‘I’ll have you inside if you don’t watch it,’ said the policeman. He advanced towards Treece. The victim was being helped to his feet, and Treece saw, with a sudden shock of shame – as if his own shame for not intervening weren’t enough – that the face was black, and belonged to Mr Eborebelosa. His hands were cut with knife wounds and he had a pain in his shoulder. He saw Treece with surprise. The attack had been a motiveless one, by youths out nigger-hunting, and he couldn’t quite understand what had happened to him. Treece took him up to the hospital in a taxi and then, when his broken collarbone had been set, took him to his home. He said little. It seemed useless to apologize; yet he knew he could, had he dared, have intervened, and he did not know how to forgive himself. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Eborebelosa, back at his digs. ‘Thank you,’ said Treece.

  8

  I

  AS TREECE had had grudgingly to admit, Louis Bates had been very enterprising in engaging the services of Carey Willoughby as his speaker, and on the afternoon of the lecture everyone had been telling him so. All day he was to be seen, for once, in the centre of an admiring host; by four o’clock he was as dizzy as a sick bee on a surfeit of praise, and his sense of participation in the events about him was noticeably diminished. One of these events was that already a crowd some seventy strong, and including the Vice-Chancellor and his wife, the town clerk and the manager of the local dancehall, Mr Schenk and Mr Butterfield, were packed in a large lecture room on hard wooden benches; and Willoughby was half an hour overdue.

  ‘I hope he really is coming,’ said Butterfield, who, since Willoughby was speaking for the Poetry Weekend he had arranged with Mr Schenk, had a vested interest in the occasion, and was frightened of what Bates was going to pull out of the bag next.

  ‘Someone has gone down to the station to meet him?’ asked Professor de Thule, of History, sneaking out of his own department.

  ‘Well,’ said Bates, bright as a pin. ‘Well . . .’ – and in spite of a barrage of subtle prevarication on his part, it became apparent to all present that this courtesy had, somehow, been completely overlooked. All depended on Bates; he had dismissed the rest of the Committee of the society for all except trivial purposes; Bates worked alone. But that capacity for bold strokes which had characterized his reign had not deserted him; he produced his masterpiece: he was going, he said, to telephone the station and broadcast a message for Mr Willoughby on the loudspeakers: Come on up. This, it seemed to Treece, waiting disturbedly in the main hall with the academic contingent, while draughts blew up the legs of their trousers and skirts, was a typical Bates extravagance, but there was no help for it; every time Bates popped into the lecture room with new reassurances, laughter and the singing of an old University song, ‘Why are we waiting?’ greeted his entrance and exit, and people were beginning to leave, unmelted by his honeyed persuasions. By now he was known to his audience as a supreme buffoon, and his ears had turned the colour of terracotta. Happily for Louis this stratagem had worked. But, alas, when he emerged from the telephone booth five minutes later, even his superb aplomb was somewhat dishevelled. ‘I can’t get through,’ he said with a catch in his voice. ‘I keep getting the station and then when I try to tell them what I want they ring off.’ A little tear grew in the corner of his eye and he added pettishly: ‘I’m going to call the telephone exchange and ask them to exchange this telephone.’

  ‘Did you press button A?’ asked de Thule brutally.

  ‘No,’ said Bates. ‘Anyway, I’ve run out of pennies.’ He started to explain that he was working class, unlike everyone else, and not used to telephones, but Treece cut him short. ‘I think you’d better hurry down to the station in a taxi and meet him.’ It was but the work of another ten minutes to put Bates in a taxi and send him down to the station to salvage what he could from the debris. As his taxi swung out of the drive, with Bates gesticulating out of the rear window, a second taxi swung in and pulled up in front of the steps to disgorge what was obviously a Bright Young Man, with a Marlon Brando haircut, Army-surplus trousers, and a suede zipper jacket, carrying a khaki haversack from which protruded a bottle of milk. ‘Do you mind if I change my socks?’ he asked. It was, of course, Willoughby.

  ‘I’m Treece, head of the English Department,’ said Treece stepping forward.

  ‘Pay for the taxi, will you, there’s a good chap?’ said Willoughby. The cavalcade passed through the entrance hall and on up to the Senior Common Room, where all the assistant lecturers were gathered, doing funny walks and pulling faces in the hope of bein
g put into a Willoughby novel. ‘Treece, Treece, Treece,’ said Willoughby. ‘The Housman Treece?’ ‘Yes; that’s my book,’ said Treece. ‘I tell my students not to read it,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Treece. Willoughby sat down in an armchair and peeled off his shoes, then his socks; one seedy foot appeared, and then the other. ‘Well, you’re a rum lot,’ he said. ‘I sat down at the station on my fanny for half an hour.’ ‘There was a misunderstanding,’ said Treece. ‘Seems like it,’ said Willoughby.

  The cavalcade stood to one side, whispering. ‘But he’s awful,’ said the wife of the Vice-Chancellor, ‘and I’ve arranged to have him for dinner. I can’t cancel it now. Can I? Can I?’ She looked at his bare feet with distaste.

  ‘Excuse the tootsies,’ said Willoughby. ‘Doctor’s orders, this.’ He reached in his haversack and produced a clean pair of socks, which he donned. The Vice-Chancellor’s wife watched all this in horrified fascination; you felt that she had not really seen feet before, or if she had seen them, she had not thought about them; she was thinking now.

  ‘I just want to make a call,’ said Willoughby, and he disappeared into the toilet. They could hear him whistling gaily within.

  ‘Is he a friend of yours?’ demanded the Vice-Chancellor’s wife.

  ‘I’ve never met him before,’ said Treece.

  ‘Does he always take his shoes off?’ demanded someone else.

  ‘This is as strange to me as it is to you,’ said Treece, disclaiming the whole thing entirely.

  Perhaps, he thought generously, it was fame that had made Willoughby like this; and really this was true. You not only had to be someone, these days, but to look as if you were someone; otherwise the gossip columnists were simply not interested. Willoughby was really rather mystified by the whole business of his success; people said he was an angry young man, though he was not conscious of it – he had thought himself a perfectly detached observer of the modern scene. They compared him with people he scarcely knew, like Amis and Wain, and called him a movement. Actually he felt as doubtless Amis felt, and Wain, that he had got on to it all first, and the others were just taking advantage. He did not know what to make of it all. He had noticed that great artists usually had a great deal of panache and manner, and he went in for manner, but sometimes it was this sort of manner and sometimes that. This time he was the Marlon Brando type, with his hair slicked down and the cares of the world upon his sullen shoulders. He was the victim of misfortunes, the charming buffoon, the delightful incompetent who forgot what he wanted to say in lectures and seduced his women students, who beneath his expansive exterior was nigh to tears. There was one thing he could not understand about his literary fame; and that was this: he had observed that artists – there were so many examples one could name, Brecht, Picasso, so many more – had a special dispensation where women were concerned. They could ill-treat and deceive and betray them, and subject them to every kind of indignity, and they, in their dozens, loved it, and him. Willoughby ill-treated and deceived and was cruel to his women, in their twos or threes, and subjected them to every kind of indignity, and they hated it, and him. There comes a point in a relationship, he had noticed, where a woman can no longer do without a man, whatever he is; yet there was never any point in his relationships where a woman could not do without him. He therefore saw himself as a literary waif, cut off from all the advantages that his role should rightfully bring.