How could it have been otherwise, since to them every guarantee must have seemed like evasion? Moreover, who was to know when every guarantee would not be called into question? The machine still functioned and, even if its laws were no longer adequate for the reasoning mind, it was still in the interest of all to keep it running smoothly. Thus anyone who refused to take part in this effort must needs have appeared to be suspect. Isolated instances, however, settled themselves, and in those cases it was scarcely necessary even to use the means they had to repulse a tiresome demand when it became crystallised into a claim. But when this incomprehensible attitude became apparent in an ever-increasing degree and in ever wider circles, public attention began to busy itself with the problem. What had previously been merely a personal difficulty unworthy of particular attention in the confusion of events had become a problem. The fanatics of cause and effect had explanations at their finger-tips. Some said that a new sociological stratum was developing, and they made a fierce attack on its elements, although they never doubted that it was, in any case, doomed to destruction. Clippings from the aspiring proletariat, they said, and the declining middle-class, and found the cause in the overcrowding of the universities, the reduction of the standing army and the increasing lack of opportunity for social climbers, and various other phenomena of this kind. The people in this new class could see themselves variously described in newspapers of every political colour. Learned articles described them as victims of the class-struggle, or of capitalism or of the lost; but in the political leaders they became fascist hirelings, work-shy louts, or emasculated dilettanti. Others again spread themselves on the subject of the experiences at the front, which they said had undoubtedly changed men’s whole characters; from this it was not far to the well-known theory of the generation destroyed by the war, even though it escaped shell-fire, and through that to the effort to describe the difficult material in one trenchant phrase as a ‘problem of the age.’
Thus it could not fail to happen that a number of representatives of this class succumbed to the magic of public interest, sinking into a prolonged contemplation of their own navels and bewailing their tragic fate; whereas, among these again were some who were able to transmute their deep meditations into printable manuscripts, and it was no longer unusual for them to find some publishing house sufficiently interested to provide them with a living, if of a somewhat insecure kind. For the majority, however, another fate was decreed. The System, after its ineffectual outcry, probably never seriously meant, against the younger generation, again bethought itself of the old solution, which was, quite simply, to abandon to the social misery which they presumably themselves desired the erring creatures who were, by their very nature, injurious to the process of production. For in the long run, naturally, only that special and specialised efficiency could be of ultimate importance which was dependent neither on epoch nor origins, and whose essential characteristic was its resignation to its appointed sphere. The machine produced for itself all it needed in the way of intellect, and everything beyond that must perforce peter out in fruitless sophistry. The best means of averting an immediate danger, of whatever kind it might be, was to manoeuvre it out of its menacing proximity and to appoint to it a sufficiently remote field of operation. Actually this was easy to accomplish, for since the representatives of unrest were scattered among all camps there was no fear of united action. Even within the different camps they were isolated, so that the individuals were unassailable, and yet seemingly without hope of uniting the outpourings of their discontent in one mighty stream and approaching a positive political objective. Whenever two or three discovered themselves to be in even the most superficial agreement they immediately declared a front, and very soon there were so many fronts that the real battle was lost sight of. Then the prophets of cross-union arose, an attempt not only to bring about for the first time an organised consolidation of this hitherto elusive class, but also, by this means, to effect its gradual absorption into the machine and to produce a reformation from within, an attempt which certainly did not suffer from lack of grandiose slogans and, in due course, came to a disastrous end.
Actually the only bond of union in this class, the only common ground, was their mental attitude—their mental attitude, but by no means the results which this produced. Ideas were as cheap as blackberries and could be gathered on every hedge, whether they connoted racial regeneration, socialistic economic planning, or a central revolution. But, in any case, it was not the objective significance of these astonishingly original contributions to the problems of the day which took our attention so much as the manner of their expression. A new mind seemed to be speaking in a new tongue. Their literary manifestations, for instance, appeared in a sort of code, the essence of which lay in the fact that old and familiar conceptions were used in quite a new sense only to be understood by those who from the outset were more or less of the same mind. This language acted as a sort of sieve, and it was owing to this useful circumstance, probably, that a special encyclopaedia was not prodded with each work, There was of course no accord about definitions; the process of thought seemed rather to begin with critical examination of the most fundamental hypotheses, and the only point in common was their unutterable seriousness and the obvious effort they were making to get the root of even the tritest and most banal phenomena and from the new significance thus attached to them to derive new developments. Thus the centre of gravity of every phenomenon shifted from the bare fact to the experience of the fact, and from the bare experience to the sublimisation of it; which showed very plainly the innate relationship of this political manifestation with every act of artistic creation—political manifestation, for these people were obsessed by politics, which appeared to them not as the simple administration of public affairs, with all its obstinate bandying to and fro, but as the great spirit embracing all life, whose movements are history and whose essence is power. The town as a spiritual image, the centre of every volition, the arena of every interest and effort, seemed for this species of men to be particularly favourable ground, and it might have been likened to a mountain within which an immense army of moles was at work, boring through rock and earth in every direction, invisibly undermining the mountain with their network of passages—an activity which did not spring from any particular infamy—they could not help themselves. And Ive bored merrily with them.
It was only natural that he, in his search for the active forces which were directing themselves against the common enemy, the ‘System,’ should in the first place encounter those men who had no firm, assured, and recognised position, but were to be found on all sides. Moreover, Ive probably realised that his whole nature and attitude made him one of them. But, as the farmers’ ambassador, he possessed a certain amount of power, and this made him mistrust the predominantly intellectual attitude of his new friends and, although he shared their freedom from prejudice, it seemed to him that this all too alert mental activity was a sign of lack of firmness; but in any case firmness was not of very great importance in that scene of action, and so he was inclined to agree with the statement which was frequently made to him: that every one would be prepared to stand on the barricades if it were demanded of him; but no one demanded it. Ive still had a naive belief in the efficacy of the barricades; at any rate as a stimulus to imagination. But he had not been long in the town when he realised, and every experience taught him anew, that his natural simplicity of attitude was quite sufficient to enable him to exist there, but if he were to live, that is, to make himself felt and bring the town to subjection, then he would require a very different equipment. He was not inimical to the town as such, he was prepared to accept it as a reality; but a few walks in the streets were enough to destroy his preconceptions, and very soon he could no longer remember what these conceptions had been except that they were of something quite different. At first he resisted the force which was overwhelming him, the uninterrupted flow of thoughts and images, each one of which by its strangeness held such a high degre
e of allurement; but he was accustomed to investigate men, things and opinions, first to discover their innate strength and then to classify them, and in the town, in the phenomenon of the town, he encountered the powerful executor of an indomitable will and he realised that to hold his own against this daemonic force would be a hard test and a glorious victory. It would not do to withdraw; if he were to shut himself off from pain he would have to set about investigating new values, and it must not be from lack of confidence that he sought a new equipment, but from the knowledge that with it he would be preparing himself for the greatest possible development. Of course, of this he was firmly convinced, at the root things must be quite simple, but what a maze had to be threaded in order to reach it! Ive lived the life of the town. And he did not hesitate, in order to do this, to begin at the very beginning. At first he tried to use his memories as a guide.
But the town gave him no clue. It seemed as though it would accept no responsibility that was not of the moment, therefore, no personal relation that was not intimately bound up with its own peculiar character. Ive learned, as it were, to understand himself as an individual for whom past and future were united in the present, and who could experience nothing for which the reason was not to be found within himself. To know the town, therefore, required a degree of self-renunciation which increased as results were obtained. This meant that the town must be apprehended in its totality if one were to be assured of one’s own totality. Face to face with the town he realised why this, the apprehension of totality, had never been possible to him with the farmers; the farmers had been under the influence of the town (even in their battle for freedom), and though the fight might be fiercest at the circumference it was regulated by the centre. The farmers had identified the town with the System, the crystallisation of the material with the material itself. But the System was everywhere, and every one who felt any responsibility towards life had settled down under its wing. And from this standpoint only could the attack be launched which for the farmers meant the preservation of their status, but for the town the fulfilment of its purpose.
VI
Ive had never feared loneliness, but even on sentry-duty during the Great War, or in his prison cell, he had never felt its brutal and bewildering character so much as in the town. It overpowered him wherever he went. In the war, after all, he had always had a warm circle of comrades to return to; the silent marshes were peopled with gods, or, when they were enveloped by sea-mists, with ghosts; in his cell he had himself and the companionship of his fellow prisoners knocking on the walls. But the town offered him nothing but desolate oppression. It began in his lodging on the fifth floor of a town tenement, where the top landing bore no relation to the marble-and-plaster splendour of the grand staircase down below. He lived in a furnished room which seemed merely to tolerate its occupant as though he were some alien body—not that Ive could be called an occupant, he was only a camper. He had not taken up his abode in the town, he had pitched his camp, and he refused to regard it in any other way. The significance of that camp was that you could depart at any moment, and he felt that the town dwellings were no better than entrenchments in which camp-followers and women might live, but for men they were only a place in which to snatch a brief rest.
On the front door of his lodging-house there were, besides the landlady’s brass plate, seven visiting-cards attached with drawing-pins, and occasionally in the dark passage Ive would run into a figure slipping by him with a silent greeting. In the street he would not have recognised one of the people who lived in the adjoining rooms, separated only by two inches of wall, and he never felt the slightest desire to make their acquaintance. Thicker than the walls of the room was the barrier of mistrust which there seemed no point in breaking down; what was to be would be, and if there was no special motive to stimulate association it was not worth while pursuing it. Ive took for granted that it was mistrust that shut off each individual in his own atmosphere; it hardly affected him personally; he was conscious of his own invulnerability, by virtue of which every new trouble enriched him. Serious harm could only come to him through himself, and he was amazed that this simple truth could not be accepted as a general maxim.
Ive hardly knew himself how he lived. He possessed nothing that he could pawn, and he filled up the income-tax declaration form with a certain amount of scornful satisfaction. He did not work, because any work he could do would have been useless. He occasionally wrote a few articles for the farmers, because he was convinced that they ought to be written, but they brought him in next to nothing. And he wrote nothing that was not absolutely necessary; to do so would have seemed to him a sort of literary charlatanry. Moreover, he found the league of respectable poverty was widespread, and he made the acquaintance of men who would have considered the possession of a dinner-jacket a form of social charlatanry, men whose minds were filled with new and extremely odd ideas, some even who introduced their revolutionary gospel with a plan for the reform of male clothing.
Frequently when he was walking through the neighbouring streets at night, he would stand in front of the houses, reading the innumerable plates on the front doors which announced the names and professions of the inmates. He discovered that there was hardly any condition of life in which one had no more to lose; poverty always managed to hide itself behind a trade. How, otherwise, could whole asylums of misery have been filled to the roof with people who lived, fortified by the mad illusion that they had a calling; lived, worked, ate, and produced children; lived by an occupation which they had chanced upon and to which they clung, knowing that it was the only thing left which assured them the status of a citizen? Astrologers and rat-catchers, agents for everything and nothing, barbers and shampooers of dogs, professional singers and hawkers, honest people out of luck, who ran no risks because they had nothing to lose except the passionate belief in their own usefulness, a belief that they shared with every one else whom Ive met in the town, sharing with them also the conviction that they were really destined for better things. Even Ive found himself indulging in foolish dreams from time to time and asking himself: What would you do if you were suddenly very rich? He examined himself conscientiously and discovered that he would certainly find such a position very pleasant, but that fundamentally there was nothing in his manner of life that he would change. At any rate he guarded himself against speculating on poverty as a stimulating factor; its strength, in any circumstances, was more sentimental than heroic. It was not the poorest, but the richest farmers in the country who had begun to rebel, and it was a complete fallacy that the workers’ revolution had benefited by the deterioration of their economic position; the very increase in numbers acted as a check on radicalism. Nowhere in the town was Ive able to observe what he had expected to find, namely, the stimulating aggravation of contrasts; it seemed much more as though, as distress increased, people strove to shuffle their positions and settle down into a state of pleasant and dull mediocrity, a phenomenon described by the newspapers, with complacent satisfaction, as a democratic achievement. It was not only the behaviour and clothing of the people in the streets; the modern dwellings, the shops and warehouses all followed the same line of modest display, and he who had eyes to see might notice the same mood of indifference in the nativities of the populace and in social life.
The town, which was great as a phenomenon, forced one also to recognize the greatness of its deception; its sensationalism in film and festival, in advertisement and trade, all pointed to the same underlying process as did its persistent industry, an inexorable process dragging everything with it in its course, Ive too was forced by the town to ignore the personal problem of his poverty; he was merely cut off from the most fascinating side of town life, always supposing he had wished to have any part in it. Up to a point one was forced to share in its deception in order to understand its nature. Thus, day after day, Ive felt himself more and more involved in a tangle of odious contradictions, and his attempts to reconcile them, however reasonable, only entangled them the mo
re. The fact was that he was far too much interested to wish to cut the Gordian knot with the sword of ideological construction, and his hopes were centred on the discovery not so much of absolute truth as of the path which led to it. He adopted an attitude of detached but keen interest towards the endeavours of mankind as well as towards his own state of utter confusion, and he was neither astonished nor dismayed to find himself falling victim to the same passionate intellectualism which, when he was working for the farmers, he had scorned as the most despicable type; of pavement-civilisation. Yet this seemed to be the only form of inspiration which the town could tolerate. In this dangerous state of mind he began his task of furthering the farmers cause, but his critical attitude acted as a perpetual check and limited the number of friends he was able to make. He did not find these where he had expected to find them, in the offices of the national parties, of the agricultural associations, nor on the editorial staffs of newspapers, where he solicited in vain for understanding of the farmers’ struggle. He found them in none of the places where they would have been most useful. He had been rash enough to believe that the aims and individual character of the Farmers’ Movement would give it value as a new political factor and would prevent it from being received with the usual intolerance and mud-slinging, but he found he had made a big mistake. The only place where he found his hopes realised, and received the welcome he had anticipated, was among people who, no matter under what flag they happened to be gathered, were really in the same position as himself; people he met at night—for it seemed as though their day only began at nightfall—in obscure bars, where they sat leaning their elbows on rough battered tables with strong drinks in front of them, in the warm smoky atmosphere of underground haunts whose low entries reminded him of the trenches in the Great War, or again in little modern cafés where serious men and intense women assembled every evening round low tables to discuss every conceivable subject over tea and cakes. For them the farmers’ cause was interesting enough, but only a problem among hundreds of other problems, none of which could be solved independently. So Ive had to be content to pluck a rose here and there from the thorny bushes. He carried on slow, tiresome and humiliating negotiations with officials in connection with Claus Heim—after first attempting to induce them at least to take a more decisive step to escape from their anomalous position with regard to the ‘System,’ which they were perpetually grumbling at, and finding himself confronted from the very outset with an amazing obstinacy. Or he would indulge in fantastic debates, picking up a miscellaneous collection of information, which gave cohesion to his disconnected experiences and consolidated his own mental position. He was honest enough to admit to himself that his knowledge of the things with which he had to deal was completely inadequate, even though he was familiar enough with the axioms which were common currency in the homes the Marsh farmers, and whose wisdom, translated into the picturesque language of proverb, could be summed up in such phrases as ‘people are the same all the world over’ or ‘aptness comes with the office.’ Thus he was only too glad to make use of the opportunities offered on every side by the town of becoming acquainted with actual facts, and what he learnt from these found a natural place in his new attitude.
It Cannot be Stormed Page 10
