Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  O, give me Samuel’s ear,

  The open ear, O Lord!

  and while they are all at it the captain surveys them with the care of a ship’s master wondering if his little crew will be sturdy enough to meet all storm and stress – for tomorrow the Club is arriving for the Summer Session and every nerve of Hyde’s Mortimer is tense with cleanliness and excitement. Mrs Paradise is fat and flustered: she sings with the others, but her thoughts are whirling madly from one room to another, accompanied by a frantic duster. Beside her, Mrs Chirk is all skin-and-bone – poor, aimless, unidentifiable thing, she is resolved to rub and rub until the few threadbare veins in her pale nose are excited to a positive redness. How different is Jellicoe – his face alive with suffering, his eyes filled with that burning dignity which only a life-long addiction to punishment, alcohol, and rebuke can give. Beside him is Towzer – a heavy, gnarled man whose grizzly beard brushes the page of his hymn-book: he peers at the lines through steel spectacles and follows each one with a forefinger as crusted and gnarled as a stump. He still looks old, but he is getting younger every day. Tray is close beside him, as usual; her lips are barely moving because, as always, she is absolutely wrapped up in some ridiculous fantasy: she alone is totally unexcited by the prospect of a horde of distinguished people arriving tomorrow: life is becoming more and more a hilarious joke to her: only a profoundly-confident feeling that one day she will marry Towzer saves the feather-brained little fool from becoming quite hysterical. So, from time to time, she turns a half-affectionate, half-satirical glance at the bearded, burly figure at her side, and positively shakes with laughter when she thinks of how completely ignorant he is, poor man, of what lies in store for him when he has knocked another ten years off his life.

  The captain sees all this and understands every bit of it, from the jumping tic in Jellicoe’s left cheek (the nearest to Mrs Paradise) to the occasional flash of understanding in Towzer’s right eye (the nearest to Miss Tray). He is touched by the thought that each of these people now enjoys a full and passionate identity which each regards as the great, human axle round which the turning world has been built. He is more touched when he looks first at Mrs Mallet, playing the harmonium with such beautiful restraint, and then, at Beaufort’s protruding pyjamas; these two companions of his have shown throughout these months a skill and ardour that fill him with admiration. Indeed, he is deeply affected by the whole scene: he feels there is something most beautiful about it: it is far finer than a painting or a piece of music because all the characters in it are actually alive. Formerly, he thinks to himself, an artist took real people and transformed them into painted ones: how much finer and more satisfying is the modern method of assuming that people are not real at all, only self-painted, and of proceeding to make them real by giving them new selves based on the best-available theories of human nature. When he looks at stout Mrs Paradise and thinks of the thin fantasy she was only a few months ago he can hardly believe his eyes: it is incredible to think how well the open ear responds to a little love and chronological falsification. And all these people are his own creation (with all due respect to help received from Mrs Mallet and Beaufort); and as he looks at them now he can hardly believe that in a few more weeks they will all have vanished again. He begins to wonder if, when they return to their old dead forms, they will carry with them any vestige, or sign, of their present identity: it is his experience that such people rarely do, but he never has learned quite not to hope that a little of it may stick. So when the harmonium ceases and it is time for him to take up the book again, he reads the prayer with unusual attentiveness and finds the words far more apt and sensible than usual.

  PART TWO

  ONE hears much about cavalry, tanks, or guardsmen collecting for a charge; but can these really compare in impressiveness to a body of thinkers collecting for a conference? Their cars storm up the drive, firing gravel all over the lawns, where the blades of the mower will pick it up again and dash it in Miss Tray’s face. Row upon row of teeth, false and natural, yellow and black, glisten in smiles behind the car windows as Club members see the captain, Mrs Mallet, and Beaufort waving welcome from the stone stairs. The car doors swing open and everyone begins to tumble out; but before examining the rank-and-file of members it is good to take a close look at the President.

  One cannot do so immediately because it is the duty of a president always to be so placed that at least a score of people must move before he can be made visible. In this case, disciple after disciple scrambles out and each, instead of proceeding into the house, stands at the open back door of the largest limousine and peers into it anxiously. Has the President survived the journey or will he be found to have been crushed? Does he know he has reached his goal, or should someone tell him? – presidents are not aware of passages. At last, as if brought into existence by these uncertainties, a shadow in the depths of the limousine is heard to grunt and an unmistakable presidential leg is poked through the door. A disciple at once seizes it by the ankle and presses it in the direction of the ground; others go round to the other side of the car and push the body in the direction of the leg. In a trice, the job is done: the President is not only out of the car but standing up.

  He stands for a moment smoothing his little beard and casting his little eyes on his surroundings with good-humoured irony. Like anyone who has been buried under heaps of followers for twenty years and sandwiched between their rancours in a thousand debates, he is a small thin man, and, as befits his rank, messy-looking. His clothes exude, in a refined sort of way, the stench of congested thought; although he has been infinitely pressed, his suit has not. His sophistication is so great that he has long since reached its limits and started all over again at the very beginning, seeing everything with wonder. It is with tolerant astonishment, like an old hand in a new whore house, that he surveys the fresh, strange beauties offered him by Mother Nature – those massive oaks down there; or are they elms or beeches? who shall say? all trees are oaks to presidents; that June stretch of what is unmistakably close-trimmed grass; and, heavens! surely those are bushes blooming in that large vacancy over there; how colourful they are, but how bizarre that a bush should behave as if it were a flower! His followers study his puzzled face with satisfaction; though each has extremes of one kind or another, none is capable of carrying bewilderment so far into total innocence. Every gesture of the President is a joy to see; turning now from the landscape to himself, as if to establish a relation, he finds on his waistcoat a quantity of cigar-ash that was unnoticeable in the city, and brushes it off with hesitant fingers. His eyes following, he even notices a run of extraordinary stains down his front, ranging from deep soup and gamboge egg to the dulled brilliance of red ink and mucilage. His lungs are simply abashed by the great quantity of air in this place; it seems to stretch for miles, unbroken by chimneys and exhaust-fumes; surely a little much for so few people? He is none too steady on his feet because the surface of the earth is so unusually uneven: every nerve in his soles impinges upon a Matterhorn of pebbles, rendering him clumsy: walking must be an odd affair, here, he thinks. And what a wind there seems to be, even though it is a still day of perfect sunshine: presumably it is the prevalence of air that gives such a breezy illusion. Well, well, well; it is all very peculiar indeed, this so-called natural life of which he has heard so much, with the sun seeming to shine on a man from all sides, unbroken by any city geometry; he is not sure that so much exposure is good. It relieves him to think that shortly he will be at a desk again, with walls all round him, and that in time to come this brilliant scene will recur only in an occasional, presidential dream, flying through his mind’s grey enclosure like a kingfisher through Liverpool Street Station.

  But the important thing about the President is that, were he not so stained, abashed, and teetering, he would not be a president at all. Every member of the Club knows that this formidable man has no option but to suggest the immensity of his real strength by parading all his frailties. They know that from the
time he was an infant he had a presiding identity, and that it could never have occurred to him to have anything else. When he was quite small, someone must have told him that he was ‘every inch a little president’, or something of the kind, and from that moment he knew himself to be a president, with no further problem but that of growing-up and finding a corpus and theory good enough for him to preside upon. If he has, while waiting for a suitable vacancy, specialized in this or that aspect of identity, the marks are no longer visible: he has long symbolized unity, totality, globality, the snake with its head in its mouth. His urbanity is staggering; he is so charming and natural that no one would dream he had a brain in his head. In spite and malice he is a match for all the members put together, but no one can imagine him sitting up at night mixing poisons for his darts. He can roll his eyes, twinkle them, scratch his nose, smile with imbecile amiability – but only because he has reached such a state of elevation that if he got down on all fours and crawled, he would still seem to be presiding.

  How different are the other members of the Club! They are all perfectly decent people, as people go, but it is not their function to coin presidential selves. These competent men have priceless identities of their own; each is quite preoccupied with leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind (particularly his own) as to what that identity is. The impressive thing about each of them is not that he specializes in a particular subject, but that he specializes in being himself – that is to say, in being the type of man who goes with the subject he has chosen to specialize in.

  Take Mr Harris, for instance, the man who brought Beaufort into the Club and trained him – not to be like himself, of course, but to be as recognizably Beaufort as possible. Harris is an immensely grave man: one day, at school, he wrote an essay that was so dull that one of the masters described it as ‘classical’. This was all young Harris needed; until that moment he had wavered, as boys do, among numerous selves, but at that instant his became a classical identity – short, austere, clear, without a trace of gush. The Club looks to him for case-histories that speak for themselves in dry, uninsistent language; they love his efforts to put sobriety into the most intoxicating themes. All this is immediately evident in his face and posture: when Beaufort waves frantically to him, Harris responds with a faint glow in one eye (the other, unfortunately, is glass) and the faintest suggestion of a smile: this, as everyone knows, is Harris’s way not only of showing warmth but of making himself recognizable as Harris.

  But now consider the man beside him, Dr Alexander Shubunkin. It is his smile that strikes one first, a smile that breaks out at the slightest pretext, splits his face in two and makes his jaw hang like a corpse’s. It is the smile of a man who probes so sharply into the characters of others that without it he might be thought unkind. Nonetheless, he cannot give the impression that he is all smiles; he has somehow to convey his analytical thrust; so he has decided to express this with his nose, eyes, and forehead, which are all pulled and puckered together to express vigilance and concentration. Lest anyone fail to recognize these confluctions, Dr Shubunkin has arranged for dozens of seams and grooves to serve as clues to his riddle: when his eyes flash with analytical interest, all the lines become illuminated and run to the centre of his face, pointing. It is probable that he got this idea from the electric map system of the Paris Métro.

  In sum, his face adds up to a most interesting whole – two opposing parts welded horizontally into one, with each part taking its turn to draw the spectator’s attention away from the other. But there are drawbacks to it. Because the whole urge, or dynamic, of Dr Shubunkin is channelled exclusively into his conflicting face he is quite shapeless and unidentifiable from the chin down. Furthermore, anyone who chooses to keep his face in two parts, and to spend every second of his life pushing one part forward or back, according to the situation, is bound to be tense, like a signal box on a busy line, and thus Dr Shubunkin is one of those people for whom the shakes must be the unifying principle; tics and tremors interweave his disparate parts, adding a third aspect to what is already double. More-ordinary Club members take off their hats to Shubunkin; well they know what a grid of energy and nervous concentration goes into the upkeep of his face, which, triple though it may appear to be, is as much a united whole as the United Kingdom, the Magi, or a three-piece bedroom suite.

  Dr Shubunkin stands at one extreme of club life; at the other stands Mr Harcourt, whose identity consists – and no less strongly at that – in his conviction that he has no identity at all. No one knows exactly when he decided that absolute negation was the best form of self-assertion, but it must have been many years ago because he does it so well. Like all Club members, he once pursued a particular aspect of the great theory of identity, but at some time or other he found the pace too hot, the competition too intense. Forgetting any dreams he may have had of becoming a poet or a magnate or an authority on hydraulic brakes, he decided to become the average man – one of the most difficult roles because it is such a curb, or drain, on a man’s abilities. But he has pulled it off – so well, in fact, that his fellow members often scratch their heads and wonder how on earth he got into the Club without being blackballed. Not only does he disclaim possession of any identity but backs this up by seeming never to know where he is or what is happening. He has never missed a case-history in his life, but speak to him about the Great Theory and he will stare perplexedly, as if the word identity were totally strange to him. It is no exaggeration to say that if the Club decided to dedicate itself to motor-racing, Mr Harcourt would not be aware of any change, even on corners at high speeds. He is a friendly man, but rather a grumbler.

  Between the extremes of Harcourt and Shubunkin are all the types necessary to fill a club. One might, briefly, mention Father Orfe, an ascetic who is a heavy drinker and has fixed his point of self-recognition precisely midway between religious faith and the hip-flask: this is a modern tendency among devout priests. There is Mr Jamesworth, whose self consists in a never-failing conviction that other people are always missing the point and spends all his effort, in a debate, trying to change the subject into something more fundamental. There is young Dr Bitterling, an authority on symbols: he is often at odds with Jamesworth but admires Orfe. But as there are many members, each absolutely distinct in his self-creation, and set in his ways by now, there is room to mention only one more. This is young Stapleton, the youngest member.

  He is a pale, hollow-eyed youth with a huge reddish moustache and a passionately-excited look: he can’t keep still for a minute, so eager is he to get down to business and change the world. It is clear that he has not been in the Club very long, because he looks at everything with such excitement: he has the identity of a reforming zealot at the moment, and manages it very well; but there is every chance that in the next few years he will stumble on some special aspect of life which, after first concentrating his powers in its direction, will then withdraw and permit him to give his whole attention to building up the self that best goes with the bent in question. Thereafter, even if he sometimes forgets what the bent is, he will never be in danger of forgetting himself. Until then, however, he will see self-forgetfulness as his aim in life. He is a wounded veteran of the last war and walks with a limp.

  This is also an interesting moment in which to see Captain Mallet afresh: suddenly one sees with clarity why he decided to be a captain. All the Club members are standing on the gravel sharing the President’s discomfort and staring apprehensively into the emptiness – and down the stone stairs trips the captain, a picture of smiling ease, a confident leader stretching out his hand to raise doubters from the waves. With careless shouts he beckons them to the stairs; they obey reluctantly, sadly watching their empty cars sweep away. Mrs Mallet and Beaufort stand side by side at the stair-head, also giving welcoming cries: but the members are not in a mood to climb boldly to safety. And so they stand, adamant and tense, at various levels of the stairs, raising their arms heartily but in a doomed way, like figures in a war memorial. The Presid
ent alone can exorcize their fears, and he cries in his high, querulous little voice:

  ‘What a delightful place for our Session, my good Mallet; but surely a little close to the sea? What? No sea for miles! I can hardly believe it. I really do not recognize the atmosphere at all: everything appears so suspended; nothing has anything behind it; what few solids there are seem quite left to their own devices. Does one feel equally at sea when one is actually in the house?’

  The members manage to smile, on seeing their skeletons thus made to dance, though young Stapleton, who is every bit as frightened as the rest, sniffs rather snobbishly at the President’s words: he is too young to approve of fear. But the captain takes the President’s cue, and says understandingly:

  ‘I assure you; once inside, with the curtains drawn, you will hardly know you have left London. Some oddness persists, of course; even inside, one has the feeling of living at an unnaturally low temperature in spaces abnormally vacant.’

  ‘Well, well, we must take the plunge,’ replies the President, and he boldly sets his old feet going and climbs all the way to the top, treating each step as if it were a dangerous parody of a real one. ‘Come on, Harris!’ he cries. ‘You next! Stapleton! Come on, my boy!’ And soon, those who are safely inside the breakfast-room are peering out of the windows at the falterers, and crying heartily: ‘Come on! It’s better in than out; you’ll see!’

  Jellicoe enters with a silver tray. The captain closes the tall french windows behind the last Club member. At once, a more homely feeling comes over the city visitors; with their fingers tight on the stem of a glass they can watch the oaks tremble through the window with less apprehension. ‘Such a threat to the self!’ the President murmurs, as if they had all scraped through a dangerous sortie. He takes an armchair that has its back to the window; at which Stapleton, though he is shaking like a leaf, deliberately chooses one that faces the dangerous landscape.