Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  *

  Four days pass before the Club session begins because there is much preliminary work to be done. The session would be pretty empty if it consisted of nothing but the transmission of ideas: something must be added to relieve the tedium, and this is supplied by a collection of devices which keeps every member of the Club so passionately active that he forgets the end to which it is all directed. Committees are set up to deal with stenography, catering, hours, schedules, rules of procedure, etc. Each committee must have a secretary; each secretary must have an assistant; each assistant must have a typewriter; each typewriter must have something to type. As the Club is a small one, most members are obliged to serve on more than one committee: this means that the secretary of one committee is frequently the assistant to the secretary of another committee; or the typewriter of, say, the Catering Committee can be used by this body only at hours when the Hours Committee has not designated it for use by the Rules Committee. All this leads to misapprehension and quarrelling, and there is no doubt that none of the Committee-men would carry on the struggle at all if they were not conscious of the presence, in the bedrooms overhead, of the Club intellects straining every brain-fibre to produce histories of attenuated merit. And the histories will not, of course, merely be read aloud and then forgotten: on the contrary, each will be read aloud a second time in French, by a member of the Translation Committee, after which it will be mimeographed, in both versions, by the Duplication Committee and copies handed round for all members to explore a third time. Information on all matters must not only be handed in pamphlet form to each member (including those who wrote the pamphlet) but be pinned to a cork board in the hall and given in advance to all committees so as to avoid schedular confusion. To youngsters like Stapleton, who are pining for the bilious thrills of intellectual dispute, much of this subsidiary work seems dull and even unnecessary. But even Stapleton has to confess what a difference four days of scurrying makes to the atmosphere: it is impossible to say that nothing is happening when every member of the Club has mimeographed sheets sticking out of all his pockets, and at every meal every cruet supports some fresh order or rule that every man must study if his letters are to be posted, his slop-pail emptied, his history read, his Ovaltine brought to his night-table. At all hours of the day, a little cluster of members is round the bulletin board; and there is no more disappointing sight in human life than that of an ardent man running to read the latest bulletin and finding only the few score old ones that he knows by heart.

  But the main importance of all this work is that it makes every man-jack of the Club discover anew that he is identified with the Club and, without it, would probably have no identity at all. Each time he reads a fresh bulletin he has the impression that he is reading his autobiography. Moreover, he is secretly convinced that he himself is the mainspring of the Club, that it is round his identity that the Club’s identity is built. If he is one of the intellectuals, he takes for granted that the history which he is now dragging-out is what makes the Club the brilliant thing it is. If he is merely a stupid secretary, he believes that without the innumerable orders, rules, and schedules that he is promulgating, the high-brows upstairs would soon be in a pickle. It is in this way that great bodies of men act in concert to move mountains: though few have seen a mountain, all are capable of movement. Their identities become manifold: each man is magnified, first, by his identification with the Club; second, by his membership in a faction of the Club; third, by his pivotal position in being the one on whom everything depends; fourth, by the stimulating increase in sense-of-identity that is generated by the other three causes all working hysterically together. No wonder that after only four days every member feels that he has lived at Hyde’s Mortimer all his life. Not even in nightmare does he hear the roar of the angry, winter sea and imagine its castellated waves sweeping him and his friends off the face of the earth for ever.

  *

  That all the struggle, suffering, and self-discipline is worthwhile is evident on the morning of the fifth day. The parquet floor of the old hall is covered by lines of wooden chairs joined together at the top, so that if one member shifts forward in his seat he carries, if he is able, a dozen with him. The intellectual members are already drooped in these chairs, their faces white and fallen, their finger-tips brushing the floor, evidence of the efforts they have put out and the benzedrine they have taken in. A few, like Stapleton, are quivering on the edges of their seats reading sheaves and sheaves of mimeography over and over for the umpteenth time: they are the children who will go completely mad if the party doesn’t start soon. The older members, with records of twenty annual sessions, enter the hall with the utmost calm, and gravely press past the knees of those who are already seated, to chairs which experience has shown them are the best. Others stand by the wall, talking in low voices and sometimes smiling, and it is here that one notices particularly the secretaries of the various committees. Like the intellectuals, they are in a state of exhaustion, but they show by their tense expressions that they are not yet able to relax. Only when the first speaker has gone to the rostrum and intoned the first words of his depressing message to humanity will these devoted harbingers of thought drop suddenly into their chairs and let the bowstrings of their minds so slacken that they could not fire even a dart of inked paper.

  The President is heard to cough in an adjacent corridor, at which the rest of the Club makes haste to take its seats. He enters the hall, mounts the rostrum, and, rubbing his white hands together, addresses the Club as follows:

  ‘Lady and gentlemen. This is our fortieth annual session, which means that for forty years, at great expense of time and money, we have gathered annually to hear speeches from those of us who believe they have something to say. Forty years – it is really a long time, as you will see if you calculate the money spent on a single session, and then multiply by forty. I was doing this in bed last night, and the total made my mouth water. I am sure it has been worth it, though I must say that when I look back over the thirty sessions I have attended, all I can remember of them is the funny bits. I cannot recall a single word spoken in gravity and mimeographed in solemnity. Nonetheless, the mere fact of having endured these agonies assures me that for thirty years I have enjoyed a continuing identity. Surely this is the purpose of an intellectual session – not to exchange views but to reaffirm our self-conceptions?

  ‘There was a time when our patients served the same purpose. When I first joined this club our great theory was in a fluid condition. So, in consequence, was my identity. We had to build both our case-histories and autobiographies upon patients who showed promise of corroboration. But as the theory grew stronger, so did the patient become more and more superfluous. We began to think it intolerable that we should be expected to spend years ploughing a single patient under. We rebelled against servitude to men and women whose condition had been diagnosed to perfection years before they ever entered our consulting-rooms. Often a full twelve-month passed before a patient would even dream in a manner worthy of the great theory on which he was stretched – and this despite the fact that he had been assured repeatedly that he was the son of the theoretician. It is my private view that this let-me-be-your-father approach was a most unhappy, academic mistake: if there is one person to whom no one in his right mind admits his shortcomings, it is his papa. How short and relatively painless the history of psychiatry would be today if, beginning in the first couch, the analyst had pretended to be his patient’s mistress!

  ‘I could talk endlessly about the nuisance of patients. We all felt like dentists who had created plates or bridges of pure gold to the most cunning designs and were obliged to sit and wait for the appropriate jaws to come in. We were as judges who had already pronounced sentence; only the criminal remained at a distance. I have myself often been obliged to sit on a completed case for years, simply for want of a suitable person. Moreover, there was the problem of what to do with a patient after he had been used. I have known Club-members who kept-on t
heir used patients for ten and more years, purely out of kindness, for they were of no value to anyone. They had been restored to health many years before, as a glance at their now-dusty histories proved. They had a perfect grasp of themselves and of what had been missing from them before. And yet they were eternally dissatisfied. They seemed to have no idea what to do. They lacked all sense of direction. One had constantly to remind them that they were fit to make their own decisions and lead active, useful lives.

  ‘Our first step to freedom was to depersonalize the patient by calling him Mr X. or Miss Y. There is nothing like algebra in this respect. It really gives the brain a chance. But it was no final solution: our equation still had to wait for an X or Y before it could be printed in a book. So, in the end, we got rid of the patient altogether. We keep only enough to bring us in a small income and solve the servant-problem. We write our case-histories with a purity of invention and ingenuity impossible in the days when someone was always coming into the room. But this is where I wish to make my warning. I must remind you that liberty must not breed laziness. I expect the histories we are about to hear to be of a high order. They must be plausible. The invented patients must sound like real people. Any personal whims must be properly contained, not only within the theory but within the bounds of possibility. Absurd paradoxes of human behaviour, for example, must be brilliantly presented if they are to be effective. Patients who have three or more personalities, all ambiguous, must be at least six times more real than patients with only a single, undivided personality. All neuroses must be traced back to infantile origins of a truly -childlike kind and not give the impression of having been found in a library by a Red Indian at his wits’ end. This is the challenge, gentlemen. I shall be sharp with any reader who fails to meet it.’

  Members had barely had time to conceal their resentment when Dr Bitterling, author of the opening history, sprang to his feet and read loudly from a manuscript. ‘I was the third of eight children,’ he exclaimed, ‘born into an upper-middle-class milieu. My father was prone to tantrums; my mother slept in an elm-coffin. I mention elm because …’

  ‘Dr Bitterling!’ cried the President, ‘you don’t imagine we are going to sit patiently through that? I see you have one finger tucked into your manuscript some hundred pages further on. Kindly start again at the top of that page.’

  The doctor gnashed his teeth.

  ‘Come on, now!’ cried the President.

  ‘… came back from the war, my four aunts were unrecognizable,’ read Dr Bitterling sulkily.

  ‘Much, much more promising,’ said the President. ‘Any fool can fill in the usual preamble.’

  ‘I hate to waste a whole hundred pages,’ complained Dr Bitterling. ‘They represent many tedious hours of invention.’

  ‘That is what we fear. By the way, which war was it he is coming back from? No, no, don’t tell me; never mind. They’re all the same.’

  Dr Bitterling began again:

  The Case of the Co-Warden of the Badgeries

  By H. M. Bitterling, M.A.

  … aunts were unrecognizable. You, who have just heard in detail about my sensitive nature and the many years I had lived abroad, can imagine that the transmogrification of aunts would be the last straw. So often in the expatriate years I had pictured them as I knew them to be – four faded tweed skirts, seen from behind bent over like a row of beer barrels with their heads invisible among beds of flowers. Thus remembered, they were a symbol of the England I loved: it was these tumulous postures I had gone to war to maintain. And now, it was as if these barrels had rolled over, risen up, turned their faces towards me and revealed their true identities for the first time.

  You have heard what the loss of Priscilla meant to me. I had only just got over it when I saw my aunts afresh. In view of my agony over Priscilla, you may think that the change in aunts was an anti-climax. You are wrong. The metamorphosis of an aunt hits a man far harder than the immorality of a fiancée. An aunt is more than a relation; she is part of the background by which a man identifies himself. One slightly-modified aunt is enough to disturb the pattern of a nephew: a total alteration in four aunts robs him of virtually every means of self-appraisal. When we are small we are stood against a particular door and, year by year, our increase in stature is defined upon it. The day comes when we find the door has been removed, taking our definition with it. My four aunts were that door.

  They had all become chain-smokers. Their tufted, leathery skins, once lovable in their goatish simplicity, had become like hams hung in a chimney, and in the looser parts quite corrugated in a reptilian way. Tender remarks fell dead to the ground on striking these tanned hides. Their teeth were yellower and more jagged than ever, and though they claimed to have National Health sets in the offing, some sixth sense told me that these would remain forever unclaimed. They greeted me, the returned soldier, with the utmost casualness, like old campaigners acknowledging the return of a playboy. They were all reading catalogues of an auction sale, apparently their only interest in life. When I said: ‘So you’re not living at lovely old Rose Close any more? What has happened to the old place?’ one of them swivelled her fag to a corner of her mouth and asked the others: ‘Who has got it now, anyway? Broadbent got rid of it to Fowler. Tench tells me that Fowler’s sounding out McCready.’ At this they all laughed uproariously, and then looked me up and down like hags from the netherworld, bursting with revolting secrets. When I asked after my four uncles, their husbands, they said: ‘Somewhere in the garden, I expect,’ with contempt in their voices: and indeed, I found two of them in the borders, replacing the beloved old perennials with what they called ‘labour-saving shrubs’, and the other two in the kitchen, washing and drying-up. I would have stayed with these crushed, defeated men, gladly exchanging with them laments for the old days, were it not that my aunts’ signatures were essential to my new job: ‘… also of four Gentlewomen of decent habits’ said the old Badgeries’ application-form. So I got into the Land-Rover with my aunts and we went rushing off to the auction – down beech-avenues which no longer existed, past houses which regularly changed hands once a year and sometimes twice in twenty-four hours. At all such things my aunts cast quick, calculating looks and bellowed to each other the probable rise or fall in value since the last sale. Where once they had toiled to beautify the landscape, they now laboured to estimate its commercial worth. One of them, Aunt Mildred, seeing the disgust on my face, screamed at me: ‘We’re not going down with the ship this time! No gentility! We’re all tradesmen now!’ At this, they all cackled hideously, and one of them bellowed: ‘No devaluation of our war loans this time!’ and a third shouted: ‘Dead or live stock, we don’t care!’ The fourth screamed: ‘No compost for us: let the dead bury the dead – and that means the men!’

  The Corn Exchange was filled to bursting. My aunts fell into Indian file and walked straight to the auctioneer’s table, crushing scores of feet, bruising a hundred ribs in their ruthless passage. They removed from a Sheraton side-table a pile of hideous jugs, basins, and lampshades, and sat on top of it. It made a dreadful crackling noise. Aunt Mildred inserted a powerful finger-nail under a corner of the veneer and contemptuously prized it off. The other three rested their heels on its brasswork, shirting to other edges when a piece snapped.

  I had always loved an auction, but this one was strange to me. I cannot describe to you the intensity of feeling that filled the hall – the grimness, the unshakeable determination. The pallor of the young post-war husbands, out to furnish the hard-won cottage or flat, was in no way as terrifying as the cold-steel ferocity in the faces of their wives. Every chair, sofa, cabinet, table – some 300 lots in all – was occupied by bodies: at least a hundred women sat silently knitting: I think they were there just for the sake of company and excitement, as at a public execution. Above them all, raised behind a kitchen table, sat the auctioneer; and at his elbow sat his assistant – calm, quiet, and beautiful, her eyes following each bid with detatched precision. I fell in love
with her on the spot: how can anyone resist a creature so hard-boiled that she resembles a statue of purity? Her cleanliness alone assured me that she was incapable of passion; but it made no difference. I only looked round the hall for some object I could buy, and thus make friends with her.

  ‘Lot 97,’ said the auctioneer, ‘is an Axminster carpet of blue and red design with a yellow cruciform centre. It measures 13 by 10 and is in excellent condition. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know as well as I do that such a carpet will reach thirty pounds. Don’t, I beg you, oblige me to begin with bids of two pounds ten and that sort of thing. Start me at least at twenty, ladies and gentlemen, and then we’ll all be able to go home and mow our lawns and cook our hubbys’ suppers.’

  My aunts roared with laughter and drummed their heels. The auctioneer raised his ivory hammer and directed upon his audience the keen look of a retriever. They looked back at him in square silence; my aunts whinnied cynically.

  ‘Very well, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said crossly: ‘if you are going to be stubborn, it’s your funeral. Who will start me at ten?’

  ‘Shillings!’ cried a firm voice. Roars of laughter and clapping rang through the hall.

  ‘Very well,’ said the auctioneer, ‘we won’t bother with this lot, ladies and gentlemen. We will go on to Lot 98. Jenkins, remove 97.’

  Not even an adept Jenkins can remove quickly a 13 by 10 Axminster with five adults, a baby, and two dogs on it. Out of sympathy for Jenkins, therefore, a dealer cried chirpily ‘Three pounds!’ – and turned away as if that completely disposed of the matter.