Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  I told her I’d once been a bookseller myself, although knowing her stated aversion to literary first editions I didn’t say exactly what kind of bookselling I’d done. The fact that I’d worked in London impressed her, and I looked around the shop as though giving it some serious professional scrutiny, which in a sense I was. Obviously nobody likes someone telling them how to run their business so I used my softest manner and said, ‘You know, in a way I think this shop may be too good.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ she said, not quite as easily flattered as I’d hoped.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’ve got some very good stock here, quality in depth, but I wonder if possibly there are just too many good things.’

  ‘Can you have too much of a good thing? she asked.

  ‘You know, Ruth, I think you can. Sometimes a bookshop can be so full of good things that you can’t see the wood for the wood pulp.’

  I might also have said that in certain other cases a bookshop could be so full of crud that a person couldn’t even get in the door, or walk round the shop, or turn a corner without demolishing a pile of books, but I was being kind.

  ‘So what do you think I should do?’ she asked. ‘Burn some of the stock?’

  I laughed falsely and said, ‘No, no, but there are other possibilities.’

  ‘Such as?’

  I took a deep breath, hoped my charm was working at maximum throttle, and told her there was a library up at the clinic that was desperately in need of books. I said it would be an act of great charity to help the clinic, but that charity could work two ways, and once her stock had been streamlined, once people could actually see what she had for sale, business was sure to improve. I also said she’d have my undying gratitude, though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted her to have that.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you may have a point about some of the stock not being as accessible as it might be.’

  ‘And this need only be a loan,’ I said. ‘Once you’ve sold some of your remaining stock and you’ve got more room in the shop you could have the books back.’

  I had a feeling this could be years away. I knew I was asking a lot, but I thought what I was saying was actually true. Ruth Harris would have nothing to lose under this arrangement. And it wasn’t as though I was demanding any of her premium stock – in fact, I wasn’t sure she had any premium stock.

  She scrutinised me carefully. It seemed she wasn’t altogether unwilling to do me a favour but she was weighing up what she might be able to ask in return.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘If you’re willing to spend the afternoon in the shop sorting through the stock, then I suppose that would be all right. You’re a very persuasive young man.’

  ‘And then I’ll need you to take me and the books back to the clinic,’ I said.

  ‘You do drive a hard bargain, dear boy.’

  I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone outside of a Noël Coward play use the term ‘dear boy’. I was amused to be thought of as dear and as a boy, though I didn’t want Ruth Harris to find me too dear or too boyish. No doubt I was exploiting her, but it was a gentle form of exploitation and it was in a good cause, and when she patted me on the bottom at various times in the course of the afternoon I didn’t feel I could complain.

  By the end of the day we had a Volvo-load of grubby, unloved books packed into boxes and ready to be taken to the clinic. The load wouldn’t by any means be enough to fill all the library shelves, and it was scarcely enough to have made much of a dent in the chaos of Ruth Harris’s shop, but it was a start.

  In a perfect world I’d have returned triumphantly to the clinic with a fine selection of classics ancient and modern, a range of reference books, encyclopaedias, atlases, dictionaries, books of poetry, a smattering of history and philosophy, a cookery book or two for Cook; and then a few potboilers and ripping yarns for the long evenings.

  As it was I found myself to be the purveyor of a heap of drek that was heavy on dated showbiz biographies, cowboy novels, bodice-rippers, car manuals and chemistry textbooks. Ruth Harris offered to throw in a copy of The Wax Man, since the pile left after the reading hadn’t reduced at all, but I declined. No point asking for trouble. She drove me back to the clinic, and I was aware of her becoming increasingly uncomfortable as we got near. She may have been vulnerable to my charm but she still found the Kincaid Clinic a bit creepy.

  ‘You should be careful they don’t lock you in there and throw away the key,’ she said and gave a theatrical shudder.

  ‘They don’t like me that much,’ I said.

  Alicia was waiting at the gate when I returned. I was surprised, and was wise enough not to think it was because she’d missed me. She used her electronic key to open up, and we drove inside. Ruth Harris looked daggers at Alicia, then got out of the car, sprinted round to the tailgate and began energetically unloading the boxes. Her enthusiasm was surprising, but then I saw her real enthusiasm was to be gone. The moment the boxes were out of the car, she planted a conspicuous wet kiss on me and she was back behind the wheel ready to go. I didn’t mind that in itself, since I’d spent more than enough time in her company, but I hoped I wasn’t going to have to tote the books up to the library all by myself. If the patients were going to be nice to me, here was a great way to start. Alicia brandished her electronic key, the gate opened, the Volvo accelerated away, and the gate slid shut again. I was back. The status quo had returned, almost.

  ‘What have you done?’ Alicia asked.

  ‘Got some books for the library.’

  ‘What kind of books?’

  ‘All kinds,’ I said.

  She peeled back the flaps on the nearest box and looked inside. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, before running off in a panic I couldn’t possibly comprehend. I didn’t understand it any better when she returned with Kincaid. He looked at me with exasperation and pity.

  ‘The first thing I want to say, Gregory, is that I’m not angry with you. If anything, I’m angry with myself. Before we go any further I need to look at these books you’ve got. You’ll be kind enough to bring them to my office.’

  He swept off and I was left with Alicia. I’d made her angry again and I had no idea how.

  ‘I didn’t think there was much point having a library without any books,’ I said, trying to justify what seemed to me to need no justification.

  ‘You have so much to learn, Gregory,’ she said, and she followed Kincaid.

  Unaided, I carried the first two boxes up to Kincaid’s office and set them down in front of him and Alicia. They didn’t accept them with any noticeable grace, and from Alicia’s expression you might have thought I was carrying in boxes of raw sewage.

  ‘Is it because Dr Kincaid is black?’ Alicia said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You perhaps feel resentful that a member of a dark race has dominion over you.’

  I was not stupid enough then, and I’m certainly not stupid enough now, to believe that I’m entirely free from prejudice, racial or otherwise, but as far as I could see, such problems as I’d had with Kincaid weren’t about race. Also, in the current situation, it seemed he was having more of a problem with me than I was having with him.

  I said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So,’ Alicia replied thoughtfully, ‘is it simply the fact that he’s an authority figure?’

  Yes, I did have the odd problem with authority, but who doesn’t? The best reply I could come up with was, ‘I don’t think filling the library with books makes me that much of a rebel.’

  Kincaid and Alicia conceded that as a hypothetical argument this had merit, but they continued to behave as though I’d done something terrible. Kincaid started pulling books out of the boxes and sent me to fetch a second load. By the time I got back, the contents of the first two boxes were spread across the floor and Kincaid and Alicia were picking up books at random and scrutinising them.

  ‘Is this a good book?’ Alicia asked.

  She held up a book called Lone Riders of the High Mesas.
Its cover showed snaggly cowboys, anthropomorphic cacti, a yolky yellow sunset.

  ‘I’ve never read it,’ I said.

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘You can’t judge a book by looking at its cover,’ I said. ‘And beggars can’t be choosers.’

  These old clichés made me feel comfortably reassured, and only offended Alicia mildly.

  ‘To be fair to you, Gregory,’ Kincaid said, ‘there is a psychological concept, rather outmoded these days, called bibliotherapy.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Using texts as a therapeutic tool,’ said Kincaid.

  ‘But surely, Dr Kincaid,’ Alicia butted in, ‘those texts must be very carefully selected by the therapist for each specific patient. We can’t simply take pot luck.’

  ‘You mean patients can’t just read whatever they want?’ I said.

  ‘Of course not,’ Alicia insisted. ‘They might want something that would exacerbate their condition. Supposing you were a belonephobic and you read the Naked Lunch?’

  ‘Belonephobic?’

  ‘Fear of needles,’ she explained.

  ‘Well, if I was a belonephobic I suspect I’d give Naked Lunch a fairly wide berth,’ I said.

  ‘But you wouldn’t know what it was about until you’d started reading, would you?’

  ‘Maybe not, but the moment I started I’d know and then I’d stop. That’s the great thing about books. If you don’t like what you’re reading you don’t have to carry on. It’s not like being strapped into your seat in front of a film with your eyes and ears pinned open. You just close the book and it stops.’

  Kincaid didn’t want this debate going on in his office and he waved me away to fetch a third load of books. When I got back this time I thought he must have gone mad. He appeared to be systematically mutilating the books, tearing off covers, ripping out pages, while Alicia looked on admiringly.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Dr Kincaid is making sure the books are fit for consumption by the patients.’

  ‘Censoring them?’

  ‘Oh come on, Gregory, don’t be pathetic,’ Alicia sneered.

  ‘Then what?’

  Kincaid broke off from his page tearing. He looked irritated.

  ‘I suppose it’s time,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Alicia sighed, ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘All right, Gregory,’ said Kincaid. ‘Apparently this is the moment when I need to explain the basis of Kincaidian Therapy to you.’

  From looking irritated Kincaid became suave, perfectly at ease, the public man. He knew exactly what he was going to say to me. Perhaps he’d said it many times before, to individuals and groups far more knowledgeable or sceptical or hostile than me. And Alicia, who must surely have heard it many times before too, gave the impression that she never tired of listening to these wise words.

  ‘I shall be speaking in layman’s terms for your benefit,’ Kincaid said.

  I took note of the insult, but what was I going to say, ‘No, no, please talk in medical jargon that I don’t understand’?

  ‘Let me ask you, Gregory,’ he started, ‘what do you see when you look out of the window?’ He held up his hand to make sure I didn’t answer. ‘It’s a question you might answer in any number of ways. You might say you see the grounds, the tennis court, the writer’s hut. You may see one or two of the patients, or a member of staff. Perhaps you see trees and sky. Perhaps you see sunshine or clouds. It probably all looks very familiar to you by now. Perhaps you see nothing remarkable. You might look out and say you see nothing at all.’

  I wouldn’t have said that, but I didn’t contradict him.

  ‘But what happened when you went into town today? You saw things of a different order. You saw advertising hoardings, cinema posters. You may have looked in a shop window and seen television sets. You might well have seen a newspaper or magazine. You might have seen some boy wearing a T-shirt with the image of a pop star on it. You obviously went into a bookshop and saw any number of jacket designs, illustrations, author photographs. The number of images you saw in the outside world was infinitely greater than the number of images you could see in the clinic.’

  ‘I think I get the point,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder if you do. Let me put it another way: how many madmen have you seen in your life? And how many madmen have you seen on television or in films? How did you know they were mad? Could you tell simply by looking? Did they have wild hair and rolling eyes? What were the signs? Did they dress like Napoleon? How do you know what Napoleon looked like? Have you ever seen Napoleon in the flesh or have you only ever seen pictures?’ He stared at me, demanding an answer. ‘Well, have you?’

  ‘No, of course I’ve never seen Napoleon in the flesh.’

  ‘But if you’d come in here wearing the hat, your hand tucked into your tunic, we’d all have known you were dressed as Napoleon and we’d all have known you were mad. We would have read the signs, the semiotic, if you will. Am I making myself clear?’

  ‘Well, up to a point,’ I said.

  ‘Look, Gregory, I have no desire to be biblical, but the truth is we’re talking about images here, graven images. Not false images of God, but false images of the world. The human environment is awash with created images, and they get in the way. They cause confusion. People are bombarded with pictures, photographs, illustrations, cartoons, comics, films, television. And in some cases, in all too many cases, this bombardment is literally driving people insane.’

  He smiled with grim satisfaction.

  ‘It wasn’t always like this,’ he continued. ‘Once you saw what you saw. You saw what was there. There was the thing or there was nothing. The world was the world. It was itself, not an image of itself, not a cheap copy. And quite simply things were better then. People were healthier, happier, saner. And why? To put it crudely perhaps, because what goes in must come out, you only get back what you put in. Looking at my patients I see that their output is scrambled. But why wouldn’t it be when their input is similarly scrambled?

  ‘Our mission at the Kincaid Clinic is simple yet not at all easy. What we have to do is control the input, stop the flow of images. Turn off the tap. Let the dog see the rabbit. The real rabbit, not a picture of the rabbit. Am I making myself clear?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘What we have here are ten patients displaying divergent forms of madness. What they have in common is that they’ve all seen too many images. As a first principle, therefore, we protect them from these sources of madness.

  ‘We’re not against visual stimulation per se, you understand. We don’t object to our patients looking at the view from a window, but we don’t let them look at paintings or photographs of views from windows. It’s fine for our patients to look at flowers, but not at still lifes of flowers.’

  ‘Or at the labels on tin cans,’ I said, as a little something fell into place.

  ‘Quite. So we create an environment that is free from images. No television, no films, no picture books, no glossy magazines, no flowery shirts or wallpaper, and so on.’

  ‘And newspapers with all the photographs cut out.’

  ‘You’re very observant. I suppose that goes with being a writer. Now, I have been accused of philistinism,’ Kincaid said. ‘But that won’t stick. We aren’t against the visual arts, just against the representational visual arts. Anything Islamic is no problem whatsoever. Jackson Pollock, absolutely fine. Rothko perhaps. Hockney definitely not. Colour Field certainly, portraiture most certainly not; the Cubists I’m not so sure about, but I think it’s better safe than sorry. And frankly, what’s a little philistinism in the cause of such a great good? And, in any case, this is where you come in.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. It seems to me that the dilemma I’ve outlined here is at the heart of The Wax Man. No?’

  I grunted non-committally, allowing that this might be one possible interpretation.

  ‘You see, the most obvious objection to Kincaidian
Therapy is that it is simply protectionist. It keeps the patients away from images and this brings about a great improvement. But when they return to the outside world they’re back where they started. We have to do something to make them less vulnerable to images, to give them a way of protecting themselves. We need to use language to do this: language, the last great bulkhead against this anarchy of images. We stop the input of images, we substitute an input of language. Then we reverse the poles; we get the patients to create a bulkhead of their own, through their own writing. Yes?’

  ‘A bulkhead,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you would understand.’

  Did I understand? I wasn’t sure if I did or not. I was well aware of my ignorance in matters psychological, and yet this description of Kincaidian Therapy sounded like pretty thin stuff to me. I didn’t say that, naturally. And I didn’t argue. I wouldn’t have known how.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Kincaid said. ‘You’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true. Trust us, Gregory, before long you’ll come to see that’s the whole point.’

  ‘Yes, you will,’ Alicia agreed.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, very good, Gregory,’ Kincaid added. ‘I knew the concepts of Kincaidian Therapy wouldn’t be beyond your grasp.’

  Was he mocking me? I couldn’t tell any more. Like any good liberal I was uncomfortable with the deluge of pap that issued from what we then called the mass media. A few of us had read Marshall McLuhan, and tried on the notion that the medium was the message and that our society was about to be retribalised, but to the limited extent that we understood what he was on about, I don’t think many of us really took him very seriously. Even if we loved certain types of rock music and movies and television, most of us still thought the world was getting crasser and more absurd by the minute, and that the mass media, image-laden as it was, had a lot to answer for.

  So yes, it did sound as though Kincaid might be on to something. Sort of. The diagnosis didn’t sound unreasonable. On the other hand, Kincaidian Therapy sounded suspiciously like rather a grand name for what amounted to no more than staying indoors and turning off the TV set. And, apparently, for tearing the jackets off books, and ripping out all the illustrations.