Goodbye, Mr Dixon

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Perhaps that would be her next fantasy. He thought, Really, I must see if this house of hers exists. He felt that this was important. It would be good if it existed, it would be a guarantee of something. On the other hand if it didn’t exist he would feel disappointed. It didn’t matter whether it was suitable for Dixon or not; certainly she wouldn’t be suitable for Dixon. Not with all her students and her bourgeois ideas. Dixon would be terrified by her rows of Reader’s Digest; he was absolutely sure that she would have such books. She was exactly the type who would know more about Dornford Yates than about W. B. Yeats. He imagined a crazy conversation between her and Dixon in which this confusion mystified them. He burst out laughing and then suddenly stopped. He got up and began to make some tea.

  5

  WHEN TOM SPENCE was in school an imaginative teacher had dubbed him “Emily Brontë” because of his habit of slouching along the street by himself with a peculiar loping stride. He didn’t mix very much with other pupils and he wasn’t very clever. He was the only son of a small, bald, worried bank clerk and his huge rather overwhelming wife. She had wanted her husband “to get on in the world” but he hadn’t succeeded owing to the fact that he was a great reader of books, many of which were beyond his mental capacity to digest. His wife on the other hand never read any books at all and did her best to stop her husband “from wasting his time”. The dreadful story of her life was that she was always being ignored because her husband was a “nobody”. At the annual staff party no one ever spoke to her though she wanted to be the queen there, forgetting or not realising that she had no qualities to make her queen anywhere. For this reason she blamed her husband, and their nights consisted of long silences punctuated not exactly by quarrels (since he didn’t say much) but by long monologues on her part. She had a habit too of taking to her bed with strange illnesses and deciding that she wouldn’t cook any meals.

  Eventually her husband retired to a shed in the garden and in summer months he would sit there and take notes. He steadily read his way through the Russian novelists that he got through the post after joining a book club. After that he read the whole of Dickens and Somerset Maugham. He felt guilty if he was not reading a book: reading was a secret vice like taking heroin. He kept a large red notebook in which he entered the titles of all the books he had read, with notes on each. His note on War and Peace read as follows:

  The action of this book takes place in Russia during the time of Napoleon. A lot of it is said to be autobiographical. This is reputed to be the greatest novel ever written. Tolstoy became very religious and is said to have made his own shoes.

  His greatest luxury was to sit in a deckchair among the humming of bees reading very slowly page after page of a good book.

  When Tom Spence was in school his mother expected that he would be an outstanding success. She would often visit the school complaining that her son was not getting enough homework. She didn’t understand much of what he was doing, but did notice once that he had misspelt one of the words she knew and wrote in to mention it. She kept in the sideboard all the letters she had received from the school (they were all written on school notepaper) and she would show them to any visitors she had. The result of this of course was that her son was not liked by the masters, who found him surly and inclined to overrate himself for no apparent reason.

  At the age of eight he began to suffer from bouts of bronchitis which slowed him down even further. His mother would keep him in bed for three weeks or so and sometimes would take him into her own bed. He breathed with difficulty, and it wasn’t until years afterwards that he recognised that this was because of the overwhelming personality of his mother who was squeezing the life out of him while she plagued the doctor with threats and demands. In the summer months he would lie in bed eating oranges while outside on the street he could hear the other children happily playing and shouting.

  In self-defence he began to withdraw into himself like his father, and would read poetry. His favourite poets were Kipling and Alfred Noyes. In the dead of night he would lie awake staring lifelessly at the window through which the moonlight poured, while his mother snored beside him.

  As time passed she realised that he was not going to be her saviour. His arithmetic or what she called sums was bad. His French and Latin were worse. He himself had grown cynical about school. He would take days off and she wouldn’t find out about it for weeks. He would go away by himself down streets he had never visited before, wander among barrows of vegetables and fruit, sit and watch the trains leave the railway station. He began to read travel books. In fact the only thing that caught his fancy in school was a project they once did on Greece. He decided that when he was older he would go there. There was lots of sunshine and plenty of fine marble statues that weren’t able to talk.

  One day his father didn’t come back into the house from the shed. They found him lying slumped over a copy of Pygmalion. He had just begun to write his opinion of it when the pen fell to the floor. The only words written there were:

  The background to this play is said to be a Greek legend. The use of the phrase “not bloody likely” caused a commotion in the theatre. Higgins is said to be Shaw since he wrote postcards to people rather than letters.

  Later Tom counted the number of entries in the notebook. There were two hundred. There were also fifteen other notebooks with similar entries. He didn’t know very much about his father, who hardly spoke to him at all in his latter days. His face had settled into an expression of perpetual puzzlement and it was almost as if he had to be pushed from one assignment to another.

  His mother bought a large black veil, but there weren’t any mourners at the funeral which took place in a large, draughty cemetery. She kept the letter from the bank manager who had arrived briefly in a large blue car and had then driven off to take his boat out for the afternoon. The name of his boat was the Interest, a pleasant little joke that had floated into his mind when he was having a bath one Sunday afternoon.

  At the age of seventeen Tom left the house. He didn’t even leave a note. He had taken a number of his father’s books—the more modern ones—and his father’s pen. His mother had kept up for some time the fiction that he had gone to England to train as a bank manager to follow in his father’s footsteps, but eventually the neighbourhood discovered that he had been seen working as a labourer and later still that he had been seen delivering parcels at Christmas. After that she had tired of keeping up the pretence and Tom had heard that she had taken up with another small man exactly like her husband who worked as a joiner in a yard. They would be seen on Saturday nights in a local bar called the Royal and she seemed quite happy. She took to wearing flamboyant colours but when drunk she would refer to “happier days” when her “brilliant” son had been thwarted by bronchitis and consumption. She would even show people the notebooks which her “brilliant” bank manager husband had compiled in his leisure hours and had once been introduced on the strength of them to a schoolmaster who had said that they were “remarkable”.

  Tom’s odyssey had begun in the West where he had helped to build a road with a number of mainly Irish labourers in beautiful summer weather which had lasted for weeks. On Sundays he would go for endless walks across the heathery moors and brood by lochs till the sun began to set. It was on one of those evenings that two or three lines of poetry had come into his head. When he got back he wrote them down in a writing pad. However, when the rains came he decided that he would leave the road-building and go back to the city, where he got a job for a while helping in a bar. He began to save his money so that he could take time off to write. He also began to read some of his father’s books and though he found them difficult he persevered because there was nothing else for him to do. The first two weeks he managed to stay off work he had written nothing at all except a very short poem which he had sent away and which had been returned. In those days he was in digs with a Mrs Thin who wanted only the “companionship” (as she was quite old) and wasn’t really interested so
much in the money. She was frightened of burglars and also had a fantasy that gangs were stealing her milk. Eventually he found the smell of Mansion Polish unbearable and left. For a small deposit he discovered that he could buy a flat, and moved in one spring day with his books and nothing much else. One day when he was looking out of the window at the river which flowed past in the distance the idea of writing a book about another writer had come to him. It had come to him purely as a gift, unsolicited yet transparent, and he had started work on the book.

  When he started the book on Dixon he had been reading Hermann Hesse in paperback. He spent his time either reading, or watching TV, or walking about. He had no friends at all, believing that if he was going to write he must lead a life of self-sacrifice and loneliness. Sometimes when he could afford it he went to the cinema. He found that his main difficulty was to write something that he himself felt, for when he reread pages of his work he seemed to hear Hesse or someone like him speaking through them. But at the same time writing was all that he could do even minimally well. Sometimes he had terrible nightmares as he walked through the city of being swallowed by a huge organism which glittered with vulgar lights. And he knew that he must learn to breathe properly before it succeeded. He grew sensitive to colour: the saddest sight he knew was the milky neon lamps glowing against the fading daylight before they slowly turned to orange. The happiest was the colours of apples and oranges and tomatoes on a fruit stall on a spring day.

  He had given himself four years “to succeed” as a writer though he hadn’t defined what success meant. He knew no writers except for a few poets, inadequately bearded, whom he had heard reading some concrete poems in a poky pub. They all said before they began reading, “This is a thing that I wrote …” They used the word “shit” a lot: he didn’t like that; it was unnecessary. It was unrefined. All he wanted to do was to write one really good thing. He thought that their work was trivial and pretentious, he was certain that their talent was minimal; and he conjectured that they were massive egotists. They dressed like disciples—indeed there was something of the New Testament in their style—and they tried desperately hard to make their conversation intelligent. He didn’t want to be like them. No, it would be far better to be large and sane like Tolstoy.

  He didn’t know what he would do when the four years were up and he hadn’t “succeeded”. Anyway he still had a year and a half to go. He didn’t have enough certificates to take him into a university. There seemed not very much open to him. Though he supposed that he was still young enough to go to night school and try for more certificates. He could probably do that if the worst came to the worst. But on the other hand he must try and finish his novel. He would have a real go at it. The thing was not to be afraid, to live sparely as Dixon would do. To remember that Art must be worked for.

  6

  THE GROUP WHICH Crawford was to address seemed to consist of school teachers; at least there was a disciplined receptivity about them and much flashing of spectacles and notebooks. Tom sat at the back trying to appear inconspicuous, for everyone about him seemed neatly suited or quietly bloused. There appeared to be more women than men and they maintained a decorous silence as if they were in church.

  After a while Crawford appeared and sat modestly in front of a table on which there rested a carafe of water with a glass beside it. An oldish man with a grey moustache introduced him as their “speaker for this afternoon” and said that he was sure that they would have a stimulating hour as Mr Crawford was a lecturer who had composed many interesting papers. He added that he was a PhD. The theme of The Novel had been suggested by the committee as suitable for those who were teaching senior classes and they all knew the difficulty some of them had with the prose section of the Higher Certificate. And this reminded him of a little joke. After he had told the joke there was a comfortable decorous laughter. Then after a final eulogy of Mr Crawford as one of the “new minds” he sat down.

  Crawford stood up and began by saying how much he was overawed by the subject he had undertaken to talk about. The novel was indeed an immense field of study, though in fact its genesis was relatively recent. The novel presented many problems to a speaker. One of the problems was that there were different kinds of novels. There was for instance Ulysses and there was Tom Jones. It was arguable that The Canterbury Tales was a novel in verse.

  What then was a novel? He suggested that first of all the novel was a structure (usually fairly long, though not always) which had characters, though not necessarily a paraphrasable plot. It was normally written in prose. Was Finnegan’s Wake a novel? He thought that it was though it was a different novel from, say, the novels of the nineteenth century.

  The novel had arisen at the time of the rise of the middle classes. However, one must be clear about one thing, there were novels in Elizabethan times though in those days the novel was not the dominant form. In Elizabethan times the play and the poem were the dominant forms. Shakespeare had never written a novel, though if he had lived in the nineteenth century it was almost certain that he would have been a novelist. He might in fact have been the Dickens of the novel for there were many resemblances between the two writers. For instance there were characters in Dickens and Shakespeare which blurred the line between comedy and tragedy. He himself for instance believed that there were many resemblances between Scrooge and Shylock. And then of course there was Robinson Crusoe which dealt with the ethics of capitalism. There again was a book which was called a novel though for most of the time the stage was inhabited by only one man. (The entrance of Man Friday introduced the exploited man as one got him in the works of Cooper and later writers. It could be argued that the cannibal scene was an ironic scenario for precisely the “red in tooth and claw” nature of capitalism.)

  Tom’s attention wandered to the window which was beside him and to the scenes which it framed. A drunk who had presumably come out of a house (since hotels and bars were shut at that time of day) was engaged in coiling himself round a lamp-post with a totally serious look on his face while he muttered some words to himself. Now and again he would raise himself up to an upright posture and say something to a passer-by, his slack grey unshaven face assuming momently different expressions, from aggression to empty hopelessness. Further on past the drunk he could see a girl in a stained yellow dress skipping endlessly with a rope, her pigtails dancing up and down her back. Directly in front of him he could see the mutilated name of a shop. It said, “GR H M MEN O TF TTER”. At a corner a red-haired boy was standing selling papers.

  He turned his attention back to the speaker who was saying: “… about the novel is the position of the narrator. This I find the most interesting thing of all. In most novels of course the narrator pretends that he is God. One could argue that the universe itself is a structure or a novel of which God is the ultimate narrator.” Tom noticed a little grey-haired woman taking all this down in a notebook, head bent. “And indeed it might be what science fiction writers are doing. The issue of science fiction raises further questions which it might not be in our interest to pursue. I should however point to an exemplar like Blish, some of whose works you may have read.”

  When Tom looked again the drunk had disappeared. Instead he could see two women talking to each other. One who was fat stood squatly in front of the other one who wore a red hat and was gesticulating freely with her right hand. Her back was to him and he speculated as to whether she was an Italian. As he watched, he heard the sound of music and then there came into his space of observation a Salvation Army band marching along and singing Onward Christian Soldiers. They looked quite military: the man at the front of the column seemed lost in a dream of generalship while the pale bespectacled women also marched with a fine pride and hauteur. Why did the ugliest girls attend poetry readings and join choirs, he wondered?

  Crawford was saying: “… But of course if one is a Marxist and one also reads novels one arrives at the interesting question: will the narrator always give the point of view of the class to wh
ich he belongs? And there are other questions which arise. Will the narrator leave out things which he doesn’t want to put in? Does the narrator play fair? Who is the narrator? What age is he? Where does he come from? Is he himself an artist? What is the relationship between the narrator and the novelist himself? Do they both come from the same class? Is the narrator to be considered as a historian? That is, a historian of fiction. And what is fiction? Is everything fiction really? Wallace Stevens might have said that. From the point of view of an unseen reality is everything fiction? Is not only the narrator fictitious but the novelist himself? Which leads us to ideas of order and disorder. Is the novel an attempt to impose order? How much of what he does is the novelist himself aware of? The questions proliferate. Though the novelist pretends that he is not the narrator how can this be? Who is the narrator of Kafka’s novels, the mysterious K? Indeed are they novels at all? I am talking here of novels told in the first person, of course, but there are also novels which are not told in the first person. Indeed most novels are not told in the first person. In which case is the hero the novelist himself in disguise? One is led here along the endless avenues of Freud. And then one might well ask: Is every structure a novel? Is every story—and remember that the word story is the same word as we get in history—is every story a novel? One has to remember for instance that science is a relatively recent phenomenon and the demand for proof, for objective proof, is also very recent.”

  When he looked out the window again Tom saw a woman trying to back her car out from between two others. Her face showed concentration and panic in varying degrees, her gloves clamped tight on the wheel. He wondered what was going on in her mind. Was she perhaps married and thinking that her husband would laugh at or be angry with her if anything happened to the car? She must of course be aware of the passers-by. Did the pressure of their stare make her feel incompetent? He had the curious feeling of eavesdropping (if that was the word) on a mind nakedly in trouble but he could not draw his eyes away. The face seemed to be looking inward though the eyes were on the road, for at that moment the road was everything, the road was the whole world. It was where she had come to with all the equipment of emotion she had gathered throughout her whole life. She pulled the car round without touching the bumper of the car behind her. Eventually she got out on to the road and he could see her visibly relaxing. She had accomplished something, it would be part of her life.