by Robert Irwin
However, unlike Julian, I did not really believe any of this. It was just a drunken fantasy. I was woozily back on my favourite fantasy trip of being dead and what I was playing around with in my head was a very peculiar sort of crime novel in which the detective-narrator discovers that it is he who is the victim of the crime he is investigating and that he is already dead. I just like to play with such nutty ideas – just as I think from time to time about sliding down the razor-studded banister. I was in no real danger of joining Julian in a folie à deux. Spells from The Book of the Dead and from other ancient Egyptian papyri play a large part in the pathworkings of the Lodge and quite a few of our meditation fantasies involve encounters with the gods of the Afterlife, but they are strictly fantasies. Anubis and Osiris have no objective reality. They are exteriorisations of the internal workings of the sorcerer’s psyche.
All of which is not to say that fantasy-exteriorisations are not frightening. They are. If I allow myself to think of how I bedded down with the carrion body of Tbubi, a queasiness steals over me and I hear again that scream which was also a stench. I find myself paddling a flesh which gives way under the pressure of my hands. Tbubi’s rupturing skin goes livid and her panting for sex has given way to cadaveric spasms. (I imagine that she is what Sally will actually become at the very end of her life and that is the real horror of the thing.) The fact that Tbubi is only a creature of my mind makes things worse, not better. Worse yet, Felton knows exactly how to force such things out of me. Knowing myself to be afraid of Felton’s powers, I was not surprised that Julian was similarly afraid. But what astonished me was that Julian seemed to be even more afraid of me than he was of Felton. This was to manifest itself in a bizarre burst of aggression towards the end of the meal.
After the soup, things quietened down a bit and Julian did not seem to need to ritually curse the courses which followed. He was, however, drinking heavily – which, since I was matching him drink for drink, I was well aware of. For a long time the talk at table was about such things as the opera season at Glyndebourne. (I was right out of it and contentedly fantasising about myself as a dead detective.) But then Granville was stupid enough to mention that The Times’s music critic, William Mann, had compared ‘Sgt. Pepper’ to the symphonies of Beethoven. Then Felton made some sneer about it being impossible to take popular music seriously, particularly stuff produced by a group who could not even spell their own name properly and suddenly, Julian remembered his earlier difficulty in understanding what beatniks and hippies were.
‘Hippies! Hippy! What a silly name! Do they waggle their hips like girls? Yes, perhaps I did mean hippy, though I should be most grateful if you could explain to me the difference between a hippy and a beatnik, and explain to me also what is the good of either, and, while you are at it, explain why you have to go around with girly long hair.’
I came to with a jolt, suddenly aware that Julian was addressing these last remarks not at Granville, but at me. Granville put his hand on my arm. I suppose that he was signalling that I should not reply to this, but Julian pressed on,
‘I take it that the excessive length of your locks is intended as some kind of badge of commitment to the work-shy hippy ideal, whatever that may be?’
I was so very drunk and (as the newly-invented dead detective) in such a benign mood, that I was not immediately aware that Julian was trying to insult me. I actually thought of him as some kind of amateur sociologist who was intending a serious enquiry.
‘As far as I know “hippy” refers to some kind of drop-out who opposes establishment values. I am doing a doctorate in sociology and planning to have an academic career. I live in a fair degree of comfort in Horapollo House and I’m not politically active. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to label me a hippy.’
I was vaguely aware of a bell pealing somewhere in the house.
‘I am pleased to hear it,’ Julian said (though he did not look pleased at all). ‘A hippy is, I think, a kind of white nigger. He has embraced nigger values, their tom-tom and banjo music, and their loose morals. The popular songs, which have emerged from that sort of environment are about copulation – nothing but. Hippies are Britain’s unwanted white-nigger changelings. They are the ungrateful, unwashed, drugged and sponging children of an affluent age – ’
Julian’s drunkenly dyspeptic ravings were interrupted by the reappearance of Mr Dunn, the butler.
‘A message for Mr Keswick,’ he said.
‘Yeah, yeah. Just let me finish this first,’ I replied, for I had now worked out that I was indeed being insulted. ‘It should not take too long to establish the realities of the matter. As for “work-shy hippies”, forgive me, Julian, but you don’t strike me as being a horny-handed son of toil yourself. How much work have you done in your life?’ Without pausing to let him answer, I rushed on. ‘What I should have said to you just now is that, although I am not a hippy, I am ashamed of not being one. The hippy way of life embodies a wholly admirable set of ideals: peace, love, liberty, tolerance, and a readiness not to judge by conformist standards. As for “work-shy”, the sort of work you are thinking about is used by society to drill people into conformity. I think hippies are right to use drugs in their quest for self-discovery, as well as in a more generalised investigation of the ultimate structures of the universe. The best hippies are engaged in an all-consuming quest for enlightenment and ultimate truth.’
I sat back with arms folded. Mr Dunn, the butler, said that there was a phone message for me. Felton tried to stop Julian replying, so that I could leave the room and answer the phone, but, having got a rise out of me, Julian was gleeful,
‘Now at last we are hearing what you really think! And it is such thin, wet stuff! The British hippy preaches peace from behind the protection of the bayonets of the British army. The liberty he espouses is assured, not by his poetic musings, but by the hard work of policemen and courts. His love is funded by the administrators of the dole. Decent, ordinary people instinctively recoil from a hippy. It is not just a matter of the dirt, the drugs, or the half-witted inarticulacy, which are all endemic among people of that ilk. It is that hippies and popular musicians have turned sexual perversion into an ideal of life. There is a sick softness, an effeminacy about these young men with their long hair and their flowery shirts and beads. They are actually advertising their desire to become girls. It is all so shameful! Well, why don’t they go to Morocco and have the operation? Why don’t you?’
‘Do not answer that, Non Omnis Moriar,’ Felton commanded. ‘Go and answer the phone.’
‘OK, I’m going, but I’ll be back.’
I staggered behind Mr Dunn, the butler, trying with no success to imitate his stately roll. He led me to the antique sedan-chair in the hallway, which doubled as a phone kiosk. I picked up the receiver and said ‘Hi!’ to whoever it might be at the other end of the line.
‘It is your mother, Peter,’ Dad said. ‘She really is very ill. You must come – tonight if possible. If not, you should start out tomorrow.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, Dad. It could be difficult. This is a very important conference, I am at.’
‘Forget the conference. Come. I – we need you now. Peter, for Christ’s sake!’
‘OK, OK, but I doubt if it will be until tomorrow. We are a bit remote here.’
‘Very well …. but Peter, I think that she may be dying.’
After quite a bit of random opening of doors, I managed to find my way back to the dining room. They were deep in some argument.
‘I cannot understand why you chose him,’ Julian was saying.
‘We didn’t choose him,’ said Granville.
‘Try to look behind appearances,’ said Felton.
They fell silent and looked to me.
‘To pick up where we left off, Julian, there is an answer to what you just said.’ As I said this, I stood dramatically framed in the doorway and I was trying to remember what that answer was. ‘Oh yeah, you were saying about why don’t I have a sex-cha
nge operation? Well, I am on a student grant, Julian. I cannot afford the trip to Morocco, still less the operation. But please, please give me the money and I will go and have it done. But please don’t think of me as an ungrateful sponger, putting the make on you for that sex-change operation that all we hippies desire. Having had the operation, I’ll come back here and pay off my debt to you by working as a maidservant. It is an offer you can hardly refuse, not when servants are so hard to find these days – and particularly not when you will be able to show your bayonet for me to clean with my tongue and you may exercise droit de seigneur over my body and, after screwing me senseless, you can take me dancing on the village green to the sound of brass bands. Come on Julian, let’s make it happen -’
I paused to see if he had a reply to this, but he just said, ‘I wish I were dead.’ (That was the second time that evening. Maybe, if he says it three times, the Good Fairy will make his wish come true.)
‘What was the phone message, Non Omnis Moriar?’ Felton was impatient, but I thought that he might at least have offered me another drink. I helped myself from the decanter, while I remembered what the message was. It was a bit of a shock. I had thought it was going to be wine, but I think it was actually port.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ I said eventually, ‘but I have just had a message about my mother. She is really very ill and I need to get home as soon as possible.’
I had been expecting some sympathy, however perfunctory, but Felton shrugged.
‘I have to go,’ I persisted. ‘Whatever it is that you want from me, and I’m damned if I know what that is, it cannot be spiritless obedience. I’m going now.’
I helped myself to a final glass, a stirrup-cup.
‘The door is over there,’ said Felton.
I rushed out of the dining room, along the hall and managed to make it to the sweep of gravel in front of the steps before I threw up. There are things called epiphanic moments. Points of glory in an individual’s life which have a mysterious but unmistakably heightened significance. One can even sense, however dimly, the flow of the Tides of Destiny during such unbidden manifestations. This was one of those epiphanic moments. I stood in the peacock-infested grounds, looking up at the stars and then down at my vomit and then up at the stars again. My vomit, little bits of quail and vegetable, was all pinkish from the amount of wine and port I had drunk and it was really beautiful, just like the stars. And I felt cleansed. I was still high from the alcohol, but it was a purer sort of high. If one can go with the roll, vomiting is like sneezing -quite a good experience.
As I staggered about on the lawn, I kept going over the argument about hippies and I kept thinking of extra crushing things I might have said. People like Julian talk as if hippies ran the country and as if everything that happens happens either in Carnaby Street or Kings Road. But the England I live in is not run by long-haired youths operating out of the Arts Lab or a recording studio. It is run from big offices by people who are old or middle-aged. Sixties Britain, like fifties Britain, like forties Britain, is run by company directors, generals, bishops, MPs, bank managers and wardens of colleges, and if anything is going wrong in sixties Britain, it is their fault, not my fault, or the fault of the Beatles. I wish the streets were crowded with young men in colourful, flowery shirts. In fact, England is amazingly dowdy and repressed. One travels a long way to find sitar music or a Dr Strange comic, but Brylcream, Typhoo tea and Woodbines cigarettes are everywhere at hand. It is like living in a continuous drizzle. If there is to be a hippy revolution, let it come soon.
Let what come soon? Let the storm from the East come, and, hurrying ahead of the storm, the raggle-taggle, Bohemian rout of the hippies, marching or dancing beside their wagons to the rhythm of oriental drums. Their banners are decorated with tantric sigils. Their faces are tattooed with boasts of sexual slavery. The hippies have started on their bad trip towards the cities of Christendom. The wheels of their wagons break the limbs of those of their number whom drink and drugs have made insensible to the pains of living, but, though many are lost in such a fashion, this hardly matters, for the legions of hippydom are so numerous and there are always more of them coming up from underground to join the crusade of eternal children. There are boys dressed as girls and girls dressed as boys and many of both sexes who are dressed in nothing at all. This is no ordinary march; it is a perpetual party, which moves through clouds of incense and butterflies. Menacing outriders scavenge the wherewithal for the travelling festivities, while grapes, intoxicants, candles, dildoes, and kisses are passed from laughing person to laughing person down the dancing line of march. Everything is free, including their bodies. The hippies’ faces are flushed and their eyes are glazed, but they are pleasant to look upon, for they are still young. Their uprising is instinctive and beyond all reason, a locust invasion of Western civilization. They are coming in their broad-brimmed hats, Indian scarves and leather boots and, though they are still far away, I already hear cries of ‘An end to Church and King!’ and the jingle of little bells, and, behind that, the throbbing bass notes of the dance of Yama, the Death-God. Let them come, the wild horde from the East and, after them, the dark rains. Bright Lucifer welcomes his people.
This last paragraph is a bit weird. It came oozing out of my biro without me thinking. It certainly is not what I was thinking on the lawn last night. It is a kind of automatic writing, I suppose. I must watch out for this, or I could be taken over by this freaky sort of prose style.
What freaky prose style? The Devil with style! And huzzah for freakshows! There is, it may readily be conceived, a kind of prose whose slow-falling cadences make it serviceable for the investigation of such curiosities as the half-understood funerary practices of pagan English antiquity, as well as for the sombre digressions which may arise from such an inquiry. In the same manner, it is sure that the perverted sports of Tiberius and his ephebes are best related in a language which resorts to the veiled licence to obscenity afforded by ironic periphrasis; the long exhalation of a dying fall will best evoke the slaughter of the victims of imperial lust, as well as the final requitus of the emperor himself. For this is a style whose blend of formality and innuendo panders to depravity, by speaking of vice with grace and circumspection. Its marmoreal sentences have been crafted against criticism. Lovers of fine writing may be seduced by fastidious diction into applauding opiate fantasies of child prostitution in the slums of London, or philosophical investigations into the nature of adultery conducted by cosmopolitan Alexandrian debauchees. Baroque paragraphs of balanced antitheses reverberate with internal echoes, symmetries and parallels. So death is a play upon words and crime a pretext for ornamental disguise. Witty doubles entendres allude to the seduction of the innocent or the desecration of graveyards, while yet simultaneously denying that any matter of weight is being written of. Words fall like snow upon a wasteland empty of moral meaning. Punctuation is like breathing and, in such a passage as this, one can hear the Devil breathing.
There it is again! My hand mocks me by writing about itself. But I now force it, against its will, to scribble the line, ‘If thine right hand offend thee cut it off.’ Having been threatened with the biblical sanction, my hand is under my control again and writing what I want.
No. I did not think about the Wild Horde from the East nor did I hear the Devil’s breath last night. Instead, having dealt with Julian’s rubbish to my own satisfaction, I started to think about what I should do about Dad’s message regarding my dying mother. There was no way I could leave this remote place last night. Apart from anything else, I was too drunk. Tomorrow morning would be Sunday. To undertake the journey from the backwoods of Herefordshire to Cambridge by public transport on a Sunday would be incredibly wearisome, if it was possible at all. Being honest with myself, I had to recognise that I found the idea of sitting beside the sickbed of a querulous old woman deeply unattractive. There were also grounds for suspicion. Dad was angry at me for postponing my weekend visit to them and so he was manufacturing this
health crisis to get back at me. He was trying to claim his emotional pound of flesh. If I gave way on this, his first test would be followed by other tests. My mother was an emotional encumbrance and, on the path of the sorcerer, one cannot afford encumbrances. What I needed more than anything else was to learn to obey my own true will.
Having made all these points to myself, I then realised that they were exactly the sorts of points that Felton would have made to me, but he no longer needed to make them, for it was as if I had my own Felton growing in my brain. My meditation about sickbeds and bus-journeys to Cambridge, not to mention Felton in the brain, had quite ruined my epiphanic moment. It was gone beyond retrieval and so I went back inside.
I found them in the smoking-room. Felton was going over Julian’s diary, just like he does with mine. There was stuff in it about Julian’s recent attempt to escape the surveillance of Mr Dunn, the butler. This was obviously going to be interesting. So I stretched out on a chaise-longue, eager to hear extracts from Julian’s diary read out as some kind of bed-time story. Unfortunately I fell instantly asleep. I have no idea how I eventually ended up in my proper bedroom.
Sunday, June 4
I was awoken by the cry of peacocks on the lawn. It is all very grand and beautiful, but I now realise that Maddiscombe Hall is a kind of mental hospital with just one patient, Julian. There was of course no breakfast until the service to Aiwass had been celebrated. So I lay in bed, writing my diary and brooding about what had been said yesterday. Up to a point, Julian is right about the subject-matter of today’s pop-music, though ‘copulation – nothing but’ is putting it too crudely. But the songs are about love and hardly anything except love. Taken as a whole, the canon of pop songs constitutes a kind of encyclopedia of modern love: loveless loneliness, love at first sight, chatting up, shyness, the first date and the first kiss, all the way through to breaking up, trying to make up and, finally, looking back on lost love across the years. The mnemonic rhymes and rhythms of pop music tell us how to comport ourselves in our mating rituals, what to say and how to feel. The lyrics annotate the movements of our hearts. The hippy revolution is love, plus songs, plus electricity.