by C. J. Driver
*
As I was going downstairs I heard Tella’s hired car drive off, and for a moment I thought it must be John going off; but when I reached the sitting-room, I found it was Tella who had gone.
“Where’s Tella?” I asked.
“Gone,” John jerked his head in the direction of the front door.
“We had a row.”
“Does that explain your foul mood?” I asked sweetly.
“No.” He did not look up. “We rowed because she said I was behaving badly, and I told her to fuck off.”
“You told me that too.”
“Did I?” Suddenly he stood up, though he still did not look at me. “If I lived in a place like this, I think I’d go clean mad. Anyway, Tella said to say sorry to you and Alison, but she wasn’t going to put up with me any longer. Maybe I should have gone myself; I’m not being much of a guest.” I suppose it must have been Tella’s decisive action which had shocked him back into some kind of reason again; whatever it was, I was glad to hear him back as a person I liked. Together we went into the kitchen where I made some coffee, which this time he drank, and then we went back into the sitting-room.
“Bob Henderson said I was to get you to tell me about town-planning.”
“It’s not very interesting.”
“Bore me with it, then.”
“Do you know anything about building?”
“A bit,” I answered. “My father was a foreman in a building firm.”
“Your father? Fallen middle-class?”
“No, raised working-class.”
“Petit bourgeois?”
“Working-class,” I insisted. I wasn’t particularly proud of it—he hadn’t been much of a father, even after my mother died—but I was not going to let John classify me too easily.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true.”
“Show me the scars then,” laughed John.
I held up my hands. “Grammar-school white,” I said.
“Where’s your accent?” he asked; he tried to get the sound into his own voice.
“Midlands; you’ve got it wrong.”
“Where is it?”
“Dead and buried; there aren’t any working-class barristers.”
“Ex-petit bourgeois.”
“Ex-proletarian.”
Eventually he believed me. The information seemed to have cheered him up a great deal, somehow, so I asked him about his own family. “No,” said John. “No, I’m not going to tell you about them. But I’ll tell you about town-planning if you like. Or about why I got interested in it.”
“I would like.”
“Do you know Johnson’s College? Where I was?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Ghastly place, isn’t it?”
“It’s not beautiful.”
“Christ, don’t I know? International anonymous of the worst kind. Well, you know I was doing English there—doing, not reading. The full rigmarole: Early English, Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, the lot. In a way I enjoyed even that, but I loathed Johnson’s; at first I thought it must be the people, but it wasn’t because I quite liked most of them. No, it was the place itself, the physical thing.
“So I started to think about architecture, and to read about it, and about the way people lived, and so began to read about sociology—you know the way we are taught here; sociology is something different from literature and you don’t have to worry about it. But it was that place. Did you say you know it?” I nodded, but it wasn’t important; he was rehearsing some scheme of his own, and his voice was beginning to take on the strange hesitations and pauses of his public speech.
“It’s all concrete sculpture—full of long passages that act as wind-tunnels in winter and doors that break off their hinges in six weeks; it hasn’t even got the advantage of Stalinist buildings, which at least don’t crack up. There are uncomfortable seats all over the place, all of them at strange angles, so you can’t either read in them or sleep; and a cafeteria that serves sawdust and chips. When we had our first big sit-in, the place just fell apart—the doors came off, the plaster fell off the walls; it just wasn’t made to be lived in …”
“Is that why you were sent down?”
“No, that was the next year, when we really got going; and they didn’t call it being sent down, they called it ‘expulsion’—one of the few times I heard the College call anything by its proper name.”
“So you didn’t get a degree?”
“Oh, no, they couldn’t do that; my teachers kicked up a bit of a fuss, not much, but enough, and the admin, people let me come back to take the exams. But when I tried to come back the next year, they wouldn’t let me—I had thought I’d do some post-grad research, but I was a bit fed-up with books anyway; so I got hold of some money and went off to Berkeley to take an M.A. in town-planning.”
“Why that?”
“Oh, I thought it was important; I thought it mattered to the way people live nowadays.”
“And instead you learned politics?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he answered. “I had politics when I was fifteen—no, I just learned a bit more about how you use politics; and I went to Mexico, and stayed on an ejido, and that taught me something too.”
“What’s that you said? That place you stayed?”
“An ejido; a sort of village-commune; this place was a failure, really, because the government isn’t really prepared to support them properly, and the capitalists have bought up a lot of land, and the peasants have gone back to being serfs. But I learned a lot there.”
“Why don’t you set up a farming commune here?” Henderson’s remark was still in my mind.
“Because it’s towns that matter now; rural communes are all right in places like Mexico, where most people still live off the land, but in industrialised places we’ve got to start with the towns.”
“Then why aren’t you working as a town-planner?”
“In a way I am; I’m doing a doctorate—I’m a fully fledged Ph.D. student at the Institute of Town-Planning and Urban Research in Holborn—paid by the State to study, mind you. A potentially useful member of society, after all.”
“Do you do any work?”
“Oh, Christ, what’s town-planning? You can’t make towns now, not for people to live in—you’ve got to make towns for people to make money in. And I’m fucked if I’m going to help with that.”
“Don’t you ever want to build a real town, for people to live in, live in properly I mean?”
Perhaps it was the yearning in my voice which made him see what I wanted, for he was suddenly serious and looking at me. “Yes,” he said, “yes, sometimes I do. I call it my City. Do you know about the City, Tom?”
I nodded. There was no need to tell him.
“Yes,” he said, still looking at me, “yes, you do, don’t you? If you didn’t you’d think I meant London. That’s what most people think. All right then, I’ll tell you.” He jumped up from his chair, all vitality again instead of the lethargy which had damaged him that afternoon and evening. “Where’s a pen and paper?”
“There, on Alison’s desk,” I pointed across the room.
“Look,” he said, sitting down next to me and sketching rapidly on a piece of writing paper he had taken. “Look. Here’s the town.
“You’ve got hills here and here,” the pen curved and twisted a line of hills, “and you’ve got to make towns to fit the landscape; you don’t use bulldozers in my kind of planning, and so you build your town in four segments, like this.” Two arms of the star blocked into the valleys of the hills. “Now, in the other empty places where there aren’t hills, you’ve got farming land, vegetable gardens, and just open spaces. Working land as well as space.” The pen danced briefly in the circle at the centre of the star. “And here in the middle you’ve got the central things: a library, a theatre, a gallery, schools—if you want schools, though I don’t think they’ll be like our schools now—a games centre, a swimming bath, shops—though you won’t have sh
ops like now, because you won’t buy anything, you’ll just take what you want, and you’ll not have to choose, because everything will be good, and you won’t want clothes shops either …”
“Because you’ll all be Free People in your white tunics…?”
“Not necessarily like now, but maybe like the Chinese: simple pleasant things, the same for everyone. And you won’t have roads, because people will walk; and there won’t be many goods to transport, only the things people need.”
“Do you really think people will walk?”
“More than now, anyway. But there’ll be a continuous underground too, from the centre here around the edges and back to the centre—going both ways, of course.”
“Won’t it be too big?”
“No, because you won’t live like now. You’ll share a lot more; you won’t have private gardens and things like that, because you’ll have the country all round you, and the people who want to garden will help look after the communal flowers and trees. And people will work in the fields too, like in Cuba, at harvest-time and so on. But you’d still have people living together, married if they want to be, and perhaps even with children if they want them—though I think the family will die out if no one owns anything …”
“And no one will ever be able to leave your Utopia?”
“No, they can go where they want; you’ll have a heliport on the edge of town, and perhaps communal cars somewhere on the edge of the town. But people won’t be restless like they are now; they won’t want to move every year or so, to get a new job with more money.”
“But where are your factories? Aren’t you going to have any either?”
“No, you’ll have to have some—not many, because you won’t want to use things up so fast, and you won’t need money—but you’ll put them out on the edges of the segments, in the hills perhaps,” and his pen sketched in a few low buildings down below the skyline of the stony hills.
“And what would you build out of?”
“Oh, if you could, stone—proper stone like they used to do.” I nodded it was stone all right—I knew that already.
“Not concrete?” Irony crept into my mind like the original serpent.
“Not if you could help it. What I’d really like to do would be to dig a bloody great hole here”—the pen gouged and levelled—“and then fill it up with water, so you’d have a lake, where people could swim in summer and fish and sail boats. Oh, things like that.”
“Convenient place,” I said; irony spoke fiercely in the name of intelligence.
“Yes,” said John, and before I could stop him, he crumpled up the paper on which he had drawn the stone City with its lake and temples. “Yes. Pipe-dreams. But we could live better than we do now—we could if we really wanted to.”
“Is that really what you’re doing?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Lawyer.” He was ironic as I had been. “Yes, that’s the clue to my character. A daydream about a perfect City in the hills.” He stood up suddenly. “I’m tired; is there somewhere for me to sleep?”
At the door of the spare room I stopped him. “John, tell me something. Did you dream that City? I mean really dream it.”
“I never dream,” he smiled. “Never, whatever Bob says. I just worked it out. It’s so obvious, really. Why?”
“No reason; I just thought you might have dreamt it.”
Yet there was no dream of any city that night. There was nothing but a dark void, where monuments in the shapes of monsters came alive and stalked me through the undergrowth.
*
John lasted until nearly eleven next morning before he said he would be getting back to London, if we didn’t mind. “I’ll have to go to make my peace with Tella, anyway,” he said. “And I haven’t been the ideal guest.” He had been much better that morning, playing with the children, talking to Alison, sitting outside in the sun drinking coffee, talking to me about the Freedom Congress he and his comrades had dreamed up to spread the good news to the young; but who could tell if he meant it, any more than I could tell then whether he had made up his City on the spur of the moment to fulfil some desire he detected in me? I never understood for certain with John if he was playing some elaborate joke, or whether he was being serious. Perhaps it was both; perhaps the City was a version of some Utopian book he had read, or perhaps it was to please me that he had made his plans. Or perhaps it was, as he said, the clue to his character.
*
God knows that in making John Buckleson’s City the same as my own I may falsify not one, but both. Perhaps because I am what I am—an émigré of the spirit, a sentimentalist prone to despair—I am bound to falsify.
Though that is the hardest thing of all, to realise imagination may fail. You see, an inability to believe in God may not be a strength of logical and legal intelligence after all, but a failure of imagination. In the same way as I say I know there is no God, or God is dead, so I know there will be no Millennium, that what we can hope for is at best a moderately reasonable, moderately equitable, moderately democratic state existing in a world of states moderately at peace; there will be no Utopia, there has been no Golden Age. Yet I have more faith in the possibility of a Millennium than I have in God. It is no use claiming that every attempt to create a Utopia has failed; it is no use weeping at what has happened to John Buckleson’s Millennium. What you are facing, what you are contesting (if it is that you do), is a man’s imagination of the good. So you won’t see John Buckleson if you won’t imagine his imagination; you won’t even understand what drove at least some of the Free People to do what they did. It is no use flaunting your high intelligence, your ruthless logic, your political acumen, because the Free People thought they knew what intelligence and logic and the old kind of politics had done to their world; the very fact their opponents cried out that the Free People were not thinking clearly was not to them criticism but praise; they loathed thought itself. What they wanted was a vision, and John gave them that vision. So what if it was a vision created by rhetoric, not a vision men could live in? We are all short on visions these days.
8
I was in the cells below a court, and they became the room of a strange mansion, one side of which opened on to a cliff, and below which was sitting a huge audience. There was some kind of party going on in the mansion, and some of the guests were playing a complex game. Leading off the great room where the guests were gathered was a long passage, from which in turn branched off four subpassages which led to four rooms, the fourth side of each of which was the open air of the cliff face. We had to get down the steep subpassages, into the three-sided rooms—which were not only dangerous but open to the view of the audience—and there we had to change the covers on a thin mattress which covered the floors of each of the rooms completely, from wall to wall, and door to the dangerous open-side of the room. In other words, each of us had to change the cover while we were actually standing on the mattress; it was not a matter of skill, we knew that. There was a trick.
There were about a half-dozen of us who were to play the game, a bishop, a headmaster, a literary critic, a judge, the hostess and myself. I was the youngest and the least-known, so I started last.
All the others seemed to go very easily; there were shouts of excitement as they went down the steep passages to the dangerous rooms and discovered the clues. I could not even attempt the steep stony passages; what if I was forced to run down them and could not stop before I reached the edge of the cliff? At last, when several of the other guests had stared at me and commented on my lack of courage, I managed the passages; they were of course easy once you took the precaution of holding on to the wall. And so the first of the rooms. As far as I could tell, the secret was to go right to the edge of the cliff, since there were buttons on the cover of the floor-mattress there, then pick up the edge of the mattress so that the stone floor was visible, step over the mattress as you held the edge up, and get the cover off. But I could not bring myself to go near the edge of the monstrous cliff, even though the
audience was there and was shouting both encouragement and abuse at me. I cowered in the middle of the room, not daring to move, until I realised everyone else must have finished, and I crept back up the steep passage, then the long one, to the banqueting room. How kind the hostess was to me when I arrived back! She gave me drink and food, she comforted me, she tried not to let me see the sneering of the other guests. The other competitors stood round in a small group, receiving the laughing congratulations of the guests.
“I had no trouble with it at all,” said the bishop, a small sun-dried man.
“It’s simple if you have any skill with crosswords,” said the headmaster in a headmasterly voice.
“I didn’t manage myself,” said the literary critic; “to tell the truth who cares? I don’t like steak myself.” Why did he say ‘steak’? Was it a clue? Was it the prize? But I admired the critic immensely for his ability to have failed and to feel no shame; and I was profoundly jealous that, although he had failed, the other competitors seemed still to regard him with an easy comradeship they did not show to me, even though I had failed too. Was it because I cared about failing? I don’t know.
Still, I thought if I stayed near the group I might discover the clue I had missed, for the other competitors made it clear they had been too clever to go near the edge of the cliff. Finally I got the clue. It was ‘spilt milk’ which, for some reason which seemed logical at the time, stood for ‘sharp mark’. Pick up the sharp mark in the centre of the mattress cover, and there would be easy instructions underneath of how to change the cover without going near the edge of the cliff.
Suddenly all the rooms became easy; the passages no longer held any terrors, the sharp mark was clear when you knew it was there, the instructions were obvious, there was no need to go near the edge of the room and the cliff-face, and within seconds I raced back to the banqueting room to claim loudly, “Well, maybe I’m last, but that was by far the fastest time.” Everyone ignored me, though I marched round the room proclaiming at the top of my voice that I had been successful in the end, though I had cheated, though I was last, though the audience and the guests had gone home.
