The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  At first Mr. Budge had hired an eminent literary personage to edit The Living Arts, and had fired him three months later, for the eminent literary personage was always away at International Conferences, and in any case the cinema audiences had never heard of him, so why spend the money? Then (here the economic process takes in Peter Ash), viewing the rough-cut of the first edition, which was about “the Strangely Modern World of Leonardo da Vinci”, for which Peter Ash had been hired only as what is called a “voice over”, Mr. Budge had said, “Why don’t we see this character? Christ! This is a personality business. Nobody’s going to look at a lot of pictures unless they like the geezer who’s showing them.” Having recorded his voice already, and not wishing to waste the money, they had tried Peter Ash out as host, and all had grown from that. Now he was a public personage with public responsibilities, and had fan-mail to prove it. There was a widow in Kettering who wrote once a week, and had promised to remember him in her will.

  So you can see that Peter Ash and Norah Palmer took their morning sight-seeing as seriously as their afternoon sunbathing. They were not stuffy about it; they were, after all, on holiday. They did not, as has been indicated, devour the artistic experience of Venice as unsophisticated tourists did. They exposed themselves to it. And, though they were discriminating, and did not try to see everything, they were also catholic. They exposed themselves to the Venetian masters, and they also exposed themselves to Miss Guggenheim’s collection of modern paintings, so as to keep a perspective. They would have exposed themselves to the Biennale as well if it had been the year for the Biennale. Peter Ash thought that next year The Living Arts might do something about the Biennale, juxtaposing modern paintings and those of the old masters ingeniously in a timeless Venetian setting of crumbling stone and canals. And Norah Palmer agreed that it might be amusing to do so.

  For her part, Norah Palmer stated (and she did not intend it as an attack on the Venetian masters), she found that she was developing a crick in the neck. Given the height of the walls of most museums and churches, given the old masters ‘boring habit of painting murals on the ceiling, she did not see how it could be avoided, but it was an inconvenience, and dulled appreciation. Now that their holiday had worn on and was almost over (with Peter Ash keeping his decision secret and close to himself), now that Norah Palmer had seen enough to be able to judge, she did not hesitate to say that the Venetian masterpieces were badly lit. Some were hardly lit at all, and hung in gloom, while others only caught the light to reflect it in dazzle. One had to be practical; these things made a difference. Obscurity was made more obscure by the Venetians’ failure to clean their pictures; they should all be restored; it was reactionary not to. Norah Palmer had seen what a difference cleaning had made to pictures in the National Gallery. The colours came right up. One saw how—how essentially cheerful the old masters had been, how richly they had enjoyed the use of colour. Even the old masters had been young once, Norah Palmer said.

  Norah Palmer responded easily and certainly to pictures. Response was more difficult for Peter Ash; it worried him. In spite of his great responsibility as the host of The Living Arts (perhaps because of it), he was timid in aesthetic judgment. Perhaps if he had been to a university, it might have been easier for him; he had always been a great reader, but that was not the same. He listened to Norah Palmer, and envied the easy superficiality of her judgments. She took these things for granted, he thought, because she had been to Cambridge, and just—just connecting with pictures was not a problem for her; she accepted them like breathing. He did not talk to her of his difficulty in connecting. Even after nine years—more than ever after nine years—he could not do that. More and more as time sets a relationship into habit, there are secret places, little areas of personal privacy, that one guards against discovery. If in the ordinary course of their life together, Norah Palmer were to blunder into one of these places (and it had sometimes happened), Peter Ash would feel relieved. Opened up, the place might not seem secret and shameful at all. Until that happened, he kept silent. He was afraid of mockery. His trouble was, you see, that he felt nothing.

  At the Scuola san Rocca, he sat before Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion”, and he felt nothing. “Before it,” he had read in James Morris’s Venice, “to this day you may still see strong men reduced to tears.” Peter Ash sat there in front of it, blinked, cleared his throat, but could feel neither tears nor even a lump. He glanced quickly around him, uneasy in case he should be caught looking anywhere but at the picture. There were no strong men in sight. He looked back at the “Crucifixion”. Monsieur Gabriel Faure, whose bountifully illustrated guide-book Peter Ash and Norah Palmer had brought with them (they consulted it before picking their sight for the morning), says, “Never before have so many figures been so vigorously presented against a background so stark and livid that it appears to have become part of the sublime horror enacted in that sacred tragedy.” Well, they had brought Monsieur Faure’s book for its pictures, not its style; Mr. Morris was for style. Still … sublime … vigorously presented…. There were a great many figures, certainly. The picture seemed to Peter Ash overcrowded and messy, if one were to go in for judgments. And dark. Norah was right. It was dark.

  Perhaps he was looking at the “Crucifixion” in a wrong way. Pictures, he remembered, were not intended to tell a story; they were exercises in composition. He should be trying to work out the relation of the masses. Balance. And yet … should one consider religious painting in terms of the relation of the masses? Mr. Faure didn’t. Mr. Morris didn’t. That was not the point of religious painting—the relation of the masses. The point of religious painting was to communicate religious feeling. If Peter Ash did not feel it, the fault was in him, and not in Tintoretto. Peter Ash had a responsibility to the cinema audience to be moved by Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion”. How hard the seat was!

  Perhaps (Peter Ash grew a little more cheerful at the thought), since he himself was not religious, he was not equipped to respond to a masterpiece of religious art. But the thought died at once. To respond to art, Peter Ash had been told, is voluntarily to enter the artist’s world; Peter Ash must be religious for the length of time he sat in front of the picture; it was a duty which, as a conscientious humanist, he owed to Tintoretto. Besides, Son of God or not, there was human suffering involved in a crucifixion, and Peter Ash ought to be able to respond to that; long ago at Worthing he had once wept continually almost all the way through a Joan Crawford movie, when strong men all about him had sat dry-eyed. Suffering! he thought, Crucifixion! He concentrated his mind on the idea, but it was no good. Behind the suffering, behind the sorrowing, a social question had begun to irk him. How long ought he to sit there? If he could not feel the right thing, then at least he could do the right thing. How long was it right to sit before what was agreed to be one of the world’s greatest masterpieces of religious art? To the humanist, art can be a sort of religion, Norah Palmer had once told him (echoing Matthew Arnold, though Peter Ash did not know it), because what distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom is his capacity to make and to respond to art, which is part of his more general capacity to frame ideas. In that case, to sit before the Tintoretto was like the period of silent prayer at the end of an Anglican church service, which one has attended to oblige one’s family. One had to sit there quietly, leaning forward, hand over eyes, until other people began to shuffle and go. Nothing happened inside, but one could at least be reverent. The ass in Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” is said to be eating a branch of palm, ironically left over from Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Peter Ash could not see this detail from where he sat—the picture was too dark—but perhaps time would pass more quickly if he were to occupy himself in looking for it. Reverently. “Surely, my dear,” said Norah Palmer at his shoulder, “you’re not going to sit here all day?” She had spoken rather more loudly than was decent, and her shoes clacked on the stone floor.

  Peter Ash said, “No. Just coming.” What had been intend
ed to be a low voice was caught up with a frog in his throat, and emerged as a croak. He followed Norah Palmer, click-clack through the gallery, click-clack down the wide stone staircase, and out into the sunlight. They had seen their sight for the day.

  *

  Peter Ash kept his decision close, and said nothing. There was no temptation to do so. They did not quarrel again during that holiday.

  But would he do what he had resolved? Each of them had thought about such a thing before. In nine years, no matter at how low a pitch an affair may be conducted, such thoughts are bound to occur. Peter Ash and Norah Palmer had undergone periods of not speaking to each other. Norah Palmer had spent nights sleeping apart from Peter Ash. There had been a terrible two months during the third year when, although they were sleeping together (and did so still, except when holiday hotels pushed them into separate rooms), Peter Ash had ceased altogether to wish to “have sex” with Norah Palmer, and there had been tears, and resentful silences, and certainly then they had both felt guilt, a guilt neither acknowledged nor understood, until at last they had talked it all out in a sensible way, and had come to the conclusion that sex—though one must never underestimate its importance, particularly at the start of a relationship—had become irrelevant to the something deeper that was shared by Peter Ash and Norah Palmer.

  I write “have sex”, clumsy as the phrase is, and not the more usual euphemism, “make love”, because they did continue to make love, in their own way, and valued that way. They had their own habitual tendernesses. A kind of ritual had developed in the way that Norah Palmer came to call Peter Ash when dinner was ready, leading him by the hand to the table in the kitchen where they ate, and in the way that Peter Ash would ease Norah Palmer into wakefulness every morning when he brought her tea in bed, by kissing first her eyelids and then her nose. There were many loving ways they shared—ways with slippers, and ways with cake, and ways of listening to music. They used the word “darling” to each other without self-consciousness when at home. They shared jokes and had a store of private words and references kept for domestic use. They would reach over, and touch each other in bed. On cold nights, Peter Ash would often wake to find his arm round Norah Palmer, and Norah Palmer would comfort and soothe Peter Ash when, as sometimes happened, he dreamed of snakes. All these and many other intimacies formed by habit, might reasonably be thought to be part of “making love”. If you had impertinently asked Peter Ash and Norah Palmer whether they were still in love after all this time, they would have explained that they loved each other, and that this, and not being “in love”, was what mattered most in making a home.

  Why then should this quarrel be more serious than any of their others. Desire had cooled, and jelled into affection. Illusion had become acceptance. Why should they not go on for ever? Oh, Peter Ash had made a decision, but decisions are made to be unmade. Why should he keep it this time?

  There are two answers. One lies in the fact that, just as matter is indestructible, so is experience. Nothing that happens is forgotten. The human mind is like an indifferent secretary, who files by some obscure process of association. One letter from Messrs. Warrington’s about haulage is filed under “Warrington”, a second under “Haulage”, a third in one of a series of bulging and untidy envelopes, all marked “Misc”. By the time a sixth arrives, a new system has divided “Haulage” into “Contractors” and “Transport, Road”. No letter can ever be found when it is needed, but no letter is lost. The letters are there, somewhere in the filing system, waiting for discovery. Long after all negotiations with Messrs. Warrington’s are over, a cache of Warringtons’ letters marked “Special Projects” will turn up at the back of a neglected cabinet. So between Peter Ash and Norah Palmer all the frets, the slights, the disappointments, the resentments, the moments of envy that the sensible person puts away at the back of his mind, talks over, and forgets, were nevertheless there, in the system, scattered over a number of dead files, but accumulating from year to year.

  The second reason why Peter Ash held secretly to his decision is more dramatic. His point of view had been changed. He had been shocked sideways. What he now saw of their life together had not changed in itself, but his position had changed, so all was changed. In just the same way, the cloud that was backed like a camel might indeed have been backed like a weasel, a moment later and Polonius been neither fool nor flatterer, if he and Hamlet had been on the move when they observed it. What Peter Ash had seen before as a refuge, he now saw as a prison. Of course, if Norah Palmer had taken back her words, if she had told Peter Ash that she did respect his talent, that she had never doubted it, that she had deliberately told a lie out of pique to wound him, why then Peter Ash would have returned to his former position and seen things as he had done before, revoking his decision almost as soon as he had made it, just as, if Saul had experienced a second fit on the road to Tarsus, women might now be able to go bare-headed into church. But Norah Palmer, pleasant and loving as she often was, intelligent as she almost always was, had faults, and one of them was that she could not bear to be wrong. She never took back her words. She preferred to behave as if they had not happened. For a moment, in irritation, she had told Peter Ash a truth. She had said that she did not respect him in anything he did. She had not meant to say it. It had slipped out. She would not repeat it, and he would forget.

  But Peter Ash had not forgotten. One does not demand respect for oneself, not nowadays, when one knows so much about the self. That would be ridiculous. If one gets respect from some part of oneself, it is enough. One does not respect Mozart or Beethoven as men. One accepts them as men like oneself, and one respects them as artists. Boring bumptious Wagner, prissy Henry James, silly Yeats—as men they grew old and ugly and died, felt lust and farted and told lies, enjoyed hurting or being hurt or both; they were inconsiderate, conceited, prejudiced, uncertain, frightened. Peter Ash did not respect himself as a man at all. I am myself indifferent honest, but jet I could accuse me of such crimes that it were better my mother had not born me…. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth? No, it would be too difficult—impossible—to be the sort of man one could respect. If he could find respect as an artist, that would be enough for Peter Ash.

  Even that was not something he could give to himself. Some artists could. They were more sure than Peter Ash; they were sustained by their sureness. In the course of his job, Peter Ash had met many writers, painters, composers, actors, who seemed to him to have no doubts about their own talents. Some of them cared that people (the public) should know what they were about; others didn’t even care for that. None of them had any doubt that what he was about was important, and that, even though he might not do his thing as well as he wished, at least nobody else could do it better. But the years at Colchester, Worthing, Hornchurch, the announcing, the jokey references to “the old groaner himself” and “a great new British recording star” had worn away at the carapace of Peter Ash’s confidence. He was afraid, very much afraid, that there was only mush inside, and one day it might start leaking.

  Worst of all was the need, in each successive edition, each “package” of The Living Arts, to pretend that he was “moved” by such and such a piece of music, a picture or a book. He had only his own experience to guide him. Perhaps it was necessary for an interpretative artist to pretend in order that other people might truly feel; perhaps he did deserve the respect he so much needed. Perhaps…. Perhaps not. The public might respect him, but that was worthless, because they were deceived. They did not know. But Norah Palmer knew; she could not be deceived. He needed respect from Norah Palmer, and when she denied him this, when she said, “I don’t respect you in anything you do,” not even, as far as he could tell, realizing how important it was to him, letting the remark slip out as a matter of course, then Peter Ash had a change of view as sudden as any epileptic fit on the road to Tarsus, and he saw the construction they had built together over nine years as no more than the linked bars of a cage that kept him
from any hope of light and warmth. And it was cold in the cage. He shared the cage with a monster who froze him, by shutting off the warmth of the respect he needed to keep alive. Then indeed, all the letters that had been deliberately buried in that inadequate filing system sorted themselves out and arranged themselves in Peter Ash’s In-Tray. The only way he could deal with them was by writing “Case Closed”. The accumulation could not be allowed to continue.

  On the penultimate night of their holiday, Peter Ash had an adventure.

  Norah Palmer was not with him. She had been driven to the open-air opera in Verona by two Americans, Bob and Lucille Hansen.

  Norah Palmer was enchanted with Bob and Lucille Hansen. They were just the sort of people, easy to pick up, easy to put down again, whom one needed on holiday to take one out of oneself, and add a dimension to Peter Ash and Norah Palmer; if Norah Palmer had been going on a honeymoon, she’d have wanted Bob and Lucille along. Bob and Lucille had only been married five years, so they hadn’t been together as long as Peter Ash and Norah Palmer. They had met at the University of Minnesota, where Bob had been studying Law, and Lucille had taken her Bachelor of Arts in Home-Making and Home-Breaking, or whatever title the state universities of the U.S.A. give to what, in English Secondary Modern Schools, is called Domestic Science. Now Bob was a corporation lawyer, working in a big office on Wall Street, and Lucille had put her degree in Home-Making to practical use as his wife. They had two children (left in the care of Bob’s mother for the duration of their holiday), and intended to have two more, since this was the age of the four-child family. They were intelligent, and self-critical, and friendly. They had spent a week in London, and had taken in a good play on six of the nights of that week. (“My dear, where did you find them?” Norah Palmer asked, but in fact there usually are six plays worth seeing in London at any one time, and Bob and Lucille had found all six.) After London, Paris. After Paris, Venice. Then back to corporation law and the children. The holiday was costing them a little more than they could afford, but would probably pay off statuswise (said with a grin), and anyway they owed it to themselves. So far it had been full of interesting people. If Bob and Lucille thought people looked interesting—or if they were sharing a table with people whose conversation sounded interesting—why they just made themselves known to those people, and the people surely seemed to appreciate it. No wonder Peter Ash and Norah Palmer were enchanted.