Imaginary Toys

by Julian Mitchell

  ‘Don’t let her bully you,’ said Nicholas. ‘But my advice for all examinees is to stay well clear of books for the whole week preceding the examination. Two hours a day on your notes is quite enough.’

  ‘My God,’ I said, ‘and you used to lock the door of the room so no one could disturb you. Nicholas,’ I said to Jack, ‘is one of those swine who pretend to do nothing, but in fact pack twenty-five hours into every day.’

  ‘And we all know what he does with the twenty-fifth,’ said Elaine. ‘But you, Charles, are the sort of swine who pretends to do nothing and actually succeeds. I think that’s much worse.’

  They all laughed, even Jack. Then he said: ‘Aren’t you coming, Elaine?’

  ‘Oh, go away, Jack, be a dear. If you’re very good I’ll have lunch with you at the Turf. One o’clock. Now go.’

  Jack looked as though he hated Nicholas and me very much indeed. Nicholas got up and said: ‘I must be getting back myself.’

  ‘Look at them,’ said Elaine. ‘Goody-goodies. Run away and read. You can tell me all about it later.’ She turned and gave me a smile. ‘Charles and I have a lot to talk about.’

  They went off, Jack looking as though someone had just put his finger back in the door and slammed it again, and Nicholas looking, with his black hair and black-rimmed spectacles, like a civil servant of not quite the highest rank.

  ‘What’s that book?’ said Elaine.

  ‘Oh, just something that caught my eye.’

  She looked at the title and the plaudits of the critics and said: ‘Really, Charles. It’s time you grew up.’

  ‘I didn’t buy it to read. I bought it to show off.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. We both laughed.

  ‘You are an awful man,’ she said. ‘Go and get me some more coffee.’

  When I came back I said: ‘What’s the trouble, Elaine?’

  ‘Oh, just the usual. Jack can be impossible when he really puts his mind to it.’

  ‘I’ve been telling you that for ages.’

  ‘We’ll get over it, though. It’s a very ordinary conflict, sex versus religion. The love of God and the love of man. How’s Margaret?’

  ‘She threw a rose out of my car.’

  ‘How romantic. Did you get out and throw it back in?’

  ‘No. I was taking her to Schools.’

  ‘Just nerves, then,’ said Elaine, trying to be cheerful. ‘Jack is impossible. Father Gibbons won’t let us sleep together, and says he won’t give us any more warnings. He’s even threatened to tell our parents. I’m sure Jack’s would be delighted, but mine would throw up their hands in lily-white disgust.’

  ‘But you both go to church, don’t you? What’s the problem?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Elaine, ‘so let’s not talk about it.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and said: ‘Let’s go, I hate this place. I can’t think why I come here.’

  It was a lovely day, getting hotter and hotter, and with that curious smell of exhaust-fumes which you only get in towns when the weather has been dry for some time, and is going to stay dry.

  ‘What a marvellous day to go punting,’ said Elaine.

  ‘Let’s!’

  ‘I said I’d meet Jack for lunch.’

  ‘I’m supposed to meet Margaret at twelve-thirty.’

  ‘There isn’t really time.’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘Oh, damn them both,’ said Elaine. ‘One must have a little peace sometimes.’

  ‘What about your Schools next week?’

  ‘I couldn’t work even if I wanted to just now. I need an afternoon off.’

  So we had one. Very irresponsible, very nice, I thought, and what on earth would Nicholas say?

  ‘Oh, I have to get some dark glasses.’

  ‘How nice. Let’s buy some for both of us.’

  2

  The Notebook of Nicholas Sharpe

  Telegram this afternoon from Phi. SUDDEN DISASTER HAVE TO INSPECT BERLIN MUST FLY SORRY LOVE PHI. I am relieved he has decided not to come. And his lies are always entertaining. I am bored with his friends, the smart, not very bright, semi-international set. Some are too clever for that wasteful life, some not clever enough. It is not an actively harmful life, and it is probably ineradicable. The damage it does is to itself. First, by being conspicuously rich and irresponsible it is constantly open to ridicule. Second, its network of gossip makes all its members acutely unhappy. Where no one is safe from malice, everyone is malicious and unhappy. There are too few young people to make it entertaining for me, too, though one doubts sometimes whether they will ever grow up. What becomes of them? Do they end up like failed Bohemians, swilling drinks in sordid afternoon-drinking clubs, hanging about with the will to act utterly lost? Or do they eventually settle down with someone? Perhaps they all hate the life, their mutual dislike of it being the one thing that keeps them and it together. Perhaps they are all preparing places of retirement, estates in Tuscany and Gloucestershire and Velay. I don’t really care. The high level of bitchiness fatigues me. I can’t do it myself, and after a while I find it boring. But Phi enjoys it, I think. He is in it and outside it at the same time. I think he prefers to have it without me, rather than me without it. I wish I knew. I am now in a state of mental paralysis, wondering whether I mind or not. In a way I wish I did mind, then I could feel more certain of criticizing Phi. But I like him still. And I think that if I had really loved him I wouldn’t feel so distant about it all. I don’t think I could ever have lived with him, though. Converting Phi to seriousness would have been a lifetime’s work, and probably unsuccessful. There are more important things to be done. Not that I would think of doing them if I really loved him. He dazzled. I enjoyed being dazzled. It was fun for a radical to travel on steam-yachts for a bit. But I am old enough to realize when he is bored. If I cared…. But I am in this strange state of suspension. I await the future with an equable conscience. The telegram did not even give me a start of expectation. Phi is such a tactful man. Perhaps I trust him too much.

  Delta says nothing, but smiles and asks me for help. So I glance through periodicals devoted to the Romance Languages. I suppose someone could write a witty ironic poem about it, but not me. Delta has black hair and freckles, and I like him much too much. I have always had a weakness for freckles, I think. He looks at me thoughtfully, but is much too young. I am obliged to have certain principles, not because of the law, but because I cannot ever allow myself to be responsible for someone else’s outlawry. Once one has accepted one’s official ostracism one can forget about it. But one must never bring someone forcibly over the border. It took me six years of agonized debate and long-suffering virginity before I accepted it. I don’t pretend I don’t wish I’d decided sooner. But I cannot even want to help anyone else to the same decision, however much I may love him. It must be something one discovers for oneself. So—Delta. I’m afraid I may fall in love with him, if anything definite happens to get me out of this state of suspense. But even if I do, any seduction will have to come from his side. I don’t know why I think any such thing is even likely. Rebound from Phi, perhaps? Or perhaps my constant wish to make myself clear to myself pushes me into imaginary situations simply for the sake of argument?

  But once one has imagined, one is no longer quite in control of reality.

  *

  At lunch today, next table, a middle-aged American couple.

  She: My vision is twenty-twenty and don’t you forget it.

  He: Yeah, and you can see sideways.

  She: My hearing is perfect, too.

  He: silenced.

  She: And if you’re lying to me …

  He: I’m not lying to you. Now will you eat your food?

  She: I’m warning you, that’s all. If you’re lying to me … Etc.

  I wonder if I should object so strongly to American rockets on British territory if I did not suspect that the order to fire would be given by the Daughters of the American Revolution. American women over
the age of thirty-nine are more frightening as a group than any number of bad-tempered, incoherent, weak-hearted generals in the White House. (Perhaps.)

  *

  I am constantly surprised that my friends seem to think of me as younger than I am. I am at least four years older than most of them. Nor do they seem to notice what I am wearing, or whether I have had my hair cut—things I notice automatically. Today, for instance, I discovered that I was wearing different-coloured socks, one red, the other grey. Furthermore I had on a pair of brand-new blue suède shoes. No one commented at all. I would not have noticed the socks myself, I admit, if I had not been admiring the shoes as I stood in the queue at the Rawlinson. But surely, even here, people will notice blue suède shoes? (They arrived this morning from London, with no indication as to who had sent them. Phi. One of his jokes.)

  I think the reason is that I am no one’s intimate; I am part of the permanent scenery. To some I am a stock homosexual pretending not to be a homosexual. They assume that, however hard I try, my clothes will somehow give me away. To others I am a radical, and it is axiomatic that radicals dress badly. They may even think I have a beard. In fact I could hardly dress less conspicuously—grey trousers, plain shirt, plain tie, dull tweed jacket, hair utterly average in length. Inconspicuously but not shabbily. I clean my shoes every few days. I have never worn blue suède before in my life. (I simply could not resist them.)

  (Why, incidentally, are the only people whose shoes really shine old men? Because they have nothing to do but clean them? Is there any evidence that shoe-fetishism increases with age?)

  As part of the permanent scenery, I am indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd. Which can be useful but is at times depressing.

  *

  Telegram from Phi. COME AT ONCE TO BRIGHTON I DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEASIDE LOVE PHI. Really!

  *

  My age. I speak of my two years in America and my two years in Paris quite frequently. They know I got my degree here, and that I am in my second year as a D.Phil student. None of them was even thought of here when I went down. Yet they treat me as if I were still one of them, an undergraduate. And to me my age seems monstrously obvious. Perhaps I am still rather adolescent. But all the same it is odd. Incidentally, Charles said a most extraordinary thing to me this morning. Not to me, to Jack. He said that in the week before my Schools I locked myself in my room to work. This is perfectly true. But how did he know? I have been ashamed of it ever since. It almost cost me my First. But who told him?

  *

  At tea today someone was quoting a proverb—I forget whether he said it was African or Asian. It was about a man looking across a river at a peculiarly beautiful boy—a goat-boy, I suppose—and saying to himself: ‘But alas, I cannot swim.’ What interested me about it was that it could not possibly belong in European literature, and even more certainly not in English. Too earthy altogether. Perhaps ancient Greece might have managed something along the same lines. But never the yearning Byzantinism of a Cavafy. The Greek anthology was so carefully and ruthlessly ruined by Victorian school-masters that one can no longer really tell whether it was any good or not. But I can’t imagine this in it. The particular quality of this saying, if that is the right word for it, is its starkness. A river, a man, a boy. Sexual longing. Simple regret without sentimentality. The man moves on, the river moves on, the boy goes on with whatever he was doing. (It must have been something rather odd.) There will be men on his side of the river in time, there will be boys on the man’s side. There is absolutely no romantic mist in that valley. It’s not even a sad saying. The man has felt a quick blast of joy. Regret need not be sad.

  It is, of course, completely inappropriate for me. The wrong word is ‘cannot’. I learned to swim only too young. ‘Dare not?’ That is wrong, too. It is not fear of the river-police that keeps me back. ‘Must not?’ Wrong again. ‘But alas my scruples forbid me to bathe naked?’ Almost, but not quite. ‘But alas we have not been introduced?’ No.

  The trouble is, first, that our particular civilization is against the quick blast of joy. It is not designed for it. It is designed for brothels and dirty acts in passages. And, second, one cannot hope to feel satisfied in twentieth-century Western civilization without at least an attempt at Romantic Love. One demands a soul as well as a body. One needs to be needed as well as to need. At least in theory. In practice, either the dirty act in the dark alley or the silent manufacture of daydreams about one’s current sexual attraction. One’s imagination is like a cinema. Sometimes the film runs for half a week only, sometimes for months. But there are almost no periods at which the doors are closed. One enters the warm darkness and looks at the screen. One sees exactly what one wants to see, even if one doesn’t always recognize it as such. Problems are posed, there are tearful partings, terrible scenes. But everything comes out all right in the end. The music wells up, the heavenly choir sings out, the lovers fade away just before the perfect climax. That is the problem with daydreams. They end either in masturbation or in a sense of disappointment or both. There is no other prospect.

  Most of the time we think we are in love we are simply running through the daydreams in our private cinemas. People even marry on daydreams. A romantic marriage might be defined as the successful sharing of a common dream. My objection to them is that one forces one’s feelings into a standard pattern, the standard pattern of our culture, and often our feelings do not fit at all. We feel obliged to feel in certain ways, for that is how we ought to feel, just like everybody else. Psychologists, by telling us what we do, only make us worse. There was a boy at school who was very worried because he did not have any incestuous feelings towards his mother. He had read some paper-backed book somewhere which told him that such feelings were normal at his age. Eventually he worried himself into dreams about her. At once his work picked up and he was much happier. He is now married with two children. I suppose he thinks he’s got to fall in love with his daughter. Sex has become a burden because we cannot believe that we are happy until we have experienced Romantic Love. It is sometimes called other things, but the whole tradition can be traced from the twelfth century. (I think—I’m not quite sure about the date.) As animals we need sex regularly. As victims of the tradition we feel we should only have it when we share our appetite with our partner, and, more than that, share a spiritual appetite for it. In practice, of course, we have guilt about sex. The whole thing is ridiculous and absurd and intolerable. But however much we recognize its absurdity intellectually, the habit is ingrained in us, and deviations from the standard pattern are almost impossible without feelings of guilt and remorse.

  Charles Hammond is a typical victim. He ‘fell in love’ with Margaret two years or so ago. She has treated him quite properly according to the book of rules; that is to say, with supreme callousness. She does not love him, therefore she can treat him however she likes. But, because she is sexually attractive to him, he continues to sit in his private cinema showing himself blue films of her in Fleshicolour. Only he doesn’t realize how pornographic the films are, how divorced from real human behaviour. He thinks the script was written by Ernest Dowson. The title is In My Fashion. And if, as I suspect, he is beginning to get sick and desolate of his old passion, it is not before time. He must get a new projectionist.

  In a healthy society, I suppose, people up to the age of, say, twenty-five would be encouraged to be sexually active and indiscriminate. Then they would learn not to confuse sex with love. In fact, of course, the opposite is the case. Schoolboys are expelled for coupling with schoolgirls, undergraduates are sent down. The rules of the girls’ colleges are simply insulting. Naturally they grow up to think that sex is something very special, and a terrible burden, almost beyond human power to cope with. Only in the leading public schools, as far as I am informed, is sexual activity taken for granted by the boys. There are quite enough homosexuals among the leaders of our society, but I am surprised in a way that there are not more, since they derive so strongly from such s
chools. One might, if one was a dictator, make laws condemning sexual freedom over twenty-five. One could threaten castration and other loathsome penalties. Under that age everything would be as free as nature allows. One would never, of course, put the laws into execution, but one would pretend to. Then one would see whether the divorce cases would lessen or not. Probably not. (The trouble with such a plan is that the dictator would die one day, and be succeeded by someone who thought the law should be made to work. There is always a danger that fanatics may totally misunderstand the master.)

  I suppose that the whole of this rumination stems from my own uncertainties about Phi and Delta. I am as much a victim as anyone else. More so, probably. The deviationist is always anxious to conform to the general rules to make up for his particular differences.

  I saw Delta today. The sunshine seems to make his freckles even more prominent. Very charming with black hair. I asked him if he was gaining anything from my researches. He blushed and said he didn’t know, it depended on what I meant. I tried to look very stern, but my pulse raced for the first time in weeks.

  Delta (very formally): They are a great help in many ways, Nicholas.

  Me: Good.

  I went away. Exams have a most loosening effect on people’s morals.

  *

  Proposed course of reading:

  Provençal poetry, with and without Pound.

  The Cantos. Try and read quickly. Try and finish.

  The Affluent Society. Reconsider. Try not to be so enthusiastic. Nenni’s works, if any, if available.

  Ayer, Problem of Knowledge. Mind getting fuzzy.

  Schlesinger on Roosevelt.

  Villon, Du Bellay, Ronsard, etc. Delta’s recommendation.

  Decline and Fall. The only book for a Sunday morning in June. If it rains, start Proust again.

  *

  No telegrams from Phi today, thank goodness.