‘Not really. It makes things you have to have to make them, that’s all. But I’m not a pacifist.’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ said Nicholas, enjoying his severity. ‘The moral state of a civilization which bases its defence on the threat of annihilation of another civilization is very weak, Charles, and as a manufacturer of the weapons your moral problem dwindles into insignificance beside that lack of morality on a million-dollar scale. But …’
And so we started it all over again, me for form’s sake defending Hiroshima against Vorkuta, and eventually, since Nicholas liked to keep to the point, and then to elaborate it at length, we analysed the morality of killing an awful lot of people in a peculiarly horrid way, and went on to discuss whether or not one was ever justified in killing anyone at all under any circumstances whatever. But always with my future as Nicholas’s illustration of moral pitfalling possibilities. Actually, I’m against killing people, in fact I think you have to be out of your mind even to want to kill someone, and I also think that hanging people for murder doesn’t really make anyone more civilized, particularly not the man who’s been hanged, and that it is not really all that much of an improvement on the quartering and drawing and public lip-licking of yore, if yore means what I think it does.
But all that didn’t help me much.
‘How will my personal abstinence from arms-making make any difference? That’s what you can’t answer, Nicholas. I mean, I can make an awful lot of money, I might even end up in charge of the business, and if I felt like it I could turn it over to making something quite different, like radiators for people with cancer.’
Nicholas expatiated on my ignorance of methods of curing cancer, and answered me fully enough, and with sufficient pointing of points to upset a cup of coffee at the next table. After the apologies were over, he took a deep breath and began to tell me why it was hopelessly immoral to go into business at all.
‘Business has its own ethics, roughly summarized as “the devil take the hindmost”. Each individual business man may lead a blameless personal life, and deplore in private, and indeed at times in public too, the very qualities which he praises at his place of business. The man who makes the most money is the best man. Anything that helps him to achieve this dominance over his rivals is laudable. Sometimes the consumer is benefited, incidentally. Sometimes not. When they talk about the consumer as the man they wish to serve, they are simply lying. They wish to serve themselves, and if they didn’t they’d never get any credit from the bank. Don’t be fooled by all those clever advertisements written by clever men, many of them with excellent degrees from the very best universities. They, too, are paid. If it serves his personal interest a business man will form a cartel, to prevent competition. This will be described as “in the interest of the consumer”. By ruthless undercutting he may try and drive his rivals to bankruptcy. This too, with great righteousness, will be described as “in the interest of the consumer”. Price-fixing agreements are obviously not in the interests of the consumer, but listen to the business man describing how they serve some idea he cloudily claims to be in the interest of efficient service. In each instance the consumer will not in fact be considered for one second. All this is obvious—the consumer is the business man’s enemy. He has a mind of his own, he can choose, he can complain about prices, the declared profits of companies, quality. He is dangerous, and democratic. He can speak. Since it has become impossible to silence him by force, he is silenced by private agreements on prices; he is assaulted by advertisements at all times, even advertisements telling him how advertising helps to make life better for him and his neighbour; he is baffled by take-over bids and monopolies.
‘The Marxist is wrong, you see, in thinking that private enterprise will eventually kill itself. We are more and more becoming as monopolistic a society as the Communists’. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that a state monopoly is any better or any worse than a private one. But one must never make the mistake of thinking that, because we live in a capitalist society, all our business men are devoted to free competition and private enterprise. Competition is the one thing a manufacturer wishes to avoid. And you, Charles, must avoid falling for all the cant that is talked about business. Read the proceedings of the Restrictive Practices Court some time. See how ludicrous the anti-trust laws are made to appear in America. And ask yourself whether you really want to take part in anything so outrageously immoral as a business world run on current business ethics.’
‘You sound as if you want all manufacture to stop at once,’ said Giles. ‘Really, Nicky, you make me feel guilty to eat.’
‘Of course, I’m not against goods being made. But I think the good should be emphasized, and that one should consider exactly what is good for whom. Look around. Look at the profits of some of our leading industries. Look at the men eating and drinking on expense accounts. Look at the percentage of national income spent on advertising. Look at the advertisements.’
‘I’ve always wanted to have an expense account,’ said Giles, rather wistfully.
‘But what do you want, Nicholas?’
‘Any society must, eventually, be based on love if it is to be a society for all its members, not just a society for the benefit of some of them. By love I don’t mean necking in the streets, I mean love for one’s neighbour, in the old Christian terminology, or, in more modern terms, social responsibility. And I don’t think our society, or any society in the world, is so based. The Communist claims that his society is based on a kind of love. In practice it obviously isn’t. Ours is based on the principle that obedience to the laws will keep things ticking along nicely. Well, that’s something. But if you’re honest with yourself, Charles, you will have to admit that your manufacture of arms cannot be in the interest of your neighbour. I know you’ll say that arms protect us. That is in itself a condemnation of our society. But, leaving that aside, is it right that the defence industry should be in private hands? Is it in the interest of the industry to have peace at all? Isn’t a cold war the next best thing to a hot war, from the industry’s point of view? Isn’t its political importance far too great for it to be allowed to remain in the hands of men whose duty, as business men, is to make ever larger profits? Have you ever thought about Herr Krupp? Have you ever considered the appalling indictment of our society that his life represents?’
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I’m not Herr Krupp.’
‘No. But you’ll be dealing with him, and his like. You’ll see his point of view. You’ll have exactly the same pressures behind you as he had. And, to the shame of Western Europe, has. Do you want to be an arms manufacturer, knowing as you do what arms manufacturers have been responsible for?’
I don’t know if those are the exact words Nicholas used, he talked so much that it was often difficult to remember next day how many subjects had been covered. But that was the gist of it, more or less, and I put it down because it summarized for me the damnable difficulty of being me. I felt I had to do something, and I didn’t only feel it intellectually. I wanted to do something. In any case, I had to have some money from somewhere. I wanted, too, to get out of the whole academic world, and never to think about the meaning of meaning again. I had a sudden hunger for the present and the future. I didn’t care any more about the past.
‘I have to do something, Nicholas,’ I said.
‘Charles,’ said Giles, ‘what do you really care about?’
That flattened me, rather. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I used to think I cared about Margaret. But I’ve been lying fallow, really, for about a year. And before that I worked quite hard, for me, and thought about history and politics and things a bit, but always in an ignorant, speculative way. I don’t know anything.’
‘Well, you know that,’ said Nicholas, smiling.
‘Well, it’s not much help.’
‘You must have something to care about,’ said Giles. He wrinkled up his nose and went on: ‘It doesn’t matter what, I don’t think. Nicky
cares about things most people never even stop to consider. Nicky has enormously high principles, and he’ll always keep going on them. I don’t have that kind of intense feeling for the practical applications of moral principles, though I respect it hugely. I’m much more empirical, I’m much more at the mercy of my feelings—I get worked up about political things because I’m outraged or disgusted or I think someone’s being plain stupid. But what I care about is something terribly difficult to describe—it’s not abstract at all, in fact I can only show it, point it out, I can’t give an intellectual formulation of it. And you, Nicky, are not to try and make one for me.’
Nicholas smiled.
‘What—I mean how—do I? What are you trying to say? Demonstrate, if you can’t explain.’
‘Quality of life. That is strictly meaningless, because everyone has a different idea of what is and what isn’t high quality. But it’s people first, not things. I couldn’t bear a life which didn’t have people like you in it, Charles, people who are serious and worried and unclear. You aren’t serious the way Nicky is. But you are concerned, involved, questioning.’
‘Not much. Not recently, anyway.’
‘That makes you all the more so now. Do you know that poem of Philip Larkin’s, where the man goes to look at a church, and he looks round it, and he wonders what will happen when we’ve given up going to church altogether? And he says that people will come back, always, because “A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions rest”—I think that’s how it goes. And people will always have a hunger for the serious, and churches will always be serious places “If only that so many dead lie round”. “The hopes and fears of all the years” aren’t in Christ any longer. They’re in tangible things, in the stones of our houses and the pavements of our streets. And people who recognize that are serious people, I think. Sometimes they’re conservative, and look to a tradition of behaviour, a traditional way of getting the best out of life. Sometimes they’re progressive, they feel inspired by the past to improve the present. But they are aware of the past, all of them, and they are aware of the present, too. And for me this awareness is an important part of the quality of life, of living, rather. And I care for that awareness wherever I can find it.’
‘Giles,’ said Nicholas. Then he shrugged, and said nothing else. But he smiled, and I had to stop looking at him.
‘The things are more difficult to describe. A matter of taste, partly. What I like and value may mean nothing to you. But all the things I care about have to do with people, eventually. I only like views or landscapes if they have had or do have people in them in some way. Jungles must be unspeakably boring—simply lushness without any human mark upon it. I suppose the decoration in my room would show you better than anything I say. It should explain, or rather express, my idea of the quality of life. Do you think it does?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever been in your room.’
‘You must come. Nicky and I are going to give——’
He stopped and looked enquiringly at Nicholas, blushing.
‘It’s all right,’ said Nicholas. ‘I think he can take it.’
‘You tell him.’
‘I expect he’s guessed already.’
Well, yes I’d guessed. So they had definitely decided they loved one another. I couldn’t think of anything to say very much, since, though I have no theoretical objection to men living together, in practice I find it terribly embarrassing. And it would have sounded awfully silly to say ‘Congratulations’ or something. I don’t know what it is—something to do with the prejudices one has been brought up with, perhaps, or perhaps it’s just an incomprehension of why they don’t want girls, and a feeling that they must be lacking somewhere. And I can’t stand all that pansy prancing about and calling each other ‘dear’ and self-consciously being naughty. Like any minority, they have en masse certain qualities that I just can’t take, and if I meet them en masse, which happens practically never, thank heavens, I squirm and feel depressed. But I couldn’t claim that either Nicholas or Giles was in the least effeminate, and I suppose it was just the idea, the thought, probably the ignorance, too, of what they did and felt that embarrassed me. Anyway, I muttered something that no one could hear, about hoping they’d be terribly happy, and Nicholas laughed and said: ‘We’re criminals, you know,’ which didn’t strike me as very funny, and luckily we soon got back to the main subject, which was me and my future.
But we didn’t get very far. Apart from being against the arms industry and business in general, Nicholas didn’t have much to offer. It’s always a mistake to suppose that someone can help you about things like that. You always decide on impulse in the end, not for some brilliantly logical reasons.
‘You should teach,’ he said.
‘I don’t know anything to teach.’
‘You can learn. You’re very young still.’
But I didn’t find that very helpful, or even convincing, and when I mulled over Pitt being Prime Minister at twenty-two, or whatever it was, it seemed to me that I should never be able to catch up on the years I’d spent footling around in the Navy as a national serviceman, then footling round at Oxford, and then footling round with Margaret. Footling was, in fact, the first adjective I would have used about myself that morning.
It had been a pretty bad week, all told. First Margaret, then the feverish sense of having to do something that mattered, then the feeling of having just woken up and found myself several miles behind the front runners, and then Jack, and then Nicholas, in fact a whole bubbling turmoil in my head, and a thousand questions and not a single answer. And all the time the word ‘responsibility’ thumping away at my mind with the rhythm of my pulse, and a sense of urgent need to think. So I decided that I would think for a while, and tried to do so, but it wasn’t much use, really, because there were all the parties going on, and the Ball was coming up, and I got very little done in the way of constructive thought, and sometimes I wished I hadn’t got a head at all. But what Giles had said seemed sensible to me. You can’t get away from the past at Oxford.
‘If only that so many dead lie round.’ Giles seemed to have something there. And it was certainly a pretty serious earth, I decided.
16
The Notebook of Nicholas Sharpe
I do not claim to act always, or even often, with premeditation. I do hope to act always with reason. It seems to me to be a cardinal principle of behaviour that very few circumstances justify unconsidered action. One of the very few is love-making, where deliberate planning is liable to have unsatisfactory results. The same is not true, however, of declarations of love. I am, it turns out, guilty of unpreparedness. Without the word ‘love’ having been mentioned, Delta and I became lovers. Intellectually, I cannot approve of this. Practically, it seems a perfect way of doing things. I wonder how much time is wasted in people circling each other uncertainly, fearful of blunder and rejection. Our courting, if that can be the word, has been brief. Perhaps our love will be correspondingly long. Certainly, after the day Phi came, which was four days ago but seems to be some time last year, time has dramatically slowed down. In a minute we seem to reach each other more deeply than months or years should allow. There has been no self-consciousness, no doubt about what the other was thinking. We have scarcely been apart, it is true. But when we have parted it has been without the least trace of anxiety. (Of course I cannot vouch for Delta feeling exactly the same as me, but as far as I can judge—Jonathan Edwards, where are you?—he does.) In my previous attempts to describe love, I seem to have left out this ingredient—perfect trust. But talking about love is unbearable. One becomes trite at once. One’s prose becomes faintly elevated and unnaturally purple. And unnatural is the one word which cannot be used to describe our love. Although a good many people would think it the only one. Natural to whom? is the question. And we are, after all, as Delta said rather ruefully to me last night, when I’d said something about this, we are, after all, human. Thank
everything. And our love-making is as natural as bird-song.
*
I have telegraphed the editor of the paper, and he has replied: START WORK JULY 20TH. So I start work July 20th. It seems extremely strange. I had thought I was going to be a great intellectual asset to the Labour Party—a distinguished young economist, like most of the leaders once were. But it seems that many of the old clichés are coming true. Variety is the spice of political wisdom, perhaps. At least I shall be learning a trade, the trade of effective words. I have never thought about myself as a writer—I don’t share Miss Emerson’s view about fiction, but I’ve never had any desire to write poems or stories. For me words are weapons to be used against, chiefly, ignorance and indifference. Particularly I must be concerned with remaking words, taking them down off the shelf of platitude and setting them to practical tasks. It was George Orwell who said that democracy was now a useless and meaningless word. Very well, then, it must be rebored, because we shall never be able to throw it away. It is the engine of our civilization. No other word will do. If it has lost its power, there are ways of restoring it. By constant re-examination of terms, and attacks on jargon, the political journalist has a role of great importance and responsibility. Dishonest ones merely polish the outside of words. Honest ones take words to pieces and replace worn-out parts and then clean and reassemble them. And such a mechanic has to learn his trade. I shall reach no one on The Democrat, or whatever they decide to call it. All my readers will already agree with almost everything I have to say. The function of such a small paper is to stimulate debate among the hard core, to stimulate and guide it, and make sure it sticks to the main point. It won’t be easy. I certainly won’t be the success Delta predicts. Readers of The Democrat will be experienced and devoted hair-splitters. But I shall learn a trade. And then …
*
Delta: I think you’re a genius, Nicky.
Imaginary Toys Page 21
