Daniel Martin (69 page)

All this made Jane herself seem younger, or at least younger of her age than she had seemed in England; more and more Dan felt the older persona she had shown there was mainly reserved for him. She gave an impression, when they were alone, and at table, that elsewhere she was acting: this more sober and dutiful was her real, or realistic self.

But that psychological distances were being dissolved did obliquely emerge in one or two conversations they had alone. Perhaps in return for his telling her about Andrea, she told him more one evening about her affaire, and Peter: his faults and virtues. It was done lightly and dispassionately, and he had no sense of a buried distress; much more confirmation of what she had suggested when she first broke the news, of a qualified relief. Somewhere, it seemed, Peter, too, had never really passed the test. She also talked of Anthony and their marriage a little, again much more dispassionately now; but there he felt she was still hiding something. He did not press. Affection said silence: her choice.

Another evening, and copying her own dispassion, he took the opportunity to be franker about Jenny McNeil and his dilemma there. That is, he started meaning to be franker; but it soon grew, like an algebraic rendering-down, more a casual analysis of the general stresses of Jenny’s kind of life, how they automatically forced one into a pseudo-protective role, than about his real feelings or the real relationship. If he was unkind in one way, talking of the déjà vu feeling he had at seeing Jenny have her secondary love-affaire with California and its ways of life and language, he tried to be fair in others: her common sense, her honesty, her struggle to keep her private judgment uncorrupted.

It was a strangely complex conversation, since as before Jane rather stood up for her own sex’s ability to know what it needed of such relationships. In being fair to Jenny and praising her intelligence Dan felt he had cut the ground from under his own feet: he wasn’t getting it sufficiently across that he knew he was being selfish, but not blindly selfish. He felt a hypocrisy, an artificiality (and also a treachery, since though he had posted a card to Jenny from Luxor, he had not even bothered to inquire about putting a telephone call through to America), in all he said. Then he was receiving a different kind of sympathy—in effect, it was a kind of condonation—from the one he was soliciting: to be told he was wrong instead of, as it was, probably right. Indeed, paradoxically, the only real pleasure he took in that conversation was far less in its words than its silences and pauses.

For once again, as in the distant past, they had begun not to have to communicate by words. The situation helped, the constant occasions when they could not say, because of others, the Hoopers at table, what they really thought: when one had to use other signals. Even when they were alone, the silences became much less of a strain. One evening, when she came to his cabin for their pre-prandial drink, she sat writing postcards, almost as if she had forgotten he was there; and that secretly pleased him as much as if they had talked. Their companionship had become more real, at least in this; but by steps so small, barely perceptible, that Dan was not to realize them till he looked back and relived those days.

Something else was changing in him, in fact changing at the very moment she sat in his cabin writing her postcards, since as she wrote, he read the book—and by then not at all out of mere politeness she had presented him with on the flight: the Lukacs. By chance, as he was dipping through it that night in Cairo, reading pages at random, he came on a passage that immediately struck home, perhaps because it strongly echoed something Anthony had said to him on that unforgotten night. It ran as follows.

Between these methods, between Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, the contemporary bourgeois writer will have to choose. There is no necessity for a writer to break with his bourgeois pattern of life in making this choice between social sanity and morbidity, in choosing the great and progressive literary traditions of realism in preference to formalistic experimentation. (Of course, there are many writers who will choose socialism as a way of solving their personal dilemma. I only want to emphasize that this is not the only possible choice for the contemporary writer.) What counts is the personal decision. And today that is determined by the question: acceptance or rejection of angst? Ought angst to betaken as an absolute, or ought it to be overcome? Should it be considered one reaction among others, or should it become the determinant of the condition humaine? These are not primarily, of course, literary questions; they relate to a man’s behaviour and experience of life. The crucial question is whether a man escapes from the life of his time into a realm of abstraction—it is then that angst is engendered in human consciousness—or confronts modern life determined to fight its evils and support what is good in it. The first decision leads then to another: is man the helpless victim of transcendental and inexplicable forces, or is he a member of a human community in which he can play a part, however small, towards its modification or reform?

Dan immediately read that again, then marked it; and read further. Again and again he felt politically unconvinced; decided he was on Brecht’s side in the bitter 1930s quarrel between the two men; but then was dazzled by the famous essay on Walter Scott, if for no better reason than that he had, many years ago, written an abortive script for a proposed production of Ivanhoe—and recognized at once how valuable this masterly new angle on Scott’s faults and virtues, on the cunning mediocrity of his gentleman heroes, might have been then to him. In short, Daniel found himself falling under the great Hungarian critic’s spell, or at least under the humanist, Erasmic side of it, that current that runs through Western history as the Nile itself through Africa. As usual it was principally because he saw something he could abstract by analogy, depoliticize, and apply to his own life not altogether, as he later realized, unlike Lukacs himself in his fierce refusal to take Thomas Mann at (‘typical bourgeois arrivist, futile, useless, artificial books’) Brecht’s valuation. It was the emotional attempt to see life totally, in its essence and its phenomena; the force, the thought, the seriousness. It was medicine in a way, and the arrived bourgeois in Dan himself did not always like its taste. But he was unexpectedly impressed, and felt both his worldview and his own being as a writer enlarged and redefined.

More so than he admitted to Jane—he did not hide that he was interested, delighted for the introduction; but a little as with that about Jenny, he felt something artificial in the one or two rather neutral, guarded discussions they had about Lukacs’s views and theories. He knew he was not saying what he really felt, but rather more taking up circumstantial positions with or against Jane herself—or to be more exact, in an attempt to get her to admit the truth of his insight during that first evening’s conversation on deck… the difference between theoretical, even emotional, agreement and where it always seemed to lead in practice.

One knew about the cost of suppressing inequality in Eastern Europe and elsewhere; and the East Europe in the flesh around them hardly argued for a more free, more-joyous humanity, a triumphant counter-hegemony. There was a stiff and very middleclass formality about many of them, much more as if they felt secretly deprived rather than politically and philosophically liberated. Jane had to concede that—though she maintained it was a racial thing, the imposition of a Russian Communism unadapted to other national needs—but he detected the old, irrational guilt in the background. We can’t really judge, she seemed to be saying, we are too conditioned by our own culture. Nevertheless, he did become increasingly sure that underneath there was far less disagreement than there might seem; and yet in a way it was counterproductive to suggest it. She immediately suspected that, as if he was just being nice, merely sympathetic, hiding what he really thought. He gained another insight: she had an ignorance of him, of what he had become, and how he had become it, quite equal to his own of her.

But they also had their genuine agreements. These formed above all in their relationship with the young American couple and with the Herr Professor. In the first they gave, or tried to give; in the second they received.

They had been taken in a fleet of ramshackle taxis to visit Abydos, the day after their tour of Luxor and Karnak; and Jane and Dan had shared one with the Hoopers. The road went through endless fields of sugar-cane and beside a wide and stagnant irrigation canal. It was hot and dusty and the poverty of the villages—they had been warned this was a bad bilharzia area—and their inhabitants was distressing. Some of the little girls who ran out to greet the passing motorcade and to hold out their hands for piastres were vivacious and pretty in their gay-coloured clothes, but the older women, in their funereal black, looked worn and emaciated. There were very few men. They saw children swimming or women filling their water-pots in the lethal waters of the canal; one had an impression of a stupid animal fatalism, even though Mitchell assured them starvation was not a problem. The great peasant bean staple, fowl, was high in protein; and anyway, wages in the sugar-cane areas were comparatively good.

Dan sensed an obscure bewilderment in Jane at all of this, a kind of numbness, though it was only the practical demonstration of what her booklet on the fellaheen said. He guessed, or hoped, that it was less a shock at the helpless immensity of the Third World problem than a realization of the parochial irrelevance of so much politics at home.

Perhaps depressed by the approach, neither Jane nor Dan took to Abydos, in spite of the elegance—but even they had an effete, etiolated, Flaxman-like quality—of its wall-sculptures. Their longwinded cicerone, the claustrophobic feel in some of the smaller chapels, the absence of lighting—they and the two Americans discreetly detached themselves after a while and followed well behind the guide and the French passengers. However, there was another great bas-relief there, of Isis massaging up the penis of Osiris at her husband’s annual resurrection from the dead. Dan remembered it well from his previous visit, a strangely eager tenderness in the goddess’s face as she knelt over her hibernating consort, the echo of the Persephone legend… and remembered a private episode with Andrea. Because of her illness she had been off sex for some time, and the ancient erotic image, even though it had been successively bowdlerized by both Coptic Christians and Moslems, had brought a small resurrection to them as well later that day. Now he and his three companions stood before it without saying anything, each pair a little embarrassed by the other’s presence. The atmosphere needed breaking.

Dan murmured, ‘Of course it’s really D. H. Lawrence and Frieda.’

The Americans laughed and Jane said, ‘That’s wicked.’

‘Even down to the censorship.’

‘I’ll agree there.’

‘Religion up to its usual tricks. Kill the body.’ But he realized, as soon as he had spoken, that he might have hurt, and glanced quickly at the other couple. ‘Sorry. No offence meant.’

The girl answered. ‘Oh no, we…’ Then, ‘I adore D. H. Lawrence.’ Then she added rather shyly, as if they might not credit it without some academic evidence, that she had once done a term paper on him.

As they left the chapel, Jane asked where she had been at university and the two women began a conversation that continued spasmodically through the rest of the tour. Jane’s side of it had, to Dan’s ears as he wandered behind them, the air of a resolution being kept; of do-gooding. He had decided the girl was unexceptional and uninteresting, with only a degree of diffidence to mark her out from thousands of other young half-educated American women of her kind; and he found her husband—as usual he applied even harsher standards to the conversability of his own sex—rather ludicrously unimaginative. Though he photographed so much, Mitchell seemed to have no aesthetic instincts whatever. He was far more impressed by size, by how the hell those guys got this thing up—in the eternal manner of practical America.

Dan decided Mitchell was something of an ancient Egyptian himself. There was such an obsession with multiplicity at Abydos and the other places they saw on the succeeding days; with numbers, with lists, with never using one when you could use several. Somewhere behind the Egyptian pantheon he detected a mathematical, possession-cataloguing super-god with a profound horror vacui or more exactly, horror uni. The Herr Professor was later to correct him on that, but Dan developed during those days a childish, and perhaps peculiarly English, image of civilizations being sorted into cricket teams. His opponents were here, in Rome, in modern America and Russia, in Kitchener’s Britain; and his own team ran through the Minoans and Etruscans and the Renaissance to well, not quite England as she is, but at least England as she sometimes still was; his England.

Perhaps his deepest dislike of this Egypt-captained ‘eleven’ was that its art could not be romanticized. It was too adamantly based on conspicuous consumption and status; the pharaohs and their gods were the first smug bourgeois of the world—the birth of fire-brigade art, as Alain Maynard cuttingly put it. It reeked from the calculated precision, the formal, statuesque coolness of their paintings and sculptures. They had somehow banned personal sensibility, affection for life, all impulsive exuberance, all spontaneous exaggeration and abstraction. They had used art, instead of letting art use them; already Stalin and Zhdanov came.

But Dan was to feel kinder towards Mitchell a day or two later. Jane had learnt at Abydos that the couple had no children; she came back from their long day at Thebes, when the ship turned to Luxor, with the news that the Americans had a small tragedy in their life. All the gynaecological details had been vouchsafed: they could never have children… or at least Marcia knew that, though Mitchell still persisted in hoping that science would find a way. She wanted to adopt, but for him adoption had become an ultimate proof of failure and he would not accept it. Egypt had saved their marriage, the pressures to conform were so terrible in the States, Mitch’s parents… their inner shyness, it seemed, was partly a lostness.