The Birdcage (2 page)

Norah Palmer worked in the script department of a commercial television company, and had read English at
Cambridge. She could give a sensible opinion on most matters concerning the arts, but she did not claim specialist knowledge outside her own field of literature—and English literature at that; Norah Palmer read French, as she read music, without too much difficulty, but not by choice. She tried to be (and so did Peter Ash) what is called an
intelligent
layman; only a specialist might be able to give the answers, but at least she could ask the questions. Both Norah Palmer and Peter Ash “kept up” with the arts. They knew what was going on. Indeed, they needed
professionally
to do so. If Norah Palmer and her colleagues had not kept a sharp eye on literature and the theatre, television drama would have sunk to a pretty low ebb, you may be sure, lacking fertilization by those sister arts. And as for Peter Ash, why it might be said that his responsibility was even heavier. The composition of the television audience is catholic, intelligencewise and culturewise. Advertising copywriters, dentists—some of the most forward-looking and perceptive minds of the community are among its members, and it may reasonably be argued that those who watch television plays are drawn from the most serious section of what researchers call the “total
intelligence-spread
”. But Peter Ash presented the arts, not modestly and intimately in the home where any tolerant person might give them temporary room, but publicly in the bustle, the to-ing and fro-ing of the circuit cinemas, to whose continuous performances the adolescent, the old and the lonely are most assiduous in attendance. But for Peter Ash, those people might never have known that the arts existed at all.

Great and noble actions (we are often told so, and we must believe it) are never the expression of the individual human will, but may more truly be regarded as the result of economic pressures. It was so with Peter Ash, ex-repertory
actor, ex-announcer, ex-disc jockey, and now a public
personage
, the resident host of
The Living Arts
, a cultural featurette, which appeared in monthly editions, each of which ran for a week at your local cinema. He had come up from Worthing, Colchester and Hornchurch, up from the News and Request Programmes for Gramophone Records to the lower slopes of Parnassus, but his setting foot there was accidental; almost anyone else would have done.

The existence of
The Living Arts
was a consequence of the decline of what is called “the second feature” in the cinema. The sophisticated audiences of the cinemas in the West End of London do not expect to see more than the film they have paid to see, but on the circuits one does not go to the cinema only to see a particular film. One goes also to pass the time, and the audiences of the localities have grown to expect a second film, not greatly caring how bad it should be, just as long as there should be
something
. Meanwhile the cost of making films has been rising, and the number of people prepared to pay to see them has been diminishing. Since second features have to recover most of their costs in Britain (for who abroad would want to buy them from us?), the two lines on the graph—box-office
returns
going down and cost of production going up—crossed after a while, and second features became
uneconomic
to produce. Yet there had to be something to fill up the time. And so, in place of the double-bill, cinema managers began to book quadruple-bills: the main film would be accompanied by three (or sometimes four) “featurettes”—travelogues, actuality magazines and the like, which already had an existence as the staple fare of News Cinemas and as travelling companions to those quasi-religious films in CinemaScope which were too long to require a second feature anyway.

The Living Arts
was the creation of Mr. Perfect Budge of
Perfect Budge Productions, the makers of
The Thing and I, Vampire at Sea, Carry on Werewolf, The Fangs of a Teenage Girl
and a great many other successful horror films. He had been seized in middle-age with the desire to upgrade his image. Mr. Budge was a shrewd operator. He knew that audiences who hadn’t cared how bad a second feature might be, wouldn’t care how cultural a featurette might be, provided that time passed in watching it. A cultural featurette would be no more expensive to make than any other sort, and might be cheaper, since almost everybody concerned could be paid less because of the artistic value of what he was doing. And it could probably be sold to the art houses of the United States. Mr. Budge would get from a featurette like
The Living Arts
the double moral profit of bringing art to ordinary people (philanthropy) and dollars to his country (patriotism), and there was no reason why he shouldn’t turn over a pound or so for himself as well.

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
intended
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.