The Game (26 page)

Ivan said, ‘What do you think, Simon?’

‘Me? I – I can’t say I think much about presentation. No, I can’t say I do.’

There was a silence.

Ben said, ‘I want to take issue with you, Ivan. I don’t like your point about art having got so refined. You sound all regretful about it, as though it did it on purpose, and could be stopped if you lectured it a bit. I don’t like Gordon’s view of art as a technique not a mystique, either. Technique’s only useful as a means to presenting a vision of life. Art’s a vision. It’s got to be, or it’s nothing, get that? And in our time art’s almost
pure vision
, we try to see things as they
are, essentially
, not as they first appear to be. Now, you’re way off the mark with all this about hunger for facts. We’ve got far too many facts in our life. They crush us. Pop art and self-destroying machines are a guerrilla warfare on the part of the spirit against these deadly soul-destroying facts, get that? You can’t get away from it, Ivan, modern man sees himself as essentially a
victim
of his environment – wherever you turn, you find thinking people writing desperately that they know their lives are like hallucinations, they know this is not all the truth, but —’

‘Ben, that proves my —’

‘Shut up a minute. Art gives expression to this vision. That’s what it’s for. Now, as far as a documentary goes, I’m going to produce the old bromide. The photograph destroyed once and for all the need for naturalistic art. Just as I suspect sociology and telly documentary are destroying the naturalistic novel,’ he glared at Julia, ‘the realistic play, the war epic, taking the meaning out. We don’t need to reproduce any more,’ he glanced at Simon, ‘every wart, every pimple. The time for that’s gone by. No, look, what
an artist
could make of Moffitt’s stuff – by bringing his own individual vision to bear on it – would be something like this.’

There was always a large easel for Ben’s ‘visual’ demonstrations of his points. Ben sketched now, hastily, lucidly, a formalized pattern of teeth, across a swelling curve, crossed by a limper curve recognizably derived from the rat-tail. He drew also a pattern of flecked white coils with an escaping black coil, geometric, but recognizably the moulting snake, and then a multiplicity of black and white formalized snakes facing each other in a geometric dance across the paper. ‘That’s the feeling it all gives me. One thing inside another, positive and negative, engulfing and escaping, darkness and light. That intensifies —’ He sat down.

‘Simon?’ said Ivan.

‘I – I hadn’t seen it that way. I – no – I hadn’t seen it that way.’

‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘Not – not much. Not – that is —’

Ben was drawing a pattern of pot-hooks. Percy said, ‘I’d rather look at the original films. There’s more there.’

Gordon said, ‘I’d have said what Ben did to those snakes was only an extreme version of what Simon was doing in any case. “Art”, in my sense. Selection, perspective, emphasis, explication. Take, for instance, that magnified shot of the eyes, before and after the casting of the skin. That was making some sort of a point. Or take the almost miraculous shot of the – the new snake –
through
the skin of – of the old. Simon was
telling us something he thought, there, and using – ah – artistic methods.’

‘Yes, and, you know,’ Percy burst in excitedly ‘don’t you think it’s all being
vaguer
than what Ben did, as well as more immediate, increases, as it were, the significance.…’

‘It depends what real significance there is. I mean,’ this was Gordon, ‘we’ve got to stop talking about how Simon conveys “meaning” and talk about
what
he means. If anything. Why should he think it important to show us snakes? Or we think it important to watch them? Ben clearly does?’

Simon made his first contribution. ‘Those snakes are real snakes,’ he said. ‘You watch a snake eating. You watch
it eating.
First, you watch that.’

‘O.K.’ said Ben. ‘So you watch it.’

‘Well, you might just be curious about how it does it. Why not? You might just want to know.’

‘Well, that affects you,’ Percy said.

‘It might not. Why should it? Why should it be anything to do with you? It’s filling its own stomach. We don’t know what it feels like. It’s simply there. I – I wanted simply to – learn, to measure.’

‘Simon —’ said Julia urgently.

‘Scientific knowledge —’ said Simon, ‘the thing in itself —’

Percy burst into speech. ‘No, honestly, you can’t get away with that. I mean, with all this rubbish about the pathetic fallacy. Snakes are absolutely
weighed down
with meanings for the average man – you kept referring to them quite naturally on your programmes – death and rebirth, evil and healing, water and light, oh, you know, and sex, look at your Freud.’

‘Everything and nothing,’ said Ivan.

‘What I like about your films as opposed to Ben’s drawings is that the thing itself is there. It’s more than the sum of the meanings. That’s what I mean by vagueness. Now, why shouldn’t the thing itself
really
“mean” something? Since it has had these mythical meanings through the ages, why do we suppose science is the only truthful way of approaching
it? All this impersonal measuring and weighing and annotating. You don’t talk like that on the air, you know, or people wouldn’t listen the way they do. You don’t
talk
as though the snakes were irreparably not part of – of our world. As though measuring was our
only
relationship with them. It seems to me just as much a pathetic fallacy to pretend we can have an impersonal and neutral relationship with – Nature – that it’s
entirely
alien – as to pretend it simply reflects our passing moods. We’re part of it.’

‘You are confounding science, art, and religion,’ said Simon.

‘Why not?’ said Percy.

‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus,’ said Ben, leaning back in his chair.

‘Why for Christ’s sake can’t someone say something useful?’ said Ivan.

Julia said, ‘To return to what Gordon was saying. And Simon being an artist and showing us his view of snakes. Isn’t it important that we see so much of him? And hear him talk? We see across his personality. We can’t just take him out of the picture. We ought, indeed to find out why he’s in it. What do you think, Simon, what would you say drives you to – this work?’

Simon looked hunted. ‘I like snakes. I – I suppose I’m a naturalist because I – I wanted something neutral to do. Something’ – he blushed – ‘where curiosity was simply curiosity.’

‘And innocent?’

‘Yes,’ said Simon quickly.

‘You don’t think,’ said Percy, ‘that you went in for snakes out of any subconscious preoccupation with evil, do you?’

‘Or sex?’ said Ben, nastily.

‘Julia tells me,’ said Ivan, ‘you used to want to go into the Church.’

‘You can make anything of me,’ said Simon, ‘as you can make anything of snakes. But I don’t like it. I didn’t come here to be psycho-analysed. I came here to discuss my work.
My
work,’ he said. ‘Results, tables of figures, so on …’

He was crimson.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ivan, ‘if anyone realizes how
very
little
of what’s been said is any use at all. Banal or high-flown, and Simon might just as well not have been there for all the use you’ve made of him. You might
try
to speak up, Simon, if you wouldn’t mind – we really can’t afford diffidence, you are our guest personality, we’ve
got
to hear more of you. Now, let’s start again. And let’s keep it simple and concrete, will you?’

Julia, before the final recording of the series of simple and concrete questions and answers they had worked out felt blind, panicky stage-fright, of a kind she had almost grown out of. What was left of what they had said was largely Ben’s drawings, Percy’s musings on the myths underlying the snakes – Simon had been induced to expatiate, scientifically, on one or two of these – and her own questions about the effect of Simon’s personality on his choice of occupation. Ivan had extracted from Simon a series of grudging statements about these. It was less a discussion than a slightly hostile interview, by now.

Julia’s dressing-room was hot, full of mirrors and boxed light. Sweating, she retouched lipstick and mascara in one of the mirrors. Ivan came in and closed the door behind him. He put his arms round her.

‘Let go. Get off. You’ll mess me.’

He let her go. ‘So I saw your meeting.’

‘I hope you were edified.’

‘Oh, by you, yes. You must have been a lovely schoolgirl. Gordon says
he’s
a mistake. Says we won’t get much life out of him.’

‘Gordon can talk.’

‘Gordon will talk, don’t worry. What will you do now?’

‘Go and talk about his art. That he says isn’t art. I wish you’d leave me alone.’

‘Now, now.’ He said, crossly, ‘I wish anyone had seen my point about the
immediacy
of television. About its being a perpetual self-consciousness.’

‘Well, it’s not a very nice one most of the time.’

Julia was always startled to find that people like Ivan took
seriously programmes like
The Lively Arts
, since this accorded so badly with the rest of their personalities, and with most of the programmes put out by the television in general, and indeed with
The Lively Arts
itself. She felt momentarily guilty at not having lived up to expectations that Ivan, in some part of his mind, clearly had.

Ivan said, ‘Well, anyway, he kissed you.’

Julia, who had thought this herself, did not want to discuss the point.

Until the programme began Julia had had the hope that it might, like so many things which seem likely not to be endurable, prove pleasant or even exhilarating after all. It did not. She was sitting very close to Simon and this made her nervous. Simon himself was very nervous, sweating heavily and answering questions monosyllabically, or with an attempt at unconcern that appeared sullen and almost offensive. The team, in consequence, by now simply a group of people accidentally engaged in that kind of interview which most closely resembles an industrial personality questionnaire, with traps for the unwary, the unsuitable, the unstable and the over-clever, developed a hostile and bullying tone. This provoked in Simon no fireworks, simply a further ungracious withdrawal.

After two minutes of this Julia became seriously afraid that she was going to faint. She looked wildly about her. They sat on a dais in front of a set that looked like a comfortable room, with one of Ben’s cages balanced on a table like a pale mushroom. Beyond was the desolate dustiness of the studio, and the lit glass box where people checked the communications. Overhead was a woven ceiling of springy wire netting from which dangled, on innumerable coils of looping wire, clumps of microphones and lights. Technicians in blue jeans slid in and out of the equipment, manœuvring cameras, lugging wire, signalling at each other across Julia.

Lights flared on and off: hot light poured down on her. Near the door, his face dark in the shadow, Ivan lounged. Julia, sick and dizzy, had to be reminded when it was her
turn to speak, and then forgot her question and its meaning. She addressed Simon absently, and pushed her hand again and again across her brow, in a peculiarly irritating gesture. Gordon felt it his place to intervene. Ivan had said once, in bed, ‘The nerve-wracking thing is that any mistake you make is seen by millions of viewers. Any
faux pas
, any vulgarity.’

She concentrated simply on sitting it through, not fainting. It is vulgar of Ivan, she thought, to trap me and my emotions in all this wire and light.

In hospitality, after the programme, Ivan became rather drunk. He told Julia several times that ‘the bloody programme just didn’t get off the bloody ground, it just didn’t get off’. Julia reflected that undue intimacy within professional relationships had its disadvantages. ‘As for you, I thought you were going to puke or something, you looked awful.’

‘You shouldn’t play the impresario with my private life,’ said Julia. ‘You can’t have it all ways.’

Ivan took hold of the front of her dress. His knuckles brushed her skin. ‘I’ve got to have some creative work.’

‘Well, not me.’

‘I like you talking. Talk some more. About
your
creative work. Where the finished product is indistinguishable from the process. Undigested gobbets of bleeding, disgusting domestic suffering.’ He looked at her. ‘Or perhaps not
all.
I don’t see what right you’ve got to complain about me —’

‘Look —’ Julia said.

Simon appeared sober and flaming, in the face, behind Ivan.

‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t go?’

‘None whatever,’ said Ivan.

‘Will you come, Julia?’

‘
Do
go,’ said Ivan, quickly. Julia took Simon’s arm.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Please. Yes.’

They took a taxi. ‘Where shall I tell him to go?’ said Simon. ‘Where do you live?’

Julia said, ‘I don’t want to go home.’

Simon pondered this. He was leaning back into his own corner of the taxi, away from her, almost invisible.

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Can we go somewhere and talk?’

‘Where would we go? I’ve not been in London since – since —’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘In a hotel somewhere. We can’t go there.’ He waited patiently.

‘We could go to a pub. Or a coffee-place. Or just walk.’

‘Walk where?’

‘Oh, up and down the Embankment.’

Simon told the driver to take them to the Westminster pier. When the taxi started he said, ‘I won’t appear on any more of those shows. They make one feel savaged. Food for thought.’

‘I know. It is rather awful.’

‘It’s a horrible job. They’ve always got to be thinking up something to have thoughts about. Points of view. Attitudes. Networks of words. The theology of television. That man said he wanted me to talk about my work. I don’t want to talk about art. I’m a herpetologist.’

‘I agree.’

‘Honestly, all this tying up of loose ends seems so dishonest.’

‘Oh, I do agree. My creative work is so much better if I don’t think about it.’