The Book Of Ian Watson, page 24
Outside, the farmers are transhumancing their sheep down Weston Lane, to pastures new.
Transhumance: I never knew this word till the other night at the village hall, when we held a quiz to select the Moreton Pinkney team for the Avon quiz. Neither did anyone else but the question master, a teacher from the grammar school in Towcester who drinks in the Red Lion and who had tackled the setting of the questions with gleeful relish. Baffled farmers stared in amaze as he revealed the true name of what they are up to: seasonal movement of livestock.
What do I see from my windows? Out there, between the ironstone-walled vegetable allotments, with the Old Fire Station tucked away in them (from the days when a cart and horses trundled forth to quench any blazes); and the Scottish baronial gates of the Manor House on the other side? It’s lively. There are non-stop events: teams of penny-farthing bicycles, vintage cars heading for rallies, tractors towing bales of hay, combine harvesters, flour lorries, scrap metal lorries, low flying war-planes screaming just above the trees, the local millionaire’s helicopter, autogyros and hot air balloons wandering from the Silverstone racing circuit (we can hear the engines revving up like faint thunder ten miles away), local riders astride their horses, racers from the Towcester race course being exercised, packs of (apparently) Vietnamese bicyclists, car loads of Japanese tourists, parties of ramblers in stout gear, herds of cows, cats, squirrels, geese, a pony and trap, the Hunt off to annoy the farmers. (Not quite all at once.)
This is the Village of pigs and paupers’ of the 19th century—at which time it had five pubs, now reduced to one. Since then it has upmarketed a bit. Here lives the aged president of the Bronte Society, with his library in the old stone forge on the lower green; here lives an ex-librarian from Camden, exmember of the Communist Party, Jewish atheist who married a black man—along with her nuclear physicist sister. Here lives an ex-rally driver and after-dinner raconteur; and a USAF ground controller currently with bright red eyes due to a collision between US metabolism and ale. Here lives a Canadian spy; why else did he say he was going on a course in cryptography before being sent to Mongolia? Here live those who sell sheep-shearing clippers, and motorcycles, and rubber bits for cars; and who are likely to be off to Moscow or Melbourne at a moment’s notice. In the largest house in the village, The Grange, lives the local taxi driver. There’s no policeman within miles, so the local pub stays open till … but I’d better not divulge that, save to say that now I know why people in the radio soap opera The Archers only drink half pints, which I always thought a bit soppy; it’s the only way to stay conscious long enough.
And here we garden. And natter over the hedge. And weed, till there are no weeds left; and zap the pests and parasites—which unfortunately, as regards the lawn, has to include worms, since worms are mole-food. (This confession quite distressed the Vicar, who cited Darwin’s early treatise on earthworms. Of the Vicar, incidentally, it is written in the Northampton Independent, this county’s version of Country Life, that his old sprawling vicarage “has become an incubus” for him. Being interested in erotic demonology, I must seek more details.)
Weed. And deadhead. And zap parasites. Or the garden of delight will not flourish.
Being a great believer in sermons in stones, and tongues in trees (and duly mindful of the quip about Wordsworth that he found those sermons in stones, which he himself had put there), at this point I feel moved to a few remarks about other kinds of parasites and weeds: namely, literary ones.
After I gave up growing cacti, for a while I became an academic, of the Eng. Lit. variety. So naturally I wrote criticism. Here are some products of that period: ‘Nothing else to live but sins: Jean Genet’s Africa’, Transition, Kampala 1967; ‘E.M. Forster: Whimsy and Beyond’, The Rising Generation, Tokyo 1969; ‘Elias Canetti: the One and the Many’, Chicago Review 1969; ‘For Love or Money: Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,’ Japan Women’s University theatre programme 1969 …
Perhaps these titles, though actual, read a little like parody? Such as we might find in one of those university novels which feed new solipsistic grist back into the academic mill?
But, then, criticism is itself parody. It is a travesty of the original words in new and condensed form: Campbell’s Rhetoric Soup. It is parasitical on original creativity, something secondary. It imitates the creative act, as weeds imitate the seedlings they grow beside (in an effort to strangle them).
No harm, of course, in writing reviews and criticism as an amateur (‘out of love’: love of the subject). But there is a whole parasitical sub-worlds, in love with itself, of the middlemen of art—academics, critics, pundits, personalities, those who sit on committees for the arts—which actually harms art; and which drains resources therefrom.
This came home to me strikingly at a one-day conference I attended at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts in March this year, entitled “Focus on Fiction,” supposedly designed to enquire into the health of the contemporary novel, high and low, genre and literary.
I shall pass over the morning’s activities, commencing with a dowager empress opening address by Marghanita Laski—who took it upon herself in passing, by a kind of parenthetical imperial fiat, to exclude pornography from the ranks of fictional art high or low; later a puzzled questioner said, “But when I was reading The White Hotel, I suddenly realized that a lot of it was pornography, and that was why it worked so powerfully …
I shall likewise pass over the succeeding college tutorial circa 1955, concerning the Grand Tradition, a further exercise in rampant twee, further establishing the sense of haut snobbery and sophisticated social nicety.
I will not allude to the slights, both implicit and overt, suffered by the invited representatives of the Romance genre; though I almost felt inclined to rush out at once and buy a few Mills and Boon books out of solidarity. And I will pass directly to the nub of the matter: the afternoon Writers’ Forum, supposedly a panel discussion in which various authors would present their own points of view, and expound their reasons for choosing a particular literary form, to be followed by questions from the audience.
On the panel were Salman Rushdie, representing the ‘art’ novel, Jessica Mann for thrillers, Jeffrey Archer for best-sellers, Roberta Leigh for romance, and myself as skiffyman.
So we five authors duly presented ourselves, each clutching a crumpled page of notes about something that we particularly wanted to say.
And they changed the format. With one bound, we were chained. Hey Presto, Frank Delaney, literary lion tamer extraordinary, was brought on stage to interview us all as specimens of authors. While the critics were allowed any amount of time to flute on, and hold forth whither so ever they wished, the authors were not even permitted their promised ten minutes of free speech, but instead must have their words rigorously controlled by standard questions. The authors—the producers of the primary product without which the whole conference, and criticism itself, couldn’t have existed—were to be kept locked in cages, exhibited, put through their paces, then dismissed. Each with their page of notes—about things of desperate import to the authors themselves, as authors—still clutched unused, or crumpled up in sheer frustration.
When it came to my turn to be interrogated, I asked if I might make a comment on the format; and pointed out that the assumptions implicit in this format, and implicit in the rest of the conference too, so far—of the supremacy of the secondary mediators of culture, over the primary producers—in fact vitiated the whole supposed purpose of such a conference. Salman Rushdie promptly inveighed, likewise. And Roberta Leigh, too, who had been lured along (till then, under false pretences), because she actually had something original to say about Romance, from the point of view of a practitioner of that genre. The circus animals rebelled. And at least the audience enjoyed the fray.
Alas, this episode is all too symptomatic of something rotten in the State of Creativity. The ivy thrives, but not the tree.
Consider a piece in The Observer (13 June 1982) entitled “The Critic as Undertaker”, by Peter Conrad. It’s a survey of the first batch in a new Contemporary Writers series of books, from Methuen; assorted critics holding forth on Saul Bellow, John Fowles, Joe Orton, Thomas Pynchon et cetera. The preferred metaphor of almost all the critics turns out to be that of an autopsy conducted on the authors and their oeuvre; plus a reckoning up of what they have ‘bequeathed’ us in their literary testaments. In the general background Roland Barthes conducts the funeral service, proclaiming the death of the author, negated by his text, which makes possible the birth of the critical reader. And attempts are made, in the case of authors who haven’t yet literally flaked it, to diagnose fatal symptoms: thus John Fowles is detected to be ‘falling off.
A shared metaphor cropping up simultaneously so many times can only unmask the actual vested interests of such critics, who really have little in common with creators yet who are competing in the same ecological niche, for the same slice of the cake of life, the cultural slice—and for the icing upon it.
Consider, finally, the Arts Council’s advertisement for Writers’ Bursaries 1982/83: “It is emphasized that writers of non-fiction works of literary merit, including those books which are in any way a support to literature, are eligible.” (My emphasis.) This is a bit of a new departure. So public tax money may now be spent on funding those people who are in any way a support to literature—rather than on supporting the creation of literature itself! What is this but a charter for parasites?
One does not of course doubt the probity of the Arts Council, who administer the national largesse for the arts. Did not the out-going Director, Sir Roy Shaw, deny that he had “been offering prominent people in public life large sums of money to become directors of a new private leisure complex in London,” and then change his mind and admit it? (The Observer Pendennis column, 14 March 1982.) But as to their concept of supporting the arts by supporting people who support the arts in any way, ho ho hum. Someone has got their priorities seriously mixed up; though is that really surprising when one considers how many members of the supporters club are knit together by mutual obligations, sponsored conferences and the rest of the circuit of metropolitan supportativeness? (Oh dear, the football team have got no boots—but the supporters club is doing fine.)
Not only do authors have to put up with being at the wrong end of the publishing process, financially. Not only do they have to put up with the engulfing and axing of the publishing industry by corporate conglomerates practising bottomline economics. Not only do they have to put up with the wholesale warping of the profession of literature by media hype, best-sellerdom, film tie-ins, ooks (artificial books), and the rest of the phony circus. (And all the while sweat and brood and work like hell to conceive and bring their works into the world.) But they have to put up with parasites waxing strong on their bodily and cerebral juices.
Little can be done by most authors to make themselves into powers within publishing. Damn all can be done to persuade Gulf Oil that they owe a duty to that micron of their empire which spans, say, original SF anthologies.
But the sub-world of parasites is closer at hand, elbowing authors in the very same socio-economic niche.
Gardeners: zap that weevil. Authors: squash a parasite today.
And on the subject of weeding …
The Culling
HOPE AND CHARITY were playing the Culling Game with the other younger village children. A dozen youngsters spun like human tops in the street, humming loudly to themselves. Their arms were flung out, with one index finger pointing. The other hand was a fist, a counterbalance. A little club. Around and around they spun, in a trance.
Several mothers watched from the doorways of the little wooden houses. A brisk early November wind blew the last torn-off leaves along the street, where straits of mud were widening every Winter between the crumbling islands of old asphalt. A couple of teenage boys were pulling a small cart loaded with split logs down from that part of the woodland which the villagers of Harmony were allowed to thin out this year.
Polly, at her door, hummed too.
‘What a good, good game,’ she thought. Angelic chords flooded her head, magnifying the thought, touching her very pleasure centers till she rocked from side to side in near delight.
All of a sudden the children stopped stock still. They stared in the direction of their pointing fingers. Four fingers—including that belonging to Charity, her sister—were aimed directly at Hope. Eight other fingers pointed at someone else or nobody.
The children hesitated for a moment, since Hope was hardly a unanimous choice. Then they began to chant, slowly at first then picking up speed:
“Cull her! Cull her! Cull her!”
As their voices rose in pitch, the words sounded more like:
“Kill her! Kill her!”
Hope fled to her mother Polly. But Polly was coasting up a crescendo of joy just at that moment. She pushed the six-year-old away from her quite roughly.
But the moment was spoiled. The climax was lost. Polly remembered that she loved her daughter. She remembered that only four fingers had been pointing, after all. She remembered that this was only a game, a mock prelude to the real thing, due to happen on Midwinter Day.
She folded her daughter in her arms, hugging and consoling her.
“There, there. You won’t be ‘It.’ I won’t let you be!”
The Gloria in her mind became a harsh, keening wail.
“I won’t let you be!”
Her head ached fiercely, and she thought of the red and golden beauty of the sunset in the West, instead. Blood ran down the sky: the blood-letting of the day …
“No! It’s beautiful, beautiful!”
Quickly the pain eased, and the discords ceased their dinning. As Polly stared into the sunset, evensong hymned its praises, only slightly out of tune.
“Home time! I’ll cook you something nice.”
Polly drew her daughter inside their neat little cabin.
“Where does the music really come from, Mummy?” asked Hope, not for the first time.
“I’ve told you—from the Aliens.”
“But what are aliens?”
“They’re people from another star in the sky. They came to Earth to help us. To stop us poisoning our lovely world, and eating all the food, and cutting all the trees, and breeding like flies. And being out of tune.”
“But do they look like you and me?”
“How should I know? I’ve never seen any aliens. I’ve never heard tell of anyone who has. We hear their songs in our heads, that’s all. They hurt us when we do the wrong thing, and when we do the right thing it sounds … too lovely for words. Maybe the aliens can’t speak and can only sing, so this is the only way they can tell us.”
“It’s horrid when I do something wrong. Like when I ran to you. I’m sorry, Mummy.”
“Maybe it’s us who cause them pain when we do wrong, and we hear their pain, rather than that they mean to punish us. But it comes to the same thing. So we all have to live in harmony, don’t we?”
“Well, it’s our home,” said Hope, not understanding. “Where else could we live? Harmony is our home.”
Polly smiled, and ruffled her daughter’s head.
Did the beasts of the field hear this music too? Did the singing birds hear it? Who could say?
But they should hear it. For the Earth was clean again. The Earth was lovely—restored, renewed. The Earth itself sang. A joyful cry sounded softly, as though far away, then repeated itself much louder, closer by.
“People used to live in cities,” Polly struggled to explain. “Big stone places, with not a blade of grass or a rabbit running about. We live quite near what’s left of one of them. Over the hill there.” The thought of the city, even in ruins, scraped across her mind like a fingernail on slate. “People destroyed it as much as they could before they fled. It isn’t a nice place. But it’ll be countryside again, one day.”
She shouldn’t even be thinking of the city! If the other villagers could hear the caterwauling in her head, she herself would be culled, come Midwinter …
How would little Hope and Charity fare without her?
But she no longer cared. The idea of the Culling was a ravishing obbligato; wonderful sounds warbled in her head. This particular song only gathered force every five years, but it never failed to come. For people went on making love—and of course bore children as a result—even though by the fourth and fifth year their heads ached with the harsh displeasure of the shrieking as they tumbled between the sheets.
But after the Culling love would be a soaring melody for the next year or three …
“Where’s Daddy?”
“I don’t know, darling. Donald went off for the day.”
“He should be here!”
“I know. Let’s not think about Daddy, while he’s away.”
Donald was sitting underground, in a man-made cave once known as a subway station. It was the last station on the line out of the abandoned city. A single torch, powered by an ancient long-life battery, illuminated the little group of malcontents: Sam and Carmen, Alice and Tate.
Their heads all hurt with the echo of being in here: a boom, boom, boom which ought to have driven them back up the rusty escalator before they ever reached bottom.
“You were wrong, Don.” Tate held his head in pain at the drumming migraine. “It isn’t damped out by being underground.”
“Maybe it is a little!”
“How can a fellow think?” They had to shout at each other.
“You can still think,” said Carmen. “So can I.” She was their liaison person with two surviving groups of malcontents to the north of the former city. “Now, some villages believe that aliens have done this.” She kept her sentences short so that she could finish them, and they could understand them. “But the people in Purity believe that the Earth has done it. The Earth Herself. Great Gaea sings us these songs. Is it possible? Can a whole world come alive, to sing songs? Okay, the Earth is alive. In a sense. The ecology is a living network. But it isn’t intelligent.”
