Babel Tower (34 page)

The young Gerard Wijnnobel listened and watched. He listened, watched, was revolted, and revolted. The lesson he drew, quite clearly from his father’s Bible commentaries, and more reluctantly—for aesthetic reasons—from the speculations of his grandfather, was that it is possible for human beings
to spend the whole of their Hues on nonsense.
And not only that, but that perhaps also there was a trap, a quirk, a temptation
in the nature of language itself
that led people, that induced them, to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense. He discovered Nietzsche, who preached against Christianity and its forms with all the delicious fervour and energy of a Christian hell-fire preacher converted, and Nietzsche said, “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” Theo-logy, the language of God, grammar, the forms of theology.

Gerard Wijnnobel became a mathematician. He became a mathematician in order to contemplate order and to renounce the mess of language. He worked on the Fibonacci numbers, which describe,
among other things, the spiral of the cochlea in the inner ear and the principle that curls the ramshorn, the ammonites, certain snails, certain arrangements of branches around tree trunks. He withdrew into pure form, as though he saw only the relations of quadrilaterals, lengths, and primary colours of Mondrian, when once he had seen the forms of light made and recorded by Vermeer with an image of a rectangular coloured window and the enlightened solid body of a reading, or thinking, or pouring woman.

Perhaps because he came to England in the war and thus had to speak and teach and ultimately think in another language, which, however well mastered, was not his own, the Wijnnobel of the 1940s and 1950s turned his attention back from the forms of mathematics to the forms of language, to grammar. He became interested in Roman Jakobson’s theories of “distinctive features” of all languages, in Saussure, who saw language as analogous to a chess game in which words were arbitrary signs to which certain formal functions were assigned, and most recently in Noam Chomsky’s claim to have demonstrated that there was a deep universal structure of language, a universal grammar, innate in all human brains, not learned, any more than the beat of the heart or the focus of the eye is learned, not modified by society or experience, but part of human biological identity, capable of constructing the hum and buzz and thought patterns of innumerable tongues. As beavers are born knowing how to make dams, and as spiders are born with the ability to make webs, so human beings are born with the ability to speak and think in grammatical forms. Chomsky’s generative grammar, Chomsky’s transformational descriptions, still in 1964 new and uncompromising, are mathematical in their exactness and depend on the use of algorithms and mathematical structures for their understanding. Gerard Wijnnobel is convinced intellectually that Chomsky is right: that the human brain is born with a capacity to generate and transform language—that this is innate, not absorbed into some empty bucket or inscribed on some tabula rasa, but there in the folds of the cortex, the dendrites and synapses and axons of the neurones in the brain. The theories, both of learning and of language, that preceded this one are more interested in the way the mind is formed and shaped by society, or by learning, or by random events. To believe that linguistic competence is both innate and unalterable, in the present world, smacks of determinism, smacks of predestinarianism, and of more unpleasant things, a suggestion that heredity, not environment, differentiates between
men. Many of the men Wijnnobel meets find that suggestion morally repugnant, exactly as he found his father’s ideas repugnant. There is much talk, in his world, of language as either a crystalline, immutable structure, or as order-from-chaos, a flame-like structure that holds its changing shape in the winds of its environment. Aesthetically, Gerard Wijnnobel would like to believe in the flame, in the shifting, variable, changing form. Intellectually, he believes in the crystal. Intuitively, also, he believes in the crystal. Chomsky’s descriptions of the human capacity to construct language fit his own sense of his own uses of it.

He believes too, that in some distant future the neuroscientists, the geneticists, the students of the matter of the mind, may find out the forms of language in the forest of the dendrites, in the links of the synapses. The genes are aperiodic crystals, dictating, to the matter they control, the structures, the forms, the substances that matter shall become. Somewhere in the future the understanding of their invariable form may lead to the understanding of the web of grammar and its invariable deep structure. Or so Wijnnobel believes. None of this is exactly helpful with the problem of what to teach to small and not-so-small children, with which the committee is engaged.

VII
 

Thomas Poole sends Frederica to see his doctor, a cheerful fat man in Bloomsbury Square. The ménage in the flat, after two months, has taken on some aspects of a marriage. There is equable discussion of shopping lists, of the feelings and friendships of Lizzie, Simon and Leo, also of books, of the novels on Frederica’s new course, which takes place in a school called Our Lady of the Sorrows, and of ways to dovetail this teaching with the teaching at the Art School. Leo is quiet. He asks sometimes if they will go “back”—he does not say “home”; children can use language with great care. He says, “They will miss me,” and specifies, “Sooty will miss me.” He watches Frederica for signs of intention, and Frederica attempts to convey settled calm, temporary certainty, trust.

Frederica’s wound is healing badly. It festers, it re-opens, it is the wrong sort of shiny pink, there is pus.

Thomas Poole puts a hand on Frederica’s shoulder as she leaves.

“Courage,” he says. “These things take time.”

Frederica turns her face to him. He will kiss her; it seems natural. Leo appears in a doorway, and Frederica shrinks into herself, briefly putting up a hand to ward off a non-existent blow.

“I’m sorry,” says Thomas Poole, easily.

“No need,” says Frederica.

The fat doctor, whose name is Limass, probes and palpates and dresses the wound. He says, with his cheerful manner, “This is a nasty one, this is a mess, the way it hit you was bad luck.”

Frederica says, “There is something else.”

“Tell me.”

“Something is wrong with my—with my vagina, with all that area. It is very painful. There are what I think you would call pustules. And a sort of crust.”

She is precise. She is shamed. She is in pain.

The doctor ceases to smile, does a cursory examination, writes out a chit, and tells her she must attend the Middlesex Hospital clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. Frederica, feeling automatically guilty, because she has gambled sexually in her time and has survived, drops her head.

“When did you last have intercourse?” asks the doctor.

“With my husband. Only with him, since I got married.” As this fact establishes itself, guilt is transformed to rage. A vision of the contents of the case in the wardrobe flashes across Frederica’s inner eye. She moves her uncomfortable thighs together and feels pain, irritation, discomfort, separate feelings, that accompany all her movements as she walks.

“I see,” says the doctor. “You do not seem to have married very wisely.”

And Frederica feels a perverse desire to defend Nigel against this easy judgement, even though her own rage does not abate. Or perhaps it is only to defend herself, for having chosen unwisely. She says, “Things turn out different from what you expect.”

“They do. Now you trot along to the Middlesex and get analysed before you get any worse. And keep off sex.”

“I can’t imagine ever wanting—any such thing—again.”

“You’ll be surprised,” says the doctor, with cheery resignation.

“Hullo,” says the plangent voice, affable and unpleasant. “Daniel the parson-person, Daniel the Vicarious, Daniel the Representative of a dead preaching-man. Are you well?”

“Little you care. Yes, I’m well. And yourself?”

“I am battered and bruised, my friend, bleeding in invisible places. Last night I went to preach my message, as I make it my duty to do—a man needs to make himself a pretty fantasy of a duty to inhabit human society every now and then, and I thought a modicum of human society was in order, a taste of the honey of human intercourse, sweet Daniel, invisible Daniel—I
yearned
weakly, dear Vicarious, to improve at least one person’s understanding. So off I went to my local to preach my little preachment. I told them:

“Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity!

“Thus spoke the Devil to me once: ‘Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man.’

“And lately heard him say these words: ‘God is dead; God has died of his pity for man.’

“So be warned against pity:
thence
shall yet come a heavy cloud for man!

“But mark too this saying: All great love is above pity: for it wants to create—to create what is loved!

“ ‘I offer myself to my love, and
my neighbour as myself
’—that is the language of all creators.

“All creators however are hard.

“Thus spoke Zarathustra.”

“It’s better in German, but I don’t suppose your education included the language of the ex-enemy, O parson-person, you don’t sound like a man of great European culture.

“So I cast these pearls before the locals in my local and they took me by the hair and by the seat of my trousers and inflicted much local damage on my person with their boots, sweet Daniel, their boots and a bicycle chain and a broken pint glass, you would e’en have wept to see it, were you human, which I do often doubt, for you are so unsweet to me, so heel-dragging in the matter of soothing my sores as your dead Master bids you to, for I am the afflicted, O parson, O person, I am your work whether you like me or not, if I understand you rightly.

“Are you asleep, O Yorkshireman? Could you not watch with me one little hour?”

“I am
not
asleep. I am watching with you. You ought to talk to Canon Holly. He reads Nietzsche. He does Death-of-God theology. It sounds to me as though you and Canon Holly could have a fine debate. I am sorry you got bashed, but you do seem, if I may say so, to have asked for it. Indeed, I quite often feel like bashing you myself, if I ever set eyes on you.”

“Ah, my sweet friend, my dear Judge come to judgement, at last a moment’s true understanding, a moment of
rapport,
worked for incessantly since I began to infiltrate my voice into the passages of your reluctant and unready earhole. I do most deeply, my temporary love, desire to be bashed, as you put it, to be bashed to smithereens and shards and molecules and
pulp
and
broth,
and if you are ready to oblige me I will manifest myself. In the alleys of Smithfield I sought you and I found you not, among hatchets and saws I perceived you not, I turned aside the red robes of justice and saw fearful implements of
torture and belabouring but my sweet Daniel, my chastiser in surplice and soutane, I found
not,
although my fessae ached for him, also my lower gut and my labile tongue …”

“Listen, you. I do not want to chastise you. Or anyone. I don’t wear a surplice or a soutane if you happen to like those things, I wear
boring cords
and a
jumper,
so come off it. Shall I get Canon Holly to talk to you about Nietzsche and the Death of God?”

“There is so much more pleasure in talking about those things to someone who can’t bear to contemplate them—so much more skill and difficulty to overcome for the proselytising Prophet. Talking to your Canon sounds like preaching to the converted, a doddle, with no kick to it.”

There is a noise in the stairwell of the crypt. Heavy feet descend the spiral stair, quick, sure, hurrying. Behind Daniel, Ginnie Greenhill rises to her feet, holding her knitting needles defensively before her.

A voice, sharp, deep, well-bred. “Is Daniel Orton here? I was told to look for him down here.”

“He’s working. On the whole we don’t see clients down here; there is a sitting-room
upstairs,
where you can have tea.”

“I’m not a client, you silly woman. I’ve got to see him urgently. It’s private.”

“I don’t know—”

“I can hear shouting,” says Steelwire’s tremolo. “You are distracted. I shall lie down and lick my poor wounds. Think of me licking them, my reluctant friend. Think of a tongue-tip touching blood.”

“There is nothing worse,” says Daniel, “than people trying to stir your imagination with what doesn’t stir it.”

“Ah, you are
touché,
I can hear it. How can you be a Christian person and not be stirred by the flow of blood, the
taste of blood,
my dear reluctant friend?”

“Is
that
Daniel Orton?”

“You can see he’s talking.”

“A moment of your time, Mr. Orton.”

“How exciting,” says Steelwire as Daniel replaces the receiver. Daniel turns to consider his visitor. A dark, heavily built man, his own height, with well-cut hair, a suit, a silk tie, a blueing chin. Heavy brows, a heavy frown.