Eating People is Wrong (25 page)

‘Very well,’ said Treece, unwillingly. ‘For one night?’

‘Well, three, actually,’ said Bates. ‘Mr Schenk and Mr Butterfield have got him as a speaker at the Poetry Weekend.’

‘He’s going to be there too?’ cried Treece.

Treece’s qualms were fully justified. As he had told Bates, he did not know Willoughby personally, though he had heard a great deal about him through the inter-university grapevine; but
the process clearly operated in reverse, for the whole point was, to be blunt, that Willoughby, who obviously employed a large body of spies engaged in collecting stories and anecdotes for him to
put in his books, had written up a long tale about Treece. He was in there.

After Bates had gone, Treece had gone storming down to see Viola Masefield, who was Treece’s consultant on the younger generation. ‘Do you know this man Carey Willoughby is coming
here?’ he demanded.

‘That bastard?’ said Viola. ‘How nice.’

‘I suppose he’s rather a bright man, but he seems to me unnecessarily malicious. I read his novels.’

‘I thought you didn’t read modern novels,’ said Viola. ‘You should; I’m glad to see we’re converting you.’

‘You are not converting me,’ cried Treece furiously. ‘All the modern novel seems to have discovered since Lawrence is that there are some people in England who change their
shirts every day. I knew that already. I don’t need to read modern novels.’

‘But you should,’ said Viola.

‘Why?’ cried Treece. ‘I read this one because someone said I was in it. And I
am
. Do you realize that the story about the professor who left the script of one of his
articles among some student essays, and another tutor gave it C minus, is about
me
? Someone must have told this man. Even down to the bit about, “This is good lower second
stuff.” It was B minus actually. That makes it worse.’

‘Poet’s licence,’ said Viola.

‘What sort of man can he be? He makes one feel thoroughly unsafe.’

‘Oh Stuart, don’t fuss so,’ said Viola maternally. ‘You play right into Carey’s hands if you let him know that you think he’s betrayed you. He’d like
you to think that.’

‘He’d
what
?’ shouted Treece. ‘You know, I just don’t understand you people. I don’t understand how he thinks. I don’t understand how you think. I
believe you told him that story.’

‘I did, actually,’ said Viola.

‘He’s staying at my
house
,’ cried Treece. ‘I suppose he’s only coming because he’s short of ideas. Why else should he come to a place like
this?’

‘Perhaps to see me,’ said Viola.

‘Well, if I were you, I’d be careful,’ said Treece.

‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ said Viola.

Treece blushed and fired his parting shot: ‘Have you seen his title?’ he cried. ‘What’s that supposed to be? “Contemporary Poetics: Adumbration and Exegesis.”
Why doesn’t he just call it “Modern Verse”?’

Treece left and went up to the Common Room, feeling that if he had learned anything about the younger generation, it was not what he wanted to know. Viola had betrayed him, and Willoughby had
done his best; and now someone had been at work on
Essays in Criticism
and stabbed him in the back there too. The ordinary laws of sound human contact were slipping; and the people who were
selling out were those within the citadel – one’s own friends, people one invited to one’s home, people who did not destroy aimlessly but with a philosophy of life that
comprehended destruction. To Treece, the existence of people, of liberal intellectuals, like himself was infinitely precarious, infinitely unsure, and infinitely precious. The kind of intellectual
purity he stood for was a tender blossom that had little or no chance in the bitter winds of the world. Sometimes you could do no more than thank God that there were people such as he was, thought
Treece in no spirit of self-congratulation; he simply meant it. But those who live by the liberalism shall perish by the liberalism. Their own lack of intransigence, their inevitable effeteness,
betrayed them. Already liberal intellects like his own found themselves on the periphery. The end was coming, as people like him had less and less of a social function, and were driven out into an
effete and separate world of their own, to the far edge of alienation. It was on communication that they depended, and the channels were being closed from the other side; and in the tearing up of
Essays in Criticism
Treece saw the end of the liberal tradition.

He looked about him, and observed that his neighbour in the next armchair was the sociologist Jenkins. He could, he reflected, have lighted on no better person to explain the changing scene to
him; Jenkins was supremely
au fait
with the contemporary world. It was said that Jenkins was so conscious of being in the fifties that, if you asked him what day it was, he would answer:
‘Oh, it’s the nineteen-fifties.’ He was working, he had told Treece a few days before, on discontent, because there was a big market in discontent things just now.

‘It’s a mad, crazy world we live in,’ he observed to him. Jenkins nodded sagely. ‘It’s a bear-garden,’ he said.

‘I suppose one is old,’ said Treece, ‘when one’s surprised at the manifestations of disorder. One comes to the point when one doesn’t want anything else to change,
however hard one has fought for change in one’s youth.’

‘Ah,’ said Jenkins, shaking a roguish finger in a very Continental way, ‘you want to have your cake and eat it. Why not, of course? It’s an absurd proverb. I always have
my
cake and eat it. It’s the only wise thing to do.’ He ate several creamy pastries with great rapidity. ‘You expect too much,’ he said finally, sucking his
fingers.

‘I always did,’ said Treece sadly, sinking lower in his chair. Whenever Treece talked to sociologists, and he made a habit of doing so, since he liked having himself explained to
himself, from all facets, he always felt in touch with the world of the inevitable, with the great sweeping processes of history. And whenever sociologists talked to Treece (and they made a habit
of doing that, because he
listened
; the sort of people Jenkins respected most were those of whom he could say: ‘So I put a logical argument to him and in the end he actually admitted
he was wrong. “You’re right, Jenkins,” he had to confess. “You’ve convinced me.”’) they felt in touch with those strange, unorganized minds that thought
they were independent, and could do as they liked, and knew not they were creatures of circumstance.

‘And this education we’re giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that’s what makes it so painful. We’re showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of
ourselves. That’s what hard-bitten Tories like yourself find so hard to bear.’

‘Tories?’ cried Treece. ‘I’m a sort of Labour man.’

‘Ah, but what sort?’ asked Jenkins. ‘The socialist millennium has come at last, and how you hate it. You wish you could send it back and ask for another. The working man has
really let you down. You thought he wanted a sturdy, working-class culture, weaving baskets and singing folk-songs. And all he wants is
The Lone Ranger
.’

‘I suppose I’m becoming the most fantastic old reactionary,’ said Treece, aghast at himself. He did, indeed, believe in privilege. Just as he often liked charming people better
than good ones, pretty women better than plain ones, he preferred the intelligent to the fools and wanted them to triumph. And this in turn led him to believe in a kind of inverted privilege; he
let himself be charmed by the pathos of the undeserving. There was no answer to the fact that the privileged had the assurance, the persuasive manner, the true gift of tongues; and so one righted
the balance by being more than fair to the underprivileged, the Eborebelosas, the Louis Bates.

‘Not really,’ said Jenkins. ‘Indeed, you’re too tolerant. We allow anything, any change, everything except perhaps bad writing. One develops scruples and respect for
others to the point at which action for us becomes impossible. And hence standards become obscured. It’s a state of chassis,’ he said, stuffing some papers into his briefcase. ‘A
state of chassis.’ He stood up, a dapper little man, looking like a commercial traveller trying to sell his intellectual wares. ‘Do you dance?’ he asked.

‘Pardon?’ asked Treece.

‘I wondered if you danced. I have to go and do some field work at the Palais.’

‘
Quel palais?
’ demanded Treece, amazed.

‘Not Versailles,’ said Jenkins. ‘The Palais de Danse. Have you been down there to the rock-and-roll sessions? I go down almost every night.’

‘How interesting,’ said Treece politely.

‘Yes,’ said Jenkins. ‘I’m getting quite good at it now.’

‘I must be the only person in town who has never been to the Palais,’ said Treece reflectively. ‘On Saturday nights I seemed to have stayed at home doing my homework until I
was about twenty-four. I never seem to have had a culture at all, like Richard Hoggart and all the others. I just stayed at home and
worked
. And when my father used to draw on the cultural
stockpile of the working classes, I just wasn’t there. I was up in my bedroom, working.’

‘Well, then, come along with me,’ said Jenkins. ‘See how the other half lives. More than half, actually. Have a little sociological beano. As you said – with sociology
one can do anything and call it work.’ He fingered the buttons on his button-down shirt. He was the only man in the University with buttons on his shirt – it was the full extent of his
Americanization.

Treece reflected for a moment; it seemed fully justifiable on academic grounds. ‘Very well,’ he said.

‘Good man,’ said Jenkins. ‘I’ll see you in the snug of the
Falcon
at seven. Wear something comfortable.’ He opened a small tin, taken from his pocket, and
put a throat pastille in his mouth. ‘Pastille?’ he asked politely.

‘No, thank you,’ said Treece.

‘Sometimes I think I talk
too much
,’ he said. ‘It’s compulsive, of course, this pressing urge to interpret one’s surroundings publicly. Sometimes I wish I
were a little kitten, starry-eyed and sweetly mystified by the oddities of this world. You know what I mean? Don’t tell Kahnweiler this’ (Kahnweiler was the head of the Department of
Psychology). ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ And he disappeared through the door.

III

‘I feel so tired,’ said Treece. ‘So terribly, terribly, terribly tired.’

‘Didn’t you find it interesting?’

‘Terribly interesting. Terribly, terribly, terribly interesting,’ said Treece. ‘But really, don’t you think, isn’t that enough discontent for one night. I
don’t think I could drink another drop.’

They had spent a long, long evening looking for discontent. They went first to the Palais. The Palais proved to be terribly respectable. Tea and soda-fountains. No Negroes. The men had all
shined up their shoes, and the girls stood at the side holding on to their handbags as if they were, somehow, a physical representation of the virtue they looked determined not to relinquish. They
had then gone to a low wine lodge, a great Victorian hall with a central counter, sawdust on the floor, large mirrors of etched glass, a small trio (small, that is, in stature) playing teashop
music (‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’), led by an old, old woman with pink hair. The people all seemed misshapen and ugly, sad victims of the impact of the Industrial
Revolution. Prostitutes, old and haggard, plied their trade. Treece had been impressed by this one, but Jenkins had not. He had seen most of these people before. ‘They’re nearly all
sociologists,’ he said.

They had next gone on to a homosexual bar, the men’s bar in a large hotel, where the barman held your hand as he gave you change, and kept trying on a pair of earrings while he was waiting
to give service. Treece liked this one, too.

They had then tried an upper-class cocktail lounge where girls in fur coats sat and drank whisky and ginger. This one Treece didn’t like, so they had gone out and on to another place that
was full of old people talking about illness. They had only half a pint this time. After that, if Treece remembered rightly, they had gone on to one or two public houses, of different sorts, until
at last time had been called. Jenkins had grown increasingly more depressed as the evening wore on, and he explained that what upset him so much was the sort of people that sociologists had to be
objective about
. He detested so many of them. He also detested, he explained, most of his fellow sociologists, who were still living spiritually at the LSE of Harold Laski, and sneered at
him whenever he wore a suit or drank wine out of the right glasses. He was also concerned about a tattooing survey that the department had undertaken. ‘It’s quite a large-scale project;
we have a psychologist who’s working on the reasons that people have for getting themselves tattooed, and then a statistical sociologist who’s working out incidence among class and age
groups, and incidence of tattooing among the population as a whole. Then we have an aesthetician, who’s considering the tattoo as a form of popular art . . . like the street ballad. The thing
is that I committed myself rather rashly to the suggestion that, as a very high proportion of people in hospital seem to be tattooed, there may be some correlation between tattooing and certain
forms of illness. I wanted to have a doctor in the survey. It was then observed that a large percentage of the people in hospital are working class, and that tattooing incidence is highest among
that class. I could have cried.’

Treece was feeling distraught, because he had, this evening, done something very naughty: he had had an appointment with Emma, to spend the evening with her, and he had deliberately failed to
go. He really did not quite know why; but the opportunity to come out with Jenkins had been seized on quite wilfully; and now he thought of her, waiting, and felt himself a rogue and a cheat.
‘I’m a mess,’ he said, as they walked down the street among the little knots of people from newly closed public houses. ‘I’m a terrible, terrible mess. The world is
too much with us.’