Sauron Defeated (28 page)

Alexander Cameron. Exeter. Born 1935. Modern historian, specially interested in Spanish and South American history.

Collects coins and stamps. Plays a pianola. [No one remembers his being invited to join the Club, or knows why he comes; but he appears from time to time.]

John Jethro Rashbold. Magdalen. Born 1965. Undergraduate. Classical scholar; apprentice poet. [Introduced by Frankley, to whom he is much attached.]

Note. It is represented as the habit of the Club for all -

members to initial the record of any meeting at which they were present, whether they are reported as speaking or not. Presumably the initialling, which in the extant Papers is in the same hand as the text, took place after N.G.'s report has been seen and passed, and before the fair copy was made. Mr. Cameron's initials never appear.

Leaves from

The

NOTION CLUB PAPERS.

[PART ONE](3)

Night 54. Thursday, November 16th, 1986.(4)

A wet night. Only Frankley and Dolbear arrived (Dolbear's house). Dolbear reports that Philip never said a word worth recording, but read him an unintelligible poem about a Mechanical Nightingale (or he thought that was the subject). Frankley reports that Rufus was drowsy and kept on chuckling to himself. The only clearly audible remark that he made was going off the deep end, I think. This was in reply to an enquiry about Michael Ramer, and whether D. had seen him lately.

After F. had read a poem (later read again) called The Canticle of Artegall they parted. R.D. P.F.(5)

[One or two minor entries, defectively preserved, are here omitted.]

Night 60. Thursday, February 20th, 1987.(6) [Defective at the beginning. Ramer's story is lost.]

[When Michael Ramer had finished] reading his story, we sat in silence for a while. He had not read us anything for a long time; in fact he had seldom appeared at meetings for a year or more. His excuses for absence, when he gave any, had been vague and evasive. On this occasion the Club was better attended than usual, and no more easy to please. That hardly accounted for Ramer's nervousness. He is one of our oldest members, and was at one time one of our most frequent performers; but to-night he read hastily, boggling and stumbling. So much so that Frankley made him read several sentences over again, though these interruptions, which only made matters worse, are omitted above. Now he was fidgetting.

'Well?' he said at last. 'What do you think of it? Will it do?'

A few of us stirred, but nobody spoke.

'Oh, come on! I may as well get the worst over first. What have you got to say?' he urged, turning to Guildford in the next chair.

'I don't know,' Guildford answered reluctantly. 'You know how I dislike criticizing...'

'I've never noticed it before,' said Frankley.

'Go on, Nicholas!' laughed Lowdham. 'You dislike it about as much as Philip dislikes interrupting.'

'At any rate I don't criticize unfinished sentences,' said Guildford. 'If I'd not been interrupted, I was going to say I dislike criticizing off-hand, and still in the heat of listening.'

'In the chill's your more usual temperature,' said Lowdham.(7)

'Most unfair! I'm a voracious reader, and I like stories.'

A chorus of incredulous shouts followed, but Guildford could just be heard amending his words, first to I read a good many tales and like most of them, and finally to I do like some stories, including one or two of Ramer's. 'But it's much more difficult,'

he went on at last, 'to say anything about the liking, especially so soon. Liking is often much more complex than dislike. And it's less necessary to say anything about it in a hurry. The feeling of liking has a very lasting flavour; it can wait, it's often better for being stored for a bit. But defects stick out all hard and painful, while one's still close at hand.'

'For those who have the knack of seeing them in every literary landscape,' Ramer interposed.

'There are minor ones,' Guildford went on unperturbed, 'that may, of course, get forgotten, or be overlooked by familiarity; but they are better removed while fresh.'

'The sort that Philip corrects at once while you are reading?'

said Ramer.

'Yes,' said Guildford. 'But there are more serious faults than his anacolutha and split infinitives that may also get passed, if the thing's allowed to harden. It may be painful for the author to have the blindness of paternal love removed, but it seems the most useful thing to do on the spot. What's the good of sitting here, hearing things before they're in print, if all we're to do is to pat the father's back and murmur: Any child of yours is'..

welcome, Mr. Ramer. Your fiftieth, is it? Well, well! How they do all take after their dear father, don't they?'

Lowdham laughed. 'And what you're longing to say, I

suppose, is: Why don't you wipe the brat's nose, and get its hair cut?'

'Or strangle it!' said Ramer impatiently.

'No, seriously,' Guildford protested, 'I only objected to parts, not to the whole of your latest infant, Michael. Only to the first chapter and the end of the last one, really. But there! I suppose no one has ever solved the difficulty of arriving, of getting to another planet, no more in literature than in life. Because the difficulty is in fact insoluble, I think. The barrier cannot and will not ever be passed in mortal flesh. Anyway, the opening chapters, the journey, of space-travel tales seem to me always the weakest. Scientifiction, as a rule: and that is a base alloy. Yes it is, Master Frankley, so don't interrupt! Just as much as the word is an ill-made portmanteau: rotten for travelling with.

And that goes for your machine, too, Ramer. Though it's one of the better failures, perhaps.'

'Thank you for that!' Ramer growled. 'But it's just like you, Nicholas, to pick on the frame, which is an awkward necessity of pictures, and easy to change anyway, and say nothing about what's inside it. I suppose you must have seen something to praise inside: we know how painful you find praising anything.

Isn't that the real reason why you postpone it?'

'Nonsense!' said Guildford. 'I thought what was inside was very good, if you must have it. Though I felt there was something very odd about it.'

'I'm sure you did! '

'I mean odd coming from you. And in its setting. For you won't get away with that framed excuse. A picture-frame is not a parallel. An author's way of getting to Mars (say) is part of his story of his Mars; and of his universe, as far as that particular tale' goes. It's part of the picture, even if it's only in a marginal position; and it may seriously affect all that's inside.'

'Why should it?' said Frankley.

'Well, if there are space-ships at all in your imagined universe, you'll fail to sell it to me, for one thing,' said Guildford.

'That's carrying your anti-machine mania too far,' said Lowdham. 'Surely poor writers can include things you don't like in their stories?'

'I'm not talking about dislike at the moment,' Guildford returned. 'I'm talking about credibility. I don't like heroic warriors, but I can bear stories about them. I believe they exist, or could. I don't think space-ships do, or could. And anyway, if you pretend that they do, and use them for space-journeys in the flesh, they'll land you in space-ship sort of adventures. If you're spaceship-minded and scientifictitious, or even if you let your characters be so, it's likely enough that you'll find things of that order in your new world, or only see sights that interest such folk.'

'But that isn't true,' Frankley objected. 'It's not true of this story of Ramer's.'

'It's generally true, all too ghastly true.' said Guildford. 'But of course there is a way of escape: into inconsistency, discord.

Ramer takes that way, like Lindsay,(8) or Lewis, and the better post-Lewis writers of this sort of thing. You can land on another world in a space-ship and then drop that nonsense, if you've got something better to do there than most of the earlier writers had. But personally I dislike that acutely. It makes the scientifictitious bunkum all the worse by contrast. Crystal torpedoes, and "back-rays", and levers for full speed-ahead (faster than light, mark you), are bad enough inside one of those hideous magazines - Dead Sea fruit with gaudy rinds; but in, say, A Voyage to Arcturus * they are simply shocking. All the more so for being unnecessary. David Lindsay had at least two other better methods up his sleeve: the seance connexion; or the suggestion of the dark tower at the end. Thank goodness, there was at any rate no return by crystal torpedo in that tale!'(9)

'But the trick in Out of the Silent Planet, getting the hero kidnapped by space-ship villains, so as to explain how an interesting man ever got inside one, was not bad,' said Frankley.

'And the stupid villainy of the space-ship folk was essential.

They behaved as such people would, and the plot depends on that.'

'Not bad, I agree,' said Guildford. 'Still it was, as you say, a trick. And not first rate, not if you want sheer literary credibility, the pure thing, rather than an alloy with allegory and satire.

Ramer is not after any such Lewisite alloy; and I think his device of letting an intelligent artist get into a contraption by accident, not knowing what it is, is a mere trick. But what I really object to, in any such tale, however tinged, is the pretence that these contraptions could exist or function at all. They're indefinitely less probable - as the carriers of living, undamaged, human bodies and minds - than the wilder things in fairy-stories; but they pretend to be probable on a more material mechanical level. It's like having to take Heath-Robinsons seriously.'

'But you've got to have some kind of removal van,' said Frankley, 'or else do without this kind of story. They may not be (* This book had recently been rescued from oblivion by Jeremy's book on Imaginary Lands. See the account of his reading parts of this to the Club, above, Nights 30, 33, 40 [not preserved]. Most of the members are fairly well-read in twentieth-century books of travel in Space and Time. N.G.)

your sweetmeat, Nicholas, but I've got a tooth for them; and I'm not going to be done out of them by you.'

'You can wallow in Scientifiction mags, for all I care,' said Guildford; 'but I've got to have literary belief in my removal van, or I won't put my furniture into it. I have never met one of these vehicles yet that suspended my disbelief an inch off the floor.'

'Well, your disbelief evidently needs a power-crane,' said Frankley. 'You should look at some of the forgotten Old Masters, like Wells, if you've ever heard of him. I admit that what his first men found in the Moon was a bathos after the journey. But the machine and the journey were splendid. I don't of course, believe in a gravitation-insulator outside the story, but inside the story it worked, and Wells made damned good use of it. And voyages can end in grubby, vulgar, little harbours and yet be very much worth while.'

'It wouldn't be easy to miss the name of Wells with Jeremy always about,' said Guildford. 'And I have read The First Men in the Moon, and The Time Machine. I confess that in The Time Machine the landfall was so marvellous that I could have forgiven an even more ridiculous transport - though it would be difficult to think of one! All the same, the machine was a blemish; and I'm quite unconvinced that it was a necessary one.

And if it had been removed - the effect on the whole thing!

Enormous enhancement even of that remarkable tale.

'No doubt authors are in as great a hurry to get there as we are; but eagerness doesn't excuse carelessness. And anyway, we're older. We may allow the primitives their ingenuousness: we can't imitate it. Isn't it always so? What might do once won't do any longer. I used to read with gusto romances in which the hero just pushed off into the Blue, over mountains and deserts, without water supplies. But now I feel that procedure is slipshoddy.'

'There's no such word,' said Frankley.

'Shut up! ' said Lowdham.

'I want my man to have his adventures in the Blue, as much as ever, but I want to be made to feel that the author has faced the difficulties and not ignored them, or fudged them. It's usually all the better for the tale in the long run.

'Certainly I'll admit that if I allow Wells his "cavorite",(10) then he makes good use of it. If I'd been a boy when the tale was new, I should have allowed it and enjoyed it. But I can't allow it now. I'm post-Wells. And we're not criticizing him but Ramer, for using at this much later date a rather similar device. Any one who touches space-travel now has got to be much more convincing: if indeed a convincing machine is at present possible.

Command of power has prodigiously increased, but the problems have become more complex, and not simpler. Scientists can't destroy simple faith and hope still to keep it for themselves. A gravitation-insulator won't do. Gravity can't be treated like that. It's fundamental. It's a statement by the Universe of where you are in the Universe, and the Universe can't be tricked by a surname with ite stuck on the end, nor by any such abracadabra.

'And what of the effect on a man of being hurled out of one gravitational field through zero into another? Even on so elementary a journey as one to the Moon?'