The Dwarfs (12 page)

Twenty-three

- Shakespeare! Pete exclaimed, placing his mug with a thump on the table, what was Shakespeare? Only a jobbing playwright. A butcher’s boy with a randy eye. And yet he made his point. You know what you look like when you drink that beer? A porpoise with all its suckers working.

- That’s it, Mark said. Where these people go wrong is in trying to give him a name and number. Every so often someone decides he needs a change of underwear. What they don’t realize is that he’s dressed for all weathers and he can smell them a mile off. They think he can swing their case if they offer him a percentage of the profits. They hope he’ll turn King’s evidence in their favour. It’s all a lot of onion. He’s never attempted to cut anyone’s losses, least of all his own.

- Very true.

- He doesn’t go round with a needle and thread, Mark said, or a tenday cure. When does he attempt to sew up the wound, or reshape it?

- What you’re saying is that he’s not a moral poet.

- A moral poet? If you mean by that that he doesn’t canvass for one kind of plug as opposed to another, then I’m bloody sure he isn’t. If I said that then that’s what I’m saying. Drink up and we’ll have another one on moral plugs that bottle up the sink. What do you mean by morality?

- I’ll tell you, Pete said. I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking myself about this business. The way I look at it is this. Isn’t morality as we use the term the practice of good towards your fellows? A responsibility we have to assume where we are simply social creatures. But it’s only a convenience suited to the needs of a given situation, at a given time, in a
given place. It goes no way towards solving, do you know what I mean, the problem of good and evil, which is adjacent to any intelligent morality.

- What do you mean?

- Well, I don’t see how good and evil can be defined by contemplation of the results of particular actions. Good is a productive state of mind, if you like, as well as a social virtue. But a productive state of mind in some circumstances may become a sterile one in others. Good and evil, they’re both qualified by circumstances. As chemicals, they’re neither arbitrary nor static.

- Give me your can, Mark said.

He walked to the bar and returned with two best bitters.

- Cheers.

- Leave Hamlet out of it. He’s another story. But the others, Othello, Macbeth and Lear, are men whose great virtues are converted by their very superfluity into faults. Do you see what I mean? Othello is jealous because of an excess of love. But look at it. He was in love only so long as his affections were unhampered by the necessity to explain them. Lear’s extreme of magnanimity starts the landslide. Macbeth’s real trouble was that he thought too much of his wife. The trouble with these people is that they refuse to recognize their own territorial limitations. Their feelings are in excess of the facts. All they’re doing is living beyond their means. And when they have to act, not upon their notions but upon their beliefs, they’re found to be lacking. When they’re called to account by common justice they’re wrong. At the same time, of course, they’re right. They’re right according to our admiration and sympathy. But that’s to look at them in no way morally.

- What are we sympathizing with?

- We’re sympathizing with what they are when unhampered by the responsibility of action. The necessity of action smothers their virtue. They cease to be morally thinking creatures. Lear, Macbeth and Othello are all forced, in one
way or another, to account for what they do and they all fail to do it. Lear and Macbeth don’t even attempt to.

The till snapped down and rang through the smoke.

- All they can see is the natural process of cause and effect working in a system of which they have ceased to be a part. They fall away from this system by lack of a social virtue. By not thinking for others. In each case, the initial thinking for others was superficial and unrealized, delusive. Their unique qualities gave them, if you like, the power of dispensation over others. So they thought. Wait a minute. The point, you see, the point is, that as all things are qualified by relevant circumstances, so they considered they were not responsible to a code of morality which did not take them into account. Where these geezers slip up is that they try to overcome a machine of which they remain, whether they like it or not, a part. The machine, if you like, is morality, the standards of the majority. It seems to me that Shakespeare justifies both the man and the machine.

- If he does, how can it be said that he’s a moral poet? Mark said, I mean, look what he does. Look at the way he behaves. He never uses a communication cord or a lifebelt, and what’s more, he never suggests he’s got one handy for your use or his.

- No.

- How can moral judgements be applied when you consider how many directions he travels at once? Hasn’t he got enough troubles? Look at what he gets up to. He meets himself coming back, he sinks in at the knees, he forgets the drift, he runs away with himself, he falls back on geometry, he turns down blind alleys, he stews in his own juice, and he nearly always ends up by losing all hands. But the fabric, mate, never breaks. The tightrope is never at less than an even stretch. He keeps in business, that’s what, and if he started making moral judgements he’d go bankrupt like the others.

- The point about Shakespeare, Pete said, thumping the
table, is that he didn’t measure the man up against the idea and give you hot tips on the outcome.

- He wasn’t a betting man.

- He laid bare, that’s all. I’d defy any man who said he saw good and evil as abstractions. He didn’t. Admitted, our own moral sense, such as it is, is likely to be obliterated during these doings. And if you take that obliteration as bad, you can call Shakespeare an immoral poet. But on the other hand, while the experience neutralizes our own morality we must retain some standards by which to measure the whole business. If we had no terms of reference, the experience would be lost.

- Well?

- What takes place is a substitution. We have, instead of common or garden morality - a socio-religious convention depending upon the consent of men to live with each other - we have instead of that the simple fact of man as his own involuntary judge, because as a man of choice he’s finally obliged to accept responsibility for his actions. You could say then, that in so far as he points that out, he is a moral poet.

- Ah. So where are we now?

- Back where we started.

- Where’s that?

- Back in the booze, Pete said. Come to me when I’m sober. The whole matter’s so full of loose ends it gives me heartburn.

- What’ll you have?

- Same again.

Pete surveyed the crowded pub, blackgrained and mirrored. Over the head of a redscarfed girl he glimpsed his face in the glass, now blotted out by shifting figures, grazed by smoke, now arrested. Levelly regarding himself, he felt for matches and packet, and lit a cigarette.

- Well, Mark said, placing the mugs on the table, this pub is aware of a visitation tonight.

- Yes, Pete said, the Angel of Death has passed over.

- Did he have one on the house? Cheers.

- You know what, Mark? Good health. You know what your trouble is?

- What’s that?

- You want to become a myth.

- A myth is what you make it.

- Shall I tell you the right way to go about it?

- A hot tip, eh?

- Follow me. I am the way and the truth. I am the resurrection and the life.

- I believe you.

- It’s gospel, Pete said. When I was born they were waiting on the doorstep with a form for me to fill up. I said I’d accept the job on two conditions.

- What were they?

- First, that I was to have a free hand. I’d send in my reports in my own time.

- What did they say to that?

- Wouldn’t give me a straight answer. And they’ve been queering my pitch ever since.

- It’s a carve-up, Mark said. What was the second condition?

- I wanted a worthwhile Judas.

- Well?

- Eh? I haven’t met anyone who was quite up to the mark, when all’s said and done.

- When is all said and done?

- God has the last word.

- What, with you? I don’t believe it.

- God! Pete said. Listen! His stupidity is his own misfortune. If he can’t see that I’m the only hope he’s got to get him out of the hole he’s in, then he deserves nothing else but my contempt. Give me your glass.

He walked to the bar. Mark glimpsed, between faces and shoulders, his own face in the mirror. He concentrated to erase his frown and watched his forehead jolt down, smooth.

- Mind your elbow.

- Did they shower you with dignities, as befits your position? Mark asked.

- Position?

- Aide-de-camp to the Lord. Eh, wait a minute, you must be the Holy Ghost.

- Up your Holy Ghost, Pete said, sitting down. No, the fact of the matter, if you really want to know, is that I’m finished with all that. It was a lark. Look here. I once thought I was a genius. I’m not. I’m a specimen. That’s the secret. But I’m prepared, mate, to take myself off the top shelf. I can’t see myself for dust. My marketprice is going down. But I’m prepared to recant like a human. The point is, I want living to uphold me. Yes. And another thing, while we’re at it. I’ve said a few rude things about you in the past. And I don’t take them back. But the truth’s all things. Your faults don’t make your virtues any less true.

- I haven’t got any faults, Mark said. I am composed of properties and characteristics. No moral blame attached. I have no faults.

- Now now. You can’t wash all the blackheads off your face with a statement like that. You might wash your face away. And what would a geezer like you do without a face?

- No bones broken, Mark said.

He lurched to the bar and came back with two double whiskies.

- Hallo, hallo.

- No holds barred, said Mark.

- Well, who shall we toast?

- Let’s toast Virginia.

- Right.

- In what fashion?

- Austerely, Pete said. In high simplicity.

- How? What’s the order of the sentence?

- To Virginia.

- A textbook toast.

- Why, what do you think?

- Think?

- Any modifications?

- No, I like it.

- All right.

They lifted glasses.

- I think that’s a fair toast, don’t you?

- It’s a textbook toast, Mark said.

- You’re right.

- We must drink to Len sometime too.

- We can do that with the beer, Pete said.

- Of course.

- We’ll do this one first.

- Right.

- OK.

- Wait a minute, Mark said. We don’t touch glasses?

- No. That’s elaboration.

- That’s true.

- Ready?

- Yes.

They lifted glasses.

- To Virginia.

- To Virginia.

- Good whisky, Pete said.

- Now for Len.

- Yes.

- We can’t just say - To Len.

- No, you’ve got something there.

- That’s no good.

- I know, Pete said.

- What?

- To Weinblatt.

- Good enough.

They lifted mugs.

- To Weinblatt.

- To Weinblatt.

- I wonder what he’s up to now, Mark said.

- Probably sitting on top of the Arc de Triomphe, playing his recorder.

- Do you know where you are at the moment?

- Where?

- In the centre of literary London. The bud of culture.

- All passion spent. It’s all a big assumption.

- I’m made of beer.

- And I’ll tell you something, Pete said. Space is pure perception. And time is nothing but a formal condition.

- Pete, said Mark, all sorts of things stare me in the face when I wake up in the morning. I can tell you that.

- That’s why you can’t take no for an answer.

- No is no answer because it’s always yes. There’s no no. No is nothing and when you’re nothing there’s no question. No qua no is no and that’s that. Otherwise they needn’t come and no their noes.

- I’m not going to bid the thunderbearer shoot, Pete said. That was his error.

- He was dropping a clangor which must be dropped.

- It must be dropped, Pete said.

He reached for the mugs and stood up, returning from the bar with two pints.

- You’re quite right there, Mark. It must be dropped.

- Have we reached the eighteenth hole yet?

- You’re near the waterjump.

- Listen, said Mark, cancel my subscription for next year, will you? I’m resigning.

- There was a poet at the bar, Pete said.

- What did he say to me about you?

- He asked me if I knew who he was.

- Yes?

- I told him he didn’t look it.

- Quite right.

- The Rabbi was in bed with his mistress, Pete said, when his landlady knocked on the door. He jumped under the bed,
leaving his bowler hat between the woman’s legs. In comes the landlady. Oy gevalt, she says. The Rabba est arangafelen!

They collapsed at the table.

- Why can you speak Yiddish? Mark asked. Who’s the Jew here, me or you?

- It’s the system, Pete said. Do you know there are beautiful women in this pub?

- Every time. Where’s Virginia?

- She’s at home.

- At home?

- At her home.

- That’s a point.

- Yes, that’s the way. I’m beginning to see things.

- See things? That’s more than I am.

- I’m breaking through a question, through a false, mate, hypothesis.

- Don’t ask me, Mark said, about the whole business. What nobody understands is -

- That’s all right.

- No, nobody understands that.

- You can never tell.

- I’m easy, Mark said. What are all these empty spaces?

- Shutting up shop.

- That’s out of all proportion. I say out. When I say out they accuse me of dogma.

- They wouldn’t dream of it.

- What do you mean, dogma?

- Up you get.

- Up guards.

- Come on.

- Up.

They walked up Oxford Street and across the roads to Grape Street. Mark clutched the bus stop.