The Game (25 page)

‘I —’

‘And television opens up to art – to this consciousness – all sorts of things that weren’t available or were getting excluded. Like your stuff.’

‘Yes. I shouldn’t have thought my work was of absorbing interest – or importance – to them.’

‘Your ratings don’t tell that tale. No, honestly, you show them wonders.’

‘What I’m trying to say is, I’m not an artist.’

‘I don’t see that.’

‘You don’t listen. If – if there’s an artist concerned, it was my friend, Antony Miller. Who is dead. He – he made the films. But I don’t – I suspect your terminology. I can’t put my finger on it, but I —’

‘Well, we’ve got you.’ Ivan waved an expansive hand. ‘Even if we can’t have him. Hamlet without Shakespeare. You did agree to appear.’

‘Oh yes.’ Simon turned away, leaned over the ice-bucket, and dropped, with tongs, two ice-cubes splat into his drink. It was almost an angry movement. Ivan watched him. He felt for some reason wrathful. On first meeting Simon he had felt, seeing in the flesh the patient face, loose and composed, curiously drawn to him. After a moment’s uneasy silence, apparently weighted with significance, he had been impelled to talk, and to talk at length, without mockery, about what he believed in. For two minutes or so he had thought he was addressing an enthralled listener. Now, there seemed to be no one there. Silently, somehow, Simon had cheated him. He retreated into the professional thought that whatever he was in the jungle, on this programme Simon Moffitt was going to be an inadequate and embarrassing performer. Then, as the professional thought ran into the private thought, he
decided that Julia could not, now, find this irritable person attractive. Ivan was satisfied with his own body and cared for it. Julia could not like this pitted skin, this nervous Adam’s apple, these loose lips. Where Simon had shaved his beard a hot rash had spread disastrously, making his face a strange patchwork of walnut and rose. He caught Simon’s eye.

‘A lot of surface interest,’ he said, waving a hand towards the face.

‘What?’

‘Surface interest. For the camera.’

‘Oh,’ said Simon simply, taking a large and apparently painful gulp of gin. He prolonged the uneasy silence that followed until the arrival of the other members of the
Lively Arts
team.

These were a poet, a musician, and a sculptor. They were all young, and struggling to become established. The musician, a pale blond youth called Percy Mottram was doing best: he was both composer and violinist. He was unpopular with the other artists and popular with the public for the same reasons: he was very beautiful, with a diffident, appealing face, and contributed to discussion a personal, down-to-earth, no-nonsense touch, as though he spoke for the man in the street. The other artists considered this mischievous. Ben McIntyre, the sculptor, had once said that if Percy occasionally wrote like an angel he invariably talked with the vulgarity and banality of most librettos. Ben was vociferous and expected. He had a bushy red beard and a navy, polo-necked sweater, and smelled slightly. There had been a good programme on his work, which was obsessed by a kind of wire puzzle trickery of bent, or mobile rods imprisoning an anguished, semi-human figure for whom escape was possible through a combination of padlocks, clues of thread, pressed levers. Except that the figure was welded to the base, or broken on the bars, or hung in chains amongst what looked like a forest of violent television aerials. These works had appeared more impressive under the camera’s moving eye than they did standing alone on plinth or rostrum.
The poet, Gordon Bottome, taught in a technical college, was the chairman of the meetings, and able to speak fluently through all gaps and uncertainties. He was metrically sound, Left-wing in sympathies, saw literature as the regenerating force of civilization, in so far as he had any faith that civilization could be regenerated, and wrote, largely, ironic meditations on strangers glimpsed on buses or in railway buffets and careful meditations on what poetry might be for, or might do to you. He irritated Ivan, and had been put on to the programme by Ivan’s superiors to curb what was, in this context, Ivan’s fanatical belief in his own powers, and to restrain Ivan from attempting to be over-ambitious or over-complicated. Ivan told him that he was an educationalist first, not an artist, and he retorted that if this was the case he was not ashamed of it. He was fond, also, of laying down the law about what the audience ‘could take’ of a given subject. What the audience could take was usually minimal.

To these persons Ivan introduced Simon Moffitt, who swallowed nervously and choked. He explained that they were first to watch several of Simon’s films, and then would hold a ‘completely random’ discussion of his work; from the recording of this a more formal discussion could be plotted and laid out for the programme. Simon, his eyes half-closed, looked into his glass. Ivan tried to assess the effect of Simon on the team – he wished Simon would do or say something to sustain that pitch of fanatical faith in his importance which was necessary if they were to work well together. During his explanation Julia, who was, as usual, late, made an entrance.

She had come to hate arriving at
Lively Arts
meetings. Since she was the only woman on the team she had at first been an object for its attention, and had later become the object of a kind of clubbish exclusion which she felt another woman would have been able to avoid. On this occasion she was flustered by having, unwisely, provoked an altercation just before leaving by asking Mrs Baker to wash the overflowing bucketful of fouled nappies in the bathroom. Mrs Baker felt
more secure, Julia had decided, now she saw herself as a weapon in a domestic civil war, rather than an object of charity. So she had made some play with the difference between her own grimy overall and Julia’s fine woollen shift, low-necked, pale apricot, drawn up girlishly with a string under the breasts. Julia felt bad. She had made her stand just before coming out so that she would not have to stay in the flat and feel bad. But, having come out, she felt distracted and disproportionately menaced.

She saw Simon before he saw her: beyond Ben, a drooping, horribly significant figure. Her stomach turned, and for a moment she thought of simply going away. Ivan at her elbow said, ‘Come and meet our guest personality, Ju.’

Simon looked up, his eyes folded behind his cheek-bones. He said, ‘Why, Julia,’ and then, surprisingly, came half-way across the room and kissed her. Julia, who would have found this gesture normal in any of the other men present, clung to him, trembling.

‘Simon and Julia were childhood friends,’ said Ivan with his Chinese grin.

‘This is your life,’ said Percy. Ben, Percy, and Gordon grinned too.

‘Simon.’ Julia let him go and gathered herself. ‘I’ve watched every one of your programmes all the way through. It gives one a funny one-way feeling of being in touch. But you’ve really been gone for ever. I honestly never dreamed you’d ever come back. Are you all right?’

He nodded, screwed up his face, peered at her intently, and said rather vaguely, ‘Yes, of course. And how are you? How is Cassandra?’

‘She’s well,’ said Julia carefully. Simon said nothing. Julia made an effort to elaborate. ‘She’s not very much changed. Not very much. She’s a don, you know, in Oxford. One doesn’t change as much as one thinks one is going to,’ she offered.

‘No. But I suppose you’re both —’ he looked round the room, took a gulp of gin, considered his own feet, waved his
hand, ‘I suppose you’re both a bit more normal now.’ He laughed. Ivan laughed loudly. Percy and Ben and Gordon laughed. Julia said with aplomb, ‘Well, a little bit more normal.’ But her cheeks, like his, were burning. It was an odd thing to have said.

Ivan poured gin and said, ‘It depends what you mean by normal, Simon. From what I know of them, they’re both monsters.’ He laughed again. Simon’s gaze rested on him and returned to Julia. Julia was suddenly possessed by the fear that Ivan intended to embark on a description of her book, and could think of nothing to say to stop this happening. She looked at Simon in despair; his flaming, chequered face, with its pimples, and the small, livid scars of countless bites even on the eyelids. I felt about him, she thought, oh yes, I did feel.

‘How is the rest of your family?’ Simon went on, doggedly. ‘How is your father?’

‘He died. In February.’

‘I’m
sorry
,’ cried Simon, in sudden, gawky, anguish. ‘I’m
sorry.’
He twisted away from her and wrung his hands. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘That doesn’t matter. One can’t go on and on being sensitive. I mean, one’s got to talk, of course one has. One’s got to get over things.’

‘Do you think so?’ said Simon, leaning towards her with sudden intensity. ‘Do you find it easy? Do you find … do you find … tell me, Julia—’

‘Time to talk about snakes,’ Ivan said. ‘You can talk about each other later.’

The team sat together on a set of Arne Jacobsen chairs which they had chosen from a furniture exhibition together, and watched through several of Simon’s films. Julia was appalled and moved by these all over again, seeing them as a series of simple, perfected images, which she did not understand, and whose meaning she would rather not formulate. There was the husk of snakeskin, the dry, perfect mask of the animal which
had rolled itself away sleekly elsewhere, the dead, butterfly-sucked pig, the anaconda coiled in a black pool under a milky froth of water-blossoms, its patterned skin blending with lights and shadows, the small constrictor which swallowed a white rat whilst Simon expatiated on its throat muscles and the scaly, pale tail twitched, protesting, out of the mouth corner. Once or twice she looked at Simon, who stared, apparently fascinated, at himself, blinking nervously and fiddling inexpertly with a cigarette.

Afterwards Ivan said, ‘Now, I want a tape of a good general discussion of these films, with all of you throwing out any ideas at all you may have, and we’ll see what we can make of them. I’ve been talking to Simon here about this, but I thought I’d go over the ground a bit just to give you a line on where to get started.

‘Now we’ve had a lot of stuff on this programme about what sort of areas of human experience can be treated in different media. We’ve had Philip Larkin saying he used to think you could write a poem about anything and now he thinks there are specifically
poetic subjects
, and all that lark. Now the telly’s an almost virgin and unexploited
art medium
and we’ve said nothing about it – bar that vile and acrimonious discussion of what differences there might be between television drama and live drama. Now, I think the really worked out documentary is something unique in our time. I think it’s more important than it may appear to be, for reasons I’ll give you. But the first thing I want to say is, there are documentaries and documentaries. Some are just higgledy-piggledy thrusting of indiscriminate information at a voracious public. Some are something else. I find Simon Moffitt’s programmes deeply moving – deeply moving – as I find a work of art. I don’t know if the rest of you feel that.

‘Now, the first thought I want to put in your heads is: we’ve got over-compartmentalized in the way we approach life. We see some things as art, some as science, some as information and so on. One of the bad things about this is the way the arts have got so
refined.
Abstract paintings, symbolist poems,
musique concrète
, novels full of symbols not people, we all know what I mean. Now, I’d have said one thing that characterizes our culture is a hunger for
facts.
A tremendous need to understand, to map out, to believe in the solid world we live in. Art doesn’t give it as it used to. Indeed, it tries to fight facts – self-destroying mechanical sculptures, Pop Art making cigarette machines look absurd, or hallucinatory, that sort of thing. Now, look, now, look, people can’t take this. They’re reading more and more biography, popularized science, psychological case histories, travel literature, if you look at what they like on the telly – educated and uneducated, they all go for Z Cars – it’s something that reproduces a reality they recognize. Now, once the artist – oh, think of the Flemish painters, think of the Victorian novelists – used to delight in reproducing the details of the world he lived in. But not any more. What documentary art we’ve got is a bit flat and uninspired. But what about our real documentaries? The film’s the only art medium now where things’ve not got self-conscious to the point of self-parody or almost private meditation. Perhaps we artists ought to spend more time in the company of people concerned at first-hand with facts. Or perhaps we aren’t the real artists any more. Perhaps people like Simon Moffitt are. So I want us to analyse what we get out of these films.’

Julia looked at Simon, who, with shaking hands, lit one cigarette from the butt of the last.

Gordon Bottome said, ‘I take your point, Ivan, about our lives having become over-compartmentalized. I should say, regretfully, that this is necessary. We can’t hope in a life-time to begin to come to grips with a large part of the areas of knowledge or the ways of life we know are available. But we should perhaps make a conscious effort to be less exclusive. In the seventeenth century any sort of treatise could be literature, could be art. Think of
The Compleat Angler.
Or, a medical compendium,
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Or, a wrong-headed scientific venture, Sir Thomas Browne’s
Garden of Cyrus.
Or Bacon. I can’t imagine any modern arts department looking at
the current equivalent of those, however well written. Not that most of them are, regrettably, well-written. Our culture has indeed become divided. Our language is a blunted instrument.’

He looked around the group. Percy said, ‘Yes.’ No one seemed anxious to develop his point. After a moment he said, ‘We might do better if we saw art as a technique, not a mystique. In the seventeenth century, if you said ‘He wants art” you didn’t mean “he hasn’t got a special vision of special meaning in life”. You meant, “He lacks the power to make what he says coherent and meaningful and pleasing.” If he went back to that, we might even be able to take in – some of us – scientific and technological subjects we now shy away from as if they smelled.’