The History Man (5 page)

In fact what happened, at the purely external level, was that one afternoon a friend that the Kirks had made, a psychology student named Hamid, an Egyptian with big dark eyes and an obsessive devotion to Jung and Lawrence Durrell, had called at the flat, wanting to interest them in going to a jazz concert that evening. It was late in the afternoon, but Howard, who was – not by pure chance, says modern Howard – forgetful of the time, was still working away in the university library, busily reading other people's theses, and making notes on them, in order to write his own. Hamid had brought with him to the flat some photographs of Abu Simbel, and a box of Turkish Delight, and so somehow Barbara went to bed with him, in the high bed with the wooden head and foot, in the room overlooking the rotting garden. She had squeaked with a certain pleasure, though it was not anything more than a hasty fumble under the covers, by no means an exceptional moment for either party. But it left Barbara with a residue of severe guilt; it was, says Howard now, typical that her response to this was to drive it down and deny it, in the hope of suppressing the entire episode. However, Hamid had his own obscure moral imperatives to pursue; he insisted on staying for supper, and his purpose was, as it emerged, to tell Howard all about the moment on the high bed that afternoon, when, as he explained, Barbara and he had made some love. ‘I think,' says Howard now, ‘the purpose he had in mind, natural enough from his cultural standpoint, was to establish intimacy between the male parties. We have to recognize his culturally determined view of women.' ‘My God,' says Barbara, ‘he just liked me.' ‘That's compatible,' says Howard. So Hamid, with his dark eyes, made his confession, comfortably awaiting Howard's response, while Howard sat, his jaws working on the supper, in a state of profound shock. ‘My first thought was violence,' he says, ‘not against Hamid, of course, against Barbara. I felt penetrated myself. The ethic of total possession of the woman you're married to runs very deep. Or did.' But he was calm, for he was intelligent, and in any case he had been taught, overtaught, to control and exclude aggression.

And he did know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history; he knew how quantitative change suddenly becomes qualitative change, and how reification occurs, and how sex is not simply genital interaction but an ultimate discharge of the libido, a psychic manifestation. He had known it all the time; now he realized it. For some time he had been feeling obscurely touched by and dispossessed by the way in which, in the onward transactions of the historical process, some new human rhythm, a new mode of consciousness, seemed to be emerging. He had felt it in the young people (at that time the young people were, to the Kirks, other people: they were the twenty-five-year-old old people) and in the revolts and the expressions of the American blacks, and in the Third World, the world Hamid came from. Now he felt stranded in historical foolishness, but he had a little sense of hope for himself. He sat over the sausages, and he listened to Hamid, who spoke in fatalistic terms (‘It is what happens, Howard, because these things are willed to happen') and then to Barbara, who defended herself with a sudden new aggression (‘I'm a person, Howard. I've been a person here all this time, stuck in this room, and he saw it, and you never have'). He poked a sausage; he recognized historical inevitability. The small revolution had come. ‘I looked across the table at this person I had been calling a wife for the last few years, and her face suddenly switched on and turned real for me,' Howard says. ‘Mine did?' asks Barbara. ‘Mine?' ‘That's right,' says Howard. ‘And when one face becomes real, all faces become real.' ‘Right,' says Barbara, ‘especially the pretty ones.'

Barbara's tiny affair in the high bed had a powerful effect; it excited the Kirks with each other. And so they found themselves taken, for a time, with a hazy dream in front of them, a dream they talked out and out; it was a dream of expanded minds, equal dealings, high erotic satisfactions, a transcendence of what they had up to now taken to be reality. They now started transcending reality quite frequently, making love in parks, smoking pot at parties, going up on the moors past Adel and running with their clothes off through the wind, buying stereo equipment, taking trips to London, rubbing margarine on each other in bed, going on demos. It was just after this affair of Barbara's that Howard's father died (‘One inevitably recognizes the removal of the psychic focus of paternalist constraint,' says Howard, ‘of course, I cared for him a lot'), and only a few days later Howard was asked to apply for a temporary assistant lectureship, right there at Leeds, in the department where he had been doing his research; a post he very quickly got. There were a few finishing touches to be given to the thesis, but he could set that more or less aside for a while; now the task was to prepare for teaching, get further into the ranges and depths of sociology. On the strength of the appointment, the Kirks got a bigger flat, with a smaller bed, and were able to install a new cooker, hire a television set, and have a few small parties. They made some new, and much more radical, friends, among other postgraduate students, and now as well among the faculty. The fact that he was no longer a man who was marked but a man who would mark pulled him out of the mental waste land of subservient achievement in which he had lived. The Kirks spent the summer in a state of continuous excitement; it was the most exciting summer of their lives.

Indeed things over those summer months began to get a little dangerous with them. They got up each morning feeling physically sated, excited with their own bodies and the other body that had excited them with their own. They talked a lot to each other about swinging, feeling good, getting high. They looked at each other and observed limitations, the obstructiveness of the other self, which was always so very there, always so very insistent, to the onward path they each had chosen; they each accused the other, from time to time, of closing the doors, killing the options, holding back, getting out. They quarrelled quite often; but these were no longer the mean little quarrels that their mean little selves, the selves of the old dispensation, before their consciousness revolution, had indulged in before, quarrels so low-keyed as to be almost invisible, while remaining deeply felt and unresolved. ‘It was a politics of growth,' says Howard, ‘an elaborate dialectic of self-statement. It was exactly what was needed.' ‘But, How, you've got to remember,' says Barbara, ‘there was still a deep bourgeois element.' ‘Oh, right, there was indeed,' says Howard, ‘it was inevitable.' ‘And I remained in his eyes essentially property, still,' says Barbara. ‘Of course it's an inevitable contradiction structured into the institution of marriage,' says Howard, ‘and we came from the generation that focused on marriage.' ‘Of course,' says Barbara, ‘we're still in fact married.' ‘But on our own terms,' adds Howard, ‘we've redefined it internally.' ‘I'll say,' says Barbara.

When the new academic year came around in the autumn, and Howard began teaching for the very first time, he found that the events of the summer had given him the gift for bringing a passionate fervour into the subject, making him want to teach it as it had never been taught before. He took his classes to the law courts, and lectured them in the corridors, until the noise became so great that he was asked to leave. He went with them and they all spent the night in a Salvation Army hostel, to know at first hand. He got into demography and social psychology, and took a Wright Mills reformist approach to the field. He found himself deeper into the academic sub-culture, the lifestyle of his fellow-lecturers and especially of his fellow-sociologists. He talked very seriously and solemnly about theoretical matters. He took to wearing the black leather jackets that most of his colleagues, for some reason, affected. There were many new beards in 1963; Howard's was one of them. Later he started selling
Red Mole
in the city centre on Saturdays, holding a copy high in his clenched fist in front of the faces of the market shoppers. Barbara no longer sat in the flat. She came to the university, went to lectures, attended political meetings, visited filmshows, and stapled provocative posters on boards when nobody was looking. She got into health foods and astrology, studying vitamin levels and cholesterol counts, and doing horoscopes of political opponents. She went to all the faculty parties, and became very outgoing and popular, standing in corners in lowcut dresses raising tendentious issues, and drinking a great deal. Altogether the Kirks became well known as a feature of the younger faculty, and one of the lively centres of the culture they had going.

They also both started having small affairs. Howard tried the wives of his friends, with what he thought of as the Hamid strategy, and was surprised to find how available many of them were, and how it improved his confidence in himself, and his social courage. Barbara began taking her pleasures at the parties they went to, slipping upstairs to the bedroom with someone around midnight, and then returning downstairs for the early-morning action, when dancing started or the pot started circulating, not wanting to miss a thing. They felt the strain, and some of the other relationships they formed seemed tempting, worth enlarging; they talked quite often about separating, feeling now that they were really bad for each other, and that the only real answer was a new start. None of their other relationships really became permanent, however. Once Barbara went and stayed for a week with some friends, the Beamishes, Henry Beamish being another young lecturer in the department; she took the television set with her, and began looking around in Leeds for a flat of her own. But their friends were all people who had psychological insights, and so they explained Howard's problems to Barbara, and Barbara's problems to Howard, and this made them seem quite interesting to each other again. So they ended up back together, at the end of the week, on a new alignment. This all had a rapid consequence; Barbara got pregnant. ‘Oh, God, the primitive techniques we used then,' says Barbara, ‘we were playing Russian roulette.' Barbara quite enjoyed the pregnancy, and she got massively fat. Her big peasant bosom swelled and she carried her enormous bump buoyantly in front of her. She went to natural childbirth classes, and Howard came along too; he did the exercises down on the floor along with her, sympathetically pushing when the nurse said push. When Barbara went into Leeds Infirmary, Howard insisted on being present. Indeed when the day came at last, he decided not to cancel his class, but to take the group along and see the birth, examining the problems of the National Health Service and the conditions of maternity care. The sister was strict and uncooperative, so the class waited out in the grounds, peering at windows, while Barbara delivered, by the Lamaze method, with Howard present, giving instructions and encouragement through a white mask. Then it was all over. Barbara sweated and the veins in her eyeballs stood out red, while Howard stared with intense and profound curiosity at the mystery of life, encapsulated there between his wife's legs, and contemplated the conditions and determinants, the Marx and the Freud, the history and the sex, that led to this most extraordinary of all outcomes.

Barbara had not at first welcomed the pregnancy, for she was enjoying things too much; but in the end it was a kind of victory for her. Howard had pushed sympathetically on the floor of the clinic, but in the end he had produced nothing; Barbara had made the ultimate statement, published in the ultimate way. Thereafter Howard had a lot of baby-minding to do, and he often slept in the day, in his chair in the room he had at the university, so as to be sure to be awake and aware for the two-o'clock feeds. He did his part, but all the same Barbara claimed to be struggling in the maternal yoke, which denied as well as satisfied, and so she made him pay her an economic salary for her useful social role as a wife and a mother, as proof that she was not second-class. But, after two months spent in the full-time company of the baby, she began to feel that it was time to realize herself as a fully-fledged economic unit. It was somehow only when an achievement was tested in the open, competitive market that it was a real achievement, a full mode of being, an existential act; she had started, in these matters, to acquire vocabulary from Howard. What she did was to get a neighbour to come in and mind the child, while she did part-time jobs on public opinion surveys and in market research, arguing with housewives in the Leeds back-to-backs about how important their views were on detergents and decimal currency, Rhodesia, abortion, and Coronation Street. She gradually became persuaded that market research was a community service, a form of grass-roots expressionism, of political action, and that she was very good at it. Altogether over this stage she became very bright and contented. Howard, correspondingly, came to feel very depressed. He was getting very tired, and doubted the rewards that were coming to him from his close, intense relationship with the small fleshly creature that was his baby. He liked the child, but not as much as he was being asked to; he actually suspected Barbara of neglect. But the trouble, for both of them, was that they had by now become busy people; there was so much for each of them to do. Now he acquired a bewildered expression, and a faint air of defeat. But he let his hair grow very long, and began to push people around intellectually at parties. He drank more, and looked sad. Gradually he found, to his surprise, that he was earning sympathy and regard; his recent troubles had impressed all the people he knew a good deal, and he was, with his accumulating reputation for having a vigorous and even dangerous wife, and an affair problem, and a baby problem, for the first time being considered as a very seriously interesting person.

It was at this time that the Kirks first started telling, to friends and acquaintances and utter strangers, their story. They presented it as the exemplary case of the Kirks, an instructive public matter, the tale of two bewildered people who had failed themselves and then suddenly grown. It was an attractive and popular story for the times, and it went through many refinements. The earlier tellings had concentrated on the liberation plot; the cramped lives, the affair, the running around naked on the moors, the explosion of consciousness and new political awareness. But after a while, there were certain elements of scepticism that needed to be introduced for probability's sake, not utterly disconfirming the tale of a couple moving buoyantly, self-realizingly, through the exploding consciousness of man in history, perhaps even complicating and improving it. For there were severe ambiguities and dark places in their relationship. The way Howard explained this, to himself and to a few others, was that they had moved from a consensus model of marriage, the usual model of marriage, which is generally taken as an ultimate consensus, wherein conflict is generated but ultimately reconciled with the famous kiss, to a conflict model, in which interests were starkly defined, and ultimate resolution must depend on violence or the defeat of one of the parties. What Howard was out to articulate was the suspicion, which could of course have been paranoid, that Barbara was out to destroy him. She of course denied this, when they talked about it; however, as Howard kept telling her, the question could not be posed at the conscious, but had to reckon with the unconscious, level. One thing was certainly true; Barbara, because she was using her mind more, was getting brighter. She had a shrewd, bitter intelligence, a strong nature, and more gift for feeling than he had. She also had the subtle arts of attack, and could use them on him well; there were times when Howard wondered whether he could survive them.