The History Man (8 page)

In the adjacent countryside, disturbed birds chattered, and sheep ran about heavily and snorted; Howard stared, and wondered at his place in all this. Barbara, who was cold, went inside, escorted by a punctilious Marvin, concerned about her pregnancy; Howard found himself detained in lengthy conversation by a middle-aged man with a benign, self-conscious charm, and the healthy, crack-seamed face of an Arctic explorer. Moths flew about them while they talked. Howard, in his fur coat, discoursed on a topic he had grown greatly interested in; the social benefits and purgative value of pornography in the cinema. ‘I've always been a serious supporter of pornography, Dr Kirk,' said the man he was talking to, ‘I have expressed my view in the public forum many times.' It dawned on Howard, from the tone of demotic regality in which he was being addressed, that he was talking to no other person than Millington Harsent, that radical educationalist, former political scientist, well-known Labour voter and mountain climber, who was Vice-Chancellor of the university of which Howard was now a part. He was a man of whom Howard had heard much; the radical aroma, the sense of educational freshness, that the colour supplements and professional journals had found in Watermouth were said to emanate from him. More locally, he had the reputation of suffering from building mania, or, as it was put, an Edifice Complex, and to have put many of his energies into dreaming up, along with Jop Kaakinen, the futuristic campus where Howard taught. It is hard to be a Vice-Chancellor, who must be all things to all men; Harsent had won the reputation for being this, but in reverse; he was thought by the conservatives to be an extreme radical, by the radicals to be an extreme conservative. But now this man, who was known for bonhomous democracy (he rode round the campus on a bicycle, and was said to have smoked pot occasionally at student parties), stood before Howard, and spoke to him warmly, and squeezed one of his shoulders, and congratulated the university on Howard's presence there, and discussed his book as if he knew what was in it; Howard warmed, and felt at ease. ‘I can't tell you how pleased we are to have someone of your stature here,' said Harsent. ‘You know,' said Howard, ‘I'm quite pleased to be here.'

Harsent and Howard passed into the house together, in search of the source of the Niersteiner; Harsent pressed on Howard, out of a briefcase in the hall, a copy of the university's development plan, and a special brochure, an elegant document printed on dove-grey paper, and written five years earlier still, at the beginning of all these things, by Jop Kaakinen, whose inspired buildings were springing everywhere into existence on campus. ‘That's Genesis,' said Harsent, ‘I suppose you might say we're in Numbers now. And, I'm afraid, getting close to Job and Lamentations.' Harsent moved on to speak to other guests, doing his social duty; Howard stood with a glass of wine in Marvin's kitchen, with its Aga cooker and an old bread oven in the wall, and studied the brochure. It was called ‘Creating a Community Building a Dialogue', and on the cover was a drawing of five students, for some reason in that state of crotchless nudity beloved of the stylists of the early sixties, and talking to each other in a very energetic dialogue indeed. Inside Howard read, in facsimile handwriting: ‘We are not alone making here the new buildings; we are creating too those new forms and spaces which are to be the new styles of human relationship. For an architecture is a society, and we are here making the society of the modern world of today.' Howard put down the brochure, and went out, under the low oak beams of the living room, to survey his colleagues, chattering on the darkness of the lawn; he thought about the contrast between this rural place and the tall Kaakinen buildings that were transforming the ancient estate where the university stood. After a while, he looked around the house and found Barbara, lying on a sofa in an alcove, her head in the lap of a senior lecturer in Philosophy. ‘Oh, boy,' said Barbara, ‘you've made a good impression. The Vice-Chancellor came and found me, just to tell me how much he liked you.' ‘He's trying to nullify you,' said the Philosophy man, ‘steal your fire.' ‘He couldn't,' said Barbara, ‘Howard's too radical.' ‘Watch it, they'll charm you,' said Barbara later, her foetal bump against the dashboard, as they drove home through the darkness into Watermouth. ‘You'll become an establishment pet. A eunuch of the system.' ‘Nobody buys me,' said Howard, ‘but I really think there's something for me here. I think this is a place I can work with.'

But that was in the late autumn of 1967; and after 1967 there came, in the inevitable logic of chronicity, 1968, which was the radical year, the year when what the Kirks had been doing in their years of personal struggle suddenly seemed to matter for everybody. Everything seemed wide open; individual expectation coincided with historical drive; as the students massed in Paris in May, it seemed that all the forces for change were massing everywhere with them. The Kirks were very busy that year. On campus the Maoist and Marxist groups, whose main business up to now seemed to be internecine quarrel, found a mass of activist support; there was a sit-in in the administration building, and a student sat at the Vice-Chancellor's desk, while the Vice-Chancellor established his own office in the boiler house and tried to defuse the tension. The Revolutionary Student Front went to see him, and asked him to declare the university a free state, a revolutionary institution aligned against outworn capitalism; the Vice-Chancellor, with great reasonableness, and a good deal of historical citation, explained his feelings of essential sympathy, but urged that the optimum conditions and date for total revolution were not yet here. They could probably be most realistically set some ten years away, he said; in the meantime, he suggested, they should go away, and come back then. This angered the revolutionaries, and they wrote ‘Burn it down' and ‘Revolution now' in black paint on the perfectly new concrete of the perfectly new theatre; a small hut was set on fire, and seventeen rakes totally destroyed. Hate and revolutionary zeal raged; people in the town poked students on the buses with umbrellas; there were demonstrations in the main square in town, and some windows were smashed in the largest department store. The faculty, as faculty do, divided, some supporting the radical students, some issuing statements recalling students to their duties. People stopped speaking to people, and offices and professors' rooms were broken into and files removed. A state of minor terror reigned, and minds were stretched and strained; ancient marriages broke up, as one party went with the left, the other with the right; all old tensions came to the surface. But Howard was not divided; he joined the sit-in, and his intense, small face was one of those that could be seen, by those locked out, peering forth from the windows, shouting, ‘Free thought is at last established,' and ‘Critical consciousness reigns,' or waving the latest slogans from Paris. In fact he was an inevitable focus, and was very active everywhere, radicalizing as many people as he could, leaving the sit-in to speak to workers' groups and trades union meetings. Their terrace house became a meeting place for all the radical students and faculty, town drop-outs, passionate working communists; there were posters in the windows that said ‘Smash the System', ‘Reality does not exist yet', ‘Power to the people'. And as for the Kaakinen-plan university, and its pious modernismus and concrete mass, and the radical new education, the new states of mind and styles of heart, enshrined inside it, that all came to seem to Howard a hard institutional shell designed to restrain and block the onward flood of consciousness. Not radical enough. Nothing
was
radical enough for the Kirks that year. Howard stared at the campus from the sit-in and what he said was: ‘I think this is a place I can work against.'

The summer realized the Kirks as they had never felt realized before. Time no longer seemed a contingent waste in which one passed out one's life; it was redeemable; the apocalypse stood at hand, the new world waited to be born. All present institutions and structures, the structures whose nature he had so carefully elaborated in his classes, now seemed to be masks and disguises, crude acts of imposition set over the true human reality, which came real around him. A massive, violent impatience overcame him; he looked around, and saw nothing but false and corrupt interests checking the passionate movement towards reality. But the times were his times; his beliefs were at last activated and made real. He found, too, that he was good at persuading people that this was so, that a new era of human fulfilment and creativity was at hand. He was busy at many meetings; and lots of people, on the edge of breakthrough, came to talk to him. He discussed with them their struggles with the vestigialities of the past, their breaking marriages. Barbara, large and yellow-haired, grew alive with expectation too; she began to push at the world. She felt herself on the front line again; the baby was old enough to leave. But now her old idea that she would go into social work, which meant a formal, institutional course, seemed just a compromise with the system; she wanted more, to act. She helped start a community newspaper. She led consumer protests. She shouted, ‘Fuck,' in council meetings. She joined in with a group of Women's Libbers and led consciousness-raising sessions. She hurried women to clinics and welfare services, hoping to strain them to the point of collapse, so the people could see how they had been duped. She arranged sit-ins at doctors' surgeries and employment agencies. She helped get a Claimants' Union started. The sub-culture, the counter-culture, clustered around them, and the parties they went to, the parties they held, were now of a different kind: activist occasions, commemorating the anniversary of Sharpville or the May struggle in Paris, and ending in a plan for a new campaign. The running motto was ‘Don't trust anyone over thirty'; it was in the summer of 1968 that Howard was thirty, and Barbara thirty-one. But they did trust themselves, and they were trusted; they were on the side of the new.

But that was in 1968; now time has passed. Since then much has been going on with the Kirks, but the intimacy, warmth and consensus of that year, seems hard to recover. They look for it; they have a strong sense of something that was undelivered then, and a hazy dream still shimmers ahead of them: a world of expanded minds, equal dealings, erotic satisfactions, beyond the frame of reality, beyond the limits of the senses. They remain in their terrace house, and they stand somehow still on the fulcrum between end and beginning, in a history where an old reality is going and a new one coming, living in a mixture of radiance and radical indignation, burning with sudden fondnesses, raging with sudden hates, waiting for a plot, the plot of historical inevitability, to come and fulfil the story they had begun in bed in Leeds after Hamid had slept with Barbara. They are busy people. Howard, with a group of students and a deep radical intent, has had a rehabilitation study done of the entire area where they live, part of a grass-roots exercise in local democracy. The local council, now impressed with Howard's urbanology, have accepted this scheme; this has the beneficial consequence that the Kirks will keep their house, while the surviving houses in the terrace will ultimately be restored. Beyond the windows of their house still stretches the waste, the transitional acres of devastation, the touches of reconstruction. Children have made playgrounds in the rubble, out of which, at a distance, prod grey, shuttered concrete tower blocks, new precincts, the terminus of the urban motorway. In the distance, across the mess, signs flash, saying ‘Finefare', ‘El Dorado', ‘Life Again Boutique'. Jet fighters fly overhead; motorscooters whine in the streets round about; there are muggings in the spaces between the bright sodium lights. By day, adolescent bottle-breakers and five-minute fornicators inhabit the rubble around them. At night the Kirks can stand inside their house, fresh from Wiener schnitzel, and see a flicker of small lights spurting in the derelict houses across the way: the meths drinkers and wandering hippies creep constantly into occupation, making an independent lifestyle, groaning in the darkness, sometimes setting fire to themselves. The Kirks respond each according to his competence: Barbara takes them Thermoses of coffee and blankets, and Howard counts them and, in the basement study he has now made – a guilty item in their now all too passable life – he writes up the results in indignant pieces for
New Society
and
Socialist Worker
.

The Kirks do not believe in property; but they look out upon this apocalyptic landscape of the times, these craters, this rubble, these clutches of willow-herb, these drifting migrants, with a sense of territoriality. It is the outside of the inside of their minds, their perfect vista; like landed squires having their portraits painted, they can be posed appropriately against it. Here is Howard, small and elegant, his Zapata moustache drooping around the corners of his mouth, the hair thinning slightly and therefore combed forward, the firm jaw jutting in an angry, thrusting look; beside him, his good wife Barbara, in her long caftan, large and light-haired, Thermos in hand, one fist slightly raised and clenched; behind them, in strong detail, a scatter of broken forms, a coming down and a going up, society and consciousness in transformation; the two central figures equal, their eyes alert, their limbs twitching, struggling to get out of the frame and on with the plot of history. The plot of history; it serves them, and it matters to them, but somehow it doesn't quite give them all now. For of course they are now in their middle thirties, and certain things have been achieved; that is part of the trouble, as Howard, who is frank in his own self-exposure, will tell you. As a famous radical at the university, Howard has a senior lectureship there, and has been put on a fair number of committees. He is still active in the town's radical causes, in a free school for underprivileged children, a rescue campaign called People In Trouble, and in the radical journals, where he writes often. He edits a sociology series for a paperback publisher, and has published a second book,
The Death of the Bourgeoisie
. The Kirks go to publishers' parties in Bloomsbury, and radical socialist parties in Hampstead, and parties for new boutiques in the King's Road. And of course they give good parties of their own, like the one they are giving tonight.