The Primal Urge

‘We must be filthy from this beastly floor!’ she said. ‘It’s all gritty and beastly. Don’t they ever sweep the damned place?’

‘Wonderful, heavenly floor!’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ll come and visit it and lay an offering to Venus on it every anniversary of this date, won’t we?’

When she did not reply, he knew he was being hearty. More, he knew they would never come here again. He was about to say something else when she seized his arm. Footsteps sounded outside on the concrete path. A pause while the grass muffled them. Then the handle of the changing hut door was turned. Jimmy clapped his hand up to his forehead to cover his ER in case it should be visible through the frosted glass, but it had ceased to glow. They listened while the footsteps receded.

‘We could always have said we were waiting for a bus,’ Jimmy said.

‘Jill’s old man keeps late hours,’ Rose said tugging on her skirt. ‘It’s past midnight.’

‘And a good time was had by all. Oh, Rangy, I love you so! This has been such a wonderful evening for me. I can’t really believe your name is English Rose.’

‘Does it sound so very unlikely?’ she asked, with a strange seriousness in her voice.

‘Very,’ he said. It astonished him that he should be feeling suddenly irritable with her, and hid it as best he could; we resent those who please us, for they can guess our weakness. ‘I’m going to get you a meal now, woman.’

‘Really?’ She relaxed at once. She was nearly dressed. He regretted it was too dark to see anything of her underclothes; such things were a mystery to him. Pulling himself together, he blundered round the partition to put his own clothes on.

‘Where, Jimmy?’

‘Where what, pet?’

‘Where are we going to eat?’

‘Your uncle Jimmy knows a dirty little Chinese restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue which stays open till two in the morning.’

She came and stood on his side of the partition then, to show him she was proud of him. When they were finally ready, they crept out of the hut, leaving the key on the outside of the lock, and walked quietly round the pool. Its surface was as still and black as oil. Keeping on the grass as far as possible, to avoid the scrunch of gravel, they skirted the house, where no lights burned.

A voice softly called ‘Goodnight!’ from above them. They looked up to see Jill Hurn leaning out of her bedroom window, shadowy under the eaves. She must have been there a long while, watching for them. Jimmy raised a hand in silent salute to all good things and led Rose back to the car.

They ate their chow mein, sweet and sour pork and crispy noodles in a quiet mood; when, after the meal, Rose insisted on catching a taxi and going off alone, Jimmy protested without vehemence and yielded without delay.

They were tired and had nothing more to offer each other.

It was a quarter to two when he let himself into 17 Charlton Square, and after three before he fell asleep. When he awoke next morning, it was to find his sheets full of earth, dead grass and dirt picked up from his session on the changing hut floor.

3

At the IBA

The Home of the International Book Association, where Jimmy worked, was a tall, undistinguished building just off Bedford Square. Unlike its rival and elder sister, the National Book League, the IBA claimed no Regency graces. There was American capital behind it: it was modern and proud of it.

As you went through plate glass doors into a foyer ambushed with cactus, a sign in sanserif announced, ‘Only books stand between us and the cave. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ The IBA ran mainly on dollar lubrication supplied by the Clyde H. Nitkin Foundation, and the words of the great man, at once original and obvious, were in evidence throughout the building. In the cafeteria downstairs, among the Mojave Desert décor, was ‘To read is to strike a blow for culture. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ In the Main Exhibition room on the ground floor was ‘Speech is silver: silence is golden: print is dynamite. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ Up in the library, appropriately enough, was ‘Only by libraries can man survive. Clyde H. Nitkin.’ And, most touching heart cry of all, reserved for the board room up by the roof, was ‘Dear God, I would rather be an author than Clyde H. Nitkin.’

This morning, Jimmy came in rather late. He stood for a moment in the rear of the foyer, exuding general goodwill. It was only six months since he had come to live in London and take this, his first job. Pleasure still filled him at the thought of it; he surveyed everything with a contentment at once filial and avuncular. Posters and book jackets jostled convivially here under busts of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Edna St Vincent Millay. Mr J. B. Priestley would speak on the 18th next on ‘What the Canadian Theatre Means.’ Angus Wilson’s new play Regular Churchgoers in its fifth week at the Criterion. Thyroid Annerson’s new play at the Stumer. The new Francis Bacon exhibition – the one with the laughing dogs – at the Hanover Galleries. Kingsley Amis to speak, mysteriously, about ‘The New Distaste’ on the 25th. The posters at least were quietly, staunchly English.

The book jackets struck a more exotic note. Peter Green’s name appeared on the serpent-haunted jacket of his large new novel Patinotoxa’s Donkey. Monkeys chased themselves round the latest Mittelholzer title from Secker’s. A formal jungle surrounded the word ‘Popocatepetl’ on Edmund Wilson’s new collection of travel essays. Orange prisms crashed across Berg and the Instability of Our Times. It was all, Jimmy told himself, at once homely and exciting. ‘The hoi polloi are rather coy at facing the printed word, but mad dogs and publishers care nought for the midday herd,’ he intoned to himself.

He nodded amiably to Mrs Charteris, the receptionist (somehow he could never think of anything to say to that woman) and went to his room. This room, lying beyond the Main Exhibition chamber, was isolated from everyone else in the building; nevertheless, it was nice to have a room at all, and Jimmy, who was second-in-command of exhibitions while Dirk Hanahan was away being ill in Boston, relished its privacy – especially this morning.

He was in a golden daze. He wanted only to sit quietly and think of the raptures of last night, with Rose alive in his arms. His room was almost bare; even the inevitable bookcase contained little more than Webster’s Dictionary and a pile of IBA pamphlets on people like Svevo. A Ben Nicholson relief on one wall only added to the austerity. That suited Jimmy well; the fewer external distractions the better.

The intercom on his desk buzzed.

‘And now a word from our sponsor,’ Jimmy groaned.

He depressed one of the ivory keys and said ‘Solent’ in a suitably crisp tone.

‘Scryban here, Jimmy. We’re having an informal discussion on next month’s activities, just pooling a few ideas. You’d better be in on it from the exhibition angle, I think. Would you kindly come up, please?’

‘Certainly.’ That was a blind. Jimmy felt perfectly fit, except for a dry mouth, but he just did not want to face people this morning. However, Scryban was Scryban and business was business … In Jimmy’s drawer lay a manila folder labelled ‘Haiti Exhibition’; he debated taking it up with him to Scryban’s room but, as that exhibition would not be held until September, decided it would look irrelevant or self-important or something equally horrid. Instead, he took the lift up to Scryban’s room.

‘Literature is a jealous god: serve it in deeds and words,’ adjured Clyde H. Nitkin from eye level.

Four people were already closeted with Scryban. Donald Hortense, the IBA librarian, a science-fiction magazine tucked in his pocket, winked at Jimmy. He was the only one here Jimmy could really say he knew. Mrs Wolf, a little, lipsticked woman with a big, difficult husband, smiled at him: Jimmy smiled back, for Mrs Wolf was always very sweet to him. Paul de Perkin, whose office door bore the enticing word ‘Social’, acted up to his label, indicating a chair for Jimmy and offering him a cigarette. The only person to ignore Jimmy’s entrance was standing looking out of the window; this was Martin ‘Bloody’ Trefisick, who called himself a Cornishman, though his detractors claimed he came from Devon. He was the declared enemy of Mrs Wolf, and his office door bore the oblique message ‘House Organ’.

Sitting sideways behind his desk, his neat knees crossed, was Conrad Scryban, the Managing Director of IBA. Jimmy had quietly admired this man from their first meeting; so effectively and unassumingly was he the English literary man, that Jimmy felt sure there must be fraud in the fellow somewhere. It made him roughly ten times as interesting as any of the other solid but transparent characters in the room.

Apart from Scryban and Trefisick, everyone in the room already bore a Norman Light on his forehead. It lent an air of strangeness and newness, like a paperback found among Roman relics.

‘Splendid,’ Scryban said vaguely, as Jimmy sat down between de Perkin and Mrs Wolf. Scryban’s baldness, like a tonsure, gave him a monastic look which his clothes quietly refuted. ‘We were saying before you joined us, Jimmy, that next month, being August, is rather a dog month generally. Anyone who is anyone will be no nearer Bedford Square than Tenerife. Nevertheless, we are duty bound to offer some sort of diversion to such of the general public as wander through our doors … Have you, I wonder, any suggestions? I hasten to add that none of the rest of us have.’

‘Actually, I believe the centenary of the publication of The Cloister and the Hearth falls some time next month,’ Mrs Wolf said cautiously.

A hush settled over them. ‘I ought to suggest something,’ Jimmy told himself, as gradually the dread of being laughed at by Trefisick was dwarfed by the dread of being considered unimaginative by Scryban. He cleared his throat.

‘How about some sort of tie-in with politics?’ he asked the company generally, following up with a brilliant improvisation: ‘I’ve been thinking about the Nitkin pearl that every poem is a pincer movement. Couldn’t we drag out some contemporary examples of that?’

‘I can see the implications,’ said Scryban, appearing actually to view them in a far corner, ‘but how exactly do you visualize … I mean, what I don’t see …’

He was too gentle to name what he did not see, but Jimmy suspected it must be the same thing he himself did not see: just what the deuce he was suggesting. He tried a countermove.

‘Well, how do you feel about the present political situation?’ he asked.

Scryban did not immediately answer. Instead Paul de Perkin leant forward, his face gleaming with interest, and said, ‘I think you have something promising there, old boy. Do you mean the international situation?’

‘Heavens, is he really fool enough to think I’ve got something?’ Jimmy asked himself drearily, and then decided that de Perkin, also unsure of himself, was also trying to appear bright.

‘Yes, the international situation,’ he said at random.

‘Ah now, let me see,’ said Scryban, conscientiously. ‘We have the Western bloc on one side and the Soviet bloc on the other, have we not? And the Middle East shuttling tediously about in between. That is how matters have been, internationally, for some years, I believe, and I confess I find it an uninspring situation: an unfruitful situation.’

‘We are all in a perpetual state of non-combatancy,’ Mrs Wolf said. Jimmy liked the remark and laughed; she smiled at him and laughed herself.

‘All very trying for everyone,’ Scryban agreed. ‘One may, in fact, quote the words Donne employed in a somewhat different context: “The foe oft-times having the foe in sight. Is tired of standing though he never fight.”’

‘We shall see a change now,’ Trefisick said, wrestling to fit his broad shoulders into the window frame. ‘These ERs completely topple the status quo at home; they are bound to have repercussions abroad. Without being in any way a prophet, I’d say that chaos will come again. Britain is already the laughing stock of Europe.’

‘That just isn’t so! The Guardian says Scandinavia is green with envy,’ Jimmy said hotly, venturing for the first time to contradict Trefisick.

‘Really? In those very words?’ asked Scryban, interested at last.

‘I see the New Statesman is less outspoken about Tory intrigues than it was last week,’ de Perkin observed. ‘And certainly the Commonwealth seems to commend us … Especially Australia; I always think Australia’s very forward looking …’

‘There was a paragraph in the Telegraph,’ Mrs Wolf said, looking round as she whipped out her paper. They had all brightened considerably under the new topic of conversation. ‘Here we are. It points out that we have inaugurated a social invention whose power potential is far greater than that of the hydrogen bomb.’

‘And we go and use it on ourselves!’ Trefisick exclaimed bitterly. ‘My God, but I never saw such bloody folly. You’ll never catch me wearing one of the beastly things, I can assure you of that!’

‘Life has grown too complicated, Martin,’ said Scryban gently. ‘We have said that so often in past years that it has become a platitude. Now that something has come along which, it is claimed, will simplify things for us, surely we are morally obliged not to look our gift horse in the mouth – especially when they are free on the National Health Scheme?’

‘But will these damned gadgets simplify life, that’s what I want to know?’ Trefisick said pugnaciously, squaring his shoulders by inserting his thumbs in the top of his trousers. ‘Have they simplified your sex life, Solent? What about yours, de Perkin? Find things easier for having a tin medal over your nose?’

‘I’ve only had mine a day,’ Jimmy said, simultaneously feeling his cheeks redden and cursing himself for not standing up to this man.

‘You’d better ask all my mistresses about that, Trefisick,’ de Perkin laughed feebly, and Jimmy cursed him for being another time server.

Mrs Wolf rolled up her Telegraph pugnaciously. She was at least forty-nine, and every wrinkle showed; but for a second defiance gave her back her youth. ‘This damned gadget as you call it, Martin, has certainly not simplified my life,’ she said without heat, her sharp teeth gleaming as she faced Trefisick. ‘On the contrary, it has complicated it. My husband and I are in the situation which comes to many couples: we are out of love with one another. Whereas for years we have manoeuvred unceasingly to hide this state of affairs from each other – and from ourselves – and from other people – we can no longer conceal it. The Norman Lights confront us with the truth.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Trefisick said, rubbing his neck, abashed; he added, despite himself, ‘All the same, Veronica, you’ve proved my point about their being a menace.’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘For the first time my husband and I are free to be perfectly honest with each other. I have only hope for the future; forced to acknowledge the facts at last, we may reach something better than a dead compromise.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have …’

‘Dear Mrs Wolf,’ Scryban said, lifting his hands from his knees and replacing them there, ‘I refuse to allow you to apologise. What you say only makes us respect and admire you the more; our vegetable love for you grows marvellously quicker than empires. You do show—’

‘I’m just trying to show you,’ she interrupted a little breathlessly, ‘that these Norman Lights really should have our utmost faith: they are the first scientific invention ever to make us face ourselves.’

They had been embarrassed by revelations about Mrs Wolf’s marriage before. Silence burst over them like an exploding muffin.

‘Well, thank you all very much for coming up and giving me your ideas. We’ll think along the political line, shall we?’ Scryban said, with more haste than usual. ‘Now I’m sure I’m keeping you all from your coffee. I would just like to say, if I might, that though I disapprove of ERs personally, I find it difficult to understand why all the criticism of them from the culture camp, from people like Betjeman and Clark and Ayrton, has confined itself to aesthetic principles. I find those of you here who have your Registers installed’ – this was said with a deprecatory smile – ‘of an enhanced appearance.’

As they left Scryban’s room, Donald Hortense materialised at Jimmy’s left elbow. He was one of Jimmy’s closest friends, which made him rather less than more endearing at present, Jimmy’s lover’s soul feeling far from chummy.

‘I don’t believe you said one word in there,’ he accused Donald.

‘That takes bags of courage, especially when one has nothing to say. Did you get that portrait for your exhibition off Sir Richard Clunes?’

‘I got the promise of it when we’re ready for it, which is all I wanted,’ Jimmy said. ‘And I went to a cocktail party he gave last night. A business do.’

‘Oh? And what do the Corridors of Power boys think about nun chasers?’ This was Donald’s method of referring to anyone in bureaucratic or scientific circles, however lowly.

They seem on the whole to take to the idea of them a deal more enthusiastically than do we Corridors of Eng. Lit. boys.’

‘Not surprising; we’re a backward-looking lot. Our glories lie behind us, pace Nitkin,’ Donald said, without much interest. ‘Come on down to the café for a chat. There isn’t a blessed thing to do this morning in the library.’

Jimmy agreed, catching a glimpse in his mind’s eye of a pair of faultless breasts thrusting towards him on the road to Walton. The IBA seemed curiously insubstantial this morning.

‘What did you think of the she-wolf washing and ironing her dirty linen in public?’ Donald asked.

‘I thought it was jolly brave of her to speak out to Bloody Trefisick the way she did. I admired her for it.’

‘You’re hopeless, Jimmy. That wasn’t bravery, you ass, it was masochism, if ever I saw it. She’s a masochist and her hubby must be a mash-assistant.’

‘You don’t believe a word you say, Donald,’ Jimmy reproved, but he felt slightly tired of the other’s habit of jokingly imputing perverted values to every conceivable relationship; it was, of course, the result of Donald being what he was, and of the law’s attitude to what he was. ‘When allowances are made, it’s what I’ve always said, It’s only ’uman nature after all,’ Jimmy rhymed to himself. All the same, he would not dream of mentioning Rose to Donald, much as he longed to rhapsodise about her to someone.

In the cafeteria they sat at a corner table, just out of striking distance of a giant American aloe cactus. Donald sat genially with his elbows on the table. Despite the too beautiful tailoring which enveloped him, he looked like a rugger forward just off the field, his hair spikey, his nose slightly flat. He had a healthy look about him; Jimmy already accepted the fact that Donald’s light glowed intermittently in his presence.

‘Had a poem accepted this morning, me boy,’ Donald said. ‘Mandragora took it – the one about the turds, that Tambimuttu turned down.’

‘I remember. Good! Congratulations. It should appear in about three years.’ Jimmy enjoyed none of Donald Hortense’s poems, but he found them oddly memorable – partly because, as a member of the Scribist movement, Donald only composed poems which were seven brief lines long.

‘Of course, I’m going to have to change my entire method of writing poetry,’ Donald said thoughtfully. ‘What a lot of people have not realised is that Norman Lights are going to put a new aspect on everything,’ Donald said. ‘For literature, it’ll be a far more sweeping change than any of the multitude of changes it’s already undergone this century. It’ll mean writers having to learn a new language even more difficult than Shaw’s forty-letter alphabet would have been: the language of changed mores and responses in the external world. Willy nilly, poetry and the novel are dunked back into a realm of exploration.’

‘I suppose so,’ Jimmy agreed. ‘A writer writes most richly of his childhood. Facing the new set-up will be a tax on him. Any novelist not tackling the immediate present will be classed as an historical novelist.’

‘Not only that. The NLs will bring a state of flux which is going to last for years, as all the ramifications seep through every level of society. A synthesis, an analysis, will be a more demanding task than ever – and its value more questionable. Because no sooner do you get the novel or what-have-you written than your specimen is out of date. Have you seen Vogue?’

Jimmy shook his head. He had never seen Vogue; Donald always had. Women’s fashion magazines were irresistible to the librarian; through them he caught glimpses of a vast, busy world with which he had not the slightest connection.

‘There’s an interesting article in it by Grigson,’ Donald said. ‘Versatile type, Grigson; I admire him for it. He’s attempting to predict the effect NLs will have on such womanly wiles as make-up and hats – and hence on the whole conception of female beauty. He thinks that at first hats will be designed to conceal NLs and then, later, to reveal them. As a long-range prediction, he emphasises that we have supplied our bodies with a new sexual focus, which he thinks may supplant some of the others in superficial importance. So that by about the mid-seventies bare breasts may be quite the thing; they just won’t seem anything to be excited about any more.’

‘It’s something to look forward to, anyhow.’

‘Infantile traumas springing up right, left and centre,’ Donald exclaimed, gulping down his coffee in disgust. ‘Well, I must be awa’.’

When Jimmy returned to his little room, he pulled the Haiti folder out of the desk and opened it. On the first sheet of paper, he had written boldly, ‘Books in Haiti since 1804.’ It was going to be a good and unusual exhibition: his exhibition. He ought to write straight away to the faculty of Pisa for photographs of Queen Marie-Louise’s grave; sufficiently enlarged, they would fill the awkward alcove at the far end of the Main Exhibition Hall. He began a rough sketch to indicate the sort of camera angle he required.

In no time, his pencil stopped. Blankly, gently, he gazed into space. The soft and nutritious thought of Rose slid over him. As if silent upon a peak in Darien, he seemed to have discovered a new ocean of truth. He perceived that most of the books in the building, and nearly all the books he had ever read, had lied; that his friends and acquaintances had deceived him; that his parents and teachers had misled him; that few, in fact, except a smattering of sages mislabelled voluptuaries, had ever staggered on his mighty discovery. Physical love was good!

Jimmy recalled St Augustine’s nauseating comments on women; he recalled the diatribes of Puritans and Victorians; he recalled the dirty jokes he had heard and told; and he seethed with anger. It was all a pack of contemptible rubbish, foul, unhealthy lies and illusion! There was no beauty like the indulgence of the flesh, no cleanliness like a woman’s intimate cleanliness.

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