The Squire Quartet

Squire looked disconcerted. ‘You must know a lot more about Marx than I do, Jacques. He bores me. But Marx would not have accepted what you say for one minute. “Method of cognition”? Karl Marx believed only in a crude dialectic which reinforced the inevitability of revolution. That’s what Marxism is really all about, isn’t it? The overthrow of the established order.’

‘Tut, that’s old-fashioned. That’s vulgar Marxism, such as you might find a British trade unionist spouting.’

‘Haven’t vulgar and academic Marxism, to use your terms, got that much in common, that they sanction anything in the way of aggression or sabotage or repression as long as it ruins society, so that some imaginary classless utopia, of which the ghastly living doppelganger is the Soviet Union, may rise from the ashes?’

‘You’ve been reading the Tory press, Tom. You don’t really think that the state of affairs in France or Britain is all that could be desired, do you?’

‘Of course I don’t. But with equal certainty, I can foresee the sort of blackguards who would grab power if our present social structures collapsed or were brought low. You don’t answer my question. You do work for revolution, don’t you?’

‘Well, capitalism is in decay, you have to face the fact.’ He laughed.

‘A definitive answer. That it’s a lie helps to show the weakness of your case. I might as well say that communism is dead in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Indeed, that’s a more accurate statement than yours, because communism is dead on its home ground. It has been proved not to work, and its shibboleths are kept going only by force, by the exertion of power by an entrenched gang of criminals.

‘Marx said that capitalism was dying over a century ago, and that bit of nonsense has been parroted ever since. He made a mistake, a big historical mistake, because what he observed was capitalism in a raw early state. Our societies have improved beyond recognition since then, and will improve faster if only we shrug off this dead preaching which impedes – it doesn’t hasten – social justice.

‘If the West collapsed, then we should have not the millennium, as you pretend, but a period in which freedom and justice go to the wall, as they have done in Russia, when the effectively aggressive bastards on the Left would smash up every virtue in the old order and anyone who stood for its values. Which does, incidentally, include all left-wing intellectuals like you.’

D’Exiteuil stood stock still in the middle of the corridor, folded his arms, stroked his beard.

‘Please don’t provoke me with such nonsense. From you of all people, such paranoia. I expect you to be more civilized. Why are you saying this?’

‘I’m not paranoid. I’m probably not particularly civilized either. But it doesn’t take a very wise man to see how the contagion spreads. Every strike, every failure in the economy, and you feel the more entitled to declare boldly that capitalism is done for. Every time you do so, claiming the backing of some sort of invalid “scientific” theory, you are assisting the destructive forces who foment trouble inside industries and inside the trade unions. That’s how your vulgar and your academic Marxists aid and abet each other.

‘You may not dream of revolution personally because I should think you have sense enough to value your skin, but whenever you mouth those ugly phrases you bring nearer the day when it is legal for a thug with an armband to kick you in the guts for as long as he wants.

‘If you like that sort of thing, okay, head for one of those countries where your catch-phrases are the going religion, but while you remain here have the decency to respect the civilized blessings, including the rule of law, however capricious, under which you are given the chance to enjoy your life.’

The Frenchman was rigid; his face had flushed a dull red.

‘You’re crazy, talking to me like this. Are you trying to attack me personally or the entire conference? Every point of view is welcome, yours or Cantania’s or Krawstadt’s, but we have to aim for some common critical language. It’s the diagnosis that has upset you … Hm … you really are scared beneath the surface. You must be symptomatic of the whole bourgeois world, already sweating at the collar because you know the day is coming.’

Squire grunted contemptuously. ‘The day is coming! Listen to your own phrases. “The day is coming.” It’s a nut-cult slogan. Better to believe that You-Foes are bringing a wise alien race to rescue us from sin.’

D’Exiteuil tucked his hands in his pockets and stood a little taller. ‘Well, I just don’t happen to believe in sin, not in the sense that you old-fashioned liberals understand it at any rate. Sin is nothing anyone can do anything about, since it’s ingrained and presupposes some ridiculous system of divine punishment no one can comprehend—’

‘I don’t believe in divine punishment either.’

‘Maybe you don’t, but you behave as if you do.’ The phrase was delivered flatly and with considerable contempt. ‘What I do just happen to believe in is that a day is coming when exploitive systems will be swept away. Maybe we don’t have a working example in the world as yet, but that’s no reason why we should not strive for better systems.’ D’Exiteuil spoke with spirit. Both men had grown red in the face. Several delegates, lounging about the foyer, watched the argument with covert interest.

‘Jacques, I do not believe that you personally hate the past and the present; but such is the attitude that all these old dried figs of cliché enshrine. “Systems” you talk about – typical French intellectual pretension to want to live under a system – but it is all simply materialism—’

‘System is just a word! We all have to live under some bloody system, you know!’ He rattled his remarkable locks about his head.

‘Karl Marx was a nineteenth-century materialist without much historical insight. He saw the miserable condition of the workers, and for that we respect him although he was far from alone in doing so, but he was typical of that progress-obsessed generation. It thought everyone would be happier when reduced to systems. He was just one more pedagogue. His idea of a classless society is one more dotty millennial creed. We should all forget about his theorizing, just as we’ve forgotten about Disraeli’s “Young England” movement. Instead of remaining hypnotized by some vain illusion of pie in the future, forget it, junk it, free your mind, and rather try to enjoy and strengthen the present.’

He was alarmed by the venom in his own voice, alarmed by what he had said to his old friend. In the pause, he saw d’Exiteuil gather himself to attack, and feared what was to come.

‘You have no creed, no scientific philosophy to guide you. Just “enjoy the present” – that’s really the feeble message behind “Frankenstein Among the Arts”, isn’t it? Enjoyment. How trivial! Sure, Karl Marx made some mistakes; but his is a whole reasoned programme for conduct, now and in the future. You when you speak make out the case against yourself. You think a classless society is dotty – or rather you hope it. On the contrary, it is a lofty ideal. We want men united, not divided, and the honest truth is – though I admit I am not much of a revolutionary – that Britain and France and Germany will have to be destroyed before all the old divisions which –’ he pressed an index finger against Squire’s shirt button – ‘which you embody in your privileged position are destroyed. I’m sorry that I make you angry, but so were dinosaurs made angry when they saw little mammals trot by.’

‘Again an analogy drawn from last century. Evolutionary argument twisted to fit human society. We’re trapped by the outworn garments of last century when we should be free to face the future, free to see that enjoyment is not trivial but central—’

‘Sorry, Tom, I’ll listen to no more. You insult me unnecessarily, I who have fought many battles on your behalf. We have hitherto managed to keep our politics apart from our friendship. Obviously that is no longer possible. I am deeply hurt, deeply offended.’

Squire looked worried.

‘I’m sorry, Jacques. Perhaps the conference has been too much for me. I have no wish to offend you personally. We must each stand up for our own beliefs.’

D’Exiteuil spread his hands. ‘Didn’t I invite you here as guest of honour? Now you call me the worshipper of a nut-cult. Well, we’ll see – you observed the flying saucer, not I. There are good men here, your friends and allies, as I counted myself. You really insult and disgrace us all.’

‘That wasn’t my intention. Forgive me for speaking out. You know I have personal troubles – possibly the strain has told on me. I shouldn’t have been personal.’

‘Excuse me, I am required in the conference hall.’

Squire stood mopping his neck with a handkerchief. He went to the bar and ordered himself a beer, which he drank standing, conscious of having made a fool of himself. He looked at his watch. He followed along to the hall, where almost all the seats except Ajdini’s were already filled.

Enrico Pelli turned a murderous glare on him.

In a minute, Gianni Frenza called upon Herman Fittich to give his paper on science fiction as a modern literary form.

Fittich, soberly dressed in a grey suit, rose, clearing his throat as he looked nervously about him. ‘To avoid a few translation problems I intend to deliver my paper in English, since possibly more of you speak that language here than speak German. My apologies to my hosts that I don’t try it in Italian, my congratulations to them that I won’t.

‘When I shall return home, when I will return home, friends will ask me how I enjoyed Ermalpa. “A lovely, fascinating, and complex city”, I may answer. I’m hardly going to tell them that I have spent almost all my time in the Grand Hotel Marittimo, and in fact in this very room. But I do know from a study of some guide books before I left Germany that this city is many things. It’s a melting-pot, that’s a phrase that comes to mind, a melting-pot. A melting-pot of conflicting cultures. Ermalpa has been a western city looking towards the east, and also an oriental city looking towards the west. Many races have made their contributions, from Phoenicians and Greeks to Arabs, Normans, and even the British.

‘Melting-pot is a funny description. Things don’t melt down that easily in human terms. After many centuries, the various traits remain pretty distinct. But that is what makes it interesting still. We don’t want an imposed uniformity of any kind.

‘So Ermalpa is a good place in which to hold this first serious critical enquiry into the aspects of the popular culture of our time. My subject is science fiction literature, or fantascienza, the excellent Italian word, or Utopische Romane, the less effective and in consequence now obsolete German phrase. Science fiction – or SF – is a melting-pot much like Ermalpa. It also contains conflicting cultures. It looks to the future and to the past and, by implication, most searchingly to the present. Many disciplines make their contribution, such as science, of course, notably astronomy and cosmology and the physical sciences, but also any other science you care to name, genetics, biology, down to soft sciences such as sociology and anthropology. Also such more general themes as religion, mythology, apocalypse, catastrophe, Utopia, perfectionism, literature, adventure, and sheer crazy speculation.

‘All such things and many more go into the melting-pot. They don’t actually melt down, but they all give the brew a flavour. Its contents are so diverse that readers can pick and choose their own specialities. This is why it’s difficult for two people to agree on what SF is all about. Despite the popular misconception that it’s all about space, it’s actually more important than that. It’s all about everything.

‘It is the modern literature read almost obsessively by the young in all industrial countries, although sadly neglected by their seniors.’

Yes, but what SF’s not about is things like this conference. It simplifies, whereas this conference complicates. It substitutes simple aliens for the complexity of nationalities and internationalities. And in the examples I’ve read, it externalizes evil, making it a menace from without instead of within. Perhaps that’s why it’s so popular. Even Marxists like it, or use it for their own purposes.

But maybe SF tells the truth in showing how change is everywhere. How the present nations, the current power blocs, will disappear, leaving not a wrack behind – or only a bootee and a bridle. I remember the Scythians and their deep-frozen underwear. In their time, they thought the world was their oyster.

Now I suppose the Marxists feel the same way. What’s wrong with all that, apart from its high boredom factor, is that it is presented as the Ultimate. There’s no ultimate in human affairs, or won’t be for many thousand million years, we hope. Surely a proper study of the future would vanquish ideology? There’s only a process, forever continuing. Eternal artistries of circumstance.

Meanwhile, on the humdrum level, I have offended Jacques. That outburst was unpardonable. Or was I feeble to apologize? Am I secretly afraid of losing his friendship? I suppose I am. But I did speak badly out of turn. I’ll write him a letter of apology, leave it in his letter rack. He is a nice man, I am fond of him. That distinction he made between upper and lower Marxism just made me mad – as it would have done Marx himself.

My affairs are a bit of a cock-up. On Monday I go back to England – to what? Teresa, you will never never know what you’ve done to me. I kicked out the girl I loved for your sake, didn’t I, because I loved you more? What else did I have to do to appease you?…

I should have stayed in the bar and had another drink. Why does old Herman look so nervous?

Selina. What did Jacques say about her? Has he been trying to make her?

I suppose he also has his private reasons for being angry. Wife at some conference or other, fears that this one may flop …

We’re all being ground down by some ghastly historical process. It’s better when you’re young because you think the process is remediable by action, political action, picketing power stations, or a bullet. I did. My son does. His son will. History in a nutshell … Fuck it all. Thighs. Thighs. No wonder that thighs are so perennially popular, and don’t get less so as you grow older …

No name with whatsoever emphasis of passionate love repeated that grows not faint at last. History is our attempt to retain that passionate love, to commemorate what has gone. Thus we extend our lives. Science fiction, I suppose, extends our lives into an imagined future …

How is Pippet Hall to survive? I must keep it on, it must remain a going concern. It enshrines history more effectively than any book, any monument. The present generation, with its inverted snobberies, despises anything of cultural wealth, but surely that attitude, that little ice age of the spirit, won’t last. The trouble is, I’ve no heart to go on without Teresa. Poor girl, poor jade! Terrible to imagine oneself offended.

There is no way in which one can give up in life, short of committing suicide. I’ve no quarrel with that. Falling on your sword is honourable, if you really have reached a dead end.

But that’s not for me. I’m as corrupt as anyone. I’d rather take Selina back to the Hall and fall on her. Iron out her bitterness. She has a fine spirit. She communicates.

Beautiful woman. Damned politics.

Part-Serb. It would be splendid to replenish the Squire stock with Serbian blood, as old Matthew Squire did with German blood. Brave buggers, the Serbs. None braver. I’m not too old to start another family.

But almost.

And sod you too, Pelli …

‘You may perhaps think my view of a critic’s function rather old-fashioned, but I am more interested in appreciation than classification. The reader must be borne in mind. Readers of SF are most struck by its originality although, if they read too much of it, they complain of unoriginality, and find they enjoy it less and less. This is because they have ceased to look for the other qualities SF possesses.

‘Goethe’s Faust is by no means the first story of a man making a deal with the devil; Shakespeare’s Hamlet is after all just another Renaissance play on the common theme of revenge. Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is just another tale of a chap who is off-balance getting a ride in a spaceship. But it is only when we look at these works in another light that we see their individual qualities – although we must always remember that they are interesting because they are also about a chap dealing with Mephistopheles, a chap trying to avenge his father, a chap getting a trip about the galaxy. Each of these three experiences goes straight down like a taproot of a tree into the awareness of the age which engendered it.

‘I should add here, if the remark is not obvious, that it doesn’t matter a bit that nobody has had a trip about the galaxy and maybe never will. Neither has anybody held a dialogue with the devil or a conversation with the ghost of their father. But this essence of the unlikely aligns SF with some striking monuments of literature – the imaginative and non-realist vein. I believe that Isaac Asimov is wrong, despite his great authority and reputation, in claiming that the space race justified SF. It needs no such justification. Our admiration for Cervantes’s Don Quixote would not be heightened if we found that some old knight had actually had a fight with a real windmill. The quality we admire is imagination, not realism.

‘This is where SF breaks from the old style of the nineteenth-century novel, and where it pleases the young and dismays the old. The novel no longer has novelty, but SF has, though we should maybe despise facile novelty just as we are suspicious of a new model of automobile – the last model may have had better qualities, if less chrome. One indicator of the novel’s lost impetus is that novels have become rather inward-looking and a bit provincial, at least in Germany and England. In the US, things are a little better, though how many new Russian novels have you read with interest lately?… Well, never mind. Arts need freedom.

‘Critics of the novel of a previous generation, such as Ortega y Gasset, held the idea that one prime function of the novel was to portray character and its development. The view is still echoed unthinkingly in the seats of orthodoxy.

‘The fact is, people just don’t believe in character, or in development for that matter, in the old way. Two world wars, the inroads of psychology, the increasing fate of man as a statistic, or a consumer, or just as a faceless speck of proletariat so beloved of Marxist jargon – all such factors have transformed us into fragmented beings. The container of custom has been shattered.

‘First cinema and then television have also profoundly affected the novel. Also inflationary economies have directed many impoverished novel-writers to more profitable fields. That non-literary consideration must be taken into account when you sum up today’s state of play. Yet SF has flourished; ill winds for the novel have proved good winds for SF. That’s true especially of this decade, when cinema and television have actually fed the appetite for SF.

‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics – he may not even have a sex life, poor chap – is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character – because that’s how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’

Good old Herman. An attempt to think things out and express the results clearly. Amazing how you can meet a stranger and love him after two days. Quite a brave man, too, under his resigned veneer.

Not a bad fellow to have with you in the slit trench when the shit’s flying. That’s the acid test. Herman and Vasili.

Rugorsky is a real character. Extraordinary – choosing a German and a Russian to fight with you in a slit trench. How our thoughts have been formed by war … Not so many years ago, I’d have been fighting against Herman. And in a few more years will probably die fighting against Vasili Rugorsky.

The idea – even the irony of it – doesn’t terrify me, as maybe it should. Better fight and die than give in. You defend your own territory. You fight for your own hearth, your own home, your own country. Something the modern generation believes silly. They’ll find out too late when the chips are down. You fight for England. It is atavistic, but the human race hasn’t evolved beyond that yet. If you aren’t prepared to defend, someone else will attack.

Of course, if the You-Foes are real and contain aliens from another planet, the whole course of human history becomes changed. Perhaps that’s why so-called civilized people are reluctant to believe in flying saucers; they are felt to be inappropriate, a discord. The orchestra’s playing Borodin’s Second Symphony; suddenly more musicians enter and start playing Mozart.

If the aliens are hostile … Well, we shall have a situation where Vasili and I will be sharing a slit trench.

I still can’t make him out. Wrote a poem called ‘Winter Celebration’, likening the Soviet system to a medieval feast. Medieval starvation, more like. Exiled by Stalin, then possibly reprieved and disappeared for a while. Disgrace, atonement … Sounds like a typical Ruskie existence. That chap at the consulate, Parker-Smith, thought that Rugorsky might possibly defect. Not here, but in Rome when we’re flying back on Monday. Interesting. If that’s what he intends, he may feel he knows me well enough to flash a warning signal. Perhaps I shall have to help him.

I wonder what Selina’s doing. Will she be dining with me this evening? If not, then perhaps Herman and I can rustle together Cantania, Morabito, the two Frenzas, and even d’Exiteuil, if he’ll speak to me. We’ll have a meal and some drink. Vasili, too. I’d rather talk to him than listen to any Western left-wing nonsense. Actually, I’d rather talk to him than anyone here, except Selina perhaps.

A drink would go down well. Old Herman does go on.

‘Charles Dickens’s novels are among the first to reflect the atomization of modern society brought about by metropolitan life. The faces in his novels are glimpsed vividly – often with nightmare vividness – but briefly, before they disappear. They are known from the outside. SF carries this process further. We see people only in relation to the unknown. The strangers have moved in.

‘Some people praise the logic of science fiction. But I am more interested in the kind of SF which creates mythical beings, robots, monsters, androids, aliens, machines, creatures from the future or the id, revenants, voices from other dimensions, which proliferate in SF as nowhere else. They are a clear indication of the struggle going on within twentieth-century man. In no other form of literature are they so freely allowed on parade.

‘Surely in the future men will see SF as the literature of our time. I am well aware that much of SF is rubbish, like much of ordinary fiction, written for retarded children by superannuated children, but there’s no reason why we should pay attention to that end of the spectrum. As we still listen to the ancient Greek myths, so men of the future will care for ours, which define technological man. We have no reason to doubt that the first tellers of the Greek myths were scorned in palace and court. The new is never welcome. So SF is scorned today in high places.

‘The distinguished founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, who is with us in Ermalpa as our guest of honour, has spoken of our task as “exploring the familiar”. That clever phrase describes pretty precisely what SF does. In paradoxical manner, the best stories present Today in a disguise which reveals it nakedly as it is. That is a true imaginative function. Emmanuel Kant has shown how the power of our imaginations, the power of mental picture-making, is essential to us if we are to understand the world. Otherwise, we can’t recognize any object, for objects are only intelligible as members of a class, of classes of vehicles or of whatever you wish. SF helps us to distinguish ourselves as one phenomenon among many, and our planet as one among many, and our lifetime as one among many. It opens the windows of our fancy and can give us a true perspective. For example, it banishes an obsolete socio-economic theory, which has gained some ground here and there, which claims that human beings can profitably be divided into abstractions labelled “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”.