A Whistling Woman (6 page)

“I know. Leo recites his stuff at school.”

“He was on our committee on teaching English. Dreadfully cocky. That may help, of course.”

Frederica nodded. Mickey Impey was a pretty young man with a lop-sided mass of golden curls. He wore a tee shirt printed with Blake's
Ghost of a Flea,
surrounded by a ring of buttons.
Frodo Lives. Make Love
Not War. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh
. FALL OUT FALLOUT.
Psychiatry
Kills. One Law for the Ox and the Tiger Is Oppression. Down with School
Dinners
. He rattled when he moved.

They tossed a coin for who should go first, and Frederica lost. If she had been thinking she would have seen that this was a disadvantage, since the second questioner has time to sum up the first during his own interview. They were in canvas chairs, facing each other. The poet put on a friendly, mischievous grin. Frederica considered him. The clapper-board clapped.

“When did you start writing poetry?”

“I piped ditties in my pram. My pram was my chariot of fire, my cloud where I piped away. Everything was poetry. Still is.”

“They must have been pleased with you at school?”

“I was teacher's pet as a tiddler. Spouting nursery-rhymes. Later, I got ground down by the system.”

“The system?”

“What they
force down
you. What
kills the imagination
. Facts and figures, kings and queens, weights and measures, eggs and skeletons and stuff, lumps of shit. Oh dear. I'm not supposed to say that, am I?”

“I've no idea. I shouldn't think so. Couldn't you find any good in anything?”

“They shut me in a mental prison-house, girl. It was torture.”

Frederica thought, there are five minutes, I should get away from education, and on to his poems. But he was displaying an attitude, like a butterfly opening its wings in the sun.

“So how would you educate the young?”

“I wouldn't. I'd give them their freedom. To find out
what
they want,
when
they want. You only learn what you
desire
to learn.”

“And things like science? That need technical knowledge—”

“Listen, darling, science is a Bad Thing. The planet is going to kill itself dead with science. Probably they'll blow us up with nuclear mushrooms, and if they don't, they'll burn away the earth's crust with napalm and extinguish the fowls of the air and the fish in the sea with pesticides. Oh yeah. Science is for two things, human greed and human blinkered arrogance. Don't teach little kids science. Teach them human things, making love, painting pictures, writing poems, singing songs, meditation. I wrote a poem against science. Do you want to hear it?”

“OK, if it isn't too long.”

The metal men in coats of white
In shuttered rooms with shuttered eyes
Make metal death with metal claws
Block out the sunshine from the skies.
The children dance in forests free
They smell the sunshine and the rain,
They dance and sing the roots and flowers
Weave magic circles whole again.
The metal men are full of hate
They bind the children with a chain
They clang the institution's gate
And box the children up in pain.
The children's eyes are red with rage
They burst the prison-gates and chain
They burn the spectacles and coats
The men go naked in the rain.
The children teach the men to play
They teach the body's ancient truth.
The naked men kneel down and pray.
Rainwashed to innocence, and youth.

“So you think the young may be able to save the world from the scientists?”

“Listen. I
know
. They
are
saving it. It's happening. They're saving it by
natural spontaneity
. They are putting the blast of the orgasm against the radioactive spout of the bomb. They can do this by just not giving in. By changing our consciousness completely.
We will make everything
new
.”

“You will change politics?”

“Politics for a start. No more dead men in deadly dark suits. Singers and sayers and hearers in lovely colours. No adversarial debating. Meditation together. A way through.”

“But there are difficult decisions. Population. How to feed the world.”

“If you change the
mind-set,
darling, you change everything. There will be new fabrics created, new colours brought to light, new styles, new ways of—of growing things, you know. New ways of sharing what there is on this earth. Yeah.”

“But the young won't stay young forever?”

The poet frowned.

“That remains to be seen. I think we may find that being truly young is a matter of being, so to speak,
in the truth,
in the truth of youth. I do believe in mind over matter. I do believe you get old and die because you secretly
want
to, you can't resist because you don't know how. But we will learn how. We will learn to live in infinity where we belong.”

“CUT,” said Alexander.
Mickey Impey had done even less preparation for his interview than Frederica. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, swayed to and fro, and after a time intoned

“Well, what do you want to talk about, then?”

“Well, we could talk about my idea of education. It's different from yours. I believe in learning things, and knowing things. I don't think it all just comes without work.”

“You're uptight, I knew it. I could tell when I saw you. I expect you've had an awful lot of it.”

“An awful lot of what?”

“An awful lot of education.”

“Quite a lot. I went to university. I studied literature. I happen to believe you think better for yourself if you know something about what other people have thought, and the ways they have thought it.”

The poet swayed faster, without opening his eyes. Crash, creak, crash, creak. He said indistinctly

“All that junk. History. The past. Bad, bad, a bad trip, all that. Like copulating with corpses, girl, whatever-your-name-is. Now, you want to copulate with the living. A
lot.
Like I do. Then you get spontaneous poems, spontaneous
overflows
as the man said, I expect you thought I didn't know that.”

“I like your poems,” said Frederica. “They amuse me. They amuse my son.”

The canvas chair lurched to a standstill.

“Listen. Stop the roundabout. Sing to the Lord. O all ye stars sing together. The lady likes my poems. Ring the bells. The condescending bitch likes my poems.”

“Have you any idea who I am?”

“Vaguely, vaguely. You're a teacher sort of person, a condescending bitch, a po-faced inerlectual, I know your sort.”

“But this particular version of it—of my
sort
—whom you are supposed to be interviewing—”

“
Whom
. Listen to her. Listen to the condescending bitch con-condescending-descending. Her descant. She puts in definite object pronouns. I expect you didn't know I knew
that
either, did you? They made me learn it. You don't need grammar.”

“I have noticed you use it very elegantly in your poems.”

“Did you say
elegant
? You fink my pomes are
elegant
. You are full of shit.”

“No, you are. But it doesn't stop you writing interesting poems.”

The rocking increased in tempo.

“CUT,” said Alexander.

The poet fell over backwards and remained lying on his back with his legs in the air, wound in the struts of his chair. His expression was beatific.
Later, Wilkie invited Frederica to the Television Centre to watch a playback of this interview. They sat in a windowless room, and watched the box in the corner. Wilkie said “As I said, the quality you have is a complete lack of fear of the camera. If you watch any of the others—including your garrulous partner—you can see fear in the neck-muscles, in the roll of the eye. The onset of Medusa. Not you. Look.”

Frederica said that she probably didn't look anxious because she took the precaution of not looking at herself. Wilkie said that if she was going to be professional she would
have
to look, and then to retain her insouciance.

She hardly recognised herself. The cameras were kind to her sharp bones, her large mouth. They made her sandy quality richer, gave her hair a dark red depth, her eyebrows, so carefully dusted and patted by the make-up artists, a winged arch. Mickey Impey's eyes had a fishy glare over his chirpy grin. But Frederica's eyes, on screen, glittered with interest and amusement. Her mouth had an intriguing wry slant.

“Do you remember, in the play, when I was Elizabeth, I recited that ballad? The woman whose skirts were cut off. Lawks a' mussy on me, this is none of I.”

“It isn't anybody else. You have all the ingredients of being a
personality
. Including what I would once have thought unlikely, a capacity to listen to other people.”

“We all grow older. I'm a teacher. I'm a mother.”

“The job's yours. Everyone agreed.”

“But I don't
want
to be a personality—”

“Oh, Frederica. I want, I want, like a bird in a nest. This is the future, wouldn't it be interesting, for a time anyway? I live two lives, I do my research, I do this. What
do
you want, anyway?”

“I don't know. Rupert Parrott thinks he'll publish my book of bits and pieces. He says it's of the moment, it's a book for
now
. I don't know that he knows. Anyway, it isn't a book, not a real book, I'm not a writer. I seem to have had an education designed to incapacitate writers. Mickey Impey wasn't so far wrong.”

“Well, then. If you know. We could pay you a retainer, the programme doesn't start for months and months, but there'll be lots of consultation, I'd like your input, as they say here. You'd be at the cutting edge of what ought to be the new form of thought, maybe a new kind of art.”

He ran back the tape and started again. Frederica gazed at her own face. What she liked in it, she saw, as Impey recited his youthful credo again, was that it was a woman's face, not a girl's. Alert, watchful, grown up. Attractive, even to its owner. She was not used to this.
Wilkie explained his idea of
Through the Looking-Glass
. Frederica thought later that this was the first time she had given him her complete attention, and also the first time he had addressed her completely seriously, as though she was neither audience for wit, nor satirical sparring-partner. She had lost her virginity to him, back in 1953, but that had been (and had been designed by her to be), a casual and unimportant happening. He had always been known as a brilliant man, a student of perception and cognition who managed to have a public career also, designing programmes. At the auditions, Frederica remembered, he had worn a pink shirt with a white collar—a rose-pink shirt with a black and white optical tie with little boxes whose perspective was unstable, and could be read many ways. His glasses now had large, heavy, squarish rims. His dark hair was longer. He was slightly too plump for this style, but not unpleasing, she remembered.

The television, Wilkie said, very seriously, was going to change everyone's consciousness. In large ways and small. The large ways were more obvious. It was already clear to everyone who mattered that the politics of the future would be conducted in these small boxes. “You have to learn to
charm
people when your face is a few inches across and you're talking into the intimacy of their fish and chips, or their fondling their girl-friend's breasts, or shoving mush down their yowling infant ...” Rhetoric would go, must go, was going. If you were going to sway the masses you must be able to do it one by one “sight unseen” as the lovely phrase has it. “It will look more honest and
be
more insidious and dishonest,” said Wilkie.

And then, television was going to change the larger world. Television was making the Vietnam war impossible for the Americans. It was revealing the images of napalm there, of starvation elsewhere on the earth. McLuhan's “global village” was one way of putting it. He preferred to think it had shrunk the earth. You'll notice, he said, as we go on, we'll talk more and more about “the planet” because from out there in space it seems small, a unity, lonely up there with its colours, the swirls of blue, and ochre, and green.

Frederica said she'd already noticed that contemporary novels tended to mention the fact of the box flickering away in the corner of the room, with its grey other-life, soldiers and tanks or other sinks in other kitchens. She said she thought it might take the place of the hearth in nineteenth-century fiction, the coals where Dickens's characters saw the generation of fantastic images, the warmth around which stories were read aloud, or told, or lived.

“You are still thinking in terms of novels,” said Wilkie. “But yes, that's just, that's very just. I was thinking also of Plato's Cave, with the fire and the shadows.”

“Novels won't go away.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“We
need
images made of language.”

“Indeed. But we are entering an age when language becomes subordinate to images. At the moment, what passes for the art of the television is bastard forms of other art-forms. Puppet-shows for kids, kitchen-sink drama squashed into three piece suites, cramped epic
films,
talking heads reciting poems after midnight.

“Now we have colour—remember the colour,” Wilkie adjured Frederica, his black and white tie following the contour of his small belly under the rich rosy shirt—“they will think of showing films about paintings and films about films, but they should be making works of art designed to be seen in small boxes with the light constructed in pixels, magenta, green, cyan blue. And the subject-matter of that art should be everything that can be thought about in coloured images, from politicians' lips to craters on the moon, from blood-corpuscles under the microscope and the slow growth of embryos to the unfolding of flowers and the seeding of forests, and all this can be woven together, as the technology advances, into one great living tapestry. Also, it can and must be
about itself,
which is suggested by your idea of flickering grey hearths in the corner of real rooms. It can show how it changes the way we see the world. It can analyse the way we respond to stimuli—whether babies seeing faces, or gannets seeing beaks, or people on sofas being induced to want—
now
—ripple ice-cream with chocolate coating. It can always show and, if it chooses, always simultaneously think. What is the use of going on and on filming music-hall and nigger minstrels, who need a proscenium arch and the body chemistry of a live audience, when you can magnify nematode worms and make new forms of beauty with infinite cubes of coloured light with infinitely varied images moving in them...?”