Bedlam Burning (22 page)

I was about to go to my hut and turn in for the night when I looked out of the library window and saw something going on in the garden. It was Kincaid. He had built a little bonfire out of the pages and jackets that he'd torn from the books, and he was standing in front of a small, flapping pyramid of flames. He looked massive and sinisterly majestic. He was agitated yet gleeful, moving from foot to foot, as if he was about to start dancing round the fire. I looked at him and for a moment I thought he might be quite insane. And then I dismissed the thought, telling myself I'd seen far too many bad movies.

I woke up next morning feeling good, and not without reason, I thought. Life seemed all right. I'd decided to stay at the clinic. I'd struck a deal with the patients, or at least they'd struck a deal with me, and I'd been told what Kincaidian Therapy was.

These were all reasons for feeling good, yet I think the main reason was that I had something to do. Today I would organise the library. Perhaps it was pretty dull of me to find that a source of pleasure, but compared to the inaction of most of the last two weeks it felt like a hell of a lark. And it was a means to a very desirable end. Once I'd sorted the books I'd be able to read some of them. Even in that swamp of fourth-rate and mutilated volumes I would surely find something that could distract and entertain an obsessive reader like me, and this would make my life better still.

I spent most of the day classifying and alphabetising the books. I enjoyed the sheer laboriousness of the job and let it take longer than it need have done. I didn't ask anyone to help me, and nobody volunteered, but when the task was virtually finished Byron and Anders arrived in the library. The occasion had elements both of a university tutorial and of a visit from a Mafia boss. The two dons. They looked around the library, seemed unsurprised and unimpressed by what I'd done, and then Byron languidly demanded of me, ‘Who's your favourite author?'

It was an unexpected question but I answered it truthfully and said, ‘Shakespeare.'

Anders gave a thick, sinusy snort, indicating a free-floating contempt that I didn't think had much to do with my actual answer. Perhaps he might have been less contemptuous if I'd said Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins, but I doubted it. Byron was more accepting.

‘Not a bad answer,' he said. ‘Obvious but not bad. Least favourite?'

‘Harold Robbins?' I offered. ‘Jackie Collins?'

Anders snorted again, but this time it contained no hint of literary criticism. It was just a snort.

‘Anders isn't much of a reader,' Byron said. ‘But he's quite a writer.'

‘Aren't you all?' I said.

‘Some more than others, but I know what you mean,' Byron agreed. ‘So Kincaid's told you all about his therapy.' I wondered how he knew that. ‘What do you think of it?'

I'd been happy not to think about it at all while I was arranging the books. It was too difficult and begged too many questions. I may have been a good reader but I was a very average thinker. So I didn't know what to reply to Byron and, in any case, I wasn't sure if it was absolutely ethical or sensible to discuss these things with the patients, so I said, ‘I think it's very interesting.'

I was not surprised by Anders' snort.

‘You've read I. A. Richards'
Practical Criticism
?' Byron enquired.

‘Well, I've looked at it,' I said.

Practical Criticism
is one of those books you can easily feel you've read even if you haven't. Back in the 1930s Richards presented his Cambridge students with plain texts of certain poems. He didn't reveal the titles or authors and he didn't provide any critical or historical information, simply asked the students to read the poems and write down their responses. It sounds pretty old hat today, but I gather it was quite revolutionary at the time. The poems, along with extracts from what the students wrote, as well as Richards' responses to both, make up the book. The poems' titles and authors are revealed on the last page, printed in reverse, like mirror-writing.

What the project seems to have proved is that it's possible to think almost anything at all about any given piece of writing. People think great poems are rotten, that rotten ones are great. Different people will find the same poem utterly lucid or utterly impenetrable. They'll disagree about whether a thing is original or hackneyed, whether it's boringly Christian or paganly immoral; and so on.

I had indeed read the book at college but I probably hadn't read every word, and I was sure I'd forgotten much of it. I suspected Byron was just the sort of smart alec who'd pick up on the gaps in my
knowledge and memory, and argue with me. That's why I only admitted to having ‘looked' at it; that gave lots of room for denial and backing down. I didn't want a literary wrangle with Byron at that moment. I also hadn't the slightest idea what this had to do with Kincaidian Therapy.

‘Richards talks about visualisation,' Byron said. ‘Some people, he reports, read a piece of writing and “see” in their mind's eye a series of precise and vivid visual images. They see Wordsworth's daffodils, they see the albatross around the neck of the ancient mariner, they see the stately pleasure dome and so on. They'll tell you they enjoy writing for its ability to call up these images. They make that a touchstone of what good writing is.'

I did more or less remember this and I nodded as sagely as I could manage.

‘But,' said Byron, ‘Richards argues that these images needn't necessarily have anything to do with the poem itself. They may have far more to do with the individual psychology of the particular reader. Readers may “see” the images of daffodils or albatrosses or pleasure domes that they already carry in their own heads. The writing calls up the pre-existing image, like pulling a file out of some mental filing cabinet. The actual piece of writing may be irrelevant. These kind of readers see what they want to see.

‘And I'm only mentioning it because it seems to me this could play havoc with Kincaid's theory, don't you think? There he is trying to protect us from images, yet the process of reading and writing may be a means of
creating
images.'

This was an objection I hadn't got around to considering, though I liked to think that given enough time I probably would have.

‘But simultaneously,' Byron continued, ‘Richards tells us that when certain other people read they don't summon up visual images at all. For them the word cow doesn't call up an image of a specific, individualised cow, it merely creates in them certain feelings, notions and attitudes that the actual perception of an actual cow would produce. I'm paraphrasing here, naturally.'

‘Naturally,' I agreed.

I was aware of Anders stalking up and down behind me, paying no attention to Byron, but browsing through the books I'd just arranged on the library shelves, pulling them out, riffling through them,
slamming them back in what I thought was likely to be the wrong place.

Byron continued, ‘Richards says that whereas a visual image is a copy of a thing, that is a representation of a single cow, a word can simultaneously and equally represent many vastly different cows. So it's just possible, isn't it, that what Kincaid might be doing in his therapy is trying to move us away from the single, individualised representation inherent in created visual images towards the more universal truth contained in words.'

Well yes, just possibly he was, but if so then why hadn't he said so? Why was it up to a Byron to make the case that Kincaid's theory had some sort of intellectual rigour to it? And actually I wasn't sure that Byron was right. I wasn't sure that's what Kincaid was doing at all. I suspected Byron was giving Kincaid credit for being a good deal cleverer than he was. Byron looked at me quizzically, the way my tutors often had at university, trying to elicit some sort of informed response from me, a response that hadn't always been forthcoming.

‘Does that sound reasonable?' Byron asked.

‘Yes, it sounds reasonable but—'

‘And did he mention Rothko?'

‘Yes, he did.'

‘But I'll bet he didn't say that Rothko's paintings have been described as television for Zen Buddhists, did he?'

‘No, no, he didn't.'

Anders stopped his browsing, riffling and slamming and plumped his wide buttocks down next to me on the library table.

‘Why don't you admit it?' Anders said. ‘You think Kincaid's a cunt who doesn't know what he's doing.'

‘No, I—'

‘You see now, that's a very interesting example of what I think Richards had in mind,' Byron said. ‘When Anders used the word cunt you probably didn't actually summon up a mental picture of a particular set of female genitals, did you?'

I wasn't sure if this was a very interesting example or not, and I certainly doubted that it was what Richards had had in mind. True, I hadn't visualised a single set of female genitals but neither had the word summoned up the feelings, notions and attitudes that the actual perception of an actual set of female genitals would have produced. I suspected we were dealing with some other issue here, but I felt
unable to see which. I considered saying something about Plato and tables and shadows on the walls of caves, but decided against it.

‘I suppose the only real question is whether or not Kincaidian Therapy actually works,' I said.

Anders snorted again, before saying, ‘Yeah, just look around you. Every fucker here's so happy and healthy, aren't they?'

Well no, they weren't happy and healthy, but why would they be? They were in the clinic, in the middle of their treatment. If the therapy had completely done its work they wouldn't have been there at all, would they? They'd have been released. I was in no position to say whether or not the therapy was working. I hadn't been there long enough. I hadn't seen how bad the patients were before the treatment started.

‘Anders is a bit miffed because he's missing his favourite television programme,' Byron explained.

‘Yeah, I'd kill to see an episode of
Bless This House
,' said Anders.

I smiled nervously.

‘Could I ask you both a personal question?' I said.

‘You could try,' said Byron.

‘Why are you here?'

‘Nothing like starting with the big ones, is there?' Byron said.

‘I meant why are you here at the Kincaid Clinic.'

‘We know what you meant,' said Anders.

Byron and Anders looked at each other deferentially, each happy to let the other have the floor, but Byron's deference was more formidable, so Anders said, ‘See, I'm a crook. Right. A hard man. You can tell that, obviously, just by looking at me. Got into a bit of bother with the Old Bill and also with some geezers down Peckham way. I had to scarper. Sharpish. I convinced the doc that I was having trouble with my nerves, and here I am. I reckoned this was the safest place to lie low till it's all over with.'

This sounded plausible enough, and yet the way Anders told it, it didn't sound remotely convincing. He must have sensed my scepticism.

‘All right,' he said, ‘I'll give you the other version. You know in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
where that cunt Pirsig looks in the mirror and he can't work out why it is that his image is reversed left to right but not top to bottom, and it's such a big
fucking philosophical wobbler that he goes crackers over it? Well, a very similar thing happened to me.

‘I'm in this after-hours dive in Stepney and this cunt comes up to me and says, “What can go up a chimney down but can't go down a chimney up?” Then he pisses off and leaves me to think about it. So I think about it for hours, days, weeks. I go right up the pictures. I wander the streets, thinking about it, doing my head in. When they eventually find me, I'm a crazy man, my clothes are in rags, filthy, soaked in my own urine, and I'm beating my head against a wall. Literally. So they reckoned the Kincaid Clinic's just the gaff for me.'

‘The answer's an umbrella, incidentally,' Byron said. ‘We wouldn't want you going the same way.'

This sounded infinitely less convincing than the lying-low story. In fact, I assumed Anders was probably joking, or at least mocking me and my desire to know anything about him. I was tempted to laugh, but I imagined that laughing at Anders was a risky business.

‘Right,' I said seriously, but I must still have sounded unconvinced.

‘Something the matter with that?' Anders exploded. ‘Isn't that good enough for you, you cunt?'

‘Yes, sure,' I said, ‘It's fine—'

‘You think there are some good reasons for being mad, and some bad reasons? You think my reasons aren't up to snuff? That it?'

‘No, no, I'm not saying that.'

‘I should fuckin' hope not.'

Anders prised himself off the table and turned his back to me. I couldn't believe he was really as angry or as offended as he sounded. I thought he was just doing it for effect. But it was quite a useful effect.

‘And how about you, Byron?' I asked warily.

Byron ran a long, fine-boned hand through his hair and said, ‘I have absolutely no idea why I'm here.'

It was a bafflingly opaque answer, but not a bad one, and certainly a satisfyingly final one. I didn't ask any more questions. The three of us stood there for some time in a little lacuna of silence, as though we were three actors in a play who'd delivered all our lines perfectly but were now waiting for some cue, some off-stage sound-effect or fanfare of incidental music that the technical crew were unable to provide. Finally Byron said, ‘As a matter of fact my favourite author is Shakespeare too.'

‘Same for me,' said Anders, though I assumed he didn't mean it.

For a moment, just a moment, I pictured, nay visualised, William Shakespeare. We all know what Shakespeare looks like: the bald head, the goatee, the ruff, perhaps an ear-ring. I was summoning up a kind of generalised schoolbook portrait, and I wasn't sure how historically accurate it was, but that was certainly my idea of Shakespeare. Was this merely pulling a file out of some mental filing cabinet, or was the word creating for me many vastly different Shakespeares?