The Book and the Brotherhood (77 page)

‘A bit, but that doesn’t matter, admiration overcomes envy. One should be inspired by something good even if one disagrees.’

‘So you disagree?’

‘Of course I disagree!’

Gerard was not exactly tearing his hair but pulling his hands through it as if he wanted to straighten out its glossy curls lock by lock. His face, shining with light as it now seemed to Rose, was like a beautiful comic mask. She was touched, but
more deeply disturbed and frightened, by his emotion, which she could not yet understand.

‘So it’s good, and of course, you disagree, but at least it’s
finished
. You’ve read it – and there we are.’

‘No, we aren’t there – not where you think –’

‘I don’t think anything, Gerard. Do calm down. Will you review it?’

‘
Review
it? I don’t know, I don’t suppose anyone will ask me, that’s not important –’

‘I’m glad you think so. Have you told Crimond you like it, have you seen him?’

‘No, no, I haven’t been in touch with him. That doesn’t matter, now, either.’

Rose felt some relief. She was disturbed by this excited talk about that dangerous book. All her old fears of Crimond were alert, that he would somehow damage Gerard, that the book itself would damage him, at the very least because he would be made unhappy by envious regrets. There was also, and she felt it now like the first symptoms of a fell disease, her fear of some amazing
rapprochement
whereby Crimond would revenge himself on her by making friends with his enemy and taking Gerard away. She wanted the book episode to be
over
; for Gerard, moved by his generosity from envy to admiration, to discuss the thing, and praise it, and then forget it, and everything to be as before, with Crimond, the surly dog, at a safe distance.

‘I imagine not everyone will like the book.’

‘No, they won’t, some will hate it, some I’m afraid will love it.’

‘You evidently don’t hate it as it seems to excite you so! I can’t believe it’s all that interesting, a book on political theory. After all there are hundreds of them.’

‘Rose, it’s brilliant, it’s all that we thought it might be when we decided it was worth financing it. It’s all we hoped – it’s also all we feared, later on that is. It will be immensely read, immensely discussed, and I believe, very influential. It’s odd, I can remember now, which I’d somehow forgotten, what we felt about Crimond all those years ago when we thought what
a
remarkable
man he was and how he’d be able to speak for all of us, for
us.
Of course it isn’t at all what we expected then, it’s more than that, and it’s not what we want to hear now, though we
have
to hear it.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about “we” – just speak for yourself – you keep on imagining there’s some kind of brotherhood, but we’re scattered, we aren’t a band of brothers, just solitary worried individuals, not even young any more.’

‘Yes, yes, dear Rose, how well you put it –!’

‘You’re interested in the book because you know about it, because you know Crimond, because you financed the thing. If it was by someone you’d never heard of you’d ignore it. What’s so good about this horrible book?’

‘Why do you think it’s horrible? You mustn’t. It’s not just another book about political theory, it’s a
synthesis
, it’s immensely long, it’s about everything.’

‘Then it
must
be a mess and a failure.’

‘But it isn’t. My God, the man’s learning, his patience, what he’s read, how he’s thought!’

‘You’ve read and thought too.’

‘No, I haven’t. Crimond said I’d stopped thinking, that what I’d been doing all my life wasn’t thinking. And in a way he was right.’

‘That’s absurd, he’s an absurd man. What will he do now the book’s over, fade away? Go off to Eastern Europe?’

‘Oh he won’t go to Eastern Europe, he belongs here. Maybe he’ll write another equally long book refuting this one! He’s quite capable of it! But this volume will take a lot of digesting. I didn’t know one of them could produce such a book now.’

‘Who are “they”?’

‘Oh Marxists, neo-Marxists, revisionists, whatever they call themselves. I don’t know whether Crimond is “really” a Marxist, or what that means now, they don’t know themselves. I suppose he’s a sort of maverick Marxist, as their best thinkers are. The only good Marxist is a mad Marxist. It’s not enough to be a revisionist, you’ve got to be a bit mad too – to be
able to
see
the present world, to imagine the magnitude of what’s happening.’

‘Well, I always said he was mad,’ said Rose, ‘and if the book is entirely wrong – headed –’

‘Yes, it is – but one has got to understand –’

‘Crimond believes in one-party government – one doesn’t have to go any farther than that.’

‘Well, he does and he doesn’t – his argument is much larger –’

‘I should think,’ said Rose, ‘that there is nothing larger than that matter.’

‘Oh Rose, Rose!’ Gerard suddenly reached his hand across the table and seized hers. ‘What a lovely answer.’ She held onto his warm dear hand which mattered so much more than any book, more than the fate of democratic government, more than the fate of the human race. ‘But, my dear Rose, we have to think, we have to fight, we have to
move
, we can’t stand still,
everything
is moving so fast –’

‘You mean technology? Is Crimond’s book about technology?’

‘Yes, but as I said it’s about everything. He said to me ages ago that he just had to do it all
for himself
, to explain the whole of philosophy
to himself
, alone. And that’s what he’s done, the preSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, right up to the present, and Eastern philosophy too – and that means morality, religion, art, it all comes in, there’s a splendid chapter on Augustine, and he writes so well, it’s funny and witty, all sorts of people will read it –’

‘But if it’s all wrong that seems rather a pity!’

‘Yes. It could enflame a lot of thoughtless smashers. He thinks liberal democracy is done for. He’s a sort of pessimistic utopian. And of course we’re right, all right I’m right, and he’s wrong – but my rightness – needs to be changed – shaken, uprooted, replanted, enlightened…’

‘I think this book will be a nine days’ wonder,’ said Rose, ‘and then we can all relax! Even you may feel a bit more normal tomorrow morning. You’re drunk on whisky and Crimond!’

‘It may be that it’s directed simply at
me.
’

‘Surely you don’t think –?’

‘I don’t mean literally. There may be a small number of people who will understand the book and be
ready
for it, and they are the people it is for – some will agree, some will disagree, but they’ll have received an important communication. It may be like a signal by heliograph – there’s only one point where it’s received, and there it’s dazzling.’

‘It’s dazzled you anyway. But if it’s all about Plato and Augustine and Buddha I can’t see it as a political bombshell.’

‘It’s not all about – it’s an attempt to see the whole of our civilised past in relation to the present
and the future
, it’s pointed, as it were, at the revolution.’

‘Oh that! Oh really!’

‘Rose, I don’t mean the proletarian revolution out of old-fashioned Marxism. I mean the whole human global revolution.’

‘I didn’t know there was one. Neither did you. You’ve just picked it up out of Crimond’s book!’

‘My dear!’ Gerard began to laugh crazily, pouring himself out some more whisky.

‘
You’re
drunk. You said I was. Now we both are.’

‘My dear girl, yes, I’m drunk, and I didn’t “pick up” out of Crimond’s book something which of course I knew before, but which I now see in a new light.’

‘It’s an illusion. Everything is just a muddle. That’s what liberal democracy means.’

‘Rose, you see, you
understand.
But a popular illusion is a great force – and even the maddest prediction can reveal things one hadn’t dreamt of which are really there.’

‘What do you mean, technology, Africa, nuclear war –?’

‘Many many things which seem separate but are connected or will connect. The foundations are shifting, we’re about to see the largest, deepest, fastest change, the most shattering revolution, in the history of civilisation.’

‘I don’t believe those things connect,’ said Rose, ‘that’s mythology. I’m surprised at you! We have a lot of different problems with different solutions. Anyway, dear Gerard,
we
shall not see this exciting cataclysm. I hope and believe that in what remains of my lifetime I shall still be able to go out and buy half a pound of butter and a copy of
The Times.
’

‘Who knows? Think what’s happened already in our lives.’

‘Hitler?’

‘Yes, unpredictable, unimaginable things. Space travel. We are surrounded by a future we can’t conceive of. We’re like those natives in New Zealand who just went on fishing because they
couldn’t see
Captain Cook’s ship – there it was in the bay, but they couldn’t conceptualise it.’

‘I like that. But what you can’t know you can’t know.’

‘Rose, human life is too short, not just that it’s sad to spend so little time at the play, but it’s too short for serious thinking – thinking needs a long training, a long discipline, a long concentration – even geniuses must have felt they were tiring too soon, giving up when they’d just
begun
to understand – philosophy, perhaps human history, would be quite different if we all lived to be two hundred.’

‘Our lives are quite long enough to have some fun, do some work, love a few people and try to be good.’

‘Yes, yes, but we’ve got to, some of us have got to, try to
think
about what’s happening, and to
fight
–’

‘Against what?’

‘Against – how can I put it – against
history.
All right, this sounds crazy – Rose, it’s so difficult, I can’t even pick it up yet – I feel like I felt in my first term of philosophy at Oxford, as if I were crawling round and round a slippery sphere and couldn’t get inside.’

‘Why bother to get inside? That might have been worth trying when you were a student, but why bother now?’

‘You mean – well, yes, I was too young then – perhaps I’m too old now – that thought hurts terribly.’

‘I don’t mean to hurt you.’

‘You’re pouring on cold water, buckets and buckets of it, but that’s right, one must be cool, one must be cold –’

‘I don’t understand. Is Crimond on the side of history?’

‘Yes. History as a slaughterhouse, history as a wolf that
wanders outside in the dark, an idea of history as something that
has to be
, even if it’s terrible, even if it’s deadly.’

‘I thought Marxists were optimists who thought the perfect society would soon emerge everywhere as the victory of socialism.’

‘They used to be. Some still are, others are haggard with fear but hanging on. Crimond thinks we must purify our ideas with visions of utopia during a collapse of civilisation which he thinks is inevitable.’

‘And looks forward to, no doubt! He’s a determinist, as they all are.’

‘He’s a black determinist, that’s the most dangerous and attractive kind. Marxism as despair, and as the only possible instrument of thought, the only philosophy that will be
ready
to
look after
a period of unavoidable authoritarian government.’

‘And as the ark carrying the new values. All the old bourgeois ones will be extinct.’

‘He’s trying to grasp the whole problem – Of course I don’t agree –’

‘I don’t think there is a whole problem, or that we can imagine the future, no one in the past managed it.’

‘I can’t convey it, the book is a huge interconnected
argument
, and it’s not just pessimistic – it’s very utilitarian, that’s always been the nicest part of Marxism! It’s about everything – there’s a lot about ecology and kindness to animals –’

‘Suitable for women!’

‘Rose, it’s a very
high-minded
book, about justice, about suffering –’

‘I don’t believe it. He wants to liquidate the bourgeois individual, that is the individual, and bourgeois values, that is values! He believes in the inevitability of cruelty.’

‘It’s a comprehensive attack on Marxism by a very intelligent Marxist, an attempt to think the whole thing through – you’ll see –’

‘I won’t. I might look up ecology in the index, and animals, kindness to –’

‘Rose, please don’t just mock –’

‘You seem to be overwhelmed because the book looks like
“what the age requires”, a new synthesis and all that, but if it’s just Marxism rules the world and utopia beyond, that’s not new, it’s just the old dictatorship of the proletariat in modern dress – and it’s everything that
you
detest anyway, so why are you so impressed? I don’t believe in Crimond’s ark, his boat which is going to shoot the rapids.’

‘Well, what do you believe in?’

‘I think we’ve got to protect the good things that we have.’

‘But really – ahead – what do you see? Catastrophe?
Après nous le déluge?
’

Rose was silent. Gerard had got up and was leaning over the back of his chair, his face illumined by a glare of excitement which seemed to Rose something comic, an intensification of his usual zany smile. At last, unwilling to say yes, she simply nodded.

Gerard turned away and began to walk up and down the room. ‘Rose, have you got any of those chocolate biscuits?’

‘The dark ones, those very dry ones? Yes, I’ll get them.’

The table still carried their plates covered in fragments, the cheese and the plum cake, the apples in a pretty bowl.

‘I’m still hungry. I’ll have some of the cake too. Is it Annushka’s?’

As Rose, in the kitchen, found the tin with the chocolate biscuits, she reflected that what was enlivening her in this argument with her old friend was physical desire, the debate was, for her, sex, her urgent agonising wish to be in bed with him transformed into repartee, as he said into mockery, just that, and not the future of civilisation!