The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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the bar while it’s showing – I lived with the series for so long, I almost know it by heart. Of course, it does relate closely to the subject of our discussions. But I must remind you, for all the kindness you have done me, that I am an amateur in a field where you are experts, and I took as my text for the series a tag from the philosopher Gurdjieff, which I discovered long ago in Ouspensky’s fascinating book, In Search of the Miraculous.
‘It’s a tag which many authors could use at the front of their books as a warning. Gurdjieff says, speaking of his work, “The object I had in view was to produce an interesting and beautiful spectacle. Of course there is a certain meaning hidden beneath the outward form, but I have not pursued the aim of exposing and emphasizing this meaning.”
‘Nor have I, because I am unable to. I only know that the traditions of the West, strong and honourable though they are, are insufficient to live by. We have to embrace the new and rise up to change.’
2
Flattery and Higher Foolishness
Ermalpa, September 1978
On checking into the Grand Hotel Marittimo, conference delegates had received small books with meal vouchers in them. One voucher had to be presented at every meal, the meal being understood to include a bottle of red wine and half a bottle of mineral water.
Squire entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel a little late for lunch, and found himself with no choice of table. He had been detained by one of the American delegates, Selina Ajdini.
Following the coffee break, four speakers had delivered papers on various aspects of popular culture: Enrico Pelli on ‘Psychiatry and the Popular Understanding of Prehistory’, Marianne de Suffren on ‘Horror Films in Catholic Countries’, Geo Camaion, the Romanian delegate, on ‘Symbolic Cognition’, and finally Selina Ajdini on ‘Aldous Huxley as Failed Prophet’.
Since only the last paper had been received in English, rather than in the language peculiar to the interpreters, and since Squire had once met the subject of the paper, and admired his writings, he had paid particular attention to Selina Ajdini.
There was another reason to attend. There were few women at the conference, and only three actually delivering papers. Of those, the most immediately striking was Selina Ajdini.
She carried herself with a defiant air, as if aware of the covertly predatory glances of the young Italians. A heavy brown leather travel bag over one shoulder gave her the air of a soldier – perhaps a soldier in a comic opera. So Squire reflected, seeing her move with the encumbered shoulder thrust forward, one red-nailed hand about the bulk of the bag. She wore a fine blue corduroy suit with a white shirt beneath. Where the blouson jacket gripped her waist, she wore a large-linked gold chain, the end of which jangled as she walked. High leather boots tight to the calf completed the comic opera soldier effect.
Ajdini’s face suggested something different. Although she was slenderly built, this slenderness was masked by her clothing; the quality emerged nakedly in her face. It had a bare keenness like a hare’s breastbone found on a windy headland, eroded of flesh, robbed of formed associations. The simile occurred to Squire as the woman rose to speak; there was something remote and inhuman, he thought, about that proudly sculpted profile, which the scrupulously coiffed black hair did little to counteract. The remoteness made her age difficult to estimate.
She put spectacles on her nose to read her paper. The paper proved to be littered with references from a dozen languages. Her thesis, as far as it could be distinguished, was that Aldous Huxley’s life typified the end of one great strand of English and European bourgeois Romantic thought. The Huxley family typified the nineteenth-and twentieth-century culturally privileged elite, with its Darwinian connections. And that elite typified a repressive class structuralism cloaked by a veneer of scientific and humanistic enlightenment.
It was Ajdini’s contention that Huxley’s ‘life parabola’ from Eton and Balliol to the scoured coast of California represented at once a despairing attempt to escape the autocratic vengeance of late capitalist society and a further plunge into a deeply destructive hedonism masked as asceticism (but betrayed by use of drugs).
Although she spoke brightly, Ajdini’s summing up was equally dusty in content. Huxley’s life represented to pop culture, one of whose idols he had been, a Janus-faced bourgeois prophet with nothing to pronounce upon but the collapse of his kind. While assuming to speak ostensibly for preservation of values such as ecology, Huxley found himself forced to act out prophetically the effete culture of the West. That culture was running into suicidal acts and self-destructive deserts. Prophecy could no longer function under capitalism; there was no science of the future since that future was about to terminate. The picture of laissez-faire sexuality and technology in Brave New World was an inadvertent portrait of a way of life already doomed.
It was not even a clever paper, decided Squire, pencilling the words ‘Higher Foolishness’ on his programme; yet it was tricked out with cleverness. Ajdini’s reference to Romanticism came adorned with learned references to European Romanticism, wherein was pointed out (in parentheses) that, although English and German Romanticisms were well propagandized, in reality the great Manzoni of Italy, and of course the Russians with Pushkin and Lermontov, not to mention other East European figures working in Slav, Hungarian, Romanian, Georgian, and other languages extending as far as the Caucasus and further, where the authenticity of folk poetry and (for example) the romantic letter had become truly popular, much more tellingly represented the Romantic tradition at grass-roots level.
When Ajdini sat down, a French delegate asked a lengthy but footling question, to do with the relationship between Huxley’s Brave New World and the ‘plays of protest’ of Shakespeare – or, as he believed, Lord Bacon – particularly The Tempest, as interpreted through the monopolistic tendencies of late-nineteenth-century scientism. Ajdini answered quite briskly, smiling and making an unscripted joke, in which it was apparent that she had been misled by the interpreter and missed the drift of the question. Frenza then intervened, thanked the main speakers for their contributions, and adjourned the meeting until sixteen hundred hours.
As delegates poured from the hall, Selina Ajdini was waiting among the ferns of the marble gallery. She advanced towards Squire, travel bag thrust forward, smiling and holding out her hand. Her big blue-rimmed spectacles still on her nose made her eyes – of a much more elusive shade of blue – look large and defenceless.
‘Mr Squire, we have not met and it is my great pleasure that we do so now; I attended your Pop Expo in London a decade ago, and marvelled like everyone else. It is wonderful that you came to Ermalpa. My name is Selina Ajdini and I am Associate Professor in Comparative Stylistics at the University of the Gulf in Galveston, Texas. This year I have a sabbatical in Europe East and West, with a roving commission for the Frankfurt-am-Main magazine Die Spitze.’
Seen close to, she looked older than Squire had estimated. Probably in her forties.
‘I used to know Ted Zold, head of the English department at Gulf.’
And no less attractive for that.
‘Ted’s retired just this year. He’s working on the Yale edition of the correspondence of Howard Dean Efflinger.’ She spoke English without an American accent, rather with some kind of European intonation Squire could not place. Her voice was pleasant – if ‘pure and clear as a mountain stream’, then the associations with the hare bone picked bare on the headland were still present in Squire’s mind. Her lips were thin and coral pink; they moved delightfully, whatever she was saying. He transferred his gaze to the blue eyes; the diatribe against Huxley had left him too affronted for any ready supply of conversation.
She was presenting her credentials in a sophisticated way, chatting about an acquaintance of his whom she had met in Budapest. She punctuated her talk with ‘Thank you’, and ‘You’re very kind’ to delegates who, passing by, felt compelled to offer her congratulations on her speech. This she did without in any way dissipating the impression that she was deep in conversation with the man she regarded as most important. The leather travel bag, turning gently on the left hip, touched Squire’s right thigh; the slender hand with