Life in the West. Brian Aldiss
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watched the delegates enter.
The delegates ambled round the table, looking for their places, pushing politely.
By each place was a name card, a microphone, a folder and pencil, a shining drinking glass with a sanitary paper lid, and a bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water still beaded from the refrigerator. Thomas Squire found his name looking up at him, and sat down, laying his briefcase before him. He was seated at the top of the table, with Jacques d’Exiteuil on his right and the secretary, Gianni Frenza, beyond d’Exiteuil. On Squire’s left was a place for a delegate from the Soviet Union, Vasili Rugorsky.
At meetings elsewhere, Squire would have taken his jacket off and hung it over the back of his chair, as much to make other people feel comfortable as for his own ease. He saw that the delegates here preferred to be formal. He sat down, content to be there before his neighbours arrived; an element of ascendancy enters into everything.
He opened his folder. In it was a ballpoint pen, clipped to a timetable of the sessions of the conference with a list of speakers. Tucked into the pocket of the folder were some foil-wrapped perfumed tissues for refreshing the face and hands, and a map of the city of Ermalpa and surroundings, presented by courtesy of the local tourist board.
A separate dossier, on variously coloured papers, presented biographies of the main speakers, with Squire’s heading the list. He looked it through idly. It had been copied and abridged from Who’s Who or some similar work of reference; he reflected on how curiously little the curt sentences told of his real life.
Squire, Thomas Charles. C.B.E. (1969)
B. July, 1929. Educ: Orwell Park, Ipswich, 1937–42; Gresham School, Holt, 1942–45 (First XIV); King’s College, Cambridge, 1947–50.
Mar. Teresa Rosemary Davies, 1951. Ch. John, b. 1953; George, b. 1955 (d. 1959); Ann, b. 1965; Jane, 1966.
Nat. service. Royal Mendips, 1945–46.
BIA, Belgrade, 1946; Exhib. ‘Restoration of Serbian Monasteries’, Wellcome Hall, 1950; ‘American Noises’, Newnham College, Camb., 1950; ‘Microgroovey: Style in L.P. Record Covers’, Verlaine Gallery, London, 1954–55; ‘Piranesi Goes Pop’, ICA, 1962; ‘On the Road Roadshow’, ICA, 1965.
Regal Insurance, dir., 1951-
Lect., Univ. of East Anglia, 1958-
Prs., Anglo-Yugoslav Assoc., 1964-
Ch. and dir., Hyde Park Pop Expo, 1968. Founder, Soc. For Pop. Aesthetics, 1969. Lect. in Pop Aesthetics at Berkeley (1971), Bahrain (1973), Austin, Texas (1975) Univs. Ch., Animals in the Popular Imagination Symp., Norwich, 1975.
Pubs. Against Barbarism, 1960; Cult and Culture, 1975; Frankenstein Among the Arts, 1978.
Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge; Wolfson, Oxford.
T.V., How Serbia Served the West, 1965. Frankenstein Among the Arts, 1978.
Clubs, Travellers, Arts,
Home, Pippet Hall, Hartisham, Norfolk, England. Tel., Thursford 336.
The desiccated facts were followed by extracts from an interview published in The Times some years earlier. There was also a photograph, reproduced in green on yellow paper, but nevertheless distinct. It was, in its way, quite a famous photograph, having served as a still to advertise ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’. Squire was dressed in a flapping canvas shirt and swimming trunks; beside him was Laura Nye in a bikini, hair streaming, in her role as Sex Symbol of the series; they were jumping through the shallow waves of the North Sea. The photo, more than the potted biog., said something about Squire’s life style.
Also included in the presentation folder were envelopes and a pad of A4 paper of good quality, handsomely decorated with the name of the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation, University of Ermalpa, Sicily. Below the inscription was the symbol of the conference, five red tulips on parallel stalks – or they could be lollipops or hearts – the iconography was deliberately ambiguous – with one stalk, the longest, branching off sideways at right angles, with a spearhead – or was it a rocketship with vapour trail? – neatly piercing a red sun. At the top of the paper on the other side, was another symbol, the symbol of the organization of which Thomas Squire was founder and president, SPA, the Society for Popular Aesthetics, with the S and the A buttressing the big P with a wide eye in its centre. Squire recognized the placing of this hieroglyph as at once a tribute to him and an insinuation. They wanted his organization.
One hundred and fifty delegates from fifteen countries were listed in the programme. The seating round the table, as a rapid computation showed, allowed for only half that number to appear. Fairly standard practice.
Squire watched the delegates seat themselves, observing their various ploys. An arrangement of pens. A watch removed from wrist and prominently displayed – LCD digital quartz most likely, to judge by its brutal shape, possibly new. A manly and immediate attack on the mineral-water bottle. Earnest writing of notes. Intense communication with one’s next-door neighbour. A deliberate stare towards the ornate ceiling. Someone whistling. Smiling. Frowning. Everything equally effective, really, in asserting one’s individuality, if one needed to do so.
Gianni Frenza, the secretary of the conference, said hello to Squire before sitting down. He was a decent solid man with a heavy face and thick shaggy hair which curled over his heavy spectacles. Probably a good family man.
Vasili Rugorsky entered with a colleague. Both bowed formally to Squire before sitting down. Rugorsky had written a curious book on Shakespeare and Evolution, which ranged Shakespearean characters on a sort of evolutionary ladder, starting with the ‘youth heroes’ like Romeo and Hamlet and proceeding through Mark Antony and Julius Caesar to Lear and Prospero. A curious work for a Russian critic. His book had been translated into French but not English. Rugorsky was a handsome man in a rather porcine way, his white hair brushed back over a good broad brow. He wore a blue double-breasted suit, with a white handkerchief protruding, neatly folded, from the breast pocket. A bit like a nineteen-forties big bandleader, thought Squire.
Rugorsky’s compatriot, according to the notice before him, which he was examining with blunt figures, was Georgi Kchevov. He was listed in the curriculum simply as ‘Leningrad critic’. Nobody knew his name. The editor who had been invited, a distinguished academician well known in the West, had not materialized; Kchevov had materialized instead. That too was fairly standard. Kchevov could be a truck driver, judging by his muscles and rugged looks. The gold-rimmed spectacles contributed a parody of a Weimar professor.
The Russians were escorted into the conference hall by one of the vulpine young academics from the University of Ermalpa who played some part in the organization of the conference. Squire observed that Kchevov spoke fluent Italian to this dignitary; Rugorsky maintained a watchful silence, blinking as he gazed about the room. He hardly looked up as the Ermalpan delegate bowed himself away.
When Jacques d’Exiteuil entered through the double doors, his copper hair gleaming, the chatter in the large room was slightly hushed. His arrival was a signal that business was about to begin. Slight but important, he smiled at all and sundry as he advanced, slipping easily from one language to another according to the nationality of the delegate he addressed. Even to the Greek …? Well, it sounded remarkably like it.
Using the biography list, Squire started to make a nationality count. Three quarters of the delegates were Italian, over half of them from the University of Ermalpa, which gave the proceedings the provincial air of which Morabito had spoken. There were ten French, five Americans, including the youthful Albert Russell Cantania, who had already made a name for himself in academic circles with his large structural work, Form Behind Formula. Had he been invited because he was likely to make a real contribution or because he had an Italian surname? Then a rabble of nationalities, including Squire himself, the only Englishman present. He was sorry to see there was no Yugoslav delegate.
The Americans, two Canadians, and two Australians, who were very young and studying in Ermalpa (and apparently invited along for the ride), all dressed in sloppy style, without ties or jackets; one Canadian wore an old T-shirt with an advertisement for something across his chest.