The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss
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I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshall and classify the multitude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know – if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God’s name am I? A fool, of course, to start with – but the rest of the diagnosis?
‘One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred.’
The adventures of Barbellion’s psyche led me to that epicentre of adolescent turbulence, The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff. I came across the book in two tall volumes, translated by Mathilde Blind – a name in its way as exciting as Bashkirtseff. This Ukrainian-Russian girl died aged twenty-five, thus becoming even more romantic than Barbellion, who ran to thirty-one years. The tempestuous Marie loved herself, hated herself. Misery excited her: it was something to pour into her many diaries. And she discovered as others have done that she was really two people.
‘At present I am vexed, as if for another person.
‘Indeed, the woman who is writing, and her whom I describe, are really two persons. What are all her troubles to me? I tabulate, analyse, and copy the daily life of my person; but to me, to myself, all that is very indifferent. It is my pride, my self-love, my interests, my envelope, my eyes, which suffer, or weep, or rejoice; but I, myself, am there only to watch, to write, to relate, and to reason calmly about these great miseries, just as Gulliver must have looked at the Liliputians …’ (Paris, May 30th 1877.)
Copying out these sentences now, I recall that for a brief period I lusted for this amazing emotional girl, long dead. I heard her satin skirts sweeping the Second Empire carpets, her voice at the piano, I empathised with her intense longings, feeling we would be a perfect match for one another, a consummation and a disaster waiting to happen.
Of course I was ashamed of these feelings. In this callow, shallow period, I was ashamed of all feeling. Much like the divine Marie, I could not tell how distraught I was. When I did have a real girlfriend, I dared not by a flicker of the eye reveal as much to my parents, or even to Betty, who might have told Dot.
Impossible to admit that I had a sex life. They would have murdered me. Or, worse still, laughed at me.
In some ways, it became more comfortable to be at school – though there was always the dread of leaving home, of feeling that I was being kicked out. I never shed tears – except when I said goodbye privately to Tiny, who was growing old.
Ours became an excellent form as we moved steadily up the school. We laughed a lot. I endeavoured to read every book in the moderately well-equipped library. This was when I started on Freud and Gibbon and Eddington and anything to do with astronomy or the workings of the human mind. My mind was already giving me trouble. The novelists we much admired were Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Eric Linklater and J. B. Priestley. Graham Greene came along a little later.
Buckland was and is a sporting school. We played Chivenor, the nearby RAF station, at rugger, as well as various other public schools such as Blundells, outside Tiverton. All that strenuous exercise prepared us not only for the Army, but for life, to endure its hard knocks.
At the beginning of the autumn term, lorries arrived to collect the senior part of the school and drive us out to new agricultural developments on Exmoor, where heath had been turned into farm land. Acres and acres of potatoes were being grown. We worked from early in the morning until late, digging up long rows, turning up nests of those smooth vegetable eggs, while the sun sloped low towards the Atlantic.
It was backbreaking work. Our reward was to be driven home to school for mass baths, all grubby naked bodies steaming together, followed by a meal in hall of sausage with piles of mashed potatoes, our potatoes.
We also held drives for the Forces. At one time, a group of us, wearing clean rugger togs, pushed the school barrow around Swimbridge, collecting waste paper. We knocked on people’s doors. Sometimes they invited us in and plied us with cups of tea. Generously they gave, throwing out valuable books, sets of Edwards’ Birds, first editions of Anthony Trollope’s novels. But, ‘Us’ll keep us bound volumes of Punch, because them’s real valuable’.
What was really worthwhile went out with the rubbish. The mediocre was saved.
As in an inverted morality play.
Suddenly, after a long silence, he began to talk … ‘A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.’
Carlos Castaneda
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
We held a ‘Wings for Victory’ fair on WBS rugger field, the Huxtable. It was a great event. Our vendettas against local farmers were set aside so that we could borrow their carts. I turned what had been shameful into satire against myself and became Adolf for a day.
Some years previously, one of the innumerable Framlingham bullies, a creature with the skin of a bullfrog and hyperthyroid eyes to match, grabbed me and declared that I resembled Adolf Hitler. Dragging me into his foul den, he pulled a lock of my hair down over my forehead and painted a moustache of black boot polish on my upper lip. I was then made to goose-step round a senior common room, giving the Sieg Heil for the delectation of all the other bullies – many of whom would doubtless have given their eyeteeth to dress up in Nazi uniforms, rape Slav women, and bugger each other while strangling Jews.
By Buckland’s ‘Wings for Victory’ day, I had sufficiently recovered from this degradation to put the act to good use. Suitably uniformed, I mounted one of the farm carts and addressed all and sundry in gibber-German, looking remarkably like Adolf. Or so my friends and admirers told me later.
Hitler still exerts an awful attraction. He has proved to be many things to many men. Hugh Trevor-Roper captured something of the truth when he described Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries.’
Well, that does sound fascinating …
It is terrible to think one should still hold Hitler in mind. And I once imitated him! Even the young and innocent are fascinated by wickedness. I suppose it helped prepare us at WBS to be soldiers.
To Crasher Fay I owe more than mere learning. For English classes, we had to produce an essay every Monday. I was excused. Crasher permitted me to present a story instead. A gratifying privilege as we trudged towards the School Certificate …
By this time, the writing of short stories had become a continuous occupation. Our form enjoyed, shared, quoted, laughed aloud at Sellar & Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, as well as their less famous books, such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote ‘Invalids and Illnesses’. It was sanitary enough to take home, where my mother read it. I overheard her saying to someone, after reading out a funny bit about diphtheria, ‘You may not like it, but it is clever.’ Eavesdroppers seldom hear good about themselves; I felt she had summed me up.
Most of my stories were less sanitary. They were mainly planetary adventures, dirty SF, crime, or dirty crime. Screwing featured largely. I often wrote in the dormitory, under the bedclothes by torch-light. The stories always remained first draft. Penny-a-read was the nominal charge. Nobody paid, everyone read. It was gratifying. A superior fellow in the Sixth, a horn-rimmed Harrison, said, ‘Aldiss, these tales of yours are ridiculous and badly constructed.’
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