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The Lecture That Wasn't

I have not been able to find out who lectured—or even that there was a lecture. I don't believe there was one.

But Bill says he was present; and Bill would not even pitch a tale to a professor, much less attempt to deceive a fellow-student who could see through him. He is quite devoid of the qualities that make for success in business or politics.

He produced notes of the lecture. Copious notes. The fact that he took notes lends colour to his statement that he hadn't the slightest idea of what the lecturer had talked about. A fellow can't do two things at once, be explained. But surely he had known beforehand who was to lecture and what he was to lecture about? Do I ever? asked Bill; lectures are all the same to me, before or after—they're an interference with swot. But, I persisted. Look, said Bill, I just popped in, yanked out my notebook, and started to scribblc—force of habit, I suppose—University coma—intellectual catalepsis—cerebral somnambulism. When Brookie did his trick with the lights, I grabbed my chance to make a quick getaway, see? Quite, I said; give us a screw at the notes. Dump 'em if you like, said Bill, indifferently. Don't you want to look at them yourself? I asked. What for? asked Bill; I attended the lecture, didn't I?

How can I say? Privately, I think he had some sort of a fit. It is difficult to explain his notes otherwise. They commence in this wise: "Human nature, It may be taken for granted, was very much the same as it was in the thirties. The intervening'period was too short to allow of any wild leaps in evolution. Considerable changes, however, had taken place in the social and political environment and these changes had exercised in important influence on literature."

Not much in that, or in the succeeding statement that the most important fact in the political world was the development of the Russias, which had achieved an industrialization as efficient as, if not more efficient than, the most progressive bourgeois state. I had heard that sort of thing before. But when the notes went on to mention "the neo-Leninism of the forties, supervening upon the original homodeism of the Bolshevik creed and finding its chief expression in poetry and philosophical speculation"—well, I blinked. What forties? "Young Russia, the product of purely Asiatic conditions, generations removed from the initial stimulus to revolution, namely, personal experience of a capitalistic environment, rapidly progressed from cynicism to iconoclasm in its deviation from the Messianic ideology of Marxism." Phew, thought I, this isn't my world.

The impossibility of the notes became more pronounced as they went along. "The political ferment which was the distinctive character of the fifties ..." Fifties now! "The prevailing sentiment was not in favour of change for the sake of change or even for the sake of securing better conditions, but was almost entirely directed to securing permanence and stability in social arrangements. The ideal of progress had suffered the fate of many another intellectual fashion. The interest of the citizen of the sixties was centred, not on the capacity of an institution for amendment as time went on, but on its capacity as a going concern whether time went on or stood still. This was largely the outcome of the efficiency of the politician of the day, who was far from being the muddled incompetent so taken for granted in earlier decades as the best man to discharge the important function of public convenience."

Well! The political blasphemy of the expression "public convenience" would have shocked me had T not begun to realise that the notes related, not to the present, but to the future—and a future which (most absurdly) the lecturer appeared to regard as past. (That is, supposing there had been a lecturer. I wonder if Bill ... no, he doesn't drink.)

The absurdity of the thing is not worth conjecture. The notes must be taken for what they are worth. Some of them are not worth much; others are worse, particularly those about what is called the "submergence of youth!" "Youth frittering away its virgin enthusiasms in exhibitionistic extravagances"—"put to learning instead of ideationizing"—the obvious comment is "oh yeah?" But all this and the other stuff about social and political conditions are evidently intended only as a background for something or other (the notes are by no means clear) about page 98 literary conditions at a time which is not specifically stated. I gathered that literature at the time not stated was in rather a bad way, partly because of the counter—attractions of an Age of Leisure, partly because of the influence of a mechanized U.S.S.R., which seems to have occupied in the popular estimation much the same position as Hollywood does today.

There are confused scraps about radio, stereoscopic television, the broadcast press, and so on. Literature was broadcast more than it was printed—people were so busy playing that they hadn't time to read. Popular authors composed directly into the microphone. The development of radio permitted the automatic reservation of instalment literature for consumption at convenience, thus making listeners independent of the scheduled hours of presentation. Application of technocracy to the literary craft—organization of collaboration—authorship institutes—mechanical devices for sorting and recording literary material—phonographic indexes of plots, characterizations, forms of expression, suitable quotations, etc.—intricate plotting machines for complicating and resolving situations (some could even produce the precise psychological reaction to a given situation, but whether in the machine, the observer, or a subject is not stated): these were some of the incidents of a literature harnessed at every point to the chariot wheel of commerce. The word "roboture" occurring in Bill's notes at this stage was, I hope, used sardonically.

A human side is mentioned, however, There were Professional Reactionists, whose function is obscurely hinted at as the pursuit of "real experience." They seem to have been a somewhat disreputable class. At another level of respectability (and probably veracity) were the Professional Autobiographers—important persons hired at a stiff price to record for public delectation their daily lives. As might be expected, these were venal people. A notable scandal concerned the efforts of a prominent Behaviourist to pre-empt a Dictatorship for his newly-born infant. The Behaviourist (term not explained) had some difficulty in escaping proceedings under a (then) obsolete law which aimed at restricting the perpetuation of the unfit. Then there were the Rag-baggers (reminiscent of the Wellses and Mitchinsons of the Georgian period) who gathered the conclusions and speculations of learned men and dished them up for popular consumption. A special branch of this business was Omniscientism (another survival from the time of Wells), most typically represented by the synthetic historians, who wrote on a large scale with Man rather then men for their topic. Their assumptions of knowledge were? tremendous and pretentious, their affirmations pontifical. They dealt with history in the large and could manipulate it so as to make it yield conclusions favourable to any thesis desired. The field in which this class of worker was most at home was pre-history, where imagination could have the fullest play. A remarkable, but quite normal, development was the writing of history, not as it had happened, but as it could have happened and even as (in the opinion of advanced people) it should have happened. A restatement of the outworn conceptions of history in the light of modern science!

Mind you, the notes do not run as smoothly as the foregoing might seem to indicate and there were serious gaps. Much, also, of what Bill had set down was mystifying, as for example, his reference to "psychiatrist symbols on dust covers." I take it that Psychology had been driven out of some position which it had once achieved and had become a department of literature. But the notes say that the trend of fiction was definitely objective. "Satiety with the infinite particularization of personal experiences under the inspiration of a science obsessed with abnormality created a demand for information which could be accepted as universally normal." (In other words, they wanted to learn how to suck eggs, poor devils.) The sex novel still had a vogue, but with a difference: it was not experimentalist. The "new morality" was an exhausted impulse, of which the eccentricities and their consequences could be accurately adjudged. (The pendulum seems to have swung towards what Bill and I would term Victorianism.) A vast field of fiction was devoted to political speculation, which was encouraged as "a most effective means of dissociating the gratification of disruptive tendencies from the temptation to translate them into action." People who read political novels no more wished to take an active part in politics that people in an earlier decade who read crime novels or Wild West novels were prepared to emulate criminals or cowboys.

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There is some reference to the Midden (or Joycean) School of fiction. Evidently the enthusiasm with which the novelists of this school had grubbed in all sorts of places for new media of expression had resulted in an enrichment of the vocabulary of the English language and an increase in its syntactical flexibility. But the school was very much in popular disesteem, as was also the Septic School, which had, at some past time, gone to incredible lengths in insisting that the purely animal side of life should dominate literature. In pointing out the violent revulsion from all forms of putrescence in art, the notes become excited: "The time was not one of despair and disillusionment, as was the period after the first of the Wars to end War, when life seemed a moral and intellectual scrap-heap and satyrs danced upon the ruins; when poets wrote with their heads in a crowd of poisonous flies and novelists raked the middens and dunghills for their inspiration. To the political ferment which began about this time is usually attributed the work of purging the tormented subjectivism of the earlier decades of the century, but-." But what? Here the notes 'abort" as Hollywood would term it

I would like to mention the Polyglottics, the Reversionists (who literally wrote backwards), the Determinists (who took a casual incident and traced its antecedents almost as far as time would allow), and many other freak schools of fiction. But enough's enough. I take the word of the notes that "if there was an absence of philosophic depth or ethical intensity in literary creation, at least the reader was not intrigued into viewing himself as an organism that functioned primarily from the hips down, with its feet caked in everlasting mud."

Afore ye go: there are some fragments about poetry, in the main a comparison of the poetry of the lecturer's time with that of our own day. I daren't hint at the criticism involved. Bill ought to have known better. But his reference to interim developments in verse structure contain one piece which I must quote, not only because it is a complete note, but also because it provides a handy stopping place. Here it is: "The limit was reached in the Poetry of Punctuationism, which dispensed with words altogether. The pinnacle of the art of this school was a poem about which 'artistic' persons argued with extreme seriousness for many years. Many attempts were made to pierce its essential meaning, but none was accepted as a final solution. The poem occupied a single page of the volume in which it appeared and consisted simply of—a full stop!"

If anyone wants to know anything further about the "lecture," the "lecturer," Bill, Bill's notes, Bill's mental condition, or me, let him ask Bill. I am busy with the meaning of that poem.

—S.