Frank Baker Page 8

  The phase does not last long.

  Winter comes, and snow is falling. I see myself waiting im­patiently outside a playhall called Tivoli in west London. As though she had drifted from the sky on a snowflake, the new love emerges lightly towards me. She dusts the snow from her coat and greets me. She is small, chubby, with large, open eyes and a pretty voice. Every­thing about her is pretty and tinkling. I compare her again to the snow, and feel certain that as soon at I touch her, she will melt out of my grasp. We go to plays and entertainments together. I do not tell her that I write poetry; I know she will be dubious of such an achievement. Instead, I pretend that I am Man-of-the-world, thinking it will please her. But my strange preoccupation with poetry and art cannot long be concealed; I cannot continue for ever talking about motor-bicycles, clothes, and dancing. She is aware of an unusual streak in me. One evening she breaks her appointment, and I never see her again.

  Now there is an interlude. I am tormented by the face and form of a lift-boy in the office where I work. He is red-cheeked with freckles and thick sandy hair. There is a grace about his movements. I speak to him going up and down in the lift; I use the lift upon every possible opportunity. He shows that he likes me—a revelation I cannot endure, it is so sweet and so bitter. His face comes to me in my dreams at night; I feel his hand as it had once touched mine in a casual contact. I imagine that every­body in the office is looking at me, suspicious of this delightful friendship. One day I speak abruptly to the boy; he blushes and bites his lip, wondering. I use the lift less and less. I banish him out of my mind.

  Now it is a girl whom I meet at a dance in north London. She seems to me older and wiser than the others. I assure my­self that she can show me much. Soon I have fallen deeply in love.

  We spend long Saturdays in the country, walking many miles and returning late to the City. We kiss too often and it is never enough. I begin to be fearful of the only resolution left to us. Innumerable theatres, cafés, and cinemas we frequent together. I write poetry for her which she indiscriminately classifies as wonderful. She does not understand poetry and is therefore a superbly easy audience for my vanity.

  In secret we spend two days together in the old cathedral town where I had been educated. I dare not tell my mother, for such behaviour is an unforgivable breach of convention. Hot and embarrassed, I enter the dark, antiquated hotel with my lover. Before the manageress I try to pretend that I am in the habit of spending week-ends with young women; I blow out my cheeks and strut about as though I were a man of forty. We do not share the same room. We could only do so had she worn a circle of gold round her finger to signify that she is my wife. I have not enough audacity to pretend that she is, and give her a ring to wear for the occasion.

  We do not share the same room. But later I go to her room, lie on the bed with her, and kiss her, till a moment comes when fear mounts in her. I leave her and go back to my own room. Sitting miserably on my bed I ask myself why I have spent all this money for the sake of a few kisses. I blame her for her modesty and do not think to examine my own sexual approach.

  A few weeks later we meet for the last time. It is in August; in the middle of that summer in which the birds came. I remember the occasion well, because while I am with her I see the birds flying over the river.

  We stand in the shadow of a monument—Cleopatra’s Needle, overlooking the Thames. It is very late. In my heart I know that I can no longer feign interest in one who seems to me to have denied the obvious issue of love. I am oppressed and worried by the con­dition of the world; stifled by the intense heat; half fearful of the strange birds who daily grow more and more ubiquitous in the City.

  She is light and talkative; she does not seem to sense my lack of response. We look over the river to the red lights of a huge advertise­ment, scattered and distorted in the shifting mirror of the water. A tram rattles past with a sound as though it were falling to pieces; a policeman’s footsteps thud heavily on the pavement behind the monument. Huddled on seats lining the road are groups of silent, sleeping people, outcasts who have no homes to go to.

  My companion talks. I do not know what she talks about; perhaps a new dress or a play that she would like to see. Her voice seems to me to break the very solemnity of the night.

  While she is talking, suddenly I see the birds, a small flock of them floating like tattered black cloth above a police boat in the river.

  “Did you see them?” I cry. “Did you see the birds?”

  She reproaches me for my coldness. I tell her I have been watching the birds and did not hear what she was saying.

  “Then,” she cries petulantly, “you think more of the birds than you do of me.”

  I can no longer maintain pretence. I tell her there are more im­portant things in life than a new hat or a new play. With melo­dramatic bitterness I quote the lines of an ancient sonnet at her:

  “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;

  Nay, I have done; you get no more of me.”

  We part bitterly. In utter gloom, with so strong a sense of im­pending tragedy that I can barely think of the lover I have so callously dismissed, I walk towards the station and so home. With a magnificent gesture of self-renunciation, I inform myself that love has no more place in my thoughts. And I count on my hand the people I have loved who now mean no more to me, nor I to them.

  Tossing over and over, sleepless in my bed, I light my candle and turn to the trough of books beside me. . . .

  *

  Again and again to books; to a twilight world of shadows more pliable than living figures; to words printed on a page rather than words spoken by friend or lover. I reached a stage when a line of the poet Keats could give me more of the tranquil essence of autumn than the sight of red apples heavy on a bough, or Michaelmas daisies drooping through a garden hedge. I summoned art to supply me with that which I seemed unable to obtain from life itself.

  We have discussed art often, and arrived at no very satisfactory conclusions concerning it. Let us see how it applied to the lives of ordinary people sixty years ago.

  Art. How hard, how final the word sounds. And in a sense, how hard, how final is any excellent work of art. Into the creation of it a man puts all the love which he has ever felt for the natural world. It is to be an offering to the creative force that made him: A signature of his Being. The artist must work for himself; work solely to express himself, seeking for no reward other than the satisfaction of knowing that out of him has come a restatement of truth.

  In those days it might be said that there were few artists, many craftsmen. Few men had enough belief in themselves, in God, or the universe, to produce a fine work of art. Because they did not represent that make-believe world for which many yearned, people despised and ignored the few art-creations of any real value. Yet men still cried for escape from reality. “Give us,” they demanded, “a reason for being alive. Show us that there is something in this world—not in another—which is worth attaining. You artists have visions which we do not possess. Reveal them to us in the style that we like best.”

  The artists were quick to respond to this cry, seeing that people were very willing to pay well for what they wanted. It is significant that all popular art was concerned with morals; with virtue and its rewards, wickedness and its punishments, rather than with the elemental ingredients of life itself. Since Nature had nothing to do with morality, people mistrusted it. A sentimentalized picture of virtue was thrust before them so that they could sigh and say, “I cannot be good like that, but I do see how attractive goodness can be and how worth while it is, since it always achieves distinction.” One of the most popular forms of fiction, for example, told in varying themes the story of a humble person who by a life of inten­sive virtue “won through” to an illustrious position in society.

  Fed with this type of art, people ceased to attempt to reform their own conditions, in static contemplation of mythical
figures. They identified themselves with these figures, saying, “I could be like that, if things were otherwise.” And sham-artists were, to use an old expression, two-a-penny.

  Literature was one of the chief mediums employed. There were magazines designed for all types wherein any one who wished could read about his own fate as it might have been, had things been otherwise. As well as journals there were books—so many, that very often the same tale was written over and over again by many different writers. There were thousands of novelists in my day; I can now only remember the names of three or four. Some had started with great aspirations of artistic excellence, only later to discover that the people cared nothing for their truths, and that if they wished to prosper financi­ally they must answer those demands which I have already des­cribed to you.

  Music and painting suffered a similar fate to that of literature, though perhaps not so obviously. A few years previously music had been a pleasant diversion in the home. Then a thing called wireless came. It was a remarkable method of capturing sound-waves so that one could hear from hundreds of miles away a man singing or speaking in another part of the world. So from every house in the streets you would hear crippled sounds of borrowed music. There was something essentially impure about the music thus sent out; a casual listener, passing by, felt as though he had unwittingly trespassed upon the privacy of an unseen world. Satiated by the excess of it, few people consciously heard it, just as few people consciously read books. It was, I think, the supreme entertain­ment of our times, unless perhaps cinema came first. A man had only to buy what was known as a “set” and he could receive all this noise at any hour of the day. It was generally much louder than the actual sound would be. If it was normal in tone the listener would complain that it was too soft. Often, while listening to the music which poured out of their sets, people talked and ate—the whole procedure being accompanied by the ceaseless rumble of traffic in the streets outside. Yet if the wind blew a slight gale they complained; if cats howled in the night they threw things at them.

  What about cinema?

  This was probably the most influential amusement offered to men and women. Like wireless, it could be obtained at almost all hours of the day, though, unlike wireless, it was not laid on to the home. (I’m quite sure it soon would have been. In my day they were heading in that direction.) A man had to go to special theatres to obtain this particular type of escape from reality.

  Cinema consisted of stories recorded by a process called cine­matography. These pictures of men and women acting, were flashed on to a large screen. They were, in short, moving pictures or plays: another wonderful invention of man. The voices of the actors were reproduced by a soundwave system which synchronized with their actions. When they spoke——

  To this day I can hardly refrain from shuddering at the memory of those loud, hollow tones—the most hideous mockery of the human voice that was ever produced. I think that cinema, with all its spurious emotion, its travesty of life, its meretricious sentiment, brings us to the worst form of art with which our people struggled against actuality. Night after night, all over this island, you would find men and women of all ages and types herded together in dark­ness. What little air penetrated these places was foul with the smell of sweat-heavy clothes and artificial scents. Little pages walked up and down with chocolates and cigarettes; organs lent to the dim atmosphere a sense of religi­osity which would have been curious to the stranger, who might easily imagine that all the people sitting there were devotees of some occult religious rite.

  In the concealing darkness of these halls, lovers inclined towards one another whenever the characters on the screen did likewise. The “act of sex,” as we called it, was not shown in detail on the screen, though there were signs that it probably would soon be considered quite proper to do so. The nearest they got to it in those baffling days was the kiss—and very prolonged it was, a grossly magnified clinging of lips to lips. Since, however, the hard-working actors on the screen never entered upon really serious clinical business the lovers in the audience were teased into a condition of intense sexual irritation.

  The dramas shown were very like the magazine stories, generally depending for their success upon a similar display of virtue and its rewards. Some people went to these dark halls two or three times a week in a miserable attempt to build up a secret life of surmise.

  I have told you what I can about the pantomime world which artists offered to men as an escape from reality. It is only a brief survey. But it may be sufficient to convey to you that art grew to dominate man to such an extent that, his faculties becoming blunted and starved, he could experience little that was not second-hand. There was nothing new under the sun, and the old things were not good enough. It was only when the birds came that I and others who escaped from the City at the end were enabled to see all that is for ever new under the sun; all that we see before us now.

  . . . Will you ask Berin to come later in the evening when the moon rises? He tells me he has made some new songs, and although I have said so much to the detriment of art, I should like him to sing them to me. . . .

  *

  In trying to detach myself as much as possible from the events, customs, and manners so far recorded, it occurs to me that a reader who knew nothing of the old world would assume from my narrative that it was so miserably governed, humanity so dense and apathetic, that I never spent a happy moment in their midst. Have I been unfair? I should be ungrateful if I pretended that the old civilization gave me noth­ing, if I pretended that there were not many moments of great happiness in the City life. The sun still shone as it shines now; it still made people smile, reminding us that there was warmth in humanity somewhere, had it but the chance to break through. The excesses of civilization had not been able to rob spring of its power; a single budding plane tree in a courtyard of the City could change the atmosphere of a season. In the parks there were flowers; I can remember banks dappled with crocuses.

  Sometimes in the lunch-hour I would take an omnibus to a different part of London, beyond the Cathedral. Here there were cobbled yards; ancient rows of houses; trees and alleyways where old shops, buried away out of time, sold judges’ clothes, wigs and legal paraphernalia. These pleasant places were known as the Inns of Court, and were mostly the residences and offices of barristers, solicitors, and others who had to do with the intricate machinery of organized justice. They had changed little, these Inns, in the past two hundred years. On spring days I would buy sandwiches, go to one of the Inns and, sitting on the side of a fountain circle, forget myself in the composition of verses or in vague memory of things I had never seen. I related these courts to scenes in old books I had read. I can still clearly recall the naïve thrill which ran over me when I discovered a house with the letters P.J.T. carved above the doorway; I had read about the house and those actual letters in a book by a famous Victorian novelist.

  Some days in this lunch-hour, I would eat quickly at a café, then with a friend who worked near me, visit one of the many bookshops which were scattered about the City. Behind the Lord Mayor’s vast house, stacked against a small domed church which had been designed by the same artist who designed the Cathedral, was a shop where books of all types were displayed in troughs outside. My friend and I would gradually push our way through the people already gathered there, and spend a half-hour reading at random from volumes that we seldom bought. He was, I remember, very fond of literature and used to write poetry under cover of a massive ledger. I remember the delight with which I made this discovery one day and his immediate embarrassment, for poetry-writing was considered an un­manly occupation. However, when he found that I too wrote verses, we became very friendly, and used to talk for hours about books, criticizing the poems that we wrote. I think, in that wooden box of mine upstairs, you will still find some notes in his handwriting about a poem I had written.

  I remember an old bookshop we discovered, grimy and derelict in appearance, bur
ied in some side street near the Tower of London. This bookshop sold nothing but old books, and they were piled so high up to the roof you felt always that there was some rare treasure at the top which was too far away for you to reach. Some­where, shovelled away in this incipient avalanche, was a little whiskered man with a green baize apron, who knew nothing about books and simply bought them by the hundreds from old libraries as one might buy sacks of coal. My friend and I felt we were in another world. Carts rumbled outside; the wheel of com­merce never ceased to revolve. Inside, it was only words of ancient men that tumbled and muttered around us. And the little old man in the green apron would puff his clay pipe, never moving; all you saw of him, like a spider in some dark corner, a bald head and a cloud of blue smoke. He used to read a journal called Poultryman, all about hens, eggs, and the profits to be made from them. How comic that seems, with all those books around him. Perhaps he contemplated a new line of business, for I dare say books were hardly profitable.