Mortgaging the Imagination

Almost five years sacrificed to the printed page. The book is finished. The art complete. It seems fitting, therefore, that I write about someone who dreams of reaching the last full stop of his magnum opus. But this man is no artist. No, he is a far more common type: those who dream of art but cannot produce it. Literature, for such characters, a collection of museum pieces, not the life-force through blood and bone; the mind’s muscle; the spirit flowing in one’s fingertips.

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The theme seems obvious enough. A new type of society is arising, replacing one sort of human with another; the clever but unstable Blackledge, the name suggestive of sin and insecurity, once thought destined to run this business, is losing out to Gerson, a mediocre talent who is meticulous, obedient and 100% reliable. He also has a qualification. This book about the rise of the bureaucrat, and behind him the graduate. 

The Saddleford Building Society is changing. The personal connections, friendships and informal deals are giving way to a wholly professional world defined by strict rules and rigid procedures; a company is morphing into a school. Not who you are, but an ability to obey and carry out commands is what matters now; toadying to be the order of this regime. For the men at the very top, in this case the Vice-chairman, are not making decisions based entirely on the facts, that is on merit and performance - no! No thrusting Vice-chair wants a clever and independent rival in the board room. If smart you’ll wear the servant’s clothes.

Blackledge’s fall is becoming inevitable. Too complacent to prosper in this new scenario, he doesn’t flatter the man turning this old business into a modern company; which because it is changing, requires an attention to the evolving detail and a talent for diplomacy. Go on, get a move on Blackledge! You have to be seen as marching into the future not lagging behind in some past byway. But arrogant, too aware of his own powers, and thinking his rise assured, he cannot adapt to these events. Too old, too clever, too secure to change. Gerson beat him to the General Manager post? That nonentity? Blackledge won’t believe it.

That something’s wrong is indicated by his sensitiveness to the car parking arrangements, over which he is overly touchy: he wants to park close to the boss. That Gerson is eventually allocated that spot is a sign of how things are going on the board. But now? An accident? A mere oversight? Suspicious minds are not comfortable with contingency. This, surely, is the influence of the Vice-chairman! Sensing a change in the atmosphere, Blackledge is concentrating on the wrong things, rather than adapting to the changing regimen, and sticking to the core requirements, and so exercising the utmost accuracy and respectability when dealing with the firm’s affairs. The obsession also reveals a character defect; Blackledge is fundamentally unstable, his wild youth likely to return if put under pressure. Though we can’t rule out a bit of time-old superstition; that edginess when one is close to the prize, when almost touching the top: Matheson is soon to retire.

In the old company the office staff are gentlemen-managers; business taking up only part of their time. There is plenty of opportunity for reading the paper, relaxing, and sitting back daydreaming; Matheson is characteristic.

The new men haven't the time to enjoy themselves.

Philip Witt works at Saddleford Building Society as a lawyer, but is really a writer; home his proper office. He published a book years ago, but the day job is stifling his output, for although he writes every night he has not finished anything since that first publication. He blames the atmosphere of the workplace. In highly pretentious phrasing - which may reveal a lack of word-skill or extreme self-consciousness: he is talking to Blackledge’s beautiful wife - he says that a building society, because of the kind of people it employs, hasn’t the right material for a novel. We suspect another reason for his predicament: he hasn’t matured. Living at home with his parents, he remains the self-conscious child, more a dreamer than an artist; his one book the lyric gift of late adolescence, when the flood of emotion and the excitements of new experiences - in Philip’s case the war - provided both the material and the will to create. His one chance for artistic success is to escape the home and become a man. But he is weak, and his attempts to move out are feeble.

His author proves him wrong. This small town building society is consumed by intrigue, sex and death. Or to put it another way: the power struggles inside a modern business are little different from those between kings and barons; and although no bloodbaths, some do suffer, while the unstable collapse; Matheson to retire to penury - he loses most of his money on the horses - Blackledge committing suicide when he fails to get promoted.

To miss the obvious suggests no artist, but an image of the artist only. Philip is a fantasist, who lacks the talent to create the objects of art.

Yet the novel could also be a satire of the artist; a weak and ineffectual, an essentially passive, person dominated by circumstance. A chance meeting with an intelligent but largely frigid woman leads to a courtship that seems destined to end in unsatisfactory marriage; the end to a literary career. It is the artist dreaming of escape, into money and leisure, where he has the time to write his masterpieces. The dream of course is the trap.

Art is hard work! Most artists either poor or drudges: they write their books in the interstices of their working lives. Art is no escape to some island paradise but a production line…they work so much harder than most people, because forever on the job. Though, writer or dreamer, Philip is suffering the artist’s alienation from his immediate environment: few offices are conducive to the aesthete. But he also losing his distance. The job to become a torment to him after he discovers an old mistake that is to cost the company a lot of money. An armoured-plated battleship - his sense of superiority, so important to sustain a personality divorced from the ordinary emotions of work - has been hit below the waterline. He is not perfect. A fallible human being not the machine he has attempted to be. The women praise his wonderful intellect, but what we see is an overly self-conscious man who lacks the dynamism to succeed in art and life; his writing an excuse to flee from the travails of daily struggle and creative strife.

Rose Blackledge effects a revolution. Sophisticated and attractive, and a few years older than Philip, she takes an interest in him, when she finds they share an old friend Charles Tillyard. Following a conversation at a party Philip writes to Rose; this letter revealing the paucity of his soul and a small talent for turning feeling into metaphor. This man is too self-aware to lose himself to art.

Dear Mrs Blackledge,

The innocent would start by imagining your surprise: the bold would assume that you felt no surprise. But I can think of nothing except addressing the envelope and sending its contents to the house of a man I call by his Christian name but to whom I would never send a letter. Writing a letter is easy even for the guilty, timid man: and he can often quite quickly bring himself to post it. But this letter implies the serious but assured trappings of espionage: an envelope addressed on an untraceable typewriter or with the left hand, signed with a false name - ‘yours loving aunt, Ada’. Perhaps - no I’m sure - your’ve often had letters in circumstances like these and find all my guilt, procrastination, sense of fate, incomprehensible. After all, you’d say, the envelope wasn't disguised, except in so far as it was in a handwriting you didn’t know; and its contents aren’t, so far as you know, in code.

A man briefly visits a family under a false name, makes love to the daughter, departs leaving no address. Later he wonders if she had a child and thinks for a few moments quite seriously of all the terrible consequences, of no effect on him, of his action. Or a ghost, with the most frightful effort, removes himself from the place of purgatory where he circles, to visit the living about whom in spite of his death he is still anguished: but none of them see him. How will you think of this letter?

Perhaps you will remember it later in the day, laugh, and go and tear it up.

                             P.W.

We are surprised that she responds. But then Rose has pretensions to art and culture; though she has easily sacrificed them for the wealthy role of Blackledge’s wife; a role of which she is beginning to tire; his drinking, his complacency, his boorishness grating on her more subtle soul. To talk about art. To remember the old, gayer, wilder times…. Rose is confusing Tillyard with Philip, creating a first-rate fantasy out of second-rate goods. Unfair? This is the first sentence in his most recent story; it reads closer to a penny-dreadful than literature:

When he took up the breakfast tray he found his wife strangled in their bed.

How lucky is this man! To be compared to Blackledge. Any frowzy aesthete to look pretty when pinned against that philistine. Of course Philip dreams. A beautiful woman to create him, she to provide the resources for an independence, where Proust and Joyce can crawl out of this clerk’s suit. Already he is talking to his parents about finding his old flat.

A weak man doesn't suddenly become strong. Christine comes to visit; she is very sad and in tears. Then for the first time in years his father enters Philip’s bedroom and asks him not to leave home. Succumbing to pressure Phillip visits Rose; it is with the ostensible purpose of asking her to quit Blackledge, but, as the conversation develops, it is obvious that his visit is intended do the opposite: he wants her to end their relationship.

Once more luck intervenes. Blackledge is away killing himself. Rose’s cat, recovering from a near fatal illness, offers some symbolic irony (the state of the marriage is embedded in Rose’s relationship to animals; her estrangement from Blackledge embodied in his indifference to a suffering bird; their spiritual divorce the cat’s gastroenteritis; the actual divorce the cat’s miraculous recovery). The affair is saved. And what a future beckons! Phillip, we are sure, to move into this home, and…with Rose’s money may even quit the firm. If this happens, it’s a fitting climax, a nice bit of tailoring with social trends, as the amateur splits off from the professional, the artist leaves the world of business.… Going beyond the confines of this novel, which leaves the future open, I’m carried away on a sociologist’s wet-dream about specialisation. Back to the book! For now they are only lovers. But in a few years time…will Philip’s defects become all too obvious to this attractive and sophisticated woman?

Have we been reading a romance? An early passage resonates.

Philip’s imagination began tracing out the implications and possibilities of that plunge into a hideously fantastic but truly real situation. Soon he fell into a light sleep where the creators of his creative powers, now totally unrestrained, made him twitch and gasp under the coverlets.

It is the artist’s daily round, that fairy tale they dream up in the coffee breaks as they struggle nine-to-five with memoranda, phone-calls and fellow employees; few being interested in art and ideas, there’s hardly anyone to talk to. The eternal dream! The struggling artist hoping for private riches, a free life, and a fair damsel who will watch him joust with words and images. This fantasy so large, and yet at the same time so integrated into a piece of social realism, that we wonder if it is indeed a satire on the artistic type; the artist a child that always needs mammy to look after him. Artists. So ineffectual. Too passive. Always looking to escape from themselves; that prison-house of circumstance.

And yet some artists do escape…. Deus ex machina. No longer Greek, today’s artist relies on very different forces to free him. Here, a wealthy suburban wife, who looks to art for salvation (though really she is seeking to recover the romance of her youth). There’s also that very modern God: chance. If Blackledge had stopped worrying about those parking spaces, had taken the time to help Rose with that trapped bird, Philip would not have been given a first-class ticket to the Garden of the Hesperides. Forced to surrender to life’s demands; he’d stay the little boy who can’t grow up, and who replaces one mother with another; Christine happy to share a bed with a baby.

(Review: Image of a Society)