Brian Aldiss - The Primal Urge

They seem on the whole to take to the idea of them a deal more enthusiastically than do we Corridors of Eng. Lit. boys.’

‘Not surprising; we’re a backward-looking lot. Our glories lie behind us, pace Nitkin,’ Donald said, without much interest. ‘Come on down to the café for a chat. There isn’t a blessed thing to do this morning in the library.’

Jimmy agreed, catching a glimpse in his mind’s eye of a pair of faultless breasts thrusting towards him on the road to Walton. The IBA seemed curiously insubstantial this morning.

‘What did you think of the she-wolf washing and ironing her dirty linen in public?’ Donald asked.

‘I thought it was jolly brave of her to speak out to Bloody Trefisick the way she did. I admired her for it.’

‘You’re hopeless, Jimmy. That wasn’t bravery, you ass, it was masochism, if ever I saw it. She’s a masochist and her hubby must be a mash-assistant.’

‘You don’t believe a word you say, Donald,’ Jimmy reproved, but he felt slightly tired of the other’s habit of jokingly imputing perverted values to every conceivable relationship; it was, of course, the result of Donald being what he was, and of the law’s attitude to what he was. ‘When allowances are made, it’s what I’ve always said, It’s only ’uman nature after all,’ Jimmy rhymed to himself. All the same, he would not dream of mentioning Rose to Donald, much as he longed to rhapsodise about her to someone.

In the cafeteria they sat at a corner table, just out of striking distance of a giant American aloe cactus. Donald sat genially with his elbows on the table. Despite the too beautiful tailoring which enveloped him, he looked like a rugger forward just off the field, his hair spikey, his nose slightly flat. He had a healthy look about him; Jimmy already accepted the fact that Donald’s light glowed intermittently in his presence.

‘Had a poem accepted this morning, me boy,’ Donald said. ‘ Mandragora took it – the one about the turds, that Tambimuttu turned down.’

‘I remember. Good! Congratulations. It should appear in about three years.’ Jimmy enjoyed none of Donald Hortense’s poems, but he found them oddly memorable – partly because, as a member of the Scribist movement, Donald only composed poems which were seven brief lines long.

‘Of course, I’m going to have to change my entire method of writing poetry,’ Donald said thoughtfully. ‘What a lot of people have not realised is that Norman Lights are going to put a new aspect on everything,’ Donald said. ‘For literature, it’ll be a far more sweeping change than any of the multitude of changes it’s already undergone this century. It’ll mean writers having to learn a new language even more difficult than Shaw’s forty-letter alphabet would have been: the language of changed mores and responses in the external world. Willy nilly, poetry and the novel are dunked back into a realm of exploration.’

‘I suppose so,’ Jimmy agreed. ‘A writer writes most richly of his childhood. Facing the new set-up will be a tax on him. Any novelist not tackling the immediate present will be classed as an historical novelist.’

‘Not only that. The NLs will bring a state of flux which is going to last for years, as all the ramifications seep through every level of society. A synthesis, an analysis, will be a more demanding task than ever – and its value more questionable. Because no sooner do you get the novel or what-have-you written than your specimen is out of date. Have you seen Vogue ?’

Jimmy shook his head. He had never seen Vogue ; Donald always had. Women’s fashion magazines were irresistible to the librarian; through them he caught glimpses of a vast, busy world with which he had not the slightest connection.

‘There’s an interesting article in it by Grigson,’ Donald said. ‘Versatile type, Grigson; I admire him for it. He’s attempting to predict the effect NLs will have on such womanly wiles as make-up and hats – and hence on the whole conception of female beauty. He thinks that at first hats will be designed to conceal NLs and then, later, to reveal them. As a long-range prediction, he emphasises that we have supplied our bodies with a new sexual focus, which he thinks may supplant some of the others in superficial importance. So that by about the mid-seventies bare breasts may be quite the thing; they just won’t seem anything to be excited about any more.’

‘It’s something to look forward to, anyhow.’

‘Infantile traumas springing up right, left and centre,’ Donald exclaimed, gulping down his coffee in disgust. ‘Well, I must be awa’.’

When Jimmy returned to his little room, he pulled the Haiti folder out of the desk and opened it. On the first sheet of paper, he had written boldly, ‘Books in Haiti since 1804.’ It was going to be a good and unusual exhibition: his exhibition. He ought to write straight away to the faculty of Pisa for photographs of Queen Marie-Louise’s grave; sufficiently enlarged, they would fill the awkward alcove at the far end of the Main Exhibition Hall. He began a rough sketch to indicate the sort of camera angle he required.

In no time, his pencil stopped. Blankly, gently, he gazed into space. The soft and nutritious thought of Rose slid over him. As if silent upon a peak in Darien, he seemed to have discovered a new ocean of truth. He perceived that most of the books in the building, and nearly all the books he had ever read, had lied; that his friends and acquaintances had deceived him; that his parents and teachers had misled him; that few, in fact, except a smattering of sages mislabelled voluptuaries, had ever staggered on his mighty discovery. Physical love was good!

Jimmy recalled St Augustine’s nauseating comments on women; he recalled the diatribes of Puritans and Victorians; he recalled the dirty jokes he had heard and told; and he seethed with anger. It was all a pack of contemptible rubbish, foul, unhealthy lies and illusion! There was no beauty like the indulgence of the flesh, no cleanliness like a woman’s intimate cleanliness.

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