Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Was that any sort of reassurance to him? I was wondering. We had said little to each other: to an extent, we did not need to. I had let slip a remark about the time-switch at Auschwitz, and he had picked it up, just as Margaret would have done, or often young Charles. I didn’t have to explain. I meant — someone had said it before me — that at Auschwitz one could not help being invaded by the relativity of time. The relativity which was at once degrading and ironic. That is, on the same day, at the same moment , people had been sitting down to meals or begetting children while, a few hundred yards away, others had been dying in torture. It had been the same with this boy’s death. While he was beginning to suffer fright and worse than fright, the rest of us had, at the same moment, through the switch of time, been living as healthily as those men round us in the bar, talking or making love or maybe being preoccupied with what seemed a serious worry of our own. Martin understood without my saying so. He did not understand (I did not want to explain, perhaps because it reminded me of another death) that I had been, in court, working out the hours of the boy’s suffering. That might have been going on — in all probability it had been going on — during a happy dinner party at our London flat, when Margaret and I were looking forward to the children’s future, making a fuss of Vicky, and being entertained by Martin’s own son.

Martin did not know that. But he knew something else, when I mentioned Auschwitz. For he and I and others of our age had seen the films of the concentration camps just after the troops had entered and when the horror came before our eyes like a primal, an original, an Adamic fact. Yes, with what we possessed of decency and political sense we had made our plans, so that, if people like us had any part in action at all, this couldn’t happen again: and we had gone on spending, though men like Rubin told us that we were wasting our time, a good deal of our lives in action. And yet, while we watched those films, we had, as well as being appalled, felt a shameful and disgusting pleasure. It was almost without emotion, it was titillating, trivial and (just as when Margaret asked me questions in our drawing-room) seepingly corrupt. We were fascinated (the sensation was as affectless as that) because men could do these things to other men.

The wretched truth was, it had been the same in the courtroom that afternoon. Not only in us, but in everyone round us. But it was enough to know it for ourselves.

So, when I spoke, as though casually, of Auschwitz, Martin did not ask any questions. He nodded (raising one hand to a greeting from the other side of the bar), and looked at me with a glance which was grim but comradely.

In time he said: “What people feel doesn’t matter very much. It’s what they do, we’ve got to think about.”

It sounded bleak, like so much that he said as he grew older. Yet, as we sat there, old acquaintances pushing by him, he was as much at the mercy of his thoughts as I was, maybe more so. We were different men, though we had our links of sympathy. What we had learned from our lives, we had learned in different fashions: we had often been allies, but then events had driven us together: perhaps now, in our fifties, we were closer than we had ever been. But Martin, whom most people thought the harder and more self-sufficient of the two, had once had the more brilliant and the more innocent hopes. I had started off in this town in the first blaze of George’s enlightenment. Let the winds of life blow through you. Live by the flow of your instincts. Salvation through freedom. Like any young man, I had got drunk on those great cries. It wasn’t through any virtue of mine, but simply because of my temperament and my first obsessive love affair, that I couldn’t quite live up to them. But there was another side to it. George, like many radicals of his time, believed, passionately believed, in the perfectibility of man. That I could never do, from the time that I first met him, in my teens. Without possessing a religious faith, I nevertheless — perhaps because I wasn’t good myself — couldn’t help believing in something like original sin.

With Martin, it had gone the other way. He had in his youth, though he had never been such an intimate of George’s and nothing like so fond of him, accepted the whole doctrine. He really did have the splendid dreams. Rip off the chains, and he and everyone else would break through to a better life. He enjoyed himself more as a young man than I had done. He had gone through the existence where ideals and sex and energy are all mixed up — perhaps, even now, when people thought him sardonic and restrictive, there were times when he thought of that existence with some sort of regret. It hadn’t lasted. He was clear-sighted, he couldn’t deny his own experience. His vision of life turned jet black. Yet not completely, not so completely as he spoke or thought. It was what people did that mattered, he had just said, as he had often said before: if that was true, then what he did sometimes betrayed him. After all, it had been he — alone of all of us — who had broken his career, just when he had the power and prizes in his clutch. Conscience? Moral impulse? People wondered. They might have accepted that of Francis Getliffe, not of Martin. But it was he who had done it. Just as it was he who, under the carapace of his pessimism, pretending to himself that he expected nothing, invested so much hope in his son, was wide open to danger through another’s life.

The bar was noisy, but neither of us wanted to leave. The place had been familiar, part of commonplace evenings, to each of us — though it had taken something not commonplace but unimaginable to seat us there together. Martin’s acquaintances downed their liquor. Most of them were middle-aged, not thinking about their age, carried along, like us, by the desire to persist. They looked carefree. For all we could tell, some of them were also at the mercy of their thoughts. One, whom I knew slightly, had reminded me of a photograph in a newspaper that morning: of Margaret and me walking with George Passant, a straggle of women demonstrating behind. Did I know “that crowd”, did I know those two women? The questions had been edged. Martin had answered for me, guarded and official, Passant had been a friend of ours when we were young men. Otherwise the rest of them said their good evenings, wanted to know whether we were staying long, offered us drinks. Someone enquired, why don’t you come back and live here, not a bad place, you know, we could do with you.

Martin said: “If you hadn’t had your connections here, just by chance — would this have meant much to you?”

He was talking of what we had listened to that afternoon.

“Should you have thought about it much?” he went on.

“Should we?” I replied. For Martin, in his unexpressive manner, was using the second person when he meant the first.

“I can’t be sure.”

“Could we have shrugged it off? Some people can, you know.”

I told him about the Gearys, who weren’t opaque, who longed, more than most of us, to create a desirable life. Yes, they could dismiss it: they could still look after both the innocent and guilty: but it seemed to them only an accident, a freak, utterly irrelevant to the desirable life they longed for or to the way they tried to build it.

“That’s too easy,” said Martin.

I said, most of our wisest friends would see it as the Gearys did.

“I should have thought,” said Martin, “we’d had enough of the liberal illusions.”

“Those I’m thinking of aren’t specially illusioned men.”

“Anyone is illusioned who doesn’t get ready for the worst. If there’s ever to be any kind of radical world which it’s possible to live in, it’s got to be built on minimum illusions. If we start by getting ready for the worst, then perhaps we stand a finite chance.”