Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Through the dark countryside, odd lights from the wayside cottages, I was thinking, he must know it all. Political memory lasted about a fortnight. Legal memory lasted about a day after a trial. You had to forget in order to get along. It made men more enduring: it also made them more brutal, or at least more callous. One couldn’t remember one’s own pain (I had already forgotten, most of the time, about my eye), let alone anyone else’s. In order to live with suffering, to keep it in the here-and-now in one’s own nerves, one had to do as the contemplatives did, meditating night and day upon the Passion: or behave like a Jewish acquaintance of Martin’s and mine, who, before he made a speech about the concentration camps, strained his imagination, sent up his blood pressure, terrified himself, in confronting what, in his own flesh, it would be truly like.

When the car stopped in front of the Gearys’ house, Martin got out with me. It was bright moonlight, still very warm. Martin said: “It’s a pleasant night. Do you want to go to bed just yet?” We made our way through the kitchen, out into the garden. Upstairs a light flashed on in the Gearys’ bedroom, and Denis yelled down, Who’s there? I shouted back that it was us. Good, Denis replied: should he come and give us a drink? No, we had had enough. Good night then, said Denis thankfully. Lock up behind you and don’t get cold.

We sat on a wooden seat at the end of the garden. On the lawn in front of us, there were tree shadows thrown by the moon. It reminded me of gardens in our childhood, when, though the suburb was poor, there was plenty of greenery about. It reminded me of Aunt Milly’s garden, and I said: “After all, it’s the twentieth century.”

For a moment, Martin was lost, and then he gave a recognising smile. It had been a phrase of hers which obliterated all threats, laughed off the prospect of war (I could hear her using it in July 1914, when I was eight years old), and incidentally promised the triumph of all her favourite causes, such as worldwide teetotalism. She had used it indomitably till she died.

After all, it was the twentieth century. We had heard others, who had found their hopes blighted and who had reneged on them, call it (as Austin Davidson did, and most of his friends) this dreadful century. Neither Martin nor I was going to know what our children would call it, when they were the age we had reached now.

Martin lit a cigar. The smell was strong in the still air. After a time he said: “There was a lot of talk about freedom.”

“You mean, among the lawyers? Tonight?”

“Not only there.”

Not able to stop himself, he had returned to the two women. Ultimate freedom. The limitless talks. More than most people, certainly more than any of the lawyers or spectators at the trial, Martin and I could recreate those talks. For we had heard them, taken part in them. “What is to tie me down, except myself? It is for me to will what I shall accept. Why should I obey conventions which I didn’t make?” It was true that, when we had heard them, those declarations were full of hope. George’s great cries had nothing Nietzschean about them. They were innocent when they proclaimed that there was a fundamental “I” which could do anything in its freedom. When you started there, though, Martin said, in an even, sensible tone, you could go further. Wasn’t that what the man Cornford was getting at with his “escalation”?

“Do you believe,” asked Martin, “that — if it hadn’t been for all the hothouse air we used to know about — those two mightn’t have it?”

He spoke without emotion, rationally. The question was pointed for us both. We were gazing out to the moonlit lawn, like passengers on the boat deck gazing out to sea. Without looking at him, I spoke, just as carefully. It was impossible to prove. Was there ever any single cause of any action, particularly of actions such as this? Yes, they must have been affected by the atmosphere round them, yes, they were more likely to go to the extreme in their sexual tastes. Perhaps it made it easier for them to share their fantasies. But between those fantasies, and what they had done, there was still the unimaginable gap. Of course there were influences in the air. But only people like them, predisposed to commit sadistic horrors anyway, would have been played on to the lethal end. If they had not had these influences, there would have been others.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But I think that wherever they’d been, they’d have done something horrible.”

“Are you letting everyone off?” he said.

“I was telling you, I don’t know the answer, and nor does anyone else.”

“I grant you that,” said Martin.

We were not arguing, our voices were very quiet. He said — in a quite different society, more rigid, more controlled, was there a chance that they would never have killed? He answered his own question. Maybe there might be less of these sexual crimes. Perhaps such a society could reduce the likelihood. “But, if you’re right,” he said, “no one could answer for those two.”

He had turned to me, speaking quite gently. He thought that I might be making excuses for us all: yet they were excuses he wanted to accept. He also knew that I was as uncertain as he was.

All of a sudden, his cigar tip glowing in the shadow, he gave a curious smile. In an instant, when he spoke again, I realised that he had been thinking of a different society. “I have seen the future. And it works.” That had been Steffens’ phrase, nearly fifty years before. When Martin repeated it, there was in his tone the experience of all that had happened since. He went on, in the same tone, not harsh, not even cynical: “I have seen freedom. And it rots.”

In some moods, he might have said it with intention. But not that night; it was one thought out of many, often contradicting each other, that he couldn’t keep out of his own mind and could suspect in mine. In fact, he took the edge off his last words almost at once. Anyway, he was saying, unabrasively, as though he too had had his memory shortened, as though he were just content with the calm night, there was something in what Ted Benskin had said, wasn’t there? Authority might have disappeared, there wasn’t much order about, but our children, like Ted’s, seemed happy. Not that there had been much paternal authority in our family; Martin was smiling about our father. “Whereas,” he said, “young Charles has to put up with you.”

Martin knew Charles very well, in his independence, his secret ambitions, and his pride. They were unusually intimate for uncle and nephew. In some aspects, their temperaments were more like each other than either was like mine.

Martin leaned back, giving out an air of bodily comfort: we seemed to have regressed to a peaceful family night.

“By the by,” he said, “I meant to have a word with you about my boy” — (he never liked calling Pat by his name of protest).

This wasn’t altogether casual, I knew as I said yes. He had been holding it back all week.

“You told me once, it must have been getting on for a year ago, about that nice girl. Vicky,” Martin went on.

“What about her?”

“I think someone ought to make her realise that it’s all off.”

“Are you sure?”

“I shouldn’t be saying this,” said Martin, “unless I really was sure.”

“It’s for him to do it,” I said, both angry and sad. I wanted to say (the old phrase came back, for which we hadn’t found a modern version) that it would break her heart.

“He’s genuinely tried, I really am sure of that too. I don’t often defend him, you know that.” Martin, who did not as a rule deceive himself, spoke as though he believed that was the truth. “But he has genuinely tried. She’s been hanging on long after there’s been nothing there. It’s the old story, how tenacious women can be, once they’re in love.”