Charles Snow - Last Things

I hadn’t realised that the young Walter – he was speaking of himself at twenty-four or five – had observed so much.

‘You knew Roy Calvert then, did you, sir?’ Charles asked, polite and expressionless.

‘You’ve heard of him, have you?’

‘Just a little. From my father.’

‘I was jealous of him sometimes,’ said Walter with simplicity. ‘Poor chap.’

To him, Charles’ question must have seemed pointless. Yet Charles himself he seemed to have taken a fancy to, though he couldn’t have found much in common.

After tea, he asked us not to go unless we had to: it was a bit early to start drinking, but we might as well pre-empt a corner in the guest room.

It was the same tactic that Francis Getliffe had used on my last visit there, and the same window corner. Walter stood for a moment, spine as upright as though he were in surgical splints, gazing over the river through the November drizzle. The necklace of lights on the south bank dimly glimmered. It was not a spectacular vista, but he was gazing at it with proprietorial pleasure, as though he owned it.

When we sat down, the room was nearly empty, though one figure was in solitude drinking gin at the bar. In a comradely, roughly casual but unaggressive tone, Walter said to Charles: ‘My lad, what are you going to do with yourself?’

‘Do you mean tonight, sir?’ Charles, trying to gain time, knew that Walter meant no such thing.

‘No. I mean what are you going to do with your life?’

Charles asked, gently: ‘What do you think I ought to do?’

‘Damn and blast it, old Lewis will be better on that than I am.’

Charles looked at me and said: ‘He’s been very good.’

It was a gnomic remark, but it sounded genuine and without edge, and I was touched.

Charles went on: ‘I should be grateful for some advice, I mean it, you know.’

Charles forgot nothing. He remembered Margaret teasing me after I had refused Walter’s present job. And the family exchanges about asking advice. One’s truisms had a knack of coming home.

‘Well, you’re obviously bright, anyway you’ve proved that. So that you must be sure of what you can do best–’

‘Yes. But how many things are worth doing?’

Suddenly Charles’ tone had changed. He was now speaking with intensity and force. So much so that Walter dropped his avuncular manner. His horizon-light eyes, set full in the rugged head, confronted Charles’ deep-set ones.

‘No, not many. That’s why most of us just do the things that come to hand. That’s what I’ve done.’

‘But is that always good enough?’

‘How do I know? Only God would know, if he happened to exist.’

‘Would you have liked to do anything different, yourself? If you’d had an absolutely free choice?’

That wasn’t disrespectful. There wasn’t any offence, umbrage, mock humility or presumption on either side. They were talking with a curious mixture of impersonality and friendliness, something like Mansel and a colleague discussing an eye operation.

‘I used to think’, said Walter, ‘that I should like to have done some first-class physics. I never did. Not within bloody miles of it. The war came along and I got shunted from one job to another. They said they were useful. I thought they were useful. That was a hundred per cent copper-bottomed excuse for not doing real physics. And sometimes I looked at myself in the shaving-glass and said Walter my lad you’re a fraud. It isn’t any blasted excuse at all.’

Charles was listening, hand under chin. Just for an instant, perhaps because of Walter’s rolling Devonshire, and his Christian name, the tableau brought back the old Victorian picture, the youth hanging onto the sailor’s tale: in my early childhood I had it fixed in my mind that the sailor must be Raleigh.

‘Then I began to get my head down to its proper size,’ Walter went on. ‘All that was just damned silly inflation, I thought. What difference should I have made if I’d stayed in a physics lab every blasted minute of my life? The answer is, damn all. There aren’t more than five or six men in the whole history of science who’ve made a difference that you can call a difference. And that’s where you don’t belong, Walter Luke.

‘Take old Francis Getliffe. He’s kept at it year in, year out. He’s done some pretty nice work. If I’d stuck at physics as long as he has, I might have done about the same. I should have chanced my arm more than the old boy.’ (After hearing Francis, not far from that same spot, express pity for Walter’s ill-fortune, there was a certain pleasure in witnessing the same process in reverse. Did Charles know that, of the two, most of their fellow scientists thought that Walter had the bigger talent?) ‘Well, if old Francis had never existed or had gone in for theology or stamp collecting or something of the sort, someone else would have come along and done exactly the same work within a matter of months. All that happens is that the old boy gets a hell of a lot of satisfaction. I suppose I might have got that too. But damn it to hell, what does that matter? When you know that you could be got rid of and no one would feel the difference?’

Walter finished in a cheerful, ruminative, acceptant tone. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? If your head’s the proper size, you see that you’re not all that significant. Anywhere. So I finished up here.’ Walter swept an arm as though to take in the Palace of Westminster. ‘Hell, it’s good enough for me.’

‘What you’re saying’, Charles asked him, ‘would apply to anything creative, wouldn’t it?’

‘Unless you were old Will Shakespeare, I should think it did.’

Charles had gone over this argument with me before: not that I disagreed about the fundamentals, though I should have altered the stress. I knew that he had argued it also with his cleverer friends at school since he was thirteen. He said: ‘No one wants to do second-hand things, do they? Scholarship’s second-hand, even the best of it. Criticism’s second-hand–’

‘That comes from having a literary education,’ Walter burst out in his old-style raucous vein. ‘You think a bloody sight too much of criticism if you put it as high as second-hand. Our infernal college’ (he turned to me) ‘after we’d cleared out elected some damn fool who’d written a thesis on the Criticism of Criticism. Instead of electing him they ought to have kicked his bottom down the Cury.’

Charles smiled, but wasn’t to be put off. ‘Anyway, no one wants the second-hand things. And there’s no use doing first-hand things unless one is superb, is that right?’

‘That’s a bit stronger than I meant,’ said Walter, who, despite his conversational style, was a moderate man.

‘Well, is this nearer? You wouldn’t allow the old romantic conception of the artist. That is, an artist is justified whatever he does and it doesn’t matter much whether he’s any good so long as he thinks he is.’

‘That’s puffing nonsense,’ said Walter Luke.

‘I believe it’s disposed of forever. Among my generation anyway,’ said Charles. ‘You’ve never had any time for it, have you?’ He turned to me.

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ I replied.

‘Well, we’ve wiped off quite a lot of possibilities, haven’t we?’ Charles had the air of one who, very early in a hand at bridge, could name where the cards lay.

‘For God’s sake, lad, don’t let me discourage you from anything.’

Walter was subtler than he seemed, or wanted to appear. He had realised some time before that this discussion was not entirely, or perhaps not at all, academic.

‘Please don’t worry. You wouldn’t discourage me from anything if I didn’t discourage myself. Most of those things I’d ruled out long ago.’