John Banville - The Untouchable

Anyway, of all our ideological exemplars, I always secretly preferred Bakunin, so impetuous, disreputable, fierce and irresponsible compared to stolid, hairy-handed Marx. I once went so far as to copy out by hand Bakunin’s elegantly vitriolic description of his rival: “M. Marx is by origin a Jew. He unites in himself all the qualities and defects of that gifted race. Nervous, some say, to the point of cowardice, he is immensely malicious, vain, quarrelsome, as intolerant and autocratic as Jehovah, the God of his fathers, and like Him, insanely vindictive.” (Now, who else does that bring to mind?) Not that Marx was any less ferocious than Bakunin, in his way; I admired in particular his intellectual annihilation of Proudhon, whose petit-bourgeois post-Hegelianism and country-bumpkin faith in the essential goodness of the little man Marx held up to cruel and exhaustive ridicule. The spectacle of Marx mercilessly destroying his unfortunate predecessor is horribly exciting, like watching a great beast of the jungle plunging its jaws into the ripped-open belly of some still-thrashing, delicate-limbed herbivore. Violence by proxy, that is the thing: stimulating, satisfying, safe.

How they do bring one back to the days of youth, these ancient battles for the soul of man. I feel quite excited, here at my desk, in these last, unbearably expectant days of spring. Time for a gin, I think.

It will seem strange—it seems strange to me—but Boy was the most ideologically driven of the lot of us. God, how he would talk! On and on, superstructure and substructure and the division of labour and all the rest of it, endlessly. I remember coming home to sleep in my room in the house in Poland Street in the early hours one morning during the Blitz—the sky redly lit and the streets loud with fire engines and drunks—and finding Boy and Leo Rothenstein, both in full evening dress, sitting in the first-floor parlour in armchairs on either side of a cold fire, bolt upright, whiskey glasses in hand, the two of them dead asleep, and it was obvious from their slack-jawed expressions that Boy had knocked them both into unconsciousness by an evening of sustained wielding of that ideological bludgeon of his.

Mind you, there was more to Boy than talk. He was quite the activist. At Cambridge he had set about organising the gyps and bedders into a union, and joined in strike protests by bus drivers and sewerage workers in the town. Oh yes, he put us all to shame. I can see him still, marching down King’s Parade on the way to a strike meeting, shirt collar open, dirty old trousers held up with a workman’s broad belt, a figure straight out of a Moscow mural. I was jealous of his energy, his boldness, his freedom from that self-consciousness which froze me solid when it came to practical activism, I mean the activism of the streets. But in my heart I despised him, too, for what I could not but think of as his crassness in seeking to turn theory into action, in the same way that I despised the Cambridge physicists of my day for translating pure mathematics into applied science. This is what I marvel at still, that I could have given myself over to such an essentially vulgar ideology.

Boy. I miss him, despite everything. Oh, I know, he was a clown, cruel, dishonest, slovenly, careless of himself and others, but for all that he maintained a curious kind of—what shall I call it?—a kind of grace. Yes, a kind of splendourous grace, it is not too much to say. When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences moving in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me—Matty was the possessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge—but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux’s infant school in Carrick-drum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six-year-old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child’s crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh. That was Boy. “What did I do? ” he would cry, after another of his enormities had come to light, “what did I say …” And of course, everyone would have to laugh.

Odd, but I cannot remember when I first met him. It must have been at Cambridge, yet he seems to have been always present in my life, a constant force, even in childhood. Singular though he may have seemed, I suppose he was of a type: the toddler who pinches the little girls and makes them cry, the boy at the back of the class showing off his erection under the desk, the unabashed queer who can spot instantly the queer streak in others. Despite what people may think, he and I did not have an affair. There was a drunken scuffle one night in my rooms at Trinity in the early thirties, long before I had “come out,” as they say now, that left me shaking with embarrassment and fright, though Boy shrugged it off with his usual insouciance; I recall him going down the ill-lit stairs with half his shirt-tail hanging out and smiling back at me knowingly and wagging a playful, minatory finger. While revelling in its privileges, he held the world of his parents and their circle in jocular contempt (his stepfather, I’ve just remembered, was an admiral; I must ask Miss Vandeleur if she knew that). At home he subsisted mainly on a horrible gruel-like stuff—I can smell it still—that he boiled up from oatmeal and crushed garlic, but when he went out it was always the Ritz or the Savoy, after which he would lumber into a taxi and make his raucous way down to the docks or the East End to trawl through the pubs for what with a smacking of those big lips he referred to as “likely meat.”

He could be subtle, if subtlety was what was needed. When we joined with Alastair Sykes in the putsch on the Apostles in the summer term of 1932, Boy turned out to be not only the most energetic activist of the three of us but also the smoothest plotter. He was skilled too at curbing Alastair’s more hair-raising flights of enthusiasm. “Look here, Psyche,” he would say with cheerful firmness, “you just belt up now, like a good chap, and let Victor and me do the talking.” And Alastair, after a moment’s hesitation during which the tips of his ears would turn bright pink while his pipe belched smoke and sparks like a steam train, would meekly do as he was told, although he was the senior man. He got the credit for packing the society with our people, but I am sure it was really Boy’s doing. Boy’s charm, at once sunny and sinister, was hard to resist. (Miss Vandeleur would be agog; not much is known publicly, even still, about the Apostles, that absurd boys’ club, to which only the most gilded of Cambridge’s golden youth were admitted; being Irish and not yet queer, I had to work hard and scheme long before I managed to worm my way in.)

The Apostles’ meetings that term were held in Alastair’s rooms; as a senior Fellow he had ampler quarters than any of the rest of us. I had met him my first year up. Those were the days when I still thought I had it in me to be a mathematician. The discipline held a deep appeal for me. Its procedures had the mark of an arcane ritual, another secret doctrine like that which I was soon to discover in Marxism. I relished the thought of being privy to a specialised language which even in its most rarefied form is an exact—well, plausible —expression of empirical reality. Mathematics speaks the world, as Alastair put it, with an uncharacteristic rhetorical flourish. Seeing the work that Alastair could do was what convinced me, more than my poor showing in the exams, that my future must lie in scholarship and not science. Alastair had the purest, most elegant intellect I have ever encountered. His father had been a docker in Liverpool, and Alastair had come up to Cambridge on a scholarship. In appearance he was a fierce, choleric little fellow with big teeth and a spiky bush of black hair standing straight up from his forehead like the bristles of a yard-brush. He favoured hob-nailed boots and shapeless jackets made from a peculiar kind of stiff, hairy tweed that might have been run up specially for him. That first year we were inseparable. It was a strange liaison, I suppose; what we shared most deeply, though we would never dream of speaking of it openly, was that we both felt keenly the insecurity of being outsiders. One of the wits dubbed us Jekyll and Hyde, and no doubt we did look an ill-assorted pair, I the gangling youth with pointed nose and already pronounced stoop loping across Great Court pursued by the little man in the boots, his stumpy legs going like a pair of blunt scissors and tobacco pipe fuming. It was the theoretical side of mathematics that interested me, but Alastair had a genius for application. He adored gadgets. At Bletchley Park during the war he found his true and perfect place. “It was like coming home,” he told me afterwards, his eyes shiny with misery. That was in the fifties, the last time I saw him. He had fallen into an enticement trap in the gents in Piccadilly Circus and was due in court the following week. The heavies from the Department had been tormenting him, he knew he could expect no mercy. He would not go to prison: on the eve of his court appearance he injected cyanide into an apple (a Cox’s pippin, the report said; very scrupulous, the heavies) and ate it. Another uncharacteristic flourish. I wonder where he got the poison, not to mention the needle? I had not even known that he was queer. Perhaps he had not known it himself, before that jug-eared copper with his trousers round his ankles beckoned to him from his stall. Poor Psyche. I imagine him in the weeks before he died, lying between army-surplus blankets in that dreary bedsit he had off the Cromwell Road, miserably turning over the ruins of his life. He had broken some of the most difficult of the German army’s codes, thus saving God knows how many Allied lives, yet they hounded him to death. And they call me a traitor. Could I have done something for him, pulled a few strings, put a word in with the internal security people? The thought gnaws at me.