Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

Max ended this article by pointing out the bizarre juxtaposition that the explosion of the first practice Atomic Bomb in which he had been involved had been code-named 'Trinity'; what indeed could be said about this! This had been the beginning of a journey in the dark. But such was the nature of any journey to do with truth, or learning about control.

Max's essay sent Eleanor back to look at the first draft of her work on Judaism of years ago: but whereas news of the suffering of Jews had then discouraged her from publishing it, now news of nationalistic chauvinism had the same effect: she explained to Max 'Of course it is my belief that the true use of power is that seeds of the spirit should be scattered secretly; but then what is the point of saying this?' Max said — 'You mean, if your efforts at control are scattered openly, they fall on stony ground?'

At the end of the 1960s Max and Eleanor were living together again much of the time: Eleanor settled into her psychoanalytic work in London; Max took up a new appointment in Cambridge. Max's mother and father were dead; Max had sold the house with the green lawns and red-brick walls; he bought a cottage on the edge of the estate where he had worked in the early days of the war. Eleanor came here to stay: Max stayed with her when he went to London. They both were now well into middle age: they had been through hard times both together and apart; but still little of this was apparent when they were with their friends. They continued to give to people a sense of involvement and excitement: of life being a successfully going concern. They had each achieved positions of some influence in their professional fields if also a reputation for roguishness — Max still on the borders between physics and biology; Eleanor on the borders between anthropology and psychiatry and with her increasingly thriving analytic practice in London. In this she was noted for the unconventionality of her style: she refused for the most part to use technical jargon; she tried to teach her patients to listen to themselves — to hear, behind whatever screens of language they might use, what might be their fearful or fearsome messages. In their private lives both Eleanor and Max increasingly liked to spend time in the company of people younger than themselves: they each would say that they felt at home in a situation in which there was some transmission of learning. (Eleanor would say 'You like to show off!' Max would say — 'Then aren't I lucky'.) It often seemed, indeed, as if the people around them were their children. Eleanor occasionally regretted that she had not had children herself (she would add 'But the situation would not have been right if I had never been sad about it'). Max occasionally claimed that it had been a conscious and practical decision (then Eleanor would say 'But you can't say things like that!'). What they both did — sometimes together but then again increasingly separately because it seemed that the process worked better that way — was to do what from the beginning of their relationship they had hoped to do, which was to provide settings which they hoped would be nourishing for whatever children, as it were, turned up.

Max had his love affairs: he did not go out of his way to attract girls: he would explain — 'What is love if it is not what turns up out of the dark?' The one time he had gone against this realisation, he used to say, was when he had set out deliberately to get Caroline — and look what had happened then! It had almost killed him. (Eleanor

would say 'You set out to attract me!' Max would say 'Ah yes, I sat underneath that tree!') It was when he was quite late into middle age that Max met — quite by chance of course! oh those loops, feedbacks: indeed they can be called 'aesthetic'! - the girl called Lilia.

Max had not seen Lilia's mother since the time nearly thirty years ago when he had been present at the wedding which had taken place in the enormous country house in the wing that was occupied by her grandmother. Max had liked Lilia's father: he was an energetic young arts' student with a passion to make films. When he had joined the army Lilia's mother had gone with him to live near where he trained: then he was sent abroad, and she and the child were on their own. But by this time Max was in America, and so he had not seen Lilia. When he got back from America he learned that there had been a fire in the enormous country house and it was now a shell: the grandmother had died and none of the family were in the area. Max, of course, retained a romantic vision of Lilia's mother — and indeed of Lilia.

Some thirty years later, then, Max for the first time came across Lilia: they were at some gathering of people protesting about the war in Vietnam. Max had gone to the meeting in the spirit in which he had gone to the anti-nuclear meeting years ago: he himself had ambivalent feelings about the war in Vietnam — he felt that protests should be not so much against this war as against the predilection of humans to make any war — but he had sympathy with the people who were making this particular protest. However, he was also known at this time to be an adviser to the government on scientific matters so it was likely that his presence at the gathering would provoke comment. Max noticed Lilia in the aftermath to the meeting; people were still talking in a crowded room; he thought he might go to her and say — You remind me of someone I used to know a long time ago — and then it would be impossible for him to say any more, the remark having been so commonplace. He was wondering about his ambivalence in such matters when, in a movement of the crowd towards the door, he found himself next to Lilia. He said 'You remind me of someone I used to know a long time ago.' She said 'Everyone says that.' He said 'I know.' She said 'You know my mother?' He said 'Why, who is your mother?' She said 'Everyone always says I remind them of my mother.' Then Max of course felt that he knew who she was, although it was as if he could not know. He said 'I see.' She said 'What do you see?' He

thought he might say — I see a broken-backed cottage: something dead coming alive.

Then Lilia said 'What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed to approve of the war in Vietnam.'

He said 'No, I don't approve of it, it's just that if there isn't a war there, there might be a worse one somewhere else. You can try to stop this war, but you can't achieve innocence.'

Lilia said 'God, what a boring attitude!'

Max said 'Yes, it's difficult to talk about it.'

The odd thing about this meeting (this was how Max told the story) was that they each talked as if they knew who the other was — Max as if he knew she was Lilia; Lilia as if the person whom she had recognised as a public figure was the person who her mother had told her had so much influenced her years ago although she had not told her his name — though in fact it was only the next day that they uncovered these parts of their stories. Towards the end of the evening, after they had had dinner together and had talked — perhaps about patterns? about things being apt to return on the curve of the universe? — they had gone back to the small flat where Lilia was staying and she had given Max coffee and had sat straight-backed and smoked a cigarette and backed away as if the smoke were coming after her; and it was then that she had said to him the sentence that had become some sort of talisman for her — 'I must tell you, I never go to bed with people I like.'

And Max had said 'Then that's all right.'

She had said 'Why?'

Max had said 'Because either we like each other or else we will go to bed.'

And she had thought — Oh, if you say that, it can be both?

Max and Lilia set up house together for a time. Lilia's mother and father were away in California — he was working in films; she was doing social work with the homeless. Max and Lilia used to stay in the cottage on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk: Max would go to and fro between there and Cambridge. Max needed someone once more to adore: Lilia needed someone to learn from. Their affair worked very well for a time, in spite of Max being so much older. But this is the beginning of another story, or set of stories.