Nicholas Mosley - A Garden of Trees

Like peacocks then. A promenade of whores before their sultan. But it takes more than ten motionless men to make a sultan, and more than six raging women to make a whore. Nothing happened.

Peter did not understand. He never understood things that people did nor why they did them. He saw things emptily, in the desert, but he did not see the Sphinx. I believe that Marius did. Peter could not even find anything to ask him a riddle.

In the town, on Saturday evenings, there is an enormous advertisement, Let’s go to the pictures. There is nowhere else to go.

At the pictures it is very strange, before the lights go out hundreds of people sit in rows and whistle and stamp their feet upon the floor. This is a catching habit. The men keep their caps on. Toffees are passed around and girls collapse upon each others’ shoulders. Then there is darkness and everybody yells. Lovers sink downwards with closed eyes. They see nothing for the rest of the evening.

Impressions are reduced to a series of reactions. When a girl appears there is whistling again, when the funny man is spotted there is so much laughter that one never hears the jokes, when a love scene is enacted there is a dreadful upheaval like fox-hunting, and when the hero and heroine are married the audience at once gets up and leaves the cinema.

It is funny, this. In the music hall jargon of to-day the word marriage is a dirty word and the word wife is a dirty word and everyone laughs at these dirty jokes, but in the jargon of films marriage is just the end of everything and people get up and go. If ever they find out that it is not the end, then they have to come back and pretend that they have been to the lavatory.

They have a restless time anyway because they are always on the lookout for the ending — this is to show how experienced they are — and when they foresee it there is a terrible rush for the doors about three minutes before time and it is as if there was a fire in the house and everyone gets stuck in the doorway. By the time God Save the King is played they are struggling furiously and have made no headway and they are very angry at being caught by God Save the King so they pay no attention to it. It is a terrible decision for them to know what to do when they are caught by God Save the King.

It is funny also how a lot of young people cannot get through a doorway. Peter once made a study of this and he said it was because twice as many people went into a doorway as ever came out of it.

After the film there is the milk bar. After dinner there is the port.

In the houses of the rich something dreadful happens to the men when their women leave them. There is the drawing-up of chairs and the moving of glasses and then the disinterment of dirt from the death of adolescence. Moustaches, cigars, mauve dinner jackets and walnut, an elegance of candles around a warmth of silver, and the stories that creep like rats from frozen holes. What is said is unrepeatable. But if marriage is a dirty word, and wife is a dirty word, are then what are usually called dirty words clean? Words from the private school playbox, words from the dressing-room, words scratched on whitewash, words which on the tongues of boys are aged and in the mouths of men are rotten. Do they look into each other’s eyes when they tell their stories? The honourable men, the barristers, the generals, the princes of the stock exchange, they write their words on plastered walls with the ink of napoleon brandy.

In the milk bars of the poor, the fish shops of the homeless, you grow up quicker. There you become a cowboy at fifteen. Your cowgirl with her great cow eyes and moue of gum. You become a gangster at twenty. But you are happier, still, really, when the women have gone.

Rich schoolboys and poor cowboys, a padded dinner jacket with facings of silk or a slouch-capped studied flounce of ties, it is all the same, all over England, black knees crossed discreetly or grey knees spread diffusely, it is all the same. Draw the chair up softly over the carpet and pierce the cigar with the golden pin at your watch-chain, snatch a stool or perch on a table and pick the cigarette delicately from the lips between forefinger and thumb and spit fastidiously with the smoke coming down through the nostrils. Play the schoolboy with your lavatory words or play the tough guy with your cinematic teaching. In a thousand milk bars all over England young would-be gangsters giving each other the brush-off and taking each other for a ride, thousands of jerking young would-be cowboys pushing each other around among the teas and cakes and pineapple sundaes quick on the draw with their coca-cola pride. And in the dining room the dirt and despair of laughter. The men of England segregated from their women in a masculine ease of corruption.

In the country there are no women. Population only increases in the cities.

In the cities there are girls. A girl is not a classification of age, a girl can be anything from twelve to fifty, a girl is someone to whom men can go in the holidays. A sister or a mother in whose lap masculinity can be repented.

I left the country. In London, among the smoke, it seemed that always I was asleep and sometimes dreaming. The remains of consciousness upon which I had lived in the country — remains held together by a view of absurdity — in the fog of solitude now lost a dimension and it was as if I were flat in a world of static deepness. This illusion, observed at first dispassionately like some assumption of geometry — that having only length and breadth I could not have existence — later became so powerful that I felt it as a fact: and sitting on a bus or stepping off a pavement I did not believe, since I lacked the depth that was necessary for solidity, that people could see me. When they did I was surprised; and I sometimes feared that I must possess some other faculty of which I was not aware, a faculty of madness such as voicing my thoughts without hearing myself speaking, and that people were being polite in not objecting to my oddity. With appearances so unmanageable it was only in dreams that there was a refuge. Life went to sleep and I cradled it.

Perhaps men are often machines, but never so much as when they are dreaming. The study of man’s mechanism begins with the study of dreams, and then the question is put — Are they always sleeping? When I asked this of myself I could give myself no answer, but I should always like to believe that for a month I had been awake. A month with Annabelle which others would say was illusion, which I extolled in despair as the moment of reality. The despair, now, since I had opened my eyes for the moment, was in sensing the difference between this condition and that.

When old men say that something terrible is happening to the young people of to-day they are quite right, it is, young people are beginning to realize that they and the world are sleeping. And when this is realized the old dreams, the old attitudes, become ridiculous. Fifty years ago youth was presumed to be a time of ecstasy, and enormous words were used to describe the passion of the passing moment. Harlequin met Columbine and they danced among the fruit trees, by Mediterranean waters huge flowers were pledged like prayers. Lovers languished beneath windows, duels were fought at dawn, poets dripped with lyrics like the tears that they described. Now it is only the old that are passionate. Romance is a dead man’s sickness. And the effacement of the young, like the disappearance of flies in winter, is a mystery that is observed with a scarcely anxious wonder.

And the young, wherever they are, know that they are flies and cannot do much about it. From the ceiling, upside down, the view of ancient heads is not a pattern to inspire any confidence. Like a film that is projected backwards every scene jerks horribly into ridicule, — the great lover is a great joke, success waddles quickly to failure, ambition becomes absurd with the regress to nonentity. Even the artist, attempting to see things clearly, finds that he has to make an enigma of himself, to laugh at himself, to contradict himself, in order that he may pay his respects, as it were, to ridicule. And amongst the graying heads themselves there is an air of pathos about existence. At any moment the world may cease, or at least become so disintegrated that the processes of normality will not apply. Illusion is out of control: assurance is abandoned. For the first time for centuries Europe is adopting the doctrine that in words it has accepted. The world is lost; but what is saved is not apparent.