Part 8

Every night Daisy went for a walk down Cemetery Street and said ‘What a lovely night,’ and passed William on her walk and said ‘What a coincidence’; and every night William, too, said ‘What a lovely night’ and ‘What a coincidence.’ They began to know each other’s thoughts and were more bored with each other than ever.

They had their shoes mended by the same shoemaker. Each knew the shoemaker had taken a girl to live with him behind the shop and then thrown her into the street when his wife had learned about it. Yet each continued to think him a nice man because they could not be bothered to think him a mean man. They became more and more absolute in their thoughts and habits until ...

I do not know what happened to them, nor do they.

AN ANONYMOUS BOOK

§1

An anonymous book for children only was published by an anonymous publisher and anonymously praised in an anonymous journal. Moreover, it imitated variously the style of each of the known writers of the time, and this made the responsibility for its authorship all the more impossible to place. For none of the known writers could in the circumstances look guilty. But every one else did, so this made the responsibility for its authorship all the more difficult to place. The police had instructions to arrest all suspicious-looking persons. But as every one except the known writers was under suspicion the department of censorship gave orders that the known authors should be put in prison to separate them from the rest of the population and that every one else should be regarded as legally committed to freedom. ‘Did you write it?’ every one was questioned at every street corner. And as the answer was always ‘No’, the questioned person was always remanded as a suspect.

The reasons why this book aroused the department of censorship were these. One--it imitated (or seemed to imitate) the style of all the known authors of the time and was therefore understood by the authorities to be a political (or moral) satire. Two--it had no title and was therefore feared by the authorities to be dealing under the cover of obscurity with dangerous subjects. Three--its publisher could not be traced and it was therefore believed by the authorities to have been printed uncommercially. Four--it had no author and was therefore suspected by the authorities of having been written by a dangerous person. Five (and last)--it advertised itself as a book for children, and was therefore concluded by the authorities to have been written with the concealed design of corrupting adults. As the mystery grew, the vigilance of the police grew, and the circulation of the book grew: for the only way that its authorship could be discovered was by increasing the number of people suspected, and this could only be done by increasing the number of readers. The authorities secretly hoped to arrive at the author by separating those who had read the book from those who had not read it, and singling out from among the latter him or her who pretended to know least about it.

All the stories in the book were about people who did not like the world and who would have been glad to be somewhere else. Some were irreligious, some were ungrateful, some were scornful, some were openly rebellious, some were secretly rebellious, some were merely ironical, some were merely bored. Many were too good, many were too bad. All were disobedient, and all wanted to go away. Wanting to go away to somewhere else did not mean wanting to go away to somewhere else with the rest of the entire population of the world. It meant in all the stories wanting to go away alone. All the stories in the book were about people who wanted to go away to somewhere where they would be, no matter how many other people they found there, the only one. All the people in the book thought the world fit only for light, heat, moisture, electricity, plants, the lower animals, and perhaps for occasional parties, excursions, commemoration days, Sunday afternoons, exhibitions, spectacles, concerts, sight-seeing and conversation. But none of them thought it fit for higher creatures to live in permanently, because all who were in it, they said, were the only one, and were thus objects of hate, ridicule or mock-adoration for one another, being each by his mind freakish and uncommon but by his brain natural and common.

Such was the philosophical import of this book. But its philosophical import was got only if the reader had a taste for, a passion for, a suspicion of, an obsession with, or instructions to look for philosophical imports. Or if he shrank from stories. What was plain and comprehensible before all philosophical imports was just stories. The four upon which most suspicion was fixed were _The Flying Attic_, _The Man Who Told Lies To His Mother_, _The Woman Who Loved an Engine_, and _The Woman Who Was Bewitched By a Parallel_.

It was impossible to say particularly which story was written in the style of which author. The effect of imitation that the book gave was rather a mixed one; that is, it was generally and throughout a witty, energetic, beautiful, simple, earnest, intricate, entertaining, ironic, stern, fantastic, eloquent, modest, outspoken, matter-of-fact and so-forth book, so that generally speaking it could not be read but as a conglomerate imitation of the noted literary manners of the time, of the well-known author who wrote so wittily, of the well-known author who wrote so energetically, of the well-known author who wrote so beautifully, of the well-known author who wrote so simply, of the well-known author who wrote so earnestly, of the well-known author who wrote so intricately, of the well-known author who wrote so entertainingly, of the well-known author who wrote so ironically, of the well-known author who wrote so sternly, of the well-known author who wrote so fantastically, of the well-known author who wrote so eloquently, of the well-known author who wrote so modestly, of the well-known author who wrote so outspokenly, of the well-known author who wrote so matter-of-factly, and of the well-known author who wrote and-so-forthly.

It is not the object of this account, whose purpose is chiefly historical, to transcribe in detail all or even many of the stories of which the book was composed, or to analyse, criticize, praise or condemn the few that shall be reproduced (in whatever way seems most economical) here. It is rather intended to give an honest, accurate, elementary notion of the book from which the reader may form a scholarly opinion of its character that shall be in restrained harmony with his own. Several of the stories (those cited above, for example) will be elaborately summarized, according to the degree of eccentricity they possess in comparison with other stories which fall more naturally into a group-significance or classification. Some will appear only in a table of constructional correspondences; others as interesting or corroborative or contradictory points of reference: still others as problems of too fine difficulty for the moment, here put aside and marked out for the future specialist.

§2

_The Flying Attic_ is the first of the miscellaneously significant or dangerous stories. The central character is a cook who had never in her life been guest to anyone and who had never in her life ascended above the kitchen floor of any house. No description of the character’s appearance, age or parentage is given, so that the atmosphere of the story, intentionally or unintentionally, is one of allegory, or morality, or symbolism--as you like. This creature, the story tells us, conceived the fantastic ambition of living permanently in a guest attic, descending only at the new moon, and then to find herself each time in a different house, each time guest to a different host or hostess.

The realization of this ambition is made technically possible by the dismissal of the cook for serving a custard made from a manufactured pink powder, instead of from original ingredients. No complaint seems to have been made against the excellence of taste or quality of the custard. Its very excellence in fact is what arouses suspicion. And so after coffee the cook is dismissed. The family chats, finally goes to bed. Then the cook steals out of the kitchen and up to the attic, at the moment unoccupied but in a state of preparation for a guest who is expected to arrive the following day. The cook draws the curtains, lights a candle, gets into bed. The beams are made of old ship’s timber; the sharp-ribbed roof suggests an inverted ship’s bottom. The candlelight, the drawn curtains, the architectural irregularities of the attic, the distorted, ship-like sense of motion faintly conveyed by the crazy contour of the attic in candlelight to the mind of the cook now floating in the unreality of the fulfilment of an impossible ambition--all these factors contribute to what must count--in the story at any rate--for a genuine disturbance of forces: the attic moves, the cook’s mind swoons with pleasure, day and night the curtains remain drawn (otherwise the problem of _locale_ would seriously interfere with the narrative device), she passes her time in a passive delirium of satisfaction, and at the morning of new moon punctually descends. The first and last descents will be given in detail, the intervening ones only listed.

First descent: as the breakfast bogy, in the costume of a German peasant--green jacket, flat, ribboned hat; into the house of a country lady, mother of three young children, recently widowed. Cook unlatches the attic door and walks slowly downstairs--a heavy male step. Cultured and terrified children’s voices are heard as the steps pass the night nursery: ‘Oh mother, the breakfast bogy--we are afraid to get up.’ ‘Nonsense, children,’ the mother calls back, ‘come down immediately.’ The steps continue, Cook enters the dining-room, sits down at the table in the chief chair as master of the house. The mother enters from the kitchen with large porridge basin, sees Cook, screams. Children come running down. ‘The breakfast bogy, the breakfast bogy!’ they cry. ‘We told you so, Mother.’ Cook says: ‘I am master here now. We will all have breakfast together and you will pay me every respect. After breakfast I shall go away and not return till luncheon. The same for tea and dinner. You must guess what I like to eat and after each meal thank me for the food. And you must kiss me good night. That is all.’ It is to be noted that whenever the central character of any of these tales gives an order, it is always obeyed without question, however wicked, unreasonable or fantastic it may be. Thus in _The Dishonest Scales_ the grocer-woman not only cheats her customers in the weight of what they buy (though the scales whenever tested seem to record quite honestly), but after taking their money she says firmly ‘Now that is all,’ and sends them away unprotesting without their purchases.

After breakfast Cook retires to the attic and appears again at luncheon. All this happens in the most orderly manner imaginable. The widow even smiles prettily to Cook after luncheon and ‘hopes the gentleman finds all satisfactory.’ Cook here nods stiffly. There is no clue given as to what either Cook or the family do during the intervals between meals. Only one rather shocking mischance occurs: the oldest of the children, a boy, spies upon the cook between tea and dinner and is snatched angrily into the attic. At dinner only two children appear, and Cook announces quietly: ‘Your oldest child attempted to spy upon me, so I turned him into an eiderdown to keep me warm.’ To which the widow replies ‘It serves him right,’ and goes on eating. After dinner Cook is kissed good night affectionately by the widow and her two remaining children, goes up to the attic, fastens the door, gets into bed and tucks herself round with her new eiderdown.

Second descent: Cook comes down into a prison tower as a captive queen, murders her warder, takes upstairs with her her warder’s poodle, the pillow she stabbed him on, and his wife’s lace cap, saying: ‘All this will contribute to the comfort of my old age.’

Third descent: Cook comes down into a full-rigged ship about to sink in a storm off the Gold Coast, rescues the captain, a villainous but hearty old man, and carries him off to her attic with great satisfaction.

Fourth descent: Cook comes down into a great kitchen as a cook and carries the whole kitchen up with her in one armful.

Fifth descent: Cook comes down into a library as a respectable young working man inquiring from the lady librarian for a book on how to mend leaking roofs. The lady librarian strongly resembling Cook in her youth, the young working man is smitten with a great fancy for her, marries her, takes her up to the attic, where she becomes cook to Cook.

Sixth descent: Cook opens her attic door to walk out as herself for a breath of fresh air, steps upon nothing and begins to fall. While falling she looks up, sees her attic far above her, flying off at great speed toward the east, where it is growing dark. ‘However will I get back to it?’ she thinks mournfully to herself. At this point there is a long passage describing intimately all of her anxieties in her fall, such as what will happen to her poodle, who will smooth out her eiderdown, what will her captain have for dinner all by himself, down to the last, which is, what shall she give them for a pudding to-night? She decides, since it is so late already (it is now quite dark in the east and her attic has completely disappeared) to give them a custard made from a manufactured pink powder, which will take only a moment to stir up and only fifteen minutes on the window-sill to cool. It would be impossible without exact quotation from the original (which is outside the modest scope of the present volume) to reproduce the delicate transition that takes place just here from one level of the episode to the next (from the higher to the lower, or the fantastic to the factual, I might say). Suffice it for our purposes that there occurs at this point a shock, the contact on the one hand of Cook’s feet with the ground, on the other of Cook’s right ear with church clock just striking seven. ‘And there will be a guest to-night,’ she exclaims to herself, tasting and stirring, chopping and sprinkling. At last dinner is served, eaten, over. ‘Dear kind Cook,’ Mistress says to her before retiring, ‘aren’t you going upstairs to-night?’ ‘My goodness, is it so late?’ replies Cook. ‘I was just cooling myself a bit’--for Cook was standing on the kitchen doorstep gazing east. So she goes upstairs to her attic and fastens the door behind her. Upon which unsatisfactory note this story concludes, leaving the reader uneasy and somewhat cheated of that general resolution of himself in the story which it is his right to expect from every upright invention--an effect all the more disquieting in that it seemed everywhere in this work arrived at rather by art than by accident or inferiority of execution.

§3

It would be well at this point to uncover a little of the philosophical skeleton of this book for the benefit of the reader likely to become too absorbed in the narrative surface, so to speak. It would also be well to emphasize, on the other hand, the fact that the anonymous author was if anything over-precious in the technical brilliance of his stories: he seemed to wish, by ringing from them a pure, glassy artificiality, that their perfection as stories should make them as trivial and false-true as stories, so that they held the moral more obediently. There is therefore little or no hint of moral in any of the stories, the sincerity of the narration in every particular being the best guarantee (according to the principles of his writing) of the presence of the skeletal sense beneath it. We might, for the purpose of analysis, call this obsession with fictitious fact an obsession statistical. And we might likewise call (for the same purpose) the style of the book the style of curiosity. The effect of this style on the reader is indeed an effect of curiosity--curiosity in the general usage of the word. That is, it makes the reader first inquisitive of the course and conclusion of the narrative, then suspicious of the philosophical import of the narrative, and finally resolved to track down angerly (as our Elizabethan might have said) the chief mystery of each narrative, namely the anonymity of the author: as indeed the police of his time were angered into doing (without success). The style of curiosity, itself, however, was of a different order of curiosity from this. If you will look out this word in any full contemporary dictionary you will find that while the current meaning is this precise _effect_ of curiosity, the two first (and previous) meanings have a more particular application:

(1) Scientific attentiveness; technical nicety; moral exactness; religious fastidiousness. Obsolete.

(2) Honest or artistic workmanship; generous elaboration; charitable detail. Obsolete or archaic.

And such, in fact, was the style of curiosity: so that the effect of curiosity on the reader had in it a touch of quaintness; which is the reason why, in fact, the anonymous author seemed to his critics, censors and readers to be imitating the style of all the well-known writers of the time and yet to be clearly not among them.

Perhaps I can best illustrate this obsession statistical and this style of curiosity (both in origination and effect) by a direct transcription. It is to be found (by those fortunate enough to lay hands upon the book itself) in the story (untitled) about the man who could not help stealing his friends’ matches though his father was a prosperous match-manufacturer, though he had a generous allowance from him and though he had no interest in the match business:

‘He paid his fare exactly, having the scale of fares off by heart (more thoroughly than the conductor) and having always in his pocket such a variety of small coins as should make it unnecessary for him to be given change in his fares, purchases and contributions to charity. He sat on top, on the left, in the fourth row from the front, by the rail, a habit so strong and methodical in him that he never thought (and was never obliged) to sit elsewhere. He made a minute comment to himself upon the flower stalls or stands along the route, concluding with the generalization that the predominating colour among the flowers sold by the lame or the ugly was mauve. He then went to sleep, timing himself to awake a minute before the arrival of the bus at the railway station. He rehearsed his itinerary, which was to miss his train at the first change and so at the second change and so to have to wait an hour there and two hours there and to examine more particularly during this time the generalization regarding lame or ugly flower-vendors. While asleep he followed his usual practice of descending from the state of personality to the state of thingality, and in this dreamy condition of passive matter he enjoyed the same security that an apple has up to the moment of its fall. And so upon waking he fell from the top of the bus--as if blown down by a strong wind--and broke his nose, one leg, two fingers, cut his left cheek beneath the eye and sustained an injury to his back that left him upon his recovery with a permanent thoughtful posture.’

From this short extract it will perhaps be clear how he teased his reader with sincerity and how his statistical straightforwardness carved out patiently a mysterious block of significance which was not brought upon the platform of the story but which the reader found obstructing his exit, as it were, when the curtain had come down and he attempted to leave the theatre. It was this seemingly innocent obstructionism of course that aroused the authorities to such a violent pitch of antagonism to the book; and which remains to this day a challenge almost impudent (so it sometimes seems) to the endurance of all scholars, philosophers and simple lovers of knowledge. For often, at our greatest moments of ingenuity and science, indeed, we find ourselves suddenly uncertain of our premises and forced to begin once more at the beginning, yielding our own philosophical curiosity to the statistical curiosity of the author. It might therefore be wise, before we entangle ourselves further in scholarly ramifications of our own, to return to the document itself. In this sober intention I mean to present, in as unmeddlesome and economical a fashion as I am capable of, the conspicuous features of one of the most baffling (though to outward appearance one of the most unaffected) stories in the collection, _The Man Who Told Lies To His Mother_.

§4

He was an author. He wrote books one after the other. It was impossible, we are told, to understand, say, the tenth book without reading all the preceding nine. And it was impossible to understand the tenth without the book that followed it. And whatever number the book was, there was always one following it, so that the author was continuously being understood by his readers. The chief character in each of the books was always the same. Half of him was the author himself, the other half of him was the only son of the author’s mother. He called the first half I, the second half He. I thought, wrote books, knew all about everything, did nothing. He knew nothing about anything but could do everything. I was wise, He was happy. I was careful to keep himself to himself so as not to have his wisdom spoiled by He or He’s fun spoiled by his wisdom. I kept himself in his study, He in the world. I did not permit He to share his study with him because this would have been like denying that there was a world outside of his study and, since he knew there was such a world, making a ghost of himself. I did not want to be a ghost and yet he wanted to remain in his study, so he supported He in the world on the books he wrote in his study. This kept up the world, it kept up He, it made I complete without his having to be complete, that is, to be both I and He. Moreover, though I supported He in the world, he made no attempt to track him, curb him or even share occasionally in his activities. I was continually disciplining himself against such temptations: in order not to corrupt his wisdom by making it a criticism of He and in order not to corrupt the fullness of He’s pleasure by making it have anything to do with sense. The important thing for I, inasmuch as He existed and the world existed, was to keep them employed in each other, so that he could be truly, wisely, actually, employed in himself. I said: I am I, therefore I am true, I am not He, therefore he is false; but He is He, therefore He is false-true so long as I encourage him in falsehood. He could not, however, be false by himself--this would have eventually made him true. To be false he needed something to be false with, he needed the world, he needed other He’s. For a long time He and the world conducted each other toward themselves with the closest and strictest falsehood; so close and strict in fact that the world, this conglomeration of other He’s, became a single close, strict, false She. He and She went on loyally enjoying themselves in each other as He and the world had done, until this falsificatory attachment became so utter that it reproduced I in his study. It reproduced I, it reproduced He and She. It did all this without giving to her only son’s mother a grandchild.