An Aesthetic Underground Read online

  My mother claims that she came home from shopping one day to find me and two friends about to open up a squirrel we’d shot. Her horror was not that we’d dispatched the poor creature but that we had it pinned down for dissection on the bread board.

  Setting-boards for butterflies and moths, the rustproof black pins, the cork-lined exhibition cases—all came by mail from an emporium in South London. The store’s catalogue featured treasures beyond the dreams of avarice—fossils, arrowheads, scrapers, neolithic hand axes (the polished ones), Roman terracotta lamps, sundry wondrous antiquities. The very name of this store, which I’ve never visited, had the same effect on me as Chimborazo and Cotopaxi had on the boy in Walter J. Turner’s poem “Romance”; it was called Watkins and Doncaster.

  (On my first return from Canada to visit my mother she confided one afternoon that she was very worried about some shotgun shells that the tide of collecting and slaughter had deposited in a cupboard some twelve years earlier. She was worried that they would explode. She said they often made her feel low and that she wept thinking about them. Amazed, I asked her why she hadn’t thrown them out. She said that she hadn’t wanted “the blood of the dustbin men on her conscience.” And if that isn’t a detail from a Thurber story, I don’t know what is. For some obscure reason it reminds me of the black Thurber maid who always referred to the fridge as “that doom-shaped thing in the kitchen.”)

  Collecting is intimately connected with writing. With mine, certainly. There is an affinity between the two activities. The kind of knowledge that comes out of collecting differs from purely formal knowledge. It is informed by love and lust. Collecting sharpens and trains the eye. It forces contact with the particular. Collecting is conservative, historical, archival. Collecting is evaluative. It demands judgement. It leads inevitably to ever-expanding interests. Collecting, then, is not mere accumulation. The creation of a collection and its tending is an intricate aesthetic affair. The knowledge gained can be gained in no other way.

  The collector is usually seen by the non-collector as obsessive and harmlessly loony but I hold that whether he collects Regency furniture or hand-painted chamber pots, the collector’s real is more real than yours. Simply, he sees more.

  MR. WHITE AND BERNARD HALLIDAY

  The next two phases of my adolescent reading were dominated by the external examinations: the Ordinary Level exams and the Advanced Level exams. The Ordinary Level exams were equivalent to Canadian high school matriculation and were usually sat at the age of sixteen. Advanced Levels were sat two years later and were used to regulate entry to universities.

  At sixteen I was still mutedly unhappy and unsuccessful at school. I was used to being told I was dim and thick and had come to believe it. My brother, Cambridge now behind him, had been and continued to be unbelievably brilliant. My school career was compared at all points with his and was found wanting. My body was flooded by naughty hormones and the air was heavy with rebellion.

  I claimed I wanted to be a professional boxer.

  Under the guidance of an ex-sergeant from one of the more thuggish branches of the British Army—“Partial to ’im, are you? Don’t ’ug ’im, ’it ’im”—I learned, as Henry Cooper put it, to “work downstairs.”

  My mother’s anguish and pressure increased as the exams drew nearer. The forecasts for my future were grim—on good days I might, if lucky, aspire to become a plumber’s mate, on bad days the gallows beckoned. My father grew more grimly silent. And so, perhaps to please my parents, perhaps simply infected by the prevailing hysteria, I started to work. Everyone was impolitely amazed when the letter arrived from the Ministry of Education. I had passed the Ordinary Level examinations in every subject I had sat. My mother, typically, wondered aloud if they’d got my name confused with some other Metcalf.

  I had had no patience with school or schoolwork up to the time of the Ordinary Level examinations simply because my interests were passionately engaged elsewhere. I was in a constant and what felt like holy connection to the natural world. My time was spent with the intensity of dream fishing for roach and perch, chub, dace, rudd, bream, and tench, names which are a poetry still. School was an abstraction to me many levels removed from the thrill of the red-and-black caterpillars of the cinnabar moth feasting on goldenrod, or the tense but fluid coiling of an adder about to strike.

  But I was beginning to waken from that dream; it was becoming less intense, less consuming as the sexual current pulled me more towards the social world. I began to realize that I had arrived at a crossroads. My mother nagged and urged, wanting me to stay on at school. I countered with odd schemes which drove her to the very verge. One proposal I remember making was that she stake me the passage money to Georgetown, British Guiana, where I would become a pork-knocker high up the Orinoco River working illicit diamonds. My father, while these battles raged—for that is what they were—sucked on his pipe and did his sage-nodding-in-silence thing.

  I said I wanted to become a club fighter because this caused maximum annoyance and distress but even I knew that I was indulging in fantasy. I didn’t have the weight, the height, or the reach. I’d seen the life, seen the pugs in the gyms. And I wasn’t hungry for it. For me it was a kind of playing. When I sparred with Dell Latter in a Croydon club I was on the receiving end of a controlled violence I knew I couldn’t muster.

  But there were things going on in my mind I wouldn’t talk about. I was reading confusedly and with odd motivations. I read a lot of books about art and art history. I had a strange conviction I might become a painter, strange because I was utterly incapable of drawing. In the odd state I was in this did not seem to matter. I also read books about religious subjects, hoping to discover compelling arguments for becoming an atheist because painting and atheism and drinking the turpentine from your paintbox like Utrillo seemed to fit together inevitably.

  I read Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazer’s The Golden Bough because of the footnotes in The Waste Land and this was the first time that the idea of footnotes and bibliographies dawned on me. Before I had resolutely ignored them. But then I was unable to grasp the idea of telling time until I was eleven. So perhaps this was simply another instance of weird wiring. My reading began that meandering course it’s followed ever since.

  From D. H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, to Frieda’s ex-husband Ernest Weekley, to Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Mme Blavatsky, and Annie Besant’s Wisdom of the Upanishads, to Roger Fry and Clive Bell and Vincent’s letters to Theo. From the gibberish of “significant form” forward to the gibberish of Herbert Read and back to Ruskin and Pater and then forward once again to Whistler’s Gentle Art—on and on unendingly and, in large part, uncomprehendingly.

  I was sullen and rude at home. I felt myself too refined, too sensitive to endure the narrow rectitude of the manse. These comic pretensions were doubtless fostered and “swollen”—and “swollen” is very much the word—by my discovery of Oscar Wilde and Huysmans’s A Rebours.

  Not very deeply hidden in the preposterous stew of adolescent rebellion and desire and aspiration was the desire to escape the pietism of my mother and live a life more generally louche and rowdy.

  I wrote about this time in my life in a mock memoir called “Private Parts” in the book Girl in Gingham.

  Irving Layton wrote for Michael Macklem, Oberon Press’s publisher, a lavish blurb.

  “Many thanks to you and Metcalf for the pleasure ‘Private Parts’ has given me. It’s almost as great as that given to me by my own.”

  Well, the novella isn’t that good but here’s an extract:

  I haunted the local library in my quest for knowledge. Not only was it a very good library but I lusted after one of the younger librarians who had a nice smile and breasts which gave the impression of great solidity. I spent hours wondering how much they weighed, what one would feel like hot and unconfined.

  It was in the
library that I found one day a book called The March of the Moderns by the art historian William Gaunt. I have never seen or read the book since. It struck me with the radiance and power of revelation. The mundane world fell away; I was oblivious to the smell of floor polish and damp raincoats, the click of the date-stamp, the passage of other browsers along the shelves. I read standing up until closing-time and then took the book home and finished it in bed.

  The book revealed to me a world where brilliant but persecuted people drank champagne for breakfast and were pissed by lunch, took lobsters for walks on leashes, shaved off half their moustache, sliced off their ears and gave them to prostitutes, possessed women by the score, consorted with syphilitic dwarves, lived in brothels, and were allowed to go mad.

  Somewhere in the sun, D. H. Lawrence was at it.

  Hemingway was giving them both barrels.

  Ezra was suffering for the faith in an American bin.

  All painters were everywhere possessing their exotic Javanese models.

  I, meanwhile, was in Croydon.

  But Art was obviously the answer; it was just a question of finding my medium. The problem with the novel was that writing took a long time and nothing interesting had happened to me. I tried poetry for a time being particularly drawn to the Imagists because they were very short and seemed easiest to imitate. H.D. was one of my favourites. Painting, because of the models, attracted me most but I couldn’t draw anything that looked like anything; abstraction was the answer, of course, but secretly I thought abstraction not quite honest. I had a go at a few lino-cuts but gouged my hand rather badly. Drama was soured for me by memories of endless pageants and nativity plays where kids tripped over the frayed carpet and I had to say:

  “I bring you tidings of Great Joy.”

  But I was not depressed.

  I settled down to wait. I lived in the manse, ate scones, and went to school, but I was charged with a strange certainty that I was somehow different, chosen, special; my Muse, in her own good time, would descend and translate me from Croydon to the richer world where women and applause were waiting.

  My career crossroads was solved not by a choice but by a command. After the results of the Ordinary Level exams were known I was summoned by the headmaster. All previous visits had involved a cane. The headmaster’s name was Mr. White. I have no idea of his Christian name; everyone was so in awe of him that I suppose we thought he hadn’t got one. We were in such terror of his besuited bulk, his jowls, his massive presence that if he appeared in a corridor boys moved to the walls and froze like cars getting out of the way of a blaring ambulance. Though the terror was in his silence.

  I tapped on the door.

  “You wished to see me, sir.”

  “Ah, Metcalf. The boy pugilist. Sit.”

  Flowers in the cut-glass vase in the window behind him, sun dazzling on the glass-fronted bookcases, two white marble busts on columns of men in wigs.

  “Our first encounter, Metcalf, was concerned with your putting pieces of carbide in inkwells. Producing a stench—methane, was it?—which forced classrooms to be vacated. Highly amusing. Highly amusing.”

  He hooked his thumbs into his gown.

  “Your career subsequently has been marked by obstinacy and obduracy.”

  He shook his head slowly and as if in sorrow.

  “The Bunsen burner? Hmmm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The machete-thing?”

  “Bowie knife, sir.”

  “I am not interested in the detail of your armaments.”

  “No, sir.”

  “That playground altercation. An ugly exchange of blows for which I had the honest pleasure of thrashing you. Hmmm? Hmmm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What are we to do with you, Metcalf?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Annealing, wasn’t it? When you attempted to burn down the metalwork shop.”

  “It was an accident, sir.”

  “One might observe that a disproportionate number of accidents seem to happen in your vicinity. Hmmm? Hmmm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And nagging at the edge of my mind is something to do with a pipette. A pipette and another boy’s blazer pocket. Also you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You seem to have an antipathy towards science, Metcalf, but I have been looking at your Ordinary Level results and your marks in English were extraordinarily high. I have spoken to Mr. Rule who rashly used of you the word ‘brilliant.’”

  He stared at me.

  “I sense in you, Metcalf, abilities untapped. But tapped they will be. I will myself tap them. And I will tap them very hard. We’ll see how ‘brilliant’ you are. I have decided that you will win a State Scholarship and go to a decent university where you will take an Honours degree in English. All schools of English require Latin at the Ordinary Level as a prerequisite. You have no Latin as your appalling behaviour and lack of effort precluded entry into the Latin stream. It is therefore my intention to teach you Latin in one year. I shall take you from your present state of numb ignorance to an ability to sight translate the set books—Caesar and Ovid—next year.”

  He regarded me.

  “This will require of you a great deal of hard work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No time for games with carbide or machetes.”

  “No, sir.”

  “That then is settled. You’ll need . . . Blue and yellow, the cover.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “The primer, boy. The primer you’ll need. Teach Yourself Latin. That’s it. Now away out of my sight and buy one.”

  I entered upon my final two years of secondary education known in England then as the sixth form. I was studying only two subjects, English and history. I had only two classes a day and spent the rest of the time reading. I could come and go as I wished and no longer was required to wear school uniform. On the first lordly day of the new term I rolled into school late, wearing a deadly elegant pair of suede shoes.

  “Good God, Metcalf!” exclaimed my history teacher. “Those are the shoes of a Nigerian pimp!”

  Why, I wondered, Nigerian?

  Every lunchtime I reported to Mr. White’s study where he corrected my exercises in grammar and translation. I learned enough Latin to develop a keen regret that I hadn’t been taught Greek and Latin from my elementary school years. I came to love the discussions about the connotations of words, the propriety of diction. I also came to understand that Mr. White was infinitely kind and his verbal harrumphing an act to amuse himself.

  There were only seven students in the English class, all of them very bright and intense, and we were fortunate in our English teacher, a newly minted double first from Cambridge. He had been a student of F. R. Leavis’s and so taught us the close reading typical of what was then called New Criticism. When I did go to Bristol University my tutor was L. C. Knights, the founder of Scrutiny, which was edited largely by Leavis; so the man had, indirectly, a considerable influence on my life. So closely did we read in that sixth-form class that we came to look on William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity as light entertainment.

  The set books for the Advanced Level exam were works by Chaucer and Shakespeare and a representative clutch of writers from the Romantic period—Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Byron, and Jane Austen. But these were merely the skeleton of what we studied. I read more in those two years than I’d ever read before. It is impossible to convey the intellectual excitement of those two years. The cliché of being in a pressure cooker is exactly right. Nearly everything that has come afterwards has been an anticlimax.

  We read the texts minutely. The placing of the texts in a larger framework was left entirely to us. It was simply assumed that we would read literary histories, other books by the set authors, their contemporaries, literary criticism,
and period history. I read unceasingly, all day and far into the night; the weekly essays on subjects of our own choosing provided an opportunity to marshal new information and ideas.

  I’ll try to suggest the breathless, careering quality of the reading. Starting Northanger Abbey, the teacher suggested the obvious point that one couldn’t really approach it without knowing what was being parodied—which led to The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Lewis’s Tales of Terror, Vathek, Rasselas, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, and The Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio, dire tomes such as Praz’s The Romantic Agony. Which led to Byron. To Quennell. To revolutions: to Garibaldi, Bolivar, Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. Background books like Watt’s The Rise of the Novel led, in turn, back to previously unread novels—lesser Defoe, tedious Samuel Richardson, the minor Fielding, Smollett, the other Sterne. And somehow forward to the diaries of the Austen period—marvellous gobs of gossip—to Captain Jesse’s Life of Brummel, the mystic doings of Lady Hester Stanhope, to T. H. White’s The Age of Scandal and then, of course, like a homing pigeon to White himself who led back to Malory who led to the Mabinogion which somehow led to Robert Graves who in turn led back to the Greek myths and The White Goddess and to archaeology—Mortimer Wheeler, Sir Arthur Evans, Michael Ventris and Minoan Linear B which led to Jean-François Champollion, Cycladic figures, the Rosetta Stone, Napoleon, fast detour through the French Revolution with side trips to Sade and a glance at Venus in Furs, back to Arthur Bryant’s popular history of the Peninsular War Campaign and on and on and on.

  The same sort of thing with Blake. Off to Swedenborg. To engraving. Back to Hogarth. Forward to Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer. Back to British Israelites, to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, to the 1831 Life of Henry Fuseli, to Gilchrist’s Life of Blake himself, to Fuseli’s Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. Side trips to John Wilkes—what was the connection?—to Fox and Pitt. Stubbornly back to the texts themselves. Baffled.