Rotting Hill (33 page)

    “Oh, yes.” In a slightly drawling tone of voice which dismissed my suggestion as irrelevant. “The book that has had most influence on me, Mr. Lewis”—and he bent his gaze upon me as if I were showing a little ingratitude—“is your
Caliphs Design.
I have got more from that book than any other and I was meaning to speak to you about it.”

    My consternation may easily be imagined. My
amour propre
reeled at the impact of such approbation.
The Caliphs Design,
with for sub-title
Architects Where is Your Vortex?
was my earliest pamphlet. It is to do with the fine arts, with especial reference to the case of the architect. The human shell, dwelling or public building, should be demolished, I protested, no city should be spared or time wasted, and our architects should construct upon the
tabula rasa
thus created, a novel, a brilliant city.

    The teaching of this book is violently opposed, surely, to the emotional “personality”-world of Mr. Gartsides and his true master Mr. Read. I put pressure upon my memory to produce some passage, or perhaps chapter, which would give aid and comfort to my “admirer”. But my memory of my own work is imperfect and I abandoned the attempt.

    “
The Caliphs Design?
” I asked coldly.

    “Yes. It’s a book that ought to be reissued.”

    I blinked.

    “Do you still think the same as you did when you wrote it?” he asked me.

    “Just the same.” But I began to understand. “That the out-dated dingy shells in which we live—indeed everything, you mean, should be razed to the ground and a national city replace it? Dazzlingly white in place of blackened brick and dirty stucco? That the sordid antiquated apology for a city in which we dwell disappear as if by sorcery, and a new city stand there suddenly where it was—of hard white logic?”

    He nodded.

    “Well, I want that now as I did then. The only difference is I know I shall not get it!”

    “Why not?” he retorted, with a touch of what was for him almost heat. He became guarded at once. “It’s worth trying for, anyway.”

    “Oh, yes. However, since you have expressed such interest in that…When writing
The Caliphs Design
I was superbly ignorant of the difficulties.”

    “Of course there are difficulties,” he agreed airily.

    “Firstly, the obstacles which stand in the way of pulling down, or of building, a single house, let alone a street—or a city.”

    “Property rights.” “That is so. But there are factors more fundamental.” I got up and passed him to fetch a box of matches. Back again I said. “I was not a social-revolutionary.”

    “I know you were not.” He was prompt and business-like. “You had the vision though. You saw what should be done to the
outside
—to house the new society.”

    “Very well—I had a vision, like my Caliph—but suppose for a moment that I had found a social-revolutionary, Mr. Gartsides, to act upon my vision. What would he have done with my vision? Naturally what Hollywood does with a literary masterpiece. He would have diluted, vulgarized, and betrayed it. It is no use going into partnership with a violent reformist philistine. Yet to realize your ‘vision’ you require capital: and in this case the capital required is
action.
”

    Gartsides jerked himself over from the right arm of the chair to the left. He stroked his raw face as if it hurt. “The man of action,” he murmured lazily, “is not always a philistine though.”

    “Well, we won’t have a parade of Men-of-Action! How I see it, and you came to me as to an oracle, is this. All the dilemmas of the creative mind seeking to function socially centre upon the nature of action; upon the necessity of crude action, of calling in the barbarian to build a civilization. The result is as disconcerting as what is unmasked at the basis of the structure of the human reason—I mean the antinomies.”

    That was my longest speech, in this access of volubility. I lay back and smoked. Then I said: “A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Gartsides!”

    “My mind is a perfect blank!” He smiled the smile of the smart.

    As a result of our conversation so far I understood, of course, that art was the last, not the first, thing that weighed with Mr. Gartsides, whose interests were political or sociological. Like most astute men of this type he had no time for private feelings, he did not take too seriously the non-political character of my mind—especially as I was not hostile but only had not trained myself to think of the human being as a power-unit.

    But I think he felt this was becoming a stalemate, or we had drifted away from the fiery purpose that had brought him to see me. Sitting up, he again mounted his savage hobby-horse.

    “So you still think like that—that’s good, Mr. Lewis. I’m glad. That’s how I think. It is why I came to see you. I can make people enthusiastic,” he assured me brightly, “I can make them see what I see.” This he repeated later several times. He regarded it as his
raison d’être
—to be an intoxicator of innocents, with big brash phoney phrases. “You remember what you said in your book about the artist and the engineer?”

    “That they should co-operate?” I looked at the clock.

    “That’s right. That’s what I am going to do up in the college—make the engineers art-conscious. They never think about art. I want to make them see they can use art in their work.”

    “I see.” I looked at the clock: but I was unable to make him time-conscious. I had not his power to make people see what I saw—at least not when it was a timepiece.

    “Why don’t you go out, Mr. Lewis, and make people enthusiastic, make people see what you see?”

    “My way of doing that is to paint pictures,” I told him. “I paint pictures of a world that will never be seen anywhere except in pictures.”

    “You don’t think so? But the day of the easel-picture is over.”

    “Then there will not even be that pale reflection of something more intelligent.”

    “No one sees what the artist does in his studio.”

    “You mean that like the Borough Group he should take his canvases into the Public Gardens so that the dormant responses of the common man may be stimulated? Or the way artists stick their things up in an alley near Washington Square, New York?”

    “Why not?” he said. “The artist is wasting his time doing easel-pictures. What he puts into the easel-picture he should put into the world outside. Spread his vision around—in things that people can touch—eat out of—
live
in! Their houses, their clothes.”

    He was all-set evidently to intoxicate
me.
I resorted to the grin, which is all that it is necessary to do when people like Mr. Gartsides who cannot paint easel-pictures, and understand nothing about the art of painting, condemn the easel-picture: or the novel or indeed any of the other so-called individualist art-forms the destruction of which they are apt to predict if not to urge, basing the abolition upon some utilitarian moral.

    “You could make people enthusiastic!” How right was the eighteenth century, I reflected as I listened, in its deep distaste for “enthusiasm”.

    But he proceeded to enlarge upon the novel functions involved in his job of “art-director”, and explained the purpose of the new colleges invented by the socialist administration. (In the field of Education they are not seen at their best.) He had gone up to Rochdale and was accepted on the spot. The director had said: “You’re the only one who took the trouble to come up and have a look. You shall have the job.” What would his “art-direction” consist of, I wanted to know. Would he sit down the engineers-in-the-making this college had been created to train and make them copy plaster-casts? He laughed away all plaster-casts. Or the nude model? I enquired. He smiled away the nude.

    He was not evasive. He made no difficulty about explaining that what he would do was just to
inspire
and
enthuse.

    “How do you mean,” I persisted. “You will in the morning leave your quarters charged with enthusiasm. You will walk around the work benches or rooms where young men are bent over blue-prints, and spout art as one would spray some intoxicant into the air? Will you get these young men to paint the college walls and ceilings?”

    “Certainly that is the form their enthusiasm might take,” he answered. “I don’t know what form it will take however. I am here to discuss that with you.”

    “There would be no work on pieces of paper or canvas—which might lead eventually to… the easel-picture?”

    “No, of course not that. What’s the use of that?”

    “What indeed. Do you paint yourself, Mr. Gartsides?”

    At this he was convulsed a little.

    “Oh, I shouldn’t like you to see any of my pictures”—he gulped down a self-deriding laugh at the mere thought of the feebleness of his own “creative” efforts.

    “Are they not good?” I asked.

    “No, they’re rotten,” he assured me.

    “Your activities are mainly destructive”—I assumed the air of one musing.

    “No, I am creative. I can fill people with enthusiasm.”

    “For what?”

    “For art.”

    It was six o’clock and I stood up. He had had his sixty minutes—and so had I.

    But I rather liked Mr. Gartsides. I even secretly wished him luck. This remarkable sergeant naturally regarded art as an uproarious racket. In that, however, he was by no means alone. Many dignified gentlemen, who draw fat salaries as—
directors
just like Gartsides only on a far bigger scale, regard art in precisely the same way. The parasites that art attracts are legion. What I liked about Gartsides was the way he had jumped into it with military alacrity, out of the farmyard or the Barrack Square. He had taken Time by the forelock. He had swung himself up on to the tremendous bandwaggon. If we were going to live with nonsense, rather Gartsides and his “enthusiasm” than the higher-up impostors—the “stripe-pants” of the art-racket.

    I took a fancy to Gartsides. From that day to this I have breathlessly followed his career. He has grown to be a somewhat different person: but he retains, to the full, his fine rough artlessness. If only he could learn to paint, he might do for the Army what Rousseau did for the Douane.

    Most of the country near London may be classed as Greater London. One is still among the factories or in a suburb. But the county of Ladbrokeshire is rural, remarkably intact, and only a county or two away from the capital. If I feel I have rotted long enough in Rotting Hill, if I want to be where the Machine Age has not dirtied the buttercups or choked the throat of a cow with soot, I go up into Ladbrokeshire.

    Last summer I found myself in the ancient township of Blatchover, and at the top of the hill got out and entered Blatchover Church. I know nothing of the history of Ladbrokeshire and imagine that it must have had a period of great prosperity judging from its churches. The wool-trade probably would be responsible for this, around the time England was freeing itself from exploitation by the Hanseatic League and ceasing to be just a “wool-farm” for the Germans. Cloth merchants were responsible for the building of fine churches in other parts of England; their presence in Ladbrokeshire, in their burgess “halls”, was doubtless the reason for this crop of rectories and vicarages. Blatchover was, seemingly, a skinners’ town, and I suppose the church is the work of the Skinners’ Guild.

    Inside it is one of the most beautiful churches I know. Gilded banners of the apostles, showing their bearded figures in blues and blacks, with patches and strips of icy white, depend the entire length of the chancel, which has two ornate chapels on either side of it. Such embellishments, for there are many others, including a large and beautifully carved Pietà, and a Bavarian Madonna, bequeathed by a refugee, furnish it handsomely as well as visibly sanctify it. But without the hanging banners and carved pillars it would be a rich and splendid interior. In this church Robert Blaise, the former vicar, who was a peculiarly liberal cleric, at a certain moment installed the Red Flag—perhaps among these saintly banners, I do not know. On the South Wall is the chapel of John Ball, one of the inspirers of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. History is full of rhymes, and one of the first to be impressed upon our infant memory is one that this aggressive priest borrowed from the German.

    When Adam delved and Eve span,

    Who was then the gentleman?

    Dick Bartleton, the present incumbent, is almost as liberal as his predecessor. He follows Ball in believing that “Things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common”. Upon a table, not far from the Chapel of John Ball, is a great deal of inexpensive literature reflecting the same priestly abhorrence of property shown by Ball. You may buy, for a penny or two, little pamphlets explaining that socialism is identical with the teaching of Christ. (With this, I may say, I am in complete agreement.) Dick Bartleton, in a little brochure of his own, describes how a believer in Christ ought to vote. “Jesus was a partisan: he did not hesitate to take his stand with the weaker side. He ranged himself fearlessly upon the side of the oppressed and the exploited, and condemned the exploiter and the master-class. We, as Christians, must follow the example of Jesus Christ.” As I have always hated
any
government, and despised any employer, and have always been exploited, I was of course glad to see Dick ranging Jesus on our side. I hoped he was not making any exceptions in favour of some governments.

    Straight-from-the-shoulder Dick Bartleton preaches a grand sermon, they say. He has one of the saints of revolution in his South Wall and he, too, teaches that nothing will ever go well in England until goods are held a great deal more in common than is the case at present. In the social history of England in these years it is worthy of note how many clergy—both clergymen and ministers—are at least as economically “advanced” as is the present Government. Some even are open and declared members of the communist party. (How they reconcile Marxist materialism with the Christian idealism I cannot guess.) A socialist society exists of Anglican clergymen, whose delegate at a recent Paris conference was a Sheffield clergyman married to a Bishop’s daughter. This phenomenon should be compared with the attitude of the French priesthood before the French Revolution.