A Whistling Woman

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’m not an interviewer.”

  “You’re not scared. You think fast. It’d be a good idea to have a thinking woman. They don’t go in for them.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come along to the auditions anyway. For the experience. You don’t know where it may lead.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what else are you doing at the moment, Frederica?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, then.”

  Wilkie’s new project was called Through the Looking-Glass. The auditions took place, not in the Television Centre, but in some large warehouse or temporary studio in Islington. Frederica went to be auditioned without enthusiasm, and therefore without preparation. She wore a dark green shirt, with white collar and cuffs. She had learned from Gobbets not to wear black, or stripes. She had also learned to mistrust the girls with little trays of make-up, rouge and sponges, eyeliners and thick mascara. She looked, in the mirrors, she thought, like a fierce doll. It stirred a memory. What? Who? The Wicked Queen, in Disney’s Snow White. The lights would bleach her, they said. There were about ten candidates, sitting in the gloom, two Sunday journalists, a lady novelist, an actress. Television presenters in those days were still sweetly-spoken women with immaculate, dressed hair and excellent, trained elocution, or men with gravitas and Broadcasting House resonance.

  The auditions were arranged in pairs. Frederica was surprised, and annoyed, to find Alexander Wedderburn, who had moved from radio to educational television, as part of the BBC team. He explained to Frederica that each pair would interview each other—“First A will interview B, and then vice versa, five minutes each way.” He said “We’ve tried to put men with women and vice versa. I’m afraid you’ve drawn Mickey Impey. He’s a pop poet.”

  “I know. Leo recites his stuff at school.”

  “He was on our committee on teaching English. Dreadfully cocky. That may help, of course.”

  Frederica nodded. Mickey Impey was a pretty young man with a lop-sided mass of golden curls. He wore a tee shirt printed with Blake’s Ghost of a Flea, surrounded by a ring of buttons. Frodo Lives. Make Love Not War. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. FALL OUT FALLOUT. Psychiatry Kills. One Law for the Ox and the Tiger Is Oppression. Down with School Dinners. He rattled when he moved.

  They tossed a coin for who should go first, and Frederica lost. If she had been thinking she would have seen that this was a disadvantage, since the second questioner has time to sum up the first during his own interview. They were in canvas chairs, facing each other. The poet put on a friendly, mischievous grin. Frederica considered him. The clapper-board clapped.

  “When did you start writing poetry?”

  “I piped ditties in my pram. My pram was my chariot of fire, my cloud where I piped away. Everything was poetry. Still is.”

  “They must have been pleased with you at school?”

  “I was teacher’s pet as a tiddler. Spouting nursery-rhymes. Later, I got ground down by the system.”

  “The system?”

  “What they force down you. What kills the imagination. Facts and figures, kings and queens, weights and measures, eggs and skeletons and stuff, lumps of shit. Oh dear. I’m not supposed to say that, am I?”

  “I’ve no idea. I shouldn’t think so. Couldn’t you find any good in anything?”

  “They shut me in a mental prison-house, girl. It was torture.”

  Frederica thought, there are five minutes, I should get away from education, and on to his poems. But he was displaying an attitude, like a butterfly opening its wings in the sun.

  “So how would you educate the young?”

  “I wouldn’t. I’d give them their freedom. To find out what they want, when they want. You only learn what you desire to learn.”

  “And things like science? That need technical knowledge—”

  “Listen, darling, science is a Bad Thing. The planet is going to kill itself dead with science. Probably they’ll blow us up with nuclear mushrooms, and if they don’t, they’ll burn away the earth’s crust with napalm and extinguish the fowls of the air and the fish in the sea with pesticides. Oh yeah. Science is for two things, human greed and human blinkered arrogance. Don’t teach little kids science. Teach them human things, making love, painting pictures, writing poems, singing songs, meditation. I wrote a poem against science. Do you want to hear it?”

  “OK, if it isn’t too long.”

  The metal men in coats of white

  In shuttered rooms with shuttered eyes

  Make metal death with metal claws

  Block out the sunshine from the skies.

  The children dance in forests free

  They smell the sunshine and the rain,

  They dance and sing the roots and flowers

  Weave magic circles whole again.

  The metal men are full of hate

  They bind the children with a chain

  They clang the institution’s gate

  And box the children up in pain.

  The children’s eyes are red with rage

  They burst the prison-gates and chain

  They burn the spectacles and coats

  The men go naked in the rain.

  The children teach the men to play

  They teach the body’s ancient truth.

  The naked men kneel down and pray.

  Rainwashed to innocence, and youth.

  “So you think the young may be able to save the world from the scientists?”

  “Listen. I know. They are saving it. It’s happening. They’re saving it by natural spontaneity. They are putting the blast of the orgasm against the radioactive spout of the bomb. They can do this by just not giving in. By changing our consciousness completely. We will make everything new.”

  “You will change politics?”

  “Politics for a start. No more dead men in deadly dark suits. Singers and sayers and hearers in lovely colours. No adversarial debating. Meditation together. A way through.”

  “But there are difficult decisions. Population. How to feed the world.”

  “If you change the mind-set, darling, you change everything. There will be new fabrics created, new colours brought to light, new styles, new ways of—of growing things, you know. New ways of sharing what there is on this earth. Yeah.”

  “But the young won’t stay young forever?”

  The poet frowned.

  “That remains to be seen. I think we may find that being truly young is a matter of being, so to speak, in the truth, in the truth of youth. I do believe in mind over matter. I do believe you get old and die because you secretly want to, you can’t resist because you don’t know how. But we will learn how. We will learn to live in infinity where we belong.”

  “CUT,” said Alexander.

  Mickey Impey had done even less preparation for his interview than Frederica. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, swayed to and fro, and after a time intoned

  “Well, what do you want to talk about, then?”

  “Well, we could talk about my idea of education. It’s different from yours. I believe in learning things, and knowing things. I don’t think it all just comes without work.”

  “You’re uptight, I knew it. I could tell when I saw you. I expect you’ve had an awful lot of it.”

  “An awful lot of what?”

  “An awful lot of education.”

  “Quite a lot. I went to university. I studied literature. I happen to believe you think better for yourself if you know something about what other people have thought, and the ways they have thought it.”

  The poet swayed faster, without opening his eyes. Crash, creak, crash, creak. He said indistinctly

  “All that junk. History. The past. Bad, bad, a bad trip, all that. Like copulating with corpses, girl, whatever-your-name-is. Now, you want to copulate with the living. A lot. Like I do. Then you get spontaneous poems, spontaneous overflows as the man said, I expect you thought I didn’t know
that.”

  “I like your poems,” said Frederica. “They amuse me. They amuse my son.”

  The canvas chair lurched to a standstill.

  “Listen. Stop the roundabout. Sing to the Lord. O all ye stars sing together. The lady likes my poems. Ring the bells. The condescending bitch likes my poems.”

  “Have you any idea who I am?”

  “Vaguely, vaguely. You’re a teacher sort of person, a condescending bitch, a po-faced inerlectual, I know your sort.”

  “But this particular version of it—of my sort—whom you are supposed to be interviewing—”

  “Whom. Listen to her. Listen to the condescending bitch con-condescending-descending. Her descant. She puts in definite object pronouns. I expect you didn’t know I knew that either, did you? They made me learn it. You don’t need grammar.”

  “I have noticed you use it very elegantly in your poems.”

  “Did you say elegant? You fink my pomes are elegant . You are full of shit.”

  “No, you are. But it doesn’t stop you writing interesting poems.”

  The rocking increased in tempo.

  “CUT,” said Alexander.

  The poet fell over backwards and remained lying on his back with his legs in the air, wound in the struts of his chair. His expression was beatific.

  Later, Wilkie invited Frederica to the Television Centre to watch a playback of this interview. They sat in a windowless room, and watched the box in the corner. Wilkie said “As I said, the quality you have is a complete lack of fear of the camera. If you watch any of the others—including your garrulous partner—you can see fear in the neck-muscles, in the roll of the eye. The onset of Medusa. Not you. Look.”

  Frederica said that she probably didn’t look anxious because she took the precaution of not looking at herself. Wilkie said that if she was going to be professional she would have to look, and then to retain her insouciance.

  She hardly recognised herself. The cameras were kind to her sharp bones, her large mouth. They made her sandy quality richer, gave her hair a dark red depth, her eyebrows, so carefully dusted and patted by the make-up artists, a winged arch. Mickey Impey’s eyes had a fishy glare over his chirpy grin. But Frederica’s eyes, on screen, glittered with interest and amusement. Her mouth had an intriguing wry slant.

  “Do you remember, in the play, when I was Elizabeth, I recited that ballad? The woman whose skirts were cut off. Lawks a’ mussy on me, this is none of I.”

  “It isn’t anybody else. You have all the ingredients of being a personality. Including what I would once have thought unlikely, a capacity to listen to other people.”

  “We all grow older. I’m a teacher. I’m a mother.”

  “The job’s yours. Everyone agreed.”

  “But I don’t want to be a personality—”

  “Oh, Frederica. I want, I want, like a bird in a nest. This is the future, wouldn’t it be interesting, for a time anyway? I live two lives, I do my research, I do this. What do you want, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Rupert Parrott thinks he’ll publish my book of bits and pieces. He says it’s of the moment, it’s a book for now. I don’t know that he knows. Anyway, it isn’t a book, not a real book, I’m not a writer. I seem to have had an education designed to incapacitate writers. Mickey Impey wasn’t so far wrong.”

  “Well, then. If you know. We could pay you a retainer, the programme doesn’t start for months and months, but there’ll be lots of consultation, I’d like your input, as they say here. You’d be at the cutting edge of what ought to be the new form of thought, maybe a new kind of art.”

  He ran back the tape and started again. Frederica gazed at her own face. What she liked in it, she saw, as Impey recited his youthful credo again, was that it was a woman’s face, not a girl’s. Alert, watchful, grown up. Attractive, even to its owner. She was not used to this.

  Wilkie explained his idea of Through the Looking-Glass. Frederica thought later that this was the first time she had given him her complete attention, and also the first time he had addressed her completely seriously, as though she was neither audience for wit, nor satirical sparring-partner. She had lost her virginity to him, back in 1953, but that had been (and had been designed by her to be), a casual and unimportant happening. He had always been known as a brilliant man, a student of perception and cognition who managed to have a public career also, designing programmes. At the auditions, Frederica remembered, he had worn a pink shirt with a white collar—a rose-pink shirt with a black and white optical tie with little boxes whose perspective was unstable, and could be read many ways. His glasses now had large, heavy, squarish rims. His dark hair was longer. He was slightly too plump for this style, but not unpleasing, she remembered.

  The television, Wilkie said, very seriously, was going to change everyone’s consciousness. In large ways and small. The large ways were more obvious. It was already clear to everyone who mattered that the politics of the future would be conducted in these small boxes. “You have to learn to charm people when your face is a few inches across and you’re talking into the intimacy of their fish and chips, or their fondling their girl-friend’s breasts, or shoving mush down their yowling infant ...” Rhetoric would go, must go, was going. If you were going to sway the masses you must be able to do it one by one “sight unseen” as the lovely phrase has it. “It will look more honest and be more insidious and dishonest,” said Wilkie.

  And then, television was going to change the larger world. Television was making the Vietnam war impossible for the Americans. It was revealing the images of napalm there, of starvation elsewhere on the earth. McLuhan’s “global village” was one way of putting it. He preferred to think it had shrunk the earth. You’ll notice, he said, as we go on, we’ll talk more and more about “the planet” because from out there in space it seems small, a unity, lonely up there with its colours, the swirls of blue, and ochre, and green.

  Frederica said she’d already noticed that contemporary novels tended to mention the fact of the box flickering away in the corner of the room, with its grey other-life, soldiers and tanks or other sinks in other kitchens. She said she thought it might take the place of the hearth in nineteenth-century fiction, the coals where Dickens’s characters saw the generation of fantastic images, the warmth around which stories were read aloud, or told, or lived.

  “You are still thinking in terms of novels,” said Wilkie. “But yes, that’s just, that’s very just. I was thinking also of Plato’s Cave, with the fire and the shadows.”

  “Novels won’t go away.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “We need images made of language.”

  “Indeed. But we are entering an age when language becomes subordinate to images. At the moment, what passes for the art of the television is bastard forms of other art-forms. Puppet-shows for kids, kitchen-sink drama squashed into three piece suites, cramped epic films, talking heads reciting poems after midnight.

  “Now we have colour—remember the colour,” Wilkie adjured Frederica, his black and white tie following the contour of his small belly under the rich rosy shirt—“they will think of showing films about paintings and films about films, but they should be making works of art designed to be seen in small boxes with the light constructed in pixels, magenta, green, cyan blue. And the subject-matter of that art should be everything that can be thought about in coloured images, from politicians’ lips to craters on the moon, from blood-corpuscles under the microscope and the slow growth of embryos to the unfolding of flowers and the seeding of forests, and all this can be woven together, as the technology advances, into one great living tapestry. Also, it can and must be about itself, which is suggested by your idea of flickering grey hearths in the corner of real rooms. It can show how it changes the way we see the world. It can analyse the way we respond to stimuli—whether babies seeing faces, or gannets seeing beaks, or people on sofas being induced to want—now—ripple ice-cream with chocolate coating. It can always sho
w and, if it chooses, always simultaneously think. What is the use of going on and on filming music-hall and nigger minstrels, who need a proscenium arch and the body chemistry of a live audience, when you can magnify nematode worms and make new forms of beauty with infinite cubes of coloured light with infinitely varied images moving in them...?”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Wilkie said, was going to be the very first television about television. And he didn’t just mean a critical chat-show. He meant a new form of thought.

  “In the meantime,” he said, “since you are going to be the visible face and audible voice of my project, you must have a television. You must have a brand-new colour television. And you must look at everything, from sport to cartoons to Vietnam.”

  Frederica asked about the colour. Black and white cinema films still seemed more complex, paradoxically. Colour was comparatively shrill. As with photographs. Black and white somehow was more analytic.

  Wilkie said that Leonardo had been suspicious of colour as transient illusion. Line and light and shadows were more essential renderings of reality. “But whether we like it or not,” he said, “we are now going to live with light-boxes full of mosaics of transmitted coloured light. People will forget what this moment was like, the moment when we had coloured light-boxes having not had them. I’ll send you one round.”

  “Leo’ll be pleased.”

  Later—much later—when Frederica who had felt old at thirty was surprised at how she did not feel old at sixty—she looked back on this time of youthful turmoil, of overturning and jettisoning, as something very far away and finished, as the mild, indefinite, tentatively hopeful 50s were not finished.

  For one thing, historically, it takes a few decades to learn that younger generations than “the young” sprout like mushrooms, that if the young of the 60s could not remember the War they were followed rapidly by generations who could not remember Vietnam, who were followed by generations who could not remember the Falklands. The face-paint, the hair, the head-bands, the bells on fingers and toes came to seem both tribal and vieux jeu, though Leo’s generation harboured a nostalgia for a “freedom” so frequently proclaimed and sung that it must have existed, in illo tempore, in some other place. Or perhaps, Frederica thought, considering how sparse her own precise memories of that time were, this was the case with all thirty-year-old memories, whether you were thirty in 1868 or 1968? You were exhausted by trying to make a life, trying to make sense, and by the life of the young, which depended on your own no-longer young energy for its existence. Her idea of her own youth was a densely patterned carpet of mnemonics and rhythms, from T. S. Eliot, first tastes of banana, melon, whalemeat, lobster, exam questions recalled in total irrelevant detail, minor humiliations, dreadful, unfocused, unsatisfied sexual desire. The carpet of the 50s was woven of many colours, in fine threads, even if much of it was pastel, or fawn, or dove grey. Whereas the 60s were like a fishing-net woven horribly loose and slack with only the odd very bright plastic object caught in its meshes, whilst everything else had rushed and flowed through, back into the undifferentiated ocean.