On the Heroism of Mortals Read online

  For Gianluca, Francesco,

  Dominika and Barbara

  “Let us say that life is hard. Let us say it in a whisper, ‘Life is hard.’ Comrades, I implore you on behalf of millions of people: Give us the right to whisper. You’ll be so busy constructing a new life that you’ll never even hear us. I guarantee it. We’ll live out our entire lives in a whisper.”

  – Semyon Semyonovich in Nikolai Erdman’s play, The Suicide, which never got a chance to whisper its truth until very shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union

  “… true literature can exist only where it is created not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics. But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox, when he must make himself useful today, when he cannot lash out at everyone like Swift or smile at everything like Anatole France, there can be no bronze literature, there can only be a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today and used for wrapping soap tomorrow.”

  – Yevgeny Zamyatin, “I Am Afraid”

  “Among Soviet authors, Babel was one of the most committed to the Revolution. He believed in progress, in everything getting better. And they murdered this man.”

  – Ilya Ehrenburg speaking about Isaac Babel.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Only a Fool Can See

  The Hat

  He – Or Is It Him?

  Living with the Polish Count

  I, the Statue

  Forks in the Road

  In That Moment

  The Selfish Geneticist

  Bearing Up Life’s Burdens Merrily

  Lives Both Sundered and Adjoined

  Three Grumpy, Half-“Celtic” Authors, a Fool and a Peer of the Realm Get Along Unswimmingly

  Other works by the same author:

  Copyright

  Only a Fool Can See

  I am a fool and that brings its own benefits and satisfactions. There are, however, several dangers that may not be immediately obvious to more sensible persons. It’s true, I saunter through life in an apparently directionless manner, but being almost invisible I have to keep my wits about me and, above all, my eyes open – otherwise those in pursuit of a title will collide with me constantly. They cannot see because they’re concentrating on the greatness of their name. They are few, but around these parts they are increasing in number. They are nuclear physicists, company directors, judges, brain surgeons, politicians, head teachers, professors of medieval history, artists and writers. Dear me, I don’t wish to suggest these are other than sublime métiers, but it is the doing of them and not the being them that is sublime.

  The minute these practitioners clothe themselves in professional conformity, adopt the gravitas associated with their position and delight in all their badges of honour, they cease to be themselves and become less capable of performing their tasks.

  These professionals will be considered the wisest of men as long as they do whatever everyone else in their profession is doing, but when they remember their independence of spirit, they are accused of immaturity, ingenuousness or even madness. Small wonder that they cling to the comfort of their titles and avoid the creative inspiration of their calling.

  But what of the majority: those whose names were invented for oblivion, so that their acts could carry in the flow of history all the human good – the anonymous decency of those who put creativity before ambition. Surely we all remember the inventive teacher who inspired and in the staffroom only inspired contempt. She sowed seeds in other minds that blossomed later, while she in early retirement struggled in part-time jobs and knew nothing of her ripened fruit.

  Surely we recall the doctor who embarrassed the consultant with his correct diagnosis, and for showing not the absoluteness of his knowledge but its independent precision in the case in point. And that life-saving precision cost him his job. Another time, he will curb his exuberance and feign his ignorance so as not to reveal that of his superior.

  Surely we know that those who write are stifled when they become writers and have to speak and sell themselves and run the business of being a writer – when they cease to be the silkworm and become the moth.

  As they rush by (or bump into me after a moment’s distraction on my part), they shout, “You’re all words and no action.” How right they are! I have nothing to do and a lot to say. I have no time to get the words out. They stumble over each other in their hurry to find a form and sequence on the page. Forgive, then, my erratic jottings, for what they lose in elegance they make up for in sincerity – always supposing that someone who has no certainties can be sincere.

  This does not mean that I wish to write in a plain style – “pared-down” lines to satisfy the heart of every teacher of “creative writing”, the ones who keep Orwell’s diktats pinned to the office wall. Only the first one is valid because Orwell – great for what he wrote and did – would have made a lousy instructor in the art of letters. No, no, quite the opposite: I wish to play with the readers and string my sentences out – stretch the elasticity of their thoughts.

  When I say I’m a fool, this is not urbane self-deprecation. Hell, no. Those who know me would laugh at your charity. How else to describe a man who does not know how to live, to love, to be loyal, to be courageous? But all knowledge starts with self-knowledge, and I know my limitations and I see the heroic greatness of others and the great hubris of others still. So let me tell you these stories based on things I have observed and things I have imagined. They are the most solid of my possessions, and willingly I share them with you. They lack structure, it’s true, and they lack finery. Nor will I entice you with suspense or reassure you about the worthiness or relative worthiness of our society as some of our great writers do, especially when writing about a particular day of the week. There’s nothing Panglossian about my stories. Nothing is in its place and nothing is the best possible. Everything is the product of the greatness of our neglected hearts and the weakness of our minds surfeited on mass-produced entertainments. No one is wholly good and no one wholly bad, for it is the moral greyness of our world that makes morality possible – and the lack of it.

  To write a good book you need to lack certainty and discover style – or rather a style that suits your voice but is not your voice. To write a great book you also need humility, honesty and compassion. Even Nietzsche, who claimed to detest these things and counted “the overcoming of compassion among the noble virtues”, was in fact overflowing with compassion – but like a schoolboy this embarrassed him. Compassion was girlish. And so his talent lent itself to ambiguity and occasionally to dangerous nonsense. That crippled compassion and his ecstatic style were his greatness. His flaw was that he often wrote extravagant absurdities and stooped to dangerous intellectual posturing – without however relinquishing his exquisite stylistic flourishes.

  I am a little grey myself. I grew up in a grey, still industrial city, and somehow succeed in not belonging, even though I’ve never left Glasgow in my entire life. I’ve gone, it’s true, for the odd weekend in the country. You know the kind of thing: an invite to some posh place with too many bedrooms, which have to be filled now and then. I may not be part of smart society, but I do get these summonses to observe, because they instinctively know that I can do that – observe, I mean. I stand in the corner and observe those who go in search of immortality. They think I will discover their greatness, but all I see is their sadness. We mortals enjoy life more because our nullification doesn’t terrify us like it does them. They have all that stuff and it makes them feel more solid. That they are more ephemeral than their buildings and artworks seems to them an act of divine
injustice, while to us it is merely divine mischief-making – a little fun at the expense of those who have no reason to complain.

  But I have travelled far in my mind and have no great loyalty to my city – it is perfectly comfortable and its familiar architecture evokes in me little more than mild fondness. It has a kind soul, if a city can have a soul, but it also has a violent temper.

  I went to its arts school, but dropped out because of a drug habit which took me another six years to conquer. Since then I have had a restless mind. I read and read. That barren activity fills my days, but what do I do with this accumulation of other people’s wisdom? Very little really. I wander the Glasgow parks and engage people in conversation. This is not difficult in our city, and not just because of its famous talkativeness and banter. It seems that I’m not alone in my idleness. Well, idleness is what these blinded people like to call it. Idleness is not productive in their opinion, but what they cannot know is that idleness opens your eyes and makes you realise how much is going on: the intensity of emotions, the different tones of voice, the colour of our vain hopes, and the delight in each other’s kindnesses. It is a world several light years away from the GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT, and it is entirely inhabited by heroes.

  If I had been successful, I would have missed all this. Instead I would have travelled far and wide to visit identical hotels, and sunk into a bog of consumerist plenty. GDP would be my brother, and when the BBC announces an upward trend in growth or the Footsie One Hundred, my heart would leap with the same joy a man must feel on hearing he’s a father. New life beckons and the cycle of nature is complete. They think that our universe is a delusion, but we think the same thing of theirs. Their madness is our wisdom. Of course. How could they think otherwise, given the extortionate price they had to pay at the entrance to that particular theme park – the dismal rides and games of that most dismal of pseudo-sciences.

  I’ve only had one long-term sexual relationship in my life. It lasted three years and it was with a prostitute. I wasn’t her pimp, you understand. I wasn’t her pimp; I was her project, the beneficiary of her good, good heart. She saved me, but could not save herself. I left her only because of the violence of her life – all of it directed at her. I could never bear her heroism – her eternal baseless optimism. It started just days after I decided to come off drugs. She took me in like a lost puppy, and without her I would never have made it. Then I left her. Look, there were some scary fellas around those parts and she couldn’t break free. I wasn’t strong enough to help her. Not very heroic? No question of it. I am not a hero but an observer of heroism. You probably thought that I, being an ex-junkie and all that, am setting myself up as one of the heroic mortals. Not at all. I had a privileged childhood. My parents were working-class, and yet they gave me everything. My father worked on the railways, but he was a self-educated man and educated me.

  He gave me enough to make me want more. I belong to the heroic mortals, but I am not one of them; that is why I am the right person to tell their tales. I don’t want you to think this is all about class, although it does come into it. Ultimately, even those who sell their souls and close their eyes are all forced to be a little heroic. Only fools like me can mix candour with cowardliness.

  The French would call me déclassé: neither fish nor fowl. Certainly I have never really worked. I was and am a spoilt child. This has to be the starting point for anyone who wants to understand me. Many a middle-class child would have envied me. Like everything else, privilege takes many forms and mine was amongst the best. The only child of a loving and hardworking couple, I lacked nothing and wanted everything. Want nearly destroyed me and when I woke from my surfeit of pleasures I suddenly found that the delicacies offered by consumer society even in the sixties no longer attracted me. Only leisure had any hold. My only desire was never to be hurried. I occupy my mind, but only in ways that I find genial in any given moment.

  I have of course played at various things. I have written reviews for The Weegie-Board, an alternative literary magazine set up in the early seventies. Once very radical, it now sounds like an elderly headmaster handing out cliché’d compliments to his favourite pupils. The corporation gives it a few quid every year and it employs three people, two of whom are children of its original founders once hell-bent on the destruction of property and all privilege, and the third is a smart young man with literary pretensions who also happens to be the boyfriend of the leader of the Labour group on the council. They still give me the odd review and I enjoy the status of venerable layabout.

  Of course you’ll think that a person like me will never have the self-discipline to finish a collection of short stories such as this one. I see your point and in part share your low opinion of myself. But I should point out that it takes great discipline to disdain all the pleasures of this bounteous post-industrial heaven, to reject the crashing din of lies emitted by our mass media and not to fall for the next crackpot conspiracy theory that happens by with siren call – just for the hell of it, just to believe in something and savour its small relief. Perhaps there is after all some small measure of courage in my cowardly existence.

  My real contempt is for the immortal gods – the true aristocrats of our universe. They run no risks and cannot know the meaning of tragedy. They look at our faulted, gruelling and unsteady existences, and envy us, but still don’t understand. For them all emotions are muted: the worst that can happen to them is a slight disappointment, which in any case will shrink to the minuscule, as eternity pounds along its endless journey, and the best that can happen is some faint excitement probably ruined by the disdainful laughter of their fellow-gods, languid and worldly-wise after millennia of existence.

  But then, don’t our rich – so powerful and celebrated – also act a little like the gods? Languid and worldly-wise they affect a nonchalance that is not theirs. That too is heroism of a kind.

  I know a writer and knew him when he used to write the most splendid prose I’ve ever read. Now he’s just a writer, which means he’s always on television or the radio. He writes about everything as if he understands it all. Last week he wrote an article about the humble and often maligned tampon which, according to him, changed Western society and next week he will prove beyond all reasonable doubt that texting, contrary to popular opinion, will improve our children’s spelling. There is no limit to the powers of his intrepid intellect.

  I did some research for him on his best book, by which I mean the one critics liked and were right to do so. Another won the Booker and made him rich. Then he became a writer and spent all his time trying to recreate those moments of exhilaration – success with the critics and then with the public. But his writing has no freshness now, and I used to feel sorry for him until one day he came jogging by. I was seated and unusually had removed my cap, because of the heat. It lay upturned on the bench beside me, on top of some papers and the book I was reading. He looked at me quizzically as though half remembering something but unsure that he wanted to. He didn’t see me because he was in too much of a hurry to be even more famous. He didn’t recognise me because he wouldn’t have been able to recognise his old self. Success and, more particularly, wealth divide us from our past and those who inhabited it. He saw me as a beggar, a profession I would never engage in: too much like hard work. As he passed he dropped a pound coin in my cap, where it sat lonely but important and cushioned by the silky, padded lining and the manufacturer’s coat of arms, a little greasy from my hair. I keep it still, that coin only remarkable for the manner in which I acquired it, that round unit by which we measure the ultimate worth of our increasingly brittle bones held together by our sweating flesh – and keep it well polished on my desk as a symbol of the folly of the wise.

  The Hat

  How many times did my grandfather tell me the story? So many, and every time there were new details; some of them conflicted with others very slightly. Perhaps he wanted to soften the cruelty of the situation; undoubtedly he told me more as I grew older. I think
I know what happened; it was a moment he clung to and that shines through those terrible years. But I listened; of his grandchildren I was the one who listened without showing any impatience at what we all knew by heart. It was a story that gained its sacredness in the retelling. It was a holy story that spoke of man’s humanity to man.

  My grandfather was born Tadeusz Szlos, a Polish Jew from Vilnius. In early 1943, he had been on the run for months and had reached as far south as Romania. He wanted to get to Hungary, which at the time appeared to be the safest place for a Jew to be, in the Nazi Empire and its satellites. Unknown to him, the Siege of Stalingrad was entering its final stages, and for him all seemed hopeless. Life was about survival for the next few days. He dared not consider a definitive solution, an escape from persecution across a border now too distant even for a resourceful man like him. He thought only about his next meal, a place to sleep and rest, and a slow, circuitous movement towards a country that could only be considered less unfriendly than the others.

  Having slept in the woods for several nights with a small bag of provisions now entirely used up, he went down a gentle slope towards a small rural township. He would never remember the name, although he studied a map of the area on several occasions. “I sometimes wonder,” he once said, “about the existence of that nameless place, and yet it was there that the most extraordinary thing occurred. So small it was. A gesture of the hand that consumed not even a second of time and a movement of half a metre. Without it I would not be here and nor would you.”

  Always that. Always harping on about our insubstantiality, the wonder of his continued existence and, by inheritance, my own. Always about the story of the hat and not, for instance, the nuns near Prague who hid him in a coal cellar until the end of the war. Always because of the smallness of the act, its quickness and its anonymity. He would hold the hat on his knees and shake his head in disbelief. Even as he lay dying of a final angina attack, I suspect he still felt the strangeness of that moment in which the rim of the hat slipped over his hair and, being slightly too large, sat gently on his ears pushing them outwards. That a life’s continuance could hang on so slight a thing seemed to madden and reassure him at the same time.