Dennis Cards of Identity

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32096-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 302 Seiten

'Formerly, he thinks to himself, an artist took real people and transformed them into painted ones: how much finer and more satisfying is the modern method of assuming that people are not real at all, only self-painted, and of proceeding to make them real by giving them new selves based on the best-available theories of human nature...' In Nigel Dennis's 1955 novel - instantly acclaimed as a satirical masterpiece - a long-empty country house is reopened by Captain Mallet, his wife, and his dashing son Beaufort. Their task is to prepare for the annual summer conference of 'The Identity Club': a group of psychologists firmly of the view that people can be instructed as to who they really are and, consequently, persuaded to do well-nigh anything. 'I have read no novel published during the last fifteen years with greater pleasure and admiration.' W.H. Auden, 1955 'One of the funniest, most intelligent and far-reaching pieces of satire.' Times

Nigel Dennis (1912-1989) was born in England and educated variously in Rhodesia, South African, Austria and Bavaria. He wrote too little but for all that there were three novels (and one that was disowned), four plays, a volume of poetry and three works of non-fiction. For twenty years he was the lead reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. His study of Jonathan Swift, one of his heroes as his own mastery of satire suggests, won the Royal Society of Literature award. Faber Finds is reissuing his three novels: Boys and Girls Come Out to Play, The Cards of Identity and A House in Order.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dennis, Nigel

Leseproben

PART TWO
ONE hears much about cavalry, tanks, or guardsmen collecting for a charge; but can these really compare in impressiveness to a body of thinkers collecting for a conference? Their cars storm up the drive, firing gravel all over the lawns, where the blades of the mower will pick it up again and dash it in Miss Tray’s face. Row upon row of teeth, false and natural, yellow and black, glisten in smiles behind the car windows as Club members see the captain, Mrs Mallet, and Beaufort waving welcome from the stone stairs. The car doors swing open and everyone begins to tumble out; but before examining the rank-and-file of members it is good to take a close look at the President. One cannot do so immediately because it is the duty of a president always to be so placed that at least a score of people must move before he can be made visible. In this case, disciple after disciple scrambles out and each, instead of proceeding into the house, stands at the open back door of the largest limousine and peers into it anxiously. Has the President survived the journey or will he be found to have been crushed? Does he know he has reached his goal, or should someone tell him? – presidents are not aware of passages. At last, as if brought into existence by these uncertainties, a shadow in the depths of the limousine is heard to grunt and an unmistakable presidential leg is poked through the door. A disciple at once seizes it by the ankle and presses it in the direction of the ground; others go round to the other side of the car and push the body in the direction of the leg. In a trice, the job is done: the President is not only out of the car but standing up. He stands for a moment smoothing his little beard and casting his little eyes on his surroundings with good-humoured irony. Like anyone who has been buried under heaps of followers for twenty years and sandwiched between their rancours in a thousand debates, he is a small thin man, and, as befits his rank, messy-looking. His clothes exude, in a refined sort of way, the stench of congested thought; although he has been infinitely pressed, his suit has not. His sophistication is so great that he has long since reached its limits and started all over again at the very beginning, seeing everything with wonder. It is with tolerant astonishment, like an old hand in a new whore house, that he surveys the fresh, strange beauties offered him by Mother Nature – those massive oaks down there; or are they elms or beeches? who shall say? all trees are oaks to presidents; that June stretch of what is unmistakably close-trimmed grass; and, heavens! surely those are bushes blooming in that large vacancy over there; how colourful they are, but how bizarre that a bush should behave as if it were a flower! His followers study his puzzled face with satisfaction; though each has extremes of one kind or another, none is capable of carrying bewilderment so far into total innocence. Every gesture of the President is a joy to see; turning now from the landscape to himself, as if to establish a relation, he finds on his waistcoat a quantity of cigar-ash that was unnoticeable in the city, and brushes it off with hesitant fingers. His eyes following, he even notices a run of extraordinary stains down his front, ranging from deep soup and gamboge egg to the dulled brilliance of red ink and mucilage. His lungs are simply abashed by the great quantity of air in this place; it seems to stretch for miles, unbroken by chimneys and exhaust-fumes; surely a little much for so few people? He is none too steady on his feet because the surface of the earth is so unusually uneven: every nerve in his soles impinges upon a Matterhorn of pebbles, rendering him clumsy: walking must be an odd affair, here, he thinks. And what a wind there seems to be, even though it is a still day of perfect sunshine: presumably it is the prevalence of air that gives such a breezy illusion. Well, well, well; it is all very peculiar indeed, this so-called natural life of which he has heard so much, with the sun seeming to shine on a man from all sides, unbroken by any city geometry; he is not sure that so much exposure is good. It relieves him to think that shortly he will be at a desk again, with walls all round him, and that in time to come this brilliant scene will recur only in an occasional, presidential dream, flying through his mind’s grey enclosure like a kingfisher through Liverpool Street Station. But the important thing about the President is that, were he not so stained, abashed, and teetering, he would not be a president at all. Every member of the Club knows that this formidable man has no option but to suggest the immensity of his real strength by parading all his frailties. They know that from the time he was an infant he had a presiding identity, and that it could never have occurred to him to have anything else. When he was quite small, someone must have told him that he was ‘every inch a little president’, or something of the kind, and from that moment he knew himself to be a president, with no further problem but that of growing-up and finding a corpus and theory good enough for him to preside upon. If he has, while waiting for a suitable vacancy, specialized in this or that aspect of identity, the marks are no longer visible: he has long symbolized unity, totality, globality, the snake with its head in its mouth. His urbanity is staggering; he is so charming and natural that no one would dream he had a brain in his head. In spite and malice he is a match for all the members put together, but no one can imagine him sitting up at night mixing poisons for his darts. He can roll his eyes, twinkle them, scratch his nose, smile with imbecile amiability – but only because he has reached such a state of elevation that if he got down on all fours and crawled, he would still seem to be presiding. How different are the other members of the Club! They are all perfectly decent people, as people go, but it is not their function to coin presidential selves. These competent men have priceless identities of their own; each is quite preoccupied with leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind (particularly his own) as to what that identity is. The impressive thing about each of them is not that he specializes in a particular subject, but that he specializes in being himself – that is to say, in being the type of man who goes with the subject he has chosen to specialize in. Take Mr Harris, for instance, the man who brought Beaufort into the Club and trained him – not to be like himself, of course, but to be as recognizably Beaufort as possible. Harris is an immensely grave man: one day, at school, he wrote an essay that was so dull that one of the masters described it as ‘classical’. This was all young Harris needed; until that moment he had wavered, as boys do, among numerous selves, but at that instant his became a classical identity – short, austere, clear, without a trace of gush. The Club looks to him for case-histories that speak for themselves in dry, uninsistent language; they love his efforts to put sobriety into the most intoxicating themes. All this is immediately evident in his face and posture: when Beaufort waves frantically to him, Harris responds with a faint glow in one eye (the other, unfortunately, is glass) and the faintest suggestion of a smile: this, as everyone knows, is Harris’s way not only of showing warmth but of making himself recognizable as Harris. But now consider the man beside him, Dr Alexander Shubunkin. It is his smile that strikes one first, a smile that breaks out at the slightest pretext, splits his face in two and makes his jaw hang like a corpse’s. It is the smile of a man who probes so sharply into the characters of others that without it he might be thought unkind. Nonetheless, he cannot give the impression that he is all smiles; he has somehow to convey his analytical thrust; so he has decided to express this with his nose, eyes, and forehead, which are all pulled and puckered together to express vigilance and concentration. Lest anyone fail to recognize these confluctions, Dr Shubunkin has arranged for dozens of seams and grooves to serve as clues to his riddle: when his eyes flash with analytical interest, all the lines become illuminated and run to the centre of his face, pointing. It is probable that he got this idea from the electric map system of the Paris Métro. In sum, his face adds up to a most interesting whole – two opposing parts welded horizontally into one, with each part taking its turn to draw the spectator’s attention away from the other. But there are drawbacks to it. Because the whole urge, or dynamic, of Dr Shubunkin is channelled exclusively into his conflicting face he is quite shapeless and unidentifiable from the chin down. Furthermore, anyone who chooses to keep his face in two parts, and to spend every second of his life pushing one part forward or back, according to the situation, is bound to be tense, like a signal box on a busy line, and thus Dr Shubunkin is one of those people for whom the shakes must be the unifying principle; tics and tremors interweave his disparate parts, adding a third aspect to what is already double. More-ordinary Club members take off their hats to Shubunkin; well they know what a grid of energy and nervous concentration goes into the upkeep of his face, which, triple though it may appear to be, is as much a united whole as the United Kingdom, the Magi, or a three-piece bedroom suite. Dr Shubunkin stands at one extreme of club life; at the other stands Mr Harcourt, whose identity consists – and no less strongly at that – in his conviction that he has no identity at all. No one knows...