Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [84]
Now, if I were a reactionary and impervious to new ideas it would be easier to understand, but I am not. I cannot remember ever refusing to listen to Charles or to anyone else when they have a new angle. But to say that everything taught under the heading of Classics is pigsfeed from beginning to end, and never has been anything else, and that we have never had any idea at all of what Plato or Socrates and Pythagoras were teaching—and etc. and so on, that kind of thing—well, I did cut him off short and sharp more than once during the evening, and he went home early. Felicity his wife was annoyed, and did not go home when he did.
Now, next day he came to me with a demand that he should be empowered to arrange the coming term’s work according to ideas which I don’t really see much point in elaborating—but suffice it to say that his point of view amounts to damning generations of scholarship out of hand. He said, what was wrong with that? That it is a historical commonplace that ideas valid for centuries can vanish overnight. I may say that Charles is very fond of talking in centuries if not millennia, always the sign of a lazy mind, to my way of thinking. However, I asked him what gave him the confidence—or did I say conceit?—to talk about the work of scholars infinitely better than himself, in such terms. Did he really have no qualms at all. He said no, that it was “perfectly obvious to an unprejudiced mind” that he was right.
I must confess we quarrelled violently. I think it was the first quarrel we have ever had—astonishingly. He was abusive and derisive. Usually of course he is rather bland, or appears to be indifferent. I was patient—I am, in fact, a patient man. He became increasingly unpleasant. You understand that all the time there was the underlying implication that it must be obvious he was in the right and that I could see it if I wasn’t stupid. Finally, I asked him to leave before I lost my temper.
Next morning he rang up—as if nothing had happened. No explanation. His manner, as always, was that an unimportant incident was over. Not that he had been in the wrong, no. Not, even, that I was rigidly in the wrong and that he had had to force himself into my mould—though I suppose that was implicit. No, it was that nothing had occurred that was in the least bit important. Yet that was intolerable, because what in fact he had done, and in front of an American colleague who may yet be working with us, was to damn not only our team and its work, and of course our respective careers, his included, but all scholarship in our field to date. Or most of it. And, having done that, and behaved with shocking offensiveness, he was now quite casually arranging to meet me and discuss a series of public lectures which only the day before he had refused to consider at all and about which he had been exceedingly abusive. His manner was appropriate with saying: I’m sorry I was a bit off colour last night, but I had a headache.
I don’t know if I am succeeding in conveying to you the flavour of this particular incident.
I don’t think I can tell you more, though there is an infinite choice of such examples.
I am at this moment in the usual frame of mind when thinking about Charles—he forces me to ask myself what it means to like or dislike a person. We have always been in each other’s lives. We have our friends in common. It is my considered opinion that Charles Watkins is a destructive person. Negative, perhaps, is the better word. I find him a pain in the neck, even, far too often, a bore. I conclude from all this that we do not know very much about human relationships.
Yours very truly,
JEREMY THORNE
P.S.
I do hope you will let me know if there is anything else I can do to help. It goes without saying, I hope, that I would do anything for Charles. An idea has struck me: I don’t know if you have been contacted by Constance Mayne, or if her name has cropped