Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [221]
Philip was dining alone. In front of his plate half a bottle of claret and the water-jug propped up an open volume. He read between the mouthfuls, as he masticated. The book was Bastian’s On the Brain. Not very up to date, perhaps, but the best he could find in his father’s library to keep him amused in the train. Halfway through the fish, he came upon the case of the Irish gentleman who had suffered from paraphasia, and was so much struck by it that he pushed aside his plate and, taking out his pocket-book, made a note of it at once. The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. ‘It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.’ What the patient actually read was: ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastrei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido as that kekritest.’ Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! what majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo.’ He repeated it to himself. ‘I shall print it on the title-page of my next novel,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘The epigraph the text of the whole sermon.’ Shakespeare only talked about tales told by an idiot. But here was the idiot actually speaking Shakespeareanly, what was more. ‘The final word about life,’ he added in pencil.
At the Queen’s Hall Tolley began with Erik Satie’s Borborygmes Symphoniques. Philip found the joke only moderately good. A section of the audience improved it, however, by hissing and booing. Ironically polite, Tolley bowed with more than his usual grace. When the hubbub subsided, he addressed himself to the second item on the programme. It was the Coriolan overture. Tolley prided himself on a catholic taste and omnicompetence. But, oh dear! thought Philip as he listened, how abominably he conducted real music! As though he were rather ashamed of Beethoven’s emotions and were trying to apologize for them. But fortunately Coriolanus was practically Tolley-proof. The music was heroically beautiful, it was tragic and immense in spite of him. The last of the expiring throbs of sound died away, a demonstration of man’s indomitable greatness and the necessity, the significance of suffering.
In the interval Philip limped out for a smoke in the bar. A hand plucked at his sleeve.
‘The melomaniac discovered!’ said a familiar voice. He turned and saw Willie Weaver twinkling all over with good-humour, kindliness and absurdity. ‘What did you think of our modemrn Orpheus?’
‘If you’re referring to Tolley, I don’t think he can conduct Beethoven.’
‘A shade too light and fantastic for old man Ludwig’s portentosities?’ suggested Willie.
‘That’s about it,’ said Philip smiling. ‘Not up to him.’
‘Or too far up. Portentosity belongs to the prepositivistic epoch. It’s bourgeois as Comrade Lenin would say. Tolley’s nothing if not contemporaneous. Didn’t you like him in the Satie? Or did you,’ he went on, in response to Philip’s contemptuous shrug, ‘did you wish he’d committed it?’ He coughed his own appreciation of the pun.
‘He’s almost as modern as the Irish genius whose works I discovered this evening.’ Philip took out his pocket-book and, after a word of explanation, read aloud. ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo…’ At the foot of the page were his own comments of an hour before. ‘The text of the whole sermon. The final word about life.’ He did not read them out. He happened to be thinking quite differently now. ‘The difference between portentosity and Satiecum-Tolleyism,’ he said, ‘ is the same as the difference between the statutes of Trinity College,