Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [90]
Angst gnaws at Ingmar Bergman’s people too. It is the cause of their irremediable solitariness. Regarding Bergman’s Angst, however, the Observer recommends that it not be taken too seriously. It smells of pretentiousness, says the Observer; it is an affectation not unconnected with long Nordic winters, with nights of excessive drinking and hangovers.
Even newspapers that are supposed to be liberal – the Guardian, the Observer – are hostile, he is beginning to find, to the life of the mind. Faced with something deep and serious, they are quick to sneer, to brush it off with a witticism. Only in tiny enclaves like the Third Programme is new art – American poetry, electronic music, abstract expressionism – taken seriously. Modern England is turning out to be a disturbingly philistine country, little different from the England of W. E. Henley and the Pomp and Circumstance marches that Ezra Pound was fulminating against in 1912.
What then is he doing in England? Was it a huge mistake to have come here? Is it too late to move? Would Paris, city of artists, be more congenial, if somehow he could master French? And what of Stockholm? Spiritually he would feel at home in Stockholm, he suspects. But what about Swedish? And what would he do for a living?
At IBM he has to keep his fantasies of Monica Vitti to himself, and the rest of his arty pretensions too. For reasons that are not clear to him, he has been adopted as a chum by a fellow programmer named Bill Briggs. Bill Briggs is short and pimply; he has a girlfriend named Cynthia whom he is going to marry; he is looking forward to making the down payment on a terrace house in Wimbledon. Whereas the other programmers speak with unplaceable grammar-school accents and start the day by flipping to the financial pages of the Telegraph to check the share prices, Bill Briggs has a marked London accent and stores his money in a building society account.
Despite his social origins, there is no reason why Bill Briggs should not succeed in IBM. IBM is an American company, impatient of Britain’s class hierarchy. That is the strength of IBM: men of all kinds can get to the top because all that matters to IBM is loyalty and hard, concentrated work. Bill Briggs is hardworking, and unquestioningly loyal to IBM. Furthermore, Bill Briggs seems to have a grasp of the larger goals of IBM and of its Newman Street data-processing centre, which is more than can be said of him.
IBM employees are provided with booklets of luncheon vouchers. For a three-and-sixpenny voucher one can get a quite decent meal. His own inclination is towards the Lyons brasserie on Tottenham Court Road, where one can visit the salad bar as often as one likes. But Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street is the preferred haunt of the IBM programmers. So with Bill Briggs he goes to Schmidt’s and eats Wiener Schnitzel or jugged hare. For variety they sometimes go to the Athena on Goodge Street for moussaka. After lunch, if it is not raining, they take a brief stroll around the streets before returning to their desks.
The range of subjects that he and Bill Briggs have tacitly agreed not to broach in their conversations is so wide that he is surprised there is anything left. They do not discuss their desires or larger aspirations. They are silent on their personal lives, on their families and their upbringing, on politics and religion and the arts. Football would be acceptable were it not for the fact that he knows nothing about the English clubs. So they are left with the weather, train strikes, house prices, and IBM: IBM’s plans for the future, IBM’s customers and those customers’ plans, who said what at IBM.
It makes for dreary conversation, but there is an obverse to it. A bare two months ago he was an ignorant provincial stepping ashore into the drizzle of Southampton docks. Now here