The Squire Quartet

Changing tack slightly, and putting a small restless right hand into his trouser pocket, he went on to praise the University of Ermalpa for having established the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation, and for its foresight in setting Dottore Gianni Frenza at its head. Even better, the University had agreed – not without a couple of years of prompting from the present speaker in his watchdog role as editor of Intergraphic Studies – to host this present vitally needed conference. They had secured monies from the International Universities Foundation, for which they were most grateful. And the Ermalpa Tourist Board had been extremely helpful also. The Faculty felt that it was following parameters set down almost a decade ago by that doyen of popular culture, Thomas C. Squire, whose series of TV programmes, ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’, had done much to further interest in a vital study area. They esteemed themselves very fortunate to have Tom Squire with them as guest of honour.

Squire appeared pleased at this, nodded to both sides of the table, and restrained himself from reaching for the water glass.

The small hand returned from its trip to the pocket and took a slow circuit through the air in a clockwise direction as d’Exiteuil explained that they hoped this First International Congress of Intergraphic Criticism would first of all promote deeper interest in polyvalent media throughout Italy, and then throughout the rest of the world, including the socialist countries.

He knew that the socialist countries had already begun to express interest, and even to study the subject academically.

As he said this, he turned slightly, to smile beyond Squire at the slightly bowed white head of Vasili Rugorsky.

‘I feel bound at this point to inject the personal note,’ the interpreter of d’Exiteuil continued. ‘I have been personally involved on this issue, and I know that all my colleagues are in general compliance that we have reached significance here only because we have taking part members of one of the foremost nations or I should say states on the planet today. It’s the home of most powerful coinages, achieved nowhere else, followed everywhere. Let’s just say without emotion how we welcome very much the two colleagues from the USSR, Vasili Rugorsky and Georgi Kchevov.’

D’Exiteuil started to clap his hands, and most of the Italian members joined in. So did the Americans. Other delegates followed suit. Squire, sitting next to Rugorsky, joined in. The applause mounted. The two Russians rose from their chairs, and stood there smiling amiably. Everyone was clapping now, smiling and nodding in agreement to each other.

‘Merci mille fois,’ said Rugorsky. There was general laughter as if a witticism had been delivered. The clapping died. The two Russians sat down. D’Exiteuil raised his left hand, palm inward, letting it drop to a horizontal position as he inclined his head with a similar movement, and then sat down himself. It was not entirely a modest gesture, not when linked with a sly little smile which chased itself into his beard. It appeared to say, ‘Well, there you are, I gave them to you. It’s what you all wanted.’

After a pause, Frenza spoke into his microphone, and the English voice in the earphones said, ‘Now our first formal speaker of our first formal session, our guest of honour, Mr Thomas Squire, will address us. Afterwards, just fifteen minutes, please. Thanks, Mr Squire, if you would …’

Squire removed his earphones, placing them on the table before him as the clapping died. He regarded the faces round the table. Sharp, intelligent, youthful, for the most part. An audience he, like d’Exiteuil, had worked for.

‘Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must address you in my native tongue, and trust that the interpreters will carry my meaning to you. Will the interpreters please stop me if I go too fast?’ His mouth was slightly dry, his heart beating strongly. He was used to the effect; it gave him power and his voice resonance as he breathed deeply. In any case, it would pass as it always did when he got into his stride.

‘It’s not for me but for our hosts to say “Welcome to Ermalpa”; what I can say is welcome to a select band, the band of people who attack that great open conspiracy, critical contempt of popular culture. That band comprises not only critics but readers, viewers, and general doers. Everyone benefits from popular culture, and a reasoned critical view should be to wish to survey it, not condemn it. The pop art of one generation becomes the classic of the next; Homer was, in his day, the Bronze Age equivalent of the TV soap opera.

‘I will remind you of the simple and seminal idea of my founding of SPA, the Society for Popular Aesthetics, which has led to our present encouraging situation here, with the Faculty enjoying IUF support. As a child in the thirties and forties of this century, I was addicted to the cinema, the great popular art form of the period. I went as often as I could in the small town in which I lived. I kept lists of the films I saw, of the actors in them – not only the stars but the minor players – and of the directors and companies who made them. I could tell by the sets and the lighting whether I was watching a film made by MGM or Warner Brothers or Gainsborough.

‘All this activity was opposed by my parents. They regarded the cinema simply as a repository for trash, as too many people today regard television. In particular, they disliked the way in which I settled on two actors as my heroes. Those actors were Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart. Flynn was at first my particular favourite, then I shifted to Bogart. The bitter and wise-cracking character Bogart played, on whichever side of the law, spoke to me of something enduring in human nature, and personified the man who lives his life battling in obscurity, often against forces of which the rest of the world has no knowledge.

‘Although I was quite inarticulate about it, I revered Bogart. For himself and for what he symbolized. My parents came to hate him. To them, Bogart was just a gangster and, if I followed him, I should go the same way. It may sound ridiculous, but so it was; nor is that kind of unthinking opposition to living symbols defunct today. There will always be a vocal minority against whatever is vital in our culture; it prefers what is safely dead.

‘The Hollywood system as it was in its hey-day has passed away. In the hour of its downfall, critics suddenly found good things to say about it, where before they had done nothing more than sneer. As soon as Bogart had died, they did the same for him. They pretended they had always praised him. He became – as Elvis Presley did a few years ago – a great cult hero. He was dead, and safe. You recognize one of the themes of Frankenstein Among the Arts: praise only for the dead; exile, cultural exile, for the living.

‘What we hope to bring about here, and hereafter, is a much wider appreciation of what it is in popular culture which had genuine vitality, and how its roots are always based firmly in the fertile soil of the past, even when that is by no means easily apparent.

‘Which brings me to my paper. You will see from your programme that it is entitled “Since the Enlightenment”. Because of the time limit sensibly imposed on speakers, I can give only a résumé now. The full paper will be published in our proceedings, and also in the next issue of our friend Jacques’s Intergraphic Studies. Am I going slowly enough for you, interpreters?’

He caught a flash of smile in one of the boxes, and continued.

‘The subject we study is admittedly amorphous. It must often seem even to us that we are all studying different, even conflicting, subjects. I believe that not to be the case, and expect that conferences such as this one will bind more closely together not only our interests but us ourselves. To that end, I hope you will consider a proposal that we should adopt a common term for our diverse subject matter. My suggestion is, “Future Culture”. FC for short. Or perhaps you prefer “Symbols Future”. SF.

‘Under some such heading, we can consider the arts which interest us, the arts of today, the arts scorned by higher criticism in whatever field. You see them listed in your programmes: pinball machines, movies, prophecy, TV, pop art, rock’n’roll, the Top Twenty, science fiction, design, and the rest. Everything from make-up to metropolises. I have nothing against higher criticism, but its analytical tools are honed towards the objectives of its dissection. It has shown itself unable to discuss effectively our Future Culture.

‘Because Future Culture is something, according to my definition, which has sprung up since the beginning of the last century. It is either affected by, or the product of, mass-production. The machine has transformed it. A paperback novel, for instance, can be purely a product of the mass-market, designed as a unit package with its cover to sell this month at check-out point in a million supermarkets and never be seen again; or it can be a newly edited edition of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. What are the differences and similarities between a James novel and the latest catastrophe novel? It’s rich ground for investigation.

‘Some of our subjects do not claim to be art or even folk art. Car bumper-stickers. I know a man in Toronto studying them now. Are they ripe for something more than sociological study? Some subjects are simply commercial ways of doing traditional things. But are T-shirts a modern equivalent of sandwich-boards or a way of legitimizing graffiti? We have to improvise questions and answers as we go along. Virtually all arts have been touched by the change-compelling system of mass-production and mass-consumption.

‘We believe that precisely in this amorphous situation lies a hope for future acculturalization. Improvisation and spontaneity are still possible, contrary to what is sometimes argued. Older arts tend always towards formalization or even fossilization, and never more so than now, as we move towards the eighties, when global change is swift. The fluidity of non-art may become one of the staples of the future. It’s up to us to forge a methodology to help direct it constructively.

‘I see from the noticeboard in the foyer that some ingenious person on the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation has videotaped my television series, “Frankenstein Among the Arts”, and will be showing it in the adjoining small hall for the next three nights. You’ll excuse me if I stay in the bar while it’s showing – I lived with the series for so long, I almost know it by heart. Of course, it does relate closely to the subject of our discussions. But I must remind you, for all the kindness you have done me, that I am an amateur in a field where you are experts, and I took as my text for the series a tag from the philosopher Gurdjieff, which I discovered long ago in Ouspensky’s fascinating book, In Search of the Miraculous.

‘It’s a tag which many authors could use at the front of their books as a warning. Gurdjieff says, speaking of his work, “The object I had in view was to produce an interesting and beautiful spectacle. Of course there is a certain meaning hidden beneath the outward form, but I have not pursued the aim of exposing and emphasizing this meaning.”

‘Nor have I, because I am unable to. I only know that the traditions of the West, strong and honourable though they are, are insufficient to live by. We have to embrace the new and rise up to change.’

2
Flattery and Higher Foolishness

Ermalpa, September 1978

On checking into the Grand Hotel Marittimo, conference delegates had received small books with meal vouchers in them. One voucher had to be presented at every meal, the meal being understood to include a bottle of red wine and half a bottle of mineral water.

Squire entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel a little late for lunch, and found himself with no choice of table. He had been detained by one of the American delegates, Selina Ajdini.

Following the coffee break, four speakers had delivered papers on various aspects of popular culture: Enrico Pelli on ‘Psychiatry and the Popular Understanding of Prehistory’, Marianne de Suffren on ‘Horror Films in Catholic Countries’, Geo Camaion, the Romanian delegate, on ‘Symbolic Cognition’, and finally Selina Ajdini on ‘Aldous Huxley as Failed Prophet’.

Since only the last paper had been received in English, rather than in the language peculiar to the interpreters, and since Squire had once met the subject of the paper, and admired his writings, he had paid particular attention to Selina Ajdini.

There was another reason to attend. There were few women at the conference, and only three actually delivering papers. Of those, the most immediately striking was Selina Ajdini.

She carried herself with a defiant air, as if aware of the covertly predatory glances of the young Italians. A heavy brown leather travel bag over one shoulder gave her the air of a soldier – perhaps a soldier in a comic opera. So Squire reflected, seeing her move with the encumbered shoulder thrust forward, one red-nailed hand about the bulk of the bag. She wore a fine blue corduroy suit with a white shirt beneath. Where the blouson jacket gripped her waist, she wore a large-linked gold chain, the end of which jangled as she walked. High leather boots tight to the calf completed the comic opera soldier effect.

Ajdini’s face suggested something different. Although she was slenderly built, this slenderness was masked by her clothing; the quality emerged nakedly in her face. It had a bare keenness like a hare’s breastbone found on a windy headland, eroded of flesh, robbed of formed associations. The simile occurred to Squire as the woman rose to speak; there was something remote and inhuman, he thought, about that proudly sculpted profile, which the scrupulously coiffed black hair did little to counteract. The remoteness made her age difficult to estimate.

She put spectacles on her nose to read her paper. The paper proved to be littered with references from a dozen languages. Her thesis, as far as it could be distinguished, was that Aldous Huxley’s life typified the end of one great strand of English and European bourgeois Romantic thought. The Huxley family typified the nineteenth-and twentieth-century culturally privileged elite, with its Darwinian connections. And that elite typified a repressive class structuralism cloaked by a veneer of scientific and humanistic enlightenment.

It was Ajdini’s contention that Huxley’s ‘life parabola’ from Eton and Balliol to the scoured coast of California represented at once a despairing attempt to escape the autocratic vengeance of late capitalist society and a further plunge into a deeply destructive hedonism masked as asceticism (but betrayed by use of drugs).

Although she spoke brightly, Ajdini’s summing up was equally dusty in content. Huxley’s life represented to pop culture, one of whose idols he had been, a Janus-faced bourgeois prophet with nothing to pronounce upon but the collapse of his kind. While assuming to speak ostensibly for preservation of values such as ecology, Huxley found himself forced to act out prophetically the effete culture of the West. That culture was running into suicidal acts and self-destructive deserts. Prophecy could no longer function under capitalism; there was no science of the future since that future was about to terminate. The picture of laissez-faire sexuality and technology in Brave New World was an inadvertent portrait of a way of life already doomed.

It was not even a clever paper, decided Squire, pencilling the words ‘Higher Foolishness’ on his programme; yet it was tricked out with cleverness. Ajdini’s reference to Romanticism came adorned with learned references to European Romanticism, wherein was pointed out (in parentheses) that, although English and German Romanticisms were well propagandized, in reality the great Manzoni of Italy, and of course the Russians with Pushkin and Lermontov, not to mention other East European figures working in Slav, Hungarian, Romanian, Georgian, and other languages extending as far as the Caucasus and further, where the authenticity of folk poetry and (for example) the romantic letter had become truly popular, much more tellingly represented the Romantic tradition at grass-roots level.

When Ajdini sat down, a French delegate asked a lengthy but footling question, to do with the relationship between Huxley’s Brave New World and the ‘plays of protest’ of Shakespeare – or, as he believed, Lord Bacon – particularly The Tempest, as interpreted through the monopolistic tendencies of late-nineteenth-century scientism. Ajdini answered quite briskly, smiling and making an unscripted joke, in which it was apparent that she had been misled by the interpreter and missed the drift of the question. Frenza then intervened, thanked the main speakers for their contributions, and adjourned the meeting until sixteen hundred hours.

As delegates poured from the hall, Selina Ajdini was waiting among the ferns of the marble gallery. She advanced towards Squire, travel bag thrust forward, smiling and holding out her hand. Her big blue-rimmed spectacles still on her nose made her eyes – of a much more elusive shade of blue – look large and defenceless.

‘Mr Squire, we have not met and it is my great pleasure that we do so now; I attended your Pop Expo in London a decade ago, and marvelled like everyone else. It is wonderful that you came to Ermalpa. My name is Selina Ajdini and I am Associate Professor in Comparative Stylistics at the University of the Gulf in Galveston, Texas. This year I have a sabbatical in Europe East and West, with a roving commission for the Frankfurt-am-Main magazine Die Spitze.’

Seen close to, she looked older than Squire had estimated. Probably in her forties.

‘I used to know Ted Zold, head of the English department at Gulf.’

And no less attractive for that.

‘Ted’s retired just this year. He’s working on the Yale edition of the correspondence of Howard Dean Efflinger.’ She spoke English without an American accent, rather with some kind of European intonation Squire could not place. Her voice was pleasant – if ‘pure and clear as a mountain stream’, then the associations with the hare bone picked bare on the headland were still present in Squire’s mind. Her lips were thin and coral pink; they moved delightfully, whatever she was saying. He transferred his gaze to the blue eyes; the diatribe against Huxley had left him too affronted for any ready supply of conversation.

She was presenting her credentials in a sophisticated way, chatting about an acquaintance of his whom she had met in Budapest. She punctuated her talk with ‘Thank you’, and ‘You’re very kind’ to delegates who, passing by, felt compelled to offer her congratulations on her speech. This she did without in any way dissipating the impression that she was deep in conversation with the man she regarded as most important. The leather travel bag, turning gently on the left hip, touched Squire’s right thigh; the slender hand with the scarlet nails, adorned additionally with a slender silver and a fat amber ring, remained grasping the callipygous leather.

‘You are part of the reason I am in Ermalpa, Mr Squire, and I hope that maybe we could get together this evening and you would allow me to interview you for Die Spitze? They plan a special number for the spring on Contemporary Thinkers. You probably know that “Frankenstein Among the Arts” has been running on German television earlier this summer.’

‘I never give interviews,’ he said, smiling to break the force of the words.

She yielded gracefully, smiling in return so that the coral lips parted on pretty white teeth. ‘I understand. Perhaps we could talk anyway and I could indulge in a little hero-worshipping over a drink or two.’

‘That would be pleasant.’

The slender hand came out. ‘Seven o’clock then, in the bar.’

He made off towards the dining room palming his hair into place, gripping his briefcase tightly under one arm. ‘Acting out prophetically the effete culture of the West …’

Most of the tables in the dining hall were already fully occupied.

Courtesy demanded that he should not appear to show preferences at this early stage of the proceedings. He made himself sit at the nearest table. In some respects, it looked the least inviting, in that the two Russians were seated there with the secretary, Gianni Frenza, and two other delegates whose names Squire did not know.

He took hold of the back of the spare chair and smiled questioningly, with a gesture of the hand. All five rose or just failed to rise in polite fashion. As he seated himself, Frenza introduced him formally to the two Russians, Georgi Kchevov with the gold-rimmed spectacles and rugged looks – close to, his rough red skin and blunt nose made him look even more an inhabitant of trucks rather than classrooms – and the white-haired Vasili Rugorsky.

Frenza then introduced the other two men as delegates from the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank Krawstadt and Herman Fittich. Both smiled and shook Squire’s hand. Krawstadt was an untidy wiry man of perhaps thirty-two with a straggle of yellow beard and a raw spotty face, the very opposite of the spruce young Italians.

Herman Fittich was a more comfortable figure in his early fifties, with white sideboards to his hair; he wore a neat grey suit. Although his face and manner were bland, Fittich gave Squire an appraising look as he shook hands. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he remarked in perfect English, ‘This is a time when we are apt to lean a bit heavily on compliments, but I’m perfectly genuine when I say that I have long appreciated many aspects of your work. You’re learned but you’re also kind to your readers. You permit us the luxury of a low boredom threshold.’

‘Good of you to say so. If you like whisky, never get a teetotaller to write about it.’

Fittich chuckled. ‘I’m sure Humphrey Bogart couldn’t have put it fairer than that. Let’s call the waiter for you. The food’s good.’

‘It smells good.’

‘The dining room is as grand as the conference hall – a token of the esteem in which the sensible Italians hold the arts of the stomach,’ Fittich replied.

In honour of the conference, vases of flowers stood on small tables round the sides of the room. Carnations in silver vases stood on every table, next to the glasses containing upright packets of grissini.

Any formality these arrangements might have induced was dispelled by the waiters. They were encouragingly numerous, and in general broad-stomached middle-aged men with oiled black hair and docile countenances; they were supported by young eager men learning this most rewarding of trades. They moved with fatherly dignity, aware of their importance, and in no time a delicious soup was set before Squire, a roll of warm brown bread provided on his side-plate, and red wine and mineral water poured into the two glasses by his right hand.

‘We met once before in the Tate Gallery in London during March of 1970,’ said Rugorsky to Squire in slightly majestic French, as his Russian colleague, Fittich, and Krawstadt were picking up the threads of their previous conversation. ‘It was during the Richard Hamilton exhibition, and Leslie Lippard-Milne was showing me round. You have forgotten it.’

He regarded Squire steadily.

Although he had forgotten, Squire found the memory returned, so that he said, ‘Why, yes – and I even remember that we met in front of …’ Teresa had been with him then, wearing a smart new suit they had acquired in Mayfair, where they were staying at Brown’s Hotel; she had been so pleased with it that she had worn it immediately and had her old suit sent round to the hotel.

‘We were introduced in front of “Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland”, one of the early landmarks of pop art,’ Rugorsky said. ‘We talked about the insights to be derived from the commonplace – as you say, the feeling behind a banal phrase, or, as I say, the sense of evolution even behind very static things such as a multinational company or a bureaucracy.’

His eyelids were heavy and fleshy, in common with his face; they descended slightly as he spoke, masking his glittering eyes which nevertheless firmly maintained Squire’s gaze.

Squire remembered both the gaze and the man now, chiefly through his sly and testing sense of humour. Good mood restored, he said, ‘There’s also the emptiness behind a banal phrase to be considered. We may have problems, I think, in understanding the difference between banality and sincerity.’ The soup was delicious.

‘D’accord. Just as insight is not always found behind complex phraseology. There again we see the spoor of evolution – mankind invents all its many languages not only for communication, but also as anti-communication devices, to keep out strangers.’

It was always a good idea to test Russians out with George Orwell, whose works were banned in the Soviet Union. ‘Orwell said that even the art of writing is largely the perversion of words.’

‘I know it. But Orwell also says that the whole meaning of a word is in its slowly acquired associations, and that is untrue – or is no longer true, or not if you believe that it is the duty of those who still can to distinguish between true and false to do so continuously. One of the attractions of words these days – this I observe mostly in the West, by the way – is that they should be new, fresh, mysterious, and therefore carry thought forward. “Escalation” was a fashionable word last time I was in London. Now, even in Paris, “Trade-off” is very popular. There is also something called “The Crunch”.’

‘The Crunch is what you get from a good grissino,’ said Squire, suiting action to words as one of the fatherly waiters took his empty soup plate away, and substituted a generous helping of lasagne. ‘I seem to think that after our meeting in the Tate we had a drink in the bar.’

‘Or,’ said Rugorsky, again fixing a veiled scrutiny on Squire, to see how his remark went down, ‘to speak more precisely, several drinks. Mr Lippard-Milne became quite merry. Remind me please of the name of his attractive wife.’

‘Sheila.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Rugorsky smiled to himself. ‘Sheila.’

‘Such new words are usually generated by small groups,’ said Fittich, breaking from his own conversation in German with Krawstadt and Frenza and speaking in English across the carnations to Squire and Rugorsky. ‘So there is always a certain cachet in using such words, implying one is an insider. In consequence, they pass quickly through the social system. We live in a world of bottlenecks, chain reactions, different ballgames, and indeed “different ballgame situations”. And we are constantly hoping that things are going to gel.’

Squire explained the word ‘gel’ in French to Rugorsky. ‘A situation that has not gelled is considered to be a liquid rather like hot jelly. As it cools, it goes through a phase-change, setting into a definite form. Would you say that this conference has yet gelled?’

Rugorsky, who had turned his scrutiny on Fittich, asked the latter, ‘Excuse me, you are a philologist?’

‘I’m sorry, I do not speak French.’

‘Then I suppose I must speak in English. We have only a few days here to make ourselves understood to one another.’

As the waiters brought in steaming dishes of fish and macaroni, which Gianni Frenza said was a local speciality, Fittich observed, ‘My belief is that the cuisine is gelling into rather a success. Too much of this pasta and I may undergo a slight phase-change myself in the region of my middle.’

After the meal, the Russians excused themselves and Frenza slipped away to consult d’Exiteuil. Squire and Fittich decided to take a turn in the street; Krawstadt crossed the foyer with them and excused himself at the doors. He had no English, as Squire had no German worth mentioning.

They walked in silence along the Via Milano, or exchanged small talk about the goods on display in shop windows.

‘It must be important to you that this conference succeeds,’ said Fittich, as they waited to cross the next intersection. ‘Although I believe – or I’m given to understand – that many of the Italians are well-known in their own specialized fields, yours is the only celebrity name. I wondered why you chose to associate yourself with the proceedings.’

‘I’ve known Jacques d’Exiteuil for some years. And his wife, Séverine. That’s one answer. Another answer is that I am not an academic so, unlike the academics here, I have little at stake. Also – third reason – well, I am rather at a loss at home.’

‘I should not have thought that to be possible.’

After a silence, when they turned down a side street towards the sea, Fittich said, ‘Sorry, you may have thought I was probing. Perhaps I was. My expression of admiration over lunch for your work was not idle. I forget you probably will not know of me, since my work goes on in Germany, and is in any case not on the scale of your “Frankenstein Among the Arts”.

‘I should tell you that I am a rather old-fashioned teacher of literature at the University of Bad Neustadt, which is not all that far from Würzburg and rather too close to the frontier with the so-called German Democratic Republic.’

‘Of course I know Würzburg, and the Residenz with its beautiful Tiepolos. For that matter, I know the GDR … What literature do you teach?’

‘German and English. Mainly old-fashioned literature, before this century. But as a matter of fact I am not averse to the contemporary forms of fiction, and have held courses on the masters of crime, such as Hammett, Chandler, and Bardin, a personal favourite. I’m also devoted to science fiction, on which topic I am to deliver my paper tomorrow.’