Goodbye, Mr Dixon Read online

  GOODBYE, MR DIXON

  IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

  This eBook edition published in 2015 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Iain Crichton Smith, 1974

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 9780857907349

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Contents

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  1

  HIS NOVEL WHICH was called The Meeting had come to a dead stop at the point where the novelist hero (middle-aged and alone) was to meet a girl of twenty-five or thereabouts whose entry into his world was to change his life.

  The problem was that he did not know what would happen when his novelist hero met the girl. The novelist hero, apart from being middle-aged and alone and divorced, was also a bit of a cold fish owing to the fact of his difficulties with his previous wife who had been demanding and horrible and, in short, a bit of a bitch. He had one afternoon packed up and cleared off with his typewriter in order to continue his new novel which was set in the future and dealt with the White City and the attack on it by barbarians. He wanted his novelist hero to be resurrected from the detritus of his life and be given the last rites of happiness with trumpets, bugles, church bells, etcetera. In order for this to happen, his novelist hero (whom he called Drew Dixon) had to meet a young girl of twenty-five who would put him back on the rails again after “the mess he had made of his life”.

  As for himself, Tom Spence, he wasn’t really a novelist at all. That is to say, he hadn’t published novels as Dixon had done: he was an embryo novelist only. He was one of those people who live hand-to-mouth on practically nothing at all, but with the determination to have a book, especially a novel, published. Not even a great novel, just a novel. It is true that he did live in a flat like Dixon but this flat was paid for not by mandarin novels created by a mind preoccupied solely with greatness but rather by sporadic incursions into the “real world”, for example by spells at labouring or any other job that came to hand. It is also true that, like Dixon, he lived in a city.

  In fact he wasn’t a novelist at allowing to the fact that he had never even brought a novel to a successful conclusion (or any conclusion) though he had in big red notebooks a number of failed and unfinished novels as well as notes for others. He had, however, once published a poem in an obscure little magazine called Trauma and in lieu of money had received five copies which he still had in his flat, since he had no friends, because he believed that to be a good writer one had to be alone like Greta Garbo, uncorrupted by the need for “making allowances” which one had to do when one entered “society”.

  Thus he didn’t have much “experience of life” though he often thought that the great novelists didn’t seem to need this. After all, what experience of life did Jane Austen have? Or for that matter Kafka, unless one were to take into account working in an office? In any case he had locked himself up in isolation spending most of the day writing, except that now and then he would take a long walk for the exercise.

  He didn’t even know very much about the world of Dixon who, unlike himself, had been writing novels for a considerable period and living from their sale. Dixon was a successful novelist and had been reviewed in the quality Sunday papers. Dixon wrote interesting metaphysical novels, rather like those of Hesse, which were very arty and symbolic and beautifully composed and shaped. One novel was about a man who, like Gauguin, had gone off to live among primitive people, and the contrasts between the tribal simplicities and urban complexities had been carefully pointed. The new novel was about the struggle between the barbarians and the civilised people in the world of the future. He would have liked to write like Dixon but found it difficult, not to say impossible. Also Dixon had been “in love” with his wife and the parting had been a shattering one. He himself had never been in love. To be in love he considered odd and artificial and sentimental. Better would be to be in lust. There was something altogether too spiritual about being in love. And if one set out to write novels or to be an artist of any kind, one couldn’t afford that. The true novelist looked at the world coldly and inhumanly. He would get material even from the death of his dearest one. His eye was like that of a seagull, cold and belonging to the sea. Certainly he himself couldn’t afford marriage. And, anyway, everything he had ever read suggested that no writer could be happily married: there were examples of Tolstoy and Fitzgerald, to take only two. And of course he didn’t earn enough money to support a wife. And on this he had old-fashioned ideas. In fact most of his beliefs were old-fashioned. He would drink if he had money but otherwise he wouldn’t. In fact he was the kind of conservative who wished to write avant-garde books but found that there was a stiffness in his imagination such that he found this impossible.

  He blamed this stiffness on his upbringing. After all, being Scottish, he could not have the malleable sort of imagination to which the world was plasticine. And his parents too had been old-fashioned and dull, so much so that he had taken the first opportunity to leave them. At school he had been a vague rebel, not passing enough examinations to allow him to get to training college or university. He pretended to look down on “education and all that” but at the same time he was often terrified and alone, and behind his laughter there was the grin of the skull. But then he must maintain his persona, mustn’t he? One teacher—who taught English—had told him that he had creative talent and featured him at length in the school magazine with poems written out of a fashionably youthful wretchedness—mostly about death—and this he had taken as a sign, since no other signs were available. After all you were a writer or you weren’t: education couldn’t make you a writer. How could education make a writer of Rimbaud? (He hadn’t read Rimbaud but knew about him.) Thus the phantom notion of writing as a generalised activity had been the banner which sustained him on dreary days when he couldn’t understand mathematics or statistics or most of the other subjects he took, and when he stared miserably out of the window at the city landscape.

  So, leaving the school, he had found himself with nothing at all he could do except odd jobs at labouring. At Christmas time he worked in the post office as a postman. And the rest of the time he wrote, isolated in his flat. This wasn’t really the sort of existence Dixon had led, though he had read on the blurbs of many novels long lists of jobs which had apparently prepared the writers concerned for immortality. He himself couldn’t say that he had learned very much from labouring. On the other hand, Dixon never had to do jobs like that: in fact, he wasn’t particularly sure what Dixon had done. People like Dixon simply emerged and were immediately recognised as significant. He imagined that Dixon would do most of his writing in a garden in the summer sitting in a deckchair, and in the winter in a large spacious study with lots of windows.

  He didn�
�t really know very much about Dixon except that he was an ideal to which he tried to attain, a mandarin who had however been partially destroyed by his wife, and who was now entirely alone working furiously on his “great” novel.

  And anyway he himself had now come to a dead stop on his own novel. It had started off well with an interesting idea, the idea that a man who tried to be perfect in art would find himself without knowing it in the middle of a situation which was steadily cracking up and which would eventually confront him with perhaps the breaking of his marriage and style. He couldn’t remember how the idea had come to him; it wasn’t even part of his experience. In fact he thought that an artist of any value should write objectively, and therefore about experiences not his own. In this, however, Dixon himself was an exception in so far as his present novel was concerned: previously he had written objectively enough about the rival claims of art and life. And even in his novel Dixon was trying to conceal autobiographical facts by means of a fable set in the future.

  The problem of art, he was now beginning to realise, was simple enough: how do you learn enough about the “real” world if at the same time in the service of art you remain isolated? How do you get enough experience in such a situation, or at least give the reader the illusion that you have such experience? You couldn’t understand the world of the novelist from working in the post office.

  Not that his own experience in the post office had been what one would call unalloyed. It wasn’t so much the vagaries of the weather that had troubled him, nor even the misaddressing of letters. Rather it had been one particular incident which had made him realise in what a world of airy inadequacy he lived. Every morning he had to go down to the railway station to get a bag of mail which he would then put on a wheelbarrow. Near the time that he wheeled this barrow across, a train was scheduled to pass, and he had been told about this by the stringy woman in charge of the branch office. One morning, however, he had forgotten about the train and his barrow had been struck by it and twisted into a mangled heap. The train had of course continued on its way and he himself, red-faced, had restored the ruined implement to the post-mistress with a feeling of utter despair. At the time he wished that he could have seen the humour of the incident—as of technology for instance smashing up a more primitive instrument—but there hid in him to his cost, as he well knew, a righteous inner being afraid of making a mistake and forever seeing him as a fly to the gods. Thus as he humped his mail from tenement to tenement he kept wondering what they would be saying about him at the office, what brilliant remarks they would have invented as they regarded the defunct barrow. He felt quite sure that Dixon would never have found himself in such a situation. In fact, perhaps that was why he had created Dixon as the ultimate aesthete, perched high above the battle, immune to the ravages of time and accident, obsessed with the beauties of art and the symmetries of the word. Perhaps also that was why he had avenged himself on Dixon by giving him a wife who would smash all that up quite senselessly and remind him that sex was above or below that sort of existence.

  Now therefore he sat in his room and stared at his typewriter, having come to a dead stop. The room itself was not a large one. In one corner there was a white cooker beside the sink which was often full of unwashed dishes. Bronze-coloured curtains hung from the window. Beside the cooker and away from the sink was the TV set opposite which he so often sat in uncreative moments watching Dad’s Army and Softly Softly. In a corner beside his chair there was a heap of books and magazines through which he scrabbled vaguely when he had to find notepaper if he ever wanted to write a letter, which he rarely did. On the table were brown paper bags containing loaves and cheese on which he existed most of the time. One of those days he would have to buy a second-hand refrigerator. This world was certainly different from Dixon’s. Dixon of course lived in a “beautiful world”. He had a large study with all the latest books. He even had a paper knife for opening his mail, which came from all corners of the world. There were statuettes, a piano, sculptures and paintings, especially those of the Old Masters. He himself preferred surrealist paintings, ones which composed themselves out of the dream world and rubbish which cluttered the artists’ minds.

  He sat at the typewriter and stared at a yellow bottle of Parozone which stood on the floor beside the cooker. The yellow was bright and almost sunny but the liquid inside the bottle was acid and harsh. Perhaps that was what art was like. Some day, he thought, I will write about a bottle of Parozone. I shall write about it as if it were a respectable theme like daffodils. I shall see it as an object in itself, uncorrupted and pure, the acid juice which turns a sunny face on the world. I shall make the bottle sing. And he thought for the hundredth time that he wished he could paint. Painting was much easier than writing. Painting was a gesture in itself, it did not have to survive against heavy odds among the sharkish adjectives and nouns of the common sea. Painting could be utterly pure and bright and naive. Writing couldn’t be.

  Oh Christ, he thought, I can’t do any more just now. He got up and took his coat down from the nail behind the door, for the day was cold. He went out, slamming the door behind him, making sure that he had the key. That bloody woman on the same landing was out, thank Christ. She did insist on knocking at the door and handing in newly baked scones and jars of preserves. He skipped hastily downstairs as if he were about to be pursued and walked briskly along the street, in his tight khaki trousers and long khaki coat whose collar he turned up against the cold wind. And at the back of his mind Dixon continually cruised in his self-sufficient world. It was a good thing he had been banished from it: he would have to find his own way about from now on. Let him see what art was all about. Let him see what he would do if he was confronted by twisted wheelbarrows in a surrealist dream of thin post-mistresses with thin necklaces and thin grey jerseys and whiffs of antiseptic deodorant. Let the bugger work out his own salvation. Let him see if he could find his new found land.

  2

  Drew Dixon, attenuated, tall, a smoker of endless cigarettes, stared out of the window at the snow which covered Glandon. He didn’t like the cold. The cold made him feel more fragile than usual. Behind him in his study were the copies of the works of Henry James whom his wife detested, preferring to read romance stories or books about Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette, historical novels such as she would find on tables at cocktail parties, and which she would glance at in the passing, while adjusting her hair in front of the mirror.

  As he stared out at the snow he was thinking of the ending of one of James Joyce’s stories. There was something wrong with these closing sentences, he was sure, there was something wrong with the sound, with the number of syllables. Drew Dixon was wearing a pink cravat; he liked pink and lilac, they were his favourite colours. On the wall behind him was hanging a Victorian painting of an autumn scene. He liked Victorian paintings.

  As he looked out he saw his wife coming in from the snow-covered scene. She was wearing a butterscotch-coloured coat with muffs. He often thought how amazingly lovely she was. But he considered her as a work of art. She reminded him of a picture he had once seen on a stamp issued by the post office — some autocratic fine-boned monarch, whose name he had forgotten. Not that he was the kind of person who often thought about the post office. His only remark about it had been, “The post office is an institution that prevents communication. In this it is like language.” He thought of himself as a kind of Oscar Wilde. Except that while Wilde was a very good dramatist he was a very good novelist. Everyone admitted that, even the Observer and the foreign papers. His works had been translated into French and German.

  He had very long thin fingers but even in cold weather he wouldn’t wear gloves. He refused to do this, though he had been in the habit of doing so. On this particular day he knew that his wife was in a bad temper. The reasons for this were complex but one of them was that she was the sort of person who was often in a bad temper. He turned back to his typewriter. He had been writing a story about a barbarian who ha
d just caught a young woman, the daughter of a professor, in a post-nuclear world. The event happened in the brush outside the city of the Civilised Ones, the White City. He worked like Flaubert, a page or less a day, sometimes, on good days, two pages. He was very particular about fining his prose down to a minimum. He knew the exact sounds and flavours of words, like his Master. His only trouble was that he didn’t bother about morality: reviewers had commented on this, but in a famous interview given to a school-girlish lady from a magazine, he had defended himself: “In the twentieth century morality is not possible.” He had made a joke about some work of his which had once appeared in a school magazine and about an English teacher who had said that he would make a name for himself in the future.

  On the other hand, Dixon had devoted his life to the word. No one could take that away from him. He had refused to do any work other than writing. He hadn’t even been a labourer or a dishwasher, however useful these jobs might appear to the creation of a great novel. He had said, “A great writer doesn’t need experience.” And his wife was in a bad temper. It is difficult to say why she was in a bad temper any more than usual. Most things put her in a bad temper. Today she started a quarrel for no reason at all almost as soon as she entered the house. She went on about her life, about his life, about the existence he led. Why didn’t he ever meet her friends, she demanded. Why did she always have to go out alone? Why did he think himself so superior? Outside, the snow fell, obliterating old prints. He thought she looked very lovely.

  It wasn’t until a very long time had passed, while he was thinking about the professor’s daughter and how frigid she really was and whether the barbarian ought to be given a sophisticated language, that he began really to listen to her. “I am leaving you,” she was saying and her face was twisted with hate, or envy. His own face was impassive. All those years of writing had made him cultivate a style, expressionless and animated. She looked exactly like a spitting cat, one of those wild cats that one sees in pictures standing on rocks in the Highlands. He suddenly thought, I don’t really like her. And he was surprised by the thought because he hadn’t considered her so remotely and dispassionately before. He didn’t know where the thought had come from. The snow was still falling remorselessly. He looked out at it and he thought, The snow doesn’t write very well. If he could choose some flakes like words … But the idea faded into the ghastly whiteness. He suddenly heard himself say, “Go to hell.”