Mitchell Imaginary Toys

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30421-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Imaginary Toys (1961) marked the literary debut of the then 26-year-old Julian Mitchell, who would eventually set aside his prizewinning career as a novelist and achieve wider renown as a dramatist, most famously with Another Country (1981). Imaginary Toys is a novel of Oxford after World War Two, where class consciousness has become newly acute, and a quartet of narrators wrestle with their studies and their more personal difficulties - among the four a coalminer's son and the daughter of a solid bourgeois family, who fall in love to the discomfort of their respective friends. In the first of a sequence of reflective, autobiographical new introductions composed especially for Faber Finds' reissues of his early novels, Julian Mitchell recalls the atmosphere of mid-1950s Oxford, and the path he took to a literary vocation.

Julian Mitchell (b. 1935), is an English playwright, screenwriter and occasional novelist. He is best known as the writer of the play and film Another Country, and as a screenwriter for TV, producing many original plays and series episodes, including at least ten for Inspector Morse. Born in Epping, Essex, and educated at Winchester College and Oxford, he would publish six novels in the 1960s (all of them since reissued in Faber Finds) including the prizewinning The White Father (1964), before shifting his focus to theatre - a move which has come to appear permanent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mitchell, Julian

Leseproben

1

Charles Frederick Hammond

‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘You might have given me hay-fever.’

The rose flew out of the window and fell, too tight in its bud to shed a petal, in the middle of the road.

‘Well, get on,’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

I wasn’t waiting for anything, really, I was just wondering what the hell I was doing there, how the devil I’d ever got myself mixed up with her, and why on earth she’d chosen that morning, of all the mornings she could have chosen, to tell me she didn’t even like my presents. And I was wondering why it had to be me, of all people, that God, if He existed, was determined to keep out of heaven that particularly beautiful day.

I’d borrowed an alarm-clock to wake me early. I’d gone to the market and paid through the nose to have a dew-wet stupid flower done up for a beautiful girl to wear on the first day of her Schools. I’d played the part of the hopeless young lover as well as I could, and all that white-bearded old man up in the sky had to offer was: ‘You must be mad.’ He was quite right, of course. Only a lunatic would ever have fallen in love with Margaret, and it was my mis-fortune to have been the number-one eligible lunatic in Margaret’s life.

The car, sympathetically, refused to start.

‘Switch on the engine,’ said Margaret.

The car started. With exaggerated care I drove her through the gowned and white-tied streets to the Examination Schools. They’d just been cleaned—outside, I mean—and the stones shone like well-scrubbed cheeks.

‘Unwillingly to school,’ I said, drawing in to the kerb.

‘Thanks, Charles,’ she said, and got out. ‘’Bye.’

She twitched her gown about her shoulders, and her long black-stockinged legs tripped along the pavement and up the steps and out of sight. The paper that morning was English History I—from the year dot to somewhere in the middle of all those Edwards. She didn’t have a clue. I’d lent her my notes, I’d virtually given her tutorials, I’d tried to teach her the difference between the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Domesday Book, but she didn’t have a clue, not a clue. If she gets through that one, I thought, it will show once and for all that it is immoral to allow girls to be examined by men.

But then in many ways Margaret was the most immoral person I have ever met. I don’t mean by that that she slept around—if only she had. No, if she hadn’t used her chastity as a weapon she might have saved me, and a few others I dare say, a lot of time, agony and petrol. She was immoral in that she allowed people to fall in love with her, and then used them. She gave nothing in return but her occasional patronage and the sort of masochistic kicks that only lovers of true bitches can really appreciate. When Margaret left Oxford, I can guarantee, there were more mental masochists around than Dr Kinsey would have believed. For instance, pretending to have hay-fever. Now it was true in a minor way that Margaret was given to summer colds, she made rather a thing about them, in fact, and insisted on being given hot toddies at parties, though everyone knew perfectly well that hot toddies were the only drinks she liked. But suppose she really was frightened of it, suppose she thought that innocent rose might harm her chances in the exam, even then she needn’t have thrown it out of the window as though it was someone else’s dirty handkerchief. She knew perfectly well that I’d got that rose for her specially—and it wasn’t a notably sentimental thing to give someone on the morning of his Schools. Many, many people have worn roses to their first paper, I wore one myself, actually, that I’d picked from a bush in the college garden, so she couldn’t pretend that she was disgusted by a lah-di-dah romantic gesture. It was simply that she didn’t want a rose, she wasn’t going to have a rose, and she didn’t give a damn about whose feelings got in the way. Usually she was much more subtle, it is true. But the stress of impending examination has brought out the worst in some of my very best friends, and no doubt she hadn’t slept too well the night before, and in any case, as I’ve said, she didn’t have a clue about English History I. So exit one rose.

But for me a rosebud on the tarmac was the beginning of the end—the true end, this time. I’d been in love with Margaret for too long, I’d told myself ‘This is the end’ too often before, not to realize that this time something had snapped and I meant it. My feelings were of as little interest to her as the number of the lorry that ran the rose over, if a lorry did run it over. (It was probably picked up by some Romeo on his way to a wooing at her college, actually.) In a way, I felt I was the victim of my society; for a society which has seven men to every girl is not the best place, at least in my opinion, to teach young ladies to care for the feelings of young men. The sheer futility and boredom of Oxford love-affairs is directly related to the disproportion between the sexes, which leaves the women in complete command of the battlefield. I am prepared to bet a large sum of money that Oxford has more virgins of both sexes than any comparable community in the British Isles, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where all the men are queer anyway. But that’s not the point. The point is that I decided quite suddenly that a great epoch of my life was over. (I was wrong, of course; things don’t end just because you think they’ve ended, but I was right, too, in a way.)

Margaret, before her final spastic attempts to learn something of the Glorious Past of her Great Country, had devoted her undergraduate career to the stage, usually under a pseudonym of some sort, as the girls’ colleges take the view that acting is not really quite what they were founded to encourage. And when I think of the hours I spent being shouted at by producers, under the misapprehension that I was the soldier who comes on in Act Three Scene Eight to be stabbed by the hero after a singularly cowardly fight with an obviously painted wooden sword; of the hours in filthy rehearsal halls with those seedy characters who chew pencils and talk about light-bars; of the hours in theatres watching other men get their grubby lips on to her grubby lips (grubby with greasepaint, I mean, of course); of the hours in tawdry coffee-houses and plush bars while she talked with her friends about the way Miranda had stolen the scene from Patrick and what Roger was going to tell Geoffrey to do tomorrow night to put Adrian in his place—when I think of those hours, the months of hours, I spent being in love with that impossible, delightful, exquisite, stupid girl—then the full horror of undergraduate life comes back to me, and I know just how glad I am that I need never, ever, go up that awful sordid sexual back-alley again, to poke in the dustbins for a few stray smiles and an odd kind word. The crying boredom of that kind of youth, all its emotional agonies and intellectual despairs have gone for good. Not, I dare say, that love isn’t always rather boring in retrospect, particularly a frustrated love. Once it’s over, it’s over; and if you’re in love with someone else, then what you did and felt and thought before must always seem pretty tedious, because the virtue of love is its living kindling quality, and no amount of blowing on dead ashes can ever compensate for the thing itself. And in recollection nothing can match the absurdity of undergraduates: the long hair of the boy and the long hair of the girl getting knotted and twisted together till they don’t know where they are, and the roots shrieking with pain as they draw apart. At least, that’s how it seems now, to me. I dare say it could be all right if you found a girl who would love you back the way you loved her, but my experience was that you didn’t. The disproportion always worked against it.

I should say, I suppose, that while Margaret was chucking my rose out of the window I was not myself an undergraduate at all. By no means. I, Charles Frederick Hammond, got a First the year before, no doubt due to some mix-up by the examiners, and for about six months I thought I was some kind of demi-god. When the news came through we opened a bottle of champagne and my father gave me a car, and though he was hoping I’d join him in the manufacture of certain alloys essential to the defence industry, and therefore highly profitable, he was quite pleased when I said I’d like to stay on for a while at Oxford and enjoy myself, since I’d worked so hard (a damned lie) and so hadn’t had time (in three years, would you believe it?) to get all that I could have got out of that great place of learning. A thoroughly decent man, my father; and even now I think he still believes I’ll help him boss the men that make the parts that go to the factories that make the bombs that will blow us all sky-high any day now, once and for all. Anyway, there I was in the most modern of rackets, the postgraduate career, sitting in the Bodleian, or so my father imagined, getting my nose down to some really fascinating work on the alum industry in Yorkshire in the late sixteenth century. In fact, of course, I was doing nothing of the kind. I was back in Oxford because that was where Margaret was, and where she was I could continue my self-analysis in the long dark hours, proving night after night that I was a fraud and a failure. I suppose really clever analysts can be absolutely impartial about themselves, but I never even tried to be. I wallowed in Margaret’s...