MAN’S WORLD (16)
By:
October 24, 2024
HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 proto-sf novel Man’s World for HILOBROW’s readers. Written by an author married to one of the world’s most prominent eugenics advocates, this ambivalent adventure anticipates both Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale. When a young woman rebels against her conditioning, can she break free? Reissued in 2024 (with a new introduction by Philippa Levine) by the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: INTRO | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25.
RECONSTRUCTION (cont.)
III
After his conversation with Lois, Christopher realized how futile had been this pilgrimage into the wilderness. He smiled rather bitterly as he recalled the earnestness of his search for a god that had resulted in the finding of an Entertainer. Already the reaction that any one less emotional would have anticipated had overtaken him.
For his own ends he had withdrawn abruptly from Nicolette’s companionship, leaving her to find any substitute. Knowing nothing of the friendship she had established with Bruce, he imagined her journey to Centrosome to have been a period of boredom, for which he held himself almost entirely responsible. Yet all that was nothing compared with this affair of Raymond. How had it developed? Was all well with her? He had the sense to realize that their relationship could not be in any way comparable to that between himself and Lois. He had never loved Lois nor ceased to love Nicolette, yet he had abandoned that child to the chance of her fate, passively accepting on her behalf conventions of which, when they threatened at all to impinge on his own affairs, he had an acute horror. How could he have supposed that Nicolette would obtain somehow from another — and, moreover, from the first who offered himself to her — all that he had himself given her?
He was almost seized with panic as he imagined what his abandonment must have meant to her, and all she might have had to endure as a result of it; and driven by a storm of intertwined emotions, he hastened back to Nucleus.
He found them both there, late one afternoon, in the Reconstruction Hall, where Venice of the seventeenth century was arising slowly from a heaped litter of material and implements. Reconstruction was the game of the day, and it was played all over the world. The history of its origin was interesting. Josef Weil, the man responsible for most of the architectural beauties of Nucleus, had a passion for making small-scale models of ancient cities. At the age of sixteen he had begun to construct a series showing the development of Rome, from the earliest described time until the seventeenth century. Paris had followed, then Brussels, London, Stockholm, Pekin, Chicago, and San Francisco. Soon his friends, painters, sculptors, writers and archæologists, had become interested in this hobby. The houses were furnished, decked with books and pictures; minute figures of the outstanding men of the periods began to people the streets and the squares of the cities.
Then, one day, some one conceived the notion of Reconstruction on a large scale. They were all familiar with the type of pageant flimsily designed and carried out by stage and film producers in the past. Those had been attempts and failures along commercial lines. The new efforts were directed by the creative instincts of whole cities, on communal lines. Co-operation under learned direction achieved remarkable results. A section of one of Weil’s models was copied under his supervision and rebuilt on the actual scale. Costumes were made under equally expert guidance, down to the jewels and pins which held them together. The ‘ town’ was stocked with all necessary utensils, whenever possible genuine. Then the fun began. All the people in turn went to live for days or weeks in this resurrected city. They re-imagined and even re-enacted the religions, the wars, the pastimes, the crafts, and the politics of those vanished days; cooked and ate their food, and used only the implements then known, making shift without the inventions which since had been created to facilitate — or complicate — existence. What had been lost or forgotten was replaced as adequately as possible. What had since been won was ignored.
The section of the ancient city stood on a convenient site close to the modern one, and the inhabitants of one went for their sojourn of as long as they pleased to the other. They all went; old and young, grown-ups and children; administrators, organizers, teachers, research workers, artists, mothers, and entertainers. Those whose imaginations were the more vivid, or who were more learned, helped the others; but soon ambition came to the aid of the natural gift of mimicry. St. John Richmond as a Doge of Old Venice; an air pilot as the gondolier; a member of the Gay Company as a Jesuit — all, needing only to turn from the latest forms of self-expression to earlier ones, learned from the game the closeness of the links which bound human nature in one long chain, and the relationship of environment to thought and action.
In all the larger communities Reconstruction was played on a grand scale. In some places a new city, or portion of one, arose year by year; in others different places and different eras were resurrected every twelvemonth, but gradually a historical sequence began to shape itself. The imagination of the people was aroused; various types were attracted by various phases of bygone culture, but all, in these days when travel was so easy as to make their own world familiar to every one, saw, through the evocation of the past, their own affairs in true perspective.
In Nucleus they still built from the models supplied by Weil, who, now an old man, conserved the enthusiasm of his youth. When Christopher entered the Reconstruction Hall, he found Nicolette and Raymond in the centre of a noisy group, eagerly discussing details of costume and comparing their models. People were coming and going amid a whirl of brocades and ribbons; armour rattled here and there; in a distant corner gut sounded a melodious ping as musicians were put into rehearsal. Antoine Herville was delivering an impromptu sermon, which was cut short when some one dropped a pile of ancient books which scattered venerable dust as they fell. Christopher was soon helping to arrange drapery — for his eye was quicker and his fingers more sensitive than those of a woman — when Raymond came to ask his criticism of a telescope he had reconstructed from an old drawing.
Raymond began explaining his telescope slowly and thoroughly. ‘Comic toys they had in those days,’ said he, his eyes twinkling as he screwed them up to inspect the instrument more closely. He was really rather likeable. ‘No wonder they could not see very far with them. I’ll take it up when the daylight goes, and find out just what it will reveal. I shall have to practise if I am to perform my part properly.’
‘But no,’ said a girl called Ruth, who was to be found near him as often as she could get there, ‘that is just what you must not do. You see, the whole point is to wait until you are actually in the city. There must be only the minimum of preparation and rehearsal. How can you see what they saw until you are back in the atmosphere through which they saw?’
‘I want to see what my telescope will reveal. Atmosphere can wait.’
‘Then you cannot play this game.’ She turned to Christopher for corroboration. ‘Isn’t that the rule?’
‘It may be,’ he said, ‘though every one does not interpret it the same way. They can’t all forget themselves so completely.’
‘I could not, I am sure,’ said Raymond.
‘Well, how do you play, then?’ she asked.
‘Just like all the rest do, I suppose. Surely the interest of the whole thing lies in finding out how they managed with the instruments at their disposal?’
‘But what were the instruments? How do you define them?’ Christopher saw the trend of Raymond’s argument and was ready with his challenge. ‘Surely the chief reason why they did not see what we do was not that their telescopes were toys compared to ours?’
‘Well, of course they were not trained observers like we are.’
‘Oh yes, they were. They were highly trained to fit their observations to their interpretations. Remember we are reconstructing a period. It would be a sheer waste of time to look through a Galilean telescope and note down what it revealed of the stars. What it reveals of those observers is what we are after.’
‘You mean…?’
‘I mean their religion, their politics, and therefore their hopes, their anxieties. Every time they sat down to observe the stars they looked at them through all those things — through prejudice and conviction, as well as through their toys.’
‘But that did not make any difference to what they saw. I am after that.’
‘It made all the difference between their century and ours.’
‘Surely, Christopher, progress depends on the methods and instruments available?’
‘Progress?’ Christopher paused to savour the full implications of the word, which he detested. ‘I don’t know what you mean by it, but if you mean what we learn by discovery, I say that is entirely a question of interpretation.’
‘But science or learning is a question of measurement. We, for example, can only learn certain things by measuring them with instruments which our ancestors did not have. That is why the instruments they did have and use are so interesting.’
‘You will see how happily they got on in spite of them. As far as your “progress” goes, we have probably lost far more than we have gained. We have almost lost the desire, for instance, of seeking the immeasurable. You people, who go on noting and measuring, measuring and noting, how often do you dare try to interpret? When it comes to that, you are more medieval. They at least had a system of interpretation, into which they endeavoured to fit their facts. They sought to exalt the glory of God, and everything they found they proclaimed to be a part of that glory.’
‘Medieval nonsense,’ said Raymond briefly.
‘If you like, but well-sustained nonsense, all the same. It achieved Christendom. It made us. What are you achieving?’
‘We are getting to know how things work. That is worth all Christendom put together.’
‘The only thing that matters is the Why, not the How. Tell us that.’
‘My dear boy, you talk like a poet or a mystic or a priest. Nobody cares about that but you. One might find out or one might not, but in the meantime let us look through our telescopes.’
‘Well, Candide, go on looking and I will go on hoping.’
‘Well, Pangloss, go on yourself. Perhaps one day you will tell us all about it.’
They smiled at one another; Raymond frankly and prosaically, as he thought; Christopher, passionately and maliciously, as he felt. The pessimist and the optimist, the man of measurement and the man of vision.
Raymond now saw Nicolette, who had come towards them during the conversation and was standing close to Christopher. She was looking at him, and her eyes were filled with pity, wonder, and alarm. If he had paused to interpret their expression, he would have thought the pity love, and the wonder shyness, and the alarm anticipation. But Raymond was no interpreter.
‘Oh, well,’ said Raymond, grasping his telescope, ‘I am going to have a look through this.’
Christopher and Nicolette then looked at one another, and both knew that the episode was definitely at an end. He could not — and could never — play their game. After all, a mating was not a marriage.
‘Oh, well——’ had said Raymond, and had been charming about the whole thing. He was disappointed, or thought he was, but it was clear to him that Nicolette was surprisingly childish and immature for her age. He wondered afterwards what had been the quality in her that had attracted him (for he had been sincerely attracted by her), and concluded that it was a certain intensity, a look of the eyes, a wistfulness about the mouth, an atmosphere of spiritual stretching out, a keenness that he could not well define in words. However…
His period of enforced chastity having thus abruptly terminated, he formed a liaison with Karen Glaum, a well-known broadcaster of stories and poems, and also gave a child to Ruth, at her own request. He remained only a few months longer in Nucleus, and in later years attained a certain limited eminence as a physicist, owing to his discovery of two important minor facts about the behaviour of polyphenols under very high pressure.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.