MAN’S WORLD (17)
By:
November 1, 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.
CATALYSIS
One word, which he seemed to worship, often entered into his conversation: ‘Intelligence.’ And he pronounced it with such force of feeling that a little bubble of froth could be seen on his lips. — JAQUES DE LA CRETELLE, ‘SILBERMANN.’
When Christopher, all penitent, begged Nicolette’s forgiveness for his temporary desertion, she remembered her prediction with silent joy. ‘In the end you will come back to me and I to you,’ she had said at their parting, and already it was so. Within a week or two of its ending she could look on the Raymond episode as a joke. St. John was absent from Nucleus at this time, and as she had merely had to soothe Antonia’s disappointment and listen to a short disapproving homily from Adrian, she could only see its comical aspect. Nevertheless, having taken pleasure in Raymond’s caresses at least, she felt now confirmed in her reaction against the physical preliminaries to motherhood. Christopher could give all the love she needed, and her inward discomfort at certain recollections (innocent kisses though they had been) appeared to her as a sign that she did not choose to penetrate the dark avenue of sex.
‘The point is,’ said Christopher, what do you want to do now?’
It was midday and they were sitting on some sandhills, taking a sun-bath. A pine forest behind them poured out scent; there was a silver shimmer over everything. Christopher was sweating slightly; small beads were on his forehead and upper lip. Nicolette lay on her stomach and with sensual delight felt the warmth travel down her spine.
‘Just bask,’ she murmured. ‘Oh, Christopher, I’m so lazy. I haven’t the slightest ambition to do anything at all. I don’t care about anything just now but sleeping and eating and watching other people do things. You, for instance, and Weil. I’ve been spending hours with him, watching him make those adorable models of his. His sight is not very sharp any more, and I’ve been helping him with the more delicate parts. What a baby I am, playing with my little toys!’
‘Not at all. That’s art.’
‘All right. I’m too hot to argue. Anyhow, I should like to go on helping Weil; he needs an assistant. Now he wants to make models illustrating the development of various arts and sciences. It means a lot of research, copying, donkey-work for which he has not enough time.’
‘Well, do. We will get him to apply to the council for you if you think he wants you.’
‘I am sure he will.’
‘So much, then, for your laziness.’
‘Yes, it isn’t done, is it? Councils here and councils there, and a job for every one. I suppose it’s inevitable, though.’
‘Apparently. Only such reactionaries as you and I would like to see the old times back, when everybody was not classed according to capacity by practical psychologists. And when one could comfortably take a job beneath one’s intelligence if one were merely lazy.’
‘I don’t think I would, really. But I do wish provision were made for oddities like you and me. Something ought to be done about us.’
‘We must do it ourselves, or others will. Particularly about you. We must make a plan and go very carefully. You had the three usual alternatives. If you help Weil for a time you may shelve a decision, but it cannot be postponed indefinitely. Sooner or later you will either be mated or immunized.’
Nicolette looked at him with anger in her eyes. Indignation brought out the perspiration that the hottest rays of the sun had not called forth.
‘I shall refuse!’
‘Splendid! But you must think it out before any one else does. They will possibly allow you a year before you decide. Do you think making toys with Weil will be adequate substitute for making babies?’
‘I don’t want one now, but I probably shall some time.’
‘Exactly. But under our system you can hardly work up to that in your own time. In a short while you will find yourself wanting some emotional stimulation. You will say, “I have gone so far, I want to go a little further.” You won’t want to go back, or rather to jump right on, to begin breeding. You will want to taste and test, possibly to sample the existence of an Entertainer. This, at any rate, is what they will anticipate. Then they will talk about example and precedent. They will never let you risk it, because they will be risking a revolutionary change in dissolving the demarcation lines between the orders. After all, the rigidity of the present breeding arrangement is not surprising: the whole scheme, practically, is feminine in inception and adminstration.’
‘Well, something must be done about it. There must be women of all kinds who rebel against it.’
‘Of course there are. Emmeline, for instance. But it is an extremely difficult thing to organize satisfactorily in any other way. Remember the dangers for them. Once the women raise the race slogan, the men will rally to them. You wouldn’t have a chance.’
‘I shall make Emmeline talk to St. John for me. She has promised to already.’
‘But you don’t imagine that he would make a difference between you and any one else? St. John is not a Jesuit, he does not play into their hands for his own advantage; he wouldn’t for yours. He will never put the particular case before the general. Perhaps I should not say “never,” but certainly not yours. He likes people to be definite, too, to know what they want (don’t I know it?). If you come to him and plead that you cannot make up your mind, he will send you away and tell you to practise some exercises until you can. All that muddle, that lack of self-determination, that miasma of mixed emotions which impede clear judgment, he will tell you, belongs to the past. It should have gone, with better and worse and such nonsensical comparatives. There is no room for it in the scientific world.’
‘Then if no one will help me, I will defy them all. I will cheat and lie and procrastinate; I will await my own time and act according to my own judgment, obscure or not.’
‘And I, my darling, will help you. You will need me and you shall have me. I will never, never desert you again as I did. They need a lesson, and we will teach it them together. Then they can draw their own deductions, and if they want to, make a real example of us both. I will find an authority whereby I can refute them. Even if reason be wholly on their side, we will discover something on ours beyond the laws of reason. But we must go slowly.’
Thus was the pact concluded.
A few minutes later they both lay sleeping. The sun looked down on them unwinkingly. The forest breathed and each exhalation was a perfumed sigh.
Weil’s workshops and museum occupied several acres in the Arts and Crafts section. They were surrounded by other architectural ateliers. All the buildings branched out like the spokes of a wheel from the central lecture and demonstration hall, which raised its lovely poised dome far above them. This had been one of his earliest and best achievements, but it lacked its final glory until Arcous Weil had begun to paint on its walls frescoes depicting the arts and the sciences at the service of humanity. Most of the representative figures were portraits, some of them still uncompleted. Political science was personified by St. John, oratory by Herville, architecture by old Weil himself. For the portrait of the World Mother, Arcous had drawn on his imagination. Behind her lay a crowd of figures symbolizing man’s slow development: great louty shapes crouched, squatted, and, slowly assuming an erect posture, acquired at the same time a softer outline, until there appeared from among them, as Apollo might have appeared among the gibbering, trembling satyrs of an ancient wood, modern man. He was drawn in profile, standing proudly alone, poised on tiptoe, ready it seemed to run or to fly. A darker, slightly negroid type a little to his right and behind him, had a hand still on his shoulder, but it was being shaken off by the glorious one, whose own two palms were laid fearlessly in the mighty fist of his mother. She was turned in an attitude of expectation towards a group to her right. Each of the figures who composed it looked towards and behind her, yet the artist’s brush had given their glances a slight slant, so that they seemed to travel further than the objects of their sight, further and higher. Of these men the foremost figure was instantly recognizable as Mensch. At the feet of the World Mother sprawled young children of all ages. They became more beautiful as they approached Mensch; they clung to his hands and his arms, one of which was crooked to hold a sleeping infant. Behind Mensch was Jesus with his Cross, on either side of whom stood a martyr and inquisitor. Moses, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle formed a group raised a little above and to one side of these, while Buddha, and close to him Confucius, were the last recognizable figures in the rear of the procession that faded slowly into a dimmer and dimmer twilight. The drawing was ascetically severe, almost childishly diagrammatical; the colour, designed strictly with a view to the concordant lighting, alone gave the work a warm, emotional appeal.
Panels, each symbolical of an art or science, entirely covered the walls of the hall; organic and inorganic chemistry preceded sculpture and painting; physics and mathematics were followed by music and poetry, and so each fell into appropriate position to form the interlinked chain. Into these, also, portraits were wrought, for this was the hall that commemorated the achievement of man for man.
The genius of Arcous Weil expressed itself mainly in composition. In the making of his ‘patterns,’ as he always called them, he was sternly traditional. Wherever you find a romantic in any of the arts,’ he would say, ‘you know that a tradition is impossible. Romanticism is a form of adult infantilism — it leads to the clinic, not the school. Even the romantic can occasionally make patterns… Cezanne … Van Gogh … Gauguin. There is no real reason why a romantic artist should not have a sense of decency. These men succeeded because they knew when to stop, what to leave out. But the romantic is easiest to imitate, and the imitator confesses his all. Dreadful consequence! You cannot repeat the pattern of the romantics. Whereas the classicist can, as they did of old, tell the same story over and over again. Why are nearly all the world’s pictures that count representations of a conventional theme, such as “Mother and Child” or “Crucifixion”? Because such pictures are mere abstractions, strictly patterned. In them the artist can let himself go on form, colour, composition. As subjects for civilized human beings neither landscape nor portraiture as such can exist. In such works we see the man who wrought them, not the subjects as seen universally. The other day I discovered a portrait of a banker — a money-broker — by a nineteenth-century fellow called Sargent. Please note, a protrait of a money broker.’
Arcous was talking to a group of students, and his eyes flashed from face to face to see if the point had gone home. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continued, as their laughter urged him on, ‘you might as well paint a banker as a cow. Except that the former are extinct and the latter getting rather rare. But you will paint landscape and figure. You will paint them as design; you will incorporate them in your patterns. And your patterns will not be mere hermaphroditic, sterile scrawls, such as the romantic infantilists of the twentieth century produced, but they will be great, glorious, allegorical wall-coverings, which can be enjoyed as abstractions by those cultured enough to want nothing more, and at the same time as inspiring pictorial stories by the Body. You will call your figures goddesses, or cities,or demons, or sciences, or heroes, or philosophies, or whatever you choose; your rivers Rhines, or St. Lawrences, or Volgas, or Amazons; use as many personal names as you like, so long as your representation is utterly impersonal; your pattern a mere pattern. You will not — luckily for you we are past the stage when that was possible — reproduce mere accurate photographic copies of dwellings or individuals or scenes; nor will you jot down a shorthand smudge and inform the world that it has no business to come prying at your picture and demand to recognize a familiar object; any one working here will create as simply and precisely as a bee creates a honey cell; let your watchword be “Enough.” And now get out.’
Arcous Weil was nineteen years of age. Though the design of the decorations was his own creation he had not attemped to carry it out unaided. Some of his followers could paint robes and folds, hands and feet, almost as well as he could; sixteen had contributed to the completion of the scheme. If they wanted to infuriate Arcous they had only to compare him to Raphael. For he had none of the ingenuousness and insipidity of that boy painter. His genius was rather of the same quality as Blake’s. There was a mystical passion in his conceptions and in his manner of expressing them. The Weils could trace their ancestry back in a direct line to one of Sephardim who had made ancient Spanish Jewry famous throughout the medieval world; and there were few families of their race now extant who could substantiate such a claim. Old Weil, absorbed in his models and the Talmudic studies which gave him equal inspiration in another way, had not taken much notice of the fact that his boy had been hailed as a prodigy at the age of seven. Arcous had had the freedom of the studios since babyhood; why then should he not profit by it? In later years, however, the son not only set his seal on the father’s fame, but attracted to the Weil workshops men and women who could not remain indifferent to the influence of his Semitic brilliance. They in their turn influenced not his art but his character. Their adulation stiffened his pride, their easy laughter his indifference. Of his own race he acknowledged no superior in intelligence save Mensch, which meant that in his opinion he was the second most remarkable man in his world.
Nicolette could not ignore Arcous, even if he himself had been willing to let her do so. That catalytic power, which was the essence of Jewish influence everywhere and at all times, could leave her no more untroubled by its mysterious presence than any of the others. From the beginning he was physically antipathetic to her. Little things about him, the shape of his finger-nails, the extreme whiteness of his teeth, the shininess of his dark eyes, the curliness of his hair, gave her curious fleeting sensations of disgust. But his influence went further than this. It was clear that he admired her, yet his admiration never lost its critical quality. His youthful self-assertiveness not only challenged her own, but his irony made it necessary for her to be constantly on guard. It was a new experience for Nicolette, this discovery of a person in whose presence one simply could not be natural, be oneself. Arcous compelled one to play his game, at his pace and in his time. She did not like him, but what did that matter compared to the fascination he exercised by forcing her into a new rôle? When he looked at her she saw herself through alien eyes, and often revolting at the unfamiliar picture, she would have wished to protest, to cry out to him: ‘But I am not like that! Why cannot you see me as I am and leave
me alone?’
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.