Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir Read Free Page B

Anthony Burgess. For the rest of it, we are the people we have always been – splendidly various, and let us respect that. The young are in control, which is as it should be, and mostly we wouldn’t wish to be out there now taking the flak, though there have always been majestic exceptions, with politicians the high fliers: think Churchill, prime minister at eighty, think Gladstone, think Bismarck. But we do not wish to be arbitrarily retired, or to have assumptions made about our capacities and our tastes, and since we are likely in years to come to make significant demands on national resources, then it would make sense to make use of us for as long as we are fit, able and willing to contribute. How you set about this I wouldn’t care to say – I am a novelist, not a think tank; some sharp young minds could surely apply themselves to the matter.
    “Go West, young man, go West.” The second part of that exhortation usually gets left out: “. . . and grow up with the country.” I sometimes think of that when noting the influx of young foreign males in my part of London – the Polish builders busy making over my neighbors’ houses; the teams of two, shoving fliers through the doors, chatting away in some language I can’t identify; those loud on their cell phones as they pass me in the street (is that Bulgarian? Czech? Russian?). I have had many an interesting conversation with minicab drivers, apparently arrived in this country a month ago and already whisking around the city: “Where are you living?” “I am in Lewisham. There is house that is all Afghan mans. Pity is no Afghan womans.” “What do you think of London?” “Is pity is so many old building, but they put up new I see, perhaps in time the old go.” “How did you get here . . .” No, best not to pursue the matter.
    These resourceful young are not going to grow up with a new country, but are cashing in on an old one, and you cannot but admire them. That takes courage, determination – and sometimes desperation. And, of course, youth. You don’t plunge into an alien city, you don’t stow away in a cargo truck, unless you have that panache, that as yet unstifled optimism, that ingrained sense that the road ahead is there, still there.
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    “The party’s nearly over,” says a friend and contemporary; she says it a touch ruefully, but gamely also. We have had a party; we’ve been luckier than many. And we are attuned to the idea of life as a narrative – everyone is. Just as the young Afghan knows his story has only just begun – and he is hell-bent on seeing that it continues – so we take a kind of wry satisfaction in recognizing the fit and proper progress, the shape of things. The sense of an ending.
    The trajectory of life, the concept of universal death, conditions our thinking. We require things to end, to mirror our own situation. The idea of infinity is impossible to grasp. When I am invited to do so, watching one of those television programs about the expanding universe, with much fancy computerized galaxy performance on the screen, and sober explications from Californian astrophysicists, I can’t, frankly. And what is intriguing is that they too, while evidently accepting the concept in a stern professional physicist way, seem also to have an ordinary human resistance. Last time, two of them said “mind-boggling,” reaching helplessly, it seemed, for that most jaded cliché to account for something that is beyond language. They couldn’t find words for it; neither can I.
    I have had much to do with endings, as a writer of fiction. The novel moves from start to finish, as does the short story; at the outset, the conclusion lurks – where is this thing going? how will I wrap it up? how will I give it a satisfactory shape? You are looking to supply the deficiencies of reality, to provide order where life is a matter of contingent chaos, to suggest theme and meaning, to make a story that is shapely where life is linear.