A drawing by Franz Kafka
A small brown-man had a narrow bedroom, a spacious living-room, and a gyp-room (more like a galley) at the top of a Gothic quadrangle. The living-room contained a fluted white mantelpiece with a gas-fire, a moth-eaten charcoal grey sofa against the internal wall, and a coffee table next to it. The brown-man read very comfortably lying on the sofa, and sitting on it he could eat meals from the coffee table. But when he needed to write he went over to a desk that just fitted into a dormer with lattice windows on three sides.
At first he simply took his books and pad of paper over to the desk, sat down, and wrote without ever looking up. As his essays got harder, however, he would occasionally look out of the leaded window before him. He noted with interest that the roofs on the other side of the quadrangle were a bluish foam-flecked green, like seawater. He took to having a mug of coffee next to him as he wrote – increasingly slowly and effortfully – and when he paused he would contemplate the tower of the city’s main church beyond the far side of the quad. Only sky and clouds were visible around the tall tower, but sometimes black shapes appeared between the battlements, or heads and shoulders moved mechanically, it seemed, along them.
Could he be seen? He constructed the beam between his eyes and theirs. Surely they could see him and watch him as he sat there writing. He kept his head down, but would occasionally look up ‘nonchalantly’ to verify whether people were there. If beams of light could pass between him and them, so could bullets, either way, and he imagined this. He was particularly alert to anything being raised above head-level on the battlements. On days when watchers were on the tower, writing became a torment. He took to dropping onto his hands and knees and crawling across the carpet to the left-hand corner of the casement to check first, with his right eye, whether they were there. If they were, he kept his ‘third eye’ on them all the time as he tried to write. He found it impossible to write at night, as he could not see the tower.
Outside, he paid no attention to the tower whatsoever, even though he passed it on the other side of the street. But one day, as he was returning to his room, he saw a crowd of tourists, including a woman in a bright red sou’wester, queuing by the big church doors that opened onto the pavement opposite, and a notice that read: ‘View city best from Tower £1.’ He had never wondered before how they got up there; clearly this was the latest arrangement. When he reached his room, he made himself a mug of coffee, took it casually to the desk, sat casually down, and casually looked up. There they all were, including the red sou’wester, draped over the battlements and staring into his dormer, staring straight at him, even pointing! With a zoom, he instantly shrank into a little man with a bowler hat on the mantelpiece.
© Patrick Miles, 1978/2022
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
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A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
The very perspective, rarely undisturbed by “redevelopments”,
the little brown man can still tight rope across from Caius to Great St Mary’s.
Lovely! The brown-man never thinks of a tight rope, or help line, does he?
I’m intrigued, Patrick, by your (very) short story posted today. And not just by the description ‘brown-man,’ — Cambridge shorthand? — which puzzles me. No; it is the intensity of the emotion which is stimulated by the fact of being seen. More than simply paranoid, there is the hint of something existential.
And then something clicked, and I remembered Samuel Beckett’s bizarre text Film (published in 1967: included in Faber’s Complete Dramatic Works, pages 321-34). Beckett prefaces this text with the Berkeleyan axiom: Esse est percipi. And the drama is played out, visually, between percipi and percipere; seeing and being seen, being and being known or felt to be. Beckett’s own summary: ‘Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception.’ (As another dramatist once put it: ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.’) Beckett’s character suffers ‘an agony of perceivedness’, very like the alarm/trauma of your ‘brown-man.’ He is disturbed by being observed by his dog, his cat, his parrot, and even a fish. More pointedly, by a print on the wall ‘of the face of God the Father, the eyes staring at him severely’. He then looks at a series of photographs of himself at different ages, in each of which he is being attentively observed; and all of which he tears up. Only at the end does Film make it clear that this is a parable of agonized self-consciousness.
Now, Patrick: is it not possible that you as a switched-on drama man might have known this text — or seen the film, which was made in 1965? And half-remembered it as you wrote your story. It’s uncanny that as he shrinks from being pointed at, your character also ends up with the photograph (of his shrunken self?) on the mantelpiece. Your story, one notes, is captioned by a Kafka drawing. Perhaps you were superintending a Cambridge confluence, here, of two masters of self-interrogation? Congratulations, anyway, to your younger and your older self!
My dear Damian, I thank you warmly, kindly, profoundly for this Comment, which pulsates with your invariable immediacy and wit. It is probably the most serious reflection I’ve received yet on any of my stories…and how could it be otherwise, coming from a genuine critic who has published on Smollett, Lawrence, Rushdie and other masters of English fiction? I’m deeply honoured.
I enjoy your account of Beckett’s Film immensely. I’m very fond of his short plays (I once wrote a parody of one, called Stammer), but had not read the Berkeleyan Film. I’m afraid, then, that I couldn’t have half-remembered it when I came a year ago to write my 1978 story, but goodness me, yes, there is a lot of truth in your collocation!
The, er, (real) existential situation of the ‘brown-man’ had preyed on my mind since the late 1960s, I would say, and was probably influenced by Gogol’s and Kafka’s stories, but it ‘accreted’ whilst I lived in Russia, where on the one hand one was literally watched and followed, and on the other paranoia was everywhere. (As I may have recounted before, when a writer friend of mine called Nikolai Bokov was being interrogated by the KGB, his ‘case officer’ said to him: ‘You suffer from persecution mania!’, to which Kolia replied: ‘And I suppose you are an hallucination?’) The ‘existential situation’, then, started to become a story about paranoia, there’s no doubt of that, but also about the effect that persecution + paranoia can have on creative writing — on the self-freedom and ‘blocking’ of the writer.
I won’t say more, if you don’t mind, as my business, especially in such an exiguous story, is of course to show and not tell, but I must answer your question about ‘brown-man’. It’s not Cambridge slang, but I think you would agree that there is a subtle difference between a ‘grey man’ and a ‘brown-man’. You will have noticed that whereas he is professionally, in his innermost acquired being, small and metaphysically brown, at the end he becomes something positively ‘little’.
Thank you Patrick for revisiting the ‘existential situation’ out of which your story (sort of) arose. I’ve not read as much Dostoevsky as you would think I shouldn’t have done, but I do remember the story — ‘The Double?’ — about the character haunted by his Doppelgänger. This must surely have been festering somewhere inside you also, at the time. (This story was once rather convincingly adapted for TV: early on, back in the 70s?.)
It’s fascinating to me, given the strong, almost magnetic parallels, that you did not know Beckett’s Film at the time. It’s as if ideas are around in the air like spores at a given time, and may be picked up by different writers and developed in different ways. And the more I reflect, the more I have to admire the way you can seize on a subject as it were out of the corner of your eye: certainly not the common stock that lies (often done to death!) in the middle of the road.