The Kirks are, indeed, new people. But where some new people are born new people, natural intimates of change and history, the Kirks arrived at that condition the harder way, by effort, mobility, and harsh experience; and, if you are interested in how to know them, and feel about them, then this, as Howard will explain to you, is a most important fact to possess about them. The Kirks are now full citizens of life; they claim historical rights; they have not always been in a position to claim them. For they were not born into the bourgeoisie, with its sense of access and command, and they did not grow up here, in this bright sea-coast city, with its pier and beach, its respectable residences and easy contact with London, its contact with style and wealth. The Kirks, both of them, grew up, in a grimmer, tighter north, in respectable upper working-class cum lower middle-class backgrounds (Howard will gloss this social location for you, and explain its essential ambiguity); and, when they first met each other, and married, some twelve years ago, they were very different people from the Kirks of today: a timid, withdrawn pair, on whom life had sat onerously. Howard was that conventional product of his circumstances and his time, the fifties: the scholarship boy, serious and severe, well-read in the grammar-school library, bad at games and humanity, who had got in to Leeds University, in 1957, by pure academic effort-a draining effort that had, in fact, left him for a time pallid in features and in mind. Barbara was inherently brighter, as she had to be, since girls from that background were not pushed hard academically; and she made it to university from her girls' grammar school, not, like Howard, through strong motive, but through the encouragement and advice of a sympathetic, socialistic teacher of English, who had mocked her sentimental domestic ambitions. Even at university they had both remained timid people, unpolitical figures in an unpolitical, unaggressive setting. Howard's clothes then always managed to look old, even when they were new; he was very thin, very bleak, and had nothing to say. He was reading sociology, then still a far from popular or prestigious subject, indeed a subject most of the people he knew thought very weighty, Germanic, and dull. He had dark yellow nicotined fingers, from smoking Park Drives, his one indulgence or, as he called it then, with a word he has dropped, his vice; and his hair was cut, very short, when he went home, irregularly, at weekends.
Over this time he was interested in society only in theory. He rarely went out, or met people, or looked around him, or acquired anything other than an abstract grasp of the social forces about which he wrote his essays. He worked very hard, and ate his meals with the backstreet family with whom he had digs. He had never at that time been into a restaurant, and almost never into a pub; his family was Wesleyan and temperance. In the third year he met Barbara, or rather Barbara met him; after several weeks, with her taking the initiative, she started sleeping with him, at the flat she shared with three other girls; and she discovered, what she already suspected, that he had never been into a girl either. They grew attached to each other in that third year; though Howard was determined that personal matters should not interrupt his revision for finals. He sat at night with her in the flat, reading over texts, in extended silence, until at last they withdrew into the bedroom with a hot water bottle and a welcome cup of cocoa. 'All we did was huddle together for warmth,' says Howard, in subsequent explanation. 'It was never a relationship.' But, relationship or not, it was hard to break it. In the summer of 1960, they both graduated, Howard getting a first, and Barbara, who had not taken much interest in her English course, and spent more time over Howard's revision than her own, a lower second. Now their course was at an end, they found it hard to separate, to go their different ways. As a result they committed themselves to an institution which, as Howard nowadays explains, is society's technique for permanentizing the inherent contingency of relationships, in the interests of political stability: that is to say, they got married. It was a church wedding, or rather a chapel one, with many relatives and friends, a formal procedure designed to please both their families, to whom they both felt very attached. They had a honeymoon in Rhyl, taking the diesel train and staying in a boarding house; then they returned to Leeds, because Howard was to begin work on his thesis. He was now, on the strength of his good first, a research student, with an SSRC grant, which seemed ample to support them both. So he set to work on his project, a fairly routine sociology-of-religion study of Christadelphianism in Wakefield, a topic he had picked because when younger he had felt a spiritual fascination with the denomination, a fascination he now proceeded to convert into a sociological concern. As for Barbara, she became, of course, a housewife, or rather, as she put it, a flatwife.
For they now began living in a succession of bedsitters and small flats, with old high-level beds with heads and feet, and Victorian lavatories called 'Cascade', and moquette furniture, always looking out over rotting gardens. The gardens, the houses backing onto them, the back streets, the corner shop, the picture-house, the bus routes into the city centre, formed the main horizon and track of their lives, the limit and circumscription of their world. They took some pleasure in being married, because it gave them a sense of being 'responsible'; and they reported home, frequently, to both their families as a contented couple. But in fact, after the first few months together, when the sexual thrill, never very intense, had begun to wear off somewhat, and they looked around themselves, they rather quickly started to be irritated with one another, depressed by their circumstances, harassed by the simplest business of running their daily lives. It was hard to live in this drifting, ambiguous social position, this graduate student poverty, this little and friendless world; the problems of it ate into all the detail of their contacts and affections. Howard talked often at this time of 'maturity'-'maturity', he explained later, when he preferred other words, happened to be a key concept of the apolitical fifties-and spoke of it as a moral value he prized above all others. He was given to explaining their lives as very serious and mature, largely because they worried a lot about not upsetting each other and not spending money wastefully; this somehow made them the Lawrence and Frieda of backstreet Leeds. But the fact was, as they later came to agree, that neither of them was in the least culturally prepared to lead what Howard later started to call-when the word 'mature' had gone, outdated because of its heavy, Victorian plush, moral associations-'adult' lives. They were social and emotional infants, with grandfatherly solemnity; this was how he later came to portray them when he thought back, a stranger, into the curious early selves of that hasty matrimony. They were conventional nothings; they made heavy weather of the dullest of existences. Often Barbara, upset to be unable to buy more than one tin of beans or one bar of soap at a time, had sat down in their old red moquette armchair, and wept over money. Despite their air of virtuous poverty, she could not help feeling her mother's fondness for having 'things': a good three-piece suite for the lounge, a well-stocked kitchen cupboard, a white tablecloth to eat off on high days. As for Howard, though he talked about mature conduct, he applied this largely to a fondness for solemn conversations and to the arguments of books; he didn't cook, or do household chores, was too timid to like shopping, and he didn't notice any of Barbara's unease.
The Kirks, then, were hardly Kirks; they were very private people, with almost no friends, innocent and silent with each other. They did not discuss problems, mainly because they did not see themselves as the sort of people who had problems; problems were things less mature people had. Barbara spent most of her time alone in the flat, cleaning and tidying it to excess, doing a small amount of unorganized reading. Their sexual relations seemed to bind them in the ultimate intimacy, to tell them why they were married to each other, prove what an intensity this thing called marriage was; but in fact they were, as they later came to reflect, poor, unenterprising, a nominal pleasure, an act of detumescence, further strained by the fear they both had of Barbara's getting pregnant, for the only contraception they used was the Durex that Howard timidly acquired at the local barber's, as well as by something else-a bite of irritation they each felt with the other, but which each denied to himself or herself, and never spoke about. 'What we were doing,' Howard started explaining after all this, when they started seeing themselves, in Howard's word, 'properly', when this stage was all over and they began talking things out between themselves, and with their friends and their enlarging circle of acquaintances, 'was trapping each other in fixed personality roles. We couldn't permit personal adventure, personal growth. That would have been disaster. We couldn't let any new possibilities develop, could we, kid? And that's how people murder each other in slow motion. We weren't adult.' Being adult came much later; the Kirks went on in much the same way for three years, while Howard worked, very thoroughly and ploddingly, at the detail of his thesis, and Barbara stared at herself in the mirror in the bedsitters and the flats. But then they found themselves in their middle twenties, with Howard's thesis and his grant coming to an end, and the need to think about the next move. And around this time something did happen to them.
What happened? Well, their saliva began to flow faster; everything started to get a new taste. The walls of limitation they had been living inside suddenly began to give way; they both started to vibrate with new desires and expectations. Their timidity, their anger, their irritation slipped, bit by bit, off them, like their old clothes, the tired shiny suits for Howard, the dull blouses and skirts for Barbara, which they discarded. By themselves, and with other people, their manner, their style, their natures freshened. They laughed more, and challenged people more. They confessed things to each other, in extreme bouts of frankness, and embarked on ambitious new schemes of sexuality. In bed they lay endlessly talking about themselves, till three and four in the morning; in the bath, on the landing, in the kitchen, they began to tweak, probe, and inject each other with all sorts of new passions and sexual intents. And what was it that had done this to the Kirks? Well, to understand it, as Howard, always a keen explainer, always explains, you need to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history; admittedly, with Howard, you need to know all this to explain anything. You need to know the time, the place, the milieu, the substructure and the superstructure, the state of and the determinants of consciousness, and the human capacity of consciousness to expand and explode. And if you understand these things you will understand why it was that the old Kirks faded from sight and the new Kirks came into being.
For, let us remember, here were two people who had grown up, though in two different Northern towns, one in Yorkshire and one in Lancashire, in the same class and value background. That background was one of vestigial Christianity and inherited social deference, the ideology, says Howard, of a society of sharply striated class distinctions and of great class-consciousness. They came, both of them, from well-conducted and more or less puritanical homes, located socially in that perplexing borderland between working-class anarchism and middle-class conformity. These were Chapel families, with high ethical standards and low social expectations; the result was an ethos in which ethics replaced politics, bringing about a mood of self-denial and deliberately chosen inhibition. Both of them, Howard and Barbara, had had their sights lifted by a grammar-school and university education, but they had retained toward that education the same attitude that their parents had held; it was an instrument, a virtuous one, for getting on, doing well, becoming even more respectable. In short, they had changed position without having changed values; and they had retained in detail the code of ethical constraint, decency and deference. They had been taught to be critical, but they had become critical only of each other, not of their environment or society; and they still retained in all their intimate values the reassuring, but self-limiting, standards of their families. They never asked, and they never received. And thus, says Howard, the nature of their psychological situation, and the consequential nature of their marriage, is all too clear and inevitable. They had married, it is quite evident in informed hindsight, in the adult modern vision, in order to reconstruct precisely that sort of family situation in which they had grown up. But they had done this in quite different historical circumstances from those that had shaped the choices of their parents. If they had looked around them, they would have seen that the energies of social freedom had changed their world; they had only to start claiming a fuller historical citizenship. Access was not denied as much as they believed, not for people like themselves, who had been chosen for élite privilege, and who had the chance to open up privilege for others, turn it into total entitlement, And thus they were failing themselves and everyone else: 'We were a disaster,' says Howard now.
And so the Kirks' marriage had become a prison, its function to check growth, not open it. Barbara, her education over, had promptly closed out her opportunities and reverted to being standard woman, a pre-Reichian woman geared to nothing else but the running of a house. The result was a characteristic syndrome of relative frigidity, suppressed hysteria, bodily shame, and consequential physical and social self-loathing. As for Howard, his way had been to progress and work hard in order to please others, never doing anything radical, negative or personal. He retained this solemn and industrious pattern in order to please his social superiors, but also even his own wife. 'I'd come home,' he says now, 'and show her drafts of my thesis where my supervisor had written "This is a great improvement" and expect her to…do what? Buy me a bicycle for achievement?' But it could hardly go on; and it didn't. For the Kirks moved through a world in which their pallid acceptance was becoming absurd, where self-suppressive achievement was being seen for what it was, weak conformity, psychic suicide. Historical circumstances were changing; the whole world was in transformation, undergoing a revolution of rising expectations, asserting more, demanding more, liberating itself. 'Our change just had to happen,' says Howard. 'The constraints were weakening in all departments: class, sex, work-ethics, everything. And man explodes. He finally has to realize his own change.'
'And woman,' says Barbara. And indeed it was, as Howard will very honourably tell you, Barbara who first broke the frame, in that crucial summer, crucial for them, of 1963. It was a year of social movement; Howard can detail for you, if you can stay around after, the manifestations, in spheres as various as popular music, political scandals, third-world politics, and industrial wage-bargaining, that made it so. Trapped in the flat, unhappy, bewildered, taking private snacks and therefore getting all too fat, she found the inherent contradiction first. 'She probed herself,' says Howard. 'That's not quite exactly it,' says Barbara frankly, 'I was probed.'
'That's true,' says Howard. 'At the purely external level, you got screwed.'
In fact what happened, at the purely external level, was that one afternoon a friend that the Kirks had made, a psychology student named Hamid, an Egyptian with big dark eyes and an obsessive devotion to Jung and Lawrence Durrell, had called at the flat, wanting to interest them in going to a jazz concert that evening. It was late in the afternoon, but Howard, who was-not by pure chance, says modern Howard-forgetful of the time, was still working away in the university library, busily reading other people's theses, and making notes on them, in order to write his own. Hamid had brought with him to the flat some photographs of Abu Simbel, and a box of Turkish Delight, and so somehow Barbara went to bed with him, in the high bed with the wooden head and foot, in the room overlooking the rotting garden. She had squeaked with a certain pleasure, though it was not anything more than a hasty fumble under the covers, by no means an exceptional moment for either party. But it left Barbara with a residue of severe guilt; it was, says Howard now, typical that her response to this was to drive it down and deny it, in the hope of suppressing the entire episode. However, Hamid had his own obscure moral imperatives to pursue; he insisted on staying for supper, and his purpose was, as it emerged, to tell Howard all about the moment on the high bed that afternoon, when, as he explained, Barbara and he had made some love. 'I think,' says Howard now, 'the purpose he had in mind, natural enough from his cultural standpoint, was to establish intimacy between the male parties. We have to recognize his culturally determined view of women.'
'My God,' says Barbara, 'he just liked me.'
'That's compatible,' says Howard. So Hamid, with his dark eyes, made his confession, comfortably awaiting Howard's response, while Howard sat, his jaws working on the supper, in a state of profound shock. 'My first thought was violence,' he says, 'not against Hamid, of course, against Barbara. I felt penetrated myself. The ethic of total possession of the woman you're married to runs very deep. Or did.' But he was calm, for he was intelligent, and in any case he had been taught, overtaught, to control and exclude aggression.
And he did know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history; he knew how quantitative change suddenly becomes qualitative change, and how reification occurs, and how sex is not simply genital interaction but an ultimate discharge of the libido, a psychic manifestation. He had known it all the time; now he realized it. For some time he had been feeling obscurely touched by and dispossessed by the way in which, in the onward transactions of the historical process, some new human rhythm, a new mode of consciousness, seemed to be emerging. He had felt it in the young people (at that time the young people were, to the Kirks, other people: they were the twenty-five-year-old old people) and in the revolts and the expressions of the American blacks, and in the Third World, the world Hamid came from. Now he felt stranded in historical foolishness, but he had a little sense of hope for himself. He sat over the sausages, and he listened to Hamid, who spoke in fatalistic terms ('It is what happens, Howard, because these things are willed to happen') and then to Barbara, who defended herself with a sudden new aggression ('I'm a person, Howard. I've been a person here all this time, stuck in this room, and he saw it, and you never have'). He poked a sausage; he recognized historical inevitability. The small revolution had come. 'I looked across the table at this person I had been calling a wife for the last few years, and her face suddenly switched on and turned real for me,' Howard says. 'Mine did?' asks Barbara. 'Mine?'
'That's right,' says Howard. 'And when one face becomes real, all faces become real.'
'Right,' says Barbara, 'especially the pretty ones.'
Barbara's tiny affair in the high bed had a powerful effect; it excited the Kirks with each other. And so they found themselves taken, for a time, with a hazy dream in front of them, a dream they talked out and out; it was a dream of expanded minds, equal dealings, high erotic satisfactions, a transcendence of what they had up to now taken to be reality. They now started transcending reality quite frequently, making love in parks, smoking pot at parties, going up on the moors past Adel and running with their clothes off through the wind, buying stereo equipment, taking trips to London, rubbing margarine on each other in bed, going on demos. It was just after this affair of Barbara's that Howard's father died ('One inevitably recognizes the removal of the psychic focus of paternalist constraint,' says Howard, 'of course, I cared for him a lot'), and only a few days later Howard was asked to apply for a temporary assistant lectureship, right there at Leeds, in the department where he had been doing his research; a post he very quickly got. There were a few finishing touches to be given to the thesis, but he could set that more or less aside for a while; now the task was to prepare for teaching, get further into the ranges and depths of sociology. On the strength of the appointment, the Kirks got a bigger flat, with a smaller bed, and were able to install a new cooker, hire a television set, and have a few small parties. They made some new, and much more radical, friends, among other postgraduate students, and now as well among the faculty. The fact that he was no longer a man who was marked but a man who would mark pulled him out of the mental waste land of subservient achievement in which he had lived. The Kirks spent the summer in a state of continuous excitement; it was the most exciting summer of their lives.
Indeed things over those summer months began to get a little dangerous with them. They got up each morning feeling physically sated, excited with their own bodies and the other body that had excited them with their own. They talked a lot to each other about swinging, feeling good, getting high. They looked at each other and observed limitations, the obstructiveness of the other self, which was always so very there, always so very insistent, to the onward path they each had chosen; they each accused the other, from time to time, of closing the doors, killing the options, holding back, getting out. They quarrelled quite often; but these were no longer the mean little quarrels that their mean little selves, the selves of the old dispensation, before their consciousness revolution, had indulged in before, quarrels so low-keyed as to be almost invisible, while remaining deeply felt and unresolved. 'It was a politics of growth,' says Howard, 'an elaborate dialectic of self-statement. It was exactly what was needed.'
'But, How, you've got to remember,' says Barbara, 'there was still a deep bourgeois element.'
'Oh, right, there was indeed,' says Howard, 'it was inevitable.'
'And I remained in his eyes essentially property, still,' says Barbara. 'Of course it's an inevitable contradiction structured into the institution of marriage,' says Howard, 'and we came from the generation that focused on marriage.'
'Of course,' says Barbara, 'we're still in fact married.'
'But on our own terms,' adds Howard, 'we've redefined it internally.'
'I'll say,' says Barbara.
When the new academic year came around in the autumn, and Howard began teaching for the very first time, he found that the events of the summer had given him the gift for bringing a passionate fervour into the subject, making him want to teach it as it had never been taught before. He took his classes to the law courts, and lectured them in the corridors, until the noise became so great that he was asked to leave. He went with them and they all spent the night in a Salvation Army hostel, to know at first hand. He got into demography and social psychology, and took a Wright Mills reformist approach to the field. He found himself deeper into the academic sub-culture, the lifestyle of his fellow-lecturers and especially of his fellow-sociologists. He talked very seriously and solemnly about theoretical matters. He took to wearing the black leather jackets that most of his colleagues, for some reason, affected. There were many new beards in 1963; Howard's was one of them. Later he started selling Red Mole in the city centre on Saturdays, holding a copy high in his clenched fist in front of the faces of the market shoppers. Barbara no longer sat in the flat. She came to the university, went to lectures, attended political meetings, visited filmshows, and stapled provocative posters on boards when nobody was looking. She got into health foods and astrology, studying vitamin levels and cholesterol counts, and doing horoscopes of political opponents. She went to all the faculty parties, and became very outgoing and popular, standing in corners in lowcut dresses raising tendentious issues, and drinking a great deal. Altogether the Kirks became well known as a feature of the younger faculty, and one of the lively centres of the culture they had going.
They also both started having small affairs. Howard tried the wives of his friends, with what he thought of as the Hamid strategy, and was surprised to find how available many of them were, and how it improved his confidence in himself, and his social courage. Barbara began taking her pleasures at the parties they went to, slipping upstairs to the bedroom with someone around midnight, and then returning downstairs for the early-morning action, when dancing started or the pot started circulating, not wanting to miss a thing. They felt the strain, and some of the other relationships they formed seemed tempting, worth enlarging; they talked quite often about separating, feeling now that they were really bad for each other, and that the only real answer was a new start. None of their other relationships really became permanent, however. Once Barbara went and stayed for a week with some friends, the Beamishes, Henry Beamish being another young lecturer in the department; she took the television set with her, and began looking around in Leeds for a flat of her own. But their friends were all people who had psychological insights, and so they explained Howard's problems to Barbara, and Barbara's problems to Howard, and this made them seem quite interesting to each other again. So they ended up back together, at the end of the week, on a new alignment. This all had a rapid consequence; Barbara got pregnant. 'Oh, God, the primitive techniques we used then,' says Barbara, 'we were playing Russian roulette.' Barbara quite enjoyed the pregnancy, and she got massively fat. Her big peasant bosom swelled and she carried her enormous bump buoyantly in front of her. She went to natural childbirth classes, and Howard came along too; he did the exercises down on the floor along with her, sympathetically pushing when the nurse said push. When Barbara went into Leeds Infirmary, Howard insisted on being present. Indeed when the day came at last, he decided not to cancel his class, but to take the group along and see the birth, examining the problems of the National Health Service and the conditions of maternity care. The sister was strict and uncooperative, so the class waited out in the grounds, peering at windows, while Barbara delivered, by the Lamaze method, with Howard present, giving instructions and encouragement through a white mask. Then it was all over. Barbara sweated and the veins in her eyeballs stood out red, while Howard stared with intense and profound curiosity at the mystery of life, encapsulated there between his wife's legs, and contemplated the conditions and determinants, the Marx and the Freud, the history and the sex, that led to this most extraordinary of all outcomes.
Barbara had not at first welcomed the pregnancy, for she was enjoying things too much; but in the end it was a kind of victory for her. Howard had pushed sympathetically on the floor of the clinic, but in the end he had produced nothing; Barbara had made the ultimate statement, published in the ultimate way. Thereafter Howard had a lot of baby-minding to do, and he often slept in the day, in his chair in the room he had at the university, so as to be sure to be awake and aware for the two-o'clock feeds. He did his part, but all the same Barbara claimed to be struggling in the maternal yoke, which denied as well as satisfied, and so she made him pay her an economic salary for her useful social role as a wife and a mother, as proof that she was not second-class. But, after two months spent in the full-time company of the baby, she began to feel that it was time to realize herself as a fully-fledged economic unit. It was somehow only when an achievement was tested in the open, competitive market that it was a real achievement, a full mode of being, an existential act; she had started, in these matters, to acquire vocabulary from Howard. What she did was to get a neighbour to come in and mind the child, while she did part-time jobs on public opinion surveys and in market research, arguing with housewives in the Leeds back-to-backs about how important their views were on detergents and decimal currency, Rhodesia, abortion, and Coronation Street. She gradually became persuaded that market research was a community service, a form of grass-roots expressionism, of political action, and that she was very good at it. Altogether over this stage she became very bright and contented. Howard, correspondingly, came to feel very depressed. He was getting very tired, and doubted the rewards that were coming to him from his close, intense relationship with the small fleshly creature that was his baby. He liked the child, but not as much as he was being asked to; he actually suspected Barbara of neglect. But the trouble, for both of them, was that they had by now become busy people; there was so much for each of them to do. Now he acquired a bewildered expression, and a faint air of defeat. But he let his hair grow very long, and began to push people around intellectually at parties. He drank more, and looked sad. Gradually he found, to his surprise, that he was earning sympathy and regard; his recent troubles had impressed all the people he knew a good deal, and he was, with his accumulating reputation for having a vigorous and even dangerous wife, and an affair problem, and a baby problem, for the first time being considered as a very seriously interesting person.
It was at this time that the Kirks first started telling, to friends and acquaintances and utter strangers, their story. They presented it as the exemplary case of the Kirks, an instructive public matter, the tale of two bewildered people who had failed themselves and then suddenly grown. It was an attractive and popular story for the times, and it went through many refinements. The earlier tellings had concentrated on the liberation plot; the cramped lives, the affair, the running around naked on the moors, the explosion of consciousness and new political awareness. But after a while, there were certain elements of scepticism that needed to be introduced for probability's sake, not utterly disconfirming the tale of a couple moving buoyantly, self-realizingly, through the exploding consciousness of man in history, perhaps even complicating and improving it. For there were severe ambiguities and dark places in their relationship. The way Howard explained this, to himself and to a few others, was that they had moved from a consensus model of marriage, the usual model of marriage, which is generally taken as an ultimate consensus, wherein conflict is generated but ultimately reconciled with the famous kiss, to a conflict model, in which interests were starkly defined, and ultimate resolution must depend on violence or the defeat of one of the parties. What Howard was out to articulate was the suspicion, which could of course have been paranoid, that Barbara was out to destroy him. She of course denied this, when they talked about it; however, as Howard kept telling her, the question could not be posed at the conscious, but had to reckon with the unconscious, level. One thing was certainly true; Barbara, because she was using her mind more, was getting brighter. She had a shrewd, bitter intelligence, a strong nature, and more gift for feeling than he had. She also had the subtle arts of attack, and could use them on him well; there were times when Howard wondered whether he could survive them.
But by now Howard was Dr Kirk; he had finished off his thesis, and been awarded his PhD for his long labours. Now the focus of his attention could change; he had been at work on a book, an argumentative book, about cultural and sexual change, which urged, as you might expect, that there had been a total restructuring of sexual mores in Britain, that sexual roles had been totally reassigned, and that the use of the traditional concepts of 'man' and 'woman', to designate stable cultural entities, was irrelevant. 'We need new names for these genitally distinct types of persons,' it said. Howard wrote the book secretively, in his office, partly because it was yet another telling of the exemplary Kirk story, and so might bore Barbara if she read it, but even more he was, like Barbara with the baby, or a nation with a new energy-source, aware that he had possession of a powerful weapon in the power politics, the dialectics and strategies, of his marriage, his own home-made yet universal battlefield. But Barbara came into his office one day, while he was elsewhere in the building, teaching a class. She sat at his desk, read the letters that lay on it, the comments that he had written on the ends of his student essays, the typescript of the book. She began to penetrate it; by the time he came back from his class she had a view of it. 'Have you been writing this?' she asked. 'Why not?' asked Howard, looking at her as she sat in his desk chair, while he sat in the chair he put his students in for tutorials. 'It's us, isn't it?' said Barbara, 'it's also revealingly you.'
'How is it me?' asked Howard. 'Do you know what it says?' asked Barbara, 'it says you're a radical poseur. It tells how you've substituted trends for morals and commitments.'
'You've not read it properly,' said Howard, 'it's a committed book, a political book.'
'But what are you committed to?' asked Barbara, 'Do you remember how you used to say "maturity" all the time? And it never meant anything? Now it's "liberation" and "emancipation". But it doesn't mean any more than the other thing. Because there's nothing in you that really feels or trusts, no character.'
'You're jealous,' said Howard, 'I did something interesting, and you're jealous. Because I didn't even tell you.'
'No character,' said Barbara again, sitting in his chair. 'How do you define character?' asked Howard. 'How do you define a person? Except in a socio-psychological context. A particular type of relationship to the temporal and historical process, culturally conditioned and afforded; that's what human nature is. A particular performance within the available role-sets. But with the capacity to innovate through manipulating options among the role-sets.'
'I know,' said Barbara, 'you've said 'all that here. But what's it got to do with real people?'
'Who are these real people?' asked Howard. 'We need a new name for your genitally distinctive type of person,' said Barbara. 'You're a shit.'
'You're envious,' said Howard, 'I've made something without you.'
'It's a smart punishment for the baby,' said Barbara, 'but it's about us, and it's empty, so I don't like it.'
'It's about what we've experienced, but in its context,' said Howard, 'we wanted to change. We wanted to live with the movement, the times. We both wanted it. If that book's just trendy, then what are you?'
'I'm just living, the best way I can,' said Barbara, 'but you want to make it all into a grand plot. A big universal story. Something of major interest.'
'Well, that's exactly what commitment is, Barbara,' said Howard. 'I don't think so,' said Barbara, 'I just think I'm living, and you're simply theorizing. You're a kind of self-made fictional character who's got the whole story on his side, just because he happens to be writing it.' Howard had thought that he was living too, and when Barbara had gone he sat in front of the manuscript on his desk. Inspecting the end of it, he found that Barbara had written a comment she had copied from one of his own notes on the end of a student essay: 'This seems to me a reasonable theoretical statement on the subject, but it contains none of your real experience of life in it, as an aware person.' But he was an aware person, and he knew the book said so; the lesson was a lesson in jealousy.
So Howard went on with the book, with a new urgency, and he finished it off quickly. Then he sent it off, without telling Barbara; and almost at once he got a contract and a very good advance for it from a well-known left-wing publisher, who proposed to do both a hardback and a cheap paperback edition, with extensive publicity. He showed the letter to Barbara; despite herself, she was impressed. She had mentioned the book critically to a few friends; now she spoke warmly about it in a wider circle. The victory pleased him deeply. He felt the delicate balance of their relationship changing again; he had produced his baby. He knew he had better take the advantage while it was there, so he sat down again in his office one day and wrote off letters in answer to the advertisements in the professional journals, applying for posts in sociology in other universities. The subject was in a state of expansion; there was much movement in the profession, largely because of the impact of the new universities, many of which had made sociology a main part of their new academic structure. There was some advance publicity for the book out by now, and he had done an interview which had appeared in the Observer; all this seemed to help his chances. He was invited for interview at three of the universities to which he wrote; one of them was Watermouth, and that was the one that interested him most, for here was a new programme, with a chance for him to develop his own approach. Now he told Barbara what he had done. At first she was indignant, recognizing that it was an element in an obscure campaign against her. But then she became curious, and when he came down to Watermouth, taking the long train journey down from Leeds, to attend the interview, Barbara came down with him.
This was when the Kirks visited Watermouth for the first time. Howard was interviewed in the panelled Gaitskell Room of the Elizabethan hall which had been the original starting-place of the new university, before the towers and the pre-stressed concrete and the glass-framed buildings that were now beginning to spread across the site, the achievement of that notable Finnish architect Jop Kaakinen, had even been conceived. The interview was affable. The interdisciplinary programme of the university, and its novel teaching methods, excited Howard, after Leeds; he could see he was being taken seriously; the modernistic campus growing on the old estate pleased him, seemed in concord with his sense of transforming history. Meanwhile, down in the town, Barbara, who had left the baby in Leeds with friends, poked around in the radical bookshops, checked out the organic delicatessen, inspected the boutiques, and looked in on the family-planning clinic. She had never really been in the south of England before; it had an optimistic, exciting look to her; she thought she saw an amiable radicalism everywhere, a fighting modern style that seemed several light-years ahead of the grimmer, tighter world of Leeds. In this new place, she saw herself, saw both of them, claiming the remaining historical rights the old Kirks had denied themselves. She sat on a railed seat on the promenade and stared outwards at the sea, a novelty, a pleasure. There were two or three palm-trees flourishing in the promenade gardens, and a few oranges growing. She thought of the child playing down on the sandy beach; she thought of the swinging parties. There were hippies with backpacks leaning over the railings; there were people talking French; there were works by Marx and Trotsky on the railway station bookstall. She saw a chance for herself in this sunlight; when Howard came back from the interview, and she learned he had been offered the job, she was bright with excitement. 'You ought to take it,' she said, 'it's a good scene.'
'I already have,' said Howard, 'you're too late.'
'Oh, you shit,' she said, 'without consulting me'; but she was pleased, and they walked down on the beach, and skimmed stones together out at the sea. The stones bounced and it was not like Leeds. And that, more or less, give or take an element of self-interest here, a perceptual distortion or two there, a dark ambiguity in this place or that, is the exemplary and liberating story, as Howard explains, of how the little northern Kirks came to be down in Watermouth, with its high sunshine record and its palms and its piershow and its urban demolition, buying wine and cheese and bread, and giving parties; and, of course, growing some more-for the Kirks, whatever else they have done, have always gone right on growing.