'And did you yourself keep silent?' I asked. 'Did the campaign affect you?'
'Of course. It affected me, as it did most people. In theory, you see, a lot of people took the recommendations absolutely literally. And not only in theory, but in the collective memory too. Overall, I'd say it was, inevitably, a failure, but if you ask other people who lived through that period or who've heard about it first hand, or if you look up references to "careless talk" in certain books, whether historical or sociological or that mixture of both which is now pretentiously known as microhistory, you'll find that the accepted version, and even genuine personal recollections of the time, all affirm and believe that the campaign was a great success. And it's not that they're consciously lying or have come to some common agreement on the subject or that they're all quite mistaken, it's just that the real impact of something like that is barely verifiable or measurable (how can we possibly know how many catastrophes were unleashed by careless talk or how many avoided by secrecy?), and when wars are won (particularly a war in which all the odds are stacked against you), it's easy, almost unavoidable really, to think, in retrospect, that every effort made was selfless and vital and heroic, and that each and every one contributed to the victory. We had such a bad time and were so consumed by uncertainty, let us at least tell ourselves the tale that most lightens our mourning and compensates us for our sufferings. Oh, I'm sure there were millions of well-intentioned British people who took the warnings and the slogans very seriously indeed, and believed themselves to be scrupulously applying them in practice: that's what they believed in their consciences, and some actually did comply, especially, as I said, the troops and the politicians and the civil servants and the diplomats. As, of course, did I, but this involved no particular merit on my part: bear in mind that between 1942 and 1946 I was only in England for very short periods of time, when I was home on leave or on some specific mission which rarely detained me here for very long, my main base was miles away, my postings far too variable. As you saw in Who's Who, I ended up in the most diverse places during those years, and in jobs that already entailed or required secrecy, discretion, caution, pretence, deceit, betrayal if necessary (in the line of duty), and, needless to say, silence. I had an advantage, it cost me nothing to observe that last stricture to the letter. More than that, perhaps because I was on a constant state of alert wherever I was posted, I was more aware of what was happening to people generally, here at home, in the rearguard. The campaign was also a tremendous temptation, in a way, for the entire population: as immense as it was disregarded, as irresistible as it was unconscious, as unforeseen as it was sybilline.'
'What are you talking about, Peter? I don't understand.'
'The citizens of any nation, Jacobo, the vast majority, normally have nothing of any real value to tell anyone. If you stop each night to think about what has been told or recounted to you during the day by the many or few people with whom you have spoken (their degree of culture and knowledge is irrelevant), you will see how rare it is ever to hear anything of real value or interest or discernment, leaving to one side details and matters of a merely practical nature, but including, of course, on the other hand, everything that has reached you via the newspaper, the television or the radio (it's different if you've read it in a book, although that depends on the book). Almost everything that everyone says and communicates is humbug or padding, superfluous, commonplace, dull, interchangeable and trite, however much we feel it to be "ours" and however much people "feel the need to express themselves", to use the appallingly
"cursi" phrase of the day. It would have made not a jot of difference if the millions of opinions, feelings, ideas, facts and news that are expressed and recounted in the world had never been expressed at all.' (Needless to say, Wheeler resorted to my language for that word 'cursi', which has no exact equivalent in any other, but which here would mean something like 'corny'.) '"Hablando se entiende lagente", you often say in Spanish. "Talk things over and sort things out". "It's good to talk," people say in various situations and contexts. All it needed was for psychologists and the like to put that absurd notion into the heads of talkers for the latter to give even freer rein to what has always been their natural tendency. Talking is not in itself either good or bad, and as for people sorting things out by talking to each other, well, talking is just as much a source of conflict and misunderstanding as it is of harmony and understanding, of injustice and reparation, of war and armistice, as much a source of crimes and betrayals as it is of loyalties and loves, of condemnations and salvations, of insults and rages as it is of consolations and mollifications. Talking is probably the biggest waste of time amongst the population as a whole, regardless of age, sex, class, wealth or knowledge, it is wastage par excellence. Almost no one has anything to say that their potential listeners might consider to be of any real value, worth listening to, let alone bought, I mean no one pays for something that is normally free, apart from in a few very exceptional cases, and yet sometimes you're obliged to. Strangely, though, and despite everything, the majority continues to talk endlessly and every day. It's astonishing, Jacobo, when you stop to think: men and women are constantly explaining and recounting, as well as explaining themselves to themselves ad nauseam, looking for someone to listen to them or imposing their diatribes on others if they can, fathers on children, teachers on pupils, parish priests on parishioners, husbands on wives and wives on husbands, commanding officers on troops and bosses on subalterns, politicians on their supporters and even on the nation as a whole, television on its viewers, writers on their readers and even singers on their adolescent fans, who pay them the still greater tribute of chanting the choruses of their songs. Patients impose their diatribes on their psychiatrists too, except that here the nature of the relationship is revealing, it's a very clear transaction: the listener charges, the speaker pays. He who talks most pays most.' (These last words were again in Spanish: 'Desembolsa quien raja, se retrata quien larga – I thought of a woman friend of mine in Madrid, Dr Garcia Mallo, a very wise psychiatrist: I would advise her to increase her fees without the slightest twinge of conscience.) 'That is an exemplary relationship, and it would, in fact, be the most appropriate relationship for all occasions. For there's a real shortage of people willing to listen, there are never many, mainly because there are infinitely more who aspire to be in the other man's trench, that is, to be the ones doing the talking and, therefore, being listened to. In fact, if you think about it, a permanent and universal struggle is being waged to grab the floor: in any crowded place, private or public, there are dozens if not hundreds of irrepressible voices fighting to prevail or to cut in, and the desideratum of each voice would be to rise above all the others and silence them: and that, within tolerable limits, is what they try to do. It could be a street or a market or Parliament, the only difference is that, in the end, they agree to take turns and those waiting are forced to pretend to be listening; it could be in a pub or at a tea-party in a stately home, only the intensity and the tempo vary, in the latter one moves very slowly, one dissembles a little in order to gain confidence before holding forth as if in a tavern, albeit with the volume turned down. Gather four people round a table and very soon at least two of them will be competing to call the tune. I did well to become a teacher: for many years I enjoyed, unimpeded, the enormous privilege of not being interrupted by anyone, or, at least, not without my prior consent. And I still enjoy that privilege in my books and articles. That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing. It is and always has been, believe me, I know from my own experience and from that of others, you, as far as I know, have so far escaped, you have no idea how wise you have been not to be tempted by writing. For that is the illusory idea of all novelists, who publish their various immense tomes full of adventures and endless reflections, like Cervantes in Spain, like Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, and the author of that tedious quartet about Alexandria that was once all the rage, or Oxford's own Tolkien (who really was born in South Africa), the number of times I passed him in Merton College or saw him with Clive Lewis, enjoying a drink of an evening at The Eagle and Child, and not one of us had an inkling of the fate that awaited his three eccentric volumes, he even less than us, his highly sceptical colleagues; it's an illusion shared by poets too, who pack so much into those deceptively short lines, like Rilke and Eliot, or before them, Whitman and Milton, and, before them, your own great poet, Manrique; it's shared by playwrights who aim to keep an audience in their seats for four or more hours, as Shakespeare himself did in Hamlet and Henry IV: of course, at the time, a lot of the audience would have been standing and would have quite happily strolled in and out of the theatre as many times as they wished; it's shared by all those chroniclers and diarists and memorialists like Saint-Simon, Casanova, El Inca Garcilaso and Bernal Diaz or our own illustrious Pepys, who never tire of furiously filling up those sheets with ink; it's shared by such essayists as the incomparable Montaigne or me (not, I can assure you, that I'm comparing myself with him), who ingenuously imagine, while we write, that someone will have the miraculous degree of patience required to swallow everything we want to tell them about Henry the Navigator, it's madness, isn't it, I mean, my latest book about him is nearly five hundred pages long, it's rank discourtesy, an abuse really. Have you read it yet, by the way?'