Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [139]
Philip and Elinor spent a couple of days with Mrs. Bidlake at Gattenden. Then it was the turn of Philip’s parents. They arrived at Chamford to find that Mr. Quarles had just bought a dictaphone. Sidney did not allow his son to remain for long in ignorance of his triumph. The dictaphone was his greatest achievement since the calculating typewriter.
‘I’ve just made an acquisition,’ he said in his rich voice, shooting the words up over Philip’s head. ‘Something that will interest you, as a writer.’ He led the way to his study.
Philip followed him. He had expected to be overwhelmed with questions about the East and the tropics. Instead of which his father had only perfunctorily enquired if the voyage had been good, and had gone on, almost before Philip could answer, to speak about his own affairs. For the first moment Philip had been surprised and even a little nettled. But the moon, he reflected, seems larger than Sirius, because it is nearer. The voyage, his voyage, was to him a moon, to his father the smallest of little stars.
‘Here,’ said Mr. Quarles and raised the cover. The dictaphone was revealed. ‘Wonderful invention!’ He spoke with profound selfsatisfaction. It was the sudden rising, in all its refulgence, of his moon. He explained the workings of the machine. Then, tilting up his face, ‘It’s so useful,’ he said, ‘when an idyah occurs to you. You put it into wahds at once. Talk to yourself; the machine remembahs. I have it brought up to my bedroom every night. Such valuable idyahs come to one when one’s in bed, don’t you find? Without a dictaphone they would get lost.’
‘And what do you do when you’ve got to the end of one of these phonograph records?’ Philip enquired.
‘Send it to my secretarah to be typed.’
Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve got a secretary now?’
Mr. Quarles nodded importantly. ‘Only a half-time one, so far,’ he said, addressing the cornice of the opposite wall. ‘You’ve no idyah what a lot I have to do. What with the book, and the estate, and letters, and accounts and…and…things,’ he concluded rather lamely. He sighed, he shook the martyr’s head. ‘You’re lucky, my dyah boy,’ he went on. ‘You have no distractions. You can give your whole time to writing. I wish I could give all mine. But I have the estate and all the rest. Trivial—but the business must be done.’ He sighed again. ‘I envy you your freedom.’
Philip laughed. ‘I almost envy myself sometimes. But the dictaphone will be a great help.’
‘Oh, it will,’ said Mr. Quarles
‘Undoubtedlah.’
‘How’s the book going?’
‘Slowly,’ his father replied, ‘but surely. I think I have most of my materials now.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘You novelists,’ said Mr. Quarles patronizingly, ‘you’re fortunate. You can just sit down and write. No preliminarah labour necessarah. Nothing like this.’ He pointed to the filing cabinets and the cardindex boxes. They were the proofs of his superiority, as well as of the enormous difficulties against which he had to struggle. Philip’s books might be successful. But after all, what was a novel? An hour’s entertainment, that was all; to be picked up and thrown aside again, carelessly. Whereas the largest book on democracy…And anyone could write a novel. It was just a question of living and then proceeding to record the fact. To compose the largest book on democracy one had to take notes, collect materials from innumerable sources, buy filing cabinets and typewriters, portable, polyglottic, calculating; one needed a cardindex and loose-leaf notebooks and a fountain-pen that could write six thousand words without having to be refilled; one required a dictaphone and a half-time secretary who would shortly have to become a whole-time one. ‘Nothing like this,’ he insisted.
‘Oh, no,’ said Philip, who had been wandering round the room examining the literary apparatus. ‘Nothing like this.’ He picked up some newspaper clippings that were lying under a paper weight on the lid of the unopened Corona.