What Not

A Prophetic Comedy

Rose Macaulay

• Publisher: Handheld Classics
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781912766048
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Hastily withdrawn from publication shortly after its controversial release in 1918, only to be reissued in 1919, What Not's initial momentum was squashed. Now republished for the first time with the suppressed pages reinstated, What Not is a lost classic of feminist protest at social engineering, and rage at media manipulation.

Kitty Grammont and Nicholas Chester are in love. Kitty is certified as an A for breeding purposes, but politically ambitious Chester has been uncertificated, and may not marry. Kitty wields power as a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Brains, which makes these classifications, but does not have the freedom to marry who she wants. They ignore the restrictions and carry on a discreet affair. But it isn't discreet enough for the media: the popular press, determined to smash the brutal regime of the Ministry of Brains, has found out about Kitty and Chester, and scents an opportunity for a scandalous exposure.

Aldous Huxley was a frequent guest at Macaulay's flat while she was writing What Not. Fourteen years later, his Brave New World borrowed many of Macaulay's ideas for Huxley's own prophetic vision.

Note on the text

This text of What Not is based on the 1919 Constable & Company edition, dated 1918 but not published until 1919. This was the second edition, as its ‘Note on the 1919 Edition’ (see below) makes clear, published after what Rose Macaulay calls a ‘slight alteration’ in the text of the first edition, to avoid libel. The original passages have been reinstated here, by the kind permission of John Clute, the present owner of a first edition formerly owned by Michael Sadleir, a director of Constable, in which the pencilled excision marks are clear. The replacement passages have been retained in the Notes at the end of the volume, for comparison.

Other than this reinstatement, the text has only been altered to correct typographical errors in the original, and to modernise the spelling of a few words where it was felt that the older forms that Macaulay used might be distracting or intrusive.

To
Civil Servants
I have known

‘Wisdom is very unpleasant to the unlearned: he that is without understanding will not remain with her. She will lie upon him as a mighty stone of trial; and he will cast her from him ere it be long. For wisdom is according to her name, and she is not manifest unto many …

‘Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children …’

— Jesus, son of Sirach²⁰, c. 150 BC

‘It’s domestickness of spirit, selvishnesse, which is the great let to Armies, Religions, and Kingdomes good.’

— W Greenhill, 1643

‘It has come to a fine thing if people cannot live in their homes without being interfered with by the police … You are upsetting the country altogether with your Food Orders and What Not.’

— Defendant in a food-hoarding case, January 1918

What Not

Apology

One cannot write for evermore of life in war-time, even if, as at times seems possible, the war outlasts the youngest of us. Nor can one easily write of life as it was before this thing came upon us, for that is a queer, half-remembered thing, to make one cry. This is a tale of life after the war, in which alone there is hope. So it is, no doubt, inaccurate, too sanguine in part, too pessimistic in part, too foolish and too far removed from life as it will be lived even for a novel. It is a shot in the dark, a bow drawn at a venture. But it is the best one can do in the unfortunate circumstances, which make against all kinds of truth, even that inferior kind which is called accuracy. Truth, indeed, seems to be one of the things, along with lives, wealth, joy, leisure, liberty, and forest trees, which has to be sacrificed on the altar of this all-taking war, this bitter unsparing god, which may perhaps before the end strip us of everything we possess except the integrity of our so fortunately situated island, our indomitable persistence in the teeth of odds, and the unstemmed eloquence of our leaders, all of which we shall surely retain.

This book is, anyhow, so far as it is anything beyond an attempt to amuse the writer, rather of the nature of suggestion than of prophecy, and many will think it a poor suggestion at that. The suggestion is of a possible remedy for what appears to have always been the chief human ailment, and what will, probably, after these present troubles, be even more pronounced than before. For wars do not conduce to intelligence. They put a sudden end to many of the best intellects, the keenest, finest minds, which would have built up the shattered ruins of the world in due time. And many of the minds that are left are battered and stupefied; the avenues of thought are closed, and people are too tired, too old, or too dulled by violence, to build up anything at all. And besides these dulled and damaged minds, there are the great mass of the minds which neither catastrophe nor emotion nor violence nor age nor any other creature can blunt, because they have never been acute, have never had an edge, can cut no ice nor hew any new roads.

So, unless something drastic is done about it, it seems like a poor look-out.

This book contains the suggestion of a means of cure for this world-old ill, and is offered, free, to a probably inattentive and unresponsive Government, a close and interested study of whom has led the writer to believe that the erection of yet another Department might not be wholly uncongenial.

It will be observed that the general state of the world and of society in this so near and yet so unknown future has been but lightly touched upon. It is unexplored territory, too difficult for the present writer, and must be left to the forecastings of the better informed.

A word as to the title of this work, which may seem vague, or even foolish. Its source I have given. Food Orders we all know; What Not was not defined by the user of the phrase, except by the remark that it upset the country. The businesses described in this tale fulfil that definition; and, if they be not What Not, I do not know what is.

April 1918

Note to the 1919 reissue

As this book was written during the war, and intended prophetically, its delay until some months after the armistice calls for a word of explanation.

The book was ready for publication in November 1918, when it was discovered that a slight alteration in the text was essential, to safeguard it against one of the laws of the realm. As the edition was already bound, this alteration has naturally taken a considerable time.

However, as the date of the happenings described in What Not is unspecified, it may still be regarded as a prophecy, not yet disproved.

RM
March 1919

Chapter 1
The Ministry

1

After the Great War (but I do not say how long after), when the tumult and the shouting had died, and those who were left of the captains and the kings²¹ had gone either home or to those obscure abodes selected for them by their more successful fellows (to allay anxiety, I hasten to mention that three one-time Emperors were among those thus relegated to distance and obscurity), and humanity, released from its long torment, peered nervously into a future darkly divined (nervously, and yet curiously, like a man long sick who has just begun to get about again and cannot yet make anything coherent of the strange, disquieting, terrifying, yet enchanting jumble which breaks upon his restored consciousness) — while these things happened, the trains still ran through the Bakerloo tube²², carrying people to their day’s work.

Compartments in tube trains are full of variety and life — more so than in trains above ground, being more congested, and having straps, also no class snobbery. Swaying on adjacent straps were a fluffy typist, reading ‘The Love He Could Not Buy’, in the Daily Mirror, a spruce young civil servant on his way to the Foreign Office, reading The Times, a clergyman reading the Challenge, who looked as if he was interested in the Life and Liberty movement, another clergyman reading the Guardian, who looked as if he wasn’t, an elderly gentleman reading the Morning Post, who looked patriotic but soured, as if he had volunteered for National Service during the Great War and had found it disappointing, a young man reading the Post-War, the alert new daily, and a citizen with a law-abiding face very properly perusing the Hidden Hand. The Hidden Hand was the Government daily paper. Such a paper had for long been needed; it is difficult to understand why it was not started long ago. All other papers are so unreliable, so tiresome; a government must have one paper on which it can depend for unfailing support. So here was the Hidden Hand, and its readers had no excuse for ignorance of what the government desired them to think about its own actions.

The carriage was full of men and women going to their places of business. There were tired young men, lame young men, pale and scarred young men, brown and fit young men, bored and blasé young men, jolly and amused young men, and nearly all, however brown or fit or pale or languid or jolly or bored, bore a peculiar and unmistakable impress stamped, faintly or deeply, on their faces, their eyes, their carriage, the set of their shoulders.

There were, among the business men and girls, women going shopping, impassive, without newspapers, gazing at the clothes of others, taking in their cost, their cut, their colour. This is an engrossing occupation. Those who practise it sit quite still, without a stir, a twinkle, a yawn, or a paper, and merely look, all over, up and down, from shoes to hat … They are a strange and wonderful race of beings, these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the stamp of public events. The representatives of the type in the Bakerloo this morning did not carry any apparent impress of the Great War. It would take something more than a great war, something more even than a food crisis, to leave its mark on these sphinx-like and immobile countenances. Kingdoms may rise and fall, nations may reel in the death-grapple, but they sit gazing still, and their minds, amid the rocking chaos, may be imagined to be framing some such thoughts as these: ‘Those are nice shoes. I wonder if they’re the ones Swan and Edgar have at 30s. She’s trimmed her hat herself, and not well. That skirt is last year’s shape. That’s a smart coat. Dear me, what stockings; you’d think anyone would be ashamed.’

These women had not the air of reckless anticipation, of being alert for any happening, however queer, that, in differing degrees, marked the majority of people in these days. For that, in many, seemed the prevailing note; a series of events so surprising as to kill surprise, of disasters so appalling as to numb horror, had come and gone, leaving behind them this reckless touch, and with it a kind of greed, a determination to snatch whatever ...

Table of contents

• Title Page Content
• Introduction
• Further reading
• Note on the text
• Footnotes