Jonathan Socrates
[ Biography ]
The Factory: Chapters 1 – 4
Chapter 1: First Things
In order to relate to any man considered by at least a few to be a genius, one must begin by travelling back to a point early in his life where his intellect and that of the general public are as close to par as possible, without travelling so far back that any hint of the personality in question fades into the pool of generic infancy. In the case of Johannes Factotum, however, even in the nebulous period of early childhood, his latent talent could not pass unnoticed.
An anecdote Johannes often recalled his mother reciting many a time was of the two-year-old Factotum standing up to lead the orchestra in a classical concert in the grounds of Howard Davis Park. Compelled to do so by what he described to me almost two decades later as the apathetic slaughtering of Holst's The Perfect Fool, young Johannes rose with duty amongst pools of picnicking families, lifted his chubby, little arms, and began conducting away. With graceful extensions, gentle, retracting pinches and deft, forceful strokes, he shaped the music by charging the orchestra, in turn electrifying the audience. By all accounts available, as he brought the piece to a close, he found himself in the centre of a standing ovation, with the leader of the orchestra raising his violin in salute of the child. It is said that the conductor dismounted the stage with the intention of surrendering his baton but was impeded by the density of the crowd and disorientated by its deafening applause. Johannes attributes this early experience with giving him the taste for artistic success, though later on, he would grow indifferent to popular recognition.
There are other examples of his early artistic output, notably his poem 'First Things' which he scribed at the age of seven. It consists of four abcb rhyming quatrains, of which only the third 'dark' stanza still exists:
The first time I cut myself,
The first sting of a bee,
These firsts are not welcome
To you or to me.1
I recall that, during my convalescence following a concussion incurred by Johannes throwing a book at my head after my questioning his use of an Old High German word in a pop song he was writing, I received from him a text message containing the stanza quoted above. A typical example of the charity he readily proffered those in need.
At the age of thirteen, Johannes was sent away to boarding school by mistake. His parents thought that he wanted to go as all his friends were going, albeit to different ones; and he thought that his parents wanted him to go, so he went without a fuss. The family would only find out seven years later that none of them approved very strongly of the idea. Young Factotum didn't care much for his new school, but politely refrained from creating a fuss by saving his tears for bedtime, a routine he would adhere to admirably for three years. His mother, who was less inclined to respect social protocol, wept publically as she parted with Johannes for the first time, and continued to do so in front of her husband as the sombre couple drove away into the night, leaving their son in his new home with its strange smells, strange people and strange customs.
One of these customs was to do with language. An official lexicon was issued to each new boy listing in precisely alphabetical order familiar words – shower, swimming pool, teacher – and their translations into school-speak, which they were instructed to memorise. One of the first acts of rebellion of the hitherto conformist Johannes was his refusal to adopt this new vocabulary. It was a silent revolution, a form of passive resistance, but an experience that taught him, as his docile classmates slipped further and further down the wretched route to conformity, the essential role of words in the process of indoctrination. Or, as he put it to me, 'the powerlessness of wordlessness.'2
But I will not dwell on these early flourishes of artistic prowess and philosophical aptitude, and focus instead on his passage from innocent creative youthfulness to full artistic maturity – a journey I was honoured to witness first hand that took exactly nine months and which resulted ultimately in his demise.
Chapter 2: Vardøger
Suddenly plunged into darkness he instantly came face to face with his own image. As he stared into the blackness of his eyes, shots of light illuminated partially, and for but an instant, buildings, vistas and faces, some familiar, some unknown, and these images, along with flashes of flesh and bursts of sound flitted through his consciousness at a rhythm detached from the one gently jolting his body from below. There were words as well – some already uttered, some yet to be spoken – names, declarations, promises.
All that he saw while staring into his own eyes, all that he heard, all that he felt, were fragments of the past, fantastical glimpses of the future, as the new identity that he had been mentally forging for some time now was about to be born.
But just as he began to lose himself in these images, the reality he had been neglecting burst through, flooding his carriage with light and spewing forth a speeding scene of London, at once usurping and banishing the darkness – upon the purity of which his reflection had suspended itself – as his train emerged from a tunnel speeding towards the capital.
***
Johannes pulled his forehead back from the window, blinking to accustom himself to the light, leaving a smudge on the glass where his head had been resting. Although the train had not begun to slow down, Johannes noticed that some passengers around him were gathering their luggage. He began to panic and frantically stuffed his pen and book into his suitcase.
Ready to alight, he sat and waited.
The train showed no sign of slowing. Johannes looked around. Everyone seemed so calm – chatting, reading, listening to music. He raked his hair nervously, looked about once more, hesitated, and from his pocket removed a brown leather journal. He hurriedly unravelled the thin leather strap by which it was bound, opened it and inhaled deeply. His expiration propelled forth in a violent whisper the name which he had written on one page: Julia.
As if he had breathed life into it, the name started to claw for Johannes, trying to pull him in, or rather, to pull him up, above all that was tangible. It tried to pull him through, beyond, and Johannes would happily follow. Images evoked by this one word started to congeal in front of him, but before they could solidify fully, they were violently dispersed as a middle-aged man in a dark suit charged down the aisle, knocking Johannes' elbow as he was once again abruptly reintroduced to reality. As he looked out onto the platform, there she was, rushing past. The reason he had decided to come to London.
How did she know he was here? He hadn't told her he was coming. They hadn't written to each other in eight months. But he was sure it was her. So why was she running away? He jumped off the train and gave chase, manoeuvring himself and his suitcase through the crowd. Johannes had the body of a long-distance runner but the stamina of a chain smoker, although, curiously enough, he was neither. He glimpsed a flash of golden hair descend into the tube station. He followed her down.
On the platform, after having told the cashier to keep the change from a twenty for a single; after having obstacle-coursed his way down the escalator to the aggravation of the obstacles; after having mailed himself through the closing doors of the carriage and collapsed onto the seat next to her, the inexplicable became tediously clear. This was nothing but her spitting image, her double, her dopplegänger.
***
His eyes kept flicking down towards her crossed legs protruding from her dress, which pressed against him with every God-sent jolt of the tube. It wasn't Julia but he regarded this lookalike as a reasonable albeit flawed representation. A two-dimensional Byzantine icon in the likeness of the object of his reverence – a symbol to focus meditation and aid worship. As the girl read her magazine, Johannes could not take his mind off her flesh, her legs. It was because of these legs – or, rather, the legs that they represented – that he and Julia had met in the first place, in Jersey, three years ago, almost to the day.
***
Stumbling through the woods at night, he and his friends had gone hunting for the Swedish language students whom, from the beach, they had heard laughing and drinking. The language students arrived in their flocks every summer. The female-male ratio always fell greatly in favour of the hot-blooded, male, adolescent natives who desperately anticipated their arrival every summer holiday.3
As the boys made their way through the pitch black, their number systematically began to decrease as local boy paired off with foreign girl and the new couple faded away into the night. After some time, Johannes found himself alone. The woods rose up steeply from the beach and Johannes realised he had reached the highest point. He turned around and looked down on the bay, whose border with the land could only be distinguished in the dark by the string of twinkling lights which formed a crescent along the promenade. The giggles, chirps and moans of the invisible couples strewn around him, which Johannes imagined as copulating corpses on a mythical battlefield, meshed with the sound of the sea, and from where he was standing, right above the bay, this aural cocktail seemed to fill the whole world.
He breathed in deeply, alone. Alone in being alone.
On exhaling, he tilted forward, just enough to give himself over to gravity, setting in motion a jagged jog down the wooded hillside, only aware of the trees by how their black silhouettes dissected the carve of the promenade lights. His strides widened and his pace quickened until he had finally lost all control, his fate resting on the ill-founded belief that each heavy step would somehow avoid any inconsistency in the slope.
Suddenly, with a yelp, the woods flipped ninety degrees towards him and Johannes found himself lying on the floor, winded. He went to release his leg from the debris entwining it but his hand met with a warm, soft surface which caused him to recoil. He sat up and realised he was face to face with a girl, a blonde girl, one of the Scandinavians, he supposed, on whose bare leg his hand had lain.
And following a brief introduction – a courteous formality – Johannes and his new acquaintance dissolved into the woodland, and into each other, joining in with the cacophonous chorus of adolescent exploration that hummed all around the woods, high above the black sea loudly lapping the shore beneath.
***
He and Julia met up several more times that summer, at first by coincidence, and then by Johannes' design. He discovered that she was not Swedish, but in fact English, from London, on holiday with her family. She was staying in a hotel along the beach from his house and he would appear as she exited in her bikini and flip-flops. He would steal her away to some secluded spot and they would talk for hours about their dreams, or rather her dreams, as Johannes had no idea what he wanted in life. She would go to study Fine Art at university in London. She would become an artist. She spoke of artists whom Johannes had heard of but knew nothing about. She commented and criticised while he nodded along, wondering how someone his own age could know so much about such things. Her parents took her to galleries which she would name. He would acknowledge them, never having heard of them. As far as Johannes was aware, Jersey didn't have any galleries, and if it did, he wouldn't be able to drop their names into conversation and expect anyone to have heard of them.
Despite their long conversations Johannes could never recreate the physical intimacy of that night in the woods. Perhaps it was down to the subsequent lack of alcohol which, in hindsight, had served greatly to facilitate proceedings. Right up to the present moment where he and her double sat side by side on the tube with Johannes relying on the jolting of the carriage to provide snatches of physical contact, his relationship with Julia had remained frustratingly platonic. But he never believed that that was her intention.
Chapter 3: Admissions and Denial
Johannes arrived in London not knowing what he wanted from life, but certain he would find out in the city. The confusion and uncertainty he felt on entering the capital was confounded further by two factors, both evident in the previous chapter, and each relating to two areas of his life in need of fulfilment: love and creativity.
Firstly, love, common to all adolescents and thus lacking in interest to the assumed reader of this Work, will be bypassed as far as possible, but an unavoidable fact is that it is love, or the perception of love, which sets Johannes on his creative path; and it is love which ultimately leads to his undoing. A flash of brilliance bookended by love.
But love is common. Love is not interesting in itself. It is the expression of love, of hate, of fear, and of confusion by a unique talent, such as the one possessed by Factotum, which deserves the attention of critics. It is his mind, for want of a better word, not his heart, which should interest us, or whatever it is that so enables him to transform base emotion into works of genius.
His dual quests for fulfilment in both creativity and love were, however, hampered early on.
This hampering arrived one morning on the doormat of his parents' house in Jersey, just before he had left for London, in the form of a rejection letter from the University. He had applied to read English literature, and had bought his plane ticket to London early in the summer in anticipation of his new life. Although his school grades were not as sufficiently high as was recommended by the prospectus, Johannes was certain of obtaining a place. His confidence lay in an extra, unsolicited attachment to his application which he was sure would guarantee him entry, and compensate for the lack of traditional methods of academic evaluation.
Factotum had appended a critical essay extolling the virtues of the verse of his favourite poet, William McGonagall, and defending the great Scot against backward-thinking, closed-minded critics.4 Unfortunately, one of these backward-thinking critics held the position of Admissions Tutor at the University, and thus the poor Johannes' application was venomously cast aside.
Factotum never disclosed the devastating information of the letter to his parents and instead went about preparing his departure as if all were well. He resolved to go to London and make his case in person to this ignoramus of an academic, for he had to justify his being in London, and he had to be in London for that was where, according to his journal at the time, love was waiting.
***
Johannes alighted from the tube at Temple station and set off towards his first port of call: the University.
He turned up with his suitcase – but without an appointment – and made his way through the empty halls, abandoned by students for summer, until he arrived at the door of Dr George Alexandrine, the Admissions Tutor. He waited for a lull in the tapping of typing coming from inside, and then knocked.
Summoned from within, Johannes opened the door and found himself in an office instantly recognisable, to those familiar with such matters, as an extended, over-compensatory symbol of academia, and thus a self-acknowledgement on the part of its occupant, at least at a subconscious level, of academic inadequacy. First of all, according to Factotum's account, there were many, many books – as desperate a sign of low self-esteem as a middle-aged man in a red convertible sports car. A more subtle indication of the superficiality of this rogue's scholarly credentials were the several potted plants adorning the window-sill – nothing but a desperate, exaggerated attempt to convey to any visitor that many long hours were spent at the desk necessitating vegetative vestiges of homeliness. Thirdly, perhaps most outrageous and requiring no explanation, were the glasses and beard.5
After a pile of papers had been resituated on the floor adjacent to a toppling tower of books, Johannes sat down on a hard, plastic chair, leaving his suitcase awkwardly stood in the middle of the small room at an angle fractioning himself with the lowest common denominator opposite. With both his artistic and love-life at stake, he began to plead his case.
As Johannes calmly yet passionately implored Dr Alexandrine to reconsider the rejection he had issued by not only extolling McGonagall's verse but also by drawing comparisons between the great poet's life and his own, the indifference which initially marked the Admissions Tutor's face contorted first to bewilderment, and then to agitation.
Finally, Johannes was evicted from the office with many proverbial kicks to the backside. Valise in hand, he wandered woefully back along the vacant hallways, down the stairs, along more vacant hallways, through a succession of doors and found himself eventually in a quad. All around him, the University rose up dauntingly and flauntingly, with Johannes finally aware that this majestic edifice within which he was currently enveloped would not be the womb where his nascent ideas of profundity would gestate, but rather a bowel from which he was presently being excreted; and, moreover, it would no longer serve as a justification for his being in London, near to the chimeric object of his affections.
Chapter 4: The Housing Crisis
On the street outside the University, a bruised Johannes hailed a taxi – an extravagance justified by his weary mental state – and instructed the driver to deliver him to The Turbine – a youth hostel whose address he had noted in his journal.
After a short ride, he was delivered to a road of red brick mansion blocks which, to Johannes's island eyes, appeared rather grand and majestic. Standing out amongst all the red brickwork was a grey gothic house, whose ground floor had been gutted and violated to create some form of shop front. Behind wide, electric orange-framed windows stood large plastic placards with the words THE TURBINE printed in bold and arrows directing pedestrians down the narrow cobbled lane to the left.
The century-old brickwork on either side of the descending lane was vandalised from cobbles to head height with the same electric orange, marking radioactively vaginal the passage to the hostel.
The lane led to a courtyard, on one side of which stood the back of the gothic house, and on the other, a converted warehouse. Grafted onto the warehouse like an artificial appendage was a futuristic, metallic staircase with orange banisters. A group of six men were congregated at the top of the stairs outside the entrance. To Johannes's surprise, the guests were Liverpudlian and in their mid-thirties, all wearing white shirts, blue jeans and smart shoes. He brushed past them with a bowed head, minding not to knock any kneecaps with his suitcase.
Inside, with the exception of an orange display cabinet containing a photographic montage of bikinied, big-bosomed girls and muscular, topless boys downing shots and cocktails, the hostel was not how Johannes imagined it to have been. Rather than being met by a sweat'n'skunk musk, the foyer bustled with studious-looking guests charging about as if propelled by the icy jet streams blasting from a myriad of industrial-strength air-conditioning units.
Johannes approached the stern-looking receptionist who was berating a former guest down the phone in an accent he couldn't quite place.
'The disclaimer you signed states we do not have the responsibility for any of the items lost, stolen or misplaced, even if the item is in our possession ... Frankly, this not my problem ... Call your embassy – they'll be able to issue a new one ... If your plane is tomorrow, this is not my problem.'
She raised her head, saw Johannes waiting patiently, and hung up.
'Yes?'
'Hello, I'd like a room for about five days. Please.'
'Now?'
'Um, yep, if that's ok.'
'I'm sorry,' she said unapologetically, taking out her mobile. 'We're full,' and she started pattering the keypad with her thumbs.
'Er, are you sure?' asked Johannes, instantly regretting it. 'I really need a room. I've got nowhere to stay.'
She spat something in her native language, which Johannes inferred from the context and her delivery to be some form of insult.
'Of course I'm sure. Everywhere around here is full – it's the University's summer school. They've taken everything. Bastard students. Now, leave me alone.'
Johannes picked up his suitcase and walked out. He ambled down the road, past the mansion blocks and turned onto a high-street. Just as despair was setting in his young soul, it was dispelled as, on the other side of the road, he caught sight of an estate agency.
***
Five unattended desks stood between the entrance and the kitchenette at the back where four rounded men in their early thirties slouched around a stack of take-away pizza boxes, slices in hands, ties loosened, top buttons undone. As the door closed behind Johannes, they looked up. Lowered voices.
'Where's Nigel?'
'He's taking a piss.'
'My colleague will be with you in a moment sir,' called one, grabbing another slice.
Nigel emerged doing up his flies, crust in mouth, and offered his hand to Johannes.
'Come this way sir.'
Four paces later at his desk, Nigel initiated. 'So what can we do for you sir?'
'I need a flat. To rent.'
'Lovely jubbly. And what's your budget sir?'
And as Johannes answered, the agent's face momentarily spasmed a slight smile before it was quickly suppressed. Johannes, astute enough to have analysed the agent's reaction accurately, felt a pang of embarrassment followed by resentment at the slob opposite mocking his meagre means.
'Unfortunately, sir, it is extremely unlikely you'll find anything anywhere in this city with that kind of budget. Ever.'
'Well, what do you suggest?'
Nigel pondered a moment. 'Sir, would you mind me asking what you do for a living? You look very young, that's all.'
'I'm a student.'
'Ah, well, that's easy then innit! Why don't you apply for halls? You know, if I was your age I'd jump at the chance. I can just imagine. All that totty. Looking for new experiences. Bet some are really dirty, eh? Away from home for the first time. Late night parties. Bloody goldmine!' He leant in, lowering his voice, 'I'm about to give the best advice I've ever given in my career, and I've been doing this job for almost four years now: get a room in halls.'
'I can't.'
'Now don't be pessimistic. You just need to ...'
'No, I can't because I'm not actually a student. I was meant to be, and I still might. But right now, I'm not. I'm nothing.'
'Right ...'
Following procedure, Nigel scrawled down Johannes's details on what seemed to be a tomato-smeared serviette, said he'd give him a call if anything came up, and rushed him out of the office. Before the door closed, Johannes caught the eruption of restrained snickering coming from the kitchenette in the back.
***
Outside, away from the sluggish, brutish estate agents, Johannes was at a loss of what to do. He reflected upon his situation, contemplating alternative academic and accommodation options, but all his reasoned contemplations resulted in the conclusion that he should leave London, and, if not return to Jersey, then at least find some other locus which would be more accepting of both his unique mind and lowly means. But that was not an option he was willing to dwell upon for long, for quitting London excluded Julia from any potential future.
Footnotes
1. Factotum pointed out to me that as a result of the stanza's first line containing one too many syllables, 'self' in 'myself' is read rushed and awkwardly. This was a conscious decision to stress the subjectivity of pain and the solitude in which we all invariably suffer. In the final line, however, the poet acknowledges the universality of suffering.
2. Factotum noted that his refusal to enter the School's discourse community facilitated his resistance to its beliefs and therefore served to stave off indoctrination, which in turn ensured the safeguarding of independent thought. He attributed his later 'artistic and philosophical integrity to the linguistic path [he] chose to tread at this fork on the road to maturity.' Years later, and following on from this early experience, Johannes conducted some independent research in which he concluded that a major factor in the Allied victory in the Second World War was the lack of competence in the teaching of foreign languages in British educational institutions (coupled with French indifference to languages other than their own). This produced a psychological resistance to any form of foreign infiltration, whether it was military or cultural, Nazi or Nietzsche. Following the success of what Johannes supposes to have been an MI5 experiment, full-scale government subsidisation ensued to cap the quality of foreign language teaching which continues to this day. Unfortunately, due to the originality of his thesis, Johannes was reluctant to reveal to me his research, only its conclusions.
3. STI, or the Svensk Tränad Institut, sends on average five hundred students to Jersey each summer between the months of June and August with the primary objection of learning English, effectively increasing the island's population by 0.5%. About 75% of these students, aged between fifteen and seventeen, are female. According to questionnaires completed by the students anonymously on their final day, 89% reveal having had intimate relations with locals. C.f. www.sti-upptåg.se.
Unrelated but noteworthy by way of digression, data compiled surreptitiously from social networking websites by the States of Jersey for philanthropic ends under the auspices of the Department of Home Affairs suggest female islanders in relationships up to and including the age grouping of 29-34 feel sexually ostracized from their partners during this June-August period.
4. Inserted randomly between pages of Factotum's notebooks, I discovered hundreds of loose sheets with McGonagall's poems copied out in Johannes' hand. Looking at the young artist's verse in light of this discovery, I was in no doubt that Factotum had learnt everything he knew about scansion and metaphor from his poetic hero.
5. Expanding upon Freud's theory of penis envy, Factotum was said to have propagated a theory of his own amongst select, enlightened academic circles. I will not deign to replicate here his theory in all its complexity – primarily because, admittedly, I cannot fathom the intricate interweaving of psychoanalysis, socio-anthropology, politico-economics and trichology. Rather, I shall attempt to provide a layman's summary: As beards are inextricably linked with masculinity, contemporary Western society, being a relatively beardless one in comparison with those of other times and other places, feels metaphorically castrated and thus inferior. To compensate, Western politicians, economists and sociologists covertly initiated a programme of 'castrating' other regions of the world through deforestation, with the forest symbolising the beard. This venture required financial capital, and so investment was sought from what we now refer to as 'multi-national corporations' which were promised uninhibited usage of the land post-castration, and 100% of any profits accrued thereafter.
Johannes was well known for his chronic pogonophobia which, however, decreased ever so slightly after his reading City of God, in which Augustine of Hippo declares, 'There are some details of the body which are there for simply aesthetic reasons, and for no practical purpose – for instance, the nipples on a man's chest, and the beard on his face, the latter being clearly for a masculine ornament, not for protection. This is shown by the fact that women's faces are hairless, and since women are the weaker sex, it would surely be more appropriate for them to be given such a protection.' (City of God, Book 22, Chapter 24). Having read this, however, Factotum experienced a brief period of mammillaphobia.