These are the two traits (I am/about me/mine) that I know best:
1. Spitting out plum stones is something one ordinarily connects with a certain cheerfulness, and I am doing that, my pockets are full of mirabelles. I have just pulled the branch down in order to get hold of the best the ripest the reddest. But I am not the least bit cheerful, despite all the spitting, the flying stones.
Who knows whether anyone thinks it is natural to live, to feel like a fish in water, here in life.
I who love the city yesterday sat in Christianshavns Torv and felt completely isolated from all the walking cycling driving laughing coughing hawking old young those with dogs or children and those without. Alone. Isolated. I have always had to haul others in after labouring to catch them in my net. Nobody ever hauls me in. That is the price of suffering from an abundance of energy, all initiative is left to me. So it was a matter of getting into my car and driving out to the country, where people are few and far between. She had just returned from the stables, and dusted, booted and spurred, she told me that she is pregnant.
‘… and she appeared for a second like some insolent and powerful captain, returning booted and spurred from a field of triumph, the dust of battle yet upon him, confronting the sovereign powers whom he was now ready if need be to bend to his will.’
— Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
But I did not try to talk her into having an abortion, even though she is getting on in years and does not know who the father is. I just thought I should have been the one expecting.
2. I have met a frail woman, a touching individual with a few ailments. I am so on top of the world that I can’t keep still. She is a colleague, a new employee. When we walk down the corridor together, to the staff room, during lunch break – I could pick her up, high in the air, and run off shouting. Then I picture myself as a rapist with a porcelain figurine. She has small, delicate hands and is disproportionately aged in relation to her years, wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, furrowed cheeks, an old neck. She is from Russia and her name is Swaka. And so delightful. And she has a sense of humour and has nothing against it all being over one day. For that reason she merrily grows older and older. In a mood like that I feel like giving women I pass a smack on the bottom. Men cannot deal with me – that’s why I have no boyfriend. This mood, this me… yesterday I saw a red evening bag in a shop that sold nothing but black items, and I thought: That’s how it feels when this mood comes over me, like a crimson flash of lightning in my brain, bang then I am nothing but energy bang spanking new, every kind of reservation swept aside, I shine and sparkle, I charge ahead on a backdrop of black.
In A Severed Head (which Camilla lent me) the characters live with their front doors unlocked, or they all have keys to one another’s houses, and for that reason they constantly run in and out of one another’s houses, and they run into one another, in one another’s houses. And this wide-openness shapes the very atmosphere in the novel. Then one of them has settled in, drunk and despondent, in the basement, and the sister of the owner of the house (who looks like a cliché of a lesbian from the beginning of the twentieth century, close-cropped hair wearing thick-soled walking shoes and a tailor-made suit in heavy tweed, imagine Gertrude Stein) accidentally bumps into him down there. The novel is cut like the episodes of Sherlock Holmes I love watching on TV (gas lamps, carriages, opium, falls from great heights, London in fog and rain, not to mention the capes), one person says something crucial about another and then cut: we find ourselves in a scene with him, where all of his dirty work is plain to see.
The characters are well-off and either they do not work or work very little, and therefore they have time to ensure love is the most important thing in their lives. The actual drama. They have affairs with one another, left, right, and centre, they run in and out of one another’s hearts. (For that reason it is also very difficult for the novel to end – because who is going to finally and conclusively remain in whose heart?) When the characters are not loving or (briefly) mourning for their lost love, they are talking about love. A conversation might sound like this:
‘– What anyway does a love do which has no course?
– It is changed into something else. Something heavy or sharp, that you carry within and bind around with your substance until it ceases to hurt. But that is your affair.’
— Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
I come to think about it, because I have stood on the sidelines and observed how Camilla has recovered from her darling over the ocean, oh, this small addition: ‘But that is your affair.’
Camilla talked at great length about her romance; I underlined the following in The Unicorn by Murdoch, which Camilla has also lent me (so when she rereads it, she can find herself there): ‘With that pride which accompanies falling in love at what passes as an advanced age he was but too eager to display it to everyone.’
In fact she wrote to him and told him how much she had fallen for him that night, at the hotel in New York.
‘If only you knew,’ he replied, ‘how many people are falling for me.’
Afterwards he listed and described a number of these women, one of whom was his wife, still madly in love after twenty-five years of marriage. He could not have done her a bigger favour; who wants to be one among many, one person in a chorus of sighs. The love (Camilla’s) subsided in one afternoon; nearly. As it does with the characters in A Severed Head, where the next one is generally better than the first. And here I place a pensive (but with the beginning of a smile?) round yellow micro-face. I am the only admirer of smileys among the companions.