[The black notebook now fulfilled its original plan, for both sides had been written on. Under the left side heading, The Source, was written:]
11th November, 1955
Today on the pavement a fat domestic London pigeon waddling among the boots and shoes of people hurrying for a bus. A man takes a kick at it, the pigeon lurches into the air, falls forward against a lamp-post, lies with its neck stretched out, its beak open. The man stands, bewildered: he had expected the pigeon to fly off. He casts a furtive look around, so as to escape. It is too late, a red-faced virago is already approaching him. ‘You brute! Kicking a pigeon!’ The man’s face is by now also red. He grins from embarrassment and a comical amazement. ‘They always fly away,’ he observes, appealing for justice. The woman shouts: ‘You’ve killed it—kicking a poor little pigeon!’ But the pigeon is not dead, it is stretching out its neck by the lamp-post, trying to lift its head, and its wings strive and collapse, again and again. By now there is a small crowd including two boys of about fifteen. They have the sharp watchful faces of the freebooters of the streets, and stand watching, unmoved, chewing gum. Someone says: ‘Call the RSPCA.’ The woman shouts: ‘There’d be no need for that if this bully hadn’t kicked the poor thing.’ The man hangs about, sheepish, a criminal hated by the crowd. The only people not emotionally involved are the two boys. One remarks to the air: ‘Prison’s the place for criminals like ’im.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ shouts the woman. She is so busy hating the kicker she doesn’t look at the pigeon. ‘Prison,’ says the second boy, ‘flogging, I’d say.’ The woman now sharply examines the boys, and realizes they are making fun of her. ‘Yes, and you too!’ she gasps at them, her voice almost squeezed out of her by her anger. ‘Laughing while a poor little bird suffers.’ By now the two boys are in fact grinning, though not in the same shamefaced incredulous way as the villain of the occasion. ‘Laughing,’ she says. ‘Laughing. You should be flogged. Yes. It’s true.’ Meanwhile an efficient frowning man bends over the pigeon, and examines it. He straightens himself and pronounces: ‘It’s going to die.’ He is right: the bird’s eyes are filming, and blood wells from its open beak. And now the woman, forgetting her three objects of hatred, leans forward to look at the bird. Her mouth is slightly open, she has a look of unpleasant curiosity as the bird gasps, writhes its head, then goes limp.
‘It’s dead,’ says the efficient man.
The villain, recovering himself, says apologetically, but clearly determined to have no nonsense: ‘I’m sorry, but it was an accident. I’ve never seen a pigeon before that didn’t move out of the way.’
We all look with disapproval at this hardened kicker of pigeons.
‘An accident!’ says the woman. ‘An accident!’
But now the crowd is dissolving. The efficient man picks up the dead bird, but that’s a mistake, for now he doesn’t know what to do with it. The kicker moves off, but the woman goes after him, saying: ‘What’s your name and address, I’m going to have you prosecuted.’ The man says, annoyed: ‘Oh, don’t make such a mountain out of a molehill.’ She says: ‘I suppose you call murdering a poor little bird a molehill.’ ‘Well, it isn’t a mountain, murder isn’t a mountain,’ observes one of the fifteen-year-olds, who stands grinning with his hands in his jacket pockets. His friend takes it up, sagaciously: ‘You’re right. Molehills is murder, but mountains isn’t.’ ‘That’s right,’ says the first, ‘when’s a pigeon a mountain? When it’s a molehill.’ The woman turns on them, and the villain thankfully makes his escape, looking incredibly guilty, despite himself. The woman is trying to find the right words of abuse for the two boys, but now the efficient man stands holding the corpse, and looking helpless, and one of the boys asks derisively: ‘You going to make pigeon pie, mister?’ ‘You cheek me and I’ll call the police,’ the efficient one says promptly. The woman is delighted, and says: ‘That’s right, that’s right, they should have been called long ago.’ One of the boys lets out a long, incredulous, jeering, admiring whistle. ‘That’s the ticket,’ he says, ‘call the coppers. They’ll put you down for stealing a public pigeon, mister!’ The two go off, rolling with laughter, but fast as they can without losing face, because the police have been mentioned.
The angry woman, the efficient man, the corpse, and a few bystanders remain. The man looks around, sees a rubbish receptacle on the lamp-post, and moves forward to drop the dead bird into it. But the woman intercepts him, grasps the pigeon. ‘Give it to me,’ she says, her voice suffused with tenderness. ‘I’ll bury the poor little bird in my window-box.’ The efficient man thankfully hurries off. She is left, looking down with disgust at the thick blood dropping from the beak of the pigeon.
Last night I dreamed of the pigeon. It reminded me of something, I didn’t know what. In my dream I was fighting to remember. Yet when I woke up I knew what it was—an incident from the Mashopi hotel week-ends. I haven’t thought of it for years, yet now it is clear and detailed. I am again exasperated because my brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable, unless, by a stroke of luck, there is an incident like yesterday’s. It must have been one of the intermediate week-ends, not the climactic last week-end, for we were still on good terms with the Boothbys. I remember Mrs Boothby coming into the dining-room with a .22 rifle at breakfast and saying to our group: ‘Can any of you shoot?’ Paul said, taking the rifle: ‘My expensive education has not failed to include the niceties of grouse and pheasant murder.’ ‘Oh, nothing so fancy like that,’ said Mrs Boothby. ‘There are grouse and pheasant about, but not too many. Mr Boothby mentioned he fancied a pigeon pie. He used to take out a gun now and then, but he’s lost the figure for it, so I thought if you could oblige…?’
Paul was handling the weapon quizzically. He finally said: ‘Well, I’d never thought of shooting birds with a rifle, but if Mr Boothby can do it, so can I.’
‘It’s not hard,’ said Mrs Boothby, as usual letting herself be taken in by the polite surface of Paul’s manner. ‘There’s a small vlei down there between the kopjes that’s full of pigeons. You let them settle and just pick them off.’
‘It’s not sporting,’ said Jimmy, owlish.
‘My God, it’s not sporting!’ cried Paul, playing up, clutching at his brow with one hand and holding the rifle away from him with the other.
Mrs Boothby was not sure whether to take him seriously, but she explained: ‘It’s fair enough. Don’t shoot unless you’re sure of killing, and then where’s the harm?’
‘She’s right,’ said Jimmy to Paul.
‘You’re right,’ said Paul to Mrs Boothby. ‘Dead right. We’ll do it. How many pigeons for Host Boothby’s pigeon pie?’
‘There’s not much use with less than six, but if you can get enough I can make pigeon pie for you as well. It’d make a change.’
‘True,’ said Paul, ‘it would make a change. Rely on us.’
She thanked him, gravely, and left us with the rifle.
Breakfast was over, it was about ten in the morning, and we were glad to have something to fill our time until lunch. A short way past the hotel a track turned off the main road at right-angles and wandered ruttily over the veld, following the line of an earlier African footpath. This track led to the Roman Catholic Mission about seven miles off in the wilderness. Sometimes the Mission car came in for supplies; sometimes farm labourers went by in groups to or from the Mission, which ran a large farm, but for the most part the track was empty. All that country was high-lying sandveld, undulating, broken sharply here and there by kopjes. When it rained the soil seemed to offer resistance, not welcome. The water danced and drummed in a fury of white drops to a height of two or three feet over the hard soil, but an hour after the storm, it was already dry again and the gullies and vleis were running high and noisy. It had rained the previous night so hard that the iron roof of the sleeping block had shaken and pounded over our heads, but now the sun was high, the sky unclouded, and we walked beside the tarmac over a fine crust of white sand which broke drily under our shoes to show the dark wet underneath.
There were five of us that morning, I don’t remember where the others were. Perhaps it was a week-end when only five of us had come down to the hotel. Paul carried the rifle, looking every inch a sportsman and smiling at himself in this role. Jimmy was beside him, clumsy, fattish, pale, his intelligent eyes returning always to Paul, humble with desire, ironical with pain at his situation. I, Willi and Maryrose came along behind. Willi carried a book. Maryrose and I wore holiday clothes—coloured dungarees and shirts. Maryrose wore blue dungarees and a rose-coloured shirt. I wore rose dungarees and a white shirt.
As soon as we turned off the main road on to the sand track we had to walk slowly and carefully, because this morning after the heavy rain there was a festival of insects. Everything seemed to riot and crawl. Over the low grasses a million white butterflies with greenish white wings hovered and lurched. They were all white, but of different sizes. That morning a single species had hatched or sprung or crawled from their chrysalises, and were celebrating their freedom. And on the grass itself, and all over the road were a certain species of brightly-coloured grasshopper, in couples. There were millions of them too.
‘And one grasshopper jumped on the other grasshopper’s back,’ observed Paul’s light but grave voice, just ahead. He stopped. Jimmy, beside him, obediently stopped too. We came to a standstill behind them both. ‘Strange,’ said Paul, ‘but I’ve never understood the inner or concrete meaning of that song before.’ It was grotesque, and we were all not so much embarrassed, as awed. We stood laughing, but our laughter was too loud. In every direction, all around us, were the insects, coupling. One insect, its legs firmly planted on the sand, stood still; while another, apparently identical, was clamped firmly on top of it, so that the one underneath could not move. Or an insect would be trying to climb on top of another, while the one underneath remained still, apparently trying to aid the climber whose earnest or frantic heaves threatened to jerk both over sideways. Or a couple, badly-matched, would topple over, and the one that had been underneath would right itself and stand waiting while the other fought to resume its position, or another insect, apparently identical, ousted it. But the happy or well-mated insects stood all around us, one above the other, with their bright round idiotic black eyes staring. Jimmy went off into fits of laughter, and Paul thumped him on the back. ‘These extremely vulgar insects do not merit our attention,’ observed Paul. He was right. One of these insects, or half a dozen, or a hundred would have seemed attractive, with their bright paint-box colours, half-submerged in thin emerald grasses. But in thousands, crude green and crude red, with the black blank eyes staring—they were absurd, obscene, and above all, the very emblem of stupidity. ‘Much better watch the butterflies,’ said Maryrose, doing so. They were extraordinarily beautiful. As far as we could see, the blue air was graced with white wings. And looking down into a distant vlei, the butterflies were a white glittering haze over green grass.
‘But my dear Maryrose,’ said Paul, ‘you are doubtless imagining in that pretty way of yours that these butterflies are celebrating the joy of life, or simply amusing themselves, but such is not the case. They are merely pursuing vile sex, just like these ever-so-vulgar grasshoppers.’
How do you know?’ enquired Maryrose, in her small voice, very earnest; and Paul laughed his full-throated laugh which he knew was so attractive, and fell back and came beside her, leaving Jimmy alone in front. Willi, who had been squiring Maryrose, gave way to Paul and came to me, but I had already moved forward to Jimmy, who was forlorn.
‘It really is grotesque,’ said Paul, sounding genuinely put-out. We looked where he was looking. Among the army of grasshoppers were two obtrusive couples. One was an enormous powerful-looking insect, like a piston with its great spring-like legs, and on its back a tiny ineffectual mate, unable to climb high enough up. And next to it, the position reversed: a tiny bright pathetic grasshopper was straddled by, dwarfed, almost crushed by an enormous powerful driving insect. ‘I shall try a small scientific experiment,’ announced Paul. He stepped carefully among the insects to the grasses at the side of the road, laid down his rifle and pulled a stem of grass. He went down on one knee in the sand, brushing insects aside with an efficient and indifferent hand. Neatly he levered the heavy-bodied insect off the small one. But it instantly sprang back to where it was, with a most surprisingly determined single leap. ‘We need two for this operation,’ announced Paul. Jimmy was at once tugging at a grass-stem, and took his place beside him, although his face was wrenched with loathing at having to bend down so close to the swarm. The two young men were now kneeling on the sandy road, operating their grass-stems. I and Willi and Maryrose stood and watched. Willi was frowning. ‘How frivolous,’ I remarked, ironical. Although, as usual, we were not on particularly good terms that morning, Willi allowed himself to smile at me and said with real amusement: ‘All the same, it is interesting.’ And we smiled at each other, with affection and with pain because these moments were so seldom. And across the kneeling boys Maryrose watched us, with envy and pain. She was seeing a happy couple and feeling shut out. I could not bear it, and I went to Maryrose, abandoning Willi. Maryrose and I bent over the backs of Paul and Jimmy and watched.
‘Now,’ said Paul. Again he lifted his monster off the small insect. But Jimmy was clumsy and failed, and before he could try again Paul’s big insect was back in position. ‘Oh, you idiot,’ said Paul, irritated. It was an irritation he usually suppressed, because he knew Jimmy adored him. Jimmy dropped the grass-stem and laughed painfully; tried to cover up his hurt—but by now Paul had grasped the two stems, had levered the two covering insects, large and small, off the two others, large and small, and now they were two well-matched couples, two big insects together and two small ones.
‘There,’ said Paul. ‘That’s the scientific approach. How neat. How easy. How satisfactory.’
There we all stood, the five of us, surveying the triumph of commonsense. And we all began to laugh again, helplessly, even Willi; because of the utter absurdity of it. Meanwhile all around us thousands and thousands of painted grasshoppers were getting on with the work of propagating their kind without any assistance from us. And even our small triumph was soon over, because the large insect that had been on top of the other large insect, fell off, and immediately the one which had been underneath mounted him or her.
‘Obscene,’ said Paul gravely.
‘There is no evidence,’ said Jimmy, trying to match his friend’s light grave tone, but failing, since his voice was always breathless, or shrill, or too facetious: ‘There is no evidence that in what we refer to as nature things are any better-ordered than they are with us. What evidence have we that all these—miniature troglodytes are nicely sorted out male above female? Or even’—he added daringly, on his fatally wrong note—‘male with female at all? For all we know, this is a riot of debauchery, males with males, females with females…’ He petered out in a gasp of laughter. And looking at his heated, embarrassed, intelligent face, we all knew that he was wondering why it was that nothing he ever said, or could say, sounded easy, as when Paul said it. For if Paul had made that speech, as he might very well have done, we would all have been laughing. Instead of which we were uncomfortable, and were conscious that we were hemmed in by these ugly scrambling insects.
Suddenly Paul sprang over and trod deliberately, first on the monster couple, whose mating he had organized, and then on the small couple.
‘Paul,’ said Maryrose, shaken, looking at the crushed mess of coloured wings, eyes, white smear.
‘A typical response of a sentimentalist,’ said Paul, deliberately parodying Willi—who smiled, acknowledging that he knew he was being mocked. But now Paul said seriously: ‘Dear Maryrose, by tonight, or to stretch a point, by tomorrow night, nearly all these things will be dead—just like your butterflies.’
‘Oh no,’ said Maryrose, looking at the dancing clouds of butterflies with anguish, but ignoring the grasshoppers. ‘But why?’
‘Because there are too many of them. What would happen if they all lived? It would be an invasion. The Mashopi hotel would vanish under a crawling mass of grasshoppers, it would be crushed to the earth, while inconceivably ominous swarms of butterflies danced a victory dance over the deaths of Mr and Mrs Boothby and their marriageable daughter.’
Maryrose, offended and pale, looked away from Paul. We all knew she was thinking about her dead brother. At such moments she wore a look of total isolation, so that we all longed to put our arms around her.
Yet Paul continued, and now he began by parodying Stalin: ‘It is self-evident, it goes without saying—and in fact there is no need at all to say it, so why should I go to the trouble?—However, whether there is any need to say a thing or not is clearly beside the point. As is well known, I say, nature is prodigal. Before many hours are out, these insects will have killed each other by fighting, biting, deliberate homicide, suicide or by clumsy copulation. Or they will have been eaten by birds which even at this moment are waiting for us to remove ourselves so that they can begin their feast. When we return to this delightful pleasure resort next week-end, or, if our political duties forbid, the week-end after, we shall take our well-regulated walks along this road and see perhaps one or two of these delightful red and green insects at their sport in the grass, and think, how pretty they are! And little will we reck of the million corpses that even then will be sinking into their last resting place all about us. I do not even mention the butterflies who, being incomparably more beautiful, though probably not more useful, we will actively, even assiduously miss—if we are not more occupied with our more usual decadent diversions.’
We were wondering why he was deliberately twisting the knife in the wound of Maryrose’s brother’s death. She was smiling painfully. And Jimmy, tormented continuously by fear that he would crash and be killed, had the same small wry smile as Maryrose.
‘The point I am trying to make, comrades…’
‘We know what point you are trying to make,’ said Willi, roughly and angrily. Perhaps it was for moments like these that he was the ‘father-figure’ of the group, as Paul said he was. ‘Enough,’ said Willi. ‘Let’s go and get the pigeons.’
‘It goes without saying, it is self-evident,’ said Paul, returning to Stalin’s favourite opening phrases just so as to hold his own against Willi, ‘that mine host Boothby’s pigeon pie will never get made, if we go on in this irresponsible fashion.’
We proceeded along the track, among the grasshoppers. About half a mile further on there was a small kopje, or tumbling heap of granite boulders; and beyond it, as if a line had been drawn, the grasshoppers ceased. They were simply not there, they did not exist, they were an extinct species. The butterflies, however, continued everywhere, like white petals dancing.
I think it must have been October or November. Not because of the insects, I’m too ignorant to date the time of the year from them, but because of the quality of the heat that day. It was a sucking, splendid, menacing heat. Late in a rainy season there would have been a champagne tang in the air, a warning of winter. But that day I remember the heat was striking our cheeks, our arms, our legs, even through our clothing. Yes, of course it must have been early in the season, the grass was short, tufts of clear sharp green in white sand. So that week-end was four or five months before the final one, which was just before Paul was killed. And the track we strolled along that morning was where Paul and I ran hand in hand that night months later through a fine seeping mist to fall together in the damp grass. Where? Perhaps near where we sat to shoot pigeons for the pie.
We left the small kopje behind, and now a big one rose ahead. The hollow between the two was the place Mrs Boothby had said was visited by pigeons. We struck off the track to the foot of the big kopje, in silence. I remember us walking, silent, with the sun stinging our backs. I can see us, five small brightly-coloured young people, walking in the grassy vlei through reeling white butterflies under a splendid blue sky.
At the foot of the kopje stood a clump of large trees under which we arranged ourselves. Another clump stood about twenty yards away. A pigeon cooed somewhere from the leaves in this second clump. It stopped at the disturbance we made, decided we were harmless and cooed on. It was a soft, somnolent drugging sound, hypnotic, like the sound of cicadas, which—now that we were listening—we realized were shrilling everywhere about us. The noise of cicadas is like having malaria and being full of quinine, an insane incessant shrilling noise that seems to come out of the ear-drums. Soon one doesn’t hear it, as one ceases to hear the fevered shrilling of quinine in the blood.
‘Only one pigeon,’ said Paul. ‘Mrs Boothby has misled us.’
He rested his rifle barrel on a rock, sighted the bird, tried without the support of the rock, and just when we thought he would shoot, laid the rifle aside.
We prepared for a lazy interval. The shade was thick, the grass soft and springy and the sun climbing towards midday position. The kopje behind us towered up into the sky, dominating, but not oppressive. The kopjes in this part of the country are deceptive. Often quite high, they scatter and diminish on approach, because they consist of groups or piles of rounded granite boulders; so that standing at the base of a kopje one might very well see clear through a crevice or small ravine to the vlei on the other side, with great, toppling glistening boulders soaring up like a giant’s pile of pebbles. This kopje, as we knew, because we had explored it, was full of the earthworks and barricades built by the Mashona seventy, eighty years before as a defence against the raiding Matabele. It was also full of magnificent Bushmen paintings. At least, they had been magnificent until they had been defaced by guests from the hotel who had amused themselves throwing stones at them.
‘Imagine,’ said Paul. ‘Here we are, a group of Mashona, besieged. The Matabele approach, in all their horrid finery. We are outnumbered. Besides, we are not, so I am told, a warlike folk, only simple people dedicated to the arts of peace, and the Matabele always win. We know, we men, that we will die a painful death in a few moments. You lucky women, however, Anna and Maryrose, will merely be dragged off by new masters in the superior tribe of the altogether more warlike and virile Matabele.’
‘They would kill themselves first,’ said Jimmy. ‘Wouldn’t you, Anna? Wouldn’t you, Maryrose?’
‘Of course,’ said Maryrose, good-humoured.
‘Of course,’ I said.
The pigeon cooed on. It was visible, a small, shapely bird, dark against the sky. Paul took up the rifle, aimed and shot. The bird fell, turning over and over with loose wings, and hit earth with a thud we could hear from where we sat. ‘We need a dog,’ said Paul. He expected Jimmy to leap up and fetch it. Although we could see Jimmy struggling with himself, he in fact got up, walked across to the sister clump of trees, retrieved the now graceless corpse, flung it at Paul’s feet and sat down again. The small walk in the sun had flushed him, and caused great patches to appear on his shirt. He pulled it off. His torso, naked, was pale, fattish, almost childish. ‘That’s better,’ he said, defiantly, knowing we were looking at him, and probably critically.
The trees were now silent, ‘One pigeon,’ said Paul. ‘A toothsome mouthful for our host.’
From trees far away came the sound of pigeons cooing, a murmuring gentle sound. ‘Patience,’ said Paul. He rested his rifle again and smoked.
Meanwhile, Willi was reading. Maryrose lay on her back, her soft gold head on a tuft of grass, her eyes closed. Jimmy had found a new amusement. Between isolated tufts of grass was a clear trickle of sand where water had coursed, probably last night in the storm. It was a miniature river-bed, about two feet wide, already bone dry from the morning’s sun. And on the white sand were a dozen round shallow depressions, but irregularly spaced and of different sizes. Jimmy had a fine strong grass-stem, and, lying on his stomach, was wriggling the stem around the bottom of one of the large depressions. The fine sand fell continuously in avalanches, and in a moment the exquisitely regular pit was ruined.
‘You clumsy idiot,’ said Paul. He sounded, as always in these moments with Jimmy, pained and irritated. He really could not understand how anybody could be so awkward. He grabbed the stem from Jimmy, poked it delicately at the bottom of another sand-pit, and in a second had fished out the insect which made it—a tiny ant-eater, but a big specimen of its kind, about the size of a large match-head. This insect, toppling off Paul’s grass-stem on to a fresh patch of white sand, instantly jerked itself into frantic motion, and in a moment had vanished beneath the sand which heaved and sifted over it.
‘There,’ said Paul roughly to Jimmy, handing back his stem. Paul looked embarrassed at his own crossness; Jimmy, silent and rather pale, said nothing. He took the stem and watched the heaving of the minute patch of sand.
Meanwhile we had been too absorbed to notice that two new pigeons had arrived in the trees opposite. They now began to coo, apparently without any intention of co-ordination, for the two streams of soft sound continued, sometimes together, sometimes not.
‘They are very pretty,’ said Maryrose, protesting, her eyes still shut.
‘Nevertheless, like your butterflies, they are doomed.’ And Paul raised his rifle and shot. A bird fell off a branch, this time like a stone. The other bird, startled, looked around, its sharp head turning this way and that, an eye cocked up skywards for a possible hawk that had swooped and taken off its comrade, then cocked earthwards where it apparently failed to identify the bloody object lying in the grass. For after a moment of intense waiting silence, during which the bolt of the rifle snapped, it began again to coo. And immediately Paul raised his gun and shot and it, too, fell straight to the ground. And now none of us looked at Jimmy, who had not glanced up from his observation of his insect. There was already a shallow, beautifully regular pit in the sand, at the bottom of which the invisible insect worked in tiny heaves. Apparently Jimmy had not noticed the shooting of the two pigeons. And Paul did not look at him. He merely waited, whistling very softly, frowning. And in a moment, without looking at us or at Paul, Jimmy began to flush, and then he clambered up, walked across to the trees, and came back with the two corpses.
‘We don’t need a dog after all,’ remarked Paul. It was said before Jimmy was halfway back across the grass, yet he heard it. I should imagine that Paul had not intended him to hear, yet did not particularly care that he had. Jimmy sat down again, and we could see the very white thick flesh of his shoulders had begun to flush scarlet from the two short journeys in the sun across the bright grass. Jimmy went back to watching his insect.
There was again an intense silence. No doves could be heard cooing anywhere. Three bleeding bodies lay tumbled in the sun by a small jutting rock. The grey rough granite was patched and jewelled with lichens, rust and green and purple; and on the grass lay thick glistening drops of scarlet.
There was a smell of blood.
‘Those birds will go bad,’ remarked Willi, who had read steadily during all this.
‘They are better slightly high,’ said Paul.
I could see Paul’s eyes hover towards Jimmy, and see Jimmy struggling with himself again, so I quickly got up and threw the limp wing-dragging corpses into the shade.
By now there was a prickling tension between us all, and Paul said: ‘I want a drink.’
‘It’s an hour before the pub opens,’ said Maryrose.
‘Well, I can only hope that the requisite number of victims will soon offer themselves, because at the stroke of opening time I shall be off. I shall leave the slaughter to someone else.’
‘None of us can shoot as well as you,’ said Maryrose.
‘As you know perfectly well,’ said Jimmy, suddenly spiteful.
He was observing the rivulet of sand. It was now hard to tell which ant-pit was the new one. Jimmy was staring at a largish pit, at the bottom of which was a minute hump—the body of the waiting monster; and a tiny black fragment of twig—the jaws of the monster. ‘All we need now is some ants,’ said Jimmy. ‘And some pigeons,’ said Paul. And, replying to Jimmy’s criticism, he added: ‘Can I help my natural talents? The Lord gives. The Lord takes. In my case, He has given.’
‘Unfairly,’ I said. Paul gave me his charming wry appreciative smile. I smiled back. Without raising his eyes from his book, Willi cleared his throat. It was a comic sound, like bad theatre, and both I and Paul burst out into one of the wild helpless fits of laughing that often took members of the group, singly, in couples, or collectively. We laughed and laughed, and Willi sat reading. But I remember now the hunched enduring set of his shoulders, and the tight painful set of his lips. I did not choose to notice it at the time.
Suddenly there was a wild shrill silken cleaving of wings and a pigeon settled fast on a branch almost above our heads. It lifted its wings to leave again at the sight of us, folded them, turned round on its branch several times, with its head cocked sideways looking down at us. Its black bright open eyes were like the round eyes of the mating insects on the track. We could see the delicate pink of its claws gripping the twig, and the sheen of sun on its wings. Paul lifted the rifle—it was almost perpendicular—shot, and the bird fell among us. Blood spattered over Jimmy’s forearm. He went pale again, wiped it off, but said nothing.
“This is getting disgusting,’ said Willi.
‘It has been from the start,’ said Paul composedly.
He leaned over, picked the bird off the grass and examined it. It was still alive. It hung limp but its black eyes watched us steadily. A film rolled up over them, then with a small perceptible shake of determination it pushed death away and struggled for a moment in Paul’s hands. ‘What shall I do?’ Paul said, suddenly shrill; then, instantly recovering himself with a joke: ‘Do you expect me to kill the thing in cold blood?’
‘Yes,’ said Jimmy, facing Paul and challenging him. The clumsy blood was in his cheeks again, mottling and blotching them, but he stared Paul out.
‘Very well,’ said Paul, contemptuous, tight-lipped. He held the pigeon tenderly, having no idea how to kill it. And Jimmy waited for Paul to prove himself. Meanwhile the bird sank in a glossy welter of feathers between Paul’s hands, its head sinking on its neck, trembling upright again, sinking sideways, as the pretty eyes filmed over and it struggled again and again to defeat death.
Then, saving Paul the ordeal, it was suddenly dead, and Paul flung it on to the heap of corpses.
‘You are always so damned lucky about everything,’ said Jimmy, in a trembling, angry voice. His full carved mouth, the lips he referred to with pride as ‘decadent’, visibly shook.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Paul. ‘I know it. The Gods favour me. Because I’ll admit to you, dear Jimmy, that I could not have brought myself to wring this pigeon’s neck.’
Jimmy turned away, suffering, to his observation of the ant-eaters’ pits. While his attention had been with Paul, a very tiny ant, as light as a bit of fluff, had fallen over the edge of a pit and was at this moment bent double in the jaws of the monster. This drama of death was on such a small scale that the pit, the ant-eater and the ant could have been accommodated comfortably on a small fingernail—Maryrose’s pink little fingernail for instance.
The tiny ant vanished under a film of white sand, and in a moment the jaws appeared, clean and ready for further use.
Paul ejected the case from his rifle and inserted a bullet with a sharp snap of the bolt. ‘We have two more to get before we satisfy Ma Boothby’s minimum needs,’ he remarked. But the trees were empty, standing full and silent in the hot sun, all their green boughs light and graceful, very slightly moving. The butterflies were now noticeably fewer; a few dozen only danced on in the sizzling heat. The heatwaves rose like oil off the grass, the sand patches, and were strong and thick over the rocks that protruded from the grass.
‘Nothing,’ said Paul. ‘Nothing happens. What tedium.’
Time passed. We smoked. We waited. Maryrose lay flat, eyes closed, delectable as honey. Willi read, doggedly improving himself. He was reading Stalin on the Colonial Question.
‘Here’s another ant,’ said Jimmy, excited. A larger ant, almost the size of the ant-eater, was hurrying in irregular dashes this way and that between grass-stems. It moved in the irregular apparently spasmodic way that a hunting dog does when scenting. It fell straight over the edge of the pit, and now we were in time to see the brown shining jaws reach up and snap the ant across the middle, almost breaking it in two. A struggle. White drifts of sand down the sides of the pit. Under the sand they fought. Then stillness.
‘There is something about this country,’ said Paul, ‘that will have marked me for life. When you think of the sheltered upbringing nice boys like Jimmy and I have had—our nice homes and public school and Oxford, can we be other than grateful for this education into the realities of nature red in beak and claw?’
‘I’m not grateful,’ said Jimmy. ‘I hate this country.’
‘I adore it. I owe it everything. Never again will I be able to mouth the liberal and high-minded platitudes of my democratic education. I know better now.’
Jimmy said: ‘I may know better, but I shall continue to mouth high-minded platitudes. The very moment I get back to England. It can’t be too soon for me. Our education has prepared us above all for the long littleness of life. What else has it prepared us for? Speaking for myself, I can’t wait for the long littleness to begin. When I get back—if I ever do get back that is, I shall…’
‘Hallo,’ exclaimed Paul, ‘here comes another bird. No it doesn’t.’ A pigeon cleaved towards us, saw us and swerved off and away in midair, nearly settled on the other clump of trees, changed its mind and sped into the distance. A group of farm labourers were passing on the track a couple of hundred yards off. We watched them, in silence. They had been talking and laughing until they saw us, but now they, too, were silent, and went past with averted faces, as if in this way they might avert any possible evil that might come from us, the white people.
Paul said softly: ‘My God, my God, my God.’ Then his tone changed, and he said jauntily: ‘Looking at it objectively, with as little reference as we can manage to Comrade Willi and his ilk—Comrade Willi, I’m inviting you to consider something objectively.’ Willi laid down his book, prepared to show irony. ‘This country is larger than Spain. It contains one and a half million blacks, if one may mention them at all, and one hundred thousand whites. That, in itself, is a thought which demands two minutes’ silence. And what do we see? One might imagine—one would have every excuse for imagining, despite what you say, Comrade Willi, that this insignificant handful of sand on the beaches of time—not bad, that image?—unoriginal, but always apt—this million-and-a-little-over-a-half people exist in this pretty piece of God’s earth solely in order to make each other miserable…’ Here Willi picked up his book again and applied his attention to it. ‘Comrade Willi, let your eyes follow the print but let the ears of your soul listen. For the facts are—the facts—that there’s enough food here for everyone!—enough materials for houses for everyone!—enough talent though admittedly so well hidden under bushels at the moment that nothing but the most generous eye could perceive it—enough talent, I say, to create light where now darkness exists.’
‘From which you deduce?’ said Willi.
‘I deduce nothing. I am being struck by a new…it’s a blinding light, nothing less…’
‘But what you say is the truth about the whole world, not just this country,’ said Maryrose.
‘Magnificent Maryrose! Yes. My eyes are being opened to—Comrade Willi, would you not say that there is some principle at work not yet admitted to your philosophy? Some principle of destruction?’
Willi said, in exactly the tone we had all expected: ‘There is no need to look any further than the philosophy of the class struggle,’ and as if he’d pressed a button, Jimmy, Paul and I burst out into one of the fits of irrepressible laughter that Willi never joined.
‘I’m delighted to see,’ he remarked, grim-mouthed, ‘that good socialists—at least two of you call yourselves socialists, should find that so very humorous.’
‘I don’t find it humorous,’ said Maryrose.
‘You never find anything humorous,’ said Paul. ‘Do you know that you never laugh, Maryrose? Never? Whereas I, whose view of life can only be described as morbid, and increasingly morbid with every passing minute, laugh continuously? How would you account for that?’
‘I have no view of life,’ said Maryrose, lying flat, looking like a neat soft little doll in her bright bibbed trousers and shirt. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you weren’t laughing. I listen to you a lot’—(she said this as if she were not one of us, but an outsider)—‘and I’ve noticed that you laugh most when you’re saying something terrible. Well I don’t call that laughing.’
‘When you were with your brother, did you laugh, Maryrose? And when you were with your lucky swain in the Cape?’
‘Why?’
‘Because we were happy,’ said Maryrose simply.
‘Good God,’ said Paul in awe. ‘I couldn’t say that. Jimmy, have you ever laughed because you were happy?’
‘I’ve never been happy,’ said Jimmy.
‘You, Anna?’
‘Nor me.’
‘Willi?’
‘Certainly,’ said Willi, stubborn, defending socialism, the happy philosophy.
‘Maryrose,’ said Paul, ‘you were telling the truth. I don’t believe Willi but I believe you. You are very enviable, Maryrose, in spite of everything. Do you know that?’
‘Yes,’ said Maryrose. ‘Yes, I think I’m luckier than any of you. I don’t see anything wrong with being happy. What’s wrong with it?’
Silence. We looked at each other. Then Paul solemnly bowed towards Maryrose: ‘As usual,’ he said humbly, ‘we have nothing to say in reply.’
Maryrose closed her eyes again. A pigeon alighted fast on a tree in the opposite clump. Paul shot and missed. ‘A failure,’ he exclaimed, mock tragic. The bird stayed where it was, surprised, looking about it, watching a leaf dislodged by Paul’s bullet float down to the earth. Paul ejected his empty case, refilled at leisure, aimed, shot. The bird fell. Jimmy obstinately did not move. He did not move. And Paul, before the battle of wills could end in defeat for himself, gained victory by rising and remarking: ‘I shall be my own retriever.’ And he strolled off to fetch the pigeon; and we all saw that Jimmy had to fight with himself to prevent his limbs from jumping him up and over the grass after Paul. Who came back with the dead bird yawning, flinging it with the other dead birds.
‘There’s such a smell of blood I shall be sick,’ said Maryrose.
‘Patience,’ said Paul. ‘Our quota is nearly reached.’
‘Six will be enough,’ said Jimmy. ‘Because none of us will eat this pie. Mr Boothby can have the lot.’
‘I shall certainly eat of it,’ said Paul. ‘And so will you. Do you really imagine that when that toothsome pie, filled with gravy and brown savoury meat is set before you, you will remember the tender songs of these birds so brutally cut short by the crack of doom?’
‘Yes,’ said Maryrose.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Willi?’ asked Paul, making an issue of it.
‘Probably not,’ said Willi, reading.
‘Women are tender,’ said Paul. ‘They will watch us eat, toying the while with Mrs Boothby’s good roast beef, making delicate little mouths of distaste, loving us all the more for our brutality.’
‘Like the Mashona women and the Matabele,’ said Jimmy.
‘I like to think of those days,’ said Paul, settling down with his rifle at the ready, watching the trees. ‘So simple. Simple people killing each other for good reasons, land, women, food. Not like us. Not like us at all. As for us—do you know what is going to happen? I will tell you. As a result of the work of fine comrades like Willi, ever-ready to devote themselves to others, or people like me, concerned only with profits, I predict that in fifty years all this fine empty country we see stretching before us filled only with butterflies and grasshoppers will be covered by semi-detached houses filled by well-clothed black workers.’
‘And what is the matter with that?’ enquired Willi.
‘It is progress,’ said Paul.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Willi.
‘Why should they be semi-detached houses?’ enquired Jimmy, very seriously. He had moments of being serious about the socialist future. ‘Under a socialist government there’ll be beautiful houses in their own gardens or big flats.’
‘My dear Jimmy!’ said Paul. ‘What a pity you are so bored by economics. Socialist or capitalist—in either case, all this fine ground, suitable for development, will be developed at a rate possible for seriously undercapitalized countries—are you listening, Comrade Willi?’
‘I am listening.’
‘And because a government faced with the necessity of housing a lot of unhoused people fast, whether socialist or capitalist, will choose the cheapest available houses, the best being the enemy of the better, this fair scene will be one of factories smoking into the fair blue sky, and masses of cheap identical housing. Am I right, Comrade Willi?’
‘You are right.’
‘Well then?’
‘It’s not the point.’
‘It’s my point. That is why I dwell on the simple savagery of the Matabele and the Mashona. The other is simply too hideous to contemplate. It is the reality of our time, socialist or capitalist—well. Comrade Willi?’
Willi hesitated, then said: ‘There will be certain outward similarities but…’ He was interrupted by Paul and myself, then Jimmy, in a fit of laughter.
Maryrose said to Willi: ‘They’re not laughing at what you say, but because you always say what they expect.’
‘I am aware of that,’ said Willi.
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘you are wrong, Maryrose. I’m also laughing at what he’s saying. Because I’m horribly afraid it’s not true. God forbid, I should be dogmatic about it, but I’m afraid that—as for myself, from time to time I shall fly out from England to inspect my overseas investments and peradventure I shall fly over this area, and I shall look down on smoking factories and housing estates and I shall remember these pleasant, peaceful pastoral days and…’ A pigeon landed on the trees opposite. Another and another. Paul shot. A bird fell. He shot, the second fell. The third burst out of a bunch of leaves skywards as if it had been shot from a catapult. Jimmy got up, walked over, brought back two bloodied birds, flung them down with the others and said: ‘Seven. For God’s sake, isn’t it enough?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, laying aside his rifle. ‘And now let’s make tracks fast for the pub. We shall just have time to wash the blood off before it opens.’
‘Look,’ said Jimmy. A small beetle about twice the size of the largest ant-eater, was approaching through the towering grass-stems.
‘No good,’ said Paul, ‘that is not a natural victim.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Jimmy. He twitched the beetle into the largest pit. There was a convulsion. The glossy brown jaws snapped on the beetle, the beetle jumped up, dragging the ant-eater halfway up the sides of the pit. The pit collapsed in a wave of white sand, and for a couple of inches all around the suffocating silent battle, the sand heaved and eddied.
‘If we had ears that could hear,’ said Paul, ‘the air would be full of screams, groans, grunts and gasps. But as it is, there reigns over the sunbathed veld the silence of peace.’
A cleaving of wings. A bird alighted.
‘No don’t,’ said Maryrose in pain, opening her eyes and raising herself on her elbow. But it was too late. Paul had shot, the bird fell. Before it had even hit the ground another bird had touched down, swinging lightly on a twig at the very end of a branch. Paul shot, the bird fell; this time with a cry and a fluttering of helpless wings. Paul got up, raced across the grass, picked up the dead bird and the wounded one. We saw him give the wounded struggling bird a quick determined tight-mouthed look, and wring its neck.
He came back, flung down the two corpses and said: ‘Nine. And that’s all.’ He looked white and sick, and yet in spite of it, managed to give Jimmy a triumphant amused smile.
‘Let’s go,’ said Willi, shutting his book.
‘Wait,’ said Jimmy. The sand was now unmoving. He dug into it with a fine stem and dragged out, first the body of the tiny beetle, and then the body of the ant-eater. Now we saw the jaws of the ant-eater were embedded in the body of the beetle. The corpse of the ant-eater was headless.
‘The moral is,’ said Paul, ‘that none but natural enemies should engage.’
‘But who should decide which are natural enemies and which are not?’ said Jimmy.
‘Not you,’ said Paul. ‘Look how you’ve upset the balance of nature. There is one ant-eater the less. And probably hundreds of ants that should have filled its maw will now live. And there is a dead beetle, slaughtered to no purpose.’
Jimmy stepped carefully over the shining round-pitted river of sand, so as not to disturb the remaining insects lying in wait at the bottom of their sand-traps. He dragged on his shirt over his sweaty reddened flesh. Maryrose got up in the way she had—obedient, patient, long-suffering, as if she had no will of her own. We all stood on the edge of the patch of shade, reluctant to plunge into the now white-hot midday, made dizzy and giddy by the few remaining butterflies who reeled drunk in the heat. And as we stood there, the clump of trees we had lain under sang into life. The cicadas which inhabited this grove, patiently silent these two hours waiting for us to go, burst one after another into shrill sound. And in the sister clump of trees, unnoticed by us, had arrived two pigeons who sat there cooing. Paul contemplated them, his rifle swinging. ‘No,’ said Maryrose, ‘please don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Please, Paul.’
The heap of nine dead pigeons, tied together by their pink feet, dangled from Paul’s free hand, dripping blood.
‘It is a terrible sacrifice,’ said Paul gravely, ‘but for you, Maryrose, I will refrain.’
She smiled at him, not in gratitude, but in the cool reproachful way she always used for him. And he smiled back, his delightful, brown, blue-eyed face all open for her inspection. They walked off together in front, the dead birds trailing their wings over jade-coloured clumps of grass.
The three of us followed.
‘What a pity,’ remarked Jimmy, ‘that Maryrose disapproves so much of Paul. Because there is no doubt they are what is known as a perfectly-matched couple.’ He had tried the light ironic tone, and almost succeeded. Almost, not quite; his jealousy of Paul grated in his voice.
We looked: they were, those two, a perfect couple, both so light and graceful, the sun burnishing their bright hair, shining on their brown skins. And yet Maryrose strolled on without looking at Paul who gave her his whimsically appealing blue glances all in vain.
It was too hot to talk on the way back. Passing the small kopje on whose granite chunks the sun was beating, waves of dizzying heat struck at us so that we hurried past it. Everything was empty and silent, only the cicadas and a distant pigeon sang. And past the kopje we slowed and looked for the grasshoppers, and saw that the bright clamped couples had almost disappeared. A few remained, one above another, like painted clothes-pegs with painted round black eyes. A few. And the butterflies were almost gone. One or two floated by, tired, over the sun-beaten grass.
Our heads ached with the heat. We were slightly sick with the smell of blood.
At the hotel we separated with hardly a word.
[The right side of the black notebook, under the heading Money, continued.]
Some months ago I got a letter from the Pomegranate Review, New Zealand, asking for a story. Wrote back, saying I did not write stories. They replied asking for ‘portions of your journals, if you keep them’. Replied saying I did not believe in publishing journals written for oneself. Amused myself composing imaginary journal, of the right tone for a literary review in a colony or the Dominions: circles isolated from the centres of culture will tolerate a far more solemn tone than the editors and their customers in let’s say London or Paris. (Though sometimes I wonder.) This journal is kept by a young American living on an allowance from his father who works in insurance. He has had three short stories published and has completed a third of a novel. He drinks rather too much, but not as much as he likes people to think; takes marihuana, but only when friends from the States visit him. He is full of contempt for that crude phenomenon, the United States of America.
April 16th. On the steps of the Louvre. Remembered Dora. That girl was in real trouble. I wonder if she has solved her problems. Must write to my father. The tone of his last letter hurt me. Must we be always isolated from each other? I am an artist—Mon Dieu!
April 17th. The Gare de Lyon. Thought of Lise. My God, and that was two years ago! What have I done with my life? Paris has stolen it…must re-read Proust.
April 18th. London. The Horseguards’ Parade. A writer is the conscience of the world. Thought of Marie. It is a writer’s duty to betray his wife, his country and his friend if it serves his art. Also his mistress.
April 18th. Outside Buckingham Palace. George Eliot is the rich man’s Gissing. Must write to my father. Only ninety dollars left. Will we ever speak the same language?
May 9th. Rome. The Vatican. Thought of Fanny. My God, those thighs of hers, like the white necks of swans. Did she have problems! A writer is, must be, the Machiavelli of the soul’s kitchen. Must re-read Thorn (Wolfe).
May 11th. The Campagna. Remembered Jerry—they killed him. Salauds! The best die young. I have not long to live. At thirty I shall kill myself. Thought of Betty. The black shadows of the lime trees on her face. Looked like a skull. I kissed the sockets of her eyes so as to feel the white bone on my lips. If I don’t hear from my father before next week shall offer this journal for publication. On his head be it. Must re-read Tolstoy. He said nothing that wasn’t obvious, but perhaps now that reality is draining the poetry from my days I can admit him to my Pantheon.
June 21st. Les Halles. Spoke to Marie. Very busy but she offered me one of her nights for free. Mon Dieu, the tears stand in my eyes as I remember it! When I kill myself I shall remember that a woman of the streets offered me one of her nights, for love. No greater compliment has been paid me. It is not the journalist but the critic who is the prostitute of the intellect. Re-reading Fanny Hill. Am thinking of writing an article called ‘Sex is the Opium of the People’.
June 22nd. Café de Flore. Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion. My father says I must come home. Will he never understand me? Am writing a porno for Jules called Loins. Five hundred dollars, so my father can go hang. Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
July 30th. London. Public Convenience, Leicester Square. Ah, the lost cities of our urban nightmare! Thought of Alice. The lust I feel in Paris is of a different quality from the lust I feel in London. In Paris sex is scented with a je ne sais quoi. In London it is just sex. Must go back to Paris. Shall I read Bossuet? Am reading my book Loins for the third time. Pretty good. Have put, not my best self, but my second-best self into it. Pornography is the true journalism of the fifties. Jules said he would only pay me three hundred dollars for it. Salaud! Wired my father, told him I had finished a book which had been accepted. He sent me a thousand dollars. Loins is a real spit in the eye for Madison Avenue. Leautard is the poor man’s Stendhal. Must read Stendhal.
Came to know the young American writer James Schaffer. Showed him this journal. He was delighted. We concocted another thousand or so words, and he sent it to an American little review as the work of a friend too shy to send it himself. It was printed. He took me out to lunch to celebrate. Told me the following: the critic, Hans P., a very pompous man, had written an article about James’ work, saying it was corrupt. The critic was due in London. James, who had previously snubbed Hans P., because he dislikes him, sent a sycophantic telegram to the airport and a bunch of flowers to the hotel. He was waiting in the foyer when Hans P. arrived from the airport, with a bottle of Scotch and yet another bunch of flowers. Then he offered himself as a guide around London. Hans P., flattered but uneasy. James kept this up for the two weeks of Hans P.’s visit, hanging on Hans’s every word. When Hans P. left he said from a steep moral height: ‘Of course you must understand that I never allow personal feelings to interfere with my critical conscience.’ To which James replied: ‘writhing with moral turpitude’, as he describes it—‘Yeah, but yeah, I see that, but man, it’s communication that counts—yeah.’ Two weeks later Hans P. wrote an article about James’ work in which he says that the element of corruption in James’ work is more the honest cynicism of a young man due to the state of society than an enduring element of James’ view of life. James rolled on the floor laughing all afternoon.
James reverses the usual mask of the young writer. All, or nearly all, naive enough to begin with, half-consciously, half-unconsciously begin to use naivety as a protection. But James plays at being corrupt. Faced, for instance, with a film-director who plays the usual game of pretending to make a movie of a story of James’, ‘just as it is, though of course we must make some alterations’—James will spend an afternoon, straight-faced, stammering with earnestness, offering to make wilder and wilder alterations for the sake of the box office, while the director gets more and more uneasy. But, as James says, no suggestion of change one can make to them can be more incredible than they would be prepared to make themselves, and so they never know whether he is laughing at them or not. He leaves them, ‘inarticulate with grateful emotion’. ‘Unaccountably’ they are offended, and don’t get in touch with him again. Or at a party where there is a critic or a mandarin who has any flavour of pomposity, James will sit at his or her feet, positively begging for favours, and pouring out flattery. Afterwards, he laughs. I told him all this was very dangerous; he replied it was no more dangerous than being: ‘the honest young artist with built-in integrity’. ‘Integrity,’ he says, with an owlish look, scratching at his crotch, ‘is a red rag to the bull of mammon, or, to put it another way, integrity is the poor man’s codpiece.’ I said this was all very well—he replied: ‘Well, Anna, and how do you describe all this pastiching about? What’s the difference between you and me?’
I agreed he was right; but then, inspired with our success over the young American’s journal, we decided to invent another as written by a lady author of early middle-age, who had spent some years in an African colony, and was afflicted with sensibility. This is aimed at Rupert, editor of Zenith, who has asked me for ‘some things of yours—at last!’
James had met Rupert and hated him. Rupert is wet, limp, hysterical, homosexual, intelligent.
Easter week. The doors of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kensington stand flush with the mid-Twentieth Century Street. Inside flickering shadows, incense, the kneeling bowed figures of immemorial piety. The bare vast floor. A few priests absorbed in the ritual of their service. The few worshippers kneeling on the hard wood, bending forward to touch their foreheads to the floor. Few, yes. But real. This was reality. I was aware of reality. After all, it is the majority of mankind who have their beings inside a religion, the minority who are pagan. Pagan? Ah, that is a joyous word for the aridity of Godless modern man! I stood while the others kneeled. I, stubborn little me, I could feel my knees buckle under, I, who was the only one obstinately standing. The priests grave, harmonious, masculine. A handful of delightful pale young boys charmingly grave with piety. The thundering rich virile waves of the Russian singing. My knees, faint…I found myself kneeling. Where was my little individuality which usually asserts itself? I did not care. I was aware of deeper things. I found the grave figures of the priests wavering and blurring through the tears in my eyes. It was too much. I stumbled up and fled that soil, not mine; that solemnity, not mine…should I perhaps no longer describe myself as an atheist but an agnostic? There is something so barren about the word atheist when I think (for instance) of the majestic fervour of those priests. Agnostic has more of a tone? I was late for the cocktail party. No matter, the countess did not notice. How sad, I felt, as I always do, to be the Countess Pirelli…a comedown, surely, after having been the mistress of four famous men? But I suppose we each of us need our little mask against the cruel world. The rooms crowded as always with the cream of literary London. Spied my dear Harry at once. I am so fond of these tall, pale-browed equine Englishmen—so noble. We talked, under the meaningless din of the cocktail party. He suggested I should do a play based on Frontiers of War. A play which should take no sides but emphasize the essential tragedy of the colonial situation, the tragedy of the whites. It is true, of course…what is poverty, what are hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, the pedestrian degradations (his word—how sensitive, how full of true sensibility are a certain type of Englishman, far more intuitive than any woman!) compared to the reality, the human reality of the white dilemma? Listening to him talk, I understood my own book better. And I thought of how, only a mile away, the kneeling figures on the cold stone of the Russian church bowed their foreheads in reverence to a deeper truth. My truth? Alas no! nevertheless I have decided I shall henceforth describe myself as an agnostic and not an atheist, and I shall lunch with my dear Harry tomorrow and discuss my play. As we parted, he—so delicately—squeezed my hand, a chill, essentially poetic pressure. I went home, nearer to reality I think than ever in my life. And, in silence, to my fresh narrow bed. So essential, I feel, to have clean linen on one’s bed every day. Ah, what a sensuous (not sensual) pleasure to creep, fresh-bathed, between the cool clean linen, and to lie awaiting sleep. Ah, lucky little me…
Easter Sunday
I lunched with Harry. How charming his house is! He had already made a sketch of how he thought the play should go. His close friend is Sir Fred, who he thinks would play the lead and then, of course, there would be none of the usual trouble of finding a backer. He suggested a slight change in the story. A young white farmer should notice a young African girl of rare beauty and intelligence. He tries to influence her to educate herself, to raise herself, for her family are nothing but crude Reserve Natives. But she misunderstands his motives and falls in love. Then, when he (oh, so gently) explains his real interest in her, she turns virago and calls him ugly names. Taunts him. He, patient, bears it. But she goes to the police and tells them he has tried to rape her. He suffers the social obloquy in silence. He goes to prison accusing her only with his eyes, while she turns away in shame. It could be real, strong drama! It symbolizes, as Harry says, the superior spiritual status of the white man trapped by history, dragged down into the animal mud of Africa. So true, so penetrating, so new. True courage consists of swimming against the tide. When I left Harry I walked home and reality touched me with her white wings. I walked in little slow steps, so as not to waste this beautiful experience. And so to bed, bathed and clean, to read the Imitation of Christ, which Harry had lent me.
I thought all this was a bit thick, but James said no, he’d swallow it. James turned out to be right; but unfortunately my rare sensibility overcame me at the last moment and I decided to keep my privacy. Rupert sent me a note saying that he so understood, some experiences were too personal for print.
[At this point in the black notebook was pinned to the page a carbon copy of a short story written by James Schaffer after being asked to review a dozen novels for a certain literary magazine. He sent in this piece to the editor, suggesting it should be printed in place of the review. The editor wrote back with enthusiasm for the story, asking to be allowed to publish it in the magazine—‘but where is your review, Mr Schaffer? We expected it for this issue.’ It was at this point that James and Anna decided they were defeated; that something had happened in the world which made parody impossible. James wrote a serious review about the dozen novels, taking them one by one; using his thousand words. Anna and he wrote no more bits of pastiche.]
Blood on the Banana Leaves
Frrrrrr, frrr, frrr, say the banana trees ghosting the age-tired moon of Africa, sifting the wind. Ghosts. Ghosts of time and of my pain. Black wings of nightjars, white wings of night-moths, cut, sift, the moon. Frrrr, frrr, say the banana trees, and the moon slips pale with pain on the wind-tilting leaves. John, John, sings my girl, brown, cross-legged in the dark of the eaves of the hut, the moon mysterious on her eyeballs. Eyes that I have kissed in the night, victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer, oh, Africa! for soon the banana leaves will be senile with dark red, the red dust will be redder yet, redder than the new-lipsticked lips of my dark love, store-betrayed to the commerce-lust of the white trader.
‘Be still and sleep now Noni, the moon is four-horned with menace and I am making my fate and yours, the fate of our people.’
‘John, John,’ says my girl, and her voice is sighing with longing like the sigh of the incandescent leaves, wooing the moon.
‘But my heart is ebony with uneasiness and the guiltiness of my fate.’
‘Sleep, sleep, I do not hate you my Noni, I have often been seeing the white man pointing his eyes like arrows at the swing and the sway of your hips my Noni. I have seen it. I have seen it as I see the banana leaves answering the moon and the white spears of the rain murdering the cannibal-raped soil of our land. Sleep.’
‘But John, my John, I am sickening with the knowing of my betraying you, my man, my lover, and yet was I being taken by force, not in having of my true self, by the white man from the store.’
Frrrrr, frrrr, say the banana leaves and the nightjars cry black murder to the sick-grey moon.
‘But John, my John, it was only one little lipstick, one little red lipstick that I bought, for the making of my thirsty lips more beautiful for you, my love, and when I was buying of it I saw his cold blue eyes hot on my maiden thighs, and I ran, I was running, my love, back from the store to you, to my love, my lips red for you, for you my John my man.’
‘Sleep now, Noni. Sit no longer cross-legged in the grinning moon-shadows. Sit no longer, crying from your pain which is my pain and the pain of our people crying for my pity, which you are having now and for always my Noni my girl.’
‘But your love, my John, where is your love for me?’
Ah, dark coils of the red snake of hate, sliding at the roots of the banana tree, swelling in the latticed windows of my soul.
‘My love, Noni, is yours and for our people and for the red hooded snake of hate.’
‘Aie, Aie, Aie,’ screams my love, my love Noni, speared to her mysterious giving womb by the lust of the white man, by his lust for having, by his trader’s lust.
And ‘Aie, Aie, Aie,’ wail the old women in their huts hearing my purposefulness in the wind and in the sign of the raped banana leaves. Voices of the wind, call my pain to the free world, the snake in the echoing dust, bite the heel of the heartless world for me!
‘Aie, Aie, my John, and what of the child I am having, it is being heavy on my heart, the child I am giving to you, my love, my man, and not to the hated white man from the store who tripped my frantic fleeing heels as I sped from him, and was being flung into the sightless dust at the hour of setting sun, the hour when all the world is being betrayed by the ageless night?’
‘Sleep, sleep, my girl, my Noni, the child is for the world, heavy with fate, and crossed with the mystery of mingling bloods, it is a child of vengeful shadows, the child of the gathering snake of my hate.’
‘Aie, Aie,’ screams my Noni, writhing deep and mystical in the shadows of the eaves of the hut.
‘Aie, Aie,’ scream the old women, hearing my purposefulness, the old women, auditors of life’s stream, their wombs dry for living, hearing the silent screams of living from their huts.
‘Sleep now, my Noni. I will return after many years. But now I have a man’s purpose. Do not stop me.’
Dark blue and green the ghosts in the moonlight, the ghosts subdivided by my hate. And dark red the snake in the purple dust under the banana tree. Within a myriad answers, the answer. Behind a million purposes, the purpose. Frrrrr, frrr, say the banana leaves, and my love sings: John and where will you go from me, who wait for you always with my womb filled with longing.
I go to the city now to the gun-metal-writhing-grey streets of the white man and I find my brothers and into their hands I will place the red snake of my hate and together we will seek out the white man’s lust and kill it, so that no longer will the banana trees bear alien fruit, and the soil of our raped country cry, and the dust of souls weep for rain.
‘Aie, Aie,’ scream the old women.
In the moon-menaced night a scream, the scream of anonymous murder.
My Noni creeps, double, into the hut and the purple-green shadows of the moon are empty and empty my heart save for its snake-purpose.
Ebony lightning hates the leaves. Jacaranda thunder kills the trees. Sweet globes of paw-paws receive indigo vengeance. Frrr, frr, say the banana leaves, ghosting the time-tired moon. I am going, I am saying to the banana leaves. Multitudes of perverted shudders rip the crisscrossing dreams of the thwarted forest.
I go on fated feet and the dust-echoes are swamp-dark in the loom of time. I go past the banana tree and red snakes of loving hatred are singing after me: Go man, go, for vengeance to the city. And the moon on the banana leaves is crimson, singing frrrr, frr, scream, cry and croon, oh red is my pain, crimson my twining pain, oh red and crimson are dripping the moon-echoing leaves of my hate.
[Here was pinned to the page a review of Frontiers of War cut from Soviet Writing, and dated August, 1952.]
Terrible indeed is the exploitation in British colonies revealed in this courageous first novel, written and published under the very eye of the oppressor to reveal to the world the real truth behind British Imperialism! Yet admiration for the courage of the young writer, daring all for her social conscience must not blind us to the incorrect emphasis she gives to the class struggle in Africa. This is the story of a young airman, a true patriot, so soon to die for his country in the Great Anti-Fascist War who falls in with a group of so-called socialists, decadent white settlers who play at politics. Sickened by his experience with this gang of rich cosmopolitan socialites, he turns to the people, to a simple black girl who teaches him the realities of true working-class life. Yet this is precisely the weak point of this well-intentioned but misguided novel. For what contact can a young upper-class Englishman have with the daughter of a cook? What a writer must search for in her calvary towards true artistic verity is the typical. Such a situation is not, cannot be, typical. Suppose the young writer, daring the Himalayas of truth itself, had made her hero a young white working man and her heroine an African organized worker from a factory? In such a situation she might have found a solution, political, social, spiritual, that could have shed light on the future struggle for Freedom in Africa. Where are the working masses in this book? Where the class-conscious fighters? They do not appear. But let not this talented young writer lose heart! The artistic heights are for the great in spirit! Forward! for the sake of the world!
[Review of Frontiers of War, Soviet Gazette, dated August, 1954.]
Majestic and untamed is Africa! What a burst of splendour is revealed before us in the pages of this novel which has just reached us from Great Britain depicting a wartime incident in the very heart of the plains and jungles of the African land.
It goes without saying that typical characters in art differ from scientific concepts of types in content, and accordingly, in form. Hence, when this author quotes at the beginning of her book a saying which, redolent as it is of Western sociological mumbo-jumbo, nevertheless contains a profound verity: ‘It is said, it was because Adam ate the apple that he was lost, or fell. I say it was because of his claiming something for his own, and because of his I, Mine, Me and the like’—we look at her work with an eager expectation which is not justified. Yet let us welcome what she has given, looking forward with hope to what she might, indeed will, give us, when she comes to understand that a true artistic work must have a revolutionary life—asserting content, ideological profundity, humaneness, as well as artistic quality. The feeling grows, as page follows page: How noble, how truly profound must be the human types evolved by this still undeveloped continent; the feeling remains with you and repeatedly evokes a response in your heart. For the young English flier, and the trusting black girl, never-to-be-forgotten as they are, thanks to the author’s entrancing power, are not yet typical of the deep moral potentialities of the future. Our readers say to you, dear author, with one voice: Work on! Remember that art must ever be bathed in the clear light of truth! Remember that the process of creating new concrete forms of realism in the literature of Africa and in general those of underdeveloped countries with a strong national-liberation movement is a very difficult and intricate process!
(Review of Frontiers of War in Soviet Journal for Literature for Colonial Freedom, dated Dec, 1956.)
The struggle against Imperialist Oppression in Africa has its Homers and its Jack Londons. It also has its petty psychologizers, not without a certain minor merit. With the black masses on the march, with every day a new heroic stand by the nationalist movements, what can we say of this novel which chronicles the story of a love affair between a young Oxford educated Britisher and a black girl? She is the only representative of the people in this book, and yet her character remains shadowy, undeveloped, unsatisfying. No, this author must learn from our literature, the literature of health and progress, that no one is benefited by despair. This is a negative novel. We detect Freudian influences. There is an element of mysticism. As for the group of ‘socialists’ portrayed here, the author has essayed satire and failed. There is something unhealthy, even ambiguous in her writing. Let her learn from Mark Twain, whose wholesome humour is so dear to progressive readers, how to make mankind laugh at what is already dead, backward, outmoded by history.
13th November, 1955
Ever since Stalin’s death in 1953 there has been a state of affairs in the CP that the old hands say would have been impossible at any time before. Groups of people, ex-communists and communists together, have been meeting to discuss what is going on in the Party, in Russia and in Britain. The first meeting I was asked to attend (and I’ve been out of the Party for over a year now) consisted of nine members and five ex-members. And none of us, the ex-members, had the usual ‘You are traitors’ inflicted on us. We met as socialists, with full trust. The discussions have slowly developed and there is now a sort of vague plan—to remove the ‘dead bureaucracy’ at the centre of the Party, so that the CP should be completely changed, a genuinely British Party, without the deadly loyalty to Moscow and the obligation to tell lies, etc., a genuinely democratic Party. I again find myself among people filled with excitement and purpose—among them people who left the Party years ago. The plan can be summarized thus: (a) The Party, shorn of its ‘old hands’ who are incapable of thinking straight after so many years of lying and double-cross should make a statement repudiating its past. This, first, (b) To break all ties with foreign Communist Parties, in the expectation that other Communist Parties will also be rejuvenating themselves and breaking with the past, (c) To call together the thousands and thousands of people who have been communist and who have left the Party in disgust, inviting them to join the revitalized party, (d) To…
[At this point the red notebook was stuffed full of newspaper cuttings to do with the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, letters from all kinds of people about politics, agendas for political meetings, etc. This mass of paper had been fastened together by rubber bands and clipped to the page. Then Anna’s handwriting began again:]
11th August, 1956
Not for the first time in my life I realize I have spent weeks and months in frenzied political activity and have achieved absolutely nothing. More, that I might have foreseen it would achieve nothing. The Twentieth Congress has doubled and trebled the numbers of people, both in and out of the Party, who want a ‘new’ Communist Party. Last night I was at a meeting which went on till nearly morning. Towards the end a man who had not spoken before, a socialist from Austria, made a short humorous speech, something like this: ‘My dear Comrades. I have been listening to you, amazed at the wells of faith in human beings! What you are saying amounts to this: that you know the leadership of the British CP consists of men and women totally corrupted by years of work in the Stalinist atmosphere. You know they will do anything to maintain their position. You know, because you have given a hundred examples of it here this evening, that they suppress resolutions, rig ballots, pack meetings, lie and twist. There is no way of getting them out of office by democratic means partly because they are unscrupulous, and partly because half of the Party members are too innocent to believe their leaders are capable of such trickery. But every time you reach this point in your deliberations you stop, and instead of drawing the obvious conclusions from what you have said, you go off into some day-dream and talk as if all you have to do is to appeal to the leading Comrades to resign all at once because it would be in the best interests of the Party if they did. It is as if you proposed to appeal to a professional burglar to retire because his efficiency was giving his profession a bad name.’
We all laughed, but continued with the discussion. The humorous note he used absolved him, as it were, from the necessity of a serious answer.
Afterwards I thought about it. Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter—yet it’s the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense.
I’ve just read what I wrote on the 13th November last year. I am amazed at our naivety. Yet I was really inspired by a belief in the possibility of a new honest CP. I really did believe it was possible.
20th September, 1956
Have been to no more meetings. The idea in the air, so I’m told, is to start a new ‘really British CP’ as an example and an alternative to the existing CP. People are contemplating, apparently without misgivings, the existence of two rival CPs. Yet it’s obvious what would happen. The energies of both would be occupied by throwing insults at each other and denying each other’s right to be communist at all. A recipe for farce. But it’s no more stupid than the idea of ‘throwing out’ the old guard by democratic means and reforming the Party ‘from within’. Stupid. Yet I was wrapped up in it for months, like hundreds of other normally intelligent people who have been involved in politics for years. Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.
People are reeling off from the CP in dozens, broken-hearted. The irony is that they are broken-hearted and cynical to the degree that they were loyal and innocent before. People like myself who had few illusions (we all had some illusions—mine was that anti-semitism was ‘impossible’) remain calm and ready to start again, accepting the fact that the British CP will probably slowly degenerate into a tiny little sect. The new phrase in the air is ‘re-think the socialist position’.
Today Molly rang me. Tommy is involved with the new group of young socialists. Molly said she had sat in a corner listening while they talked. She felt as if ‘she had gone back a hundred years to her own youth’ when she was first in the CP. ‘Anna, it was extraordinary! It was really so odd. Here they are, with no time for the CP, and quite right too, and no time for the Labour Party, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t right about that, there are a few hundred of them, scattered up and down Britain, yet they all talk as if Britain will be socialist in about ten years at the latest, and through their efforts of course. You know, as if they will be running the new beautiful socialist Britain that will be born on Tuesday week. I felt as if they were mad, or as if I were mad…but the point is, Anna, it’s just like us, isn’t it? Well? And even using that awful jargon we’ve been making fun of for years and years, just as if they’d just thought it all up for themselves.’ I said: ‘But surely, Molly, you’re pleased he’s become a socialist and not some sort of career-type?’ ‘But, of course. Naturally. The point is, oughtn’t they to be more intelligent than we were, Anna?’
[The yellow notebook continued:]
The Shadow of the Third
From this point of the novel ‘the third’, previously Paul’s wife; then Ella’s younger alter ego formed from fantasies about Paul’s wife; then the memory of Paul; becomes Ella herself. As Ella cracks and disintegrates, she holds fast to the idea of Ella whole, healthy and happy. The link between the various ‘thirds’ must be made very clear: the link is normality, but more than that—conventionality, attitudes or emotions proper to the ‘respectable’ life which in fact Ella refuses to have anything to do with.
Ella moves into a new flat. Julia resentful. An area of their relationship obscured before is now exposed by Julia’s attitude. Julia had dominated Ella. Ella had been prepared to be dominated, or at least been prepared to look as if she was. Julia’s nature was essentially generous—kind, warm, giving. Yet now she even goes to the length of complaining to mutual friends that Ella had taken advantage of her, had made use of her. Ella, alone with her son in the big ugly dirty flat which she now has to clean and paint, thinks that in a sense what Julia complains of was true. She had been rather like a willing captive, with the captive’s hidden core of independence. Leaving Julia’s house was like a daughter leaving a mother. Or, she thinks wryly, remembering Paul’s unfriendly jokes that she was ‘married to Julia’—like the breakup of a marriage.
Ella is for a while more alone than she has ever been. She thinks a great deal about her ruptured friendship with Julia. For she is closer to Julia than to anyone, if being ‘close’ means mutual confidence and shared experience. Yet at the moment this friendship is all hatred and resentment. And she cannot stop herself thinking about Paul who left her months ago. Over a year now.
Ella understands that, living with Julia, she has been protected from a certain kind of attention. She is now definitely ‘a woman living alone’; and that, although she has not realized it before, is very different from ‘two women sharing a house’.
For instance. Three weeks after she has moved into the new flat, Dr West telephones her. He informs her that his wife is on holiday and asks her to dinner. Ella goes, unable to believe, in spite of the too-carefully dropped information about his wife’s being away, that this is not to be a dinner about some aspect of office-work. During the dinner Ella slowly understands that Dr West is offering her an affair. She remembers the unkind remarks that he so carefully passed on to her at the time that Paul left her, and thinks that he has probably pigeonholed her in his mind for an occasion like this. She also understands, that if she, Ella, turns him down this evening he will work through a short list of three or four women, for he remarks spitefully: ‘There are others, you know. You aren’t condemning me to solitude.’
Ella watches developments in the office, and sees, that towards the end of a week, Patricia Brent has a new manner with Dr West. The tough, efficient, professional woman’s manner has become soft, almost girlish. Patricia has been the last on Dr West’s short list, for he has tried and failed with two of the secretaries. Ella watches: maliciously pleased that Dr West has ended up with what, for him, was the worst choice; angry on behalf of her sex that Patricia Brent is positively grateful and flattered; terror that accepting the favours of a Dr West might be the end of her own road; angry amusement that Dr West, turned down by herself, made a point of indicating: You wouldn’t have me, but you see, I don’t care!
And all these emotions are uncomfortably strong, rooted in a resentment that has nothing to do with Dr West. Ella dislikes feeling them, and is ashamed. She asked herself why she is not sorry for Dr West, a middle-aged, not very attractive man, married to an essentially competent and probably dull wife. Why shouldn’t he try to attract some romance to himself? But it is no use. She resents and despises him.
Meeting Julia at a friend’s house, their relations are chilly. Ella, ‘by chance’, starts telling her about Dr West. In a few moments the two women are friendly again, as if there had never been a coldness. But they are now friends on the basis of an aspect of their relationship which had always been subordinate before—criticism of men.
Julia caps Ella’s story about Dr West with this one: an actor at the theatre Julia was playing in, brought her home one night and came up for coffee and sat complaining about his marriage. Julia: ‘I was all kind and full of good advice as usual, but I was so bored at hearing it all again I wanted to scream.’ Julia, at four in the morning, suggested she was tired and he should go home. ‘But my dear, you’d think I’d mortally insulted him. I could see that if he didn’t make me that night his ego would be all deflated, and so I went to bed.’ The man was impotent, Julia good-humoured. ‘In the morning, he said could he come over again that night. He said, it was the least I could do, to give him a chance to redeem himself. He’s got a sense of humour at least.’ And so this man spent a second night with Julia. With no better results. ‘Naturally he left at four, so that the little woman could believe he had been working late. Just as he left he turned on me and said: ‘You’re a castrating woman, I thought you were from the moment I saw you.’
‘Jesus,’ said Ella.
‘Yes,’ said Julia fiercely. ‘And the funny thing is, he’s a nice man. I mean, I would never have expected that sort of remark from him.’
‘You shouldn’t have gone to bed.’
‘But you know how it is—it’s always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can’t bear it, one needs to bolster him up.’
‘Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?’
‘Yes, but I never seem to learn.’
A few weeks later, Ella sees Julia, tells her: ‘Four men, and I haven’t even flirted with them before, have telephoned to say their wives are away, and every time they have a delightful coy note in their voices. It really is extraordinary—one knows a man, to work with, for years, then it’s enough that their wives should go away for them to change their voices and they seem to think you’re going to fall over yourself to get into bed. What on earth do you suppose goes through their minds?’
‘Much better not think about that.’
Ella says to Julia, out of an impulse to placate, to charm (and she recognizes it as she speaks as the same need she has to charm or placate a man), ‘Well, at least when I was living in your house, this didn’t happen. Which is odd in itself, isn’t it?’
Julia shows a flash of triumph, as if she would like to say: Well, I was good for something, then…
There is now a moment of discomfort: Ella lets slide, out of cowardice, the chance of saying that Julia has behaved badly about her leaving; the chance of ‘getting it all out in the open’. And in the silence of this discomfort, there is the thought, which follows naturally from the ‘it is odd in itself, isn’t it?’—is it possible they thought us Lesbians?
Ella had considered this before, with amusement. But she is thinking: No. If they had thought us Lesbians it would have attracted them, they would have been around in swarms. Every man I’ve ever known has spoken with relish—either openly or unconsciously, about Lesbians. It’s an aspect of their incredible vanity: seeing themselves as redeemers of these lost females.
Ella listens to the bitter words she is using in her mind and is shaken by them. At home she tries to analyse the bitterness which possesses her. She literally feels poisoned by it.
She thinks that nothing has occurred which has not been happening all her life. Married men, temporarily wifeless, trying to have an affair with her—etc. etc., ten years ago she would not have even noticed or remarked on it. All this was taken by her as part of the hazards and chances of being a ‘free woman’. But ten years ago, she realized, she had been feeling something that she had not then recognized. An emotion of satisfaction, of victory over the wives; because she, Ella, the free woman, was so much more exciting than the dull tied women. Looking back and acknowledging this emotion she is ashamed.
She thinks, too, that the quality of her tone with Julia is that of a bitter spinster. Men. The enemy. They. She decides not to confide in Julia again, or at least, to banish the tone of dry bitterness.
Soon afterwards, the following incident. One of the sub-editors at the office is working with Ella on a series of articles giving advice about emotional problems—the problems which arise most often in the letters which come in. Ella and this man spend several evenings together at the office. There are to be six articles, and each has two titles, an official one and one for jocular use by Ella and her colleague. For instance, Do you sometimes feel Bored with Your Home? is for Ella and Jack: Help! I’m going round the bend. And: The Husband who neglects his Family, becomes My Husband sleeps around. And so on. Both Ella and Jack laugh a great deal, and make fun of the over-simple style of the articles, yet they write them carefully, taking trouble with them. They both know their joking is because of the unhappiness and frustration of the letters which pour into the office, and which they do not believe their articles will do anything to alleviate.
On the last evening of their collaboration Jack drives Ella home. He is married, has three children, is aged about thirty. Ella likes him very much. She offers him a drink, he goes upstairs with her. She knows the moment will soon approach when he will invite her to make love. She is thinking: But I’m not attracted to him. But I might be, if only I could shake off the shadow of Paul. How do I know I won’t be attracted to him once I’m in bed? After all, I was not immediately attracted to Paul. This last thought surprises her. She sits listening, while the young man talks and entertains her, and is thinking: Paul always used to say, joking, but really serious, that I had not been in love with him at first. Now I say it myself. But I don’t think it’s true. I probably only say it because he said it…but no wonder I can never work up any interest in a man if I’m thinking all the time of Paul.
Ella goes to bed with Jack. She classifies him as the efficient type of lover. ‘The man who is not sensual, has learned love-making out of a book, probably called How to Satisfy Your Wife.’ He gets his pleasure from having got a woman into bed, not from sex itself.
These two are cheerful, friendly, continuing the good sense of their work together in the office. Yet Ella is fighting down a need to cry. She is familiar with this sudden depression and combats it thus: It’s not my depression at all; it is guilt, but not my guilt; it is the guilt from the past, it has to do with the double standard which I repudiate.
Jack, announcing the fact that he must return home, begins talking about his wife. ‘She is a good girl,’ he remarks, and Ella freezes at the condescension in his voice. ‘I make damned sure she never suspects me when I go off the rails. Of course, she gets pretty fed up, stuck with the kids, they’re a bit of a handful, but she copes.’ He is putting on his tie, pulling on his shoes as he sits on Ella’s bed. He is full of well-being; his face is the unmarked, open face of a boy. ‘I’m pretty lucky in my old woman,’ he goes on; but now there is resentment in it, against his wife; and Ella knows that this occasion, his sleeping with her is going to be used subtly as a means to denigrate his wife. And he is jaunty with satisfaction, not because of the pleasures of love, about which he knows very little, but because he has proved something to himself. He says good-bye to Ella, remarking: ‘Well, back to the grindstone. My wife’s the best in the world, but she’s not exactly an exhilarating conversationalist.’ Ella checks herself, does not say that a woman with three small children, stuck in a house in the suburbs with a television set has nothing much exhilarating to talk about. The depths of her resentment amaze her. She knows that his wife, the woman who is waiting for him miles away somewhere across London will know, the moment he enters the bedroom, that he has been sleeping with another woman, from his self-satisfied jauntiness.
Ella decides (a) that she will be chaste until she falls in love and (b) that she will not discuss this incident with Julia.
Next day she telephones Julia, they meet for lunch and she tells Julia. She is reflecting, as she does so, that while she has always steadily refused to confide in Patricia Brent, or at least refused to be an accomplice in her sardonic criticism of men (Ella thinks that the sardonic, almost good-natured quality of Patricia’s criticism of men is what her own present bitterness will mellow into and she is determined that it won’t), yet she is prepared to confide in Julia whose bitterness is turning rapidly into a corroding contempt. She again decides not to indulge in these conversations with Julia, thinking that two women, friends on a basis of criticism of men are Lesbian, psychologically if not physically.
This time she keeps her promise to herself not to talk to Julia. She is isolated and lonely.
Now something new happens. She begins to suffer torments of sexual desire. Ella is frightened because she cannot remember feeling sexual desire, as a thing in itself, without reference to a specific man before, or at least not since her adolescence, and then it was always in relation to a fantasy about a man. Now she cannot sleep, she masturbates, to accompaniment of fantasies of hatred about men. Paul has vanished completely: she has lost the warm strong man of her experience, and can only remember a cynical betrayer. She suffers sex desire in a vacuum. She is acutely humiliated, thinking that this means she is dependent on men for ‘having sex’, for ‘being serviced’, for ‘being satisfied’. She uses this kind of savage phrase to humiliate herself.
Then she realizes she is falling into a lie about herself, and about women, and that she must hold on to this knowledge: that when she was with Paul she felt no sex hungers that were not prompted by him; that if he was apart from her for a few days, she was dormant until he returned; that her present raging sexual hunger was not for sex, but was fed by all the emotional hungers of her life. That when she loved a man again, she would return to normal: a woman, that is, whose sexuality would ebb and flow in response to his. A woman’s sexuality is, so to speak, contained by a man, if he is a real man; she is, in a sense, put to sleep by him, she does not think about sex.
Ella holds on fast to this knowledge, and thinks: every time in life I go through a dry time, a period of deadness, I always do this: hold on to a set of words, the phrases of a kind of knowledge, even while they are dead and meaningless, but knowing that life will come back and make them live too. But how strange that one should hold on to a set of sentences, and have faith in them.
Meantime, men approached her and she refused them, because she knew she could not love them. The words she used to herself were: I won’t sleep with a man until I know I could love him.
Yet, some weeks later, the following incident: Ella meets a man at a party. She is again conscientiously going to parties, hating the process of ‘being on the market again’. The man is a script-writer, Canadian. He does not attract her particularly physically. Yet he is intelligent, with the cool wise-cracking transatlantic humour she enjoys. His wife, at the party, is a beautiful girl, as it were professionally beautiful. Next morning, this man arrives at Ella’s flat, unannounced. He has brought gin, tonic, flowers; he makes a game of the situation ‘man coming to seduce girl met at a party the night before, bringing flowers and gin’. Ella is amused. They drink and laugh and make jokes. Out of the laughter, they go to bed. Ella gives pleasure. She feels nothing, and is even prepared to swear that he feels nothing either. For at the moment of penetration the knowledge goes through her that this is something that he set himself to do and that’s all. She thinks: Well, I’m doing this without feeling so why am I criticizing him? It’s not fair. Then she thinks, rebellious: But that’s the point. The man’s desire creates a woman’s desire, or should, so I’m right to be critical.
Afterwards they continue to drink and to make jokes. Then he remarks, at random, not from anything that has gone before: ‘I have a beautiful wife whom I adore. I have work I like to do. And now I have a girl.’ Ella understands that she is the girl, and that this enterprise, sleeping with her, is a sort of project or plan for a happy life. She realizes that he expects the relationship to continue, he takes it for granted that it will. She indicates that as far as she is concerned the exchange is over; as she speaks there is a flash of ugly vanity on his face, though she has said it gently, positively, compliantly, as if her refusal were due to circumstances beyond her control.
He studies her, hard-faced. ‘What’s wrong, baby, haven’t I satisfied you?’ He says this wearily, at a loss. Ella hastens to assure him that he has; although he has not. But she understands this is not his fault, she has not had a real orgasm since Paul left her.
She says, dry in spite of herself: ‘Well, I don’t think there’s much conviction in it for either of us.’
Again the hard, weary, clinical look. ‘I have a beautiful wife,’ he announces. ‘But she doesn’t satisfy me sexually. I need more.’
This silences Ella. She feels as if she’s in some perverse emotional no-man’s-land that has nothing to do with her, although she has temporarily strayed into it. Yet she realizes that he really does not understand what is the matter with what he offers her. He has a large penis; he is ‘good in bed’. And that’s it. Ella stands, silent, thinking that the weariness of sensuality he has in bed is the other side of his cold world-weariness out of it. He stands looking her over. Now, thinks Ella, now he’s going to lash out, he’s going to let me have it. She sets herself to take it.
‘I’ve learned,’ he drawls, sharp with wounded vanity, ‘that it’s not necessary to have a beautiful woman in the sack. It’s enough to concentrate on one part of her—anything. There’s always something beautiful in even an ugly woman. An ear for instance. Or a hand.’
Ella suddenly laughs and tries to catch his eye thinking that surely he will laugh. Because for the couple of hours before they had got into bed, their relationship had been good-humoured and humorous. What he has just said is positively the parody of a worldly-wise philanderer’s remark. Surely he will smile at it? But no, it had been intended to hurt, and he would not withdraw it, even by a smile.
‘Lucky I have nice hands, if nothing else,’ says Ella at last, very dry.
He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: ‘Beautiful, doll, beautiful.’
He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
That evening Ella goes to Julia’s house, and finds Julia in what she classified as ‘Patricia’s mood’—that is, sardonic rather than bitter.
Julia tells Ella, humorous, that the man, the actor who had called her a ‘castrating woman’ had turned up a few days before with flowers, just as if nothing had happened. ‘He was really quite surprised that I wouldn’t play. He was ever so jolly and companionable. And I sat there, looking at him, and remembering how I had cried my eyes out after he had left—you remember, there were two nights, and I had been ever so sweet and kind putting him at his ease, and then he said I was…and even then I couldn’t hurt his damned feelings. And I sat there and I thought: Do you suppose he’s forgotten what he said or why he said it? Or aren’t we supposed to care what they say? We’re just supposed to be tough enough to take anything? Sometimes I think we’re all in a sort of sexual mad house.’
Ella says drily: ‘My dear Julia, we’ve chosen to be free women, and this is the price we pay, that’s all.’
‘Free,’ says Julia. ‘Free! What’s the use of us being free if they aren’t? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the old idea of good women and bad women.’
‘And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?’
Julia says: ‘Then you’re luckier than I have been. I was thinking yesterday: of the ten men I’ve been in bed with during the last five years, eight have been impotent or come too quickly. I was blaming myself—of course, we always do, isn’t it odd, the way we positively fall over ourselves to blame ourselves for everything? But even that damned actor, the one who said I was castrating, was kind enough to remark, oh, only in passing of course, that he had only found one woman in his life he could make it with. Oh, don’t run away with the idea that he mentioned it to make me feel better, not at all.’
‘My dear Julia, you didn’t sit down to count them?’
‘Not until I started thinking about it, no.’
Ella finds herself in a new mood or phase. She becomes completely sexless. She puts it down to the incident with the Canadian script-writer, but does not care particularly. She is now cool, detached, self-sufficient. Not only can she not remember what it was like, being afflicted with sexual desire, but she cannot believe she will ever feel desire again. She knows, however, that this condition, being self-sufficient and sexless, is only the other side of being possessed by sex.
She rings up Julia to announce that she has given up sex, given up men, because ‘she can’t be bothered’. Julia’s good-humoured scepticism positively crackles in Ella’s ear, and she says: ‘But I mean it.’ ‘Good for you,’ says Julia.
Ella decides to write again, searches herself for the book which is already written inside her, and waiting to be written down. She spends a great deal of time alone, waiting to discern the outlines of this book inside her.
I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else. I don’t understand what happens at the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It’s enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna. Why did I choose the name Ella? Once I met a girl at a party called Ella. She reviewed books for some newspaper and read manuscripts for a publisher. She was small, thin, dark—the same physical type as myself. She wore her hair tied back with a black bow. I was struck by her eyes, extraordinarily watchful and defensive. They were windows in a fortress. People were drinking heavily. The host came over to fill our glasses. She put out her hand—a thin, white delicate hand, at just that moment when he had put an inch of liquor in her glass, to cover it. She gave a cool nod: ‘That’s enough.’ Then a cool shake, as he pressed to fill the glass. He went off; she saw I had been looking. She picked up the glass with just an inch of red wine in it, and said: ‘That’s the exact amount I need for the right degree of intoxication.’ I laughed. But no, she was serious. She drank the inch of red wine, and then remarked: ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Assessing how the alcohol was affecting her—she gave another small, cool nod. ‘Yes, that was just right.’
Well, I would never do that. That’s not Anna at all.
I see Ella, isolated, walking about her big room, tying back her straight black hair with a wide black ribbon. Or sitting hour after hour in a chair, her white delicate hands loose in her lap. She sits frowning at them, thinking.
Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticizes her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being ‘a career woman’. This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticized her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does—sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she ‘really’ is. He has rejected her ‘real’ self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected.
Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.
She looks inside herself again and finds:
A man and a woman. She, after years of freedom, is over-ready for a serious love. He is playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge. (Ella gets the idea of this character from the Canadian script-writer—from his cool and mask-like attitude as a lover: he was watching himself in a role, the role of a married man with a mistress. It is this aspect of the Canadian that Ella uses—a man watching himself play a role.) The woman, over-hungry, over-intense, freezes the man even more than he is; although he only half-knows he is frozen. The woman, having been unpossessive, unjealous, undemanding, turns into a jailor. It is as if she is possessed by a personality not hers. And she watches her own deterioration into this possessive termagant with surprise, as if this other self has nothing to do with her. And she is convinced it has not. For when the man accuses her of being a jealous spy, she replies, and with sincerity: ‘I’m not jealous, I’ve never been jealous.’ Ella looked at this story with amazement; because there was nothing in her own experience that could suggest it. Where, then, had it come from? Ella thinks of Paul’s wife—but no; she had been too humble and accepting to suggest such a character. Or perhaps her own husband, self-abasing, jealous, abject, making feminine hysterical scenes because of his incapacity as a man? Presumably, thinks Ella, this figure, her husband, with whom she was linked so briefly and apparently without any real involvement, is the masculine equivalent of the virago in her story? Which, however, she decides not to write. It is written, within her, but she does not recognize it as hers. Perhaps I read it somewhere?—she wonders; or someone told it to me and I’ve forgotten hearing about it?
About this time Ella pays a visit to her father. It is some time since she has seen him. Nothing has changed in his life. He is still quiet, absorbed in his garden, his books, a military man turned some sort of mystic. Or had always been a mystic? Ella, and for the first time, wonders: What must it have been like, married to such a man? She seldom thinks of her mother, so long dead, but now tries to revive memories of her. She sees a practical, cheerful bustling woman. One evening, sitting across the fireplace from her father, in a white-ceilinged black-beamed room full of books, she watches him read and sip whisky and at last brings herself to talk of her mother.
Her father’s face takes on the most comical look of alarm; clearly he, too, has not thought of the dead woman for years. Ella persists. He says at last, abruptly: ‘Your mother was altogether too good for me.’ He laughs, uncomfortably; and his remote blue eyes suddenly have the startled rolling look of a surprised animal. The laugh offends Ella; but she recognizes why: she is annoyed on behalf of the wife, her mother. She thinks: What’s wrong with Julia and me is quite simple: we’re being mistress-figures long past the age for it. She says aloud: ‘Why too good?’ although her father has picked up his book again as a shield. He says, over the top of the book, an elderly burned-leather man, suddenly agitated with emotions thirty years old: ‘Your mother was a good woman. She was a good wife. But she had no idea, absolutely no idea at all, all that sort of thing was left completely out of her.’ ‘You mean sex?’ asks Ella, forcing herself to speak in spite of her distaste for associating these ideas with her parents. He laughs, offended; his eyes rolling again: ‘Of course all you people don’t mind talking about that sort of thing. I never talk about it. Yes, sex, if that’s what you call it. Was left clean out of her make-up, that sort of thing.’ The book, a memoir of some British General, is raised against Ella. Ella insists: ‘Well, what did you do about it?’ The edges of the book seem to tremble. A pause. She has meant: Didn’t you teach her? But her father’s voice says from behind the book—the clipped yet hesitant voice, clipped from training, hesitant because of the vagueness of his private world: ‘When I couldn’t stick it, I went out and bought myself a woman. What did you expect?’ The what did you expect is addressed, not to Ella, but to her mother. ‘And jealous! She didn’t give a damn about me, but she was jealous as a sick cat.’
Ella says: ‘I meant, perhaps she was shy. Perhaps you should have taught her?’ For she is remembering Paul’s saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.
The book slowly lowers to her father’s lean and stick-like thighs. The yellowish, dry, lean face has flushed, and the blue eyes are protuberant, like an insect’s: ‘Look here. Marriage as far as I’m concerned—well! Well, you’re sitting there, so I suppose that’s a justification of it.’
Ella says: ‘I suppose I ought to say I’m sorry—but I want to know about her. She was my mother after all.’
‘I don’t think of her. Not for years. I think of her sometimes when you do me the honour of a visit.’
‘Is that why I feel you don’t like seeing me much?’ says Ella, but smiling and forcing him to look at her.
‘I never said that, did I? I don’t feel it. But all these family ties—family stuff, marriage, that sort of thing, it seems pretty unreal to me. You’re my daughter, so I believe. Must be, knowing your mother. I don’t feel it. Blood ties—do you feel it? I don’t.’
‘Yes,’ says Ella. ‘When I’m here with you, I feel some sort of a bond. I don’t know what.’
‘No, I don’t either.’ The old man has recovered himself, and is again in a remote place, safe from the hurt of personal emotions. ‘We’re human beings—whatever that may mean. I don’t know. I’m pleased to see you, when you do me the honour. Don’t think you’re not welcome. But I’m getting old. You don’t know what that means yet. All that stuff, family, children, that sort of thing, seems unreal. It’s not what matters. To me at least.’
‘What does matter then?’
‘God, I suppose. Whatever that may mean. Oh, of course, I know it means nothing to you. Why should it? Used to get a glimpse sometimes. In the desert—the army, you know. Or in danger. Sometimes now, at night. I think being alone—it’s important. People, human beings, that kind of thing, it’s just a mess. People should leave each other alone.’ He takes a sip of whisky, stares at her, with a look of being astonished at what he sees. ‘You’re my daughter. So I believe. I know nothing about you. Help you anyway I can of course. You’ll get what money I have when I go—but you know that. Not that it’s much. But I don’t want to know about your life—shouldn’t approve of it anyway, I suppose.’
‘No, I don’t think you would.’
‘That husband of yours, a stick, couldn’t understand it.’
‘It was a long time ago. Suppose I told you that I’d loved a married man for five years and that was the most important thing in my life?’
‘Your business. Not mine. And men since I suppose. You’re not like your mother, that’s something. More like a woman I had after she died.’
‘Why didn’t you marry her?’
‘She was married. Stuck to her husband. Well, she was right I suppose. In that line it was the best thing in my life, but that line—it never was the most important to me.’
‘You don’t ever wonder about me? What I’m doing? You don’t think about your grandson?’
And now he was clearly in full retreat, he didn’t like this pressure at all.
‘No. Oh, he’s a jolly little chap. Always pleased to see him. But he’ll turn into a cannibal like everyone else.’
‘A cannibal?’
‘Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone. As for you—what do I know about you? You’re a modern woman, don’t know anything about them.’
‘A modern woman,’ says Ella drily, smiling.
‘Yes. Your book I suppose. I suppose you’re after something of your own the way we all are. And good luck to you. We can’t help each other. People don’t help each other, they are better apart.’
With which he lifts his book, having given her a final warning that the conversation is over by means of a short abrupt stare.
Ella, alone in her room, looks into her private pool, waiting for the shadows to form, for the story to shape itself. She sees a young professional officer, shy, proud and inarticulate. She sees a shy and cheerful young wife. And now a memory, not an image, rises to the surface: she sees this scene: late at night, in her bedroom, she is pretending to be asleep. Her father and mother are standing in the middle of the room. He puts his arms about her, she is bashful and coy like a girl. He kisses her, then she runs fast out of the bedroom in tears. He stands alone, angry, pulling at his moustache.
He remains alone, withdrawing from his wife into books and the dry, spare dreams of a man who might have been a poet or a mystic. And in fact, when he dies, journals, poems, fragments of prose are found in locked drawers.
Ella is surprised by this conclusion. She had never thought of her father as a man who might write poetry, or write at all. She visits her father again, as soon as she can.
Late at night, in the silent room where the fire burns slowly in the wall, she asks: ‘Father, have you ever written poetry?’ The book descends to his lean thighs with a bump and he stares at her. ‘How the hell did you know?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought perhaps you did.’
‘I’ve never told a soul.’
‘Can I see them?’
He sits a while, pulling at his fierce old moustache that is now white. Then he gets up and unlocks a drawer. He hands her a sheaf of poems. They are all poems about solitude, loss, fortitude, the adventures of isolation. They are usually about soldiers. T. E. Lawrence: ‘A lean and austere man among lean men.’ Rommel: ‘And at evening lovers pause outside the town, Where an acre or so of crosses lean in the sand.’ Cromwell: ‘Faiths, mountains, monuments and rocks…’ T. E. Lawrence again: ‘…yet travels wild escarpments of the soul.’ And T. E. Lawrence again who renounced: ‘The clarity, the action and the clean rewards, and owned himself beat, like all who come to words.’
Ella hands them back. The wild old man takes the poems and locks them up again.
‘You’ve never thought of having them published?’
‘Certainly not. What for?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘Of course you’re different. You write to get published. Well, I suppose people do.’
‘You never said, did you like my novel? Did you read it?’
‘Like it? It was written well, that sort of thing. But that poor stick, what did he want to kill himself for?’
‘People do.’
‘What? Everyone wants to at some time or another. But why write about it?’
‘You may be right.’
‘I’m not saying I’m right. That’s what I feel. It’s the difference between my lot and yours.’
‘What, killing ourselves?’
‘No. You ask such a lot. Happiness. That sort of thing. Happiness! I don’t remember thinking about it. Your lot—you seem to think something’s owed to you. It’s because of the communists.’
‘What?’ says Ella, startled and amused.
‘Yes, your lot, you’re all reds.’
‘But I’m not a communist. You’re mixing me up with my friend Julia. And even she’s stopped being one.’
‘It’s all the same thing. They’ve got at you. You all think you can do anything.’
‘Well, I think that’s true—somewhere at the back of the minds of “our lot” is the belief that anything is possible. You seemed to be content with so little.’
‘Content? Content! What sort of word is that?’
‘I mean that for better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.’
The old man sits, fierce and resentful. ‘That young sap in your book, he thought of nothing but killing himself.’
‘Perhaps because something was owed to him, it’s owed to everyone, and he didn’t get it.’
‘Perhaps, you say? Perhaps? You wrote it, so you ought to know.’
‘Perhaps next time I’ll try to write about that—people who deliberately try to be something else, try to break their own form as it were.’
‘You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can’t be anything else. You can’t change that.’
‘Well, then, I think that’s the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.’
‘Then I don’t follow you. And I don’t want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.’
This conversation with her father starts a new train of thought for Ella.
Now, looking for the outlines of a story and finding, again and again, nothing but patterns of defeat, death, irony, she deliberately refuses them. She tries to force patterns of happiness or simple life. But she fails.
Then she finds herself thinking: I’ve got to accept the patterns of self-knowledge which mean unhappiness or at least a dryness. But I can twist it into victory. A man and a woman—yes. Both at the end of their tether. Both cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their own limits. And out of the chaos, a new kind of strength.
Ella looks inwards, as into a pool, to find this story imaged; but it remains a series of dry sentences in her mind. She waits, she waits patiently, for the images to form, to take on life.
[For something like eighteen months the blue notebook consisted of short entries different in style not only from previous entries in the blue notebook but from anything else in the notebooks. This section began:]
17th October, 1954: Anna Freeman, born 10th November, 1922, a daughter of Colonel Frank Freeman and May Fortescue; lived 23 Baker Street; educated Girls’ High School, Hampstead; spent six years Central Africa—1939 to 1945; married Max Wulf 1945; one daughter, born 1946; divorced Max Wulf 1947; joined Communist Party 1950, left it 1954.
[Each day had its entry, consisting of short factual statements: ‘Got up early. Read so-and-so. Saw so-and-so. Janet is sick. Janet is well. Molly is offered a part she likes/doesn’t like, etc.’ After a date in March 1956, a line in heavy black was drawn across the page, marking the end of the neat small entries. And the last eighteen months had been ruled out, every page, with a thick black cross. And now Anna continued in a different writing, not the clear small script of the daily entries, but fluent, rapid, in parts almost unintelligible with the speed it had been written:]
So all that is a failure too. The blue notebook, which I had expected to be the most truthful of the notebooks, is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read it over, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what happened on 15th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its emotionalism and because of its assumption that if I wrote ‘at nine-thirty I went to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated’, this would be more real than if I simply wrote what I thought. And yet I still don’t understand why. Because although in life things like going to the lavatory or changing a tampon when one has one’s period are dealt with on an almost unconscious level, I can recall every detail of a day two years ago because I remember that Molly had blood on her skirt and I had to warn her to go upstairs and change before her son came in.
And of course this is not a literary problem at all; it is the same as the ‘experience’ with Mother Sugar. I remember saying to her that for the larger part of our time together her task was to make me conscious of, to become preoccupied by, physical facts which we spend our childhood learning to ignore so as to live at all. And then she made the obvious reply: that the ‘learning’ in childhood was of the wrong kind, or otherwise I would not need to be sitting opposite her in a chair asking for her help three times a week. To which I replied, knowing I would get no answer to it, or at least, not on the level I wanted, since I knew that what I was saying was the ‘intellectualizing’ to which she attributed my emotional troubles: ‘It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallizing what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism—one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognize in that dream, such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad—then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned, I’ve gone beyond the childish, I’ve transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people.’ At which, of course, she smiled. And I said: ‘I’m now using your own weapons against you. I’m talking not of what you say, but how you react. Because the moments when you’re really pleased and excited; the moments when your face comes alive are those when I say the dream I had last night was of the same stuff as Hans Andersen’s story about the Little Mermaid. But when I try to use an experience, a memory, a dream, in modern terms, try to speak of it critically or drily or with complexity, you almost seem bored or impatient. So I deduce from this that what really pleases you, what really moves you, is the world of the primitive. Do you realize that I’ve never once, not once spoken of an experience I’ve had, or a dream, in the way one would speak of it to a friend, or the way you would speak of it, outside this room, to a friend, without earning a frown from you—and I swear the frown or the impatience is something you aren’t conscious of. Or are you going to say that the frown is deliberate, because you think I’m not really ready to move forward out of the world of myth?’
‘And so?’ she said, smiling.
I said: ‘That’s better—you’d smile like that if I were talking to you in a drawing-room—yes, I know you’re going to say that this isn’t a drawing-room, and I’m here because I’m in trouble.’
‘And so?’—smiling.
‘I’m going to make the obvious point that perhaps the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say—he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.’
‘Would you say you were better or worse for your experience with me?’
‘But now you’re back in the consulting room. Of course I’m better. But that’s a clinical term. I’m afraid of being better at the cost of living inside myth and dreams. Psycho-analysis stands or falls on whether it makes better human beings, morally better, not clinically more healthy. What you are really asking me now is: Am I able to live more easily now than I did? Am I less in conflict, less in doubt, less neurotic in short? Well, you know that I am.’
I remember how she sat opposite me, the alert, vigorous old woman, with her efficient blouse and skirt, her white hair dragged back into a hasty knot, frowning at me. I was pleased because of the frown—we were outside, for a moment, the analyst—patient relationship.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘If I were sitting here, describing a dream I’d had last night, the wolf-dream, let’s say, more highly developed, there’d be a certain look on your face. And I know what the look means because I feel it myself—recognition. The pleasure of recognition, of a bit of rescue-work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form. Another bit of chaos rescued and “named”. Do you know how you smile when I “name” something? It’s as if you’d just saved someone from drowning. And I know the feeling. It’s joy. But there’s something terrible in it—because I’ve never known joy, awake, as I do, asleep, during a certain kind of dream—when the wolves come down out of the forest, or when the castle gates open, or when I’m standing before the ruined white temple on the white sands with the blue sea and sky behind it, or when I’m flying like Icarus—during these dreams, no matter what frightening material they incorporate, I could cry with happiness. And I know why—it’s because all the pain, and the killing and the violence is safely held in the story and it can’t hurt me.’
She was silent, looking at me intently.
I said: ‘Are you saying perhaps that I’m not ready to go on further? Well, I think that if I’m capable of being impatient, of wanting it, I must be ready for the next stage?’
‘And what is the next stage?’
‘The next stage is, surely, that I leave the safety of myth and Anna Wulf walks forward alone.’
‘Alone?’ she said, and added drily, ‘You’re a communist, or so you say, but you want to go alone. Isn’t that what you’d call a contradiction?’
And so we laughed, and it might have ended there, but I went on: ‘You talk about individuation. So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognizes one part after another of his earlier life as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the reflection of that great archetypal dream, or epic story, or stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the experience, or fitted it like a piece of mosaic into a very old pattern, and by the act of setting it into place, is free of the individual pain of it.’
‘Pain?’ she queried softly.
‘Well, my dear, people don’t come to you because they are suffering from an excess of happiness.’
‘No, they usually come, like you, because they say they can’t feel.’
‘But now I can feel. I’m open to everything. But no sooner do you accomplish that, than you say quickly—put it away, put the pain away where it can’t hurt, turn it into a story or into history. But I don’t want to put it away. Yes, I know what you want me to say—that because I’ve rescued so much private pain-material—because I’m damned if I’ll call it anything else, and “worked through it” and accepted it and made it general, because of that I’m free and strong. Well all right, I’ll accept it and say it. And what now? I’m tired of the wolves and the castle and the forests and the priests. I can cope with them in any form they choose to present themselves. But I’ve told you, I want to walk off, by myself, Anna Freeman.’
‘By yourself?’ she said again.
‘Because I’m convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before…’
The small smile was already beginning on her face—it was the ‘conducting smile’ of our sessions together, we were back as analyst and patient.
I said: ‘No, don’t smile yet. I believe I’m living the kind of life women never lived before.’
‘Never?’ she said, and behind her voice I could hear the sounds she always evoked at such moments—seas lapping on old beaches, voices of people centuries dead. She had the capacity to evoke a feeling of vast areas of time by a smile or a tone of voice that could delight me, rest me, fill me with joy—but I didn’t want it just then.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘The details change, but the form is the same,’ she said.
‘No,’ I insisted.
‘In what way are you different? Are you saying there haven’t been artist-women before? There haven’t been women who were independent? There haven’t been women who insisted on sexual freedom? I tell you, there are a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.’
‘They didn’t look at themselves as I do. They didn’t feel as I do. How could they? I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had an encounter with some mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date…’
‘Isn’t it?’ she said, smiling.
‘No, because the dream of the golden age is a million times more powerful because it’s possible, just as total destruction is possible. Probably because both are possible.’
‘What do you want me to say then?’
‘I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new…’ I saw the look on her face, and said: ‘You are saying that nothing I feel or think is new?’
‘I have never said…’ she began, and then switched to the royal we… ‘we have never said or suggested that further development of the human race isn’t possible. You aren’t accusing me of that, are you? Because it’s the opposite of what we say.’
‘I’m accusing you of behaving as if you didn’t believe it. Look, if I’d said to you when I came in this afternoon: yesterday I met a man at a party and I recognized in him the wolf, or the knight, or the monk, you’d nod and you’d smile. And we’d both feel the joy of recognition. But if I’d said: Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there’s a hint of something—there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvellous, but something new—if I said that, you’d frown.’
‘Did you meet such a man?’ she demanded, practically.
‘No. I didn’t. But sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across, they’re split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.’
She said, after a long thoughtful silence: ‘Anna, you shouldn’t be saying this to me at all.’
I was surprised. I said: ‘You’re not deliberately inviting me to be dishonest with you?’
‘No. I’m saying that you should be writing again.’
I was angry of course, and of course she knew I was going to be.
‘You’re suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.’
‘And so?’
‘It would be a record of how I saw myself at a certain point. Because the record of an hour in the first week, let’s say, of my seeing you, and an hour now, would be so different that…’
‘And so?’
‘And besides, there are literary problems, problems of taste you never seem to think of. What you and I have done together is essentially to break down shame. In the first week of knowing you I wouldn’t have been able to say: I remember the feeling of violent repulsion and shame and curiosity I felt when I saw my father naked. It took me months to break down barriers in myself so I could say something like that. But now I can say something like:…because I wanted my father to die and—but the person reading it, without the subjective experience, the breaking down, would be shocked, as by the sight of blood or a word that has associations of shame, and the shock would swallow everything else.’
She said drily: ‘My dear Anna, you are using our experience together to re-enforce your rationalizations for not writing.’
‘Oh, my God, no, that is not all I’m saying.’
‘Or are you saying that some books are for a minority of people?’
‘My dear Mrs Marks, you know quite well it would be against my principles to admit any such idea, even if I had it.’
‘Very well then, if you had it, tell me why some books are for the minority.’
I thought, and then said: ‘It’s a question of form.’
‘Form? What about the content of yours? I understand that you people insist on separating form and content?’
‘My people may separate them, I don’t. At least, not till this moment. But now I’ll say it’s a question of form. People don’t mind immoral messages. They don’t mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex’s sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand formlessness.’
‘So it is formless works of art, if such a thing were possible, that are for the minority?’
‘But I don’t hold the belief that some books are for the minority. You know I don’t. I don’t hold the aristocratic view of art.’
‘My dear Anna, your attitude to art is so aristocratic that you write, when you do, for yourself only.’
‘And so do all the others,’ I heard myself muttering.
‘What others?’
‘The others, all over the world, who are writing away in secret books, because they are afraid of what they are thinking.’
‘So you are afraid of what you are thinking?’ And she reached out for her appointment book, marking the end of our hour.
[At this point, another thick black line across the page.]
When I came to this new flat and arranged my big room the first thing I did was to buy the trestle table and lay my notebooks on it. And yet in the other flat in Molly’s house, the notebooks were stuffed into a suitcase under the bed. I didn’t buy them on a plan. I don’t think I ever, until I came here, actually said to myself: I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary. In Molly’s house the notebooks were something I never thought about; and certainly not as work, or a responsibility.
The things that are important in life creep up on one unawares, one doesn’t expect them, one hasn’t given them shape in one’s mind. One recognizes them, when they’ve appeared, that’s all.
When I came to this flat it was to give room, not only to a man (Michael or his successor) but to the notebooks. And in fact I now see moving to this flat as giving room to the notebooks. For I hadn’t been here a week before I had bought the trestle table and laid out the books on it. And then I read them. I hadn’t read them through since I first began to keep them. I was disturbed by reading them. First, because I had not realized before how the experience of being rejected by Michael had affected me; how it had changed, or apparently had changed, my whole personality. But above all, because I didn’t recognize myself. Matching what I had written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this—the untruthfulness of what I had written was because of something I had not thought of before—my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defensiveness, of dislike.
It was then I decided to use the blue notebook, this one, as nothing but a record of facts. Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper, ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of…’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can’t write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.
It occurs to me that what is happening is a breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how I am becoming aware of it. For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape, form, expression are nothing, then I am nothing, for it has become clear to me, reading the notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened.
Last night I had a recurrence of that dream which, as I told Mother Sugar, was the most frightening of all the different types of cycles of dreams. When she asked me to ‘give a name to it’ (to give it form), I said it was the nightmare about destruction. Later, when I dreamed it again, and she said: ‘Give it a name’, I was able to go further: I said it was the nightmare about the principle of spite, or malice—joy in spite.
The first time I dreamed it, the principle, or figure, took form in a certain vase I had then, a peasant wooden vase from Russia, that someone had brought back. It was bulbous, rather jolly and naive in shape, and covered with crude red and black and gilt patterns. This vase, in my dream, had a personality, and the personality was the nightmare, for it represented something anarchistic and uncontrollable, something destructive. This figure, or object, for it was not human, more like a species of elf or pixie, danced and jumped with a jerky cocky liveliness and it menaced not only me, but everything that was alive, but impersonally, and without reason. This was when I ‘named’ the dream as about destruction. The next time I dreamed, months later, but instantly recognized it as the same dream, the principle or element took shape in an old man, almost dwarf-like, infinitely more terrifying than the vase-object, because he was part human. This old man smiled and giggled and sniggered, was ugly, vital and powerful, and again, what he represented was pure spite, malice, joy in malice, joy in a destructive impulse. This was when I ‘named’ the dream as about joy in spite. And I dreamed the dream again, always when particularly tired, or under stress, or in conflict, when I could feel that the walls of my self were thin or in danger. The element took a variety of shapes, usually that of a very old man or woman (yet there was a suggestion of a double sex, or even sexlessness) and the figure was always very lively, in spite of having a wooden leg, or a crutch, or a hump, or being deformed in some way. And the creature was always powerful, with an inner vitality which I knew was caused by a purposeless, undirected, causeless spite. It mocked and jibed and hurt, wished murder, wished death. And yet it was always vibrant with joy. Telling Mother Sugar of this dream, recreated for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, she asked as usual: ‘And how do you name it?’ and I replied as usual with the words spite, malice, pleasure in hurt; and she enquired: ‘Only negative qualities, nothing good about it?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said, surprised. ‘And there is nothing creative at all there?’ ‘Not for me.’
She then smiled in the way I knew meant that I should think more about it, and I asked: ‘If this figure is an elemental and creative force, for good as well as for evil, then why should I fear it so terribly?’ ‘Perhaps as you dream deeper you’ll feel the vitality as good as well as bad.’
‘It’s so dangerous to me that as soon as I feel the atmosphere of that figure, even before the figure has appeared, and I know the dream is beginning, I struggle and scream to wake up.’
‘It is dangerous to you as long as you fear it—’ This with the homely, emphatic, mother-nod, which always, in spite of everything, and no matter how deep I was embroiled in some hurt or problem, made me want to laugh. And I did laugh, often, helpless in my chair, while she sat smiling, for she had spoken as people do of animals or snakes: they won’t hurt you if you don’t fear them.
And I thought, as I often did, that she was having it both ways: for if this figure, or element, was so familiar to her in the dreams or fantasies of her patients that she instantly recognized it, then why was it my responsibility that the thing was totally evil? Only the word evil is too human a word for a principle felt to be, in spite of what part-human shapes it chose to assume, essentially inhuman.
In other words, it was up to me to force this thing to be good as well as bad? That was what she was saying?
Last night I dreamed the dream again, and this time it was more terrifying than anything I’ve experienced, because I felt the terror, the helplessness, in face of the uncontrolled force for destruction, when there was no object or thing or even a dwarf to hold it. I was in a dream with another person, whom I did not immediately recognize; and then I understood that this terrible malicious force was in that person who was a friend. And so I forced myself awake out of the dream, screaming, and when I awoke I put a name to the person in my dream, knowing that for the first time the principle was embodied in a human being. And when I knew who the person was, I was even more frightened. For it was safer to have that terrible frightening force held in a shape associated with the mythical or the magical, than loose, or as it were at large, in a person, and in a person who had the power to move me.
Once really awake, and looking back at the dream from the condition of being awake, I was frightened because if the element is now outside of myth, and inside another human being, then it can only mean it is loose in me also, or can only too easily be evoked.
I should now write down the experience to which the dream related.
[At this point Anna had drawn a heavy black line across the page. After it she had written:]
I drew that line because I didn’t want to write it. As if writing about it sucks me even further into danger. Yet I have to hold fast to this—that Anna, the thinking Anna, can look at what Anna feels and ‘name’ it.
What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is the beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will now be part of me and I must deal with it.
It is easy now, looking back over my life to say: That Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or ‘named’—yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: Yes, that’s what I was. I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical, using femaleness as a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men. Yes—something like that. I was an Anna who invited defeat from men without even being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become—but what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to women of our time, that can turn them bitter, or Lesbian, or solitary. Yes, that Anna, during that time was…
[Another black line across the page:]
About three weeks ago I went to a political meeting. This one was informal, at Molly’s house. Comrade Harry, one of the top academics in the CP, recently went to Russia, to find out, as a Jew, what had happened to the Jews in the ‘black years’ before Stalin died. He fought the communist brass to go at all; they tried to stop him. He used threats that if they would not let him go, would not help him he would publicize the fact. He went; came back with terrible information; they did not want any of it made known. His argument the usual one from the ‘intellectuals’ of this time: just for once the Communist Party should admit and explain what everyone knew to be true. Their argument, the old argument of the communist bureaucracy—solidarity with the Soviet Union at all cost, which means admitting as little as possible. They agreed to publish a limited report, leaving out the worst of the horrors. He has been conducting a series of meetings for communists and ex-communists in which he has been speaking about what he discovered. Now the brass are furious, and are threatening him with expulsion; threatening members who go to his meetings with expulsion. He is going to resign.
There were forty-odd people in Molly’s living-room. All ‘intellectuals’. What Harry told us was very bad, but not much worse than we knew from the newspapers. I noticed a man sitting next to me, listening quietly. His quietness impressed me in an emotional gathering. We smiled at each other at one point with the painful irony that is the mark of our kind now. The formal meeting ended, and about ten people remained. I recognized the atmosphere of the ‘closed meeting’—more was to follow, the non-communists were expected to leave. But after a hesitation Harry and the others said we could stay. Harry then spoke again. What we had heard before was terrible; what we heard now worse even than what the most virulent anti-communist papers were printing. They were in no position to get the real facts and Harry had been. He spoke of the tortures, the beatings-up, the most cynical kinds of murder. About Jews being locked in cages designed in the Middle Ages for torture, of being tortured with instruments taken from museums. And so on.
What he was saying now was on a different level of horror from what he had said before, to the meeting of forty people. When he had finished, we asked questions; each answer brought out something new and terrible. What we were seeing was something we knew very well from our own experience: a communist, determined to be honest, yet fighting every inch of the way even now not to have to admit the truth about the Soviet Union. When he had finished speaking, the quiet man, whose name turned out to be Nelson (an American) got up and broke into passionate oratory. The word comes easily because he spoke well, and obviously out of a great deal of political experience. A strong voice, and practised. But now he was accusatory. He said that the reason why the Communist Parties of the West had collapsed, or would collapse, was because they were incapable of telling the truth about anything; and because of their long habit of telling lies to the world, could no longer distinguish the truth even to themselves. Yet tonight, he said, after the Twentieth Congress and everything we had learned about the conditions of communism, we saw a leading comrade and one we all knew to have fought for the truth inside the Party against people more cynical than he, deliberately dividing the truth into two—one, a mild truth, for the public meeting of forty, and another, a harsher truth, for a closed group. Harry was embarrassed and upset. We did not know then of the threats being used against him by the top brass to stop him speaking at all. He said, however, that the truth was so terrible that as few people as possible should know about it—used the same arguments, in short, that he was fighting the bureaucrats for using.
And now suddenly Nelson got up again and launched into an even more violent, self-accusing denunciation. It was hysterical. And everyone was becoming hysterical—I could feel the hysteria rising in myself. I recognized an atmosphere I recognized from ‘the dream about destruction’. It was the feeling or atmosphere that was a prelude to the entrance of the figure of destruction. I got up, and thanked Harry—after all, it was two years since I had been a Party member, with no right in the closed meeting. I went downstairs—Molly was crying in the kitchen. She said: ‘It’s all very well for you, you aren’t Jewish.’
In the street I found Nelson had come down behind me. He said he would take me home. He was quiet again; and I forgot the self-beating note of his speech. He is a man of about forty, Jewish, American, pleasant-looking, a bit of a paterfamilias. I knew I was attracted to him and…
[Another heavy black line. Then:]
The reason why I don’t want to write this is because I have to fight to write about sex. Extraordinary how strong this prohibition is.
I am making this too complicated—too much about the meeting. Yet Nelson and I would not have so easily been in communion without having shared all that experience, even though it had been in different countries. On that first evening he stayed late. He was courting me. He was talking about me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are on some kind of frontier. I suppose I could say that they ‘name’ us. We feel safe with them. He went up to see Janet, sleeping. His interest in her was genuine. Three children of his own. Married for seventeen years. His marriage a direct consequence of his having fought in Spain. The tone of the evening was serious, responsible, grown-up. After he left I used the word—grown-up. And I matched him against the men I’ve been encountering recently (why?), the men-babies. My spirits so high I cautioned myself. I was marvelling, again, how easy it is, living deprived, to forget love, joy, delight. For nearly two years now, the disappointing encounters, one emotional snub after another. I had drawn in my emotional skirts, become guarded in my responses. Now, after one evening with Nelson I had forgotten all that. He came to see me next day. Janet just on her way out to play with friends. Nelson and she instantly friendly. He was speaking as more than a potential lover. He was leaving his wife, he said, needed a real relationship with a woman. He would come that evening ‘after Janet was asleep’. I loved him for the sense of the ‘after Janet was asleep’ and the understanding of the sort of life I have. When he came that evening he was very late, and in a different mood—garrulous, talking compulsively, his eyes darting everywhere, never meeting mine. I felt my spirits sink; it was from my own sudden nervousness and apprehension that I understood, before my mind understood it, that this was going to be another disappointment. He talked of Spain, of the war. He was condemning himself, as he had at the meeting, breast-beating, hysterical, for taking part in the Communist Party betrayals. He said that innocent people had been shot, through him, though he had not believed at the time they were innocent. (Yet as he spoke of this, the feeling kept going through me: he’s not really sorry, not really; his hysteria and the noise is a defence against feeling, because it’s too terrible, the guilt he would have to feel.) He was also at moments, very funny, with the American self-punishing humour. At midnight he left, or rather slunk off, still talking at the top of his voice, looking guilty. He talked himself out, so to speak. I began thinking about his wife. But I wouldn’t admit what my instincts told me quite clearly was wrong. Next morning, unannounced, he came back. I couldn’t recognize him as the loud hysterical man—he was sober and responsible and humorous. He took me into bed and then I knew what was wrong. I asked him if it was always like this. He was disconcerted (and this told me more about his sex relationships than anything) that I frankly spoke about it while he tried to pretend he didn’t understand me. Then he said he had a mortal terror of sex, could never stay inside a woman for longer than a few seconds, and had never been different. And I saw, from the nervous, instinctively repulsive haste with which he moved away from me, the haste with which he dressed, how deep was his fear. He said he had started psycho-analysis, expected to be ‘cured’ soon. (I could not help wanting to laugh at the word ‘cured’ which is how people talk, going into psycho-analysis, the clinical talk, as if one were submitting finally to a desperate operation that would change one into something else.) Afterwards, our relationship had changed—a friendliness, a trust. Because of the trust, we would go on seeing each other.
We did. That was months ago. What frightens me now is—why did I go on with it? It wasn’t the self-flattery: I can cure this man. Not at all. I know better, I’ve known too many of the sexual cripples. It wasn’t really compassion. Though that was part of it. I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men’s criticizing us for being ‘castrating’, etc.,—all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is ‘castrating’—this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.
No, what terrifies me is my willingness. It is what Mother Sugar would call ‘the negative side’ of the woman’s need to placate, to submit. Now I am not Anna, I have no will, I can’t move out of a situation once it has started, I just go along with it.
Within a week of my having gone to bed with Nelson the first time I was in a situation I had no control over. The man Nelson, the responsible quiet man, had vanished. I could no longer even remember him. Even the words, the language of emotional responsibility had gone. He was driven by a shrill compulsive hysteria, in which I was also caught up. We went to bed for the second time: to the accompaniment of a highly verbal, bitterly humorous self-denunciation which switched at once into hysterical abuse of all women. Then he vanished from my life for nearly two weeks. I was more nervous, more depressed than I can remember being. I was sexless, too, I had no sex—nothing. A long way off I could see Anna, who belonged to a world of normality and warmth. I could see her but I could not remember what it was like to be alive, as she was. He rang me twice, making excuses, insultingly obvious, because there was no need for them—they were excuses made to ‘a woman’, to ‘women’, to ‘the enemy’, not to Anna; in his good moments he’d be incapable of such insensitivity. I had, in my mind, written him off as a lover, but intended to keep him as a friend. There’s a kinship between us, the relationship of a certain kind of self-knowledge, of despair. Well, and then one evening he came over, unannounced, and in his other, his ‘good’ personality. And listening to him then I could not remember what he was like when hysterical and driven. I sat there and looked at him, in the same way as I look at the sane and happy Anna—he’s out of reach, she’s out of reach, moving beyond a glass wall. Oh, yes, I understand that glass wall certain kinds of Americans live behind, I understand it too well—don’t touch me, for God’s sake don’t touch me, don’t touch me because I’m afraid of feeling.
That evening he asked me to an evening party at his house. I said I’d go. After he left I knew I shouldn’t go because I felt uneasy about it. Yet on the face of it, why not? He’d never be my lover, and so we were friends, so why not go and meet his friends, his wife?
As soon as I entered their flat I realized how much I had not been using my imagination, how stupid I had chosen to be. Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching out for happiness. Well, entering the flat, I knew I had chosen not to think, and I was ashamed and humiliated.
A large rented flat, full of tasteless, anonymous furniture. And I knew that when they moved into a house and filled it with their own chosen things, they would still be anonymous—that was the quality, anonymity. The safety of anonymity. Yes, and I understand that too, too well. They mentioned the rent of this flat and I was filled with disbelief. Thirty pounds a week, it’s a fortune, it’s crazy. There were about twelve people, all Americans to do with television or the films—‘show business’ people; and of course they joked about it. ‘We’re show biz, and why not? Nothing wrong with that, is there?’ They all knew each other, their ‘knowing each other’ was on the basis of being show business, on the arbitrary contacts of their work; yet they were friendly, it was an attractive, accepting, casual friendliness. I liked it, it reminded me of the casual, informal friendliness of the white people of Africa. ‘Hallo, Hallo! How are you? My house is yours, though I’ve only met you once.’ Yet I liked it. By English standards they were all rich. In England people as rich as they are don’t talk about it. An atmosphere of money all the time, anxious money, with these American people. Yet, with all the money, everything so expensive (which they apparently take for granted), a middle-class atmosphere that is hard to define. I sat there, trying to define it. It’s a kind of deliberate ordinariness, a scaling-down of the individual; it’s as if they all have, built in, a need to fit themselves to what is expected. And yet one likes them so much, they are such good people, one watches them full of pain because they choose to scale themselves down, to set limits. The limits are money-limits. (Yet why?—half of them were left-wingers, had been blacklisted, were in England because they couldn’t earn in America. Yet money, money, money all the time.) Yes, I could feel the money-anxiety, it was in the air, like a question. Yet the rent of Nelson’s big ugly flat would keep an English middle-class family in comfort.
I was secretly fascinated by Nelson’s wife—half the ordinary curiosity—what is this new person like? But the other half I was ashamed of—what does she lack that I have? Nothing—that I could see.
She was attractive. A tall, very thin, almost bony, Jewish woman; very attractive, with striking bold features, everything emphasized, big mobile mouth, big, rather beautiful curved nose, large prominent striking black eyes. And colourful dashing clothes. A loud shrill voice (which I hated, I hate loud voices), and an emphatic laugh. A great style and assurance about her, which of course I envied, I always do. And then, looking at her, I knew it was a superficial self-assurance. For she never took her eyes off Nelson. Never, not for one moment. (Whereas he wouldn’t look at her, he was afraid to.) That quality I begin to recognize in American women—the surface competence, the assurance. And underneath the anxiety. They have a nervous, frightened look to their shoulders. They are frightened. They look as if they were out in a space somewhere by themselves, pretending that they are not alone. They have the look of people alone, people isolated. But pretending not to be alone. They frighten me.
Well, from the moment Nelson came in, she never took her eyes off him. He came in with a wisecrack, the self-punishing, self-defining humour that scares me, because it accepts so much: ‘The man is two hours late, and for why?—because he was getting loaded, to face the social happy evening ahead of him.’ (And all his friends laughed—though they were the social happy evening.) And she replied, in the same style, gay and tense and accusing: ‘But the woman knew he’d be two hours late, because of the happy social evening, so the dinner’s fixed to be ready at ten, please don’t give yourself one minute’s concern over it!’ And so they all laughed, and her eyes, apparently so black and bold, so full of apparent self-assurance, were fixed on him, anxious and afraid. ‘Scotch? Nelson?’ she asked, after serving the others; and her voice was suddenly a shrill plea. ‘Double,’ he said; aggressive and challenging; and they looked at each other a moment, it was a sudden exposed moment; and the others joked and laughed to cover it. That was another thing that I began to understand—they covered up for each other, all the time. It gave me the most uneasy feeling, watching the easy friendliness, knowing that they were on guard for dangerous moments like this one, so that they could cover up. I was the only English person present, and they were nice about it, for they are nice people, with an instinct for generosity: they made a lot of self-mocking jokes about the stock American attitudes towards the English; and they were very funny, and I laughed a great deal, and felt bad, because I didn’t know how to be easily self-mocking in return. We drank a lot; it was a gathering where people set themselves, from the moment of entering, to get just so much drink inside them as soon as possible. Well, I’m not used to it, and so I was drunker than anyone, and very quickly, though they drank very much more than I did. I noticed a tiny blonde woman, in a tight Chinese green brocade dress. Really beautiful she was, with a tiny neat exquisiteness. She was, or is, the fourth wife of a big ugly dark man, a film tycoon of some kind. She had four doubles in an hour, yet she was cool, controlled, charming; watching her husband’s drinking anxiously, babying him out of getting really drunk. ‘My baby doesn’t really need that new drink’—cooing at him, baby talk. And he: ‘Oh yes, your baby needs that drink and he’s going to have it.’ And she stroked and patted him: ‘My little baby’s not going to drink, no he isn’t, because his momma says so.’ And Good Lord, he didn’t. She caressed and babied him, and I thought it was insulting; until I saw this was the basis of this marriage—the beautiful green Chinese dress and the long beautiful earrings, in return for mothering him, babying him. I was embarrassed. No one else was embarrassed. I realized, as I sat there, much too tight, watching them; out of it because I can’t talk the cool wise-cracking talk, that I was above all embarrassed; and afraid that next time there was a dangerous corner they wouldn’t cover up in time, there’d be some awful explosion. Well, about midnight there was; but I understood there was no need to be scared, because they were all far ahead of me in some area of sophistication well beyond anything I was used to; and it was their self-aware, self-parodying humour that insulated them against real hurt. Protected them, that is, until the moment when the violence exploded into another divorce, or drunken breakdown.
I kept watching Nelson’s wife, so bold and attractive and vital, her eyes fixed on Nelson every moment of the evening. Her eyes had a kind of wide, blank, disorganized look about them. I knew the look, but couldn’t place it, then at last remembered: Mrs Boothby’s eyes were like that when she was cracking up, at the end of the story; they were frantic and disorganized, yet staring wide with the effort not to show the state she was in. And Nelson’s wife was locked, I could see, in some permanent, controlled hysteria. Then I understood that they all were; they were all people on the extreme edge of themselves, controlling it, holding it, while hysteria flickered in the good-humoured barbed talk, in the shrewd, on-guard eyes.
Yet they were all used to it, they had been living inside it for years; it was not strange to them, only to me. And yet, sitting there in a corner, not drinking any more, because I had got tight too quickly, and was in the over-aware, over-sensitive state of having drunk too much too quickly and waiting for it all to subside—I understood that this was not so new to me as I imagined; this was nothing more than I had seen in a hundred English marriages, English homes; it was the same thing taken a stage further, taken into awareness and self-consciousness. They were, I understood, above all self-conscious people, aware of themselves all the time; and it was from the awareness, a self-disgusted awareness, that the humour came. The humour was not at all the verbal play, harmless and intellectualized, that the English use; but a sort of disinfection, a making-harmless, a ‘naming’ to save themselves from pain. It was like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.
It was quite late, as I’ve said, about midnight, that I heard Nelson’s wife’s voice, loud and shrill, saying: ‘OK, OK, I know what’s coming next. You’re not going to write that script. So why waste your time on Nelson, Bill?’ (Bill was the big aggressive husband of the tiny tactful mothering blonde.) She went on, to Bill, who looked determinedly good-humoured: ‘He’s going to talk and talk again for months, but he’ll turn you down at the end of it, and waste his time on another masterpiece that never gets itself on the stage…’ Then she laughed, a laugh full of apology, but wild and hysterical. Then Nelson, grabbing the stage, so to speak, before Bill could shield him, which he was ready to do: ‘That’s right, that’s my wife, her husband wastes time writing masterpieces—well, did I have a play on Broadway, or didn’t I?’ He shrieked this last at her, shrieking like a woman, his face black with hate of her, and a naked, panicking fear. And they all began laughing, the roomful of people began to laugh and joke, to cover the dangerous moment, and Bill said: ‘How do y’know I won’t turn Nelson down, it might come to that, it might be my turn to write the masterpiece, I can feel it coming on.’ (With a look at his pretty blonde wife which said: Don’t worry, honey, you know I’m just covering up, don’t you?) But it was no good their covering up, the group-self-protection was not strong enough for the moment of violence. Nelson and his wife were alone, forgetting all of us, standing at the other side of the room, locked in hatred for each other, and a desperate yearning plea to each other; they were not conscious of us any longer; yet in spite of everything, they were using the deadly, hysterical, self-punishing humour. The wisecrack:
NELSON: Yeah. Hear that, baby? Bill’s going to write the Death of a Salesman for our time, he’s going to beat me to it, and whose fault will that be—my ever-loving wife’s fault, who else?
SHE (shrill and laughing, her eyes frantic with anxiety, moving in her face uncontrolled, like small black molluscs, writhing under a knife): Oh, it’s my fault, of course, who else’s could it be? That’s what I’m for, isn’t it?
NELSON: Yes, of course that’s what you are for. You cover up for me, I know it. And I love you for it. But did I or did I not have that play on Broadway? And all those fine notices? Or did I just imagine it?
SHE: Twelve years ago. Oh, you were a fine American citizen then, no blacklists in sight. And what have you been doing since?
HE: OK, so they’ve beaten me. Do you imagine I don’t know it? Do you have to rub it in? I tell you, they don’t need firing squads and prison to beat people. It’s much easier than that…well, about me. Yeah, about me…
SHE: You’re blacklisted, you’re a hero, that’s your alibi for the rest of your life…
HE: No, dove; no, baby, you’re my alibi for the rest of my life—who wakes me every morning of my life at four a.m., screaming and wailing that you and your children’ll end up on the Bowery if I don’t write some more crap for our good friend Bill here?
SHE (laughing, her face distorted with laughter): OK, so I wake up at four every morning. OK, so I’m scared. Want me to move to the spare room?
HE: Yeah, I want you to move to the spare room. I could use that three hours every morning for working in. If I could remember how to work. (Suddenly laughing.) Except that I’d be in the spare room with you saying I was scared I might end up on the Bowery. How’s that for a project? You and I on the Bowery together, together until death-do-us-part, love until death.
SHE: You could make a comedy of it, I’d laugh my head off.
HE: Yeah, my ever-loving wife’d laugh her head off if I ended on the Bowery. (Laughing.) But the joke is, if you were there, stranded drunk in a doorway, I’d come after you for assurance, yeah, it’s the truth. If you were there I’d come after you, I need security, yes, that’s what I need from you, my analyst says so, and who am I to contradict?
SHE: Yeah, that’s right, that’s what you need from me. And it’s what you get. You need Mom, God help me.
(They are both laughing, leaning towards each other, screaming with laughter, helpless with it.)
HE: Yeah, you’re my mom. He says so. He’s always right. Well it’s OK to hate your mom, it’s in the book. I’m right on the line. I’m not going to feel guilty about that.
SHE: Oh no, why should you feel guilty, why should you ever feel guilty at all?
HE (shouting, his dark handsome face distorted): Because you make me guilty, I’m always in the wrong with you, I have to be, Mom’s always right.
SHE (suddenly not laughing, but desperate with anxiety): Oh, Nelson, don’t get at me all the time, don’t do it, I can’t stand it.
HE (soft and menacing): So you can’t stand it? Well, you’ve got to stand it. For why? Because I need you to stand it, that’s why. Hey, perhaps you should go to the analyst. Why should I do all the hard work? Yeah, that’s it; you can go to the analyst, I’m not sick, you’re sick. You’re sick!
(But she has given in, turned away from him, limp and desperate. He jumps towards her victorious but appalled): And now what’s wrong with you? Can’t take it, huh? Why not? How d’you know it’s not you that’s sick? Why should it always be me that’s in the wrong? Oh, don’t look like that! Trying to make me feel bad, as usual, huh? Well, you’re succeeding. OK, so I’m in the wrong. But please don’t worry—not for a moment. It’s always me that is in the wrong. I said so, didn’t I? I’ve confessed, haven’t I? You’re a woman, so you’re in the right. OK, OK, I’m not complaining, I’m just stating a fact—I’m a man, so I’m in the wrong. OK?
But now, suddenly, the tiny blonde woman (who has drunk at least three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch and is as cool and controlled as a soft little kitten with sweet, just-open misty blue eyes) gets up and says, ‘Bill, Bill, I want to dance. I want to dance, baby.’ And Bill jumps up towards the record-player, and the room is full of late Armstrong, the cynical trumpet and the cynical good-humoured voice of the older Armstrong. And Bill has gathered his beautiful little wife in his arms, and they are dancing. But it is a parody, a parody of good-humoured sexy dancing. Now everyone is dancing, and Nelson and his wife are away on the edge of the group, ignored. No one is listening to them, people can’t stand it any more. And then Nelson says, loud, jerking his thumb at me: ‘I’m going to dance with Anna. I can’t dance, I can’t do anything, you don’t have to tell me that, but I’m going to dance with Anna.’ I stand up, because everyone is looking at me, saying with their eyes: Go on, you’ve got to dance, you’ve got to.
Nelson comes over, and says loudly in parody: ‘I’m going to dance with Anna. Dance with m-e-e-! Da-a-a-ance with me, Anna.’
His eyes are desperate with self-dislike, misery, pain. And then, in parody: ‘Com’n, let’s fuck, baby, I like your style.’
I laugh. (I hear my laugh, shrill and pleading.) They all laugh, in relief, because I’m playing my role; and the dangerous moment is passed. And Nelson’s wife laughs loudest. She gives me, however, an acute, fearful, inspection; and I know that I’ve already become part of the marital battle; and that the whole point of me, Anna, was probably to add fuel to the battle. They’ve probably fought over me, interminably, in the terrible hours between four and seven in the morning, when they wake in anxiety (but anxiety about what?) and fight to the death. I can even hear the dialogue: I dance with Nelson, while his wife watches, smiling in painful anxiety, and listen to the dialogue:
SHE: Yes, I suppose you think I don’t know about you and Anna Wulf.
HE: That’s right, you don’t know and you’ll never know, will you?
SHE: So you think I don’t know, well I do know, I’ve just got to look at you!
HE: Look at me, baby! Look at me, doll! Look at me, honey, look, look, look! What do you see? Lothario? Don Juan? Yes, that’s me. That’s right. I’ve been screwing Anna Wulf, she’s just my style, my analyst says she is, and who am I to argue with my analyst?
After the wild, painful, laughing dance, everyone dancing in parody, and urging all the other members of the group to keep up the parody, for their dear lives’ sake, we all say good night and go home.
Nelson’s wife kisses me at parting. We all kiss each other, one big happy family, though I know, and they know, that any member of this group could fall out of it tomorrow, from failure, or drunkenness or unconformity, and never be seen again. Nelson’s wife’s kiss on my cheeks—first left, then right, is half-warm and genuine, as if to say: I’m sorry, we can’t help it, it’s nothing to do with you; and half-exploratory, as if to say: I want to know what you’ve got for Nelson that I haven’t.
And we even exchange glances, ironic and bitter, saying: Well, it’s got nothing to do with either of us, not really!
The kiss makes me uncomfortable, nevertheless, and I feel an impostor. Because I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.
Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected.
The evening after the party I was at home sitting in a chair, exhausted. An image kept coming into my mind: it was like a shot from a film, then it was as if I was seeing a sequence from a film. A man and a woman, on a roof-top above a busy city, but the noise and the movement of the city are far beneath them. They wander aimlessly on the roof-top, sometimes embracing, but almost experimentally, as if they are thinking: How does this taste—then they separate again and aimlessly move about the roof. Then the man goes to the woman and says: I love you. And she says, in terror: What do you mean? He says: I love you. So she embraces him, and he moves away, with nervous haste, and she says: Why did you say you loved me? And he says: I wanted to hear how it would sound. And she says: But I love you, I love you, I love you—and he goes off to the very edge of the roof and stands there, ready to jump—he will jump if she says even once again: I love you.
When I slept I dreamed this film sequence—in colour. Now it was not on a roof-top, but in a thin tinted mist or fog, an exquisitely-coloured fog swirled and a man and a woman wandered in it. She was trying to find him, but when she bumped into him, or found him, he nervously moved away from her; looking back at her, then away, and away again.
The morning after the party Nelson telephoned and announced that he wanted to marry me. I recognized the dream. I asked him why he had said that. He shouted: ‘Because I wanted to.’ I said he was closely bound to his wife. Then the dream, or film sequence, stopped, and his voice changed and he said, humorous: ‘My God, if that’s true, I’m in trouble.’ We talked a bit longer, then he said he had told his wife he had slept with me. I was very angry, I said he was using me in his fight with his wife. He started screaming and reviling me as he had screamed at her the night before at the party.
I put down the receiver and he was over in a few minutes. He was now defending himself about his marriage, not to me, but to some invisible observer. I don’t think he was very conscious of my being there. I realized who it was when he said his analyst was on holiday for a month.
He went off, shouting and screaming at me—at women. An hour later he telephoned me to say he was sorry, he was ‘nuts’ and that was all there was to it. Then he said: ‘I haven’t hurt you, Anna, have I?’ This stunned me—I felt the atmosphere of the terrible dream again. But he went on: ‘Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to have the real thing with you’—and then, switching into the painful bitterness—‘If the love they say is possible is more real than what we seem to get.’ And then again, insistent and strident: ‘But what I want you to say is that I haven’t hurt you, you’ve got to say it.’ I felt as if a friend had slapped me across the face, or spat at me, or, grinning with pleasure, had taken a knife out and was turning it in my flesh. But I said that of course he had hurt me, but not in a way which betrayed what I felt; I spoke as he had spoken, as if my being hurt was something that could be thought of casually three months after the beginning of such an encounter.
He said: ‘Anna, it occurs to me—surely I can’t be so bad—if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone…then it’s a kind of blueprint for the future, isn’t it?’
Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine; and so we ended this conversation, with every appearance of comradeship.
But I sat, in a kind of cold fog, and I thought: What has happened to men that they can talk like this to women? For weeks and weeks Nelson has been involving me in himself—and he has been using all his charm, his warmth, his experience of involving women, and using them particularly when I’ve been angry, or he knows he has said something particularly frightening. And then he turns casually and says: Have I hurt you? For it seems to me such an abrogation of everything that a man is, that when I think of what it means I feel sick and lost (like being in a cold fog somewhere), things lose their meaning, and even the words I use thin, become echo-like, become a parody of meaning.
It was after the time he rang me to ask: Have I hurt you? that I dreamed and recognized it as the joy-in-destruction. The dream was a telephone conversation between me and Nelson. Yet he was in the same room. His outward guise was the responsible, warm-feeling man. Yet as he spoke his smile changed and I recognized the sudden unmotivated spite. I felt the knife turn in my flesh, between my ribs, the edges of the knife grinding sharp against the bone. I could not speak, because the danger, the destruction, came from someone I was close to, someone I liked. Then I began to speak into the telephone receiver, and on my own face I could feel the beginning of the smile, the smile of joyful spite. I even made a few dancing steps, the head-jerking, almost doll-like stiff dance of the animated vase. I remember thinking in the dream: So now I am the evil vase; next I’ll be the old man-dwarf; then the hunch-backed old woman. Then what? Then Nelson’s voice down the receiver into my ear: Then the witch, then the young witch. I woke, hearing the words ring out with a terrible spiteful gleeful joy: ‘The witch, and then the young witch!’
I have been very depressed. I have depended a great deal on that personality—Janet’s mother. I continually ask myself—how extraordinary, that when inside I am flat, nervous, dead, I can still, for Janet, be calm, responsible, alive?
I haven’t had the dream again. But two days ago I met a man at Molly’s house. A man from Ceylon. He made overtures, and I rejected them. I was afraid of being rejected, of another failure. Now I am ashamed. I am becoming a coward. I am frightened because my first impulse, when a man strikes the sexual note, is to run, run anywhere, out of the way of hurt.
[A heavy black line across the page.]
De Silva from Ceylon. He was a friend of Molly’s. I met him years ago at her house. He came to London some years ago and earned his living as a journalist, but rather poorly. He married an Englishwoman. He impressed one at a party by his sarcastic cool manner; he made witty remarks about people, cruel, but curiously detached. Remembering him, I see him standing away from a group of people, looking on, smiling. He lived with his wife the bed-sitting-room, spaghetti-life of the literary fringes. They had one small child. Unable to earn a living here, he decided to return to Ceylon. His wife was unwilling: he is the younger son of a high-class family, very snobbish, who resented his marrying a white woman. He persuaded his wife to go back with him. His family would not take his wife in, so he found a room for her and spent his time half with her and the child and the other half with the family. She wanted to return to England, but he said it would be all right, and talked her into having another baby, which she did not want. No sooner was this second child born than he took flight.
I suddenly had a telephone call from him, asking for Molly, who was away. He said he was in England because ‘he had won a bet in Bombay, as a result of which he had a free ticket to England’. Later I heard this was untrue: he had gone to Bombay on a journalistic assignment where, on an impulse, he had borrowed money and flown to London. He had hoped that Molly, from whom he had borrowed money in the past, would take him on. No Molly, so he tried Anna. I said I had no money to lend at that time, which was true, but because he said he was out of touch with things, asked him to dinner and invited some friends to meet him. He didn’t come, but telephoned a week later, abject, childish, apologetic, saying he was too depressed to meet people, ‘couldn’t remember my telephone number on the evening of the dinner’. Then I met him at Molly’s, who had come back. He was his usual cool, detached, witty self. He had got a journalist’s job, spoke with affection of his wife who was ‘coming to join him, probably next week’. That was the night he invited me and I ran away. With good reason. But my fear was not from judgement, it was running away from any man, and that was why when he telephoned me next day I asked him to supper. I saw from how he ate that he wasn’t eating enough. He had forgotten he had said that his wife was coming ‘probably next week’, and now said ‘she didn’t want to leave Ceylon, she was very happy’. He said this in a detached way, as if he were listening to what he said. Up to this point we had been rather gay and friendly. But the mention of his wife struck a new note, I could feel it. He kept giving me cool, speculative and hostile glances. The hostility was not to do with me. We went into my big room. He was walking around it, alert, his head on one side, as it were listening, giving me the quick impersonal interested glances. Then he sat down, and said: ‘Anna, I want to tell you something that happened to me. No, just sit and listen. I want to tell you and I want you to just sit and listen and not say anything.’
I sat and listened out of the passivity that now frightens me, because I know I should have said no, and at just that point. Because there was hostility and aggression in it—not personal at all. But the atmosphere was full of it. He told me this story, remote, detached, smiling, watching my face.
A few nights before he had made himself high on marihuana. Then he walked into the street, somewhere in Mayfair—‘you know, Anna, the atmosphere of wealth and corruption, you can smell it. It attracts me. I walk there sometimes and I smell corruption, it excites me.’ He saw a girl on the pavement, and walked straight up to her and said: ‘I think you’re beautiful, will you sleep with me?’ He couldn’t have done this, he said, unless he was high on alcohol or on marihuana. ‘I didn’t think she was beautiful, but she had beautiful clothes, and as soon as I had said it, I thought she was beautiful. She said, quite simply, yes.’ I asked, was she a prostitute? He said, with a calm impatience (as if he’d been expecting me to ask just that question and even willed it), ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ I was struck by the way he said: It doesn’t matter. Cool, deadly—he was saying: What does it matter about anyone else, I’m talking about me. She said to him: ‘I think you’re handsome, I’d like to sleep with you.’ And of course he is a handsome man, with an alert, vigorous, glossy good looks. But cold good looks. He said to her: ‘I want to do something. I’m going to make love to you, as if I were desperately in love with you. But you mustn’t respond to me. You must just give me sex, and you must ignore what I say. Do you promise?’ She said, laughing: ‘Yes, I promise.’ They went to his room. ‘This was the most interesting night of my life, Anna. Yes, I swear it, do you believe me? Yes, you must believe me. Because I behaved as if I loved her, as if I loved her desperately. And I even believed I did. Because—you must understand this, Anna, loving her was just for that night, the most wonderful thing you can imagine. And so I told her that I loved her, I was like a man desperately in love. But she kept falling out of her role. Every ten minutes I could see her face change and she responded to me like a woman who is loved. And then I had to stop the game and say: No, that’s not what you promised. I love you, but you know I don’t mean it. But I did mean it. For that night I adored her. I have never been so in love. But she kept spoiling it by responding. And so I had to send her away, because she kept being in love with me.’
‘Was she angry?’ I asked. (Because I felt angry, listening, and I knew he wanted me to be angry.)
‘Yes. She was very angry. She called me all kinds of names. But it didn’t matter to me. She called me sadist and cruel—everything like that. But it didn’t matter to me. We had made the pact, she agreed, and then she spoiled everything for me. I wanted to be able to love a woman once in my life without having to give something back in return. But of course it doesn’t matter. I’m telling you this because it doesn’t matter. Do you understand that, Anna?’
‘Did you ever see her again?’
‘No, of course not. I went back to the street where I picked her up, though I knew I wouldn’t see her. I hoped she was a prostitute, but I knew she wasn’t, because she told me she wasn’t. She was a girl who worked in one of the coffee bars. She said she wanted to fall in love.’
Later on in the evening he told me the following story: he has a close friend, the painter B. B. is married, the marriage has never been sexually satisfactory. (He said: ‘Of course the marriage has never been sexually satisfactory,’ and the words, ‘sexually satisfactory’ sounded like a clinical term.) B. lives in the country. A woman from the village comes in every day to clean the house. For something like a year B. slept with this woman, every morning, on the kitchen floor, while his wife was upstairs. De Silva went down to visit B. but B. was away. So was his wife. De Silva used the house waiting for them to come back and the cleaning woman came in every day as usual. She told De Silva that she had been sleeping with B. for a year, that she loved B., ‘but of course, I’m not good enough for him, it’s only because his wife isn’t good for him’. ‘Isn’t that charming, Anna? That phrase, his wife isn’t good for him—it’s not our language, it’s not the language of our kind.’ ‘Speak for yourself,’ I said, but he put his head on one side, and said: ‘No, I liked that—the warmth of it. And so I made love to her too. On the kitchen floor on a sort of home-made rug they have there, just as B. did. I wanted to because B. had. I don’t know why. And of course, it didn’t matter to me.’ And then B’s wife came back. She came back to get the house ready for B. She found De Silva there. She was pleased to see De Silva, because he was her husband’s friend and ‘she tries to please her husband out of bed because she doesn’t care about him in bed’. De Silva spent the whole evening trying to find out if she knew about her husband’s love-making with the cleaning woman. ‘Then I realized she didn’t know so I said: “Of course, your husband’s affair with the cleaning woman doesn’t mean anything, you shouldn’t mind.” She blew up. She went frantic with jealousy and hate. Can you understand that, Anna? She kept saying: He has been sleeping with that woman every morning on the kitchen floor. That was the phrase she kept saying: “He’s been sleeping with her on the kitchen floor while I was reading upstairs.”’ So De Silva did everything to pacify B.’s wife, as he put it, and then B. came back. ‘I told B. what I’d done and he forgave me. His wife said she’d leave him. I think she’s going to leave him. Because he slept with the cleaning woman “on the kitchen floor”.’
I asked: ‘What did you do it for?’ (Listening, I felt an extraordinary cold, a listless terror, I was passive in a sort of terror.)
‘Why? Why do you ask? What does it matter? I wanted to see what would happen, that’s all.’
As he spoke he smiled. It was a reminiscent, rather sly, enjoyable, interested smile. I recognized the smile—it was the essence of my dream, it was the smile from the figure in my dream. I wanted to run out of the room. And yet I was thinking: This quality, this intellectual ‘I wanted to see what was going to happen,’ ‘I want to see what will happen next,’ is something loose in the air, it is in so many people one meets, it is part of what we all are. It is the other face of: It doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter to me—the phrase that kept ringing through what De Silva said.
De Silva and I spent the night together. Why? Because it didn’t matter to me. Its mattering to me, the possibility of its mattering to me, was pushed well away into a distance. It belonged to the Anna who was normal, who was walking away somewhere on a horizon of white sand, who I could see but could not touch.
For me, the night was deadly, like his interested, detached smile. He was cool, detached, abstracted. It didn’t matter to him. Yet at moments he suddenly relapsed into an abject mother-needing child. I minded these moments more than the cool detachment and the curiosity. For I kept thinking stubbornly: Of course it’s him, not me. For men create these things, they create us. In the morning, remembering how I clung, how I always cling on to this, I felt foolish. Because why should it be true?
In the morning, I gave him breakfast. I felt cold and detached. Blasted—I felt as if there was no life or warmth left in me. I felt as if he had drained life out of me. But we were perfectly friendly. I felt friendly and detached from him. Just as he left, he said he would telephone me and I said that I would not sleep with him again. His face changed suddenly into a vicious anger; and I saw his face as it must have been when the girl he picked up in the street responded to his saying that he loved her. That was how he looked when she responded—angry and vicious. But I had not expected it. Then the mask of smiling detachment came back, and he said: ‘Why not?’ I said: ‘Because you don’t care a damn whether you sleep with me or not.’ I had expected him to say: ‘But you don’t care either,’ which I would have accepted. But suddenly he cracked into the pathetic child of the moments in the night, and he said: ‘But I do, indeed I do.’ He was positively on the point of beating his breast to prove it—he stopped his clenched hand on the way to his breast, I saw him. And again I felt the atmosphere of the dream of the fog—meaninglessness, the emptiness of emotion.
I said: ‘No, you don’t. But we’ll go on as friends.’ He went right downstairs, without a word. That afternoon he rang me up. He told me two or three cool, amused, malicious stories about people we know in common. I knew something else was coming, because I felt apprehension, but I couldn’t imagine what. Then he remarked, abstractedly, almost indifferent: ‘I want you to let a friend of mine sleep in your upstairs room tonight. You know, the one just above your room where you sleep.’
‘But it’s Janet’s room,’ I said. I couldn’t understand what he was really saying.
‘But you could move her out—but it doesn’t matter. Any room. Upstairs. I’ll bring her this evening about ten o’clock.’
‘You want to bring a woman friend to my flat to stay the night?’ I was so stupid that I didn’t know what he meant. But I was angry, so I should have understood.
‘Yes,’ he said, detached. Then in the abstracted cool voice: ‘Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.’ And he rang off.
I stood thinking. Then I understood, because of my anger, so I rang him back. I said: ‘Do you mean that you want to bring a woman into my flat so that you can sleep with her?’
‘Yes. Not a friend of mine. I was going to take a prostitute off the station and bring her. I wanted to sleep with her just above your room so that you could hear us.’
I couldn’t say anything. Then he asked: ‘Anna, are you angry?’
I said: ‘You wouldn’t have thought of it at all if you hadn’t wanted to make me angry.’
And then he let out a cry like a child, ‘Anna, Anna, I’m sorry, forgive me.’ He began wailing and crying. I believe he was standing there beating his chest with the hand that did not hold the receiver, or banging his head against the wall—at any rate, I could hear irregular thumps that might have been either. And I knew quite well that he had planned all this from the beginning, right from the moment when he telephoned me about bringing the woman to my flat, so that he could end by beating his breast or thumping his head against the wall, and that was the point of it all. So I rang off.
Then I got two letters. The first one cool, malicious, impertinent—but above all, irrelevant, it was off the point, a letter that might have been written after a dozen different situations, each of them quite unlike. And that was the point of the letter—its inconsequence. And then another letter, two days later, the hysterical wail of a child. The second letter upset me more than the first.
I have dreamed of De Silva twice. He is, incarnate, the principle of joy-in-giving-pain. He was in my dream without disguise, just as he is in life, smiling, malicious, detached, interested.
Molly telephoned me yesterday. She has heard that he has abandoned his wife without money, with the two children. His family, the rich upper-class family, have taken then all in. Molly: ‘The point of all this is of course that he talked his wife into having the second child, which she didn’t want, just to make sure of nailing her fast and leaving him free. Then he buggered off to England where I suppose he expected me to smooth his brow. And the awful thing is, if I hadn’t been away at the crucial moment, I would, I’d have taken the whole thing at its face value: poor Cingalese intellectual unable to earn a living, has to leave wife and two children to come to the well-paid intellectual marts of London. What fools we are, perpetually, eternally, and we never learn, and I know quite well that next time it happens I’ll have learned nothing.’
I met B., whom I’ve known for some time now, in the street by accident. Went to have coffee with him. He spoke warmly of De Silva. He said he had persuaded De Silva ‘to be kinder to his wife’. He said that he, B., would put up half the money for a monthly allowance for De Silva’s wife, if De Silva would promise the other half. ‘And does he pay the other half?’ I asked. ‘Well, of course he won’t,’ said B., his charming intelligent face full of apology, not merely for De Silva, but for the entire universe. ‘And where is De Silva?’ I asked, already knowing the answer. ‘He’s going to come and live in the village next to me. There’s a woman he’s fond of. Actually the woman who comes to clean my house every morning. She’ll go on cleaning our house though, I’m glad about that. She’s very nice.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said.
‘Yes, I’m so fond of him.’