‘Complete physical union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide – and yet not quite real, for it stops when the telephone rings.’
There are not many books of prose which I can think of having read with enjoyment more than once. Poetry, yes I get more out of re-reading it than I did the first time. Also some plays like Shakespeare’s, Goethe’s and C. B. Fry’s because large chunks of them are in fact poetic. Prose, generally no. If it is a narration of events as in novels or short stories, I seldom read a second time. It may have some nice turns of phrase, some witticisms, some beautiful descriptive passages, but rarely anything more. The only exceptions are a collection of pensees or aphorisms which compel one to ponder over them. My two top favourites of this genre are Andre Gide’s Fruits of the Earth and The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus. Gide’s work I have often referred to in my writings. I wish to re-introduce Palinurus.
I can’t recall when and how I came by my copy of The Unquiet Grave. It lay among my books for a couple of decades before I persuaded myself to open it. My reluctance to do so was my being under the impression that it was a work of some ancient Greek dead long before the advent of Christ. Palinurus was a character in Greek mythology, a sea pilot who drowned in his sleep but recovered after three days only to be murdered by natives of an island where he found shelter. When I read the book, I found in it many references to Pascal, Flaubert, Goethe, Baudelaire, Chamfort and a host of other French, German and English writers. Whose nom de plume was Palinurus?
As is my habit, when a book really excites me, I force it on my friends. It never comes back. My heavily underlined copy of The Unquiet Grave disappeared, as if for ever. By chance I happened to mention it to my friend Croom Johnson, then head of the British Council in India. He knew all about it. The real name of the author was Cyril Connolly (1903-1974). He was a product of Eton and Balliol, editor of Horizon, columnist, literary critic and author of several books. The Unquiet Grave were jottings in his diary kept during World War II when he was in a mood of extreme despair because his marriage was on the rocks and he could not get to Paris which he loved above all other cities. He talks about the breakdown in his personal relationships in his first essay: ‘There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives and since it can be minimized by obeying a few simple rules, rules which approximate to Christian marriage, they provide, even to the unbeliever, its de facto justification. It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and as we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together. The object of loving is a release from love. We achieve this through a series of unfortunate love affairs or, without a death-rattle, through one that is happy. Complete physical union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide – and yet not quite real, for it stops when the telephone rings.’
I go along with him but I am not sure if he is right when he says: ‘We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving: we may appear to ourselves to be as much in love at other times – so will a day in early September, though it be six hours shorter, seem as hot as one in June. And on how that first true love affair will shape depends the pattern of our lives.’
Again I am uneasy with his analysis of marriage. He says: ‘Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire – in moments when they are not neurotically dependent – but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, nor the hen a falcon.’
Connolly appears to be hooked on the notion that first love is the real thing and being so, likely to be disastrous. He also makes a sharp distinction between love and marriage:
‘First love is the most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode – and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.’
His conclusion about the end of love will evoke sad memories in the minds of those who have been through the ordeal: ‘When a love affair is broken off, the heaviest blow is to the vanity of the one who is left. It is therefore reasonable to assume that, when a love affair is beginning, the greatest source of satisfaction is also to the vanity. The first signs of a mutual attraction will induce even the inconsolable to live in the present.’