Here in this awful hospital I can still savour the sweetness of our transports on that morning two years ago. This is saying a good deal, for two years is a long time in my life these days—with its dreary round of boredom, pain, fear, and sobriety. It is only the remembrance of such moments that sheds any brightness over the interminable days and nights I am now going through. I keep asking myself whether I will ever live such moments again: that is, if I am going to live at all—for I am sure if I do I will find a way to enter once more the enchanted circle of such a love as I enjoyed in the rue Galilée—an experience too beautiful to be offered only once in a lifetime. After all, I am only twenty-two. There must be still a good deal of life in me; and though my back is badly disfigured by rib-section and I feel one shoulder is already two inches higher than the other, the rest of me is pretty much the same. My spirit, above all, is as sprightly as ever. This is to say, I suppose I have learned nothing and forgotten nothing and will return to habits of dissipation with the same appetite—but on the other hand I have promised myself to do so with a little more caution, and to fall in love with a little less abandon the next time, if possible.
There are some natural philosophers and wiseacres who affirm that what a man has done he will do again, but I do not think they are right: he will follow the same pattern, perhaps, but not so recklessly. This is shown in the memoirs of all the great sensualists like Pepys and Rousseau, and of all the great scoundrels like Casanova and Frank Harris. It is a pity that more memoirs like theirs are not written. These are the best we know of the life of individual man; from them alone we discern the probable pattern of our own lives, to what extent it must conform to our given nature, what penalties and rewards are entailed by our wilful departures from it, and whether any effort to change that pattern is either possible or worth while. Everything a man writes about himself is instructive. Young as I am, I have read widely and lived freely and am convinced that the best rule of conduct is impulse, not reason. Of course if I die from my operation next week, I will have been proved wrong; on the other hand, if I live it will prove nothing. But then nothing can be proved about a man until he is dead.
I admit I am worried about this operation. Timor mortis conturbat me. Dr Archibald assures me there is an even chance of my surviving; the administrative head of the hospital has also advised me, very tactfully, to make my will.
Fortunately I have nothing to leave but my clothes, books, and manuscripts—none of them of any value. But the impulse to leave things tidy behind me, which is after all the whole duty of man when faced with death, has made me draw up a will properly witnessed, in which I have left everything, including the six scribblers in which this book is written, to Graeme. He was touched to hear it.
‘I haven’t read the last three-quarters of your book, of course,’ he said, ‘but it should be quite amusing. As for the clothes, they wouldn’t fit me without extensive alterations, and the truth is they’re rather ragged by now. There won’t be any succession duties anyway.’
‘I don’t seem to be able to leave you anything.’
‘You leave me the remembrance of a number of years we spent together. With a few highlights like the way we left Montreal in three taxis, spring in the rue Broca, the walk in Luxembourg, and the moonlight bunk from Dongibéne’s.’
‘You’re forgetting Stanley.’
‘She wasn’t really important,’ he said.
‘I’ve been thinking, I should have come back to Canada with you as another distressed Canadian.’
‘But you wouldn’t. You were in love with Paris. You thought it was the Great Good Place. Well, it’s not. You were in love with a dream.’
I see he was right. It was a dream of excellence and beauty, one that does not exist anywhere in real life. Montparnasse and its people came very close to it. But no city or society in the world, even the Paris of those days, can realize the elusive dream I had. Though the plum-blue light of Montparnasse evenings and the sun-washed clarity of its noon seem in retrospect an idyllic setting, and I shall never know again such freedom, lightheartedness and comradeship, they were not enough. Now I may be in the position of having to leave this insufficient world. It’s not a pleasant thought—and so I revert to Mrs Quayle’s bed.
It was henceforth to be the arena of our love, the scene, in the words of Victor Hugo, of our sublime combats; if I had known the toll they took of my strength and health, I might have made them less sublime. Here I should like to warn all young men against nymphomaniac women: these lovely succubi are still as dangerous as they were thought to be by the medieval clergy, their smiles will lure you to perdition, their loins will fit you for the bone-house within half a year. Drink to excess, stay up all night, walk around hungry, write poetry, smoke, take drugs, indulge in all the varieties of youthful despair, but do not squander your vital forces in the arms of a woman.
This was something I did not know in the winter of 1929. There was no one to tell me, for from the moment I began living with Mrs Quayle I saw none of my friends and companions: my life was passed in the scented prison of the womb-like apartment in the rue Galilée. Whenever my mistress and I went out it was to the stuffy restaurants and theatres of the étoile quarter. I never saw Montparnasse again.
It was a life much like the one I had led on the boulevard Beauséjour, with the addition of unlimited alcohol and endless dalliance. I felt at times like Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, except that I had no desire to return to the upper world: I had no Elisabeth to woo or knell me back to the light of common sense, and the allegory of the dead olive staff never occurred to me.
Even Mrs Quayle’s jealousy was something I accepted without protest. Every glance I turned on a woman in a public place provoked a show of pique; and every attempt I made to write was greeted with derision. ‘You will never be a poet, my dear,’ she would say.
This verdict was irritating, but by dint of repetition it assumed for me the sad colour of truth. I no longer even looked at the wad of scribbled pages I had carried around with me; in fact it was a blessed relief at last to seal them all up in a large brown envelope and bury them at the bottom of my trunk, along with my literary ambitions. I told myself that my desire to write had never been more than a kind of itch, a disease I had caught at McGill University, a symptom of juvenile revolt. I came to believe I was lacking in any seriousness or sense of dedication and had written merely out of vanity. Literature had been for me simply an instrument of self-assertion, an excuse for leaving home, a pretext for idleness. I had really nothing to say.
Now, of course, it is different. I keep on writing this book for the best reason in the world: to recapture a little of the brightness of those days when I had health and spirits; for that brightness even seems to gild these long dreary days. As I write, I escape this ugly applegreen room, I forget the ache of my sawn ribs and my fear of death, and every day when I finish my quota of pages I have a sense of accomplishment, of not having wasted what little time I may still have to live. Moreover, Dr Archibald approves my industry. ‘What chapter are you on now?’ he asks, or, ‘I can tell you have done a good day’s work yesterday, your colour is improved.’ The nurses also marvel and twitter at the pile of scribblers that is growing beneath my bedside table. I am indeed sailing along like a clipper. I’m only worried that I won’t finish this book before my operation, for there are still two chapters to write.
I would be furious if anyone were to destroy my scribblers. My feeling for them is quite unlike what I had for the papers I stowed in my trunk in the rue Galilée—those abortive poems, plays and stories had hung around my neck like millstones. One day I found they were gone.
‘I looked them all over,’ Mrs Quayle said, ‘and burnt them. They were quite unworthy of you, my lovely child.’
I was more disturbed by her highhandedness than by any sense of loss.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I have been thinking you might like to travel with me to a warmer climate and would like to clear out your old effects, as I always do myself from time to time. This Paris winter is lasting much too long.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the land of sunshine and dancing. Spain.’