8
Bertrand Russell And D H Lawrence
The celebrity which is nowadays so lavishly and instantaneously bestowed, often proves to be surprisingly transient. Where Victorian heroes loomed ever larger after decease, with long-winded, adulatory biographies as signposts along the road to posthumous fame, ours have but to turn up their toes to be largely forgotten. When there are adulatory biographies, more often than not they provide an occasion rather for marvelling at a personality cult that is past than for reviving its practice.
Witness Ronald W Clark’s massive tribute to the late Bertrand Russell. I suppose mathematical specialists still have occasion to make honourable mention of his Principia Mathematical (written in collaboration with AN Whitehead), and students majoring in philosophy to turn over the pages of his History of Western Philosophy. No doubt pious nuclear disarmers are liable to look back nostalgically on the great days of the Aldermaston marches, and there may even be aspiring free-lovers, progressive educationalists and anti-God zealots who refresh themselves from time to time by returning to Russell’s writings on such themes. Of course, too, his name crops up frequently in memoirs and other documentation, especially relating to the Bloomsbury set, now decidedly in fashion. Here, his frequent stays at Garsington Manor, and intimate relationship with Lady Ottoline Morrell, the presiding goddess, ensures him honourable mention, along with Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence and other frequenters of her court.
Even so, all the way through Clark’s well-researched, and well-written tribute to Russell I keep asking myself whether his subject really rated such ample and assiduous treatment. Was Russell, as Clark indomitably insists, a great thinker, a master-mind, a seer, even a rather special kind of near-saint? Or, as I have long believed myself, no more than a quick-witted, excessively randy, displaced earl, who managed to shock his way into being noticed, first academically, then as an authority on shifting contemporary mores, and finally, thanks to the joint efforts of the Kremlin and his Svengali-like secretary, Ralph Schoenman, as a figure of world significance in the shaping of foreign policy and the defining of international relations?
My own impressions of his polemical writings, in which I have had occasion to browse from time to time, and of his radio and television disputations when I have been a participant, is that his thinking was superficial, his intellectual bigotry fluctuating and often absurd, and his capacity for making irresponsible dogmatic statements, limitless. Indeed, in the light of the inconstancy of his views, the recklessness of his pronouncements on contemporary affairs (he once bet me 20 pounds that Sen. Joseph McCarthy would infallibly be elected President of the United States on the completion of Eisenhower’s first term), and his readiness to throw out highly biased opinions on everything under the sun, from the poet Wordsworth to the Crucifixion, it must be considered extraordinary that he continued to be revered as a man of learning and sagacity.
Here, some observations by Thomas Gray, author of Elegy written in a Country Churchyard - lines which at one time all schoolboys were expected to learn by heart - on how Lord Shaftesbury came to have philosophical credentials, may be relevant. They are quoted in Dr Johnson’s incomparable Lives of the English Poets:
‘You say you cannot conceive how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue; I will tell you. First, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe anything at all provided they are under obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. A dead lord ranks with commoners: vanity is no longer interested in the matter; for a new road has become an old one.’
It seems to me to fit Russell like a glove, and will surely seem even more apposite by the year 2010 when he will have been dead 40 years.
It is greatly to Clark’s credit that, while maintaining his attitude of awed reverence for Russell’s gifts and attainments, as far as can be seen he makes no effort to fake the evidence. This would, in any case, have been a difficult, and even risky, undertaking in view of Russell’s relentless, if not shameless, candour about himself in his autobiography; particularly regarding his non-stop amours, whether at the elevated level of his long love-affair with Lady Ottoline, and, later, with Colette (Lady Constance Malleson), or of his persistent efforts to lure female admirers, the younger the better, into his bed. Not to mention his four marriages.
The long tale of his conquests, faithfully monitored by Clark, must be considered remarkable, especially in view of his scrawny appearance; the receding chin, the squeaky voice, the simian features and other intimations of biological exhaustion. Even Lady Ottoline, who, in the light of her Garsington clientèle, cannot be credited with undue squeamishness, complained of Russell’s ‘lack of physical attraction, the lack of charm and gentleness and sympathy.’ Fame, it has been justly remarked, is a great aphrodisiac -a saying which doubtless goes far to account for Russell’s notable success with what used in pre-lib days to be called the fair sex.
In Lady Ottoline’s case an additional impediment was that Russell was a sufferer from pyorrhea, which, he explains, marred their physical transports. Returning from a visit to America, he was able to assure her that he had been cured of his distressing complaint, as well as passing on to her a detailed account of his seduction of Helen Dudley, the young daughter of an eminent gynaecologist who acted as his host during a stay in Chicago. While the seduction was proceeding, he tells us, Helen’s three sisters obligingly ‘mounted guard to give warning if either of the parents approached.’
It was scarcely a Tristan and Isolde situation, but one which, as described in his letter, served, along with the purification of his mouth, to reactivate his sexual relations with Lady Otto-line, for the enjoyment of which they repaired every Tuesday to Burnham Beeches for the day. Poor Helen Dudley, arriving in London in the middle of this rerun of an old idyll, was given a sharp brush-off by Russell on the specious grounds that,as the 1914-18 war had just broken out, and he proposed to take a leading part in opposing it, a liaison such as he had proposed in Chicago was inadmissible.’ The shock of the war,’ Russell writes of the affair in his autobiography, ‘killed my passion for her, and I broke her heart.’ Subsequently, he goes on, she ‘fell a victim to a rare disease, which first paralysed her, and then made her insane,’ and concludes, in a truly philosophical vein:’ If the war had not intervened, the plan which we formed in Chicago might have brought great happiness to us both.’
The episode confirms something Leonard Woolf told me once à propos Russell - that the trouble with him was that he was utterly heartless. He just does not seem to have had any true feelings about individual people, which may explain why, on the one hand, he continued into old age writing mawkish adolescent love-letters, and, on the other, became so ardent a propagandist for humanitarian causes. As Swift pointed out, those who are most concerned about humanity seldom care much about Tom, Dick and Harry. Thus Russell, who worked himself into a lather of frenzy even in his 80s and 90s lest the men in the Pentagon or the Kremlin should blow us and our earth to smithereens, was liable in his most intimate personal relationships to display an almost unearthly callousness.
In this respect, he may be seen as a sort of companion-piece to DH Lawrence; as Russell out of his inhumanity forged his mighty championship of humanity, so Lawrence out of his impotence forged his mighty championship of potency.The cold-hearted earl, following in the tradition of his famous grandfather, Lord John Russell, known as Radical Jack, became a sort of People’s Totem, as the impotent Nottingham miner’s son became the equivalent People’s Phallus.
It was in Cambridge that these two gimcrack prophets of our time were brought together. Initially, they showered one another with compliments and planned future collaboration, but their spheres of interest overlapped too much for harmonious relations to prove durable, and soon they were screaming insults. Lawrence was able to get in a fell blow with one of the characters in Women In Love - Sir Joshua Malleson, ‘a learned, dry baronet who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh horse-laugh.’ Russell weighed in two decades later with a ferocious attack on Lawrence broadcast by the BBC, and may be said to have won on points.
Russell was in the habit of saying that he would most have like to live in the years before the French Revolution as a compatriot of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. One can quite see why -enjoying the fun of preparing a revolution but departing this world before the tumbrils called. Instead, it was his fate to live into and after the Russian Revolution. He visited the new Soviet regime in the very early days, in 1920, and reached the conclusion that it was ‘a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar’s ...No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead.’
In his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism he wrote about the regime in this strain, in splendid contrast with the sycophantic and abysmally credulous reactions of other intellectuals like Shaw, the Webbs, Gide, Barbusse, etc. etc. Yet before even Russell’s words were printed, on his way to China, when his fellow-passengers asked him to speak about Russia, he felt bound to say ‘only favourable things about the Soviet Government.’
It was the ultimate Trahison des clercs, and epitomizes what was to be the practice of the flower of our Western intelligentsia in the tumultuous years to come, whereby they have been instrumental in undermining and invalidating all the values and aspirations they purported to be upholding, in the process, incidentally, abolishing themselves. In this sense, Russell may be seen as the foremost intellectual of his time, and also the last one of genius; the voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way for the outpouring of meaningless words and the repetition of mindless slogans which lay ahead.
***
Ferreting about in contemporary letters, as even so unsystematic and unscholarly a book critic as myself will from time to time, the figure of DH Lawrence looms up inescapably. I very much wish it were not so. How often I have closed one of the many outpourings about him with the thought that never, but never, will I so much as open another, come what may! Then another appears on the scene, perhaps by one of those unspeakable women who gathered round him, and I’m at it again, hooked!
Now at least I can hope that my addiction will henceforth be fed from a single source. By a happy chance I find myself in possession of Edward Nehsl’s three-volume D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, a magnificent piece of scholarship containing pretty well everything of significance written about Lawrence, whether by his friends and associates or by himself, all chronologically arranged, judiciously chosen, conveniently and exhaustively annotated, with an excellent index and bibliography. Next time I pine for a fix I shall turn to Mr. Nehls instead of sucking down, say, some of Frieda Lawrence’s raw spirit or Middleton Murry’s rancid cider, and calm will be restored.
One chapter of Mr. Nehls’s vast work riveted my attention for a particular reason: 1908-1912: Croydon, when I was at an elementary school in Croydon, Lawrence was teaching at another, and my teacher, Helen Corke, was a close friend of his, spending much of her spare time with him. Thus I was able, in considering this phase of Lawrence’s life, to fill in the background in a quite personal and vivid way. Also, I recently had a long televised conversation with Miss Corke - now an old lady in her eighties, but not all that older than me in my middle sixties -about her relations with Lawrence and her memories of him as a fellow teacher in Croydon.
Those early elementary or board schools were built on a standard plan provided by the old Board of Education. They had an air more of prisons than of schools, standing up stark and gaunt, all with a regulation asphalt playground into which the children were turned for their morning and afternoon break. I’ve never seen anything quite like them in America; they belonged, I fancy, to a phase of our Victorian social history which never got across the Atlantic. In the public estimation they were for the poor and the lowly; we who went to them, especially in a predominantly middle- or lower-middle-class South London suburban area like Croydon, were considered ‘rough,’ and if not actual delinquents, quite close to being so. The more respectable and affluent families sent their children to fee-paying private schools where they had caps and blazers; we were educated at the public expense - in those far-off days more a stigma then, as now, a right.
The school Lawrence taught at was built at a later time than mine, and so was less dismally institutional. But it was run in the same sort of way, with an inflexible syllabus, and subject to occasional inspection by a Scotsman named Robertson, now long since dead, whom I remember well. He had masses of white hair brushed back picturesquely from a rather florid countenance, and even then I sensed something bogus in him - confirmed now by his mannered, almost patronizing account of Lawrence, included by Mr. Nehls in his composite biography. Robertson obviously didn’t care much for Law-rence, and describes with some acerbity how he took him to a local literary society ‘at which each member or visitor was expected to speak for some minutes on a modern poet.’ (They suffered even then, didn’t they? Even before the coming of TS Eliot and The Beatles.) Lawrence, it seems, chose Rachel Annand Taylor, who, he announced dramatically, according to Mr. Robertson’s account, had ‘red hair, squirrel-red hair.’ I confess I had never heard of her. This Robertson examined me once for a scholarship examination, and passed me. It was said at the time that he did it only to ingratiate himself with my father, who was on the local Education Committee. I hope it may not be so, but honesty compels me to admit that it was the only examination of the kind I ever passed.
A vivid impression abides with me of Miss Corke standing by her blackboard, or coming among us, her charges, seated at our desks, to look over our shoulders to see how we were getting on with our writing and adding. (Remember, this was fifty-eight years ago, and we were still using slates which made an excruciating scratching noise as we made marks on them.) Now I have to add to this memory the thought that not so very far away, with a similar blackboard and similar desks, DH Lawrence was standing in front of his rather older pupils. Robertson remembers him as having ‘a pale face, stooping shoulders, a narrow chest, febrile hands, and a voice which I can only describe as contralto.’ He and Miss Corke met most weekends, going for long walks over the Downs, talking very seriously about literature and their emotions, breaking into fragments of foreign languages - German, French - going to concerts, all part of a general cultural assiduity which belonged to people of their sort in those times.
In the light of Lady Chatterley and other Laurentian ravings about sex, it seems somehow funny to me now - the two of them blamelessly reading Greek plays in translation to one another, and then poor Miss Corke between whiles having to cope with my and the other children in her class’s stubborn illiteracy. As I remember her in her early twenties, she was pretty and rather slight, with a lot of billowy hair; very much in the style of the mezzotint illustrations in a volume of Maupassant’s short stories on my father’s shelves whose pages I turned over at a very early age.
Talking it all over with Miss Corke nearly six decades later in my garden, with the arc lamps correcting the sunshine, the cameras turning, and clapper boards interrupting our talk, was a bizarre experience. To her he was ‘David’; the years rolled back, and I was in her classroom learning to spell (not that I ever did); she and Lawrence facing the wind as they made their way along the coast road from Brighton via Rotting-dean to Newhaven. They stayed in a boarding-house, Miss Corke recalls, at opposite ends of a long corridor, and in the middle of the night she ‘woke into an intensely silent sea fog, which swathed the house like a huge, clammy spider web, and filled me with cold terror.’ Terrified, she made her way along the corridor and stood outside Lawrence’s room. Then she heard him talking to himself in his sleep, was reassured thereby, and returned to her bed. She described the experience in some verses she wrote, entitled Fantasy; Lawrence took them over, and rewrote them as Coldness in Love, in which it is he who stands in the corridor outside her door. Both poems exist, and shed much light, particularly on Lawrence, but also on Miss Corke and the relationship between them - so much more actual and human than Mellors’ goings-on with Lady Chatterley in the woods.
Then again, Miss Corke was involved, as she told me, in a tragic happening during the time of her friendship with Lawrence. She had been having some kind of love affair, in the context of those days, with a musician who was married, with several children. After much hesitation they went away together to the Isle of Wight for a week, and then, when the musician came back and rejoined his family, in a mood of desperation he hanged himself in the bathroom. Lawrence took this tragic theme and used it for his novel The Trespasser, in which he calls the hero Siegmund and the heroine Helena. Together, he and Miss Corke worked over the theme, until Lawrence came to identify himself with Siegmund. Miss Corke wrote an account of the tragedy in her novel Neutral Ground. Some student, more diligent and scholarly than I, should find in this a fascinating subject for a thesis. Rarely can the actual process of literary composition have been so fully documented. There is also, as bearing on the same subject, Miss Corke’s perceptive and well-written D.H. Lawrence, the Croydon Years, and now, I have heard, all the tapes of our long conversation in my garden have been deposited with the University of Texas.
Another figure in Lawrence’s life who emerged into full dimensions as Miss Corke talked about her was Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s first and probably best love, the original of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, his good genius who helped him with his early efforts at writing, and sent off a batch of his poems to Ford Maddox Ford at the English Review, where they were accepted and published -his very first publication. Jessie Chambers visited Lawrence in Croydon, and she and Miss Corke became firm friends. Lawrence’s behaviour over the publication of Sons and Lovers, which Jessie Chambers considered scurvy, led to their estrangement, and was a blow from which she never recovered. No one in my opinion understood Lawrence so well; her D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, published under the pseudonym ‘E.T.,’ is a touchingly truthful account of him by someone who loved and understood him all too well.
And what of this, in a letter to Miss Corke after Lawrence’s death? ‘As an artist, when he is dealing with the immediate and the concrete, he is superb, but when he assays to be a thinker I find him superficial and unconvincing, and quite soon boring . . . His concern was to find some means of escape from the narrow prison of his own ego, and to do that he was prepared to assault the cosmos. So, whenever I read his almost delirious denunciations of what he pretended to regard as Christianity, I only see the caged panther lashing himself into a fury to find some way out of his strait prison. DHL was a man in bondage, and all his theorising and philosophising only bear witness to his agony.’
A man in bondage - exactly! When I compare these luminous thoughts and sentences with the congested disquisitions on Lawrence by, for instance, FR Leavis, I realize anew the chasm which divides real insight from academic criticism. ‘I am sure,’ Jessie Chambers concludes, ‘that he broke through his prison before the end, and died a free spirit, though he had lived in bondage.’ Let us hope she was right.
9
Ever since I can remember I have [on occasion] felt myself abstracted from the world of time; impelled, in Lear’s words, to take upon myself the mystery of things. As a child I had vivid recollections of this happening -walking along the road, seated in a room talking to people, and then, suddenly, almost with a click, I was not there anymore; not a participant, just a spectator, looking on from afar. When I first read the phrase: ‘A stranger in a strange land,’ it was, to me, greatly poignant because it exactly fitted such a state of mind. Since then I’ve often used it in talk and writing. Sometimes there are long intervals when this feeling of being a stranger in a strange land doesn’t come, so that I almost forget what it is like; but, sooner or later, it always comes back - bringing inexpressible delight.
I believe this sensation to be the basis of all religion and all art. It may be called the ‘soul’ in contradistinction to the body, or the imagination in contradistinction to the will. Once it has been fully experienced, all other experiences seem trivial by comparison. No perceptive human being has ever been wholly content with mortality. Man cannot live by bread alone. Looking back, it seems to me that all the happiness I have ever known has been derived from glimpses beyond mortality; from pausing, say, in the Strand, and seeing people, traffic, shops, like particles of dust caught up in sunshine and therefore momentarily existing separately. Of course, other things conduce to this state of mind, as talk, especially with a wholly sympathetic friend, and sometimes sensuality - the body then dissolving in fire rather than light, made molten rather than translucent. Beware, however, of falling into the error of a Tolstoy or a DH Lawrence, and regarding sensuality as, in itself, good or bad. Hunger is neither good nor bad, but its satisfaction deserves a grace.
My instinct has increasingly been to be abstemious, and to see in death a promise of deliverance - like one confined in a cell seeing remote blue sky through prison bars. At the same time, I have often not been abstemious, and often despaired. Peace cannot be achieved through satiety, but only through seeing beyond appetite; the idea that desire can be eliminated, by being fed is an illusion, since desire grows by what it feeds on. Not renunciation and not indulgence (the same thing really), but serenity - a harmony between flesh and spirit, between time and eternity, between living and dying. This is the peace of God which passeth all understanding; this is a state of grace.
The opposite is despair. Then time closes in on one like low-hanging clouds. Not a gleam of light breaks through any-where. There is no horizon, and the sullen air is dry and heavy in the mouth. Then one is trapped and imprisoned indeed - a heavy iron gate which has clanged to; a windowless cell, utter silence and utter loneliness. Who, in such circumstances, would not cry out to die? Death seems the only release when there is no hope of otherwise escaping from the cold, dark dungeon of mortality. Thus situated, I have longed to die, and even tried to die.
It is the nature of the soul to soar beyond the flesh and beyond time. There are no conceivable circumstances, individual or collective, which can pin it down irretrievably to earth. Escape is always possible. I know this to be true with all my heart. The compulsions towards the earth -fear and desire and appetite- belong to the body, but ecstasy belongs to the spirit. Transmutation of the earth’s compulsions into the spirit’s ecstasy is being born again. In her sentimentally pious Journal, Eugenie de Guerin asks: ’What do you do when you are sad, you who pray no longer? What do you do when your heart is breaking?’ Something in the nature of prayer - a reference of earthly unease to a comforter beyond the earth - is necessary to save hearts, and sanity, from cracking. The circumstances of mortality -irretrievably imperfect beings capable of conceiving perfection - are otherwise unendurable.
Sleeplessness, from which I suffer habitually, is an eruption of the unconscious. The mind turns round and round, like the wheels of a motor car when they will not grip; horrors invade one - shapes and ideas which embody the terrors of living; Coleridge’s slimy things crawling about a slimy sea. Kipling described the condition as the night getting into his head. Thus, I dreamt of a sort of play. There was a man who was sick, and everyone was kind and considerate to him. Then in the second act he had gone mad. The curtain rose on a nurse and others playing cards on the floor, laughing; and he came on to the stage, immensely aged, bald and shrivelled, with an open book in his hand and babbling confusedly. The others paid no attention to him. On another occasion, I thought I was imprisoned and made for the window to escape, putting my hand through it, and, in the process, cutting an artery so that blood spouted up.
These are the horrors of life, the Evil One, who can be kept at bay by day, but at night can work his will. To keep him off, I try to think of all the most exquisite things I know - as, a summer’s day walking through a cornfield, a warm moonlit night by the sea, a congregation in a country church at Evensong with the light of the setting sun touching the brass eagle on which the Bible stands ,and say over lines I particularly like - as Donne’s ‘My dearest love I do not go . . .’ or the collect: ‘Dearly beloved brethren, I pray and beseech you as many as are here present to accompany me . . .’ or the Lord’s Prayer.
What is fear, which eats away at one’s heart and prevents sleep? Though it attaches itself to specific things, as bodily illness or other material disasters, these only focus what exists already. They give a name to what is nameless. Fear is darkness; fear is being excluded from the society of God; fear is servitude to fleshly appetites. The only way to exorcise fear is by its opposite, love - perfect love which casteth out fear. The more love there is in a human heart, the less room there is for fear. Without love a vacuum is set up which fear soon rushes in to fill. The same thing is true of a society. When it is based on the concept of hatred, its only mystique is fear. Everyone has to be afraid in order to hate; everyone has to hate in order to go on being afraid.
In Russia, in Hitler’s Germany, one sensed the omnipresence of fear -the sudden knock at the door, and everyone growing pale; the fear in people’s eyes, the furtive looks. When I left Russia by train, just across the Letvian frontier where there was a white stake in the ground with a G.P.U. man in his familiar long grey overcoat standing beside it, one of the passengers went out into the corridor and shook his fist in the direction whence we had come. We all spontaneously joined him and did likewise; then began to laugh hysterically. We had been delivered from the kingdom of fear.
Since that time its bounds have been greatly extended .Even, however, if they encompassed the whole world, it would not be forever. Men look towards the light and away from the darkness; their hearts yearn after love, and release from fear.As a prisoner, however deep his dungeon, and however long he has been incarcerated there, never quite forgets the delights of liberty, so in the sunless land of fear there can never be any enduring acclimatisation. Though whole generations pass away, still in the soul of man there is the longing to behold the radiance of God’s love whence he is derived. Flowers in dark places which never feel the sun still lift their blooms in its direction, for such is their nature.
Efforts to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth are wholly misguided, and those, like Gandhi and Tolstoy, who undertake the attempt are led inevitably into falsity. Thus, Tolstoy suffering the humiliation of having armed guards on his estate to prevent the peasants from stealing timber, and Gandhi being involved in Swaraj politics. The point is that perfection cannot be instituted in terms of imperfection, but imperfection can strive after perfection in terms of itself. It is the difference between the steeple of Salisbury Cathedral reaching into the sky and the Tower of Babel intended to mount to Heaven. The one is exquisite in its aspiration, the other ludicrous in its pretension; the one serene, the other clamorous and discordant. Tolstoy wanted to be wholly good and wholly spiritual; but in abolishing his appetites by the will he only enraged them, putting himself in the pitiable situation of fornicating furiously and disgustedly when he was seventy and over, abandoning home and wife when he was eighty. Appetite cannot be willed out of existence, but only, by God’s grace, transubstantiated - dying in the flesh and being re-born in the spirit.
***
Walking through the streets of London, individual restlessness comprehended in a collective restlessness - traffic, passers-by, all caught up in the same essential rhythm, like dead leaves caught up in the autumnal wind. No destination or purpose, except just to move as others are moving; the bright green grass of Regent’s Park, varying shops towards whose windows lingering glances, faint desires, are cast, evening papers mechanically offered and taken. Then down Baker Street, through Portman Square, on to Hyde Park Corner in the Spring sunshine, houses in Park Lane newly painted, green shutters bright as the green grass. At Hyde Park Corner itself the orators declaiming, words cast into the air and falling they know not where; faces distorted as with passion, angrily persuasive, clamorous and insistent -venerable figure, little heeded, sternly beseeching: ‘Prepare to meet thy God!’, placard to this effect displayed; heavily bearded exponent of some ancient lost cause, and another with studied oratory, a crucifix beside him, recommending the Catholic faith.
Vast conglomeration of people, in groups, pairs or solitary - what has drawn us together, up and down, to and fro, lingering or hurrying? ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’, in each passing face; desire on the benches or under the trees; arm threaded through arm or hand contained in hand - together yet strangers, world so familiar and yet so strange, so friendly and so hostile, so dear and so terrible. These my brothers and sisters in mortality, each one entering so strangely into the kingdom of time, so strangely departing thence; comforting himself as best he may, languid or purposeful, eager or passive. I suddenly thought with great thankfulness: ‘I have no grievances against anyone, no sense of having been wronged by anyone, no scores to work off or anything whatsoever to avenge. Human beings only wrong one another in so far as the person wronged agrees to be wronged. The wrong is in the recipient not the doer. I wish no ill to any living soul; if anyone were delivered into my hands for judgement I should have at once to acquit him.
A spring morning in the country - sunshine, birds singing, the grass dewy, the air fragrant, all the earth born again with the same ecstasy year by year, undaunted by the inevitability of the coming of autumn and then winter; eager only to reach the summer, that prospect sufficing. This is the pattern of the will in operation, of all earthly desires. Useless to reason -How can it go on with a ruinous end so certain? By the same token -How can spring ceaselessly repeat an exuberance which only exhausts itself in cold and desolation? Yet onto this mystery of spring, the earth’s rebirth, has been grafted (or rather harmonised with it) another of vastly deeper significance - the spring or rebirth of the soul. Thus time’s rhythms portray those of eternity as a smile portrays amusement. From the one the other may be deduced. One is an image of the other. If there had been no spring it would not have been possible to understand the soul’s ecstasy.
A religious procession making its way along Hatton Gardens on an April Sunday seen from the top of a bus - before them a crucifix held up, and as they moved along, chanting some hymn or other. For a moment it was deeply moving, to the point of evoking tears - human souls in the deserted and ruined City, so varied in their habiliments - old and young, decrepit and vigorous, some hobbling, some striding, right at the end an aged grey lady in a bath chair, but all pressing forward after the Cross, singing as they went. This is the vision, I thought, of the saved entering the gates of the Celestial City, all singing, all confident, hobbling, shuffling, running towards the light.
Walking over Hampstead Heath, Hesketh Pearson quoted Gloucester’s remark in ‘King Lear’ when, after he had been blinded, he said to the Old Man: ‘I stumbled when I saw.’ I marvelled that so brief a phrase could be so greatly moving. The whole mystery of expression in words came upon me - that a mere five should overwhelmingly convey a vast tragedy in all its implications. At the prospect of the death of someone dear thoughts on an afterlife are called in question. That face, so familiar, is to be drained of life; that voice, so often heard with delight, is never to speak again; that laughter will boom forth no more through evenings of dear companionship. These are facts before which no mere hypothesis, no mental affectation can stand up. The deep tenderness of one earth dweller for another imposes the need for an authentic solace or none at all. No platitudes or theoretical hopes will serve. Insistence in argument - To me, as to Blake, the death of the body is no more than going from one room into another -confronted with the reality of death makes a poor showing.
‘Do not go,’ one wants to say -as I so often have said to Hugh Kingsmill late at night trying to detain him a little longer, on seeing him home - one more turn up and down to defer parting. ’Stay a little longer.’ That is the feeling now - let immortality, however sublime, be postponed in favour of some continuance of mortality, however inadequate. As a lover will barter for a caress - just one, even contemptuously bestowed - all the pretensions of a spiritual love with its pride and integrity, enduring any abasement, taking the caress as assassins take their fee. It is like seeing someone off on a train, and the train begins to move, and you run foolishly along the platform, keeping pace with the train, faster and faster, until the platform ends.
***
Church services are very empty, and yet at their worst they have a kind of sweetness. Faces humbly downcast are more tolerable than when they are clamorous. The most terrible sight of a human being is when he is orating, face inflamed, swollen, with words; mouth gaping open like a vast, vile chasm, hands clenched. Demagogues, as Lenin and Hitler, are usually presented in this hateful posture. Even mock humility is preferable -a congregation chanting: ‘We have erred and strayed in thy ways like lost sheep . .’The church service is designed to still rather than inflame the will; at least to settle the dust of living for a little while. Boys’ voices convey innocence; the candles shine like truth, and the wonderful phrases of the psalms and hymns and prayers and scripture tranquillize. ’The dayspring from on High hath visited us’ - I kept saying it over and over in my mind, finding it infinitely satisfying. I used to consider that the trouble about church services was that one didn’t believe, so that the words of the Creed died on one’s lips or were hypocritically spoken. Now, I feel differently, since I have seen that faith is more than merely believing as wisdom is more than merely knowledge.
Quite apart from any belief, whatsoever, faith, for me, maintains the following propositions:
***
From the point of view of eugenics, a parent should care most for those of his children who are healthiest and most intelligent, and least for the weakest and most incompetent. In fact, it is often the other way round. I remember in Algiers, a woman with an idiot son on whom she expended all her energies and tenderness. This seemed to me more profound in its significance than any principle of eugenics.
It was a small white house where she lived, and when one opened the garden gate a bell tinkled, to warn her to come out and protect her son, interpose herself between him and strangers. He normally sat in the sun among flowers she had planted muttering to himself and sometimes trembling. If, to a visitor, he managed to ejaculate a word coherently she was as smiling and proud as if he had achieved some brilliant distinction. She tenderly translated his incoherence to visitors as a mother proudly interprets a child’s first efforts to speak.
I sometimes hear that bell now; it evokes the blue sky, the flowers, the whole fragrance of love. Eugenically considered, the idiot is a useless mouth and the mother engaged in a futile pursuit; but then if the idiot had been destroyed I should have been deprived of the bell, which I can say in all sincerity is more precious to me than all the literature of eugenics with the Fabian Society thrown in. Again, biologically considered, when a woman is old and withered and barren she should legitimately be cast aside; and yet these marks of age, that withered frame, are the very pattern of love, as a sunset is the glory of a summer’s day, or as the exquisite colours of autumn recall in tranquillity the ecstasy of spring.
***
The will is insatiable in all its appetites, haunted by fear, spurred on by desire which grows by what it feeds on, its only conceivable outcome the Gadarene swine blindly, inevitably hurling themselves to destruction. There is no release from the will through the will. Release is possible only by the destruction of the will followed by re-birth in the spirit. Whatever might happen to the world, to the Christian Church, to me and mine, this will always be true; in the realisation of its truth may I be delivered from fear. The destruction of the will cannot be willed, but is achievable only through God’s grace. Every indulgence in desire feeds and strengthens the will - as alcohol, fornication in thought and deed. How I long sometimes to be delivered from desire, envying the dead because their appetites have died with their flesh; saying over to myself those last words of Cromwell - ‘It is not my desire to eat or to sleep, but to make what haste I may to begone.’
Yet the wonder of life is that it is possible to die in the flesh and be reborn in the spirit without waiting for death. There is escape from the prison before the sentence is served. How I wish I could keep this always before me, reading what embodies it, eschewing anger and lust and hatred, all the will’s brood, fixing my eyes beyond the horizon of time and my spirit beyond the confines of flesh. There is no doubt now, and never has been any doubt, that therein lies all joy, all blessedness, all true achievement. Everything else is vanity, and at last anguish and madness. There is nothing worth thinking about except eternity, and nothing worth feeling except love, which is the soul’s delight. Beyond the tallest spire, beyond the furthest view, beyond all thought and aspiration and excellence - [there] I would be, and abide ever.
There is no imagery adequate to the purpose. Mortal love is sweet, but compared with this other, only bitter. When it reigns, material things are shadows, and men and women tread the streets silently, as though pavements were covered with deep snow. ’Be not afeard, be not afeard, ’I say to myself. Fear has no meaning when perfect love casts it out. What should I fear for? - this mortal life of mine? It soon must end in any case. This mortal society to which I belong? It, too, infallibly, will perish tomorrow or the day after, and, like enough, as others have, leave little or nothing behind to show that it ever was. These small possessions, these dear ones, this corner of my own? They, likewise, are mortal, and cannot be defended against the ravages of time, which washes over them, and all else, like huge breakers on a sandy coast. I have no stake in the world, or would not have any, and cannot lose what I do not have. I would arrive in eternity like a happy traveller, unencumbered with baggage, or regrets, or letters-of-credit. When the world has truly no power to hold me, then am I free indeed; then only truly delivered from all evil.
It is easy for weeks on end to be wholly submerged in the world of time -like a watchmender who, with magnifying glass screwed in his eye, sees nothing but the minute machinery he is repairing. How strange this will seem looked back on across eternity - my soul among the billions and billions which have existed, now exist, and will exist hereafter, with a vast desert of time stretching into the past and another reaching into the future, living for a few decades on a speck of dust riding through the universe; mysteriously born, and then, shortly after, as mysteriously dying; and yet, absorbed in these circumstances, as a moth is in the brightness round which it flutters; as a worm is in the dark earth through which it bur-rows. How terrible for man is this absorption! How miserable, wretched and lost when the waves of time close over one’s head, and its salt is in one’s mouth. To look beyond mortality! To see the glimmer of light where the dawn will break, and to hear sweet sounds in the distance growing imperceptibly nearer!
How am I to lose the world, break the bonds of time, breathe not the stale air of mortality but the fresh breezes of eternity, live in terms of everlasting reality instead of the delusions of sense, keep my gaze fixed on God, from whom alone comes peace. Like as the hart panteth after the water brook, tongue parched, eyes wild with longing, so do I yearn for eternity, and cannot find satisfaction in anything else; not in eating or drinking or in the indulgence of any appetite; not in the wonders of the world or human companionship or love or lust, in life or in death, in work or in idleness, in contemplation or in restless movement, in riches or in poverty, in fame or in obscurity, in understanding or in folly. No other food will do, no other joy will substitute.
‘And there were the dishes in which they brought to me, being hungry, the Sun and Moon instead of Thee, ’St. Augustine cried regarding his secular studies. I, too, have a hunger which the Sun and Moon will not satisfy. Its satisfaction is the only pursuit I care for; that it exists, provides the certainty that the wherewithal to satisfy it also exists - as the fact of physical hunger presupposes the existence of bread. There is no name for this hunger except love, and only in the self’s obliteration can it be satisfied. It has existed since the beginning of time, and will exist till the end of time. For me, a Western European. I find its most perfect formulation in the New Testament, and, especially, in the First Epistle of St. John.
How extraordinary is this longing, every day more intense
-for what? I scarcely know - for perfection, for eternity, for that peace which the world cannot give; a longing to begone, and yet not a desire for death such as one feels in moments of despair; a consciousness of having some part in a purpose transcending time and space, of hearing distant music, of being in love, but not with another human being - rather with life itself, and death, and all creation; pain, disappointment and other ills only like blemishes on a loved face which make it the more lovable. I often say over Caliban’s words - ‘This Isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs . . .’, and think of his dreams, so wonderful that when he waked he cried to sleep again. Yet the ecstasy cannot be conveyed.
***
A watery, wintry dawn seen across London roofs is exceedingly lovely. It is as though the old Thames were once more flowing through deserted, desolate marshes. In the stillness, London seems only a dream, a shadow, with no corporeal existence. Seeing it thus, I reflected that the greatness of Christian civilization, of which London is a manifestation, derives from the religion out of which it was born. Throughout all its cruel history, the idea has been kept alive that men belong to one family, with one father in Heaven, and so must be brothers one with another. However imperfectly, this concept finds expression in law, in art, in all institutions, in the whole apparatus of society. Materialism, whether in the American or the Russian version, is the exact antithesis of such a concept. It claims for the ego all rights because there is nothing but the ego, and therefore leads back to barbarism, to the condition before civilization existed. This is absolutely and irretrievably the consequence of setting up Man as his own God. Thither we are now moving, with what accompaniment of horrors cannot be imagined. I feel this deluge upon me, and ask only that I may be vouchsafed the strength to live out what remains of my own days, in the light of truth as I have seen it - that Man lives in so far as the ego dies, that self-abnegation is greater than self-assertion, that to bow the head before the wonder and mystery of creation is more fitting than to raise it in defiance, and that the imagination alone can light a path through the forests of the night - Paul, Blake, Beethoven, Constable and many, many others contributing to that sublime radiance.
Goodness has an aroma of sweetness, evil a stench. This is not fanciful, but a fact. Between the powers of darkness operating through the will, and those of light operating through the imagination or soul, there is ceaseless war - a conflict which takes place collectively, as well as inside each individual. This recalls an image in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ - Christian, climbing up a mountain in the shade keeps seeing round each bend the sunshine in which he longs to be but never reaches. Like all Bunyan’s images, it is perfect because it recalls an exact experience. How excluded one feels in the chill shade when one sees the earth bathed in sunshine, seemingly near, yet out of reach. So it is possible to be excluded from goodness. ’Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee,’ is, perhaps, the most poignant of all prayers. It is also true that goodness exists by virtue of itself and not by virtue of the acts it induces. Goodness in itself spreads light; the halo is an authentic phenomenon. The mere presence of goodness destroys its opposite as light destroys darkness. Nothing needs to be said, or even done. In the presence of goodness anger is consumed, arrogance expires, lustfulness flickers out - a fire without fuel.
For days, and even weeks, the light can be lost sight of, the task forgotten. Then, in a despairing moment, remembrance comes, and resolution is again summoned up. There is no other answer to despair -neither drug nor stimulant, neither sleep nor wakefulness; no change of scene, or of companionship, or of way of life; no satiety of the senses. This is a hunger which bread will not satisfy, a thirst which drink will not quench. The only satisfaction lies in self-abnegation; the way, as the New Testament says, is narrow, and the gate to it is straight. Yet along this way alone is life worth living; can, indeed, be lived at all. Generalised plans for human felicity are all doomed, not merely to failure, but to produce the exact opposite of what was intended. Each individual must find the way alone and follow it alone. Who knows what future horrors the pursuit of collective chimera may hold. It may even be that Man, in the Will’s final frenzy, will blow the earth itself to pieces, and himself with it. No matter. All that will be lost is a speck of dust travelling through the universe - that’s nothing. What remains is eternity and Man’s part in it - that’s everything.
10
Somerset Maugham And Leonard Woolf
A visit to Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque was always memorable and enjoyable, though latterly, of course, in view of his condition, liable to be painful. His folded, parchment face and small glittering eyes; his elegant, but somehow not quite ‘correct’ attire, clothing a body which was neat, slight and wiry; yet likewise, in some indefinable way, distorted and infirm; the stutter which varied between making speech almost impossible and being barely noticeable, according to his mood and the company he kept; the villa itself, with its large, carefully tended garden, swimming-pool and other appurtenances of affluence, the well-run household, the luncheon excellent, simple and invariable, always the same inscrutable servants opening the door and waiting at table; with this ostensible luxury, a decided flavour of parsimony, of a careful, even somewhat grudging, hand in control - it all added up to a single impression. Of what? I remember asking myself the first time I went there. The answer was obvious when one came to think about it. Maugham lived in the style and spirit of one of his own short stories.
The touch of ‘commonness,’ the skill and ingenuity, the sentimentality masquerading as cynicism, the false values so appetisingly served up from China to Peru; wherever two or more were gathered together in clubs, messes, P & O liners, wagons-lit, with the dawn coming up like thunder, out of Sevenoaks, ‘crost the Thames -were not these precisely the characteristics of life in the Villa Mauresque, shining in the Riviera sun where Cap Ferrat juts into the blue Mediterranean? Romantic writers are forced to dwell in their own illusions, to build them into little houses which, like snails, they carry on their backs, retreating into them when danger - that’s reality - threatens. Thus, poor old Snow shuffling along the corridors of power, Waugh for ever revisiting Brideshead, Hemingway living dangerously to the point, in the end, of blowing out his own brains; thus Maugham on the Côte d’Azur, where the brown bodies with their delicate bikini tracings are packed side by side, stretching from Cap Ferrat to eternity. Truly, God is not mocked.
The thing I like best about Maugham, and found most admirable, was his total lack of literary pretentiousness. He just never thought of himself, or behaved, as a great writer. If anything, he underrated his own work, seeing himself as a popular entertainer merely, who would soon be forgotten. Actually, ‘Cakes and Ale’ (his own favourite, as he told me once) is, in my opinion, a much better novel than many which are more highly regarded today. His comments on other writers were shrewd and perceptive, and never governed by current fads and fashions. His attitude towards contemporary mandarins like T.S.Eliot was well this side of idolatry. The craftsman in him - far and away his predominant side as a writer - steadied him in making literary judgments. It was a great pleasure, and most beneficial, to listen to him when he talked about the technicalities and practice of writing.
For critics generally he professed contempt, and, unlike other successful writers, never seemed to bother much about reviews. Perhaps he resented a little the lack of esteem for his work among highbrows. I know he sometimes let fall a sigh in the direction of Rapallo along the coast, where Max Beerbohm was growing ever more famous in literary and intellectual circles with every book he did not write. Someone once remarked at his table that a small fund was being raised, sponsored by Eliot, to provide Beerbohm with a wireless set. Maugham’s irritation at this ludicrous project was evident. His stutter became convulsive.Why, he seemed to be asking, reward indolence when his own steady industry brought him so little esteem? Such mighty sails for so tiny a craft!
In general, however, he was well content with his lot. He liked being rich and took pleasure in the thought that his earnings from his pen had probably set a record. Forgive me, AP Herbert, but there has never been a time when successful writers could so enrich themselves. Even in a league which included Shaw, Wells, Wodehouse, Kipling, Galsworthy, etc., Maugham’s earnings have been prodigious. His satisfaction at being wealthy has been more due to vanity than to self-importance or self-indulgence. His ways were relatively simple and abstemious. Like all timid, lonely people, money seemed to him a protection. It set up a buffer between him and a largely alien and hostile world. To this end he sought it, first diligently and ardently, and finally as an addiction.
Contrary to popular view, far from being ‘cynical,’ Maugham’s temperament was romantic, if not sentimental. I remember that on one occasion he described with great feeling how at some public function he had seen the Windsors and they were holding hands. Was it not a touching proof, he said, that their romance, which cost him so dear in worldly terms, had proved worthwhile? The impression of Maugham which nothing will efface is of an outsider. Of the many who have claimed that honorific title of our time, he unquestionably deserved it. He had many acquaintances among what he would call, with a deprecating smile, the great; Churchill and Beaverbrook, for instance. Visitors were frequent at the Villa Mauresque, and included a variety of notabilities. Yet Maugham was never, as it were, fully integrated into this world of the eminent and successful, even though he ostensibly upheld its credentials. Particularly latterly, he spent much of his time alone, or in the company of his faithful friend and secretary, Alan Searle, whose exacting devotion to him over many years deserves the highest commendation.
What, then, set Maugham apart? Not, certainly, any mystical leanings. He was the least religious of men. Nor did he, like Swift, come to sicken of the company of his fellows. In principle, he remained gregarious and companionable. Was it, perhaps, his early poverty? His not very happy childhood? His homosexuality? The failure of his marriage? I should not have thought so. Plenty of people with these, and worse, afflictions, and far less gifted and successful than Maugham, have managed to come to terms with their circumstances. Maugham, it seems to me, never did. It was this side of his character which appealed to me and made me feel always affectionately disposed to him; a sort of fastidiousness, an essential integrity which held him aloof. At the end of a long life full of fame and wealth and distinction, he remained triumphantly an outsider.
The last time I visited the Villa Mauresque he had just got rid of his pictures in consequence of some tiresome and unedifying family row. The spaces on the walls where they had hung still showed. He complained bitterly that he missed them, and I blurted out, for once carried away in his company, how all any of us wanted was that he should have for his remaining years whatever satisfaction life could offer, and so on. I don’t think he even heard what I said; deafness increasingly afflicted him. In any case, it was no business of mine. I think of him now, and always shall when I look down on Cap Ferrat - an old, old man staring forlornly at those empty spaces on his walls, indomitable even in his wilfulness; a craftsman whose steady application and accomplished performance in the field of English letters must deserve the respect and the envy of other practitioners.
***
I shall always think of Leonard Woolf in his lovely garden at Rodmell, in Sussex. It was part of the serenity of his temperament - he was the most serene person I have ever known - to love his garden the more for its association with his wife Virginia, even though it also recalled her tragic self-inflicted death. In one of its more enchanting corners there was a bust of her, and there I sat with him on a summer’s afternoon talking about her without any sense of unease or restraint.
Woolf, as he told me, had no belief in or expectation of immortality. He was entirely convinced he would never see Virginia again, or continue to exist in any way himself when his earthly life ended.There was no despair or even drama in this for him. He was a true stoic. He lived his life nobly and austerely, and, I am sure, relinquished it gracefully. When I heard of his death last week at the age of 88, I felt no pang of regret, such as one normally does even for the old when they pass away. In his case, it would have been unbecoming. All I felt was gratitude for the time I spent in his company. Though we disagreed fundamentally, I found a sort of inspiration in him. I loved his simple way of life, his utter honesty and truthfulness, his patience and dedication to work, his innumerable acts of kindness and consideration to all sorts and conditions of people. To village people whom he delighted to help and know. To Bloomsbury survivors like Labokova with whom he invariably ate his Christmas dinner. To fellow gardeners for whom he organised an annual show.
Up to the end he largely did for himself. Luncheon invariably consisted of bread and cheese, slices of tongue, lemonade from the great jug he made himself, or beer. The passion for goodness was not in him. But the practice was. He was an extraordinarily good man. One of the many touching pictures that emerged was of him and Virginia together setting the type for printing, on their flat-bed press, the very first edition of ‘The Waste Land.’ This was the beginning of the Hogarth Press, which they founded and which throve, in terms of prestige and finance. Woolf told me that his original idea had been that typesetting might prove an effective therapy for Virginia’s mental disturbance: I find this kindly notion more estimable than the result - the launching of a thousand seminaries on Eliot’s preposterously overrated poem.
Woolf will, of course, be forever associated with the Bloomsbury set. I always felt that, although he belonged to them, he was in many respects different. Thus he was born into an affluent and cultivated Jewish family, but after his father’s early death they were in straitened circumstances
-something which few of the other Bloomsburyites ever experienced. Then, as a highly efficient civil servant in Ceylon (no one, incidentally, has given a better account of what being in the old ICS was like than he in ‘Growing’, the first of five autobiographical volumes),he acquired a practical knowledge of government and affairs. This held him in good stead as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and imperial affairs and as a publisher. He justly prided himself on being a capable administrator and man of business. Finally, he was too nice and too sensitive to feel the sense of superiority over other mortals with which Virginia, her sister Vanessa and her husband, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and the others were afflicted.
He saw very clearly the faults of Fabians like the Webbs, and had numerous highly diverting anecdotes about them. His judgments were shrew and sound; as when he said about Bertrand Russell that he was cold and without feeling. Even his close friends, even Virginia, he weighed up justly and dispassionately. I sometimes thought that in the last resort he did not care greatly for humans at all, and much preferred animals; especially dogs, who were his constant companions. He communicated with them with uncanny skill, and came, as it seemed to me, to look like them. I am sure that at Rodmell their barking is hushed and muted now. If I were to address a letter of sympathy about his death to anyone, it would be to them.
Woolf ‘s socialism and internationalism (he was one of the first to envisage a League of Nations in his ‘International Government,’ first published in 1915 as a supplement to the lately-founded New Statesman) were consistently and sincerely held, but against a background of an essentially pessimistic attitude to his times. He believed in his heart that all the liberal hopes plausibly entertained for our Western civilisation expired in the First World War, never to be seriously revived. Even so, he worked on, to the very last day of his life, concerned about injustice, cruelty, oppression and all other impediments to ameliorating our human condition.
11
There are few things more repulsive than picturesque old men. If ever I find myself cultivating a venerable white beard and hair to match I shall know that the end has come. The thought is put in my mind by looking at the picture of Havelock Ellis on the dust-jacket of his autobiography, first published in 1940 and now reissued. To be vain about youthful good looks is permissible, though still not edifying; one remembers with distaste all the high-table camp talk about Rupert Brooke’s good looks (for instance, Lytton Strachey’s high-pitched ‘Rupert in en beauté tonight’ on catching a glimpse of him at a theatre) among Cambridge homosexuals. But to be vain amidst the foliage of old age is disgusting, and betokens an obsessive narcissism.
Ellis was a classic example. His body, he indicates in My Life, gave off sweet smells; ‘my mother when she kissed me used often to say that my cheeks were scented, and my wife, who has frequently made the same remark, has also said that my cast-off shirts have a distinct odour of cedar.’ His head, he writes, passed for being ‘noble’, his eyes for being bright and beautiful; ‘Olive Schreiner said once of my nude form that it was like that of Christ in the carpenter’s shop in Holman Hunt’s Shadow of the Cross’. On another occasion Olive Schreiner compared him to the ‘eager, bright-eyed satyr in Rubens’s picture, Silenus’. A ‘dear friend lived to call me ‘Faun’, and Edward Carpenter, with the quiet twinkle of his luminous eyes, once said to me: ’He is the god Pan.’
Faun or Pan or Christ, or all three at once, Ellis clearly had a great and abiding passion for himself. He works lovingly over his limbs, features and organs, only leaving out the genitals, one feels, because they were too sacred in his eyes to be included even in this auto-erotic survey. Nothing clouded the serenity of his relationship with himself; they never, as it were, spoke a cross word to one another - he and himself. It was a perfect marriage, and if there were occasional infidelities - with his wife Edith, with Olive Schreiner, with ‘Amy’ who turns out to have been the daughter of his friend Dr Baker Smith, with Margaret Sanger, the early American contraception evangelist, and with Françoise Delisle the companion of his last years, actually a French woman named Françoise Lafitte-Cyon -his only true love and dear companion was himself.
With so narcissistic a temperament Ellis was bound to find his relations with women -to put it mildly -unusual and delicate. Alan Hull Walton, in his introduction to this new edition of My Life, insists that Ellis was neither impotent nor homosexual. We must take his word for it, though none of the relationships with women described in My Life can be considered as normal, or, in the accepted sense, sexually satisfying. His wife turned out to be a lesbian, and after their marriage soon reverted to lesbian practices. In the end the poor woman went off her head, becoming, except in occasional lucid moments, fiercely hostile towards Ellis. Olive Schreiner, with whom he was according to his own account in love, was clearly a passionate woman (Ellis called her ‘lion’ and she him ‘my soul’s wife’), but their indulgence in sensuality together, such as it was, can scarcely have been, from her point of view, up to scratch. Some idea of how it went is perhaps conveyed by the following bizarre incident:
‘I see her at her rooms at Hastings where I had come to spend the week-end with her, bringing at her desire my student’s microscope, for she wished to observe living spermatozoa, which there was no difficulty in obtaining to place under the cover glass for her inspection, and I see her interest in their vigorous mobility.’
This is not, I should suppose, quite what Antony and Cleopatra were up to.
What precisely happened with Amy, his mistress of sorts over a number of years, is not even hinted at, but rightly or wrongly one has the impression that with her, too, it was the by-ways rather than the main stream of sexual passion along which they ventured. Of all his lady friends Amy seems to have been the most quiescent, and may well have been called on to indulge his proneness to urolagnia (his own word) which he considers he inherited from his mother, to whose ‘early love of water’ he draws attention:
‘Once at the age of twelve she took me to spend the day at the London Zoological Gardens. In the afternoon as we were walking side by side along a gravelled path in a solitary part of the Gardens, she stood still, and soon I heard a very audible stream falling to the ground. When she moved on I instinctively glanced behind at the pool in the path, and my mother, having evidently watched my movements, remarked shyly: ’I did not mean you to see that.’ . . . No doubt there was a shy alarm as to what her now tall, serious boy would think of this new experience with his mother, but there was also the impulse to heighten a pleasurable experience by blending with it the excitement of sharing it with her son.’
Later, he writes, he became interested in vesical energy, and published a paper on ‘The Bladder as a Dynamometer’.’My vision of this function,’ he goes on, ‘became in some degree attached to my feeling of tenderness towards women - I was surprised how often women responded to it sympathetically.’ This view was confirmed when his sister Louie said of his mother’s behaviour in the Zoological Gardens: ’She was flirting with you.’ As for Françoise - by the time Ellis joined up with her he was getting on in years, and even his urolagnia had doubtless begun to lose its edge. Françoise, in any case, was well armed. Had she not called herself, in a fragment of autobiographical fantasy, ’The Woman Who Can Do Without A Man’, all unconsciously preparing for her life with Ellis?
One naturally associates Ellis with Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, another picturesquely white-bearded pair in whose writings -Leaves of Grass and Towards Democracy -likewise a strong narcissistic strain is discernible. Carpenter (a largely forgotten figure now, I imagine, but in his day a name to conjure with in progressive circles) was, of course, a pioneer homosexual, and Whitman, despite repeated offers in his verses to impregnate all the daughters of America, shared the same tastes, having a fancy at one time for a street-car driver named Pete. I have read a touching account of how Whitman used to ride to and fro on Pete’s street-car, hoping to enjoy a tête-a-tête with him on the way to the depot when there were no other passengers. Another homosexual associate of Ellis’s was John Addington Symonds, with whom he started collaborating on a work on sexual inversion. Symonds died before matters had gone very far, and Ellis, in his account of the project, disparages Symonds’s contribution. One gets a rather different impression from Mrs Grosskurth’s lately published brilliant biography of Symonds -not that it matters much either way.
However one looks at it, Ellis was by way of being a sexual oddity, and to that extent, one might have supposed, ill-equipped to be a guide, philosopher and friend in this particular field. Yet he, along with Kraft-Ebing and other maestros, prepared the way for - in Alan Hull Walton’s words - ’undoubted giants’ like Freud and Kinsey, and the so-called Sexual Revolution of our time. His Studies in the Psychology of Sex has been, and for all I know still may be, highly regarded; I well remember as a smutty adolescent scouring its footnotes for juvenile erotica, and seeing it displayed, along with treatises in a like vein, in what used to be known as ‘rubber shops’. In a sense, indeed, he emerges from the pages of My Life as a true prophet, embodying, as he did, the narcissism, the self-love tapering off into impotence, of the sex-obsessed times which lay ahead.