Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  I had my hair washed and set at a salon opposite the hotel in a high complex of shops with a centre courtyard with water and trees, balconies and seats set out where shoppers could rest in comfort. I found it cool and pleasant. In the salon a young stylist was trimming the beard of an older customer, kneeling in front of him like a supplicant and delicately parting, combing and snipping the silken hairs of the long beard with a concentrated, almost loving dedication. I hadn’t seen this done before.

  WEDNESDAY, 28TH JANUARY

  I am writing this on the BA flight on my way home from Miami. The captain promised a relatively smooth flight, but this was optimistic and my wine slopped over the pristine tablecloth as soon as it was served. I like the redesigned first-class cabin of British Airways. I am sitting, as I did on my way out, in my own capsule, my window seat isolated from the rest of the cabin by a curved partition with a panel of buttons to my left to operate the various seat positions. This I find more convenient than the previous system of having them in the armrests where I could never comfortably reach them when wearing a seat-belt, nor easily identify which button was which. The main advantage of the redesigned seat is that one can lie flat and attempt to sleep. One button when pressed elongates the seat into a bed and each passenger is provided with a duvet and pillow. At least one male passenger changed early into his pyjamas and settled down dinnerless for the night. This morning the cabin, with passengers neatly folding their duvets, had the appearance of a small and exceptionally luxurious school or army dormitory. I had no appetite for breakfast, but early morning tea arrived on a small tray with elegant teapot and jug. First-class travel, provided one hasn’t to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life’s luxuries.

  My hotel in Miami, the Biltmore, was the largest and most impressive at which I had stayed. I love five-star American hotels, not because of the luxury, but because they are so wonderfully efficient and anonymous. One is a transient among other transients. Nothing is here of previous visitors and I shall leave behind nothing of myself. To return to the room after an absence is to find everything immaculate as if the absolving hands of the chambermaid have smoothed away more than the detritus of the past day. I think I could write in such a place. On tour, however, there is hardly time even to appreciate the comfort. But I shall remember breakfast at the Biltmore. I ate it in warm sunshine in the courtyard under a palm tree and beside the largest hotel swimming pool in the United States; each breakfast was separately cooked in an open-air kitchen, the smell of bacon overlaying the warm scent of flowers and water.

  The last day of the tour in Miami was the only one on which there was spare time. My minder took me to see Miami Beach. A thin rain was falling and a sluggish tide crept wearily over the deserted and pitted sand. Versace’s house, the gates locked, looked elegant and incongruous among the sugar-candy colours of the innumerable hotels. For someone whose ideal of a day at the sea is a secluded and empty cove, Miami in high season must be Hell-on-Sea. From there we were driven to the botanical gardens. The weather had by then improved and we enjoyed a quiet walk under the trees and by the lakes.

  There was still some time to spare before leaving for the airport, so my last event in the States was a visit to a cinema to see Titanic, something I could just as well have done back home. It is over-long but the special effects are certainly memorable and will no doubt achieve an Oscar. I didn’t believe in the young lovers and was irritated by the usual Hollywood anti-British bias. The Englishmen all wore evening dress to demonstrate their upper-class unfeeling arrogance, even on the last night of the voyage, when they would not have changed for dinner, while the Irish were happy innocents dancing their jigs below deck. One of the crew, who in real-life had behaved impeccably, was shown as a murdering coward, which I thought unforgivable. The young hero, Leonardo di Caprio, clung to the wreckage on which Kate Winslett was elegantly lying to deliver a poignant valedictory speech before sinking slowly out of sight. I felt the energy required for this could have been better spent in swimming to a similar piece of wreckage and keeping himself alive. But I have no doubt the film will be an immense success with adolescent girls all over the world. It was an odd way of spending my last evening.

  Soon we shall prepare for landing and the tour will finally be over. It has been far less exhausting than I feared, except for the days in New York and Washington. I enjoyed the company of the three publicists from Knopf who accompanied me—Sophie, Jill and Gabriella—all enthusiastic, intelligent and highly capable. I could not have been better looked after.

  THURSDAY, 29TH JANUARY

  Joanna from Faber telephoned yesterday to discuss the cover for the trade paperback of A Certain Justice and we talked about the new Ted Hughes collection of poems, Birthday Letters. She promised to send a copy and it arrived this morning. It was impossible not to begin reading at once and just as impossible to stop once I’d begun. Inevitably one’s response to the poems is influenced by the joint tragedies; how could it be otherwise? I have always felt great sympathy for Ted Hughes and huge respect for the dignified silence with which he has endured years of calumny. No woman who is the mother of young children and kills herself can be sane, and this degree of mental pain has its roots far deeper than the imperfections of a marriage. Equally no one who has never had to live with a partner who is mentally ill can possibly understand what this means. Two people are in separate hells, but each intensifies the other. Those who have not experienced this contaminating misery should keep silent.

  But now Ted Hughes’s thirty-five years of silence are broken. I have never found him an easy poet, but then why should he be? Poetry is like religion: sometimes the vision is immediate and almost frightening in its intensity; sometimes it is reached with difficulty, giving intimations only, and those confused and partial. Here the verse, unimpeded by a jumble of feral imagery, flows like a clear strong stream bearing the weight of pity, terror and regret. The poems are too honest to read as an attempt at justification. They may be a means of exorcism. Certainly they are a tribute of love.

  February

  TUESDAY, 3RD FEBRUARY

  I looked forward to today as I do to any day on which I am to see a daughter or a grandchild. I was invited to deliver a lecture to the Cambridge Union on “Fiction: Has It a Future?” and arranged in the morning to have lunch with Beatrice, to see her room at college and then, after the lecture, to spend the night with Clare.

  It has been a bright day but exceedingly cold. There is something about the coldness of Cambridge that is peculiarly raw and I wished I’d been warmer clad. However, I bought a second scarf on my walk from the centre of the city to Trinity, and this helped. Beatrice took me to lunch at a restaurant specializing in pasta, and then I saw and admired her room and rested on her bed while she did some quiet reading before going to a lecture. When she returned she and a fellow student walked me to the Union, where the officers of the Union took me to dinner before the talk.

  Both my young escorts are reading history and they asked me what it was like living in Cambridge during the war, and why was it, did I think, that my generation had been so dilatory and so reluctant to stand up to Hitler? I explained that this was very largely the result of the First World War. When my parents talked about the past, they seemed always to be dwelling on the war and on the destruction of a whole generation of young men. My generation was born under a pall of inarticulate grieving. One of my earliest Ludlow memories is of a terraced house with a photograph of a fresh-faced private, himself hardly more than a child, in the window between small Union Jacks. It was one of many such humble and poignant shrines. Then later we read the poets of the Great War, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, saw the films, particularly All Quiet on the Western Front, and read the war novels. We grew up with the conviction that war in its horror, its brutality and its degradation was the greatest calamity possible and must at all costs be avoided. The words “never again,” spoken or unspoken, were ever-present.

  My
father, who fought in the 1914–18 war, could never really believe that Europe could allow it to happen again, not even when, on 3rd September 1939, war was declared. And even if we were to “stand up to Hitler”—a euphemism for going to war—when and how would that be possible? We had disarmed. Even if the mothers of England had been happy to see their sons slaughtered in the defence of the Rhineland or Czechoslovakia, the men and the money weren’t there. In the end we realized, as did Europe, that the confrontation was inevitable and began to re-arm. We went to war with none of the patriotic fervour or enthusiasm of 1914, but with the grim realization that this war was both inevitable and just, and would have to be seen through.

  The young men thought it wrong to judge the past by the standards of the present and they are of course right. No doubt in a hundred years’ time our descendants will marvel that we were able to watch the death by starvation or the massacre of thousands on our television screens and yet did nothing to stop it. Yet what could we have done about Rwanda? Admittedly, given sufficient will, an army could have been sent to stop the killings; but what would follow? Could we permanently occupy a country and rule it? Stopping fighting is one thing; effecting reconciliation between tribes which have been hating each other for generations is less easy. I doubt whether it can ever be achieved by the intervention of a foreign power.

  We talked about what it was like to live in Cambridge in the early days of the war. I can recall a series of sounds and images: the disciplined tramp of young feet as companies of airmen in training marched through the streets with flashes in their caps; the city crowded with unfamiliar people—evacuated civil servants, academics from other universities, refugees; dancing at the McGrath Ballroom with young airmen from the East Anglian fighter and bomber stations in the knowledge that the boy I danced with one Saturday might not be there the following week. His friends would just say “he couldn’t come.” I wouldn’t ask why, partly because I knew and partly because they were not there to remember death.

  A particular memory is of going to work one morning at the Ministry of Food to find the lawn of Christ’s College completely covered with sleeping and exhausted soldiers, gaunt-faced and mud-stained and still in their battle dress. They were part of the remnant of the Dunkirk evacuation. I’ll never know how and by what means they found themselves apparently dumped at this incongruous staging post.

  Our entertainment came from the wireless and from films. The war years produced some memorable films: Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Of Mice and Men all appeared in 1939. Queues would lengthen outside the cinemas while we waited for what we called “the big picture” to end. The performance was continuous and as the couples came out, the doorman would call “four one-and-six-pennies,” and the queue would shuffle forward. The British film industry geared itself for the propaganda war. Some early films I saw, in their banality, probably provided more comfort to the enemy than encouragement for us, but Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead and This Happy Breed, and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V remain in the memory. I began for the first time to watch French films with Connor: Les Enfants du Paradis, Le Jour se Lève. During the war, cinema was at its most creative, its most influential and its most entertaining. I have seldom gone to the cinema since with the same anticipatory pleasure.

  We were comparatively safe in Cambridge. A few inadvertent bombs were dropped and there were casualties but the main thrust of the war was elsewhere. I remember climbing the Gog Magog Hills and seeing the distant red glare of the sky where London was burning, remember, too, hearing our heavy bombers leaving on their raids, seeming to lift themselves grunting into the air. There is one persistent and vivid memory. I had spent an afternoon with an elderly friend of my mother’s, visiting a relation of hers who lived in a distant village. We were returning to Cambridge by bus in the darkness when the Germans raided the East Anglian airfields. We rumbled slowly on between the low hedges and the flat landscape, hearing the crash of distant bombs and ringed by fire. It reminded me of the burning of stubble after the harvest. The blacked-out bus didn’t stop—what would have been the point?—but I remember that we all sat in absolute silence. It wasn’t the silence of fear, more the weariness of the journey and a resigned acceptance. My elderly companion slept, slumped against me. The raids weren’t close enough for there to be real danger, but I had a sensation of grinding onward inexorably through a deserted landscape that had become alien and surreal. The sights and sounds of Cambridge at war come back clearly, but the emotion is more elusive. I have no recollection of fear—not then—or, I think, of any apprehension that the war would be lost. I suppose I felt healthy, alive, optimistic, eager for life; in other words, I felt young.

  SUNDAY, 8TH FEBRUARY

  This was a golden day with weather to match: sunny, even warm, and with a clear blue sky. Jane and Peter arrived shortly after ten and we took a hurried glance at the papers before setting out for our walk. We went to Holland Park, wended our way down the most agreeable streets north of Kensington Library, then through to Hyde Park and as far as Watt’s statue of energy. I had taken some bread with me and on our return we threw pellets to the seagulls which swooped and shrieked, snatching the bread on the wing. Some of the people strolling in the sunshine round the pond must have been carrying their weight of unhappiness, but the air seemed to sing with pleasure. The old men were racing their model boats, the children chasing the pigeons, others sitting in the sunshine reading their books, the lovers strolling hand-in-hand.

  We walked round the sunken garden at the Palace, now in its winter decrepitude but bringing back memories of tulips and the scents of high summer. Peter hadn’t visited it before. Walking out over the grass I hoped again that the proposed Princess Diana Memorial Garden would not be built here. There is already the sunken garden, and the great stretch of green is so important—and not only to the residents of Kensington walking their dogs. Surely some more appropriate place can be found.

  Afterwards we went back to Holland Park and had an early lunch at the Belvedere; a good meal eaten in pleasant surroundings and in peace before the usual Sunday lunchtime rush. The plan was then to go on by car to the Tate. Jane demurred at first, feeling tired, but we persuaded her, after which she admitted to the prospect of pleasure.

  The Tate was busy, as it always is on a Sunday afternoon, but not disagreeably so. We visited one of my favourite pictures, William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay. I like Victorian painting, including genre painting, and this has always appealed to me largely, I suppose, because it’s a seascape and I love the contrast of the gaunt, dark, almost ageless cliffs and the Victorian figures in the foreground. But for so peaceful and innocent a view I find it a disturbing picture, one which always induces in me the same gentle melancholy. The painter stands underneath the cliffs looking up at the faintly discernible comet streaking across the sky, but the women are preoccupied in collecting shells, almost as if they were totally detached from the beauty around them and oblivious to the wonder in the sky. One knows that the shells would later be used to decorate boxes or photograph frames, one of the ways in which the underemployed middle-class Victorian woman managed to pass her time. The picture seems to speak of the transience and pointlessness of human life, of the brief span of our days measured against the intensity of space and time. But I love it and wish I had it on my walls.

  Jane wanted to see the Bacons, so Peter and I walked through the Turner galleries. I know that Turner is a great painter—but I don’t respond to him as I do to lesser geniuses. Peter and Jane drove straight home from the gallery after dropping me in Holland Park Avenue. It has been one of those days which will remain in memory, one more to be carefully shored up against ruin.

  THURSDAY, 12TH FEBRUARY

  I went at 2 o’clock to Bush House to discuss on the BBC World Service Thrones, Dominations, Jill Paton Walsh’s completion of an unfinished novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. Our interviewer was Harriett Gilbert. I had been sent the six chapters some time ago and asked whether I would li
ke to complete the novel, but I didn’t think it could satisfactorily be done. The fragment, obviously very much a first draft, was about 40,000 words long and DLS was clearly less concerned with plotting a detective story than with the preoccupation previously dealt with in Gaudy Night: How does a woman with both heart and brain reconcile the emotional and sexual side of her nature with her intellect?

  She certainly never managed to do this satisfactorily herself. It is interesting how often unintelligent, even stupid, women manage their emotional lives more satisfactorily than do their cleverer sisters. When Harriet Vane says in Gaudy Night that the reason she values the life of the mind is because this is the only part of her life she hasn’t made a mess of, she is obviously speaking for her author. DLS was made deeply unhappy, even distraught, by her unconsummated love affair with John Courtos, subsequently found sexual satisfaction but no commitment in the arms of a married philanderer, and finally married a divorced man who resented her fame and sank into alcoholic bad temper. No wonder she distrusted the emotions. For Dorothy L. Sayers, even her religion was a matter of intellectual assent to dogma, not an emotional response to a personal God.

  Jill Paton Walsh, an admirer both of Sayers and of Lord Peter, has managed to reflect the Sayers style, remain true to the proposed theme and provide a detective story very much in the mode of the 1930s. She has not incorporated the whole of the Sayers draft, wisely excluding the more embarrassing passages. I easily detected the vital clue and had little doubt about the identity of the murderer but this, too, made the book typical of its age. I doubt whether anyone could have done it better.