The moon’s shadow passed, the sun—though still veiled in cloud—restored its normal light to the earth; the tension of the human beings about me relaxed, our unadmitted fears subsided; laughter and talk sprang up and no longer seemed an obscene jest in the fact of cosmic immensity. But I remained silent and preoccupied as we slid and scrambled downwards. Robert was evidently alarmed by this behaviour, for as we were waiting for the car doors to be unlocked he gave a preliminary sniff, twirled round on his heels and while he was facing away from me exclaimed in a shamefaced tone:
“I didn’t meant to make a row.”
“That’s all right, Bob,” said I. “I didn’t mean to speak so crossly, so we’re quits.”
I put all the affection and kindliness at my command into my voice, for I now perceived that my vaunted “brotherhood of man,” upon which I had prided myself so much, had really been confined to those human beings I liked, to those who thought and felt as I did. My alleged brotherhood had really been founded on a self-righteous contempt for all who differed from me in their approach to life—even for a too-bright tie, I saw, I had condemned them.
Bob jumped away, scowling and embarrassed. I threw myself imaginatively into his position, and knew that I should have felt the same, if my father had spoken to me in such a sickly, excessively emotional way as I had done to him. I dubbed this mode of thought translation, and made a vow to practise it habitually.
We drove home feeling sleepy, dirty and in that irritable frame of mind which follows great nervous tension. Now that full daylight revealed their prosaic imperfections, the long queues of cars were no longer romantic, but wearying and somewhat dangerous. However, we reached Hudley safely; I entered Ashroyd and found my father at breakfast. Looking at him with the veil of sexual jealousy removed from my eyes— or perhaps, to speak more accurately, knowing that the veil was there and discounting it—I saw him as a small, elderly, harassed man who was gazing up at me with a deprecating air, like a child expecting to be scolded. About him on the table lay the proofs of some photographs of myself which had been taken to accompany an article of mine recently accepted by a popular weekly.
“I opened them, Chris,” said my father crossly. “You were so late, I thought you were never coming.”
Yesterday I should have been furious at this intrusion upon my literary affairs; today I saw that my father had been really anxious about my safety, and had opened the parcel to calm his nervous suspense, or perhaps even to comfort himself by looking at my picture. I decided to eat before changing, in order to keep him company; sat down beside him and picked up the photographs.
They horrified me. The fair, young, weak, conceited face, with the self-pitying lines drooping from nose to mouth—was it really mine? It was the face of a man utterly unconscious of his own real weakness.
With an exclamation of disgust I threw the prints aside, and made up my mind to know myself and my motives down to the very deepest layer.
4
I have often smiled to myself sardonically at the thought that it required a total eclipse of the sun to bring Christopher Jarmayne to his senses. Of course it required nothing of the sort; any event would have sufficed which held up the mirror to my personality and forced me to see reflected there, superimposed on my own and touching it at many points, that of my father. In recent years, too, I have been able to chuckle at Robert’s clownish intrusion upon the solemn moment of total eclipse; a most salutary lesson, both as regards life and literature, for the earthy, the comic, must always be taken account of in human affairs, ginger shall always be hot i’ the mouth and cheerfulness (as Dr. Johnson’s friend remarked) is always breaking in.
But however pretentious was my original view of the eclipse incident, or however trivial the actual result, for me at least it was a flashpoint, a moment of illumination which has served me as guide for the rest of my life.
For a year I wrote nothing, but spent my leisure in a relentless study of my own nature and motives, in the light of such psycho-analytical reading as I could get hold of. Perhaps strangely, I was never in the least tempted to seek a psychiatrist and undergo an analysis; this may have been due to pride or to what is professionally termed “resistance,” but I felt merely that I agreed with Byron’s lines:
Hereditary bondsmen! Ye must know
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow!
I no longer wished to be rescued, to be cured, to be freed, for this passive and pettish dependence seemed to me part of my maladjustment; I wished now to rescue myself, to cure myself, to free myself. A self-analysis by an amateur in psychology is necessarily imperfect, partly from ignorance, partly because one tends of course to interpret one’s discoveries about oneself as one deeply wishes. But at least one avoids the professional psychologist’s pitfall, which Fliess so troubled Freud by indicating, when he said that Freud read into his patients’ minds what was really in his own. Besides, to perform one’s analysis oneself confers a sense of power, of achievement, of ability to cope, which in itself is an immense gain to a man who has felt himself unequal to life, a failure, below standard, defeated. I derived a growing strength to continue the process of self-question from the stimulus of my cumulative success along this line.
Accordingly I took, as I say, stock of myself. I observed my capacity for pity, my love of justice, my hatred of persecution, and saw how they were rooted in my own affections, my own experiences; my Oedipean love for my mother and jealousy of my father, my misery at the hands of Geoffrey Graham, had caused these pearls in the oyster to grow. But these discoveries, and other similar discoveries in my reading concerning the lowly origin of all human excellencies, arts and ideas, did not cause me to despise the virtues, the arts and the ideas. What a piece of work is man, I exclaimed to myself, who from anal bodily excreta has eventually constructed the frescoes of Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Beethoven, the idea of justice and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral! What a superb achievement! Is it to be wondered at, however, that having come so far away from his origins, he sometimes flags?
It was not to be expected, of course, that the neurosis of thirty years should be cured in a moment, or perhaps ever completely cured at all. (I make no such claim.) But at least, in thus attempting to drag up into the daylight of the conscious intellect my unconscious motives, I was on the right lines. “Where id was, there shall ego be,” said Freud: “It is reclamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee.” (Hardy had much the same idea, which he expressed through symbols in The Dynasts, when he made the Chorus of the Pities express their hope about the Immanent Will which moulds the cosmos: Shall not its blindness break? Yea, must not its heart wake? ... Consciousness the Will informing, till it fashion all things fair.) Without accepting every detail of the Freudian dicta, which struck me sometimes as too neat, too homogeneous, for our highly complex world, I accepted their main principles and tested them out on myself. My reward was the disentangling of painful knots of feeling which had tormented me for years, the reclamation and disinfection of much festering matter. It was, of course, during this period that I reached many of the conclusions about my own previous actions, which I have recorded as tailpieces to those actions, in preceding chapters of this record.
For example, I now understood my daydreams and the wish-fulfilment nature of their hold on me. Again, when I came to examine my customary passionate defence of the underdog, which undoubtedly was right and contained much feeling that was good, I saw that quite often it also sprang partly from a mean jealousy of the successful. I found that I often disliked the hero of a play, the winner of a tournament, in favour of some minor character or the defeated runner-up purely from resentment because I did not resemble the conqueror, and could not identify myself with him. The conqueror, of course, stood for my father and was rejected on that account. To keep in my heart a sympathy for the small man, while refusing to allow myself a jealousy for the great, is a difficult task and of course I do not always succeed in it.
Indeed my whole point here is that this reclamation of the unconscious is a continual and continuing process, which should terminate only with life itself. The struggle is not over after a single analysis. One often fails—from ignorance, from laziness, from lack of goodwill—but at least one must continually make the attempt to act reasonably, not ignoring or disregarding the id, but sublimating its desires and using its power to invigorate the ego.
A most useful exercise in the attempt to adjust myself into a living understanding with my fellow-men, is the habit of translation I mentioned previously. I had occasion to practise this a good deal with Robert, whose tastes at so many points were opposed to mine. Robert, I said to myself as I scanned his school reports, is as bored by history and literature as I was by loom mechanics. I did not throw overboard my view of the relative value of literature and loom mechanics, but I agreed that his feeling was as strong as mine and pained him as severely.
To say that one is captain of one’s soul is an unfashionable mode of expression; though I think it desirable I would not for a moment venture to assert that I have achieved such complete sovereignty. But I think I might claim that I have established a working partnership, with my intelligence, my reason, as the senior partner. Let me repeat, however, that only by constant vigilance, constant self-examination, am I able to maintain this supremacy; at any moment it is liable to slip. To apply this vigilance, this self-examination, at the time of the action, when it could be fruitful, instead of years later, was henceforward my constant aim.
8
Escape
1
In the following two years I wrote a couple of novels, The Brazen Rod and The Inadvertent Mind, which reflected my preoccupation with the matter of awakening consciousness— their titles being taken from passages in Hardy’s Dynasts where he appears to be discussing the problem on a cosmic level.
These two books represented a considerable advance on my earlier work. Although in them I was of course putting forward my own ideas about the universe and the nature of man, the main character was in neither case myself, nor was the atmosphere laden with the peevish and irritable resentment which had coloured my first fictions. Moreover, both these novels owned firm chains of causality, “plots” to use the old-fashioned word, their incidents selected from real Yorkshire happenings and composed into illustrations of my theme.
These two books were again, of course, financially un-lucrative, though not quite so devastatingly disappointing as the earlier pair. But what was of more importance, they were quite differently received. Instead of employing towards them the indulgent and condescending tone which one keeps for childish productions, the critics treated them as adult work and judged them by adult standards. Accordingly the reviews of The Brazen Rod appeared to an uninitiated eye much less favourable than my earlier notices. This very much vexed my father, who turned the cutting over in quite a pettish style and glared up at me from angry blue eyes as he demanded to know what the critics meant by this behaviour.
“The reviews are worse but surely the book is better, Chris,” he said crossly. “There’s quite a story in it. And it’s not so silly. I mean, it’s really quite interesting to read.”
Nowadays I was able to see the humour of such remarks, though not without an effort. I pointed out that to be reviewed at all by persons and journals of such eminence was a compliment; but my father was not familiar at that time with the notion of any difference in standing between, say, The Times Literary Supplement and some remote provincial town’s evening gazette, and he listened to my explanations with an air of offended reserve, as if to an inferior’s false excuses. However, at the mill next day he repeated my explanations word for word to John, who listened with an air of suspended judgment.
“Edie thinks the book’s quite interesting,” he said—accenting the third syllable of this word in true West Riding style.
When the notices of The Inadvertent Mind reached us, even my family began to believe, though in a tentative and hesitant way, that there might be something in Chris’s writing after all. The words promising, interesting, assured, original, honest, occurring in these notices, battered at their defences; my father was to be seen poring over the strips of print with a perplexed but beaming air, and now enquired carefully from me as to the relative importance of the various newspapers. Edie, to whom I had hitherto been poor Chris, an awkward liability of her husband’s whom she accepted with cheerful kindness for his sake, told me one day in a tone of surprise that I was growing quite good-looking. (My physical health had, in fact, steadily improved since the day of the eclipse and my shoulders, arms and legs had now reached a more normal girth.) John surveyed me thoughtfully.
“Aye, Edie’s right. You’re a lot improved since you took to writing, Chris. Pity there isn’t more money in it,” he said.
This remark angered me—angered me more than I thought it should. I therefore investigated my own reactions, and found that I had in fact made little attempt to earn money in any of the legitimate sidelines of my profession—whether from diffidence or idleness I did not know, but probably the former. I was vexed with myself on this account, and therefore vexed when John laid his finger on the sore spot of my vexation. I set to work (being at the moment “between novels” as I liked to say) and spent the next few months in a search for paid journalism in the literary world. After a time I was in a moderate way successful; I found myself equipped with a small but regular reviewing job and the entry to some newspapers and journals for occasional articles. My interest thenceforward centred more and more in my typewriter and less and less in Hilbert Mills, so that going to the mill became an exasperating interruption—after the weekend particularly; for to have to leave a piece unfinished on which I had laboured all Sunday was legitimately annoying. There came at length a Monday morning when I rushed upstairs to make a correction I had just thought of while my father stamped angrily in the hall below and John, whose habit it was to call for us in his car, sounded the horn at the gate in a prolonged and irritable fashion.
“Chris! Chris!” shouted my father at the foot of the stairs.
I longed to tell them to go without me but dared not, so rushed downstairs in a bad temper, seething with resentment against them as tyrannous taskmasters.
But since my moment of illumination this kind of feeling was suspect to me and I had taught myself to examine it with care. As soon as my temper cooled that morning I turned upon my situation all the searchlights of reason I could command. If I wished to give all my time to writing, why did I not do so? Did my acquiescence really proceed from a sense of duty? Could not my work at Hilbert Mills in fact be easily replaced? Yes, I told myself firmly; it was the merest routine. What then really prevented me from leaving Hilbert? Lack of faith in my work? A preference for material comfort? Of these I thought I could acquit myself. Cowardice, then? Yes, I reflected; that had always been my trouble; fear. But of what? Fear of stepping from the shelter of a cosy regular job into the harsh blasts of a competitive world? Hardly that, I thought, for my wants were simple; once Robert’s maintenance was paid I could live on very little; the memory of my contrivances during the days of Mr. M’s bookshop returned to me with genuine pleasure. Fear of failing in my family’s eyes? Surely not—I was used to that, I thought sardonically. My fear was the simple physical (or deep-rooted biological) fear of confronting my father and my elder brother.
Once this was recognized, mere shame drove me on to the confrontation. That very afternoon, in the moment after the buzzer had sounded when the workpeople were streaming from the mill, while my father (his back turned to me, which I admitted was helpful) was taking down his coat from the office hatstand, I gathered all my courage and blurted out to him:
“Father, I want to give up working at Hilbert.”
My father turned and gave me a look, sharp and intent, which I was nevertheless at a loss to interpret. John, who had been locking up, now came into the office.
“Chris wants to leave Hilbert,
John,” said my father.
John turned quickly and they both stared at me. Now that I saw their faces side by side the meaning of their expressions, thus duplicated, became clear to me. They showed relief.
The blood rushed strongly to my face and I recoiled, for the pang of humiliation was severe.
But it was my plan nowadays, I reminded myself, to admit everything, to repress nothing. I struggled with my fears and my humiliation, and brought myself to utter, though in a somewhat choked and childish tone:
“I’m sorry my work’s been so bad that you’re glad to be rid of me.”
“It’s not that, it’s not that at all!” exclaimed John, stepping forward.
“Now, Chris!” my father admonished me. “You know it’s not that, my boy.”
“What is it, then?” I demanded. In spite of all my efforts I could not keep out of my voice the note of hurt pride.
“Trade’s very bad, Chris,” said my father.
“And going to get worse,” said John.
“If you can get hold of any money outside the textile trade, take it, Chris,” urged my father, beginning to pace up and down the room with an agitated step.
“We shall be glad not to have to find your salary, Chris, and that’s a fact,” said John.
I was astonished, incredulous, ashamed and sardonically amused. So much for my vaunted perception! While I had feared to incur their displeasure by leaving them, they had wished me to go, and though all the statistics of the firm’s dealings passed through my hands, I had not noticed a continuing drop in production. I remember now that there had been such a drop, which I had attributed to a seasonal slackening. In fact, I thought, recovering my confidence to some extent, I still so attributed it; I had heard too many grumbles about bad trade from West Riding manufacturers for too many years, to believe this one fully now. And the present elucidation was a triumph, after all, for my new mode of conduct. Rather ashamed all the same, I said quickly:
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