Why did I not see that I was being shown the pattern of a truthful life? Blinded by what thick gross flesh, which let me see and not see, admire without learning, and return, as if drugged, to my mental and emotional squalor?
Who now lives in that house? They inherited a fortune unless, like me, they were too dense to pick it up.
That year, solemnly, I took one of the folders we used in the office and wrote on it: Letters from Famous Men. Years later I found it at the bottom of a trunk. It contained two brief friendly notes from Walter de la Mare.
*
What had I left, to live my distracted and sterile life? Nothing. No one except a child not yet four.
I want to act justly towards my young self. It is easy for me to overwhelm her with reproaches, to abuse her. To her is due my most piercing regret; to her restlessness, her horror of a settled life, her puerile ambitions. The error she made was capital. Its guilt is the heaviest of all those I carry, and irredeemable; I cannot accept it, as I can my other failures. The temptation to treat her as an enemy, a criminal, or more simply a fool, is very great. But let us listen to any excuses she has to offer. Her youth? Her curiosity, the greedy violence of the life given to her? Her wish to prove that she was not, in the worldly sense, a failure, not, by her mother to be written off as a disappointment, merely a married daughter? Why did she never think of all those youthfully-dead to whom nothing now was permitted, although doubtless they would have been pleased with what of life she was throwing aside? Yes, why?
But what use are these accusations? She would say that she was driven. By whom?
The sensible reasons she gave — that nothing much was to be expected of her husband, that it was on her their child depended for a satisfying future — only so many eddies above the secretly strong under-current. It swept her away from what for nearly four years had been the deep centre of her life, when she was drudge to a small house, servant to her child and absorbed in serving him. To it she remained fastened by innumerable living threads. The room she rented in London had to be shared with the agony that seized her when she thought of him — at night, or at the hours when she would have been giving him his bath or in the early morning lifting him out of bed. Her mother wrote to her that on the first morning when his kind foster-mother went in, he sat up in bed and said quickly, as if propitiating her, “Good-morning.” She cried as she had never cried, and knocked her blind head on the wall. Night after night. . . . Years later, when the child disappeared in a boy and a young man, words glossed over at the time — as if there would still be time to put it right — sprang awake, with a terrible freshness and power, to teach her the meaning of anguish. . . .
Time and again, driven by what hunger, she went back and lived with him in one place and another — for a few months or a year. In the long quarrel between her two hungers, time passed. At last it was too late. Only then she knew what she had been doing.
The other day I asked her why she had not been afraid to leave him.
“Did you never think he might die? ”
“No,” he said instantly. “nd later, when he was ill, 1 was there to nurse him. I should always have gone back for that.”
Because at that time her own life was so strong in her, she had, I suppose, then, no fear of death.
*
Really there is no reason why childless people should have houses. One large room would be enough for each of us. Earlier in this war, when I reflected that at the end of it I must find a decent house to live in for the rest of my life, the thought pricked me that I had no child to keep in it.
How thankful I was to leave the first house I had. The difficulties I should face, living in other people’s houses with a very young child, were nothing. I did not think of them; I simply went, seizing the first chance to leave a life and a provincial city I detested. This, not the first stage of my journey, was the first time I ran away. Not my first serious blunder, it may have been the first fatal one. Childless people may drift as they please and, free of the intolerable burden of a house, adorn their shells with any charming or splendid pattern they can: a child needs solid earth for his roots. Deprived of it, he is led to look for it in himself. The process is a dangerous one: if it turns out well, what has been lost? Nothing—only the past.
When I went into that house, I knew — knew, I say — that the trap had closed; I was caught by everything I had determined to avoid, possessions, a settled life — and the repetitive drudgery, distractions, forethought, involved in looking after a house. I hid, as I thought, my increasing anger. It gave me away one evening when I wanted to put off the moment of going in. My mother was there, and scolded me as if I were still a child. Did she at that moment forget her own boredom when she was younger? It was a disease which attacked her like an animal. It broke out in terrifying fits of rage, in which she slammed the doors of her room again and again, and at last locked herself in there with it for hours. I would prepare a tea-tray with the intense anxiety a child is able to feel but not to see the end of, and take it up. Setting it on the floor, I knocked. “I’ve brought you your tea.” No answer. Sometimes I crept away, leaving the tray. At others I waited, sitting mutely on the top stair, for an hour, hours, long after the tea had become cold and useless. These rages, inexplicable at the time, a cyclone which blew up and devastated our lives, bewildering us, until it wore itself out and dropped — only later I began to realise that they had been boredom, a violent boredom, and a despair equal to it, which had no outlet except this useless one. What child could have helped her? A little later, I must still have been very young, I learned to feel less anxious. The anxiety was there, stupefying me a little, but I went on blindly with whatever I was doing. One day she said to me in a curious voice, “You have no milk of human kindness.” It was after one of these storms, and I had left her alone for hours, while I sat and painted in the kitchen, not thinking about her.
Don’t you see that I had not understood? That a child could not, without more help?
*
The turning-points of a life can be seen long after. A traveller on foot climbs hill after hill, always in front of him another, not aware that he has ceased to climb and is avoiding the more difficult paths. One day, turning his head, he finds himself opposite a gap in the hills, which are closing behind him. On the horizon, he sees it was there he turned off. Impossible to think of going back; his feet are heavy with the earth he has been walking in, he cannot climb even the nearest hill: he cannot even imagine what the country was really like — were there frosts, and days of chill discouragement, rain coming through your shoes, and cracks opening in the ends of your fingers? Viewed from here, it lies in a delicious serenity, warm, the tops of trees inviting to sleep. The thought occurs to him — or is it a memory? — that at one time, when he was looking forward, he saw this serenity in front of him:
Et les premiers jouets de la jeune lumière
Iles! … Ruches bientôt quand la flamme première
Fera que votre roche, îles que je prédis,
Ressente en rougissant de puissants paradis,
Cimes qu’un feu féconde à peine intimidées,
Bois qui bourdonnerez de bêtes et d’idées….
Some time early in 1914, Harriet Shaw Weaver offered me two pounds a week — it was her own money; and the journal she edited, which was publishing Ulysses at the time, must have been costing her much heavier sums — so that I could come to London. Where had I met her? It must have been the year before, when I was for the first time in London, living in the greatest poverty and happiness, and writing, for my Master’s degree, with all the impudence in the world, a thesis on European drama. She was generous and disinterested to a degree scarcely conceivable in the world of letters. The delicacy of her offer to a student, a girl of whom nothing was known; there was nothing to know — did I thank her suitably for it? I must have done my best.
I accepted. But, a day or two later, I wrote again, refusing. That I was leaving her made my mother very unh
appy, and this time I had not the courage, or harshness, to insist on going. Imagine: if I had gone to London then and worked on The Egoist, I should have met and listened to those few writers who were bringing disgrace on themselves by writing as though there were still something fresh to say about man and his nature, and new ways of saying it — new at least in England. Uncouth as I was, a lettered barbarian, but full of curiosity, and perhaps teachable, I could not have helped learning a little. And I should have stayed in London, with them, not put myself in the power of one person. Everything would have gone otherwise than it did. Might I not even have learned to write? Instead of pouring out — first in a blind gross impulse (I could not look truthfully at a single object, still less at myself); then, when I had created for myself imperative needs and must have money for them — a number of silly and meaningless books? It must be said, too, that I had no idea they were without meaning. Perhaps, after all, I was unteachable. . . .
*
When for the first time a human being was able to separate himself from an object — animal or idea — and so to re-invent it, why had he an impulse to paint it on the wall of a cave or make a song of it? Why was he not content simply to embrace it with his thoughts? It was perhaps because he was a failure in other ways: not a clever hunter, he impressed himself on the men he despised with their invariable luck as bores, by drawing the horses they tamed and the bears they killed; or he was blind and sang to prove how brightly he saw. . . . With the achievement of happiness for all, there may be no artists. All will be content simply to live, with grace, energy, reason; and when they are old, to sit still. What a magnificent world! What harmony! … There are no signs of it.
*
It is perhaps an exaggeration — but one of those by which children who are lying tell more of the truth — to say that what drew me to study European dramatists (in place of the anodyne theme given me by my professors) was a vague notion that drama, more clearly than any of the other arts, even than music, offers the analogy of a universal art — or act — of creation. There was much talk then, in the year before the first war, about the Theatre. Without excuse, I formed an idea of the Theatre which had no relation, or the vaguest, with the theatre as it was. And this idea — of a stage or temple where, between the actors’ gestures and the imagination of the dramatist, the myths governing man’s thoughts and through them his acts, would be given a form — haunted me during the year and a half when day after day I sat and read the plays of modern dramatists. Half aware of it, I expected to find, here or in some other country, a drama which evoked in the spectators their creative impulse, so that it was an action taking place in themselves, a discovery of their own emotions and development of their own thought, which was made visible on the stage.
After two or three disappointments I did not go to the theatre. I had so little money. It was too vexing to spend it on watching through an evening the succession of trivial events or an intrigue, which fell about the stage like lumps of plaster from a ceiling and was supposed to have something to do with life. To the totality of the thoughts and feeling of our time, it bore the same relation as to the body one of its dry nail-filings. The real interest of the theatre was the audience, as I saw it from pit or gallery — a monster, part animal, part God, simultaneously living and dying, covered with eyes, a brain over which the dramatist’s needle was moving without starting up a single coherent phrase; but the creature was alive, born every instant in the bubble blown by the lights, and dying as many deaths. Here, and behind my eyes, and not on the stage, was solved that problem of simultaneity which haunts every writer — and can only be solved by suggestion, never by logical statement.
Walking every day from my room to the British Museum: there to sit reading and, with a ruthlessness not yet twenty years tired, condemning printed play after play: when I glanced up, or when the closing bell went, it was a shock to find myself shut in by the circles of books and the dome: dizzy from it, and sometimes a little from having eaten nothing since breakfast, I wandered out into the hall, to feel the walls still pressing me and the insistent unreality of the statues, and so into daylight or dusk, the pigeons tumbling under their stone ledge, the side-streets opening books and buttered crumpets in their windows, a sky heavy with sunset, the creases of the monster’s brain, unintelligible, turning with the axles of the street and the angles of house-fronts and gutters.
Better than the theatre was to spend sixpence on a seat in the gallery of the Coliseum. It was there I saw a Reinhardt ballet, my first ballet, and though I think it was only clumsily exotic it proved to me that I had been right to stay away from the theatre. It was a revelation of what can be evoked, what underworlds of insight and feeling brought together into the daylight (or the light from the immense candelabra of the scene). The music created its own space, in which dancers and spectators could move freely, and simultaneously time was creating itself in the movements of the dancers, the memory of one gesture reflected in all those nearest it. A whole, a poem formed by the enclosing definite acts of the music and the indefinite continuously unfolding gestures of the dance, was becoming. Willingly or unwillingly, the spectator re-lived the action endlessly evoked in himself and the universe, the upward spring, the instant, imperceptible, of arrest, the descent, and again the spring. What was development in the single dancer became in the whole ballet the idea itself of movement — that is, of life.
And then to leave the theatre and walk home, with one of the friends of that time (God be thanked, of this, too), through London streets not yet spoiled by too powerful lights. The emptiness of our stomachs was scarcely even an inconvenience. We had the future to feed on. And at present we had the dark streets leading to the river, and the river itself, concealing light below its cracked surface (concealing, if we had known it, terror and conflagrations), and our talk, endless, like the river, like the ballet, like our lives. These were months of freedom from responsibilities not begun in dreams. We were indifferent, being so young, to the lower-middle-class world in which our poverty forced us to live. Why should we who had just enough to eat, our country eyes, music amiably free of charge (or almost), the post-Impressionists, and had discovered Anatole France, mind?
I was free. No one obliged me to consider him, to love or be loved. Whatever I took in my hand, a fine morning or a book, could absorb me: I had not to wonder whether something else or some person were being robbed. In some way, and without being able to pay the price asked for it, I have been looking ever since for a freedom of this order.
*
Yes, freedom — but already illusory. Before this, at the university, I had involved myself in obligations and lies. I was only putting off the moment when they would fall due. . . .
The first accident shaping my life was that I went, instead of to one of the older universities, with a formal discipline, to Leeds. No one except those who are touched by it in youth, understands the nostalgia of the industrial North. They only can play on the keyboard stretching from deep valleys, smooth grey hills or roughened with bracken* moor, to slate roofs, stone, cobbled streets slippery with soot, the hard cold husk of a sound kernel. Indescribable in a phrase, the smoky sunlight which a northerner returning home feels as warm on his skeleton as the sun of the Midi. The silence in mid-afternoon, in one of the villages where every man and almost all the women are at work in the mill, is like and entirely unlike the silence of a French village. On a day of wind, sun, and cloud, the air here is thin and strong, marking out the stone, soot-blackened, of the houses, the stream running discoloured past the mill, and the clear smaller stream running to join it: the life here — it derives only from the eighteenth century — has the toughness of the far older life of the French village; it is cruder, less civilised, less rich; it has less imagination and less cruelty: it is unlikely to breed a poet or a monster, admired, of rapacity. We are average people, we northerners, not lacking, though, in salt. And we are restless. Restlessness which drives a man out of his valley is not French.
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The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 5