Smith.—Here we shall soon be alike. At first, one is nothing but memory, time has no longer an existence except as memories, and all one’s care is to keep them distinct and separate, not to fall headlong into the stream and lose consciousness with desire. It is not easy. From all sides, from every level of one’s past life, from every flight of a desire once flown if only for a second, things call out demanding to be seen, listened to. . . . Because of the new war, and the deaths, this house called me again. . . . But already I begin to guess at something other than memory, or at another memory. It has happened to me to return to a French town I know well, Le Mans, and find myself looking at a house, small, poor, in flames, and at a woman dying beside her dead children, while soldiers speaking a language only vaguely familiar were burning and killing in other houses in the same street. Then I realised that I was seeing one of those incidents, of a siege followed by a massacre of all the inhabitants, described by Froissart as briefly as one of our communiqués describes the sinking of a ship or the wiping out of a battalion. The strange — or is it not so strange? — thing is that so many of these memories which are peculiarly mine are of cruelty and violence — as though it were these, and not the simple joys or the complicated ecstasies, cling most strongly to our skeletons or to the earth.
Green.—I wish I understood cruelty.
Smith.—I begin to think it is one of the prime movers, a tool of evolution. Unconscious in animals, already half conscious in human beings, when it becomes fully conscious perhaps our horror will get the better of our attraction and we shall renounce it.
Czech.—My mind darkens when these things are spoken of. It has happened to me often in the last year, my nineteenth, to think of suicide, so great has been my horror in having anything in common, even a body, with men who could do what I have seen and heard of men doing in the concentration camps in my country.
Green.—I can’t imagine wanting to kill myself. I regret, and bitterly, the separation from my body. It seems to me now that I made it myself, and with such care. I remember trivial things about it, not even pleasurable, how it stood in the broiling sun at a cross-roads, hot, dusty, sweating in its clumsy uniform, and how it talked to someone, and laughed. I almost feel grief. Who can be crying, so close to me, if it is not myself?
Moving to the door, he stands looking out, and suddenly leaves them. With a smile, Smith turns to the young Czech.
Smith.—No doubt he’s gone home. His friends, or a lover, have called him — or his mother’s house. One or other of these always speaks first.
Czech.—Really? I hope not. If I told you what had become of my nearest friend and of my father and brother, you would beg them not to speak to me. I shall stay here, in this country which did not want me and has nothing to say to me. I don’t care to remember the Vltava which was the first natural thing to teach me that light flows and turns on itself and plays like a river, nor the dark street in Prague which spoke to me of sunlight, nor the stones which are my heart beating—
Smith.—Take care! You won’t be able to save yourself from anything you risk thinking about. . . .
But the Czech has gone. Left alone, Smith touches the wall of the house gently, with a casual friendliness.
Smith.—Until next time you need me. . . . Was I, perhaps, born only to save a few very ordinary things from dying — this house; the eggs, a dozen of them, I sat whisking in a kitchen bowl so that my mother could skim the froth into the birthday cake she was making; the very old may-tree, as tall and thick as an oak, two grown together, under which we played — we called it The Tree; the Grass of Parnassus in the red earth of the cliff, so strong, so delicate, its gleaming white veined with purple; the cliff-top itself, rough fields not defaced, as now, by houses; and the harbour — above all, the harbour, between its hills, its old roofs, its few ships, humble and useful. . . . Dear, how dear, deepest love of my body and mind. Yet help me to forget, to go farther, to go on.
*
Certains des “problèmes” qui nous agitent sont, non point certes insignifiants, mais parfaitement insolubles — et suspendre notre décision à leur solution est folie. Donc passons outre. — Les Nouvelles Nourritures.
*
1943
6 January. Harlech lies, clings, rather, between the sea and a country of severe beauty. The coast on which I was born is not unlike this. But there I was — I am — in everything. This country is as alien as Budapest — or so it feels to me. More alien, since there I was in Europe. Here, one is no longer in Europe, the hills, among the oldest anywhere, reject Europe, and in their soft voices the people speak a language which owes Europe nothing.
It rains a great deal here, but on the days when you can see the country it offers the stranger everything except its confidence, everything he sees. This country is a long afternoon when the sea, peacock-coloured, is parted by a cone formed of flakes of light, whirling and falling between the sky and the edge of the sand, where are long ribs of light; the near flakes are larger than stars, shifting, going out, reappearing, soundless explosions of light in the sea itself; where the point of the cone touches the horizon a pure light; the sun moves, and the storm of light moving with it over the bay, clever as a flight of birds, is gone: it is the estuary, claimed by the wind-moulded and barren hills: it is the great line, colour of pollen, of evening, flowing round the horizon and below the hills planted at the other, the remote edge of the bay; they are cut off by it from the sea, and they float, paler than a pale sky, between it and this lying impure light: it is the sun when it drops towards the sea, elongated and deformed, pulled out of shape by all that weight of barred and bronze water, and throws a strong doubt on the truth of violet sands and a sky as many-coloured as a circus: it is the rainbow spouting from the sea between two waves: above all, it is the hills, the small and great hills, abolished by the light.
Mine is a mind bound fast to the body, to what it sees. Like those who gave me life, I live in my eyes. It follows that no one is less awake to voices from the other, invisible, side of life. When rarely I hear such a voice it forces its way upwards through a weight of rock and earth, and is too strong for me. I am a savage whose god has spoken. Since I came here, every night when I lie down, the idea of death steps into my mind. It is an idea, a sensation, not an image. During the day it vanishes completely; I forget it; I work. As soon as I have turned the light out at night and lain down to sleep — I sleep well — before I have had time to expect it, it is there. Yes, it forces its way in. But then if it did not I should hear nothing.
I ignore it as much as possible. This moment is the first I have reasoned about it. Either it has stepped into the room left when my fear of failure became indifference to failure: or it is that old anger which seized me when, very young, I reflected that one day I should no longer be able to look at the world.
But it is not anger; and not a fear. It is as if sound were coming from the mute notes of a piano. I hear an absence of sound and translate it to mean death. Whose death, close to me at this moment, is troubling me — such trouble as I allow myself to overhear? My own, surely? — but why? I am not so ill.
I have a book to finish.
*
24 February. It is not true that, two weeks ago, an air-raid killed my young sister; it is not true that she alone, of the five or six persons in the kitchen of the communal restaurant, was killed when a bomb demolished the place. She was a volunteer worker — a part of her war work — and when the bomb fell, since there were no other sounds, no gun-fire, she must have heard it come. It is not true that you don’t hear the bomb which is going to fall near you. One of those daylight raids of single planes. Flying at a great height, they loose their bombs on some small unguarded town and make off. What are they? Young men making a practice flight?
It is not true that she is dead. The image of her, young resigned mouth, lips parted, as if to drink at a stream, and her poor face, a little disfigured, is not clearer than the others, smiling and fresh. When old people die, surel
y with nothing left to want, unless it were another sunny afternoon to slip in among all those they have been gathering since childhood, one’s anguish is without disbelief — even without despair. But there was so much she wanted. To see her children again; to work, to use her quick rather short fingers, young restless hands; to make plans. She planned as she moved, with the pure energy of delight. From everything of hers we touched, afterwards, it was the future sprang out. Even, expecting that in a long war there would soon be no such frivolities, she had bought the cards for three more birthdays — for a boy of seven, eight, nine, and a girl five and six and seven. And there were all the other things she had prepared for them, going with her little money into shops and spying out what might please them or they would be sure to need. The festival their return was to be . • . and her gaiety hoarded to be spent on them.
Why, God, take one so filled with the future? You could have taken me and that column of the past I am becoming. Why, why?
Is it possible she is not still learning and working somewhere, she who worked ceaselessly from the moment she drew herself out of her deep dreamless sleep in the morning until the night, when she went late to bed, leaving with regret some of her tasks unfinished? Is it possible?
*
I have to remind myself of what has happened. There is not a nerve in my body which consents to it. And now I know that what we say of the young dead, They shall not grow old, says only that the agony of their solitary going away remains, unchanged by time. The future does not spring from it, as it sprang from the laid table, and from the places where, under a handkerchief or among books, she had hidden it. Nothing wears it down. And think that so many young are being hurried out of life before they have grown used to it, and this pain, this glacier, is covering Europe with its cold — where we have to live.
*
She rejoiced in her tireless acts, and the young gestures of her body. And now all of her which was action lives in our minds, nowhere else. The other, the dream which slept in her, disinterested in all she was always doing, is where? What journey is it making, through what country it recognises and which knows it?
I dreamed of her. “Oh, my little love, your clothes, we have given away all your clothes.”
“Not those I wear,” she said, smiling.
*
Under the young sun, and for a few minutes, these hills put off their terrestrial bodies and become spirits or forms, the colour of sleep. My young sister’s death has destroyed in me the fear of dying, but left the fear, unappeased, of another’s defeat. For this there is no cure, and one should not seek a cure. It could be found only by a refusal to live.
But this refusal. . . . I should not be making it — surely? — if I avoid the social and half-public life which is a torment to me. And increasingly so hard to carry off that I have sometimes wondered whether I am, as we say, all there. Ami?
There is always in the background this one occupied with l’inanité de son famélique cauchemar. I can hold my mind together, and turned to the light coming from outside, long enough to talk to one or a few friends or a few strangers (or non-friends, which is not the same), and make them believe I am sane and intelligent. But not more, or for very long.
Is it possible to accept cruelty and death, and remain curious about the world? For me, yes — I have a double dose of curiosity. The silence will hurry me off long before I have exhausted my pleasure simply in looking — which no self-discipline, improbable enough, could lessen to the benefit of this other pleasure in the prose, deliberately unmelodious, broken into discords, and expressive, of Mallarmé. My eyes, a little staring, have worn themselves on the world and its images, but the images which have clouded them came from the other half of life. To cure myself of a sense of absence, almost intolerable, I have tried to add myself to the world, and I have a handful of memories. But very small — you couldn’t speak of it as a world. Not even when you have taken up into the account all those inner changes and constructions which — how much time I wasted — are almost nothing.
And the images of the world? — are they not safely among the inner creations? Of course. They are my happy life. I am ignorant about joy — since it belongs to the use of the senses and, led by hazard, I use only one of mine. But who supposes that a joyless life must be unhappy? Only those who do not know what words mean. I believe that I should be even happier if I chose to give up the life of action and seeing, and tried to complete a few of those invisible constructions which hold, or seem to, the meaning of change. It would be a refusal, another.
The change is always from life to memory.
*
It is not surprising how often my memories have the form and colour of France: cette terre lumineuse; discrète et subtile, has already the quality of a living idea. The real France is too complex, perhaps too exacting, to be carried in the mind or to be loved. Directed by memory, I reach easily a France of warmth, perfume, light. On n’arrive jamais à la mort sans dot: when my dower is looked at by death’s persevering solicitors they will find, among the rest, a July night with the word Macon, and the word mânes, written under it: for a time they will be able to make out the Saône, the colour of doubt, and the flat shuttered houses — you would say they are only appearances — on the other bank. Perhaps a taste lingers of the white strawberries, peaches, raspberries, small grapes, of the meal, or of a sauce which has barely thought of garlic. Then darkness, and the feeble light of the street-lamps along the quay becomes the life-blood of millions of spectral moths, their bodies, a long fibre dividing transparent wings, invisible except for the veins: they fall together under the lighted window in cloudy heaps, moved by a creaking breath when the night air from the Saône touches their dryness.
There were so many that they infested the night; in the morning, except for those caught in the ironwork of balconies and a handful of dust, they were gone. I asked the porter of the hotel whether they had a name. “Of course,” he said curtly, “we call them mânes.” I did not know what he meant until I remembered,
Je vois, je vois flotter, fuyant l’honneur des chairs
Des mânes impuissants les millions amers. . . .
Mâcon has a sinister history of violence and sieges, beginning in barbarian times and lasting until the end of the sixteenth century.
Seldom, before the cold of these years, have I felt the strength of my longing for the heat of France, that stillness of the heat which reaches from the dry ground to the sky, isolating, from the useless movement of time, it may be a vast shabby square like the Place d’Amies in La Rochelie, or the whole of some obscure small town, or a road in the Landes. The heat holds everything within it immobile, porous to the silence. The images bring with them … and split open like husks to show their seeds … their own reflections of colour and the power of the sun over France. They are often the images not of a familiar place, but of shabbily cream-washed walls, as in the Grande Place — how small, with its arcades, how quiet, with its fringe of hills (and in the mountain villages higher up the roofs are weighted by stones) — of Thones. There is an amazing dignity in many of these small towns, with the sense of a composed unified life, not dependent on some city or arterial road. The road to Thônes from the valley and the lac d’Annecy lies between meadows and trees, so many trees.
And not only the warmth of France, but the perfume of France, and the light, the pure pollen of the light, helping at the birth of vines and ideas. It so happens that both images are reflected for me from a river. From three rivers, Loire, Gironde, Dordogne. What, when I have named them, comes towards me and asks, smiling, to be caressed and given life? At Bourg-sur-Gironde, in the worn square with the church, the steps leading far down and steeply to the river, the fig-tree below the lip of the wall, the lime-trees of the square — it is the last week of June — release the first hesitant notes of a phrase which will be taken up again by the Dordogne at Libourne, and between Libourne and St. Pey d’Armens render, in the massive light, the double reverberation of perfume a
nd bees. What honey in a phrase! And at Saumur — again June — the Loire has had the idea of coming without sun, freed from the interference of the sun passing between the sky and the surface of the water, the pure reflection of light, flowing through its own images of stone embankment and modest houses: serpents of light move along it and plunge for ever; the one following is not the same. Always new beginning and no end. The illusion, life ceaselessly casting its bright skin, is complete. . . . O Loire, O Dordogne, O Gironde, I need only touch you with my fingers for my thirst to be stilled.
*
Sleep, sleep; the temples lie beneath the hands
On the warm earth and where the towers sprang
The roots turn and twist, and the voices sang
Where silence rises, falls, rises, the sands
Are not so cold if deep, deep, in the land’s
Throat a source softly denies the pang
Of earth on the eyes … and the viper’s fang
Bites harmlessly where only a leaf stands.
Who lives? The one stooping to the spring
Now, or the others, suppliant, who cling
To the roots and speak close to me? … the voice
Climbs in me an obscure path to rejoice
In the young light ripening the seeds of sight. . . .
Under the closed lids the night is not night.
*
I have learned that honours — au pluriel, au pluriel, Pôguy mocks — give no pleasure unless they can be taken home to a family. In this, the approbation of strangers is not worth very much. Even Pôguy — do not doubt it — would have been pleased with one or two quite small honours he could have taken home to the house in Orléans. A deep instinct, unless we have been spoiled, makes us wish to please, with these bright useless things, the eyes which are like but not ours … since they are worth nothing in themselves … and, without a family, we have nowhere to put them.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 26