by Alec Waugh
‘I spent a month with Scott Moncrieff in Italy when he was translating “Jeunes filles en fleur,”’ said Gordon. ‘I asked him if he didn’t get very bored at times. He did, he said. But by translating a writer’s work he said that you got right inside an author’s mind, that you saw things that the ordinary reader never sees; that it was as exciting as a miner discovering gold when you come upon the five sentences that an author had been wanting to write for fifty pages.’
‘I wondered if you had read Proust,’ she said. ‘There were echoes on him in that third book of yours.’
She was the first to notice that, because it was an echo of rhythm, not of matter.
‘For a month I read nothing else,’ he said. ‘Then I found I was seeing everything in terms of Proust. It was rather like a child living with someone who has a strong personality. He starts talking with that person’s accents. I had to stop.’
‘You read “Swann,” though.’
‘That, and the beginning of “Jeunes filles en fleur.”’
‘You’ve read the best then. How that man understood jealousy!’
‘I suppose he did.’
‘Only suppose?’
‘I don’t know what jealousy’s like. I’ve never felt it.’
She laughed.
‘Then you’ve never loved.’
‘Is jealousy necessary to love?’
‘It’s a part of it, most always. It’s funny that,’ she said. ‘Do you remember that passage of yours, in “Intrigue,” when you made the husband say that he had no right to be angry with his wife for doing something that he must have known from the start she was capable of doing? I wondered when I read that whether you had got beyond jealousy or had never known it.’
‘Has one got to know it? Don’t you think jealousy is just a child’s emotion; vanity, and possessiveness?’
She shook her head.
‘Ninety-nine times in a hundred, maybe, but there’s one time when it’s more than that, when it goes deep, into real instinct, when you can understand the emotion of a woman who’ll throw vitriol in another’s face. And you’ve never felt that. I wonder if you’ve ever loved.’
It was a question that Gordon set himself as he sat three hours later in his hotel bedroom, his head rested upon his hands, looking out upon the place of Vanderbilt; remembering the intent, questioning expression of that slow green gaze; the languid grace of those white shoulders; the singing Southern quality of her voice; the long oval of her chin; the corn-coloured wave of hair across her face; recalling sentence by sentence the course of their hour-long talk from the first ‘I so wondered what you would be like,’ to her answer to his, ‘I’ll be seeing you soon, shan’t I?’ ‘I’m going to see to that.’
It was not the first time that he had sat so, at an open window at an evening’s close, reliving the evening that had passed; recalling the sound of a voice, the glance of an eye, the turn of a head, the movement of a hand. Into Gordon’s life there had come such episodes as are the part inevitably of an unattached young man’s experience. On the strength of them he had written passages in his novels that would ten years earlier have been pronounced daring; had contributed to the women’s magazines epigrammatic articles on the modern daughter and the modern wife; discussed in the Sunday Press the psychology of marriage and the problems of parenthood. But as he sat at the window of the Chatham, that question of Faith Sweden’s ran unansweringly through his mind. ‘I wonder,’ she had said, ‘if you’ve ever loved.’
It was a question that he found hard to answer. If love meant the rapture which films and plays and novels had attributed to it, he knew he hadn’t. Ardour he had known; and vanity, wounded or appeased; tenderness, and a pagan sweetness; a sense of completion; of delight in beauty and in health; a gathered and intense height of living. With those he was familiar. But the torture and the rapture he had heard described; the agonies of jealousy; the concentration of one’s personality in another’s, so that one’s happiness was completely dependent on another; so that one was like a countryside and she the sun; so that one was in light or shadow according to her mood. Like that he had never felt. He was inclined to wonder whether such states of mind were not a figment of the poet’s dream. Of love’s importance in the sum of human activities he was well aware. So heartily advertised a commodity could not well be else. A certain section of a young man’s life was inevitably clouded by a preoccupation with the facts of sex. Sex that was suppressed or misdirected warped a life. In his novels he always held that two pieces of information must be given to the reader about any prominent character. His income must be told and the nature of his sex-life. They need not be stressed, but the facts must be given. At the same time although his novels were concerned with love-making, with the relations of men and women, he had been at pains whenever he had needed a big scene between a woman and a man, to arrange his plot so that the loss or retention of a woman would be important not only for love’s sake, but for some other secondary reason that was bound up with it. He arranged that in some way the course of a man’s career, of the setting of a woman’s life should depend upon the outcome of that love. In order to give to the gaining of love a sense of triumph and to the loss of it a sense of failure he arranged that material and worldly success should stand or fall by it. He did not believe that you could portray truthfully a man who loses a woman feeling that life has become a vacuum for him, unless that woman is taking far more than herself away with her. That was how he had felt, that was how he had written. ‘But perhaps,’ he thought, ‘that’s because I have never loved.’
By ten o’clock next morning Faith had rung him up.
‘Now tell me what meals you’ve got free this week.’
He told her.
‘Well, keep them free, then,’ she had answered, ‘and don’t get next week too full. We’ll dine at our house tonight.’ She never questioned his readiness to accept her plans for him.
During the next three days they saw each other practically every day, in such a variety of settings as New York alone can offer.
There were knockings on the latticed doors of basement speakeasies; there were hip-flask excursions to the St Regis roof; Sunday breakfasts in Greenwich Village; from the centre box at the Metropolitan they saw the clouded fires encircling Brünnhilde; from the tiers of Madison Square Garden they saw Georgetti sprinting round the curving race-course. There were drives over Brooklyn Bridge to Long Island road-houses; and visits to Picture Galleries, to the Metropolitan Museum; to the Aquarium. In Roger Sweden’s apartment in the East Fifties between Park and Lexington there was an unceasing cascade of parties.
It was the kind of apartment which European fancy pictures as typically New York. A penthouse. On the fortieth floor, you could see from its balconies the emblazoned insignia of Tudor City, the shadowed expanses of Central Park, the vast bastions of Queensboro bridge; the huge piled chunks of concrete down which the lights of the city cast their oblong patternings of shade and gold. Its drawing-room was a replica of eighteenth-century taste. There were Fragonards on the walls, a Boucher, and a Chardin; there were gilt chairs and an inlaid Boulle cabinet in brass and tortoiseshell; there was a green clock embossed with silver cupids; there were mirrors and rococo tables. You felt as though you were walking into a museum piece. You had the same effect as you came into the small cocktail-room into which guests were shown before lunch or dinner. With its circular-set bar, papered in gold and scarlet, its aluminium, red-leathered stools and red-leathered tables, it was as faultlessly Condé Nast as the drawing-room had been Louis XV. On one side of the wall were book-shelves arranged pyramidically. In the gap between the pyramids was a Paris poster of Yvonne George. Round the walls were set cosy red-leathered corners. There was no window. The dining-room was early New England. The furniture without paint or finish. The pine table long and bare. The walls wainscoted with wide moulded boards. Under the window a vast Harley chest. The log fire in the open grate was protected by a sheet of glass. It was as though Roger
Sweden had gone into an Ideal Home Exhibition and ordered five specimen rooms. Perhaps he had. You had no feeling of home in his apartment. His real home was in the country, at Hyde Park. His apartment on Fifty-third Street was the place where he entertained his friends. He was always entertaining. The house was never empty. He had an intense curiosity about life. He also liked to see people happy. Whenever a man interested him he invited him to dinner. And most men interested him. He was a gracious host. His hospitality was lavish, but never ostentatious. When he was part of a group in any night club or speakeasy, it was assumed with an entire absence of fuss that the check should be brought to him. He was always in control. And yet at the same time he never allowed his wife to be treated as an appendage. He invariably deferred to her. She was the hostess. There was a constant stage-managing of effects so as to bring her into prominence. ‘He married her,’ Gordon thought, ‘because she’s beautiful, because he needed a hostess who would be a credit to him. He wanted a son. He acquired her in the same way that he acquired his Condé Nast cocktail-bar, his New England dining-room, his Louis Quinze drawing-room. But at the same time he’s subtle enough to make her feel that she’s indispensable to him.’
Which she was, of course. She was part of his background, part of the screen behind which he deployed his attack on life. But for herself, what was it like for her, he wondered? It was a question to which he had found no answer. There was so much of her that he did not know. She was from the South, she told him, from Louisiana. Her grandparents would have been entirely ruined in the Civil War had they not held stocks in Europe that they had not been able at the time to realize. Gordon from his memories of the West Indies pictured her childhood in terms of an old plantation home, such an affair of brick and wood as he had seen crumbling into decay behind Montego Bay; in which an old family, rich in pride, strove to maintain the prestige and traditions of colonial life in a world that had new traditions, new standards of prestige. She had come north to College. She had had some idea of working. But she had been lazy, she had said. She could not go into competition with the hustling Northerners. She had idled; her family had rich connections; there had been dances and dinner parties in the fall; summers in Newport and Long Island; occasional trips to the lazy, sun-soaked South. Then she had married. ‘And that’s all there is to it,’ she said.
In one way it would seem enough. She had been given everything that a young girl dreams of. She had a kind, considerate, devoted husband; a man of whom any woman could be proud; of whom no doubt she was proud. He had given her a son. He had made a position for her. He had filled her house with entertaining people. On the surface it was such a life as ninety-nine girls in a hundred dream of. And yet how much of this life had been really hers? How much of herself had gone into it? Was her son really hers, or just another of Roger’s possessions; no more her own than her house was. She seemed static and composed. But still he wondered. Was not this very eagerness with which she had pursued their friendship a proof of something missing? It was hard to tell. For though he saw much of her, he saw her in fact extremely little. It was always in crowds they met. And in America conversation was strident, perpetually general. There would be occasional minutes as they drove to a theatre, or away from one; as they strolled in the interval between the acts round the gallery of the Metropolitan; when at some party they would find themselves momentarily islanded by the stream of talk. It would be only for a moment or two, though, that they would be alone. Someone would join them; or else Faith herself would cast a slow, searching look along the room.
‘I’m not sure if they’re enjoying themselves over there,’ she would say. ‘I feel that I ought to break that group.’
‘You’re so busy being the perfect hostess,’ he once said, ‘that you have no time to enjoy your parties.’
She smiled at that; answering in the consequentially appropriate way that he associated with her.
‘Do you remember that passage in one of your books,’ she said, ‘when you make one of your characters leave Penang. He thinks that he’s probably said good-bye to it for ever. But that he’s liked it so much, that he’s left something of himself behind there? Then you went on to make him think of all the other places that he’d been to in which he left portions of himself; of how he’s scattered himself, so that except to himself he can’t be complete anywhere. I’d never thought of that before, and it’s so true. I thought that it was true of myself too, in a way; that I’d scattered myself; not among places, I haven’t travelled much, but people. There’s this perpetual flow of people through this house. Roger’s always inviting new friends. Some of them I like quite a lot. But they come and go. New York is a city that people hurry through. Lots of them I don’t remember afterwards by face or name. But there’re some of them that something gets shared with somehow. When I see their cars swing down the drive, my heart gives a little jump. I knew from your book that you’d felt that jump. I didn’t think it would be difficult for us to be friends.’
As so often when she talked, she had turned her head and leant forward, her knees crossed and her wrists crossed over them. It was a pose that accentuated all that was most languid in her.
‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ said Gordon, ‘that you would have felt that way. I’ve always thought it was one of the advantages of marriage that there should be someone with whom you had shared all those casual episodes, that each friendship and new-found place was something to be had in common.’
‘You’ld have thought that, would you?’ she replied.
It was always obliquely in that way that he obtained his rare insights into her mind, in keeping with the odd oblique intimacy that had sprung up between them—an intimacy that was, at the same time, more personal than any that Gordon had for a long time known. Friendship, indeed, had been something that he had known little latterly. He had attributed this to the fact that as the years passed, and as the sum of one’s past increased, as one’s own nature became more complicated, and as one arranged a superficial self to present to the world, it became more and more difficult to build up any real friendships with those who knew little of one and of whom oneself one knew extremely little. One seemed able to give less and less of oneself. Or rather, what one gave became increasingly superficial and easily recovered. But with Faith Sweden it had been different. She, by her understanding of his work, had made it possible for him to be complete with her. The whole of a writer’s work is a process of self-confession, more complete than he is himself aware of. The person who reads him understandingly, has the key to all that is puzzling in him to his friends. However great or small his talent he is most himself when his pen is in his hand. He is in his own solitude able to draw on the crowded experiences of his life. He is like an organist with the keys and stops of his instrument before him. He is not, as he is with his acquaintances, forced to draw only on that amount of experience that he has shared with them. His whole life is in front of him. Everything that he says has the background of a life behind it. With his friends he can never be wholly that. He can be only as much of himself as they chance to know.
As the twenties yielded to the thirties Gordon had grown more and more conscious of this process of isolation. As he had travelled from one country to another, so had he travelled from one life into another. As a schoolboy his problems had been those of two hundred others. There were numberless boys with whom he could compare notes, to whom he could say, ‘It’s like this, isn’t it?’ As a soldier he had shared the trials, hopes, pleasures, despairs of two million others. His life was something to be held in common with any officer in any B.E.F. canteen in France. Later, as a young man in London, there were many similarly positioned people to whom he could say, ‘What do you usually do when a thing like this happens?’ He could compare notes with the members of his football and cricket sides; with the old school friends and fellow officers he had kept in touch with, with London journalists, publishers, readers, fellow novelists. His problems were financial, amatory and sartorial. Where shou
ld one have one’s waistcoats made? How long credit would Tom & Bowley give? Was it really true that women appreciated a certain roughness? There were many with whom the young man in the early twenties could discuss such similar problems. But later as one grew established, as the sum of one’s acquaintances increased, as one passed and got passed by in the race, as one’s friends married, as the contemporaries of boyhood slipped towards failure or climbed towards success, one came to find that one’s occasional evenings with old friends tended towards a ‘Do you remember?’ conversation; a sharing of the past, since their presents ran no longer side by side; while with new friends it was only the present that he shared. The problems of any moderately successful man of thirty are personal to himself.
To feel himself understood as he was by Faith was an experience of complete novelty for him.
In spite of this intimacy they were, however, completely ignorant of the facts of each other’s lives. She would never begin to tell him about herself in a straightforward manner. She would talk about her past, her present, her views on the future only when something in the course of their talk suggested it. And it was then in an impersonal manner that she spoke; as though she only used her life as a means of explaining something about life in general.
It was in this way that she came to make her first real admission about her past. They had been to see a film based on a story by Stacy Aumonier called ‘Two White Hands.’ It was a study of jealousy; of how a husband realizing that there is a danger of his wife being unfaithful to him contrives to frighten the potential lover without allowing the wife to know that he is taking action. ‘It’s a little like a story of yours,’ Faith said as they sat in Reubens afterwards. They were not alone. They never were alone. There were half a dozen in their party. But the partitioned cabins along the wall gave them an appearance of isolation.