What a bore loyalties are. “Of course, you little fool.”
“Gregory, I’ve not been a good girl,” she said, “I’ll make you a bloody awful missis I will. But if you reely want me I’ll try.”
“Want you?” For some reason I was angrily contemptuous. Then I saw that the little charade must be indulged in. It was too much part of her social upbringing for her to see its ludicrousness. A blind spot. But the damage to me, to my pride … You see, even this was not selfless. The wretched responsibility of our lives! Action always in response to outside forces. Never a pure irresponsible action, the theme of the Taoist meditation.
Well, the marriage was solemnized if you can use the expression. The registrar was bald. The witnesses were Lobo and Chamberlain. The day was cold. Grade coughed endlessly. The reception consisted of a tea in the tiny flat where Chamberlain hatched his schemes. The forced solemnity of everyone, the ceremony, were deplorable. Only Chamberlain was gay, and proposed the health of the blushing bride in a short speech. Gracie, called upon to reply, said: “O no I can’t, reely I can’t. You all been very very good to us, haven’t they Gregory?”
From remote regions of ice I called back. And heard my own tinny voice remark, “Yes, my dear.” My pride was finally wounded. The victory remained with these good-natured oafs who were trying to be so busy and so jolly, don’t you know. Make it easy for them, don’t you know. Try and pretend that nothing has happened. Put them at their ease, don’t you know. I walked home bareheaded. Followed a dinner at my flat (our flat) at which a great deal of wine was consumed; at which Clare allowed Tarquin to fill his glass; at which Gracie became alarmingly the piercing hostess, and remarked, “Oh, do have another portion won’t you, Mr. Chamberlain?”
After they had gone and the washing up was stacked for the char, Gracie came into the drawing room and announced, “Well that’s what I call a lot of reel sports, don’t you think?”
Shall I go on and recollect what a failure it all was? I had ended it all so nicely with Gracie dying in the little bedroom. It was planned out superbly, wasn’t it? The telephone ringing. The half-second of eternity when the light was switched on, and Gracie lay there goggling at the ceiling. Yes, it was all set. Even down to the last little touch: going up slowly to the front door, up the stairs, outside, to where the snow lay thick; the soft lamps; gateposts bathed in whiteness; hedges cut clean, fretted coal-dark against the powdered trees. Going up for a breath of air, I had intended to put it. Standing shivering at the gate to make water, while my whole life lay before me, written in the snow. Lies, all lies. My disease is the disease of the dwarf. To make myself plausible I am forced into a sort of self-magnification of action, of thought. I am forced to make myself transcend reality.
That is why Gracie was so wonderful. So aptly cut out for you in green ink, shaped for a fine slick tragedy. To tell the objective truth would be to cut my own throat. That is not how she died. But each line I add to this makes me more and more reluctant to finish the job. Hara-kiri. A knife turned round in the bowels—but not the bowels of compassion. The bowels of pride. If I could get at the ulcer which has poisoned my actions I would stir it with my nib until the black bile and pus and splinters gushed forth. Pity me, I was born dead.
There is no room for the classy irony with which I have treated the theme hitherto, which is almost my only literary wear. The moon is shining on these pages. Your genuine ironist is never grilled solely on the iron of pride, as I am grilled. The green fountain which starts from this pen is poisoned at source. False irony; a mask baked down tight over the real interplay of facial muscles. God, to find words which would bite down, right down to the pure lustral source from which perfect action flows. This ultimate purification is the theme of my meditations all night long. I try, believe me, I try. When the wireless shuts down I anaesthetize myself, my own body, my own quintessential self, and watch it carried to the theatre. The amphitheatre is crowded with advocates. Under the waxen arcs I see the cloth spread. I am wheeled on the great soft trolley to a point of vantage. Strict white automatons parade with necessary apparatus. The masked face of myself leans down over my body, selects an instrument, and begins. A long bloodless slit in the band of yellow. A sound as of a razor cutting silk. A quiet hiss and splash and infinite masque of movement among the white figures, busy as ants. The gutters are slowly, noiselessly brimmed with blood. Discarded livers, kidneys, tracks of coloured guts drop away from under the sheet and plop into an enamel pail. The yellow envelope of flesh which is my belly becomes ever more flaccid, more empty. I tell you this goes on all night, every night. I am thoroughly opened and explored. My guts are emptied. And to no purpose. It is no good whatsoever. Today I am still what I was yesterday or the day before. It is no good.
Here I am, I want to say always, take me and rip me open. There is a prize offered to anyone who can find the essential Herbert Gregory, alias Death. These stammerings betray me, but no matter. I am writing for the public of the damned. Let this become a piece of superb cartography. Let me be laid out here in relief, to be pored over by professional students of the soul’s geology. See, strata by strata: the most delicate laminations. Suffering, dear ones, has made me marmoreal. You will find written on me all those symptoms of strain that you can see on the faces of old actors. There is no variation from the magnetic north of artifice. Touch me, there is absolutely no charge. Observe, I am utterly metamorphic, I fall away in long rotten flakes.
Sometimes I imagine that it is not I, not really I, in which I read these symptoms of decay. It is my world dying on me, with me, in me. Strange tunes seem to blow about the snow-lit drawing room these days.
Gracie, when you died, when you really died there overlooking the sea, could you imagine that I, turning from your little pinchedup face with the knowing gamin grin on it, should wring my hands together in an intense grief. Not for you! Not for your dissolution, but for my own? You poor white symptom of my world, did you know that the trite mask of sorrow I wore hid the great merciless fear and rage which your death forced on me? You could not guess that, recoiling from your dead mouth as from a branding iron, I was recoiling from myself—the infinity of empty I’s who had yet time to talk, talking of ordinary things in ordinary places.
No, I say to myself, let her be. Don’t think of her. She is just a pawn in this philosophic game which you are playing and which is going to kill you. Let her be. The accent is not on the commonplace loss of a body, of a laugh about the house, feet on the stairs, warm body in a warm bed; it is the loss of the embryo Gregory which was born in her, and which she took away into death with her. I was with child by her. I was kicking in the womb. What right have you or anyone to judge my sorrow, not for her, but for the irreparable loss of my germ? The real struggle was not between us but in me. Let her be. Death is just one of those mathematical constants whose value we must accept as approximate—to ten places of decimals. She used to say to me, after we were married: “Gregory, we’re not pals very much, are we? I mean we don’t like the same things, do we? I don’t care for a lot of old books like you do, and you don’t care for the pitchers and Gary Cooper and all. Do you? Oi, answer your missis when she talks to you, or I’ll clout you one.”
“No, we don’t very much, do we?”
“Then I tell you what.” That with a serious tone. “If you’ll come to the Pally once a week with me, I’ll read one good book every week and get improvement. I’m not very brainy, but I’m quick on the uptake, aren’t I?”
If I had not been nourishing myself on her, this idea would have sounded less frightening. So we were to establish points of reference between each other? I was to learn the rumba and she help herself to slices of improving Gibbon. Perhaps Voltaire, or Butler. (I would like you to know that I am well-read.)
The charm of these little scraps of gossip is in their completeness. Their completeness of falsehood. The process, alas, is too simple. Take a thought from its context and you can make it mean anything you like. You see, when Grac
ie married me, it was as if she had died on me. The metamorphosis was alarming. While I had been an equivocal, a rather queer and undependable lover, there was always a pinch of good salt to season the dish. There was always a head chef, in fact—your humble servant. But an economic dependence on a husband to a person like Grace means a complete social independence. She is irresponsible, anchored finally by a strip of printed parchment, and a few lame words mumbled by a bald-headed man. Therefore she is free. It began almost as soon as the wedding guests left: a critical survey of the flat, and a careful enunciation of its limitations. “We’ll get it all fixed up,” she said, “so it’ll look nice and dinky when your friends come. I want to work hard for you, Gregory.” That was how it began. I give you full permission to recognize this as comic relief. There were curious additions to my tasteful set of furniture. Hideous bamboo trolleys, bead curtains. My beautiful sofa was called inelegant; it was suggested that we should have it covered in red damask, with tassels. “We must get the parlour shipshape,” she remarked once or twice, and I recognized a new note in her voice. There was the ring of the Penge matron coming to life in her tones. It is difficult to admit that I began to loathe her. I loathed her because I was in love with the ordinary, uninhibited Grace who was sure of nothing; and who by obedience alone maintained her precarious hold on my affections. As a stranger she was a paragon. As a wife she produced nothing but this crop of warty furniture, a few copybook aphorisms (old-style), and a bad temper in me. If it began with the parlour it could only end with my friends. Tarquin was to be slowly dropped. “He’s a kind of pansy,” she remarked. “I don’t like it. I seen that kind before. He’s a winny.” Next Clare. Not that he was ever a friend of mine. But now that she was a respectable married matron she was angry at the thought of him. She resented him. Lobo and Perez passed muster. Their manners were so lovely. But Clare might yet try and shake the economic stability of marriage by a revival of their great love. He was to be cut dead from the roots.
There were rows, yes. There were great tearings of checkered sofa cushions, wilful smashing of the chinoiseries with which my spouse had lined the bookshelves. But to my horror I found that Gracie was not to be cowed any more. She was a wife, by Jesus Christ, and she was going to give me of her best whether I liked it or not. And all the glorious misunderstandings on which our love had been built now came forward and contributed to the frightful domestic uproars. Trying to explain, with my usual scholarly precision, just what it was she was doing, she would enrage me with a burst of snivelling and the accusation: “You try to make me out a little tart, that’s all. You think I’m not classy enough for your wife because I don’t speak proper. I tell you Gregory, I’m doing me best, aren’t I?” If I pointed out that that was not the point, she would whimper: “You just want a prostitute here to use. You don’t want me to try and give you a home.” Bang! another piece of Tottenham Court Road china. All this was unbearably tragic, unbearably comic. What was really fatal to our relations, however, was the slowly altering cosmography of our social life. There is nothing like pride for giving one the interpretive faculty. I flatter myself I can play the social astrologer as well as anyone—shall we say Proust? The glance, the lift of a forefinger, the attitude before a mirror, the hair-trigger meaning of a word—these constitute the furniture of a world in which I am too much at home. All this, of course, is a pretty way of saying that our marriage was not a success. The enterprise was undertaken as a defence against the rights of an individual. It was to end in estranging me from all those who had backed me up in it. The brightly coloured tesserae which formed the mosaic of our lives—and so on.
In the beginning, let us say, Gracie was an asset to the menagerie. She was amusing because there were no signs of seriousness on my part. She had a certain chic; as, you might say, a pet marmoset might have, if it were worn on the left shoulder of a Charlotte Street genius. It was a case of: “Come along and meet Gregory. He’s so original, my dear. He keeps a performing woman.” Something of that sort. As soon as the maid became a matron the whole angle of vision altered. It was no longer I who was quaint. It was Gracie. I was poor little Gregory. And she herself was not so much quaint as boring and silly. Her affectations, her knowingness, her fatuous little clichés. It was impossible, in fact, for people to come and enjoy my company, without being forced to go through the ultra-suburban palaver which Gracie insisted on.
And then, how those bamboo pieces rankled! But I would have furnished the flat in chintzes, if only she could have been prevented from poisoning the springs of relationship. Chamberlain was horrified by her stolid and utterly ladylike composure. “What a little Magdalene,” he remarked, as usual never slow to say what was most truthful and most inconvenient. “One of these days she will say, ‘Mrs. Gregory to you, young man.’ Seriously Gregory, where does this tram ride end?”
Can you imagine me remarking, “I think it’s shortsighted of you, young man, to expect me to help you criticize my own wife?”
The Chamberlains hardly ever called after that. One gets used to being very much alone. However I missed the fine rolling arguments, the eternal questions of desire, marriage, etc.
Of course, there were spaces between the stars occasionally. When she was ill, weak as a kitten, there were rarer moments, when our lives seemed to burn up again, twist up into red shapes of real fire and tenderness. Passion flourishes on tears and self-reproaches. But the contact was tenuous; a precarious crossing from island to island over immense gulfs. Superimposed always across our world was the notation of the disease, with its movements up and down the chart, unpredictable. Yes, it was my world dying, I can see that now, in retrospect; falling away into wanness and death. Without any sort of emotion we were waiting for the last convulsion of matter, the last shaky dredging out of the lungs, bright spurt of blood, untying of fingers and knees.
I would give anything for it to have been as I wrote it. In spite of my defects the potential emotion is there, you must admit it. It should have been a mouth-to-mouth affair with an elegant epigraph and a cracker motto for an epilogue. Gracie died just at the time when I had no emotion whatsoever to spend on her: dingily, surrounded by nurses and heartless starched blouses, in a Bournemouth nursing home. What thoughts went through that silly little head at the last, one does not know. There was no movement in the room, except the prodigious movement of the sea. Mist, and the rain hissing along the concrete marine parade. In the silence you could hear the waves combing up across your thoughts, washing them, sucking back the impurities as they went back. Not even the fashionable numbness, I assure you. Lightheaded as a bell. The rigor had set the bashed face of my little tart in a Christ-like grin of pure imbecility. In my imagination I fell upon the corpse, and enacted a whole scene out of a Greek tragedy. There was nothing moving in the room except the gigantic sea licking the windowpanes, and my thoughts in their heroic mime. All my life I have done this—imagined my actions. I have never taken part in them. It is the catharsis of pure action which is so wounding an absolute to contemplate now. Invultuation! Daily I pierce the image of myself, and nothing happens.
(I am obsessed by the imaginary triviality of all this. Is this just another tic born of diffidence? Am I concerned, here, privately, standing on my own soul’s ground, with the creation of literature?)
History is a study which has none of the venom of reality in it. Your protagonist, your chorus, your crowd: everything on the stage has no more personality than an old pack of cards. But autobiography is another matter altogether: if you are honest, a continual, a painful kinosis. If you are dishonest, an eternal fear.
I have been rereading these pages; a little weary and disgusted at the way I prey upon myself; a little horrified at the squeals which go up from them. Memories of De Profundis!
Since I returned from Bournemouth—alone, the very word is like a bell—I have had all my time to myself. I see no one, except occasionally Tarquin, occasionally Morgan. There is nothing to do, nothing to be done. Yet, this is a lie, be
cause this time has been the most critical in my life; the most vital, as far as the making of decisions goes, I have ever known. I have been glad to be alone, to revise the vast catalogue of thoughts and actions which have been born in me. My body is here, like a vast unused library in which no one has interested himself for years. Aware all at once of the battered volumes around me, I have been indexing them, estimating the mental and spiritual calibre of their original collector. It is fearsome work. Here an Ella Wheeler Wilcox, there a Freud … further on an Old Moore’s Almanac, a Baedeker. But where is the Black Book—that repository for all the uncut gems of creation? I grope along the shelves, blind.
This is my forty days in the wilderness. There has been time to revise, to annotate, to gloze. Fiat voluntas. On the manuscript I shall draw a Phoenix, with its feathers in flames; a raving piece of heraldry to insist on the eternal desire in me—to confess and be assoiled. Meanwhile, I wander along in my private wilderness, broken-mouthed with thirst, humming the Te Deum, envying everyone. Yes, the butcher, the baker, the nun and the candlestick maker. The porter who brings me my meals, and stands like a carving with the glass of beer held in his paw. Even Tarquin whose struggle is not with the Holy Ghost but with his own weakness.
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