Noble in Reason (24 page)

We set off at midnight for Kilnsey Crag. I sat in front beside the driver; Edie with Anne and Robert at the back.

From the first Robert was an intolerable nuisance. A strong restless boy of nine with a loud voice and not very good manners, confined in the small space of a moving car for a couple of hours, can cause a good deal of discomfort. Robert jumped up and down, shouted, complained; he was hungry and insisted on one of the picnic baskets being extracted from the boot and opened, he was sleepy and insisted on lying down (for half a minute) with his head on Edie's knee. His first excitement over, he became bored with the whole affair and wanted to turn back, reiterating loudly:

“Let's go home, Aunt Edie! Who wants to see the silly eclipse? Let's go home.”

The scene outside the windows at this time was one of great beauty. Thousands of cars (as the press next day recorded) were making their way towards Kilnsey from all parts of England; at every turning and crossroads, more joined the stream. The night was dark and very still, so that these cars {their headlights on at full) converging along the twisting Yorkshire lanes, appeared like strings of jewels moving in graceful curves across black velvet; while the trees and grass suddenly illuminated in their beams had that appearance of being cut out of cardboard and painted, which oddly enough is very romantic. The air was cool and fresh; the noise of our own engine drowned all other sound, so that the illusion of starry patterns silently mutating was complete. All this offered me a high aesthetic pleasure, but Robert would not allow me to enjoy it. His demand to return grew increasingly clamorous; when I countered by remarking that I at least wished to see the eclipse, he gave out a sound between a yelp and a groan and subsided for a few moments. But all too soon he revived and commanded Anne to play noughts and crosses with him by the light of his electric torch. The wrigglings and
gigglings, the arguments and quarrels, the shovings and at last the slaps, which this game appeared to involve—for Anne being a hefty girl five years older than Robert stood no nonsense from him—entirely prevented any poetic or aesthetic feeling in its players' vicinity.

We parked in a well-chosen field just beyond the crag, and ate the excellent meal Edie had provided. Robert enjoyed this so heartily that his schoolboy's greed appeared naïve and endearing; moreover, while he ate he was at least silent, which was a relief. After the meal he fell asleep. Tucked up in a rug with his head pillowed on Edie's shoulder, his long fair eyelashes—Beatrice's eyelashes—sweeping his firm red cheeks, he appeared pathetically vulnerable, as sleeping children so often do. At that time I held strongly the view that the boy's happiness depended upon my power to keep the secret of his birth; his future was in my care; seeing him thus I felt protective towards him.

The darkness began to lift as the sun climbed towards the horizon; in a grey chill light, through grass thick with dew, the four of us climbed the hill, leaving Robert still asleep in the car. Larks began tentatively to sing; lapwings, disturbed from their nests, fled with their wild mournful cry; the sun rose, and with mingled hope and disappointment, we saw that the sky was covered with intermittent cloud. Presently the transit of the moon's shadow began; in company with the many other sightseers who had chosen the same slope as ourselves, we gazed up earnestly through our square of previously smoked glass, but because of the driving clouds caught only occasional glimpses of the darkening sun. As the moment of total eclipse approached, amid a general cry of disappointment a heavy cloud obscured the relevant portion of the sky. But though the event of totality was thus invisible to us, its moment of occurrence was unmistakable to all our senses; an indigo shadow descended on us like an icy breath; colours
faded, birds ceased to sing; the whole wide landscape of dale and fell took on a sinister twilight air, as if the world were about to perish before our eyes; our blood chilled; death seemed near; panic would have been easy. At this strange and terrible moment, when all on the hillside fell silent with awe as we perceived the puny stature of man confronted with the great forces of the cosmos, his temerity in defying those forces, his incredible achievement in conquering them to make the earth his serviceable habitation—at this sublime and solemn moment, Robert burst over the brow and shouted in aggrieved (and very Yorkshire) accents:

“What did you leave me for? Is this the eclipse? There's nothing to see! Daft, I call it.”

Vexed by the interruption on my own account, and ashamed that a lad in my charge should spoil the enjoyment of the other bystanders, I exclaimed forcibly:

“Do stop that awful
row,
Robert!”

(Not wishing to be too hard on him, I used the word
row
as a kind of playful substitute for
noise.)

Robert gave one of his derisive howls and began to jump up and down, shouting rhythmically scornful variants of the word
eclipse.

I lowered my smoked glass and took my eyes from the clouds in order to deal more firmly with the boy. At the same moment Edie said sharply:

“That's enough now, Bob—you heard what your father said.”

Three experiences fused in a sudden lurid flash. Edie's words recalled to me that I stood to Robert (in his view) in the relation my father stood to me; I remembered that my father had once used to me precisely the same angry words I now used to Robert; by some trick of light my face was reflected in the glass I held and I saw that I carried on my forehead the vertical frowns I had so dreaded in my father.
I am like my
father,
I perceived; I look like him, I speak like him, I even call Robert by his full name as my father used to call me by mine. My father is a human being, subject to all the human limitations; he is well-meaning, fallible, perplexed, of like passions with myself, subject to nerves and outbursts of temper like myself, yet wishing me well as I wish well to Robert. Why then have I hated him so viciously? What dark motive has tricked me into this sterile fear, this inhibiting passion? Freud has the answer to that, I thought at once, and marvelled that 1 had never applied before to my own case the idea of the Oedipus complex, with which I was all the same sufficiently if vaguely familiar. I didn't apply it because I didn't want to, I reflected; I didn't wish to cease to hate my father.

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.

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.