The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (30 page)

Am I unjust to him as a writer? It is possible. Someone said that ‘all contemporary writers are either our friends or our foes’; and it is certainly hard to be objective about the contemporary crew. The scandalized annoyance which I could not prevent myself from feeling when I saw one of Arnold’s books favourably reviewed had of course its base sources. But I had also, at various times, tried quite hard to reflect rationally upon the value of Arnold’s work. I think I objected to him most because he was such a
gabbler.
He wrote very carelessly of course. But the gabble was not just casual and slipshod, it was an aspect of what one might call his ‘metaphysic’. Arnold was always trying, as it were, to take over the world by emptying himself over it like scented bath water. This wide catholic imperialism was quite alien to my own much more exacting idea of art as the condensing and refining of a conception almost to nothing. I have always felt that art is an aspect of the good life, and so correspondingly difficult, whereas Arnold, I regret to say, regarded art as ‘fun’. This was certainly the case in spite of the sort of ‘mythological’ pomposity which has made some critics take him seriously as a ‘thinker’. Arnold never really
worked
on his ‘symbolism’. He saw significance everywhere, everything was vaguely part of his myth. He liked and accepted everything. And although he was ‘in life’ a clever man and an intellectual and a tough arguer, ‘in art’ he went soft and failed to make distinctions. (The making of distinctions is the centre of art, as it is the centre of philosophy.) The cause of his failure was, in part at least, a kind of enthusiastic garrulous religiosity. He was in a somewhat shadowy way a disciple of Jung. (I mean no special disrespect to that theorist, whose work I just happen to find unreadable.) For Arnold, the artist, life was simply one big gorgeous metaphor. I think perhaps I will forbear to characterize him further here, as I can already hear the venom creeping into my tone. My friend P. has taught me much about the absolute spiritual necessity of silence. As an artist I knew of this in humbler ways and instinctively at an earlier time and my knowledge informed a kind of contempt which I always felt for Arnold.

My relations with my sister were much simpler and also much more complex. Sibling relationships are usually complicated and yet also so taken for granted that unsophisticated participants are often unconscious of being caught in such a spider’s web of love and hate, rivalry and solidarity. As I explained earlier, I identified myself with Priscilla. My horrified distress at Roger’s happiness was a reaction of self – defence. I was affronted by the impunity with which this husband had exchanged his elderly wife for a young girl. That is every husband’s dream, no doubt: only in this context I was the elderly wife. Indeed in an odd way my sympathy for Rachel derived from my sympathy for Priscilla, despite the fact that Rachel was such a different case, so much tougher, more intelligent, more interesting and more attractive. On the other hand, Priscilla irritated me to the point of ruthlessness. In general I cannot stand weepers and whimperers. (I was moved when Rachel spoke of ‘fire’. Affliction should strike sparks, not induce self – pity.) The silence which I have always valued has included a determination to keep the mouth shut under blows. Nor do I encourage tearful confidences. The readers will have seen how promptly I shut Francis Marloe up. This was another point on which I differed from Arnold. Arnold, even affirming that this was part of his ‘job’ as a writer, constantly encouraged people quite indiscriminately to tell him their troubles. (He exercised this talent on Christian the first time they met.) This had of course more to do with malicious curiosity than with compassion and often led to misunderstandings and subsequent bitterness. Arnold was a great ‘leader up the garden’ of persons of both sexes. I despised this. To return however to Priscilla, I felt very troubled by her afflictions and yet very unwilling to be involved. I have always felt that a realistic sense of one’s limitations as a helper is an essential part of being a good neighbour. (Arnold entirely lacked this sense.) I was not going to let Priscilla interfere with my work. And I was determined not to view her, as Rachel did, as ‘done for’. People are not so easily destroyed.

Christian’s take – over of Priscilla, though utterly ‘obscene’, was already becoming more of a problem than an outrage. I was more inclined to let the situation ride. Christian would get no profit from her hostage. But I did not think that she would therefore abandon or ‘drop’ Priscilla. Perhaps here again I had been influenced by Arnold. In some people sheer
will
is a substitute for morality. What Arnold called ‘grip’. When she was my wife Christian had employed this will in an attempt to invade and conquer me. A lesser man would have surrendered in exchange for a marriage which might even have been a happy one. One can see many men who live happily, possessed and run (indeed
manned,
the way a ship is manned) by women of tremendous will. What saved me from Christian was art. My artist’s soul rejected this massive invasion. (It was like an invasion of viruses.) The hatred for Christian which I had nursed all these years was a natural product of my struggle for survival and its original spear – head. To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate. Now however, no longer really threatened and with an incentive to be more objective, I could see how well, how
intelligently,
Christian had organized herself. Perhaps learning that she was Jewish had altered my vision. I felt almost ready for a new kind of contest in which I would defeat her casually. The final exorcism would be a display of cool amused indifference. But these were shadowy thoughts. The main point was that now I felt ready to trust Christian to be business – like and reliable about Priscilla, since I felt like being neither.

In the light of later events I was disposed to regard almost everything I did during the period so far narrated as blameworthy. I daresay human wickedness is sometimes the product of a sort of conscious leeringly evil intent. (I used to think of Christian as evil in this way, though later this seemed at least exaggerated.) But more usually it is the product of a semi – deliberate inattention, a sort of swooning relationship to time. As I said at the beginning, any artist knows that the space between the stage where the work is too unformed to have committed itself and the stage where it is too late to improve it can be as thin as a needle. Genius perhaps consists in opening out this needle – like area until it covers almost the whole of the working time. Most artists, through sheer idleness, weariness, inability to attend, drift again and again and again from the one stage straight into the other, in spite of good resolutions and the hope with which each new work begins. This is of course a moral problem, since all art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. There is an analogous transition in the everyday proceedings of the moral agent. We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them. We allow the vague pleasure – seeking annoyance – avoiding tide of our being to hurry us onward until the moment when we announce that we can no other. There is thus an eternal discrepancy between the self – knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the self – awareness which we have of ourselves subjectively: a discrepancy which probably makes it impossible for us ever to arrive at the truth. Our self – knowledge is too abstract, our sell – awareness is too intimate and swoony and dazed. Perhaps some kind of integrity of the imagination, a sort of moral genius, could verify the scene, producing minute sensibility and control of the moment as a function of some much larger consciousness. Can there be a
natutral,
as it were Shakespearean felicity in the moral life? Or are Eastern sages right to set as a task to their disciples the gradual total destruction of the dreaming ego?

In fact the problem remains unclarified because no philosopher and hardly any novelist has ever managed to explain what that weird stuff, human consciousness, is really made of. Body, external objects, darty memories, warm fantasies, other minds, guilt, fear, hesitation, lies, glees, doles, breathtaking pains, a thousand things which words can only fumble at, coexist, many fused together in a single unit of consciousness. How human responsibility is possible at all could well puzzle an extra – galactic student of this weird method of proceeding through time. How can such a thing be tinkered with and improved, how can one change the quality of consciousness? Around ‘will’ it flows like water round a stone. Could constant prayer avail? Such prayer would have to be the continuous insertion into each of these multifarious units of one recurring pellet of anti – egoistic concern. (This has, of course, nothing to do with ‘God’.) There is so much grit in the bottom of the container, almost all our natural preoccupations are low ones, and in most cases the rag – bag of consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love. Neither of these was relevant to my messy and absent – minded goings – on.

I have perhaps not even now sufficiently emphasized how much I was dominated during this time by an increasingly powerful sense of the imminence in my life of a great work of art. This pellet irradiated each of the ‘frames’ of my awareness in such a way that even when I was, for example, listening to Rachel’s voice or looking at Priscilla’s face, I was also thinking: the time has come. At least I was not thinking these words, I was not thinking anything in words: I was simply aware of a great dark wonderful
something
nearby in the future, magnetically connected with me: connected with my mind, connected with my body, which sometimes literally shook or swayed under that tremendous and authoritative
pull.
What did I imagine that the book would be like? I did not know. But I intuitively grasped both its being and its excellence. An artist in
a
state of power has a serene relationship to time. Fruition is simply a matter of waiting. The work announces itself, emerges often quite whole, when the moment comes, if the apprenticeship has been correct. (As the sage looks for years at the bamboo branch, then draws it quickly and without effort.) I felt that all I needed was solitude.

What the fruits of solitude are, my dearest friend, I know now very much better and more profoundly than I did then: because of my experiences and because of your wisdom. The person that I was then seems captive and blind. My instincts were true and my sense of direction was sound. Only the way turned out to be very much longer than I expected.

 

 

 

 

The following morning, that is the day after my dispiriting conversation with Rachel, I started to pack my suitcase again. I had had a disturbed night, the bed seeming to burn under me. I had decided to depart for the country. I had also decided to go to Notting Hill and see Priscilla and have a cool business – like talk with Christian. I would not attempt to see Rachel or Arnold again before I went. I would write them both long letters from my retreat. I rather looked forward to writing these letters: affectionate and steadying to Rachel, rueful and ironical to Arnold. I felt that if I could only reflect for a while I could sort out that situation, defend myself and satisfy them. For Rachel, an
amitié amoureuse
, for Arnold a fight.

The mind, so constantly busy with its own welfare, is always sensitively filing and sorting the ways in which self – respect (vanity) has been damaged. In doing so it is at the same time industriously discovering methods of making good the damage. I had felt chagrined and ashamed because Rachel regarded me as a failed muddler, and Arnold was posing as having, in some unspecified sense, ‘found me out’. (And, what was worse, ‘forgiven me’!) Reflection on what had happened was already repainting this picture. I was quite strong enough to ‘hold’ them both, to comfort Rachel and to ‘play’ Arnold. The sense of challenge involved already made my bruised vanity cease a little to droop.

I would console Rachel with
innocent
love. This resolution and the ring of the good word made me feel, on that momentous morning, a better man. But what rather preoccupied my thoughts was the image of Christian: her image rather than any definite proposition about her. These images which float in the mind’s cave (and whatever the philosophers may say the mind is a dark cave full of drifting beings) are of course not neutral apparitions but already saturated with judgement, lurid with it. I still felt in waves my old poisonous hatred of this bully. I also felt the not very edifying desire before – mentioned to erase, by a show of indifference, the undignified impression which I had made. I had displayed too much emotion. Now instead I must stare with cold curiosity. As I practised staring at her charged and glowing image it seemed to be dissolving and changing before my eyes. Was I beginning to
remember
at last that I had once loved her?

I shook myself and closed the suitcase and snapped the catch to. If I could only
get started
on the book. A day of solitude, and I could write down something, a precious pregnant something like a growing seed. With that for company I could make terms with the past. And I was not now thinking of reconciliations or even of exorcisms, but just of the shedding of the load of sheer biting
remorse
which I had carried with me through my life.

The telephone rang.

‘Hartbourne here.’

‘Oh hello.’

‘Why didn’t you come to the party?’

‘What party?’

‘The office party. We specially put it on a day that suited you.’

‘Oh God. Sorry.’

‘Everyone was very disappointed.’

‘I’m terribly sorry.’

‘So were we.’

‘I – er – hope it was a good party all the same – ’

‘In spite of your absence it was an excellent party.’

‘Who was there?’