The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (59 page)

I felt that every single thing that was happening to me was not just predestined but somehow actively at the moment of its occurrence
thought
by a divine power which held me in its talons. At times I felt almost as if I were holding my breath in case some tiny movement of my own should interfere with the course of this divine possession. Though in the same thought I also knew that I could not now, by the most frenzied struggling, ever escape my fate. The court room and the judge and the condemnation for life were mere shadows of a much huger and more real drama of which I was the hero and the victim. Human love is the gateway to all knowledge, as Plato understood. And through the door that Julian opened my being passed into another world.

When I thought earlier that my ability to love her was my ability to write, my ability to exist at last as the artist I had disciplined my life to be, I was in the truth, but knew it only darkly. All great truths are mysteries, all morality is ultimately mysticism, all real religions are mystery religions, all great gods have many names. This little book is important to me and I have written it as simply and as truthfully as I can. How good it is I do not know and in a sublime sense I do not care. It has come into being as true art comes, with absolute necessity and with absolute ease. That it is not great art I daresay I am aware. What kind of thing it is is dark to me as I am dark to myself. The mechanical aspects of our humanity remain obscure to us until divine power has refined them absolutely, and then there is no anxious knower any more and nothing to be known. Every man is tiny and comic to his neighbour. And when he seeks an idea of himself he seeks a false idea. No doubt we need these ideas, we may have to live by them, and the last ones that we will abandon are these of dignity, tragedy and redemptive suffering. Every artist is a masochist to his own muse, that pleasure at least belongs to him intimately. And indeed our highest moments may find us still the hero of such conceptions. But they are false conceptions all the same. And the black Eros whom I loved and feared was but an insubstantial shadow of a greater and more terrible godhead.

About these things, my dear fellow, we in our seclusion have often spoken, in our times of quietness together, with words whose meaning glowed out of an ineffable understanding, like flames upon dark water. So friends, so spirits, ultimately converse. It was for this that Plato, in his wisdom, forbade the artist. Socrates wrote nothing, neither did Christ. Almost all speech which is not so illumined is a deformation of the truth. And yet: I am writing these words and others whom I do not know will read them. With and by this paradox I have lived, dear friend, in our sequestered peace. Perhaps it will always be for some an unavoidable paradox, but one which is only truly lived when it is also a martyrdom.

I do not know whether I shall see the ‘outside world’ again. (A curious phrase. The world is, in reality, all outside, all inside.) The question is of no interest to me. A truthful vision finds the fullness of reality everywhere and the whole extended universe in a little room. That old brick wall which we have so often contemplated together, my dear friend and teacher: how could I find words to express its glowing beauty, lovelier and more sublime than the beauty of hills and waterfalls and unfolding flowers? These are indeed vulgarisms, commonplaces. What we have seen together is a beauty and a glory beyond words, the world transfigured, found. It was this, which in the bliss of quietness I now enjoy, which I glimpsed prefigured in madness in the water – colour – blue eyes of Julian Baffin. She images it for me still in my dreams, as the icons of childhood still haunt the visions of the ageing sage. May it be always so, for nothing is lost, and even at the end we are ever at the beginning.

And I found you, my friend, the crown of my quest. Could you not have existed, could you not have been waiting for me in this monastery which we have inhabited together? That is impossible, my dear. Were you there by accident? No, no, I should have had to invent you, and by the power which you yourself bestow I should have been able to. Now indeed I can see my life as a quest and an ascesis, but lost until the end in ignorance and dark. I was seeking you, I was seeking him, and the knowledge beyond all persons which has no name at all. So I sought you long and in sorrow, and in the end you consoled me for my life – long deprivation of you by suffering with me. And the suffering became joy.

So we live on together here in our quiet monastery, as we are pleased to call it. And so I come to the end of this book. I do not know if I shall write another. You have taught me to live in the present and to forswear the fruitless anxious pain which binds to past and to future our miserable local are of the great wheel of desire. Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusion, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points. You who are a musician have shown me this, in the wordless ultimate regions of your art, where form and substance hover upon the brink of silence, and where articulate forms negate themselves and vanish into ecstasy. Whether words can travel that path, through truth, absurdity, simplicity, to silence I do not know, nor what that path can be like. I may write again. Or may at last abjure what you have made me see to be but a rough magic.

This book has been in some way the story of my life. But it has also been I hope an honest tale, a simple love story. And I would not wish it to seem at the end that I have, in my own sequestered happiness, somehow forgotten the real being of those who have figured as my characters. I will mention two. Priscilla. May I never in my thought knit up the precise and random detail of her wretchedness so as to forget that her death was not a necessity. And Julian. I do not, my darling girl, however passionately and intensely my thought has worked upon your being, really imagine that I invented you. Eternally you escape my embrace. Art cannot assimilate you nor thought digest you. I do not now know, or want to know, anything about your life. For me, you have gone into the dark. Yet elsewhere I realize, and I meditate upon this knowledge, that you laugh, you cry, you read books and cook meals and yawn and lie perhaps in someone’s arms. This knowledge too may I never deny, and may I never forget how in the humble hard time – ridden reality of my life I loved you. That love remains, Julian, not diminished though changing, a love with a very clear and a very faithful memory. It causes me on the whole remarkably little pain. Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.

Mr Loxias has kindly shown me the manuscript written by my former husband and has asked me if I wish to make any comments on it, these to be published with the book itself. I do not think I have many comments except that the whole book seems to me to be sort of off key. I think many things are in the eye of the beholder. I was not at all ‘self – satisfied’ during the trial, but very upset indeed, for instance. It would have been very heartless to be self – satisfied then. Bradley has a way of seeing everything in his own way and making it all fit together in his own picture. Perhaps we all do that, but we do not write it down in a book. He does not give a very fair picture at all of the time of our marriage. I do not want to be nasty to him, I am very sorry for him indeed. It must be very depressing to be in prison, though he is putting a brave face on it I must say. (It is rather funny that he calls it a monastery. Some monastery.) In fact I cannot imagine anything more awful, and I think it is a great achievement that he has managed to write this book at all. I can say nothing about its value, I am not a literary critic, I mean its value as a novel or whatever it is. But that it is not a very true picture of the bits I know about it is all I can say. Bradley never hated me during our marriage. I think he never really hated me at all, but because I left him (which he does not say in the book) he had to pretend that he did. He describes how I dominated him or stole him from himself or something, these are very eloquent parts of the book and very well written I dare say. But it was not ah all like that in real life. The trouble with our marriage was that I was young and wanted more fun and happiness than Bradley was able to give me. Because he is quite witty sometimes in the book and makes things funny (sometimes he makes things funny which are not really) a reader might think that he was an amusing person to be with, but this is not so, even when he was young. There was no sort of battle between us at all as he tells in the book, I just got very depressed and so did he, and I decided to leave him though he begged me and begged me to stay, which he does not tell us. Our marriage had been a mistake. I was much happier in my second marriage. I did not say the horrible things about my second husband that Bradley says, though I may have made a joke about him. Bradley has never been very good at seeing when things are jokes. He says somewhere in his book, I cannot now find it, that he is a puritan and that I think is the truth. He could never understand women. And I think he was jealous of my second marriage, people never like to think their wife was happier with someone else. Of course he is quite wrong when he thinks that after I came back to London at the beginning of his ‘novel’ I was really interested in coming together with him again. I was not. I came to see him because he was about the only person I still knew in London and also because I was curious to see what had happened to him in the between time. I was cheerful and happy and I just wanted to look him over, so I stopped by. I did not need him!! But it was jolly clear at once that he needed me, and this bit he did not tell at all properly. He was after me at once. And when I told him I just wanted to be friends in a friendly casual sort of a way, he was pretty furious and put out and then I expect he wrote those things about hating me and about my being so awful like a sort of female spider as a kind of revenge because I was not friendly enough to him when I came back to London. Really it is obvious I think from the book that he was in love with me again, or had always been in love with me. It was a great shock to him when I came back and when he found that I rejected him a second time. I think it was this that finally unsettled his reason and brought on the kind of insanity which my husband was so anxious to prove at the trial. Both his sister and his mother were very unbalanced and neurotic, incidentally, they could have done with analysis, all the family. I do believe that Bradley was really mad when he killed Arnold Baffin, it was a brain storm, and he forgot about it all afterwards as if it had been a dream. Those sleeping pills he took make people forget things. I think the death of his sister upset him terribly too, though he did not seem to be very upset, and he certainly abandoned her though he must have seen what a state she was in, and left her to me to be looked after, which he was glad enough to do. Perhaps it was something to do with money, he was always a bit of a mean man. And what he says in the postscript of his book about his sister does not seem to me to be real feeling, but rather that he was feeling guilty, which he so often did, though it does not seem that it made him behave any better. As for the part about Miss Baffin, that must embarrass her a lot, as it was obviously mostly in his mind. I am rather surprised that the book is to be published. I think all that story was to veil his loving me. Anyway, people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels. I think the trouble with Bradley was that he never really got over his background. He is always going on about ‘the shop’, and I think he felt ashamed of his parents and of not having had a proper education, I think that is the key to a lot. I am afraid he is a bit of a snob, which does not help anything. My husband thinks Bradley is not really a writer at all, but should have been a philosopher, only he was not educated enough. Bradley is wrong too to say that the idea of
haute couture
only came to me during the trial, I do not know why he says that. I was never going to take on women’s underwear with Mr Baffin, and had planned my existing salon even before I arrived back in London. He is right about one thing though, that I am good at business, as witness the fabulous success of the salon in a few years. My husband too has taken to business like a duck to water and his knowing about tax is so useful, so one good thing came out of that trial, though as I said at the begining I was very unhappy indeed and very sorry indeed for poor Bradley. (And for Mr Baffin too of course.) I would like to say to Bradley now if he ever sees this piece that I am very sorry for him and think of him with affection. There is no point in writing him letters any more. That poor Bradley is still quite mad is shown by the postscript to his story, where he seems to think that he has become a mystic or something. That part was rather creepy I thought and really like what mad people write. And why all this fuss about art anyway, we can live without art I should think. What about social workers and people who work on famine relief and so on, or are they all supposed to be failures or not all there? Art isn’t everything, but of course Bradley would think what he’s taken up with is the only important thing. At any rate he is getting another publication out at last. I think by now everyone must know that ‘ Mr Loxias’ is really a well – known publisher who hopes to make a lot of money out of publishing Bradley’s memoirs, which I hope that he will. The Sunday papers will publish them too I am told. I do not know if people in prison can draw royalties at all. So the person Bradley talks of as his ‘teacher’ and so on and whom he seems to think so much of must be somebody else, or else that bit is probably made up as is obviously much else in the story. I would like to say again, how sorry I am for Bradley and how I hope that he is not too unhappy in prison. Perhaps being a bit out of your mind is a merciful thing if it makes you think that you are happy when you are not.

Christian Hartbourne

It is my pleasure and privilege to add a critical epilogue to this unusual ‘autobiography’. I do so gladly as homage to my old friend, still languishing in ‘durance vile’, and I do so dutifully as a service to the cause of science. This remarkable piece of self – analysis from a talented pen deserves a thoroughly detailed commentary, for which, the publisher tells me, there is unfortunately no space in this volume. I intend however to publish in due course a lengthy book, upon which I have now been at work for some time, about the case of Bradley Pearson, and in this work the ‘autobiography’, a prime piece of evidence in this
cause cé/èbre,
will of course be fully treated. What follows here is merely a digest of a few concise points.