A Writer's Notebook (89 page)

There is nothing about which men lie so much as about their sexual powers. In this at least every man is, what in his heart he would like to be, a Casanova.

She was successful, well-off, admired; she had a host of friends. She should have been a very happy woman, but she wasn't, she was miserable, nervous and discontented. Psychoanalysts could do nothing for her. She couldn't tell them what ailed her, because she didn't know herself. She was in search of her tragedy. Then she fell in love with a young airman, many years younger than herself, and became his mistress. He was a test-pilot, and one day, when he was trying a machine, something went wrong and he crashed. He was killed before her eyes. Her friends were afraid she would commit suicide. Not at all. She became happy, fat and contented. She had had her tragedy.

It is curious how defenceless people are when confronted with their own frailties in others. The humbug is taken in by other people's humbug; the flatterer takes their flattery at its face value. The most abandoned liar I know once wrote to me in a fury because someone had told lies about her daughter. I don't know why I didn't write back to ask her if she thought she was the only abandoned liar in the world. R., who is an inveterate swanker, is invariably taken in by other people's swank. He is always trying to make himself out more important than he is, and notwithstanding one disappointment after another, goes on placing implicit faith in the similar pretensions of others. Nothing ever made me more doubtful of T. E.
Lawrence's genuineness than that he so heartily trusted two persons whom I knew to be bogus.

One of the things that must strike the foreigner in the United States is that whereas most men have a host of acquaintances, few have friends. They have business associates, playmates at the bridge table or on the golf links, buddies they fish or shoot or sail with, boon companions they drink with, comrades they fight with, but that is all. Of all the people I have met in America I only know two men who are close friends. They will arrange to dine together and spend the evening in desultory conversation because they enjoy one another's society. They have no secrets from one another and each is interested in the other's concerns because they are his. Now when you consider how sociable the Americans are, how amicable and cordial, this is very strange. The only explanation I can offer myself is that the pace of life in the United States is so great that few men have time for friendship. Leisure is needed for acquaintance to deepen into intimacy. Another possible explanation is that in America when a man marries his wife engulfs him. She demands his undivided attention and she makes his home his prison.

Women's friendships everywhere are unstable. They can never give their confidence in its entirety, and their closest intimacy is tempered with reserve, misgiving and suppression of the truth.

A friend indeed. She is middle-aged, but neat and trim and very smartly dressed, the kind of woman of whom you say: “She must have been quite pretty when she was young”; but when you ask why she never married you are told: “She's simply devoted to her mother.” She has a great capacity for sympathy. No one could be kinder. When your husband is being
tried for fraud she will sit beside you all through the proceedings, and when he is sentenced to a term of imprisonment she will come and stay with you till you get used to the situation. If through some mischance you are suddenly ruined she will spend a week with you to help you to decide what to do, and if you're in Reno and suddenly feel you can't face the ordeal of going into court she'll hop on a plane and give you her support till you get your decree. But it is in the case of death that she is at her best. If your husband has died of coronary thrombosis, if your daughter has passed away in childbirth or your son been killed in a motor accident, she will pack a couple of suitcases and by train or air fly to be with you. Distance is no object. She will not be appalled by the rigours of the climate in North Dakota, nor deterred by the heat of summer in Texas; even the inopportune gaiety of Miami at the height of the season will not daunt her. She will not shrink if the tragic event is attended by an unwelcome publicity; she is very nice to the reporters and can't forgive herself that she forgot to ask them not to mention her name in their write-up. She will listen with unfailing patience as you tell her over and over again the sad details of your dear one's last moments. She will make the necessary arrangements. She will see to the flowers. She will answer the letters of condolence that you don't think you need answer yourself. She will pray by your side in church; she will stand by your side, sobbing, at the open grave. On your return from the cemetery she insists on your taking a rest and then, after a good dinner—“You must keep up your strength, darling”—she suggests a game of gin-rummy. She always leaves the day after the funeral, she has a thousand things to do in New York, and “You must try and pick up the threads, darling.” Back in the metropolis, though naturally exhausted after what she has gone through, she picks up the telephone and tells her friends, one after the other, how dreadful it has all been.

It is natural enough that Americans should resent it when Englishmen in America criticise, and the retort is obvious: “If you don't like the country why don't you go away?” They don't make it; they brood in dudgeon. But what is hard is that when they criticise England, and you don't take offence, but are quite likely to agree with them, they ascribe it to your conceit. They take it as an affront, for they think you don't care. And you don't.

Of late I have been asked two or three times to write for the French papers and magazines that have come into existence in England and America since the fall of France. I have refused, but not from ill will, for I owe a great deal to France: it was France that educated me, France that taught me to value beauty, distinction, wit and good sense, France that taught me to write. I have spent many happy years in France. I have refused because I thought the sort of articles they wanted me to write would only be of disservice. A number of distinguished writers have since done what I would not do. To my mind they have written to no purpose. They have told the French that for long they were the most civilised people in Europe and that their culture was matchless; they have spoken of the grandeur of their history, the greatness of their literature and the superexcellence of their painting; they have told them that they live in a beautiful and fertile country and that Paris is an enchanting city that all the world has loved to visit. The French are only too well aware of all that. It has been their undoing, for it has caused them to conceive a grossly exaggerated opinion of themselves. At the beginning of the nineteenth century France was the richest and most highly populated country in Europe; the Napoleonic wars drained her wealth and decimated her people. For more than a hundred years now she has been a second-class power masquerading as a first-class one. It has been a double misfortune to her; first because it led her to pretensions she lacked the resources
to maintain, and secondly because it caused the greater powers to fear ambitions which she could never in point of fact have realised. The war has made manifest what only the very astute saw. Let her face the truth and decide what she will do about it. She can resign herself to being a richer Spain, a more spacious Holland, or a resort place as delectable as Italy; but if that does not suffice her and she desires once more to become a first-class power it is in her own hands. She has a productive country, advantageously situated, and a quick-witted, brave and industrious people. But she must cease to depend upon the prestige of her past greatness; she must abandon her self-complacency; she must face facts with courage and realism. She must put the common welfare above the welfare of the individual. She must be prepared to learn from peoples she has too long despised that a nation cannot have strength without sacrifice, efficiency without integrity, and freedom without discipline. She were wise to turn a deaf ear to these gentlemen of letters, for it is not flattery that can help France, but truth. She alone can help herself.