An Honest Ghost (10 page)

“Wait a second,” the man says. A breeze was slightly disturbing his hair. “You’re not an Italian, are you?”

That isn’t funny, it’s just vulgar. It was high time to go. “Time to fuck off.” Filth: it is inseparable from sex, from its essence. Just how he could manage to face his wife and two children twenty minutes after was not my problem, of course.

Then for a time I stumbled about in a cold darkness. My belly is warm and happy, though full of wind. To live beyond forty is indecent, banal, immoral!

But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Eleanor, and only Eleanor, stood there. She was like a statue that embodied universal carnage and, at the same time, was unconcerned with the effects of that carnage; she came to represent heedlessness itself—in her, heedlessness had reached its heights of perfect oblivion. It was very strange. She looks as uncanny as ever, and more severe as she gets older. She was sort of gorgeous. “I don’t know, dear,” she said, “but I think the scenery’s so perfectly French.” Not true. She was cold, and tired, and ageing, and disgraced. Six years of virtue and security had almost tamed her.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “My life lately is full of coincidences.”

She put both hands on my shoulders, and looked at me intently; she seemed trying to read something in my face. “You like being mysterious, don’t you?” She is so practiced in her self-deceptions that she can make convincing arguments on their behalf. “You get along very well without me.”

“Oh yes,” I said. Quite so. Cowed by my tone, she backed away a few steps. Her mouth was slightly open—she could feel that—and waves of horripilation fled across her skin. She was a little vulgar; some times she said “I seen” and “If I had’ve known.” I wanted to kiss her. I was elated; and I walked in front feeling very gay.

She wasn’t sure yet, but she certainly thought her life needed a lift. But we were sure it was not a thing we wanted to think about. “You don’t want me here, do you?” she said. She felt a surprising pleasure. With an impulse that borders on the religious, she’s searching for truth. She wants to be loved, she wants to be admired, she wants to be a success, she wants to give others pleasure, she wants to stay young. She had a hard, bright devil inside her, that she seemed to be able to let loose at will.

“Actually your father did once mention a strain of insanity in his family.”

In the darkness beyond she heard a rustle and the sound of something breathing, the noise of some startled animal making off.

All is mystery except our pain.

We lust for apocalypse.

32.

Surprisingly, Eleanor journeyed to England in the autumn. And throughout the journey she practiced herself in the mood she must take and keep: a mood cool, artful, and determined. From early morning till about three o’clock in the afternoon she would seldom speak—it taking that time to thaw her, by all accounts, into but talking terms with humanity. Those who thought they best knew her, often wondered what happiness such a being could take in life, not considering the happiness which is said to be had by some natures in the very easy way of simply causing pain to those around them. In short she was fast becoming more uninhibitedly herself than ever.

33.

The forsythia is spent now, but there are lilacs, azaleas, geraniums, Japanese wisteria.

And you as you always were.

Do you remember?

I read again these notebooks. To this end I am at present staying for a few days at a hotel. The pleasures of obsession. In the vicinity of the hotel the lights of luxury apartments loomed insolently.

The very writing of my book of memoirs had brought home to me that memory is a darkroom for the development of fictions.

“Language,” says Wittgenstein, “sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings….” (Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.) There is no one reason why people talk. In short, all my reading was coming in handy.

For no reason at all I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time; I was horribly unkempt, almost coarse, with swollen features that were not even ugly, and the rank look of a man just out of bed. A writer without his own tone is no writer at all. It’s scarcely possible for the artist to write a word (or render an image or make a gesture) that doesn’t remind him of something already achieved.

We are in fact made of the same material as Isabel Archer, as Dorothea Brooke.

A novel must be new and not new.

“Once you pick up a Compton-Burnett,” Ivy commented about her own books, “it’s hard not to put them down again.”

34.

Roy gets up off his knees when he sees me. “Be sober,” he admonished himself. This succeeded, to his own astonishment. When he got to his feet finally, shaking his head and staggering a little, all he could say was, “My God! That it should come to this! ”

He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor. A bold, blunt-tipped nose, positive chin, a very large mouth,--the lips thick and succulent but never loose, never relaxed, always stiffened by effort or working with excitement. Never as a young man had he imagined himself at thirty-four. He’d grown up in the Pentecostal faith and had been frightened by the old people speaking in tongues every Sunday. He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, and sits down to his breakfast: he drinks three glasses of tea and eats two large doughnuts, and half a buttered French roll. So far so good. “Every thing must have a beginning … and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.”

Don’t be too hard on him, he was studying to be a professor. And he retained a Brooklyn pronunciation: his ‘the’ tended to be ‘duh,’ ‘with’ to be ‘wit,’ ‘working’ to be ‘woiking.’ We came to like him, to trust him, almost to admire him. He wrote a novel. But is a man capable of self-understanding? We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. He said one of the ways to compose is to go over what

you’re doing and see if it still works as you add something else to it. “You should write as a writer would, polish it up, embellish, add some style to it, that’s your job, as far as I know.” The most important key in the world is passed on from one sleepwalker to another.

When I squint I can see that the small bookshelf propped on the desk holds volumes by Freud, Winnicott, Lacan. The room was a maze of little objects and curiosities, arranged somewhat in the manner of a Woolworth’s bargain window.

Tell me, what became of you?

The policeman replies, “I don’t know. I’ve only one ambition—to be free to follow out a good feeling. Fashion is very important to me. For this alone I consider myself a very lucky man. I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. We must learn to what extent our thoughts are consistent with our lives, and to what extent compensatory; to what extent ideals are a guide to behaviour, and to what extent they are behaviour itself.”

The young man was certainly a windbag, and might be a rival. Not bad, but—how can I put it?—a little odd. He would describe for you the empire waist and puff-capped sleeves, and with his forefinger he might languidly draw a semicircle just below his collarbone to show you what he meant by a scooped neck. His words sounded low, in a sad murmur as of running water; at times they rang loud like the clash of a war-gong—or trailed slowly like weary travelers—or rushed forward with the speed of fear. The style, as always, tells the deep story. The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume. We stand at opposite ends of the kitchen, two naked men, first not looking at each other, then looking.

“Well, my very earliest childhood memory was on the scary side. I wasn’t in a mood for people in those days. Must I remember? I ended by finding sacred the disorder of my intelligence…. Nothing contagious,” I assured him. Fictions constructed out of quotations--. “What is that you are eating?” I shout. There was salami, sliced hard-boiled eggs, lambs’ tongues, cold ham and roast beef, potato salad, cheese and fresh figs.

“You said so many things, and I’ve forgotten all of them. What foolishness!” His lips were strong and yet gentle as he spoke.

Enough, unhappy one, I said, be still.

35.

It was a sunny day. Wild spring. A pack of teenagers kept up an ecstatic dance of their own. There was great variety in their faces, but in nearly all something supercilious and sardonic. I hate them. Yet they looked not so much sinister as desperately sad. It feels like a massive gang rape is about to take place and we’re all the rapists and the victims at the same time. It goes on forever. All night their voices rose and fell, sharpening into quarrels like the voices of men.

Let them howl. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Perhaps it is the spirits who write my stories.

The telephone rings.

“Well, thank you for calling, David. I’m tired of hearing myself talk.”

“It is essential to be occupied. It is a great art and I have mastered it. From tomorrow onwards,” said David, “I shall only be able to go out at night.” It seems to him that people are stopping in the street, following him with their eyes, as if to say: there he is at last. “Who is there to fuck around here? The police officer?”

Again I had to confess my ignorance. “I’ll be right over,” I said. “But you’re not in New York, are you?” O Mary, go and call the cattle home / For I’m sick in my heart and fain would lie down.

“The arrangement,” David notes laconically, “sounded very promising, so we decided to go. There was a man there called a folk-singer,” says David with venom, “and, naturally, everybody had to hear some folk songs.” At dinner he didn’t realize the girls sitting at the next table were boys. “And this guy says, ‘I don’t care if it’s the fucking queen of England!’”

“A poet, I dare say.” It is two o’clock in the morning. I have nothing to say.

What if you had got a son, and the copy showed the same flaws as the original? I suffered from wrestling with the trap that I had thoughtlessly led myself into.

He tells of a kind of love affair. “I did not know we had friends in common,” he said.

Now at this most inappropriate of times my sex begins to reassert itself. That was the root of the trouble! So I drank and smoked, drank and smoked. The secret duel had now begun.

Oh, how undignified this was!

“I have been trying to remember you as you were before all this happened,” I say. The deepest history is the history of subjectivity. The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.

For an evening or two I experience a quiet, fickle sadness, before I begin to forget.

36.

“It’s because”—Joe caught his breath—“like the book puts it: ‘Whosoever shall say unto this mountain be thou removed into the sea an’—uh-uh, yeah—‘an’ shall not doubt that those things which he hath sayeth shall come to pass, why, man, that guy is gonna have just exactly what he sayeth!’” He was leaning over the table, his hands clenching it, and trembling. As it happened, Joe had a truly sardonic sense of the absurd, and he was—as I would later learn—a deeply humane person. “God seeks people, good people, of course, he doesn’t need the wicked and capricious—especially the capricious, who decide one thing today and say something else tomorrow.” Perhaps this willingness to question certainties and prejudices just ran in the family. “I notice that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling,” he complained. It felt like an episode in a dream, arbitrary and drenched with emotion.

Youth is a dreadful condition, I thought. He has a way of making everything I do seem unimportant. I turned away and straightened the unmade bed. I wobble a bit when I stand. He was right. It is not true that there is dignity in all work. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy.

“To the Renaissance!” he kept shouting.

That sort of thing is all right up to a certain age, no doubt, but if something isn’t done to divert him, there is a good danger of his developing into a long-haired and anaemic ascetic.

“Just because it’s Italian doesn’t automatically mean it’s valuable.”

How many people have had so understanding a father?

“Pah!” cried Joe, in deep disgust. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having them, those we spent with a favorite book. “And she ain’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise.”

Quoting gets on my nerves.

Childhood seldom interests me at all. Had he been suppressing it? He began to wake in the night; the worried thoughts which came disturbed him, and in the morning there remained a residue of the night’s unease.