An Honest Ghost (5 page)

“You are quite Voltairean!” he murmured. “Things can always get worse.”

“Ah.”

Longing for sweeter grass, he wanders away. “I don’t care for children.”

Very ingenious, one feels, but how much better not to have said it! And since, on occasion, he quotes Levinas, people take him for a great mind.

A moment later the engine roared and the tires squealed out of the driveway.

When I was left alone in his house, looking around the library, which was, in some mysterious way, the incarnation both of his absence and his presence, I asked his spirit (it was, of course, a rhetorical question) why things had turned out as they had for us. There was no denying it was interesting, but would it be enough to sustain a long-term relationship? It was fascinating, it was empty and spectacular, but after a few days it also got a bit boring. I work better alone. I forbade myself to go on brooding about it.

Leafing through a pile of books, I have been wondering if there has ever been in America a novelist with a point of view toward the taking and giving of pleasure even vaguely resembling Colette’s, an American writer, man or woman, stirred as deeply as she is by scent and warmth and color, someone as sympathetic to the range of the body’s urgings, as attuned to the world’s every sensuous offering, a connoisseur of the finest gradations of amorous feeling, who is nonetheless immune to fanaticism of any sort, except, as with Colette, a fanatical devotion to the self’s honorable survival.

15.

Eleanor “sprang from a noble race.”

“If you want to call it that,” she said. “I’m always kind to people who have good Louis Quatorze. No one’s supposed to know about that,” she said, more resignedly than annoyed. I found it all repellent and queasy-making.

As a child she was lonely and shy in public, with a “desperate inner life.” Once she thought she heard voices and stopped, only to hear nothing at all. At this point a wonderful piece of luck came her way. Flowering puberty. A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends upon it.

There were stormy scenes at home, sobs, moans, hysterics. And then, who knows how or why, the situation gradually improved. The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.

Traits that we all recognize in ourselves are, in her case, blown up into intense inner (and sometimes public) dramas. She was under the spell of that timorous curiosity which leads women to seek out dangerous emotions, to go see chained tigers, to look at boa constrictors, frightening themselves because they are separated from them only by weak fences.

Little is known about her mother—there were no exciting stories about her—who died when Eleanor was only eight years old. Eleanor took no notice, as if regarding such an incident as too trivial to heed. “To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.” The paradox is not confined to poetry.

She stood in the darkness leaning against the wall and watched Greta Garbo. Beside her was a Jewish boy, a hump-back, with a face that hunger had sharpened into a painful beauty. He smiled wistfully and touched her pretty hair and said, “You’re gorgeous, you know,” and went back to his room for the night. Eleanor loved the evening entertainment.

Everything lay beneath a peculiar shimmer that made all it touched smaller and more delicate; she felt a bit dizzy and sat down.

On such unproductive occasions I don’t linger very long.

16.

I am sitting in my room, looking at the houses and gardens across the street, while all kinds of thoughts pass through my head. Scared of the trap of being less desired than I myself desire, the trap that is called being in love.

Better take two of those blue pills tonight.

The object in your hands is not a novel. Novels seem like desperate attempts at control, and poems like attempts at grandeur. The novel is a monumental waste of time.

The worse your art is, the American poet John Ashbery once remarked, the easier it is to talk about it. Originality is therefore the price which must be paid for the hope of being welcomed (and not merely understood) by your reader.

Miracles happen every day. Each is in a different style.

Introspection, however, is not to be enforced. Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.

17.

David gave a great sigh. “But where are you going, Eleanor?” At first, he was so overwhelmed by her beauty, her charm, and her powerful personality that he could scarcely speak. Suddenly their eyes met, and she smiled to him—a rare, intimate smile, beautiful with brightness and love. Now that this handsome young man was proving himself a reality she found herself vaguely trembling; she was deeply excited.

Please, David, she pleaded, you mustn’t feel so badly. We only want to make you happy, to make you finally you, David dear.

Now he’s really in trouble.

The deeper you go, as a writer, into the minds of your characters—the more detailed and refined your registration of their thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, scruples— the slower the narrative tempo becomes, and the less action there is.

I was in the kitchen fixing iced concoctions. I will not let any gloomy moralizing intrude upon us here to-night.

I remain a while feeling deeply, or at least trying to feel deeply.

I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he would give me a kiss.

“Oh, don’t be tedious,” said David. For now was no time for romance or enthusiasm. As soon as the conversation reached a certain level he would murmur: “Oh, no dreams and utopias, please!” The sense of love stirred in him, the love one always feels for what one has lost, whether a child, a woman, or even pain. But instead of being down in the mouth with fear, he felt elated by it, living, as he did, in a deep, violent and finally organic belief in his lucky star. His life has been an attempt to realize the task of living poetically. Poor, ridiculous young man. “He has a lovely smile,” my mother liked to say. And David did some adorable things.

Everybody is feeling a little more cheerful about everything to-day even though it is a dark and gloomy day.

They danced at arm’s length, their teeth bared in hostility. They attacked one another with obscure allusions and had a silly quarrel. “Do you think,” he said to her, “that I might come and live with you in your house?”

When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. She hadn’t said, “Oh, yes, darling!” but it was understood.

“What the hell are you laughin’ at?” he asked.

“Do not talk nonsense,” said Eleanor, in a low tone. What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice. “Do you know how many men I’ve slept with the last two months?” Somehow she managed to look sleek and disheveled at the same time. It left her feeling slightly upset and annoyed, first with him and then with herself.

He listened carefully, as always, putting in an appropriate word or two. “In future we’ll do our best to spare Mademoiselle’s nerves.” The night was full of an evil she didn’t seem aware of, and he had failed to exorcize.

They were young and seemed to be in a bad mood, but at the time I felt they had sprung from a dream in which good and bad moods were no more than metaphysical accidents. One of the defects of my character is that I can never grow used to the plainness of people; however sweet a disposition a friend of mine may have, years of intimacy can never reconcile me to his bad teeth or lopsided nose: on the other hand I never cease to delight in his comeliness and after twenty years of familiarity I am still able to take pleasure in a well-shaped brow or the delicate line of a cheekbone.

She spoke of his many manly virtues, and extolled the human qualities which made him a helper of the weak and frail, because he himself was weak and frail. Kindness personified; very capable; dapper through and through; antique-loving. “The trouble is, my dear, that he has not yet found the right woman.” She really knows how to exasperate me.

They agreed on all points, and aroused each other to a ridiculous pitch of enthusiasm over nothing in particular.

“And now you are going to have a change,” said Eleanor, with a condoning smile and a sense of relief, as solemn spirits on seriously joyful occasions affected her as they did most people. One of the three silver rings she wears is taloned, like an obscure torture implement.

“Just like a mother,” he said. She is nothing but sexuality; she is sexuality itself. He withdraws again, nibbles her ear, moves to her neck and traces, with his tongue, the exposed part of her chest.

Then there was silence; and a cow coughed; and that led her to say how odd it was, as a child, she had never feared cows, only horses. “That’s why I always like Englishmen.”

“Amen,” sang David fervently, looking as if he had just come down from an Italian picture of singing angels. Not knowing what to say, he accented his awkwardness, playing the inoffensive fool.

He hadn’t meant to live like this or among these third-rate people.

This scene was not positively comical; however, it was imbued with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which continued to grow. The Beautiful is always strange.

“You seem a sufficiently intelligent young man. You look good enough to eat. Don’t insult me, David, please. Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward! Do you prefer that?”

He refused, but not without a struggle. “It’s not out of laziness,” he replied very seriously, “but to maintain my dignity.”

His contempt of Nietzsche, whom she adored, was intolerable. They thrill him, these little demonstrations of womanly certainty.

She was so trapped and entranced by his passion for her that it seemed to her now as though she might care for him as much as he wished. “But at the same time I’ve been threatening for months to give up la vie sexuelle—and maybe this is the time to do it.” These are the falsifications that survival can require of us. “I’m perfectly willing to take my chances,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in them,” he said.

“It’s true I’m not clever enough to bake banana bread and carrot bread and raise my own bean sprouts and ‘audit’ seminars and ‘head up’ committees to outlaw war for all time, but people still look at me, David, wherever I go.”

O dear, o dear, o dear. Colette had it right. Thus women are naturally, inescapably, untruthful.

Returning to the door of the drawing-room, where there were more people now and everything seemed to be moving in a sort of luminous haze, David stood there watching the dancing, half shutting his eyes in order to see better, and breathing in the languorous scent of the women, which filled the room like a vast, ubiquitous kiss. He kicked the door shut behind him, then stood in the middle of the room, his face screwed up with rage. “What did I tell you?” he started screaming.

“Well, what a lot of smoke without any flame!” said Eleanor, not looking into anyone’s face. She herself was something of a princess turned into a swine-girl in her own imagination. “Young people are so sad!” she said. “We are so spiritual.”

And his dark, liquid, nervous eyes, looking anywhere but at her. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

She took it as a compliment. She came forward, very businesslike, her hat pushed forward like a greedy bird. “And you really don’t despise me?” she asked, smiling through her tears, which was difficult, seeing there were no tears to smile through. The voice was so faint he could just barely hear it. This no longer seemed fun to us.

Once we have taken Evil into ourselves, it no longer insists that we believe in it.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. We have to read others as they have to read us, and where there is reading there is bound to be misreading, and doubt about which is which. Though I concealed my anger, I tried to make it clear that I was doing so. We love women in so far as they are strangers to us.

I went out into pale damaged daylight, twilight already falling. “You won’t stay there long!” David exclaimed.

He spent the next few days chatting with Eleanor and trying (unsuccessfully) to make his way through Ivy Compton-Burnett’s More Women Than Men.

They need me, don’t you think?

18.

“What are you laughing at?” said David, raising his voice. He means to be rigorous, not hard; he himself is appalled by how he can sound.

“Why, David,” said I, sitting up, “do you want to come into my bed?”

He’d spent half the day, if not all of it, drunk out of his wits. The Magic Mountain sits open but unread on his lap. He wished that he too could be carried away on waves of emotion. But it opens up the night to the risks of the dark side; these should not be underestimated. The wish always to be somewhere else, at least in one’s mind.

He had a sad penchant for becoming enamoured of his wife’s lovers. I gathered from David that this depressed her exceedingly. “Such missteps,” he added as an aside, “are unavoidable ever since we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”