The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (53 page)

 

 

 

 

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear, subject to the rule of what the Buddhists call
dukha,
the endless unsatisfied anguish of a being who passionately desires only illusory goods. However within this vale of misery there are many regions. We all suffer, but we suffer so appallingly differently. An enlightened one may, who knows, pity the fretful millionaire with as pure an energy as he pities the starving peasant. Possibly the lot of the millionaire is more genuinely pitiable, since he is deluded by the solace of false and fleeting pleasures, while there may be a compulsory wisdom contained in the destitution of the peasant. Such judgements however are reserved for the enlightened, and ordinary mortals who feigned to utter them would rightly be called frivolous.
We
properly think it a worse fate to starve in poverty than to yawn in the midst of luxury. If the suffering of the world were, as it could be imagined to be, less extreme, if boredom and simple worldly disappointments were our gravest trials, and if, which is harder to conceive, we grieved little at any bereavement and went to death as to sleep, our whole morality might be immensely, perhaps totally different. That this world is a place of
horror
must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad. Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance. (This is a tautology.) This is the planet where cancer reigns, where people regularly and automatically and almost without comment die like flies from floods and famine and disease, where people fight each other with hideous weapons to whose effects even nightmares cannot do justice, where men terrify and torture each other and spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear. This is where we live.

Does this background forbid
refinement
in morals? How often, my dear friend, have we not talked of this. And shall the artist have no cakes and ale? Must he who makes happy be a liar, and can the spirit that sees the truth also speak it ? What is, what can be, the range of the sufficiently serious heart? Must we be always drying these tears, or at least aware of them, or stand condemned? I have no answer to give here to these questions. Perhaps there is a very lengthy answer or perhaps none at all. The question itself will remain, as long as our planet remains (which may not in fact be long) to bedevil our wise men, indeed quite literally sometimes to make demons of them. Must not the response to such a problem be demonic? How God must laugh. (Himself a demon.)

This preludes, dear friend, my apologia, offered to you not for the first time, concerning this love story. The pains of
love
? Pooh! And yet: the ecstasy of love, the glory of love. Plato lay with a beautiful boy and thought it no shame to see here the beginning of the path to the sun. Happy love undoes the self and makes the world visible. Unhappy love is, or can be, a revelation of pure suffering. Too often of course our reverses are clouded and embittered by jealousy, remorse, hatred, the mean and servile ‘if onlys’ of a peevish spirit. But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony. And who can say that this is not in some way a fellow feeling with those quite otherwise afflicted? Zeus, they say, mocks lovers’ oaths, and we may covertly smile even while we sympathize with the love – lorn, especially if they are young. We believe they will recover. Perhaps they will, whatever recovery may be. But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.

 

Of course I felt remorse. Love cannot really tolerate death. Experience of death destroys sexual desire. Love must
disguise
death or else perish at its hands. We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged. (The false god punishes, the true god slays.) Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.) Of course Priscilla’s death was, in relation to my love for Julian, a dreadful and completely fortuitous accident. It was indeed my sense of its utter irrelevance, its almost – not – having – happened – ness, which made me able to commit the sin of concealment and delay which so much shocked my beloved. And this evasion was a
mistake
which resulted in as it were crystallizing the death of my sister into something very much harder for that alien love to assimilate. I saw all this very clearly afterwards. I ought to have trusted the future, I ought to have set everything directly at risk, I ought to have run to Julian and taken her with me back to London straight into the middle of that graceless and irrelevant horror.

I thought this afterwards, lying upon my bed, while Francis padded softly around the house inventing tasks for himself. I lay on my bed with the curtains half pulled and gazed at the chimney piece and at the buffalo lady and at
A Friend’s Gift
. I also felt a violent rage against Arnold, which was a kind of jealousy, a vile emotion. At least he was her father and had an indestructible connection with her. I had nothing. Did I really believe, I was asked later, that on that awful night Arnold had really come back and taken Julian away? I cannot answer this clearly. My state of mind, which I shall in a moment attempt to describe, is not easily conveyed. I felt that if I could not build a pattern of at least plausible beliefs to make some just bearable sense out of what had happened I should die. Though I suppose what I was conceiving was not true death, but a torture to which death would be preferable. How could I live with the idea that she had simply left me in the night without a word ? It could not be. I knew there was an explanation. Did I desire her during this time? The question is frivolous.

I tried, out of a sort of last – resort self – preserving wisdom, to suffer purely. O you my fellow sufferers, you who mourn in waning hope and in ingenious fantastic yearning the loss of the beloved, let me give you at least this advice: suffer purely. Banish remorse, banish resentment and the screaming contortions of degrading jealousy. Give yourself over to immaculate pain. So, at best you will rejoin your joy with a far purer love. And at worst – you will know the secrets of the god. At best, you will be privileged to forget. At worst, you will be privileged to know. Hope is of course the prime tormentor, and I made a pact with hope. I did hope, but I hid my hope inside a black cloud. Some part of my being
knew
that Julian loved me, was part of me, and could not be taken from me. Another part of my being remembered and waited and moaned. I allowed no commerce between them, no speculation, no discussion, no reduction of one to the other. I passed my time, so far as I could, in a pure burning pain. Can one get beyond that image of pain ? Hell is depicted as fire. And men who ran the gauntlet in Imperial Russia could do no better when an inquisitive writer, their fellow prisoner, questioned them about their sufferings.

In waiting time devours itself. Great hollows open up inside each minute, each second. Each moment is one at which the longed – for thing
could
happen. Yet at the same instant the terrified mind has flown ahead through centuries of unlightened despair. I tried to grasp and to arrest these giddy convulsions of the spirit, lying on my back on my bed and watching the window glow from dark to light and fade again from light to dark. Odd that a demonic suffering should lie supine, while a glorified suffering lies prone.

 

 

 

 

I shall now advance the narrative by quoting several letters.

 

I know that you will communicate with me as soon as you are able to. I will not leave the flat for a single moment. I am a corpse awaiting its Saviour. Accident and its own force induced the revelation of a passion which duty might have concealed. Once revealed, your miraculous self giving increased it a thousand fold. I am yours for ever. And I know that you love me and I absolutely trust your love. We cannot be defeated. You will come to me soon, my darling and my queen. Meanwhile, oh my dear, I am in so much pain.

B.

 

Dear Christian,

Have you now any idea where Julian is? Has Arnold taken her away somewhere? He must be keeping her hidden by force. If you can discover anything at all, however vague, let me know for God’s sake.

B.

 

Please reply
at once
by telephone or letter. I do not want to see you.

Dear Arnold,

I am not surprised that you are afraid to face me again. I do not know how you persuaded or forced Julian to go away with you, but do not believe that any arguments of yours can keep us apart. Julian and I have talked with full knowledge and understand each other. After your first departure all was well between us. Your ‘revelations’ made and can make no difference. You are dealing with a kind of mutual attachment which, since you make no mention of it in your books, I assume that you know nothing of. Julian and I recognize the same god. We have found each other, we love each other, and there is no impediment to our marriage. Do not imagine that you can constitute one. You have seen that Julian was unwilling even to listen to you. Please now recognize that your daughter is grown up and has made her choice. Accept, as indeed you finally must, her free decision in my favour. Naturally she cares what you think. Naturally too she will not finally obey you. I expect her return hourly. By the time you get this she may even be with me.

Your objection to me as a suitor has of course deep motives. The matter of my age, though important, is certainly not crucial. You have even admitted to me that as a writer you are a disappointed man. And some part of you has always envied me because I have kept my gift pure and you have not. Continual mediocre creation can sour a whole life. The compromise with the second best, which is the lot of almost every man, is by the bad artist externalized into a persisting testimony. How much better the silence and guarded speech of a more strict endeavour. That I should also have gained your daughter’s love must seem, I can well understand, like the last straw.

I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy. If I feel vindictive towards you now, it is simply because you are an obstacle in the way of something infinitely more important than any ‘friendship’. Doubtless it is wise of you to keep out of my way. And if you visit me again, do not bring a blunt instrument with you. I do not care for threats and hints of violence. I have, I assure you, quite enough violence inside myself ready to be provoked.

Julian and I will settle our future together privately and in our own way.
We
understand each other perfectly. Please accept this fact and cease your cruel and vain attempts to force your daughter to do what she does not want to do.

B.P.

 

Dearest Old Brad,

Thank you for your letter. I don’t know where Julian is (honest!), I believe she is staying with friends. I saw Arnold and he was laughing about the whole matter! I’m afraid I can’t quite understand now why you got so excited. (I confess it rather amused me at first!) Of course she is an attractive girl, but doesn’t she regard you as some sort of uncle or sugar daddy? I can’t make head or tail of it all. Arnold says you took her on a seaside holiday and then when you got a bit too intense she legged it. Anyway, that’s his story. I think, all’s well that ends well, honi soit qui mal y pense, no smoke therefore no fire, and so on. I expect you will have calmed down somewhat by now. Do please see me. I
know
you were in last time I called, I could see you through the glass of the hall door. (You ought to be told how transparent that glass is, especially if the sitting – room door is open!) I assume you have still got Francis (I don’t want him of course) who is crazy about you. No wonder you imagine everyone is! See Below.

Brad (this is the most important part of this letter) I want to say this to you. I wish in a way I hadn’t met Arnold so pat on coming back. I like him and I feel sort of curious about him and he amuses me. (And I like to be amused.) But he’s a red herring, I guess. I came back for you. (Did you know that?) And I’m still here for you. I go for you in a deep way, I never really gave you up, you know. And in a deep way you’re even far more amusing than Arnold. So why not let’s get together? If you need consoling, I’ll console you. As I told you before, I’m a damned attractive clever rich widow. A lot of people are after me. So what about it Brad? That little old till – death – do – us – part bit did mean something, you know. I’ll ring again tomorrow.

Caring for you, Brad old thing, with much love

Chris.

The passage above about ‘waiting’ may have suggested that weeks had now passed. In fact four days, which seemed like four years, had passed.

Men who live by words and writing can, as I have already observed, attach an almost magical efficacy to a communication in that medium. The letter to Julian I wrote out three times, sending one copy to Ealing, one to her Training College, and one to her school. I could scarcely believe that any would reach her, but it was a relief to pain to write the letters and to drop them in the box.

On the day after the funeral Hartbourne rang up to explain in detail why he had been unable to attend. I forgot to say that he had earlier
dictated
to Francis by telephone a carefully worded message of condolence about Priscilla’s death! My doctor also rang to say that my usual brand of sleeping pill was now on the forbidden list.