everywhere who loathe me. I could name them; if they were in a book I
could turn to the exact page. People who loathe me do so for one of
two reasons: because I have frightened them because I have loathed
them (that is, made my death-face at them, which I shall not describe
as it might in this way lose some of its virtue) or because they are
interested in me and there seems no practical way of (or excuse for)
satisfying their interest. As to love, that is another matter--it has
nothing to do with either interest or fear. Love is simply a matter of
history, beginning like cancer from small incidents. There is nothing
further to be said about it.
But as to loathing: I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this
loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I
sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as
poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it
is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.
To continue about this woman. What is to her irritation is to me
myself. She has therefore a very direct sense of me, as I have a very
direct sense of her, from being a kind of focus of her nervous system.
There is no sentiment, no irony between us, nothing but feeling: it is
an utterly serious relationship.
For if one eat my meat, though it be known
The meat was mine, the excrement is his own.
I forget in what context these words were used by Donne--but they
express very accurately how organic I feel this relationship to be. The
tie between us is as positive as the tie between twins is negative.
I think of her often. She is a painter--not a very good painter. I
understand this too: it is difficult to explain, but quite clear to
myself that one of the reasons I am attached to her is that she is
not a good painter. Also her clothes, which do not fit her well: this
again makes me even more attached to her. If she knew this she would be
exasperated against me all the more, and I should like it; not because
I want to annoy her but because this would make our relationship still
more intense. It would be terrible to me if we ever became friends;
like a divorce.
HUNGRY TO HEAR
Hungry to hear (like Jew-faces, kind but anticipating pain) they sit,
their ears raw. The conversation remains genteel, of motor cars: her
brother bought a car, he was having a six months’ vacation from an
Indian post, he should have known better than to buy an American car,
the value depreciates so, and _she_ (his sister) should not have lent
it to _her_ (her friend) even though it wasn’t her fault that the car
only did fifteen miles to the gallon after she returned it. A clear
situation like this, in which life is easy to understand, is cruel
to them. It leaves no scratches in the mind around which opinions,
sympathies, silly repetitions can fester and breed dreams and other
remote infections--too remote always to give serious pain. They long
to be fumbled, to have confusion and uncertainty make a confused and
uncertain end of them. There they sit, having pins-and-needles of
obscurity which they mistake for sensation. They open their newspapers:
‘I suppose it is foolish to spend all this time reading newspapers?
They are lying and dishonest and devoted to keeping a certain portion
of the population in ignorance and intellectual slavery? Or is it
foolish to take it so seriously? I shall go on reading them out of
sophistication?...’ Oh, go to hell.
IN A CAFÉ
This is the second time I have seen that girl here. What makes me
suspicious is that her manner has not changed. From her ears I should
say she is Polish. If this is so, is it not dangerous to drink coffee
here? Does anyone else think of this, I wonder? Yet why should I be
suspicious? And why should her manner not remain unchanged? She has
probably been cold, unhappy, unsuccessful or simply not alive ever
since I saw her last. Quite honestly I wish her success. The man who is
making sketches from pictures in the Art Magazine may find her little
Polish ears not repulsive. For good luck I turn away and do not look
at her again. I, who am neither sluttish nor genteel, like this place
because it has brown curtains of a shade I do not like. Everything,
even my position, which is not against the wall, is unsatisfactory and
pleasing: the men coming too hurriedly, the women too comfortably from
the lavatories, which are in an unnecessarily prominent position--all
this is disgusting; it puts me in a sordid good-humour. This attitude
I find to be the only way in which I can defy my own intelligence.
Otherwise I should become barbaric and be a modern artist and
intelligently mind everything, or I should become civilized and be a
Christian Scientist and intelligently mind nothing. Plainly the only
problem is to avoid that love of lost identity which drives so many
clever people to hold difficult points of view--by _difficult_ I mean
big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality.
I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my
point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number
of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the
fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold
themselves away when I do not wish to think. If I fold them away now,
then I am sitting here all this time (without ordering a second cup)
because other people go on sitting here, not because I am thinking.
It is all indeed, I admit, rather horrible. But if I remain a person
instead of becoming a point of view, I have no contact with horror. If
I become a point of view, I become a force and am brought into direct
contact with horror, another force. As well set one plague of cats
loose upon another and expect peace of it. As a force I have power, as
a person virtue. All forces eventually commit suicide with their power,
while virtue in a person merely gives him a small though constant pain
from being continuously touched, looked at, mentally handled; a pain by
which he learns to recognize himself. Poems, being more like persons,
probably only squirm every time they are read and wrap themselves round
more tightly. Pictures and pieces of music, being more like forces, are
soon worn out by the power that holds them together. To me pictures and
music are always like stories told backwards: or like this I read in
the newspaper: ‘Up to the last she retained all her faculties and was
able to sign cheques.’
It is surely time for me to go and yet I do not in the least feel like
going. I have been through certain intimacies and small talk with
everything here, when I go out I shall have to begin all over again in
the street, in addition to wondering how many people are being run over
behind me; when I get home I shall turn on the light and say to myself
how glad I am it is winter, with no moths to kill. And I shall look
behind the curtain where my clothes hang and think that I have done
this ever since the homicidal red-haired boy confided his fear to me
and I was sorry for him and went to his room and did it for him. And my
first look round will be a Wuthering-Heights look; after that I shall
settle down to work and forget about myself.
I am well aware that we form, all together, one monster. But I refuse
to giggle and I refuse to be frightened and I refuse to be fierce. Nor
will I feed or be fed on. I will simply think of other things. I will
go now. Let them stare. I am well though eccentrically dressed.
FRAGMENT OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL
What could I do but treat my secret as if it did not exist, that is,
as my mother did hers until she confided it to me? which was not
confiding, but a necessary explanation of the curious gift or curse
(you will decide which for yourself before many pages) that I had
from her (the flesh only knows how) when she put me into this world
fifty-four years ago in a carved bed made of an old sea-chest that she
had of her father (together with many other things) who was a Dutch Jew
of a family that had fled from Spain and made its fortune as merchants
and traders and in African mines and which disinherited him when he ran
away to sea from school and saw things in China which neither white man
nor Jew might see without death, but which long afterwards recalled him
when he was in America and too proud to accept the portion denied him
in his youth, which my mother never forgave him but continually during
her lifetime besought me to apply for in my own person, which was
pleasing and persuasive.
My mother, I say, broke her secret to no one, excepting me, and this
was not breaking it, since I had the same secret, and I broke my secret
to no one, which was either wise or foolish (I can’t say which) but not
wicked, for had I wished it was a thing that could go against no one
but myself (as you shall see). How my mother had it, she did not know,
although she was of the opinion that she caught it from a travelling
bookseller who secretly sold romances to the pupils of the French
convent in New Orleans where her father kept her--over the garden
wall. It could not be the books, she said, for they were as innocent
as the Bible, with no more rapes and indeed fewer mysteries. The
contamination, if it was such, must have been from his eyes, if at all,
which were long-lasting ones, she remembering them many days after each
visit and for a long time seeing through them, as it were. She knew
nothing about him but that he was Mexican, of a poor breed but of such
charm (he dressed in the Mexican manner) that she would have run away
with him had not her strange possession come over her at about this
time and changed the whole course of her life.
‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, when she told me this, ‘he used a charm against
you. It is known there are certain herbs to be found in Mexico which
may be used to cunning ends.’
‘That may indeed be so,’ my mother said, ‘for I remember he once gave
me a fine gold chain to wear on which was suspended an image of a pale
blue stone, and I could never make out what it represented, as it was
all twisted and seemed a different thing each time I looked at it, now
like a snake, now like a clenched hand or like a troll’s face.’
‘Surely,’ I cried, ‘it was this charm that brought the thing upon us.’
For I thought, if it was a charm that brought this thing on my mother,
it might be a charm that would take this thing from me; and for this
reason I have ever been one easily affected by superstitions of all
kinds and ready to put my faith in what is but circus farce to others,
a weakness that has been as great a source of misfortune to me as my
possession.
‘It might indeed have been so,’ replied my mother, ‘but I cannot be
sure. At about the same time Sister Mathilde began praying for me, as
if God had sent her against this journeyman for my sake. She prayed in
my room and soon she slept in my bed the better to protect me, and I
began strongly to dislike it for she sweated powerfully and loved me
more tenderly than is good for girlish sleep. Wherever I was between
these two I shall never know. If one was of God and the other of the
Devil, then there is a third power which exists to save the human soul
from both, I hesitate to say with what intentions or effects. For as I
was one morning sitting on my pot and enjoying innocent conversation
with myself, suddenly I looked up, feeling myself not alone. Think
how my modesty fainted to behold the room full of people all looking
intently (and kindly) at me. I covered my face with my hands. I dared
not rise.
‘“Never mind, child,” said a shrill voice at my ear that sounded like
an aunt’s, “it will soon be happily over.”
‘“Happily over!” I tried to shriek but could not, trying to rise and
button myself.
‘“Leave your dress alone, chicken, you could not look better,” said
another voice at my nose, a third cousin’s by its sound. Nor could I
have--I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror just then, and I was a
bride! This is how I found myself married to Mr. Pink, whose calling
was jobs for which no name could be found, and could ask no questions
for shame, since the last I knew of myself was on a chamber-pot, but
only pretend to be possessed, as seemed reasonable in the principal
party of the event, of full knowledge of what was going on about me.’
This martyr’s discretion in my mother has ever been a noble example to
me in my own endurance of that cruel idiosyncrasy which she, to her
everlasting grief, passed on to me. ‘Never lose self-possession,’ she
continually besought me, ‘or contradict circumstances, which cannot
lie and which know you better than yourself.’ Dearest Mother! Shall
I blame her for that inheritance she gave me against her heart and
will and by which I had the blessing of her eternal (so long as she
lived) solicitude? Not to mention (petty recompense and enjoyment) the
liberty she gave me beyond all reasonable expectation I could have had
of remorseful indulgence from her, which included the privacy of her
papers which I could not read since she wrote always in bed and upon
brown paper, from sombreness of spirit, and the treasures her father
gave her out of spite to her mother, for bearing him a black child by
perfidy of blood or whoring, it exasperated him not to know which, and
of which, though all were mine from childhood, I loved and attached
to me but one shabby trifle, a totem six inches long that did me for
a doll while I remained a child and for a child when I became a woman
and dared not breed, confide, form honourable attachments or soften my
heart save to that which, being wooden, could not soften its heart to
me.
My mother, as I said, having once grasped her unspeakable peril,
resolved to protect herself with the means at hand, that is, to remain
Mrs. Pink, if she could, until she found herself something else. And
to further her security in this she formed a second painful resolve,
never while she could help it to leave her bed, thinking that she might
thus restrain her visitations or at least govern the place in which
they seized her. Alas! restrain them she could not, and alas! a bed (as
she learned too late) was more ungovernable than a chamber-pot, for in
this bed she got me, in a cruel lapse when Mr. Pink her husband was in
the Argentine collecting the names of common tropical plants for the
Secretary of State known in private life as a gifted maker of South
American tales, and when she must undoubtedly have been visited by
hundreds of Mr. Pink’s friends and relatives, Mr. Pink, who understood
my mother’s infirmity and never blamed it except as such, insisting
that it was his uncle the Chicago photographer who had nearly an
artist’s appreciation of the human form, of which my mother being half
Jew and perhaps a dash negro, was an exotic and irresistible example.
This unavoidable slip, of which I was a living and growing reminder,
never prejudiced Mr. Pink my mother’s husband against me, but on the
contrary seemed to stimulate his curiosity in me. He was a thin man,
but I think of a passionate imagination, and I wanted nothing. Nor was
he quite certain that it was his uncle the Chicago photographer, but in
the wistful hope that it might have been Prince Moredje, the famous
Balkan adventurer whom he used to decorate official banquets of which
he was responsible for the seating plan, he provided me with a riding
master though we lived in an unimproved flat in the rear and bought me
when I was quite young a green plumed hat from an auctioneer friend
of his who specialized in theatrical costumes. Himself he dressed
shabbily, as his profession required. I never knew him otherwise than
in his black and white checked suit and red tie, and it was one of the
sorrows of his life that he could not wear black, for he was a quiet
man, since his greatest attraction to his clients was that he was not
genteel, by which he seemed more efficient, mysterious, quaint and
criminal. My mother required very little beyond bed shawls, of which
she kept two, one for company and one for private, the company one
being pure white, that she might be thought of by visitors as a pale
object martyred to her bed and so not excite experiences; I have this
very shawl to thank for myself, which she was wearing when her sense
was suddenly transported in time and she found herself with me in her
womb and could make no denial or protest, and her white shawl on her
shoulders though in private, that is, alone with her husband Mr. Pink
who had just let himself in at the door from the Argentine, whence he
had come in all haste to embrace her, having been made anxious by
certain reports which his friends and relatives maliciously wrote
him of my mother. Her private shawl, a red cashmere, she consoled
herself in; she only wore it when she felt safe. In this shawl too
she consented to rise for her needs and melancholies. How often have
I come upon her standing in her shirt at the window, only half of her
decently covered, the rest of her naked and unhappy--a pair of pretty
buttocks that she could scarcely trust as far as the door and ready
to betray her at the least winking of her eye and plant her where she
must acknowledge her position by that she sat in it with them. It was
to our further mortification that our sad affliction only came over
my mother and me when we were sitting, an attitude that by its ease
soothes suspicion, and that we have never come to ourselves except in
this attitude, which may try dignity painfully, as I have reason to
know. ‘To find one’s feet’--how well, alas, do _I_ know the tragic
significance of that phrase....
WILLIAM AND DAISY: FRAGMENT OF A FINISHED NOVEL
William and Daisy lived in Cemetery Street. They had no connection
with each other except that they were not attracted by life or death;
so they lived in Cemetery Street. William was pessimistic because he
disliked life a little more than death, Daisy was optimistic because
she disliked death a little more than life. William had two memories:
one, that he had been familiar with harlots; two, that he had been
familiar with famous writers. These two memories mixed and he could
make nothing of them. Daisy had two memories: one, that she had once
been a harlot; two, that she had in her time known several famous
writers. These two memories mixed and she could make nothing of them.
They could make nothing of their memories except that they both felt
dignified and did not wish to end their days in a workhouse. So they
lived in Cemetery Street.
Every night Daisy went for a walk down Cemetery Street and said ‘What
a lovely night,’ and passed William on her walk and said ‘What a
coincidence’; and every night William, too, said ‘What a lovely night’
and ‘What a coincidence.’ They began to know each other’s thoughts and
were more bored with each other than ever.
They had their shoes mended by the same shoemaker. Each knew the
shoemaker had taken a girl to live with him behind the shop and then
thrown her into the street when his wife had learned about it. Yet each
continued to think him a nice man because they could not be bothered
to think him a mean man. They became more and more absolute in their
thoughts and habits until ...
I do not know what happened to them, nor do they.
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK
§1
An anonymous book for children only was published by an anonymous
publisher and anonymously praised in an anonymous journal. Moreover,
it imitated variously the style of each of the known writers of the
time, and this made the responsibility for its authorship all the
more impossible to place. For none of the known writers could in the
circumstances look guilty. But every one else did, so this made the
responsibility for its authorship all the more difficult to place.
The police had instructions to arrest all suspicious-looking persons.
But as every one except the known writers was under suspicion the
department of censorship gave orders that the known authors should be
put in prison to separate them from the rest of the population and that
every one else should be regarded as legally committed to freedom. ‘Did
you write it?’ every one was questioned at every street corner. And as
the answer was always ‘No’, the questioned person was always remanded
as a suspect.
The reasons why this book aroused the department of censorship were
these. One--it imitated (or seemed to imitate) the style of all
the known authors of the time and was therefore understood by the
authorities to be a political (or moral) satire. Two--it had no title
and was therefore feared by the authorities to be dealing under the
cover of obscurity with dangerous subjects. Three--its publisher could
not be traced and it was therefore believed by the authorities to have
been printed uncommercially. Four--it had no author and was therefore
suspected by the authorities of having been written by a dangerous
person. Five (and last)--it advertised itself as a book for children,
and was therefore concluded by the authorities to have been written
with the concealed design of corrupting adults. As the mystery grew,
the vigilance of the police grew, and the circulation of the book
grew: for the only way that its authorship could be discovered was by
increasing the number of people suspected, and this could only be done
by increasing the number of readers. The authorities secretly hoped to
arrive at the author by separating those who had read the book from
those who had not read it, and singling out from among the latter him
or her who pretended to know least about it.
All the stories in the book were about people who did not like the
world and who would have been glad to be somewhere else. Some were
irreligious, some were ungrateful, some were scornful, some were openly
rebellious, some were secretly rebellious, some were merely ironical,
some were merely bored. Many were too good, many were too bad. All were
disobedient, and all wanted to go away. Wanting to go away to somewhere
else did not mean wanting to go away to somewhere else with the rest
of the entire population of the world. It meant in all the stories
wanting to go away alone. All the stories in the book were about people
who wanted to go away to somewhere where they would be, no matter how
many other people they found there, the only one. All the people in the
book thought the world fit only for light, heat, moisture, electricity,
plants, the lower animals, and perhaps for occasional parties,
excursions, commemoration days, Sunday afternoons, exhibitions,
spectacles, concerts, sight-seeing and conversation. But none of them
thought it fit for higher creatures to live in permanently, because all
who were in it, they said, were the only one, and were thus objects of
hate, ridicule or mock-adoration for one another, being each by his
mind freakish and uncommon but by his brain natural and common.
Such was the philosophical import of this book. But its philosophical
import was got only if the reader had a taste for, a passion for,
a suspicion of, an obsession with, or instructions to look for
philosophical imports. Or if he shrank from stories. What was plain and
comprehensible before all philosophical imports was just stories. The
four upon which most suspicion was fixed were _The Flying Attic_, _The
Man Who Told Lies To His Mother_, _The Woman Who Loved an Engine_, and
_The Woman Who Was Bewitched By a Parallel_.
It was impossible to say particularly which story was written in the
style of which author. The effect of imitation that the book gave
was rather a mixed one; that is, it was generally and throughout a
witty, energetic, beautiful, simple, earnest, intricate, entertaining,
ironic, stern, fantastic, eloquent, modest, outspoken, matter-of-fact
and so-forth book, so that generally speaking it could not be read
but as a conglomerate imitation of the noted literary manners of the
time, of the well-known author who wrote so wittily, of the well-known
author who wrote so energetically, of the well-known author who wrote
so beautifully, of the well-known author who wrote so simply, of the
well-known author who wrote so earnestly, of the well-known author
who wrote so intricately, of the well-known author who wrote so
entertainingly, of the well-known author who wrote so ironically, of
the well-known author who wrote so sternly, of the well-known author
who wrote so fantastically, of the well-known author who wrote so
eloquently, of the well-known author who wrote so modestly, of the
well-known author who wrote so outspokenly, of the well-known author
who wrote so matter-of-factly, and of the well-known author who wrote
and-so-forthly.