eyes as she'd come into the kitchen, with her beret on, remained in his mind.
Dick was subdued as well. Little was said between any of them; they gazed
at the other guests in a desultory fashion.
Granville could pay for nothing,
which was another miscalculation on the part of providence; he only had a
few shillings in his pocket. But yet, for all his trembling and his concern
to get back to Pinkie---God only knew what forael the evening was exciting;
it was exciting to suffer in this way; the inner trembling was like an excit-
ing undertone. And it gave him an attitude of unconcern towards the hair-
girl which she seemed to prefer to his former one of flushed participation.
He leaned back in his chair coolly, and she leaned towards him, sharin_ the
silence. They drank arak again, and she said she had to be home about mid-
night to see 'dadt. Granville was suddenly facetious and asked kith a laugh
her
how 'dad' was; she turned to him slowly with 2 grave,. sallow, bony face,
her black hair pulled tight round her brow so that her eyes were wide and
narrow, and said in a harsh way, "All right, big-prick, that's enough about
dad!" He felt stung, but as she at once began talking about something else
pale
to the kakragirl, and as Dick looked quite unconcerned, running his hand thr-
ough his beard and gazing across at the pianist, he was soon at his ease again"
The hair-girl even turned to him again as she was leaving and said she thought
all people who trafelled were interesting, and that they must get together
again some time and be real friends. Again the image of Pinkie sprang to his
mind and he hardly smiled at her in reply, which again stood him in good
stead with her if the quick interested glance she flashed at him was antthing
to go by; he simply held out his hand, neither formally nor shyly, and nodd ed
good bye! The pale girl stayed on a little longer, then she went as W ell3
She hardly spoke at all, only sat there in an easy way, limply, her stomach
bulging softly under her jumper while she gazed before her; her hand dangled
axm,
down from the chair-reet, and nothing that happened appeared to have an impact
on her; her eyes didn't change, bit neither were they fixed; they stayed
in a soft, reflective unconcern, which seemed to have infected Dick as weal;


he had the impression that nothing could penetrate her pallor, which
seemed actually inside her skin, its substance, not a colour only; it
was like a wonderful veil that had been put over her and yet was absorb-
ed into her, no longer substantial. Dick told him afterwards that she
was driving him mad but that he was 'inching' her steadily towards the
bed.
Granville told him about his impression of her pallor, and he
said it was exactly right---there was some thing inmovable but marvell-
ously soft all round her, and he added that the idea of seeing her
naked made him shudder all over; he wondered if he'd be able to bear
it, having got nervous about the idea so often; he'd never felt like
that about a woman before! She was soft to the touch as well, he
said; he'd never felt anyone with such a soft body. Hanni was like
a 'skiffle-board' next to her. He also told Granville, for the second
time, that the hair-girl,s real name was Makboula, and that she didn't
allow auyone to use it; he doubted if 'dad' existed; she was a rum
girl and no one knew what went on at her flat, if she had a flat;
Rerd never been round to the address to check up. They parted at
Waterloo, where Granville went to see him off, meaning to walk home,
right across the City, which would take him about an hour; it was
just after one o'clock in the morning, and there the strange, quiet
evening ended.
again,
Pinkie was Shill out; and his previous state threatened to return,
only worse, with the fear now that she would stay out all night. But
she came back a few minutes after herd taken off his shoes. - He heard
her go straight to the bathroom, but she didn't run the water. He had
Between *e legs;
thebidea that she was wiping herself with the towel,) a clear image
of it came into his mind, and to confirm it he went there after she'd
gone upstairs to the kitchen; one of the towels looked recently used,
and
ran it over with his hands, in
haste.
And he
surrpetitious


found a small spot near the idga edge, moist and fresh. He lifted
it to his nose ald thought he recognised the smell of anargasa. sperm.
Was
He was surprised to find that there as a thrill in this for him, be-
6 iv
sides the pain which was becoming so familiar to him now that
was
like A permaneat Xale 6 e Yowels.
hardly-codaciousofit-wheaddt grippsdaim-agsisy He thought he would
confirm his impression by examining her underwear after sherd slipped
into bed; he would quickly touch them in the darkness to find if they,
Rar
too, were wet. But the time game and therdike no sign of/underwear.
When she took of/her skirt she was naked underneath. He asked her,
trying not to speak with a trembling voice, didn't she, for Lord's
sakef---he aimed at facetiousness---wear knickers these days? And
her reply, quite non-commital, was that she 'd always found them 'an
impediment'. She then yawned and asked how Dick was these days;
aud he said, "Finelm When they'd switched the light out she told him
Hav Cuenliy,
that she 'd decided to go to a cineman "That kate?" he asked, with
a touch of roguishness in his voice that was new and puzzling to him;
and she replied, laying her head on the pillow and pulling up the
sheet, "I went to the café afterwards. Hanni and Clockwork were
there!" Then they fell asleep, simultaneously, it seemed.


at night with the flush of strangeness in him. She wouldn't have liked it,
perhaps, but her blood would have risen to him! As it was, that night, he a
came back to her resentful eyed; she'd already gone to bed, and gazed at him
from the pillows with a frown, while he undfessed.
She attributed to him what
he hadn't performed, and for a few days this burned in her and incensed her,
and excited her: Why hadn't te done it? The desire still ached in him.
It would have released hér from the sin she saw herself accused of in his
which
a well!
eyes that neither of them could name; he would have had his burden of sink
The moment had been perfect in the brothel; desire had coincided wi th the
oppostuniyy; but if Pinkie took the lead his desire would be stunned by fear
lo of what she might be doing; he realised that." He had forfeited the right to
lead their unhappiness. !
But he was resolved now to imitate Dick. He even had a mystical sense
of Dick as the guide appointed to him. Their afternoon at the Marquis hadn't
been mentioned again.' The crisis had made a rift between them. He couldn't
bring himself to call on the hair-girl alone, though he had her addfess; he
was afraid of her ridiculing him; and of being ridiculous to the rest of the
Ris
lals group, Dick included, supposing there was a group! Her face came to/mind
again and again, indistinct, with dark, hollow eyes and high cheek-bones,
deathly sallow in complexion; she was gazing beforeher, downwards, not at him
at all, the bones on her shoulders showing, talking to herself all the time.
He didn't know if she came to mind naturally or whether his will was doing
I it! Why did he want to call on her? Was ahe herd the face he'd been expecting
evln
all these weeks? But that was ridiculous. She didntt) appeal to him.
Only his will persisted, telling him that there was a mystical connection in
his meeting with her. He tried kaxchrkngdkkmsel? to say something to Dick:
when would tkey be going out again? But he always funked it. Dick was
going about his life quietly, saying little. He'd taken Linger-Longer to
the theatre and 'drawn a blank', Pinkie said.
Pheerisis-begenate-peter-out Ruseia-propesedy-net-dimectlyte


Hanni had now returned to Hampton Court.
She said she fo und
it in a hell of a mess, and Dick said it ati had all been done the
evening before, whem.he'd given dinner to Linger-Longer'in a last
effort'.
He tried to work on his report again. He wrote that the revolt
in Rubath had been 'the birth of a middle-class', equivalent ta. what
happened in England in 1832. He thought a defintiion of I middle
class' was necessary, so he wrote that this meant the class whose,
historical role was to destroy religion.. When he read this over he
thought it had too metaphysical a tone for a commercial report but
he left it.
Tye sheikh of Rubath was now producing a White Paper on 'national
reconstruction', together with the army-officers who had rebelled
against him. Glenning said that Creed was behind this, too---he
got on quite well with the army officers! And the joke among the
politicians now was that the riots had at least produced a 'social
Creed'.


ayteset
gmiet-upold/Tay-be
aa 12 doxsatoty-loyalty istirred
speschesg the
conditions of the poor werentt a reale element in the politiçal changes atr all,
pnly a useful pubiicity-platfory toeensure their support for middle-class
spokésmen; the poor didn't shift for themselves, and political action was
Zoreignto themy neverbhadess, after an initial period when they wouldsuffer
the same or perhaps worse hardships than béfore (whize the middle-elass was
pé-orgapising the country on an industrial basis), they WO uld estenbwonty
ca I
poshape-loee, enjoy a prosperity similar to thet in the west;
and the Smiddle-class plant he wrote, would thus have unfolded suceessfully
in the Middle East. He had got the words 'middle-class' in andwas thank-
fui for ity but he thought e definition was incumbent on him; so he wrote
that this meant the class whose historical role (he had to cross out the word
wrote y SsTake)
'hystericaly, 1 which he had writton instead)-was to end the religious(epoch and
mattesa
Antroduçe 'the planned community.
He didnit feel thisreally explained, and
Retrud tgb
when/he read At over to himself/it had avastly metaphysical/tone for a
gommercial report; but he left it Glenning eame in andsaid that Creed,
who had always got on well with the army-men, had prepared every word of
ChoWhite Peperrand the joke among the paliticians 1o was
thx riots
tad at Taastredubed na soctal-Cresd',
There was an unpleasant incident between hin and Dick one morning, during
the week-end. He was getting into a pair of trousers in the bedroom when
aK #e house.
Dick came in, looking for Hanni who 'd apparently said she might be calling
Mgetter - 01
* the over-time, SThey
nodded to each other, and then Dick noticed the long,blueish acars on his leg
from the war.
"What are they?" he asked.
"Oh, haven't you seen them before?" Granville said casually. "I was
wounded."
There was a pause and he sensed a stiffening on Dick's part. He looked


"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing. But, you know," Dick went on in a slightly trembling voice,
"I've got no sympathy for that at all. Did you expect me to have?"
"Well, I'm rather surprised at myself. I But you went out to murder
people and that sS what you got."
He pulled on his trousers quickly. "Yes, that's what I got." His anger
was up at once, but this was the first time Dick had made a frontal attack on
him, and the anger was diminished by surprise. "I didn't ask for sympathy."
Dick was glaring at him in an unnatural way, and he felt quite frightened
for a moment.
"What's bitten you?" he asked, calm again.
"Nothing. You attack people often enough, don't you?"
"What's that got to do with it?"
thh
"I mean why be surprised when I do?" Dick said.
"I'm not! You've got the right!"
"That's what I was exerting, old sport---the
Dick's ease of
right."
manner had returned; his eyes were genial again. And he left the room with,
"Well, I'd bettér look for the old woman. o
Pinkie
Granville told Haunk about this later and she said that Dick was probably
ahor the
theyld seen,
brooding over what he'd said fter bheyld-all-seen Hamlet, togetherpibis
dongapeech. "After all, you're not the one to pull your punches, are you,
sweetheart?" she said with a quick, critical glance at him. Dick was fright-
fully sensigtive, she added, and although he liked to give the impression of
being balanced he brooded on hurts'for a long time without saying a word, and
was full of 'the most awful doubts about himself.'
Granville 'built people up
too hight' and then thought that only a "God-almighty blow' would knock them
down, whereas a 'tap' would do the job! He had a passing impression that
this wasn't her true style of speech; the second such impression he'd had
recently.


He expected to be stung by what Dick had said but instead he felt
light and grateful; perhaps it was because Dick had shown his hand, and
he could now see him in his heart, as a fellow-sufferer. He went out
him
and bought a bottle of good wine, then *phoned BaEk to say it was wait-
ing for him whenever he liked to call, as a reward for *taking attacks
so well'; to be drunk on the premises or not, as he wished. Dick's
voice at the other end was quiet and gracious: "What a nice thought,
Pip! Yes, please, teacher, I'll be there, Monday, and we'll go fifty-
fifty!" On Monday evening he came full of smiles, and they drank the
bottle together, sitting in the music-room.
Dick told him Mubrasnnler that, in view of the conversations
they*d had during the crisis, he now put him down as 'a romantic supp-
orter of ancien régimes everywhere.' Thatmaeiin@rexvilletleistalk
Resaid,
pbout ADu Krhen-moohes It was a familiar theme jof 'justifying
poverty aud distress---other people's of course---on picturesque groun-
dst!'s Granville wasn't unlike those 'Arabophils' Hamni sometimes came
across at the Foreign Office---who when they went out to the Middle
diriest
East found 'dignity' in the Arabs and then hobynobbed with the norst
rogues among them. Dick spoke pleasantly, gaziug at him with light
eyes, smiling, simply putting the propositions before him for rejection
or sgreement.
"Wahnever there*s something to say about henna-marks on Abu
Kath'm's brow," he went on, "or the call-to-prayer that blares down the
dirty streets, or the stinkof the river at night in the summer months
and all that caper, you say it! But as far as Arab schemes to change
Arab life go, even elementary ones such as irrigation of the desert,
or plans to introduce wide roads and hospitals, you've got nothing to
say at all!m
Granville shrugged. "Well, all I can say is that I don't


belong to the romantic school!"
"All right, tell me why not. You agree, first, that only talk-
ing about the stinks and the henna-marks would be romantic, don't you?"
"Yes," Granville agreed doubtfully.
"Well, then, tell me what else you think about over there! Tell
me one realistic element that comes into your thinking about Arab
"I-cantt." Again he shrugged.
But then he added, "In my friend-
ships there, perhaps."
"No, I won't let you get away with it, old sport, Your friend-
ships won't clear up the trachoma in the villages and decrease the
child mortality-rate."
"Oh, I agree there."
"So you are a romantic, Pip!"
"But why not?" Dick persisted, seeming pleased at Granville's
lack of resistance but also curious.
"I don't know! I can't tell you!"
Dick laughed and took another sip of his wine. "You talk just
like me. And I thought I'd get a real explanation out of you."
"It's something I haven*t made up my mind about."
"Well, that's how I like you, old sport, soystay where you are :
But
sd this was exactly what Granville didn't intend to dor Met
nlacn ttaink
Sie & 9 - Lar
mamepasitiodt
r. a
Old
* ent to show that any good we
rom
L these public schomes end plans. But would he have Tiked LO See
oae
e h
aad been-eut er work?
Neute he-heveliked te # - e his parents half-starrod ast
in RU-
would hehare liked Eagland tohave remetned in the dark


edrigstages of tsdustrislion, beforethe-Raotory Acts and saxitation
Aots and HOuGNagACtSA What was it to be then,the 'flame' in people,
which he recognised in Abu Kath'm, or decent lives? He had to say
decent lives!
How could he wish auything else on people? And why
shoudd the two be incompatible? But he felt they were; the plans
and schemes would be at the expexnse of the *flame'; and here he was
back at the beginning! Ropheltorahtuselfy If the price to be paid
for good lives was death in the end---a kind of civic collapse---what
kow fos
was the good of it? He couldn't resolve the matter. He realised K
he looked on the middle class as a total historical mistake;
hiifmeal
he wrote them off; S 1
he could see no need for this/mistake,
jiusy
much less
Middle-class
was
a negative development
Fute
eimply
soslT
in his eyes: the factories had come, people had been herded into them,
smoke had filled the air, life was violated and made ugly. But how
Cmld
Raup
was an historical mistake,last t Edg two centuries possibléta How was it
possible tfiat history kad saddenly be#t twisted out of its path and
remain## distorted ever since? How could he put himself in opposition
Surely that was romantic? to sinply turn
to history? HRXTERRMHEKXBEEREXINikatxkexhaoxxixayxxXXXXIXZE his back? 3
Ttoln
Staliphe Relt hawasnit doing this; if oaly he eonldclscidase fox
himselfwhat sis ideas were on the Bubjeett Farfron turning his
back,haow bold-himsslf, hereally Tolt that the middle slasschad
taken en through à expericace they aad eded,
Herd alwayalbateay
Verdw Sussex, DQ be ldoatified with
a pranitivists" rar-nbat-Nedek
hadeasted
1 A sehaote. What were his ideas, then?
What did distiuguish him from a romantic? He couldntt tell himself!
jals He didn't kiow what this experience was that men had needed. There
lay his next real task cf thought.
Hanni dropped in later and an argument developed between her and
Dick.
First she looked at the empty wine-bottle and, recoguising a
real chateau-label, murmured, "What a mean bastard you are, Dick.


I thought you said we'd got to cut down on spending?" She lifted the
bottle up to the light while Dick watched her. "And you couldn't eveu
leave me half a glass."
Dick nodded quietly. "That,s right."
"He didn't know you were coming over," Granville said with a smile.
"Yes, he did. I 4phoned him at the office this afternoon. Not
that you were very warm about it," she added, turning to Dick again.
And again he nodded, with the same expression as before.
"Well,". she murmured, sitting down, but without looking in the
slightest bit annoyed, "I say you're a mean bastard."
"And I say you're an interfering bitch," said Dick crisply, but
also without annoyance.
He then finished off his glass with a show
of relish and added, "That bottle cost the best part of a couple of
quid, too."
"That's what I mean!"
Then Dick turned to Granville and said, "Well, thanks again for
the thought, bo'sun. I don't think anybody's invited me to a choicer
drop of claret this two years."
There was sinence and Hamui admitted defeat with a sudden smile.
"Have I broken in on a stag-party, then?" she asked.
Granville was just about to tell her no, not at all, when Dick
murmured firmly, "Yes."
"Oh* well,in that Kase," she aaid, stretching her legs and taking
off the coloured scarf round her head, "I'll stay!"
she
Coffee was made, and MOA introduced another attack on Dick by
saying that he was 'too bloody rational by half'; atlavtycheychelonian
she agreed with Pip on the subject! She talked softly, choosing her
sentences with the utmost care, gazing sideways at Dick without blink-
ing, an edge of sceptical humour in her voice.
She said that was why


he loved 'communists and scientists best of all the bipeds', at which
Dick smiled in a distant way and winked at Granville.
She added that
? Hese people
the # conversationgjalways made an 'idiot smile' come over his face; he
fes
loved them because' tyeg wereseratiosalte theirapprosohy fore
believed in everything byA rational, "except your prick of course, and
analysid
even. that comes in for some quiet rational praparotioa at times, doesn't
Here Dick laughed outright and asked, "What are you referring to
old peach?"
there, HXITEXR*
But she didn't answer for the moment, only went on gazing at him
levelly, with the flicker of a smile on her lips. Then she said,
"I mean, you like to know when aud where it's going to happen, don't
you, so you can get yourself iu shapei sorum
"Well, naturally, matron, I like to see my way ahead
Granville joined in the half-joking combat, and said he quite
agreed, Dick was ratioual 'down to his fibres and bones'o whiahureda
MUpassovertothe etxorside ofattraetlony Sscientists and comm-
unists, he said, put forward clear propositions, which led to action
lafs
of some kind; and this was why Dick liked them! Every rationalist
was a practical man at heart, or tried to be. Hanni carried on kh
Dick
Seiearinr Lonte Hastieatin
asdce and said that when ne was with thon/ne spoke i a Yspecialr way,
trying to make everything he said sound like 'statistics'; and then
gioiig
she imitated him, showing how his beard lifted up, and-gave him a goatibh
look.
hen
The more intimate a subject was, she
went on, the more impersonally he liked to talk about it. That was
another of his 'school-boy affectations'.
She turned to Granville ana
told him with a smile, "Do you know, we had a geneticist dowa at Hamp-
anafias
ton Court last week, aud Dick kept asking him things like, Mheliete
thereraalgeadyresearchistothhoposaibilitnofinfluenetag-bho-sex


ofra-tumuembryoil the earlyatagesorandeptibazidritherety
aaa 'When the female orgauf makes a secretion on being excited, what
exactly is going on, can you tell me?'
He thinks he's so bloody clev-
Dick was eajoyiug himself, leaning back in his chair, his eyes on
the ceiling, seeming to contemplate himself with her, as if they were
flirting, using his image as a convenient subject. In her level gaze
there was relish of his person, reluctant and concerned.
It was guon an uusual veiu of talk for her, and Granville felt
illuminated as to her nature, as if they'd been strangers before.,
HoemenentBad her Beodshadsoincided te sring her-saseyapparently
ad-torcenore fhe still, dignified presence with which she protected
herself, xhatwas always like a dark shadow, apreserta sometimes en-
chanting and sometimes hunched and ancient, sometimes unsubstantial
want tare trv te momenk.
like the evening light and sometimes dry and imprisonedyl Rorasement
When oner looked across at her ena could see the desert blazing in her
eyes, but closed round with darkiess, so that it was like a glimpse
- of the boundary where light and darkness met and were one, at the prim-
itive beginning of matter.
He resolved to talk to her more often so that a real friendship
would grow; the possibility was obviously there. AUAAAAEAETE
XKit
An uncomfortable wariness/prevailed between them; aud this made it
difficult in his relation with Dick, because there was abways her shad-
mervellous
OW near by, an ambiguous no-man's-land.
How Nonderful it would be if
all four of them could share confidences together and live in self-
yielding warmth and safety, facing their own desires, so that a power-
towards
ful vividness came about, from the variety of their separate feelings
ana/theirordrushesntb the lonely, subtle world outside, always giving
them something to tell! And other people would be drawn to them; the
tals rooms of this house were vivid even now; they could share everything;


there need never be any problems of money; there needn't be dislikes
or quarrels, because everything would be plain and stated; their nat-
tesefacts
Yah
ures would ne simply facts; it would. be/silly to quarrel with tkem gas
it. would be to quarrel with trees; they would watch the outside world
together; there would be this. marvellous fellowship of the flesh, in
which all their raw destres would be shared and known, so that in look-
ing iso. themselves it would be like looking inbe a strange pool,
secret and mysterious, and apart from them, no longer their own poss-
essions nursed in silence! If only they could break the silence be-
tween them!
seal
There was, silence between them for a moment, and he found himself
looking for something to say; shouldn't he express interest in what
Hanni had just said about Dickis 'statistics-talk'? should he ask
Dick, with a smile, why he went in for this style of talk? oparpeeut
dafitgwasDicksatistjing? But as he sought round /his mind for the
right interjection he begau to realise that this was exactly the thing
that went against them living openly together. Mbat-wachedoing but
trying to find a Tarm thathad no-meanlgbbeyond-politenessy What was
it but a doubt of Hanni and Dicky that he should all the time be asking
whav
himself what sentence would put them at ease,) would elicit an amusing
whal
confession or anecdote,would call out their Terishlaad friendship?
Itin
tkw
l Surely thet meant) he was in a state of tension? Why couldn't he lean
back in his own silence, letting them interpret it as they wished, so
pefect
that his nature was conveyed to them
in truth, Pal ua AAnterirsiovanent
w A
wesroasenimgmsagingithat the othertwowerent ike tiloyaldtint
theyoreated a-respensivertensionte hinselrs Let him create his own
silence, and then perhaps they could reply with theirs; let them fall
into a truthful silence responsive to his! For how could a question
Kah conceisved out of tension put them at ease? Surely that was the mis-


take and stress of all middle-class conversation?
mewasatt - Interested 1 putting a question at the homeatatter
al he st nte
sit there, a a since they were hris-frienda,
1 thy not
But the pressure of therponversation and its form
would weigh on him, ad he would feel obliged to acknowaadge ity as a
presence beyond all three of them which began to touch fA their. th-
oughtsy so that the most spontaneous utterances were brought within its
aperf
compass in the end, and/moulded to its formal requirements. Only Dick,
the
as. he'd often observed before, had *kis gift of breaking through this
into intimate self-revelation, probing and enquiring, and unfolding
himself; he was used to this world, it seemed, and had learned the way
Exxiy to handle it early, so that the word 'candour' had come to mean
this for him---a deliberate breaking-through of conversational forma
It had to be done, in the name of sanity; perhaps that was how Dick
remained sane, always thallenging the dark powers to come to the light;
the mind was there to break these powers by analysis. But the others
enoygl
weren't like that.
HannI's mind wasn't ausficiestly trained, to make
the analysis; Granville had too little experience of the conversational
fomysp-tnotingrphacoerand Pinkie, happiest of all, had a form in
herself, natural and organic, which didn't take account of other people,
yhe k
aud which other people could dislike. Raikie refused the analytic
effort, or rather it was unnecessary to her, however much it might have
excited her, as it appeared to sometimes; MAial she gave vent to
heyself unguardedly, sensing in a blind way that the dark powers were
an element of change and instruction in life, and had to be absorbed
in the flesh, not reduced to indignity and AMo fluug out by the mind;
she hid much, but never to the point of wounding herself; she follow-
ed her desires, while Granville refused to, finding himself in a per-
manent neatral territory as a result.
Hanni was similar to him in


this respect: she had neither Dick's searching mental hold nor Pink-
ie,9 flow of manner; the struggle was already giving her stature,
beyond the shyness she'd always had in England; there was a mute, sttt
striking dignity growing in her; her face was beginning to wear a
proud,
tragic look, determined and immutable, withla nutet long-suffering wis-
dome in it, like a god found in the desert, made of stone. It was
partly this untouchable element that put Granville in awe of her, at a
stiff distance.
Again he concluded that Dick had' the purest middle class alchemy
in his blood, of all of them, like a new metabolism, as natural to him
as breathing, and as automatic.
He heard Hanni ask Dick whether he was a communist or not, and if
not why he didn't join the communist party.
And Dick considered this in silence, still gazing up, and stroking
his beard.
"Why not?" sha asked him in a level, clear wayo asteshea eaught
Kam
biokteprewiongmodofofaress-enaminatior
on tholatmospharen
"Beaaane I don't like the idea of shedding blood.
Thatis against
all the rules for me. #i
Here Granville was interested and spoke at once, with a bite in
his voice: "But you don't mind cutting out embryos as you call them,
and shedding blood like that?"
"Now, then, sea-scout," Dick murmured, smiling at him archly,
"hold hard."
He was just about to answer this, opening his kouth to speak,
when he saw Hanni's face become rigid, and it seemed that her self-
noment
revelatory, had flown away,AUPOROAN had he frightened it away?
Oor She said nothing, and looked as she'd done on innumerable occasions


in the music-room---mute and distant.
Meanwhile, inwardly, he forced
his interest
kinagif
in the theme to abate, like gripping a pounding heart re -
lentlessly for a moment until there was no sign of life; and miracul-
ously, when he had achieved this and was sufficiently collected for
as uell,
formal conversation again, the pase seemed to return to her, and she
spoke once more.
What terrible ghostly worlds had come into being!
"I wonder if he is all that rational," she said to Granville,
then leaned over and stroked Dickis hair for a moment.
"You're just
a soft sentimental lump underneath, aren't you, darling?"
"That's right, mother,' " Dick said in a mock-childish voice.
Then he, too, leaned forward and began taking part in the conversation
seriously for the first time, as if in. answer to the biting remark
Granville had made.
He said that his paradox* lay in the fact that
Tals he admired rational people for their lack of squeamishness.
"And I mean by rational," he added, "the opposite of people like
you, old sport." lis oblection to bioad ches wen
logiea N A Lit
Lodto-Surtrex blood-shhd
reate
Ow ppe:
howereny that certain experiments were necessary in theinterests of
curing people of diseases, aperiments-which might cause pain and
blood-shed in animals; and logically, perhaps, he oughtto agree with
the bloody pevolution onthe grounds that it would cure the aiseases
oseicty,bnt ho-conkdntt-fme killing people ald that - was that
ke sa id
As an ideal, heheliaged one couldn't beat communism; it planned life
according to principles that had been thought out and supported by
study and resezrch, instead of the 'haphazard ways" of capitalism.
On the other hand, being a paradoxical person, he was quite relieved
that communism hadn't come about yet, because it would bring ta fright-
ful lot of earnestness and do-goodism' into life for which he was un-
suited by temperament.
But as an ideal, logically, he saw no holes in


it. For instance, children ought to be brought up, not haphazardly
as they were now, but according to an intelligent plan, which would
enquire
Pach
RagNIrE into what the child was best suited for, what training he would
all
respend to best and what society required of him at te timeso
Granville cut in with a remark that this might be unfortunate
for the child---he'd be 'in prison* before he started, in the 'prison
of other people's ideas about him f / But Dick said that/the mattér
was properly studied the training would go according to the child's
aptitudes and therefore wouldn*t constitute a prison.
Granville re-
plied to this, how was it possible to know so much about a child's ap-
titudes, enough to make safe predictions about his desires and happiness,
te clild emld say
nottinp
limseep ?
ols
especially
children sorarlabiphaowssetritle about thensaltes suffe
iciontlyte - give clear answess op-even-indications? And Dick said
again that it could be done if research was exhaustive enbugh.
There the talk ended, with a little irritation on both sides;
the soothing effects of the wine were turned to spleen, and he wished
that Hanni hadn't come inr Nowadays when he and Dick confronted each
other they exaggerated their points of view out of irritated defiance;
this gave them a wild idea of each other, and that in turn made the
defiance stronger.
When Pinkie came in he told her about the conversation, wgile they
were getting ready for bed, and she said that 'old Hanni' had probably
got her ideas---the 'rationlist' talk---from Glenning, who liked to
down.
amuse himself by stripping Dick's character bares
"She's got a sound head on her, has old Hanni," she said, "but no
Apd shev addad-inemoohcetegantuayy
mind! a Maotloetlifetlmettin suity hefon
The bottle of wine for Dick had drained him; he asked Pinkie if
he could borrow something from her but she replied, "I was going to
ask you the same thing, old cockt" She hadn't a sou; in fact, she was


overdrawn.
He asked how she managed to spend so much, in view of the
fact that he always footed the domestic bills, and this started an arg-
her unctedote
ument.
He tried to broach the question of whe ther she and, Maimbury
had loaned Grove anything, but he couldn't, though it supplied the in-
dignation with which he argued.
He was always trying to pluck up courage to go and see the hair-
girl; he thought perhaps he would offer Dick, the muscular-looking
girl and the hair-girl dinner somewhere, a table for four, don't you
sna had
know; but for that you needed coin, a base element, no doubt, but/which)
nls
haly a magical influence over restaurateurs, waiters and so forth.
hesitated to ask for an advance at the office. He wanted to take a
bus to the Strand and look for Joy Celeste's home, but he thought of
'dad' being there: he feared being ridiculous in the eyes of this
mysterious, stooping old fellow with the tiny headr


Chapterpw.
He lad got into the habit of reading the morning paper over break-
fast more or less column by column.
It was an hypnotic activity myton
he'd never known before; he left his books unread, and never went to
the library, mome
haasegemedtanavelzolsayhu thenatter) trwas
sarti The newspaper was lying there wheu he got up, on the door-mats
with some ridiculous head-line, and he ran down to get it automatically;
at the breakfast table he opened it with his left hand, keeping the
right for his cup of tea, which he could now pick up and replace in the
saucer, after long practice, without glancing at it. He always turned
to the middle pages first, where the gassip-columu was.
It gave him
Hke
a sense of matbadbeen Hapreningrin-Toucontheeveaing-beferonand
Atrouggested an inner circle of glittering activity from which he was
cut off and which was going on all the time, spreading a glow over his
small life.
This circle involved more or less the same people day by
day, but it wasn't 'society' in the fashionable sense; it was question-
able whether that even existed.
It was a kind of special gossip-column
Seemed
society, and even though it might be imaginary, it Rang suffietently
oble
Aruentone accepted dering the breakfast-hour, in a half-dream, a little
alo it
sickly and squalid, but compulsive. And she-geasipeodluma was a relief
dity ciric ctimes
from the dry, tyrranical hold of the other pages, where robberies, 2
yacht-races and political maneouvres were talked about, and the eye was


Go2
seemed to
drawn against its wills by a few quick phrases that touchép the heart
and then pulled quickly away again. He had the impression that the
gossip-column was actually an intimate report of people's doings. It
was like reading a letter someone had written him. His mind put up a
little resistance to this, but acceptance became easier wi th time $ it
went with the cosy light in the kitchen and the steaming cups of tea.
And why so much effort, after all? The gossip was like meeting new
people.
Butuky-wasu a re setistied t 6 thepeepla he alreadyJeene Alb
nip. hecould
war thet this gossip-world was glittering and extravagant
as his wasn't; he didntt know where it was going ono ratern, He had
Tel
no evidence that it was going on at all; but still it was a relief.
It was more hopeful than reading a book because it talked not about an
imaginary world or a past world but one that was going on here and now,
it might be only a few hundred yards from him. Certain names always
figured in the columx---Warsdale, Maine, Wynters; a star-lame was
Laura Lady Maine; she was a 'Havish party-goer', POA Glenning said one
andagg a LAC
skkmly tai
barslote, Dynt
Ay as gka
evening. 2 These were the titled people; but having a title was only
one of the certificates of entry; it wasn't essential. Nor was power.
Nor was it even enough to be rich and important. Affielal neceptions,
dinners
bininess-pen's
as L a Omatic events were 2t
touehed. There
a Gik
had to be some thing wild,
to for iustance, coulabe spoiledby
the owner being a respeetable
raner eemseroial san Rhere
hedtoba a ouEcestloros extravagance, but extravagance on a sound
A kind 2 respectable wildness,
footingo atauchoendravesayeven The parties and balls, since
they were all dsecribed in the same column, seemed to involve a group
as distinct from the rest of the country as the old noble classes had
been. knd it wersarelief S
n hat there were still-people
whobehaved as
hey outside the hundreds o?
ttle civie laws that


And
hammed efestrofmankind in Alao he felt a thrill at nearly being
at the edge of the group himself, for weren't some of the names conn-
ected with Pinkie's family? Arthur Wynters, for instance, was Maim-
irdo buris son! A cousin of Pinkie's! The column would say, 'Viscount
Maine will be back from his annual trip to New York at the end of the
week.
Something tells me he may shortly take a week-end at Warsdale,
accompanied by his daughter. But Laura Lady Maine danced three times
n 18 row last night wi th the rather dashing Hon. Wynters, who had flown
in only an hour before from the Bermudas. One of the party told me
afterwards, "Arthur always kéeps his appointrents."
He noticed that PInkie turned to the column ravenously when she
came home in the evening, and Apen sometimes she and Hanni talked about
thefparties described as though they'd been there themselves.
This
surprised him because he expected her to feel boredom at a world she
already knew; but apparently, she didn't know it; and she relied on
the newspaper like everyone else! If anything, Hamni was AGA less
caildlood
interested.
fep Pinkie spoke without redishg of her, Tife at Aldercote,
and made it seem that the people she kad known there, by virtue of
Tkls her having known them, were dull and not atra in the style of thgse
glittering personalities in the gossip-column.
The inference of the
column was that a kind of 'high socéety', mingling with trade' and
i art' mora liberally than bho-bld-days, still went on in
palatial
houses under brilliant chandeliers, with flunkies and attendants. The
silly
picture was absurd, but it formed in his mind without him doing any-
thing about it, in a breakfast-hour state of crassness which came
each day with a dull, thudding cosinesso
Hostoftheglittering-namesy including Maine, Warsdale ad
UANEs-WI2S-Thos-DE big tradiug familiea whech-had-eaterel the
peerageat theend 01 the niseteenth century or just befora thentirst


morlaurgrs Pinkie said that the 'real' aristocracy was living in
kese
rented rooms aud draughty
this didn't rob the '1911 arist-
dungit
barnsy
ocracy', as Glenning AAARMA called it, of their glitter for her. Once
they had met Arthur Wynters by chance in Shaftesbury Avenue and Gran-
ville noticed that she seemed to glitter and sparkle herself, in talk-
rypotkelic
ing to him, by a strange
derxefheetharan He was a pale young
/process @
man with delicate, fluttering eyes, and there was a quiet assurance
about him---in the slow, undefensive way he moved and gazed before him--
which was unusual in the post-war geutattbrss pegpleo
Her family was also connected with the Maines, but illicitly.
A General Maine had had all affair with one of her grandmothers during
the 1914 war, and had been responsible for a deep hole in the divan
from
downstairs in the music-room, which had comey a house in Carlton Terrace
where the grandmother had lived for the war-years, it being so conveni-
hear
entiynory the War Office.
Granville had gazed at it in wonder after she d
a tkar
Mad told him, trying to imagine the grand and fabulous actions/m moiela
herattxibutedrtartha world before his birth, and the magnificent bed-
room with rose-coloured silk overlays, aud the immense lace curtains
hiding the wildows, in all uiisubstantial Carlton Terrace where the houses
gleamed and towered like rocks of immutable sugar, and where the hum
of the traffic---or the clip-clop of hoofs---was softened by tall trees!
he grardmethu
mp. Pinkie told him Jaryr that in fact Maine and Mancy, asysmey was called,
had always made love in a box-room full of cobwebs, in the servants'
quarters; her grandfather, she said, being a 'rather vague odd boy!,
always thought the pounding tabove stairs! was a Zeppelin raiaf One
night the bombardment was so loud that he decided to go up on the roof
and 'have a look', and he came across Maine in one of the upstairs
rooms, in his Blues, though he was supposed to be fighting on the
western front; "Whatis it like up there, Maine, old boy?" grandfather


asked, and Maine replied at once, "Much too hot for you, sir! Better
stay dowllstairs!"; and they both went down to the cellar for a drink.
Maine said he'd 'dropped in to have a look at the raid on the roof',
as the War Office roof was *crowded', and her grandfather seemedcquite
lic.
satisfied. The raids had gone on long after the Armistice, which her
grandfather had thought was 'just like the Germans'.
When Pinkie told these stories the men in them were nearly always
vague and bewildered, so that one wondered how public life had ever been
al me time.
carried on betorerthopresutreposhv Butlnis vagueness helped to cast
a legendary warmth over them as well. Nearly every article of furnit-
ure they'd got from Aldercote had a story attached to it. The divan
'with the hole helped tke to give the music-room its glow, making it
seem watched over by the past, and also as if it were continuing the
now
past in its glowing colours; the room had - an extra dignity and presence e
It made him think of heavy curtains, and love-letters written in a
large, generous, untidy hand; so different from the careful, educated
little scrawl he had taught himself.
But it was more than a thought;
it was almost a memory, seeming to lie in the room. Much was due
Yoo,
t O the curtains in the bedroom,) with their sad monkey. And in the
book-shelf there was a collection of Maine+s letters and memoirs, writt-
en inyhalting and oddly meek way, with much more tender feeling and
ewer
doubt, Franville thought, than the letters he himself/wrote a received.
Something had gone out of us; harthoughty we couldn't weep any more
like those men; yet we thought of them as blustering and hard---mil-
Tode
and
itary men who badriddes rough-shod over their women and servants, who
Yet
had sent battalions to their slaughter, aMsartorthe Yet they had
tis
peculiar meek dignity. He came across a note one day, slipped into
tke Memotrs, yellow and faded, one corner inexplicably burned, from
Maine to Nancy Grysham, from General geadquarters in France, dated


November 18th, 1915: *My own darling Nanky,' it said, 'dined at the
chateau last night, quietty toasted your health at the very moment,
would you believe it, when my host reférred to Nagyx Nancy, the town,
in French!
Rushing this off to catch the bag. Big push starting
soon, your own Ted. Ris Please tell Mamma to serjd chocolate bis-
cuitel!! Maine always announced a push some time before it happened,
to give German spies, #s Pinkie said, 'a sportsmanlike hint'.
Some-
times he even gave the exact day and hour.
'At dawn the day after
tomorrow,' 1 he would write, 'the big show starts'.
Taese memoirs ayew - V
baed
Ghemnone;
Theoffectoofclbaing e Ror -
- was awareof there beiugsone
fhixig i TiM, Inherited from these sen -
rrevel HOWIL beforen
drom kav Jetter
nip.
The past gazed on him as it gazed oll the music-room. He felt he had
tis 1
to join up with the past, by his development; he didn't know quite
ills how. But he couldn't forfeit what these men had had.
If he'd been
a Grysham it would have been easy; the gruff tone of the Grysham males
would be in his voice now, and their apther glaring, impersonal gaze
would be somewhere in his eyes; he right be like Nigel, who was more
on the classical4 or what Pinkie called the 'gilt'4 side of the family.
umllut Raue feen
He joonddnttrbd/just one single person sitting in a kitchen, trying to
make out where his personality lay and what the world was made of.
The past would have been in his flesh: people would have said, 'That's
just how his grandfather looked!* Andnso Life wouldn't be just here
and
Nor would his own life
itals
now.
stick out like a sore thumb; he'd
be one of the shadows of the house, that came and went, among the other
shadows of the past that had come and gone in their time. The glow
would be that of the past and future as one presence, absorbing every-
thing!
Sometimes he felt he was in a mystical association with these


men,
ascrapg
beaple, through Pinkie. There was/PL a letter he'd seen from one
of her uncles, Clave, who'd been killed as a boy at Ypres in a dawn-
attack: 'Dear Mums, my boots are cracking again, and could you send
some notepaper, also, dearest darling, I lost the precious lanyard.'
hike a tiny cty! W7H
I Tharewas) such a yielding innocencesxthx tse-toney thats brought
tears ta his * - - 8 - thera sorkoserouorof-tbery pereonality, Ao brittle
Only
mind-work going onf bat this golden, unquestioning belief! Theyfhil
had such delicate voices compared with ours, so rich and full of heart,
so rambling and soft. Everything had been spoken without caution or
fear then. There tad been such openness. - urpelationsmitheaeh
ether wore mere Xke business-29t ati
ar S mettered
in their world; they Kad çaused attention; they had been worth ex-
r essipgi eople as
ed het they hadhad to leaveeash other, even
onky on a e meaths- But we were hemmed in all the time; our feel-
hade
ings bubbled over and simmered and caused endless distortions.
These were alweys his-thoughts when he dippedinto the family-
retbers
Athes there was the
OW of men fer Whom feople
Pesple had been
ken
Nepe the be-all and end-all of lifet thrilling anasutinately curious,' tike
exeitingspeculatiossequivaleatto oursabOwtstersy the outer spaces,
speed,aha death! Rooms had been full of theirtouch and sound, ourpeopilen
futhof the exciting rustle of clotheso
thenrrapeoplobadastillbeen the centre of iife. not-examples-of
natleastz
Mhighert themes And whenever he was with one of Pinkie's relatives,


60K
foa he
mher
onsrofthootder-genoratiaty he felt a tremendous/relief, at the sensation
of counting again in the scale of lifef for himself alone, in his flesh,/the
way he moved. and talked, tnerideas th came)
hea a Aowas-totally
different from the usual Sensation; the room the sky outside, the touch
of his clothes, the sight of other people, the sound of voices were differentz
uoheinpresencey actual people countad,for_thomselvest there was no grand-
ness in life beyond the grandness of people; they contained the glow of life,
aud-elementsof-the beyond,in.theny So their voices had a richer so und, and
when they moved or smiled it always had a fabulous quality,.yet quite natural,
sunelves!
A/MMA.much.more natural than bhe-gamo-bhing
othep-soeisty? Therewasabustle
ofglowing humanity in the roomy and Their eyes lit up at other people, ga
ifeheyvera overcome by thertheugbtrolvehe fabulous qualities thetlatin
Chempard by the endless achievements brotebbbbsgwere as a et gandbyrtben
and
infinite spaces thay suggested,
would take aloratimoto get backto
thatye thought;
radn - 1
each
ee the
Tustle of ourclothes
room-was 1a longer exci tt : ne
aarried cha orid a our eyes and spacesl
was astonished, in his
nip
trmer
naif modern self, that no schooling had gone into making these / people fabul-
achnally K
this
rl ous; there had been no ideas po support them. They had/ grown up with the
tteir
glow Inthehr flesh. They had governed their households, and pertity te -
country,with it. Tosigspelling had-been-atroetous; at least, shas wasitros
ofthel@yshums. Nancy had written her letters to the general in one rush,
with no full stops or commas, like the sommon peopled heirl abeendancy
depend
eQuestionbat lor What they were in themaelvess an pomeseh
mpression-ttrat they hadnit been Tach-di@burboa-hy the
appearance of A new kind
England,
trains and symmetricalroadds and
kert
ye al SaTz
ade kam meto
nd imy factory wan is par
they ad e
tet
and partly
oun
theytouched the Partory-owers and thetr families with-their glew and marr-
giig
ed their daughters-eff
them
They had seen everything with the old way


The gossip-column helped him believe what he knew was untrue,
that their world was still intact.
Of course, after breakfast there
was a slow, lurking disgust. It was numbed state, like being condemned
only to watch life. There he sat in the ki tchen, and his whole .self,
even his flesh as he leaned on the edge of the table, cupping his hand
under his chin, was put out of use. For the effect of reading about
a falsely glittering world was to take away the giitter real glitter
of the kit tchen for him. For two years he hadn't had quite this feel-
ing, which he now accepted every morning as what it was to be alive!
tose Ywo years
In thattine he'd hardly read a newspaper. He felt, now, like some-
thing small in a fetid and unseen hole, watching an unreal tower that
was the world. His independence was tainted.
And the paper always
made it seem that the world was going along on perfectly organised
and sound lines like a story being unfolded day by day which however
had no real plot, no meaning and no interest.
Under its influence the intimate side of his life seemed to
disappear and he was. no more involved in himself than a stranger would
be. Indeed, he saw himself as a stranger---bushy eyebrows---tiny
white creases round his eyes from the Basrah sun---! Marked, found
out! A clerk, a little clerk---! It made him giddy and sick.
All the hours with Mohammed by the river were an illusion, all the
endless blue depths of the sky were an illusion, and the desert,
and every spell he'd fallen under---nothing counted but this dreary,
day-by-day tale of a world where for a thing to really happen and be
really serious it had to stink of money or importance or crime or
but.
a rotten glitter or whatever would draw a crowd; nothing that would
draw one single creature, with a message to him alone, addressed to
his stature alone.
He had a panic-stricken sense, which he remembered from two ye ars
before, of being stranded for ever in England, a dumb registered
functionary in a world where the spell had gone out and nothing was
allowed to glow---the horror of never being able to leave the cauntry
again, of being directed in his movements for the rest of. his life
according to his type and function, for after all weren't there millions
of people like himself, who was he to have the desert and know Mohammed
and stare infthe blinding spaces, who was he, who was he? The endless
English cry that had smashed and wrecked everything until it had
finally smashed and wrecked the country itself---who was he, who was'


he, who is this fellow, who ISXHEXEXREXXE******* are you exactly? I
am I----I----I XXXXXXXXXXXXXXEXXIHRXEPREEE and I stretch to the ends
of the earth as endless as the spaces and no man shall take it from XAN
yout wheris -Re
me, no man shall touch me with thie doahly/Cancer!
To ( P.616


filledix the giow-forenesalf. Nothing sank into-oners-miad Deoause
Athad no power of intimeeys the man on thestage, making ris quick
rgoctevesnconld never teuch ts intimatelyr he asked nathing fer hin-
Seliy Bissigagwere the 1ag
wertch,nst his power todanceor evan
wimos
But he didn't feel the power, or the right, to stop taking the
paper.
Pinkie said topth the style appealed to her, it didn't 'put on
airs', it was 'racy and bitchy', and it 'gave the fashions'.
Some-
times he flung it on the floor, and watched it lying there inertly,
with its endless task of deifying public lifef like a musical box that
sang the same thing over and over again, 'Look at the crowd, Look at
the crowa!. A. crowd, however, did excite fellow-interest, and sooner
or later he bent down, his eye caught by one of the headtlines, and
began reading before he was really conscious of donmgveon putt Always
when he put it down again and leaned back it was like descending from
a high, floating voyage where only the shadows of faces had been seen;
and this withered the room for him; he was no longer quite there;
the plates on the dresser didn't remind him so vividly of the old Lon-
dony and the sound of carraages rumbling past;atharddome-tedoneg
the shaft of sunlight on the table was less lively; it was only a dusty,
yellow patch; he wasn't present to his own life; the world was stark-
ly phsical, and he watched it in dumb relation, with the newspaper as
his only passport to its inner reality; but then, once attained, this
inner reality was only dust and shadows.
(Shenning-sadd one-evening that readingCreedlespeech had been
ore ofthe finest tTiNg in hislifet he, toe, disliked the newepapers.
Aevartising TIM
said washollow-eneugh, L 5 advert: Se
worldtwas-worse,
jourpalist, he - added, rac e to have an eye for
rak - end-importtantanse whether he liked en - net;
sureky


Glenning told them one evening that heja started as a journalist.
He said it was the same work as publicity---aoumnahiem was 'caption-
writing'. When he thought of all the people he'a worked with he felt
sick at the thought of their influence on people's minds, except that
by now he knew they had none, really. He said HHM he.d fallen into
'the racket' with the brightest of intentions and had meant to get out
of it---to start his real life---as a matter of fact, to study music---
as soon as he'd made a bit of money. "phen," he said, "my guts slack-
ened, after about twenty years"; and now he got a melancholy pleasure
from sitting in the ruins of xieft self'. He never went to a concert;
he had no records; he felt music would. hurt him. He'd studied ne arly
up to the Mus Bach but had run off to Greece, after a girl or something;
he couldn't remember; anyway, he'd never gone back to college. He'd
been brought up im the country and was the son of a country-parson.
He had meant to become a priest at one time. "Or am I making that up?"
he asked with a smile. "I can't be certain."
After he'd he ard this Granville bubbled over to convey how much
he, too, derived from music. He tried to talk---perhaps he could really
his
talk to Glenning, from his heart, instead of listening to the sad little
witticisms with a yes and a no all the timer--but all he found in himself
moral
mond
was the bare words, all useless
warmjdrive omrpanangra
without,ino
miensth behind them. He wished he could talk with an easy flow about
himself as Glenning did! But all his processes of speech were gummed
up. He couldn't sit back and reflect about his own life. Also he
realised that he wanted more to persuade Glenning that he had intell-
igent ideash tham to convey the ideas themselves. As if doubt was
ikl
cast on him every moment of the day?
Only with Pinkie did he talk endlessly, walking round the room,
flinging his arms out---HEXEEXEXKISXXERIXExheingxtaxthE he laid himself
bare to the one person it suffocated most.
The following Saturday the weather changed and it was warm again,
with.hardly a breeze; he was aware of it the moment he woke up because
of a fluffy, indefinable smell of leaves, mixed with that of the
hot tarmac below; the light streamed in from between the curtains
TPLIT


Pinkie was s till asleep, turned away from him, and he began to feel sleepy
again; too. There was a delightful silence; the traffic in the distance
alle
only made a light, comforting swishing noise, as if they were near the sea
and a holiday was beginning. He turned on his side again, towards her, clos-
ing his eyes, and just at this moment she stirred as well. She was hardly
awake. His cheek touched hers slightly and he was sleepily aware of her face
being turned square in his direction, as if to ask him a question. With a
sleepy tenderness he drew closef to her still and for a moment their lips
h.p. touched. Then he almost feal asteep, his mouth open. But the drowsy mood
of tenderness returned, and he put his face close to hers again. She hadn 't
moved and still seemed to be questioning him silently, her breathing stea ady
and deep. Then she made a startled movement, and everything changed: he
felt her eyes open, so that her lashes brushed quickly against his brow.
She seemed to stare inot the dimness of the room, trying to recollect her-
self, stiff and bewildered. Theyr lips were still almo st touching, and he
dared not move, wondering what was about to happen: Suddenly she pushed
away from him.' It was as if she'd just discovered who it was, so close to
close rtim.
her, and hadntintendedstty @nly in sleep had she fallen intoritis and now
she drew back in a parldaganadn panic-stricken way. She held herself atiffly
at the edge of the bed, gradually waking up, her breathing quicker. There
was silence. He waited, hardly daring to breathe. Perhaps she 'd had a
nightmare.: He made the slightest involuntary movement towards her and the
moment she noticed it her body qui ckened again, with the same panic-stricken
movement as before, and this time she leaped out of bed. His heart began
beating fast while he was wondering what she would do. She ad drawn back
yayally
Srom him AN
impersomalnex. as if his sleeping presence
And
was nauseous to her, that of a stranger! She seemed to assume he was still
k i
asleep; he was aware of her as watching him for a moment, with this imperson-
al horror, as if he were inert! He made pretend he was still asleep, breath-
with
ing deeply, and then he heard her start dressing, always/the same quick,


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and disturbing way like arriving home---back to ourselves---in
a place we couldn't recognise, with a language spoken which wasn't
our own, with none of our friends---no familiar face---at hand.
It was like the meeting of the invisible, and perhaps it could
never have been anything but a series of vivid glimpses, in the
heat of the afternooh. I doubt if friendship on my terms were
really possible: Angelo seemed to know nothing about those terms,
as I learned---they weren't in his life and I think they C ould
never be.
The real thing perhaps was that we were real strangers
for ever, and that this was exactly how we grasped the invisible
together. We couldn't have this in life. It had to be a com-
plete inner thing. It couldn't de velop, even. We couldn't
have a real daily relationship. We had a kind of one for years---
but there were long silences, of mon ths, sometimes a year, or tio,
and most of the time we were nearly a thousand miles away from
each other in any case. And our meetings were brief---two or
three days here and there. We wrote to each other only in our
hours of need.
Perhaps we couldn't have glimpsed that invisible
and darkly unexplained and awful and ecstatic world without being
total strangers at the end as at the beginning. Our actual living
worlds really were strange to each other. Or rather, they were
the same in the darkness of the night and the passing of thousands
of years of t ime.
In those first weeks he showed me Verdi for the first time.
He made me listen first to Il Trovatore, just at the right time,
so that the tears poured down my face. Then I think it was
La Forza del Destino, or a part of it, and La Traviata. The
shere horror and terror of Il Trovatore---the absolute direct
strokes in the music that are like strokes of fate---he pointed
out. He had a way of conducting the music and st tanding over


you making wild faces, which was irritating but at the same time
the thing that joined you toge ther, without you liking it. Later,
in Paris, he grew ashamed of this warmth, which Franc ine told him
irritated people: without it he wasn't really himself. In those
first days he used to grip you in the arm sometimes, at a stirring
passage in the music, and squeeze you right to the bone, with a
sharp, thrilling gleam in his eye. He_really became Verdi.
Verdi was Italy. You could see it. And inside Angelo it was
all one; and, as he said with disgust, so little in the visible
Italy you saw all round you. For me he began a kind of search
into Verdi which is like going into a vast unknown landscape littie
by little, and even after eight years this search seems hardly to
have started. He found for me land after land of extraordinary
and dazzling promise and forbidden Wonder that I thought couldn't
exist in life---even in music to which I had always gone with my
last insoluble problems, since a child, with my last grief and
yearning. It was Angelo who first touched the edge of this
Verdi-land for me, fir st touched the door that hadn't yet opened
and but for him might never have. Verdi seemed the real Italy---
a marvel that is visible to most people in certain compelling
sensuous appeals that never reach words. Angelo despised Italy
because he was her so completely and overwhelmingly. It was why
he stood alone. He was perfectly misunderstood---I say perfect-
ly because in our time there is a kind of perfection to be had
from being misunders tood, a man can be perfectly and beatifically
misunderstood, his anger taken for sweetness, his darkness for
light. Angelo was called a snob by Italians who spent their
lives scraping away at the fabric of life to find a fat Position
in it because of the terrific Italy he represented, and the st: irring
and dazzling dream of life he had, which wasn't at all pleasant,


and his yearning to break away to more and more marvellous forms
and colour and even---in those first days, when he was much under
Roman influences---love. For the sons and daughters of function-
aries, up to their necks in day-to-day 'life' and day-to-day
perscnalities', he didn't exist because he didn't give himself
a fashionable name like 'communist' or 'socialist' or 'poet'
(among the nineteenth-century names current then) ; and he was
a 'snob' because of this terrific Italy he represented, which was
for them just high tone, social tone being all they really grasped
or looked for.
He took me into his om real country through Verdi---into the
basic harmony where all the colours and heat and massive strong
undertones of Italian life were joined and integrated like the
unfolding of a marvellous story that had ne ver been heard before
in the history of the world but had always been there and belonged
to the sky and the hot, golden dawns, and to a mysterious, bre ath-
taking spell at the centre of things, where they were born, the
centre of all self and being. And so there was something basic
and final and completely unchangeable in Verdi, in the clattering
first bars and the gradual unf olding that seemed never to have any
hesitation but to contain the fullness of each moment of feeling,
always burnished wonderfully like copper, full of warm, saturating
light, thrilling with a peculiar life-thrill that touched all the
SO: urces of taste and smell and sight. That was the first im-
pression he gave me---in the terrific clanging introduction to
La Trovatore, and in the theme of the gypsies that contained the
burnished light of their fires, and the heat and ciacadas round
them, and to give the glint of their ear-rings and show their
bright, dark eyes, and carry off their fine, fatal, unswerving
passion that knew nothing but its object and never the consequ-


party, and Angelo seemed to thrive on this and understand it,
yet at the same time he felt unworthy of it; though what he felt
unworthy of I didn't know at that time. The big, pleasant, long-
haired, smiling singer, with her bare arms and low-necked dress,
seemed to intimidate him and take avay his usual direct and inqu-
isitive approach to people---his questionnaire-self. He didn't
know her name, he wasn't introduced to her, but there he was in
romm
her thick arms, being led round and r ound the little, in a dance
he'a never done before. With a sound instinct, Angelo was alwags
formal. He never allowed himself a moment's informality with
another person, even a close friend: in clothes or habits. He
let off with his mouth sometimes, into a kind of scorching vul-
garity, but that was as far as it went. He didn't seem to be
able to trust his path---see his way ahead---Without a formality
of manner, dress, walk and speech. There was a wonderful photo-
grapa of Angelo as a student which I looked at again and again
when Francine showed it to me; he had such a total absence of
bohemianism---that cancer of middle-class life. I was_used to
those little flag-signs middle-class children put up to show you
that they aren't going to occupy the old expected positions of
power any more, and that they want to revolt, but in the style
of their parents, that is, comfortably---With jackets and ties
and a bit of hair on the face, so as to perpetuate the same hard
and self-seeking values as their parents, only with a dash of
socialism or fake religion or blatant sex-freedom or art, to
give the thing its modern dress. And in this photograph there
was so much of the other world, which hadn't been touched yet by
anything so C omplicated---anything so poverful that it could
afford rebellaons of any kind. It took my breath away at first,
There was Angelo, going into a concert at the Teatro Argentina,
with an umbrella in his hand, his tie so straaght, his head


lifted, musingly and also painfully, with a kind of strained
delicacy, his eyes narrowed slightly, with a frown, fastidious
and clear-cut, while he was caught by the flash-lamp. In this
formality his lonely and inimitable nature stood out much better
than it would otherwise. He seemed to be walking out of the
close Roman World of that time---I think it was just at the end
of the war; the Rome When the streets were drenched with brilliant,
st: ifling sunlight, not thick with traffic as now, though noisier
than now ; a Rome that was still lazy, undisturbed, southern,
a tiny city on two sides of a river, its population less than
half What it had been in ancient times; without the tall,
pastel-shade blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with small
villas among trees; the Rome where trees lost their leaves and
these leaves settled on the roads and were hardly touched;
where the tntimate part of the city, round the Piazza di Spagna
and as far as the Piazza Venezia at one end and the Piazza del
Popolo at the other, extending along the river through tiny,
mediaeval streets as far as the ghetto opposite Trastevere, was
still in a noisy southern sleep. And Angelo se emed to be step-
ping from that hot, bright world into the dimness of the theatre's
foyer---for music, the invisible. And with such a look of
pain! That world was closed still, it hadn't been invaded and
broken into by hordes of peasants looking for work, or by bureau-
crats, or by foreigners; so the heavy southern conventions,
with a searing hot desire underneath which they---and the brothels--
tried to contain, lay over everything, in a midday stillness and
boredom, the city squares empty and barren, friendship hardly
possible except in the southern terms of convention---freindship
with a Woman unthinkable - - -woman herself un thinkable, marriage
the heavy imprisoning gate that closed on you for ever in the


barren square, your dreams floating uselessly into the hot,
dusty air, in a tedium that closed you further and further in
yourself, while your woman bred you children and closed you round
with dullness and habit and a base, fleshy possessiveness which
if thwarted turned into cruel fury.
That was before he met Francine. She visited Rome university
as a student from France. I often wondered about their first
meeting. I vondered if it was delicate, enquiring, intrigued,
with a secret joyousness that they'd each found their freedom---
because Francine as well had come out .of a heavy tedium, but
more northern, the northern-Latin tedium of tall, many-windowed,
dark buildings from the nineteenth century, stretching from one
end of the street to the other in a firm declaration O f intell-
igence, symmetrical, even pleasant, but with a menace, even SO. me-
thing dismal, a world fixed and set in its intellggent routines,
with a formula for everything and a mature behaviour which fright-
ened the uncertain ones and made them walk the streets alone for
hours on end, as Francine did in Paris when she was a young girl.
The excitement that engulted Angelo when a woman was present
was really a life-excitement. It went far beyond the actual
woman, and certainly beyond sex. Perhaps that was why Franci ne
was so aware of it; she was far from being just jealous. I
remember asking me that question one hot afternoon after coffee,
in their room that looked down a hill towards the Vatican---in
a queer, captivated, hissing voice, his eyes piercing, *What
do you think it'd be like living With a really beautiful woman--
an extraordinary noman, a real Venus---do you think you'd ever
get tired of her, wouldn't there be something new every day,
so that you'd never get tired of her, you'd always feel this
terrible, ecstatic beauty---imagine her body---so langorous and


mighty and soft---I think I'd go mad!' That was the theme of
nearly every conversation you had with a young man in Rome---if
you were alone with him: ah, if beauty came his way---a real
Woman---ah, then he'd do something! But it never did. The
moment always passed, it was always just a moment and then the
world returned, the real---all too real---Woman re.turned with ler
tiresome qualities, her fears like his own, her coquettry and
whims. But, ah! for a woman-- -an everlasting woman---a woman
who wasn't a moment---who sustained her beauty like a marvellous
picture as touchable and gleamingly vivid as a Caravaggio! And
as Roman.
There was always that feverish and troubled desire of Rome, a
gnawing, obstinate passion that was contained by its being so
fleshly---only the langorous, yearning flesh, on hot afternoons,
behind closed shutters, in the streets, in cars at night, under
the trees, a contact that was sudden and compelling- could quell
it, for a moment; nothing in life, in people. And that was why
Angelo's theme always came up again---'If I was alone in a room
with an attractive woman I,wouldn't be able to resist her,
I couldn't, couldn't, I know it!' And his actual slim flesh
would seem to tremble and shudder. Half of this came from other
people's expectations, especially women's expectations. What
sort of a feeble creature must you be if you didn't throw yourself
on a woman when alone with her? Were you lacking---or was she
ugly? They were the only two possible answers in the southern,
tight, provincial world. Of course, the northerner found it


easier, safe in his cold climate. But where the hot, dense
air poured through the shutters, and the flesh was brown, and
the sex stirred hotly...
Ah! And the ma n felt a certain
sensual obligation; all his pride was caught up in it, there
was even a challenge from the woman, silently transmitted
through the generations by the mother. There was always a
service to be done for the W oman. Failing it meant the final,
basic shame. So men looked at Women audaciously in the street
when they didn't want to, whe n they felt actually tired and dis-
gusted and bored.
And in this world the easy freedom of the northern woman
looks like the most blatant sexual challenge of all. Thex
shere openness and unguardedness of the north are a sort of
maddening invitation to sex at any time. There are no corni
in the foreign W orld---no horns, no such thing as infidelity
because everything is free! This is What the first dark,
provincial glance at the foreign W orld says. It doesn't see the
key toe that freedom, which is invisible. It doesn't readily
perceive the invisible. As Angelo told me, the Italian doesn't
see the 'invisible man' inside another person. There are only
the outer gestures of freedom, which look quaintly unguarded and
dispassionate. It seems so easy to invade that world---snatch
some of its prizes.
In tha t provincial world the cazzo---the prick---is an im-
portant and proud possession from the earliest age. It is the
man's special acquisition-- -something by God's grace which sets
him apart from the other half of the species. Male and female
are the fundamental division in life: you talk of your children
as 'the male' called antonio and 'the female' called Paula.
Its is always the 'male' and the 'female'. And the female


at birth is a disappointment. A male is a great occasion.
There even lingers in Italy a sense of the W oman as a handmaid
of duty, and the man as a kind of guest, waiting for his food and
calling for his wine. It is an almost Arab sense of women,
sometimes. It goes deep into the ancient world.
It was really in Paris that our friendship developed.
And in this development it found its destruction. In Rome that
had always been prevented. We saw less and less of each other
after Melli and I started to live together. Once we me t by
chance at S. Felice in Circeo, by the sea, one Sunday afternoon,
and nodded to each other like pleasant acquaintances. Our
glances were distant, yet we all seemed to know we belonged to
each other in S ome way. On the other hand, we really were
acquaintances, we really did know nothing about each other;
yet we knew each other better than we knew the people we called
our friends at that time. Both sides were ambiguously aware
of this, but it didn't change matters.
Whenever we did meet in Rome it was stiff and unsatisfectory.
The old warm speech had gone. It seemed to be because we were
four now---two C ouples. Yet more seemed to be promised. We
didn't know. We just waited, let things slide.
A few weeks after Melli arrived Francine took me aside
and spoke to me in a rasping and bitter way, saying I seemed to
have lost myself, I never visited them now, and when I did there
was no longer the old passion in what I said; I held back and
seemed cautious and didn't give myself; what had happened to
me? I couldn't explain, because I didn't know myself. We


were walking down the hill towards St. Peter's, just the two of
us, and I remember she was very angry, pale and quivering slightly.
But all I did was shrug my shoulders and smile at her; she walked
into a shop and that was good bye. Angelo, as always in these
things, kept apart. He didn't say a word before or after.
He never said he agreed with Francine or disagreed. It seemed
to make hi im feel enormously tired, any friction of that kind.
He just kept quiet. Anyway, there wasn't a word between us for
many months.
Melli and I went on living on the outskirts of Rome, making
our lives together, timorously, building up bat by bit and day by
day the life that had be en smashed in both NE of us. There was
no time for anything else. Then suddenly I phoned Angelo one: day
to see how he was. And to my relief he made a cry of delight,
and we were soon making a date. We all met aga: in---we were
friends. But really it was the same. There was no development.
The first flush---when Angelo had thought we cauld make a wonder-
ful group together of some kind---was over. And now ve were
separate. Really Angelo and I should have seen each other alone
all the time. Then, so to speak, Italy vould have tolerated
it: it would have been within the traditions; above all, wi thin
Angelo's. But he had chosen another World---by marrying Franc ine.
And Melli and I belonged to that other world by birth. So a
man's relation---with the women excluded or at best onlookers--
was out of the question. Yet anything more than that was in some
peculiar way rendered impossible by Italy.
My only enjoyable mome nts With Angelo after that, in Rome: ,
were when we were alone---in a café, sitting in his car, while
he poured out his C omplaints against Italy. But they were
snatched moments---they were really only urgent plans for him


to get away from Italy. He asked my advice: should he leave?
And I said I thought so, yes. He had to enter the other World
completely---for a time. As I had done, le:aving England. Then
he could come back, when he'd shaken off his country sufficiently
to be: able to inherit it in its fullness and truth.
In our friendship, even in Paris, there was always a negative
element that seemed to C ome from him alone. He never seemed
really to find his ease with us. He never really accepted us--.
or himself in our presence. I wonder how far he saw us in our-
selves. He would be at his ease with us for a time--- he would
seem to accept us fully---and then it would be broken again:
there was always a difficulty; only towards the end, in the last
year or so, did we seem absolutely and fully to be ourselves with
each other; perhaps because we had each made a kind of surrender
in our own life, the surrender into new truth that awaits ev ery-
body. But before that the ease would always be broken---sudden-i
ly; and he would seem almost a stranger again, there would sudden-
ly be one of the old formal questionnaires directed at Melli about
Germany RnÉ at me about England. And this troubled Francine as
well. It seemed to trouble---eventually to wreck---her nerves .
It produced a kind of constipation---a most intimate physical
refusal to give. Nothing could be taken for granted: one wasn't
accepted, in one's intima ate nature. This was what Francine
seemed to feel. And we only began to realise this slowly.
Before, we only thought she couldn't undierstand him properly.
We didn't really see how much she suffered. In a way, we were
both too busy with out friendship with Angelo---in music, books,
in walks and little drinks and cups of tea toge ther, and his
long confessions about how unberable he found family life and
also Franc ine. . She was so nervous, he said. Once, in Rome,


he had just yearned for other women; he couldn't stand being
with one woman all the time. But that was over now. It was
more a terrible unsatisfied life-need. And to Francine he
al ways seemed to be shifting his position, in the intimate
things: she was already, by nature, a highly nervous person,
fragile and quick, especially quick to daubt herself, and she
doublt needed a resting-place in her intimate life, which he
couldn't give her. Essentially, he was alone, from beginning to
end. Completely and utterly alone as perhaps only a Sicilian,
with his strange connection to the classical world, can be.
There was probably no development in our friendship even
when I thought there vas, for this reason. For a long time after
they'd moved to Paris---for about two years---We heard hardly
anything from them; there were just one: or two letters. They
couldn't see us, he explained in his letters, because they were
living in such miserable circumstances. For the time being.
We didn't find this strange at the time---we didn't realise that
in this he was expressing a world totally foreign and unknown to
us. In misery, creatures don't show themselves to each other---
that was his world: the very opposite of ours ; a world with-
out solidarity, really---a world of lonely cre eatures. But we
didn't perceive this at the time. We just read his letters and
left it at that. He wrote that they were wai ting for their house
to be ready---they had bought a little house. Then we should
ome. We could ev er stay with them. He seemed to need a scene
to be laid for our meetings; and if this SC ene wasn't laid pro-
perly there was disaster. Our friendship ended when we failed
to lay the scene: : we hadn't time; we arrived in Paris suddenly.
At the moment we needed his cons oling talk most, his talk stopped.
He belonged to a strange, terrible world. It had absolute-


ly no sympathy in it, absolutely no love. It was classical.
And he himself seemed to become more classical, too. The
leavening influences of Italy---Which are really those of the
church---seemed to cease. He became more stark, more crisp and
slim, more piercing, more direct, with a great air of loneliness
and desertion round him, as I imagine the Sicilian landscape to
be. His soul burned and penetrated. It didn't communicate,
except in tiny bursts. It didn't console, nor was it consolable.
It was like the appearanc ce of an andient Greek S oul---eager, gleam-
ing, fierce, unsympathetic. And together with this his immediate
life seemed to be more squalid than before. He was squalid at
meals---snatching at his food, guzzling his wine greedily. His
teeth were black from nicotine. He made sneering remarks to him-
self, under his breath. He shot insulting glances at Melli, as
if to pay her out for any love he had spent on her. Francine
cried endlessly, the tears would pour quickly down her face ar d
disappear again, apparently unseen by him. He was like the land
and sky of Sicily, I said to him once, at one of those last meet-
ings; though I'd never seen Sicily, only glimpsed one of its
harbouss; what I knew, I felt I knew through him. 'You're less
and less of a person,' I said to him, 'you're lendscape---as
every man must be, more and morem if he develops properly---he
must be the landscape of his own country---you're the rivers and
hard rocks and long, deserted beaches of Sicily, you're the torrid
And I read somewhere that in Sicily there is squalor among
people, wherever they are together; an inner squalor, but when
you're alone, outside the villages and homes, in the enormous,
still country, you get at the soul, at the orogin, but it is hardly
a human soul.


of a vast flood trying not to get his feet wet---haunted by vul-
garity, banality, madness, chaos, self-obsession, all the pitfalls
of the creature who is denied society.
I only know one clear example of the same thing in England and
that is the writer Joseph Conrad. He was brought up in the other
tradition, close to the German world, but he used English. So you
get a glimpse of it through the way the language changes under his
pen. First of all, it isn't English. It isn't us. When you
read Conrad you feel you are reading a kind of translation without
it having the disadsantages of a translation: you are listening to
a real man, only translated in some way. And because his concepts
are for us lofty---that is, they begin not in a human situation but
in the reflections of a lonely and cultivated man---there is a terr-
ific vulgarity in his work now and then which you never get in an
English writer of the same extraordinery powers. You see it some-
times when he talks about people in the lower classes, even when he
is admiring them. They aren't quite whole. He can't quite see
them. They're half-caricatures, half serious sketches. The
barmaid in one of the short stories has large bosoms---no name ;
she is Miss Blank. She has no speech when we go into the bar--- -
no light little gestures; though we've been going into this bar
for years and she knows us well. She seems locked in her low
status. And this is really the status of vulgarity---a kind of
blind inner ugliness and smallmess: essentially, she hasn't got
beyond primitive evacuation-difficulties---her sweat probably
stinks, she might let out a fart through shere lack of proper
control. This is probably what provincial vulgarity is at the
root--- something to do with evacuation, with the question of
primitive control. It reminds me of Angelo's frequent recoil
from people---the nose lifted slightly with distaste, from the


Perhaps the friendship collapsed into its real self.
Perhaps the friendship we have now---of silence---is what we were
working towards. At the frontier of the invisible, when. we
seemed about to become practical friends and knew the recital of
each other's diffoculties by heart, it stopped. He took the
necessary action; but only because it was inevitable, perhaps.
It was a dezastating shock, among all the others we had just
had in England. It se emed our chief consolation in life was
dead. But afterwards, in a strange way, it was better. There
was a sense of relief; an extraordinary sense of freedom which
we couldn't understand. We both buckled down to work again--
> swerfin Rome prpon---with an amazing festive freedom.
Perhaps Angelo's stark, blinding intuitions had known S omething
about this beforehand.
He could only take actioh from himself) from the state of
his own feelings. In that way, he never used judgement. He
acted straight from his feelings; they were the spring of energy.
That was the - only way open to him because he had no society in
him. He had to take his immediate, dazzling-clear appraisal
of things, becaus e he was alone. I remember how he described
a young German once---'He's lost his eyes---When he sits at
table he's looking for his eyes all the time---on the floor,
under the table, but they've gone---!' And this was an exact
description not because it hit off a characteristic of the man
but because it immediately conveyed his approach to things--
it showed you at once an image of his pale, stretched face,
that had been in so much suffering which it had never under-
stood or penetrated to a cause.
Angelo's judgements of other people---or ra ther, pictures---
were ne ver tempered with sympathy, so there was no danger of


we were sitting at the lunch table, in the half-darkness,
sipping the last of the Wine, with the sun gleaming through little
chinks in the shutters. And that subject, fascism, seemed there,
in the shadows. But it was triumphantly passed over between
us. I can remember now What a triumph that was, so soon after
the war, to forget that I was English and he was Italian: to
let a whole basic history go by the board, perhaps because we
knew what a reward there was for us if we did so. It was an
intimate triumph for us both which we never spoke about. We
overçame politics---and five years of concentrated war-publicity.
You can't get round that horrible war-publicity: it turned the
Italian into a certain sort of creature; the fascist was a kind
of black core which might be found in the heart of any Italian
you met. And I thrust these thoughts, which had never started
in me and which I had yet to think through, away from my mind.
We both insisted on seeing each other at the frontier of life---
as we were.
That, partly accounted for the terrific sense of celebrat-
ion in our conversations: freedom from war. And it was a kind
of freedom neither of us had known before. We'd never shared
dreams with anyone outside our own worlds, hitherto. I think
I can remember the dim sensation at the back of my consciousness
of Angelo as a fascist---I don't mean fascist in thought but
fascist by birth, by torture, if you like. - It never came into
my mind as anything conscious, but there was a certain hidden
recoil in Angelo, an hauteur-- -a certain imposed dignity that
lurked there---which belonged to fascism. It was an inaccess-
ibility to freedom. It was something black. It was a neg-
ative painted world---the world was painted bright colours but
these were cheap and artificial; but of course the child had


taken them as bright. It was a sense of a black negative
centre that dangerously disturbed the natural world all round
it. The colour was always black. This was the colour of the
absolute negative; the no-colour; it was like the perversion
of life to the point of exaltation. Exaltation was a strong
element. The black centre exalted to be putting an end to
life. And it was strange that in the last months of our friend-
ship, when all his childhood was reappearing to him, and perhaps
he was facing his past square-on, he and Francine were wearing
black most of the time, entirely black---black coats, black
stockings, black shoes, black ties, even black shirts. They
were two strange figures in England---pale and cut out clear
with black. An enormous negative had been done to life. The
black disturbed Melli. She said so at the time. She didn't
know why.
Rome softened him in the war-years because it was by nature
perhaps the least fascist of Italian cities. There isn't the
right pride in Rome. There is a bit of the ancient bombast--
cutting a figure again---but the city has passed under a lot
of wreckage since then. There is S omething more like Jewish
resi ignation, a sense of the passing of things, the doom behind
all power. It comes from real knowledge. And this knowledge,
from centuries of watching power at work, acted on Angelo when
he first came to the city.
There was something too neat and finished about fascism
for Rome. She doesn't like too much assertion, just as she
doesn't like finishing a building. I haven't seen a really
finished building in Rome, either old or new. Something has
to be left, a bit of nude staircase or a gaping cellar, to


let the spirit out; you don't want to wrap things up too neat-
ly. Too much logic stuns life. And the two things went on side
by side in Angelo---the sense that for freedom you have to let
things slide a bit, and the sense that some strict action was
nec es sary--even some damage---to stop a mess. I suppose one is
only free when one has these two things as one and the same sense.
Socrates had it, which is perhaps why he was persecuted. And you
found it in English politics, When there was such a thing.
The Romans are empiricists as the English used to be, except
that they don't wait and see, they just wait. When you've finihh-
ed waiting for one thing to collapse you start waiting for another.
The consoling element in Roman noia lies here---you are waiting
all the time in a kind eternal ante-room, and you dream of the
room on the other side of the door which you never penetrate,
it gives a glow to the ante-room, even th hough nothing real can
possibly happen there---since it all takes place in the other
room, the last, magnificent salon of all. Nothing happens in
Rome. And Angelo was softened under this first shadow of real
humanity.
Fascism, like its child nazism, wasn't a political doctrine
in the Anglo-Saxon sense at all, but a facet of the provincial
temperamen t. Its basic interest was to cut a figure in the
world. The Italian preocoupation with figura was its seed.
And both movements followed a theme that had been going on in
the middle classes of Germany and Italy for decades before:
namely, that you have to show some vitality, there has to be
action, something must be disturbed, otherwise there is death
and emptiness. That, underneath, is the provincial situation.
Thus, people completely innocent of the political ideas of
fascism and nazism were the causes of it---they bore it in


the ir way of talk and gat. hering together. In the provincial
world, however you may try to escape it, you begin to cut a fig-
ure the moment you go among other people. I don't mean you
try to show off. But you try to be lively, you have a certain
idea of the form any conversation should take, and in some way
every conversation you have outside the intimate family circle
is a performance. This is so In Germany and Italy. Really
the effortangelo always made when he was with other people---
even as we found out, W ith us---was the effort involved in all
provincial gatherings. The idea of society as a source of ease
and natural behaviour is absent to the provincial consciousness,
so that there is no society in the proper sense at all. This
lack of society was exactly what caused fascism and nazism,
not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. The Italian is rarely arrogant, and I've never known
a murderous German.
I believe that Angelo never really perceived me as a whole,
only as moments. At one moment I was lively and passionate,
striding all over the room, at another I was elegaic, at another
penetrating, at another just absent, there but doing, saying,
apparently thinking nothing, a pesce morto---a dead fish.
He often used those words: he would say, 'You're sitting there
like a dead fish!' That is the Sicilian World, too. You sudden-
ly, in that world, achieve God: you suddenly put out massive
branches like an oak, you tower over other people for a moment,
delivering yourself. And then---silence again. For you aren't
an oak. You are onlyJonelfor a moment, then you go back to


tradition, too. You have a philosophy, but you don't let it
go right through your life. You don't jigger with the basic
things, like where your money comes from. So it is at one and
the same time.a craven conformism and a rebellion: this creates
the negative and spurious element of fascism. And there again
is a reason why it took root in the provincial countries, Italy
and Germany, and not in our world: power in the provincial
countires is the status quo that pervades everything outside the
family. It isn't on the whole open to discussion. It is con-
ceieved as permanent and unalterable. The family is the real
seat of discussion, unlike in our world. And of course the
family is an island of interests to itself. But in our world
power is a fluid and continually moving thing, always in the
balance, and we grow up with an unquestioned sense of having
the right to challenge it. This is the moral indignation that
doesn't exist in the proxincial world---it is an emot ion really
and truly lacking. In our world having no power gives our
challenge all the more grace and rightness. In the provinci al
world having no power robs the challenge of anything but self-
interest. On this hub Europe---and the whobe Christian world---
is split in two.
If you are poor in our world your challenge to riches is
made clean. In the provincial World it is made dirty.
I think this is why my moral indignation, which I shall
always have whatever the flux of my interests, was finally for
Angelo---though not consciously or willingly---self-interest.
I think perhaps our friendship broke on this hub, more than on
any other. At this point the two worlds can't understand each
other.


shouldn't he do what he likes, if it's his own life? This
is the provincial freedom. The other man may go to the devil
if he Wishes to. So the tendency is for everybody to be left
to his own W orld, and for the world to consist of immediate
interests stirred and spurred by dreams. There are political
dreams, religious dreams---collective dreams of every kind;
and each time they happen there is an enormous upheaval.
The development of the me tropolitan World is opposite to this:
its greatest modern revolution has been industries, namely the
slow organic alteration of life according to practical observ-
ations, not dreams.
The provincial dream is the only form of collec tive action,
the only patriotism.
This is the same for Italy as for Germany.
Like the werman, the Italian is alone, he has to fight alone.
Like the werman he expresses nature, its marvel and vigour.
He has to fight through with the dream of self, the dream of
power, the dream of work. The invisible is all inside him,
not outside. He doesn't translate the invisible into outside
terms, either. Whereas in our world that happens all the time,
the invis ible becomes continually absorbed and ma terialised in
life, our rooms and houses and family-habits reflect us, that
is, they express the invisible to which we belong, they are our
outer realised form. And this is rare in Italy. You will
find a clever young doctor, fighting to get somewhere---not
just in a career, but in real development---you will find him sit-
ting in the same kidd of room as everybody else, the same unen-
chanted sitting-cum-dining room with its naked electric lights
and hideous sideboard, the same lack of glow and mystery. And
the W oman who wants to get out of the old provincial life and
be fashionable and stylish like the women in Paris, she sits


in the same rooms, too, she invariably has the same sense of
unenchanted womanhood as most of the wamen round her, only
dinaares
she is troubled, often neurotically, from that natural balance
which
xitah is her safest anchor. In Italy there isn't any sex in
the northern sense---the peculiar enchanted fascination one sex
has for the other, based on respect. French love is respect,
whether you like it or not. It explores all the exquisiteness
and refinement of human respect. In origin it is aristocratic.
But in Italy that can't exist: There can only be the dream of
sex, usually from foreign infouences: it gets connected with
affectation, vanity, even rebellion; it isn't real enjoyment,
natural enjoyment. Natural enjoyment is the short-lived act
of love. This is What sex means in Italy. It means the lit-
eral moment of love. The invisible isn't in people or things:
there is just the body, which has its natural appetites, for
sex and food. There isn't a real development in people.
There isn't real development of character on a communal scale,
just as there isn't in Germany; there is only development in
sir ngle people, by terrific effort. The sex in Germany is a
tremendous assertion of nature, it is nature as a massive and
truthful dream; there isn't the desolation in sex that you
find in Italy. It has become a vigour that you get nowhere
ekse. Sex is intact in Germany as passion. In Italy this
has been curtailed, as a force, first by the slave-civilisation
of ancient times---the inheritance of squalor---and then by the
church which tended to take over pagan forms. The world of
Germany and that of Italy are divided by the fact that Italians
are historically an enslaved people, and when you have been
humiliated you don't feel like sex, you don't have respect for
your own body and you don't expect other people to. Your sex


grasp me as he usually did, before the words were really out
of my mouth. I told him that years abroad seemed to discour-
age the doubt in one---and that this wonderful element came
back to me when we returned to England for a few months. He
still looked surprised at the word 'doubt'. And he said nothing.
I added that in Rome I was right inside my OWn wo:rld, I surround-
ed myself with my own warld, I was a world to myself; but in
one's own country one hears and understands every subtlety, one
learns again that one isn't the author of the World, one hears
clever and concise and complicated propositions, stated quickly,
there is the brisk competition of ideas, and a pleasant annocent
doubt returns, when one ceases to lay hold of every idea as if
it was a log to keep afloat by; one learns the flow of real
talk again, as one can only have it With one's own people;
abroad, talk is just an exchange, an exchange of ideas; among
your own people it is a blind and tentative journey where pride
has to be asleep. But he didn't seem to see. At least, he
only nodded and turned away. He seemed not to be thinking on
those lines. Yet something of the same kind had happened to
him: a great innocent doubt had departed. He seemed bent,
wholly, on certainty. Angelo became more and more mysterious
for me in those days, as he drifted further into his dry, isol-
ated, pale, marvellous and brilliant reality.
He was clinging to oertainty---for survival. It was a
certainty he'd made for himself out of stupendous effort over
the last few years, and he now seemed to be keeping it going
by force of will, not letting it rest. Calling most people
cretini was an aspect of this. The faith in him really seem-
ed to have gone. Faith and doubt are really the same thing.


It seemed he could no longer rest in himself, leave his devel-
opment to time. He had to cling to the invisible, which he'd
built for himself. The invisible didn't exist in his world,
except locked inside single and lonely men. He clung to it for
all he was worth, inwardly. You wouldn't think, to look at
him, that his work had anything to do With enchantment or com-
passion at all. It seemed something hard and cruel, sharp as
from
a knife, which meant him turning away all the time---funr his
wife, everybody. It meant having no friends, even the one or
two friends we are allowed in life. It meant that the blood
had almost to be stopped. Then, in perfect and absolute isol-
ation, the work could begin.
It was the exact opposite of everything I'd known in my own
world. It wasn't just the solitude he and I had always talked
about---I'd urged him more and more to surround himself with
solitude, especially living as he did in a big city. This
wasn't the same o Solitude is really tender and easy, When it
is real: it achieves a marvellous sense of spectatorship, but
the really solitary person isn't cut off from anyone or anything,
he is given more perfec ctly to life than anyone else. But
Angelo was entering an Absolute. He was being absolute in his
life. And this wasn't solitude. It was too artificial. And
everything in me, all my Englishness, shuddered at that. I
had no sympathy for it. It was a sort of death for me. I
wanted to get away, to breathe properly again, to get back to
our freedom that Melli and I had together, with each fresh day
J growing freely between us, with its own form, but with a definite
form each time. Angelo had to impose a form, in some way.
He had to cling to the form he'd made for himself, because of


and squalors that are its language and always will be. Really
he is a man without a faith. He's alone, With his thoughts.
He's in a dead world, just as a Sicilian is said to be in a dead
world when he's surrounded by nature; traditionally, he is com-
pletely oblivious to it. It all lies there round him like a
pesce morto. Yet he is part of it. This is his stréghth.
There is a terrible loneliness round him which is perfectly. class-
ifal in origin, and more or less inconceivable to us ; he is the
last classical man. He is quite different from the Italian in
this. He has a driving and cutting will, a power to see clearly
even to the point of utmost darkness in his own self, and to make
dazzling clear reflections even while he is up to his neck in
the squalor of life. He has this marvellous remoteness and spirit-
uality, which leads to his suicide. The classical world was a
tragic world, and so is his. There isn't any hope, finally.
There isn't the mess and squalor of paganism---the having a stink
and liking it; there is this alter ego of paganism---the obsess-
ive and terrible horror of the vulgar which is the classical
absolute, and the precise opposite of anything Christian.
Being with educated Sicilians is for me like suddenly find-
ing myself in a nursery or a bed with strange pe ople, grown-ups
at that. It makes you feel as if something awful is going to
happen---somebody might drop a fart or giggle, and the whole
95 thing will fall toypieces. There is this high state of tension
all the time, bordering on hysteria. There is no Sicilian con-
versation in the educated sense: there is superb and lucid ex-
position, there are heights and chasms and clear rushing streams,
and deserts, and the hard, baking sun, but there isn't the give
and take of conversation.
There isn't any drama. o There can


( linor
K speak, throwing little chunks of bread across the table, and
putting another potato on his plate. He licked his chops,
guzzled his wine and had everything down inside a few minutes-
talking the whole time as well. It wasn't that he lacked table
manners. They'd just never started with him. When he practised
them they were hardly more than horror of vulgarity, namely,
a form of hysteria again.
The tension would al ways start the moment we were together
again, like a dynamo. It wasn't unpleasant---not at all a stiff-
ness or restraint. It was tremendously exciting. Nothing could
be left to silence. If I was S ilent, especially in the early
days, he would cry, 'Forza, forzat'---strength! Only for a brief
and lovely period, which was like a special inheritance for Melli
did
and me, too ecstatic to be bearable almost, when that tension
ceased and life just flowed along between us, with Angelo saying
things like, 'Oh, words don't matter' and 'Let life take its
course.' But Francine would look at him doubtfully. She always
seemed to doubt him in this way, and for years we didn't under-
stand why. Wha t she was really doing when she glancet at him
like this was conveying to him---reminding him---What he was
really like, in himself, after the tension of our meeting together
was over and they were alone again, and the pesce morto of the
world had ret turned, the corpse of daily life; and then there
were no flights for her, nothing was allowed to flow... She
didn't understand him, we said. It was true she didn't. But
at the same time she knew him as he was, which was why he clung
to her, why he listened to her and why---'in his terrible way',
as Francine said---he loved her.
He didn't respect us, in ourselves, because we weren't
permanent characters for him. He respected in Melli the


English could be remarkable. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of being understood, he would start talking English,
slowly and clearly, enunciating it beautifully. But he always
said that English wasn't his 'destiny'.
We went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, and looked across
at the other bank, which was in the form of a rising lawn, with
a house among trees, like the close, hilly Hampshire c ountry.
It was all neat, picturesque, very clean and vivid. He had a
great sense of England. It was always the freedom that caught
him. He said the same as on his first visit---he felt so free!
He could see it in people's faces---it was so marvellous after
the tension of the Continent. The ease, the perfect ease of
life underneath, the space inside people, a kind of inner harmony
of freedom that was like a communal dream, were what struck him,
he said.
We wen t up to London to see my parents and I remember the
little cry of amazement he gave when he walked into the back
room, into the blaze of little lights---the wonderful glow of
intimate life that made everything look like a palace. At
first he said nothing as we walked into the tiny hall from the
front door, only nodded in his solemn way to my father, but
when the door of the back room was opened and the glowing light
broke on us he made this little cry of joyful appreciation.
And he told my parents later, 'I love your son all the
more now, becaus e I know you!' It made him understand me.
It was S omething to do with the intimacy---the thrill of that
room, which I still feel myself when I go there, intact from
ch hildhood, and which always makes Melli feel abs solutely calm,
as if she'd found her real element at last. The world there


is safe because it relies on nothing that isn't human. All
its commitments are human. All its references. There is
absolutely no power. Nobody has power. Therefore there is
no corruption. The creature is fully contained and allowed
for in that world. There is nothing but the creature. And
because there isn't any power or Position he is the king of
every place he is in, by natural election. But that Working-
class world isn't by any means just a natural or primitive
world. The lack of power isn't due to power not having started
up yet. An enormous history of civilisation and respect is
actually behind it. The people with power---those who get hold
of power---leave the class: if power is within their grasp,
that means they've already left it, in any case.
There is an enormous invisible freedom in that World, as I
know now from having tasted its opposite. There is an enormous
delicate and respectful appreciation of the human creature there,
an enormous Christianity---much more so than in the middle class.
The middle class has nothing to C ompare with that world,
as far as respect for the human creature goes. The middle class
is in this respect blunt and gross, by comparison. Shere good-
ness of feeling---the substance of society---is sustained by
working people everywhere. And as their world dwindles, as
the ir numbers grow less, so the middle class gets invisibly
weaker, until in the end there is a kind of massive crisis,
when the whole matter of intimacy and power has to be gone
into, when the choice has to be made quite clearly as to wheth-
er we are belonging to a Christian civilisation or not, and
what that means. By that time all the intimacy at our dispos-
al will be used up, and it will have to come back by me ans of


conscious and chosen allegiance.
There is only one other place where I've known that same
intimacy---not the thrill so much, but the intimate sense of
safety in a creature's world, where all the consolations are made
for the humble and thwarted, for the lonely, and not for the power=
gul, the logical and the effective. And that is Italy. Finally
ae've always had to flee back there, for it to save our lives
again. The power lies absolute round and over Rome, just as it
does round the streets where I was born, but it isn't ins ide:
it belongs to another class, ar nother breed of mankind, Who aren't
seen often. They cut figures, they have appointments and import-
ant occasions, they are restless, shifty, damned. But their act-
ivities are outside, while there is this glow of an inner family-
seat which is hidden at the centre. There isn't the thrill of
respect and freedom as there is in England, it isn't the same
kind of thing, it isn't in people, the thrill lies more in place,
in something physical, almost external, it isn't grounded in the
thrill of people being together, but it comes from the same root.
Angelo's background was stark in comparison with mine.
That was W hy Rome could save him. Its world is sad and bared,
but still there is the thrill that even seems to emerge from the
boredom and that refuses no new bedecompanion. Hothing gets
refused in Rome. It all gets mixed up in a hot compost---the
thrill is the steam that comes off, and the mysterious heat
inside can never be localised because it shows no flame or even
a glow. It stinks of course, but so do we all at times.
And perhaps Angelo lost this influence slowly when he was in
Paris, perhaps its softening touch was forgotten, and he drew
nearer and nearer to his own original world, wh ere stinks are


what other people have. His world seems to have a rooted
puritanism, but not one of a Christian origin. It reminds me
more of the Arabs. They are supposed to wash at once after
they've made love, and to make love near a river if they can.
You can see the difference between our world and theirs in their
lavatories, where you squat over a hole in the floor. The tiny
water-tap at your side is such a clearl-cut physical device C ompared
with the conceptual paper of our world, wich prevents you coming
into contact with your own flesh. In the Arab lavatory you just
turn the little tap on, put the fingers of your (right) hand
under the water and wipe your arse. Simple! When that is
clean you wash your hands. Really that's cleaner than paper,
if you come to look at it. The intimate connection between flow-
ing water and cleanliness is still there. The sense---the horror---
of evacuation is there just the same as in Christianity, there is
the same risk of sof confusing evacuation with the love-processes,
as among all humanity, but it isn't conceptual. The different
religions treat it differently.
As the middle classes grow in our world so the acute stink-
consciousness of our civilisation grows. The more in flight
from his problems a middle-class person is the more stink-conscious
he is. I suppose this is Why some unhappy daughters of the
middle class literally bathe themselves in scent, to hide the
original stink of self: the inner natural self is putrid---
this is the basic middle-class philosophy. For the middle class
has historically vindicated the outer rights and freedom of
the human creature, his dignity, but at the expense of the
religious faculty. They had to show that every man was a child
of God---in life. But to do this they had to show that there
was nothing divine about him either---that he inherited no


natural power over his own kind: the claims of pope, king and
nobleman were knocked out one by one. So you got God taken out
of the human creature as fast as he was being put in. The human
creature became master of the World. And of all reality. Chrsst
seemed to have given people a terrific spur of freedom---he seeméd
to offer glory, something divine in life, if only you threw off the
shackles.
And the middle-class stink-self is the creature ostracised by
this grand flight for glory: the middle-class child learns early---
with frequent devastating effects on his nervous system---that in the
area of rights and civic relationships he is free, but in the intimate
areas he's as good as---shit. It is a strange thing to happen.
Essentially, the middle-class upbringing is indoctrination in shame:
the natural and spontaneous outburst of humanity which is every
chold's birthright is discouraged---rarely in a conscious way e
For there are other things which the middle-class child has to
grasp unless he is to go under---the byways of power. He has
so many techniques to learn.
The Working-class child knows nothing about these things,
in his world where ambition S: imply doesn't exist and life is taken
as it's found. Like an Italian he is the king of his own feelings,
they assert towards the mother their own natural kind of royal dig-
nity, and the intimacy is therefore not disc ouraged. In the middle-
class world intimacy is the greatest threat to movement and
developme nt, whether you like it or not, and however good a
mother or father you are: you yourself are caught up in am-
bitions, and no other path can be put before your child, so that
in humanity he must be groomed accord ing to the world he will
inherit. In the middle-class world only the non-intimate rights
are furthered. The middle-class world is grounded on power, not


on humanity, as all aristocratic society was and all lower-class
society must be in order to survive. The middle-class thrill
is at root the sound of mighty machines---the sound of nature
harnessed, the thrill of movement and spectacle; and the arist-
ocratic thrill is the thrill of other people, in the same way as
the lower-class thrill is, too. In the middle-class world other
people aren't enough. There is the great world-struggle pre-
occupying the middle-class mind---the mind has to make its fierce
dema nds on nature. And When these demands have been exhausted---
as they will be perhaps by the pathetic flights into space, which
are like a last effort to turn eternity and even God into a civic
right, there will have to be the thrill of people again, the
thrill of the sound of their coats swishing, the thrill of the things
they say and do with their own hands.
That will be the end of the stink-self. Every man can then
be a slave and kind in one, as only the Working man is at present,
though his position isn't a permanent one, nor an unadulterated
one, nor an invulnerable one: he is for all that a child, a
victim, a helptess reftection of the middle class (his master),
and one by one he has to go into the middle class, send his children
in, according to a process that has been going on for all to see
si nce the eleventh century. The middle-class has reached its
utmost mental development---and its obsessive stink-consciousness
is its consciousness of the last lingering odours of the intimate
thrilling self which the mind has had to forget in its enormous
plans for the marshalling of power, which in its steel parts and
regular noises and clean emissions of wanted commodities is as
different from the farts and ordure of mankind as anything you
can get. The middle class has tried to create God on earth,
in men, and for this reason it has collapsed inw ardly more and


more with each wonderful success, So that in the end when it
has cleaned the whole World up and its great thriving project
---freedom---has been acc omplashed, it will committ a sort of
suicide back into humanity. For the real World---not the pro-
jects put on to it---is still there for contemplation, as un-
explored as it always was. The whole hidden world of our own
organs that do their work invisibly every moment, the hidden
world of plants and the seasons and the invisible attractions and
influences of the earth, and the language of animals, all the
world tha t lies all round us nearly dead at the moment, wh ich
our senses and instincts have lost track of, so. that we are like
pale and hostile and unknown visitors, not knowing What we shall
do next by way of destruction, all this awaits us again. Our
intuitions, which the middle class has all but killed by calling
invalid, will get their life back again. Clear and golden
intuitions are the prize of civilisation, just as in a person
they are the prize of real thinking.
Where I was born nearly all the mystery of created life
is still there intact; and Angelo felt this. There is the
thrill of the outside created world which, though wounded and
darknwith smoke, is absolutely beyond you, beyond your powers
and knowledge. The mystery of Christmas is still there,
the streets at Christmas, in the crisp air, when everything is
still and you seefthe lights on the little Christmas trees in
the windows, and the lamplights make the roads look like
village lanes. Not all the created life is there, the mystery
isn't quite intact, there is a nervous background of menace
which is mostly disregarded from inside but is always there.
Only the people have made it natural. The actual streets were
put there as part of a mathematical proposition for somebody's


profit-end-loss account, and this can never fit into a real and
lasting scheme of things. But the people there have made vill-
ages of them. Every Christmas was as mysterious to me as the
countryside. There was the crisp hush of the week before the
actual day, and we used to go carol-singing in small groups; and
the sky seemed as silent and vast as you find it in the country.
The roofs were low, just like a village. Usually the sky was
haunted and ghostly, turned into a frightening zone of emptiness
and oblivion by the great work-schedule that hung over everything
and tried to make itself the only thing there was in all creation.
The untouched intimate heart won in the end, though: it kept the
glow, and you felt this most of all in the special seasons, at
Easter, on Shrove Tuesday, on the Bank Holidays. The created
world came back again then. It was still the breath of God,
over the streets: you were still in the state of grace, that
is, the child of great creating forces which you didn't under-
stand but the rhythm of which was in you. The knowing and fore-
seeing face of the middle class wasn't there. The mark of that
face is its lack of respect: this is what differentiates it from
the working class or the peasant face. It has nothing to respect
in the universe . There is just---nothing. The sky 1s---nothing.
The invisible is---nothing. There are just hard, touchable
objects and---space. But Where I was born there was the wonder
of active and irresistible things outside you; and that doesn't
wilt in the old people, because it isn't an attitude but a total
state of being which only the slow and painful initiation into
the middle class can end. Once it has ended not thing can bring
it to life again. And Angelo seemed to rec ognise this; I think
it was what made him utter his astonished, happy little cry.


I don't think there was anything like that in his own
life. I think his life had the terrible Italian bareness.
R Some magbificence had been denied. There is this deep histor-
ical slave-element in Italy all the time. And perhaps Angelo
had ht in his life even stronger than other Italians. Perhaps
Sicily has it more than the Italian continent. He used to tell
me about the terrible hysteria of family-life, the pale, quivering
hatred behind everything, the feuds. He used to imitate his
uncle---thin and pale and sharp-faced---standing just behind the
curtains of the window watching people go by outside, talking to
himself, his eyes narrowed with a hatred as consuming and help-
less as-disease---'Look at that one! He calls himself a priest!
He'll die soon! Curse him! Curse him!', his lips like knives
already cutting . And then the 'occasions', 9 the family gather-
ings. The neighbours who came to pay their respects and sniffed
round looking for all the proper signs of such an occasion---the
coffee, the wine, the cake, all offered with a terrible absence
of real feeling for others, and received in the same wa_y.
Under the smiling and hand-shaking-- I *When is this idiot going
to offer us something? Is that all he's got? And he swindled
one of his brothers out of a hundred thousand lire only last
week!' It was a life starved like the hot earth. And the heat
seemed to bake feelings dry, to suffocate and crush the creature
into a victim of the elements, the ir slave. Angelo hated and
feared hot weather. It finished him completely. In cold
weather he was lively, clear, active. Just a day of real heat
would knock him over. Perhaps his world was pagan. I don't
know. It is so difficult for me to see, across those OC eans
of difference between us, across the enormous religious divides.
Perhaps Chrsst was lacking in his world. Perhaps only Christ


a fabulous way, across enormous glowing spaces of air, as at
the amphitheatre of Epidaurus where you sit looking across the
parched Greek plains towards the mountains of Arakhnaion, and
the gods seem to sit there, while the air among the cypresses is
mild and eternal, the same as it must have been for Aesulapius
and the sick people C oming to him, close to that amphitheatre.
Christ entered Angelo like that, like a breath, like the
recognition of a great new power in the universe. But it was
a spectacle; Christ was a breath-taking spectacle that he saw
clearly. But one spectacle can be replaced by another. You
can't have the same spectacle before you all the time. And the
next step wasn't to alter h: im inwardly in any way, it had nothing
to do with the inawrd moral charac ter. That was much more my
world. After becoming really conscious of Christ there were
things in my own life that I saw much more clearly---always
related to moral actions of some kind. But the change it made
in Angelo was to make his eyes brighter, With yet one more bright-
ness. It was like getting the benefit of a new sun. But nothing
in it contributed towards a permanent and decided moral character.
This, perhaps, was the development lacking in his world. That
was why he could say helplessly, 'Vou see, I never know what I'm
going to be tomorrow. Or even in two hours' time. I never know
how I'm going to feel, what I shall think, what I shall want to
And there was still a kind of pagan triumphing in him which
was completely strange to any feelings I had ever had. Once
when we were driving through Paris he jumped the traffic lights
and a policeman stopped us at once. Francine whispered angry
little comments as we drew to a halt. Then there was a long
conversation between the policeman and Angelo. He told the man


mildly and quietly that he'd been sonfused because he was
driving some English friends through the city to show them the
sights, and in pointing something out---jumped the lights...
A beautifully contrived, beautifully spokem Italian story;
and it would melt any heart. The policeman was tall and grave,
and listened sceptically at first. But he softened, especially
when he realised that Angelo was a forneigner. He seemed to
appreciate it, above all, that Angelo had no bitterness or fight
in his speech, no rasping haugh I tiness. So with a smile he let
him go.
Now Angelo shouted a thank-you and drove off fast, and I was
amazed to see that he felt triumph, hot fellow-feeling for the
other man, not the slightest appreciation or even awareness of
the kindliness in the other man, the fact that he had given same-
thing fre ely to a stranger, which is the best homage one can get.
It made me pause. It was like a papse of his character for me.
But not exactly that. I wasn't aware of a lapse so much as of
a character which I had clearly not understood properly so far,
) I and which I had wrongly tak en efor granted was like my own in
most ways.
And of course the northern civilisation gave him a thousand
gratuitous little triumphs like that every day. And he couldn't
see the key to it; that was how it seemed. In his world yielding
to someone else seemed too close to being a fool ever to be pract-
ised much. He couldn't understand how pe ople could be so
yielding and credulous---and, perhaps, soft. He wanted to see
something more definite. Really I think he didn't believe in
this apparen atly good world: he wanted to see the evil, clear,
as kt had been in his world. All this good seemed to him a


kind of massive concealment. He wanted to see other desires
naked, he wanted to see the evil and negative. He didn't want
to lose himself in a fluid, chaotic mass of good_ness. It was
like being helpless in his mother's arms again, perhaps. Life
had to be externally clear-cut for him. It: had to leave him
alone, above all. And all the goodness seemed to put on him an
unexplained and continual obligation. What did they want?
What did they want from him? It remindeaner %or the way Italians
often take unexpected gifts, with a wary, narrow look, as if to
say, 'What's all this for? what's being asked of me?'
The. Italian face, indeed, is rarely lit by a really unreserved
and open smile, never by real laughter. There isn't real intimate
humour in daily life, none of the bright and optimistic attitudes
that form the features of the northern face and give it depth
and an encrusted individuality. History has made its encrust-
ations on the face---violence and s truggle, pain, yearning.
But these are communal lines, not individual. And they are
classical. They also tend to close the face. There is a sad
and elegaic humour---something ironic, also intimate, but not
with optimism or relish. Pleasantry is missing. There isn't
really pleasantry in conversation. There is delight, curiosity,
the sad dirge of an endless confession, but not common pleasantry.
This comes by individual breeding and effort. Faces lack light.
Given light and openness they would be quite different, their
lines would have developed differently, they would be good-look-
ing in the northern way, which they almost never are. Faces convey
no hope or plan of life. They aren't on any quest at all.
There is no questing in life. After r'a been living in Italy
some years I began to recognise a foreign tourist at once, by
instinct almost, without ever looking closely. And the sight


began to thrill me in a way I couldn't understand. I began
to ask myself what was this different quality I saw in them,
that made them so immediately recognisable. And after some years
I realised that mainly in their walk, their way of striding,
they always S seemed to be questing for something, quite naturally
and unconsciously. And it was in everything they did---the way
they looked at things, the way they smiled, the open way they had
of asking questions. They had this deliberate air of going some -
where. Whatever they were doing they always seemed to be going
somew here. But the Italian never does.
In that C omparison you can see the difference between tw O
worlds---how far we have been taken towards not accepting what
lies all round us, towards questing every moment for an end or
solution, and how far the Italian at the opposite pole accepts
all the time, waits and looks on and accepts, strolling through
life however quick his pace. Angelo's pace was always much
quicker than mine. He shot through streets like a torpedoe.
But the root-difference between our worlds remained. We had
both developed a long way away from our worlds; he had learned
the questing ache, and I had learned the acceptance. But that
root-difference, behind us, at the birth of life, remained,
hardly conscious to either of us.
The northern man sets out early on his quest. Already as
a child---alone with his conscience, the king of his own conscience--
he has it before him. I knew the direction I would be taking in
life at the age of eleven or twelve, and I can't say I've swerved
much from that direction. But in the south there doesn't seem
any need for a direction. The world is just there, made for
you, and you fill it in your turn like everybody else. In a way


you have no responsibility over your life. The world Won't
forsake you in the south. It will always give you something
to eat, something to hang on to life by, however wretched you
are; you aren't judged by your quest, as in the north. You can
always get a little bit pf pleasure, a drop of wine spared from
someone, the healing sunlight. And then there is the mother---
she passes from generation to generation as the unfailing fount
of help which can never wane. Life can pass in a dream, in the
south. You wake up to your gifts late, on the whole, especially
if they are strong. You wake up to your own will late. Angelo
was like this. He only divined gradually what sort of thing he
was naturally required to do in life. And each step was a terr-
ific effort and pain, like unsucking himself from a great marsh.
He really did begin changing his life nearly half-way through it,
with deeisions of the kind I had taken in the years of puberty.
And he'd changed so much. He'd studied so many different things,
altered his course, altered his job. First there had been the
safe road, pointed out to him by his family, which he had accepted
and followed, and then there was the slow and spasmodic awakening,
year by tear, until he had altered the whole thing from top to
bottom. The years he spent studying a subject that had absolutaly
no interest for him at all, and which on the contrary produced
a numb loathing and disgust in him every time he opened a book,
must have been a purgatory that was nearly the end---how he sur-
vived it with a clear mind I can't understand at all. And it
was always a question of survival. This was his quest. A
quest for bare survival. Mine was always a quest to finish or
honoy
X start a book, go abroad, get enoughy to do my work, and that sort
of thing. But his was a quest just to survive in his bare self---
to keep hi imself this side of madness, despair, the utter and outer


darkness. - For mon ths of his life my friend has laid in dark-
ness, Without speech, nearly gone out in his flame, a victim to
some eternal darkness and helplessness that comes on him, as he
said it came on his father. He complained about his father--
but there was always Francine's quiet voice saying, 'You're the
same, you're the same as your father.' Angelo said that his
father had spent most of his life 'crying'---regretting, complain-
ing: for forty years he'd been crying about his health, how he
was going to die at any time, but he was now past eighty, and app-
arently still sound of limb. He ran to church every morning---
the church was his pagan god, Angelo said; it wasn't a witness of
silence for him, but worldly power e He believed in God as other
people believe in society.
For his father life was never quite realised; his quest never
really began. - And Francine said it was the same for Angelo.
The scene had to be laid so carefully for this quest---so many
enemies had to be fought off---so much solitude had to be pro-
cured---the outer world had to be placated and appeased in so many
ways. And here the Absolute came in. The outer world was an
absolute power that had to be fought all the time, while the
fighter was weak, being flesh, and not absolute at all. You
could only get through by putting one absolute against another.
That was why there was really no quest: if you make the
outer world into an absolute you glorify its powers, you humble
yourself to it---which makes the act of defiance necessary as
well. You build the world into such vastness that you are. left
without any power in yourself at all: you have to assert your-
self deliberately, in order tot to go under; you tell yourself
you have to be strong---that you are indèed strong, and that the
fight will be long and bitter. Everything involves the long


and self-destructive fight. Nothing is soft.. Nothing comes
easily. Nothing is relative. The world is all absolute round
you; other people are absolute---they are enemies or friends,
fools or not, great or small. This is Where the fight for sur-
vival comes in---your intimate flame of life is always at stake
in this struggle with absolutes. And only when towards the end
of your life---if at all---you realise that the absolutes aren't
there and that you yourself aren't absolute, and no act of defiance
is necessary, only then are you free for the quest which should
have begun in youth. Angelo told me once how Verga had come to
write his real books---the ones for which he is known: he came
across a leaflet that described an experience at sea, in the
seaman's own language; it was just a seaman talking about the
sea, from himself. And that seemed to set Verga's language
free. There were no absolutes; no monuments. He found his
own speech, suddenly, after years. There was just the relative
.creature talking about the relative world, in crisp, spare terms e
From that time he began to write properly, without being artific-
ial.
In our world of the north all literature is that seaman
talking. The relative world weaves in and out of his narrative.
But in the provincial world, in Italy and Germany, the great
battle with absolutes has to take place. The outer World is
absolute. A man's statements are absolute. One statement
clashes with another---there is none of the endless dialogue
of free and WC ondering voices as in our World. There is none of
the leaven of the invisible society.
Right at the bottom, those absolutes are pagan. And in
Angelo's world they're classical pagan---still with their old
dignity and fire. They don't belong to the Christian world,


weren't really meeting, even when there was nothing obviously
wrong. Once Melli arrived in Paris a day or so before me and
Angelo said to her, sitting in the dim, still drawing-room that
overlooked a tiny courtyard, 'How is he? Is he in a good state---
or---' He paused---'funny?' And he seemed to expect her to
know what he meant. But she looked at him questioningly, and he
brushed the matter quickly aside, seeming to assume that she just
didn't want to talk about it; she was baffled as I was when she
told me later.
Then later she said she thought he didn't see me as really
separate from one of his own S tates. He didn't see the theme
in me---only a series of moods that seemed to have little to do
with each. other. I suppose that meant I was a pagan for him,
really. The pagan.is the child of every sensation, always com-
pletely engulfed by it. I was a storm, then light, then laughter,
then calm, then full of portent---like something in his own world.
The pagan has no deliberate approach to the world. Reality over-
powers him every time. Whjat was invisible for Angelo in my changes
was that deliberate approach of the northern world. Perhaps this
was the key to all our differences. I think this is why he shrugged
at the end and said to me, 'I'm sorry---I can't read your books--
I want to---but I can't read English---it's a destiny---I know that
now.' He felt there was something invisible to him.
I think he missed the safe inner order of my world, the har-
mony that lies right underneath and therefore makes any sally away
fnom it an adventure-- -there are no dangers of bursting the seams. -
My long dramatic descriptions seemed to tire them as much as stir
them.
One thing I thought afterwards: that he had left us either


- 2nf
to become great or become small.
The northern world had nearly crushed Melli, too. When
we met I knew she was convalescent from an illness, but not that
she'd been in such danger. It was a mercy I didn't know, in a
way---because we would ha ve held back from life in those first
months, we wouldn't have talked till late at night or walked at
dawn, none of the things that actually helped her recovery.
I was also ignorant in a deeper way---about health as a
whole. And I learned this from Melli. She already had it
in her---the power of health. She had the enormous natural-
born silence that this requires.
I'd had an inkling of it
before---but it was all twisted and girdered-about with the
prevailing concepts of health. I had felt these were wrong.
I'd always felt strangely at odds with medicine---whenever I had
to see a dpctor. There was some contradiction there: I felt a
loss of power and self-reliance and initiative which I thought was
wr ong, whenever I faced a doctor. But I didn't know why it was
wrong. I tried to argue that he, the doctor, was wrong e But it
was a difficult road. And, slowly, Melli taught me why. First
she had the inner rhythm and silence of health, and secondly she
was learning herself, as the best doctors do, through their own
bodies.
Even as a child her's was a rhythm, a deep, inner rhythm,
wl hich just doesn't do for this epoch. And as fast as the doctors
oftte di>nder
looked for a cause, they gave up. It was mad to suppose that the
usual doctor of today could ever have found anything.
When she was a small child her family was chased out of Germ-
ftot 212


to find out more about it in the library. I was hot at the
collar and my hands were trembling as I opened the medical encyclo-
pedia to look up hypertension'---what a fine state to study any-
thing in! And partly this was because I wasn't in charge of my
owh body, though I didn't of course know this. I was helpless.
If my body got a cold or 'flu or measles ot gout or anything that
came al ong, well, it just came along. I just had to wait. I
had no. sense at all that the body gives warning of what it will
do, and shows its weaknesses intimately. I thought that was
health. And now I think it is ill-health. All I could do,
in the matter of the body, was to keep my fingers crossed. Now
in all other respects in life I didn't keep my fingers crossed:
that wasn't enough for me---never had been. I directed my will
towards this or that object, lived towards this or that, and always
had done. But in the case of health, it seemed---in the case of
the basis of all will---I left it to chance, or to the society
round us (in which I was supposed not to believe). It was little
wonder I had such ambiguous feelings when I faced a doctor, as if
I was being found out in some way.
And here was I trembling like a leaf because there was a
medical book in my hand, sweating like a cannibal in front of a
witch-doctor! I was superstitious, clearly. My approach to
medicine was thoroughly and completely superstitious;. I was
little better than a pagan would be. You couldn't imagine that
I was an Oxford-educated individual. What hope had I of doing
anything for Melli in this state?
Knowledge would have held me---my terror of Melli dying---
in check; whereas I was ignorant. It seemed I first had to clear
my mind of a lot of rubbish, but I didn't know what this rubbish
was. I only felt it was there. Yet I couldn't believe that the
text-books were wrong, either. Nor could I quite believe them.


a disaster. This is because it must be a dream, and not an
inherited safe form. Like Italy, the German world has grown
out of independent duchies which were always a law to themselves--
not from an integral monarchy, radiating a single authority
through its noble classes, as in France and England. There is
no communion of ideas, no collective genius of thought, in
Germany, just as there isn't in Italy. This is why you see
people's faces changing So much, especially if they have great
gifts. The doctor in charge of the clinic, for instance---I
always had to look at him twice, to recognise him. This isn't
a sign of inner vacillation---it simply means the absence of
an inherited communal form. The peasants have an inherited
physical form of life, as in Italy, but as soon as the break is
made with this life the search for form has to begin. In the Anglo-
Saxon world character develops in each creature as a collective
force, whether he likes it or not. But in Germany it. develops
by individual crisis and effort; the encrasted lines of age are
the lines of a single and individual development, and the be ing
of this isolated creature has been so variously interpreted
and misinterpreted in its life by other people, it has been seen
in SO many false and true lights (other people have no collect-
ive criterion in their judgements) that it tends to change accord-
ing to the light it is in. This is another great danger of the
German people.
There is little sense of other people in the German.
There is little psychological insight---I mean, as a natural


Our books on war are exercises in pity, on the whole---horror,
some kind of recoil, some collective indignation on behalf of
other people's lives, on behalf of the collective healtha and
goodness that is being put at stake in war. But this isn't so
with the German book.
Invariably if it tries pity for other
people it is only insipid. Usually it is just a stark account
of horror. But the horror is peculiarly insentient. You have
the feeling that these people belong to chill rainy nights where
the bullets are flying and men are screaming.
That was how Germans seemed to me in the last war. They
invariably put in a stiff attack on a rainy night. And they
didn't seem to feel the exposure, not like our men. They
belonged to nature more. But they weren't bad men. I was
always struck by their simplicity and natural goodness when they
came in as prisoners. You might say that their officers were
bad. But not abstractly so. They weren't visibly cruel men.
Even the SS officers I didn't find cruel men. But they were
men who could be present at some fearful brutality without feel-
ing it much: after all, it would be somebody else's suffering.
In our world that could only be a bad person. But in the
German World that doesn't follow: and knowing this is the first
step to understanding that world.
The German goes his own way. It is the only way he can
go, and why our world will never really understand him, only
respect and admire him, or work with him, but never really join
with him in his world. He is the great natural force of our
European world, almost speechless, like rocks and mountain
streams. The officers and men who came in as prisoners were
each fighting their own war---they each had their dream. On
our S ide we weren't. I -wouldn't have gone into the war if


it hadn't been for the concentration camps: they were the S pur
to moral indignation---in a people that didn't want to fight.
Without them I think people would have had to be pushed into
the army. But the German with his terrific vigorous good will
and belief, that is ready to gush out at the slightest enc ourage-
ment from someone of power and authority (it might be, S omeone
with a powerful enough dream), will be off on his war before he
knows where he is, and only think about it aftewards, with some
puzzlement. He won't change, though, howvere much he puzzles
about it. He will just join the collective puzzlement: what
happened exactly? It was the same with the concentration camps:
I've never met one German young or old who seemed to feel the
slightest genuine horror at those camps. Such horror would be
a collective emotion, really---proper to a collective massacre.
It would belong to our world, but not to the German. There is
just perplexity in them---What did I do? all I did was loin
the army! fight a war---then all this comes out at the end!
Only those Germans who suffered in the camps themselves, or lost
a relative in them, have the real horror: because it springs
from self-interest. The basic communion of pity and fellowship---
ail abstract or collective sympathy---is lacking in Germany.
This is what the rest of the Christian world doesn't understand,
in not understanding the German. You will get a German saying
of himself, 'Now look at how I behaved in the first world war,
prancing about on a horse, with a spiked helmet, anxious to fight
it out with England---what an ideal!' But there it will stop:
going further---changing himself---requires the self-examination
which is just not part of the German upbringing, as it is .part of
ours.


In the German world power is like nature. It takes on the
permanent and overshadowing forms of nature: the status quo
is always there for good, like waterfalls and mountains---until
it disappears. Hitler, the American occupation, industrial
prosperity---they are each there for good, as long as they last.
In the German world power is as little fluid as nature, in the
sense that mountains and streams don't walk away overnight.
away
K But if they do walk the German adjusts himself at once---they
were only scenery. It was never really part of him. Nothing
collective ever is.
There is this vigorous and primitive belief all the tim,
which is both healthy and dangerous. The background is pagan
as it is in the Italian world, too. But the Italian world has
been softened by the leaven of the church. There hasn't been
any such thing in Germany. I shall never forget seeing, in a
pleasant little village near Hamburg, a Lutheran priest stroll
out of his house in knickerbockers---it was hot---with that
self-celebrating swagger you often get in the German official.
It isn't a swanking walk so much as a primitive and pagan
exercise in self-satisfaction, like an inner dance. The forth-
right chin was there: the man with no doubts. It was.strange
to see it in a priest. Power---status quo---stuck out of his
body: it was in his walk. It reminded me of the pulpit in his
church, which I'd just seen: it was placed exactly above the
altar so that it seemed actually to be emerging out of it, not
to one side of the chacel as it usually is. I'd never seen
that before and my first impression was one of blasphemy.
It was like making the priest a spokesman for God. The voice
actually came out of the mystery of the cross and the host.
Not even in the Roman church, with its apostolic succession,


do you get that: only the pope has divine access to eternity,
so to speak, but even then he doesn't issue physically out of
the godhead. But in this Lutheran church the godhead seemed
owned socially. It went with the hierarchy of power. The
priest had God up his sleeve. It was the god of power, that
is, a pagan god.
Sometimes the clinic was like a faery castle for me. The
pine forests seemed so near---and the stark mountains that were
called the 'mother' and the 'father'. The faery-element was
in the people, too. Their faces had been developed by strange
primitive forces.
The German is rearing to go---to be led, to believe and
lapse into a state of believing self-immolation, where the in-
dividual responsibility is given up. One man, given the
right preparation, can change the German scene overnight.
Belief gathers like a storm, a marvellous primitive dream of
life, which is such a necessity in Germany, the ache for glory
and splendour. The dream grows until it seems to engulf the
whole of humanity, then it reaches politics, then it explodes.
Germany is much further from us all than most of us can
imagine. The German kings of England were never understood.
They acted with a wild, ungainly, awkward and yet S imple violence
at times: for instance, when the young Prince of Wales, the son
of George 11, dragged his wife out of Hampton Court screaming
with a baby half hanging from her and raced her in a carriage
to St. James's Court so that his heir shouldn't be born under
the same roof as his father, whom he detested and abhorred.
Lord Hervey's memoirs from that time---he was a subtle, scatheing,
intriguing, clever courtier---are a chronicle of the most dis-
astrous misunderstendings. Most of them came from the fact


lenoveniun famils
that the Germans/had no idea what all this English freedom
was about. They couldn't see why a man with such enormous
power, like the king, should be unable to exercise it according
to his wishes and convenience, but have to consult interests and
parties and an undefined entity called public opnnion. They
couldn't understand a pec ople who asked to be defended against
its enemies but hated the sight.of a military red coat. They
couldn't understand a people who spat on the royal carriage and
yet were decidedly not republicans. They couldn't understand
why an apparently absolute power should be given to a king and
then limited and curtailed and ridiculed by the fact that parl-
iament and parliament alone had the power of the purse. In
the German world a man with power does not beg and he does not
discuss.
There seemed no rules in the royal behaviour, to English
eyes. It was a choas of vigour, sentimen tality, courage,
vacillation, brutality, graciousness. Above all there was no
justice. No recollection today of what was said yesterday,
This
and a wavering from one minister to that according to immediate
muctedt,
self-interest and the persuasive powers of the minietera There
was no judgement. They had no themes in their char acters.
They were either riding the crest of a wave proudly or else
drowned in self-humiliation and contriteness. They could be
proud and offensive and pugnacious, then an extraodrinary simple
and child-like charm would appear, which would disarm everybody.
They dealt each other smashing blows, inside the family, and
these blows were apparent tly taken for granted by all of them.
The king would have a sudden overpowering regard for his
daughter, followed by an absolute nullity and blundering insent-
ience towards her. And she reciprocated the behaviour.


To the outsider this is incomprehensible and outrageous.
But it is the German world. It is all the original vigour and
rude health of our civilisation.
This is why it saved Melli when our own world had nothing
to offer. It all depended on one man. When I met him for
the first time I was standing by Melli's bed at the clinic,
talking. She had just had a bath, I think, and the routine was
to spend an hour in bed afterwards, well covered-up.
There was
a quiet knock on the door and at once I felt, with this man's
presence as he came into the room, the most extraordinery sense
of peace, like an invisible wave that washed slowly over me e
It felt as if he'd gone alone all through life's battles.
In that moment I knew more about him and his clinic, and
about what he'd done for Melli, than I ever knew. befare from
hearsay or eger learned afterwards. I always have to make
this first absolute contact first, to know a person. It more
or less is What my tummy tells me. If it aches, there's a
person in coils. If it doesn't, the other person is all
right. It's an animal feeling. In medicine this is terribly
difficult, if you're trying to stear through darknesgall the
time, as I was, trying to repair my ignorance little by little.
I had realised that in the end it depended on how this doctor
struck me in my animal feeling. It depended on the man.
And this doctor who stood before us now, in white, had
gone the road alone. He'd done the self-change. That peace
isn't possible short of a terrific and completely unsparing
act of self-examination. All knowledge has to be dreamed
first, and be yielded up from intimate life painfully and
slowly. Then it is given to other people, to become their
certainty.


with this ene ergy; you tend more to rapture and to heady, neb-
ulous dreams, you get a bit of mountain madness in your inner-
most self, your nightmares are sickly and menaced, with strange
vengeful and spiteful creatures from the dark woods, unsparing in
their venom, nudging and sneering and pinching.
I went through my own therapy at the clinic, picking up
what information I could from the little books written by the
doctor in charge. I wanted to find out for myself. I didn't
want a doctor doing it for me ; I wouldn't have learned anything.
Which can be dangerous if you're as ignorant as I am. Beeaase
of that, it was months and even years before I found out what
was suitable for my own system. But at least I learned in
those first few weeks that the body wasn't just an inanimate
lump, but worked and S ometimes complained in all sorts of ways
whichnuntil now I knew nothing about.
The clinic was quiet and soothing. Everybody was in bed
by nine. I could read with my bedside light until nearly
midnight. But I tried to sleep early. I wanted to get the
maximum benefit out. of the stay.
One evening Melli happened to go to one of the clinic
lectures about sleep. Apparently, it wasn't only that you
needed en ough sleep: the hours in Which it took place were
important, too. There were certain hours of darkness in Which
it should take place. The intestines, for instance, had
ceased their Work by a certain hour, and after that food tended
to turn rotten inside, and go to fat, namely, dead cells.
So sleep an d eating were linked. I remembered that my mother


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as disease? Again, only questions; from an ignorant person.
You hear So many stories about what is supposed to be
happening to us nowadays, without our knowing. Are they true?
Who can tell us if they're true or not; who has the over-all
knowledge? There are specialists, but none of them dare to
speak outside their province. The earth is being poisoned,
people say---not so much possoned for ourselves as for the
future generations. We were brought up on the last vestiges of
the old life, when the basic things-- -the food and soil and air--
hadn't been tampered with. But what ab out the future? What's
happening inside us? What influences the child in the womb,
unknown to us? Are all the tiny, invisible processes of the
body known? If incubation-periods are anything from ten to
twenty years, how do we know what is happening to our children?
Can anyone tell us, for certain? If the crop-specialist tells
you it's 'safe' to spray crops wi th a certain weed-killer, does
he mean it is safe for my liver? Not at all. He doesn't know
anything about the liver. He means his spray will safely kill
the weeds but not.the crop. So the words these specialists use
have to be examined. It is all vague. The word 'safe' is
vague, me an ing one thing for one man and another for another.
Specialists have rarely be en trained in language and expression,
and yet we have to know precisely what they mean. Who can collate
all the things they say except the ignorant, like me, who can
watch and compare?
What is the fate of a class that has challenged ev ery pattern
of life, wherever it has found one, in order to make something
spuriously 'new'?


And there are the apologists. Without spraying poisons
on to crops, they say, we would have no apples---no tomatoes--
on the table. But have we really reached a point in our history
when we sit down to eat. a possoned tomatoe rathet than none at
all? Is it really possible that no apples or tomatoes were
eaten before the epoch of science? With all the spurious thought
we've eccumulated it seems we can't sit down and think out the -
simplest and clearest propositions.
What hope can a man tho has spent all his formative years
in a laboratory learning formulae have of answering questions
like these? Yet he has control of our lives, and those of our
children. He has no real voice, his mind invariably hasn't had
a real training, except in other people's formulae. How far---
outside the formulae---does he go along on superstitions, more
untested than my superstitions because he feels he has the support
of his formulae? How far are we in the hands of functionaries
none of whom could take responsibility for the power he uses?
How far are the dpctors just functionaries of medicine,. although
given the power to heal? How far are we bei ing led into darkness,
by people who prefer the darkness?
In the last hundred and fifty years life everywhere has been
put under new principles, and no one has bothered to examine these
pri inciples to see if they are all right for the world or not.
They*ve come into being at an alarming rate, they belong to us
and they stem from us, yet we're their servants---slaves. They
form a prison-house round us . And partly this is why life seems
to become unreal---because prisoners are notoriously day-dreamers.
Nearly everything robust and geuine from two centuries ago has
been taken in hand and overhauled, and a vast prison based on


the principles of production has been put in its place. It is
rather like living in a factory where the only important thing is
what's produced, and yet we 're not like that---we need intimacy,
we dwell on the little follies of life for our pleasure, we take
notice of each. other not for what is useful in each other, not for
what goes towards producing things, but for the way wecturn our
heads, and our smiles, and that peculiar deep magnetism that pulls
us to this person rather than that. These are the real important
things of life, and yet that is hidden in our world. The middle
class still has its face fixed on the production. It's true, we've
made a factory. We live in a factory. Nothing else counts in
our lives but what goes on in the factory. Everything else---like
the family, or God, orthe countryside---has ceased to move/except
as an agreeable or even passionate attitude. But we have to make
it look like the earth again, we have to plant trees, we have to
find out how to turn ourselves from little factory-dwealers into
men again. We can't do it by running away from the factory.
But we can't just leave things as they are.
What intimacy can we hand down, as the old generations handed
down intimacy to us? All we inherit is a repertoire of principles-
rules and principlest Where is the intimacy, unless it is What
each of us desparately manufactures out of the broken sticks of
our lives, in the ruins? Nearly everything we ha vem even now 9
has come out of an intimate act---everything from theatres to
horse-rac: ing. It is all started from an intimate and usually
tiny group of people, doing something of the greatest importance
to themselves, but which would be folly---an evening's pleasure---
to us now.' What human creatures did was the highest imprtance
to them. But that has been knocked out for us. Yet we still


This went hand in hand with the discovery of our bodies,
it was one and the same journey, and at the end the sense of health
was total: it meant not just better nerves but the mystery of
created life.
When you arrive in England after years away you feel a
wonderful thrill and cosy excitement, provided you've got enough -
money in your pocket. Everything from the louses to the lights
in the train-compartments seem made with intimate devotion;
intimacy and saftey are the first things that strike you. You
can settle down. Let the mind wander. You're free.
There is an underlying safe zone in which everybody is
joined together, in England; ra ther sleepy, never reaching Words.
You see it in people's faces. Everybody belongs to the same
world, but this is never spoken. This is why everything feels
so safe and intimate. You have the underlying collective silence
of the family, without the limitation of freedom. Things don't
have to be spoken. This is a marvellous relief. Centuries of
organic development are behind that. Two Englishmen saying hullo
after ten years away from each other may only shake hands and give
each other a quick intimate glance that to the foreigner is no
look at all. But there's terrific historical development behind
that. The most infinitesimally subtle glance is understood.
This is what makes it So difficult for the Englishman abroad
sometimes. His glances, little gestures, grunts, nods, yawns
and smiles mean absolutely nothing---except perhaps that he's
gone cuckoo.


children of men with money in their pockets.
This doesn 't me an that I think myichildren are going to
inherit anything better---however mich I like to protest that I
didn'tforiginate in the middle class. For no one really originates
in the middle class---they're broken in at the age of two or five
or owenty, according to circumstances. The fact is that my
children will still be the butcast children of a man with money
in his pocket, however little he may actually have. The money
lies all round them, in the schools and universities and hospitals
and friends and jobs that are waiting for them---the whole abstract
apparat tus of the middle-class inheritance, which cannot be avoided.
From whai t I have learned in the middle class you have relations
with the people you like and the people you do business with.
The people you like are the people you approve of and Who presum-
ably approve of you: the approval is handed back and forth on the
principle of the market-place. If you hate somebody you turn
your back on them. The breaking-off of relations is an a massive
scale in the middle class, a deadly ritual that stops the blood.
There is nothing binding. Nothing you can absolutely take for
granted. So no arguments can be carried through. Nothing can
be inherited. We offer our children dust and ashes, and there's
no way of getting round it.
There is the C omple te collapse of human authenticity.
The
thrill and mystery of the human presence is gone. It is leaving
the human face---the cracks and lines of real experience and
single human power are going. He has no power. But some he
must wield. You can't get round it. You can't get round
the single human creature as the basis of all thought. In the
end even the rules and principles wear down because the shere


same. .
We got out of England in a panic rush, after the third
winter. There was no money, the violence had caught up with
us. Here was a country where a kind of psychic violence had
taken place. A shock right at the centre of life. So much
violence had been done, England wasn't big enough to contain it
all, So it spilled over on to the continent of America. We
couldn't hide it any longer---the charnel house. The countryside
was there: it lay there like a reminder, a great waste camp
for food-production.
Angelo and francine were like a fire waiting for us---when
we got out. The moment I saw Angelo walking along the Rue de
Beine arm-in-arm with Melli, whotd gone on before, I knew a fresh
life was about to open. But we only get signs in this worldm
not the ac tual me ssage.


Part 11
-visible girders.
Cd 0
W uleke still
d A
12 fasui V
farimy
ho V
When Angelo and I met, the
ee : orus ras put
aeides Aed-the-Supopean-drese
weomething of-which We
seemed to have been starved, and which we needed for our-uevelop-
M - ment. à Before, I'd only had the dream of my country. I say
I s snh 2 - 'onlys, but perhaps it is all one over has o I'd been enchanted
and daunted---as part of the very samelexperience---by my country,
by the people I loved in it. For me, in England, there was al-
tays that marvellous fairy-pnohontment, together with everything
else. It alrays gaveme that twinge of intimate excitement.
And Angelo was the same. Hitherto, he'd only fought the battle
of his country. And now there was a kind of reprieve for both
of us-a new dream opened-bebmeon-esg-bbeb-seemod-d4seement-from
ampthing-olso-before It included our. oun countries but in a
strange way was the best in our countriess ac-mehr thet
It cane in glimpses. le learned
fast from each other. Ho really showed me Itely---through the
horror he felt at it mostly, and through himself. And I shar ed
him e.bit of the world outside---in myself. Yet, weto
o We felt we shared the same dream and had done al-
ways e -Aow, for the first time, ve were meeting in each
other the protagonists of that life-dreen---in the flesh; that
was what made it remarkable for us.
Lae
in Roma
Only in
first weeks/dia we really see a lot of eaah
other. I-had-hardly any Italianand Angela no English,-but
in-some way
VCI TAC poured-ont-epocshoe that raro immed-
fately comprenerettles It was in a strange and even -


ROMAN CONFEESIONS
ad .
3 Jadl 6 l A lavye,
Angolo
Ne coomed
hob r. kuow how Lo lied becme af, eth. A imps taad
paiud
whm the nijeer
atirad
and
lis ege mald tix Heuselae, dackly
eindl,
lokeA
las
like >tme u ceeuel A Y vill
+ cose
4 stane tal Nm
talh ub K 1 a
Ihememle te fealuir 7 Carren
aud V unld clomp
cerret
He Mice -
wa Coand-
lirle
>tudis
pinitise
aud Latred in Lis
talne hil cadd 6o
wod und sreel; A tpeng
hew- clean. srisine
chais, : lang
-imohardve bhind Slun, A smisellinp
Weele alw,
-Ihec inild (c tamel
lauf
desk with une, slidiig dramen,
:b 2 - da a
Uhich
: mo
Aisects: and Aput nit A Klindiig ljhe
chasel
ayy
anhstatdd. wilh 7-p 1
A fen tip las ii he shaloc,
Bacl nesning Le lelr L. fese
in ten. h mack cestaii poratu
the AsceC
palw
rustuserstu, wridiy tirca
n a hing
ead
nine N tan,
a he useasel
tense
tis Lead -peyrd.
mite
losk 1
Hlidl,in Stass
alwag fmidin
nnol Skedded;
drd
uk 2 the Ingsc
Slin hosc.
hin
annd L
rcil
lif,
+he visin
tmly
L Lal skidied hiu nc tudier tal,
wll his
a ca Lshn
- had
prinis
put
dennatot 1
J uf uit liig-a
hergic, And he'd mu A
Aud
soutten nill inls
l kuon Lu.
sen
saki 4 nisiuiit,
No, Le'd heves
as Aa curd
a Kinee:
wele.
Ke a la
susaellanidi hi sulipel L
7 ai
he A
ao mstuatin
anilitnis 1 L da islinis,
Jane hant
Yoo
LSh nnlol
aw the ha . € ecaolel
kud, un
too unirothhg


Cru ls hin eges snd trow sain. Mernwhile
with Lo lay
sih.tnt coackel lp, Men -ith A licasette stuck meninto,
betuce hem- Yie hasl h hiv,ean woros! Aluall, canal
hue immshn ulm few uul to betvee
IL CL c
Vey litle,
Jol Yoc
h mte mar.
Lomisel,
ume a kn am sfprentics
A Li
ul Lin,
H tuytled Uncl h ke flar
and uho lmyhier
aund
hene >ic
hoon.
-fra
fungerit
>xto un enly
pmiee
uitl He
otG
Shak
Kes
pauho
A nce
-tLe flro F
ais & .i.t
Anol he uuld pace the .iom, p-kting
uoune
ludspekn
creling.
tinf Lis sisette snoke, squimr.
guick yor
Cile tamching 3 crec F.
sulli vidd snadziine
aship
lui
Bd Aue ustain 7 Hhe
tulk - snllinl.
L med
Surs Y dorgoten.


sset
disturbing way like arriving home---back to ourselves---in
a place re couldn't recogniso, with a language spoken which wasn't
our own, with none of our friends---no familiar face---at hand.
dram
It was like re meeting
tre and perhaps it could
never have been anything but a series of- vivid glimpses, in the
heat of th afternooh.
de oubt
Pn L e
torae 0ne
a ally yu DR stbier Angeio suenen to KCN noummg about-theee-torms,
lahz
as pa Jearned tmey veront
: m-they-oculd
novon-ber The ree Ae erpe a thet * oal strangers
for aver A nA a a
a a exac uay HOY we graspor the-imdodble
togathers
It had to be a com-
plete innor thing. It couldn't de: velop, even. We couldn't
have, a real daily relationship. ie had a kind of ono for years---
but there were long silences, of months, sonetimes a year, or tno,
and most of the time we were nearly a thousand niles aray from
each other in any case. And our meetings were brief---two or
thrce days here and there. We wrote to each other only in our
hours of need. Perhaps we couldn't have glimpsed that invisible
and darkly unexplained and awful and ecstatic world Without being
total strangers at the end as at the begiming. Gur ac tual living
worlds really were strange to each other. Or rather, they were
the same in the darkness of the night and the passing of thousands
of years of t ime, tuc - X Beel ly day.
Ponglo
la me
In those first weeks he
Verdi,for the first tine o
He made me listen first to Il Trovatoreo suete
à a ne
so that ne tears poured denn
faeer Then I think it was
La Forza del Destinog I
and La Traviata. The
shere horror
H of Il Trovatore---the absolute
strokes in the music that are like strokos of fate---he pointed
out. He had a way of conducting the music and standing over


you making wild faces, which was irritating but at the same time
the thing that joined you toget ther, without you liking it. Later,
in Paris, he grew ashamed of this warmth, shich Francine told him
Prut
irritated people: without it he wasn't really himeelf. In those
first days he used to grip. you in the arm sometines, at a stirri ng
passage in the music, and squeoze you right to the bone, with a
sharp, thrilling gleam in his eye. He really became Verdi.
Verdi was Italy. You C ould see it. And insi de Angelo it was
of W Enated
all one; - and, as he said with disgust, so little, in the
Italy you saw all round you. For mo he began a kind of search
into Verdi which is like going into a vast unknown landscape littie
by little, and even after eight years this search seems hardly to
hare started. Ke found for me land after land of eteee
pronise and I orbidden wonder that I thought couldn*t.
exist in life---even in nusic to which I had always gone with my
last insoluble problems, since a childo wsth-sg-leot-ersof-eot-ertoferd
It ras Angelo cho first touched the edge of this
pulled aN
had
Verdi-land for me, -
DSnETH the door that
opened,
3 A
antbut nr
== Verai
ick
d J marvel that is visible
Bet
aananous ap peals that
a reactt words. incefo despised : Italy
because he was hof so completely and ovopwholmingly. It was nhy
he stood alone. He ras perfectly misunderstood---I eay perfoot-
ly becapeo in our time there Xo a kind of perfection to be had
fron/being misunderstoge a man cen be renfensls
keatifically
pisunderstood, his nger taken for svectness, his darkness for
light. Angeig Was carled a enob-by Heliene ho-epent their
lives scraying away at tne Tabric of-fife find a fat Position
in it eeuseof the terrific Italy be capresentod,
irring
and azsling Erean
asntat e11 pleasant,


Argalo an
- id his yearning tobreak avay to
S a nore marvellous forma
and colourgand even---in those first days, rhen he was much undor
RomanAnfl uences---love. Ferthe sons and aaugrters orrurction-
Aries, up to their necke in day-to-day e and day-to-day
persanelities', he didn't exist beceuse he dian't give hinself
a Tashionable name like 'comunist' or 'socialist' or 'poet*
(among tho ninete ent th sentury namos current then) ; and hovas
a 'snob' because of this terrific Italy he roproconted, which was
for thenjust high tone, social tone boingall they really grapped
gnsooketfor.
He took mo into his Oin real country through Verdi---into the
basic harmony where all tho colours and heat and massive strong
undertones of Itelian life tere joined and intograted like the
unfolding of a E
story that had never been heard before
in the history of the marld but had almays been there and belonged
to tho sky and the hot, golden dawns, and to a mysterious, bre ath-
taking spell at the centre of things, where they were born, the
centre of all self and being. And so there ras something basic
and final and conpletely unchangeablo in Verdi, in the clattering
first bers and the gradual unf olding that soomed never to have any
hesitation but to contain tho fullness of eech moment of feeling,
alrays burnished Vonierfully like c opper, full of warm, saturating
11ght, thrilling with a peculier life-thrill that touched all the
so urces of taste and smell and sight. That was the first in-
pression he gave mo---in the terrific clanging introduotion to
La Trovatore, and in the theme of the gypsics that contained the
burnished light of their fires, end the heat and cifhadas round
them, and to give the glint of their ear-rings and show thoir
bright, dark eyes, and carry off their fine, fatal, unswerving
passion that knew nothing but its objoct and never the consequ-,


party, and Angelo soomed to thrive on this and understond it,
yet at the same time he felt uncorthy of 1t; though what he felt
unworthy of I didn't know at that time. The big, pleasant, long-
haired, smiling singer, with her bare arms and low-neckod dross,
seemed to intimidate him and take avay his usual direct and inqu-
isitive approach to people---his questionnaire-self. Ho didn't
know her name, he rasn't introduced to her, but there he was in
foom
her thick arms, being led round and round the little,in a dance
he'd nover done before. With a sound instinct, Angelo was alwags
formal.. He never allowed himself a noment's informality with
another person, even a close friend: in clothes or habits. He
let off with his nouth sometimes, into a kind of soorching vul-
garity, but that was as far as it vent. He aidn't seem to be
able to trust his path---see his way shead---mithout a formality
Lar
of menner, dress, walk and speech. There was 8 nonderful photo-
graph of Angelo as a student which I looked at again and again
mhen Francine showed it to me; he had cuoh a total absence of
bohemianiam---that cancer of middle-class 1if0. Lwagunod to
those little flag-aigns migdic-alass ohildron
* - now you
that-they-erone going to cocupy the ordexpebtet poritions-of
pomer-ang-more,and- thas they-went-to ravel
tr bit otyie
Corlasin
A nor paser A
bagmtpoomtor
6i a Jjactots ant ties
andrroit-ol-hetg-e-enthe Tace, so as to porpetuate the Bame hard
and solf-anaking_valnen as their perente
daetrof
Socialien- oP-1eke TOlig1o
bletent pafreedon Lor art,te
Hwr
give the thing ita modorn-dresss ind In tto photograph there
old
was so much of the eEr morldo hieh hedn been-touohod yat bE
: itet
V 14 tinmg 80 poveriul that It could
effordrebeliabngod
It took ny breath aray at firat,
There was Angelo, going into 8 concert at the Teatro Argontina,
with cn umbrella in hie hand, his tie 30 strasght, his head


lifted, muningly and also peinfully, vith a kind of strained
delioecy, his ayes nerromed clightly, vith a frown, fastidious
and clear-cut, while he tas caught by tho flash-lamp. In this
formality his lonely and inimitable nature stood out ruch bettor
than it nould otherwice. He seemed to be walking out of the
olose Roman warld of that time---I think it ras just at the ond
of the nar; the Rome When the atrecto mere drenched with brilliant,
stifling sunlight, not thick with traffic as non, though noisior
than now; a Rome that ras still lazy, undisturbed, southorn,
a tiny city on wo sidee of a river, ito population less than
half what it had been in anciont timos; mithout the tall,
pastol-shadedblocks of flats on the outskirts, but with omall
villes among trees; the Rome where trees lost their leaves and
these leaves settlod on the roads and rere hardly touched;
vhero the satimate part of the city, round the Piazza di apagna
and as far as the Piazza Venozia at one ond and tho Pinzza del
Popolo at the other, oxtending along tho river through tiny,
mediaoval streets as far as tho ghetto opposite Trastevero, ras
still in a noisy southern sleep. And Angelo seomed to be step-
defic
ping from that hot.pricht world into tho dinness of the theatrets
foyer---for musio, a imrtm FA
ithoucha-look-ef
paint Thot vorid-nes elesed
sartur L a beon invaded and
brokon-ante-by-hordon of Seaadnta looking for sonk
à burean
crats, en Freignet
fho hoavy southorn conventicns, s
oith a searing hot desire underneoth uhioh they---and the brothels---
tried to contain, lay over oyerything, in a midday stillnoss and
boredom, the oity squareg empty and barren, friendchip hardly
possiblo exoept in the southern terms of convention---freindehip
vith a nomen unthinkable---TOman heraolf un thinkable, marrioge
the heavy imprisoning gate that çloned on you for over in the


barren square, your dreais floating uselessly into the hot,
dusty air,ma tedium that closed you furthor and furthor in
yourself, while your vonen_bred you ohildren and closed yeuround
nith dullness Bad habit and a base, fleshy-possessiveness whioh
if tharted turned into oruol-fury.
That was. before he met Francine. She visited Rone university
hal
as a student fron France. I often rondered aborrt their first
3 AA libe
meetingy I-wondered-if it sas deliaater-enguiringr-intrigued,
with $
jeyenr
* B found thosa Sreeden
tro
becauee Francine aell had come out of a heavy tedium, but
more northern, the northern-Latin tedium of tall, many-vindowod,
dark buildinge from the nineteenth century, stretohing fron one
end of the street to the other in a firm declaration o f intell-
igence, symmetrioal, oven pleasant, but with a monace, even some-
thing dismal, a Horld fixed and set in its intellggent routines,
with a formula for everything and a mature behaviour whioh fright-
ened the unoertain ones and made them walk the streets alone for
hours on end, as Francine did in Faris shen she was a youns girl.
The oxcitement that engulfed Angclo vhen a woman was presont
was really a life-excitement. It rent far beyond the actual
vonan, and certainly beyond sex. Porhaps that ras why Franci ne
was so aware of it; she was far fron being just joalous. I
remomber asking ne that question one hot af ternoon after caffoe,
in the ir room that looked dom a hill towards the Vatican--in
a queer, captivated, hissing voice, hie eyes piorcing, That
do you think it'd be like liring with a really beautiful woman---
an extraordinary noman, a real Venus---do you think you'd ever
get tired of her, Wouldn't there be something new evory day,
so that you'd never get tired of her, you*d always feel this
terrible, ecstatic beauty---imogine her body---sO langorous and


mighty and soft---I think I'd go mad:* That vas the theme of
nearly every conversation you hed with a young man in.Rome-a-if
you vero alono with him; ah, 1f beauty came his way---a real
woman---ah, then he'd do something! But it never did. The
mou de always paased, it was always just a momont and thon the
wor returned, the real-s-all too real---Woman returned with le r
ti ome quelities, her fears like his own, her coquettry and
whit
aht for a women--wan
But,
everlasting woman---a woman
b Harft a moment---who suatained her beauty like a marvellous
as touchable and gleamingly vivid as a Caravaggiot And
as E man.
There was alwaye texst fevarish ond troubled desire a
Rome, a
onlry
obetinate passion that wes, contained by its being so
gnaringg,
fleshly---only the langorous, yearning flesh, on hot afternoons,
behind olosed shutters, Sn_the-obreets, in oars at night, under
ln tte parts In
the troea, a oontact that was sudden and
oould quell
compelling,
lul
daily
it, for a moment; nothing in, lire, in people. X And that pas
why
Angelo*e theme always came up again--m'If I was alone in d room
with an attrec tive woman I wouldn't. be able to resist her,
I oouldn't, gouldn't, I know it! à And his aotual alin flesh
would seen to tremble and shudder. Half of thie came from other
people's expectations, espocially women's expeotations. What
sort of al feeble creature must you be if you didn't throw yourself
on a women when alone with Her? Were you lacking---of was she
ugly? They were the only two possible answers. in the southern,
tight, provinoial rorld. pr oourse, the northerner found it
refered K Le flesh. harhow
Lashth iy tmadom
Eveyhip
sperfelly


188 en
easier, safe in his cold cl inmate. But whero the hot, dense
air poured through the shutters, and the flesh was broun, and
the sex stirred hotly... Aht And the nan felt a certain
sensual obligation; all his pride was caught up in it, there
was even a challenge from the voman, silently transmitted
through the generations by the mother. There was always a
servico to be done for the woman. Failing it meant the finel,
basic shamo. So men looked at wonen audaciously in the street
when they didn't want to, when thoy folt actually tired and dis-
gusted and bored.
And in thie world the easy freedom of the northern women
lookel1 1ike the most bletant sexual challenge of all. Theg
shere oponnees and unguordedness of the north arp a sort of
nagerv meddening invitation to sex at any time. There are no corni
hurtan
in the foreign world---no horns, no auch thing as infidelity
because everything is freef This is what the first dark,
hu m
provincial glanco at the foreign world says. It doesn't see the
key top that freedom, rhich is invisible. It doesn't readily
peroeive the invisible. As Angolo told me, the Italian doesn't
see the 'invisible nan' inside another person.) There are only
the outer gestures pf freedom, vhich look quaintly unguarded and
kimko
aontam
dispassionate. It seems ao easy to, A invade that world---snatoh
some of its prizes.
was
In that provincial world tho oazzo---the prick-- an im-
wan
portant and proud possession from the earliest age. a It i the
man*s special acquisition---something by God's grace which sets
him apart from the other half of the species. Kale and female
WOR
are the fundemental division in life: you telkel/be your children
as *the male' called intonio and *the female' called Paula.
ItA 6 almays the 'male* and the 'female'. And the femala


at birth a disappointment. A male 1 a groat occasion.
There even lingers in Italy a sense of the waman as a handmaid
of duty, and the man as.a kind of guest, raiting for his food and
calling for his wine. It is an alnost Arab sense of vomen,
sometimes. It goes deep into the ancient norld.
cas- peells - Snsonis that oun Snsondehig-dovetoped.
And in thia Aamolopmantit fonnd its dastruatson,
In-Rome -thet
et cxvey -
prosentod
ie sat less and less of each other
after Lelli and I started to live together. Once we ret by
chance at 3. Felice in Circeo, by the soa, one Cunday afternoon,
and nodded to each othor like pleasant acquointancos. Our
glances were distanto yetse-all eeened to-imon-tre-betonged
eeeh-etherin Bune reyo UH the other hand, re really rere
acquaintances, we really did know nothing about each othor;
yet we kner each other better than re kner the people we called
our friende at that timo. Both sides were anbiguously avare
ofthis art d an dIur if chenge matters.
Thenever we aid meet in Rome it was stiff and unsatisfoctory.
The old warm speech had gone It seemed to be because we rere
four now---two couples. Yet more seemed to be promised.)
le just vaited, let things alide.
A fen weeks after Kelli arrived Francine took me aside
and spoke to mo in a rasping and bitter way, saying I seemed to
have lost myself, I never visited them now, and when I did there
was no longer the old passion in what I said; I held back and
eeemed cautious and didn't give myself; what had happened to
me? I à couldn't explain, because I didn't know myself. Te


vere walking down the hill torards st. Feter's, just the tuo of
us, and I remember she ras very angry, pale and quivering slightly.
But all did was shrug my shoulders and smile at her; she val ked
into a shop and that vas good bye. Angelo, as almays in these
things, kept epart. He didn't say a word before or after.
Hc never said he agreed rith Francine or aisagreed. It seemed
to nake hin fecl enornoucly tired, any friction of that kind.
He just kept quiet. Anymay, there casn't a nord betucen us for
mony months.
Holli and I vent on living on tho outskirts of Rome, making
our lives together, timorously, building up bit by bit and day by
day the life that had boen smashed in both o uf us. There was
no time for cnything else. Then suddenly I phoned Angelo one dey
to see how he cas. And to my relief he nade a cry of delight,
and we wore soon making a date. le all met again---re rore
friends. But really it was the sene. There was no development.
The first flush---Then Angelo had thought ve could make a vonder-
ful group together of sone kindu--vas over. And now we were
separate. Really Angelo and I should have seen each other alone
all the time. Then, so to speak, Italy vould have tolerated
it: it vould have becn within the traditions; above all, within
Angelo's. But he had chosen another Morld---by marrying Franc ino, *
And Melli and I belonged to that other rorld by birth. Go a
mon*s relation---mith the women excluded or at best onlookers---
was out of the question. Yet anything more than that was in sone
peculiar nay renderod impossiblo by Italy.
Hy only enjoyable mome nts with Angelo after that, in Rome, a
were when we rere along---in a caré.,sitting in his car, while
he poured out his complaints against Italy. But they reré
snatohed moments---they nere really only urgent plens for him


to get avay from Italy. He asked my advice: should he leave?
And I said I thought so, yes. He had to onter the other world
completely---for a time. As I had done, o le aving England. Then
he couzd come back, vhen he'd shaken off hie country sufficiently
to be able to inherit it in its fullness and truthe
lalex
In our friendship, even, in Paris, there was alvays a negative
element that seemed to come fron him alone. He never seemed
really to find his ease nith us. He never really accepted us-
or himself in our presence. I Fonder hon far he s07 us in our-
Aohdub
selves. He would be at his ease with us for a ti- he rould
seem to accept us fully---and then it nould be broken again:
n mae
disficulty:
von 1- * 1 TA
year or so, did we seem absolutoly and fully to be ourselves with
eech other; perhaps because we had each made axind of surrender
in our om life, the surrender into neytruth that araits ev ery-
body. - But before that the oaso-fould always be broken---sudden-2
ly; and he vould seen aldost a st ranger again, there vould au dien-
ly be one of thedid formal questionnaires directed at Kelli about
Germany and at me about England. And this troubled Francine as
wefl. Itseemad to trouble--merentually to srecksunhor sorves.
DIt produced a kind of constipatian---a most intimate physical
refusal to give. Nothing could be taken for granted: one nasn't
Howly ae bopan h L L L
accepted, in one's intimate nature. mhiewe A
meino
Francine Lad mgyered A a low She saaded tis cold uan I miv SR
seemod T o0
ouiy
Aesene, waile ak tke Lah rune iv 3 as wtcking
Befere, me anly thought she couldn't uni erstand him praperly
tod
diin't roally see hou much sho-sufeored. In a way, re-weme
DCCA
beth too busy with eut friendship with Angelo---in music, books,
in malks and little drinks and cups of tea together, EET his
long confessions about hon unberable he found family-life, aad
weslanland
rlal us
alse Franc ine. She was so nervous, he SR. Gmg, In
Romee)


ho had
yearned for othor women; he-couldatt etend-being
In Paris,
With-ono moman all the-time But that was over non It tas deorly
e a a terrible unsatisfied 11fe-necd. And to Franoine he
a ways seemod to bo shifting his position, in the intimate
things: she mas already, by nature, a highly nervous porson,
fragile and quick, especially quick to doubt herself, and she
doubly needed a resting-placo in hor intimate life, thich ho
couldn't give her. Essontially, he Was alone, rom
cats Coapletciyontit-mauy-mzne as porhapo only a Sioilian,
ancreus Greeke
with his otrange conneotion to the, classtcnt Worla,Yoen bo.
hitk d
There gas
- EEEE no devolopment in our friendehip oven
shctle,
STurke
jdead
uhen I thought there vas, for this roason. For a long time af ter
de thrm
thoy'a moved to Faris---for about two yeors---we heard hardly
dailg
anything from them; th just one or two lotters. They
those
couldn't seo us, he explained in tte letters, because they were
living in such miserable ciroumstences. For the time being e
# * Ptr thie U
- dn' ne asa that
thie-he-mas ompreseing werke doters -feretg and-aninom-to
peryle
in m isery IL
Agalo' 2 wor 6
turus don't show thomselves to cach othert
that was his world: the very opposite of aurs; a'world uith-
who 8low ntorsaloe mls sTheght , pride, waa lky ene-boryans
out solidarity, really---a Horld of lonely croaturook But we
didn*t perceive this at the time. He just read his letters and
left it at that. He wrote that they were ral ting far their house
to bo ready---thoy had bought a littlo houso. Then we should
come. Ce could ev a otay with thama Ho soemed to need a scene
to be laid for our meetings; and if thio scene wasn't laid pro-
porly theee ras/disaster. Cur friendship onded chon re failed
to lay the scene: we hadn't time; te arrived in Faris suddonly.
WLon
Because Hedei v I cnde La rnme.
At the moment, ne needed his consoling talk noot, his talk stoppod. A
He belonged to a strange, terriblo Horld. It had absolute-


ly no sympathy in it, absolutoly no love. It was classical.
And he himself seemed to become more classical, too., The
leavoning influences of Italy---which.are really those of the
church---seeme--seemed to cease. He became more stork, more crisp and
slim, nore piercing, more direct, with a great air of lonel in ss
and desertion round him, as I imagine the Sicilian londscape to
be. His soul burned and penetrated. It didn't communicate,
except in'tiny bursts. It didn't console, nor was it consolablo.
It was like the appearance of an andiont Greek soul---e0ger, gleom-
ing, fierce, unsympathetic. And togother with this his immediate
1ife seomed to be more squalid than beforo. He was squalid at
meals---onatching at his food, guzzling his vine greedily. Hie
teeth were black fron nicotine. He made sneering remarks to him-
self, under his breath. He shot insulting glances at Lelli, as
if to pay her out for any love he had spent on her, Francim
cried endlessly, the tears would pour quickly down her face and
disappear again, apparently unseen by hin. He was like the land
and eky of Sioily, I caid to him once, et one of those last meet-
ings; though ra never seen Sicily, only glimpsed one of its
harbouns; what I knew, I felt I knew through him. 'You*re less
and less of a person, A I said to him, 'you're lendscape---as
every man must be, more and moref if he develops properly---ho
must be the landscape of his own country---you're the rivers and
hard rocks and long, deserted beaches of Sicily, you*re the torrid
nights---pitiless sea--!o
bar
one
4ue I road soperere that in sicily there # squalor among
coeK
n aly
people, whererer they are tagether, en inner squalor, but when a han
wbn
you*re alone, outside the villages and homes, in the enormeus,
E a
Vayh
Syde he
osicly
still country, you get at the soulhe the origin, bus L io hardly
a human scul.


of a vast flood trying not to get his feet wet---haunted by vul-
gerity, banality, madness, chaos, self-obsension, all the pitfalls
of the creature who is denied society.
I only know one clear example of the same thing in England and
that is the writer Joseph Conrad. He was brought up in the other
tredition, close to the German world, but he used English. So you
get a glimpse of it through the way the language changes under hts
pene First of all, it isn't, Inglish. It isn't us. Uhen you
reed Conrad you feel you are reading a kind of translation mithout
it having tho disadeantages of a translation: you are listening to
a real man, only translated in some way e And because his concepts
are for us lofty---that 1s, they begin not in a human situation but
in the reflections of a lonely and cultivated man---there is a terr-
ific vulgarity in his work now and then which you never get in an
Inglish vriter of the same extraordinary powers. You see it sone-
times when he talks about people in the lower classes, even thon he
is admiring them. They aren't quite mhole. He cantt quite see
them. They're half-caricatures, half serioue sketches. The
his
barmaid in one of
short stories has large bosoma---no name; ;
she is Miss Blank. She has no speech vhen we go into the bar--
no light. little gestures; though we've been going into this bar
for years and she knows us well. She seems locked in her lon
status. And this is really the status of vulgarity---a kind of
blind inner ugliness and smallness: essentially, she hasn't got
beyond primitive evacuation-difficulties---her sueat probably
stinks, she might let out a fart through shere lack of proper
control. This is probably what provincial vulgarity is at the
root---something to do with evacuation, with the question of
primitive control. It reminds me of Angelo's frequent recoil
tis nose eigted suigaits unrh distaste, ron tze
ponm penplian tha nnse 1iftad al iohtiv with distaste. from the


Ferhaps the friendship collapsed into its real self.
Perhaps the friendship ne have now---of silence---is what we were
Working towards. - At the frontier of the invisible, when we
seemed about to become practical friends and knew the recital of
each other's difficulties by heart, it stopped. : He took the
necessary aotion; but only beoause it was inevitable, perhapa.
It was a devastating shook, among all the others we had just.
had in England. It seemed our chief consolation in life was
dead. But aftermerds, in a strange way, 1t was better. There
a Aaw
vas a sense of relief; anaxtreneordimag senso of freedom which
appily
we couldn't understand. Te both buckled down)to work againlas
ver wozi in Rome
AZAT
auttreme
Jeeu thin
Perhaps Angelo's auer
intuitions had kHWF tomcoring
et : this beforehand.
He could only take actioh from himself: from the state of
his onn feelings. In that way, he nover used judgement. Ho
acted straight from his feelings : they were the apring of energy.
That was the only way open to him because he had no society in
him. He had to take his immediate, dazzling-olear appraisal
of things, becaus e he was alone. I remember how he described
a young German once---'He's lost his eyes---when he sits at
table he's looking for his eyes all the time---on the floor,
under the table, but they've gone---1 And thie was an exact
description not because it hit off a cheracteristic of the man
but because it immediately conveyed his approach to things---
it shomed you at once an image of. his pale, stretched face,
Taken
wr Hous euar
that had toain so mich suffering EE -
a er under-
faodug
luy i
etead or penetratar/to a cause.
Ihem
Angelo's judgements of other people---or rather, picturest--
were ne ver tempered ni th sympathy, so there was no danger of


we were sitting at the lunch table, in the half-derkness,
sipping the last of the wine, with the sun gleaming through little
chinks in the shutters. And that subject, fascism, seemed there,
in the shadoms. But it was triumphantly passed over betveen
us. I can remember now what a triumph that mas, so soon after
tat
the war, to forget that I was English and,he was Italian: to
let a whole basic history go by the board, perhaps because we
knew what a reward there was for us if we did so. It was an
lough
intimate triumph for us both shich we never spoke
tie
abouty
overcame politics---and five years of concentrated wer-publicity. 3ne
lic. You can't get round that horrible war-publicity:
COYTAINBONE
C tatina
- * fascist was a HE
ind
black core - - might K d in the heart of any Italiano
And I thrust these thoughts, which had novez ear e
in me and yhich I had yat to-think throigh, away from my mind.
Debothmssistod on sceingench one
80se-merss
was the cirf pleeone usd tro encd * -
Fu -
That, partly aacounted
E a
40-sence C a
ion in-our-oonvereetioner froedom from war. And itwas a kind
offreedon-neither-ef-ae-hod-knom-bofore. 9 We'd never shared
dreams with anyone outside our own worlds, hitherto. I think
I can remember the dim sensation at the back of my consciousness
of Angelo as a fascist--I don't mean fascist in thought but
fascist by birth, by torture, if you like. It never game int o
my mind as anything consoious, but there was a certain hidden
recoil in Angelo, an hauteur---a certain imposed dignity that
lurked there---which belonged to fascism. It was an inaccess-
ibility to freedom. It was something black. It was a. neg-
ative painted World---the world was painted bright colours but
these were cheap and artificial; but of course the child had


Intr V I
taken them as bright. It was a sense of a black negative
contre that dangerously disturbed the natural world all round
its The colour was always black: This was the colour of the
absolute negative; the no-colour; it was like the perversion
of life to the point of exaltation. Exaltation was a strong'
element. The black centre exalted to be putting an end to
life. And it was strange that in the last months of our friend-
ship, when all his childhood was reappearing to him, and perhaps
he was facing his past square-on, he and Francine were wearing
black most of the time, entirely black---black coats, black
stockings, black shoos, black ties, even black shirts: They
mere tno strange figures in Englend---pale and cut out clear
with black. An enormous negative had been done tolife. The
black disturbed Melli. She said so at the time. She aidn't
know why.
Rad
Rome softened him in the war-years because it was
nature
: - VS the leest fascist of Italian cities. There ien't the
Pruphs
right pride in Rome. There is a bit of the encient bombast---
cutting a figure again---but the city has passed under a lot
of wreokage since then. There is something more like Jewish
14 Rome
resignation, a sense of the passing of things, the doom behind
all power. It cones from real kncwledge. And this knowledge,
from centuries of watching power at work, acted on Angelo when
he first came to the city.
There was something too neat and finished about fasoism
for Rome. She doesn't like too much assertion, just as she
doesn't like finishing a building. I haven't seen a really
finished building in Rome, either old or new. Something has
to be left, a bit of nude staircase or a gaping cellar, to


Cuntmir
Iealet
let the spirit out; you don't want to wrap things up too neat-i
ly. Too much logio stuns life. And the two things went on side
by side in Angelo---the senso that for freedom you have to let
Appotilz
things slide a bit, and the senso that some striot aotion wae
necessary--even some damage---to stop a mess. I suppose one is
only froe when one has these tno thinge as one and the same sense.
Socrates had it, which is perhaps why he was porsecuted. And you
found it in English politios, when there ras such a thing.
The Romans are empiricists as the Inglish used to be, oxoopt
that they don't wait and see, thoy just vait. Chen you've finihh-
ed waiting for one thing to collapse you start waiting for another.
The consoling element in Roman noia lics hero--you are waiting
all the time in a kind éternal ante-room, and you dream of the
roon on the other side of the door which you nevar penetrate,
it gives a glow to * ante-room, even though nothing real oan
becaud evergaking
possibly happen fhore---sese H takes place in the other
room,/the last, magnificont salon of all. Nothing happens in
Rome a And Angelo was Boftened under thie first shadow of real
humani ity.
Fascism, like its ohild nazism, wasn't a politioal doctrine
in the Anglo-Sexon sense at all, but a facet of the provinc 1al
temperament. Ita basic interest was to out a figure in the
vorld. The Italien preoccupation with firura was its seed.
And both movements follored a theme that had beon going on in
the middle classes of Germany and Italy far decades before:
namely, that you have to show some vitality, there has to be
action, something must be disturbed, otherwise there is death
and enptiness. That, underneath, is the provinoial situation.
Thus, people complatoly inncoent of the political ideas of
fascism and naziem rore the causes of it---thoy bore it in


their way of talk and ga hering togethor. In the provincial
world, however you mey try to escape it, you begin to cut a fig-
ure the moment you go among other people. I don't mean you
try to show off. But you try to be lively, you have a certain
idea of the form any conversation should teke, and in some way
every conversation you have outside the intimate femily-circle
is a performance. This is so In Germany and Italy. Really
lici
the effortAngelo always made when he ras with otber people---
even as we found out, with us--was the effort involved in all
provincial gatherings. The idea of society as a source of ease
and natural behaviour is absent to. the provincial consciousness,
so that there is no society in the proper sense at all. This
lack of society was exactly what caused fasc ism and nazism,
not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. - The Italian is rarely arrogant, and I've never known
a murderous Germen.
I believe that Angelo never really perceived me as a whole,
only as moments. At one moment I was lively and pessionate,
striding all over the room, at another I was elegaic, at another
J penetrating, at another just absent, tmm D doing, saying,
apperently thinking nothing, a pesce morto---a dead fish.
He often used those words: he vould say, 'You*re sitting there
like a dead fish:' That is the Sicilien World, too. You sudden-
ly, in that world, achieve God: you suddenly put out massive
branches like an oak, you towor over other people for a moment,
delivering yourself. And then---silence again. For you eren't
an oak. You are only one for a moment, then you go back to


tradition, too. You have a philosophy, but you don't let it
go richt through your life. You don't jigger with the basic
things, like where your money comes frome $o it is at one and
the sene time a craven conformism and a rebellion: this creates
the negative and spurious element of fascism. And there again
is a reason why it took root in the provincial countries, Italy
and Germany, and not in our sorld: pover in the provincial
countires is the status quo that pervades everything outside the
family. It isn't on the whole open to discuesion. It is con-
ceieved as permenent and unelterable. The family is the real.
seat of discussion, unlike in our morld. And of course the
family is an island of interests to itself. But in our World
power is a fluid and contimally moving thing, alwaya in the
balance, and we ETOW up with an unquestioned sense of having
the right to challenge it. This fsthe moral indignation that
doesn't exist in the proxincial world---it ie an emotion really
and truly lacking. In our world having no power gives our
challenge all the more grace and rightness. In the provincial
out.
world having no power robs the challenge of anything but self-
interest. On this hub Europe---and the whole Christian world---
In America tis
is &
Yidden
is split in two.
spliv
gnaue
cine 3 ar.
If you are poor in our world your challenge to riches 1s
made clean. In the provincial world it is made dirty.
I think this is why my moral indignation, which I shall
always have whatever the flux of my interests, was finally for
Angelo---though not consciously or willingly---8elf-interest.
I think perhaps our friendship broke on this'hub, more than on
any other. At this point the two W orlds can't understand each
other.


c man
shouldn*t/pe do what he 1ikes, if it's his own 1ife? This
is the provincial freedom. : HSr man may go to the devil
Yan d ouv K6 l6 Jave lis aul, 4r thav sul's soke.
if he wishes to. A So the tendency is for overybody to be left
to his onn world, and for the world to consist of immediate
interests stirred and spurred by dreams. There are political
dreans, religious dreams---collective dreams of every kind;
and each time they happen there is an enormous upheaval.
The development of the met tropolitan world 1s opposite to this:
its greatest modern revolution has been industries, namely the
slow organic alteration of life according to practical observ-
ations, not dreams.
The provincial dream is the only form of collec tive action,
the only patriotism. This is the same for Italy as for Germany.
Like the "erman, the Italien is elone, he has to fight elone.
Like the vermen he expreases nature, its marvel and vigour.
He has to fight through with the dream of self, the drean of
Aream
porer, the dream of Tork. The inviaible is all inside him,
not outside. He dceen't translate tho Anuistble into outside
terns, either. Thercas in our norld that happens all the time,
dream
the invis ible becomes continually absorbed and materialised in
life, our rooms and houses and family-habits reflect us, that
is, they express the invisible to which we belong, they ere our
outer realised forme And. this is rare in Italy. You will
find a clevor young doctor, fighting to get somenhere---not
just in a career, but in real development---vou will find him sit-
ting in the same kiga of room as everybody else, the same unen-
chanted sitting-cum-dining-room with 1ts naked electric 1ights
and hideous sidcboard, the same lack of glon and mystery. And
the woman who wants to get out of the old provincial life and
be fashionable and stylish liko the women in Paris, she sits


in the seme rooms, too, she invariably has the same sense of
unenchanted Womanhood as most of the vomen round her, only
Rawing logv Ike
she is troubled, often neuroticelly, from-thet natural balance
which was
wktak is her safest anchor. In Italy there isn't any sex in
Amon
the northern sense--ythe peculiar enchanted fascination one sex
has for tho other, based on respect. French love is respect,
chether you like it or not. It explores all the exquisiteness
and refinement of human respect. In origin it is aristocratic.
But in Italy that can't exist. There can only be the dream of
sex, usually from foreign infouences: it gets connected with
affectation, vanity, even rebellion; it isn't real enjoyment,
in lals Jies in
natural enjoyment. Natural enjoynent
the short-lived act
A E
of love. This 1s what sex means in Italy. It means the lit-
Ic prduce childven.
eral moment of' love,/ The invisible isn't in people or thinge:
there 1s just the body, which has its natural sppetites, for
sex and food. There isn't a reel development in people.
There isn't roal development of character on a communal scale,
just as there isn't in Germany; there is only development in
single people, by terrific effort. The sex in Germany is a
vigonus
tremendous assention of nature, it is nature as a massive and
ack
truthful droam; there isn't the desolation in sex that you
find in Italy:i-Xft has become a vigour that you get nowhere
I L
else. Sex is intact in Germany as passion. In Itely this
has been curtailed, as a force, first by the slave-civilisation
of ancient times---the inheritance of squalor---and then by the
diocoriaged all sex mfsiale the familiy.
churoh, whioh tended
The world of
Germany and that of Italy are divided by the fact that Italians
are historically an enslaved people, and when you have been
humiliated you don't feel like sez, you don't have respect for
your own body and you don't expect other people to. Your sex a


grasp me as he usually dido before the words were renlly out
of my mouth.
Sed tmt à yoane-abroad-suemed-todisscour-
age the deubt in-ene--wand-thet-this-monderfut-6fement-ceme-
baok-te-me when-we-returnedto inglant-for-e-fen-monthey He
looked surprised at the word *doubt'. And he caid nothing.
lived ia a ltla uml - xgg,
y A added that in Rome I was right inside
Isurround-
my_ommortd,
enved
ed-ayself with my own warrd,i-nas world to myseit); but in
Tiny
oud
Dlanguge, I
onete own country OnO hearg and understands every subtlety ene
I was
my rmm
again
learng again that -one-tentt the author of theymorld; a
NT - camai
clevar and conaise and complicatod-propositionp stated quiokly,
was
agomn
there $e the brisk compatition of idadofand a pleasent Annocent
edl anq I
doubt returng, a whon one oeasen to lay hold of every idea as if
it was a log to keep afloat by; one learna the flow of real
talk again, as ope can only have it with ono own people;
abroad, talk is just an exchange, an exchange of ideas; among
towerd, fom
your own people it is a blind and tontative journey wherepride
Angalo
But e aidn't seem to see. At least, he
only nodded and turned avay. He seemed not to be thinking on
those lines. o Yet something of the same kind had happened to
him: a great innocent doubt had departed. Ho seemed bent,
wholly, on certainty. Angelo bocame nore and more aysterious
for me in those days, as ho drifted furthor into his dry, isol-
wored 2 alasales.
ated, paled marvallona-and betlliantrantitrenttty
He was clinging to oertainty---for aurvival. It was a
Rard
certainty he'd made for himself out of - estous effort over
the laot fer years, and he now seemed to be keeping it going
by forco of willo not -
t. Calling mosF people
Thp
cretini vas an aspect of this.
faith in him reatty seem-
ed to have gone, 9 D Faith and doubt are really the same thing.


It eeemed he could no longer rest in himself, leave his devel-
fatm
opment to time. He had to cling to the invisible/ which he'd
built for himself. The invisible didn't exist in his vorld,
except looked inside single and lonely men. He clung to it for
all he was Worth, inwardly. You Wouldn't. think, to look at
him, that his work hed anything to do with enchantment or com-
passion at all. It seemed. something hard and cruel, sharp as
from
a knife, which meant him turning avay all tho time---Sm his
wife, everybody. It meant having no friends, even. the one or
ekl
two friends we are allowed in life. It moant that the blood
had almost to be stopped. Then, in perfect and absolute isol-
Pais
ation, taro work could begin.
leamad
It was the t opposite of everything I'd knw in my own
world. It wasn 't juot the solitude he and I had always talked
about---I'd urged him more and more to surround himself with
solitude, eapocially living as he did in a big city. This slitudle 2
his
Read
/ wasn't the same e Solitude is really tender and
win1t
easyo
tereah it echieves a pepveligus sense of spectatorship, a wh
the really solitary person isn't cut off from-enyone-oranything,
he is eiven more perfectly to life than anyone else. But -
Angelo. was entering an Absolute. He was being absolute in his
life. And this wasn't solitude. It was too artifioial. And
everything. in me, all my Englishness, shuddered at that. I
had no sympathy for it. It was a sort of death.for mo. I
wanted to get avay, to breathe properly again, to get back to
nte
our freedom that Melli and I had together, with each stosp day
unsepec/dly
hew
yal
ta La ue
growing fraoty bet tween us, with 1ts own)forn, : with- a
form each time. Angelo had to impose a formotn
He had to cling to the form he'd made for himself, because of


and squalors that are its language and always villbe. Really
he is a man without a faith. He's alone, with his thoughts.
He's in a dead world, just as a Sicilien is said to be in a dead
world when he's surrounded by nature; traditionally, he is com-
raluse.
pletely oblivious to E It E lies thete round him like a
pesce morto. Yet he is part of it. This is his streghth.
There is a terrible lonelinoss round him which is ser seet olas 8-
ital in origin, and more or less inconceivable to us; he is the
last clessical man. He is quite dirferent from.the Italian in
this. He has a driving and outting will, a pover to see clearly
even to the point of utmost darkness in his own self, and to make
dazzling-olear reflections even while he is up to his neck in
the squalor of life. He has this marvellous remotenoss and spirit-
uality, which Jeads to his suioide. The classical world was a
tragic world, and so is his. There isn't any hope, finally.
There isn't the mess and squalor of paganism---the having a stink
nccopoling
and Hking it; there is this alter ego of paganism---the obsess-
ive ant-trertted horror of ther vulgar whioh is the classical.
absolute, and the precise opposite of anything Christian.
Being with educated Sicilians is fo-me like snddenly find-
ymna
hursery
clildien dressed cn
ing nyoelf in a meaery
bet with strange peopioy grown-upso
atohat. It makes you feel E something avful is going to
will
happen---somebody night drop a fart or giggle, and the whole
trma alis
thing will fall tobpieces. a There is this high state of tension
eke e Germ en reusim Whiil also apnitr Jm
all the time, bordering on hysteria, There is no Sicilian con-
versation in the educated sense: there is superb and lucid 8x-
position, there are heights and chasms and clear rushing streams,
and deserts, and the hard, baking sun,, but there isn't the give
and take of conversation. There isn't any drama. There can
myoediai D
nen inc


speak, throwing little chunks of bread across the table and
putting another potato on his plate. He licked his chops,
guzzled his wine end had overything down inside a few minutes---
talking the whole time as well. It raen't that he lacked table
nenners. They'd just never started with him. Then he practised
them they were hardly more than horror of vulgarity, namely,
a form of hysteria again.
The tension would ty start the moment we rere together
egain, like a dynamo. It wasn't unpleasant---not at all a stiff-
ness or restraint. It was teen : E
exoiting. Nothing could
be left to silence. If I was silent, especially in the early
days, he would cry, 'Forza, forzat'---strongtht Only for a brief
and lovely period, vhich was like a special inheritance for Melli
did
and me, : too ecstatic to be bearable almost, aben that tension
cea seg and 1ife just florfl along between us, with Ingelo saying
things 11ke, *Oh, words don't matter* and 'Let life take its
course.
But Francine would look at him doubtfully. Fho-TIEyE
seemed to donbt
for years te didn't under-
8ho
dewbe
stand whyk What she was really doing when sho glances at him
Reslanlly
kim
7 He this was conveying to hime-preminding himeywhat he was
spkadid
really likep in himself, after the tension of our, meetings toga Er
was over and they were alone again, and the pesce morto of the ordinary
world had re turned, the corpse of daily life; end then there
wruld be
wauld ba
ware no flights for her, nothing waa ellowed to flow... She
alwayp
didn't und erstand bim, me/said. It was true she didn't. But
at the same time she knew him as he ras, which was why he clung
to her, why he listened to her and why--'in his terrible way*,
as Francine said---he loved her.
He didn't respect us, in ourselves, because 179 weren't
permanent characters for him. He respected in Helli the


Jord.
English could be remarkablat All of a audden, if there mas no
other way of being understood, he would start talking English,
slowly and clearly, enuuciating it beautifully. But he always
said that English wasn't his 'destiny'.
We nent for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, and looked across
at the other bank, which was in the form of a rising lawn, with
wilt
teyond,
a house among trees, Hke the close, hilly Hampshire countryd
Iwesallneat, picturesque, vory-eloon-sndasuidd. Ha had a
Greatsoneb ofsne me
* a no freedom-thet-caught
him He said the same as on his firet visit---he felt so freet
Sued relief
He could see it in people's faces---it was morvaltots after
the tension of the Continent. The easek :
:M of Euglish
life underneathyhe-spere 1 à
of inner harmony
was
of freedom hat- like a eommunal dream, wese what struck him,
he said.
Te vent up to London to see my parents and I remember the
little ory of anazement he gave Whon he nalked into the back
room, into the blaze of little lights---the sondental glow of
tilimacy
te tingplace
intimate ita that made look like a palane. At
littte
first he said nothing as we walked into the tiny hall from the
front door, only nodded in his solemn way to my father; but
when the door of the back room was opened and the gloring 1ight
broke on us he made this little cry of joyful appreciation.
And he told my parents later, 'I love your son all the
halped
more now, because I know you!* It made him understand me, Le said.
It was something to do with the intimacy---the thrill of that
room, which I still feel myself when I go there, intact from
childhood, and which always makes Melli feel chacdutely calm,
2 +e Lond un gac chskasls
as if shera found her real element at last. The world r


absolutely no power, exercised by one person over another.
Nobody has power, so there is no corruption. There is nothing
but the human creature. And because there isn't anybPosition
he is the king of every place he is in, by natural election.
But this working class isn't anyneens just a natural or mach
Asas primitive conglomeration.
1t inv a backwesd
tditoi 1 de nidlla - clan: ie la
culture and also >phisticslas, e tell a,
ttv
He riddl clan. nls iu leat
el educaton
kmol
pur;
sel,
Hosr
-Le sabe to
Auefoe al aee
vian
aughtuig
vigoms
mma
d fory
trail
clane alane
Caan
ade
ol mgeafe
daliinr
the til
dyeat.
) peph
Lol
-fhesntsi
-cogincip
centianih.
lug
ali
sih
Suongabicalin
lt nith
lan Ty
kille
Lslot.
Jel
tLL
belte
daclas
Xoiits enp
musal
PaA <Z,
aviir
cotiin
pg la
the
combol
rtilade
lrin
ILu n
Lals
u Lase.
hoi
Jru


io saro because it relies on nothing that ien't hunan. All
its commitments are human. All its references, * There is
abeolutely no power. Nobody has power. Thorofore thero is
no corruption. Therorentu
: ondationed
Ruman
- A maat
There is nothing but the creature. And
because there ien't any power or Position he is the king of
tis
every place he is in, by natural election. But t Working-
class world ien't by any maans just a natural or primitive
world. The lack of power ien't due to power not having 8 tarted
A lang
up yet. Ap-enermous history of civilisation and respect ia
actuelly behind it.n The peeple mith pomer-aathose who-get-hold
of-pomer---kenve- #ho oleee
pewer toait metr grasp,
that meana thaytve Alraady lett
any-oee0
There is an enornous invisible freedom in that world, as I
know now from having tasted its opposite. There 1e -ap-onermous
bes nes
Te delicate and respectful appreciation of tan human oreature
tLe.
there,
puit 2 long
and parnop w i e
seviing Xiamits ue knou 6
an-enermens/Christionity--- uCar 1
1 elace
/E s
The middle class has nothing to oompare with that workd,
Clrirtias fing
as feras rospect sor the huurenr creeture goes. Enc middle class
Wottie e-ple
is in-thie respeet blunt and grosed by comparison, Eherog à code
eutr M sam le ) deceuey and food
neeeof = en a
the aubstance of a +
ar ned
werting peopto-every A ses And As their world dwindlos, as
their numbors grow less, so the middle claos gets invisibly
Brconr can C9
box
woaker, fntil in theend there is a e :
massive orisis,
guesfion
vestus
when the whole antter of intimeoy AH power has to be gone
into,
the choice has to be mado outt
ty as to wheth-
er we ere belong to a Christion oivilisation or not, and Y do
chinnils
tre
tvenoi trenk Ciu polnie scaulnl, delign ay, Lex
what
means. By that time jall the intimaoy at our dispos-
al will be used up, and it will have to come back by means of
Xufan 1C ik uml apholai v
mrre Af


- pervessin o A
R soine >cale, gang-uur < Le Righen prurcil level,
shysical well- Ue up
trarcly conlanled pidemics, collapre
ite e
Hmet raprnsni n apuce
Joral


conscious and chosen allegiance.
There is only one other place where I've known that same
an in tehmdm tachsheen
intimnost--not the thrill so much, but the intimate sense of
safety in a creature's morld, where all the consolations are made
for the humble and thwarted, for the lonely, and not for the pover-
ful, the logical and the effective. And that is Italy. Finally
I'ne
my eige
detro always had to flee back there, for it to save ou Hret
ials again. The power lies absolute round and ovor Rome, just as it
does round the streets shere I was born, but it isn't inside:
it belongs to another class, another breed of mankind, who aren't
seen often. They out figures, they have appointments and import-
ant occasions, they are restless, shifty, danned. But- their act-
ivities are outside, while there is this glow of an inner family-
seat which is hidden at the centre. There isn't the thrill of
Ih Rome
respect and freedom as there is in England, it im't the same
kind of thing, 1t isn't in people, the thrill lies more in place,
in something physical, almost external, it is't grounded in the
thrill of people being togother, but it comes from the same root.
Angelo*s background was stark in comparison with mine.
That was why Rome could save him. Its vorld is sad and bared,
but still there is the thrill that -
onergesfrom the
boredom and that refus03 no new bedecompanion. Hothing gets
refused in Rome. It all gets mixed up in a hot compost---the
thrill is the steam that comes off, and the mysterious heat
inside can never be localised because it shows no flane or oven
a glow. It stinks of course, but so do we all at times.
And perhaps Angelo lost this influence slonly vhen he was in
Paris, perhape its softening touch was forgotten, and he drew
nearer and nearer to his oun original world, vhere etinke ore


INSERT
what other people have. His Torld seems to have a rooted
puritanism, but not one of a Christian origine It reminds me
more of the Arabs. They are supposed to rash at once af ter
they've made love, and to make love near a rivar if they can.
Yoi can see the difference betreen our world and theirs in their
lavatories, where you squat over a hole in the floor. -The tiny
water-tap at your side is such a olearf-cut phyaical device comparod
with the conceptual paper of our sorld, vh ich prevents you coming
into conteot with your oun flesh. In the frab lavatory you just
turn the little tap on, put the fingero of your (right) hand
under the water and nipe your arse. Simple: When that is
clean you wash your hands. Really that's cleaner than paper,
if you come to look,at it. The intimate connection between flow-
ing water and cleanliness is atill.there. The sense--the horror---
of evacuation is thore just the same as in Christianity, there is
the same risk of Rf confusing evacuation tith the lovo-procosses,
as among all humanity, but it isn't conceptusl. The difforent
religions treat it differently.
As the middle classes grow in our marld so the coute stink-
consciousness of our civilisation grows. The more in flight :
from his problems a middle-class person is tho more stink-conccious
he is. I suppose this is why some unheppy deughters of the
middle class literally bathe themselves in scent, to hide the
original stink of self: the inner netural solf is putrid---
this is the basic middle-class philosophy. For the middle olasa
has historically vindicated the outer rights and freedom of
the human croature, his dignity, but at the expense of the
IN SERT
Iurerv
religious faculty. Xrhoyhed-e
: se a ahild
restu
ofGod
Duv a a nur thog bad to
mmothing divine-abont
tet


Insw, P. 242
Jinv appearncer duviy He middle ager, diclan)
a rnced Ic
1ow al the puncen
a lan wa caparre 2 A
nue In Lin
5ha; thri rin iaesp C a a
sraf
kine
been
tmes wrer tLe
pogen
Yr am
hallud
Ln ianils
Laa
acla rce
Maver.
iv wm
elan e Maus, eu e
dalui 2v venyms
selrasd uiorg
Aha
coln Arnl
cliild 2 Grd. and anldl
Hhe clinsr 2hi -llan C fle
N A miioldlle
Andha senadeents wal
gips
Bru Le se auel 2 cLs
seaualial
Re lsars:
thom
ha chureh. Las
. He uol nuls
lon 7 dinnils
pegle, ee E -
colleped,
Halls ibegk
rlpiis
ristrbe Mv Hez
h luaks te
bepule. :
hepan
the wanastip
len
auol hot a
Itais sifgn
ae thm 2 efe,
alade
Ir thuk v
a A
- eL
a Ikay caho
um mAt iu
Wr stand
ji Le
wh Lotig
La. lahels
aun
remolad
Htey
rhe mmalle
ler did,
2ulhaki
evey
rapirasi
Hurin
+ clos
hure undinpe
2 Diday
Hham Llou
untl wn Lave te pigmies Hem Imeli
cada ker
mtaide
tar
in l La vgpins
duu Lu
l euals
Imben 15
this
k an
A achiine
c custins
hke duark.
urize pygpl hv reb
losk
cunn
konls,
A he
luhemar
nlemn
and
In be
kins
ICnv.
2 pye,
fu mils) humar crclirem


sefv
eat
the elaime-of-rope,ktngand
nobleman-were-knooked out ono D one
So yongotGod taken out
brved k be AA
ofthe numan orea ture as rast as he was *
The human
creature beoame master of the world. And of all reality. Chrast
Kod
seemed to have given people a terrific spur ce freedom---he, seeméd
fals to offer glory, something divine in life, if only you threw off the
shackles.
And the middle-olass stink-self is the creature ostracised by
this grand flight for glory: the middle-class child learns early---
with frequent devastating effects on his nervous system---that in the
area of rights end civic relationships he is free, but in the intimate
areas he's as good as---shit. It ie a strange thing to happen.
Essentially, the middle-class upbringing is indoctrination in shame :
the natural and spontaneous outburst of humenity which is every
chbld's birthright is discouraged---rarely in a conscious way *
For there are other things which the middle-class child has to
grasp unless he is to go under---the byways of power. He has
so many techniques to learn.
The Working-olass child knows nothing ab out these things;
in his world shere ambition simply doesn't e xist and life is taken
as it's found. Like an Italian he is the king of his own fe elings,
they assert towards the mother their own natural kind of royal dig-
lis
nity, and the intimacy is therefore not discouraged. In the middle-
class world intimacy is the greatest threat to movenent and
development, whether you like it or not, and however good a
mother cr father you are: you yourself are caught up in am-
bitions, and no other path oan be put before your child, so that
in humanity he must be groomed according to the world he will
inherit. In the middle-cl: ass world only the non-intimate rights
are furthered. The middle-class world is grounded on power, not


couragef. This doesn't mean he is punished or even thwarted
in his desires. In that way he's freer than anyone in other
classes, or anyone in history. But he learns that he doesn't
count: he will 'count 'one day', perhaps; he sees that the world
he opened his eyes on at birth isn't for some reason the world
he will make his way in later. Sometimes he notices the desparate
struggle bwteen those two worlds in his parents's eyes. His tofp
Pearlr
Iht-angog has no place in the sceme of things: his parents may
ObelieveO in it, and WOO it, and protect it; but he sees the
LSo
truth. Taeaefere you have in middle-class children thet hurt
may
clarity which semetimes grows into Trony- As a child he doesn't
belong to the important scheme of things : not as an Italian bhild
does, for instance; an Italian child is equal with his parents,
he is only a smaller edition, and there is no difference between
one age and another. But in our world the different ages ase
marked: each has its different intimate demand Which doesn't
Teteettetio
fit the scheme of things.
The working-class child knows nothing about this either.
In his world ambtiion simply doesn'tvexist and life is as it is
seen at birth. Like an Italian he is the king of his own feelings,
wit th a natural right to be given an audiencel-for them.
+ in
the middle-class world you are caught up in ambitions whether
you like it or not and this must show to your ch ildren. mAnd-
maraty-tho-méddibewcdassuchild must be-szonmod..cor-ume World
ar o PU - Por-bhewmid. class yorld is grounded onpowers-net
Thest
phe-meddte- * pess upbringing must in all humanity be a subtle
mustering of arms for the fight for Position which will one day
tabe pluce:
fot
pememebrutr the Position may be a -
or money or simply what
your neighbours think of you, or it may be a re jection of all
these things6, but a Position of same kind it will beo retea
natural-and
nheri an00-
9 middhe-ciasses arebeeed
on ower,-not


Locial
ho ICe
fno sundid A prud,
Cun
strerahe
humauity Ce all
Aol un
cun Lo
e an
cisly
eky
dur
- cusnie
arudl (e -
iehs
: aiihy
umd
legel
cnidils
salgi
ilitra
ate arato
pretitu.
prarilaer
Hinel:
luss
niiddle
fir


inton ace
91 on mmenityo as ell cristocratic society vas end all. lower-class
society must be in order to survive., The middle-class thrill
is at root the sound of mighty machines---the sound of nature
harnessed, the thrill of movement and spectacle; and the erist-
ooratic thrill is the thrill of other people, in the same way as
the lower-class thrill is, too. In the middle-class rorla other
how
people aren't enough. There is the.great sorld-struggle, /pre-
tat
oceupying the middle-class mind---the mind, has to make its fierce
demands on nature. And when these demands have been exhausted---
as they will be perhags by the pathetic flights into space, which
are E a last effort to turn eternity and even God into a civic
right, there will have to be the thrill of people again, the
thrill of the sound of their coats swishing, the thrill of the things
they say and do with their orn hands.
That vill be the end of the stink-self. Every man oan then
be a slave and king in one, as only the Working man is at present,
though his position isn't a permanent one, nor an unddulteratod
one, nor an invulnegable one: he is for all that a child, a
viotim, E helpless reflection of the midale class (his master),
and one by one he has to go into the middle closs, sond his children
in, eccording to a process that has been going on for all to see
si nce the eleventh century. The middlc-class has reached its
utmost mental development---and its obcessive stink-conseicusness
is its consciousnees of the last lingering odours of tho intimate
thrilling solf which tho mind has had to forcet in its enormous
plans for the morshalling of porer, nhich in its stecl parts and
regular noises and clean emissions of wanted commodities is as
different from the farts and ardure of mankind as enything you
can get. The middle class has tried to create God on earth,
in men, and for this reason it has collapsed in ardly nare and


2A5
more with each ronderful success, so that in the end when it
has cleaned the rhole world up and its great thriving project
--froedom---hes been accomplashed, it will comnitt a sart of
suicide back into humanity. For the real Morld---not the pro-
jeets put on to it---is still there for contemplation, as un-
explored as it always vas. The shole hidden vorld of our oun
organs that do their-work invisibly every moment, the hidden
world of plants and the seasons'ond the invisible attrections and
influences of the-earth, and the lenguage of animals, all the
world tha t lies all round us nearly dcad at the moment, vh ich
our senses and instincts have lost track of, so that we are like
pale and hostile and unknown visitors, not knowing What- we shall
do next by way of destruction, all this amaits us again. Our
intuitions, vhich the middle class has all but killed by calling
invalid, vill get their life back again. Cleer and golden
intuitions are the prize of civilieation, just as in a person
they are the prize of real thinking.
Where I vas born neerly ell the myctery of created life
is still there intact; and Angelo felt thie. There is the
thrill of the outside created vorld thich, though wounded and
darknwith emoke, in absolutely beyond you, beyond your povers
and inowledge. The mystery of Christmas is still there,
the streets at Christmas, in the crisp air, when evarything is
still and you secdthe lights on the little Christmas trees in
the windors, and the lamplights make the roads look liko
iks
village lanes. Not all LE croated life is there, te myatery
faclary
isn't quito intect, there is a nervous background of menace d toutine:
whici mrst disregarder
Inm atis
l. Cr Only the peapto have made it natural. The actuel streets were
put there as part of a mathematical proposition for somebody's


profit-end-loss account, end this can never fit into a real and
lasting scheme of things. But the people there have made vill-
ages of them. Every Christmas was as mysterious to ne 88. the
countryside.
There was the crisp hush of the week before the
actual day, and we used to go carol-singing in small groups; and
the sky seemed as silent and vast as you find it in the country.
The roofs were lon, just like a village. Usually the sky was
haunted and ghostly, turned into a frightening zone of emptiness
and oblivion by the great work-schedule that hung over everything
and tried to make itself the cnly thing there was in all creation.
The untouched intimate heart won in the end,' though: it kept the
glow, and you felt this most of all in the special seasons, at
Baster, on Shrove Tuesday, on the Bank Holidays. The created
world came back again then. It was still the breath of God,
over the streets: you were still in the state of grace, that
is, the child of great creating forcos which you didn't under-
stand but the rhythm of which was in. you. The knowing and fore-
seeing face of the middle class wasn't thero. The mark of that
face is its lack of respect: this is rhat diffei rentiates it from
the working-class or the peasant face. It has nothing to respect
in the universe.. There is just---nothing. The sky is---nothing.
The invis ible is---nothing. There are just hard, touchable
objects and---space. But where I nas born. there was the Tonder
of active and irresistible things outside you; and that doesn't
wilt in the old people, beoause it isn't an attitude but a total
state of being which only the slow and painful initiation into
the middle olass can end. Once it has ended nothing can bring
it to life again. And Angelo seemed to recognise this; I think
it was what made him utter his astonished, happy little ory.


ended
Renian
Kere
I don't think there was anything like that in his oun
life.
think-hin Hfe-hrad the torrible rbekien-berenens.
Some-magbieicende-had-been-denieds There-is-this deep histor-
-ioel-slave-eloment-in-Itely call-the-time- --And-perhapeAngelo
ret
hia-lifowaxen stronger than-ather-itelions. Ferheps
Sioddg-has-dt-more, than.
san-continent, He uned to tell
In Sicily,
me about the terrtble hysteria of, family-life, the pale, quivering
hatred behind everything, the feuds. He used to imitate his
unole---thin and pale and shorp-feced---standing 4 betriad the
curtains of the window watching people go by outside, talking to
himself, hie eyes nerroned with a hatred as consuming and help-
less as disease--e 'Look at that one: He calls himself a priest:
He'll die soop! Curse him! Curse hint', his lips like knives
already cutting. And thon the 'occasions', the family gather-
lc. ings: The neighbours who came to pay their respects and aniffed
Royimnes;
round looking for all the proper signs of suctt andesasion--the
vecsivesl
aoffee, the wine, the cake, all offerad with an terrtble absence
tkanhs as ta, Alae rvan nilk ouh alsenee 7 kindnes,
&r-peet-feorl p For-ethers,-snd-sesedvod-in-the-same-
Under the Bmiling and hand-shaking--- *When is this idiot going
to offer us something? Is that all he's got? And he swindled
one of his brothers out of a hundred thousand lire only last
week!* It was a life starved like the hot eerth. Amd the hoat
tresde
posple
seenet-to boke feclinge dry, to suffocatefeand orush/
ereature
into-a-viotin U the cienente, thetn-elaga, Angelo hated and
feared hot voather.
* finiched him oomplately. In/cold
Bur
mstrter he waB lively, clear, active. A Juet a day of real heat
would knock him over
Ferhaps his vorld was pagan. I don't
know. It is 80 aifficult for me to see, across those oceans
of difference between us, across the enormous religious divides.
Perhape Chraat was lacking in his morld. Perhaps only Christ


litee the tralio)
loue and kala - enslegey (ale
and e
verge,
genuntis,
yort
doidsnf
dasrenid tym apenthai
the
Knce 7
he lan
vini -
mpbuit
pinen
betvay
tisl hanhatong
arin umen.
An Itace
emal iu lecan anl chasrig
t his13
Cm tta o swed
kry oho wed in Arprlo,
lirie, you he
He Lan ho ty?
tide
Aand.
- li
the the Frab
udlauce
ralery
ke te usntin
clean cntos Lui
eLL d
le - hdy eend
12 lt duttiralls
L geah
end
t Araly
- vee C /
pegybo-
gyhuine
ree A C -
lohs,
hencl
VOTACISMO
uth
Coeek.


INSERT
INSERT
Tra hune yu lerow He Sielia, Hee hus
trauc
Taliam
hue
reslise Low Ayfree he - Shon + Ilale ei
Andl
can faanline alu hin, t
vasely cam nith h pupu nowadayp.
gah de niplain 2 Ha Siulan appla pyer
l ttre
2 Ks
h Argelo : nausicak
poinv
1R02 heeTon
h He paiv - 2
fine herd
mingiolst
obesnie
atoua
the pine 2
The
2 the
huhnows
puie
>phihg )
metfo
pupl veenin
uad
L a
muqu
A He Iregn'e cud
ketacen
iintla iu alieeg
Evcn
tLe ibyllic, uirh
vulid
ke doerfleoi
phpicelly
troum, eye lumiisrs
CAns pals
huddle leitu,
lu clors cls,
Sim, FOLTE
dasle -laised,
A gestire
resslule
also repmene:
loo
yeu
dausd
sndder
U sriftu ho uene '9 yhe joca
malke ke Ialia),
(on coung)
layz 2 praly Lorie land in haudk i th
Lenle 2 sfrinis fre
vinenv
to chetren : pide, jealory,
plaan


antw across enormous glowing spaces
as at
the amphitheatre of Epidaurus where you sit looking across the
parched Greek plains tovards the mounteins of Arakhnaion, and,
Lmild
the-node-econ-h €
: thejair among the oypresses
Jeehs la be
a +eternal, the same as it mist have been for Aegulapius
and the aiok people coming to him, close to that amphitheatre.
Christ entered Angelo like that, Mhe-abrenth like the
recognition of a great new porer in the universe. But it was
a spectacle; Christ was a breeth-taking spectacle that he saw
clearly. But one spectaole can be replaced by another. You
cen't have the sane apectacle befcre you all tho time. Ând E he
change
chuw
next step wasn't to
- him inwardly tor reyiett had nothing
ih lin - ase.
to do with tho ingwrd moral charao ter, That was muoh more my
itals
world. Aftor becomtag reatty conscious of Christ there were
Yan hefn
thinge A STT
An I saw much nore olearlyt
eveng
a n.
moral actions of same kind. But the change it made
enjfron
in Angelo was to nte his eyea Axtghba with yet one more bright-
ness. It nas like getting the benefit of a new sun. But nothing
in it contributed torards a permanent and decided noral cheracter.
This, perhaps, was the development lacking in hie torld. That
was why he could say helplessly, "Hou see, I never knon what I'm
going to be tonorrom. Or even in two hours' time. I never know
how I'm going to feel, vhat I shall think, what I shall rant to
impal
Td There was still a kind of pagan triumphing in
which
foregn
ras conpletely etrenge to any feelings
aver had. Onee
Lerv
shen we were driving through Paris he jumped the traffic lighta
grelload and a policeman stopped us H =ar
Francine whispered angry
little comments as we drew to a halt. Then there was a long
ennverantion hetwean the naliceman and Anzelo. He tola the nan


grt miacol M
mildly and quietly that ho'a been sonfused because he was
driving some English friende through the city to show them the
sights, and in pointing something out---jumped the lights...
A beautifully contrived, beautifully spoken Italian story;
and it would melt eny heart. The policeman was tall and grave,
and listened sceptically at first. But he softened, especially
when he realised that Angelo was a forfeigner. He seemed to
eppreciate, EA above all, that Angelo had no bitterness or fight
in his speech, no rasping naughtiness. So with a smile he let
him go.
Now Angelo shouted a thank-you and drove off fost, and I was
rot 5 Stilaola Cul
X di Lur
amazed to see that he felt triumph, hot- FOLOW-feeling fer-the
Hot lhe ri MLAA
e ad
other man, nat tha elightent.appreciation er-even-ewerenees-ef
the rindliness 1
otne
a the Faot- re
ae 4 ven some
Lim a la ie
Pxe Lfank
thing-frealy a stranger
the-best
5 p
one-oan-get.
Le'd Scoredl
Nal
omege,
ona
thou
ard.
made
was
afguer
me pause. e
liké a bapse of
-oheraoter for me.
nilml A d Low Etle
beau
Istid
ALL Ah
But tou sxactly
wasntt arara f lapso-
Inanlinad M L
daap
a Arianils
* re TY
shich
had lear
a anderstood properly - ar
nmd
oea
Lople tb Th b
leer
eG :
a à
h da milt cl
oet ways.
And of course dp northern oivilisation gave him a thousand
gratuitous little triumphs t every day. And he couldn't
see the key to it; that was how it seemed. a In his world yielding
to someone else peemed too close to being a fool evar to be pract-
ised much. Ho pouldn't understand how people could be so
yielding and orelulous---and, perhaps, soft L He wanted to see
samething more definite. Really I think he didn't believe in
this apparently good world: he vanted to eep the evil, clear,
as kt had been in his world. All this good socmed to him a


was
Srorlim
2 place
Cln
Renes
2ike
meld.
- ind-of-maonive-eoneeaiment. He wanted to see esher desires
nalced, he wanted to see the evil any negativo. Heasan't want
o-loso-himsalf in a flnid, ahmatio-sne-of-cvot nUsSe
wes
1ika being helpless in his mothents arms againy perhape Lifo
had to be externally cleer-out for him. It had to leave him
alone, above all.
Fhe goodness seemed to put on him an
unexplained and continual obligation. What did they want?
Ichat did they want from him? It remindedy of the may Italians
lspale
take unempeeted giftaf with a wary, narrow look, As if to
At B say, That's all thia for? what's being asked of me? 9
gluss
The Italian faceo Anfaso is rarely lit by a really unréserved
Tarer niee
is aun
and open am 1le, mevor by Foal laughter. There tmn Ma intimete
A aut
humour in daily life nona of the bright and optimiptac attitudes
mould
that. forn the features of the northern face and 8t
depth
and an encrusted individuality. History has madé its encrust-
Ialrein
alue al pmaity.
ations on tha face--violence and st trugglo, pein,-yeerning.
But these are communal lines, not individual. And they are
classical. They also tend to close the face. There is a sad
and elegaic humour---SOmething ironic, also intimate, but not
l.c I
ith : Hmi
Pleasentry is missi ng. e
Phere-ien't
really pleesantryin eonveraatio. There is delight, curiosity,
the sad dirge of an endless confession, but not common pleasan try. *
Malian
This comes by individual breeding and effort. K Faces lack light. Thay
Giveriight and-opemess they-weuld be quite-different,their
lines-would-have-developed-differently..thoy.mould.be-gaod-lookos
ing-Ar-the-northern wey, which-theg-elmost-never-ere. Faces convey
Pegyle
no hope or plan of life, They aren't on any quest at. all.
(There is no questing in life. After I'a been living in Italy
cned
some years I bagonto recognise a foreign tourist
onea, by
Aurip
instinct almost, without enee looking closely.
a The
cight,
Iash
goo puggled - heeplen distunce.


Cantire
began to thrill me,in a way' - I couldn't understand. I degan
Aok
to ask myself what was this different quality, I saw in then,
which
that made them 3o immediately recognisable. And aftér soms years
it lay
I realised that mainly in their walk, their way of striding;
aae the tine,
they ahps seemed to be questing for something, q naturally
and unconsciously. And It was in everything they did---the ray
gaydal
they
cod at things, the way they smiled, the open way they had
of asking questions. They had this deliberate air of going some-
where. Thatever they were ' doing they alt ways soemed to be going
somew here * But the Italian never does.
Rawe
the
In that comparison you - the difference botneen tno
wal dous ralandly
worlds---hew Cap-we-have-been mtmr-tomente-mon-ncopte rhat
lies all round us, torartt questide every moment for an end or
waile
solution, E TEETET the Italian at the opposite pole cecoptr
# waits and looks on and accepta, strolling through
life hovover quick his pace. Angelo's pace was always much
quick er than mine. Ke shot through streets like a torpedoe.
But the root-difference between our worlds remained. te had
mdundusll
oun
both developed, a long way anay from our worlds; he had learned
the questing ache, and I had learned the eoceptance; But that
root-difference, behind us, at the birth of life, renained,
hardly conscious to either of us. e
The northern man sets out early on his quost. Already as
a child---alone with his conscience, the king of his onn conscience---
he has it before him. I knew the direction I would be taking in
life at the age of eleven or twelve, and I can't say' I've swerved
much from that direction. But in the south there doesn't seem
any need for a direction. The world is just there, made for
you, and you fill it in your turn, like everybody else. In a way


Car.
you have no responsibility over your life. The warld non't
forsake you in the south. It will always give you something
to eat, something to hang on to life by, however wretched you
are; you aren't judged by your quest, as in the north. You aan
always get a little bit pf ploaoure, a drop of wine spared from
saneone, the healing sunlight. And then there is the mother---
she passes from generation to goneration as the unfailing fount
of help which can never wane. Life cen pass in a dream, in the
south. You wake up to your gifts late, on-the-shoir, especially
if they are strong. You wako up to your own will late. Angelo
was like this. He only divined graduaily what sort of' thing he
mas naturally required to do in life. And each step was a terr-
tog.
ific effort and pain, like unsucking himsolf from a mont
He really did bogin changing his life nearly half-way through it,
with desisions of the kind I had taken in the years of puberty.
And he'd chaged so mich. He'd studied so meny different thingo,
altered his course, altered his job. First there had been the
safe road, pointed out to him by his family, which he had accepted
and folloned, and then there was the slow and apasmodic avakening,
year by sear, until he had altered the rhole thing from top to
bottom. Themaars ho-opent-otudying-ar-subjeot-that-hed-ebaolutaly
ne-intorest-for-him-et-ell, ane-vhichon te Contrery produced-
a-numb-loathing-ond-disgust-in-him-evory-tig ne-opened-e-book,
must-heve-beena pungatorg-thet-mas-nearly no end-wehow-he-sur-
viwed- 4t-mith-a-oteer-nin-Tcan't understana-at-all. And it
vas always a question of survivel. This was his quest. A
quest for bare survival. Mine was alnays a quest to finish or
Ne ohsy
start a book, go abroed, get enough,to do my work, E that sort
of thing. But his ras a quest just to survive in his bare self--
to keep himself this aide of madness, dospair, the utter and outur


Cur.
darkness. For mon ths of his life my friend has laig in dark-
ita
ness, without speech, noarly gone out in his flame, la victim ta
shan/tl
like
some
helplessness thatdones DCAm, # -he
lupre Rin. ude s t
said
smm his father He complainod about his father--,
luk sejel
But There ses
Francine a quietiuetee saxine 'You're the
ttd
same, you're the same as your father.* Angelo
-thet-his
X tow Leld
father-herd spent most of his 11fe 'erying'---regretting, oomplain-
Rael
Tellip inghds
ing: for forty years he'a-been
about his health, hon he
was going to die, at any tim - but he was now past eighty, and epp-
Aidelt
arentiy still sound of limb He ran to church every morning---
the church was his pagan goa, Angelo said; it wasn't a witness of
silence for hin, but vorldly power. Ie believed in God as other
soeirt prator
people believe in seoiety- reputalion
kax
heer
had
For his father life mass never quite realised; his
never
quest,
really began. And Francine said it was the same for Angelo.
The scene had to be leid so. carefully for this quest--80 many
enemies had to be fought off---so much solitudo had to be pro-
cured---the outer vorld had to be placated and appeased in so many
ontnids
ofing
ways, And here the Absolute came in. The cater worla, was an
absolute power that had to be fought all the time, ghile the
HNO
fighter was weak, boing flesh, and not absolute at all. You
n rongalis waldl,
pitelinis
could only get through by a antg one absolute against onother,
tum
That was why there was really no quest: if you mate ' the
outer world into an absolute you glorify its poners, you humble
yourself to it---which makes the act of defiance necessary as
well. You build the world into such vastness that you are left
without any power in yourself at all: you have to assert your-
self deliberately, in order tot to go under; you tell yourself
you have to be strong---that you are indèed strong, and that the
fight will be long and bitter. Everything involves the long


and self-destructive fight. Nothing is soft. Nothing comes
easily. Nothing is relative. The world is all absolute round
you; othor people are absolute---they are enemies or friends,
wise,
fools or neti great or small. This is where the fight for sur-
vival comes in---your intimate flame of life is always at stake
in this struggle with absolutes. And only whon towards the end
of your life---1f at all---you realise that the absolutes eren't
there and that you yourself aren't absolute, and no aot of defiance
is necessary, only then are you free for the quest which should
have begun in youth. Angelo told me once hor Verga had cone to
lala in cifi : Ke tal
write his real books---the ones for which he is
ho-oane
Lap
knomy
iig
chancad l6 aerees a leaflet thar described an experience at sea, in he
seaman's N > * lenguage; t-we just a seaman talking about the
kad
sea, from himself. And that soemat-to set Verga's language
Sudkend,
dohin
no 'hheralwe A
free. There were no absolutes; no
He found his
A In tv
monuments,
sesnTulk
own speech, suddenly, after years. There was just the relative
ital, creature talking obout the relative world, in crisp, spare terms *
Verga
From that time he began to write properly, without batng artific-
1ality
In our vorld of the north ell literature 1s that seaman
talking. The relative world weaves in and out of his narrative.
But in the provincial world, in Italy and Germany, the great
battle with absolutes has to take place. The outer world is
absolute. A man's statements are absolute. Ono statement
clashes with another---there is none of the endless dialogue
of free and wondering voices as in our World. There is none of
the leaven of the invisible society.
Right at the bottom, those absolutes are pagan. And in
Angelo's world they're classical pagan---still with their old
dignity and fire. They don't belong to the Christian vorld,


weren't really meeting, even when there was nothing obviously
wrong. Once Melli arrived in Paris a day or so before me and
Angelo said to her, sitting in the dim, still drawing-room that
overlooked a tiny courtyard, 'How is he? Is he in a good state-
or--- He paused---"funny?: And he seemed to e xpect her to
know what he heant. But she looked at him questioningly, and he
brushed the matter quickly aside, seeming to assume that she just
didn't want to talk about it; she was, baffled as I was when she
tald me later,
Ten
de bought-hedidrt-seg me as reell a
seperatefrom One of-his Cwir states
lo didn't ee he theme
disineeclid
a -series of,mooder that seemed
ni 2
3L suppose that meart I wasa pagan for him,
really. The pagan is the ohild of every sensation, always BHHF
# engulfed by it. I was astorm, then light, then laughter,
then calm, then full of portent-- --like something in his ovn world.
The pagan has no deliberate approach to the world. Reality over-
powers him every time. what was invis ible for Angelo in my changes
was that delibérate approach of the northern world. Perhaps this
was the kéy to all our differences. Ithink this 1s why he shrugged
at the end and said to me, 'I'm sorry---I can't read your books---
want to---but I can't read English---it's a destiny---I know that
now." He felt there mas Something-invistblettohime
I think he missed the safe inner order of my world, the har-
mony that lies right underneath and therefore makes any sally away
foom it an adventure---there are no dangers of bursting the seams -
Rim
My long dramatic descriptions seemed to tire them as much as stir
Kim.
trm
hol
k ackieve 3, a1 L
thenr. They wve jamey
safalg :
dexpanls Hfligha
Aortr
One thing I thought afterwards: that he tet left us either


New Bork
to become great or become small.
The northern world had nearly orushed Melli, too. When
we met I knew she vas convalescent from an illness, but not that
she'd been in such danger. It was a mercy I didn't know, in a
way---because we would have held back from life in those first
months, we wouldn't have talked till late at night or walked at
dawn, none of the things that actually helped her recovery.
I was also ignorant in a deepér way---about health as a
whole. And I learned this from Malli. She already had it
in hor---the power of health. She had the enormous natural-
born silenee that this requires. I'd had an inkling of it
before---but it was ali twisted and girdered-about with the
prevailing concepts of health. I had felt these were wrong.
I'd alweays felt strangely at otds with medicine---whenever inad
to see a dpctor. There was some contradiction there: I felt a
loss of power and self-relience and initiative which I thought was
wrong, whenever I faced a doctor. But I didn't know why it was
wrong. I tried to ergue . thot he, the doctor, was wrong a But it
was a diffioult road. And, slowly, Melli taught me why. First
she had the inner rhythm and silence of health, and secondly she
was learning herself, as the best dootors do, through their own
bodies.
Even as a ohild her's was a rhythm, a deep, inner rhythm,
which just doesn't do for this epoch. And as fast as the doctors
lookod for a cause they gave up. It was mad to suppose that the
a Cause
usual dootor of today could ever have found engt - dag.
When she was a small child her family was chased out of Germ-


to find out more about it in the library. I was hot at the
collar and my hands were trembling as I opened the medical encyclo-
pedia to look yp 'hypertension'---what a fine state to study any-
thing in: And partly this was because I wasn't in charge of my
owh body, though I didn't of course know this. I was helple ss *
If my body got a cold or *flu or measles ot gout or anything that
came al ong, well, it just came along. I just had to wait. I
had no sense at all that the body gives warning of what it will
do, and shows its weaknesses intimately. I thought that was
health. And now I think it is 111-health. All I could do,
in the metter of the body, was to keep my fingers crossed. Now
in all other respeots in life I didn't keep my fingers crossed:
that wasn't enough for me---never had been. I directed my will
towards this or that object, lived towards this or that, and alvays
had done. But in the case of health, it seemed---in the case of
the basis of all will---I left it to chance, or to the society
round us (in which I was supposed not to believe). It was little
wonder I had such ambiguous feelings when I faced a doctor, as if
I was being found out in some way.
And here was I trembling like a leaf because there was a
medical book in my hand, sweating like a cannibal in front of a
witch-doctor: I was superstitious, clearly. My approach to
medicine was thoroughly and completely superstitious; I was
little better than a pagan would be. You couldn't imagine that
I was an Oxford-eduoated individual. What hope had I of doing
anything for Melli in this state?
Reld
Knowledge would have held me---my terror of Melli dying---
in check; whereas I was ignorant. It seemed I first had to clear
my mind of a lot of rubbish, but I didn't know what this rubbish
was. I only felt it was thero. Yet I couldn't believe that the
aham
Mam aanla T mito halieva thems jin
tithots Le wyoyg eilka.
Nv cmlal puite behiere/on.


a disaster. This is because it must be a dream, and not an
inherited safe form. Like Italy, the German warld has grown
out of independent duchies which were always a law to themselves--
not from an integral monarchy, radiat ing a single authority
through 1ts noble olasses, as in France and England. There 1s
no communion of
no. collective
ideas,
genius
thought,
Germany, just as there isn't in Italy. This is why you see
people's faces changing so muoh, especially if they have great
gifts. The dootor in oherge of the clinie, for instance---I
always had to look at him twioe, to recognise him. This isn*t
VTG simply meank
a sign of inner vacillation-- to6
no - E : means the absence of
de Geman
any inherited. communal
The peasants have an inherited
formd
physical form of life, as in Italy, but as soon as the break is
persank-
made with ths life the search for form has to begin. In the
Anglo-
Saxon world character develops in each oreature as a collective
force, whether he likes it or not. But in Germany it develops
in the Gamm
by individual crisis and effort; the encrusted lines of age,are
ifonalEd
the lines of a single and individual development, and the be ing
of this isolated creature has been so variously interpreted
and misinterpreted in its life by other people, it has been seen
in sO many false and true lights (other people have no collect-
ive oriterion in their judgements) that it tends to change accord-
Seen
ing to the light it is in. This is another great danger of the
German, penp
theg
SThere is little sense of other peopl% in-the-Oermen.
There is little psyohological insight---I mean, as a natural


Our books on war are : exercises in pity, on the whole---horror,
some kind of recoil, some collective indignation on behalf of
other.people's lives, on behalfiof the collective healtht and
goodness that is being put at stake in war - But this isn't so
with the German book. Invariably if it tries pity for other
people it is only insipid. Usually it is just a stark account
of horror. But the horror is peculiarly insentient. You have
the feeling that these people belong to chill rainy nights where
the bullets are flying and men are screaming.
That was how Germans seemed to me in the last war. They
invariably put in a stiff attack on a rainy night. And they
didn't seem to feel the exposure, not like our men. They
belonged to nature more. But they weren't bad men. I was
always struck by their simplicity and natural goodness when they
came in as prisoners. You might say that their officers were
bad. But not abstractly so. They weren't visibly cruel men.
Even the SS officers I didn't find,cruel men. * But they were
abe le
men who
e present at some fearful brutality without feel-
ing it: EEE after all, it would be somebody else's suffering.
In our world that could only be a bad person. But in the
this
German world a L doesn't follow: and knowing this is the first
the Germau,
step to understanding Fatas WOTHE
The - German goes his own way. It is the only vay he can
go, and why our world will never really understand him, only
ahals
respect and admire him, or rork with him, butnever really join
with him in his world. He is thegreat natural force of our
Eurcpean world, almost speechless, like rocks and mountain
streams. The offieers and men who came in as prisoners were
each fighting their onn war---they each had their dream. On
our sidé we veren*t. I wouldn't have gone into the war if


it hadn't been for the concentration camps: they were the spur
to moral indignation---in a people that didn't want to fights
Without them I think people would have had to be pushed into
the army. But the German with his terrificvigorous good will
and belief, that is ready to gush outat the slightest enc ourage-
ment from : someone of power andauthori ty (it might be, someone
with a poterful-enough dream), will be off on his war before he
knows where he isand only think about it aftewards, with some
puzzlement, He won't change, though, howvere much'l he puzzles
geuerop I
aboutit. He will just join the
puzzlement: what
happened exactly?' It' was the same with the concentration camps :
I've never met one German young or old who seemed to feel the
ta cmcontalon
laure h
slightest genuine horror at those camps. Such horror would be
a collective emotion, reailyl--proper to a collective massacre.
It would belong to our world, but not to the German. There is
just perplexity in them---What did I do? all I did was loin
the army! fight a war---then. all this comes' out at the end!'
Only those Germans Who suffered in. the camps themselves, or lost
a relative in them, have the real horror: because it springs
from self-interest. The basic communion of pity and fellowship---
all abstract or collective sympathy---is lacking in Germany.
This is what the rest of the Christian world doesn't understand,
Ng etfr wll
in not understanding the German. You will get a German saying A
of himself, 'Now look at how I behaved in the first world war,
prancing about on a horse, with a spiked helmet, anxious to fight
it out with England---What an ideal!' But there it will stop:
going further---changing himself---requires the self-examination
a necaceen - unaridable
which is just not part of the German upbringing, as it is, part of
ours.


In the German world power is like nature. It takes on the
permanent and overshadowing forms of nature: the status quo
is. always there for good, like waterfalls and mountains---until
it disappears. Hitler, the American occupation, industrial
prosperity---they are each there for good, as long as they last.
In the German vorld power is as little fluad as nature, in the
sense that mountains and streams don't nalk avay overnight.
But if they do nalk the German adjusts himsalf at once---they
were only scenery. It was never really part of him. Nothing
collective ever is.
There is this vigorous and primitive belief all the tin a
which is both healthy and dangerous * The background is pagan
as it is in the Italian world, too. But the Italian world has
been softened by the leaven of the ohurche There hasn't been
any such thing in Germany. I'shall never forget seeing, in a
pleasant little village near Hamburg, a Lutheran priest stroll
out of his house in kniokerbockers---it nas hot--with that
self-celebrating swagger you often get in the German official.
It isn't a swanking valk so much as a primitive and pagan
exercise in self-satisfaction, like an inner dance. The forth-
right chin was there: the man with no doubts. It' was atrange
to see it in a priest. Power---status quo---stuck out of his
He Ladl Gra up his Meeve. Iv 3 1 +ke
body: it was in his walk. Itrominded-me ef :
church, i0h
just-seen: it uas-placed-exactly Labove-the
altar 80 that it seemed actually to be emerging out of 1t, not
to one side of tiic chacel as it usually is. I'd never seen
that before and my first impreseion was one of blasphemy.
It was like making the priest a spohesman for God. The voice
aotually çame out of the mystery of the eross and the host.
Not even in-the-Romarchurch, vith-its-apostolic-succession,


de-youget
Hae pope-hes-ddvine-00000-40-ehe-to-ehermsby,
soto speaky but auan then-ha-dsesnt-ieeus-physicellg-out-of
the godnead. but in this tutherarchurehurch-tho-godhead-seemed
owaed-eoosally.
It ment mith tha hierarohy-ohg-of-povers The
priest-hed-eod
6 ee - vers It was the god of power, that
is, a pagan god.
Thav
in Gamang
Gomebinerr the clinic was like a faery castle for mes
The
ust
pine forests PMES so near---and x8e etark mountains that were
called the *mother' and the 'fathert. The faery-element ras
in the people, too. Their faces had been developed by strange
primitive forces.
The German is reering to go---to be led, to believe and
lapse into a state of believing self-innolation, where the in-
dividual responsibility is given up. One man, given the
right preparation, can change the German scene overnight.
Belief gathers like a storm, a marvellous primi tive dream of
life, whichts a
rete srby ArOermeny the ache for glory
and splendour. The dream. grows until it seems to engulf the
thole of humanity, then it reaches politics, then it explodes.
Germany is much further from us all than most of us can
imagine. The German kings of England vere never understood.
Phey-ao-ted-mith
Hr-Awkwerd-end-yet-eimplo-violence-
at times-8or-inetence, When the young Prince of Fales, the son
of George 11, dragged his wife out of Hanpton Court soreaming
with a baby half hanging from hor and reced her in a carriage
to St. James's Ccurt so thet his heir shouldn't be born under
own
Re we aeyad mngheds's soyprhenain
the same rcof as his father, whom he détested and abhorred,
Henrey
Lord Hervey's memoirs from that time---le was a subtle, soothping,
intriguing- clever courtier---are a chronicle of the most dis-
astrous misunderstandings. Host of them eame from the feot


that the Germans had no idea what all this Inglish freedom
was about. a They couldn't see why a man with auch enormous
porer, like. the king, should be unable to exercise it according
to his wishes and convenience, but have to consult interests and
parties and an undefined entity called public optdion. They
couldn't understand a people who asked to be derended against
its enemies but hated the sight of a military red coat. They
couldn*t understand a people who spat on the royal carriage and
yet were decidedly not republicans. They couldn't understand
why an apparent itly absolute power should be given to a king and
then limited and. curtailed and ridiculed by the faot that parl-
1ement and parliament alone had the power of the purse. In
the German world a man with poner does not beg and he does not
discuss.
There seemed. no rules in the royal behaviour, to English
eyes. It was a choas of vigour, sentimen tality, courage a
vaçillation, brutality, graciousness. Above all there tas no
justice. No recollection today of what was saii yesterday,
and a wavering from one minister to that according to immediate
self-interest, and the persuasive poners of the minieter. There
was no judgement. They had no themes in their characters.
They were either riding the orest of a wave proudly or else
dromned in self-humiliation and contriteness. They could be
proud and cffens ive and pugnacious, then an extraodrinary simple
and child-1ike charm would appear, which :ould disarm everybody.
They dealt each other smashing blows, inside the family, and
these blots were apparently taken for granted by all of them.
The king would have a sudden overpowering regard for his
daughter, follored by an absolute nullity and blundering insent-
ience towards her. And she reciprocated the behaviour.


To the outsider this is incomprehensible and outrageous.
But it is the German Torld. It is all the original vigour and
rude health of our civilisation.
This is rhy it saved Melli rhen our own world had nothing
to offer. It all depended on one man. "hen I met him for
the first time I was standing by Lelli's bed at the clinic,
talking. She had just had a bath, I think, and the routine vas
to spend an hour in bod afterwards, rell covered-up. There vas
a quiet knock on the door and at once I felt, rith this man*s
presence as he came into the room, the most extraordinary sense
of peace, like en invisible wave that washed slowly over me *
It felt as if he'd gone alone all through life's battles.
In that moment I knew more about him and his clinic, and
about what he'd done for Melli, than I ever knew befare from
hearsay or eger learned afterwards, s I-always-heve-to-makr-
this first absolute contact first, to know a person. It more
or less is what my tumny tells me. ET it aches, there'a a
person in coils. If it dgeertt, the other person is all
right. It's an entnal feeling. In medicine this is terribly
difficult,f you're trying to steer through darknes all the
time a3 I was, rying-to-repepuir-migmorence-Hoble-by-M4tte.
nly
I had,realised that in the end it depended on hon this doctor
struok me in my animal feeling. It depended on the man.
And this doctor who stood before us now, in white, had
gone the road alone.. He'd dane the self-change. That pence
isn't possible chort of a terrific and completely unaparing
act of celf-examination. All knowledge has to be drcamed
first, and be yielded up from intimate life painfully and
slowly. Then it 1s given to other people, to becone their
certainty.


30h
with this energy; you tend mere to rapture and to heady, neb-
ulous dreams, you get a bit of nountain madness in your inner-
most self, your nightmares are sickly and menaced, with strange
vengeful and spiteful creatures from the dark woods, unsparing in
their venom, nudging and sneering and pinching.
I went through my own therapy at the clinic, picking up
what information I could from the little books written by the
doctor in charge. I wanted to find out for myself. I didn't
want a doctor doing it for me; I wouldn't have learned anything.
Which can be dangerous if you're as ignorant as I am. Beepase
of that, it was months and even years before I found out, what
was-eurtetle formy own systems But at least 1-lourned-m
lonl
a hote-firet-fow-wecks that the body HSTE just an inanimate
lumpo but Workea and Eamett Emers "complained in all sorts of ways
than 'd kroun
whichnuntil ROW--Knen nothing about.
The clinic was quiet and soothing. Everybody was in bed
by nine. I could read with my bedside light until nearly
midnight. But I tried to sleep early. I wanted to get the
maximum benefit out of the stay, k share Melei' state en much a praide:
One evening les : happened to go to one of the clinic-
lecturea about sleep. Apparently, it wasn't only that you
needed enough sleep: the hours in which it took place were
importent, toos There were. certein hours of darkness in Which
it should take place. The intestines, for instance, had
ceased their Work by a certain hour, and after that food tended
to turn rotten inside, and go to fat, namely, dead cells.
So sleep an d eating were linked. I remembered that my mother


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as diséase? Again, only questions; from an ignorant.person..
You hear so many stories about what is supposed to be
happening to us nowadays, without our knowing. Are they true?
Who can tell us if they're true or not; who has the over-all
knowledge? There are specialists, but none of them dare to
speak outside their provincé, The earth is be ing poisoned,
people - say---not 8o much potsoned for ourselves As for the
STez
'future generations. d We were brought up on the last vestiges of
the old life, when the basio things---the food and soil and air---
hadn tt been tampered with. But what ab out the future? What's
happening inside us? Wha t influences the child in the womb,
unknown to us? Are all the tiny, Anvisible processes of thè
body known? If incubation periods are anything from ten to
I twenty years, how do we know what is happening to our children?
Çan anyone tell us, for certain? If the crop-spec ialist tells
you it's 'safe' to spray erops wi th a certain weed-killer, does
he mean it 1s safe for my liver? Not at all. He doesn't know
anything about the liver. He means his spray will safely kill
the weeds but not the orop. So the words these specialists use
have to be examinéd. It is all vague. The word 'safet is
vague, meaning, /one thing for one man and another for another.
Specialists have rarely been trained in language and expression,
and yet we /have to know precisely what they mean. , Who oan collate
all the things they say except the ignorant, like me, who can
watch and compare?
What is the fete of a olass that ha S challenged ev ery pattern
of/ 1ife, wherever it has found one, in order to make something
spuriously 'new"?


And there are the apologists. Without spraying poisons
on to crops, they sey, we would have no apples---no tomatoes---
on the tablé. But ha ve ve really reached a-point in our history
when we sit down to eat a podsoned-tomatoe rathet than none at
all? Is it really possible that no epples or tomatoes were
eaten before the époch of science? With all the spurious thought
wetve accumulated it seems we can't sit down and think out the
simple st and olearest propocitions.
kar
What hope dan a man tho #aE spent all his formative years
in a laboratory learning formulae haver of answering questions
like these? Yet he has control cf our lives, and those of our
children. He has no real voice, his mind invariably hasn't had
a real training, except in other people's formulae. How far-
outside the formulae---does he go along on superstitions, more
untested than my superstitions because he feels he hes the support
of his formulae? How far.are wé in the hands of functionaries
none of whom oould take responsibility for the power hè uses?
How far are the dpctors just functionaries of medicine, although
given the power to heal? How far are we being led into darkre s8,
by people who prefer the darkness?
In the last hundred and fifty yeers life everywhere has béen
put under new principles, and no one has bothered to examine these
principles to see if they are all right for the world or not.
They've come into being at an alarming rate, they belong to us
and they stem from us, yet we're their servants---slaves. They
form a prison-house round us * And partly this is why life seems
to become unreal---because prisoners are notoriously day-dreamers.
Nearly everything robust and geuine from two centuries ago has
been taken in hand and overhauled, and a vast prison based on


last insoluble problems. .


last insoluble problems.


last insoluble problems. a


tiny city on two sides of a river, its population less than half
what it had been in ancient times; without the tall, pastel-shaded
blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas among trees;
a Rome whose intimate parts, round the Piazza di Spagna, extending
as far as the Piazza Venezia at one end and the Piazza del Popolo
at theother, lay in narrow, mediasval streets, straggling by the
river towards the ghetto opposite Trastevere, RERE still in a
southern sléep.


tiny city on two sides of a river, its population less than half
what it had been in anoient times; without the tall, pastel-shaded
blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas among trees;
a Rome whose intimate parts, round the Piazza di Spagna, extend: ling
as far as the Piazza Venezia at one end and the Piazza del Popolo
at theother, lay in narrow, mediauval streets, straggling by the
river towards the ghetto opposite Trastevere, XEXN still in a
southern sleep.


tiny city on two sides of a sluggish river, its population less than
half what it had been in ancient times; without the tall, pastel-
shaded blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas among trees;
ARome-ghone intimate parts rou


tiny city on two sides of a sluggish river, its population less than
half what it had been in ancient times; without the tall, pastel-
shaded blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas among trees;
a-Rome-whosd-intimate-.arts, utoum


tiny city on two sides of a sluggish river, its population less than
half what it had been in ancient times; without the tall, pastel-
shaded blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas among trees;
a Rome-whose antimate parts, Bou


tiny city on two sides of a river, its population.less than half
what it had been in ancient times; without the tall, pastel-shaded
blocks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas among tfees; X
a Rome whose intimate parts, round the Piazza di Spagna, extending
as far as the Piazza Venezia at one end and the Piazza del Popolo
at theother, lay in narrow, mediaeval streets, straggling by the
river towards the ghetto opposite Trastevere, WEXE still in a
southern sleep.
daun
Roui Iie leaua
feoalsl
Lal
lin Tha
Inee
dell
tLe
Wlose
nw Thez
Sargel
1 d: gpogna
undl
cerne
Pdi Veneget
fae
Pokol
alng
Tngbl-t
Sasefo
ntr,
meslidaed
hom L
gralts
souther
harvs
leah


Litolbed alav
Wle we A Jun Tante nutic In nue
da I
umd 2
wmer. hg
- le
HV hey
Loel,
ailyiel
wus
syiny
Juov
2u satoin
uad him
emld
kanlial and pa -
A um o
the ome Ll 2
Le izlkad
Hofu
kib L
STUN Aim 00:
L Kikeol
how
dnh
ken joie
say"
Hei eyan,
toinn
and
tn p;t


1ls Hhon) Low mmoled ther Lms - ager ha the
Dhouldin; the Stonv trips
the Enerz
the
Cki the a
2 Leave,
ulue mpsaded
Jisfe
Lo hewc.
Souel tam e
cin
t thr fisy
We She I6. duoll 2
uman I 'el -
mek.
aclal
las a : - h udup -
? bo tavee
la0 -Liphy
O7 L ise Ho
1o0
L Cons
no s
pami, Jeam
eran tare Lo
mocs alco huan
imoprind
all unuan,
ulis
lemlsfel 1
ud sasp,
Sxail
She L - l kool
rtre
tui
R ban
M12p
mn sirg
the
/ bercit
Les
tillid
mulf
rsary
Juer,
shaed
Tr wl
ot se
aret
ar L
gnp
sHery col
marth
tr pef
Sepurlie
weg
Dhl cauil
col
Areh
hri
Eand, say on yell
wheuer
GN Lr
Les aol
feal
Keld
mde,
Hov
ernd
2 docly
segu
lmnppit
mmild


There was always a feverish and troubled desire in Rome, a
gnawing and obstinate passion that was only contained by its being
so fleshly, without mental afterthoughts." The langorous, yearn-
ing flesh got its satisfactions on hot afternoons behind closéd
shutters, in cars at night, making them tip and roll slightly as
you walked past them, under the trees in the parks, in a.contact
that was sudden and compélling


There was always a feverish and troubled desiré in Rome, a
gnawing and obstinate passion that was only contained by its being
so fleshly, without méntal afterthoughts. The langorous, yearn-
ing flesh got its satisfactions on hot afternoons behind closed
shutters, in cars at night, making them tip and roll slightly as
you walked past them, under the trees in the parks, in a contact
that was sudden and compelling


There was always a feverish and troubled desire in Fome, a
gnawing and obstinate passion that was only contained by its being
auly
so fleshly, without mental
A The langorous, yearn-
ardenongtn
ing flesh got ite-sebisfeotione on hot afternoons behind closed
shutters, in cars at nighto (making them tip and roll slightly as
you walked past them, under the trees in the parks, in a contact
Culd
Itie deor
that was sudden and compelling
guesl
Ji daily
in pespl;
hol henk
tur hotmy
life,
L dram,
bugttim


insulting glances at Melli, as if to pay her out for any love
he might have S pent on her. Francine oried endlessly, the
tears would pour quickly down her face and disappear aga in,
apparently unseen by him. He was. like the land and sky of
Sic ily, I told him omce, at one of our last meetings; though
I'd nev er seen Sieily, only glimpsed one of its harbouss; what
I knew of it, I knew from him, whioh was perhaps the surest way.
'You're getting less and less of a person, 2 Isaid to him half-
joking, 'you're a landsacape, as every man must be I suppose if
he develops properly---he must grow into the landscape of his
country---and you're the rivers and hard rocks and long, deserted
beaches of Sicily, you're the torrid nights---the pitiless sea---!'
And he laughed in his strange way, in a dry, high-pitohed voioe,
his head raised and his eyes half-closed in their usual languorous


insulting glances at Melli, as if to pay her out for any love
he might have spent on her. Francine oried endlessly, the
tears would pour quiokly down her face and disappear aga in,
apparently unseen by him. He was like the land and sky of
Sic ily, I told him once, at one of our last meetings; though
I'd nev er seen Sicily, only glimpsed one of its herbouss; what
I knew of it, I knew from him, which was perhaps the surest way.
'You're getting less and less of a person,' Isaid to him half-
joking, 'you're a landssoape, as every man must be I suppose 1f
he develops properly---he must grow into the landscape of his
country---and you're the rivers and hard rocks and long, deserted
beaches of Sicily, you're the torrid nights---the pitiless sea-o-l'
And he laughed in his strange way, in a dry, high-pitched voice,
his head raised and his eyes half-olosed in their usual languorous


insulting glances at Melli, as if to pay her put for.any love
he might have spent on her. Francine cried endlessly, the
tears would pour quickly down her face and disappear again,
apparently unseen by him. He was like the land and sky of
Sic ily, I told him omce, at one of our last meetings; though
I'd never seen Sicily, only glimpsed one of its harbouss; what
I knew of it, I knew from him, which was perhaps the surest way.
'You're getting less and less of a person,' Isaid to him half-
joking, 'you're a landsacape, as every man must be I suppose if
he develops properly---he must grow into the landscape of his
country---and you're the rivers and hard rocks and long, deserted
beaches of Sicily, you're the torrid nights---the pitiless sea---!'
And he laughed in his strange way, in a dry, high-pitched voice,
his head raised and his eyes half-closed in their usual languorous
way.
Iusel
daye
Yer
clyné
Anol in
louy
sar selen
undspge wgfan
mol
cuythy
low à.
tLe par
dcth,
ukr
rhe
nae,t
hsmy 2
li dmlgery
no ad
clul
euy
yLe
sile,
Kteer
puph
ju C
gmp
any
ikure
Leip
ho a
hu selp
aolag


Htar
lile
Syv regak
tie
tuen Li
vw'ct
L. C
H3 I
CODOEG.L


of a vast flood trying not to get his feet wet---haunted by vul-
garity, banality, madness, chaos, self-obsession, all the pitfalis
of the creature who is denied society.
I only know one clear example of the same thing in England
and that isthe writer Joseph Conrad. He was brought up in the
other marid tradition, close to the German world, but he used
English


of a vast flood trying not to get his feet wet---haunted by vul-
garity, banality, madness, chaos, self-obsession, all the pitfalas
of the creature who is denied society.
I only know one clear example of the samé thing in England
and that isthe writer Joseph Conrad. He was brought up in the
other msttt tradition, olose to the German world, but he used
English


of a vast flood trying not to get his feet wet---haunted by vul-
garity, banality, madness, chaos, self-obsession, all the pitfalas
of the creature who is denied sooiety.
I only know one olear example of the same thing in England
and that isthe writer Joseph Conrad. He was brought up in the
other xortt tradition, alose to the German world, but he used
English


A ROMAN FRIENDSHIP
pan
Ae lamed Eaucine sis h A keiid 7 Clylensena
Ate charceds
dar
(C Gecaue l- uge
aud pale, mlk slinger lise.
hol Cuite niikle, Cae the tragc
hies 4m
dee sin He T - A - -
ke uncl ariefprig
maing lamenting Yad hee done, Joi hetine, tuce nighlt
Sreghuie vond hiin dad l: be cla racal. Lee J A
a classical silenee in kes Paris hous. the lasr
fla
Lo A He seal seesn whs Thes elack : fasin 2
accidenlal 1 >rialioi
Ae dupen pmitieig 1
action.
botant
Aayot
- - - - Ahot little 6
n de Rue
de Sine cansel lkis romanhi ; 8
( Ine -
tike somathis
C te t.la
ha Beleme!
efivnes
sriter
clmied:
< Lnick lke te ne
Napoen'
oknez
beefo
taln
ke hahel
sripirn
prhaiv.
hecale the n raashoi
ho hadk, 1 trauble 7
Rerythnit
ous
nud
: 7 A- Lo C 1 S ae Ltallucene l-5: i( 34
2 fon. l-ge
ton.
becabe
t: clotie
He (meekes, a
sa has 2
lugic 9
Lie
bold
thech.
shtes hnd tigkie :
f le
2 Rumnar yab-t
euers Vne
hee becal herceped
tunl
dinth
heu.
feaksis
mtt
Veehed h
- thi enstustad
esicl Acal. Aa
(1Le vrice 2 Lais par
6, pusec
cald Jae 1a lils.


Due to the hot wwather


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. The Italian is rarely arrogant, and I've never known
a murderous German.
I believe that Angelo never really perceived me as a whole,
only as moments. At one moment I was lively and gushing, striding
Sad padipo,
Comic,
all over the room, at another I was etegain,at another penetasti
lwas
and at another just absent, a pesce morto, a dead fish---doing, saying,
apparently thinking nothing. He often used these wordse tee:
he would say, 'You're sitting there like a dead fish!'
This is Very
ithe Sicihan Cou areu muesa
the Sicilian world, too: everything is momentsf nothing seitane. E
You suddenly, in that world, achieve God: you suddenly put out
massive branches like an oak, you tower over other people (for a mom-
ent, delivering yourself, V Then there is silence again. F'or you
aren't an oak: you are only one for a moment, then you go back to


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. The Italian is rarely arrogant, and I've never known
a murderous Gérman.
I bélieve that Angelo never really peroeived me as a whole,
only as moments. At one. moment I was lively and gushing, striding
all over the room, at another I was elegaic, at another penetrating,
at another just absent, a pesce morto, a dead fish-a-doing, saying,
apparently thinking nothing. He often used these words, too:
he would say, 'Toutre sitting there like a dead fishi'
This is
the Sicilian world, too: everything is moments, nothing being.
You suddenly, in that world, achieve God: you suddenly put out
massive branches like an oak, you tower over other people for a mom-
ent, delivering yourself. Then there is silence again. For you
aren't an oak: you are only one for a moment, then you go back to


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germanse The Italian is rarely arrogant, and I've never known
a murderous German.
I believe that Angelo never really peroeived me as a whole,
only as moments. At one moment I was lively and gushing, striding
all over the room, at another I was élegaic, at another penetrating,
at another just absent, a pésce morto, a dead fish---doing, saying,
apparently thinking nothing. Ho often used these words, too:
he would say, 'Tou're sitting there like a dead fishi*
This is
the sivilian world, too: everything is moments, nothing being.
You suddenly, in that. world, achieve God: you suddenly put out
massive branches like an oak, you tower over other people for a mom-
ent, delivering yourself. Then there is silence again. For you
aren't an oak: you are only one for a moment, then you go back to


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. The Italians is rarely arrogant


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans : The Italians is rarely arrogant


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. The Italians is rarely arrogant


grasp me as he usually did before the words were out of my
mouth. He still looked


grasp me as he usually did bef ore the words were out of my
mouth. He still looked


grasp me as he usually did before the words were out of my
mouth. He still looked


and squalors that are its language and always will be. Really
he is a man without a faith. He's alone, with his thoughts.
He's in a dead world, just as a Sioilian is said to feel in a
dead world when he's eurrounded by nature; traditionally, he is
oblivious to nature. It lies round him like a pesce morto.
Yet he is part of it. This is his strength. The loneliness
round kin, being olassical in origin, te more or less inconceivable
to us; he is the last olassioal man. He hasxa driving and
cutting willm a power to Bee alearly even to the darkest point in
his own self, and to make dazzling-olear reflections while up to
his neck in the squalor of life. He has this marvellous remote-
ness and spirituality, whioh leads to his suicide. The olassical
world was a tragic world, and s0 is his. There isn't any hope in
it, finally. Yet there 18 no Italian resignation, ei ther---the
having a stink end accepting it; there is the alter ego of pagan
squalor insetad---the obsensive horror of vulgarity, a classical
absolute, and the precise opposite of anything Christian.


and squalors that are its language and always will be. Really
he is a man without a faith. He's alone, with his thoughts.
He's in a dead world, just as a Sicilian 1s said to feel in a
dead world when he's surrounded by nature; traditionally, he is
oblivious to nature. It lies round him like a pesce morto.
Yet he 1s part of 1t. This is his strength. The loneliness
round gim, being classical in origin, ks more or less inconoeivable
to us; he is the last olassical man. He hasxa driving and
outting willn a power to sée olearly even to the darkest point in
his own self, and to maké dazzling-olear reflections while up to
his neok in the squalor of life. He has this marvellous remote-
-ness and spirituality, whioh leads to his suicide. The classical
world was a tragic world, and so is his. There isn't any hope in
1t, finally. Yet there is no Italian resignation, ei ther---the
having a stink and adcepting it; there 1s the alter ego of pagan
squalor insetad---the obsessive horror of vulgarity, a claseical
absolute, and the precise opposite of anything Christian.


and squalors that are its language and always will be. Really
he is a man without a faith. He's alone, with his thoughts.
He's in a dead world, just as a Sicilian is said to feel in a
dead world when he's surrounded by naturep traditional
Nalure
oblivioue-to nature
It lies round him like a pesce morto,
Yet he is part of it. This is his strength. The loneliness
round gim, being classical in origin, ks more. or less inconceivable
to us ; he is the last classical man. He hasxa driving and
cutting willm a power to see clearly even to the darkest point in
his own self, and to make dazzling-clear reflections while up to
his neck in Ehe squaloto ceai He has this marvellous remote-
ness and spirituality, which leads to his suicide. The classical
world was a tragic world, and So is his. There isn't any hope in
it, finally. Yet there is no Italian resignation, either---the
having a stink and accepting ito There is the alter ego of pagan
squalor ipeptea
obseesive horror of vulgarity, aebesstoal
bserute arrd the precise opposite of anything Christian.
lalo- Greek
H rusl )


speak, throwing little chunks of bread across the table and
putting another potato on his plate. He licked his chops,
guzzled his wine and had everything down inside a few minutes--
'd losv tis
talking the whole time as well. It wasn't that he lackeed-tabte
Aal /ta h-.
Jwre Aammar
sells


speak, throwing little chunks of bread across the table and
putting another potato on his plate.. He licked his chops,
guzzled his wine and had everything down inside a few minutes--
talking the whole time as well. It wasn't that he lacked table


speak, throwing little ohunks of bread aoross the table and
putting another potato on his plate. He licked his chops,
guzzled his wine and had everything down inside a few minutes---
talking the whole time as well. It wasn't that he lacked table


English could be remarkably good. All of a sudden, 1f there was no
other way of getting through, he would start talking English, throw-
ing in idioms like 'It rainéd oats and dogs* and 'I'm feeling blue'.
But he always said that English wasn't his 'destiny'.
We went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, their masts swaying
in hundreds, and looked aoross at the Hem pshire side, where there
was a rising lawn and the typical, close, hilly


English could be remarkably good. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of getting through, he would start talking English, throw-
ing in idioms like 'It rained cats and doge * and 'I'm féeling blue'.
But he always said that English wasn't his 'destiny'.
We went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water; their masts swaying
in hundreds, and looked across at the Han pshire side, where there
was a rising lawn and the typical, close, hilly


English could be remarkably good. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of being understood, he would start talking English,
slowly and clearly, enunciating it beautifully. But he alway S
said that English wasn't his 'destiny'.
He went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, and looked across
at the other bank, which was in the form of a rising lawn, with
a house among trees and the close, hully Hampshire country beyond.
He said the same as on his first visit---he felt so free. He
could see it in people 's faces---it was such a relief after the
'tension' of the Continent. The resae' of English life, an
inner harmony of freedom, was what struck him, he said.


English oould be remarkably good. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of being. understood, he. would: start talking. English,
slowly and clearly, enunciating it beautifully. But he always
said that English wasn 't his 'destiny'..
He went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, and - looked across
at the other bank, which was in the form of a rising lawn, with
a house among trees and the close, hally Hampshire country beyond.
He said the same as,on his first visit---he felt so free. He
could see it in people's faces---it was such a relief after the
'tension' of the Continent. The resae' of English life, an
inner harmony of freedom, was what struck him, he said.


English could be remarkably good. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of being understood, he would start talking English,
slowly and olearly, enunciating it beautifully. But he always
said that English wasn't his *destiny'.
He went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, and looked aoross
at the other bank, whioh was in the form of a rising lawn, with
a house among trees and the dlose, hally Hampshire country beyond.
He said the sâme as on his first visit---he felt 80 free. He
oould see it in people e's faces---it was such a relief after the
'tension* of the Continent. The tesae' of English life, an
inner harmony of freedom, was what struck him, he said.


English could be remarkably good. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of getting through, he would start talking English, throw-
ing in idioms like 'It rained cats and dogs' and 'I'm feeling blue'.
But he always said that English wasn't his 'destiny'.
We went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay on the water, their masts swaying
et SE
in hundreds, and looked across at the Hempshire side, where there
(iay Md,
1 lemat
was a
lawn
rising
and/the typicalo close, hilly csunligy
Hrel alny Srakamplan Wa I,


opuraged. This doesn't mean he is punished or even thwarted
in his desires. In that way he is freer than anyone in other
classes, or anyone in history. In fact, his failure to arouse
a hot, unthought-out response is part of the discouragement:
he seems to be pining for a good clip round the ear.


cpuraged. This. doesn't moan he is punished or even thuarted
in his desires. In that way he is freer than anyone in other
classes, cr anyone in history. In fact, his failure to arouse
a hot, unthought-out response is part of the discouragement:
he seems to be pining for a good clip round the ear.


absolutely no power, exercised by. one person over another.
Nobody has power, so there is.no corruption. There is nothing
but the human creature: And because there: isn 't anybPosition
he is the king of every place he is in, by natural election.
But this working olass isn't by any means just a natural or much
less primitive conglomeration.


absolutely no power, exercised by one person over another.
Nobody has power, so there I is no corruption. There is nothing
but the human creature. And because there isn't anybPosition
he is the king of every place he is in, by natural election.
But this working class isn't by any means just a natural or much
less primitive conglomeration.


cpuraged. This doesn't mean he is punished or even thwarted
in his desires. In that way he is freer than anyone in other
classes, or anyone in history. In fast,his failure to arguse
a hot, unthought-out response is part of the discouragement:
he seems to be pining for a goof clip round the ear.
Buthi intiuingy
ler ho Hlace -
Le alobe 2 kuip
believe -
cis
broy
ard
prail
aud - 450
i co
ninshy
nuttie .
Zuoloe
totatt.
he wee
alilicln
C +Le
have
lerr
the
chill
a - - Io
trot
Jhcl Jmn
darty
iim,


T twtootrek
wk nr mee
-Lot unttose
A 6
par
lerd clit
t be
buiis
veem
ol Le .
urud He gas


Ti doeni Leas Le : puniasd -
huasel iu Li Lexie.
Ho in tea
i Lu -3us han
: oha
BHidi
dlana,
1 M
Liinas.
eoter
purcon
casefet - +
doeait Cac:
leam Hav h
Jha Li
lae dosi
Le wil cume,
ond Li
ase len uyfeue,
end. H
desie -
demend ae as
sitinists
wnle Le yo
Hv the
e umld
leam
a C -
And
bc A A a
le ciil


courages. This doesn't mean he is punished or even thwarted
in his desires. In that way hets freer than anyone in other
olasses, or anyone in history. But he learns that he doesn 't
count: he will count tone day', perhaps; he sees that the world
he opened his eyes on at birth isn't for some reas on the world
he will make his way in later. Sbmetimes he notices the desparate
struggle bwteen those two worlds in his parents 's eyes. His
intimacy has no place in the sceme of things: his parents may
+believe' in it, and WOO it, and protect it; but he sees the
truth. Therefore you have in middle-class ohildren that hurt
clarity which sometimes grows into irony. As a child he doesn't
belong to ' the important scheme of things: not as an Italian bhild
does, far instance; an Italian ohild is equal with his parents,
he is only a smaller edition, and there 1s no difference between
one age and another. But in our world the different ages aee
marked: éach has its different intimate demand Which doesn 't
fit the seheme of things e
The Working-class child knows nothing about this either.
In his world ambtiion simply doesn'tvexist and life is as it is
seen at birth. Like an Italian he is the king of his own féelings, 9
with a natural right to be given an audience for them. But in
the middle-class world you are caught up in ambitions whether
you like it or not and this must show to your ch ildren. And
in humanity the middle class child mus t be groomed for the world
he will inherit: For the mid e class world is grounded on power, not
The middle-class upbringing must in all humanity be a subtle
mustering of arms for the fight for Position which will one day
come about: the Position may be a title or money or simply what
your neighbours think of you, or it may be a rejection of all
these things; but a Position of same kind it will be, not a
natural and humble inheritance e
We middle-classes are based
on power, not


courages. This doesn't mean he is punished or even thwarted
in his desires. In that way hets freer than anyone in other
classes, or anyone in history. But he learns that he doesn'tt
count: he will count 'one day', perhaps; he sees that the world
he opened his eyes on at birth isn*t for some reason the world
he will make his way in later. Sometimes he notices the desparate
struggle bwteen those two worlds in his parents's eyes. His
intimacy has no place in the sceme of things: his parents may
*believe' in it, and WOo it, and proteot it; but he sees the
truth. Therefore you have in middle-class . children that hurt
clarity which sometimes grows into irony. As a child he doesn't
belong to the important scheme of things : not as an Italian ahild
does, far instance; an Italian child is equal with his parents,
he is only a smaller edition, and there is no difference between
one age and another. But in our world the different ages ace
marked: each has its different intimate demand Which doesn 't
fit the soheme of things a
The Working-class child knows nothing about this either.
In his world ambtiion aimply doesn'tvexist and life is as it is
seen at birth. Like an Italian he is the king of his own feelings,
with a natural right to be given an audience for them. But in
the middle-class world you are caught up in ambitions whether
you like it or not and this must show to your ch ildren. And
in humanity the middle class child mus t be groomed for the world
he will inherit: For the mid e class world is grounded on power, not
The middle-class upbringing must in all humanity be a subtle
mustering of arms for the fight for Position which will one day
come about: the Position may be a title or money or simply what
your neighbours think of you, or it may be a rejeotion of all
these things; but a Position of s ame kind it will be, not a
natural and humble inheritance
We middle-olasses are based
I on power, not


feuds.


feuds. e


feuds. o


feuds. He used to imitate his unclse---thin and


feuds. He used to imitate his unclse---thin and


feuds. He used to imitate his unclse---thin and


made its encrustations on the Italian face---violenve and
struggle, above all poyerty: But these are communal lines, not
indiviudal


made its encrustations on the Italian : face---violenve and
struggle, above all poyerty. But these are communal lines, not
indiviudal


made its enerustations on the Italian face---violenve and
struggle, above all poyerty. But these are communal lines, not
indiviudal


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as diases


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as diases


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as diases


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as disease? Again, only questions; from an ignorant person.
We were brought up on the last vestiges of the old life,
when the basic things---the food and soil--


already there in : the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as disease? Again, only questions; from an ignorant person.
We were brought up on the last vestiges of the old life,
when the basic things---the food and soil--


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as disease? Again, only questions; from an ignorant person.
We were brought up on the last vestiges. of the old life,
when the basic things---the food and soil--