WAITING; FOR: MELLI
Maurice:Rowdons:
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HAROLD OBER ASSOCIATES
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VAITINGFOR MELLI
Maurice Rowdon.


CONTENTS
III


This is the story of friendship---a glimpse of its Perhaps
we only get one in life. - Our epoch doesn 't allow us any mores
It begina with Melli.
For five years, sherd kept me alive. It was the first time
in my life I was free to do what I wanted to do,every day.
That
doesn't mean just money. Melli gave me the time--the slow time
that grows out of a Bource that doesn't change and never has to
speak---the gift of undisturbed time that always lies inside her,
amazingly untouched by the world.
We got a tiny, intimate home going, first in Monte Sacro,
a hideous jerry-built garden suburb just outside Rome with very little
garden about it, and then in Rome itself, in the. old part,. where
it was noisy and cluttered-up but with a strange embracing glow
that seemed to belong to the end of the nineteenth century, as
that epooh was in Europe and not in England---the time : of horse-
drawn oarriages and dim lamplights and oandles at table, and a
sort of commercial baroque that wasn't too disgusting. - We used
to feel this most when we were dressing to go out in the evening,
especially a winter-evening when the televisions weren't blaring
across our courtyard, and all the colours of the room glowed sharp-
ly, with the Japanese standing lamp, the deep-blue carpet and sea-


blue ceiling, the bright yellow curtains that didn't quite fit--
ever rything so clean, even in the city, with clear primary colours
that always have a special glow in Italy.
The light---this is what you miss when you leave Italy, the
marvellous glowing 1ight which is always there like a mystical
presence even on dull days, and which opens the eyes vide, as the
dry air videns and nourishes the fibres and jbints and nerves.
Just the light and airof Italy heal. Just a touoh and even the
tightest face from northern civilisation starts to clear and show
a natural 11ght, as it eases the muscles underneath and soothes the
guts and lessens the anxious, trotting pride and stops the invisible
gnawing of the worm of ambition that always plans and schemes and
thinks to itself and can't ever yield to the world outside because,
in the north, the real vorld isn't allowed to show. The real world,
which 1s natural light and air, is still there in Italy: it has gone
into the guts and tissues. I don't mean optimism. le have much
more of that. In that way Italy is a dark, numbed world: endlessly
dark.
Everything I'had belonged to kelli. It still does. I had
absolutely nothing. Just what I stood up in. I could smile---
I could rise to that---just enough to make her think I was more or
less sane.
In Monte Sacro we had hardly more than one room for the two of
us, and even that was small. It was wonderfully cosy. There was
another room, much smaller, only that was separated from the next-
door flat by a wall as thin as cardboard and you could hear every
cough
word, every verd and even every creak of a chair caused by the moving
of a behind. It would only do for a little reading in the day.
If you tried to sleep there you were projected out of your sleep
by the sound of sweeping and dusting, which went on for hours, not


ordinary dus ting and sweeping but a fanatical kind: the furniture
was always pushed across the floor with a horrible wrench and squeak
(she seemad to be both the laziest and the most energetic person you
could imagine), and the broom hit every bit of chair-leg and wains-
coting head-on. Italy is norve-wracking. But the real nerves
underneath don't suffer: I've always found that strange. Then
there was the conversation. This was southern Italian, shouted,
with lots of coughs---but quite charming: I liked the conversation
best of all.
So we slept and ate in the bigger room, and we brought up our
dog there tooa There was a tiny balo ony leading off this room
through french windows, which never got the sun apart from a few
delightful moments about breakfast time. In fact, the vh ole flat
was out of the sun. The windoms looked down into shadow.
The description 'garden suburb' came from its previous exist-
ence, before the war, in Lussolini's time, when it had been a place
on its own, quite separate from Rome, consisting mostly of villas
large and small among trees, along quiet, orderly little roads.
You still felt this other life some times, with the tall new blocks
udad la take
standing up behind:.. Once you, toek ja bus from 'the Porta Pia along
a deserted Via Nomentana, with trees on either side of an avenue,
but now you joined a smelly queue of cars and cycles and got there
in half-an-hour if you were lucky. And now there are houses and
new flats nearly the whole way out. And the garden suburb gleams
and flashes at the end like a huge concrete Zoo, where every shop
seems to sell precisely the same thing, in flimsy coloured plastic
bags, even the vegetables. The goods they sell don't seem to have
come from a real place or been grown anyrhere. This is the little
tinsel dream of Italian prosperity. The tall blocks look vivid
for a fen weeks and then start peeling in the rain or sun.


Helli was living in one of the new blocks when we met---
with the sound of bulldozers all through the day, and none of the
roads made up. These roads were always the subject of dispute
betveen the contractors and the town authority: neither took
responsibility for them, so they were mud in the winter end a fine
dusty sand in the summer. But her place was quiot, cleàn and quiet,
because she was the first occupant and most of the other apartments
were empty. I - shall never forget that first healing quiet.
Konte Sacro was the place for the new lower middle-class,
people who nere more orderly and subdued than their mothers and
fathers; they'd turned their backs for good on the old rough
peasant life where you squatted in a field for a shit, and at
night flung yourself down on anything flat and slept at once.
Contadini---peasonts, already a term of slight contempt, or hurt
distas te, mixed tith compassion, with just à hint of the dignity
given by the fascists and false for that reason.
The place had a terrific tedium. It was the Italian tedium---
the sad inherited convic tion of the nerves that nothing is going to
move or change---a tedium gone out of the body, Where it had slept
quite comfortably and healthily for centuries, into the mind. A
nervous ted 1um. Partly 13 was because the place was new. The
Italian intimacy would grow again---probably already has---but the
old timeless and healthy tedium wouldn't come back. Now there was
just alien restleseness. The streets would begin to look intimate---
Italy can do that to the most hideous things---but this restlessness
vould be on top. There is this nervous mind-searching you never got
before.
In that first tiny home we made together we started to come to
terms with our oun restlessness. le found each other e xhausted,
elmost broken, in different ways : but outwardly resilient. In


a way we'd both just recovered from something. Melli from a real
siokness, me from a life-siokness, which are the same thing in the
end. Really we were at the end of g struggle when we met. The
meeting was only a olimax, and afterwards we felt it had been pre-
destined. We both seemed to wait for it, already conscious of it
coming, certainly to need it, absolutely, with every fibre and littàe
nerve, spoken in ev ery chance remark to other people and felt in
sleep, always as a waiting. I know I waited, day after day, in
the most massive pause.of my lifé.
So that when it happened it was almost not a surprise. I
remember tho morning perfectly. It was one of the dazzling and
radiantly clear days you get in the autumn in Rome. It meant for
me a release from disgust and a horrid weight that had been loading
itself on m for months, even years, accumulating like the dust and
the dry, poisoned air in the streets and the deafening traffic.
At that time in Rome, I remember, I was almost never alone.
But it was all dust. Everything said was dust and misery and
dross. It was all for nothing, from nothing, towards nothirg o
I was nothing.. I couldn't afford to be alone: I mean, really
in the money-sense I couldn't afford it. I didn't have enough
moneye In faot, I had absolutely nones So I had to keep
rotating. Otherwise I would have lost all connection with the
worlds. I kept oaloulating to myself, 'I oan't die, I ,oan't starve
to death, so something must happen, if I just hang on.' So I hung
on from day to day, just getting through each day separately, as a
separate account which I thought of singly, getting just enough
food under my belt, perhaps one bus ride, a walk across Rome, a
ooffee here, a drink from someone there. I always regretted not
being able to talk about it---to say, 'I'm finished.' But I


couldn' 't. If I'd done that I could probably have picked up an
easy job : somewhere or even been given money straight off, as a
gift. But Ialways behaved as if I knew things vere all right, so
naturally people thought the same * And it was complicated by the
fact that, I didn't wanta job. If one appeared on the horizon I
found myself taking a side-street.
At the time we met I'd just picked up a job as an extra in
some American film, which would last a few days. The idea was to
dress up as a German priest, in a bright scarlet cassock with a wide
furry hat, toge ther with a small group of boys from Trastevere who
had the devil of a time making dirty jokes and larking abouts We
were supposed to be tourists from the Greman coll egé à As the film
was alvays shot outdoors, in the ruins of the Forum or at the Col-
osseum---it was one of those massive 1 films on a wide screen that
showed the finest spectacles of the vorld---we had towalk through
the streets in our red cassocks, and of course we were taken ' for real
priests.. The Trastevere boys really did look like priests, too.
They had the natural acting abilities of tho children of the poor. J
1o themefan-days-they actualiy rere priestss They created extra-
ordinary alarm, and the film director had to make an appeal to them
not to 'overdo' the fun, because they might get a complaint from the
Vatican. They mould follow a roman dovn the street with their
cassocks lifted up over their knees, doing a sort of dance. Romans
ab Lem
used to decades of gloony, undemonstrative priests stared and gaped
and stood rooted to the pavement. The women would look round with
a kind of ravished amazement, mixed with interest. The boys made
their us ual setual cat-calls, 'Che pezzo!', . Amazza, che cullo!'-
what a piece, what an arse on that one! One of them bunched up his
waist band in. the form of a massive phallus, knotting it at the end,
and rushed straight up to a passing woman, holding it in both hands.


She was so astonished that all she could do was to step aside wibh-
time
out saying a word, her mouth open, at the same/watching hard, as all
the other women did---not afraid, because these were priests after all,
only intrigued and horrified and fascinated and pertotay stunned and
unwillingly amused all in one; and like the others she kept turning
to look at us, hurrying off at the same time. The boys would whip off
their neat, rimmed hats just as someone was passing and make as 1f to
piss in them, pushing their bellies out and straining hard. The
American director---tho looked exact tly like most people's idea of an
American direo tor, with horn-rimmed spectacles and a chair to sit in
by the camera and a kind of green shade over his eyes, gazed 'on mildly
from a height where the cameras couldn't be seen. He had such a
tolerant look---he even smiled. And now and then he sent down mild
messages---please, boys.jlittle respect, please.
Apparently, that was the historical reason why the German priests
wore red: back in the centaries they'd behaved so rowdily in Rome that
the pope hed put them in a colour people could see a mile away. That
was the story, anyway.
As we were crossing the road from the Forum to the Colosseum
(about the most dangerous road in Italy because it is so wide), on our
way back from a snatched lunch in a pizzeria, a man with a deadly pale
face and a morbid, gloating expression picked up with us, right in the
middle of the traffic, and began asking one question after 'another---
were we about to be ordained, how long had ve studied, nere we sad
about it perhaps, what sort of feeling did we have about the priestly
life? He was struck, apparently, by our not wearing our hats---it
seemed to him our last as certion of freedom, before we took the cloth.
And we kere so young . He kept looking at us closely, fascinated and
gloating, taking us in one by one, very slorly, from our feet upwards,


looking starved of life, with a slightly sweating pallor. And the
boys answered with perfect seriousness. They seemed to know what he
wanted to hear. Yes, they were about to be ordained, it was a sad
moment but also a stirring one too, for all of us. le nere so
young! Yes, yes, the morbid. chap said with a nod, he could see that,
with' his perverted little glance at all our parts. We'd given up
everything, the boys went on, we'd given up our homes, our possessions,
our families, and of ccurse----women. Ah! Ah, yes: Wasn't that
peinful? How could we do it? It was hard, the boys said, terribly
hard---they spoke, with a wonderful soft solemnity; it was hard, but
when one had heard the Mes sage, and seen from afar, and knew. one's
vocation, when the light was olear ahead, dazzling one's eyes, then
all the little pleasures other men strain after were very small things
indeed, my son! They talked wi th absolute understanding 6 They really
did und erstand. They veren't amiling at all. They moved and spoke
and looked round exactly in their role, and there was that subtle Roman
humour underneath which is sad and shows a sad face, and never laughs. I
One of the scenes was ac tually in the Forum, and we had to walk
between the ruins slouly, some of us looking at the stones and others
reading their prayer books or saying the rosary. And they did it all
with such an extraodrinery natural ease. It was beyond even ac ting e
They valked solemly, not a bit too fast or too slow. And nobody
had to tell them. They knew all the characters of Rome---of life-
in the: ir blood, and didn't have to be told. And all the while they
were walking along solemly they were making dirty jokes, vithout mov-
ing their faces, saying, 'Lobk at that big column, my friend, it's
just like your father's prick!'
I watched all this through thick layers of loneliness and alarn
and restlessness that were like a hot rash all over me, making me


tremble. Getting up in the morning and going through the day meant
a voyage through nervous alarm that changed its scope and situation
every few moments and, was also strangely exciting; the, excitement
provided the moral energy to go on. Only for a few hours in the
morning did life look sane, out in the tiny country houset near
Frascati Where I was living at the time, with an Italian family.
The daughters and the father.would have gone to work by then, rth ile
the noisiest boy had gone to school.. - So I was alone.with Lisa, the
mother. She was a quiet, sharply goodlooking woman, thinned by
work and worries. She had such an easy way of talking, direct and
rather child-1ike, and we Wouldtalk for long hours together, vh ile
she mended socks or cooked. It was those long hours of healthy
tedium that kept me in sanity at all. Nothing I asked seemed incon-
venient to her, or irritating. I was in the house like a stray.
I brought in what money I could, when I could. The meals were noisy---
the clattering went on from the moment . we sat down until the tiny cup
came 5
of coffee which only one or two of the grown-ups had at the end -
tzeet an enormous clash and clamour, with three generations talking
at the top of their voices, but without touching the hungry, digesting
organs inside. The room where we ate and sat and lived most of the
time was a derk, thr 1lling place with a:staircase and dining table at
one end, and a cluttered sideboard under Russian ikons and pictures,
which had been brought back from a visit of the papal nuncio before the
nol-le
war. The father was a member of the pope's hohse guard and dressed
in a magnificent uniform now end then, and carried a sword at the side
of the pope's chair. Whenever we talked about priests having vomen
or anything like that---which. his sister, -
eet
mnnttton liked to do---he bit his lip and went rather
quiet; xktxk but he took colour-photos of some of the most attractive
young women in Rome, showing a lot of bosom, usually in bathing cos sty


umes, and now and then one of the looal monasteries nould invite him
to dinner and he would take the transparencies along and show them as
lantern slides. He would spent minutes fixing his camera, if there
was an attractive woman to take, and would
poring over
her bosom through the view-finder. He had a rather panic-stricken
glence sometimes, showing the whites orthis eyes like a horse, and
for all his stamping he was a mild, tolerant man, with that faint
humour which in the real Roman hardly twitches the lips. They were
real Romans, in the old, flourishing, wild and rampaging sense.
Every moment was burned away, rather then lived. Tneir tedium was
the old kind. They had the noisy, raucous, passionete and philistine
approach of the old penniless nobility. There was sudden sh outing,
then long quiet. The voices were thick and unawere. 3ometimos the
ribald sister would lower her. dress and show one of her breasts, with
a quiet laugh, to show us how beaatifyl she'd once been; and the
father would look away, remonstrating very quietly, but with the hardly
visible twitch of his lips, cracked and thick, unhindered by a moment's
real imposed discipline in all his life. nd the old woman, his
mother, talking firmly and quietly at his side during the meals,
ranging over names and ramilies and the past, in a dialogue that seemed
to have been going on for fifty years, with nothing changed.
Outside the windows at the back there was a small courtyard with
a fountain, where the women washed and gossipod all day, and in the
front they had a little piece of garden leading down to the road of
olive trees and peach trees. In summer the house baked silently,
with the dogs barking in the yard every now and then, and the sound
of cicadas was so overpowering that it was like a higher silence,
nearly beyond all feeling, drugged.
I used to sit there for many hours, with Lisa, while she knitted
or mended some trousers, or talked to her sister-in-law, who sipped


white wine all the time and sat sighing and yawning, and making her
ribald chuckle. As I say, the morninga just after breakfast were
the most peaceful time. I would take my tea alone, with a big hunk of
bread and jam, and Lisa would be in the kitohen at the other end of
the room, with the sun streaming in, getting the vegetablés ready
for lunch, talking to, through the open doorway.
The house was nearly always ramshaokle, nearly always deafening,
and sometimes she passed her hand over her brow in a tired way and said,
There was a kind of primitive struggle, hardly statod,
between her mother-in-law and herself. The old woman would talk
slowly and stolidly, always getting her point over, through the clatter
and shouting. Her oonversations with her son were endless, and had a
violent, gutteral, passionate and yet dry tone, hard and meroiless
and yielding and soft at the same time---the Roman way of talk that
probably was the same in the ruling families two or three hundred
years ago, among the so-called black aristocracy, the aristocracy of
the church. They'd dd lost all their money and their position, but
tho dry, clattering wildness was still there, the extraordinary
surges of passion that nearly wrecked everything, including them-
selves, the terrific rise and fall of life évery day, always
violent and dramatid, never pausing, always raising and dropping
life with a loud reverberation that had no effect, that led to
nothing, to no change, that was always enclosed again in the Boft
web and woof of life, and then wrecked again, moment by moment, with
a olashing, vulgar, disgusted, eostatic, tamed and abject and yet
passionately assertive movement of feeling, that gorged itself on
the energies and the heart and the bowels,.and ate them up all day
and spewed them out, and then regurgitated it all again as if from
nothing. For hours of days, and days of weeks, it seemed that I
sat there, nearly always in the same ohair between the window and the
ToP.12a


dining table, in a kind of second life in which all self and looking-
forward and even the natural animal-identity seemed to have been given
up, while only the fibres and nerves went on living, numbed even to the
point of satisfaction, drowsy and distant, vith only the flesh in prop-
er comection, and growing invisibly all the time, in the hot room,
while someone talked or the radio blared or the women shouted at the
yatd as
back /pht** they washed autat clothes or the whole family became active
in one full clattering chorus that only stopped suddenly, as if put out
by God, at bedtime, to be resumed with the same violent suddenness at
seven the next morning . It seemed I could have gone on sitting there
always, and nothing would have changed very much, gradually I would have
become a limb in their family-life that could never beremoved again,
ab sorbed into their momentary dramas----Lisa going to bed with her
young nephew, the father writing an appalled letter to this young
nephew, though gentle at the same time, bec ause he loved him so much,
and then the attempt of the young nephew to seduce the daughter, and
a quarrel between Lisa and her sister-in-law, over the nephew, whotty
the sister-in-law claimed was being seduced by Lisa, and so forth,
all in great dramatic instalments day by day. I certainly was drawn
into the drama, but not yet with my whole life: my energies were
being shouted anay and spent passionately on the immediate mome nt,
until the body that owndd them B lumped down at night and slept like
the others, vaking violently agein soon after dawn, to take up the
long raucous dialogue, and so life passed, tearing and tugging the
flesh in a pointless perpetual motion so that you never really owned
your own life for a moment and there wasn't a moment to spare in which
to see Pe clearly, there was no separateness from other peoplem
even your lips were like the lips of something from the past, a
gulf or vine-terrace, like the lips of the baked earth, and every
change came from outside, from an angry fate or a suddenly benign


one, but if you tried to cling to the benign one it ehowed a bitter
vengeful spite and threw you off again. It taught.me the meaning
of what stendhal said, that passion had passed out of Europe in the
Bixteenth century. Passion is that hard, raucous, immediate method
of life which poses at once what one must do, and gives no spare
moments in which to see things olearly. But we have to see things
clearly all the time; we're lost otherwise. It's our méthod, a
different life.
It was the real Roman style, in that house. It was what
Stendhal meant when he said that the Romans were passionate---that
this was what distinguished them among Italians. Their life was
unpausing and wild, yet numbed, listless, sunken, abject. Feelings
rose from the ab, jeot vapours, like plants from docay- Under the
old Roman passion, of thich there are still traces today, you have
that natural evblution, the decay isn't thrown off or refused,
whioh is a. secret of survival. In that house I loarned my first
Italian---I was flung, at once, into the heart of Rome, with nothing
fancy or modern, I was given the real flesh of Rome as it had always
béen, even in the pagan days perhaps. It seers and. yet secretly
fattens your flesh. It is brutal yet wayvardly soft, with nothing
virginal, nothing fixed or strict or unharmonious, least of all in
its violence; nothing is strained, nothing is allowed in the slight-
est degrée negative, even what is an absolute and brutal no, nothing
that could stop the daily consuming and spending and laying waste
of flesh.
That was nearly nine years ago. I was still being whirled
round then, wondering at what point in the wheel's giddy turn I
would be flung off. All I knew was that it couldn't go on whirl-
ing round at that rate.
I didn't know what was happening to me but I was aware that
/T R13


this was a period of waiting---with the Whole of my body, where
I abandoned any olaim to a real, moving self. There was something
deliberate in my waiting, after all---I was deliberately laying
myself open to God, I wanted fate to decide something for mé, I
wanted to be. shown the path mystically, without putting anything in
the way à
That was why Ita oome to Rome in the first
I left
place.
London suddenly. I threweve erything up. And I don't really know
why it was Rome. I knew no one there. I took a one-way ticket
to Rome on borrowed nney, with enough extra to keep me a fow days.
I went into the blue with my eyes shut. It was- done with an absol-
ute surrender---either it would- save me or finish mo. I drew the
darkness on myself, blindly, letting go of my identity. I only
had the name and pioture in my passport. Otherwise there was
nothing. I believed that if I surrendered helplessly to fate, it
would have to give a me a sign. I wanted a sign. I wanted fate
to show me where I belonged in life, to whom I belonged. And I
had to be naked for that. I had to be without possessions, and
without anyone to save me. At a point in life you have to do that.
You must lay yourself open to fate, in however little a way (the
effect will be for the whole of life---there's no little way with
fate), because fate is only a word for your ultimate self, a reality
without flesh or single existence, that is known only on the death-
bed.
Melli did the same, and about the same time. She came from
Germany, after growing up in America She yielded her flesh in the
same may, after the shadow of death had fallen on her for a moment.
That was infinitely greater than my surrender. She knew the force
she was surrendering to. I didn't. She had more shere knowldge
of the invisible than I could imagine. There was no foresight in


what she did: thereforé only passion.
And whon I got her little note one day--it arrived after
a roundabout journey, quite miraculously-I think it was even lost
for à time---anyway, there it was on my bed one sad, blazingly sunny
afternoon, just after I'd got back from Rome, and an enormous relief
- vent through me, as if I'd got to the end of a long journey,
though I didn't know. who this person was, I'd never net her. liy
mind said nothing. My mind had no ideas. It was just a note-
from the friend of a friend. But there was this extraordinary
peace in me, and a confidence beyond anything I'd known for years,
as I read it. All out of the blue, I had to reply---make an
appointment, Bo I wrote the name of the only caré I knew in Rome
where you could sit for any length of time and which wasn't done out
in travertine like a lavatory. It was aalled the Aramno, the.spider,
and atthat time had chandeliers and mirrored walls, and potted
plants, like a Viennese caré; later they changed it, especially
the name, i and put the marble and chromium in. The Italians have
few real cafés, only hurried little bars where you snatch a thick
oup of coffee and buzz off again.
Suddenly life ohanges in all sorts of veys---towards an end:
without you knowing it. Not long before this I'd got to know
Angelo and Francine. I used to go to their flat, and some-
times stay a night or two on the sofa in the sitting room, That
nas a strange story, too. I'd met Francine in London, quite a
number of months before. - She'a just had one of her - many quarrels
with Angelo, and had paoked up and flown off. Iwas sitting in
a café on a Sunday morning, when the streets were deserted and there


was that look of torpor and dearth over everything with the clouds
low over the roofs. I was sitting there alone, next to someone I
was on nodding terms with---he warked in the City and always wore a
dark suit, and was nicknemed slippery Dick, I don't know why.
Francine was in the corner by the coffee bar, reading something by
Bernard Shaw: I remember looking at the title from across the room.
It was a. dark and sompioty chaotic period for me, when I was
separating from my first wife: we'd been apart the year before, on
and off, but now it looked final. We were very nice to each other
about it--the great battles were over---and now there only rema ined
the slow physical ache of becoming separate, I don't mean in sex but
just in the daily habit of contact and always being there. t7hen I
come to think of it, we weren't together very long, only about five
years, and for the last one of those we were apart. But it was 11ke
drawing ourselves out of a long sleep, not a very comfortable one but
a friendly one---we were always friends, and there was that unbroken
respect betreen us that made everything perplexing and contradictory.
The morning I met Francine we'd spent most of the night up, talk-
ing at someone's flat, about five of us: one of them was an actor,
I think, of French origin, and he was telling us yarns by the hour;
I can remember his dark, rather elfin, lined face, and his pleasant
clothes, as he talked and one person fell asleep While another woke
up; all through the night until dawn that went on. Then we all
trooped back to our house and had breakfast. Those nights had some-
thing terrible and ecstatic in them---there was the excitement of
straingng the nerves to a delicious, troubled fatigue which gnared
and enflamed the sex, in a situation where one's body and everybogy
else's was being broken up---everything was breaking up, not only
the furniture and books that looked drabber and drabber in the daily
smoke of London, but all hopes and wishes and tender little services,


all folly and intimate little preoccupations, all : was being closed
and thwarted, like. the closing-up of the fertile organs in a woman.
And always that low-hanging sky, it seemed---always a strange dawnj
when the sound of the birds made you slightly sick because it mas
natural: the sunlight was always forgotten, it came and went like a
lure to other places. And underneath this swinging and rolling and
sickeningix yielding daily life there were the shadors of betrayal
and things left undone and badness unacc ounted for---there was never
cruelty. exactly, nothing really unkind, that seemed too positive a
gesture for lives already swallowedap, but there was a gathering
badness, from promises that came to nothing, from leaving everything
int imate to the mercy of the huge city. There nasn't anybody bad
there, but the badness grew from there being nothing else---people's
goodness, which is really their intimacy, shone for a moment and then
was put out by drink or a late night or a sudden infatuation that
eclipsed everything for a week, a month, a year---sO, that everything
was personality, faces and clothes, a way of talk, a fascinating little
habit (a laugh or a way of standing or it might be just a nervous
cough) that was copyrighted by the owner and kept as his mark.
very
There was complete honesty. You couldn't dig
lom into your-
self because there wasn't the time or :: the necessary silence and
composure, but everything that was conscious poured out in an ecstatic,
flowing way, which turned everybody into a little philosopher---
candour was the one hold on life people had; without thet endless
self-revevelation there was no sanitys People knew that things were
breaking up, their bodles and heerts were breaking. And,nearly
every one of them was secretly planning a getaway, ev en from his own
wife or closest friend to whom he told everything. One would drpp
out here, another there--- sometimes he was never heard af again---
*Oh, he's in New. York, I think'---'She married a watchmaker of all


people, and they're living in Penge', Penge being a joke for sub-
urbia or those who'd given up the struggle. Underneath, everybody
was planning for his.ovn intimacy---a way out, one day. In the end
everybody left, though thoy might not have moved house---they might
only have - moved a block away from where they'd spent their darkest
nights, but their lives changed, they planted their intimacy again,
now
to try and make it grow. And they all look back on each other, with
a sort of fear and disgust---they fear meetings---no more of that
life---the life where the characters are always changing. le were
nearly all wreoked, and we all left in the nick of time.
I was sitting in the café feeling heavy, and lost, rather sick
from the night before. It was unusual for me to go to a café alone---
at least to a café like this, where a lot of people I knew congregated:
I either stayed at home or.went a short bus-ride away to a convention-
J al place where there were women with thefr little dogs and a fittad
carpet. on the floor. I felt safe there. But this.time, to my own
astonishment, I left the house and walked straight to the oafé round
the corner. I didn't even hesitate before going in. I didn't walk
up and down the road outside to see if there was enyone there I wanted
to avoid. And I didn't feel awkward taking a seet alone, squeezed
between other people, I felt too heavy, life was going too far for
that sort 'of vorrying to be possible any longer---I was beginning
to settle down in the mud of excitement and grief every day that
clung to me, mud that was an irritant and a drug as well, so thick
after a time that it was.protec tive; and shyness was impossible:
bringing a blush to the face through all that wrong living needed an
effort. But I did manage it at times. Like a child. Suddenly.
As if an unaccountable shame that was almost collective, almost not
belonging to oneself at all, flooded up and drowned everything else
for' the moment. But on the whole I had a kind of permanent. trembling


composure. a I sat down and nodded to Slippery Dick. He was alvays
polite, with a neat and thoughtful air, and gave me a nice smile
back.. We talked a: bit. Francine. got up and left, and quite invol-
untarily, without intending it in the slightest, I said: to him,
*What a nice-looking girl.* And he said at once, 'Would you like to
meet her?' He then jumped up and dashed out into the street to y
fetch her back. I sat! there in a dim, deeply underground astonihh-
ment. She had struck me---ogain sithout real consciousness, but like
a movement for underneath my being, where there were only dreams and
ac hes and glimpses of fate---as not being grecked, as not being a
wrecker, but as having an intimate and truthful concern: it was in
her face, a look of clean concern, she could still worry about trifles,
and above all she was truthful, she had a face that couldn't tell a
lie---it would show a lie immodiately. She returned after a long
time. He had to run nearly the length of the road. How extraordin-
ary that he should do that---we hardly knew each other---all I did was
make a chance remark, what seemed a chance remark---and he dashed off
as If I'd given him en urgent order! He was still panting when hhey
came in. And I was sufficiently recovered from my numbness for y
heart to be beating quickly at the ordéal of a first meeting. I stood
up and ne shook hands. Francine. From Paris. Actually from
Rome---she had just come from Rome - Ah, Rome! - I knew Rome. I'd
been there the year before. She was a pretty girl with long dark
ha ir and very clear eyes, slim and rather pale. After a, fer minutes
Slippery Dick got up to go, and left us sitting there. And I don't
believe I ever spoke to him again. I saw him some years later in
some S ort of dance-hall, or a club, but he didn't recognise me--
so many people como and go in that vorld, die and then come to life
again, fall and pick themselves up, suddenly change their characters,
their clothes, nalk, voice, mind.


So there we were! Vithout any warning---in a few minutes---
Francine and I, with our lives changed, beçause the meeting did change
our lives d We spent the whole of that day together, wandering round
London, taking bus-rides, sitting in a park. It was mervellousto be
perfectly simple, after so long. lie just talked: se were at our
ease. And to my astonishment I told her all about my present sit-
uation. The candour which never came to me when I was with other
people, when it was the necessary coin to be passed round before you
could be accepted, was suddenly there like a clear light, simple and
motionless, so that I talked qietly and without the slightest shame.
I can remember her saying to me suddenly, while we were walking along
a deserted street, 'Do you know, I think you and my husband are going
to be close friends!' And there wasn't just opinion in her voice.
There was even more than conviction: it was just final---knowledge.
And I hardly did more than nod; I just accepted it. I ( could see
him clearly, though sheta hardly talked about him at that
time. He was there, clear and dark, the first image before I'd set
eyes on him.
Probably, in the dimness of that morning, I thought life had
another Little love-affair in store for me---with her. But: life
had other intentions. And that also was a relief. All this
'love' business had been going on so long, there had been such a
traffic of free and engaged and half-engaged bodies over the last
year or so that I was sick and tired of it, to,the death: People
did it to keep alive. They touched bodies to keep the blood flow-
ing----rightly. The body either.has to be stirred with love or
with the signs and symbols of love: it can get along with very
little. These were the signs and symbols. It wasn't pleasure.
o an agfoit
The moment or two of ecstatic recognition at the beginning was
quickly lost. The intimacy had then to be reckoned with. But


love-
this was at variance with the first
which
elittezingrscgnition,
was public, which belonged to public glitter and was like a little
tkeatniae
eclleetisa vision---it could never be cashed, it could never be turned
to intimacy. So,we (I wonder if Francine felt the same thing?)
arrived inmediatély at what we danted, without kndwing in the slight-
est What it was-e-but that's 11ke all real wants, they show thenselves
through their fraition afterwerds,
make life
they
serve them the mome
ent a chanee offers. And we were a chance for each other.
The strange thing is that Francine was never part of the stunning
friendship that started betueen Angelo and me in Rome, and then absorb-
ed Melli as vell. 3he always stayed a bit outside. 3he was always
at the edge, slightly resenting, with her simplicity, her capacity
charming
for doing a service : a marvettona power to be moved and appealedto.
She maintained a kind of discipline for the rest of us. She had
something similar to my first wife---a kind of inexhaustible mercy
Toughness -
combined with bmps, In the English this is a soft, hesitant
quality, e certain gracious expectation before the spectacle d 1ffe,
in the French it is more a decision 'of the intelligence, this same
respect for life. And it can flash into hardness, learned from
hundreds of years of organic development, in both cases. Both are
ancient and ave-inspiring combinations.
Somet times, later on, she even began to fear our visits, when
they had noved to Paris. So much was disgorged, that was painful
for her to touch---much more painful than I realised at the time.
Those visits brought"up ell sorts of discontents in Angelo that lay
dormant otherwise; the moment we were together he launched into
one of his accounts of the horror of life, while Francine made her
frightened recoil.
She would rather it stayed below, unmentioned. She would rather
not go through it, but at the same time she recognised that if you


live with a man like Angelo you couldn't live on any other, terms :
She recoiled from the enormous contredict tory horror and tràgedy and
marvel of life; that unfolds like an unbelievable picture of which
we were never given any warning, and which se ems chabtic. She
feared this ceeming chaos and dared notrplunge into it. And this
seeming chaos was Angelo's. order: She wanted life neater, with
practical solutions.
Their quarrels were famous among their Roman friends:. The
friends would ask with the rather ratty malice of the Italian
educated classes, 'Are they still quarrelling?', their eyes glint-
ing a little---la classica questione, this was called, the class-
ical question everyone asked about Angelo, from their neat enclaves.
He vas 3o clever, so much alone and remarkable in his thoughts, so
turbulent and yet extraordinarily calm, with the born authority of
an intelligence that pervades éverything and touches every exper-
ience and learns all the time and shakes off the dross and contin-
ually renews itself and is continually in new shape, continually
apart from anything social or accepted or even heard---that he was
an isolated man.. Nothing came of his friendships,
And. since he always gave himself, terrifically, burning him-
warm enue closed
self every time on those A pas - - a souls, it wasn't just isolation
but continual suffering.. He offended the careful rationalism
of middle-class people.. That was painful for Francine, too;
because she shared the rationalism; she believed in the world as
logic, people's logic---but with, saving frailty of doubt that drew
wlom
her to Angelo more than to the othera/she said she preferred.
She saw every little group of friends come to ruin. He was
always compleining, always humiliated, always brought up ogainst
the rock of other people's hearts, bleeding and half-broken, and
pouring himself out to her. This was 'weakness' for her---this


continual giving of himself, the shedding of his reality every
moment of the day. Instead of being taken as a gift abd privilege,
this shedding was taken by other people as hatred, selfishness,
a wilful opposition.to life, always grinding and talking and sighing
and declaiming and appealing and attaoking. Angelo aroused the
gréatest middle-class fear there is-m-of an unpredictable flbw of
talk that asks for no occasion.
In Angelo the wonder and ebb and flow of life were still
untouched, Then we fcund each other we flung ourselves on each
other becausoxwe had shared the same story and know every item of
the other's struggle. We were astonished how we'd lived in the
same world---he Sicilian, from perhaps the most primitive and barren
part of Sicily, me a Londoner. We knew the feeling of being
disgusting to other people, through talking too much---showing
the eelf in too muck nakedness; we had oaused the same recoil in
othor people. That single thing---the hurt sense that our words
had made. people recoil, as early in life as webould rememb ber---was
our way of recognising each other. We stared at each other,
the blond and the swarthy, with amazement at every disaovery.
Years before, I would have put my strugile down to puritanism---
that was why my continual talk had seemed to create disgust, because
it had shown the nakedness of jife, it had unoovered the body;
and, ah, if I'd been born in the southern world, the catholic world,
where the inner flow hadn't been interrupted, things would be diff-
erenti I didn't know that Angelo put his struggle-down tol the
opposite, to the very world I thought I Would be safe in, the
southern world', the oatholic world, where the priests gnawed at
ybu like beetles while, ah, in the other World-w-for him-anthe prot-
estant world, in the world of the north, where people were tree, where


no priest could interfere with you, where people spoke the truth when
and as they liked, where you were 'admired for stepping out of liné,
there heta be safet
And this made us think that wetd had the same struggle, which
I now know to be wrong.
Sometimes when Angelo had read us a few lines of Dante, or just
talked, I looked into his face, only a few inches avay, and shuddered
with the proximity, because it was like a god's face, dark and con-
contrated and eternal, his nestrils dilated slightly and his eyes
darkly blazing. I remember his reading Dante's verse about a terr-
ible storm at sea that swallows creatures up, and his face was the
storm, it was relentless and monumental, without self, like the
weather, beyond. people,
It was never easy for Francine. Partly she was right, that she
was up against the Sicilian world, which she knew nothing about:
life verged on hysteria all the time. And now and thên Angelo
seemed beyond recall, so alone in his dry, mourning southern self;
J Ibve heard her say, *But, Angelo, won't you help me? Dontt leave
me alone like thist' And he would half-lie in his chair, wen,
his eyes narrow, wi th a grey, gleaming, burnt-out look in them,
his lips dry: not the friend of mankind.
They're what people a handsome couple: both of them slim,
no waste.flesh---everything excess is claimed by. the nein activity
of nerv es * He's neat and dépendable. He does eve erything you ask
him with quiet care, vatching évery detail. You see this in the
way ho puts on a record---he knows exactly where the music he wants
lies, evon if it's.in the middle, and he lowers the needle with infinite
care, never making a scratch. And éver since I first knew him he's
been meticulous in dress, he néver goes out without a neat, suit and


a collar and tie, never a pullover or open coller---never beach-wear
on the hottest day. - That's really S outhern. 'The body ien't to be
joked about,' he says with a little smile. You see the squares in
the deep south crowded every Sunday, in the hottest weather, with men
dressed in black---black suits, black hats, black boots---everything
black fot the dry, melancholy, brittle southern soul. Black for the
thwarted passions, for the silent vendetta, the snatched, forbidden,
half-horrified love, the heat that burns in the darkness and dies in
its own smoke. e
I didn't see Franc ine for some days after that first meeting,
then Angelo flew to London to try and patch the quarrel up. He was
suddenly there, after sending her : a telegrem. I met them both on
the day of his arrival, and we went to a pub together. We looked at
each other curiously. He was : darkly pale, with clear, strong, black
eyes, and we stood together in the large bare saloon-ber putting
monosyllabic questions to each other bec ause my Italian was so bad
and he had no English. Francine wasn't a scrap nervous. Within
a few minutes he said to me, 'Freedom, that's what you.see in this
country! It's in people's eyes, it's in the eyes of the girls!*
Freedom is a light, he said, that's the first thing you see in
people's eyes when you step off the plane:
In those days he was always
a about girls. The grand
question in Rome for men---women. iould life with a completely
beautiful woman be exciting and terrific every day? he asked me
once. Was this one attractive, did I think, wasn't that one un
orrore? Kas Francine attractive? did other men look at her?--- -
he suddenly put this question to me as we were welking down the


road from his home towards the Vatican. That seems a long time
ago---he was like a pris aner then as far as women went, his eye 8
followed them everywhere and gorged on their bodies. He was still
the southerner thore---morvelling that women could walk about free,
and actively attract and seduce men without being whores. They
were still distant creatures for him---certainly not fellow-citizens.
And he resented this interest he had in them. At the same time it
brooded and burned in him, an itching but yet not really voluptuous
desire, which
destt it was impessible to satisfy. When we went to the sea he
used to gorge his eyes on Melli's breasts and legs, making us laugh.
But there must be no jokes about the body. The body had to be
clothed, like a gaudy, radiant, fascinating and shameful temple under
heavy guard. He told me one hot day, in a whisper, the breath
hissing through his teeth, that he'd never be able to resist a woman,
an attractive woman, if he was alone with her for more than a few
minutes. He couldn*t, no, he couldn't: And he hated Italian women,
he said. They dragged you down into SE fetid, passive, mindless
pits which weren't even sexual in the end. The Italian cullo---
the arse---in spite of its spectacular roll from side to side in a
tight skirt was really sexless: behind it there was the.dull mother,
and aeons of dull, suffocating, man-eating motherhood behind that:
Nothing made him feel more lonely, he said, than the thought of.an
affair with an Itelian woman. s They played you a dirty game, he
said. They were prick-teasers, and they learned this in childhood.
They stepped back vhen you advanced, advanced when you stepped back,
every movement was a horrible little game designed as an insult to
your manhood, in order to subdue, beoause the two sexes nere deadty
enemies in Italy, there was no friendship between them, certainly
no love, hardly any contact, only a brief animal-contact in which both
lost
sides seemer-
position. And, having broken your manhoodin


time, if they were lucky, they pushed you into church and you
were free to eat of the forbidden fruit, but it turned, out nasty
because having been withheld so long there was something matter-of-
fact about it, like a money-transaction finally concluded, the flesh
was passive in her where it was unyielding before, you were sunk
in disgust, the let-down was terrific, both sides vere cheated, it
had all been made too much of, the grovelling onmial-appetite was
quickly appeased, the boredom st amped back like a terrible shadow,
fat
and occupied the chairs, waiting patiently
# death.
could
ne ver have married an Italian women, he said.
But for someone who couldn't think of marrying thom he certainly
feasted his eyes on them.
At the. same time he was free. Like most Italian men he add-
ressed the woman and not the man when there was a choice, but he
knew men, he knew he needed them, I never felt I was lost to him
when a woman was present. Only he couldn't take his flashing,
narrowed eyes avay from them. His nostrils vould always dilate,
and a faint predatory smile come over his lips. He tould glance
at them, oough, blink, gaze at them for a long time, cough, move
his shoulder in a characteristic little twitch, look at them again,
gaze at their bosom, cough, twitch his hhoulder again, make his
little smile, in the most extraordinary sexuel pantomime I've ever
seene without being voluptuous, it was sexual. It excited the
excited
women in a basic way---it touched the organs---itt appraixtay between
the legs, it was hot and close. It. belonged to quick, stabbing
sex, hurriedly covered up, rather Arab.
At that time one of his best. friends was a young pianist an d
I remember Angelo's terrific loyalty to him, the thrill he had at
his first concert; he kept on saying, 'Hannaggia, mannaggia!' to
himself, his eyes narrowed and his chin pushed out triumphently,


with the shere thrill of seeing his friend perform. Those Were
the green days. He went through many fires after that, and began
to aocept being alone. In those first days, in Rome, he was still
expecting marvels from people---I don't mean from single persone
but from people as a whole. He wanted uB to form scme sort of
group, not deliberately but in suoh a way that one formed round
us, of the most euitable people, with voluptuous E7118, to ward
off the loneliness which Rome imposed on her ohildren to keep them
separated, and the peculiar Roman ennui which in the end made only
the family possible, only the self-contemplating things, in a
sensuous, withdrawn, silent hunger. Rome broke friendships, unless
they were family-ties and without thrill. It made them flare up
and then it broke them. For hours we talked about the city,
thrilled and horrified, as if it were a person. And sametimes
Angelo would oall me on the phoné, to ask me to come to a café,
just to talk, as a relief from the pervading, heavy oity that had
had 8o mioh more experience than we, And every day it was, *We
must leave, we must leavet'
After the pub---I remember it was a hot evening, and we were
all sweating---we took a bus-ride and Angelo for some reason talked
at the top of his voioe. He sat on one side of the gangway and
I on the other, and, bellowed his questions at mew--his "questionnaire',
as we called it afterwards. He would ask questions in the most
formal and pointed voice---how big was London, how many people
lived there, were there many Indians resident in London, were the
effects of the empire still felt, what did I think of the empire,
had I been in the House of Commons during a debate, were there
women MPS as woll, was 1t true that American women wore the
trouserst in the household, did I like America, how often oould
one divorce in England, who was the oldest prime minister the count-


ry had ever had, what was the Latin quarter of London like, did
I enjoy spaghetti, did everyone in Scotland wear kilts, was I a
great tea-drinker, what did I think of Scott, was Ia. protestant,
had I ever been to Brighton, did 1t often rain 'cats and dogs'
(this in English) in London?. These questions would st un and abash
you, and usually all he got was a mumbled 'Well...' before he
rushed on again. The background to these questions seemed to be
a very formal, clockwork education, and a sharp, delving curiesity
underneath that had picked up all sorts of odd little things about
really
the world in its yearning for freedom. Angelo hadn't been educated
in Italy Ls
mk-he'd lived in Sicily the first seven
years of his lifo and then moved with his family to North Africa..
haol
After that he,came to Rome for the university. His time in Rome
was the most miserable of his life, he told me---everything was
desert, every friendship he had, every girl, until he met Francine.
I've seen a photo of him from t hat time,t the same neat person but
perment terribly pained, nith
yearning and thwarted express.
ion. in his eyes, completely wit thdrawn, with a tense alobfness.
But elways with that searohing and clean expression as rell, fast-
idious like a girl. I think he had a neat rolled umbrella in
thet pioture, and a high, dazzingly white collar.
I saw nothing of them for a week or more after that first
meeting in a pub, and I didn't have their address in Rome, nor did
I knokw that I'd ever be gotngto Rome- again.
I began to think I'd seen the last of them. The usual
wrecking life went on, ecstatic because it was slowly destructive,
but hushed inside, nith the pain. Suddenly one night, at eb out
ten o'clock, I was passing the café where I'd met her first, and
there they were both st anding, in a great crowd near the bar, in
the dimness of the wall-lights, Angelo looking bewildered and frail,


politely distant, listening to something she was saying, eyeing
the other people nervously, very derk-looking in the shadows, with
a sharp, penetrating yet not probing faoe--walways delicate and
thoughtful. I went straight in to see them, and stood talking
to them for some time---just empty things that you say in a great
crowd always. All I remember now i8 seeing Angelo's fade in the
shadows--his bewilderment, the vi olence that seemed to be done to
him by the crowd.
They gave me their Rome address. I would come and see them,
I said. I would come to Rome one day. a It was a strange address:
something like *the stepe leading up to St. Peter's'; at least,
that was how I remembered it. And it was a good thing it did sound
strange because I lost it at once. I realised I didn't even know
their Burnames. And they'd left Londa.
All I had to go on, when I did get to Rome a few months later,
was this atrnge-sounding phrase. I looked in the phone-directory
and found Bomething like it; at least, the word St. Peterts was in
it. a
I rémémber it was a hot, brilliantly sunny day when I left
Frascati to look for it. I had no number. God knows hoy I
expected to find iti Istarted from the huge square in front of
St. Peter's, which looked slightly misty in the great heat. The
road was there, rising steeply from the entrance to the holy oity
towards a railway station at the top of a hill. There were houses
and blooks of flats on either side: A little shop. There seemed
no real hope of finding it; but I knew I must. Istood about,
walked up and down. Then I asked at the little shop---did they
know a young oouple?---I tried to desoribe them, he a lawyer,
I suddenly remembered that. But they thought I was crazy. I
seemed to remembor the number 50, or perhaps 56. But that gave


me no result either. Then I made a détermined offort of will,
quite suddenly, thinking, 'I dan't waste any more timett And
I went towards the tallest blook of flatsat the topf of the hill.
The foyer was oavernous and dool, full of marble, rather luzuribus
in the post-war Italian style, shiny and spacious. The portiera
was sitting in hér office, Did she know a lawyer? called Angelo?
No. Really not? He was married to a Frenchwoman. Ah, a French
womani Yes. Ah, yes, indeed, yes. She nodded (I suppose she'd
heard their querrels echoing down the stairs often enough), and she
told me their surname, which even then didn't strike a ohord.
The top floor. They were heret So up I went, in the noiseless
lift.
A ring at the door. A pause. A few hushed footsetps.
Then the door .opened quietly and slowly, and there was Angelo.
'Oh! A moment of reo.ognition, then a little welooning embraco.
Frano ine would be happy to see met Please come int rait in
the sitting rooms He would telephone his wife at once, she was
out, he knew where she was, she would return at once. He bustled
raund, talking all the time. For I was still Franoine's friend
rather than his. I went and sat down in one of the armohairs
and he popped in and out of the room to say she was on her way, she
wouldn't be. long, I must be patient. But he aidn't stop to talk.
He was in a fluster of bewilderment, going to the balc ony to see
if he oould see her, then looking at meand saying she wouldn't be
more than a few minutes, and how happy she would be: to see me--
she had often talked about me since their London visit.
It was a large room, looking down on the road that led to
St. Peter's, with a wide baloony, hidden from inside the room by
long lace ourtains that stretched right across the wall, making
the light in the room soft and enolosed, with the heat drifting


in like a breath of desert-air every now and then. There was
a fitted oarpet and Louis Quinze chairs which they both treasured
enormously, as I found out later---they were always forbidding yog
to sit on them in case they collapsed. Everything was neat. A
nice long sideboard, a merror, a big radio-gram and lots of records.
French books in paper covers. And an air of softness over every-
thing; great-s stillness after the streets of Rome. The noises camé
up' pleasantly distilled.. - The radio was by a big sofa where I nauatag
sat and TE sometime S slept later ono It was an elegant room,
with something too formal about 1t---the furniture had been set care-
fully; everything had.been lovingly seen to, in the French way,
delicate and sensible and comfortable, but nothing had been really
touched with their lives yet, the stillness hadn't been broken, the
place wasn't fully and absolutely theirs yet, it wasn't made with
the ir daily lives. It was still in abeyance, waiting for them,
beautiful because of that---in its stillness. It was quite an
immense flat', with a long dining room . where we used to sit for
hours after a meal talking, and a small studio for Angelo where all
his ugly law-books were, and- a dark, cool bedroom.
After a while Francine came back, and ve sat talking, the
three of us, in a cheerful and easy way, yet also hesitant, as' if
we were preparing ourselves for all.the hundreds of conversations t
we would have later on. Franoine sat on the edge of the sofa,
smiling---asking questions---slim, with bright eyes, her hair fall-
ing straight down to her shoulders, more or less uncurled, while
Angelo paced about the room, smiling quickly and then glancing at
me, talking, puffing at strong-smelling cigarettss he didn't seem
to want, always agitated, never still for a moment, going to the
windon, coming back again, asking if there was anything I wanted,
taking a book out to show me, laughing in his strange, elated,


hoarse vay, his eyes black and piercing, his nose aquiline and
sharp with a fastidious little point that always seemed to be
sniffing and recoiling and taking measure delicately and pain-
fully, while his mouth was set more placidly, as it would be.later
on in life, after the terrible Roman battles were finished and he
no longer tried to persuade or change people or win their love but
remained in his own stillness and indifference and the pained dis-
belief that was really the best belief of all.
I can't remember if I etayed to lunch or not. I think I said
no (with my mouth watering), wanting not to stay too long the first
time., I had an 1dea,, I'm sure, that something had happened, that
a new kind of heaven, an experience I'd never known or predicted
in my life before, was coming. about, and I didn't want to press it
too far the first moment. I felt safe---completely free with them
both: I could come in when I wanted to, phone them when I wanted
to, stay when I wanted---I. knew that without asking them, and this
safe feeling drove me away. early.
I can remehber the first lunch there, shen we sat in the dining
room with the curtains drawn against the harsh sun, leaning back in
our chairs when the meal was over and the table was strewn with
napkins crumpled up and bread-crumbs and our half-filled glasses of
red wine, while we talked drowsily, laughing and then serious again,
in the same rhythm as always aftervards. Already Francine began
to fall a little out of our conversation, and she felt this, She
took on the role, mostly, of 1istener. There was always something
to be solved between her and Angelo, so this listening role was
really the right one: she couldn 't solve these things in herself,
she could only wait for an exposition from outside, blaming the
world or me or Angelo, then being amused or touched, then being
angry and offended, then orying, then being amsed again, but


alnays feeling inadequate, not up to our flou of talk that seemed
to take no account of her. Instead of accepting her role and
letting the flow go out of hér hands, she always criticised herself
inwardly and told herself 'that she wasn't being regarded enough,
we didn't think of her enough. And this was much worse when there
was Melli as mell, especially as Angelo---being himself--started
conoentrating his attention on her and asking her his volley of
questions. That seemed to prove for Francine. that there wasn't
any future for her with hin---everything that added to his life
took avay from hers. And so she cried bittorly---often in silence,
without moving her face. - This went on, reallys for years, this
conviction in her that she was condemned to be a stranger to us
while we enjoyed a moving, everlastingly different, thrilling
warmth. nd partly she nanted it to be like this---she hated the
'Sicilian' side in Angelo, it wasn't her. world, it was suffocating
and, violent for her. But on the other hand she vould look at us
wistfully sometimes as if vondering what it would be like to come
in and surrender---surrender her will---and lot the flow of talk
go on past her and if hecessary wi thout her, if necessary beyond
ghe
her, so that
could come back to it
when it woke
they
frecly,
to her
again, when it returned to her. orbit of understanding. But when
it seemed to go beyond her she accused herself of being beneath
it---she vasn't clever enough for us, she hadn'ta good enough
soul! And this would bring a negative after-feeling of anger--
she didn't want to understand, she didn't believe it was real
cleverness, she knew clever people who wouldn't agree, our talk
was a kind of weakness, only an indulgence, the world outsi de
didn't take eny notice, it didn't care, ve had no positions in
life: She didn't really understand what Angelo wanted---what
he couldn't find. And he suffered from that. And she took this


suffering as & criticism of her lack of an inner understanding---
ah, she hadn't a good enough so ul, hag she?---and also this made
him harder, in his sudden outbursts of indignation (they weren't
really anger, much less violent, but she took them like that),
end made him bring out a ward 'she feared---like 'middle class'-
or he would say something hurtful about her father---and then it
would be tears, slammed doors, a smashed cup or two, and a slow,
tired, moaning reconciliati on that went on for the rest of the
day---in.this reconciliation Angelo would seem wested, datkm end-
lessly sad, like a man in the desert after a long, dry journey.
Francine's feeling mas aggravated later on 'by the talk that
used to go on between Angelo and Melli about music. This closed
me out as well---but that didn't seem to help her.' Angelo and
Melli had both studied music---and apart from the enormous knowledge
that passion gives they had an immediate graphic understanding
that made their talk about it easy and floving. They remembered
about every piece of music they'd ever heard, down to tvo-minute
improvisations on the piano, and went through them all. It was
titillation, most of it---they were just getting to know each other
alwoys
and there was the first thrilling sexual awareness that there la
hust
to be where two sexes aren't déad to oach other. And thei r relation
a ssarily
had to grow separate from gine, witi its oun glow,
one.
sexual, This titillation-talk had a deliberate, erotic exclusive-
ness----I felt that Melli masn't above trying to elbow me off tke
Angelo pitch---and was the preliminary without which their
got
fihendship wouldn't have Ras its flesh and blood. So at the same
time as I felt excluded I was glad. Just a friends ship betreen
Angelo and me would have been hopeless: the women would have
wrecked us, we would have wreoked them. The four of us couldn't
have been together like that, complete like nature.


So . each relation had to grow in its specific And individual
way. d When I first met Francine in London I thought she was going
to be just more sez: and the thrill of sex was the opéning reality
between us though we didn't touoh each other. And it was the same
with Melli, whèn she came to Rome: she had to find her relation
with Angelo, and sex was the first reality. Friendship only grows
from real desries. All friendship (I knew nothing .about it before
I met.Angelo) 1ssexual: therets the glow of fleshly understanding,
a strange vibrant appreciation of the body, Whioh is also at the
same time like a proxmitiy far beyond life but with nothing shadowy
or mental about it, much less physical in the ordinary senses
Then therets no intimate form in life but only dead society,
as nowadays, offering us no guide and never touching the real
springs of our behaviour, our real relations, our springs of love,
when they happen, grow slowly and through extraordinary violence
and for a long timé we 're within a hair's breadth of being destroyed.
In the old world, before this deathly sodiety started, when there
were forms even for intimacy, forms that didn't destrpy, when
there wére publid tears and.kisses and shouting, thé relation
between Angelo and me would have grown steadily from that first
moment---that first lunch with thè heat pouring through the closed
curtains and the half-filled glasses of wine between us, and the broken
pieces of bread, would have been répeated again and again,
as we drew slowly into manhood and the glory and wonder
of our dreams and endless talk and listening and laughing would
have spread until they reached almost infinity, filling the room
round us and every carafe of wine and soiled, thick tableoloth
and all the bo oks and the cb ildren as they grew up. But that
TP.37


waen't our world.
Yet those first moments of recognition would always have
been there, in any world: that warm promise of a new experience,
and the sense that we could give ourselves fully, for the first
time, in all the thousands of tiny contradictibns and hesitations
and firm decisions and follies and glimpaes and visions and tempt-
ations and dreams hardly séen and suddon revelations and hopes and
paralysing fears and indignation and hatred and then slow compass-
ion and a oertain fine, yielding mercy, and then in dullness, and
silence, and in pain that made words impossible, and in hot desire-e-
all the things for Which our epoch has false names and through which
it has driven false patha for us to take the moment we open our
mouths. We were free, we could give ourselves---Which méant a
glimpse of creation. And we both needed, with an urgency that
made us fling ourselves on each other with words, to do that.
And Melli, when she came, needed it too, as the donvelescent needs
light and air. It was the beginning of the first real intimacy
any of us had known.
The reaation with Angelo revealed more and more, it didn't
fall on obstructions---there were no sudden dark and hidden peculiar-
ities in him that fought sly of the ultimate freedom--that was the
astonishing and marvellous thing for mo. There was a slow and contin-
ual spreading, more and more he stood revealed to me in his meaning,
nothing slipped into a false idea nursed through weakness, there was
nothing perverse in him, no sudden twist or betrayal or reluctant
faith or self-disgust that yearned for an escape from the light,
nothing that I'd become used de in other friends---I called thom
friends : There was nothing in him reluctant of the light, nothing
flinched from it, the light always healed him and moved him, there
wasn't a sudden alinging to self, he was the first real friend of


light. that I'd known : There aren't many in the world. That can
be safely saids There never will be.
And this, first to me and then to Melli, was a blessing life
had given no warning of, for which there seemed no parallel, muoh
less worthiness in our selves: It was a double blessing. So, with
our wounds, coming it seemed from the four corners of the globe, #
we suddenly faced each other; in a miracle far which re had laid
no plansnor even nursed hopes *
When I met Melli it was one of those still autumn days when
the light and air had a spécial excitement. We were to meet in
the Spider but we'd never seen each other before. There was a
oafé full of people to choose from, and a number of them were sit-
ting alone at their tables. She was near a far window, quite
still. This is the first impression I had of her---the remarkable
and stunning stillness that was more than peace, more than a sta te
for herself alone, but touched the world outside. She vas wearing
a nicely cut grey tweed suit with a jumper underneath, and was lean-
ing slightly on the table. I forget how we arranged to recognise
each other but I remember my eyes went over all the other people
in the place and finally rested on her with a kind of lasting and
empha atic inevitability that seemed made from beyond life, without
the slightest support or testimony from either of us, like a scheme
fbr which we were just the rehearsal and promptors.
I can remember that she looked a bit wan, from the strains of
the previous few months, which I knew nothing aboute She seemed
in a musing state, like someone returning to things after a. long
while away. And all round her were lights---the windows looked


out on to a narrow and crowded side-street. And there was the
lovely warm sense of autumn in everything, the special gat hering
intimate light, with the early Roman dusk, and the shining qality
of things as if the hot sun was still in the pavements and walls
and squares, having given them a glow inside, from underneath,
that would last them all winter.
We smiled at each other and I sat down. And we talked
hesitently. She didn't flash and brittly crack and twitter and
sparkle and send off jagged little flames of pride and scorn and
cleverness and all the hard naif defences that the weak and lost
go in for. It was almost no conversation. le just had a sort of
poor badinage, mostly from me---because if you're caught up in
a worla where anything intimate is reprosented as a stink it is
better to try and make people laugh, to get through the
brittle prejudice and masquerade into a bit of sanity, to stop
yourself from crying and wanting to get on to a bed and die.
So I had this tone---quite a habit with me then---of trying to turn
everything into gaiety, and Helli responded with slight, puzzled
smiles, turning her head slowly to look at me, only half-conscious
of me as yet, in the way of women, whose first thoughts are never
in the head, unless they're those men-women
whose
breasts have an incongruous and disturbing effect of not being in
were
the right home. Underneath we rammmtxtuxar brea thing with the
same rhythm, struggling for air, although we couldn't know it.
We sat in the same kind of easy posture, helf-leaning, in tho
same watching and exhausted 8 tate, while our smiling questions-
and-answers, that belonged to the vorld we would both thankfully
give up, went on indepemdently of us. -
There was something frail and suggestive and enquiringly
gentle about Melli but at the same time a steadiness and strength


that glowed in her, so that her expressions came slowly, like
decisions from deep down, always in her own time that established
itself and touched the outside world with: silent authority, Thile
she enquired all the time, only smiled and asked questions and
nodded, never asserting anything unless it came like a quiet,-Booth-
ing shaft, from her mind, laying its effect minutes after it had
been spoken. Yet she didn't seem to hold back. There was this
flowing and invisible self that went as coolly as the air and
seemed to have been arrived at slowly, from years of watching and
noticing and divining, and being mortally hurt. She hadn't a
public manner. A fool could walk over her in a moment.
I' remember someone saying; "What's Helli got up her sleeve?
That's her st ory? Thy is she so quiet?' The silence seemed to
affront him, as it touched him and made him admire her, but it
was uncanny for him, he seemed never to have known anything like
it before---a creature who didn't hurry to hake herself beholden to
others or exouse herself or make little traceries- over her nature
that vould form an acceptable picture he CO uld grasp. It was
always i the seme question, *What's at the bottom of her quietness?'
Since then I've learned not to go by words with Helli---I
know when to take a quiet and sympathetic 'Yes' for 'No', and when
to take her little nod---that she will do something my way---for
a sign that she's going to do it hers. At one time, people used
to think she was under my domination in some way, because I seemed
to be speaking most of the time and she - not at all. That was how
we were balanced at the beginning, not very evenly; in public; that
18." But talking was my way, as quiet was hers. Speaking and
writing- were my element, like air to-breathe. I 8 uldn't develop
or solve anything without talking all the time and bringing it all
up to the surface in vords. Melli sugfered from this at first,


because she thought the flood of talk was didactio. Then she
began to realise that it was only a flow like the tide; and she
oould interrupt it at will, could disregard it, fall asleep in it,
turn it off like a tap. And it began to free something in her.
Something was looked in her, from the years before. This talk
of mine broke a sort of organio reserve she had. She realised
the talk wasn't a person talking: it wasn't an ego--I seemed no
more responsible for it than a bending tree is for the wind.
And what I learned from her was---silence. I was astonished
to realise, bit by bit, what an enormous repertoire of speeches
oould lie in eilence, if this was real, growing from a proper
root, as true as the quiet of a tree. I was like a child in
her silence. I learned more than I'd ever done before from a
single oreature. I couldn't name it, I could only say it was
like a viotory, this silence---it persisted until a sort of triumph
attached to it. Melli always seemed to take the line of passive
resistence with difficult people, whereas I persisted and tried
to persuade them and argue things out, always hoping that a state of
candour would introduce a natural harmony. But Melli knew more
about the people she was dealing with than I did. For most of them
the intimate self was a smelly charnel house, and it was best left
oovered up. Shetd learned that as a middle-olass child, she was
used to people thinking of themselves, essentially, as stinks. I
grew up knowing nothing about that. This was a great support for her,
like the appearance of a world she had only hoped might exist.
I had grown up among working people, and for working people eve ery-
where the human ereature 18 fabulous and mysterious like a
temple, and finally unknown; it is basic life-knowledge
among working people. Far from being stinks, people
are good in their intimate selves. Basically all people are


good. , This is practical daily knowledge outside the middle
class. Therefore you find that wherever the common people go---
wherever they sit down and play cards or just talk or sing, even
if the place is bare valls and a ceiling, just a brick backyard,
they make an atmosphere, they give the place a glow, it gets fabulous,
you look into their corner with wondering, they make themselves
kings wherever they are, they need no materials. Therever my
mother and father are, you feel this glory. The spark. isn't. dead
in them. But middle-class people can make the most splendid
palace hollon and drab, with their sniffing principles. With
everything they've touched in the last two hundred years, they've
brought the kiss of death.
myoum
And Melli learned that I took that world for granted, I
thought it was the only world there was, shared by everbody.
We learned about each other's world, slowly. a We saw we took for
granted completely different realities---different civilisations.
She'd always dreamed about mine---she never believed in her own,
in America hav
but she was taught, it was the only one that existed. iith me,
she slowly began to perceive that_she was listening, in the torrent
of words, to a new experience, where people could lay themselves
yaked gladly, without fear of the charnel house inside, and not
only this but she began to feel that this was the experience of
the majority of people on the sarth. It was amazing to discover--
that the further down you dug in yourself the more order and
splendour there was to be found, the more goodness. There was
something in yourself that could be relied on, after all. She
ate
shed the foul middle-class doctrine---that 'underneath' you
a kind of savage that has to be 'controlled'---overnight.
What neither of us knew at this time was that this was a step
tonards understanding Christ, which we would take tagether, more


or less.
I remember I caught a glimpse of Melli's face as we walked
avay from that café, down the side-street vhich we'd been.glancing
at from inside for the last half-hour, towards Piazza sano Silves-
tro which wasxa mass of one-decker buses with overhead rails making
their peculiar animal puff when they pulled up, with crowds of
people walking between. them and in the lights from the shops, a
dense unhealthy warmth from the pavements.mingling with the car-
fumes,. . everything deafenped with noise and movement, while we
picked our way along.. She had to walk for a moment on a step
leading into a shop, to avoid somebody, and it was then : that we
glanced at each other, and really. looked at each other for the
first time. Her face, her profile as she half-turned to me,
with a slight smile, gazing down for a.moment, was extraordinarily
beautiful, and clear, subtle, strong, and classioal and reflective,
full of the beyond, looking out far, far aray, 7ith that promise
of herrtt freedom---that we both needed so much then. How we
needed freedom: ie needed to spread ourselves and slouly abandon
our thoughts and break the metal-structure world that was all round
us and claiming our time and, , attention and even praise, and telling
us we were nothing in exchange: In that first moment of really
looking we caught a brea th of the freedom we would have togother,
of being able to took at the world .with leisure fallen on our
flesh like a new light and dew. ie left each other then---she
stepped up into the bus---we were going to meet again that evening,
after she'd eaten, in the square under Angelo's flat.
I went out efter dark to meet her and remember standing in the
dusty, makeshift square with rubble at its edges while the lighted
bus came swinging round the corner to its terminus by the station.
She got dovn and came walking towards ne with a certain slow


and reflective gait, so collected in herself, walking smoothly,
her head up, her body hardly moving, but lifted easily forward on
her legs, in a sure,and collected motion, like someone drifting,
half-dreaming with an assurance of peace, not the hard self-willed
ansurance that pre esses forvard deliberately, but the dormant power
of reminiscence and thought that come out of sorrow, cerried like
something soft on the shoulders, that mustn't be disturbed but needs
no strain, a soft and consoling burden, both fragile and unassailable.
I recognised her only by her walk, though I hadn't been aware of it
before. It was her---in the darkness, with the dim exciting lights
shining from the edge of the square, like a night in the epoch before
the first war, when there was still mystery in the air, before the
last human .mystery had.been worn away. Rome draws so much on that
last spring of humanity, as Salzburg does. And she was part of this
wonderfully promising mystery that gathered round the square and
enclosed the high apartment where Angelo and Francine were waiting a
It was,second confirmation for me---her walk. It was.wholly
Tials
she was complete, she was the same all the way through. She wore
the same grey suit as before; it went with this slow dreaming walk
of hers, that seemed to come out of sleep back into the world, into
revelation, rhile she watched from the distance, approaching all the
time.
There was that first intimate chill of the Roman autumn, together
with soft, dim lights, and a still sky, with sights and dounds very
clear, as the days were too when the bright yellow sun poured down
seem
uninterrupted, meking everything look-tite under clear water, with
a marretims glitter in everything; sometimes on those days I used
to walk down from Angelo's flat to 3t. Peter's and stand near one
pencil
of the fountains, gazing at the huge dome which was like a REKKRE
draving held very still agal nst the sky and quite unreal and


untouchable, though clear and defined.. There's nothing on
earth like the Roman sun on those autumn days when it splashes down
and saturates overything with a clean and glittering light,
touching every window and penetrating through the dark houses *
And this evening was the aftermath of a day like that, soft and
enclosed, with a dimness gathering round like the sides of a
theatre bustling with people, before a clear, splendid performance.
Theres absolute noia---boredom---in Italy. Richer and deeper
than anywhere else in the world; stretching to the ends of life.
Something is miss ing from life. There's a basic interest lacking.
Nothing to do. Nothing waits to be done. You learn early not to
press donn on your life for the northern, exciting, curious pleasures.
The noia runs through everything like a solid, magnificent, torrid
stream in Rome, disturbing and itritating and nourishing you. It
seems the reality, the besic reality of all life. It doosn't take
avay from you, as the northern boredom does. The organs and glands
thrive on it. Only the mind is unsatisfied and disturbed. Nothing
but the noia, the slow, inner rhythm that divides, you from other
people except in an organic unison, underneath. Nothing else seems
to thrive---no friendship or curious, light, interesting pleasures.
Only the basic things, like forming a union with somebody, like
building your body and health. None of the civilising things.
None of the voluntary things. The friendship with Angelo didn't
thrive in Rome. Really it couldn't exist. But the friendship
formed there---it got its baptism there. The gneat early colours
surrounding it were the heavy, sensual colours of Rome. Bat 1t
couldn't develop there. It couldn't become the fabulous contract
it did become.
And Helli was walking into this, across the square. She was
walking into our lives, the grand and stirring noia that makes evesy


man a king---of nothing. 30 she nas coming into our royal
circle with its dim and mysterious lights, on the. top floor.
The hours Angelo and I spent together plotting and scheming
to get away, and dreaming of 1t, vowing to each other---that seemed
the only important thing, to get away, avay from Rome! The terrible
city, the whore, as ne called her, who called you back and satisfied
you in a way, she satisfied your needs, but .not your wants, no,
all the conscious things vere unsatisfied; and we nould sit together,
huddled close to oach other, with. narrowed eyes, scheming and dream-
ing, in his tiny car or a cafer And this dreaming, with an ecstatic,
brilliant and also rhetorical yearning, was part of Rome; it was the
looking-out, beyond, that you needed like fresh air; to new things,
to the future, other places. But here-and-now was++-just a basic
satisfaction you hardly knew about: only the body was soothed, and
the mind was soothed, the organs were whole, there was something for
the taste-buds always, there was the rich Wholesome reality of the
an d
Latin genius: surrounding you, even while the mind was unsatisfied,
1 laid to sleep; : you might VOw to get away but there was to-
morrow, and then tomorrow, and only a last great burst of disgust
would get you going.
Melli was coming. into our schemes and vons, with Rome lying
there all round us mending and bringing to birth and lulling and
drugging with health and offering endless evenings rhere the senses
phayman yearned and languished and cried out, there was Rome
offering nothing for you in your own striving. self, in your own
Proken
self-formed life---no, that would be lulled away, or mhent to
pieces slowly. 1f you tried too hard, or corrupted---there were
those deadly little groups of people who. did try, who atarted with
delerminad la
something curious and exciting, who,* coutymake a real interesting
city out of Rome, a place where things happened as they did


in the northern cities---they would make a kind of Paris, but
it ended in the wilting of character, in last angry and violent
bursts of corruption, in affairs, and intrigue, touched wit th a
deliberate, morbid wickedness, the total inversion of the unsatis fied
soul, and even murder, and suicide, and drugs, but all. flowing along
in the same splendid and stirring rhythm of noia, that offered high
cobour and warmth, a terrific pervading warmth that you felt most
in the autumn when the lights were dim and everybody's lives gathered -
closer in the newwinter mystery, there was more pervading warmth
than in the sweating dog-days when everything closed. and the whole
still
city lay/under a cloud of irritated self-disgust. We often said to
each other, *Only family thrives here'. Not even love thrived,
except in its aspect for the. family. It thrived in its deep cop-
ulating steadiness. The hot contact thrived---the thick feminine
rump, the hard male pressure, the moment, the sweating torpor of
desire. These basic elements of love thrived and survived. They
made children, families. They provided the only uhity. A union
was a close compact, a touching of buttocks, there wesn't comradeship
in a union, there wasn't charm or curiosity or interest, or the
slightest altraism. ' There was just - the basic flesh-union thet burst
in to quick and even wild moments of contact, and otherwise vent
along unconsciously, in torpor, and disgust. Nothing could shake
off that reality. It was like the earth on which the city was
founded. It smashed tp pieces the slightest artificiality or
convenient untruth or affectation. It just mocked it and trod it
in the dust. It broke the little masquerades and practised quirks
and oddities of character that are known in the north, and provided
one basic and lasting wisdom that was tainted and stood with an
absolute unconcious firmness for the rest of your life against
make-believe and cleverness and so-called personality and


prestige and trumped-up mystery and all the unnatural things that
comprise the northern world. Rome is a thoroughly natural city,
with the freedom knocked out---it never started. And with this
natural life that will never .accépt an attitude as reality, Rome
has the maximum smashing and destroying power, together with the
maximum healing and body-enriching qualities. But all the quirks
and make-believe schemes of so-called personality in the northern
world, and all the attitudes that pile invisibly higher and higher
nottkern
in the bigycity so that the air thrills with things about to happen,
come from freedom. And with this Rome never has had any truck.
You will know Christ through Rome, you'll get familiar with him
even if you never mention his name or go in a church, his life has
a curious pervading reality there, though it has no civic goodness
or any other northern form, only a frightened, tenacious pity for
the human creature in his night, the personal and intimate comfort
you don't find in the north, which makes Rome a place of inner and
personal pilgrimage by thousands of people in every generation who
go to make their lives again, poor bastards, and to learn the basic
principles again, as Melli and I did. You will know Christ all
right but you won't be able to live him, you won't be able to grasp
that intoxicating and dengerous gift that stemmed from him over
generations and races and countries---freedom. Not in Rome.
You may know it in yourself---or dream it, dimly. You may bring
it. But it always will be very silent and closed inside, as
Christ himself carried it. You won't take it for granted as you
do in the northern life; it isn't outside you, handed to you on
a plate. So in a way you do live Christ, but again basically,
again in the flesh, as he did. You know him really for the first
time. He's no longer historical or past. But you won't be
able to take the gift of freedom from him, as a pure gift


incorporated in your life, without bitterness, as in the north.
Christ was one thing and you're another, Rome seems to say. And
so you're a kind of slave. He is made the new invisible master,
but the master has the inner, silent freedom to teach you, if you
concentrate. That's the point---if you join the privileged and
concentrate: then a new life begins, in solitude. Rome finally
teaches solitude.. The inner and silent message is there for you
to unders tand, if you have the will. But most people don't want
to understand, Rome says. They want to be safe. So Rome offers
safety to the organs and senses. and flesh. Not freedom.
Angelo and Francine were upstairs and said hullo very politely
and formally în their little hall---thoy were like two children some-
times, Angelo with his fear of strangers, making him over-alert and
excited. The moment Helli was sat down on the sofa his questionnaire
started. What part of Gernany did she come fram? she had grown
up in imerica? did dhe like America? she was going to be a sculp-
tress? she was going to study in Rcme? did she wish to become a
great artist? did she want to be famous? what kind of work did
she want to do---abstract, traditional, futurist? Melli nodded
to nearly everything. That first evening passed slowly and quiet-
ly. We vere all really gazing at each other---the talk meant
nothing. Even Angelo seemed not to be concentrating on his -
questionnaire. Ke'd found éach other, the four of us. Angelo
didn't play any music, end we left early to take her back to her
flat on the outskirts.
He asked her a lot about Gernany. Did she know Berlin?
what about Goethe? what did she read most of, English or German?
And Kelli sat there coolly all the time, usually ansviering with
a smile, while Francine tried to interrupt him. He delved into
Melli's eyes, trying to divine her. In the darkness of the


car on the way to her place he kept flashing her quick glances +
sidevays, bouncing up and down a bit in,his seat uith a kind of
sensual excitement, hunching his shoulders in a sudden movement as
if he wanted to get rid of the collar of his jacket, then : coughing
in a. way that made it sound like a word shouted, chaning his position
in the driver's seat, his hands playing on the steering wheel, his
head turning quickly when he askod @ question. He vas more or
less oblivious of me Only the woman counted. And foreign!
That meent---freedom: he put his hand
on her knee and with-
quickly
dres it--it makes me smile now. It just needed a woman---a real
woman---to put him into a blind, gleaming, tense state, so tense
that. it was nearly beyond sex.
As we drew into the strange shadows. of the new garden suburb,
where the proper roads stopped and wide dusty lanes took their place
just like the roads in the desert leading out of Baghdad, with lights
slung up temporarily on wires and swinging about in the breeze,
the great new blocks rising out of thè earth like coloured neat
mountains glittering with lights, he turned to her with a last,
*Tell, we're there, cara signorina!' and touched her leg again
with his free hand as if he'd been preparing it for the last
minuteg, in a soft, confirming little pat. There wasn't rivalry
between.us but I was determined not to let Angelo have his own wigre
and my future.one as well, so I jumped out of the car---in a kind
of Anglo-Saxon abstract intimacy (the fellow citizens) that excluded
this southern sex-maniac,and walkod with her to the mai in door.
I even made it seem---because Angelo was satching us hard from his
tiny car---that there was already an understanding betreen us, I
made it seem to to Melli as vell, in case she had thoughts of falling
for the.dark one instead of the blond! This first choice is so
precarious---dark equals blond--- sometimes the blood wants this


one, some' times that, but I ras as determined about this as about
anything. in my life----I found as I stood there. I wasn't competing
with Angelo: there was just this flat determination in me, If.
there'd been conpetition IEd have given up: with the innate laziness
that cames over/when there is any competing to be done. I alvays
hand it to the other. man on a plate. A sniff of. competition, in the
air and all my resources are laid asleep. They were always adnonish-
ing you at school to. cpmpe to---when. they veren't tanning your! arse,
tearing your- balls off in a 'game*, saying something sarcastic and
*teaching* you the functional pleasures of Anglo-Sazon life,
We- stood in the dim shadows of the block, just outside the
glass entrance, and arranged to see each other next day. I said
I would come out and see her. To my astonishment she agreed.
I helf-expected her to peep round my shoulder and call out, 'Hullc,
there, dark one, come, and make an appointment, too!' I was as
alive to Angelo's charm as if I'd been in her body. But instead
she smiled up, at me dimly, always from that distance---just beyond.
And so we shook hands. I can remember now exactly what she was
wearing as we said, good night---it.was a white, open-necked blouse,
its collar tucked over the grey jacket, cobl and clear like herself,
suggesting a firm,: straight intelligence,. and unerring judgement.
I forget if I was still working at the Forum cn the seven
wonders of the W orld as a German priest but I think the next day
was ty last and thar we were payed off outside a café. I remember
how different the light of the sky seemed to me that day, and what
a springing elation caught hold of me and made the priest-Work seem
abject and ridiculous not as it had done before but in a new way


that left me untouched, because really I'd gone into another world,
I knew it, I was no longer just myself, I was at the edge of some-
thing, a great new reality was about to begin and I had a new pride
that calmed my nerves. I remember standing at the edge of the pave-
ment that day, in a square nicknamed Piazza Quadrata, the 'square'
square, a place I hated because of its empty din, its sombre blocks
of flats, the dusty shops and tall sad trees looking down on tram-
lines, the little cinemas near by with neon lighting, and no reminder
anywhere of Italy, which can't be said even of the new jerry-built
districts, where at least people still sit outside in the evening.
Most of my lonely hours seem to have been spent round that square.
I can remember standing at the edge of the pavement in the hot
noon sunlight, just before crossing the road, and feeling with this
sudden spring of elation that I was about to be launched on to a
vast new - shining sea and that all I had to do instead of in-
wardly weeping and fighting and more and more encrusting myself
in my own life and senses until I was nearly dead except in the
pure functioning of my organs, was just to walk on, as myself, and
I would be known for myself, for the first time as long as I could
remember, perhaps for the first time in my life: Icould return
to myself. It seemed that hitherto I couldn't afford to be
myself---I'd forgotten to be mysolf---not enough time, enough
money.
It made me quieter---usually I would bound up the stairs to
see Angelo and Francine, my other saviours, and launch into a long
overpowering speech, until Angelo was tempted to take over with one
of his own and se stood together sweating and gesticulating, with
bread crumbs and wine steins all over the table, and Francine look-
ing on quietly. But I changed. I was quieter. The quietness
grew on me over the next few neeks. Francine, above all, was


to notice it, and say she didn't like it.
I vent out to the garden suburb and ve were toge ther nearly
the whole day. Little by little we realised we both wanted to---
rest. Gazing at her was enough for me : 1istening to a record,
glancing at aibook, talking, drinking tea. with these intimacies
we healed ourselves. Sex came about as easily as smoking. But
smoking, as Egremont says in a book by Disraelis is 'the tomb of
love*. This sex is a kind of initation rite in our vorld. It
makes conversation easier. I can remember our first sensations.
There was abaodutety no pleasure o There was the impression of
rumpled clothes---not much else. Her shyness was what sometimes
never abates in a woman---the organs have made an habitual recoil
from the outside world since childhood; her organs rere like
mine---used to 'pleasure', namely hard interest, but not
satisfaction at all. I can remember when our organs met, and
it was as narrowly phgsical as possible: pure touch. It was
less than it would have been with a whore. Te veren't fit for
sex, either of us. There was only the itch. It wasn't the
sex that grips the middle---wracks the middle of the body in its
spasm, like the centre of an axis. It was just bareness. In
Yer Kereis ho tig tue.
proper sex there is no body,) The moment is enclosed in a shared
our
dream---this is why brother-sex is no good in,epoch, and why the
brothels have mostly died out; because there's no shared dream
between strangers, as there used to be. This dream comes after
a long search, nowadays. And we were a long vay from even start-
ing that search. It was just a ritual of secretion: the middle
of the body was only accessory---the breasts and prick were the
Jatar
bare instruments of a kind of pleasure-contest. Only,when we
turned to the outside world---when we delved into each other's


tastes---when we turned the sex into light and air, and talked
it away, vhen literally there was no séx left, nbthing between
our bodies at all---did the dream begin that led to the mystery
of real body, as secret as light itself.
I looked back on the previous fer months. I'd been doing
so much. Spurious activity gren like twining roots out of my
loneliness, until the whole organism was nearly choked to death.
And it was a terrifically exciting state. I remembered that.
The outer skin had a strange rebrile touch, warm and toned-up,
but there was nothing inside except rehearsal for activity.
I didn't get experiences right through to the inside. I didn't
get any relish or slow dawning appreciation. There was too much
tomexorcise and waylay. I don't mean I clung to other people's
company. I spent long hours alone. But it wasn't really being
alone. It was activity. Even the lonely experience, which is
a marvellous one, didn't reach right through me a My experience
was masturbated: I was a good member of the middle class.
I threw myself into everything---a dance at the little house
at Frascati, drinking coffee in the village square---but there
was,no fullness. I was present to those places in my excited and
talkative and exhilerated self, but not in my permanent reality.
That stayed in suspense o I was fascinated and intrigued all the
time, I had an endless intoxication with the simplest things---
standing at the side of a country lane smoking, lying under a
vine on a hot day, sitting in a church, making myself a sandwich
with
and
of tomatoes, chopped rosemary and olive oil, e plenty of pepper;
: Jilah
but it wasn't total participation. For others it was: I was with
them as I never was again, later. I was aware of a certain statto
misery underneath: a starvation of self I couldn't put my finger
on. It was like signing my name to life every minute but


seeing no more than the promising and colourful contract. Only
the shell of life was offered. I çan remember those hours at the
house 80 vell---in the heat of the afternoon, with the radio blaring---
somebody had passed by and flicked it on---or the oifcadas bellowing
outside among the olive trees, a truck thundering by. on the road
below, with a cloud of dust, and the hours would slip by, the nerves
were still, waiting for their next adventure, the blood was thick,
I was hot and aware all the time, but the real fibre of self was
gone. In London, and then in Berlin, this fibre had been snapped
every moment of the day. Now it vas laid asleep.
Only sleep was a real pleasure. But the moment I was awake in
the morning there was the bleak question, how" I was going to live,
make
e money. Yet I didn't get a job. I had a degree, I'd even
taught at a university. It would have been so easy. But I was
ashamed to. I remember standing in the Piazza S Silvestro,
near the post office, with a friend who was showing me a printed
form put out by some school, which you had to sign if you wanted
a job there. I could have filled it in. But I didn't. I
didn't want a solution. I didn't want to make things easier for
myself. I was .on a test of some kind. I wasn't clear what
this was. But it was a test of my whole life, therefpre my whole
powers.. I would stand at the life-frontier and say, *This is my
total identity, I have no other, and this act baptises my identity.'
I wanted to baptise the meaning of my life. I didn't want to
finance my identity in any way. I just wanted to wait, in my
total and complete self, and let fate put on its stamp of guarantee,
to set my actual day-to-day life on that path and that path alone,
sikli so that it was no longer in the slightest degree even a chosen and
therefore academic. being. So I waited, going to sleep in my
little room with the glass door, near the staircase where people


clattered up and down all day.' A letter came from London---there
was a job for me in Ankara, if I wanted it, with long holidays,
voyage paid.' From the Turkish embassy. But I said no. I was
too busy being destitute.
I'd been trying to do that---lay myself bare---for a long
-time before. I can remember the same shame in Baghdad, even
while I was' teaching happily at the university, and writing my own
work in the afternoons and evenings. The work there was light and
fairly easy. I took classes in the mornings, between nine and
midday. I used to stroll down to the college from my house on
the outskirts of the city. The college-year was over before the
real summer heat started, so that the weather was bright and S1 pring-
like most' of the time, with a olear'glittering sunlight and a
warm wavering breeze coming in from the desert. It'was called the
country of - two springs. - We used to go out to Babylon some tines
and picnio there, or' drive out to the arch of Tesiphon, visit one
of the desert villages. Once I went with my students on a small
steamboat we hired, along the Tigris, where it was narron and flat
and untroubled, between grassy banks, in the cool weather, with
everything glittering, while we sprawled on the little decks or
hung over the sides; and I remeinber we arrived at a tiny summer-
house,' € hardly more than one room, but with a proper roof and walls,
like the river-house of a palace, gleaming white with a perfect
lawn and palm trees in front, immediately on the river, and we all
hopped off the boat, picnic baakets were taken dovn, dance records
were put on and the girls started dancing dogether, thei r long
black hair touching and their hips moving slowly, in the heavy Arab
way. It was all totally silent round us, with the water not
moving and not a soul to be seen. The sun glittered and dazzled
all t he time, the boat swayed ever so slightly at its anchor, and


the water tapped at its sides.
Then I finished work those mornings in Baghdad I would stroll
back to the house, or get a lift from one of the richer girls whose
father owned a Cadillac or Oldsmobile, and after a lunch in the
long dining room from which I could see palm trees and the ghite
square house next door, I would sleep, with that dead sleep of the
desert-countries, and then read while tea was being got for me.
Then I might sit at the desk and write, or stay on my bed in a
dreaming state. I might listen to music, on, a gramophone borrowed
from one of the colleges. Some afternoons I had to go fown to the
college to supervise a club or discussion group---something deadly
that was called cultural for some reason. But mostly I was free
after midday. And in the evening there vould be one, of the hotels
by the river, with a friend, or an hour in the,little windowless
bar of the. Riverside hotel where you got chitken livers and brandy.
The money was good, all I wanted. But there was shame underneath.
I was aching all the time to give it up while I was feeling content.
For one thing there was the shame of getting good money in a place
where people walked past you in rags and where whole villages were
starving. But that feeling might have abated, in time---after all,
my Arab rriends were earning good money too, as doctors or lavyers
or something, and they vere the people who were supposed to be the €
hope of the country. And there were medical schemes, irrigation
schemes, slum-clearance schemes---things were changing, the compar-
ison would have become less stark as the middle class in the city
grow and took its propperity for granted. The shame---like a
power tugging at my jacket all the time, even while I clowned
ab out in the classes, feeding my girls with words and books and
all sorts of wind they'd never heard before, even while I was
giving myself publicly as I'd never done before---the quiet shame


acted all the time: I wasn't doing what my life-identity
required.
I could argue that I ras doing it, that I was writing as I'd
ne ver done in my life before---in security, knowi ng where the next
week's money was caming from---I could argue that. this was bringing
security---order---into my work. But it was no gooda The facts
weren't enough. I had to be wholly my life-identity. I had.to
obey that.
I obeyed it against my interests, my freedom and certainly my
happiness. I closed the college-contract after a year and didn't
go back. The last few weeks there hadn't. been-very happy; it
was lonely, there were the usual intrigues you get in these coll-
eges allmover the earth, I seemed to be getting enwebbed in trouble.
But that didn't matter. It wouldn't have st opped me going back.
Since it wasn't my whole 11f e I could play the required games
demanded
easily. I was amazed how much I dammasntzngret? sometimes, what
risks I took---I just went my own way in the teaching and if any-
body disagreed with me that was too bad, they would have. to get
used to me. So people approached me gingerly. That ease---
the sense of not being really committed there-r-gave me authority.
And I used it more and more. I made a nuisance of myself when I
could, to keep my place intact---I shored my teeth when one of the
ladies on top, whose husband was later sentenced to death by the
revolution, stuffed a lot of refrigerators in my top classroom to
start a course in housekeeping. That was my Hamlet room, as
opposed to my Rape of the Lock toom across the way, and. the refrig-
erators were probably all pert of a dim policy of intrigue in any
case. My attitude was that it was a privilege for them to have
me, and to pay me, and this attitude was easy for me because it
was unconscious, I mean I really did feel it was a privilege for


them. It amazes me now---having since then demeaned myself and
begged and cajoled for money---how I leapt into that income as if
r'a had it all my life, without even a thank-you, with a nice two-
storey house - on the outskirts and a couple. of servants, and girls
feeling flattered to give me a lift home in dad's limousine, and
gy citizenes actually campeting to.have me as a private tutor for
their children- at a rate which even now, over eight years later,
seems fabulous. I e had a limousine---long ênd dazzling,
with a chauffeur---to take me to my privete lessons two afternoons
walk
a week in. the centre of town, and I used to ster out of the house
after an early tea in a grudging and uncooperative state of mind,
and hear the cracking radio from inside the car with irritation,
before I stepped into the soft pinkish interior and was whisked
purringly away between. the palm trees, still yawning, with the
ugly little textbooks in my hands, tomards my illiterate charges.
Those extra hours were the only ones I taught grammar in. ! They
were drudgery and nothing else. I had two pupils and they learned
what they could. The heat was beating. up at that time, and was
stifling eyen in the early hours of evening, and we lounged about,
with water trickling down straw in the doormays, to Ieep the air cool.
The two boys liked to waste,my time talking about the city and I
let them. We struggled through,two hours like dead men, and I
tried to stuff English dovn their throatshike handfulls of pork-
fet: they, brought 1t up immediately. Then I got annoyed they
n Heir
smiled in the Middle Eastern way---it liveted the afgernoonsup a
bit.
In the college I got the name for being a bit of a clown,
emong the girls, and I used the clowning method to teach. The
feact that they were all girls made it easier. But I yearned for
men-classes as Well, or at least for the mixed classes the other


colleges had. The women intrigued and gossiped too mich.
You could never get anything.straight home, without this little
web of the herem. But fate had put me intoa women's college.
And really it was a harem. They came, most of them, draped in
the veil, and took it off for the classes. Hardly one of them
unless Re wud
had been alone with a man before, athout-himhertg a brother or
at least a close cousin. If it had ever happened it had been a
fluke---or a betryal. And here they were alone with a man for
hours on end, every morning. At first I had no idea about this.
I was there to teach, to talk about Pope and Hamlet and Chaucer,
and teach I would, I clowned to get my points home, but it had.
other effects. They used to press up against me when I marked.
their books---'Come and have your book marked, Fatima'---and I
used to wonder why. I thought they were interested,in what I was
saying.
I think I worried more about money at that time than ever
before, because I was getting enough of it. Engngh money always
poses the question, what is going to happen if the supply stops.
I begrudged spending any of it---I wanted to buy myself two or
three years of independence, to write my books in. This was how
I saw all money, as buying that. How much d a silent room would
it buy, for how long? Of course, I did spend---they seemed enormous
amounts. And I never seemed to have anything in the bank.
This was due mostly to an admirable Jew in the ministry of finance
to whom you had to go to get your balance-sheet stra ight. He
ne ver told you exactly what you had in the kitty---in fact, he
told gou hundreds of pounds less, so that you were always anxious
to cut down your expenses. At the end, when I wound up : the cont-
raot, I was surprised how much I really had, : apart from the bonus. o
He sat crumpled up in an untidy tropical suit over his desk,


sweating, with piles of untidy files and contracts and acoounts
all round him and on every table and chair,, To sit you down he
always had to remove a little pile of dusty accounts. And you
always had to wait. He, nodded to you politely when, -you walked in
but never attended to you at once. That.. was his little kingship.
He was the only one in the building, I heard, : who could really do
accounts, he had a genius for them that the Arabs couldn't under-
stand. and were aved and silenced by, and he governed all these
massive amounts of money with a tareful, kindlys tyrranical eye :
Everything was impossible with him, the moment you mentioned it.
Could you hare fifty pounds at once? Fifty? Impossible! And
you would came: avay with half---to be deposited in the bank next
week, perhaps. You were baffled because although you knew the
money was yours he.had a way of covering it with mystery so that
you didn't know quite how much you'd already spent of it. The bank
account might be in front of you but he always had little rules
and provisions which showed why all the money due to you hadn't been
paid in and might never be. It never once occurred to me to bribe
him. In Italy I would have done it at once. But I think it was
and
the sense ona size of the power he liked. He was a charming,
spoken
spesiing man with a sudden soft yet piercing gaze, never
presuming beyond his exact position but using it with a nice kingly
fullness. One had to climb up an iron staircase. to get to his
corridor, in a dusty, flaking building with irrigated lawns,
parched paam trees and gravel paths outside, with that queer heavy
air of foreboding that there is round an Arab government building.
I never got used to the money there. I never felt I really
had it but that it passed. like a tinsel episode, doing nothing for
my position in life, securing nothing that money is supposed to
buy. The money-part was like a dream, not to ouching me a I


remember stopping at a tiny wine-store in the main street one
autumn evening, when it was dark and still warm, on the way home,
to buy some drink for the sideboard, which had been empty since
I arrived: I'd reached the estate of having a sideboard of drinks
and there was the money to do it With. So, always vith the sense
that I was spending hours of the life I ought to be leading, I
ordered a. roughly adequate sideboard---gin, whiskyg brandy, some
sherry and s0 forth. I can remember feeling that the storemen,
a derk, quick, smiling Arab with a sharp face, wouldn't allow the
order in some way, wouldn't take it seriously. But he went on
writing the order down. And I was afraid all the time that I
wouldn't have enough money in my pocket to pay. And it didn't
seem my right. I felt the right would be questioned. I didn't
have the personal power to do the ordering, I felt. It wasn't my
world. I seemed to be apologising to him, even, I felt apologetto.
And I more or less stumbled from the shop, wi th the sense of a crime
on my shoulders. The first 'sideboard' I had orderedi Well, he
promised to have it all sent to the house, and I half-expected it
not to arrive. But it was there before I got hame. It didn't
seem much after all. Only a few bottles. I forget how they were
drunk, in what circumstances. I believe I didn't get ay more.
There vas always this sense I had of violating a certain inner
chord---a certain place I tried to oboy, but without âny clear
consciousness, I couldn't have put the matter into words.
I bought suits and shirts made to measure for the first time
in my life. I had no idea what I was doing in these clothes-
shops---I mean, having been brought up in England I had no idèa of
comportment, no sense at all like the Italian sense, which every
person has rich or poor, of what becomes the body an d makes it
feel easy and assured and harmonious. At that time clothes


for me were things you flung on with a sort of feverish perplex-
ity, wondering if they would stick and not explode on your skin
like industrial boils or get you into fierce argume nts with trish-
men on the streetcorner when the pubs closed, or tempt the conduct-
or to stop the bus and have you put off for general unfitness.
I didn't inherit from my norld the clear, sane, restful sense of the
body which Italiens have and which at one time was the rightful
inheritance even of slaves. I can remember stumbling through the
streets where I vas born feeling like a criminal and hiding my eyes
from everybddy that passed by, much as they were doing from me, I
expect. The air of those streets, the grim shopfronts, the creak
and clatter of the trams, the forbidding-looking grey pavements of
asphalt, made the body start and draw back and lose that first natal
connection with the physioal life of the outside breathing world,
bit by. bit. I had had holidays from this fearful nervous background,
which it would take years to undo: one was in Austria, where I
with a long
stayed on a farm near Salzburg, in a wooden room Bxartorkirg balcony
looking down on the valley of the Salzach, and I started writing
my second book there, with hesitation and in a sort of broken grief
which only allowed intermittent glimpses-through of real life---of
my own real life---while the'cool misty airs drifted through the
window, and cow-bells sounded across the valley, the chickens clucked
in the yard below, and the family noved about talking in raucous
voices with an occasional thump on the kitchen table or the scrape
of a milk pail. Those few weeks gave me the first clear hiny of
my real voice for a long time---the voice drifted in from the steep
hills, and when we got back to London it entered fully into me,
like a wonderful recollection become organ and flesh; I began writ-
the toom
ing again, with ovenuthing upside down all round me, ladders and
whitewash pails and rolls of wallpaper, and decorators coming and


going, so that I felt the voice was all the more sure and that
I'd done the journey that had exorcised the war and the nervous
defeats that had preceded it like a mounting army to orueh the last
fibres of hope and pleasure. At the end of that time, with the
substance of the Austrian book done, I remember sitting down at a
desk by the Window and thinking, *Now what?* And the answer to
that was - a telegram from Baghdad asking me to come over. Within
ten days I was there.
Baghdad was my first release into the body---the war had only
been a hint of it, hedged in and stunted by murder. In Baghdad
I began to realise the effects of having a God-given body, the
stupendous inheritance which this was and which I'd alrays half-
disregarded before and been cheated out of in aome way by the life
round me. It was : in the ti niest things, like taking a glase
of lemon tea in the morning, or standing in the quiet sandy quad-
rangle at the back of the college. In sex the body had been lack-
ing in some way, there'd been appetite and a gnawing underground
local desire, but the complete functioning body was in abeyance,
there was the fog of a hostile outer life round 1t, a public life
that throbbed and hummed in the streets and denied the intimate
processes of the body, its leisuroly requests and long-drawn-out
fulfilments. In those London stréets you had a hot stabbing
des ire between your legs---for the woman next door you peeped
at through the window, the girl you glimpsed taking a bath one
summer night, the towel waving madly over her naked shoulders like
a naughty dance, the woman who stood at the bus-stop at about
seven every evening and looked monstrously inviting from behindo
I remember this hot sonsation of desire was so maddening that
once I stood in the middle of the local reference library and
ejaculated there and then, in a flood, because of a woman reading


close, by.
Every event in Baghdad banished the old nervous body---from
the blatant, orackling call-to-prayer that came over the city loud-
speakers at dawn every morning to the splashing of oars on the muddy,
eddying river at night after the sun had gone down and coloured
lights shone from the minarets and hotel gardens. Leisure started
getting into my body. I remember the long walk home from the
college, along the half-made roads that almost mel ted in the noon-
heat. And there W as the tiny kiosk near the house, at the edge
of a
public garden with border flowers, sh ere, I used to get
bottles of Coca-cola on hot afternoons, and water melons. * The
pressing olaims of the outside life died avay, the silent organs,
that had been shocked into din mnees, began to thrive and show them-
selves plain, as an extraord in ery common inheritance---divir, yet
shared with every creature,on the earth. It was the opposite of
the Anglo-Saxon death-lire, which. said that the body was a work-
unit, and pleasure taking time off.
In the, last few weeks there I felt stranded---spied-on;
the heat had started. Gossip travelled fast and even the police-
man a point-duty was supposed to note every car that passed him
and its occupants, if they were worth noting. My neighbour, a
Kurd, told.me he'd never had trouble finding out if his wife was
up to any tricks when she- went out in the car every afternoon---
the police traced her. route all over the city.
On the hot, stormy days the city felt grotesque and haunted.
There was this sense of an unpredictable, spying power, close to
your own conscience, changeable as you were changeable, doing
invisible things that might easily involve you one day. Terrific
heat always seems to produce disgust with creation. The sky
bears down with a personal relentless ceight, only releasing you


to your own thoughts in the dead of the night. I used to try
and snatch the early coolness at dawn, walking out on to my-
balcony. But already the sun had that fierce, sickening glow
that bored into everything. By eleven the weight of the sky had
come down, the whole city was still. Then all there was for it
was to sweat and drink. Sometimes the evenings.gave a sudden
surprising coolness and it was possible to take a bus to one of the
hotels without getting your clothes wet all through. I came to
dislike even the croaking little buses that went along the main
street, which I'd enjoyed at first; now they were. dusty, scorchigg
monsters, breathing fire when you got near them, grinding along in
a wet' mist of heat.
stnngaly
I felt tepaidieeit threatened in that heat. I had good
friends---Arabs and Kurds. But thè feeling wouldn't leave me e
It was a deep inner threat---not entirely outside me. It seemed
so easy to die like a dog (or a king) and not be missed, death
was so close, breathing at the edge. of your skin; and that was
the fascination as well, like a drug. It was the whole meaning of
the place in a way. : There was the fascination that you could
yield at any moment to that vast, breathing death like a sunsot
all round you, belonging to no particular tim---full of ages ago,
tirch
from. before your bteth. That was the element of struggle. You
cut
wanted to gst clear---now, at once, at any cost---anything to get
away from the city, into the next country, to. the sea, just a few
hundred miles across the desert. Then, oh, the safety and long i
çool hours, like being received back into. your own life. again!
And you would recognise yourself again with such relief: because,
at the same time, you had wanted to stay. You wanted.to surrender,
and you wanted to escape that rant in yourself. The nord Islam,
after all, means surrender. There's the chance of surrender


all the timo---euchp perfect finding of your solf, such a complete
arrival at what you are at the last frontier that there is nearly
no self. left. I mean, a surrender to the death of self. A great
ecstasy would accrue from that, in the coolness of the two springs,
in the pitiless heat and the crushing scandals of the oity, an
ecstasy of release from self which goes very well with the slow
clicking of beads in the hand on a hot afternoon.
Then I got to Beirut on the Lebanon coast I was 80 relieved
that I nearly danced in the roadway. I got down from the desert-
bus and just stood there breathing in the air for a few minutes.
So cool:. The sea frothed and splashed and rolled close to the
road, there were carés, restaurants, French food. I stayed there
a few days getting my senses back and taking the :old relish in
things. And I had a renewed sense of individuelity. But it :
was illusory. It was the kind based on orgenisation---ont one's
joining the clatter of the world: not based on our selves, through
and through, forged in the slow machinations of the will. When
that comes about it's invisible. Nobody sees it.
But the freedom came back. My name---what my life was to
be---the friends I had---my date of arrival at the next town:
choice and decision came back. Yet in Baghdad I'd laid the basis
even of that freedom. * The work was done there, sweating in the
afternoon with nothing on above the waist, sitting on my bed;
this work was blindfold, as it vere, it sprang from a source of
and
lah
surrender , in a way the self did yield at last, so that the consc-
ious will gave place to the deep organic one which just moves - in
the direction of the required object. And it had all seemed so
difficult before---the self had been there before with.its illusory
identity, prompting me to false efforts and stunned for the lack
of anything to surrender to, always referred back to its miniat-


-n68 a
ure will, which. is the personal will, not the grand will which
is there from birth and slow of growth, altogether invisible and
never in. harmony with the personal will, which prompts solutions
and keys and short cuts and good ideas all the time, and never the
total necessity that lies outside as. objectively as the sun, and
about which there is no. arguing when the time comes, to which there
is no alternative and for the satisfaction of which no idea is any
good because no idea has any relevence. Befcre, the self alvays
got its invitation, *Speak!'. But now it got the invitation that
couldn't be refused, to listen.
I can remember sitting at a terrace-café in Beirut, outside,
under a cool arning, high above the road that runs by the beach,
looking out to sea on a glittering, spacious morhing soon after I'd
arrived.from Baghdad. I was talking to somebody but. the state I
remember was.that of looking out to sea across the bright, shining
buildings, and containing in that moment the whole of my. life, not
its events
cane but its proper meaning, that. was light
and glittering and hopeful like.the sea and the road below; I sat
perfectly still in my. wicker chair, with the tortured weeks of
Baghdad well behind me, and the morning seemed endless. There was
this picture that had no image at all---the essential moment of a
whole, life, summarising. everything in such a way that no worde or
like a breeze
images were possible, being only a breath of intimation/from the
sea, stirring the striped awning above us and sweeping away the
noises from the road below. It. had samething to do with books,
this moment---that was as near as it came to a definite. thing:,
the smell and touch and shape of books was there, the strange,
awed moment of vriting that was alnays full of trembling and
fear, the act that came from a spell and yet cast a spell when
it was done, every day; the invisible light in the moment of


writing, that was there, the invisible image that touched all real
sights and sounds and penetrated them to where they lay together in
one dream, always with this hope and terrific clean gladness that
could never be impaired or drained away but stood for all tim,
taking in any age and state and remaining absolutely the sage;
that picture---moment---seemed half out at sea, where it was dazz-
ling-blue and calm with bright white foam now and then on same of
the slow breakers, it seemed held up above the sea, in the air,
touched by the town as well, 'not separate at all, but getting some
of its bustling reality from the edge of the town where there were
boats, trucks and customs-houses on the harbour, where there was ' a
smell of good morning coffee and the: garlic going into the lunch-
dishes, and the sound of gulls, and the hushed, gutteral, clandest-
ine sound of Arabic.'
well-
It was perhaps the first real moment of Xxxt being that I
remember. The meaning of Moe life was caught and enclosed in
a state that: being real wasn't in time at all but without beginning
or end, only anchored to that terrace-café and the pleasant striped
avning for want of a place to be. - And yet the presence of those
things round me, the sea down below, was so strong that - the state
didn't seem possible without them: they clung to that moment so
ren
strongly that they were penetrated
CT with it--no
longer awning and sea and the sounds in the street, but the ways
and motions of a dream of life that is like a glimpse of creation.
That image had something to do with my future, what I would do,
and also withthe past, but in such a way that it made time and
present and future and past, and also any achievement, any act of
doing, meaningless. Yet it was a guide, also. It was a help
to my will, and a proof of my will. It was a aign to me, of the
way 1 vould go about things e: It masja moment of relish for all


70 in
sorts of Work I would do---Work not yet formudated or even
imagined; it was a substitute moment for Working---the peculiar
dream-work that you need to sustein the actual, live work; it
was the warmth that provided the later glow, and illumined every-
thing. It was strange I should have it then, just after the hot
weeks in Baghdad, as if to say, 'Now here's your freedom again,
most of it made for you and not by you---don't just walk into it
aga in and take it for granted, - learn from this moment what your
meaning is, try to keep yourself as you were in Baghdad, keep your
surrender, keep the thinking-will down, let the dream-will through,
don't let the. world put it to sleep by offering sou the other thing,
Jilah the work in which you can shine and move and impress---keep this
image as your authority, keep what belongs to you.' And yet it
wasn't articulate. It was far removed from a decision of any
kind. - It was only a moment that seems to me now to have said
those words. And that moment had 8o mething to do with feeling
clean---with the bright cloth of my tropical clothes, the sea-bleached
awning above, the clear air of the harbour, and the sun that poured
down in one huge, uninterrupted avalanche of yellow light, not
pausing for any corner and yet not scorching the heart out of things
as it had 'done in Baghdad.
That I would ever go to Italy and live there was allrunknown
to me. But the friend I was with had relatives there; he was
part-Italien.
tay-bac
After three or four days I walked dorn to
the harbour and got my ticket, on an Italian boat. It would stop
at Naples, after a call at Syracuse, and I decided to get off the
boat at Naples and take a train up to Rome.
It was a gleaming white boat,. quite small, with tiny Jounges
like those on the cross-Channel boats. I sat in one of these


for hours on end in a half-dreaming state, with the sunlight pouring
in through the doorway from the deck and the engines throbbing
quietly underneath, on a smooth blue séa. I remember an Italian
family---and elderly man and his wife with a young girl---who sat
there quietly, seeming in the same stato as myself, hardly ever
talking to each other but gazing round in an intelligent way,
politely attentive to everything but at the same time easy, in the
way erus Italians of the educated classes have, their expressions
fine and rested, a shade intimidated by the foreign world, with a
fear of not coming up to its needs, sof that they seem to have a
fine and clear perception,
w5 through cbncent-
ing
ratts on the subtleties they feel they're supposed to shon, and
also through a real subtelty, a certain minuteness of intelligence
that goes with good nerves and the ingrained fear of vulgarity that
you get - in the peasant countries. I wanted to talk to them but I
knew no Italian then, and I kopt on leaving it to another day as
the boat drifted on; I gazed and read and dreamed in the flashing
white sunlight coming in from the sea, with the noise putting my
nerves at rest, so that I secmed to be talking to this family
already, underneath, in the throbbing silence, and in the light
Holled
that would be there for ever, in the sea that amed end : saza and
didn't bother about anyone, and in the cool, rock-dry air that came
across. from Greece, the sky that had seen gleaming temples with
huge pillars and marble Apollos standing in the sea and other ancient
things that made words unnecessary and meant that this quiet Italian
family of three had come close to me and an act of. recognition had
passed between us, in a way none of us vould quite be able to
realise, though the peculiar organic and silent connection nould
always remain, having solved something in each of us perhaps that
we oould only recognise slowly, after ma ny years. I remember


the man's slight, pointed -beard with its touch of grey, and his
delicate, small, penetrating eyes, reticent and shy; he was at
a frontier of life, perhaps; and I remember the girl with her
unmoving, clear face, her eyes quite still as she gazed across
the room, hardly moving, always with a certain wondering caution
in her, like an animal, her experionce untouched yet, unattacked.
The mother is vague to me. 3he nas a shadom to the others, acc om-
panying them, inside them all the time, fully given to their rhythm,
and so her face was vague to me, her actual lines were unnecessary
to the act of knowing her.
I liked these states---rare enough then---of complete, half-
dreaming acceptance, without the nervous attack and foresight
education had tried to teach me e I remember a similar state in
Tel Aviv during the war, close to the beach, when I was eating
fruit at a café-table eutratar on a kind of cement clearing that
sloped down to the sea, on a hot day in the late afternoon, one
Saturday, with tmo :or three other soldiers. I renember how the
underground numbing misery of being a soldier lifted from me for
a moment, leaving its twin---the splendour of having no identity,
hardly a name, no aim except to survive, hardly a wish except the
gloty
wish in dreams that doesn't .even hope for possibility, the a : ur
of never asking why, the tension to sounds like an animal; the
splendour kept the twin misery, from rotting t body and E resolve;
it cas nature's way; there were sorrow and pain but no melancholy,
the thwarting misery from my former life had stopped---nature sav
love,
to this. Two years or so before that I'd fallen in H when I
was still at school, in the country, and the two of us had separated
in that catastrophic way young people have in a world that has
nothing healthy to teach. In the. army I carried her photograph
about everywhere, I looked at.it until it was no longer a face for


me but millions of little spots on a piece of paper, I couldn't
remember her face any longer, I daydreamed about her every night
before I went to sleep, I filled up every spare minute with her
image in the daytime more or less all throigh the war, I searched
the letters I got from other people for a little mention of her,
what she was doing, even if it was terrible; this, too, was
something that kept me together, it was the good accompnaying
dream, from a wrong and bad world---I had to take that world's
odd oures with its errors. It would have been better if I'd just
had desires and purged them with whores, this is a better world,
but it waantt mtne. - I belonged to the falling-in-love world.
And 8o I never really enjoyed a woman all through the war, it was all
catastrophe for me, I was never united to the Woman I should other-
wise have come to know in ohildhood and sustained through all the
first desires of puberty; Woman for me was a gnawing and itching
licenoe---a dream that took half my prick while 'love' took the
other, so the poor little chap got nothing real out of it for himself.
There was no real desire in me in the war, there wasn't in the other
men, either; ono or two married men seemed to have it, and to satisfy
it. But most of the others were like me. Since the falling-in-love
world is necessarily the masturbation-world, desires weren't all that
urgent. Soldiers seemed to prefer a smoke and a talk, with something
to drink, in a tent or a low bivouad, with the rain. or sun outside
and the sound of the country, or in. a big hotel lounge turned over
to the army, in Taranto, Bari, Ancona, Forli, Naples. There wasn't
sex. Everybody had been prepared badly for the world he was in now, 9
which really had to do with the mysteries of the body and the earth,
with the spur of death everywhere, for which---even for death---we merent
glorious enough. Yet there was a glory to be had, and it was


the opposite of war---the opposi te of shock: all the time I
was being shaken and torn under new shocks, in my young body, and
I mas being healed as well.
People had no stature for each other---that was the world
the army had come out of, a world where a man mustn't lift his
head too htgh, and thus a world where his sex, which is his glory,
his-senne-of the -w
TA vas damaged and
humiliated. And so, while a soldier was learning glory in his
body, through the fruit he- was eating, the marvellous nights spent
awake dlose to the Mediterranean, through the spur of death and
the smells of the countryside, the first glimpses of a world that
didn't banish him intimately, he was officially insignificant and
nothing, just a unit of murder-work.
relief
So many people ended the war with skextarking that they'd got
through, but with the contradictory feeling that they'd glimpsed
something they vould never have again, which they didn't understand,
which seemed even to put them on the side of war, except that they
had yearned for peace; R
den
there was this reminder that somethiag
wrong seemed to have been going on in their pre-war lives---that
this wrongness would perhaps continue now, once they'd settled down
again, something they didn't understand but which amounted to a
total criticism of themselves and society.
And so there was a lot of restlessness and misery after the
war, espocially as war-conditions didn't stop but went on for
ten or fifteen years, with all real sense of England---of Frence---
of Germeny---of Italy---gone, except as a dream, a daydream of the
past, with American armies and weapons keeping the actual material
frontiers intact.
The agottling-down took place, gradually, there were children


to look after, the intimacy of wives and home, the little Bights
and sounds that after happening regularly a year and then two and
then five and then ten, became as inflexible a part of the outside
reality as the stars and the sound of the sea had been in the war,
and then the ohildren began to grow up with no knowledge of what
you meant, with their yearnings that made your country seem a real
country again, because it was the scéne of their early wonderful
desires, 86 that the tiniest corner that seemed to have been dis-
oarded by war was nysterious to you again, through their yearnings
which found the smallest place enough---a possibility of heaven
everywhere.
And then working people were better-off---the process had
started in the war, through higher wages and the strength of the
trade unions. There was a terrible weariness with the old life,
the old false accents of the suburban middle class that had governed
overything before the war, the old division of life into olass-shadows
that no one really took seriously but which had seemed to correspond *
with exiefting interests, the old warld where unimaginative people
teality
thrived and eat
was another word for NO---there was such wear-
iness with it all. Working people began to flood into the middle
olass, children went to school in thousands; the country seemed to
be concentrating---in those years after the war---on this one thing,
the graduation of working people into middle-olass life; and for a
time there seemed a ohance of a new middle dlass. But it wasn't
so. The old shadows didn't disappear. Only the real interests
behind them had gone. But the shadows were still there. Something
strange happened. The settling-down went on quickly but with peculiar
dissatisfactions everywhere, underneath. Things weren't
quite right. Life wasn't quite---authentic, as it had
been once. The authority seemed to have gone out of people.


Yet things did seem right. Gn the surface they seemed quite all
right. No one. gave any evidenee---in talk and books and plays and
things like that---that they weren't all right. The old names
came back, the old faces, same of the old annoying accents---strange:
together. vith good wages, new schools and all the paraphernalia of
a new reality. There was irritation underneath, a theurting of
life on a massive scale that was much Worse than before the war,
and which sent not just lonely men abroad but thousands and thous-
ands of ordinary bright people, until England had the highest emig-
ration rate in the world.
The atmosphere vasn't of something bad or hard. It had been
much more so before the war, There was a new quietness over every-
thing. There vasn't the old bad st ruggle, with hard-faced business
men on top, the sense of violence being done to life all the tim 9
through rackets and hidden scandals and dirty political deals and
the rough handling of poor people. There wasn't the old sense of
pover being brandished everywhere. * And there was a big change under-
neath, in people. You could see it. They were turning to some-
thing newe But it was smothered. All life seemed smothered now,
in a strange may. People's faces began to look smothered---to the
outsider. There didn't seem power---enywhere. People began to
look less authoritative---not simply less certain but less authentic
in the pores of their skin, not just in their ges tures but in the
cast of their features. They didn't seem to be developing proper-
ly, freely---with real struggles. I noticed this more and more
after the war. Only the real. old class---who still had a few
remnants at the top---kept a bit of the old atmosphere of author-
ity. But in the ordinary middle-class positions there was only
a sort of fancy-dress authority, a kind of imitation of the previous
sorld which was kept going by something other than its own efforts


and ideas. They didn't seem to need ideas. It seemed that the
English middle olass çould be kept going officially, like a sub-
sidised institution, without dreams or disturbing ideas that could
ohange its organisation. The violence and hardness, the enese of
rackets and hard-won authority, had moved to America,
Englishmén oame to resemble policemen---keeping everything in
order, marking time. Théy were the quietest, most just and decent
and obliging policeman in the world, they didn't wear uniforms or.
carry weapons---their traditions (another subsidised reality) prev-
ented uniforma and weapons. But still they were polio emen. There
was a way to do everything, a way to say it. There was a status
guo to maintain, in almost évery field. But what was this status
quo? It didn't seem to exist. And a certain puzzlement grew in
people's eyes. They were telling you the letter of the law in
the service of---what?
And I felt this the more as I began to live abroad. I began
to see my country olearly, with a peculiar troubled love.
It seemed that there, was a formula for eve erything. Where
there was a question of power being exeroised---in offices,
mostly---it had to. be enclosed in a peculiar smothered formula
that was frightening because it was ghostly---unreal. There could
be no sign of a living and talking person in this formula.
Aotual persons were smothered. There weren't persons any more but
credentials. And these credentials seemed ghostly, too, and
therefore ffightening. They seemedto come from nowhere a
They were marké on a piece of paper.
Ibcan remember an interview I had for a fellowship at
Oxford---I had the idea then of beooming. a don so as to give
myself the time to write booke, but it was a brief idea because
I realised that horror is no gateway to freedom, on however safe a


salary. I can remember, inthe horror of the quiet long carpeted
room where the candidates were interviewed by about a dozen dons,
that I talked to persuade them how I was going to change the people
I taught, I thought this was what teaching meant, provoking to change:
on my right I had a 'philosopher', a fairly young man with an un-
healthy, puffy face, so deeply smothered behind concepts that his
words seemed to come out through endless fluffy filters; and I can
remember his quiet, saroastio voio, which seèmed to me strangely
yellow like jaundice at the time, because it summarised so much of
the poison of irritated and muffled violence that had accumulated
through the war and through the years of substitute-peace afterwards,
I remember his. voioe asking me whether, after I'd done my work of--
er---missionary zeal, I would.be prepared to teach my pupils a little
philosophy porhaps?
Offidially I had a hope in eleven of getting that job, but
really it was a hope in a million. It was the zeal that stood in
my way, not my real unfitneas, whioh was ignorance.
Englishmen's olotheg---that was another awful thing. They
hadn't changed since the Thirties, not as far as ordinary. men went.
They began to look greyer and greyer. It wasn't just the war-a
beoause this particular thing didn't get better with peaces
If anything it got worse. People crépt round like beetles under
a st one, cheered up by a stale cup of tea at the station-buffet
or music from thé loudspeakers, or an announcement.from. a voice
which didn't knon what accent to keep and so was fake-genteel.
Some necessary belief in self, some power to oarry the head high,
had gones The less style you had the better for you in that
world: unless of coursé the style had a formula, and if it didn't
it was soon fitted into ones The policemen guardéd, preserved;
I but nothing changed or was born.
Nothing offended


because nothing was risked. It was all shadoms and gestures.
The truth wasn't talked. You were free in an uneasy way, too
free---smothered in indifference. Issues seemed temporarily to
have disappeared.
There was no real argument about anything.
There was no real politics, since there wes no real political
choice, all the political power was formed and determined outside
England and outside Europe e Politics was just how much money
you should get for how much W ork, how many slums should be pulled
didae,
down and Whether a road should be built: you Rontnt get the
young arguing about 1t, because it ras all administrative, there
was no real fight in it any more, all the fighting had been done
by other generations. And yet this truth never really transpired:
it didn't come out; you would think, from all the institutional
talk on the radio and in the films and newspapers, all the talk
that poured from people who showed the right credentials, that
everything was as authentic as it. had always been, that' there was
nothing wrong - The real truth---that England was not an independ-
ent country-didn't come out. Politically it was obvious. But
it didn't go further. The important thing wasn't even that indep-
endence had gone but that its loss wasn't recognised or ever dis-
cussed. So it wasn't fought for. Yet the loss was there, in
the most intimate and personal way - Above all 1t showed in a
Kere was a
horror of style---n will to smallness and drabness, like
a cancer at the centre of life. Yet the body itself wasn't really
ill. People themselves---in themselves---didn't seem like that.
It vas like a common unwanted identity, coming from nowhere, a
And because the lack of independence was unrecognised, its pesen ce
was dreamed. The English didn't dream about the past partic-
ularly, much less about the supposed grandeur of the nineteenth
century which most of them and their forbears had got nothing


but misery out of and which had treated them as less than slaves.
They dreame d daily life. The dream-atmosphere began to envelop
everything. Thetf dreamed what : their own lives weren't---naturally
developing lives. They dreamed that the man above them had auth-
ority, which he didn't. They dreamed that things were be ing looked
after, which they weren't.
I can remember distinçtly how my own hopes vere smothered.
I came back from the war with a terrific avid need to read and be
alone, and though there was this. desolate loneliness in me that
cama from an interrupted youth, it wassomething that only. gnawed
at me intimately, it didn't hinder the concentrated blazing att-
ention I gave to anything I could lay my hands on by way of books.
That went on for two years or more, in one enmmmaug feast. of read-
ing from early morning until late at night, in nearly complete
solitude, with outward misers and fumbling, but with this building-
up going on all the tine, invisibly, renewing my povers of
fout
called
mind after *e years in that universal youthful
mhara
widinerness
war,
eneat cheeks w: suene I
But then, quite. suddenly, it came to an end. I came to know
people. Hy solitude stopped. I was avare that---quite suddenly---
the old world hed come back again. The old faces were there again,
for some reason. The future was muffled suddenly. I knew I
would have to fight myself out of this W orld. That was how my
time would be spent: not fighting in my work, which is the natural
legacy of 1ife, but fighting to be free to fight.
An artificial world had.come into being---suddenly. I
remember feeling this sitting in an Oxford pub with a friend one
evening---it was one of those dull summer evenings that have a
disturbing and nervous excitement, when the clouds are low and
stifling and there is a strange pleasurably grim light over every-


thing. It was an old pub with a low ceiling, on the outskirts
of the oity: I can remember looking out of the narrow window from
the wooden bench where we were sitting, and having the sensation
of the return of old, dead shadows, to which I must now show a kind
of idiot and out-of-joint respect, and talknin a language that
wasn't my own again, and play in a theatre where the scenery was
dusty and fromsfs and I didn't know my lines, for a quite frivolous
and yet dominating end; it was a strange vague sensation which I
lecane conbcines a
only rattummat trtharepat years later, when the truth
had clarified a little. You could say I felt the return of the
old middle class, which had been put back into position---quite
suddenly---to perform its police duties of preserving the status
quo, which, since there hadn 't been time enough since the war for
a new one to develop, had to be the old one. But the idea of
class didn't enter my head. It was simply a sensation of the
total eclipse of hope, almost a conviction that through an event
unknown to me, outside, my struggle would be deathly hard, from
that time on: and in a strange way unnecessarily so, in a nay
that didn't belong to the story of my ofn development or yu to
the actual nature of the country all round me, but came out of
the blue, gratuitous, unforeseen and completely out of joint with
the needs of the time.
Perhaps it had something to do with the - friend I was with.
te were friends without having anything in common. We liked
each other---without liking the otherts world. We were together
but no ideas joined us, no fight of any kind, not the slightest
identity as Englishmen, nothing but a curious, fascinated loyalty
neither of us could understand. We---liked the look in each
other's eye.
It gave me the sensation of having to listen---from now on--


to imbecile talk as if it was clever, to the story of petty
invented desires as if they were passions, to the sound of worm-
wood as if. it was music. I would have to listen to the invisible
leaders of England---humming to themselves, marking time, passing
the day, because they had nothing. new to offer. Real life was
now irrelevant. It went. on like a roaring wind that no one all-
owed himself to notice. They danced, joked, drank and fucked in
this roaring wind.
The greater the change ac tually going on in the co untrys the
less it seemed it was men tioned. The greatest change of all was
perhaps in matters of class, so that class was a word coming to
sound more and more forbidden.
Hy sensation in the pub was a misty one---the first sense of
trom Ke wat.
real vagueness I'd had since coming backk ie sat there speech-
less. We had nothing real to say to each other. I gazed out
of the mindom on to the sad street in a forlorn ray, realising in
those few moments that the old rotten society had come back, like
a ghost, not real but there, powerless but dominating, obliging
but obstructive. Everything was there again as before the war.
Nothing had cl hanged. Yet ithad all changed---from royalty to
food. The C ountry had changed from top to bottom---but this
dream was put on top and made to fit, much to everyone's inner
perplerity. This dream said tpat---royalty was the same,. the,
swish hotels the same, and titles, and Working pe ople with their
grievances, and slums, and being left-wing; all -the old life
was still there! But it was now more free and easy (being a
dream) : artists and people liko that could now get C.B.Es
(they could be counts of a British empire that no longer oxisted
which
and,had never interested most Englishmen in any case), a Chelsea
lay-about might lunch at court, you yourself might even take a


cup of tea with a peer of the realm. It was all easy--no :
struggle: because it wasn't real. Nothing had authority any
more. e Yet 1t was still there.
In those first months after i the war I worked and thought,
prepared my future life, marshalled my forces---for anything but
Tals
mists and vapours. But now I started dreaming as well. I
dreamed that perhaps those lovely parks and the country palaces
were still@intact; that somewhere perhaps, in. offices, in the
clubs of St. Iames's, people were really thinking and deliberating,
that perhaps' 1ife hadn't lost its flavour of authority after all.
It was' an idiot-dreom that grew on me without me having anything
to do with it--a kind of eighteenth-century dream that missed
out. the immense smoky cities. It was part of enjoying the country-
side. Somewhere---across that hedge, by that road---a hundred
miles away---the old authori ty was alive. Juet because it was
dead.
I can remember staying in a country house with its own park
under
and lake, exes a rich squire for whom the local tenants rang hand-
bells on Christmas morning. yI used to sit in the hall and the
old library when nobody was about dreaming the place alive,
because it was dead of the real community that had surrounded
it oncee It needed the dream, Every little object---the sun-
light coming through tho bathroom window on to the great Victorian
bath, the feescoes, the huge fireplace in the hall, the gun-room,
the massive oak staircase, woke a dream.. The owner probably had
more money than any of the previous owners. There rere probably
mare servants, more lavish food, a cellar more full of wines and
port and champagne, there were better stables, the dairy was a
peying proposition, the roof didn't leak, there was hot wa ter in
every dressing room. The owners were business people, they


worked hard, their week-ends were lively and hearty. But what
did the house mean? What was its authority? What was theirs?
They had none, though they had poner. The real authority was
just visible at the edge of the park---in the council houses.
It was in the policeman . who came to the house to enquire about
gun licenoes and didn't say sire It didn't go with poner.
And so a dream had to be supplied---of the time when people carried
authority in themselves, When there was excitemont in the rustle
of a dress and the'sound of a voice. It was all mist and un-
certainty. Those hearty, lively people had authority. But yet
they didn't. The house was pover, yet it was just a shell.
My years at Oxford were the most degrading experience of my
life. A sickening dream like jaundice, a bad and slothrul dream,
spread over everything like a permanent chill light. There life
was all mist! And I remember the ohill and misty days there most
vividly, not the lovely sunlit ones * One or two nice images
rema in-mma glimpse of a meadow at tho back of Magdalen full of
J V snakesheady Estillaries, fri
supposed to be one of only tno fields
in all England which have them in abundance, in a blaze of deep
tiger-skin colours. And the flat land by the river where ponies
grazed, out towards the Pike. The river at Christ Church, with
willows and low stone bridges where there's hardly a sound.
These were sights---I remember si ights. There were the long dining
halls. with tarnished pictures on the valls,where we' had dinner,
and the grey mediaeval stone, the panelled rooms.. But it was
all dreaming, all endless dreaming. vhatever was pleasurable
and soothing had something to do. with a magnificent dream.
I used to sit in the Radoliffe Camera dreaming over books, trying
to dream the place live and reel again. The reality for me-
the only one---was a tiny room on the top storey of a house


inthe Viotorian part of Oxford Where I spent a whole year alone.
That was the real non-dreaming life, before the jaundice spréad
from the city on to me # For years afterwards. I couldn't bear
to think of that chilly city of masturbating youths for long,
its lovely old buildings squashed and shaken by the lorries that
trundled through. It was when I started to feel identified with
the city, and to meet people, that I felt my life had collapsed.
A fearful kind of hgsteria came over me a It hadn tt been there
before. I took a room near a maternity hospital, and when there
was some noise from the child on . the floor above---it was a cooped-
up little hole of a house--I used to dash out of my room yelling
like a maniac, my eyés starting out of my head and my face flushed
angrily. I used to shake and tremble after these strange bursts
of abstract horror that came over mé The father of the child
was some sort of male nurse at a mental hospital, appropriately
enough, and he would come down and look at me with a strange,
wan preoccupation, his mouth open, saying, What's the trouble?'
But he had his shouting bouts, too. When I talked too mich in
my room he would shout down, *Ah, shut your bloody mouthi' A
gay little house I
And that had happened suddenly. For two years my 11fe had
been all books and hard work, and then-life burst all over mo
like yellow vomit. One.morning I dashed out of my room yelling
before I was dressed---I stood in the hall absolutely starko,
wit th the couple upstairs staring down at me with astonished faces a
What Oxford meant as an experienoe I didn't know---what the
devil all the olubs and functions and 'May Ballst as they were
called meant was beyond me like deliriuma There were apparently
'gentlemen' at Oxford---a few, though where theytd sprung from
after two hundred years of industrialisation Christ alone knew.;
But there they were, and I could have been a Mongol for all


the mouthing and chuckling and drinking and aying and naying
meant to me. At the very end I went to one or tno of the
'parties' and even to a Ball, and at the Ball what with the burn-
ing torches and the great merquees. and the lavn with faery lights,
the women in their gowns. a little dream came to the rescue and
attached itself graciously to my memory of the whole tomn, for
a moment or two, in the ebb and flow of the jaundice of the day
and the sleeping hysteria of night, and the numbed misery of a
kind I hadn't even known in rar, even in the years of puberty
in the streets of London.
That
Phe Italian boat docked at Syrecuse for an hour or so, close
to a narrow promontory, and I remember the deep blue water and the
gleaming white sides of the boat, in the utterly calm southern day,
with the sunlight pouring down on to the great blocks of cement in
the tiny harbour, with low houses close by rather like houses I'd
seen on the outskirts of Baghdad. 3icily didn't seem such a diff-
erent world. And the boat with its twinkling port-holes and snooth,
varnished decks looked so neat and perfect aga inst the blue of the
water. I strolled up the road a little way, nodding to a group
of people standing by their house, curious and watching. Then I
drank a glass of thick black wine in a little cantina exactly opp-
osite the boat, in a dark, windowless room with a stone floor and
old wooden tables, and flies everywhere, reminding me of southern
Italy during the war. This tiny glimpse of the very edge of
Syracuse made me think of Greece and the Arab countries much more
than Italy. There was something in the way the stones and pillars
contrested with the water, something of the sane air as in Greece,


a touch of the same golden light, a breath from a gre at invis ble
mare element in the sky, like a god.
Then re went on to Naples where we arrived quite early the
next morning, in a different brilliant light, more yellow and int-
imately and personally suggestive than the Greek, less golden and
infinite and stirring---but stirring in a different way, towards
a more intimate relish and excitement. After sitting in the
station café for an hour with my bags all round me I went on to
station-
Rome. I remember thisyoafé patticularly, its long bar and its
Wicker chairs in a teat spacious hall, with the tall doors wide-
open on one side; I found myself in a state of vemptete ease and
composure, perhaps with relief at being out of the Arab world;
but it was more than that---I think it had something to do with
Italy, a certa ain sense of arriving back in my world, and that
here was my world, although I couldn't see why at the time, I
could only have made historical comperisons, about the Roman empire
Iculdne
being the embryo of Europe and so forth; a knoup the int-
imate and personal connection that was awaiting me and which avaiss
everyone brought up in the Christian world when he passes through
Italy, although there may be no act of recognition, only a hidden,
almost unfelt assent, nearly ancient. I can regember sitting in
the wicker chair of that spacious café just as I remember the
terrace café at Beirut a few days before. In Beirut there was
ecstatic recollection, so to speak, of the future, a sudden
heartening and exhilarating glimpse which acted as a kind of guarantee
of the rightness of my life, without words, in a few seconds,
while in Naples it was a state of ease without thoughts or the
slightest ecstaty, without past or future, only a long-dravn-out
state of pleasure, not even revery; it was completely organic,
just as the connection underneath it (to Italy)---which I knew


nothing about---vas organic and would have to be learned organ-
ically, with deep inner changes as physical as secretions you
don't see but which take place every moment inside you, changes
that are never signalled or known by signs beforehand, but which
give their result quite suddenly, making a fait accompl1 which you
then have to recognise and adapt your mind to; quite different
from the processes I was used'to in my oun world, where the mind
àid the signalling and warning, and achieved conscious changes,
and pushed ahead all the time like an explorer, but without the
long physical training and composure the explorer must have.
In those years after the twer---the ten or fifteen years---
we were like pris oners, we were yearning intimately all the time
for a freedom we couldn't define but which we had once had. And
it wasn't that re were prisoners of a violent or negative reality
we could fight---the terms weren't clear enough to fight. ihat
were we prisoners of? Te couldn't say *
The imprisoning thing was unreality. It was like a blanket
in front of life all the time, numbing our senses a little, always
there between us and the object. A terrific importance seemed to
be paid to gestures---in place of reality. Some had the gestures
of an upper class, but everyone knew that an upper class no longer
existed. And others had the gestures of a lower class---you even
saw working people taking on the gestures of a fictional working
class, with political-pamphlet géstures; you saw educated people
from the working classes keeping their old accents fgsocial effect,
as you saw emancipated people from the middle classes taking on
Working-class accents for social effect; you saw men too pale


and thoughtful to be farmers making the ges tures of farmers and
living on the land; you saw bank-managers making the gestures of
benk-managers, customs-officials those of customs-officials, doctors
those of doctors---none of it had quite the living substance, the
driving
personal dtiting force. And gestures bred themselves. Your
clothes were a gesture, your accent was a gesture, your ideas were
a gesture, your sex was a gesture, your walking into the Dorchester
hotel could be interpreted as a snobbish gesture, you walking into
the Dorchester hotel with your collar unbuttoned and no tie on could
be an effective counter-gesture, just as your walking into the Dorch-
ester hotel with a starched white collar and carefully knotted tie
could be a gesture counter to the counter-gesture; your taking
lunch in a working man's café could be a gesture, your not belonging
to a club could be as deliberate a gesture as belonging to one a
your ges ture of taking a taxi everywhere could be replaced by the
gesture of never taking one, your gesture of taking a holiday in
Cannes when you wanted one in Brighton was equivalent to the gesture
of taking one in Brighton when you wanted one in Cannes; your
dreary
gesture of wearing old and Rirty clothes in a Thirties s tyle because
otherwise people would think you were putting on airs unsuitable to
a ten-pound-e-week clerk was the same as the gesture of wearing
colours that jarred and shockedo just to shon people you didn't
care being only a ten-pound-a-meek clerk; your gesture of looking
to the left when royalty passed on the right was equivalent to tho
gesture of saluting them; your gesture of being a bit af a gay
dog because you felt too respeesable was the aquivalent of the
were
gesture of being respectable because you felt you knn too much of
a gay dag. More and more life became an arena of public roles,
where every man had to carry his gestures 11ke a uniform, and
where nothing inward existed any more. Thus, being a soldier,


being at Oxford, having a job, not having a job, marrying and
not
having children, not marrying and having children, going to the
theatre or not going to the theatre, walking by the river at night
or taking a bus or flying in an aeroplane or looking at television
or kissing someone hullo were all gestures, they all carried an
indescribable stain of not being quite real.
There was a suspension of the inner resources of will and
desire, because a gesture had been made without corresponding
necessity, thus making a dumb and underground accusation of the
whole being of each creature, so that for a moment he stood fixed
into his own gestures and would need a drink, a party, an hour
or so alone, an act of love, a thousand-mile journey, to break
that fixture and regain the original life that moved and changed
inside him and belonged to the mysterious real world and to no
public capacity whatsoever.
You had to make endless mental allowances---the man you
were talking to who had the gruff air of a workman, leaning all
over the table with his glass of beer, might De from a well-to-
do family which had shel tered him too much; the delicate man
who only liked tomatoe juice worked a lathe all week. Gestures
followed counter-gestures in a kind of delirium that took the
place of life and hid all reality and direct communication
between people, and spread an air of things-not-being-done when
they were being done, and of being-done when they were not being
done, e There were brisk wooden business men who used a classy
accent to get the shirt off your back, and there were those who
made the gesture of grabbing your shirt but then gave it back
with a smile. Naturally a trade in gestures grew up: making
the proper gesture was half the battle, you left the dirty work
to other people until it seemed that' no dirty work was being


done anywhere anymore; only gestures---the gesture of cooking
food in a restaurant that wasn't real food at all but a few ideas
thrown together to meke the gesture of a meal (after all youbnly
ranted to eat out as a gesture)---potatoes cooked tno days before
with eyes and all, peas dyed green to look the part, meat a week
old, a slithery sauce made with colduring and flour, and a nice
bit of deep-frozen fish tasting of nothing, cooked in fat so stale
that it stank (but stijks had little chance of getting through that
ghostly world of gestures) -a gesture materialised into edible
form, strangely abstract---rather like eating a bit off a categorical
imperative---So that the poor eaters had an abstract look, faintly
bewildered at this 'good old English faré'.
Food, like a bed, is basic to life and tells a story about
its author---you can't get round it: and the food in England
became so unspeakably grotesque and foul (unless you knew where to
'look', as the phrase was) that it was like a galloping consumption
all over the island, spreading further the more it laid the victim
low. Foreigners began to Wonder if the English really had taste-
buds like other people.
If you complained the waitress always said that. Nobody Else---
the ghost that was always being invoked---had complained. This
Nobody Else skulked and crawled from one gesture to another,
act tually believing in the gesture-vorld all round him (though his
belies
organs inside didn't share the bedi68), and setting such little
store by his own tastes that in the end he had none, feeling sure
that They---the top gesture-makers---couldn't be wrong, there
must be something wrong wi th your own palate if you didn't like
own
it. For ina vorld of gestures you had to lose s ight of
your,self
ymuiselg
in some way, you, counted for nothing, you were only valuable for
your gesture and otherwise you had no voicem no whim, no taste,


no silly desire that people should oater for in any ways You were
on sufferande. of course, when you went On The Continent you order-
ed coffee and got real coffee, you ate when you liked. and what you
liked. But that was only another gesture---a slightly. classy one.
It was a holiday, and Going On the Continent meant taking time - off
from reality. Europe---your own civilisation---was a playground.
Even the national beverage, tea, tried to become a philosophioal
idea in that period. Thé greatest Christian tea-drinking people
in the world, with every tea in their shops from Darjeeling to Lapsang
and Orange Pekoe and Assam, teas with *liquory* blends and twiney'
blends and scented 1 "blends, only ordered straight tea when they
went into a caré. No restaurant thought of advertising all the
different types, or of running Earl Grey, strong Indian and Chinese
blends as three alternatives. Even for your straight tea you
inggriably got slop---water kept boiling in an urn for hours(a orime
for tea), the pot unwarmed (as you can detect by the small leaves
floating on top), and the tea, a cheap growth.
Working people ev erywhere had more money now : but one thing
théy couldn't buy was quality and finesse. Here the shadowof an
overpowering history fell on them: quality and finessé had been
a monopoly of a small and beneficent oligarhhy for hundreds of
years, or at least since the eighteenth century, and were still
assooiated with a creature who no longer existed except as a
convénient historical gesture---the gentleman. And since the
country wasn 't developing organically---since, in those post-war years,
it complotely lacked a directing and thinking class, the absence
of the gentléman with his repertoire of fine tastes meant the
absence of any market for the.goods heta liked. Instead of


spreading to the working people who could now afford it,, the
merket died out. You would think the middle class would have
kept it alive. But in the middle class the cancer of the empty
gesture was stronger than anywhere else.
The looks of abashed and grieved wonder on the faces of waiters
and waitresses in that period are something to be remembered---
tea now, at three o'clook in the afternoon? Good God, no! A
drink, outside licenoing hours? a glass of water with your mashed
potatoes? some bread with your chemical gravy? a salad? sone ice
TL wailess
in your water? Trey were like policemen: E
A VE
If you
lic.
wanted anything to eat you had to have a clear criminal sheet, and
/t to keep pretty quiet; Letting out a scream, vomiting, spilling
your gravy or complaining in a quiet voice could have got you arr-
ested. Even the foreign restaurateurs in England learned that it
didn't matter what you serred up to Englishmen. When I was at
Oxford, one mild Sunday, I had a 'foreign' meal and went to the
station to see sonebody off---and spewed the whole lot out in one
yellow jet across the platform. I felt perfectly all right---in
fact, getting rid of it was the best part of the meal. I was told
afterwards that the food came down from London in big ice-boxes
and had been cooked six weeks before. The meals in college were
pretty rough, too, although I can't be sure of that as I had no
taste-buds at the t ime, like most of the people round me d But
I've been in Oxford colleges since, and there always seems to be
a sort of stale fat-stench round the dining hall, it seems to have
got right into the wood panelling. The same for Cambridge, too.
And people look perplexed. When they go in to eat they look like
people going to their exoution. which in a way they are.
I shall never forget Angelo and Francine after they'a eaten


at a fashionable (meaning the gesture of serving goods in a classy
way) stores in London, on their second visit. We met them in a
'continental' café afterwards, where theye compensated for their
experience by eating a poor initation of an apfel strudl (Vienna,
city of my dreams 1) served by a nice-looking girl Who then hovered
over us trying to say that our time was up---a queue was forming,
there vere other prisoners waiting to present their clear sheets.
Anyway, at the fashionable store they'd decided to eat---I'd for-
gotten to warn them. They'd gone upstairs---low lights, cardinal-
red striped wallpaper and all that lark---very classy. And a
murmur of talk. well, when it came---they thought they'd try
the classic dish of the national cooking genius, fried bacon and
eggs with half a grilled tomato thrown in as a coneession to the
colour-scheme---the whole lot tasted of soap. It didn't suggest
Sitals soap---it was actually 1ike eating soap. But even this wasn't
meal
the worst thing---they'd had an English restaurant/before, after
all, and their taste-buds had been inured; and they pushed the ir
plates aside. What worried them was the sight of a well-to-do,
furred, clearly sophisticated woman opposite them tucking into
the same soap-dish like a Workman at his bread and cheese. They
stared and stared. She was dressed; so well! She seemed to have
such good tastel Eyes not unintelligent! A commanding manner
with the waitress. And there she was washing her tummy out with
carbolic soap! They asked me---how could that be? And I said
perhape
perhaps she dreamed the taste---she had a
closing her mind
were
way,of
to the taste of soap. Thegla-bocn drosgoned as well, they. said---
all over the stores, like soldiers: Given little tickets an d
told to quèue here and pay there! Angelo looked deathly palegy
as - II une mnuineoy
Tm at MT
That


vas how such a thing would affect him---strike him deathly pale.
A gesture-England was, naturally, a dead England. And
perhaps this was the idea. Perhaps the whole of Europe was,
so to speak, spuriously dead---each country in a different way.
Unknow to most English people, England was bec'oming known in the
outside world for all sorts of things it wasn't; it was becoming
embalmed into a kind of dead reputation, a fiction. England was
now a 'traditional' country, or an 'imperial' country, or a 'stiff'
country, or even an 'eighteenth century' and "picturesque' country.
I used to feel this in all sorts of ways when I was abroad. It
as an Englithmen
was like suddenly not being yourself. It was clear that. S ometimes /
I was associated with a tremendous grandeur---an. imperial history.
But this was strange. So little of that had been heard about in
my own country. But it wasn't so much what q alities were at trib-
uted to ane, as that all these qualities were unreal. Especially
in Europe, one country didn't seem in real relation with another.
The English had equal fictions about the French or Germans, the
French had the same about the Italians, and so forth. Nothing
was working naturally.
Underneath, England is a turbudent and ardent country---but
this stopped. There was an awful quiet. People sai d it was
because the country was exhausted from the var. And this was
true. But exhaustion from war---as you could see in Germany
in the first years after the war---makes the energy for peace.
had
That peace-energy, started up in England. Then suddenly it
stopped.
Really it stopped in the rest of Europe, too. You hear
people talking the same way in Italy and Germany---hom everything
looked lively and hopeful in the ruins, in the first two years
after the war. but that this suddenly stopped end the old crowd


was back. A new world was expected, but it didn't oome. Or
rather, a new world appeared to be there, not a better one necess-
artly, but the whole feeling was new, But instead an old world
came back which the inmates had to try to decipher as best they
could and which foreigners régarded as rightful and authentic.
I had no more idea of what this old England was about than I had
of bird-habits in Borneo. Had it ever existed, this fiotion?
Europe wasn't so much fixed in dead ideas as in fiotions that
had originated thousands of miles away. For these fiotions were
American.
That was natural enough, given the enormous power that America
had acoumulated not only by its geographioal vastness and natural
wealth, and size of population, but by means of two world nars for
whioh it had provided the arsenal, wi thout being attacked itself or
suffering great depletions of manpower. Those were the bare facts.
Twioe Europe had been an almost-dying beast; and twice America had
been untouched. Two wars had bolstered up ite sooiety (its rich men)
at the minimam possible oost. These wars were really basic middle-
olass arguments about civilisation which involved Amerioa as much as
other countries; America could no more separate itself from Europe
than it dould separate atself from the English language which it
spoke, or from the formé and habits of Christian thought Which it had
inherited, or from its own fears and urges which were exaotly the
same as in the equivalent middle-olass sobiety of Europe. It ended
the second of these wars with a money-power at least three times
greater than that in the rest of the world, beoause the rest of the
world was largely in ruins.


But the presence of America in Europe after the last war--e
though Amerioa and Europe were basioally the same world, with the
same problems---was the presence of a foreign and sametimés hostile
civilisation. Amerioa dould understand Europe as little as the
middle olass in any of the European oountries dould understand its
own history, its own people, its working class or its poasenrpys
and for exaotly the same.reason---that America enthroned the
European middle-olass ideal worked out in the nineteenth dentury,
namely the definition of the human oreature by his work, and of his
position by the money he got for it. It was a simplifoation:
there being, in America, no overshadowing historical presenc es such
as an old noble or peasant olass, or even a proletariat in the
stfict.sense.
Youcould say that America was middle-class Christendom as an
island to itself: the embodiment of the grand nineteenth-century
theme---life as production.
Its fictional attitudes to the rest of the world spread, until
each country was typecast into a role foreign to it. Germany waseee
murderers: the actual question, what is there in the German charact-
er that makes for murder, wasn t thrashed out; it was put intopola
storage for time and prosperity to heal. E_ngland was the splendid,
colonial, irrieating ally. Frandé meant intelligence, decadence,
whores and good food; a bit of the atmosphere of the gay nineties
(Montmartre). Italy---the little paradise garden, with.a quaint
tendency (for a paradise garden) towards communism. It was all
a not unattractive dream, really. And each oountry had its corr-
esponding diplomatic role:. Germany was the hired bully (against
Russia); Italy the olown; England the major-domo or gentlements
gentleman. The major domo rather looked down on his master
(and was turned into a lackey for his pains) ; the bully déspised


him, and the olown---the wisest of the three---simply milked him.
It was a bit of a mess beoause it had nothing to do with the
actual dountries, namely the people living in them. It was a
strange world we had to learn about all overcagain, as 1f we'd never
grown up in it. The Italians never really got to grips with their
own fasciem, nor did the Germans with their nazism; nor did the
Frenoh and English with their old commeroial fumblers still surviving
from the Thirties. There were little clashes with Américanse-e
we all had them: little misunderstandings in which we gasped-
Frénchmen, Englishmen, Italiens---at being taken quite naturally
and without question as caricatures. I Bhall never forget a young
German who had done his post-war pilgrimage to America in search
of freedom saying to his wife after I'd made a joke, spluttering
with happy laughter, 'And in that accent, toot' There was ev en,
now, an authentio English language; but not spoken any longer by
Englishmen.
The publicity that poured all over the world, but especially
over our part of it, in not only scoial but also intimate and
personal ways, was basically that America had received a long-due
ethical reward from God, and that it was now the earth's rightful
ruler. Yet--it was strange: this wasn't an empire, clearly.
It had the ethical olaims -of empire. It did rule the : western seas
and upper spaces. o It was the richest country in the world. Its
interests had infiltrated everywhere, and it had the power to bring
down foreign governments, évén English one 8. But .still, the actual
composition of America seemed to -prevent it being an empire in
the customary nationalist style: because it wasn't a nation like
others; : it was the embodiment of an idea, to-whioh people from'
everywhere emigrated. Yet this idea was an ethical one, that there
was something wrong with the rest of the world. So while it


couldn 't have an empiré in the proper sensewe-because it had come
into being as a protest againet empire---it had an invisiblé ethical
empire which brought into being a Europe that fitted thé Ameraoan
image. Since its basis as a country was ethical, , it could have no
allies--eno eugals. America always addressed her ethioal inferiors,
a faot which was never realiséd in England until too late, when the
country was isolated from its own world, Europe. America was an
empire without owning up to it. And that ambiguity traced itself
all thraugh our lives in those years 6
The soul of the world---especially Europe---had passed into
the American soul. America was the spokesman of the twentieth
century. This was the ethioal attitude supported by the most
gigantic publicity-service that had ever existed. Simple people---
in Amerioa as in the rest of the world---were: baffled and confused.
And in our world it had the effect of making us feel that real life
was evading us all the time. The ethioal authority had been
transported elsewhere: but by power, not by right.
The publicity wasn 't swallowed, quite: it was gulped down like
the lump of pork-fat sailor boys used to have to swallow once, as
an initiation; it couldn't stay down for ever. And as the American
ethical idea turned the rest of the world into a fiction, it had to
turn America into a fiction as well, in order to do it effectively.
No society is an.ethical achivement. Always and eve: rywhere it is
the kingdom of interests. Ethios belongs to conscionce, which in
the end is always private, and contrary to Bociety: consoience is
precisely the turbulent factor which changes society. But this
was hidden for a time by the shattering publicity of power and
success that dominated the world. America became the promised land,
ethioally. At the same time it was an integral part of our own
world, it had the same desparate problems. And it was an ally;


which was perplexing. And in the end this perpléxity worked
against the publicity.
People with the new éthical authority after the war were
unable to make themselves felt; whioh is another. way of saying
that the natural social evolution stopped. It was a pérfect
chance for mediocrity.
In this world-publicity, America became another word for
modern. And the wreckage of Europe after the war gave this
publicity a visible support. Someone travelling from America,
finding a half-ruined Europe, remembered not the war but the ethical
lessons he'd been. taught in childhood as Amerioan history.
Europe was now visibly the 'old* world. But sometimes the traveller
preferred this: he preferred the old' world to.his own. Hore
he invariably showed the other aide of the same doin of ethical
publicity: he deplored the *Americanisation' of, say, England
and Franoe---in ugiy roadside gas-stations which had actually been
put there thirty years before; he deplored the fact that 'even*
in Europe---the séat of wisdom and tradition---they were now going
in for the 'modern' (namely, American) habit of pulling down build-
ings more than a few deoades old. It even began to seem that
inddstrialisation hadcfirst taken place in America and not in Europe.
The first railways, the first mines.and spinning mills and steam
engines had no longer come about in.England over a hundred years
before but in some strange wey had been the moral property of
America. Those pioneers. of modern life had been Americans 'in
spirit* if not in residence; even Leonardo. da Vinci.was an
*American'; you might hear someone say, half in jest. . Since
America was an inmigrant and not. an organic nation it could al ways
be described as a spirit immanent hére and theré throughout
European history, until finally it had lodged in one partioular place


as the climax and raison d'etre of that history, in an Hogelian
sort of way. Few Americans, by being American at all, dould
avoid the allurements of this publidity.
In a peculiar way this had the effect of preserving Europe
in its essential quality---as an inner dream. Under a kind of
invisible and benevolent miltary ocoupation this dream thrived
and even glowed warmer than : before: Europe myHEn mended its cities,
got rich again. Thé dream was supported by reality but not
disturbed (or changed) by it. So 1t was a trifle academic as well.
Rather like being characters in a pantomime. It was a nice feeling.
Pantomimes are nice: there was an audience---the scenery vas clean
and colourful, the stage had the best equipment; it all felt jolly
and safe. But still, there was à funny feeling when you went out
into the street. You couldn't dream all the time. But without
the dream life was inoomplete.
I remember. the hours we spent talking to Angelo in Paris,
after they'd moved there---listening to Verdi or Schubert or the
Beethoven - sonatas, talking about Dante of Leopardi, whom he'd
just started to read, like.a child learning its first steps, with
that extraodrinary total ignorande that Italians inherit. And
Europe as a warm, vivid dream alwaye seemed to be there---in the
room---in the shade from the tree outsidé whose leaves touched the
windows, and in the sounds from the courtyard below as people walked
by and children played, and the look of the Frenoh booksmassed on
Angelo's shelves in their paper covers when the sunlight oame in
briefly in the morning sometimes, reminding me of my first frightened
visits to Paris years before, whioh had had the ecstatio horror
of youth. It was always Europe in those talks--aand an older
Europe, when there*d been less traffio and the food had been better
and the sky had seemed lighter. We were looking baok all the


time---to a kind of nineteenth dentury glow you sometimes feel
in Verdi---orimson and gold---with hansom dabs and the sound of
hoofs on cobbles, and lantern lights---vhich also happened to be
the period Angelo's little house was built in. Every time we
heard a piece of music it was an actual and present experience---
of thought---and yet also it was like looking into a. marvellous
past until the two things---the present thought and the past fact-
were the same: art was the past onclosed perfectly like a womb,
or like the glowing centre of all life, past and safe because it
oould never be altered or reduced. And then, we were so muoh
Europe ourselves, the four of us---Frenoh, Italian, German, English;
we were each of endless ouriosity to the other, a vast source of
strangeness and difference. a
But Angelo always said, 'Europe 's finished. Europe 's dead.'
He felt this contradictory death that was going on all the ti me,
under the dream, so that the dream was more completely and safely
a dream than it would have been otherwise. Like an Italian he
aocepted it: he didn't look forward, he didn't. examine it too
closely; it was just the status quo at the time, and therefore
all of reality. More and more, too, he said he aidn't care for
America, He wasn't interested in it. The country irritated
him, more and more. And that, too, was an acceptenoe---of the
other side of Europe that was by no means a dream although
equally invisible,
And When, in the end, Europe was at its famous point of
recovery, and the governments were beginning to make their own
politioal decisions again, even ocoupied Germany, that dream of
Europe---the glowing, inner Europe---far from beo omtng material-
ised in any sort of triumph suddenly oollapsed. Europe became
real, with all the dirt of politics again. Paris seemed bleak--


a capital of power politics again. And at almost exaotly that
time the friendehip between Angelo and me collapsed too---before
we knew what was happening.
More and more in those deadly post-war years, when a wrong
dream of Bngland began to swell and roll and envelop everything
like a mist, the real objeots of life---the sights and sounds and
smells that have their only seat in the single human oreature---
seemed to become less and less distinot, and tricks and feints
and guises and tinkerings became greater and greater until the
whole of English life looked like an emergenoy-job to patch so me-
thing up for reasons that weren't quite olear, and on behalf of
a status quo that was less than an interesting fiotion.
Wherever you went you met one of these tricks, and for years
I took them seriously. It wasn't the fact that the war had
wreoked the economy or that the country had lost its empire: on
the dontrary, people were richer and happier---in the current sense
of happy. It was the faot that a genuine life wasn't coming out


of individual people, in talk and struggle. The dream was
necessary for people not responsible for their own lives.
At one and the same time as the Englishman was acknowledged
to have quite a position in the vorld, he had none, which was
a perfect dondition for trioks and dreams a And eve rybody who
had a middle-class job hid behind these tricks and dreams at
som point or other. He had to. At some point, in every
middle-class job, there had to oome the secret. conviction,
'I'm corrupt.*
You only had to try and get some body in his office, or
write to him, and if there was any kind of *position' attached
to his work--if a 'position; dould be dreamed into it---there
was alwaye a trick you were supposed to go through and to
understand. I myself never really got to unders tand these
tricks, which were like police-formulae except that the police-
foree was ineffectual and designed to guard a fiotion in
which nobody believed. There would be a seoretary with a
peduliar fluting accent designed to show 'position' at second
remove, or a letter would be signed 'in his absence' for
someone you knew was warming his,arse at the gasfire all day
and cracking dirty jokes over the phone with another position'.
And if the letter was act tuallywritten---dictated of course---
by the Position himeelf, it was invariably in that dead
tone thought to be suitable (in a period when the individual tone


of voice seemed struck out of life) for the Making of An
Impression. And so the farce went on--the recipient answered
in the same tone, which he thought was the only one understood
by Position, especially if he was a Position himself. And 60
even middle-class youths who had started sohool or college with
a certain delioate goodness and sincerity and equality of approach,
for no people have a more deliberate sense of equality than
middle-class péople, began to find themselves fixad in a mbuld
which they didn't understand, mich less liked, but which on
the whole they thought was the mould of authority; except
that it was a hoax. They arrived at their Position', but with
a faintky startled air, as if there was Bomething unreal about
it, which there was. But they went on; father or mother or
unole said. this was how things were done---of course. But of
course!
The idea. was that 1f you wanted to show your Position you went
in for a oertain withholding of feeling, and much reliance on letter-
heads, and secretaries with appointment books, and a general tone in
your letters that while you favoured your clients you didn't need
them. This went on in the smallest busine s8, as if the only thing you
needed in order to establish : yourself was an air of eome kind-
preferably the air of seeming to dress other people down slightly,
so as to oreate the suggestion that they came to you instead of
vice-versa. That was dream-business, conducted on . the assets of
the past, which had secured a large enough clientèle to take care


of the next decade or so; after that there'd be trouble---which
there was e
Then there were the titles---the .most obviously fictional
element of the whole fiction: patrons. of this firm and that society
and this club and- that agency, the lord so-and-so, the marquis thas
knens
and the Sir that, MBE and CBE and Christ alone knose what else.
And if you joined this institute or that association and paid your
little whack every year you could. - have certain initials behind your
name: a Position! And that was the question at every turn of
life---the man who blocked the door everywhere you. went (invariably
on an income that hardly kept him in pride) had it on his lips:
what was your positoon? What were your credentials? At the
oustoms---who were you? Tihat right had you to. epproach him,
even if all you wanted to.do was to buy his refrigerators? I
shall never forget a young Arab merchent coming to me in Baghdad.
with a latter from an English refrigerator-c ampany an his hand.
He wanted to know what it was all about.. For while the letter
didn't actually turn down his offer to pay good money for a number
of their rofrigerators, it pointed out - their Position in the matt-
er and wanted to know his: it secmed to say in effect, who are
you to be writing to us out of the blue like this? who is your
bank? what are your references?, and of course you must know that.
we don't allon credit. And all in the . dry tone of Position.
Not really of patronage, because the writer himself wàs hardly
visible, especially as someone else had. signed his letter for him
( his Position didn't allow him to actually sign the letters), with
the use of those little initials p-p.s in case the. client should +
think he was being addressed directly. Direct talk seemed to
pass out of England in those years. * And probably the man with


the Position was neither surly nor pa tronising in himself, but
just lacked his own voice, he wouldn't have known what to say
without the formula, so it vas better. to play safe and couch him-
self in a deadly, stark, grey language* The only pleasure in
that was what he got with the secretary, dictating the dead letters,
um-ing and ah-ing and let-me-seeing, with his fingers together . in
front of his face, and many arch frowns and quizzing looks, as the
business went slonly down the pipe., At least the English enter
disaster with a certain quixotic irrelevance, and much less worry
about material eircumstances than they're given credit for: it is
part of our greatness.
Since his Position was no position at all, since it didn't
single
spring from his own stgxka energy and nature but wen t along from
dattry day to deathly day in an office-routine that had its. form-
ulae already as sembled like a machine, there had to be the dream.
as well: the one fed the other, with cumulative effect. Hen.
sat in offices play-acting Men Sitting In Offices to the tune of
thousands of pounds of wastage a year, in a bacchanalia that has
something attractive and aristooratic about it. The fridges this
first-class actor was trying not to sell vere getting petter and
better, because at least the engineers and the workers were doing
their job, hovever much tea they were supposed to drink. And
this created a great national perplexity, a vast scratching of
the head as to why these foreign marke ts kept falling into the
hands of people whose Work seemed no better. In industries
where there were vast potentialities, and which were making money
hand over fist in other countries---indestries like book-manufact-
ure, catering to millions of English-speaking people all over
the world, and to millions of poor.bastards on the home market
who were undergoing the misfortune of an advanced eduoation,


firms went bankrupt right and left, and pulled in their horns,
and cut down on this and cheese-pared on that, and developed a
new pinchbeck atmosphere at a time when on the face of it the
*economy', that peouliar abstract of modern life, was booming.
Change had to come from somewhere. But it couldn't come
from the middle positions. They were too busy telling people
that oh, this could never be done that ray, or, but that's quite
impossible, you'd never get vory far with that---leaving the
dead, bare office routine to do it all, in its om way, in the
silence and bareness and starkness of a place where living creat-
ures no longer existed except in brief flaming moments among them-
selves in the evening, in a scheduled squirt of sex after the
deadly journey in the train hnt-bomatke and the deadly hours of
Doing It The Right Way were over.
I know nothing more awful in all the world than the sight of
the hordes of people pouring into the big London stations at night
and then away from them in the morning, they're like the last
hordes of mankind who have given up hope, whose little frail desires
and yearnings have been squashed nearly out, to the point where
only a cup of tea is a help---slovenly and pale and sad and
shuffling anaytired slaves vho serve what they don't understand
or even care for, with a daily self-debasoment Which in the end
is all a mistake and dreadfully unnecessary, because it doesn't
a hieve the crackle and sparke of wealth it was meant to. I
don't think the sight of workers pouring out of a factory is
really as terrible as that. It is terrible, but Workers keep
something closed in their faces, they keep it in reserve, you
have the feeling that there is something contained in them all
the time, there is a glimer of optimism in the ir eyes, a tiny


glimmer they keep as closed as possible, and there is the strange
mechanical satisfaction of their work: life must have some satis-
faction, though it may be a terrible satisfaction. And their
homes are marvellous. You can glimpse them sometimes when you
walk past---the homes of the younger gonerations; with striped wall-
papers and tiny chandeliers and walls a different colour and fitted
carpets and tables of olean, sound wood, all in a decent and straight-
forward taste, cheerful and with an intimate sort of relish that
makes
gaires you gasp sometimes with vicarious delight; and Working homss
have always done that---always taken the intimate part of the current
taste, even of Viotorianism, and made it in the form of a tiny
palace to last a life-time of dreams and daily secure happenings
that are identical after ton or twenty or fifty years, as they
should be in all worlds that haven't gone insane.
This is the great chenge in England since the war---the
massive invisible revolution: the change in working people.
And this is the audience and market that people of Position failed
to address, except in its dirtiest and lowest tastes, through the
various forms of journalism. That messive invisible change seemed
to leave hardly any mark on the country. Looking at it from the
kal
outside you would never think it happened. A whole organic dev-
elopment that should have taken place in the first years after
the war, when the workirg class was beginning to stretoh itsolf
and look about for the first time, at the threshold of a new kind
of society, was stopped. And people of Position were suddenly
there who knew not the devil what was happening. lore than any
other single factor, this was the cause of the growing sense of
bankruptoy at a time of apparent boom: the proper energies were
leashed up.


On the surface nothing happened except that people got a
bit more prosperous, o This was the basic fact---an enormous
relief from worry for most of the people in the country. And
the fact was hardly noticed. It vas the basic political fact, too:
all the talk by the intellectual servants of Position about the
loss of the British empire and its humbling effect on the country
had nothing to do with the reality at all. Not only vasn't the
loss felt---whatever 'loss' might mean in the cash terms that are
supposed to be the womb of modern Socioty---it was hardly seen.
The empire, to most people in the country, had never been alive;
so that its death brought no tears. Most of them had never been
cafn. to any part of it. At best they had relatives in one of the domin-
ions. Most people were indifferent to the Position of the country
Rad
abroad because they had never participated in making 1t or got any-
Rasns
thing out of it, except in ways they etams notiog. This indiffer-
ence was the basic crippling fact in the country's recovery from
war. Everything was left to the men of Position, who scrambled---
but only when they had to---to save the leavings onpthe plate.
You got thts extraodrinary contrast in England between an optimist-
ic and more and more contented class of common people, who had now
won most of their battles, with more money in their pocktes than
their parents had had, but within living momory of the depression
copoi
and the means test, beginning to look round them with the freshness
of a first generation, with a certain wonder and excited caution,
doing things that seemed to have been socially forbidden before,
even when there'd been money to do it, such as plane flights to
Italy or southern France, going to the theatre outs ide the Christ-
mas season, buyingaxpensive clothes and so on; you had the contrast
between this class and that of Position whose lives in comparison
were cramped, pinched, fetid and faded-genteel, with everything


that was classically theirs falling into slow decay, a class
without ideas for the future because they had no grip on the
present, and whose only collective resource was a negative weriness
and sceptioism---always saying 'no'. Every man and woman of
Position knew his job, apparently, and believed that if anything
was going wrong 1t would be noticed by somebody higher up whose
authority had never been questioned. There were Experts---and
Ways of Doing Things. But that was the fallacy. Nobody higher-
up aid notioe. The dream was all-pervasive. It included high
and low. The bankruptoy lay in antual life-ourrency, not in cash;
so it wasn't noticed. Not until the cash was affected.
In some way, this was the case all over Europe---with différent
trappings. The myth was put about by the sons and daughters of
Position that Europe was finisbhed---an told woman* that was now
managed from the New. World. The English found that Americans
treated them with a magnanimity no Englishman gave them (and which
they gave no Englishman): it was said that the Americans now
displayed the out-going, imperial generosity which had once been
an English gift. They capitulated easily to the American publicity-
myth for the simple roason that they themselves had nothing p to
offer their own country---its problems were beyond them, and so
it seemed better to leave the conflict of life to America,
Besides which, America was a middle-class paradise. That is,
the collapse of middle-class morale hadn't shown through there
yet in clear money terms. It was a good place in which to shelve
the aotual middle-class problems, and leave their solution to
those lonely and negleoted creatures in America who felt that
it wasn 't a paradise at all but howling hell, and said 80.
I can remember my own bafflement when I heard those stories,
everywhere in. Europe, that twet were finished. It was a funny


way of putting things. I didn't feel finished. I felt I'd
only just started. There was an enormous amount to see and learn.
To begin with, I dian't know Europe: Italy in the war, then France
and Austria afterwards, were my first timorous glimpses. And here
were these other people---they'd apparently donet Europe in some
way that went with Position---taking it all with a flat, blasé
fatigue. I didn't feel tired. I didn't feel old. I felt extra-
ordinarily now. * After all, mine was the first generation in my
family to read and write properly. That séemed to----promise some-
thing. I jumped into the world---having soméhow survived Bohool
education---ready for anything. And there weré thousands---perhaps
millions---like mo e And wonders did unfold. But all the time it
was against the grain---hidden and etrangely unproductive of external
events. These other people---whose voices were the only ones to be
hèard on the whold---Baid'everything was finished. *We* were decad-
ent. *We' had explored eve rything to the bottom---there was now
soil-erosion'. They were talking for me as well. It was they who
went to the parties---Wrote in the newspapers---represented *England'
to the foreigners.
Only Americans were 'young'. And that was how Amerioans began to
look at you. You were suddenly a kind of old and wise and half-
dead 'european': -
my sénsation that I had come from the oommon people
gave way to another one, by virtue of this caricaturing gaze,
namely that I was in a mystical way aristocratic, whioh I suppose
ev ery European is, finally. I was a 'colonial' owner ofsome kind,
though I couldn't see how. One even began to hear that one was
'parochial', because oné hadn't driven across the Arizona desert.
It was a strange world euddenly to aome into being, apparontly out
of nothing: certainly out of no reality. My 1ife was finished,
the nyth said. I was a momber of the museum, so to speak, I


was interesting, even fabulous; but not quite all there. It was
a little bit how the Australians and white South Africans and
Canadians looked at you: you were a huntin' and shootin' sort of
feller, terribly white, you know,, from the old country, the mother
country, home and all that rot, you know. Only the Americans,
coming from an industrial society, had a more realistic grip, and
a better overall picture of Europe e And they were independent of
Europe. e Or they hoped, now, that they would be. Huch of post-
war history is the history of their attempt to bring about an
organic independence for themselves that was impossible. This
explains the peculiar dual nature of their politics---the friend of
Europe who at the same time triep to break her infl uence wherever
possible.
In every conversation I had with Americans, on ev ery topic
from stars to lumbago, I felt this caricaturing element that lay
underneath and alternated with their sense of the caricaturing
element on my side. For as they turned me into the old, if wise,
European' who had explored all the roads which they, as the young
and pioneering, vere about to start along, I turned them into the
callow, if refreshing, American' who was arguing out the things 3
that had interested European minds a century or so ago. For the
dream that stood between us was the seme. It was a false dream.
Only false relations could grow from it.
Americans flocked to Europe. Europeans flocked to America.
The dream that held both worlds in its grip was the same, only its
terms rere different. 4 ohange from one to the other was pleas-
ant, if you were the dresming kind. America was a nice bed for
the European to lie in, Europe a nice bed for the American. And,
because of this, the dream was given more and more chance to
become reality. The differences between Europe and America


geteme
sley
which were cited in the dream tended to
nore true. You
couldn't help beginning to feel that, after all, the Anericans
over there really did seem to be arguing and thinking things out
more and facing the dirty realities of our time. And, people in
America, began to feel that really perhaps the Europeans had a better
grip, as a people belonging to the past and therefore on safer and
saner ground. But there was a difference. Americans hadn't
capitulated to anything. In Europe certain people had. They
had capitulated not only their own lives but all those around them.
The Americans didn't ask them to.. They just did 1t. .So there
was an unequal distribution of power; the dream gained foot even
more. Since, at the end of the war, England's independenoe---
strength---Was greater than that of any country in Europe, her
capitulation was the greatest, beang the most unnecessary. She
lost even that little, bit of real England that the Thirties had
left. The war had turned her intoa military springboard for a
huge western offensive. The peace now turned her into a kind of.
vell-run factory. Her guiding lights turned to America because
tkal
they were aloser to thatf world than to any other; they were more
American, in fact, than they were English---they understood {and
liked) thè Americans better than they did their own working class.
Therefore it is really wrong to say they. capitulated. This 1s.
political talk---just empty words. They didn't have to capitulate
or do anything con Sc lously. They were just already members of *.
the Anglo-Saxon indus trial chernel-house.
In England the weather always seemed bad now, even when it
was: quite good. It seemed to get. an obsessive hold on people 's
lives---as 1f, because, everything elsefas finished, all you could,
do was stare at the sky. Even the royal family complaine d that
it rained whetever they rent: apparently, they took the weather


with them, even to places that only had a thimble-full of rain a
year. The question you wanted to ask was, why with all that Common-
wealth, stretohed across nearly a sixth of the earth's surface and
apparently well-disposed on the whole to the mother country, the royal
family couldn't arrange to have itself siven a private holiday at one
of the spots where the sun always shone, making a pérmanent residence
there, so.aé to keep that natural luzury which befits captains and kings. e
They could have done business by phone and the fambus 'red box* oould
have been flown out from London every morning. Then they could have
held up their heads for the rest of the country. But they had to be
'1ike everybody elset-i-a ridioulous idea if you want a king at all.:
They were servants---of civil servants. Above all there was this will
to smallness and drabness in the country, getting at the roots like a
cancer. Envy st opped everything. And where a country shuns style
it must be governed by civil servants. There was a horror of arist-
ooraoy, inherited from the Thirties. And this 1s all right as long
as money is being made. All visions are aristooratio in some nay.
And 1f you are. neither making money nor having visions there is no
development. The furniture gets dustier and dustier: which is
what happened in England, as it will in America---when money is no
longer being made there and horror of eristocracy lingers like a
wound in its side.
In those dark yéars after the war there was simply no way of
judging a man than by his Positian. There was no real measure of
violende and struggle, no hard measure, there was decidedly none of
the olear suffering of the other epoohs, even the epoch before the war.
Since reality had really departed, samething 1ike a form had to be
clung to, something oonorete, beoause the English always begin from
the conorete, they never go from thought to objeot but vioe-versa.
from
And the only available form was something left over/the past---but
which for a very long time had been nothing but a form. So a form


we-even that from another society---was suddenly introduced as
reality.. Your credentials had to be gone into but nobody told you
that these credentials were just a form and that therefore thèy could
be fiddled. - You only had to know how to fidale, and if you were
middle olass you had probably had this training at home or at school..
The peculiar dream-quality was that this fiddling wasn 't olearly
fiddling, it was apparently in earnest and yet the people who pract-
1sed it weren't in earnest.. If you wanted a job there was always
the queation of bona fides. That was how the, old class of authority
had always behaved---'Who i8 he?* That had been a donveniest form,
for finding out character: a quiok and reliable form.. Now it was one
stage further on from a form-ea 'formality*; often, you were told,
a 'mere formality's Formality governed everything.. And the reward
that came out of this was a vague privilege, not named very definitely:
a privilege belonging to the old olass of authority except that this
didn't exist any more,, and hadn 't existed for quite a numbor of deoades.
But it was there 'on paper*. And the country got more and more into
.the condition of a peaceful, 1f slow, treadmill where nobody paused
from the treading to ask a few clear questions as to what the devil it
was all about. If it hadn't been for the peade---the orderly and
intimate community the English create wherever they are---there would
have been total oivic oollapse.
A stale and shameful air got into everything a
This shame was a
strange feature.. You oould see it in people's faces. It was the
natural shame of the dreamer, the confirmed dreamer who has to face a
crowd. People looked more and more retiring. Visitors from
abroad noticed it---the English were extraordinarily *civio', so
much thet they nearly cancelled themselves out.. If you stayed in


the oountry any length of time you got into this self-demeaning
habit yourself---oh, no, thank you, yes, please, oh, I wouldn't
bother if I were you...
The air was stiff with bona fides, with polioe-guarded
credentials and Positions that began to show the holes more and
more. The told gentleman' with his family business who sent aoross
to the family wine-mérohant in St. James's Street for his carafe
of vintege-claret (Algerian swill laced with sugar) and always took
you to the marvellous Frenoh plaoe called Le Merdre Where chemical
gravy was squirted on to platés and stomach pumps were available
in the lavatory, this gentleman who told an anecdote 80 nicely and
had just bungled a big job for you was wearing thin and stale even
for himself: the whole oountry was so clearly geared to something
else, ànd had been for quite fifty years, but nobody could say what
it was. The only people to make a real moral mark were the twisters
and fumblers and procrastinat ors. It wasn't their fault, either.
The country had fallen into their hands but they hadn't asked for
it. It had been handed to them on a plate. For same reason
they'a been left holding the baby, men who would have been the
laughing stook of their mothers and fathers had they suggested
trying to run a business fifty years before. There was the possib-
ility that the old class of authority still had some spunk left,
and knew how to run things by a kind of inherited instinct. But
sinoe a real olass of authority hadn't existed for over a century
exoept in foreigd histors textbooks, and only a handfull of families
existed with anything like inherited powers of government, this
didn't materialise. There was as near complete chaos as you
could get in a country where social order was the first requirement
in any situation. Pinchbeck ladies and gentlement began to
proliferate all over the country, in imitation county-clothes and
imi tation county-accents---1 the men stânding in pubs dressed in


hacking jaokets just not quite right, with asoots round their
necks, drawling coneopts that didn't even belong to the world
they were imitating. The order was all imagined to be there,
the security was taken for granted by the new pinchbeck ladies
and gentlemen who found themselves taken seriouslyo by thosefrom
the lower olasses who were just getting the ir first glimpse of
the outside world. But their biggest blunder was not s0 muoh
stepping into the jobs and being taken seriously, which they
couldn't help, as taking themsleves seriously. The result of this
was. that the oountry lost about as much influence and power in
ten years as it had accumulated in three denturies.
Itwas rather like being under house-arrest. You had lost
control of your life. But who exactly had put you under house-
arrest? Who were the warders? You couldn't say. You couldn't
even say olearly you were under house-arrest: you certainly never
saw the guard outside the door. Though you heard gossiped evidence
that he was there.
Only Europe was olear to me in those years---I mean the
Continent: a marvellous new landscape I'd discovered through the
war. It had been raped and shocked, but there was peace again.
It was a daydream for me, like a woman, when I sat in that attio
room on the outakirts of Oxford a few weeks after the war had
ended, in the red-brick, still street from Victorian times with
its Buggest ion of utter safety to the point of death. I was so
excited in that room, with books all round me, on the floor,
on the bed and tables. I had a little table wedged olose to
the window, and I oould glande down at the street every few
minutes as I worked. I ate there as well, wedged in the corner
by the window, doing my first thinking for four or five years,


ecstatioally relieved at being alone again, actually able to
deoide for myself whether to go downstairs and walk in the streets
or not, or go to a oafé in town, or buy a book. I bought books
from Paris. I dreamed about the castles in Germany, which r'a
never seen, about the tall pine forests and wooden farmhouses
with. their overlapping eaves, and the valley leading from Italy
through the Alps to Villach and Klagenfurt in Austria, whereI'd
once felt, ooming out from between the mountains into flat green
fields, that I was arriving home at last, though I'd never seen
it before; I dreamed about the lakes near Yugoalavia, the Ossiar-
chersee and the Worthersee, and the little inns by the road, with
streams and elm trees, and about the hot vineyards and tomato
groves in the south of Italy, the broken-down barns rich with
smells because of the heat; thé shimmering mountains on the
Garigliano, the ondless colum of smoke that used to go up from
Vesuvius, straight as arribban held in the air on olear, still
days; I thought of the olive groves on slopes just outside
Salerno; my thoughta were all turned east, not consoiously---
the east seemed actually to be in: the work I was doing, latent
in the books---and those memories seemed to be my points of
referende whénever I sat down at the desk. I read German books
as well. I'd always wanted to take languages at school
instead of olassios; but I'd missed the chance. I tried to learn
a few verbs and nouns of German now. Europe was a new possibility
for me, an cocurrence for the firet time, with that freshneseyou
got in an autumn dawn in Karinthia or the Tyrol, with bright
mountain grass and the sound of cow-bells. It wàs a disooveyy
that had only been hinted to me before, in London, when I'd
yearned to go abroad. Now it was like a total aot of thought


that involved my future, my intimate designs and wishes,
inseparable from the thinking I was doing, it didn't matter what
the thinking was. It was like finding my whole identity for the
first time, a necessary element in all the thoughts I had had - BQ
far, but which I'd never been consoious of. It wasn't that I'a
felt isolated from it before. With nazism and the political
crises before the war you thought about Europe a lot. She had
been very closely there. It came from a sense that a separation
was growing now, Perhaps it was a last-minute embraoe---you
didn't know why at the time,
Beoause an artificial isolation did come about. It wasn't
éven a slow business. It was a matter of the first months after
the war. A source of life-blood was cut off.
More and moré the Continent became a holiday-place. Not
in real connection. If you lived on the Continent you were now
'lucky', you were having it 'easy', you weren't quite inside lifo,
you were on a perpetual holiday. The procedent established by
the rich English in the Thirties was still followed, though tha
Bituation had changed utterly. And this isolation was what
suddenly ended the flow of my thoughte, and ourtailed their
energy, turning me to interim tasks, so to speake What character-
ised my first energy after the war was something that should have
had immediate historioal fulfilment, in me as in millions of
others; it wasn't just thinking about Europe, itmas thinking new
European thoughts quite as a matter of course * Or rather, they were
simply new thoughts: at that time, they weren't 'European*;
they are only so now--in the light of what happened ef termards *
*Europe T became the name---due to the artificial isolation which
developod between its countries, and all round it---of a national
area, whioh it had never been before. When I dreamed about


Europe in Oxford I was dréaming about countries---plades.
Only afterwards did the Europe wé talk about now---an area of
power politios---develop at all. And it developed by virtue of
ceasing to be a civilisation: becoming instead a hope and a dream,
in a decided physical aréa,
Europe and my own dountry were the landscape round all thought
for me, and the energy of my thinking was the moral en ergy to change
and make feesh life inside that landsoape, invisibly. It was what
thinking always is and must beunless there is something wrong with
it: it must have a country, a place, a home, a spot of baptism,
and such a thing canst be made by a man's lonely will, it can't be
made by people just deciding to get together and make a consoious
society, it has to come from the invisible and undeolared will
that is never in one man alone nor in one time alone but develops
like an organ, in the darkness of conception and birth---a state of
oommunity whioh no mind can be responsible for or even beoome
conscious of, except in moments of self-estrangement. I mean that
my first thoughts after the war were a natural and complete act,
they were proper thinking, but later they were not; later their
struggle was with a certain puzzling unnatural element that kept
coming in, they werentt clear with à decided moral direction,
they had to deel with obstacles on thé road---which blocked the
sight. The probleme inherent in ail thought were no longer the
only ones, the question kept C aming up of whether it was possible
for the act of thought to survive at all, and of how to keep one's
faculties in line for the other méntal offensives, and of What
strange new menaces might not be blindly at work inside us.
My thinking and reading went on as before, but there was a peculiar
new block to the moral aspect, to that moral energy which sees


opportunities not for action but for expression: and these
opportunities seemed to didappear. Nothing seemed shared any
more. There seemed no authoritative and objeotive experience,
of the simplest things. Unresolved ideas lay about éverywhere,
from olass to God, and were just left lying there. And yet the
were
probotms behind them were what WEB opérating on life all the time,
disturbing and halting and negating efforts; only they weren't
80 to speak officially recognised, they weren't supposed to be there
although they were there with increasingly strong presence, 80
that in the end they oame into life like inanimate things, not
thought-out as they should have been but lived-out painfully and
drearily in their contradiotion. There was an invieible orisis
going on all the time involving the whole question of the future
and validity of the middle clase, the whole question of whether
the world it had made was going to break up not from war but from
shere basio unhappiness. It was this orisis---involving all
Christendom---whioh was postponed for twenty years or 8o by the
existence of a middle olass as strong (that is, wealthy) as any
had been in the nineteenth dentury: nemely, America. 'Europe t---
as she now wag---could lean on the last surviving facet of nine-
teenth century oivilisation, thus turning its problems baok a
century without any of the zest or oonviction felt at that time.
I began to be aware after the war that having an attitude
towards America was now a complicated and ambiguous matter.
Resenting America was in some way low-class now. There was
something shameful about it. Liking America was rather high-class
now. You might not want to do either. But some attitude was
inoumbent on you. There began that Amerioan fate in post-war
foreign relations of being identifiod in every oountry with the
rich and classy e This was the basic contradiction in Amerioan


influence---it ohampioned the underdog, it had a Bore resentment
of Class and Position, but wherever it was felt it bolstered up
both, and smothered the natural resouroes of real changes That
18 the fate of rioh people: they never get to know the realities
anywhere; they're guided and chaperoned; they meet the climbers
and apologiats and charlatans. That American influence invariably
did was to finance a fiotional and sometims attractive past.
Outside America it represented the opposite of change and newness.
An element of shame entered into one's contaots with Amerioans a
You didn't want to semm to ask a favour. And they brought that
atmosphere of rich people---of having something morally contaminating
about them: the atmosphere of a dream-world, a rich one, rather
artificial and tinselly. It didn't matter if an American dressed
himself in a torn shirt or hung around bars or Bet him elf up as
a bohemian in Paris or Rome or got into brawls-a-the stigma of the
last wealthy middle class was almays there. Foreigners were always,
Rim,
to some extent, like a proletariat spread befor el
a 4 even the
better-off ones, It was in the American's gestures and accent.
TReF began to have the artificial quality of a kept class.
Thus, tha myth worked both ways: it stopped the development
of the 8 untries under Ameridan influence, and it stopped the
development of America itself.
Having an attitude to America wasn't like having an attitude
to another country. Some people hate one country, or think they
do, and some another. They always have dono. - But this mas
different. It began to be.clear in those first years after the
war. If you had any attitude towards America, whatever it was i
like or dislike, reserve or plain speotatorship, it involved
nearly everything elgo S under the sun; it was a moral attitude.


You were asked, it seemed, for approval or otherwise, without
your wanting to give either, just as you wouldn't want to give
oither in the case of Japan or France or Italy. You oan't
approve or disapprove of whole co untries. You can travel through
them and hate the size of people's heade, or approve of their
love habits. You oan find their food good or their lavatories
intolerable. You can adore, say, French women. You can dislike
the noise Italiens maké. But it doesn't involve you in a whole
moral posi tion. You wouldn't have to drag your whole life in,
make a kind of life-confession. But that seemed to be involved
in.the case of America.
Vhat you were really called upon to do was to approve of
middle-olass life. That was the basio thing. To some people
this was easy, to others impossible, to yet others ambiguous and
puzzling. But to everybody it was elementary---like being asked
to subsoribe your name to a petition from fifty or a hundred yéars
ago whioh you thought had been argued out and forgotten even before
your birth. You were suddenly asked to record a vote against
slavery, on behalf of equal rights for women, for free education,
poor relief, againet class privilege: all the measures, in fact,
of nineteenth-oentury industrial sooiety. This meant that you
had been subtly construoted into an enemy of the measurest No
wonder ambiguity was the keynote of nearly every oonversation in
American company.
Criticism of Amerioa (meaning anything American) began to
bear a kind of guilt with it. In those first years after the war
there was talk of tenvy'. You mus tn't envy the Amerioans, a
That was strange. Then envy was taken for granted---it was
taken for granted that they had something enviable, that is,
better? Why? Hitherto they had just been another country.


Now théy represnted a whole better life. You mustn't feel
superior to them, either. : That was another 81 trange thing.
Who said you had ev er felt superior to them---that the thought had
even entered your head? A high-olass journalist playing the
squire in Shropshire might write an artiole about it: this anti-
Améridan feeling had to stop, he might Bay; ; the envy and superior-
ity were painful. He Beemed to be talking for: himself: could that
be? He seemed to be saying that he had felt the superiority,
and saw the grounds for the envy, but stopped himself because
America was paying to alean up the ruins in Europe (as well as
a handsome sum for his"syndicated artdole) I - It seemed that the
'right people - were schooling England---as their prototypes were
schooling every country in Burope---into a kind of acquiescence
they themselves found advantageous." It was their World, apparently.
Their world was being kept alive. Not ours. We'd never felt
the superiority, or seen the grounds for envy. Nor did we see
why we were supposed to applaud morally beoause a few people got
rich out of American business oontacts. But we were definitely
being sohooled. Things were hushed. A kind of oensorship crept
into life. ) And twer wéré the majority of the people in England;
or, at least, this is my guess.
All the Right People had taken trips to America, or were about
to do so. It was quite a high-class property. County ladies talked
about Connectiout and Ohio as if they were a stone's throw away,
certainly much oloser than calais. of course, they liked the 'old
country', and alwaye oame back to it, but things were done so muoh
better in the States, didn't you think? The 'old country' was
dreary and slow,' having been snubbed and dressed down and shameless-
ly used by these very people for fifty years or more. These
people seemed, in fact, to have sunk their own country, without


being asked to by the Americans and without being admired for
it by the Americane---a faot whioh took some years to beoome alear.
So that a dreary 'old ocuntry' really did dome about--and seem
to be of advantage to them. Their own power aidn't dwindle at
onoe, thought they were inoompetent to exeroise it. It only slowly
fell away, over about fifteen years, like rotten skin. The farms 9
the old family businesses, the manor houses, only drifted into
the slough instead of casoading in as soon as the war was over,
The county people, the imi tation dounty people, the fiddlers and
procrastinators and cadgers and bunglers *rolled out the oarpet'
for visiting Amoricans a That was the expression. To the visiting
American they were everything from eighteenth-century squires to
the 'splendid British'---whichever role the visitor seemed to
require. They could fulfil any of the caricatures: there was
apparently an endless stock of acting ability in the old World.
The American (His Exoellency the Ambassador, perhaps?) got his suits
on savile Row, his ties on Bond Street and his bowler hats you-know-
where, and he was served by a shopkeeper who talked and behaved as if
it was a hundred years before even his own time, and:looked the part.
The American rarely knew that he alone was keeping that shopkeeper
off the etreet where he deserved to go and would have gone had his
market been left to the natural tastes of the Englieh and not been
subsidised as foreign pantomime.
But invariably the American felt ewindled. He played the
American---whatever daricature of himself he was supposed to fulfil.
And secretly he boiled and resented, as, secretly, his Inglish
associate boilod and resented. For the ones who talked about envy
and superiority towards America were the ones who felt it
most. Their capitulation was the greatest and most shameful.
They were capitulating for the whole of oivilisation.


Fellow-conspirators burn and boil secretly against eaoh other.
Above all, the dream was a real matorial benefit to most
English people, which was why it lasted so long. The medioore
in their positions thrived on it; or at least ticked over,
which was all they could afford to hope. It was like a game of
monopoly in which one player hoards all the money: he paralysos
the game for everybody elsé, but by produoing stagnation all round
him he eventually loses, little by little, the money he has hoarded.
The mediocre only knew how to hang on to what they had: they
didn't want adventures because then their powers would have been
put to the test and their money riaked. They oould sey. no-mand
did to almoët everything---but they had nothing to suggést for a
possible yes.
But the dream was useful to working pe ople as W ell. I saw
how my own mother and father began to take on stock Korking Class
Attitudes, as they'd never done before. It was like whizzing
baok fifty years. The world was suddenly full of toffs, country
houses, 'high Booiety' and even the honest masses: all with the
growing support of TV, it seemed. England became like a bad
Ameridan film about iteelf. And there were 'protests fumagai inst
conditions and 1déas that had gone out in the Thirties. Fiotional
protests against a fiction.
This picture of an old sooiety meant that working people,
though they now had more money in their pockets than ever before,
had no new thinking to do, no fresh ideas to adopt and above all
no responsibilities. The *upper' class was still supposed to
be there, looking after things with its strident manners and


125 ia
its inherited know-How, irritating as these were. It made parrot-
cries easier when you.wanted more money* It made the labour
struggle simpler: 1f you didn't get the money you asked for you
went on strike, though the rest of the country might go to the
devil. You never tried to influence the mediocrities in charge
of things * You didn't try to join them, that is, share their
responsibilities. It was snugger to sày that they alone were
in charge, and that . they were to blame.. Disraeli's two nations'
were kept alive now as a matter of interest on both sides.
America was now the 'newoomert in politics: and she had
twice saved Europe ffom her own 'mess'. The myth spread until
1t was no longèr questioned: millions of dollars went to propagating
it in in every form from films to private talk. People forgot
that an American president had been quite as responsible for the
Versailles treaty after the 1914 war as either the English or
French prime ministers; that one of the major reasons for the
failure of embargos ageinst Mussolini after he invaded Abyssinia
was America's wish to keep her oil flowing into his country;
that perhaps the strongest voice for the release of Germany from
the Versailles clauses limiting her armaments in the Twenties was
that of America, All this was natural mistaken politics, which
1s the inheritance of every country on earth: but we were now
told not only that there had been no mistakes in the casé of
America, but that she had had no politics at all.
Above all, people forgot that America was a crude laisser-
faire capitalism, not a missionary force. It was, in fact,
more like what Europe had been a century before than what it was


like now 6 Like other empires, this one extended its area of
influenoe with the help of missi onary zeal. In the same way,
world markets were soon acc ompanied by world arms.
In this period German ideas---the philosophy of powér---had
subtly more and more influende over Ameridan thought: there was
the growing megalomania of American aims, corresponding with the
growth of American arms ; thêre were world sohemes and scholerships,
there were international research organisations, there were oultural
exchanges and plans for flights to the moon in a sort of Walpurgis
Nacht of abstraction and sublimity; discernible were a certain
German scorn for the human creature in his intimaoy, a oertain
German awe of poner and success, and a haunted German horror of
failure and rejection, 80 strong as to paraylse t all but the
most conventional ambitions; above all, a oertain Hegelian sense
of being the ch osen nation of history. AB if Hitler had given his
genius to a whole continent, to be put into an acceptable Anglo-
Saxon rational and liberal setting, where its disguise oould be
donveyed most effeotively.
In twenty years or 80 the country that purported to bring
with it a higher moral oivilisation built up a world power as
watertight as any empire. Never before, even in ancient Romen
times, had an empire kept its power by such an emphasis on war.
All we heard of in those years was war. Peacetime excitements
oontinued to seem a little absurd, just as if a war was still
on; an element of absurdity still olung to the intimate little
devotions one person paid to another, as if hardness was now the
incumbent humen theme e
There were politioal crises, organised or acoidental, and
a mounting publicity of high moral attitudes that contoided with
the mounting volume of armaments. And underneath this armoured


sky éach country languished. The problem of what our civilisation
was hadn't been broaohed: an effective answer to Hitler hadn't
been given. In fact, there was a mare thorough mobilisation for
war than in his day. Everbody was mobilised in his soul.
The enogolopedid definition of knowledge, the mechanioal
définition of science, the functional definition of the humen
creature---everything that personified late nincteenth-century
thought---were suddenly laundhed on Europe as if they were
novelties.
What characterised the barbarian epochs---and the reason why
they are called the dark agés---was that the worship of light which
during
marked all other civilisation ceased ster them. In the ancient
world Jove, the god of light whosé image s tood at the top of mount-
ains, was what made countries and peoples whole and one: just as
later on the hidden light of Christian truth was what made western
civilisation whole and oné.
During the barabrian odcupations history became dead, the
cluttered
churohes lay like museums atatterst with precious objeots that
aroused sensations of awe and aoquisitveness; the paraphernalia
of Christian civilisation---manuscripts, paintings, musi0---Were
rubble whioh was at best marketable. The 'rdal' activities of
life were those whioh dould be shown to have no dream. Every one
was divided, basically alone. Children gréw up with strange gaps
in their perceptions: often in dumb resentment at what they felt
instinotively they had missed. At the baok of everything--
keeping thé 'peace'---was the daily threat of violence: and,
looally, the practioe. During that time it was isolated pookets
of men who had ideas and wrote books and prayed for no bther reason
than thay they were interested in them, in monasteries which were
to all intents and purposes dead. They kept Christian feelings


alive for the next generations,
afkr rke war
In those years the word America meant tyranny for me € It
meant a block to happiness and devolopment, It meant that my
tke
own country---whioh finally and at very deepest point is mes
whether I 11ke it or not-wewas running domn; it meant that only
a mask was being shown which would sooner or later be torn away.
I burned sedretly for freedom. I believe everybody else did, too.
But they nev er époke about it, There was no evidence of it.
Apparently the will was dead. The American was, if a tyrant,
a most mild and innocent one.
I had a famished love for my country whioh oertainly wouldn't
have existed in any other epoch; it wouldn*t have been necessary--
it would have lain dormant. It would simply have been. a state of
being, not a claim, Now it seemed necessary if we were going to
keep our language going, or any recognisable form in. whioh to grow
up; if there were to be homes and intimacy again, a safe place
from which all poetry begins, and without which there are the dark
ages.
It made an intimate differenoe to the whole course of life,
this lack. It made oonversation stale and inbred. It robbed
every object, every face, every meeting of its authority: for
the simple reason that thé real authority was being exercised
three thousand miles away: But it was deeper than that. The
loss of authority was everywhere, It was the great new fact
of 1ife, The truth in the end was that authority wasn tt being
exercised from anywhere.


The greatest ambiguity was that America was really ourselves:
a process in ourselves. It could fasoinate us, put a kind of
spell on us, These moments of fascination might be brief, but
they involved a sense of eestatic self-1iberation which seemed
to offer a chance of throwing everything over-wall our past
and thérefore everything that haunted us from the past, the
intimacy and hidden organic formulae that stretched over our
lives like a web, the necessity to make our cities again, the pains -
and shadows round us that seemed to heve takon on our onn personal
names: heady moments when life promised more than its dimensions
and seemed to become a reel religious being, instead of som thing
always just short of---marvellously and bafflingly short-m of
religion; moments when even-society promised to be turned int o
some thing fraternal that would be without power or inequality,
with their deadlystings and intrigues. Spurious---this bid
to make God comprohensiblo---but VG manufac tured the need
ourselves.
If, instead of morking out for myself why the London
streets where I was born haunted and horrified me for years
afterwards, I'd just gone avay from them and told myself that.
from now on I was free and wouldn't think of the past again, that
would have béen an Amorican act, I would have made a new life, app-
arently, out of (apparently) new material. But my being haunted and


horrified by those streets, instead of feeding me through the
tissues of experience and conflict to make in the end a complete
person, and a moral solution, - would have been thrust und er, in a
peculiar dark and coiled-up inner zone that only reached expressim
through nightmares and strange unknown outbursts of the heart,
calls from a past now deathly because feared and shunned, and
nearly unc onscious, in a bristling contained violence under equ-
1librium; and that rould have been the American state. -
In some way it.is all of us. America is us in extremis,
beyond the point where we can be rescued. America was the need
of the middle class to make---to try to meke---an intact world where
only itself would be known: no working people with their loving
acceptance of work and refusal of embition, no peasantyy with its
daily blindness in the fields, no aristocracy with its divinity of
person and 1ts wildness that springs from inner form and seems (to
our vorld) to threaten chaos; no power beyond the Workaday require-
ments of life, nothing but the material, the logic of production,
no folly that might disrupt the schedule; an intact and closed
world of opportunity, ambition, failure or success, civic religion,
and separate inviolable prides that will refuse the humility of
being fully known and taken for granted in community. It was an
experiment against what came to be called 'neture', meaning ( in the
middle class terminology) a picturesque, blind, terrible and marvall-
ous but almays separate and basically irrelevant zone outside us.
There was to be no power outside what men could understand: a
world apparently made by men---that 1s, made conscious, withait no
past, no passion or 'force of nature', therefore no religion, nothing
invisible to engulf men's consciousness and make it their victim--
nothing to hold, imprison, darken the ir minds. Their minds had
to be the light shed on everything. * a The body, the earth, the


sky, the will, the desires---all had to be comprehensible to the
consciousness, and arranged and ordered by it. Nothing must be
allored to give---to yield---to the invisible outside world, to
the rhythms of the 'outer' (but necessraily 'inner' as well)
universe---nothing must be lost in the dark, silentf marsh of the
blindly created forces outside. Outside was chaos; in the con-
sciousness there was order; the consciousness even brought order
to the surround ing chaos. This experiment that took place over
centuries was to make men free of the invisible so as to give the ir
lives order, to stop them being Blaves of fears, storms, momonts;
it was therefore a religious experiment, but conducted against the
great manual of religion---the natural universe; it was designed
to rescue the.consciousness from paganisn---from the terror of an
unexplained and cruelly indifferent: universe; and this it did.
But its long battle left ruins: in the aftermath all you got was
men's consciousness in the rorld, men's order---it put its deadly
mark everywhere, cancelling out the real order behing; the world
round us was ravaged---inside us as well; we were born in the smbke
and ruins after the battle. You could say the battle was to rid 1
the middle ages of its pagenism----ie horror of death, tha numbed
pagan resignation to the apparent wild di sorder of the forces out-
its
side, the sorrowing sense of the macabres
AT u
merprval
timess It nas to bring Christian order into actual men's being,
instead of remaining as a desparate faith, a kind of sustained pass-
ionate hope. a It was to fulfil the Second Coming which the middle
eges were always waiting for: the coming of Christ into men, not
very
as hope any more, but as the, form of perception and conscioueness.
And in the firat terrible dawn after the battle, When the dead
have still not been removed, we have to rake up to the world again,
we have to get used to peace, look. round us again, notice. things,


kat
we have to remember the enemy has been dealt with, there's tine
to look about and instead of mershalling forces all the time and
dragooning nature for the next zero-hour ve can watch things. come
to life again all round us, ve can see how they grow and what extra-
ordinary ingenious natural lives they have apart from us: we can
teal
haw,acienoe-w-inotend of battle-order as knowledge---for the first
time. And this discovery had to be through the mind because this
is the only intact faculty left to us after centutes of battle on
faculhied.
the othergA Ee have to dssoover the stpendous order that lies all
round us, in the soil, in the animals and plants, in the. space through
which we look, in the movements of things, in the tiny glends and
cells and channels of our omn bodios: and we can only do it when we
know that we are part of this order, and are not in battle-order
against it all the time. It means religion, which is always surrend-
er. And this surrender to discovery is vhat brings the middle
class to an end, by a process it will take on itself.
The charnel house brought into being by that experiment is
enormously, dreary. This is the dreariness of a long, treeless,
industrial street. You feel it in France, in England; in Amerioa
it is in extremis, eaten into the flesh of life. It is dreariness
because the sky is changed---it falle back to second remove; 5 it is
a kind of dead spectator to men; it doesn't feel created any more,
nothing has that stunning and exciting sense of being created fron
beyond us any more e It is like putting overything under a huge
plastic roof---once it was made of glass, at the end of the nine-
teenth century; ena the last previous furniture in the charnel
later
house always looks innocent to the BIESORE inmates. That roof
covers everything, even the countryside, it filters the light and
darkens even the rain. It fills the air with sounds made by
people, but not sounds of people. It always reminds you of


people, you can never get away from them: but people as small
creatures---ticking, unnatural intelligences; as uncreated.
They seem to have oreated themselves. They're all consciousness.
which is
mind,
And here again you get the American mind in extremis---our Porti,
slowly evolved over the centuries, gone nearly to nadness, in a
stata
mint that can never lose itself, that is morbidly and irretrievably
conscious. At the same times in the charnel house, ve are respons-
ible for ourselves. This is an advance. Ve have a new kind of
freedom. It compensates for the dreariness. It makes it possible
to look forward and change things . In Italy and Gormany you still
have a sense of created nature round you, and of people being, pert
physical
of it, even in the industrial districts. There ien't the, drearin-
Bul
oss. There isn't the other thing either, the full self-responsibility,
the freedom. So the two facets of our great modern charnel house
draw together, and grow by each other. The one sustains the other.
So that in the end the strange heady and anchorless freedom will go,
and so will the dreariness. There will be the surrender to the
real, objective freedom that lurks outside, in the surrender of the
middle class. There is a rreedom outside nhich we haven't tuned to
yet.
America---or rather the publicity-myth ne are in the habit
of calling America---1s an attempt to make the cne world work efter
all: the vorld of uncreated being; it tries to alter the drear-
ine ss by giving ita coat of paint, ) A AR, and demolishing
it every few years for a new building. It confesses its oun
failure. This is what makes any religion or art in America an
act of revulsion from the whole environment, an act of total reject-
ion. It has to reject totally the vorla of uncreated being.
The ideal middle-class society is without blind comunal
sources. A socioty with the minimam heritage, the minimam inher-


itanco. The perfect end-product middle-class vorld---the *Amer-
1oat---1s where there can be no genuihe inner devolopment, no real
movement, no sustenance from the past and no hope from the future;
only an endless accumulation of power by each generation, and each new
generation discarding the last and therefore discarding itself,
with no soil in which to grow and reflect and nurse Wounds because
the ploughing-over is constant, so that ploughing-over is the only
reality, in a circular and repetitive mad movement which has no
reason beyond itself, in a self-assertion that repeate I am I am
I', and all forthold in the objective---the natural and ordered---
world outside is nearly lost and is only kept by reforence to the
past or its equivalent (the world outside 1 America') where vestiges
of folly and community and aristocracy can be found; each generation
being a narvellous imitation of what is going on outside or what
used to be or what is thought to be, in order to perfcct it or con-
plete it or round it off, to be as it vere the Logic Centre or the
Finishing Laboratory of the Christian world. This 'America' will
go down quickly as part of the middle-class upheaval everywhcro,
not in deaadence or degeneration.or any of the other famous nineu
teenth century forms that are usually promised (as if there wa S the
opposite of, decadence anywhere else in civilisation) but by volunt-
ary change; not through displacement by another class, or through
violence or even less of power, but through a simple and clear self-
examination that will be forced by circumstances (namely, by the
natural and ordered universe outside), and will involve the death
of the warm of ambition. In this enormous mystical upheaval,
whose appcarances will be anything but mystdcal, the nineteenth
century divisions of middle-olass 11fe into Europe or America or
Asia will cease.
America will then be a place, for the first time, as opposed


to the,renlisation of an idea. Its great spurious ethical . am-
bition---its attempt to teach ethics through pover---is basically
the spurious drean of middle-class life everywhere: a disastrous.
and doomed illusion, which all great religions begin by destroying.
*Americar is therefore the great anti-religious society, precisely
as the middle-class in the great anti-religious class by definitim.
The American artist is in difficulties from his birthi He asks
himself to perform the most C omplete religious act outside the
church, but by his birth he subscribes to the greatest anti-relig-
ious experiment ever conducted in the name of a religious end (and
a valid religious end). He can only begin by denying that exper-
iment from start to finish, which means unearthing and rejecting
every principle he has imbibed since childhood. He can only
approach Aart ---as opposed to a kind of lond and splendid journ-
alism---if he damns the whole pic ture from top to bottom, with
himself throrn in. He has to see the doom and C ollapse of the
whole experiment in every thought and gesture and smile all round
him. Short of that he can't get to the frontier where God and,
not man shows him the way. At best he '1l achieve what the Victor-
ians achieved---a bustling public statement where there are men
and vitid objects, and plans, and a language to make you hop,
but no.solace for us, nothing that includes us waifs and strays of
history, nothing from the God for whom our little generations are
Tta Vidlmen
sand in the desert. And thoy were in the seme position---the
same experiment was going on all round them in its first stages,
so loud and constant that the lonely voice of thought sounded,
selfioh, a little mad, shameful---dirty. The Victorians, too,
were the spurious ethical leaders of the world. Their massive
error, too, was, the idea that the rioh man can ever have something
moral to teach. The rich man has one possibility, uhich might


just secure his own salvation: prayer. For the delights of
community, like moral insight, aro for the poor.
After the upheaval America will be able to take up its real
history again, and its continent become a brooding mystery again.
The land will get its irner pulse back, you will see the extra-
ordinary crisp marvel of the pioneer-country again, its strange,
hugeness,
half-forbidden *EXANEE ite special light, the vivid : colours,
the intimacy and sanity, and the nineteenth-century paraphernalia
of a national ethics and indeed anything national at all will fall
to pieces. It won*t have to try for a national identity like an
outpost any more - It:will be its own World. It will just be
there, as my Englishness is here, whether I like it or not. A
country is language.
The language of a country is its heart---the physical source
of warmth and ciroulation. It saction is invisible and unplanned.
It evolved through slow evolution, quite independently of the body
in which it beats---independently, I mean, of the will in that
body. Its sounds come from ways of thinking and feeling: these
are like rivers and weterfalls that have made narks on the rocks
as polished as glass. A language is already, in its form and
sounds, part of the thinking ,of the creature who uses it: it
actually farms thoughts, as it bears the burden of thought to other
people's ears. It goes cn in secret, it lies in a kind of womb of
the past, it speaks in dreams, it can be seen in its syntax and
sounds in dreams, it becomes the faco and look of thought, it has
a strange and terrible boing in itself, like the heads of grand-
mothers and the smell of fir-pino burning, the ring of copper and
the sound of ancient trees being felled; it is the countryside
where y ou were born. Its human vehicle, above all, is the mother.
She bears the secret language through the generations. She brings


it in the first months like a rune, with its strong glowing
colour an d ancient imperative demand. The writer can never co me
into being, he can never develop. He can only be born. Language
is only his sign, for the countryside, for the fear in his belly
that this man causes and that man relieves, for the sounds that
heunt him early, and the crisp, chill air at night, and the moon,
and lanes through hills with hedges on either side.
The English language always touches life concretely---it
touches things e It isn't reflective. It is crisp and clear like
stones and streams and the barks of trees. Its words are actual
objects. People call it an empirical language, for this reas on.
You begin with the living and touchable world round you, you begin
with the intimate community of objec ts. That is safe. That is
the coin of poetry. Each language is its countryside, and there-
fore its people. German is sweeping, lonely, primitive, like
forests. French is reflective, dazzling-clear like the light of
the sky in the Isle de France on an early summer day. e Italian
names the feelings all the time, it starts from them, inadequato,
like the irresastible outburst of a child. But these are locked
away from me : I can' only talk about English. I know a bit of
the other three languages but the secret of the vomb is hidden from
me, and must always be. A writer always knors that a man had one
lenguage and one only. If he has two, equally fluent---he has
none e
The English language doesn't start with a principle and then
work towards the object. There aren't the facilities for it.
The English don't drap from experience clean and satisfying moral
incentives e That would be too static a function for the language o
The words have to be in movement, above all in actual life. They
resist the formal. They work in and through daily life, and


achieve. moral incentives in terms of what is to be done. The
lenguage encourages a kind of pragmatic action all the time. It
is close to doing. Unlike Italian and German, there 1s one language
for all purposes---talking, working, writing. There isn't a speeial
language for literature. The language of the common people is the
language of literature in English; in German or Italian this would
ha ve to mean vernacular or dialect literature. German and Italian
require an enormous life-effort on the part of their writers, just
to achieve language---that is to say, form. The form isn't already
there; the actual daily language threatens to drag them down into
formlessness ('vutgarity'). In Germany and Italy life and thought
were never joined together on a collective basis, perhaps because
of the lack of a complete and integral aristocrecy---that determinant
of the form of all society. In France and England you had this
aristocracy: to a great extent it came to England as a gift from
France, through William; in fact, this man gave England the fruits
of what he'd learned in his own country---a centralised aristocracy,
namely, monarchy as it came to be known.
Therefore you have a fundamer ntal difference of psychology between
on the one hand the French and English world, and on the other hand
the German and Italian world. It is the difference between the
organic and the provincial cultures.
Listening to Angelo talking was for me the st rangest and most
stirring journey into another norld because I could always marvel
at how he started with the generality and then went on to the inst-
ance and situation. This is a particular Sicilian gift. I always
talked about things, there was almays an example on my lips, all
my thinking and talking were concrete in that respect, although
they might correspond with Angelo's insubstanoe. The styles were
totally different; there were also fubdamental differences of


psychology which I didn't learn about for years. I think my
style was basically incomprehensible to him.as well. In his world
things were what had to be held at bay, they were the opposite of
reflection and generality, not the source and material. In his'
world this clinging to things was like clinging to chaos; the things
their
all round---namely, daily life---had no form of ttx own accord,
it seemed; they meant the failure to reach thought, they meant
vulgarity and provincial suffocation and imprisoning vapours and
the olutch of a dead and pervading past and superstitions and hyster-
1as; they mean t being looked in self, which seemed not to have in-
herited any collective form, but to be the seat---especially if
left undeveloped---0f ignorance and disgust. One day, after we'd
known each other for nearly ten years, he suddenly turned to me and
said, appopos of a judgement I'd just made, *Ah, I see, I see...
Now that's very English. I can see now. You go from particu lar
instanc es. Partioular instances---things---that means your percept-
ions and senses are your guides, you learn from them as you go al ong,
there's a harmony for you in them, you don't form a judgement of
life through thought, directly, you have to touch it at some point,
and only then do you know about it. And that's Shakespeare, too.
Everything comes through touch.* That I'd just done was to say
something about two friends of his, one a Russian and the other a
Greek, both living in France. I said that when you shook the
Russian's hand it was like entering a contract: his grip had
something contractually binding about it---it seemed to ask you
to sign somewhere, in a contract describing the terms of loyalty
and friendship. And the Greek's handshake was flesh---carne--
you felt the soft and sensuous flesh right at the centre---it was
almost mat---there was some overpowering attention to the sensuous
in it. It was randy, so much prick that the inner character seemed


to have gone, the inner stiffness. It was desire so deep that
it was fathomless, therefore soft all the way through. And he
leapton this---"Yes, yest That's him!' He lowered his voice---
'You know, he likes licking 80 much, between the legs., And it
was so true of the Russian---the contract. I had got to know
these men- in a moment, through- a- handshake, not through thought
and appraisal.
jugaments I And. he added to Nicole, *You see the way hethinks ?--
one quick empirical moment and he knows them.'
But he didn't understand it any better. At least, I don't
think so. It was still a distant world for. him, an d one finally
to which he cauld. never belong. He could only make an intellect-
ual recognition of it. Perhaps. Perhaps he knew me better than
I shall ever know.
Mine
was the opposite of his way. a His marvellous calm and rounded
and elegaic appraisals of other people were. Sicilian, as I came to
realise slowly. There was S omething classical about them. That
elegaic and calm and melancholy thing was already in - his language.
His language was waiting there, to fill him, almost like a body of :
thought already there, not just an, instrument of mords. Language
is never an instrument.
Angelo never really had patience with my halting Italian,
especially when I spoke it fast, and all the little halts and mis-
takes came pour ing out. He never really taught me anything about
Veaching
his language. He wasn't like an Italian---patient, easy, teac higg
me to take it slomly. Through him I learned all the wrong lessons
of speech in Italian. I went at itd headlong instead. of opening A
all the tissueso so to speak, and falling into a slower and nat ural
rhythm, enunoiating clearly and slowly, as if there was all the
time in the W orld. I always felt his impatience---that dry,


classical, unsympathetic scrutiny,of the 'island', as they call
it. In his language he was the *island', not Italy, certa inly
not Rome.
This is the limitation af the American language--it is always
being drawn back into the role of instrument-of-thought, with noth-
ing intimate---no distinct countryside---to serte it, only remnants
and dreams and little pockfos of the past. Really, this is the
danger of all language now, and the American is only language in
extremis, broken under the strains of middle-class life. American
has to serve the requirements of péople who_do not share with each
other the same forms of thought, the same vivid intimacy: it has
to serve Germans, Arabs, Chinese, Sicilians, Irish---whoever the
emigrant is, It can.only be an_enormous complicated vehicle that
stands avay from the mouth and the blood, so to speak, like a mach-
ine infinitely regulated to all the_millions of different propositions
that have to be expressed. This is what makes it enormou sly diff-
icult to read for those who haven't been groomed to it---difficult
for those who have, 80 ametimes, too. It 1s like looking into the,
jagged parts of a machine that clatters and clicks while purporting
to be the sound of a human crea ture. There is much more of the
past in Amorican than in English---meny more old expressions, from
never
'gotten* to 'sayl'. *Son of a bitch', Which 1s XETA used in Eng-
land now, was used there in 1733. 'I'll be even with you' sounds
specifically American now, but you can find it in Shakespeare.
out
There are dozens. of words which went/centuries ago in England which
still have their old_crisp force and tread in American. But still
the language is prevented from taking its roots in intimacy,
because of the endless ploughing-over. The intimacy of a language
is really born in the first primitive efforts of community, and
even though the Amerioan language was brought from. elsewhere. you


still got that intimacy---its ring--in the first pinneer-stories.
But gradually this language became a public medium, not the heart
and glory of life planted by the mother. Every language has its
intimate form that is the form of its people, their habits and
dreams. - But with each new immigrant this is brokep down in Amer-
ica. So_you really get hundreds of different languages there.
You get people writing in clear, puritan language that is really
from the seventeenth century; you get the machine-language des-
igned for all purposes---for the production-society; you get a
kind of German style, unwieldy and abstract; you may got a sort
of Italian plastic vividness. The rhythm of American is always
different from English, too. Réally American is made for the un-
an biguous social act-i-it has the swing of speech between s trangers,
but strengers who share something; so the language has this atrange
sweeping and yet intima to ring. The stranger has to be put at his
ease; basically, everybody is a stranger. By comparison with
this, English is the language of a family. It has no deliberate
intimacy whatsoever but an infinite number of half-conscious signs.
The American when he hears English hears, essentially, Europe e
It brings out all his love and hate of Europe---it provokes the
whole troubling ambiguity of his attitude. Just the sound of
English can do that. It suggests the haughty, the authoritative,
the lorby, the immobile, the traditional and fixed, the datk,
the past, the dream, the horror. It is listening to the past,
for the American. And 80 all language 1s, essentially, for the
middle-class world. All intimacy, all the dark roots'of our
lives, our kisses and our sweat---are the past. And the past
lours at the middle class. It has to be dealt with. It can't
be avoided much longer. The nineteenth century promised that


it would be killed off, once and for. all. But this wasn't ful-
filled. Thepast can't go on being a sort of kiss one momen t, and
a stink the next. In tis ACTION I5 only Jur i ou
EMT MEHER
4d ans : a EE
I remember living in the country near London, in Kent, after
the war, in a tall, slim.semi-detached house that looked across an
ugly little strip of.garden towards the lovely Darent valley, which
was always wonderfully still, A a perfect lawn with the river
going through it like deep glass, under trees. I could see this
valley from the window where I worked. Sometimes I saw it at
dawn. The room was at the top of the house. I could see the
dawn falling on the misty grass like a dust, and gradually the
trees would open to view, stealing out of, tha dimness. It was
ane of those villeges that have hardly been touched, except with
a little urban craziness like a poor tide that brings old bits and,
pieces---a little crime, some driftwood of malice, a daft old lady---
and leaves then on the sand to dry. Once all the pets in the
village were killed off by a maniac, or perhaps he was the treasurer
of the cricket clud. We lost our White cat, thich used to follow
us about like a dog. Three dead whippets were left in a sack on
somebody's doorstep just beforea village conference was due to be
held there to discuss it all. The village was the past, with a
London. madness to keep it bright. The men used to travel up to
Lond on to work, and tried to form. a community on the week-ends---
like a big-arsed monster without arms or legs making, gibbering
noises. There were little quarrels---the journalist up the hill
was a communitt, the bank-man down - the hill was bitterly anti-


comnunist; the wives rere involved---an insult at the pub---gry
knooking on the bank-man's door to redress the insult---nearly a
fight; a0 the boys went on, in the droan-life they thought was
real. And the cricket alub---thoy voro always trying to cet you
to join. It was like an itch. They nanted you to scratch as
well, otherwise you didn't look right. The cricket club was like
a lavatory-pon for the evacuation of hidden dreens, hopes and daring
sexual affinities---thich should have got to the romen but. unhappily
for them didn't. There nere those eternol-seeming aftornoons on
creens, with tho plock of the ball like a clock marking off evory-
fox
body's distrecs. As a means of evacuation for sohool-boys (hunting
is muoh better, I think: the horses are swift and lovely, there is
the hard autunn veather, the mid and the monory of gloming manor
halls and log firos and sirloins of beef and.mild, god-damning Eng-
lishmen standing in their brecches farting in front of the fire.
I've alvays been afraid of cricket, for fear of being hit in the
balls. It alvays seomed to me that you needed a big pad not over
your knees but over your balls, and rhen I nas chain-ganged into
playing the game at the age of teolve ar s0---at the galley where
I got my education, together 1ith four velto across my backoide
vhich drew blood---I used to lean forard a bit when the bateman's
instrument closed on. tho ball, in case I got it straight in that
little spot vhere (I hoped) much activity was being held in store
for me. of course, I ought to have been nilling to give up every-
thing in the interests of what tho school called public apirit, of
uhich cricket was for unexplained reas ons a part, but being of veak
and mortal flesh I was anxious to keep my sox.
This public spirit, rhich didn't really have any spirit about
it/all,. was also present in the village. But the real village--
the soul of the village---resisted this, and at night it ras dark


148 an
and mediaeval, end silent, exactly as it must have been a century
or moro ago, in the days of the paintor Palmor and Filliam Blake,
who nere often there. Falmer did a lovely picturo of the autumn
moon.over the village, with the mysterious hill rising up to it.
That was my third glimpse of the silence, tho marvellous smeetneso
and intimacy, that lie beyond men, and which ne have temporarily
tried to break in ourselves. The first time was at the beginning
Eupland 2
of the war, near the southes C ohaty the second in the war itcelf,
in Italy and Africa and Palestine and the Lebanon, and lastly Greece.
The distrees ofnsocioty all over the middle-olacs norla, fron Cil-
esia to San Francisco, was so rigid and fast that only two world
wars eauld break it. The rest has to be done by ment themselves.
Those months in the village, vith clean fiolds and woods and
orchards all round, and hills that made every end.of the rcad
mystorious, were a kind of canvalscence for me from the insanity
of Oxorra. I started wark in about tho most miserable job thero
was in London. I used to travel up every day in the sniffing and
havking hordes of people with their ruotly neuspapors and chapped
noses and smelly raincoats, as far as Charing Cross station where
ve rera all speved out of the train by an invicible halevolent
force, to flop, stumble, staggor, trip and cranl towards the rain
lunatio exita like tho prisoners in Fiellio who haven't seen the
light for so long, except that te had no voices and didn't sing
Oa welaho Lusttt because even the light had lost its joy for us.
Our lives vere hon much death, TO thought ve might do without the
light. to thase ola men and ladies of thom I vas one staggored
out of the station not even like prisoners but like the frecmen of
death. I cuppose even a century ego England wasn't totally given
up to these hordes, it hadn't entirely becore the exercise-yard
of these hordess if the freemen of death have exercise-yerds.


But since the war this byas what it has becone. Those hordes don't
give themselves airs. That is the one rulee No pretences or gest-
ures of being fully human, only lat-abiding and work-abiding and
death-abiding good people, going to their rosy homes for the ti ny
permitted kiss in the evening, to make clean the day. Though when
I got back at night I didn't foel like kissing anybody, I didn't
feel much like anything. All I wanted to do was to sit and breatho
the air from the window, and to drink in the country silence, and
to feel the dim, secret trees outsido and the orisp valley, and let
the thoughts of dead men---the roal living doad--flow into me,
together with hopes that made me shudder suddenly with thoir shere
magnitude. And I looked at everything---the carpet by the fire in
my room, the bed in the corner, the old chintz-covered cheirs donn-
stairan tho books on the shelves. I thought of the intimate country-
lane outcide the bedroom windon. The kitchen that jutted into the
garden was like thr room of a onstle. These were all parta of a
life that other people hod lived, or that I had lived befare, and
belonged sololy to the 8 ilent Englend outside, that lovely gentlo
presence.
Hy job was to sit in an office with two other men, who like ne
rere broken-hearted clouns, anipping pieces out of newspapers and
pasting then on to a booRlet which nhen printed up in all its
fatuity and staleness would go out overseas to covernment posts
which wouldn't even glance at ite Iy vork was alvays finished
oarly, if it could be said ever to start. The only rule behin
it ras that not a trace of the mystic human brea th should be
present, on the finished product. And aftor that I sat twidal ing
my thumbs. I amokod, I got up and went for a poe about onco an
hour, I looked out of the vindow across at the dreary Victorian
mashions opposite, I thought about nonen. But I oouldn't act-


ually do anything, I couldn't think up a plan for ny immeliate
life; a plan of escape it tould have to bo. - I couldn't even
read. And the peoplein the corridor outside and/tha ather rooms
always secmed to have oolds. The dim glow of the corridor was
like the glon of a ruming noses And nobody seemed really to
speak. I don't think I was spoken to the vhole tina, except by
the broken-hoarted clowns, in quips and groans and asides. At
least there ought to have been drinking or card games or parlour
tricks---or music-hall turns, orgies, nudo cxhibitions. These
nould have given the nork a neaning, and the mansions vould have
got back some of their old robust nystery, as they muot have had
in Victorian times, because people at least ato well then and had
naughty' music halls, they rere' strict about cex but at least it
was hard going for. them, at least they still had whoros, and the
best of them, even anbassadors, - kept pictures of plump nude ladies
over their beds. But now, at a time whon thoro ras supposed to be
the greatost liberality about tho body, it really seamed to have
disappaared, and sex didn't 30cm half as inportant as the morning
cup of toa if one could judge fron the schoming and squabbling and
fretting there was about it. For porfect foulness this morning
cup of toa ras seconded only by the afternoon cup of toa. So
you couldn't even look forvard to that. Cnc of tbe tall, massive
rooms should have becn fitted out as a kind of splondid vhorchouse,
and we could have had a running buffet cll day, with persian carpets
on the floor and billowing satin curtains and din russet lights,
and long settees with footrests where you could sit with on df the
girls, with one rule only--that the tork to be done must be done,
somphow. That room would have boen the tonple where me could
lift up our heads and get a little
dignity and splendour
ttan Say
and depth into our long faces; re could
that as the creatures


of God we had more to shon for His ingonuity than snotty noses.
In all the tine I was there I only romembor seeing one girl, tho
hurried past along tho corridor one day---with a handkerchiof in
her hand. I don't say that I aidn't soe more than one, I only
can't remember more than one. And the handkerchiof was an import-
ant part of the scene. It flashed as sho passod. Then sho vas
gone and I didn't aee hor again. Everyone seemed to be hiding,
including myself and the other olowns. The chief of the nhole
placo did the same. He camo into the big office - on tho othor oide
of the corridor every morning (he had a carpet, a dosk and same
curtains---you got a certain quota of things ao you nont higher,
and that was'his lot) and nade a kind of pale dive through his
door with ahere terror at being seen (moving, too) by one of his
subordinates. Beaause he wasn't supposed roally to be there,
not as hinself, anyray. He was a---Position. And if he'a been
seen by the subordinates there would have been tho quostion of
whether he chould be called eir or not, end thon the counter-
question of whether he should oppear to want to be called sir,
sinco after all this was democracy, and who was ho to put on airs?
Yot beoause in fact he ras highor-up he aid have jurisdiction over
them eto ete. It was very ambiguous. And 80 there ras the pale
dive, and the pale dive of his subordinates anay from him. It
was not only ambiguous but chostly too.
Even the noney I got Fas unreal. I got juat about enough
to cover tho fare to and from the village and tho oxtras implied
by two train journeys a day---oups of stale tea, a pellet designed
for multi-firing guns called A Bun, a Wash and Brush Up to fore-
stall total @ ollapse, and lotions, tonios, ponders to keep ny logs
valking straight. One day I realiced I oould have begged or
borroved the same amount easily, and got my oun gork done as uell.


I seemed to sit about so nuch in thot job that, like all the other
clowns thero, I looked as if I nas valking round with an arnchoir
stuck to my backside, whenever I did walks It had an effect on
the stance. But ne didn't really walk, any of us---10 . only staggered
and stumbled about with files under our arms, uncomfortably avare
of tho insisible pulsing 1ife in our flesh and veins which refused
to be put out by the death all round us. I soon got boils on my
arse, the first I'd ever had, and was-obligod to atand up at my
KRal tem
vork, which mado a-chango: I wend hete I nanted to rest my
legs, you knon, I tried sitting on oushions but they were so
pal nful that I preferred leaning over my desk as if interest was
TRe troils
rooting me there. Ty nere the end as far as 1 was concerned.
I decided to get out. I suddenly dashed downstairs and phoned
one of the biggest magozine-publiching concorns in London, and
shouted until I had got hold of oneof the top boys, porsonally.
I sounded so urgont and deranding that ali the underlings put me
through, until I was all of a sudden at the top. fnd I told him
at once, I was so dosporate, the job I tas in vao 30 ghastly that
in all humanity he nuet put out a helping hand to me and give mo
a job. He made an appointment for me at once, for the folloming
efternoon. And off I rent the next day, to one of those innense
publishing officos in Covont Garden; and 1 ras shown into the
cheirnan's office. He was a nicc man, kindly and qiot, and
said to me, *Tell, you soem pretty desporate.' I went into an-
other spoech and he told me quietly that he thought, just from
hearing me talk, that I sould certainly go far one of these days,
and he'd try to got me a job, but it nas very hard, the times rare
very hard, what with people still.coming Daok from the arny who
wanted their old jobs; but he nould do his best. Te sniled at
each othor and shook hands; at least r'a got a lot of wind off


my chest. 3ome days later he phoned me at the office, to my
astonishment, bocause I never expocted to hear another vord, I such
was my buoyanoy, and & repeated that he'a beon very impressed by
me, that he, had tried very hard for me but thore was absolutoly no
chance of getting a job for me just then, it ras hopeless and unfort-
unately he had no povor to invont jobs. So that mas that. But
this action non me my froodome I applied to teke a post-graduato
degree, at my old colloge, an. idea I loothed and detested, but I
got 1t, I had won a reprieve for another oightoen months at leaot.
had
The oxtraordinary thing was that the boils-job, only lasted siz
recks. It was the longost tims I ever stayod with death, but yet
I insult doath vhon I say that, in the manner of my epoch, for
death could never be like that, death is tho viou you have over tho
hill, the silence and rustle of vind in the troes, the stream that
goes without you knoving it and the sound of sheep and their be lls
in the night. And this death nas what I went back to in the count-
ry every. night, the real and lovely death.
Ferhaps the deadliest thing in that job was tho sight of people
queueing for cigarettes in a tiny shop near the office the size of
a railway-compartment. There was alrays this queue, of Whioh I
made myself one, endlessly getting nearer the counter and never
succeading in unrevolling itself, not until the offices got into
full death-aving at about half-past ten and tho last pale, snotty-
nosed, wheozy freemen nere safely locked insido. The queue casn't
alive, it ras bent and withered and shuffling like the ghost of a
shabby idea. And the ghosts of people's feelings ront on urd er-
neath--wanimating it and giving what littlo life there ras to the
quick murmur of cigarette-formula (since there was a formula for
evorything in life, developed in vartime, and you -rere a fool if
you didn't know it); and those feelings undernea th nere nar-like,


they struggled like the ghosts of war for the tobacconist's att-
ention, they preyed on her telepathioally for a packet of Players
or Goldflake instead of Weights or Woodbines, for these wère the
days of cigarette-shortage and they needed the best smoko to provide
haze for the day's séance at the affice. And a 8 trange reluctant
clicking response took place in the tobacconist-lady's face, hardly
moving it, like a machine under the folds of her pale skin, deciding
to deny this one his Players, that one his Goldflake, to give liber-
ally to that one and stintingly to the other, while the endless
writhing creature of ghosts moved towards her.
I dan remember having a sense of the total collapse of England
early in the war, before it had really happened. I remember dis-
tinotly sitting in a oafé one morning near a training camp on the
outekirts of London where I was waiting for the draft abroad. It
wasn't a horrible sensation. It was just a dalm and thoroughly
clear sense that this future experienoe---of the oollepse---would
come. It was a glimpse of a future England. You could see it
there already. I could see it in people's faces as they came in
for their morning coffee; a more authentic look whioh had been on
them a year or two before had gone. I remember there was a glass
fanlight, and a pleasant glowing light in the room from the sky.
It was a sudden conviotion of the oollapse of authority. Just
authority---everywhere---had ceased to exist. I knéw it, at that
moment. The experienoe might have no meaning. But that was the
experienoe.
And it wasn 't just England. It touched everything else. It
was in the Americans at the same oamp. They passed like strangers.
sense
There was a sanse of total and absolute decadence---so oomplete
that one oould only see it as the new life (because there was no
antidote or opposite).
England was ravaged by Americans, in its intimady. It was a


ravage from inside, as if England had brought it on herself. It was
something she even seemed to have worked towerds. We all falt this
ravage, secretly. Some talk/about it. Most didn't. These was no
love between Ehglish and American soldiers, but there was no love any-
way, between one American trooper and another, one English trooper
and another, between Canadians and Poles, New Zealanders and Aussies.
The whole rotten modern world was there, seething with malice and-m
its chaperon---Bentiment.
There was a sense of the collapse of even the most intimate
moral fibre, even the natural fibre the animal has. There was one
soene, I remember: a drunk American soldier in Picoadilly, in the
darkness late at night when the hollownoss of the city at war oamé
into its own and drove out everything but fear and remorse, standing
in the shadows with a girl, his pants open, pulling her towards him
while he tried to masturbate himself into an erection, his eyes closed,
almost alseep from the drink; and she was swaying with him, That
was the beginning. A new terrifying force had entered, to whioh the
body of the foreigner was always a corpse. It was the new foroe in
all of us. We were all foreigners. a It only looked like ravage from
outside. But it was in all of us. Te were all foreigners, to each
other. That didn't stop at the end of the war It remained the
basic oondition. It is still there in us *
why
That was, this soene in Piccadilly appalled me. Basically it
had
was a glimpse of us all. I was trenty then and, no formed idea.
All I knew was that I could either fight this new thing, or give
wey to it. But it took me years just to find out how to fight
it. England was finished. People were finished. That was
all I felt. It was perfeotly Bymbolio that an American should


heve given me the glimpse. The imcrican wcs me--in extremia.
In tho war I feared Anoricans like nazis. I thought of them:
as 'natural' nazis, the born nazis. Ghon. oftor the war, in Austria,
I sau a amall troop of them walking down a hill---thoy suddenly
appeared closo to ne, their bayonets (I cat7 thon as daggers) clink-
ing against their belts, thoir fcoks thick and aunburrod, as I had
seon sane of our SS prisoners, I began trombling all over and had
to stand still until they passod. It was like the shock of antoahr
battle. I rould have laughed to knon that I was trenbling at-
mysolf.
This had nothing to do with tho Anoricans I actually net.
It wasn't cubstantisted in any way. re mixed in with the Texans
just short of Cassino, before the spring-attacks, over Christmas.
Our tents were close to each other. rassive German 88mm shells
Roles tin
made amaskef the earth betreen us now and thon. It was cold,
grey ceathor on the rhole. Thoy had accents that fascinated me,
and an easy air that kept araning me to tho ir tents. But I at ayed
avay on the whole so as not to 'impose', not realising that thoy
woren't Inglishnen and that they talked to strangers as a matter
of course. Ge used to oxchange bully beef for thoir spam. They
had tinned turkey for Christras, and plenty of shisky. They had
the gift of mcking a festive cc casion evon thero, sith great holes
being heaved up all round us. This fastive porer had the flavour
of the eleventh hour about it, whoreas our festive occasions, rhi ioh
had assimilar intinate glow, in tents lit aysterionely by kerosone
lemps, and with vood firos improvised out of biscuit tins, nere
strangoly different. There was the samo intimacy in both, the
came- glon and love of occasion. But the flavour of England was
the flayour of an island---the light and strangely free and indiv-
idual- island-touch chore what counted---what made the glow---Nas


the stamp and personolity of each face, its ripples and ancient
marks, and the distinot and individual and fabulous ring of evory
voice. And the American glow had something eloventh-hour about
it, quite apart fron the rar. Their actuol physical closeness to
oach other ras greater, thoy sat more round tho sparkling firo,
they dren up closer, much as if tho intinacy didn't lie inside
thon but rao a need alnost like a fear; and thoir freedon dian't
lio in the individual stamp of fao C---in tho etrnity behind o80 h
face
tahe---as it did with the Engliah, 1t lay in som kind of eternity
all round thom, oamething onormously spacious that ongulfed and
arallonod the individual marks on facos, and tho ring of voices,
and it was alvays like the last gathering of allmhumanity, tho
last gathering there ever ras to be, surrounded by the fearful
and fathomless silence; thero lay its elevonth-hour quality.
So it created a sense of tremendous reliah-- this is otill the
mark of American intimacy for me: a physioal relish, the crunch
of things in the mouth, tho flow and coolnoss of a drink, the amell
of ccoking, the oxciting sound of sore one turning over the page Ss ar
a book, the physical recieving of the hunen croaturo into the last
glowing circle vith no reference to his position a even the quality
of his presence. This last is what counts in Durope---the quality
of tho ercature; it 13 vhat nokos groups and cubtle divicions that
are mutuolly oxclusive and alnays will bo. But at that furthest
point
exploration/of the uhivereal middle class, tho American group,
vhore ovorythim else has boen loft behind, every bit af aristocracy
end thorefore all proocoupation uith tho quality of tho creaturo,
whero thore are only the onornous bare plains all round, and no
evidence that God ones you a glance, so that life really is at
tho end of its tether, at the eleventh haur, the oamp ia the fount
and tomb of public intinacy. The camp, cuch more evon than the


family, is the basis of American lifes
The European freedom is that of the utmost individual
development, the freedom of unique quality in the human creature,
while the American aska for freedom of aotion unenoumbered by fear
of quality, as a shared right of all creatures. When confronted
with eaoh other these look like two types of freedom, mutually
destructive. But they are opposite facets of the same civilisationo
They only become distinet by proximity: when they are put olose
their difference is what strikes the eye---they each grow more
extreme bg proxinity. So teruopeant freedom and *American* freedom
come into being, althought they arentt mutuellyoxolusive at all.
The European freedom becomes by contrast an anxious reference to
quality, the American an anxious reference to equality.
This division is a logical outoome of something that has been
going on since at least the eleventh oontury, when there were the
first signs of what we know now as the middle class---vhen townsmen
came into being as a population distinct from the peasants and
knights and priests of the countryside (or domain) all round them.
There, in the growing aifferenoe botween the town perched alone on
its hill, hugged behind great walls, and the silent domain of fields
surraunding it, you had the first intimatibn of the kind of agony---
or vision, or joy---that has animated us ever since. The townsmen
becamé more ani more bent oh the deliberate organisation of life-
in sewage arrangements and education and finance and so forth, all
of which dépended on foresight; rhile the domain dontinued to
represent the natural and unforeseeable (the earth worked by itself),
and to bring thoughts of God and fate, baged on a natural division
of labour between the knights and the peasants, that is, thore who
defended the land and those who worked it. Inside the town, life--
since it depended on trade---was arranged and ordered and calculated


for; outside, in the domain, it was simply inherited---the earth
gave its substance, the peasant worked it, the knight was fed in
return for his function. And the towns broke the domains. They
broke the invisible hold on 1ife, the depth of a present undietin-
guishable from past or future: the domain's silence. They did
it by making contact with each other. Their trade opened up a
completely aifferent lifewe-of movement and, onde more, secular
splendour. History'---the ohronicling of events as if they were
all leading somewhere---started again for the first time sinoe the
Roman empire.
There was something unsatisractory about the Christianising
of the ruins of the Roman empre. Paganism was aborbed---used---
by the church. The old pagan festivals became part of the Christ-
ian liturgy: the day of the sun's birth moved easily into Christ-
mas. Not only this-a-the form of daily pagan life was inherited
asiwell: the attitudes. You got the mass of the people quiet and
mumb
- : like slaves, as if they were still under Roman landlords.
There was still, basioally, a slave-based 800 iety. Only these
slaves had a new faith---a faith for the first time; they took
it gratefully and blindly. And this was what the towns al tered.
They brought the praotioal Christienity: they were the firet seed
of that Svangelicaliem that established
- A - powerful middle
olass in Viotorian times. Christianity had to be oleer-seeing.
The blind faith could only be temporary. And this bore an element
of original truth with it---that Christ had always appealed to the
clear-seeing in men. This was where grace lay, in being aware.
Each man, really, was to be his own coneciende, prophet and saviour:
that was at the back of everything Christ said. There were no
rules in Christian teaching about how you should live each day,


apart from very bare ones: nothing 11ke the advice in Judaism
and later Islam. There was only a new dignity: from which every-
thing mist spring (even.if it took two thousand yoars---whioh it
probably will). People mustn't be blind any more. It was the
oontradiction of slavery. Every man had the power to sée, no
matter how degraded or wretohed or even bad he was. Nobody was
barred from this olear sight. That was the marvel of Christ's
teaching, and why it was perseouted. And 8o the itch to retoh
this olear sight went on and on in Christianity, spreading to
more and more people. It made for turmoil, which was there all
through the middle ages, although we tond to lump the whole period
toegther nowadays as an uneventful one. In fact, the Renascence,
far from being a sudden revolution, was just the dénouement of this
long inner turmoil. The turmoil came from wanting more and more
to break the pagan forms that still held life in grip--eeven to the
point of breaking the intimate fabrio that held all life together;
and this was what was done in the end---everything was challenged,
every authority and blind service, on the assumption that God was
something Anside men and that what lay ougside---the earth and sky
and animals--was a wildreness of untrammelled paganism that had.
to be broken and bowed. And we are in the extraordinary position
of olearing up the ruins (if ne can)---on a ba ttlofield whero every-
thing intimate to us has been destroyed, not by an enemy but by 4
ourselves. This is why I say that the last aot-a-of our recovery---
is an act of contemplation. I mean, you have to begin to see again
where God lies outside men. You have to see where those spades
and teeming, d omplicated lives aren't wiaderness---aren't pagan
chaos. It means surrender, but not pagan surrender, which is the
only one we know 80 far.
/ to P. 160 ja.


Europe came out of this struggle. It came from the friction
of town and domain---the struggle was Europe's story of development
throughfout the centuries. And what you have in America is as
pure a transported 'town* as you can get, with its laok of domain
even as a remembered background, and its resultant emphasis on
production and forethought and the visible and arranged and spoken.
And if you put this close up against Europe it makes her look
(especially in American oyes) pure-domain, as America looke from
our point of view pure-town. But this is fictional: both worlds
exist in both, in the same struggle. That camp-element in
American freedom belongs at bottom to the domain: just as in
European freedom there is a hint of the first excited movement of
the towns a And in European people you have a natural knowledge of
America often without their having been there, beoause they know the
aspiration of pure-town in themselves.
*Town* and 'domain* represent the two facets---a kind of end-
loss dichotomy---of Christian feeling. The domain-element is
alive now only as inner recollection. The Renascence was the
ora
bequeathment of life into the hands of the town, and the maxx of
aristooracy---that is, the deliberate development of quality--
begen from it. Aristocracy really carried the invisible
loyalties of the domain into town-life by means of money: but
the contradiotion that lay in this---the liberation from anything
feudal that money would always provide---was the destruction of
aristocracy. And the permanent mistake of Amerioan society---
that takes away all its stability---is perhaps the mistake that
this destruo ti on was a levelling movement, whereas it was simply
the spreading of aristocratic values to more and more peoplé, 8o


that a clear aristocratic dlass was no longer necessary (that is,
no longer had a0 much to teaoh) a American pioneers made the mis-
take of taking aristocracy as external (dress, wealth, privilege)
and not phat it was through the Renasoenoe---en innder quality,
absorbed elowly by the poorest classes. Every generation in
Amerioa has been upset by the dogged necessaty of making everybody
look and feel alike 1f possible; and the most surprising lesson
for the American who lives abroad is always his realisation that
in faot people are different, and that his own psyohology is a
special and by no means shared one.
Each destruction brought about by the town---the slow destruct-
ion of privilege and even ecolesiastioal authority, everything that
still rested on divine right---drew the human oreature (oitizen)
nearer and nearer that freedom of action which Christ seemed to have
promised. Christ lived at a time of slavery. He spoke to slaves and
heathen aliké. Every creaturé was splendid for him---that was the
stuperying element of his work. It didn't matter how squalid, neglect-
ed, ignorant or even sinful a creature was, he had the splendour of
being the child of God. It lifted the vast mass of people up to the
level of the religious right away---an unheard-of thing. That
was the terriblé flame that lioked its way through the dying Roman
empire, that was what provided the invisible quality of the
domain (Christ as the inner eecret, as intimacy) and the visihle
quality of the town (Christ as rights, as the released explirer).
And while Europe developed fully from this leavening and mixing
and struggling of town and domain, Amerioa had to rely more
and more on improvised and mental knowledge, beoause outside the
Amerioan community (town) you got not the domain with its resources
of long and natural experience but unexplored wilderness, where
inaction meant disaster.


tgnors Eo an American freedom was evolved thich emphasised
the child-of-God splendour as a kind of sociel credential for
which every creature (subject) qualified, while European freedom
emphasised this as a natural, inherited credential with no necc-
essary visible forn or guerantee. Proxnity of one with the other
did only harm to each. It made a caricature of both because it
was based on the assumption that here vere two aistinct Worlds:
Kke
that was required by, powor-politics,this century.
The Anerican freedom was procisely what ravaged first Englian
and then European freedom, in and after the lest ware I san the
beginning of it, but I had to mait till the end of the war before
I knen that the corroding and corrupting process had taken place.
At the end of the var, in England, there seened only mediocrity
left. Middle-class expectations had got snaller; middle class
poople had become pettier and narrower people, with somothing
stale and ambiguous and shabby about them, they nere now people
vho playod safe and small; and any self-assertion was taboo.
iny style had to trim itsolf to the genorel pattern, if it wanted
to fit in. Thousands got out. The Working class was no help
in this because it was intact and stronger than bofore. The rot
didn't apply there. But the fact remained that only the middle
olass could givo the country colour and development. That was
the kind of society it was, for bettor for for worse: working
people were onlookers.
In the war, the tiny island had to become the aircracft-
carrier and springboard for a vast offensive against the continent.
It turned into a kind of factory. The distances drindled, t Aanal
oould all be spanned in a fow minutos' flight. The stale and corrupt
air of the factory grew. But the factory-ekement alone rasn't
the decisive one, because the C cuntry had been going that way


for nearly tno hundred years, $ and had done nore damage to itself
than could ever be done by an outsiderin a few years. Yet the
Arerican presence was precicoly this factory-element---it was
exactly the ravage torards which England had been working.
These strangers weren't exactly foreigners. Nobody considered
that they were even more porerful than the Enelish, especially
during the war. They rere equal. They rere friends. Yet
they were more poverful; they vere foreigners. * Thoir shere
numbers, the shere weight of their equipment, seemed to argue
a greater power. But it wasn't talked about. Only in high
places was it a fact to be reckoned with. Loner down, it wasn 't
felt yet. They occupied whole villages. *fmerican' villages
in England were like ghost villages; they still atew-if any-
thing, they're worse nou, seening to have eettled into a pernanent
glostliness.
All the intimate life has gone fron them. The houses,
memosral stones, lawns, are there as always before. But the
places are dead. It's an tair-force' villege. The American
presence brought abstraction with it--a
dead abe tract
cloud that, laid everything raste like an enoamous spray of need
poison. Yet that abstraction was already in English life.
You could even say it had been created in Englend, in the first
induotryial towns. That was the nature of its abstraction---
the deathly air of a bleak, industrial street. Not a tree, not
a bush---however many trees and bushes there actually were; they
seemed painted, artificial, irrelevant.
Yet the people who brought this weren't foreigners. Their
ab straction was something we could understand. Only they didn't
see the intimate English freedom, they coulan't recognice it,
even when they edmired its signs and effeats. The signs of
thoir oun freedom wore so aifferent. Here, at the most intinate


point, thoy were foreigners. It was essentially a painted seene
for them, because the mainspring of free choico in tho English was
dumb and invisible to them. The scene was attractive to them or
dull, according to their taste. There, at that point, you got
the clash of two forms which belonged so intimately to the same
World that they represented the maximam---the most ambiguous and
torturous---problem for each other. The two sides stared at each
other thinking they were staring at themselves; than they realised
the ir mistake. But the mistake didn't end the natter: you couldn't
just shrug the other vorld off as 'foreign*. The fact was that
perheps you were staring at yourself after ell, only you didn't
understand. Basically, perhaps, it was lack of eelf-comprehonsion.
The middle class in England had given up the ghost. Its
intimate hold on the country---Dhich had been far from pleasant--
wes gone, and it had nothing morally to put up agoinst a morking
class that complained about social inequality, or againet the
American alternative which was to give everybody the chance to
get rich. They didn't beliove in themsolves. Ir thoy belioved
in enything, tt was America, Hintorically, they had ravaged Eng-
land and turned it into a sort of marsholling yard for goods in
the same way as the Americans had done vith their on continent.
They'a driven roads through the country, brought into being a new
class of goge-slaves who vere exploited with 80 muoh insentience
that not even brutality ves involved: all with one sacred idea
behind it---making money. And this sacred idiot-god hadn't
been pushed over. It maant no real idea at all, no vision of
1ife, it meant you had nothing at all. It moant that at the end
you wouldn't even be able to buy the splendour or confort you'a
promised yourself, beccune the meana to enjoy and the means to be
splondid were exactly What you had destroyed in your first vorkers,


and what you had destroyed in yourself to get them to work.
All you got at the end rere stinking oities with too many people
in them, and as near chaos as life could get. That had happened
in Englend, and it would happen in America. The hour of banknu ptcy
had to be faced. And at thet hour you neoded something in your
head more than.the vision of a crisp pound-note or dollar-bill.
Since, by your position, you vere committed to organising life,
you had to know to what end it should be organised, and why.
And this was where the English middle olass folded up and made as
if to die---keeping itself alive morally by frequent visits to hhe
'new' world. All over Europe,. .as in Englend, you got a middle class
whose position was unsupported by any philosophy except the nire €
teenth century one of getting rich at any price, in which they no
longer believed.
And the shame it felt was a surviving tremor of feeling from
the past, from its days of 'splendour' in the nineteen th century,
which in fact had been days of no splendour at all but- only the mad-
ness of money-making; a splendour which had moved to America af ter
it had done its vorst in Europe, through two wars and fifty million
dead in as many years by bombardment, hunger and torture. A 'splend-
our' of that kind is certainly frightening in 1ts turmoil---which
is only its effort to make life ring and echo with the joy it was
alvays anaured money could buy; but joy is the treasure of the
unambitious. And theee same ambitious splendours are now going to
be repeated in upper space: we are going to texplore' the skies;
we're moving again, we're progressing! Only the progressing' face
looks a trifle idittic now, with its perpetual grin. kith its


money, it will buy us infinity, of all things. Perhaps it
will meet God up there. But more likely it will meet itself.
Perhaps this is why they look so muoh like idiot-ohildren, these
texplorers' of the middle class: as they prepare for the last
journey of all, to the tomb of the nineteenth century.
I can remember how a peculiar wxexplained shame and ambiguity
used to ocour, whenever I talked to Amerioans, even quite intimate
friends. It would always be there, the Ambiguity---for me a
souroe of distress that got worse and worse the more I tried to
think it out.
For one thing, I was painfully aware of my aocent. This
sense
wasn't a Eae-that mine was more ugly or more lovely than his,
It touched on that question of freedom. It touohed on that
theme of quality. Basically, it was a sensation that what
there was of quality in my acoent-e-what flowed from the history
of my country--was being fiotionalised by him into something
else: namely, privilege. To my own ears the accent might sudden-
ly sound peremptory, or too stout and decided, or artificial,


or courtly and rounded and stylish, or delicate or pompous of
superior of formal or plain gruff or negative. I felt turned
into someone else: but this wasn't the problem; it was that
I didn't know who the invented person was, where he'd come from.
He was supposed to be 'English'. But he aertainly wasn't me.
The sense that my acoent was even delicate or stylish was quite
a discovery as I'd always been a bit ashamed until then of it
carrying more of the old Cockney strains of childhood than was
desirable; at least, my family was always pulling me up about
it. And who knows that the Amerioan didn't feel his accent was
being fiotionalised into sounding slack and unstylish and vulgar?
This was what our accents did to each other---in terms of re-
fleoted consoiousness. It wàs one of many points--athough I
didn't realise it for years---where our different freedoms
touched each other. My accent had come from the developed
quality of the single human oreature---in this sense it. had
come from the aristooracy, as I began to realise; for 'Europe',
as we now call it-wit used to be called Christendom---is repres-
ented by the Bingle human face---tragio or lovely, strangely
dramatic, a Michelangelo, And the American's accent, with no more
than its roots in my world, had been formet by the urgent and simple


requirement to make intimacy with strangers in a too-spacious
land---by a painstaking social equality.
And with this, on my side, there nent a sense of shame.
This shame seemed to accuso me of being---to fictionalise me into
boi ng--wa retrograde and snobbish and out-dated creature whose
11ps vere always pouted inthe defence of sonething from tho past,
like Working-class life or peasants or Arabs or noblemon, of which
the American secmed (as his part of the antitheats) to have a fict-
ional 1dea. Liy accent vas only tho sound of these nogative
qualities, as the expression of my face---defensive, often flushed
and pugnacious---was the sight of them. And these clashes seemed
to happen cuite often, in England, in Baghdad, in Italy, wherever
I vent, and to produce tho very sana distaste and remorse after-
war ds as if I'd engeged in sonething whioh I hadn't thought out
properly and which would alvays get me into the same blind dead-
lock. I believe that while that post-war status quo lasted
neither of us could resolve the problen for hinsolf, without
this violent upheaval. le were neither of us free. ie mere
prisoners of the same universal middle-class deadlock, and pris-
oners can never think things right to the end. They can go a
long way, but thore has to be themorat
nore than a little
can
square of vindow through tka whioh the
There has
light, comep.
to be some power of movoment.
It was like the vagueness of a dream, though porhaps the
dream was greater on the European side because our governmen to
were littla more than governments-by-proxy. Officials only
looked and sounded autboritat ive, becauso thoy know from the
past hou it ahould be played. -
You had
the some life as you always had before. But it wasn't your


real life. I can remember this sensation sO distinotly from
those years. I used to walk or oycle in that village outside
London, along the narrow, intimate lanes which are still there
as they were two hundred years ago, between broad fields and sudden
wooded hille, with old tiled farmhouses behind oourtyards and
elm-trees: and there was always a kind of blanket of puzzlement
in front of mesa-there was a permanent element of shame, too, at
not living the right life in some way, at not having a plàoe in
life, in not being known for what I was, in not being able to grip
with the real problems which I knew were there all the time,
Even the right and proper suffering seemed to elude mo.
There were all these referendes to a past society. The war
had smashed up everything. Yet had 1t? The old things were still
there---the fine parks, the authentic tones of command. Were they
there? And you looked. After all, England wasn' tt Germany: we
hadn't béen smashed quite to pieces. Before the war we'd known
that told Englandt, was dead, that it had been done to death by the
money-mad people, in the same way as the old Amerioa had. But it was
vegue now, this truth. Wedidn't even feel as if ve were prisoners .
Yet there was this peculiar shame of remaining in our own countries---
the sense that everything had been hopelessly compromised, that
nothing had its own inevitable life. And you could Bee the shame
in every country in Europe---the semé shame and sense of comppomise;
the same brightening at the idea of rabroad'. The injection of
power into Germany---the terrifio new wealth acoumulated therem--
didn't alter anything:. her middle alass was even weaker at the
end of it than those other countries. Real middle-olass strength
must lie in ideas. And the turmoil of its ideas had ceased.
It seemed to have no more to offer.


I believe the firot roon vhere I felt completely free cas
in Baghdad. I had a big rush-mat in that room---and whonever I
smell straw inside a room now, from a ohair or garden-toble, I have
a quick tinge of excitement thot seems to be telling me about
books and thinking, about the thrilling flavour of sitting down
with a book to read or write, about the gloming tomple every real
room 18---about freedon. Agad nst the window ras my desk, which
I'd picked up. quite cheaply at the market off the ma in street,
and in the corner was a narrow bed nhoro I slept in the afternoons.
And thero was a straight-backed chair nhere I used to s tand the
gramophone. It was a bare room, rether tall-ccilinged, and
long, with a door leading out on to a square baleony vhere I sat
and read sometimos in the morning, facing the nisty edges of Bag-
hdad, if the Eun vasn't too strong. A tiny mindow nas cut into
corner of the room rather like a window in a monastery. I could
soe the sondy roadnay outside from that. And from my desk-vi ndow
I could look at the side of Ismail's house. Jometimes his nan-
servant would be romping on the floor with his two wives, like a
ch ild, laughing soundlossly. The 1ight was alvays thrilling and
strange in the evening. And the lights in the house were dim,
B0 that the corridors with thoir arches had the look of a tiny
stone palace in the midale of the desert. Ismail and I nent
out together in tho evening scmetimes, floating off in his car
behind the chauffeur, or he would give me a lift to ny college,
recking of esu-de-cologne after his shorer, very clean-shaven and
fresh, his head lifted up, overything about him clean and meticul-
ous, with a white shirt and a dazzling tropical suit. He was an
enormous man, not fat though---nith a long, easy, pronling strido
and a peculiar movomont of his mouth as if he nas biting on a stool
bit like a horse. He had fine, light blue eyos. He told me


that vhen he was younger and drank less he could pick up a
witk
handeerohier from the ground by his teeth going at full gallop
hotselrack.
on. 1 demese
He was a Kurd and spont the day in the rambling
cap
offices of the ministry of justice, feeling contrite---usually---
from a braul the night beforo. He always got drunk after about
nine in the evening, and hie chauffeur raited for him in the
car, holf-asleep, nith dark glaeses on even at night, because he
had a wall-eye from trachoma. We had absolutoly no conversation
together, but te enjoyed it: we sat in the cabarets drinking,
talking to the chores in the little hotel-cum-brothels on the north
side of the river, and sometimes drove out into the desert with
our vives, to see some gypsy dences. He always got drunk on these
trips, winking and moving hie head about and putting his tongue
out, and on the way back in the car he always made a quick pass
la trying
at my wife, axauttEK to put his hand betreen her legs. Next
morning there would be a sober little note of apology, written in
a copperplate hand by one of the street-writers who atood about
to be hired, vith the: ir ink and paper ready. Cr else there vould
be a present of dolmars, tho Arab cakes, or a chicken, or a bottle
of vine. His wife, a fine-looking Egyption woman vho hated the
voil-habits of the city, got joalous of my wife and sent hor a
little note in French one day saying sho'a always thought English
woren nere ladies: she couldn't see why her husband made so
many passes at her unless she was encouraging hime She ought to
have soon him at ono of the brothels. He used to make a dive
at one of the girle, giva hor a hard pinch in the pussy a0 that
she let out a shrill yell, then swing her tet on to his lap,
wit
making his peculiar movement of the mouth,,a genial, extraordin-
erily magnanimous and tolerant look in his eyeg.
In that room I felt free of
blanket of perplexity there


had been over my life. I was myself a This moant that my problcms---
the proper ones that every opooh holds in storowm came to mp fast,
and in the time I nas there, which was lcss than a year, I got more
done than in the previous five years. I believe this ras becauso
I was in the pure domain-life, in the grip of the invisible; un
atai ned and unliberated by enything middle-class, exccpt what was
clear import from abfrad. The stram on my floor, the echo of
my gramophone acrocs the room, vith its sounds that soened nuch
stranger : and more outlandish than they Tould heve been in Europe,
the door on to my balcony, the sounds on ny balcony at night, the
movement of tho otiff Zeaves of palm trees bclow, the voices at the
toun,
edgo of the
- singing, the Bound of a drum, a suddon hot breath
from the anttexx desert that started at tho end of tho garden,
the bark of a dog, a cloud of sand behind a passing car, the clap
of hands from the next house for a servant, the wild roar of
radios in El Rashid streeto at the centre of the town, the twink-
ling lights of the minarets from across the river, the brom,
swift river itself, the vile snell of boiling turnips, the chink-
chink of beada in soreone's hand, the vhirl of fans, the sound of
bare feet on the pavement, the crisp, brilliant autumn morninge
shen the eun seemed to shine through dazzling glaos in one immense
ceecade of happy light---all these things were like the opening
of a physically religious sorld
wo chere the giant inhibitions
of public and men-imprisoned gods had not yet worked. I was
free as my oun sooiety hadn't let me bo for yoers.
I remember other rooms, but none like that whore the sense
of a sudden freedom was 8o strong. It was like really lifting up
my head for the firot time. In Ingland it had felt as if my whole
body had been in disuse. There was a strange kind of spiritual
excitement to be had from not owning a body, but you could hardly


be yourself: you vere conderned to a kind of pleasureable
spectatorship. You learned, in England, not to beliove in the
body. That wasn't fron any puritanism---except in so far as
the whole industrial history aprang from puritan feolings.
/l.c C It was from there being too much work in the
So much. that
aira =
vork now seemed more or less impossible; really, not much d it
seemed to be dohe. Kork is nourishod by leieure and spurred by
dreams. It creates schedules but is ultimately destroyed by
them; and this is that seemad to have happened in England.
Schedule hung over everything 1iko an invisible girder, it was
even in people, in their taut public nerves Which gave little
reflection of tho lives they had underneath; public life and
intimate life seemed divided now to the point of a chronic pera-
lysis of action. If you lifted your head too high you rere
11kely not to get it knocked off, which would havo been proof of
some philistine envy at nork, but to get it bruised on a girder.
You couldn't blane the girder, nor could you really get annoyed.
All you could do was to keep your head ducked in future.. At
home it ras difforont: there you unsproad. But in public the
fearful girder of work seemed to be the only real operating
thing. It marked out every part of the day---into Work-part
and lunch-part and tea-part and then in the evening lesiure-
part; it marked off Caturday from the other deys, giving it
the peculiar half-thrilling, half-saddening eense of- a half-
worked day; it foll like a blow on Sunday, reni orins it an
empty factory, meaningless, desorted and emelling faintly of
roast and Yorkshire. Before the var, there had been an active
and spiteful philistinism, the businer-olasses and their serfs
had still been strong and negative. But now there rasn't this
schedule
harsh and brutal air. Only the sEnEERERE remained, the in-


visible girders.