WAITING FOR-MELLI
Maurice Rowdon
(2nd Folder: pps. 176 - 330)
HAROLD OBER ASSOCIATES
Incorporated
40 East 49th Street
New York


When Angelo and I met we were still the children of war:
he from the fascist world, I from the anti-fascist. But fascism
was one of the subjects we never touched. And by not touohing it
we secured a first mutual freedom: the European dream began for
both of us. It included our own countries but in a strange way
was the best in our countries. It came in glimpses. We learned
fast from each other. He really showed me Italy---through the
horror he felt towards it mostly, and through himself. And I
showed him a bit of the vorld outside---in myself. We felt we
shared the same dream and had done always. Now, for the first
t ime, we were meeting in éaoh other the protagonists of that life-
dream---in the flesh; that was what made it remarkable for us.
Only in those first weeks in Rome did we really see a lot of
eaoh other. It was in a strange and even disturbing way like
erriving home---baok to ourselves---after a long Journey that had
begun wi th birth. Yet this home was a place we couldn't recognise,
the language spoken wasn tt our own, there were no familiar facos,
certainly no friends. It was like meeting in a dream, and perhaps
it oould never have been anything but a series of vivid glimpses,
in the heat of an afternoon. It had to be a completely inner
thing. It couldn't develop, even. We coulan't have a real daily
relationship. Ie had a kind of one for years---but there were
long Bilences, of months, 8 ametimes a year or two, and during most


of that time (after he moved to Peris) we were a thousand miles
from each other in any case. Our meetings were brief. Perhaps
we could only glimpse that sparkling and darkly unexplained and
ecstatic world between us by being total strangers at the end as
at the beginning. Our ac tual living worlds really were strange
to each other. Or rather, they were the same in the darkness of
night, in the passing of thousands of years of time, but different
by daylight.
Angeld had never wanted to be a lawyer. He seemed not to
know how he ta become one, either. A pained look came into his
face when the subject was. mentioned: his eyes would fix themselves
darklyand blindly in a stare that was like stone and seemed as if
it would last for éver. I remember the feeling of barrenness and
hatred in his little Roman studio: the office-furniture was brand-
new---olean, shining wood and steel; a typing table which could be
wheeled about, bookshelves behind glass, a swivel chair, a long
desk with easy sliding drawers that looked REXER oustom-built for
dead routine; a lamp that could be turned in any direction and
sent out a blinding light. None of it was used. A few books
lay in the shelves, légal textbooks wi th slips of coloured paper
in them as markers. Eaoh morning he left the flat at nine or ten
on a tiny motor-scooter, whirling through the streets blindly,
his stare tense, his head uplifted, as he weaved in and out of
the traffie and skidded. And always there was a slight fastidious
look of recoil on his 1ips, helped by his slim nose.
He had studied musio far five yesrs---a fact he kept very
quiet about at first. He had put all his piercing and stern
southern will into that musio, then given it up with disgust.
This subject, too, he always brushed aside. 'I wasn't good
enough!' he always said. And with a long sigh, through cracked


lipe, a cigarette stuck una omf ortably between them, he would
say, 'And I had to live---earn money!' Actually, he earned very
little. The commissions were few. He was more or less an app-
rentice to another man, whom he despised and who laughed at him.
Angelo hurtled back to the flat as early as possible, soon after
noon, and plunged into musio at once---the floor shook with his
powerful loudspeakers. And he would pace the room, puffing air
with quick gasps through his cigarette-smoke, aquinting, coughing,
moving his shoulder in a charac teristic little hunching movement.
He would talk---suddenly. The nast iness of the morning vould
slo owly be forgot ten.
In those firet weeks he rev ealed Verdi to me for the first
time. He made me listen to Il Trovatore. Then I think it was
Ia Forza del Destino and La Traviata. The shere horror of I
Trovatore---the absolute strokes in the qusio that are like strokes
of fate---he pointed out as he strode up and down. He,had a way
of oanduoting the music and standing over you making wild faces,
whioh was irritating but at the same time the thing that kept you
alive to every bar. Later, in Paris, he grew ashamed of this
warmth, which Franc ine told him irritated péople: but without it
he wasn't really himself. In those first days he used to grip
me in the arm at a stirring passage, squeeze me right to the bone,
with a sharp, thrilling glèam in his eye. He reelly became Verdi.
Verdi was Italy. Inside Angelo they were united; and, as he
said with disgust, so little of it was in the Italy-you saw all
round you. For me he began a séarch into Verdi which is 11ké
going into a vast unknown landscape little by little; and even
after eight years this search seoms hardly to have started.
He found things for me that I thought couldn 't possibly exist in
life---even in mus ic to whioh I'd always gone as a child with my


last insoluble problems. o
He took me into his own real country through Verdi---to
the basio harmony where all the colours and heat and strong
undertones of Italian life were joined and integrated like
the unfolding of a story that had never been heard before in
the history of the world but had always been there, latent in
the hot, golden dawns, a breathtaking spell at the centre of
things, a sun like a gong in a cave. There was something basic
and final and unchangeable about Verdi, as if he got down to the
first tissues of natural feeling, in the clattering first bars
and the gradual unfolding of his musio that seemed never to
hesitate but Rinays contain the fullnesa of eaoh moment of
sensation in depth, always burnished wonderfully like
copper,
with warm, sa turating light, thrilling with a peculiar life-thrill
that touched all the souroes of taste and smell and sight. That
was the first impression hé gave me---in the terrific clanging
introdue tion to La Trovatore, and in the themeor the gypsies that
contained the sparkling
of their
and the
add
light
fires,
heat
cicadas
round them, and to give the glint of their ear-ringe and sbow their
bright, dark eyes, and carry off their fine, fatal, unswerving
passion that knew nothing but its object and never the consequ-
/to P'179 a.


-ences or future and so plunged into the singeing firos of
providence in the end. And thora vas alraya ingelo conducting---
peering suddenly into my eyes, quickly pointing sonething out,
clutching his hands togethor, pacing round, Whilo Fronc ino sat
quiet and still, letting it all breok over her like the sea.
Yeers before, I'd heard Verdi's Roquiem in London, but it
wàs one of those concerts you can't say anything about because
the music never seems to get home to you; you're HRe an on-
lo3ker, in a strange numbnoss of spirit. The nusic just floated
avay in a groat block of sound while I sat matching it disappoar.
But it left ne aftervards in a divided stato. I didn't just put
it aside'as a concort I'd nissed.)
m ea to
It wasn't just the concert. Tho Roquion
was too---real for ne, thon. I rasn't old enough, I think.
It needs tremendous
because
hao
maturity
tho pulse and year ning
of real religion, hich we aren't uoed to. de aron't used to
religion as tho rcal burdon of sorron and anguish in lifema-in
our lifo. Ne're all a bit protostant. Religion can be a
sorrowful and anguishing spectacle--the Paosion---te arrive soonor
even at Bach's St. Latthen Fassion, it is 30 much more in our
experience. But Terdi's Requten is a kind of argument straight
from life; it is more Catholic than anything we know nonadays,
in the church or outside. I don't think it is any easier for
the Italian than it is for tho foroigner. I think this is why
Toscanini, while he did tremendously olomental and true roadings
of the operas, didn't get anywhere noar the Reqdiem. He once
caid he wasn't nature enough for the Bach; but he necded prec-
istby the same st: retoh axt experionce---the same rovolution---
for tho Vordi. I only really heard Verdi's Roquien---it ras
revealed to me for the first tino---in a performance entiroly


by Russians, under an Italian oanductor of Russien origin.
There you got the marvellous anguiah and also terror and love
that seemed to come out of the night, in lonely voioes that
had no boginning or ond.
So this was my firat real knowlodce of Verdi. More and
nore I got tho sense of a tremendous story unfolding bafore me,
but something I*a never knorn a hint of boforo in ny life-
something tromendous that was inside the music and yet made out
of the nost basia and original souree of lifo, s0 that it cane out
unhositatingly and without preparation; in none of these great
operas was there the alightest preparation for tho next noment
of foeling, only a awift and broath-taking thrust forvard along
the path that seemed to have beon prepared from tho boginning of
time, launching the soul with a torrific invigorating thrust that
svept away every falso or sentimental or even aspiringly spiritual
elenent because it waa Always concrete, always gloning and vivid,
to be touched, never a departuro into attitude or self or vaote-
ful reminiceence, alvays establishing the real World, a World so
rioh that it could be praised and dopiotod and sung every ninute
of every hour for thousends of eternities and yet not be exhausted
or reduced in one particle of its monder.
Like all real art, Verai is hio country at ite noment of
birth and inpact on the world; and because a country is always
atraining avay from ito birth ond botreying it, art almays sounaly
contradicts it as well, always goos in oppocition. Underneath---
or rather, in-a-all Angelo's bitter outpourings about Italy, his
horror of it and outraged nisery, there was the real Italy, that
was complote in him, as it had made ite original impact on the
outside world. And he know England through me, through the same
horror and outrage, it became intimate vith him through me, he


kneu it at tho scul.
You uill often got Italians saying thoy dislike Vordi--
as a mattor of course. It is a sort of socially compelling
remarka It is quite the thing. If you teach aeronautios at
Catania university and happen to bo at dinnor with a narchose
in Kaples a ronark liko that could holp to prove you woren't
uncouth---not the derk, aniffing provinc ial up fron the sauth
who is scoretly gloating over the waiter with 8 llod whito gloves
and over the faded, threadbare ourtaino, it could prove you know
a thing or two. Verdi-opora ployed and sung badly is oapty
bombastio nolodrama, full of vulgor Itolian brio, bohind which
thero is juet self-soaking and a pagan insentienco to othor peoplo.
And this is the Verdi you nant to show you disapprovo of. It is
equivalent to saying you rejoct tho village---the provinoial oho
is always raising his voice and hasn't lcarned the foshionable
solf-
city-restraint yot---the hot, dark, skufonerasted individual
without a fino thought in his hoad or any knowlodge of tho cool,
disciplined, foreign worid Italy has now cone to terms with.
And poor Vordi can be made to represent all that. Ho can be made
into the derk, feared, vulgar past. A little too *loud', you
know; a littlo too 'rough' hero and there; a little too *nolos
dramtict---oll the things you fear you are youreelf. Go a man's
country tries to get its oun back on hine
But of course Verdi is none of these things, though he is loud
and rough and evon melodracatic as the monent of fooling requires,
as tho truth requires. There is alcays this absolute crcated
order in his work uhich deale oith dangerous elemental forcos and
still is unshattered---thie is the astonishing pover in Vordi,
that the whole vorld is about to fall, there io almost too much
diaastor, but tho narvellous order remains unbroken, there is


the absolute continuous faith underneath, mhich all the pagan
forces in the warld can't finally touch. And the Italian who
pleys safe ond rante to climb socially to the nen, cool, disciplin-
ed order of the citizon-world that has come fron abroad (as all
real attitudes come to Italy from abroad), this delicate, cautious,
obcervant creature who ien't quite lost or quite damned---he doesn't
like that elemental thing, he doem't want to play with fire, he's
finished with the Italy that elboas and pushes ita way through
life. He wants a airferent order and poor Vordi is one of the
sccrifices, because Italy can never quite reach that new order,
she can nover give up that inaviable elemental fire that plays in
the eyes of slaves-a---phich you can see in the rarche, on tho Ad-
riatic side of Italy, mixed with desperation and boredom---and
that always destroys any form. It was all taned centuries ago,
but it never really abated---it nas never mastered. And Verdi
did master it, as an artist must. He made a stunning conquest
of this elemental fire---the soed of squalor in Italian life-,
through terrific trials and failures. Only an Italian knocs
nhat endless houre and days of acspair this means. Only one or
too nen acrose the oonturies have the real organic will for it:
their surroundinga give thom no help. There isn't a standard
for them, or an example---only from ebroad. It was the semo
Merganils
with Lanzoni; Angelo told me about his,life once---years and
years of peinful rewriting, to achieve his monument. He hap
Was
to take from life---but all round him life Ens formless; there
was
Was
no Morality---order---groo into it---morality i all rules,
was
outeide, a kind of luxury; 1ife = foless, basioally helpless,
an endless kaleidoscope of sensations gripping thia individdal
and that, hold together only fron the outside, by power---the
police, the church, the foreigner. Right at the bottom, Italion


lifc is pagan.
You could see how Angelo struggled with this elemental and
chaotic fire in himself as vell---it ras particularly strong in
him. It was in his feelings for women. As I say, a noman
wasn't e natural percon in a room for him---in those first days.
She was continuously and unabatingly and proclainingly a voman
all the time she sat there, quite opposite to a man, distirt and
not really free, almeys in the shadow of this fixed relation with
the man. He sas amod, disturbed, painod, thrilled, frightoned
by women in those days. I can remenbor our going to a little.
party togother---it. vas someone's flat olong tho. Via Nomentana;
I can remember him dancing vith a young American voman, a singer
from one of the night-clubs, and to my surprise he was desperately
embarrassed, the sreat poured. out of hie brora and he kept glancing
hung
and smiling at me as they shuffled together, he almost hanging on
to her. It wasn't right for him.. A monan wasn't that for him.
And this vomen---the foreignor---ras a dominant oreature for him:
ame-inspiring as his onn wonen weren't. This little party, whore
people sat and talked nicely and quietly, sipping. their drinks and
smoking and nibbling sandwiches, in corners and on settees, a mix-
ture of Italian and Englich and Arerican poople,
nas too open and relaxed and easy for him---that eaeo,
thich is partly indifference to other people, was something he
hadn't leorned, it ras Anglo-Saxon, OZ French, but he hadn't khorn
it in his oan life, he had knoun conversazioni and student-parties,
but he didn't know this casual world shore sax and drinking and
talk wore all taken easily and elowly and politoly in a kind of
insoparable trinity shioh sometimes ended in disaster but not.
publicly at least; the party always went on, s0 to speak.
There vas sonething delicate and good-willed in the air at that


party, and Angelo seemed to thrive on this and understand it,
yet at the same time he felt unworthy of 1t; though what he felt
unworthy of I didn*t know at the tt me. The bis, pleasant, long-
haired, smiling singer, with her bare arms and low-neoked dress,
beemed to intimidate him and take away his usual direct and in-
quisitive approach to people-w-his questionnaire-self. He aidn't
know her name, he wasn't introduced to her, but there he was in
her thick arms, being led round and round the little room in a dance
heta never done before, With a sound instinot, Angelo was alwaya
formal. He never allowed himself a moment 18 casualness with
another person, even a friend: in clothes or habits. He let
fly with his mouth some times, into a soorching vulgarity, mostly
towards Francine, but that was as far as it went. He seemed not
to trust his own path: a decided ma mer, dress, walk,, speech,
were his crutch. There was that wonderful photograph of Angelo
as a student which I looked at again and again when Francine ahowed
it to me: ERREE EEE such a total absence of bohemianism in it,
none of the middle-elass cancer. And there was so much of the
old world: it took my breath away at first---Angelo going into
a concert at the Teatro Argentina with an umbrella in his hand,
his tie s0 straight, his head lifted, musi ngly and painfully,
with a sort of strained delicacy, his eyes narromed slightly,
his frown fastidious and clear-out, while he was caught by the
flashlamp.
In this formality his lonely and inimitable nature stood
out much better than it would have otherwise, In that photograph
he seemed to be walking right out of thé hot Roman world of that
time---a Rome whose streets were drenchod with brilliant, stifling
sunlight, not thick with traffio as now, though perhaps noisier
than now; a village-Rome, lazy, undisturbed, very southern, a


tiny city on two sides of a Bluggish river, its population less than
half what it had been in ancient times; without the tall, pastel-
shaded blooks of flats on the outskirts, but with villas mong trees;
a Rome where leaves floated down in the fall and stayed where they
were; whose contre, round Piazza di Spagna, as far as thé Piazza
venezia at one end and the Piazza del Popolo at the other, straggling
along the river in narrow, mediaeval streets towards the ghetto
opposite Trastevere, was still in a southern sleep. And Angalo
Beemed to be stepping out of that hot, chaotic, bright world into
the dimness of the theatre's foyer for musio: form.
were
When we alone together he talked about women. They were olose
to music in one way: a whole world of half-forbidden sensations,
formed and finished for him to goggle at. The subjeot hatnted and
pained him. Just the thought of the smell of a Homan would start
him off. He talked about their hair, their feet---how he liked
kissing their feet, softly, and going slowly upwards---and their
hips, how rounded theyware, bigger than their sh oulders, and their
breasts that were unfolded suddenly like a glimpse of heaven,
herdly bearable. Sometimes it was an actual woman we'd met.
was she too emall? tochippy? too twee? too commanding? too
passive, perhaps? Or it might be the one imagined creature who
was always in his mind---the most beautiful of all women who
filled the room with every hungry desire when she walked in,
and who made the men stop and gasp in the streets. There was,
in fact, one very beautiful Roman girl in our oirole who nearly
fulfilled his expectations: and he stared at her, he olung to
her hand, he gazed at hor bosom 80 alosely that he seemed to
have fallen asleep, amiling and gasping and sweating funtil
everybody was laughing.


There was always a feverish and troubled desire in Rome, a
gnawing and obstinate passion that was only contained by its being
so fleshly, without mental sympathies. Only the lânguorous,
yearning flesh---on hot afternoons behind olosed shutters, in cars
at night (making them tip and roll slightly. as you walked past
them), under the trees in the parks, in a contaot that was sudden
and compelling---could quell this destre for a moment: but nothing
in daily lire, in people; no dream. Everything referred to the
flesh. That was how Rome combined heal th and, boredom so perfeotly.
In that provinoial world the gazzo---the prick---was an import-
ant and proud possession from the earliest childhood. It was the
man's special acquisition, something by God's grace whioh set him
apart from the other half of the speoies, and superior to them.
Male and female were the fundamental division of life: you talked
of your children as *the male* called Antonio and 'the female'
called Paula, not the boy ond the girl. And the female at birth
was a dieappointment. A male was a great cocasion. There even
lingers in Italy a sense of the woman as a handmaid of duty, and
the man as a kind of guest, waiting for his food and calling for
his wine. It is an almost Arab sense of women, sometimes.
It goes deep into the ancient world.
And in this world the easy freedom of the northern woman
looked like the most blatant sexual challenge o The shere open-
ness and unguardedness of the north in sexual affairs was like
a maddening invitation to sez at any time. There are no X corna
in the northern world, no ouckold*s horns, no such thing as
first piclure.
infidelity because everything is free: this is the/varston of
the northern world that the southern provincial makes at his
first astonished glance. He doesn (t see the key to that free-
dom, which is invisible. He doesn 't readily perceive the invisible 0


As Angelo told me, the Italian doesn't see the *invisible man !
inside another person. It seems so easy for grim to invade thet
northern world---snatch some of its prizess
We saw less and less of each other after Melli and I. started
to live together. Once we met by chance at S. Felice in Ciroeo,
by the sea, one Sunday afternoon, and nodded to each other like
pleasant acquaintances.
Thenever we did meet in Rome it was stiff and unsatisfactory.
The old warm speech was gone. It seemed to be because we were
four now--two couples. Yet more seemed to be promised, beaause
of that. We just waited, let things slide.
A few weeks after Melli arrived Franoine took me aside and
spoke to me in a rasping and bitter wey,.saying I seemed to have
lost myself, I never visited them now, and when I did. there was
no longer the old passion in what I said; I held back, she said,
and seemed cautious and didn't give myself; what had happened to
me? I couldn't tell her I was changing myself, as.Angelo would
later on in Paris---because I didn't know, I remember we were
walking down the hill towards St. Peter's, just the two of us o
and she was very angry, pale and quivering slightly. All.I did
was shrug myshottitetn and smile at her; she walked into a ahop
and that was good bye. Angelo, as always in this kind of argument,
kept apart. He didn't say a word before or after, in agreemant
with Francine. Any friction of that kind seemed to make him
feel E a tired. Anyway, there vasn 't a word between us
for many months.
Melli and I went on living on the outskirts of Rome, making
bit
and
lives
our first
together timorously, building up
by bit
day by day what had been smashed in both of us. There nas no
time for anything else.. Then suddenly I phoned Angelo one dpy


to see how he was, To my relief he made a ery of delight, and
tixing
we were soon mking a. date. le all met again. But really it
was the same as before. There was no development. Nor was
there real ease, either, no real acceptance. The first flush
of our friendship---hen Angelo thought we coula make a wonderful
group together---was clearly overa Now we were separate again.
Really Angelo and. I should have seen eech other alone all the
timé. Then Rome would have tolerated it: a male friendship was
within its traditions; above all, within Angelo's traditions.
Women excited and divided him too much. He could never get used
to their being in the same rooms Their presence---like a heady
smell---meant only one thing. But he'a ohosen another world by
marrying a girl from Paris. And Melli and I belonged to that
other world by birth. So excluding the women wasn't possible.
Yet anything less than that was made impossible by Rome *
My only enjoyable moments with Angelo after that, in Rome, were
when the women weren' tt there--in a café, sitting in his car while
he poured out his C cmpahinta againet Italy. But these were
snatched moments: they were really only urgent plans for him to
get away from Italy. He al ways asked my advice: should he leaver
And I said yes.
In our friendahip, even later in Paris when it seemed to have
enteredca more northern equilibrium, there was always a negative
element that seemed to o ome from him alone. He never really
found his eese with us a Hè never really accepted us, because he
néver aocepted himself in our presence. He would be atease for
a moment, then it would be broken again: it produced a sort of
constipation, a most int imate physioal refusal to give, in all
of us. Nothing could be taken for granted. - Bedause you woren 't
accepted in your intimate nature. There was a touch of the


German in it, as if Frderick II the Hohenzollern, who after all
had given Sicily her form in the middle ages, had left some of his
oharacter as well.
Slowly we began to see how Francine suffered: and, on the
contrary, how she needed his coldness to suit her own reserve,
even While it wreoked her. I had always been too busy with my
friendship with Angelo to understand her: she'd been amotheted
under musio and books and long confessions that went on five and
eight and ten hours, through meals and endless cups of tea add
coffee. In Rome he had yearned for other women: that was one of
his big 'problems * there. Even with Francine in the street he
oraned round 1f he saw an attractive woman, and stood. still. But
that was over in Paris. The Parisian woman taught him respect.
And he gave it grudgingly and slowly: but it cost him his desire.
That aohing, squeezed lust seemed to go.
He was alwaye ahanging position towards Francine, in the
intimate things: one minute he wanted her as he'd never wanted
her before; then all he wanted was a break with the family.
She was already, by nature, a nervous person, fragile and quick,
especially gaick to doubt herself; and she doubly needed a resting
place in her intimate life. Really he was alone, as perhaps only
a Sioilian, in his strange conneotion to the ancient Greek world
with its stark absolutes and ideals disembodied from daily 1ife,
is alone.
There was no development in our friendship even when I thought
there was, for this reason. For a long time after they'd moved
to Paris---for about two years---we heard hardly anything from
them; just one or two letters. They couldn't see us, he ex-
plained in his letters, beoause they were living 'in such


miserable circumstanoes.' For the time being. In Angelo's
world, I realised, people didn't show themselves to each other
in misery. Only -when they could cut a passable tigure did they
show themselves, evon to their olosest frionds. We just read
his letters and left it at that, not qiite understanding. He
wrote that they were waiting for their house to be ready: they'd
bought a little house. Then we should C ome * - And stay with
them. He seemad to need the carefully prepared soene, If a
scene wasn't properly laid it was a disaster for him. As it
turned out years later, our friendship ended whon the scene wasn't
sufficiently laid: wa bungled our arrival in Paris, and were in
a désparate state. At the moment when we needed his consoling
talk most, it stopped..
The world he came from had absolutely no sympathy in it,
no love. It was the olassical world, really. And he seemed to
become more classioal as he grew older. The leavening influences
of Italy---Which are basically those of the ohureh---seemed to
cease. He became more stark, more crisp and slim, more pieroing,
more direot, with a great air of loneliness and desertion round
him, as I imagine the Sicilian landscape to be. His soul burned
and penetrated. It didn't communioate, excépt in tiny bursts.
It didn't console, nor was it oonsolable. It was like the app-
earanoe of an ancient Greek Boul---eager, gleaming, unsympathetio.
And together with this his daily life was more squalid than
before. He was squalid at meals-w-snatching at. his food, guzzling
his wine greedily. His teeth were black from smoking, He
made sneering remarks to himself, under his breath. He' shot
to'P. 193;


insulting glances at Melli, as if to pay her out for any love
he might have spent on her. Francine oried endlessly, the
tears would pour quickly down her face and disappear again,
apparently unseen by him. He was like the land and sky of
Sioily, I told him at one of our last meetings: 'You're getting
less and less of a person,' I said to him half-joking, 'you're
a landsoape, as every man mist be, I suppose, if he develops
properly---he must grow into the landscape of his country---
and you're the rivers and hard rooks and long, deserted beaches
of Sicily, you're the torrid nights---the pitiless sea-e-t'
And he laughed in his strange way, like a deer ooughing, only
high-pitched, his eyes almost closedwith their usual languor.
I read once that in Sicily there was great squalor among
people, whenever they were together, an innder squalor, and that
only if you get away from them, outside the villages and homes,
in the vast, still countryside that sweeps down to the sea, do
you get to the real soul and origin of Sicily. It is hardly
a human soul.
Yet Angelo's Maze had a wonderful softness. Andan his
long elegies---about death, how senseless it made everything,
about his drudgery at the offioe, and his shamed horror whenever
he was with a group of people to *enjoy' hims elf---there was
such a soft regret that it was like musio.


He nas most at éase uhen he was alone with Melli and me
together. He talkod mostly to Molli---it was quité difficult
for me to get a point home. Yot he wasn*t at ease with Helli
alone. He needed us both---and thon all the dry, stark, lonely
side in hin flowed avay. He ras on extraordinarily loving person.
Or rather, he had enormous capacities for love---thoy wero latent
like hot
that
energies
must find a direction: but the theme that
lovo prosupposes---a thome of respact, basically---masn't thore;
you have to know whore you stand, to love; you have to have an
imege of the humen creature, planted alnost at birth. The con-
sistenoy was laoking. And our cansistenoy tired him--as 1t vill
do any Itolian. He needed it, it ras a haven for him, but he
changed too rapidly and pholly'ever to share it. His one con-
sistency was truthfulnéss, and this is chere he differed from all
the Italians I know. He had none of their ciroumspection and
deep instinet for canpromise. Ho was circunspect in situations--
fighe
ho waen't the one to go out and nt anybody. But,
SELEEE =
I nevor knew him
utter one word of false account. a He delved into his onn life
with an extreordinary stark clarity, just as if ho were rocks and
the dim blue sea, ond only had to say what was thore. He talked
about Francine in the sane way, naking her shudder. Nothing was
spared this stark, clear gaze simply because ho knew nonother way:
it casn't on effort but his natural state. This io a very extra-
ordinary thing, ond I hed nover met it before in my life--an in-
capacity, a rooted and very nearly phyeical incapacity, for mny-
thing but the truth. Perhaps this is uhy so mich has come from
Sicily to Italy by way of uriters, languago, strongth. *Sicilian*
is rather a term of oantempt among the continental Italians.
It moans tho crooked, vulgar, bestial peasant; or southern


hysteria; or a lost, hot, deserted landscape. But I sometimes
feel it is the actual reality of Italy---Itely's vhole truth.
You hear people say that wherever Sicilians are together, on the
same lovel of society, there is hate. But there is no love in
Italy, either. There is sentiment, which the Sicilian doean't
practice. Though even here, in Italy, it stops at sentiment,
without action being influenced. There ien't love be tween the
sexes; no love, I meàn, that is planted almost at birth; what
love comes about---and you see it sometimes, especially in the
poor---is from offort. There is no natural background of love
and respect. Thero. are at titudes, pretensions, centiments.
But the actuality isn't so different from sicily, though you
hardly see it on the surface; you can live in Italy ten years
ti thout knowing about it.. I think thore is the same sterk,
fierce, lonely and unpitying world underneath; only the church
has softened the clasoical element, and with it the element of
truthfulness, and with that the courage. It. substitutes a kind
of circumspect, hidden courage which con be recognised by its
shore corrupt tenacity. For this reason, the opposite world
to Sicily is not to be found in Tuscany, in Floronce, in the
Romapgna, as one might think because of certain northorn traits,
but in Rome, through the closencss of the church: there you find
softness, compromise and a subtle lack of pride; in the Sicilion
pride gleams like a frightening round, as . it did in all tha pagan
peoples. But in continental Italy Chis pride it Btill there;
in fact, it governs the actions of life in an intimate way, as
a fear of cutting a poor figure; it is perhaps the one stable
oriterion in Italian behaviour, the one means to self-oxamination;
only it adjust 8 to circumstences, it is rarely direct and obvious,
though fascien encouraged it---the forvard thrust of the ch in;


usually it goes softly, tempering the truth and weaving endless
cobrebs of prevarication and embellishment---it is the thing that
creates the sentiment and pretonsions; and it can come out as
the little act of disprezzo--the treachery that oan never bo dis-
covered. But in the Sicilian the pride is still a atark, gleaming
concern, unflinching and consistent; sometimes it is called ariot-
ocratic, by romantic peoplo; but is the opposite of any aristocrat-
ic quality, because its cause is a lurking sense of smallness.
And it is direct. It docsn't try to undornine the onemy subtly,
gnawing away at the fabric of opposition; this is more the Italien
way. It kills, outright. It Governs by fear, openly and clear-
ly, as you see in the mefia. The mafia isn't a game, much less
an exclusive bunch of criminals; it enters into every form of
Sic ilian life, intimately; everybody knocs about it, though he
might not say aoke It is the fece of Sicilian pride.
Angelo always nanted to come and see us alone, perhaps
because he had to be alone to be hinself. It was how he rant tod
to present hinself to us, wi thout Frano ine - Perhaps this was
why the friendship was suddenly destroyed. Le arranged to go
to France, that last time, with Franoine, not him; she did all
the preliminaries. It became, suddenly, a kind of fanily
mat ter. And there he suddenly felt botrayed. He chose to be
absolutely alone. He seemed to say, *Very nell, if these are
my friends, I shall have none . 1 And on that last visit he went
out of his way to ahon me how different, not hom close, na vere;
in nearly avery conversation. Then, in a little burst, thore
rould be the old dream betveen us again. It was a distraught
and sickening month. In the first few days WG were with him,
when Francine ras away, he sat with us at table and said in a
00 ompletely exhausted voice, 'You see a destroyed man in front


of you.' His ohole life seemed to have collapsed. He W as find-
ing his whole life in Parin impossible. His health had gone sev-
wese
eral times: thore varnEse weeks in thich he lay in a RF
feverish torpor, thin and sallow-pale. But he gleaned brighter
in the ruins. It was more like his onn world. He didn't really
want anything eleo. The ruins made 1t possible for him to be
desited
alone---they offered the now
stark comparison between their
oun
en disorder and hisyinvieible form, which he rehearsed every day,
alone
at the rop *e Rouse,
more and more, SA in his room, at % little desk he'd bought. The
domms tairs
room ugskatxax with the gramophone and books, vhere me'd spent
6o many hours, all four of. us, talking and laughing and drinking
tea, with this gloning inner Vorld before us which re could never
deceribe, because it was like something encestral---that room be-
came dead: it looked more. like a waiting-room even than tho one
urenk
in Rome; it was diemal and fronzy; no life eeemad on in
furm
it any moro. Ho seemed to have chosen his invisible EE onco
Came from
and for all: and---in the terms of the world he betenge : EE Om
this meant
death - humanity in him.
Then he came to England on his first visit alone he seemed
to bury his head againet my surroundings at first. It was
strango. As the throe of us nere pasoing the gaunt, dismal build-
ing whore I vent to school at the age of four,. and Helli was
pointing it out to him, he turned away abruptly and said some-
thing grudging about not wanting a biography of me. But later,
when he'd seen the home where I wes born, he was different.
He was even loving and gentle. But there cas some essential
respect missing all the time: some basic curiosity in people.
There always had been.
And when ve were valking along the main road near my home,
with its purring trolley-buses and sombrely brilliant shop-


windows, and the dark side-streets with their peeling paint
and dusty-looking bushes, he had much the same kind of ansrer
whon I said something about the 'industrial horror'. He said,
'0h, you're obeossed with the industrial horror:' I began to
realice when he said this that ho hadn't the slightest koy to
half of the things I*d becn saying ovor the years about thoce
streets. In a way, ho did see---vith his sure instinots. But
it cas only the 'sadness' he saw, putting it next to the 'sadness'
of his oun world in Sicily. In his way of perceiving things
the two worlds met. This is hon he judged overything---nt its
kernel. He knew nothing about my vorld except at the point of
eternity, uhero it touched his orn, in the same numbness of soul
but with different soenery. Once I talked about a visit Melli
and I had nade to Poscarg, where there was a bit of indist ry--
on the Adriatic side of Italy; I said I'd noticed the beginnings
of an 'industrial talk' and industrial forns of body* in the
people there, nhich I thought could never heppen to Italians.
And he had brushed this aside as nell. I think he ovaluated it
Ih me
as a moral horror; that 18,/basically romanticism; therefore,
a middle-class attitude. Ho didn't soe the actual -
problems involved which Blake and evory real vritor after him
industnis
had talked about. He secmed to soe/ in the classical nine-
teenth century say---as en experiment justifiod by its production;
thus Re
and, attributed to me the classical ninteenth-century recoil (by
exactly the samo class of poople). )---romentic horror ot the 1dea
of experiment. In this as in many other things he secmed middle-
olass. You could even say thet his punotiliouoness and formality
rere nidale class. But in fact thie wasn' 't G0. It nas only hds
onormous distance from any of the birth-pains of the northorn vorld
he now lived in. He san its fruits and liked them better than


provincial squalor, as most Italians will. Cherever he ront he
chose acutely middle-class friends; quite often rich
ones, too.
That came from a problem in his own vorld, as rell:" he nas E much
in flight from 'vulgarity', and in his world vulgarity was reprosen t-
ed by the poor and uneducated. So it approximated to a northern
middle-class attitude without being it.
Only much later, on his last visit to England, did he sudden-
ly realice---through his food-exporionce at the "fashionable'
store---what this 80-called industrial horror might nean, boyond
a romontic attitude. He suddenly kneu it nas samething you
couldn't brush aside, but on the contrary it cauld brush aside
you---as it had done whole populations, whole hopes of a lifet ime,
the whole héalth of bodies.
And only slovly did I bagin to realice that this invisible
ekeleton of schedule that had come into being In England didn't
exist in Italy---or Germony---even whore there were industries.
That is, I realised that it ras a lifo-characteristic, which you
find in the Anglo-Saxon countrios and also in Franse. I begen
to realise that it rasn't simply tho hunan accompanimont of in-
Rad
dustry. It was the soul, porhaps, that brought induotry into
being, but it wasn't necessarily brought into being by industry.
I began to feel that industry could nevar have started in Italy
or Gerneny, for sone reason; though---just for that reason-
it could be exploited better there, because it posed no harror.
That I learned slonest of all about Angelo and me was porhaps
the greatest difference there was botween us, which constantly
divided us from each other unawares---our attitudes torards the
working people. For me they cere a kind of paragon of moral
behaviour and cleonliness; they were society's safe anchorago,


really holding things toge ther: But for him they (as peasants,
since a Working
exists in
people barely
Italy) seemed to represent
a baokground of darkness and ignorance. That wasn't the whole
story. Those people were basically of higher moral worth for
him, too: but only at the end, at the last frontier, so to speak,
Rad bem
as they mere for Verga, the Sioilian writer, after he'a finished
his life on the mainlend of Italy, at Milan, the northernmost city.
was
But it la the moral morth of ignorance. And I think it is the
same in Germany. You get the same distanco from the loner poople,
in the middle olasses. There is really a total psyohological
gulf, as there isn't in France and the Angl-saxon countries.
The lower-class background is essentially the dark, feared past
of ignorance end above all superstition---to an extent we can
hardly conceivo.
This is why theretonds to be one speeoh for writing end de-
loaiming in Italy and Germany, and another for ordinary talk.
There is a rhetorical speeoh and a human speech, whereas in
France and the Anglo-Saxon world the époken and the written speech
are the same---literature is simply people talking, and if they
use a special language this means they arè preoious and false.
If you want to be healthy inyour writing you have to be truth-
ful and natural, and talk as you sould to your wife or a friend.
Choosing nords too carefully, riveting up and tinkering with
your centences like little bits of jowellery or matcinery, is
provincial in our world. But a tremendous journey has to be
taken by the Italian or German writer before he can achieve any-
thing like this eese, mhich we inherit naturally. Tho snares
of vulgarity---banality---are always in front of him, for the
simple reason that any special speech always risks the rhetorical,


of which banality and vulgarity are the borels, so to speak;
if you talk too high and lofty you risk giving the impression
not of being extra-olean but of having perhaps a stink in your
hida
ponts, uhich you are trying to Red
This is the other side--
the arse-side---of measured and solemn and carefully Worked-out
sentences. What happens if you belch suddenly or let out a fart?
You're caught! So it is better to start off natural if you can;
and for the provincial culture this is easier soid than done.
That 1s natural? There is no natural way of speech that passes
for overy occasion; eesontially, there ie no socioty, no sold-
idarity between people. Above all, the pervasive tenderness you
get in people in France and the Anglo-Saxon countries, which comes
from an intimate scciety that has eroun orgonically over the cent-
uries, is mostly absent in the provinoial world. Tho tenderness
is lacking because respect betneen people is lacking, basioally.
Society in the proper sense---and therefore literature---means
reapect. And in the provincial countries respect is reserved for
power. Respect is shown to people with pover, or to people wh en
they shom power---not necessarily money-pover, but any sort of
human power. The respect ion't for the creature in hineelf,
who shares rights with overyone else. There is no monsieur or
mister, essentially. A man with power tends to keep it and he is
in Ilaly and
expected on the whole to abuse it, He
naturally disposed
Hotan't
to share it or disouss it with those who don't have 1t. And-m
unlike in the rest orthe Luropean vorld---power attracts the humble
and intelligent, they find ready excuses for 1t even when they are
its victims; while in our vorld power at once creates its rebels.
Rbellion in the provincial co untries isn't a tradition, it has no
form and excites no respect: on the contrary, it is chaos. The
wild, enbittered assailant of pover would be quite as unjust if


he had any himself. He hates it because he wants it and lacks
it. Vhereas, in our vorld, there is a form and tradition in
rebellion; there is a natural stir of indignation in us, whioh
brings a flush of freedom to our cheelcs, and to be real thia met
be on behalf of other people, with whom a are in solidarity not
thr ough idnetity of interest but through belief; the man of spirit
tends to excite adniration in our norid. But in the provincial
vorld, espeoially in Germany, he is simply insulting: he excites
diedain. This is fu ndamentally because each man is alone.
In the provincial culture you are expected to be vorking for your-
self---you flush with indignation at a challenge to your own int-
erets, but hardly for anything else. Self is the basic reservoir
of idees and struggles, while in our world a man in his utmost
solitude is still inside a community of souls whom he can address.
If you vant to go your own path in the provinoial countries you
have to be a real Heroules--both to avoid' the morld round you
with its stings, and an excessive solitude. If you want to be
distinot, as a rriter or doctor or anything else, you have to so
aga inst everything round you, you have to choose a kind of blood-
less and terrible 1solation uhich we in our norld oan haraly
imegine. Te are wrecked in our rorid; much more so, in an open
and public way. But we are always paid that essential respect,
of heving the right to ohoose for ourselves. But in the prov-
incial culture that respect shioh should aocompany every stage
of lifo like music isn't there. You will lose your grip on
morality---almost certainly---because you can't invent morality
alone, it has to come through solidarity with others, I it comes
povincial
with speech. Alone we aren't enough. But in thati vorld your
first st and has to be alone. You are like a person at the edge


of a vast flood trying not to get his feet wet---haunted by vul-
garity, banality, madness, chaos, self-obsession, all the pitfalls
of tho creature who is denied society.
I only know one olear example of the same thing in England and
that is the writer Joseph Conrad. He was brought up in the other
tradition, close to the German world, but he used English. So you
get a glimpse of it through the way the language changes under his
pen. First of all, it isn't English. It isn't us. Then you
read Conrad you feel you are reading a kimi of translation without
it having the disadvantages of a translation: you are 1istening
to a real man, only translated in some way e And because his concepts
are for us lofty---that is, they begin not in a human situation but
in the reflections of a lonely and oultivatedmon---there 16 a terr-
ible vulgarity in his work now and then whioh you never get in an
English writer of the same extraordinary powers * You see it some-
times when he talks about people of the lower olasses, aven when he
is admiring them. They aren't quite whole. He ean't quite see
them. They're half oaricatures, half serious sketches. The
barmaid in one of his short stories has large bosoms---no name;
she is Miss Blank. She has no speech when we go into the bar-
no light little gestures; though we've beon going into this bar
for years and she knows us well. She seems looked in her low
status. And this is really the status of vulgarity---a kind of
blind inner ugliness and smallness: essantially, she hasn 't got
beyond primitive evaouation-diffioulties---her sweat probably
she
let out a fart through shere lack of proper
stinks,
might
is at hhe
control. This is probably what provincial vulgarity
root---something to do with evacuation, with the question of
primitive control. It reminds me of Angelo's frequent recoil
from people---his nose lifted slightly with distadte, from the


impression of stink. The barmaid isn't due, in other words,
for Conrad's respect. But in an Inglish as in a French story
she wald have a neme, she would have little original mannerisms
that seem to come out of a great organic culture and civilisation;
she would be a living element in. the story. She mould have respect.
She sould be in a society---though the writer might snub her and
think of her as a lon element. The essential human respect would
still be there. For Conrad it was a different question: he was
only stating the values and standards to which he belongod, and
to which for him literature belonged, and to which this bermaid
certainly didn't balong. He wasn't being a snob, just a writer:
by being that, he was at once separate from the elements of ign-
the barmaid. For us this is loftiness and
oranoeg)in
anobbery,
but in the other tradition it is a real antithesi8. thile the
language of the common people feed literature in England and
France, while it is the fount and womb of all speech, it means in
the provincial co untries mainly the parochial idbom. I have heard
an Italian vriter say that he always tries to speak in 'correct'
Itelien, and that talking to the common people 1s becoming for him
like talking a 'foreign lenguage : There isn't the slightest
snobbery in that. It is just en aoknowledgement of the fact
that in the provincial world society begins with the eduoated:
lic. thereas in the metropolitan countries it is alr ready there long
before E eduoated stary, in the working people and the labourers
as in the higher classes, often more in the lorer than in the
higher. Bach class in the metropoliten world is far from evac-
uation-problems, or vulgarity, and there are inherited forns of
tenderness and respect which have nothing to do with ordinary
which are,
social politeness (ir anything, greater in the provincial


world). Gtendhal once said of the Germans that they were too
lacking in modesty to be tender, and the same could be said of
the whole provincial culture, the more so the further south you
go, until in Sicily you arrive at a world shere each man is a law
to hinself, hemmed in only by fear of athor nen's pover, sametines
scheming to assert hinself, with the resources of silence and isol-
ation, so that 'respect '---fear----ill one day be shown him in
turn.
I ehall never forget Angelo sitting vith five or six other
people in the garden of that little house near Paris, at our last
meeting; all the others were Frenc h, by origin or upbringing.
And he sat lon in his deck-chair, a wan and terrible expression
dying
on his face, like
a HE his nose aquline and thin,
aman,
his eyes dark and half-closed and threatening, with the shero ex-
haustion of the afternoon---of being with other people. Yet
for the rest of us---each of us fairly shy, in his way---it was
a congenial and easy afternoon, with that long inconsequontial
hum of leisure that is so beautiful on a hot summer aay, in a
garden. I could see what an enormous, and invardly hysterical,
offect it had on him; just the step necessary to talk to someone
else seemed to need a huge offort in him far beyond shyness or
any social reluctance; he racn't shy. Each time, it soened to
mean the creation of society all over aga in, from soratch. It
meant a conscious performence of some kind. You could feel it
in the way he used the word cretini, too; the rest of the rorld
cas always a cretin. He was always trying to persuade his freands
to pierce the enormous mists of oretinism all round them. It was
right, he was less of a cretin---but it made one giddy. Vas the
saying of it enough? Was that all there waa to be said for the
great buli of creaturehood? And his French friends recoiled


from this, while attracted by the appeeranca of certainty.
Partly it was a sense of the happy few, like Stendhal's, and part-
ly it mas this other thing---a distaste for the ignorant, shuff-
ling peasant-mass, with their primitive problems of control.
Perhaps that was how he saw the whole rorld, even the northern
vorld---in terns of that peasant-mass; obsessed more and more
by tho problem of vulgarity. It was certainly on his face more
and more, in those last days, eapecially when ho met people for
the first time. It came out most sharply when he tas talking
to Helli one eftornoon, after a sad and tense lunch when sechad
had absolutely nothing to say to each other. Betneen murmuring
and cursing to himself he said to her that of all the thousands of
people in e concert hall listening to musio only a hand-full,
people like ourselves, really knew what vas going on or really
experienced anything. He told her this in a soft way, as if
ridding her of an illusion---one of the public illusionsa real
person is expected to gron out, like awe for newspaper person-
alities. But she faght him strongly. She wouldn't have it
that allmthose thousands she'd seen pouring into halls in London
were Just---cretins. There vas something more to it than that.
ind misic was more universal than that. Real understanding
was for the tiny hand-full, but therewas more to what the others
took from it than that. People had far more undretsnading than
he thought, she said. She stuck to hor point, with that flat
and pouting resistance that seemed to ccme from aeons of freedom,
rhile I kept to the eige, prevaricating, letting her fight it cut,
because I had no contaot with him these days. And it was so clear
that the cronds pouring into the concerts tere quite different for
hin---they were more the hordes of the ignorant and brutish. That
was 'mjority* in his morld. A certain tenderness, à certain


dreaming in their faces would I think be lost on him. He
mouldn't see it, perhaps. I remember how he stared rudely at
a young couple---really a boy and girl---in London once, in a
train, and how disconcerted they were. Pity didn't make him
turn avay. They were abashed, and the boy---though Angelo could
hardly have known it---was shocked and hurt, I think. It was
strange: no pity came to Angelo's rescue. There was that final
cold separation from the other human creature. Contrary to
popular suppositions, the coldness betneen people grows the further
suth you go, not vice versa. Only it is never stiffness.
Perhaps in Angelo's world the mass of the people veron't free;
I mean, they weren't seen as free. They were a horde. And one
rednined in thankful and stoio isolation from this horde. You
got those hordes in a Sicilian square, with black suits and black
hats, just staring. Perhaps that was the rorld at the back of
his consciousness---the starved Sicilian vorla where you hate your
equal, and shere society mist mean the conspiracy to obstruot.
And you become more and more haunted by the endless web of this
as th
obstruction, whioh threatens you equally in a friend ay an czopy-
all are enemies basically. I
recembere Arab saying- --a
friend is equal to a thousand enemies. No good, in that world,
could come from people jaining together.
I - saw this again so clearly when we were with a youhg French
couple in a Paris café one evening. He was suffering hell at
this time. He had kept on saying to me, 'I'm completely demol-
ished, you know---this world has finiched me.' Paris seemed
really to have crushed him. And it had brought out his ovn
world in him, more and more. I could haraly recognise him.
He'a been so different in Rome. But then he had told me that
his Roman friends had softened him Bo mch. Thoy'd had a good


influence. At this café it waan't just that he was - formal.
There was something extra---something pained and disgusted. He
seemed engulfed with disgust, and it coloured other people in his
sight. He sgt aloof and straight-backed. They were our frtends -
and he had met then for the first time. And I felt nervous on
their behelf, just as if I mere with a snob and was afraid they
wouldnat come up to his mark. So much scomed to have changed in
him, yet I suppose it wasn't a real change. As he sat there he
was like a man listening to a hundred accusations, mostly about
his dignity. He was all dignity. Nothing else---not thé An-
gelo I knew; he refused to give a glance in my direction, and
when Ispoke he switohed away abruptly. And, being a' great per-
son, he carried it all through outrageously, without proportion,
like a elom. He lifted his head up so that his neck looked stiff
like a giraffe's, and his lips were pursed as if he nere playing
the oboe, he turned stiffly this way and that and also made the
most remarkable little speeches in French, like an essayist with
five hundred words as his limit. They were like school essays.
And he spoke as if he were the centre of all attention, naturally;
not many months before he would have striven hotly for attention.
Much of his self-doubt had disappeared, but with it his softness
had gone, too. We sat at a table near the entrance; Francine
was talking to the girl mostly, while Melli talked to the man.
Angelo and I sat in silence, hooking on to the other conversations
now and then. Every word I said provoked pained recoil in'
him. te had now been together tno or three weeks, and in that
time he must have murmured Basta, basta---enough, enough---to him-
self a hundred times. He had prowled rourid, sonding out shof ts
of invisible hetred, which vent to my stomach like wounds.
But in the silence of that café I began to compare hin


with the rest of us and ask myself where the difference lay;
because he ras quite separate. And it seemed to lie in the
matter of ease. We were easy, our talk was casual and wi thout
rehearsal; again, I don't mean that we veren't shy; simply that
our natural and in-born mode of speech was an easy one. It had
never occurred to me before hon much this was so, but I saw it
now by comparison. re all seemed to have grown up in a kind of
inner society, and Angelo hadn't. If anything, Angolo had less
shyness (an effect of society) than any of us. But he was alone
in a basic way which we weren*t. - And avery word he spoke, per-
haps for this reason, was an act of figura; it was a deliberate
making of an effect---he was cutting a figure. Not boasting,
of course, or anything like that: just arere of the figure he
would be cutting in every vord he spoke. fnd when the rest of
us talked we weren't making figures of any kind; ne were just
listening or asking questions; ; we were visibly passing the time,
in the varnth of company, we were sitting in various relaxed
neys, whereas Angelo was tense, nearly to the point of hysteria,
as I could see. When the rest of us talked there was .no compet-
ition between us e Angelo gave a little speech on Rome---after
the other man had asked him cimply if he had ever lived therc.
I could hardly believe it. The essay wes pedantic and lifeless;
he tried to give a kind of resumé of all the main features of the
city, but in a school-way---cheracter of the people, form of gov-
ernme nt, influence of the church, artistic achiovenon ts. e It
ras ste aggering. And the other man--a business man---looked at
him quietly, then gave it up and turned away. Angelo would have
done muoh better to say Ihate the city' or I love it'; this is
what he would have said in the old days. Aftorwards, when we
mere all atanding outside the oafé saying good bye, Angelo was


at his peculiar Biraffe dignity again; he boned slightly to the
wonan, his lips dry and his eyes coapletely disenchanted---with
BO little charm, so little softness; no feelings for others that-
soever, no living sense of them. A dry, isolated, tortured man
whose thoughts cut 1ike steel. Ind when re got baok to the house
it was the old painful theme---the voman had been a 'eretina'.
You could feel the acful barrenness of the world through him.
The streets outside seemed wind-smept and deserted, terribly
hollow. Yet in other years they'd seemed enchanted, nhen me'd
all nalked arn-in-orn together by Notre Dame or through the
Champs Elysées.
That last vieit to Paris came after nearly ten years of
friendship. Suddenly all the life rolli and I had becn trying
to make in England collapsed and we had to get out fast. There
was no money and we made a big scramble to get out bofore it got
varse. Paria was our first stop: we rould be there a month,
recuporating from Ingland and basking in our friendship, the four
of us, with children cloce by; then we would go on to Rome, to
Angalo
Gice
our flat. Just as ce = had recuperated with us, fron Paris.
But I had an inkling of what was going to happen already
in England. It was a dull sensation as I welked in that lonely
and marvellous gerden where we stayed, like a tiny island between
hideous towns and highways; there was the red-roofed barn at
the end, under elm trees; it was a dull sensation among many
others, since life was falling tp pieces ao quickly and in so
many respects. That was a great year of change. Everyone
else's life seemed to have changed, too. It felt as if reality
had suddenly come back---all over Europe. Hatea shoned through
at last. Things found their proper level. Togother vith the
terrific changes in cur life, Molli and I were calner and more


satisfied. We were ourselves.
It seemed that something had died---some
falsity
hanging over life. New positions had to be taken. It felt
as if an old experiment had died. The change meant
upheavals---Fe went through more than ever before; but they were
in the right direction---they weren't useless suffering but proper,
for the first time.
We were little pawns in this change. Ve just watched.
And the conlapse of our friendship was oneof the things we watched.
It was suddenly before us * But Angelo and I had no differences.
It vas even cool and aware. He was perfectly clear about it in
SLe
the last few moments we saw each other. So was Franc ine e Thy
said he had changed totally from What he'd been a year or so
before. He had to be alone. It was best for us, too. He
said in a quiet voice, in that tone he sometimes had of a -
fatigue and yet clarity, that he had no right to use his friende
like 'objects'. He couldn't make a spectacle of himself---a bad
spectacle, to such close friends. He had to go away because he
wanted to keep our respect for him. His respect for us made him
want to go away. And he uttered one of the most terrible---and
Italian---things I have ever heard: 'I never know what I shall
be the next hour---the next minute.' And this, he added, was
the only way he could live---by facing it. And Franoine had
ac customed herself to it---she went her way while he went his.
It seemed that our relation with them imposed too mich of aform
on their relation with each other. This was why Angelo always
wanted to be alone with us. And it was why the friendship coll-
apsed when we had a thriving relation with both of them for the
first time.
/ to page 211 a-


This happened, typically, in Rome. Angelo and Francine left
Paris before us, for two weeks' holiday in Rome, and were to stay
in our flat, awaiting our arrival. The friendship therefore be-
gan and ' ended in Rome. - This city, which is no more than its
people, brings everything out, into the open. I've always noticed
that. It takes the ambiguity out of every situation; and makes or
breaks it thereby. People bécome olear in' Rome for the first time,
though you may have know them twenty years or more.
The tension between us mounted terrifically in the tiny,
stifiing flat, then broke---and they were both driving eway in
a taxi with their bags, for the last time. He was ill, pale,
feverish. He couldn't bear to live in such proximity to us---80
naked to us. We were calm and happy enough, and thought at first
that the Paris friction must have passed: the chill of feer from
those silent, threanted nights in the French countryside, the sense
of political violence în the air, was over. We were delighted to be
among our own things again.
But Angelo was still locked 1 in his pale, venomous isblation.
He kept to the bedroom with Francine---the door and windors tight
olosed despite the overpowering heat. Sometimes he flew into a
rage and we could he ar things flying about the room, and Francine
crying. Then he emerged: he had to go---they would be better tn
a hotel---it wculd be bet ter for us, too, more coureous---he must
feel free, to come and go as he pleased. But couldn't he feel
ae axhad him .
free with us, of all people? We stared at him in amazement.
No, he just had to go away. And, please, we were to feel no
ranc our.
/ to page 212.


Perhaps the friendship collapeed into its real self.
Perhaps the friendship we Have now---of silence---is what we were
working towards. At the frontier of the invisible, when we
seemed about to become practioal friends and knew the recital of
each other's difficulties by heart, it stopped. He took the
necessary action; but only because it was inevitable, perhaps.
It was a devastating shock, among all the others we had juas had
that
in England. It seemed our chief consolation in 1ife was dedd.
But afterwarde, in a strange way, it was better. There was a
sense of relief; a new sense of freedom which we cculdn't
understand. We both buckled down happily to work again in Rome.
Perhaps Angelo's intuitions had seen this beforehand.
He could only take action from himself; from the state of
his own feelings. In that way, he never used : judgement. He
acted straight from his thoughts; they were his spring of energy.
That was the only way open to him because he had no society in
him. He had to take his immediate, dazzling-clear appraisal
of things, because he was alone, I remember how he desoribed
a young German once---'He's lost his eyes---when he sits at table
he's looking for his eyes all the time---on the floor, under the
table, but they've gone--l And this was an exact description
not because it hit off a charaoteristic of the man but because
it donveyed hia whole approach to things---it showed you at once
an image of his pale, stretched face, that had taken so much
sufferéing without ev er understanding it or penetrating it to
a cause.
Angelo's judgements of other people---or rather, his piotures of
them---were never tempered with sympathy, 80 there was no danger of


sentiment. This is what his friends recoiled from; partly
axked tot
feeling,
they marted sentiment, and partly they were held back by ERRE
*There but for the grace of God go I...* So thore was an
element of courage in Angelo's induitions as well: he didn't
care of the judgement was turned back on him; really, he wasn't
aware that it might be---there was no society in him, as there -
was in his friends. a Suddonly this starkness of his would make
a recoil even in himself, afterverds. I remember we nere in a
village once not far from Paris, buying cekes, and I said to him
in Italian, aidn't he think the shopnoman and her daughter looked
arfully miserable? And he said at oneo, 'Don't deceive your-
self. They heven't got feelings like yours. Don't put your
feelings into them.' I shut up at once, as arzays when I hear
something à - - outside my psyoholagy. And he seemed arare,
self-doubt,
with his lingering sensitive AXaXEENSTE that there was probably
something more to be said. I think there ras as
brilliant delicacy in him which regretted what he'd said.
During that last visit he talked to Melli---for the first
time---about his fascist education, and whet ruin it had made
of his life. He'd been sent as a child to a fascist schoal,
Radnt
which I attet knombefore. He said it had st opped all real
education. And he had alrays suffered from this---from a
sense of never being able to catch up; as if real literacy
was barred him. Only Rome had shoan him sonething other than
fascism, he said. Otherwise, it wae all he knew as a child.
He talked about this in a pained and hushed way, like a man
making a series of last confessions o
It was funny, I'd never associated him with fesoism.
But I remembered I had onoe, briefly, before we really knew
each other. It was at our first meeting, in Rome, when


we were sitting at the lunch table, in the half-darkness,
sipping the last of the wine, with the sun gleaming through little
chinks in the shutters. And that subject, fascism, seemed there,
in the shadows. But it was triumphantly passed over between us.
I oan Bee now what a triumph that was, BO soon after the war, to
forget that I was English and that he was Italian: to let a whole
basio history go by the board, because we knew what a reward there
was in store for us. Ve overcame politics---and five years of
ooncentrated wer-publicity, which is the most insidious and wioked
of any. For me fasoism was a kind of black oore you might find
at the heart of any Italian: something spooky. So I had no
diffioulty in keeping off it.
This was the kick we got out of each other at first: freedom
from war. Suddenly we realised we needn't be the slaves of smear-
journlism any more. Hitherto we'd never shared dreams with anyone
outside our onn worlds. But I think I can remember the aim sensation
at the back of my consciousness of Angelo as a fasoist: I don't
mean fascist in thought, but by birth, by torture, if you like. It
never came into my mind clearly, but there was a oertain hidden
recoil in Angelo, an hauteur---a certain imposed dignity that
lurked there---which belonged to fasoism. It was an inaodess-
ibility to freedom. It was something bladk. It was a neg-
ative painted world---the world was painted bright colours but
these were cheap and artifioial; but of dourse the ohild had
taken them as bright. It was a sense of a blaok negative centre
that dangerously disturbed the natural world all round it.
The oolour was alwaye blaok, even inside the bright colours.
Black was the oolour of the ab solute negative; the no-colour;
it was like the perversion of life to the point of exaltation.


Exaltation was a strong element. The black centre exalted to
be putting an end to life. And it was strange that in the last
monthe of our friendship, when all his childhood was reappearing
to him and he was perhaps facing his past square-on, he and Francine
wote
zere-monring blaok most of the time, entirely black---black coats,
black stockings, black shoes, black ties, even blaok shirts.
They made strange figures in England---pale and clear-out in
their black, against, the green fields and hedgerows a A great
negative had been done to life. The blaok disturb ed Melli.
She said 80 at the time. She didn't know why.
He turned Francine into a kind of Clytemnestra in those last
waeks. Her face changed. It became longer and paler, with
stronger lines---not quite wrinkles but the tragic lines you see
in the eotress, from weeping and lamenting twide-nightly,
Evrything round him had to be classical. There was now a
classicalmsilence in their Paris house, in the last months. His
room upstairs was classidal: a couch like the one Napoleon's
sister posed on in the nude; a simple table, a chair, no marks
of trouble or movement or even work. Everything became the assert-
ion of form---logio and form: F# not of co ursé our intellectual
fuk
logic--- # - aa the logio of the Greeks, a harmony of universals.
His olothes became starker and tighter: the lines were bolder,
especially in black. And every véstige of human sympathy, erratic
and unttdy, seemed to disappear from both of theme They became
paralysed in this constructed form, which Angelo perhaps needed
to save his 1ife. And our presence (the voice of hie past) mado
1t all the more necessery.
Rome had softened him in the wer-years because it was by nature


the least fascist of Italian oities. There isn't the right
pride in Rome * There is a bit of the ancient bombast---outting
a figure again---but the city has passed under a lot of wreckage
sinoe then. There is Bomething more like Jewish resignation in
Rome, a sense of the passing of things, the doom behind all power.
It oomes from real knowledge. And this knowledge, from centuries
of watching the rise and fall of power, aoted on Angelo when he
first came to the oity.
There was something too neat and finished about rascism
for Rome. She doeen't like too much assertion, just as she
doesn't like finishing a building. I haven't seen a really
finished building in Rome, either old or new. Some thing has
to be left, a bit of nude staircase or a gaping cellar, to let
the spirit out; you don't want to wrap things up too neatly.
Too much logio stuns life. Opposite principles went on in
Angelo---one said that far freedom you have to let things slide
a bit, the other that some strict action is noessary---even
some damage---to stop a mess. I suppose you are only free when
these two things are melted into one intuitive senso of fate.
Socrates had it, which is perhaps why he was persecuted. And you
found it in English politics, when there was such a thing.
The Romans are empiricists as the English used to be, except
that they don't wait and see, they just wait. When you've finished
waiting for one thing to oollapse you start waiting for another.
The condolping element in Rohan noia lies here---you are waiting
all the time in a: kind of eternal ante-room, and you dream of the
room on the other side of the door which you never penetrate,
it gives a glow to your ante-room, even thought nothing real can
possibly happen here---because ev erything takes place in the other


room, in the last, magnificent salon of all. Nothing happens in
Rome, * And Angelo was softened under this first shadow of real
humenity.
Fascism, like its child nazism, wasn 't a political doctrine
in the Anglo-Saxon sense at all, but a facet of the provinoial
temperament. Its basio interest was to cut a figure in the
world. The Italian preoccupation with figura was its seed.
And both movements followed a theme that had been going on in
the middle classes of Germany and Italy for decades before:
namely, that you have. to show some vitality, there has to be
action, something must be disturbed, otherwise there is death
and emptiness. That, underneath, is the provinoial situation.
Thue, people completely innocent of the political ideas of
fascism and nazism were the causes of it-e-they bore it,in
their way of talk and gathering together. In the provincial world,
however you may try to escape it, you begin to cut a figure
the moment you go among other people. I don't mean you try
to show off. But you try to be liwely, you have a certain
idea of the form any conversation should take, and in some wey
every conversation you have outside the intimate family-cirele
is a performance. This is so in Germany and Italy. Really
the effort Angelo always made when he was with other people--*
even, as we found out, with us-eewas the effort involved in all
provincial gatherings. The idea of society as a source of ease
and natural bohaviour is absent to the provinoial consciousness,
Bo that there is no sooiety in the proper sense at all. This
laok of society was exaotly what caused fascism and nazism,


not the arrogance of the Italians or the murderousness of the
Germans. The Italian is rarely arrogant, and I've never known
a murderous German.
I believe that Angeld never really perceived me as a whole,
only as moments. At one moment I was lively and gushing, striding
all over the room, at another I was sad, at another domio, and at
anbther I was just absent, a pesce morto, a dead fish---doing, saying,
apparently thinking nothing. He often used these words: hè
would say, *Youtre sitting there like a dead fisht' I This is very
Sicilian, too: everything is moments, without theme. You
suddenly, in that world, achieve God: you suddenly put out
massive branches. like an oak, you tower over other people, de-
livering yourself---for a moment. Then there is silence again. For
you aren't an oak: you are only one for moment, then you go back to
/To P. 218 a


yourself---to noia, tedium, being a dead fish.
And perhaps this was the cause of the nerpus unreality
rhich always existed in our relatian with Angelo. It vas never
safe and it was never relaxed. Being rolaxed might be one of
those moments, but it didn't embrace the whole. That was partly
its ezcitement, too. But it wasn't friendship in the sense I'a
alwayo used the vord. There was no real theme, no saliderity---
just brilliant moments. In the beginning it was an extraordinogy
exploration taken on by two strangors, one of thom born in a London
street, the other in a village near Marsala, Tith amazing adfinitios
between them. And from that, after ten years, it threatened to
becone either friendship or, in the only other relation of dom-
parable intimacy in the provincial World, family- And Angelo
woulan't tolerate family. Not after those brilliant moments.
For there is this basic difference betneen our world and
that of the provinoial culture, that in the latter you only lst
your hair down in the family. Friendship is reserved for other
things---and least of all relaxation. Ana our mode is totally
opposite to that.
If you let your hair donn with a friend in the provincial
World you run the great danger of letting your whole self go---
of appearing a shere helpless meas a Poner finally is what
counts, and. family is a shelter from the stinga and humiliations
of power. And here I was taking to ingelo all my ingignation
heard
about power, while he kax it as a kind of family-confession,) S
as sound-lioking: In his vorld friondchip has to be/solace-a-
from this wound-lioking as from anything elsa. It has to be
soaring moments. It has to be above the squalid shared stinks
of family-life. In his world the family is still the reservoir
of your shit on the one hand, and your sperm on the other.
/To P. 219


ind friendship offers a rescue from this. No wonder he mur-
mured to himself in those last days, *That friends these are!'
I can see 8o clearly now how impossible the differenca betreen
our worlds made any friendship. I romenberd, on the last day
re sa17 each other, in the terrific heat of Rome, Franoine said
U to mo quietly, 'You.see, Angelo can't live@Junbuttoned." There
it was. All I could do was blink at her in a baffled vay.
Had we lived uhbuttoned? I became conscious of my open shirt.
But after all the vea ther was sweltering. I all of a sudden
felt why Angelo was so punctildous about his dress. And he
couldn't bear ne to be slovenly, especially vhen other people
vere ooming. It was as much as he couldto take off his jacket
in the evening, when ve were all alone together---friends of ten
years standing. He had.a marked horror of shoning his body.
friends
Ghen we told him once that ne'a bathed naked with some perate we
knew ie was horrified. *The body isn't to be joked about.'
Sex, like your mbst intimate foubts about yourself, vere for
the darkness. And family was darkness.
So quite suddenly, at the moment when we nere offoring him
the first step tomards real intimacy, by telling him our most
intimate troubles, the friendship ended, when we least expected
it. - I think he began to see me as formless, even with a touoh
of vulgarity. And he turned away in horror---it was a great
crashing blow for hin, too.
Yet only a fer weeks before, he had vrittan to us in Eng-
land, 'I'm yearning to see you again, just two days after leaving
you.* It was so strange, their wearing black on that last
visit. He seened to tase an intimate, hidden pleasure in
himself when he was in black. He was reluctant to take it off
anene evening, when we had visitors. They rere like birds


the lwo o Rem.
of doom,k It made them look dry, pale, utterly closed and symn-
etrical. Perhaps fascism was black because it had no real
pleasure, no joy, no intimate affection or woywardness, no gentle
littlo folly. Just the aterk, clear-cut silhouette, in black.
Nothing untidy, nothing loft to chance, nothing badly done.
At this time there secmed a real fear in Angelo of doing something
shoddily. He woula say, 'You wouldn't expect me to do it bad-
ly, rould you? Then I'd rather not do it at all:' And vhen I
said to him, on one of tho last days, that he ould by now her e
made his room upsteirs his 'temple', staying there moro and more,
to tackle the bitter strugele of his tork, he said, *Yes, I know
What you mean---and I do struggle---I give myself to it all the
time---you must bebieve me-w-but you don't expect me to sit there
and turn out bad wark, do you?* It wes such a rhetorical quest-
ion that my natural ansner, *Yes!, was storped. It seemed that
the idea of figura was still operating, even in the silence of his
own room. That was the bitterness of tho struggle. 250 invisible
Rovering ouer tim. -
cruel spectator was still there,) Perhaps more so now than ever
before. He had to have all his dignity to face him.
ind in our world that cruel spectator isn't thero. He
isn't there at the baginning, at least,as re grow up in tho
community of the doad, with their ronderful consolations that
are like the countryside---which are our countryside---and
neither are thoy there at the end, when te've won through in the
sti ruggle. They're there in tho midale a bit---making us stumble,
but they seen to be of cocial composition.
It makes such a difference, this soil ve grow up in, bequeathed
by the dead. In the provincial countrios there is no real so il
of this kind. There is the Wonderful sturay natfual soil.
But the community af the dead is so renote. At best, in youth,


it is a dcad school-idea, stuffyand ink-sta ined and academic:
the museum of the past, which you need to have a connoisseur's
alrad W.
kncwledge of before you can lift up your head and talky So it
isn't a reel cc ommunity. You must *know so much---especially if
you give yourself the air of wanting to join that community.
And Angelo was -pa ined by that---how much it ras necescary to
*know'. He studied hard---for hours in his room upstairs: he
studied Italy.
In the provincial vorld there is nature---which te have got
dj llaly aud Grermany.
so far avay from. Nature is Es
But there is no soil
strengthk
in the sense of an inhorited form of life---behaviour, specch end
dreams that cut through ell classes and constitute the inner soc-
iety. There is no society based on the creature's ect of ident-
ifying himself with others. In the provincial ca Iture self-
identification with the other creature is impossible. People
are too far apart. Pride is left intact in each of them, a little
fortress. And if you want to do anything extraordinory in the
provincial culture you have to disoipline yourself to live in a
kind of Absolute---always a risky business; whercas in our World
you live in a real invisible community. This invisible comun-
ity was due, historically, to the great aristocratic families,
who laid down the spiritual ends of life after the collapse of
church authority. But the aristocrecy of tho provincial Torld
was only noble for itself: in Germany and Italy it remained
divided---simply families with land and poter. It had its absolute
standards of behaviour, it had its invisible tribunal before rhich
it judged itself; each family looked after its onn justioe---and
in both Italy and Germany there were private family-executions
uhere some dishonour had been done. There was no shared identity,
under one monaroh, as in France and England. Each noble house-


hold in the provinoial marld was an island to itself. The thrill
and desperate fascination of other people, the rustle of their
dresses, the sound of their snuff-boxes being snapped to, the
ra ttle of their carriages, the lights and sudden kisses, in a
delirium of ane and curiosity for the human presence---personified
completely in the royal preseno@---was the secret of the great
aristocracies who left unified, or netropolitan, countries behind
them.
This is the invisible comminity we inherit and which gives
us our form---the form we can always safely and reliably lean
back on however mioh we let ourselves go. And this collective
form is lacking in Gormany and Italy: it has to be made each
time, all over again, with a bitter and Herculean effort, on the
part of each man. Sometimes you'11 notice that a German's face
---G ven his whole body---seems to change frequently: he looks
a different person every few hours, 8o much so that sometimes
you can hardly recognise him. The more alone he i8, the more
struggle he has---the more that will be true. For he haa had
to make his form for himself.
I think Angelo didn't really understand France for this
reason. With his terrific mind that was still impossible:
the organs and nerves and tiseues in a man are rhat counts in
that sort of judging. I remember him saying, in the garden
of that little house near Paris, 'The French are so nice-
they're too nice!' And he added, 'It only needs a little blon,
and they'd fall to piecesit They're Bo good---such good pe ople:
Good! Goddt* I didn't think much about this at the time,
but later I did, when he began prowling round talking to himeelf,
and flinging dark, murderous glances everyvhere. That was a
chill month for ne and no mistake: The gardener of the house


was always talking to hinself outside, or cursing me for having
pruned his roses too much. At night it was too silent. The
houses in the village were all shuttered up, some of them with
steel and motal grills. te slept very little. There nere rifle-
shote at night, it boing the time of the Algorian bomb-outragos.
There Beemed a fixed, still hatred overyvhere, and Angelo reflee et-
eat it. The politeness of poople---the use of the monsiour,
obsessively, every fen seconds---soemed to bring out all the pride
in him. Ho lifted his head so high whon he spoke in shops, and
he spoke so oarefully. And they soemed to recognise him as a
foreigner, that sas the strange thing, though he spoke perfect
and fluent French. They seamed to recognise something souhhern
in him---hio dignity wasn't based on reapect but on self; they
could feel it; he didn't really see them at all, and they knew
All that 'goodness* he found in France ras just formless-
ness for hin, I think. It was really the invisible society of
respect; and he couldn't see it. I believe he felt that there
were people all round him being veguely good and nice to each
other without reason; even out of a kind of weakness; out of
a fear for each other which he didn't shore. I think it was
a reality absolutely closed to him, He didn't see the form in
other people. It was mostly a silent and invisible form.
And for the provincial culture this is a form that doesn't
exist. I believe it was the form joining us together in that
café, when he remained so aloof and exoluded: for him I think
all we aid was exchange moaningloss smiles and talk a lot of
unprepared nonsense.
In that last month he even seemed to become a fascist for


the first time---a fascist of the heart, without the rank ideas;
the man who jiggered about with the natural matorial of life
(through being too subject to it) in the interests of vitality.
It cas grotesque to watoh. Routine had to be. broken.. Some
damage had to be done to the natural intimacies. The little
French garden always seemed full of rifles and every sort of
revolver, brought along by his friends. Since the last war,
when I san what a bullet the size of a pea can do to the flesh of
a man, lot one a piece of schrapnel, I've. had a horror, close
to hysteria, of guns and things going off. Like all people who
have used the things in earnest I cen't bear to see them being
played about with, especially by youthe fron well-to-do families
who think. they are cutting a fino figure with them. On Sunday
afternoons the garden sounded like a battlefield. One of the
youths---I say youths, but they were all quite half-way through
life---hed a habit of going 'BrTTTT! to express Bom one he dis-
1iked, aiming an imaginary machine-gun at the stomach of his
victim. Yet he sas the mildest and kindest person on earth,
really. But this mildness waen't enough for him. It was like
a trap for him. He wanted to do things. In soma vay he hadn't
proved himself. And nothing he did in life seemed to holp.
He just couldn't prove hinself whatever he turned to. He tried
cleeping in foresta without a tent over his head, and no.food.
He tried staying up all night. He had quite a little philosophy
of staying up all night. You discovered the real Borld, outsido
at nighe, he said.
men, Which 1s true. You do. But in his case he couldn't
discover this worid in himself. He had to do something. He
had to make a clatter because there was no real world inside
him. He was like a man who had to pinch hinself to prove he


was alive. The question, What are we going to do now?* was
always on his lips. For when he was silent and still he was
clearly---for himself---doing nothing.
I think fascist came exactly out of that terrible barrenness:
out of the last ohill tomb of the middle-class soul, which saw no
light round it at all, only stillness and silence---its own.
And our world was only saved from that by our inner society,
which kept the stillness alive, even for the middld-clasa soul.
But in the provincial world the middle-class soul threatened to
go mad. It had to cling to a form. This form had to clatter
and resound, to show it was there all the tire: it had to seem
on the march all the time, finally to murder. It had to be
external. It had to be clear-cut, black, and sof forceful as
to hide the barren chaos underneath. This is why fascism omph-
asised outward behaviour so much---the chin pushed forward, the
trueulent stride, the air of certainty.
A man who can't prove himself and yet will prove himself
in some way has to dostroy in the end. Just after the war,
when I felt unable to prove myself, when the four years of being
caught up in international murder were telling on me, I had that
machine-gun image, too---I was always defending myself with it
in my dreams, against the charge that I was nothing, inside or
out. That, in the provinoial culture, is where the vigour of
fascism---the spurious vigour of impotence---mould begin to nake
its appeal.
I can still see that young men---inventive, kindly, watchful,
restless, with remarkebly haunted, beautiful eyes. Like Angelo,
he was a foreigner to the French World, and it was crushing him
in some way. He had a good job, very well paid. His advent-
ures were definitely Sunday effairs. This is in tho rascist


tradition, too. You have a philosophy, but you don't let it go
right through your life. You don't jigger with the basic things,
like where your money 0 ames from. So it is at one and the same time
a craven oonformism and a rebellion: this creates the negative and
spurious element of fascism. And there again is a reason why it
took root in the provincial countries, Italy and Germany, and not in
our world: power in the provincial countries is the status quo that
pervades everything outside the family. It isn't on the whole open
to discussion. It is conceived as permanent and unalterable. The
family is the real seat of discussion, unlike in our warld. And of
course the family is an island of interests to itself. But in our
world power is a fluid and continually moving thing, always in the
balance, and we grow up with an unquestioned sense of having the right
to challenge it. This moral indignat: ion doesn't exist in the prov-
incial world---it is an emotion really and truly lacking. In our
world having no power gives our challenge all the more grace and
rightness. In the provinoial world having no power robs our challenge
of anything but self-interest. On this hub Europe---and the whole
Christian world---is split in two. In America this split is 8o grave
as to be a hidden civil war*
If you are poor in our world your challenge to riches is made
clean. In the provincial world it is made dirty.
I think this is why my moral indignation, whidh I shall always
have whatever the flux of my interesta, was finally for Angelo---
though not oonsciouely or willingly---self-intereot. I think perhaps
our friendship broke on this hub, more than on any. other. At this
point the two worlds dantt understand each other*


All the subtle and delicate sense of what the other person
1s thinking that you find in the metropolitan peoplos is lacking
in the provincial world except as a facet of individual character,
m te preng Cia e
and a very unusual one, too. This 1s a source of encrmous stréngthy.
It makes for vigorous, unhindered action, such as you find in
Germany,.and a thoroughness which in our world is nearly imposs-
ible. ihere, în our world, the creature is held back by scruplos,
he is held back in the provincial world by lav, thet 1s, fear.
The kind of solidarity with other people which for us is freedom
is a tiresome and really insincere obligation to the provincial.
He doesn't believe that you could possibly have that much interest
in the fate of others. Other people neon---separate zones of
interest.
I think tenderness is almost totally absent fron the provinc-
ial relation, too, except again as an individual thing, the fruit
of special development and effort. Tenderness is the intimate
expression of respect, nhich is the first public jevel of real Christian
society. It *poduces fervour. In the provincial world this
moral fervour is passion. Frovincial fervour is almays from
personal and ioolated conviction, or from foreign influence,
like half the fervid movements that have existad in Italy.
It is the fervour of a dreams It is designed not reelly to
seve other people but to make your dream of them come true;
it is the fervour of Luther, Savanorola and---to bring it dorn
to pantamime--fascism. But real moral fervour in our norid
is for others: puritanism originates here. There isn't a dream.
It invites the othor person to a freedom of conscience, to the
real inner freedom. But in the provincial culture such an
invitation means only one thing---that you want to dictate moral-
The pmineial ashs,
ity to other people: you threaten your victim's freedong why


shouldn't a man do what he 1ikes, if it'8 his own life? This is
the provincial freedom. A mên may go to the devil if he wishes to.
You don't try to save his soul, for that soul's sake. So the tend-
ency is for everybody to be left to his own world, and for life to
consist of immediate interests stirred and spurred by lonély dreams a
There are political dreams, religious dreams---collective dreams of
every kind; and each time they happen there 1s a great upheaval.
The development of the metropolitan world is opposite to this:
its greatest modern revolution has been industries, namely, the
Blow organio alteration of life according to practical observations,
not dreams.
The provincial dream is the only form of collective action, the
only patriotism: this is the same for Italy as for Germany. Like
the German, the Italian is alone, he has to fight al one e Like
the German he expresses nature, though less its vigour than its marvel.
He has to fight through with the dream of self, the dream of power,
the dream.of work. The dream is all inside him, not outsi de. He
doesn tt tranelate it into outside terms, either. Thereas in our
morld that happens all the time, our dream becomes continually absorbed
and materialised in life, our rooms and houses and family-habits
reflect us intimately, they show the dream to whioh we belong, they
are our outer realised forms And this is rare in Italy. You will
find maybe a clever young doctor, fighting to get somewhere in his
underpaid and neglected profession, but you won't see evidence of his
fight (dreem) in the rooms he shares with his wife, there will be the
electric
same unechanted sitting-oum-dingng-room with its naked
bulbs
and hideous sideboard, the same lack of glow and mystery. And
the woman who wants to get out of the old provincial life and
be fashionable and stylish like the women in Paris, she sits


in the same rooms, too, she invariably has the same sense of
unenohanted womanhood as most of the women round her, only she is
troubled, often neurotically, having lost the natural balance
which was her safest anchor.
In Italy there ien't any sex in the northern sense---none of the
peculiar enchanted fascination one sex has for the other, based on
respect. Frenoh love is respéct, whether you like it or not. It
explores all the exquisiteness and refinement of human respeot. In
origin it is aristooratic. But in Italy that oan't exist. There
cên only be the dream of sex, usually from foreign influences: it
gets oonnedted with affectation, vanity, even rebellion; it isn't real
enjoyment, natural enjoymentl Natural enjoyment in Italy lies ' in the
short-lived act of love. This is what sex means in Italy.' It
means the literal moment of love, to produce children. a The dream
isn't in people or things: there is just the body, which has its
natural appetites, for sex and food. There isn't a real development
in people. There isn't development of character on a comnunal soale,
just as there isn't in Germany; there is only development in single
people, by terrifio effort. The sex in Germany ie a tremendous
assertion of nature, it is nature as a vigorous and truthful act;
there isn't the desolation in sex that you find in Italy; in fact,
it has bec ame a vigour that you get nowhere else. Sex is intact in
Germany as passion. In Italy this has been ourtailed, as a force,
first by the slave-divilisation of anoient times---theinheritance of
squalor---end then by the church, which discouraged all sex outside
the family .The world of Germany and that of Italy are divided by the fact
that Italians are historically an enslaved people, and when you have
been humiliated you don't feel like sex, you don't have respect for
your dun body and you don't expect other people to: Your sex-


ting
energy is the first/ to die when you*ve been humiliated.
But this hasn't heppened in Germany. Charao ter has developed
in Germany with the force and aplendoug of something in nature,
like a thunderbolt or an evening sky. But in Italy splendour
is all outside the human creaturo: it lies thore in the carth
and sky, inert and also menacing because it shons how powerful -
God is, and you move about in it, sadly, not caring to look up.
Italy is the saddest oountry in Europe, humanly. The spectacle
all lies outside, and as for the human oreature, he reflects
nature, faithfully. The Italian is intimidated, historioally
his
and actually. The inner theme of life is still squalor, no
longer for most people the actual equalor of poverty, but squalor
of status, the squalor of the heavinees of a body which has
never learned its full glory; it has only learned its natural,
physical glory, 11ke plants and beasts; the glory of choosing
for itself, of paying the en ormous debt of ten derness and respect
thet freedom means, this is only being learned slomly, by foreign
influence, with a wondering and delighting credulity.
The four'of us were talking one evening in that village
outside Parts and Angelo said that he'a now been avay from his
country for five years, and he wanted to go baok. Just for
a short vicit. It would be an THGOUS upheaval for him, he
knen that. Not pleasant but so exoiting that he oould hardly
think about it. And he vondered what the experience pould
teach him. I said thet my orn experience---returning to Eng-
land after as many years---had affected me in one way perticular-
ly. And he nanted to know nhat this vas. It was one of the
fev oecasions in that lest month when his face really lit up
with curionity. I said that years of living out of my country
ilals
had taken awav mv doubt. He rondered at this. He couldn't


grasp me as he usually did before the words were out of my
mouth. He looked surprised at the word *doubt'. And he said
nothing. I added that in Rome I lived in a little cocoon, barred
by the tiny intimaoies of language from complete absorption in the
outside world; but in my own country I heard and understood every
subtlety of language, I learned aga in that I wasn't the author of
my own world; a pleasant innocent doubt returned, and I ceased to
lay hold of an idea as if it was a log to keep afloat by; I
learned the flow of real talk again, as ycu can only have it with
your own people; abroad, talk is just an oxchange, an exchange of
ideas; among your own people it is a blind and tentative journey
towards form. But Angelo didn't seem to see: At least, he
only nodded and'turned awey. He seemed not to be thinking on
those lines, Yet samething of the same kind had happened to him:
a great innocent doubt had departed. He seemed bent, wholly,
on certainty. Angelo became more and more mysterious for me in
those days, as he drifted further int o his dry, isolated, pale
world of absolutes.
He was olinging to certainty---for survival. It was a
certainty he'd made for himself out of hard effort over the last
few years, and he now seemed to be keeping it going by force
of will. Calling péople oretini was an aspect of this. The
faith in him seemed to have gone, if it is true that faith and
doubt are really the same thing. It seemed he could no longer
rest in himself, leave his development to time. He had to
cling to the invisible form, which he' id built for himself. Above
ail, his days at the office were a drudgery, and he hated his
work with a fine loathing that got more and more reticent every
day. Francine offered to take the job over for him but he refused.


He came baok in a state of half-collapse ev ery evening, he fell
1l1 every few months. Nothing rots the body sooner than living by
what you hate. So he clung to the dream he'd made for all he was
woth, inwardly. You wouldn't think, to look at him, that even this
dream had any enchantment in it, much less compassion. It seemed
something hard and oruel, sharp as a knife, which made. him turn away
all the time---from his vife, everybody. But that was the only way
a dream could exist in his World---looked inside single ànd lonely
men. It meant having no friends, even the one or two friends all
people are allowed in life. The biood had to be stopped. Then,
in perfect isolation, his work could begin.
It was the opposite of everything you learned in the Anglo-
Saxon world. It wasn't his being alone---that was something I'a
always advocated and advised. But this solitude of his was all
tension and effort. Real solitude is tender and easy, if properly
achieved. It acquires a sense of speotatorship: the really
solitary person isn't out off, he is given more to life than anyone
else, he chooses his own time in which to look at life. But
Angelo was entering an Absolute. He was being Absolute in his
daily life. It wasn't real soliture; it was too artificial. And
everything in me, all my Englishness, shuddered at that. He was
simply keeping the outside world at bay, in a sort of chosen death.
I wanted to get away from him, breathe properly again, return to
the freedom Melli and I had when we weré together, with each day
growing unexpectedly between us, with its own new form, yet with the
same form each time. Angelo had to impose a form. He
had to cling to the form he'a made for himself, beoause of


the fear that he had no real form, only a kind of inner stinking
charnel house of family-tears ond hatred projected on to the world
like the skunk's fluid.
se -
m- M name
adhe seremers a a a
omrarmmnt a tana
centenphy des a tng nitu Bn estrotme YMT EmRetavey
That absalute is dangerous. e Absolutes aren't real friends.
They are suicide---an element in the sicilion au icide. where the
creature ultimately can't let go and clinge to the dead eternal
form as the stink under his nose gets stronger and stronger.
For the first time since I'a known him Angelo behaved as if he
had a permanont stink under his nose. énd you felt you vere part
of the. stink. You became conscious of your shoes, the way your
trousers vere creased. I felt wrong if I sat in a pullover in-
stead of a jacket and tie. And Francine seemed to bear this
terrible tension in her own life, permenently. She was ill---
wrought-up, sad, nervous, sick, always crying silently, then
brushing amay her teers wi thout saying a word. - It was like a
total constipation being imposed on life. In fact, Melli and
near Paris.
I had constipation nearly ali the time we were at that housoa
It was Francine's complaint, too---permanently. Lild laxative
pills were always going round. She took them nearly every day.
You couldn't have a really easy shit. There sas this tension
in everything---this false absolute that had nothing human in
it nor, apparently, any. knowledge of what a human was or. should
be; there was this bad philosophy---as all philosophies of the
which
demmrtals
absolute are bad, BE Socrates always went out of his way to she# A
neatly
by refusing to tie up his dortrines E at the end, into some-
thing finished and logical; there was this intimate unspoken
verdict all the time that we were all disgusting---the verdict
sey-disgust.
of EtRE
Once vhen I was reading


some lines from Hamlet to them, in those last days, sitting
between Angelo and Franc ine on the settee, I felt his sense of
vulgarity like a hot breath on my left side, rhereas Francine
nas accepting ovorything, she was actually listening to chakes-
pear; byr he seemed to be withdrawing into a kind of prudish
self-isolation---he seemed to feel, 'He's vulgar, he's reading
Shakespeare vulgarly', in a conviction that was like the emission
of a stink in its secretiveness; and it didn't seem to stop even
at me---it seemed to include Shakespeare as rell. Shakespeare,
in that quick, rasping speech of Hamlet's, wasn't being sufficient-
Lahespeare undl
lals
ly a monumer ent.
Bothjseemed to have fallen short of that terr-
ible Absolute for whioh only silence and inactivity rere tho anaw-
ers to anything, the only really mystical answers, because they
are like death. This is. why I say the Absolute is suicide in
the Sicilian. It really is choosing death.
The man who clings to the. Absolute is really the most relative
of all. He can't let himself plunge into the World---even stroll
through it---because of its intimate claims on his attention.
He is still prone to its claims, nore than other mengl per
rico
davizb
There isn't enything
absolute in life, except death: speech and words and thought
are relative, this 1s their god-given nature; and God gave no
absolutes, only the lonely mind sives absolutes, which always imply
a departure from the accident and flor of life, a departure you
have to pay for in your humanity. The man of absolutes is a man
in a corner so tempted by the world that he doesn't dare to touch
it at any point; he can't go through the follies and disguises


and squalors that are its language and always will be. Really
he is a man without a faith. He's alone, with his thoughts.
He's in a dead world, just as a Sicilian is said to feel in a
dead world when he's surrounded by nature. Nature lies round
him like a pesce morto; he is oblivious to it. Yet he is. part
of it. This is his strength.
The loneliness round him, being olassical in origin, is more
or lèss inconceivable to us; he is the last classical man. He
has a driving and outting will, a power to see clearly even to the
darkest point in his own self, and to make dazzling-clear reflections
while up to his neck in squalor. He has this marvellous remoteness
and spirituality, whioh leads to his suicide. The olassical world
was a tragic world, and so is his, There 1sn ft any hope in it,
finally. Yet there 1s no Italian
resignation, ei ther---the having
a stink and accepting it. There is the alter ego of paganism,
the revolt of the late-Greek--an obsessive horror of vulgarity,
the precise opposite of anything Christian.
Being with educated Sicilians is like suddenly finding yourself
in a dursery with ohildren dressed as grown-ups. It makes you feel
some thing awful might happen---somebody will giggle or drop a fart
and the whole formality will fall to pieces. There is this high
state of tension bordering on hysteria, like the German tension which
also springs from an intimate rejection of the human creature. There
is no Sicilian conversation in the cducated sense: superb and lucid
exposition, heights and chasms and clear rushing streams, and deserte,
and the hard, baking sun, but not the give and take of converaation.
There isn't any drama because there ien't any theme. There ' can


never be. And Angelo missed, for this reason, all the drama-
tic elements of my conversation---the English conversation; he
never understood that I always chose a situation to talk about,
anoonsciouoly, for its dramatic substance, for its boing capable
of a dramatic theme which I then enunciated with horror or indig-
nation or pathoe, as the theme diotated. But that was how I saw
life, as the aonfliot between fates, for high odds. Really there
sere no fetes for him, thich meant no people. Thero was no con-
tinual running conflict. That wasn't his arena, His arena was
the invisible, the enormous pageant of the imngination, tho morld
that teems round the lonely self, the tregedy, but not the drama,
This is why he only san "as moments. People had no permenent
characters in his morld. They veren't fates personified, as
they are in ours. te oee the permanent charaoter ta a person
and ho is this for us all the tims, When he is ill, vhen he is
sad, empty, happy, all the tima, unless he goos mad or dios.
In this
Fers there is a cortain sartey and security of life, or rather
of percoption, which we take for granted as simply the ray people
always think. But this is denied to Angelo*s world. Again
that is classical. Sioilians are oupposed to vergo on hysteria
all the tino. This is classioal hysterda. Talk goes on in
high tension or not at all. There is eilence---or this outburst
of high tension. It is rat her like a Russian novel. fnd that
is why I alwaye felt tenaion with Angelo, together with this mar-
vellous inspiration and splendour. 4 It was a splendour in tension,
the tension was like the overpomering suction and current of a
wave. ne never digested properly nhen he was at table with us, 0
it was all a big rush; he attacked his food tith a violonce that
left the rest of us chasing him, thile Francince fed him, so to


speak, throwing little chunks of bread across the table and
putting another potato on his plate. He lioked his ohops,
guzzled his wine and had everything down inside a few minutes-s
talking the whole time as well. It wasn't that he'd lost his
table mamers: hetd never really had tali When he practised
them they were hardly more than horror of vulgarity, namely, a
form of hysteria again.
The tension would start the moment we were together, like
a dynamo. It wasn't unpleasant---not at all a stiffness or
restraint. It was even exciting. Nothing could be left to
silence. If I was silent, especially in the early days, he
would ory, 'Forza, forzat'---strength! Only for a brief and
pleasant period, whioh was like a special inheritance for Melli
and me, too eostatio to be bearable almost, did that tension
cease and life just riow along between us, with Angelo
Baying
things like, *Oh, words don't matter' and 'Let life take its
course. I But Francine would always look at him doubtfully.
For years we didn't unders stand why she seemed to doubt him 80.
kim
But later we realised that she must have been reminding with
that glance of what would oame after our ecstatio meeting, when
he was back in himself, and the pesce morto of the ordinary
world had returned, the corpse of daily life; and then there
would no flights for her, nothing would flow for her... She
didn't understand him, we always said; it was true she didn 't;
but at the same time she knew her man, which was why he clung
to her, why he listehed to her like a child sometimes, and why---'in
his terrible way', as Francine said---he loved her.
He didn't respect us, in ourselves, only the best in us: not
our permanent characters.
He respected in Melli the


Germon grea tness. In me the English greatness. And te in
ourselves, in our bodies, participated in these moments of
greatnoss; our bodies were the vehiolos of these moments.
T7e, as the creatures he loved, rore creatures on a tonse and
high level, constantly. That nas how he saw and loved us, on
our tense level. These were the moments we shared---the nesmelbs
oua pageant of the imagination.
l Paris
Then suddenly 1t was gone, on hia side. ie rent expecting
A naves
the pormammt-and coneoling friendehip Which like nature leget
ils
* ond it tas finished in him. Even music, our great
shared medium, was dead. Even Verdi. The world ras dead.
And we therefore sere dead, too. There was nothing over and
above his sense of our greatness---like forces of nature---to
sustain him, none of the respect that joins other people perman-
ently like a silver thread.
I remember when he first came to England alone. We'd
taken a cottage in Sussax for a few recks and he had to do a
country
three-hour journey ecross FRFEy fron the airport in Kent,
a slon, winding journey by train through some of the loveliest
domnland and valleys in England. He was happy to be without
Franc ine. Her suffering didn't let him free---this is rhy
he felt the relief being alone. Their suffering pressed and
sucked on each other, and only increased the nutual load.
He looked round him all the time, curious and exoited.
On the train from the airport he had got into conversations,
he told us---people rere intrigued at his foreignness. His


English could be remarkably good.. All of a sudden, if there was no
other way of getting through, he would start talking English, throw-
ing in idioms like 'It rained cats and dogs* and 'I'm feeling blue * *
But he always said that English wasn't his destiny.
We went for long walks through Itchenor to the harbour where
endless clusters of yachts lay, their masts swaying in hundreds,
and looked across at the Hampshire side with its rising lawn, and
boyond, the typical close, hilly countryside above Southampton
Water. He said the same as on his first visit---he felt so free.
He could see it in people's faces---it was such a relief after
the 'tension* of the Continent. The tease* of English life,
an inner harmony of freedom like a commanal dream, was what struck
him, he said.
We went up to London to see my parents and I remember the
little cry of amazement he gave when he walked into the back
room, inot the blaze of little lights---the glow of intimacy
that made the tiny place look like a palace. At first he said
nothing as he walked into the hallway from the frontdoor, only
nodded in his solemn way to my father; but when the door of the
back room was opened and the glowing light broke on us he made
this little ory of appreciation.
And he told my parents later, 'I love your son all the more
now, because I know youl' It helped him understand me, ho said.
It was something to do with the intimacy---the thrill of that
room, which I still feel myself when I go there, intact from
childhood, and which always makes Melli feel calm, as if she'd
found her element. at last. The world of the London backstreets
is safe because it relies on nothing that isn't human e All
its commitments are human; all its references. There is


absolutely no power, exercised by one person over another.
Nobody has power, so there is no corruption. There is nothing
but the human creature. And because there isn't any Poisition
he is the king of every place he is in, by natural'election.
But this working class 1sn't by any means just a natural or
primitive congloeration. It isn't a backward edition of the
middle class: it has its own culture and also sophistication,
as full as that of the middle class, only it doesn 't rely on
formal education or power. Therefore at one and the same time
it is vigorous---more vigorous than aything in the classes above---
and also frail and easy to defeat. Its delicate and respectful
appreciation of people is the fruit of long Christianity, beginning
rinelcenl-centrg
not just with the Evangelicalism brought by the, middle class together
with higher wages and better faotory conditions, but with the
centuries of rural life that went before.
Perhaps it is the
only surviving Christianity we have, that of the dwindling common
people everywhere: their Christianity being a function, not a
mental attitude.
The common people represent a guarantee of decency and good-
ness (practiced not from unction but as a necessity of daily life
in overcrowded areas), and as their world dwindles, through higher
education, so the middle class gets invisibly weaker too, because
the general decency is weakened: until in the end there is a
massive crisis when the whole question of intimacy versus power
has to be gone into, and the choice has to be made as to whether
we belong to a Christian civilisation or not, and'if so what
Christianity means. By the time that crisis breaks (in the form
of public soandals, delinquency, sex-perversion on a massive scale,
gang-war on the highes at political level, barely cantrolled


epidemics, the collapse of physical well-being and even the
weather through experiments in space, an appalling volume of
chronic disease among the young) all the intimacy at our disposal
will be used up, and it will have to be revived by means of
conscious and chosen allegiance.
There is only one other place where I've known that same
intimacy as in the London backstreets---not the thrill so much
but the intimate sense of safety in a world where all the con-
Seam
for
solations : made REET the humble and thwarted and lonely in
and
and not the powerful, d logical
effective. And
that is Italy (in almost any but the mostvoorrupt class). Finally
V Ieve always had to flee back there, for it to save my life again.
The power lies absolute round and over Rome, just as it did round
the streets where I was born; but it isn't inside. Other people
have it whom you don't see and hardly notice. They out figures,
have appointments and important occasions, they are restless,
shifty, damned. But their activities are outside, while at the
centre there is this glow of a hidden family-seat. There isn't
the thrill of respect and freedom in Rome as in England, it isn't
the same kind of thing as the northern peoples have, it isn't
grounded in the thrill of people being together, but it comes from
the same root, which is Christianity.
Angelo's background was stark in comparison with mine.
That was why Rome could save him. Its world is sad and bored,
but still there is the thrill of smallness that emerges from the
boredom and which refuses no newcomer. Nothing gets refused in
Rome. It all gets mixed up in a hot compost---the thrill isthe
steam that comes off, and the mysterious heat inside can never
be localised because it shows no flame or even a glow. It


stinks of course, but so do we all at vtimes. And
perhaps
Angelo lost this influence slowly when he was in Paris, perhaps
its softening touch was forgotten, and he drew nearer and nearer
his own original. world, where thrill is a forbidden and lonely
dream.
His roots seumed to be puritan wi thout having anything
Christian about them. It reminded mo of the Arabs. They are
supposed to wash at once after they 've made love, and to make
love near a river if they can. You can see the difference between
our world and theirs in their lavatories, where you squat over a
hole in the floor. The tiny water-tap at your side is such a
clear-cut physical device compared with the conceptual toilet-
paper of our world, which prevents you coming into contact with
your own flesh. In the Arab lavatory you just turn the little
tap on, put the fingers of your (right) hand under the **r wat er
and wipe your arse. Simplet When that is clean you wash your
hands. Really. that's cleaner than paper, if you come to look at
it. The intima ate connection between flowing wa ter and cleanliness
is still there. The sense--the horror---of evacuation is also
there just the same as in Christianity, there is the. same risk of
confusing'evacuation with the love-processes, as, among all humanity,
but it isn't conceptual. The different religions treat it
differently.
As the middle classes grow in our world so the acute stink-
consciousness of our civilisation grows, a The more in flight
from his problems. a middle-class person is the more stink-consoious
he becomes. I suppose this is why some unhappy daughters of the
middle class literally bathe themselves in scent, to hide the
original stink of self; and why with universal education the
market for breath-refreshers and de-odourises grows o The inner


natural self 1s putrid---this is the trouble. For while the
middle class has vindicated historically the outer rights and
dignity of the human creature, it has been at the expense of
the religious faculty. In its first appearance during the middle
ages the class aimed to show all the prowess a man was capable of---
every gift endowed to him by God; this in itself was a great step
from pagan times, and the aim was certainly an achievement of
Christianity, deriving from the new Law that even a slave was
God's ahild and could demonstarate His extraordinary gifts.
But the painful result was loss of divinity: not only did the
church collapse, but the vreligious faculty as such began to fail
in people. Men began to make the mistake that they were the
authors of life, and not the interpreters. What started as an
act of celobration, reaching its climax in the Renascence, ended
as a lonely act of pride. The moremonderful the things that
men did, the smaller they seemed to becoms---until we have the
pigmies of today . For every exploration into the mystery
outside them brought them closer and closer to an immensity th ich
made them look like dwarfs. So we are brought back full circle
to the Christian law, that indeed we are dwarfs, and there lies
our hope and truth.
The middle-class stink-self is precisely the creature
ostracised by that great flight for propess through t he centuries:
the middle-class child learns early---with frequent devastating
effects on his nervous system---that in the area of civio relation-
ships he is free, but in the intimate areas he's as good as---
shit. It is a strange thing to happen, this sudden grounding of
a world-religion in ordure. Essentially, middle-class upbringing
is a long indootrination in shame: the natural and spontaneous
outburst of humanity which is every child's birthright is dis-


couraged. This doesn't mean he is punished or even thvarted in
his desires. In that way he's freer than anyone in other classes,
or anyone in history. But he learns that he doesn't count: he
will count 'one day', perhaps; he sees that the world he opened
his oyes on at birth isn't for some reason the world he'll make
his way in later. Sometimes he notices the desparate struggle
between those two worlds in his parents 's eyes. His soft heart
has no place in the scheme of things: his parents may 'believe*
in it, wOo it, and protect it; but he sees the truth. As a child
he doesn't belong to the important scheme of things: not as an
Italian child does, for instance; an Italian child is equal with
his parents, he is only a smaller edition, and there is no difference
of psychology between one age and another. But in our world the
different ages are marked: each has its different intimate demand
which doesn 't fit the scheme of things.
In the middle-class norld you are caught up in ambitions
whether you like it or not and this must show to your children.
Their upbringing must in all humanity be a subtle mustering of
arms for the fight for Position which will one day take place:
the Position may be a job or money or simply what your neighbours
think of_you, or it may be a brave rejeotion of all these things,
but a Position of some kind it will be. Our social choices are
necessarily grounded on power, not on humanity as all aristooratio
society was and lower-class society must be if it. is to survive.
But in our world *humanity* means rights, wages, living conditions---
an abstract as far from our intimate desires as possible,
For the middle-class thrill is at root the sound of mighty
machines---the saund of nature garnessed, the thrill of movement
and spectacle; and the aristocratic thrill is the the thrill
of other people, in the same way as the lower-class thrill is,


too. In our middle-clasa world other people aren't enough,
There is the great world-struggle now preoccupying the middle-
elass mind---the mind that has to make its fierce demands on
nature: and when these demands have been exhausted---as they will
be by the pathegic flights into space, which are a last effort
to turn eternity and even God into a civic right, there will have
to be the thrill of people again, the thrill of the sound of
their coats swishing, the thrill of the things they say and do
with their own hands.
That will be the end of the stink-self. Every man can then
be a slave and king in one, as only the working man is at present,
though his position isn't a permanent one historically, nor an
unadulterated one, nor an invulnerable one: he is for all that
a child of something he doesn't understand---the victim and above
all helpless reflection of the middle class (his master); and one
by one he has to go into the middle olass, send his children in,
according to a process that has been goingnon for all to see Bince
the eleventh century. The middle class has reached its utmost
historical development---and its obsessive stink-consciousness
is its consciousness of the last lingering odours of the intimate
thrilling sler which the mind has had to forget in its stern plans
for the marshalling of power, which in its steelmparts and regular
noises and clean emissions of wanted commodities is as differant
from the farts and ordure of mankind as anything you can get.
The middle class has tried to create a godly earth in distinotion
from men, and because of this contradiction it has collapsed
inwardly more and more with each access of mervellous power,
80 that in the end when it has cleaned the whole world up and its
grea t thriving project---freedom---has been accomplished, it


will have to committ a sort of suicide back into humanity.
For the real vorld---not the projects put on to it--is still
there for contemplation, as unexplored as it always was. The
whole hidden world of our own togans that do their work invisibly
every moment, in secretions and subtle alohemies and evolutions
J from digestion togliving cell, the hidden world of plants and
the regular seasons and the movement of the heavens and the
invisible attractions and influences of the earth, and the language
of animals, everything that lies all round us nearly dead at
the moment, which our senses and instincts have lost track of,
so that we are like pale and hostile and unknown visitors, not
knowing what we shall do next by way of destruction: all this
awaits us again. - Our intuitions, which the middle class has
all but called invalid, will get their life back againa Clear
and golden inutitions are the prize of civilisation, just as in
a person they are the prize of health.
Where I was born nearly all the mystery of oreated life was
sgill there intact, though there were no trees in 6 ight: and
Angelo felt this. The thrill of an outside created world is
still there, quite beyond you, happily beyond your powers of
changing it or your knowledge. The nystery of Christmas was
still there, with the crisp air in the streets, and the stillness
in the evening, the lamplights that made the roads look like
village lanes. There was the nervous background of menace and
factory routine: but the inmates made it natural. The ae
stfeets had been put there as part of a mathematical proposition
for somebody elsets porrit-and-loss account, and that could never
fit into a lasting scheme of things: but the people made villages
of them. Every Christmas was as mysterious to me as the


countryside. There was the crisp hush of thu week before the
actual day, and we used to go carol-singing in small groups;
and the sky seemed as silent and vast as you find it in the
country. The roofs were lon, just like a village. Usually
the sky was haunted and ghostly, tumed into a frightening zone
of oblivion by the great work-schedule that hung over everything
and tried to make itself the only thing there was in all creation.
The untouched intimate heart won in the end, though: it kept the
glow, and you felt this most of all in the special seas ans, at
Easter, on Shrove Tuesday, on the Bank Holidays. The created world
came back again then. It was still the breath of God, over the
streets: you were still in the state of grace, that is, the child
of creating forçes which you didntt understand but the rhythm of
which was inside you. The knoving and foreseeing face of the
middle class wasn't there. The mark of that face 1s its lack of
respect: this is what differentiates it from the working-olass
or peasant face. It has nothing to respect in the universe.
There is just---nothing. The sky is---nothing. The invisible
is---nothing. There are just hard, touchable objects and--
space. But where I was born there was the nonder of active and
irresistible things outside you; and that doesn't wilt in the old
people, because it isn't an attitude but a total state of being
which only the slow and painful initdation into the middle class
can end. Once it has ended nothing can bring it to life again.
And Angelo seemed to recognise this; I think 1t was what made
him utter his astonished little cry.
I don't think there was anything like that in his own
life. He used to tell me about the hysteria of his family-life
in Sicily, the pale, quivering hatred behind everything, the


feuds. He used to imitate his unele---sharp-faced and sallow---
standing at the curtains watching people go by outside, talking
to himself, his eyes narroned with a hatred as consuming and
helpless as disease---'Look at that one : The dirty awine!
He calls himself a priest! He'll aie soont Curse him, curse
himt', his 1ips like knives already cutting. And then there were
the 'occasions , when the family got together. The neighbours
came to pay their respects and sniffed round looking for all the
proper signs of hospitality---the coffee in the right place, the
vine, the cake. And the hospitality was received as it was
given---with a total absense of feeling. Under the smiling and
hend-shaking there were asides---*When is this idiot going to
offer us something? Is that all he's got? And he swindled one
of his brothers out of a hundred thousand lire only last week!*
It was a life starved like the hot earth. The heat baked
feelings dry, turned the people into orushed slaves. Angelo
al ways hated and feared hot wea ther. In the cold he was lively,
clear, active. Just a day of real heat would knock him over.
Perhaps his world was pagan. I don't know. It is so
diffioult for me to see, across those oceans of difference
between us, across the enormous religious divides.
Perhaps Christ was lacking in his world. Perhaps only Christ


brought mercy, humour and a certain inbred humility to the Italian
mainland. The world Angelo described was so stark. People mere
more like landscape than human boings---they were the hard, baking
rocks, the massive and torrid sea, the miles of dazzling sand,
the hot, still air. Yot they didn't seem - prtas a I4
not primitive in thesmelves at all. There was nothing primitive-even
Heir
in the hyeteria. Tener
- RSe It was
classical and stylised. There was .nothing smudged or vague abott
it. It had the sharpness of conscious thought, almost. It
Have
wasn 't an unseeing world. It vasn't the kind of saave-world
thay
voucherr exists among the Calabrians---the people es good and bed
as animals are. It wasn't an undeveloped warld that Angelo
Yer
seemed to be describing. *d it rasn't a Christian World, eilkar.
It could eee Christienity, it could see Christ. ingelo hed a
wmdargue
monell à hushed avareness of Christ .This came about after he'd
left Italy, rhen the priests---who belonged to the suffocation and
hatred of hie early life---mere no longer round the oornor. Fe
even otopped detesting the church. He began to see its mild and
wer
healing parts. But the priests, in his world, secned outside
Christendom, too. They threatened and broke people invardly,
their ive Harias were hysteria, there was the came furtive and
derk and cruelly aivided world. Chriot hadn't brought any balm,
really. He vas just ohurch: power. Chich he isn't in the rest
of Italy, not quite: he still has his appeal to the lonely,
he still goos a little to one side of the power used in his nane,
he still accounts for odd little moments of grace and intimato
in Iraly-
wanik
But he dtenltssen reelly absorbed in/Angelo's
compassion, A
world. The power was absorbed: Christ vas one more vehicle of
hatred and threat. He hadn't got far enough to touch the land-
scape, it seemed: he hadn't cooled the bare, hard rooks, he hadn't


put himself on the cool wind in the evening, he wasn't really
in the churoh bells. The stark world hadn't been touched. It
was the same in Angelo. He saw Christ. He understood him with
an extraordinary mild charity, much like Christ's own: he taught
his children carefully about Christy too---he first tried the
ancient classioal myths on them, then the gospels, and afterwards
he told me with great wonder that the gospels were what had really
entered the children's imaginations and touched their lives, the
mercy and intimacy of the story seemed to move them, like a
wonderful reminisceneb from before the womb, it was all naturally
much oloser to them, whereas the Greek myths were frightening,
terrifio, stirring, distant---they appealed 11ke a thunderstorm
does, they thrilled and struck awe but they hadn't got this lonely
and intimately oonsoling thrill of Christ, the inevitable right-
ness of development that the story of the Passion has.
But Christ didn't enter Angelo's character. Christ didn't
seen to change him." Angelo did change, tremendously, in the
time I knew him. But it was a change wrought from his agony
and despair. The change Christ brought about in him was more
like that given by the revelation of new physical knowledge:
it seemed the impact of a new kind of physical wonder outside
him, like the sky at Ostia Antica in the evening, after the day's
heat, where we used to walk sometimes in the early days.
He always marvelled at those ruins in Ostia Antica: he said
he felt the classical there more than anywhere else in Rome,
the golden light that hung over these bricks and chipped colums;
it was the most 'Greek* place in Itely. Perhaps it felt like
Sicily for him. There was the Greek golden quality in
the air, a kind of sparkling dust to which the ancient
gods seemed to belong, BO that they seemed to be talking to you,


across glowing spaces, as at the amphitheatre of Epidaurus
where you sit looking across the parched Greek plains towards
the mountains of Arakhnaion, and the mild air among the oypresses
seems to be eternal, the same as it must have been for Aesculapius
and the sick people coming to him, close to that amphitheatre..
Christ entered Angelo like that, like the recognition of a
new power in the universe a But it was a spectacle: Christwas
a breath-taking spectacle that he saw clearly. But one spectacle
can be replaced by another. You can't have the same spectacle
before you all the time. And his next step wasn't to change
inwardly, Christ had nothing to do with the inward moral character
in his case. That would have been a northern evolution. For
instance, after I'd become conscious of Christ there were things
I saw much more clearly than before---moral actions of every
kind. But the change it made in Angelo was to brighten his eyes,
with yet one more brightness: it was like getting the benefit
of a new sun. But nothing in it contributed towards permanent
and decided moral character. This, perhaps, vas the development
lacking in his world. That was why he could say helplessly,
'You see, I never know what I'm going to be tomorrow. Or even
in two hours* time. I never know how I'm going to feel, what
I shall think, what I shall want to do.*
The more you know the Sicilian, the more you realise how
different he is from the Italian. And you can generalise about
him as you can about very few peoples nomadays. The stock
description of the sicilian applies perfectly to Angelo:
musical---to the point of extreme and sametimes excess refine-
ment; imeginative---to the point of the obsessive; : rational-- -
to the point of sophistry; humourous---to the point of the
grotesque and cruel. A people veeri ng between the tragic add


the idyllic, with little in between. Even physically the
description is valid: of middle height, colour pale-brown,
eyes luminous, dark-haired, slim, compact. In charadter, too-
resolute yet also repressed: a gesture or slight movement of
the face denotes a sudden change of feeling (quite unlike the
Italian, this). The sense of being inferior goes hand in hand
with plans for greatness: : pride, jealouss, love, hate, constancy
(also unlike the Italian) in both friendship and revenge,
generosity---all are strong; a touch of mysticism, darkened by
superstition; the final damation for him is betrayal, the two
finest virtues for him are courage in a man and chastity in a
woman. All these sh owed in Angelo, as they showed in the history
of his island. He had no joy of living, yet he had no tendency
to indolence like the Arab; he was tidy and clean without being,
like the northern peoples, optimistic. He spoke gutterally and
drily, in a way sometimes reminiscent of the Arab; and with a
sharpness---in speech and c ancept---reminiscent of the Greek.
There was a pagan triumphing in Angelo which was foreign to
any feelings of mine. Once when we were driving through Paris
he jumped the traffic lights and a policeman stopped us.
Francine whispered,angry little camments as we drew to a halt.
Then there was a long conversation between Angeld and the cop.
I heard my friend saying mildly and quietly that he td got a
little confused as he happened to be driving some English freihds'
through the city, showing them the sights, and in pointing same-
thing out, why---he jumped the lights. A beautifully oontrived,
beautifully spoken Italian story. The cop was tall and grave ,
and listened sceptically at first. But a whole culture was
playing on him, and he soon melted. Perhaps he was used to dealing
with haughty pride. Anyway he left him go with a smile.


Then followed the pagan triumph. Angelo shouted a thank-
you and drove off fast. He didn't seem to feel any gratitude,
or realise that the other man had paid him a kind of homage.
He was only exultant. As if he a won in cards. And it made
me realise more than any other tiny event how different our worlds
were, how little we'd been undtetsanding each othér all these
years. That policeman aould have been a piece of wood for all
he felt towards him. I realised what a deep moulding effeot
Christienity had had in my world, Bo deep that few people realised
that their actions had anything to do with Christianity at all.
And the northern world must have given him a thousand little
gratuitous triumphs of this kind every day. He was out of place
in the *goodness' of the Christian world. He wanted to see all
desires quite naked, the evil and negative as well. Life had to
be extemnally clear-cut for him. That half the desires jjad been
put away under a oivie decency confused hime It seemed to Aim
effort: a strained formality he wanted to break all the time.
Or something sloppy:
watery kindness everywhere. Life had
to leave him alone, above all. And all this goodness seemed to
put him under a continual anexplained moral obligation. What
did these people want with their smiles and thank-yous? It
reminded me of the way Italians take gifts, with a wary, narrow
look, as if you want something out of them or are trying to
cut a superior figure: gifts are still rather an affront in
Italy, despite foreign influence.
The Italian face is rarely lit by a really unreserved and
open smile, rarer still by laughter. There is an intimate
humour in daily life but none of the bright and optimistic
attitudes that mould the features of the northern face and give
it depth and an encrusted individuality. His tory has of course


made its encrustations on the Italian face---violence and
struggle, above all poverty. But these are communal lines,
not individual. And they are classical in origin. They also
tend to close the face. There is a sad and elegaic humour---
something ironio, also intimate; but pleasantry is missing,
that leaven of northern society. Pleasantry comes by individual
breeding and effort. Italian faces lack light. They convey
no hope or plan of life, and therefore are the most natural faces
we know. They aren't on any quest at all. People aren't self-
constructed as they are in the north; they're already made, so
to speak---and see their own contradictions from a puzzled and
helpless distance. After I'd been living in Italy sone years
I could recognise a foreign tourist easily, after hardly a glance,
because of the questing I saw in them. The sight of them even
began to thrill me, as I felt more and more surrounded by the
other way of life. I asked myself what different quality it
was I saw in them---how I recognised it, apart from clothes and
complexion. It was something in their way of walking, striding:
it was their whole rhythm of movement---it was quite different;
they were questing for something, all the time, without knowing
it. It was in the way they gazed at things, bent their necks
forward, in the way they smiled, the open way they had of as ing
questions. They were deliberate about everything, as if they
were fulfilling an unspoken plan. They always seemed to be going
somewhere. But the Italian never did, even when he actually was a
In that comparison you have all the difference between the
two worlds, of the north and south. In the north we don't
naturally accept what lies all round us, we challenge it all the
time for a purpose or solution, while the Ital ian at the opposite
pole waits and looks on and accepts, strolling through life


however quick his pace. Angelo's pace was much quicker than
mine. He shot through the streets like a torpedoe. But the
root-difference between our worlds remained. He had learned a
bit of the questing ache, and I had learned some acceptance,
but that root-difference behind us, at birth, remained, hardly
conscious to either of us.
The northern man sets out early on his quest. Already as
a child---alone with his conscience, and the king of his own
conscience---he has it before him. I knew the direction I would
be taking in life at the age of eleven and twelve, and I can't say
I've swerved much from it since. But in the south there doesn't
seem any need for a direction. The world is just there, made for
you, and you fill it, in your turn, like everybody else. In a
way you have no responsibility over your life. In the south,
you know the world won't forsake you, There is always going to
be fruit on the trees, and someone will give you a drop of wine.
Above all, you aren't judged by your quest, as you are in the
north. There is the healing sunlight, above all the mother--
she passes from generation to generation as the unfailing fount
of help which never wanes o
Life can pass in a dream, in the south. You wake up to your
gifts late, especially if they are strong. You wake up to your
own will late. Angelo only divined gradually what sort of life
he wanted. And each step was a terrible effort and pain, like
unsucking himself from a bog. He only really began to ohange
his life about half-way through it, with tjui decisions of the kind
I had taken in the years of puberty. And he'd studied so many
different things, altered his course, his job---so many t imes.
First there had been the safe road pointed out by his parents,
which he accepted and followed (I think they wan ted him to be


a doctor, like his grandfather), then there was the slow and
spasmodie awakening, year by year, until music looked like the
final choice; and he changed that.
One question dominated his life---that of survival. If
he had any quest it was that---a quest for bare survival. There
always seemed a threat to steal his soul, quite apart from jbbs,
and he nas always clinging to it fiercely, to keep his identity.
My quest mas always a particular one---to start of finish a book,
to go abroad, get enough money to work freely on, that kind of
thing. But his was a quest to sustain his bare self---keep him-
self this side of madness and despair, to stop a plunge into the
outer darkness which always seemed to threaten. For months of
his life my friend has lain in darkness, apparently finished,
without a word to say for himself, the victim_of some helpless-
ness from his father. He used to complain about his father,
about how hé spent most of his time tcrying and gnashing his
teeth', and was always worrying about his health, though he was
now past eighty and had never had a sickness. But Franc ine
always said quietly, "You're the same as your father, exactly
the same. . He deecribed. how his father ran to church every
morning, for the first Mass: the church was his 'pagan god',
Angelo said; his father believed in God as other people did în
reputation.
For his father, too, life had never been quite realised:
his quest had never really begun. As for Angelo, the scene had
to be laid so carefully for this quest to begin that it never
came about: so many enemies to be fought off, so mich solitude
to be prooured, so much to be placated and appaesed in the outside
world. All this before he could begin to be himself. And
here the Absolute came in. The world outside was an absolute


power that had to be fought all the time, though the fighter
was weak, be ing flesh, and not absolute at all. You could only
get through by pitching one absolute against another in Angelo's
world.
That was why there oould be no quest: if you turn the outer
world into an absolute you glorify its powers, you humble your-
self to it---which makes the act of defiance necessary. You
build the world into such vastness that you are left without any
power in yourself at all: you have to assert yourself deliberate-
ly, in order not to go under; you. tell yourself you have to be
strong---that you are. indeed strong, and that the fight will be
long and bitter. Everything involves the long and self-destructive
fight.. Nothing is soft. Nothing comes easily.: Nothing is
relative. The world is all absolute round you; other people
are absolute---they are enemies or friends, cretini or wise,
great or small. This is where the fight far survival comes in---
your intimate flame of life is always at stake in this 81 truggle
with absolutes. And only when . towards the end of your life--
ifat all---you realise that the absolutes aren' 't there and that
you yourself aren't absolute, and no act of defiance is necessary,
should
only then are you free for the quest which /have begun in youth.
toP. 256 a.


Angelo told me once how Verga had came to write his
first real books---the ones for which he is knom: late in
life. He had chanced to see a leaflet describing an experiance
at sea, written in seaman's language; just a seaman talking
about the sea, from himself. And that had suddenly set Verga *s
language free. Suddenly there were no absolutes for him:
no monuments, no 'literature'. He found his own speect, after
years - In that sea-talk he found just a relative creature
talking about the relative world, in crisp, spare terms, not as
if he were God. From that time Verga began to write properly,
like a man talking.
In our world of the north all literature is that seaman
talking. The relative world weaves in and out of his narrative.
But in the provincial world, in Italy and Germany, the great
battle with absolutes has to take place, The outer world is
absolute. A man's statements are absolute. One statement
clashes with another---there is none of the endless dialogue
of free and wondering voices as in our world. There is none
of the leaven of the invisible society.
Right at the bottom, those absolutes are pagan. And in
Angelo's warld they 're classical pagan---still with their old
dignity and fire. They don't belong to the Christian world,


which has taken one unifying absolute from the Jevish religion
and rendered it the only thopoughly spiritual and invisible fact
of all created life whatsoever. The greatness of the Jenish re-
ligion was 1ts knomledge that if there are absolutes there is only
one. There can only be one ebsolute, 1f there are any at all,
simply because everything is in relation in our morld: so,to be
real, an absolute must contain everything there is. For life
hasn't been created in different pieces: one piece isn't oxclus-
ive of another, the world is mixed and in continual and necessary
affinity.
If you see life in absolues---shich were originally personified
in the separate classicel gods---you see 1t in pieces: and a piece-
vorla belongs to piece-perception. This 1s really what southern
perception. 18. It is perceiving by moments, the succession of
one sensation by another mithout unifying principle, with the min-
imum constructive theme, the minimum character. Angelo dould
change fantastically, from one moment to the next---s0 much that
you could hardly believe ho was the sane person. Ho would show
total chaos end collapse, followed a monent later by tho nost
extraordinery order, strong and clear like a E light.
in his
didrie mean
The *truth'
a southern rorld Sentt an objective app-
Sau,
woted.
raisal of what the eye sees, as
in ourfa Eoch moment
d qwn separale
hag its/truth, in the souhhern vorld. And only in the rareet
was
cases---the rarest individuals--- thera any unifying sense of
truth that pervades all these morents. tTruth' in the Italian
world, e8 in the German world---though much less obviously---
is not at all seperate. from the individual; it 1sn't a unity of
facts and propositions, standing apart fron us, as we tend to
las
conceive it. In the. provincial norld such a sense of unity


would be the fruit of individual thinking---'philosophy'.
The norld of absolutes is really a hopeless norld. Also
a slave-world. This is why there were hordes of slaves in bae
Times
ancient rrtt---hordes that could have dofeated armies if they'd
wanted to; but an absolute outer world creates a slave-inhabit-
ant. Even as a king this man is a alave. All the terrible
themes of Greek tragedy are really menaingleas to us, and a bit
irritating as well, because they look like blind and wilful slavery
to ebsolute foelings---loyalties, family prohibitions, fate--
which could be cleared up in a minute with a bit of censible talk,
in our world. There is terrific nobility---great stirring move-
ments like the wind---people like rocks, water, fire---the golden
dust of gods. But it's all false, in the end. It all collapses
in the and, not as a civilisation collapses, -with the movement and
progress of time, but with iner collapse into a new form; not as
domnfall of pover but as development; a new flower is put out,
a new soil begins to work invisibly. And so the ancient world
gren into the Christian world. The Christian norld isn't the
growth of a now civilisation, but the developmont of the ancient
world. The Jomish Horld entered its voice at the crucial monent,
and the contact went right through the crumbling Roman empire like
a shudder. There began tho use of fate, so to speak, in a cons-
cious and clear recognition of the way it Worked---not the dark
slave-acceptance of it as something to be propitiatod and wooed
ond bribed. The bribing of fate was vrong---this nas what Moses
laid down. It ras no good trying to talk to the sky as 1f there
were human beinge up there---absolute ones. The abaolute must
be absolute---completely invisible, completely spiritual, com
pletely inward, yet perveding everything there is. This was
Moses's foundation-stone to our religion---our life---our civil-


isation---our peroeption---our charac ter---our knowledge. In
getting hold of one unifying principle in creation he provided
us with the one unifying principle of character in ourselves, in
thought, in sensation. He freed us from absolute fate by making
us part of it---the absolute must al30 have a voice inside us,
since we vere created. That was the beginning of the quest in
life which we have inherited as a natural thing.
Angelo*s attitude to women changed a lot in the years we
knew him. I shall alwaye remember hon silent I was when he askod
me that question in Romo, in the first days, about how I thought
life would be with a *really beeutiful woman'. I hesitated,
nithout knoving why I did so at the time. It just seemed a
false question. But I never forgot it--or the nature of my
own silence. I think I just murmured something about beauty
being a *momont'. or perhaps I only thought that afterwards.
that I came to know later through Melli was thet beauty was
always shared, it was between two people, never a picture of any
kind; it vas always a moment botween two poople, like a common
breath between them; it engulfed them both, and in this way it
was beyond them both, but it wasn't static, it was something that
moved, like a sudden impulso.
But I oould see his lovely woren as he spoke---it ras in
the way his eyes narroned an d he caught his breath: she was tall,
distant, megnificent, speochless---impossible. She was imposs-
ible. And absolute. I naturally recoiled from that, as I can
own
reoognise now. I recoiled from that was to TVA vorld inhunonity.
It was conpletely bereft of humanity, his dosire.


slared
That was how he Zooked et women, too. They seemed, jointed
objects when he looked at them---broasts, legs, behinds. He
didn't make them seen mechanical as the puritan does nith his
masturbating appetite; but they were just bereft of humanity
under his gaze, though their heat remained; they became dark
and overpovering zones of temptation. That seemed to be the
strongest thing. Sometimes he would stare at their breasts with
a hard, contemptuous, self-protective sneer, and say to me softly
as they passed, 'Look at that one---just look at that arse!'
There wasn't the puritan oruelty or ill-health. But there vasn't
real enjoyme nt. And this also is Itelion. The woman is a sort
of reservoir of temptations that suck avay your powers. And
there is something definitely sinful in a woman's desire. In
attributing sex to them you are rendering them cheap: the clean
woman takes a grudging and economical attitude towards sex; she
makes it a struggle, a trial of strength. This is Italian sex--
a bitter rivalry between the two types of humanity, who have no
love for each othor.
The woman is mother in the Italian rorld: she is family-
tedium, childhood-desire, nurse. She isn't really in your
Horld, if you're a man. Men talk, play carde, entertain hopes,
visions. Women don't. They say in the northern civilisation
that behind every great enterprise there is a woman. But this
isn't true in the southern world except in the most basic way
conoeivable: the vomen look after the actual vegetable growth
of life---the tissues, secretions, evacuations, births, the
food and all the intimate deaires. The destres are her field,
exclusively. They are her stage and dominion. The somen main-
tain the imer flow of life, and the men are helpless spectators
of this.


Angelo often used to say to us as a joke, rubbing his
hands together in an exggerated way, *Ah, uhat wouldn't give
for a really dirty roman nowt' That was southern, too. The
image mas a plump, glum, unenchanting wonan who coupled herself
on to the prick without delioacy or cven enjoyment, only a defiant
contempt of all desire: a moman vho braved the element of sin,
but was dirty for that reason. In my vorid the lust-image was
different---it was more the mature, hord-limbed, oapable wonan
whose grip was strong. Not the yielding, plump woman of the
south. Not really the mother, or the mother turnod dirty.
The mother soorches routhern desire. As in the Arab world,
the concopts benutiful-and-fat are often run together, as the
real woman-attraction. It is the engulfing, dark, vegetative
appetite, not the friend of thought, not real thrill. The
thrill of the northern world is missing---the thrill of Bex
as a journey, taking you nearer and nearer the nameless goal:
another quest. In the southern torld it draus you down, it
robs you of identity, it weakens; it suoks you back into the
family where you have no future, no place in the outer life,
no direction---you're just there, accepting, taking your pleasures
as they come ind so you get the educated Italian who looks
for thin nomen, or turns his nanen thin when he gets them.
Rer
Sometimes he vill try to distort into something 'delicato'--
the girl who isn't quite natural: being natural is tho pitfall---
there lies the age-old plumpness, into which she might fall baok
if you let her; a0 there have to be little artifical touohes,
little 'fine* touches---try this hat, try this way of making
love, try staying up all night to got interesting creaces under
the oyes, smoke cheroots, peint your nipples blue. This is


invariably the appeal of the foreign woman---the slim nonan,
far
the boy-girl. She is as zaf away as possiblo from that other
lusty image of plump and fruitful and heavily natural vulgarity.
old
llal ain
There 1s the same. worm again---vulgarity. It haunts the brain
A in Haly
and gnaws pleasingly at the sex. And so E attractive waman, gets
that vengeful look of narrowed, half-frightened, defondive
refusal in her eyes, challenging the man's whole position. Sho
ien't a fricnd. In the northern world she is always a poseible
frtend. But in the south sex ien't a homage--it implies no
respeot.
At first, Angelo always looked, Molli up and domn with a
closed, fierce, derkly brooding attention, poring over her.
In his oun. world ohe couldn't have been there---except as femily,
and therefore boring. hen we were at the beach together,
which was very rare, he always looked at her legs with a kind
of horror-struck astonishment, more than desire, naking Franc ine
and me laugh.. He nearly always eddressed her and not me When
we were together---in the Italian style. The presence. of a
woman puts a new flevour on life at once---her funotion is never
forgotten by the man. This attention, thile preserving hor in
her natural identity, which is healthy, olso successfully separ-
Ronlthy.
ates her once and for all from the man_s world, which
isn't
The man's world is therefore ary: there is little enchantment
or thrill for the simple reason that woman are missing, horever
much they may physically be there. And the women are used to
this, through the centuries: the result is that they are with-
out enchantment on the whole, never having been asked to provade
it. They provide flirtation, the old sex-struggle, jealousy---
but nothing that departe from vanity, and therefore no real thrill,


no lasting fascination.
The southern world is neither a man's morld nor a waman's
vorld, but is in a tenuous state of siege. The whole sex-process
is seriously mained, perhaps as much as in puritanism, but in
a quite different way, and without anything unhealthy. The
sexual jeculetion is still there intaot; the inhibitions rasely
touch on the vital organs, as in puritanism. But the whole thrill
of sex through incorporation with the other faculties of 1ife,
including the religious ones---the ones of mystery---1s missing,
and there im't the painful and tortured desire that you get in
puritanism to win back the old forgotton natural mode of life.
In the southern world nature tends to be the enemy of men, the
enemy of action; while in the north it has to be called back
all the t ime. Therefore in the end the greater loss is in the
souhhern consciousness. But it keeps our vorld going by the
shere natural and wholesome function of its organs; it is a
kind of living guarantee of humen sanity for us.
Christendom would split right apart without this duality,
I think. One day it may be joined together into one civilisation.
But a long road has to be travelled yet. The Chriotien has
hardly taken more than a first hesitant stop--in two thousand
years---tomards the realisation of the living principles of his
religion.
Angelo lost his old obsessive attitudes towards womon Thile
he was in Paris, but he didn't get the northern thrill of sex
in exchange. All he did was los0 the old haunting deoire and
certainly the hysteria attached to it. Tomen became friends.
It was the women in France who changed him nost. At first he
was captivated and delighted. He daw with his extraordinery


clear insight the respéct they showed themselves. They res-
pected themselves as Italian women didn't, apparen tly. They
respected their onn desires. They even---marvellous though it
was---respected their desires for men. And with that the haunt-
ing sexual desire seemed to fade slowly in Angolo. Once, in the
last weeks, Melli asked Francine if *he ever flirted these days,
if he ever went with another woman, and she said, 'Hagari...',
that sad Italian nord which can do. for almost any unrealisablé
hope: if only he didt But no. It all seamed dried in him.
He was in too terrible a condition. You have to have hope for
desires. And his life seemed all but cruched.
Really I think he was being crushed by the northern world.
He cculdn't see what the enemfy was-a-he had his own enemies,
but they put him out of focus with the Worla he was living in
now. e The same had happened to me Italy. I had all buxt lost
myself. I used to get into a kind of wild, raging storm, through
the lack of any intimate connection with the world round me.
In the foreign world you aren't understood in your most intimate
gestures any more: you aren't of the fanily, and above all your
indignation isn't of the family; it is'seen as caricature,
almost, a mechanical and meaningless operation. And this seemed
to be happening to Angolo: he was getting separated more and
more, he tas alone in a way that was making real solitude im-
possible; every gesture singled him out as separate. Like me
he was fighting the enemies of his childhood, in his own proper
struggle, but he wasn't getting baok the little consolations and
even congratulations of his own country. Instead, nothing was
understood in him. The French didn't understand him. He was
admired and liked and even loved. But he always said, 'They


don't understand.' He complained about the men---how he had no
friends. The blood his own world vould have given him was mics-
ing. To fight your own country you have to be getting its blood
in your veins as well. Fighting your own country is self-develop-
ment. But if you remove the phys ical enemy you fight a ghost---
memories. This is the danger of living abroad. It requires a
long preparation---a terrific balanoe, before you're ready for it.
That ie properly interior to life has to be really interior to
you, what is oxterior must be really outside you: you have to
have taken the measure of your World, you have to have pessed
through the trial by fire and water. In my case this took place
in Rome. In Angelo's case, Faris.
But all the time I'm vriting this I know it is only tentative
truth. I know I must be blind to the depth and mystery of Angelo's
struggle as he is blind to mine. le can only wash aga inst each
other like the sea. And we seem to join the sane wave, to act-
uelly be the same wave, but then we separate again. And every
search we make is our own searoh, we can nevar go beyond our own
enemies, the truth is a state and not an experienoe---the truth is
a glimpse we can get in a thousand different ways, it has a thous-
and different faces: it has as many faces as the sea, as the light
that goes from dawn to dusk and nevers knows falsehood. In a
way, it doesn't matter what your truth is. Khon I look for Angclo,
shen I think I find him in myself, it gives me the satisfaction
of a truth, like a light that shines for a moment.
In the end it seems ve have to turn avay from each other to
face our own enemies. It was Angelo who made the conscious and
clear and self-sacrifioing act of turning avay. I never vould
have, through thick or thin: I would heve olung to it. I


would never have allowed myself to reflect about it. But
Angelo is safe in reflection-e-the quiet voice comes, the eye
sees, and then there is action. My world would have had to see
the action first. Only after Angelo began to turn away did I
see what stark differences there rere between our rorlds. Before
Rad Been
then there wag juet him and me, not two worlds at all.
We drew terrific sustenance from each other. Our world wi th
each other was complete, after nearly ten years: that was the
moment vhen real northern friendship could have begin, and for
Angelo it was the monent to end. In his world the invisible
remains the utterly invisible---there is no acknowledgement of
it except in the silence and solitude of the single creature.
So vhen we were about to graps the invisible, in our lives, it
had to end. In his world the invisible is never brought into
life---it doesn't chango life: only the 3 ingle creature moves
oloser and closer to its silent obligations.
Yet his development and my development nont on side by side.
I could tell from the ney he described the gradual ebbing of his
desire to persuade other people, the gopwing richness.of his
being alone, the slow dawning of the grand outer world as a
spectacle beyond him: all this was the same. But then there was
the further development, the last one of all in whioh we would
separate and render each other invisible. For him the absolute
waited. He had told me with an extraordinory excitement, taking
me aside, gripping my arm, that he was starting on something he'd
always dreaned about in a fearful way, always half-afraid, but
he'd yearned for the.chence---the power---the happiness to try.
Could I guess what it was? I stood there gaping at him, so
taken by his excitement---hic gleaming eyes---that I thought he


was going to say he'a turned homosexual or something. No,
he'd begun to write poetry. And re started to talk about it.
He vas unwilling to talk---I was, too. But he said the questions
had to be gone through. He wanted to ask me lots of questions.
He was half-afreid of 1t, too. He was afraid of - mens someone
who had vritten for a long time now---in whom it was an activity
as natural as breathing, and had been since early childhood.
And he was embarking on something that had cost him years of
preparation and tremor. He couldn*t bear to be watohed, eithor,
in this process. That absolute was beokonging him all the time.
He wanted to be speechless. But he couldn't help talking.
He nanted to know in what sart of mood I wrote a book. I talked
about the rhythm---the flame that rose and might rise every day
for a long time, for a week or tho or three, and then might sudd-
enly die, and you would have to wait, you would have to be patient,
you would have to search hard, waiting for the flame to light
again, becanse it wouldn't light without great effort, the effort
must always be there, the wait must be active and seeking, before
the darkness Would lift and the body would be taken as it were
down from the cross, before the creature would rise again and the
earth begin its right novement again, and tho blood flow. And
he said later---in Paris---to my surprise, just as if it was a
reason vhy we couldn't be friends, *Ah, that wouldn't be for me---.
I couldn't do that!'
I never really understood this. Perhaps he meant he couldn't
allow himself to collepse. Perhaps he aennt he hadn't the faith
to sustain himself in darkness. Perhaps he meant he could only
go to his work in moments of flame, and then leave---his work
must be occasional poetry, not more And I remember he said at
the same time, after a vioaent quarrel ne had had due to some-


thing I can't even remember now, *You see, I want to read your
books, I vant to read English, but I can't, I never shall, I
know now that English isn't for me...* It was like an elegy on
our friendship---it had the note of saying good bye; he seemed
to be watching somebody close to him disappear, but with utter
consciousness. *
Or perhaps the whole pace. of our northern world was too
much for him---espec ially the pace of love and friendship.
Perhaps that vasn't what his world had ever prepared him for.
It had prepared him for the bitter lonely struggle against a
mossive obstructive vorld that fought with knives and little acts
feltfe
of contempt. Perhaps hel I had to do something to blaok hinself in
my eyos. They say this is what a Sicilien will do sonetines.
To maka himself oasy a
Before, I used to cooperate with this absolute of his,
without know ing it. I used to write him letters that never went
too deep. into my intimate life; they were intimate letters, but
general, not in detail---they were about the absolute vorld re had
created between us. I wrote to him about ousfreindship, about
the solace he and Francine sere to us. And about the countryside.
Sometimes about people. But after he and Franc ine came to Eng-
lend and joined in our life for a week, joined in our struggle,
when they saw it was 1ife-and-death like their own, when---after
that--I vtote him desperate letters, even when I rasn't feeling
and
desperate, HEE in shere celebration of the new partnership we
while
had found, everything vent wrong. a And I felt it even when I
vrote the lettors. I talked about the little life-bl078 that
had atarted to rain in on Helli and me. Ana even thile I was
writing I felt a flush of bamblderment cryep up ny neok and
suffuse my cheeks, a flush of shane as well. That surprised


me because it rasn't my shame. It mas the shame that poured
IRnew
from our relationship, from the way, A he would read my letter. I
felt as if I was laying myself bare: that was what I meant to
do---that was friendship, and I'd always done it-as an act of
homage to him and Francine; but now I felt this recoil on his
side---and it must almays have been there, only hidden to me.
He see emed to feel now that I was offering hin no longer my strong
and rubicund nature, as he called it, but the slave, the vailing
victim of life. That ras hom he seemod to read mo and hear ne;
and alvays as if I rore putting hia under an obligation, to do
somothing about it. For myself, I was just fighting and telling
hin what my fight vas about. I had no more thought of losing,
or complaining, or being a slave, than of flying in the air.
It was just the fight that had been going on for years---tho
usual, commonplace but exciting and desperate struggle, to get
youreelf heard. A silly struggle in the end, but then death
But
makes averything silly. Et it wasn't sufficiently the absolute
for him. He really began to believe that I was taking the relative
outer world in earnest. Ho thought I was really and intimately
diamayed at the outer world: that I respected it. And he kept
saying to me, when we met in France a fer reeks later, 'You know,
your vork has to wait---all reol nork has to---until after we'ro
And I do believe he thought, for the moment, that thia idea
dead.f)
was new to me. Yet ve'd talked about such thinge for years.
It was like the collapse of a dialogue Fhich had been going on
Perkaps
l.c. for eight years. Thero alvays had been a basic misunderstanding
A I
between us. But non it was all that remained. Our tvo norlds
atood fecins each other, stark. And we rere poverless.
There had been little signs, now and then, that our worlds


weren 't really meeting, even when there was nothing obviously
wrong * Once Melli arrived innparis a day or so bef ore me and
Angelo said to her, sitting in the dim, still drawing-room that
overlooked the courtyard, 'How is he? Is he in a good sta te--
or...?*. He paused, .funny?* And he seemed to expect her to
know what he meant. But Bhe looked at him questioningly, and he
brushed the matter quickly aside, seeming to assume that she only
wanted to be tactful. She was as baffled as I was when she told
me later.
I think he missed the safo inner order of my world, the
harmony that lies tight underneath and therefore makes any sally
away from it an adventure: there are no dangers of bursting the
seams. My long dramatic descriptions soemed to tire him as
much as stir him. They were journeys from safetys not desperate
flights to achieve safety, as he perhaps thought.
One thing I thought afterwards: that he left us either
to become great - ar become small.


The northern : warld had nearly crushed Melli, too. Then
we met I knew she was convalescent from an illness, but not that
she'd been in such danger. It was a mercy I didn't know, in
a way---because we would have held back from life in those first
months, we wouldn't have talked till late at night or walked at
dawn, or done anypof the things that I think helped her.
I was also ignorant in a deeper way--about health as a whole.
And I learned this from Melli. She already had it in her---the
power of health. She had the enormous natural-born silence that
this requires. I'd had an inkling of it before---but it was all
twisted and Girdered-about with the prevailing concepts of health.
I had felt these were wr ong. I'd always folt strangely at odde
with medicine---whenever I'd had to see a doctor. There was same
contradiction here: I felt a loss of power and self-reliance and
initiative which I thought was wrong, whenever I faced a doctor.
But I didn *t know why it vas wrong. I tried to argue that he,
the doctor, was wr ong. But it was a difficult noad. And, slowly,
Melli taught me why. First she had the inner rhtthm and si lence
of health, and secondly she was learning herself, as the nest doctors
do, through their own bodies.
Even as/child her's was a rhythm, a deep, innder rhythm,
which just doesn't do for this epoch. And as fast as the doctors
looked for a cause they gave up. It was mad to suppose that the
usual doator of today could ever have found an answer.
When she was a small child her family was chased out of Germ--


any by nazism and settled for a time in Vienna, A day before the
nazi troops arrived there they were tipped off by a friend and got
away in the nick of time. From there they went to Sweden, where
they stayed two years and her father was arrested for being involyed
with the British secret service against the nazis and was imprisoned
for two months. They decided to get out of that country too,
before it got hot, and travelled : acfoss Russia to Japan, arriving
in Moscow the day the nazis signed their pact with Stalin: down-
stairs in the.hotel SS officers were celebrating loudly, and they
language
could hear the German/through the floor. But they got to Japan
and after a last-minute fight to get visas crossed the Pacific in
a Japanese liner, and then settled in the United States. It was
there that melli grew up end had all her first most conscious
years. She had a marvellous childhood there. Bat At the age of
puberty, when she was about fourteen, she developed what the
doctors called.hypertension---her blood pressure was found to be
muoh higher than normal, after she was examined for continual
Can
head-aches. Doctors know that blood-pressure/coma from an un-
balanced nervous system, when it is too high, and one way of lower-
ing blood pressure is to out the sympathetic nerves, simply to
remove some of them from use, so that they can't play their role
too heavily any more. This is offective for a time, for five or
six years---though this limit wasn't known then: it was thought
permanent. It is a devastating operation, dangerous and a terrific
shock to the whole system, especially a child's system. It obtains
a kind of reprieve from the high blood pressure but of course
offeres no solution. The surgeon remarked after he'a done it
that it had been a terrible experience operating on a perfectly
sturdy body which appeared to have nothing wrong with it. But she
went through her university years without head-aches and free


of pressure. The heart was thus freed from an enormous burden
in the crucial years of development. 0+, al least thac was te story.
Hypertension doesn't mean a tense percon. It doesn't even
mean a nervous person. People with strong tendencies to hyper-
tension are often calm, extraordinerily and distinctly reposeful.
And Melli has always been this---as a child she was placid and
contented, and hardly ever cried. And no obvious self-suppress-
ion was involved here. You don't feel with her that the calm
comes from suppressing hot feelings. There 1s difficulty in
expression, but this isn*t the same: the rhythm is simply one
that doesn't ask for expression. It is 11ke a olear underground
pool that goes in a perfectly natural current which will always
be found to be the seme, however slow. And Melli always struck
me from the first moment we met with the coolness and soundness
and clear penentration of her mind. : This is calm all the way
through. You will get some doctors arguing about inhibitions,
when they come to high blood pressure. But this calm goes right
behind the formation of inhibitions or anything else circumstant-
Gad
ial. It is a natural rhythm---natural like a stream---Bhish is
intimately challenged by our epooh, by its whole paraphernalia of
false effectseits whole pack of fabrications, chich can be blown
Buddhiie
down in a moment if you try long and hard enough, as,a Einet can
shed the world. And here lies the struggle for health. It was
this that I began to understand through Melli.
That can only be done by the self. It has to be a complete
and thopbugh act of self. It needs an exemination'into the whole
of life, in which nothing is spared. But not in the manner of
pachology, which is designed for heppiness in the present status
Reseth mit involve
quo: on the contrary, tiad la-designed-for the destruction of
one
the status quo, in Self.


And Melli only arrived at this completion of vhat was
already her inner knowledge by accident, when she was in Germany
on a visit after the war. The other side of n our civilisation---
the vigorous provincial culture where you see huge thriving
stiel
farms and people Working the land with their own hands---came to
her rescue *
I believe the other world, the Anglo-Saxon world, never could
have helped her. She never would have got a sense of plain and
whole health as a médical reality: .her own efforts would have
been left aside; she would never have, learned responsibility for
her own body, because she would.never in the Anglo-Saxon world
have learned what the body was 4 It is no use being told that it
is a respiratory system.or lymph or kidneys; a subtle machine e
You have to know it belongs to you, and in what way this is so.
The medicine of the Anglo-Saxon world was mostly drugs and
surgery a Outside of that you jusy grinned and bore whatever you
had. There was no approach to health, apparently not much collect-
ive idea of what health. was---unless 1t was getting 111 and being
cured again. of course there - vere the vegetarians and homeopaths
and nudists and dietioians: but they seemed to accept the same
views of the body as the other dootors, only to cut out the drugs
and surgery until strictly necessary. Their methods were rarely
exact, as those of the ordinary doctor seemed to be: so it was
easy to call them cranks and charlatans. Nor was this different
in Germany, or in Italy for that matter: but a sense of nature
in those Countries.
had remained/ The word. 'nature* was still not a crank word as
it had bec ame in our world. By accident Melli found in Germany
a new possibility for her body which suited her as nothing else
had done, and which incidentally saved her life.
When I put this to,a specialist in London---that Melli had


been saved not by drugs but, a total approach to her health---he
only said, 'But it's old-fashioned!' This was some year s after
her treatment in Bavariaa The act tual measurement of the pressure
hadn't changed much, the London man said.. Her health had improved
miraculously, against even the prediotions of her doctor in Bavaria,
but the London man wanted her to take a drug that would get thé
clock-reading down to what most people had. He saw the thing from
the point of vien of the"heart. And there was a lot in his argum-
ent. But that was the case with every doctor you talked to.
They always had a different part of the body they were interèsted
in, and they san all the functiens from that point of view. It
seemed thet no one had sat down and thought out for himeelf that
health méant, and what the strange and marvellous balance maintained
by the body consisted of. The only man who seemed to have done
that was the man in Germany. And we found ourselves going back tc
his advice again end again, some times by accident, sometimes by a
curious instinot of self-preservation.. These other doctors didn*t
make us feel safe. They didn't even look sofe in themselves.
And he did.
The London specialist sc ared me, for which I was very thankful
later, because he was the first to wake,me up to the seriousness
of melli's disorder. The a1 tmosphere in his room was frightening.
this
ever
And at that time
was what I expected when I went into ag
doctor's room. It was all heeby-jeeby land for me - And,
making
though a kindly and considerate man, he didn't seem to mind giving
#e this impression. In.fact, he was out to frighten me. He
fixed me with his eyes end.told me straight off that if I didn't
die.
do something quick welli could lose her mind, go blind or TOrEEs
At that time I didn't realise that when he took her pressure--


perfunctorily---it must have soared as it always did in the
presence pf a strange doctor. Pressure is notoriously dependent
on present state of mind; really it is a flezible pressure of
supply, to cope with. the body's needs as.they arise; and since no
one has had his pressure measured in all his states, sitting and
standing, arguing an d norking and getting angry, there isn't much
evidence about hor it varies; but it obviously does vary a lot.
The important thing is the margin within which it varies. And
the. London man was alarmed by this.. He was mostly right. - The
first part of "elli's treatment had been taken, but there was still
a long way to go, and werhadn't started it yet, despite the advice
who wanked us
of the German man, to go back to him at least once a year and stay
clinie
aa rime.
in his at leas tb three weeksy We didn't take any notice of
and
this because Melli was eating well and sleeping well,/above all
because I had no more idea of what all these charts and tables and
figures meant then flying in the air. I knew Melli had been 111
and that now she was well. That mas.what the prevailing medicine
taught me to think: a person who was ill lay down, and a person
who wasn't.stood up. That was about as much concept of health
as most people had.
As a result of that doctor frightening me I went deeper
and deéper into the subject. Until then her medical treatment
had been strictly her province. The doctor's world was.her
world, and at first I felt as if I was interfering. A doctor
would come to take a sample of her blood and measure her pressure,
and I would hang about outside the room; the atmosphere was


always like that of a hospital.
I begen to realise how astonishingly ignorant of the body I
was a If anybody had told me that my liver was down near my boots
I shouldn't have been too surprised. Ididn't know if the kidneys
were in the baok or front, and I thought the stomach was below the
intestines. The people who hed ever tried to get me interested
in what they called the 'body' had always come to me with charts
and hideous diagrams and lurid colour-photographs- of sores and
wounds---in other words, with the sick body. That was supposed
to be the basis of medicine---the sick body. Or the corpse.
And naturally I was disgusted and turned anay *
The body had no oonneotion with me-w-that much was clear,
It was like living with a hood over my head. I doubt whether
anybody outside the Anglo-saxon world could gron up quite like
that. Italians invariably have a natural sense of the body.
The Germans have their vigorous and inborn sense of nature. It
is something the provinoial civilisation leaves intact. But
in our world you can grow up eating concepts, so to speak.
Nothing is quite real. You don't look behind things. The city
is an immense dream---it is all done for you, an unbelievable
conjuring trick that has no more humanity than a factory-wall
lit by flares at night. In Italy and dermany you will never
find cities like those in France or England or America. They
can never develop in that direction, either, given all the indust-
rialisation in the world. The citiee keep a definite human
compass in the provincial world. You see it in their roads,
the shape of their baildings, chether they're ugly..or not.
The single human creature has kept his claim on life, in his own
senses. Whereas in our world he has only kept his claim on
life fif rights and concepts.


In Italy, too, Melli would have recovered. Nearly every
Italian peasant knows the classical treatment for high blood-
pres sure---which only one doctor in New York advised, and was over-
ruled by the rest. In the provincial civilisation the idea of
the body as Bomething alive---as continually active and changing---
has survived, while in our world it is largely conceived as a
static and helpless entity that ralls unpredictably 111 and has to
be given firts-aid. In our world medicine is a repair-service,
not a concept of health at all.
All I could do was to ask the London man questiond. And his
an swers seemed satisfactory. But all the time I felt there was
deseribe
something wrong. For he was the kind of man we both would say
WEB wrong about life from top to bottom. Science seemed to mean
the reorganisation of life for him: its material---the body, nature,
call.it what you like---was a kind of unruly and ignorant mass that
had to be shown the way. It was shown the way with instruments,
drugs, injections. Thereas our lives vore based on the absolute
opposite---that the body, or nature, isn't unruly at all, and that
it can show us they way if we allow it to. On that basis, after
all, Melli's life had been saved. So she felt she knew, for her-
self.
And she kept on saying, *No, no, I can't face it. I can't
take that drug.' It was all she could tell me, while I wavered
to and fro in my searoh, between the London man and the man in
Bavaria (whom I hadn't yet met, incidentally). The drug was
simple to take, the London doctor said. It involved little
side-effects which you had to get used to, such as fainting in
the first stages, watering at the eyes, congestion of the nose to
some extent, and a tendency to constipatibn. This s unded very
strange. The reading on the clock would be all right, her charts


would be straight, but she vould walk round like somebody with
a permanent cold in the head, going off into a faint sometimes,
and so forth. What sort of health could that be? What sort
of symptoms were those? If you went to another doctor with
those, presumahly he'd start treating you according to his special
subject, in a never-ending process. Normelly those symptoms
would indicate a disorder: would it be less of a disorder simply
because it had been put there deliberately by a doctor?
Yet at present she was feeling completely healthy and livelym
What sort of medicine was it that took these things avay? For
days we mulled it over between us, and for nights on end I. tried
to think it out, alone. It seemed so strange for a 'cure'.
Yet there wasn't a doctor ne knew in London who didn't advocate
it or something like it.
* Also ehe would have to go to hospital, to find out what
dose she could take safely; she could faint in bed---it was
better than fainting on the feet. All the tests vould be carried
out. If he found sonething wrog with a kidney he could cut it
out. *We can always cut it out!' he said, fixing me with his
eyos. He said he egreed with the cperation she had had as a
child, only he nould have goné 'much, much deeper* wit h the
surgical knife. It was rather'a horrifying picture.
And I didn*t wonder that Melli was frighténed. The thought
of it alone was enough to put her pressure upe For me, that
was what medicine was and always had been. That was what doctors
were. Their'consulting rooms scared thé daylights out of you,
and made you feel helpless and ignorant. But Melli knew the
other kind of médicine. She knew it wasn't old-fashioned, as
the London man apparently thought, because it didn't belong to
fashion at all, either old or new fashion, an d that was its


strength. Nor was it slipshod: in fact, the examination it
offered seemed to be much more thorough than that proposed by
the London man. It consulted every aspect of the body, it
treated every stage in the process converting food and air into
living cells, it watched the development of the body in all its
cycles. It called itself 'biological' medicine. Whereas, at
best, the London man's medisine was based on the vague doctrine
that food---any food, more or less---was converted by the body
into *energy'. If you scrape almost any doctor's mind nowadays
you will find that this is what his approach rests cn finally,
and perhaps unconsciously. It is the nineteenth-century ooncept
of the body as a machine; which drove out all the previous medicine
without proving its worthlessneas.
In fact, the London man asked me one day what Iwanted in
Melli---a "broken-down Ford* or a *smooth Cadillac*. I just
mumbled something, completely confused. It didn'tocour to me
to say that she vasn't a car, and I wouldn't want to live with one
anyway. e But there was the concept---a dead, silent machine which
started
ral
you aRiE up, and Which you fed with fuel every day. This made
us masters of the body--we were the drivers. But could we drive
the body? He seemed to want to. That seemed to be his idea
of science.
Melli could at least be sure of one thing, from her treatment
only
at. the olinio in Bayaria---not fae that the clook-reading was
better, but that the whole of her body was going es it should.
But with this drug she never could have been sure. And those
symptoms would have indicated the opposite. She Vould have had
to close her mind to the future---as to where these new synptoms
were leading her. But in health.you have to see ahead, for the
simple reason that the body is a total organ, one that doesn't


suffer an un-balence in one place without. everything else being
affected in time. For this reason the *biological' modicine
sometimes called itself 'totel* medicine. It treated a symptom---
or an organ---as part of a whole process, and the whole process
had to be ezamined. It was better to see that all the organs.
did their Work properly, and thus slowly eliminate the cause of---
the physical need for--the high pressure. If the body had to
take the strain of high pressure, at least it must have the
maxinum health.
There was another thing---that no doctor could say what the
high pressure was caused by. But only the man in Bavaria.seemed
to take this ignorance into account, and incorporate it in his
treatment. He maintained that a.new drug, produced in a laborat-
ory, might upset the sys tem in unknown ways, and cause an invisible
worsening of the seat of the disorder: it was safer to groom the
body slowly to health, in all other respects besides the pressure,
so that the cause, whatever it vas, would be isolated as much as
possible. In this way, he found out. that the seat of the trouble
wasn't the kidneys, as most doctors thought until then: chetr
indeed, there was no visible organic cause---and this, again, the
other doctors had been unable to.say for certain.
As it. happened, the drug the London man advocated to me, in
his boyish goodness of heart, was later looked. on as dangerous
even in his cirales, and was superseded by another which was
said to have no side-effects. But only languege called those
symptons 'side* effects. Who could say that they were permanent-
ly *side*, that 1s, minor? And who could. say that just because,
in this latest drug, no side'beffects were visible, none existed
(Invisibly and perhaps more dangerously)? Doctors seemed to
show an extraordinary confidence in each other's words. Did


their words count according to their Position? what did
Position have to io with the truth? tas medicine part of the
surrounding social dreem like everything else? Vere there
habits and traditions that existed because of the people that
practised them, and. not because of their truth? This Lond on
doctor clearly felt awe for other "distinguished" doctors. The
surrounding sociel dreanvorld was sacred to him---this one's
'opinion', that one's 'experience', the other one's 'name'.
Clearly, he hadn't passed through the lonely evolution necessary
for the power to heal, in our epoch. He was still a boy of the
middle classes, though over fifty---for whom there were 'experts',
'facts' proved by statistice, and 'medical knowledge' as fixed as
an algebraic equation. He clearly vasn't Horking from hinself,
with his onn thoughts and energy. It was all in reference to a
world he was really frightened of, and in ave of, lie soneone
aiming at a definite social position.
Which is Uhy, perhaps, he always seemed frightened by his own
ubject; - and rihy his oun health wasn't good. Hie nerves weren't
put
right, which meant he couldn 't/his patient at eases Ie was work-
ing very hard, with nervous strain all the time, but work never
killed a man unless it was wrong vork.
Our situation at botton was this: te either had to say that
the whole fabric of society round us was sound, in which case this
faithful servant of it was probably sound as vell, or that it was
a disaster. Te said it was a disaster. That was what sd had
always believed, both of. us, and it was what so had based our
lives on without roalising it.
But that was only the reality underneath. In fact, I was
nore than half-convinced by the London doctor. I spent houra
every day in a trembling panic. I ran to tho nearest villago---


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


Most of all I had to change myself. I had to change my life.
But the ohange only came months later, after long lonely refleot-
dusing an
ion tr-the English winter, without a soul to talk to on the sub-
ject, even Melli---because the fashionable medicine was teaching
me to look on her as a helpless victim of powers nobody knew
anything about, and which it was therefore better not to discuss
with her. It seemed we were only called on to make a 'decision'.
le had to 'weigh the facts'. It was very middle-class, that
language. I wouldn't have acoepted it in_any other field.
Suddenly one used middle-class language for the most crucial step
of one's life? That was strange. * I was troubled and haunted,
and lay awake at night, starting eve: ry time Melli moved. Where
did I stand in matters of health---the body---disease? Did I
really believe that these faithful children of the middle classes---
whether they were twenty years fola, fifty years old, sixty or
seventy---Oould help me, in anything? Could they help me in a
dire orucial step, of life and death? But could I do without them,
either? What was my position, then? Conveniently, I had never
thought it out. Being of more or less robust constitution, I
hadn't had to.
As fast .as the London man tried to make his treatment seem a
quite pedestrian and ordinary thing, it sounded more and more murd-
erous to me. Melli would have to measure her own pressure two
him
or three times a week and send a note of the readings every montho
All his old patients did 1t, he said. It was
perfect tly easy. And they had 'normal' lives: they vent to bed
as late as they liked, they ate vhen and what they wanted, they
took planes all over the place, worked un der heavy pressure;
unlike Melli, who apparently led an *abnormal' life. Their


lives didn't seem normal, much less healthy, to me, but they were
top people, and for the doctor that seemed to be the test of val-.
idity in our world. I kept hearing in my mind the advace of
Melli's doctor in Bavaria, 'You have to become anartist# in the
quiet life.* It would/ have done to repeat that to most
Anglo-
Saxon doators, or perhaps to most doctors anywhere---at the risk
of a ribald laugh. But it kept recurring to my mind.
I asked 1f any of his patients were young o It was always
difficult for me to get a clear answer from him because he seemed
to be defending himself all the time, and my questions went to him
like cannon balls against a fortresss But couldn't these things
be talked about simply? Was the body so complicated and difficult
that a person of my intellgience could learn. absolutely nothing
about it? Had God created something you needed special credent-
ials for, to know about? It seemed thet at every point in life
you were. met with a person with credentials---who was like a
barrier to clear knowledge. o But could these people think? Had
these people really studied, in the proper sense of the word?
Had they thought things through? Had they ever stodd alone?
Or had they just smallowed what they'd been told, like fanthful
servants? Like nearly every child born into the middle classes?
No, it appeared that he had no other young patients. Had
he ever treated one? That was vague. An answer was avoided.
But I was left with the impression that he hadn't. Here was a
further worry. His old patients had probably developed their
high pressure after lives of normal pressure.: But in Melli we
had quite a different case. But he mouldn't admit it was a diff-
erent case. It was only a matter of the clock-reading. The
clock-reading was too high; it had to be reduced, whatever age
you were. And I couldn't argue with that.


He said $hat under his treatment she could eat meat again.
But she didn*t want to eat meat. She felt better not eating it.
In fact, not eating it had provided the first relief for her system,
years ago. He didn't actually say it but the impression I took
away was that meat would make her stronger. Perhaps this was
because I believed it myself, in my heart of hearts. But she
didn't look frail. Infact, she was strong. In fact, she often
stood up to things better than I did. But my belief had never
been formed: it was just there. Yet I began to consult some
memories in my mind. I thought of an Austrian farm where I'd
kad
once stayed: there they*a only eaten meat on holideys---1,felt
kad teen
quite a pig eating it every day. Bread WEB their great stand-by,
had
dumplings in vegetable soup, potatoes. And they worked twelve
to fourteen hours a day in the fields, all the time I was there.
That was strange. I began to find out other things. The
peasants everywhere had been like that at one time. There was
a spphistioated peasantry now, in Germany and France, but in
former times only thy rich and noble had eaten meat once or twice
a day, as we all do now. And the rich and noble were the ones
who had needed the spas and cures, and had reveloped all the
peculiar disorders required to be treated there. Noblemen had
been short-lived, on the whole, too: they'd been lucky to reach
forty. I put two and two together. The doctor in Bavaria
used certain of the old spa treatments. Were the old noble
diseases becoming universal ones now, as a massive idle class
spread all over the eenth?
So a quiet life and a meatless diet were apparently not as
abnoraal as the London doctor tried to make out. But I kept
quiet, knowing that the current terminology had the ticket-
olassification, 'vegetarian', ready for talk like that. It


seemed that on every bit of clear knowledge and information we:
had in life a name was fixed to' denote its social group. But
what had social groups to do with finding out about the body?
On the other hand, the man in Bavaria wasn't a vegetarian.
He advised meat for working people, even every day. But for
people who sat on their fannies most of the year, Who enjoyed
themselves on their fannies, who travelled to and fro on their
fannies---the bulk of the middle class---he advised a good bit
less, About three times a weak, he said, But you had to fill
in with other things. You couldn't just knook off the meat.
You had to know what you were doing. You had to do something
positive---not just out something out. And for the London doctor
On the conhras,
lie
it seemed to mean depriving, and nothing else. A It meant
Pact
adding to the diet, not taking avay. It meant paying a close
and thorough attention to what you ate, not carelessly abandoning
an essential element out of a kind of mystical ohstinacy. On
that subjeot, I found you oame up against a dense fog of prejudice
and superstition, more in England than anywhere else. The word
'diet'---which was practised as treatment by poor and rich alike
in- Italy and Germany---meent only one thing in England: slimming.
It was connected with temperance and a pinched and cold attitude
to life. It meant puritanism. But, as I came to realise
(because I shared those fears), it only meant a way of eating.
You could have a meat diet, for instance. Or a wine diet.
Rave
You oould, fattening diets. But in England it was only another
dream-word, drifting in the fog of shoddy ideas from the nineteenth
century.


Nobody spoke up for the doctor in Bavaria---even those who
know thet he had saved Molli's 1ife, even people who had benefited
from his treatment themselves. In Gormany he was more or less alone.
His clinic wasn't even granted official rocognition, thoughy local
doctors all over Germany sent him their patients--ewhen all else had
failed. One thing I ne ver heard enyone deny---even other doctors,
even Anglo-Saxon dootoro: that he was a fine doctor himself.
We paid our first lons visit to the olinic .one summer. I'd
been there twice before but only as a visitor, staying in a near fby
pension. This time I stayed in the clinic itaelf, in a room next
to Helli's. Life is a number of mell-constructed accidents-e-
there Was no room at the looal inn, and the clinio offared me room
and board without medioal treatment. I said to myself that I
didn't need a oure, even if I had the money for it; I was too
healthy. It was true . I was waen't an my back. I was GV en robust.
But it nasn't what I would call health non a
Next to Molli'eroom on the other side there was a young man with
cander. Somatines ne heard him crying at night with tha pain, and
later he aied. I suppose he waon't more than twenty.
The clinic was in the mountains and thore was clear, oool
sunlight over massive valleys, with pino woods and sudden green
alopes; and an enormous number of aquirrels---they oame to our
Trench windome to eat nuts in the morning, mostly grey, but
somotines you saw a fox-squirrel, too, with his wonderful
russet coat. The clinic was a woodon chelet on a slope,
looking donn into trees, with a road running close by. Its
atmosphere was astonishingly light and oheerful. There mas
all the special vigorous intimacy and S implioity thet the
Germans have, and which is really a pagon quality, as if


their whole world was a mysterious and grand forest, and they
were the gnomes.
It hes always struck me--this utter simplicity of the
Germans. If they're bad---they're bad from simplicity. There
isn't the abstract badness of our world. There are more bad
effects than în our world, because the badness has no form, it
springs from single people, from caprice and lonely machination,
and so tends to chaos. There isn't any society, there isn't
real communion at all. People are alone, with this enormous
untouched intimacy and simple vigour. It makes them perhaps
the most dangerous people in the world. They never know a
limit to their dreams, and in the lack of society they try
to bring their dreams to fruition. But it always comes from
their simplicity. Behind everything in their world there is
the basic simple approach of the single human creature. There
is no discussion. If you eddress them collectively you address
them like children. And they follow with incomparable simplic-
ity and good will, if they follow at all.
Nothing could be moru wrong than the publicity that has
gone out since the war, indicting thèm as murderous, with a
kind of abstract and collective evil. They have little
that is collective at all. There is no conversation in our
sense---that lubricant of real society. People talk and
they listen, but theger isn't the give and take, the develop-
ment by enquiry, of real conversation.
When something collective does happen it is nearly always


a disaster. This is because it must be a dream, and not an
inherited safe form. Like Italy, the German world has grown out
of independent duchies which were always a law to themselves---
not from an integral monarchy, radiating a single authority through
its noblemen, as in France and England. There is no comnunben of
ideas, no collective genius of thought, in Germany, just as there
isn't in Italy. This is why you see people*s faces changing so
much, especially if they have great gifts.
The doctor who saved Melli*s life, for instanoe---he had been
one of Hitler's dieticians. And I always had to look at him twice,
to recognise him. But this isn't a sign of inner vacillatim.
It simply meant the absence of any inherited communal form.
The German peasants have an inherited physical forn of 1ife,
as in Italy, but as soon as the break is made with peasant-lffe
the search for form has to begin. In the Angio-Saxon world
character develops in each creature as a collective force, whether
he likes it or not. But in Gormany it devolops by individual
crisis and effort; the encrusted lines of age in the German are
the lines of an isolated development, and the béing of this
isolated creature has been so variously interpreted end mis-
interpreted in its life by other people, it has been seen in
so many false lights (other poople have no collective criterion
in their judgements) that it tends to change according to the
light it is seen in.
This is another great danger of the German: he has little
sense of other people; little psychological inight---88 a natural


gift. This is why, while there is strong theatre in Germany,
there is-no great human drama as in England and America and France:
aga in, it is like Italy in this. *Other people' in the German
world obstruct one or help one, and you tend to approve or dis-
approve of them according to which they do. It_1s the opposite
of our metropolitan vorld where people have their own moral integ-
rity which you don't necessarily call into question if they happen
to go against you. Here again is. the lack of anything collective
in Germany.
There is enormous pride, the pagan accompaniment. of cimplicity.
This is the first and longest battle of the gifted Germai n---to
defeat his oun pride. In our world pride is ridiculed away earty
in life as a backwerdness of charac ter, a failure of the sp irit.
oppesite
itals
#E is the epp i in Germany---pride is an assertion of the
spirit. The modesty in our world which is cultiva ted early as
a mark of development and maturity gets no encouragement in the
said,
German warld. And modesty, as Stendhal sa is the key to tender-
ness. The child in Germany learns early that he 1s alone.
Round him a certain tone is established---among the other children---
of irony and a certain hurtful disparaging doubt, against which
the child cultivates a protective irony and a protective disposition
to disparage in his turn. The indignation of our world is
unknom---the righteous indignation which the society round you
tacitly encourages: because righteous indignation must always
be on behalf of something other than self-interest. The struggae
of the gifted man or woman in Germany is a struggle to achieve
a steady moral character. If you read books on war from Germ-
any---any book on war, from the first or second war---you will
always find them lacking in real decided moral verdict. There
is always something uncomfortable and ambiguous about them.


Our books on var are exercises in pity, on the whole---horror,
some kind of recoil, some collective indignation on behalf of
other people's lives, on behalf of the collective health and
goodness that is being put at stake in war. But this isn't s0
with the German book. Invariably if it tries pity for other
people it is only insipid. Usually 1t is just a stark account of
horror. But the horror is peculiarly insentient. You have the
feeling that these people belong to chill rainy nights where the
bullets are flying and men ere screaming.
That was how Germans seemed to me in the last war. They
invariably put in a stiff attack on a rainy night. And they
didn't seem to feel the exposure, not like our men. They
belonged to nature more. But they weren't bad mena I was
always struck by their simplicity and natural goodness when they
came in as prisoners. You might say that their officers were
bad. But not ab stractly so. They vreen 't visibly cruel man. d
Even the SS officers I didn't find cruel men. But they were
men who might be present at some fearful brutality without feel-
ingj after all, it would be somebody else' suffering. In
our world that could only be a had person. But in the


German world this doesn't follow: and knowing this is the
first step to understanding the German.
I've never met one German young or old who seemed to feel
the slightest genuine horror at the concentration camps e Such
horror would have to be a collective emotion---proper to a collective
massacre. It would belong to our world, but not to the German.
There is just perplexity in them---*What did I do? All I did was
join the army, then all this comes out afterwards! Only those
Germans who suffered in the camps themselves, or lost a relative
in them, have the real horror: because it springs from self-
interest. The basio communion of pity and fellowship---all
abstract or collective sympathy---is lacking in Germany, This
1s what the rest of the Christian world doesn't understand, in
not understanding the German. You will get a German saying
regretfully of himself, 'Now look at how I behaved in the first
world war, prancing about on a horse, with a spiked helmet,
anxious to fight it out with England---what an ideal!' But there
it will stop: going further---changing himself---reguires the
self-examination which is just not part of the German upbring-
ing, as it is a necessary and unavoidable part of ours.


The. German isn't taught as a child to compare his, actions
inwardly with an imagined collectivity---he isn't made avare
of a collective verdict operating on him invisibly all the time
Instead he learns how to protect himself against others. He
learns how to survive. And more often than not, as he takes
some knocks, a certain oynicism devolops: all the world is
self-interest, he saye. This makes the impact of America since
the war an enormous one for the Gorman, whether he likes Amerioa
or not: for the first time it présents him with a world vhere
pride has been conquered, in intimate and daily dealings, where
there is a collective pity and self-identification with others,
yet combined with the great power which he hag been taught only
oomes from self-assertion.
show
All the publicity designed to hhow that he has a bad cheract-
er---which has left the German ashamed and perplexed---misses the
fact that he has no character at all in our senseo
MF i
- a - d a MENE OF
People, to prove their existence and
certainly their power in his eyes, have to assert themselves all
the time. If you're silent you can't expeot him to divine you---
divino what you are, where you stand. Equally with the Italian
he doesn't aee the 'invisible man* inside. There has to be
something seene In his world giving way to someone else is a
sign of weakness---or rather, he is aware that it will geobably
be mixconstrued as veakness. So his tendency is always. to
try end show himself in strength, in cose other people take
advantage of him. The exterior man is of tremendous importance
in Germany. a This is the meaning of the firm chins you frequent-
ly see---the haughty, opinionated air
many people heve when
they talk, their eyes lifted and rather narroned: this is the
creature in doubt, thoroughly alone, showing his extorior of


power. He can't afford to look hesitant because this is what
he is so much. And it accounts for the strange combinetion
you get in so many Germant men---external courage with moral
weakness. They will fight to the last ditoh with no self-
commitment morally whatsoever. The courage is dazzling in
Germany. People are rocks of courage. But it has nothing to
do with moral choice or responsibility.
Thére are two forces in thà world for the German, psycholog-
ically---self and power. Self : is inside, power is outside.
Therefore you get the amazing discrepancy in Germany between
the power held by certain men and the power they actually have
in themselves (the responsibility). If a man with power
helps you he expects no criticism from you. Your right to
criticise goes striotly according to your power, not, as in
our world, according to the truth of what you say. The ring
of discussion---especially hot moral indignation---is at best
personal insult in his World. As to the morality of the
power he is exercising, and the istate of his own soul---that
is nobody's business but his own. He may go to 'the devil if
he wants towe-and take you with him. This is freedom*.
In the most apparently responsible men, who conduct themselves
in society with careful and punotilious respectability, you
will get sudden shows of brutal power, when they are crossed.
There is aittle chance of a man with power shoving justice,
except to advance his reputation for justice. It is best
for the underling in Germany, if he wants a quiet life,


above all if he wants to get on, to make a show of acquiescence
and S ilently vish his boss to the devil. This accounts for
the hypocrisy you often get in German relations.
Sometimes a thin pale film seems to cover the faces of the
young, from never having burst out in moral indignation and been
encouraged for it (bascially, by the father): from never having
inherited the power of righteousness. A few great creatures
have this power---of pure indignation wit thout violent under-
tones. Holderlin had it. Naturally he was driven mad.
No artist can survive in Germany without going mad.
This is because anger is dangerous in Germany. It is best
for a man not to give way to anger. In our world anger has a
public and inherited safe form, which re call indignation.
But in Germany there is no such thing: there is only the lonely
flush of anger, a man fighting obstaclos for his own self-interest;
threatening to break things up. The lively indignation behind
all art is in Germany çonstrued as badness (the artist is a *devil',
that 1s, lit by selfish and destructive anger), and so pushed
easily to madness.
One of the most distressing sights I know is that of two
i/ala
Germans linking arms and drinking Briderschaft together. Perhaps
you can see clearly, while they're doing it, what enemies they will
be one day; you may seé where their point of incompatibility lies.
You won't speak---you vould siock their simplicity: as you would shook
them both a few years later if you mentioned the Bruderscheft.
That this Bruderschaft means is a kind of eleventh-hour
attempt to make society, on the part of people who are alone and
divided. It is sentiment and hysteria---the only real collect-
ive emotion in Germany. In our empiriotal society we would no


more think of drinking bruderschaft than saying spells and
charms. There is something horrifying and disturbing about
it: perhaps because the sentiment shons the violent chaos under-
neath.
The German soul is never et rest in a known and safe relatinn
with other people. Thero are dangers whenever a German tries
to make society. He can only do it with a drean; it has to be
deliberate. A blindness comes into the German eye, the mistinoss
of a dream; and the beot thing is to gether up your loins in
dotble quick time and push off, before the explosion.
I was once in a car in Berlin, being driven by a chauffeur,
when he had this misty look. He didn't see the other car coming
at high speed from the right, tovards the came intereection, but
I did. I could hardly jump out. I poised myself as best I
could and when the crash came, full-on, I got avay nith a cut head
and a pooket-full of glase from thé windom. The driver of the
other cer wos unconsoious for tmo days. The engine nas buckled
and useless. But the chauffeur seemed as sanguine aftorvards
as before. With one poor devyi lying unconsoious in the middle
of the road, waiting for a doctor, and me with blood streaming
down my face, he said over the phone to his master, *Ah, it's
nothing!* After all, he masn't hurt.
Germans use modern porer with the old individual vigour,
like men on a rarm, rhich is disastrous. This is why their
collective dreams, when they start, are collectively disastrous.
The beginning of the end for the German is vhen he feels he
is right, and feels norally supported by otl hers; then he feels
moral power. l There is no empirical warning from his past,
'All power corrupts'. He simply can't follow the ebb and flow
of other people*s feelings, and thus tho ebb and flor of fate.


In the German world power is like nature. It takes on the
permanent and overshadowing forms of nature: the status quo
is always there for good, like raterfalls and mountains---until
it diseppears. Hitler, the American occupation, industrial
prosperity---they are each there for good, as long as they last.
In the German world power is as little fluid as nature, in the
sense that mountains and streams don't walk anay overnight.
But if they do walk the German adjusts himself at once---they
were only scenery. It wes never really part of him. Nothing
collective evor is.
There is this vigorous and primitive belief all thc timo,
which is both healthy and dangerous. The background is pagan
as it is in the Italian world, too. But the Italian world has
been softened ty the leaven of the church. There hasn't beon
any such thing in Germany. I shall never forget seeing, in a
pleasant little village near Hamburg, a Lutheran priest_stroll
out of his house in knickerbockers---it was hot---vith that
solf-celebrating swagger of the German official. It isn't a
swanking walk so much as a primitive and pagan exercise in self-
satisfaction, like an inner dance. The forthright chin was
there: tho man with no doubts. Power---status quo---stuck out
of his body. It was in his walk. He had God up his sleeve.
And it was the God of power, that is, a pagan god.
That clinic in Germany was like a faery castle for us. The
pine forests were very close by, and we could see the atark
brown mountains that were called the 'mother' and the 'father'.


Their faces had been developed by strange primitive forces.
The German is rearing to go---to be led, to believe and
lapse into a state of believing self-immolation, where the
individual responsibility is vested in sameone else. One man,
given the right preparation, can ohange the German scene over-
night. Belief gathers like a 8 torm, a marvellous primitive
dream, an ache for glory and splendour. The dream grows until.
it seems to concern the whole of humanity, then it reaches
politios, then it explodes.
Germany is much further from us all than most of us can
imagine. The German kings of England, for instance, were never
understood by their 8 untrymen I o When the young Prince of Wales,
the son of George 11, dragged his wife out of Hampton Court
screaming with a baby half hanging from her and raced her in a
carriage to St. James's Court so that his heir shouldn*t be
born under the same roof as his omn father, whom he detested and
abhorred, nobody understood at all. Lord Hervey's memoirs from
that time---the work of a subtle, scathing, astute courtier--
are one long list of staggered, frightened, indignant attempts to
piece the king*s character together into a cons istent whole.
Most of the misunderstandings came from the fact that the Germans
had no idea what all this English freedom was about. They
couldn*t see why a man with such enornous power like the king
should be unable to exercise it acoording to his wishes and
convenience, but have to consult interests and parties and an
undefined entity called publio opnion. They couldn't understand
a people who asked to be defended against its enemies but hated
the sight of a military red coat. They cculdn'tjanderotand a
people who spat on the royal carriage and yet were decidedly not


republicans: They couldn 't understand why an apparently
absolute power should be given to a king and then limited and
ourtailed and ridiculed by the fact that parliament and parliament
alone had the power of the purse. In the German world a man
with power does not beg and he does not discuss.
To the outsider this is incomprehensible and outrageous.
But it is the German world. It is all the original vigour and
rude health of our civilisation.
This is why it saved Melli when our own warld had nothing
to offer. It all depended on one man. When I met him for
the first time I was standing by Melli's bed at the clinic,
talking. She had just had a special bath, and the routine was
to spend an hour in bed afterwards, well covered-up. There was
a quiet knock on the door and at once I felt, with this man's
presence as he came into the room, the most extraordinary sense
of peace, like an invisible wave that washed slowly over me o
It felt as if he'd gone alone all through life's battles.
In that moment I knew more about him and his clinio, and
about what he'd done for Melli, than I éver knew before from
hearsay or ever learned afterwards. I knew it depended on
how this dootor struck me in my animal feeling. It depended
on the man. Everything follows from that, even medioal doctrine.
And this dootor who stood before us now, in white, had
gone the road alone. He'd done the self-chenge. That peace
isn't possible short of a terrifio and completely unsparing act
of self-examination. All knowledge has to be dreamed first,
and be yieaded up from intimate life painfully and slowly.
Then it is given to other people, to become their certainty.


There were pleasant walks near the clinic which Helli knew
fron her other stays. The paths weaved in and out of vooda, by
the side of hills, over quiok, cloar streoms hardly a metre wide
and tiny vaterfalls, with tall firs everywhere, and nooden cruca
ifixes at the roadside, and here and there those wide massive
green Bavarian valleys that look like the last plateua of earth,
the beginning of heaven. Sometimes the mountains had an awful
l1ke sharp stones
and splendid closeness, haRaxantAgXER
you oould grasp, with
every subtle colour, brown and green and purple and white, absol-
utely fixed against the sky, so still that they seemed to deny
that there had ever been movement in the universe since the beginn-
ing. And then on other days they vould stand misty and remote,
like the edge of a vast, mysterious landscape you had never seen,
which lay on the other side, colouring the sky behind them. The
mist would make them look soft and mild. It nas liko a oountry
I'd dreamad about, as home. There were the nagnificent wooden
houses with long roofs that sloped domn far beyond the walls and
formed a shade round the baloonies and vindors, and there were the
cobbled yards hehind with chiokens and ducks and geese, and tall
carts and threshing machines, all Without the abstract touch of
our epoch; a first stark necessity was still alive in them, as
it was in the hard, lined, gnomish and genial faces of the people
there. A fine old man with a flushed, healthy face and bright
eyes would always give us 'Gruss Gottt' when we passed in the
morning along one of the paths o
And it was marvellous being in Helli's country with her,
really for the first time. The cities didn't count---Te'd
stayed in Frankfurt; but it maan't like Germeny. Here you
san why nature had such a hold on Germans. That was its poner---
the mountains and the massive grass alopes and valleys: you


vere alone inside it, nearly lost; it rose like a torrif 1o
monstrously
and absohutaty independent dumb world, with something reckless
in it, all the time stating the splendid and huge, the beyond,
where you vere so tiny, whero you belonged to the dark, shelter-
ing spaces in the woods. It lay there more extmaomatunrtly
untouched than any other countryside I'd over seen. Italy rasn't
untouched liko that. England had been worked over and over,
tace
like a million lovely gardens. Only France had a tot of that
enormous implacable - spread. But not quite that combination of
stark mountains and firs and pastures: the French country had
a vonderful sweetness, and it embraced the human creature, espec-
ially in the Isle de France, where the sky has a limpidness and
intimacy which is like a sweet private message to each creature.
But the German 8 untry, whether you are in the heath outside
Hamburg, with its immense, dark stretches of pino-forest, or at
the edge of the salzkemmergut, isn't intimate. It stande outside
you like a messive and stirring statement you can't avoid.
German country is spectaole. It doesn't include you. You
have to be rapt---you watch and gasp all the time. You're over-
shadowed. You feel in Germany that the development of the
German people couldn't have been anything else. Their voices
have been lost in the vastness. There rasn*t the natural opport-
unity.to create society. There was only the dumb and endlessly
primitive community of nature. That -can never be altered,
however many cities go up. German oountry turns you into a
lonely opectator of eternity, it makes you giddy, you know less
what is right and what is -wrong than you do outside the country,
you get a sudden nameless ehergy like a wind thet starts up without
varning in the trees at night, and you don't knon what to do


* 1 th this energy; tou tend to rapture and to heady, nebulous
dreams, you get a bit of mountain madness in your innermost
self, your nightmares are sickly and menaced, with strange
vengeful and spiteful creatures from the dark woods, unsparing
in their venom, nudging and sneering and pinching.
I went through my own therapy at the clinic, picking up what
information I could from the little books written by the doctor
in charge. I wented to find out for myself. I didn't want
a doctor doing it for me; I wouldn't have learned anything.
Which can be dangerous if you're as ignorant as I am. Because
of that, it was months and even years before I found out that
wasit
the body E just an inanimate lump but works and complains
in all sorts of ways which until then I'd known nothing about.
I begen to understand what this man meant when he talked about
the 'inner doctor'.
The clinic was quite and soothing. Everybody was in bed
by nine. I ( could read with my bedside light on until nearly
midnight. But I tried to aleep early. I wented to get the
maximum benefit out of the stay, to share Melli's state as much
as possible.
One et vening she happened to go to one of the clinic-leotures
about sleep. Apparently, it wasn't only that you needed enough
sleep: the hours in which it took place were important, too.
There were certain hours of darkness in which it should take
place. The intestines, for instance, had ceased their work
by a certain hour, and after that hourJthe food tended to
turn rotten inside, and go to fat, namely, dead cells.
Sp sleep and eating were linked. I remembered that my mother


and father, and all the people in the district where we lived,
ate early in the evening, and only had a bite of something towar ds
bed-time.' 'Dinner', the big meal of the day, was around noon.
The bulk of the people had always known how to live : properly,
it seened. - They followed a definite and unchanging rhythm
every day. But we had broken the rhythm. And we were paying
the price in a thousand different ways, mostly in nervous
diseases.
Melli was now pronounoed strong enough for the juice-cure,
in which she would have nothing solid for a fortnight. Before,
she hadn't had the stamina---the dootor_s problem had been to
build her up, after her weakness from daily meals of undigested *
food, during the crisis some years before whioh had first taken
her to him, when no other doctor in Germany had anything to suggest
whhad
for her, including the foremost specialists, ad offered no hope
for her life.
She began the cure, with fear and trembling in both of us,
because we were both victims of the superstition that if you don't
get solid food down you every day you are going to conk out.
She didn't conk out. And when it was finished a further
remarkable change for the better tookmplace in her body. The
tests showed all her organs working more or less perfectly now.
And the eye-doctore-more than any other specialist the eye-
doctor has a total view Oirough his lens of the medical history
of the patient hefore-htm, 11ke a miniature of the whole marvel
of the body, set out behind the eyeesaid after he'd examined
her thio time that' he'd never seen anything so miraculous in his
career ; her sight had made a complete recovery, and the soars
from the time of her crisis were nearly healed.


Unawares to ourselves, ve were finding that there was
a definite natural rhythm in life---a way of eating, a nay of
sleeping, a way of working. Without this total change there
could be no health, no cure.
It's all broken rhythm nowadays. The middle class is the
exploring class---it breaks np the traditions and habits of the
old life and examines them, to see if they ought to be jettisoned
or not. It has the late nights and rich food and heavy drink-
ing of the old nobility, but it hasn't the C ompensating violent
sports, and the basic calm of the nerves. It has the lack of
splendour and the workaday approach of the old peasantry, but
not the life in the fields. The middle class has created
bohemians, but the whole class is really bohemian and always has
been. Its habits and regularity are at best a thought-out
system, to make charac ter where there is none.
What's going to happen in the future? What about the
children being brought up in a.broken rhythm? What will happen
to the vast and increasing populations of people who spend the ir
lives in a chair but don't revise the ir habits accordingly?
rill there be sterility? unknown diseases, terrible like plagues?
cancer? (These are only questions, from an ignorant man).
will it get worse as sophistication spreads? What about the
fact that most of the American school-children who die, die of
cancer now? The answers aren't known, apparently. Nothing
can be predicted because there are no precedents. Never
before on this earth have people lived so confidently with so
many unknowns. Hust as the nineteenth eentury handed down to
us dirty cities, and a population of near-cripples, are we
handing down problems that oan't be solved, because they're


already there in the bones and blood and organs of the young,
as disease? Again, only questions; from an ignorant person.
le were brought up on the last vestiges of the old life,
when the basic things---the food and soil and air---hadn't been
tampered with. But what about the future? that's happening
inside us? What influences the child in the womb, unknown to
us? Are all the tiny, invisible processes of the body known?
If incubation periods are anything from ten to twenty years,
how do we know what is happening to our children? Can anyone
tell us, for certain?
What hope has a man who spent all his formative years
in a laboratory, learning formulae, of answering questions
like these? Yet he has control of our lives, and those of our
children. He has no real voice, his mind inveriably hasn't had
a real training, except in other people *s formulae. How far--.
outside the formulae---does he go along on superstitions, more
untested than my superstitions because he feels he has the support
of his formulae? How far are we in the hands of functionaraes
none of whom could take responsibility for the power he uses?
How far are the doctors just functionaries of medicine, although
given the power to heal? How far are we being led into darkness,
by people who prefer the darkness?
In the last hundred and fifty years life everywhere has been
put under new principles, and no one has bothered to examine these
principles to see if they. are all right for the world or not.
They've come into being at an alarming rate, they belong to us
and they stem from us, yet we're their servants---slaves. They
form a prison-house round us e And partly this is why life seems
to bec cme unreal---because prisoners are notoriously daydreamers.


Nearly everything robust and gemuine from two centuries ago has
been taken in hand and overhauled, and a vast prison based on
the principles of produotion has been put in its place. It is
rather like living in a factory where the only important thing is
what's produced, and yet we're not like that---we need intimacy,
we dwell on the little follies af life for our pleasure, we take
notice of each other not for what is useful in each other, not for
what goes towards producing things, but for the vay we turn our
heads, and our amiles, and that peculiar deep magne tism that
pulls us to this person rather than that. These are the real
important things of life, and yet that is hidden in our warld.
What intimacy can we hand down, as the old generations handed
down intimacy to us? All we inherit is a repertoire of ptinciples---
rules and prinoiples: Where is the intimcy, unless it is khat
eaoh of us despérately manufactures out of the broken sticks of
our lives, in the ruins? Nearly everything me have, even now,
has come out of an intimate act---eve erything from theatres to
Rave
horse-racing. We lost touch with their background. Yet we still


live on their intimacy - The theatres still have their galleries
and stalls and boxes, which came from the way people watohed the
pageants and shows in the streets, centuries ago-a-the nobles on
horseback in the street, the well-to-do looking fron windows on
either side, the populace on tho roof-tops. and this is the case
with every form we have---overything from the way we eat with
knives end forks, to the way we take our pleasures in the ovening.
It all came out of the flurry and bustle of human life. But what
comes out of the factory? What oomes out of the newapaper-sheet?
the dead voice in the miorobpone? Yet we aling to intimacy just
the same * Its tiny seed is there.
There is no villain of the piece. That, again, is an old-
fashioned doncept, bequeathed from the epochs of intimacy.
There is no one man who sits down and thinks up a poison that
will Hill off all the insecte in a given area and incidentally
all the salmon and game as well. There is only the principle,
and by the time a poison---a bomb--*a bad habit---is in praotice
it has become a universal principle not only a few men but millions
live by whether they like it or not, and a principle they dare
not let go. It isn't that he's to blame, or them. There's
nothing intimate---not even enough for personal blame. He or
they cantributed their last remaining intimacy to the problem
and received their Iobel prize, and then their work was swallowed
up in a principle that affeoted ev ery child born from that time
on, or affected the soil in a hundred mysterious and unpredicted
weys---affeoted people and things thousands of miles away, in
languages and scenes unknown. This is the strength of a prinoiple.
It has no'face, no blame, there is nothing even to arouse the
indignation. The middle-class spurious indignation about policies
and villains and the magnates and power-moguls is just old-fashioned


stuff from the jolly pre-ninettenth-century epochs where what
single people did had effects. Principles spread like ghosts.
Hals
They are ghosts. Yet they'ro real în that they control us e
Nothing oould be less real to me than the physicist's caloulations
on a piece of papers but they're real enough if they affect the
bones of any child of mine. That man isn't real to me, I
haven't seen him and I don't know his name, I may not have been
within a thousand miles of him, but he enters my priva te life,
he gets into bcd with me, for all I know he is taking the power
of my balls aways he nay be rendering me sterile. Some people
sey he is. Some people say he isn't. But that he affects mé
no one denies.
So he is real all right. But only de a principle.. A
prinoiple is immovable like a god, as totally not-there and yet
very-much-there as a god is; as present and as absent.
It isn't E matter of countries any more, of Gourse. There
is just the one reality, the whole world over. And at present
power lies with those countries where principles have swept ete ry-
thing else aside and plundered life most successfully, to the
exolusion of all else. But those princ iples are the life-
determinents for us all, wherever we are. In that way we're all
Americans---everyone in the world. We lost our nationality,
our class, cur family, our churon, not after the last war but
a hundred and fifty years ago when modern America started (in
England). In America the prinoiples began to stalk over a
whole continent, cutting vast roads and fertilising deserts,
all the more sweeping because they were unaccompanied by any
tke
of illusory reminders, or warninge, of the past. Publicity
has tried to turn America into a nem experience but it is the
name of an experience we've been going through for nearly two


centuries, in a process that has dnddenly come to a full stop,
now.
For now the consoling nineteenth-century ohant that In
The Middle Ages the mortality-rate was over fifty peroent,
and there were fearful plegues and people died early, ie not
enough. To avoid the past, why should we savage the present?
Our bodies began to feel rested as they'a never done before.
There was E terrific increase of stamina. liy work was quieter
and more sustained. My nerves were cempletels different. I
hed the strange sensation that they were being renewed inside me,
but in a very fleshly way, like new skin growing.
Sleep was easier. Above all, work was clearer: there was
no sense, when I worked now, of leaning on my nerves, and ending
with exhausted nerves. I wes never suddenly,tired cr suddenly
hungry now - ind I had to learn a new kind of balance, in all
my habits. Gradually it became a style of life which I guarded
jealously ageinst the outside world. Hy body told me quickly,
and unerringly, what it wanted---espacially if there was a forced
return to the old life for a few days. I enjoyed food more than
r'a ever done, and wine. The simplest things were much more of
a treat and privilege for me than ever before. Yet I wasn't
eating different things. All I'd done, basically, was to change
my timetable. I had learned to follow the rules of my body, not
my will or desires, or even senses. I became aware of things
I'd hardly noticed before. Even the countryside was new to me--
the flowers and smells. It wasn't that I saw things differently


but that I belonged to them more; the rieing and falling of
the light each day seemed inside me, not just a spectacle outside.
I wasn't just senses now, but a creature.
I realised that health wasn't just being well, or not
being ill, or living a long time, but having a nervous system
the
thythm
that was in a proper rhsphm. I found there was only one
rhythm, and that you either have it or you don't. And with all
the strength and robustness in the world there is no real health
1f you fall short of it. And I believe a man always knows if
he has this or not. But pérheps I'm wrong * Perhape I would
have claimed it before. I can't remembèr.
And it seemed that health was an obligation to other people.
It was an obligation to sanity---to our whole future. When a
people loses the seed of health as its guiding rule, when this is
no longer the fount of ell its thoughts, there is darkness, as now.
Te were both more sensitive to broken-rhythm, but to real
ohallenges more robust. There was a wonderful sense of the dawn,
not just as the physical reality every day, but as the moment that
our owmtodies;
precded our waking, inside/ not just light but a movement
inside, a waking inside, deep in the organs end tissues. Life
showed us the proper things to do, mcre than it had before. It
seemed to pick out the dark and unnatural more easily.
And there was a cumulative effect, springing from this
important change, which further changed our life in a basio way:
we wore no longer any good for what passes for society nowadays---
we were no good for invitations. Those endless sitting and
talking sessions were over+ Our social life---for want of a
better expression for the collective misery nowadays---was over.
And that was perhaps the most marvellous thing that had ever


happened to us 4 We'd tried for; 'solitude' before, and we both
tended to reolusive habits, because, of the horror of middle-olass.
amusements generally. But the dolttude. we'a had was bloodless.
It dian't wàrm us at all. It was just an absence, of people.
But real solitude is the security of your nervous sys tem, essent-
1ally. And you oan't get that just by absenting yourself from
other people. The peasant who worked with others in the fields
all day, and ate with them at night, and slept in the same room,
still had an aotual aloneness that was unfathomable and real
like the vind at night. He could never be. plumbed. And our
horror is that ve can be plumbed so easily, we can be torn and
divided and made bare by the alightest incurston from the outside,
by the smallest ohance ene ounter in the street, unless we deliberate-
ly set ourselves the task of wholaness.
And this oan't be an attitude. It can't be a thought, or
a facet of personality. It has to pervade the whole of life.
The whole body and mind has to be made over again. This is the
finel---life-saving---exploration of the middle olass. It has
to be done in terms of the tiniest and most intimate habits.
It means overhauling bit by bit all the foroes at work on our
lives, from outside. It means challenging them. It is the
worknor years. It means quostioning the truth of everything
that gets public support. It means taking public support as
the stemp of falsity wherever it lies---wherever a principle
begins to stalk acroas life. And this is something for which
there is no middle-olass discipline. In the working olass,
in the old peasantry as in. the old noble classes, it is, or
was, a discipline. You grew up in an atmosphere of bonevolent.
oynio ism towards publio power: dominated finally by the example


of one man who had stood absolutely alone and was na iled to a
aroas for it. But in the middle olass you grow up with a super-
stitious sense that somewhere you have to join it, if you dontt
want.to.mies the bus a Finally, the verdiot of the group is the
real oné. And that has to chenge. The old authority, of the
single creature, has to come back,
Most doctors oan never be real dootors because they haven't
changed their own lives. Even when they've had the inclination
they haven't had the time. You can only heal 1f you've healed
yourself. Most of the doctors I know are unhealthy people.
Sometimes they're hard drinkers, as if they're soared of samething.
They haven't grown used to nature. They don't lovet it. They're
Boared of seeing the disease in people because they're so power-
less against it. I've talked to dootors in hospitals who seemed
as scared as I was when I looked at my first medioal enoyolopedia
in that village library. This is béoause their own nerves aren*t
right. And if your own nerves aren't right you dan't have an
apprecdation of your onn body, and therefore a power to heal and
prediot. Half the power of diagnosis is a sense of your omn body.
But if your intuitions are panio-strioken and oonti nually disordered
by the wrong life you can't lean on them, even to perform the
purely functionary forms that most doctors are asked to perform.
To be a real dootor you have to have overhauled your life, and this
is lonely Work, If you have swallowed the nineteenth-century fiotion
that your body is a machine which your mind is in S ome strange way in
dharge of, you can never begin.
We realised we would have to live with our eye on Melli's
disorder all the time, every day, realistioally. No nineteenth-


century pill dould help us, by fixing the clook-Teading.
But we weren't sure. There was this doubt all the time. We
were ignorant. Sometimes there would be a mutual terror, that
we were doing the wrong thing. - Then it would subside. Thore
would alvays be thie thing, the invisible worm that flies in the
night, in the howling storms and
1V ber a OTIMSOH
A to bring us to the reality again. But it helped our vigi-
lance---this terror that no one else on the earth could sees exoept
perhaps the doctor who knew just how quickly he'd snatohed her from
the valley of the shadow, But the body kept reality before us.
If something was wrong, it reminded us. That was the new life
we had. The body spoke. A late night, a meal thet was wrong,
a little drink we thought was harmlessess---the body spoke 1mmed-
iately. There. were these reminders nearly every week, then less
and less as we came to know how to deal with them, and how to
avoid them. There would be arises of terror, in which we were
completely and absolutely alone; then we would rise from it
again and go baok to the world. We knew that the world has to
be humoured. Tell it a comfortable story.
We got nothing budkshee any more. We paid for everything---
in the flesh. Nothing aduld be left to. orossed fingers any
more. All of God's apperatusa-the whole tattoo of objeots and
desires---had to come under careful review. We could afford to
be grateful for nothing. We had to know Where we stood, in
everkthing. We had to live counter to the lives of everyone
around us,
Then real sex came---as opposed to pleasure. It waen't
until we descended voluntarily and saorificially into the depth of
the night and were without self or interest or presence, but were
To P.31.


creatures of the silence that lies. inside the core of the universe,
that sex was given to us. It wasn't until we'd laid down our
selves. We burned them---at the altar of pleasureew-willingly.
It took a long time. But in the end re had no self. * The whole
of our insides, our organs and tissues and intimate erotic secretions,
weren't us at all but a world with its own rhythm and ebb and flow
and thoroughly outward reality as much, a8 trees and waterfalls and
hills, which twe followed. It means the reoognition---in this
case not like a revelation, but a slow dawning---of God, A pagan
can't love. The naked spectacle of the night has to be there all
fot love :
the time, end observed all the time not thrown away for a little '
bit of pride in daylight, or for a little, bit of appetite. Only
the religious love. Animals and pagans have intimaoy and vigorous
affection and loyalty, they have pleasure and warmth. * But the love
whioh is the most perfect respect, founded
on reality and
knowledge and the laying-bare of the heart, is, religion. This is
so because theonly heart that oan lay itself bare is the one that
appreciates how little people's, worde and sins and ections and
Compaied wirh
pover are,
jthe spectacle of the real,. eternal world
brtore
outside.
To lay yourself bare, and have no fear. of words, or fear of any
verdiots on your dirtiness, or feer of anything but the simple
truth, of your being, means knowing your delightful smallness
before God. In this happy and marvellous discovery, whioh at one
stroke olears up all the, silly struggles of 1ife with other people,
and puts the vanity and pride at rest at last, in their empty
searoh for. significance where no significanoe exists, in the ir
endless smarting under verdicts that could néver belittle what
didn't think itself big, brings the oreature to the station of
all peade, where real action begins.


This went hand in hand with the discovery of our bodies,
it was one and the same journey, and at the end the sense of health
was total: it meant not just better nerves but/the mystery of
created life.
When you arrive in England after years awar you feel a cosy
thrill and excitement, provided you've got enough money in your
pooket. Everything from the tiny houses to the lights in the
train-C ompartmen ts seem made with devotion; the safety. of the
island is what strikes you most. It feels like going deeper and
deeper into a glowing, warm hall. You can settle down. Let the
mind wander. You're free.
There is an underlying safe zone in_which everybody is joined
together, in England; rather sleepy, never reaching words. You
see it in people's faces. Everybody belongs to the same wotld,
but this is never spoken. Really it is the underlying collective
ailence of the family: centuries of organic development are behind
that. The society is a vast, complicated family, even to the point
of destroying the actual family-unit. Two Englishmen saying hullo
after ten years away from each other may only shake hands and give
each other a glance which to the foreigner conveys no intimacy at
all. But there's terrific historical development behind that.
The most infinitesimally subtle glance is understood. This 1s
what makes it so difficult for the Englishman abpoad with his
glanoes, grunts, nods, yawns and smiles that means absolutely
nothing to the foreigner except perhaps that he's gone cuckoo.


You see it. in the tiny houses with their neat durtains and
orderly back gardens, As you go by in your snug train-compartment
you're sucked into a quiet, intimate lifé that liea all round you
like the oountrysidé even. when' you're in a huge oity. - If you
don't redognisé that intimate silence---the lack of any need for
gestures---England's beyond you. Some people thrill to it at
once: Otheré don*t---they see nothing in it, therets no 'life'.
But the thrill is there. A certain intimate thrill at the dentre
of life.
But then there is the other thing: a kind of frightening
threat to tear away the life-possibilities from defenceless
people, without warning. You feel it in the buildinge end the
chill streets. : Hére are the Anglo-Saxon rules and prineiples
stalking through lifé, A great ravage has gone on. It makes
you feel an outoast if you have no money in your pooket---in
Paris, in London, New York. Having no money means having none
of the doin of ravage. Money is the orisp, squalid passport
to intimaoy, from the land of chill. This is the coin of the
great Anglo-Saxon gharnel house of the soul, on éither side of
the Atlantio. France is torn in between this énd the provindial
world on the other side---it partakés of both, thé powers end
horror of both. These are the east and west of our civilisation.
The west means freedom, basioally; the east, nature. Amerioa
was kept alive by the influx of Europeans, making their intimate
villages which would last for a generation or so before rules and
principles claimed their children and put the film of abstraction
on their taces. England was kept alive by its proximity to
the continent, just.
Now you get the basic contradiotion of the middle class,


which will destroy---heal---
that it has had to follow the
principle of inheritance, but has only rules and prineiples to
offer as heritage. 4 It has set out historically to. break the
old society,, all the mystical and religious and superstitious
forms of authority that held it together; all had to go so that
trom
people oould be freeme-of blind authority. Everyone had to be
clears Everyone must be given the power of sight---overy slave
and subject. It was done. He stood alone. His habite and
intimacies and dreams were gone. The intimate inheritance had
been out off. But he was free. He inherited, not the lovely
repertoire of tales at night, from his mother and father, but
the rules and prichiples of how to work and how to think, and
how to compete and how to keep fit,
+e middle dass
That was one thing thy, couldn't do away with---the old
noble habit of passing on property to the son* You've got to
have some continuity. You gan't make life afresh with each
generation. And that was its weakness. It producea a sort
of massive degeneration much vorse than the old noble classes
risked, because they intermarried with the lower #lasees and
kept their blood strong. At least, in the old nobility the
heir of the property or title waa brought up with an image of
how to govern, and with a full sense of.his own powers, and of
his role. It didn't matter much what his mind was 1ike*
He was authori ty in his whole person. But now the middle-class
child inherits a definite position with neither the training
nor invariably the mind for leadership: yet he is a leader.
achieves
He eeta power without any reference at all to his abilities,
time
so you get, at one and the same, the most perverse syetem of
privilege and inheritance, coupled with an attack on privilege


wherever 1t is. You find this contradiction in classically
middle-olass people: they at tack privilege and atyle and its
airs and graces, yet they are privileged people. This is the
key to the péculiar middle-olasa oonscience that seens to attaok
what it feels most guilty of.
Guilt is the key-feeling of the olass for that reas on.
The son or daughter who inherits all the tights of education
and sometimes money as weli has no image put before him, at least
not one. that is going to serve him publicly. He may iike his
tese
dad, or have a happy home, but thts are private fortunes 4
At best money has to be his guide. But money can't guide.
So nothing is inherited. that fits him for life. Anything like
the style of the old noble classes, the thoroughbred quality,
has passed away. There is only a system of training millions
of people for the leadreship they have no gift for. And you
oan't léad with nothing in. your mind* You muét have a great
wermth benind you, which can only be taught in infandy, before
even language is there, and then this warmth must be seen to
futym
pervade the outside physical World, its guerantee end mark;
the first without the second is nothing.
So the son wi th no-aptitude for thitnking. is educated right
up to the university. But his real inheritanoe was just dust
and ashes. He wasn't. given an idea of what the humen oreature
is, but only what the human oreature can produce. So as fast
as the clase spreads end gets rioher, and enrols new memébers
every day from other classes, it beoomes more degenerate.
As fast as a mên Bets up in a new home and heaps bounty on his
children, from the sweat of his brow, or the aweat of other
people's, his children beoome delinquents. An outer life you've


been brought up to think of as dead---the sky just gasses, and
other people fellow-units of work---isn't going to comand your
respeot.
Even personal inheritanoe goes by the board gradually, and
you're left with the soaial inheritance of schools and jobs.
There are quarrels between father and son: the fa ther no longer
has the old mark of authority---he was never allowed to develop
any airs and graces himself; so he isn't so different from a
in Kim
boy, something isn't quite' developed, henas never given a real
position in life, for himself alone, only for himself as a facet
of the general Bocial inheritanoe. He has eurbed himself danger-
ously in the interests of the general weal.
And out of thda totel death of everything intimate and binding
(the intimate areas become the least binding) there has to be a
desparate effort that can only be desoribed as religious : the
laws thet exist outside men have to be learned again, by learning
where they are inside, in the self, so that power once more becomes
a human faculty and not a deadly abstract instrumont by whion people
are estranged from intimate life.
You von't starve without money in your pooket, in the charnel
house, the Bocial rules being wha t they are, but you'll be sterved
in the most terrible sense of all. The whole of life can suddonly
drop dead for you. This is what the middle-class child learns
early in lire, that he should expeot nothing. This is the
olassioal condition of hypertension. It is the state of permanent
shook: you would expect to find that hypertension is almost a
new disorder, and that it flourishes in the oharnel house more
than anywhere else; and, in faot, it might be called the American
disorder. The whole nervous system is in a state of alarm.


This ién't fear or discomtort. The nervous system would probably
thrive better under brutality. Thts is alarm from the unspoken.
A most terrible intimate alarm, in the argans and secreting glands, a fear
that the very nipple that feeds you might be snétohed away. It
never will be, you *knowt that. But the organs and secreting
glands aren't so sure. They can't feel safe. They know the truhh
underneath: that nothing intimate is binding, in that world.
Contracts are binding.
Among working people that threat would be absolutely imposs ible.
Yals There would be much gréater real danger of the nipple being
snatched away---through hardship---but the threat isn't felt.
My own lifé was perfeotly safe in childhood, I was rocked in a
calm to which I didn't know any excéption, while my parents were
barely clinging to life and my father was out of work, in the
General Slump. The streets outside were chill, there was the
blank stare of the city all round, but inside there was always
this dazzling cosiness, like being - in a palace. I was emong
the richest children on the earths My father left for the docks
at five in the morning and got back around seven in the evening,
but he was a rioh mon, too. Wo had a marvellous blezing fire in
the hearth, a tiny square of it that glowed -white and heated the
whole room. The tiny room where -the five of us lived nearly all
the time was the most wonderful palace of colours and lights and
cherms and grece and splendour I have ever been into. I was
brought up on the philosophy that the people in the other dlass
were more fortunate, but when I joined then later, efter I had
graduated through their terrible universities of the soul to
their world, I began to seè what glory I had come from, and
what pity and understanding and patience I owed to the outcast


children of men with money in their pockets.
From what I have learned in the middle class you have
relat ions with people you like and the people you do business
with. The people you like are the people you approve of and
who presumably approve of you: the approval is handed back and
forth on the principle of the market-place. If you hate some-
body youbturn your back on them. The breaking-off of relations
is on a massive scale in the middle class, a deadly ritual that
sto ops the blood. There is nothing binding. Nothing you can
absolutely take for granted. So no arguments can be carried
through. Nothing can be inherited. We offer our children
dust and ashes, and there's no way of getting round it.
There is the complete collapse af human authenticity. The
thrill and mystery af the human presence is gone e It is leaving
the human face---the cracks and lines of real experience and
single human power are going. He has no power. But some he
must wield. You can't get round it. You can't get round
the single human creature as the basis of all thought. In the
end even the rules and principles wear down because the shere


intuition underneath is laoking. The single creature has to
be flattered again, for himself alone. The ohild 1s groomed
early not to trust his lonely poners, but to learn, and learh.
Short of giving his whole life to the challenging of all
the noi sy reality round him---from a tenacious instinot that
something is wrong---a mannis bound to be the ohild of rules
and principles, and these will walk all over his face and make
the ir deadly abstract mark, so that he loses himself and oan never
achieve any intimate end that he might sèt himself. The int-
evades
imate 1ife always thrarte him, without that battle. Most people
in the world are passive. They inherit their reality and try
to be good memebers of it. They believe true what most people
in the world say is true. Now when people were governed by the
seasons, and knew the rhythm of their own desires an d Whims,
this was all right. In be ing passive, they still had their own
field of authority, thr ough yielding to the great natural author-
ity outside them. But now the ir authority is based on a false
premise. They don't want to murder millions of their own kind,
they don't even want to murder one, but they may be doing so
without know ing it. Just in keeping the rorld going they may
be destroying it. Their basic premise is a basic contradiction.
It wasn 't, before the era of rules and principles. Life wasn't
based on a thought-out premi se at all: it started and ended
consciously in nature. Without this norm you lose the pover
of predicting what nature will do. You have no precedents.
But na ture is still there. Even if you want to get to the moon
you have to use it. You have to surrender to it even to conquer
it, as the ourrent phrase is. There are rules outside and inside.
Once these rules were acknowledged and known. They are no longer.


Even the so-called countryman doesn't know them.
We can't grasp all these principles at work on us, we
are each of us ignorant, we're each of us speechless before formulae
we could never hope to unravel alone in twenty lives, let alone in
one a We have no voice and yet we have to speak. We have to
consult somet thing in ourselves for which there is no rule or
principle. We have to use our judgement, efter nearly two
centuries inwhich the single and Tallible human judgement has
been undermined and finally dfenroned. Someone has to stand
alone. Someone has to take the risk of speaking from himself.
He has to put his doubts and fears.
There's a terrible stillness, like after a bomb. Then
people oame together for an evening, a couple of hours, and
smiles are exchanged. We huddle round on a market-basis of
fair exchange. But I had to give even that up. I found I
could never hold myself. I was always wanting to talk---as
I'a been taught totalk as a child, in a natural and unfrightened
flow, letting the indignation or pas sions come and go, wi thout
afterthought. But nearly always there was a disaster 1f I
did so.. Apparently, this was offensive talk. It had a peculiar
contradictory effect on me. It made me stop my natural speech,
as an increasing habit. In that World you got off most lightly,
it seemed, if you wi thheld yourself, rendered yourself incognito.
And this is what I learned to do. This is how the middle-class
reticenéce grows: the hypertension may strike us late (when it
can' 't affect the organs seriously) or it may strike us early.
When Melli and I met we had no relations, except in the
middle-class barren sense. - There were no passions. Nothing
that had to be observed, nothing binding, Like so mâny people


who are lost in that warld we ached for duty and self-sacrifice.
lreak
If you don't - through middle-class life you can't get to the
fount. e You have to live selfishly, with dreams of unknown guilt
at night and hates that are hardly specified and a mounting irritat-
ion,egainst the rest of mankind. I know men who are nearly
suffocated by the hate and irritation they feel against mankind,
and they have the reputation for being quiet and decent, and even
jolly. And you seem to have a jolly time with them: but then,
when you've gone, those poor children.of ashes seemed to have
plented a kiss of death on your cheek; only your insides told.
you what their ins ides vere like---externally thepe was no sign
at all, only smiles and agréements; their real presence only came
on you afterwards, the presence of anguish and dearth and helphess-
ness.
If a child is taught that the world may be.snatched aray,
that even mother and father ere finally merchants grubbing for
money on hie behalf, not moved bya love that is 8o beyond them
that they can't give it à name, the two chronic habits of the
lie
middle-olass oivilisation
in wait like a snare: constipation
and self-abuse. Both are an act of withholding, in shock.
They are two aspects of anact that wants to keep and preserve
what little mite of power there 1s, since only rules and principles
stalk about outside, and have no face for you. .And the history.
of individual development in the middle class is right at the
bottom the history of the struggle to get free of those habits,
towards the original native self-expression, such as aristocracies,
peasentries and Working classes have had.
The life I had as a ohild, while a glowing refuge from all
this, was by no means immune to it, and was in fact a part of it.


It had been produoed---menufactured---by the middle class.
without them we wouldn't have been there. We did nothing to
bring those streets into existence, nor did our ancestors.
There was just the labour market, which we filled, in our millions.
And 'the middle class brought the labpur market into existence.
And while they couldn't bring the dead philosophy of the
market into our lives, we were still in a way their children.
While we were rocked in a calm and wonderfully safe lap, we still
knew there was something strange outside. something was wrong.
The streets had a dismay ing look---rows upon rows upof them,
without a tree. That didn't see em right, netural. The factory
hooters sounded weird. The light was weird, from the smoke.
The oreak of the trams was somehow not right. So it wasn't cosy
all the way through. You knew it was only cosy at the very
centre. But outside was the terrible world of rent collectors,
unemployment, disease. The rat-ta t-tat of the rent man was . the
most frightening sound of my childhood. I oould feel it from my
mother---s she froze with horror. Yet she hadn't horror in her,
as a condition, when she nursed me; I was one of her solaces
from horror. The rat-tat-tat was like hell knooking. Suddenly
my father went sick: for two years or so he spewged his food up,
he rould spem walking along the street, spe W up the food he'd
eaten only a few minutes before. The doctor told him not to
worry---stomach oramps, nerves, something he'd eaten. Then my
father went to hospital on his own initiative, for an exemination,
by blind inetinot, and they pushed him into. a bed right away:
duodonal ulcer which had to be opera ted urgontly. A week longer
and he would have been dead, they told him. The home was really
smashed by that. There was just the sick-benefit: a pittance


on which to keep three children. There was always a crisis
of this kind. So the threat of the middle-class world was oper-
ating on us all the time. In the heyday of science ve were more
wredehed than we ever would have been before. We belonged to
nothing, no one a Each working-olass district was a settlement
cut off from the rest of the world. It had to be, to keep
this intimate life going, intaet from an outside world which asked
for one criterion to be observed and one criterion only, that
you sold yourself on the market,and produced another man's goods
for him. I've never been able to do that. In fact, I've
always refused to do it, apart from a six-weeks relapse. I've
lived, and still to this day live, by whet in the middle class
is oalled sponging and getting something for nothing.
- This inheritance we all get of dust and ashes is so deep
that it freezes the source of the soul itself; even the breathing
may be affected, quickene d by panio, uno onsciously.
That private process took place in me the moment I took my
first step into the middle olass. By the end of fourteenth year
I had learned the two great private cornerstones of the middle
class civilisatioh---self-abuse and constipation. I don't
remember that I actually couldn't go to the lavatory. I romember
that one of my brothers had trouble that way. It wasn't physical
in me. It was more all-pervasive. I just couldn't go. I
couldn't go at all, in anything. I was just stopped up, and that
went on for five years or more. I couldn't think, I couldn't:
smile, I couldn't read, I couldn't play, I couldn't waké up in
the mornings : What I could do without any trouble was toss myself
off. I suspeot that the two things are intimately connected,
and that the one enco urages the other. Thé orgasm is the body


ials
insisting on going in some way or other -
It seems that everything has to be re-learned in our world,
beginning with sex. This is the basic distorted thing. There
oan be no more talk now of natural behaviour. We've forgotten
how to do the most intimate and natural services to our own
bodies. le have to learn life all over again. We have to learn
slowly how to love, how to eat. Actual cohabitation is almost
unknown in our world unt 1l it is learned in the trials and errors
of marriege. le have even forgotten---our bodies have forgotten---
how to have a good shit. You get doctors concentrating on this
one problem, the principle of evacuation, and writing books about
Hey Sng.
it, too. You mustn't strain on the pagn, Not more than the
natural slight pressure necessary. It must oome naturally, of
its own accord, with a slight natural help. There it is again,
the prinoiple of surrender. You have to learn to surrender to
the wisdomp of your own body. The anus must open.and close as
if for a birth, the doctors say; the closure at the end of the
evacuation must be complete and natural; there must be no strain-
ing afterwards even if there is the mental conviction of having
more to give; that way lies disorder---diarrhea, unsteady bonjes.
Just the opening and closing, which aftervit has been doné once
or twice will show the way for the future, by habit, and the body
will be seen to have a life of its.own in that respect, which you
can follow.
Unthinkable wreckage is being done to life. Cities are
canyons of noise and fume s and broken inti imaoy a And to feed
idle
an enormous/population millions and millions of beasts are
year
trapped and tortured RXNEX by year, and even bred outside the
natural light of day, in a stupendous violation of the rights
of the earth which will wreak à natural vengeance on the criminal


breed responsible forit. And. millions and millions of creatures
big and Bmall are used by firms and laboratories all ovér the .1 World
to carry out hideous and viciously cruel tests, to establish the
origin of the middle-class diseases that are spreading everythere.
Far from having achieved a civilisation through the nineteenth
century we haven't yet taken the first step towards making this
earth and marvellous and clement place to live
le have
8o far
done nothing but torture and maim and massacre its oreatures, en d
even to condemn our own children to death, though by a slow torture
that may take a generation or two to show itself.
Those first visits to England, after four or five years to-
gether in Rome, were thrilling and fasoinating for us. It was the
end of our first chapter in the Italian world, the first course in
understanding, nhen 8l1 the previous life we had had was regurgit-
ated and disturbed. Melli came back to the world of the living in
Rome ; it was her dawn; she woke slowly to this dawn. when not only
her body but her whole created self was healed of the northern
society. And our friendship with Angelo and Franoine formed in-
visibly. We seemed to have a destiny together, between the four
of us: But at this moment the destiny seems finished. I wonder
if we shall ever know the real explenation---if real explanations
are ever vouchsafed to us in life. Perhaps the destiny is dev-
éloping in silence now, as it did in the first: days in Rome, when
we sardly saw each other. Perhaps fato only guides and divides
and sorts out, without an explanation at the cross-roads. In
some way the four of us worked for each other, we developed by


means of eech other, and perhaps brought a world into being
which is inside us now Without us knowing it.
In those three winters in England, in the dark, flat, icy
countryside with the shrieking of foxés at night, and the sound
of the first cock long before dawn, ve got a peculiar sense of
home : There was even something mediaeval, a touch, intact from
the past. It was in people. There was a certain glowing
charac ter in them. We were strangers. We read ravenously, books
from two and three humdred years ago. And the past still seemed
to be there. te seemed to touch it, like actually walking through
history. I began to find the Englishness in myself, really for
the first time, There was the thrill of being a stranger, yet
knowing the intimaoy. You could-feel the past in the house we
lived in; there were dark, héavy beams, that creaked in the
night.
It was there that I got the first great warning about Melli,
and we begen to mend our lives slowly, matching it to the rhythms
outside us and the unfolding of every day, from down to dusk.
And there was this sure sense of the natural that the Italians
had given us. We knew what was false in people, What was a
vrong trail. We could see the wrong dreams and principles at
work in people like furnaces without warmth. We knew what was
dead stuff, because of Italy.
We watched the outer life together+ We noted its little
habits. Re watched the birds. Tie saw how the sun vent down,
and darkness gave way to the light. And we let the quiet get
into us, through our habits. - We did what that doctor had advised:
'Be an artist in the quiet life.' He could as well have said
'Be an artist' and left it at that. The process is one and the


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