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tseneipgam · 4 years

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‘Magdalen, I should explain is a typist in the city, or she was at the time of the earlier events related in this story. This hardly describes her, however. Her real employment is to be herself, and to this she devotes a tremendous zeal and artistry. Her exertions are directed along the lines suggested to her by women’s magazines and the cinema, and it is due to some spring of native and incorruptible vitality in her that she has not succeeded in rendering herself quite featureless in spite of having made the prevailing conventions of seduction her constant study. She is not beautiful: that is an adjective which I use sparingly; but she is both pretty and attractive. Her prettiness lies in her regular features and fine complexion, which she covers over with a peach-like mask of make-up until all is smooth and inexpressive as alabaster. Her hair is permanently waived in whatever fashion is declared to be the most becoming. It is a dyed gold. Women think that beauty lies in approximation to a harmonious norm. The only re4ason why they fail to make themselves indistinguishably similar is that they lack the time and the money and the technique. Film stars, who have all these, are indistinguishable similar. Magdalen’s attractiveness lies in her eyes, and in the vitality of the manner and expression. The eyes are one part of the face, which nothing can disguise, or at any rate nothing which has been invented yet. The eyes are the mirror of the soul, and you can’t paint them over or sprinkle them with gold dust. Magdalen’s eyses are big and grey and almond-shaped, and glisten like pebbles in the rain. She makes a lot of money from time to time, not by tapping on the typewriter, but by being a photographer’s model.”

“There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earl’s Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason.’

‘It is the same deception that we are all involved in; except in so far as women are always a little more unbalanced by the part they have to act. Like high-heeled shoes which shift inward organs in the course of time. Few things disgust me more than these pretended profundities. Yet I had found Anna deep. I cannot think what it is about her that would justify me calling her mysterious and yet she always seemed to me an unfathomable being. Dave once said to me that to find a person unfathomable is simply the definition of love’

‘To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others. Or sometimes she would try another technique, that of deadening, by small and steady shocks, the sharpness of jealously, until in the end the victim became resigned to the liberal scope of her affections, while remaining just as devoted to her as ever.’

‘After a while I began to have an uneasy feeling of being observed, I am very sensitive to observation, and often have this feeling not only in the presence of human beings but in that of small animals, Once I even traced the source of it to a large spider whose mysterious eyes were fixed upon me. In my experience the spider is the smallest creature whose gaze can be felt.’

‘”Fireworks are sui generis,” he once said to me. “If you must compare them to another art, compare them to music.” There was something about fireworks which absolutely fascinated Hugo. I think what pleased him most about them was their impermanence. I remember his holding forth to me once about what an honest thing a firework was. It was so patently just an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. ‘That’s what all art is really,’ said Hugo, ‘only we don’t like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.’ The enjoyment of fireworks, according to Hugo, ought to be an education in the enjoyment of all worldly splendour. ‘You pay your money,’ said Hugo, ‘and you get an absolutely momentary pleasure with no nonsense about it. No one talks cant about fireworks.’

‘At that very moment the telephone rang. My heart sprang within me and fell like a bird striking a window pane’

‘Now, what features of the present situation make you feel that it’s hopeless to fight for socialism?’

‘It’s not exactly that I feel it’s hopeless ...’ I began.

‘Come, come,’ said Lefty, ‘we’ve confessed to the illness, haven’t we? Let’s get on towards the cure.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘it’s this. English socialism is perfectly worthy, but it’s not socialism. It’s welfare capitalism. It doesn’t touch the real curse of capitalism, which is that work is deadly.’

‘Good, good!’ said Lefty. ‘Let’s take it slowly now. What was the most profound thing Marx ever said?’

I was beginning to be annoyed by this question and answer method. He asked each question as if there was one precise answer to it. It was like the catechism. ‘Why should any one thing be the most profound?’ I asked.

‘You’re right, Marx said a lot of profound things,’ said Lefty, not deigning to notice my annoyance. ‘For instance, he said that consciousness doesn’t found being, but social being is the foundation of consciousness.’

‘Mind you, we don’t yet know what this means ...’ I said.

‘Oh, yes we do!’ said Lefty, ‘and it doesn’t mean what some mechanistically minded Marxists think it means. It doesn’t mean that society develops mechanically and ideologies just tag along. What’s crucial in a revolutionary era? Why, consciousness. And what is its chief characteristic? Why, precisely not just to reflect social conditions but to reflect on them — within limits, mind you, within limits. That’s why you intellectuals are important. Now what would you say was the future of a body like NISP?’

‘To get more votes than any other party and make you Prime Minister.’

‘Not a bit of it!’ said Lefty triumphantly.

‘Well, what is its future?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lefty.

I felt it was unfair of him suddenly to throw in a question to which he didn’t know the answer.

‘But that’s the essence of it!’ he went on. ‘People accuse us of being irresponsible. But those people just don’t understand our role. Our role is to explore the socialist consciousness of England. To increase its sense of responsibility. New social forms will be forced on us soon enough. But why should we sit waiting with nothing better to keep us company than social ideas drawn from the old ones?’

‘Wait a moment,’ I said. ‘What about the people meanwhile? I mean the masses. Ideas occur to individuals. That’s always been the trouble with the human race.’

‘To be alone in such a carnival is a strange experience. I decided to refrain from drinking. After a few drinks I knew that a sentimental loneliness would begin to spoil my detachment. Whereas to be the cool and collected spectator of scenes of mad revelry, the solitary man who brushes aside with a wan smile the women who accost him and coloured streamers in which the enemies of solitude hasten to entangle him; this was the pleasure which I promised myself for that evening, and I had. no mind to let such rarely compounded moments of contemplation be ruined by miserable yearnings for a woman I could not find.’

‘When the sun was set I might perhaps go to sleep. I never let myself sleep during the day. Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair. The sun will not tolerate it. If he can he will pry under your eyelids and prise them apart; and if you hang black curtains at your windows he will lay siege to your room until it is so stifling that at last you stagger with staring eyes to the window and tear back the curtains to see that most terrible of sights, the broad daylight outside a room where you have been sleeping. There are special nightmares for the daytime sleeper: little nervous dreams tossed into some brief restless moments of unconsciousness and breaking through the surface of the mind to become confused at once with the horror of some waking vision. Such are these awakenings, like an awakening in the grave, when one opens one’s eyes, stretched out rigid with clenched hands, waiting for some misery to declare itself; but for a long time it lies to suffocation upon the chest and utters no word.’

‘I enjoyed this part of the day too. By this time I could combine a considerable feeling of tiredness with a feeling which was almost entirely new to me, that of having done something. Such intellectual work as I have ever accomplished has always left me with a sense of having achieved nothing: one looks back through the thing as through an empty shell ; but whether this is because of the nature of intellectual work as such, or whether it is because I am no good, I have never been able to decide. If one no longer feels in living contact with whatever thought the work contains, the thing seems at best dry and at worst stinking; and if one does still feel this contact the work is infected through it with the shifting emptiness of present thought. Though it may be that if one had any present thoughts that were at all considerable they would not have this quality of emptiness. I wonder if Kant, as he conceived his Copernican Revolution, said to himself from time to time, ‘But this is nothing, nothing’? I should like to think that he did.’

“It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself. To experience this was extremely painful. Yet as I tried to keep my eyes fixed upon where she was I felt towards her a sense of initiative which was perhaps after all one of the guises of love. Anna was something which had to be learnt afresh. When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.”

‘the final paragraph clearly came from the heart, or whatever cool yet sensitive organ Sadie kept in place of one’

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