Efforts at Truth Read online

  One of my most passionately loved novels at this time was Henry Williamson’s The Pathway in which the hero is a rebellious young man who returns home from the First World War; by the end he, like my hero, has managed somewhat arbitrarily to get himself killed. It seemed that even those so contemptuous of society were unable to hold out against the sacrifices and guilts that were demanded by society: but how inevitable was this despair? There is no doubt in Spaces of the Dark of Paul’s scorn of conventional society:

  …a world like a gamble in a second-rate casino with the hard, formal face of the man who fears the risk, the high, bright laugh of the woman who loses, the death-mask of the croupier the only man who wins … And that is all they are, he thought, blank shapes in a smoke-filled room – these charming chattering social people, living on nerves, dying on charity, bankrupt before they were born.

  But the difficulty of course – as my hero Paul never really knew, as I myself did not yet know – is not to see what is wrong with society, but to learn what might be wrong with oneself.

  For Rosemary and I in our island Garden, listening occasionally to rumours of new wars and the threat of the Bomb, of course it was easy to see what was wrong with society; what means had we of seeing what was wrong with ourselves?

  There is a nihilism at the centre of Spaces of the Dark that is epitomised by the operatic story: there are attempts to counteract this by the passion of a voice shouting against a storm. Paul and Sarah imagine a life together (the figure of Sarah was taken from Rosemary); but they see life at best as a matter of moments of illumination, the world does not seem to them to be a place where or upon which they can build. To them the world is ‘inevitably a place of killing one’s friends, of worshipping a god that sanctifies such murder, of defiling and destroying the beauty that might be loved’. Paul sees that sanity might lie in ‘the avoidance of all loyalties, the denial of ideals, the rejection of all dogma, the development and initiation of the individual soul in defiance of the communal madness’. But in attempting this he sees that he has also ‘almost rejected life itself’. He has a shot at carrying the nihilism; but after a time this fails.

  Rosemary and I had intended, hoped, to have no secrets, no guilt, in our life together; we were to have a shot at being always able to look at truth – for which task we thought we could be sufficient to ourselves. And we had found some Garden. But how in a Garden does one learn?

  Perhaps we both had some inkling that we had to be rescued from the enchantments and mists and limitations of more than the social aspects of our backgrounds.

  Here is a letter that Rosemary had written to me from her mother’s house shortly before we married:

  Just before dark there was a tremendous storm and the sea and wind were very high. I crawled out in the dark along the bottom of a breakwater and climbed up on to a catwalk that runs right out into the sea with a hurricane lamp at the end to keep things off the rocks. The sea was beautiful, merciless and infinite, till one thought one was part of it having known its creation. In the lulls I felt like Dido standing on the wild sea bank, wafting her love to come again to Carthage.

  But tonight everything is still, and mad in a different way – knowing no impulse, but with a steady evil inborn madness which must be more dangerous.

  Now I’m calm, and the early part of this letter sounds like the Boy’s Own Paper. But still I shall send it. I probably am the Boy’s Own Paper. All the dogs have been sick today.

  This stillness is awful. I can just hear an owl sounding very very far away like something in a dream.

  My love, darling, do come again to Carthage.

  Chapter 2

  In the summer of 1948 Rosemary and I returned from the West Indies. We had thought of staying on to avoid any third world war; but how can one avoid a Bomb? We still intended, however, to settle at some distance from our families; from what we saw as our pasts.

  In the meantime we planned to go on a Grand Tour of the art-works of Europe – to try to see, before they might finally be destroyed, those manifestations of the European imagination that seemed to have been attempts to exalt the propensity of humans for self-destruction and self-immolation.

  The odd circumstances of my life (my mother had died when I was nine and my father had got himself locked up as one of the most unpopular men in Britain by the time I was sixteen) had made it difficult for me, I suppose, to cling to ordinary family and social ties: both my sister and I had taken refuge in what had seemed to us a magical circle of friends. In my case, these friends were from my schooldays and from those who had gone with me into the army; these were now joined by some of Rosemary’s friends. It was with such a group – seven or eight of us – that we planned to go on our Grand Tour. I had been extraordinarily lucky in the places I had been able to visit when I had been in Italy in the war – Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice – but from the galleries and museums in these places most works of art had been removed and those that remained had been boarded up. I remember bribing my way into a basement in Florence and gazing at a crate that was said to contain Donatello’s David. My generation had grown up starved of works of art; we felt a need to remedy this.

  We were to travel, four boys and four girls (should I not call us ‘boys’ and ‘girls’? we often behaved as such) in two cars and a motor caravan converted from an old ambulance. This latter broke down irreparably just south of Dieppe: one of the girls withdrew from the group when the rest of us got drunk in Paris. We continued in the two cars, with an allowance of just one blanket each and a depleted stock of food. This was a time when food in Europe was scarce or expensive and the foreign travel allowance was only £35 per person, and we were to be away for two months. But we planned to travel rough; this would be part of the voyage of discovery.

  We travelled to Chartres, Bourges, Vézelay, Avignon; we went on to the galleries and churches and palaces of northern Italy. We gazed at the enormous cathedrals that seemed to lie weightless on the earth; we stood in front of annunciations, nativities, crucifixions, resurrections. All these seemed to be saying something about the nature of human predicaments – of life and birth and death; but with an eye to something beyond them. We stayed for a time in Venice where on the walls in the Accademia Gallery men in bright striped trousers rested elegantly on the oars of gondolas; where the city seemed to be both settling into the sea and rising out of it, like the sun. In Ravenna, Florence, Sienna, there were the representations of saints both tortured and composed: messages seemed to be contained in their concerned, adoring faces. What was it that they had seen – as if around some corner? We went on to Spain where martyred bodies were even more ecstatically torn and bleeding; where in cathedrals reliquaries like tiny charnel houses glorified skin and bones. We went to bullfights and were both appalled and awestruck: well, ordinary humans too might have to become accustomed to looking at death, might they not? We did not go to the religious services in the cathedrals: one of the pecularities of the European aesthetic imagination is that it can be entranced by the kind of beauty that is on offer to it, yet not interested in the springs from which this comes.

  I myself at this time was hostile to Christianity. I had felt some religious emotion when I had been confirmed at school, but after this had come to accept Swinburne’s picture of Christ as the ‘pale Galilean’ and Nietzsche’s view of Christianity as a priest-induced ‘slave morality’. I cannot remember if I tried to make connections between these attitudes and what I felt about the works of art I found so beautiful. I was awestruck by tragedy: and the power of tragedy depends perhaps on not too many sensible connections being made.

  With regard to our group of friends – after a time it became apparent that things were not going well. During the war we had been held together by a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (‘them’ being people who felt righteous in the war: ‘us’ being those who accepted its terms but still felt strangers to it). But now there was only ‘us’: from ‘them’ we were free! And so, as is common when outside pressures are removed, our group began to break up before we got to Spain. This was not, for Rosemary and me, a matter of great concern. We had distanced ourselves from our families; might we not have to accept a distancing from our friends? We had our marriage, ourselves; was not this enough?

  But for those quiet, adoring faces on the walls of galleries and churches – this sort of thing had not been enough?

  After our Grand Tour we went to live, Rosemary and I, on a small hill farm in North Wales. This I bought for £5,000 which I had saved from the income from my mother’s family trust while I had been in the army (I could not touch the capital of this trust). On this farm Rosemary and I planned to continue to paint and to write: we were also to grow corn and root-crops and to tend sheep and cows and chickens. Thus this was to be a continuation of some sort of Garden – but one outside Eden, as it were, where one had to work to put down roots.

  My first novel Spaces of the Dark was now finished and was on an erratic course round publishers. After two or three rejections it was taken by Rupert Hart-Davis on the recommendation of David Garnett. I was given lunch by the latter at the Reform Club, and he asked me, ‘Do you intend to publish under your own name?’ I said, ‘I never had much trouble with “Mosley” when I was in the army.’ He said, ‘The literary world is not like your nice soldiers.’

  I had by this time embarked on my second novel, which was once more (surprise!) in some ways obviously to do with myself. It was also again to do with things of which I was not wholly conscious.

  This second novel, which was called A Garden of Trees, was never published. Its story is as follows:

  A young man has been travelling on his own in the West Indies; he has been trying to be a writer; he returns to London where he comes across a small but what seems to him a magical circle of friends. This consists of a brother and sister called Peter and Annabelle, aged twenty and nineteen, who are living in a flat in Grosvenor Square while their parents are away; also a slightly older man called Marius who comes from a family of sugar-planters in the West Indies. The magic of these three seems to consist in their ability to create a fantasy out of almost anything or nothing. My nameless hero, who is also the narrator, first comes across Marius at a political meeting in London’s East End, where there is a clash between Fascists and Communists; Marius seems to be observing the scene respectfully, but to be seeing it as absurd. My hero has hitherto felt out of place in the world; he now falls in love with, feels at home in, this somewhat fantastical circle of friends.

  But it appears that Marius has a wife who is ill in hospital; she has been paralysed by some accident. The awareness of this breaks in on the circle of friends. My hero is taken by Marius to see his wife; he and she talk alone. She tells him that her ‘accident’ was that she shot herself. She did this in some madness and terror at the emptiness she felt at the heart of her life with Marius – and this was in spite of (as well as because of?) the idealistic nature of their love. My hero sees that there may be some emptiness, some terror even, at the heart of the circle of friends.

  He confronts them with the idea that their ‘magic’ is at the cost of the reality of the immolation of Marius’s wife; he bursts the bubble of the circle of friends. The wife dies; but before this she has said to my hero – I want you to see that Marius will be all right. He imagines from this that she means she would like Marius to marry Annabelle. So my hero abandons Annabelle, with whom he is himself in love. He performs his own act of immolation, out of regard for what he feels has been the wife’s.

  But Marius and Annabelle do not marry; and when my hero returns from another period of solitude abroad he finds Peter drunk and depressed, and Marius and Annabelle in what seems to be the clutches of priests. Annabelle is having a child by Marius, but still they do not marry; and this seems to be a matter of little concern to the priests. The second half of the book is to do with the efforts of my hero to understand what is happening. He confesses to Annabelle – I was wrong: I should have grabbed you when I had a chance! She says – No, one does only what one can; one cannot tell how things will work out. In the end Annabelle miscarries, and Marius goes back to the West Indies where he is killed in a political riot. My hero does eventually marry Annabelle and even seems to have accepted the influence of priests; but there is no active hope in the way things have worked out. At the end my hero and Annabelle go rowing in a small boat: the last line of the book is: ‘The sea was no good for them and they crawled to eternity.’

  Now what was happening in my life at this time?

  Rosemary and I were living in our lovely low-built grey stone farmhouse like something crouched in the long grass of the hills of North Wales. We kept cows which produced just enough milk to pay for their feed, hens which were apt to drop their eggs from the branches of trees, sheep which got water on the brain and their heads stuck in fences. We had two geese, one of which we killed and ate and the other would come and honk outside the window of the room in which I worked, imagining that it saw its lost mate in the glass. We had a pig whose throat was cut by the local slaughterer and which died, grunting reproachfully, in my arms. We were helped by a couple called Mr and Mrs Davies who lived in a cottage on the farm; I was taken under the wing of a kindly neighbour who taught me that I should wear a cap and carry a stick at livestock sales. We balanced our books through the mercies of something called the Hill Farm Act, which gave subsidies to farmers for doing almost anything on such stony land. In the early mornings and evenings I wrote my novel. I had a black cat that used to lie in the coal scuttle, the contents of which occasionally, absent-mindedly, I would hurl towards the fire.

  This was a good life. The letters I wrote to old friends at this time seem funny, hopeful, self-mocking. Was there an emptiness at the centre?

  We had come to North Wales to get away from our pasts – from attitudes such as those of my father who saw salvation in commitments to extravagant political causes; from people who accepted the conventions and ambitions of the traditional social world. Such attitudes had seemed to us false, and we had got away: but to what? In North Wales we had wanted to put down roots; but was a hill farm in North Wales a place for us to put down roots? Such beautiful but stony ground! One of my favourite novels just before this time had been E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey in which, after the break-up of an esoteric undergraduate circle of friends, some symbol of renewal seemed to be offered by a young farmer rushing off with his young child to sleep in the woods. But what happened then? This was the end of the story! Novelists did not seem much interested in such questions as – But what happened then?

  In the summer of 1949 Rosemary’s and my first child was due to be born. Our small farmhouse was in obvious ways not yet suitable for a baby: the only available running water was still that which rushed past the back door in a mountain stream (the local house agent had warned us – When it floods, just remember to open the front door): we were waiting for a grant to install piped water under the auspices of the Hill Farm Act. So we came to London to wait for the birth of the baby: we rented a small house in Chelsea and there met up again with some of our old circle of friends. Had we in fact missed them? (Indeed, what are roots!) While Rosemary was in hospital (in those days newly-delivered mothers spent a fortnight in hospital mostly separated from their babies and with the visiting hours even for husbands strictly limited), myself and some of the friends made a home movie called The Policeman’s Mother with a 16mm camera – the story of which was based on the idea that oppressive social attitudes arose from the frustrated Oedipal yearnings of those in authority. We laughed a lot, drank a lot. When Rosemary left the hospital with our baby son she went to stay in her grandmother’s huge house in Hertfordshire. Here, while I went back to the farm to try to speed up the work that was now being done, she was provided with what was called a ‘monthly nurse’ to look after the baby. This was another regular tradition among upper classes at the time – people like Rosemary and I were not considered fit to look after babies. (My father used to say – Leave it to the experts! – ‘experts’ in his context being sometimes teenage nursery-maids.) Rosemary and I had imagined that we were breaking away from our pasts, but nothing in our present had taught us about babies.

  While I struggled with the machinations of the Hill Farm Act Rosemary took advantage of her freedom by going up from Hertfordshire each week to an art school in London. This was something she had always wanted to do, but it had been postponed by her marrying.

  We were both still so young! We had had such hopes and ideals. We thought that married couples should both be faithful and be free. This ‘freedom’ was part of another upper-class tradition; but as rebels against tradition we thought we could manage the fidelity too. But what was fantasy: what was reality?

  What indeed is the style of love? Does not each want both to possess the other, and be free?

  We had to start from scratch in learning about children.

  Here are extracts from Rosemary’s letters to me that autumn. They were written from her grandmother Lady Desborough’s huge house, which was called Panshanger, and from the lodging-house in London where Rosemary stayed when she went to the art school. (My own letters of this time do not seem to have survived.)