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'No. You ask such a lot. Happiness. That sort of thing. Happiness! I don't remember thinking about it. Your lot- you seem to think something's owed to you. It's because of the communists.'
'What?' says Ella, startled and amused.
'Yes, your lot, you're all reds.'
'But I'm not a communist. You're mixing me up with my friend Julia. And even she's stopped being one.'
'It's all the same thing. They've got at you. You all think you can do anything.'
'Well, I think that's true-somewhere at the back of the minds of "our lot" is the belief that anything is possible. You seemed to be content with so little.'
'Content? Content! What sort of word is that.'
'I mean that for better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.'
And so we laughed, and it might have ended there, but I went on: 'You talk about individuation. So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognises one part after another of his earlier life as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the reflection of that great archetypal dream, or epic story, or stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the experience, or fitted it like a piece of mosaic into a very old pattern, and by the act of setting it into place, is free of the individual pain of it.'
'But I don't hold the belief that some books are for the minority. You know I don't. I don't hold the aristocratic view of art.'
'My dear Anna, your attitude to art is so aristocratic that you write, when you do, for yourself only.'
'And so do all the others,' I heard myself muttering.
[...] On that first evening he stayed late. He was courting me. He was talking about me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are on some kind of frontier. I suppose I could say that they 'name' us. We feel safe with them. [...]
We did. That was months ago. What frightens me now is-why did I go on with it? It wasn't the self-flattery: I can cure this man. Not at all. I know better, I've known too many of the sexual cripples. It wasn't really compassion. Though that was part of it. I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men's criticising us for being 'castrating,' etc.-all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is 'castrating'-this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.
But I sat, in a kind of cold fog, and I thought: What has happened to men that they can talk like this to women? For weeks and weeks Nelson has been involving me in himself- and he has been using all his charm, his warmth, his experience of involving women, and using them particularly when I've been angry, or he knows he has said something particularly frightening. And then he turns casually and says: Have I hurt you? For it seems to me such an abrogation of everything that a man is, that when I think of what it means I feel sick and lost (like being in a cold fog somewhere), things lose their meaning, and even the words I use then, become echo-like, become a parody of meaning.
[...] The demonstration was not at all like the orderly political demonstrations of the communist party in the old days; or like a Labour Party meeting. No, it was fluid, experimental-people were doing things without knowing why. The stream of young people had flowed down the street to the headquarters like water. No one directed or controlled them. Then the flood of people around the building, shouting slogans almost tentatively, as if listening to hear how they would sound. Then the arrival of the police. And the police were hesitant and tentative too. They didn't know what to expect. Anna, standing to one side, had watched: under the restless, fluid movement of people and police was an inner pattern or motif. About a dozen or twenty young men, all with the same look on their faces-a set, stern, dedicated look, were moving in such a way as to deliberately taunt and provoke the police. They would rush past a policeman, or up to him, so close that a helmet was tipped forward or an arm jogged, apparently accidentally. They would dodge off, then come back. The policemen were watching this group of young men. One by one, they were arrested; because they were behaving in such a way that they would have to be arrested. And at the moment of arrest each face wore a look of satisfaction, of achievement. There was a moment of private struggle-the policeman using as much brutality as he dared; and on his face a sudden look of cruelty.
A woman, starved for love, meets a man rather younger than herself, younger perhaps in emotional experience than in years; or perhaps in the depth of his emotional experience. She deludes herself about the nature of the man; for him, another love affair merely.
Saw in the review of a book recently: 'One of those unfortunate affairs-women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in love with men quite unworthy of them.' This review, of course, written by a man. The truth is that when 'nice women' fall in love with 'unworthy men' it is always either because these men have 'named' them, or because they have an ambiguous uncreated quality impossible to the 'good' or 'nice' men. The normal, the good men, are finished and completed and without potentialities. The story to be about my friend Annie in Central Africa, a 'nice woman' married to a 'nice man.' He was a civil servant, solid, responsible, and he wrote bad poetry in secret. She fell in love with a hard-drinking womanising miner. Not an organised miner, the manager, or clerk, or owner. He moved from small mine to small mine that were always precarious, on the point of making a fortune or of failing. He left a mine when it failed or was sold to a big combine. I was with the two of them one evening. He was just in from some mine in the bush three hundred miles off. There she was, rather fat, flushed, a pretty girl buried in a matron. He looked over at her and said: 'Annie, you were born to be the wife of a pirate.' I remember how we laughed, because it was ludicrous, pirates in that suburban little room in the city; pirates and the nice kind husband and Annie, the good wife, so guilty because of this affair, more of the imagination than the flesh, with the roving miner. Yet I remember when he said it, how gratefully she looked at him. He drank himself to death, years later. I got a letter from her, after years of silence: 'You remember X? He died. You'll understand me-the meaning of my life has gone.' This story, translated into English terms, should be the nice suburban wife in love with a hopeless coffee-bar bum, who says he is going to write, and perhaps does, one day, but that isn't the point. This story to be written from the point of view of the entirely responsible and decent husband, unable to understand the attraction of this bum.
But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences.... [...]