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Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist. I suffer torments of dissatisfaction and incompletion because of my inability to enter those areas of life my way of living, education, sex, politics, class bar me from. It is the malady of some of the best people of this time; some can stand the pressure of it; others crack under it; it is a new sensibility, a half-unconscious attempt towards a new imaginative comprehension. But it is fatal to art. I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
[...] Immediately there was a burst of energy. People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own communist parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. That is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a communist party. People or groups of people who don't even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the communist party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny communist party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities of the party which is not what I am talking about) a small orchestra, readers' circles, two dramatic groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the conditions of urban African children which, when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long-overdue sense of guilt, and half a dozen discussion groups of African problems. For the first time in its existence there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of the communists only as a group of people to hate. And of course a good many of these phenomena were disapproved of by the communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions.
[...] But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me (and how odd this obsession should be showing itself, so long ago, in helpless lists of opposing words, not knowing what it would develop into), once I say that words like good/bad, strong/ weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write 'a story,' 'a novel,' because I simply don't care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality. And after twenty years of living in and around the left, which means twenty years' preoccupation with this question of morality in art, that is all I am left with. So what I am saying is, in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant? Is that what I am saying? And if so, what does it mean? [...]
The most striking of the three, but only because of his quality of charm, was Paul Blackenhurst. He was the young man I used in Frontiers of War for the character of 'gallant young pilot' full of enthusiasm and idealism. In fact he was without any sort of enthusiasm, but he gave the impression of it, because of his lively appreciation of any moral or social anomaly. His real coldness was hidden by charm, and a certain grace in everything he did. He was a tall youth, well-built, solid, yet alert and light in his movements. His face was round, his eyes very round and very blue, his skin extraordinarily white and clear, but lightly freckled over the bridge of a charming nose. He had a soft thick shock of hair always falling forward on his forehead. In the sunlight it was a full light gold, in the shade a warm golden brown. The very clear eyebrows were of the same soft glistening brightness. He confronted everyone he met with an intensely serious, politely enquiring, positively deferential bright-blue beam from his eyes, even stooping slightly in his attempt to convey his earnest appreciation. His voice, at first meeting, was a low charming deferential murmur. Very few failed to succumb to this delightful young man so full (though of course against his will) of the pathos of that uniform. It took most people a long time to discover that he was mocking them. I've seen women, and even men, when the meaning of one of his cruelly quiet drawling statements came home to them, go literally pale with the shock of it; and stare at him incredulous that such open-faced candour could go with such deliberate rudeness. [...]
[...] Jimmy's flesh was heavy, almost lumpish; he carried himself heavily; his hands were large but podgy, like a child's hands. His features, of the same carved clear whiteness as Paul's, with the same blue eyes, lacked grace, and his gaze was pathetic and full of a childish appeal to be liked. His hair was pale and lightless, and fell about in greasy strands. His face, as he took pleasure in pointing out, was a decadent face. It was over-full, over-ripe, almost flaccid. [...]
lol familiar
When we got into the car without suitcases or kitbags, we were all silent. We were silent all the way out of the suburbs. Then the argument about the 'line' began again-between Paul and Willi. They said nothing that hadn't been said at length, in the meeting, but we all listened, hoping, I suppose, for some fresh idea that would lead us out of the tangle we were in. The 'line' was simple and admirable. In a colour-dominated society like this, it was clearly the duty of socialists to combat racialism. Therefore, 'the way forward' must be through a combination of progressive white and black vanguards. Who were destined to be the white vanguard? Obviously, the trade unions. And who the black vanguard? Clearly, the black trade unions. At the moment there were no black trade unions, for they were illegal and the black masses were not developed yet for illegal action. And the white trade unions, jealous of their privileges, were more hostile to the Africans than any other section of the white population. So our picture of what ought to happen, must happen in fact, because it was a first principle that the proletariat was to lead the way to freedom, was not reflected anywhere in reality. Yet the first principle was too sacred to question. Black nationalism was, in our circles (and this was true of the South African communist party), a right-wing deviation, to be fought. The first principle, based as it was on the soundest humanist ideas, filled us full of the most satisfactory moral feelings.
[...] I remember envying her. I remember loving George for just that moment with a sharp painful love, while I called myself all kinds of a fool. For I had turned him down often enough. At that time in my life, for reasons I didn't understand until later, I didn't let myself be chosen by men who really wanted me.
But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. 'If we were married,' he had complained, 'it might be all right.' I laughed at him, and he said: 'Yes. Laugh. But there's sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.' He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. 'What position?'-I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. 'Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.' 'Always have been?'-inviting him to remember his history. 'For as long as it matters.' 'Matters to you-not to me.' But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use-the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us-the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time. [...]
We walked up to the big room through the hot sunlight, the dust warm and fragrant under our shoes. His arm was around me again and now I was pleased to have it there for other reasons than that Willi was watching. I remember feeling the intimate pressure of his arm in the small of my back, and thinking that, living in a group as we did, these quick flares of attraction could flare and die in a moment, leaving behind them tenderness, unfulfilled curiosity, a slightly wry and not unpleasant pain of loss; and I thought that perhaps it was above all the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities that bound us. Under a big jacaranda tree that grew beside the big room, out of sight of Willi, Paul turned me around towards him and smiled down at me, and the sweet pain shot through me again and again. 'Anna,' he said, or chanted. 'Anna, beautiful Anna, absurd Anna, mad Anna, our consolation in this wilderness, Anna of the tolerantly amused black eyes.' We smiled at each other, with the sun stabbing down at us through the thick green lace of the tree in sharp gold needles. What he said then was a kind of revelation. Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young. But it was Paul who, alone among us, had 'amused eyes' and as we went into the big room hand in hand, I was looking at him and wondering if it were possible that such a self-possessed youth could conceivably be as unhappy and tormented as I was; and if it were true that I had, like him, 'amused eyes'-what on earth could that mean? I fell all of a sudden into an acute irritable depression, as in those days I did very often, and from one second to the next, and I left Paul and went by myself into the bay of a window.
[...] He was genuinely touched that Ted, 'a scholarship boy,' was still concerned about his class. At the same time he thought him mad. He would say: 'Look, mate, you've been lucky, got more brains than most of us. You use your chances and don't go mucking about. The workers don't give a muck for anyone but themselves. You know it's true. I know it's true.' 'But Stan,' Ted harangued him, his eyes flashing, his black hair in agitated motion all over his head: 'Stan if enough of us cared for the others, we could change it all-don't you see?' Stanley even read the books Ted gave him, and returned them saying: 'I've got nothing against it. Good luck to you, that's all I can say.'