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'And I thought-Anna I wish I could explain it. It was really a revelation. I thought: I've been married to him for years and years, and all that time I've been-wrapped up in him. Well women are, aren't they? I've thought of nothing else. I've cried myself to sleep night after night for years. And I've made scenes, and been a fool and been unhappy and... The point is, what for? I'm serious Anna.' Anna smiled, and Marion went on: 'Because the point is, he's not anything, is he? He's not even very good-looking. He's not even very intelligent-I don't care if he is ever so important and a captain of industry. Do you see what I mean?' 'Well, and then?' 'I thought, My God, for that creature I've ruined my life. I remember the moment exactly. I was sitting at the breakfast-table, wearing a sort of negligee thing I'd bought because he likes me in that sort of thing-you know, frills and flowers, or well, he used to like me in them. I've always hated them. And I thought, for years and years I've even been wearing clothes I hated, just to please this creature.'
Anna laughed. Marion was laughing, her handsome face alive with self-critical irony, and her eyes sad and truthful. 'It's humiliating, isn't it Anna?'
'Yes, it is.'
[Here was pinned to the page a review of Frontiers of War cut from Soviet Writing, and dated August, 1952.] Terrible indeed is the exploitation in British colonies revealed in this courageous first novel, written and published under the very eye of the oppressor to reveal to the world the real truth behind British Imperialism! Yet admiration for the courage of the young writer, daring all for her social conscience, must not blind us to the incorrect emphasis she gives to the class struggle in Africa. This is the story of a young airman, a true patriot, so soon to die for his country in the Great Anti-Fascist War who falls in with a group of so-called socialists, decadent white settlers who play at politics. Sickened by his experience with this gang of rich cosmopolitan socialites, he turns to the people, to a simple black girl who teaches him the realities of true working-class life. Yet this is precisely the weak point of this well-intentioned but misguided novel. For what contact can a young upper-class Englishman have with the daughter of a cook? What a writer must search for in her calvary towards true artistic verity is the typical. Such a situation is not, cannot be, typical. Suppose the young writer, daring the Himalayas of truth itself, had made her hero a young white working man and her heroine an African organised worker from a factory? In such a situation she might have found a solution, political, social, spiritual, that could have shed light on the future struggle for Freedom in Africa. Where are the working masses in this book? Where the class conscious fighters? They do not appear. But let not this talented young writer lose heart! The artistic heights are for the great in spirit! Forward! for the sake of the world!
lmao
'I've learned,' he drawls, sharp with wounded vanity, 'that it's not necessary to have a beautiful woman in the sack. It's enough to concentrate on one part of her-anything. There's always something beautiful in even an ugly woman. An ear for instance. Or a hand.'
Ella suddenly laughs and tries to catch his eye thinking that surely he will laugh. Because for the couple of hours before they had got into bed, their relationship had been good-humoured and humorous. What he has just said is positively the parody of a worldly-wise philanderer's remark. Surely he will smile at it? But no, it had been intended to hurt, and he would not withdraw it, even by a smile.
'Lucky I have nice hands, if nothing else,' says Ella at last, very dry.
He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: 'Beautiful, doll, beautiful.'
He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being 'a career woman.' This woman who, throughout the five years of then-affair, in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticised her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties, and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does-sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that's what you wanted, that's what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she 'really' is. He has rejected her 'real' self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected.
Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.
She looks inside herself again and finds: A man and a woman. She, after years of freedom, is over-ready for a serious love. He is playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge. (Ella gets the idea of this character from the Canadian script-writer-from his cool and mask-like attitude as a lover: he was watching himself in a role, the role of a married man with a mistress. It is this aspect of the Canadian that Ella uses-a man watching himself play a role.) The woman, over-hungry, over-intense, freezes the man even more than he is; although he only half-knows he is frozen. The woman, having been unpossessive, unjealous, undemanding, turns into a jailor. It is as if she is possessed by a personality not hers. And she watches her own deterioration into this possessive termagant with surprise, as if this other self has nothing to do with her. And she is convinced it has not. For when the man accuses her of being a jealous spy, she replied and with sincerity: 'I'm not jealous, I've never been jealous.' Ella looked at this story with amazement; because there was nothing in her own experience that could suggest it. Where, then, had it come from? Ella thinks of Paul's wife-but no; she had been too humble and accepting to suggest such a character. Or perhaps her own husband, self-abasing, jealous, abject, making feminine hysterical scenes because of his incapacity as a man? Presumably, thinks Ella, this figure, her husband, with whom she was linked so briefly and apparently without any real involvement, is the masculine equivalent of the virago in her story? Which, however, she decides not to write. It is written, within her, but she does not recognise it as hers. Perhaps I read it somewhere?-she wonders; or someone told it to me and I've forgotten hearing about it?
'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.