The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  It is far too late to risk a trip to a woman she knows who extracts mutinous strangers. What are we going to do with you, Clever Clogs, teeming as you are with ready life?

  London, 1953

  Sunday

  Rosanna is having an affair. Not her first either—apparently she and Claudio have this understanding that they both need time apart from each other, and in this time apart both are free to take lovers. Rosanna thinks that deep down Claudio does not quite believe her to be as free as himself. ‘Every now and then he goes crazy,’ she said. ‘Last year I was spending the night with a lover in his rooms at Soho when Claudio came knocking on the door in the middle of the night. I don’t believe a man brought up a Catholic with the idea of sainted motherhood can completely evade his past.’

  I listened to all this with a feigned air of sophistication, as if it was nothing to me to hear my best friend in London is having an affair. We were sitting in her living room, where Claudio’s fabulous new series of photographs of London and Paris were carelessly stacked against the walls, and all the windows were open to the thick wet summer air. It is a beautiful room, gracefully proportioned, with high ceilings and an enormous marble fireplace. Rosanna was slung over a velvet sofa like a discarded garment, all slouch and crumple. She was smoking one of her endless ready-mades; we were drinking martinis, preparing to pick up the children.

  ‘Aren’t we the naughtiest mothers in South Ken,’ she said, ‘drinking, smoking, having affairs. Do you think Mrs Dance will expel us?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, pouring myself another drink from the pitcher at my feet. ‘Is this all mine?’

  Rosanna didn’t answer, she lay back on the couch with her eyes closed. ‘William is the finest lover known to man,’ she said, ‘sorry, woman. He goes on and on for hours—when he finally comes it is unbelievably exciting. And I thought British men were supposed to be duds in the sack.’

  I sat there listening, glad she didn’t have her eyes open. I wasn’t embarrassed, I didn’t think she was bad, I just couldn’t understand how she could bear another man other than her husband to enter her body. I am an Old Testament woman myself, I am wedded for life, my body belongs to no one but my husband, David John Murray. I am the human swan, mated for good, repelling all others.

  Yesterday I watched my husband reading his new short story for a recording at the BBC. He’s had two stories accepted now, which has fuelled his desire to give up journalism and launch himself into a novel. As he read, I sat in the control room and watched the sensual curve of his upper lip, the dark command of his open mouth. I claimed his chest for myself, the hair greying at his temples, the collapsed skin over his eyes. I claimed him then, I claimed him afterwards too, in the pub with all the other writers where we went for a drink. I claimed him as he sat among the faint; as he told endless stories and charmed the women. This one is mine, my heart said, this mouth, these lips, this tongue. He was telling an exaggerated story about a reading he did at Oxford where the other writer he was reading with was blind drunk.

  He was miming being drunk, the writer’s failed aim for the microphone, his mistaken belief that the first row of the audience contained a urinal. ‘Oh, he didn’t!’ cried a pretty lady poet. ‘I don’t believe you!’ My husband stood up and started opening his fly. ‘Stop! Stop!’ everyone shrieked. This raconteur is my husband, my heart said, this man of story is mine. When we left the pub I took his arm and said, ‘Don’t kiss any other girls, will you.’ He bent over and kissed the top of my head. I stopped walking: ‘You know that if you do I’ll take a knife to your heart.’ He laughed as if I was joking.

  I could not bear to place my lips against another man’s mouth, I could not bear an unknown man’s fleshy stalk to touch me. Our children came from that private place where David has been, our children travelled that dark wet route on their way to us. Seven years we have been together now, seven years since another man touched me: never another again.

  ‘Would you ever have an affair, Kate?’ Rosanna suddenly asked, opening her eyes.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’m still in love with David.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said.‘You can still love your husband and have an affair. Is the sex still good?’

  When we lie together it is as if we share a skin.

  ‘Pretty good,’ I said, my lips involuntarily curling up in an adolescent smirk.

  ‘In my humble opinion a bit of fantastic extramarital sex does wonders for the marriage bed,’ she said. ‘You should try it. Do you think David has ever had an affair?’

  I sat up. ‘Never! He wouldn’t have an affair in a million years.’

  Rosanna slowly rose too. ‘Come on, it’s time to pick up the kids.’ She crossed the room and took my glass.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure, honey,’ she said, ‘that’s the one thing you can never take for granted.’

  I smiled and we went out the door together, the new woman and the old, the woman of the future and the woman from the Old Testament masquerading as a sophisticated modern woman of 1953.

  I can’t believe David would ever be unfaithful.

  Monday

  Humiliating, cringe-making scenes from my literary career. Oh, God, can’t bear to think about last Tuesday; days later it is still causing me to wake in the night, in horror and nauseous remorse.

  Last month my first novel with a ‘prestigious’ London publisher was published. No flashy launch for me, but as a consolation prize I was invited by my publisher to one of its famous parties, where the poet of our century, Mr Thomas Stearns Eliot himself, was going to be present. I was beside myself with nerves—Eliot, the man who single-handedly ushered poetry into the modern world! Apparently he lives like a book himself—composed as a poem, nerveless—I wondered if I would get the chance to speak with him, and if I did, whether I would have the nerve to open my mouth.

  At the party everyone stood around in clusters, looking over shoulders for someone more famous, more celebrated. Saw Cecil Day-Lewis, Rosamond Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, and lots of others I didn’t recognise but would know their work if I heard their names. Felt myself degenerating by the second into my public, more fluffy self, my smile freezing, every utterance becoming more and more stupid. I’m so much more acute than my social self suggests; no one would ever guess from my trite and meaningless conversation that my intelligence is bright within, appraising, actively working, more unflinching than could ever be expressed in the open air. What is this social self but a false self sent into the world as a form of protection? I wanted to flee.

  General atmosphere all round of drunk desperation, fake bonhomie; overheard a well-known editor laughing about there never having been so many hostages to fortune collected in one room at the same time. HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE—the corruption of the writing life—the next book will make my name, the next book will ease the perpetual agonising over money—hence, the envy which builds up for those who have been ‘struck’. Cannot remember who said that literary fame is like lightning—never know where it will strike, but once it strikes, you know without doubt you are hit. And then I saw TS Eliot himself, standing in a corner, larger and taller than I had expected, his shy lovely eyes hovering on the face of a woman I did not recognise. I knew at once that even if the chance should arise I could not possibly say a single word to him.

  Somehow found myself in an argument with a celebrated male writer over ‘women’s writing’. (I am too embarrassed even to record his name.) He said while he had the utmost respect for it (immediately hackles went up—why is there no category called ‘men’s writing’?), he believed that essentially writing was an occult thing for women, and that his tastes in books were exclusively homosexual.

  ‘Surely for women art must always be a thing apart,’ he announced. ‘Women are creation, after all; one might argue that creation for men is a compulsion to better a woman’s ability to give birth. I believe men are essentially jealous.’ Several people nodded their heads, women included. I listened,
dumbfounded.

  ‘Women are life,’ said another man, whom I did not know.

  ‘And presumably men are death,’ I said, my heart jumping. Everyone turned to look at me. I willed myself not to blush, but my heart was thrashing.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s what I meant,’ the man I did not know said, ‘but, yes, there is something in that. Men’s need for war, to go off and fight. I believe creative energy in men is drawn from the same source—energy and action. A woman’s instinct is to withhold, to protect and nurture. Women do not have the same instinct to act, to create, that men have.’ He stopped speaking and looked at me. ‘My dear girl, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it—anybody who has the audacity to look like you could not possibly be a serious creative artist. You’re far too beautiful.’

  Several people laughed approvingly and everyone looked at me, waiting for my reply.

  I thought: a woman’s instinct is to make art, to break herself upon the page until the bloodied page breathes.

  ‘I’m afraid I am an unnatural woman. My instincts are creative not maternal.’ I turned and walked quickly away.

  I felt like a bloody idiot. I WAS a bloody idiot. I blindly groped my way to the bathroom, trembling, buckled by hot shame. Trying not to cry, I rushed down the empty corridor of the famous London publishing house. Women writers! Everywhere: rushing, mad women writers, bawling into their handkerchiefs.

  And now comes the piece de resistance: I soon learned that the man I had walked away from was the most famous literary critic in England, the man whose word could make or break a book. David laughed himself stupid but, personally, I never wanted to leave the house again.

  Then, last Tuesday night, after swearing I would never go to another of those nerve-racking parties, we went to another nerve-racking party. (I’ve been stuck at home with the girls for months—then two parties in quick succession at which I disgrace myself!) The first person I saw as I entered the room was the esteemed critic leaving by another door—we were in a private room upstairs at the Ivy, and he hadn’t seen me come in. My poor book had won exactly one review since publication—squeezed in with four other books in a job lot of ‘first novels’, reviewed by another first-time novelist—and when I saw the most famous literary critic in the whole of England walking out the door, something went off inside me, a personal cataclysm, an interior earthquake, a private explosion—anyway, something happened, and I started to RUN towards him—RUN!!—as if I had a tail on fire. I ran towards him, out the room and down the stairs, panting horribly, aware of my own humiliation as I ran, not thinking of anything else really but my own shamelessness, and of course I was making so much racket on the stairs (I was wearing heels), he reeled around in what I can only describe as terror. The mad beauty descending on him! The woman writer without a maternal bone in her body! I was smiling idiotically, goofily, as I came towards him, realising I had no idea of what I was going to say.

  ‘Hello, there!’ I called out in my most jolly voice. ‘On your way out?’

  But it was myself who was on the way out, of course, myself who was digging her own grave in broad daylight, by the light of the silvery moon. I was going down swinging, the woman writer whose children were asleep at home without her, the woman writer who believed herself capable of war.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, shaking my proffered hand, ‘the authoress with unnatural instincts.’

  I laughed weakly, stupidly, showing all my teeth: a perfect picture of simpering femininity.‘Katherine Elgin,’ I said,‘pleased to meet you.’

  He was already looking at his watch. ‘I’m afraid …’

  ‘Oh, please don’t let me stop you. Which direction are you headed in?’

  I was going to pretend to be going his way. I was going to pretend to be the nicest possible woman in the whole world in the hope of a splendid review—did you know that I would walk on nails to reach a reader’s eye? That a book only becomes a book when it meets a receptive eye?

  Just at that humiliating moment my husband appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Kate?’

  The waylaid critic of international repute was already speeding on his way, nodding his goodbyes as I turned towards my husband on the stairs.

  David supposed me to be making some secret assignation—he did not catch the famous critic’s face—he supposed me to be caught in the act of making plans for a future rendezvous with another man!

  All the interminable way home in the taxi he went on and on about my flirtatious ways, about how I continued to flaunt myself about in the most humiliating fashion.

  ‘I don’t understand why you need to do it,’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful! You could have any man you wanted! You don’t need to prove it again and again!’

  What does beauty have to do with anything? Beauty is for girls and men: it is nothing to a woman who wishes to make art. Beauty matters only to women who have nothing else but beauty: then it is a terrible, perishable thing, a flame already going down.

  I told him I did not want a lover, I already had the only lover I needed. We stayed up for hours, talking and drinking, finally collapsing into bed. When he came he cried out as if in pain. ‘That was wonderful,’ he said and immediately fell asleep.

  Thursday, Reading Room, British Museum

  Mrs Dapp is picking up the girls from school—thankfully don’t have to rush back. Got an idea for a novel which has been niggling me—but how to write a novel about the relationship between Australians and sport? How to approach it? (How I love this room, the glory of its domed glass roof, its benches, its little green-shaded reading lights—the fact that centuries of other greater writerly hands and eyes have sat here before me—what an honour, what a privilege, that my own paltry hands can join them. Am rereading Gissing’s New Grub Street in bed at night and falling in love with it all over again—so much of it takes place in this very room where that poor woman of ink-stained fingers, Marian Yule, toils anonymously for her father, where she gets headaches from reading too many books. So many books! So much compressed human effort! In this room one might suppose for a moment that the effort is worth it, that books are not an isolated consumer preference or an idle way of passing the time, but a real and actual way of participating in the world—a vivid, living, breathing means of communication.)

  Anyway, must go and check to see whether my communicating books have arrived—is there a single book in the world this marvellous place does NOT possess? I’ve ordered mountains of stuff about sport, Australians and football. The Great Australian Football Novel???? Now there’s an idea!!

  NOTES

  AUSTRALIA: Official handbook issued by the Australian National Publicity Association, June, 1941.

  Social Conditions

  ‘As a nation the Australian people are wholehearted in their fondness for outdoor sport and recreation. In this they reveal a characteristic of their Anglo-Saxon forebears, since the British have always been noted for their enthusiasm for competitive games.’

  What about the upcoming Melbourne Olympic Games? Pat writes in a letter this morning that the place is already going crazy, with lots of articles in the paper about the games being Melbourne’s big test to see if it can take its place with pride as one of the great cities of the world. She’s working for a new theatre company (she says the Melbourne theatre scene’s much better than Sydney’s) but she swears she’s leaving town when the Games are on. I’ve bloody had enough of it already, Athykay. Is the Queen going to come? Will the Olympic Village be open in time? Can we show our international guests that we are a swell, sophisticated people? Who the hell cares? Christ, it’s enough to make me get on the first ship to London!

  Hmmm, maybe I should go back and watch it all for myself. Maybe David and the girls and I should move to Melbourne instead of dreaming of Greece??? But how could I get a novel out of a hundred or so athletes converging on a city for several days and then going home again? Plot? Details?????

  After lunch

  Getting tired, headachy, just like inky Mar
ian.

  Is writing a branch of memory? If I could remember everything, could I write like Proust? (Ha!) Writing is an attempt to capture temporality. Sense of felt life.

  Is it true, as Rosanna suggests, that living in the world of books can sometimes deaden you to the cries in the street?

  More particularly, can it deaden you to the cries in the room?

  Friday

  How little we know of what will befall us.

  How lucky to live without knowing.

  How unlucky of me to choose to walk from the library down through Covent Garden to the Strand and then on to Fleet Street because it was the most glorious day and I thought I would surprise David instead of going straight home. How unlucky to catch sight of my husband walking a little way ahead of me down Fleet Street, his arm around the waist of Evelyn, the prettiest secretary in the office, to see them stop and engage in a kiss so fervent that David’s hat fell off when Evelyn took his head in both hands. His secretary, for God’s sake! That fact alone is almost as humiliating as the fact that the lips which pressed themselves so long upon my own came down upon another woman’s mouth.

  How cruel to see a lying word alive on my husband’s tongue.

  Story

  (LONDON, 1952–53; WRITTEN BY KATHERINE ELGIN’S ELDEST DAUGHTER, ANNA B. 1947)