As I walked along I thought of a broad road which I see sometimes in a dream, a road winding over the hills just as this one did that I was on; it leads to a city which, I know not why, I am eager to reach. Men and women are hurrying along the road, and often I have awakened to find myself up and half across my room in my desire to be of their number. The city is plain to see, standing on the top of a hill, surrounded by battlemented walls, and the road, broad and white, can be seen winding up to its great gates. The air is fresh and sweet and the sky is blue. They press on, men, women and children, not talking with each other, for they are intent on their purpose, and their faces shine with expectancy. They look neither to the right nor to the left. They hurry and their eyes are eager and bright. I do not know what they await. I only know that they are impelled by some urgent hope. The city reminds one a little of those cities of El Greco which stand on the brow of a rocky hill, cities of the soul, seen tremulously in a flash of lightning that tears across the darkness of the night. But those are cities of narrow, tortuous streets, and the dark clouds encompass them round about. In the city which I see in my sleep the sun shines and the streets are broad and straight. I know vaguely what the men are in those cities of mystics, the manner of them and the peace they offer to the tortured heart; but what kind of men they are in this city of mine and why it is that all those others on the road so passionately seek it, I do not know. I only know that it imports me urgently to go there, and that when at last I slip through its gates, happiness awaits me.
Lines.
I could not bear the thought that I should ever lose you
Or that our lives might ever be disjoined,
But yet I knew that in your wanton heart
There was for me nor love nor tenderness.
To many another I saw you give unwanted kisses,
But when I sought to break the chain that bound me
You twined your slim soft arms about my neck
And would not let me go.
Humbly I thanked you when you feigned to love me.
I bought your grudging lips for gold.
And now the love I thought would last till death is dead.
Ah, where is that high power that you had
To make the heavens golden with a smile
Or with a careless word to cloud the summer day?
In weariness, and not in death or parting, is
The bitterness of love. Spent is my passion
Like a river dried up by the sun’s fierce rays.
I look into my empty heart and shrink dismayed:
My soul is like a desert, and the wild wind blows
In its silent, barren spaces.
The night-birds build their nests amid the tombs
Of kings. My eyes rest on you sadly. I regret
My pain, my rapture, my anguish and my bliss.
1930
The Boarding House at Nicosia. The food is the typical English food that you would get in a private hotel in Bayswater. Soup, fish, roast and a sweet, which is either a trifle or a cabinet pudding; and on Sundays a savoury of stuffed eggs. There are two bathrooms fitted with a geyser, which heats the water with wood. The rooms are furnished with little iron beds and cheap furniture painted white. There are on the floor strips of rug that look like horse-blanket. The drawing-room has large chintz-covered chairs and tables covered with Maltese drawn-work. The light is bright and inconveniently placed for reading. Here in the evening the guests collect and play hearts for infinitesimal sums. There is a lot of noise and chaff. The proprietor is a small fat Greek, who speaks not very good English, and he is assisted in the dining-room by a scrubby Greek boy with fine eyes and a gold tooth.
The guests. A military man, an ex-Dragoon, very gentlemanly and good form. He is tuberculous and spends his time in pensions on the Riviera or wandering about the Near East. He is tall and thin with sharp features and thinnish hair plastered down on his head. An elderly, fat lady with white hair, extremely gay and flirtatious. She is what is called a man’s woman, and exchanges chaff across the dining-room with the other guests. She laughs a great deal and is very skittish. A business man from Egypt with his stout wife. He has a red face and greyish hair done like a private soldier’s; he might have started in the ranks. An elderly man with gold-rimmed spectacles who is slowly going round Europe studying social welfare. He writes articles for minor papers and is getting material for a book on the social conditions of the working classes. He talks of nothing else. He has a large fund of old stories which he is constantly trying to tell, and which the other people are always preventing him from telling. There are two slim ladies in delicate health who live much in their bedrooms. The other women think it odd that they should have cocktails brought them before each meal. A small stout old man with a pointed white beard and spectacles, who has spent forty-two years in Japan. His business was shaken by the earthquake and ceased to pay, so it was dissolved. He came back to England to settle with his daughter and bought a house in Harrow, proposing to live with her and her husband for the rest of his life. He had seen practically nothing of her since she was six months old when she was sent back to Europe then, and when he came to settle down with her he found that they were complete strangers. Friction arose, and so, leaving her the house, he came out to the Near East. He regrets Japan and would like to go back, but feels he cannot afford any longer to live there as he had been used to. He goes to the club here, reads the papers and plays billiards. In the evening at the hotel he plays patience or listens to the conversation. He very seldom joins in, apparently feeling a little out of it, but he chuckles at the chaff that passes to and fro. He is just waiting for death. With all of them chaff is the staple conversation. The price of the pension is ten shillings a day.
New York. She was the secretary of a wealthy woman, and she lived in a small hotel in which lived also the father of an English poet. She had a passionate admiration for the poet, and for his sake befriended his father who was poor, alcoholic and really rather disreputable. He loved his son and was proud of him. Then the poet came to New York to stay with her employer. She felt sure that he could not know in what poverty his father lived, and as soon as he found out would do something to relieve his distress. But the days passed and he made no sign of wishing to see his father, and at last, one day when she was answering letters for him, she told him that she knew his father, that they lived in fact in the same hotel, and that his father wanted terribly to see him. “Oh?” he said and went on with his dictation. She was horrified. She felt obliged to tell the old man. He chuckled. “He’s ashamed of me,” he said. “He’s a lousy poet,” she said indignantly. “No,” he answered, “he’s a lousy man; he remains a great poet.”
It is essential for a writer unceasingly to study men, and it is a fault in me that I find it often a very tedious business. It requires a great deal of patience. There are of course men of marked idiosyncrasy who offer themselves to your observation with all the precision of a finished picture, they are ‘characters’, striking and picturesque figures; and they often take pleasure in displaying their peculiarity, as though they amused themselves and wanted you to share their amusement. But they are few. They stand out from the common run and have at once the advantage and the disadvantage of the exceptional. What they have in vividness they are apt to lack in verisimilitude. To study the average man is an affair of quite another sort. He is strangely amorphous. There is someone there, with a character of his own, standing on his own feet, with a hundred peculiarities; but the picture is hazy and confused. Since he does not know himself, how can he tell you anything about himself? However talkative, he is inarticulate. Whatever treasures he has to offer you he conceals with all the more effectiveness that he does not know they are treasures. If you want to make a man out of these crowded shadows, as a sculptor makes a statue from a block of stone, you want time, patience, a Chinese ingenuity and a dozen qualities besides. You must be ready to listen for hours to the retailing of secondhand information in order at las
t to catch the hint or the casual remark that betrays. Really to know men you must be interested in them for their own sake rather than for yours, so that you care for what they say just because they say it.
The Outward Man. One of the difficulties that confronts the novelist is how to describe the appearance of his characters. The most natural way is of course the formal catalogue, the height, the complexion, the shape of the face, the size of the nose and the colour of the eyes. This may be given all at once or mentioned as occasion arises, and a salient trait by repetition at apposite moments may be impressed upon the reader’s attention. It may be given when the character is introduced or when interest has already been excited in him. In any case I do not believe that the reader gets any clear impression. The older novelists were very precise in their enumeration of their characters’ physical parts, and yet if any reader could see in the flesh the person whom the author has thus elaborately described I do not believe he would recognise him. I think we seldom form any exact image in our minds as a result of all these words. We have a clear and precise picture of what the great characters of fiction looked like only when an illustrator like Phiz with Mr. Pickwick or Tenniel with Alice has forced his own visualisation upon us. The cataloguing of characteristics is certainly dull, and a good many writers have tried to give liveliness to their description by an impressionistic method. They ignore the facts altogether. They scintillate more or less brightly on the subject of their characters’ appearance and expect you from a few epigrammatic phrases, from the way he strikes a vivacious onlooker, for instance, to construct in your mind a human being. Such descriptions may often be read with a pleasure which you cannot get from a sober enumeration of traits, but I doubt whether they take you much further. I have a notion that their vivacity often conceals the fact that the author has no very clear picture in his mind of the character he is inventing. They shirk the difficulty. Some writers seem unconscious of the importance of physical characteristics. It appears never to have struck them how great is their influence on character. The world is an entirely different place to the man of five foot seven from what it is to the man of six foot two.
1933
Monserrat. Like a poem, harsh and difficult, of a poet forcing his verse to strange harmonies and wrestling with his medium in the effort to make it carry a significant beauty and a power of thought that words are incapable of expressing.
Zaragoza. The chapel was dimly lit with candles on the altar, and at the altar steps two or three women and a man were kneeling. Above the altar was a Christ on the Cross in polychrome and almost life-size. With his low brow, thick black hair and short, straggling black beard he had the look of a peasant of the Asturias. In a dark corner of the chapel, away from the others, a woman knelt, with her hands not joined in the common way of prayer, but with the palms open towards the altar, the arms a little away from her body, as though on an invisible platter she were bearing the offering of an anguished heart. She had a long face, smooth and unlined, and her great eyes were fixed upon the image over the altar. There was an infinite pathos in her posture, that of a suppliant, helpless and defenceless, who sought aid in her confused distress. You would have said that she could not understand why this pain had been given her to bear. I did not believe that it was for herself she prayed, but for another that she interceded. A child in danger of death, a husband, a lover in prison or exile? She remained strangely still, and her eyes, unblinking, were set fast on the face of the dying Christ. But it was not to the living presence of which the image was no more than a crude symbol, it was literally to the grim, realistic figure, the work of human hands, that she made her passionate plea. There was in her eyes utter submission, resignation to the will of God, and yet a complete and intense confidence that from that wooden statue relief and succour might come if she could but move the heart within the wooden body. Her face shone with the radiance of her faith.
There is nothing to say of Murillo (except that he is not so bad as Valdes Leal) but that his pictures are very good furniture for sacred buildings. From any other standpoint they are profoundly insignificant. He has a pleasing talent for composition, his colour is soft and pretty; he is loose, sentimental, graceful and superficial. And yet when you see these paintings in the places for which they were painted, dimly lit and magnificently framed, in a chapel of which the rich tones complete their colour, you cannot deny that they have something. They appeal to an over-wrought, sickly devotion, the other side of the Spanish violence, crudity and brutishness. They appeal to the faculty of shedding abundant tears, the love of children, the casual admiration of a pretty girl and the half superstitious charitableness, which are to be found in the average Spaniard.
La Celestina. It can be read with interest, but it can hardly today excite. Its importance is historical. It was, it appears, the forerunner both of the picaresque novel and of the Spanish drama. Certain of its characters have been repeated and emphasised by a number of succeeding authors. But the terms in which historians of literature speak of it are exaggerated, and to describe it as a great masterpiece is absurd. The intrigue is inane. The dialogue is praised for its naturalness and doubtless it is written in an easy and idiomatic language; but every one of the persons expresses himself in the same fashion, with a constant use of the wise saws which is the curse of Spanish literature and which even Cervantes overdid. The humour is all of a pattern and consists in the rank absurdity of putting moral apothegms in the mouth of the old procuress who is the chief character, and the most living, of the tragi-comedy. But it is seldom that this provokes even a smile. One would have to be very easily moved to mirth to laugh. Some of the scenes are gay and lifelike. You can approve them, but you are never carried away by them. Though the story concerns the love of a young cavalier and a high-born damsel and there is much to-do about the extremity of their emotion, there is never a thrill of passion from the first page to the last. It is a love story from which love is absent. Of course it is a mischance that Calisto should be a fool and Melibea a half-wit; a half-wit, however, with the culture of a blue-stocking, for when she is about to throw herself from the top of a tower in desperation at her lover’s death, she pauses to deliver, after Plutarch, a series of reflections on the mutability of human things, with examples drawn from classical story.
It is a book that owes its celebrity rather to the accident of time than to intrinsic excellence.
Seville. When you are in the country toward evening the light has just that warm golden glow with which Murillo surrounds his saints, and the little white clouds on the horizon are like the cherubs that surround the Virgin in glory.
The crowd in the bull-ring. A thousand paper fans of all colours fluttered in the heat; it looked as though a swarm of butterflies had suddenly started into life.
Valdes Leal. It is all fluid. The design has a vague sweep of no significance. It gives you the impression of a badly blurred photograph. These people have no bones in their bodies. Valdes Leal had no power of composition and his pictures have no architecture; the vast canvases seem to be filled at haphazard. The colour is dull and conventional. It must be admitted that he had a certain imagination, but it was the inept, exaggerated imagination of the counter-reformation.
Andalusia. The moon leaned low against the sky like a white-faced clown lolling against a circus wall.
The harvest moon flitted in and out of the trees as the car sped by, like a fat gay woman playing hide and seek with a grotesque but rather appealing archness.
The hoots of the motor-horns and the roar of the exhausts pierced the night like the jagged peaks of the mountains in Japan against the unclouded sky.
M. P. He threw his bread on the waters in the confident hope that it would be returned four-fold, but in case providence were inattentive, took care to attach a string to it, so that if need be he could pull it back.
In the development of every art there is an interval between the charm of naïveté and the elegance of sophistication, and it is then that perfection is prod
uced. But in this interval is also produced dullness. For then artists are in complete command of their medium, and their personality must be out of the ordinary if they are to avoid the tediousness of realism.
Compare the springlike delightfulness of Raphael’s early works and the sumptuous power of the stanze of the Vatican with the emptiness of the pictures when he painted like Giulio Romano.
In perfection there is always the malaise of the degeneration which will succeed it.
The artist has by his nature the detachment and freedom which the mystic seeks in the repression of desire.
The artist, like the mystic who seeks to attain God, is detached in spirit from the world.
Intense activity blunts the doer to the sense of sin; it is only when his activity is thwarted that his conscience has opportunity to gnaw.
The art of the Renaissance gives you all it has to give at once. It has peace, healthiness and serenity. It more nearly reached perfection than any other style. It is stimulating, but not to the imagination, rather to the general sense of well-being. It gives you the feeling of physical contentment that a sunny morning does in spring.
Cordova. Plaza del Potro. It is a long, narrow place, with small white houses on each side of it, and at the end the river. Towards the upper end is a fountain with a prancing horse on a pedestal. Hither come the neighbours with earthenware jars to fetch water. They take it from jets through a hollow bamboo. Donkeys and horses are watered from the basin. On the left as you look up from the river is the Posada. From the front it looks a modest house; it has two storeys, it is whitewashed and has a large door which is closed at night. But inside is a great courtyard, very roughly paved and uneven. There are stables, each just large enough for a single horse, beside which the groom or boy could sleep. There are no more than two or three horses now. One of the stalls is occupied by an itinerant flower-seller who comes in chanting his pregon. In the broad archway that leads from the street to the courtyard girls are ironing linen. There are two small kitchens for common use. The upper storey is reached by rough stone stairs. There is a wooden balcony all around, jutting out, with a rickety balustrade, and this balcony gives access to the rooms. Here Cervantes lived.
A Writer's Notebook (Vintage International) Page 25
