Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  For days, and even weeks, the light can be lost sight of, the task forgotten. Then, in a despairing moment, remembrance comes, and resolution is again summoned up. There is no other answer to despair -neither drug nor stimulant, neither sleep nor wakefulness; no change of scene, or of companionship, or of way of life; no satiety of the senses. This is a hunger which bread will not satisfy, a thirst which drink will not quench. The only satisfaction lies in self-abnegation; the way, as the New Testament says, is narrow, and the gate to it is straight. Yet along this way alone is life worth living; can, indeed, be lived at all. Generalised plans for human felicity are all doomed, not merely to failure, but to produce the exact opposite of what was intended. Each individual must find the way alone and follow it alone. Who knows what future horrors the pursuit of collective chimera may hold. It may even be that Man, in the Will’s final frenzy, will blow the earth itself to pieces, and himself with it. No matter. All that will be lost is a speck of dust travelling through the universe - that’s nothing. What remains is eternity and Man’s part in it - that’s everything.

  10

  Two Writers:

  Somerset Maugham And Leonard Woolf

  A visit to Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque was always memorable and enjoyable, though latterly, of course, in view of his condition, liable to be painful. His folded, parchment face and small glittering eyes; his elegant, but somehow not quite ‘correct’ attire, clothing a body which was neat, slight and wiry; yet likewise, in some indefinable way, distorted and infirm; the stutter which varied between making speech almost impossible and being barely noticeable, according to his mood and the company he kept; the villa itself, with its large, carefully tended garden, swimming-pool and other appurtenances of affluence, the well-run household, the luncheon excellent, simple and invariable, always the same inscrutable servants opening the door and waiting at table; with this ostensible luxury, a decided flavour of parsimony, of a careful, even somewhat grudging, hand in control - it all added up to a single impression. Of what? I remember asking myself the first time I went there. The answer was obvious when one came to think about it. Maugham lived in the style and spirit of one of his own short stories.

  The touch of ‘commonness,’ the skill and ingenuity, the sentimentality masquerading as cynicism, the false values so appetisingly served up from China to Peru; wherever two or more were gathered together in clubs, messes, P & O liners, wagons-lit, with the dawn coming up like thunder, out of Sevenoaks, ‘crost the Thames -were not these precisely the characteristics of life in the Villa Mauresque, shining in the Riviera sun where Cap Ferrat juts into the blue Mediterranean? Romantic writers are forced to dwell in their own illusions, to build them into little houses which, like snails, they carry on their backs, retreating into them when danger - that’s reality - threatens. Thus, poor old Snow shuffling along the corridors of power, Waugh for ever revisiting Brideshead, Hemingway living dangerously to the point, in the end, of blowing out his own brains; thus Maugham on the Côte d’Azur, where the brown bodies with their delicate bikini tracings are packed side by side, stretching from Cap Ferrat to eternity. Truly, God is not mocked.

  The thing I like best about Maugham, and found most admirable, was his total lack of literary pretentiousness. He just never thought of himself, or behaved, as a great writer. If anything, he underrated his own work, seeing himself as a popular entertainer merely, who would soon be forgotten. Actually, ‘Cakes and Ale’ (his own favourite, as he told me once) is, in my opinion, a much better novel than many which are more highly regarded today. His comments on other writers were shrewd and perceptive, and never governed by current fads and fashions. His attitude towards contemporary mandarins like T.S.Eliot was well this side of idolatry. The craftsman in him - far and away his predominant side as a writer - steadied him in making literary judgments. It was a great pleasure, and most beneficial, to listen to him when he talked about the technicalities and practice of writing.

  For critics generally he professed contempt, and, unlike other successful writers, never seemed to bother much about reviews. Perhaps he resented a little the lack of esteem for his work among highbrows. I know he sometimes let fall a sigh in the direction of Rapallo along the coast, where Max Beerbohm was growing ever more famous in literary and intellectual circles with every book he did not write. Someone once remarked at his table that a small fund was being raised, sponsored by Eliot, to provide Beerbohm with a wireless set. Maugham’s irritation at this ludicrous project was evident. His stutter became convulsive.Why, he seemed to be asking, reward indolence when his own steady industry brought him so little esteem? Such mighty sails for so tiny a craft!

  In general, however, he was well content with his lot. He liked being rich and took pleasure in the thought that his earnings from his pen had probably set a record. Forgive me, AP Herbert, but there has never been a time when successful writers could so enrich themselves. Even in a league which included Shaw, Wells, Wodehouse, Kipling, Galsworthy, etc., Maugham’s earnings have been prodigious. His satisfaction at being wealthy has been more due to vanity than to self-importance or self-indulgence. His ways were relatively simple and abstemious. Like all timid, lonely people, money seemed to him a protection. It set up a buffer between him and a largely alien and hostile world. To this end he sought it, first diligently and ardently, and finally as an addiction.

  Contrary to popular view, far from being ‘cynical,’ Maugham’s temperament was romantic, if not sentimental. I remember that on one occasion he described with great feeling how at some public function he had seen the Windsors and they were holding hands. Was it not a touching proof, he said, that their romance, which cost him so dear in worldly terms, had proved worthwhile? The impression of Maugham which nothing will efface is of an outsider. Of the many who have claimed that honorific title of our time, he unquestionably deserved it. He had many acquaintances among what he would call, with a deprecating smile, the great; Churchill and Beaverbrook, for instance. Visitors were frequent at the Villa Mauresque, and included a variety of notabilities. Yet Maugham was never, as it were, fully integrated into this world of the eminent and successful, even though he ostensibly upheld its credentials. Particularly latterly, he spent much of his time alone, or in the company of his faithful friend and secretary, Alan Searle, whose exacting devotion to him over many years deserves the highest commendation.

  What, then, set Maugham apart? Not, certainly, any mystical leanings. He was the least religious of men. Nor did he, like Swift, come to sicken of the company of his fellows. In principle, he remained gregarious and companionable. Was it, perhaps, his early poverty? His not very happy childhood? His homosexuality? The failure of his marriage? I should not have thought so. Plenty of people with these, and worse, afflictions, and far less gifted and successful than Maugham, have managed to come to terms with their circumstances. Maugham, it seems to me, never did. It was this side of his character which appealed to me and made me feel always affectionately disposed to him; a sort of fastidiousness, an essential integrity which held him aloof. At the end of a long life full of fame and wealth and distinction, he remained triumphantly an outsider.

  The last time I visited the Villa Mauresque he had just got rid of his pictures in consequence of some tiresome and unedifying family row. The spaces on the walls where they had hung still showed. He complained bitterly that he missed them, and I blurted out, for once carried away in his company, how all any of us wanted was that he should have for his remaining years whatever satisfaction life could offer, and so on. I don’t think he even heard what I said; deafness increasingly afflicted him. In any case, it was no business of mine. I think of him now, and always shall when I look down on Cap Ferrat - an old, old man staring forlornly at those empty spaces on his walls, indomitable even in his wilfulness; a craftsman whose steady application and accomplished performance in the field of English letters must deserve the respect and the envy of other practitioners.

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  I shall always think of Leonard Woolf in his lovely garden at Rodmell, in Sussex. It was part of the serenity of his temperament - he was the most serene person I have ever known - to love his garden the more for its association with his wife Virginia, even though it also recalled her tragic self-inflicted death. In one of its more enchanting corners there was a bust of her, and there I sat with him on a summer’s afternoon talking about her without any sense of unease or restraint.

  Woolf, as he told me, had no belief in or expectation of immortality. He was entirely convinced he would never see Virginia again, or continue to exist in any way himself when his earthly life ended.There was no despair or even drama in this for him. He was a true stoic. He lived his life nobly and austerely, and, I am sure, relinquished it gracefully. When I heard of his death last week at the age of 88, I felt no pang of regret, such as one normally does even for the old when they pass away. In his case, it would have been unbecoming. All I felt was gratitude for the time I spent in his company. Though we disagreed fundamentally, I found a sort of inspiration in him. I loved his simple way of life, his utter honesty and truthfulness, his patience and dedication to work, his innumerable acts of kindness and consideration to all sorts and conditions of people. To village people whom he delighted to help and know. To Bloomsbury survivors like Labokova with whom he invariably ate his Christmas dinner. To fellow gardeners for whom he organised an annual show.

  Up to the end he largely did for himself. Luncheon invariably consisted of bread and cheese, slices of tongue, lemonade from the great jug he made himself, or beer. The passion for goodness was not in him. But the practice was. He was an extraordinarily good man. One of the many touching pictures that emerged was of him and Virginia together setting the type for printing, on their flat-bed press, the very first edition of ‘The Waste Land.’ This was the beginning of the Hogarth Press, which they founded and which throve, in terms of prestige and finance. Woolf told me that his original idea had been that typesetting might prove an effective therapy for Virginia’s mental disturbance: I find this kindly notion more estimable than the result - the launching of a thousand seminaries on Eliot’s preposterously overrated poem.

  Woolf will, of course, be forever associated with the Bloomsbury set. I always felt that, although he belonged to them, he was in many respects different. Thus he was born into an affluent and cultivated Jewish family, but after his father’s early death they were in straitened circumstances

  -something which few of the other Bloomsburyites ever experienced. Then, as a highly efficient civil servant in Ceylon (no one, incidentally, has given a better account of what being in the old ICS was like than he in ‘Growing’, the first of five autobiographical volumes),he acquired a practical knowledge of government and affairs. This held him in good stead as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and imperial affairs and as a publisher. He justly prided himself on being a capable administrator and man of business. Finally, he was too nice and too sensitive to feel the sense of superiority over other mortals with which Virginia, her sister Vanessa and her husband, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and the others were afflicted.

  He saw very clearly the faults of Fabians like the Webbs, and had numerous highly diverting anecdotes about them. His judgments were shrew and sound; as when he said about Bertrand Russell that he was cold and without feeling. Even his close friends, even Virginia, he weighed up justly and dispassionately. I sometimes thought that in the last resort he did not care greatly for humans at all, and much preferred animals; especially dogs, who were his constant companions. He communicated with them with uncanny skill, and came, as it seemed to me, to look like them. I am sure that at Rodmell their barking is hushed and muted now. If I were to address a letter of sympathy about his death to anyone, it would be to them.

  Woolf ‘s socialism and internationalism (he was one of the first to envisage a League of Nations in his ‘International Government,’ first published in 1915 as a supplement to the lately-founded New Statesman) were consistently and sincerely held, but against a background of an essentially pessimistic attitude to his times. He believed in his heart that all the liberal hopes plausibly entertained for our Western civilisation expired in the First World War, never to be seriously revived. Even so, he worked on, to the very last day of his life, concerned about injustice, cruelty, oppression and all other impediments to ameliorating our human condition.

  11

  The Prophet Of Sex

  There are few things more repulsive than picturesque old men. If ever I find myself cultivating a venerable white beard and hair to match I shall know that the end has come. The thought is put in my mind by looking at the picture of Havelock Ellis on the dust-jacket of his autobiography, first published in 1940 and now reissued. To be vain about youthful good looks is permissible, though still not edifying; one remembers with distaste all the high-table camp talk about Rupert Brooke’s good looks (for instance, Lytton Strachey’s high-pitched ‘Rupert in en beauté tonight’ on catching a glimpse of him at a theatre) among Cambridge homosexuals. But to be vain amidst the foliage of old age is disgusting, and betokens an obsessive narcissism.

  Ellis was a classic example. His body, he indicates in My Life, gave off sweet smells; ‘my mother when she kissed me used often to say that my cheeks were scented, and my wife, who has frequently made the same remark, has also said that my cast-off shirts have a distinct odour of cedar.’ His head, he writes, passed for being ‘noble’, his eyes for being bright and beautiful; ‘Olive Schreiner said once of my nude form that it was like that of Christ in the carpenter’s shop in Holman Hunt’s Shadow of the Cross’. On another occasion Olive Schreiner compared him to the ‘eager, bright-eyed satyr in Rubens’s picture, Silenus’. A ‘dear friend lived to call me ‘Faun’, and Edward Carpenter, with the quiet twinkle of his luminous eyes, once said to me: ’He is the god Pan.’

  Faun or Pan or Christ, or all three at once, Ellis clearly had a great and abiding passion for himself. He works lovingly over his limbs, features and organs, only leaving out the genitals, one feels, because they were too sacred in his eyes to be included even in this auto-erotic survey. Nothing clouded the serenity of his relationship with himself; they never, as it were, spoke a cross word to one another - he and himself. It was a perfect marriage, and if there were occasional infidelities - with his wife Edith, with Olive Schreiner, with ‘Amy’ who turns out to have been the daughter of his friend Dr Baker Smith, with Margaret Sanger, the early American contraception evangelist, and with Françoise Delisle the companion of his last years, actually a French woman named Françoise Lafitte-Cyon -his only true love and dear companion was himself.

  With so narcissistic a temperament Ellis was bound to find his relations with women -to put it mildly -unusual and delicate. Alan Hull Walton, in his introduction to this new edition of My Life, insists that Ellis was neither impotent nor homosexual. We must take his word for it, though none of the relationships with women described in My Life can be considered as normal, or, in the accepted sense, sexually satisfying. His wife turned out to be a lesbian, and after their marriage soon reverted to lesbian practices. In the end the poor woman went off her head, becoming, except in occasional lucid moments, fiercely hostile towards Ellis. Olive Schreiner, with whom he was according to his own account in love, was clearly a passionate woman (Ellis called her ‘lion’ and she him ‘my soul’s wife’), but their indulgence in sensuality together, such as it was, can scarcely have been, from her point of view, up to scratch. Some idea of how it went is perhaps conveyed by the following bizarre incident:

  ‘I see her at her rooms at Hastings where I had come to spend the week-end with her, bringing at her desire my student’s microscope, for she wished to observe living spermatozoa, which there was no difficulty in obtaining to place under the cover glass for her inspection, and I see her interest in their vigorous mobility.’

  This is not,
I should suppose, quite what Antony and Cleopatra were up to.

  What precisely happened with Amy, his mistress of sorts over a number of years, is not even hinted at, but rightly or wrongly one has the impression that with her, too, it was the by-ways rather than the main stream of sexual passion along which they ventured. Of all his lady friends Amy seems to have been the most quiescent, and may well have been called on to indulge his proneness to urolagnia (his own word) which he considers he inherited from his mother, to whose ‘early love of water’ he draws attention:

  ‘Once at the age of twelve she took me to spend the day at the London Zoological Gardens. In the afternoon as we were walking side by side along a gravelled path in a solitary part of the Gardens, she stood still, and soon I heard a very audible stream falling to the ground. When she moved on I instinctively glanced behind at the pool in the path, and my mother, having evidently watched my movements, remarked shyly: ’I did not mean you to see that.’ . . . No doubt there was a shy alarm as to what her now tall, serious boy would think of this new experience with his mother, but there was also the impulse to heighten a pleasurable experience by blending with it the excitement of sharing it with her son.’

  Later, he writes, he became interested in vesical energy, and published a paper on ‘The Bladder as a Dynamometer’.’My vision of this function,’ he goes on, ‘became in some degree attached to my feeling of tenderness towards women - I was surprised how often women responded to it sympathetically.’ This view was confirmed when his sister Louie said of his mother’s behaviour in the Zoological Gardens: ’She was flirting with you.’ As for Françoise - by the time Ellis joined up with her he was getting on in years, and even his urolagnia had doubtless begun to lose its edge. Françoise, in any case, was well armed. Had she not called herself, in a fragment of autobiographical fantasy, ’The Woman Who Can Do Without A Man’, all unconsciously preparing for her life with Ellis?