Dante’s Inferno is not so far from the truth. Hell is what we make it. The damned endure torment not from the underworld but from within. Hell is not other people, as Sartre would have it, but ourselves. We inflict our own punishment. Meanwhile centuries of civilisation have not yet devised a cure for crime. Society imprisons the criminal instead of directing his interest towards a panacea for the committed crime. It would be more humane, and might be more successful, to train those who assault the old and feeble to care for the sick and aged, to make the rapists of young women work as midwives, put the poisoners into laboratories to discover some means of saving life rather than destroying it.
There are certain fundamental laws which have helped to shape us as human beings from the earliest days, and without which we should perish. The strongest of these is the law of the family unit, the binding together of a man and a woman to produce children. In the process of time this may become unnecessary, the test-tube baby turn out to be a more practical, less wasteful method of begetting and rearing the young. In our present state of development we cannot do without the unit. Emotionally, we should be starved. We seek, even in the sexual act, a long-lost comfort. A basic peace, reunion with ourselves. The fact that marriages so often fail is our misfortune. Incest being denied us, we must make do with second best. The perfect husband or wife is an illusion, a hero or a heroine born of fantasy, something we seldom recognise until, as Hamlet phrased it, the heyday in the blood is tame.
Society, as we know it, must disintegrate once the family dissolves. Nothing but the family bond will hold men and women together. Already women, emerging from centuries of submission, fret against their more passive role, demanding equality in all things as their right, but in achieving this they lose their first purpose in life, which is to preserve, to maintain the family. Women have not yet learnt how to serve their families and their own ambitions without conflict, and until they do so husband and children suffer, as well as they themselves. This is the greatest problem of our time. Our own and succeeding generations must learn to adjust to the ever changing status of women in our modern civilisation, for without a home, without a centre, we become disoriented, lost orphans without shelter, faith and confidence collapsing about us like a house of cards. Chaos reigns.
The second great problem of our time is how to live without religion. I believe that the dawn of the religious instinct in man came about through his first encounter with death. Death which slew his father and his mother, so that his groping mind sought consolation in a greater Father, a greater Mother, whether in the sky or in the bowels of the earth. He saw disease or misadventure strike down the beings upon whom he had hitherto depended. He saw them wither and grow old. This could not be. Therefore he created in his imagination the immortal ones. They would never let him down. The eternal Father would command him, praise him, punish him, the eternal Mother nourish him. Whatever he could not understand was of their doing. The laws of his own parents became confused with the sterner laws of his gods, and the necessity for sacrifice arose. The earthly parents, those frail creatures who grew old and died, losing all strength and beauty by so doing, were then transformed into immortals too. They lived on, but in another sphere, in the Islands of the Blest, or beyond the stars. Death, the last enemy, was thus defeated.
Belief in gods and demons became ingrained. The gods were good, the demons evil. Man was the tool of both, torn in conflict by opposing wills. The necessity to worship, to do homage to something greater than ourselves, is bred in the bone. It is part of our heritage, irrevocably intertwined with the basic need for family, for security. Deprived of our gods, of God, we are children without parents, hungry, lonely, fearful of the dark. Mankind, in this present century, balks dogma, balks what our forefathers called Divine Authority. Yet if those we revere on earth deceive us, to whom then shall we turn?
There is a faculty amongst the myriad threads of our inheritance that, unlike the chemicals in our bodies and in our brains, has not as yet been pinpointed by science, or even fully examined. I like to call this faculty the sixth sense. It is a sort of seeing, a sort of hearing, something between perception and intuition, an indefinable grasp of things unknown. Psychologists have called this sense the Unconscious Mind, the Superego, the Psyche, the Self. Scientists, to date, are not prepared to acknowledge such a sense, or, when they do, explain it as a memory storehouse, connected to the brain. This may well be, but, whether it proves so or not, it is also a storehouse of potential power. The phenomena of precognition, of telepathy, of dreaming true, all come from this storehouse, and the therapeutic value of hypnosis, still in its infancy, depends upon it too. The sixth sense, latent in young children, animals and primitive peoples, more highly developed in the East than in the West, has long lain dormant in most civilised societies.
I believe that neglect of this sixth sense has contributed to our problems throughout the ages. It can act as guide, as mentor, warning us of danger, signalling caution, yet also urging us to new discoveries. This untapped source of power, this strange and sometimes mystical intuitive sense, may come to be, generations hence, mankind’s salvation. If we can communicate, one with another, by thought alone, if a message from the storehouse can act as a panacea to pain, so curing the body’s suffering, if recognition of a fault, a crime, can be understood before it is committed, if dreaming in time can recapture from the past certain events known to our forebears but unperceived by us, then surely a series of possibilities, multitudinous, astonishing, may lie ahead for our children’s children.
Naturally there is danger in the use of the sixth sense. There is danger in the misuse of electricity, of atomic power: dabblers in magic, in the occult, in so-called spiritualism (telepathy in another guise) and the quack hypnotists, all can use the sixth sense to their own advantage. The combat between the good within us and the evil will always be with us. It is again part of our inheritance. The serpent under the tree, the demons from Pandora’s box, these figments of our doubts and fears will continue to threaten us until they are perceived and understood. Each one of us is Perseus, who, cutting off Medusa’s head, saw her reflection in the mirror and recognised himself. The sixth sense can help us to this recognition and, by fusing the conscious with the unconscious, broaden our vision so that all things become possible. When Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ I believe he meant just this. As prophet and seer, with the sixth sense more highly developed possibly than in anyone before his time or since, he knew the potentialities of the inner power and drew upon it, believing, as one of Jewish faith, that the source was Yahweh.
The gospels, their message blurred though beautiful, show us a messianic figure of compelling personality at once loved and often misunderstood by his immediate followers, speaking in riddles. Was the historical Jesus, the healer of the sick, the worker of miracles, the opposer of buying and selling in the Temple, more deeply involved in a struggle to help the oppressed peoples of Israel than we have hitherto been told? Can the shouts of the populace calling ‘Hosanna… Hosanna…’ in that fateful Passover week be interpreted as ‘Free us… Free us…’? Did that cry of agony from the cross, in Aramaic ‘Eli, Eli, lama shabachthani,’ mean ‘My power, my power, why have you gone from me’?
This, to the devout Christian, will seem blasphemy, a denial of all later teaching, reducing the Son of God to the Son of Man. Yet the cry of Jesus, however it was phrased, was the eternal question put by man in the face of death since the beginning of time. No answer from the heavens. No answer from within. The historical Jesus nailed to his cross, the mythical Prometheus chained to his rock, both dared to refashion men on earth by breathing fire upon them, to turn them from figures of clay and matter into living gods. Their failure was their glory. For only by daring can man evolve, shake himself free, triumph over the hereditary shackles that bind him to his own species. Only by daring can the spirit, hitherto a prisoner in matter, break away from the body’s ties, travel at will across time and space, discarding the bod
y’s aids that have served in ages past, the eyes, the ears, the heart, the lungs, and venture into the unknown, untrammelled, free.
Nothing is impossible, no vision too distorted that cannot become reality generations hence. A hundred years ago men would have laughed to scorn the idea that, sitting at home in their armchairs, they might watch and hear events taking place thousands of miles away, that they themselves could travel in a few hours across the sky from one end of the globe to the other, that drugs would combat madness and disease, that atomic power would bring light or destruction to whole continents, that their great-great-grandchildren might land upon the moon. Man is forever seeking, forever probing, and although as individual particles we must conform to a pattern, to a design, the great process of adaptation still continues, changing us imperceptibly, so that we cannot foresee what we shall ultimately become.
In my beginning is my end. The I who writes this essay lives and dies. Something of myself goes into the children born of my body, and to their children, and those children’s children. Life, whatever shape or form it takes, goes on, develops, adapts.
Humbert Wolfe, a poet of my youth now dead and seldom, so I am told, read by the young of today, wrote a long poem, first published in 1930, called The Uncelestial City. Three verses caught my attention in those days, over thirty years ago, not particularly for their language but for the attitude expressed, and they sum up for me now, as they did then, all that I have been trying to say in the foregoing pages.
Continue! knowing as the pine-trees know
that somewhere in the urgent sap there is
an everlasting answer to the snow,
and a retort to the last precipice,
that, merely by climbing, the shadow is made less,
that we have some engagement with a star
only to be honoured by death’s bitterness,
and where the inaccessible godheads are,
that to plunge upwards is the way of the spark,
and that, burning up and out, even as we die
we challenge and dominate the shameless dark
with our gold death—and that is my reply.
Death and Widowhood
[1966]
Death, to the novelist, is a familiar theme. Often it is the high spot of a particular tale, turning romance to tragedy. A character, his demise planned for a certain chapter while the story was still in notebook form, vanishes from the manuscript, and the author, like a successful murderer whose victim has disappeared, decides that the killing was well done. I have done this several times in my novels. I can even confess I enjoyed the killing. It gave a certain zest to the writing, and if I felt an inward pang for the loss of the character I had created, the pang was soon forgotten and the memory faded. The fictitious person was, after all, only a puppet of my imagination, and I could create others to take his place. The writer, like a spider, spins a web; the creatures caught in the web have no substance, no reality.
It is only when death touches the writer in real life that he, or she, realises the full impact of its meaning. The deathbed scene, described so often in the past, with fingers tapping it out upon a typewriter or pen scratching it on paper, becomes suddenly true. The shock is profound. Sometimes this encounter with reality can so awaken the writer from the imaginary world that he never recovers. I believe that this is what happened to Emily Brontë. The fantasy world of Gondal that had been hers, peopled with heaven knows how many persons, coupled with the harsher, wilder land of Heathcliffe, Cathy and Wuthering Heights, faded on a certain Sunday morning when her brother Branwell, his dragging illness accepted with resignation for so long, of a sudden died. A cold, caught at his funeral and then neglected, hastened her own decline and death barely three months afterwards. It does not account for her stubborn refusal to see a doctor, her silence with her two sisters, her complete withdrawal within herself, which can only be explained by shock, or trauma as we would call it today, occasioned by direct experience of death. The death of a brother, for which she blamed her sisters and herself. They had neglected him. Therefore, she argued, she must be neglected likewise. It was an unconscious form of suicide, not uncommon to the suddenly bereaved.
I am a writer too. Neither a poet nor a great romantic novelist like Emily Brontë, but a spinner of webs, a weaver of imaginary tales; and when my husband died in March of this past year it was as though the sheltered cloudland that had enveloped me for years, peopled with images drawn from my imagination, suddenly dissolved, and I was face to face with a harsh and terrible reality. The husband I had loved and taken for granted for thirty-three years of married life, father of my three children, lay dead. If by writing about it now I expose myself and my feelings, it is not from a sense of self-advertisement, but because by doing so I may be able to help those readers who, like myself, have suffered the same sense of shock.
Like Emily Brontë, one of my first reactions, after the first bewildered fits of weeping, was to blame myself. I could have done more during the last illness, I should have observed, with sharp awareness, the ominous signs. I should have known, the last week, the last days, that his eyes followed me with greater intensity, and instead of moving about the house on trivial business, as I did, should never have left his side. How heartless, in retrospect, my last good night, when he murmured to me, ‘I can’t sleep,’ and I kissed him and said, ‘You will, darling, you will,’ and went from the room. Perhaps, if I had sat with him all night, the morning would have been otherwise. As it was, when morning came, and the nurses who had shared his vigil expressed some anxiety about his pallor and asked me to telephone the doctor, I went through to him expecting possibly an increase of weakness, but inevitably the usual smile. Instead… he turned his face to me, and died.
My readers will have heard of the kiss of life. We tried it, the nurses and myself, in turn until the doctor came. But I knew, as I breathed into his body, that it was useless and he was dead. His eyes were open but the spark had gone. What had been living was no more. This, then, was the finality of death. Described by myself in books time without number. Experienced at last.
The aftermath of shock must alter the chemistry in the blood, for it forced me to action instead of to collapse. I had to telephone my children. Make arrangements. See that necessary things were done. These responses were automatic, numb. Part of my brain functioned, part of it seemed closed. The part of it that was automatic and dissociated from emotion ordered an immediate autopsy so that the doctor’s first assessment of death by sudden coronary thrombosis could be verified. The part of it that was numb began to fuse with the emotions, every instinct urging me to perform those actions he would have wished carried out, the wording to The Times making clear that by his own request the cremation should be private, there would be no memorial service, instead his friends might send donations to the Security Fund for Airborne Forces—those Airborne Forces he had commanded in 1942, 1943 and 1944, his beloved ‘paras,’ his glider pilots.
It was not until the cremation was over, which only my children and a few close friends attended, and I had scattered my husband’s ashes at the end of the garden where we often walked together, and my children had returned to their own homes, that I knew, with full force, the finality of death. I was alone. The newly discovered tenderness of my daughters, the sudden maturity of my son, himself to become a father within a few months, had not prevailed upon me to go back with one of them, to recover, as they put it, from the strain. ‘No,’ I told them, ‘I want to face the future here, in my own home, by myself.’ To go elsewhere, even with them, would postpone the moment of truth. What had to be endured must be endured now, and at once, alone.
In marriage one partner—unless both are killed simultaneously—must go before the other. Usually the man goes first. Generations of wives have known this. Now I knew it too, and must adapt. I must force myself to look upon the familiar things, the coat hanging on the chair, the hat in the hall, the motoring gloves, the stick, the pile of yachting magazines beside
his bed, and remind myself that this was not the separation of war that we had known twenty years earlier, but separation for all time.
To ease the pain I took over some of his things for myself. I wore his shirts, sat at his writing desk, used his pens to acknowledge the hundreds of letters of condolence; and, by the very process of identification with the objects he had touched, felt the closer to him. The evenings were the hardest to bear, the ritual of the hot drink, the lumps of sugar for the two dogs, the saying of prayers—his boyhood habit carried on throughout out married life—the good night kiss. I continued the ritual, because this too lessened pain, and was, in its very poignancy, a consolation.
I wept often because I could not prevent the tears, and possibly, in some way beyond my understanding, tears helped the healing process, but the physical act of weeping was distressing to me beyond measure. As a child I seldom cried.
I thought long and often about the possibility of life after death. Baptised and confirmed in the Christian faith, I acknowledge no denomination, yet have an instinctive yearning for survival, as indeed the human race has always done, since man first sought to come to terms with death. I liked to think of my husband reunited with the parents who had gone before him, and with his comrades of two world wars. I liked to think that all pain, all suffering, had been wiped out, that he knew, as none of us can know here on earth, indescribable joy, the ‘peace which passes all understanding’—a line he used to quote.
The Rebecca Notebook Page 10
