*
5 September. The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present. But sometimes a present moment turns under our eyes into a remote past, and that is a death. It happened to me today to see these two reflected rays cross each other. Waiting for my local train to London, I saw a train filled with men in khaki, the first since the other war. They were the same, young in their clumsy uniforms, crowding with the same voices and gestures to the windows: I only had changed. Then I was tireless and confident, a young woman with her baby. Now,, he is in the new war, and I, I am quickly tired, my body less, supple, my mind cloudy and tortuous, without those horizonless hopes. So, I thought, the past ages so slowly that it will easily outlive me. . . . But who, at any moment, knows whether he is living in the past, or in how deeply buried a past? A friend had invited me to dine with her at the Ivy: the room was crowded with people I knew, or their faces were familiar because I had seen them often before in this friendly restaurant. I noticed that there was not yet a uniform in the place. Suddenly I thought that something was happening in the room, and I looked up and caught all these people, known and unknown, in the very act of becoming nothing if not a memory. They had not changed in any way, none of them was more than a minute older, but during that minute they had become part of a past only distant enough to be old-fashioned and without, as yet, a meaning. Their faces indeed made no meaning — they were a syllable endlessly repeated, ba, ba, ba. Or the unrecognisable faces of drowned men. The silence would have alarmed me if I had not recognised it.
In the half darkness of the Circus, at the intersection of these two moments, two figures had been waiting. The first was the middle-aged prostitute wearing her professional fox fur over one shoulder and her gas-mask over the other. Near her, the old man offering, with a total indifference, a few laces: he had forgotten why he was standing there, so without hope that he had become the absence of himself, a vacant place in the street and the street was being sucked into it.
*
Obliviously where he stands
Nothing, nor the strings laid
Lax as dead Christ across the forgiving hands
Of the Marys across his, made
Light move in the dry fountain he became
When all his life fled into this palm,
Arctic upspringing sheaf, quick to claim
What silent No of alms?
A pure light the lamps refute
Endlessly evokes this five-fold wick, cold
Source of flame, and mute
Trumpet of the rejoicing bone, void where rolled
By the same No abolished, and were lost
The glittering axles of the street, women’s
Hands gripping their masks, default or flight of Eros
And the spiteful innocence
Of children from whose eyes the stones press
A young sun, suspense
In their sons of mothers that resembles breasts,
Cries breathing silence …
O heart of the rejected beating out absence
And the death of the world.
*
16 September. I have spent the day drafting a letter — to go to the centres of the P.E.N, in all allied and neutral countries. It has given me a great deal of trouble, and clearly is not all written from the same level. To say, “We, a democratic nation”, is not true on the same level as other things are true — as that lies corrode the society which builds on them. But if there are an unknown number of steps leading down to what would be true if one could reach complete disinterest, there are also many people who will refuse to descend more than one of them. They must make what they can of my letter, which moves clumsily from step to step, not always down.
A war which, so little as I can judge, may last five years, will certainly poison us. There may come a time when I shall no longer understand how it can be possible not to hate. Or we may be invaded. For that reason, and one other, I am copying my letter — to confront it later with myself. The other reason is that many people would disapprove of this letter: if I am killed I should like this mild snap of my fingers to be left here.
With the outbreak of war, the value of the P.E.N, has increased a hundred-fold. Its responsibilities have increased in like measure. In what has come to be called totalitarian war the life of the spirit is as much threatened as the life of the body, and its death is the greater disaster. The natural instinct of officials and of what are called men of action is to suppose that such an activity as literature can easily, even usefully, be pushed aside in war. Or they will allow or even encourage writers to live as propagandists but not otherwise. This open neglect of literature and the other arts is only what can be endured and outlived. The worst is the danger in which war puts all we intend when we speak of civilisation. If the fearful urgencies of war are allowed to invade every part of life, not only our homes but our minds, and not only our minds but the Reason or Imagination, they will silence our belief that men, being all of them human or being all the children of God, ought to respect each other. It is not pleasant to imagine a future in which this belief has been destroyed.
Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilisation. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve — or to corrupt — civilisation, and are obliged to use them. At this moment we see that the civilisation we know most intimately, having been brought up in it, is abominably in danger. If we should have a long war, we shall begin to hate whole nations, and to wish to punish them by every means in our power. We shall justify ourselves in using hideous means by the excuse that they shorten the war. Or the enemy nation will be the first to use such means and we shall retaliate. We, a democratic nation, have begun war with the greatest reluctance, with no aim except to curb aggression. We see already, and shall see more clearly in a short time, the extreme difficulty of fighting a war without the help of an aggressive spirit in ourselves. If we are to be stiffened to a conclusive war, we shall learn to hate. If we suffer horrors we shall be tempted to return them, even though civilisation cannot survive another merciless slaughter. The irrationality we have deplored in Nazi Germany will take hold on us. In our effort as defenders of civilisation we shall end by cutting its throat.
It is a duty of writers to hinder in every way the growth of hatred and contempt for the enemy nation. A writer who persuades us to hate is ensuring that we are unfit to make peace. One of his tasks is to keep us sane; to remind us that certain forms of warfare can be used only at the cost of destroying civilisation; to stiffen us against the indecency, the blunders, of hate and revenge.
We, a democratic nation, have long been accustomed to think, speak, and write with a notable freedom. We pride ourselves on refusing to be led by the nose by our leaders. Probably we pride ourselves too easily. But undeniably there are among us enough stubborn individuals to give trouble to any over-eager authority. We are justified in speaking of our tradition of freedom. At war with a totalitarian state, we run a terrible risk of losing this freedom. One prohibition and regulation follows another to make us militarily efficient. Free speech, never much liked by authority, is discovered to be a danger. It is impossible to allow much freedom of action. All must be kept under observation, all must obey. People must be told what is expedient for them to know. They must write what can serve or at least cannot hinder the interests of a state at war. In this way our inherited right to discuss and enquire freely is easily taken from us. If we are not very careful, a freedom which has taken centuries to grow will in a few months be cut back by nervous or jealous authorities. No one has a closer interest in guarding this freedom than writers. We want to save the forms of civilisation as they exist for us in our fields, homes, and cities. But without the spirit the form would be worth less to us. It would be worth very little. Therefore we must not allow our minds to submit to any restraint that may be imposed by war on our bodies.
The writer spends his life tr
ying to give a correct account of what he feels; trying to penetrate the nature of reality; trying to communicate the result of his experiments and exploration; in short, trying to tell the truth. In peace time he is not often molested in his pursuit of truth, though he will be made clearly to understand that he is pleasing himself. Governments at war only care about truth if it is useful. The disinterested pursuit of truth in war time is at best useless; at worst, a danger to the state. The old quarrel between truth and expediency is settled at once, in favour of expediency.
A state can support itself for a time by telling lies, but at the cost of corroding the very basis of civilisation, which rests — it can rest nowhere else — on the trust one man, one body of men, one country, can place in the others. When this is destroyed, the whole falls into rottenness. The first to suffer by the suppression of truth, writers ought to be ceaselessly and anxiously on the watch. If they are forbidden to publish truth, they can remember, and wait their time. They can discourage lies, and what are worse, half-lies. Their plainest duty in war time is thus one they owe to their conscience and to society: they should be thankful that for once self-approval and the public service require the same difficult effort.
In the eighteen years of its existence the P.E.N, has been able to create innumerable strong ties between writers of all countries. The strength of these has been well tested during the strain of the past few years. We are to endure a severer test than any. We shall prove in ourselves that there exists a reality of intellectual and spiritual life which is in danger from invading armies only if we allow it to be. It can be defended by an act of will and faith. No other means exist to defend it. There is no vagueness about what we are required to defend or about our responsibility. We are required precisely to defend the integrity of the written word; to think our own thoughts, not any provided for us; to know beyond doubt that the only hope for the future rests on our being able to keep open as many channels as possible for the movement of ideas; to repeat, if necessary to die repeating that any word, any act, any treaty, which debases the dignity and freedom of common men is evil and to be rejected.
The English P.E.N, salutes every other Centre. To the Centres in the neutral countries, we know how heavy your responsibility is and that you are equal to it.
I cannot help wondering how many of these sentences would sound if they could be heard by a man whose gaolers have been torturing him. But it is no use trying to live in an experience not our own.
*
This ear in my room — used to the delirium of Europe — is easily switched off. Its benefits are lies, trivialities, and a little Mozart; if I were forced to attend to it for the whole of a day, I should go out of my mind. But nothing can shut off this invisible ear growing in me. It listens avidly to the murmur of voices coming through the cracks in my life, and is deaf only when I implore it to hear. During the news this evening, they broadcast the record, made in France, of an Irish regiment moving out along a road. Rain, mud, thin October poplars, and then the pipes playing an air the speaker called Killelly. But it was a song of my mother’s; she was in one of those rare moods when a young lively tomboy possessed her — and about Killaloo. . . . You may talk of Bonaparty, Or any other party, And commong voo parley voo. . . . And two doctors from the South Took two days to find his mouth Which had somehow got concealed behind his ear. . . . The pipes are only the lack of her voice, full, clear, itself a prisoner of this other ear which is mine and not obedient, deaf whenever it chooses, and when it chooses quick with voices. And, ah, cruel, before I can turn away, the room is full of other echoes. . . . O fair dove! O fond dove, Dove with the white white breast, Let me alone, the dream is my own, And my heart is full of rest. . . . Towards the end, the dove did mourn, and mourn, and mourn … and my mother broke into her loud ringing laugh. Yet she never laughed over the just as absurd Stay, steersman, Oh! stay thy flight, Down the river of years. . . . Moor thy bark to the shelving glade, Where as children we laughed and played. . . . Stay! Stay! Stay! … Sadness rose with her voice and made us lightly uneasy. What tide, what shores, what great waves? Half in terror of making a mistake, and half to avoid the sadness, I gave all my attention to the music; my fingers would not stretch an octave, and I could reach the pedals only by slipping quickly on and off the stool. . . . I had forgotten it, words, tune, piano reflecting in its dark surface the sun sliding below the cliffs, the cry, startling me, of a gull, the weak mignonette scent; it has the false clearness of what is remembered, fresher, livelier, than the room I am standing in, and all a lie.
*
Has not this verse from one of Barnes’s poems the very sound of the blinds being drawn up and a window opened in the house? O grief, that the absence of a mother must take its place among the other things in common use, and carelessly handled.
Vor daughters ha’ mornen when mothers ha’ night
An there’s beauty alive when the fe air est is dead;
As when woone sparklen weave do sink down from the light,
Another do come up an catch it instead. . . .
Either let me come to you in your night, or come here and let us go back together to your noon and my morning.
*
1940
28 January. Yesterday when I opened my bedroom windows at night — I must open them, though it means struggling with the black-out — I noticed the curious sound made in the trees by the light wind, a dulled chinking or creaking sound, like fragments of glass being moved … rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar. . . . I didn’t understand it until this morning when I saw that some time after dark yesterday afternoon each blade of grass, twig, thin branch, had had drawn strongly over it a sheath of ice. The leaves of the privet and the sprays of evergreen firs were held, each separately, in its icy double, the grass had stiffened into transparent bodkins, a thin greenish-brown vein threaded them; and the reeds; in the growing light the bare branches and twigs of the apple-trees looked to be of glass, reflecting the tree. The ground had frozen under an inch-thick glacier, and the north wall of the house was a dull mirror. By noon, the wind had strengthened a little and the creaking sounds were louder. We took the children out to look at this superb but brittle world. Nicholas was amused but not startled. Why not a new world? Judy, who is a year and eight months, looked at it from her blue eyes, clear mirrors of so much cold, and said nothing.
29 January. During the night it snowed. Still fast in their ice, the leaves and branches now have a layer of snow. The electricity has failed, we got breakfast and ate it in the weak light of candles: the telephone wires, too, are down. When you step outside, the cold cuts the breath off in your throat. No sun, and the sky swollen with snow.
30 January. Still the cold. And the whiteness of snow lying over the reflection in ice of leaves and branches. The big rhododendron gives itself the airs of a cactus, each leaf swollen to a monstrous thickness by the ice — a grey green-tinged icy flesh. If Europe were held a long time in this sterile flesh all the plants and seeds would die in it and the war end in famine. The light today smells of the frozen yews, veined by a dark sap.
31 January. This is the fourth day of the ice. The air is perfectly still. A vapour has been stretched out behind the trees, immobile now in the greyness. The tallest, a very old acacia, is split along all its branches, and many bushes have snapped off at the roots and frozen to the soil. The lawn is dazzling without light — spikes of ice, the once living grass, thrust out of the snow in a few places and where they are thickest look like miniature tank-traps. The children amuse themselves by running against bushes to start the sound of glass rods ringing together, surprisingly loud, and then branches snap off. . . . This evening I found, fallen to the back of a shelf, Valéry’s Variété: 2. I must have bought it in Bordeaux, the July before the war — but how did I come to forget it? Perhaps by grace of some instinct warning me I should have more use of it later. When I cut the leaves I saw, with a shock of pleasure, that it had essays on Stendhal, Baudelaire, Mallarme. Imagine it,
in the trough of the war, to come on this island of calm energy and intense massive light.
*
5 February. The days are easy: there are beds to make, the children, stoves, a novel about Alsace which I must finish. I have never in my life been able to feel that it did not matter when I finished a book. I write slowly, very slowly, and then, after the first few chapters, a nagging anxiety has inserted itself behind the others and presses on me with a growing force, until I am writing all day, to evening, scarcely able to bear the weight, and longing to be rid of it. Is it boredom? Or a fear I have not named yet? I can never understand how it is that other writers have so much time. They travel and do not take a manuscript with them, they live social lives and have love-affairs or quarrel with each other, or they run about making speeches. When do they read? Or learn? Or is it only my stupidity makes writing a trouble?
It is at night I become a coward — when I put the light out and draw my curtains, and there is nothing for it but to lie down and remember the war. Then it is as if the air became water, my lungs struggle with it, trying to force it through my body, which can only lie there as though it must break open and let out this despair, and the agony of wanting the war to stop, now, quickly, to free us from the bad dreams. But it is real — the misery of poor women lying awake worrying about the rent and the future; the children running loose in the cities without schools; the anger of young men whose lives, at best, are being mutilated; the drowning men, the men who at this moment, as I breathe this cold air, are being choked. “We all have to die.” Yes, yes, but that is not the point. The point is my brother’s unformed writing, of a child, and his awkward hands, and the little he had learned even of the simplest joys before his death was forced brutally into him.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 15
