Elizabeth had had a long convalescence, but now she seemed to have recovered entirely; at any rate, she was quite as well as she had been before the miscarriage. I noticed one change in her, however. Before, when she wasn’t actually working, she had wanted mostly to be alone with me. Now, she seemed eager for company. I certainly didn’t resent this, or take it personally. My own position with Elizabeth was too secure for that, and I was only too glad to see her so happy and lively.
We spent those two summers back at the Schwarzsee, and the winter in Italy, with visits to France and England in between. There was a whole batch of postcards from Elizabeth—often with half a dozen other signatures squeezed into their corners—referring to parties, excursions, picnics, dances, charades in which she and I had taken part. ‘Such a wonderful weekend at the Bertoluccis’ villa, with Brian and Magdalena and Sandy and the Prescotts. How we all wished you’d been able to stay on for it!’ ‘Last night was unforgettable. Mary Scriven went as Queen Victoria, of course; Stephen and I were de Musset and George Sand—complete with cigar!’ ‘It rained in torrents, and a poor little French poet was attacked by bees in the wood. For some mysterious reason, this was one of the happiest days of my life.’
All kinds of people came out to stay with us; some of them the very same ones I’d thought of as malicious enemies in our early London days. I welcomed them now, and even got to like them. It was certainly much easier to be a host than a guest, and it seemed to me that their presence brought Elizabeth and myself closer together, instead of separating us. Especially at night, when we would lie discussing them and laughing about them in bed. Elizabeth was an extraordinary mimic. She could imitate Tarr to the life, saying, ‘Picasso’s a ruffian’, and Mrs Ockham appealing to her husband, ‘I don’t think we’re quite as fond of Proust as we used to be, are we, darling?’ and Propter raising his arms and dropping them despairingly into his lap as he sighed, ‘As far as one can see, there’s no prospect of anything but absolutely indefinite squalor.’ While we were having fun like this, we might just as well have been children in a nursery. Our ages didn’t have any significance at all.
In August 1929, Elizabeth finished A Garden with Animals. And that autumn we finally went over to the States. Sarah had been begging us to come, in her letters, for the past two years.
The news of the stock-market crash reached us by radio in the middle of the Atlantic, during a gale, and made many of our fellow-passengers feel suicidal as well as seasick. I wondered vaguely if I was ruined, and had half-serious talks with Elizabeth about ways in which I might be able to earn a living. But I didn’t worry much. I couldn’t imagine myself poor because I’d never thought of myself as being rich. (Jane taught me to do that, later.) Our wandering bohemian kind of life was actually quite expensive, but it didn’t seem so because it didn’t include any big visible assets. Rich people, as I pictured them, had to have mansions and motor-cars and jewels and a staff of servants. ‘I’m afraid we’re something far more sinister,’ Elizabeth agreed. ‘We’re the Invisible Rich. Even a Communist couldn’t detect us with the naked eye.’
As it later proved, I’d had no need to worry at all. The family business was perfectly sound. A cousin of mine on the board of directors explained to me, with a smile of discreet Puritanical smugness, that of course they hadn’t risked any speculations; in fact, they had seen the whole thing coming, months ago. I got the impression that he regarded the crash with righteous approval as a sort of financial Judgment Day; and I felt relieved but a bit ashamed to find myself herded in with the prudent high-principled sheep instead of the reckless greedy goats. I hadn’t done anything to earn my salvation, either, and it was obvious that my cousin disapproved of me and the dilettante life I was leading. Well, I disapproved of his life too, even if I had no right to. I wanted no part of it. I was glad to get out of Philadelphia again, that same day, and hurry back to Elizabeth in New York. And so I missed my only opportunity of revisiting Tawelfan that year.
We spent Christmas with Sarah at her college in Ohio. I was so happy to be with her, and see how perfectly she fitted into her surroundings. (‘Since she came into our midst,’ the College President told me, ‘we’ve been wondering how we ever got along without her.’) But Sarah’s surroundings were a bit too much for us. ‘This little house is positively bursting at the seams,’ Elizabeth wrote in one of her letters, ‘and we’re never alone with Sarah for an instant. I think she feels, bless her heart, that we’re too precious to be kept to herself; it’s her duty to share us with the entire neighbourhood. So we’re being fed to the five thousand, in microscopic helpings. The first callers arrive for breakfast and the last ones leave long after midnight. And, oh dear, the introductions! It seems they have two sorts of names here; the sort that are too ordinary to remember, like Smith, Jones, Brown, and the sort that are too extraordinary, like Naddo, Hagenbuehler, Bachardy, Aufderheide. I repeat them over to myself in an anxiety-nightmare, trying to learn them; but I never can. They all know our name, however, and each others.’ Americans must have a genius for this. Sarah certainly has. “I’m afraid you find it a little quiet here, now,” she says apologetically, “but wait until the vacation’s over! I can promise you plenty of company then.”’ I made the excuse to Sarah that the mid-western winter was a strain on Elizabeth’s health, and we left, early in January, for California.
In Hollywood, Elizabeth was fascinated by the movie world and we frequented it a good deal, watching its inhabitants at work in the studios and dining at their homes in the evenings. ‘How Balzac would have loved them!’ she wrote. ‘But he should have come here a few years earlier in the great days of splendour, when they ate off gold plate in fake French châteaux hung with real Gobelin tapestry, and then went bankrupt overnight and committed suicide with sleeping-pills in their Jacobean beds. If Balzac had written a Splendeurs et Misères des Vedettes, he’d have made his Vautrin a film-producer whose terrible secret is that he’s actually a runaway professor of literature from Christ Church. Vautrin’s mortal enemy, a rival producer, would suspect this of course, and set a trap for him: at a magnificent banquet, he’d bribe a corrupt British novelist to misquote a line of Dryden in Vautrin’s presence. Vautrin, very drunk, would forget his disguise and automatically correct the novelist—with an Oxford accent. Tableau!’
By April, we had moved on to San Francisco. ‘What a fascinating, nostalgic city this is,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘right out at the last edge of the earth. The gateway to the water-world. You watch the ships stealing off into the fog and the cold shadowy Pacific. Never in my life have I felt the “poetry of departure” as I do here. You long to take wing and fly, fly away westward to the uttermost islands.’
A few weeks after this, we had ‘taken wing’ ourselves, on a boat bound for Honolulu; and that was when our wanderings really began.
‘It seems as if we can’t stop travelling,’ Elizabeth told Mary Scriven, nearly a year later. ‘Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Bali—when I make a list of the places we’ve been to, it sounds too utterly fantastic. If I could have seen it in advance, I think I’d have dropped dead from sheer exhaustion. But that’s not how we do it, of course. We make no lists. We have no plans. We arrive somewhere, hate it and leave instantly, or fall in love with it and settle, perhaps for ever, we simply don’t know. Only, if we do settle, there’s a day when the call comes—the merest whisper it is, very often—and we’re off again. The important thing is not to regard this as a journey, but as a way of life. Then it seems quite relaxed and restful.
‘If you’re worried about my health, don’t be. I’m wonderfully well, on the whole. Never any serious trouble with my heart. And the doctors I see from time to time seem quite pleased with me.
‘If any part of me feels tired, it’s the organ of perception; that little sensitive animal one keeps pulling out of the unconscious by the scruff of its neck and exposing to each new collection of sights, sounds and smells.
The creature has to be pampered and petted and protected from overstrain—for, without it, as a writer one is lost and blind. “Come on now, dear Guinea-Pig,” I say to it coaxingly, “use your eyes and nose and whiskers. How does this place strike you? What’s its essential quality? What am I to say about it?” Sometimes the Guinea-Pig is alert and astonishingly clever (it even surprises me) but more often it sulks and mutters “No comment” or “It looked better than this in the photographs” or “Why come all this distance when you could find exactly the same landscape in Surrey?” And then it has a maddening way of becoming interested in some irrelevant detail, something which doesn’t “fit” into the milieu at all. In Singapore, for example, it would pay no attention to anything but an old family photograph-album belonging to a Brazilian priest! I just have to endure its humours, though, and be grateful for its help. And that reminds me, I wonder if the New Statesman has printed any of those travel-sketches I keep sending? I’ve done nearly enough, now, for a book.
‘Our mail seldom catches up with us, and so I find myself writing fewer and fewer letters; it requires so much faith to consign them to the unanswering void. Perhaps I’ll simply put this one in a bottle and drop it into the Bay of Bengal, hoping it’ll eventually float along the gutter of the mews to your doorstep. We’re on our way to Calcutta—don’t you envy us? Already I’m sniffing the land-breeze for the first whiff of curry.’
What brought us back to Europe, at the end of 1932, was chiefly Elizabeth’s urge to begin another novel. ‘I find I can write short stories almost anywhere,’ she told Cecilia. ‘I can sit down in a ship’s cabin, or a hotel bedroom, or under a tree, and absorb myself in my little anecdote. But a novel—that’s such an undertaking. For that I need elbow-room, a vast desk, familiar surroundings, regular meals, unlimited time; the illusion of immortality, in fact. No more trains and ships to catch. No more fuss about tickets and passports and Customs declarations. No distracting temples and pagodas, odd music, strange flowers. I need the dear friendly old Eiffel Tower rattling in the wind, and Notre-Dame (looking smaller than ever, this morning) in the rain. We’ve taken a flat on the Quai de l’Horloge (note above address) at the top of a tall, tall house, right under the roof. The stairs are a real via dolorosa, so steep, but I climb them in easy stages with frequent rests, and it’s worth it. My workroom has a window-box and I plan to grow wallflowers and daisies in it and muse over them wistfully like the consumptive girl in a Victorian novel who knows she’ll never see the spring again. I have every intention of seeing the spring again myself, however. By then, I ought to have finished a rough draft of this book.
‘I told you all my plans for it in my last letter, so no more of that, now. But I’ve got a tentative title I’d like you to consider. I thought of it yesterday morning, when I woke up with those lines in my head from The Progress of the Soul:
And the great world to his aged evening;
From infant morn, through manly noon I draw.
‘The World to His Evening, how do you like that? Stephen says it sounds affected, precious, self-consciously quaint. Perhaps I agree with him. I don’t know. It isn’t quite right, and yet, it has the mood I want to convey. I can’t make up my mind.’
Elizabeth had been too optimistic about the rough draft. ‘Here we are, nearly at the end of May,’ she wrote to Mary Scriven, ‘and I’m still not more than three-quarters through the wood. I feel absolutely no interest, no enthusiasm. I only know that I have to go on. I drag myself to my desk. Opening my notebook is like forcing the door of a safe—a safe which turns out to be empty, anyhow!—and, psychologically speaking, my pen weighs at least a hundred pounds; I have to use all the muscles of my will to pick it up.
‘What a winter! What a spring! I scarcely stirred from the flat for weeks on end. I got ill, as I wrote to you, immediately after we returned here from our London visit. (Memories of those evenings at your house are almost the only gleams in this six-month gloom.) I must have picked up some particularly noxious kind of British ’flu-germ—specially bred for foreign tourists, no doubt—and it wouldn’t leave me. I ached, I burned, I shivered, I coughed, I sneezed. And then, when the creature had finally exhausted its venom, my heart—which I’d begun to rely on again and not even think about—started being a nuisance, and the doctor sent me back to bed. Stephen has been such a saint, throughout all this. He must get dreadfully tired of his decrepit old wife, but he never shows it. His kindness and patience are past belief. I’m much better now. Only—“I have to be careful”. Oh my God, how I’ve come to loathe that phrase! I want to scream, sometimes, with impotent rage, like the poor father in Turgenev: “I said I should rebel, and I rebel, I rebel!”
‘Forgive this self-pity. One’s private aches and woes are nothing—less than nothing—nowadays. Oh, the ghastliness of these times! Mary, don’t you smell pest in the air? It’s spreading out of Germany all over Europe. It’s carried from eye to eye, from voice to ear. The newspapers are rank with it. And the wireless, too. Merely to hear that hideous screaming voice of Hitler’s is to be infected; you don’t even have to understand a word of German. Everything is being tainted.
‘Some mornings, the vividness of the green leaves along the river-bank makes me absolutely sick with dread, as if I saw them against the black of an oncoming storm. How can people walk under them and say “il fait beau, ce matin”? But that’s a stupid question, I know. Everyday life only goes on because of our utter insensitivity. Otherwise, we’d all fall down on our knees or into each other’s arms on the spot, and the world would dissolve or turn into heaven, and the Nazis would be nowhere. And if I mind this more acutely than, say, our concierge—to whom the whole affair is perfectly normal; those pigs of Boches misbehaving themselves once again, according to their nature—it’s not due to any spiritual superiority of mine, but simply because I’ve been so weak and ill and morbid.
‘At a period like this, it’s hard to believe that art has any value, at all. My pen wavers in the middle of a sentence and I think: Oh, what’s the use? What’s the use of this game with words and shades of meaning and feeling? Oughtn’t I to be doing something to try to stop the spread of this hate-disease? Oughtn’t I to be attacking it directly? But, of course, this very feeling of guilt and inadequacy is really a symptom of the disease itself. The disease is trying to paralyse you into complete inaction, so it makes you drop your own work, and attempt to fight it in some apparently practical way, which is unpractical for you because you aren’t equipped for it—and so you end frustrated and doing nothing. The only way I can fight the disease effectively is to go on with the work I understand. I know that’s true, in my bones. Then at least I shan’t be paralysed.
‘But, even as I tell myself this, I feel the constant wretched gnawing of fear. Suppose there’s a war—and they take Stephen away, and your Maurice? No. We mustn’t give way to such thoughts, even for an instant. Let’s live from day to day, and meet things as they happen. Mary darling, we must keep in touch now, more than ever. We must help each other. Don’t let go of my hand.
‘I believe Stephen and I will make a move soon. This flat will be too stuffy in the hot weather. So we’re thinking of the mountains. I need a new air to give me strength.’
A month later, she wrote to Mary again:
‘You see, we’ve returned to the Schwarzsee. You probably guessed that we would. The weather is glorious, and I feel my energy renewed. Another two months, and the rough draft will be finished. Very messy and tangled still—but finished!
‘This place has changed, though. The air is tainted here, too. How could I have imagined that it wouldn’t be, since we’ve moved so much nearer to the source of the disease? The Third Reich is almost on our doorstep. And the villagers here are intensely aware of it. Stephen, who gets more opportunity of talking to them than I do, says there’s a lot of covert sympathy for the Nazis. They think Hitler will take over Austria soon, and they’re glad. It’ll be a change. Something exciting. They see no further than that.
/> ‘You know they’ve always had that charming custom of lighting bonfires on the hillside for Midsummer Eve? Well, the other night, Stephen saw the glow of a big one in the distance, so he walked up to get a closer view. And it was a huge swastika built of brushwood, blazing away all by itself with not a soul to be seen. By next morning, it had burned down to the embers and left an evil black scar on the grass. The local authorities condemn these demonstrations officially, of course, but they’re careful not to make too many enquiries. No one in the village will admit to having the faintest idea who set the fire. They shake their heads vigorously—and then they smile.
‘You remember that family from Bavaria, the ones who rented the Schloss in 1927, and gave that wonderful party on the lake I told you about? They were Jews—and now we hear that the Nazis arrested the daughter at their home in Munich, and that she died “of pneumonia” in a concentration-camp. They’ve got the father too, somewhere, if he’s still alive. The rest of the family is scattered in exile; with many of their guests, I imagine. And the villagers, who really enjoyed their being here and probably charged them triple for everything they bought, now talk about their tragedy with a loathsome, sly pleasure. “Ah, those Jews! Their money’s no help to them now!” Oh, the envy, the terrible patient vindictiveness of under-dogs! My Goodness, how they can hate!’
When Elizabeth finally finished her rough draft, I felt enormously relieved. I knew she’d been overworking, in spite of all my warnings, and I kept fearing she would have another breakdown. I dreaded a winter like the last. We agreed to spend the next one further south, and in the autumn we moved to Spain. We were in Granada and Malaga, and then we went over to Tangier. It was there that The World in the Evening was revised. I hummed tunes to myself with joy as I typed up the last pages, made the typescript into a parcel and took it down to the post-office to be sent off to the publishers. That night, Elizabeth and I had a bottle of champagne with our supper.
The World in the Evening Page 18
