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A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.
To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.
How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.
went quickly out again to the cheery paper streamers and the clink of glass. Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.’
the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love.
I had always been Sarah’s friend, and when I met Henry it was on Sarah’s territory, her haphazard living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment.
I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.
‘Jealous lovers are more respectable, less ridiculous, than jealous husbands. They are supported by the weight of literature. Betrayed lovers are tragic, never comic. Think of Troilus. I shan’t lose my amour propre when I interview Mr Savage.’
The not done things are done every day, Henry. It’s part of modern life. I’ve done most of them myself.’
had always been irritated by that mechanical response to her presence because it meant nothing—one cannot always welcome a woman’s presence, even if one is in love, and I believed Sarah when she told me they had never been in love. There was more genuine welcome, I believe, in my moments of hate and distrust.
It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses:
was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days.
One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.
The whole affair had gone very briskly: he had almost convinced me by the time I came out into Vigo Street that this was the kind of interview which happened to all men sooner or later.
I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy: in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere.
I don’t know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical.
I would have liked to have left that past time alone, for as I write of 1939 I feel all my hatred returning. Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
I had a wild hope that the sight of me a few days before had woken not love, of course, but a sentiment, a memory which I might work on. At the time it seemed to me that if I could have her once more—however quickly and crudely and unsatisfactorily—I would be at peace again: I would have washed her out of my system, and afterwards I would leave her, not she me.
So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour.
And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper.
War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but now there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel—the end of love. That
It occurred to me with amazement that for ten minutes I had not thought of Sarah or of my jealousy; I had become nearly human enough to think of another person’s trouble.
Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God’, and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man.
I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on the stairs, the opening and closing of doors,
So you might say that the Liberal—I believe he was a Welshman called Lewis—made our bed for us that night.
Half of it was gone—the half where the hotels used to stand had been blasted to bits, and the place where we made love that night was a patch of air.
It was as though all the men in the past and all the men in the future cast their shade over the present.
‘It would be better if I called you,’ she told me, and caution, I thought, caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I remembered again the stair that always—‘always’ was the phrase she had used—squeaked. BOOK TWO I The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used
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