A Sort of Life (19 page)

It is better to remain in ignorance of oneself and to forget easily. Let the unemployed continue to lurk around the pubs in Vauxhall Bridge Road and the kidnappers drive out of Heidelberg towards the frontier, safely and completely forgotten; we ought to leave the forgotten to the night. If one day they find their way into a book, it should be without our connivance and so disguised that we don’t recognize them when we see them again. All that we can easily recognize as our experience in a novel is mere reporting: it has a place, but an unimportant one. It provides an anecdote, it fills in gaps in the narrative. It may legitimately provide a background, and sometimes we have to fall back on it when the imagination falters. Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men – he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

Eight months went by with no reply from Heinemann, and at last I wrote to remind them of my typescript. I felt sure that this would bring me no luck, and I was not surprised when a bulky package came quickly back. The managing director, Charles Evans, wrote himself, apologizing for the delay. There had been two contradictory reports, so he had wished to read the novel himself and now, in spite of his interest, he regretted … At the same time he hoped I would show him my next book. That this was a polite formula for a mislaid manuscript seems obvious to me now, but I was a novice and I was so encouraged by his words that I never sent the manuscript elsewhere, content to abide by Heinemann’s decision. I would write one novel more, I decided, and, if the third book proved as unsuccessful as the others, I would abandon this ambition for ever. I was established on
The Times
, and marriage would be possible in another year.

I knew nothing of a letter lying in my parents’ files, like a little time-bomb, which was to make that future seem doubtful. Perhaps they had forgotten it themselves, as one forgets an unpleasant fact one has lived with for a long time and cannot alter, and it was only my sudden illness which brought it back to mind.

The doctor to whom I complained of recurrent pains was a dangerous man to consult. I had picked him at random as I wandered down a Battersea Street troubled by a sharper stab of pain than usual. His brass plate caught my eye on a house not far from the railway viaduct. Smoke coated his panes, an aspidistra drooped on his window-sill, starved of tea-leaves, and his door vibrated gently as the trains emerged from Clapham Junction. The doctor opened the door himself, a young Hindu, and showed me into a dingy consulting room where he must have been waiting with eastern patience for the sick to seek him out. He judged my pulse and took my temperature and prodded where the pain lay; then he gave me a bottle of medicine ready prepared which he said would do the trick. I think he charged six shillings for the consultation and the bottle. Luckily over the telephone I told my brother, who was now an intern at Westminster Hospital,
what had happened, and that night I found myself in a public ward at his hospital to be operated on for appendicitis with the least possible delay. The Hindu doctor stayed in my mind – a symbol of the shabby, the inefficient and possibly the illegal, and he left his trace, with another doctor, on some pages of
A Gun for Sale
.

As I lay in the ward after the operation (in those days they kept the patient at least a week) I began to plan my third novel, the forlorn hope. I called it
The Man Within
, and it began with a hunted man, who was to appear again and again in later less romantic books. But curiously enough there came to me also in the ward, with the death of a patient, the end of a book which I would not begin to write for another six years.

It was our second death. The first we had barely noticed: an old man dying from cancer of the mouth. He had been too old and ill to join in the high jinks of the ward, the courtship of nurses, the teasings, the ticklings and the pinches. When the screens went up around his bed the silence in his corner was no deeper than it had always been. But the second death disturbed the whole ward. The first was inevitable fate, the second was contingency.

The victim was a boy of ten. He had been brought into the ward one afternoon, having broken his leg at football. He was a cheerful child with a rosy face and his parents stayed and chatted with him for a while until he settled down to sleep. One of the nurses ten minutes later paused by his bed and leant over him. Suddenly there was a burst of activity, a doctor came hurrying in, screens went up around the bed, an oxygen machine was run squeaking across the floor, but the child had outdistanced them all to death. By the time the parents reached home, a message was waiting to summon them urgently back. They came and sat beside the bed, and to shut out the sound of the mother’s tears and cries all my companions in the ward lay with their ear-phones on, listening – there was nothing else for them to hear – to Children’s Hour. All my companions but not myself. There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer. I watched and listened. This was something which one day I might need: the woman speaking, uttering the banalities she must have remembered from some
woman’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only in clichés. ‘My boy, my boy, why did you not wait till I came?’ The father sat silent with his hat on his knees, and you could tell that even in his unhappiness he was embarrassed by the banality of his wife’s words, by the scene she was so badly playing to the public ward, and he wanted desperately to get away home and be alone. ‘Human language,’ Flaubert wrote, ‘is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.’

After two weeks I returned to
The Times
, but perhaps because I had returned too soon, I fainted my first evening at work. I was given another week’s holiday and went to Brighton, as I had so often gone in the past with my aunt after a childish sickness. I thought no more of the affair, unaware of the time-bomb ticking in my mother’s desk. (I have the little machine before me now, a letter written five years before, in 1921, to my father by Kenneth Richmond.)

My mother wrote to me in Brighton asking me when I returned to London to go and see my old analyst. I was a little puzzled, but I was pleased at the thought of seeing him again; I was aware that he had deliberately severed our relationship, for fear that I might come to depend on him, but to me he represented the happiest period of my life. One night at Brighton I was sitting quite alone, or so I thought, in one of the shelters on the front, when a voice spoke to me unexpectedly in the darkness. ‘Good evening,’ it said in the accent of old age.

‘Good evening,’ I replied, trying to see through the night.

‘I am Old Moore,’ the voice said. So perhaps I should have been warned.

Kenneth Richmond no longer lived in the trim little house in Devonshire Terrace off Lancaster Gate, but a larger and darker house without any memories for me. We talked a little of my second novel and he offered to help me in my search for a publisher, but I felt sure this was not the purpose of my invitation. And then, speaking as unexpectedly as Old Moore on the Brighton front, he reminded me of what I had quite forgotten, the occasion when I had once fainted at his dinner table. Afterwards he had taken me to see a specialist in Harley Street: a small dark intense man whose features are now confused in my memory with those of the actor Ernest Milton and of Colonel de Castries of Dien Bien Phu.

‘Your mother tells me you are engaged to be married,’ Richmond said. ‘Now about this fainting attack at
The Times
…’

I remembered how the specialist had questioned me about earlier attacks of fainting in the summer stuffiness of the school chapel. Many children, I told myself, went through such a phase.

‘Doctor Riddick diagnosed epilepsy,’ Richmond said.

Epilepsy, cancer and leprosy – these are the three medical terms which rouse the greatest fear in the untutored, and at twenty-two one is unprepared for so final a judgement. Epilepsy, Richmond went on, could be inherited: I must consider the risk carefully before marriage, and he sought to comfort me by pointing out that Dostoievsky too had suffered from epilepsy. I couldn’t think of a reply. Dostoievsky was a dead Victorian writer, not a youth without a book to his name who had pledged himself to marry … ‘Let me see your novel,’ Richmond said, meaning to be kind. ‘What is the title?’

‘
The Episode
,’ I said.

I left the house and began walking fast towards South Kensington, the King’s Road, Oakley Street, the Albert Bridge, away from
this
episode. When I got home I wrote a letter; they had left things rather late, I said, before informing me. Poor souls, I can sympathize with them now as I read the letters which were written to them on the same day by Richmond and Doctor Riddick. Doctor Riddick’s was frightening, even in its moderation. ‘The attacks to which he is occasionally subject are, I think, epileptic; but since he has lost consciousness in three only, there is a reasonably good chance that, with suitable treatment, the condition may be arrested.’ The treatment seemed to consist of good walks and Keppler’s Malt Extract. Richmond’s letter was more encouraging, and my mother in pencil has pathetically underlined all the optimistic phrases she could find, perhaps to comfort my father – ‘quite likely to clear up completely’ … ‘no cause for alarm’ – even the phrase about Dostoievsky is trotted out and surprisingly underlined, but then follows what I think was unfair and dangerous advice: ‘We agreed that Graham ought not to be told what is the matter in any terms that included the word epilepsy.’

Was the diagnosis right? With the hindsight of forty years, free from any recurrence, I don’t believe it, but I believed it then. I remember next day standing on an Underground platform and trying to summon the will and the courage to jump. It was not my new Catholicism which restrained me. There was no theological despair in what I felt. I was simply tired out by the thought of starting a completely different future than the one I had planned. But suicide requires greater courage than Russian roulette, the trains came and went, and soon I took the moving staircase to the upper world.

My next thought was of an elderly priest Father Talbot of the Oratory. I had been passed on to him – a fashion priests have – by Trollope, and I had spent many agreeable hours with him in discussion and argument at his quiet chambers in the Oratory, as unclerical as rooms in college. He was a man of very liberal views, and surely, I thought despairingly, he would have some answer to my greatest problem: that if I were epileptic, I must avoid having children. Surely there must be some cranny of canon law or moral theology that would contain a ruling for just such a case as mine.

He asked me to go out with him, and for the next hour we drove in a taxi, crossing and recrossing the same rectangle between the Brompton Road and Bayswater, just as we crossed and recrossed the same lines of argument. Under no circumstances at all was contraception permissible. ‘The Church forbids me to marry then?’

‘Of course we don’t forbid marriage.’

‘Do you expect married people to live together without making love?’

‘The Church expects you to trust God, that’s all.’

Up and down, over and over, a useless embroidery which made no pattern.

How differently he would have answered my question today, telling me, I have no doubt, to follow my conscience, which even then was elastic enough for almost anything. Catholics have sometimes accused me of making my clerical characters, Father
Rank in
The Heart of the Matter
and Father James in
The Living Room
, fail unnecessarily before the human problems they were made to face. ‘A real priest,’ I have been told, ‘would have had something further to say, he would have shown a deeper comprehension, he wouldn’t have left the situation so unchanged.’ But that is exactly what in those days, before John Roncalli was elected Pope, the priesthood was compelled to do. There was no failure in comprehension. Father Talbot was a man of the greatest human sympathy, but he had no solution for me at all. There was only one hard answer he could honestly give (‘the Church knows all the rules,’ as Father Rank said), while the meter of the taxi ticked away the repetitions of our fruitless argument. It was the Rock of Peter I was aware of in our long drive, and though it repulsed me, I couldn’t help admiring its unyielding façade.

My misery did not last long. My brother, by this time a doctor, was the first to question the diagnosis, and then the medical correspondent, Doctor McNair Wilson, who had been in the subeditors’ room when I fainted, confirmed that he had seen no symptom whatever of epilepsy.

I married, and I was happy. In the evenings I worked at
The Times
, in the mornings I worked on my third novel. Now when I write I put down on the page a mere skeleton of a novel – nearly all my revisions are in the nature of additions, of second thoughts to make the bare bones live – but in those days to revise was to prune and prune and prune. I was much tempted, perhaps because of my admiration for the Metaphysical poets, by exaggerated similes and my wife became an adept at shooting them down. There was one, I remember, comparing something or someone in the quiet landscape of Sussex to a leopard crouching in a tree, which gave a name to the whole species. Leopards would be marked daily on the manuscript, but it took a great many years for me to get the beasts under control, and they growl at me sometimes yet.

One day in the winter of 1928 I lay in bed with a bad attack of flu, listening to my wife in the kitchen washing up the breakfast things. I had posted copies of the typescript to Heinemann and The Bodley Head about ten days before, and I was now resigned to a long delay. Hadn’t I waited last time nine months for a refusal? Anyway, uncertainty was more agreeable to live with than the confirmation of failure. The telephone rang in the sitting-room and my wife came in and told me, ‘There’s a Mr Evans wants to speak to you.’

‘I don’t know anyone called Evans,’ I said. ‘Tell him I’m in bed. Tell him I’m ill.’ Suddenly a memory came back to me: Evans was the chairman of Heinemann’s, and I ran to snatch the telephone.