I'll Never Be Young Again (22 page)

I would not do either of these things, not I. I would not be humble and accept his kindness - gratitude and the rest of it. I did not want those sorts of sensations in my life. I could hear the voices of his friends: ‘He was so good to him, you know, so good to him.’ Because he would send me the money if I asked for it. I knew that all right. He would send it willingly, without any reproaches, having expected such a summons for a long while. He would not even take it seriously; he would open the letter at breakfast with a little smile and a shrug of his shoulders, looking across at my mother. ‘Something from Richard at last. In trouble, of course. We had better send him a cheque, and his fare home. Will you see to it, my dear? You had better read his letter.’

And then he would open
The Times
, folding it carefully, turning to the centre page, while my mother rather anxious and flushed fingered my close-written screed, worried that his breakfast might have been spoilt by my interruption, and ashamed that she had had a hand in the making of me, his son, who should have turned out so differently, who had been such a quiet little boy - no trouble - and now all this suddenly, all this. Such a worry, such a breaking up of the placidity of things. My father wandering off to the library, his indifference to me sincere, not even a cover of pretence, and then looking out of the window absently, his eyes fixed, an old man with no understanding, and back to his desk, giving the lie to this, steadying his pen with steady fingers, calmly, clearly, writing his way into the pages of immortality. . . .

No, I would not whine to him. I could stand by myself. I would not trade on his name or his relationship. It gave me a keen satisfaction, this feeling of intense individualism.The famous father, the outcast son. Being free of him, being a rebel, smashing at authority. I would show them all what I was made of - one day. Here was I, just nobody, drunk in a café, but I was more alive than he. Drinking took away my inferiority. I painted a picture of myself to myself, rather a devil, getting what he could out of life and not caring, then startling the world with some magnificent gesture. Living intensely, supremely. . . . Oh! yes, that was me all right. If I had been sober I should only have been a boy sitting at a little table on a pavement outside a restaurant, going back later to a solitary room, with no occupation, slightly foolish, very inexperienced and lonely - admittedly lonely, but I was drunk and full of deep-worn theories, and this was Paris, and I was a grand fellow. I called stoutly about me, I cursed a waiter for the slow service, I bought a French paper which I did not read, I gazed slowly and critically at the legs of a passing girl.

Why should anyone doubt me? - I knew about these things.

There was a party at the next table. There was a man with a beard and full, protruding eyes, he kept smashing his fist on his knee and talking all the time. He wore a purple shirt, open at the neck. By his side sat another man, small and putty-faced, who hung upon his words, and there was a tall fair boy bending over their table now, a portfolio of drawings under his arm which I felt he would never sell nor have the courage to show, and there were two girls without hats, bad figures and good hair. They tried to look Hungarian, but were English all the time, and this did not matter to me, being drunk, they were not ridiculous at all. I was certain that they painted brilliantly and wrote brilliantly, but nobody understood them, and they were in advance of their age - one day they would be understood - but in the meantime they would work furiously, and burn with ideas, and be miserable for no reason, and talk too much, and all sleep with each other on different nights.

‘I’m not drunk,’ I said to myself, ‘I’m not drunk at all.’

I listened to them gravely, catching snatches of their conversation, and every word they spoke seemed to me to be sincere and true. There was not an atom of absurdity in the man with the long brown beard. He was the apostle of a new faith. ‘In art,’ he said, ‘sex is everything. You can’t get away from it.’

I nodded my head as though I were sitting at his table, and I wondered if this was a very new idea or if perhaps I had heard it somewhere before.

‘Every curve in drawing,’ he continued, ‘expresses a sex-urge. Unconsciously, of course, to people who deliberately blind themselves to their own impulses, but to us - to us who know, it is the very essence of creation. When I fling a straight line on to a stretch of canvas, I always remind myself that it isn’t a line - it’s a symbol, a sex-symbol. If I wasn’t aware of this I shouldn’t be able to draw at all.’

He paused, and we all stared at him in admiration.

‘We’ve got to cultivate it,’ he said: ‘we’ve got to break away from this state of appalling passivity. We must acknowledge sex on canvas, but not as a product of civilization - it must come from within ourselves as a last definite protest. . . .’

I was lost in wonder at his flow of words. Then one of the girls spoke. ‘Kroenstein says that there is no such thing as sex,’ she announced; ‘he says that it only exists in our imagination.’

Ha! Here was a poser.This would not be so easy for the fellow in the beard. If Kroenstein said a thing like that . . . I had never heard of him, it was true, but anyone with the name of Kroenstein surely. . . . Was I very drunk? My bearded man would not give way, though; he was determined to carry off the situation. He laughed, and leant back in his chair with a shrug of his shoulders.

‘You’re a little behind the times, aren’t you?’ he said; ‘nobody has believed in Kroenstein for at least three months. He’s gone right out.’

That of course was another matter. I felt sorry for the girl. Still, it was her own fault for trying to brag about her knowledge of Kroenstein. I smiled stupidly to myself and nodded my head. I watched the same figures pass up and down the pavement in front of the Dôme, stroll down as far as the Coupole, and then return again, crossing over the street to the Rotonde. The same figures, over and over again.

This was great, this brilliance, this noise, this clatter of traffic, and my head swimming and my eyes staring. I wasn’t lonely - not I. . . .

I could hear the fellow in the beard holding the conversation again.

‘You, Josef, paint in terms of rhythm,’ he was saying; ‘I can tell by your work that you’re striving for some inner purity that you haven’t yet learnt to control. You’re sex-conscious, too, but it doesn’t break the harmony.’ The fair boy leant forward eagerly.

‘You say it,’ he exclaimed, ‘you say it very truly. Rhythm has more importance to me than the sex.’

But here the putty-faced man shook his head, he laid his hand on the shoulder of the fair boy.

‘Rhythm,’ he said, ‘will lead you so far - and then, pouf!’ (he snapped his fingers). ‘You come against a blank wall. Symmetry of design is the great thing to achieve, but you’ll have to surrender to sex before you purify yourself. You’ll have to surrender.’

The fair boy looked about him a little helplessly. I wondered if he would surrender to sex immediately or if he would wait until he got home. Then the other girl spoke, the fattest and plainest of the two. She wore horn-rimmed spectacles and she was spotty under the skin.

‘If only,’ she said, ‘if only we really knew just what it was that our bodies wanted.’

They looked at her with respect; they were silent, they admitted that she had thrown across to them a thought of very deep intensity. I began to imagine a little conversation between the girl and myself.

‘When I look at you,’ I was saying, ‘I know perfectly well what my body doesn’t want.’ And then she would crumple up like a child from a convent, and burst into tears. ‘It can’t be much fun for a girl,’ I thought, ‘unless she is pretty.’

I sat very still and watched the flickering lights of the Rotonde, while their voices went on and on, droning in my ear, and I was very far away, really. . . .’

After a while I shook myself out of a dream, and I looked at them, and I saw there was another man sitting at their table, and he was thin and very round-shouldered, and his face was olive green. He was the only one of them who wore a hat, one of those wide black ones that suggest no sense of humour - or possibly too much. He called for another round of drinks. He fluttered notes in his hands, hundred-franc notes.

‘I wish,’ thought I, ‘that all that belonged to me,’ and I fumbled in my pocket and drew forth a crumpled five-franc note. And this was all that remained, and I was drunk and I did not care. I looked across at them all sitting at the next table. The olive-green man was important; even beard and putty-face sat back and let him do all the talking.

‘I want you to do the cover this month, Carlo,’ he was saying, ‘and I want you for once to give your mind entirely to me, not to let yourself be swayed by an impulse coming from your own indifference. I want you to express my thought in curves, and I suggest that the thought be called “Flight” - you can, of course, lend it something of your own treatment.’

‘By “flight”,’ said Carlo with the beard, ‘you mean to convey one distinct impression of the slipping away of the mind after the consummation of the body?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Then there must be no striving after tone effect?’

‘None.’

Carlo seemed disappointed. I thought it was a damned shame he shouldn’t have his tone effect - a damned shame.

‘Of course,’ said olive green, ‘it must be formless, utterly formless. You can’t connect any purity of line with impotence. Your curve must suggest relaxation - a negation of sex after the act.’

‘Yes - yes - I understand.’

It was more than I did. I did not understand one bloody word of what they were saying. I had half a mind to tell them so, too. It would serve them right. None of this was real, anyway, so what the hell did it matter what I said to them? I got up from my table and dragged my chair after me. I pushed against one of the girls, and sat down, and struck my fist on the table.

‘Nonsense,’ I said loudly, and that was all. They gazed at me in astonishment. I could see the blank surprise in their faces. The fat girl was the first to recover herself.

‘You get out of here,’ she said.

I smiled at her politely, and then I remembered, and I shook my finger at her in reproach.

‘You,’ I said, ‘are the girl who wants to know what to do with her body. That’s right, isn’t it?’ She flushed under her skin and looked away from me in disgust.

‘He’s drunk,’ she said.

I stood up again, and bowed to them very gravely.

‘I think you are all so charming,’ I said, ‘so very charming.’

‘Who are you?’ asked Carlo.

‘I’m a poet,’ I said.

Olive green raised his eyebrows. ‘We are not interested in you,’ he said.

I looked at him a little sadly. ‘That’s where you make such a big mistake,’ I told him; ‘you ought to be interested. You need a wider, broader vision than the science of curves can ever give you. I don’t believe in curves - I never did.’

‘Are you a sodomite?’ asked the other girl.

I considered this thoughtfully for a few moments.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t sufficient rhythm.’

‘Supposing you go back to your table and leave us in peace?’ suggested olive green.

‘I would rather recite one of my poems to you,’ I said.

This was very amusing. I was enjoying myself. Or wasn’t I? I sat down at their table once more. ‘My poem is a study in repression,’ I said; ‘I wrote it some time back, but I don’t think it is really dated. In fact, between you and me, I think it’s pretty good.’

I began to say the lines of the poem that once, long, long ago, I had laid on the desk in the library before my father, and he had taken the paper in his hands, and then let it flutter softly on to the floor.

And a boy had run away down the chestnut drive, flying from the shadows that pursued him. But I was not that boy any more, I was somebody else, escaping down another drive, escaping from another shadow.

‘Perhaps you would like to hear some more,’ I said when I had finished; ‘if I can remember rightly there is one poem that deals with a different sort of sensation entirely.’

They looked at me stupidly, and their faces were flat, like ghosts, without any expression.

‘Well?’ I said later, ‘and if the first was too thin for you, what do you think of that one?’ I leant back, my hands on my knees, unconscious of ridicule, proud of my little triumph.

‘Do you want another?’ I said.

And when I had come to the end of my little repertoire I saw that they were smiling at me, and the olive-green man was rubbing his hands together, and the ugly girl’s eyes were large behind her glasses. She breathed heavily, she leant against me, excited.

‘It’s marvellous,’ she said, ‘marvellous.’ And the bearded man looked at me and laughed, and suddenly they were all aware of each other, as though this was the first time they were together. I hated them then, I hated them. It was all right before when I could fool them with their curves, and their rhythm, and their symmetry of design. Not now, though. They were different. It was not a game to any of us any longer. They were men and women with narrow, horrible minds, running round and round the same subject like moles in a trap, little moles, fusty and evil-smelling. And I was not so drunk as I thought I was.

‘I’ll be going now,’ I said.

The olive-green man touched my sleeve with his hand. I shook him off; I did not want his hand.

‘Those poems of yours are very good,’ he said softly, ‘very good indeed.’

I did not say anything; I knew how bad they must be if he should praise them.

‘You would probably like to see them in print,’ he said; ‘every writer likes to see his work in print. I bring out a paper every month; it is circulated privately - among my friends in the quartier. I should like you to contribute something.’ Little fusty mole in his trap. . . .

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, I don’t want to do that.’