I Can't Stay Long Page 5

  And this translation seems to me to be a symbol of the change which everything undergoes on its way from country to city. All things that grow, for instance, by the time they have reached the city seem to suffer such a loss of virtue that only by legal courtesy can they any longer be called by their original country names.

  Why doesn’t someone find a new name for city flowers and city vegetables? In my village, in the full tide of summer, we had to cut down the roses with a sickle to get to our front door. If you left them for a week they swept over the house like flames, cracking the windows and breaking through the roof. As they grew, in great blowsy perfumed masses all over the garden, you could jump on them, or hack them with knives, or even drive the cows through them, and still they flourished as persistent and lusty as weeds.

  But look at those London roses – scentless, puny, plastic-coloured shades, mass-produced in market gardens, sold for a shilling and dead in a night. Fancy having to buy flowers anyway. I can never get used to it. We used to chuck them like rubbish at the neighbour. Primroses, tenpence a withered bunch; dry little violets sprayed with hair-oil. Step out of our back door and you’d tread on a pound’s worth before you’d gone a yard. And cowslips – very rare in the London streets and costing a packet in season – we used to pick them by the bucketful and make wine out of them. I’ve even seen people selling cow-parsley and beechleaves up here. It’s like selling the air.

  And take new potatoes and mushrooms – both favourite victuals of mine. Something terrible seems to happen to London ones; they come to the table like ghosts of reality, tasting of flour and water.

  At home, when we wanted new potatoes for dinner, we went to the garden for a forkful, knocked the earth off, washed them under a pump, and threw them in the pot. When cooked they tasted of thyme and mint and summer, their texture as delicate as marron glacé. London potatoes are just imitations, like plaster casts, dry and dusty, tasting of ash.

  And if we wanted mushrooms we picked them before breakfast from tufts of wet grass in shining September fields. And when fried, they had the magic flavour of manna, neither vegetable nor flesh, a woody root-sweet tang, with an aura of orchids, sap and badgers’ tongues. Theirs is a taste like no other in the world. But London mushrooms have no taste at all – blown up like rubber bubbles in derelict basements, or the dark of suburban Nissen huts, and empty of all virtue save the name.

  But I talk too much of food. We all do. London has a spirit too, it has beauty, moods, shades, atmospheres; lingering sharp blue November afternoons, heavy rose-pink summer evenings, jaunty spring mornings, and star-bright winter nights. These moments of beauty are probably the worst of all. For a wet day of bedraggled ugliness leaves me in comfort, but the beauties of London of which I am most conscious are those days when the airs and hues of the country pile up and overflow and come sliding over the city roofs to remind me of what is going on in the fields and woods of home. Then I am most restless, and my days most demented.

  Even the elements are somehow corrupted and made monstrous here. And to walk on a sun-baked pavement is torment; the heat seems rank and artificial, an affront rather than a blessing, and to see rain falling on a pavement is also torture. Grass in the rain smells of milk and honey; pavements in the rain smell of wet cigarettes and boots.

  Another thing that makes me uneasy in London is the tameness of the pigeons. I like pigeons wild. I like to see them volley out of a high tree when they hear me coming and go swooping off discreetly to the neighbouring parish. It is a gesture to us both and balances our respect for each other. But in London there is none of that. Pigeons come padding after one like spivs, podgy, sly, looking for easy grub. They’re fat and spoiled and scarcely even bother to fly any more. No, give me the remote, high-flying wood-pigeons every time, rather than these seedy Trafalgar Square touts with their crops stuffed full of pop-corn and bus-tickets. Letting themselves be photographed indeed!…

  No, I shall never get used to London. But it has one sort of negative advantage. It is easy to work in such a muddled wilderness; it forces the mind and imagination to create the world it cannot offer. In a prison cell, as many writers have found, it is easy to work, for there is nothing else to do. And London is rather like that, a place which, in obscuring the moving forms of the seasons and blotting out the intimate features of the stars, keeps one in perpetual and vivid awareness of that perfect exiled world to which one can never return, and to which it is probably better one never should.

  For here in London, I am like a radio receiver set up in a cellar, continually receiving messages from the other side of the lines. I can lie here in bed in the morning, with drawn blinds, and by the temperature of the air and the very quality of sound coming from the street, I know exactly what kind of day it is a hundred miles away: that there is frost on the fruit blossom, or that it is a perfect morning for harvest, or that on such a morning the sheep will be tumbled into the sheepwash and bleating under the shears. As I start my day, and acquaint myself with the congestion in the buses, I know already the scene in the distant village, white washing blowing in a brisk west wind, cows splashing among the bullrushes, foxgloves spearing the hedgerows, cornfields toasting in the sun under swooping storms of birds.

  Yes, that place is still my home, which London can never be, in spite of all these years. And the reason is the obstinacy in the blood. I come from generations of Cotswold farmers. I have inherited instincts that are tuned to pastoral rhythms, to the moods of the earth, to seedtime and harvest, and the great cycle of the seasons. London cannot fulfil those instincts, and I for my part cannot lose them.

  So London remains my cage, the door is open, but I cannot leave. Meanwhile, the cage is comfortable enough. And now, as I finish this somewhat ungrateful piece, if I am conscious of a faintly bitter taste in the mouth, it is, I must confess, my own fault. I have just been biting the hand that feeds me, and it tastes of soot.

  Writing Autobiography

  Autobiography can be the laying to rest of ghosts as well as an ordering of the mind. But for me it is also a celebration of living and an attempt to hoard its sensations.

  In common with other writers I have written little that was not for the most part autobiographical. The spur for me is the fear of evaporation – erosion, amnesia, if you like – the fear that a whole decade may drift gently away and leave nothing but a salt-caked mud-flat.

  A wasting memory is not only a destroyer; it can deny one’s very existence. A day unremembered is like a soul unborn, worse than if it had never been. What indeed was that summer if it is not recalled? That journey? That act of love? To whom did it happen if it has left you with nothing? Certainly not to you. So any bits of warm life preserved by the pen are trophies snatched from the dark, are branches of leaves fished out of the flood, are tiny arrests of mortality.

  The urge to write may also be the fear of death – particularly with autobiography – the need to leave messages for those who come after, saying, ‘I was here; I saw it too’. Then there are the other uses of autobiography, some less poignant than these assurances – exposure, confession, apologia, revenge, or even staking one’s claim to a godhead. In writing my first volume of autobiography, Cider with Rosie (1959), I was moved by several of these needs, but the chief one was celebration: to praise the life I’d had and so preserve it, and to live again both the good and the bad.

  My book was a recollection of early years set against the village background of my Cotswold upbringing. The end of my childhood also coincided by chance with the end of a rural tradition – a semi-feudal way of life which had endured for nine centuries, until war and the motor-car put an end to it. Technically the book was not so simple. It took two years, and was written three times. In remembering my life, even those first few years of it, I found the territory a maze of paths.

  I was less interested, anyway, in giving a portrait of myself, than in recording the details of that small local world – a world whose last days I had seen fresh as a child and which no
child may ever see again. It seemed to me that my own story would keep, whereas the story of the village would not, for its words, even as I listened, were being sung for the last time and were passing into perpetual silence.

  The village was small, set in a half mile of valley, but the details of its life seemed enormous. The problem of compression was like dressing one tree with leaves chosen from all over the forest. As I sat down to write, in a small room in London, opening my mind to that time-distant place, I saw at first a great landscape darkly fogged by the years and thickly matted by rumour and legend. It was only gradually that memory began to stir, setting off flash-points like summer lightning, which illuminated for a moment some field or landmark, some ancient totem or neighbour’s face.

  Seizing these flares and flashes became a way of writing, episodic and momentarily revealing, to be used as small beacons to mark the peaks of the story and to accentuate the darkness of what was left out. So I began my tale where this light sparked brightest, close-up, at the age of three, when I was no taller than grass, and was an intimate of insects and knew the details of stones and chair-legs.

  This part of the book was of course easiest. I had lived so near to it, with the world no larger than my legs could carry me and no more complex than my understanding. I ruled as king these early chapters. Then the book moved away from me – taking in first my family, then our house and the village, and finally the whole of the valley. I became at this stage less a character than a presence, a listening shadow, a moving finger, recording the flavours of the days, the ghosts of neighbours, the bits of winter, gossip, death.

  If a book is to stand, one must first choose its shape – the house that the tale will inhabit. One lays out the rooms for the necessary chapters, then starts wondering about the furniture. The moment before writing is perhaps the most harrowing of all, pacing the empty rooms, knowing that what goes in there can belong nowhere else, yet not at all sure where to find it. There are roofless books in all of us, books without walls and books full of lumber. I realized quite soon, when writing my own, that I had enough furniture to fill a town.

  The pains of selection became a daily concern, and progress was marked by what was left out. The flowing chatter of my sisters, for twelve years unstaunched, had to be distilled to a few dozen phrases – phrases, perhaps, which they had never quite uttered, but bearing the accents of all that they had. A chapter about life in my village school also required this type of compression. Here five thousand hours had to be reduced to fifteen minutes – in terms of reading time – and those fifteen minutes, without wearying the reader, must seem like five thousand hours. In another chapter, about our life at home, I describe a day that never happened. Perhaps a thousand days of that life each yielded a moment for the book – a posture, a movement, a tone – all singly true and belonging to each other, though never having been joined before.

  Which brings me to the question of truth, of fact, often raised about autobiography. If dates are wrong, can the book still be true? If facts err, can feelings be false? One would prefer to have truth both in fact and feeling (if either could ever be proved). And yet … I remember recording some opinions held by my mother which she had announced during a family wedding. ‘You got your mother all wrong,’ complained an aunt. ‘That wasn’t at Edie’s wedding, it was Ethel’s.’

  Ours is a period of writing particularly devoted to facts, to a fondness for data rather than divination, as though to possess the exact measurements of the Taj Mahal is somehow to possess its spirit. I read in a magazine recently a profile of Chicago whose every line was a froth of statistics. It gave me a vivid picture, not so much of the city, but of the author cramped in the archives.

  In writing autobiography, especially one that looks back at childhood, the only truth is what you remember. No one else who was there can agree with you because he has his own version of what he saw. He also holds to a personal truth of himself, based on an indefatigable self-regard. One neighbour’s reaction, after reading my book, sums up this double vision: ‘You hit off old Tom to the life,’ he said. ‘But why d’you tell all those lies about me?’

  Seven brothers and sisters shared my early years, and we lived on top of each other. If they all had written of those days, each account would have been different, and each one true. We saw the same events at different heights, at different levels of mood and hunger – one suppressing an incident as too much to bear, another building it large around him, each reflecting one world according to the temper of his day, his age, the chance heat of his blood. Recalling it differently, as we were bound to do, what was it, in fact, we saw? Which one among us has the truth of it now? And which one shall be the judge? The truth is, of course, that there is no pure truth, only the moody accounts of witnesses.

  But perhaps the widest pitfall in autobiography is the writer’s censorship of self. Unconscious or deliberate, it often releases an image of one who could never have lived. Flat, shadowy, prim and bloodless, it is a leaf pressed dry on the page, the surrogate chosen for public office so that the author might survive in secret.

  With a few exceptions, the first person singular is one of the recurrent shams of literature – the faceless ‘I’, opaque and neuter, fruit of some failure between honesty and nerve. To be fair, one should not confine this failing to literature. One finds it in painting, too, whose centuries of self-portraits, deprecating and tense, are often as alike as brothers. This cipher no doubt is the ‘I’ of all of us, the only self that our skills can see.

  For the writer, after all, it may be a necessary one, the one that works best on the page. An ego that takes up too much of a book can often wither the rest of it. Charles Dickens’s narrators were often dry as wafers, but they compèred Gargantuan worlds. The autobiographer’s self can be a transmitter of life that is larger than his own – though it is best that he should be shown taking part in that life and involved in its dirt and splendours. The dead stick ‘I’, like the staff of the maypole, can be the centre of the turning world, or it can be the electric needle that picks up and relays the thronging choirs of life around it.

  Part Two

  * * *

  Love

  Love is; and makes all the rules itself, according to the multiple needs of the lover. We can all of us imagine what love should be, love being one of our earliest unshakeable certainties – having nourished it since childhood as a symbol of private magic, transfixed with our special demands and wishes. Our image of love is the spell we put on others – or fancy we do at least – in order to compel them to enter that particular part of ourselves which egoism has hollowed out to receive them. Indefatigable love-seekers all, spending the bulk of our energies to this end, why then are we so often defeated, finding durable love more difficult to win than almost any other ambition?

  To be in love, of course, is to take on the pent-house of living, that topmost toppling tower, perpetually lit by the privileged radiance of well-being which sets one apart from the nether world. Born, we are mortal, dehydrated, ordinary; love is the oil that plumps one up, dilates the eyes, puts a glow on the skin, lifts us free from the weight of time, and helps us see in some other that particular kind of beauty which is the crown of our narcissism.

  Love also brings into our lives that mysterious apparition called style, the special fluency of our acts and feelings, so that we are dressed, while it lasts, in the flashy garments of supermen, omnipotent, supercharged. Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing she said, the need to see her to have life confirmed. At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another’s, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.

  Yet historically, they say, love is a modern invention, and largely an obsession of the temperate West. Whole nations and continents scarcely cater to it at all, and still live conspicuously well-knit liv
es. In much of Africa, the Mediterranean, South America and the East, love is a fiction, a light relief, its territory confined to the faintly fizzy narcotics of folk-tales and comic-strips. There, the mating of the sexes is considered too important a matter to be left to sentiment or the chance effects of moonlight, and so remains in the traditional hands of parents and brokers negotiating with such realities as cows or fig trees. If love or passion be present, this is a lucky bonus, the gilt-edge to the marriage bond; but it is real estate, rather than romantic whim, that is thought the best guarantee of a lasting match.

  How then did we, of all people, fall into this dreamy snare, and put ourselves at the mercy of romantic love? For the Americans and the British are among the few in the world to order their fate at its fragile bidding, who stand ready and willing, at the first twinge of fancy, and with an almost total lack of further enquiry, to set up life together, expecting nothing more palpable in exchange than a pair of bed-sheets or an electric razor.

  In this sense we are romantics, and are stuck with it I suppose, and everything seems conscripted to serve the illusion. It is propelled and fostered by almost all forms of our culture, popular pressures and social example – by art, entertainment, advertising, news, the influence of public heroes and private friends. Love’s whim is the democracy by which we live, and in which we all stand nakedly equal, stripped of all possessions and all advantages save the chance favour we arouse in each other.