Collected Essays (38 page)

It is fitting, I think, that his last book should be as unserious and shameless as this collection of aphrodisiac recipes, to close a life in which he had enjoyed varied forms of love, left a dozen or so living tokens here and there, and been more loved himself than most men. (One remembers the old gypsy family from northern Italy who travelled all the way to Capri to spend an afternoon with Douglas and proudly exhibit to him another grandchild.) With its air of scholarship, its blend of the practical – the almond soup – the wildly impracticable – Rôti sans Pareil, the crispness of the comments (we only have to add his customary endearments to hear the ghost speak): ‘Very stimulating, my dear’, ‘Much ado about nothing’, ‘Not very useful for people of cold temperament’, with a certain dry mercilessness in the introduction, this book will be one of my favourite Douglases: it joins
Old Calabria, Fountains in the Sand, They Went, Looking Back, London Street Games
, the forbidden anthology of limericks.

He will be delighted in the shades at any success we may have with his recipes and bark with laughter at our ignominious failures, and how pleased he will be at any annotations and additions, so long as they are exact, scholarly, uninflated, and do not carpingly rise from a cold temperament. For even his enormous tolerance had certain limits. He loved life too well to have much patience with puritans or fanatics. He was a gentleman and he disliked a boor. One of the finest passages of invective written in our time is his pamphlet against D. H. Lawrence in defence of Maurice Magnus, and an echo of that old controversy can be found in these pages.

Not many years ago I met in the South of France a Mr D. H. Lawrence, an English painter, whom I interested in this subject and who certainly looked as if his own health would have been improved by a course of such recipes as I had gathered together.

There are said to be certain Jewish rabbis who perform the operation of circumcision with their thumbnail so rapidly and painlessly that the child never cries. So without warning Douglas operates, and the victim has no time to realize in what purgatorio of lopped limbs he is about to awake, among the miserly, the bogus, the boring, and the ungenerous.

1952

INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE

I
N
a book
*6
which is at times crude and conceited, at others perceptive and tender, Havelock Ellis tells the story of an ‘advanced’ marriage. That is really the whole subject – there are chapters on his family and his childhood, on his experiences in Australia as a young school-teacher buried in a bush station and first conceiving his career in sexology, but these are only introductory to his meeting with Edith Lees, the secretary of the New Fellowship, and their long unhappy theoretical marriage. The background is already period: an odd charm hangs around the Fabian Society, around anarchists, feminism, what Ellis himself calls in an admirable phrase, ‘that high-strung ethical tension’: it is necessary to be reminded that encased in those years were real people, muddled and earnest and tortured.

This is an extraordinarily intimate autobiography, far too intimate to be suitable for general reading.

What can it matter when we are both dead? Who can be hurt if she and I, who might have been hurt, are now only a few handfuls of ashes flung over the grass and flowers? To do what I have done here has been an act of prolonged precision in cold blood, beyond anything else that I have ever written. For I know that, to a large extent, the world is inhabited by people to whom one does too much honour by calling them fools . . .. All mankind may now, if they will, conspire together to hurt us. We shall not feel it.

But it was really they who conspired together to hurt each other, talking it all out beforehand – economics, heredity, birth-control – strolling along a Cornish beach, an odd, earnest pathetic pair of lovers, who had left out of account all natural uneugenic feelings of jealousy or possession. Members of the New Fellowship presented them with a complete set of Emerson’s Works.

But even under those auspices the marriage went wrong. There was never much passionate love between them, and Ellis soon considered himself at a liberty to take a mistress. Writing forty years later he remained convinced that his wife had no ground for objection. Objection in any case was swept away by theory: the wife had to be friends with the mistress, and Ellis could see no reason for her pain when she pleaded against a meeting between the lovers in the Cornish village where she and Ellis had first loved. So it went on – the woman always more natural than the man and struggling to be reasonable in his way. The pain stabs out from letter after letter, but Ellis never saw it, chiding her tenderly for failure in sympathy or understanding.

After a time they ceased to live as man and wife, though a kind of passionate tenderness always remained like a buoy to mark the position of a wreck. In London, Ellis had a flat of his own, and in the country they lived in two adjoining cottages (the middle-aged man, when his wife was ill, lay with one ear glued to the intervening wall). All the while Mrs Ellis was being driven to the last breakdown of health and sanity by the remorseless Moloch theories that love was free, jealousy ignoble, possession an indignity. She couldn’t always keep it up. ‘Oh: Havelock, don’t you feel you don’t want me. I let myself drift into thinking you only want Amy and not me . . .. All I feel I want in the world is to get into your arms and be told you want me to live.’ This towards the end of her life, for the miracle was that their love was never killed by the theory – it was only tortured. On his side he never relented: he would write coolly, tenderly back about the spring flowers, and his work was never interrupted: the sexology studies continued to appear, full of case histories and invincible ignorance. And yet, between this ageing man with his fake prophet’s air – rather like a Santa Claus at Selfridge’s – and the woman haunted by extending loneliness and suspicion, so much love remained that one mourns at the thought of what was lost to them because they had not been born into the Christian tradition. Years after her death he writes with a kind of exalted passion and a buried religious feeling:

Whenever nowadays I go about London on my business or my recreation, I constantly come upon them [places where they had met]: here she stood; here we met; here we once sat together; just as even in places where she never went, I come upon some object, however trifling, which leads, by a tenuous thread of suggestion, to her. So that it sometimes seems to me that at every step of my feet and at every movement of my thought I see: before me something which speaks of her, and my heart grows suddenly tender and my lips murmur involuntarily: ‘My darling!’

1940

THE VICTOR AND THE VICTIM

O
NCE
when I was spending some weeks in a
léproserie
in the Belgian Congo, across the border from Dr Schweitzer’s famous hospital at Lambaréné, the doctor spoke to me of ‘sentimental’ and ‘scientific’ leper colonies. He did not use the word sentimental in any pejorative sense – the sentimental hospital offers something to the human mind in pain or despair which the scientific may not be able to do, and the scientific sometimes fails by reason of its own dogmas. (In Brazil, in the wonderfully organized leper colonies there, the babies are separated at birth from the mother, so that for the sake of statistics – no leper children – there is a thirty per cent rate of infantile mortality.)

Nobody could fail, after reading Dr Franck’s fascinating account
*7
of his stay at Lambaréné where he organized a dental clinic, to put this hospital and the adjoining leper village in the category of sentimental, and his admirable drawings, which remind one sometimes of a Segonzac transported to Central Africa, bring the reader closer than any photographs to the heroism and squalor and the unexpected laissez-faire of this strange settlement on the Ogowe river.

Here is the Doctor, myopic in his thick glasses, bent close over his writing desk while the ants, whom he feeds daily with raw fish, swarm across his papers: here is the makeshift room which has yet lasted a long lifetime with the old-fashioned iron bedstead, the mosquito net, the ewer and basin, the oil lamp, the books stacked on the floor with the wooden crates, and the palm trees with their piano-key leaves blocking the view outside. So much here is makeshift: the bed on pulleys for the paralysed patient made out of packing cases, the bedridden man hatching eggs, Dr Franck’s own cubby-hole of a clinic, only partially separated from an emergency operating room on one side and a delivery room on the other. And as for the laissez-faire, here are the animals which roam Lambaréné, the cats, dogs, monkeys, pigs, antelopes, and the Nubian goats, a present from the States – they proved to be milkless and yet linger on, producing a few anaemic kids:

You feed the animals when ever you feel like it, you can even pet them within limits but always with the back of your hand, because all these goats and dogs and cats visit sick wards teaming with microbial life of the most horrifying varieties, walk through grass through which lepers just waded, and are (if someone wanted to establish records) perhaps the greatest microbe carriers per square inch of body surface anywhere on earth.

It is easy to notice the debit side of a ‘sentimental’ African hospital. I have visited one myself in the bush near the river Ruki, a
léproserie
of mud huts without a doctor, served by two African dispensers and one European nun who bicycles through the forest every morning from her convent by the river, and sometimes in depression I am haunted by the memory of the woman who, hearing me enter the darkness of her hut, crawled out of a pitch black inner room like a dog from a kennel, unable even to raise her head, making sounds which even my African companion could not interpret into human words.

But certainly in the case of leprosy there is a credit side to the sentimental. Now that leprosy is curable more and more attention must be paid to the psychological problem of the patient. The careful can never be quite carefree, and in a squalor shared by those who serve perhaps a relationship grows. ‘The hospital without the animals’, Dr Franck writes, ‘would perhaps be wiser but certainly much sadder.’

Dr Schweitzer has become a victim of his own legend, a legend which would not have grown up around a more scientific hospital. Other men – Dr Harley, of Ganta in Liberia, is only one example – have given up their lives as completely to the Africans, but because of Dr Schweitzer’s prowess on the organ, his life of Bach, his books of philosophy, the Nobel Prize, the camera-eye of the popular Press has picked out Lambarène, a camera-eye which more often than not distorts the image. And in the wake of publicity, however unsought, inevitably comes denigration. (Envy is one of the distinguishing marks of man.)

Journalists writing emotionally and inaccurately of Schweitzer, lying in little ways for the sake off the newspaper story, have conveyed to the world a false Schweitzer whom it is easy to attack. Some of us who have at best one talent to develop become jealous and critical of a man who has developed, as Dr Franck writes, ‘every one of his potentialities to its utmost limits’. The man who sometimes seems hidden in limelight more than in forest may not be a great musician or a great philosopher or a great doctor, but his achievement, at this moment of history, is more important than his music, his writing, or his medical skill: ‘The
Grand Docteur
will live on as the man in whom the Western conscience became incarnate long before it was exploited in order to adorn a political holding-action in black Africa.’

1959

SIMONE WEIL

S
IMONE WEIL
was a young Jewish teacher of philosophy who died in exile from her native France in 1943 at the age of thirty-four. Since that time knowledge of her has spread by word of mouth, like the knowledge of some underground leader in wartime. This is her first book
*8
to be published in English, the first message to reach us, though we had known that she had been acclaimed by both Catholics and Protestants in France. We read with excitement as the signals are handed in: contact at last has been made: and with a growing doubt. Here is a moment of vision: this we understand; but this? – surely the message must have been mutilated, for it seems to contradict what went before; and this? – the phrases seem jumbled, they mean little to us.

The most important part of the book, apart from the essay ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, does literally consist of messages, letters written to a Father Perrin, a Dominican in Marseilles, the first three explaining why she is hesitating to be baptized, the last three giving her spiritual autobiography, an account of her intellectual vocation, and her thoughts before leaving North Africa for England and being finally separated from her spiritual adviser (if one can so call one whose advice was never taken, and who was more often than not the victim of her preaching). It is a great pity that we cannot read Father Perrin’s replies. From her references to them we can imagine their careful sympathetic approach to her problems, the vain attempt to guide the wide wash of her mystical thought into a channel where it could increase in depth.

Her abiding concern was her relationship to God and the Church. She had come to believe in the Christian God, in the Incarnation, and the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church (of its social functions, perhaps naturally, as one who had experienced for some weeks the hardships of the Catalonian front, she remained suspicious), but she had no will to take the next step. She expected God to intervene, to push her into the Church if he so desired. She would not act except under orders. ‘If it is God’s will that I should enter the Church, He will impose this will upon me at the exact moment when I shall have come to deserve that He should so impose it.’ But how can one deserve without some action, if only of the mind? She pays lip-service occasionally to free-will, but we cannot help feeling that she unduly restricted its scope. There are traces of Gnosticism in her postponement of baptism until she could be certain of perfection.