The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (12 page)

My dear Arnold,

I hope that you and Rachel have forgiven me for yesterday. Although summoned I was nevertheless an intruder. You will understand me and I need exclaim no more on that point. One does not want witnesses of one’s trouble however ephemeral it may be. The outsider cannot understand and his very thoughts are an impertinence. I write to say that I have no thoughts, except for my affection for you and Rachel and my certainty that all is well with you. I have never been an adherent of your brand of curiosity! And I hope that at least here you will see the charm of this lowering of the gaze! I say this in the gentlest way, and not as a reminder of our perennial argument.

I also write to ask you, as briefly as possible, a favour. You were of course interested to meet Francis Marloe, who by the weirdest accident was with me when you telephoned. You spoke of meeting him again. Please do not do so. If you reflect you will see how hurtful to me any such association would be. I do not propose to have anything to do with my former wife and I do not want any connection to exist between her world, whatever that may turn out to be, and the things of my own which are dear to me. It would of course be characteristic of you to feel ‘interested’ in probing in this region, but please be kind enough to an old friend not to do so.

Let me take this chance to say that in spite of all differences our friendship is very precious to me. As you will remember, I have made you my literary executor. Could there be a greater sign of trust? However, let us hope that talk of wills is premature. I am just now leaving London and will be away for some time. I hope I shall be able to write. I feel that a most crucial period in my life lies ahead. Give my fondest love to Rachel. I thank you both for your consistent cordiality to a solitary man; and I rely upon you absolutely in the matter of F.M.

With all affectionate and friendly wishes,

Yours ever
Bradley

 

By the time I had finished writing this letter I found that I was sweating. Writing to Arnold always, for some reason, provoked emotion: and in this case there was superadded the memory of a scene of violence, which, in spite of my bland words, I knew the chemistry of friendship would take long to assimilate. What is ugly and undignified is hardest of all, harder than wickedness, to soften into a mutually acceptable past. We forgive those who have seen us vile sooner than those who have seen us humiliated. I felt a still unresolved deep ‘shock’ about it all; and although I had been sincere in telling Arnold that I was not ‘curious’, I knew that this was not, for me either, the end of the matter.

Refilling my pen, I began to write another letter, which ran as follows:

 

My dear Julian,

it was kind of you to ask my advice about books and writing. I am afraid I cannot offer to teach you to write. I have not the time, and such teaching is, I surmise, impossible anyway. Let me just say a word about books. I think you should read the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
in any unvarnished translation. (If pressed for time, omit the Odyssey.) These are the greatest literary works in the world, where huge conceptions are refined into simplicity. I think perhaps you should leave Dante until later. The
Commedia
presents many points of difficultly and needs, as Homer does not, a commentary. In fact, if not read in Italian, this great work seems not only incomprehensible, but repulsive. You should, I feel, relax your embargo upon poetry sufficiently to accommodate the better known plays of Shakespeare! How fortunate we are to have English as our native tongue! Familiarity and excitement should carry you easily through these works. Forget that they are ‘poetry’ and just enjoy them. The rest of my reading list consists simply of the greatest English and Russian novels of the nineteenth century. (If you are not sure which these are, ask your father: I think he can be trusted to tell you!)

Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime. Do not worry too much about writing. Art is a gratuitous and usually thankless activity and at your age it is more important to enjoy it than to practise it. If you do decide to write anything, keep in mind what you yourself said about perfection. The most important thing a writer must learn to do is to tear up what he has written. Art is concerned not just primarily but absolutely with truth. It is another name for truth. The artist is learning a special language in which to reveal truth. If you write, write from the heart, yet carefully, objectively. Never pose. Write little things which you think are true. Then you may sometimes find that they are beautiful as well.

My very good wishes to you, and thank you for wanting to know what I thought!

Yours
Bradley

 

After I had finished this letter and after some reflection and fumbling and excursions to the chimney piece and the display cabinet, I began a further letter which went thus:

Dear Marloe,

as I hope I made clear to you, your visit was not only unwelcome but entirely without point, since I do not propose under any circumstances to communicate with my former wife. Any further attempt at an approach, whether by letter or in person, will be met by absolute rejection. However, now that you appreciate my attitude I imagine that you will be kind and wise enough to leave me alone. I was grateful for your help
chez
Mr and Mrs Baffin. I should tell you, in case you had any thoughts of pursuing an acquaintance with them, that I have asked them not to receive you, and they will not receive you.

Yours sincerely,
Bradley Pearson

 

Francis had, on his departure on the previous evening, contrived to thrust into my pocket his address and telephone number written upon a slip of paper. I copied the address on to the envelope and threw the paper into the wastepaper basket.

I then sat and twiddled for a bit longer, watching the creeping line of sun turning the crusty surface of the wall opposite from brown to blond. Then I fell to writing again.

 

Dear Mrs Evandale,

it has been brought to my attention that you are in London. This letter is to say that I do not under any conceivable circumstances wish to hear from you or to see you. It may seem contradictory to send you a letter to say this. But I thought it possible that some sort of curiosity or morbid interest might lead you to ‘look me up’. Kindly do not do so. I have no desire to see you and no interest in hearing about you. I see no reason why our paths should cross, and I should be grateful for the continuance of our total non-communication. Please do not imagine from this letter that I have in this long interim been speculating about you. I have not. I have forgotten you completely. I would not be concerned about you now were it not for an impertinent visit which I have received from your brother. I have asked him to spare me any further visits, and I hope that you will see to it that he does not again appear on my doorstep as your self-styled emissary. I would appreciate it if you would take this letter as saying exactly what it appears to say and nothing else. There is nothing of a cordial or forward-looking import to be read ‘between the lines’. My act of writing to you does not betoken excitement or interest. As my wife you were unpleasant to me, cruel to me, destructive to me. I do not think that I speak too strongly. I was profoundly relieved to be free of you and I do not like you. Or rather I do not like my memory of you. I scarcely even now conceive of you as existing except as a nastiness conjured up by your brother. This miasma will soon pass and be replaced by the previous state of oblivion. I trust that you will not interfere with this process by any manifestation. I should, to be finally frank, be thoroughly angered by any‘approach’ on your part, and I am sure that you would wish to avoid a distressing scene. I derive consolation from the thought that since your memories of me are doubtless just as disagreeable as my memories of you, you are unlikely to desire a meeting.

Yours sincerely,
Bradley Pearson

PS
I should add that I am today leaving London and tomorrow leaving England. I shall be staying away for some time and may even settle abroad.

 

When I had finished writing this letter I was not only sweating, I was trembling and panting and my heart was beating viciously. What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial. Hatred?

I looked at my watch and found that in the composition of the letter a long time had passed. It was now too late to catch the morning train. No doubt the afternoon train would be better in any case. Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

I re-read the letter which I had written to Christian and reflected upon it. I had produced it out of some sort of immediate need for self-expression or self-defence, a magical warding-off movement, such as I have explained that I naturally indulge in as a letter-writer. However a letter, as I have at times to my own cost forgotten, is not only a piece of self-expression; it is also statement, suggestion, persuasion, command, and its sheer effectiveness in these respects needs to be objectively estimated. What effect would this letter have upon Christian? It now seemed possible that the effect would be the exact reverse of what I desired. This letter, with its reference to a ‘distressing scene’, would excite her. She would see behind it some quite other communication. She would come round in a taxi. Besides, the letter was full of genuine contradictions. If I was settling abroad why send it anyway? Perhaps it would be more effective simply to send a line saying‘Do not communicate with me’ ? Or else nothing at all? The trouble was that by now I felt so worried about Christian and so polluted by a sense of connection with her that it was a psychological necessity to send some sort of missive simply as an exorcism. To pass the time I wrote the envelope: our old address. Of course the lease had been in her name. What an investment.

I decided that I would send off the letter to Francis and postpone deciding what sort of communication, if any, to send to Christian. I also decided that it was now a matter of urgency to get out of the house and down to the station, where I could have lunch and await the afternoon train at leisure. It was just as well the earlier train had been safely missed. I have sometimes had the unpleasant experience, arriving very early for a train, of finding myself catching its predecessor with a minute to spare. Thrusting the letter to Christian into my pocket I found my fingers touching the review of Arnold’s novel. Here was another unsolved problem. Although I was well able to consider refraining from doing so, I knew that I also felt very anxious to publish. Why? Yes, I must get away and think all these matters out.

My suitcases were in the hall where I had left them yesterday. I put on my macintosh. I went into the bathroom. This bathroom was of the kind which no amount of caring for could make other than sordid. Vari-coloured slivers of soap, such as I cannot normally bear to throw away, were lying about in the basin and in the bath. With a sudden act of will I collected them all and flushed them down the lavatory. As I stood there, dazed with this success, the front door bell suddenly began to ring and ring.

 

 

At this point it is necessary for me to give some account of my sister Priscilla, who is about to appear upon the scene.

Priscilla is six years younger than me. She left school early. So indeed did I. I am an educated and cultivated person through my own zeal, efforts, and talents. Priscilla had no zeal and talents and made no efforts. She was spoilt by my mother whom she resembled. I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent. My mother, though not too unhappily married, had a continued grudge against the world. This may have originated in, or been aggravated by, a sense of having married ‘beneath’ her, though not exactly in a social sense. My mother had been a ‘beauty’ and had had many suitors. I suspect she felt later in life, as she grew old behind the counter, that if she had played her cards otherwise she could have made a much better bargain in life. Priscilla, though she made in commercial and even in social terms a more advantageous buy, followed somewhat the same pattern. Priscilla, though not as pretty as my mother, had been a good-looking girl, and was admired in the circle of pert half-baked under-educated youths who constituted her ‘social life’. But Priscilla, egged on by her mother, had ambitions, and was in no hurry to settle with one of these anprepossessing candidates.

I myself had left school at fifteen and become a boy clerk in a Government department. I was living away from home and devoting all my spare time to my education and to my writing. I had been fond of Priscilla when we were children, but was now, and deliberately, cut off from her and from my parents. It was clear that my family could not understand or share my interests and I drew away. Priscilla, entirely unskilled, she could not even type, was working in what she termed a ‘fashion house’, a wholesale establishment of the ‘rag trade’ in Croydon. She was, I imagine, some sort of very junior assistant or clerk. The idea of ‘fashion’ seems a little to have turned her head: perhaps my mother was concerned in this too. Priscilla began to lard herself with make-up and haunt the hairdresser and was always buying new clothes which made her look like a guy. Her pretensions and her extravagance were, I believe, the cause of quarrels between my parents. Meanwhile I myself had other interests and was suffering the anxiety of those who know at an early age that they have not had the education which they deserve.

To cut a long story short, Priscilla really got quite ‘above herself’, dressing and behaving ‘grandly’, and did eventually satisfy her ambition of penetrating into some slightly ‘better’ social circles than those which she had frequented at first. I suspect that she and my mother actually planned a ‘campaign’ to better Priscilla’s lot. Priscilla went to tennis parties, indulged in amateur dramatics, went to charity dances. She and my mother invented for her quite a little ‘season’. Only Priscilla’s season went on and on. She could not make up her mind to marry. Or perhaps her present beaux, in spite of the bold face which Priscilla and my mother jointly presented to the world, felt that after all poor Priscilla was not a very good match. Perhaps there was after all a smell of shop. Then, doubtless as a result of working so hard on her season, she lost her job, and made no attempt to obtain another. She stayed at home, fell vaguely ill, and had what would now I suppose be called a nervous breakdown.