I did wonder — But this is politics?
In Germany, I suppose, there were people learning to sing sad songs and carry torches to bonfires.
In the autumn of 1930 I went to my father's college in Cambridge. There were the old men like bees or wasps moving in front of the fagades of ancient buildings: somewhere inside were the distillations of honey or of poison from flowers. In going to the university at Cambridge I was, of course, hardly getting away from my family: I was in some sense even coming back to it, since I had been away for four years at boarding-school. I do not remember much about this time at schooclass="underline" it was to do with the distillations, I suppose, by which upper-middle-class Englishmen enable large parts of themselves to remain as schoolboys.
But no one gets away from their schooldays, or indeed from their families, except by what grows in the mind; and this goes on for the most part in the dark.
There is a Freudian theory that any young man who in childhood has been the undisputed favourite of his mother goes through life with the feelings of a conqueror. Well, I did not consciously want to be anything so vulgar as a conqueror: but I did imagine, yes, that I had got away from my upbringing and my family.
I felt I had been helped in this by the strange dark girl who had risen sword in hand, as it were, from the mists of that lake in the Black Forest: whom I loved; but whom I did not feel ready to take on on a mundane level.
I remember that we talked about politics, you and I: were you not closer to Communism at that time than you remember? (You imagined you had got away from your mother?) You certainly
showed your antipathy to those Nazi boys: I suspected at first that you did not go down to the performance of the play in the evening because your friends had joined up with them — or was I even then being too modest? You showed some antipathy to me when I suggested that in the cannibal-race of the Western world these Nazis might play the part of scavengers, garbage-collectors, to clean the mess up. But then was not this the sort of thing that was being said by the Communist friends of your mother's?
In Cambridge before 1930, it is true, we did not know much of either Communism or Fascism. It was the fashion, I suppose, to say about Russia 'Of course, the experiment might go either this way or that.' And about Italy 'At least Mussolini makes the trains run on time.' Reactions amongst students were influenced by the contempt we had for what we saw and read of politicians at home. These seemed to be like dinosaurs already half fossilised in rock: we thought — Hurry on, ice-cap, come down from the pole.
I would say to my mother 'Freud doesn't seem too optimistic about the chances of social improvement.'
My mother would say 'Truth after all does not depend upon the chances of improvement.'
I said to my father 'But if there is no guiding principle in evolution, then why should one form of behaviour be any better than another?'
My father said 'Science and ethics belong to different worlds.'
I would think — But might not this attitude be like that of the dinosaurs just before they were caught by the cold?
But then I would think of you, my beautiful German girclass="underline" whose legs as they moved within your skirt were like the clappers of a bell; the memory of whose mouth still sometimes took me by the throat so that it was as if I could not breathe. I thought — There are connections here beyond the reach of the scientific world; sailors are lured to rocks by sirens; rocks are where fishes and humans crawl out on to a new land.
In Cambridge, young men put their heads into the sand of scrums on football fields. Old men stood and watched them as if they themselves would leap in and be blind.
Oh yes, I felt as if I were an agent in occupied territory. But what was the agency? What was it for? Who were the other agents? (Of course, you.)
Indeed one should not stay too long in the company of someone whom one feels is a fellow agent: there is such work to be done!
When I first went to my father's old college I had rooms on a staircase on which there were also the rooms of a man called Melvyn. Melvyn was a short chubby man with a round face and a high domed forehead and eyebrows that went up to a point in the middle like those of a stage devil. My rooms were above his, so that I had to pass his door when I went up the stairs. He would leave his door open when he was inside his room so that it was as if he wanted to be on show for whoever would look at him. Within this frame he would appear to be posing in various tableaux: the student at his desk; the aesthete reclining on his chaise-longue; the visionary at the window; the eccentric flat on his back on the floor with a pillow under his head. I would think — It is as if, yes, he is doing these performances because he is like one of those particles that might not exist unless someone is observing them. Then — Or is it I who make up such patterns into which people have to fit; if I did not, might I not exist?
Or — But I wonder about this, and they do not?
One morning in the middle of my first term I was going up the stairs and through Melvyn's open doorway I saw that he was lying half on and half off his chaise-longue as if he were ill; his shirt was open at the neck and half out of his trousers; one arm trailed towards the ground where an empty glass had fallen on its side. I thought — This is a tableau to which I am supposed to guess the reference: The Death of Nelson? The Suicide of Chatterton? I went on up the stairs. When I came down again some fifteen minutes later Melvyn was still in the same position. I tried to work out — Well, of course he does this to attract attention: but then don't people who try to kill themselves also do it to attract attention? I went in. I thought I might wander round his room and appear to be interested in the books that were on his shelves; then, if it were a game, I would not have appeared to have been a fool; I would not have rushed like an ambulance man into a charade.
On Melvyn's walls there were posters depicting heroic Russian workers: there were scrolls in the form of strip-cartoons illustrating the life of Lenin. I thought — Perhaps this is why I am being lured into this room, so that there can be observed my reactions to the life of Lenin. Then — But what if I am a fly; do I not want to study the life of such spiders?
There was a smell coming from Melvyn so that I was aware of him even when I had my back to him. The smell was of stale wine,
unwashedness, not quite of death. I wondered — By a sense of smell, people might be tested on what they think of Lenin?
I went and stood by Melvyn. His small cherub's mouth had a slight encrustation round it. It was like the opening to a waste-pipe that had been blocked.
After a time Melvyn opened one eye and said 'Kiss me, Hardy.'
I said 'Yes, I thought of that.'
'What did you think of?'
'The Death of Nelson.'
He said 'England expects every man to do his duty.'
I said 'I was just passing the door of your room.'
He said 'Do you know what my nanny used to call "duty?"'
'No, what — '
He said 'After breakfast, every morning — that's what Nanny used to call "duty".'