“If you desire the prosperity of your people, the independence of your Government, a place of honour for the Lone Star among the flags of all nations, you will support the re-election of President Barclay in this campaign… .”
This too attracted me. There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn’t get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal : even the seediness of civilisation, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the ‘tarts’ in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the motor salesmen in Great Portland Street. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.
Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question …
But there are times of impatience, when one is less content to rest at the urban stage, when one is willing to suffer some discomfort for the chance of finding-there are a thousand names for it, King Solomon’s Mines, the “heart of darkness” if one is romantically inclined, or more simply, as Herr Heuser puts it in his African novel, The Inner Journey, one’s place in time, based on a knowledge not only of one’s present but of the past from which one has emerged. There are others, of course, who prefer to look a stage ahead, for whom Intourist provides cheap tickets into a plausible future, but my journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are.
The motive of a journey deserves a little attention. It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland. The psychoanalyst, who takes the images of a dream one by one-“You dreamed you were asleep in a forest. What is your first association to forest?”-finds that some images have immediate associations; to others the patient can bring out nothing at all; his brain is like a cinema in which the warning “Tire” has been cried; the exits are jammed with too many people trying to escape, and when I say that to me Africa has always seemed an important image, I suppose that is what I mean, that it has represented more than I could say, “You dreamed you were in Africa. Of what do you think first when I say the word Africa?” and a crowd of words and images, witches and death, unhappiness and the Gare St. Lazare, the huge smoky viaduct over a Paris slum, crowd together and block the way to full consciousness.
But to the words ‘South Africalittle my reaction, I find, is immediate: Rhodes and the British Empire and an ugly building in Oxford and Trafalgar Square. After ‘Kenya’ there is no hesitation : ‘gentleman farmers, aristocracy r& exile and the gossip columns’. ‘Rhodesia’ produces: ‘failure, Empire Tobacco’, and ‘failure’ again.
It is not then any part of Africa which acts so strongly on this unconscious mind; certainly no part where the white settler has been most successful in reproducing the conditions of his country, its morals and its popular art. A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. This Africa may take the form of an unexplained brutality as when Conrad noted in his Congo diary: “Thursday, 3rd July … Met an off ” of the State inspecting. A few minutes afterwards saw at a camp place the dead body of a Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell”; or a sense of despair as when M. Celine writes: “Hidden away in all this flowering forest of twisted vegetation, a few decimated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies, crushed by taboos and eating nothing all the time but rotten tapioca.” The old man whom I saw beaten with a club outside the poky little prison at Tapec-Ta, the naked widows at Tailahun covered with yellow clay squatting in a hole, the wooden-toothed devil swaying his raffia skirts between the huts seem like the images in a dream to stand for something of importance to myself.
To-day our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.
Via Liverpool
But none the less I was a little scared at the prospect of going back by way of Africa alone; I feel very grateful to my cousin, who was willing to accompany me, to share the journey, for which no maps were to be bought, from its start in the restaurant car of the 6.$ from Euston, as we sat before the little pieces of damp white fish. A headline told me that there was another clue in a trunk murder case; a man on the dole had killed himself; while along the line the smaller stations were dashed out like so many torches plunged in water.
The huge Liverpool hotel had been designed without aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about comfort and a genuine idea of magnificence. It could probably house as many passengers as an Atlantic liner; passengers, because no one goes to Liverpool for pleasure, to the little cramped square and the low sky-signs which can almost be touched with the hand, where all the bars and the cinemas close at ten. But there was a character hidden in this hotel; it wasn’t chic, it wasn’t bright, it wasn’t international; there remained somewhere hidden, among its long muffled corridors, beneath the huge cliff-like fall of its walls, the idea of an English inn; one didn’t mind asking for muffins or a pint of bitter, while the boats hooted in the Mersey and the luggage littered the hall; there was quite probably a boots. Anyway enough remained for me to understand the surprise of Henry James when he landed in England, “that England should be as English as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be.”
The natural native seediness had not been lost in the glitter of chromium plate; the muffin had been overwhelmingly, perhaps rather nauseatingly, enlarged. If the hotel were silly, it was only because magnificence is almost always a little silly. The magnificent gesture seldom quite comes off. When on rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide, one gets a sense of the theatre or the films, it is “too good to be true”. I find myself always torn between two beliefs : the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it appears better it is really worse. But in the huge lounge at Liverpool, like the lounge of a country inn fifty times magnified, one was at home on the vast expanse of deep dark carpet, only one business man asleep with his mouth open; at home as one would certainly not have been if the Hollywood imagination had run riot. One was protectively coloured, one was seedy too.
Next morning, in the public-house near the Prince’s Stage, four middle-aged women sat drinking with an old dirty man of eighty-four. Three had the dustbin look; they carried about them the air of tenements, of lean cats and shared wash-houses; the fourth had risen a little way in the world, she was the old man’s daughter over from America for Christmas. ‘Have another drink, Father?” He was seeing her off. Their relationship was intimate and merry; the whole party had an air of slightly disreputable revelry. To one the party didn’t really matter; she had caught the American accent. To the other women, who must return to the dustbin, it was perilous, precarious, breath-taking; they were happy and aghast when the old man drew out a pound note and stood a round himself. “Well, why shouldn’t he?” the daughter asked them, asked Jackie boy, the bar-tender, the beer advertisements, the smutty air, the man who came in selling safety-razor blades, half a dozen for threepence, “it’s better than spending it on a crowd of strange dames.”