With his lofty unconcern for mere living, Henry James exerts a strong pull on him. Yet, try though he may, he cannot feel the ghostly hand of James extended to touch his brow in blessing. James belongs to the past: by the time he himself was born, James had been dead for twenty years. James Joyce was still alive, though only by a whisker. He admires Joyce, he can even recite passages from Ulysses by heart. But Joyce is too bound up with Ireland and Irish affairs to be in his pantheon. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, tottering though they may be, and myth-shrouded, are still alive, the one in Rapallo, the other here in London. But if he is going to abandon poetry (or poetry is going to abandon him), what example can Pound or Eliot any longer offer?
Of the great figures of the present age, that leaves only one: D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence too died before he was born, but that can be discounted as an accident, since Lawrence died young. He first read Lawrence as a schoolboy, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the most notorious of all forbidden books. By his third year at university he had consumed the whole of Lawrence, save for the apprentice work. Lawrence was being absorbed by his fellow students too. From Lawrence they were learning to smash the brittle shell of civilized convention and let the secret core of their being emerge. Girls wore flowing dresses and danced in the rain and gave themselves to men who promised to take them to their dark core. Men who failed to take them there they impatiently discarded.
He himself had been wary of becoming a cultist, a Lawrentian. The women in Lawrence’s books made him uneasy; he imagined them as remorseless female insects, spiders or mantises. Under the gaze of the pale, black-clad, intent-eyed priestesses of the cult at the university he felt like a nervous, scurrying little bachelor insect. With some of them he would have liked to go to bed, that he could not deny — only by bringing a woman to her own dark core, after all, could a man reach his own dark core — but he was too scared. Their ecstasies would be volcanic; he would be too puny to survive them.
Besides, women who followed Lawrence had a code of chastity of their own. They fell into long periods of iciness during which they wished only to be by themselves or with their sisters, periods during which the thought of offering up their bodies was like a violation. From their icy sleep they could be awoken only by the imperious call of the dark male self. He himself was neither dark nor imperious, or at least his essential darkness and imperiousness had yet to emerge. So he made do with other girls, girls who had not yet become women and might never become women, since they had no dark core or none to speak of, girls who in their hearts didn’t want to do it, just as in his heart of hearts he could not have been said to want to do it either.
In his last weeks in Cape Town he had begun an affair with a girl named Caroline, a drama student with stage ambitions. They had gone to the theatre together, they had stayed up all night arguing the merits of Anouilh as against Sartre, Ionesco as against Beckett; they had slept together. Beckett was his favourite but not Caroline’s: Beckett was too gloomy, she said. Her real reason, he suspected, was that Beckett did not write parts for women. At her prodding he had even embarked on a play himself, a verse drama about Don Quixote. But he soon found himself at a dead end — the mind of the old Spaniard was too remote, he could not think his way into it — and gave up.
Now, months later, Caroline turns up in London and gets in touch with him. They meet in Hyde Park. She still has a southern-hemisphere tan, she is full of vitality, elated to be in London, elated too to see him. They stroll through the park. Spring has arrived, the evenings are growing longer, there are leaves on the trees. They catch a bus back to Kensington, where she lives.
He is impressed by her, by her energy and enterprise. A few weeks in London and she has already found her feet. She has a job; her CV has gone out to all the theatrical agents; and she has a flat in a fashionable quarter, which she shares with three English girls. How did she meet her flatmates, he asks? Friends of friends, she replies.
They resume their affair, but it is difficult from the start. The job she has found is as a waitress in a nightclub in the West End; the hours are unpredictable. She prefers that he meet her at her flat, not fetch her at the club. Since the other girls object to strangers having keys, he has to wait outside in the street. So at the end of his own working day he catches a train back to Archway Road, has a supper of bread and sausages in his room, reads for an hour or two or listens to the radio, then catches the last bus to Kensington and begins his wait. Sometimes Caroline comes back from the club as early as midnight, sometimes as late as 4 a.m. They have their time together, fall asleep. At seven o’clock the alarm clock rings: he must be out of the flat before her friends wake up. He catches the bus back to Highgate, has breakfast, dons his black uniform, and sets off for the office.
It soon becomes a routine, a routine which, when he is able to stand back for a moment and reflect, astonishes him. He is having an affair in which the rules are being set by the woman and by the woman alone. Is this what passion does to a man: robs him of his pride? Is he passionate about Caroline? He would not have imagined so. In the time they were apart he barely gave her a thought. Why then this docility on his part, this abjectness? Does he want to be made unhappy? Is that what unhappiness has become for him: a drug he cannot do without?
Worst are the nights when she does not come home at all. He paces the sidewalk hour after hour, or, when it rains, huddles in the doorway. Is she really working late, he wonders despairingly, or is the club in Bayswater a huge lie and is she at this very moment in bed with someone else?
When he taxes her directly, he gets only vague excuses. It was a hectic night at the club, we stayed open till dawn, she says. Or she didn’t have cash for a taxi. Or she had to go for a drink with a client. In the acting world, she reminds him tartly, contacts are all-important. Without contacts her career will never take off.
They still make love, but it is not as it was before. Caroline’s mind is elsewhere. Worse than that: with his glooms and his sulks he is fast becoming a burden to her, he can feel that. If he had any sense he would break off the affair right now, clear out. But he does not. Caroline may not be the mysterious, dark-eyed beloved he came to Europe for, she may be nothing but a girl from Cape Town from a background as humdrum as his own, but she is, for the present, all he has.
Nine
In England girls pay no attention to him, perhaps because there still lingers about his person an air of colonial gaucherie, perhaps simply because his clothes are not right. When he is not dressed up in one of his IBM suits, he has only the grey flannels and green sports jacket he brought with him from Cape Town. The young men he sees in the trains and the streets, in contrast, wear narrow black trousers, pointed shoes, tight, box-like jackets with many buttons. They also wear their hair long, hanging over their foreheads and ears, while he still has the short back and sides and the neat parting impressed on him in his childhood by country-town barbers and approved of by IBM. In the trains the eyes of girls slide over him or glaze with disdain.
There is something not quite fair in his plight: he would protest if he only knew where and to whom. What kind of jobs do his rivals have that allow them to dress as they please? And why should he be compelled to follow fashion anyway? Do inner qualities count for nothing?