...[4]
I am not, then, proposing to describe my life as a «taxman.» For some reason which I cannot fully understand the profession of «taxman,» like the profession of «dentist,» seems to excite laughter. But this laughter is, I suspect, uneasy. Both taxman and dentist only too readily image forth the deeper horrors of human life: that we must pay, perhaps ruinously, for our pleasures, that our resources are lent, not given, and that our most irreplaceable faculties decay even as they grow. And in an immediate sense, what makes a man more obsessively miserable than income tax or the toothache? No doubt this accounts for the defensive covertly hostile mockery with which one is greeted when confessing to either of these trades. I used to think however that no one but fools like Francis Marloe actually believed that tax inspectors chose their profession out of secret sadism. I cannot think anyone less sadistic than myself. I am gentle to timidity. Yet latterly even my quiet and respectable calling has been used as evidence against me.
When this story starts-and I will not much longer delay its inception-I had already retired, at an earlier age than is usual, from the tax office. I worked as an Inspector of Taxes because I had to earn a living which I knew I should never earn as a writer. I retired when I had at last saved enough money to assure myself a modest annuity. I have lived, as I say, until latterly, without drama, but with unfailing purpose. I looked forward to and I toiled for my freedom to devote all my time to writing. Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time. I have been on the whole a lucky man. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say it now.
The shock of leaving the office was greater than I had anticipated. Hartbourne warned me that it would be so. I did not believe him. Perhaps I am, more than I realized, a creature of routine. Perhaps too, with scarcely pardonable stupidity, I imagined that inspiration would come with freedom. I did not expect the complete withdrawal of my gift. In the years before, I worked steadily. That is, I wrote steadily and I destroyed steadily. I will not say how many pages I have destroyed, the number is immense. There was pride in this as well as sorrow. Sometimes I felt at a (terrible phrase) dead end. But I never despaired of excellence. Hope and faith and absolute devotion kept me plodding onward, ageing, living alone with my emotions. And at least I found that I could always write something.
But when I had given up the tax office and could sit at my desk at home every morning and think any thoughts I pleased, I found I had no thoughts at all. This too I suffered with my bitterest patience. I waited. I tried to develop a new routine: monotony, out of which value springs. I waited, I listened. I live, as I shall explain soon at more length, in a noisy part of London, a seedy region that was once genteel. I suppose I have myself, together with my neighbourhood, made my pilgrimage away from gentility. Noise, which had never distressed me before, began to do so. For the first time in my life I urgently wanted silence.
Of course, as might be pointed out with barbed humour, I had always in a sense been a devotee of silence. Arnold Baffin once said something like this to me, laughing, and hurt me. Three short books in forty years of sustained literary effort is not exactly garrulity. And indeed if I understand anything that is precious, I did understand how important it was to keep one's mouth shut until the right moment even if this meant a totally voiceless life. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. I hate, in any context, an intemperate flux of words. Contrary to what is modishly thought, the negative is stronger than the positive and its master. What I needed now however was literal silence.
...[5]
As I now read this Foreward through I see how meagrely it conveys me. How little perhaps can words convey except in the hands of a genius. Though I am a creative person, I am a puritan rather than an aesthete. I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie. For myself, I have no theories. True politics is simply the drying of tears and the endless fight for freedom. Without freedom there is no art and no truth. I revere great artists and the men who say no to tyrants.
It remains to record a dedication.
...[6]
A celebration of love
Part One
...[7]
I lived then and had long lived in a ground-floor flat in a small shabby pretty court of terrace houses in North Soho, not far from the Post Office Tower, an area of perpetual seedy brouhaha. I preferred this genteel metropolitan poverty to the styleless suburban affluence favoured by the Baffins. My «rooms» were all at the back. My bedroom looked onto dustbins and a fire escape. My sitting– room onto a plain brick wall caked with muck. The sitting-room, half a room really (the other half, stripped and degraded, was the bedroom), had wooden panels of that powdery dignified shade of green which can only be achieved by about fifty years of fading. This place I had crammed with too much furniture, with Victorian and Oriental bric-a-brac, with tiny heterogeneous objets d'art, little cushions, inlaid trays, velvet cloths, antimacassars even, lace even. I amass rather than collect. I am also meticulously tidy though resigned to dust. A sunless and cosy womb my flat was, with a highly wrought interior and no outside. Only from the front door of the house, which was not my front door, could one squint up at sky over tall buildings and see above the serene austere erection of the Post Office Tower.
So it was that I deliberately delayed my departure. What if I had not done so? I was proposing to disappear for the whole summer, to a place incidentally which I had never seen but had adopted blind. I had not told Arnold where I was going. I had mystified him. Why, I wonder? Out of some sort of obscure spite? Mystery always bulks larger. I had told him with a firm vagueness that I should be travelling abroad, no address. Why these lies? I suppose I did it partly to surprise him. I was a man who never went anywhere. Perhaps I felt it was time I gave Arnold a surprise. Neither had I informed my sister, Priscilla, that I was leaving London. There was nothing odd in that. She lived in Bristol with a husband whom I found distasteful. Suppose I had left the house before Francis Marloe knocked on the door? Suppose the tram had arrived at the tram stop and taken Prinzip away before the Archduke's car came round the corner?
...[8]
Then the front doorbell (already too long delayed by my rambling narrative) rang.
The person who stood outside (within the front door of the house, but without my subsidiary front door) was strange to me. He seemed to be trembling, perhaps from the recent attentions of the wind, perhaps from nerves or alcohol. He wore a very old blue raincoat and a stringy fawn scarf of the throttling variety. He was stout (the raincoat failed to button) and not tall, with copious greyish longish frizzy hair and a round face and a slightly hooked nose and big very red lips and eyes set very close together. He looked, I later thought, rather like a caricature of a bear. Real bears, I believe, have eyes rather wide apart, but caricatured bears usually have close eyes, possibly to indicate bad temper or cunning. I did not like the look of him at all. Something significantly ill-omened which I could not yet define emanated from him. And 1 could smell him from where he stood.