When George was younger he used to say, ‘Que faire? I love good food and good wine and pretty women.’ This, which George did not regard as a falsehood, was misleading, not only because George was not seriously interested in food and drink, but because he was not (in the crude accepted sense) seriously interested in women. He pictured himself as ‘highly sexed’, as no doubt a great many men like to do. (When does one ever hear a man announce that he is not highly sexed?) In fact he was a good deal less erotically interested in women than was his brother Brian. He was credited with some brief affairs both before and after marriage, but these were (in my view) probably nervous cravings rather than great passions. His relation with Diane was the only ‘illicit’ union which had lasted, and in this conventional lust played a minor role.
Stella in some way stunned George, as if she had hit him very hard on the forehead. (They met at London University as fellow students.) Perhaps this initial coup was what he could never forgive. She was the cleverest strongest woman that he had ever met. Though later he said that he was never in love with Stella, only obsessed and hypnotized, there is no doubt that he was in love. She was in love too, though for some reason people always wanted to explain this away by saying things like, ‘She took him on as a challenge.’ George early gained the idea that Stella intended somehow to ‘break’ him; and there was perhaps such an element in her love. She had begun to feel that she was the stronger, and George could not bear this. Violence was his answer. It was a menage which lacked the language of tenderness. Yet George admired and, in a way, prized his wife, and Stella’s love was love, loyal absolute commitment, the love of an intelligent realistic person capable of unselfishness. She was one of the few women who were entirely unsentimental about George. People argued about whether Stella ‘knew what he was like’ when she married him. I think she did; but she overestimated the influence of her kind of love upon this kind of man. She was without feminine wiles, and could not conceal her strength as a more cunning or intuitively tactful woman might have done. She never soothed or accepted George’s manner of being himself. Strength and love were one for Stella, love redeeming strength, power corrupting love. ‘I’ve married a policewoman,’ George complained early on, before things became very bad, and before Rufus died. (About the death of the child and its effect opinions differed.) Stella’s father, a diplomat, detested George and a coolness arose between Stella and her parents. When Stella’s mother died, David Henriques retired and went to live in Japan, whence he sent presents and affectionate letters in which George was not mentioned. Henriques became an expert on netsuke.
Many men are violent (the sealed doors of houses conceal how many). George conformed to a less usual type in that he made violence his trademark. He made a point of his aggressiveness and bad temper to define his esse; and this in some quarters actually made people more tolerant and forgiving. As Brian said, George ‘got away with things’. Some smilingly described his conduct as ‘rudeness à outrance’, others pointed out (and this had an element of truth) that he was prudentially violent; or else he was lucky. (That he was lucky was something that George believed too, a belief he managed to combine with seeing himself as a ‘doomed bull, full of rapiers’.) The causes of a habit of violence are mysterious and not often lucidly studied, since those who take an intelligent interest in violent cases usually have deep psychological reasons for preferring certain explanations. (This is almost always true in politics, and often in analysis.) Alex said (and half believed) that George simply drank too much. Others said it was because of Rufus, some blamed Stella, some Alex, some Alan. Yet other theories saw George as a repressed homosexual, or an Oedipus victim, or a one-man protest against the bourgeoisie. He figured indeed upon many flags which were flown. And although George never systematically took up the game of explaining himself, he dabbled in it to the extent of tinting his excesses here and there with ameliorating hints of a more interesting ethical background. He felt, or affected to feel, that his chaotic and unbridled personality was in some important sense more real than the decorous natures that surrounded him. George was supposed to be closer to awful aspects of the world which other people preferred to ignore, and was thereby somehow sympathetically joined to the afflicted and the oppressed. I once heard him say of his brother Brian, ‘He doesn’t realize how terrible and how serious life is.’ This use of the word ‘serious’ is idiosyncratic but highly significant. I may add that, on the occasion in question, George then laughed. In such contexts Brian was in turn perhaps quite right to hazard that George helped one to understand terrorists.
Frustrated ambition, or as some more plainly put it George’s chagrin at discovering that he was no good, was also mentioned as a cause or an excuse. As a student, George had studied philosophy, then history and archaeology. Later, although he got a first-class degree, he failed to get the academic posts which he coveted. He wrote plays which no one would perform and (it was rumoured) poems which no one would publish. There is no doubt that he was consumed with envy of artists and thinkers. He did some historical research, inclining to call himself an archaeologist although he had done no field work beyond a fortnight’s junior grubbing at the Roman Wall. He entered the ‘museum and archive’ world and held one or two posts, then becoming deputy keeper at our Ennistone Museum, where he also drew a stipend as ‘research scholar’. He was said to be compiling some important work. However the fact remained that at the age of more than forty he had published nothing except A Short History of The Ennistone Museum. (This little work, which is still in print, is well written but necessarily of limited importance.) George was in fact a clever man, he was the lively gifted promising person whom Stella had loved and married. (She could not have loved a fool.) Only somehow he had never managed to do anything substantial with his talents. Instead he set about destroying himself. No one was very surprised when he ended his museum career by smashing all that Roman glass.
I confess that I cannot offer any illuminating explanation. Every human being is different, more absolutely different and peculiar than we can goad ourselves into conceiving; and our persistent desire to depict human lives as dramas leads us to see ‘in the same light’ events which may have multiple interpretations and causes. Of course a man may be ‘cured’ (consoled, encouraged, improved, shaken, returned to effective activity, and so forth and so on) by a concocted story of his own life, but that is another matter. (And such stories may be on offer from doctors, priests, teachers, influential friends and relations, or may be self- Invented or derived from literature.) We are in fact far more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psycho-analysis lead us to imagine. The language of sin may be more appropriate than that of science and as likely to ‘cure’. The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone’s life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. There was some deep (so deep that one wants to call it ‘original’, whatever that means) wound in George’s soul into which every tiniest slight or setback poured its gall. Pride and vanity and venomous hurt feelings obscured his sun. He saw the world as a conspiracy against him, and himself as a victim of cosmic injustice.