Two Lives and a Destiny was not only a success in England. It had a big sale in America and was translated into several European languages.
As a result, my name acquired a life of its own. I no longer possessed it exclusively. Suddenly, therefore, I had a background.
All sorts of doors opened to me. I was deluged with requests to write articles on this, that, or the other—on anything, on nothing. I was interviewed. I was asked to lecture. The world suddenly became quite a different place. My publisher, Bickenshaw, suddenly became quite a different person. So different, in fact, that I almost waited to be introduced. Agents wrote to me, enclosing little booklets in which were modestly outlined the inestimable advantages conferred by their services. Hundreds of people who had read the book wrote to me. One correspondent accused me of plagiarising an unpublished work of his own. Every photographer in London wrote to me, craving a sitting—at no obligation to myself. Old school fellows I had forgotten wrote to me, saying they weren’t surprised I had written a book because they remembered how jolly good my essays used to be. Scores of people wrote to me saying that their father was exactly like the father in my book. And everyone in the United Kingdom with the name of Trent wrote to me—saying they were distant relatives, and how bad times were with them.
So 77 Potiphar Street was no longer a possible address.
I took a flat. I joined two or three clubs. I went to dinners, parties, country houses. I had a good private income and my appearance was a success. I met all sorts of people—eminent, amusing, influential. And, gradually, I accepted their assumptions about me.
I accepted their assumptions about me. Not one of them was true, not one of them bore any relation to what I was, but I accepted them. How, otherwise, could I meet these people? You lose your background unless you adapt yourself to it. Also, I told myself that all this was temporary. It was amusing to be a celebrity for a year or two. Above all, life had cheated me. Success was a type of revenge. So my real self—the naked, empty Ivor Trent—stood on the bank and watched the successful Ivor Trent swirling round the social vortex.
But although I left Potiphar Street, I kept my rooms there. By now Captain Frazer’s experiment had completely collapsed, so I gave Mrs. Frazer money to save them from bankruptcy. This was not generosity. Instinctively I knew that I could only write in this room overlooking the river. That sounds the merest superstition, but it is nevertheless a fact that I have never been able to work anywhere but here. I have tried again and again—always with the same result.
But there was a deeper reason why I retained these rooms. I knew that I belonged to the nomads who drifted in and out of this house, for I, too, was a rootless person. I, too, had no place in the world. I, too, was a bankrupt—on a very different level, it is true, but a bankrupt none the less.
I did not see Elsa and I did not write to her. When I returned to these rooms (two or three years after the publication of Two Lives and a Destiny) to write my second book, she had gone—and I did not ask Mrs. Frazer if she knew where she was.
I hated her.
That is difficult to explain, but it is essential to explain it.
I had become a man whose external life bore no relation whatever to his interior one. Outwardly, I was a success. Inwardly, I was a failure. I had rebelled against this secret knowledge. I refused to admit this inner emptiness. To do that would be to go into the desert—and wait for a miracle. But I dared not do that.
I rebelled, and the last ten years of my life are the history of that rebellion. My relations with others are incidents in that history. Wrayburn once told me that I had evaded my “spiritual destiny,” and that my relations with others “represented my time-killing activities.” But he did not know how true these statements were, for I deceived even him.
Only I—and Elsa—knew the truth about Ivor Trent. Only she and I knew the real Ivor Trent, the man who was empty and naked—the man who had made a book out of the debris of his life. To others, I was what I appeared to be. So I turned to these others and deserted Elsa.
I turned to them because I was determined to prove to myself that I had power. I would make others acknowledge that power so that it might seem real to me. If they believed in it, I, too, might be able to believe in it.
There was nothing very extraordinary in this decision. How many men are there who, being miserably unhappy at home, devote their finest energies to the creation of a great business in order that outward success shall numb the knowledge of inner failure? Why, what is our civilisation—our pride in “our dominion over Nature”—but one vast conspiracy to escape from the terrible knowledge of our emptiness? More and more we live “outside” ourselves. We blind our eyes with seeing, deafen our ears with hearing. Bigger and bigger grow our buildings, mightier and mightier our cities, in the frenzied hope that outward visible triumphs will so hypnotise us that we shall forget our inward spiritual squalor. Noise, sensation, speed—those are our gods. We, who dare not be silent, dare not think, dare not be still, lest we should see the ghosts we have become.
No, there was nothing extraordinary about my decision to live “outside” myself.
Before the publication of Two Lives and a Destiny, I had no choice. I could have gone into the world, of course, but it is one thing to be “a Mr. Trent” and quite another to be Ivor Trent.
I capitalised my background and went into the world. My novel was dramatised and the play had a considerable success in London and New York. Money surrounded me like an incoming tide. I played the part of a successful person, but, underneath, I knew I had run away from myself. I knew that my activities had no centre: they were mechanical, not organic. I was a ghost in fancy dress.
Still, I went into the world. That is, I became involved in chaos. I knew that the structure of society had collapsed. I knew that only a spiritual miracle could deliver the world from its deepening darkness—just as I knew that only a spiritual miracle could quicken life in me. A façade would not save either of us.
So, by a masterpiece of irony, I did exactly what my father had done. I presented a façade to the world, behind which shivered my empty and naked self.
Everyone accepted this façade as being the man. Everyone believed that I was what I seemed—that I had a forceful, dominating personality, and all the rest of it. I became reckless in my relations with others. I wanted to prove to myself that I had power, and I was determined to prove it.
But there was one person who knew the truth—Elsa. It was why I hated her. She was a nobody, an artist’s model, tramping from studio to studio, but she knew the real Ivor Trent whom I was denying. I never wrote to her and she did not write to me. But she knew. I had told her everything. And the fact that I had deserted her, without a word or a line, was proof conclusive that I dare not seek to justify my present type of existence to her.
She knew—and the knowledge that she knew was agony. While she lived, I should know that my mask was a mask. Her very existence was a subtle form of blackmail.
The better I became known, the greater my “triumphs’’ in the world, or with women, the more intolerable the knowledge became that Elsa was not deceived. She knew that the great Ivor Trent was a ghost; a coward who had abandoned himself and her; a fake, like his father, who deceived others with a façade. She knew—this tuppeny-ha’penny starving model in Chelsea knew my secret. And the fact that she was negligible, in the world’s eyes, only lacerated my pride more deeply. Had she been my “equal” in any way, I could have endured it. But this nobody, in her squalid room!