Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [82]
That incident sums up something in Charles for me.
I must say at this point that our relations were formalised by the time we were nine in this way: Charles was the original eccentric oddball, and Jeremy was the solid dependable one. I’ve always played along with it. I’m stuck with it, as it were. But when I say to Charles and to others that what I admire is his originality and his daringness of thought, and so on, that is not the point at all. For in fact there is something too careless, almost sloppy, about his “originality.” I suppose he is a bit of an anarchist. Of course his experience has tended to make him one.
His father was in business and did badly in the slump. Charles started work, while I went to University. He did every variety of job, and there was talk of his going off to the Spanish Civil War, but he didn’t. The war started and he joined up at once. I was flying throughout the war, and Charles was in infantry, and then with Tanks. We met once or twice. I knew a bit of what he was up to, through mutual friends. He refused a commission, more than once. This was so like him. I asked him why, and he began roaring with laughter and said he had refused to annoy people. I found it then, and find it now—affected. And unconvincing. I told him so. I could say that “this caused ill-feeling” but as I was about to write that, I realised that it might have caused ill-feeling in me, but I don’t think in Charles. We did not quarrel, though I’ll acknowledge that I would have liked to quarrel—at last.
When the war ended, Charles went back to University. This he got through well and easily. He has a not uncommon facility—a memory that is really almost photographic. For an examination he will study day and night for the month beforehand, get phenomenal marks—and will have forgotten most of it three months later. He says this of himself.
Very well. By the time he was ready for a job, I had been lecturing four or five years. I was in a position to pull strings or at least put a friendly oar in. There were a dozen applicants for the post and Charles was the youngest, and least experienced. Well, he got the post and through me—but that is not the point. Which is this. In the crisis week, when things hung in the balance, he came to visit me. He was scruffy, untidy, a bit flamboyant—all this as usual. Nothing terrible—not like our present students, far from that level of exhibitionism, but pretty irritating. I told him that he had to take his appearance more seriously, and that he was putting me in a difficult position. He listened, didn’t say much. Next time I saw him, he had got the post, and—he was looking like me. I must explain that. We are physically different, but I have some mannerisms. Not that I knew of them until Charles showed me them! He had equipped himself with an old jacket of mine—asked my wife for it, she was throwing it away. He had acquired a pipe, which he had never smoked before, and he got his hair cut like mine. When I first clapped my eyes on this, I thought it was a monstrous joke. But not at all. You’d expect this to be a joke between us perhaps? Or at least an issue? No, it was not mentioned for a long time. Yet everyone noticed it, commented. When I came into a room, or saw him across a street it was like seeing a monstrous caricature of myself.
When someone did finally mention it (my wife, as it happened), and I looked at him, hoping for some comment, he merely nodded, rather impatiently, but not very. With a sort of small frown, as if to say: Oh that, what a detail.
I suppose it may strike you as a detail, too. But I may add that now, years later, people tend to think that it is I who have copied Charles, modelled myself on him. And that fact says everything about how we are both judged. And yes, it rankles.
Now an episode from last summer. It so happened that my wife and I were having a stormy patch. I had been overworking and so had she. We had agreed to spend the summer apart. We knew we