Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [87]
I heard from an old school chum yesterday that you are going about saying that the classics are a load of old rope and all current teaching absolutely ropy, and that no one understands what it was all really about. Except, of course, you.
Congratulations. Oh congratulations. I’m not surprised that you’ve lost your voice—so a little bird tells me? and can’t utter!
I’ve told you, you are preposterous.
With hate. I mean it.
CONSTANCE
DEAR DOCTOR X,
I can answer your question very easily: yes, Charles Watkins did come to see me in the middle of August last. It was late one night. I think a Wednesday, but I can’t really remember, I am afraid.
Yours truly,
ROSEMARY BAINES
DEAR DOCTOR Y,
After I posted my letter—two letters, actually—I remembered something about Charles that perhaps you should know.
It is about the last war. Of course to me it is rather old hat, but almost from the start of knowing Charles really well I thought that the last war hadn’t done him much good. I once met a friend of Charles (with Charles) who said that Charles once said to him that he—that is, Charles—had decided early in the war that he wouldn’t survive it. He was in danger a lot. His friends, that is, the men he was fighting with, were all killed off around him, twice. He was the only one left alive in a group of buddies, twice. Once in North Africa and once in Italy. When he reached the end of the war he could not believe he was still alive. He had to learn how to believe that he was going to live, said this man. Whose name is Miles Bovey. I’ll put in the address for you because perhaps you should ask him. He said that Charles had a long stretch at the end of the war when he did not want to begin living. He was drinking then. So Miles said but I have never seen Charles drink more than usually. Then Charles went back to University. Charles once said something to me that I have remembered. He said that ever since the war he couldn’t believe that people really found important the things they said they found important. He said he had had to learn to “play little games.” He said Miles Bovey was “the only person who ever really understood me.” I asked him what little games and he said “the whole damned boiling.” Needless to say, I said: Love, too? I don’t remember what he said to that.
Yours sincerely,
CONSTANCE MAYNE
DEAR DOCTOR Y,
Thank you for your kind and explanatory letter. It was not possible to gather very much from Doctor X’s letter.
Yes, I suppose one could say that Charles Watkins was “not himself” that evening, but you must remember my knowledge of him to that date was confined to hearing him lecture, and some remarks about him by mutual friends.
I can’t tell you if that lecture was important to him. It was certainly important to me. I wrote him a long letter telling him it was important and why. Perhaps writing it was a mistake, but looking back I don’t regret it. We sometimes have to take the chance of embarrassing people by claiming more than they want to give—or can. My letter was a claim. Of course I knew it was. You may ask: what did I say in it? but to answer that would mean writing the same letter. Suffice it to say that I heard him lecture, and things he said started me thinking in a new way. Or experiencing in a new way. Of course not in any dramatic exterior way. I did not get an answer to my letter. I thought once or twice of writing again, in case the first letter had not reached him, but there was no reason to suppose it had not. I concluded that my letter had been tactless, or perhaps ill-timed, and that I would not hear at all from him.
But I was sitting that evening in a little Greek restaurant in Gower Street where I go fairly often. Frederick Larson was with me—the archeologist. Suddenly Charles walked in and sat down with us saying: I thought I would find you here.
This was not nearly as odd as it looks. For one thing he knew where I lived, for he had received