The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [265]
Perhaps it is a sign of age that I am busy all day without really doing anything. This diary has trailed on, it is company for me, an illusion of occupation. I now feel uneasily that before I end it I ought to offer some sort of reflective summing up of—of what? I shrink from this. There is so much pain. I have not recorded the pain.
What an egoist I must seem in the preceding pages. But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? There are spiritual beings, perhaps James was one, but there are no saints.
Well, I will try to reflect, but not today. When this is all done, will I ever write anything else? The story of Clement? Or that book about the theatre that my friends kindly profess to think so necessary? Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world.
A few letters have arrived for James but they are all from scholars. It appears that my cousin was quite a well-known orientalist who corresponded with learned men all over the world. I have sent the letters on to a man at the British Museum who rang me up asking about the fate of James’s books. I asked the BM man round to look at the books and he came yesterday. When he saw all the stuff in the flat he nearly fainted with emotion and cupidity.
I cannot think what to do about James’s poems. Yes, James’s POEMS! I think I have not mentioned these before! So James did, in some sense at any rate, do what he said he would do: join the army and become a poet. There, in the otherwise bare top drawer of this desk, they were, and indeed there they are: all neatly typed out and filling several large looseleaf books. A ‘personal relic’ no doubt, but with no directions, no covering letter. Toby Ellesmere, who, as I think I mentioned, is now a publisher, has got wind of their existence and has rung up about them twice. Perhaps James mentioned them to him sometime. He has never seen them, and I have not shown them to him. In fact I cannot bring myself to look at them, even to glance at them, for fear that they should turn out to be embarrassingly bad! I had almost rather destroy them unread.
It occurs to me that the only lines of poetry I ever heard James quoting, and he quoted them often, were Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not!
Of course this chattering diary is a façade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretences are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
I have had another letter from Angie, sending another photo and repeating her kind offer.
Gradually autumn is taking charge of London. It is remarkable how early it seems to arrive. The leaves of the plane trees, yellow and red and brightly spotted, appear like little messages stuck upon the damp pavements. Cox’s Orange Pippins are to be found in the shops. I am storing them on the top shelf of my larder. I walk down the street to the embankment every morning and evening and see the turbulent skies over the august towers of Battersea Power Station, and the eternal drama of the Thames rising and falling. I wait. Peregrine is to receive some sort of award for his services to peace. Rosina has gone to America on a job. I have had lunch with Rosemary, with Miss Kaufman, with poor old Fabian, with a frenetic young actor called Erasmus Blick. Of course I have not troubled to record that I am constantly badgered by theatre people to return