The Secret History - Donna Tartt [250]
“No, I don’t think so.”
He was startled by the gloom in my voice.
“But what’s the matter?” he said shrilly. “You got it, didn’t you? It’s okay. Everything’s all right now. Isn’t it?”
I was staring out the car window, at the window of Julian’s office.
“No,” I said, “no, I don’t really think that it is.”
Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: “One of Julian’s most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light.” And under it, in a different ink, “maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well (?)”
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.
Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched onto young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality or why—even in the light of subsequent events—I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.
But even in fairy tales, these kindly old gentlemen with their fascinating offers are not always what they seem to be. That should not be a particularly difficult truth for me to accept at this point but for some reason it is. More than anything I wish I could say that Julian’s face crumbled when he heard what we had done. I wish I could say that he put his head on the table and wept, wept for Bunny, wept for us, wept for the wrong turns and the life wasted: wept for himself, for being so blind, for having over and over again refused to see.
And the thing is, I had a strong temptation to say he had done these things anyway, though it wasn’t at all the truth.
George Orwell—a keen observer of what lay behind the glitter of constructed facades, social and otherwise—had met Julian on several occasions, and had not liked him. To a friend he wrote: “Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his ‘Asiatic serenity’ is, I think, a mask for great coldness. The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror. Acton”—this, apparently, Harold Acton, who was also in Paris then and a friend to both Orwell and Julian—“disagrees. But I think he is not a man to be trusted.”
I have thought a great deal about this passage, also about a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny. “Y’know,” he said, “Julian is like one of those people that’ll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.” This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian’s personality. It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. “Julian,” he said curtly, “will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.”
When I disagreed—strenuously—and asked what was wrong with