So it came to me quite suddenly, lifting me from the despondency into which I had fallen, coming clearly out of a mist as though it had always been, that I must write - that writing was my thing.
Now that I was not stifled in that atmosphere of home, nor smothered by his presence, his will over mine, his silence compelling me all the time - it was my duty, now that my father was distinct from me and I no longer his rebellious shadow, now that I had learnt, however humbly, however foolishly, something of life other than myself - I would shake clear of lethargy, and make supreme above everything, untouched, pure, coming from within - this business of writing.
I would not write because I was expected to; I would write because I must. Because it was the strongest thing, and I wanted to be swept away by it to the exclusion of everything else.
Then I went down from the Sacré-Cœur, and the grey had faded now and darkness come, and the cafés and restaurants were open and ablaze with light in the Place Pigalle, men and women crowding the pavements, the men with their faces nipped from the cold, the women drawing their coats close, standing in the cafés by the glowing braziers, and a smell of steaming chestnuts filling the air.
I went away down to my funny small room above a coiffeur in the Faubourg Montmartre, where I had lived since the autumn, and I lit the gas and drew my chair up to the bed that stood for a table, and I kept my coat on because of the cold.
Then I dipped my pen in the bottle of mauve ink I had borrowed from the coiffeur, and spread out two sheets of paper before me that I had also borrowed - and I thought hungrily of the supper that awaited me, bread and sausage, Gruyère cheese and a Camel cigarette, and so, with my old hate gone and a new hope risen, I sat there and wrote a letter to my father.
It was difficult because I had never approached him with any intimacy before. I had been a member of his household, subservient to him; he had accepted me as a customary part of his daily life, aside from his writing, as a piece of furniture, belonging to the place, just a child and then a boy, but holding no inner life of my own, being only of importance because I was his son. Never had there been any words of meaning between us, no moments alone, no consciousness of our relationship, until that last day when I had flung my poems on to the desk before him, and even then no betrayal of what he felt towards me, only the question in his eyes, his face upturned to me. So I had to begin as one stranger to another, ignored, blundering, at a loss for words, unable to touch him by a call for sympathy, feeling with each stab of the pen that it was impossible ever to explain away the storing up of those years of anguish and discontent, culminating in that fevered declaration in the library. Nor could I bring myself back to the reality of that time. I was different, I did not feel it any more. There had been ships since then, and riding over the mountains, and Jake. As I wrote I could not make them come true, the sensations of the old days. It read like a cold plain statement of facts; there was no depth behind it. I could not explain Jake either, my father would not understand. I could not say: ‘I met a fellow called Jake and he made me see things differently. He’s dead now. . . .’ What had my father got to do with Jake? It was useless telling him about that.
Nor would I prostrate myself, be humble, be ashamed; it was not forgiveness I asked for; this new state of mine was not a state of being sorry; it was a definite appeal for understanding, an attempt for him to grasp my point of view, and above all for him to share with me my sudden cherished comprehension of writing.
I said to him: ‘I don’t know whether you ever expected anything much from me. I don’t know whether I was important enough to you to become a disappointment. When I left home you may not even have been aware that I was gone. But in spite of the fact that we never knew one another I have something within me that belongs to you, that you have given to me without your conscious knowledge, and I long - beyond anything in the world - for you to tell me that you understand. However indifferent or antagonistic we may feel, we can’t help being part of one another, you and I. Maybe creating me was a little thing, unimportant, something of a mistake, but I’m alive as much as any of your poems are alive; I came from you, and my body is yours, and my blood, and even though you never realized it, you let me grow from a child into a boy blighted in some hopeless inexplicable manner because of your own glamour. I had your greatness and your brilliance thrust upon me, and I was left untended and alone, lost in my personal inferiority, made wretched by the sense of it, loathing mediocrity because I was your son. Often I wished you dead, often I wished you to be a separate distinct personality that I could cherish stories of, somebody in a photograph of whom I could build up little fancies, little dreams, and smile, hugging my knees, when I listened to the things you had done, told me by my Mother, a different Mother - more gentle, more tender - who would see in my face the memory that was you.
‘And I would say to myself: “He was like me, he would have understood.” But instead of this you were alive, you came and went about the house, and I was only a boy too shy to speak, so that from the beginning until the end our lives were not bound together as in the depths of me I longed and prayed for, and you were not my father and I was not your son.
‘I missed all the joy that goes to make up the lives of other boys; I missed you not carrying me on your shoulders as a child, nor taking my hand when I was afraid, not laughing up at me from the ground as I climbed a tree or found a bird’s nest, not throwing a ball to me across a field, not leaning with your hand on my shoulder. I missed not being able to run and tell you things, not racing over the lawn and dragging at you, pulling your arm excitedly, wanting to show you something; above all, I missed you as I grew older, missed not having you as a companion, not sitting alone with you, listening as you talked, and then you smiling at me, suggesting what I should do with my life, connecting me with you, giving me the warmth of your personality and the blessed security that we were part of one another, and you understood.
‘It hurt me to be so terribly proud of you, and for you never to know and never to care; it hurt me that I could not ever say with any truth or meaning: “My father and I - my father and I . . .”’
As I read over these words it seemed to me that they sounded like little senseless protestations, coming too late, unable to change all that had happened, and I felt he would skip over them restlessly, rather bored, thinking to himself: ‘What is all this about? I suppose he wants some money.’ So I broke off and went on to tell him about my writing.
‘Up till now I’ve existed more by good luck than anything else, I’ve knocked about, I’ve mixed with people and I’ve learnt things, and I know now that all that isn’t any good to me any more, that I’ve got to write. I believe that if I stay here in Paris it will come to me and I’ll give every ounce of energy to it I possess. I won’t tire, I won’t slacken. A fellow I knew - he’s dead now - said that if I ever wanted a thing enough, if I gave myself up to it entirely, I’d get it and I’d be all right. I think he knew me better than I did. It’s not going to be hard starting if I feel you know about it and you understand.
‘When you get this, and if you have not put me right away from your mind, would you send me a letter and tell me so? It would mean so much to me, so much. . . . I can live ridiculously cheaply in Montparnasse, but if you would write me a letter, that is what I ask for, beyond anything, so that I shall know at last that we are not apart from one another, you and I.’
After this the blank space, the hopeless search for words, and then giving it up, and writing down the childish conventional ending, so formal it sounded, so cold - ‘Please give my love to Mother. I hope you are both fit, and everything is all right. - RICHARD.’
I posted the letter that evening; it was nine-thirty by the time I had finished, and I went out with it at once to catch the last post. Then I came back and ate my supper. It was a Tuesday, and I calculated that my father would not receive the letter until the Thursday morning, down in the country. He would probably take a day to think it over. Then, supposing he wro
te on Friday, catching the afternoon post, which would leave Lessington at five-thirty - that would mean the letter would travel Saturday - no, I did not think it was possible to expect an answer before Sunday. Sunday at the very earliest, probably Monday. I would have to hang around for five days with nothing to do. In my mind I would travel with the letter, cross the Channel with it, lie beside it in the van from Paddington, watch it sorted in the Post Office at Lessington, rest in the postman’s bag as he bicycled along the hard main road and turned in at the drive by the Lodge gates.
I wished now that I had not sent it; I wished that I was somebody else and that it had not anything to do with me.
I remembered a line I might have crossed out, I remembered a sentence I could have phrased better. And, anyway, I had not said what I had wanted to say.
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday passed, hopeless days when I pretended to myself I did not mind; I had made too much of a thing, and on Friday afternoon I walked very hard in the Bois, to Boulogne and back; it was cold, and I could not keep warm any other way. And when I got home to my room in the Faubourg Montmartre, Friday evening, I went upstairs and opened the door, and there was a type-written envelope pushed under the door, lying just inside.
I took it in my hands and went over to the window, and stood for a few moments, not doing anything. Then I lit the gas and sat down on the bed and tore open the envelope.
I pulled out one slip of folded paper. It was a cheque for five hundred pounds.There was not any letter. I laid the cheque aside, and looked once more into the envelope to see if I had been mistaken. No, there was not any letter. I went on sitting there with the empty envelope in my hands.
3
I found a room in the Rue du Cherche-Midi. It was a fair size, and heated, not badly fitted up, at the top of the building, too, and I could put a chair and table by the window and look out over Paris.
There was a jeweller on one side of the house and a dealer in antiques on the other.
The Rue du Cherche-Midi is one of the longest streets in Paris; my end of it opened out into the Boulevard Montparnasse, so that I was back in the quarter I liked and close to my cafés.
I gave myself time to settle down and to look around and to buy one or two things. I had been going about looking like a tramp all the autumn, and now I tried to force myself to regular working hours, breaking off for meals and intervals of rest, but not at stated times, going out and eating only when I felt hungry, throwing myself on my bed and sleeping only when my brain seemed to close up like a shutter, and it was impossible to let anything through. This happened often, of course. I found it incredibly hard to concentrate, and I would sit at my table beside the window with a sheet of paper before me, something hammering at the back of my mind, struggling for release, and then my will refusing to give way, my thoughts straying, wandering in the air, following some trend of their own which I could not control. At other times words seemed to flow from me, effortless, tripping over themselves, and my pen tore across the paper as though it were guided by mechanical means, and I would cover sheets with this scribbling; then, flushed and excited, I would read over what I had written, to find it empty of meaning, spiritless, uninspired, not even the sentences hanging together, the very phrases clumsy and ill-framed, the dialogue stilted and unnatural, and most of what was written appearing to me in my cooler moments as unnecessary and superfluous to the main theme. It was cold too, sitting still, the chauffage central being poor at most times. I never sat without a coat with the window tightly closed, and my limbs would go numb and my fingers stiffen, so that I made the cold an excuse for leaving the room, and, going out into the street, crossing to the Boulevard Montparnasse, and dropping inside a café for something to eat or to drink.
I would tell myself that this business of sitting in a café saved me from becoming used and stale, that the change of atmosphere and the view of people coming and going opened and cleaned some recess of my mind, so that afterwards I could go back refreshed, stimulated, eager to work for several hours at a stretch; but somehow deep down I knew this to be false. I knew I would return to my room with my brain much the same as it had been before, only a little more distracted, a little more capable than ever of making pictures of what I had seen; pictures of a man sitting alone with an empty glass in front of him; a girl in a red hat looking over her shoulder, two Hungarians speaking with their hands, and these things were not any good to me and my writing; they were only solitary pictures, interesting to me alone. They were not of the slightest value; they carried me away to no purpose. I said that winter was a bad time, that it was hopeless to expect my mind to concentrate when my body was cold. Paris was merciless in winter, the air was stiff and harsh as though a frozen breath had blown from heaven upon the city, leaving it quite still, wrapped in a hard glaze, the very solidity of the cold penetrating the quivering frame of my body. I would come out of a café and stand at the edge of the pavement waiting for the traffic to pass, with my shoulders hunched and my chest caved in, the expression of my face set in deep lines, immobile and seared, and then walk swiftly, my head bent, the cold forcing its way within me, creating a vivid sense of pain. There was something cheerless and forbidding about my room in the Rue du Cherche-Midi; it seemed warm at first only because of the comparison with the temperature outside, and then after a little while the first temporary warmth would dissolve into a chill airlessness, and I would sit there with my coat on, my mind numbed, my body too, and my spirits at zero. The cafés were kind, though, the glow sent forth by the hot braziers, the relief given by a strip of matting after the frozen sting of a pavement. The comfort of other people’s body-heat, all of us crowded together, and voices, and the smell of food; being hungry and tearing at the crisp burnt bread, spreading a spot of hard butter, the genial satisfaction of meat, covered in a strong sauce, yellow and steaming, and then the potency of Gruyère cheese, the gulping of bitter coffee, and breathing into my lungs the nearness of the people, the bustle, the clatter, the haze of cigarettes. There was not anything like this, the satisfying of hunger. It seemed to be the only thing that kept the soul alive. I had to walk, too, to bring some life into my body. I would fight against the timidity of the first encounter with the icy breath of the still streets, and force myself to stand straight, not bent and cowed with cracked lips and watery eyes; then I would get a tram from St-Séverin which took me to Boulogne, and walk like a madman along the deserted allées in the Bois, passed sometimes by horsemen, blue with the cold, their horses stamping on the stiff sand, the breath coming from their nostrils like a wreath of thin smoke.
In February the Seine was frozen, great cakes of ice floated on the surface of the water, blocked together, swirling majestically in the current of a stream, and it looked like the breaking up of an Arctic river, white and relentless, the ice lumps cracking and tossing against each other in strange confusion.
There was a certain exhilaration in this, that Paris should be in the grip of such a thing, the slow procession of crushed ice on the surface of the Seine. It was as if the idea of it had been thrown on to a vast canvas, a splash of grey and white, and the picture of it remained with me in the cramped space of my room, making me forget about the cold, remembering only the magnificence and strength of winter that burst unhindered, scornful of humanity, caring not at all. When the thaw came the streets ran with water, the rain falling from the leaden sky like a sheet aslant, spattering on to the cobbled stones, twisting round corners in a gust of wind, and a thousand-odd lights were reflected in the shining puddles, the striped blinds of a café, the black skirt of a priest, the rain dripping from a spout on to his broad hat, the purple coat of a woman bent under an umbrella. One day a watery sun showed itself for a few hours, and there was a break in the sky as large as a man’s head, a little patch of pale blue, and next day I was awakened by a bird singing, and a streak of sun making a pattern on the floor, and when I went out there was a woman at the corner of the street in a green shawl selling oranges, a girl without a
hat running in a check dress with a basket on her arm; the doors of the cafés were open, letting in the fresh clean air, and the tight black buds on a tree had loosened during the night, softened and were round, little shoots of green coming into view, curling like feathers.
People did not hurry any more; they were no longer nipped and strained, they wandered along the boulevards looking into the windows, they sat down outside the cafés and read a paper, somebody laughed, somebody whistled, and trams flashed past bright in the sun, a child bowled a hoop followed by a little barking dog, and a girl strolled on the arm of a young man, a new blue hat on her head.
Then I knew that the old winter was gone, and this was a breath of something new, sparkling and dancing in the air. I wanted to capture it somehow and hold it close, this trembling joyous thing infinitely precious, and I went on walking with no purpose, listening to the clash of bells from a church as they struck midi, a troop of boys running from school, their satchels slung over their shoulders, girls chattering, linking arms.
White clouds were spun in the sky, and the fresh wet streets echoed the blue and the golden spots from the sun. An old man stood by a kiosk with a straw hat and a cane, and a little red flower in his buttonhole. Surely a most ridiculous old man.There was a sparrow at his feet, hopping about, nosing for crumbs, absurdly expectant, and from a window above a café a woman leant shaking a rug, pausing an instant looking along the street, her dark hair caught in a sudden frame of light. Then she turned away, back into the room, and the old man sauntered across the street, swinging his cane, his hat on the back of his head, and the sparrow lifted his wings suddenly and rose into the air, fluttering, dipping, losing himself above the roofs and was gone.
I strolled along with my hands in my pockets, smiling for no reason, singing a song.
I knew now that I should be able to write, that the words I had already written would count for nothing, would pass by as though they had never been, and that when I went into my room I should throw open the window and let this fresh sweet air lighten the dull walls, and I would sit down with a new strength, that had not as yet been part of me, rising from within, powerful, beautiful and true. I would work as I had never worked before, purified, possessed, a light coming to me, breaking through the dark and dusty channels of my mind.