Journey from the North

Chapter 1

There are people, there are even writers, whose lives were worth recording because they were passed in strange or exciting ways, or involved famous persons, or could be written as the story of a great mind in search of its beliefs. I have a good but not a great mind; my chances of meeting great men have been few and I have not sought them: the men and women who have come nearest slaking my curiosity about human nature have been obscure as well as alive with humours. The humours of the great are usually too well groomed.

What is a record of my life worth—the life of a writer treated with justice in circles where camaraderie, cette plaie mortelle de la lit- térature, is the merciful rule?

Perhaps little, except that as a life it spans three distinct ages: the middle class heyday before 1914, the entre deux guerres, and the present; three ages so disparate that to a person who knows only the third the others are unimaginable. Anyone born before 1900 can examine one civilization as if it were done with—as it is, but for noticing that a few of its ideas and traditions are still feebly active. Indeed, I can excavate two finished stages in society, since I remember sharply the one I rebelled against while continuing to live blindly by more than one of its rooted assumptions: that people of my class do not starve, that reticence in speech, and clean linen, are bare necessities, that books exist to be read. I ought to be able to describe them both.

Possibly I lack the coolness to give a dependable account of them to the ignorant. I can try.

That arrogant half-sarcastic phrase, it can be tried, is one I heard so often in my North Riding childhood that it has become an instinct. I seldom know when I am being led astray by it. It was a servant’s saying, but a northern servant.

The span of my life is even longer than it seems, since its roots are twisted round hundreds of lives passed in the same place. Only a life starting from centuries of familiarity with the same few fields and streets is better than fragmentary. If there is any tenacity in me, any constancy, if there is an I under all the dis- similar I’s seen by those who know or knew me as daughter, as young woman, undisciplined, confident, absurd, as wife, as friend, the debt is owed to obscure men and women born and dying in the same isolated place during hundreds of years. All I could do to destroy the pattern, I have done.

What Pascal, writing about Montaigne, called ’le sot projet qu’il a de se peindre’ is, after all, a book like any other. If it is dull, it will quickly be forgotten. Or, if it is not readable now, when there are people alive able to compare the portrait with the original and find it distorted or a lie, it may become readable when neither they nor I are here to protest.

How far can I hope to give a true account of an animal I know only from the inside? Nothing would have been easier for me than to write one of those charming poetic memoirs which offend no one and leave a pleasant impression of the author. I am trying to do something entirely different. Trying, in short, to eat away a double illusion: the face I show other people, and the illusion I have of myself—by which I live. Can I?

It is true that what one sees from the inside is the seams, the dark tangled roots of feeling and action, which may be just as misleading, as partial, as the charming poeticized version I am trying to reject. But it is a truth—known only to me.

I feel an ineffaceable repugnance to writing about close friends. Of the few people, men and women, I know intimately, I can bring myself to write down only the least intimate facts. This falsifies the record at once. But what can I do? Nothing.

‘The real story of a life would consist in a recital of the experi- ences, few or many, in which the whole self was engaged. The greater part of such a book would be very dull, since as often as not our whole self turns its back contemptuously on the so-called great moments and emotions and engages itself in trivialities, the shape of a particular hill, a road known in infancy, the move- ment of the wind through grass. The things we shall take with us at the last will all be small.’

I wrote this, or something very like it, in a novel published thirty years ago. It is probably true. The pain and ecstasy of youth, the brief happiness, the long uncharted decline, can be summed up in the tune of a once popular waltz, of no merit, or the point in a country lane where the violence and hopelessness of a passion suddenly became obvious, or the moment when a word, a gesture, nothing in themselves, gave the most acute sen- sual pleasure. None of these can be written about.

It will be easy, too, to lose one’s way in an underworld where time is no longer a succession of events, one damned thing after another, but a continuous present in which the dead, and the little I know about them, jostle the ghosts of the living. And where the antique chorus of frogs listened to in March 1935 in Spain is—at the same moment—distending the darkness above a lake in northern New York State fourteen years later.

The first thing I remember is the deck of a ship in sunlight. A lady, her face hidden from me by the parasol in her hand, is there in a low chair. My head, which does not reach above the arm of the chair, aches. I must just have told her so. Without turning her own, she answers, ‘Nonsense. Children don’t have headaches.’

She must have been mistaken. Some indefinite time later I am lying peaceably at the bottom of a crevasse, its walls densely white; two persons, indistinct, are looking over the edge, and one of them says, ‘She’s sinking.’ The ship, I think. That the ship is sinking out there is no business of mine, and doesn’t ruffle me.

My third memory is of a field of marguerites, so long-stemmed, or I at the time so short, that they and I were face to face, eye against incandescent eye. The whiteness seared, dazzled, blinded, a naked seething radiance, whiter than all whiteness, running out of sight.

Since beginning this book—that is, yesterday, Friday, the 11th of August 1961, the day of the new moon—I have realized what most intelligent people doubtless knew already: in any life a few, very few, key images turn up again and again, recognizable even though deformed by the changed light or the angle at which they reappear. This fierce whiteness is one of mine.

Another is the sound, a middling deep note, of the Whitby bell-buoy, ringing a mile off-shore, clearly audible at night or at any time when the wind blew off the sea.

And another sound, made, this one, by the fishermen’s chil- dren when I was very young: it was like the screech of gulls—Ah- wa-a-ah!—piercing, barely human, half summons, half warning. You could believe that every ship in the world was casting off at once. It was years before I knew enough to interpret it as Away! In due course I shall come on the other two or three of these primitive or underworld images, voices out of sleep, out of a lost harbour, which are mine. They may indeed be the only things I ever, in the positive sense of the word, hear or see.

The voyage on which I so nearly died was one of my earliest, if not the first. It was certainly not my mother’s first: in those days before human existence got out of hand, a sea-captain had the right to take his wife with him on any voyage, even as far as the River Plate or the Far East. She knew one or two older women, childless, who had no shore home; all they possessed, their clothes, family photographs, curling-tongs, shared the cap- tain’s cabin next the chart-room with his clothing and the ship’s papers. She, I believe, envied these freed women while barely approving of them: life in a house of her own often bored her.

So long as she had only one child, she could go away easily, joining the ship in an English port or at Le Havre or Flushing. The first of these departures that I remember was in the early light; I see clearly the half-dark kitchen and taste the end crust of the loaf, soaked in scaldingly hot tea, she had given me: it was yeasty and exquisite. Were we going to Greenock, Harwich for Antwerp, Swansea? Once, in the last port, directed to it by the man in the ticket-office of the dock station, she and I found our- selves in a small hotel, in a bedroom immediately behind the bar, which was full of lascars. It was too late to seek farther, and while I slept in my clothes my mother spent the night sitting on the trunk she had dragged across the door.

The days at sea in a less than 3,000-ton ship were crushingly long and boring—it would not have entered anyone’s head to amuse me—but the ports … ah!

Antwerp: tall yellow-faced houses behind a quay; the Place Verte with its flower-women; the rue de la Meir; the open trams; the zoo gardens at night, a band playing to sedately strolling families, the tall schoolboys in girlish socks and blouses, ridicu- lously bare-legged; the superb glove shop; the rough knife-edged grass of the ramparts; the open carriage clip-clopping us back to the docks.

It was Antwerp that gave me my first notion of an art. In a shop-window of the rue de la Meir there was a large painting of a garden, with two half-embraced figures in the foreground. It seized on my imagination and became for a few weeks my idea of sensual bliss. This had nothing to do with its merits as a paint- ing, which doubtless did not exist.

One day when we came ashore—off the Saxon Prince?—the wharf was strewn with black brittle husks from some outlandish cargo; a man waiting to come aboard told us that Queen Victo- ria had died, news that made my mother pull a sorrowful face. So far as I knew, I had never heard of the woman, but a sense of her importance and the strange husks underfoot started up in me such a crazy excitement that to this day voyages and death resemble each other in my mind as one harbour is like another in another island.

So many journeys, begun before memory, so many half- obliterated departures, how could they fail to ruin my life?

Its pattern, if the word can be used of such a coil, was set by them at the start.

The impulse to go away has disturbed, delighted, mocked me, and is to blame for my failure to settle anywhere. I left one place with anguish, leaving behind half my soul, the less indifferent half: none of the many others I have lived in keep more than a thin paring of it, thinner and less persistent than the shadow I catch sight of in Bordeaux or Antwerp of my mother, pausing to stare in a shop-window at a hat she would buy if she could barely afford it, and were less arrogantly afraid of the foreign sales- woman: in those days she was an elegante—the word is not used now, but it fitted her—coveting finely simple dresses and beauti- ful gloves. I doubt whether she was content anywhere—any more than I am. I even doubt whether she felt the pleasure I rate higher than any other, that of being in a foreign town for the first time, free of its probably mediocre streets and cafés, its sounds, and the silence which encloses the stranger walking about in it, obliged to no one for her happiness.

The restlessness in my nerves and senses comes to me through her. Where did she get it? From sea-going ancestors, from the North Sea, from the stones themselves of the little port (already able in the seventh century to build a parish church and an Abbey to which the body of St Edwin, first Christian king of Northumbria, was brought at the end of the century: in the ninth, the Danes burned both church and Abbey), with its mem- ories of loss, flight, violence?

Restless, adrift from the start, spiritually clumsy and impru- dent, can I make sense of my life? Has it a meaning? If I can find the courage to stare coldly at its ghosts (including my own past selves, clumsy ungovernable young idiots), and as coldly at the moments of happiness as at griefs, blunders, sins, humiliating failures, will the meaning, if there is a meaning, emerge?

It can be tried. I am too old to be mortified by a failure.

And in a world so sharply menaced by destruction as ours, there is something friendly in the idea of going on gossiping to the last minute—if it is no more than to call a friend’s attention to the exquisite yellow of a dying leaf or to ask for news of a child, the one who came last year to stay, and tethered an imagi- nary horse in every room in the house.