My Father and Myself (12 page)

All this tittering and gloating in the lavatories of sex belonged, then, in my thought to the same compensatory category as an actual London lavatory about which my father used to chuckle. This lavatory, said he, was very popular because there were mirrors in the urinals so placed that stout old gentlemen like himself were able to view and admire their own “tools,” otherwise out of sight beneath the bulge of their bellies.

I HAD TEN years in which to get to know my father, that is to say as man to man: 1919 to 1929, the year of his death, and I was at home in Richmond for only a portion of that period. Soon after my repatriation, in almost skeletal shape, for I had nearly succumbed in Switzerland to the Spanish
grippe
and was still convalescing there when the war ended, I studied with a crammer for Little-go, in which I had failed in 1914, defeated by Paley's
Evidences of Christianity
. Easements were now granted to those whose education the war had interrupted; I passed muster and went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1919.

After four years of active service and incarceration and at the age of twenty-three I did not enjoy it much, though why I should begin my sentence like that as if I were providing reasons for discontent I don't know. Throughout my time there I lived in digs in Bridge Street; I believe I did eventually have the chance of rooms in my college, Magdalene, and did not bother to take them. Had I done so, perhaps I should have a stronger sense of having belonged to the place. As it is, I recollect very little about my Cambridge years. I felt unsettled, restless, purposeless; I wasted my time. For some reason, or no reason— how the extraordinary choice came to be made I can't recall—I took up the study of Law with the notion of becoming a barrister. My father, who already cherished the highest and proudest opinion of my mental abilities (he used to say that I could always do better than anyone else whatever I set my mind to), enthusiastically paid my dues at the Inner Temple and boasted among his friends that the future of the Woolsack was assured. In fact reading Law, dry though it was, did not entirely bore me, I was interested in the criminal side of it, and even labored through immense tomes such as Williams on
Real Property
, Williams on
Torts
, with intelligence and was well thought of by my tutor. But my mind was only partly engaged and the confidence in myself I did not ever share with my father began to fail; I was far too slow-witted and ruminative a man, it seemed to me, to make a successful barrister, I took only half my tripos in Law, idly turning over for the rest to English Literature—a subject we can all study for ourselves in our spare time without the need for academic instruction. Throughout my school days and Army days I had written verse; I continued to do so in Cambridge and some of it found publication in one or two periodicals and in a volume called
Poems by Four Authors
_;
a three-act play,
The Prisoners of War
, which I had written in Switzerland and completely recast at home before I went up, was thought to be unproducible and lay in a drawer. I emerged from Cambridge therefore with an inglorious BA degree, a handful of verses, and some lifelong friends.

Vacations had been spent with my parents in Richmond, where I had a bedroom and a large pleasant study lined with books at the top of the house. When I came down in the spring of 1921, and when I was not travelling abroad, I lived there for two or three years until I started to establish myself in various parts of London. I was now set to be a writer, and my Father no doubt made an easy displacement of the Lord Chancellor for the Poet Laureate. My study was understood to be private ground where the Great Mind could meditate undisturbed. But write I could not and during this immediate post-Cambridge period that I spent at home I became more and more fretful and frustrated, more and more persecuted—though the only person who persecuted me was myself. I had every material comfort; my sister bequeathed me her car when she went off to Panama to engage herself to an American businessman whom she married in 1926; my father was giving me an allowance of £350 a year, a substantial sum in those days; he never interfered with me in any way and seldom asked questions. His feeling for me may be seen in a short letter he wrote me during my last term at Cambridge:

No son could ever have received from his father a sweeter letter than that; how saddening it is to read it now. The very boundlessness of his faith in me contributed, as time went on, to my anxiety. For I could not write, and if he did ask questions on his return from his office in the evenings: “Well, old boy, what have you been doing today?” I felt ashamed and evasive, for I had done nothing; if he did
not
ask questions, I was equally worried by his silence: did he think me a “loafer?” This, as I have said, was one of his favorite words of contempt for idle, shiftless people, and although I don't now believe he ever applied it in his thoughts to me, I applied it in what I feared to be his thoughts to myself. Had I known then that he had been something of a loafer in his own youth, down at The Cell Farm and throughout his connection with the Burckhardts I daresay I should have felt better, but my knowledge of his past life at the time was of the sketchiest. As it was I lived in a constant state of restlessness and self-consciousness. Much was expected of me, nothing was accomplished. I kept desultory notebooks in which I jotted down ideas for works that never got written, I tried my hand at short stories, macabre and in the most clotted manner of Henry James, I began a verse-play about Galeazzo Maria Sforza, a fifteenth-century Milanese despot who was eventually assassinated by two young friends in the cathedral porch for his perversions and abominable cruelties. But I seemed unable to concentrate and got hopelessly stuck in everything I attempted. Trips abroad did nothing to stimulate creative thought. I went to Jamaica on one of my father's boats, travelling
en prince
with a Cambridge friend of mine; I visited France, Italy, Jugoslavia; I spent five months in India (1923–1924) as companion to a maharajah and brought back a journal of my stay; whenever I was home again my neuroses returned. I remember that when I reached our front door on my return from India and was about to insert my key in the lock, I suddenly thought, “Oh hell! What am I doing? I could have stayed longer in India had I wished. What on earth have I come back for?”

It would be false, however, to give the impression that I was entirely miserable. I enjoyed, I am sure, a good deal of my life. But there was always, underlying everything, this fret in my mind about not knowing where I was going, not being able to get on. I felt guilty. I felt guilty when I spoke unkindly to my mother for tapping timidly upon my sacred study door as she sometimes did, though she interrupted nothing, for there was nothing to interrupt. I felt guilty at lying abed in the morning when my father went off to his office at eight, and in the evening, when he wanted his game of bridge and I was needed for a fourth, I felt trapped. I had spent a good deal of my captivity in Germany and Switzerland playing cards to pass the time and had become something of an expert; now that I was “free” I wished never to see a card again. I often played grudgingly, therefore, or even rebelled, depriving my father of his game and afterwards feeling a cad for having done so. I did not discuss my troubles with him, I had other and intimate friends, intellectuals like myself, in whom I confided, but if he did not actually realize what was going on, that I was getting nowhere with my self-appointed tasks, he saw I was discontented and bored, as my sister also, when she was on the scene, was discontented and bored, and this saddened him I am sure, it saddened him that in spite of all the advantages he had afforded us, advantages which, in his own upbringing, he had gone without, expensive education, money, freedom, leisure, we should seem at odds with this “wonderful old world.”

There was, in fact, an extra awkwardness in the way of my consulting him, had I ever wanted to do so; I had an uneasy feeling that he was rather hoping I would decide to join him in his business in place of my dead brother. Indeed, should I not actually offer myself, since I seemed unable to do anything else, to this important, proud concern, with its large fleet of steamers, which he had built up out of nothing, and in which the sons of his partner and colleagues were already being enrolled? He would be pleased if I did, no doubt. Yet he never, by so much as a hint, sought to influence me to such a course; the worry lay entirely in my own nervous anxiety. In fact I recall that someone else suggested such a solution while we were at table: “Why don't you take a job with your Dad?” and he saved my face by answering off-handedly for me, “Joe isn't interested in bananas.” The only time he ever mentioned the matter, so far as I remember, was when I joined the BBC in 1928, at the invitation of the Talks Department (my unmarketable play had by then been published and produced, and I was a “coming” man) on a salary of £350 a year; he then said mildly, thinking only of the cash, that if I'd ever thought of entering Elders and Fyffes I would have been started off at twice that figure. However, I never seriously thought of offering myself to him; I disliked his partner, Arthur Stockley, and despised jobs. My father's way of life, the commuting life, the regular habit, the daily papers in the same morning and evening trains, the same “cheerio” travelling acquaintances, the passing on of the latest smutty story, and the cheap satisfaction of being recognized and saluted by guards, ticket-collectors, porters and taxi-men upon the way, seemed to me contemptible, death in life. No, freedom for me! Yet, in 1928, this, so far as routine went, was the way of life I chose and imprisoned myself in for thirty years.

So although I now see that my father was not critical of me for “loafing,” had faith in me and minded not at all what I did so long as I was happy, these nervous strains and anxieties, mere figments of my own frustrated thought, and the slynesses I sometimes practiced to preserve what I considered to be my personal freedom and dignity, confused and impaired my relationship with him. Concerned entirely with my own problems I gave no thought to him, except perhaps as underlining them with his tact; yet he too, I now know, had
his
problems and might have been glad to share them with a more attentive son. It may be that in temperament I belonged more to my mother than to him; as she herself once remarked, “I know it's not a nice thing to say, but of course the
culture
comes from
my
side of the family,” and I shared with her several idiosyncrasies, physiological or psychological: I shall extend the list later. Although my father sometimes took Epsom Salts, they were precautionary, a flush for his over-taxed liver; his bowels behaved generally with exemplary regularity. My mother and I were martyrs to constipation. She took suppositories, I lived on cascaras. Like her again I was frightened of sea-sickness and always wanted to postpone Channel crossings if the trees outside our house were blowing about on the eve of my departure. Such behavior disgusted my father, “mere nerves” he called it, as though that solved the problem; but as a small boy, before my operation for peritonitis, I had been liable to sickness in almost any vehicle, even a carriage or a lift, and afterwards was always sick, hideously, abjectly, groaningly sick on the most moderately disturbed sea, until Mothersill and Kwell came to my rescue. Oh those troopships during the war—was not one called
The Viper?
—where in the darkness one slipped and fell in the vomit the wretched crowded soldiers had puked up all over the deck and each other, and to which oneself soon added!

However, if I was more my mother's son than my father's, that is not to say that I was ever able, or inclined, to talk about myself to her either. Indeed I evaded her more than I evaded him, she was too garrulous and as inattentive as myself. I don't remember having had a close heart-to-heart conversation with her in my life, or with him. But then there was another obstacle that blocked the way to confidence, an obstacle more important than anything I have so far mentioned, and to which I must now come.

A USEFUL VANTAGE point for observing my father and myself together is the Bois de Boulogne in the spring of 1923. My parents were in Paris with my sister, who was working as a mannequin for one of the fashion houses, and I joined them there, coming up from Ragusa, where I had been with a young artist friend. At this time I had a flat in St. John's Wood.

I remember sitting with my father one afternoon in the Bois, watching the procession of people go by. If I had known and thought about him then as much as I have learnt and thought about him since his death, what an interesting conversation we might have had. For here was the city of his romantic youth, hither he had brought Louise after his desertion of de Gallatin, here he had married her and lived with her and her parents in the Boulevard de Courcelles until she died, hither he had escorted my mother thirty-one years ago. The place must have been full of memories for him, happy and sad, and if I could have that day again, I hope I should make better use of it. But although it was jolly sitting with him in the Bois, we had no interesting talk; instead we were watching a dog's large turd, just pointed out by him, which lay in the middle of the path in front of us. Which of the people passing along would be the first to tread on it? That was our curiosity, and thus, whether it was dogs' turds, or “yarns,” or other trivialities, did all our life together senselessly slip away.

To watch the world go by—this “wonderful old world” as he often called it—whether in the Bois, on Richmond Terrace, or elsewhere, was one of my father's pleasurable leisure occupations, and when our little excremental comedy had worked itself out to its messy conclusion, we reverted to observing the faces and dresses of the crowd parading before us. But whereas my father was appraising the women, commenting on those “plump little partridges” he found interesting, I was eyeing the young men. Venus herself could have passed without attracting my gaze or altering the beat of my pulse if my father had pointed her out.