Self Condemned

By Wyndham Lewis and Allan Pero

Self Condemned, originally published in 1954, tells the story of Professor Renarding and his wife, Essie, as they find themselves in Momaco, a fictionalized version of Toronto, following Ren resignation as an academic in London, England. Reduced to a position at the second-rate University of Momaco, Rennd Essie suffer through a bleak and oppressive isolation in a dreary and alien city.

The novel, a devastating, disturbing satire of life in wartime Canada, explores the difficulty individuals face as they struggle to adapt to new surroundings while preserving their sense of wholeness, as well as the bond that develops between people during a shared experience of isolation.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Aug 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781770705203

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was born on his father's yacht off Nova Scotia but grew up in England. The author of many novels, including The Revenge for Love, The Apes of God, and Tarr, he was associated with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pund. Besides being a leading figure of the Modernist movement in English literature, Lewis was also a much-praised artist whose portraits of T.S. Eliot now hangs in the Durban Art Gallery in South Africa.

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The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.

This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.

The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.

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VOYAGEUR CLASSICS

BOOK STHAT EXPLORE CANADA

SELF

CONDEMNED

A NOVEL

WYNDHAM LEWIS

INTRODUCED BY ALLAN PERO

DUNDURN PRESS

TORONTO

Copyright © Dundurn Press, 2010

Introduction copyright © Allan Pero, 2010

Self Condemned was originally published by Methuen & Company in 1954.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Project Editor: Michael Carroll

Copy Editors: Matt Baker and Nicole Chaplin

Design: Courtney Horner

Printer: Marquis

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lewis, Wyndham, 1882-1957

Self condemned / by Wyndham Lewis ; introduction by Allan Pero.

ISBN 978-1-55488-735-4

I. Title.

PR6023.E97S4 2010             823'.912               C2010-903915-7

1    2    3    4    5      14    13    12    11    10

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

www.dundurn.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BY ALLAN PERO

Wyndham Lewis has always been a flashpoint of controversy. A Modernist Renaissance Man, he is as famous for his brisk, whiplash line as he is for his satirical, crackling prose. In addition to his achievements as a visual artist, he was a novelist, satirist, philosopher, polemicist, poet, and art critic. He was born in Canada at Amherst, Nova Scotia, on November 18, 1882 (the same year as two of his contemporaries, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf). His father, Charles Lewis, was a wealthy ne’er-do-well who fought on the Union side in the American Civil War. One of the interesting features of the Lewis family is that several of its branches extended from the United States into French Canada. Charles’s brother, William, was a Montreal wine merchant, for whom Charles worked for a time. Lewis’s mother, Anne, was British. Their marriage wasn’t a happy one. After a brief period spent in Canada, the Lewises moved to England, and their young son, then called Percy, attended Rugby (the British preparatory school), and later won a scholarship at the Slade School of Art. These funds came in handy, since Charles Lewis had spent much of the family’s money, having run off with the maid some years earlier. Anne Lewis had been left in straitened circumstances to raise the boy alone.

Lewis quit the Slade in 1902, and for about six years spent his time travelling, studying, and painting in France, Spain, and Germany. Fluent in French, he attended lectures at the Collège de France given by Henri Bergson, a French philosopher then very much in vogue. During this time, Lewis became fascinated by the various artistic modernisms then beginning to emerge — among them, Cubism and Futurism. When he returned to England, he began to publish some stories based on his Continental experiences, which were eventually collected under the title The Wild Body. Along with Ezra Pound, Lewis has the distinction of being the co-founder of Vorticism, the only avant-garde group Britain has ever produced. The Vorticist movement’s manifesto BLAST, which published, among others, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West, appeared a few months prior to the beginning of the First World War. Lewis was himself caught up in the conflict, first as a gunner and bombardier, and was later fortunate enough to receive a commission as an official war artist for the Canadian government in 1917. He narrowly escaped death several times; the devastation of the war prompted him to develop a larger conceptual framework for thinking about art, culture, and politics in what he several years earlier had called the Melodrama of Modernity. His first novel, Tarr, a sharp, Dostoevskian critique of the bourgeois-bohemian set in Paris, appeared in 1918.

Wyndham Lewis as a second lieutenant in the British Army during the First World War.

One of the results of the Great War was that it effectively killed the Vorticist movement. By 1922, Lewis’s own art production had begun to slow down as he became more engaged with the task of writing. He spent several years researching in the British Museum and started publishing, between 1926 and 1931, an astonishing number of prose texts: The Wild Body, The Art of Being Ruled, The Lion and the Fox, Time and Western Man, The Childermass, The Apes of God, Paleface, The Doom of Youth, as well as the sledgehammer title The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator. Together these books come to several thousand daunting but fascinating pages. The imaginative scope of these volumes, comprising fiction, philosophy, political theory, and art and literary criticism, offers trenchant analyses of culture and everyday life. They are a testament not only to the range of his thinking and reading but also to his titanic energy. Lewis’s persona became that of the Enemy, who would suddenly appear on the scene, provoking critique, laughter, and acrimony. As you might surmise, though he counted people such as Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Augustus John, Rebecca West, Marshall McLuhan, A.Y. Jackson, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, and the Queen of Bohemia, London painter Nina Hamnett, among his friends, he also made several enemies — like Virginia Woolf, the artist and critic Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, the Sitwells — but these antagonisms were sometimes taken more seriously by the public than by the participants (not that they didn’t feel the sting of one another’s barbs). Lewis once said of Edith Sitwell: "We are two good old enemies, Edith and I, inseparables in fact. I do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwell’s favourite enemy" (Blasting and Bombardiering, 91). He was right. She devoted an entire chapter to venting loving spleen about him in her autobiography, Taken Care Of, seven years after his death in March 1957.

Lewis’s reflections on the development of the Enemy persona surface in a brief 1932 article entitled What It Feels Like to Be an Enemy. His answer revolves upon the idea of intimacy: to be an Enemy is "Much the same as a Friend — a very intimate friend, who has forgotten why or how he ever came to begin the relationship" (Wyndham Lewis on Art, 266). In caricaturing his persona as the Enemy, Lewis ironically exploits the cultural and political implications of this confusion of the two terms, even as he acknowledges (with puncturing tongue-in-cheek) that his actions as the Enemy are also a self-mocking study in urban paranoia.

For example, his use of modern technology (the telephone is an important weapon in the armoury of an ‘Enemy’) is central to his ludic reign of terror:

After breakfast, for instance (a little raw meat, a couple of blood-oranges, a stick of ginger, and a shot of Vodka — to make one see Red) I make a habit of springing ... to the telephone book. This I open quite at chance, and ring up the first number upon which my eye has lighted. When I am put through, I violently abuse for five minutes the man, or woman of course (there is no romantic nonsense about the sex of people with an Enemy worth his salt), who answers the call. This gets you into the proper mood for the day. [Wyndham Lewis on Art, 267]

These fictional telephonic ambushes reveal to us our uncanny relation to the telephone; we have installed, at our own expense, hailing devices that simultaneously preserve and compromise both our anonymity and our sense of identity. His telephone calls alert us to our subjection; the disembodied voice, booming with malevolence and mockery, performs the subversive role of conscience. In the role of caller, his is the alien voice that signals to us our own uncanny nature. Lewis’s pranks are meant to show us that the ringing telephone doesn’t necessarily ensure and reaffirm who we are, or that we’re important. Instead, he playfully takes us to task for our compliance, for our complacent pleasure in following the rituals of subjection that lurk behind phrases like Sorry, I’ve got to take this.

In this regard, it’s no wonder that his engagement with media and technology would influence the thought of Marshall McLuhan. Lewis and McLuhan met in Windsor in the 1940s (where Lewis had moved after his unhappy sojourn in Toronto), when the latter was then starting his career at St. Louis University. As an accomplished and ingenious lecturer at Assumption College (then part of the University of Western Ontario, and now the University of Windsor), Lewis played a role in securing McLuhan’s two-year appointment to the faculty. The impact of Lewis’s thought on McLuhan’s work is obvious: McLuhan’s books are peppered with quotes and references to Lewis’s works. Apart from his analyses of advertising, temporality, and visual media, Lewis’s book America and Cosmic Man contains the seed of one of McLuhan’s most famous concepts: the global village.

At thirty-seven years old, Wyndham Lewis cut a dashing figure.

But any discussion of Wyndham Lewis must always return to a particular problem — his notorious flirtation with fascism. Indeed, for many people, Lewis’s relationship to fascism was much more than mere flirtation — it was a fine romance. At least, a romance in the sense that it is assumed that Lewis was happily in love with fascism and never questioned it or its aims.Yet I would suggest the opposite; his relationship to fascism was informed by nothing but questions. Even a quick glance through his political books of the 1930s reveals maddeningly contradictory stances. Fascism is variously described in these works as a problem, a cult, an alternative, a pose, a nostalgic return to classical imperialism, a tool for peace, and a product of war. What do we make of this panoply of contradiction? Rather than look upon it as mere inconsistency, I contend that we should think about its implications. At several moments he seems to suggest a kind of approval of fascism, even as he elsewhere (often in the same text) criticizes and satirizes its politics. Suddenly, he will bizarrely declare himself on the political left, while at the same time inveigh against the brutalities of Stalinism in the Soviet Union (which in the 1930s was a very unpopular opinion among many leftists).

Lewis’s response to fascism assumed this trajectory: (1) a qualified, contradictory approval, followed by (2) a period of hectic activity in which he isn’t so much defending the truth of fascism as he is trying to contain (and explain) the increasing number of political fires set by it in Europe in the 1930s; (3) that in attempting to retain fascist Germany as part of Europe’s political landscape, he is working through his uncertain identification with Hitler by critiquing Europe’s failure to live up to its own egalitarian principles; (4) that as a veteran, he is genuinely horrified by the prospect of another world war; and (5) much of the last two decades of his creative and intellectual thought are devoted to the question: "Why did I not see what fascism is? He would later dismiss his political writing of that period as ill-judged, redundant, harmful of course to me personally, and of no value to anyone else" (Rude Assignment, 224). How many writers or political commentators would dare say such a thing about their own work? Not many.

After a series of trips to Europe in the 1930s, Lewis changed his political stance radically. Witnessing first-hand the effects of Adolf Hitler’s domestic policies, and the horrifying conditions Jewish people were forced to endure, Lewis confronted the important difference between the myopia of political abstraction and the brute clarity of political fact. The question of his political blindness (sometimes projected onto others) is putatively asked and answered in series of books, fiction and non-fiction alike: The Hitler Cult and How It Will End, Anglosaxony: A League That Works, Rude Assignment, The Writer and the Absolute, and Self Condemned.

This reprint of Self Condemned is based upon the first edition published by Methuen in 1954, three years after Lewis went blind, and three years before his death (even then a period of enormous productivity in which he produced some of his best work). Self Condemned is in part based upon the experiences of Lewis and his wife, Gladys Anne (always called Froanna), who left for Canada the day before war was declared in September 1939. Although he had predicted (for once, rightly) in The Hitler Cult (1939) that the Second World War would last six years, he never intended to remain in North America for the duration of the fighting. The trip was expected to be an opportunity to pick up portrait commissions from wealthy Americans and Canadians. Regrettably, very few actual commissions materialized, though he did paint Eleanor Martin, the mother of former Prime Minister Paul Martin. A recurring cycle of bad luck, debt, cash-flow problems, and social isolation all contributed to the Lewises’ largely unhappy stay in the long-gone Tudor Hotel on Sherbourne Street in Toronto — a dismal refuge that Lewis at the time generalized as his Tudor period (Letters, 311). Strangely, he took very little advantage of his family connections in Montreal, which was, of course, a lively cultural centre even in the 1940s. Indeed, some Montreal painters and writers — among them, Jori Smith, Marion Scott, John Lyman, and Prudence Heward — were readers of his work. Lewis made several notorious pronouncements about Canada and Toronto of the 1940s, which rankle or delight, depending on one’s sensibility. He referred to Canada as a sanctimonious icebox, and offered this diagnosis of Toronto the Good: ‘Methodism and Money’ in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness (Letters, 309, 327).

But it would be a mistake to confuse the novel with autobiography. René Harding, the main character, is not Wyndham Lewis. Nor is Hester Lewis’s wife, Froanna. The differences are crucial. In the novel, René Harding, a professor of modern history, decides to renounce his professorship and chooses intellectual and social isolation in Canada, rather than remain in Europe and watch the brutal spectacle of the Second World War. His self-imposed exile from Britain to Canada on the eve of war (engineered by him without Hester’s knowledge) is a form of protest against the ravening psychosis of history, of which the coming war figures as a prime example. Rather than become what he imagines as inevitable — an apologist for the collapse of imperialism — he gives up his teaching post, offers a condescending farewell to his mother and siblings, and thrusts himself and his wife into poverty.

The couple’s ultimately disastrous move to Momaco (the fictional double for Toronto) accelerates the process by which René’s sense of agency shrinks to that of a small room. In this respect, the novel is a fascinating example of the kind of externalized psychology Lewis believed in. That is to say, he wasn’t a believer in psychoanalysis or any interior notion of consciousness; mind and body are locked in combat with each other, but the field of battle is always an external one. Lewis tended to regard people (himself included) as having what one might call an exoskeletal psychology; relationships were about the external play and clash of shells, carapaces, pelts, rather than the internal conflicts of different souls or psyches. The novel is a compelling anatomization of Harding’s psychic collapse, whose overweening intellectual arrogance and seemingly limitless capacity for denial lead him and his wife into a domestic inferno.

Wyndham Lewis and his wife, Gladys, aboard the Empress of Britain, bound for North America in September 1939.

This dualism, which recalls that of Descartes (Lewis gave Harding the name René with good reason), is projected both onto the Hardings’ marriage and onto the room they are forced to inhabit. These projections become the occasion for one of the most sustained metaphors in the novel. Part Two of the story, entitled The Room, is an extended meditation on the emotional effects of co-existing in a hotel room extending only twenty-five feet by twelve. The Hardings’ relationship becomes a study in paranoia as the Room begins to take on the status of a separate consciousness, as if a mind were something which could be entered through a door and sat down in (Self Condemned, 214). As their idea of themselves as independent people continues to crumble, bodies become estranged from their voices. The voice, an important symbol of one’s individuality, begins to attach itself to the Room, and not necessarily to René or Hester.

In another sense, their marriage, descending as it does into depression, suspicion, and mutual accusation, is a microcosm of the global conflict raging outside the walls of their cell. The Hardings’ confinement is, the novel suggests, a phenomenon that ranges over the whole continent like the Chinese toy of box within box within box. And these boxes were all of a piece, all cut out of the same stuff. They were part of the same organism, this new North American organism. Their cells would have the same response to a given stimulus (Self Condemned, 226). Hotel Blundell can be hived off from these containers as a microcosm of the world outside (Self Condemned, 227) — a highly unstable box that contains and is contained by psychosis. The hotel is a site of constant violence; they overhear brutal domestic abuse, a beloved worker in the hotel, Affie, is murdered, and René himself is slugged in a tavern. This cramped space at first permits René to give vent to an increasingly misogynistic attitude to his wife. He casts himself in the role of mind, and she in the role of body; his frankly ugly fantasies that her only worth is as a sexual object slowly recedes to yield a new insight — In the other world, Hester, I treated you as you did not at all deserve. I cut a poor figure as I look back at myself (Self Condemned, 281).

On the surface, René’s acknowledgment of his former brutality seems admirable, even romantic, as he concedes that This tête-à-tête of ours over three years has made us as one person.... It is only when years of misery have caused you to grow into another person in this way that you can really know them.... I am talking to myself and we are one (Self Condemned, 281). But this rather banal declaration of love and vulnerability has a sinister undertone. The oneness he feels is simply another version of the egoism that drove them from England in the first place. As he begins the slow process of resuscitating his intellectual career, René’s smug sense of superiority revives along with it. In effect, their relationship is a tragic allegory of the global catastrophe from which they seek refuge. The disaster ends in marking the hotel itself; one blazingly cold winter night it goes up in flames, and in the aftermath of fighting the flames, the building is encased in a hollow shell of thick ice.

The Tudor Hotel, the real-life Hotel Blundell, in Toronto after the fire on February 15, 1943.

Increasingly frustrated by her isolation, Hester argues with René about the possibility of returning to England. He flatly refuses, obsessing over the self-imposed notion that it was Momaco or nothing, and he began to know this hysterically, fanatically, almost insanely. For he knew quite well that it was a fearful thing to know (Self Condemned, 361). His career, he now believes, is absolutely tied to North America, and that any other choice — namely, Hester’s choice, London — would be death. Work, his latest muse, takes her place. And with traumatic consequences. René’s abandonment leads to Hester’s suicide: she throws herself under a truck, severing her head and legs from her body. In a brilliantly written, gruesome scene of identification, René encounters the gaze of death:

Topmost was the bloodstained head of Hester, lying on its side. The poor hair was full of mud, which flattened it upon the skull. Her Eye protruded: it was strange it should have the strength to go on peering in the darkness. René took a step forward towards the exhibit, but he fell headlong, striking his forehead upon the edge of the marble slab.... As he fell it had been his object to seize the head and carry it away with him. [Self Condemned, 425]

How does one confront a scene like this? Hester continues to peer without seeing into the darkness. She looks at him, but she neither sees nor recognizes him. Just as he wouldn’t see her point of view in life, René must face that her perspective is now utterly closed to him. But why does he reach for her severed head? Why this grotesque gesture? It is as if he is trying, even after her death, to bring her gaze into line with his, as if they could again have the single perspective he fought so long to wrest from her. The desecration of her body is a radical form of denial — not just of the fact of her death but that he is in part responsible. In a variant ending to the novel, Lewis brings the Hardings back to London, by turns condemning René to working as an academic hack, and Hester to her suicide. But the important difference between the two endings (and the published one is superior, in my opinion) is that it focuses on René’s emotional collapse and the hollowing out of his psyche. In the published version, the inability to look upon his guilt produces a total dissociation from reality, which the novel calls The White Silence.

He falls into another kind of cell — an achromatic prison that cuts off all feeling and all perception, a blinding labyrinth in which the mind began to dream of white rivers which led nowhere, which developed laterally, until they ended in a limitless white expanse (Self Condemned, 428). When he slowly emerges from this psychosis, he finds himself haunted by his dead wife. He comes to dismiss these apparitions as Hesteria, effectively placing the blame for her death and his illness exclusively on her. And this gesture produces the final irony — it is in this moment that he is truly condemning himself; his academic career revives and flourishes, but at the price of his humanity. He is now, like the hotel that once housed him, a glacial, fiery husk of a man awaiting death. The chilling clarity with which Lewis is able to write such an agonizing, yet human novel is a testimony to his enduring power as a prose stylist. And the fact that he doesn’t flinch from telling us this story is an avowal of his confidence and respect for us, his readers.

The original dust jacket, with an illustration by Michael Ayrton, of the first edition of Self Condemned, which was first published in 1954.

Wyndham Lewis continued to write even after becoming blind in 1951.Three years later he published Self Condemned.

Some Books by Wyndham Lewis

America and Cosmic Man. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1948.

America, I Presume. New York: Howell, Soskin and Company, 1940.

The Apes of God. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

The Art of Being Ruled. Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.

Blast. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–1926). London: John Calder, 1982.

The Childermass. London: Chatto and Windus, 1928.

The Complete Wild Body. Ed. Bernard Lafourcade. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1982.

The Hitler Cult, and How It Will End. London: Dent, 1939.

The Jews — Are They Human? London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939.

Malign Fiesta. London: Methuen, 1955.

Monstre Gai. London: Methuen, 1955.

Men Without Art. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987.

The Revenge for Love. Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1991.

Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography. Ed. Toby Foshay. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984.

Self Condemned. London: Methuen, 1954.

Tarr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

Time and Western Man. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays. Ed. Alan Munton. New York: Carcanet Press, 1979.

Wyndham Lewis on Art. Eds. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969.

Further Reading

Ayers, David. Wyndham Lewis and Western Man. London: Macmillan, 1992.

Chapman, Robert T. Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires. London: Vision Press, 1973.

Edwards, Paul. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Foshay,Toby Avard. Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Gasiorek, Andrzej. Wyndham Lewis and Modernism. Tavistock, Eng.: Northcote House, 2003.

Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Meyers, Jeffrey. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Michel, Walter. Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971.

O’Keeffe, Paul. Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. London: Pimlico, 2001.

Powe, B.W. The Solitary Outlaw. Toronto: Lester, Orpen, and Dennys, 1987.

Quéma, Anne. The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s Allegories, Aesthetics, and Politics. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999.

PART ONE

THE RESIGNATION

I

THAT OTHER MAN AGAIN

"If you call five six, you embarrass five, seeing that people then are going to expect of him the refulgence of six. He looked up, coughed, and continued. If you rename six seven, far more bustle is expected of him. I have been speaking, naturally, of the ante-meridian. In the post-meridian it is the reverse. Put your clock on, call five-thirty six-thirty, and people will exclaim how much more light six-thirty has. You push back the night. If you call Clara Stella, people would say how dull Stella has become, or how bright Clara has become. Five and six, post-meridian, are like Stella and Clara. See?"

The little girl sees, Essie Harding said.

From the other side of the breakfast table Essie had stared at her husband under a wide clear brow, with blankly bold, large, wide-open eyes. It was a mature face, the natural wide-openness not disagreeably exploited: the remains of the child-mind were encouraged to appear in the clear depths of the grey-blue. But as he spoke of five and six, she thought, rather, of forty-seven and of thirty-seven (but not of thirty-four and twenty-four). She renamed ages: as her husband spoke of renaming the hours of daybreak and the sunset, she shuffled about the years of life, calling thirty forty and vice versa. As to the explanation of what occurred when you put the clock forward or backward, Essie did not follow or would not follow. Allergic to learning, as are many children, for her the teacher was a lifelong enemy. As she had stared, wide-eyed and with her mind a wilful blank, at her mistress as a child, her eyes hung open like a gaping mouth; and the fact that her husband was a professional teacher, a trained imparter of knowledge, caused Essie all the more readily to drop back into the mulish trance of childhood; expertly unreceptive she stripped her large defiant eyes of all intelligence, and left them there staring at his face, while her moist red lips were parted as she slowly raised a fresh spoonful of sugared porridge.

Have I made it clear what it means to put the clock on? he enquired, with no expectancy that the reply would be that he had.

No. She shook her head.

He laughed.

You are lazy, he told her. "Had you been a boy, and had you lived a few decades ago, your bottom would have been furrowed up by the cane; fessée after fessée would have been your lot."

She slowly sucked the spoon, and there was substituted in her eyes for the aggressive blank, an amorous and inviting light, as he had expected.

Deliberately he had referred to the caned posterior, as if it were a bait the other way round in order to provoke the reaction in question. He looked at her curiously. For a moment he almost embarked upon a didactic account of the periodic nature of sexual desire in the animal kingdom. Instead he enquired, Why this sudden interest in daylight saving?

Rosemary …

Ah. I see. Just repeat what I said about calling five six. She is a bright child, you will not have to interpret.

Essie laughed. Any more questions of that sort and I shall explain that I am dumb, and that she must wait until Gladys gets well. She has one of those enquiring minds. I think she is an awful little brat, between ourselves.

Her mama has an enquiring mind, too. It’s a beastly thing to have, I agree.

He lighted a cigarette and watched her almost furtively for a few seconds. Then he placed his hand upon an open letter at the side of his plate.

What shall we do about Richard?

When does he want us to go?

About the tenth, I think, of next month. How do you feel about it?

She sat with her hands behind her head, staring silently at the wall behind his head. Neither spoke for some minutes.

I do not feel terribly like the idyllic landscape of England just at present, he observed. Do you feel like going down yourself for a weekend? It would do you good.

Not by myself; because I look countryfied, they would want me to milk their cow and draw water from their well. I came back last time from their place thoroughly worn out.

Right. Anything would be better than bucolic England just at present, for me. I must write him.

A bell in the little hallway exploded into hysterical life. A door, from behind which the hum of a vacuum cleaner had for some time been heard, opened, and one of London’s Dickensian charladies stood there without moving for a moment, a small bird-like figure with a white crest, which bobbed backward and forward, and an irascible eye. This eye was directed across the breakfast table towards the front door. The char-lady propelled herself around the room, head shooting in and out, and darted at the front door, ready for battle. Her small, raucous challenge was heard, What is it? Ooder ye want? The landing was extremely dark, and Mrs. Harradson never could see who her enemy was. In the present case a telegram appeared out of the shadows impolitely near her little beak. She seized it, and, with considerable suspicion, holding it between thumb and forefinger, she re-entered the breakfast room.

It’s for you Professor Harding, sir.

Thank you, Mrs. Harradson.

Shall I tell ’im there’s an answer, sir?

Harding opened the telegram, and shook his head. No, thank you, no reply.

Having banged the front door upon the uniformed intruder, Mrs. Harradson with her violent gait re-entered the bedroom, from whence she had come, and almost on the instant there came the angry hum of the indignant vacuum.

It was a large, gaunt, and very dark room in which they sat. It was lighted only by one window in the extreme corner, opening onto the central air hole. Between the window and the front door was a shadowy dresser, and a minute water closet nestled indelicately in the small hall, the first thing to confront the visitor. The room in which the Hardings sat was eccentrically withdrawn from the light of day, as though London had been Cadiz: had it not been for the electric light they could not have seen to eat. For more than half the year no more than a token daylight found its way through the corner window. The house was designed by an imbecile or an Eskimo, Harding would say. Why do we stop here? To which Essie would reply, That I have often wondered myself. It was an incomplete cylinder, for its central air hole was little more than a semicircle, the back yard of another house completing it on one side. Opening off this cavernous chamber (dining room, kitchen, storeroom, all in one) were a bedroom and sitting room. Both of these were, in the ordinary way, day-lit: but because of the tower-like design of the building, they had a somewhat eccentric shape.

Rainfall was occurring, a thunderstorm threatening London, and the immured Hardings felt the need of more light. René Harding sprang up to switch on a standing lamp.

Another beastly day, he said absentmindedly.

From whom is the telegram? Essie enquired.

From Canada. It is from a colleague of mine with some information I required.

Essie was looking at him, as if expecting the answer about the telegram to complete itself. Professor René Harding was tall, about five foot eleven, with broad shoulders and such markedly narrow hips that the lower part of his jacket was inclined to flap. His beard did not crudely blot out his face, nesting his eyes in a blue-black bush or surrounding them with a disturbing red vegetation. It merely lengthened the face, and stylistically grained and striped it with a soft material not differing greatly from it in tone, reminiscent of the elegant stone hair which leaved, curled upon, and grooved the long French faces upon the west façade at Chartres. His eyes were of a brown to match the somewhat sallow skin.When he laughed, rather than bisecting his face laterally, he thrust forward his bristling mouth in what might be called the ho-ho-ho position, employed by the actor if he wishes to give the idea of something stiltedly primitive. Should it be one of an archaically masculine, bearded chorus of uncouth warriors that he has to represent, that is when he ho-ho-ho’s (not ha-ha-ha’s). René’s eyes were at the cat-like angle, glittering out of a slit rather than, as with his wife, showing the eye in its full circular expansion. He was one of those men it is difficult to imagine without a beard: and who one felt was very handsome bearded, but did not feel sure about its being so becoming were he to be beardless.

Speaking generally, he was inclined to furrow up his forehead à la Descartes, and to assume half-recumbent attitudes by choice, rather than to sit erect.

These physical idiosyncrasies corresponded to an innate preference for the dressed rather than the undressed, even if the costume or the disguise was nothing more than hair. His wife was of course a born nudist; and he had recently, it is true, come to feel, especially at breakfast time, that he was in a nudist camp.

But this was a very abstracted man. He seldom saw his wife in full focus, but behind, or through, something else. He did not often completely withdraw himself from the intellectual problem he had in hand, when conversing with an intimate or even with a stranger. Inside him, he left simmering as it were, in the background of his mind, the dominant problem, in the way that a housewife reduces to a simmer something she has in hand, to leave her free for a short while for action elsewhere, in response to a sudden summons.

As he sat down he placed the telegram in his pocket and picked up the Daily Express. Filling himself a fresh cup of coffee he drank this in a long gulp. Replacing the cup in the saucer with fracas he continued to stare dully and angrily at the Daily Express headlines.

Monday, 15th May, 1939.

THE KING WILL BE TWO DAYS LATE

IT’S THAT OTHER MAN AGAIN

DUCE SAYS PEACE

Nothing to Justify a War.

Essie was still looking at him, and now she asked, What is in your paper, René?

It’s that ‘Other Man Again,’ he replied, almost mechanically, echoing the headlines. He looked up at her, his face wrinkled, with a dismally roguish smile. The German chancellor, you know.

So I gathered, Essie said, and slowly lowered her head to look at her own paper, the Daily Telegraph.

For about ten minutes, husband and wife read their papers without speaking. Rather abruptly Harding rose, wiped his moustache, and exclaimed, Are you going out to the shops, my dear?

Hester Harding rose, too.

A little later, yes.

"See if you can get me the Times, will you? Also the Manchester Guardian. I am going in to work now. If anyone should telephone, do not put them through."

No one?

No one at all!

All right, said Essie. You look preoccupied. Is there anything in the papers you don’t like?

A damn lot, but not more so than usual! I shall be through with what I have to do about one o’clock!

They had rented the next-door flat, a one-room affair, the front doors facing one another across the dark landing. He was inserting his key in the opposite door, that of No. 7, as he was closing his own. This other flat, which he used as a study, was walled with books. There was a small desk at which he now seated himself hurriedly and drew the telegram out of his pocket.

For her part, Hester went into the room where Mrs. Harradson was still at work with the vacuum cleaner, a novelty she greatly appreciated.

Oo, ma’am, Mrs. Harding, I didn’t hear you, ma’am, said Mrs. Harradson jumping up and down, an excitable marionette, as she heard Essie’s voice. She turned off the vacuum.

What do you think that old wretch Hitler has done now, Mrs. Harradson?

Oo! I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am. What is it, ma’am, the nasty ole man?

Yes, he’s a horrid old beast. He says woman’s place is it the kitchen.What do you say to that, Mrs. Harradson?

Oo, ’e do, do ’e, ma’am! What does that dirty ole German want to be givin’ us orders for, where we oughter be, nasty ole man.

I don’t know what their wives are doing. That is a man’s country where women seem to have no rights at all. The men shave their heads in the most disgusting way; they don’t mind what they look like. If my husband shaved his head I would sue for divorce on the spot!

Nasty ole man! Mrs. Harradson barked: and it was not clear whether she was referring to Professor Harding or to That Other Man, except that her employer did not belong to that evil category, which she classified invariably as nasty ole men.

After a little more desultory conversation about the political scene, the lot of women, and the arbitrary behaviour of men generally, especially those that rang the front doorbell, Essie strolled away into the sitting room, the Daily Telegraph and an illustrated tabloid in her hand. She propped herself upon cushions on the settee and plunged into the tabloid. It was not long before she heard Mrs. Harradson at work in the large cooking and eating room; there was also a piano there and she could hear her dusting the keys. Essie read in the tabloid how a woman had gone into a neighbour’s house about ten in the morning for a nice chat and had not returned till the afternoon. She discovered her two children both dead: they had swallowed all her aspirin tablets, which she had left by the side of her bed. Essie reflected how careless the lower classes were, and yawned. Mrs. Harradson’s voice was heard in the next room, furiously apostrophizing someone as she scrubbed the sink.

"Nasty ole man — nasty ole maaan. She heard maaan" repeated several times: it could be none other than Hitler, and Essie, smiling, got up and moved, with a smile still on her face, into the next room.

Who are you talking about, Mrs. Harradson, Herr Hitler?

Not Hitler, not him! Mrs. Harradson replied, after a violent start at the sound of her employer’s voice. It’s that Lucifer, nasty ole man. Walking the earth, nasty ole man! She scrubbed harder, as if to scrub him away.

Lucifer