I am not accustomed to challenges, my usual habits prevent them. Her words released into my veins an utterly intoxicating flood of adrenalin. I gazed on her with awe and gratitude. She had turned her face sideways and tears slid down the curve of her cheek. I lifted the little book and said playfully, “If I dislike this you will think me a dead man; if I love it there is hope for me?”
She said coldly, “I am not a fool.”
Her proud chin was at an angle as defiant as the beret, her small nose was as tip-tilted as a sparrow’s beak. The bridge may have been broken. I, who have never touched a woman tenderly in my life, longed to lift and cradle her protectingly. So much sudden new experience could overstrain an old heart. I pocketed the book, climbed down to the floor and said, “Madam, my habits are invariable, you may find me here whenever you please. I will have read your book in two days.”
For the second time in four years I allowed myself a holiday. On the sunlit pavement I was gripped by a walking frenzy. She had given me a precious part of herself (I stroked the book in my pocket) and defied me, and asked for help, and wept. I loved her, of course, and did not regret that this state, for me, would be painful and perhaps impossible. Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra found love painful and almost impossible. Phaedra and Medea found it quite impossible, but nobody doubts they were enhanced by it. I was enhanced by it. I am a wholly suburban Parisian who distrusts, as much as any provincial, that collection of stale imperial pie-crusts calling itself Paris. We require it to awe the foreigner who would otherwise menace out language and culture, but I refuse to be awed. So I was amused to find myself standing on one of the curving benches of the Pont-Neuf, my arms on the parapet, staring downstream at one of our ugliest2 buildings with a strong sentiment of admiration and delight. Since I was physically unable to seduce her I must persuade her to seduce me. This required me to remain aloof, while feeding her with increasingly useful parts of my mind, cunningly sauced with flattery to induce addiction. Everything depended on her poems. If they were entirely bad I would lose interest and botch the whole business. I sat down and read.
I was lucky. The person of the book was intelligent, tough, and on the way to being a good writer. She was a feminist, vivisecting her mauled sexual organs to display the damage and making the surgery icily comic by indicating, in a quiet lip-licking way, “It’s even more fun when I slice up him.” Some poems showed her embracing and embraced by a lover and unable to tell him something essential, either because of his indifference or from her fear that big truths are too destructive to be shared by a society of two. It was entertaining to see a woman in these Byronic postures but she was potentially greater than Byron. Her best work showed respect for human pain at a profounder level than sexual combat. It was spoiled by too many ideas. A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, above which, however, they tower like precipices. My woman avoided banality (which has, indeed, swallowed hordes of us) by turbulent conjunctions. Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses. Her instinct to approach me had been sound. I could teach her a great deal.
I bought a note pad from a stationer in the Place Dauphin. It was Sunday. I entered the Louvre and fought my way through the polyglot mobs to the Maria de Medici salon where I always feel at home. The canvases adorning this temple to female government bubble with enough good-humoured breasts to suckle a universe. My favourite painting, which always give me a wicked thrill, shows the Italian banker’s fat daughter handing over the tiller of state to her son, a boy with the clothes, rigid stance and far too solemn face of a very small adult. The ship of state has a mast with Athene beside it pointing the way, her curves compressed by armour which recalls the corsets of my manageress. The motive power of the vessel is provided by lusty women representing Prudence, Fortitude, etc., who toil at heavy oars with pained, indignant expressions which suggest that work comes to them as a horrible surprise. Unluckily there is no sofa near this painting. I settled before the canvases which show Maria’s coronation inaugurating a new golden age and there, in the severe language of literary criticism, wrote the first love-letter of my life. I was inspired. I filled twenty-four pages with minute writing before closing time, then walked home, corrected them in red ink, typed them, recorrected, retyped, then sealed them in a large manilla envelope of the sort used for preserving legal documents. My heart palpitated as I inscribed her name upon it.
I had said I would read her poems within two days. For a week I extended my lunch hour beyond the normal and on the eighth day her shadow fell across the print of the book I was reading. Without raising my eyes I placed the letter between us, saying, “You may wish to digest this in private.”
I heard the envelope torn, then looked up. She was giving the letter an attention which excluded myself and everything else. She read slowly, and some passages more than once. An hour elapsed. She slid the pages into her handbag, gave me a full, sincere smile and said, “Thanks. You have misunderstood my work almost completely, but your warped picture of it conveys insights which I will one day find useful. Thanks.”
She tapped the tabletop with her fingers, perhaps preparing to leave. I grew afraid. I said, “Will you now explain why, in our first encounter, you called me reactionary?”
“Your work explains that.”
“The Sacred Sociology?”
“Yes, for the most part.”
I sighed and said, “Madam, it is not my custom to justify myself or criticize others. Both practices indicate insufficiency. But to you I surrender. Your poems suggest you love freedom, and want a just communism to release human souls from the bank-vaults of the West, the labour camps of the East.” “And from the hospitals and asylums!” she cried ardently. “And from the armies, churches and bad marriages!”
“Good. You desire a world-wide anarchic commonwealth where government may be safely left to a committee of retired housekeepers chosen by lot, like a jury.”
She smiled and nodded. I said, “Madam, I wish that also. For centuries men have been misled by words like God, fate, nature, necessity, world, time, civilization and history: words which hide from us our cause and condition. The bourgeois say that because of these things our state can change very little, except for the worse. But these words are nothing but names for people. We are our God, fate, nature, necessity, world, time, civilization and history. Common people achieved these limbs, this brain, the emotions and the skills and the languages which share them. We have made every blessing we enjoy, including sunlight, for the sun would be a meaner thing without our eyes to reflect it. The fact that man is infinitely valuable — that man is essentially God — underlies every sacred code. And when I say man is God I refer least of all to God the landlord, God the director, God the ruler with power to crush a majority for the good of the rest. To hell with these overpaid demiurges! My gratitude is to God the migrant labourer, the collectivized peasant, the slave of Rio Tinto Zinc and the American Fruit Company. He is the heavenly host whose body is broken day after day to nourish smart people like you and me. The Sacred Sociology tried to make news of this ancient truth. Did it fail?”