I try to recollect the beauty of the world. Before my legs grew so numb I used to go for walks to Kensington Gardens and then, as the whole of Hyde Park gradually became a playground for a disgusting cosmopolitan lower class, to Holland Park, where the foreign trees and shrubs grow in profusion but the hybrid is a short-lived rarity. How I love this London in springtime, still, with the scent of early lilac and daffodils, the carpets of wallflowers, tulips, forget-me-nots, those fields of lemon and scarlet, the great chestnuts coming to leaf, the blossoming cherries. I would walk up to the top of Ladbroke Grove, where all the substantial gardens were, and then stroll slowly down to Holland Park Avenue, smelling the shrubs and the flowers, the honeysuckle, the sweet plane trees, remembering my boyhood in Kiev. Then I would wander to the Kreshchatik on one of those days we know so well in Russia, when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, winter is gone and spring has arrived. Kiev’s warm yellow brick would begin to absorb the sun again and all the parks and avenues and cleared spaces, all the little suburbs like our own Kurenvskaya, explode with varied colour, while the bright shopfronts fling open winter shutters to reveal their new treasures and even the trams become glittering carriages of light floating on sunbeams, bearing us through the hills and valleys of paradise. A city built on hills always has a singular spirit. London, built where the river was shallow and fordable, has all the additional fortification necessary to a valley city. A hill is a natural defence and those who live upon hills naturally feel more secure. Londoners are always sounding the reassuring trumpet of their own superiority, as if they know how vulnerable they are. It is the same with Berlin. Yet there remains nothing like a London spring, fresh with rain and silvery sunshine, with as many shades of green as a forest of jade and alive with tulips, with violets and daffodils. The British, unable to express affection for each other, lavish their love on flowers and animals. They flourish pictures of roses where others display crucifixes. Even their weeds and vegetables are national symbols. There is no city on earth more full of contented dogs, cats and herbaceous borders. It is, if not Blake’s Paradise, at least a Jerusalem for the Jack Russell, the Oriental shorthair, the African Grey, the British Queen or the Rhode Island Red. Even their polecats are domesticated!
What would otherwise seem deplorable, this lust to give affection to animals or plants, is more understandable when you consider the average representative of the English hoi polloi. He is as fatuously self-inflated, as belligerently stupid, as ill-mannered, ill-smelling and ill-contented as any creature upon the whole round world. One grudgingly admires those who still try to save him, when the only use for him, the only use the tribe ever produced him for, is to serve in some horrible overseas army. Without the colonies, the British have nowhere to send him. Their posturing becomes an empty charade, bereft of substance, plot or meaning. Is it any wonder that the annual entertainment for these people, the only living show they are ever prepared to attend in a theatre, is the Christmas Harlequinade in which down-and-out comedians regale a fresh crop of proto-louts with the full weight of their inheritance of prejudice and filth? These cattle have learned to praise themselves for their own vulgarity. What better Lumpenproletariat than one which makes virtues of the very things which keep it from aspiring to some better state? The Sun is their Bible. It is a Bible of Pride bereft of dignity or spirit. If this is the salt of the earth, this chanting army, then I will take my food with a little less flavouring. They are the same louts who brought disrepute to the Nazi party and who seized control of the Duma in 1917.
Mrs Cornelius can forgive these people everything. She says she is proud to be working-class. I can only mourn the collapse of good taste and public morals. I have offered my experiences to the BBC more than once but, of course, I am not of that Bum-Boy Clique as the Bishop calls it and refuse to prostitute myself. On my one visit to the World Service, I kept my trousers firmly buttoned and any attempt to lay hands on me were met with polite but firm disapproval. I am too old, I said, for that sort of thing.
‘Yore too proud, Ivan. It’s bin yer tragedy,’ she says. Mrs Cornelius has always suggested that my integrity was the worst obstacle to my success in any course I chose. Like von Stroheim, I would neither corrupt my talent nor sell myself to the highest bidder merely to make a profit or win some politician’s approval. So many émigrés found it necessary to do that and I cannot say I blame most of them; but neither do I blame myself. It is not my fault if I am the victim of an unfashionable sense of honour. We are created as individuals. We should respect this. The modern move towards making us all one standard, thinking the same, acting the same, wanting the same things, all in the name of ‘mental health’, is not to my taste. We are becoming the slaves of dull-minded computer programmers. I was the first to condemn Bolshevik and Fascist alike for such fallacious mechanistic understandings. In this, Freud and Marx have much to answer for, of course. They were put on pedestals while Nietzsche, ignored or reviled, who stood, like Max Stirner, for the individual, for the potential super-being in all of us, who provided the philosophical stimulus for my flying cities, my vision of a spiritual samurai caste extending a helping hand to every race and class, each according to its level of maturity, was silenced. Nietzsche became associated with Nazis, certainly, but that is no more his fault than Saint Joan’s becoming identified with the House of Tudor because she was politically useful to Henry the Eighth. We do not ask what Henry’s general attitude towards women was! I have always been willing to give credit where it is due and to place blame where it belongs irrespective of Party or Religion. But now, as Goethe discovered, it is against the law to offer the opinions of experience. These days one must toe the computer’s line, and woe betide the fool attempting to set a lifetime’s experience against some youth’s imaginary notions of reality! In that respect, at least, the other brother, Frank, is not so bad but one need not bother to try to talk to Jerry or Catherine. Whether she agrees with them or not, Mrs Cornelius defends her children. She is a she-tiger, in this respect. Only she is allowed to criticise. I telephoned Jerry that day and he went to see her. He was with her when she died. I was looking in all the time, but I had to protect the shop, there are so many vandals. He came at once and for that, believe me, I grant him a great deal of leeway. But he is jealous. And nowadays I think he avoids me. She told me things she would not tell her children.
Even to me she would never reveal her exact age. It was one of her rules. Also I was only allowed, in company, to bring up our more recent experiences, in England. Apart from between ourselves, she refused to discuss the early days. I sometimes suspected it was because she had discovered the secret of eternal life! Only in her last decade did she begin to show her years. But then she used her age as she had used her beauty, as a finely-adjusted weapon to get what she needed. I always admired her that ability to recognise her best interests.
In private, the past returned with a vengeance! She kept a great number of scrapbooks and boxes under her bed, many of them held together by nothing but greasy dust. They contained cigarette cards, magazine cuttings, letters, ration books, birth certificates, dirt-veined official documents and worthless currency - her entire lifetime’s collection. There were clippings of her from The Picturegoer and Movie Magazine, stills featuring her in scenes with John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Lon Chaney and myself, from the only shocker we appeared in together, The Weasel Strikes Again, in which I played the mysterious Weasel himself. I asked about it shortly after the funeral, but her boy kept all his mother’s papers and is reluctant to let me go through them. He promises he will find the picture for me. I do not hold out much hope. He fobs me off. And the other brother is completely crazy now. My only hope is Catherine, but she is away.