How many lives can you see at a glance in New York, without seeing a single life? Supposing every window were a life — a little bright box of life.
A man is six feet tall (okay, you’re not — but you can handle that) and the Citicorp building is nine hundred feet. There’s got to be something wrong there. Or else something splendid, something sublime.
Just stand back and take in the view. You think this is one brute of a city, but it’s also magic, it’s amazement to the eye. Distance lends enchantment. Is that the name of the game? The trick of it? To rise above it all. To get a little vantage, a little perspective, a little elevation. To perch at some perfect window (say, the twenty-second floor, somewhere around 59th and Park) with your perfectly chilled Martini, and reduce it all to a vision.
Am I a hypocrite? I think little boys shouldn’t play with toy guns, but I think Leonidas, holding the pass with his Spartans, was a fine, brave thing. And once I read Homer because I was told Homer was the greatest. But what else was Homer singing about so deathlessly than these guys with spears sending other guys down to Hades?
Distance lends enchantment. And time heals. That’s the other big sop, the other big lie. Let some years go by. Oh, five, ten years. Then rub your finger over the place where the old wound was. See? Hardly feel a thing.
You know, the boys came in from school the other day and Paul says, ‘Mom, can you tell me something? Is the world getting bigger or smaller?’ Just like that. I didn’t know if it was some joke with a trick answer, or something their teacher had thrown out at them, or something going round the schoolyard, or else some serious, anxious inquiry. I said, ‘I don’t think I know that. But I guess you must be getting bigger, though!’ And I put my arms round him, and I felt him wriggle like mad, the way they both do these days, to get free.
So tell me, Doctor K. What do I do? Do I answer his letter? Do I go to see him? Or do I stay here with you?
Harry
Last night Jenny and I watched on the news the Task Force steaming its way towards the South Atlantic. Those by now familiar shots of troops jogging round the decks of a requisitioned liner and helicopters waltzing over the waves have lost their vague air of comedy. As if, though it could all still be called off at any moment (what do they say in the States, Sophie — it will happen? It won’t?), the imperceptible point has already been passed when the pressure of feeling that has all along been, secretly, wanting it to happen, willing it to happen, has outweighed the pressure of feeling that says: But this is preposterous.
A show-case war. An exhibition war. A last little war for old time’s sake. Sending the ships and the men to some far-off corner of the globe, while the nation waits and guesses. Save that this time, along with the ships and the men, goes a small battalion of camera crews and newsmen, and, despite what they say about the difficulties, at that range, of satellite transmission, it is going to be the TV event of the year.
And it’s strange to think that I could be there. True, I’m sixty-four, but I’m a fit man, my eye’s still good. (And I feel young, absurdly young.) They would give me a flak-jacket and a helmet. They would pay me the slightly begrudging respect due to some worthy veteran. But (thank God!) no editor or one-time crony has phoned me up actually to suggest it. How about it, Harry? And what have you been doing for these last ten years anyway? What do you say? For old time’s sake?
For old time’s sake! Those scenes at Portsmouth! That pantomime! That performance! How everyone played their parts. The troops lining the rails. The bands, the cheers, the ships’ hooters, the women waving and weeping. It wasn’t even a re-run, with twentieth-century props, of grand Victorian send-offs for illustrious imperial expeditions. It was the Trojan War all over again. Someone had raped our precious Falkland Isles, so the ships must sail. And somewhere, in a sacred grove, behind the harbour, before the bands could strike up and the ships slip their cables, someone had discreetly cut the throat of a modern-day Iphigeneia.
Iphigeneia! Iphigeneia! Of all those old Greek myths that my Uncle Edward once made his special province, it is that one that sticks with me. The blue bay at Aulis, flecked with white-caps. The ships beached, pinned down by the wind, the troops grumbling and mutinous. And Iphigeneia on the altar.
It’s so easy to imagine how it might have happened otherwise. How Agamemnon might have said, No thanks — nothing is worth that. How he might have embraced his daughter and said to his men, Okay, enough, let’s go home. The wind would have held. The Trojan War would have been cancelled. Instead of sailing to a ten-year blood-bath, the men might have enjoyed a heaven-sent interlude. A seaside break. Beach games, cooled by that onshore breeze. Like those paratroopers parading on the sun-decks of the Canberra: a holiday cruise after all.
She wants me to take real photos again. But she wants me to take only beautiful pictures. The sun burnishing the wind-bent grass on a Wiltshire hillside. Her own face. On those nights when we first went to bed together it was as though there were certain things which, in spite of herself, she had to broach. As if there were ghosts she thought she would quickly exorcize, but she found them more stubborn than she supposed. When you are sixty-four you cannot pretend that you have no past. She would kiss the scar on my cheek, cautiously at first and then lingeringly, running her lip, the tip of her tongue along it, as if she had found some new, unexpected erogenous zone. She would say: ‘Tell me about …’ and ‘What was it like …’ And even: ‘Did you ever — just a little bit — enjoy it?’ Then she asked (ten years ago she was only thirteen): ‘And why did you stop?’
No Trojan War. No Homer. No ten-year siege. No wooden horse. No Hector, Achilles, Andromache, Hecuba. No story. No action. No news. (On news-stands throughout Hellas, words to make an old hack weep: ‘Trojan Task Force Recalled’.)
I used to believe once that ours was the age in which we would say farewell to myths and legends, when they would fall off us like useless plumage and we would see ourselves clearly only as what we are. I thought the camera was the key to this process. But I think the world cannot bear to be only what it is. The world always wants another world, a shadow, an echo, a model of itself. I think of Uncle Edward, the bright hope of New College, who marched off to war in 1915, his head full of the words and deeds of the Greeks and Romans and the myths with which they had filled their own heads. Who knows if that other world in his head made it harder or easier for him to bear (for just that short, long while) what he found?