I sit at a table in my room, dreaming of far-off places, of vultures making clouds of letters in the sky, black against blue, cutting up the sun with scissor-wings. They turn and spin, swoop and spit their deepest bile at a tree that is still burning, ignited by the sun whose hot rays pierce to the earth as soon as the vultures move down and away from it and are no longer its shadow.
Each of my two eyes is a door that has locks but no keys, and I burst open each in turn to go through and see what they will show me. Sometimes it is landscape, now and again it is people; often empty sky.
I live in a Kent village eight miles from the English sea, and wonder at my reasons for buying this house. It is an equal distance from Dover and Newhaven, so that I can get out of the country and on to the mainland with little delay, as well as being fifteen minutes from Lydd Airport in case a lightning getaway is called for.
I long for a bridge to be built over the Channel or a tunnel dug under it to France so that I can drive as far as China without touching water. Better still if the Channel were filled in, and this island was connected to the mainland which is its rightful place, all the rubbish of Europe tipped into the sea until land joins land and cliff meets cliff. Two ample canals could be built through it for ships, and that would be that.
The house is set in the comparatively fresh air of the countryside, though I can get to London in under two hours, and stand in Oxford Street choking thankfully on petrol fumes. It is so strategically placed that the built-up mass of London blocks me off from my past and family in Nottinghamshire. There were other reasons as I studied the map, though some of them seem wrong-headed now. Certainly I don’t write better or worse than anywhere else, which is all that matters. There is enough space for me to accumulate quantities of books. When my eyes want to wander over the shelves I begin to wonder which I would abandon if I had to leave and could only take fifty with me, or whether I would worry overmuch if I had to clear out with none at all. It is a hypothetical though frequent question, being so close to the coast.
The few square miles of high land the village stands on are surrounded by marshes which are so flooded when the rains come that Oxney is again almost the island it once was in the Middle Ages. Acres of water on every side lap the borders of the few roads leading out from the island. Swans that float on it take off with a great fanning of wings and wild melancholy honkings that echo across the open spaces. Pink clouds reflected in the water remind me of the early morning rice fields outside Valencia.
In spring and autumn the sunsets are broad layers of snake-green and ox-blood on either side of the church tower, with no disturbing noise except for the occasional car. The colours are so thick and livid with tranquillity it seems I have only to reach beyond the bedroom window and peel them off in layers. But peace begets the opposite of truth, which cannot be found behind the deadening tints of a country dusk slowly torn apart by the flitting of numerous birds.
When frost comes the bushes and trees of the garden change from green to white. Even the smallest detail of leaves and grass blades shows up in the hoar frost. A freezing mist holds the patterns in their monochromatic place. By the end of the day it is like looking into a tank of milk, and I draw the curtain across it.
If the temperature rises slightly it brings white banks of snow lifting against the doors. But the house is solid and warm, a fit haven to deceive any man who thinks of getting the truth from it. He can sit there and ponder, knowing that when the snow melts he will be able to smell the earth again and find a little measure of truth and beauty in that, though never enough to satisfy.
All might be revealed if one goes back into the jungle, but the truth — never. Before a novelist comes into the open he must first find some trick of getting inside himself, and there is no other way to do it but go backwards, which is the only direction left if one is to rediscover the fictional truth that sprawls behind one’s spirit.
4
If I am tempted to say that nothing I have so far written has been of the truth, it is only so that I can question whether it is true or not. What I do know is that it is difficult to use the truth for getting at the deepest structural fibres of one’s spirit. Truth may not be the tool for it at all.
Not that I will tell lies. I have told many, of course, but lying is a generous and honest act in a writer, something he was born to do and is therefore bound to continue as well as he is able in order to get as close to the truth as possible. Telling lies to explain the truth is where Art and Conscience meet uneasily. Such a state is the other side of the coin to deception, like that island of such name in the South Atlantic which was thrown up by volcanic eruption and, being hollow inside, tricked ancient mariners into thinking it was larger and more important than it was, until they properly explored it and saw the true lie of the land, whereby it was confirmed that deception finally took in nobody, and that the island in any case was in continual eruption.
The older one gets the harder it becomes to lie with conviction. One’s heart hardens, and one refuses to prevaricate either to entertain people or to save someone you love from pain. In other words, one will not compromise. One’s integrity stiffens — though there is a danger of it becoming fossilized. The time when I could falsify with ease was a carefree golden age. I did not even have to think about it or make a decision to do so, but simply dissembled out of a positive joy of life. If I want to tell lies nowadays I have to start speaking the truth and wait for them to grow from that, though it makes little difference in the end.
Although it has become difficult to lie, self-interest prevents me telling enough truth to stop me living in the ease and comfort of creating fiction. And yet there is no danger, because I have been protected from speaking the truth. It hasn’t occurred to me to try and tell it, and I haven’t seen the need of it, nor felt it to be necessary. I thought I was already dealing with it, but realize that this is not so at all, because I didn’t know that the truth about myself existed. It seemed that I lived the truth and breathed the truth as far as I myself was concerned.
Even in those years of sham, gullery, and make-believe I was searching for the truth. He who lies does so only because he feels he has more need of the truth than he who keeps silent, or than he who pompously professes to speak only the truth, which is next to saying nothing.
So let me pick up another strand of my raw material, and begin to interweave several threads as I go along.
5
Grandfather Burton hated dogs. He despised people who loved them and even those who showed them kindness. He was blind in one eye, and that was the one he looked at animals with, unless they had hoofs or horns and might be tempted to go for him, in which case he fixed them with the other till he had stared them out and could afford to ignore them.
Dogs were as subservient and slavish as those who called them by name, petted and patted them. Such people were feminine and soft and did not know why they were on earth. They had to become friendly with dogs — as if dogs could ever tell them why or, more likely, inform them that it wasn’t necessary to question why they were on earth. Because of these blind and sweeping prejudices a large section of English humanity was cut off from him, which may have been exactly how he wanted it, though I think he had little opinion about it either way. If he kept dogs it was only because they had their uses, but they got little thanks for it.