It was not pleasant to see his own hidden yearnings given some benefit of liberation in others. Yet Joseph would have been unhappy with that freedom. He did not have the moral stamina to sustain such breadth, which therefore stopped him getting it, and which led him to condemn it in those who had got it — who in any case were not happy, though in his limited vision he did not realize this. It was better to condemn others, as a sure way of hiding his own faults.
There was a tight and lonesome streak in him, a need to stay by himself with what he had got, as if to be in life at all called for a sustained and painful effort. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone and looked after, like a baby still warm in the amniotic fluid. Even a neighbour knocking at the back door turned him into a tense, poised animal about to shout them abusively to hell.
Joseph fitted silently and resentfully into his occupation, grudging the near presence of his fellow-workers so much that in order to stay apart from them he laboured with a dedicated frenzy of industrious skill that made him invaluable to any customer or boss. Such an individualist was, of course, antisocial, paying no dues and joining nothing. If he had to buy a licence or fill in a form it was a wicked infringement of his personal liberty. A slight twist of humanization might have made him a good anarchist, but for that slight twist to come about the planets would have to alter in their tracks.
Many might call him a typical Englishman, and if there was such a thing they could easily be right. Knowing the blood that ran in him I have always thought that an anti-social person was one hair’s breadth from hating foreigners. He was certainly patriotic, for though he wasn’t a ‘joiner’ he could always be persuaded to put on uniform in times of war. Without being loud about it he knew he must be patriotic because it would never do for his tight little world to be altered by any foreign or revolutionary influence. His safe cocoon might be upset. He might actually have to meet other people, people who were new to him what’s more, strange people, the dark people, people not actually and absolutely like him, people who stood with their mouths open or who sweated when they worked, people who might not be as prepared as he was to leave everybody else alone — people, in fact, who might imagine they not only had a perfect and easy-going right to stop him in the street and ask the way to Sneinton Market, but also to talk to him about the weather afterwards.
And yet one must give him his due, for perhaps he thought, with that modesty which is the opposite side of the coin to black conceit, that his soul was of value only to himself, and that he ought not to bother anyone else with it. A frustrated hermit, he suffered because he was forced to live through the muted agony of ordinary life, for which he did not feel himself fitted in any way, though he made a courageous attempt to go on with it.
He became so good at suffering in silence that the real wounded were those who were forced to live close to him, such as his own family, which served as a sort of lightning conductor. The pain of suppressed violence, emotional and otherwise, was etched on to the face of his wife and children, which enabled his set features to present a tight-lipped dignity to the world.
The real violence pent inside was sufficiently curbed by society, and he had the one good quality of being law-abiding, and therefore willing to allow society to influence him, in that by saving him from the realization of his own wild and sombre fantasies it at the same time protected others. Providing the laws were good, he was reasonable, but if ever the laws became unjust to a certain portion of the community, and the law was on his side, he would be a demon.
At the same time, and to himself, he saw too much worth in his own soul. A man who overvalues his soul and nurtures it alone — pets it, indulges it, allows it to grow and get to full flower untampered as much as possible by society, who keeps it free and proud, and believes it to come straight out of the soil loving the wind and the smell of its own earth — is the hermit, the ascetic, the monument of selfish ecstasy, the bigot, and the patriot for himself alone.
He is the man who calls on God from his imprisoning parlour, which he sees as his very own and golden field and thinks is heaven on earth. But he would kill God if God appeared — after condemning him for lack of pride in condescending to approach a mere and lowly mortal such as himself. Calling to God in an ecstasy of self-approbation, the man in the middle of the field is too involved to help anybody. He has already given up hope of his fellow-men, which means that he never had any of God.
By way of an opposite we have the man who lives by the best of those moral laws inscribed in the various holy books of the world, the social man who interacts and confronts nature both as a communal act and to get his food. Such people can be more tolerant and civilized, more sceptical and rational, and less dangerously dogmatical, servants of God but not enamoured of the mystical soil, more religious in a family sense, and in a way more civilized. He would help a stranger as well as his neighbour. And he who helps a stranger will make sure his neighbour does not die alone. His brother certainly would not.
53
Joseph was dark-haired when young, and inclined to be stocky in middle age. Unlike the Burtons, who kept good heads of hair throughout their lives, he went bald by his late thirties, so that he was fairly pink on top when I knew him as a child. He had the eyes and forehead of a lawyer, or the discontented manager of a small provincial department store. His light-brown eyes betrayed the unrest within, indicating what great reserves of honesty were needed to control such potent turmoil. His fine sensitive fingers seemed to hold proof of the skill that saved him from himself.
He was a useful and talented craftsman, good with hands and eyes. Two of his brothers relinquished the family trade to become managers of butchers’ shops, and on slack afternoons they would look forlornly at the traffic-flowing world over trays of chops and sausages, as if wondering how they came to be where they were, and whether they would ever get out of it except through the grave.
Joseph was a man of neither God nor Party, but if a man has no religion, one might ask, what then is left? His own soul, would be the reply. If a man has (in general) no patriotic feeling, what remains? His own country. If a man has no love to give, what can take its place? His own family. Their basic questions and answers could only have fallen out like that. And if the roots of Joseph’s family were fused and burned down for him there was only the sharp, debilitating, aching desire to find or meet some woman of cosmic force and passion to fall in love with who would alter everything. Death, life, death: in his dreams he saw a round-faced mature woman with reddish hair and small white teeth. Could that be anything to do with happiness?
Joseph and his brothers were non-men who had dragged themselves from the Welsh hills, or the misty marshes close by, and had made a go of it in Staffordshire because they could not go back to where they came from. Being not of this world they seemed to be more English than the Burtons, sole survivors of some lost tribe still too shattered by an unexplained disaster that had bitten at their tails.
Pride they had, but pride is a means of self-preservation when at bottom you are not sure of what there is to preserve. Or if you do have something to preserve then an excess of pride indicates that you feel yourself in danger of losing it. Pride is an encircling moat that you dig around yourself and fill with the muddy water of self-esteem.
Joseph was excessively proud and self-centred, and it was a far more concentrated pride than that of the Burtons, a meaner pride that not only drew the head back but also pulled in the stomach — which was just as well because Joseph was a rather sedentary and self-indulgent person. One felt that in order to get out of a tricky situation Burton would tell lies, while Joseph would tighten his face like jaundiced steel and grit his teeth as the leaden sky dropped in on him.