Burton was like a ramrod in his walk, born that way, it seemed, but Joseph was a turkey-cock who had to know he was proud, and constantly tell himself so, before he actually appeared proud to other people. His eyes then burned with the self-importance of the little man who believes he is the centre of the earth and of society around him.
He acted his part with panache, and a certain amount of swagger, a show-off who is often recognized as the lynchpin and asset of a tight society afraid of falling to pieces. He was considered to be noteworthy and attractive enough, a by no means common attainment that lifted him — in his estimation — from the crowd round about. Where the Burtons might at most get stomach ulcers, the Sillitoes were prone to cancer.
As brothers they lived for themselves alone, not as a clan and for each other, but imprisoned in the airless cells of their families, which usually consisted of one or two children, except for my father, who was illiterate and had five. The fate of Joseph’s wife would be a tale all of its own if he had not been so self-righteously discreet in his treatment of her. Full information rarely emerged. Edgar’s wife abandoned him to melancholia and idleness, and to his frequent tears brought on by memories of Gommecourt. Frederick left his wife after twenty years of marriage, to devote himself to art and freedom, though it may have been a mutual parting. An early scene of home-sweet-home is of my mother bending over a bucket to let the blood run into it after my father (a real Sillitoe, so the Burtons said) had used the usual overforce of his energy when he hit her on the head with a shoe.
What agony of the heart did he go through before the hand lifted to strike? I hope it lasted for a decently long time, though I suppose that after the first blow they came on call, almost with pleasure on both sides, as the barrier went down and the fist pounded. And if the pain of my father’s soul seemed to have plagued him for an eternity before he picked up the shoe or clenched his fist, maybe it was really only a few minutes, in spite of how long it felt when he fought the great fight to leash back his vicious urges.
Joseph turned against women because, having an aversion for his own life, he held them to blame for his birth, unwilling to get up courage and turn such wrath on the father who was equally responsible — or to set it at no one at all, but to do the impossible and live reasonably ever after.
He held his wife down more effectively than by knocking her about. He did it by sheer force of demonic personality. He oppressed her by oppressing himself even more, and there is no more final way of doing it than that. In other words, he did it at any price. He spited himself to crush his wife, and perhaps he thought it eminently worth while, since it held in check the parts of himself he was afraid of, but which were nothing more than the surviving freedom of his spirit which society had trained him to despise.
54
Joseph imagined that if he lived alone he would live longer, and that family life was cruelly shortening the number of his years on earth, time that would be blissfully untrammelled if he had no such domestic commitments. This fact, unjust to everyone, gnawed at his vitals. It was one of those fundamental untruths which had moulded his features — but became true after it had fixed them for ever. He could not know that if women want to stop living in the jungle with men, and if men care to ease their fang-and-claw existence with women, then they have to be together in peace, and start chopping the trees down instead of each other. Like most people, he could not see beyond the limits of his own conflict. If he could, it might no longer be there — and then what would he have to live for?
On his wedding day Joseph committed the minor and understandable fault of drinking too much whisky. When the guests left he turned on the wedding presents and smashed them to pieces. Or maybe it was something else, I’m not too sure. Whatever it was, it would have been easier on his wife if Joseph had been able to forget it. Then she might have forgotten it also.
But memory feeds on guilt, and guilt on memory. Without memory there is no guilt: without guilt — no memory. Guilt attacks those least able to bear it, and who have done least to deserve it. It takes the energy of the weak who are trying to be strong. The monsters of history are immune to guilt. Those with long memories remember guilt till their dying hour. A harmless and repressed desire becomes an obsession that can turn into a crime, either quick and homicidal, or one that lasts forty years and leaves no obvious or open wound. So the women suffer more, because they are made to remember the wrong the husband is supposed to have committed by the continual phenomenon of his guilt, by which he leaves her in no doubt that he did whatever it was only because of meeting and marrying her. He implies that no one but she can be held responsible for it, though the nominal blame stays entirely his because he wants it that way, and won’t let anyone forget it.
Guilt is that unacknowledged feeling at having come out of the slime, a useless sensation which drives the innocent into apathy and sloth. It begets the crime that creates another, and so it is compounded into a monstrous black tangle in the soul allowing no other person to live close by — unless they infect themselves with the same malaise, so as to be able to fight back and prevent themselves going dead under it. Joseph was guilty of nothing more than the harmless desire for a freer life. But he thought that to achieve it would utterly wreck his peace of mind, and maybe that of everyone near by, whereas in reality it would have liberated them as well, or at least made their lives more tolerable.
In a sudden rage he would hit the wall with his fist, while Burton, who did not recognize rage because he lost his temper far too easily, and who assumed absolute right to be on his side anyway, and who didn’t need the fuel of guilt to get the best out of life, would hit his children. Is there much to choose between them? Joseph was bitter and timid. He lived in a twilight world of hard work and respectability, being the sort of person who decided early on in life that it was easier to pick up a cash book than a hod of bricks. He rarely worked hard enough for his labour to call forth much sweat, and even when he did, rather than mop his brow, he would stand and look as if he were bone dry, like someone not accustomed to sweating, in which case he would get dry sooner than if he took to wiping at the sweat assiduously — though he had the sort of skin that did not sweat much anyway.
He clung to his tight principles for fear he would drop into hell — hell being a chaotic place where he wouldn’t be able to tell one person from another. He never made any contact with the Burtons, being geographically divided from them by the spiritual barrier of the Pennines — which assumed the same height and ruggedness as the Alps which cut off the Romans from the Numidians, until Hannibal pushed a way through the passes with elephants. Beyond the Pennines lay the flat, open lands of the Trent and the Fens, where the Burtons and all their like could stay for ever, part of that tribe of pikers who dealt in coneys and ponies and other such pastoral low life.
Joseph believed in the freedom of the individual in such a way that instead of being a slave to others he was a slave to himself. It was certainly a case with him that though self-pity corrupts, ordinary human pity corrupts absolutely because it would lead him into more contact with people. He would not get out into the world and compete with others. Competition was anathema and death, indignity and dishonour. He knew that safety lay in hard but ambitionless work, and with his combined qualities of tenacity, loyalty, application, and skill he could appear proud without being put upon.