In the time he has been here he has changed a great deal; he is not sure it is for the better. During the winter just past there were times when he thought he would die of cold and misery and loneliness. But he has pulled through, after a fashion. By the time the next winter arrives, cold and misery will have less purchase on him. Then he will be on his way to becoming a proper Londoner, hard as stone. Turning to stone was not one of his aims, but it may be what he will have to settle for.
All in all, London is proving to be a great chastener. Already his ambitions are more modest than they used to be, much more modest. Londoners disappointed him, at first, with the poverty of their ambitions. Now he is on his way to joining them. Each day the city chastens him, chastises him; like a beaten dog, he is learning.
Not knowing what, if anything, he wants to say about Ford, he lies abed later and later in the mornings. When finally he sits down at his desk he is unable to concentrate. Summertime contributes to his confusion. The London he knows is a city of winter where one plods through each day with nothing to look forward to but nightfall and bedtime and oblivion. Through these balmy summer days, which seem made for ease and pleasure, the testing continues: what part is being tested he is no longer sure. Sometimes it seems he is being tested simply for testing’s sake, to see whether he will endure the test.
About quitting IBM he has no regrets. But now he has no one at all to speak to, not even Bill Briggs. Day after day goes by when not a word passes his lips. He begins to mark them off with an S in his diary: days of silence.
Outside the Underground station he bumps by mistake against a little old man selling newspapers. ‘Sorry!’ he says. ‘Watch where you’re going!’ snarls the man. ‘Sorry!’ he repeats.
Sorry: the word comes heavily out of his mouth, like a stone. Does a single word of indeterminate grammatical class count as speech? Has what has occurred between himself and the old man been an instance of human contact, or is it better described as mere social interaction, like the touching of antennae between ants? To the old man, certainly, it was nothing. All day long the old man stands there with his stack of papers, muttering angrily to himself; he is always waiting for a chance to abuse some passer-by. Whereas in his own case the memory of that single word will persist for weeks, perhaps for the rest of his life. Bumping into people, saying ‘Sorry!’, getting abused: a ruse, a cheap way of forcing a conversation. How to trick loneliness.
He is in the vale of testing and not doing very well. Yet he cannot be the only one to be tested. There must be people who have passed through the vale and come out on the other side; there must be people who have dodged the testing entirely. He too could dodge the test if he preferred. He could run away to Cape Town, for instance, and never come back. But is that what he wants to do? Surely not, not yet.
Yet what if he stays on and fails the test, fails disgracefully? What if, alone in his room, he begins to cry and cannot cease? What if one morning he finds that he lacks the courage to get up, finds it easier to spend the day in bed — that day and the next, and the next, in sheets that get grubbier and grubbier? What happens to people like that, people who cannot stand up to the testing, and crack?
He knows the answer. They are shipped off somewhere to be taken care of — to some hospital, home, institution. In his case he will simply be shipped back to South Africa. The English have enough of their own to take care of, enough people who fail the testing. Why should they take care of foreigners too?
He hovers before a doorway in Greek Street, Soho. Jackie — Model, says the card above the bell. He is in need of human intercourse: what could be more human than sexual intercourse? Artists have frequented prostitutes since time immemorial and are none the worse for it, that he knows from his reading. In fact, artists and prostitutes are on the same side of the social battle-lines. But Jackie — Model: is a model in this country always a prostitute, or in the business of selling oneself are there gradations, gradations no one has told him about? Might model in Greek Street stand for something quite specialized, for specialized tastes: a woman posing naked under a light, for instance, with men in raincoats standing around in the shadows, gazing shiftily at her, leering? Once he has rung the bell, will there be a way of inquiring, finding out what is what, before he is entirely sucked in? What if Jackie herself turns out to be old or fat or ugly? And what of the etiquette? Is this how one visits someone like Jackie — unannounced — or is one expected to telephone beforehand and make an appointment? How much does one pay? Is there a scale that every man in London knows, every man except him? What if he is identified at once as a hick, a dummy, and overcharged?
He falters, retreats.
In the street a man in a dark suit passes by who seems to recognize him, seems about to stop and speak. It is one of the senior programmers from his IBM days, someone he did not have much contact with, but always thought well disposed towards him. He hesitates, then with an embarrassed nod hurries past.
‘So what are you doing with yourself these days — leading a life of pleasure?’ — that is what the man would say, smiling genially. What could he say in return? That we cannot always be working, that life is short, we must taste its pleasures while we can? What a joke, and what a scandal too! For the stubborn, mean lives that his ancestors lived, sweating in their dark clothes in the heat and dust of the Karoo, to eventuate in this: a young man sauntering around a foreign city, eating up his savings, whoring, pretending to be an artist! How can he so casually betray them and then hope to escape their avenging ghosts? It was not in the nature of those men and women to be gay and have pleasure, and it is not in his. He is their child, foredoomed from birth to be gloomy and suffer. How else does poetry come anyway, except out of suffering, like blood squeezed from a stone?
South Africa is a wound within him. How much longer before the wound stops bleeding? How much longer will he have to grit his teeth and endure before he is able to say, ‘Once upon a time I used to live in South Africa but now I live in England’?
Now and again, for an instant, it is given to him to see himself from the outside: a whispering, worried boy-man, so dull and ordinary that one would not spare him a second glance. These flashes of illumination disturb him; rather than holding on to them, he tries to bury them in darkness, forget them. Is the self he sees at such moments merely what he appears to be, or is it what he really is? What if Oscar Wilde is right, and there is no deeper truth than appearance? Is it possible to be dull and ordinary not only on the surface but to one’s deepest depths, and yet be an artist? Might T. S. Eliot, for instance, be secretly dull to his depths, and might Eliot’s claim that the artist’s personality is irrelevant to his work be nothing but a stratagem to conceal his own dullness?
Perhaps; but he does not believe it. If it comes down to a choice between believing Wilde and believing Eliot, he chooses to believe Eliot. If Eliot chooses to seem dull, chooses to wear a suit and work in a bank and call himself J. Alfred Prufrock, it must be as a disguise, as part of the necessary cunning of the artist in the modern age.
Sometimes, as a relief from walking the city streets, he retreats to Hampstead Heath. There the air is gently warm, the paths full of young mothers pushing prams or chatting to each other as their children gambol. Such peace and contentment! He used to be impatient of poems about budding flowers and zephyrous breezes. Now, in the land where those poems were written, he begins to understand how deep gladness can run at the return of the sun.