THE AFFIRMATION
by Christopher Priest
Extract from "Sailing to Byzantium," from W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats; and of M. B.
Yeats, Anne Yeats, and Macmillan London Ltd.
Copyright 1981 Christopher Priest
ISBN 0-684-16957-6
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.
To M.L. and L.M.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
W. B. YEATS
"Sailing to Byzantium"
THE AFFIRMATION
1
This much I know for sure:
My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine years old. Already there is an uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a variable; I am no longer twenty-nine.
I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy into one's mind. If I am to reveal myself then I prefer to do so by my choices, rather than by my accidents. Some might say that such accidents are the product of the unconscious mind, and thus inherently interesting, but as I write this I am warned by what is to follow. Much is unclear. At this outset I need that tedious quality of pedanticism. I have to choose my words with care.
I want to be sure.
Therefore, I shall begin again. In the summer of 1976, the year Edwin Miller lent me his cottage, I was twenty-nine years old.
I can be as certain of this as I am of my name, because they are both from independent sources. One is the gift of parents, the other the product of the calendar. Neither can be disputed.
In the spring of that year, while still twenty-eight, I came to a turning-point in my life. It amounted to a run of bad luck, caused by a number of external events over which I had little or no control. These misfortunes were all independent of each other, yet because they all came together in the space of a few weeks it seemed as if they were part of some terrible conspiracy against me.
In the first place, my father died. It was an unexpected and premature death, of an undetected cerebral aneurysm. I had a good relationship with him, simultaneously intimate and distant; after the death of our mother some twelve years earlier, my sister Felicity and I had been united with him at an age when most adolescents are resisting their parents. Within two or three years, partly because I went away to university, and partly because Felicity and I became alienated from each other, this closeness had been broken. The three of us had for several years lived in different parts of the country, and were together only rarely. Even so, the memories of that short period in my teens lent an unspoken bond between my father and me, and we both valued it.
He died solvent but not rich. He also died intestate, which meant that I had to be involved in a number of tedious meetings with his solicitor. At the end of it all, Felicity and I each received half of his money. It was not large enough to make much difference to either of us, but in my case it was sufficient to cushion me from some of what followed.
Because, in the second place, following a few days after the news of my father's death, I heard that I was soon to be made redundant.
It was a time of recession in the country, with inflating prices, strikes, unemployment, a shortage of capital. Smugly, with my middle-class confidence, I had assumed my degree would insure me against any of this. I worked as a formulation chemist for a flavour house, supplying a large pharmaceutical company, but there was an amalgamation with another group, a change of policy, and my firm had to close my department. Again, I assumed that finding another job would be a mere technicality. I had qualifications and experience, and I was prepared to be adaptable, but many other science graduates were made redundant at the same time and few jobs were available.
Then I was served notice to quit my fiat. Government legislation, by marginally protecting the tenant at the expense of the landlord, had disrupted the forces of supply and demand. Rather than rent property, it was becoming more advantageous to buy and sell. In my case, I rented an apartment on the first floor of a large old house in Kilburn, and had lived there for several years. The house was sold to a property company, though, and almost at once I was told to get out. There were appeal procedures, and I embarked on them, but with my other worries at the time I did not act promptly or effectively enough. It was soon clear I should have to vacate. But where in London could one move to? My own case was far from untypical, and more and more people were hunting for flats in an ever-shrinking market. Rents were going up quickly.
People who had security of tenure stayed put, or, if they moved, transferred the tenancy to friends. I did what I could: I registered with agencies, answered advertisements, asked my friends to let me know if they heard of a place coming free, but in all the time I was under notice to quit I never even got so far as to look at any places, let alone find somewhere suitable.
It was in this context of circumstantial disaster that Gracia and I fell out. This, alone of all my problems, was one in which I played a part, for which I bore some responsibility.
I was in love with Gracia, and she, I believe, with me. We had known each other a long time, and had passed through all the stages of novelty, acceptance, deepening passion, temporary disillusionment, rediscovery, habit.
She was sexually irresistible to me. We could be good company to each other, complement our moods, yet still retain sufficient differences from each other to be surprising.
In this was our downfall. Gracia and I aroused non-sexual passions in each other that neither of us had ever experienced with anyone else. I was normally placid, yet when I was with her I was capable of degrees of anger and love and bitterness that always shocked me, so powerful were they. Everything was heightened with Gracia, everything assumed an immediacy or importance that created havoc. She was mercurial, able to change her mind or her mood with infuriating ease, and she was cluttered with neuroses and phobias which at first I found endearing, but which the longer I knew her only obstructed everything else. Because of them she was at once predatory and vulnerable, capable of wounding and being wounded in equal measure, although at different times. I never learned how to be with her.
The rows, when we had them, came suddenly and violently. I was always taken unawares, yet once they had started I realized that the tensions had been building up for days. Usually the rows cleared the air, and we would make up with a renewed closeness, or with sex. Gracia's temperament allowed her to forgive quickly or not at all. In every case but one she forgave quickly, and the one time she did not was of course the last. It was an awful, squalid row, on a street corner in London, with people walking past us trying not to stare or listen, with Gracia screaming and swearing at me, and I stricken with an impenetrable coldness, violently angry inside but iron-clad outside. After I left her I went home and was sick. I tried to ring her, but she was never there; I could not get to her. It happened while I was job-hunting, flat-hunting, trying to adjust to the death of my father.