‘She had of course many secrets being a true child of the Mouseion, and I had to guard myself desperately against jealousy or the desire to intrude upon the hidden side of her life. I was almost successful in this and if I spied upon her it was really from curiosity to know what she might be doing or thinking when she was not with me. There was, for example, a woman of the town whom she visited frequently, and whose influence on her was profound enough to make me suspect an illicit relationship; there was also a man to whom she wrote long letters, though as far as I could see he lived in the city. Perhaps he was bedridden? I made inquiries, but my spies always brought me back uninteresting information. The woman was a fortune-teller, elderly, a widow. The man to whom she wrote — her pen shrilling across the cheap notepaper — turned out to be a doctor who held a small part-time post on a local consulate. He was not bedridden; but he was a homosexual, and dabbled in hermetic philosophy which is now so much in vogue. Once she left a particularly clear impression on my blotting-pad and in the mirror (the mirror again!) I was able to read:—“my life there is a sort of Unhealed Place as you call it which I try to keep full of people, accidents, diseases, anything that comes to hand. You are right when you say it is an apology for better living, wiser living. But while I respect your disciplines and your knowledge I feel that if I am ever going to come to terms with myself I must work through the dross in my own character and burn it up. Anyone could solve my problem artificially by placing it in the lap of a priest. We Alexandrians have more pride than that — and more respect for religion. It would not be fair to God, my dear sir, and whoever else I fail (I see you smile) I am determined not to fail Him whoever He is.”
‘It seemed to me then that if this was part of a love-letter it was the kind of love-letter one could only address to a saint; and again I was struck, despite the clumsiness and incorrectness of the writing, by the fluency with which she could dissociate between ideas of different categories. I began to see her in an altered light; as somebody who might well destroy herself in an excess of wrong-headed courage and forfeit the happiness which she, in common with all the rest of us, desired and lived only to achieve. These thoughts had the effect of qualifying my love for her, and I found myself filled sometimes by disgust for her. But what made me afraid was that after quite a short time I found to my horror that I could not live without her. I tried. I took short journeys away from her. But without her I found life full of consuming boredom which was quite insupportable. I had fallen in love. The very thought filled me with an inexplicable despair and disgust. It was as if I unconsciously realized that in her I had met my evil genius. To come to Alexandria heart-whole and to discover an amor fati — it was a stroke of ill-luck which neither my health nor my nerves felt capable of supporting. Looking in the mirror I reminded myself that I had turned forty and already there was a white hair or two at my temples! I thought once of trying to end this attachment, but in every smile and kiss of Justine I felt my resolutions founder. Yet with her one felt all around the companionship of shadows which invaded life and filled it with a new resonance. Feeling so rich in ambiguities could not be resolved by a sudden act of the will. I had at times the impression of a woman whose every kiss was a blow struck on the side of death. When I discovered, for example (what I knew) that she had been repeatedly unfaithful to me, and at times when I had felt myself to be closest to her, I felt nothing very sharp in outline; rather a sinking numbness such as one might feel on leaving a friend in hospital, to enter a lift and fall six floors in silence, standing beside a uniformed automaton whose breathing one could hear. The silence of my room deafened me. And then, thinking about it, gathering my whole mind about the fact I realized that what she had done bore no relation to myself: it was an attempt to free herself for me: to give me what she knew belonged to me. I cannot say that this sounded any better to my ears than a sophistry. Nevertheless my heart seemed to know the truth of this and dictated a tactful silence to me to which she responded with a new warmth, a new ardour, of gratitude added to love. This again disgusted me somewhat.
‘Ah! but if you had seen her then as I did in her humbler, gentler moments, remembering that she was only a child, you would not have reproached me for cowardice. In the early morning, sleeping in my arms, her hair blown across that smiling mouth, she looked like no other woman I could remember: indeed like no woman at all, but some marvellous creature caught in the Pleistocene stage of her development. And later again, thinking about her as I did and have done these past few years I was surprised to find that though I loved her wholly and knew that I should never love anyone else — yet I shrank from the thought that she might return. The two ideas co-existed in my mind without displacing one another. I thought to myself with relief “Good. I have really loved at last. That is something achieved”; and to this my alter ego added: “Spare me the pangs of love requited with Justine.” This enigmatic polarity of feeling was something I found completely unexpected. If this was love then it was a variety of the plant which I have never seen before. (“Damn the word” said Justine once. “I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of ‘evolution’ or ‘revolt’. Never use the word to me.”)’
* * * * *
These later extracts I have taken from the section of the diary which is called Posthumous Life and is an attempt the author makes to sum up and evaluate these episodes. Pombal finds much of this banal and even dull; but who, knowing Justine, could fail to be moved by it? Nor can it be said that the author’s intentions are not full of interest. He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. ‘Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine.’ (I mean, of course, ‘Claudia’.) ‘I dream of a book powerful enough to contain the elements of her — but it is not the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot in a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the narrative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would setmy own bookfreeto dream.’
But of course one cannot escape so easily from the pattern which he regards as imposed but which in fact grows up organically within the work and appropriates it. What is missing in his work — but this is a criticism of all works which do not reach the front rank — is a sense of play. He bears down so hard upon his subject-matter; so hard that it infects his style with some of the unbalanced ferocity of Claudia herself. Then, too, everything which is a fund of emotion becomes of equal importance to him: a sign uttered by Claudia among the oleanders of Nouzha, the fireplace where she burnt the manuscript of his novel about her (‘For days she looked at me as if she were trying to read my book in me’), the little room in the Rue Lepsius…. He says of his characters: ‘All bound by time in a dimension which is not reality as we would wish it to be — but is created by the needs of the work. For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.’