It seems that the infinite only makes itself known to the finite by means of selected symbols or ‘emotions’ (which perhaps are only the result of symbol-action): it is beyond the comprehension of the finite (human?) mind to understand the reality behind these symbols. But this does not exclude the possibility of creating — througha fuller understanding of the symbols — a higher form of consciousness which might ultimately glimpse the reality that lay behind.
I had long since seen that my father looked on Nietzsche’s work mainly in political terms whereas I saw it as dealing with metaphysics — in that Nietzsche had seen that language was what humans used in their exercise of power, and that any idea of ‘truth’ had to recognise this and somehow overcome it. Hence Nietzsche’s extraordinary elliptical, ironic, highly wrought style that had to be understood by a reader as an artwork rather than an argument. I hoped to go up to Oxford after I got out of the army in order to read philosophy and to try to get more straight my ideas about all this. (But then, when I did get to Oxford, my tutor said, ‘We don’t do Nietzsche’ — implying that he had been a Nazi).
Mervyn had left the London Irish in Austria in order to work on the staff at Central Mediterranean Headquarters. It seemed that I might not be in a close working relationship with him again. I had a letter from him –
The chaps here are nice, but at present they seem solely interested in their work — not because they like it, because they seem to have been allowed hardly any other interests during the war. How terrible. There is also a large content of ‘the affected young man’ — not your sort of affectation but a far more transparent species of this sometime delectable trait.
Am READING seriously and furiously. Do you know that we have been living in ignorance (I have anyway) of décadence (French) as opposed to honest English decadence. The French sort is far more awful and I must define it to you as soon as I understand it so that we can practise it like mad.
Hope you have opened a branch office of the SDA; you should get many members now. I am having difficulty in extending it here of course.
PS Has your mighty epic (which we planned you would publish at the age of 80 years) taken any less amorphous shape?
For many years I forgot I had planned an epic. But here it now is, rarefied and distilled over a lifetime of not knowing quite in what style to write it.
I had been impatient to get home, not only to my family but also to my old school friends; and now when I got back to the battalion from Venice I learned that this would be possible — under the aegis of an army order that all officers and men under a certain age and with less than a certain time of serving overseas were now eligible to be sent to the Far East to continue the war against Japan — with the benefit of a month’s leave in England first. So my wish to get home was granted — but rather in the manner of that ghost story in which a couple are given three wishes, the first two of which are fulfilled in such a horrific manner that the third has to be that the first two should be cancelled. However, I wrote home –
The authorities declared I was eligible for Burma by just three weeks, and nothing that any kindly CO or brigadier out here can do can stop me. But as it happened I received the news with something like relief, and would not now alter the arrangement even if it were possible. I have been growing moribund in Austria with the harassing job of organising sports from the confines of a stuffy office. Leave, I am sure, will miraculously revive me.
I don’t know how much this was bravado: it was perhaps a fatalism I had learned; and there might be a way of going east with my old clique of friends. So off I went from Austria on the long and by now familiar journey back through Florence and Rome to Naples to wait for a boat to take me home, if only en route to tortuous approaches to Japan. I was sitting with a few fellow travelling companions on the terrace of the Officers’ Club looking out across the beautiful bay at Vesuvius, which was smoking rather ominously in the distance (it had caused some consternation by half erupting the previous year: this was August 1945), and I was thinking that after all on no account did I want to go to fight Japan. Then we read in the local army newspaper that a bomb had been dropped on Japan that was a new sort of bomb — something to do with what goes on at the heart of the matter — and its effects were so horrific that countless thousands of people had been killed and the Japanese were already talking of surrender. In fact, its effects were so unknown and so uncanny that in future large-scale wars might be made impossible. So I thought — Well that’s not so bad then! Good old whatever-it-is at the heart of matter!
12
Humans seem at home in war. They feel lost when among the responsibilities of peace. In war they are told what to do: they accept that they have to ‘get on with it’ In peace it seems uncertain what they have to do: they have to discover what the ‘it’ is to get on with.
I had been keen to get home to be with my family and friends, even if it was only for a month before going out to Burma or wherever. But if the war was really about to be over, then it might be possible that I could be at peace in the Far East with my so-called clique of friends. This clique I had fantasised about in Italy was a sort of alternative family, to be enjoyed if possible in conjunction with both my father’s and my sister’s establishments. At school my friends and I had been, yes, in our attitudes homosexual; though only in one pairing occasionally practising. For the most part we were fantasy-gay in style, in conceits. In war this style had had to be carried on mainly by letter. But as part of occupying forces in Burma, Malaysia, might not three or four of us form an exotic home from home?
When I had gone from public school straight into the army this had seemed to be a continuation of a homosexual world in which there were no natural family ties — no responsibilities, no chance of children. In this sense it had been like the Garden of Eden. Would it be possible to create a peacetime Eden?
In the army in Italy I had hardly thought of myself as homosexuaclass="underline" I had scarcely felt myself sexual at all — sex was an itch that war had pushed into the sidelines. Then, when I had been in Naples with Anthony (with whom my friendship was strictly platonic) I had written to a third member of the clique who was recovering from D-Day wounds in England — ‘Anthony keeps talking paternally of the ultimate necessity of marriage and family-rearing which, he maintains, involves SETTLING DOWN at some quite early date. I do not grant him this last proposition, for I hold that it is just as preferable to be UNSETTLED in marriage as it is out of marriage.’ And then — ‘I WILL NOT BE RESPECTABLE.’ And earlier — ‘I am both ignorant and disinterested in women.’
But then, when I got home to London in September 1945, I found that the whole grandiose social whirl had started up again as if there had been only a blip since September 1939. Almost every night there were what used to be known as debutante dances, to which those thought to be socially acceptable were invited and to which I had the entrée through my sister Vivien and my Aunt Irene Ravensdale. And each of these dances seemed to consist of an enchanted garden of girls. How was it possible that I had not noticed girls before? Now, suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere and infinitely alluring; as thick on the ground as — how might it be put? — ‘autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa’? But had not this been Milton’s reference to fallen angels? Well, so be it. If it was love that one wanted — take one’s pick!