I bumped into Rosemary again some months later in a coffee bar in Oxford. I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ said, ‘Good.’ She said, ‘I thought you were that murderer.’ There was a murderer on the loose at the time who was said to chop up women and dissolve them in the bath. I thought — Well this indeed is a singular signal that one can hardly explain; but might it be what is required?
I took her out to dinner. She hardly spoke. I rattled on. After a time I said, ‘What are you thinking She said, That I could send you mad in a fortnight.’ I said, ‘Why wait a fortnight?’ I went out to where my car was parked and I gave her the keys. I lay down in the road where she could run over me. She said she did not know how to drive. I got up to show her. Then we drove back to her lodging. By the end of the evening I think we both thought we might marry.
The next weekend I suggested we go in my car for a drive in the country. She asked if we could visit her old grandmother who lived in Hertfordshire. I said — Of course. I had the impression that Rosemary’s family must be hard up, for in spite of her presence at London dances she appeared to have no money for bus fares and to possess no smart clothes. On Sunday we drove through country lanes and eventually came to the gates and lodge of a drive leading to what must be a large country house. An old lady came out from the lodge to open the gates. I wondered — This is her grandmother? The old lady waved us on. We drove through what seemed to be endless acres of parkland and came to a long low house like a battleship. We went in through a back door and along stone passages where all life seemed to have stopped; then through a baize door to a small sitting room, outside which Rosemary asked me to wait for a moment. Then when I went in there was a very old lady in a wheelchair who, when her granddaughter had introduced me, said, ‘And I was such a friend of your grandfather’s!’
I still had no idea who this lady could be who had been a friend of my grandfather George Curzon. (I managed a bit later to glimpse an envelope lying on a desk addressed to ‘Lady Desborough’.) She asked Rosemary if I would like to see what she referred to as ‘the paintings’. She gave Rosemary a huge old-fashioned key and we went down a central corridor of tattered grandeur and into a long high picture gallery where, when Rosemary had opened a creaking shutter, there appeared — through cobwebs — a Van Dyck? An Italian Renaissance Holy Family? A huge portrait of a soldier on a horse that could be — surely not! — a Rembrandt? (Rosemary said — ‘Yes, they say it is.’) I thought it important that I should not appear to be bowled over by all this. Why should it not be as natural as anything else? But it seemed more likely than ever that we would marry.
*
So this was peace. But there still seems to me, sixty years later, to be a problem of how to write about war. From the complexities of peace you can produce an artwork. From the simplicities of war — can you portray in one breath both heroism and horror?
People are not supposed to write about their successful exploits in war: this is considered to be bad form. And about the exploits of others — well, this is easier to write when they are dead. There is a whiff of immature triumphalism in stories about successful killing — unless one has paid the price of being killed oneself. Good stories were able to be written about the First World War because then the whole absurdity could be seen as just horror, a senseless disaster. But the Second World War had not been like this — had it? It was held to be just and right. And yet there were the horrors, the disasters. There are very few good accounts of the fighting in the Second World War — one of them, as I have mentioned, is Raleigh Trevelyan’s The Fortress about the landing at Anzio. A good story about the Second World War has to comprise a way of writing about the horror and the rightness, the misery and the satisfaction, the evil and the good, all in one. Not a problem for epistemology? No?
Perhaps more a problem for religion. The old Greeks had gods — and so did Nietzsche, although he exclaimed that his god was dead. (I later suggested in a novel that such a god might better be seen as a successful train robber retired to the Argentine.) Anyway, not much of a task here, it is true, for logical or verifiable thinking. But then what should be the style? What about my own candidate for Good Fairy: that which goes on at the heart of matter? Here, one is told, things can both be and not be at the same time; an observer affects that which is observed; reality is a function of the experimental condition. So why should not this be the style in which one might float in the deep end of peace? A lifetime’s effort indeed! Or would one rather drown?
Humans seem at home in war; they do not feel at home in peace. This cannot be said often enough. So long as it is denied — so long as it is thought that peace is prevented by the actions of certain misfits — then humans cannot learn. There are few novels written about how to live in peace; they are held to be boring. People prefer to read about, and indeed many to experience, the senseless excitement of the simulation of war; the dicing with destruction and the risk of being dead. But if this is the condition on which evolution has depended and which has brought us to where we are, then it hardly makes sense to object — unless, that is, it is seen that evolution has also brought us to an awareness that this condition has become too dangerous and might be surmounted: one can be conscious, that is, of existence on another level.
Evolution has depended on carnage: some species have to be destroyed so that others survive. On the way, however, there have also evolved alliances, dependences, symbioses by which some species may help each other to survive, even if at the cost of others. It seems that humans have evolved an ability to be aware of this, even if they do not seem able to stop being at war within and among themselves. They see they have their animal nature; and, somewhat at odds with this, their human nature which sees the possibility of something different. But they do not seem to have evolved a strategy by which to be at ease with this — except perhaps through religion or the creation of works of art. In the course of evolution, that is, they have experienced an order beyond that of animal or even human nature — an order which seems to be outside evolution because it sees how evolution can be assessed and even reorganised. This order seems to manifest itself as infinite, eternal. Humans have called it the supernatural or spiritual; and it can naturally, of course, be said not to exist. But it seems to have arisen from a tendency of humans to try to make sense of their situation — that of being confined in an evolutionary process and yet also experiencing that a part of them is free of this, and even at times can influence it. They may attempt this by art; or perhaps try to do it by seeing their situation as funny.
Even in formal war there had seemed to be some spiritual ordering as well as orders coming down through chains of command — how else did I stay alive? You get on with things as best you can — but then what does ‘best’ involve? You keep your eyes and ears open; you learn the limitations of orders; you become aware of an ability within yourself to know what further is required. And then, when necessary, you are ready to jump in at a deep end. But I have told my story.
My last letter to my friend Timmy before he went out to Burma still hoping, perhaps, to ‘prove’ himself in war, was –
I feel that you were right in your decision to issue Burmawards. Not, however, for the reason you give. Life in battle is the most futile thing in the world, for it is the only futility about which one is forced to care desperately. And for this reason it is the most unreal thing in the world. Indeed, its most potent effect upon me was to suggest that there was no reality in anything; that all was the wild imagination of an aimless mind. I now think nothing; I am too weary to wonder about the unreality of reality; I have reached the stage where everything must be accepted or rejected without inquiry. All that I have learned of men is that they are composed of such a mixture of perfidy and nobility as I cannot hope to unravel; and all I have learned of life is that there is nothing more to be known about it save that which is observable at the end of one’s nose.