Delight, page 6
40
New box of matches
In the early ’Twenties, when I was writing regularly for the London Mercury, I used to spend much time, and far too much money, in the pub below in Poppins Court. Among the company there was a dark, romantic-Regency sort of man called Bohun Lynch, who did a very brave thing, for he wrote a novel about happiness. (He died not long afterwards, and it may be that his unconscious mind, prompting him to write this novel, already knew that Death was hurrying to meet him.) It was called A Perfect Day, and it was crammed with as many felicities as poor Lynch could muster for his hero. I have forgotten most of the novel, but I always remember that this hero of his found himself picking up a brand-new box of matches and experiencing a definite sensuous pleasure at the sight and feel of it. I knew what he meant; and ever since, when I have picked up a new box of matches and known a tiny flicker of delight, I have remembered Bohun Lynch, and have caught a glimpse again of his dark, romantic-Regency face.
41
Playing with small children
When I am playing with small children (and I am an old and cunning hand) I do all those things that bore or irritate me in my adult life. For example, I plunge, to their delight and mine, into ritual and tradition, create secret societies, arrange elaborate ceremonies of initiation, invent mysterious codes and passwords, turn Freemason, Oddfellow, Rosicrucian, member of the Illuminati. The most successful game I ever had with two of my children − and we played it every night for months just before their bedtime − was based on their remembering a monstrous rigmarole of questions and answers, which they often recollected when I forgot, that admitted them to some secret order we had cooked up between us. Their eyes immense, solemn, shining, they stood before me, night after night, motionless and quiet but poised on the edge of abandon − for if the ritual broke down anywhere they would throw themselves about and scream with laughter − and go through the maze of nonsense we had devised. This was how the day should end, and they were sharply disappointed if I happened to be engaged elsewhere; for they could not play this game by themselves, and their mother, like any sensible woman, would have no truck with such solemn piffle, meant only for men and small children. Their delight brought me mine. But I have never felt that I could play such games − though they are common enough − with a lot of other heavy middle-aged men, all wearing fancy dress and spectacles.
42
Mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels
Drinking mineral water in the bedrooms of foreign hotels. Especially in France and Italy, where I eat far too much, take more wine than agrees with me, and so soon exist in a surfeited liverish condition, am yawny, headachy, and in a torment of thirst. How delightful then to escape from the cathedrals and art galleries, the laborious encounters with distinguished foreign colleagues, to take off one’s coat and shoes in the plushy hermitage of the bedroom, and to receive from the waiter a bottle, fresh off the ice, of whatever brand of eau minérale they fancy round there! It will have been awarded gold medals and diplomas. It will attempt to cure rheumatism, catarrh of the stomach, urinary complaints, obesity and gout, gravel and stone. It is recommended by doctors who look like Daudet and Zola characters. But not only is it good, this mineral water (any brand), it is also beautiful. It gurgles out of its green bottle like a chill and sparkling mountain spring, and arrives in the furred desert of my throat like a benediction; and as I sit there, in my shirt-sleeves and socks, swilling it down, knowing that rheumatism, catarrh of the stomach, urinary complaints, obesity and gout, gravel and stone are now being sharply challenged, I forgive my fellowmen, no matter how bearded and incomprehensible, and think much better of myself and of life in this world.
43
Coming of the idea
The coming of the Idea. There is nothing piecemeal about its arrival. It comes as the ancient gods and goddesses must have manifested themselves to their more fortunate worshippers. (And indeed it comes from the same place.) At one moment the mind knows it not. The next moment it is there, taking full possession of the mind, which quivers in ecstatic surrender. I have been accused − and not unjustly − of having too many ideas. “More hard work, more patience,” they tell me, “and not so many ideas, my boy.” But although hard work and patience may bring rewards I shall never know, where is the ravishing delight in them? Lord, let me live to welcome again with all the old abandon, not knowing whether I am dressing or undressing, whether it is Tuesday morning or Friday evening, the sunburst of the Idea!
44
Stereoscope
Re-discovering the stereoscope. You soon get tired of the thing, of course, but then if you leave it alone for a few years and then re-discover it, the old queer magic begins working again. Nothing that we have invented since the stereoscope, an old toy by this time, has to my mind offered us an adequate substitute for its peculiar enchantment. Its secret is that, having attained at last the third dimension, it begins to remind us of the fourth dimension, that of Time. When it is working well, the stereoscope offers us a sudden halt along the fourth dimension. Time’s express unexpectedly comes to a standstill. Through its eyepieces we catch a glimpse of a moment frozen for ever. A little conjuring trick with space turns into a trick with Time. Probably the best description of the stereoscopic effect is in Rupert Brooke’s “Dining-room Tea”:
I saw the marble cup; the tea,
Hung on the air, an amber stream;
I saw the fire’s unglittering gleam,
The painted flame, the frozen smoke.
No more the flooding lamplight broke
On flying eyes and lips and hair;
But lay, but slept unbroken there,
On stiller flesh, and body breathless,
And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,
And words on which no silence grew.
That − and pretty good writing too, much better than anything Brooke’s critics offer us − is dining-room tea as seen through the stereoscope. There are industrious amateurs of the camera who make their own stereoscope views, and no doubt many of them have old moments of family history preserved in this fashion. To me they would be unbearable, altogether too poignant. No movement, not a flicker, no reaching toward us; but there, clear and smiling in the sunlight, the dead would stand, youth and hope would bloom again, and the very rose bushes and patches of lawn would rend the heart. The stereoscopic views that I possess, and in which I find delight, have nothing to do with me; and in them it is not my own bit of Time, but the world’s, which stands still. And sometimes with a rum ironic effect too. I found an old batch of these views during the war. One of them, perhaps fifty years old, was particularly charming. In it was a high summer in the Bavarian Alps: a steep path descended to a broad village street, and an old peasant woman pulled a small cart up this path; and, looking over a wooden railing in the foreground, were a youngish man in Bavarian peasant costume, who was smoking a pipe, and a buxom woman also in peasant costume; and down below, across the street, were tall houses with steep roofs and pointed towers, and beyond were thick woods and the foothills, and beyond them the mountains powdered with snow, and the sharp tooth of the Watzmann. It was an idyllic scene. I felt I would give a good deal, especially after several years of bombed London and the black-out, to saunter down this path, exchange a word with the man with the long pipe, and then stroll on the sunny side of the street below. The description on the back of the stereograph began enthusiastically: “This is one of the most famous mountain resorts in the German Alps. You can find few spots even in Switzerland with scenery as grand … there are endless possibilities in the way of walking and mountain climbing.…” And the name of this delightful place was Berchtesgaden. But in that captured moment of its time, not even the faintest shadow of a swastika mars the sunlight, and Hitler is still a queer sulky lad over in Austria. Perhaps once he saw this same stereoscopic view, saw the same steep path, the two peasants, the old woman and her cart, the fairy-tale roofs and towers among the woods; and it is possible that it was some such glimpse that began it all − he would find his way into this scene, accompanied perhaps by Wagnerian strings and trombones, even if in the end he had to wade through blood into it. To think they are all there, Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, all the black brutes of the S.S. waiting to enter this scene at their appointed place along the time track!
45
Seeing the actors
When I was a lad and regularly took my place in the queue for the early doors of the gallery in the old Theatre Royal, Bradford, the actors on their way to the stage door had to walk past us. I observed them with delight. In those days, actors looked like actors and like nothing else on earth. There was no mistaking them for wool merchants, shipping clerks, and deacons of Baptist chapels, all those familiar figures of my boyhood. They wore suits of startling check pattern, outrageous ties, and preposterous overcoats reaching down to their ankles; They never seemed to remove all their make-up as actors do now, and always had a rim of blue-black round their eyelids. They did not belong to our world and never for a moment pretended to belong to it. They swept past us, fantastically overcoated, with trilbies perched raffishly on brilliantined curls, talking of incredible matters in high tones, merely casting a few sparkling glances − all the more sparkling because of that blue-black − in our direction; and then vanished through the stage door, to reappear, but out of all recognition, in the wigs and knee-breeches of David Garrick or The Only Way. And my young heart, as innocent as an egg, went out to these romantic beings; and perhaps it was then, although I have no recollection of it, that the desire was born in me to write one day for the Theatre. Now, after working on so many stages, I know all about actors, and I doubt if the very least of their innumerable maddening tricks and absurd egoisms has escaped my observation; but, quite apart from the work we do together and without reference to the needs of my profession, I have a soft spot for actors, and probably it is because of that old delight I used to feel as they went swaggering past us on their way to the stage door. And indeed I sometimes wish they would swagger more now, buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats, and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and kept them rogues and vagabonds, which is what at heart − bless ’em! − they are.
46
Sunday papers in the country
A most mysterious source of delight, arising from the unexpected arrival of Sunday newspapers in the country. When I am in London I care less than a fig whether I have the Sunday papers or not; but if I am staying deep in the country, far away from shops or any regular delivery of papers, and if by any lucky chance these papers are brought to the house, then I am as much delighted as if I had been given a fine present, exclaiming in a kind of rapture at the very sight of the Observer, Sunday Times, Sunday Express, Sunday Pictorial, and the News of the World. And why − I cannot imagine.
47
Long trousers
There was a time when merely wearing long trousers brought me delight. In those days, when I must have been about fifteen, I had only one suit − my best − with long trousers. My other suits had knee-breeches, buttoning tightly just below the knee and worn with thick long stockings, turned down at the top. There was really nothing wrong with my appearance when I wore these knee-breeches and long stockings, for after years of football I had muscular well-shaped legs; but whenever I wore them I felt I was still imprisoned, a shame-faced giant, in the stale miniature world of childhood. Condemned − and I use this term because there were strict rules at home about which suits could be worn − to wear these knee-breeches, I felt that no glimpse of my real self could catch the town’s eye: I might almost have been sent to school in a pram. Conversely I felt that as soon as I put on the long trousers then appearance and reality were gloriously one; I joined the world of men; and even without doing anything more than wear these trousers − and leaving the other wretched things at home I could feel my whole nature expanding magnificently. On the occasional days when I was allowed to wear the adult trousers to go to school, I almost floated there. Never did eighteen inches of cloth do more for the human spirit. On those mornings now when I seem to stare sullenly at the wreck of a shining world, why do I not remind myself that although I grow old and fat and peevish at least I am wearing my long trousers?
48
Planning travel
Planning travel. I still find this delightful, whereas travel itself seems to me now a very dubious enterprise. But with paper and a sharp pencil and plenty of tobacco, together with a calendar and maps and time-tables in front of me, I can still recapture the old bewitchery. For an hour or two I dismiss the hours of boredom that lie in wait for me, the indigestion and incredible beds, the monstrous service charges and appeals for tips, the humiliating servitude to passport and customs officials and currency regulations, the ever wilder and more desperate packing, the soiled shirts and the socks with holes in them, the cold, the heat, the dust and flies, the headaches far from home. The maps and time-tables say nothing of these things but yet contrive to suggest dawn in the mountains, sunset in the desert, the oranges outside the window, moonrise over strange water, smiling brown faces, laughter in the night. I am no lover of air travel but I must confess that for happy Planning I would not now be without The ABC International Airways and Shipping Guide, which is one of the few successful poetic works of our time and might well be considered for the Nobel Prize.
49
Metaphysics
In my time I have found delight among the metaphysicians, especially those who are most ingenious in their dialectic. McTaggart, for example. I used to attend some of his more elementary lectures at Cambridge, and enjoyed every moment of them. He would stand with his head to one side, looking like a colossal pink schoolboy reciting a lesson, with a kind of owlish innocence about him; and, after many instances that would involve pink elephants or unicorns, would exile into limbo the materialists and dualists and then proceed to establish in the upper air his own crystal castle of idealism. Reading him even now, I recover some of that old delight. It is the superb technique and the smiling confidence, like those of a juggler, that give me such pleasure. I am no disciple of Professor Ayer − and have no pretensions to philosophy − but I never felt that McTaggart was really telling me anything about life, that he was busy revealing the truth. Not that I could ever discover any flaw in his argument. What he set out to prove, he proved, so far as I was − and still am − concerned. I would never have dared to contradict a single statement he ever made. Always I floated easily with him up to that castle hanging in mid-air. But I never really believed a word of it. I came away from him, however, refreshed and enriched by the experience as if I had spent an hour with a benevolent wizard. Are they all gone now, these illusionists of logic, these verbal jugglers? Are there no undergraduates anywhere who are turned once or twice into gaping Aladdins?
50
Early childhood and the treasure
I can remember, as if it happened last week, more than half a century ago, when I must have been about four and, on fine summer mornings, would sit in a field adjoining the house. What gave me delight then was a mysterious notion, for which I could certainly not have found words, of a Treasure. It was waiting for me either in the earth, just below the buttercups and daisies, or in the golden air. I had formed no idea of what this Treasure would consist of, and nobody had ever talked to me about it. But morning after morning would be radiant with its promise. Somewhere, not far out of reach, it was waiting for me, and at any moment I might roll over and put a hand on it. I suspect now that the Treasure was Earth itself and the light and warmth of the sunbeams; yet sometimes I fancy that I have been searching for it ever since.
51
Reading in bed about foul weather
There is a peculiar delight, which I can still experience though I knew it best as a boy, in cosily reading about foul weather when equally foul weather is beating hard against the windows, when one is securely poised between the wind and rain and sleet outside and the wind and rain and sleet that leap from the page into the mind. The old romancers must have been aware of this odd little bonus of pleasure for the reader, and probably that is why so many of their narratives, to give them a friendly start, began with solitary horsemen, cloaked to the eyebrows, riding through the night on urgent business for the Duke, sustained by nothing more than an occasional and dubious ragout or pasty and a gulp or two of sour wine (always fetched by surly innkeepers or their scowling slatterns), on side-roads deep in mire, with wind, rain, thunder-and-lightning, sleet, hail, snow, all turned on at the full. With the windows rattling away and hailstones drumming at the paper in the fireplace, snug in bed except for one cold elbow, I have travelled thousands and thousands of mucky miles with these fellows, braving the foulest nights, together crying “Bah!”
